SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (Iron Tank Part 2, Ikari III: The Rescue, and P.O.W.) playthrough
0Whew, quite the title up there. That's right though, three games today. Kinda, just the last level of Iron Tank (since it had a continue system), which should have finished yesterday but for the crash. That crash hurt, a lot, as it wiped out all of my weapon energy, which would have made the final boss a bit easier having full ? and refuel. Oh well. The final boss was actually kinda neat, being multiple stages. But overall, the game is just brutal. The AI for the enemy tanks is actually a little too good, in that it knows where to sit to be able to attack you without opening itself for attack. And enemies NEED to open themselves to attack for the game to have a semblance of fairness. I didn't like this game at all.
Next was Ikari Warriors III: The Rescue. The last in the only "series" of games in this set. Though each game is radically different. And in this one, they mostly took away the guns. An Ikari Warriors game without guns. Instead, we have BATTLE DANCING! Seriously, the enemies in this are more ballet dancer than soldier. And it's pretty awful. The graphics are decent, but they really, really needed to differentiate the different enemy AIs better. Almost all the enemies in the stage look the exact same, just behave a bit differently. At least SNK did learn some lessons, controls are pretty good, even if you can only attack four directions now instead of 8. And you do get indications when you are doing actual damage to bosses... kinda. Some are a bit unclear. I didn't like this game either.
Finally, is P.O.W. Prisoner of War. This one I loved the arcade version of, though I've never been very good at. It's a side-scrolling beat 'em up, in the same style as games like Streets of Rage, Final Fight, Double Dragon, etc. And it performs quite well. It doesn't have the same bullet, er, punch sponge enemies as games like Final Fight, and you can get some good power-ups in this home version, such a brass knuckles to make you deal more damage. Really, another actually very solid entry on the NES. In fact, this might be the best side-scrolling beat 'em up on that system. Some of the bosses, sadly only two, had a neat effect for them. You had to beat up enemies until they dropped grenades, then throw those. It's pretty simplistic, but it worked really, really well.
And that marks the end of considering the "SNK Collection" as its own block, as starting tomorrow I look at the final NES game in it - Crystalis. Though given the size of that particular game, I'm going to be treating it as its own thing. On YouTube, it'll still be included in the SNK playlist of course, but I'm putting all of these up on their own first. -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/the_nametag
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