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 • Released in 1989• Developed by Taito • Genre: Action • Popularity Level: Cincinnati Reds • Leonardite Rating: Moderately Def • Barry's Take: Skyshark is a great game to play and entertain yourself with during a slow afternoon. It's not the typical airplane game in that when you get power ups, you can't shoot 8 types of guns with a spread the size of New Guinea. No. In fact if you can stay alive long enough to get 4 or 5 power ups or "S's" as I like to call them, your spread might get to be 1 or 2 inches in actual size, but man is it sweet then. Then you fight the plane the size of the tv screen and you waste all your guys then get lucky and find that spot where he can't get you and he dies. And you thought you won but not a chance and you land on the second runway of the game and you yell a choice word, then proceed to throw your cartridge into a lagoon and have a bowl of rice checks. GREAT GAME!!!! • You know how it is when elderly people gather at a senior center. They sip coffee, play cards, and talk about the most wicked killing machines on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Wait, that's just what I imagine them doing. But I also imagine myself riding in the Ecto 1 and roughing up Tombstone Tackle and his posse, so that probably shows how much weight my theory has. But if our elders really do have these discussions, the usuals will come up as answers. You know who I am talking about, characters like Little Mac, the spread gun on Contra, and Lawrence Taylor on Tecmo Bowl. Those are all well and good, but there is one thing that bothers me. Never mind the fact that the spread gun isn't even a character, we're completely neglecting the Sky Shark pilot. That's right, the little hero who sits in the cockpit of the world's most dangerous double prop. Some of you might clamor for the pilots from 1942 and 1943 respectively to also be honored in the same way, but they didn't have their face on the front of the game like this guy. For all I know a monkey or a dust mop is flying those planes. That's a can of worms I don't want to get into, and one that Sky Shark artfully avoids. This guy has some serious cajones, man. He isn't just dogfighting, he is navigating, firing his endless supply of ammunition, and manning the trigger of numerous atomic bombs. And speaking of the bombs, he can actually replenish his supply just by flying over one. Let's see Little Mac do that. There's also a theory that he is the grandfather of Tom "IceMan" Kazanski, but I just made that rumor up right now so go ahead and disregard it.
Maybe that's not the reason. Maybe it is. Maybe Jon Chaney looks like a cocaine addict. But maybe there's another reason for Sky Shark's blatant omission from the toughest character pantheon. I think it's because he is a non-descript looking guy. Sure, he looks tough. But that wide-eyed, teeth-bared grin is nothing I can't duplicate by eating one of Wendy's mysterious square hamburgers. Perhaps, though, it is because if you look at the cartridge long enough, the pilot looks like Norm MacDonald. Norm's a funny guy who did a nice job with Weekend Update and Dirty Work, but I certainly don't think of him when listing the toughest guys in the world. I mean, come on, the guy starred in a movie directed by Bob Saget. So since they decided to use a B-Level celebrity to grace the cover, I decided to come up with a new and tougher model for the Taito masterminds to use. I started with a list of 600 people, a bottle of expired cough medicine, and a copy of Ishtar. Twelve hours, three seizures, and a noise complaint later, I came up with the winners:
When you start this game, you take off from a typical runway. Pretty normal for an airplane game, not really anything out of the ordinary, obviously. However, I want everyone to remember this runway as we'll get back to it later. The plane controls actually handle pretty tightly. The airplane is able to bank left and right as quickly as you press the directional arrow. This might seem like common sense, but when you take into account games like Tag Team Wrestling, where you'd press the button, and by springtime the game would finally register a response, this is actually a good feat for an NES game.
Your game plugs along with all the usual explosions and 8-bit effects that you came to expect from NES shooters. Your plane manages to kill airplanes, boats, ships, tanks, really f'ing huge tanks, planes of the same description, bunkers, civilians, and Osama Bin Laden among other things. I don't have any factual evidence of the last one, but I do know that you kill everything else in the eastern world so why the hell not? The reason for this is the quality of your ammunition. Let me elaborate on the plane's gun for a moment. If you think your standard chain gun is pretty tough, you should see this thing. Your shell is about the size of your plane. Now take into the fact that you are firing two of them at the beginning, you begin to wonder how big the barrel is on this thing. If you keep forcefully removing the life from your enemies and keeping your own, your gun spread will keep getting bigger. You soon are firing a line of bullets twice the width of the plane. Keep in mind that the bullets are half the size of the plane themselves. I don't care what new technology we have, why in the world did we abandon this miracle firearm? If nothing else, I want to mount that baby on my car. 75 in a 55? Try and ticket me with that thing. Now that you are familiar with the amazing power of your gun, we need to discuss your atomic payload. Experienced Sky Shark players, under the shroud of anonymity, will admit to firing off the majority of their bombs at nothing. The reason for this is that the bomb will explode everything on screen, so you need not target anything in particular. Man, with an arsenal like this, I'm starting to think that any idiot could have been the Sky Shark guy. This game basically builds up to one climactic fight with this huge bomber that has the capability of firing many, many bullets simultaneously, taking up your entire line of sight, and playing stations from both AM and FM band. Sure sounds tricky, right? Yeah, except for the fact that even the slowest children figured out the "trick" to beating this plane. All you did was sit in one corner, while he couldn't hit you, and then he was defeated. A great idea right? Why shouldn't all games equip the final boss with a fatal flaw? Because it's really dumb. I have illustrated the final sequence in terms of some famous wrestlers and wrestling events.  That is strike one against this game. The gigantic strike two comes just minutes later. After you go through the ridiculous end fight, you have to fight a few more worthless enemies before beating the game. If you have done this and didn't realize you beat the entire game, I can see where that could happen. The reason for that is that you just land on the runway that started the game. You touch down, take off, and play the whole damn thing again. Never once do they say "Good Job", "Congratulation!" or "A Winner is You!" Instead, they leave everyone very frustrated and at high risk for committing felonies. But in total, there are only two strikes against this game. It is a very fun game and a nice challenge, but to have it end the way it does is like kicking the #1 team out of the national championship game. It's a sham and shouldn't be tolerated, but we live with it anyway. Bottom Line: Sky Shark is very common so it's easy to find. Pick it up, beat it, smash the cartridge for using you at the end, and then never speak of it again. E-mail the Leonardite |
  "Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." -Joe Theismann Taken from a GameFAQs.com review of Sky Shark: "This game is known as ''hard.'' But if you get a few more you can really dominate in this game, blowing up the giant white planes, super tanks, all by just thinking about it. And another cool thing about your ammo in this game: every bullet you fire is independent. I mean it! Start level 1, position your plane between the first two baby planes that come at you, fire once, and your two bullets take them out. This concludes my ammunition analysis. " Thanks, professor, for your analysis and for your notification of it. Had you not told me of your conclusion, I would have assumed you were reviewing an Abba concert or teaching me how to bake banana bread.  The touching commemorative stamp issued by the Japanese Postal Service to honor the pathetic Sky Shark navy.  You make look tough, but you are no match for Dr. Peter Venkman. |
