The CoCo discord has a weekly high score competition on a CoCo game of their choosing, this is my first ever week there, and I decided to play in it. Fun little game!
It’s basically a clone of Miner 2049er on the Atari 2600, but this is coded entirely in BASIC, so it’s a little wonky at times, but I still really enjoyed it. I got to the 5th loop, 6th stage.
I’ve beaten Sidewinder MAX!
The third installment in a fairly prolific but very obscure series of flight combat games, Sidewinder MAX is an unique and interesting entry in the console flight game skies… though not always in a good way.
The first Sidewinder (released in NA as Bogey Dead 6) was an Ace Combat clone. The 2nd game (exclusive to Japan) tried to mix things up by reducing the weapon quantity and make airplanes less agile, though it was still fairly arcadey. MAX fully commits to the more realistic direction. Planes are very wobbly and sluggish at low velocity (usually being most agile in the 500 to 600 kph windows) and you can only carry as many missiles as your plane has hardpoints. Damages to your subsystems is tracked and will affect your plane’s characterics accordingly (being hit in the fuel tank will make your fuel consumption more prononounced for instance). On normal difficulty and higher, you will suffer blackouts and redouts if you swerve too abruptly (though this is purely visual). Enemy planes are very strong and clever, so every battle is intense, as short as they are (you always return to base automatically after 5 minutes). Basically, it’s not Ace Combat.
Initially you start as a nameless pawn with no choice over their plane and weapon loadouts, but after a dozen of missions, your superior dies in a landing accident and you get promoted to flight leader. This lets you do things like change you and your flightmate’s weapons, put in requests to refuel at the start of missions and switch airplane (which can, and most often are randomly refused), and most interestingly, you can draw up your own mission plan! Yeah, you can decide your own insertion point, squad objectives and flight path though the missions are so short and simple it never really warrants using. You can even do things like turn off the plane safety fuel calculation: when it’s on, your afterburners will become unusable when you 30 fuel or less. Turned off, you’ll be able to use them as much as you want but you’ll automatically return to base when you reach unsafe levels.
All of this may sound and is very neat and the moment-to-moment plane gameplay is good, but the game suffers from a lot of jank:
The controls have very annoying limitations. Unlike most flight games (including all other Sidewinder installments), the machine gun must be selected as its own weapons and cannot be used independantly of your missiles. It can also only be fired when you’re locked to a target and within 1000m of distance. This makes ground combat in particular very tedious, as ground enemies have small hitboxes.
The bigger problem with this, though, is that it makes some missions unwinnable. You see, many missions require destroying buildings, and building can only appear as a target on your HUD if you have a specific missile primed. They can’t be destroyed by anything else, so if a mission requires you to destroy 6 buildings and you and your 3 other flightmates are assigned a plane that can only carry one such missile, well you can’t win period. This is especially frustrating because you can only switch planes before seeing the mission briefing and knowing what targets you are supposed to destroy, and even if you do know what’s head for most of the game, your request to change planes may be randomly refused. The designers seemingly anticipated this would be a problem, because Sidewinder MAX includes the curious feature of letting you progress irrespective of mission success and failure. Yeah, except for an handful of plot-critical missions (indicated by having this track play during gameplay), if you don’t accomplish your objective but mission control gives the RTB order, you’ll be able to progress through the storyline anyways. The consideration is nice, I guess, but winning that way doesn’t feel good.
Another problem is that the game just loves to waste your time. There are so many text boxes you have to sit through during “coffee time” and briefings are lengthy with lot of slides and slow transitions, including such pointless details as showing the roads of whatever area you’re going to (dude, I’m in a plane!). It becomes especially maddening in the final chapter where you’re promoted to Squadron Leader and have to discuss with the general to assign’s everyone plane, a tedious process that involves three separate screens you can’t simply refuse to do even if you’re happy with the initial dotation. The game’s “abort mission” prompt returns you to the title screen so if you found out you didn’t make the right choices and need to go back to the drawing board, you have to sit through all of it again. It’s maddening!
The plot goes as follow: After the head of the royalist government is killed in an event known as the “Black April Incident”, the third-world country of Eskara is caught in a bloody civil war between the pro-capitalism Reform Alliance and the socialist Gospill-Goshawk government. The mercenary outfit “Fighting Birds” has been hired by the former to even the odds.
