Tag Archives: Bullet Hell

Zarlor Mercenary, Atari Lynx

Zarlor Mercenary is a single or multiplayer vertically-scrolling “bullet hell” shooter that was developed by Epyx and released exclusively for the Atari Lynx in 1990. The game plays in landscape (horizontal) format, and the background scrolls horizontally too.

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Zero Wing, Megadrive/Genesis

The English language Sega Megadrive conversion of Toaplan‘s Zero Wing has gone down in history as one of the (unintentionally) funniest games of all time. The intro sequence (which was created for this version of the game and does not appear in the arcade original) features some of the most hilariously bad translations of all time, including the now iconic sentence “All your base are belong to us“, which became a meme in the early 2000s.

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Zero Wing, Arcade

Zero Wing is a side-scrolling bullet hell shooter developed by Toaplan and distributed into arcades by Namco in Japan and Williams Electronics in North America in 1989.

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Raiden Densetsu, FM Towns

Released in Japan as “Raiden Densetsu” (“Legend of Raiden“), but with a title screen that calls it “Raiden Trad“, this is an authentic port of the Seibu Kaihatsu arcade game Raiden, but with a few extra options.

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Viewpoint, FM Towns

Originally released as an arcade game on Neo Geo MVS hardware, Viewpoint is an isometric bullet hell shooter originally developed by Aicom, ported by Sammy and published by Ving for the FM Towns in 1993. It obviously takes inspiration from Sega‘s Zaxxon, but its aesthetic owes more to Irem‘s R-Type.

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Viewpoint, PlayStation

The 1996 PlayStation version of Aicom‘s classic isometric shooter, Viewpoint, was ported by Visual Concepts Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. It features updated graphics and music, with the same basic gameplay elements of the original.

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Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa, Sega Master System

Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa is the sequel to the classic 1986 Sega arcade game, Fantasy Zone. Rather unusually, it came out first on the Master System, before later being released as an arcade game. Usually the opposite occurs, but in this case the Master System version was released in 1987 and the arcade version came out in 1988.

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Commando, Atari 8-Bit

***CANNED GAME***

The Atari 8-Bit version of Commando was developed by Sculptured Software for Data East in 1989, but unfortunately the game was never released. Thankfully a prototype still exists and is available online, which is good because this is one of the best 8-bit ports of Commando around.

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Commando, Apple II

The 1987 Apple II conversion of Capcom‘s Commando was developed by Quicksilver Software, Inc. and published by Data East in North America only, and it is a reasonable port although the play window is probably the smallest out of the all the versions of Commando I’ve played so far.

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Commando, BBC Micro

Unfortunately the BBC Micro version of Elite‘s conversion of Commando is an absolute travesty, with terrible graphics and horrible gameplay and the only thing it has in common with the arcade original is the name of the game and the basic scenario.

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