Baryon

Baryon is a vertical shooter for DOS from 1995, made in South Korea and spread around the world through shareware distribution. That was an unusual thing to find on a PC at the time: vertically scrolling shoot-'em-ups belonged in arcades and on consoles, and the few DOS attempts mostly looked dreadful. Baryon is the exception — it runs in a tweaked 256-colour VGA mode, keeps a steady pace, and its artwork holds up next to coin-op competition.

You pick one of two ships, each with its own weapon type, and the kit is classic: main-gun upgrades, missiles, screen-clearing bombs and a shield. The play is unadorned — fly up the screen, weave through enemy formations, and keep track of when you actually need that bomb. Two players can fly at once, which is a nice touch for a shareware release.

The difficulty is high and the game knows it; the menu lets you slow the game speed down, which back then was mainly there to tune it to a faster computer, but it doubles neatly as a difficulty dial. Without it this is a hard ride where knowing what comes from where matters most — the kind of game whose first three attempts are spent watching yourself die, with the fourth one starting to make sense.

Its biggest weakness is scope. The shareware version, which is what almost anyone ever saw, contains a single level; the rest required registering, and few people outside Korea managed that for a title like this in 1995. So it does not hold up as a full game, but as a well-crafted example of the genre on the PC it is absolutely worth a look.

On oldgame.cz Baryon runs straight in the browser with nothing to download.