SNK made and published this 1988 top-down tank shooter, a trip from the beaches of Normandy toward Berlin with prisoners of war to rescue. The tank is named Paul and codenamed Snake, which kicked off the Metal Gear jokes. It has ideas we hadn't seen on the NES, but they don't mesh well.

What works

Combinable power-ups. Rapid fire, armor pierce, bombshells and long range can be stacked, each with a bar showing how much is left. They turn up regularly, though the game rarely gave a reason to mix just two instead of using them all.
Health versus ammo. Running over soldiers gives you health, while running over tanks costs a good chunk. Shooting soldiers drops ammo instead. Running people over was satisfying.
Choose your path. A menu map shows how close you are to Berlin, and it barely moved over a long stretch of play. The shorter routes have the harder levels, so a longer route is easier. Paths diverge sometimes, and unlike Star Fox you are not locked in. The easiest difficulty is still hard.

What doesn't

The turret. You turn the tank with the D-pad, and hold B, which also fires, while pressing the D-pad to turn the turret. You can't move while turning it, and enemies come straight on from the left and right. A forward-only gun would have turned it into a shmup, so the workaround is the better choice. It is still frustrating.
Too much fire. The enemies are placed on purpose, but there are too many for a tank this slow. Sometimes there is fire everywhere and nowhere to go, and slowdown doesn't help, because you realize you are trapped. Two hosts said they never reached the halfway point.
The radio. It gives vague warnings and mentions prisoners without saying where. You can't tune it.

Worth knowing

It is based on SNK's 1985 arcade game TNK3, and in the Japanese version Colonel Ralph from Ikari Warriors is inside the tank. There are no bosses per se, just choke points where you must kill what blocks you. The big tank is the "think tank" in the manual, and the final enemy looks like an even bigger one, the Metal Gear of 1944.

The bottom line

Skip it. Nobody voted it onto the Essential Games List. Sean is not much of a run-and-gun guy and had fun once he got hold of the tank controls, but called it too much of a mess to recommend. Joe thought the good concepts never came together into anything he couldn't get elsewhere. Mike called the path choosing "pretty revolutionary" but said it comes down to implementation.

Written from our conversation in this episode.

Click a timestamp to play from there. Landing a little off?

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

The date, June 5th, 1944. The United Forces are preparing for their final assault on the Normandy coast. The mission, establish a beachhead, break through the front lines, and infiltrate and destroy enemy headquarters. This is Iron Tank, Invasion of Normandy.

And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. And today, if it wasn't clear, we are in the trenches. That's World War I, Mike, come on. There were no trenches in World War II? But it wasn't iconic. What do the tanks go in?

I know they don't go in the trenches, so I'm saying, what would be the tank equivalent? Fields? They go into the fields. The tank equivalent of the trenches. We'll feed on the beaches, we'll feed on the fields, we'll feed on the little children. Gotcha. Okay, and that's a lot, Sean, all at once.

For those of you that don't know, we are playing Iron Tank, Invasion of Normandy. It's an SNK game. I'm going to give you a brief overview here for a second. I describe this as a top-view action-shooting game where you control a tank starting on the beaches of Normandy, then advancing forward while fighting various enemies. You can also rescue prisoners of war. What do you guys think? Sounds interesting. So far, adds up. I did leave out an important thing, but we'll talk about that in the gameplay section.

For those of you that care about the deep lore of this, it's just history. So you don't have, there's no like... Questionable, of questionable merit. Questionable merit, yeah. The way that the eight-year-old who's playing it might think it went. Yeah, when you're storming from the Normandy River into the forest of Normandy. Yeah, eventually into Berlin itself. Well, I never knew that there was just one single tank invading Normandy.

His name is Paul, codenamed... That's the tank's name. Oh, really? Yeah, there's no one in there. That's funny. And it's codenamed Snake. Did you guys catch that? Threw me off a little bit, too. I was like, wait, is this related to Metal Gear, but like historically... There are the transmissions. Well, the tank is the first Metal Gear. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, I like that theory. SNK and Konami have nothing to do with each other. I just thought it was funny that we got a game where the titular character is also the titular character. I don't know why I said that. You are correct. It's also, yeah, Snake.

