A beautifully preserved slice of video game history – Toaplan Arcade Shoot ‘Em Up Collection Vol 1 review

PC; Bit Wave/Embracer
Four games from a cult 1980s shoot-em-up developer - from Zero Wing to Truxton - show the value of game preservation

Even if you've never heard of long defunct shoot-'em-up developer Toaplan, any historians of meme culture will know a key moment from the Mega Drive conversion of its arcade classic Zero Wing. Load that game up and during the opening cinematic, the enemy leader appears on screen with the legendary quote all your base are belong to us". That garbled phrase has appeared in everything from YouTube error messages to Elon Musk tweets to AOC speeches, but if one line of dodgy translation is ALL you know about this often overlooked innovator in the shooter genre now's your chance to get better acquainted.

Toaplan Arcade Shoot-'em-Up Collecton Vol 1 includes four games from throughout the company's 15-year life span, and they provide a varied overview of both its own output and the history of the shooter genre. The earliest of them, Twin Cobra, is a military-style vertical scroller with your helicopter battling a range of enemy aircraft, tanks and artillery emplacements, while collecting power-ups to change and upgrade your main weapon. It's very much in the style of Capcom's smash hit 1942, but massively unforgiving - a factor acknowledged in the original Mega Drive conversion which included a cheat for multiple smart bombs. Truxton is arguably Toaplan's first ageless classic, a sci-fi blaster with a similar three-type weapons mechanic as Twin Cobra, this time including the awesome Truxton Beam which fires a continuous laser that locks on to and tracks enemy craft. Zero Wing is a horizontal scroller from 1989, clearly inspired by Gradius and R-Type, with similar biomechanical enemies and landscapes, but it's notable in its own right due to the tractor beam feature that lets you grab enemy ships and use them as shields.