I’m not sure how any red-blooded male could turn down this kind of packaging. I bought Trouble Shooter just a few weeks after it came out. The fact that I was an avid Sega player at the time meant nothing. I simply had to see how two bimbos with guns were going to save the day. I don’t believe that had ever been done before (neither by video game bimbos or real life ones).

Much to my surprise, this game isn’t too bad. It’s a shooter released in 1991, the peak of the Genesis’ horizontal shooter faze. Of course, every game needed a gimmick at that time, and though the gimmick MAY seem to have been the obvious lesbian connotations, it also happens to feature two characters onscreen at once. Oddly enough, it’s a one-player game. You control one of the gals, and the other just sort of follow along, much like the "option" weapons in games like R-Type or Phelios.

The sound and graphics won’t WOW you, but they’re adequate, and the game manages to move along pretty smoothly. It isn’t one of those flicker-fests that we saw with earlier Genesis shooters. Another high point is the fact that the game goes beyond the call of duty in its scoring system, which is quite intelligent: you get bonus points for the amount of life and firepower left over at the end of a round.

The power-up system sucks (you pick a special weapon between stages, otherwise its your plain old pulse rifles), and the game is way too short at five stages, but I’m still strangely drawn to it. There are enough shooter-style games in the Genesis to stun the Empire itself, but very few horizontal shooters are as fast or addicting as Trouble Shooter.

Still, it isn’t going to set any records. It will simply go down as the game featuring two bimbos who save the day… if you win. Otherwise it’s just the game featuring two bimbos who go down. Wait, that didn’t come out right.