my god... i remember this game being super amazing when i was a kid. a friend of mine had it and everyone would just hangout at his place playing it for hours and hours

YES! I can't wait for this to come out. I have this for the TG-16.
This is one of my favorite games. I was hoping for this to be released!

So is this better than Soldier Blade? Everyone on the Soldier review board says no.

If I was to give Soldier Blade 95% I would give Blazing Lazers 93% - The difference really is minimal. For fans of the genre downloading this is a no-brainer!

Sweet, another shooter. I love these. I still haven't beaten Soldier Blade and Super Star Soldier (They're really freaking hard @_@) but I'll definitely get this one. I love the genre.

I loved this game and It is still awesome.

Secound only to Soldier Blade as the best pc engine shooter.

Does anybody remember the Japanese GunHed film?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097410/

It was unbelievably awful (and the dubbed version was worse), but had amazing special effects (for 1989).

I just bought this and I haven't played it before and I love it. Very good $6 purchase

A shooter not to be missed. I've never played Soldier Blade, but will get it due to the rave reviews. You can't pass on this one either.

I don't really like this kind of game, but this one was EXCELLENT.

Boy, the TG really shined in this type of games!

I love how the VC has given some of these old gems their due respect. I had never played this game before I downloaded it based off of the comments section on this very page. I have always loved this type of game. Non stop thumb action with all sorts of dodging tons of enemies. I am not a master at these games but the great colors and and vibrant action really make this game a good starting point into this genre. I loved learning the different power up system and how to rack it up with the best combo of main weapon and sub-weapon. The reviews are right when they mention the first levels are pretty easy if you amass a killer weapon. However it does get quite challenging and I am currently only on the "easter Island" Head Guy level. Seriously download this game. The soundtrack is super rocking and I just love the hypnotic tracks. I have it hooked up to my stereo and it is awesome. One last tip...If you are not the greatest at this type of game but still would like to enjoy...track down the 30 continues cheat online...nobody said you had to play fair to have fun?

Can't believe this is a Soldier game. It's so much slower and there's no 2 min and 5 min mode. Which is missed. Still good though

The soundtrack for this game is stellar. In more than one way. Great shooter.

A classic shooter, well worth downloading.

A very good and challenging shmup, albeit bordering on unfair at times. Certain enemy projectiles are friggin huge, paired with unforgiving collision detection. Whatever, I like it nevertheless. Go download it .

Do yourself a favour and download this old gem. Definately in my top five of all time. Currently working on area 9 (I forgot how freakin' hard it gets). Good assortment of weapons, although, come on, who really uses the photon blaster or the ring blaster. I take the deceptor wave and sheild all the way to the bubble level if I can and then it's pretty much field thunder from there on. Superb shooting gameplay. Excellent graphics (for their time). Great cheesy 80's style electronic drums and keyboards music (kinda like mid-eighties Phil Collins' Genesis-but better). I have also downloaded SSS and Soldier Blade but I'm waiting until I can finally crack this one again before I really venture on.

This was my first ever shooter when I downloaded it a few months ago. I used to think shooters were too hard, and now I can't stop playing them! Blazing Lazers is still one of the best, even though I can sweep through the first three levels without taking a hit. The music is great and the power-up system is fun. Once you loose your power-ups at the giant statue heads you're screwed, though.

I'm at level 7 (when I can get past those damned heads), so I've still got a little ways to go yet.

5 stars!

An excellent game, but yet another that reminds me just how bad I've become as a gamer! I need to get back to basics I guess! This game is one of the reasons I bought the system. It was always on display at a local video game store, and blew my mind at the time. Still impressive today.

This isn't related to the Soldier series, it's a "side-story" to the Aleste series and it's made by Compile. It's a great, intense game but I prefer the Aleste games that came after it because they have more eye candy and are more forgiving.

This is a 8bit and far inferior version (not the exact same game) of super aleste on the SNES which was a revelation cause of the amount of sprites on the screen with no slow down.Maybe they used a chip on the cart or they were wizard programmers.I'm sure this game was great at the time (helped by the wow factor) but unlike R-type it isn't now.

This game is definitely one awesomely intense shoot-em-up. By intense, I don't mean insanely hard, because if you've powered up your ship, you can take a hit or two, and there are powerups dropped by almost everything you blow up. There are four different modes of powerups you can use. I recommend getting and keeping the III powerup, as this is the one with the "blazing lazers" that practically blast the whole screen. After that, just focus on piking up the pink blob powerups and avoid the numbers I, II, and IV. There are also multi-fire thingies that will surround your ship and fire away extra blasts. Awesome game, despite my not being able to get past area #1 (I am not an expert player by any stretch on shooter games).

@apexpredator: thanks for the tip-off. I looked up the cheats online and I found a hoard of stuff, including a debug mode [accessible with some bizarre button mashings] with a code 77 for invincibility - Hmmm, I've gotta ty this stuff. Hopfully, if this is true emulation, it will all work [just like the "minus world" and "Thank you dead Mario" glitches still work in SMB].

The codes work.You can even make the game harder cause it's way too easy hahaha! Only 1 of those codes work I think.

Stage 9 is just silly hard once you lose your power ups. I had to cheat, gaming gods forgive me.

