JmeWhyte

I’m pretty sure that Orange Pixel, the mak­ers of Star­dash, watched the Youtube videos of a game called Ass­hole Mario (see here), a home­brew ver­sion of the Nin­tendo clas­sic with an insane amount of cheap tricks and nigh on impos­si­ble dif­fi­culty.

Star­dash is tough, real tough but the stages are no longer than 35 sec­onds long mean­ing the bite­sized lev­els won’t drive you insane if you die towards the end of a stage. And die you will, very very often. The chal­lenge comes in that there are no power-ups at all and if touch any bad guy you die (unless you jump on them). In this respect it’s just like Super Meat Boy in that you’re given infi­nite lives to beat a stage. In each level there are two stars to be earned. One for fin­ish­ing it in a strict time limit and one for col­lect­ing all the coins scat­tered through­out the level. In order to beat the time limit means you’re encour­aged to run full-pelt through the level like Sonic, tim­ing jumps to per­fec­tion to beat the stage. But there is no penalty if the time runs out, allow­ing you to col­lect the coins at will to earn the other star. Each world has eight stages and in each stage is also a hid­den key that opens up a tem­ple level if all keys are col­lected in a world. Find­ing these keys requires a lot of trial and error and brings even more depth to the game.

The physics are spot on so you can rarely blame the game if you die, though hit detec­tion is, on rare occa­sions, a lit­tle off. My only gripe with the game is that while the style is pur­pose­fully 8-bit/Gameboy, it would be nice to have the game in colour. Star­dash is fan­tas­tic, a true plat­form­ing gem that will make you bet­ter at games if you can grab all the stars and unlock all the lev­els. I’m cur­rently at 88% and am using all spare time to press on ahead. Inde­pen­dent games like this should be sup­ported and event though the game is free on Android, I want to buy the paid ver­sion as it is just so good.