Adzuken

Legacy of the Wizard (NES)

Dungeon crawling with the whole family.

The Good
The NES library is rather cluttered with obscure, Metroid-like sidescrollers contained within interconnected worlds, and I’m honestly surprised by how often I turn over a rock and come across a new one. Legacy of the Wizard was something I bought years ago with the intention of playing immediately, only to have it languish on my shelf. I’ve finally gotten around to playing it, and while it hasn’t set my world on fire, it at least turned out to be a pleasant member of the sub-genre.

Legacy of the Wizard stars a family of four and their pet as they delve deep into a dungeon that is conveniently located beneath their home to defeat a dragon. Unsurprisingly, each family member has their own strengths and weaknesses and are restricted to only using specific items. For example, the daughter, Lyll, can jump quite high and uses a mattock to destroy specific blocks. Their pet monster, Pochi, on the other hand, has limited range and jumping height, but can’t be hurt by monsters, making it good for basic reconnaissance.

In order to slay the dragon, you must first acquire four crowns and the Dragonslayer sword hidden within the dungeon. The dungeon itself sprawls out in every direction, and while it may seem at first to be nothing more than a twisting labyrinth, it’s actually separated into distinct regions that only specific family members can traverse using special items. This gives the game a dash of variety that many of its contemporaries lack, as each section plays out differently than the other. One may be fraught with peril and require sharp combat skills to get through, while another leans heavier in the direction of puzzles, which typically means moving lots and lots of blocks.

What I love most about the game is its art style. The world is almost entirely constructed from blocks and objects of equal size, and even the enemies and the family conform to this size restriction. As a result, a lot of small details were packed into them to make each look unique, and the art style comes across as nothing short of adorable. The enemies, no matter how dangerous they may be, all look rather goofy. Every character has a super-cute, big-eyed, big fisted look that is really quite charming. There’s a lot of detail packed into each family member, especially when it comes to their attire, and the small details make them look completely distinct from one another.

It’s a pretty fun and challenging romp, and it does so without becoming quite as obtuse as some of its contemporaries, such as Castlevania 2 or Goonies 2. It still has issues when it comes to communicating how things work. A lot of the items are offered with no explanation and it can be difficult to tell how to use them. This can be eased by having access to the instruction manual, but even then, some of the images don’t feel like they correspond to how the items appear in the game. There’s also no real in-game map, so it does require you to play cartographer by making your own, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but certainly can be satisfying.

The Bad
While it’s not the most difficult game out there, Legacy of the Wizard certainly isn’t friendly. You’re given a long health bar, and as far as I know, no hazard in the game results in instantaneous death, yet it tries to wear you down slowly using a variety of tricks and traps. Dying has you dropping all the items you accumulated since the last time you set out, and you’re sent back to the homestead; a harsh punishment, especially in the later portions of the game. The map itself has a number of dead-ends and pitfalls that can have you wasting valuable life to get through. It’s evened out by the sheer number of inns scattered throughout the dungeon, but a stay at each one takes ten precious pieces of gold.

The resources that you require are mostly only found when dropped by enemies, which can lead to a great deal of grind as you attempt to replenish your supplies. The amount of gold you can carry at one time is a meagre 109 pieces. Grind itself is complicated by erratic enemy movement, the fact that even your basic attack drains from your magic (forcing you to drop gold in at an Inn to fully replenish), and the cruel habit that enemies have to drop poison instead of anything useful. The poison tends to be vexing, even when you’re not grinding, since enemies will often drop them in narrow corridors, forcing you to pick it up and take damage or waiting several seconds for it to de-spawn.

It’s also a very loose game. It’s the type of game that gives you a long health bar with full expectation that you’ll need it. Most enemies don’t exhibit any sort of predictable pattern and most family members only have short ranged attacks, meaning it’s impossible to go forever without taking damage. It’s even a viable strategy to sacrifice a bit of life to jump on an enemy’s head to get to a higher area. Tying into that is the ability for Pochi to actually climb enemies to rise indefinitely, which I’m certain is a glitch. There are also a number of jumps that are either stretched out to the max, or require you to leap under a low ceiling and into a specific block making it necessary to have your character stand as far off the ledge as possible. These aren’t hallmarks of good design and can be a little aggravating in places, but on the whole, the game works.

Bosses are a disappointment overall. Rather than having any thoughtful designs, they’re just larger enemies who bounce around and fire projectiles in your direction. The first few are bewilderingly easy to the point where you may not even glimpse them before they’re felled, while a couple of the later ones do incredible amounts of damage and spew so many projectiles that getting your own fire through the barrage is difficult. There is an item that makes them slightly easier, but it’s stashed in a secret shop that is hidden by a slightly obtuse puzzle. Even with this item, I was only able to defeat them by using the level geometry to my advantage, thus thwarting their rudimentary AI. The final boss has a bit more thought put into it and is a bit more conventional, but it only has one attack and an incredibly basic movement pattern. Like I said; disappointing.

The Bottom Line
While I have my complaints, I really like Legacy of the Wizard. While I was pretty lukewarm on Goonies II, a similar title, I found this one to have just the right amount of challenge to keep me going. It’s certainly not the most polished game in the world, it’s glitchy and parts of it are kind of rough and half-baked, but it has a sort of warmth in its design. Its fun aesthetic, varied gameplay, and satisfying exploration all make for an enjoyable experience. It’s maybe not a standout in the genre, but it’s an OKAY game in its own right, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

By Adzuken on June 6, 2015

Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)

The Blue Shell Shuffle

The Good
I’ve always enjoyed the Mario Kart series, but I’ve never loved them enough to call myself a fan. In my younger days, it was something my family could always beat me at, so my fragile ego caused me to keep a distance from the earlier titles. Since then, I’ve played every entry in the long-running franchise, but never truly committed myself to any of the titles. Mario Kart 8 has finally broken through my apathy, and for the first time since F-Zero GX, I’ve finally found a racing game I can sink my teeth into.

If you’ve played any of the most recent Mario Karts, you know the drill. It’s a cartoony mix of arcade racing and car combat as you fight to win races using a combination of slick driving and dirty tricks. You’re provided with thirty-two tracks; sixteen of them brand new, and sixteen updated remakes of older courses. Gliders and submersible propellers make a return from the seventh entry, as do interchangeable kart components. New to the series is an anti-gravity mechanic that allows karts to traverse inverted portions of track, and while it doesn’t add anything tangibly different to the formula, it does allow tracks to get pretty whacked out, and some feel like they could have been ripped straight out of F-Zero.

The most impressive upgrade to this version – and I feel plenty of shame for saying this – is the presentation. Simply put, Mario Kart 8 is mad pretty. From the karts and characters to the tracks and lighting, everything is damned impressive. The attention to detail is almost astonishing, with track backgrounds sporting wondrous fantasy vistas and drivers exchanging glances at each other as they drive by. All of the tracks have their own look and feel, and even the new rainbow road’s dangerous looking space highway has a completely unique appearance compared to the remade N64 rainbow road, which floats high above the Mushroom Kingdom’s version of Paris. I found myself peering beyond the track’s horizon to take in the little details sprinkled beyond.

Yet while the art style is largely superficial, it ties into the game’s polished feel. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been lukewarm on just about every entry in the series, and this is the first one that I’ve actually felt any enthusiasm for. It’s because it just feels good. Controls are responsive and for what seems like the first time since Double Dash, the karts feel like they have some weight behind them. The sound design is a little more even, and I’m happy to report that the cacophony of screaming that erupts in a four player session from the various high-pitched kart drivers has been reduced to a more tolerable level. Not only that, but there’s more grandeur to the music that was once so easily drowned out by the chaos. All around, Mario Kart 8 just feels terrific.

I find myself going back to it constantly, even all these months after its first release. I just had to get all the gold trophies and I’m still making attempts to get the stars awarded for flawless grand prix victories. I even went through the time trials and defeated all the staff ghosts, something I haven’t attempted since my days with F-Zero GX. Even when that dried up, I went and played online multi-player, which is another rare activity for me. Everything about the game excites me, and I haven’t felt this way about a racing game in a long, long time.

The Bad
It’s unfortunate to see a return of the rubber-band AI that has long plagued the Mario Kart series. While perhaps not as noticeable this time around, computer controlled racers gain a boost in speed the further back they fall behind the lead player, which essentially means that the better you do, the faster they go. It’s a horrible system that cheats the player and provides leniency to a system that doesn’t even have the capacity to appreciate it, all for the sake of artificially increasing the game’s difficulty. This is most vexing in multi-player, where the top AI racers will stick to the fastest player, so if one human player isn’t as skilled as another, they may end up forced into a lower rank as they struggle to keep up.

Even without rubber-banding, there’s no getting around the random nature of the game. While a skilful racer can defeat an inexperienced opponent without much difficulty, close races are often decided by who the universe has bestowed the best item upon. Blue shells are still the game changers that they’ve always been, but at least now you can escape their wrath by using the new horn block item or by activating a mushroom at the very last second. Items can also be turned off in online matches for those who want race results to depend entirely on the driving skill of the individual.

It’s a petty disappointment, but it mystifies me that so much of the driver roster for Mario Kart 8 is taken up by baby versions of characters. There are five babies in total in the driver count, which seems excessive. I’m sure these appeal to some players out there, but I’m just not sure why characters like Birdo were cut in favour of someone like Baby Rosalina. It doesn’t make any difference to me, I suppose. No matter what characters they could have added, I’d never race as anyone other than Luigi.

The Bottom Line
Let’s be honest here; there isn’t much that Mario Kart 8 does to differentiate itself from prior games in the series. Yet despite that, I’ve played it far more than any other entry in the series, or perhaps any racing game since the last F-Zero. While I’m used to Mario Kart sequels feeling like they’re merely in a holding pattern, Mario Kart 8 finally takes everything that’s been built up over the years and refines it into one of the tightest games I’ve ever set my hands it. It feels like a payoff, like all the pieces have dropped into place. It’s an absolutely AMAZING game, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Nintendo has difficulty topping it when it comes time for yet another sequel.

By Adzuken on May 29, 2015

Bloodborne (PlayStation 4)

A night to remember.

The Good
I’ve been playing From Software’s Souls series since the very beginning with the release of Demon’s Souls, and since then, my play-style has largely been the same. From title to title, I don a suit of plate armour, pick up straight sword and shield, and rigidly stick to that kit from beginning to end. Far from ambitious, I know, and sometimes I do become envious of players who are more creative with their weapons and apparel, but I guess I’m just happy in my comfort zone. However, it seems the creators of the series had issue with my little safety bubble since for the latest game, Bloodborne, everything has been rejiggered specifically to ensure that my beloved play-style is no longer a viable option. As it turns out, it’s going to take more than a calculated strike on my comfort zone to turn me off the series.

Make no mistake; while Bloodborne’s title no longer references souls (largely just swapping that word out for “blood” at every opportunity), it is a true-blue member of the Souls series. Anyone familiar with Dark or Demon’s Souls will spot the stark similarities immediately. From player movement, to UI, to multiplayer, to the hilariously floaty ragdolls, it carries all the best traits of the venerable franchise. There are, of course, a lot of changes, both large and small, but the list of what has stayed the same is most certainly a lot longer than what has been modified.

Like the games in the Souls series, you play as a character who awakens in a place with no memory of how they got there or what they’re supposed to do. This time around, rather than being set in medieval fantasy, you’re placed in the gothic-inspired city of Yharnam to find your purpose. The streets are desolate, walked only by shambling monstrosities and insane hunters. Anyone with any semblance of sanity left has barricaded themselves inside their homes and, for the most part, refuses to speak with you, merely referencing the hunt and often chastising you for not performing your role as hunter more expediently. As is the series’ tradition, rather than actually tell you the story, Bloodborne merely sits back and drops pieces for you to pick up and assemble along the way. It’s done largely without the use of cutscenes, instead providing it through cryptic snippets of dialogue and item descriptions. It’s a much more organic way to let the story unfold that harnesses the interactive medium in a way that many cutscene heavy games fail to.

Yharnam is a bleak visual treat. The series’ trademark morose atmosphere is thick in the city’s rain-wet, coffin-lined streets. Remarkably, the world gets continually darker and more nightmarish as the game progresses, though it doesn’t quite feature the environmental variety of its predecessors. Malformed men with makeshift weapons and firearms are soon replaced by lurching monstrosities and their grotesque friends, the statues that clutter the sidewalks change from plain, old-fashioned creepy cloaked figures to actually pretty distressing statues that seem to depict the final terrified moments of the populace, and the environments progress from familiar but ruined to unsettling and nightmarish. I never felt that the game became truly horrific, but there are a few uncomfortable images that have been burned into my memory.

While the changes in aesthetic, setting, and plot are largely superficial, the place where Bloodborne diverges furthest from the previous games is in its combat. Many small tweaks were made to make the combat flow better, and the result is a system that promotes aggression over a guarded defense. Attack combos flow together better, and health can be regained if an enemy is counter-attacked in time. Backstabbing has been removed, forcing you to either stagger an enemy with a well-timed shot from a secondary weapon or attacking it in a weak spot using a charged attack if you want a chance to land a critical strike. Weight restrictions have been removed, so every character build is nimble enough to dodge. All this makes battles, especially those against the boss monsters, more intense as combat requires quicker reflexes and better pattern recognition.

The Bad
The fact that Bloodborne carries so many stark similarities to previous games of the Souls series means that it can’t escape from comparisons with them, and, in many ways, its deficiencies will stick in the craw of some of the series’ fans.

More specifically, character building has been streamlined to a rather uncomfortable point. There are fewer attributes for you to spend your experience on, and similarly there are fewer weapon and armour options. With the removal of things like shields and heavy armour, defensive builds aren’t practical or even possible. Likewise, magic has been almost entirely ripped out, and what’s in its place is largely underwhelming. This isn’t to say that there’s no flexibility in how you build your character, but whenever player interaction would come up in previous Soul titles, you’d never really know what you were going to see since many players would often put together bizarre combinations of weapons and attire. This time around, it seems that everyone has simply rolled the same dude in a duster.

The series’ infamous unforgiving difficulty has also had its fangs pulled in some ways, as it’s much less of an inconvenience than before. Dying still sends you back to the last lantern you used, but there are so many shortcuts everywhere that even if you die on a boss, it’s typically only a short jog to get back to where you were. You still drop all of your unbanked experience when you die, but that’s it. Previous games coupled this with the loss of something else, such as your corporeal form in Demon’s Souls or your humanity in Dark Souls, but no equivalent exists in Bloodborne, and that takes away from the risk. The only real punishment for dying an embarrassing death this time around is having to sit through a vexingly long loading screen, which was even less tolerable before a patch shortened it.

While much of Bloodborne’s narrative hits the same notes as previous games in the series, it comes off as far weaker. You’re once again left picking through the ruins of a once grand civilization that was at one point lifted into the stratum by a grand secret that was its eventual undoing, but while the Souls series had legendary gods and kings, Bloodborne just has a sinister church and a nebulous university. Even when you reach these shadowy places, there doesn’t seem to be much that betrays their sinister purpose. There’s a psychological aspect to the game that suggests the focus was supposed to be on the player character, but they’re introduced into a mad world and any madness that’s piled on top of it could just be routine to them, for all we know. There also seems to be fewer sane NPC’s this time around, which may be a stylistic choice to add to the oppressive atmosphere, but without their own perspectives and backstories to flavour the pot, things are left a bit bland.

The Bottom Line
While Bloodborne never reaches the same dizzying heights of Dark Souls, it still retains the creative spark that made it so special. The dark atmosphere, the intense boss fights, and the minimalistic storyline still work to make a game that feels like nothing else out there on the market. There are attempts to take the series to new places by shifting the focus to combat and moving to a new setting, but surprisingly, it still feels a lot like the other games in From Software’s series. This sometimes works against it, as the game can feel limited in comparison to its predecessors, but make no mistake that Bloodborne is an OUTSTANDING game that’s well worth your time.

By Adzuken on May 23, 2015

Metroid Prime (GameCube)

Through the eyes of a bounty hunter.

The Good
After eight years of hiatus, Metroid returned in a big way. On the same day in 2002, Metroid Fusion for the Gameboy Advance and Metroid Prime for the Gamecube were released in North America. Fusion was a traditional sidescroller developed internally at Nintendo and closely follows the gameplay of Super Metroid. Prime, on the other hand was given off to the unproven western developer, Retro Studios, and flipped into the first-person perspective. In a post-Halo world, much of the fanbase was worried that the focus would be changed to be more action oriented. It’s possible that Nintendo also lacked confidence in the results, as Metroid Fusion contained an introduction that labeled it “Metroid 4”, while Metroid Prime was given no such status within the series. Nowadays, however, gamers tend to look more favourably on Retro’s work, and for good reason.

Despite the drastic change in perspective, Metroid Prime draws heavy inspiration from Super Metroid and largely ignores the features that are typically found in conventional first-person shooters. Perhaps the most disorienting is that it doesn’t use a dual analogue control scheme. Instead, the Y-axis is locked during movement and only by using the free-look button can you actually look up and down. Combat instead uses a lock-on system, rather than allowing free aiming. This, along with the game’s meagre selection of weapons, limits combat to a secondary role and helps the game push its exploration focus.

