I like to think that I’m no longer lured into playing a game simply because it has good graphics, or comparatively good graphics, rather. In just about every magazine I could get my hands on, Equinox looked pretty, and just about every other word in the previews and reviews were about how great the game was, how similar it was to Solstice for the NES (which I’ve still never played), and how awesome of a game that was. So when I found it in my local game rental store, I had to give it a try.
It turns out that the hero of the first game has been kidnapped by an evil wizard of some sort, and you, as his son, have to solve a series of puzzles in various wells to save him. I tend to begin wondering if all wizards are this obtuse, but we can have discuss that another time.
Inside each well is a series of rooms, filled with monsters, blocks, and sharp things. Your goal is to, I think, go through the rooms and find some tokens. Find all the tokens and you fight the boss character for that particular dungeon-well. Clear all the dungeon-wells and you win! I guess.
I can only guess at that because I didn’t make much progress in this game. It’s presented in this isometric pseudo-3d perspective, which looks pretty good, given the hardware. The problem I ran into was that I have a really hard time figuring out where things are in relation to each other in the fake 3d space. I frequently couldn’t tell if the Spiky Ball of Doom was floating above my head and one space away or if it was just two spaces away. This led to a lot of missed jumps, and a lot of ouchies for my little shirtless guy.
I played this game for a couple of hours the weekend I rented it, but just kept failing at jumps that I thought I should be making thanks to the wonky perspective. Frustration usually doesn’t make a particularly fun game, so I took it back to the rental store. And while I’d love to say that from that moment on I decided to never again be swayed by good graphics, my personal history would argue otherwise.
[...] more attention to the games I buy, even if they are cheaper than $10. But I’m a sucker for good graphics, and occasionally compelling box art. And it’s good to play games that I don’t like [...]