A Wolf Among Us (01/03/15)
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ (All courses S ranked on 01/08/15)
Distance (beta 3315, 01/11/15)
Shantae: Risky's Revenge- Director's Cut (01/16/15)
Sega Bass Fishing (01/17/15)
Fairy Bloom Freesia (01/17/15)
BasketBelle (01/18/15)
Tiny & Big: in Grandpa's Leftovers (01/20/15)
Sideway: New York (01/22/15)
Doom 64 EX (01/23/15)
Shadow of the Ninja (NES, 01/29/15)
Shatterhand (NES, 01/30/15)
S.C.A.T. (NES, 01/31/15)
Abadox (NES, 02/01/15)And with that, I have finished all of the American games from this list:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/natsume/natsume.htmBut to finish my Natsume NES tour, I still need to also play Dragon Fighter, Power Blade, Power Blade 2, and The Jetsons: Cogswell's Caper. There's also Dungeon Magic: Sword of the Elements, but I don't have any interest in that one since it looks like it aged horribly.
Abadox was great up until the level leading up to the final boss, which had these ridiculous enemies that were five flames that would quickly spiral in to form a phoenix that would then fly away like a rocket to the top of the screen. It was very easy to get killed instantly by one of the five spiraling flames unless you just happened to know where you should be on the screen to not get killed, which took a little memorization. The other tricky thing though, is that you can't shoot when the flames are coming in because you will destroy one or two of them. If that happens, they don't form the phoenix and instead pursue you relentlessly until you die. This meant that for large portions of the second-to-last level, you had to avoid shooting anything (and there were lots of things to shoot) or else you would trigger your demise. I played the game with save states that I would only start at the beginning of the level, but I eventually abandoned that idea on this penultimate challenge.
The rest of the game was a lot of fun though. The (almost) last stage was still enjoyable with save states, but it would have driven me insane without them. Abadox is also one of those shmups that is designed so that you almost have to get a 1CC if you decide to play without save states because your powerups and speedups slowly stack up and are all lost when you lose a life. Their absence is keenly noticed. However, don't get too many speedups or your pretty much destined to crash. I was able to get through most of the game on one credit, but died somewhere around Stage 4 or 5 and reloaded from saves after that.
Where this game really shines, other than the great gameplay, is in the concept and graphics. You have flown inside of this planet-sized alien being in space that's basically like a moon with a mouth. The graphics are full of quivering flesh and intestinal coils as you fly through the guts of this thing. It's pretty gross, but with the 8-bit graphics the disgust of it is all kind of fun and cool rather than how nauseating I can imagine an HD revamp of this game could be.
Playing through these games, I'm finding that Natsume was really a powerful dark horse in the NES days. The games I've played have all been great, but also all led up to some infuriatingly difficult final moments that likely prevented many people from finishing their games on original hardware, and thus kept them from having a greater mass appeal.
