Shatterhand (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
734A playthrough of Jaleco's 1991 NES action game, Shatterhand.
Shatterhand is a "westernized" face-lift of the Famicom game Tokkyuu Shirei Solbrain. It's a classic Natsume platformer, only now starring an 80s fashion hero who rocks massive BluBlockers, a Marty McFly vest, and rolled-cuff jeans. He also can destroy pretty much anything with his fists, hence the name Shatterhand.
Anything includes walls, people's faces, and bullets. That's right - he can punch gunfire right out of the air. How cool is that?
He can also summon a semi-autonomous flying doid to fight with him by collecting three alpha and/or beta icons. The order you grab the icons in determines which robot shows up, and there's a good variety to choose from. My favorite is the one that fires mines, but they're all pretty useful.
If you manage to grab the same combination of icons a second time, and if your droid is still intact, you'll transform into a super robot thing that shoots fireballs. If you can reach a boss in this form, you'll be able to cut him down without too much trouble.
The gameplay is fast and *very* smooth, and there's a lot of variety here for a game that ultimately boils down to running to the right while violently flailing at anything that moves. One level allows you to flip gravity (like Metal Storm), while another has a floor that pushes you toward walls of spikes as missiles go flying by. The droids give you some interesting options in approaching some of the stages' hairier chokepoints (if you're fighting in close quarters, always go for the ricochet shot!), and the boss designs do some neat things to keep it all feeling fresh.
Shatterhand certainly has its moments of teeth-grinding frustration, but overall, the difficulty level is very manageable. The game isn't a cakewalk, but the controls are usually rock solid (save for those wall grab/jump segments, argh!) and the stage designs *usually* avoid throwing too many things at you at once. It requires a bit of practice and the development of a few strategies, but it's never painful in the way that Ninja Gaiden, Batman, and Contra all had the tendency to be: if you were good at NES games back in the day and had rented Shatterhand on a Friday night, there was a good chance that you'd have seen the ending before it went back. It's not super easy (like Jackie Chan) nor will it make you want to snap a controller in half (like Adventure Island). I thought that it struck a comfortable balance between challenge and fun, and mechanically it's of a level of quality generally reserved for the toppest-tier Konami, Sunsoft, and Capcom games.
It also competes in that same league with its graphics and sound. The killer intro and the stage select scenes are ridiculously overblown (I mean that as a big compliment), the stage backgrounds are loaded with little animated elements and feature some of the best looking parallax scrolling I've seen on the NES, and the fluidity of the player sprite's animation is impressive. And that soundtrack! It stands out - even among the Natsume NES titles - for just how well done it is. It's dramatic, punchy (no pun intended), and drives a pretty hard beat non-stop. By the time you've beaten it, several of these themes will be permanently etched into your memory.
This is a title that deserves all the praise that it's given. The gameplay and the level of polish applied here places Shatterhand firmly in the same league as the NES's best action games, and if you don't love it, I have but one question for you: have you played it?
(This is a replacement for an older video I had up. It was only 480p so the picture was a bit muddy, and since the encode for this playthrough is 60fps, sprite flickering no makes things invisible. Much better now!)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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