Man this is burned into my memory, listening to this I'm sat cross legged on a bar stool on my bedroom carpet playing for hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikZpkZx-Qh4

The soundtrack is spectacular...

There's a English translation patch for the JP version that works in the Retron 5 (and I assume emulators since the Retron is based on that) - supposedly the best version of the game to play.

nick_md wrote:

Man this is burned into my memory, listening to this I'm sat cross legged on a bar stool

o/

Really not sure on True Lies now.

Like I said earlier, it's not inherently bad but just painfully average. By 1995 there were already much better games of this type on the SNES/MD than this, let alone the fact that the next gen was kicking off.

Anyone else played it apart from @nick_md

This type of licenced wander-around identikit game was the curse of the era. There wasn't anything wrong with them but they existed alongside the finest examples of the genre ever made.

I stayed well away then and continue to avoid licence tie ins. Buster Busts Loose remains the one exception I have encountered - I only got it because of glowing praise in Super Play.

Addams Family was nice game actually - there's another licence. Reminded me a bit of Jet Set Willy with the house layout and the bizarre enemies to avoid. Was a solid game that - early one too - but it probably struggled up against SMW at release.

I picked it up for pennies cart only long after the SNES was dead after reading a retrospective on it.

Konami's 16-bit track record (Nintendo and Sega) is ridiculous.
Solid as a rock.

Plok has an outstanding musical score. Gameplay and art style were quite good too.
But yeah, licensed movie tie ins were mostly quite shit.

True Lies gets a bit of love here and there. Not played it yet but there's a low level 'legit tie-in' buzz about it on a few retro channels.

True Lies (SNES)

Inoffensive is the best thing I can say to sum this up.

I'm not sure if it was ever any good. 1995 was quite a late release for 16-Bit. I could easily name a dozen 8 way overhead shooters that predate this that are much better.

As a retro game in 2020 its really not worth the time or effort, I played it for about 3 hours and only got about half way.

I'm not quite sure what the retro YouTube channels are thinking giving this game so much praise. It might be one of the best movie tie ins of the era but that doesn't make it a good game on its own.

The A.I is terrible, to kill the bazooka enemies for example you simply strafe back and forth shooting them whilst they stand motionless shooting your shadow. Then again Metal Gear Solid enemies could only see 10 feet in front of them, so am I being to harsh?

As far as a console war head to head goes the SNES one is definitely the better of the two. Rolling is done with the extra face buttton instead of a double tap of the strafe button, not that its a massive issue. Also things don't get busy enough for blast processing to be called upon and the higher colour palette of the SNES is very noticeable. Like Alien 3 it's not exactly one to brag about though.

So it's not horrible. It's playable, looks and sounds decent enough. Compared the The Last Action Hero and Terminator 2 it's a masterpiece, but compared to Smash TV, Zombies ate my Neighbours, Pocky & Rocky and countless others it's simply not good enough.

2/5

My Reviews

True Lies has a strafe button???

Is that the fix-position button?

I played some more just now but I'm finding it quite unforgiving, I'm only up to the third level (park/hedge maze). I'm using the password system as I don't really do save states. Maybe I'm shit.

Will post a full review/thoughts over the weekend.

Some Pocky Rocky 2 chat on page 82.

The grandaddy of twinstick arena shooters.
Still one of the best.

They did a semi sequel called Total Carnage but it isn't nearly as good as Smash TV.
Pocky and rocky feels like it could've benefitted from twinstick controls. They would've had to cut some gameplay features tho due to snes controller limitations.

I have both Smash TV and Total Carnage on SNES.

The SNES Smash TV is amazing, I even prefer it to the arcade version which I also have in an arcade collection on PS1.

I've never given much time to Total Carnage, should rectify that.

I'm up for either, and a lot of other games mentioned.

nick_md wrote:

Someone at work suggested we add Pocky & Rocky to our retro list. Never played it, looks lush and my kinda thing from screens/vids.

Or these.

Few retro games I've completed for the 52 games ina year thread:

Street Fighter: The Movie (PS) 

Playing through some games on my modded PS Classic, I thought I'd delete this curio after a few rounds but actually saw it through with Ken.

I always thought this was meant to be a terrible unplayable mess? Seemed fine on the surface tbh. I'm sure missing frames and hit detection differences make this terrible for experts ala HD Remix, but I strung together all the basics with specials and supers with no problems.

It felt like SSFII Turbo enough to me, maybe if I'd played for longer and with a few different characters I would have started to notice its faults.

