Catalogue No. - T-7008G

Well, what can I say about this? Gekirindan is probably the most shoddy arcade port to the Saturn ever and what's more shocking is that it seems the port was a co-venture between Taito and JAMP (Japan Media Programming)!  Why the hell didn't Taito do this themselves?  After all their other arcade ports are fantastic.  Why let JAMP in on the action?  They seem to produce mostly poor software. I guess it's no surprise that Taito's name doesn't appear on the game intro or even the case cover.

So, what is wrong with Gekirindan? Well, for a start the intro is bloody poor quality FMV ! Why ? There's nothing in the intro that the Saturn couldn't do or hasn't done before. Just pure laziness. Next when playing the game you'll notice the screen jerk every now and then as the game loads in some data and what's even worse is that the game actually pauses to load in the bosses !! It doesn't stop there though. Gekirindan features quite a bit of scaling. ad we all know that the Saturn can do some beautiful effects in shooters with scaling.  Not in this game it seems. The scaling is slow and jerky beyond belief. Also if you play the game in Saturn mode there are loads of effects missing. So you have to play the game in tate mode with the pad set to TV horizontal mode and play it as a horizontal shooter.

Now when you consider that Taito also made Layer Section (Galactic Attack) two years before this which features no loading times, no poor FMV intro and no jerky scaling, you have to ask yourself what the hell went wrong with Gekirindan. At least it has a good soundtrack, or at least I think so.

Gekirindan still plays well enough but with all the problems that plague it which shouldn't be there it's hard to recommend this to anyone apart from the hardcore shooting fan or collector.