^ re: the prince of persia talk. never played the game much, pretty sure i'd hate its weird trial & error sensibilities. however, i did recently order the super famicom version for its gorgeous boxart. next time my friend who lets me tag in on his import orders visits, i'll probably give it a shot.
Blinge wrote:
I think where I finally gave up was the memo handcart/rail tracks level.
going to be honest, here, i pause/unpaused through that, eheh. it's way too fast!!!

i did the same for clinger winger on battletoads - the only level in either game i pulled that shit on. they're both so brazenly awful, near-cueless memorization festivals that i just didn't care how i did it so long as i got through them. i also feel like i have a significantly reduced capacity for simon says shit compared to most people, really. i just cannot drill it in without what feels like total agony. reminds me of schoolwork or something, i just start glazing over and become inundated with myopic, existential woe.
Sumez wrote:
I never figured out how to move out of the starting area on the first stage. I'm glad it was only a rental...
i had a few rentals like this back when i was younger, too. i think the one that always sticks out to me as the worst was the NES "mario is missing," which i couldn't finish a single stage on. i was really particularly young at the time of renting it and extremely disappointed at how it was not as good as any other mario game i'd played. ahhh lol
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bear with me for a story i'll tie back into being relevant - so, my cat, aisha, gets separation anxiety when she's not in the same room as we are, but cannot enter into our game room without strict supervision because of the many display items in there for her to chew on. she similarly can't be in the living room without some supervision despite spending most of her time in there with us, so we have a homemade gate (that i'm proud of) in the hallway we'll put her behind when we're in another room or if she's acting up and we don't have the energy to deal with her wanting to misbehave - or, y'know, if we need to be out and about. this gives her the hallway, the staircase, and the area at the top of the stairs (where i usually sleep on a foam mattress to keep her company). it's got all her toys, the litterbox, food & running water, etc.
however, doing & undoing the gate requires fiddling with this latch, and the game room is in the area behind the gate with the only bathrooms either past it or all the way upstairs. the kitchen similarly requires going past the gate. if i want to go in the game room, i can't leave her unsupervised in the living room because of her tendency to get on stuff without someone watching and my tendency to
have a lot of stuff, so i have to lock the gate behind me. she also likes to try to squeeze past it and into any room i'm in, because she gets separation anxiety really easily and starts freaking out if you enter another room without her and crying and mewling. she'll even wake up from a nap just to immediately lose her shit.
so, for the last year and a half, to play most of my classic games without moving individual consoles out to the living room SDTV, i have to wrangle her, get her in the gated area, and then squeeze into the gameroom without her slipping in. then, when i want a snack or need to use the bathroom (and i'm on a diuretic for health reasons, so this is frequently), i have to do the gate again, twice, and both sneak in & out of the room without her squeezing in. on top of my seriously difficult depression and anxiety issues, this has been gradually weening me off casual play of games i love for this whole period because it is really, really tedious and is also a strain on my back problems.
no longer!!! hopefully! i've finally moved all the classic gaming consoles back into the living room as of yesterday and have immediately started trying to catch up a bit. wound up playing a couple of games on webcam for a friend. unlike the taz-mania friend, she wasn't watching with the intention of revelling in my suffering, though like the taz-mania friend, she ultimately did laugh heartily at my agony when i hit the second of the two games.
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those games i played were:
ankoku densetsu (pce) -
also known in the west as "the legendary axe II," this game is a... sequel? spiritual follow-up? to makyo densetsu (which you can watch a pretty quality play i did of
right here), that kinda manages to feel like a proper follow-up despite little-to-no meaningful crossover staff and some divergent mechanics. i managed to get to the final boss on my first attempt, and then cleared the game with a whopping
thirteen spare lives (at some point, an enemy dropped a very rare "VII" icon, which turned out to be 7 1-ups) on my second attempt, only dying once from a time out in the final maze and finishing with a score of 767,000. while i think this game falls a little bit short of makyo densetsu's quality, i feel like it only falls a teensy bit shy and is actually a rather good game, like its predecessor. solid action, tight-but-occasionally-restrictive controls, pacing that feels great at first but becomes a little bloated late-on, and a solid, but slightly offbeat and charming presentation you'd expect from a pc engine classic.
