Airstrike

You can't get around it with bombs. Airstrike from 1995 is an old and obscure gem where you sit in a fighter cockpit and simply bomb everything along your flight path. It's not complicated — typical light entertainment from the days when graphics were measured in pixels rather than polygons.

You go from point A to point B, aiming at targets you see below or around you. The game unfolds over the landscape you're flying through, and your job is straightforward: press a button, drop a bomb, watch it explode. Nothing more, nothing less. The controls are primitive, but that's exactly how games were played back then — arrow keys for flight, spacebar or some other key for shooting or releasing ammo.

What's surprising is how little the game has on paper yet how much time it can still eat up. There's no complex physics, no decision-making about when to pull the stick to dive at the right angle. You fly, you spot a target, you bomb it. Levels repeat — different landscapes, same objectives. The graphics are flat, the sound is raspy, but that's exactly where its charm lies. Back in the day, this would keep you entertained for a while, today it's pure nostalgia.

Airstrike belongs to those games you play on an emulator in the sense that you're reminded of what life was like in the mid-nineties — when users didn't need to be hand-held through tutorials and a ten-minute diversion with zero pretense was enough. It's not a masterpiece, but it's not bad either. It's exactly what the box promised: a bombing game.

These days you'll pick it up when nostalgia hits for an era where graphics were counted by the eye rather than by the numbers. You won't play it for long, but those few minutes are plenty for a retro enthusiast.