Arcade Shmups #28

Raiga - Strato Fighter (1991)
By: Tecmo Genre: Shooting Players: 1-2 Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Featured Version: Arcade First Day Score: 116,620 (one credit)
Also Available For: Xbox (compilation)

I suspect there's a decent chance many of you won't have heard of this obscure shooter, and that's a surprise. It arrived at a time when the genre was immensely popular and it was bestowed upon us by a well known arcade developer. It was even available in the West (US only, no release for us European oafs), so why wasn't it known to more players? Well, I suppose it may have gotten crowded out by the sheer number of similar games available, but aside from that I've no idea. Of course, your resident herb-flavoured retrohead knew all about... okay, I admit - I hadn't heard of it either! I discovered it simply due to spotting its cool name (Strato Fighter? Yeah!) in my MAME list and giving it a go. With that in mind, I guess it should be part of my 'Random Game' feature, but it was probably around 7 or 8 years ago that I saw it and it has remained on my 'to review' list ever since (hey, in my defence, there are about 1,000-odd games on it!), but I've finally gotten around to playing it.

Film Review #119

Cosmos (2019)
Directors: Elliot Weaver & Zander Weaver Starring: Tom England, Joshua Ford, Arjun Singh Panam, Ben Vardy

Certificate: PG Running Time: 128 Minutes

Tagline: "Only they will hear. Only they will believe."

Every now and then, when I'm struggling to find something I feel like watching, I'll scan through the offerings on the streaming services to which I currently subscribe, as many others also do I'm sure. A frequently perused genre is sci-fi which has probably been my favourite genre since I first discovered Star Trek as a child. Most efforts that show up in searches that I haven't already seen are ones with such catastrophically bad ratings that I don't even chance them, but one hitherto unknown film recently caught my eye during such a search that sounded very intriguing. It may be worth pointing out at this point that Contact, the 1997 sci-fi film starring Jodie Foster, has long been among my very favourites. For those who don't know, Ms. Foster plays a radio astronomer who intercepts a signal from another world - a subject that has captivated me for many years - and it was this premise that also formed the basis for Cosmos, a fairly recent British indie film made with literally no budget at all.