Monday 29 January, 2007

Note* this log is just for fun not for grade.
Acrobat mission is a fast paced vertical scrolling Shmups. Its special lay to fame is a charging ability that changes depending on the power up.

I tryed this game because it was the only shmup avaliable to me. It is a good example of a bad game.

There is a lack of power ups. As far as I can tell only 2 weapon upgrades and a super bomb. The super bomb does a screen clearing action. The power ups do stack to 4 with enhances your weapons power. There is also a charging ability you gain with a weapon upgrade which allows for an additional special attack.

Whiles this is neat its not very interesting and it gets boring quickly as nothing new is added during the course of the game.

The part of this game that I feel is most important to discuss is the frustration I felt while playing. It is simply very very difficult right from the start. I was able to make it to the boss of the second level and this took about collective hours of game play. To make matters worse I was cheating by using a save state feature on my emulator so I could save and restart when I wanted. I reloaded from my saved state on the second level boss about 30 times and yet I still never came close to beating it. Granted there is a pattern and so its possible to beat it is very difficult.

The other element in the game which is lacking is a way of gaining lives. You are given 3 lives in the beginning of the level and this must last you the rest of the level. This proves to be nearly impossible.

So in closing Acrobat Mission for the Super NES is a reasonable addictive game because of its difficulty but the difficulty comes on way to hard and there is a lack of creativity and novalty in the game.

Cool, thanks for the gamelog on this one -- had never heard of Acrobat Mission.

Here is a link to another review of the game. They didn't like it much either, though strangely they thought the bosses were one of the best points about the game :-)

http://www.classicgaming.com/Shmups/reviews/acrobat/index.html

- Jim

I read the review and I suppose the game does have some interesting little elements. The review did not comment on the difficulty so I presume I must just kind of suck at playing shmups.

No, the person writing the review online is just a really hardcore shmup player, and has years of gameplaying experience with the genre. It sounds to me like you did pretty well.

- Jim