Random Game Saturday: Aero Blasters
Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension

Outside of having what I consider to be one of the all-time greatest Mega Drive covers, Kaneko's Aero Blasters (or Air Buster, depending on where in the world you are) holds a special place in my heart.

By the time I stumbled across it in a local pub and restaurant as a kid, I was already somewhat aware of the idea of coin-ops being ported to home formats. My main gaming platform prior to getting a Mega Drive was the Atari ST, and that was positively flooded with arcade conversions – usually done rather poorly by companies like US Gold.

When I first got my Mega Drive at the end of 1990, I'd never played games like Golden Axe, Strider and Super Monaco GP in their original coin-op form – they were, to my pre-teen mind, Mega Drive games first and foremost.

It was only later, when I encountered them in local arcades, that I realised they had a lineage that pre-dated their arrival on Sega's 16-bit system. As a result, I never actively compared them to the original arcade games.

Aero Blasters was different. I played the aforementioned arcade cabinet while waiting for my parents to finish their pub lunch, and quickly recognised that it had been featured in a recent issue of Mean Machines magazine.

This spark of recognition was accompanied by a realisation that the Mega Drive port appeared to be a very close match to the original coin-op, so I made up my mind to track down a copy at the earliest opportunity.

In the end, I picked up the North American version, Air Buster (which had pretty awful cover art) from KC's Computer Emporium in Loughborough, UK – the vastly inferior artwork didn't matter all that much, given that I was stunned by how close the game itself was to the arcade I'd played so very recently.

At the close of the millennium, I would pick up the Japanese version from CeX's short-lived retro store in London, and that's the copy you see in these photos. It's a treasured part of my collection, and a game I continue to revisit from time to time – and it still blows me away how close it is to the coin-op, even now.