Cleared on March 2nd, 2023 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 1/160)
At the beginning of March, I have took on the challenge of clearing 160 games on the Sega Genesis. I cataloged each game that I thought looked interesting and play each of them from start to finish. However, I wasn't just going to decide on my own, so I roll a number to decide for me.
As fate would have it, it landed on Wings of Wor first. A 2D side-scroller shoot em up where you play as an angel shooting demons and all kinds of aberrations. Thinking it would be simple enough, I went on with the game... and realized just how hard this challenge was going to be.
Early on, you'll realize if you get hit once, you lose a life and if you don't know about the settings feature, you start out with 3 and all it takes is 3 hits and its game over. Obviously, getting hit once and losing a life is to be expected in a game like this at the time, but dodging the attacks themselves is a different matter.
You can remedy this through the settings as you can change the amount of lives you get, or through the dark arts of emulator save states. I'll admit, my patience can run very thin, and rather than try to beat the game like everyone else did in the 90s, I just decided to just wing it as a 2010s zoomer would. Somehow even then the game can feel rather tedious and patience trying, even on the game's default easy mode.
Difficulty aside, I really love the game's aesthetic. While the player character doesn't look all that detailed, the background is really good and the monsters (notable the bosses) actually look terrifying. It's a classic battle of angels vs demons in a battle to stop destruction, and the music for being a Genesis game is also quite appealing.
The mechanics are pretty fun too. Along the way, you collect blue and red orbs to empower your ability to shoot foes. Blue increases the radius of your spread shot while the red orbs increase the overall damage you deal. Both of them will be very valuable, but lost upon losing a life, so the game rewards you for surviving, but can snowball into a defeat which will make it even harder for you to recover from.
You can also get gems which will change the pattern of your shots. One lets all shots face directly forward, one spreads out in a cone, and one lets you shoot backwards although this one is rare and rather situational anyway.
And lastly, you have "special attacks" or spells as I call it. You can collect scrolls with a letter in order to gain an additional attack. The more scrolls you collect of the same letter, the more powerful it will be upon pressing the special button, but do be careful, if you collect two S scrolls and then collect an E scroll, but there's an S scroll coming up, you will not be able to empower the S spell to level 3. On the upside, you can have the E spell on hand if you somehow die or run out of spells. Oh yeah and you can lose them on death if they are active, so don't be afraid to go wild once you have them active.
I think what really stuck out to me about this game is that upon clearing the game while pretty much just cheesing it with the aforementioned dark arts, it gave me what I consider the fairest compliment that I could've gotten from doing this. "Congratulations, you are learning". Now I know it gives this message for beating the game on easy mode, but I can say that the difficulty was anything but. The mobs die faster, no doubt, but you still lose a life in one hit. And I can say that, yeah, I've learned quite a bit about the game. In fact, later on, I went back to try to beat the game on Normal difficulty without save states, relying purely on continues, but I can only get as far as beating the 4th level before the 5th level just annihilated all of my continues, but given the 6 levels the game has and the fact that I had to use save states at the 2nd level, I'd say not bad.
At the very least, even if the difficulty can seem brutal, it's at least a game I can see getting better at and maybe, in time, I'll be able to beat this game as people did back then. Until then, I'd say I had fun with it.
At the beginning of March, I have took on the challenge of clearing 160 games on the Sega Genesis. I cataloged each game that I thought looked interesting and play each of them from start to finish. However, I wasn't just going to decide on my own, so I roll a number to decide for me.
As fate would have it, it landed on Wings of Wor first. A 2D side-scroller shoot em up where you play as an angel shooting demons and all kinds of aberrations. Thinking it would be simple enough, I went on with the game... and realized just how hard this challenge was going to be.
Early on, you'll realize if you get hit once, you lose a life and if you don't know about the settings feature, you start out with 3 and all it takes is 3 hits and its game over. Obviously, getting hit once and losing a life is to be expected in a game like this at the time, but dodging the attacks themselves is a different matter.
You can remedy this through the settings as you can change the amount of lives you get, or through the dark arts of emulator save states. I'll admit, my patience can run very thin, and rather than try to beat the game like everyone else did in the 90s, I just decided to just wing it as a 2010s zoomer would. Somehow even then the game can feel rather tedious and patience trying, even on the game's default easy mode.
Difficulty aside, I really love the game's aesthetic. While the player character doesn't look all that detailed, the background is really good and the monsters (notable the bosses) actually look terrifying. It's a classic battle of angels vs demons in a battle to stop destruction, and the music for being a Genesis game is also quite appealing.
The mechanics are pretty fun too. Along the way, you collect blue and red orbs to empower your ability to shoot foes. Blue increases the radius of your spread shot while the red orbs increase the overall damage you deal. Both of them will be very valuable, but lost upon losing a life, so the game rewards you for surviving, but can snowball into a defeat which will make it even harder for you to recover from.
You can also get gems which will change the pattern of your shots. One lets all shots face directly forward, one spreads out in a cone, and one lets you shoot backwards although this one is rare and rather situational anyway.
And lastly, you have "special attacks" or spells as I call it. You can collect scrolls with a letter in order to gain an additional attack. The more scrolls you collect of the same letter, the more powerful it will be upon pressing the special button, but do be careful, if you collect two S scrolls and then collect an E scroll, but there's an S scroll coming up, you will not be able to empower the S spell to level 3. On the upside, you can have the E spell on hand if you somehow die or run out of spells. Oh yeah and you can lose them on death if they are active, so don't be afraid to go wild once you have them active.
I think what really stuck out to me about this game is that upon clearing the game while pretty much just cheesing it with the aforementioned dark arts, it gave me what I consider the fairest compliment that I could've gotten from doing this. "Congratulations, you are learning". Now I know it gives this message for beating the game on easy mode, but I can say that the difficulty was anything but. The mobs die faster, no doubt, but you still lose a life in one hit. And I can say that, yeah, I've learned quite a bit about the game. In fact, later on, I went back to try to beat the game on Normal difficulty without save states, relying purely on continues, but I can only get as far as beating the 4th level before the 5th level just annihilated all of my continues, but given the 6 levels the game has and the fact that I had to use save states at the 2nd level, I'd say not bad.
At the very least, even if the difficulty can seem brutal, it's at least a game I can see getting better at and maybe, in time, I'll be able to beat this game as people did back then. Until then, I'd say I had fun with it.