The Steel Empire on the Genesis, got the 1cc!
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Damn that’s some dedication, congrats!
Thanks! It wasn’t too bad actually, I only did 3 or 4 attempts.
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Finished the Sega Ages version of Phantasy Star on my Switch Lite.
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Nice one. I gave up going for the complete ending on this one.
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Yeah, I’m pretty sure I spent more time trying to beat the UFO levels than playing the regular zones 
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So, I’ve been playing Out Run a lot lately and I’m finally getting the hang of it again!
I’m especially proud of that last run. Ten seconds remaining on the clock, ohhhh yeahhh!
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Nice work! A bona-fide classic!
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I finished up Sonic CD a week or so ago. A fun game but ultimately one I lost patience with and just got to the end as soon as possible. I enjoyed the CD music (I played the JPN version) and the variation between the past, present and future. I even started off attempting to get all of the time stones but after the first few zones it really becomes excruciating trying to hang onto enough rings because of some poor level design.
All in all a good game but I think it’s probably the weakest of all the 16 bit entries.
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I’ve beaten TMNT Fall of the Foot Clan!
It’s a very simple Altered Beast-style single plane beat’em up. You pick one of the four turtles (which are functionally identical. they all look the same and carry different weapon, but their range and power is the same) and travel through fairly flat and linear levels until you reach the boss. You can swing your weapon, throw shurikens or do an hilariously overpowered jump kick. Enemies constantly respawn and the game tried to spice things up by adding light platforming sections and segments involing jumping or crouching invincible obstacles, although Mario this ain’t.
It’s also ez. The game is very short and you have a generous health bar combined with frequent pizza pick-ups that restore two segments a slice. This was my very first time playing the game and I only lost one turtle, on my first go playing the final stage. But it’s not easy in a boring way, if that makes sense? The game constantly keeps you on your toe through how aggressively it spawns in enemies and the breezy pacing combined with boss battles that discourage mindlessness means it clip along at a nice pace.
The presentation is competent. The sprites are faithful (if stifly animated) rendition of the turtles and the cartoon’s rogue gallery, and the first stage theme is as good of a rendition of the famous cartoon theme as the Game Boy sound chip will allow. And really, “competent” perfectly describes this game. As a kid, I would’ve loved it, as an adult paying the SMRP when it was new I would’ve been furious, and as neither I can appreciate as a decently entertaining piece of disposable entertainment. Which, sometimes, is all you need.
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I love that game. Yes, it’s slow and simple but it was one of the first GB games I ever played plus it has the main theme tune.
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Bruce Lee (Commodore 64, Evercade version)
Yeah, this game is not much of a looker, but man is it fun!
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That’s awesome, I’ve always heard great things about that game, but haven’t played it myself.
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I’ve beat Timesplitters 2!
Timesplitters 2 and its sequel recently went for sale for $2 each on the Xbox store. I’ve long been curious about the trying the series and I really enjoyed what I played of the original on PS2 (I genuinely liked the “grab an item and go back to the start level” structure even if it’s clearly something they did only because they didn’t have the money and time for a traditional single player adventure) so what better opportunity really.
I beat Timesplitters 2 last night, and I have some thoughts I felt like sharing while theyre’ still fresh. First… Teh Good
-The campaign does a fantastic job at switching things up. The premise is that you’re a space marine going back in time at various point of history to recover crystals used by an alien race (the titular Timesplitters) to destroy humanity and you either disguise yourself as someone period-appropriate or possess them (It’s not made clear and neither make much sense with how the story is presented, so best apply the MST3K mantra here) and so each level is a different era. One level may have you play as a Russian soldier sabotating bioweapon experiments during the Cold War, then as a private eye waging war against the mob in 1930s Chicago, then as a Flash Gordon-style space hero trying to recover stuff from a crashed UFO, and so on.
I love when video game levels tell a self-contained story and it’s done brilliantly here. Levels feel unique, nailing whatever pastiche they’re aiming for through excellent visual design and soundtrack. The “Atom Masher” level is a bit of a dud (it’s supposed to be a send-up to the campier James Bond films, but it’s just a boring metallic corrider) in this regard, but it’s an exception. There are very few reused assets and though there are some recurring weapon archetypes (mostly pistols and shotguns), each era has its own unique weapons and gadgets, making each level fresh from a gameplay perspective too. I especially enjoyed the aforementioned Chicago gangster level.
