After a succession of not overly enjoyable games – with the final one being Wriggler – it’s great to finally pick up a game that not only rings back from the past with some brilliant gaming memories, but within the opening few rounds still shows you that the gameplay has been retained after a quarter of a century. Bouncing in at No.#74 within the Your Sinclair Top 100 is Pang.
This coin-op conversion originally arrived on the arcades back in 1989 under the names of Pomping World and the more well-known title Buster Bros. The license was soon picked up by the massive software house Ocean Software and developed by Arc Software in 1990.
The idea for Pang is loosely linked to the classic early arcade game Asteroids, however in this case large balloons have begun to terrorise major cities around the world and it’s down to the Buster Brothers to visit these cities and burst the balloons invasion plan.
Your initial weapon is a straight shooting harpoon gun and as you pop the random bouncing balloons, they split into smaller balloons and again into smaller spheres of doom upon impaling, before finally vanishing on the final popping. With a number of handy power-ups dropping to help you dispose of these latex bringers of doom, Pang can get rather intense as you find yourself being boxed into a corner. It can take the use of some quick thinking smarts to remove the screen of the static bringing foes.
Pang as said at the top of this page has kept its gameplay throughout the years, and it is really rather brilliant going back to it after so long away.
Originally published June 15, 2016. Updated January 27, 2023.
