"It is the first game to be created by Gazelle, one of the offshoots of defunct developer Toaplan that were founded after they declared bankruptcy in 1994," with "Knuckle Bash designer Junya Inoue serving as one of the game's graphic designers" (per Wikipedia). That May, Japan's Game Machine "listed Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon ... as being the eleventh most-successful arcade game of the month, outperforming titles such as Virtua Fighter."
"Amongst the numerous Commando clones on the market, Ikari Warriors was distinguished by its unique control style with rotary joysticks and a two-player cooperative mode," per Wikipedia. The game "was originally intended to be an official licensed adaptation of the film Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), but SNK were initially unable to acquire the rights to the film." Even so, "Sylvester Stallone, whose role as John Rambo had an influence on the game, owned an Ikari Warriors arcade cabinet in the 1980s."
"The main character, Opa-Opa, is sometimes referred to as Sega's first mascot character," and the 1986 game, alongside Konami's TwinBee, is "credited with establishing the cute 'em up subgenre" (per Wikipedia). To arm the little ship, "the player must get money by defeating enemies, bases or bosses, and access a shop by touching a marked balloon."
In Gaelco's 1991 coin-op, per Wikipedia, "players assume the role of a pharaoh warrior who embarks on a journey through four increasingly difficult levels taking place in an Ancient Egypt setting to save his wife by defeating the Egyptian gods Horus, Nut, Isis and Osiris." The studio "decided to work on a horizontal-scrolling arcade game similar to Double Dragon, Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja and Ghouls 'n Ghosts." It stayed an arcade exclusive for decades: "The title was never ported to other systems, until its inclusion as part of the Gaelco Arcade 2 compilation for Evercade."
"The reason Atari wanted me to design it is they were tired of their games taking 150, 200 chips, and they knew I designed things with very few chips, so we had incentives for getting it under 50 or under 40 chips," Steve Wozniak said of Breakout in a 2007 interview with Gamasutra. Atari's engineers, faced with the finished board: "They had trouble understanding it."
"Data East also created Night Slashers, clearly their best beat-em-up and undoubtedly capable of cracking a connoisseur's Top 10 list, if it weren't for the game's unbelievable obscurity," reads a 2006 review at HonestGamers, which sums up the appeal: "watch the heads roll, the chests implode, and the guts soil the cement."
"Nothing about this game is done well, and yet everything just meshes together so perfectly into one gigantic dose of pure nonsense," writes Hardcore Gaming 101, which also says Trio The Punch "is like a visual representation of the writings of William S. Burroughs if he was a Japanese video game designer."
"A number of shoot-em-up fans regard it as one of the best shooters of all time; others feel that the cluttered visual style and rank system ruin some pretty cool ideas," writes Hardcore Gaming 101. That rank system reacts to how well you play, and "creates some ridiculous scenarios where players will intentionally suicide at points to make the difficulty manageable, and can only properly clear it by scoring high enough to rack up extra lives."
"The rather obscure Japanese TAD Corporation wondered what it would be like to give a third-person point of view to gun-based carnage," writes Hardcore Gaming 101, crediting Cabal with the wave of imitators that followed, Wild Guns and NAM-1975 among them: "None of these games would likely exist if Cabal didn't set the table."
"The colorful, trippy graphics are reminiscent of many Amiga games," writes Hardcore Gaming 101 of Spanish maker Gaelco's run-and-gun. "It's not really on the level of other genre greats like Metal Slug (though it did predate that game by about a year)."
Flash Boy shipped on Data East's DECO Cassette System, tape-loaded arcade hardware where "the machine was turned on and 2 to 3 minutes later the game was loaded and ready to be played," as AtariProtos describes it. "The tape medium didn't prove to be nearly as robust as Data East had hoped, and the cassettes had a bad habit of failing to load after only a few months."
"In addition to a three-screen release, there is also a (more common) two-screen version," notes Hardcore Gaming 101; the shot above is the full three-screen spread, while the MiSTer core runs the two-screen one. "For some unknown reason, Darius II was renamed Sagaia outside of Japan."