Bummer Raid

Pick a pilot, taxi down the runway and fly north into everything they have. Bummer Raid is a vertical-scrolling arcade shoot-'em-up made by Aicade in the spirit of the 8-bit console shooters of the late eighties: a 4:3 playfield, a tight retro palette, chunky pixel aircraft and a brand-new soundtrack written for three square-wave voices and a noise channel.

Uncle Ace, Daddy Bomber, Brigadier Buscuit, Batfire Girl and Nanny Nuke each fly their own twin-engine prop plane in their own paint. Fire works the way it did on the old machines: tap and the shots come thick and fast, hold and you get a lazy trickle, so your thumb does the work. Shoot down supply carriers for P pickups that build your gun through ten shot types, S pickups for speed, and number pods that call in up to two wingmen. Shoot a pod to spin its number before you grab it and you choose the formation: side fire, forward diagonals, rear cover. Every pilot's top weapon is their own — muscle arms, fart clouds, round biscuits, bats or nukes — and a cluster bomb clears the screen when it all goes wrong.

The campaign runs from a coastal assault on a cruiser blockade, through a jungle gauntlet and a volcanic valley, out over open water thick with bombers and mines, into a storm of helicopters among rocky islands, and on to an arctic fortress and the aircraft carrier waiting at the end of it. Every mission ends in a boss.

Bring a friend: two players share one keyboard, or two controllers, and one score, and keep flying until both are out of lives. Optional HD lighting gives every sprite painted shading without blurring a single pixel, and CRT scanlines are one checkbox away. On a phone, on-screen controls fly player one.