Like previous Metroid games, the game world is a large web of rooms and other nodes connected together. Progression is limited by what upgrades have been picked up, so certain doors will be impassable until a specific arm cannon upgrade can be found. It really does feel like Super Metroid with an additional dimension to the point where it sometimes feels like it’s reading off the same script. Many of the power-ups from the previous games can be once again found here, with few additions to actually take advantage of the extra dimension. Likewise, the game’s minimalistic story features numerous settings and obstacles that are repeats from the series’ seminal entry.

Metroid’s lore has always been rather disconnected and abstract which makes it difficult to get a handle on how things work. The space pirates, for example, are a race of sentient creatures vying for galactic dominance, yet they were always depicted as sluggish, dimwitted, and extremely vulnerable, and it was hard to believe that they’d have the ambition to build an empire, let alone weaponize a creature such as the Metroid. Metroid Prime does a decent job of making the space pirates a more rounded threat. They’re depicted as an amoral, technologically advanced, militarized society. You can learn a lot about the world, the backstory, and what you’re up against using logs that are read by scanning terminals and enemies with Samus’ visor. There’s an awful lot of text, much of it disposable, littered throughout the game, but it does a good job of adding depth to the space pirates’ organization while dropping a selection of five-dollar words for that added sci-fi effect. For the first time, there’s a lot of context to what’s going on and it really adds some useful perspective to the events in the game.

At the time of its release, and even throughout the Gamecube’s lifespan, Metroid Prime was considered to be quite the graphical powerhouse. By today’s standards, it has lost its dazzle, featuring blocky environments and low resolution textures, but at the time it was rather impressive. However, one part of its visual design that hasn’t aged is its attention to detail. The HUD in particular is creatively done, bordered by the edges of Samus’ visor to give the impression of looking out through her eyes. That’s not necessarily anything new, but it also reacts to environmental effects to further cement the illusion. Rain beads on it, vapour sticks to it, and if there’s a bright flash nearby, the image of Samus’ eyes appears reflecting in the glass as she looks around. While this is all greatly superficial, it’s a rather impressive attempt to further immersion, and there are many other small details like this that add to it.

The Bad
While Metroid Prime was quite the looker in its day, it came at a price in the scope of its environments. Prime’s world boils down collection of nodes and corridors, which is fine since that’s the sort of structure that previous games featured. However, the effect that it does have is that Talon IV doesn’t feel like a real place. While the topology is a little strange, demonstrating a variety of biomes in ridiculously close proximity to one another, it’s not the only reason for the preposterousness of its world. There’s nothing to really give you an idea of how everything links up. If it wasn’t for the map, keeping a sense of direction would be nearly impossible. The map screen itself shows an abstract honeycomb when zoomed out, rather than a view of the overworld, and it’s difficult to place everything together mentally. This could have been solved by giving the player a view of the world from a high place, or having Phendrana Drifts visible in distant mountains and the Phazon Mines from atop a cliff, but no effort was made to tie everything together believably, making the world feel tangibly phoney.

Considering the game plays out entirely in the first-person perspective and a lot of attention has been given into the visor to make it actually appear as though the game is played out through Samus’ eyes, it’s a little unfortunate that Prime still falls into the old standards of establishing shots. Cutscenes are pretty rare, but when a new environment or particular enemy is introduced, the game cuts away to show Samus standing rigidly on the doorstep as she looks around. Obviously, this doesn’t have much of an impact on gameplay aside from taking the player out of the moment, but I feel that the camera should have never left Samus’ helmet.

There’s a lot of backtracking late in the game; more than usual for a Metroid game. The worst example of this occurs towards the end of the game where you’re required to collect a number of artefacts to reach the final area. There are some very specific hints available that reveal their positions, but it’s still necessary to walk across hell’s half-acre to actually reach them. Some can be picked up as you go throughout the game, but others require you to have a vast collection of power-ups before you can reach them. This isn’t a major ordeal, but it is the weakest portion of the game by far. It reduces the game’s already sluggish pace to a glacial crawl as you hop around the environment on a treasure hunt.

The Bottom Line
I replayed Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion in tandem and came to the conclusion that while I enjoyed Metroid Fusion more than I did previously, I enjoyed Metroid Prime less. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy Prime, it’s an OUTSTANDING game, but in my youth, I loved it. Metroid Prime never really reaches the high points of Super Metroid, but it still delivers a pretty tight experience. The atmosphere is excellent and the attention to detail is almost peerless. It’s commendable that Retro was able to translate the exploration based gameplay of the earlier sidescrollers so deftly to the third dimension. I have my doubts that any other developer will meet with the same success that was found here when it comes to translating the Metroid series to 3D.

By Adzuken on May 15, 2015

Disney's The Little Mermaid (NES)

Fish sticks.

The Good
I would have been about three or four years old the last time I actually watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid. I’ve got a basic idea of the plot, some images can still be pulled up from my memory, and I can hum a few of the songs, but it’s all bits and pieces. I am, however, a fan of Capcom’s works on the NES and hold their licensed games in high esteem. To date, I’ve play most of them, and I can say that The Little Mermaid certainly stands out in one less than desirable way.

Taking liberties with the storyline, The Little Mermaid has Ariel changing back to a mermaid to fight Ursula, who is attempting to take control of the ocean. Like most Capcom games, it takes the form of a sidescroller and features all the tight controls and excellent sprite-work that one could expect from the publisher. In the first few minutes of playtime, it gives the illusion that it’s going to be yet another fun adaptation of a Disney license, and while it doesn’t lose steam or fizzle out, it does abruptly stop well short of its potential.

The game takes place almost entirely underwater, with only the occasional opportunity to flop across small stretches of land as gracefully as a manatee on the beach. Ariel’s only means of defense is shooting bubbles to trap the various aggressive sea creatures so they can be thrown against walls or into other enemies. The range and strength of the bubbles can be upgraded by opening treasure chests and collecting orbs, which would be a nice little character building mechanic if all upgrades weren’t dropped upon death, sabotaging any feeling of character progression.

Predictably, each of the levels are capped off with a short boss battle, largely drawing from characters in the movie. All the other enemies are pretty generic, and the music is comprised of passable 8-bit versions of the movie’s various songs alongside original, but forgettable, level themes. Gameplay is also pretty smooth and inoffensive for its entire runtime, but that’s about all the credit I’m willing to give it.

The Bad
I plucked the Little Mermaid off my shelf as something to play while I waited for a game to download on my PC. I fully expected to only get a taste of it and return to it at later date to give it a more focused playthrough. Less than an hour later, I was looking for something else to fill the time, not because I couldn’t stand playing it for any longer, but because I’d finished it.

I’m used to Capcom’s Disney licensed games being pretty short. In fact, for most Capcom games I sit down with the expectation of seeing the credits before I stand up again, but Little Mermaid is by far the shortest game I’ve played from the publisher. Less than an hour. Even shorter than the movie it’s based on. In that hour, I learned the basics of how to play and kept going until the screen said “The End.” It didn’t even offer me the option to play at a higher difficulty. That was it. Five same-y levels and a final boss. Done.

A small part of the issue is that the game isn’t very challenging. I died a handful of times while learning how to swim, but after the third level I stopped seeing the game over screen. The enemies in the game simply aren’t aggressive enough, and largely stick to extremely basic movement patterns. The fact that you can swim through most levels without even engaging any of the enemies or collecting the pickups practically negates them as obstacles and makes the whole game feel pretty flimsy. It’s important to note that the target audience for the adventure is likely children, and I’m sure that they’d find the Little Mermaid a lot more challenging than I did.

However, there’s a feeling of thoughtlessness pervades the game. Dying means you lose all your upgrades, but the only checkpoints in a level are directly before the boss when you would need those upgrades the most. It feels pointless to even have lives when a game over actually comes with the advantage of another opportunity to collect power-ups. The levels are so ridiculously short that it’s only a temporary inconvenience should you lose your stock of lives, and the boss battles aren’t so difficult that the upgrades are indispensable.

Then there are the secret power-ups. Each level has small cubbies hollowed out that invite you to throw a seashell or enemy into them. Doing so causes a pickup to appear – either health, or one of the absolutely pointless score increasing items. Yet you can’t throw enemies downwards, requiring that they be maneuvered so they’re thrown from within the cubby, rather than in the direction of it, which is so daft that I doubt was by design. Treasure chests also contain power-ups, but they can only be opened by seashells and rocks for some reason, so to get the orbs within, you’ll need to use the shells exclusively on the chests rather than taking a chance on the cubbies.

Finally, why the hell is it necessary to hold B to swim faster? I never let go of the button, since more precise movement was never required. It takes up a whole button that could have been used for something that’s actually useful. Jumping out of the water or sweeping the sea floor with your tail are both proximity based, and this causes you to lose the ability to shoot at high or low altitudes, so it seems like that would have been a much better use for the button.

The Bottom Line
The Little Mermaid is easily summed up as a mostly competent game with an unacceptable duration. I’m staggered by how short it is. Kirby’s Dreamland is barely a longer game, and even it has the courtesy of offering a more challenging difficulty once you finish it. The fact that The Little Mermaid is almost saved by tight controls and above-average graphics is a testament to how well Capcom had refined its craft at the time. Yet unlike games like Duck Tales it does nothing unique or different to make up for its deficiencies. It’s disappointing, it’s MEDIOCRE, and even at twice its duration, it wouldn’t be anything special.

By Adzuken on May 8, 2015

Demon's Souls (PlayStation 3)

Let strength be granted so the world might be mended.

The Good
As technology advances, many of today’s games are making pushes more towards interactive storytelling. The need to obtain the same level of respect as Hollywood blockbusters is a carrot that seems to dangle in the faces of the industry’s biggest publishers. That’s fine. There’s certainly a lot of potential to tell some great stories using the medium, but more and more games are dropping what was once a crucial piece of a good game: the challenge. Not everyone is willing to invest the time to learn the rules and build the skills required to topple the games of yesteryear, so there’s a lot of fear of alienating a large portion of the market that wants their interactive experience handed to them. That’s fine, too, but I feel it’s a waste of the medium. There’s a lot of power in making the player work for their story’s conclusion, there’s a lot more satisfaction in saving the world when you’re forced to actually fight to do so, and few games demonstrates this power quite as well as Demon’s Souls.

Starting as it means to go on, Demon’s Souls casts you as a warrior who has pierced the sinister colourless fog surrounding the besieged kingdom of Boletaria only to be killed. Rather than that being the end of it, your soul is ripped from your body and deposited in the Nexis, a central point connecting five different lands and the prison for the soul devouring Old One. You’re tasked with helping an enigmatic candle maiden lull the Old One back to sleep by defeating powerful demons and taking their souls to become more powerful.

Despite how simplistic that may sound, the narrative is actually pretty nebulous. Demon’s Souls largely eschews cutscenes when telling its story. There are some – a few expository slideshows and establishing shots – but for the most part the plot unfolds through small snippets of occasionally cryptic dialogue and flavour text attached to the game’s many items. It may be a bit anaemic for some gamers that are used to most modern games that are scripted up to the collar, but those willing to actually do some digging into the game’s lore are likely to find a satisfying amount of depth and backstory. It would probably be inaccurate to say the narrative is central to the game, but it’s there for those that seek it.

The environments themselves largely overshadow the narrative. While the game begins in the grey, winding corridors and walkways of Boletaria, it’s not long before the other areas open up and the real game begins. The nexus that binds you is a central hub for the game’s worlds which include a deep and claustrophobic mine, a darkened asylum and its neighbouring towers, a shrine built into a tremendous mesa, and a murky swamp filled with criss-crossing makeshift structures. Few other characters inhabit these worlds, but the ones you do encounter have their own interesting backstories, each wandering for different reasons. It’s a lonely and treacherous world, one whose ruins and monsters tell a story of their own.

Capping off each slice of level is one of the game’s fantastic boss battles. While some of these are pretty straightforward battles against big dudes, the most fascinating ones feature bosses with specific weaknesses or strategies required to topple them. One of the more memorable bouts requires you to pick up a special weapon in the environment, and the sense of empowerment that comes from wielding it is incredible. Others will have you tiptoeing around to avoid detection or hacking at a specific spot until the baddie takes a fall and gives access to its weak point. Even the more straightforward bosses are a thrill to fight and provoke a sense of adrenaline-filled intensity that I can’t recall ever feeling outside some of the trickier classics of the 8 and 16-bit consoles and computers.

Blended into this is a rather unusual multiplayer system that has you interacting with other players in a number of temporary measures. When connected to the central server, notes and bloodstains left by other players can be found littering the ground. The notes can alert you to secret areas, hidden items, or warn of difficult enemies, while the bloodstains allow you to view the last moments of a fellow adventurer as they suffer their sometimes amusing fate. On top of this is the more conventional cooperative and player-versus-player mechanics. While clinging to their human form, players can summon up to three teammates to assist them, but they are also open to invasion from the more malicious players. This is all voluntary, but some of the game’s more memorable moments are linked to player interaction.

The Bad
The reputation that surrounds Demon’s Souls is that it’s an extremely difficult game, which is an assessment that I find to be inaccurate. If the measurement of a game’s difficulty is how many times the player fails in attempting a challenge, then Demon’s Souls doesn’t come close to some of the games I’ve played. During my various playthroughs of the game, it was rare that I’d fail on a boss or in the midst of a level more than four of five times. What Demon’s Souls is, I’d argue, is an unforgiving game. What most gamers have difficulty grappling with is how seriously it treats death.

Dying in Demon’s Souls carries quite a number of repercussions. The most obvious is that you’re immediately kicked back to the last archstone that you spawned from, forcing you to make the perilous trip back through the level. To make things more harrowing, you drop your entire stock of the game’s main currency; souls. Souls are used to both level up and buy items from the various shopkeepers. When you die, you drop them all near the place of your demise, and if you fail to return to them without dying again, you lose them forever. As though that weren’t troublesome enough, you’re also stripped of your corporeal form and reduced to just your soul, which has the drawback of a halved healthbar. To get your body back, you’ll either need to defeat one of the game’s bosses, assist another player in defeating a boss, or simply use a rare and limited item. To top all this off, there’s also the matter of world tendency, a rather poorly explained mechanic that has the various worlds become more or less perilous depending on how successful you are. The point is: do everything you can to avoid dying.

That’s easier said than done. The world of Demon’s Souls demands a great deal of situational awareness. The levels a fraught with traps of a wide variety that prey on the unsuspecting adventurer. Running towards an enemy that waits patiently at the end of a hallway is a good way to get ambushed. Failure to notice environmental cues can result in yet another embarrassing death. Attacking an enemy without first observing their attack patterns often ends with another flattened would-be hero. Underestimate even the lowliest of enemies and you may find yourself cornered without means of defense. Demon’s Souls isn’t always friendly about its hazards – a lot of bosses carry in their arsenal moves so damaging they could be described as insta-kills – but being cautious goes a long way in avoiding the frustration that comes from repeated deaths.

It can be an alienating experience, as frustration is almost unavoidable. Even the first level of the game is long, meandering, and so packed with peril that some give up before even completing it. Most people who have experienced the game like to cite a moment where everything finally clicks for them; a moment where Demon’s Souls finally makes sense. For me, it was blundering my way through a level, absolutely turgid with souls I had unwisely been hording, and finding myself face to face with a particularly intimidating boss. At that moment I knew my only way out was to take the boss down; defeat wasn’t an option. No game has ever instilled such a tangible fear of death in me. It was at that moment that I finally understood the genius that underlies all its mechanics.

The Bottom Line
While it is technically a spiritual successor to the somewhat obscure King’s Field series, when stood next to the tutorial filled, cutscene packed games of today, Demon’s Souls looks and feels as though it were developed in a vacuum. Few games have managed to place so much meaning on death, and fewer have been able to so deftly utilize negative reinforcement to do so. It pulls it all off so effortlessly, wraps it all in deep and flexible character building, and tops it all off with some truly imaginative and unforgettable boss battles. It’s an OUTSTANDING game, bordering on genius, and while not everyone will dig its uninviting demeanour, I feel that everyone experienced in the hobby should at least try it.

By Adzuken on May 2, 2015

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Wii U)

A Backpack Overburdened with Adventure

The Good
Captain Toad and the Toad Brigade first showed up in a supporting role in Super Mario Galaxy, where they traveled the levels in their mushroom shaped spaceship. In Super Mario 3D World, Captain Toad’s role was upgraded to playable character in his own set of intermission style levels where he navigated cube-like levels, collecting stars. The gameplay in these levels was a grand departure from the rest of the game to accommodate Captain Toad’s complete inability to jump. As a result, they were snack-sized levels with light puzzle elements. They were also absolutely fantastic diversions, and it left me wanting a full game based around the concept. Almost a year after he first got his playable role, Captain Toad is back to make my wish come true.

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker will feel pretty familiar to anyone who played the intermission levels in Mario 3D World. Most of the mechanics that were present there have made the transition to the full experience. For those uninitiated, the goal is to guide Captain Toad to the star at the end of a series of obstacles. Toad’s overburdened backpack slows him down to the point where he’s sluggish and ineffective in combat, so much of the game revolves around navigating simple puzzles to reach the star. Spatial awareness is pretty important, requiring the zoomed back camera to be rotated around the small levels to reveal hidden paths and enemies. The gamepad’s touchscreen is used to manipulate certain pieces of the landscape, and blowing in the microphone can raise platforms, which works a lot better than it sounds and is actually pretty enjoyable.

