Action Fighter

Action Fighter is a fairly little-known game that was released for the Sega Master System back in 1986. The design document for the game must have been a pretty simple one. It probably just said, "Hey, remember how cool that arcade game Spy Hunter was? Let's make a game just like it, only significantly cooler."

One part Spy Hunter, one part Xevious.

Action Fighter was a driving action game that put you into a transforming vehicle and asked you to shoot up any cars that got in your way. Spy Hunter's vehicle transformed too, but it only went from a car to a speedboat and back again. In Action Fighter, you started the game on a highly vulnerable motorcycle and then collected power-ups to turn it into a car. Once you were in car form, you could collect two more icons and earn your wings. Once you transformed the car into a flying car, the game carried on a bit like Namco's classic arcade shooter Xevious, giving you the ability to shoot straight ahead or drop bombs on ground targets. Rounding the whole thing out, the game had some pretty decent boss battles at the end of each level, putting you up against a series of submarines in one level and other collections of big vehicles throughout the game.

If Spy Hunter can be remade into a moderately successful mission-based shooter, then we say there's no reason why Sega can't follow suit and bring its little-known clone into the 21st century in a similar fashion. The dynamic of changing your ground-based vehicle into a flying car is definitely a cool one that would probably lend itself well to a modern mission-based shooting game.

Ambulances, motorcycles, black cars--blow them all up.

But let's not abandon the idea of 2D gaming in favor of making a game that basically apes Midway's Spy Hunter remakes. Besides, Spy Hunter 2 added boss fights--which was one of Action Fighter's advantages over the Spy Hunter arcade game in the first place--when it was released on the Xbox and PlayStation 2 last year. What would really be best for Action Fighter at this point would be either an updated remake in the Sega Ages line of classic rereleases or an entirely new game on a handheld platform like the good ol' Game Boy Advance. The driving and shooting action would fit quite well on a GBA these days, and the level-based design of the original would make for an easy password or save-game structure for playing on the go. We like Action Fighter, but we don't necessarily want to hook up a Master System just to play it.