Together Retro: Urban Strike

[Ivo]

I finished Desert Strike back in the day, but never got round to trying the sequels.

Unfortunately my time is rather short at the time, so I don't think this will be it.

Ivo.

[noiseredux]

so I spent 9/1 playing the SNES port to sort of get myelf comfrotable with it. It's not that easy. That's for sure. But it's cool.

I started on the GB port today now that i have a console version to compare it to. The GB port is stripped down as far as arsenal and overall graphics, but it's actually pretty detailed for what it is. The speed of the helicopter and controls are good. There's no slowdown which shocked me, and the animations are better than expected.

Of course I have all month to compare/contrast.

[bomber991]

I guess I'll be playing the SNES version.

So what's the point of being able to pick a co-pilot?

I ended up playing for an hour before I figured out I could just press the machine-gun button fast to make the gun shoot fast instead of just holding the button down.

Gotta love the cutscenes between levels. It seems like every game now-a-days has cutscenes between levels, but back in the urban strike days it wasn't something that was always expected.

[dsheinem]

I spent Friday afternoon playing about an hour or so each of Desert, Jungle, Urban, Soviet, and Nuclear Strike for research purposes. Urban is superior graphically to Desert and Jungle, but something abut the feel of the game is a little off. It's still a lot of fun, though. I played through the first mission and some of the second - I plan to finish the game as we play along this month. I'm playing the Genesis version.

If you can look past the cheesy FMV cut scenes, Soviet and Nuclear are both excellent games as well. Since the series' roots in the 16-bit era were already pseudo-3D, it makes the jump to polygons quite well. If you have time to play more than Urban Strike this month, I'd recommend playing either Jungle Strike or Nuclear Strike (or both ).

Look for a podcast with interviews with Mike Posehn and David Foley later this week.

[FAHQALL]

Totally inspired me to pull out the Genesis and all the "____ Strike" games. Urban Strike is still my favorite.

[Hatta]

Well, I remember why I never got too far in Urban Strike. These ground missions are fucking awful. As one reviewer would say, it's a shitload of fuck. Always locking onto the wrong target, or not locking on at all, getting hung up on a wall going around a corner, etc. I've been playing the ground mission after the one in San Francisco for the last hour and a half, at least 8 attempts and I haven't done any better than my first attempt. Why would they tack such an awful game onto such a great one? It feels like someone made me a delicious cake and shat all over it.

I just put on another Dead show (DP26), we'll see if I can beat this level by the end.

Edit: I did finally beat that level. The New York level immediately after it was easy, so I feel better now heh.

[Hatta]

I don't know how far anyone else is, but I'm stuck on Vegas. The problem is when you have to clear the strip of enemies. I can get most of them pretty easily, but the strip goes right through a Danger Zone, which dramatically increases enemy firepower. Usually completing the earlier missions gets rid of the DZ, but I can't figure this one out.

I'm guessing that the DZ is related to one of the later missions, and the strip only hits it tangentially. Maybe if I can figure out a good angle I can get at the tanks without entering the DZ. At least this isn't as frustrating as the last level I had problems with, since the controls are so much better.

[noiseredux]

I haven't beat the first mission yet. I need to play this more!

[Orion Pimpdaddy]

Finally got a copy. I'll be playing the Game Gear version.

[noiseredux]

I'm playing the Genesis version and the Game Boy version and comparing/contrasting the likes.

Now that I "get the hang of it", I think the game is quite good actually. I finally beat the first mission (in the Gen version). Haha.