#501 Metroid Prime

Posted: 11th August 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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2

533rd played so far

MetroidPrimebox

Genre: Action/First-Person Shooter
Platform: Gamecube
Year of Release: 2002
Developer: Retro Studios
Publisher: Nintendo

The Metroid Prime series is Metroid done as a first-person shooter, an interesting variation on the theme that was experimental at the time.

So when we started playing Metroid Prime, we did so using the Wii remastered version. Because of its control issues, we redi it a few weeks later with the Gamecube version – so there’s a fairer comparison.

Our Thoughts

Playing the two versions show how much a tutorial can make a difference. The Wii controls are so awkward, the escape at the end of the tutorial level felt impossible for a while. I just couldn’t get through in time, and wasn’t that close to finishing it either. The Wii version doesn’t support the Gamecube controller either – not making your life any easier. Later, trying the Gamecube version, I finished the level with quite a bit of time remaining and actually got into the semi-open world.

Because that tutorial level isn’t really representative, and doesn’t feel much like Metroid. While scanning for information bits is interesting and adds some flavour to the world, there are no secrets, no passages to explore (except for a semi-mandatory one needed to get the map) and not much to do but to follow the path. It’s probably so you can’t miss anything while going through the tutorial, but it doesn’t feel like a Metroid world yet.

After this (and losing a bunch of abilities they teach you about) you end up on another world, more open than the corridors we’ve seen in the 2D Metroid games (although it still has those as well). It invites you to explore and (to be honest) see all the parts you can’t get to yet, parts of the world that opens up as you gain more abilities. The promise is actually there, which is very exciting.

Looks-wise, the Wii version is an upgrade, but it’s a waste with the gameplay downgrade. The first(?) alien world also mostly has a lot of browns, but I hope later upgrades change that far enough.

Final Thoughts

Although the size of the world is impressive and the game feels more open in how the world looks, even if not necessarily in the path, Metroid Prime does lack something the earlier 2D games had. It’s probably because it has the slower start, where other games drop you in this environment where you still don’t have as many places where you can go, but can see all the other paths and where it feels like there are more places to go… later.

#534 Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

Posted: 7th August 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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1

532nd played so far

Disgaea_Hour_of_Darkness

Genre: Role Playing/Strategy
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher: Atlus/Koei

I’m struggling to remember whether we’ve played a tactical RPG yet. I’ve played some before – Pokemon Conquest was an addiction in the house for a while – but aside from games in the region like Baldur’s Gate, the good list ones such as Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics haven’t come up yet.

Disagea: Hour of Darkness is the first of two games in the series that are on the list. It’s, as said, a tactical RPG involving demons, involving you taking back rulership of the (dark) world.

Our Thoughts

One of the downsides, for me, of tactical RPGs is that they miss out on some parts of the RPG experience that I tend to enjoy – the storylines and characters – and that individual character development can feel a bit limited. While characters gain levels, usually this just changes the numbers without adding much in the way of abilities or choices – equipment being most of that. Disgaea adds some more development, but it’s designed for breadth, with loads of characters, rather than getting deep into its development. Most story is in cutscenes outside the battles.

And those battles are pretty decent. I’ve not found a cap on how many people I can bring in yet, which means there’s some grinding potential for difficult battles (although that might change later), although it can feel like a bit of a slog for bigger battles. Sometimes the animations can really feel like they slow things down. On the other hand, there are plenty of options in the game, the friends attack system being implemented nicely in particular – if you attack with other characters next to them, they’ll join in the attack.

Land effects – or geo panels – pay a role as well, with removing them being a part of the reward system, but also helping or hindering you. By being on the right square, you can increase your attack power, get weaker or gain bonuses. Interacting with specific jewels on the battlefield changes or removes them, damaging everyone on the tiles, which can create some powerful chains, but also giving you the downside of losing that effect. It added an extra layer to the game, nicely improving the strategic background.