But not solid or liquid. I thought you were going to say his name is Tank. I guess it is a Tank. The character because the Iron Tank is the character? Yeah. Iron Tank is the character? Well, the tank is what's codenamed Snake, right? Right. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess it's not a character, but... I also like Iron Snake as like a, you know, because there was liquid snake, solid snake. This is Iron Snake. Helium Snake. This is in the Metal Gear universe.

But one thing that we should note is that if you play the Japanese version, inside the tank is Colonel Ralph, who also appeared in Ikari Warriors 1. So they are making this like, sort of shared universe. Where is he? Was he one of the Ikari Warriors? Yeah, he was one of the Ikari Warriors. Oh, okay. Yeah. So he just like, does all these things all the time, only with one or two people.

I just figured that like, you know, with a name like Ikari, it would be like a more Japanese equivalent, you know? Right. And if you'll remember, Ikari Warriors had a tank as well. Yeah. So this is basically like an updated Ikari Warriors 1. Yeah, it's like a spin-off. Yeah. But it made by the same people. So I think it's like, you know, what if you just took the tank tanks and they made it its own game?

Did you come across that thought at all when you were playing Ikari Warriors? Like, oh, I'd love to just play a game where I'd just be the tank. I think we talked about it, didn't we, on the episode? Probably. I don't remember that. I mean, that's just a good bet for me. I don't remember that either. I'm just guessing. Episode like 34, 44, one of those fours. Yeah, let us know. Yeah.

So let's get into the gameplay here. Okay. I think we need to talk about the most important thing, which is controlling your tank. Yes. Sounds simple, right? You move around on the D-pad, you shoot. You've got two different types of ammo. You've got your normal, like, ammunition, and then you have your, what they refer to as your main weapon, but that can be changed. However, there's a twist to this whole controlling the tank mechanic, right, Joe? There is, and it has to do with the turret, the gun on the tank. I think, usually, I mean, I'm thinking of more modern controllers where you have more options of buttons to press to turn the turret.

So obviously we don't have that. So they came up with this questionable solution of how you turn the turret, where you turn your tank with your normal D-pad, but if you're pressing B, which is also the shoot button while you're pressing the D-pad, you turn the turret, which I found wildly confusing. So this was, as soon as I saw this game on the docket for, like, a future episode, and I was looking at a couple screenshots, I realized that they were either going to do two things. They were going to be a tank that only shoots forward, which ruins the idea of playing as a tank. Like, that's kind of what tanks do.

Or they were going to do some weird hack to make the controls work for it and still be able to control your treads and your turret differently. And they went with the second option, which I think is the better option, but, like, I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass. Yeah, because then you have to, like, you can't move while you're turning the turret, and then a lot of times you're just trying to shoot and move, and then you turn the turret. Like, it's just frustrating.

Yeah, I think that the real problem with that formula comes down to when you account for how many enemies and how often enemies appear on screen, that it would be one thing to have that approach where the turret moves on its own and you have to, you know, do a different input for that. If you had time to be more strategic about this kind of thing. However, enemies appear straight on from the left and right, different types of enemies. You have foot soldiers, you have other tanks, and those things all matter differently on the screen.

So you have to kind of just know where your turret is at all times and be fast with your control over it. And that's sort of like they kept the pace of a typical run and gun where you have marginally more snappy controls, but they completely slowed down your movement with this tank. And I don't think it's a complete failure. I think that it at least provides a challenge.

And to go back to the pacing there, don't you think a game where you position yourself in a tank should be more about like, you know, strategic, like tank on tank or tank on, you know, like a lot of people, not the traditional running gun sense. You know, like it seems weird to be this tank that just steamrolls everything, but also is not actually, you know, it's not actually doing that because you're constantly getting attacked as well. In what games do you remember playing with a tank just out of curiosity?

Yeah, I would try to think about that because the only time I've ever thought of like a tank would be Grand Theft Auto. Okay. You know, that's not realistic at all. Grand Theft Auto tank, there's the Halo tank, which is, you know, still pretty loose and you don't really have to think all that strategically with that.

But then on the other end, which is what I think what you're thinking of more, there's like the Battlezone tank, which is completely like, not turn-based, but it is very tactics-based.

So I think that you could go either way. I think that because they made the tank so slow in both like the turret movement and your own movement, that we're sort of coming with this challenge issue. Right. Yeah. I don't have anything further to say on that. I think it was just, it's a learning curve that maybe with like hours of practice you could like overcome.

I just don't, for me, it wasn't hitting. Same. And I think it was more because of the barrage of enemies than it was the failure of the turret control. I was just going to say that. I think the failure of the turret control definitely affected me a lot, but also combining that with just how much, like how much gunfire could be on the screen at once that you have to avoid and how slow you go to avoid it. It just seemed, even right out of the gate, a little like just overly challenging for like the first level. And I can only imagine like by like the last level. The first level was actually kind of easy.

Well, maybe I'm thinking of a little later then. But, you know, when I remember there being several times where there's just like fire everywhere. Yeah. I'm like, where could I even have gone? I mean, maybe it was shortly after that. I think unless you're good at these games, you're going to die the first time you play that first level. But that's more of a, you know, learnings and takeaways thing. Yeah. Which we'll get into because there are elements to. And when I said that it was easy, I mean in comparison to like everything after it. Right. Sure. Yeah. Still challenging.

I will also add that I wouldn't have wanted the tank to shoot straight on. So I don't disagree with their choice here. I disagree with how they place the enemies. Shooting straight on would have just turned this into a shmup. Yeah. A shmup with a tank instead of a plane or a helicopter or the various other space weapons we've seen. And I'll also note that like it seems that their design sort of, yeah, continuing off of that, there are moments where you will trigger a complete ambush.

And because your turret moves so slowly, it's impossible to get everybody before they pretty much kill you unless you have a certain power up, which I think is just bad. That's just bad design in itself. But we'll get into that when we get into power ups. You can't necessarily like run away from combat because of the way that the scrolling is designed.

You can kind of push, you can go up to the top of the screen and push it forward, but only ever so slowly. And that's just going to cause you to get into the line of fire with everyone. And in the specific moment that I'm talking about, you can't move forward past like a wall until you kill these three tanks that surround the team. Oh, I see. What I would call the bosses of each level at the end. Yeah. But even though there's no like levels per se. It's not so much a boss as it is just like a choke point. Gotcha. Okay. And you talked about those different power ups. They are rapid fire, armor pierce, bombshells, and long range.

I almost, you know, knowing that this is SNK, I kind of hoped for some more ridiculous style power ups for a tank. But I get that this is going for that World War II thing and there weren't power ups on tanks to begin with. So might as well just try to like keep it to like, you know. Right. You know. So these are fine. They just kind of seem uninspired at this point.

And did you include the question mark, like kill the whole screen one in there? I did not include that because when I'm talking about these ones, I'm referring to the ones you have to select to go to the menu and then choose from which type of animation. You have to do that with the kill the whole screen ones. Oh, really? Okay. You just can't combine it with whatever the other one is. So that is another. Well, yeah. The moment that I was talking about where you cannot get past it unless you have this power up is that kill the whole screen or you will die. And that's confirmed?

I mean, at least if you have. To the average player. You're going to die unless you do that. Right. But that is a thing that we haven't really talked about yet is that you can combine these power ups. And while there isn't too much variety in what they are, you can at least create different variations of them.

Yeah. I think it's an interesting way that we haven't seen power ups used before, not only combining them, but that also that you have this like bar of like how much of that power up you have left. And you can kind of decide, well, I'll put this and this together for these enemies and this and this together for those enemies. Personally, I didn't find that there was like too many reasons for me to put like just two together and not all of them.

