Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine is a shoot 'em up developed and published in 1987 by Hewson Consultants for the ZX Spectrum, and was then ported to the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, NES, and Amiga. It was programmed by Raffaele Cecco. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Atari ST versions featured a main theme by Dave Rogers, while the Commodore C64 version (later released on the Wii's Virtual Console service) featured a completely different theme by Jeroen Tel.
You play a small green guy who needs to blow up eight towers, because their presence is somehow poisoning the water of planets which could potentially be ideal colonies. Unfortunately you need to get to the top of these towers to blow them up.
You make your way up to the top of the tower via walkways around the outside of the towers. You need to jump over, kick, and run from various enemies in your journey to the top. Most vertical movement is achieved by jumping onto moving ledges at the right moment.
The game was considered revolutionary in its time for its graphic technique. As the main character walked around the outside of the tower, the character was fixed in the middle of the screen while the tower itself rotated. This gave it a pseudo-3D effect.
Towers are linked together via a voyage through the sea in your trusty MK.7 submarine. This plays out as a side-scrolling collect-'em-up in which bonus points can be obtained.
The game is set on a spaceship viewed from a top-down perspective. The ship consists of numerous rooms and levels, each one populated by hostile robots or "droids". The player, in control of a special droid called the "Influence Device", must destroy all the other droids on the ship. Each droid (including the player) is represented as a circle around a three-digit number. The numbers roughly correspond to the droid's "power" or "level", in that higher-numbered droids are tougher to destroy.
The Influence Device is numbered "001". The primary way in which the Influence Device destroys other droids is by "linking" with them, effectively taking them over. When the player takes over another droid, the previously-controlled droid is destroyed.
Uridium (released on the NES as The Last Starfighter) is a science fiction side-scrolling shoot 'em up originally designed by Andrew Braybrook for the Commodore 64, and later ported to other 8-bit machines. It consists of fifteen levels, each named after a metal element, with the last level being called Uridium (a fictional metallic element, not to be confused with the real metallic element iridium). The manual quotes Robert Orchard, who invented the name as saying "I really thought it existed".