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Playing through Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers for NES, dumped from the Steam version of The Disney Afternoon Collection using the game-extraction-toolbox and run in the emulator Mesen.
Simple but fast, colorful, and well-drawn graphics and action as you run your tiny chipmunk through various giant-to-you environments, chucking oddly common miniature crates at everything.
This is fun until a few points that feel cheap, like the several sequences where double-sized enemies suddenly pop in from the sides kinda faster than you can get out of the way, and especially the one outlier boss fight midway through where for some reason a) you die in one hit instead of the usual three and b) recessed spikes in the floor have ridiculous hitboxes that hit/kill you from half your body width away.
I had trouble with some of the other bosses but I think that was me just sucking at recognizing what to do to avoid their simple but very wide bullet patterns.
Also, if you take the time to dig through all the mini crates in the levels you seem to find loads of health (acorns) and stars (sometimes extra lives?). I still have no idea what all the flower icons were for. ... Oh, 50 makes a 1-Up appear, says GameFAQs (ditto 10 stars). So yeah if I'd been going more out of my way--there's no timer in the game, so you could take all the time you wanted to collect them all, if you were into that sort of thing--to get those maybe even I would'a been swimming in extra lives.
Not having the patience for that, I definitely would have run through all my lives/continues in some of the boss fights and probably a few of the platforming bits (mechanized axes in the last stages, for instance); playing these Disney Afternoon Collection games is reminding me that I beat very, very few platform/adventure-style NES games as a kid; it wasn't even really my focus to do that, I just played them until I ran out of lives/continues, and maybe I would do that a few more times in the next few months, and that was about it. So Mega Man 2 was my first and last Mega Man game, for instance--I thought it looked great, and the sound was great, but I wasn't keen on falling down holes, and tricky boss fights, and eventually having to restart from the beginning, or mess with password codes, so that was enough.
Now that I can buy the ROMs pretty affordably and play them with save states I somehow feel like I need to get all the way through the darn things. When there are infinite lives cheats that's all right; when there aren't--Mesen doesn't have them for these Rescue Rangers games, alas--I have to resort to save scumming and I get sorta stressed out. : PPP So if Mesen had an infinite lives cheat for this game I would have liked it more, which isn't really fair to the game, except that it was kind of a horrible way to have games set up in the first place, which is why I didn't play them when the only way to play them was by their own rules.
Anyway, CnDRR is all right, aside from that one cheap boss fight in the middle. Apparently it can be played 2-player co-op, which would probably be something of a hoot. |
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