Dragon Fighter (NES)

Sorry it's been so long since the last post, I've been spending lots of time playing fare far too mainstream for this blog, like Dodonpachi Ressurection and Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, and so on. Both of those are really good, by the way.
Anyway, when you first start playing Dragon Fighter, it seems pretty much like any other generic NES platform game: you're a sword guy in a frosty wasteland, it's really hard, you're fighting absurd enemies like killer snowflakes and ninja bears. But then you die and get game over (since there are no lives), and if you're me, you think "That can't be it! There has to be more to this game!", and you find out that there is more to this game, that this game has a gimmick. A really cool gimmick.
There are two meters at the top of the screen while you play. The shorter one is obviously your health bar (don't worry, it gets slightly longer every time you complete a stage), the longer one is your dragon bar. Your dragon bar fills up a tiny amount every time you kill an enemy, and when it's at least half full, hold up and jump together to turn into a dragon. Then proceed to fly around and shoot stuff until it runs out or you change back voluntarily.
Obviously, the cool gimmick alone makes the game a pretty amusing diversion, and apart from that it's not really bad, just a generic NES platform game. It does have one pretty big flaw, though: the only health recovery items are dropped by enemies randomly, so depending on whether the gods are on your side that day, you could get plenty of them or you could get none. In a game as hard as this, that can make a really big difference as to how far you get on a playthrough.