Going back and looking that this ROM the other day and playing it a bit brought back a bunch of memories about the early days of home gaming. This game is one of many that were all very similar. It is a side scrolling platformer beat-em-up back before we really had categories for games. We didn't really label games back then because we didn't have a ton of genres. Almost all games were similar to this one in some way.
Capcom in particular made a lot of games like this one and while I didn't bother looking into it, it certainly seems as though they used a lot of the same resources from one game to the next. *Ghosts and Goblins" is probably their most famous and it is also legendarily hard. Trojan was really hard as well and this was done on purpose, but at least in this one, you had a life bar and could take a few hits before going down.
You simply go from left to right and end up fighting progressively more difficult bosses on your way through a number of stages on your way to getting through the entire game. The objective here isn't very clear as in what the story is, but we didn't really concern ourselves with such things back in the mid 80's, we were just happy to have something to play that wasn't some blocks running around on the screen such as what Atari had gotten us used to right before they nearly destroyed the entire gaming industry.
Trojan was made tough by the fact that as you got along in levels a bit there would be so many things attacking you at once and many of them you couldn't even kill them. Such as this portion here on your way towards the final battles where these jumping guys on the top constantly throw stars at you and you can't even reach them to kill them. All the while the enemies on the bottom, some of which also throw projectiles are also coming at your endlessly along with their armor clad silver counterparts who just charge at you with a mace.
It's all very boring today but like I said, it was a long time ago and our standards were extremely low because we had no standards. It was 1986 and if you were at all familiar with Ghosts and Goblins you can see that it is unapologetically similar
I find it funny that we were completely "wowed" by things such as this scene where a couple of burly dudes much bigger than you busted out of the wall complete with flying rock effects and the first couple of times you got to this portion of the game you probably died because you didn't now how to hurt them. Like many things in this game, once you figured it out it was actually quite easy.
Up to that point though, this game was frustratingly difficult and probably moreso than it's predecessor, Ghosts and Goblins because unlike the prior games, you had a limited amount of lives and once those were gone, you had no choice but to start the entire game over from the beginning.
After defeating the final boss Achilles, we get our ending screen lol. We really didn't expect much out of the endings of our games back then just like we didn't expect much out of our games.
We did get a fun little section where all of the enemies you face in the game were paraded out and we got to know their names while some animation would happen. It is remarkably lame these days but in 1986 we were happy.
The thing about this game and so many others like it was once you completed it, there really wasn't much reason to ever play it again. Such was gaming in the 80's.
Imagine if you will a game is released, it's hard as nails but once you figure out how to do it you can likely make it all the way through one life and then it only takes about 15 minutes or so to go through the entire thing. That was gaming in the 80's folks!
I had fond memories of this game but really wish I had just left it in my memories. I didn't last long as far as replaying this game nearly 40 years later and watching a playthrough of it done by someone else was more annoying than everything else. It just kind of shows how much gaming has evolved since then. I think if you were to go back in time with a PS5 and show people the options we have today that they would crap their pants and then die from a heart attack brought on by glee.