For the last week or thereabouts I’ve been playing a lot of a coin-op called Fire Hawk – it was released by Korean manufacturers ESD in 2001 and a little “research” on the internet reveals that it’s actually built on a hack of Psikyo’s code with the most popular guess as to where the “donation” came from being the Strikers series; the influence of those games is pretty obvious too, with the overall look being like an unrefined, low resolution version of Strikers 1945 III.

Each level has a cliche… erm, theme ranging from desert with armed pyramids to rainforest and passing through that mining town with a huge marshalling yard, a rusty industrial area and the semi-rural landscape that’d be quite nice if it wasn’t for the mega tanks and concealed guns along the way. It also has what I can best describe as a “twee village” that sticks out like a sore thumb since it’d belong in an entirely different game if there hadn’t been an absolutely massive jet “parked” by one of the buildings – the bizarre scale of the jet to it’s surroundings hints that whoever drew the backgrounds wasn’t told which scale was being used for everything else.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why I got so hooked on the thing. It’s a relatively simple shooter and not exactly perfect either since there are some bugs in the mix and, whilst most of the issues are cosmetic things like bosses leaving large chunks of themselves behind after exploding, I reckon the variation in the amount of kicking a boss will take on the later levels is too erratic to be deliberate and the collisions seem to be a bit squiffy since I’ve seen medals floating under the body of my plane without a hit being registered.

But it could’ve been worse; there’s a hack of Fire Hawk (oh, the irony) by another Korean dev Yona Tech called Spectrum 2000 that manages to all but shatter things to the point where the difficulty was ramped up to “fecking quick” at the start, half a helicopter and two bits of tank track were still considered to be an active boss that was therefore still firing and, whilst credit feeding through it to see how badly damaged things actually were, it fell apart completely, leaving an invisible, non-firing and indestructible chunk of boss in play so the level wouldn’t end!

Actually, I suspect that I do know why Fire Hawk (and to a degree Spectrum 2000 although that was more a morbid fascination) managed to hook me, it’s the simplicity of the thing; after a little “complexity” whilst having to choose from five different planes with their own weapons and initial level order, it becomes a case of dodging like a madman, grabbing power-ups and medals as they go past and most important of all giving anything that gets in the way a serious kicking.