Why is Undeadline (MSX) held in such high regard?

[Damocles]

Bear in mind I've just been screwing around with MSX emulation, so any points may be invalid due to emulation deficiencies.

Honestly, I don't see it. The MSX rev is generally held to be quite fun, especially in comparison to the Genny/MD rev. Why is this? The enemies either cause negligable damage, or there are so many of them that avoiding damage is impossible. Weapons are relatively useless...at least near the beginning. Whenever there are more than a few enemies on-screen, the game slows to a crawl. The fairy/upgrade system is interesting though. *shrug*

Tell me that the slowdown is because of emulation problems and I'll be happy as hell....though on a 2.5Ghz comp, this shouldn't be an issue.

[Damocles]

Ok...I've played it some more, and it seems that things just keep getting worse. Weapons are horribly underpowered, and revert back to your default weapon at the start of the next stage. What the hell? I have not been able to work out slowdown issues, so I'm assuming it's from the game itself. Overall, it just seems to be a jumbled mess of randomly strewn enemies. Oh, and bosses are a joke.

[CecilMcW00t]

So to you is it harder than the Genesis/MD version? Cause the MD one is nail bitingly hard but it seems to be very possible. I was able to to get up to the 5th stage on default settings without continuing. Seems to be heavily memorization based.

[Damocles]

It's hard in a different way. Whereas the MD rev only lets you take 3 hits before dying, the MSX rev has quite a long lifebar. Coupled with the fact that enemies do very little damage and the presence of a shield/dodging ability, getting through the levels is almost guranteed. As mentioned before, bosses are a joke. One, maybe two patterns....at least on the first six stages.

No, the difficulty lies in the plodding place and enemy clutter. There is just so much stuff going on that it's difficult to keep track of. I'm looking for a way to overclock my emulator to see if I can get better results, but so far it's a no go.

EDIT: Overclocking to 150% or so helps some, but when there is only one or two enemies on screen, the pace becomes annoying once again. What I really need is some sort of dynamic overclocking method. And no, frameskipping doesn't do this.

[Shatterhand]

The game slowdowns in a real MSX, but I remember when I played it on an emulator, it slowed down a lot more.

Undeadline MSX is NOT harder than the MD version, not even close. I could finish MSX Undeadline back at the time, while I get destroyed in the 1st level of the MD version.

Back when this game was released, it was one of the most cool games on the MSX library. I think it's still very fun to play, though it has aged a lot.

For a better T&E Soft game, go for Super Laydock 2

[Damocles]

As a side-note, I've just found out that the X68000 rev. kicks all kinds of ass. That's all.