Yesterday I beat Ax Battler: The Legend of Golden Axe. My urge to play was brought on by hacking the Wii and installing a Game Gear emulator on it, which in turn was brought on by Sunday boredom.

Ax Battler is a leading candidate for my all-time favorite completely terrible game. The core platform swordplay is a chunkier, laggier version of Zelda 2, and there’s an overworld map that’s a Dragon Warrior/Quest ripoff, with less interesting people, and more annoying random enemy encounters. I actually like the action RPG set-up, which is why I probably have fond memories of playing Ax Battler as a kid. (Yes, I was one of the spoiled ones who had a Game Gear.)

There’s no boss fight in Ax Battler. At the end of the final level, the entire last battle is conducted by non-interactive text narration on a plain, black screen, “ARRRs” and “GAAAHs” galore. It’s as if the developers ran out of time and reckoned they found a clever way to omit the final showdown. Or maybe they knew the whole game was a stinker and were happy to lazily walk away from an unfinished product.

In any case, the point of this whole anecdote is to say that game developers can’t get away with those kinds of shenanigans anymore. I guess that’s a good thing, but I am bit nostalgic for the days when professional game development could still seem like amateur hour.