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You may not ever get a chance to play SKYCURSER as it’s currently limited to JAMMA-compatible arcade cabinets. But you can, at least, appreciate what it’s all about from a distance.
It’s a horizontal 2D shmup about Guy Griffin, the last man on Earth, fighting against a tyrannical space-based plague that has ravaged the planet. But the most important aspect of SKYCURSER is its “meat-on-metal” aesthetic.
You face large detached eyeballs, skulls with tentacles, and giant ships overtaken by a fleshy splurge of limbs and sinew. It’s gross but it looks awesome. You have to survive waves of these enemies by bursting them open, exposing their guts, which consist of both machine and animal parts.
SKYCURSER’s creators say that it’s inspired by “Id Software’s Doom, Nazca’s Metal Slug, Namco’s Splatterhouse, James Cameron’s The Terminator and Michael Jackson’s Thriller.” So it hearkens to a time – around the late 80s and early 90s – when media was fascinated with the concept of the cyborg; a creature of flesh and machine.
For anyone who grew up playing those arcade games, SKYCURSER should be a nostalgic flashback to their childhood, when video games seemed dangerous and disgusting. Find out more about SKYCURSER and see more images on its website.
