J. J. Squawkers

1993 · Athena · Arcade

J. J. Squawkers doesn't have much of story, other than brief crawl text telling the villagers fell into spells of some sort. The short intro where two birds get attacked with the house exploding to pieces is apparently why they're going on rampage to beat up everything in their eyes, so fair enough. You play as these two angry birds named Ani Karasukun and Ototo Karasukun (altogether standing for "crow brothers" in Japanese, by the way). Along with basic ability to run and jump, they have standard projectiles attack to shoot out the enemies or destroy the objects. Your default weapon at the beginning is a handful of tomatoes. You can exchange them with better weapons by picking up the item dropped by specific enemies; available weapons include pumpkins, watermelon seeds, screws and springboards with red sneakers. Each weapon differs from others about its usefulness; for instance, screws are thrown in straight direction until they meet obstacles or the end of screen, making it easy to deal with enemies far away. On the other hand, watermelon seeds can't reach such a long distance, but they're thrown in several shots simultaneously spread in various angles, effective against the multiple enemies approaching in wide range.