Recently I began a tradition of playing a GBA game before bed and usually I deliberately pick either licensed garbage or things that are kinda middling. Anyways since it’s December I booted up Santa Clause Saves the Earth. It honestly isn’t as terrible as I expected, it is not good mind you, but it’s perfectly playable.
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i got a couple hours into Sorry We’re Closed fairly recently and meant to get back to it - but i was really enjoying the take on survival horror. it felt really unique in a way that a lot of other survival horror revival stuff i’d seen (even stuff like SIGNALIS which has good vibes) didn’t really feel. the sort of colorful character designs and the gay dating sim/Persona energy mixed with Silent Hill and some slightly more beat-em up type mechanics just felt really fresh.
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Oh no! Even more badly written reviews!
DRAGON CRYSTAL
SHORT VERSION: A streamlined RogueLike for consoles, this doesn’t have enough interesting ideas to make it standout today, but is still a fun, solid RogueLIke for those who don’t mind suffering at the hands of lady luck. My sessions didn’t feel like they dragged on at all!
LONG VERSION:
It’s a RogueLike for the SMS/GG! And a pretty fun one, too.
It’s quite streamlined since it’s for console, and there are only 30 floors, but it ain’t easy. I kinda cheesed my first winning run… I was obviously under-powered to face the enemies on the last five floors BUT had five staffs of travel, so went straight to floor 30… it has tough but non-aggressive enemies that are easy to avoid, and just waltzed to the crystal and won the game, hah.
So yeah, there is different armour, weapons, scrolls, potions, staffs, and you don’t know what the last three do unless you use them. Maybe something good, or bad! You can throw them at enemies to test them out, too. Weapons and armour can also have special properties.
You can’t go back up floors which I didn’t like… especially since it’s easy to accidentally walk on the exit while exploring.
So what does this do different to other RogueLikes? Well, if you die with enough money, you can continue (but you’ll lose all items apart from the weapon and armour you were using). There are no shops so that’s what the money is for.
You also have a dragon that follows you around and grows as you level up! Sadly, it doesn’t really do anything except protect your back from attack since it fills that space. I was hoping it would help me fight when it was fully grown, but nope.
Eating is also automated. As long as you have food, you’ll eat it and heal, or lose health if you run out.
Umm… I think that was it. So, yeah, a solid, traditional RogueLike that I had fun with! Just be prepared to suffer at the hands of bad luck and RNG like with other old school RLs… it can be pretty brutal if you don’t level up enough and stumble on good items.
Also, in the end, there isn’t enough here to make it standout from the massive amount of RogueLikes that have come out since… so not much reason to go back to this one… but I would have played the hell out of this back in the day, and it’s still a good time!
SIMCITY 2000 SPECIAL EDITION
SHORT VERSION: I’m a SIMp for this game! Still tremendously fun today with just the right about of complexity. Has some rough edges, but has aged well for the most part.
LONG VERSION:
This game is dangerous! When I went back to play it, I kept staying up way too late trying to perfect my city. Such an addictive little game… so satisfying watching your little city grow, and then gain access to bigger and better things to keep the increasing amount of Sims in your city happy.
A lot of the simulation is of course abstracted, but it’s all done so well and in a way that (for the most part) makes logical sense to you as a player.
Aside from complaints below, the interface has aged pretty well, and information is communicated well to the player.
It also looks and sounds great, has a good sense of humour (like the game booing whenever you talk to the tax man), and I love how Writing snuck in his own political beliefs into the game (do NOT reduce transport funding).
Basically, I love this game, but I do have problems with it! First of all, while the manual is mostly excellent, it does a bad job of explaining some things… the water system for one! It doesn’t explain that water radiates from the centre no matter where you have pumps, leading to much confusion (I had to read a strategy guide to get it). It also doesn’t mention some things that are important for city growth, such as eventually connecting to your neighbours (though citizens will demand it if you take too long to do so).
Sometimes your advisors aren’t clear in what they want, too… for example, the education dude will say “we need more adequately funded grade schools” which could mean education needs more funding, or you need to build more schools, or BOTH.
But… for the most part the game is very good at communicating information to you… it just makes these oversights much more glaring!
