Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Old school, yo! Maybe I should buy a Wii? I was leaning towards a 360 though... I hear Super Mario Galaxy is the best thing since sliced bread.

*I better get back to my Massively overlords before they flame me to a crisp. I'll stop by more often, heck, I think the Wii will even see some MMOs. :)

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I think we need to have a warm-up on what we like about the VC.....cause I love it!

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Yes, Zanac rocks!

Some tips for the next time you play it....

1. Those places where the scrolling stops are this game's version of boss encounters. Except Zanac bosses aren't screen-sized monsters, they're -gun emplacements- on the ground. If you destroy all the ground targets before time runs out, you get bonus points. This is partly important because....

2. Zanac is a dynamic game. Every time you play, the enemies will be slightly different. There are sections that tend to have certain enemies over others, and ground targets are always the same, but the flying enemies are chosen by the game on the fly.

3. But while enemies are different every time, there are things you can do to make them easier. Every time you shoot a certain number of shots the enemies get slightly harder (it's usually not enough to mean you should let off the fire button though). Every time you shoot a "Sart", those little satellite-like enemies that appear in an upper corner for a few seconds and then vanish, the enemy difficulty goes down. Letting a Sart get away makes it go up a bit I think. Defeating a boss gives you a major break in difficulty, while letting it go by without destroying it increases difficulty (as you can tell in your video: notice, when the targets are scrolling off after a failed attempt, that they shoot faster).

4. This is one of the earliest uses of the Compile Weapon System, where there's a number of numbered weapons you can collect, and getting more increases its power. And Zanac remains one of the most developed uses of the system, featuring eight different weapons, each with many levels of power. Unlike later games however, Zanac really makes you work for them. Whenever you pick up a new weapon, it begins at level one power; you can't switch weapons, then switch back and expect to get back to your old power! To get far, you really must pick one weapon and stick with it. It doesn't help that dying or running out of ammo puts you back to lowest-level Weapon 0 again.

5. The game difficulty adjustment? It also watches the weapons you pick up! Notice, whenever you get a #2, the "forward shield" weapon, the game will usually send in enemies that attack your ship from the side! In this way Zanac is a game about manipulating the enemy forces as much as destroying them.

6. There are tons of secrets in the game. Killing a Sart with a subweapon often gets you a "blue render," an extra life. Shoot a blue render until it turns red to permanently powerup your autofire! You get several seconds of invincibility from picking up a numbered weapon! Get Weapon 2 to level 6 to gain 80 seconds of complete invincibility! Get weapon 6 to level 6 to get one shot that turns all enemies on the screen into blue renders!! And that's far from all....

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I'm so happy Eternal Champions is on the VC ( I knew it wouldn't take long). Now if only they put the second one on there!

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Mmm.. Zanac. Bliss.

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Just because you suck at Eternal Champions doesn't mean it's bad.

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I traded my copy of Eternal Champions for Sonic 3 back in 4th grade.
I think I won on that trade :)

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