Phelios (フェリオス, Feriosu) is a 1988 vertical scrolling shooter released for the arcades in Japan by Namco. It runs on Namco System 2 hardware. A home version for the Mega Drive/Genesis was released in 1990. The game features a plot loosely based on Greek mythology. The player takes control of the knight Apollo, the god of the sun, who sets off on the legendary winged horse Pegasus, to rescue his lover, Artemis, the goddess of the moon, from the Titan, Typhon (the one that Zeus dropped a mountain on). The game takes names and little else from Greek mythology in which Apollo, god of the sun, was actually Artemis's brother. The game shows players an Artemis that acts as an stereotypical princess (but in Greek mythology, she was the goddess of the hunt, and took pride in never being with any man). The arcade version of this game was never released in the United States, due to Artemis's "bondage/torture" scenes, which were shown between each stage, and were similar to those from the new version of Namco's own Rolling Thunder; while no nudity is shown, the scenes were still somewhat "strong" to be shown in an arcade game during the early 16-bit era. This game's score display also gives the illusion of allowing values which do not end in "0", like Hopping Mappy, Bakutotsu Kijūtei, and Metal Hawk did before it - however, the smallest point value that the game can award to a player for killing an enemy is 10.

Prince of Persia is a 1989 fantasy cinematic platformer originally developed and published by Brøderbund and designed by Jordan Mechner for the Apple II. In the game, players control an unnamed protagonist who must venture through a series of dungeons to defeat the Grand Vizier Jaffar and save an imprisoned princess.Much like Karateka, Mechner's first game, Prince of Persia used rotoscoping for its fluid and realistic animation. For this process, Mechner used as reference for the characters' movements videos of his brother doing acrobatic stunts in white clothes and swashbuckler films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood.The game was critically acclaimed and, while not an immediate commercial success, sold many copies as it was ported to a wide range of platforms after the original Apple II release. It is believed to have been the first cinematic platformer and inspired many following games in this subgenre, such as Another World.[4] Its success led to the release of two sequels, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame and Prince of Persia 3D, and two reboots of the series, first in 2003 with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which lead to two sequels of its own, and then again in 2008 with the identically-titled Prince of Persia.

Progear (プロギアの嵐, Purogia no Arashi, lit. Storm of Progear) is an arcade video game developed by CAVE and published by Capcom on the CPS-2 arcade system board in 2001. This was Cave's only horizontal scrolling shooter until Deathsmiles in 2007. The game features a steampunk-like style and art design. This game is the second of two CAVE shoot 'em ups to be released in America with the third CAVE NTSC-U/C release being Princess Debut, and in limited print; and as a result, the US version is somewhat rare.