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To celebrate the publishing of our 700th review, we’ve chosen a shooter that’s aptly named. Toaplan’s Hellfire was released by the shortly-lived Seismic, and it’s pretty darn hard. Though it may not be visually stunning compared to other games in the genre, it’s a great game that offers solid gameplay and a rockin’ soundtrack to compliment its difficulty level.
Rare games always create controversy, and fewer games of the 16-bit era are rarer than Uzu Keobukseon, known outside its native Korea as Space Turtle Ship. A shooter that conjures up images of Truxton and Twin Cobra, it’s one of those games that few people know about and even fewer have played. The question is: is it worth tracking down?
The Mega Drive has a ton of shooters that never saw release outside of Japan. Unfortunately, for every gem like Battle Mania 2 there is a dud like XDR: X-Dazedly-Ray. If you ever needed a game to cure insomnia, Unipacc has filled your prescription to the letter. Read our full review for more details, and trust us. It’s more fun than the actual game itself.
Aicom and Sammy scored a big hit with Viewpoint, an isometric shooter that was big on visuals and hard as nails. Sammy decided that there weren’t enough versions of the game around, so it decided to release the game for several consoles, including our very own Genesis. Sega fans should take note that this is perhaps as close as they’ll ever get to a real Zaxxon sequel. And no, Motherbase 2000 on 32X doesn’t count.
It seems that only a handful of the seemingly endless stream of Space Invaders sequels and variations that have surfaced since 1978 actually try anything new, and the release of Space Invaders ’91 (Space Invaders ’90 in Japan) was a lukewarm effort at injecting some new life into the classic gameplay. It didn’t add much, but what’s there is actually fun for a while.