Retro Gaming – Page 21

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: March 2014

I’d just like to point out that in no part of this post am I trying to fool you. Yeah, there are some really weird entries in here this month, but none of them are jokes. I legitimately spent some time trying to figure out the appeal of Freakyforms.

Note that the Now Playing list is shorter than usual. I’m proud of this, because it means that I’m focusing on completing games, rather than having a dozen on the go at once like a spaz.

~ Now Playing ~

Zelda: Oracle of Ages (GBC) – It’s weird, because I claim Link’s Awakening to be my favourite Zelda, but I just can’t get into this one. I think it probably has less to do with the obtuse puzzles than the fact that it takes damn near forever to navigate the two world maps. Five dungeons down, three to go.

Yoshi’s New Island (3DS) – I’m only just starting World 3, but here’s what I can tell you so far: It’s almost as good as the original game, just with different graphics and worse music. So basically, yes, you want to play this, but do it with the volume off.

Freakyforms: Your Creations, Alive! (3DS) – I bought this thing years ago and have barely touched it, picking it up recently only as something to do while on the can. It’s a lot like Drawn To Life in that it’s fun to turn everything into penises, but not actually very fun to play. Once you get your penis fix, it’s basically just collecting a zillion doodads that give you more customization options. I don’t know if I’ll bother seeing it through to the end, or if there even is an end.

Blowfish Meets Meteor (iOS) – I’ve trained myself to ignore my phone as a gaming device, but every few days I remember that this game is actually really good and pick it up for a few levels. Those cute little mermaids aren’t going to save themselves, you know! I’ve progressed to World 5 at this point, and I have no idea how much longer it goes on.

Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES) – I’ve beaten the other two DKC games multiple times each, but for some reason I never really got into this one. I want to finally scratch it off my list, but I don’t know if I can be bothered to complete it to the full 102%.

Snapdots (DSi) – This is where I’m getting my “a little like picross but not really” fix for now. All I have to say at the moment is that the difficulty is really uneven. The stupid-easy and retarded-hard puzzles are all intermixed seemingly at random. Fun, and most of the time makes you actually think.

~ Game Over ~

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (360) – I am terribly fond of this one, and like the two other FFXIIIs that came before it, it’s pretty much dominated my gaming time. I even wrote a whole thing about it, I like it so much. So read that for thoughts more in-depth than “I think it’s neat.” I finished the game, and I’m playing through again on new game+, just destroying everything in my way.

Pokémon Battle Trozei (3DS) – It’s a Pokémon block-matching game. If you want to know more, check back in on Sunday when my full review goes live. I’ve “cleared the game” but still have roughly half the Pokémon list to fill in.

Jet Force Gemini (N64) – Hey, come on. You should know by now that I’ve been writing big spiels about any N64 games I play this year. Get with the program. TLDR: It’s was pretty alright until the end, when it turned into poop from a butt.

Soul of Darkness (DSi) – A crappy-looking Castlevania wannabe. It’s actually a decent effort, but there’s still no reason that you should play it over an actual Castlevania game. The one fun thing about it is that like all of Gameloft’s DSi games, it uses the camera to replace art assets with photos you take. This game in particular lets you replace the three main characters’ faces with whatever you choose.

Tappingo (3DS) – A puzzle game that people keep comparing to picross, but really it isn’t all that much like picross. You assemble a picture with a group of square tiles, and that’s about all they have in common. Tappingo is significantly easier than picross, and is definitely more of a thing you zone out with while you’re listening to the TV in the background. Not something you play for a deep intellectual challenge. It was brief, but fun.

Jett Rocket II: The Wrath of Taikai (3DS) – The sequel to a goofy 2010 WiiWare platformer that I inexplicably loved. More than half of the levels are side-scrolling now, and the overall game isn’t quite as enjoyable as the first one, but it’s still good enough that I’m looking forward to the third game that the ending teases. Also the collectable solar cells are just money now, so that’s nice.

Pokémon Y (3DS) – I think I counted this in Game Over before, but this time it’s really game over. The Pokédex is complete. 718/718. This is where I would drop the mic if I were inclined to do a thing like that.

