I never really got into the Resident Evil thing when it first made the rounds on the original Playstation. Mostly because I didn’t have an original Playstation. I did get the remake of Resident Evil 2 for the N64, but I still haven’t opened it. Someday I will…
But!
I did, once the remake of the first game came out, decide to try my hand at the series and found it to be pretty awesome. So when the fourth game on the series was coming to the ‘Cube, it was a no-brainer to pick it up. It stars Leon, the guy from the Resident Evil game I haven’t opened yet, on the hunt for the president’s daughter, who’s been kidnapped. Kind of a trite story, but you don’t need to worry so much about that. What you do need to worry about is the island and mansion full of zombie-like things running around trying to kill you. See, unlike the other games, the people in this game haven’t really been zombified, they’ve been… Well, I don’t think I should spoil it for you. Suffice it to say, ‘they ain’t right’.
On the GameCube, this game is gorgeous. It’s easily the best looking game on the system, hands down. It doesn’t really play like the older Resident Evil games, though. The older games had you going through some area or other, solving rather obtuse puzzles to proceed, and had the rare odd gun battle. This one has lots of gun battles and the odd (or sometimes very odd) puzzle to solve. It’s kind of interesting, since you’re not beholden to solving puzzles to slowly open up doors, you are able to explore a huge amount of game space, killing native villagers along the way.
I don’t think I can say enough good things about this game. I will say, though, that it certainly earns its ‘M’ rating. Young ‘uns need not apply… at all. But if you have the constitution for it, I’d highly recommend it.
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a librarian? To shelve books according to the Library of Congress Classification System? Well, wonder no longer! The game simulation you’ve been waiting for is here!
I played this game for about two minutes before I gave up. I have it on good authority that classifying and arranging books can be fun, but not this time.
Give it a try here if you’re really hard up for something to do. As an added bonus, there’s another game with slightly more action to keep you occupied called I’ll Get It. Can you help patrons locate the material they need before they give up on you and leave? Do you dare take part in the digital representation of library life?
I really like the Crazy Taxi games. They let me live out my fantasy of being a cabbie in an impossibly souped-up car from the safety of my couch.
Crazy Taxi 2 was a bit disappointing. It added some new mechanics and was pretty fun, but I just didn’t really like the new map as much as the old one. This might be because I spent a lot more hours with the original game, and was more familiar with its layout. 3 follows the tradition set forth by 2 in that you have another new map and four new drivers. Otherwise, it’s identical to the second game. Pick people up, take them where they want to go, get money, repeat until obscenely rich.
What I really liked about this game is that they included the map from the original game and kept the ‘jumping’ ability and the multiple customers introduced in the second game, which for me would completely justify the purchase of this game… if I had an Xbox to play it on.
Being able to do the jumps in the first game, something you weren’t originally able to do, makes the map a load of fun. It helps if you’ve gotten familiar with the jumping from the second game, and the dashing and drifting in all the games. And since I managed to complete the ‘training challenges’ in the first two games, I certainly am. If you’re not… well… I understand that this game has ridiculously-hard skill-honing challenges too.
The games in the Mega Man series are pretty good games on their own, but they’re really about one main thing: fighting other robots and using their powers as your own. Everything else? Just gravy.
So what would we have is we stripped out the adventure mode and most of the story? We’d have Mega Man – The Power Battle.
This game is set up more like a fighting game than a straight action game. It’s you, as your Mega Man protagonist of choice, in a series of battles against the robot masters of Mega Man games past. You don’t fight all of them, just selected bosses from the first seven games, and then only eight. Win and you get the boss’s special weapon. Lose… well if you lose you have to put in another quarter and continue or walk away from the cabinet in shame.
I was only able to find this game one place: in the arcade of my local Super K-Mart, and once I did, I went there every Friday night / Saturday morning for the next several weeks… until the K-Mart shut down. I didn’t hear anything else about this game for years until the Mega Man Anniversary Collection came out. I immediately snapped it up, and now am quite pleased that I don’t have to go on any more midnight lurks to get my fix.
All of the Wario Ware games manage to be largely the same and yet wildly different at the same time. Their difference really lies in their control schemes. And with the Wii using a motion-sensing wireless controller, the possibilities opened quite wide for control options.
Yeah, you could hold it like a remote control, or like an umbrella, or a pen, or a steering wheel, or like a boxer, or numerous other things. And you have to change up these ‘forms’ as they’re called to make progress in the game. It really plays just like every other game in the series, you get a game, a vague goal, and about 5 seconds to figure out what to do and then do it. Nothing groundbreaking, but it really works here.
But! As fun as this game is (and it is a certain amount of fun) the real fun in this game is getting some folks together to play it. Watching someone play this game is easily as fun (if not more so) as playing. You can check out this video of some guy (not me) playing. Look for the money shot around 3:27, that’s when we get to see the best game on the title: Hula
So,yes, the real value of this game is making your friends look like fools playing it, while joining in, of course. Easily one of the best games to introduce the unfamiliar to the Wii and its unique controls.
Since the Wii came out with it’s… erm… ‘Revolutionary’ ability to allow you to purchase and download old games for discontinued systems I’ve taken the opportunity to check out some of the games that I missed when they originally made the rounds for one reason or another.
