Lost In Translation/Night Striker

About The Game
Night Striker is a 3-D arcade video game shoot-em-up rendered with fast moving, sprite-scaled graphics.

Players must guide an armoured hover car through a number of scrolling levels - destroying waves of enemies in the process - in an attempt to rescue a scientist who has been kidnapped by a terrorist organization. A large guardian awaits players at the end of each level, with each one taking several hits to destroy.

Instead of having a set number of lives, the player's vehicle is equipped with a shield that depletes whenever the player is hit by enemy fire or has collisions with either enemies or scenery. The player's shields are recharged at the end of every level.

Night Striker takes its influences from many landmark games of the sprite scaling genre, all of which are Sega releases. The basic shoot-em-up gameplay is similar in style to both 1985's "Space Harrier" and 1987's "Thunder Blade". Some of the game's levels resemble those of 1988's "Galaxy Force II" as well as "Thunder Blade", while the game's level structure - a 'pyramid' of levels that allows players to chose their own route through the game with the use of end-of-level forked roads - is borrowed from the 1986 classic, "Out Run".

Trivia
Released in October 1989.

The eerie and ambient game soundtrack is by Zuntata, an internal team of composers within Taito responsible for other great soundtracks including Darius Gaiden, Gunlock, G-Darius.

Pony Canyon / Scitron released a limited-edition soundtrack album for this game (Darius II : G.S.M. Taito 4 - PCCB-00010-12) on 21/11/1989.

A new version of the soundtrack was released in 1998 and is sprinkled with anecdotes (spoken in Japanese) about the game (Z-Replica Vol. 2 - Urban Trail Night Striker - ZTTL-0025).

Zuntata Records released a limited-edition soundtrack album for this game (Zuntata History L'ab-normal 1st - ZTTL-0038) on 01/04/1999.

Updates
The US version is slightly different, it has the 'Winners Don't Use Drugs' screen.

Staff

 * Producer:
 * Tohru Sugawara


 * Director:
 * Kenshi Kaito


 * Software:
 * Tohru Sugawara
 * Hideki Hashimoto
 * Toshiaki Tsukano
 * Tmr-Win
 * Iromust
 * Takashi Kitabayashi


 * Character Designers:
 * Kohzoh Igarashi
 * Minori Ishino
 * Takako Kojima
 * Kenshi Kaito


 * Hardware:
 * Toshiyuki Sanada


 * Electric:
 * Tomio Takeda


 * Mechanic:
 * Tohru Yamamoto
 * Tohru Hirata
 * Tomio Suzuki
 * Nobuyuki Iwasaki


 * Designers:
 * Shinobu Sekiguchi
 * Akio Nomura


 * Sound & Music Composed By:
 * Masahiko Takaki (Zuntata)


 * Executive Producer:
 * Keisuke Hasegawa

Ports

 * Consoles :
 * Sega Mega CD (1993)
 * Sony PlayStation (1995)
 * Sega Saturn (1996, "Night Striker S")
 * Sony PlayStation 2 (2007, "Taito Memories II Vol. 2")