Taito may be famous for creating the likes of Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble, but for a brief period at the close of the 1980s, it became the hottest name in arcades thanks to the release of Operation Wolf, a Rambo-inspired military shooter with a realistic Uzi strapped to its cabinet.
Ported to pretty much every home system of the era, the game was followed by sequels that expanded on the core gameplay but never quite achieved the same degree of fame. Fast forward to the present, and emulation specialist M2 has bundled up Wolf with Operation Thunderbolt and Space Gun — and thrown in the utterly superb Night Striker, a Super Scaler-style shooter inspired by the likes of Space Harrier and After Burner for good measure — to create Operation Night Strikers.
Mindless shooting is the backbone of Operation Night Strikers, then, and in lieu of proper light gun support, M2 has opted for a trio of potential control methods. You can use the analogue stick — which works well enough — or opt for using the Joy-Con’s gyro controls. The third option involves a USB mouse.
The gyro-aiming approach has been used in titles such as House of the Dead: Remake, and it works better than you might imagine, thanks to the presence of an on-screen crosshair. This tends to drift as you play, but thankfully, you can recalibrate with a single button press during the action. Using a USB mouse will feel a little like cheating for light gun purists, but it is perhaps the best interface method of the ones available, assuming you’ve got a flat surface handy to rest it on.
All three light gun offerings here are excellent, with Operation Wolf giving you plenty to shoot at while its direct sequel spruces things up with more dynamic environments, all made possible by 2D scaling tech. Space Gun takes this to the next level, swapping out hostile military juntas for xenomorphs and cleverly simulating smoothly-scrolling 3D-style corridor sections with angled 2D sprites.
Night Striker is the outlier, as it’s not a light gun game but one where you control a futuristic car which can instantly take to the air. It feels like a fusion of OutRun (thanks to the branching pathways – although to be fair to Taito, Darius features those, too) and Space Harrier, combined with some amazing Blade Runner-style locations and a wonderful Zuntata soundtrack.
It’s arguably the best game in this collection, and this pixel-perfect port even surpasses the one released on the Saturn and PS1 in Japan back in the ’90s. It might be pushing it slightly to say the Night Strikers is worth the cost of purchase on its own, but it’s certainly close – and sets us up nicely for M2’s forthcoming sequel.
Because this is an M2 release, you get the traditionally spot-on emulation as well as various CRT filters and other options, including online leaderboards and in-game achievements. There’s also a selection of information arrayed around the screen, which makes things like health and remaining bombs easier to parse; all of this can be toggled on and off at will. It’s also possible to select between the US and Japanese versions of each game.
Also impressive is the fact that M2 has gone the extra mile and included the home ports that followed these coin-op releases (on my physical import copy, at least – they’re available as DLC on the eShop). For Operation Wolf, the Famicom, NES and Master System versions are present, but sadly, the PC Engine port isn’t. Operation Thunderbolt’s SNES conversion also makes the cut, but it’s a pale imitation of the original game, despite offering six different characters to play as.
Not all of the ports allow you to use gyro aiming, and there’s often quite a notable gulf in quality between them and the arcade originals, but they’re still interesting to play. For many of you, the nostalgic pull might be stronger with these versions, as they may well have been your first experiences of these notable arcade releases.
Night Striker’s Mega CD port is included, too, and while it looks like a blocky mess when compared to the coin-op, the sense of speed is impressive, and the arranged soundtrack is fantastic.
Conclusion
The notion of picking up a collection featuring three light gun shooters and a relatively obscure Super Scaler-style game might be a little too esoteric for some Switch owners, but hardcore Taito fans will have a blast (no pun intended) with Operation Night Strikers. The emulation is perfect, the control methods are decent, and there’s plenty of customisation on offer, making this another highly recommended M2 offering.
Longevity is going to be an issue for some — even with the online leaderboards in place — and some of the included home ports are a little rough around the edges, but players of a certain age will find a lot to like here, given the legendary status of Operation Wolf and the quality of the other titles included.
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