December '91
"Experience the power of the mighty Firehawk helicopter gunship in this ultimate action game! Use skill to pilot the Firehawk through seven daring missions to pick up your troops from enemy-infested islands!
The opposition is tough and intelligent; with air, ground and sea defences. Destroy gunboats, jet fighters and tanks. Battle with enemy troops armed to the teeth with lethal weapons! Engage Firehawk's advanced weaponry systems and make the most of the 32 different styles of firepower! Super fast 360 - scrolling and land, sea and air mission scenarios - the action's just non-stop in Firehawk!"
What the press said
The Levels: Missing in Action
(coming soon)
Having completed The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy on the NES we appreciated how powerful the NES was for creating scrolling character mapped play areas with overlaid hardware sprites (64 x 8x8 pixel sprites). This was the perfect technical requirement for our vision of Operation Gunship, where you flew a helicopter gunship over islands shooting and launching missiles at enemies buildings and vehicles. Your objective was to collect the Commandos trapped on the islands and return them to your command ship. The more destruction wreaked the better!
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It did work very well although there was an annoying bug on the scrolling that took over a week to solve! Well, mostly solve, still very occasionally a wrong character will scroll on the edge of the map! So annoying! The 8 bit processing capabilities of the 6502 meant little processing time was given to the AI for the enemy vehicles.
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Whilst it reviewed quite well, sales were low due to massive delays caused by attempting to release unlicensed NES games in America.
