The Closeout Warrior

Here’s a review that appeared on this site in May of 2005.

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I really wanted to like Sword of Mana. Secret of Mana is one of my all time favorite Super NES games, and I figured that this game should be a worthy successor since it shares the ‘of Mana’ surname. Oh, how wrong can I be?

Sword of Mana was apparently released some years ago for the original Game Boy system as Final Fantasy Adventure. When it was remade and rereleased for the Game Boy Advance, it kept the original Sword of Mana name. Confused yet? If not, continue on.

There are actually two story lines in this game: one for each of the main characters. Which one you choose will determine what your perspective is watching the events of the story play out. Supposedly to get the whole story you need to play through the game with each of the characters. They even provide you with two save slots to do it.

The game is graphically similar to it’s (supposed) Secret of Mana cousin. Several of the creatures even look like they were lifted right out of the Super Nintendo game and plunked down into this one.

Levelling up in this game is a bit of a departure. You do not simply level up as the game progresses. When the time comes for you to gain a level, you choose what job you want to level up from the ones available to ‘customize’ your character. Interesting.

One of the things not explained very well in the manual or in the game is the passage of time. Every time you transition from screen to screen, part of a day will pass. When you enter the next outdoor area it will stop the action to tell what time/day it is. Every time.

You will do your adventuring either alone or with the other main character. If you are alone and run out of health points, it’s Game Over. I’m a big boy, I can accept that. If, however, you are grouped with the other protagonist and you run out of health, it’s Game Over regardless of how much health the other character has and whether or not you have Bring Back To Life items in your inventory. So if you take control of the ditzy computer controlled player who got stuck between two trees and the Artificial NonIntelligence runs your main character into the gaping maw of a Pain Elemental, it’s Game Over and you didn’t even get to see what happened.

So we have a mediocre game that would probably be a decent time-waster if it weren’t for that annoying ‘main character dies and it’s Game Over’ thing. Playing a ten or fifteen minute segment four or five times in a row because your partner got stuck behind a curve in the path and couldn’t heal you grossly extends this game beyond fun and into the realm of tedious.

Game Name: Sword of Mana
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Purchased from: Toys ‘R’ Us
Amount of money I wasted on it: $6.42
One word summary: Brain-Lock

I picked up Gargoyle’s Quest at one of my local used video game shops for a paltry sum. I didn’t really know what it was all about, I had only seen some screen shots in a couple of magazines. What I did know was that it was a vaguely RPG-ish game with the main character as a gargoyle. Awesome.

I never had a manual or anything for the game, and never bothered to look up the game later, but from what I can gather, the story goes something like this: Firebrand, our hero, has to travel back to the ‘Ghoul Realm’ and stop Breager, who is some kind of Demon-king… guy.

The game mixes up side-scrolling action sequences with traditional RPG overworld elements. Pretty much all the action takes place in these side-scrolling stages. Firebrand’s problem is that he starts out super weak. He can spit tiny fire-marbles, and can fly just barely further than he can jump. To counteract this, he has to fight impossibly large and mobile monsters to get various candles and claws to increase his attributes. How a candle makes him fly further, I haven’t determined.

The only problem I really had with this game is that it was pretty short. I played through it enough times that I was able to blow through it in less than an hour. Still, it was a pretty fun hour.

This review originally appeared on this site in June of 2005. I’ve brought it back from the dead to haunt your dreams once more.

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I hate to spoil the review this early on, but The Ripping Friends sucks. If you are unfortunate enough to acquire a copy of this game, I advise you to put in the ‘Unlock Everything’ code (Right, L, Up, Down, B, Left, Left, Right, Left), play each level of the game for a few minutes and then either burn the game down or pass it along to one of your friends/relatives like that fruitcake nobody seems to want.

This game is based on the short-lived animated series of the same name, and about the same grade. In the videogame adventure you take one of the four brothers on several (six) missions to save the city/world/solar system from some of the baddies in the show. Typical stuff.

