Finest Hour

Finest Hour (ファイネストアワー, literally: Fainesuto Auwā), is a run and gun arcade game which was released by Namco in 1989 only in Japan; it runs on Namco System 2 hardware, and was described by the company as "one of their all time best", for its attract sequence. However, it was never ported to any home consoles or released in the United States, which means it may not have lived up to this big statement - and it is also the only NS2 game where the C140 drowns out the Yamaha YM-2151.

The player must take control of a Transformer-like battlemech, known as "Sygnus", who is equipped with a laser cannon, Vernier (misspelled by the game as "Verneir") jump-jets, auto-targeting, and an automatic cooling system; much like in Namco's own Mirai Ninja (which also runs upon their System 2 hardware), pushing that joystick twice in the same direction will make Sygnus switch from a march to a dash while he is moving and you cannot make him change the direction that he is facing in mid-air. However, unlike the aforementioned Mirai Ninja, he has no "life meter", just a temperature meter which increases when he is hit, and decreases when he is not hit - but if the timer should run out, his cooling device will break (indicated by the text "COOLING DEVICE BROKEN" at the bottom of the screen). And if he should overheat (which usually happens when there are too many enemies firing at him at once), your game will immediately be over (as six texts about impossible continuation appear on the screen, and he explodes).