The Genesis in 1990 did not lack shooters. It drowned in them. Horizontal, vertical, cute, military, space-marine — if it scrolled and shot, Sega's 16-bit machine had three of it by Christmas. Standing out in that crowd should have been impossible. Then a small Japanese studio called Compile quietly shipped a game about a lone pilot in a flying samurai mecha, fighting a rogue supercomputer across a future Earth rebuilt in the image of feudal Japan — all of it moving at a pace that felt less l...