I am fighting my way through
Bang! Gunship Elite, a forgotten space game from 2000, on Hard Difficulty for my YouTube channel.
Well, so far this difficulty can stand up its name. I am in mission 4 of 19 only and it is indeed very challenging already.
In this mission i have to protect a convoy on its way to a station and i am being overwhelmed with my two wingmen by countless enemies.
It is a not very good game in terms of the Space Combat genre actually. But i have the impression, that this one does not want to be one after all.
The whole gameplay has more in common with the Shmup genre, only it is in First Person in a free flyable area and that there are mission objectives instead of Bosses.
For a shmup it is atleast a very interesting entry, that added some things from the space combat genre. So it wanted to make things different.
It is also an obscure entry, as it was already fully developed and localized in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German. But it was only released in USA in English for PC and Dreamcast. The german language version on PC was released only through a gaming magazine over one year later.
The other language versions were unreleased as far as i know... maybe because Red Storm Entertainment, which were the publisher of this game, were bought by Ubisoft in the same year.
Very hard for the french developers, as it was their native language version never released
Interestingly, the Dreamcast Disc has some files that refers to a japanese version as well, also it has some files that refer to exclusive gameplay options for the Naomi 2 system. Even they does not seem to be fully implemented in this version, as the normal game is loaded with a Naomi emulator.
But maybe there were at least plans to make an Arcade version of this game later, too