Alongside the stars, three gems are hidden in each course, and collecting them presents a greater challenge than merely reaching the star. While collecting every gem is optional, it is necessary to collect enough to proceed through some of the milestone levels. Should the gems not provide enough of a challenge, each level also contains a special objective that requires you to perform certain feats, such as completing the level without taking damage or eliminating every enemy in the level. While none of the above is likely to completely bake your noodle, they do provide a fun assortment of tasks to keep things progressing.

Even as someone who was hoping for an expanded version of the initial Captain Toad concept, I was surprised by how much mileage Nintendo got out of the familiar gameplay. Many of the levels twist the mechanics in extremely interesting ways, presenting challenges that have you navigating darkened houses, digging to the bottom of a series of tunnels, shooting turnips from atop a minecart, or my personal favourite, riding a train through a blizzard. There are a lot of standout courses that show off the creativity of the design team, and while some themes repeat, it’s generally a fresh experience for most of the levels.

Above all, I simply love the game’s adorable presentation. I’ve been generally lukewarm to Toad as a character, especially since he developed a voice that sounds like he smokes twelve packs a day, but his captain persona is one that I’ve grown attached to. He shows off his personality quite well with the ways he celebrates or struggles with the weight of his backpack, and while it doesn’t reach the level of characterization found in something like Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, it does go a long way to keeping things entertaining. Captain Toad is just a character I’d like to see more of, and I hope he’s included in more of Mario’s future adventures.

As a side note, owners of Super Mario 3D World are given a little bonus for having a save file on their system. A number of bonus worlds are unlocked that are torn straight from Mario 3D World and rejiggered to allow Captain Toad to navigate them with his limited skills. The levels aren’t quite as fun to navigate as Toad, nor are they as fun as the core levels of Treasure Tracker, but it’s still a neat little bonus.

The Bad
I find it disappointing that, while the storyline sets everything up as though Captain Toad is setting out on some quest across dangerous territory, the gameplay doesn’t really give any sense of an expedition. Each level seems to be its own little pocket dimension and there’s no feel of progression from one place to the next. Aside from the slowly ramping difficulty, there’s no real suggestion of it being a journey.

The only time I got any sense of travel was during the Star Express level, which has Toad riding along on a train, but even it doesn’t show him actually getting anywhere. There’s never any transition between stages; one moment you’re in a haunted house, the next you’re in a volcano. The minecart levels would be well put to use if they linked up the various level types, but again, they exist only in their own place and time. Obviously this is a superficial complaint and doesn’t really have any impact on gameplay, but a more cohesive experience is something I feel the game would benefit from.

There’s a lot of recycling that goes on in Captain Toad. Visually, a lot of assets seem to be lifted directly from Super Mario 3D World and gussied up a bit, but the most noticeable example of re-use is with the boss battles. In total, there’s about two, but they’re repeated a few times throughout the game. They’re also largely the same battle each time, only toughened up a bit. I feel this is a massive missed opportunity, since there are a lot of interesting opportunities for boss encounters without the use of direct combat. While the rest of the game feels pretty tight, this particular piece of repetition feels lazy in hindsight.

The Bottom Line
I played Treasure Tracker to completion in about 18 hours. I completed every bonus stage, nabbed every gem, and beat every target time. I’m satisfied with what was provided, but I’d still like to see more down the line. In an industry that’s become swamped in dour and serious games that show little relation to their light-hearted roots, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a nice diversion. Perhaps if Captain Toad ever returns, he’ll do so in a more cohesive adventure that utilizes the mechanics presented here to create a more long-form adventure. As it is though, Treasure Tracker is an OUTSTANDING game that successfully expands on the initial Captain Toad concept into a tight and creative game.

By Adzuken on April 24, 2015

Mega Man II (Game Boy)

Missing a few nuts and bolts.

The Good
The Mega Man series is one of my favourite corners of the NES library. While the gameplay is pretty much the exact same from entry to entry, the tight controls and excellent design is almost peerless on the console, which more than makes up for their lack of inventiveness. Yet, my introduction to the series wasn’t even on the NES; it was on the Gameboy. While I drooled over images of Mega Man 2 and 3 in a password book I had as a small child, it wasn’t until years later that I got my first taste in Dr. Wily’s Revenge on the old dot-matrix handheld. It has been a while since I last replayed it, but if I recall correctly, it’s a decent transition from the original formula. Despite this, I never really moved on to the other entries in the Gameboy series. I’ve now had the chance to play through the confusingly named Mega Man II (not to be confused with the NES’s Mega Man 2), and I’m left wondering what the heck happened.

The game starts without introduction, throwing you into the classic stage select screen of 4 robot masters, which, from the outset, is a smaller number than even the original NES Mega Man’s six, but rest assured that four more show up after the first set are thwarted. It’s a mix of bosses from Mega Man 2 and 3 on the NES, which is an interesting way of shaking things up without any actual effort, but it is unfortunate that there isn’t a completely new set.

Bosses aren’t the only reused mechanics from the NES titles. Both Mega Man’s dog, Rush, and the slide from Mega Man 3 appear, though the charge shot from the fourth game is still absent. With the return of Metal Man, the Metal Blade power-up is here and it’s just as overwhelmingly useful as it was in Mega Man 2 (NES). However, the game’s difficulty is significantly lower than any of the NES titles, so the metal blade’s eight-directional attack is rarely necessary. I’m also not sure why someone thought Top Man was worth carrying over to the portable format, but there you have it.

The Bad
While taking what are arguably the two best games in the Mega Man series and mashing them together should result in an excellent portable experience, the feeling that pervades all of Mega Man II’s runtime is one of thoughtlessness. The gameplay itself is untouched from the previous games, yet the overall design has taken a turn for the worse. Item distribution is slapdash, allowing for imbalances, such as the pickup of multiple e-tanks in extremely accessible areas in the same stage.

The graphics have been understandably downgraded from the console versions, but the sprite work, when it isn’t ripped directly from the NES games, is absolute crap. There’s one entirely new character in the entire game and he looks like Proto Man’s dorky brother on a pogo stick and fights like one would expect from such an amalgamation. Even a few of the enemies that have just been downsized to fit the tighter rooms have had their proportions thrown completely out of whack. In every visual aspect, the game is a wreck.

Speaking of the game’s visual issues, the obstacles in each of the stages aren’t diverse enough to make one level feel distinct from the others. Even compared to the NES series’ stages, they’re incredibly vanilla. They show no creative obstacles like the force beams in Mega Man 2’s Quick Man stage or the vast underwater sections of Bubble Man’s; it’s all so unambitious. At least Air Man’s big floating heads are still present in his stage, despite the fact that they’re arguably the worst designed obstacle in Mega Man 2.

Even worse is that a lot of the visual flair has been sucked out in the transition to monochrome. The floors and walls all mimic the related NES stages, and there are some attempts of replicating some of the backgrounds, but for the most part, the visual changes between stages are incredibly subtle. This is perhaps expected due to the conversion to compensate for the four shade palette, but I wish there was some ambition in making the stages appear distinct.

It’s also a considerably shorter experience than any of the NES titles, almost shockingly so. While this is normally forgivable given that it exists on a platform that runs on batteries, there’s no excuse for the startling lack of content. While the series’ standard eight robot masters are present, only four are selectable from the offset, with the other four available once reaching Wily’s Castle. Wily’s Castle itself only consists of one short and quite simple stage with no sub-bosses. The bosses that do show up are generally unimpressive, and rarely did I ever find it necessary to switch away from Mega Man’s standard buster.

Then there’s the music, which at times shows vague indications that it takes inspiration from the classic tunes featured in the NES titles, but more often descends into a cacophony of high-pitched squeals and dull ticks and thuds. Some of the tracks are so uncomfortable to listen to that I had to turn the volume down to tolerate them. I honestly am uncertain if the included songs are remakes of ones found in the NES versions, but if they are, then they are poor facsimiles to the point of being unrecognizable.

The Bottom Line
While it’s not far and away the worst Gameboy game I’ve encountered, it is easily the worst Mega Man game I’ve played to date. To be fair, I didn’t suffer too much while I trekked through its poorly laid out stages, but I owe that largely to its brevity and toothless challenge. It feels like the team who created it knew nothing of what makes a Mega Man game actually good. The controls feel all right, sure, but there’s no flow to anything. It all feels so slapped together and haphazard. And while nothing about it descends into the territory of offensively horrid, it demonstrates that not a lot of thought was really put into it. It’s BAD in a way I never thought a Mega Man game could be. The fact that it’s put together from parts torn out of the second and third entries in the NES series makes the whole thing feel like a bodysnatcher is wearing the skin of an old friend. My entire perspective on the series has been changed with this brand new low.

By Adzuken on April 17, 2015

Clash at Demonhead (NES)

That’s a good band name.

The Good
Clash at Demonhead – what a great title? It sounds like a heavy metal song. In truth, there isn’t a lot that’s metal about the game, excluding, perhaps, the cover-art. Instead, the game is a rather light-hearted affair that fits right in with a lot of other late-80’s action-sidescrollers. It’s not one that I heard much about prior to actually buying it. In fact, I might have overlooked it entirely if it wasn’t for that great title.

I had a great deal of difficulty following the game’s premise, but it seems to follow the exploits of some sort of soldier or special agent named Bang. Famed inventor of doomsday devices, Professor Plum (not related to the famed murder suspect from the board game, Clue, I’d imagine), has been kidnapped, and it’s up to Bang to go save him. As simple as the story may sound, I found it confusing at first. What confused me was the fact that many characters and events are dropped in as though they’ve already been introduced previously, and we’re supposed to know who the heck they are. Likewise, history between all the characters and the world they inhabit is implied, but never established, which kind of leaves the feeling that we’ve begun watching a serialized television series in the middle of a season.

The story does have its stronger points, but that’s largely due to the game’s open-ended structure. While gameplay takes the form of a pretty standard action-sidescroller, it’s framed using a big map consisting of a series of routes. Your task is to gather seven medallions from bosses who are scattered throughout the map, but their locations aren’t given. It’s left up to you to figure out how to progress, and it’s surprising how well the game handles it. Major areas are placed in obvious spots and provide a clear idea of places to check out. If there’s an area that’s important, chances are one of the game’s characters will point it out to you. It’s an incredibly organic way to drive the narrative; dumping cutscene choke points and letting things play out as you explore. It’s a level of open-endedness that I feel surpasses the item-based exploration of games like Metroid or Castlevania 2.

That’s not to say that Clash at Demonhead is completely freeform and structureless; there are a few key things you need before you can get far. The shop where you buy your gear must be located first so you can buy an item to call it at any time, and a special set of skills can be unlocked if you take the time to find the hermit hiding somewhere in the world. So while the game does have ways of inhibiting your progress, it never really forces you in that direction, instead leaving it up to you to find it for yourself. For example, you will eventually need the magic powers the hermit gives you, but it can wait until after you defeat all the governors, or find the jewel, or rescue your girlfriend. It’s pretty easy-going.

This laid-back attitude is also conveyed by a rather lively art-style and sense of humour. While the title, Clash at Demonhead, makes it sound like something rooted in dark fantasy, it’s actually pretty hard to place Demonhead’s universe. On the one hand, you’re some sort of soldier who has to prevent a science-wrought doomsday, yet you spend most of the time scaling mountains and traversing empty wilderness. The enemies are an equally strange bunch, featuring everything from stone throwing ogres to weird spring-like robots. There’s a tonne of diversity in Demonhead’s aesthetics, from the frequently changing environments, to the outlandish character portraits. While the visuals are sometimes rough around the edges, you can tell that someone had a lot of fun designing everything.

The Bad
Of course, there’s a downside to all this. Like many of its contemporaries in the sub-genre, Clash at Demonhead makes numerous trade-offs to accommodate its ambitious scope, and these concessions are seen in almost every facet of the game. The music doesn’t have a great deal of diversity to it, and for a game of Demonhead’s size, it can be pretty annoying to hear the same tracks repeated incessantly, especially considering the soundtrack is pretty weak to begin with. Likewise, the environments are pretty ugly, frequently displaying poor use of the game’s tilesets. The backgrounds and terrain are incredibly blocky and often depict strange seams in the landscape. There is a decent amount of diversity in the backdrops, as well as some nice small touches in a few places, but none of the locations have the same appeal as some of the more focused sidescrollers of the era.

Beyond aesthetics, the gameplay also tends to be pretty loose, especially where controls are concerned. Bang is pretty slow to stop, always taking a few more steps forward after you release the direction, and this leads to the controls feeling a touch unresponsive. The game also only allows you to have two projectiles on screen at one time, and if you’re far from your target, this can make combat feel pretty clunky. There’s an unpolished feel to the game’s progression as well. Some of the earliest bosses that you’re likely to discover are ridiculously hard, especially if you don’t immediately realize that most of them have a specific trick to defeating them easily. And while these tricks are a nice departure from the typical pattern-based bosses of the era, later bosses are much more predictable, and tend to be much easier to topple.

These are all pretty minor gripes, but the general unpolished feeling pervades throughout the entire game. If you were to slice out the game’s remarkable structure and focus on just the individual levels, then you’d be left with a decidedly sub-par experience. It’s not offensive or anything, it’s just weaker than the console’s best efforts.

The Bottom Line
While the late 80’s saw numerous open-ended sidescrollers arriving on the NES’s library, Clash at Demonhead may be the most intriguing use of the formula. Rather than restricting progress based on what items you have in your pocket, you’re given complete freedom to explore the world in any way you choose to. It’s a game free of a lot of the cryptic nature the sub-genre is known for, focusing entirely on discovery. Best yet, its inventive structure allows for progress to be made at your own pace, rather than forcing you through its hoops in a predefined order. The gameplay itself seems to suffer for this, featuring clumsy controls, ugly environments, and mediocre music, but none of it is so bad to truly torpedo how GOOD this game really is.

By Adzuken on April 10, 2015

Pilotwings (SNES)

Flight Club

The Good
One of the Super Nintendo’s three launch titles, Pilotwings absolutely reeks of SNES. I once heard it referred to as Mode 7: The Game, which I find is actually a pretty appropriate title. Mode 7 was a sprite scaling trick that allowed the SNES to stretch out a sprite layer to look like 3D terrain, and both Pilotwings and another launch title, F-Zero, made extensive use of it in entirely different ways. While F-Zero was a high-speed, futuristic racing game, Pilotwings is a laid-back, recreational flight simulator. At least, most of it is…

There’s not much background given to Pilotwings as you’re thrown into your first lesson. Land a biplane on a runway and skydive onto a bullseye. From there, challenges become slightly more complex, throwing in a hang glider and even a jetpack and having you fly through rings and in high wind. The goal is to do as well as possible in a number of different grading categories to receive your license and advance to the next level. It’s a pretty well done structure, as it forces you to become proficient at each of the various events while allowing a little slack for the odd poor performance. It felt great that even though I was pretty poor at hang gliding, I could make up the points by doing well in the rocket belt stages.

The mode 7 effect is put to good use to render the terrain and provide smooth gameplay. The scaling of the ground makes it easy to see just how close you are to landing and allows for a high degree of precision. Using the rocket belt, you’re also able to swap the camera to an overhead position to get a better view of where you’re landing. There were still moments where I had to utilize the altimeter to tell how close to the ground I was, but I find this to be necessary even in today’s world of 3D polygonal flight simulators.

Pilotwings is a lot more light-hearted and carefree than most flight simulators of the time, focusing on fun rather than accurately depicting flight. The result is a game that’s borderline relaxing, in spite of how challenging it gets in the later stages. I absolutely love the soundtrack, which features buzzy instrumental samples similar to other early SNES games. It’s a calming soundtrack that perfectly underlies the mellow gameplay. Combined with the drone of the plane’s engine or the rush of the wind, the game provides an almost meditative atmosphere.

The Bad
So Pilotwings may not be the most compelling of concepts out there, but the combination of its steady, slow-paced gameplay and smooth, jazzy soundtrack makes for a pretty relaxing experience.

And then…

Suddenly, all your flight instructors are captured by an evil organization and only you have a license grade high enough to fly an attack helicopter on a rescue mission. I’m dead serious; after four sets of licenses, the game throws you this curve ball, completely without warning. What kind of flying club did I sign up for here? I thought I was learning how to skydive and hang glide, not training to be part of an airbourne invasion. Why does this club even have an attack chopper? Why aren’t we calling the military or police force to rescue them?

But no, with no way to opt out of this armed assault, you’re coerced into the helicopter and sent into a nest of anti-aircraft guns. A single hit from any of the super-accurate guns will send you crashing to the ground, ending any dream you may have had of buying your own private plane and skydiving with your friends. It’s brutal. It seems incredibly out of place and jarring to suddenly find yourself going to war. It doesn’t feel like violence belongs in the context of the game. I’m all for variety, but this is just unwelcome.

Since first purchasing this game, I’ve picked it up three or four times and each time given up at this stage. I tried various strategies each time, such as flying at varying altitudes and engaging enemies in a variety of ways, but I’ve seen the burning wreckage of my helicopter too many times to count. I just wanted to go back to the mellow flight lessons that make up the bulk of the game, but I was stuck. I finally finished the mission by flying extremely low; below 25 feet. It was a less than ideal situation, all around. Worse yet is the fact that this mission appears twice, as if once wasn’t punishing enough.