Although it takes time to begin unlocking, the options outside combat are interesting as well. As you go up in power, you can increase your ranks in the Dark Assembly, where you can hold votes to improve your shops, unlock maps and gain other aid. It’s an interesting mechanism that makes it feel like there are more politics at play, which ties into the plot. Even if it’s just a numbers game, it feels like you have to actually become a ruler.

Final Thoughts

I don’t think I invested quite enough time in this game to really come to grip with the mechanics – although that would take more time than I would have anyway. The game was already a lot of fun to play, even if the last level we played was quite frustrating. I’m keen on going back to experiment further.

#270 Sensible World of Soccer

Posted: 3rd August 2016 by Jeroen in Games
0

531th played so far

Sensible_World_of_Soccer_cover

Genre: Sports
Platform: Amiga/PC
Year of Release: 1994
Developer: Sensible Software
Publisher: Renegade/GT Interactive

More football games, more sports, more of what I feel we’ve seen before. Sport games just as much feel like they’re a checkbox game – same functionality, each adds a feature, but how does Sensible World of Soccer compare to FIFA 10, what more would it offer?

Our Thoughts

This… was a football game. Slightly more playable than other games, I’m happy to report, as it seemed like it handled better, but I still didn’t manage a win. I did manage to score though, that was a big win. But more on that in a bit.

For me, more strategy player than twitchy action game, this game had the perfect option. Rather than playing out the entire game each time, you can let the game resolve the results of your matches, while you just set up the strategy – an early Football Manager setup. It may not seem like much, but means that you can still progress at a somewhat faster pace.

As said though, the actual matches, which should be the focus of the game, aren’t my sort of thing. Two notes I’ve had is that, first of all, the aiming is pretty bad – there isn’t much granularity to be had. That was off putting, as was the player AI in general, which didn’t get the players where you want them.

Final Thoughts

These football games really just aren’t my thing, but it also feels like there’s no game that seems to really train you in them – some game-based cultural heritage that I never learned. Unlike FPS games, however, I haven’t been picking up on it as I played, partially because, again, the games don’t seem to be set up for it.

The football manager mode was nice, though, so this isn’t a lost cause. If anything, this is something I expected to see resolved in later games instead. A good try, with a supposedly decent simulation (for its age) – and the reights to a lot of the real life teams and players of the day!

#266 Gravity Power

Posted: 30th July 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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0

530th played so far

gravity_power

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Amiga
Year of Release: 1994
Developer: Bits Productions

To be honest, Gravity Power seems to be a Lunar Lander ‘inspired’ game. Not too inspiring to be honest, although we’ll see.

Oddly enough, this was an upgraded version of an earlier released game, initially released with a magazine (to encourage you to buy the magazine). It was good enough to make it in here.

Our Thoughts

Gravity Power is a simple game. A 1 vs 1 Lunar Lander-style shooter, not unlike Gravity Crash, just not as… impressive, really. And you need to take off from the ground. Oh, and it’s two player only (or at least the AI player never worked for me – Amiga games are troublesome to play now), which really limited the appeal of this game for me.

I can see how, once you get used to the controls, this can be a very fun game, and there is a lot of variety in the levels. It’s just that the setup doesn’t work well. The game looks fine, but would have been dated even at the time.

Final Thoughts

I tried the game, and as close minded, it didn’t work for me. The book says it was once considered by some to be the second greatest game – it doesn’t feel that way to me. These days, just skip ahead to Gravity Crash.

#661 Rogue Galaxy

Posted: 26th July 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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0

529th played so far

RG_EU_Cover_300

Genre: Role Playing
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2005
Developer: Level-5
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Somehow it feels like I haven’t played a JRPG in a while. In fact, when it comes to the blog, RPGs have been sparse lately. I make up for it in my personal gaming, and indeed I recently completed Final Fantasy X. Still, I miss the usual variety it offers to the blog, not having a chance to explore the fields. Although there have been plenty of other good games – I have no reason to complain.

Rogue Galaxy is an action RPG focused on bounty hunting. Beyond that, the descriptions of these RPGs blur together a bit – I think I’m better off just playing it.

Our Thoughts

Action RPGs are a bit of a love-hate thing for me. Adding in small timing-based QTEs, as in Paper Mario, work well for me, while if it is barely an RPG in combat, like Fallout 3 outside of VATS, I can enjoy it as that. Rogue Galaxy makes it a bit more difficult, as it is a fairly standard 3rd person action fighting game (at times like a cheap Shadow of the Colossus), with RPG trappings and spells, but not quite as much fighting precision.

Character progression ins somewhat interesting. There is pretty standard leveling involved, but also use of items to unlock extra abilities – somewhat like Final Fantasy X‘s grid, but with more standard stat changes. It’s an interesting system, allowing for trade offs without fully screwing you over if you can’t find something you need.

The story and concept add some natural feeling side quests and variety of the levels. As a galactic bounty hunter (starting off on a wild desert planet, which does sound familiar) you travel around the galaxies fighting on different themed planets. It sets up a bunch of the changes and a good reasno to travel. It also gives you a good reason to travel back – capturing enough of each enemy to meet your quota. There’s more of a story than that, of course, but the basic setup is there.

The boss fights seem to be even more interesting. The first boss fight is in stages, not just requiring differently aimed attacks, but also having you climb the beast to hit weak spots. It’s not quite Shadow of the Colossus complex, but it brings in some interesting added variety. The controls don’t always deliver on it, but it works.

Final Thoughts

Rogue Galaxy is a good looking game with a bunch of interesting ideas. The battle and advancement systems aren’t entirely new, but feel fresh and more interesting than what we get otherwise. The side quests are varied and create a far more interesting world and set of tasks than you’d normally get. It all works that well.

#197 Super Tennis

Posted: 22nd July 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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0

528th played so far

SupertennisSNES_boxart

Genre: Sports
Platform: SNES
Year of Release: 1991
Developer: Tokyo Shoseki
Publisher: Nintendo

It feels like there are a fair amount of tennis games on the list. I suppose it’s the standard approach – Pong started it, and even afterwards it’s a pretty simple formula to start with as a sports formula. Super Tennis is, I guess, a predecessor to the Mario Tennis series, one of the games where Nintendo’s mascot doesn’t appear yet.

Even so there are a bunch more tennis games, both older and newer, and even if Top Spin 3 has been a while, there are a bunch more coming up down the line.

Our Thoughts

Tennis games are usually cut from the same cloth. The rules of tennis don’t change that much and while you can tweak the moves a bit, most of the rules are already present in this game. You change the graphics, but even then there is a standard setup looking from the back of one player. It’s probably why it can easily show up fully in a game like Wii Sports. We see 2D sprites here, but the basic gameplay stays the same between all of these.

And yeah, I realise there are probably control differences. I’m not skilled enough to tell the differences, and don’t have the time to figure it out.

One of the small touches that worked quite well were the added voice samples. They were still rare in the era, but the limited vocabulary from the referee allows for some of it, and it adds to the atmosphere. It seemed like a nice touch.

Beyond that, the game feels nice and simple. There are simple tournament modes that work quite well and the controls are straightforward. It’s pretty good fun, really.

Final Thoughts

There’s nothing remarkable about this game, but it shows how tennis is such a good sport – better, I feel, than something like football.ย  There’s nothing special, possibly, but it works well and looks good in a SNES way. Just fun.

#465 Black & White

Posted: 18th July 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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0

527th played so far

Black_&_White_Coverart

Genre: Life Simulation/Strategy
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2001
Developer: Lionhead Studios
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Black & White isn’t a game we’re going into blindly. We’ve both played – I don’t think I ever finished it, but I always enjoyed playing the game a lot.

Black & White is a god game from Peter Molyneux, one of the first games where the designer overpromised and didn’t quite deliver (also see Fable). The twist this time is that you control a giant creature who influences events and can be molded by you. Sort of.

Our Thoughts

Black & White is pretty much what we described before, a god game where you encourage your tribe to build up an area, but don’t have much control yourself. You can move them to place to get them to do jobs, but you’re just as often hoping they will do the right thing.

But the creature makes all the difference. Again, he has his own mind, but you can leash him to teach him things. One makes him nicer, one makes him more evil, the third helps him learn faster. He has his own personality, formed by your action – do nice things around him (helped by the leash) and he’ll do the same, do bad things and he’ll copy that. You can punish him by hitting him, or scratching him to reward him and teach him behaviour. Add to that that he can learn to cast spells and manipulate the world in the same way you can, and you get an interesting challenge, where you have to balance watching him, teaching him and tending to the rest of the world.

All of this is in an interface that tries to integrate as much as possible. Therea re no real menus (other than an option screen that requires temple access in the first place) and so all control is through the hand cursor you’re using. It’s minimal and immersive, but at times annoying – for example, a lack of minimap navigation means you can get lost and have some trouble trying to find a mission location again.

But it works. The interaction feels more seamless and the world and creature responsive enough to seem impressive, showing off the AI. It gets you and is an amazing toy. Some of the missions don’t work well (and I can’t get the hang of creature fighting), but it’s all good enough to get you through.

Final Thoughts

Creaky around the edges, the game is ambitious in a way that doesn’t always quite work out. Where it does, though, the game is immersive and fun, setting up a great toybox to play around with. The storyline adds to that, but enough of it just has you wanting to see what the game brings out next.

#576 Zuma

Posted: 14th July 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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0

526th played so far

Zumacover

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: Internet
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Oberon Media
Publisher: PopCap Games

Zuma has been lurking for a while, PopCap Games’ casual games like Peggle having been fun already and I knew more of them were a lot of fun to play. I know the basics of this game from other implementations, but it’ll be nice to play it in this more focused form.

Our Thoughts

Zuma‘s gameplay is, as you’d expect, simple at its most basic. You shoot marbles at a long string of marbles that slowly comes to your position (using a long and convoluted route). When you match three (or more) of a colour in a row, they disappear and pull the queue back for a while. When all marbles are gone, you win the level.

On its own, it’s a solid idea that could carry the game for a little while. The extra additions Zuma brings to the format is what makes it. Not just the tracks it runs down – there are some interesting variations here, with marbles looping on themselves, two tracks rolling together and diving over and under each other that make it trickier to keep track of where you need to go – but also the pwoerups that stop or slow down the board or move it elsewhere.

With the puzzles you encounter being fairly self contained, the challenge is in the ongoing cascade of more marbles making things worse for you. Well balanced, you rarely just lose outright, it’s always a slow descent into madness.

Zuma takes a lot from Aztec art as an inspiration – something that Peggle had in a few places, but is stronger here. It’s simple, but effective.

Final Thoughts

As with all good puzzle games, Zuma isn’t a complicated game, but it uses a limited number of elements for a bigger challenge and slowly builds on them. An amazing good time, even when you started it because your husband is asleep on the couch behind you after a Minecraft binge.

#1007 Minecraft

Posted: 10th July 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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1

525th played so far

minecraft-cover

Genre: Simulation
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2011
Developer: Mojang
Publisher: Mojang

Minecraft must be one of the biggest game success stories of the past decade, responsible for the success of many streams and streaming sites, as well as the rise of Mojang and all that that entails.

We’ve played around with it before – before the list update that actually made it one of the 1001 games – and enjoyed it, just not to the extend as others. This time we really get to jump in.

Our Thoughts

I’ll be honest, I’ve been staring at this post for a while without knowing where to start. Minecraft can be so many things for different people that it’s difficult to see where to start. I hope I can cover the basics now going through the game. And I assume I don’t have to explain what the game is…

Not related as much to a specific mode, but probably the most recognisable element of the game, are the graphics. They’re blocky and pixelly, a necessity for what it’s trying to do, but I must admit it got difficult at times to know and see what’s what – it was mostly just hoping it was useful.

But then, exploration and discovery is a major part of the game. While the achievements give you some guidance, you need to work out on your own what most crafting recipes are. There’s some satisfaction in figuring out what they are, but mostly we turned to the wiki to figure it out.

Then the first step is to use these tools to set up a safe place – usually a simple house, a few walls, torches and so on. At night fiends spawn (unless you’re playing peaceful) and while you can kill them, avoidance is a good thing. Playing with that on, especially at high, makes it a game of survival. You have to get food, be in a safe place, and survive in this blocky world.

Your other option, and one you need to take in this situation, but also when you play more peaceful, is exploration. There are really two options here – out and down. Digging down gets you to rarer and more special blocks, allowing tougher tools and weapons and weirder creations, some that can be used to program or do other things. There are mines hidden in the mountains, and the continuation of ‘story mode’ – a way to get to another world where you can kill the big creeper.

The other way is to go out. While there are plenty of mountains, the Minecraft world is divided in biomes with far more diversity than that. Some distance from our starting point, we found a deep gorge, for example, with creatures roaming the bottom. We had to create our own stairs to get down and explore though, and ended up in one of the mines discussed earlier – while also gathering rubies and sapphires. Aside from oceans, there are villages and NPCs to find (although we didn’t). We did this for a while, got lost, and only made our way back through some debug tools, a nice exploration that we could continue.

But then there’s the other part, that made Minecraft and its streams famous, and the thing that we only vaguely did: creating things. I must say I didn’t always have the patience to figure it out, but there are some truely impressive things you can do with it. Not just in looks, but there are electric systems and the like that can create impressive movements. And man, it was tempting to keep expanding the house we had built.

Final Thoughts

Minecraft is a phenomenon. I might not have been quite as taken in with it as some, but yeah, personally I’d love to explore further and deeper, finding out more about what’s there to find…

#535 Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly

Posted: 6th July 2016 by Jeroen in Games
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0

524th played so far

Fatal_Frame_II_-_Crimson_Butterfly

Genre: Survival Horror
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Tecmo
Publisher: Tecmo

The Fatal Frame series is one we’ve been avoiding for a bit. Not because of our dislike of survival horror games – although Resident Evil has certainly put us off, something like Silent Hill was great to play.

No, Fatal Frame was meant to be that frightening. Ghosts are only seen through a camera, and that being the only way to capture them. They are supposed to be that scary that it was an issue early on. This is one we’re playing in bright daylight.

Our Thoughts

Fatal Frame II was incredibly effective at spooking you. There is just enough exposition to make you worry, there’s the suspense because you know something will happen soon (making the slow bits more tense while paying off quite well). What helped as well is that exploration often paid off, not just with items, but with scary prospects and hints at future puzzles and sightings. There are a bunch of random occurences as well.

The central mechanism is what helps so much. As might be obvious, the game is set around photography – you need to look through a camera to track ghosts and take photos of them to defeat and capture them. All your upgrades are centered around this as well, working as a non-lethal weapon.

It’s an interesting setup for an adventure. Exploring smaller Japanese houses makes for a scary enough setting, always contained so you know there aren’t many places to search, while at the same time not giving you a chance to get away from what’s threatening you. And knowing these things are coming, you have to be ready when you step into the room. The camera mechanic makes them even more challenging: it forces you to limit your field of view, which means that as the ghosts teleport or move around you, it’s a lot more difficult to keep up, and a lot more tense as you fight them. Even so, the limitations aren’t unfairly so – various camera-based indicators stick around even if they normally wouldn’t be there.

Final Thoughts

Atmosphere is a big part of survival horror games, and Fatal Frame II has that in spades. Added to that, the controls are better than a Resident Evil, but still limiting and constricting – just for a good reason this time, the camera constricting your movement. It’s tense enough to keep you on your toes, but also enough breathers that you can keep going.

And we have another one in the series coming up.

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