Now this really is a classic from that hangar of classic shooters, Toaplan. Fire Shark, or (brilliantly) Same! Same! Same!, as it's known in Japan, is a WWII top-down shooter filtered through the mind of a maniac: a lone twin-prop plane faces off against an endless armada of tanks, boats, zeppelins and cannon, with huge lasers and gouts of flame crossing the screen at wild angles.
Even to a jaded shoot-em-up fan like me, Fire Shark is a brilliantly chaotic experience, full of colour (on a console not noted for its vibrant palette), imagination and gigantic mechanical bosses. There are neat incidental touches too: the tiny soldiers that greet you on the runway at the end of each stage; the way your can plow kamikaze-style into enemies as you fall from the sky.
Fire Shark also marks a sublime halfway point between the quiet austerity of their earlier efforts like Slap Fight and their phenomenally difficult later works like Donpachi; here, there's a wonderful middle ground where the challenge is high but never punishingly so. The game's balance is such that even losing all your power-ups doesn't leave you crippled as so many other shooters are wont to do; this is no Super R-Type, that's for sure.
'Essential' is an over-used term these days, but as far as Mega Drive shooters are concerned, Fire Shark is easily in the big league MD genre classics such as MUSHA Aleste, Raiden and Toaplan's Tatsujin. Excellent.
