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Here's something cool for fans of obscure Japanese first-person shooters. A new set of ROM hacks has just dropped for Arsys Software and Masaya's Japan-exclusive Mega Drive port of Star Cruiser, fixing a bunch of bugs with the original game and offering some improvements to movement.
Star Cruiser, for context, was a first-person shooter with light RPG elements originally released for the PC-8801 in 1988 and followed a hunter charged with destroying an evil militaristic faction called VOID. Considered an early 3D pioneer for its use of polygonal graphics, the gameplay was primarily divided between planet-based exploration/combat and interplanetary travel, with the story being delivered through ADV-style dialogue with NPCs portrayed as sprites.
Landing on planets, players would explore maze-like maps from the relative safety of their cruiser, entering into a separate battlefield to blast away at enemies in first-person, occasionally taking breaks to upgrade their weapons or fix up their ship.
Various ports of the game were released for other Japanese home computers (including the Sharp X-1, the PC-9801, and the Sharp X68000), but the version that we're specifically interested in is the Mega Drive edition, which was released in 1990. This featured a number of changes from the original game, notably allowing players to seamlessly engage in battles without the need for a separate battlefield, and removing the need to pay for vehicle fixes, while also giving you the option to name your own character.
The brand-new patch, developed by a person going by the name marinyan, was brought to our attention by @yoshinokentarou on Twitter/X and is now available to download from GitHub as three separate IPS files. These include a patch with bug fixes only; another patch that removes turning restrictions, letting you move left and right while walking forward and backwards; and a final patch that adds diagonal parallel strafe.
What's most fascinating to us, though, about this whole thing is Marinyan is the partner of Star Cruiser programmer and designer Kotori Yoshimura (who was also involved with Prince of Persia SNES and created the original Thunder Force), with the latter revealing they provided "input on adjustments to ensure the game balance wouldn't be disrupted."
You can find the GitHub page here.