Thunder Force IV Playthrough | Megadrive/ Genesis | Real Hardware
6Review - This is one of the most graphically advanced games on the Megadrive. It really pushes it to the limit with all the effects going on at the same time. This takes a lot of inspiration from Thunder Force 3. Such as the ability to choose your weapons and ship speed on the fly, encouraging experimental play to give advantages over various situations. You also get to choose the order of the first 4 levels so you can practise. Where it builds on is the weapons are more impactful, there are more levels, a lot more bosses, but the main difference is that even though it is a side scrolling shooter, you can also scroll the screen vertically.
This makes for some very different gameplay situations as you can carve out your own path as different enemies will appear at the top or the bottom section of the screen. This can however be a disadvantage if you haven’t memorised the enemy placements on the top and the bottom because enemies can appear from the bottom or top of the screen without warning and not enough time to reflex dodge.
The boss fights are really epic and take a lot of practise to learn the patterns. Some of them are really too hard and took me a long time of practising on emulator with repeating save states over and over until I got the hang of the them to go for my real run. Not only are they rock solid, but there are loads of them. It took a very long time of learning before I could beat this game legit.
The quality of the game reminds me of Contra (Probotector) in how it pushes the graphics and epic boss fights, but it is unnecessarily hard. I honestly don’t know how I would have worked out the bosses without the luxury of emulators. Especially the last boss which looks like you can’t move because it fills the screen and you don’t know which parts of it’s body you can fly through. You even have to know to save a weapon that shoots backwards because one of the parts of the body can only be shot from the right side.
A fantastic game, but too hard.
Rating – 9/10
Difficulty – 9/10
Original JPN game played on PAL Megadrive modded with 60HZ region switch
Picture split between CRT TV for my own viewing and OSCC scan converter with 2x line doubler, upscaled to HDMI for recording
No cheat/ save states used
Easy difficulty
Game cart pic in thumbnail from my own collection
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#megadrive #genesis #thunderforceiv #thunderforce4