Slapfighting with gauntlets

Ok so it didn't take me till September , but it did take a while.
The obligatory World of Warcraft bit ..
Warcraft continues to eat up all my spare time ...At this stage I'm looking on it more as a hobby than a game.I've managed to level my priest up to 58 out of a possible 60, so I'm nearly there.
I'm probably going to try and get through those few levels as quickly as I can and then take a break for a few weeks, and try something else, like Oblivion(the game , not y'know suicide or anything)
My guild have moved to their own ventrillo server (as we were annoying the hell out of the Lads we had borrowed it from, sorry again about that ) , and we do a lot of dungeon runs and general malarky together with it .Great crack altogether..

the bit where I prattle on about old gaming
I've also managed to increase the retro collection a bit ,the tally now stands at Atari 2600 (the woodpanel one) Spectrum 48k, NES,Mastersystem,SNES,Megadrive(II),Atari ST ,Playstation,N64,(I've 4 actually),Dreamcast..and not retro but competing for shelf space - PS2,and Gamecube.
Also I've a large ball of tangled up cables and a partially hidden TV.
And about 30 controllers.
10 of them PSX ones.


Gauntlet:7 sorrows:

You're making a new addition to the revitalised gauntlet series of games.
Do you?
a. stick to the format of shooting the bad guys from far away , finding you way around laberyinthian levels,grabbing keys to open doors and chests, stealing food and potions from your mates, all wrapped up in a cartoony pleasing graphical style .
or b. Ditch most of the shooting for a dodgy combo melee combat style ,get rid of the potions, have linear levels , and wrap the whole thing up in a cod dramatic "story line" .
Oh and it has static intro screens which seem to consist of panning around a half finished drawing of the 4 warriors,which was the kind of shite people put up with on the Atari ST ten years ago , but is inexcusable on a modern game.It just makes the game look unfinished (which in fairness I half suspect it is)
Basically it sounds like someone , thought they'd bough the rights to golden axe ,and then about 3 weeks from shipping , realised their mistake and slapped a gauntlet logo on it.
Oh and any game with at combo system that rewards hitting the X button 30 times in a row , but not playing axe based keepy-uppys with a baddie has to be bad.





Obscure game of the day:Slapfight aka Alcon: by Taito

I didn't realise this was obscure until I noticed it was missing from both the tatio ps2 compilation packs.The pleasingly named slapfight is a vertical shoot-em-up , which uses the "vaguely similarr to Gradius" style of buying power-ups with stars dropped from shot enemies.Theres a nice mix of weapons , and the whole thing rattles along at a great pace.The music is cracking as well, (its probably too perky to be proper shooter music , but I don't care , I love it).
There was a great remake of this on the Megadrive called Slapfight MD, which featured and updated version as well as carbon copy of the original.
If you play this on MAME (or time travel back to 1989 and play it in an arcade), try not shooting anything on your first life and see what happens after you die.....