#18: Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine (Hewson, Commodore 64, 1988)

Leaving aside the actively shoddy Predator, Cybernoid is the most alienating game to date from my modern perspective. It has a narrative about space pirates stealing stuff and your quest to retrieve it, but that’s mostly outside the game itself and irrelevant. In genre terms, it’s a shoot-‘em-up, which means you control a ship flying around the screen, shooting straight ahead (and eventually in other directions) at enemies. It was a popular enough genre back then to get its own construction kit, which I remember reading reviews and instructions for in magazines. Later on, it developed into being rather niche, particularly in Japan, with difficulty to the forefront in games with screens full of enemy fire, the ‘bullet curtain’ or ‘Bullet Hell’. Cybernoid, by comparison, offers Bullet Purgatory.