Fire Shark is a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up developed by Toaplan and first distributed into arcades in 1989. It is the sequel to Flying Shark, which came out in 1987, and once again features biplanes that must blast their way through ten different stages of military mayhem.

The most obvious upgrade over Flying Shark is the fact that two players can play Fire Shark simultaneously, which wasn’t possible previously.

Another major change are the upgradable weapons, which are more fantastical in Fire Shark. There are three types of weapons that can be picked-up by shooting blimps (or zeppelins, or whatever you prefer to call them) and collecting the subsequent power-ups. Firstly there’s a wide spread shot. Secondly there’s a green laser beam-type weapon, and thirdly a flamethrower that shoots out in a long, straight line up the screen. By collecting power-ups with the word ‘P’ on them you can increase the power of these forward-firing weapons, although you need to collect three ‘P’ power-ups to increase power by one level, with level three as the maximum. And, of course, if you lose a life while powered-up you automatically drop back down to the lowest level again.

Like in Flying Shark, you also have bombs as a secondary weapon. Dropping a bomb will create a large explosion that will damage anything caught in the blast. These are limited use, but can be re-stocked by collecting power-ups labelled ‘B’.

There are also power-ups labelled ‘S’ which will increase your aircraft’s movement speed when collected, and lightning flash-shaped pick-ups that award extra points. Very occasionally you might also get ‘1UP’ power-ups that grant extra lives.

Fire Shark, in my opinion, is a better game than Flying Shark. It’s not quite as difficult as Flying Shark (although Fire Shark is still a very challenging game); it looks better, and is more varied. And of course the simultaneous two-player mode is an attractive new feature.

Unlike its predecessor, Fire Shark wasn’t ported to home systems, other than a lone Sega Megadrive/Genesis port that was released in 1990.

More: Fire Shark on Wikipedia