We can chalk up this game to another one that I didn’t really have any idea what was going on. Flying Dragon has two kinds of playmodes: a sidescrolling platform thing, and a tournament martial arts fighter.
See, your guy has to make his way to a series of martial arts tournaments, but the way is crammed full of wave after wave of very weak enemies. Occasionally a slightly stronger enemy, like a schoolgirl, will make an appearance. You have to beat all of these enemies, grab the trinkets they drop, and proceed to the locked door to continue.
Once you actually get to the tournament, the game changes completely. A series of targets will appear on you and your enemies. You have to either hit or defend these targets depending on if they appear on you or your opponent. Adding a wrinkle to this whole mishmash of a game is that some of the competitors in the tournaments are ‘tusk soldiers’ in disguise. If you can undisguise them by hitting them in their weak spot, they turn into these weird guys with tusks for a face. To completely finish this game you have to find the tusk-guys, defeat them all, and get the scrolls they hold to make you stronger. And finish the game proper.
Typically I like a good inexplicable game, and this one tries real hard to be inexplicable. Being attacked en route to a martial arts tournament by a schoolgirl? Fighting soldiers with tusks for faces? Pummeling statues to get powerups? Yeah, that works. I don’t know how, but it works.
I played a lot of Demon Sword growing up, but I don’t think I ever really knew what was going on. I understand that this game is a sequel to Legend of Kage, but I never played it. So there’s a good chance that I’m missing out on some of the intricacies of the story. What I do know is that you start out with a little stub of a sword and have to find and kill demons to get the parts of it back. You’re constantly being attacked on all sides by swarms of disposable minions, but it’s cool. You can jump about twenty times your own height to get out of the way.
I was going to show you a video of this game in action, but couldn’t find one that wasn’t terrible in one way or another. You’ll have to settle for a screenshot instead.
Playing it again now makes me realize how mediocre this game really was. It fits squarely into the category of ‘games I played a lot because I didn’t have money to buy anything else’.
Thanks to my years of playing video games I now know that if aliens ever invade Earth that I need to find two of the best, most highly trained, musclebound men that I can find. I then need to give them access to all sorts of heavy weaponry, and then drop them as far from the enemy base as possible, shirtless and bandanna-ed.
You’re going to think this plan of action is going to be foolhardy. But trust me, I’ve seen it in action, and it cannot fail.
If the knowledge that I’ve gleaned from my years of practicing the Digital Arts can help save the planet from rampaging militaristic aliens or giant mutated crabs then it will all be worth it.
Bionic Commando is the sequel to Commando, a game I never played. Although, I don’t really think that matters much. All that connects this to the first game is that your character has to rescue the hero of that game, Super Joe.
What makes this game really weird is that the hero can’t jump. He makes up for this with a grapple attached to his arm that lets him grab onto things, swing around, climb on things he wouldn’t be able to normally, pretty much all the things you would thing a guy with a grapple attached to his arm would be able to do.
In each stage you have to find a wiretapping station and the boss. Compounding your mission is the fact that the levels are very large and very hard to maneuver in. Even better is that you will eventually find multiple radios and multiple items. You have the chance to take one radio and one item into the stage. Only one radio will work on a particular stage, the other ones will only get you garbage. It’s not imperative that you take the correct radio in, the information that you get is nice, maybe how to defeat the stage boss or something. What is slightly more important is the item you take with you. If you’re going into a cave, you better take your lantern, otherwise you’re fighting in the dark.
I found out many years after I’d moved on from this game that the story was pretty heavily altered to make this square peg of a game fit into the round hole of Nintendo’s censorship policy at the time. I don’t know that having the original story in place would have enhanced the game at all, but it does explain why the last boss bears a striking resemblance to Adolph Hitler, who you have to hit full in the face with a bazooka. It’s uncharacteristically brutal for the heyday of the NES, but it’s at the very end of a pretty tough game, so there’s not a lot of people that are going to get to see it, unless they cheat. Or know where to search on the Internet.
