Weekending 7/30/16: Gremlins 2 the New Batch (NES)

 

• Introduction:

As of late I’ve been neglecting requests from other people as for time conflicts and just downright laziness. Raymond lately…..has gotten way worse with his sleeping habits as of late which we don’t understand. He wakes up at 3 and it’s really hard to get him back down. So I’ve been trying to find games I would think our easy and also game I’ve played before so I had a little more to write about. Gremlins 2 I had recently picked up from Too Many Games because some YouTubers I follow like the game chasers or Iretrogame.com talk about this game being good, and I figured it was fairly uncommon, so when I stumbled upon it I picked it up for a fairly decent price.  A few weeks ago my friend John had seen the list of games I currently own and put in a request to do this game. He based it off the soundtrack(which is incredible by the way, I’ll get into that later)But he had never played the game, and neither did I so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This would be the first time I play this game, and I have absolutely no history with this game besides I had seen the movie a million times when I was a child so….Here we go.

 

One of the many in-game cut scenes…Yes this is on the NES

• Day 1

I started right away, I was fresh off of the masterpiece that is moonwalker and I just was ready to start, I was pumped and excited. I always watched a very good mini review of the game from Iretrogamer. I love this guys channel, he has a lot of good stuff on there a lot of videos he shows are old home videos of his beloved father who was also a huge gamer, I love watching these because some day I feel I will be just like his father with my son growing up, that is if he is even into playing video games.

Stage 1-1

Alright, so you play as Gizmo from the movie and as I started playing I couldn’t believe how reliable to the movie this game is. It really does follow the movie as best as it can. The game is played in a top down view like Zelda however it isn’t a RPG or adventure title, It’s a plat former with well-timed hard jumps and enemies with difficult to read patterns. THIS GAME IS HARD! it’s NES HARD. The controls are solid in this title like most NES hard games. If you die, it’s all on you. Can’t blame the game, glitches or balancing issues. You have all the tools you need to complete the game. So as I am trying to get through the first stage Gizmo throws tomatoes as a weapon. I know it’s pretty lame but they have to start somewhere, Each stage Gizmo has a different weapon from his arsenal I’ll explain as I continue to write but as for right now he throws tomatoes. After a pretty detailed cut scene the game begins and man was John right about the soundtrack. Right away the tones in the game make it feel like it is definitely a Gremlins game. The first stage was kind of easy, This I would say was the tutorial level, There were no gremlins to fight yet just generic enemies like bats, and rats. There were some giant tomatoes to fight…..but I’m trying to figure that one out, also this is the only stage that didn’t have a boss fight at the end. Every time you kill an enemy, they drop gems which is used as currency. You can use the gems to buy power ups, extra lives, items and extra hearts. The catch is there is only one shop in each Sub level (IE stage 1-1 and stage 1-2) and you can only buy one item at a time. so you have to choose wisely for the situation. As you continue through the game the power ups and items stack up. Once you die, you lose everything and have to start from scratch….and you will die a lot. Gizmo can only take 6 hits unless you buy a heart container which gives him an extra 2 hits. There are also balloon items that if you have them in your inventory and fall into a pit, Gizmo will fly out of the pit and for a short period of time you can guide him farther into the level, if you buy more balloons you can use this as an effective strategy and escape some of the harder platforming sequences.

 

The shop in each stage

So on with the game, I got through the first stage in a breeze, it was pretty easy with my previous plat forming skill set that I have, So I was feeling this game was going to be not as bad as I thought…..Then I hit the 2 stage. After another beautiful cut scene, the next stage took place in the sewers where the air vents lead. This is when the fun was over. It all of a sudden got insanely hard for me and I struggled a bunch trying to get to the stage boss. At this point it was getting late, and luckily the game had password saves, so I was able to start where I left off….minus the upgrades. Raymond had woken up and I knew that it was time to go to bed after I had gotten him back down for the night, for I knew that his teeth were bothering him and it was going to be a long night.

• Day 2

Like usual Tonight was my late night at work so once I got home I went right to bed, the night before little man woke up at 3 and had been doing it for a whole week straight so I went to bed in anticipation that it was going to happen…..and it did. So I just went to bed.

