Battle for Midway - Midway Campaign
A vertical shooter set in the WWI
Battle for Midway - Midway Campaign is a fast vertical shooter, starring an attack plane, set in WWI. It was initially released for the NES console, and, you'll soon find out that indeed, it is a very console like game. However, that is not a flaw, but it is a feature of the game; you shoot waves of enemies, mostly planes, and you have to destroy certain stationary or mobile things in order to get upgrades. Take care nt to shoot at the upgrades, as you will turn them into lesser ones. If you are careful and don't succumb to the enemy fire, you will find out that your plane will gain a lot of energy, better weapons and better special attacks. At the end of each stage you'll meet a boss, in the beginning a ship, but later on, these boss fights will become even more interesting. Great, long, fast and increasingly difficult, Battle for Midway - Midway Campaign is a very well polished and well done vertical shooter. Download it along with R Type, a horizontal shooter, one of the better ones out there.
A history lesson in gaming development
Battle for Midway, although it's aged rather poorly, is a very good history lesson in wargames and how they looked an played like way before controllers, keyboards and mouses. Written entirely in the Basic programming language, this naval simulator game depicts a sea battle between the Japanese and American forces during the World War 2. You can play as either and while you won't get any in-game statistics, when the battle's over you'll see exactly how many ships did you lose and did you ultimately win or not. The gameplay is very similar to those in text adventures - you type in commands and the game lets you know how things turned out on a pretty simple and obscure map of the field. While the game is too old and slow for anybody to find it interesting, the game is actually very good for its time since and its programming, although now insanely simple (even I can program in Basic) was very advanced back in 1982. This is a game that shouldn't be played for entertaining but for educational purposes.
