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. An opportunity you don’t want to miss, let me tell ya. 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. 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?). 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).Īt the beginning of the game, you’re equipped with your default weapon and armor. 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. 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. Sure, NES version of Black Dragon looks equally awful, but it’s the arcade version I’m talking about that counts. 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!). And the result would probably be something like the Black Tiger. 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.
This game Black Tiger - MAME working perfectly with emulator version mame64ui, you can download on this web site.