1990 TAD Corporation
I had the pleasure of owning an original copy of Blood Brothers until a couple of years back, and it was installed in a local video rental shop where it took far more money than it should have, and with good reason.
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In Blood Brothers, you control a cowboy at the bottom of the screen who fires at enemies using a crosshair moved around with the joystick. The first button fires a shot, the second button performs a dodging roll, and the third throws a grenade. You can't move your character around while you're shooting, and you can't be hit while you're rolling. It's another of those interesting games that neatly and efficiently splits your attention between the position of your offensive (in this case, your crosshair) and the defence of your vulnerable element (your cowboy), which (to me anyway) is immediately pleasing.
What tips the scales from fun into excellence is the attention to detail paid to the game's execution and presentation. The explosions are satisfyingly enormous, there must be hundreds of different enemy types, most of the scenery can be blown apart, there are two different gun upgrades (one of which provides a nice bass-heavy soundtrack that you can feel through your feet), and there's cover for you to hide behind. Which, like everything, can be blown to smithereens if you so desire.
My one complaint is a pretty standard one - for a game with so many collectable bonus points icons spurting out of the destroyed scenery, you'd think it'd save high scores after the machine's been turned off. When did game developers forget how to do that? Pac-Man saved high scores, and that greedy yellow bastard is older than me.
Despite that minor complaint, Blood Brothers is a lovely game, and I'm not surprised that it took such good money in 2004 despite being fourteen years old. Sequel, please.
Retro Reviews
http://www.retroreviews.net/article.php/blood_brothers