Game:

Rocket Knight Adventures (1993)

Duration: 1:04:20

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If you had a Sega console back then and no Nintendo machine, you were most likely jealous that you missed out on the great games from Capcom and Konami that were developed exclusively for Nintendo consoles. Other than a Castlevania and Contra game for the Genesis/Mega Drive which I already played through for my channel, Rocket Knight Adventures is an exclusive for Sega's 16-bit machine. It later appeared on the Nintendo SNES too, but it was a different game with the same main character.

You are Sparkster, an opossum. These things are ugly enough in reality so why did someone think this could be a great main character? Well, Sparkster is not an ordinary rodent. He got a rocket jetpack, a knight's armor and a sword. That jetpack can be charged up and becomes a major part of the gameplay. It allows you to fly briefly in 8 directions and if you hit an obstacle you will bounce off and keep going, though, in two stages you can fly permanently. It also is a powerful attack and you need it frequently to beat bosses or get out of difficult situations. You need to master this or you won't get very far. Your actual main attack is your sword that fires some little energy thing in the direction you're facing.

The plot is not very complex. A princess has been kidnapped and you're off to rescue her. The game is a mix of Contra and Sonic the Hedgehog. Contra, because you fight lots of sub-bosses, the game throws a lot of different stage hazards at you and especially towards the end of the game it kinda has the mood of the later stages in Contra games. Not alien themed, but the techno environment has a similar vibe. It's similar to Sonic too because, well, it really tries hard to be fast paced with a main character that has some attitude.

Is it good, is it bad? That lies in the eye of the beholder. In my opinion it just doesn't feel original and it tries way too hard to be funny, but fails miserably at that. The jokes and subtle details are forced and never made me laugh. Then there is the level design. They went way overboard with it. It's like they had too many ideas and not enough games to use them so they crammed them all into this one. Almost every other screen you do something entirely different for maybe a minute and then there's something new again. They should have picked a few good ideas and really flesh them out and build the stages around those ideas. That would have also made it easier to make better use of those limited 8 MBit of storage. But then... Super Mario World only had 4 MBit available and it's awesome, looks good and is huge.

The game gets much better towards the end. Stages 6 and 7 are really good, Stage 1 blows, it's a mixed bag. The graphics are good, colorful, detailled. The music isn't good, mediocre at best, but there are one or two tunes that I really like especially the techno one in the last stage. Sega's soundchip isn't that good, I know, but it is capable of much better than this.

You know, back then I read reviews in magazines of Rocket Knight Adventures and it scored pretty well and it got on my list of games I really wanted to check out at some point. Now I have and now I know I should have played Shinobi 3 instead. It's not *that* bad, but personally, I prefer a more streamlined experience instead of twenty different gameplay elements put together. Before I forget, this game has 4 difficulty settings and this is played on the third one, Normal. On Hard you die in one hit and at the very end you get "You are very strong!" instead of "Try Hard Mode!" according to the interwebz. So that was definetely not worth the trouble and it doesn't add anything to the game since there are no new enemy patterns and such.

Thanks for watching! And as usual: If you would like to see a game played through here, just let me know. Doesn't have to be limited to Sega Consoles either.

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