So, in honor of Howard Phillips last issue of Nintendo Power, I’m reviewing the game for the last installment of Howard & Nester – The Lone Ranger from Konami.

The Premise:

You play as the Lone Ranger, the last of a group of Texas Rangers whose posse was murdered by Butch Cavandish, the notorious outlaw. You, along with your side kick, Tonto, go forth to avenge their deaths, and rescue the president, who Cavandish has kidnapped!

The Good:

I’ve mentioned that I’m playing all of these Quality Control games on an Emulator, right? Good. So, with the 360 Controler, and the D-Pad mapped to the analog stick, all the shooting on the top down stages and on the maze stages is perfectly smooth. The sensitivity is perfect, and everything responds quickly. I’d hate to play this on a 4-direction D-Pad, but on an stick, it’s fine. Probably it would work just as well on the NES Advantage controller or another 3rd party arcade stick, if you had one of those.  It even works great in the maze stages.

The Bad:

While the game isn’t as grindy as I feared, the grind is there. You can probably max out your ammo in the first area, and I recommend that you do it, so you can more easily buy weapon upgrades later.

The Ugly:

The platforming stages. They just don’t work very well, particularly in relation to the maze stages and the more Ikari Warriors style up and down scrolling stages.

The Verdict:

I must admit that this really isn’t as bad as I feared, and I’m definitely going to give it an recommendation – with the caveat that I also recommend that you play it with an analog stick of some sort,  and, since I forgot to put the buy link in the caption, I’ll put the link at the bottom of the review.

Buy “The Lone Ranger” from eBay.com.