There’s very little that I can say good about this game, so let’s start off with what I found to be… well… not so good with it:

The game sounds terrible. The majority of the people in the game (including your characters) have the same generic “AAHH!” sound when you kill them. The music is catchy in the way where it sticks in your head and just won’t leave. It makes me want to turn up everything else in the house in the hopes that something else will get stuck in there and drive out the horrible sounds this game makes my Game Boy emit.

The game itself is tedium defined. Playing this game is as simple as staying in one room (area, whatever) while waves of enemies come at you (usually only a few at a time) until you’ve defeated enough so that the doors open and you can look around the labyrinthine levels to try and figure out where to go next. You do have a radar at your disposal, and it helpfully points to the direction of the nearest enemy for you to go and dispatch. If said enemy is on another screen, however, the radar quickly loses any effectiveness it might have otherwise had.

You can only have a maximum of 3 lives in this game. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t any extra lives in this game, because they’re just about everywhere. You are only allowed to pick one up, though, if you’ve got less than three lives left.

The ‘Combo’ system is alluded to in the instruction manual a few times, but is never actually explained. Anywhere. Supposedly there is a way to induce a manly amount of pain on the unsuspecting hordes of similarly dressed clones, but the most I could manage was two hits in a row. Fighting the majority of the enemies (except for the bosses) goes something like this: Punch once, enemy falls down for 2 seconds, enemy gets up and is invincible for 2 seconds, punch enemy and he falls down for 2 seconds, etc., etc. This game might have been slightly less unbearable had I been able to plow through more than 3 enemies every 5 minutes.

The four Ripping Friends are identical as far as I could tell except for two things: they look different from each other, and they each have different ’special’ moves. The only special move really worth anything is Chunk’s, since it restores some of his health. You can pull off your special move after you fill up your ‘manliness meter’ by doing the alleged combos alluded to earlier, or just holding the ‘B’ button down for about 5 seconds.

The best thing about this game is that it came with a free Ripping Friends poster. Sure the show was bad and the game was on par with the show, but you get a double-sided poster in the box!

Game Name: The Ripping Friends
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Purchased from: EB Games
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99
One word summary: Pitiful

Our trip down memory lane continues with this review from July 2005. Enjoy!

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It seems like game companies, when strapped for new ideas, will take some scoops out of the pile of their old steaming crap, package them together with something recognizable, and then release it as a ‘retro’ collection. Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced comes with six games: Frogger, Gyruss, Time Pilot, Scramble, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and Rush’n Attack. Each of these games is identical to their arcade counterparts, for good or ill. By putting in the Konami Code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A) you can access something different in each game, ranging from Improved Graphics(tm) to Extra Lives(tm). If you’ve played any of these games in their arcade forms, then you know full well what to expect here. The only difference here is that you don’t have to bring a stack of quarters with you to play.

Frogger

I’ve never liked Frogger. I’ve played several versions of this supposed classic, and I just can’t get into it. I understand that there are fans of the game out there, and if you are one of them, then you might consider getting this collection for this game alone. If you’re like me, however, you’ll look for something else. Your goal in this game is to get your frog (who can’t swim) across a busy highway and then across a busy river, picking up girl frogs and flies along the way. Fairly simplistic by today’s standards, but so were most of the games at the time.

Gyruss

For those who’ve never heard of Gyruss (don’t worry, I never heard of it either until I got this collection) the game plays a lot like Galaga with the exception that your ship can move along all four sides of the screen. Enemy ships will come out from the center in waves, eventually landing in a formation where they will peel off and attack your ship. While playing the game, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had ‘been there, done that.’

Time Pilot

In Time Pilot, you have to take your craft through the unfriendly skies shooting down enemies and rescuing parachuters. Do this enough times, and you can go along to the next era of war and get updated ships. I found the game to be a little slow for my tastes.

Scramble

What is up with the flying games? In the third flying game, your goal is to go through a tunnel and shoot the enemy missles, ships, miscellaneous gee-gaws, and fuel tanks. Shooting the fuel tanks will replenish your fuel supply (obviously) and will allow you to continue on your quest to rid the caverns of their missle problem. This game tries really hard to be fun. It has the constantly-draining fuel mater, the ability for you to shoot in two directions (straight ahead and in an arc downward), and wave upon wave of easily destructible foes. The main problem that I found with this game is the lack of action. The missles come from the ground fairly slowly, and the enemy ships just kind of hang out in their predetermined flight paths. The game just turns tedious right away.

