By the time Konami released Jackal on the NES, the company had already put out some heavy hitters for the system, which shows in the fit and finish in Jackal. Gradius, Life Force, Contra, TwinBee, Castlevania I & II, to name a few. To say that they were a juggernaut for the system would be an understatement.
To port the game to the NES, they kept the upward-only firing machine gun, and split the game up in to 6 stages, each with their own new boss. The final boss of the game was also tweaked, adding a second stage to the fight that’s not present in the arcade.
Along with the graphical downgrades that needed to be done for the less powerful NES, they added a bunch of new tile sets to the game, to allow each stage to stand out. This creates a really nice sense of progression through the game, in place of the mostly-sand graphics the entire way through the arcade version.
It will come as no surprise then, that this is one of my favourite games in the NES library.