I also wish scenarios were arranged in order of difficulty, or were given difficulty ratings in the selection screen. The first one that pops up is Atlanta, which can be quite tough if you don’t fully understand how the game’s systems work (and how to cheese them). Well, that’s true of all the scenarios really, but some are still much harder than others!
I also wish you could take your city into unique, different directions… once you get a grasp on the systems, it’s not too hard to build a bustling city in free mode every single time, and though it’s always fun, I wish I could go for different objectives.
BUT my biggest problem? It’s so easy to misclick! The game really needs an undo button, because the amount of times I accidentally built something in the wrong place or bulldozed something (including expensive things) was QUITE HIGH. Highlighting what you’re about to nuke would also be a big help.
Oh, that reminds me, I do recommend playing with disasters on… if you just want to build a city, then leave them off, but I like the wrench they throw into my works and trying to recover from them adds an extra fun challenge to the free build mode.
It also need to highlight/preview what’s about to get changed/nuked when you raise and lower terrain (or, again, some kind of undo) because boy howdy it’s easy to make a mess.
OKAY, it sounds like I have a lot of complaints, but most of these I can deal with, and for the most part this is a tremendously fun game with just the right amount of complexity and simplicity to keep me enthralled without ever feeling too overwhelmed. A classic!
MOONWALKER
SHORT VERSION: It’s still fun getting Michael Jackson shot, stabbed, and attacked by dogs in the crotch as you go through this solid port, but it’s less mechanically sound as the Genesis one, and also has less level variety. That makes me saw “ow!” rather than “hoo!”
LONG VERSION:
A solid port of the Genesis game with impressive visuals and audio for the system, though quite weaker as a game…
For one, it lacks a lot of the “cool”/goofy factors, like dancing enemies to death, and the appearance of Bubbles! Though some people may think that’s a positive.
There’s also less level variety, and it doesn’t play as well. A lot of this is due to not having magic sparkles… this reduces your range considerably. Fighting the dogs is such a pain without them! The game also gives you much less time to react to guys being behind doors or bombs in cars.
Also, in theory it’s cool getting a power-up that lets you throw your hat without using health (as in the Genesis game), it becomes less cool once you realise it leads you wide open to attacks when you use it.
It DOES have a cool animation of Jackson turning into a robot and car between levels! And the robot and starship levels are very different to the Genesis version… which set of levels is worse, I’m not sure.
But yeah, solid port and fun enough (if sometimes frustrating due to the lack of attack range), but I’d much rather the Genesis one.
TAZMANIA
Great cartoon visuals for the system, and a nice variety of environments… the game itself is a super generic platformer (with super simplistic boss fights and level layouts), with a spin attack mechanic, plus Taz will eat anything on the ground including bombs, so you gotta be careful what you walk over.
Would be a fun little time waster… if it wasn’t for jump lag, slippy slidey physics around countless death pits, and while the spin attack is a fun mechanic in theory, it’s so easy to fly off an edge and die. You end up having to play quite cautiously, which doesn’t feel fitting for the character.
Not being able to look up and down doesn’t help, leading to lots of blind jumps… you end up having to memorise levels. If these issues weren’t here, it wouldn’t a great game, but still a fun one! As it is, this is a bit tedious… at least it’s short. It takes about half an hour to beat if you don’t game over, which isn’t too hard thanks to 1ups being common.
RAMPAGE WORLD TOUR
Oof, what an ugly looking port. I feel DE did the best they could with the limited tech, with the bright blue background and contrasting colours needed so players could see the tiny enemies and bullets… but a game with so many tiny things just isn’t fit for a tiny screen, let alone one without a backlight.
Plays surprisingly well, though! And all the fundamentals seem to be here… except multiplayer, which was a huge appeal of the original game! Also there are 100 levels, it’s rough enough playing through more than 10 with a friend with graphics you can actually parse, let alone doing it by yourself with tiny unrecognisable pixels coming at you from every direction.
Oh, this is also compatible with the OG Game Boy… no fuckin’ thanks!!!
V-RALLY
SHORT VERSION: A solid Rad Racer clone that would have been great fun back in the day! But as solid as it is, it’s still simplistic, and grows increasingly dull with each race. I won’t rally around this game!
