Flying Tigers [DOS] Longplay
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Here's a little flying-shooter game on the DOS: Flying Tigers. You control a fighter jet on a mission to shoot down enemy planes and other ground targets. The controls are great: it's really easy to move the ship around the screen, and you can shoot continuously by holding down the fire button (by default CTRL) instead of having to spam it like crazy. Your main gun which fires red bullets, never run out. You can get a lot of upgrades to this gun by collecting a yellow orb with wings with the letters ML, NM or DR on it. Shooting the orb itself will cause it to cycle through these letters which changes your firing pattern when grabbing the orb: DR stands for "direct" and allows you to shoot 1, 2 or 3 strings of bullets behind you, to your left, right or straight ahead, in addition to your two standard guns which always point straight. The more "DR" orbs you collect, the more bullets you'll shoot, though you can never have more than 5. The direction of the gun automatically changes when you fly in that direction, which isn't good, because there's times when you want to move left while firing to the right (or vice versa), but when you press the left arrow key the bullets also shift to the left side of the ship. There should be a separate key to toggle the direction of your shots (like in Silver Surfer on the NES). NM stands for "normal" which makes your ship fire only straight ahead in sets of 2, 3 or 4 bullets. This is the default weapon you start with. Collecting another NM powerup adds a third gun in the middle and grabbing a second one after that adds 2 more, for a total of 4. Collecting more orbs after that won't upgrade the guns any further. Finally there's the ML symbol which stands for "multi" and is the most effective shooting pattern: grabbing one makes you shoot 3 streams of bullets in a fan pattern and collecting another one widens the fan to 5 streams, covering almost the entire screen. There are also special weapons which have limited ammo and are equipped by collecting a blue orb with 2 red letters on them. I won't go through all of them, but the most effective of these and also my favorite, is the laser (LZ): it shoots a wide beam of light from the tip of the ship, cutting through anything in its path (both on the ground and in the air). It doesn't stop when it hits an enemy, so it can take out an entire group of enemies in one swipe. Other power-weapons include fireballs, rockets, bombs and a shield. You can only hold one of these at a time and you fire it with the ALT key by default. The special weapons can be used by themselves or at the same time as the red bullets, by holding down both the fire buttons - this gives you more coverage and firepower. There's a boss battle every 5 levels where you fight some sort of machine. They get harder and harder to defeat and some will kick your ass pretty badly at first, but once you get the pattern down you'll be able to fly in, fire a few shots, and back up before they make contact with you. The music is awesome : there are only a few soundtracks, but they make up for that by being energetic and memorable. The sound effects are kinda lame, it's just "POW POW POW", but that actually makes it more fun. The game has 3 difficulty settings: rookie, normal and flying tiger, from lowest to highest. These determine how fast the screen scrolls, how tough the enemies are and how many hits you take before dying. Speaking of which, your life bar is on the right side of the screen. When drained all the way, your ship explodes and you lose a life indicated by the ships above this meter (you start off with 2). You can refill the energy meter by collecting a tiger head, which is dropped when you shoot down the blimps or their equivalent, as in later stages the enemies change their aspect but keep their characteristics. When you lose a life the level doesn't restart - you'll respawn at the bottom of the screen and carry on if you have any lives left. When you run out of lives you get a continue option, but you'll start from the beginning of the stage you died on. Thankfully you get unlimited continues too. Sounds like a great game of the era, doesn't it ? Well, I must say there's one fatal flaw, one problem that ruins the whole experience: there's no save feature ! If you want to see the end you have to finish it all in one sitting, which is tiring to say the least, because it's a very long game and gets pretty eye-straining because of the constant scrolling of the screen, so I recommend taking breaks every 5 levels or so ! Even so, the game is great ! It's fun blasting sh!t, and you'll probably have a hard time stopping. Try it out !