Game:

Forgotten Worlds (1988)

Duration: 0:00

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3

A 1-credit clear of the arcade game Forgotten Worlds [forgottn], played with WolfMAME 0.268. Score: 2,377,200. I just barely scraped out a clear, and ended up timing out two bosses. But...a clear is a clear!

This is a great game from a period where Capcom was releasing lots of exceptional arcade games like Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Strider, and Final Fight. It's got an unusual control scheme (which would have made it hard to drop into another arcade cabinet). You move a joystick to move, and rotate it to aim in any direction. Turn without firing to reposition your option (sometimes this is useful!), hold down the fire button and turn to just aim in a different direction.

A couple of notes:
- It's hard to avoid getting hit entirely in this game. But you can get armor (which deflects several hits), you can refill your vitality, and you can buy a potion that brings you back to life once. You also get a partial vitality refill after each stage.
- Tapping the fire button fires off a bomb that clears (almost) all shots off the screen and damages all enemies, at the cost of some vitality. I do that several times throughout the run, especially against the armored guys that start showing up on stage 7.
- There are lots of hidden items - money (zenny), armor, vitality refill, bonus points.
- In this route I delay buying a secondary weapon until I can get the bouncy shots, then keep them until I can switch to the bendy laser.
- Taking the bottom route on stage 5 allows for getting some big money by destroying the stationary electric zappers - they take a lot of shots but it's worth it.
- The second form of the final boss is extremely hard. When he turns purple, he's getting ready to fire off a spread of lasers that's very hard to dodge. Getting there with lots of resources (armor, life, and potion) means you can win a war of attrition.