Games I Have Finished (as far as I can remember)

[A Black Falcon]

Xbox 360
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Akane the Kunoichi - beat 100%. This 2d platformer is short and simple, but it's a $1 XBLA Indie Games title, so what would you expect? FOr the price, it was definitely worth it. The game is a tile-based, 8/early 16-bit-styled platformer. There aren't many enemy types, but at least each boss is different, and each of the five worlds has a new setting. The first three worlds are easy, but by the boss of world 4 it gets tougher, and 5 is definitely the hardest. Fun game though. It's short and cheap, and certainly is worth playing. It won't take long, and is fun. The ending could have been better (even the "you got all the stuff" ending is short and not that great compared to, say, the intro), but at least it was something.

As for the game, it's an action platformer where you play as a female ninja, Akane, and you have to save the lord, who was kidnapped by evil ninjas. The lord is popular with women, apparently, and Akane likes him too. You can probably guess how the good ending goes.

Sega Master System
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Bomber Raid - Yes, I beat it already. This game is quite mediocre, but for some reason it got me to keep coming back; I've been playing this quite a bit for several days now. The game is short, with only five levels, but the levels are long, and the last two levels are pretty tough. Crazily for a 1980s game from Sega the game actually has infinite continues (most SMS action games from the '80s don't allow any continues at all, except maybe via cheat code!), which is part of why I stuck with it, but it was also because even if it's repetitive, somewhat ear-bleedingly mediocre aurally (the songs are so short and loop endlessly!), and really is a quite generic game -- it kind of feels like 1942 or 1943 with a dash of Compile (Zanac or Aleste) added in... but even so, for some reason, I kept playing. Was I actually having fun? Eh, I don't know. It was kind of relaxing, I guess. It's just a simple game... fly up, shoot the stuff, try not to die. This is one of those games where dying punishes you HARD, since you lose all powerups, which makes you ship very slow and weak. And there's no shield, so you need to be very careful.

I do kind of like the level designs, though. I mean, they're far too long, as was somewhat common in the '80s, but I like that the enemies come from the left, right, and front. This is not one of those games where the enemies just come down the screen at you, lots of them come from the sides as well. It keeps you on your toes, for sure, until you've memorized the levels. The bosses are alright, but they're mostly just a collection of turrets you have to destroy. Oddly, the third level has a two-form boss, with a second form that took FOREVER to kill (though it wasn't too hard since the bullet pattern was easy to avoid), but no other level, not even the last one, has anything like it. Bizarre, and out of place; I'd think the ending would have two forms too, at least. Still though, there's a decent variety of enemy ship types, and I definitely like how they mix up enemy approach angles and patterns. It makes that really annoying music and repetitive gameplay as I played levels 4 and 5 over and over more tolerable.

Overall, Bomber Raid is alright. It's definitely not above average, but it was fun enough to be worth playing through, anyway. That's about it to it though, it has no difficulty settings. It does restart after you beat it (after you watch the ending and credits), but it's just back to the beginning, no difficulty change.