Darius

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Darius
System(s): Sega Mega Drive
Publisher: Sega Games (JP), Sega of America (US), Sega Europe (EU)
Developer: M2, Hideki Konishi
Licensor: Taito
Original system(s): Taito Triple-screen System
Developer(s) of original games: Taito
Genre: Shooting
Number of players: 1
Release Date RRP Code JP 2019-09-19 ¥6,980 (7,538)6,980e US 2019-09-19 $79.9979.99 DE 2019-10-04 €79.9979.99 ES 2019-10-04 €79.9979.99 FR 2019-10-04 €79.9979.99 UK 2019-10-04 £69.9969.99 IT 2019-10-04 €79.9979.99 AU 2019-09-19 AS 2019-09-19

Darius (ダライアス) is a side-scrolling space shoot 'em up originally developed for arcades by Taito. A Sega Mega Drive port was produced in 2019 that is pre-installed in the Mega Drive Mini as a bonus game.

Story

The vicious Belsar have attacked the peaceful Darius system, which now faces absolute devastation at their abominable hands. Darius' defense fighters proved no match for the overwhelming firepower of the alien forces, which wiped out their entire fleet in one fell swoop.

With nothing left to protect them, the people could only sit and wait for the icy embrace of death as the satellite bombardments continued unopposed, until a single bright light came out of the darkness of the mourning clouds, referred to as "Silver Hawk".

Like a phoenix brought forth from the embers of a burning world, the bird-shaped visage became a beacon of the planet's last fight for survival.

Gameplay

The player controls an ornate fighter spacecraft, named the Silver Hawk, and must navigate through scrolling terrain while battling a variety of fighter craft, ground vehicles, turrets, and other obstacles throughout the game's stages (referred to as zones in the game). The ship's arsenal consists of forward-firing missiles for air-to-air attacks (fired with or ), aerial bombs for air-to-surface attacks (fired with ) and a protective force field, all of which can be upgraded by Power Capsules (in the form of large, colored orbs) that are dropped by specially-colored enemies throughout the game's zones. If the player is shot at without a force field active or collides with the terrain, a ship is lost and all upgrades are returned to the lowest level (e.g. LASER 4 will downgrade to LASER 0). Losing all ships ends the game, with no option to continue.

When the player reaches the end of a zone, a boss battleship appears, which must be defeated to proceed. Once the boss of a zone is destroyed, the player is given a choice of which zone to play next via a branching path. There are a total of 26 zones in the game (with zones V and Z occurring twice in the game's branching path system), but only seven can be played in a single run.

Although the original arcade game used a setup consisting of three CRT monitors and one-way-mirrors to present a seamless widescreen display to the player, the Mega Drive port condenses gameplay to a single screen, limiting the player's field-of-view, and two-player support has been removed. However, new gameplay modes and options have been added: the player can choose to play a Boss Rush Mode where they fight all 26 bosses consecutively. The player can also choose to change the Silver Hawk's pilot to Tiat (the second player pilot in the arcade original), who retains all upgrades when a ship is lost, but doing so will disqualify the player from entering the high score table.

Levels

	Zone A
	The boss of this zone is King Fossil.
	Zone B
	The boss of this zone is Electric Fan.
	Zone C
	The boss of this zone is Burst Out.
	Zone D
	The boss of this zone is Big Rajarnn.
	Zone E
	The boss of this zone is Little Stripes.
	Zone F
	The boss of this zone is Dual Shears.
	Zone G
	The boss of this zone is Myhome Daddy.
	Zone H
	The boss of this zone is Fatty Glutton.
	Zone I
	The boss of this zone is Guard Savage.
	Zone J
	The boss of this zone is Steel Spine.
	Zone K
	The boss of this zone is Hard Mollusk.
	Zone L
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone M
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone N
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone O
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone P
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone Q
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone R
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone S
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone T
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone U
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone V
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone W
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone X
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone Y
	The boss of this zone is
	Zone Z
	The boss of this zone is Great Thing.

History

Taito originally planned to release a port of the game for the system, but it was cancelled for unknown reasons. A port of the sequel, Darius II, did get a release, however.

Prior to its announcement for the Mega Drive Mini, a fan port of the game was created by Hideki "Hidecade" Konishi as a proof-of-concept. This proof-of-concept would be used as the basis for a commercial version of the game with further development from M2.

Production credits

This article needs a list of production credits, either from the game itself, a manual, or other reliable source.

Digital manuals

• 

  Mega Drive Mini manual

• 

  Mega Drive Mini JP manual

Technical information

Main article: Darius/Technical information.

ROM dump status

System	Hash	Size	Build Date	Source	Comments
?	CRC32 26ca4234 MD5 05dac074b9f194d74c44848eb15ad53f SHA-1 4841d8f05a73cb7c5f98b710f14ebd72be1a6504	4MB	2019-04	Mega Drive Mini

References

NEC Retro has more information related to Super Darius

Darius games for Sega systems
	Darius II (1990) | Darius (2019) | Darius Extra Version (2020)
	Sagaia (1992)
	Darius Gaiden (1995) | Darius II (1996)