Deathbringer

The Unique Selling Point of Deathbringer is the amazing parallax scrolling – each of the 36 lines of the background scrolls individually, making for the closest thing to a real-life effect yet seen. It's very impressive indeed, but it would seem it didn't leave much memory space for gameplay, because Deathbringer is so thin in that department it makes Barbarian II looks like, I don't know, Sim Earth.

In most of these horizontally-scrolling beat-'em-ups, gameplay is a simple matter of walking for a bit, coming up against a bad guy, fighting to the death with him, walking on a bit more etc. Deathbringer boldly does away with the 'fighting' bit, allowing you to quite happily walk right through any of the enemies who block your way, meaning that you only have to kill the occasional one in order to keep your sword (which lusts for blood and will kill you if it isn't 'fed' regularly) happy. Now and again there are big end-of-level-type baddies to kill or simplistic dodging sequences, but otherwise that's yer lot.