Gemini Wing

From the inlay:

"Die Mutant Alien Scum"

Not the most friendly of newspaper headlines you must agree, especially when it comes to promoting intergalactic relations, but then there has always been a so-called 'gutter element' to holo-journalism. (Not that anyone can remember what a gutter is, these days, but the general feeling is that it was something rather unpleasant, if fairly useful.)

And it was that heading "Die Mutant Alien Scum" that caused all the bother when it appeared in a space-wide holo-edition of the SoonDay Spirit. After several centuries of reading "little green men turned me into a potato" stories invented by SoonDay Spirit journalists, aliens throughout space were beginning to get just a little bit fed up with humanity. Naturally, human diplomats did their best to repair the damage, but your average little green man reading the SoonDay Spirit on the top of a Venusian omnibus wasn't swayed. As time went on, he got more and more fed up with being slandered and vilified in the holo-outpourings of a small and insignificant bipedal race that lived on a dirty little planet in the Sol system.

When the crazed SoonDay Spirit headline writer finally flipped his xenophobic lid and came up with DIE MUTANT ALIEN SCUM as a front-page lead story for the early edition one Tuesday, the clamour of outrage comng trom the top of the omnibuses throughout the galaxy could be heard on Earth. Alien anger continued to mount, and by the middle of Wednesday morning, political leaders on every civilized world in the galaxy realised there was only one course of action open to them if they wanted to get re-elected by their people: declare war on Earth.

So by lunchtime on Wednesday, every civilised race in the galaxy had declared war on Earth, the human race, and in particular all journalists working for the SoonDay Spirit. Expecting an easy victory in the game 'Earth V The Rest of God's Creations', alien hordes set out for the time-space adjacent to Earth and prepared to do battle with humanity's feeble space fleets. But they hadn't reckoned on the ingenuity of Earth's weapons scientists; they didn't realise that the Gemini Wing figher project was already complete. And their spies had spent so much time on earth chasing girlies and turning them into potatoes to report back on the development of awesome weapon systems such as the Windscreen Wiper of Death ....

What at first seemed to be an easy victory for alien forces turned into a bitterly-fought conflict, a space-war that is still raging in several dimensions. Which is about where you come in, as the pilot of a Gemini Wing fighter. Pausing only to shout the battle cry of the crack GW regiment you belong to - "Die Mutant Alien Scum" - you leap into the control seat of your craft, warp to a vertically-scrolling etherworld and start fighting the good fight ....

User Summary

This is a vertically scrolling shoot-em-up. The power-up system is interesting in that one-off shots of special weapons are collected and stream behind you ship in coloured orbs. Firing the alternative weapon shoots the weapons from the orbs in the order they were collected.

Most of the home versions state "Produced by The Sales Curve Ltd for Virgin Mastertronic Ltd. Coding by Imagitec Design."