Captain Skyhawk

Year: 1990
Developer: Rare

Captain Skyhawk is our second really pleasant surprise in a row. It's your basic space shooter, except with a bunch of really cool twists.

First of all, Rare has succeeded in simulating a 3-d environment really well -- it feels like you're moving in both the x and the y as you zoom forward. Second, there are a couple of interesting mini-games thrown in -- one that's essentially an airplane shooter from behind, and another that's about docking with a space station that's really slow, twitchy, and nerve-wracking. And on top of it all, there's some real variety in the graphical presentation that makes the whole thing feel really nice.

On the down-side, as with Cabal, it took us a few plays to figure out what the hell was going on, and even when we did, the main stage was super twitchy -- we slammed into a lot of walls. Also, the boss fights were sort of anti-climactic, given the difficulty of getting to them.

Overall, though, once we got this down, we passed the controller back and forth for well past the 20 minutes we'd planned on playing. Captain Skyhawk has some real personality, and there are a bunch of different things to like about it. This is still pretty early for Rare -- I know that RC ProAm was before this, but we're still 3 or 4 years from when they hit their stride. But it's a really good game, and probably missed being really famous only as a result of the NES being near the end of its life.

Rating: 9/10 Lots and lots of fun, period.
Advice: Keep moving. This is how games used to be, and you forget that, and you shouldn't. Keep fucking moving.
Best Moment: Docking. Finally. On my 15th try.