Jeremy Parish covers Cobra Triangle in NES Works 137

Our pals at Rare are back to apologize for that whole John Elway mess with a slick, high-speed combat racer. At the same time, they’ve ratcheted up the difficulty to utterly painful levels as a way to punish everyone who complained about John Elway. Our pals at Rare giveth, and they taketh away.

As long as you can abide by the extreme challenge level, which would inform future original productions by Rare, Cobra Triangle has a lot going for it. Technical finesse! A variety of mission types! Slick graphics! A Gradius-inspired power-up system! And, somehow, it rips off Ocean’s Waterworld for Virtual Boy six years before Ocean’s Waterworld or the Virtual Boy ever existed. That’s a neat trick. Truly, was anything beyond Rare’s abilities in the NES era?