Creamy Goodness wrote:Absolutely loved Blazing Lazers until stage 8. At that point the game started feeling a little long to me along with a noticable difficulty spike.
The trick to clearing Blazing Lazers is blasting the weapon orbs on screen that change. When they turn into that green energy orb thing, collecting it will clear the screen but also if you look at your ship stock it will turn gold. Every one you collect gives you an extend which bypasses the checkpoints so if you can simply hoard enough of them early on and always get the shield you can simply manage resources well enough to clear it with brute force and strategy instead of skill like I did lol.
Two other secrets are that if you don't shoot the first boss it will eventually just leave and give you a boatload of bombs. There's also a secret 8-way shot you can get. It's all covered here:
https://retrogameresource.com/index.php ... pc-engine/
Also, with regards to mini consoles--if you guys want to use one as an emulation station I'd highly recommend either a mini SNES or NES. Check out PattonPlays on youtube and
https://www.reddit.com/r/miniSNESmods for easy instructions. It can run a lot of Playstation games decently. N64 is pretty meh and MAME is probably hit or miss, but it plays pretty much all 16 bit consoles and below just fine. But yeah, using a USB mod you can literally have the entire libraries of SNES, Genesis, NES, GBA down to GameBoy, PC Engine, etc. all in one neat and portable box. Plus the menu and song is really cute as a front end. On my PC I just use LaunchBox.
IMO when it comes to emulation vs hardware for me it's: Original hardware and games + a CRT > Original hardware with a flashcart or repo + a CRT > a PC with a good gaming monitor > a mini console
I've done them all, and I personally go the PC route for the most part these days out of sheer convenience. What's nice about emulating with retroarch in particular is that you can try out a ton of built CRT filters for modern TVs and monitors, extremely convenient save states for learning shmups where you can use a hotkey set on your controller to instantly load states and seemlessly grind sections and bosses, AND using run ahead you can minimize input lag for whatever controller or stick you are using. It's truly a golden age if you're into retro gaming and extremely bang-for-your-buck.
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