Yie Ar Kung Fu

Proto-fighting game Yie Ar Kung Fu should be one of the stand-out games of this collection. It should be one of the games that makes this package, but it’s probably the game I spent the least amount of time with. Perhaps it’s my lack of experience with the game talking here, but I couldn’t find very much to like about it. I cut my fighting-game teeth on Street Fighter II, so perhaps I’m spoiled. The moves in this game are fairly easy to pull off (e.g. push a direction and press a button) and the fighters control well enough. I was just left wanting more.

Rush ‘N’ Attack

Rush’n Attack is one of those classic action games. Your goal is simple and to the point: “Save the Prisoners of War!”. You are a soldier who can take one hit going up against waves of heavily armed enemies (who, thankfully, also can take only one hit) in your quest to protect freedom for another day. This game is sickeningly hard (or I’m sickeningly bad at it) since enemies are placed such that if you don’t have perfect timing/precision, you’re toast. The amount of cheap kills in this game is staggering. This game (along with Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Frogger) is one of the primary reasons to own this collection.

The only extra feature worth mentioning is the multiplayer. You can play multiplayer versions of the games provided that you have another Game Boy and a link cable (only one copy of the game is required). These games are definitely more fun when you can get someone else in on the action and they’re simple enough that it’s extremely easy to just jump in and play if you’ve never tried any of them before. Once again we have a compilation that takes some mediocre, mixes it with some stuff nobody’s heard of, and manages to throw in a couple of extras. Had this collection been more than Konami’s B-list arcade games, it might not have been so bad, but as it stands, it’s just OK.

Game Name: Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Purchased from: EBGames
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99
One word summary: Passable

It’s always refreshing to come across a puzzle game that doesn’t involve sorting things that inexplicably fall from the sky. Picross has you using your brain to uncover a hidden picture.

Picross takes place on a grid. For every row and column on the grid, there is a series of numbers like “4 2 3″. These numbers tell you that there is a stretch of four continuous squares filled in, some amount of blank space, two more squares filled in, some more blank space, and then three squares in a row filled in. You have to use your ‘logic’ to determine which squares to fill in. Your result is a nice little picture of some sort.

Your only tools, besides your brain, are the ability to mark (or unmark) a square that you don’t want to fill in, and the ability to fill in a square. You want to make absolutely sure that you are filling in the right square, because every wrong square you chip away will remove precious minutes on the clock. You run out of minutes, and you get to start the puzzle again.

Oh, and for some reason, Mario’s an archaeologist. I kind of just don’t pay attention to that.

There is an insane number of puzzles to be had in this game. I spent several dozen hours with this thing, and only managed to complete about half of the puzzles. I still pick it back up every now and again to do a few more puzzles. It’s got some got some pretty good staying power, I’m just kind of disappointed that none of the other games in the series managed to make it to my collection.

When it comes to playing video games, my Mom is the epitome of a casual player. She loves the kinds of games that she can just pick up and play for a few minutes in between the few thousand things that she has to do every day. So I was a little surprised when she spent just about as much time with my Game Boy as I did on the Christmas Morning that I got it. But I was even more surprised later on when she decided to play through my copy of Metroid II.

I don’t really remember why or when she decided that she wanted to play it, but it was shortly after I got the issue of Nintendo Power that featured maps to the whole game. I would sit with the magazine splayed open and take on the function of Navigator while she would play the actual game. We spent many afternoons that summer with this setup, and she would eventually make it through the whole game.

So, the game itself? Well, it picks up where the original Metroid game left off: You’re intergalactic bounty-hunter Samus Aran, who travels to planet SR-388 to rid the universe of the Metroids for good. You navigate the twisty passages, all alike, finding upgrades to your weapons and bounty-hunter suit, and killing the remaining Metroids, which are inexplicably mutating into various dangerous forms.

It’s a very good game, and totally Mom-approved.