Nothing gets my motor running quite like an old-school scrolling shoot ’em up, and it seems like the genre has had something of a renaissance in the last decade or so. Scrolling shooters were a staple in arcades and home consoles during the ’80s and ’90s, and nowadays developers are taking the elements that made those games so fun back then and injecting them with modern flourishes to create new games that feel new and classic at the same time. Probably my favorite recent example of this is Steredenn ($3.99) from Pixelnest Studios, and if that game had a very close cousin you could say Fantastic Studio’s Black Paradox would be it. Black Paradox takes the framework of a classic shooter and stuffs it full of impressive retro-style visuals and nonstop ’80s references. I mean, you ship is basically the DeLorean from Back to the Future and everything has a very ’80s hard rock feel to it. Check out the trailer.

Black Paradox launched as an Early Access title on Steam back in July, and has received a pretty great response so far. More content and tweaking is planned (hence the early access) but players have also been wondering if the game would ever make it to iOS. Well the answer is… yes! Fantastic Studio is planning on bringing Black Paradox to iOS sometime in November. Similar to Steredenn, Black Paradox is a roguelike shooter and you’ll need to fight through 7 stages that feature randomly generated enemy patters and hazards each time you play. However the boss fights at the end of each stage are pre-determined, and there is actually a storyline to follow that ties everything together. You can actually read more about the wacky story as well as find more information about Black Paradox on its Gamejolt page, and there are desktop demo versions you can try too. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one and will let you know when a more specific release date is revealed.