 

First Boss

• Day 3

Raymond went down pretty easy, so I was able to play tonight. Instead of using a password I just started over. Refreshed I was able to breeze through the first 2 stages and beat the boss.  In stage 2 I forgot to mention that Gizmo has a torch that shoots fireballs. Way better than tomatoes, So at least fighting enemies was a little easier. The first boss was kind of easy, he just jumped around and swatted at you if you got to close. Once I beat him there wasn’t a cut scene it just went right to the 3rd stage, this is when it got really hard. Now Gizmo’s weapon was paper clips that he threw. It sounds worse than the torch but the paper clips go further and do the same amount of damage and if you upgrade it you throw 3 at a time. This stage was the media floor of the building from the movie. Everything in this stage was related to all the shows that were on in the movie. Like Uncle Fred’s grave yard, and there was a kitchen show with the kitchen gremlins you had to fight. This stage was really hard. but I was able to make it to the boss who was the electric gremlin from the movie and he was quite a challenge he moved fast with no set pattern and throw electric balls that would split into four so it was tricky dodging them.

Electric Gremlin

This boss was a bitch. The first time I fought him I actually beat him but got hit by his projectile at the same time which killed me. When you die at a boss they make you start at the last sub stage so you have to play through the stage again. Very hard on your moral, However I realized the more I played the better I got at the stages. So I ended up getting back to the boss……..3 more times. On the third time I beat him…and it felt so damn good. After he was defeated I was treated to a cut scene where the main character from the movie sucked the electric ghost into the phone lines and put him on hold.

Got em.

Then came stage 4…..This stage was the hardest yet. Now Gizmo had the paper clip bow and arrow from the movie, This was the best weapon so far because it shot really fast and made a big difference. This stage had a lot of obstacles to dodge, also conveyor belts that would dump you into pits and a lot of very hard jumps that you needed to make. But then I got to the boss, and He was hard….Real hard…..He was a gremlin with an Uzi…

I died almost immediately and was far too drained to go through the gauntlet known as stage 4-2 right now. So I called it a night and would try again the next night.

 

• Day 4

 

At this point I wanted to have all the power ups to fight the Uzi toting gremlin so I started from the beginning, After I did my research I found out that the game only consisted of 5 viciously hard stages….Wow that’s it?….. I guess with the gread cut scenes and graphics they couldn’t do too much but they sure as hell made those 5 stages hard as hell.  So it didn’t matter once I got to stage 4-2 I died so I lost everything….. So I decided just to get good at stage 4-2 and try to get the weapon power up which shot multiple arrows at once when you fired it. I quickly found out that this is a must when fighting the boss at the end of this stage. So once I got to him I actually made quick work of him and was able to complete the Final stage which was only one sub level….Thank god it was only 5-1 then the final boss which if you remember from the movie was the gremlin spider.

Final boss

The final weapon Gizmo gets is still the bow and arrow, only now the arrows are flame arrows, After going through the extremely difficult final stage which took me about 6 tries. When I got to the store I bought an extra life instead of the weapon upgrade which worked out in my favor. When I fought the final boss I just got between his legs and Spammed the fire button. Once Gizmo died he was instantly resurrected with his extra life, so I continues to spam the final boss until he was dead. With that I had beaten the game and boy did it feel good! I was shown another beautiful cut scene of all the gremlins in the building melting just like from the movie.

Still could not believe this was a NES game

• Conclusion

Wow…..I could not believe how incredibly hard this game was and that I was able to fully enjoy it and beat it. I recommend this game although I think a lot of people probably didn’t know about it or even played it but, wow it’s an impressive display of what the NES could do back in the day. A must for people who enjoy Sunsoft games and those who seek a real challenge…..But play with caution it is defiantly a frustrating game.

 

The end!

Also for those who want to watch a nice video that Iretrogamer did you can click on the link here.

Also all the other stuff on his channel is very well done and it’s nice to see other people on how they grew up with Video games in their life, It’s a channel that should have more subscribers than it does.

Next week I will be doing another request. So if you have anything in mind just let me know!

 

 

-Ray