A front-loaded shooter.
Japan’s gaming fandom loved Namco’s Xevious, and the SG-1000 couldn’t escape its influence. In fact, the decidedly Xevious-esque Star Jacker didn’t just ship alongside the console; it even appeared prominently on the system’s packaging. The game has a secondary legacy as well: It demonstrates the importance of having someone fluent in another language vet your work when you give your game a name in that language. Star Jacker sounds a little off to the anglophone ear, like it’s some off-color version of Sega’s own Star Raker. Yet the two have no relationship beyond the fact that both games (along with Star Raker’s military variant Borderline) incorporate vertically scrolling combat.
Both Borderline and Star Raker debuted on the Sega/ Gremlin VIC Dual arcade board, along with early SG-1000 releases N-Sub and Safari Hunting. As a result, Star Jacker offered a more complex game design, having made its coin-op debut as one of the first releases to be powered by Sega’s impressive-for-its-time System 1 arcade board. Even though the SG-1000 largely resembles the VIC Dual setup, internally speaking, only a handful of ports from that platform made their way to the console. The System 1 board, on the other hand, served as the point of origin for nearly a dozen SG-1000 and Master System releases.
Naturally, moving those games to a console with power equivalent to an older chip set meant that they had to be scaled down or simplified to run on SG-1000, and we see the results of that compromise with Star Jacker. In arcades, Star Jacker featured nicely detailed visuals and fast, smooth scrolling. On SG-1000, it has a more minimalistic look, and its scrolling is (to put it kindly) headache-inducing. Not only does Star Jacker suffer from the console’s lack of innate per-pixel scrolling, but the amount of things happening onscreen at any given moment can be disorienting. For many reasons, it takes some time to get used to.
That said, Star Jacker’s concept does require the SG-1000 to push around a lot of objects all at once, and the humble hardware acquits itself impressively in that respect. Much of the activity you see on screen reflects the fact that Star Jacker is a pretty strange take on the shooting genre. I suspect that the idea behind the name “Star Jacker” might have been to suggest something akin to a “carjacker” or “hijacker.” If so, that concept doesn’t come through in the gameplay, as Star Jacker doesn’t involve stealing things. Quite the contrary, you’re constantly losing them. Again, this is a shooter strongly inspired by Xevious [see NES Works Gaiden Vol. I].
As such, your ship commands two weapons: A forward cannon and a short-range bomb. The cannon fires straight ahead, gunning down airborne enemies and objects, while you target the bomb by way of a reticle to direct where it will land, smashing up ground-based emplacements and targets. Cementing the Xevious connection, an octagonal boss shows up toward the end of each stage and spews projectiles at you, and it can seemingly only be destroyed with a bomb—much like Xevious’ Andor Genesis. Defeat this ship before it slinks away (again, like the Andor Genesis) and Star Jacker allows you to skip ahead to the end of the level by applying the same awkward top-down flight effect Namco enacted in Super Pac-Man: Your ship doubles in size and passes harmlessly through (or over) everything below.
Well—your ship, or your ships. You’ll find one final Xevious connection here: Star Jacker lacks a power-up system. On the contrary, the quirky trait that defines this shooter and makes it distinct from the competition is that it features what is effectively a power-down system. When you begin a game of Star Jacker, you have four lives… and you control them all at once. Your ship is trailed by a conga line of your reserve fighters, which follow behind you and trace your lead vessel’s movements. In a way, it almost feels like Sega was predicting the design of Gradius [see NES Works 1985 & ’86] and its iconic Options here. Your backups (or is that “jack-ups”?) weave along in your wake, firing in sync with the lead ship and quadrupling your firepower. Rather than sit in a straight line behind the lead ship, the backups instead trail along in the path you’ve defined with your movements, potentially generating a wide spread of simultaneous fire depending on how dramatic your lateral motion has been.
