Steel Gunner 2

Steel Gunner
Arcade flyer
Developer(s)	Namco
Publisher(s)	Namco
Designer(s)	G. Iwasaki
Composer(s)	Y. Takayanagi
Platform(s)	Arcade
Release	JP: December 1991
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	2 players can play simultaneously
Arcade system	Namco System 2

Steel Gunner 2 (スティールガンナー２, Sutīru Gannā Tsū) is an arcade game that was released by Namco in 1991; it runs on Namco System 2 hardware, and as the name suggests, it is the sequel to Steel Gunner, which had been released in the previous year. It was also sold as a conversion kit for Taito Corporation's Operation Thunderbolt (which was released in 1988 as a sequel to Operation Wolf, which also used a Yamaha YM2151 FM sound chip, for its effects as well as its music, but it used an OKI MSM-5205 PCM sound chip for speech synthesis, as opposed to a C140).

Gameplay

Again, the players must take control of the Neo Arc (which, again, is a pun on Newark, New Jersey) policemen, Garcia and Cliff, but this time they are on a mission to destroy the evil army of Vanguard who are attacking the city (and also named after the player's tank from Blazer); as with the original Steel Gunner, it creates the illusion of not having a scoring system (like The Return of Ishtar and Yokai Dochuki), but, unlike its predecessor, it does not have the text "1UP", "HI-SCORE" and "2UP" on its title screen, which further enforces the illusion. Some of the enemies from the original game make comebacks, but have undergone a makeover since the first time Neo Arc saw them, in 1990 - and several new enemies have also been introduced as well. Again, the players can shoot anything on the screen, including background objects, and even innocent bystanders (of which there are only eight types now as opposed to ten); but again, if they should do the latter it will cause them to lose energy as if they got hit by an enemy.