Hellfire

Overview

Hellfire is a horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up from Toaplan and Masaya originally released in arcades and then ported to the Sega Genesis and PC Engine CD-ROM. For its Genesis/Mega Drive releases, it had a different publisher in each region: Masaya for Japan, Seismic for North America, and Sega for Europe. The PC Engine CD-ROM version was called Hellfire S, and featured a remixed soundtrack and a new protagonist.

It has a gameplay quirk in which the player can cycle through various firing modes, each represented by a specific color. For instance, red/purple fires directly ahead, yellow fires behind, green fires directly above and below, and blue fires in all four diagonal directions. This allowed players to target enemies in every direction, as long as they could switch modes quickly enough. The player could also resort to a much more powerful shot, the Hellfire, but only a finite number of times per stage.