#448 Power Stone 2

Posted: 12th January 2020 by Jeroen in Games
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837th played so far

Genre: Fighting
Platform: Dreamcast
Year of Release: 2000
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

I haven’t played many Dreamcast games recently, in part because I have to go out and retrieve it from semi storage (the bedroom TV) and connect it to a TV that is too new to handle aerial connections gracefully. I’ve got a cable orderedfor next time, but for this session I’m hoping to knock a bunch of them off my list.

Power Stone 2 is a Dreamcast era fighting game. It’s 3D, rather than the 2D plane that you still saw more at the time, and to be honest the entire thing feels more colourful than more realistic fighters. It’s a good start, even if my expectations aren’t that high either.

Our Thoughts

When playing Power Stone 2, I find it hard to avoid comparisons to the Super Smash Bros series. First of all, weapons play a big part in these games, with them being quite defining at times. There is also a version of a final smash with their fusion attacks, which you can activate by collecting differently coloured gems. They are the main differentiator between character, who otherwise felt somewhat interchangable. It’s a nice feature and won me some battles, but seeing more individuality would have been nice.

The other part of the game that reminds me of Smash Bros games – at least the more modern incarnations – are the stages. They are active and dynamic and more complicated than that series. Each stage, except for the bosses, has several stages that you jump between – once by climbing a Japanese temple, another one with the floor giving way, and there’s a jungle temple where for part of the arena, you’re getting chased by a boulder Indiana Jones style. It makes the games a lot more interesting as you’re adjusting around this. I guess the fact that the fighters are interchangeable helps here, as one isn’t more suitable to some stages than others.

There’s a lot of stuff to do in the game, not in the least from the different variations. The standard arcade story mode is in here, with a limited set of stages and some story, although it has the downside of its bosses, which felt a lot less fun than a straight up battle. Then there are other modes that focus as much on collecting items and unlockables as you go through, for what feels like a longer campaign. I can see myself get lost in this for a long time.

Final Thoughts

Power Stone 2 has some symptoms of its age, mostly coming from the lack of distinct fighters and how that turned everything more generic. I also got annoyed with some boss fights, which is a shame because everything else worked so well and this is the closest I think I’ve gotten to seeing a game with the dynamics of a Smash Bros game, going for fun interactions more than serious, grim stories. If not for the demise of the Dreamcast, perhaps this could have been a contender for that crown.

#750 Contra 4

Posted: 8th January 2020 by Jeroen in Games
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836th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Nintendo DS
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: WayForward Technologies
Publisher: Konami Digital Entertainments

Contra III was a pretty standard run and gun game, with some level based enhancements that made it stand out, but ultimately existing in a genre that doesn’t appeal to me. Contra 4 was released 15 years after it, which likely means this is a retro throwback – not the best sign for me.

Our Thoughts

Contra 4 does feel like a throwback to the old run and gun genre, playing and feeling like the originals. The only change I really spotted was the life system, which is a lot more generous than the original and allows you to get further in the game. You need it with the old school difficulty, which still makes it frustrating but at least I’ve got more attempts to try and finish it.

There’s a decent variety of weapons, which is always fun, but it didn’t have any standouts either – it’s the standard I’d expect for the genre, done well but nothing that jumps out.

Final Thoughts

I feel like Contra 4 wasn’t very memorable. It did what it did, and was quite tough to get through – I don’t think I got past the first level, with a very tricky and long boss fight at the end. It’s not a game I’m going to go back to, it just didn’t work out well.

#920 F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

Posted: 4th January 2020 by Jeroen in Games
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835th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC/Playstation 3/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Monolith Productions
Publisher: Warner Bros. Games

Bringing in another sequel, we return to the world of F.E.A.R., an FPS with a horror-based story that we played about a year ago that was effective in its story telling, but didn’t have much to show for its shooting – it was very average and yet ate up too much time playing. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I expect that to be too different in the sequel, so we’ll see how that goes.

Our Thoughts

There’s something especially effective about horror in a first-person context. You’re much more in the moment and in the area, and so when something happens it feels that bit scarier. There’s a bit where this is especially effective early in the game, where you need to escape a hospital that has been attacked by others. There are lots of dead bodies around, some in mysterious places, and since you are unarmed you feel vulnerable. You end up sneaking past some guards and while I’m sure it’s safe enough, it feels really tense.

By that time, you’ve already completed a different mission with more of your weapons. During that you have a bunch of creepy things happen – following a creepy girl in a vision or dream sequence, you get your vision shifting and weird things showing up in the levels as you play. Every time you enter an empty room, you are on your toes.

There are still plenty of fights, but they feel slightly more focused – you’re spending less time running around large areas until you’ve gotten all of them. It’s a fine cover shooter – certainly better than Kill Switch – and while I enjoy it enough it was never my highlight of the game. The game has a pretty good physics set up too – a lot of it feels dynamic, with you flipping tables and using everything in the environment to add to the firefights.

Final Thoughts

F.E.A.R. 2 is a good sequel. The combat feels better than before, although the real interesting part is the exploration of the areas, experiencing the stories and finding the goodies around the level. The balance might have been a bit off on the amount of battles, but overall it felt like an improvement.

#559 Kill Switch

Posted: 31st December 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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834th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Namco USA
Publisher: Namco

Kill Switch really is one of those generic titles that does tell you what it’s about, but feels interchangeable with about twenty other games at the same time. Everything about it screams generic-ness – it’s a cover shooter, you’re fighting terrorists, even the cover is desert brown. Right from the start, my question is why? Why Kill Switch?

Our Thoughts

Why indeed? It’s not the best cover shooter, the Gears of War series proves as much (full disclosure – I worked on the spin-off Gears Pop! title, although I never got near the main franchise, and you could apply the same argument even to Mass Effect 2, though perhaps not as strongly). I’ve put the story down as terrorists – the environment certainly seem to cover that – but it’s vague enough that there’s not much there beyond standard story beats. The reason it’s here is not because it’s the best, but because it’s the first -this is what started the modern cover shooters that became such a big thing.

Taken on its own, Kill Switch is a standard military shooter with a cover system that’s rather middle of the road – while a good attempt, the controls don’t feel quite right yet. A large part of it is that the controls are pretty flaky. It’s hard to get the aim sensitivity right, which made the whole thing aggravating, with missed shots for seemingly no reason. Even the move controls suffer though, as crossing some wooden planks took three goes because the controls didn’t let me do it normally.

It’s not worth the aggravation, especially as the story is so paper thin. It’s all standard, I never felt it offered anything special and it mostly bored me. It’s not worth bothering for either.

Final Thoughts

I think this is where the definition of having played a game comes in. I have no desire to finish it and think it’s weaker than what came after it, but being the first, it feels important to know. It feels like a good enough reason to include it, but it’s a game to try, not to finish. Keep it in mind for what it did, not what it is now.

#310 GTI Club Rally Cote d’Azur

Posted: 27th December 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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833rd played so far

Genre: Driving
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1996
Developer: Konami
Publisher:Konami

In my last write up about Fuel, I wrote about games that would have been good when the book was published, but wasn’t as notable now. On the other hand, GTI Club Rally Cote d’Azur feels like it fits in with the likes of Sega Rally Championship, games that are notable because of what they became, but may not be the best now. I guess we’re getting another checkpointed race – I’m happy I’m starting to run out of these arcade racers.

Our Thoughts

This game’s basic game is quite straight forward when you’ve played earlier arcade racer – you go around a track, hitting check points in order to increase your time limit.ย  However, where other games stick you to a single track, GTI Club takes you to a small village with a street plan that you can explore. You don’t really get much time in the arcade mode, but there is a small alternate route I’ve used to avoid a tunnel at one point.

Beyond that, while the idea is nice, it’s not at the level of the Carmageddon games where there are plenty of opportunities to explore and gain extra time to let you do so, here you have to stick to the track to be able to complete the rounds on time. The preset tracks all follow a fairly similar route, not using most of the village, which feels like a waste of the area. I guess it’s there for the visuals, but it feels like it might have been too much.

Final Thoughts

As is the case with many of these arcade racers, GTI Club has bigger ambitions than its arcade set up allows. There’s a nice growth in where you could go in the game, but the time limits make it difficult to actually do something with it. It was nice to spend some time with it, but not something I am keen to keep playing.

#923 Fuel

Posted: 23rd December 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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832nd played so far

Genre: Racing
Platform: PC/Playstation 3/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Asobo Studio
Publisher: Codemaster

One part of the structure of the list is that 2009 games are over represented on the list – over a tenth of the list is that, which makes sense when the book was published in early 2010, when those would have been the best games, but something that feels off now. Fuel is one of those games that’s on the list because it was notable at the time, but doesn’t feel like it has as much of an impact now.

Fuel is an open world racing game that is set in a post apocalypic, Mad Max-like racing obsessed universe. I’m not sure how it’ll compare to others, like Burnout Paradise, the main other one I remember playing.

Our Thoughts

There is something that feels epic about the big wastelands of Fuel. You have these giant levels, with different biomes in and between them – starting off near a lake with a fairly wooded section, the second one feels like it has some more desert in it, and so on. I don’t they connect officially, but the world is set up as if they are, moving from area to area. They don’t really need to be anyway, each section is so big that you can get lost in there – and often do, as I did when I went racing around to explore the world and see what’s out there in this abandoned, messed up world. The Mad Max comparison is hard to avoid, although the variety of the world helps a lot and works a lot better.

The world has some incentives to explore. You have a bunch of collectibles – mostly liveries and pretty pictures, but it gets you moving. There are also challenges and purchasables to find and generally it always feels like you can get somewhere if you can get going a bit longer. The world is big enough that it takes quite a while between places, but the markers are decent enough to work. It’s fun to see the world, even if it doesn’t quite have the storytelling other games put in their open world – it’s mostly just there.

The real progression is available through the menu. There are a bunch of important races that you have to finish in different difficulties – an easy low difficulty, but the third, hard difficulty is challenging at the start and soon starts requiring a lot of practice. Since you need to finish a bunch to move to the next area – so far two of the three stars per race, but I’m sure that’ll change – you have to keep practicing to either finish a few harder races or get decent at all of them.

One nice addition is how the game sends you on your direction. They are dynamic and adapt as you drive, giving you a decent line on where you need to go next without getting confused if you experiment with your route. Unlike many other games, I never felt lost, which really helped my confidence – and gave me a good chance to pull ahead a few times.

Final Thoughts

Is Fuel worthy of being on the 1001? I don’t think it is with hindsight, even if we just look at games up to 2010, but I can see why it would have felt special at the time. There’s something magnificent about the big open worlds, but those same worlds also feel too big – not too empty, but the scale doesn’t work for driving around casually and finding things. The races are good, though, and I enjoyed those a lot as well – although again, I reached a skill ceiling I couldn’t breach yet. It’s maybe not amazing, but the game is fine and worth messing around in.

#584 Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

Posted: 20th December 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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831st played so far

Genre: Role-Playing
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2004
Developer: Level-5
Publisher: Square Enix

This week I had some extra time and it only seemed right to invest that in a long, deep game. Dragon Quest VIII seemed like a good pick: Dragon Quest V was a game I enjoyed a lot and this had a lot of contents that would easily carry me through these hours. I’m not even sure whether it’ll give me that far, but it’ll be a good time to experience this one.

Our Thoughts

There is something small about the way the eighth Dragon Quest game starts. You enter a town as the bodyguard of a king who has been turned into an imp, as well as the princess who’s been turned into a horse (and seems happy to pull the cart). You chase the jester who’s transformed the king and princess and from there a story starts that I’m sure will be more world threatening as the story goes on. You’re joined from the start by the bandit Yangus and gain two more as time goes on, covering some of the other stereotypes. There’s a decent world built up around this, which isn’t quite as in depth as it could be, but functions well to tell the story.

That world still looks decent – the more cartoony style works well to both set the tone of the (early) game and to keep it from getting too dated. There’s some rough edges, but it works and the colourful world builds into the mood the series sets. They’ve also paid a lot of attention to the details that make the world more real. The most subtle but most immersive is that while you’re traveling around the world map, you’ll occasionally hear the sounds of the horse and cart behind you, as the king follows you around the map. You never actually see them, but it feels like they’re really there. Add to that things like a day/night cycle that has an effect on the encounters and behaviour of folks in the towns and it really starts to feel like the world is alive.

The combat sticks to the series’ turn based roots. The characters attack and use their spells and abilities, which you rank up by investing points in one of a few skills which differ between characters. They allow for some nice specialization while still allowing for some ongoing growth. It has a monster collecting mini game as is common to the series by now, as well as some changes to allow a character to psyche up and get stronger. On the whole, it’s not too innovative, but it’s a system that works.

Final Thoughts

Although the core battle system may not have been as innovative, Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King creates a surprisingly alive world, with some nice touches, down to you playing as your pet mouse several times to explore places you can’t get to otherwise. With all of that, it has all the elements of what an RPG like this needs, with the only downside that there’s a bit too much grinding required at times – that’s why I had to call it off before I really wanted to – I had a full day, but needed to do other things.

#555 Mojib Ribbon

Posted: 16th December 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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830th played so far

Genre: Music
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: NanaOn-Sha, Ltd.
Publisher: SCEI

I feel like Vib-Ribbon was one of the weirder rhythm game. There’s still the track you come down, but the presentation was unique and made it both more interesting and more difficult. Its sequel, Mojb Ribbon, seems to be equally stylish, but the gameplay itself has changed. Whether it’s for the best is a second thing.

One of the biggest challenges is that the entire game is in Japanese. I hope the game doesn’t become too difficult because of it.

Our Thoughts

At its core, Mojib Ribbon is actually a very simple rhythm game. As the music plays, you put a pen to paper to write the lyrics of the song on a scroll. These are, as I said, all in Japanese, but while knowing the text might help a bit, you don’t actually need to do that to play the game. If you follow the on screen prompts, it’s possible to play. It is, of course, not quite as easy as that. First, you need to dip your pen in ink (or, I think, have it rain down from the sky or something? The metaphor doesn’t quite make sense, but the pen gets filled with ink). You then press it to the paper as a phrase starts and lift it up when it finishes.

While it sounds simple, the timing to do that is incredibly precise and missing it, in my experience, usually gets punished twice: Once for pressing down at the wrong time, then a second time for missing the start of the phrase. Since the fall animation is lengthy, getting that twice puts you off the rhythm for the next one and I ended up struggling a fair bit in response.

Stepping beyond that, the game does look lovely, with the circles of Japanese text working effectively at creating the right atmosphere. There’s something natural about the calligraphy that suits the flow of the game. There is a lot of variation in the music as well, although the computer generated speech that’s used for the vocals gets quite repetitive and gets in the way of the experience. Of course, the stories the game is trying to tell don’t apply to me, so it’s possible they would draw me in further, but it doesn’t feel the game needs it to be interesting.

Final Thoughts

As a rhythm game, Mojib Ribbon feels quite simple and lacking, while requiring too much precision to feel natural. As a way to create an atmosphere and a mood however, it works well to accomplish that. I can see why the game was never translated – even if you could do that to the system, I’m not sure the game would translate well enough to work for a western audience. It’s a shame, but it’s nice to have seen what I could get.

#99 Fairlight

Posted: 12th December 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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829th played so far

Genre: Adventure
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1985
Developer: The Edge
Publisher: The Edge

This genre of isometric adventures, which we’ve seen before in games like Knight Lore and Crystal Castles, had its moment in the eighties but has almost completely died out since – I think the still upcoming Monster Max is the most recent one we have on the list, and even that is from the Gameboy era. Even nostalgia doesn’t seem to apply to it – with all the remakes we’re seeing, I’ve not seen one that harkens back to this genre.

Fairlight is another one of these, focused even more on the adventure side rather than action, and I wonder whether this one will connect – I know it would have 25 years ago, but time has moved on.

Our Thoughts

As I said, Fairlight qualifies as an isometric adventure, but in the broader sense of adventure. The main game has you go around the castle, collecting items and using them in different places while trying to stay alive. Several enemies roam the area, but while there are moments where you can attack them, combat is limited enough that you can’t spare the limited health you’ve got an dealing with enemies. Throughout, you’re better off avoiding them and learning their AI to make sure they end up in the right place as you run around the screens.

Beyond that, there are a lot of rooms with different items and the goal is to combine them somehow to make your way through. It’s not made clear what to do – the objectives are vague enough that I couldn’t get further with it, even with a guide, and I saw most of the movement by watching videos. Even then didn’t really tell me why, but somehow there is a combination that works here.

The graphics are abstract enough that it doesn’t help much here either. It sort of makes sense when enemies and such are, but the areas are only really distinguished by colours and I couldn’t see much rhyme or reason to it. It’s put together for the game, rather than in any way that makes sense. Again, there’s no real plot here and I just never figured out what I was doing.

Final Thoughts

Fairlight is let down on multiple sides. Its style is outdated – these isometric adventures feel dated on their own and immediately mark it as older – besides, the diagonal controls never quite make sense. Then there is the way the story and goals aren’t communicated. Some more work could probably give you some idea, but here I just felt I was wandering around aimlessly. The number of enemies, that take too much puzzling to avoid but have no real way of dealing with them, didn’t help here, as it felt they discouraged exploration. It just didn’t feel like it wanted me to play and get through the game at all. That’d make sense for the arcade – eating quarters as it can – but not for a home game.

#387 Space Station Silicon Valley

Posted: 4th December 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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828th played so far

Genre: Action/Platform
Platform: Nintendo 64/Playstation 1
Year of Release: 1998
Developer: DMA Design
Publisher: Take Two Interactive

It feels like the Nintendo 64 era was the high point of the 3D action platformers – your Super Mario 64s and Banjo Kazooies. Sure, later platforms had them too, but they were so much more popular at this point and it feels like I’ve sen more of them. Smaller areas with some tricky jumps, usually a fair amount of collectibles and cartoony physics.

While offering its own thing in controlling enemies, Space Station Silicon Valley feels like it fits in in this mold – you move from level to level, with some challenges in each level and moves that unlock until you can face the final boss. I’ve enjoyed the genre enough so far that I’ve been enthusiastic about this one – I hope it pays off.

Our Thoughts

I’m not sure the title of Space Station Silicon Valley really explains a lot of what’s going on. The main gameplay loop is that you’re this tiny bug that moves between mechanical animals. You start off going into this mechanical dog, but to finish your missions you need to switched between them – either because you’re meant to do that or, more often, because you need the different abilities. Sheep, for example, can float and since they run on bio energy rather than electricity, they can go into the water as well. They’re weak in battle though and incredibly slow. It’s a pretty neat mechanic where you even need to keep your food chain in mind, as (for example) other dogs will try to attack sheep.

The levels are fairly short, with two or three tasks each. There are no checkpoints during the levels: If you fail, you start from scratch. That’s actually what’s quite frustrating: a small mistake can kill you and while the levels aren’t that big, they do invite exploration enough that you want to try things. However, if you accomplish anything, a mistimed jump could lose you all of it. Add to that that the levels don’t always make sense at first glance, and it becomes quite a frustrating experience.

There are some collectibles in the game – a trophy per level as well as a bunch of power cells and they were the more interesting thing to try and get in the level. It also, however, seems to be completely pointless and not something the game tracks too in depth, and it feels like a bit of effort to reward you for them, even if more cosmetically than what you get by getting them all at the end, would have made for a nice extra goal. I’m still not sure if the save system would have helped here, though, or just made that a lot worse.

Final Thoughts

Space Station Silicon Valley has two sides to it. The animal swapping mechanic is a really nice idea, even if it feels like the animals could be tweaked. The missions are a mixed bag and don’t feel like anything to write home about. The other systems, though, are pretty frustrating and work against you far more than is justified. It’s easy to imagine a new version of this fixing these issues and really making use of these mechanics, but as it stands the game’s age is probably responsible for pushing it all down.

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