Ok, I'm not one of those gamers who lets nostalgia cloud my vision. There's plenty of games I pumped quarters into when I was a kid that, when I play them now, suck balls. But, as we all know, lots of old games still kick ass even now because they were well made and served their purpose and delivered good, old-school arcade action. And those games leave us with fond memories and we can't let them go. No....no...those aren't tears. I'M NOT CRYING!!

In all seriousness, one old arcade shooter I love the hell out of is Capcom's masterpiece: Forgotten Worlds

YOU CANNOT STOP ME WITH PARAMECIUM ALONE!!

DAMN STRAIGHT, MR. GENERIC BLONDE HAIR HEROIC WHITE GUY!

Forgotten Worlds is a 2-D side scrolling shooter that, when it was originally released, featured a somewhat original gimmick in that the game was controlled with a joystick and a large, disc-shaped, rotating thingy that rotated your character allowing you to shoot in 360 degrees.
The move-with-one-stick-shoot-with-the-other-thing had been used before, but not really so well in a scrolling game. Forgotten Worlds also used an interesting power-up system in that as you flew through the levels, you occasionally would run into a shop ran by a pleasant girl who would sell you heavy weaponry. This got you little satellite devices that not only incinerated your enemies, but block enemy shots too, adding a little bit a strategy to it.



The ability to buy different weapons with money you win in the game and basically create your own strategy made this is a damn addictive game in the arcades, even though you had to pump plenty of money into it to survive; it was pretty hard.

Of course, it also helped that the game made no sense and had no real story to speak of. You're fighting a generic bad guy and the bosses include a mummy, a mechanical Egyptian worm, an angry face made out of crystal, and two muscle dudes who like to jump around a lot.

INbetween levels, one of your heroes would declare some strange victory speech (in digitized sound) and move on.

Supposedly in the Japanese version there was a way to get the shopgirl naked. Not that I'd know. No, really....I wouldn't know.

When the game was ported to the Genesis, obviously the rotation was altered by basically assigning 2 buttons to rotating in different directions, and they gave you the option to auto-fire (where you gun just constantly blasts away, leaving your mind to think about more important things like aiming down the throat of that giant, evil, old man shooting things out of his mouth)
It didn't really matter, though, and it didn't hurt the game too much. The game still kicked ass, had the digitized voice, and despite removing one short level, packed all the arcadey goodness into a small, homemade package, sort of like your mom's apple pie. If it were an arcade game. Sort of.

Anyway...Forgotten Worlds is, in my opinion, one of the best shooters of the classic age of arcade games.
If you would like to play it, it is currently available on the Xbox, PS2, and PSP in the first volume of Capcom's Arcade Collection. (and that version is the arcade one with the deleted level put back in).