Have You Played... Ikari Warriors?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I never played games in arcades. I think that was partly because I lived in a town where there weren't any, and partly because the intensely middle class upbringing I received informed me that such places were off piste. (Making them so damned attractive.) But as I look back on the games that most entertained me as a kid, I think I'd have had so much fun if I did. The idea of playing Ikari Warriors not on a small TV in the kitchen, but on a big cabinet surrounded by bleeps and bloops and occasional cascading coins, sounds brilliant.

However, it was on a small TV in the kitchen. And much fun was had.

I hadn't even seen Commando or Rambo, or any of the 80s movies on which it was based. Despite the middle class attitude with which I was raised, we didn't match it financially, and couldn't afford a VHS player back then. So I wasn't even able to sneak views of films I was too young to watch. I didn't have the frames of reference. But flipping heck, I enjoyed the top-down, shooty-bangs.

I would love to see a twin-stick remake of this. Someone get Keiko Iju out of retirement and have him do that for me.