It should be pretty obvious by now that I have an unhealthy affinity for puzzle games, specifically puzzle games that have you arranging things that are falling into some kind of container. So when I saw that I could get two of my favorites for $20, I was pretty well obligated to seize the opportunity.
Tetris & Dr. Mario is, fairly obviously, a combination of the two titular games, with only minor graphical and audio upgrades. Single-player, multi-player, it’s all the same, really. But the real draw is what’s called ‘mixed mode’. In mixed mode you and another player compete in a little Tetris, a little Dr. Mario, and then a little more Tetris. This alone justified the purchase for me.
If nothing else, the game’s just a way to have two puzzlers in one convenient package. And, since everyone knows how to play Tetris, and nearly everyone knows how to play Dr. Mario, it’s pretty easy to pick up and play, too. Bonus.
It’s true, I’m one of the few folks that bought a Nintendo 64 and didn’t buy Goldeneye. The game that I heard time and again was the greatest game on the console. The game that I still hear about today when fans talk about what game they’d most like to see on the Virtual Console or Xbox Live Arcade. Of course, neither of those things is likely to happen, and that suits me fine.
Goldeneye follows the plot of the Goldeneye James Bond movie, which I also haven’t seen. But the gist of the game is that you go through the various parts of the movie through the eyes of Mr. Bond himself completing whatever ridiculous objectives are thrown in your way.
I played the demo of this game a few times, and just couldn’t get into it. The big problem that I had was that the controls were a little wonky. I just couldn’t wrap my head around trying to move around with one thumb and aiming with the other. I just found it clunky, and not a lot of fun when I was dieing all the time.
But people assure me that it’s the finest Nintendo 64 game ever made. That it’s the best example of blocky guys shooting each other with heavy artillery you can find on the console, or possibly any console before or since. Which are both statements that I can’t really endorse, at least not while my palm lies here ungreased.
A while back I mentioned that I really liked Tetris Attack, the game about matching up puzzle pieces to make them disappear from a steadily rising stack. A few years later and I would find out that a similar-but-not-quite-the-same game was making the rounds called Meteos.
Meteos, like Tetris Attack, has a grid of multi-colored blocks that you have to manipulate in such a way that three or more of the same color are lined up together. In Tetris Attack the pieces disappear, but in Meteos the matched pieces start to fly off the top of the screen, taking any on top of them with them. But the key gameplay difference is that in Tetris Attack you can only move your pieces left and right, but in Meteos you can only move them up and down.
There’s a story mode that tries to help explain the story behind the game, something about multicolored meteors plummeting onto the planet and you having to match them up to send them back into the ether, but it’s really mostly unnecessary. It just kind of gives you an excuse for the space-themed backdrops and characters.
I really should have liked this game a whole lot, given that I like Tetris Attackand its derivativesso much. But I guess that my mind is set against trying to play the game in a way where I have to think along the y-axis instead of the x-axis. And as a result, the only time I played this game, I did really poorly at it. Couple that with the fact that one of the people I was playing the game with was able to get a degree of success by scribbling on the screen, kind of made me suspect its worth as a puzzler.
But maybe I’m being too hard on it. Maybe it is a great, awesome, compelling, and addictive game. But I have no desire to play it any more to find out.
It’s weird. I like to think that I have a pretty firm grip on what kinds of games I’ll like. I also like to think that I can see through the layers of crap I find on the various websites and can distill it down to get to the information that I really need. So, for weeks I found information floating around the Internet telling me that Every Extend was a pretty good game, and for some reason, I believed it.
Every Extend is a game about blowing stuff up, which is normally pretty awesome. You slowly travel down a tunnel and have to blow yourself up to destroy the enemies in the tunnel. Each time you blow up costs you a life, but if you take enough enemies with you, then you get an extra life. You continue on like this until you run out of lives.
Riveting.
The game’s original, I’ll give it that. But, unfortunately, in this case, ‘original’ means really boring. I played the game for about five minutes and got extremely bored. I’m not really sure how the folks behind this took all the fun out of recklessly blowing stuff up, but they sure did.