I’ve never actually played paintball, but if I ever did, I have to believe it would be a whole lot different than Gotcha! for the NES. To its credit, it is the only NES game that I’ve ever played that requires you to use the controller and the light gun at the same time, but I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.
Gotcha! puts you on one side of a paintball, ‘capture the flag’ match. You have to navigate to the other team’s base, get their flag, and make back to your own base without getting shot to win. You, of course, use the control pad to move left and right and the gun to shoot the enemy team. Yep, you read that right, you can only kind of glide left and right, no forward or backward for you!
Here’s what’s going to happen when you play this game: You’re going to play it for a round or two, you’re going to realize that there are dozens of ways you can better spend your time, then you’re going to play something else.
You play a game like Shadowgate and you might think: “That was fun, but I’d like to play more games like this. A game where I don’t know what’s going on, but have to unravel a mystery.” Well, you’d be in luck because there is such a game. Deja Vu.
The game is presented through the eyes of a detective who wakes up in a bathroom stall, drugged and with amnesia. Turns out that he’s been framed for murder, and he has to figure out who he is and who really committed the murder all before the police put him away for life.
You essentially go around the city, collecting evidence, using drugs to facilitate confessions, and generally detective-ing around, gathering the clues, and destroying the planted evidence. It’s pretty fun if you’ve ever wanted to put yourself in the shoes of a hardboiled detective. The only problem? You can’t destroy the good evidence, only the bad. See, to win the game you have to collect all the evidence and dispose of the bits that incriminate you in the sewer. If you try throwing something away that you’re not supposed to, the game won’t let you. So, once you throw away everything that the game will let you, you go to the police station and you win!
It’s a bit ham-fisted for a solution, but rather fool-proof, I suppose.
It’s a classic tale, really. Knight in shining armor and his betrothed are about to get married when she (and everyone else around) is killed by the hordes of demons that invade. So the gallant knight rushes off to thwart the evil.
Arthur, the knight, must run toward the right (and sometimes the up and the left) and massacre everything in his path using anything he can find. Treasure chests sprout up from the ground all over the place. Though they’re just as likely to contain some form of Demon Death(tm) as they are to contain a powerup.
And you’ll need those powerups. This game sends enemies swarming you from every direction, and Arthur just isn’t that maneuverable. He can move left and right, jump a bit, and fire left, right, or up, and that’s it. It’s pretty annoying, too, because if Arthur gets hit by anything, no matter how insignificant, his armor comes flying off. If he takes another hit before finding some replacement armor (which is pretty scarce), he’s reduced to a pile of bones. Add to the mix enemies that are placed exactly where you need to jump, wind that blows you around, and enemies besieging you from all sides and you have a game in which the difficulty borderlines on psychotic. This game has a rep, and it’s deserved.
It’s certainly possible to finish this game, but you’re going to spend way too much time trying to do it. The best part? After you spend hours and hours getting to the end, you have to finish the game a second time to get the ‘real ending’.
You shouldn’t play this game unless you like a stiff challenge. You’re not going to finish it without a ludicrous amount of effort that would be better spent elsewhere.
I have no doubt that the astronauts that pilot the space shuttles are highly trained, and exceptionally competent. Space flights are exercises in precision, and tiniest mistake could result in disaster if not properly diffused. While I’ve never actually participated in an actual space mission, I have sent a few virtual pilots into space, and if real spaceflight is as boring as this game, I feel very sorry for the technicians.
Just like real astronauts, you have to ride the elevator and flip various switches outside of the ship, then go get your crew and load the ship in the time limit. This is as exciting as it gets, it’s all downhill from here.
Once the ship is launched you have a few tasks to do: pitch so many degrees, release the ballast, etc. You do this in one of two ways, either stop a line advancing across a meter in the ’safe zone’, or mimic one arrow with your arrow. It’s kind of tough to explain, so I’ll let this excruciatingly boring video illustrate.
