Same! Same! Same!

Same Same Same (also known as Fire Shark) is a vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up game developed and published in 1989 by Toaplan. Toaplan Co. Ltd. is a Japanese game developer established in 1984. Most of the famous game franchises developed by this company were scrolling shooter games and some of them are Truxton, Knuckle Bash, Zero Wing, Hellfire and Out Zone. Toaplan developed games for big video game companies like Romstar, Taito, SNK, and Data East. After 10 years of operating, the company declared bankruptcy in 1994.

Same Same Same which literarily translates to Shark Shark Shark is a sequel of Flying Shark, another video game of the same genre released 2 years prior. The player controls a bi-plane armed with a weapon system that dislodges missiles in 3 directions. After a strange enemy fleet named Oconner settled on the Mediterranean Sea in 1991, the fleet has gradually increased in size and expanded its base. After two years, a world war was created due to the invasion of the Oconner Fleet and they must be annihilated before they spread more menace.

In this ten-stage action video game, your objective is to destroy every assaulting enemy and enemy base you encounter, until every one of them has been eliminated. Each stage has a different setting and difficulty level, you must survive all attacks to reach the tenth stage. Apart from the default 3-way missile shooter, your weapon system is upgraded when you pick up power-ups during the game. The more powerful your weapon system becomes, the more advantage you have over the enemy fleet. You score points each time you kill an assaulting aircraft, and when you gain high points, you gain up to 10 extra bombs which is extremely useful when fighting bosses in advanced stages.

You start each stage with 3 lives but you can gain more lives by accumulating huge points. While you fight the enemy fleet, you must avoid getting hit by any of the aircraft or the missiles they continually fire at you. If you get hit, you either start the game from the beginning or any of the checkpoints in the game. Once all the 10 stages are cleared and all bosses are defeated, you can play the game all over again at a much higher difficulty. The makes it more refreshing every time you play the game all over again.