Dead Moon

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The game starts somewhere on Earth and then launches the player into space to intercept the alien invaders. During aerial fights, supply ships will periodically enter the screen (near its top or bottom) and, if shot down, they will grant upgrades. Multiple pickups of the same color/upgrades will increase your current weapon's power to a maximum of three levels and allow the ship to take one more extra hit per pickup to a maximum of three hits. Actually, this might get a bit confusing since you almost cannot avoid certain upgrade pickups. This will make you change your already selected weapons, lots of times! There are six different levels to fly through, each with a mid-level boss and a bigger one at the end!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Dead Moon's graphics are really good. They feature a large variety of colors and lots of huge sprites simultaneously on screen! There is also parallax scrolling involved on the background. The action is quite fast and sports smooth sprite animation at all times. The game uses nice and catchy in-game tunes surrounded by some great Sci-Fi sound FX. Dead Moon is a fantastic, arcade-style, shoot 'em up game for the NEC PC Engine and Turbografx16 consoles.