What Did We Play Yesterday?

Super missile, my beloved.

The room with the hanging bug thing was tedious as hell, because I just wanna run around blasting things and it took me a minute to get into a proper rhythm of freeze the bug, use as platform, fire missile, repeat, but I did it. I was thrilled to finally get some super missiles to deal with those pesky green doors.

I was surprised by how quickly I beat the area boss, Ridley. I simply stood beneath him and filled him with missiles, and didn't even bother dodging his attacks. I've allowed the game to guide me to this point, and haven't gone out of my way to get upgrades, but obviously having 6 health tanks and 100-something missiles made this battle easier. Some of the upgrades took a few attempts to nab, but overall, I've gotten most if not all of the ones accessible to me.

Finished up the Wild West chapter. You have the option of setting traps by giving the townfolk various items. Each person takes a different amount of time to set their trap(s) but this was no issue. After the traps were set there was some downtime before the baddies showed up.

While blowing up the Crazy Gang, quite literally, was entertaining, I found this chapter overall to be kinda meh. The story isn't interesting or novel, the gameplay is a bit tedious (you simply run around to every house, pick up whatever items are there, and run back to assign traps), and the ending is, well. Weird. Watching bandits and their horses get launched across the screen repeatedly was definitely the highlight. I didn't mean to kill Mad Dog (I assumed Sundown would let him, go, just as he did in their first duel) but I'm not sure I want to reload and replay the chapter to change that.

Continuing to enjoy Gradius Origin. I attempted to play Life Force which, as we all know, is hard as balls. I am definitely the least competent at this game in particular, but I have a special place in my heart for it since playing on an arcade machine during my travels.

Salamander 3 is my favorite though, and I'm still plunking away at it. This time I got to some sort of weird eyeball ship things, which occur after the weird volcano eyeball things. I'm not sure if I've reached this boss before, but this attempt felt like a milestone for some reason.

Encountering some alien environmental obstacles. Turns out those tiny bugs I encountered earlier can eat through certain barriers, and then there is chungus up there. Getting the Varia suit was nice, as it protects from heat and bugs (but not the hotter types of lava). There's lava, and then there's Lava evidently.

Currently playing through the Wild West chapter of Live-a-Live, which has some unexpectedly colorful dialogue. The game offers a few false dialogue options (the cowboy can say, "..." or whatever the game wants you to say, and it loops until you do the thing) but I get why they offer the option even though it's a kinetic story. It's a Seven Samurai type setup. I've gotten through the prologue, but haven't started prepping the town for the showdown.

Enjoying some Gradius, my beloved. I've only played the console versions of this, primarily NES, so I fired up the EU arcade version for a bit.