Archive for February, 2008

Newer Entries »

Gauntlet

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

The NES and Arcade versions of Gauntlet are kind of the same, and yet a bit different. They both make you take charge of a warrior, valkyrie, magician, or elf and traipse around a series of dungeon rooms, killing what eventually feels like millions of monsters. The main difference, though, is that in the arcade version the game goes on for as long as you have quarters and in the NES version you have a definite goal and an end-game.

Your goal is to navigate the labyrinthine gauntlet, slay the dragon, and open the mysterious vault to save the kingdom. What’s in the vault? I don’t really remember, mostly because I never had a manual to this game and I didn’t make it very far.

The kicker to this game is that to get the secret combination to win the game you have to go through a series of secret rooms, and the way to said rooms is usually in a pretty non-obvious location. Maybe in a breakable wall, maybe in a breakable wall that you can’t tell is breakable, maybe it’s one particular exit in a cluster of half a dozen exits, or maybe something else. Oh, and the combination changes each time you play. You don’t have to find the combination, of course, but if you don’t and you manage to make it to the end of the game, well then you lose. The game likes to play with your head… which, if I had complete control over a game’s design, I’d probably make mine do the same thing.

I guess it kind of goes without saying that I never finished this game, never even came close. I played it off and on for a couple of Summers before I found my first digit of the combination, and then realized that I had to find a combination. I don’t really know how people were supposed to figure this crap out. Especially in the days before the Internet cheat sites.

The main thing I liked about this game was the music. It’s definitely got some of the better examples of chiptunes on the old NES, and is certainly in my top few for the system.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Xenophobe

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Xenos are apparently aliens and in this game you take charge of some kind of alien exterminator and have to kill lots of them. Why? They’ve invaded a series of space stations, that’s why!

There isn’t really much story to this game other than the above. You and up to two buddies have to make your way through a series of increasingly complex space stations and kill the marauding within, and you’re up against a time limit (self-destruct, don’t you know) it’s pretty generic as far as that goes, but what’s really kind of nice about this game is that though three people can play at the same time they don’t have to be in the same room at the same time. The screen is divided into thirds and each person is free to go wherever he wants.

xenophobe

This game is mildly distracting for a few minutes. It’s kind of fun running around shooting aliens, but it gains quite a bit more fun when you have one or even two more people working together with you to clear out the infestations.

And who says playing video games isn’t a social activity.

Posted in Arcade | 1 Comment »

Tetris DS

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

By now we all know about Tetris: arrange blocks to form lines, simple but addictive gameplay, yadda yadda. The game’s longevity and the sheer amount of Tetris clones out there are a testament to its design. So to keep milking that cow you’re going to want it available on as many platforms as possible. But you have to make it new, exciting, and, if possible, shiny!

Tetris DS starts out normal enough, it’s got the standard brick-stacking mode, but this time with old Nintendo characters cavorting on the top screen. Keen!

But the meat of the single player game comes in the other modes. Mission mode, for example, tasks you with clearing lines a certain way in the time allotted to slay some Zelda enemies. Though I swear some of the challenges on the later levels are impossible. Then there’s Catch mode where you have a puzzle floating through space and you have to crash it into other pieces, some with explosives on them, and blow up the bricks… This mode is very boring, I played it about twice. Push mode has you and an opponent on opposite sides of the same puzzle area, and each time you clear two or more lines it shoves the puzzle slightly closer to your opponent. Make it cross their ‘danger’ zone and you win! This mode is actually pretty fun, especially if you have an actual person to play against. Puzzle mode is pretty tame. You have a pre-set puzzle and a few blocks to place to try and clear the whole screen, but you can undo as many times as you want, so you’ll go through the permutations pretty fast. Touch mode has a giant tower of blocks and you have to use the stylus to move them around and clear lines. This one takes a bit more thinking than the other modes, but is still distracting for a while.

But, oh man, the game has Wi-Fi capabilities. What this means is that now, when you need to get your Tetris fix you can hop online and search for a random opponent. And there is always someone way better than you just waiting to give you a savage beat down. I can’t decide if I was more jazzed about the ability to play against four friends at once or that I could play against someone if I’m anywhere in the world that has an Internet hot-spot.

This game is, so far, my favorite implementation of the series. I’ve got my $30 out of it several times over.

Posted in DS | No Comments »

Wire Hang Redux

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Wire Hang Redux is supposedly a remake of the original Wire Hang game, at least that’s what the website says. I never really heard of it until I heard of this game, so we’ll accept that.

The game is a little weird. You have to use your grapple to ascend a never ending sky full of floating platforms. The higher you go, the more points you get. You also get bonuses if you make your grapple line longer or recover (fall just off the bottom of the screen and then save yourself), but you also risk falling off the bottom of the screen and losing the game. You only get one life, so that becomes fairly important.

wire hang redux

I like this game because it’s simple to control, you only use the left mouse button; it can be picked up quickly, you can learn to play in minutes; and it will run on just about any computer that will also run Windows (sorry Mac guys, Linux Guys, and the two Sun users out there). If you’ve got a few minutes to burn you might want to give the game a shot, and you can do that here.

Posted in PC, Windows | No Comments »

Moto Racer

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

I don’t really get into most racing games, especially the ones that strive for realism. Of course, I don’t really know if Moto Racer is realistic or not, my knowledge of motorcycle racing is limited to what I’ve been able to glean from those reality shows where people crash a lot. Nevertheless, I played this game a bit because I had just gotten one of my first 3D video cards for my PC (a lovely Riva TNT card), and it was packed in to show off what 3D could look like.

