Szlia
Member
Played a little more of my NES backlog. First, Gauntlet II. It is an endless dungeon crawling game. First five floors are set and then you get random floors out of a list of about 100, for ever. It is aggressively mediocre and totally uninteresting. In about 20min you see just about all the game has to offer and it is drab.
After that I played some cowboy action with Gun Smoke. It's basically a western-themed vertical shoot'em-up with a sloooow scrolling. Other than the setting, the main original idea of the game is its control scheme. B makes you shoot 30ish degrees to the left, A 30ish degrees to the right and B+A makes you shoot straight. You get to mash a lot, but the game is sorta smart: it does not let you mash B and A alternatively to continuously shoot in a 60° arch! There is some basic power ups (move faster, shoot farther) and there are merchants here and there that sell extra weapons that have limited ammo (ammo is dropped buy enemies, found in destructible containers and can also be bough, reaching 0 does not make you lose the gun but dying with the gun does, you can switch guns in a pause menu). You can also buy a horse (you become a bigger target but can sustain multiple hits - without a horse anything kills you).
Other than the setting and shooting mechanism, another originality of Gun Smoke is that it kinda reuses a design element we previously talked about when discussing Robo Warrior: the levels loop endlessly until you find a wanted poster hidden in the level. You need to shoot multiple time a specific spot for the poster to become visible. As a hint, it does make the impact sound you get when hitting barrels, but the not so nice people at Capcom often put the hidden posters next to barrels... Thanks for nothing! Alternatively, you can buy the poster at a merchant, but it is pretty expensive, to the point you probably need to loop the level twice to be able to afford it.
Obviously, I could not be arsed to look for hidden wanted posters in a slooooooow autoscrolling level that loops, so I used spoilers. Maybe it was not so hot of an idea, because that way I managed to beat the game on my first credit! I can tell you the whole game loops after the brief ending sequence, but I can't tell you what happens when you run out of lives!
I then played some Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers. It's a fast paced platformer where you play on of the titular squirrel. The two hot things in this game is that you can grab objects and throw them and that there is a 2 player mode and not one after the other: simultaneously! I last played the game briefly 25ish years ago, but since then I saw it ran by the speedrunner EndySWE dozens of times, so I was pretty familiar with it and, like Gun Smoke, I beat the whole game on my first credit! I got pretty lucky on some bosses though. A very fun, very fast paced game with tight controls. My only complains are that the bosses are not very interesting and that there is a very annoying jumping section late in the game: you climb a shaft with retracting platforms, but since the camera never scrolls back down and that falling off camera kills you, troubles arise. You jump, scroll the camera up, miss the platform you aimed for and fall to you death even through 3 pixels under the bottom lies a now useless platform....
I brought back my SNES mini from my friend's place, so I'll play next the retro game of the month: Super Mario RPG!
After that I played some cowboy action with Gun Smoke. It's basically a western-themed vertical shoot'em-up with a sloooow scrolling. Other than the setting, the main original idea of the game is its control scheme. B makes you shoot 30ish degrees to the left, A 30ish degrees to the right and B+A makes you shoot straight. You get to mash a lot, but the game is sorta smart: it does not let you mash B and A alternatively to continuously shoot in a 60° arch! There is some basic power ups (move faster, shoot farther) and there are merchants here and there that sell extra weapons that have limited ammo (ammo is dropped buy enemies, found in destructible containers and can also be bough, reaching 0 does not make you lose the gun but dying with the gun does, you can switch guns in a pause menu). You can also buy a horse (you become a bigger target but can sustain multiple hits - without a horse anything kills you).
Other than the setting and shooting mechanism, another originality of Gun Smoke is that it kinda reuses a design element we previously talked about when discussing Robo Warrior: the levels loop endlessly until you find a wanted poster hidden in the level. You need to shoot multiple time a specific spot for the poster to become visible. As a hint, it does make the impact sound you get when hitting barrels, but the not so nice people at Capcom often put the hidden posters next to barrels... Thanks for nothing! Alternatively, you can buy the poster at a merchant, but it is pretty expensive, to the point you probably need to loop the level twice to be able to afford it.
Obviously, I could not be arsed to look for hidden wanted posters in a slooooooow autoscrolling level that loops, so I used spoilers. Maybe it was not so hot of an idea, because that way I managed to beat the game on my first credit! I can tell you the whole game loops after the brief ending sequence, but I can't tell you what happens when you run out of lives!
I then played some Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers. It's a fast paced platformer where you play on of the titular squirrel. The two hot things in this game is that you can grab objects and throw them and that there is a 2 player mode and not one after the other: simultaneously! I last played the game briefly 25ish years ago, but since then I saw it ran by the speedrunner EndySWE dozens of times, so I was pretty familiar with it and, like Gun Smoke, I beat the whole game on my first credit! I got pretty lucky on some bosses though. A very fun, very fast paced game with tight controls. My only complains are that the bosses are not very interesting and that there is a very annoying jumping section late in the game: you climb a shaft with retracting platforms, but since the camera never scrolls back down and that falling off camera kills you, troubles arise. You jump, scroll the camera up, miss the platform you aimed for and fall to you death even through 3 pixels under the bottom lies a now useless platform....
I brought back my SNES mini from my friend's place, so I'll play next the retro game of the month: Super Mario RPG!
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