P-47 Thunderbolt

"Pull on your trusty leather flying jacket, strap yourself into the cockpit and take off in your Republic P-47 Thunderbolt to battle it out in the skies with the worst the enemy can throw at you. In this faithful reproduction of the Jaleco arcade game, you will find yourself back in World War II piloting one of the best loved fighters against adversaries in the water, on land and in the air. Fight it out over eight levels of extreme action, increasing your firepower at every opportunity. Smooth, fast, non-stop action all the way in Firebirds latest arcade smash. Now's the chance to prove yourself as a real hotshot fighter pilot."

A multi level shoot em up which involves you flying your plane and attacking wave after wave until you meet the final boss at the end of each level. The boss requires many hits so it is advisable to have your weapon of choice levelled up by this point else you will be here a while. While general enemy projectiles are fairly easy to avoid, there is also flak cannon fire aimed you way to avoid. They are slower moving and you would think easy to avoid, but when moving out of the way of the faster fire, it can be easy to accidently run into them especially at the boss battle when you are trying to line up shots in just the right spot.

The 8-bit home computer conversions of this game were not the greatest, but up against the others the C64 game seems a particularly lazy effort. The Spectrum game appears as you might expect a spectrum game to appear being limited to 48k with detailed sprites but no music. The Amstrad version is the clear winner with fairly smooth scrolling in full colour and reasonable sound effects. The C64 version has multiple music tracks throughout with sfx sounding like it has re-used elements from Power-Drift also composed by Dave Lowe. The scrolling is terrible and the sprite work is really blocky and barely defined compared with the other versions. The screen starts glitching when the screen gets busy. Overall, not a great conversion to the C64. The jerky scrolling kind of breaks the slight parallax effect used in some levels.

There is no ending to the game and it will just loop back to level one allowing you to continue to build up your score noting that there is no high score table in the game.

00:00:00 Title screen
00:00:50 Level 1
00:03:27 Level 2
00:07:47 Level 3
00:11:11 Level 4
00:18:11 Level 5
00:23:27 Level 6
00:29:22 Level 7
00:34:37 Level 8
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00:42:02 Game has looped