LONG VERSION:
This is actually one of the better Rad Racer style games I’ve played… the “rally” nature means you get warnings about upcoming turns/obstacles, giving you time to position yourself or brake (yes, you need to brake in this game) which makes a huge difference.
The cars also handle well, and there is a good sensation of speed. The other racers are more moving obstacles than actual competitors, but that works well in a game like this. It’s also fairly generous with collision detection, essential for a small screen game.
The visuals are of course simplistic, but they at least try to add visual variety in the backgrounds and obstacles… I wish the animals exploded when you hit them, though. Different weather/terrain might affect races? I didn’t notice any impact, though. All cars are auto, too.
Oh, this has hills like Rad Racer, too… this ain’t flatland! All the tracks are two lane though, unlike some other Rad Racer clones that widen and shrink the width.
Of course, the problem here is that despite being a solid little title, it’s still a simplistic Rad Racer style game, and I grew tired of it soon enough… then suddenly beat the game (both modes are rather short). I could have tried again on a harder difficulty, but lacked the interest. Would have kept me entertained back in the day, but I can’t see people going back to it today unless they have nostalgia for it.
MARIO 3
SHORT VERSION: Still one of the best platformers ever made IMO. I have a few gripes here and there (one of which is addressed in All-Stars), but dang near perfection when it comes to obstacle-course style platformers. It’s hammer (bros) time!!!
LONG VERSION:
Still slaps! Love all the powerups (including how rare some are), the different themed worlds, each level being built around different mechanics and ideas (or building on previously established ones), the board game nature of the maps (chance cards, etc.) and said maps feeling alive with shortcuts you can unlock and roaming encounters, it feels great to play, there are so many secrets to discover, blah blah…
I also like there are ways to get past hard levels if you get stuck, such as the pwing or cloud, etc. Very useful in world 8!
You could complain about the levels being short, but I feel they explore their ideas enough in the short time… the short length also excuses a lack of check points. You could also complain that the fortress boss is stupid easy and repetitive but eh, I see the level itself as the boss. So, things that I could see as flaws but they don’t really bother me.
What DOES bother me is the lack of saves (unless you’re playing on Famicon)! Which is why I prefer the All-Stars version, despite having more nostalgia for the NES aesthetics. Sure, you could use the whistles but sometimes I want to play through all the worlds! You can use save states today, too, but I tend to review games as if I’m playing them on original hardware.
The final level is also a bit anti-climantic, but I guess it’s okay considering all the tank parades you had to deal with previously… world 8 also cranks up the difficulty a little too much maybe? But it’s fine if you saved good powerups.
OH, also the ringing that plays when your speed is at maximum is a bit piercing, especially if your pwinging through a level.
ANYWAY, still one of the best platform games ever made, the end.
JOURNEYMAN PROJECT 2
NOTE: This review is based on “walkthru mode” which is basically easy mode. I’m going to play through the harder mode later.
This was a fun time-traveling adventure! Full of 90s multimedia cheese, too! FMV characters, early CGI environments that you walk through via videos connecting nodes together (not slideshow style like Myst)… I spent ages just exploring the house you start in, an extremely 90s new age paradise full of Easter eggs to play with, plus… CHEESE GIRL!
There actually isn’t that much plot… it opens with your future self coming back in time, tasking you to clear your name regarding time crimes you’ve been framed for. And there isn’t really any plot development until right at the end where the rest of the story is all dumped out. It’s an interesting story, at least, also the villain (who I’m pretty sure has PTSD) kinda has a point.
Anyway, you spend most of the time going back and forth between four different time zones (ancient, medieval, renaissance, future), trying to find evidence to clear your name… these all boil down to solving puzzles to slowly make your way down a linear path to a final hard piece of evidence, which pretty much concludes that time zone.
You’ll have to go back and forth to find items in places that you can use in other time zones, Day of the Tentacle style, and the puzzles are pretty varied… sometimes it’s code breaking, sometimes it’s solving riddles, sometimes it’s inventory puzzles, and sometimes something more unique, though there were no puzzles that blew me away.
Since I was on walkthru mode, the puzzles were streamlined quite a bit, which I appreciated… I still got stuck here and there, but I managed to beat the game without a walkthrough, though I did get hints from Arthur sometimes.
