I've had a copy of Cliffhanger for years, never got around to playing it. I must admit I did, er, obtain a copy of Dracula the other day so I'll have to see how it goes. Not expecting much.
Video Game Critic, HonestGamers and DefunctGames are the unholy trifecta of horrible amateur videogame reviews farm. I wish I had saved HonestGamer's "review" of Armored Warriors, whose entire thesis was that the game sucked because the enemies were mechs insteads of humans and thus it lacked "the human element" Final Fight has.
Sorry about all those double posts. Something went wrong with my browser, and it seemed like my posts weren't going through, so I kept retrying. They didn't show up until later for some reason.
I like the part where the reviewer doesn't actually mention how the game plays. He even gives Denjin Makai II a much higher score, despite it being a far easier game.
Pretas wrote:
I like the part where the reviewer doesn't actually mention how the game plays. He even gives Denjin Makai II a much higher score, despite it being a far easier game.
Well DM2 is absolutely amazing and one of the finest scrolling beaters ever, so a higher score is not a failure in that respect. Its relative ease is overshadowed by the depth of its combo system amongst other things.
I don't know if it has been already posted here (sorry, too lazy to browse all the previous pages) but this review is a legendary joke: http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... e14-2.html
It reminds me a crappy, greek magazine which gave Bangai-O the title for the worst shmup of the year. Note that this magazine was a huge Playstation propaganda.
My thought exactly. Metal Storm is one of the best NES games that aged pretty well. Any other games similar to Metal Storm? Retro or not it doesn't matters as long as it's good.
Vetus wrote:
My thought exactly. Metal Storm is one of the best NES games that aged pretty well. Any other games similar to Metal Storm? Retro or not it doesn't matters as long as it's good.
I hope this doesn't come off as a joke because of the lame license, but I heard Windy Witch Way for GBC is good and pays homage to Metal Storm.
Eurogamer review for Humans Must Answer. Not that HMA deserves a good review, but it's just those first two paragraphs...
The scrolling shoot-'em-up, or shmup as it is sometimes lip-smackingly known, is perhaps gaming's most conservative genre. This is a style of gaming that has its roots in the very earliest days of the arcade, found its ideal form not long after and has resisted any attempts to deviate from that formula in the decades since.
There have been innovations, of course, but those mostly come from enterprising specialist developers playing around within the fairly rigid boundaries that fans expect. Ikaruga found brilliance just by making the colour of your bullets and enemies a central part of its design. Sine Mora tethered time limit and score together, forcing the player to keep scoring in order to stay in the game.
Vetus wrote:
My thought exactly. Metal Storm is one of the best NES games that aged pretty well. Any other games similar to Metal Storm? Retro or not it doesn't matters as long as it's good.
I hope this doesn't come off as a joke because of the lame license, but I heard Windy Witch Way for GBC is good and pays homage to Metal Storm.
Weeks ago, before checking this post today, I gave a try at this game. My first reaction was "Metal Storm rip off!". But then I went cool because I reminded to myself that I was the one who asked for a Metal Storm-style game. Besides it's pretty well-made, expecially for an 8-bit licensed game. Making a video game on 2001 based on Wendy the Good Little Witch was definitely a weird idea but WayForward Technologies made their miracle. It's one of the most beautiful-looking games for Gameboy Color (the animation's quality reminds me the first Shantae for the same console from the same creators) and one of the most underrated games. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLJCVQOmEPQ
Looks unfocused and repetitive to me. Yeah, it's got reasonable graphics (but then lots of garbage GBC games do) but I'm not seeing the Metal Storm quality gameplay - just simple platforming with out-of-place looking platform details and the occasional jump puzzle. Maybe that changes later on, though.
Edit: More thoughts to follow -
I'm playing on the Normal difficulty level, not Hard. The super-accurate (if old) emulator KiGB shows noticeable delay between holding up and jump to when Wendy actually executes the gravity reverse jump, and a more notable delay before you can do anything when landing. Shooting doesn't feel quick either. This slowness doesn't help it out from the perspective of making it a palatable action game, although it doesn't really try to be one in my view. The levels and gameplay seem based mainly on simple puzzle elements - although the ideas behind how the enemies move around and are designed are generally well thought-out, if a bit stereotypical (LOL at the spearman thing that runs in a panic to hide in bushes from which he stabs at you). One thing that did stand out are the red floors that you can jump through. There's a pattern of triangles that I initially assumed would work like Metal Storm's one-way barriers - but no, you can jump through these from either direction, and so WayForward has given up a significant potential for puzzle gameplay. Finding the stars strewn throughout the levels, which count towards taking more hits and towards max firepower, is very repetitive and there's a lot of running back and forth trying to make sure you've checked every corner, which is also repetitive since the levels tend towards unfocused sprawl. Everybody likes to complain about games that are linear, but then you see something like this. Once you're at max stars, you can either try to find all the rest for max points (why?) or you can just run to the end. I don't know if there's any penalty for losing stars and regaining them, if there's a penalty from leaving levels with less than the full number of stars, or if there's a penalty from not finding all the stars in a level (aside from losing a few 50 point opportunities, oh no! There is no saved highscore table so there's not even that reason to try).
