Disney's TaleSpin

The Good
TaleSpin is a shooter made by Capcom based on Disney's animated spin-off of The Jungle Book. By the late 80's Capcom had amassed a vast experience with the shooter genre: 1942 (1984), Exed Exes (1985), Battle for Midway (1987), Area 88 (1989) and many, many others. So it was only logical for them to make a shooter with the IP from a Disney Saturday morning cartoon about planes and aviators.
Still it's far from generic and has interesting mechanics. You control a plane that shoots horizontally: B shoots, and A inverts your plane, a loop-the-loop, to sometimes scroll in the opposite direction; but when you ascend or descend your plane, you do it at an angle so you are able to shoot in diagonals (it's kind of weird at first) The game makes a good use of this because some enemies and bosses required that you shoot at them in angles. So this combination of different types of shooting with the constant need of changing the scrolling direction makes for a very interesting shooter.

It has a super fast scrolling, very rare to see this sort of speeds with minimum lag on the NES; it really adds to the challenge. The Gameboy down-port - which is of course a downgraded version of the original - also has an impressive fast scrolling for the system. It has 8 thematic levels; and though some of them are just ridiculous - like flying your plane inside a Haunted Mansion - it's all done in good fun. The graphics are beautiful, cute and colorful and the music serves its purpose.

The Bad
I've found it to be quite a difficult game, specially on the early levels. Your plane is too big and slow, it controls weird; the enemies pop out of nowhere, their bullets and the scrolling are at times way too fast, and you can only shoot one bullet at a time. But by collecting the money bags, and cargo boxes you get to buy upgrades for your plane: that means more speed, more bullets, an extra heart and lives. Also the game has some invisible items that you can make suddenly appear by shooting at empty space, but the problem is that when you want to kill an enemy frequently these items obstruct your bullets causing unfair hits from the still alive enemy. I don't know who actually made TaleSpin (has no credits) but I feel somehow Tokuro Fujiwara was involved, on behalf of the difficult challenge and certain enemies and aspects that remind me of the Makaimura series (but then again, this whole Capcom era had this "challenging games" philosophy)

The Bottom Line
TaleSpin may not be Capcom's best shooter, but its unique mechanics, challenging gameplay, and charming Disney theme make it a hidden gem worth exploring for fans of classic Capcom.