About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
The land of Yuria has been invaded and is now ruled by the iron fist of Death Adder, who secured his throne by seizing the Golden Axe™.
Three brave warriors now rise to the challenge of defeating Death Adder and his soldiers and returning peace to the Kingdom.
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
It was free. I really don't know what I was thinking (in the colloquial sense), because even at a zero dollar price point, I didn't want it. I could say that I thought it wouldn't do any harm, but even that's not true. I knew, even then, that I did not want to play it, but I guess I was just filled with hubris. I was making such fine progress on the blog that I thought I could handle it. I never foresaw a day when I would be near-exhausted, dragging myself to the finish line, only to have this massive roadblock in the way.
Expectations and Prior Experience
As you might have gathered, I am not hopeful. I know Golden Axe. I've played Golden Axe. I can't say whether I've played this exact game, but if I haven't, then I'm sure it was a sequel, or a knock-off, or the game that it itself is knocking off. Either way, it's a late 80s/early 90s era side-scrolling brawler - a genre that . . . I'm not going to say bad things about except that it's definitely not for me.
What I will complain about is arcade games, an evil fucking blight on the creative potential of the medium with a revenue model that makes free-to-play microtransactions look humane and considerate by comparison. The one unforgivable sin of early home consoles is the way they just directly and uncritically ported these concentrated bundles of anti-fun and inflicted them upon unsuspecting children, who subsequently grew up to think that unforgiving difficulty curves, lack of save points, and a gambling-esque system of limited continues somehow constitutes "classic" (or, god-forbid "hardcore") gaming. Once The Legend of Zelda came to exist, console games no longer had any excuse to suck.
But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I know a lot of old arcade games have their devotees, and that must be for a reason. And I'll be playing it on an emulator (Sega's official one, to be precise), so maybe I'll do like I did with Landstalker and abuse the save states to make it a more enjoyable experience. Or maybe I'll just tough it out. It's not like I have a stack of quarters on the line. If I stall out at the first level and just have to replay it over and over again, like I'm Johnny Gat in eternal side-scrolling purgatory, then at worst it will be reducible to the sensual experience of pressing buttons, which isn't too bad, all things considered.
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