See you in the spring of 2023 to (re)discover the three different versions of Steel Empire: its original version released in 1992 on Mega Drive, its Game Boy Advance port from 2004 and its Steam remaster from 2018. Each of these iterations has the particularity to have been reworked from scratch, drastically modifying the graphic and artistic style – in addition to some balancing adjustments – to better accommodate the specificities of the different consoles. Halfway between Jules Verne and The castle in the SkySteel Empire offers half a dozen courses in a biplane or airship – all in an atmosphere steampunk totally assumed right to the end of the menus, draped in a sepia filter like an old projector.
Give us back Alsace and Over Horizon
The little extra that makes all the difference in this compilation is the presence of Over Horizon, another studio shmup released in 1991 on Famicom and the following year in… Germany, for one reason or another. Strongly inspired by Konami’s Gradius, Over Horizon has the particularity of having been supervised by Yoshinori Satake, co-director of Steel Empire.
As usual with the distributor, several limited-edition physical editions are planned for Steel Empire Chroniclesfrom the relatively classic box version to the Special Edition including its batch of giveaways perfectly useless – posters, soundtrack, posters and even replicas of the Mega Drive and Genesis boxes. The height of the collector, two reissues of the SEGA PAL and NTSC console versions of Steel Empire are also planned – but also for Over Horizon on NES.