Way back in the proverbial day, when I got my TurboGrafx-16 for Christmas, there was this deal that if you sent in a copy of your receipt and the UPC code off the box, you could get a free game. I chose this game, so it is one of the oldest TG-16 games I own. It is a great vertical Shmup. I remember standing in front of a projection TV in a McDuff's Electronics store in the mall, playing this game. They had it near the front of the store with the TV facing the glass so that people passing by could see it. I was so amazed by this game. The speed, the colors, the variety of enemies, the weapon upgrades... I was even amazed by the voice that announced the new upgrades. It was a little hard to understand, but was much clearer than anything the Genesis ever produced.

I have only had Soldier Blade downloaded on VC for a couple of weeks, so I don't really think I'm ready to make a formal comparison.

A cheat that I used to do on this game... on the level that looks like you're inside some animal (the one in the video where brains are attacking you), there is mid-point boss that is essentially like eight eye sockets on either side of the screen that keep producing eyeballs that home in on you. I would get the highest level of weapon IV, where I had four indestructible satellites that orbit your ship in a circle and sit at the bottom of the screen, just to one side of the center. The eye sockets keep spitting out eyes, your rotating shields keep killing them, you keep getting points, you keep getting extra ships for points. I would do this, turn off the TV, go to bed, go to school or work the next day, come home, turn on the TV and have like 20 or 30 ships ready to go.

How is the easiest difficulty in this game? I'm pretty new to the SHMUP genre and I want to try to find the easiest possible one to start with as I know the genre is notoriously difficult.

If you want an easy shooter I would suggest Soldier Blade and if you have the room, Lords of Thunder.

a good introduction to the shmup genre.

I'm going nuts here.

As soon as I pick up fire 3 and the shield item, I can reliably make it ALL the way to area 9 without losing a single ship.

And then I get consummately stomped, all the way through sixteen ships and four continues. HELP!

Oh and great game of course. Fluid controls, great stages, and not overly-oppressive on the number of killer, slow-moving dots at once. My favorite vertical shooter, I think, though I haven't gotten Star Parodier yet. My only criticism--although this hits pretty much every such shooter ever made, really--is that it's so incredibly hard (hence my above frustrations) to re-power-up your ship after it gets destroyed that one death is very likely to result in another soon after. And that obnoxious difficulty spike at the end.

@Cally Yeah, there is kind of a brick wall that it hits that is pretty hard to get over. I have the game for my TG-16 and I can get pretty far (don't remember exactly how far) but at a certain point, it becomes pretty painful. As far as the getting powered back up after dying, yeah, it is nearly impossible. Some games (like Gate of Thunder which I wholly recommend) let you get several different weapons powered up and you only lose the one you were using when you died. So that makes it easier. Even if you have a favorite weapon, and lose it when you die, you still have some kind of backup weapon. And then there are games that, when you die, a little powerup ship comes out and spreads some powerups on the screen to help you get back in the groove (I'm thinking of one of the Darius games but can't remember which one. I have Darius Gaiden for the Saturn and Darius Twin for my SNES and can't remember if both do that.)

I like the controls better in Blazing Lazers than in some similar games such as Soldier Blade. The ship in Soldier Blade seems too quick and touchy, hard for me to make precision shots, even when the ship is at the slow speed.

My personal favorite weapon and power up is the III weapon (Field Thunder) powered up to the level where it has one lazer going straight and two squiggly lazers going up on either side of the straight one. And yeah, as far as homing missles, full power, or shields, shields are the way to go.

Ok, question.
I've got Soldier Blade, and love it. I've been playing Super Star Soldier on EMU and I'm really feeling it. Should I go for Super Star or Blazing Lazers? Is one a better game overall?

If you want some variety, go for Blazing Lazers. I haven't played it yet, but it's developed by a different company than the other two, Compile, which is best known for the Aleste games. I'm thinking about picking it up myself.

Homing Missiles and the "I" power-up were the best comb IMO. Once your missiles are powered fully, you will soon experience what I called "brushing their teeth", where your missiles will literally dart back and forth on some of the boss's weak points before they attack you.

Is this game harder than Soldier Blade? I am interested in playing it either way, but was just curious...

@Eltigro

I agree with your observation about Blazing Lazers' control versus Soldier Blade's.

I have this and it is EXTREMELY awesome

I think the III works best

Yeah, I could not get into this one. It wasn't as bad as Star Soldier, but certainly not up to the quality of, say...the Soldier series.

Okay . . . I have to revise my statement.

I think I suddenly changed my mind about Blazing Lazers (and Soldier Blade, which I'm starting to appreciate more now). Call it an epiphany, but I have this to say about BL: once you get the right power-ups (and in this game, there definitely are RIGHT and WRONG power-ups) it's the easiest shooter ever. Get your hands on a shield and beam 3 and there's pretty much no stopping you. However, if you should be unfortunate enough to lose your power-ups, it becomes the most insanely hard shooter ever. Especially near the end--oh well, "I just lost one ship," right? WRONG. You'll be shooting peas with thirty to forty deadly objects and dots and trying to weave between them, hating yourself for losing your power-ups, with a checkpoint RIGHT in the middle of the chaos. Good luck!

What I like about BL, still, is the (rather inexplicable) variety of settings. Ancient Egypt with missiles coming out of pyramids? Wha (?) . . . AWESOME! And it's still fun to play around with, but man, enough time with it and you discover some incredibly unbalanced gameplay. Personally, though, I know enough times getting to the end with Shield and beam 3 intact . . . and NOT dying during that stage and I'm sure to see the end. Maybe someday . . .
4/10

Me no want. Doesn't look that cool.