Daiku no Gen-san

aka Hammerin Harry

• It’s sorta hard to figure out all the different versions of this game, but the rom I’ve got came from the Famicom version and as far as I know has no English translation patch. This does not cause any problems, there’s hardly any text in the game until the ending screen. I think maybe it was released in English in Europe(?) but I didn’t want to deal with any NTSC vs PAL nonsense, I just wanted the original game as written
• Anyway this game is super fun, and there are several more for other consoles that came out over the years, and I’ll probably give those a try as well. It’s short and sweet, with a basically-fair difficulty curve. Nothing is too hard or too easy.
• You can tell it’s a later release because it also looks really good. The sprites are super crispy, the animations are smooth, and each level is distinct with several unique enemies.
• The controls get a little wonky when there are tons of enemies on the screen, especially when it comes to making precise jumps. This doesn’t really affect anything except in the very final level when there’s a lot going on on-screen at once during a very precise jumpy-section. This annoyed me but I couldn’t stay mad for very long because it’s not like I had to try it and fail very many times, because the final boss is super easy.
• This ending screen is only for the first loop; I did not make a run at the second loop