Game:

Geostorm (1994)

Duration: 0:00

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6

A 1-credit clear of the arcade game GunForce II, rom [gunforc2], played with WolfMAME 0.270. Score: 1,161,300. This sequel dials up the melodrama to 11! With dramatic battles! Oodles of explosions! Bombastic music! The game barely holds together at times, and the butt-rock guitar is out of tune, but it's a badass memorable punk experience. The bosses are especially good. This game is sort of a messy rough draft for Metal Slug - some of the key staff who made this game at Irem went on to make Metal Slug at Nazca. I learned the game from Pete Hahn's commentated 1cc. There are also clear videos online from some of the usual suspects like LordBBH and Janet.

This is much harder than the original GunForce. For one thing it's longer, so there's more to learn and attempts take more time. There's a lot of visual noise on screen that can make it hard to spot threats - even after many hours playing the game I had occasional "Wait...WHAT KILLED ME?" deaths. There's a lot of RNG in play - randomized item drops, randomized enemy spawns like the three stage-2 midboss robots or the two pairs of walker mechs in stage 5, some randomized (or at least unpredictable) enemy AI, even randomness in whether the armored robots on stage decide to die when hit by normal shots. But the biggest boost in difficulty here is: You only have two lives! So while you can recover from 4 or so mistakes in the first GunForce, here you've got just one second chance. It took me dozens of attempts but in the end I got the clear.