Lost Classics: In The Hunt (PS1, Arcade)

From the people who bought you R-type, prepare to go on the hunt in In The Hunt! I know, that was a horrible pun.

Not to be accused with the movie The Hunt for Red October (although they both center around subs), In The Hunt was a side scrolling shooter from Irem in the mid 90s. Taking control of a submarine, you (and a friend in co-op) take on a terrorist organization known as the Dark Anarchy Society, who has used a doomsday device to melt the polar ice caps, flooding the entire world. You take on all manner of enemies, from robotic submarines to mutated sea creatures. In the final stage of the game, you battled the other player, Double Dragon style (which leads me to believe that Billy and Jimmy Lee were piloting these subs). The home versions featured a remixed soundtrack along with four different difficulty levels. Many of the people behind this game would go on to make the Metal Slug games for SNK, and you can see that this game had a similar art-style. While In The Hunt didn’t stand out among other shooters of the day, it’s six stages of action are a blast to play through, and playing as a submarine is a nice change of pace for the genre.