OMG The Rocketeer!

Robocop vs The Terminator is good.

Alien 3 on SNES is good.

Aladdin is good on MD and SNES.

Then there's the mammoth amount of good Star Wars games.

Star Wars Arcade
Super Star Wars
Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Super Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (just the Hoth levels)
Star Wars Episode I: Racer
X-Wing
TIE Fighter
X-Wing vs TIE Fighter
Dark Forces
Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

@ChopperByrne good shout with Star Wars.

The SNES Trilogy is solid, if a bit harsh in terms of difficulty.

I'm gonna try the following:

Demolition Man - Mega Drive
Star Wars Arcade - 32X

I got past level 1 once I think. Brutally difficult game.
This was on Amiga, not sure if it was better or worse elsewhere. Longer loading times wont have helped.

I had Star Wars Arcade for 32X when I was a kid. I kinda liked it but don’t think I ever made any real progress with it.

What's the difference between the 32X and Arcade versions? They're selectable on the 32X port.

Just like any SHMUP, Star Wars arcade was about learning the patterns. Player 2 could definitely be of major assistance by shooting areas of the screen where waves were entering from while Player 1 aimed at more stationary targets.

I just wanna know all about The Lawnmower Man tie-ins. A wonderful hot mess of a movie, and by association I think, the studio execs said HOT DANG we need a snes game for this! It's essentially the same medium!

monkey wrote:

The Terminator on the Megadrive is, well, it's bad. It's really bad. But I've still got a soft spot for it.

This might be because I just put myself through the whole of Back to the Future 3, but I still think this is a decent enough game.  Atrocious VFM at the time but it looks great, sounds great, plays OK and only lasts 15 minutes.  It's the perfect retro game!

Batman Forever on PS1 might be the most insane scrolling beat 'em up I've ever played.

I need to do this now after the pishba. I remember the Prince Batman game on MD being legit if that helps?

Ran out of continues, not going back. It's a complete mess - closer to Pit-Fighter than a proper scrolling beat 'em up. No scope for crowd control, enemies that will drink an entire health bar one they lock you into attack patterns and a randomised power-up gimmick running through it that stinks. It's an absolute shocker. Plus it all rolls with the digitised look, eeeurrgh.

Batman Forever again.



OK I might go back just to get it done, I've got a save state on the level I reached.

Stretching the 90s thing a bit, nevermind:

Back to the Future III - Mega Drive (25mins)

A brutally unfair odds & sods mish-mash of minigames that even manages to do a terrible job of converting the film's theme to chip music.  Stage 1 is a sidescrolling horseback autorunner that requires a ridiculous amount of pattern memorisation to progress, level 2 is a one screen Marty MOMPOV shooting gallery that requires a ridiculous amount of pattern memorisation to progress, level 3 is an isometric plate chucking shmup of sorts (memorisation required, natch) and level 4 is a drab right to left platformer where your goal is to reach the front of the train. They're all varying degrees of bad, but the shooting gallery is the only section anywhere near passable.  I'd imagine this was cobbled together in a matter of months (generous estimate: just over three) but even with Probe in typical scramble & punt mode I'm surprised no-one flagged the issue of opening the game with the weakest section of the lot. I like autorunners - I find the genre quite relaxing if done right - but the amount of hazards you have to duck/shoot/jump before a screen suddenly and mercifully declares that you've rescued Clara is insane.  You'd have to write the patterns down if you wanted to progress, so it's got more in common with an electronic Simon Says device than (what would now be considered) a proper runner.  The shooting gallery is okay, but the win state is an absolute fuckload of points, way more than I expected to require, so that gets the thumbs down too.  I hated the plate throwing but save scummed my way through, and the final stage is just weak. 

The whole thing reminds me of The Flintstones on Master System, another of Croydon's finest (and one I had the misfortune of owning as a kid, although I can't remember why), only without the 'redeeming features' of a paint the fence level or the borked 'yabadabad' sample when you hit start.  Absolute pish.  There are worse licensed games out there than this, but not many.  36%



The Terminator - Mega Drive (<20mins)

