Saturday 2 April 2016

#9: E-SWAT: City Under Siege

Damn, it's been a while!

There's a few reasons for that. Most relevant is that I've been playing other games, which I really should write about at some point. I've even made some progress in Project X Zone... you can take that as indication to how I feel about E-SWAT: City Under Siege.

I didn't exactly wax lyrical about it last time, but now that I've managed to go through the game and watch the final boss die, I feel even worse about it. The levels get even less fun, becoming extremely repetitive and much harder. I really can't stress enough just how poor this game is.

I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I didn't beat E-SWAT entirely legitimately. The Mega Drive Ultimate Collection lets you keep three save-states per game, and I used them to maintain my progress between levels. Thanks to the terrible penalty of losing a weapon when you die, there's barely any point in retrying some levels. I guess in Contra fashion you might be able to swap to a useless weapon so you lose that one instead, but I really don't feel like giving this game any credit for strategy.

Do you like hard run and guns? Do you like bad endings to video games? Have you played all the good run and guns? Play E-SWAT. Or better yet, don't.

Emily picked my next game as Astonishia Story, a PSP RPG from Korea. Apparently this is actually "Astonishia Story R", a remake of the first game in the series, but you know how it is with Western JRPG releases.

We have a day out planned tomorrow, so I probably won't make much gaming progress.