Blue Lightning

When you want a single game to prove what your new hardware can do, you don't show charts — you drop the player into a fighter cockpit. Blue Lightning was exactly that kind of calling card for the Atari Lynx: a fast, loud and visually confident rail shooter meant to convince at launch that a pocket console could work miracles.

The Top Gun inspiration is impossible to miss. You fly a fighter jet deep into the screen, shooting down waves of enemy aircraft, dodging mountains and guiding missiles onto ground targets. It's a classic rail shooter — your route is fixed, your task is to survive, aim and time evasive maneuvers — but the pace and spectacle made it a small sensation in 1989.

The star here is the hardware scaling the Lynx boasted. Objects grow realistically as you approach them, so enemies and terrain rise up out of the depth of the screen and create a pseudo-3D sense of speed that other handhelds of the era couldn't imitate. The studio Epyx, author of the console and its first games, meant this to literally take shoppers' breath away in every store.

As gameplay, Blue Lightning is more of a flashy ride than a deep challenge — anyone who knows the rail shooter genre knows what to expect: learn the route, avoid the crash, shoot down whatever flies at you. But precisely as a technology demo and launch draw it did its job to perfection and became one of the titles most often associated with the Lynx.

Today it's mainly a historically interesting piece — the moment a portable console first showed off an effect that belonged more in the arcade than in your palm.

Why play: A flashy rail shooter that shows off the power of Lynx scaling and delivers brisk, cinematic Top Gun-style action.