Air Buster: Trouble Specialty Raid Unit a.k.a. Aero Blasters: Trouble Specialty Raid Unit is a 1990 horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up video game developed and published by Kaneko and licensed to Namco. The game was originally released in the arcades in 1990 and was subsequently released for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 (as Aero Blasters) and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis (as Air Buster in North America) in 1990 and 1991 respectively.In Air Buster, the player controls a fighter jet also designed for space travel and shoots enemies, collects power-ups, and defeats bosses to advance levels. As a console game, Air Buster had the distinction of being two player simultaneous, which was rare among side scrolling shooters on home consoles at the time; all games in the Thunder Force, Gradius, and R-Type series were only 1 player on the home consoles.

Aleste (アレスタ?) is a 1988 shoot 'em up video game developed by Compile for the Master System. It is a direct successor to Compile's earlier Zanac, featuring many of the themes and gameplay mechanics of that work.

Alien Soldier (エイリアンソルジャー?) is a side-scrolling run and gun video game developed by Treasure for the Sega Mega Drive. The game was released in Japan and Europe, but not physically in the US (one of the few to be released in this pattern), but it can be rather expensive due to its rarity in either region. The game was playable in America on the Sega Channel cable service and has been reissued for PlayStation 2 as part of the Sega Ages Treasure Box disc. The Sega Ages version, whose disc also includes Treasure's Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy, exceeds the Mega Drive's intrinsic sprite display limit, which eliminates slowdowns or missing graphics during busy scenes (e.g. boss fights with many explosions). Also, the player can select either the sprite-based pixelated graphics of the original game or a new mode that uses certain filters to produce a high-resolution look. The game was re-released again on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console download service in Japan on October 9, 2007, in Europe on November 2, 2007, and North America debut on November 5, 2007. The game is listed in Guinness World Records Gamers Edition 2010 under the category "Most boss battles in a run and gun game". The catchphrases seen on the title screen, "FOR MEGADRIVERS CUSTOM" and "VISUALSHOCK! SPEEDSHOCK! SOUNDSHOCK! NOW IS TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE!", describe the game's technical prowess for the Mega Drive hardware, at the core of which is the Motorola 68000 CPU.