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[arseniy]

February 5 2013
25 anniversary of the game!

Here what we can do:
Say something nice.
Tell experience with the game. Like, beating it first time or playing first time. How old were you etc.
Name our favorites - weapons, areas, bosses or even music.
How did you find the game.

Happy birthday Guardian Legend!

[arseniy]

OK, I'll be first I guess.
This game is my favorite. Love it! That's why I had to create this site!
My favorite weapon back then was Reppeler. But now it's fireball. But I have to use sabers more then fireball.
Happy 25th birthday game!

[RubyC42]

not sure i have anything worthy to mention because i only "discovered" the game in 2011, not to mention the fact that I am still needing to complete either version (Regular and Optomon's Hack) isn't something "nice" i'd talk about :p

But hey, at least it, together with the Roleplay, has inspired me to make (as of now) 5 TGL-styled personal characters

[UserK]

Happy... release day? Beloved eyeball game! 

It's still 04 Feb here. I'm glad someone brang the cake... because the camera I used to shoot the cake I was supposed to post is now like 400 km away from me and I hadn't the chance to download the pics!
Anyway, Arseniy nailed it, this photoshopped cake is perfect and much more adeguately pixelated.

I found the game in a store and picked it up. I am of the idea that my country was (still is) considered the junkyard of what USA does not buy. It gets dumped there. At full price of course. I have a lot of underdogs in my NES collection. Well, I don't. I have a few really. Actually, I had, because I lost some of them.
Maybe the fact that I avoided the games everybody had helped. You know, to trade them.

I think the passwords almost made me cry.

[RubyC42]

... because the camera I used to shoot the cake I was supposed to post is now like 400 km away from me and I hadn't the chance to download the pics!

I am of the idea that my country was (still is) considered the junkyard of what USA does not buy. It gets dumped there. At full price of course.

So.... Canada?

Hope you had a nice trip btw

[Amanroth]

To think it has been 25 years... Time sure does fly.

I got The Guardian Legend when it was first released in the U.S. It was just one of the random games my folks got for me for my still fairly new NES. I was only a few years old at that time. I still remember what most of my experience was like up to beating the game. For quite some time, I couldn't get past area 0. I'd occasionally make it up to Defense System and then would go down. I knew from the back of the box that there had to be more to the game than the flying, I just wondered how long it would be until I discovered it. It felt like quite an accomplishment the very first time I managed to beat the starting area and got to the next part of the game.
I had fun discovering the extra weapons you could use. And the one that releases the two fireballs became my favorite and the one I originally used to defeat Fleepa. It was in the water levels that I ran into the boss that haunted me for the longest out of them all, Optomon. I was stuck trying to defeat him for the longest time. It felt impossible with how much damage those weeds of his did. It felt like a huge accomplishment the first time I beat him by focusing mainly on dodging the weed while shooting and disregarding the bubbles. In the grass area, I almost cried when a blue version appeared with even longer weeds. The fireball became my new favorite weapon when I found out it could blow those weeds away. I beat the red one on my very first try. I felt like I had come a long way.
When I finally beat the final corridor, I was left to wonder what to do next and as soon as I checked the map, I noticed the spot that was glowing. I instantly realized which room that was and thought, "So that's what was with that mysterious empty room!" That room had always had me suspicious from the first day I entered it. I got through the level and thought I had beaten the game right as I saw the scene of flying away from the planet. I was surprised when all of a sudden the final boss appeared in space. It took a few tries but I soon developed my old strategy to beat him, just get a suicidal and use sabers/fireball right in his face then use EE to take out projectiles until health is restored and repeat. This first victory was probably about five or so years after I had first gotten the game. As I watched the credits, I suddenly felt a bit silly over the fact that, until that very moment where I saw her picture, I hadn't even thought about if the main character of the game was female. I then used the TGL password and beat the game with little difficulty.

I recently decided to play the secret edition hack of the game and got enlightened on a few things along the way. One thing being how wrong I was about certain weapons... mainly the one that shoots two blasts behind you. A long time ago when I first played I thought, "That has to be the most useless weapon ever!" I now realize, using that weapon wisely would have saved me a loooot of grief back in the day. I actually beat that version just yesterday. It was a fun experience, except for the last boss (a case where the line between challenging and annoying should be better noticed).

Now I guess I wait to see what other fun fan-made hacks/remakes show up. One can only dream of there ever being something official after a quarter of a century (though that has happened in some cases, so you never know ).

[teremochek]

Happy Birthday "The Guardian Legend" !!!   
Congratulations to all the Anniversary game. This is a big date !

[UserK]

Amanroth's post sounds so familiar. I could have written it myself. Everybody knew that room had something to hide! 

Hope you had a nice trip btw

I hadn't. One of my relatives took it and it's a working trip anyway.

[optomon]

I have way too many stories about this game. This game could be almost described as a lifelong obsession.

I first played it in 1990, when I was 5. I watched my older brothers play it before the nintendo eventually before the Nintendo ended up in my bedroom. I think I was 8 when I first beat it. I remember beating it on TGL mode when I was 10, and my primary hurdle at the time was red optomon. I have two memories of crying because I couldn't beat him, which is pretty pathetic, but hey, I was a kid and Nintendo was everything. I also discovered the evil J code.

So many times I had imagined new levels to play for Guardian Legend. On the playground at school I would wander around and imagine certain places were levels and things were objects found in the level, thinking up new variations of bosses and enemies and weapons. In high school, I doodled maps and levels and everything. I was always wrapped up in my own little world for some weird reason, determined to make my own TGL game.

When I was 14 I tried to get new levels by spending countless hours using game genie. When I was 18, I discovered that I could modify the game using a computer, and spent further more billions of hours trying to understand the games code. By the time I was 20 I had completely modified the over world map. I would slowly go back and things to it over the years, bosses, corridors and everything I could make.

The result of all this self absorbed determination is the present day Guardian Legend Secret Edition. It is a fitting monument to my lifelong obsession I suppose. Perhaps my dream was to share the obsession and relate to others who had it to some degree. Carts of the game are about to be public. It is very fulfilling to see others play new levels they might have imagined at one point in the last 25 years or so.

Guardian Legend is a lost classic. Had it been more popular it could have spawned a huge franchise with loads of games. Hopefully we see that by 2038.

[zhongwei_zhu]

Thank you for share!
I like The game of The Guardian Legend and we were born at the same year,when I was in elementary school I often played it and I still love it

[pern]

registered just so I can say happy belated birthday TGL!!

[Yoyo]

That cake is sick. Happy birthday, TGL!! Absolutely love this game, worth every bit of time I spent on it and more to come. 

[dragnfly]

So yeah I'm almost a year late. So happy early 26th birthday! The cake looks amazing! And it'll be that colour naturally if it sat around for a year.

Before even playing the game my older brother had traced the PAL box art (we weren't in Europe. He got the pic off of some BBS) and that got me interested. I saw the name on a game case I'd walked by dozens times but never even picked it up. I rented it... and got my butt handed to me. Actually, I've never been good at shmups. I play Touhou (SA and IN are my favs) but that doesn't mean I'm good at them. LOL. Anyway, I eventually got out into the labyrinth and described it to my brother as "Hades Nebula at the start, but then it turns into the parts of Blaster Master where you don't have the tank." So not totally accurate but I was, like, 9. Cut me some slack. I eventually got pulled into the world. I hadn't played Zelda at that point (remember, kids. What's a classic now was just "another neat game" when it was new) so finding secrets and making maps that were that bloody huge was astounding to me. Most of my gaming had been on the Commodore64 where a huge game was less than 50 rooms. It was a real thought-changing experience.

[andreasaspenberg]

i got the game for Christmas long ago i believe but i played it very little until i hurt my foot back when i just had the first nintendo. i still have both that and the game however. i really struggled with getting corridor 4 opened as i did not understand english well enough back then.

[arseniy]

i got the game for Christmas long ago i believe but i played it very little until i hurt my foot back when i just had the first nintendo. i still have both that and the game however. i really struggled with getting corridor 4 opened as i did not understand english well enough back then.

I think better post this to Happy 2015 New Year topic, because 25 anniversary was 2 years ago  :
http://theguardianlegend.com/forum/index.php/topic,1994.0.html