The Bottom Line
Jarring shift of subject matter aside, I thoroughly enjoyed Pilotwings. The relaxing tunes, droning sounds, and stiff but fair challenge results in a pretty calming game. It isn’t a very deep or diverse game, but it ends rather quickly; just before it has a chance to get stale. Few flight simulators are as friendly and welcoming as Pilotwings, and it’s unfortunate that there aren’t more like it. A game that depicts flight in such a whimsical and leisurely manner is tough to come by. Of course, the developers still forced in a combat section for no reason, but if you omit that, Pilotwings is a GOOD game that I recommend to anyone looking for a more calming way to soar.

By Adzuken on April 3, 2015

Superman (Nintendo 64)

Lex Wins

The Good
When I was making a purchase at a game store, the clerk told me that if I spend $15 more, I’d get a free t-shirt. After a short while of looking, I brought to her an N64 game that fit the price requirements. She looked at it, then back at me with concern in her eyes. “Why?” she asked quietly. The game I had brought was Superman, and her reaction was no doubt due to the game’s notoriety. It’s not a rare sight on lists of the very worst games of all time, and it has been sarcastically reviewed and broadcast by many tortured internet personalities. I was so certain that I wasn’t going to play more than a few moments of the forbidden game before putting it away that when it asked if I wanted to clear space on my memory card so I could save, I declined. It was after I quickly surmounted two levels of it that I realized that completing the game was actually viable, so I started over with sufficient save space and prepared for the long haul.

The game’s plot involves Superman trying to save his friends from a virtual version of Metropolis. It’s a pretty standard framework when you want to throw common sense out the window and set up rules and situations that aren’t possible in the real world, but somehow the storyline still manages to make no sense. You’re pitted against mainstays of the animated series: Parasite, Metallo, Darkseid, Lex Luthor, and Mala (who I recall seeing, but don’t remember who she is). The thing is, if this is a virtual world, why is Superman saving people from bombs and tornadoes? Who cares if Lex Luthor is building weapons if none of this is real? I’m just going to guess that the whole “virtual world” angle was tacked on at the last minute.

Despite what you’ve probably heard, Superman 64 is surprisingly playable. I say “surprisingly” because I was led to believe that it was broken beyond all reason, so my expectations were as low as expectations can reasonably be. Gameplay is split between two distinct varieties: traversal or “ride” missions that have you flying through rings and saving people, and action missions that involve punching and mild, sometimes obtuse, puzzle solving.

The image seared into minds most gamers will be the rings that Superman is forced to fly through, which aren’t nearly as difficult as commonly reported. I was able to get through all of them without much trouble. Where I failed most in the ride missions were the crimes that punctuate travelling through fog-ridden Metropolis. After every set of rings, you’re dropped into a situation with very little instruction and must figure things out from there. Some are simply “punch all the bad guys,” while others force you to pick up a car and hurl it off a bridge or protect citizens from tornadoes. Once you get used to the game’s demands, the tasks aren’t too daunting. If you fail to prevent the crimes three times, you’re started from the beginning of the task itself, rather than the rings that precede it, which is a rather nice concession the game makes. Considering that some of the ring challenges put 5 to 9 minutes on the clock, having to do them over again once is bad enough without being constantly pushed back there.

The action stages more closely resemble an actual super-hero game, but the combat is so laughably horrid that most of the action is just flying into the lesser enemies and occasionally slapping one when there isn’t enough room to fly. Superman’s punches are just so slow, the hit detection is so inaccurate, and the animation is so awkward that it’s almost better to not even bother. I spent most levels ignoring enemies, flying straight by them in a mad search to find whatever the objective was at that time. It’s thankfully rare that you truly need to fight, such as during boss battles or the slowest escort mission in existence.

The Bad
Don’t let the few positive things I have to say about Superman make you think that it’s a passable game. It didn’t get its reputation for nothing. It’s a glitchy, poorly designed mess of a game that should never have been released in the first place. The fact that I was able to get from beginning to end is literally the only positive thing I can think to say about it.

A lot of Superman’s problems would be solved if the game would just talk to the player more. You’re often plopped down in a situation with a vague explanation and forced to figure out what to do under a strict time limit. Even when a decent explanation is present, it’s easy to accidentally hit a button and skip it entirely. Other times, you won’t be able to interact with a switch in the environment until you’ve triggered an arbitrary piece of dialogue elsewhere. Even if everything was clearly explained, the developers still enjoy hiding things in obscure places. Keycards often appear in areas that have already been searched, and triggers will sometimes open in dusty corners that are often obscured by the game’s atrocious draw fog. Some keys don’t even notify you that you’ve picked them up or what effect they had, and sometimes event triggers are placed way back at the beginning of the level, forcing you to backtrack, sometimes repeatedly. It wasn’t rare for me to find myself flying in circles, trying to figure out where I had to go to proceed.

After each failure, things get easier since most enemies can be ignored while you go back through the paces. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s sometimes a requirement to clear out an area, the cast of villains wouldn’t stand much of a chance. The main grunt of Luthor’s army is the shadows; characters in hats and macs bathed entirely in fashionable, slimming black. Their main tactic for taking you down is to stand perfectly still, shooting a handful of bullets in your direction before obsessively reloading. They also have a tendency to shoot each other, which I’m not sure was intentional, but it is pretty funny. Bosses would provide some variation if it wasn’t for the fact that they have the same propensity for slapping that Superman does. Fights with them tend to degenerate into vicious hand waving until one combatant falls based solely on who was favoured by the game’s temperamental hit detection. That is until heat vision comes into play, allowing Superman to stun-lock bosses until they give up and fall over.

Yet it wasn’t the enemies, or the sometimes strict time limits, or the game’s obtuse guidance that was most responsible for forcing me to play levels over; it was the game’s poor clipping barriers that frequently allowed me to fall into the level geometry. I lost count of how many times it happened, but I can confidently say that there was only one occasion that I was able to free myself from the abyss, and it was only because I fell into the floor below. Once I got stuck thigh deep in the bottom floor, and I was unable to jump or fly to get free. It would have been almost humourous if it didn’t happen right at the end of the level.

What really aggravated me was that the game forces you to play through on the hardest difficulty if you want to finish it. There’s nothing quite like working your way through a game, only to have the last couple levels and, indeed, the ending itself gated off unless you start all over on a harder difficulty. If “normal” difficulty isn’t the normal difficulty setting, why even call it normal? What’s worse is that the harder difficulty isn’t even all that difficult, it’s just annoying. Enemies have more health, so the shadows take two hits to take down, necessitating more circling around their slow bullets just to slap them again. Slap fights with bosses become even more a matter of luck until you can just stun-lock them into oblivion with heat vision. But flying through rings, the most time consuming portion of the game, is either the exact same or so similar that I didn’t notice the difference. I just didn’t want to play through the game twice, okay!?

Yet I did it anyway, even after it froze on a dialogue prompt right at the end and forced me to play through the last level again. All that for one of the most abrupt and surreal endings I’ve ever seen in a video game. Spoiler alert: it’s bizarre.

The Bottom Line
I suppose the big question is whether or not Superman 64 is as bad as its reputation suggests, and to be honest, there are worse games out there. In fact, there are worse games on the N64. It’s the Atari E.T. syndrome; it’s high profile crap, but certainly not the crappiest. I’m certainly not implying that the game is actually any good, make no mistake, it’s TERRIBLE. It’s buggy, the combat is terrible, the environments are ugly, the whole thing feels unfinished, but at least it’s playable, if only barely, and there are games out there that can’t even claim that. At times, I even found myself enjoying it a little, but that’s likely due to the sense of danger in playing a game so universally hated. I just have no vitriol for it. It’s not an entirely soulless game, nor is it a disappointing entry in some long running series that a big named publisher sent out to die, it’s just another crummy licensed game.

By Adzuken on March 27, 2015

Chameleon Twist 2 (Nintendo 64)

Tongue twister

The Good
I didn’t really like Chameleon Twist, but I’m all about getting closure on a series, so I dove recklessly into its one and only sequel, Chameleon Twist 2. As it turns out, you don’t need to be acquainted with the first to understand its storyline, because it’s exactly the same. A completely normal backpack-wearing chameleon encounters a white rabbit that appears to be on his way to the Mad Hatter’s tea party and is flung into a series of magical worlds. The only way you can really tell that this is a continuation from the first and not a remake is that the chameleons seem to be more experienced from their last adventure and no longer move like their every joint is riddled with arthritis.

Having come directly off the first game, I was actually surprised by how smoothly the chameleons control. Running and jumping feels responsive, and all the chameleon’s tongue related moves are quicker and easier to use. It finally feels like the controls are up to the game’s challenge, and as a result, the platforming feels much more solid and the game feels less rickety. The unique controls can finally be put to better use, and tongue vaulting, swinging, and flipping is a breeze and gives new life to the game. It’s really quite impressive, at least, in contrast to the last game.

Likewise, the issues with the camera have been solved by having it locked at specific vantages, often turning the game into a quasi-sidescroller. It’s similar to the one used in the previous game’s Desert Castle stage. To use a more recent example, it’s a lot like Super Mario 3D Land’s camera, where it’s always pointed in a way that allows you to tackle the various obstacles without having to worry about wrestling with it. It’s pulled off pretty well, and I can’t say it ever gave me any problems.

Coins replace the collectible crowns in the previous game, and this time around there’s a much better reward for collecting them all. For every level that all the coins are collected on, a costume is unlocked that the chameleon can wear. Each of the four chameleons has their own set of costumes, and even if they don’t have any effect on gameplay, it’s a pretty fun reward to try and get. Separating the rewards by level rather than giving them out for a perfect game like the previous title did makes earning them less frustrating and ensures that they can be used for more than just replay value.

Most of the bosses are far more ambitious as well. In particular, I enjoyed the battle with the giant robot, if only for the sense of scale. They have the unfortunate problem of being pattern-based damage sponges, but their visual personalities help them stand out. Some of the battles are more annoying than others, but at least they are a bit more memorable than the ones in the first game.

The Bad
It’s hard not to get a sense of déjà vu from the four playable characters, the six abstract stages, and the minimalistic storyline. While the new moves – especially the ability to stick your tongue to any wall – do have a considerable impact on gameplay, the game feels more like a do-over than a true sequel. Some of the non-control related problems are still there, such as the short running time, and the mere existence of the first games tarnishes the once lustrous uniqueness of the experience.

Even the game’s lighthearted, candy coated shell isn’t quite as sweet as it once was. The Chameleon design in the North American version has mutated in the intervening time between the first and second games, and rather than looking like a rounded blobby person, the characters’ heads actually look unsettlingly like an actual chameleon’s. It’s more detailed, yes, but it’s also almost disturbing looking. There are some neat enemy designs, such as the hamburgers (I guess I have a thing for food-themed enemy designs), but everything has a mean look to it, which is a departure from the googly eyed critters that made up the rogues gallery of the previous game. It’s a matter of preference, for sure, but I preferred the sugary cuteness of the previous title.

The levels also aren’t nearly as varied as the original game’s. Sure, they all have unique themes, but they all play basically the same. I couldn’t tell you what the difference between the Carnival and Toy stages are beyond their physical appearance, for example. Everything sort of blurred together for me, just a mess of pegs and sliding blocks. Even the colourful bosses, with a few exceptions, all play out in a pretty similar fashion, with all of them involving the slurping up of enemies to fire at opportune times.

The Bottom Line
While I once again wasn’t compelled to go back and grab all the collectibles that were on offer, I actually enjoyed Chameleon Twist 2, which is more than I can say for its predecessor. It’s a vast improvement off the first game to the point where it doesn’t have to rely on its unique personality to be tolerable. But even with all its improvements, it’s a pretty AVERAGE game. There are many better platformers on the N64 to choose from, and from a quality standpoint, Chameleon Twist 2 falls pretty low on that list. Still, if you burn through those, Chameleon Twist 2 might be worth a look, if only for those burger monsters.

By Adzuken on March 21, 2015

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PlayStation 3)

Can’t explain the pain away.

The Good
The Metal Gear Solid narrative is really starting to wear on me. Perhaps playing the games in the series back to back was a bad idea, because it has been a constant string of stories full of bloated exposition, overblown dialogue, and horrendous endings that seem to go on forever. Worse yet, the game’s narratives are all remarkably similar, and many of the same themes have been hammered on throughout. Thinking about going into Metal Gear Solid 4 actually gave me anxiety. It’s a game that holds a reputation for extraordinarily long cutscenes, even in comparison to the previous titles in the series. To continue on, I had to remind myself of two things: the Metal Gear series has, with some exceptions, provided enjoyable gameplay, and this is the last core game of the series I have to tackle before I can give it a rest.

To my surprise, Metal Gear Solid 4 begins without a single mention of nuclear weapons (stick around, they do show up). According to Snake’s introductory narration, war has changed and is becoming routine. He’s sent into the middle of a “proxy war” with the mission to kill the bizarre amalgam of Liquid Snake and Revolver Ocelot, now abbreviated to Liquid Ocelot. It’s a strangely straightforward task compared to his previous missions, but to complicate things, premature aging has set in for him and he’s slowly dying. Faced with becoming obsolete in a changing world, Snake has to keep things together for long enough to finish the job so he can finally rest.

While the wilderness setting of Snake Eater has been dropped in favour of a globetrotting adventure, a few of the mechanics introduced in the previous game have been retained in slightly altered states. Most notably is the camouflage system, made possible by Snake’s new Octo-camo suit. Lying on the ground or pressing against a wall changes the colour and texture of the suit to mimic the environment around Snake, and allows him to hide in plain sight. It’s actually a pretty interesting adaptation of the camouflage system, and adds greatly to the stealth gameplay.

The change of setting is also an interesting one. While the environments lack the personality of the locations in previous Metal Gear games, the battlefields that Snake must traverse add another interesting layer onto the sneaking gameplay. The proxy wars that go on around you are left largely unexplained – just another routine battle in the war that has changed so much, according to Snake. With no background to the ongoing battles, it creates this surreal sensation like you’re crawling past some entirely different game. It’s as though Snake is passing through some multiplayer skirmish in a modern war game; it’s an interesting sensation.

Unfortunately, even more than any previous game in the series, the gameplay isn’t the focus of Metal Gear Solid 4, and any interesting ideas it brought with it is left bleeding out in a ditch by the beginning of the third act.

The Bad
Metal Gear Solid 4 sits as an attempt to bring conclusion to Solid Snake’s storyarc, and there’s an attempt to tie up all the lingering loose ends. Perhaps fittingly this means it’s also the most verbally cluttered of all the Metal Gear Solid storylines. The culmination of all the conspiracies, character arcs, and soft science is a tough load to carry, and having sat through every single game in this series, my mind was ready to buckle under the weight of contradictions, retcons, and mangled continuity. I wouldn’t know where to begin in fully analyzing the narrative’s problems; it’s such a tremendous mess that it’s difficult to process.

Even if you were somehow able to swallow every drop of farfetched information that’s constantly poured out of the game’s cutscenes, the series still hasn’t evolved past its inability to convey its story in any sort of succinct or interesting way. It tries, at least. Codec sequences have been cut down significantly, and through the use of setpiece action sequences, the gameplay seems to be reaching out to meet the narrative halfway, but the cutscenes won’t be upstaged. The length of the cinematics have ballooned to such extremes that the game now features mid-cutscene save points, controllable picture-in-picture, and the much needed ability to pause during them. Worse yet, most aren’t even told in an interesting fashion, consisting of nothing more than characters pacing around the room, touching their faces thoughtfully, which is only marginally better than the codec sequences that plagued earlier games.

Pretty much any character who hasn’t died (and even some who have) reappears in Guns of the Patriots to get their storyarcs tied up. Each is given a significant chunk of screen time, whether the role they play in the plot is significant or not, and the result is some of the worst dialogue in the series. Few conversations carry on for long before a switch goes off in somebody’s head and they start talking in sickeningly bad metaphors about some nonsense like lightening shining through the darkness. Some characters pop up for no reason, only to die for sometimes contrived reasons later on, complete with the series’ standard death monologues. Stick around for the very end where every surviving character’s arc is tied up in one super-massive, disgustingly happy ending. Wow, it is really bad and it goes on forever.

What’s worse is that it doesn’t have the same laid back attitude of Snake Eater or the self-awareness of Sons of Liberty. There are clever moments of breaking the forth wall, but most of the time it doesn’t seem to know how ludicrous it really is. The writing seems to be totally in love with itself, devoting a disproportionately massive amount of screen time to blatant fan service and heavy-handed visual metaphor. In such a mad rush to appreciate the series’ long history, it has the inability to focus on any message, theme, or character arc. It doesn’t even provide an appropriate send-off to some key characters. Instead, it constantly props them up for some glorious heroic sequence with no actual purpose for their sacrifice, while less interesting characters are resurrected for some hollow redemption. The writing in general sometimes emits the whiff of fan fiction; far too wrapped up in making its favourite characters look cool to actually tell a fully cohesive story.

