/vr/ - Retro Games

Dungeon Hunter is a promising dungeon crawler, with one key difference: it requires you to use a light-gun! It was a MSX1 cartridge pack-in for ASCII's PlusX Terminator, a rare light-gun peripheral that can be used to play Gunstick-compatible titles. But you need the ASCII gun (or an emulation of it—I'm using blueMSX 2.7 to play without any hiccups) to play this one. It's pretty fun, though I wish there was a world map to indicate how many stages I have left before completion. In addition to graveyard areas you have to clear, each being variations on popcorn enemy waves + unique guardians, enemies will fly at you from vanishing points or travel around each stage's maze waiting to surprise anyone who isn't noting their position on the map. Game's technically exceptional given the specs it's meant to run on, but the music's repetitive. And I dislike how the game's often confused between letting me shoot to check the map or igniting a bomb to clear the screen. BEEP shop has the game + light-gun stocked at one of its stores, but importing that for 12000 yen + middleman fees is too much for me.

I also played 2021 Snooky yesterday. That's a 1991 turbo-R puzzler that I'm having trouble figuring out, as there's no manual scans anywhere, the game seems to have been programmed badly (I can still play even after satisfying the Game Over requirement), and it feels yet again like a demo for some other product (the developers, Atelier Taka, made a line of graphics tools for MSX2/turbo-R users). I like the music and physics simulation though!