The Closeout Warrior

This is an article that originally appeared on this site in July of 2005. Enjoy!

Thankfully, this time it wasn’t.

Marble Blaster is a difficult game to describe if you haven’t played it or something similar. The game is marginally similar to Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball, so if you’ve gotten some play time with one or both of those titles under your belt, you’ll have a fairly good idea what’s going on here. If not, take heart that it’s not a terribly difficult game to just pick up and start playing. The gameplay goes something like this: you control a marble and have to navigate through the varying courses to the goal. Sounds simple and it is.

Controlling the marble is relatively straightforward. It uses the standard WASD control scheme used in many many PC games. The mouse is used to control the camera and the left mouse button uses the various powerups scattered throughout the courses. Easy enough.

The game looks about as good as can be expected. The marble has swirls of color on it, presumably so you can see it move. I don’t really have anything to compare the courses floating in the sky to, of course, but the visuals are acceptably represented. There’s not a lot of detail on any of the surfaces, which helps the system requirements for this game remain fairly low. This game will likely run on pretty well anything you have that has a 3D card in it.

One area where the game is a bit lacking is the sound. Sure, the game has sound, but… Here’s some key points about it:

1. The music fits, but is just kind of ‘there.’ Often it’ll just blend into the background and I’ll forget it’s even there.
2. The marble exhibits the same sound no matter what surface it’s rolling on. All the surfaces sound suspisiously like a marble rolling across a table.
3. There’s an announcer (with an oddly deep voice) that announces what powerup you picked up each and every time you do so. “SUPERBOUNCE!”

So what does all that add up to? We have a game with a simple, but not completely original concept that is engaging and easy to play. A game that doesn’t look horrible and sounds decent. To me that sounds like a winner… Or at least one that was worth the $5.00.

Game Name: Marble Blaster
Platform: PC
Purchased from: EB Games
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99
One word summary: Good! I know, I’m shocked too!

Today’s post is from one of the first games that I reviewed on the original version of this site. It was part of the genesis of the site itself. Enjoy!

Rayman. Wow. I don’t even know where to begin. My only experience with the Rayman franchise is on the demo disc that came with my Dreamcast. From that experience, I thought that the series could do at least one thing well: look really good.

The Good

Rayman Arena has been or will be released for just about every modern console on the planet. All the different versions, I imagine, are pretty close to the same, but I’m not going to compare them. I’d have to buy them all, or at the very least rent them all, and that’s not on the agenda. I checked it twice to be sure.

Rayman Arena plays as a pretty solid game. There are two modes to choose from: Race and Battle. In Race mode, you take control of one of the trademarked characters from the Rayman 2 universe and run around a track. The first to make 3 laps wins. Easy. I only played the first 3 race stages. By myself. The races themselves are nicely done. I enjoyed playnig the stages on practice mode, but got spanked when I tried to play against the computer. Battle mode is a little different. It’s 1v1 (or 1v1v1 [or 1v1v1v1]) with one of 3 goals: Grab the shiny thing (Lums), Beat Each Other Senseless, and Hold on to the Shiny Thing for as Long as Possible. Grab the Shiny Thing is pretty straightforward. The only weapon you get is the ice…something. It freezes your enemies in place for a few seconds. It’s borderline fun. Beat Each Other Senseless is a little more action oriented. Don’t go into the match expecting Unreal Tournament Deathmatch, and you won’t be horribly disappointed. Each of the players gets 5 ‘life points.’ Knock off all 5 of them and you get a point. 5 points wins. There’s weapons all over the place, but you won’t know what they are until you actually pick them up, so you will have a hard time staying away from the lamer items. I got bored before I played HOTTSTFALAP, so here’s a picture of me waking up at a LAN party.

Rayman Arena PC looks pretty decent. The game has modest enough system requirements that it will run well on a lot of computers. I poked around the menus for several minutes and couldn’t find a place to jack up the level of detail in the game. But as it is, it didn’t make my eyes run away in terror, so it’s acceptable.
The box for the game claims that it supports LAN play, but I couldn’t convince anyone else to get a copy, so I’ll just have to take the box’s word for it.

The Not So Good
Rayman Arena has an inconsistant control setup. why the designers decided that there should be one setup for Race and another for Battle is beyond me. I get used to one scheme, and then have to switch it up for the other mode. The designers were gracious enough to let you configure the controls to your liking, but using the mouse+keyboard combo, I couldn’t get them both to the same.

Rayman Arena also comes on two discs. No big deal, right? The copy-protection scheme, however introduces a whole host of headaches. Well, really just one. When you start the game, it does the obligatory CD check. But here’s the fun part: you have to put in both CDs. You can reduce this annoyance by putting the second CD in a second drive, but if you don’t have one… well, just get used to switching them out.

The Verdict

Overall, this game is not too bad. I’m sure if you had some friends with this game at a LAN party somewhere, it’d be a great way to pass a few minutes. I’ve played worse games. For that matter, I own worse games.

Title:Rayman Arena
By:Ubi Soft
Price I paid for it: $3.31
Price I would be willing to pay for it now: $3
Grade: 7 out of 10. This game would be a world better with a unified control shceme and without that annoying CD check.

Short and sweet impressions of a game I wrote about in 2003

That being said, there’s a place online where you can play a versoion of the ‘classic’ game that ‘hardcore’ ”gamers” still giggle about, Zork.

This is the first review I ever wrote for this site. It’s also just about the worst game I’ve ever played, strategy or otherwise. Playing this game was pretty much the genesis of the Review portion of this site.

Picture this: It’s the 44th century and things are going great. There’s no violence, and no crime. There’s only one problem with this Utopian existence. You’re bored. So bored that the only think that you find entertaining is watching people kill each other. That’s where the Nexagon: Deathmatch comes in. The Deathmatches feature convicts battling it out for the ultimate prize: freedom.

This game raises a lot of questions, like, “If there’s no crime, where do the convicts come from?” But those are questions that you don’t need to ask.

I had high hopes for Nexagon: Deathmatch, but I’m not sure why. The official website actually exists, and has some stuff to download, which is good. Even the opening movie (which you can download for free from your friend the Internet) is kind of neat.

The game itself, on the other hand, is another story.

Nexagon tries to be a combination of some Real Time Strategy game and Smash TV. So you not only have to stomp your opponents into the ground, but you have please the advertisers while you are doing so. Pleasing the advertisers is as simple as controlling a billboard (placed throughout the arenas) or buying little decorations for your Sanctum (your base). Of course, you also have to work out a budget to also buy more units. They may be convicts, but they don’t work for free.

Believe it or not, the actual gameplay is pretty pathetic. It consists of you giving your units the general idea of what you want them to do, and then they go over and only kind of do it. The gameplay is kept moving through the use of the automatic pause feature, that stops the game whenever something important happens (like your unit sees another unit). Once each side gets more than one unit on the field, you can imagine the fast-paced action when they start looking at each other.

Combat in this game is a little funky as well. When the units are walking to where I told them to go, and they get attacked, they dutifully keep going and won’t fire back until they get to wherever it is I told them to go. Bless them.

I only managed to play through the tutorial mode and part of the first map of campaign mode before the game mercifully killed itself off, so I’ll concede that I may not have gotten to the part of the game where I unlocked the Fun.

Everything is in 3D, and the Thralls look different enough that you can tell them apart from one another. Mostly. One of the features that the box boasts about over and over again is the ‘completely destructible 3D environment’ which is good, because I wanted to destroy everything about this game. The music is passable, but the announcers get old very quickly. They’re using their ‘DJ’ voice throughout the matches, I guess to simulate a television broadcast. The only thing it simulates is ‘Lame.’

OK, well, the game has a multiplayer feature, but I couldn’t use it. There were no servers up when I was playing the game, and I wasn’t going to make one of my friends blow the $2.99 plus tax on this game to try out the crappy multiplayer.

So what went wrong? The official site looked decent. The trailer looked OK. The testimonies from CDMag and DailyGame.net on the box were glowing (sort-of). Even the cover of the manual was printed in color.

I can certainly see why this game went from it’s original price of $39.99 to $2.99 since it’s original release in September 2003. I understand that there are a few people that actually ended up liking this game, and I feel sorry for them. If you have the opportunity to pass up this game, take it. Take it and run.

Game Name: Nexagon Deathmatch
Platform: PC
Purchased from: EB Games
Amount of money I wasted on it: $2.99
One word summary: “Pitiful”

This review originally appeared on this site in April of 2005.

Now… several… years later I discovered that in exchange for one portrait of Alexander Hamilton I can get an opportunity to play 15 of the games I never really got a chance to experience, and one game SEGA throws in with everything.

Sega Smash Pack Twin Pack features the following games faithfully emulated on your PC:

• Super Shinobi
• Vectorman
• Altered Beast
• Sonic Spinball
• Columns
• Outrun
• Phantasy Star 2
• Golden Axe
• Comix Zone
• Flicky
• Kid Chameleon
• Shining Force
• Vectorman 2
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2
• Super Hang On

The selection of games is interesting to say the least. There seems to be mostly “classic” games in this collection with relatively few games thrown in as “filler.” I do find it slightly odd that they included Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Phantasy Star 2, but not the progenitors of their respective series. The only real dog in this collection (besides Sega Swirl) is Flicky. All the other games in this collection are action/adventure games and Flicky plays more like a bizarre version of Mappy, which I never found to be terribly enjoyable.

I think I walked by a demo of Sonic 2 in a store once, and my memory of how that sounded is corroborated by how this version sounds, so I can assume that the sound for the rest of the games is emulated as flawlessly as can be expected. I didn’t really notice too much of a sound enhancement while playing these games with surround sound speakers.

Graphically the games look exactly as they should… if you stand about 15 feet away from your monitor. Playing low-resolution games on a high-resolution computer monitor makes it look like someone at Activision Value Publishing found a way to animate it using the tiles on my kitchen floor. Heavily detailed games like Comix Zone that would probably look fine if there were some way to zoom out end up looking like a Genesis threw up all over my screen.

If you”re going to be playing any of these games for any length of time (with the possible exception of Shining Force) you should do yourself a favor and get a game pad. In my experience, trying to play games designed for a pad with a keyboard just never translated well enough to be particularly enjoyable.

Game Name: Sega Smash Pack Twin Pack
Platform: PC
Purchased from: Target
Amount of money I wasted on it: $9.99
One word summary: “Acceptable”

This review originally appeared on this site in August of 2005, now revived for your reading pleasure.

Let’s take a look at the system requirements for this game:

• 450 MHz Pentium III or equivalent
• Windows 95/98/Me/XP
• 128MB RAM
• 100% DirectX 8.0a-Compatible 16MB 3D accelerated card
• Windows 98/Me/XP-compatible sound card (100% DirectX 8.0a-compatible)
• 4X CD-ROM Drive
• 300MB Hard Disk Space
• 100% Windows-compatible mouse and keyboard

I’ve got all of those wrapped up and then some, so I plunked down my two bucks and headed home. The manual talks for thirty-odd pages telling me how awesome this game is. On page 9, for example, it says that:

There are five options [for difficulty]:

• Beginner
• Novice
• Intermediate
• Expert
• Legend

Note: It’s best to start with Beginner difficulty before working up to Legend.

I also learned that out of the 84 countries that competed in the 2002 Winter Olympics that I could choose to represent any one of the 16 that the developers thought were important enough to include. I thought that was nice of them.

Once I installed the game, I came to a perplexing problem. Although my machine exceeded all of the requirements, the game refused to run no matter what options I chose. I thought that since the game’s three years old there could be a patch. I checked. No patch. Well, maybe there’s a known issue. Turns out I get this page which says my video card (a GeForceFX) came out after the game did, and as a result, the game won’t run and will never run on my machine unless I downgrade the video card. The only other computer I have in the compound that has a CD-ROM drive is an old laptop that doesn’t have DirectX 8.0a drivers for its hardware. So, I just shelled out two dollars for a box, an instruction pamphlet, a couple of Eidos catalogs, and a coaster.

And it’s still better than that N*Sync game I bought.

Game Name: Salt Lake 2002
Platform: PC
Purchased from: EBGames
Amount of money I wasted on it: $1.99
One word summary: Paperweight