Rocket Knight Adventures is a great game for those that need a quirky game to get them through the day.
The story of Rocket Knight Adventures is a bit on the 'who cares' side, as the game focuses on giving you a jump in and play game. Sparkster, the main character and leader of the Rocket Knights, sets off to defeat his rival and defunct Rocket Knight, Axle Gear, and eventually gets caught up in the rescue of Princess Sherry.
Rocket Knight Adventures has a pretty solid control scheme. You run around with the D-pad, and jump with the B button. The A and C buttons attack with Sparkster's ranged attack. Pressing the A or C button in conjunction with pressing Down on the D-pad, will charge Sparkster's rocket pack. Releasing the buttons will propel him quickly in any of the eight available directions, while instantly killing any minor enemies and bouncing off of walls. During some stages, Sparkster will be flying the entire stage, in which the game plays like a side-scrolling shooter.
The music, as you would expect from Konami, is terrific. Each tune is catchy and hum inducing. The sound effects, on the other hand, sometimes do not fit with the circumstances and can seem out of place. The 16-bit Sega Genesis is almost not enough for the quality of the animations of all the characters. It looks like Sparkster himself has around 80-90 different frames.
One of the greatest parts in Rocket Knight Adventures is the hard difficulty, which starts you with one life, no continues, and only one life block. In other words, you can't be damaged until you get 20,000 points and gain a new life, forcing you to memorize the entire game.
Overall, Rocket Knight Adventures is a great game for those that want to explore the challenging hard difficulty, try out an early side-scrolling masterpiece, or just want another reason to dust off the old Genesis.