Arcade scrolling shooter game

What many forget about the game is that it is also very difficult to beat. The game is a fixed shooter in the style of Space Invaders , with the player destroying enemies which descend in formation from above as well as swooping down, diving and shooting at the player-controlled spaceship. Whilst the game starts off relatively tame, the difficulty soon starts to build and eventually becomes a very real challenge.

Plenty of retro games have undergone modern reimaginings , but it is easy to forget the origins of some of the world's most recognizable characters. In the case of Donkey Kong , the game that started it all was also one of the most difficult in the franchise. Controlling a familiar red-hatted character, the player attempts to ascend a series of ladders and platforms as the titular villain Donkey Kong throws down barrels from above. The game is difficult to get to grips with at first and requires the player to be a quick learner just to tackle the first level effectively.

After that, things ramp up, with more obstacles and hazards introduced, some of which seem to require impossibly quick reactions to avoid. Rescuing Pauline from the ape's clutches is a daunting challenge. Developed as the sequel to Defender , another notoriously difficult arcade game,, Stargate is a side-scrolling shooter game that has the player pilot a spaceship through a mountainous region on an unnamed planet as aliens descend and attempt to kidnap people from the surface and destroy the player's ship.

The player has a tough job attempting to stop the aliens whilst also surviving long enough to make it to the next level. The ship moves extremely fast at just a touch and shooting accurately is hard, making the first few attempts at the game very short for most players.

The player has some other tools, such as missiles and a hyperdrive button that warps them to a random location, but using them effectively takes some practice. A game that was oddly ahead of its time, Tempest places the player in control of a "blaster" in a 3D space that stretches into the distance. The walls of the space are segmented into individual lanes from which enemies approach fast, while the player snaps the blaster from lane to lane to destroy them using a rotary knob.

The speed with which the enemies approach is the main source of difficulty in the game, and as levels continue the game can become extremely chaotic with the number of enemies approaching at the same time from different lanes. Whilst the game is interesting to play casually, attempting to beat it all the way to level 99 is a much more serious task.

So what went wrong? Why was this genre, which at one stage was positively bursting with fresh ideas, allowed to wither and fade? The side-scrolling shooter owes its existence to design genius Eugene Jarvis, whose seminal game Defender established many of its most familiar attributes.

Ad — content continues below. Like Defender , Scramble was ferociously difficult, particularly when the rolling planet surface gave way to claustrophobic little tunnels, where the environment became as deadly to negotiate as the waves of alien craft.

The Commodore 64 alone saw a range of thinly-veiled clones of Defender and Scramble , each rechristened with names such as Survivor , Skramble and the rather rude-sounding Shaft Raider. Konami somewhat cheekily recycled the code from Scramble itself, with Super Cobra also released in offering up the same frantic vaunt through tunnels and across mountains, except this time in a little helicopter.

But Super Cobra was, if anything, an even more widely-ported game than Scramble , with versions of it appearing on the Atari , the Colecovision and the MSX home computer. Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Created by a group of four developers in their early 20s, Gradius was originally envisioned as a direct sequel to Scramble , before its design gradually drifted away from the game which inspired it.

Players expecting more of the same on stage two were surprised to find themselves in an entirely different environment: a surreal network of maze-like columns, rocks and Maoi heads, which spat hoops of deadly lasers. Later levels were set among metal chambers, or grotesque, organic caverns. For the youths crowding into arcades back in , this was thrilling stuff.

Gradius not only challenged you to beat your own score, but seduced you with its visuals — playing the game became as much about seeing what would scroll into view next as it was about defeating the alien threat. Shooters had featured power-ups for several years since , but none allowed the player to customise their ship to their own style of play. Gradius was a solid hit, sparking not only a wave of ports to home computers and consoles, but also a string of sequels and spin-offs, which appeared annually through the rest of the decade.

Salamander provided a simplified weapons system and a two-player co-op mode. Gradius II introduced some stunning graphics, most of which survived in a remarkable port to the Nintendo Entertainment System later that year. Gradius III offered a greater range of weapon options, but also saw Konami ramp up the level of difficulty to frightening extremes. Full of imagination and deliciously strange humour, the Parodius games were classics in their own right.

While Konami spent the latter part of the s exploring the possibilities of the Gradius series, another contender appeared in arcades. At the time, R-Type looked like something sent back from the future. Follow Us.

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