#169 Final Fight

Posted: 11th February 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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670th played so far

Genre: Fighting
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1989
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

Final Fight is not a one-on-one fighter (as I thought for some time) – instead it’s another beat ’em up like Double Dragon. I guess it’s just one to experience.

Our Thoughts

This mostly felt like a pretty straight forward beat em up. You get your enemies storming you, you beat them off and keep going until they’re dead or you move ahead far enough. It uses props – showing how there’s more sophistication and use of the environment here – including chandeliers, but it’s not extensive enough to really have an impact. I never felt they helped me much, it was just an extra hit that got me.

It didn’t help here that I felt locked into my animations several times, with the game forcing animations to finish before I could continue acting. It made the game feel sluggish and frustrating, rather than fast as you want in situations where you get swarmed. Add to that a slightly awkward control scheme with not enough buttons – attack and pick up on one button being one of the compromises that don’t feel rightย  – and I had were a bunch of times where the game just felt frustrating.

There’s some interesting things – health pickups in the form of food feel a bit rare in this game – but despite some good ideas and a good basic setup, the game never took me from fine to memorable. To me, that’s unforgivable for this list.

#986 NBA 2K10

Posted: 7th February 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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669th played so far

Genre: Sports
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Visual Concepts
Publisher: 2K Sports

I’ll be honest, I feel like a lot of these sports games are ones I have to cover – the yearly entry of the time was put on the list as the best representative of football, hockey, baseball or football, but it’s partially because that happens to be the one that was out then, rather than completely the best. It’s fine, but not being a big player of sports games, they are always a bit more awkward.

I’ve already played NBA Jam, which was an older, but seemingly streamlined basketball game. This is years later, of course, but I’ll see how this works out.

Our Thoughts

So as all sports game do to me, I had to take my time to get into it. Unlike other games in the genre, though, I did get there. I mean, I started off with big name teams I recognised – like the Chicago Bulls – so the game was clearly on my side, but that’s what I needed to start. The controls and gameplay felt incredibly intuitive, and while I’m sure I missed some tricks, I managed to do okay getting through the game – far better than I expected and certainly better than I did in other sports games.

I didn’t jump into career mode as much, which is mostly again because I’m worried about not making it, and not being able to make it through these is what put me off the games earlier. The quick play mode feels so good to play and really rewarding, which was a good reinforcement and a good way to show how these sports game can stay accessible, even to first time players – and it’s something that carries through to these game modes.

It still feels like a good basketball game as well – at least as far as I can judge – and from other games, I feel like they might be perfect as an introduction to the genre. Here, however, it’s pulled off well in a way that doesn’t force you to deal with a legacy of years.

#578 Half-Life 2

Posted: 3rd February 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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668th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2004
Developer: Valve Corporation
Publisher: Valve Corporation

The Half-Life series is one of the big ones that revolutionised story telling in games and really pushed the FPS genre forward. We noticed this when playing the first game already and I know it’s been said about its sequel as well. It’s also the second part of a trilogy that will likely never be finished, but it seems like it has reached heights that might be difficult to equal at this point.

This game also required Steam and was responsible for getting that on every PC, meaning it gave it to chance to change and dominate PC gaming as it does today. That, however, has little to do with the actual quality of the game – whatever that quality might be.

Our Thoughts

I enjoyed jumping into this world. I still feel that, on some level, the train ride of the first game sets up the world better than the loose fragments of this game. At the same time, we’ve moved from starting in an industrial complex to an occupied city. It’s very dystopian, different from what I expected and showing the larger, open areas we’d been encountering in this game.

What follows, initially, is a story in this dystopian world where you are constantly chased. You meet up with the resistance, but need to get from location to location without help while under attack from the army. There’s some neat gadgets that come in – a lengthy vehicle section that feels really good – but the real highlight comes with the gravity gun, at which point the game’s excellent physics move from a puzzle implementation (which happens several times and work incredibly well) to being a great combat option.

I did have trouble with some combat encounters, as progress isn’t always as clear while enemies keep respawning. It’s focused a lot on creating cinematic and exciting moments, which is annoying when you miss an entry and assume it’s a physics puzzle. While I get it’s part of the game and it can be a good thing, it’s usually so seamless that it feels weird when they get it wrong.

Final Thoughts

Half-Life 2 provides a nice cinematic experience in FPS form, combining the two pretty nicely. The seams do sometimes show between the two, with some less impressive bits when they join – some of it felt quite empty or tedious, while others are still pretty exciting and fun to play. Still, for the most part it connects and it does create a bunch of great moments.

#806 World In Conflict

Posted: 30th January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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667th played so far

Genre: Strategy
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Massive Entertainment
Publisher: Sierra Entertainment/Ubisoft

See that number up there? Two thirds of the way through. Making progress y’all!

It feels like a while since we last covered an RTS. We’ve had some games, like the amazing Star Control 3, that mixed it with other genres, and there have been tactical games like Faselei! with a smaller unit count, but the last one focusing on large scale battles with plenty of units and unit building would be Age of Empires, maybe, although that too is focused more on the economy than games like this are.

It’s good to come back to it, though, as I do feel a lot of affection for the type of play.

Our Thoughts

World of Conflict is a game focused on tactics, dense with objectives – rather than the one or two I am used to from most RTS games, you have several per map as well as optional ones. There’s a feeling of this forcing you down a path at least, leaving no room for exploration, but that works with the setting.

Imagine if the cold war hadn’t ended, but instead led to a third world war. And imagine that in this, the US got invaded by the Russians. Here, you fight that off – working in friendly territory and, at least initially, your role is defensive – trying to stop the invasion and save civilians.

One of the interesting parts of this story is that you have a definite protagonist who shows up in in-engine cutscenes. Always from the back, mind you, so they can stay faceless, but it is interesting to actually see you get addressed in some way. It does well in setting up the illusion you’re dealing with something more real and personal.

So the game itself then takes place in these city areas and large towns. You don’t actually have to deal with the whole map at once – AI players keep the enemy at bay in other corners, while you deal with the problems in a specific area, shifting as the level goes on and creating multiple smaller sections that flow into each other. There’s no real base building – nor would there need to be – but there are varying options for reinforcements, which still gives you control over the units you use for parts of the game.

Final Thoughts

World of Conflict was a lot of fun to play, moving the RTS focus to strategy rather than economy while still creating the large scale battles I want from it. The setting feels a bit odd and too real at times, but it tells a decent story and lends it to far more variety that I would have expected.

#734 Tony Hawk’s Project 8

Posted: 26th January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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666th played so far

Genre: Sports
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2006
Developer: Neversoft
Publisher: Activision

We’ve played a Tony Hawk game before, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. That was fine, a skating game in preset arenas that felt mismatched – not that natural and, even though you’d always want to create a setting with some good elements to skate off of, it wanted to make you feel like you were in an environment, which you simply weren’t.

Now there are six years between the release of that game and this one, and it’s been six years since I played the previous game. It’s a nice analogy, and I feel like I’m going in fresh because of it.

Our Thoughts

While playing this game, I was starting to wonder whether we ran into the same problem as we did with Parappa the Rapper. I found it really difficult to get the timing of the combos right, even in the tutorial, and I am wondering whether the game wasn’t adjusting enough for modern TV latency. It could be that I couldn’t quite get the timing right, but struggling with this in both the tutorial and early levels of the game, I hope it’s that rather than the game being set to too high a difficulty.

It meant that I struggled to get beyond the first area, instead I mostly explored the initial area. That was a lot of fun, finding the different places where you can do tricks and where you can interact with different challenges. But again, when I struggle to spin for long enough in the starting area, what lies beyond doesn’t matter, and you do run out of stuff to do in the initial area (which leads to me trying to break the game’s physics… multiple times).

Final Thoughts

The game’s potential is there, but – through either difficulty or technical changes – the game doesn’t give me a chance to actually see where it ends up going. It’s frustrating, because I tried and it couldn’t get out of my way.

#536 Call of Duty

Posted: 22nd January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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665th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Infinity Ward
Publisher: Activision

How have I not played Call of Duty yet? The series is now one of the biggest out there (although, with the likes of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, we couldn’t quite say that felt right) and its yearly releases always seem to be a big deal for at least some part of the gaming population.

Back in 2003, when the first one was release however, this wasn’t the case. Other military shooters were around – I think – and this just added a new one that clearly hit the zeitgeist somehow. Today’s task is clearly to find out why that is.

Our Thoughts

Call of Duty feels pretty standard, but as the first to really popularize the genre, that almost seems expected. It’s a decent quality military shooter that does the job quite well. It actually feels like it keeps things quite grounded and straight forward, with no real tricks – that’s what makes it work here.

It looks pretty decent and gets a lot of things right straight away – possibly the reason it grew. It has good gunplay and gives some good goals and basic story as you move around, making it more than just killing a bunch of people standing in your way. There are some tactics involved, even if it’s not as much as later, but it works.

What this game did was to set the standard. Others iterated on it, especially graphically, but the core here actually feels good, and the relative simplicitly actually helps it stay more playable than more advanced ‘simulations’

#804 Warhawk

Posted: 18th January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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664th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Playstation 3
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Incognito Entertainment/SCE Santa Monica Studio
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

I’ve simultaneously wanted to play this game and was dreading to do so. Warhawk is a multiplayer shooter, with no singleplayer mode or content. That makes it harder to review, especially as the game is already a decade old, so there might not be as many players around.

Besides, as I’m playing, I’m home alone, so nobody to play with. I just hope I can get something out of it.

Our Thoughts

So yeah, my experience was a bit limited as I didn’t play online that much. At the same time, that was fine, as these shooters aren’t as much my thing anyway.

The game plays on multiple levels – ground, with vehicles, planes or the titular Warhawk – the coolest part of the game. You fly around and bomb things with plenty of weapons and options. It’s a decent challenge with plenty of options and it’s in the title – it’s meant to be the exciting option!

Beyond that, the game is a decent shooter/flight sim, but I suspect that you need to get into the strategy to really enjoy it. I guess I didn’t get enough into that, nor did I really care to.

#327 Wave Race 64

Posted: 14th January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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663rd played so far

Genre: Racing
Platform: Nintendo 64
Year of Release: 1996
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Publisher: Nintendo

Sure, we have plenty of racing games – early on it was an easy genre for multiplayer, and it’s something people still love – but few take place on the water and I swear even less use jet skis – googling it, this is the only notable one that does, with only Diddy Kong Racing offering something slightly similar.

At this point in time, Mario Kart and F-Zero were the big Nintendo racing franchise. This doesn’t quite seem like either, but it will be interesting to see where it leads to.

Our Thoughts

While the answer isn’t quite that it’s somewhere in between, it neither has the cartoonish feel of Mario Kart or the speed of F-Zero. Instead, there’s some sense of realism, but also a loose race that lets you get on with things without requiring a lot of practice early on, something Nintendo clearly does well.

You’ll easily score more than enough stars from your early races to keep going for a while, but the difficulty ramps up well enough that you have to stay on top of things and improve if you want to keep going. It’s well done and becomes a lot of fun.

Water is quite difficult to represent well in games and was even harder two decades ago. This game does it well – perhaps not with perfect physics, but it looks good and realistic enough. It’s quite impressive, needed for a game that relies so much on water, but done better here.

Final Thoughts

Wave Race 64 is an interesting racing game – not too high intensity, but with plenty of challenges in keeping up with the track and making it through the game.

It looks decent, too, with enough focus on the water to make it feel right. Sure, it’s not realistic, but so close enough that the game feels right.

#113 Spindizzy

Posted: 10th January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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662nd played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1986
Developer: Electric Dreams Software
Publisher: Electric Dreams Software/Activision

Spindizzy looks interesting. It uses the isometric perspective that’s quite popular in these days, but doesn’t use the human characters moving around and mostly looks like a version of Marble Madness. It’s not exactly that – instead it’s more of an exploration game like Knight Lore – and plenty others that I honestly haven’t been putting off, really – in how you explore an area.

Our Thoughts

Spindizzy is a big game, with loads of puzzles. There’s large, multi-screen mazes that make heavy use of moving between height levels and other tricks like it. There’s a lot to see and I feel like I only scratched the surface.

The downside is that I didn’t really manage to come to grip with the controls. The game heavily riffs on Marble Madness and the controls and physics are taken from this game. However, where that game relied on short, reflex based levels, here you are meant to solve more complicated puzzles and deal with longer stretches of precise movement. The focus is different and because of that, I struggled to see a lot – as always, I’m happy for Youtube.

This is even more because the game contains some really cool ideas and it’s a great one for its time that works out quite well. It’s a decent look and there are a lot of things the game manages to do with it that show how much everything in this genre had evolved compared to the references I mentioned earlier. It’s just a shame that the basics, the controls, are ones that are too hard for me to pick up for a casual session.

#363 R-Type Delta

Posted: 6th January 2018 by Jeroen in Games
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661st played so far

Genre: Shoot-Em Up
Platform: Playstation 1
Year of Release: 1998
Developer: Irem
Publisher: Irem/Agetec/Sony

Today we go back to the world of R-Type, a side-scrolling shooter that is more or less just that. It was decent, incredibly difficult but with really good bosses… assuming you reached them.

We’ve now reached the fourth game in the series, made for the Playstation and so focused on something to play at home, which would hopefully rebalance the game to make it more playable.

Our Thoughts

So this game is still difficult, but the solution is, well, pretty much like how I played the original R-Type: the game gives you a lot more continues than you see anywhere else, hence giving you a lot more chances to make it through the game. You still hit a wall, but as you can push through, you get to develop more strategies. Obviously, earlier sections become easier as you play them more, so you get further. It seems like a good middleground between difficult and accessible, even if it is still fairly time consuming.

It’s still punishing, but at least you get to more bosses faster. I always feel like these are the most interesting part of these games – more than just dealing with enemies you learn to beat, there’s something unique and cool about them. It doesn’t always pay off, but here it feels like it mostly does. It pays off, and that’s great.

The game looks good too, and that helps. There are some of the PS1 era jaggy edges, sure, but it mostly hides it well and it makes it all fit together well. The futuristic looks help, smoother with some detail in background where it can be textured. It’s pretty effective and becomes its own treat to see new things.

Final Thoughts

I had a decent feeling about this game – the later shooters always feel more fun to play than the old ones that dominated gaming early on and feels like an improvement without sacrificing its difficulty.

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