Together Retro: Beat-'Em-Ups

[ESauced]

Played Ninja Turtles 2 on NES. It’s a good game but it’s hard to go back to after playing 3 recently. Whereas 3 has a different special attack for each turtle, 2 just has a jump slash which is the same for every turtle (even Raph who has a unique special move in the arcade game). 3 also has the stab and flip move, but in 2 your limited to slash, jump and kick, or jump slash. The jump slash does 2 hits of damage and unlike the special moves in the other turtles games, it does not decrease your health. So really aside from bosses there’s no point in doing anything else. It makes the gameplay get stale a lot faster than any other Turtles game. The jump attack also feels very floaty in this game compared to Turtles 3. In 3 I can easily line up the jump and hit an enemy; I found myself sailing over enemies most of the time l when I first started this, and even after playing through mos of the game I still struggled with it

I figured I’d play until I got my first game over which turned out to be all the way until the penultimate boss. If I had lived a moment longer in two spots where I died just before a pizza, I likely would have beaten it. So it’s pretty easy, easier than 3 I’d say, and certainly easier than the arcade.

The NES version had a couple of levels which are not in the arcade game, and they were probably better off left out. They are the weakest levels in the game. They both feel out of place and the music in both is at best unremarkable.

The first NES exclusive level is a snow level, which seems promising enough, but there’s not much to see and it doesn’t last long. There are some snowmen enemies in the level that fire rockets at you. They seem out of place in the game and they’re also annoying. The boss of this level is a polar bear (or something like it) that chucks rocks at you. It’s the easiest boss in the game. Beat the level and there’s a scene where you break a weather generator and it’s spring again. So, on the way to rescuing April the Turtles had to sidetrack to stop an artificial winter I guess

The second NES exclusive level is in a dojo. The music in this level is a remix on the tv show theme song, but considerably worse than any other remix done in the arcade games. This level is also responsible for me not beating the game. After only losing 2 lives in the first 5 levels, I lost two in this level alone, mainly because of a tiger enemy which took one life and half the health of another. It is a very annoying enemy that runs across the screen in random spots making it very difficult to land hits, and on top of that it is a sponge, taking almost as many hits to kill as a boss. And if you try to land two hits at once it will pounce and hit you. Oh, and there are two of them.

Certainly not a bad game. But it can’t hold a candle to 3 or 4,

[lordb0rb4]

Congrats on prfsnl_gmr and Ex!!!!!

[dsheinem]

Congrats, Ex! Sorry I couldn't keep pace better...next week I'll take it down.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Well folks, I did it. I beat God Hand.

Proof:

My camera's flash washed the CRT image out, sorry for the crappy quality.

Congrats!
I'm curious, did you use the "Grovel" special move once? It makes the dynamic difficulty reset to level 1. When I beat the game, I spent barely any time at all at level DIE because it would kill me so fast . I just noticed you talking about fighting demons I didn't remember ever fighting and a lot of your screenshots were on DIE, so it just seems like you really tried to make Normal mode as hard as it could be.

[Sarge]

Great job, Ex. Glad you made it through, and also glad to hear it's not as brutal as Urban Reign.

[Exhuminator]

Congrats on prfsnl_gmr and Ex!!!!!

Thanks!

Congrats, Ex! Sorry I couldn't keep pace better...next week I'll take it down.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to your opinions of God Hand after you beat it.

Congrats! / I'm curious, did you use the "Grovel" special move once?

Thanks! I only used Grovel once during stage 8. I was surrounded by a group of hard enemies who were almost at level DIE. I actually didn't get up to level DIE that often. Mainly because the attacks I used were fast and evasive, but not very strong. I think the faster you do large damage to enemies, the quicker you reach DIE. I usually chipped enemies to death rather than bludgeoning them. So my meter only rarely reached DIE. (I had to fight a spike demon on DIE once. That didn't go well.)

Great job, Ex. Glad you made it through

Thanks! Fun game, you oughta beat it too! We've got more than a week left in June.

-

And here's my crappy God Hand review.

For the rest of this TR month, I'll just be credit feeding MAME beaters. I think I've earned my due with this TR.

[prfsnl_gmr]

And...Double Dragon II (Arcade/iOS) is down. Overall the game is pretty easy, but the version I played required me to 1CC the last level, which was quite a challenge (since the last boss has some attacks that do significant damage and can’t be dodged consistently...the game was designed to be fed more credits right at the end). So, basically, 1CC for stages 1 through 3 and 1CC (and a lot of practice) for stage 4. (Please note that I turned the difficulty down a bit to make up for the fact I was playing the game with touch controls.)