Altered Beast (PC) – I got the recent SEGA Humble Bundle, and it came with a collection of ten Genesis/Mega Drive games. This is the first of those. It’s kinda butt, and I’m not even ashamed to say that I had to give myself infinite lives to beat it. Whatever, it’s an old-school brawler; it’s not supposed to be beaten.

~ Reruns ~

Donkey Kong Country (SNES) – Picked it up on a whim and nearly finished it in one sitting. Or so I thought. Turns out that I had forgotten that the last world is a thing that exists, so I wasn’t actually that close after all. One thing I noted is that it’s an awful lot harder than I remember.

3D Classics: Kid Icarus (3DS) – It doesn’t get a lot of respect, but I love Kid Icarus to pieces. It’s challenging, but not actually as hard as you may have heard. Or maybe it’s just because I’ve played it enough times over the past couple years to get really good at it. It just makes me sad that the 3D Classics version doesn’t have a new game+ mode like the NES original, because…

3D Classics: Kid Icarus (3DS) – I had so much fun the first time that I played it over again. This is the first time this kind of thing has happened, so I wasn’t sure how to deal with it. And thus, I listed it twice.

Super Mario Bros 2 (NES) – I bought the Virtual Console version of this on 3DS on a whim, and plowed through it in one go. Using all the shortcuts, of course. I’m a little shocked at how much harder it is than I was expecting. I had a lot of trouble making through the final stage. I suppose there’s a reason that I was never able to finish it as a wee one.

Year of N64 – March: Jet Force Gemini

Jet Force Gemini and I have a unique relationship. I sort of glossed over the coverage in Nintendo Power back in the day, and I did rent it once. However, while I didn’t have any immediate problems with the game, my friends held a negative opinion of it (though why that was never came up), and I didn’t spend very much time with it because of peer pressure. As it stands, I think it’s still the only video game I haven’t played for that reason.

But now I have played it, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t miss all that much.

That’s a pretty blunt way to put it though. The fact of the matter is that JFG is an alright game, but it certainly doesn’t dazzle the way that it should. Mostly because it’s got a handful of minor-to-infuriating issues that bog it down, but also because pretty much everything else that Rare did on the Nintendo 64 is a much better way to spend your time. If Mickey’s Speedway USA weren’t so mediocre and Donkey Kong 64 wasn’t a minigame-focused mess, JFG would be the worst N64 game developed by Rare.

Though, again, that’s harsher than it actually sounds. I appreciate Rare’s efforts with JFG, but it’s one of those games that could greatly benefit from a complete overhaul. A remake isn’t something I’d buy an Xbox One for, but I’d certainly plunk down $15 if it were remade as an XBLA game. But that’s for an actual remake. I wouldn’t pay a dime for a simple HD edition, and you’ll find out why soon enough.

The absolute worst problem with Jet Force Gemini is controlling the game. It has a control scheme reminiscent of a platformer mixed with a first-person shooter – that is to say that the control stick moves your guy in the direction you press it, and the left and right C buttons are used to strafe. The controls themselves are solid in theory, and they work for similar games, so what’s the problem here?

First of all, the characters feel very slippery. It’s hard to explain, but they don’t have that nice tight feeling that you expect to get from a high-profile 3rd-person action game. Precision movements are very difficult to make. It’s very common that your character won’t quite move the way that you want them to, and I’ve lost many, many lives by accidentally overshooting a ledge and plummeting into the void. Trying to move backward is also way more trouble that it ought to be.

The strafing is also super-weird. Maybe it’s a third-person thing, but the characters don’t simply move to either side the way you think they would. They seem to sort of randomly drift forwards or backwards a bit as well, and that can really throw you off in the middle of an intense firefight. Holding the R button to enter aim mode fixes this, but trying to aim while dodging the enemies’ unbelieveably accurate shots is its own little chanllenge.

When mixed with the slippery character movements, jumping is just not something you ever want to have to do. Just trying to line up your character for a jump is difficult, and landing where you want to is even harder. Fortunately, precision platforming isn’t something that the game asks you to do very often, but it’s a huge pain it the butt when it does come up.

