Ark Area

Ark Area is a 1987 arcade shooter developed and published by the Japanese studio UPL. It never went on sale in Europe or America and stayed a domestic release, which is probably the main reason hardly anyone knows it, even though it follows on from the same team's older and rather more famous Nova 2001.

The important difference from most shooters of the period is that you do not only shoot where you are flying. The ship fires in every direction, so the game is not about dodging along a single axis but about working the whole screen. Enemies arrive from all sides, including the one you have just turned your back on, and survival depends on whether you can separate your direction of travel from your direction of fire. Anyone weaned on vertical shmups, where holding the button and weaving left and right is enough, will flounder for the first few minutes.

The structure is honestly arcade: a couple of dozen short stages, bosses, and power-ups collected in between that gradually strengthen your fire. The pace is quick, the stages are brief and the difficulty climbs steeply, because the machine was built to earn its keep. That is worth knowing today too, since this was never designed to be finished in a single sitting.

I would not sell it as a forgotten gem. It is a solid, fast and very hard arcade game that does one thing well and has no grand ideas beyond it. Its real interest is as evidence of what multidirectional shooters looked like before conventional horizontal and vertical shmups pushed them aside. Short sessions suit it best.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with nothing to install.