Bosconian is an awesome 3rd person birds-eye view space shooter, made by Namco in 1981. I first played it on a gaming system that connected to a TV, and though the graphics are simple, gameplay is pretty good!
The gameplay is simple, with no background story that I know of. Basically you are a cute little 'X-Wing' style craft, that can shoot bullets or lasers from the front and back of the ship, and you destroy alien bases. It is harder than it sounds though.
Enemy craft are constantly flying around, and rather than shooting at you, they tend to simply Kamikaze straight into you! Making it quite hard to deal with large numbers of them. The craft also come in formation attacks, at which time an alarm sounds, and a formation appears, led by the leader craft. If you destroy the leader though, the rest of the ships disperse, meaning if you are a good shot, it should be easy to disperse these formations.
Apart from the other ships, there are large green hexagonal bases which must be ALL destroyed to complete the level. They start off pretty easy, but as the levels progress, the bases become quite hard to destroy. This is because to destroy them,
you must shoot the core, and in later levels, the core closes, and the base shoots at you, making it a lot harder! Various other objects appear throughout the game, such as mines, asteroids, and bonus ships. All of which can be destroyed, the bonus ship giving a big chunky bonus if you score one!
Graphics are nothing to get too excited about, but I'm sure were good for their time. Colours are bright but clear, the graphics clearly portray what everything is, and everything has a definite '80s' feel. The game has very basic sound, consisting of explosions, beeps and crash/death noises. It also has a token number of recorded voice samples, such as 'Alert' or 'Condition Red'. They are very basic but add to the game, and are of course much better than no sound at all! The game has no end, but simply wraps around, so when you complete the game at something like level 250, you begin at level one. In theory you could play the game forever, until you run out of lives! I would say that Bosconian is a decent enough game that would do you no harm, and provide a couple of hours of fun if downloaded!