Yet even if I discount the storyline entirely from my critique, the gameplay itself suffers from its own problems. It’s insanely schizophrenic, loading you down with tonnes of stealth and combat options before spending over half the game pushing you through action setpieces. From the third chapter onward, Octo-camo might as well have been thrown in a bin since sneaking is rarely required. It’s baffling to see the game suddenly taken up by restrictive objectives and on-rails sections; reduced to gameplay that is barely more interactive than its cutscenes. The whole second half of the game winds up feeling like moments of mindless action sandwiched between excruciatingly long cutscenes, while the game’s stellar stealth is left buried by the onslaught of mind-numbing exposition.

The Bottom Line
I honestly and sincerely hate to spit so much venom at a game, but Metal Gear Solid 4 is the culmination of everything I’ve begun to resent about the series. As I’ve progressed through the Solid series, the many weaknesses in its over-arching story have become more intolerable while the few strengths that it had have become so buried that I sometimes forget that they’re even there. I feel that the biggest reason I detest it so much is because it carries the considerable weight of the previous titles. The cutscenes are bloated beyond reasonable limits, filled to the brim with absolutely ludicrous exposition that attempts to tie up every dangling loose end but only succeeds in punching more holes in a plot that is already more perforated than a Tetley teabag. Even if you could somehow extract the game’s problematic narrative, the gameplay itself is fantastic until it’s mysteriously dropped halfway through in favour of numerous tiresome setpiece moments. It’s BAD. It’s the worst the series has been, and I can only hope that because closure has been given to the overarching plot, future games can begin anew, free of the horrible wreck that has become of its continuity. At least, it can’t possibly get any worse, can it?

By Adzuken on March 13, 2015

Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (PlayStation 3)

Yeah, but how does it taste?

The Good
One thing that has begun to aggravate me about the Metal Gear series is how reminiscent each game is of the previous one. Both canon and non-canon games have all followed the same structure; infiltrate an enemy base, rescue hostages, defeat members of an elite team, and prevent nuclear war. While I haven’t fully grown weary of sneaking through corridors patrolled by nearsighted guards, I’m certainly ready for a change. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater represents the greatest shift the series has seen, moving all the action outdoors and into the jungle and re-focusing on new and exciting mechanics. Yet despite this, what Snake Eater proves most is that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Snake Eater represents a radical shift in narrative. The story follows the series’ future antagonist, Big Boss, back in the early days when he carried the codename Snake. He’s tasked with the mission of covertly infiltrating an enemy facility, rescuing a civilian scientist, and destroying an enemy super-weapon to prevent nuclear catastrophe. Nope, wait, my mistake. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Okay, so it’s still the exact same plot as the previous games, only now it’s set in 1964 against the backdrop of the Cold War.

While the story structure remains the same, when it comes to the smaller details, Snake Eater is a completely different beast than the previous games. This time around, the narrative has taken a lot of influence from 1960’s spy fiction right down to a musical interlude in the style of post-Goldfinger James Bond movies. With the change, the story takes a subtly more light-hearted tone, mostly dropping melodramatic elements such as long death monologues and drawn out dialogues about a character’s tortured past. The support characters who you remain in contact with over the codec seem less worried about unloading their emotional baggage on you and more interested in fun banter and in-depth detail about the items you’re carrying. The game hasn’t completely been exorcised of heavy-handed character drama, but the shift in narrative focus has made it less obstructive and slightly more enjoyable.

But it isn’t the story that has been given the biggest shift; the gameplay is almost entirely different than any of the previous titles. Rather than being dropped off at the front door of a compound and left to accomplish his mission, Snake starts off in the middle of a jungle and has to make his way between multiple camps and bases. In a way, it’s a lot like the NES port of the original Metal Gear. While the game’s world is quite linear – more so than even the previous Solid titles – there’s a nice bit of exploration to be had as risk is weighed against reward when searching the undergrowth for new gizmos. Certain areas can be easily traversed, but everywhere holds the possibility of extra gear being tucked away in a corner, should you be willing to risk discovery to get it.

With the shift in terrain come a lot of new elements in the shape of survival mechanics. Rather than simply chowing down on rations to heal, health returns gradually so long as you keep your belly full and your wounds stitched up. New to the game is a stamina bar that dictates not only how well your wounds heal, but also smaller things like how steady your aim is. To keep it topped up, you have to eat food which can be found in storage sheds, on guards, or by hunting animals and snatching certain flora. First-aid must be applied to specific wounds to keep Snake from bleeding out, and while field surgery is pretty simple, the supplies must be obtained from the environment. The survival mechanics really aren’t as deep as they may sound, but they do add a nice bit of character, as superficial as it may be. The field surgery in particular I wish was used more frequently in video games, as it lends a greater feel of interactivity to what is otherwise typically instant.

Finally, there’s the addition of camouflage. Since Snake is no longer wandering the corridors of a grey-blue facility, he can use various camouflage patterns and face paint to try and blend into the environment around him. The soliton radar didn’t exist back in 1964, and the motion detector and sonar you’re provided doesn’t really work the same way. The enemy field of vision is much greater than it was in previous games, and without the soliton radar, you can’t see when you’re entering a guard’s line of sight. To make up for this, a percentage is displayed onscreen to tell you how well you’re blending into your surroundings, and it may be necessary to swap wardrobe to better conceal yourself. With the right outfit, guards may not see you until they actually trip over you.

The Bad
The problem with all of Metal Gear Solid 3’s many new mechanics is that they feel like they belong in a much longer game. Snake Eater was the lengthiest Metal Gear game at the time of its release, but even with it, the opportunity to use some of Snake’s new tricks doesn’t come up often. Survival just isn’t that difficult when there’s so little ground to cover. Certain terrains are only seen once for about two areas each, so many of the animals only exist in small pockets. Food is extremely easy to come by to the point where you might as well not bother hunting since rations, instant ramen, and Calorie Mates can be found in just about any shed and never go rotten. You can get first-aid items from various plants, but these too can be found lying around in large quantities. Larger stretches of wilderness where supplies are less frequent would have been more ideal since at least then you’d be forced to scrounge for everything you can get, rather than always being loaded up with items.

The issue of wasted potential pervades a lot of the game. You practically trip over new gizmos and healing items every few steps, and while this provides a great deal of flexibility in how you approach the game, it lends to a feeling of superfluousness. You have a myriad of options on how you get through the game, but whether you sneak through unnoticed or mow down everyone who gets in your way, it basically all feels the same. The game just isn’t dynamic enough to support all methods of gameplay in a satisfying manner. It has the bizarre trait of being too deep, but not broad enough, and just ends up feeling cluttered.

Despite these minor problems, for most of the game I was practically in love with Snake Eater. Then, during the concluding three or four hours, it falls back into old habits. Boss battles and action setpieces are suddenly sandwiched between tremendously long cutscenes that are absolutely packed with horrendous dialogue and borderline incomprehensible exposition. The final stretch of story that concludes the last boss battle is monstrously long, something like 45 minutes in total, going over who double-crossed who, and how everything was set up from the beginning to play out exactly as it did. It’s bad enough that this gets spewed all over the concluding chapter, but this is the exact same kind of plot twist that has been used in every other Metal Gear Solid game. Not only is the series severely long-winded, it can’t stop repeating itself.

The Bottom Line
While Snake Eater made an attempt at the end to sabotage my enjoyment of the game by dropping a metric tonne of weapons-grade exposition directly on the concluding chapter, I have to remind myself that everything leading up to that was pretty near excellent. The many new survival mechanics that have been layered on top of the series’ standard stealth really makes the experience shine like never before. On top of that, the boss battles are immensely memorable and the 1960’s aesthetic is utilized in many extremely stylish ways. However, it’s become too difficult for me to ignore the tremendous deficiencies in the series’ writing. It’s GOOD enough, but what should have been an outstanding game is dragged down by its inability to fully shed its flabby exposition.

By Adzuken on March 6, 2015

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (PlayStation 3)

La li lu le lo.

The Good
I really enjoyed the original 2D Metal Gear games, but was greatly disappointed with the series’ first outing into the third dimension. While it certainly held moments that were reminiscent of past greatness, Metal Gear Solid was mired in questionable writing and mediocre gameplay. It still held promise, though, featuring memorable characters and striking presentation. Metal Gear Solid 2 was one that I had previously skipped after I was warned by friends that “if I didn’t like the story in the first game, you definitely won’t like the sequel’s.” With this advice still in mind, I went into Solid 2 with slightly lowered, but still optimistic expectations.

Previous games in the series featured largely the same storylines, right down to repeating plot devices. This time around, the story is shaken up in several ways. The series’ main protagonist, Solid Snake is swapped out for new protagonist, Raiden, after a lengthy prologue sequence. Since the last game, Snake has been working with Otacon to destroy or expose black market Metal Gears that have been popping up since the Shadow Moses Incident. After failing a mission and being believed dead (it’s made pretty obvious he isn’t), Raiden takes over in the aftermath just two years after. His job is to infiltrate an offshore environmental clean-up rig called Big Shell, rescue the president, and prevent the launch of a nuclear device. Okay, so maybe it’s not all that much different than the previous games.

A lot has improved in terms of gameplay since the original Solid title. Most notably, the camera is usually pitched at a better angle, so while the view is still incredibly restricting, it’s not as claustrophobic as before. You can also aim and shoot from the first-person perspective, allowing you to better hit enemies that are currently offscreen. I’m still not sure why the camera can’t be controlled at will, since it can in underwater sections, but at least I didn’t find myself frustrated by it like I was in the previous game.

The alarm states are more dynamic. If an enemy spots you, they don’t immediately trigger the alarm; they have to radio it in first. If you take them out before they can finish their call, the alarm won’t go into alert, but guards will be dispatched to investigate. Guards don’t disappear when killed anymore, so if they come across one of their fallen comrades, they’ll begin searching for you. To prevent this, you can now drag bodies to hide stash them away. You can even shoot the radio on a soldier’s belt to prevent him from calling for help. All in all, the combat and stealth is greatly improved this time around, and while the gameplay from the first Solid frustrated me, the improvements here made it much more enjoyable.

The game still features a pretty concerning gameplay to cutscene ratio, but it’s a bit better at actually letting you play the game. Chunks of the game are left undisturbed by the ring of the codec, allowing for memorable sections, like one where you infiltrate a portion of the base dressed as an enemy soldier. When the codec did ring, I found the characters to be a bit more enjoyable to talk to this time around. While Raiden’s girlfriend comes off as attention-starved and creepy, the fact that the game depicts an already ongoing relationship – especially one that is as unhealthy as theirs – is actually pretty rare for video games. Snake in his supporting role also shows a different side of the character, and it’s pretty well done.

Most strikingly, the Metal Gear series has a history of breaking the fourth wall, and this finally pays off in Metal Gear Solid 2’s conclusion where the whole narrative jumps off the deep end in an effort to play with your expectations. Without spoiling anything, the climax of the game is well worth sticking through all the feverish exposition about conspiracies. It’s a moment where the game seems to acknowledge that everything about it is absolutely ludicrous and fully owns up to it. Though, unfortunately it does once again feature an almost intolerably horrible denouement.

The Bad
Yet despite the ambitious narrative, the Metal Gear Solid 2’s story still mired in the same overblown exposition and questionable dialogue. While the cutscenes and codec sequences are spaced apart a little better to provide a more reasonable pace with less starting and stopping, most of the cutscenes are significantly longer than the ones found in the original Solid title. Perhaps the good news is that the added length is mainly devoted to action rather than entirely filled with long death monologues, random spillages of melodramatic life stories, and lengthy dialogues about the nature of life. Those are still present, but the story attempts to be more than just heavy-handed character development, at least.

The biggest issue is that the narrative, even more than it was in the first Solid, is extremely unfocused. The writers seem to have a lot to say about free-will, censorship, love, life, war, nuclear proliferation, and even reality itself, so all of it gets thrown into the same pot, disguised under a story about rescuing the president. It constantly harps on the old conspiracy about a shadow organization that controls the government, which is a tale as old as time. The result is a complete mess, where characters complain about their petty issues while the fate of the world hangs in the balance. At the worst of times, character motivation becomes muddy and incomprehensible, and at the best of time it scrapes out something insightful, and then quickly buries it so it can throw something else your way.

That’s the worst of it, though. In terms of gameplay, I didn’t find much that irritated or annoyed me. The only part that bothered me was the boss battles. They’re much fewer in number and pretty weak (par for the series, it seems). Yet what was really disappointing wasn’t the bosses you fight, but the ones you don’t. On a few occasion, a fight with a big named baddie is brought up, then resolved in a cutscene. It’s weird; the game seems unwilling to let the player take part in these action sequences, afraid that the fight won’t be bombastic enough.

The Bottom Line
With greatly improved gameplay, I certainly enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 2 a lot more than the first Solid title. The variety in gameplay, the improved stealth mechanics, and the greater attention to interactivity makes it a joy to play. Even the story, though still riddled with drawn out moments of dry exposition, has a few moments of brilliance that shine through and make it a more enjoyable narrative to sit through. However, its storytelling still seems to be at odds with the gameplay – perhaps more so than before. I’m not sure how I feel about sitting through 20 minute cutscenes in the first place, but when situations that should be part of the gameplay are resolved within them, I feel like the developers have misplaced their priorities. Nonetheless, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a GOOD game, and I’m glad to have the series back to some sort of shape that I can enjoy.

By Adzuken on February 27, 2015

Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation)

The Running Gun Blues

The Good
There were only two Metal Gear games that I played prior to my most recent playthrough of the series, and the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid was one of them. Back then, I really didn’t enjoy the game, and my most vivid memory of it was being thankful it was over. Now that I’ve played the original Metal Gear titles on the MSX2, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the series and felt that I was well prepared to give the first in the Solid series another chance, this time on the original Playstation. I went into it expecting to enjoy it with a newly gained perspective of the series. Unfortunately, I just feel that same way I did after completing it the first time.

Metal Gear Solid starts out the same way as the previous two games: Snake arrives at a compound filled with enemy combatants and must infiltrate it with nothing but his wits and a pack of cigarettes. Where Solid diverges from the original series is in both its new 3D polygons and a much greater focus on storytelling. Before you even start, you’re given the option to view a rather lengthy set of briefing videos that outline the mission Snake’s about to embark on in great detail. It’s optional, since much of the information provided is also given in dialogue, but it underlines the great effort taken to create a deep story experience.

This time around, Snake is tasked with rescuing two hostages and preventing terrorists from launching a nuclear device. The terrorists are composed of soldiers from Snake’s old unit, FOXHOUND, and they make up the game’s diverse rogues gallery. While Metal Gear 2 had some interesting bosses, Solid takes it a step further by giving them unique personalities and building them up before finally placing you at odds with them. This leads to some extremely memorable encounters, and is perhaps Metal Gear Solid’s most outstanding feature. However, the attempt to make them well-rounded characters unfortunately leads to them launching into absolutely ludicrous monologues both before and after their battles.

While Metal Gear Solid does have a case of the early 3D uglies, the presentation holds up remarkable well due to a great artstyle and sound design. It’s hard to believe that the voice acting came from the late 90’s, since most of the performances are extremely well done; passable even by today’s standards. Characters and environments are blocky and pixelated, but excellent texture work, the use of atmospheric lighting, and adherence to the series’ typical blue-grey colour palette make them visually appealing, despite their obvious age.

Despite the many changes that Solid brings to the series, there are still portions reminiscent to earlier games. The item collecting is still present and still satisfying, though it’s somewhat diluted by the game’s more linear progression and some superfluous items. Certain portions feel directly ripped from Metal Gear 2, such as a puzzle that requires you to heat and cool a key card to get it to fit in different locks and a certain encounter where Snake must confirm the identity of a character by following her into the women’s bathroom. Unfortunately, many of these additions feel useless within the game’s new structure. The aforementioned key puzzle in particular already required a great deal of backtracking, and Solid’s linearity and insistence on constantly popping up new storytelling sequences makes the sequence even less tolerable.

The Bad
I’d be hesitant to call Metal Gear Solid’s narrative bad, since it does feature a decent amount of depth, memorable and well-rounded characters, and an interesting progression. However, it’s hard to actually appreciate it when it’s mired in so many problems that it would likely take a lengthy essay to properly cover. The root of the problem isn’t in the story, which is largely a repeat of the previous games, but rather in the storytelling. Gameplay is frequently interrupted by cutscenes or codec communication sequence, and these interruptions tend to be long and drawn out.

This is the price of those diverse and memorable characters; long and overdramatic dialogue. Every character in the game is so quick to spill their life story that it quickly gets ridiculous. You’d think you were in a chat room full of teenagers, rather than on a covert infiltration mission. Almost every boss gives a long monologue as they die the clichéd slow death, telling you all about how tragic their life was and how great you are for finally giving them peace. Any character who talks to you over codec feels the need for venting their every insecurity. This does have the benefit of creating sympathetic villains and conveying motivation, but there are better ways of handling character development. This is the storytelling equivalent of publishing someone’s diary.

If you’re not listening to a character prattle on about how they were born on the battlefield, then they’re probably over-explaining the game’s technology and political climate. I can’t say I’ve ever wondered how a key card works in the game, yet Metal Gear Solid takes the steps of carefully explaining how that door slides open when you get near it. This is the sort of thing that goes better in flavour text. If I cared, I’d ask. I imagine the goal of all this superfluous information is to make the game world feel more real, but over-developed trivialities sit beside ridiculous ideas like the ability to manufacture the perfect soldier by splicing specific genes. The mere fact that so much effort went into making certain elements of the narrative airtight and realistic just makes the many preposterous elements harder to swallow.

