Planet Probe

A prototype vertical space shoot’em up game with a parallax background.

The player controls a probe sent to a mysterious planet and is attacked by several types of enemies. Face the attacks using all the available weapons and escape from the planet to complete the mission.

This rare Japanese coin-op can be described as an elaborate evolution of Tehkan’s Senjyo. There’s fixed horizontal scrolling (from left to right), but your spaceship shoots vertically. You can shoot into the pseudo-3D background, to destroy the outposts located on the landscape, AND right up in the sky, to eliminate the enemy spaceships. The scrolling never stops, and environments smoothly cycle from deserts to volcanic areas, from alien oceans to futuristic cities. There’s no music in the game (only sfx) but the hi-score table features a catchy tune [note: so catchy I still can remember and play it after almost twenty years!] What else? Your ship is very slow and there are no power ups, still there are plenty of secret bonus targets, such as super deformed pterodactyls and an invisible knight you can spot only when its silhouette is exposed to moonlight. Planet Probe is so rare that no picture can be found on the Net and nobody seems to own a PCB of the coin-op; anyway, at the time several videogame magazines featured news about the game and/or published readers’ hi-scores.