Devastators

Konami was shipping arcade action games at a relentless pace in 1988, and Devastators is one of them: a military shooter in which one or two soldiers push forward against overwhelming numbers.

The camera is the notable part. Rather than the usual side-on or top-down framing, the action runs away from the viewer into the depth of the screen, a compromise arcade designers of the late eighties liked because it delivered a sense of three-dimensional space using conventional 2D hardware. Enemies close in from the sides and from behind cover, you have both gunfire and grenades, and the game lets you duck behind obstacles for protection. That cover mechanic is what separates it from most contemporary run-and-gun boards, where evasion was the only defence available.

A second player can drop in at any point, standard for a 1988 arcade PCB and genuinely transformative here. Alone you can only cover so many angles; with two people the screen becomes manageable and the pacing makes far more sense. Difficulty is tuned the way arcade difficulty always was, meaning it is calibrated to keep coins going into the slot rather than to be fair. If you approach coin-op history as history, the presentation is worth a look: Konami was among the most technically accomplished Japanese developers of the period, and it shows in the sprite work and the audio. You can play Devastators directly in your browser on OldGame.cz through arcade emulation, with nothing to install and no ROM to track down.