Developer - Jorudan   Catalogue No. - T-24053

Type - Vertical Shooter

Oh man, if there was an award for the most drab dullest looking Mega Drive game then this would win it.  The problem with Task Force Harrier EX is that the first 7 stages are all set in what I presume to be Russia, meaning that there is snow everywhere which in turn means every stage is a miserable shade of gray mess.  You maybe thinking that this may not be such an issue as the screen shots on the back of the box are actually all taken from later stages (there are 13 in total).  Add the fact the the overall graphic quality is really poor and you have yourself one VERY ugly looking Mega Drive shooter.  However, it's not all bad news.  As a game, Task Force Harrier EX is actually not that bad.  There's plenty of action, fair difficulty curve and ok music.  What this game does do very well though is speech.  Oh yes, while most of the game looks like a college student's project, the speech is THE BEST I've ever heard on a Mega Drive.  Better than the very good Strider II speech.  Basically, it's perfect with no background hiss, no gravely voice and no robotic type sounds.  It's true, Task Force Harrier EX has amazing speech for a Mega Drive.  The coder of the PCM audio (T. Suzuki) clearly deserves a place in Mega Drive audio programming history.

One very odd point I found about task Force Harrier EX was the default screen settings.  You see, the original arcade game had a vertical display.  On modern consoles or basically from the Saturn upwards this was a given option for gamers but on 16bit machines like the Mega Drive, more often than not the vertical image would be stretched across a horizontal screen.  This is the default setting for Task Force Harrier EX and that is fine since it was common place back then.  The strange thing is that with a cheat you can open up an option to add a side information bar to the game play screen which will resize the game play section of the screen in to the same ratio that the arcade game used.  This makes things look far better and really puzzles me why this wasn't the default screen setting in the first place.  The cheat also allows you to level skip, switch on MUTEKI mode which is invincibility and also a colour debug setting.

For those interested the cheat is done as follows.

As you switch on your Mega Drive hold down on the D-Pad and Start together.  Release them once the Task Force Harrier EX Title screen appears.  Then push UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, A, B, A, C, B.  It will seem as nothing has happened but if you enter the option screen you'll find the MUTEKI option, Stage Select option and Window option.  Also when you play the game you can skip stages by pausing the game and pressing A.  Pausing the game and repeatedly pressing B will give you a frame by frame mode while Pausing the game and pressing C will allow you to mess about with the game's colour pallet.

Another interesting point is during the end credits for Task Force Harrier EX it says "See you again in Altein"  What was Altein?  There was never any game released under that title.  It turns out that Altein was never released.  Apparently it was going to be a 1024k shooter and was cancelled at the 50% complete stage.  The game would be developed by Jorudan and released by Treco who are in-fact basically Sammy.