Space Harrier Version Comparison

I’ve been visiting the Space Harrier series lately, mostly Planet Harriers, the 2000 arcade sequel that somehow escaped getting a Dreamcast port.

Google picked up on that (ugh) and pointed me to a 55 minute video comparison of home versions. I don’t think any of you will want to watch the whole thing, but I’ll embed it as a place to start from:

Space Harrier ports are interesting because of how impossible it was for home versions of the time to simulate it. It was a technical marvel in arcades, at a time when generally arcade hardware tended to be miles better than any ports. So, few of these versions have even a slight hope of matching up.

But that makes them interesting! Every one of them had to make a compromise between Space Harriers many different facets, and try to get as much of the arcade’s feeling through despite severe hardware limitations. The arcade beats most of them for quality, of course, with few exceptions.