Gun-Nac

Gun-Nac is a Compile shooter with a sense of humour and a shop. The enemies are fruit, toys and robot pigs, the stage graphics are bright and silly, and underneath all of it is a serious scrolling shooter with an upgrade economy.

That economy is what makes it different from the shooters around it. Coins drop from destroyed enemies, and between stages you spend them in a shop to buy weapons, shields and speed permanently - so a run is a budget as much as a fight, and choosing whether to save for a better ship or spend on a quick fix is a real decision. The weapon set is wide and every one of them is viable, which is rare. It arrived at the very end of the Famicom's commercial life in Japan and was published in the US by ASCII the following year, which is why it is one of the least-known good shooters on the system.

• ▸Coins collected in play, spent in a between-stage shop
• ▸Permanent upgrades bought with money rather than dropped as power-ups
• ▸Comedic enemy and stage design with a genuinely hard game underneath
• ▸A wide weapon set with no single dominant option