Undeadline アンデッドライン - Mega Drive Longplay - No Deaths (Nomiss), Real Hardware

A no miss clear (no death) run of Undeadline (アンデッドライン) for the Sega Mega Drive, played on normal difficulty. Captured straight from a region modified X'Eye using an Everdrive X5, no cheats. That's right, I bought an Everdrive. Me. I have succumbed after all these years! :{ Lord knows I might try playing arcade games not on compilations, soon! I even upgraded to Amazon Prime so I'd have gotten the device uninterruptedly into my Mega Drive spree. I'm writing this having only started that kick I believe less than a week ago - I've been going rather hard, and I've already sampled what would be thousands of dollars in just a few days. While the previous games in this spree were all games that I owned, I finally found motivation to go beyond that and into reevaluating games I'd only played a stage of on an emulator before dismissing (or maybe even just watched a video of - I believe I sampled every Mega Drive shooter, but I can't remember trying Undeadline). Undeadline seems to be brought up frequently alongside "Twinkle Tale" - insofar as even a Google search seemed to suggest that Undeadline is considered its 'evil twin'. I love Twinkle Tale almost absolutely - it quickly became one of my all-time favorite games and I cherish it very much - but a cursory look at Undeadline on a longplay video left me assuming it was for hardcore shmup addicts and not for action gamers who occasionally like to receive a little whooping once in a while. I didn't realize it had a shield and watched someone upload an emulator replay with heavy tool abuse and thought it must be incomprehensibly difficult. Well! I finally gave it a go with the awesome power of THE EVERDRIVE, and I managed to actually get a clear - and then a nomiss clear (well, kind of, the final boss killed me after it blew up because it had started charging a laser just before dying and wiped me just as the screen faded to white. Ask in the comments and I'll link that replay lol)... And all in the same day I started playing! Yes, seriously. And with a weapon a friend said is trash! I'll show THEM what "trash" is O_O (j/k - thank you, sincerely, for the engaging learning and recommendations, Palazzo!). Honestly, I feel like an absolute heel for thinking I could dismiss this one or think it was the 'obvious' inferior to Twinkle Tale. The comparisons are justified in more ways than I think anyone could really articulate to me, and it's really not that hard, it's just blisteringly exciting as all hell. This, Senjou no Okami II's original mode, and Twinkle Tale create a trio of utterly magnificent, top-down shooting action on the Mega Drive that have all seriously increased my appraisal of the machine in the last few years. Undeadline doesn't sound like a game that would be nearly as well-made as it is, honestly. It's one of three different versions of a shooter/rpg that was originally on the MSX and from Hydlide devs, it's largely unknown outside of hardcore circles and among 'collectors,' and it really doesn't even seem to be that much of a looker on replay videos. However, it seems to possess a different director than the other two versions and has received a tremendous mechanical overhaul, it isn't well-known because it's not friendly to beginners and would scare any YouTuber off within an instant, and its visuals are actually pretty dang considered - there's just so much dithering that if you're looking at this on something other than a CRT you're doing the amount of work put into it a disfavor (play it on composite! Like Twinkle Tale, it needs it! I only played on S-Video so the capture wouldn't look awful). Shoutout to the player's adorable little walking animation, which I can only assume is the game's Hydlide DNA at work. I do really feel like this game is extremely deceptively considered and a genuinely 'hidden' gem whose masterclass design lies buried beneath the facade of ostensibly being a conversion of a port of a game for another console. Its intro visual even lays cut in half from the X68000 version because it no longer has a character select. Everything about a quick look at a longplay suggests that within this game lurks not the heart of a tragically neglected and truly lovely - if deadly - beast, but a mangy little mutt that might viciously gnaw your ankles off. I wish I had listened to everyone's praise a little more closely and given this a go, but I think I let its price tag do the convincing that any eagerness people had for it was up to insular elitism. I was wrong! And also dumb! lol DESCRIPTION CONTINUED IN LINK: https://justpaste.it/ckxoc (edit: originally published this with "hard mode" in the title, which was leftover from copy/pasting the title from another video for my usual formatting! apologies!)