This submission is for Last Action Hero for the NES, based on the movie of the same name. It's an overwhelmingly mediocre game, so I assume the movie was just as meh.

Last Action Hero is a relatively short game that is neither good nor bad. It has little bits of janky charm in it, but it's a cookie cutter low effort movie tie in cash grab at its core.

We control whomever Arnold played in the movie and we go around beating up surprisingly few jabronis on our quest to save some kid from getting chucked off a roof or something. Along the way we make a helicopter explode simply by punching dudes who come out of it, beat Death in a fistfight and take a good many damage boosts along the way.

You have a basic arsenal of attacks. A high kick, a medium punch, a low punch, and a turnaround punch. All of these cost animation frames so we only kill that which we have to along the way, which is mainly just the bosses and minibosses. We can also jump by tapping or holding B. Holding B can cause you to lose frames though. If you jump again on the frame you land, you stop moving right for a frame. If you jump shortly after you land, you don't lose the frame.

Standard side scrolly action/beatem up level with a surprisingly high number of things trying to kill us, from Kenny Loggins cosplayers, to cops, to Oscar the Grouch throwing bombs at us from a trash can. We do a few Dboosts in this level by timing our jump (which is a fixed height) to get pushed forward as we float past the enemy. There's a one-up (red heart) before the boss, which we grab for more dboosting later. Each life has 6 hearts, and everything does 1 damage. Losing a life is inconsequential as it doesn't have an animation or any slowdown. You just kinda keep going like nothing happened as long as you don't game over.

Health is refilled after boss fights and level transitions as well, which is handy.

Bosses in this game have some exploitable patterns where throwing the right combination of moves from the right distance/position keeps them mostly locked in place and their health bar just melts. Deviating from this can cause them to hit us and knock us back, which we don't want.

After the boss goes down we immediately fight another boss on the rooftop. He throws axes and is a little "tankier" than the previous fight. His knockback doesn't really knock us back so we just push him as far left as we can with the attacks.

Our first building level, where we traverse a medieval looking house or castle or whatever where knights chase us and archers shoot arrows at us. There are also doors. I don't know who designed this building but I called to ask if they had a restroom for customers and someone who sounds a lot like Arnold yelled "THERE IS NO BATHROOM" at me. Guess we just gotta use those barrels.

After we dispatch the boss and file a report with the local health inspecter, we're outside of the castle which is apparently 12 feet away from a graveyard. The groundskeeper is mad at us so we have to kill him while arrows rain down upon us. So basically we went into the castle, just to leave the castle, and kill a dude outside the castle which we could have done without entering the castle. This game makes no sense.

We enter some random house which doesn't have front or back doors (that HAS to be a violation of some building code) and pretened to be a safety inspecter. We beat up the owner (while some woman is using a plant as a toilet in the background. There really is no bathroom!) for not having doors on his building and move on. This is basically like the castle level but with bouncier furniture.

This is like the first level but with more cars, more traffic, and mass confusion about how these cars are supposed to get anywhere with all the incredibly steep hills and no painted lines. At one pint the blue car literally just drives straight through one of the traffic jammed cars because there's only one lane or something? We catch up to the boss at the end who I think is the city planner and we beat him up for doing a terrible job designing this city and ignoring our suggestions at the most recent town hall meeting.

Another building. No bathroom. We get to the top and fight the most tedious boss in the game.

It wouldn't be an Arnold game without a helicopter. This time we fight it. Sorta. Every 256 frames, the chopper drops an enemy. When we kill 18 such enemies the chopper bursts into flames and crashes. There is an important note here. If you hit an enemy twice (either through a punching double hit or like jump kicking them and hitting them again on the ground) you don't get credit for the kill. 0x0019 is the chopper health value.

This very short level culminates in a fight to the death. With death. Who is probably the easiest boss in the game. Go back to playing chess, you hack.

After a short walk through the theater, we come across the dude from earlier who we fought on the roof. Well, we fight him on the roof again and the result is the same. He gets rekt. The end.

Still no bathroom.

Samsara: Claiming for judging. File replaced with a truncated/bugfixed version.

Samsara: A bit of punchy-kicky, a lot of runny, and a dash of damage boosty. It all looks good(y).

Let's add another one to that single year publication record, shall we? Accepting!

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