Star Ship Hector is one of those NES shooters that starts with a wild premise and just rolls with it. Earth’s basically toast after World War IV, but lucky for you, your spaceship’s got a time machine—so you jump back to find the planet overrun by these freaky biomechanical monsters. No big deal, right?

You’ve got two weapons: a double laser for anything airborne and bombs for stuff on the ground. No ammo limits, which is nice, but don’t get too comfortable—enemies come at you from all angles, and some of those ground turrets are sneaky. The first few levels ease you in, but then the screen starts filling up with weird alien ships that look like they’re made of scrap metal and nightmares.

It’s got that classic NES challenge where you’ll die a lot at first, but once you memorize enemy patterns, you start feeling like a time-traveling badass. Just don’t expect the story to make much sense beyond “shoot the weird things.”