Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
1. Tormented Souls - Switch
2. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II - PC
3. Fantasy Empires - PC
4. Vagrant Story - PS1
5. Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor - PC
6. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - Switch
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project - NES
8. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - PS5
9. Tomb Raider Remastered - PC
10. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - PS5
11. Unicorn Overlord - Switch
12. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Solaris Showdown - PC
13. Princess Peach: Showtime - Switch
14. Fida Puti Samurai - PC
15. Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money - PC
16. Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts - PC
17. Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues - PC
18. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - PC
19. Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road - PC
20. Super Buff HD - PC
21. SaGa Emerald Beyond - Switch
22. Blasphemous 2 - Switch
23. Trepang2 - PC
24. Homeworld 3 - PC
Homeworld 3 brings back the property after lying dormant for so long. It's developed by a studio made up of former devs from Relic who made Homeworld 1 & 2, so the pedigree is solid. It picks back up the gameplay from Homeworld 2, without much in the way of updates. But given the utter lack of 3D-space RTS's, that isn't a bad thing.
The game is set 100 years after Homeworld 2. The establishment of the gate network has ushered in a new era. However, a corner of the galaxy has started to have its gate network go dark. Karan S'jet, the Navigator from the previous two games, launches a fleet to investigate; all contact is lost. That was 20 years ago. You are Imogen S'jet, a new Navigator on a shakedown cruise. The instabilities are getting worse, and you are tasked with trying to figure it out once and for all.
What sets Homeworld apart from other RTS's is the 3D movement. The map is littered with mega structures that can be maneuvered around in three dimensions, as well as sometimes maneuvered through. The game has multiple control options; one that ports the old games' controls, one that is a new set they came up with that is intended to be an easier onboard for new players (at the cost of not having as much flexibility), and the ability to pick and choose options from each.
Once inside a map, you are given a Mothership which serves as your primary production facility. You'll need to gather resources in order to build up your fleet, which can be gained from either free floating mineral nodes or by salvaging destroyed enemy capital ships. You will slowly unlock the various ships in your fleet over the course of the campaign. There are a variety of population limits; for a given class of ship, like strikecraft and frigate, there is an overall population limit, and then for a given chassis, like interceptor or fleet bomber, there is a separate population limit. The limits are such that you have to create mixed fleets, though you definitely will want to cap out each class. The various ships have different specialties around the kinds of targets they're best at engaging. You can also place turrets on the floating structures, and they are a solid force multiplier (especially since they're their own part of the population limit). Each mission has a lot of script triggers, and it can behoove you to notice one coming up and delaying triggering it, as you usually want to make sure your fleet is full before triggering an attack or the end of level. Your fleet persists across maps, so if you don't reinforce before the end you'll be behind the eight ball on the next map.
The game is relatively short; I made it through the campaign in a little over seven hours. There's a decent variety in the missions, and the difficulty curve is in the right spot. More importantly, the game doesn't have much in the way of "gotcha" moments where a triggered enemy force spawns in to ambush your backline. It's an eminently fair campaign. If you're a fan of RTS games this is a solid one, and a worthy successor to its predecessors.
Games Beaten 2024
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
Re: Games Beaten 2024
January
Injustice: Gods Among Us (Xbox Series)
Metroid Prime Remastered (Switch)
Fire Emblem Engage (Switch)
Knights of the Round (Switch)
Megaman: The Power Battles (Switch)
February
Metroid Other M (WiiU)
Metroid Zero Mission (WiiU)
Super Mario Bros (All Stars/Switch)
March
Xenoblade Chronicles Deluxe (Switch)
Mario Kart 8 DX Booster Course Pass (Switch)
Princess Peach: Showtime (Switch)
ACA NeoGeo Real Bout Fatal Fury (Switch)
Super Mario Advance (Switch)
April
Splatoon 3: Side Order
Mario vs Donkey Kong (Switch)
Super Mario 3D World (Switch)
May
Super Mario Wonder (Switch)
Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter (Arcade)
I beat Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter! This is a cool one for me. When I was a kid in the 90s, I marveled (heh) at X-Men: Children of the Atom, X-Men Vs Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, (etc). Oddly enough, I never encountered a Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter machine and did not know it existed until I was in my mid-20s. It took some practice and Arcade1Up making the difficulty dipswitch available but I beat it last night with Ryu and Cyclops, the classic team.
It's an okay game. It plays like a solid Street Fighter Alpha era game. The roster is bizarre. You have the expected folks like Captain America, Wolverine, Ryu, and Ken. Then you have... Blackheart? Shuma-Gorath?? Dan??? For such a small roster, the choices are wild.
The balance is also strange. Some characters feel completely nerfed. Ken Masters suddenly has limited range fireballs, his tatsumaki is more like a shoto anti-air move? Speaking of shoto characters, there are way too many. Cyclops, Captain America, Ken, Ryu, Dan, Sakura, Akuma. Wow.
All in all, I really do like the game still. The artwork and production values are great, the final boss is not impossibly hard, and the music is great. It's a shame that more of the classic Marvel Superheroes cast did not make it in like Magneto or Ironman but it's all good.
Injustice: Gods Among Us (Xbox Series)
Metroid Prime Remastered (Switch)
Fire Emblem Engage (Switch)
Knights of the Round (Switch)
Megaman: The Power Battles (Switch)
February
Metroid Other M (WiiU)
Metroid Zero Mission (WiiU)
Super Mario Bros (All Stars/Switch)
March
Xenoblade Chronicles Deluxe (Switch)
Mario Kart 8 DX Booster Course Pass (Switch)
Princess Peach: Showtime (Switch)
ACA NeoGeo Real Bout Fatal Fury (Switch)
Super Mario Advance (Switch)
April
Splatoon 3: Side Order
Mario vs Donkey Kong (Switch)
Super Mario 3D World (Switch)
May
Super Mario Wonder (Switch)
Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter (Arcade)
I beat Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter! This is a cool one for me. When I was a kid in the 90s, I marveled (heh) at X-Men: Children of the Atom, X-Men Vs Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, (etc). Oddly enough, I never encountered a Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter machine and did not know it existed until I was in my mid-20s. It took some practice and Arcade1Up making the difficulty dipswitch available but I beat it last night with Ryu and Cyclops, the classic team.
