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If you've ever played Target Earth on the Sega Genesis, you can think of Cybernator as what Target Earth would be like if it were playable.

Seriously, I love the Virtual Console for stuff like this. I owned Target Earth as a kid, and as much as I liked its premise of robots shooting things, its unfair difficulty was just too much to bear (and this was coming from a kid who liked Ghosts'n Goblins). Before the Virtual Console, all I could do was wonder why Target Earth's full potential was never exploited in a sequel. As it turns out, such a thing has existed for years, and I never knew about it until this week.

A sequel to Target Earth in everything but its name (the two games share the same developers and the same series title in Japan), Cybernator plays very similarly, with a few key differences. Like Target Earth, Cybernator places you inside of a giant robot with a tiny gun. You stomp and dash around massive levels, destroying any hapless mechs or puny humans on your way. You've got a jetpack that can boost your jumping abilities a bit, and you can find new weapons hidden throughout the game to help even the odds against bosses.

Unlike Target Earth, though, Cybernator at least gives you the impression of being possible to finish without cheating. Cybernator also gives your robot the ability to make things blow up by punching them, so that's another big plus right there.

The game itself is overwhelming at first, with bullets flying in from all angles even in the first stage. Your mech can absorb quite a few shots before dying, though, and as you get used to the amount of destructive power you have within your control, you'll soon find yourself speeding through levels with all the grace you can coax out a lumbering, violent robot. Later antigravity stages allow you to steer your mech around in mid-air, and at least one level that takes place in a field of asteroids (which your crewmates regretfully abbreviate as "roids") resembles a fast-paced horizontal shooter.

It's...great. I love this game. There's so many little things to love about it, too, like the way tiny humans will scurry around your feet after you destroy their vehicles, or the way your mech damages walls and floors as you traipse around and shoot the place up. Damage modeling in a 16-bit game -- incredible stuff! The damage even looks a lot more convincing here than in many modern games, since you won't ever happen to glance at the floor after a firefight and see a bullet hole floating two inches above the ground.

There's an annoying and inconsequential storyline that interrupts the flow of the game a bit at points, but the action segments are so tight and satisfying that you won't even care. Download this.

Here's a speedrun of the first level, which makes the game look way easier than it actually is. There'll be a lot more shooting and dying when you play it, I promise.

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