Reviews
Game
Major Styker is a scrolling shoot-em-up (shump) for DOS that helped fill the shump void in the PC market at the time. It has several things that you'd expect a shooter to have like multiple firing styles, shields, air and ground targets, and lots of bullets flying at once.
Unfortunately, Major Stryker has several faults that prevented it from ever becoming a household name. First, it was in development using EGA graphics when many games were starting to use the VGA palette. So, even though the game was released in 1993 it still looked like a game from 1991. Second, Major Stryker also doesn't take advantage of some of the shump staples that veteran players are used to like missiles, lasers, or heat-seekers. Third, the game doesn't really ever change. If you play through the Shareware stage you've seen pretty much everything there is to see about the game. The enemies, the levels, even the bosses are all pretty much the same throughout the game which makes it drag on in the later levels.
That aside, Major Stryker is a competent shooter with lots of planes, turrets, and ships to destroy, and even though it recycles the bosses, they're still pretty interesting looking and fun to fight. Also, there is a short dialog interlude between each zone which offers plenty of humorous innuendo between Stryker and his female counterpart at HQ which keeps things interesting.
Music
The music of Major Stryker is quite fitting. The combat levels feature loud, upbeat music and the cutscences have a more melodious sound. Some tracks, like "Soaring to Dizzy Heights" are annoying, but others, like "Light Years Per Hour" show off a great sounding electric guitar. Great sounding for AdLib, that is.
Ripping
The music of Major Stryker was extracted from the Volume1B.MS2, Volume2B.MS2, and Volume3B.MS3 files using Frenkel Smeijers' Textract utility. The track names come from the in-game music jukebox; however, the rip name of "High Flyer" is "Score!" which doesn't match, but the in-game name is assumed proper. The music was recorded to Vorbis using the Winamp plugin, AdPlug 1.8. Two tracks, "Apogee Fanfare" and "Segueway" don't terminate properly in AdPlug, so they were edited manually.
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Stryker
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