If you haven’t seen our glorious new issue yet, feast your eyes on Oliver Frey’s excellent cover art! Featuring all manner of ships, enemies and weapons from the history of shoot-’em-ups, it leads in to our bluffer’s guide to one of gaming’s oldest genres.

So what else is in the issue? Well, we have in-depth looks at the making of Atari’s Black Widow and Westwood’s PC version of Blade Runner, as well as complete histories of the Rebelstar and Twisted Metal series. Elsewhere, we open the archives on French publisher Loriciels and sit down with Andrew Hewson, and take a look at the Texas Instruments TI-99. The issue also contains our ultimate guide to Bionic Commando and a look at your favourite multiplayer games of all time. If that’s not enough, we’ve also crammed Wheelie, Spy Vs Spy, Pro Wrestling and Side Pocket into the issue.

The issue is available from newsagents now, and as always you can order it directly from us via imagineshop.co.uk or get a digital copy at greatdigitalmags.com.