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.

Simple 1500 Series Vol. 24 - The Gun Shooting (Playstation)

Judging by the title of this game, and the fact that it's a Simple 1500 budget release, you'd probably expect a bland, bare-bones target shooter, maybe like a less colourful version of Point Blank. Surprisingly, it's not like that at all: it has a plot, characters, and even an animated intro showing those characters getting aboard some kind of futuristic buggy thing! It also has some pretty cool artwork on the loading screens between stages. Of course, I can't tell you what the plot is about, or what the names of the characters are because all that stuff is in Japanese. Who cares anyway, though?
Anyway, the game is a typical lightgun shooter: you move slowly through the stages shooting at tanks, robots and other mechanical stuff that wants to kill you. The stages are fairly varied in their looks, though they all take place in some kind of exotic outdoors wilderness, there's forests and valleys and deserts and so on, so they aren't all the same. You do fight a lot of the same enemies on every stage, though, but that's one of the corners you expect to be cut in a budget game.
The only problem with the game is the difficulty: it is incredibly easy for most of the game. You can take at least thirty hits before getting a game over, and not only are the enemies not particularly enthusiastic about trying to kill you, but at least half of the time you get hit, you won't lose any health. Plus you're likely to get at least one extra life on each stage. I did say it was only incredibly easy for most of the game though, as once you get to the mid-boss of the last stage, and what I assume is the game's final boss, the difficulty takes a sudden and dramatic spike upwards. These two guys will hit you fast, and take off lots of health when they do. It's really cheap, and i would have preferred a harder game in general to a very easy game with really hard bosses at the end. Until you reach that point, it's a fairly fun, leisurely game and the surprisingly high production values make me wonder why it's a simple series game with a generic title, rather than being sold on it's own right with an actual name and such. I'm also slightly surprised that it wasn't one of the simple series games brought to the west under a different title by budget publishers late in the Playstation's lifespan.