Description of Black Tiger - MAME

This game Black Tiger - MAME working perfectly with emulator version mame64ui, you can download on this web site.

Have you ever wondered, whether could Castlevania got possibly any better? Well, let’s be all honest and take down those pink glasses: it wasn’t that good in the first place to begin with; but essentially: yes, it could. And the result would probably be something like the Black Tiger. Released only a year after Castlevania’s NES launch in 1986, Black Tiger (or Black Dragon in Japan) shares very much the same gameplay as Castlevania, only with significantly better sounds and visuals (like really, Konami, do you feel like there couldn’t be done more with the arcade version of Castlevania? shame on you!). Sure, NES version of Black Dragon looks equally awful, but it’s the arcade version I’m talking about that counts. You take the role of the eponymous Black Tiger, a mighty warrior and the only remaining man of courage and valor, who can stop the three black dragons, creatures that emerged from the hell itself, only to bring chaos and destruction on Earth. Now, depending on the DIP switch settings, you start either with two, three, five or seven lives; the game difficulty can be set to eight levels, with level one being the easiest and eight being the hardest. Obviously enough, you lose a life in one of the three scenarios: a) on contact with an enemy, b) when hit by an enemy attack, and finally c) on contact with ‘trap’ terrain (see those green thorny things? yeah, don’t touch these). At the beginning of the game, you’re equipped with your default weapon and armor. As you play along, however, you collect the so called zenny coins, for which you can buy upgrades to both weapons and armor as well as more lives and time for the level time limit (feels like Castlevania yet?). As to where you buy these upgrades and goodies, throughout the game you’ll encounter trapped sages (drug dealers in pink robes? hell, I don’t know!), who’ll either offer you some random reward (like zennies or health) or give you the opportunity to buy things from them. An opportunity you don’t want to miss, let me tell ya. The game offers both single and multiplayer gameplay, but as I haven’t even bothered to properly set up the player-two controls so far on my setup, I can’t really tell you anything about the latter, just that it should be possible to pull off. There are seven stages in total, with three bosses (yeah, the dragons I’ve talked about before)at the end of round three, five and seven. And obviously, after you beat all the three of them, the game ends. All and all, I’ve grown quite fond of Black Tiger, namely because it’s so much more better than some other games of the time, that it just feels like a reward to play it. Really folks, don’t confuse our fondness for retro-gaming with nostalgic-blindness. Take the iconic Asteroids as an example: they are waaaaay older than the majority of the games I’ve managed to ‘bash’ so far, and yet it hasn’t aged a single bit. But can you honestly say the same about some of the atrocities made for Atari two-six-hundred or NES? And moreover, can you say the same for some of the arcade titles you’ve played in the arcade as a little kid? Now, Black Tiger certainly aged. Yet it’s not really this awful looking old squaw one should avoid. Certainly not. Actually, if you take a look at the weapon/armor upgrade system, it’s quite a modern approach and quite a milestone in the video-game development history. Have fun, folks.