While making some nostalgia trip thanks to MAME, i noticed mentions of Guwange :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaS6OHpznI0Watching that video triggered some lost memory in my brain.
From some of my adventurous youth memory, i played sometime a coin op but i have been unable to find the name.
I remember the coin op was located next to Operation Wolf in the pub we were playing it with friends of that time, so i imagine it is certainly +/- as old (Operation Wolf was from 1987).
The main problem is that i never actually knew the name (most likely it was untranslated from japanese characters in the title screen), so i have been unable to at least recognize it on some name listings from coin ops of that era since all that time
The concept was rather similar to one of a shoot'em up, it was set in some medieval/fantastic japanese environment like the Guwange of the youtube video, as you basically never ceased to fire to destroy the various enemies coming to you.
But unlike Guwange it was not following an automatic scrolling you incarnated some kind of ninja in this kind of semi-"top view" like in the Guwange game but from which the screen could scroll in every directions.
I remember you could sometime pick up a scroll, that allowed your character to use some special attack for a certain amount of time some could fire on every direction, some not.
One of those special attack was throwing a water wave (that could fire only from bottom to top), another was some canons shooting canon shells.
The last remnants of my memory cells remember a level that looked like some kind of medieval themed japanese town, another level was in a cavern and at the end of this cavern there was some kind of big frog statue (that shooted something) in the end of that stage.
While there were some hard difficulty in some places, it was not a game of the era of the
manic shooters Does this remind something to anyone ?
EDIT : thanks to an old coin op specialist, i found the name of that old game : Ninja Emaki.