3/5 ★ – RawMetal's review of Sinistar.

System: Arcade Started: February 12, 2024 Ended: February 12, 2024 I always wanted to play this arcade classic. I blamed the Internet back in the day for showing me Sinistar. It could be either from Screw-Attack or Gametrailers for their Top 10 videos. And they showed this demon-looking space-beast who looks like an even creepier version of Andross from the SNES Star Fox game. I would consider him to be one of the criminally underrated video game antagonists in gaming. Seeing Sinistar at the Arcade made me want to try this out to see what I’m missing. This can be one of the best Space-Horror games, but it holds back on the things it has. This game is awfully cryptic in how to beat Sinistar. During this playthrough, I did not know what I was doing but I was shooting at everything until I heard that signature sound, “Beware, I Live…” blaring from the cabinet speakers. Then Sinistar came at me like a bolt of lightning and was instantly killed by his mouth vortex. I tried shooting at him, but nothing was done and eventually he took away all my lives and got a game over. The sad part is that there is no game demo clip on how to beat Sinistar but the game does mention he has “13 pieces”, so I had to use my smartphone and quickly research this game. Eventually, I found out that you are supposed to destroy those asteroids and they pop out little blinking dots known as Sinibombs (Sounds like a Breakfast Cereal). You have to collect those and stock up and once Sinistar has awakened, you can use the Sinibombs as soon as he gets close to you. Thankfully, the bombs are like homing missiles and Sinistar has 13 Pieces which means you need at least 13 bombs to kill him. Once you beat Sinistar, you go to the next zone as there are a total of 4. Beat them all and it looped back to Zone 1 with increased difficulty. I really love the novelty of this game, especially Sinistar himself. This game will scare the shit out of kids with Sinister's iconic roar and it's up there with Chrono Trigger’s Lavos roar. At least you can look at your radar on the top of the screen to see where he's at. And he flies at you at top speed too. Once he’s close to you, his mouth is like a vortex that sucks you in and its instant death. The funny part is that the most common death in this game is not Sinistar, it's mainly those turret gunners. Those things will fly towards you and they will shoot to kill with dead-accuracy shots. Once you see those guys, they have to be dealt with immediately or else your screen will be flooded with the turret gunners, the fire projectiles and even Sinistar. My problem for this game is its high difficulty spike, even when it's the second zone of the game, there are like six gunner turrets hunting you down like crazy and you have to be quick with the joystick to fend them off. I kept dying in the second zone. What I also found out was that the developers from Williams Electronics made the game purposely hard for coin revenue purposes. If this game was released as it was without the difficulty spike, this could easily be one of the best 80’s Arcade games next to Space Invaders and Donkey Kong. I do hear that the Atari ports for Sinistar were arguably better since the unfair difficulty spike was fixed. For a game that is cryptic, it's still worth playing for curious folks who are digging into classic arcade games of the 80’s. Emulated, Arcade and even ports from Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2 port. There are better classic 80’s Arcade games than this though but it would not hurt to try until you beat Sinistar. If only the difficulty curve should gradually increase at a fair pace and tweak the speed of the ship you control, then I would have given this a 5-star rating. Due to its success somehow, there is even a PC exclusive of Sinistar in 3D called Sinistar: Unleashed which is something I don’t mind playing if I got the time.