But other than conserving some of them. But it's a cool concept. Yeah. And you pick up these power ups fairly regularly, which I thought was nice. And the other aspect of your tank management is the damage control because there's a there's collision between foot soldiers and tanks. And the difference, of course, being that running over soldiers will actually act as health, whereas running over tanks will obliterate like a good chunk of your health, which totally makes sense. I'm not sure where the health thing.

No, no. I meant like that the tank shouldn't reward you either because then the whole game will just be mowing down everything rather than shooting it. I did appreciate that you could just run over everybody, though. Like, I mean, I know that you shouldn't because they're going to they will drop ammunition if you shoot them for the normal way.

But it was still it was still satisfying. I didn't expect them to let you do that, even though, like, that's you're in a tank and they're not. So you would think it would. But you would expect to just take damage for you at the very least to gain damage from that adds a whole new strategic component to it. Oh, right. Because you're right. You have to kind of trade off power ups and ammunition versus the health that you might desperately need at that point.

Yeah. Especially as you go later on, there's more frequent tanks and other enemies as opposed to these soldiers. So the soldiers, when they appear, you more likely want to run them over just to make sure you get some of your health back. Just assuming you're not great at health. Yeah. I wasn't I wasn't great at my health management. One thing I noticed was that if you pick up any kind of ammunition, you do get a bit of energy back.

So does it just that if you run them over without it, it gives you more? I actually wasn't I was usually shooting them before I ran them. Interesting. OK, I guess I wasn't I only knew based off the manual that the running over the soldiers gave you health. So I was assuming that, you know, I was only paying attention while I was collecting soldiers to confirm that. That is a really disgusting thought, though. You know, just the blood of your enemy. Yeah. It's metal hole. Well, that's Iron Snake for you.

What's his actual name? Jeff? It's Paul. Paul. Oh, but in the other one, it was in the other version. Oh, it was Ralph. Ralph. R-A-L-F. You know, the non-typical way of spelling it.

Yes, I mean, you have this damage control thing. You have the ability to control your weapon layout for your tank. And then there's this choose your path component of the game that we haven't talked about yet that I think is really cool because there's also a map you refer to in your menu that lets you constantly check how close you are to Berlin. And I will say that I think that this is to scale. Because I was playing for a while and when I checked the map periodically, I barely moved.

So this has to be one of the biggest game worlds in a game like this that I've seen. I think at the very least you have to go through something like 11 levels at the shortest path. And what they've chose to do is that on the ones that are shorter paths, they've made the levels themselves harder. Yeah. So it actually works out in your favor to take a longer route if you're struggling with the game because you won't come across those more difficult levels, whereas the ones that might jump you or zip you across the screen from, say, like stage 5 to 9 instead of going like 5, 6, 8. I didn't realize that. That's a cool little risk-reward sort of like choose your own difficulty almost.

Yeah, yeah. And you're never locked to – it's not so much like Star Fox, the way people might be thinking about that, where you get the map layout at the beginning and you choose which planet you want to go to. It doesn't work like that because Star Fox locks you into that path after you've chosen it at the beginning.

This is more like you can choose to zip ahead and do a hard level now, but at the end of that level there still might be – might be, not all the time – two or three diverging paths you can choose from afterwards that, you know, if you really thought about it, you might take one that looked like it was not going to get you as far because you might get a chance to take it a little easier or something like that. Yeah, they all like – the easiest difficulty though is hard. Just don't forget that. Yeah, no, no, no, yeah, yeah. It's still an NES game. Yeah. So that's worth mentioning.

I don't really know what the solve here for this kind of game is because of how difficult it was for me. I didn't even – I don't even want to say I made it to the halfway point in this game. I didn't either. So I don't know if that's just give us more health. I don't know if that would, you know.

I think it also might be – The enemies? Yeah, managing like – not even all the time. There's a lot of times where it's not so bad, but like managing the enemy fire on the screen. I don't know if – I know I keep saying this. Do you guys experience this where like sometimes you're just like – I'm just like I don't even know where I could have gone in that situation.

Like I was at somewhere too late to – you know, the enemies fire on me. It's too late for me to kind of get out of the way and there's like two – it's too dense. Right, and it's so dense that slowdown is not even helpful because you're – at that point, you know, sometimes in NES games when there's too many sprites on screen, it slows down and you almost feel like you're in slow motion and able to do cooler things.

But this is not the case here because you realize more or less that you're actually trapped and one of those bullets or maybe multiple are going to hit you. Yeah, there are times I feel like if you could just freeze frame, you could find moments where like, yeah, there's no way out of this situation. Yep, that's me. That's right. You're probably wondering.

So there weren't bosses at the end of the stage per se, but there was a clear like thing that you had to accomplish before you could move on to the diverging paths. There are some boss-like enemies.

There's right away, I think in that first level, the think tank, I think it's called. Yeah, there's a big tank. The big tank, yeah. Yeah. But they call it the think tank in the manual. There's also like a giant submarine.

There's the fighter planes that go by. Those trains. We didn't even talk about the armored trains that Berlin had. Is that true? Was that in like actual history? They did have a big train gun, but I don't know if that's like an armored train. No, no. I meant like that was like a thing though. Like they had as part of their like railroad system, armored military train system. Yeah, just like as like a patrol, they would send trains down all their train tracks at like 80 miles an hour and just like hit anything they could. That was how they did it. Right, that makes sense. I get it now. You could see that on the History Channel.

Yeah, you know, I guess I never really thought about this game in terms of its historical accuracy, but now I see very clearly. Yeah, I mean, I didn't make it to the end, so I don't know what to say about the ending of this game, but it seems like you fight a just bigger think tank. Yeah. The biggest one. He looks gigantic. It might as well be Metal Gear, right? It is Metal Gear. It's the Metal Gear of 1944. True. Yeah. They've never gone to World War II in Metal Gear Solid. No, no. Do you think they will?

Only if there's like a crab. Like if you get to fight a crab. Oh, a giant enemy crab? Yeah. Got it. Okay. So it could be historically accurate. So you have this, you have the choosing your path, you have the main gun options where you can build out your loadout. You have the damage control of health versus risk.

That's a lot of strategy in one game. Do you think that they all complement each other? That they're all just there as additional choices on top of each other? Is it too many things to manage? I think it's too much to manage. I think that if some things were tweaked, then it could be a complementary experience. But, and it's not even that like in these earlier NES games that we played, like, oh, there's too many enemies. They don't even care where they put them. It's just like they're randomly spawning and running at you. Like, no, these are placed enemies.

But I think they just got a little too like slap happy with it when they were coding it. Right. Because my, I think the coolest idea in this game is the ability to combine your power-ups and manage those that way. And I really wish that they had planned out the levels in a way where it's like, I mean, maybe they did and I just didn't like pick up on some of it. But I didn't really feel like there was ever a need for me to like experiment too much with like, what does this do and that do?

And I know we touched on that earlier. And we've said like some good things about this game and some bad things. But like, I want to say like, I didn't really have fun with this game. And I think that that, not to spoil my thing, but like, I think that that really kind of speaks to the fact that like there's cool things that we're talking about this game, but don't feel like they're meshing well together. I totally think that games can have cool features and still suck. Yeah. Not that I'm saying this game sucks, but you know, that remains to be seen.

Also speaking to the historical accuracy, maybe this is like a thing you're not supposed to win. Like no one man could ever take down the German war as hell. Does it say German? Well, you're going to Berlin. Well, I mean, it's, but you're the United Forces. Oh, gotcha. Okay. That's true. I think this is an alternate. This is an alternate history where Normandy is actually. The country of Normandy. Yeah. They're a country and they are the ones starting the war. So you have to just fight them.

Yeah. I guess I never thought about it in that, in that context though. So you, if you were going into a war zone by yourself, you would be barraged by enemies. They would totally take advantage of that. It's actually a deconstruction of every other running gun game I've ever played.

