Quick Video Games Reviews
May. 10th, 2021 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroCastlevania Legends (GB, Replayed on Gambatte on RG350) - Improvements over the other Game Boy Castlevania games: There are dead ends and alternate paths; the game isn’t just a single straight line. The five hidden objects that lead to the best ending offer replayability. There’s an Easy mode. Cons: Pretty much everything it keeps. The power-ups for the whip that you lose on hit (except in easy mode). The slow, plodding Belmont pimp-walk and the hard-to-control jumping. The special powers that use too many hearts for their limited utility. (And the lack of classic subweapons.)
Vice: Project Doom (NES, Replayed on Nestopia) - I think this is my favorite of the balls-hard Ninja Gaiden style platformers. (I can’t beat it without cheat codes/save states, mind you.) I like the shoot-em-up car levels and the FPS shooting gallery levels that mix things up; I like the weapon variety; and I particularly like the way the story is doled out in fragments to (as I noted when I replayed Ninja Gaiden III) every time you succeed in getting through another level, you get another revelation of the story. Mutagenic drug produced by aliens all the way through the reveal that the main character is a clone with a mysterious destiny. Crazy stuff!
New Super Mario Land (SNES Homebrew, Played on SNES-9X) - Clearly trying to be faithful to the original level design with graphics that are trying to look like New SMB and end up looking more like a wobbly Yoshi’s Island. The hitboxes are wonky, mercy invulnerability is very short, and Mario’s sprite regularly overlaps with pipes and blocks. There’s a wall-slide and wall-jump mechanic that honestly isn’t very helpful, because it fights both my reflexes for Super Mario Land and for New SMB. (I can beat SML in about 20 minutes. I needed save-states for this because everything was so dang wobbly.) I applaud that somebody put this together, but it’s not a particularly good game all told.
CIMA: The Enemy (GBA, Played on ReGBA on RG350) - This was made by Neverland/Natsume, who were responsible for the Lufia series. And every time I try a non-Lufia game by them I think “This was creative and pretty and really not so good.” I was drawn in by the fact that it’s an action-rpg in a world where monsters called CIMA drag people through Gates into a magical world where they can give them hope and then steal their life-force. Unfortunately, in practice, this game is “Escort Mission: The Game.” You have a herd of 14 people (who only move one at a time and have horrible pathfinding) who you need to get safely from one end of the dungeon to the other. The tutorial dungeon was tooth-grindingly slow as each person crawled their way to get set-point and you…mostly just waited. I’m reminded of when I tried Energy Breaker in 2013 (by the same team) and found that it was a tactical rpg with a lot of potential hobbled by a slow and clunky interface and lack of useful explanations of how to play.
Kabuki: Quantum Fighter (NES, Replayed on Nestopia) - Very much the same game as Ninja Gaiden, but with a much more bonkers premise: A computer program has gone rogue, as Colonel Scott must have his mind transferred into the computer to fight it, and he takes the form of a kabuki dancer who whips monsters with his hair. The plot actually stays pretty much on-point from there, with the military scientists directing Scott between the areas to defeat the program’s defenses and self-destruct a weapons satellite that the program has taken over. There are only five areas and a final battle, which is kind of a relief given the nastiness of some of the areas and the simplicity of the plot. Also, the ice physics in this game are some of weirdest I’ve ever encountered.
Little Samson (NES, Played on Nestopia) - The first four stages are a prologue, where you play each of the four characters and then are gathered by the king. (The boss of that area is the dragon character, who needs to be beaten by Samson in order to join them.) Then you do the real stages, where you can switch between the characters. (You can beat most levels just with Samson, but the other characters often make it easier. And this game does get, like many NES games, REALLY hard. But it does have passwords, which is nice given how long it is.) Shockingly little knockback, which is wonderful for the era and the genre. I’ll admit to having no idea how the map works, since you seem to go looping around it in no particular order until the last few stages. This was a particularly late NES game (1992), and while it isn’t worth the thousands of dollars collectors pay for the cart, it’s solid.
Vice: Project Doom (NES, Replayed on Nestopia) - I think this is my favorite of the balls-hard Ninja Gaiden style platformers. (I can’t beat it without cheat codes/save states, mind you.) I like the shoot-em-up car levels and the FPS shooting gallery levels that mix things up; I like the weapon variety; and I particularly like the way the story is doled out in fragments to (as I noted when I replayed Ninja Gaiden III) every time you succeed in getting through another level, you get another revelation of the story. Mutagenic drug produced by aliens all the way through the reveal that the main character is a clone with a mysterious destiny. Crazy stuff!
New Super Mario Land (SNES Homebrew, Played on SNES-9X) - Clearly trying to be faithful to the original level design with graphics that are trying to look like New SMB and end up looking more like a wobbly Yoshi’s Island. The hitboxes are wonky, mercy invulnerability is very short, and Mario’s sprite regularly overlaps with pipes and blocks. There’s a wall-slide and wall-jump mechanic that honestly isn’t very helpful, because it fights both my reflexes for Super Mario Land and for New SMB. (I can beat SML in about 20 minutes. I needed save-states for this because everything was so dang wobbly.) I applaud that somebody put this together, but it’s not a particularly good game all told.
CIMA: The Enemy (GBA, Played on ReGBA on RG350) - This was made by Neverland/Natsume, who were responsible for the Lufia series. And every time I try a non-Lufia game by them I think “This was creative and pretty and really not so good.” I was drawn in by the fact that it’s an action-rpg in a world where monsters called CIMA drag people through Gates into a magical world where they can give them hope and then steal their life-force. Unfortunately, in practice, this game is “Escort Mission: The Game.” You have a herd of 14 people (who only move one at a time and have horrible pathfinding) who you need to get safely from one end of the dungeon to the other. The tutorial dungeon was tooth-grindingly slow as each person crawled their way to get set-point and you…mostly just waited. I’m reminded of when I tried Energy Breaker in 2013 (by the same team) and found that it was a tactical rpg with a lot of potential hobbled by a slow and clunky interface and lack of useful explanations of how to play.
Kabuki: Quantum Fighter (NES, Replayed on Nestopia) - Very much the same game as Ninja Gaiden, but with a much more bonkers premise: A computer program has gone rogue, as Colonel Scott must have his mind transferred into the computer to fight it, and he takes the form of a kabuki dancer who whips monsters with his hair. The plot actually stays pretty much on-point from there, with the military scientists directing Scott between the areas to defeat the program’s defenses and self-destruct a weapons satellite that the program has taken over. There are only five areas and a final battle, which is kind of a relief given the nastiness of some of the areas and the simplicity of the plot. Also, the ice physics in this game are some of weirdest I’ve ever encountered.
Little Samson (NES, Played on Nestopia) - The first four stages are a prologue, where you play each of the four characters and then are gathered by the king. (The boss of that area is the dragon character, who needs to be beaten by Samson in order to join them.) Then you do the real stages, where you can switch between the characters. (You can beat most levels just with Samson, but the other characters often make it easier. And this game does get, like many NES games, REALLY hard. But it does have passwords, which is nice given how long it is.) Shockingly little knockback, which is wonderful for the era and the genre. I’ll admit to having no idea how the map works, since you seem to go looping around it in no particular order until the last few stages. This was a particularly late NES game (1992), and while it isn’t worth the thousands of dollars collectors pay for the cart, it’s solid.
