Description
A playthrough of Acclaim's 1989 shooter for the NES, Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine.
Played on the hard level.
Cybernoid is a port of a popular 1988 Spectrum ZX game from Hewson, a company that console fans might recognize as the developer of Future Basketball, which Hudson brought to the SNES in 1991 as https://youtu.be/SLZrmcKRsCk
Zoggian space pirates are raiding Earth's top-secret storage asteroids, and they've already "confiscated jillions of astralbucks worth of commodities." Earth's tech-bubbas have developed a "techo-new spacefighter", and they want you to take it on a test run. You're mission is to wipe out the space pirates and reclaim the three asteroids.
It's an arcade-style flip-screen shoot 'em up. Each room presents a unique assortment of obstacles, traps, and space-baddies to contend with, as well as a strict time limit. Your ship comes equipped with an upgradeable gun, and you start out with nine lives and several limited-use weapons and items, including the dubiously named "genocide pods", to challenge the raging hordes.
The game's premise is familiar, but it plays quite unlike most NES shooters. Many screens feel like puzzles the way they force you through tight corridors while bombarding you with endless streams of projectiles, and the controls take practice to get used to. Your ship is subject to the forces of gravity, so you'll need to master the art of rhythmically tapping up on the d-pad to avoid being splattered in hairy moments.
Cybernoid is a very challenging, often frustrating game. Thankfully, the game does allow you to pause the action to survey the scene and to prepare your weapons. It becomes easier with practice, but there's a steep learning curve, and the action requires a lot of focus.
I liked it, but I didn't love it. It's a good game - the ZX version was immediately hailed as a classic in Europe - but I'm not sure that its design was a great fit for the NES in 1989. I think that its substance is stretched too thin by its difficulty, and it's not mechanically engaging enough to justify the commitment it requires to see things through to the end. If you love sadistic games, Cybernoid will satisfy, but if you don't relish the thought of spending four-to-five hours mastering a ten-minute game, you'll probably want to pass on this one.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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