SHORT VERSION: A cheap, tacky remake of an Amiga favourite, it’s 20% faithful recreation and 80% awful, boring FPS segments.
LONG VERSION: I played the NES version of this back in the day with friends and remember enjoying it despite being janky (namely the side-scroller bits), so was curious to see how this one is.
Well, the main positive thing I can say is that it’s at least named after the North forces so it feels less problematic, though you can still play as the South if you want to be a horrible racist (my friends always made me play as the horrible racists on the NES). It still calls Native Americans Indians, though.
Anyway, this game sucks. Feels, looks, and sounds so, SO cheap, with the side-scrolling segments replaced with boring as hell, simplistic FPS segments with idiot AI more basic than Wolfenstein 3D. Oh, enemies also like to appear out of thin air half a meter behind you during fort defense missions. And all the FPS bits drag on for so long, too!
The main board and strategy segments are basically the same, and still fun if incredibly simplistic (much like the original)… but the FPS segments make up like 80% of the game.
It’s also ugly as hell, looking like it was made up of primarily cheap bought assets, and generic stock audio (I looked up other people’s game footage, and some had the audio muted because the stock stuff got copyright struck).
Apparently there was another remake which is much closer to the original… that one could be worth checking out, but I don’t know where to find the PC version (and it was also a phone game, which doesn’t bode well for it).
Also apparently this is based on some old comic, I had no idea. I bet it’s Belgian, let me look it up… CALLED IT.
SLOWLY FIGHTER makes a lot of sense. The premise is that all of the playable characters are martial arts masters, so expert and fully trained that to them fights take place in slow motion. They are so good at fighting that all fights end in a single precise hit and so the game is very similar to Divekick but a lot less frantic.
So you can tell where the priorities lie. It’s nice to see in the wake of other indie fighting games that feel like they are trying to be Third Strike again with no budget. The rest of the game and its tone emerge naturally from the central idea. As a novelty, you can have fun with it for a couple of hours. It even has a character creator.
The story mode is pretty entertaining just to see how ridiculous they get with each character’s reason for fighting. Fights are held back a bit by character’s super moves. When a player activates a super they basically become invincible and just send out an obstacle course of projectiles that the other player has to slowly dodge around. It kind of flies in the face of agency in a fighting game since one player pauses the game so that the other player can (very slowly) play a tool-assisted course clear. It’s hard to hold this against it when the rest of the game is so heart-warming.
holy shit, do you have a link to a download for this? this would go crazy as a mystery bracket game (granted my locals doesnt do mystery but hey some other people i know do, LOL)
NES North and South is one of my top 5 player vs. player games of all time, up there with Panel de Pon, Rampart, and I’m not sure what the other two are.
trying to beat Ninja Gaiden (NES) to like, heal my inner child or something (this was a game I played a lot as a youngling and could never come anywhere close to beating), and I cannot believe how much they do not want to let you do so (sending you back to 6-1 every time you lose to the boss - then surprise there’s a second boss that you have to beat first try or they will send you back to 6-1 again). they hate my inner child.
Has anybody played A Highland Song? I played it for a bit (about 1 hour and half) and I quietly enjoyed it for such short time. But I bounced off it because it’s easy to get lost in the mountains, which are full of dead ends, and can get frustrating (especially due to the time limit). So, basically, I enjoyed the short impression it made on me (especially the scottish accent of the protagonist!), but ultimately I felt like I would spend my time doing something else.
Somebody else might like it more than me, though!
Playing it is like visiting the original game as a tourist. All the abrasions have been removed for our pleasure. We’re technically there, but not really.
Now :
There are no more random battles, enemies appear on the map and are very easy to ignore. No area is threatening anymore
To compensate the loss of xp / yen gain from removing random battles, the game has included little battles at set places that offer quadruple xp / yen plus extra rewards at set intervals of course
Waypoint markers and objectives are everywhere which invalidate the point of using demon abilities on NPCs to read their minds / ignite their spirits etc, and all the detective work in general
The game will automatically switch to whatever demon is needed for whatever situation in the field for a truly seamless experience, and will tag any NPC with new dialogue to read, which makes « seeing everything » easier, but also removes any possible serendipitous excitement from seeing an obscure line of dialogue
Guns don’t use bullets now?
Also the color palette isn’t muted anymore
Despite it all, I’m still not really willing to entirely repudiate the remaster… The OG’s rigidity was already annoying 20 years ago. The remaster also revamped and improved the battle system - going from totally limp ARPG jank to totally cool ARPG jank. And the best part of the game has always been wandering through fixed angle 1930s PS2 Tokyo as coolboy Raidou
Rolled credits on Abiotic Factor. Easily the best survival game I’ve ever played. Look at this fucked up evil face:
Story spoilers below, for anyone who cares:
It really does straight up turn into Half-Life by the end. You were manipulated by the guy above - who is the g-man insert - to start a portal storm so that his employer could invade earth as they’ve been trying to do so for millennia. “It’s so beautiful when you reach a new world, the kind of thing that only happens two or three hundred times in a lifetime.” You even get to see the results of your mistake when you accidentally get sent into the future. They said they intend to keep updating the game past 1.0 with more story stuff so I’m deeply curious where they take it.
Brutal Legend was free yesterday on itch so I grabbed it. It’s a very silly game but it really seems to commit to the idea of “what if we make a whole game around a metal album cover?” The soundtrack is all rock music and it’s a breath of fresh air from the MCU-ified scores of most videogames. Honestly pulls off the God Of War style beat um up better than God Of War even if the combat is not as good.
It’s also a semi-open world and you get around driving a car and driving doesn’t suck, so props to 2009 double fine for making a videogame car. I literally know how hard that is.
