Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars - War of the Warts

[Inyarear]

Here's a shot of the Air Marshall as the last boss. When you're busy freeing your friends on the toad tanker, he also turns up on this platform every time you find one of your friends, and zaps them with a weird green ray that turns them against you. Then you have to shoot some sense into them (!) with your lasers and plasma rays and stuff to get them back on your side.

During the final sequence, the Air Marshall keeps throwing this bomb at you that looks a lot like some kind of green hamburger or taco. Goofy as it might appear, that bomb does make things difficult, since it's a scatter-shot device that flings little fiery barbs in all directions. The Air Marshall's skin must also be getting pretty tough in his old age, because you have to keep shooting him almost forever to knock him off that platform once and for all.

[Inyarear]

As I mentioned earlier, the levels, especially the later ones, have a lot of fun challenges to them. This is the spinning disc that you have to get across to get into the core of the ship. If you wait on the platform long enough, the stormtoads in this device will either end up level with your platform and start shooting at you, or they'll tumble right into the pit. I guess the toad armada considers these guys pretty expendable.

[Inyarear]

The artwork in this game was really appealing, even if it was all 16 colors at most (also known as EGA graphics, I believe). Here, for example, is the core of the toad tanker, which is a lot of fun to destroy. (Willy comes in very handy in this sequence, since he has the most powerful gun, and it can take out most things in one shot when it's charged.)

[Inyarear]

Here's another one of my favorite bosses in the game, a toad shuttle that flies up behind you in the escape sequence near the end. Oddly enough, while you'd probably think the toads would all be heading for the exit, since this is the part right after you blow the core and start a Star Wars-style chain reaction that blows out the entire ship, the toads on this shuttle seem more interested in stopping you from escaping than they do in keeping their own lives; the hatches on the top open up to fling out a bunch of jumping toads who try to latch on to your little escape pod and drag you down, although it's easy enough to evade them, and you can scrape them off in the spikes below if they do happen to grab you. They must waste about twenty or thirty of these guys every time you're here in front of the ship, sending them leaping to their doom. Talk about disregard for sanctity of life!

[Inyarear]

And for my last shot... I offer this composite picture. Part of what makes the toad shuttle so impressive (apart from the fact that you usually view it in fullscreen, and not in the dinky little screenshots I've been showing you here) is that you never see all of it at once. You start out with it coming up behind you, and then it passes under you and in front of you, giving you a shot at its engine. Then it passes overhead and settles down on top of you, leaving you very little room to maneuver in that little gap underneath while the turrets on it blaze away at you. Finally, it picks up and drops in behind you again to repeat the cycle. Meanwhile, you'd better be finding some way to eliminate those turrets, or you won't be seeing too many more of those cycles! In any case, here's the whole ship.