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BoneSnapDeez wrote:Isn't Keith Courage actually a Mashin Hero Wataru game?

Yeah, I was poking around earlier. Not sure how much they changed on release over here. Probably a lot. I haven't put a lot of time into Keith Courage, but I don't remember it being very good.

Exhuminator wrote:

retrosportsgamer wrote:I hope to re-obtain it for my daughter in a couple of years.

Dog Island is a fun one, I bought if for my own daughter to play on her PS2. She thought it was good. But let me recommend a different dog game for PS2 that she personally loved and played fervently:

Very underrated and humorous action adventure game.

For Wii I also recommend these for your daughter:

My daughter loved them both, and I bet yours will too.

Do you need the fishing controller to play Fishing Resort or is it just a nice to have? I'll check out that other Wii game as well since I'm always looking for more Wii recommendations.

January:


26) Killer Instinct (GB)
27) Mashin Hero Wataru Gaiden
28) Sly Spy (Arcade)
29) The Red Star (unreleased XBOX, also on PS2)

In Soviet Russia, The Red Star owns you! This game means business, guys. Oh sure, it starts out all nice and relatively breezy, but about 2/3 of the way through, it starts to get really, really rough. If you've played Cannon Spike, you know what to expect, a combination of melee and shooter bits. It's actually executed really well. But this game goes full-on bullet-hell towards the end, and if you're not accustomed to playing a lot of those (yeah, that'd be me), it will destroy you. You have to be on your A-game. You also need to make sure to choose your upgrades wisely, or you might end up in a near-unwinnable state.

Oh, right, upgrades. You can't actually grind, you get a number of points based on your performance in the stage. I'm pretty sure this isn't based on time, but only on how much damage you take. So you really want to abuse those earlier stages as best you can so you're not losing too many points from getting C rankings or something. I was pretty consistently pulling S and A ranks until the halfway point, dropped to A-B, and the last few stages saw B-C, which honestly didn't matter as much since most upgrades were out of my range anyway. Which, of course, is an argument that you won't actually get in an unwinnable state, but it sure won't make it easier.

Graphically, it looks pretty good, lots going on. I may need to hook up to a better TV, though. I played on my hodge-podge hookup which is an old TVBox 1440 hooked into a 23" Gateway monitor. It's probably about as good as a scaler in a cheap HDTV, so passable at best.

I actually think I might go and grab this one legit, because it definitely feels like the type of game that you'd want to revisit from time to time. It's not terribly long (under five hours), but you get three characters to choose from (two at the start) who play very differently. I used the speedy character, Makita. No, she doesn't use power tools. I tried the big guy in the arena mode, and seemed to do pretty well with him. There are certainly times I would have appreciated being able to take stuff out faster.

Anyway, give this one a shot, especially if you enjoy shmups, because it's got a ton of that DNA. Even if you don't, it's worth a try. I had downloaded the unreleased XBOX version a while back, but as mentioned, it's also available on PS2. Not sure how the two stack up performance-wise, though.

ElkinFencer10 wrote:

visual_death wrote:I finally just beat/finished Heavy Rain (PS3)!

Loved the story. Controls during non-quick time events sucked...but otherwise good game.

Since I finally have more time, I'm trying to finish games that I started. Next one I might try to tackle and finally finish is either Ni no Kuni or Last of Us...

I have a lot of unfinished modern games to beat...

THE LAST OF US. That still holds my spot for "Overall Best Video Game of All Time."

Sarge wrote:Shows how much opinions varied. I thought TLoU looked fantastic, and really did feel like playing a movie, but at the same time, the gameplay was just solid. Nothing standout in my opinion. Make no mistake, I enjoyed the heck out of it, but it played pretty average.

That ending, though. I've seen so many arguments about that, and I gotta say, I come down on Joel's side in this case. (That should be sufficiently vague as to not spoil anything!)

I love the game as far as I've gotten! I just remember the last time I played it, I was stuck.... but definitely a game I want to finish!

jmbarnes101 wrote:Do you need the fishing controller to play Fishing Resort or is it just a nice to have?

Nah you don't have to have it. The standard Wii controls work fine. Another good game for kids is Help Wanted: 50 Wacky Jobs, my daughter enjoyed that one as well.

But none of them are as great as Go Vacation. Seriously, if your kid has a Wii, it's criminal not to buy them a copy of Go Vacation folks.

1. Flag to Flag - Dreamcast (January 12)
2. The Battle of Olympus - NES (January 18)
3. *NEW* Thunder Force AC - Arcade/MAME (February 6)

One of the 28 games in competition at this year's Yolympics at Twin Galaxies. This was an arcade version of Thunder Force III. It would be later ported to the SNES as Thunder Spirits. Once you get past stages 2-4, the rest of the game is a cake walk with the Hunter weapon, and you won't have to worry about dying, plus you get a ton of 1-ups. 1cc'd it easily.

It's worth noting that Thunder Spirits is still pretty different.

1. Sly 2 Band of Thieves HD (PS3)
2. Black (Xbox)
3. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox)
4. Super Mario Bros Advance 4: SMB3 E-Reader Levels (WiiU)

Man! I really... wanted to like this, it looked so cool when the release hit the eShop and I checked out videos online. Seeing SMB1, SMB2, and SMW elements in the SMB3 engine looked so awesome.

Sadly this felt like a very random officially endorsed rom hack. It was cool seeing elements from other Mario games meshed in, and enemies from SMW or something in here, but these were rare occurrences. Otherwise all the levels were very gimmicky and trigger happy in design, which is not how I like my Mario. SMB3 is a cake walk going back to it thesedays so it was nice to get the complete opposite of the difficulty spectrum, but style wise, these levels just weren't that good to me. A cluster of strange ideas and annoying parts.

Was worth a run but nothing I'd really freak out about now and probably won't revisit.

1. SSX 3 (oXbox)
2. Mario Kart DS (NDS)
3. Fairune (Android)
4. Streets of Rage (Gen)
5. Amplitude (PS2)

6. Kirby's Dream Land (GB)

Picked this up earlier today for $5 at a classic gaming competition. Played through the regular game pretty quickly (got to the last boss with only one life, but after continuing I lost only one more life). Gave the first level of the "Extra Game" a try and found the increase in difficulty more than I was interested in for the moment.

Kirby is fun, and there's a real simple intuitiveness to its gameplay. Graphics are solid considering it is a Gameboy game, and it is a fairly quick paced game. I was entertained, and it makes for a good distraction for an hour or so.

I'll probably go back to try the Extra Game again when I'm up for a challenge.

Xeogred wrote:It's worth noting that Thunder Spirits is still pretty different.

I was going to try that next, then I noticed they put a little more meat to the end of the game, another section after blowing up the interior of the ship on Stage 6, and Stage 8 is not the "boss rush" it used to be. That might not be as easy to do on a credit