{"id":1300,"date":"2006-10-17T20:38:14","date_gmt":"2006-10-17T23:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2007-12-22T20:49:31","modified_gmt":"2007-12-23T00:49:31","slug":"you-asked-most-difficult-shootem-ups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1300","title":{"rendered":"You asked: most difficult shoot&#8217;em ups"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">W<\/span>ithout a doubt, that would be Salamander, a Konami game released in 1986 (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Salamander_%28arcade_game%29\">wikipedia<\/a>). I played the game on an MSX-2 home computer and I actually tried to beat it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=768\">last year<\/a> (that older entry has a screenshot plus original sound!).\n<\/p>\n<p>There are a couple of reasons why I think that game is so hard: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The game can be played with two players simultaneously, which shows: there&#8217;s so much action going on all over the screen that it is sometimes impossible to break through stages without any help.\n<\/li>\n<li>The game features <em>multi-directional<\/em> scrolling in all stages.\n<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s a frequent change of view: in most stages, you &#8216;fly from left to right&#8217;, however, there are 2 or 3 stages that shows your &#8216;ship&#8217; from a birdsview.\n<\/li>\n<li>&#8216;Yo Save Games are for losers&#8217;.  There are no save games in Salamander. You&#8217;re supposed to beat the game. And you start with only 3 lives.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That said, I beat the game: However, if you plan to play it (there&#8217;s plenty of MSX emulators around nowadays), make sure you buy the right joystick. The game is all about counting.\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"extra\"><small>I read that the Wikipedia article states that the MSX version contained way longer stages. Yeah: like if I didn&#8217;t know.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Without a doubt, that would be Salamander, a Konami game released in 1986 (wikipedia). I played the game on an MSX-2 home computer and I actually tried to beat it last year (that older entry has a screenshot plus original &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1300\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[40],"tags":[188,187],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}