Tiger-Heli – NES

I love vertically scrolling shoot-em-ups, and one of my favourites in the arcades growing up was Tiger-Heli.  It was developed by Toaplan, and released in the arcades in 1985.  The NES version was published by Acclaim in 1986.  This was one of Toaplan’s earliest games, and they later went on to make some more great shoot-em-ups, which include Truxton, Sky Shark, Twin Cobra, Hell Fire, and the infamous Zero Wing (All your base are belong to us!)

In Tiger-Heli you control a helicopter, and it’s your mission to… well I’m not sure since I don’t have the instructions, but I simply made it my mission to destroy everything on screen.  Strangely about 99% of your enemies are surface targets such as tanks, boats, jeeps, and cannons.  This is one of the first games that I can remember where you can destroy non-enemy targets such as cars, and houses.  As evidenced by the Grand Theft Auto series, indiscriminate destruction is a lot of fun, and it is fun in this game too.  To destroy these targets, one buttons shoots, and the other one drops a carpet bomb.  You are limited to two of these bombs, and they are mounted on the sides of your helicopter.  One neat thing is that if an enemy bullet hits one of these bombs, you will not die, but your bomb will go off.  If you do get hit with an enemy shot, you lose a life.  To help you along the way, you can acquire up to two mini-helicopters that fly along side of you, so you can enjoy double or triple the firepower.  These mini-helicopters can also be shot down, and for whatever reason it’s always sad to lose these little helicopters.  Almost everything in Tiger-Heli can be destroyed with just one hit, except for these large tank type things that occasionally occur.  There are no end bosses in this game, and these tanks are about as close as there is to a boss enemy.  There are only four stages in Tiger-Heli, and when you finish the fourth stage it loops back around to the second stage, and the difficulty increases.

The difficulty in Tiger-Heli is reasonable.  The game moves at a slower pace than a lot of shooters, and this should appeal to novice gamers.  The graphics are kind of plain, but it’s okay, because it’s easy to tell what everything is, and more importantly it’s easy to see enemies, and their shots.  I like the smouldering remains of enemies when you destroy them.  The music for me brings back a lot of memories, but others will find it repetitive.  There are only two soundtracks in the game, the default one, and the upbeat one that plays when you have a mini-helicopter flying with you.  After all of these years I still like this game a lot.  Even though I’ve beaten the game, it’s still fun to play again for a high score.  It’s not the best shooter out there, but it is solid.  Shooter fans, and arcade fans should get this.

Rating – 7 / 10