Kirby’s Adventure has you taking control of a pink ball-like guy with the ability to suck up and copy the special abilities of his enemies. He has to use his fantastic abilities to save Dreamland from not having any more dreams. You know, don’t worry about the story. It’s a whole lot more fun to run around the stages and try out the different abilities.
I sailed through this game pretty quickly. It wasn’t too tough… until the last boss fight. Well, boss fights. There are three final boss fights, each more final than the last. Even better is that the last couple of boss fights ramp up the difficulty so far that your controller might get broken. Unless you paid $40 for a Wii Remote. In which case I suggest you go to your local used video game store, pick up a couple of used and/or already broken controllers, and take your anger out on them.
The title of this game is a bit misleading. Yeah, there are alligators in it, but it’s a pinball game. There’s no story or anything, but there is a pinball table full of alligators, which is worth… something.
So picture four pinball tables in a row, lined up so that the top of one is the bottom of the next. The further up you go, the more possibilities for points exist, but the tables are tougher to keep your balls on. Lower tables are slightly easier, but give you less points, and are slightly less desirable.
I played this game a lot. It’s a much better game than the crappy 1985-ish NES Pinball game. Plus I could take it on the go with me. My only complaint with it is that no matter how high a score you got, there was no way to save it. As soon as you turn off the power, you lose everything. It’s a limitation of the hardware of the day, I suppose.
I didn’t really think so at the time, but this game seems to be pretty rare. I know there’s a two-player mode, but I never found anyone else that had it, or even a store that carried it. Heck, I got my copy second hand. But I’m still keeping an eye out. If I find a second copy, it’s mine. I’ve even got two Game Boys and a link cable on continuous standby. I’ll experience two-player even if I have to play both myself.
If you’re like me and couldn’t balance on a skateboard if your feet were glued to it and it was the size of a small Japanese car, then you might have given up all hope of making it at the X-Games. You then might have gone to your local arcade and tried Top Skater. Because just like playing Dance Dance Revolution isn’t really dancing and playing Guitar Hero isn’t really playing the guitar, Top Skater isn’t really like riding a skateboard, but you can pretend that it is.
The machine is just a giant platform with a skateboard bolted to it. A skateboard that you can move left and right or tilt forward or back. Your guy moves along the screen all on his own, and you get to steer with your horribly uneducated feet. Your goal is to go up ramps and do tricks to gain speed. You do tricks by waggling the board around while your character’s in midair. It doesn’t really matter what you do, your guy will just keep doing tricks as you wiggle the board around a bit. The only thing to be wary of is that you need to make sure your angle of entry is perpendicular to the ramp when you land. Otherwise you’re going to be eating the ramp, and losing speed.
The game was ridiculously hard to control, and sticking the landings was nigh impossible. On top of all of that, the game was eight tokens to play (roughly the equivalent of $2). And when you’re first starting out, that’s a pretty big investment for about 5 minutes’ play time. Eventually, since nobody was really playing it, the cost went down to a reasonable level, but it was still not the best investment in the room. Partially because of the extremely fat people, the kind that make dimples in the sidewalk as the waddle past, would try their hand at the game. They’d barely fit between the retaining bars, and the machine would groan in agony as they tried (and failed) to make any significant progress.
As a rule, I don’t really get into golf games. I just typically don’t find the video versions very exciting.
Golden Tee is a little different, and a bit more interactive than most golf games, so maybe that’s why I played it as much as I did. And when I say ‘interactive’ I mean that the control is a little more… involved than your typical golf game.
In a regular golf game you pick your club, press a button to start your swing, press another button (or the same button) with the right timing to dictate the power. And your golfer does his thing. In this one, you have a trackball, and your motion with it dictates the swing. You roll the ball real fast, and your golfer hits the ball harder. It’s such a simple and intuitive thing that I can hardly believe it took so long to make it into a game.
The main problem I had was that you had to pay through the nose to play this game. In the arcades I went to, you spent three tokens (or quarters) for three holes for each person playing. This meant spending a lot of money just to see the whole course, even with discounts for buying multiple holes.
But that didn’t stop me from playing the first three holes of each course over and over again. Out of the dozens of games I played, I don’t think I ever finished a round. I just didn’t have the desire to pump that much coinage into the machine. But I did manage to get a couple of ‘best shots’ in the demo mode, so that’s got to count for something, right?
Nanaca Crash is one of those silly Flash games that made the rounds a couple of years ago. It’s kind of hard to explain what the game’s about since I don’t know Japanese, but I have been led to believe that the game is based on an adult-oriented manga series. The game, though, is pretty tame.
So, what is it? I’m not real sure. You have this girl on a bike that crashes into a guy, sending him flying down a course. Along the course is a random assortment of four girls and two other guys. Hitting the guys will slow you down or change your angle of flight. Hitting two of the girls will boost your speed, hitting the third girl will negate the effect of the next girl you hit, and one girl stops your progress and ends your game. Unless your ’special’ is lit for the girl you hit, then you have a tiny window to press the mouse and get a crazy boost. You can also call the ‘bike girl’ a few times to give you a couple more mini-boosts.
Confused yet?
Part of the game is trying to figure out how to take advantage of (read: abuse) the system to get the best distance possible. It’s also just kind of oddly compelling to crash into that poor guy over and over again and watch him bounce helplessly down the course.