The other issue I have with the game is how it handles collectibles. Rare games are well-known for requiring you to pick up a metric ton of silly baubles, and JFG alleviates that by making half of the pickups character upgrades (health/ammo expansions and new weapons) and keys, but it’s the other half of the collectibles that bug me.

The Tribals are a teddy bear-like race of friendly creatures who have been captured and enslaved by the space-bug bad guys. Throughout each stage, a handful of Tribals are scattered around, and it’s your job to find and save each one of them. They’re literally just standing around waiting to be saved, and all you have to do to save one is to run up to it, which will teleport it to safety.

What makes them annoying is that you have to rescue all of them to get to the end of the game. Already that’s kind of dumb because they aren’t handed out as challenge rewards like jiggies and power stars in Banjo-Kazooie or Super Mario 64, they’re just standing around. It doesn’t feel like you’re actually doing anything to earn your ending. It stings even more that you need certain upgrades before you can rescue some Tribals, so you have to backtrack if you’re going to get them all. The thing that makes me really irate about this is that when you return to a level, you have to rescue all the Tribals in it. Ones you’ve found already aren’t recorded, meaning that you’ve got to get them all in one go.

This basically means that you should ignore the Tribals until you’ve got all the upgrades and weapons, and then go through all the stages again. It would have been really nice of the game to tell you this in advance, but it doesn’t. So the first-time player will waste a ton of time getting all but that one inaccessible Tribal in each stage, and then return only to learn that he/she has to get them all again.

The one saving grace of this system is that since you and the enemies can straight-up murder the Tribals, so if you mess up and get one killed, you don’t have to reset the game. But really, that’s just alleviating one annoyance by susbstituting it with another, slightly less annoying one.

Jet Force Gemini’s redeeming qualities are pretty much all in the combat. It’s a third-person blast’-em-up, and firefights are good fun. Once you get a grip on the wonky controls, that is. The really fun thing is that it’s a cover-based shooter before cover-based shooters existed. The space-bugs have really great aim, and while you can’t snap to cover like you can in modern games, you’ll have to learn to strafe in and out from behind trees, crates, and the like if you want to make it very far. Simply trying to barrel through stages like a crazy person will not work at all.

The game also gives you a rather huge arsenal of guns and other weapons to play around with. After only a few stages, you’ll be equipped with a pistol, machine gun, plasma shotgun, sniper rifle, tri-rocket launcher, two types of grenades, and remote mines. There are even more guns and gadgets to collect, and enough different enemy types that pretty much all of them get a chance to shine. I’m the kind of guy who tends to favour one weapon, but JFG had the rare quality of making me comfortable with regularly rotating through my entire arsenal.

I’m also a fan of the cartoony space setting. It’s not a thing you see all that often in video games. Generally things of the sci-fi variety are super-serious, but JFG likes to goof it up whenever it gets a chance. From the adorable little Tribal coos and the gooey splatters that bugs make when you shoot them, to groan-worthy puns and jokes in the dialogue and the doofy-looking nervous system displays on the character select screen. And of course, since it’s a Rare game, at one point you have to find an NPC’s missing underwear.

I would be remiss to omit that you can also unlock special game modifiers by collecting the severed heads of your enemies. The special unlockables include: making blood rainbow-coloured, turning yuor main characters into kid versions of themselves, and changing all the basic enemies into Mr. Pants. That, my friends, is some sweet, sweet irony.

However, Jet Force Gemini does its absolute best to destroy any goodwill it’s earned once you get to the second act. Here, you’re given the task of collecting 12 spaceship parts (one of which is awarded for finding all the Tribals) before you can face the final boss. Most parts are found in new areas, so it’s not the worst fetch quest of all time. However, two of the ship parts are nearly impossible to win.

To get one of the pieces, you need to win a racing minigame. This is the absolute worst racing sequence that I’ve ever played, and it’s so viciously difficult that I almost turned off the system and called the game done after spending more than an hour over two evenings trying to win. I thought the Goron race minigame in Majora’s Mask was bad, but it’s got nothing on the JFG race.

