I don’t remember how many issues in a row, but there were several of my EGMs that told me, essentially, that
- “Axelay is awesome.”
- “Axelay is awesome!”
- “Axelay is AWESOME!”
So I eventually decided to give the game a look.
It turns out that Axelay is a shoot-em-up. So you have to take your obscenely expensive and almost comically fragile ship up against wave after wave of enemies who are better armed, better armored, and more maneuverable than you, and try to shoot most of them down.
This isn’t really a problem for me, though, I’m an old hand at shooting games. I mean, yeah, I used the cheat to get 30 ships in Life Force, but I didn’t really need all of them, and the EGM review listed this game as ‘hard’ difficulty, but that can’t be too much harder than anything else I’d played, so I gave it a shot.
It turns out that I wasn’t as good at shooting games as I thought was.
I don’t really know what happened, but some friends of mine and I pooled our money together and rented it for a couple of days. We played it a bit, but immediately crashed into the brick wall that’s the learning curve of this game. Out of the three of us, none of us made it to stage 2.
I guess I must have thought that I had a bad night or that I had a broken controller or some other kind of malady because I rented it again a few weeks later, and you know what?
I failed again.
I actually had more success with the silly little toy that shipped with the game than with the game itself. The little junket presented you with a repeating image of some kind of spaceship and you could use the power of the Super NES to rotate it around and zoom the picture in and out.
It was about that time I decided that shmups just weren’t going to be my thing, I didn’t have the chops for them. What do I have the chops for? I’m still trying to figure that one out.