Super Thunder Blade GENESIS

Super Thunder Blade was a Genesis launch title in 1989, converting Sega’s 1987 arcade helicopter shooter Thunder Blade to the new 16-bit hardware. It alternates between into-the-screen pseudo-3D sections and top-down overhead stages as your gunship fights through five missions of ground and air targets.

As one of the console’s earliest releases, it was built to show off the Genesis’s sprite-scaling capabilities at a time when few home systems could approximate the arcade’s pseudo-3D effect at all — a technical showcase piece as much as a shooter, and a snapshot of what launch-window developers considered an impressive display of the new hardware.