Beat in slow motion mode. I actually put the speed to normal for stage 2 but once the game became harder and I got speed upgrades I found myself dying too often. Without those speed upgrades I moved painfully slow to the point where it was better to ignore half of the screen. Speed and weapon types dropped from enemies and could by cycled by shooting. I did the entire game using rockets because they killed everything in 1 hit. Rather than hold down the turbo button like in many shoot em ups I fired single snipe shots. After beating I tried out the other weapons. Black S was crappy bullets that had the same tight clustering as rockets while doing less damage. Green W was the spread shot and it put so many projectiles on screen that it tanked the framerate. Red had a weaker forward shot while doing a single back shot. S was speed and P seemed to upgrade weapon power the same as if you picked up the same weapon you already had. Or maybe it allowed switching weapons without losing upgrades because I was getting top upgrades from only 1 pick up while testing. I liked the enemy designs being all real world jets, ships, tanks and men. The behaved and shot a little differently and some took more than 1 shot from the weaker weapons. SAMs with homing missiles were the biggest threat and where I sometimes used my screen clearing bombs. Orange tanks and big choppers were next simply because they fired quickly. AA guns were the least threat because they could not aim only shooting straight down in a fixed pattern. The difficulty did not get too high and there were no bosses for some reason despite a large ship and buildings. Instead each stage ended with a sped up sequence and the final "boss" was a building with no weapons just infinite jets flying by. This was a fairly meh game with nothing really special. No bosses was a shocking omission but I have played much worse NES shoot em ups. I did like the little map in between stages that showed my progress.

6.0/10