Video Game Collecting

I finally received Rambo III for SEGA Genesis.  Actually I received it about a week ago, but I really haven’t had much time to play it.  I like the Rambo movies.  Especially the first one, and it just so happens that the 3rd movie is my least favorite.  Games and movies never work well together so I was ready to be let down. 

In this case I wasn’t let down at all.  I actually enjoyed this game for what little I got to play of it.  It’s loosely based on the 3rd movie and even includes digital stills from it.  It plays similiar to Ikari Warriors (which was obviously inspired by the 2nd Rambo movie)  but resembles Heavy Barrel more and could be considered a precurser to Shock Troopers on Neo Geo.

Unlike many top-down war games Rambo III does have one feature that would have made those other games much more interesting: RAPID FIRE.  Not only does Rambo have unlimited ammunition, if you hold the button down and leave the D-pad alone Rambo will start moving the gun back and forth, effectively spraying the bullets everywhere.  THATS AWESOME!

You can also shoot arrows, which is very much Rambo-esq, but you can also set time-bombs, which I don’t recall in any Rambo movie but I could be wrong.  Now on to the best part:

The box art is beautiful.  It isn’t a promo picture from the movie either, or if it was, it certainly wasn’t for the American audience.  I’d like to believe it was unique for the game(s).  The reason I say this is look at the Commodore version:

Notice anything missing?  Where are his arrows and bows?  It seems the Genesis version is unique to the arrows and bows, but it also proves that it must be a painting and not a still from the movie, because… what is holding the arrows and bows in the Genesis box art?  Are they stuffed into his back pocket?  Who knows, the point is that this is a good game for SEGA Genesis.

I recently had another spending spree with http://www.pedrogames.com/.  This time I concentrated on Data East titles.  I’ll have post about that later, but one of the games I purchased was Heavy Barrel for Nintendo…

I don’t ever recall seeing this game in the arcade, though I’ve always known one existed. My prior experience with Heavy Barrel was the DOS version which sucked terribly. But the Nintendo version is just dandy.

Heavy Barrel isn’t the first angled-top-down war game. Ikari Warriors and Guerrila war (and even Commando) had pretty much perfected the genre. But Heavy Barrel is unique to me because it resembles the NeoGeo game “Shock Troopers”. Take a look and decide for yourself: