A remake of the action platformer game Gunstar Heroes from 1993, developed by the Japanese studio M2. The player is taken to a fantasy world where the two main protagonists (Gunstar Red and Gunstar Blue) fought Golden Silver, a sinister robot. Khabarzar latest episode youtube.

Treasure’s visually stunning side scrolling shooter, Gunstar Heroes is now re-mastered in 3D! Take advantage of Gunslinger Mode by choosing between FREE and FIXED shot modes on the fly and cycling through all your weapons.

Actionplatformreeditions/remasters/remakesNintendo exclusive titles

publisher: SEGA

Game mode: single / multiplayer

Multiplayer mode: local network, players: 1 - 2

Gunstar Heroes from 1993 proved to be a great hit, which resulted in the release of a sequel entitled Gunstar Super Heroes for Mega Drive in 2005 and a port for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 four years later. The Nintendo 3DS version offers several extra settings and adds three-dimensional effects. 3D Gunstar Heroes for 3DS was published by SEGA. Realmyst spoilers.

Plot

The plot of 3D Gunstar Heroes is practically identical to that of the 1993’s original. The Japanese edition is only slightly different from the international one. The remake’s developers made it possible to quickly jump from one version to the other, thanks to which the player can experience both while only having one copy of the title. The main protagonists are twins named Gunstar Red and Gunstar Blue who fight a robot called Golden Silver. Thanks to the siblings’ struggle, alos including Yellow (sister) and Green (older brother), four diamonds that gave Golden Silver power had been hidden away and thus the antagonist was neutralized. Another antihero, Colonel Red who took control over Green’s mind, intends to reverse this state of affairs and restore the robot to operation. The player can assume the role of Gunstar Red or Gunstar Blue to thwart Colonel Red’s plans.

Mechanics

In 3D Gunstar Heroes, similarly to the original, the player can combine two weapons to create a kind of a hybrid. M2 expanded this option with the Gunslinger mode that allows us to combine not two but as much as four guns. Another notable addition introduced for Nintendo 3DS users is Mega Life Mode that allows the players to double their base amount of hit points (from 100 to 200). Thanks to the addition of the Gunslinger and Mega Life modes, the game is much more friendly to new users.

The possibility of choosing one of two ways of targeting enemies is also an important novelty. The first one allows us to aim and shoot while in motion, while the other forces us to stand still to take aim. This setting can be changes at any moment. What’s more, we can also switch the protagonist while playing.

Game modes

3D Gunstar Heroes for 3DS features a single player mode and a local multiplayer for two players. To play together, we need two copies of the game.

Additional information

The player can change the game’s graphics to more retro-looking with the emulator developed by M2. Thanks to it, we can see the world of 3D Gunstar Heroes as if we were looking at a CRT display. What’s important, the studio didn’t extend the production’s screen to panoramic proportions, so 3D Gunstar Heroes only offers 4:3 resolution.

SEGA has been up a translated interview about 3D Gunstar Heroes on its blog today. Producer Yosuke Okunari and M2 president Naoki Horii were interviewed.During one part of the discussion, the two developers commented on why Gunstar Heroes was chosen to be one of the ports:Yosuke Okunari: When we first began work on the SEGA 3D Remaster Project, we decided to go with a few arcade titles and a few Mega Drive titles.

We believed that if we are able to perfectly emulate the console itself, similar to how we worked on the Virtual Console, we wouldn’t run into as many architectural problems and thus development would proceed according to schedule. Out of the eight titles during the first batch, five of the games were Mega Drive titles and the other three were from the arcade. The intention was to ensure we could actually develop (the much harder) three arcade titles. You see, we made the overall schedule easier to manage by buffering things with the Mega Drive games. Since arcade games tend to vary from game to game in the way they interact with the hardware, by adding these predictable Mega Drive games in, we could better handle delays caused by unforeseen issues on the arcade games.

I mentioned this in a previous interview as well, but the reason why we picked the titles that have previously been ported to PS2 or Wii was also to mitigate any unexpected issues. But even taking that into consideration, just having these Mega Drive games in the lineup really helped lock in the schedule. That’s why we had those five titles originally.

Since we successfully released the ports for the arcade titles during the first batch, we had a better idea of what the schedule would be for subsequent titles, and that gave us lee-way to work on titles we’d never touched before for the second batch, like Out Run. And now here we are releasing three new games for the second batch, games we decided to pass on the first time around for reasons other than hardware. These are titles that M2 actually refused to develop at the time.Naoki Horii: We discussed in our previous article about 3D Streets of Rage 2 as to whether or not we would actually be able to get the backgrounds into 3D or now, and one might expect, there were those who said that Gunstar Heroes’ backgrounds wouldn’t be convertible anyway, so it was removed from the list of porting candidates. For example, the background on the 4th stage is not a true isometric projection, but rather it’s just a simple 45 degree angle line going into the screen, and thus is difficult to put into true stereoscopic 3D.Okunari and Horii also spoke about Gunstar Heroes’ popularity, which is one reason why it was selected.YO: Gunstar Heroes has been ported to a variety of game systems to date. The number of times this game has been ported is testament to its popularity, and as far as priorities go, this game was on the top of the list and would have been in the first batch.NH: Oh yes, absolutely.YO: It’s just the process of converting a game into stereoscopic 3D is a step above normal porting. Originally, this project stemmed from wanting to make a Mega Drive Virtual Console, but these days just a straight port doesn’t really capture the attention of the 3DS audience. I mean, it’s been a rough time for the Game Gear Virtual Console games on 3DS, you know.

And so Gunstar Heroes was regrettable not chosen for a 3D conversion in the first batch.Be sure to give the full interview a look. Update (8/14): Bumped to the top. SEGA has now officially confirmed the news on Twitter.3D Gunstar Heroes is releasing 8/20 on Nintendo eShop!

Keep an eye out for developer interview blog posts next week!— SEGA (@SEGA)Original (8/12): Thanks to a listing on the European eShop, it’s now confirmed that 3D Gunstar Heroes is heading to the 3DS on August 20. And given previous releases of SEGA’s 3D Classics, the game should be out in North America next week as well.

Pricing is set at $4.99 / €4.99. SEGA has included a couple of new modes in 3D Gunstar Heroes. There’s Full Spec mode, which provides players with any of the game’s fourteen weapons. 3D Gunstar Heroes also has the Mega Life mode that doubles the amount of lives players would usually have.Aside from the new modes, 3D Gunstar Heroes contains elements from other SEGA 3D Classics.

That means local multiplayer, the ability to choose between the Japanese or American version of the game, a tube TV filter that can be toggled on or off, and stereoscopic 3D. A new round of SEGA 3D Classics have been announced for North America and Europe. 3D Streets of Rage 2 is due out in July, followed by 3D Gunstar Heroes in August and 3D Sonic The Hedgehog 2 in September.Additionally, SEGA has confirmed that 3D Thunder Blade launches on May 14. 3D Fantasy Zone II is out this Thursday.All of these games feature “a full-fledged re-mastered vintage experience, stunning 3D visuals and optimized for the platform.” New modes and features are included as well.Pricing for all of the SEGA 3D Classics are set at $5.99 / €4.99 / £4.49 each.

Distribution is handled through the 3DS eShop.