Gaiares GENESIS

Gaiares is Telenet Japan’s 1990 horizontal shoot-’em-up, built around a weapon-stealing mechanic: your ship’s Attack Device lets you rip a weapon directly off certain enemies mid-fight and use it against the rest of the level, on top of a base loadout you can freely reconfigure between stages.

That flexibility made it stand out in a genre where weapon loadouts were usually fixed power-ups collected in a set order. It was also one of the more graphically ambitious Genesis shooters of its release window, with parallax scrolling and boss designs that pushed the hardware harder than most shoot-’em-ups on the console at the time.