Boogie Wings

Boogie Wings, released in Japan as The Great Ragtime Show, is a 1992 arcade shoot ’em up from Data East — and one of the strangest, most playful things the company ever put into an arcade cabinet. You fly a World War I biplane across a world overrun by a mad inventor who claims to have come from the future.

Everything revolves around the hook dangling beneath your plane. At the start of a stage it carries a bomb, but once that has been dropped, the skyhook can snag almost anything: barrels, vehicles, chunks of debris, even enemies — and you can swing whatever you grab and hurl it into other targets. Losing the biplane is not the end, either: your pilot carries on on foot, free to climb into tanks and other machines found along the way. Few shooters hand the player this many toys at once.

The whole thing is wrapped in ragtime aesthetics. Parade floats, posters and brass contraptions can be shot to pieces almost completely, and the backgrounds teem with dozens of animations that often have nothing to do with the action at all. Over it plays a soundtrack built on jazz and ragtime, something the shoot ’em up genre has never really heard elsewhere.

It is not flawless — the on-screen chaos can be hard to read, and the hook has a wilful physics of its own that takes practice. But that anarchic playfulness is exactly why it holds up: every run reveals another object you can grab or another machine you can steal. Boogie Wings never received an official home console port, so for years it remained a treat for arcade-goers and collectors.

On oldgame.cz you can play it straight in your browser, no installation needed.