Zunou Senkan Galg (NES) review"Zunou Senkan Galg is the video gaming equivalent of being waterboarded." |
I've played bad games in my time. Mostly, this is my fault; I seem to have some mental deficiency that makes me seek out bottom-of-the-barrel media just so I can nod sagely and echo “Yup; that’s pretty terrible all right”. Thing is, there’s a kind of twisted comedy to broken products that lend backhanded relevancy. Things can be so bad that they’re funny, things can be so poorly put together that you can’t help but stare at the train wreck they've become. But beneath this is another layer of awful that’s impossible to take any enjoyment from; then, beneath this layer is the bedrock of suck, where things can’t be any worse. Where indulgence is pain and disbelief and slowly rising fury. Dig a little more, and you’ll finally find Zunou Senkan Galg.
Zunou Senkan Galg was released only for the Famicom in Japan by a developer without a single other title to their name before or since. It’s also known as Scroll RPG because it brings to scrolling shooters the very worst aspect of early role play games -- the endless grind. Galg isn't interested in the established formula of battling through a stage concluding with a large boss fight; even in 1985 it declared this established progression trite and overused. Instead, it asks you to collect a hundred parts strewn across three maps. Only then would you be able to take on the end of game boss and finally see completion.
One hundred is a large number. Zunou Senkan Galg never wants to end.
The idea was that you would undertake the same small loop of a level to pick up a white triangle placed somewhere in the treadmill before you do it all over again. This would repeat over and over until you've picked up the hundred parts you need to summon the giant boss fight that would end the game. Each loop is about a minute or so long, and each time you complete a loop, the next retread would dial up the difficulty. The Marsh stage starts off with a few weird diamonds launching themselves into your meagre bullets (I assume they did, anyway; the bullets are so small and so hard to see that I only really knew I was firing when something in front of me exploded). There’s the odd kamikaze worm enemy and some kind of electrified barriers would appear because they’re famously synonymous with marshland. You scroll through without much trouble, grab the part then start again.
Staff review by Gary Hartley (December 28, 2014)
Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you. |
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