The game places a big focus on story. There’s a lot of dialogue . There’s an ingame encyclopedia covering the geography, history, and factions of Eskara. After each missions, you can hit the base’s pub and talk to your fellow pilots and the base’s staff, with dialogue changing depending on the success or failures of your mission. The voice acting and cutscenes are entirely in English (interestingly provided by big voice actors like John DiMaggio and Tara Strong rather than the cheap native english speakers living in Japan that games like this typically employ) but there’s not a lot of it so you won’t be able to follow much of the plot unless you understand Japanese or whip up google’s translation app (which has some trouble with the game’s font).
The game’s gritty and realistic tone extends to its mission design: though some levels are a bit more creative, every mission boils down to either destroy all air targets, some ground targets, or some buildings. Sometimes a dam or a bridge. The other Sidewinder games have naval combat, but not this one. There’s only one escort mission. The game has 33 missions which is pretty big for the genre’s standard but this is achieved through shameless padding: the 2nd chapter alone has four missions where you need to hit very similar tank columns, and four other missions where you attack the same airfield! There are no crazy missions where you have to fly through a canyon like in Ace Combat, or anything similar videogamey.
Even the ending is subdued: you’re simply tasked to destroy a few ground targets and then return to base to hear the head of the enemy government make a speech where he promises to open the country to foreign investment, followed by one last training session with your buddy. It’s pretty downbeat but I take it.
The following Sidewinder games (which unlike this one, were released in the west under the title “Lethal SKies”) would take the games strong flight gameplay, add more fanfiful mission design and boss battles against crazy vehicles, and ruthlessly streamline the everything else. This was a good thing.
Though I may make it sound like a tedious bore, Sidewinder MAX really is a pretty cool and unique game, but only skilled (and patient) flyers need apply.
I’ve beaten this mutliple times now (mostly via emulators) but after I re-obtained a Phantasy Star 4 cartridge again I decided I needed to replay it ASAP and 5 days later:
More importantly I can now access the secret Sound Test option 
Awesome screenshots, looks super sharp!
Just after I finished Phantasy Star IV I decided I would finally attempt to complete Phantasy Star 2 which I had attempted on several occasions but never made it to the end for various reasons.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!
So I start again from scratch:
The game has a really lovely world, music, characters and story but boy at times it feels very archaic to the point it feels necessary to have the assistance of the originally included guide book.
But I push on though the annoying dungeon maps of the dams… and the planet Palm gets destroyed sadly in a few lines of dialogue without ever being visited in game: 
Thankfully we now get to travel to Planet Dezo and the dungeons get a little less complex and more enjoyable to go through. We also get to meet a character from the past:
So another week later from when I started it is time for the end bosses:
I’m severely under-leveled, but I barely survive the final battle:
Overall enjoyed the game and glad I finally finished it and got to see the awesome ending, just wish the game had a larger ROM size to work with so the story could have been properly fleshed out more and that some quality of life adjustments would have been made.
Just finished the original Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on PC. This is the NightDive remaster, and it’s done really well, just like their other remastered projects like Doom64.
Very fun game, but the large levels and hidden keys got to me a bit by the end. Still enjoyable, and I’ll be diving into the 2nd game soon!
Yay, I completed Liquid Kids today! It gets pretty tricky near the end, so I had to use quite a few credits.
Kiaidan 00 on the PC Engine Super CDRom²
Uh oh you got the bad ending! 
Not necessarily a retro game but it sure could be done on a Saturn or PlayStation, Deelit in Wonder Labyrinth Record of Lodoss War.
This is an image just before the “The End” screen.
I’ve 1cc’d Kingdom Grand Prix / Shippuu Mahou Daisakusen (specifically, the Japanese version)
The 2nd installment in Raizing signature-series-I-regret-snubbing-for-far-too-long series Mahou Daisasuken, Kingdom Grand Prix is a blend of genres you don’t see every day; specifically, racing game and 2D shooter. Yeah, basically it plays like how you’d expect a vertical shooter of its time to play but beside the usual dodiging bullets and collecting power-up actions, you also have to worry about your placement in a 8-contestant races. Holding the fire button and staying in the top third of the screen will speed up the scrolling while firing full auto and hanging back will slow it down. Balancing between your speed and survival will be the key to win and…
… And you can ignore all of that because the whole racing aspect is fucking broken. Quite simply, the CPU isn’t playing the same game as you. It’s still a vertical shmup so when you get hit by a bullet or smooshed by the physical elements of the playfield, you die, and if you loses all your lives it’s game over. CPUs, when they get hit, sometimes fall down but more often than no the game just goes masks off and has the other racers go through bullets or fly over physical obstructions. Every level has a boss that comes 2/3rd of the way through. You have to defeat it to complete the level but most of the time the CPU will just fly past it without a care in the world. To even the odds, you can sorta bump other racers to the bottom of the screen or down them with a well-timed bomb, but the former is awkward to do and not always possible.
