The worst game I ever loved.
Hal Laboratory are the ones who owned up to creating Air Fortress, the game this page is supposed to be about, and contrary to their logo, the third letter is an L. Hal and I, we have a history together. The Adventures of Lolos were the first puzzle games I ever played, and probably the only ones I ever liked (Tetris doesn't count because it isn't a puzzle game. It just isn't). Revenge of the Gator was the first Gameboy cartridge I ever lost (as well as the only one I never found... ehhh, and eventually lost again at any point). And for a few years I made comic strips featuring a really badly drawn Kirby. In case you were wondering, Kirby is the only video game character to win the Easiest to Draw championship elimination tournament six consecutive times (just barely losing to Diglett in 1998). So for me to do it badly, and for a few years likely signals some kind of developmental disorder. Other video game characters I liked to draw included Dragon Warrior slimes and Adventure squares, if that tells you anything.
At one point I became bothered by Hal's further efforts as a Nintendo subsidiary, and gave mine fingers, sharp teeth and chicken feet, and denied it was Kirby, and in fact went so far as to call it by a different name, but no one was fooled. They'd say "I like how you turned Kirby into a monster." I hated that. I hated it so much that I added another character that looked like regular Kirby and called it Ybrik, and had the first kirboid pick on it. Even now that I've acknowledged it I still hate that. Luckily for the sake of my non-embarrassment now, there was no Side-7 back then.
That last paragraph was 100% irrelevant, but I assure you this is going somewhere.
It must have been advertising that ever made me want to play Air Fortress. It's possible that the main reason I despise any and all whoring practices now is how susceptible I used to be to them. Not that I hate Guardian Legend, it's one of the few I was lucky with, but know that I only had it because
"first there was Zelda, and then there was Zelda II. Now comes Guardian Legend and Battle of Olympus!"
Certainly, were the Nintendo corporation responsible, they would not have mentioned Zelda at any point without prefixing it with "the legend of..." and undoubtedly would have had better visuals than the actual cartridges, but the scheme worked, didn't it. Back then, people could say any old thing to sell a game. Now of course that's illegal, or so I'm told. But if that was a lie too, then... gadzooks!
Guardian Legend is the more well known of the two, despite being the one that didn't feature a cameo appearance by Zeus.
Ehhh... I'll try not to.
"Not when it's a tiny 16x32 pixel sprite, I can't," perhaps you're thinking. First of all, it's 15x31, so ha ha, loser, and I suppose the fact that
this exists, and that an internet translating club spent months of their lives converting it to English was because it really is original and enjoyable as a game, and that the gamma correction knob doesn't need to be turned down at all.
Sometime between this page's original debut and the appearance of bimshwel.com, I did attempt to partake of "Sailormoon Another Story" beyond the scene shown here, and I can tell you it is every bit as miserable as I assumed it was, though it should be noted I only played it at all because I started to doubt that assumption. I should not have. So.
I tried a Zillion (ha ha, ugh) times to think of anything interesting to say about this remarkably unremarkable game. The best I could come up with was "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Robot." That's the best I could do. Therefore, Air Fortress page.
The colony needs more food! The thumbtack-sized ants are too good for cashews, apparently. That's too bad, because whoever owns this house has eight hundred of them just lying around his cathedral-sized living room. You'd think with the roughly equal amount of quarters this guy could afford more than two colors of crayons. But no, it's red and yellow all over the place. Someone's drawing a lot of pictures of Hulk Hogan.
These directions were too hard for some people.
Yepsirah, these graphics were worth updating, all right. Ehhh. The most amusing part about Dragon Warrior games was easily the olde English, but the story the needless retranslators love to give is that it wasn't in the Japanese version, and we must be true to Japan, mustn't we. I say, of course the Japanese version didn't have old English. They can't even speak new English.
You know what it turns out the Japanese versions always do have, plenty of memorable lines like "BASTARD!!!!!!!" and "SHIT!!!!!!" Yes indeedilydope, if not for the brilliant dialogue, I might not have considered Final Fantasy II worth playing through for the eighth time just to find an item that makes the screen turn pink for a few seconds.
But that's a story for another day. We're here to talk about
,
aren't we.
Video games have progressed quite a lot since Air Fortress. Even by 1993, it was common knowledge that the incoherent babbling of someone with the intelligence of MEGA-BRAIN can prove lethal if not limited to small, between level doses. It is impossible to say how many people lost their lives reading the introduction to Air Fortress.
