1943: The Battle of Midway is an absolute classic arcade shooter game released by Capcom in 1987 and converted by Probe to the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum home-computers. The game was also released for the Nintendo NES and NEC PC-Engine/Turbografx consoles.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The game is the sequel to the arcade smash 1942 and has you once again fighting over the oceans during the Second World War. The game is set in the Pacific Theater of World War II, off the coast of the Midway Islands. The goal is to attack the Japanese Air Fleet that bombed the American Aircraft Carrier, destroy all Japanese Air and Sea forces, fly through 16 tough levels, make your way to the Japanese battleship Yamato and destroy it. The gameplay is a typical bird's-eye bottom-to-top shoot 'em up. You must shoot anything that moves and avoid being hit by enemy projectiles. Same story, same action as its predecessor actually. It is difficult to progress though, as it is hard to avoid the enemy fire and (once again) due to its somewhat loose controls.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The C64 conversion offers good graphics with nice colors but the level detail is lower compared to the Amstrad CPC. This conversion tries to resemble as much as possible the original graphics but fails to do so due to the 8bit hardware. Overall, the game runs fluidly and the fast action is pretty much its strongest point. Note that the sprite animation does not suffer at all during gameplay, in contrast to the CPC and ZX conversions! As far as the sound goes, the music is nice but the in-game sound effects are rather poor as we would expect better from Commodore's SID chip.