Of course it's not worth playing over SSFII Turbo, and it's redundant to anyone who doesn't have a soft spot for the terrible movie its based on like me.

One I'll keep on the Classic which I was not expecting.

3/5

---

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Arcade)

Along with SFII the Alpha series are my favourite fighters by far and this is possibly my pick of the bunch.

Superseded not long after by Alpha 3, but by that time my interest in the genre had started to wane.

Played this an obscene amount of time back in the day and I still get a kick out of playing it to this day.

5/5

---

Tecmo Bowl (NES)

Aside from 10-Yard Fight which I got with my second hand NES way back in the day, the only American football games I’ve played are a handful of 16-Bit Madden games.

In 2012 I found myself getting into the NFL, for my sins I decided to follow the Detroit Lions and have even seen them twice at Wembley.

Sports video games these days are far to in depth for my tastes so I’ve decided to go retro, and what better place to start than what many consider a real classic, and I’m pleased to say I’m not disappointed at all.

This game has a great pace and is so simple, I think even non-football fans could get a kick out of it, especially in multiplayer. The game could be described an advanced rock, paper, scissors with an American football motif, much like how Punch Out!! has little to do with boxing.

You have 4 plays to choose from and the defence has to pick what they think you’ve gone for, much like the real game. If you choose run 1 and the defence picks the same, you’ll be crushed for a sack. If they’ve picked run 2 you’ll have a chance to gain some yards. If you chose pass 1 and the defence picked run 1 or 2, you’ll be gaining serious yards with no covering defence etc.

It’s nice and simple and perfect for my sports gaming tastes. Yeah there’s a lot of luck involved, but I always enjoyed my time playing, even when conceding a touchdown in the dying seconds of the 4th quarter to lose. Maybe if I got this instead of 10-Yard Fight in the 80’s I would have fell in love with the sport much earlier.

A tough one to rate, as an 8-Bit American Football game it’s nigh on perfect. Only officially licenced teams and players could improve it, which the sequel has. I intend to play that along with the three 16-Bit Editions at some point this year, especially once my excitement builds for the new season.

Because of that, this might become redundant very quickly and I might have to re-evaluate my scores for all five games at the end of the year, but for now at least...

4/5  

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Another World (Switch) 

Blew my mind in 1992/3 but I never had the patience to complete it back then. It's perfection through repetition of the highest order, and the amount of instant deaths put me right off. This anniversary edition has checkpoints at least, which makes it much more tolerable.

It never played great, which was more forgiving in the early 90s, but the delay and overall sluggish controls hinder the enjoyment. You do get used to them but its a far cry from even Flashback, which came out soon after.

The ability to change between the original and updated graphics with the push of a button is a feature I wish more updates did, but I gotta say the updated graphics are rather disappointing. The backgrounds are ok in places but much more should have been done, especially with the character models.

So after slogging my way through, cursing quite frequently, I was hoping for an ending fitting of the opening intro. It was terrible! So much so I took to the internet to find out more and discovered there was a North American Sega CD exclusive sequel, which carries on exactly where this left off.

This begs the question... why the fuck was that not included here? Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

I'm glad to finally tick it off the gaming bucket list. It's not aged particularly well, but it's a very iconic game that made a big impression with its cinematic experience. It's the best version to play, but if they included the sequel and gave it a bit more love it could have been so much more.

2/5  

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Virtua Racing (Switch)

Not much to say about this. Everything from the arcade original has been improved and a 20 lap grand prix mode and online play have been added.

It's a shame they didn't include the extra tracks and vehicles from the 32X/Saturn ports, like Another World it feels like a missed opportunity.

Unlike Another World though, this plays really well. I got addicted to beating my own times just as much as completing the game.

Good stuff, now where's Daytona, Sega Rally etc.

4/5  

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Punch-Out!! (Arcade)

Looks and sounds the part, but unfortunately the controls are a bit stiff and unresponsive, which for a game like Punch-Out!! is almost game breaking.

Vastly inferior to the console entries in the series, play one of those instead.

2/5  

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Tetris Attack (SNES)  

I'm not a massive puzzle game fan, but a few over the years became an addiction. Tetris, Dr Mario and Bust-A-Move being the big three, and this is most definitely up there with those.

The aim is to match 3 tiles of the same colour, the catch being you can only rotate your tiles horizontally. Once you get that down chaining combos and matching 4-5 tiles becomes the aim, and it becomes very addictive.

Like most good puzzle games, if it clicks it's almost a perfect game, for me the only negative is its difficulty. I only completed it out of sheer perseverance and a bit of luck.

5/5