 Snaaaaaaun… that's drunk? I went on a big Superscoped binge last summer and somehow forgot a game in its Operation Thunderbolt complete with cover art featuring Adam Carolla looking mildly annoyed that he had to do rescue some hostages. This game was originally made for arcades way back in 1988 as a follow-up to one of the most popular Gallery Shoots of the Time, Operation Wolf, and by all accounts the RK version held up its end to the bargain, winning awards for best graphics in 1989 from Crash Magazine, and hey, even the computer ports of this game, received for Amiga and Commodore 64, were named best 16-bit arcade ports according to Zero Magazine. The Super Nintendo version was not released until 1994, but it's made by Taito, the same folks that made the original arcade, so this port is okay, and the number one thing it's got going for it is that it's compatible with the Super Scope and the Super Nintendo mouse, as well as the regular controller, so that's really cool. Of course it helps that the controls are ridiculously simple no matter what you pick. This is one of those games where the instruction manual is only like eight pages long, and dedicates an entire page to showing you the controller. X and Y shoot missiles, B and A shoot the regular gun, the D-pad moves your crosshair around, well duh. It would have been nice to learn more about the six different characters who use different guns, but the differences really aren't distinct enough to even mention. You get a health meter with three lives and zero continues to get through eight levels with no saves or passwords, but thankfully this game is multiplayer, which is pretty cool. You can also choose the order for which of the first three levels you want to start with, so that's neat. Even though this is one of those games where all you do is shoot stuff, they at least throw in a decent amount of variety in the settings. There's two main structures here, one is your typical side scrolling gallery shooter where you slowly slide from left to right, and the other has you moving forward, like in a dungeon crawler. As you can see, this game is, uh, not the smoothest. You get enemies river dancing in purple pajamas out from the sides of the screen to try and attack you. I love when you shoot a guy through the window, they somehow just somersault and spring forward. There's a certain campiness here that I can't help but admire, but yeah, you can see the footage here. If there's one word to describe the gameplay and presentation, it's unpolished. The other superscope gallery shooter games like Exxon and Bazooka Blitzkrieg play a lot smoother and have a much more polished presentation, whereas this game comes across like it was slapped together in a few weeks. If you play this one with a controller, you're gonna be really frustrated because the crosshair is really slow with the d-pad. I had zero issues with the mouse and I'm sure the superscope is fine too, but the controller was pretty annoying to use. I should mention that in levels 4 and 6, you have to rescue hostages by blasting open doors in the background where people run out and start doing jazz hands in your face instead of simply running away. Why is everybody wearing purple? Did everybody here go to LSU or something? Uh, you shot me, but go tigers. Level 5 has these huge fighter jets that just awkwardly fly in your face and promptly disintegrate into nothing after you shoot them. Then level 6 has a boss fight where you get a guy firing hubcaps at you. The game at least gives you some stats after each level, and like I said, this game is multiplayer in its arcade style, so the second player can join in with the mouse, superscope, or controller at any point during the game, so that's cool. Operation Thunderbolt also makes a painstaking effort to tell a story, apparently a passenger plane wanders off into a no-fly zone. The quote-unquote good guy's solution to this is to threaten to shoot the plane down, but oh no, it turns out that skiers brandishing hot blue guns are holding the pilot's crew and passengers hostage. The plane lands at its apparent destination where we meet General and President for Life, Abul Bazar, who also boasts being a warlord of the Bintazi People's Republic on his resume as well, and I bet that guy gets a ton of LinkedIn invites. He gets off the plane and settles into a fancy bark-a-lounger, along with a camera guy and a sound guy demanding that his friends in France and Germany be released from prison. What's funny is that you never see this dude again in the game, so this is even more pointless than usual when it comes to shoehorning a story into a gallery shooter. So yeah, Operation Thunderbolt is a pretty blah experience on the Super Nintendo. It's choppy as hell, it sucks to aim with the D-pad, and while I appreciate it that it's compatible with the superscope and mouse, you can find much better gallery shooters on the SNES, everything from Battle Clash to Metal Combat to the aforementioned of Bazooka Blitzkrieg and X-Zone. Really, if you want to play Operation Thunderbolt, you're still better off playing the original arcade, even though it was released six years before the SNES port. That game still cuts a quick pace and plays really smoothly and is a lot of fun to play. Play that one anyway you can. The Super Nintendo port though, eh, you can probably go ahead and skip that one. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.