Die Hard Isn't That Bad

So usually when I come to near the end of a game or after I've finished it I'll do a blog post on it,  I've you've been watching the stream you'll have seen I'm doing a 100 game NES challenge and I've not really talked much any of the games I've finished on here so I want to talk about the game that was, so far, probably the most fun.

Die Hard came out in 1990 for the NES and basically follows the same plot of the movie.  You are tasked with stopping the crooks of which there are 40 in the building and you have to kill them all before the timer runs out and they get away with a bunch of money.  It's a simple game and it's easy to pick up and play in short bursts thanks to  the in game timer keeping a single attempt down to about 30 minutes.

Now the game ain't perfect by any stretch.  In fact, there's a hell of a lot wrong with it really.  The two big problems with it, for me, are the controls are sort of crap which makes aiming shots and killing crooks way more stressful than it should be and the foot power gauge mechanic.  I get that it was a thing in the movie and of course, if you walk over broken glass you're gonna fuck your feet up but in this game the gauge drops just from running.  Considering this is a game where time is very much of the essence, the fact that you are punished for running is BEYOND stupid.  This games lack of quality however has been well documented by our good friend, The Angry Video Game Nerd.  The episode he did on this game, while entertaining, I think gave it a bit of a reputation that it doesn't deserve.

If you can get used to the shit controls and stupid foot system it's actually quite clever.  For example if you kill a crook and steal his radio, you can listen in and find out where the other crooks are going.  The crooks will of course wise up to you though and stop radio chatter, but if you used the radio to call the police, they will contact you and tell you where crooks have been spotted throughout the building.  If you go into one of the lower floors and blow up a computer you can fuck with the hackers efforts to open the safe, thus giving you more time to kill crooks or if you spend too much time crawling in vents, the crooks will start attacking you through the vents.  It's nice to see the game react to the way your playing and there's even a way to cheese the game by getting all the crooks to fight you at once at the end but this is stupidly hard to achieve.  There's also a pretty decent number of endings for a game this old, most of them being "you lose" endings but my favorite is that it's entirely possible for you and the final boss to kill each other at the same time and the game will be like "You saved the day but you died as well, GAME OVER" and I can't think of that many games that give you an ending for a double KO.

So if you saw that AVGN video and wrote of Die Hard as just another shit movie tie in game, I implore you to give it a go.  If you have no idea what I'm on about then go give it a go anyway because despite all it's glaring flaws its a surprisingly fun game