As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #28, September 2006.

Shooters have always been a mainstay of the arcade and home gaming industry.  In fact the first commercially released arcade game, Computer Space, was technically a shooter.  With the NES hardware bringing enhanced graphics over the joystick era consoles to the masses, it made perfect sense to see more accurate ports of popular arcade shooters on store shelves.  Nearly every shooter of the previous or current era of the time saw release on the NES, from the most popular to the most obscure.  So far I've attempted to broaden the horizons of NES gamers with some obscure titles in this column.  However this time I'll broaden my own and return to a nearly forgotten game from my youth, Sky Shark.  Released in American arcades in 1987 by then arcade powerhouse Taito, Sky Shark followed along the same vein of shooters such as Xevious and 1942.  Top down and vertically scrolling, Sky Shark put players behind the stick of a P-40 Warhawk fighter in the middle of World War II.  Your mission: fly from airstrip to airstrip, deep into enemy territory to locate American prisoners of war.

Sky Shark plays like any other shooter of the day - shoot everything and avoid what you cannot.  The P-40's guns can be upgraded by picking up floating "S" powerups, dropped by shooting groups of special red enemy planes.  These increase the coverage area and spray of your shots but do not increase their destructive power.  The only other weapon your plane is equipped with is the standard bomb, which cuts a circular inferno of carnage through anything in its blast radius.  Plane control is governed via a single joystick and all of this transfers over perfectly to the NES control pad - it's all very intuitive.  The audio package is fine on the NES, I don't know of anyone that fondly remembers the music from Sky Shark so it really isn't something that is important.  The arcade original is graphically beautiful yet the level of graphic detail is often overlooked.  The level of detail in this game is incredible for 1987 and it can easily be mistaken for a game of the early 1990's.  Over on the NES things get a little rough but there is still a decent level of color depth and sprite resolution.  Things look as they should, just not as detailed, but the graphics are recreated well enough.

However all is not well with the arcade Sky Shark and it wasn't until playing it again that memories of frustration returned.  The inherent problem here is that enemy shots move so much faster than your plane can maneuver.  This is a problem that plagued many earlier shooters as well but when the rest of the game is so well done it's like being shot in the foot.  You simply cannot move fast enough to avoid cheap deaths.  Imagine playing through Gradius without a single "Speed Up" powerup, it's almost that bad.  This is great for arcade operators since it makes Sky Shark quite the quarter muncher but it lead to an awful lot of smacks to the control panel in my younger days.  Thankfully in the NES version your plane moves at a rate more along the lines of the rest of the action, making things more about reaction rather than memorization.

It plays proficiently, a lot of fun, a good challenge, accurate to the arcade original - so why isn't Sky Shark an arcade or NES title most people remember?  The answer, Capcom's sequel to 1942, the retrogaming shooter juggernaut that is 1943.  1943 was released in 1987, the same year as Sky Shark, and it took arcades by storm with it's fast gameplay and interchangeable weapon system.  It made Sky Shark's slow gameplay look stale and unresponsive.  While not as visually impressive as Sky Shark; the changing gameplay, the varied missions, the huge boss battles, and the fast strategy of 1943 made it an all time classic.  Then when 1943 came over to the NES, that became the vertical arcade shooter of choice for the platform.  Sky Shark never had a chance.  It's still a fun game, a solid port, and I personally enjoy the NES version more than the arcade original due to the better speed balance.  For this game it's more about personal preference - a nice game to pick up but you won't miss anything if you don't.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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