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.
The Wii Zapper doesn’t look much like the NES Zapper. It’s a dual-gripped thing that your Wii remote slides in, and the nunchuk goes in the back. So it kind of looks like you’re holding a crossbow, I guess. So why would you buy such a thing? Probably to play shooting games, and good thing for us, Nintendo has decided to throw one in free with the accessory (or does the accessory come with the game?).
Link’s Crossbow Training stars Link… with his crossbow… running around shooting targets. That sounds kind of obvious, I know, but that’s why I make the big bucks. The game takes place in various locations around Twilight Princess and has a few different goals, depending on the area you’re in. But it basically boils down to either just shooting at targets or running around and shooting at enemies.
The game is really simple and really short. It’s more of a demo to familiarize yourself with the Zapper, but for what it is, it’s actually a pretty solid experience. I’ve only played it one time thus far, and in that time I just played a little of the two-player head-to-head action, which lets you and a friend take turns in a scenario and compete for points. And even though the Zapper looks a little unnatural to hold, it’s actually not too bad, but is it better than using just a Wii remote and a nunchuk without the plastic shell? That I haven’t decided yet.
I got a lot of time in with the original Street Fighter 2 game, but it had a couple of shortcomings. Like if you had two people playing, they couldn’t pick the same character, and the four boss characters weren’t playable. But now? All that’s changed!
Really, other than those couple of changes and a few minor technical changes that only the hardcorest of players would care about, this game is otherwise identical to the old title, just refined a little. I guess the older one was successful enough that Capcom didn’t want to mess with the formula too much. But they’d end up tweaking it some more and releasing a few more versions over the years.
I guess to a neophyte the Final Fantasy series might be a little intimidating. Ridiculously convoluted storylines, lots of characters with obvious flaws, and sometimes obtuse battle mechanics might be difficult to grasp. So, what do you get if you take all of that out? You get something like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is kind of a ‘beginner’s RPG’. And what that means is that it’s got all of the features of a regular RPG pared down to its barest elements. They story? Something about saving the world, but without all the normal twists and turns. Party management? Only two characters in your party, max. Battles? Streamlined to the point where you can win most of the time by holding down the ‘A’ button to accept the default commands. Oh, and your partner is so powerful that you’re going to have to try real hard to lose.
Since I had the experience of a few Final Fantasy games under my belt, I fully expected that this game would be easy, and I was mostly right. You’re pretty much always told exactly where to go and what to do to proceed. The battling amounts to just holding down ‘A’ until you win, so you just kind of meander around the game taking in what passes for the story… Until you get to the end.
The last boss of the game, for some bizarre reason, is a lot tougher than anything else in the game. Duh, I know, it’s supposed to be. But this one was far and away tougher than anything else in the game, and a genuine challenge. I actually had some trouble beating him… but I did beat him. After that I found out that there’s a glitch(?) that allows you to cast Cure on him to do ludicrous damage and win without much effort. Which kind of seems anticlimactic… unless you just played through the game a second or third time and want to get right to the ending real quick.