Dead Angle

Dead Angle, a 1988 arcade shooter from Seibu Kaihatsu, drops players into gangster-era America as a lone gunman working his way through screens of mob muscle. It belongs to the shooting-gallery lineage, but it arrived with one idea nobody else had.

That idea is the hero himself: he appears on screen only as a transparent outline. You watch the action through your own silhouette, sliding the whole figure around to dodge incoming fire while aiming at enemies behind the glass, so to speak. It is an elegant answer to the shooting gallery's oldest problem — how to show the protagonist without blocking the player's view.

The late 1980s loved cinematic arcade themes, and Prohibition-flavoured America supplied a rich one: fedoras, tommy guns and shadowy back alleys. Seibu Kaihatsu, the workshop later famous for the Raiden series, delivered it with typically solid action craftsmanship.

The structure is pure coin-op: short, intense gunfights, bosses drawn from the mob hierarchy, and difficulty tuned for the arcade economy. A single-player affair, as the entry notes, and a fine specimen of an era willing to experiment with form inside an established genre.

The transparent-hero trick is best understood first-hand, and you can do exactly that — the game launches straight in your browser on OldGame.cz.