The PC Engine version of Salamander was first released by Konami in 1991, and it demonstrates why NEC‘s small-form console was so ahead of everything else at the time. It has great graphics and sound, smooth scrolling, large objects moving around the screen, very little sprite tearing, responsive controls, and a simultaneous two-player gameplay mode.

This version of Salamander is a pretty much perfect port of the arcade original, although it has been slightly re-worked in places. It has faster enemy animations and improved sound over the arcade version. You also start from a predetermined position on a level after losing a life, which is different to the original.

You can choose to play the game on Beginner or Expert difficulty levels, and the game features all six levels as seen in the arcade version. These alternate between horizontally-scrolling, and vertically-scrolling levels.

Salamander is missing only a few small details from the arcade game, like some of the parallax background scrolling, and the game does judder occasionally when there’s a lot going on on-screen. These are relatively minor faults, though, in the grand scheme of things.

This version of Salamander is so good that it has been re-released many times over the intervening decades. It has appeared on Virtual Console for both the Wii and Wii U; it has been released on PlayStation Network and for PC, and it was also included as a game on the North American TurboGrafx-16 Mini, which was released in 2020.

Salamander is a fantastic port of a great ‘bullet hell’ shooter, and it is still well worth playing nowadays.

More: Salamander on Wikipedia
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