Although you could collect a rocket launcher or
flamethrower, the vast majority of enemies had to
be taken out by stopping to jab them with a knife.
With an endless stream of them approaching from
both sides of the screen, progress through the
levels was a slow, gruelling stab-a-thon.
CLASSIC WEAPON
M
aking licensed arcade
conversions for 8-bit
computers generally
involved the programmer
borrowing a coin-op machine, or just
watching a video of people playing
it, and somehow trying to recreate
as much of the game as possible on
vastly inferior hardware.
The results were often far better
than anyone had any right to expect,
and this was one of the Spectrum’s
top arcade ports. The brutal difficulty
of the original Konami coin-op was
increased somewhat by the way
enemy bullets blended into the
background, but the first couple of
levels (the only ones most people ever
saw) were great.Developer Jonathan Smith
Publisher Imagine Software
Genre Run and gun
Released 1986