I can't be trusted on this one because I loved it as a kid and still have a soft spot for it.  Aside from SOR2 it's probably my most replayed MD game for a start.  As a 10/11yr old I was obsessed with the first Terminator film.  I got the MS port on release day and picked up a second hand copy of the MD one not long after I made the jump to 16-bits of power.  No regrets.  Four stages.  One life.  No continues.  I reckon you could speedrun it in 15 minutes or so.  But they'd be 15 hot minutes.  Ergo it represented disgusting VFM at £44.99 - the 47% Mean Machines Sega review that praised the game but bodied it for Lastability was spot on in hindsight.  Swish graphics, a genuinely decent soundtrack (the music for the first stage is particularly good) and passable horizontal fire shooting....NGL I still quite like this and it's probably my favourite Terminator game that doesn't also star Robocop.  Quite possibly horrendous for anyone who didn't play it in 1992. 76%



Go on naysayers, deny this bangs:



Batman Forever - PS1 (1hr)

Good grief.  A few screens into this I quit back to the menu to check the file description, assuming it was a crazy fan hack that had nothing to do with the supposedly average scrolling beat 'em up I'd seen in magazines of the day.  Remember those bonkers StreetFighter II hack cabs that started to appear in chip shops a few months into the UK boom, where Ryu threw two zigzagging fireballs at once and his dragon punch swept across the screen in a wide arc (and also produced fireballs)?  They were known as Black Belt Editions near me, but that could've just been a postcode thing. Anyway, this is so weird it reminded me of those.  You wanna get nuts?  Said everyone involved in this project on day one of production.

Before I'd defeated half a dozen enemies (but after a couple of unknown power ups presented in an Altered Beast style) Batman suddenly shrank to half size.  After eventually returning to normal I accidentally stepped on an item that caused him to grappleshot around the ceiling, repeatedly BAM/POWing enemies that weren't there.  There seems to be a random upgrade system at play throughout the game, which basically adds a Mario Kart unpredictability to any pick-ups.  This might have worked if the basic gameplay was up to scratch, but as the punching & kicking is atrocious it just makes the whole thing feel like a shoddy interactive tombola.  You plod along hammering buttons while weird shit happens and, given that it's a seemingly straight port of an arcade game, it persistently holds its hand out for more coins along the way.  The rub here being that the home port limits the amount of credits available, with the easiest setting allowing a maximum of 7 continues, which ran out for me (so I had to go back and cheat).  Whereas the best examples of the genre allow good players to stay on top of enemy waves with what tends to be called crowd control (by making use of throws that knock enemies over, backwards attacks, sprinting into space and so on), this just seems to exist in a perpetual state of lurid, trippy, shonky button mashing.  Just about the only way to win, as far as I could tell, was to constantly perform fireball motions and spam punch for multi-hit attacks, then jump to safety at a key moment.  By the halfway point I felt like a casualty of the longest thumb war ever.  Enemies can wreck you in seconds if they lock you in their pocket, and there's no rescue special that allows you to do anything about it.  

I despise digitised graphics with a passion and this is an especially poor example of a fad that mercifully died out not long after it kicked off.  Still, my hatred of the visual style didn't affect my judgement with the gameplay here - even if it looked as glorious as something like Alien Vs Predator this would be a deep basement tier belt scroller.  It has no redeeming features that spring to mind and I wouldn't even recommend it as a 'check this crap out' co-op experience.  Truly horrific; I didn't expect to play anything worse than BttFIII so soon into the 90s tie-in project, but here we are.  23%

As usual when I post YouTube videos, apologies if it eventually turned out that this guy was an incel weirdo:



Sorry to be a sourpuss grumpyface but 'it's so zany!' isn't worth half as many points from me *goes back to considering Bud Spencer & Terence Hill: Slaps & Beans 2 on the EShop at 20% off*

Rambo: First Blood Part II - Master System (40mins)

I knew this as Secret Command when I had it - iirc it was re-released as part of the upper-lower tier budget offerings and cost £12.99 new.  The Ninja was only £9.99, and that's a much better game imo, but this was still good fun, even if it was knocking on a bit by the time I first played it in 1990.  At some point I presume it was rebranded as a Rambo game when Sega had the license for a bit. Or maybe the ROM I found is the American release, but wotevs - this is essentially the same game I had as a kid on my PAL Master System.  

It's very slow for a Commando clone, which isn't really something I mind because it gave me a chance to actually get through it (with copious amounts of save states ofc).  It's odd that all bullets travel slower than a nonchalantly chucked paper plane, but if they were any faster I doubt I would have ever seen stage 2 as a kid.  Confession: I've never seen Rambo part II (or III for that matter), but I'm interested now that I know the big boss at the end is the head of a giant mechanised rock monster hiding in the final room of a futuristic lair. 

It's aged better than most but I wouldn't say it's worth playing these days unless you're revisiting.  Considering it first appeared in 1986: 82%