Hot Shot
ps1_hotshot_cover.jpg

From the Phoenix Games stable, which has brought us such highlights as London Cab Challenge and Air Raid 3, here we have what's turned out to be an at least briefly amusing Cabal clone. If you haven't heard of Cabal, it's a third person shooter where you have a single screen playfield (or in the case of Hot Shot, slightly wider than a single screen, scrollable left or right) and move your character left or right to dodge incoming fire, or hold down your fire button to shoot back, and move a targeting cursor.

"Hot Shot" has very primitive graphics - four or five types of guys to shoot, but there is the occasional surprise. For example, there's a tank as a boss after level 3. The tank even has a machine gun that pops up halfway through the battle as well as its turret. I know it's a bit silly to be impressed by a PlayStation 1 game having a fraction of the features of an eighties arcade game, but it's from Phoenix, so I'm always impressed when they go beyond the bare minimum of effort. Sad, but true.

It's a laugh, and it might amuse you for at least 5 minutes (if only so you can get tired of the two different death screams, or if you want to wonder whether the programmer(s) were racists, as the main bad guy sprite you'll be shooting the most appears to be a black guy), perhaps 10 if you loved Cabal. Certainly the blurb on the back of the case (which isn't mentioned in the manual at all, unsurprisingly) is most entertaining:

Dangerous prisoners have escaped from a top security prison. Your mission is to stop them. Chase them through 20 levels of increasing difficulty but watch out the prisoners have taken charge of an abandoned military facility and are waiting for you.

For the record, the "abandoned military facility" looks like shonky abandoned city textures. To be fair, I couldn't be arsed to finish past the first few levels, so maybe the backgrounds change later in the game, but does it really matter?

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