It's an okay game. It plays like a solid Street Fighter Alpha era game. The roster is bizarre. You have the expected folks like Captain America, Wolverine, Ryu, and Ken. Then you have... Blackheart? Shuma-Gorath?? Dan??? For such a small roster, the choices are wild.
The balance is also strange. Some characters feel completely nerfed. Ken Masters suddenly has limited range fireballs, his tatsumaki is more like a shoto anti-air move? Speaking of shoto characters, there are way too many. Cyclops, Captain America, Ken, Ryu, Dan, Sakura, Akuma. Wow.
All in all, I really do like the game still. The artwork and production values are great, the final boss is not impossibly hard, and the music is great. It's a shame that more of the classic Marvel Superheroes cast did not make it in like Magneto or Ironman but it's all good.
Maybe now Nintendo will acknowledge Metroid has a fanbase?
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prfsnl_gmr
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 12235
- Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:26 pm
- Location: Charlotte, North Carolina
Re: Games Beaten 2024
1. Chico and The Magic Orchard DX (Switch)
2. Dusk ‘82 (Switch)
3. Dusk (Switch)
4. Rock Boshers DX (Switch)
5. Metal Slug 4 (Neo Geo)
6. Bleed 2 (Switch)
7. Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS)
8. Mighty Gunvolt Burst (3DS)
9. Love 3 (Switch)
10. Mini Mario & Friends: Amiibo Challenge (3DS)
11. Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Switch)
12. Mother 3 (GBA)
13. Princess Peach: Showtime! (Switch)
14. Avenging Spirit (Arcade)
15. Blossom Tales II (Switch)
16. The Fall of Elena Temple (Switch)
Blossom Tales II is a perfectly fine clone of LoZ: LttP, making it perfect for someone, like me, who wants to play a game like LttP without replaying LttP again. The indie pixel graphics are perfectly serviceable; the soundtrack is fine; the story and script are irreverent and twee; there’s an over world; there’re four lengthy dungeons; there’s a hook shot; etc. It’s perfect comfort food gaming, but completely inessential. I enjoyed it like I enjoy a good meat loaf. While it doesn’t reach LttP’s heights, it edges out LttP with regard to its puzzle design - which is really great - and the amounts of secrets, collectibles, etc. the developers were able to stuff into such a relatively small overworld.
The Fall of Elena Temple is the sequel to The Adventures of Elena Temple, a fun little indie platformer that, in its fictional universe, was released exclusively for the off-brand versions of popular consoles and micro-computers. While the game was that same on any fictional console or micro-computer, applying various graphical and sound filters allowed you to switch between the game’s various “ports”. The Fall of Elena Temple, in contrast, has no graphical filters, but it is a former Playdate(!) exclusive, meaning it was released initially only for an off brand handheld. Joking aside…The Fall of Elena Temple is actually a pretty great puzzle platformer. The goal in each of the game’s 23 levels is to collect all of the coins and reach the exit, and the central mechanic is that you can teleport Elena back to previous points from which she fell off a ledge. The levels are full of traps and one-way passages, and a wrong move can make completing a level impossible. Still, it’s never frustrating, and it’s easy to restart if you get stuck. Better, the levels are very clever, and the game introduces new mechanics right up until the end. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and while it’s quite short (and can be beaten in 90-120 minutes), it’s also quite inexpensive.
2. Dusk ‘82 (Switch)
3. Dusk (Switch)
4. Rock Boshers DX (Switch)
5. Metal Slug 4 (Neo Geo)
6. Bleed 2 (Switch)
7. Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS)
8. Mighty Gunvolt Burst (3DS)
9. Love 3 (Switch)
10. Mini Mario & Friends: Amiibo Challenge (3DS)
11. Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Switch)
12. Mother 3 (GBA)
13. Princess Peach: Showtime! (Switch)
14. Avenging Spirit (Arcade)
15. Blossom Tales II (Switch)
16. The Fall of Elena Temple (Switch)
Blossom Tales II is a perfectly fine clone of LoZ: LttP, making it perfect for someone, like me, who wants to play a game like LttP without replaying LttP again. The indie pixel graphics are perfectly serviceable; the soundtrack is fine; the story and script are irreverent and twee; there’s an over world; there’re four lengthy dungeons; there’s a hook shot; etc. It’s perfect comfort food gaming, but completely inessential. I enjoyed it like I enjoy a good meat loaf. While it doesn’t reach LttP’s heights, it edges out LttP with regard to its puzzle design - which is really great - and the amounts of secrets, collectibles, etc. the developers were able to stuff into such a relatively small overworld.
The Fall of Elena Temple is the sequel to The Adventures of Elena Temple, a fun little indie platformer that, in its fictional universe, was released exclusively for the off-brand versions of popular consoles and micro-computers. While the game was that same on any fictional console or micro-computer, applying various graphical and sound filters allowed you to switch between the game’s various “ports”. The Fall of Elena Temple, in contrast, has no graphical filters, but it is a former Playdate(!) exclusive, meaning it was released initially only for an off brand handheld. Joking aside…The Fall of Elena Temple is actually a pretty great puzzle platformer. The goal in each of the game’s 23 levels is to collect all of the coins and reach the exit, and the central mechanic is that you can teleport Elena back to previous points from which she fell off a ledge. The levels are full of traps and one-way passages, and a wrong move can make completing a level impossible. Still, it’s never frustrating, and it’s easy to restart if you get stuck. Better, the levels are very clever, and the game introduces new mechanics right up until the end. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and while it’s quite short (and can be beaten in 90-120 minutes), it’s also quite inexpensive.
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ElkinFencer10
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 8683
- Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2010 8:34 pm
- Location: Henderson, North Carolina
- Contact:
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Games Beaten in 2024 - 16
* denotes a replay
January (1 Game Beaten)
February (1 Game Beaten)
March (3 Game Beaten)
April (7 Games Beaten)
May (4 Games Beaten)
16. Army Men: Green Rogue - PlayStation 2 - May 13*
Army Men, as a series, is known for mediocrity. Some would say it’s known for downright bad games, although I would usually disagree. Usually is the operative word in that sentence, though; Army Men: Green Rogue, given the subtitle Omega Soldier in Europe, on PlayStation 2 is genuinely one of the worst non-indie games I’ve ever played in my life. It’s worse than Portal Runner on Game Boy Color. It’s worse than Duke Nukem 3D on Genesis. It’s worse than Battletoads in Battlemaniacs on Master System. It’s pretty much on par with Call of Duty on NGage and Ride to Hell: Retribution on PS3 and Xbox 360. I don’t say that in an attempt to do the “lol look how mad I am at this bad game!” AVGN thing; I say that because it truly, genuinely is that bad.
