November Together Retro: Time Travelers Never Die

[prfsnl_gmr]

I'm gonna take a run at Time Soldiers next week.

Which version?

[Sarge]

Alright, peeps, a quick question: Anything worth playing on the NES front outside of StarTropics 2 or The Magic of Scheherazade?

Oh, dang, almost forgot about Time Diver: Eon Man. Might play through that again, at any rate. I'm still open to suggestions, particularly from the Famicom side.

EDIT: Just thought of another one. The NES Star Trek has a time travel element to it as well. I've always thought the game looked pretty interesting, so I might also give that a shot.

[BoneSnapDeez]

I'm gonna take a run at Time Soldiers next week.

Which version?

Arcade, emulated on PS3. Which is what you played, right?

[Exhuminator]

Anything worth playing on the NES front

If you're feeling masochistic:

If you want to play something half decent:

https://www.romhacking.net/translations/642/

[Sarge]

I'm pretty sure I'd need to save-state my way through Time Lord. I actually gave that a go a few months ago, and hit a pretty solid brick wall. It's one of those Rare games that decides to be pretty cheap about how it handles things at times. The bosses in particular require sustained fire to do damage; they heal back up otherwise. There's no indication of this, of course! They also pulled these shenanigans in Snake Rattle 'n' Roll, where you have to absolutely keep pounding at the last boss, and if you stop, you have to start from scratch. It's pretty terrible design, honestly.

If you can believe it, Bill & Ted always looked interesting to me. Then again, Nintendo Power could do that for almost any game if they put their mind to it.

Oh, did you know that there's a completed prototype out there for Bashi Bazook? Interesting stuff, that. Sometimes I can't help but wonder about the games that were lost to the ether because they were never published.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I'm gonna take a run at Time Soldiers next week.

Which version?

Arcade, emulated on PS3. Which is what you played, right?

Yep. That’s the one!

[Sarge]

Ugh, Time Lord is traaaaash. I guess once you figure it out, it gets easier, but man. There's so much ridiculously cheap design going on here, and objectives aren't really spelled out very well, either. You have to collect five orbs in each stage to warp to a new time period. Finding said orbs, or collecting them, is a puzzle, but they're the obtuse sort of "puzzles" that some of the worst NES games used. Stuff like randomly attack a spot in midair, which sends you flying up to collect an item. Or having it appear after you clear out all the red pirates in the pirate ship stage. Or just standing underneath one until it decides to float down. Or collecting a certain amount of mushrooms and it appears. Or ringing a bell four times before the bell itself turns into an orb. Or killing a certain number of enemies to move an orb close enough to collect, but with positioning so tight that you're likely going to get blown up by a mine. That kind of stuff.

Oh, did I mention there's a global timer to all this ridiculousness? Yeah, if you don't beat the game fast enough, you run out of time overall and it's game over. No continues. I found this out when I got to the last stage. I save-stated the crap out of the last bit to squeak out an ending, literally managing to get a kill just as the whole place was going sky-high. Whee.

I mean, there are a few things to like here. I think the game itself plays pretty decently, although figuring out how to avoid damage can be a pain. And dishing it out against some bosses can also be challenging, because Rare also decided that they needed to have some bosses that regenerate their health (without telling the player) if you don't keep a steady stream of fire up.

I give this junk a 3/10. It's playable, but it's bad. (And I suspect an expert-level player that knows what to do would actually kinda enjoy the game, and even I probably would given a revisit, but that first impression is awful.)

[MrPopo]

I'm on a mission this month; I need to get through Soul Reaver so I can get to Soul Reaver 2, which involves time travel. But man, this pre-analog stick 3D platforming is rough.

[BoneSnapDeez]

I made a run at Time Soldiers today. It is definitely built off of the Ikari Warriors engine, but it is much, much better game. In it, you travel between different time periods to find all of your comrades (the titular Time Soldiers, presumably). Once you arrive at each of the time periods, such as prehistoric times, the Roman Empire, the World Wars, etc., you run up and down and from left to right shooting everything you see. As in Ikari Warriors, you can rotate your Time Soldier 360 degrees so that you can shoot stuff at different angles. In every time period, stuff is also trying to shoot you, and regardless of what time period you’re in, stuff shoots at you in pretty much the same way. (History repeats itself, I guess?) The changes in scenery and frequent swapping between time periods really does help to disguise monotonous overhead shooter gameplay, and while the rotating joystick controls are pretty awkward, Time Soldiers would actually make a pretty great twin-stick shooter...But...it is one of those arcade games where you are allowed to feed credits until the last level...which is drastically harder than its predecessors. (In other words, when you die on the last level, it’s game over, no matter what.) If I had spent $4 getting to the last level of this game in an arcade, I likely would have died putting my fist through the monitor when I learned this fact. Thankfully, we now have these small miracles called “save states” to prevent such tragedies, and I will make another run tomorrow. I hope to learn just how difficult it is to get through the last level in one credit...without having to plough through all of its predecessors again just to take a shot at it.

This is a good take and pretty accurate.

I find this to be a mediocre game with some awkward controls (may be better in the arcade). It's better than Ikari Warriors, which doesn't say much.

I made it to the final level, died, and I have no motivation to give it another go.

I have a sneaking suspicious that the SMS port may be the way to go, but I don't own it (yet!).

[alienjesus]

If you're looking for a more interesting top down run and gun with a time travelling motif, give Ninja Commando on Neo Geo a go. It's pretty decent.