In 1986 Taito released Tokio to the arcades. It's one in a long line of 1942 clones. You control a biplane over the streets of modern day Tokyo. Same gameplay as all the games in the vertical shooter genre at the time. Shoot them first and avoid everything else. This time you can kill the enemies and red planes appear. Collect them as your wingmen. You can then change the formation of the wingmen to alter the spray of your weapons. You can cycle through a few formations and depending on how many wingmen you've collected, they will change dramatically. From wide shots, to concentrated beams and the like. The wingmen can be shot down so you have to consider that when moving to avoid shots. There is also a command to launch the wingmen kamikaze style into a target. They'll rush off and crash into it and cause heavy damage. The game has you flying through districts of Tokyo attempting to get to the city center. Each few sections along the way feature a boss battle. The graphics for this one aren't all that impressive, even at the time. The gameplay is derivative of the genre which was on its way out at the time as more complex styles of gameplay were being offered up.
Tatio released Continental Circus into the arcades in 1987. They probably meant to call it Continental Circuit first of all, as it's a formula 1 racing game. All of the cabinets in the US actually had the game as Continental Circuit, but the game's title screen still read Continental Circus. The game features three tracks. You need to qualify for the first one by achieving a ranking of eighty or higher in two laps. If successful, you'll move on to racing in that track. You'll then move on to the second track where you'll have to qualify further up in the overall rankings, and then race the track and advance in the rankings again. You keep doing this until you're at the last track and are going for the number one spot. The game featured a steering wheel, gas pedal, and a high-low shifter. Some sit down versions of the arcade game had overhanging shutter based 3D glasses. Some versions didn't. If the glasses were there, and they were enabled, looking at the game without them you'd see two exact images of the game sort of offset from each other and in different colors. Looking through the glasses brought the imagery together. Versions of the game without the glasses had the version of the game being emulated here. The unique thing about this game at the time was the use of the pit. If you bumped another car or obstacle, you'd begin to smoke and you couldn't take another hit. You car would explode if you hit something at that point. So you'd have to pull in to the pitstop and get your car repaired. You weren't racing against the other car's physical presence. You're racing against their times, and pulling into the pit didn't hurt you time wise. The game here suffers from not having the wheel, but it's actually playable. Another problem with this game at the time was it came out post Out Run and attempted to mimic that game's pioneering graphics techniques on inferior arcade hardware. Needless to say, it didn't work out that well.
In 1987 Taito unleashed another classic arcade game on to the scene in the form of Operation Wolf. Operation Wolf is a lightgun game where a mock up of an uzi is mounted before the screen of the machine. It has a trigger button for firing and another button to shoot a grenade. What made Operation Wolf special was in the way the enemies were presented. The game scrolls from either left to right or right to left and while this is going on enemies come on to the screen from either side or the top of the screen and then turn into the screen to fire at you. You have guys running in from the left and taking cover behind trees waiting to lean out and fire at you. They come diving in from the right and roll prone before firing at you. The helicopters come in from the sides and turn towards you and fire. The sprites are huge and the animation is great. All of it. Their movement in, and their death animations. The game also has a logical progression. You're going in to free some hostages, so to start you go to take out the enemy communications. You proceed on in subsequent missions to take out their ammo supply and weaken their defenses on the way to liberating the prisoners of war. You then proceed to escort them out and to the awaiting transport plane and you guard them as the plane takes off. You have to shoot items on the screen to pick them up, like ammo clips and extra grenades. The game features hidden items behind destructible bits of the scenery. You can shoot coconuts off the trees or chickens and pigs to reveal hidden items. The game also throws in some friendly characters you don't want to shoot and often need to protect. The game is frenetic and truly good fun on a console. I wasn't expecting it to be this much fun but they've really taken the extra steps to make sure it was. You control an onscreen crosshairs to aim. They have options to allow you to adjust the analog sensitivity and even to invert the Y axis. The control is perfect on a console as a result. This one remains great.
Taito released Exzisus onto the arcade scene in 1987. A brutally hard sidescrolling shooter in which you play as a space man purging the planets of an alien infestation. The game has all the standard bases covered. Forced scrolling, mid-bosses, weapon power-ups, and long and drawn out bosses. The graphics are great for the era and the music and sound are very impressive. The game features prominent parallax scrolling. Which I still just adore to this day. The game is really freaking hard. What makes the game hard is that the constant stream of enemies are coming at you from all directions. You have to be so exact in your movements. There isn't a pixel allowed for error. You need skills for this one. This isn't for the casual shooter fan. Not in any way. A very good game for those types, and nobody else.
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