NES #14 Guerrilla War

Seriously folks, this has got to be one of the easiest games ever made. I remember renting this one often as a kid because it was one of the few games I could actually beat with only a couple of days to play it. I was really proud of that back then. When you're a little kid without many skills you'll take whatever little victories you can get. Last week I played through it once again and the whole experience only took about fifteen minutes. I probably should've saved this game for a later time when I was starting to run out of games to beat. Now there will probably be blank spots in this blog. Oh well, I don't think there's many people reading it anyway.

So when you first start the game up it doesn't seem like it's going to be easy at all. The gameplay is very similar to Ikari Warriors. It seems like there's always four or five guys shooting at you at once, and you of course die in one hit. When I came back to this game after an 18 year absence I died very quickly and thought that maybe my memories were wrong. I thought that maybe it was like Rush'N Attack where I remembered playing through it with the Game Genie only to find out that it's actually a very difficult game. However, after playing this one a little while I figured out that I was right all along.

So what makes a game where you die every 15 seconds so easy? Well there are two very closely related things. The first one is that you have unlimited continues. The second one is that after you continue you start back in the exact same spot you died in. This really takes the strategy and challenge out of the game. You can just run blindly forward and die 50 times but still win. You don't even have to shoot anything until you get to the bosses and you'll still be fine. And all those hostages you have to save? All they do is give you bonus points which will go away after you get a game over. You could conceivably kill all the hostages, leave all the enemies standing besides the bosses, and still win. What kind of a game does that?

Okay so I guess I can see where the developers were coming from. They probably thought the game was too hard at first. Nobody would even be able to get past the first level if they didn't make it the way they did. However, this really takes the fun out of it. There's no reason to do anything except run to the finish line. Who cares if you get shot up along the way? They could've at least made the game with checkpoints. That way you would have to clear a certain amount of terrain before you could continue again. That would at least make things a little more interesting.

So this entry ended up sounding a little more negative than I expected. It's just that this game isn't like I remembered it. Well actually, I guess the problem is that it's exactly how I remembered it. Blindly shooting and winning without a challenge is the kind of thing that appeals to a 7 year old, and not so much to a 26 year old. I guess I should just say that this game brings back memories but is not as much fun all these years later and leave it at that. But seriously, why did you do it SNK!! That game could've been a blast!!