Please help me remember a videogame from my childhood

April 15, 2009 1:23 PM

I'm trying to remember the name of a video game I played in the late 80's or early 90's.

I can't seem to find it with all of my searching in game archives around the net. I spent many hours and an inordinate numbers of quarters on it, and I'd love to find it again.

It was an arcade space shooter, and although technically more advanced and came out later, it's like Time Pilot in terms of being able to fly in any direction while watching from an overhead position. The game was divided up into a number of stages, about six or seven, in which the underground terrain changed distinctly for each one.

A few things that I remember about the game:

1. The game had a radar of sorts in the lower right corner that was broken up into square quadrants (I think a 5x5 grid), and each quadrant had a number in it that designated how many "tank" type ships were in that area. These enemies didn't move, and you had to go into that area to kill them. In addition to these tank enemies, there were also free-roaming ships that usually traveled in groups that were trying to take you out pretty much wherever you went.

2. You would get weapon upgrade tokens when you killed the tank-like ships mentioned above, and also groups of the free-roaming baddies. You could incrementally increase the power of your weapon. One weapon in particular that I remember: when you shot it, it was a horizontal pulse made up of a number of rings side by side.

3. Each stage ended with a boss that was very large, and generally took up the entire screen. You'd fight it after clearing the stage of all bad guys.

4. The second stage was very distinct, in that even though it was a space shooter, it was over a planet terrain that looked like canyons (all the rest were space-age cities and such). The end boss was a squarish ship that was the size of the entire screen and enclosed your ship by surrounding it with the four borders of the ship. The way to beat this boss was by shooting out the four diagonal corners, while avoiding bullets that were coming at you within the enclosure.

I know this sounds like a pretty generic description of most every space shooter ever made, but I'm hoping that if you played it, you might recognize the details. Thanks!

posted by SpacemanStix to sports, hobbies, & recreation (4 comments total)

Go to mamedb.com and use the advanced search to narrow it down to shooters made in your year range. After that, just scroll through the names and screen shots until you find something familiar.
posted by jedicus at 1:50 PM on April 15 [2 favorites has favorites]

Wow, that did it; thanks jedicus! Man, I spent a lot of hours playing this game, and a lot of time trying to find it again.

In case you were wondering, it was this game.

And it looks like the image from the arcade cabinet was the boss that I was describing in #4 above. I don't think I ever realized that when I was playing the game.
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:30 PM on April 15

Looking at the picture, I remember some more details about the game. You had to fill in the line of stars, which you did by killing enemies, before the final boss would show up. You had a couple of super-bombs in your arsenal that were designated in the upper right corner. And there were four weapon types you could get, which are designated in the four different colored rectangle boxes above the stars.

And here's a video of the beginning of the game. Although it's been almost 20 years since I've played it, it feels so familiar when I watch it...
posted by SpacemanStix at 2:59 PM on April 15

Check out MAME, you can play it in an emulator if you're so inclined to revisit the game. One nice thing about emulation is you can abuse the freeze/thaw abilities to actually finish games that were designed to eat up quarters by being stupid-hard. I went back and beat Ghosts 'n' Goblins that way, it was very satisfying. Fucking game. I beat you!
posted by cj_ at 5:05 PM on April 15