its biggest faults are how directionless it becomes late-game, and how the general set design isn't quite as tight as its predecessor. as long as you keep yourself powered up and have vague familiarity with level layout, you can plow through this game with some incredible ease. while i think it stood at potential for exceeding its predecessor (whose last level is just way too damn long) due its slightly more interesting multi-weapon system and lack of the uniquely strange charge mechanic to clog the pacing up, it's missing a bit of the bite & structure. one way in which this manifests is that many bosses can be won by attrition, particularly if you're wielding the axe. while i use the sword through most of the stages for its flexible swing arc and reasonable range (occasionally switching to the chain), the later bosses in particular are total jokes with a beefed up axe and can be shred to pieces.
levels become a bit more mazelike as you hack and slash your way through them, ending with a genuine maze packed with dead ends (and copies of the rather mean next-to-final boss) for the last stage. though its not as long, winding, or memorization heavy as makyo densetsu's infamous tunnels in its last stage, it's still, similarly, not particularly fun, nor does it leave a satisfying taste in one's mouth for the conclusion. like makyo densetsu, ankoku densetsu ends up being a slightly front-loaded experience, where i think it's most enjoyable when it's leaning toward more casual design and not hitting you with the tedious hazards of its turgid final stages.
not to imply the game isn't worth one's time, however! i really feel like the goodwill generated by the earlier stages carries a momentum that lasts the rest of the game, and it's still a very enjoyable game to get a clear on. i'd recommend people maybe play it ahead of its predecessor, as while i don't consider it as good, it's a way more friendly way to break into the two of them and get used to some of their shared sensibilities. makyo densetsu is a bit more of an acquired taste, while ankoku densetsu is more easy to break into and immediately have fun with.
mesopatamia (pce) -
also known as somer assault, over here. ah, man, a stinging disappointment this game is! it's trash, plain and simple. i must have spent something like 8k yen on this little sucker and good god is it not worth it. when picking pc engine games up and browsing its library, i often liked to consider this part of what i mentally referred to as the pc engine's
weird trilogy of idiosyncratic action games you couldn't really get much of, elsewhere. along with it was gomola speed, a 'snake'-esque... seek & destroy (?) that totally owns, and gekisha boy, which i've played none of yet but seems to be like what you would get crossing a crass irem auto-scroller with pokemon snap.
mesopotamia seemed really neat with its bizarre slinky protagonist and its deeply strange sense of motion, but atlus clearly had not a fucking clue what they were doing and designed one of the most incompetent action games i've ever played. were it not for the decent music and admittedly quite striking & quality pixel art (all the astrological signs get depicted as giant, metallic gods, including a big-tittied baphomet for capricorn, for whatever reason), i would consider this worse than a mid-tier xbox live indie game. and, to be clear, i say that having been someone who subjected themselves to more of that platform than anyone reasonably should - i know how biting an insult that is.
almost none of the game is designed around your weird movement and firing angles, getting hit can often take a second to register, and enemies & the totally random power-ups they drop can despawn (or not spawn at all) with comically minimal scrolling. levels have strict time limits that are sometimes (i believe literally, measurably) impossible to meet if you haven't gotten powered up without losing a life, and most bosses are most aptly fought by simply staying in a corner and blasting them away via attrition. i can't tell you how many lives i lost while playing this just because of timing out thanks to the directionless maze stages and slow movement.
on top of everything, i got to the very end to the final boss and couldn't defeat them (first it's... satan, as a woman? then some shadow duplicates? then... yahweh???). i think if i'd have persisted long enough, i'd have eventually gotten good enough luck on the projectile patterns, but some of the attacks seem completely unavoidable (particularly without speed-up) and i'd keep getting deep in and just losing through attrition. i'm going to tackle it again sometime soon and farm extra lives on my birthday astrological sign, which determines which boss will just throw you power-ups. can just collect a bunch of 1ups and then cruise through the rest of the game to actually have enough HP to just sit through the end.
i want to really, really, really recommend against this one to anyone not deliberately looking to add expensive kusoge or atlus titles - there's so little of redeeming value for the price tag. even as someone who has come to really appreciate gritty, mediocre action games of the time period just for their good sense to be brief & challenging, this was totally uninteresting, grindy, and awful.
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edit: ah, also -

this is apparently the ending screen in the US version, which appears to have a cutscene made just for its opening, too. does anyone know if the US one is slightly better programmed or fixes anything? the addition of the cutscene makes me curious if they cleaned anything about this mess up.