Aesthetically the game is a pretty typical paint-by-numbers licensed game. Before a level you get an unnecessary large picture of Wendy and the level name (i.e. 2-2 or Bonus Level) and some horrible music of some apparent length. After levels you get another picture with a four-character password grid, and more wasted music. During each "episode" (i.e. the three levels from 1-1 to 1-3) you get to hear the same universally bad music repeatedly. Then there's a bonus level (I'm not sure if there's some kind of star requirement to get these) which open with some character of one hideous witch or other, as apparently WayForward couldn't put in proper bosses, so seeing these portraits of characters that don't appear in the story is a not-so-gentle reminder of this failure. "Hey, we did what the contract said and put everybody in the game!" The bonus levels are a waste of time, being very sloppy autoscrolling hori shooting segments with Wendy riding a broom and trying to shoot enemies lazily floating along or trying to catch stars. For some reason the actual playfield extends into the hidden status bar area, and for some other reason Wendy can use one button to turn upside down on the broom and back upright. I have a bad feeling that there is going to be a later level with environmental obstacles, but maybe I'm expecting too much and they just ran out of ideas about what to do with that second button. Make dedicated controls for different gameplay types?! Madness, I tell you!
The game does what it sets out to in a very average and unspectacular way overall. The severe adherence to structure (so far, up to the third episode) makes the game less interesting than it should be. However, given its missteps compared even to Metal Storm (slow response to inputs compared to other GB and GBC games, no one-way barriers, useless autoscrolling levels, useless most everything) it is not only a worse action game that Metal Storm, but also a worse puzzle game as well. That's pretty sad because Metal Storm is so fast-paced that it's limited in how puzzling it can be.
There is some kind of "Advance World!" option in the main menu which obviously requires unlocking. It might be interesting, but I'm not hopeful.
To show how much he played the game: "I've played a bunch of Akai Katana, and I enjoy it, but I'm still not exactly sure how it all works."
Not only that, but I think he didn't even play Origin or Climax modes due to the fact that he didn't even mention them.
No one is going to give me back those minutes of my life that I spent reading this trash. This shit is so bad is laughable, the price comparison to Skyrim at the end is the icing on the cake.
The sad part is that the game manual that comes with Akai Katana actually does a very good job of explaining how the mechanics work. Scoring for any of the modes isn't really that difficult to figure out, it's stuff like knowing what keeps your hit chain going in Slash when you're not in ninja mode, having to chase after your katanas, etc. The extends really aren't difficult to get with a bit of effort, and if he couldn't even attempt to figure out the scoring he could have simply read the manual...
There's also a rather silly 'rank' system where getting a certain number of power-ups causes smaller enemies to start spewing suicide bullets upon death and bigger enemies to take more damage- yes, the maximum upgrade makes enemies harder to kill. When these 'handicaps' are on, the game really gets frustrating, so you eventually learn to avoid pretty much every power-up that comes on screen, which is a strange, terrible way to play a shoot-em-up. So, while Insector X is nothing special, it doesn't do anything horrifyingly bad either- although the rank system is pretty strange, that's pretty much all it does wrong.
That's a pretty stunning admission of incomprehension, but seemed to be the exception amongst the reviews on that site, which generally seem like "HG101 if it was less obsessed with detailing every piece of paper with stuff related to the game printed on it, and more interested in gameplay nuances." A lot of their reviews are actually excellent (although I note that the cries about difficulty returned for the Zombie Raid and especially the Sailor Moon reviews). Good site, very unfortunate sentences. They might actually be right in this case - many shmups have autofire weapons, and I think Insector X starts you off with a peashooter; but as the Psycho Soldier review notes, sometimes it's a PRO GAMER TACTIC to keep power below the top level. Also, some of these reviews might've been handicapped by MAME Player's Syndrome (i.e. the Batman emulation got some bug fixes, though perhaps that was years before this review was written, and admittedly its sprite priority system is primitive). Well, that's enough for now.
Can't say with regards to that specific game, but I have to agree rank systems that become punishingly difficult when you power up are garbage. That's the one thing that really hurts a lot of otherwise amazing Psikyo games for me, and is also the primary reason I hate vanilla Pink Sweets.
I guess I'll have to do a look and see to compare it with other examples like Garegga and games of that kind
I admit that in a simple game (and Insector X is probably just this) it looks like a flaw if the game is trying to trick the player to stick with a peashooter. All I care about is having the ability to knock enemies down faster...if they take longer to take down there should be some kind of risk/reward balancing at stake.
" If Darius Gaiden has a weakness, it might be the music."
>n<
I also get a feeling that the review date for most games is the same as the "played for the first time on" date.
The Detana Twinbee Yahhoo Dexlue Pack review on the same page is also messed up. He refers to it as if it only included one game. The description says he played Detana Twinbee, but describes Yahhoo. I know the selections are in Japanese (I have the PSX one, myself), but I'm perplexed that someone would buy the pack and not know it includes two games.
So many contradictions in those 6 paragraphs of retarded vomit. And I loved it.
Game sucks because it's too hard but if it was easier it would just be boring. The setting is too silly but oh wait now it's as generic as they come. Ok sure thing bro. At least he didn't name drop Ikaruga.
