Sky Shark

D
MS-DOS 0 subscribers
Manual

54K plays 1987 #Action#Shooter

Flying Shark, known as Sky Shark in North America, is a vertically scrolling shooter arcade video game originally developed by Toaplan and published in 1987 by Taito in Japan, Romstar in North America and Electrocoin in Europe. Controlling the titular biplane, the players must fight endless waves of military vehicles while avoiding collision with their projectiles and other obstacles. The plane has a powerful bomb at its disposal that can clear a portion of the screen of bullets and damage enemies when fired. It was the third shoot 'em up game from Toaplan, and their eighth video game overall.

Flying Shark was ported to multiple systems, each version created by different third-party developers. The game proved to be a success for Toaplan among players in Japanese arcades and garnered mostly positive reception from western critics, but the game was met with mixed response from magazines, specifically the home conversions. In 1989 the sequel Fire Shark was released. The rights to the title are owned by Tatsujin, a Japanese company formed by Masahiro Yuge.

From Wikipedia's article Flying Shark, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Controls

This is a PC game: it uses the keyboard the way it did under MS-DOS, and the mouse where the game supports it. Click the game screen first so it gets your key presses.

Many DOS games start with a menu or ask a question first — read the screen and answer with the keyboard. Arrow keys, Enter, Space, Ctrl and Alt are the usual game keys.

Emulator help & troubleshooting

Comments

Live chat

Connecting…

Chatting as a guest · Sign in to use your name
0/300

Controls

This is a PC game: it uses the keyboard the way it did under MS-DOS, and the mouse where the game supports it. Click the game screen first so it gets your key presses.

Many DOS games start with a menu or ask a question first — read the screen and answer with the keyboard. Arrow keys, Enter, Space, Ctrl and Alt are the usual game keys.

Emulator help & troubleshooting

Jackal MS-DOS 302K plays • 1986
Guerrilla War MS-DOS 95K plays • 1987
Space Invaders MS-DOS 221K plays • 1978
Operation Wolf MS-DOS 44K plays • 1987
Tunneler MS-DOS 119K plays • 1991
Gauntlet II MS-DOS 49K plays • 1986
Wizball MS-DOS 33K plays • 1987
Heavy Barrel MS-DOS 11K plays • 1987
Sopwith MS-DOS 60K plays • 1984
SilkWorm Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) 93K plays • 1988
Moon Patrol MS-DOS 114K plays • 1982
Ikari Warriors MS-DOS 67K plays • 1986
Gauntlet MS-DOS 40K plays • 1985
Commando MS-DOS 94K plays • 1985
River Raid MS-DOS 2.2M plays • 1982
Defender II (Stargate) MS-DOS 64K plays • 1981
Wolfenstein 3D MS-DOS 2.1M plays • 1992
Doom MS-DOS 3.7M plays • 1993
Total Carnage MS-DOS 40K plays • 1992

Pixel Verdict

Sky SharkDOS

3.5 Good job

Players 75 · 20 votes

No critic scores found for this game: this is the players' rating.

What the reviews talk about

Key wordsplayabledifficultoriginal

What the critics said

  • Sinclair User's Tim Rolf stated that "it is difficult, but Taito has made it so awesomely playable that the difficulty is a real joy".

    — Sinclair User, 1987 (Tim Rolf)

  • Edge magazine praised the gameplay, visuals and music, claiming that "Toaplan arguably perfected the vertical shoot 'em up with this early effort", though the publication lamented it never received a proper conversion.

    — Edge, 1994

From the Reception section of Wikipedia's Flying Shark article, under CC BY-SA 4.0. The words are the critics'; their full reviews are on the publishers' pages.

Full reviews

Face key

  1. 1.00+
  2. 1.540+
  3. 2.050+
  4. 2.560+
  5. 3.068+
  6. 3.575+
  7. 4.080+
  8. 4.585+
  9. 5.090+

5.0 Outstanding! · 4.0 Great job! · 3.0 Good job · 2.0 Could be better · 1.0 Wake me up when it's over · A thumbs-up adds half a point. Our own drawings, in the spirit of the faces GamePro magazine used in the '90s.

Save to...