Bios

You shoot blue squares, they shoot at you, someone wins. Bios from 1990 is one of those games that multiplied like mushrooms after rain on pirate disks in the nineties — minimalist with lightning-fast pace, no unnecessary plot, and graphics that won't distract you from what matters most: survival.

It's a classic arkanoid in new clothing. Your square moves along the bottom of the screen, you shoot upward into an endless stream of enemies trying to hit you. Graphics? Lines and pixels. Sound? Beeps. Simplicity bordering on absurdity, but that's exactly where the magic lies — when the game kicks into high gear and the screen turns into chaos of colored bullets, you feel like you're playing exactly what you see, nothing more, nothing less.

Controls are intuitive — arrows and space, as they should be. The game doesn't waste time explaining itself; you're just there and you have to survive. No skill tree or upgrades — just accuracy and reflexes. As levels progress, the pace accelerates until your brain can't keep up. It's not a revolution, but in an era when games weren't yet drowning in tutorials and settings, something like this had its charm.

Bios is a typical representative of its time — a game you'd play for dozens of minutes during breaks in the computer lab, enjoyed precisely because it had no ambition to be anything more. Today you look at it through rose-tinted glasses because that era is gone. Did it age? Sure. The graphics look like they were drawn by a kid on a Spectrum computer.

If retro purism catches you and you're hungry for shooting without excuses, you'll find it in an emulator. It's great for five minutes when you crave something fast and mindless. It may not be of its class, but that's exactly why it's worth remembering — as a corner of an old school that nobody builds anymore.