The premise of the game is that the Green Army has completed a secret project to create the Omega Soldier - the ultimate super soldier - by extracting plastic from Sergeant Hawk and each of his Bravo Company commandos and mixing them together to mold a soldier with the strengths of each of them. Cool concept, not gonna lie. Too bad that cool concept is ruined by horrible gameplay and a complete lack of any character development. You awaken in the jungle in the wreckage of a Green helicopter that was shot down while transporting you. You start walking and decide to murder everything you see because everything is trying to murder you - Tan, Grey, Blue, everyone. Tan makes sense - they’re always the bad guys. Blue isn’t too strange; they’ve always been playing both sides of the war, helping the Tan one day and the Green the next. Grey is weird, though; outside of Dr. Madd and his soldiers, the Grey are almost always portrayed as ranging from neutral to hating both Green and Tan but Tan slightly more (think US/USSR relations during World War II). Of course, none of that is explained in the game, and if it is, I couldn’t hear it for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.
Visually, the game is mediocre. It’s not the worst looking game on the PS2, but it’s in the bottom 50% of games for visuals. The game has a slightly desaturated look to it that other games in the series don’t have. For example, Grey soldiers look like Black soldiers, and all of the foliage looks like the collard greens like that little old lady used to make for every church potluck - cooked to death and reduced to a dull, drab olive green mush (you’ll get that if you grew up in the American South). Unfortunately, the sound design isn’t any better. The music is utterly forgettable, and the sound balance is terrible; at the default values, you’ll have a hard time hearing any dialogue whatsoever over the deafening music and sound effects. The worst part, however, is definitely the gameplay.
They tried to make this game with an “arcade” style, but they did it in the same way that Tesla made the Cybertruck - in the worst way possible, a way so bad that they invented new ways to make their product awful. It’s a third person shooter, like most of the console Army Men games, but it’s also vertically scrolling. The problem is that the scrolling is extremely slow, making it impossible to just rush through missions or sprint through a dangerous group of enemies. You’re at the bottom of the screen, and you control the Omega Soldier with the left stick while controlling the aim with the right stick. It’s kind of like a twin stick shooter if it sucked. It’s virtually impossible to aim with any accuracy which makes the rocket launcher almost unusable, and any game where the rocket launcher is garbage is a bad video game automatically. Speaking of the rocket launcher, there are four weapons you can pick up - the rifle, the rocket launcher, the grenade launcher, and the flamethrower. The rifle is the best for killing enemies at distance. The flamethrower is the best for killing enemies up close. The rocket launcher and grenade launcher aren’t good for anything except bosses, and there are only five or six of those, if I remember correctly, in the game’s 16 levels. If you pick up a weapon you already have, that weapon gets improved by one stage. You can also pick up grey arrow power-ups to upgrade whatever weapon you have one stage. If you pick up another weapon, though, it overwrites whatever you’ve got. Got a fully upgraded rifle which turns it into a massive minigun? Not anymore; now you have a base level rocket launcher. Get rekt, bro. That’s not particularly unusual for vertical scrolling shooters, but most of those shooters have a ship or character that is quick and nimble; the tanks in Sarge’s Heroes are more agile and maneuverable than the Omega Soldier.
Despite the fact that the game is pretty small - despite being on PlayStation 2, it’s pressed on a CD rather than a DVD - it takes forever to load. You’ll be sitting at the level loading screen for a solid 45 to 60 seconds most of the time, and it takes so long to load your save files at the save screen between levels that you’ll think your game is bugged and doesn’t detect the memory card (which is why I had to use the level select cheat until level seven when I finally realized I was just being impatient). Why does it take so long to load, though? There isn’t that much data to load given the size of the game, and it’s not like the laser is too weak or slow; most of the PS1 Army Men games load faster than this. It’s by no means the worst thing about the game - it’s probably the least offensive problem - but it’s definitely jarring to have Sega CD loading times in a game from 2001.
Army Men: Green Rogue on PlayStation 2 is abysmal. It’s insanely difficult, it’s hard to aim, the audio balance is way out of whack, and it’s just not fun. Like, some games are objectively bad games but are still a ton of fun - Devil’s Third on Wii U, for example - but this isn’t like that. This is a Birdemic, not a Fear Town, USA. It’s not so bad it’s good; it’s just plain bad. If you’re a huge fan of the series, it MIGHT be worth emulating, but unless you, like me, just want every game in the series on your shelf, it’s not worth buying for any price. No “But I’m a huge fan of the series!” makes this game feel fun. It may not be the worst video game of all time, but it’s hands down the worst game in this series.
* denotes a replay
January (1 Game Beaten)
Army Men, as a series, is known for mediocrity. Some would say it’s known for downright bad games, although I would usually disagree. Usually is the operative word in that sentence, though; Army Men: Green Rogue, given the subtitle Omega Soldier in Europe, on PlayStation 2 is genuinely one of the worst non-indie games I’ve ever played in my life. It’s worse than Portal Runner on Game Boy Color. It’s worse than Duke Nukem 3D on Genesis. It’s worse than Battletoads in Battlemaniacs on Master System. It’s pretty much on par with Call of Duty on NGage and Ride to Hell: Retribution on PS3 and Xbox 360. I don’t say that in an attempt to do the “lol look how mad I am at this bad game!” AVGN thing; I say that because it truly, genuinely is that bad.
The premise of the game is that the Green Army has completed a secret project to create the Omega Soldier - the ultimate super soldier - by extracting plastic from Sergeant Hawk and each of his Bravo Company commandos and mixing them together to mold a soldier with the strengths of each of them. Cool concept, not gonna lie. Too bad that cool concept is ruined by horrible gameplay and a complete lack of any character development. You awaken in the jungle in the wreckage of a Green helicopter that was shot down while transporting you. You start walking and decide to murder everything you see because everything is trying to murder you - Tan, Grey, Blue, everyone. Tan makes sense - they’re always the bad guys. Blue isn’t too strange; they’ve always been playing both sides of the war, helping the Tan one day and the Green the next. Grey is weird, though; outside of Dr. Madd and his soldiers, the Grey are almost always portrayed as ranging from neutral to hating both Green and Tan but Tan slightly more (think US/USSR relations during World War II). Of course, none of that is explained in the game, and if it is, I couldn’t hear it for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.
