 SEGA DRUNK! Despite the title, Rolling Thunder 2 does not have anything to do with Garth Brooks. Instead, it's the second game in a series of arcade action platformers made by Namco. The first game was ported to a bunch of platforms including the NES, and that one's a pretty decent port I'll consider. The second game got a home console port to the Sega Genesis, and the third game, Rolling Thunder 3, was made exclusively for the Genesis. But I just wanted to make a video about the second game, because it's really a surprisingly accurate and well made arcade port, especially for 1990. You play as Agent Albatross, who along with his partner Leela, must take out the crime syndicate Geldra after they brought down the entire planet's satellite network. And yes, since there's two characters here, this game is two player co-op, and there's no slowdown to speak of here, so this is a really fun one to play through with the second player. You have three lives to get through 11 levels with a health meter, none of that one hit death stuff thankfully. No continues, but there is a password system, and not just any password system, this game has you join together random words to form a sentence. For example, the second level password is a magical thunder learned the secret. Man, that sure as hell beats putting in a bunch of letters and numbers. The controls here are very precise, just like the arcade. The only hang up here is that you can't fire up or down, just left and right, but that's fine. The balance of speed here between your character, enemies, and enemy fire is really well done, which makes this a satisfying play through, and even better is that the difficulty is well balanced too, and by that I mean, the game gives you enough time and space to get used to the controls and all the enemy patterns you have to deal with. But by the time you get to level 4 or so, you better be ready because this game gets really tough. That's when you start dealing with these jumping grenade tossing guys like this loser. Ugh, I hate this guy. You can't just randomly fire at will either, there's ammo that you have to manage, which you can replenish by going in these doors in the background. You can also get a health replenishment through these doors, as well as pick up more powerful weapons like a machine gun, a flamethrower, and a cluster gun. These weapons really help with the difficulty, so you gotta pick your spots and manage your ammo wisely. The level design throughout the game is simple but effective, it's a good match for your character's abilities, and if you hold it up while jumping you can swing up to a higher ledge no problem. The thing is though, I will say this game does get a little bit repetitive, lots of ducking and dodging and hiding behind things, and destroying a seemingly endless number of these masked guys. I don't know, maybe it's just the Contra fan in me that wants to just cut loose and go Rambo on these guys. You also can't shoot while you're jumping, which is kind of annoying at first, but I found it's not really that big of a deal. I do enjoy the little touches this game provides though. Some enemies take more than one hit to kill, and when they get hit with that first shot, they're just like, kind of mildly peeved. Like, ow, come on, would you shoot me for? Plus the death animation here is awesome. I gotta mention the music in this game. It's some of the best in the Genesis catalog, and it's clear the dev team were proud of how this game sounded because there's a separate music menu that depicts a band playing the music from the game, and you can flip through all the different tracks. It's freaking great. I should point out one aspect of the two-player mode real quickly, and that's when one player dies, they don't immediately respawn. The surviving player has to make it to a continue point to activate them again, so keep that in mind. It really adds to the challenge of an already tough game. I should also mention again that this series continued with Rolling Thunder 3, exclusively on Psychogenesis, and it's exactly what a good sequel should be. It's more Rolling Thunder, more weapons, more level variety, more everything, so it's really good. Still, like I said earlier, I wanted to kind of spotlight Rolling Thunder 2 in particular because it's a great arcade port, made in an era when that was definitely the exception and not the norm. The Genesis definitely has some quality ports, both from the arcades and PC, everything from Golden Axe to Sid Meier's Pirates, to Alien Storm, to Rolling Thunder 2. This game was available on the Wii Virtual Console, but unfortunately, it hasn't been made available on any other online store since then. The cartridge usually goes for something like $20, and if you're into action platformers like this, I think it's well worth picking up. And I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.