I went back and played Ninja Gaiden 3 all the way through…on Nestopia, with cheat codes and save states. Two things stuck in my head: One was that they put nice big plot reveals at the end of every level, which given how much trouble it was to reach and beat the later levels, meant you were getting a reward each time. It’s not just “Oh, quick, chase him to the castle!” It’s “There’s a clone of Ryu!” or “Irene is alive!” or “There’s a giant dimensional warship!” The stakes really get raised each time. Which leads me into the second thought: This game is batshit loco.
(Honestly, while this device is absolutely amazing for $10, one of the things I really love about my RG350 is the ability to enter cheat codes and use save states…though some emulators make the easier than others. Gambette is my current favorite of the OpenDingux emulator suite.)
55. SNOW BROS
This is an action/puzzle game like Bubble Bobble; you need to hit enemies with snow to turn them into big snowballs you and roll into each other. There seem to be power-ups but I couldn’t actually figure out what they did. And I thought I had the knack of it (you get plenty of extra lives) until I reached the boss stage, which was really nasty. I can’t find any documentation, but was this connected to the MegaTen series in any way? The snow brothers and the flying pumpkin that shows up when you take too long on a stage resemble mascot characters from those games.
56. BATMAN
Standard side-scroller media tie-in. Batman punches dudes, lacking any “wonderful toys” including batarangs. I appreciate the fact that he’s got a neat wall-jump ability; I don’t appreciate that using it in the first area seems to be entirely pointless.
57. SILK WORM
A weirdly-named side-scrolling shooter where you have the option of playing as a helicopter (which moves in two dimensions) or as a jeep (which can only move along the ground and jump over obstacles, but can change its angle of fire). Apparently it has a boss sequence and ending; I didn’t make it far enough to see anything change.
(I’m entertained by the plot, though!)
58. BOBBLE PART 2
It’s Bubble Bobble 2, which strongly resembles every other Bubble Bobble game; you trap enemies in bubbles, pop them so they transform into food, then devour them.
59. GUERILLA WAR
The top-down adventure of a commando who shoots his way into an encampment to rescue hostages as shoot lots of dudes. The hostages are very hard to tell from the enemies on a small screen; they really needed to be more colorfully distinctive. Apparently the Japanese title of this was Guevara, and it starred Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. I suspect that two-player co-op would be super fun with this game, especially since it apparently has unlimited continues.