A-Jax

In the second half of the eighties Konami was one of the strongest arcade manufacturers around, and A-Jax from 1987 belongs to its run of fast action titles. The Commodore 64 version faced the problem every arcade conversion of the period faced: moving the pace and the look of far more capable hardware onto an eight-bit home computer without breaking what made the original work.

At its core this is a shooter with a constant stream of attackers, where you weave between shots and clear formations before they close in. Knowing where enemies enter and in what order matters enormously, because the difficulty is built around repetition and learning. The coin-operated origin shows in the pacing: the arcade version had to earn money, so pressure arrives quickly and errors are punished on the spot rather than gently corrected.

The C64 offered eight hardware sprites, hardware scrolling and the SID chip, which could give shooters a genuinely solid bass foundation. That is why conversions on this machine often sounded better than their counterparts on other eight-bit computers even when the number of objects on screen had to be reduced. What you get is not a copy of the arcade board but a compromise shaped around what the machine could actually sustain.

The game runs directly in the browser on OldGame.cz, which makes it easy to compare the home version against whatever you remember of arcade shooters. As an introduction to Konami's output beyond its most famous brands, it is a quick and undemanding place to start.