-There’s a tremendous of content here. The main story is fairly short, but levels change and add objectives as you increase the difficulty and it’s not the only mode: you also have a map editor (which I didn’t try), multiple dozen of “Arcade League” missions that have you do themed bot matches with silly restrictions and objectives, and Challenge maps that have you do more sillier and more specialized tasks like shooting through cardboard cut-outs or throwing bricks at windows. Every challenge and Arcade League instances employ a tiered ranking system that unlocks you more stuff the better you perform so that makes for a lot of replayability.
Teh Neutral
-The game is very old-school hard. There are very few health refills (none in most levels) and enemies are as numerous as they are agressive and accurate. Some levels have strict time limits. Checkpoints are placed inconsistently and there’s only one per level, often placed closer to the start than you’d like. Levels are short for the most part so it’s not too much of a bother, but it is one. I’d be lying if I wasn’t frustrated in multiple instances, but I’d also be lying if I didn’t feel some sense of elation when I finally conquered the robot factory and its damage-sponge, homing rocket-launcher loving bastards.
Teh Bad
-The game employs archaic Goldeneye aiming where your firing cone is stuck in the center of the screen and you need to bring up “aim mode” to move your cursor. I could’ve tolerated this but the aim mode is horribly sensitive - it’s very difficult to aim where you want and line up headshots. The game allows for complete button remapping but has no sensitivity option. The game compensates for this by giving you very strong bullet magnetism but it doesn’t feel very satisfying.
-Just as bothersome as the aiming is the weapon switching. Like most old first person shooters, the game allows you to carry every weapon you come accross and switching them is done the left and right directions on the d-pad. There’s no Turok-style weapon wheel or visible display of your inventory and weapons are ordered in a strange way, so you’ll be eating a lot of shit trying to switch to the weapon you want to use in the middle of the battle. Further adding to the annoyance is that your mostly-useless map/PDA device is part of your weapon selection so that’s one more thing you need to scroll through. The game has plenty of unused buttons on the controller so there should have been some ways to bind favourite to a quick swap. Certainly make the PDA its own button at least.
-The story missions have a lot of annoying “gotchas”. A great example is in the final mission: at one point you need to go to the space station’s outer hull to man a turret and shoot down spaceships but if you didn’t go to the left room at the start instead of the right, you won’t have the space suit needed to venture to that section without losing health. If you do realize something’s up and backtrack to that location, well you’ll still lose because the timer to complete the mission is so strict you can’t lose time backtracking that much. There’s really no reason the suit couldn’t have been placed in a more obvious spot or have the game nudge the player to explore and find the item before doing the objective.
There are also weird and janky things like a turret section in another level where the enemies you’re supposed to shoot down take a bizarely long time to spawn.
Overall: I see myself enjoying this game tremendously more on a replay now that I know where to go and what to do (went through much of the same arc with Perfect Dark Zero). A modern rerelease that doesn’t mess with anything but fixes the aiming and control issues would be enough to take it from “very good” to “absolute masterpiece” (and indeed the name of one such rerelease was sighted in the Nvidia Geforce Now leak, though it’s been a few years now without announcement so who knows if it’s still on the cards). Either way I hope you didn’t hate reading this!
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Play Future Perfect. That’s one of the best first person shooter campaigns of all time.
I did that right after beating 2! Been gushing about how good it is in the discord
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Yep. That’s amazing stuff.
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I’ve one-credited the Genesis port of Midnight Resistance! It’s a horizontal Contra-style run and gun game by Data East and essentially a successor to Heavy Barrel, taking most of the same ideas (rotary aiming, the “barrier” drone pick-up, having to spend keys to unlock power-ups) and appliyng them to a horizontal format. The Genesis version lacks a music track and has the expected graphical cutbacks but it plays well and has much better music.
The Genesis doesn’t have a rotary joystick so the port defauts to a “aim in the direction you’re holding” scheme but there is also a variety of alternate schemes that sort of let you approximate the original controls by letting you rotate your character’s aim, which is what i used here. Being able to aim independantly of your character’s movement is more than a gimmick and I can’t think of many horizontal ru and gunners that let you do that.
The game is great. Tight stage design that fully leverage the unique aiming scheme, cool gun, challenging bosses, the whole lot. A small danper on the experience is the final level, which is fucking cancer. You spawn in this room where infinitely-respawning tiles with the final boss’s face on them hover all around you and shoot at you, so if you came in with the flamethrower gun that otherwise shreds the whole game, well fuck you because once you’re forced to crawl in the tiny tunnel leading to the final boss, you will die. But overall Midnight Resistance is a great game.
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