Oh, right, Arthur! Since you’re a time traveler, you have to avoid contact with other humans… this cleverly lets the developers avoid making conversation systems and stuff. You can still encounter humans, but they tend to just kill you. Anyway, this can make the game feel empty/lonely (like the first game which just had killer robots), but you find an AI named Arthur who keeps you company.
Arthur is kinda like an obnoxious nerd from the 90s who thinks he’s really funny and makes references constantly. Thankfully, he isn’t always grating, and in fact provides context and information to some of the historical stuff you encounter… that’s edutainment, baby! You can also ask him for help when you get stuck sometimes.
I did have some issues… you can look up and down, so you’re constantly looking all around you whenever you move somewhere to make sure you don’t miss anything. There is also some pixel hunting here and there, but nothing too egregious. Also, when you go back to a time zone, you have to solve all the puzzles again which grew tiresome (even if it didn’t take long).
The lack of plot development during the actual game also lessened the sense of adventure… it was still fun exploring these worlds and solving puzzles, but it felt kinda… meandering, I guess? It doesn’t help that the evidence you find doesn’t paint a bigger picture… they’re pretty much macguffins.
The humour is also mixed… sometimes it’s pretty funny, especially the death screens, but pop culture references and fourth-wall breaking gags really kill the mood. The one exception is getting killed by a falling cow ala Quest for the Holy Grail, that was good.
Overall though, this was a fun time. If you want to experience a 90s era multimedia adventure, this is a good one to go with due to the walkthru mode as it cuts out lots of typical adventure game bullshit.
My overall opinion my change once I play through the other mode, but so far, really solid and fun adventure.
CATZ 2
It’s a cat RPG! This starts out with a whole bunch of charm with it’s silly story and characters, plus getting to dress up the cats! But unfortunately, the bulk of the game consists of repetitive fetch quests where you go back and forth between the same areas… would be great for kids, I imagine, but it got just too dull for me.
PRETZEL PETE
Anti-street food propaganda!!!
Seriously though, this is the fakest looking game I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of fake looking games. Amazingly, it’s mostly playable.
Good for a laugh due to the ludicrous concept and weird boss designs, at least! Also, the first boss rips off Shadows of the Empire.
FUN FACT: You can play as the Pretzel Pete truck in Tyrian 2000 (they had the same publisher).
PAPARAZI
I played this randomly off a demo disk years ago, and it took so long for me to track it down again, I felt like I imagined the whole thing which is fitting since it feels like a nightmare. Stuck with me for years.
The game was never finished, as far as I know, so we just have this unbeatable demo… which kinda feels more fitting for the subject matter?
Amazing aesthetic and atmosphere… I imagine this inspired a lot of modern indie horror game makers.
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I have tried to do this on the regular on car trips and might start again because as much as I love this system i never feel like i got my fill of it. The version of Polarium on gba encourages you to do just that with an advent-calendarized daily puzzle mode. Without sampling random gba roms I don’t think i would have realized Smashing Drive was an ok time for what it was and had only been drawn to play it after pulling back some vague memories of passing by the cabinet in our defunct Gameworks years ago.
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I didn’t play too much as a kid aside from pokemon and ultimate spider-man so the last several years is me playing all the titles I would’ve gotten if I cared about playing games back then. Now I have 2 nearly full card binders of GBA games and a flash cart for stuff like fan translations so I have quite a lot of choices. Notably I have played the good stuff too which is kinda why I’m playing trash right now
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Damn. I need to start setting my difficulty low to find games to drop into…
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did you know: the ms and gg versions of dragon crystal have different tilesets
also there’s a mega drive roguelike called fatal labyrinth that’s almost identical to dragon crystal but there’s no dragon friend and only one tielset that’s uglier than any of the 8-bit ones. but that’s because it was originally a download game for that japan-only service from like 1990 or whatever
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Three missions left in Dragon Rage. It got easier. There were really only three missions of any difficulty. Hopefully that remains the case. It’s an extremely functional game. Only slightly below the original Spyro trilogy, maybe, except for the fact that it looks and plays like a PS1 game on the PS2.