Visually, the game is mediocre. It’s not the worst looking game on the PS2, but it’s in the bottom 50% of games for visuals. The game has a slightly desaturated look to it that other games in the series don’t have. For example, Grey soldiers look like Black soldiers, and all of the foliage looks like the collard greens like that little old lady used to make for every church potluck - cooked to death and reduced to a dull, drab olive green mush (you’ll get that if you grew up in the American South). Unfortunately, the sound design isn’t any better. The music is utterly forgettable, and the sound balance is terrible; at the default values, you’ll have a hard time hearing any dialogue whatsoever over the deafening music and sound effects. The worst part, however, is definitely the gameplay.
They tried to make this game with an “arcade” style, but they did it in the same way that Tesla made the Cybertruck - in the worst way possible, a way so bad that they invented new ways to make their product awful. It’s a third person shooter, like most of the console Army Men games, but it’s also vertically scrolling. The problem is that the scrolling is extremely slow, making it impossible to just rush through missions or sprint through a dangerous group of enemies. You’re at the bottom of the screen, and you control the Omega Soldier with the left stick while controlling the aim with the right stick. It’s kind of like a twin stick shooter if it sucked. It’s virtually impossible to aim with any accuracy which makes the rocket launcher almost unusable, and any game where the rocket launcher is garbage is a bad video game automatically. Speaking of the rocket launcher, there are four weapons you can pick up - the rifle, the rocket launcher, the grenade launcher, and the flamethrower. The rifle is the best for killing enemies at distance. The flamethrower is the best for killing enemies up close. The rocket launcher and grenade launcher aren’t good for anything except bosses, and there are only five or six of those, if I remember correctly, in the game’s 16 levels. If you pick up a weapon you already have, that weapon gets improved by one stage. You can also pick up grey arrow power-ups to upgrade whatever weapon you have one stage. If you pick up another weapon, though, it overwrites whatever you’ve got. Got a fully upgraded rifle which turns it into a massive minigun? Not anymore; now you have a base level rocket launcher. Get rekt, bro. That’s not particularly unusual for vertical scrolling shooters, but most of those shooters have a ship or character that is quick and nimble; the tanks in Sarge’s Heroes are more agile and maneuverable than the Omega Soldier.
Despite the fact that the game is pretty small - despite being on PlayStation 2, it’s pressed on a CD rather than a DVD - it takes forever to load. You’ll be sitting at the level loading screen for a solid 45 to 60 seconds most of the time, and it takes so long to load your save files at the save screen between levels that you’ll think your game is bugged and doesn’t detect the memory card (which is why I had to use the level select cheat until level seven when I finally realized I was just being impatient). Why does it take so long to load, though? There isn’t that much data to load given the size of the game, and it’s not like the laser is too weak or slow; most of the PS1 Army Men games load faster than this. It’s by no means the worst thing about the game - it’s probably the least offensive problem - but it’s definitely jarring to have Sega CD loading times in a game from 2001.
Army Men: Green Rogue on PlayStation 2 is abysmal. It’s insanely difficult, it’s hard to aim, the audio balance is way out of whack, and it’s just not fun. Like, some games are objectively bad games but are still a ton of fun - Devil’s Third on Wii U, for example - but this isn’t like that. This is a Birdemic, not a Fear Town, USA. It’s not so bad it’s good; it’s just plain bad. If you’re a huge fan of the series, it MIGHT be worth emulating, but unless you, like me, just want every game in the series on your shelf, it’s not worth buying for any price. No “But I’m a huge fan of the series!” makes this game feel fun. It may not be the worst video game of all time, but it’s hands down the worst game in this series.
Patron Saint of Bitch Mode
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TheSSNintendo
- 128-bit
- Posts: 581
- Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:27 pm
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Streets of Rage 4 (Switch) last week. On a second play through with Blaze right now.
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ElkinFencer10
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 8683
- Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2010 8:34 pm
- Location: Henderson, North Carolina
- Contact:
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Games Beaten in 2024 - 17
* denotes a replay
January (1 Game Beaten)
February (1 Game Beaten)
March (3 Game Beaten)
April (7 Games Beaten)
May (5 Games Beaten)
17. Army Men: Green Rogue - PlayStation - May 18
Army Men: Green Rogue on PlayStation is one of the few instances of a cross-generational game release where the past-gen version is actually better than the current-gen version. That’s not to say that the PS1 Green Rogue looks better than the PS2 Green Rogue - it absolutely objectively does not - but as far as fun goes, yeah, I’d rank the PS1 game above the PS2 game. They have the same story which is why I was originally going to cover them both in the same review, but after playing the first couple of levels on PS1 for comparison, I quickly realized that the gameplay and the levels, while sharing the same rough settings (jungle, alpine, city, etc), are completely different between the two games.
3DO went for a more “run and gun” style game here as opposed to the standard third person shooter that most of the series provides, and while they probably nailed that goal better in the PS2 game since it automatically moves you forward, the PS1 game is just more fun. It’s still got a real run and gun feel, but it doesn’t scroll forward automatically, so it gives you a little bit more of a feeling of control. You can’t go backwards in the level, so it’s definitely not just “regular Army Men but in a tunnel,” but you aren’t forced forward before you’re ready, making it easier to ensure that your genocide of the Tan fascists is complete. It’s also just not nearly as difficult. The final boss is like the Mount Everest of difficulty spikes and is downright unreasonably difficult, but the first 98% of the game is pretty fair and much less brutal than the PS2 game in my opinion. A challenging game is good; a brutal game is frustrating. On PS2, Green Rogue is the latter; on PS1, it’s a solid example of the former.
The premise of the game is that the Green Army has completed a secret project to create the Omega Soldier - the ultimate super soldier - by extracting plastic from Sergeant Hawk and each of his Bravo Company commandos and mixing them together to mold a soldier with the strengths of each of them. Cool concept, not gonna lie. Too bad that cool concept is ruined by horrible gameplay and a complete lack of any character development. You awaken in the jungle in the wreckage of a Green helicopter that was shot down while transporting you. You start walking and decide to murder everything you see because everything is trying to murder you. In the PS2 version, you fight Blue and Grey soldiers in addition to Tan soldiers, although the game never explains why the Blue and Grey are allied with the Tan; in this PS1 version, though, you're only fighting the Tan with no Blue or Grey troops appearing.
Aiming feels a bit weird, but it’s not nearly as hard to aim as on PS2. By and large, it feels a lot like aiming in any other PS1 Army Men game; cumbersome and clunky but not unusable. Graphics are about what you’d expect from a PS1 Army Men game - much inferior to Metal Gear Solid, but better than something like Return Fire on 3DO. Sound is...fine. Music is definitely solid, but the sound effects are unfortunately so forgettable that the music itself kind of gets dragged down. You get mostly the same weapons as on PS2 - rifle, flamethrower, and rocket launcher; but instead of a grenade launcher, you get regular grenades that you throw like in the other games. You also don’t have to pick which weapon you want to carry; you get all of them once you pick them up, and you can switch between them. Each weapon can be upgraded to level three by picking up a duplicate, and each time you die, you lose a level. If you have a weapon at level one and die, you lose that weapon entirely (except for the rifle; you’ll always have at least a level one rifle). I honestly think that’s a pretty decent way to balance it; it was pure frustration to get a weapon maxed out on PS2 only to lose it in favor of a level one weapon because you weren’t able to get out of the way of the weapon swap.
All in all, Army Men: Green Rogue on PlayStation, while better than the game’s PlayStation 2 version, is awful and definitely the third worst game in the series after Green Rogue on PS2 and Portal Runner on Game Boy Color, respectively. No game will ever dethrone Green Rogue on PS2 as the worst in the series, but Green Rogue on PS1 gives it a solid run for its money. This one is at least worth playing in my opinion if you’re a big fan of the Army Men series, but only once and not necessarily even all the way through to the end, and it’s not worth buying unless you’re just bound and determined to have a full Army Men collection on your shelf. If you’re not a staunch fan of the series, steer clear.
* denotes a replay
January (1 Game Beaten)
Army Men: Green Rogue on PlayStation is one of the few instances of a cross-generational game release where the past-gen version is actually better than the current-gen version. That’s not to say that the PS1 Green Rogue looks better than the PS2 Green Rogue - it absolutely objectively does not - but as far as fun goes, yeah, I’d rank the PS1 game above the PS2 game. They have the same story which is why I was originally going to cover them both in the same review, but after playing the first couple of levels on PS1 for comparison, I quickly realized that the gameplay and the levels, while sharing the same rough settings (jungle, alpine, city, etc), are completely different between the two games.
3DO went for a more “run and gun” style game here as opposed to the standard third person shooter that most of the series provides, and while they probably nailed that goal better in the PS2 game since it automatically moves you forward, the PS1 game is just more fun. It’s still got a real run and gun feel, but it doesn’t scroll forward automatically, so it gives you a little bit more of a feeling of control. You can’t go backwards in the level, so it’s definitely not just “regular Army Men but in a tunnel,” but you aren’t forced forward before you’re ready, making it easier to ensure that your genocide of the Tan fascists is complete. It’s also just not nearly as difficult. The final boss is like the Mount Everest of difficulty spikes and is downright unreasonably difficult, but the first 98% of the game is pretty fair and much less brutal than the PS2 game in my opinion. A challenging game is good; a brutal game is frustrating. On PS2, Green Rogue is the latter; on PS1, it’s a solid example of the former.
The premise of the game is that the Green Army has completed a secret project to create the Omega Soldier - the ultimate super soldier - by extracting plastic from Sergeant Hawk and each of his Bravo Company commandos and mixing them together to mold a soldier with the strengths of each of them. Cool concept, not gonna lie. Too bad that cool concept is ruined by horrible gameplay and a complete lack of any character development. You awaken in the jungle in the wreckage of a Green helicopter that was shot down while transporting you. You start walking and decide to murder everything you see because everything is trying to murder you. In the PS2 version, you fight Blue and Grey soldiers in addition to Tan soldiers, although the game never explains why the Blue and Grey are allied with the Tan; in this PS1 version, though, you're only fighting the Tan with no Blue or Grey troops appearing.
Aiming feels a bit weird, but it’s not nearly as hard to aim as on PS2. By and large, it feels a lot like aiming in any other PS1 Army Men game; cumbersome and clunky but not unusable. Graphics are about what you’d expect from a PS1 Army Men game - much inferior to Metal Gear Solid, but better than something like Return Fire on 3DO. Sound is...fine. Music is definitely solid, but the sound effects are unfortunately so forgettable that the music itself kind of gets dragged down. You get mostly the same weapons as on PS2 - rifle, flamethrower, and rocket launcher; but instead of a grenade launcher, you get regular grenades that you throw like in the other games. You also don’t have to pick which weapon you want to carry; you get all of them once you pick them up, and you can switch between them. Each weapon can be upgraded to level three by picking up a duplicate, and each time you die, you lose a level. If you have a weapon at level one and die, you lose that weapon entirely (except for the rifle; you’ll always have at least a level one rifle). I honestly think that’s a pretty decent way to balance it; it was pure frustration to get a weapon maxed out on PS2 only to lose it in favor of a level one weapon because you weren’t able to get out of the way of the weapon swap.
All in all, Army Men: Green Rogue on PlayStation, while better than the game’s PlayStation 2 version, is awful and definitely the third worst game in the series after Green Rogue on PS2 and Portal Runner on Game Boy Color, respectively. No game will ever dethrone Green Rogue on PS2 as the worst in the series, but Green Rogue on PS1 gives it a solid run for its money. This one is at least worth playing in my opinion if you’re a big fan of the Army Men series, but only once and not necessarily even all the way through to the end, and it’s not worth buying unless you’re just bound and determined to have a full Army Men collection on your shelf. If you’re not a staunch fan of the series, steer clear.
Patron Saint of Bitch Mode
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PartridgeSenpai
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 3001
- Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2015 9:27 am
- Location: Northern Japan
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1. Terranigma (SFC)
2. Eastward (PC)
3. Pulse (PC)
4. Lost Ruins (PC)
5. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (PC)
6. Dropsy (PC)
7. Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)
8. Pokemon Ruby (GBA) *
9. Secret of Mana (SFC)
10. Fire Watch (PC)
11. Bokura (PC)
12. Romancing SaGa (SFC)
13. Trials of Mana (SFC)
14. Castlevania Legends (GB)
15. SaGa 2 (GB)
16. SaGa 3 (GB)
17. Celeste (PC)
18. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (PC)
19. Celeste 64 (PC)
20. CB Chara Wars: Ushinawareta Gya~gu (SFC)
21. To The Moon (PC)
22. LOVE (PC)
23. Pikuniku (PC)
24. Night in the Woods (PC)
25. The Beginner's Guide (PC)
26. Suikoden (PS1)
27. Chocobo Dungeon 2 (PS1)
28. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Advance! Fire Adventure Team (Wii)
29. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Go! Storm Adventure Team (Wii)
30. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Aim! Light Adventure Team (Wii)
31. Line Attack Heroes (Wii)
32. The Quest for Camelot (GBC)
33. Tales of Destiny (PS1)
34. Metal Walker (GBC)
35. Frog Detective 1 (PC)
36. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team (GBA) *
37. Frog Detective 2 (PC)
38. Frog Detective 3 (PC)
39. Super Robot Wars Alpha for Dreamcast (DC)
40. Brain Lord (SFC)
41. Lagoon (SFC)
42. Dark Hunter: Jou Ijigen Gakuen (PS1)
43. Ys: Books I & II (PCE)
44. Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (SFC)
45. Ys IV: Mask of the Sun (SFC)
46. Dark Hunter: Ge Youma No Mori (PS1)
47. Ys V - Expert (SFC)
48. Jaseiken: Necromancer (PCE)
49. Paladin's Quest (SFC)
A friend told me about this game around the time I was finishing up Necromancer. I like to consider myself fairly familiar with the Super Nintendo’s library, and so I was quite surprised that there was an RPG of all things on the system that I just had no memory of hearing about before. She told me it was a favorite of a friend of hers when they were little, and they called it a forgotten classic. While always skeptical of such claims, I tried to go in with an open mind as I always do. Opinions seemed quite split for this game online, and I tend to fall on the more favorable side of such things when I end up playing games with this kind of split reputation. Regardless, now that I’m done with it, I’ll just say that I certainly wish I could see this game as a forgotten classic! XD. The game doesn’t record your playtime, and I slowly made my way through it over a couple weeks, so I reckon that it took me around 25~30 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game using emulated hardware (and liberal savestate and speed up use in particular areas I’ll get to later).
Paladin’s Quest is, ironically, not the story of a paladin at all (though given that this is an Enix-localized game in English, it’s unsurprising that the translation is kinda crap XP). The Japanese title is Lennus: Kodai Kikai No Kiroku (Lennus: Memory of the Ancient Machine), and it’s far more accurate in its description of the game’s contents. The game takes place on the world of Lennus, and you play as Chezuni, a young boy attending a magic school. One day, his younger friend Ducas dares him to enter the forbidden tower on campus. Not one to back down from a challenge, Chezuni goes with Ducas into the tower where he ends up almost immediately accidentally activating an ancient, evil machine that beats him up. Upon regaining consciousness, Chezuni is informed by the school’s principal that the entire academy has been destroyed and all the staff and students KILLED by the ancient machine he woke up, and he’s now the only one who can stop it!
This game is from late 1992, so it probably won’t amaze you when I say that the story isn’t particularly incredible. That said, it’s frankly got some pretty steep competition in that regard, as Super Famicom RPGs really started picking up that year. Final Fantasy V, Dragon Quest V, Shin Megami Tensei 1, and even Hero Senki (that Gundam X Kamen Rider X Ultraman licensed RPG I played a year or two ago) all came out that same year. Paladin’s Quest ends up falling behind all of them, to be perfectly frank. While the story does have some cool reveals and twists, it doesn’t have much at all in the way of character. It sorta tries to have an overarching theme, but the narrative as a whole really struggles to make much of an impression in large part due to just how slowly paced it feels.
It’s mostly just another RPG where you go from town to town solving problems and collecting Big Plot items here and there, and then things ratchet up near the end until the story finally comes to a close. It’s so by the book that it honestly feels far more like an 8-bit RPG that was pushed forward onto 16-bit hardware without much consideration to how the narrative would need to be changed to accommodate greater hardware and storage capacities. This isn’t a badly written game by the standards of the time, sure, but it wouldn’t have been anything impressive then, and it certainly isn’t going to be anything impressive now either.
Mechanically, Paladin’s Quest has a lot of interesting and clever design choices that almost make it a compelling choice for a beginner’s RPG (in the same way something like Earthbound or Super Mario RPG did on the same system). While you have relatively standard turn-based combat, the actual way you navigate combat is very fast and snippy due to how you actually barely need button pressed to navigate battle menus. Just pressing the four cardinal directions on the D-pad will select any option you could want in battle, and you only really need the B button if you want a dedicated cancel key. It takes a little getting used to, but given that you can also even rebind the buttons from the options menu, this is a game that gives the player an unusually large ability to customize their experience, particularly for the time it was released.
Additionally, the game’s battle system is quite simplified (even for the time), as it lacks any kind of MP system. Instead, casting spells simply consumes HP. While this does mean that you never have any HP healing spells, it also means that your healing is instead all tied to items in the form of HP bottles of varying strengths. The game has quite a lot of spells, but very few total items. You actually can’t even use items in battle outside of the bottle you’ve equipped to that particular character’s belt slot.
Farther simplifying things still (in a sense), you only have two out of your four party members to worry about equipment for. Chezuni and his friend Midia are your two permanent party members, while your other two slots will be filled in by either temporary plot-mandatory party members or the much more common mercenaries that you get to tag along with you. Some of these mercenaries have odd or unfortunate downsides (two or three are basically traps), most of them are simple, straightforward upgrades to previous ones. However, if you like a particular mercenary, you don’t necessarily even need to get rid of them! While you can’t change equipment or buy new spells for a merc, they level up with EXP just like your main two party members do. Equipment doesn’t actually boost your stats that much in the first place, truthfully, so just getting another level or two instead of worrying about new armor or weapons will often keep an old favorite merc just as strong if not stronger than a new merc might’ve been (at least until the very late game).
Bundle all of that together with how relatively short and straightforward dungeons are and how relatively well signposted the story is, and you have a simple, approachable RPG to help any newbie get into the genre... at least in theory ^^; While I started out with lukewarm but still positive feelings towards Paladin’s Quest’s design, the devil is in the details, and they really came out more and more as I got further and further into the game. There are a few fairly major design choices that really bring down the gameplay experience of Paladin’s Quest to the point that it very well might end up scaring off as many RPG newbies as it invites in.
On the more minor end of things, we have the menu and UI design. While not bad in and of itself, it’s very cumbersome both in and out of battle. Everything being D-pad based makes things easy for doing stuff with one hand, which I certainly appreciate, but it also means you’re doing a lot more button presses with far less efficiency than you would be if you were using both the D-pad and face buttons like a more normal game does. Out of battle, healing is done by going into your inventory and using the healing bottles you’ve got, but after every use, it closes your inventory completely. Given that you’re usually using like 4 or 5 or more charges of these things per healing session, that makes for a very big pain in the butt to lick your wounds after any major fight.
Difficulty in and of itself is a weird thing as well. The game has very little in the way of bosses (much like was the case with old Dragon Quest RPGs and such things). Until the final boss (who is a truly miserable slog and where I did all that aforementioned save state abuse), there’s barely a truly challenging fight through the whole game as far as mandatory fights go. Encounter design, however, is really messed up to heck and back. The end of the game is absolutely lousy with miserably tanky and hard-hitting enemy packs who will often take five or more minutes per encounter to put down (and the encounter rate is not nearly low enough to make that reasonable), but that is in no way an anomaly. In just about every other area, you’ll always be running into really mean packs of enemies who are way stronger and more annoying than anything else in the area who take forever to put down. The battle system just isn’t dynamic or deep enough to make these long, drawn out combats fun or interesting, and it makes random battles a real chore very fast (and they basically never improve).
The biggest problem, however, is one that weighs down on all others, and that’s the way the magic system works. In a rather unusual move for the time, Paladin’s Quest actually has no dedicated “intelligence”-type of stat that in most games would scale your magic power higher as you level up. You also don’t actually learn new spells from leveling up either. Instead, magic as a system is effectively completely segregated off from the power curve of leveling up and split into eight different stat bars (one for each magic element). As you progress through the game, you’ll slowly accumulate more elements you can draw from, and gaining a new element will saddle you with a big new pile of spells for both of your main characters as elements automatically mix to make new spells (getting the water element when you already have earth will give you the water + earth spell, for example).
It’s already very annoying that you can’t actually check what your huge list of spells does in battle. You can only check them in the stats screen out side of battle. However, far more annoying than that is how these spells actually power up. One use of a spell will increase the power of that spell’s element by one point. The higher your power in a particular spell, the more your offensive AND defensive power for that particular element increases (so if you want to have a higher natural defense from lightning magic, you better get spamming lightning spells). However, while your normal levels actually increase fairly quickly, your magic affinities increase *extremely* slowly, and it just comes off feeling like a fool’s errand to try and power any of them up. Add in that magic as a whole tends to do pretty pitiful amounts of damage even with your points in an element completely maxed out, and you have a system that’s a real pain in the butt to try and interact with much (especially when what you’re trying to defend against is some element you don’t have yet or, in some cases, can never possibly actually acquire).
How that magic stuff interacts with that wonky difficulty is also a fairly major sticking point with me for this game. Because the game lacks much in the way of bosses, it’s hard to actually know just how over or under powered you really are. While a more typical RPG from the time would have you grinding until you can safely progress through an area without healing all that much, that’s not really the case in Paladin’s Quest. Your healing reserves run SO deep because your spells consume HP, virtually every dungeon in the game is more of a question of “how deep are your healing resources and are you brave enough to just keep going, trusting that they’ll not run out?” more than how resistant to enemy attacks you really are. This can mean that when you actually *do* get to some huge fact mulching boss (particularly the final boss), it can come off as a real shock even if you’ve been not running away from encounters and have the best gear you possibly can (as I was).
All in all, the gameplay is just really uninteresting and tedious. If the game weren’t very hard, then the simplicity wouldn’t really be an issue worth mentioning, but because the game actually does get not just hard, but very time consuming, we end up with a big negative feedback loop of boring: slow trudging battles to slow monotonous healing to dull interesting story, rinse and repeat for 20+ hours.
The aesthetics are quite pretty and striking, at least in the visuals. I don’t think saying that the graphics look primitive really gets across well enough how they look. It’s almost like they went for a minimalist style that was still 16-bit in nature (what a friend and I dubbed as looking like from a “12-bit” console, halfway between 8-bit and 16-bit). Monster design and world design overall are very cool and unique, and at the very least for visuals, the game doesn’t fail to live up to expectations for a game from late ’92. The music is all around okay, but nothing special. It uses some interesting instruments for its tracks that certainly made them stand out a bit more at first exposure, but there just really aren’t that many songs in the first place. What’s there isn’t bad, but I’d struggle to call any of it particularly good or memorable (especially comparing it to other RPG OSTs that were gracing the SFC that same year).
Verdict: Not Recommended. I was fully planning to ultimately hesitantly recommend this game until the last 1/3rd of it or so, at which point it just really started to sink in just how poorly put together the whole thing was. While it’s not a crime to not excel at anything in particular and just provide an approachable, competent experience for beginners, it really starts being a problem once it starts getting frustrating and boring, and that’s a sin that Paladin’s Quest is absolutely guilty of. It even had me fondly remembering the mind-numbing grinding of Necromancer, which was what really pushed it over the edge for me that this was something I just really couldn’t recommend at all XD. Simply put: Your time is worth more than what you’ll spend playing through Paladin’s Quest. Paladin’s Quest would’ve been underwhelming and filled with outdated, mean design even back when it came out, and time has been nothing but more and more unkind to it since. Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere for your SFC RPG fun times, as there is no hidden classic waiting for you in Paladin’s Quest, just something that’s unremembered for very valid and fair reasons.
