Hi there!

A cute little Non-R-Type shoot'em up from Irem, converted to the 64 by Probe Software:

I'm sure this game must have an amazing background story, but all I can tell you is that Mr. Heli is on a mission to shoot everything that moves in 3 different themed, pretty detailed levels

They're all loaded separately, so each is considerably long and has Mr. Heli fighting through a variety of vertical or horizontal scrolling passages. At the end of each stage there's a bigger guardian, uhm... guarding the entrance to the real endboss.

The extra weapons system, no actually the whole game when thinking about it, reminded me a lot of Blood Money. I'm pretty sure that the Arcade machine has "influenced" the development of Blood Money a lot to say it politely

The conversion is making excellent use of the C64s abilities. The graphics are fantastic and the music from Maniacs of Noise is once again a SID masterpiece. I really wonder why this game didn't create the same buzz than R-Type when it came out.

About the only thing one can complain about is the overall size of it. I think even back in the days before state saving almost everyone would've stormed through the three levels on a single afternoon.

Instead of yet another congratulations message I better show you the final boss:

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Irem Arcade conversion in the form of "Vigilante", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel