I bought Crazy Taxi before I had a Dreamcast. And when I finally got my hands on the system, right before it was discontinued, it came with two (yes, two!) pack-in games: Sonic Adventure and Sonic Shuffle.
Sonic Shuffle is a rip… er… clone of Mario Party. You take your characters around various game boards and play mini-games to earn currency, and whoever gets the most wins! Only instead of Mario and Friends it’s Sonic and Friends, and instead of collecting coins you collect rings, and instead of being fun and exciting the game is boring and tedious.
I could only stomach playing this game one half of a time. I tossed it in the old Dreamcast mostly because it was free and I was hungry for something new to play. And it just didn’t do anything for me. All I could think of was how similar this game was to Mario Party, all the way down to the sound effects and the effects of the different spaces. And since I had already played that game to death I was just kind of done with the experience. And I kind of wonder, would I have liked this game better if I hadn’t already spent several dozen hours with a game that was mostly identical?
Since the Nintendo 64 has four controller ports on it, it makes sense that you would eventually get some games that would make use of them all. And since I didn’t actually own Goldeneye, the first four-player game that I would spend any significant time with would turn out to be Mario Party.
Mario Party is a series of mini-games tied together by a overarching board game of sorts. See, you and three players take turns rolling a die and walking around the board. After all four players have moved they all go to play a mini game where coins are the prize. You use the coins to buy Stars, which are the main currency of the game. Whoever has the most stars at the end of the game is the Superstar, a.k.a. the Winner. There’s a little more to it than that, but you get the idea.
This game isn’t actually all that fun unless you’re playing with at least one other person, and each person you add bumps up how much fun you can have. There’s just nothing like having a close match between real, actual people. Especially when you steal their coins and stars at the last minute to win. Mwahaha!
Some of the mini games require you to rotate the control stick as fast as you can. Which sounds good in theory, but it quickly becomes apparent that the best way to do that is to mash your palm down on the stick and rotate it quickly around. This leads to two things: severely worn out/broken controllers and wearing a hole into the palm of your hand.
I played this game a whole lot, and although I never actually injured myself playing this game, I guess a lot of people did. Enough that Nintendo had to settle a lawsuit and give out some padded gloves to people who just couldn’t, you know, take a break now and again.
When I was first playing Kirby’s Avalanche I had no idea that it was based on a game called Puyo Pop. Or, more accurately, that it was the same game as Puyo Puyo but with the characters replaced with characters from the Kirby universe.
A few years later, when I got my hands on a DS, I saw a video review on XPlay that told me that a new Puyo Puyo game had come out that I had somehow missed completely. That is the only time I can remember that as soon as the review ended that I went immediately to the store to get the game.
This game is nearly identical to the old Avalanche game: colored blobs fall from the sky and you have arrange them such that four of the same color touch each other. Once they do they disappear, and with careful planning you can shower your opponents with trash to try and impede their progress. But this game also has been balanced a fair bit.
See, in the old game, it was the one who could make the biggest chain the fastest that would win. They’d bury their opponent with garbage, and there was precious little to do about it. In this game, though, you can do what’s called ‘offsetting’. What that means is that if your opponent sends you some garbage and you can make a chain before the garbage drops on your screen, then you reduce the amount of garbage that will fall on your screen, and if you offset enough to offset all of the garbage and then some, the difference is dumped on your opponent’s screen. It’s a significant change, and one that makes the game just work better.
There’s also the introduction of ‘fever’ mode. If you offset garbage enough times you get to go into a special mode where your puzzle is temporarily replaced by a series of pre-built chains awaiting for you to trigger it, giving you a chance to send a ridiculous amount of trash to your opponent. But just getting there is contingent on your opponent sending you trash in the first place, so you have to work a bit harder to bury your opponent.
One of the other things I really liked about this game is that you can play up to eight players with one copy of the game, which I liked to do a whole lot… even though I don’t know seven other people with DS units that I could get into the same room at the same time and who I could convince to play it with me.
But I have the option available to me, should that particular set of circumstances ever present itself.
