No. 1: Darius.
Legendary Widescreen Shoot-em-up from Taito

Darius - Click to expand image

Darius. Taito (c.1987). This game is legendary amongst hardcore shoot-em-up players.  The massive cabinet housed 3 monitors side by side and was adorned with Taito's beautiful artwork depicting Proco, Tiat and various robotic fish enemies . Although Darius was a  two-player, only casual players used this possibility, as there were simply not enough power-ups in the game to be shared two ways, unless you just wanted a quick blast. No, the real challenge of Darius was to complete the whole game on a single credit, or if you were really hardcore, without losing a single life. I must now blow my own trumpet (I'm double-jointed you see), and proudly proclaim that I was the only person I knew that had ever managed this, and indeed could repeat the feat every few games. My hi-score was around 5.5 million, maxmised by stalling the final boss and killing the formations of spinning cubes that came from behind to coax you back into the danger zone. This resulted in games that were between 30 minutes and an hour long, all for just a single, 30p credit.

 Power-up's were gained by collecting small coloured-pods: red for missiles , green for bombs  and blue for armour . For every pod of a certain colour a bar would fill up another notch; fill a bar and gain an evolution in that type of weaponry. Lose a life however, and all of your bars would be emptied.  This was really tough, because the power-up pod's were well-hidden in either the landscape or the enemies themselves. Extra lives, were occasionally to be found, as were silver pods (a points bonus) and golden pods (a smart bomb). 

The enemies were multitudinous, swarming from all corners of the landscape moving so swiftly that you often died as a result of a collision with them, rather than from their bombs. Massive, screen-sized fish/robot hybrids were the end of level guardians, the most insane, demanding bosses of any game of the time. Darius also used a pyramid level layout much like Out Run (see earlier review), offering fantastic replay value as you found a different route through the games 26 massive levels.

Other Darius games have followed, in arcade form, on the Super Nintendo, for the Commodore Amiga and on the Sega Saturn, but none have surpassed the balanced gameplay and sheer atmosphere of the original - a truly, legendary video game in all respects.

Featured: B*stard-hard gameplay, giant fish, about 62 million bombs fired at you on average every game.

Other Notes: Darius hid a lot of its power-ups in the last alien in a formation , a method never used before in a shoot-em-up. Do the names of the ships (Proco, Tiat) look strange to you? Try reading them backwards...

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