I hate to spend so much time harping on the game’s writing, but when the game is so ridden with cutscenes and dialogue it’s hard to ignore. By my estimate, somewhere around one-third of the entire game’s running time is taken up by cutscenes, and this is taking my numerous deaths into consideration. It seems that for every two rooms traversed, a cutscene is there to interrupt, and the constant starting and stopping becomes extraordinarily aggravating until it all culminates in the most excruciatingly eye-roll inducing ending I think I’ve ever sat through. If the narrative just played nice with the gameplay instead of constantly getting in the way, I would have been much kinder to it.

It doesn’t even feel like the designers knew what to do with the gameplay. As mentioned, many of the gameplay elements from the early Metal Gear games have been replicated in the new 3D engine, but the structure had to be completely gutted in order to accommodate the cutscenes. Exploration has been scaled back considerably to the point where the game feels restrictively linear. Yet, despite dropping exploration entirely, the designers make a half-hearted attempt to cram it back in there. Rooms are still locked until you get a key, so backtracking is still necessary, but few of the rooms contain something that makes the trip worthwhile. Worse yet, some of the forced backtracking is unreasonably forced. The worst case of this is a boss battle that has to be interrupted while you travel back to one of the game’s first rooms in order to retrieve a weapon. You then walk back to the boss, defeat them (potentially), and get sent all the way back there in a cutscene, only to have to walk back again. It’s ridiculous!

What makes this even more intolerable is the horrendous camera angles which seems to be stuck between poorly emulating the perspective in Metal Gear 2 and trying to present something more cinematic. The result is a view that is zoomed in way too close and angled way too high, making the whole game feel frustratingly claustrophobic. This forces reliance on the radar, which works okay, for the most part, allowing you to accurately see an enemy’s field of view, but the problem is that it gets frequently jammed. So if you’re unfamiliar with the position of enemies and auto-turrets, you could easily wind up walking into the line of sight of one that is carelessly positioned right outside the camera’s perspective.

The Bottom Line
You’ll have to forgive me if, after the excellent Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, I’m extremely disappointed with Metal Gear Solid. Even if Solid’s storytelling and dialogue were spot on, the gameplay from the previous games had to be so scaled back that very little remains of what makes the first games so satisfying. What was held onto feels more like ornamental additions held onto for tradition’s sake, such as pointless backtracking sessions and items that are basically unnecessary. It’s not all bad, though. While I found it to be frustrating to play, its outstanding presentation ensures that there are a lot of memorable moments and characters to meet. I just wish it wasn’t all bogged down in a completely MEDIOCRE experience.

By Adzuken on February 21, 2015

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX)

What was that noise?

The Good
Though Snake’s Revenge is technically the first sequel to Metal Gear, it was done specifically with a western audience in mind and without the input of series’ creator, Hideo Kojima. Due to this, it was quickly ejected from the series’ canon when Kojima got around to making Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for the MSX2, which wound up being released the same year. I actually kind of liked Snake’s Revenge when I recently played through it, but it felt very safe, never straying too far from the mechanics set in place from its predecessor. Metal Gear 2, on the other hand, finally takes the series forward and cleans up some of the problems that plagued the first game.

Once again, the game follows the exploits of the titular special-ops soldier, Solid Snake, as he attempts to infiltrate a military compound to save a civilian scientist. This time around, there’s a lot more backstory given. The newly founded country of Zanzibarland (not related to the real world Zanzibar, I assume) is waging war on its neighbours, supplied by the only nuclear weapons left on earth, and has captured the aforementioned scientist, who holds a solution to the world’s oil crisis.

While the story itself is pretty interchangeable with that of the first game, Metal Gear 2 goes to greater lengths to actually tell a deeper tale. Many of the bosses and the supporting characters are given a great deal of personal traits and backstory, and will spew them into your face whenever given the chance. A few of the bosses use their death monologues to wax philosophic in a way that’s deeply cheesy, but still rather ambitious for a game made it 1990. Supporting characters in the first Metal Gear were mostly just stationary and confined to individual rooms, and the addition of short cutscenes does a lot to make the plot feel more dynamic without getting too in the way.

Snake’s Revenge suffered for dropping the first game’s interconnected world in favour of a more linear experience, and thankful Metal Gear 2 didn’t follow its example. The Zanzibarland base is completely open for exploration, and once again requires you to scour its every cranny for useful items that allow you to proceed to previously unreachable locations. The base this time around is much more varied, with two distinct buildings as well as the area between. The rooms and hallways are more detailed in a way that’s both functional in terms of gameplay and visually interesting. It doesn’t stray too far from the series’ signature muted, grey-heavy colour scheme, but it does make for an extremely appealing environment to sneak around in.

Despite sharing the same structure, there’s a lot added to Metal Gear 2 that makes it feel almost like an entirely new game. A special radar system was added that allows you to get a view of the sectors around you and greatly expands the active radius of enemies, so rather than their movements being confined to the screen you presently inhabit, they roam a 3 by 3 grid. This greatly cuts down the frequency of moments where you step into a new screen and find yourself directly in a guard’s line of sight. It also means that tripping an alarm can no longer be nulled simply by exiting the screen or killing all the guards who attack. You’re actually required to slip out of sight and hide before the alarm will go back into a neutral state.

Snake can also crawl now, which may seem like a minor addition, but it has a great impact on how the game plays out. Not only can you enter vents for new points of ingress, but you can also hide in small openings that are scattered throughout the game world; a requirement if you trip an alarm. This also ties into the guards’ fancy new sense of hearing, since certain floors will give off sounds that bring the guards to your position. Crawling across grating or singing sand ensures that you don’t tip off an enemy to your location. Of course, it’s sometimes useful to bring a guard around a corner where they can be easily dispatched. In cases like that, you can also knock on walls to get their attention.

This may be a small positive to some, but I was overjoyed to find that the keycard swapping from the first game and Snake’s Revenge has been greatly reduced. Previously, to open locked doors, it was often necessary to root through your pockets to find the correct key card. Now, after picking up a sequence of three cards, you can grab a special key that combines the three keys into one. This cuts down the potential number of key cards you need to attempt from a maximum of nine to just three. When I picked up that first master key, it was like all my Christmases came at once.

The Bad
While perhaps unavoidable in a game like this, Metal Gear 2 features heavy backtracking that gets more pointless and less tolerable as the game goes on. Items are spread between the two buildings that make up the compound and many of them require you to obtain keys from the one building to open doors in the other. This is eased near the start by allowing you to take a shortcut through the sewers of the two buildings, but this is taken away far too early and blocked off in one of the buildings for no real reason. You can cut down the amount of travelling required if you plan carefully and only search for new items in the building you’re currently completing objectives in, but that only gets so far. The annoyance reaches its zenith near the very end, where you’re forced to walk all the way back to a room near the beginning to obtain a key that unlocks one of the very last doors in the game. It is a baffling design decision.

Bosses are improved greatly. Some of the best ones act as puzzles, requiring you to figure out how to defeat them, and these particular battles are especially satisfying. However, the bosses lose their teeth in the later portion of the game, becoming incredibly simple and easy to outwit. There were multiple boss battles that were set up in some elaborate fashion in which I found myself defeating my aggressor in a simple fashion. One fellow couldn’t figure out how to circumvent a set of boxes and found himself victim to a few dozen grenades that I lobbed from a safe spot, but the battlefield we were on suggested that a more intense game of cat and mouse was intended. That wasn’t an isolated incident, and the three bosses that followed after each suffered equally embarrassing defeats. After the creatively designed fights that were set up in the beginning, my expectations were set a little higher than that.

The Bottom Line
It feels like Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake delivers on the promises made in the first game. Everything that made the original great has been expanded on and polished to a bright gloss. Some of the flaws that plagued the first game are still there in some form or another, but compromises were made so that these missteps no longer stand out and frustrate. I thoroughly enjoyed Metal Gear 2 from start to finish, and it feels like the perfect game based on the formula. It’s creative, memorable, and completely OUTSTANDING in almost every way. I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the early days of the action-stealth genre.

I’d like to disclose that the version of Metal Gear 2 that I played was the port included in the second Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence disk on original difficulty. While this is mostly a straight port of the MSX2 version translated to English, it does include some small changes that I have taken into consideration.

By Adzuken on February 13, 2015

Snake's Revenge (NES)

I found the plans for Metal Gear 2.

The Good
While the once adored NES port of Metal Gear is often looked on less fondly than it once was, Snake’s Revenge has always maintained a less-than-stellar reputation. Developed as an NES-only sequel and targeted specifically to western gamers, it was quickly booted from the Metal Gear chronology when series creator, Hideo Kojima, finally released Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake later in the year. Because Metal Gear 2 was never released in North America, it remained largely unknown by gamers here. This resulted in Snake’s Revenge mistakenly included in some articles that recounted the series chronology, and frequently considered the worst entry in the series. Considering Metal Gear was a bit of a mess, though still an enjoyable one, this left me curious to see exactly why Snake’s Revenge is so reviled.

Snake’s Revenge follows basically the same plot as the original Metal Gear. A hostile force is said to be developing a super-weapon, and Snake is tasked with infiltrating their base and destroying it. Like its predecessor, Snake’s Revenge emphasises a focus on staying out of the enemy’s line of sight rather than directly engaging them. On top of the many mechanics returning from the first game, many features that were cut from the NES port have been restored, such as the heightened alert status and enemies dropping rations and ammunition if you punch them out. With the heightened alert status, you can no longer simply walk to the next screen to escape enemies, since groups of them continue to swarm you until you kill enough of them. I actually have no idea what causes a guard to go into high-alert rather than normal alertness; it seems to happen at random. Perhaps they’re just sometimes extra surprised.

Overall, Snake’s Revenge is a lot tighter and more polished than the first Metal Gear. Enemy placement is greatly improved, so I had fewer instance of walking into a new area and getting immediately spotted by a guard or camera. It still happened occasionally, but it was even rarer than the MSX2 version of the first game. Enemies are now more aggressive and cause more damage than they did previously, so they’re much more of a threat, and sneaking past them is more favourable. Resources, like health and ammo, still reappear if you leave a room and come back, but rooms that contain them are less common, requiring you to sneak up on enemies and punch them out to try and stock up. This does have the unfortunate side-effect of facilitating the old item farming tactic, which may make the game worse off depending on how you look at it.

The visuals in the first game were in desperate need of improvement, and thankfully, Snake’s Revenge addresses that problem. Metal Gear’s horrendous grey and brown mess has been cleaned up considerably, and the graphics have been overhauled to make better use of colour. This unfortunately has the terrible side-effect of making everything look cartoony, but at least you can now tell what things are supposed to be. Snake now has a huge upper-body and looks like what a pre-adolescent boy would consider cool. There’s a lot more variety now in terms of visuals, and a lot of different environments, each with a unique feel. Different enemy types show up in different places, which is a nice change from the grey and tan blobs that you fought all throughout the first title.

The Bad
While an increased difficulty is certainly appreciated after the rather Metal Gear, the unfortunate reality is that a lot of the challenge comes from an abundance of sudden or instant death. Just like in the last game, your health gauge and the number of items you can carry is increased as you progress, but advancing at an equal pace is the number of enemies that swarm you after triggering an alarm as well as the frequency of instant death traps. For some strange reason, pitfalls are carried over from the previous game and so are obstacles that have you crossing bottomless pits. The hit detection has certainly improved over Metal Gear’s making these threats a little less cheap, but the punishment for actually dying is more severe to the point of being very somewhat unreasonable in certain situations.

While most of my frustrating deaths were at the hands of the game’s many bottomless pits, the bosses also had a habit of causing me some pain. While I’d certainly say they’re a vast improvement over the first game’s underwhelming cast of baddies, they come with their own set of problems. Many of the bosses attack with patterns that are extremely difficult to avoid, and each one causes massive amounts of damage. I struggle to think of a single boss that wasn’t capable of draining half of your health bar with a single successful strike. The only way I was able to survive some encounters was by chowing down rations like Snake just gave up on his weightloss resolution. One boss is actually capable of killing with a single hit, and while it’s easy to outsmart, I took a few to the face before I finally got it right. Despite this and the problems with sudden death, the game isn’t unreasonably difficult, but it can certainly be punishing.

What hurts Snake’s Revenge the most is how it strayed from the actual world structure of Metal Gear. A lot of the charm of the first game was being left on your own to infiltrate the base and finding items to allow you to proceed deeper. This is dropped in favour of a more rigid and linear experience. Collecting items to unlock doors and take out enemies is still required, but it’s all laid out in front of you and available when needed. This does allow for more variety and less backtracking, but it does a great deal of damage to what made the first game special. That’s not to say that the new structure isn’t without merit – later games in the Metal Gear Solid series play out in a more linear fashion – it just seems a lot blander in comparison to the first game’s more open structure.

Aside from torpedoing one of Metal Gear’s greatest assets, Snake’s Revenge injects one new idea into the formula: side-scrolling sequences. Technically Metal Gear used these for when you got on an elevator, but these have been upgraded to full action-sidescroller status. Stealth from this perspective is something that needs to be designed with care, and that certainly isn’t how it was undertaken in Snake’s Revenge. Movement is so restrictive in these sequences that the only way to really get through undetected is by entering a screen when an enemy is facing a way, but most of the time, the enemies are looking straight at you when you walk in and there’s no way to stop them from triggering a mad rush. Then the combat kicks in and it’s horrible. The only weapon you can use is a knife or a pistol, and the pistol can only be used while standing. And to make matters worse, each section is practically the same and uses the exact same obstacles. It’s a mess.

What really gets under my skin is the fact that unlocking doors still requires swapping through keycards, one by one. Like the first game, you amass eight different cards, and not one of them becomes obsolete. Every time you come to a locked door, you have to try every key until it opens; there’s no way of knowing beforehand. I had to laugh at one section near the end of the game which places you in a series of room, each with three locked doors, all of them identical, and even with the full suite of keys, only one will open. That’s just cruel. How about just opening the door for me if I have the required key? Why make me fumble through my pockets every time I want to proceed through the game’s numerous locked doors? It’s a tremendous waste of time.

The Bottom Line
In what is very reminiscent of how I felt about Metal Gear, I kind of like Snake’s Revenge in spite of its many flaws. There’s still a lot of satisfaction to be felt in opening a previously locked door and finding a brand new toy waiting inside. Sure, it sometimes got frustrating when I got insta-killed while walking over to said toy, but the good times definitely outweighed the bad. Snake’s Revenge is a lot tighter and more polished than the first Metal Gear, but it also come across as a bit blander and more sterile. It’s an OKAY follow-up to the first game, and may be worth a look if you want to cap off the NES Metal Gear experience, but your time may be better spent with the canon sequel: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.

By Adzuken on February 6, 2015

Metal Gear (NES)

Well, Solid Snake, it’s amazing that you’ve lasted this long!

The Good
Metal Gear on the NES has suffered the strange fate of a tarnished reputation. It was once unquestionably considered a classic, and while to some it still is, it’s simply not held up in the same light. Most likely, this is due to the MSX2 version creeping into common gamer knowledge as well as the popularity of its successors, the Metal Gear Solid series. Metal Gear’s creator, Hideo Kojima (who wasn’t involved in this port), even disowned this particular version of the game, claiming that it wasn’t up to his standards. The jokes that elevated the game’s poor translation into gamer mantras probably didn’t help either. This was my first time playing Metal Gear, and it’s a long overdue introduction.

Beginning with a paradrop into the jungle (if that’s what that green and brown mess actually is), the game follows the exploits of a soldier with the unfortunate call sign of “Solid Snake” as he attempts to infiltrate a military base and destroy a secret weapon being developed there. Within the confines of the game, the leader of the base is kept a mystery until the end, but the instruction manual tells a different story. Don’t read the manual.

Metal Gear attempts to distinguish itself from other military action games by having a focus on stealth. Guards only become hostile if you pass in front of their field of vision, giving you a chance to sneak up on them. To emphasize this, you start the game off without a gun and have to reach the base with nothing but your wits and your fists. What Metal Gear achieves is an adventure that feels less like an assault and more like an infiltration, which was a pretty novel approach at the time. It largely works, giving a feeling of spy fiction without sacrificing the fun and simplicity of the era’s action games.

Gameplay-wise, the game plays out in a fairly non-linear format that has you collecting specific items to allow further exploration of the base; a format that seems to have grown in popularity in the late 80’s. Along the way you keep in contact with supporting characters over radio, and they’ll sometimes drop hints and give you direction if you call in at the right time and the right frequency. The radio is, unfortunately, not as well used as it was in the MSX2 version, which leads to some downright cryptic moments. You also receive hints from prisoners that you rescue, and you’d do well to pay attention to what they say, as they tend to be more helpful than the radio.

