Back in the early to mid 80's there were a ton of games that were like this and once the world rolled over to NES I would say a good 3rd of the overall library had a sort of overall ambiance just like Rolling Thunder. The game was rather basic, especially by today's standards but for some reason it just managed to be more fun than other games that were like it.
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In Rolling Thunder you play a secret agent named Albatross as he infiltrates a terrorist organization to rescue his female partner. This would probably be considered sexist these days but we were a more sensible people back in the mid 80's and nobody was concerned about such things.
While the game was very similar in nature to a long range of other games in the side-scrolling action platformer genre, this one stuck out from the rest because of a few key reasons
- Your character could take multiple hits before dying
- there were weapon powerups that could be accessed at multiple points in the levels
- the movement of your controlled character were very fluid for the time
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Although it wasn't a technical achievement the manner in which you jumped from one platform to the above or below ones was part of what people liked about this game so much. Albatross seemed very agile and very few of your enemies could keep up with your vertical speed. In a shell, there was something just extremely "cool" about it all.
One difficult thing about the game was that unlike many other games like it, you had limited ammo so it was folly to simply fire with reckless abandon. Arcade nerd-rumor quickly spread that the ammo closets could be revisited multiple times (as far as I can tell an unlimited number of times) simply by scrolling the screen forward a bit and then walking back. Like basically every game in that point in time the screens and everything contained inside of them would totally reset if you just scrolled down a bit. Sure you had to kill the enemies again but once you figured out the patterns it wasn't very difficult to walk back an forth half a dozen times without event taking any damage.
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When this game got ported to the C-64 and later the NES it wasn't anywhere nearly as impressive as the stand-up arcade but we played it anyway for the sake of saving our quarters.
If you look on streaming services at a longplay video it appears as though the game is very easy but I can assure you that it was anything but that. This game had a reputation for being brutally difficult and quickly became known as a "quarter muncher" in the arcade circuits. There was only 5 levels but they increase in difficulty from level 1 to 2 was immense. I only ever finished the arcade game one time and it probably cost me several dollars for the pleasure.
If you would like to have a look at this gem of an arcade game for free the ROM can be downloaded for the price of nothing, here