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Played by: MadMatty
Flying Shark, produced by Catalyst and published by Firebird in 1987.
"Hot from the Arcades, Flying Shark is the definitive conversion of this shoot-em-up, chart-topping classic hit from Taito. Develop your strategy as you face swarms of enemy planes, tanks, gun emplacements and a host of sea-borne craft as you bomb, blast and battle your way into arcade history."
A classic shoot-em-up which I thought was a well made game for the time and enjoyed firing it up every now and again. Bases upon an arcade an original game of the same name, I think it was converted quite well. You control your plane through five levels blasting anything that moves. Certain red waves can drop a weapon upgrade and yellow waves will give bonus points. You get bombs to clear any larger enemies that are tough to kill and after the five levels the game loops and you go round again. There is no ending.
The game is brutal though. Even on the first level, you'll get enemies that fire normal and high speed shots which can be jarring when you see both at once. The game gets a bad rap for invisible bullets killing you, but the games hit detection is actually quite good. So no invisible bullets, but you can get shot from behind if you let an enemy scroll off the screen and fires a high speed shot. In each loop the difficulty ramps up so you will likely see double shots coming at you.
The game uses a small window which requires scrolling left/right to see all of what's going on and part of the right side is empty after the score column. I guess this is where the game gets its speed from and kind of feels like how a pal game played on an ntsc system would feel. I think what keeps me coming back to the game is the excellent music especially in level 1.
The US version of the game is known as Sky Shark and that was by a different development team. I read somewhere that Taito didn't like the Firebird version and had the game remade for the US market. That game has some nicer details and is full screen, but misses the animated water and the music isn't Tim Follins best work. Oh and its sfx or music, not both. I do think Flying Shark is the better of the two games.
00:00:00 Loop One
00:16:40 Loop Two
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