If you've followed my blog for the last couple months you may have noticed me mention the game Thunder & Lightning a couple times in my future plans. If you're not familiar with the game its an Arkanoid clone. A pretty good one though. I played it several times before my surgery and got the either the last level or second last level 5 times and then failed. One such run was particularly frustrating as I got to the last level with 5 extra men, which should have been more than enough to finish it off. All I needed was pretty much any item except the missile. Literally any other item would have been helpful (some more so than others, obviously) except that one. Well with my 5 lives I was able to obtain 5 missiles before dying. Its very rare that I get the same item twice in a row, so 5 was devastating.
When I was recovering from surgery at home I gave the game a try on our 42" Flatscreen and was finding it much more difficult to play for some reason. So it got shelved until I returned to work this past week. With all of the above in my mind I was determined to finally beat it even if it meant playing it safe (or being cheap some might say :p). There are 3 levels that have new blocks spawning and if you can clear out enough of the blocks and keep them at a manageable level you could play the same level for as long as you want. By doing this I spent probably about 1-1.5 hours farming 1UPs between these 3 levels in order to ensure my victory. Doesn't make for the most exciting video, but I'm still happy to be able to cross it off my list! And after all that I was treated to the best ending screen to date......
Since we had a pretty good snowfall up here already what better game to celebrate with than Heavy Shreddin'. Much like George Foreman's KO Boxing this game seemed brutally hard at first. After getting used to the controls and realizing that you NEVER have to use one of the two styles of control available it became quite a bit easier. The game seems quite long at first two, but all of the 18 different runs are short so in the end my final run was just barely over 20 minutes. The Backwoods levels which you have to finish at the end of each run are really a lot of fun too. This game really surprised me.
Last up for this update is Flying Warriors. You might remember me talking up how much I enjoyed playing Flying Dragon this year. I was very much looking forward to Flying Warriors as its somewhat of a sequel. While it did have some of the parts I enjoyed from Flying Dragon it also added a lot of new things to the game. Most of which I didn't like. One of the things I liked to much about Flying Dragon was the simplicity of it. The game had you doing fetch quests, farming enemies for money, changing to multiple characters for slightly different spells, and a couple poorly thought out turn based boss battles. I really want to like this game, and had they fleshed out some of the new ideas a little better I think I would have, but given the choice I'm gonna pick Flying Dragon over it.
Future Plans - With the nintendoage list I'm using to choose my games dwindling, and the number of games I even own on that list rapidly shrinking, I'm getting relatively low on options these days. I got my doctor's OK to finally dig into those two last power pad titles I've been salivating over though. After that though you can probably expect to see some gems like Back to the Future II & III, Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure, Mad Max, Roger Clemens MVP Baseball, and maybe if your lucky some Pinball games!
