231. Airwolf (Kyugo Boueki, Famicom, 1988)

Airwolf is a straightforward horizontally scrolling shooter that is a port of Kyugo Boueki's 1987 arcade game, itself an adaptation of the 80s TV show of the same name. Unrelated to the NES version of Airwolf, which was developed by Beam Software. Gameplay takes place over 6 stages, and you can choose from one of 3 air weapons and one of 3 ground weapons to customize your helicopter. I eventually found a style I liked, which I fondly dubbed "Oops! All Missiles".

The B button shoots your air and ground weapon simultaneously, while A is a turbo button that increases the scrolling speed, but uses a limited supply of fuel. While this sounds like an interesting trade-off, the gameplay is challenging enough that I never really felt the need to speed up the action, though I could see the ability being very cool for repeat players and in speedruns. Every time you die, you have to start the level over from the beginning, which feels needlessly punishing in a scrolling shooter with limited lives, though thankfully I'm using save states.

While most enemies are small turrets or ships that can be taken down with one hit, there are occasionally much more powerful enemies that had pretty interesting patterns. The first is a golden plane that follows you from left to right and then right to left, while all of the other enemies are gone once they leave the screen. Second is a pink helicopter that is constantly dropping dangerous paratroopers. While neither are visually showy, they were both mechanically fun to fight and felt like a duel where you had to get close to them but not too close. Unfortunately, levels 3 and 4 had no such duel, and that was as far as I got into Airwolf's 6 stages.

These special enemies take the place of a more standard shooter boss, as instead of an end of level large enemy with a bunch of health, you get to play a bonus first-person perspective shooting gallery level where you are shooting at a large ship or series of turrets. The enemy simply fires missiles toward you that can be shot down, and while this type of level is kind of slow, it is at least a welcome break from the difficulty of the scrolling shooter sections. 

There are a few quirks to Airwolf that make it less than stellar. Your shots are blocked by enemy shots, which makes certain turrets much more difficult to shoot. There is also a lot of slowdown, to the point that it's weird how fast the game manages to get when there is only one enemy on the screen, which doesn't happen very often. My biggest gripe is that stages basically have to be memorized, as enemies will frequently enter the screen from all sides. While you can mostly hide in the upper left corner to avoid this, it also is not a ton of fun.

4/5, a fast, challenging horizontal shooter based on a TV show starring Ernest Borgnine