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i’m playing far cry 2. i take a job from the UFLL to kill some paratroopers who are in the country to extradite an APR guy. why they want to protect their enemies, I don’t know, whatever. my shithead IDF deserter “buddy” Paul tells me the paratroopers i’ve been told to kill are actually other IDF guys come to extradite him back to israel. Paul is very agitated and accuses me of being Mossad for like three seconds before he calms down. he comes up with some harebrained scheme to have some belgian guy in a mansion tell them to go somewhere else near a bunch of medical supplies my buddy stole. paul very nonconvincingly explains this will make it easier to kill them for some reason, instead of when they were camping in the middl of the open desert. i clear out “PRIVATE PROPERTY” and force the belgian to make the call before shooting him in the face with a shotgun. i go to this shantytown Paul has apparently set up as an ambush zone with the help of his APR buddies. naturally no one is there and I immediately eat an RPG to the chest. luckily my other buddy, a yugoslavian grandfather, helps me up and reminds me that i should keep moving when a guy with an RPG is attacking me. he proceeds to immediately take several rockets and almost dies before I pull his ass out of the fire. I guess we’re even. I blow up the paratroopers’ supplies after killing everyone. IDF Paul, ever the genius, calls me to say oh shit they put the medical supplies in with their shit and now APR is gonna blame it on me. The same APR guys who absolutely did not show up to help us (Paul wasn’t fucking there either) ambush the IDF paratroopers at all. I head up the road to try and save Paul from getting teamkilled by his “friends” in APR but as I’m approaching the outpost he runs out into the road and immediately gets splattered across the grill of a Unimog. You could like almost see the red triangle forming above his head as it barreled towards him. why Paul chose to engineer such an unnecessary series of events that lead to his own demise is a complete fucking mystery. as I’m staring at his mangled body the game helpfully lets me know that vehicle is now available at my safehouse.
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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Anodyne 2 sent me back to the Saturn Dimension! (Analgesic Thread)
TimeSplitters (2000) - playing this on PS5. it’s kind of dogshit but also kind of great if you can tolerate its dogshittiness. i am really enjoying it now that i’ve finally (after many years) figured out that they actually want you to play this like prototype goldeneye when it was still an on-rails shooter. why is this game batshit hard. it always feels like it is running too fast, like everything is permanently set on 2x speed. i finally started being able to clear the levels on Normal difficulty. you gotta memorize the shit out of these enemy spawns in a lot of cases.
i love it, to be clear
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I remember 2 being a big upgrade with the challenge levels being especially engrossing. Who knows what 13-year-old Minty was thinking though…
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my feeling on timesplitters at the time was: these games are so much more backwards than Halo as a console FPS standard bearer and also the lack of verticality in comparison to something from the “previous generation” like Quake/Quake 3 makes them much less interesting than PC FPS games, the free radical ex-goldeneye devs honestly should have gone to work at a different studio rather than making this weird dead-end branch of N64/PS2 FPS design, but the level editor was really cool
I think TimeSplitters 1 may have been the first game I played a lot of with actual dual analog (a year before Halo)
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I would say they’re a total dead-end, but I don’t think we get Bizarre Creations’ The Club without them. There’s a connection there, right? I’m not just imagining it?
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Considering that they were both British game companies existing at the same time, the people at Bizarre Creations were almost certainly playing Timesplitters at a minimum, I’d be shocked if that didn’t have an impact on design even if there was no actual crossover in terms of developers.
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i replayed timesplitters 2 when it got released on ps4 a while back, and the big thing that surprised me is the weird aiming. there’s a small amount of movement you can do to the right stick that just kind of moves the crosshair around the screen, before you get to the amount that starts you turning.
i guess that’s a vestigial part of the original game being a rail shooter at some point?
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I don’t like the first two Timesplitters games much but Future Perfect is an iconic Xbox-era game to me, such expressive animation and extremely goofy, like an alternate-reality Ratchet and Clank.
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Timesplitters 2 is an all timer for me but I never picked up part 3.
Rather than being a dead end, I think the console FPS that knows its limitations is an important thing.
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Öoo is such an incredibly smart game, goddamn. Every time I come across a branching path where the solution to one side feels impossible, I take the much longer second path and gain nothing but the knowledge of how to immediately get past that first hurdle.
That said I’m horrifically stuck now, but if I just keep beating my head against it, surely I’ll make it…
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