SPACE HARRIER

God bless the 80s and its technical restrictions when it comes to video games, for Space Harrier with its surrealist surroundings wouldn't have been made. The game was ported to a plethora of systems and  I played the game quite frequently on 4 of them and enjoyed each and every version of it. Whether I played the 16bit arcade version or the clunky 8bit C64 version with the mesmerizing sid soundtrack, the experience of playing the game was simultaneously joyful and bizarre. First I feared the fact that I would let it suck me into its world whenever I played it and I feared this game just as I feared early animes as a kid (whether it was framerate, the goriness of it  or something else, I don't know). There was also something beautifully unsettling about flying through a long-gone civilization's urban landscape and killing mammoth cyclops and  the extinct civilization's defence systems in the form of  giant heads and flying shapes, and I couldn't help but feel like a usurper disturbing the peace of the deceased. No explanation was given to the nature of Harrier's mission(s), no storylines, nothing, and I would often  get this feeling of being a bad guy. When I revisited the game in college I had a completely different perception of the game , but the taikan (body sensation) remained. I still feel strange playing this title.

Space Harrier was the first successful rail shooter ever made.