Aby game that you heard about and thought “meh it’s just another xyz style game. How good can it be?” But you gave it a go anyway and it turned out the game was really good.
Aby game that you heard about and thought “meh it’s just another xyz style game. How good can it be?” But you gave it a go anyway and it turned out the game was really good.
Die Hard (for the NES)
Warning: You MUST read the manual!
At first glance it might look like a simple top-down scrolling shooter like Commando or The Chaos Engine, but it’s so much more. It’s very free and open, with seven floors to explore, and once the in-game timer ends you must go to the 30th floor for the final showdown. The thing is that there are a few ways both to pick off the terrorists singly or in pairs, and to extend the time limit. If you just hide in some corner of the building and wait for the timer to run out, you’re going to get mown down by 30 armed terrorists in a fairly small space. But if you’re good you can use that time to wipe out almost all of the terrorists, leaving only the leader Hans himself to face you, which is much more manageable.
Die Hard wasn’t high on my list at all when I first played it in the 1990s, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s still one of my all-time favourites. But ever since AVGN did a video on it, it’s become popular to dump on it.
Most “complaints” that I see about this game either show that the person hasn’t actually played it for themselves at all, or are solved by reading the manual. Funnily enough, in that AVGN video he even says something like “Maybe this would make sense if I read the manual, but f*** that, who reads manuals?”
The only negative thing I have to say is that IMO the “foot power” meter, which affects movement speed, runs out a bit too quickly even when you walk everywhere instead of running. That being said, I’ve only noticed it on later replays, and I don’t recall it being a problem the first time I played it all those years ago.
Thank you for posting this. I’ll have to check this out - I slept on this for all this time. You don’t see many scenario-style games… ever? The fixed timer and resources sound like quite the challenge.
In the 90s, everyone who wanted a shot at understanding what was going on. Games didn’t have a ton of text, so the manual was the way to learn the controls, get backstory, and even some hints for obtuse puzzles.
If you’re going to play an old game, you need to embrace the way people played back then, which was the manual and sometimes a paid guide book.
And social media wasn’t a thing, nor YouTube, nor forms for sharing it really known. Reading the manual on the way home, getting excited to play it was part of the experience.
Super Mario 64 was, by memory, one of the first to have tutorial-like directions and informational instructions in game with more in the first few levels. Even then reading the manual still helped. I was genuinely shocked when Skyrim just omitted a manual entirely compared to the thick booklet Oblivion came with.
Yup, I remember reading the manual on the toilet while my sibling was playing so when it was my turn, I’d have a leg up. We would take turns, cheering each other on as we got past a difficult part, and sharing secrets that we found.
With the internet, I can just look up a walkthrough pretty soon after the game launches, so I have no reason to look at the manual (if there is one) or talk to anyone else.
I think that’s why competitive MP has taken off. People want that social experience, and that’s filling in for what used to exist. I remember PvP being a thing, but I also remember helping each other out on a SP game being a thing, so both were social activities (if it wasn’t a sibling, it was a friend or coworker).