Re: Games That You've Beaten

I first played Amagon as a weekend rental in 1989 and found the game to be rather difficult.

Specifically:

-as Amagon, getting hit by anything or falling offscreen costs a life
-the novice will waste ammo and quickly run out
-variable-height jump takes some getting used to
-continues aren't available until Zone 4 (7 levels in)

Amagon seemed so hard that it didn't get much play that weekend; I'd rented several other games and mostly played the ones with easier learning curves.

The next year I saw Amagon selling for ~$10 and bought it, along with two other games. In a repeat of what happened over that rental weekend, I rapidly became frustrated with Amagon, put it aside, and played through the other two games instead.

It took a substantial effort, through a considerable amount of preparation, to overcome my negative mindset and convince myself that it was even *possible* to beat Amagon, but finally I believed again that it could be done (the first step toward beating any game) and with renewed determination set off on the path to victory; there was no turning back now.

After playing persistently for many hours I started to make some progress. Although skill is important, Amagon isn't so much a game that you get good at as it is a game that you get used to. And I was certainly used to recovering lost ground by the time I got to Zone 4 and the ability to continue. From there my NES stayed on constantly and I fervently hoped that there was no power outage. Even with continues the gameplay remains tough, but by now I had the rhythm down and made good time in cutting through the remaining six levels. Having been trounced so thoroughly twice before, completing it was a fine moment to add to my video gaming résumé.

For some time I thought that Amagon must have previously been an arcade game, such is its demoralizing level of difficulty, but the NES version is all we've got.

-Tarbolde

"Be Prepared For Your Mission!"

I bought Shingen the Ruler (NES) for $2 at a secondhand store in the late 1990s, no instruction book. First-time players should expect to spend most of the game scrolling through numbers and moving troops across large battlefields at about 5 squares per round. My initial attempts ended in punishing defeat after a small number of turns. I remember thinking, "I must be the only person in the world playing this game right now." But in spite of the slow pace, I began to have fun playing Shingen and eventually developed a workable strategy that took me to victory. Having no instructions added an extra layer of difficulty to an already challenging game. Good times.

-Tarbolde

"Just lookin' out of the window, watchin' the asphalt grow."