Vertical scrolling games

Before James Bond was saving the world with cinematic flair, he was crashing pixelated helicopters in 007: License to Kill. This top-down action game takes the movie and crams it into six bite-sized missions of explosions, awkward flying, and questionable hit detection. You’ll drive, swim, fly, and die - a lot. The controls are about as smoot...

Action Fighter (1989, DOS) is Sega’s way of saying, “Why choose between car chases and aerial dogfights when you can have both?” You start in a motorcycle, grab some power-ups, and suddenly you’re flying a jet and blowing things up. It's like Spy Hunter had a Red Bull and watched Top Gun. The controls are twitchy, the pace i...

Strap in and crawl through the mud - Airborne Ranger (1988) is here to chew bubblegum and infiltrate enemy lines. And it's all out of bubblegum. This tactical action game lets you drop behind enemy territory, blow things up, and look extremely cool doing it (in blocky, 8-bit fashion). It's part stealth, part shootout, and somehow still manages to b...

Ajax (1989) is like an arcade fever dream: vertical shooter, transforming vehicles, lasers everywhere, and a soundtrack that yells “blast stuff!” every few seconds. One minute you’re flying a helicopter, the next you’re a tank on a hoverboard - don’t ask how, just shoot. It’s pure ’80s adrenaline: fast, lou...

Ballistix asks: “What if air hockey was controlled by futuristic cannons?” The answer: chaos. You frantically shoot pucks with directional blasts while the physics engine does whatever it wants. It’s fast, it’s bizarre, and it kind of feels like trying to herd cats with a leaf blower. Multiplayer is where it shines — a...

Flying Tigers is an abandoned vertical-scrolling sci-fi themed shoot 'em up game developed and released by Ticsoft in 1994 for MS-DOS only. Flying Tigers is the first chapter of the two parts Flying Tigers video game series.

Nebulus, also known as Tower Toppler in some regions, is a classic video game released in the 1980s. It was developed by John M. Phillips and published by Hewson Consultants. The game was initially released for various home computer systems, including the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and others. It later saw ports to different platforms. Neb...