Double Dragon II: The Revenge

You go through all the trouble of rescuing Marian in Double Dragon only to have the evil Shadow Clan come back around and kill her off for some reason. Needless to say, the Double Dragons are a little bit cheesed off. So they decide to get some revenge on the Shadows by wandering headlong into their ranks and slaughtering them all using their martial artistry.

Somehow the game manages to have a slightly more violent premise than its predecessor.

But it’s also a whole lot like the first game. You walk slowly in the direction that the disembodied hands tell you to go bludgeoning thugs with whatever you can find, though your fists and feets work pretty well if you can’t find any goodies. What’s kind of different, though, is that you don’t have to bother with that ridiculous experience point system in the first game to earn your best moves. You can do all of them from the outset… assuming you can figure out which combinations of buttons to pull them off.

Like the first game, this one’s got four stages, and, also like the first game, the game isn’t too tough until you get to the end of the game, where it ramps up in difficulty so far that you’ll get lightheaded from the sudden dip in oxygen.

It’s about that point that you’re going to be really glad that the NES controllers were made out of some kind of space-age plastic that’s nigh-indestructible… unless you have those new-style ‘dog bone’ controllers that just kind of feel flimsier. Then you’ll have to start exercising some self-control. Though they do feel flimsy enough that your controller might disintegrate on impact with your TV, but I wouldn’t recommend trying it.

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