Shatterhand No-Death Playthrough (Actual NES Capture)

This is a capture of me playing through Shatterhand on the NES. This is not an emulator. This footage was captured directly from my front-loading NES using an actual Shatterhand cartridge.

Shatterhand was another game that I grew up with in the early '90s. For some reason, one of my uncles out in New York sent me and my brother a copy of this game when we were kids (perhaps around '92 or '93). It wasn't a new copy either. It was just the cartridge by itself (which was really odd since gifts tend to be new).

In any event, the game was excellent. My brother and I played this game a bunch but I wasn't able to beat it until I was around 12 years old (that was when I started developing the skill to beat NES games aside from Zelda I and II). It was always fun creating different satellite robots and seeing what they could do.

Shatterhand is one of those excellent, straightforward action games on the NES, similar to Batman or Power Blade. The level design is amazing, and it has some of the best music on the system. It's also fairly well balanced due to the satellite robots and the abundance of health and power-up stations.

What's neat about this game is that if you forge two of the same satellite robots in a level without your first one dying, you'll obtain cybernetic armor that will let you destroy anything in sight for 15 seconds (although getting hit decreases the timer). And the stages are typically designed so that you can obtain the armor right before a boss. So if you map out your plan beforehand, you can clear most of the bosses with this amazing power-up.

After you clear the first stage you can choose to complete the remaining stages in any order you want (except the last one), just like Mega Man. It doesn't matter what order you choose, but for this playthrough I decided to knock out the hardest stage first: Area F. I've found that it's best to rely on either Laserbot (ɑɑβ combination) or Yoyobot (βɑβ combination) on that stage in order to take out the robot below the platform in the vertical scrolling section.

The remaining stages aren't that difficult, except for the last one. More than anything, this video shows how I like to complete the game and how I like to use the cybernetic armor to my advantage. Maybe it'll give you some ideas if you haven't played this game before.

This is once again a no-death run. I used a turbo pad for this, so you'll see some neat tricks you can pull off with that.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and a composite connection at 60 frames per second. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the NES's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using an NES Max turbo controller.