What makes the race bad is mostly in the controls. Despite the N64 controller having an analog stick, moving your racer left or right is not a precise affair. Rather, you move the stick and it basically just flings itself in that direction. It’s basically impossible to control, and if you so much as gaze the wall, your speed is immediately cut in half (at least!). The AI is also brutal. The racer that starts next to you has a one-way rubber band effect; if you’re behind, it’s extremely difficult to catch up, but if you’re ahead, he will find a way to pass you. I don’t know how I passed this race, but I did it, and I felt the biggest relief, as I assumed that the worst was now behind me.

Enter Floyd. Over the course of the game, you recruit a little flying robot buddy who you can control to play little obstacle course mini-games for multiplayer unlockables. Except that one of these courses actually has a mission-critical item as its top prize, and it’s retarded hard to win.

The idea is simple: fly through a course of pipes, collect 8 doodads, and shoot 4 targets. Super easy. I completed it like nothing, but I wasn’t awarded the prize. What the game doesn’t tell you is that you have to do all this in under a minute. Also, the controls while playing as Floyd are even worse than the racer controls. Aiming is a bit sloppy in JFG on the whole, but trying to shoot something acurately while under a strict time limit? Nearly impossible. That and the collectibles have a hitbox that is much smaller than they are, so you basically have to fly right through the middle of them or you’ll miss and have to start over.

I came close twice, both times hitting the finish line less than a half-second too late. The fact remains that the other hundred or so attempts (I’m not exaggerating, either…) ended somewhere between 1:07 and 1:22. I’ve come close enough that obviously I think it’s something that I could accomplish, but not without channeling a lifetime’s worth of luck.

So I gave up. I invoked the Fuck It Adjustment, watched the final boss battle and ending on YouTube, and moved on with my life. This stupid mini-game was so infuriating that I nearly destroyed my N64 controller; clearly I wasn’t having fun anymore, and at that point it’s just not worth it. I think that by choosing to give up on Jet Force Gemini, I’ve grown a little bit as a person.

And so, my journey with the Jet Force came to an abrupt end. I got everything else required to beat the game, so I came close enough, but this one’s gonna remain incomplete. I suffered through a lot of crap just to get to the end, and that stupid Floyd course was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I want to be more positive about the game overall, but the fact of the matter is that the entire second half seems designed to make you hate it. It’s too bad, because there’s something decent buried under all that crud.

Year of N64 Bonus Round Q1 – Super Mario 64

Super Mario 64 is a game so near and dear to my heart that I’ve been calling it my Favourite Video Game for well over a decade now. For a while I was thinking maybe that Super Mario Galaxy might supplant it, but Spring Mario is stupid. Other than that it’s a pretty perfect game.

That gets me to thinking though, that I could go on and on all day about why I like Mario 64 so much. But I’ve done that before. Maybe not in blog form, but I have. So instead, let’s have a chat about the things I don’t like about Super Mario 64.

The short answer is nothing.

Yeah, that’s a huge cop-out. Obviously, if someone digs deep enough, they can find something to complain about even in their absolute favoutire thing. But it’s hard. One of the reasons that Super Mario 64 sits unchallenged on the throne of games I like the most is that there’s nothing about it that makes me grumpy, nothing that makes me call bull on it.

If you’re going to make me give you an actual answer though, I suppose one thing I might complain about is the way the Wing Cap controls. It works exactly as it’s supposed to, but it’s impossible to gain altitude with it, as Mario enters more of a glide than a full-on flying mode when he’s in the air. You get the boost from the initial takeoff, but from there on out it’s all descent. Maintaining speed is also a struggle. As Mario glides, he slows down to a rather lazy pace. The only way to regain any speed is to dip and then quickly pull back up, and after doing this, the tendency to lose control is fairly high.

I can see why Nintendo might have limited the Wing Cap’s flight ability, as there are a number of power stars that would be much easier to get if you could just fly up to them. But really, I’d rather have the option to cheese or not to cheese, rather than just have it strippped out in hopes of keeping the game “fair.” The cape power-up in Super Mario World is exactly that kind of broken, allowing you to skip entire levels once you’ve mastered it, but you won’t hear anyone complain about it. Mario 64 gives you so much freedom to play around any way you want, it’s just weird that free flight isn’t also included.