At some point before the GameCube came out there was a promotional video that showed some stuff that the system would be capable of doing. One of the scenes in the video showed a fight between Link and Ganon from the Legend of Zelda series. It looked pretty good for a demo.
Then, when rumblings of a new Zelda game being in development surfaced, lots of folks (me included) just kind of assumed that the super-awesome scene that we saw in the demo movie is going to be what the final game would look at. Turns out that we were all kind of wrong. Kind of very wrong.
The game, it turns out, was going to be cel-shaded, and what that meant was that everything in the game was going to look like a cartoon, and what that meant is that a lot of folks were completely thrown for a loop. In fact, the visual look of the game is really polarizing to fans of the series. I kind of got the impression that a lot of people thought they were ‘lied to’ when they saw that the game that they were getting wasn’t going to be the game they thought they were getting. But, I didn’t really mind too much.
I knew the game was going to be, beyond anything else, a Zelda game, and they hadn’t really let me down up to that point. And the graphics, I gave them a fair chance, and they did a pretty good job. The game looks good, cel-shaded or no.
The game takes place sometime after the events in Ocarina of Time, and somehow the world has become flooded. One day Link’s sister gets kidnapped by a big bird and Link has to go rescue her, and then save the world (natch).
Really, though, what you do is run to the bottom of a dungeon, collect the treasure inside, then try and find the next dungeon to do the same thing, but here’s the thing. The world is flooded completely, and all that’s left is a bunch of islands, which were mountaintops. The world is absolutely huge, and the islands are not. But you have to use your little skiff and sail around until you find the right island.
But that’s not all!
Late in thegame you have to find these shards of the Triforce. The problem is that they are literally hidden everywhere. You do get maps telling you the vicinities you have to search in, so you get to do a ton of sailing and a lot of plumbing the depths of the ocean. Kind of tedious, I’ll grant you that.
But the rest of the game was really good. My metric being that the game felt really short. Other than the sailing there was nothing about this game I didn’t like. Except for maybe the sidequest where you are tasked with taking pictures of enemies in the game to create statues. But, since that was optional, we won’t count that. I’d even go so far as to say that I liked this game better than the Wii offering.
Last night I had the opportunity to play Giga Wing. It’s one of those games where you take a very-destructible flying machine and move inexorably forward to deal with hundreds upon hundreds of enemy ships. Pretty standard stuff, really. But, pretty quickly, two things really stand out about this game.
First, the enemies somehow shoot lots and lots of instantly-fatal bullets, so many that the screen is often completely full of Hot Flaming Death(tm). But to mitigate that, you can charge up and occasionally use a ‘reflector’ shield that will bounce the bullets back in the general direction of the enemies, and will turn into collectibles.
The collectibles are the second thing to note. Each time you get one of the gold-colored collectible junkets, your ‘bonus multiplier’ goes up, which increases the rate that your score goes up (natch). The thing is, though, that there are so many items that increase your multiplier so fast that your score is going to get up to a ridiculous level really fast. My first time playing it, I had scored over 2,100,000,000 points. And Wikipedia says that the all-time high score at this game is 291,252,468,839,040 points, which I think I could buy.
Given enough credits at this game, it’s not too tough to get to the end. The game’s actually kind of short. But you need to memorize most of this game and have extremely-finely-honed reflexes to beat it with any kind of panache. Which you’ll certainly need to have if you want to fight the ‘real last boss’ see the ‘real ending’. It turns out that to do both of those things you have to finish the game with one credit. One! I think I have a better chance spontaneously becoming fluent in Esperanto.
I’m not actually sure what to make of 3-D Worldrunner. It’s a little game made by Squaresoft before they got into the whole super-complicated RPG thing, but it’s nothing like those games… other than it’s completely inexplicable.
What I do know is that you take control of some guy clad in green who is inexplicably driven forward and must overcome obstacles to reach the boss of the planet. Once there he somehow gains the ability to fly and shoot fireballs. Beat the boss and it’s off to the next planet.
The cool thing, though, is that this game is presented in this quasi-3D perspective, and you’re always running toward the horizon. The only things you can really do are crash into things, jump, and, if you grab the magic potion, shoot fireballs. But, primarily it’s the jumping around and trying to figure out how to use your fantastic leaping ability to cross ridiculously huge chasms.
The other fantastically awesome thing about this game is that it used red/blue separation to make the image appear in actual 3D. On the original NES! And although my copy was used and didn’t come with a box or a manual or a little plastic dust cover, it did come with a pair of glasses. But, I couldn’t actually ever get the colors on my ancient console television to match the colors of the tinted film in the glasses, so it just made the game look kind of fuzzy.
Okay, so that part wasn’t as exciting as it could have been.
The folks behind Bookworm also make lots of games that are fairly obviously clones of other games. And, while I would prefer that companies take chances and make games based on new ideas, I can appreciate the need to create a game that folks might already be familiar with to bolster sales. Making games is a business, after all.
Zuma is a pretty apparent copy of Puzz Loop, even to an untrained eye. But, since I don’t have any experience playing Puzz Loop, I guess my experience with Zuma will have to do.
Zuma has you taking control of this stone frog-thing at the end of a circuitous track that begins somewhere offscreen. A line of marbles comes down this track toward the frog, and if they collide with it, it’s game over. But, the frog also has the ability to shoot more marbles at the ones coming down the track. By matching enough of the same color they disappear, and if you make them all disappear, then you win the level and get to move on to the next, where everything moves a little faster.
I only played this game a couple of times on someone else’s dime and I really wasn’t all that impressed by it. It might be because the game starts out so slow and takes a ridiculous amount of time to get to the Good Stuff(tm). Or it might be that I didn’t think that the XBox 360 controller was particularly well-suited to play a game like this (a paddle controller would be awesome). But I really think I didn’t get a lot of mileage out of this game because it never ‘clicked’ with me. Lots of puzzle games are simple, but they have to tickle that special part of my brain that makes repetitive motions fun, and this one didn’t quite reach it.
A lot of shows on the Adult Swim programming block are pretty terrible, but they do somehow manage to air a decent show occasionally, like the reimagining of the Birdman character as some kind of attorney for other characters in the Hanna-Barbera universe. The show ended its run not too long ago, but a game of sorts was made based on it. I somehow missed that it came out on the Wii until this past weekend when my local Best Buy had the thing on sale for $20. So, I decided that there were far worse things in the store that I could spend $20 on and grabbed it.
The game is a whole lot like the show, and in fact, without the ‘gameplay’ moments, could actually pass for a few episodes. You have to take Birdman through several cases each with ever-decreasing levels of sense. You have to interview witnesses, collect evidence, go to court, examine and cross-examine witnesses, and try to win cases. It’s kind of like Matlock-lite.
The thing is, though, the game is presented in (almost) nothing but movie clips and static backgrounds. You watch a clip, answer a question, watch another clip, search for ‘evidence’, watch another clip, present evidence that proves or disproves some testimony, and then watch the end clip. Some cases are longer than others, but that’s the gist of it. And, with the exception of the cross-examination part, it’s impossible to lose at this game. Answering the questions correctly (guessing works just fine) when they’re presented is a no-brainer. Finding evidence is also pretty much a gimme. You have this static background and a magnifying glass which ’snaps’ to anything you can pick up. Which you do, and it’s off to trigger the next cutscene.
But that’s not to say that the game isn’t fun. It just depends on your definition of ‘fun’. This ‘game’ is pretty obviously targeted to 1. fans of the show and 2. people who don’t play a lot of games. What you’re really buying here is a collection of a five slightly expanded episodes of the show wrapped around an interface that barely qualifies as a game. Which makes this thing a very niche title.
I have to note, though, that the game is very short. I was able to make it through the game in about 4 and a half hours. Had I paid the full $40 for it, I’d have been a little disappointed. But at $20, I got roughly the equivalent of a 4 hour DVD (with interactive features!). And that’s far more palatable.
The first couple of Zelda games were pretty good and everything, and even though I liked the second game well enough, I’m relatively certain that I’m in a significant minority. So it’s no big surprise that the game would return to the kind of game that started the series, some kind of overhead-viewed adventure through some dungeons.
The game also tried to give the backstory to the series a little more meat. It established where Ganon came from, told where the ’seven wise men’ came from, and lots of other little tidbits that tried to kind of kick the Zelda mythos into high gear. You can get everything you need to know just from playing through this game. There’s plenty of exposition in just the right places to keep you going.
The game starts on a dark and stormy night (fancy!) with Link getting a telepathic message from the Princess in Distress, Zelda. Link’s uncle also got the message, and he sets out to rescue her first. Incredibly, though, uncle-guy fails at his mission pretty much right away and it falls on Link to take up the family sword and shield and figure out what’s going on.
Eventually, you find out that there is this evil wizard who’s kidnapping girls for some reason, and to get to him, you have to get the Master Sword, and to get that you have to get three pendants hidden away in three separate dungeons all over the known world. Once you get all of that you have to find and rescue each of the kidnapped maidens who are being held in seven separate dungeons in a parallel, corrupt version of the real world.
But, that’s all fine because each time you go into a dungeon you get a special item that you are almost guaranteed to have to use to defeat the master of that dungeon, and just generally gives you more stuff you can do, which, in turn, will let you get to areas in the overworld that you couldn’t get to before. It’s an elegant design, really, the world expands slightly every time you get one. One of the early dungeons, for example, has you finding these gloves that let you lift rocks that were once too heavy to move. Then you think back to a rock that you saw with some tantalizing goodie behind it, and you go back to get it.
I rented this game one time, and was impressed by it. There was no part of this game I didn’t like… with the exception of one puzzle in the Ice Dungeon, it’s got a pretty circuitous solution, but it is solvable. But the rest of the game? Pure gold. Heck, possibly even platinum. The guy that went in with me to rent the thing and I stayed up most of the night playing it, but we weren’t able to fully polish it off. I was not to be deterred, though! I would rent the game again (though from a different place) and play (mostly) though it again. After that I decided that I needed to actually purchase the game to finish it off, and since I didn’t have any kind of money or cash flow source, I decided to get the next best thing, the strategy guide.
I pored over the strategy guide for months, studying all of the nooks and crannies of the game, learning where the hearts were and how to defeat Trinexx and what the names of the enemies are (knowing the difference between a peahat and a leever might come in handy some day). Finally, I was able to finish the game and cross it off the list. But it didn’t really end there. A few years later I found the game in a bin of games on Teh Clearance for a paltry sum, and since my wallet contained exactly that amount, I brought it home with me, and played through it again.
And I never once questioned why Link had pink hair.
Games where you get to play as Superman should be awesome, but they’re not. Frankly, I’m amazed that you can have a guy that is real strong, real fast, nearly invulnerable, can fly, can see through things, and has other powers that manifest when needed, that you can base a video game on, and then somehow make it an absolute chore to play.
Superman 64 takes place in the Superman universe that was portrayed in the cartoon show of the 90’s. The story is something about Lex Luthor having trapped Jimmy, Lois, and… someone else in a virtual reality environment, and Supes has to find them. How does he find them?
By flying through rings, or carrying something while flying through rings, or some other menial task. And to add to the… special flavor of this game, whenever you fail at something and start it again you get treated to the same voice-clip, “Then there’s no time to waste!”
The flying is just about the most uncontrollable thing that I’ve ever tried to do in a video game. I got immediately frustrated at it, and I couldn’t stomach playing the game for longer than five minutes. And, thankfully, I didn’t feel obligated to play this game any longer than that. I only played this game one time in a demo station at my local electronics store. And, I’ve got to say, it’s a good thing that the controller was bolted to the display, otherwise it might have sailed across the store and become lodged in the screen of the display laptops.
It’s the kind of game that I wake up some mornings and breathe a sigh of relief that I didn’t actually pay any money at all to play this game.