I’ve been playing a lot of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy lately and it seems like it has a number of improvements over the arcade release. I’m curious what other ports people find particularly good.
I’ve been playing a lot of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy lately and it seems like it has a number of improvements over the arcade release. I’m curious what other ports people find particularly good.
Hands down: Bionic Commando (NES).
The arcade game is an exercise in quarter-eating frustration, with difficulty on par with Ghosts and Goblins only with harder movement tech. I promise you, the next time you boot this in MAME, you’ll move on in under three minutes, possibly never to return.
The NES version is a platforming masterpiece of difficulty scaling, minor backtracking, lightweight inventory management, all with a nice side of world exploration to tie it all together. It even has Commando-style mini-games to break up any possibility of monotony. It’s a solid playthrough that has all those elements, but nothing is overdone or gets in the way of the action.
This is a good example, but man did I dislike Bionic Commando on the NES. I was just so terrible at it. There was clearly just some disconnect in my brain because I beat many of the ultra hard NES games.
I totally get that. Every other game has A for jump, B for shoot, with some subtle variations on top of that. That muscle-memory runs deep. Then this game comes along like “I’m going to destroy this man’s whole career” by changing out jump for “do wildly different stuff depending on which way the d-pad is leaning.”
I really wanted to like that game too, I could tell it was a good game. It just wasn’t meant to be.