Cheating AI is no foreign to racing games, but this isn’t garden variety rubber banding. It’s more like if Gran Turismo made you race a track, and in the middle of it the game forces you to ace a gymkhana test while the other racers jump over it.
Cheating computers aside, playing Kingdom Grand Prix “to win” just doesn’t feel good. To be the fastest means staying at the top of the screen and not firing but the result is you constantly get swarmed and bump into things.
And it’s all the more fortunate you can mostly ignore the racing aspect because in all other respects, Kingdom Grandprix is a winner. The original Sorcer Striker was already one great looking game but this one is gorgeous. You’ll be hard-pressed to see any shooter with better-animated and more charismatic bosses. The soundtrack gets you appropriately pumped (Love this not-at-all-inspired-by-the-86-transformers-movie-track). The action is furious. While the stages are shorter than usual to accomodate the racing structure, I like that this is a breezy ˜15 minutes lopp, and that the game has branching paths (you can pick between 2 levels for most stages and between 3 final stages) means there’s plenty of content still. If I have one criticism to make for the shooter gameplay, it’s that your characters are a wee bit too twitchy and the result is that tap dodging might result in your oversteering and hitting a stray bullet. But I got the 1cc so obviously it’s not game-ruining.
As you can tell, I didn’t bother with placing well in the race and thus I didn’t get my character’s true ending or access the 2nd loop. I heard the Saturn version has a code to turn it into a pure shooter so if that let me access loop 2, I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Panzer Dragoon Saga
Apparently there is much that I “have not seen”, but that’s okay. I wasn’t going for 100% and was just playing semi-casually for the experience. I’ll probably go back later at some point to see things I might have missed.
Does 2008 count as retro yet? Anyway, I finished Dead Space on hard! Pretty great game… the atmosphere and sound design is truly amazing for the time period, and the enemies (necromorphs) are quite scary.
There were times on hard difficulty that I was completely out of ammo and struggling, but actually never really had issues with actually killing the necromorphs.
Once I had my suit upgrades and a surplus of money, I started buying crazy amounts of ammo and the game became really easy.
The end boss was a joke and a let down in my opinion.
I would give the game a 4 out of 5 easily if it wasn’t completely riddled with bugs the entire way through. Probably the buggiest game I’ve ever played through.
3 out of 5.
Shame about those bugs. I think Dead Space executes perfectly on what it sets out to do aside from that last boss, an all timer from that gen. The second one is good, too, much more bombastic, however and not an all timer like this one. Were you playing on PC?
Yeah, PC. I have the second one installed and ready to go, will be getting into that soon.
Awesome, can’t wait to read your thoughts on it.
Finished Dragon Warrior on NES for the first time. Never got to play this one as a kid.
Very grind heavy, which is a pain in the ass, but I still enjoyed the game. The best part of the game for me was figuring out the puzzles late game to get prepared for the final fight. I was scratching my head for a while with the clues given out by the townfolk around the map, and the “ah-ha!” moments when you figure it out are pretty special.
I found the end boss to be way too easy. I was level 21, and killed him on my first attempt… I wish there was more nuance to it. Instead of only attacking and healing, it would have been really cool to have to time some counter attack moves like sleep and stopspell. Oh well!
Great game though, especially considering it’s age.
Finished Starfox 64 for the first time tonight. Pretty easy, but that’s also the default easy route.
Dude, I think this is my absolute most played game ever. Definitely check out how to unlock the other routes and shoot enough baddies down to get medals on each of the stages. That’s the real game here. Then get medals on each stage on expert mode (again the real game).
In my opinion, you took a medium route - getting to Solaris on your first try was a great accomplishment.
This is one of those games where getting 100% was intended before Nintendo started inserting this “easy to beat hard to 100%” style of gameplay in every modern Kirby and Mario game. Even Star Fox Zero’s design is more onerous than this one.
In Star Fox 64, it’s actually doable without scanning every nook and cranny since it’s purely based on achievable scores. But it’s still a fun challenge.
Each of the routes is short enough to beat in an about 1 hour by design too. I highly recommend you sink more time into it.
No joke, I’ve probably beaten it about 100 times now. And it never gets old even though I can pretty much do it without taking a hit now.