But, you don’t have to take my word for it. Download it and bore yourself if you have five minutes you don’t want back.
I never really was much of a horror movie person, so I probably should have known better than to try and play a game based on a horror movie, but I was young, and had played everything else at the rental store.
Friday the 13th takes place in a summer camp and follows the counselors as they try to defend the campers from Jason as he rampages around the campgrounds for some reason. I’m sure it would have made more sense to me if I’d seen the movie all the way through.
You have at your disposal several camp counselors, each with slightly differing abilities. Some are faster than others, some can jump higher, that kind of thing. You have to use them all to complete the objectives in this game, and since I never could manage the first one, I don’t know what happens after that.
See, you have to take your counselors around the camp lighting fires in all of the fireplaces in all the cabins. Thing is, though, that Jason could jump out and attack you at any time (assuming he’s offed enough campers), so you always have to be on your toes. Because, even if he can’t be killed for good, your guys can. Once they’re killed, they’re gone for good, and invariably it’s going to be the ones that move the fastest and jump the highest that you’re going to lose first.
This is one of the few games that really freaked me out a little bit. I think the real reason I was on edge all the time was because Jason was pretty scary to my preteen mind, and he could be literally anywhere at any time to jump out and attack you. So when you were running low on health (which I was a lot), meeting him was definitely not something that you wanted to happen. Now that I’m a bit older and (hopefully) more composed, I should probably try and play that game again. I doubt there’s going to be anything in there now that’s more creepy than the stuff I saw in Resident Evil.
If Dungeons & Dragons was too much game for you, I guess you could always go for Knights of the Round. It’s kind of the same thing but without all of the pesky details like inventory management. You just have to run to the right and slaughter the throngs of baddies that try to impede your progress.
You take control of either Arthur, Lancelot, or Perceval and try to defeat the forces of evil. I don’t really know much more about the story than that, though, but it seemed nebulous enough to me to make a passable game.
As you go to the right and beat up enemies, you will slowly gain experience points. Get enough experience points and you gain a level. Gain a level and you can take slightly more damage, get slightly better armor, and get a slightly more powerful weapon. And that’s just a fancy way of saying that you can kill stuff faster, which is good because they keep getting more and more health for you to whittle away.
I played this game several weekends in a row for three reasons. It was a pretty entertaining game to play with the full compliment of three players, we could finish it in about an hour, and it just so happens that the amount of tokens I could get at the arcade that housed the game (35 tokens for $5) was nearly exactly the amount that I needed to finish the game. The rest I blew on Fast Draw Showdown.
Fighting games are really just an excuse for two characters to get together and beat the pulp out of each other. All you need is a pretext to explain why the characters want to beat each other unconscious. Take X-Men, for example… Er… well, this game doesn’t really have much of a story. All that I could tell is that you take control of one of the X-Men or one of their enemies and have to defeat Magneto and stop his crazy ‘kill all of the non-mutants’ scheme. Now, why you have to fight the other mutants before you get to fight Magneto, I don’t know. Maybe you can think of them as his guardians or something. In fact, I’m sure if you think about it long enough, you can rationalize it somehow in some way that makes sense. I don’t have that kind of time.
I don’t pretend to know much about the X-Men universe outside of what I saw in the animated series, I never really was that into comics or anything, so I don’t really know that much about the characters or their motivations. But what I do know is that this was a pretty good game. It plays a lot like the Street Fighter game, but a lot more cartoony. The moves are a lot more exaggerated, and with the mutants’ superhuman abilities, the action goes way over the top.
But, I didn’t really spend a lot of time with this game. Mostly because it was in my local arcade for about three days. That particular arcade had a ridiculously high turnover rate for games for some reason. The downside to that is that I didn’t get very good at many games, because I didn’t get to spend time with them, but the upside is that I got to play lots of really mediocre games…
Pokémon Silver was a pretty good sequel to a pretty good game. A pretty good game with a pretty good companion game. So it only followed that Silver would have a companion game of its own.
