Mission Craft (Sun, 2000)
Not to be confused with the Mission-Craft/Minecraft series, obviously. But it can be confused with StarCraft because, well, look at it. I guess people might have heard of this already, mainly for all the wrong reasons. I wanted to play it again, though, just for the hell of it. Ripping off artwork and music might be ok if you're making a free game that you have no intention of making money from, but plagiarism on this scale for a commercial release is a bit cheeky. Not content with stealing the graphics from StarCraft, they ripped-off the music from WarCraft 2. Just to annoy Blizzard even more, presumably. Power-ups, bomb icons and bullet patterns, meanwhile, are nicked from Psikyo games.
There are 9 stages, and level design is a bit weird; Stage 2, for example, can be beaten in around 20 seconds. Enemies tend to have massive amounts of HP, so unless you fancy button-mashing like crazy, autofire will definitely come in handy. So far I've made it to the end of Stage 5; the bullet patterns get faster and denser as you progress, so there should be a decent challenge there, if you can bring yourself to persevere with it. There are lots of reasons why it deserves one star, but after playing it for a while, I found that I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. If you're the type who enjoys playing terrible doujin games for a laugh, or if you fancy playing the ugliest Psikyo game ever, then check it out...
Rating: *
P.S. There's an arcade in Brookfield, Illinois that has this, so be sure and pay a visit if you're in the area.