That was very funny. Also real fast thinking about, thinking about 1917 for a minute. I mean, this is like an adaptation of that. Yeah. That's different. No, 1917 is an adaptation of Invasion of Normandy, just without the tank. Okay. Yeah. We'll go with that. Yeah. On very loose terms. Right. I know I said earlier that this is like Ikari Warriors 1, but did you guys know that this is actually based on SNK's 1985 arcade game, TNK3.

Tink3. Yeah. T.N.K. And I don't think the TNK stands for anything. Totally numerous. I think it's funny that companies like SNK would make a TNK game. Because the next letter of the alphabet. I'm actually, I'm on the edge of my seat for the prequel, RNK. Because that's funny as well. Right. These are all, everything we're saying is funny.

I'll link Tank3 in the show notes so you guys can see what that game played like. But if you watch it, you'll definitely see right away how this is almost like a sequel, but not called TNK4. The squeakquel. You know. It's a squeakquel.

Others, though, believe that this game is based on Guerrilla Warfare. Another. The concept. Another SNK game. Actually, it's just called Guerrilla War. I said Guerrilla Warfare. Like Guerrilla War? Guerrilla War. I'm serious. And you know what the worst part is? It doesn't have guerrillas in it. Damn it. It's another World War II game. It came out the year before, so I'm not like sold on the idea that it could be influencing that fast. I think TNK3 being like further away means that this is just like the natural lineage of things. But Guerrilla War comes to the NES in 1989,

so couldn't have positively influenced it in our minds because we haven't played it yet. But we will, along with many other SNK games. Can't wait. Yeah, SNK. They're all over the place. Mm-hmm. But this is why when you play like Capcom versus SNK, on... Can you pick a tank? No, you can't pick a tank, but you play on like, you know, let's say GameCube, right? Like I think it existed. Capcom versus SNK. Was on GameCube. You would know the whole Capcom roster. You know, it's like, wow, look at that. Ryu, Mega Man, Simon. Like that's maybe Simon. No, Simon's Konami.

Captain Commando is in some Capcom-related fighting games, I think. Okay. He's in Project X Commando for sure, but... Interesting. Anyway, my point was, when you look at the SNK side, you might not recognize any of those characters unless you grew up with these games. Yeah, I remember when I would play those games in the arcade, I never knew what any of them were except for the couple like Street Fighter guys that were in there. Yeah. None of them have reached a level of like iconic or anything. They're just like, oh, this... Yeah, who are they? Yeah. All right. And I got nothing else, so does anybody have any straight thoughts before we move into the Essential Games list?

Well, Mike, you didn't like let us respond to your request for straight thoughts. I was kind of hoping we could get out of this one early. All right. Well, I just wanted to stop and ask you guys. It's not so much like a straight thought, but... Straight question. It's a straight question. Like, I know that we touched upon the existence of the radio, but do you guys have any thoughts on the radio? Like, I thought that it was completely...

Like, it didn't help with anything. It was just giving us very vague sort of like, you know, there might be something happening up ahead of you. It mostly tells you, buddy, the things that are happening or potential locations of prisoners of war. But it never says like where. No, it never says where. I stopped checking it after a while. And on top of that, the annoying thing is that the prisoners of war who do talk other than saying thanks, the ones who say stuff, just say stuff that you can learn in the manual. Yeah. They don't say... They don't actually give like hints about take this path. Like any progression or anything that's... Right. Like, make sure you go right. I heard that there's less enemies.

You know? Like, that would be cool. And I know that you said you ignored it, but I ended up... I had to respond because I cannot take that... Yeah, it is an annoying... Beeping. It only beeps for as long as you're in that area, though. So it's not too bad. I also just thought it was funny that we're named Snake and we have the radio now again. And it just felt very similar to Metal Gear. Yeah, but you can't tune it. No. Yeah, really. And that's what I'm kind of in it for is like if I can't tune the radio, I don't want to play the game. Exactly.

Sean, if you don't mind, would you give your vote first? My vote for what, Mike? The Essential Games list. Oh, okay. Okay. Do you want to play the music again or do you want to... No, I think we're... Okay. I think we're... You know what? Let's do it. Okay. That... I feel much better now.

