#64: Thunder Spirits

Thunder... Thunder... THUNDER SPIRITS!

I had never heard of this game so I didn't know what genre to expect, until I saw the title screen. This is going to be a side scrolling shooter. Or maybe a top scrolling shooter. Seika is the company that has brought us Drakkhen and Lagoon which were definitely on the sketchy side of the RPG genre... How would Thunder Spirits compare to other shooters?

PEW PEW!

The first thing I try in a new game is to hit all the buttons on the face of the controller. Three of them did nothing (no bombs?) and one of them shot my guns. Very slowly if I held it down, or I could really mash the button to get a semi reasonable stream of bullets. Maybe it's just me getting old, but I don't like having to constantly jam the button that much to accomplish something. Give me autofire! Or a limited number of bullets so mashing is detrimental. Don't make the only way to reasonably play your game be to mash one and only one button!

TROGDOR!

I got some powerups along the way. Some of them seemed to do something, others did not. Then I noticed there were more icons at the bottom of the screen. Could I hit select to change them? Nope. But it turned out L and R both cycled through the options at the bottom. R would change my currently equipped weapon. L would change my current ship speed. Changing speed sounds good, because it means I could go slow through an intricate maze of bullets and fast to avoid sharply turning enemies but because you could only toggle in one direction and there were 4 speeds it didn't seem plausible to change on the fly. So I just set it to as fast as possible and hoped I wouldn't careen into things. I did. Changing weapons was interesting in that the powerups would only buff some weapons and death would only level down the currently equipped powerup.

The game had limited lives, and limited continues, but if you continued you got to keep going right from where you died. So it was more like slightly less limited lives. I still managed to lose them all without beating the first level. I may have made it to the dragon boss but he had a fire breath attack that seemed to be unavoidable. Once I ran out of continues I had no desire to restart from the beginning. Especially with my right arm going numb from all the button mashing.

Rating: D-