Gun.Smoke Arcade Full Legit Tutorial Playthrough With Commentary (Detailed Methods)
9I put "Legit" in the title because I have seen many cheated runs of the game with invincibility cheats. All my playthroughs are legit and detailed in the description. This is Rom Version US, 851115, Set 1 and is set to the default "Normal" difficulty mode, as are ALL arcade playthroughs I do, unless noted otherwise.
This game took over 20 hours to beat over the course of several years of on and off play . Its a 30 minute long game without deaths, so the density and difficulty is insane. This tutorial will be unique in that it shows how to survive checkpoint to checkpoint with no starting power ups most of the time. Its the result of not resetting when losing a continue, but the game definitely punishes you for it. Most videos dont show this aspect of old arcade games and can be deceptive when trying to beat them checkpoint to checkpoint. A very popular channel, World At Longplays, as an example, actually uses save and load states to cheat through games and reloads states anytime they take damage to make it look like No Damage/Death runs were done. I have only seen a few playthroughs on youtube of this game that appear legit.
In this tutorial I try to break down this INSANE game the best I can. Memorization only helps maybe 25 percent in this game. The rest is muscle memory and moment to moment adaptation, overall skill. In most old beatable games you can memorize movement completely or near completely. Best you can do in this game is memorize some spawns, but even those can change randomly it seems.
This makes games like Contra on NES look like beginner games. Gun.Smoke for NES is also nothing in challenge compared to this version. As usual arcade versions of many games ported to consoles were WAY more difficult, utilizing the extra arcade hardware power to fill the screen with death. This game takes that to a unique level of pain, compared to other arcades.
All but one death edited out, since the transition would be awkward otherwise.
Stay tuned !!