Past meets present: Slap Fight

As basically every studio working on shooting games was back in 1985, Toaplan’s first shoot ‘em up, Tiger-Heli, drew significant inspiration from Xevious. It had plenty of its own contributions to add to the lineage of the genre — screen-clearing bombs were the invention of Toaplan, first utilized in Tiger-Heli — but the speed the game moved at and the way enemies fired at you was still very reminiscent of Namco’s massive hit, only in a realistic military setting rather than a sci-fi one. That this was the direction Toaplan went in first made plenty of sense, considering it’s also what the developers there knew: Tiger-Heli is clearly a refinement of another helicopter-based vertically scrolling STG, Gyrodine, which multiple members of the Toaplan staff had worked on at their previous studio.Toaplan would further experiment with the Xevious-style formula in its next shooter, but this one would have sci-fi elements and draw further inspiration from outside sources. Slap Fight, first…