#cyclone system

Shadow Blasters

Released in the early days of the Genesis, Shadow Blasters is an obscure side-scroller with a few bright ideas. In North America, it also had a terrible cover, and a title easily confused with Sega’s Shadow Dancer. 

Saint Sword

There aren’t many Genesis games like Saint Sword. A collaboration between Taito and Cyclone System, a short-lived developer whose games were ambitious and original but always a little rough, it’s a side-scroller in which each level functions as a mini-maze. Levels are relatively large, and scroll in all directions; in order to solve each of them, you must find a key and the door it unlocks. The key is always held by some common monster that usually hangs around a pre-determined part of the level, so the moment-to-moment gameplay consists of exploring every area of every level while killing everything that moves. There’s a bit more to this, however. 

This game is featured in our new NES Cult Classics book! Please check it out!

Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth

While Dragon Fighter and Actraiser both deserve praise for combining two different gameplay styles together, Wurm has them beat by combining four or five together, debatable on how you feel about the ground drill mode of the game’s ship. Wurm isn’t a hugely remembered title, but it definitely has fans, and for good reason. It was yet another NES game that dared to dream on the console’s limited hardware, managing to create an ambitious story and game in a small package. While there are indeed quite a few issues with the game brought by the limitations the team had to deal with, it manages to accomplish so much despite that it’s hard not to be impressed.