Also, Tiny-Huge Island is probably the least fun level. It’s not that the challenges are bad or anything, but the gimmick makes the level less fun than it could be. If you’re huge, it’s a miniscule stage with virtually nothing to do. If you’re tiny, it’s designed so that it takes forever to get anywhere. This is easily overcome by using the size-changing pipes, but it’s still a minor pain in the butt if you just want to bounce around the stage like a loon.

I’m really stretching it here, but I guess I also don’t like how your extra life counter resets every time you save and quit the game. That one’s mostly negligible though.

Big Plans -OR- Fairly Transparent Filler

You know, maybe that post title is a little too harsh. I don’t really do filler these days, so it’s not like I need to poke fun at it the way I used to back when basically every post was filler.

As for the subject at hand, I wanted to take a moment to check in and talk about how the Year of Nintendo 64 is going. It’s largely a personal project, so it’s not like I’m taking notes and sharing this stuff with everyone I know. I’m not even committed to writing a full article about every game I play. That said, I still want to sort of chart a course for the rest of the year here, as a reminder to keep me on task, if nothing else.

I spent January rounding up a few new games that I’ll be mixing into the lineup of games that I already own. Truth be told, I didn’t actually own enough “beatable” 64 games to get me through the year, so making some acquisitions was a must. I reserve the right to change this at any time, but here’s the breakdown of what I’ll be playing each month:

January – Goldeneye 007
February – Body Harvest
March – Jet Force Gemini
April – Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
May – Quest 64
June – Doom 64
July – Gauntlet Legends
August – Bomberman 64
September – Donkey Kong 64
October – Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes
November – The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
December – ?????

As you can see, I’ve come up slightly short. I do have a few other games that I could pop in there, but they’re either so short (Pokémon Snap) or I’ve played them recently enough (Banjo-Tooie) that I don’t feel like they’re a good fit for the project. They may still get some play, but they won’t be the main games. What really differentiates them? Nothing, I guess. My goal is one a month, I suppose that doesn’t mean I couldn’t play two in a month.

You know what? Nuts to it. I’mma pop some quarterly titles in there, because it’s an excuse to make another list. I know that the first quarter is almost up, but I just completed Super Mario 64 DS, and I’m willing to count that. Maybe I’ll play the original again anyway.

Q1 Bonus Round – Super Mario 64
Q2 Bonus Round – Pokémon Snap
Q3 Bonus Round – Mario Party 2
Q4 Bonus Round – Perfect Dark

There we go. Now if only I had social media’d this thing it might be more than me just concocting a weird excuse to play old games. I guess it’s still not too late, but I mean, we’re already in March. The hype phase is over. Whatever. My compulsion is to put words on a page, not to try to force people to read those words.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: February 2014

Last month was so loaded down with entries in both of the main categories that I managed to forget to add a couple games, which will be included this month. Since I write these opening blurbs at the beginning of each month, I’m sitting here hoping that February’s list won’t be quite so full, but you just never know!

~ Now Playing ~

Super Mario 3D World (Wii U) – Yeah, still hacking away at this one. Technically, I’ve finished the game. I’ve beaten every level and collected every doo-dad, but this game makes you really go the extra mile for your 100% clear: you have to beat every level with all five characters. It may be a ridiculous task, but the game is so good that I’m happy to oblige. Except for the final two stages that are just crazy hard to the point of not really being fun anymore.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: February 2014

Year of N64 – February: Body Harvest

If GoldenEye 007 was one of my most played Nintendo 64 games, I suppose it makes sense to follow it up with one that I have never played and know virtually nothing about. For the sake of contrast, you see.

Indeed, I had never played Body Harvest before The Year of Our Lord 2014. I had barely even ever heard anything about the game. I remember reading an early preview of it Nintendo Power, but I don’t recall ever seeing any actual coverage of it in the magazine. Googling seems to confirm there was never full coverage of the game, just a few hints stuffed into the Classified Information section.

On top of that, Nintendo really gave Body Harvest the shaft. The game was originally supposed to be a launch title for the N64, with Nintendo as the publisher. But they didn’t like it, and dropped it, leaving the game sitting in limbo for a little over two years before it was finally picked up and released. The developer, DMA Design, later became the studio that people know much better as Rockstar North.

So if you think about it, if Nintendo had played nicer with DMA, maybe Grand Theft Auto would have been a Nintendo game, or at least multiplatform thing instead of a big hit for the Playstation. Maybe.

Continue reading Year of N64 – February: Body Harvest

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: January 2014

Another year is upon us, and with that year comes a long a whole buttload of new games that I’ve purchased on both Nintendo eShops and Steam. Because those year-end sales were absolutely mad. And not “angry” mad, but “British” mad. Of course, I’m not playing all of those games at once, so you won’t see them all here, and that kind of defeats the purpose of mentioning them at all.

2014 is going real swell so far.

As it turned out, January was absolutely swamped with short games that I was able to beat in a matter of hours. So this is a big one. Hold onto your butt.

~ Now Playing ~

Super Mario 3D World (Wii U) – The wait to Christmas was absolutely killer in 2013, because I was waiting for this very game. And yet, I did not burn through it in a week like I could have. No, I find that a new Mario game is best when savoured a few levels at a time, and man oh man, have I ever been savouring this one. This is the special kind of game that you buy a system for. Technically I have beaten it, but there’s so much more to do that I’ll leave it in Now Playing for the time being, and move it to Game Over once I’m good and done with it.

Dark Souls (360) – Yeah, I’m still at it. I play more than once a week though, so I’m way ahead of the weekly blogs.

Chibi-Robo: Photo Finder (3DS) – It can’t possibly live up to the standard that I set by the original Chibi-Robo game, but it’s still got a lot of the heart that made the first game a winner. The real problem here is the game’s main gimmick: taking pictures of stuff. It would come off a lot better if the 3DS’ camera wasn’t awful. Heck, it would probably even be a lot of fun with a decent camera. Alas. I have no idea how long this game is going to be, but I’ve filled up two museum displays so far.

Plants Vs. Zombies 2 (iOS) – My wife and I are racing to see who can get to the end first, and neither of us are making progress quickly. Me, because I play like once a month, and her because she’s stuck on a particularly hard level. She’s also quite a bit farther than I, so if she gets over that hump I might be in trouble! Oh, and EA? If you’re going to insist on locking stuff away behind micro-transactions, please make them reasonably priced. There’s no way I’m going to buy any extra plants or power-ups at $3 a pop. If they were $1 each, I’d probably already have them all.

Valdis Story: Abyssal City (PC) – This is like, my dream game (after Super Mario 3D World). It’s a colourful metroidvania with multiple playable characters, a focus on combat, and a Borderlands-style perk tree. Now if only I could play it with a controller from the comfort of my couch on an actual Video Game Machine. Sigh… PC exclusives make me sad. I really have come to loathe playing games on my computer.

Super Monkey Ball (iOS) – Logic would denote that playing a game whose main mechanic is tilting the playfield would work great with tilt controls. That’s not quite the case, as Monkey Ball on my iPhone is very difficult to play, and even harder to enjoy. If you need a Monkey Ball fix, I’d recommend just picking up one of the GameCube games. Maybe the one on Wii. I never played that one though. I’m on World 2 of 5, but I doubt I’ll bother finishing it.

Long Live the Queen (PC) – I’m not into text adventures or anime princesses, but for whatever reason, I felt like I needed to own this game. And it’s sort of blah. All you really do is choose which skills to learn between scripted events, and hope that Elodie doesn’t get murdered along the way. Finding all the ways she can die is probably the most fun you can have with this one though. To date, I’ve only played enough to suffer one death. Here’s a really good review that makes me wish I appreciated it more.

Body Harvest (N64) – Yes, I started my N64 game for February early, but my goal is simply to beat one per month, not to only play one a month. Also I’ve never played Body Harvest and have no idea how long it’ll take me to finish it. Currently I’m on part three of the second mission, and I’m fairly impressed. It’s long since become obsolete, but if I’d played this when it was new, my mind would have been blown wide open.

~ Game Over ~

Picross e3 (3DS) – It’s the weirdest thing, this game had been out for months, and I wasn’t even slightly inclined to buy it. Mostly because I was waiting until I’d finished Paint It Back, but also a little bit because I may have overloaded on picross in 2013. If that can even happen. Burned though it in a week though, because I’ve got to burn through something in a week.

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (3DS) – Wifey gave me this for my birthday last year, and I played it until the game decided to send me back to all the corners of the map that I’d already explored for a big fetch quest, and my enthusiasm petered out. I spent most of January slowly slogging through the second half of the game, and I’ve got to say that the guiding principle behind the whole project must have been making everything twice as long as it needs to be.

Gone Home (PC) – A game about wandering around a house, trying to find out where your family has disappeared to. It’s a cute little game with a lot of heart, but it’s not something I’d necessarily recommend. Not at full price anyway. If you see it on sale and narrative-based wandering games are your bag, go for it. Maybe I’d have liked more it if my PC had been able to run it at full speed.

Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale (3DS) – Gameplay-wise, it’s very similar to Gone Home, but I liked this one so much better. Maybe because it has a more fantastical story, or maybe because it’s much more lively. I don’t know, but I really enjoyed this one. I just don’t like that you have to grind for collectables to truly finish it. :p

Bugs Vs. Tanks! (3DS) – Exactly what it sounds like; you play as an officer in a battalion of tanks that have been shrunken down, and have to combat insects to survive. It’s not a superb game by any means, and can get somewhat frustrating at times, but it’s fun. Also, it’s one of the exceptionally rare 3DS games where the 3D effect actually adds something.

Brain Age Express: Sudoku (DSi) – I finally finished all the sudoku puzzles in there. Guess I wipe it now and start again? Nah, probably not.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (PC) – I actually finished this game in December, but totally forgot about it. That’s because despite the fact that I want to say I like it, it’s a pretty forgettable game. Also it has a stupid mechanic where you have to wait entire days to make certain critical events happen, and that’s just a huge pain in the butt. And making me wait to play a game more often than not makes me forget about the game altogether. It’s still pretty good, though.

~ Reruns ~

Kirby’s Dream Land (GB) – I tend to play through this one every few months or so. It only takes half an hour, and I think it’s pretty fun despite the simplicity. Also I love the music.

Super Mario Land (GB) – Same as above.

GoldenEye 007 (N64) – It felt really good to go back to a game that I spent so much time with, but have never pick up again since. I even wrote a whole thing about it. The word for it may or may not be “retrospective.”

Year of N64 – January: GoldenEye 007

Let’s not beat around the bush here; everybody’s played Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64. Everyone. It’s that one game that was a must-have if you owned an N64, and if you didn’t own an N64, you probably bought one so that you didn’t look like a fool when your friends came over and asked why you weren’t playing GoldenEye. So you probably don’t really need me to tell you all that much about what it is.

Being the first game in TE’s Year of Nintendo 64 though, I’ve made a paper-thin commitment to write something about it. And now that I think about it, I guess that it’s old enough now that there are kids who are so young that they’ve never played it. That’s a little spooky, and makes me feel very old. But then, a lot of things make me feel old, so let’s not dwell on that.

Today, I want to take a look at GoldenEye from the perspective of someone who hasn’t played the game in over ten years, and see how the real deal holds up against the GoldenEye that is perched upon a pedestal in my memories.

Continue reading Year of N64 – January: GoldenEye 007

Something blurry this way comes

I’ve had a bit of a fascination with Nintendo 64 lately, though why this is happening is a complete mystery to me. Nostalgia probably has a lot to do with it, as is usual for a lot of the things I do. It’s been on my mind for a while now, but only a couple days ago did I actually take the initiative to dust the thing off and give it some playtime.

The N64 is the one pre-2000 console that I’ve never packed away, but it hasn’t so much as been plugged in for well over a decade now. So imagine my surprise when it decided that it didn’t want to play nice with my TV. That is, everything was connected properly, but the N64 refused to output anything to the TV. I don’t know why; maybe it’s because it’s an old machine, maybe it’s because the TV is too new. Maybe Ijust wasn’t putting the jacks into the correct plugs, but I’m pretty much an expert at plugging video game machines in, so I doubt it’s that one. I did eventually get it working, but I have no idea what I did that made the two decide to finally cooperate.

The next hurdle was deciding what to play. My Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time cartridges have mysteriously disappeared, so my first choice wasn’t plausible, and I couldn’t play Zelda either. I would be more worried about them, but I have multiple other ways to play legit copies of those games, so it’s not a big deal.