Pokémon Stadium 2 is largely the same as the previous Stadium game, but with a few additions. Most of them are pretty minor, but the one that I was most interested in was the academy. There you were presented with lots of information on just about every aspect of the Pokémon universe. You have charts to show you what’s weak to what. You have lessons on all kinds of battling and breeding techniques (with some canned examples!). As well as detailed profiles of all of the little monsters. You’re going to get more information there than you every thought you’d need to know.
Like the prior game, you don’t get a lot out of this unless you have the accompanying portable title to go with it. It’s designed to be a companion game, so if you judge it purely on its own, then it kind of falls short; there’s just not that much for you to do in it. It’s only when you link to your portable full-on adventure game do you really get the full benefit of this game. And if you do, then it’s really fun and informative. Otherwise you’re going to have that blank “Is this all there is?” look on your face about ten minutes into it.
The original Pokémon game that I played was pretty fun, and I guess a few million people agreed with me. And what do you do when you have a wildly popular game? Why, make sequels of course!
Pokémon Silver (and Gold) is, essentially, the same as Pokémon Blue (and Red) with a couple of minor changes: it takes place in a new region to explore, the battle mechanics have been tweaked, there are several more creatures to fawn over, which can now breed somehow, and the landmass from the original game is included to go and explore.
The story is basically the same as the previous generation. You decide to set out in the world to become a Pokémon trainer, and along the way you cross paths with Team Rocket (still the bad guys) and foil whatever nefarious plans they concoct. But, ultimately, this game is largely the same as the older one. You still go around and have to find, capture, train, and fight your ultimate team of beasties and try to be the best.
I spent far too long with this game. The first one was really fun, and this one, being basically the same game but refined a little bit was just as fun. And since they put the people and places from the first game in this game, it just added icing to the cake. And the breeding thing? That was just weird, and you better believe that I spent hours upon hours mixing and matching Pokémon to create the ultimate team. Which I never was able to do, but I sure had fun trying.
The games in the SimCity series have steadily gotten more and more complicated. I understand it’s because the superfans of the series really like micromanaging every aspect of their little simulated people’s lives. So you keep getting more and more things that you can do, which means that you have more and more things to think about as you’re mayoring in your city. First you have to create appropriate zones, then you have to give them power, then they want water, then they want roads, then they want highways, then they want a place to stash their trash, and etc., etc., etc. Your Sims are very needy.
And you, as mayor have to do absolutely everything by yourself, while listening to your advisors, of course. Or you could do what I did and completely ignore them, build the city however you want, and then watch as nobody moves in, you run out of money and the game ends.
But assuming you do manage to make a city that people want to live in you have gobs of information at your fingertips, hidden away in all kinds of menus. You can see where the traffic’s congested the most, you can see who does and doesn’t have water service, or how your rating as mayor is, or where the crime is, or where sphere of influence is for the various schools in your city, or lots more stuff.
The game is really just more of a refinement of SimCity 3000, which was a refinement of SimCity 2000, which was a refinement of the original game. And each time they make a new iteration of the game, they pile on more stuff to do and to manage, which is fine for the really hardcore city manager types, but kind of overwhelming for a neophyte. Heck, it was a lot for me to handle, and I’m an old hand at Simming around.
However, there were two things in particular that I did think were kind of neat about this game. First was that if you had a copy of The Sims on your computer, you could have one of your Sims from that game move into your city and tell you what he or she thinks of it. Then you kind follow what they do throughout the days and such. Kind of an interesting crossover.
The other thing, though, is the inclusion of Rush Hour. Rush Hour is essentially an expansion to the base SimCity 4 game that allows you as mayor to drive around your city to do silly little missions. The missions are pretty lame, and the vehicles are pretty well uncontrollable, but it kind of gives you some insight into how brilliantly or, in my case, how poorly the roads in your fair city are laid out.
There was just so much to do in this game that after about a dozen or so hours into it, tweaking the settings for the trash, the water, the police, the education system, zoning for more properties, poring over traffic density maps, stomping out fires, and so on, I just kind of got a case of ‘minutiae overload’ and I put the game up on the shelf in indefinite hiatus.