Bosconian (1981)

this intro from the arcade Gamefaqs serves as a good general review:

"It was the first game to feature the continue function. This enabled players to go as far as they wanted as long as they had the quarters. The game itself never quite gained a real wide following since other Namco/ Midway games were still drawing a lot of business. A couple of these notable games were Pac Man and Galaga. Still, the game play proved to be unique since one was able to "wrap around" the screen to the other side giving one the feeling that there were no size limits in the game. Although the enemy fighters never fire on your ship, they move faster and attempt to ram it. Other hazards included asteroids and mines to ensure that this would be a battle to the death. Good luck in fulfilling your mission."

The continue function is indeed nice and is maybe the games best feature to have aged well. If it's indeed the first then it definitely deserves mention. For the early age of 1981 this is a really good looking, fast, fluid and responsive shooter. I actually really do enjoy it and I've played it in an arcade before. It's not perfect though. Every time you die you go back to the center of the 'galaxy' (which i hate) and by the time you get to round 9 it starts getting pretty ridiculous. The space stations will shoot at you instantly. and attack formations can form and ram you before you even know they're there. Still, being able to insert infinite quarters i was able to make progress. The easiest way to eliminate a space station is to actually just ram into it. even if you get shot down if you are close and moving in the same direction your debris will take it out (this is also true for enemy formations sometimes and after you wipe them out they still hit you and kill you)
Reversing directions can also be disorienting and lead to a quick death, because it will pan the screen in the travelled direction, sometimes spawning enemies right on top of ya.

Like most games of it's day, this really feels like a game designed around trying to get a better high score rather than complete it. The scoring system is interesting with different enemies giving different point values such as the spy ship (which when its coming is announced 'spy ship sighted!' in ra eally garbled low res synthetic voice) the enemy formation leaders, and the space station turrets (and stations themselves)

rounds 5-7 seems the best place to get a high score. The enemy will spawn squadrons to go after you but its not so fast and hard that you'll just keep burning through credits lickety-split like round 9+

I managed to get to round 15 and thought stuff looked like it was getting familiar so I think it just loops after a certain point (like Pac Man, Centipede, etc.) So I called it as crashing into space stations restart repeat was only fun for so long. Overall a pretty impressive and replayable game featuring a continue feature, synthesized voice, and decent speed and sense of motion. It's true that its not as fun as some other games IMO (such as Missile Command) but its still pretty good and it might even be the best multi-directional shooter of it's day (that i've played anyway) IT has its flaws mainly the difficulty after a certain point made through means such as instant space station response time, and way less time until condition red occurs, and the annoying tendency to spawn enemies as soon as you reverse direction

I was wanting to play this for the sharp X68000 originally, possibly just because the platform is known for these kinds of shooters (and often they run really fast!) but the arcade of this was fine.