Air Zonk

In 1992 Hudson Soft did something few publishers were doing: it took its platform mascot series and turned it into a shooter. Air Zonk belongs to the Bonk family, but instead of prehistory and platforming it delivers futuristic horizontal action in which you fly and shoot everything that appears.

The tone is deliberately overblown. Enemies are caricatures, the environments are colourful to the point of gaudiness, and the whole game pokes fun at the earnest space shooters that filled the market at the time. Its most interesting mechanic is the companion system: you collect characters who fly alongside you, and merging with one produces a temporarily stronger combination with an attack of its own. That gives the player a reason to think about who to keep rather than simply grabbing whatever drops.

The PC Engine was an ideal home for shooters. It handled large numbers of objects on screen without slowdown, and its shooter catalogue ranks among the strongest of the eight and sixteen-bit era. Air Zonk benefits directly: it is fast, smooth and readable even when the screen is crowded.

The game is single player and its length matches the conventions of the day, meaning one long sitting will see it through. Difficulty is better balanced than in many arcade shooters of the same period.

Visually it does not try to be pretty in the usual sense: the palette exists to keep enemies distinguishable from scenery, which in a shooter this busy matters more than detail.

On OldGame.cz it runs directly in the browser, with no emulator to install.