What Metal Gear does well is pacing. The NES version includes a much longer introduction that has you traversing a short stretch of jungle before reaching the first base, which gives ample time to get acquainted with the game’s stealth mechanics. Items are provided at a steady pace, giving a nice feeling of forward momentum as you wander the base. With a few of the game’s more obtuse sections, there is likely to be a great deal of wandering in circles, but I found these moments easily overcome if I stepped back and thought about it for a moment. Usually the solution was to double back to some door that I wasn’t able to pass when I didn’t have the proper key.

The Bad
While Metal Gear sucked me in and kept me entertained from start to finish, that’s largely in spite of a myriad of absolutely horrendous design choices. There are so many things wrong with this game that it’s difficult to decide what exactly to focus on. If I had to reflect on it, I’d largely attribute the fact that I was able to complete the game despite of its problems to just how easy it makes things.

To begin with, Metal Gear is one hell of an ugly game. The sprite-work isn’t bad, but too much detail was attempted on each individual character, and the game’s palette just isn’t up to the task of showing it effectively. Enemies look like walking messes, and I couldn’t even tell what a few of them were supposed to be doing. On top of that, everything animates so awkwardly that I almost laughed when I first saw a particular enemy that appears to be working on its ballet as it kicks its way across the floor. The worst part of the visuals is the abysmal pallet used. There’s so much oppressive grey everywhere. Most of the enemies are grey, the interiors are grey, and a lot of the items are grey. If it’s not grey, it’s brown or green; it’s depressing!

From a gameplay standpoint, everything is incredibly slapdash. The placement of enemies is entirely without thought. Depending on where you enter a new screen, there’s a chance that either a guard or a camera will be looking directly at you, immediately triggering an alarm. Before you get the pistol, sneaking up behind guards is a necessary strategy, but once you have the pistol it can basically be thrown out the window. The pistol kills most enemies in a single shot without requiring you to get close, and while ammo isn’t exactly plentiful, you’re capable of carrying an ever increasing amount of it and can completely load up whenever you come across some. Any finite resource, such as ammunition or rations, will reappear if you leave the screen and come back, which allows unlimited use of the weaponry and limitless health. After a certain point, none of my deaths were related to damage from enemies, but often due to the game’s annoying traps that spring on you without much warning and kill instantly.

The boss battles featured in the game are, with a few exceptions, extremely mediocre. It’s not just the fact that they’re poorly designed, though some certainly are. Many of them can only be hurt with a significant amount of damaged taken from one particular weapon, but they show no indication of taking damage, making it impossible to tell whether the weapon you’re using is having any effect. Is it too much to ask for them to flash when they’re hurt like they do in other games? Even when they’re not cryptic, they’re usually underwhelming. None of the bosses will modify their tactics if the one they’re using isn’t working, so the general strategy of standing where you can’t be hit and firing shots in their direction usually works.

Lastly, what is the point of having so many keys? Doors are all identical and there’s no way to tell what key opens what door. It’s not consistent, either, so key #1 opens doors all throughout the game, regardless of their location. That means every time you come to a locked door, you need to go through your keys, one by one, humping the door until one of them finally opens it. Once you’ve got several keys in your pocket, it becomes incredibly aggravating. It would help if the keys and doors were some other colour than grey. At least the inventory is sorted, unlike the MSX2 version which arranges them in the order you pick them up.

The Bottom Line
In a lot of ways, Metal Gear is a bit of a mess, but it never got under my skin enough to ruin my fun. That’s pretty key; if the game had been less forgiving and demanded more precision and finesse, the many ways that the game cheats you would be far past aggravating. It is incredibly cryptic in a few places and there are many opportunities for a cheap, undeserved death, but I’ve survived worse in a game. So even though I have a lot to complain about, I still think Metal Gear is an OKAY game. Its core design is still fun and compelling, and because it’s paced so well and rewards come so frequently, I found it difficult to put down. I definitely recommend it if you’re willing to put up with a bit of rickety gameplay.

I played the MSX2 version immediately after completing the NES port, and as for how they compare; I definitely think the NES version is worse, but not significantly. The MSX2 version feels a lot tighter in comparison to the NES, but many of the problems that I had with the NES version were present there first. The biggest letdown is that the actual Metal Gear itself isn’t a boss within the NES version, and what’s in its place is an extremely poor substitute. The whole thing feels like a rushed port forced to fit on the NES’s less capable hardware, but even then, with enough work, a more faithful transition should have been possible. Still, I’d argue that everything that made Metal Gear worth playing survived on the NES, and a few cut corners is no reason to disown the game.

By Adzuken on January 30, 2015

Aerobiz (SNES)

Cause widespread misery as the CEO of your own airline.

The Good
Sometimes when the pickings get slim at the video game store, I begin purchasing games I’ve never heard of based on the cover art alone. Aerobiz was one such game, sold at a slight premium over the normal riff-raff. Its label depicts an executive looking busy in his office while an airliner flies dangerously close outside his New York high-rise window. Maybe there’s a chance that I can be as cool as that slick-haired suit.

As you may have guessed from the name, Aerobiz is a simulation about running your own airline. You establish your first branch, negotiate for slots in various airports, and set up routes between cities based on the range of your fleet of planes. There are two scenarios available: one from 1963 to 1995, and another from 1983 to 2015. The main difference is that while many of the included aircraft configurations are available from the start in the latter time frame, the former unlocks them as time advances, providing an extremely limited selection from the get-go.

To complicate things, you’re competing with three other human or computer controlled companies. The game really heats up towards the end when competition begins for various routes. Having the best planes, the lowest fares, and a healthy heaping of good old fashioned advertising are crucial to squash the competition. Like any good simulation, it’s about maximizing profits and grinding anyone who gets in your way into the dirt. The goal is to accomplish a set of objectives before you opponents. These consist of attracting a certain number of passengers, earning enough profit each quarter, and linking a certain number of cities. I feel this is a better alternative to the old Monopoly method of bankrupting your opponents, and it ends the game a lot quicker than simply reaching the end of the scenario time frame.

To win takes constant negotiation. You’re allotted three negotiators who you can send out into the world to buy slots at various airports. The limited number of negotiators makes sure that even if you’re making money hand over fist, your competitors still have an opportunity to catch up through careful planning. There’s a decent amount of strategy required. Buying planes with big passenger capacities and using them on longer, more popular routes while relegating smaller planes with less range on commuter routes can make a big difference on your bottom line. It’s not overly complicated and may not have the depth of some other simulations, but there’s enough there to keep you busy for the length of a game.

For better or worse, Aerobiz starts off at a pretty quick pace. Rather than starting out with short commuter flights and propeller planes, each player is given a veritable fleet of jets and two routes available for opening at the start. While this could be viewed as the game being dumbed down to just the basic concept, it does mean that games are kept to a reasonable 2-4 hours with no real slowdowns in developments as the various companies fight tooth and nail for passengers. It’s actually quite lean for a business simulator, and it’s refreshing to have one that aims to be compelling, rather than just addicting.

It’s worth noting that, because of its turn-based gameplay, Aerobiz features a multiplayer mode for up to four players. I wasn’t able to try this out, and would probably have a difficult time convincing someone to sit down with me to compete over the airline business, but it’s there if you have a more fulfilling social life than I do.

The Bad
In what strikes me as strange for a business simulation, there’s a severe lack of information and feedback provided. I often felt as though I was left in the dark as to where, exactly, my money was going. Sure, I’d consistently turn a profit, but I lacked crucial data needed to maximize my efficiency. For example, I have no idea if the planes that are left in my hanger have a monthly cost. Does it tie into my maintenance budget? The game doesn’t say. What about the slots you buy in each city: onetime fee or monthly cost? The game doesn’t say. Is it so much to ask for a monthly expenditures sheet?

It’s also a rather sterile production. It may sound a bit strange, but I’ve always enjoyed the hypnotic soundtracks of the era’s simulations and part of my motivation for even playing Aerobiz was to hear if its tunes were in the same league as the SNES version of SimCity. The truth is, while its songs contain the same buzzy instrumentation, they’re rather bland and many of them are nearly grating. You can thankfully change the track that plays while you make all your decisions to any of the country themes, but they all have the same basic generic feel to them.

Adding to the sterility is the game’s lack of imagination. Aerobiz was released in 1992, and the second scenario’s deadline of 2015 was quite a ways into the future. In Street Fighter 2010, Capcom thought we’d be fighting aliens, and in Outrun 2019, Sega believed that we’d be driving rocket cars in a few years. Yet as far as I know, no fictional planes are used in Aerobiz to fill the sizeable future gap. The cancelled McConnell Douglas MD-12 is the furthest extrapolation the game was willing to take. This seems like the one chance the devs had at injecting a little imagination into the game and it was totally passed up. The advisors, the planes, the cities; there’s not a hint of personality to any of them. There isn’t even much that you can inject yourself, as the corporations aren’t customisable in anyway outside their names. Even those are limited to 7 letters which I filled with SUCKAIR.

Part of this lack of ambition might be because the developer has shown a bizarre reverence to airliners to the point of clogging gameplay with scenes of jets being slowly delivered to hangers or taking off and landing. Stick around past the end of the game and you’re treated to a slow, unskippable montage of low-res pictures of historic airplanes. It sometimes makes the game feel more like a showcase for the various historical jetliners. Maybe if you’re interested in the subject, you’ll appreciate the attention to detail, but commercial airliners don’t exactly have me grinding my thighs together.

The Bottom Line
While Aerobiz kind of falls a bit short as far of simulators go with its limited options, lack of feedback and tangible data, and propensity for wasting time for no reason, I still think it’s worth a playthrough or two. It has a nice competitive edge with its fare wars and at certain points the competition can get pretty fierce. A little bit more personality and imagination would have gone a long way to make the game shine a bit more. While Aerobiz is a pretty AVERAGE game, it has at least sparked my interest in seeking out its sequel, Aerobiz Supersonic, to see if any of my complaints are resolved there.

By Adzuken on January 24, 2015

Super Mario Sunshine (GameCube)

Mario’s court ordered community service.

The Good
Nostalgia was sparked for me while I was cleaning an old Gamecube controller of mine. An incident involving a mix of laughter and hot chocolate being ejected from my adolescent self’s nose left it sticky and unusable for about a decade. While I was meticulously cleaning the gamepad inside and out, I found myself wandering the dusty depths of my memory, plucking choice images of some of my favourite games. Though thoughts of Rogue Squadron 2 and F-Zero GX were at first competing for my attention, I came to the realization that I never actually completed Super Mario Sunshine. It hadn’t clicked for me in my youth, and while I made it very near the end – the final boss’s front doorstep, no less – I lacked the motivation to actually cap the game off with a victory.

So I picked it off my shelf and started up a new file and was soon to discover that I couldn’t really remember much about the game. Some of the images lined up with my memory, but the game’s progression through the various worlds, and even many of the mechanics, had all been filed away in the trash bin of my mind. Rarely have I ever been given a chance to actually re-experience a game from my youth, so I certainly wasn’t about to pass up the chance.

The game’s framework is set up in a series of cutscenes that provide a stark reminder of why voice acting should be kept to an extreme minimum in Mario games. Mario has been framed for spreading graffiti around the resort hotspot of Isle Delfino and is forced to clean up the mess left by his dark doppelganger using F.L.U.D.D., a device that spews both water and tutorials in a number of inventive ways. The one I got the most usage from was the hover nozzle, but it’s also fun ripping around with the booster, and the rocket is great for getting to high places.

Aside from the added water pack, gameplay is extremely similar to Mario 64. You’re placed in a hub world and must travel to various lands to collect Shine Sprites and return sunlight to the tropical paradise. Most of Mario’s moves from its N64 predecessor have returned with some new ones added and some others removed to accommodate F.L.U.D.D.’s repertoire.

The biggest difference between the two games isn’t actually Mario’s new backwear; it’s the cohesiveness. Mario 64 was very abstract, so all the tasks were largely unrelated, but Sunshine is much more grounded and most of the challenge revolves around cleaning up the mess left by Shadow Mario. It vastly changes the feel of the game. Most of the challenges faced are explained by NPC’s, and most shines and blue coins are obtained by helping them. Levels are based around places that feel more natural, such as a theme park or hotel, and since the platforming had to be adjusted with this in mind, it feels less mechanically straightforward. This unfortunately winds up hurting the game in a number of ways.

Still, the cohesive world does have its advantages. The scenery is often very striking, with the spooky hotel bathed in the red of the setting sun, and a tribal village surrounded by trees and mushrooms that glow in the night like a black velvet painting under ultraviolet light. It also allows there to be a bit more story development, but that’s largely squandered (probably for the best). Levels feel smaller, but there’s a lot more incentive to explore the nooks and crannies. Delfino’s inhabitants have a lot to say, and while it’s rarely interesting, it does make the world feel like somewhere people actually live, rather than a cluster of isolated lands. This is highlighted by the ability to view other destinations on the island by looking off in the distance, making the island feel like a singular world.

The Bad
Mario Sunshine seems like the odd one out when you look at the core Mario series, and it’s for more reasons than just its bizarre inclusion of fully voiced cutscenes. The series has always involved adventure in far off and wondrous places that are incredibly abstract in their design, but Isle Delfino is a pretty grounded resort town filled with inhabitants who have petty problems for you to solve, and this is the root of the game’s major problem. It’s an interesting and unique departure for the Mario series to have it so grounded, but it’s also rather mundane, and this permeates a lot of the design.

The most problematic deficiency is in the challenges presented. While there’s a lot of carryover from Mario 64, such as dealing with boss problems or collecting a set number of red coins, there’s also a great deal of what feels a lot like janitorial work. The worlds simply aren’t built like Mario 64’s, and so there’s less that actually challenges control proficiency and more that challenge patience. For example, in each world there is a shine you obtain by chasing down Shadow Mario and spraying him with enough water. However, there is no limit on how long you have to finish him off, nor does he recover any health by avoiding your jet. This means it’s only a matter of time and patience before enough shots are finally landed on him and he goes down. There’s no challenge to it, it’s not thoughtfully designed or even fun, and you have to do it once in every single world.

It’s also a bit of a cop-out that 24 of the shines need to be bought for ten blue coins each. There’s 240 in total hidden throughout each of the worlds (about 30 in each), but there’s no way to view how many remain in each world. This reduces a portion of the game to nothing more than a grand scavenger hunt, and considering there’s already the red coin challenges carried over from Mario 64, it’s entirely lazy and unnecessary. This is part of the reason why I decided not to pursue collecting all 120 sprites. The coins are entirely optional, luckily, since the only requirement for completing the game is beating Shadow Mario in each of the worlds.

Even the challenges that strictly have you reaching a certain area are complicated by thoughtless design. I often found myself the victim of tasks that required several long and tricky steps that had to be repeated when I failed. One such section required obtaining food for a Yoshi from a machine and using it to freeze enemies and climb a series of platforms. Each time I fell into the water I had to start the whole lengthy and tedious sequence over again. Every once and a while, the game gives no mercy. It can aggravate.

Lastly, where the hell is Luigi? So, what, he gets to star in Luigi’s Mansion, but he doesn’t even make an appearance in Mario Sunshine? Snubbed, just like in Mario 64. Unforgivable.

The Bottom Line
During the time I was initially enamoured with Super Mario Sunshine and delighted to have the chance to re-experience it from what felt like scratch, I pledged myself to collect every Shine Sprite in the game. Eventually, reality set it and I realized I just wasn’t enjoying it enough to go that far, and considering I went the completionist route for the Mario Galaxy games and more than once for Mario 64, that’s all I feel I really need to say. Super Mario Sunshine is certainly a GOOD game, one that I was glued to for a few straight evenings; it’s just a pretty weak entry in the core Mario series. It’s a fairly unique entry, but at the same time it’s less polished and more mundane. Don’t get me wrong, I totally recommend it, but if you skip it and go straight for the Super Mario Galaxy games, I can definitely understand.

By Adzuken on January 16, 2015

Wai Wai World 2 - SOS!! Parsley Jō (NES)

Why Wai Wai?

The Good
One look at my Famicom collection and you’d probably notice that about half of my imports are developed by Konami. Konami had a pretty decent selection of games for North America’s NES, but it was completely outclassed by the many great games that stayed in their native land. It’s because of these unlocalized games that it’s no surprise that the Konami Wai Wai World games didn’t make it across the ocean either. Considering it feature characters like Upa from Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa and Fuuma from Getsu Fuuma Den, a lot of the game’s tributes would be completely lost on a western audience. It’s honestly difficult for me to decide which is the greater shame; the fact that the above mentioned games where never localized, or that Wai Wai World 2 wasn’t.

Konami Wai Wai World 2 is a completely different beast from its predecessor. While the first was an incredibly clumsy but faithful tribute to the characters it contained, Wai Wai World 2 is a much more slick game. The exploration has been ripped out, and left in its place are simplified stages and a lot more gameplay variety. With much of its puzzle solving torn out, so too is its backtracking, which is a welcome treat. Even more of a relief is the removal of health bars for each individual character, which prevents the infernal grinding for health that plagued the first. It’s a much leaner experience because of this, which really helps it shine.

The game also has a much more light-hearted tone than the first. Though Wai Wai World was hardly straight-faced, a number of its enemies and environments were a bit on the gritty side to reflect the games they were based on. Here, everything is presented with fabulous exaggeration reminiscent of Parodius or perhaps Boku Dracula-Kun, which was released a few months prior. Even the Yomi stage from Getsu Fuuma Den is presented in a cute but faithful recreation. The result is that Wai Wai World 2 has its own personality, even despite the fact that it’s cobbled together from tributes to other games.

