Powder

Powder is a sidescrolling "shmup" for the Amiga, made in a slightly cartoonish style much like many shooters for the SNES and PC Engine. The system is rather straight-forward; instead of a long range of power-ups, you have a reconfigurable ship, with five modes, which can be alternated by pressing the space bar or second joystick button. The first mode has spread fire firing forward at three angles, the second mode is a kind of gatling beam gun, firing a long blast from three rotating pipes. The third mode has a battery of rocket launchers firing in the direction you are travelling. This means that you can dive-bomb enemies or intercept them from below. The missiles have a very short range, though.

Powder has a graphical style reminiscent of Irem's old games (not R-Type, mind you), or Hudson's for that matter. Even though it is made for the OCS chipset, which was 13 years old when Powder was released, it features many small graphical touches such as reflections in windows and landscapes with a lot of detail. Each stage has several sub-bosses which halt the otherwise forced scrolling. Although the game is mostly horizontally scrolling, the playfield is at least one and a half screens high, allowing for high manoeuvrability, and with certain portions of the game scrolling diagonally as well.