This terrible pun of a title (meant to ‘parody’ the word Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon) was developed by Sunsoft and distributed into arcades by Sega in 1989. It’s a one or simultaneous two-player Contra clone scrolling through a futuristic warzone.

The story is: you’re flown in (in a VTOL Harrier by the looks of it) and dropped behind enemy lines, from where you must infiltrate an “airtrip” [sic – I think they meant “airstrip“, but they couldn’t be bothered to spell it right…], and then find a (bay) route to the embassy where some hostages must be rescued alive.

As well as standard joystick controls you have three buttons at your disposal: one for shoot, one for jump, and one for cycling through four different attack modes (machine gun, grenades, flamethrower, and shotgun). A set of icons at the bottom of the screen shows which is active.

When you reach the end of an area you then have to deal with a boss battle. The first boss is an almost exact replica of the barrier in the first Contra. Subsequent bosses include a robotic snake, and a stupid metal cube with four guns that you have to destroy within a set period of time, otherwise an indestructible robot comes out and kills you without warning…

A later level gives you the chance to ride a futuristic, floating bike to the embassy. This is a ‘push-scrolling’, on-rails type level with explosive mines all over the place that will kill you unless you shoot them a path through them.

Bay Route is relatively plain-looking as games from this period go, although some of the background elements are well-drawn, if lacking colour. It also has a few nice touches, like enemy soldiers hiding behind walls and attacking when you walk past them (the solution is to wait for them to come out, then blast them); extra enemies coming out of doors or sliding down poles, and a female character for player two.

Bay Route is a fairly dour and derivative experience overall, but it might be entertaining for two players to thunder their way through by adding credits and continuing the game until the end. It’s about an hour’s worth of fun in total – not much more.

More: Bay Route on arcade-history.com