The arcade version of Double Dragon II is just OK. Now that I’ve played through it, I think I can write, without hesitation, the the NES version of the game is better, in many ways drastically so. Double Dragon II is also a step down from its arcade predecessor, IMO.

Double Dragon III (Arcade/iOS) and Gekido: Kintaro’s Revenge (GBA) are up next. If I beat the former, I think I will have almost every Double Dragon game under my belt - I will likely post on that later - and Gekido is the only GBA beat ‘em up in my collection I haven’t beaten (pun intended).

[noiseredux]

elaboration as promised:

Guardian Heroes
1996, Treasure


I feel like I'm being pretty negative about games lately. I don't know if it's a mood that I'm in personally, or if I just keep picking out games to play that just aren't connecting with me. Maybe it's a combination. But I do know that I attempted to play Guardian Heroes maybe six or seven years ago and it didn't click with me then. But seeing it sit in the "ready to install" section of my Xbox One's library, I thought I might give it another chance. As well all know sometimes I game doesn't sit right once but revisiting it years later can make it feel like a whole new game.

That isn't the case with Guardian Heroes. I still feel exactly the same way about it today as I did back then. And in fairness, this time I actually bothered to play it all the way until the end credits which I didn't bother to do last time. So at least now I know that my opinion is based on really giving the game a fair chance to change my mind.

I'll start by saying that I greatly admire Treasure as a developer. Their work is truly that of auteurs. Their games always look stunning, but more importantly their games tend to come with novel ideas and a knack for pushing the game's respective hardware to the absolute limits. To put it another way, Treasure games were always games that looked like they shouldn't have been possible on whatever console they were released on.

And Guardian Heroes is really no different. While certainly there were plenty of 2D sprite based games released on the Saturn (at least in Japan), it seems Sega was really trying to sell their polygons at the time - probably in an effort to compete with Sony rather than create a clear niche alternative to Sony. But I digress. The point is that there just aren't other Saturn games that look like Guardian Heroes. The sprites here are HUGE! And everything is so fluid. It's like playing a comic book.

But... as a beat-em-up, I just don't find Guardian Heroes all that much fun to play. I find the controls sluggish to the point of frustration. I hate that after doing certain combos your character does some kind of emote that you have to wait for before another button will register for instance. I don't know - maybe some players find this part of the charm. Not me. I also can't stand the way you have to switch between three different horizontal planes (think the original Fatal Fury). Again, this is just annoying to me. And why do we need it? Why couldn't it just be a free roaming beat-em-up? Does it have to do with how many ginormous sprites were on the screen at once or something? I don't know.

The upside to all of this is that the game isn't terribly long. Nor is it terribly complicated to fake your way through. I totally just button-mashed and still had no real problem reaching the end credits briskly. I didn't pay much attention to where I spent my upgrade points between levels. I didn't read a single sentence of the story! Thank goodness that the Xbox 360 port of the game allows you to skip through all the cutscenes. Or rather, it just speeds them up. Even when they're running at a rabbit's pace they're excessive in my book.

So there you have it. Great looking game that feels like a boring chore to actually play through for me. Shrug.

[Sarge]

And...Double Dragon II (Arcade/iOS) is down. Overall the game is pretty easy, but the version I played required me to 1CC the last level, which was quite a challenge (since the last boss has some attacks that do significant damage and can’t be dodged consistently...the game was designed to be fed more credits right at the end). So, basically, 1CC for stages 1 through 3 and 1CC (and a lot of practice) for stage 4. (Please note that I turned the difficulty down a bit to make up for the fact I was playing the game with touch controls.)

The arcade version of Double Dragon II is just OK. Now that I’ve played through it, I think I can write, without hesitation, the the NES version of the game is better, in many ways drastically so. Double Dragon II is also a step down from its arcade predecessor, IMO.

Double Dragon III (Arcade/iOS) and Gekido: Kintaro’s Revenge (GBA) are up next. If I beat the former, I think I will have almost every Double Dragon game under my belt - I will likely post on that later - and Gekido is the only GBA beat ‘em up in my collection I haven’t beaten (pun intended).

I didn't know you were doing this on iOS. That makes things much trickier, what with the lack of precision and all against the last boss.

[BoneSnapDeez]

I don't think this would change the mind of the naysayers but Guardian Heroes is much better in its original Saturn form. You can tell the game was made for that specific controller.

noise you are a good writer and should do more long ass review posts.

I'm still gonna try to finish Double Dragon before the month is done. Maybe Ninja Combat too, but I'm not as invested in that one.