Uploaded September 2022 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Full Run of Sky Soldiers (スカイ ソルジャズ), and arcade shmup made by SNK.

Stage Listing:
00:00 - Stage 1
03:15 - Stage 2
04:43 - Stage 3
05:48 - Point Farm Stage 3 Boss
12:13 - Stage 4
13:43 - Stage 5
15:10 - Stage 6
16:38 - Stage 7
18:07 - Stage 8
19:31 - Stage 9
20:58 - Stage 10
22:26 - Stage 11
23:54 - Stage 12
25:22 - Stage 13
26:48 - Stage 14
28:12 - Stage 15
30:00 - Final Boss Rush
31:11- Ending & Credits

Not a whole lot to say about this one, Sky Soldiers is a very generic shmup where you fight various types of enemies in some sort of time travel thing. I don't know, it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I had no idea this even existed until someone mentioned it in the comments so I gave it a try. Not a hard game by any means, and using autofire trivializes most of the game.

At the start of each level you get to pick a special weapon out of four different types, the only ones worth using are Homing and Buster. Homing is used in most of the levels with Buster being reserved for a few of the more nasty bosses that come late in the game.

Bosses are all mostly giant ships that fire various things at you, mostly bland except for a few of them near the end, particularly the one in level 14 that can slow and invert your controls if you get hit. Best to speed kill that one, otherwise it can be a run ender. Also the first (train?) boss takes an enormous amount of damage to kill for some reason, no idea why the made it like that.

The stage 3 boss can be farmed for points indefinitely, takes absolutely no skill since you just sit in the corner and fire. There is no timeout so you can do that to your heart's content and max the score if you want. I stopped after farming around 1 millions from it I think.

Edit: Apparently the boss timeouts are not properly emulated in MAME, so you really could not milk this boss indefinitely. I'm not sure what the actual timeout is but the points earned on this part in this run are probably not possible on the real PCB. So don't take my score too seriously in this one.

In general this was just a pretty forgettable game. It's not the worst thing I've ever played but it's also not great.