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Latest: Captain America and the Avengers. One of my favorite games of all time, actually...

I'll be posting the (also excellent) NES version of the game later this weekend.

The second part of my Cap review, this time for the NES. I happen to love this game, and unlike the arcade brawler, it's not nearly as well known.

A bit of history for you folks, covering Kung-Fu Master and its various sequels/successors. Some would call it the first beat-em-up ever made, but I think 8-direction movement is way too strongly associated with the genre for that... meaning, I consider Renegade (review coming soon!) to be the first.

But that's just semantics. It's an important part of the genre's foundation, no doubt about that.

yo, I love Renegade. I find the whole Kunio-kun series fascinating - especially in how much of it was localized and removed from being part of a bigger series here in the States.

Yeah, that's easily the most interesting thing about it - aside from, you know, being the first ever real beat-em-up. I've played it and the ports, and I'll be writing about it this weekend.

The truth is, I didn't have the patience to make it past the first level. I really, really hate the left-right thing, and the arcade game is pretty cheap. Managed to almost beat the NES port in a single run, weirdly enough.

For some reason, I just felt it was sort of necessary to get through these games - or at least write about them - before digging into the real classics of the genre.

I don't know that I ever played the arcade game. Probably not. But I sunk many hours into the NES game as a kid. And I tried the DOS port a while ago.

But it is super interesting how Renegade would lead to River City Ransom. And how that would lead to things like Super Dodgeball and World Cup. And how Double Dragon's legacy would overlap. The whole franchise is just this insane family tree. It's the sort of niche that deserves its own book or something.

EDIT: Holy shit, did you know Renegade got an SMS port? I didn't!

I did indeed! even weirder that it was released, exclusive to Europe/Brazil (naturally)... in 1993. However it's really terrible. I've already written a review of the arcade/nes game with a brief mention of the SMS version. It will get published later this month.

In the meantime, here's a new review I wrote a few weeks ago.

This review was exactly what I was afraid of when I started my "Marvels Project" (basically an attempt to play, and write about, nearly every Marvel game released on consoles and handhelds)... I found the games so terrible, but not uniquely terrible like The Uncanny X-men (NES)... that it was hard to play them, let alone write about them with anything interesting to say. The third game was so damn bad that I had to turn it off and imagine committing AVGN-style of destruction to everything with the LJN/Acclaim logo on it. Except, you know, it was just a ROM.

So this review is a little boring and poorly written. Apologies! But I've already written a few more pieces that I'm more proud of, which will be published in the next few weeks or so.

Recently I've been slowly discovering this wonderful little genre, the shmup. It's almost entirely new to me, but I'm enjoying it so far.

And what better place to start than Gradius?

touchofkiel wrote:Recently I've been slowly discovering this wonderful little genre, the shmup. It's almost entirely new to me, but I'm enjoying it so far.

And what better place to start than Gradius?

Gradius is a great place to start

noiseredux wrote:

touchofkiel wrote:Recently I've been slowly discovering this wonderful little genre, the shmup. It's almost entirely new to me, but I'm enjoying it so far.

And what better place to start than Gradius?

Gradius is a great place to start

because then you can play much better shmups after that.

Haha yeah I'm excited to get to the "good" stuff. But I wanted to start with some older series that are considered classics, and the first Gradius was a good bit of fun. I just played some of 1942 (snooze), and after that I'll tackle February and March's Shmup of the month.

I'm excited to get to Darius because I've always loved those big robotic fish...