What makes your reserve caravan different from Gradius’ Options is that they remains as vulnerable to enemy fire and collisions as your main craft. If any ship in your line takes damage—not just the vanguard ship—that fighter is instantly destroyed and you lose a ship from your reserve. To put it in terms of Star Jacker’s contemporaries, you could compare the backups to the spirit of Galaga’s dual-ship mechanic as much as the Options in Gradius or ninja shadows in Ninja Gaiden II. Star Jacker presents players with a powerful risk-reward consideration, in that a full line of ships commands a tremendous amount of firepower and can tear through enemy formations but also presents a much larger target than a single ship would.
Then again, does it really count as a risk-reward option if it’s forced upon you? Unlike in Galaga, you don’t have any control over whether or not you multiply your forces at the risk of losing your reserve ships; rather, the game simply plays with this mechanic. As it happens, you’ll find it almost impossible to avoid losing a ship or two in a matter of moments from the game’s opening. Between the choppy scrolling, hectic action, and enormous effective hit box of your serpentine assault chain, dodging all incoming threats with the full four-ship flight proves tremendously challenging.
This gives Star Jacker a strangely inverted difficulty curve. The more lives you lose, the smaller your chain becomes, and therefore the easier you’ll find it to stay alive. Completing a stage with your full fleet intact demands true expert-level skills, while zipping around with your final ship is easy enough that you can make it through multiple advanced stages that way. The problem is that coasting through space with a single ship doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying as tearing through foes with a full group of fighters. With your firepower reduced to a single shot, you can dodge your way around easily enough, but you also pose a minimal threat to the bad guys and lack the force to rack up points for the all-important scoreboard. Star Jacker feels backward from the standard dynamic of the shooter genre—an approach to the format so counterintuitive you’d swear this was a Treasure creation, presenting you with an obtuse puzzle box of game design and sternly demanding that you master its mechanics through error and experimentation. But no! This is a Sega project through and through.
Surprisingly enough, really, it may be an entirely Sega-driven production. SG-1000 mainstay Compile did not handle this home conversion of Star Jacker, despite that studio’s prodigious work-for-hire output during the console’s early days—not to mention the fact that a quirky, systems-driven shooter like this seems entirely in line with the company’s core strengths. According to findings detailed at the Game Developer Research Institute [gdri.smspower.org], Star Jacker may have been converted to SG-1000 by ELS, the studio responsible for Yamato. Whatever the case, whoever brought Star Jacker to the console did a respectable job of getting a relatively cutting-edge arcade work to run within the constraints of a much less powerful home system without overly compromising playability—and, most importantly of all, while preserving its one-of-a-kind mechanics for the home crowd.
SIZE MATTERS
Sega couldn’t seem to settle on a format for SG-1000 packaging. The system’s earliest releases shipped in large boxes reminiscent of early Atari 2600 packaging. Not only did Sega build its boxes at roughly the same size of Atari game packaging, but it even incorporated the same gatefold cover format seen in Atari’s 1977 and ’78 releases.
However, around the same time that the SG-1000 hardware underwent its big design revision to become the SG-1000 II, SG-1000 game boxes also evolved. The large boxes faded away to be replaced by a much smaller design that eschewed the luxurious shelf-wasting structure of the original format in favor of a compact construct that perfectly encased the cartridge and a manual with barely a millimeter wasted. The new box style offered some obvious advantages thanks to its slim form factor. Although it took up as much lateral space on a collector’s shelf as the older boxes—after all, the cartridges themselves hadn’t become any slimmer, so neither could the boxes—they could be tucked easily into lower, more shallow spaces.
At the same time, they also presented a distinct disadvantage over the original box. Rather than flipping open with a tabbed front-surface book-style cover, the new boxes used standard box flaps at the top and bottom ends. This made for a more fragile and easily damaged design than the inaugural format, with the new flap tabs suffering more significant damage from wear over time.
Interestingly, some games appear in both formats. To stimulate the collector hind brain, Sega didn’t simply scale down those original boxes to the new style; games with new-style boxes sport completely unique artwork across revisions. The contents of the carts rarely changed, but does that matter to a completionist? Of course not.
