Retro
-Asterix
This is a cute little platformer. Apparently it’s a PAL only. There’s really nothing special to say about it. It’s pretty short. It gets a tad difficult toward the end, but never as bad as Adventure Island.
-Duck Tales 2
It’s been a good while since I played the first DT game and I really enjoyed it. This one was also enjoyable. It seemed a bit easier than the first one, but that might just be my age. It was fun and another licensed game that did it right.
-Ninja Gaiden
This game is a classic. The cutscene storytelling is amazing for the time. Problem is, it gets ridiculously difficult toward the end. This is the only of the NG games I played as a kid and I did make it pretty far, but ended up just shutting it off. It’s very frustrating to the point of impossibility. The way enemies respawn is just ludicrous. AVGN covered this crap pretty well.
-Ninja Gaiden 2
Even worse… much worse. This game just gets absolutely ridiculous toward the end. Even with savestates and rewind the game has some impossbily brutal moments. The final battles are just absurd considering you have to defeat 3 bosses in a row with a single life bar. That said, it’s more polished than the first. The addition of being able to climb all walls up and down was great. The multiple-shadow-images thing is extremely useful too. It would be overpowered if the game wasn’t ridiculously hard. Problem is you loose them if you die and the game would be even harder if I didn’t savestate my way to constant triple images.
-Ninja Gaiden 3
I’m in the middle of this one. Supposedly the US version is harder than the JP version (which is unusual). You lose double health, though with rewind I’m not noticing obviously. The game throws a lot of enemies at you like in NG2, but I finding it a little better developed. The respawning problem is no longer and issue. Even without the shadow images the game’s not too bad. Despite these improvements the game doesn’t feel the same as the first two. The story has certainly jumped the shark and being largely technological seems quite out of place.
The thing that made me want to blog right this minute was an amazing cutscene. I think it’s the one after the Act V title screen. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen on the NES. Basically it’s a scene of Ryu in the foreground on a precipice, a castle in the background, and mountains and clouds even more in the background. There are multiple layers of parallax scrolling as well as a Ken Burns effect panning Ryu into the shot. It’s nothing by today’s standards, but it’s absolutely breathtaking for NES.
