Aero Fighters, known as in Japan, is a vertically scrolling shooter originally released in arcades in 1992 by Video System and was also released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993. It was the first in the Aero Fighters series, and a spiritual successor to the 1991 Turbo Force. Gameplay This game uses basic shooter mechanics of the SHMUP genre of video games. Pressing button 1 fires normal weapons; this can be upgraded by collecting P or the rare F items, though the maximum power level has a hidden ammo count, after which the player will return to the previous power level. Pressing button 2 launches a powerful special attack; uses are limited to how many B items the player has collected (every life starts with two). Some ground enemies will drop score items when destroyed; they appear as the currency of the selected character's nation. By default, players start with three lives, and can acquire one more at 200,000 points. Aero Fighters is famous for its large cast of characters, unheard of in 1992. Each pair of characters represents one of four nations. The two-player sides may only select the four characters given (one for each nation). In a two-player game, only a single nation can be chosen. The game has seven stages divided into two parts. The first three stages are selected randomly from a group of four, with one for each character's nation; however, a character will never go to its nation's stage. The other four stages are fixed. After beating all seven stages, the player sees the character's ending, then play much more difficult versions of those stages, after which the game truly ends. Reception In Japan, Game Machine listed Aero Fighters on their May 1, 1992 issue as being the second most-successful table arcade unit of the month. RePlay also reported the game to be the second most-popular arcade game at the time. Despite being a solid entry, the arcade version had little to distinguish itself from the competition. One critic wrote: "Aero Fighters is a thoroughly solid game, let's get that out of the way. It is also a game that is easy to forget. At a time when shooters were a dime a dozen it didn't exactly stand out." GamePro gave the Super NES version a negative review, saying the weapons are imaginative but the game suffers from slowdown, mediocre graphics, weak