209. Sky Kid (Namco, Famciom, 1986)
Gameplay is basically the same as the arcade original: the screen scrolls right to left, and you have to dodge/shoot down enemies on your way to pick up a bomb and use that bomb on a specific large enemy target. Your plane actually tilts at a 4-degree angle when you are ascending or descending, and this can be key for firing upwards / downwards at air / ground enemies. This feels kind of obvious and I wonder why more shooters didn't steal this mechanic. I always hate in Gradius having to hug the top or bottom of the screen to deal with certain enemies, and Sky Kid gives me a fun tool to abate that issue.
The A button fires a straight medium range shot, and the B button performs a loop (either up or down) that prepositions you and dodges any enemies. When you are carrying the bomb, you can't loop, as the B button also drops the bomb. This means you have to be extra careful when you have the bomb since dodging is not an option. This gives the stages a nice kind of 2-part flow with pre-bomb and post-bomb segments.
While the enemy AI in the first level is pretty basic, after that, planes will actively hunt you down, so you are forced to use the dodge more. I actually found that if I just never stopped dodging, I could actually make it through seemingly impossible odds unscathed. This still doesn't help when you have to pick up the bomb, but it was still fun to see how far I could get just mashing dodge, even if that meant my score wouldn't be as high.
Graphically, the Famicom version of Sky Kid looks like a cheap knock off of the arcade original. You can't even tell that your pilot is supposed to be a bird. Heck, the American NES release of Sky Kid has a human guy on the cover, because he's just like 8 white pixels in the game. The music is also pretty bland and the same in every level, but these are all typical early arcade-to-Famicom port issues.
3/5, a difficult horizontal shooter with a cool dodge
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