Captain Silver playthrough log

Decided to try and beat this game that I played a lot when I was a kid, but never managed to make it past the first couple levels... The fact that you die from anything in one hit probably made me not want to give it a serious try. The 2nd level where you're on a boat, I barely even recognize most of it... it completely changes up all the enemies by then. It's not actually THAT hard though, surprisingly... just getting the powerups and avoiding the easy predictable enemies enough to make it to the level boss with all your lives is enough to get through it... The bosses can get kind of hard though.

I decided to start using savestate checkpoints at the beginning of each level. Just because I was in a rush to finish this and didn't want to start over again after getting game over. The 3rd and 4th levels aren't that hard either, once you know what to expect. And actually, in the NTSC version, the 4th level is the last one. I bet I could've gotten this far without savestates easily if I practiced a bit more, but I wasn't willing to put that much time into this game.

However, I'm playing a rom of the PAL version, which has 2 extra levels that were cut from the NTSC version for unknown reasons... The 5th and 6th levels are where the game starts to get kind of ridiculously hard. The 5th level is a lot like the 1st, with falling obstacles and such, only now there are enemies that throw projectiles and take several hits... I managed to get to the boss with all my powerups, but then the boss beat the crap out of me, and I had to actually save a checkpoint right before this boss cuz it was just too hard. You can only hit him while crouching or jumping to hit his head.. but your attack is so short range, and the boss walks back and forth randomly so any time you try to get within range to hit him it seems like there's a random chance you can just die and there's nothing you can do about it...

Finally, the 6th stage... it's easy if you have a powered up sword. At this point I was running out of patience with this game and didn't want to bother trying without it, so I just loaded from my checkpoint and kept trying until I could get to the boss, then saved another checkpoint there.

This boss is very challenging, but fair unlike the 5th one. I needed to load my checkpoint like 5 or 6 times to finally beat him.

If it weren't for the last 2 bosses being as hard as they are, I could seriously see myself beating this entire game legit without savestates.

The version that I played was the SMS version. Out of curiousity I checked out the NES version on youtube, it looks terrible... almost like a completely different game engine that doesn't work nearly as well.