I understand that there are other control methods as you progress in the game, but I never got much past the first mission. A game about launching a space shuttle should not be boring, tedious, or annoying, and yet this game manages to be simultaneously all three. An impressive feat. Not impressive in the good way, though.
I’ve followed professional wrestling in one form or another for most of my life. It’s a weakness, I guess. But I’m willing to suspend a great deal of disbelief when watching the shows or playing the games based on the shows. Unfortunately, with WWF Wrestlemania, I’m not able to suspend nearly enough.
I won’t bore you with the nit-picky details, but I will say that this game is absolutely terrible.
Your characters only look vaguely like the people they’re based on, which is understandable given the limitations of the hardware. But the rest of the game? Inconceivable! Your characters can move in the four cardinal directions, but not on the diagonal. There are allegedly special moves, but I could barely figure out how to do more than just punch or kick. There’s no crowd of spectators, which is half of the spectacle of wrestling. There’s no kind of single player mode outside of a tournament. Inexplicably, a health restorative will slide along the top of the screen to collect (sunglasses for the Macho Man, what looks like a port roast for Andre the Giant, and so on).
This game is just… so… bizarre and bad that it’s almost worth playing once so you can marvel at its sucking power. Then you’ll never want to play it again.
Being a Belmont is hard. You live only to kill Dracula. This wouldn’t be quite so bad, except Dracula has a tendency to not actually stay dead. Simon Belmont had it especially rough, he killed Dracula in the original Castlevania, but due to being cursed, had to locate and destroy Dracula’s body parts.
How Dracula’s body parts got scattered around the countryside, each in a different castle, I can’t say. But you have to find them. The body parts, and the castle. Castlevania 2 is not the linear game that its predecessor was. You get free reign to go wherever you want from the get-go, exploring the countryside, looking for mansions and clues, chatting up each town’s locals, and battling monsters. When you start playing this game, a few problems become immediately apparent.
Just like the previous game, your sub-weapons are powered by hearts. Each time you use one, a certain number of hearts is consumed. But, these hearts are also the currency for the game, so you must choose between killing enemies at a distance, since you’re initially relatively weak, and and getting uncomfortably close and bludgeoning them with what amounts to a slightly al dente wet noodle in order to conserve your hearts and buy better weapons.
The mansions, without some sort of guidance, are nearly impossible to find. The townsfolk will give you some clues, grammatically bankrupt and unfathomably mistranslated clues, but clues nonetheless. Clues that will tell you that if you possess (sorry, ‘prossess’) a certain crystal and kneel at the edge of a certain body of water that you will suddenly make stairs appear in the water, allowing you to not drown when you jump in. Or a clue that will tell you that if you want to get to a certain mansion you have to jump on the riverman’s boat and cross it, but stay on the boat so that you can cross it again, and then back again to get to the correct shore.
It is fortunate, though, that most of Dracula’s body parts that you will eventually find turn out to be useful. You can use his rib as a shield, and his fingernail to break certain bricks with your whip. This gives you some incentive to actually go into and attempt to complete the mansions, which is much more difficult than it sounds. The mansions are thick with enemies, enemies that reappear if their patrol area scrolls off the screen, invisible platforms, and blocks that look solid, but actually aren’t. Top all of this off with a boss at the end and you can get to the crystal ball that holds the body part, which you can claim if you have an oak stake. Yep, I hope you found the incredibly inconveniently-placed stake salesperson. No stake, no body part, and if you leave the mansion for any reason without claiming your part, you get to fight the boss again to get it.
Make no mistake, this game hates you. Hates you with a fiery passion. If you dare attempt to plumb its depths, prepare to be mauled by its brutality. After investing weeks trying to wrap my head around it, I put in a cheat code, finished the game, and got the worst ending possible. Interestingly, this would be the best ending I would ever get at this game.
