Turrican II: The Final Fight

Turrican II: The Final Fight is a platformer/shooter as typically seen on consoles, but designed for home computers from the ground up.

Its plot is - naturally - very simple: an evil mega-robot called The Machine attacks the United Planets Ship Avalon 1, slaughtering all who resist. All - except Bren McGuire, who manages to escape and slips into the experimental Turrican bionic armor. As Turrican, he strives to show The Machine who's the boss.

Unlike other games of its type, this game contains three levels of horizontal shooter action in the spirit of R-Type or the developers' own Katakis. Six large worlds are to be explored, where you are basically free to go everywhere you want, since there is no automatic scrolling and the levels are packed with hidden extra lives and weapons. All those levels are very different: the first one in the rock desert is pretty colorful with parallaxing rainbow background and happy music, while the following worlds get darker and darker.

Turrican can get some different weapons for his arm cannon:

The bounce weapon which rebounds from surfaces into smaller bouncing balls when powered up;
The laser, which can shoots beams as large as Turrican himself when maxed out;
the multiple shot beam, which can shoot up to five beams covering approximately a 90 degree angle.

The Turrican suit weaponry is not limited to the arm cannon however:

He also can fire a continuous beam, activated by holding the fire button. This beam can be rotated around Turrican, so it is possible to blast things below him in this way;
Additionally, he can fire power lines by pressing the space bar, resulting in two energy bars as high as the screen going from the Turrican suit to the left and right of the screen, severely damaging enemies in the process;
If the space bar is pressed when the hero is crouching, the Turrican will morph into a shuriken shape. In this state, it will roll to the left or the right, damaging enemies while being invincible and small bombs can be dropped by pressing the fire button;
Finally, the most powerful attack, which can only be used one time per life, can be delivered by pressing the fire button and the space bar at the same time. The Turrican suit will morph into a shuriken shape and fly around the screen for several seconds, while firing shots of the different weapons in multiple directions.