Zelda 2 makes some really sharp decisions especially in the early game. You have to face your fears and go into a dark cave to get the candle.
And then the ridiculous difficulty spike right away in Death Mountain. With the warren of two or three-cave nooks on the overworld, each allowing you to hope that the next dive may be the last. Then it lets you heal on the beach but not save, before making you dive into the cave system again.
Basically if you’re what someone calls a “Xennial” you’ve played SMB 2 (US) and Zelda 2, that’s the defining feature of the microgeneration I won’t be taking questions at this time
I’m 35 and we were a Zelda 2/Mario 2 family, but not at the time of release. Those games came out in the 80s but it was 1990/91 before we got them. Probably because we didn’t buy a lot of games, much less new games, we went to the mom and pop video rental places regularly. Back then they were everywhere and occasionally would sell old stock so a couple of times for Christmas we got a swath of game store cartridges.
Among them came Simon’s Quest but not Castlevania. So my first Castlevania was Simon’s Quest. Now I think the reason I never saw the original Castlevania until I was much older and in high school was because maybe back in the day people who had played Castlevania were put off by how different Simon’s Quest was and returned it to the video stores or sold it off more frequently than Castlevania.
I don’t know. But for a minute there as a young kid who played primarily NES games I developed the impression that a sequel to a game was just going to be really different as a matter of course. See also NES TMNT and the sequel which was based on the arcade version. Totally different games. Now they’ve figured out that people flip out if you release a sequel and it’s not sufficiently similar to the previous game.
But yes, Zelda 2 is great though I didn’t realize it at the time. To me back then it was just different but still a fun game. Same with Mario 2. As I got older and developed taste my early opinions were that the originals were better than the sequels until I learned that that was a silly way of looking at things and they could both be really good but for different reasons.
yeah, i think about this a lot, how in the 80s, companies were willing to release sequels to games that were almost completely different from their predecessors. it was such a brief period of game dev time, but i still miss it haha. even as a kid, it didn’t bother me, for whatever reason. it was just like “yeah, Mario 1 is like this and Mario 2 is like this,” but there was no doubt that they were both Mario games.
And then Mario 3 was real different with the world map stage selection screen! Which became part of the standard afterward but at the time it was just one more neat surprise.
I want to say they should make video games surprise us again but as I’ve gotten older I learned that most people really don’t like surprises.
One of my friends once trolled me when I asked what he was playing the first time I saw NES Metroid on the TV by answering “Mario 4”, and I actually believed it. He never stopped ribbing me about it later
What if the good ending revealed Mario instead
I thought it was vidconsphere gospel that “the second entry in every Nintendo series is the weird one”, now you’re telling me kids these days don’t even know about these games smdh what’s the world coming to etc
Anyway,
Beat up a lich in Warframe, played a bunch of Armored Warfare (cleared the AMX-30B2 and unlocked the AMX-40 and AMX-13 DCA), and that’s pretty much it.
I played a bunch of Turok 2 last night while streaming it. What a fucking mess of a game!! It’s got this horrible structure in two ways:
Every level has multiple missions you must complete before getting to the end. If you miss any single mission, they dump you back at the start of the level so you can go through the whole thing again, except only 10% of the enemies respawn and everything’s unlocked, so it’s mostly just…walking until you find the one thing you missed
The levels themselves pretty much seem to consist of challenge rooms connected by corridors, so there’s no real sense of place. Even worse, half the corridors are actually identical teleporters, so there’s even less connection. Navigating this becomes extremely difficult because they are ALSO interconnected by switches, so completing a challenge in one room might open a door in the last room you are in, but where was the last room? Which was even was it? It’s this weird mishmash of Doom style level design and, like…just a bunch of rooms. Also the levels are SUPER FUCKING LONG, like I’m talking 45 minutes for one level the first time through.
All of that said, it was pretty fucking awesome to shoot dino-men in the face with arrows. The first level in particular is built around using the bow and arrow a bunch, and using a mouse and keyboard makes this really good to do. I imagine doing it on a real N64 would be hell though, because you need to make fairly precise headshots to down these idiots in less than 5 arrows.
In conclusion, Turok 2 is a land of contrasts (full of dinosaurs)
This is complicated by the fact that the original SMB2 is essentially a standalone expansion pack. Zelda II is weird, though.
chocobo mystery dungeon is way harder than it looks (IT IS NOT POKEMON MYSTERY DUNGEON EASY). im getting my ass handed to me by a persistent fire tile breathing, minion spawning phoenix but i think i can beat it as a dark mage chocobo i need to stop being a coward white mage. i was just excited about white mage cuz the sbcon loyal steed is a white mage but WHITE MAGE SUCKS FOR BOSS FIGHTS
It’s not that people don’t know about them, they just write them off as dated weirdos. They haven’t been accepted into the canon that SMB, Castlevania, and Mega Man belong to.
because elemental weaknesses are such a big thing in this game, it seems like black mage is the best class pretty much all the time, since it can do elemental damage whenever you like
This feels completely plausible; it’d be like how Bomberman becomes Lode Runner at the end of Bomberman.
That ending amused me because Bomberman escapes (…the mines?) to become human and immediately gets a job 90% like what he was doing before as a robot slave
There’s no such thing as rewarding “work” even/especially if you’re “your own boss.” All work can stuffit
