Released into arcades by Taito in 1990, Space Gun is a first-person sci-fi horror shooter set on a crippled spaceship that has been overrun by killer aliens. It can be played by one or two players.

The aim of the game is to rescue the human crew members while blasting all the hostile alien creatures. As is often the case in these kinds of games, the humans are often in peril, and in your line of sight, and you have to be careful not to accidentally shoot them as the aliens move around.

The tone of Space Gun is cartoony and satirical, and it is obviously influenced by films such as Alien and Aliens. The creatures come in various forms and at different stages in their life cycle. Of course there are face-hugger-type aliens jumping out of leathery eggs, as well as fully-grown monsters that resemble the xenomorphs from the Alien films. Occasionally you’ll have to face a boss – and beat it – to continue.

A second button on the cabinet-mounted guns (there were two guns – one for each player) changes weapons, and you have limited use of a flamethrower, a grenade-launcher, a sword, and other weapons. Thankfully you don’t have to constantly re-load because your default weapon is some sort of plasma gun that never runs out of ammo. You can shoot magazines to refill your secondary weapons, though. The cabinet also has a foot pedal that is used to reverse the direction of travel, so you can go backwards and explore areas you previously missed.

Space Gun is a fast, loud and fun shoot ’em up that plays nicely in MAME, with a mouse instead of a lightgun. While I wouldn’t say that it’s particularly great, it is good enough to entertain for an hour or two. It has some nice touches, like destroyable landscapes, and even breakable windows in front of a vacuum (when you break the windows they unfortunately don’t result in all the air being sucked out of the room, which would have been neat, instead shutters come down to seal the holes), but it isn’t particularly original or different (although the cabinet is definitely large and impressive). This being a Japanese game, the translations to English are laughably bad in places, with some howling spelling mistakes, but I guess that’s all part of the charm…

Ports of Space Gun were released for a variety of systems in 1992. Ocean Software developed and released conversions of the game for the Amiga, Atari ST, C64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, and Sega released a version for the Master System. The arcade version is also currently available on the retro-gaming service, Antstream (at the time of writing).

More: Space Gun on Wikipedia