Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (1990) is Namco's vertical shooter with a great hook: you don't fly a ship, you are a dragon. You breathe fire at things in the air and drop bombs on things on the ground.

That two-layer targeting is the whole design, and it's different from every other shooter on the console. The playfield has enemies at your altitude and enemies on the terrain below, and they need different inputs. Ground targets ignore your fire breath entirely, so a screen full of gun emplacements and flying monsters means you're alternating attack types under pressure rather than holding one button.

The power-ups are the other reason to play it. Collect the right items and you grow a second head, then a third, each one adding its own stream of fire. A three-headed dragon covers most of the screen. Other pickups widen the breath, add homing, or upgrade the bombs, and the damage you take shrinks you back down, so there's a visible, readable relationship between how well you're doing and how big you are.

It's a sequel rather than a port. The 1987 arcade Dragon Spirit came first, and this NES game continues the story with the son of the original's hero, which is why the subtitle is there. Namco also eased the entry: the NES version opens with a simpler first stage built for the home audience and rebalances the early going, then stops being polite around stage four.

The atmosphere is heavier than the premise suggests, with a soundtrack that treats a game about a flying lizard as a fantasy epic, and bosses that are mostly enormous decaying monsters.

A stylish, off-the-beaten-path shooter in a library full of spaceships. Being the dragon never gets old.