Williams‘ brilliant 1990 arcade hit, Smash TV, is an insane overhead shooter with a wicked sense of humour.
You play a contestant in a futuristic game show – one in which you must kill to survive. And you have to kill a lot of people, robots, monsters, and snakes, to make it to the end.
Sega‘s 1987 arcade shoot ’em up Alien Syndrome is a difficult game. Even with quicksaves I can only (be bothered to) get to the end of level two. Which must explain why many of the Alien Syndrome videos on YouTube are cheat videos… No one can be bothered to play it properly single-player.
Taito‘s superb Operation Wolf was one of the first arcade games to feature a machine gun with force feedback on the cabinet.
Williams Electronics‘ 1982 arcade classic Joust sees you atop a flying bird, trying to knock other riders off their flying birds.
Atari‘s 1985 arcade hit Paperboy features an isometric road to cycle down and houses to throw newspapers at. It’s an attractive proposition for an arcade game. Especially when the game has real bike handlebars for steering, which the original arcade cabinets did.
Developed by a team led by Yu Suzuki at Sega in 1985, Space Harrier is a super-fast third-person, flying-into-the-screen fantasy blasting game, originally housed inside a hydraulic cabinet in arcades. This would jerk around as you moved the control stick, giving you a feeling of movement as you played the game.
Quite possibly the maddest (and best) video game title of all time, Fat Worm Blows A Sparky was a critical hit back in 1986 when it was first released.
Shantae is a great little platform adventure game, made for the Nintendo Game Boy Color by WayForward Technologies and published by Capcom in 2002.
The main character is a female, half-genie swashbuckler, called Shantae, and is up against the pirate Risky Boots and her band of cack-handed shipmates.
I can’t write about the other Shadowrun games without mentioning the Sega Megadrive/Genesis game, first released by Sega in 1994.
The King of Grabs 