Eventually I settled on Goldeneye 007, which felt like the right choice, but I was a little worried that it would be the hardest game to get back into because of the N64 controller. And let me tell you, getting used to playing a first-person shooter with the N64 controller after about 12 years of dual-stick controls is not a task for the weak-willed. I fumbled my way through the Dam stage as quickly as I could, accepting that this was not going to be an easy or competent playthrough. By the time I hit the first Surface stage, the controls were starting to feel almost natural again. As I reached the end of the game, I felt like I had regained enough of my skill to maybe even play it again on Secret Agent difficulty. Or maybe I’d just go back and try to unlock all the Agent-level cheats. I still haven’t decided.

Playing through Goldeneye again has been a lot of fun, though I must admit that I’m not sure what to hit up next. The truth of the matter is that I’ve got a hankering to try out some games that I don’t own, so I’ve been poking around the internets to see if I can score some N64 games on the cheap. So far I haven’t turned up much, and I’m finding it odd that for a console that gets no respect, N64 games don’t come dirt-cheap. I mean, we’re still only talking about $15-$25 bucks, but I was hoping that I’d be able to find some in the $5 range (that are not sports games). It’s hard to justify spending $20 on an old game that’s probably not as good as I remember it being when I could just as likely put that $20 towards a decent current-gen game. At least none of the ones I want are hitting crazy SNES prices.

I was pretty happy when I found a copy of Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes for $10 on eBay. I know it’s not a very good game, but I spent a lot of time playing it when it was new, so the value is there for me. Hell, that’s what I’d be paying for a Virtual Console version anyway. You know, if Nintendo hadn’t completely dropped the ball on the N64 side of Virtual Console. Yes, we got the Marios and Zeldas, but I’m in it for the curiosities right now. I’m in it for games like Doom 64, Bomberman 64, and Quest 64. Games I may have rented in the day but never beat. Oh, hey there it is. Apparently I’ve gotten myself back into Nintendo 64 for some silly, past due sense of closure.

I also found copies of Body Harvest and Jet Force Gemini for $10 and $15 apiece in the local used games shop. A quick look on eBay shows that I may have been able to get them for a dollar or two less with good timing and a lucky bid, but I’m willing to pay the difference for convenience. Body Harvest is a game that I never played back in the day, but seems to be one of the better N64 titles, and I did rent JFG once, but none of my friends liked it so I had to dump on it too to fit in. It seems like something I’d enjoy though, so here’s to second chances.

Anyhow, I’m declaring now that my big video-games-style goal for the year is to beat one [1] Nintendo 64 game each month. Whether they’re new games or games I already own and have beaten before, it doesn’t matter. Just one a month. I need to get this 64-bit monkey off my back. Also I might publish a review of each one. Maybe. It’s the Year of Nintendo 64 here on TE. Hold onto your butts, it’s gonna be mediocre.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: November 2013

The good news is that winter is here and I no longer have to feel bad about spending all my time inside playing video games. The bad news is that… well, there isn’t any bad news at the moment. It’s December that’s got all that holiday business to it; November is fairly smooth sailing as far as having free time goes.

That said, real life tried its best to get in the way, but November was still a fairly productive month for gaming. This month, I continued my recent trend of finding games that I could finish in an afternoon, and I think I’ll be keeping that up for a while. It’s fun to dive into epic games that take the better part of a year to finish, but sometimes the thing that really hits the spot is a game that I can start and finish in one sitting.

I don’t have any new categories for this feature this month, so that’s good. I figured that my tendency to obsessively categorize things would have me introducing a new one each month. But that doesn’t seem to be the case… yet.

~ Now Playing ~

Adventure Time: Explore The Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW! (Wii U) – It was a small pain in the butt to actually secure a copy, but it was worth it. Between the abundance of Adventure Time charm and having another game that The Wife will play with me, I’m pretty happy with this game. It’s also a lot of fun too, being a dungeon crawler that hearkens back to old-school fare like Gauntlet. Games like this aren’t really made any more, which is too bad because I quite enjoy them. We’re currently 50 floors down.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: November 2013