Superior side-scrolling
shoot 'em up of the old school. Up there in heaven with
R-Type.
Originally an arcade title by
Temco, the game found it's spiritual home in a superb port to the Amiga 500, where it recieved vast amounts of well deserved praise. As with any decent Amiga title, copied disks of this were flying around the
playground like wildfire when I was a boy. Ah, the utterly corrupt innocence of youth.
The game lets you play as either a
jeep, with a 180 degree rotating gun and the ability to jump, or a
helicopter, which was fast as hell and could, well,
fly. The game really got fun when two people stepped up to the ockey, one on jeep and the other on copter. The helicopter player would invariably last longer, as the Jeep was frankly a bit
shit. But it was cool anyway. I used to love teaming up against the weird composite helicopter
sub-bosses we called
goosenecks. Of course,
infinite lives cheats were nice, as we were young and
lame.
If you've not played this game, imagine a more military version of
Revenge Of The Mutant Camels. It was followed up by the arguably superior/inferior (I go for the latter) sequel
SWIV, using a top down view that made the jeep unusable as well as crap. Bizzarely, SWIV apparently stood for SilkWormIV (4), but no-one knows what happened to the other two titles.