Battle Lane! Vol. 5 © 1986 Taito Corp.
A vertically scrolling shoot'em up where you ride a motorcycle.
Main CPU : (2x) M6809 (@ 1.25 Mhz)
Sound Chips : Yamaha YM3526 (@ 3 Mhz)
Players : 2
Control : 8-way joystick
Buttons : 2
Released in January 1986.
The actual licensing of the game went from Taito to Tecmo who further licensed the title to Romstar. This was a common distribution technique for games which were perceived as being 'second tier' or less when compared to 'hit' games. The game is still great fun and is, unfortunately, underappreciated.
While popular history seems to think that Data East designed the game (because the pinout matches Data East pinouts) the internals of the two 6809 processors appear to be a little more complicated than that. The design internally is rather Machivellian. It seems almost like it was created by a hardware designer who did not like software programmers!
Elout de Kok of the Netherlands holds the official record for this game with 1,343,700 points on May 2, 1986.
Programmer : Hitoshi Satoh, Naritaka Nishimura
Graphic Designer : Takashi Yoneda, Kuniko Mukai, Kohji Ogata
Sound & Compose : Computer Gang Stars Corp., Hoppy Sawa, Boku Ohkubo, Hige Yamazaki
Assistant : Hiroshi Satoh, Hiroyuki Sekimoto, Atsushi Tanimoto
Game's manual.
Game's picture.
Game's ROMs.
Game's screenshots.
See goodies section.