Top Gunner

Top Gunner—or Jackal as it's probably better known—is an overhead game set in a warzone. Rescue the good guy hostages in your jeep while annihilating the enemy forces (also in your jeep).

Developer Credits#

Stored at 0x0BE60 in the master CPU:

KONANI 1986 8 04
KOJI HIROSHITA
MASATO OHSAWA
HIROMICHI OKASAKI
HIDEYUKI TSUJIMOTO
SHINJI TASAKA
KENGO NAKAMURA
MASAMI TABATA
KIYOKO MIZUTANI
YOUSUKE UNO
MITSUHIRA IDAKA

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Regional Differences#

While the setting of Jackal is intentionally vague, Top Gunner, thanks to a set of graphical changes, is definitely meant to take place in Vietnam.

Title Screen#

Japan	US	World

Graphical Changes#

The flag on the player's jeep is a nondescript orange and blue flag in every other version but Top Gunner, where it's a star-spangled banner.

Jackal	Top Gunner

Red flags (presumably the North Vietnam flag) were added to the enemy gates and campsites in Top Gunner.

Jackal
Top Gunner

Strangely, in every version of the game, the final area and the game's progress map have the same red flags.

Five-pointed red stars were added to most of the enemy vehicles in Top Gunner, to really reinforce the whole North Vietnam thing. The only exception to this is the Molotov Cocktail-throwing van.

Jackal
Top Gunner

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Controls#

There are four versions of the game (excluding bootlegs) currently supported by MAME. One ROMset, known as jackalr, has support for rotary joysticks, which allows the player to adjust the direction their jeep's machine gun is aimed at. This was likely a location test version, as its main program ROMs are labelled "Q" on the PCB and very little information seems to exist about this version online. Because the other versions only support standard 8-way joysticks, the way the player's machine gun works differs between them. The Japanese version, or Version T, has the gun shooting towards the direction the player's jeep is facing, whereas the US and World versions, Version U and V respectively, has the machine gun fixed to always shoot northwards (which was the control scheme used for the NES port).