Times were very different in the 80's. We had almost no expectations of video games after Atari tried to do their best to completely destroy the industry by releasing absolute garbage with zero regrets or apologies. When the NES came out it was really a serious game changer for the industry because even though it looks silly now, this was so above and beyond anything else that we had seen before that all of us were just in awe.
When the NES was first released there weren't a lot of game options but we kind of liked almost everything because again, we didn't really have much to compare it to and it was so much better than anything else we'd experienced that we would have called anything great. The NES in my mind was the beginning of the end for arcades because it wasn't long before the stuff being released at home was better than arcades and we didn't really need them anymore.
Russian Attack was definitely an arcade-style game that would have been a "quarter muncher" if it was in arcades. It might have been in arcades but I never saw it there.
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This was one of many get from the left to the right side of the screen games that involved bosses at the end of each stage. This is a game with many flaws but again, we didn't know any better in 1986 so we just rolled with it. It was remarkably difficult and a single hit would kill you.
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Your primary attack is a knife, which is terrible because it means that you have to get right next to your enemies to strike them. It doesn't really matter though because almost all the enemies seem to have a death wish as they throw themselves into your knife over and over again. They do not pursue you, so if you go up a ladder or something the person who was previously running at you will just keep on running.
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You do get some weapon upgrades along the way but when you get the grenades you only get 3 of them and when you get the bazooka you only get 4 shots. The game also goes into "cheese mode" anytime you get an upgrade by throwing more enemies at you so picking up a weapon does not mean you are going to blaze through the section like getting a star in Super Mario Bros.
I think if I were to play a game like this today, even with updated graphics and sound I would give up really quickly because if an enemy so much as touches you, you die. That's something I can't really tolerate in any game but that's really all we had in all games at the time, including Super Mario Bros.
Rush'N attack seems like a precursor to the much more popular Contra game that was absolutely epic and also, extremely difficult. You can see a lot of graphical similarities between the two and it wouldn't surprise me if resources were reused and some of the same people worked on developing both titles. They were both made by Konami after all, so this does seem like a likely scenario.
The patience it required to get all the way through the mere 4 stages this game had in it was a level of patience and memorization of upcoming enemies that I simply do not possess these days. Back in those days of my teenage years and very little else to do since there was no internet or video on demand, I did in fact memorize the attack patterns almost to the point where I could do levels based on muscle memory alone.
Imagine a game being released today at full price where it was possible to finish the entire game in just over 15 minutes. I am sure a lot of people would be pretty ticked off by that. It was kind of the norm back in those days though before Zelda came along and introduced us to the world of save games. In case you don't know what I am talking about in the NES days you had to play most games from start to finish each time you started up. Some games introduced codes that would save your progress like in Metroid but it wasn't until Zelda came along that there was actually internal storage and a battery on the chip board. Those were crazy times.
Rush'N attack isn't really worth playing these days unless you want to go back in a time machine and see what it is that we considered to be entertainment back in those days. If you do want to check it out you can get an emulator and the ROM file for free, HERE
If you ever played this classic NES game and had the patience to make it through the entire thing like a LUNATIC... I'd love to discuss it in the comments!