ThunderBlade

A helicopter rushes across the desert and you're trying to hit anything that moves on screen. ThunderBlade is a simple first-person shooter that brought its arcade reputation from the eighties to PC. When you fire it up, you immediately see what it's about—fly, shoot, survive.

You're controlling a military helicopter and the landscape scrolls toward you like a conveyor belt. You're shooting and trying not to crash into mountains or sea. There's no plot here, just one simple question: how far can you get? Different treacherous zones alternate—deserts, mountains, water—and each presents the helicopter differently.

Control is straightforward, like old arcade games. You move sideways, shoot at enemy targets and try to dodge terrain. After a few minutes you realize it's not about complex maneuvering—it's about reflexes and dodging in time. Graphics are EGA level, the terrain looks like layered triangles. You can look at it but it won't dazzle you.

In the nineties it was simple diversion—something you played while the computer was doing other things, or briefly in a computer store. On PC it never achieved the status it had on ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64. Here it stayed more a curiosity, something that reminded players how simple and direct games were in the eighties.

Today you play it mostly from nostalgia than real passion. It feels like an entry in an inventory of the era: what did we play when that's all there was? ThunderBlade comes under your hand, you enjoy ten minutes of its hypnotic repetitiveness and then you remember why you came back—simply because it was here.