Hi there!

The missing link between 1942 and uhm... 1943:

Playing this one wasn't easy. I had to very carefully update Nestopia for it. The game constantly crashed the emulation in Version 1.35 and I didn't get the latest Nestopia to run under Win 98. This is getting more and more troublesome lately

In the end I managed to get 1.36 working. It requires an extra unicows.dll to provide a unicode layer for Win 98, but once you have that ready, it boots up and most of the GUI works. I think the more recent versions of Nestopia introduced more problems for Win 98 when they switched from INI to XML configuration

The game itself really falls right between Capcoms two NES offerings. It's improved over 1942 everywhere, but 1943 reigns supreme. I must say it has excellent music for a NES game though, one of the best for the console.

Sky Shark is a much harder game then the competition. Hard as nails if you ask me, without state saving it should be pretty frustrating, I can easily imagine controllers being smashed after playing this

The game has you sightseeing five varied levels before it just loops back to the 2nd level.

I think it's much too hard, but if you like the genre, it might be worth a look.

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another vertical shoot'em up in the form of "Bedlam", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel