u/fingersmaloy

I finally got to spend some quality time with Undead Line after getting the recent Retro-Bit rerelease several months ago, and I thought I'd offer my impressions.

You may have heard of this game in the context of its notorious high difficulty, but after spending a few sessions with it, I was pleasantly surprised to find it to be one of the more approachable Genesis shmups. I played on Easy mode, which is a feature not even guaranteed to be present in a Genesis shmup, let alone actually balanced to be "easy," but I was able to 1cc it by my third session.

This is remarkable, because I've played a lot of shmups over the years, some quite rigorously, and have never 1cc'd any, ever. Or really even come close. At least on paper, I think that makes Undead Line the easiest shmup I've ever played. Of course, that's only on Easy mode, and when I switched to Normal I don't think I managed to even beat two stages 😅. Still, I recommend this one if you're looking for something you'll be able to clear without quitting your day job.

One possible critique is that, in a game with a lot of different weapon types, I get the sense that most of them aren't that useful, and one of them (the twin daggers) is extremely useful. I just use twin daggers all the time and it works on everything. If anyone has other tips about the weapon types, I'm all ears.

Subject line. Is that price point feasible anymore? Any recommendations on where to look? I've been scouring FB Marketplace and Ebay, but it's fairly slim pickins, and the price range I'm seeing is more like $300+ for a broken one, to as high as $2500 for a CIB one (which I wouldn't want).

Even though I have a Mega Everdrive Pro, I've been thinking more and more about getting a Sega CD Model 1 because I really like the look of it, but I also know one would almost certainly require a tune-up, which I'm estimating would be at least another $100 on top of the price of the unit.

If you're curious, this would mainly be to supplement the very impractical but fun music setup in my home office—It's an old 90s boombox with a Model 1 Genesis sitting on top and connected through the Genesis' headphone jack, with one of those Ali Express LCD screen cartridges for a mini display, so I can load up games and blast BGM tunes. Unfortunately the boombox's CD player recently died, and after months of trying to repair it, I fried an important chip and decided to cut my losses. The whole setup already looks like something out of Serial Experiments Lain, so I thought it would be fun to hook up a Sega CD for music CD playback. But, y'know, $150 fun, not $2500 fun.