As an 80's child, I barely missed the heyday of the video arcade. I fondly remember a couple of glorious birthday parties at a local Atari-branded mall spot, burning bags of tokens on Turtles in Time, Captain Commando, and Knights of the Round.* But by the time I was tall enough to put my own quarter in a slot, the classics like Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig-Dug and so forth were already long out of date.
So in a way, Switch 'N' Shoot is like setting my birthdate back a decade and getting a taste of those games when they were a fresh new design: simple controls, high skill ceiling, and score-chasing addictiveness. Imagine walking up to a cabinet with these bold colors and a single, chunky, seductive button in the middle of its scratch-resistant console.
Switch 'N' Shoot has only one button to its control scheme, but that's enough to fuel a lot of fun. Your ship is always moving in one or the other direction, and pressing the button both changes your direction and spits a bullet upward. Mastering the timing of this single, multi-purpose action to clear away enemies and catch power-ups sounds trivial, but the progression of levels (an infinite loop, in true old-school arcade style) tunes the difficulty in a perfect curve that will keep you nudging your high score higher session after session.
S'n'S also boasts endearing flourishes like a procedurally generated pilot name for every new run, and a strange bearded announcer figure who praises your accomplishments and mourns your defeats, in light humorous fashion. For $4 on Itch, this gem will erase boredom in any five or ten or thirty minutes you have at hand!
* Why are the beat-'em-ups the ones I most clearly and longingly recall? Probably because you could get all the way to the end of one by feeding quarters and mashing buttons--no skill required!
