Varth: Operation Thunderstorm

Varth's gameplay draws very heavily from 1942 and other games in Capcom's 194X series. The goal is to destroy enemy units while avoiding being hit, and reach the end of the level, occasionally ending with a boss fight. There are 30 levels in the game. One hit from an enemy will cause the player to lose a plane.

The biggest difference between Varth and most other games in the genre of its time is the inclusion of items called "Pods". When a player picks up a pod item, a pair of pods will follow the player and carry weaponry of their own to supplement their artillery. Additionally, pods can completely block most (but not all) forms of attacks from enemies, rendering the player almost invulnerable to attack from any direction in which the pods are situated. Players can choose from two formations for their pods - fixed or smart.

This game follows the story of a disaster that befalls a human colony on a planet of the same name. The entire colony is run by a 7th generation supercomputer which controls the operations of all machinery on the planet, but for the residents of Varth, Delta-7 has been possessed by the entity "DUO" (Dimension Unbody Offender), thought of as an evil spirit but actually a temporal-spatial consciousness which spontaneously arose within the supercomputer. DUO has come to the conclusion that human existence is inimical to the planet, and has therefore turned the planet's defenses against its own populace. Eighty percent of the planet is laid waste by the event, and this is only the beginning of DUO's cleansing scheme.

The colonists' reliance on the supercomputer has caused them to lose the ability to take care of themselves, and thus have no means of fighting back. The only hope for the colony lies in the pilots of two planes equipped with 4th generation computers which DUO cannot control—they are controlled not by machinery, but by humans.

In Japan, Game Machine listed Varth: Operation Thunderstorm on their September 1, 1992 issue as being the seventeenth most-successful table arcade unit at the time. RePlay also reported the game to be the third most-popular arcade game at the time. Play Meter listed the title to be the forty-ninth most-popular arcade game at the time as well. In the October 1992 issue of Japanese publication Micom BASIC Magazine, it was ranked on the number eight spot in popularity.