By the same token, the quirky, fiddly Super Fantasy Zone,which didn’t arrive in the U.S. until 2008,was the polar opposite of the Thunder Force series. The former looked like a cross between a kawaii Japanese anime and a 60s acid flashback; the latter are all hard surfaces and pounding synth-metal music. Ironically, the Thunder Force games were generally more forgiving – Super Fantasy Zone, despite its friendly face, has the teeth of a predator.

Sound and Fury

The 16-bit era also gave developers more leeway than ever to tailor their graphics and sound beyond the circles, blocks, and bleeps of, say, Namco’s Xevious from 1982 – and having been given this new box of tricks to play with, those developers duly went nuts.

Wings of Wor, sometimes known as Gynoug, is one of the weirdest-looking shooting games ever made. Released in 1991 and created by Masaya, it pits a winged hero (a kind of grown up Kid Icarus) against an army of exotic, demonic-looking entities. In short, Wings of Wor splices the iconography of ancient Greece with the H.R. Giger-inspired bio-mechanical look seen in games like Salamander and R-Type, then throws in some topless, muscular men for good measure. The result is a game that, in a genre not widely known for its atmospherics, comes draped in an unmistakeably spooky air. By the time the bosses roll in – a grotesque assortment of deformed lizards, sentient death machines, and giant screaming heads – it’s clear that we’re in the presence of something deeply strange. Masaya would later go on to make the similarly weird Cho Aniki series, which upped the muscular men quotient even further.

Less twisted, but no less captivating to look at, Steel Empire forged a steampunk landscape seemingly inspired by Studio Ghibli’s classic anime, Castle in the Sky. The usual array of chrome ships and glowing lasers seen in typical space shooters was here replaced by armored zeppelins and huge rumbling tanks. Its visuals alone were enough to justify its cult status, and Steel Empire was among the relatively small number of shooters that lingered on after the Genesis era ended. Ports later appeared on the Game Boy Advance and the 3DS in later years.

Few – if any – Genesis shooters transformed the genre in the way that some of its most famous names did, but the best of them nevertheless came with their own cool ideas and gimmicks. Toaplan’s Zero Wing is best known these days for its “All your base…” meme, but get past that, and you’ll find a rock-solid space shooter with a clever mechanic: your ship is equipped with a beam that drags in enemies, which you could then use as a shield or as a projectile. Gaiares, actually released a year before Zero Wing, took this even further. Here, the player could use a Force-like drone to take the weapons systems from enemy ships, resulting in some varied and spectacular displays of laser power.