A pair of photos from the excellent PC Engine translation of Toaplan's Twin Cobra, or Kyuukyoku Tiger as it's known in Japan. Somebody out there needs to secure the rights to the Toaplan catalog - home to some of the greatest arcade shoot-em-ups ever made. And Hudson, or whoever is in charge, needs to release this game on the Virtual Console.
Twin Cobra was my favorite arcade shooter back in the late '80s, and turned me into a diehard Toaplan fan. They pretty much wrote the book on vertically-scrolling arcade shoot-em-ups. These games were tough as nails but never cheap, and always addicting. The PC Engine had the best home version of Twin Cobra (the NES and Genesis versions were disappointments), very detailed and fast and intense. Fire up Magic Engine on your computer and see for yourself.
C'mon, Hudson. Make some phone calls. Bring this game to the Virtual Console.
1 comment:
Couldn't agree more. Toaplan's vertical shoot-em-ups achieved the perfect difficulty level: adrenalin-racingly difficult from beginning to end, yet still possible to recover from if you lose a life and power-ups. Spending a coin on Twin Cobra or Flying Shark was the best possible value for money when I was 18: twenty minutes in which the outside world ceased to exist, and left you buzzing with adrenalin for hours.
They were really masters of 8-bit sprite artistry too, peaking (for me) with the remarkable Out Zone in 1990.
I also enjoyed Hellfire (1989), which instead of a second weapon let you change the direction of fire. If anything, it was even harder than Shark and Cobra.
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