A comparison of the unreleased Famicom Strider Hiryu, and NES Strider.
Never mind the off colours; perhaps my video capture card has too much green/yellow
in it. Pressing the B button on controller 2 puts the game & music into
fast-forward (4x or so), but also causes massive screen glitching in the intro.
The machine gun is better shaded in the JP version (check the middle part
and gunclip.)
From this screen, lyrics that match the intro's tune appear on-screen. Oddly,
Sheena and Kain's names don't appear UNLESS you fast-forward the game. If
you do that, the names appear in between the glitches of writing to VRAM too
fast.
Hiryu's colours are all weird in the proto. They seem to match the comic or
Strider 2 (AC/PSX) more than the NES art.
His scarf is a little detached from his neck there.
The Red Dragon scrolls onscreen in different directions between both versions.
Strider's cape uses his skin tones in the JP version, whereas they're red/magenta
in the NES.
Text box and picture positioning differences are well-known.
In-game dialogue is written vertically in the Japanese version.
The Japanese text says "Kazakh Federation".
Kazakh - you'll notice that you start with only 10 energy units. The game
is VERY HARD because of this. Other differences are stars in the sky that
were deleted from the US version, and slightly different BG palettes. I never
noticed this before, but the NES version of Strider has enemies that use 3
of the 4 possible palette banks of the NES at the same time: 1) Brown-Orange-White
for the head, 2) Black-Green-White for the body, and 3) Black-Blue-White for
the boots. That's very creative colour usage. The FC Proto's footsoldiers
use far fewer colours (brown, green, tan, and white for the sword.)
Purple/magenta seemed to be introduced later for various enemies. This guard
takes several more hits in the proto than the NES version.
The power pellet seems to have its colour range in reverse order in the proto.
Here, the flying dude looks quite different without the magenta body.
A structural difference! As in the JP Bionic Commando, JP Strider had a wall
you had to break through with your weapon. Who knows why it was taken out.
Um, there's no data file 1 in the proto!!! (Well, DF1 simply mentions China,
so perhaps it appears at a more appropriate moment.)
The list of "tricks" is filled out already, with the first entry
reading "Cypher", your usual weapon.
The proto is a bit less populated in several areas.
The "lifter" doesn't even move in the proto (it's coloured differently,
too.) It just stands there and takes a lot more damage.
Character and disk positioning differences in this room. The proto doesn't
say "LEVEL UP" or "xxx acquired" like in the NES version.
The sloping floor was a cool idea...
Apparently the Blue Dragon's computer is having a malfunction in the JP version
-- it doesn't have a clue where Egypt is!
