Cobra Triangle (1989)

Pilot a weaponized speedboat in Cobra Triangle through 25 obstacle course-like stages that include racing, rescuing, defusing bombs, and fighting water monsters!

At first, I thought I could actually beat this and had it handled. I was making it through the levels, not super gracefully and with a bit of save scumming, but I was progressing. Then I get to a lochness monster boss fight and was obliterated. Even with infinitely reloading my save state, I was defeated over and over. So I looked up a longplay, and that's when I discovered you can upgrade your boat??? Now it all starts making sense. With this new knowledge, I tried again, except I couldn't figure out how to upgrade the boat (while writing this review, I found out you do this by picking up the power-ups in each level). So I resorted to watching the longplay anyway. Ah well. I gave it my best shot.

This is a fun game even though I sucked at it. Apparently it was included in the Rare Replay compilation that released for Xbox One. I'd recommend giving it a try, especially if you're interested in Rare or NES games. David Wise from Donkey Kong Country fame also composed the music (though I didn't find it particularly memorable).

Played as far as stage 8 before I gave up. That stage was all about avoiding ice shards that shot up out of the water, yet even at 40 frames per second and with save states I found this too difficult. Maybe if the boat did not have to fight against the strong current and actually zoomed forwards immediately, or if the ice was not so ridiculously fast, or there was room to go around the ice. The log jam whirlpool obstacle course earlier was also ridiculous, as was the waterfall jumping stage where the ramps moved around. In fact I would say these stages were worse than the Battletoads racing stages. The combat oriented stages were not too bad though they were still timed races and the mine disposal and swimmer defense stages felt more like minigames. The 2 boss fights I did felt claustrophobic with so little room to move, and the boat was too difficult to control to actually avoid damage or make precise shots, so I just parked there holding turbo shoot. There was a lot of missed potential here to make a Strike style game. The boat controls and isometric view were similar to those games. All they had to do was make more freeform explorable stages with objectives. As it was though, too difficult and not fun.

4.0/10

History:
Nope! Never heard of this one either. It makes me think of Tropic Thunder when they smoked GORILLA PANIC!

Expectations:
It "sounds" fun. I mean it's described as RC Pro Am with guns and boats and it's made by Rare which used to mean something. That's basically all I can hope for.

Night 1:

What a stupid game!

Okay, bad way to start a post, I'm better than this... okay...

No! This is the dumbest @#$%ing game I've played so far this entire project!!! And it's #33!? Faxanadu, Batman, Super C, Battletoads, Chip n' Dale... All ranked LOWER than this steaming pile of boat wreckage! GameRadar, you have failed this city project!

Is it me? Am I missing something? I get it. It's an arcade game, all about the score. There's no story, no real objective, just a skill based game that gets progressively harder the longer you. The better you do, the higher your name goes on the high score list. Fine. That's fine, no issues there at all. My issue is the game itself.

The controls are just barely okay. Maybe I'd say they were pretty good, but I've played Micro Machines! No, the controls are okay, mostly, they're mostly okay... sometimes... The upgrade system is a complete cluster, I had to look it up online just to figure out how to use it. Hit detection is terrible. The challenges you're performing are just the dumbest things...

I didn't care for this game.

Conclusion:
I don't know what it is about this one that turned me off so bad. It just felt like a mashing of bad ideas done badly. I guess, from a technical standpoint compared to other games released in 1988 it was fairly well made, but from a gameplay perspective I found no enjoyment from this game. I played through it five times, making it as far as Stage 8, and hated every minute of it. At first I was like, oh, okay, it's like Wario Ware for the NES twenty years before Wario Ware, I can dig that! I did not dig it...

Play it Again?
Probably. I'll probably see this game on the shelf several months from now and think, hey, why didn't I like that game again? I'll slap it in the NES and remember...

Personal Score: