Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium (Hyper Dyne Side Arms, Avengers (JP), Black Tiger) playthrough
0Three more games today, and all three were bad in their own ways. Some real cheapness today, and a good glimpse on why arcades were starting to fail in the late 80's to early 90's.
Hyper Dyne Side Arms: This one was tricky, but I saw the trick right away. The first two levels throw a bunch of powerups at you, and not a whole lot of enemies. They let you experience how powerful you can get, and get the feeling that you can take on everything. And then it throws a vertical stage at you. And, with this game, because of the power-up system, it's not even as soon as you die but rather as soon as you lose the fusion form that you may as well walk away from the cabinet. Enemies are beyond plentiful, especially later on. You don't get a lot of wiggle room, the new live invulnerability doesn't last long at all. Power-ups are abundant... but almost impossible to really collect, since you have to shoot them enough times for them to cycle through to the proper thing. Worse, the game was boring. The same enemies, the same bosses, over and over and over. It wasn't fun. And this is one that wasn't on any of my earlier sets.
Avengers (JP): Another one where the Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 was able to get the English ROM, but not here. Strange. The game started out really good. I liked the controls of it, I liked the style. Top-down, melee combat. Sure the boss with the chain was a bit overboard, swinging it around overhead and making limited windows to attack, but nothing that couldn't be death with. But that was just the first boss. We're back to a checkpoint system game, but this had one of the worst 'arcade' mechanics I've seen. Bosses that block your attacks, have very limited windows to hit them... and have a timer that automatically game-overs you. UNLESS you lose a life to refill your timer. Wow, just.... wow. You have to die to advance. Combine that with some really questionable hit boxes near the end and you get a game that had promise, but being forced to steal your money meant they had to destroy what could have been fun. Again. People think microtransations today were bad for the "fun" of games, having games designed around incentivizing people to spend their money, that practice has existed for nearly 50 years now. Make the game worse to make people pay more.
Black Tiger: This one initially reminded me of Magic Sword. But it once again ran into the "it's an arcade game, make them spend money" problem. Specifically, it has a mechanic that just punishes you for trying to continue playing. You gain extra life based on your score. A score that resets when you continue. So you either have to be good enough to get that high score for more life, or good enough to not need the life. Which will get you the more life anyway. I truly disliked it. You can get armor to help, but the armor is a one-shot, and prevents you from spending the coins on weapons upgrades which, initially, are more important because they keep. This is a game where, once you die, there's not a lot of point in continuing. And that's not good for quarter-eating. -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/the_nametag
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