Game:

Cyber Core (1990)

Duration: 0:00

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4

Ralph's your name. Extermination's your game!
So that is the last of the Alfa System PCE clears I had to complete. And no, fuck Violent Soldier, I'm not playing that crap again hahaha.

Cyber Core is kind of a Xevious clone but with bugs instead. You predictably get some tiny unsatsifying enemies to destroy heh, but there's still plenty of chonky baddies to beat too. The game is surprisingly well paced for a console shmup and some of those enemy bullets are quite fast even. Alternating between air and ground targets adds some fun and variation in your inputs and approaches.

That said, the last stage is a big difficulty spike with the relentless enemy spam that kinda turns the game into a 20 minute waiting room followed by checkpoint hell. Over the attempts, I tried various kinds of weapons to tackle that stage, and here I initially wanted to try the side rings...but thought the brown power would give it to me even though it was actually the red one ooopsies. Getting the wrong powerup item is also really bad in this game because switching weapon types straight up resets your accumulated power upgrades for the previous shot! And even if you revert to the previous weapon type afterwards you have to rebuild the power. Wtf.

I kinda assumed a first death in the last stage was the end of the run, but I still tried to collect other weapons, test some positionning strats and stuff. And I thiiiink I got some sorta strat with the sideways sweeps and moving in ovoids...but nothing is truly 100% reliable in this level. I somehow made it to the boss after some heavy struggles. Thank goodness it's not a hard boss.

US version
Played on Mednafen