Well, again, there are a lot of things about this game that I like. I think that I'm not much of a run-and-gun guy, but I appreciate that there's some tweaks to the formula happening. I think that there's some tweaks to the formula happening. Again, not the best execution, but I did have fun with this game after I got a hold of the wacky tank controls.

But, again, like, this... It's too much of a... It's too much of a shit show most of the time for me to say that this is a recommended game or to... Let alone say it's an essential game. So, I will say no.

All right. That's one no. Joe? Yeah, similar thing. I mean, I kind of already spoiled it earlier, but I didn't have a lot of fun with the game. I thought it had some good concepts, but overall, they didn't come together in a way that did anything for me that I can't get elsewhere. I mean, there are even other games I didn't care for that I probably like better than this one. So, yeah. I'm going to give it a no.

Okay. I'm not really sure what this game needed to make it essential because it hit a lot of interesting concepts that we haven't even seen before. I think that choosing your own paths thing is pretty revolutionary, and we praise something like Mega Man, which did it differently, but, you know, more or less, this is another way of executing that same kind of issue.

So, I think that all those things that it adds to NES games that we've never seen before are awesome ideas. It's all about implementation for a game like Iron Tank. I don't even know if maybe this game needed a larger field of view, and this way there was more, like, opportunities for you to think about placement of your tank. Most of the time, you just had to be somewhere in the center of the screen to make sure you could round out bullet attacks and stuff like that.

I don't know if it was as simple as my suggestion early on in the episode of just removing the amount of enemies. Maybe that would have came off as boring or just eventually, like, as you continue, you know, because it's a massive game, it'd just get dry after a while of just seeing the same kind of things happen over and over again. So, maybe you do need that barrage. Or, maybe this is the lesson that no one man can take down a country, you know? Like, it takes a nation. It takes a village. It takes nations.

So, yeah, it's not getting an essential games list for me, but SNK continues to show that they might produce something worthy of the essential games list down the line. They're growing, and I can't say that they'll continue to grow, but their games are definitely getting more sophisticated than where we started, which, for reference, I'm pretty sure was Athena. Yeah. So, we've come a long way from Athena. On the Heat Seekers charts, SNK, moving on up. And that's about all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia.

Next week, we'll be playing Legendary Wings, a game I swear I've never heard anybody drop to me before. No one said on, like, you know, like, no one's name dropped that. Oh, yeah. No one said on, like, a forum, even, like, check out these pickups of, like, games I've recently found at a garage sale. And Legendary Wings isn't even in the boxes, you know? Like, I don't see this thing anywhere.

Even the box art. Like, seeing that for the first time, I was like, what is this? So, if you've played this before, I want you to write in to us on NostalgiaCast, at NostalgiaCast. That's our Twitter. Twitter. And just let me know, like, what, you know, how you found this game growing up, because I feel like no one heard of it, even though it's a Capcom game. So, that's kind of interesting.

We'll definitely get into all that. Sean, will you have a good week until next week? Yeah. Okay, great. Joe? Absolutely. And we want all of our listeners to have a great week, too. And if sometime this week you happen to say NostalgiaCast is a podcast you should listen to, know that you should have said Nostalgia is a podcast you should listen to. We're only NostalgiaCast on Twitter. It'd be wrong to say that as the title of our show.

I think you should also, like, post about it online a lot so that, you know... For practice. Instead of, like, the 2011 Steam game, Nostalgia, the 2020 podcast. You really want to climb up those Google search charts. The Google search that comes up. Yeah, that would make me very happy. Maybe we should talk to Google. Let's talk to Google. Yeah. Who is he? Mr. Google? Mr. Google. Tom Google. He's like a puppet with, like, googly eyes. Is that the same Tom from Twitter? Tom from MySpace? Oh, Tom from MySpace. Yeah. All right. Thank you.

← GAUNTLET LEGENDARY WINGS →

109 · IRON TANK

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Also released in 1988