Unfortunately, it turns out that I’m really bad at racing virtual motorcycles.

Shortly after I played this game I got really bored playing it the ‘right’ way. So I started driving around the courses and seeing how fast I could go before I crashed. Then I bought Final Fantasy VIII. And then I never played this game again.

Posted in PC, Windows | No Comments »

Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself)

Monday, February 4th, 2008

Meetings are pretty much the bane of anyone stuck in the corporate world… or so I understand. I don’t really go to them myself. It seems that in this particular simulator of Cube Life your character has had enough of attending boring meetings and when the latest mandatory invite comes in he decides to kill himself rather than attend. So you have five minutes to wander around the office and do enough damage to kill yourself before the meeting starts otherwise you’ll be attending it and be bored senseless.

5 Minutes

This game is actually a lot harder than it sounds initially. You’d think that stabbing yourself in the stomach with a pair of scissors or running your face through a couple of paper shredders would do the trick, but you’d be mistaken. But they do move the process along. It’s actually quite the challenge to off yourself in the time allotted and with the apparently extremely safe office you’re in. But the truly dedicated, the ones that persevere will find a way, they always do.

Can you?

You can try for yourself here.

Posted in PC | No Comments »

Banjo-Tooie

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

The ending of Banjo-Kazooie fairly strongly hinted that there would be a sequel. In fact, it outright showed some pictures and told you that the stuff in them will be in the next game. One of the things in the ending that was really intriguing, at least to me, was that there were some items in the first game that were completely unaccessible, but the ending showed clips of Banjo collecting them, hinting that they would be used somehow in the next game.

A couple of years later I bought the sequel, eagerly anticipating getting the tantalizingly out of reach items from the first game and then somehow use them for goodies in the second game, but it was not to be. The feature was axed from the game, and without any word from the developers nobody really knows what the plan was or what kind of things were to be unlocked. Ah well.

It turns out, however, that the second game in the series is fun in its own right, so that lessened the blow considerably.

Banjo-Tooie is a lot like the first game. You take control of a bear and the bird that lives in his backpack and have to get puzzle pieces to progress, sometimes getting transformed into various creatures to do so, and the story culminates with a battle with Gruntilda (the villain of the first game) and her sisters. Only this time the duo can separate, gaining new moves, and you can occasionally control Mumbo (the witch doctor from the first game).

Oh, and occasionally you get into an area where the bear wields the bird like a shotgun, shooting eggs from her mouth. Which I found to be kind of out of place, but not off-puttingly so.

I liked this game about as much as I did the first one, and was pretty disappointed that Rare kind of quit making this series (though rumblings of a third game are starting to make the rounds). And if the only problem that I can find is that it didn’t link up with its predecessor like it was supposed to, then I’d say that’s pretty minor and still a winner.

Posted in N64 | No Comments »

Wario Ware: Mega Partygame$

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

The original Wario Ware game was pretty fun, but one problem with it was that it was for one player only. So, take the original game, which is already a bunch of little games wrapped up in a big game, and wrap it in yet another game, add four player support, and you have the makings for a pretty interesting party game.

The game features several short games where each of up to four people compete by playing the microgames. Let’s say, for example, that you’re playing the Disco game. Up to four people choose characters, and are each assigned a stage in a disco complete with cheering onlookers. Every so often a spotlight shines on one of them (or sometimes all of them) and the selected person has to play a game. They win and they continue, but things go a little faster. They lose and some of their crowd goes away. Lose all of their crowd and they are out.

This game is really well suited to parties. It’s the kind of game that you can pick up and play without really knowing what’s going on. It even auto-adjusts the game and makes itself harder for the better players and easier for the less experienced folks. And then you have the ‘Listen to the Doctor’ game where the doctor gives you some action to perform while you’re doing the game, like singing a song or with the controller on the floor in front of you. The other players are supposed to applaud based on how well you followed the doctor’s instructions, whether you finished the microgame or not is pretty much irrelevant, and certainly evens the playing field quite a bit.

I got a lot of use out of this disc and still break it out on occasion when the opportunity presents itself, and even though it’s pretty much a rehash of the Game Boy game it’s got the multiplayer which totally saves it and makes it a lot of fun… if you have people around. Otherwise you’re better off with the portable offering.

Posted in GameCube | No Comments »

ChoRenSha 68K

Friday, February 1st, 2008

Shoot ‘em ups (colloquially referred to as ’shmups’) are a lot the same: you have a vehicle of some kind (usually one that flies) that’s extremely maneuverable yet extremely fragile. You have to take this vehicle up against a ludicrous amount of enemies, and use your extreme maneuverability to pierce their defenses and kill them all. This typically requires you to have pinpoint reflexes, extremely quick reflexes, and a bit of memorization of the enemies’ attacks.

ChoRenSha 68K is a throwback to some of the classic shooters. There’s no story (that I know of), just your ship flying through space shooting and trying to kill lots of enemy ships. And it’s hard. Real hard.

This game was too hard for me, but I’m admittedly a wimp at shooting games like this. The main reason I picked it up was that it was free to download, free to play, and not half bad to boot. An odd combination, really. This game looks almost professional quality, which is quite impressive for a game that takes up less than 2MB of hard drive space. You can download it and give it a try here.

Posted in DOS, PC | 1 Comment »

Newer Entries »