Retro spotlight: MUSHA

The Aleste series of shooters wasn’t actually named such in North America, not until near the very end of its time in the shoot ‘em up space. Most of the time, that led to annoying changes: Aleste to “Power Strike,” Super Aleste to the highly generic “Space Megaforce,” things of that nature. With the overseas release of Musha Aleste in 1991, however, a positive change was finally made: in North America, the game was known as “MUSHA” (sometimes stylized as “M.U.S.H.A”), with it standing for “Metallic Uniframe Super Hybrid Armor.” Since MUSHA is a game where you pilot a mech instead of a space fighter of some kind, that’s not only a change that fits, but it’s also one that’s pretty sick. Especially in comparison to “Space Megaforce.”The Musha in Musha Aleste didn’t have anything to do with the mech, either, so this was a matter of a clever backcronym by North American publishers Seismic Software: the word musha means “warrior” in Japanese, making the title of the game basically Warrior…