Our Heroes

In a shoot'em up you essentially play as the craft you fly; who pilots it in the game is really of not much importance. But or the sake of frills and whatnot (sometimes even T&A, but not this time), there often are pilots added on. A good example is, well, our heroes above. Pretty much standard-issue hero and heroine. But try and string their names together backwards and see what ya get (courtesy of KLOV).

Some years (100?) from now, one runs into the Darius II/Sagaia crew, and these turn out to be:



But this is jumping ahead of time. Chronologically, the first real heroes of this saga are Sameluck Raida and Lutia Feen:

G-Darius also gave a bit of a backstory into these characters (which can be read elsewhere. It also gave the Silver Hawks a rather quaint origin:



As I have said elsewhere, you play as a craft in a shoot'em up. Of course, then, the real hero is:





And now, je laisse la parole à a better writer than me:

Oh bliss, bliss and heaven. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship, gravity all nonsense now.

You get a plush Silver Hawk if you get this one right . I must add, though, you really do get a a bird of rarest spun heaven metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship in G-Darius.

Partisanship not aside, it does cut a better profile than a lot of ships in horizontal shoot'em ups (mecha and flying humans I will not consider). Compare it with the clipped-wings-SR71 Blackbird-Black Fly of Metal Black,the cookie-cutter-paper-dart-till-it-rolls Vic Viper, the Axelay (singularly ugly from the front and side if you ask me), the flying patrol car of Gate of Thunder(figuratively, at least-look at the intro if you don't believe me), that Syvalion thingy, the 'phlying phalli' that are the R-9 and the A-144 Phalanx...you get the idea? So sue me.


The three existing Silver Hawk models

The Darians rolled out three Silver Hawk models, one exclusively for Darius Force/Super Nova. They all looked alike cosmetically, but used different weapons. The weapon system, though, was more or less the same. There was a straight laser/cannon, dubbed the Missile and a 'Bomb' (more like Gradius' 'missile', to confuse things further) for strafing, sometimes augmented by straight but weak lasers. The 'Missile' and 'Bomb' are generic terms, I must confess. Some Hawks were outfitted with proper bombs (lovely, lovely things): the Black Hole Bomb which served as some kind of maelstrom for small enemies and fire, and then spat out bursts of energy. The original Silver Hawk had the unique Capture Ball. The concept of a 'capture' weapon is not unique, I must confess, but captured enemies could be put to two uses:they could be simply detonated in a traditional bomb manner, or they could charge up a devastating Alpha Beam. I will not discuss this at length because I'm lazy. Somewhat thoughtfully, and perhaps taking a leaf from the Vic Viper's book, the Silver Hawks are fitted with Armour, which powered up too. It could even be powered up to the point that collision into scenery did not result in death. All in all, an ambitious but clunky weapons/defence system.

When drawn cartoonishly, the Silver Hawk becomes somewhat paunchy, or merely chubbier. If you don't believe me, look at the elaborate headdress Tiat has in the Super Darius II'wrong card, go home' screen. In the joke game Akkanvader/Space Invaders 95: Attack of the Lunar Loonies, it is as paunchy as ever (except from the top-down view), and is called the 'good Tatio-prouding ship'(sic). Almost as good as the tuna sashimi line.

On a somewhat unrelated note, there exists a Studebaker Silver Hawk, a Beretta Silver Hawk hunting rifle, and a 2004 action flick starring Michelle Yeoh called Silver Hawk.


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The Darius series of videogames are copyrighted 1986-2004 by Taito Corp. In addition to this, the text and doctored images on this page are the intellectual property of Arun S. Rajkumar.