#0122 Rolling Thunder

Today I played Rolling Thunder. A Side Scrolling SHMUP from Namco.

Ya know, for all the praise this book gave this game. I gotta say, I'm really not seeing it. It's really underwhelming, esspecially for an acrade game. The book says this game was "Explicit by even today's standards" and praises the game in its uniqueness.

Not only is this game not unique, (it's basically Green Baret with guns), it's really not good. The very first level, there's a series of boxes that are too high to jump over, and seemingly no way around them.

I was about to say, until I actually went and took a look at the arcade cabinet. Right on the cabinet it tells you how to jump onto the upper ledges. Had the game not had this, it would have been one disaster of the game. So I went back and played the game again, with this new knowledge and... It's still okay. Honestly, I really wanted to give it a chance, see where this "Shocking explicitness" was coming from, but it's just very underwhelming. The controls are simple, I suppose, but there's really no depth that I see to the game, and the difficulty curve is intimidating. I must have tried playing that game a dozen times and was never able to even get past the first level. That's not a sign of a good arcade game. If there is something of value to this game, then I didn't see it. And unlike Defender of the Crown, the fact that it didn't hook me within the first couple minutes isn't my fault, it's the developer's fault. If you're going to make an arcade game, you have to make sure that it's engaging to the auidence from the moment you start playing, otherwise they're going to move on to other games. Simple as that. Oh well.

Next up: Super Sprint