Another major difference between the two games is the selection of characters. Wai Wai World 2 has five available characters (not counting the main character): Fuuma, Goemon from the Ganbare Goemon series, Upa, Simon Belmont from Castlevania, and Bill from Contra. Missing is Mikey from Goonies, King Kong, and the Moai head, who were all featured in the first game.

This time around, the Konami stars are temporary power-ups, rather than freely selectable characters. When playing as a guest character, you’re placed on a time limit, but are invincible during that period. Each character has its strengths and weaknesses, and in certain situations they have abilities that get them through places where other characters can’t. For example, Upa can eat the cake on his level and open the chests, whereas other characters can’t.

There’s a lot of variety on display this time around. On top of the simple side-scrolling stages, there’s horizontal, vertical, and third-person shoot-‘em-up sections and even a simple puzzle game. Even the platformer levels have a good amount of variation, featuring stages that scroll to the right or left, as well as a water stage. Best of all, the game prominently features a two-player coop mode, and it’s obvious it was built with it in mind. The game is a lot of fun to play with a friend and allows for dream team-ups. There’s nothing like having a good old fashioned geek out with a like-minded Konami fan.

The graphics are certainly pleasant, as they are with most games released around the time of the Super Famicom. Everything is really bright and colourful, and most of the games and levels represented look better than they originally did. The art style is what really ties it together. The sprites for the characters in the original Wai Wai World looked almost as though they had been ripped directly from the games they had originally appeared in. Here however, they’re all given a stylistic overhaul and are done in a big-headed, chibi style. The results are nothing short of adorable, and seeing Bill Rizer and Simon Belmont in their chubby and big-eyed form is a real treat.

The Bad
One of the problems that arise from the game’s genre hopping is a randomly fluctuating difficulty curve. The most obvious example is the Twinbee stage that occurs early on. It’s an almost exact replica of a real game of Twinbee, a vertical scrolling shoot-‘em-up. The player is given very little warning and is thrown in to fend for themselves. The stages are rather difficult, so if you lack the skills required for the genre, you’re basically up the creek; there’s no way to bypass it entirely. On the flipside, the Contra stage is a walk in the park, and then later there’s a stage mimicking Road Fighter, which is also pretty challenging. The difficulty isn’t completely unreasonable, but it’s easy to be frustrated by these sections if you’re only interested in seeing Simon Belmont crack the whip. The point is that if you’re going to die in this game, it will be these stages you die on, and it can lead to some irritation.

Level design is nothing to write home about. It’s not particularly offensive, but it feels like what results from the kitchen sink approach that this game followed. Levels may appear similar to the games they are pulled from on the outset, but more exploration shows that far less thought were put into them. Enemy placement is less meticulous, and game-specific level elements, such as the destructible blocks in the Getsu Fuuma Den stage and the turrets/item dispensers in the Contra stage, feel thrown in for the sake of it. The stages are also incredibly simplistic to the point where there’s very little challenge in navigating them. They’re functional and get the point across, but won’t impress anyone. The real disappointing part is that they don’t do that great a job of conveying the spirit of the games they’re ripped from.

The music, while not exactly terrible, is a rather large letdown. Considering that Konami’s Famicom games have some of the most recognizable music on the system, it’s a bit jarring to hear them remixed so poorly. I would suspect that the composer was trying to unify the soundtrack and put a light-hearted spin on the classic tunes, but the result deviates too far from the source material to be satisfying. Hearing the jungle theme from Contra carry off onto its own bizarre tangent is extremely disappointing. Like I said, it’s not terribly bad, but considering it’s trying to pay tribute to some of the best tunes on the Famicom, it falls short.

Another, much more petty complaint is the fact that you can’t fully customize your team to your liking. You’re forced to pick from predetermined sets of three. There are enough variations available that you can likely find one that suits your needs, but there’s an equal chance you’ll be frustrated by the inability to place Fuuma, Simon, and Goemon on the same team, or something to that effect. It would be much more satisfying to be able to build your own team, rather than be forced to play the presets.

The Bottom Line
Wai Wai World 2 stands as a great tribute to Konami’s fantastic Famicom library and a huge improvement over its predecessor. It may not always meet the high standards set by games it pays tribute to, such as Castlevania and Contra, but its simple yet light-hearted approach has loads of charm that makes up for it. It may be dragged down a bit by some too-difficult tributes to scrolling shooters, but when viewed as a whole, it’s a GOOD little game in its own right. Anyone with an appreciation for Konami’s Famicom library will definitely see a lot of value in this celebration of their accomplishments.

By Adzuken on January 9, 2015

Chameleon Twist (Nintendo 64)

A slip of the tongue

The Good
Aside from my unquenchable thirst for collecting game cartridges that I’ve yet to play, my only motivation for picking up Chameleon Twist was memories of playing it alongside my mother when I was a youngster. Upon starting the game, I found this to be confusing because although some images from the game neatly fit my memory, such as the cookie enemies and the ant queen boss, the only two player mode is the battle mode, which means I couldn’t have played through the game with my mother. It sort of makes me wonder what other memories from my childhood are complete fabrications.

The transition from 2D to 3D was a painful one for video games. No precedence had really been set, so developers were forced to experiment with different control schemes and mechanics to make use of the extra dimension. Experimentation may sound fabulous in today’s world of mass-produced sequels, but it wasn’t much fun at the time. Chameleon Twist came out one year after the N64 and the seminal 3D entry in the Mario series and shares many of the growing pains of the platforming genre, but at least on the surface it has an infectiously cheerful disposition.

You’re given a choice between 4 round-headed characters that don’t look anything like chameleons who, aside from their goofy expressions and colour scheme, are completely identical. Gameplay centers around the use of the chameleon’s extendable tongue, which is used to vault them up to higher places or stick to enemies and conveniently placed posts. It’s certainly an interesting gimmick with some neat usage, but it’s unfortunately weighed down by extremely sluggish controls and somewhat frustrating level design.

It’s not all bad. The game is ridiculously charming. Each of the levels focus on different mechanics, so it’s certainly not hurting for variety. The soundtrack is somewhat grating, but most of the tracks are lighthearted and chirpy in a way that seemed to live and die during the early 3D era of games. Likewise, the graphics are extremely cute, or at least, the enemy designs are. The enemies in Kids Land are especially adorable, such as the aforementioned cookie enemies.

The Bad
I’ll admit that the game’s personality carried me through to the end, but I can’t say it was a comfortable journey. There were certain moments where I was almost ready to call it quits, and those moments always came down to the platforming demanding more precision than the controls are capable of.

The chameleon is a sluggish and twitchy animal with extremely poor eyesight. Movement is just so unresponsive and sticky that even the most basic actions are made difficult. None of the game’s challenges are particularly cumbersome and are always presented in bite-sized portions, but it can take multiple tries just to get your tongue wagging in the right direction. Part of the problem may be related to the N64’s stiff and inaccurate analogue stick. Most of the chameleon’s abilities rely on it being pointed in the right direction, whether it’s trying to latch onto a post or spit enemies at other enemies, and the precision is just not there. You can lock your character in place with the R button, which gives you a dotted line as guidance, but even then, simply lining it up with your target is difficult.

Then there’s the camera. To the game’s credit, you can control it, but only barely. There are two separate view modes to choose from: one that looks down at a fixed angle, and another that freely floats around your chameleon. Forget about the free camera, since it has a nasty habit of getting stuck behind scenery and rarely offers a useful angle. The locked camera is more usable, but just barely. It greatly limits your field of vision and tends to sway around under its own influence. This can lead to bumping into enemies obscured off-screen or running off a cliff because the camera realigned itself at an inopportune moment.

There’s one level, the desert castle, which features a camera different from the other levels. This one chases your character throughout the whole sequence, giving the game a pseudo-sidescroller feel. I wish they used it for the other levels, because for a few glorious minutes I was actually able to muster some appreciation for the game’s mechanics instead of wrestling with a problematic camera.

Even with all these problems in mind, it’s at least an endurable experience, but only because it’s over in about 2 hours. It consists of only 6 levels clocking in at about 20 minutes each. As far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no penalty for death, so having to continue repeatedly at a particularly difficult section isn’t much of a hindrance. Every obstacle can be overcome with perseverance and patience, so there’s not much to get slowed down by. It also ends rather abruptly. I’m not even certain that every level needs to be completed, since the 6th level is unlocked simply by beating the 4th or 5th. Once you complete the sixth level, the game unceremoniously ends without anything resembling a climax.

Afterwards, you can go back to previous stages to try and collect any crowns that you may have missed. This allegedly unlocks special areas and some sort of boss attack mode, but I wasn’t willing to replay the game to see it.

The Bottom Line
I find it hard to completely hate Chameleon Twist, but it’s equally difficult to actually like it. With its cute art style, clever mechanics, and decent assortment of challenges, it seems to have at least been made with love. It’s because of its infectiously light-hearted personality that I stuck with it, even when it demanded far too much from its own clumsy controls. Sometimes it’s worth putting up with a MEDIOCRE experience if it’s unique enough, and while it’s unlikely that I’ll ever pick it up again for another playthrough, at least can always cherish the wonderful falsified memories I have of it.

By Adzuken on January 2, 2015

Rygar (NES)

Wield the ancient world’s most terrifying weapon: the Yo-Yo!

The Good
Rygar’s a bit hard to classify, but its nearest neighbours would be Castlevania 2 and Adventure of Link. It’s a sidescroller that features RPG like levelling and an exploration-heavy, interconnected world with new areas opening up as items are found. It also came out in the same timeframe as the previously mentioned games, which seems to demonstrate the sort of hive mind that Famicom developers were connected to at the time. While I may be pretty down on Simon’s Quest and Adventure of Link, Rygar is mostly all right by me.

The premise is pretty standard NES. You play as some dude in football gear named Rygar who is trying to save the holy land of Argool from a dark king named Ligar. To do this, he wields something that looks like a cross between a buckler and a spiked yo-yo. The game takes you through the standard fantasy forests and canyons in both side scrolling and top down perspectives. Side-scrolling is pretty slick, though at times clunky. Top down is just always clunky, giving you no ability to attack diagonally. On the whole, it’s not terrible.

Maybe it’s hard to hate because Rygar is a pretty forgiving game. There’s no limit on continues and dying sends you right back to the start of the area you’re on with the only real punishment being that your life is only refilled three hearts. This is even true of bosses, if you die, you’re popped right back to the doorway of the boss room with three hearts refilled. This means you can jump right back into combat, though on later bosses you’ll likely need to leave and grind for health. Still, the game isn’t without challenge, and in some places you’ll be fighting for survival, but it’s not going to make you suffer unreasonably for your mistakes.

On the topic of being reasonable, it caught me by surprise that the other characters in the game give hints that are actually useful. This may sound obvious, but after playing games like The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania 2, and the Goonies 2, I’m used to talking to obtuse character who provide absolutely useless or overly cryptic information. In Rygar, the old hermits will actually tell you what item you need to proceed, whether or not you’re going the wrong way, and even specific directions on certain occasions. You’d think this wouldn’t be surprising, but in the 8-bit generation, NPC’s were rarely helpful.

The Bad
Rygar is by no means a lengthy game, maybe clocking in at four hours on your first playthrough, but it’s still long enough that you’ll likely want to stop midway through. Unfortunately for you, there’s absolutely no save system. No level skip, no password, no warp zones. If you want to conquer the game, you’d better sit down and keep playing. It isn’t totally uncommon for a game of this generation to lack any save feature, but Rygar just feels like it should. It contains unlimited continues and will start you off on the same screen you left off, so the only real obstacle to completing the game is your patience.

There’s a general lack of polish in Rygar that’s hard to describe. It’s kind of glitchy in a lot of places. My favourite glitchy moment allowed my character to climb in thin air as if they were on a rope. Bosses are pretty lame, with few requiring any strategy beyond having enough health and waling on them. Enemies aren’t so much placed in the game world as they are dumped in as you walk around. I mean, these are all pretty small complaints that probably won’t do more than annoy, but they are there.

There’s no real variation in your attacks. You pick up items that allow you to proceed, but that’s basically all you do. There’s a grappling hook, a crossbow, and a pulley. All of them, even the crossbow, are just used to bypass certain obstacles, essentially acting like fancy keys. There’s no real magic system, only two small power-ups for your yo-yo, and no true projectile weapons. Not to mention that simply obtaining the grappling hook disables you from looking up or ducking while attacking in some places, and there’s no way to unequip it. It’s not a big deal, but a projectile weapon would have been nice, or at least something to replace the yo-yo.

The Bottom Line
Rygar may lack the tight controls of a game like Mega Man, the devious challenge of Castlevania, or the satisfying exploration of The Legend of Zelda, but it’s still an AVERAGE game. When you comb the NES library for the classics, this one will never rise to the top. It’s something you play in between the console’s more notable titles. Something to numb the mind. You’ll neither regret playing it, nor will you regret missing out on it. It’s just there, okay. Try it, or don’t. See if I care.

By Adzuken on December 19, 2013

Far Cry 3 (Windows)

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again.

The Good
I remember playing the original Far Cry back in my high school days on my first rig. I remember being impressed by the open-ish level design and the lavish (at the time) graphical effects. Far Cry 2 was a bit of a disappointment, which didn’t surprise me considering it was done by a different developer. Far Cry 3 is a return to the jungle setting of the first game, though it’s easy to predict that it likely won’t include super-mutants with rocket launchers for arms.

Far Cry 3 tells the story of Jason Brody, a guy who I doubt I’d get along with in reality. He and his friends are vacationing on a pirate infested island when they’re captured by pirates. Who’d have thought? Jason escapes and then must save his friends, but not before going feral and answering the call of the wild. You’re basically let off the leash early on and are free to build yourself up or follow the storyline, which is packed with a decently well-rounded cast of characters.

The various upgrades you can acquire do a lot to add a little of the spice of character building. Hunting animals allows you to craft consumables and equipment to allow you to carry more guns and ammunition. Experience from various activities unlocks new perks such as additional health bars. It’s very standard stuff in this era of gaming, but it does help ease the monotony and give you something to shoot for.

While the graphics are decent, the character design is where it really shines. Most are given distinct personalities that fit well in the world the game is trying to convey, and their appearances do a lot to compliment this. From your motley crew of friends to the psychopaths you fight, each one has a design that tells you a lot about them at a glance. It’s therefore very unfortunate that very few play much of a role in the story outside of a cutscene, and none of them do much outside the confines of scripted events.

A lack of decent characters was major shortcoming Far Cry 2, and it’s not the only issue that has been addressed for its follow-up. Gone are those annoying guard outposts that constantly spawn enemies if you so much as step outside the perimeter. In its place is a territory system that actually allows you to clean up the island and make it relatively safer. Unfortunately, some of the things that Far Cry 2 did well have been taken away, such as the in game map, replaced by a typical full screen map. On the whole, it’s still an improvement.

The Bad
For all the variety that Far Cry 3 has, its problem is that it’s just kind of dull. Not tremendously dull, it’s perfectly entertaining at times, but not very stimulating. I think the biggest reason for this is that there’s no real challenge to it. From the start, if you take the time to climb some radio towers to extend your map, take over a few outposts, and hunt some animals, you’ll be set for life. You can craft most of the gear from the get go and once you unlock an LMG, a sniper rifle, and maybe something that explodes, nothing can stand in your way.

This is playing on hard, even. For most of the game I sat in bushes sniping off guards one by one. Even the armored heavies were no match for a rocket or a well-placed tiger. Considering that in the original Far Cry the guards could spot you in the bushes from 2 kilometers away, it’s surprising to see that these ones will give up the hunt after a minute or so. I guess the alternative might have been to have the regenerating guards of Far Cry 2, which would have been far worse, but more capable adversaries would have been nice.

Maybe the point was to make you feel like a badass, but I don’t buy that. You’re put in the role of some spoiled man-boy who must answer the call of the wild, but as a gamer who’s probably played a jillion shooters in their life, you’re more likely to be king of the jungle in seconds. You’re rarely made to feel vulnerable and the game never asks you to take your time. Even when you do die, the consequences aren’t that harsh since you’re merely taken back to one of the game’s frequent checkpoints.

It begins to feel like housework. Drive here, climb this tower. Drive there, clear out this base. Run here, hunt this animal. Hang glide there, advance the story. It’s hard to feel absorbed in the world, especially when it feels as preposterous as this one. The island is both densely packed and completely empty at the same time. The landscapes are pretty, but they’re repetitive and there’s something unconvincing about them. The random inhabitants who are on the island are all bland, copy-pasted set dressings. There’s nothing to draw you in. It all feels like being on safari in a zoo.

The Bottom Line
Far Cry 3 is a fairly competent game, but it’s rather lifeless and lacks any real personality. You can tell that it was made by a team of a jillion people, because there’s a distinct lack of love to most of its components. The only real spark it has is in its story, and even that is just kind of stuck in there for progression’s sake. Most of the time, I felt as though I was just going through the motions, pushing my way to the game’s conclusion, but at no part did I actively hate the game. It’s just so painfully AVERAGE, that’s it’s difficult to get excited about. However, you could certainly do worse.

By Adzuken on August 23, 2013