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Spouting Thomas's avatar

These are two more games about which my first reaction is to ask, "Why oh why are there so many ports for such mediocre games?" I also had this reaction to Ghosts n' Goblins, which in my view is a more memorable and distinctive title than either of these, but mostly in a bad way.

I guess a number of Japanese developers like Konami and Capcom experimented with the idea of porting even the most mediocre titles to every variety of Western PC when they were first exporting games to the West in 1986-87. They apparently figured out this was a bad idea pretty quickly. I don't know anyone who owned anything like Rush'n Attack for DOS, I can't imagine it sold well.

As for playing them on NES, I rented both of them way back when and found both of them OK. I agree that Rush'n Attack has aged reasonably well. But I've definitely always noticed the main character's fragility and remember it really bugging me as a kid. In Super Mario Bros., those are at least monsters running into you. But why (I ranted to my friends) should a man die instantly from being touched by another, unarmed man?

I remember contrasting this to Legend of Kage, which I guess we would say was a bad game. But as a kid I thought it was such a breath of fresh air that your enemies (also humans attacking a human) actually had to swing at you in that game; a mere touch did nothing.

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JT's avatar

I do miss this 1980s movie trope of the one man army. And Rush’n Attack seems to be one such example of it..

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