I did it.

Final dungeon feels like an attempt to recreate a Darm Tower (of Ys), except a half-ass version. Even the mirror maze is simplistic to the point of being unnecessary. Guess what the final boss is like? It's a big "demon" who flies around the screen, periodically rendering certain sections of the floor unusable. He's pretty easy to beat though.
I kinda "cheated" throughout the final dungeon. I discovered that, like many of these old save-anywhere RPGs, saving and loading resets the screen and thus clears out nearby enemies. Did that whenever I saw a big group. No need to fight anyone anyway, I had max experience and gold.
Ultimately, I'd say that Shada is to Ys as Golden Axe Warrior is to Zelda. They're both insulting cheap imitations of a beautiful experience.
pook99 wrote:I'm loving these write ups. I wonder if all of these atari games were bad on their release or is it just that Atari has aged terribly.
The Atari 2600 is a great consoles with mounds of fantastic games.
Here's the thing.
The 2600 dominated the second generation. I mean, crushed it. 30 million consoles sold. In contrast, runner-up is the Intellivision with 3 million.
This means that most developers of the era turned their eye towards the 2600.
If you look at the libraries of the Odyssey 2, Intellivision, ColecoVision, etc. you'll see primarily first-party games, arcade ports, and heavily-ported titles from the "big" publishers (Activision, Imagic, Parker Brothers). And that's generally it.
However, the Atari was so popular it resulted in these pop-up developers who existed only to quickly and cheaply crank out 2600 games. Mythicon, Apollo, Data Age, Telesys, Zimag, Froggo, and more. Plus you had random companies like Quaker Oats creating video game divisions, Zellers literally cloning games, and so on. The console ending up with tons of barely playable crap as a result. Tons. It made people mad. See the video game crash.
If you're playing the 2600, best to stick to the well-known publishers like Atari, Sears, Activision, Imagic, CBS, Parker Brothers, Sega, 20th Century Fox, Coleco... Of course, it is fun to venture out into the netherworld, occasionally...