''Bio-ship Paladin'', known in Japan as , is a

1990 File:1990 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The 1990 FIFA World Cup is played in Italy; The Human Genome Project is launched; Voyager I takes the famous Pale Blue Dot image- speaking on the fragility of humanity on Earth, astrophysicist ...

horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up arcade game. It was later ported to the

Sega Mega Drive The Sega Genesis, known as the outside North America, is a 16-bit fourth generation home video game console developed and sold by Sega. It was Sega's third console and the successor to the Master System. Sega released it in 1988 in Japan as ...

. While the game is essentially a standard horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up, it has an innovation that makes it unique in the genre. The player flies a spaceship (specifically, a bioship) which has the standard forward guns to be found in all horizontal scrollers, but it also possesses a weapon that can be manually targeted with a crosshair, in the same manner as in the game ''

Missile Command ''Missile Command'' is a 1980 shoot 'em up arcade video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. and licensed to Sega for Japanese and European releases. It was designed by Dave Theurer, who also designed Atari's vector graphics game '' Temp ...

''. This allows the player to fire in any direction with pinpoint accuracy, and adds an extra level of strategy to the game. The game saw an almost arcade perfect port on the Sega Mega Drive. What few changes there were actually enhanced the look of the game such as added parallax scrolling backgrounds in level 2. It would eventually see a re-release after quite some time as part of the '' Arcade Archives'' series for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 on August 5th, 2021 worldwide.

Story

Taking place on the

planet A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is neither a star nor its remnant. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis, which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to create a you ...

Atlantal, a huge battleship and space fleet suddenly appears and attacks Atlantal's largest

city A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...

, Delila, leaving the city in ruins. The fleet, known only as The Aggressors, continue to spread throughout the planet and further into the galaxy, past the Galegino Path, the

sea The sea, connected as the world ocean or simply the ocean, is the body of salty water that covers approximately 71% of the Earth's surface. The word sea is also used to denote second-order sections of the sea, such as the Mediterranean Sea, ...

flame A flame (from Latin '' flamma'') is the visible, gaseous part of a fire. It is caused by a highly exothermic chemical reaction taking place in a thin zone. When flames are hot enough to have ionized gaseous components of sufficient density they ...

s. To drive out and stop The Aggressors, the best twin-seat space fighter on the planet - the Paladin - is sent out; a powerful bioship that can grow larger in strength and size. The Aggressors are suggested to have come from Earth as the enemies, bosses all have vehicle names of different languages and many of the bosses are actually named after

alcoholic drink An alcoholic beverage (also called an alcoholic drink, adult beverage, or a drink) is a drink that contains ethanol, a type of alcohol that acts as a drug and is produced by fermentation of grains, fruits, or other sources of sugar. The c ...

Gameplay

The Paladin had a variety of offenses. Unlike most

shoot 'em up Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups or STGs ) are a sub-genre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of charac ...

s, the Paladin actually had an armor gauge, meaning that the ship would not be destroyed with one hit or after brushing up against a foreground object. The ship had a semi-automatic Laser weapon that, when held down, would charge up and unleash a stronger laser blast. The ship also had the Beam weapon. Once selected, players could use a manual aiming crosshair that could be placed anywhere on the screen, allowing the player to shoot any visible enemy fighter. The player or players had to fight through nine levels filled with clever foreground obstacles and slews of enemies. Many of the bosses had to be destroyed by first shooting off their guns, missile launchers and jets before destroying the whole ship. However, there were no Extend bonuses.

Reception

In Japan, ''Game Machine'' listed ''Bio-ship Paladin'' on their December 15, 1990 issue as being the eleventh most-successful table arcade unit of the month.

References

External links

* *{{mobygames, /bio-ship-paladin Arcade video games 1990 video games Nintendo Switch games PlayStation 4 games Sega Genesis games Horizontally scrolling shooters UPL Co., Ltd games Video games developed in Japan Multiplayer and single-player video games Science fiction video games Video games set on fictional planets Hamster Corporation games