NES #17: Strider

Well here's yet another Capcom game. It seems like they made half the games I've finished so far. I'm not sure if that's because they are especially easy or that I played them so much as a kid. Either way I appreciate Capcom for making this blog a little bit easier. Many of their games are easy to get through and fun to write about.

So Strider was a game that I absolutely loved as a kid. I always loved non-linear games with deep story lines. This game also reminded me of Bionic Commando which was my absolute favorite game. Looking back on it though the two games don't seem all that similar. Maybe I thought they were alike because of the world map and menu screen. They both just seemed a little more advanced than the average Nintendo game.

Anyway, this game is about a group of Striders. Or are the bad guys the Striders? I have to be completely honest with you. The story in this game makes absolutely no sense to me. The storytelling is a little clunky, so it's hard to tell what's going on. First you're supposed to go kill Kain, then you save Kain, then he goes crazy, and your sister is in there somewhere, then there's a guy named Faceas Clay (get it!), then all your friends die and you appear to be fighting against the Striders. It's all very confusing.

The gameplay is set up in an interesting way. Some of the levels you will pass through more than once. Along the way you will get key cards and special items that help you get further into levels. It's sort of a pre-Symphony of the Night layout. It sounds like it would get a little tedious, but the levels are set up well. The new sections are usually placed in the earlier parts of the levels so you don't have to travel long distances over the same terrain. The only thing I don't like about the levels is that, like a depressingly large amount of NES games, you keep having to fight the same boss over and over. You got this big alien robot computer thing that you fight about a half dozen times. It's easy the first time and never gets any harder. Oh, and there's also a part where you are in Australia then you go through a small tunnel and are in China, but I'm gonna let them slide on that one.

I just have a couple of nitpicks with the game play itself. First of all it is way too hard to do a wall jump. You're going to need to quite a few times in this game, but the jump controls are really stiff. The first time I attempted to beat this game I must've tried wall jumping a hundred times before I ever did it successfully. It's even worse when you have to do two or three of them in a row. The other thing that bugs me is that the special moves you get are almost completely useless. I never remember using any of them except for the plasma shot and the health recovery. There's also nothing on the screen that tells you when you've got them. I guess it's not much of a problem since you'll never use them anyway. It does make for a cool looking menu screen though.

Although I've played Strider a million times, this was the first time I ever beat it. It surprises me some to say that because the game isn't very hard. It's also quite short for a password game. I doubt it took me more than a couple hours to beat it. It's probably about half the length of Super Mario Bros. 3 if you skip the warp zones. This is certainly a good weekend afternoon game for when you can't think of anything to play among your 250 NES games and you're in the mood to play through one you haven't beaten before. I'm sure that kind of thing happens to you all the time.