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1. Terranigma (SFC)
2. Eastward (PC)
3. Pulse (PC)
4. Lost Ruins (PC)
5. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (PC)
6. Dropsy (PC)
7. Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)
8. Pokemon Ruby (GBA) *
9. Secret of Mana (SFC)
10. Fire Watch (PC)
11. Bokura (PC)
12. Romancing SaGa (SFC)
13. Trials of Mana (SFC)
14. Castlevania Legends (GB)
15. SaGa 2 (GB)
16. SaGa 3 (GB)
17. Celeste (PC)
18. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (PC)
19. Celeste 64 (PC)
20. CB Chara Wars: Ushinawareta Gya~gu (SFC)
21. To The Moon (PC)
22. LOVE (PC)
23. Pikuniku (PC)
24. Night in the Woods (PC)
25. The Beginner's Guide (PC)
26. Suikoden (PS1)
27. Chocobo Dungeon 2 (PS1)
28. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Advance! Fire Adventure Team (Wii)
29. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Go! Storm Adventure Team (Wii)
30. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Aim! Light Adventure Team (Wii)
31. Line Attack Heroes (Wii)
32. The Quest for Camelot (GBC)
33. Tales of Destiny (PS1)
34. Metal Walker (GBC)
35. Frog Detective 1 (PC)
36. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team (GBA) *
37. Frog Detective 2 (PC)
38. Frog Detective 3 (PC)
39. Super Robot Wars Alpha for Dreamcast (DC)
40. Brain Lord (SFC)
41. Lagoon (SFC)
42. Dark Hunter: Jou Ijigen Gakuen (PS1)
43. Ys: Books I & II (PCE)
44. Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (SFC)
45. Ys IV: Mask of the Sun (SFC)
46. Dark Hunter: Ge Youma No Mori (PS1)
47. Ys V - Expert (SFC)
48. Jaseiken: Necromancer (PCE)
49. Paladin's Quest (SFC)
A friend told me about this game around the time I was finishing up Necromancer. I like to consider myself fairly familiar with the Super Nintendo’s library, and so I was quite surprised that there was an RPG of all things on the system that I just had no memory of hearing about before. She told me it was a favorite of a friend of hers when they were little, and they called it a forgotten classic. While always skeptical of such claims, I tried to go in with an open mind as I always do. Opinions seemed quite split for this game online, and I tend to fall on the more favorable side of such things when I end up playing games with this kind of split reputation. Regardless, now that I’m done with it, I’ll just say that I certainly wish I could see this game as a forgotten classic! XD. The game doesn’t record your playtime, and I slowly made my way through it over a couple weeks, so I reckon that it took me around 25~30 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game using emulated hardware (and liberal savestate and speed up use in particular areas I’ll get to later).
Paladin’s Quest is, ironically, not the story of a paladin at all (though given that this is an Enix-localized game in English, it’s unsurprising that the translation is kinda crap XP). The Japanese title is Lennus: Kodai Kikai No Kiroku (Lennus: Memory of the Ancient Machine), and it’s far more accurate in its description of the game’s contents. The game takes place on the world of Lennus, and you play as Chezuni, a young boy attending a magic school. One day, his younger friend Ducas dares him to enter the forbidden tower on campus. Not one to back down from a challenge, Chezuni goes with Ducas into the tower where he ends up almost immediately accidentally activating an ancient, evil machine that beats him up. Upon regaining consciousness, Chezuni is informed by the school’s principal that the entire academy has been destroyed and all the staff and students KILLED by the ancient machine he woke up, and he’s now the only one who can stop it!
This game is from late 1992, so it probably won’t amaze you when I say that the story isn’t particularly incredible. That said, it’s frankly got some pretty steep competition in that regard, as Super Famicom RPGs really started picking up that year. Final Fantasy V, Dragon Quest V, Shin Megami Tensei 1, and even Hero Senki (that Gundam X Kamen Rider X Ultraman licensed RPG I played a year or two ago) all came out that same year. Paladin’s Quest ends up falling behind all of them, to be perfectly frank. While the story does have some cool reveals and twists, it doesn’t have much at all in the way of character. It sorta tries to have an overarching theme, but the narrative as a whole really struggles to make much of an impression in large part due to just how slowly paced it feels.
It’s mostly just another RPG where you go from town to town solving problems and collecting Big Plot items here and there, and then things ratchet up near the end until the story finally comes to a close. It’s so by the book that it honestly feels far more like an 8-bit RPG that was pushed forward onto 16-bit hardware without much consideration to how the narrative would need to be changed to accommodate greater hardware and storage capacities. This isn’t a badly written game by the standards of the time, sure, but it wouldn’t have been anything impressive then, and it certainly isn’t going to be anything impressive now either.
Mechanically, Paladin’s Quest has a lot of interesting and clever design choices that almost make it a compelling choice for a beginner’s RPG (in the same way something like Earthbound or Super Mario RPG did on the same system). While you have relatively standard turn-based combat, the actual way you navigate combat is very fast and snippy due to how you actually barely need button pressed to navigate battle menus. Just pressing the four cardinal directions on the D-pad will select any option you could want in battle, and you only really need the B button if you want a dedicated cancel key. It takes a little getting used to, but given that you can also even rebind the buttons from the options menu, this is a game that gives the player an unusually large ability to customize their experience, particularly for the time it was released.
Additionally, the game’s battle system is quite simplified (even for the time), as it lacks any kind of MP system. Instead, casting spells simply consumes HP. While this does mean that you never have any HP healing spells, it also means that your healing is instead all tied to items in the form of HP bottles of varying strengths. The game has quite a lot of spells, but very few total items. You actually can’t even use items in battle outside of the bottle you’ve equipped to that particular character’s belt slot.
Farther simplifying things still (in a sense), you only have two out of your four party members to worry about equipment for. Chezuni and his friend Midia are your two permanent party members, while your other two slots will be filled in by either temporary plot-mandatory party members or the much more common mercenaries that you get to tag along with you. Some of these mercenaries have odd or unfortunate downsides (two or three are basically traps), most of them are simple, straightforward upgrades to previous ones. However, if you like a particular mercenary, you don’t necessarily even need to get rid of them! While you can’t change equipment or buy new spells for a merc, they level up with EXP just like your main two party members do. Equipment doesn’t actually boost your stats that much in the first place, truthfully, so just getting another level or two instead of worrying about new armor or weapons will often keep an old favorite merc just as strong if not stronger than a new merc might’ve been (at least until the very late game).
Bundle all of that together with how relatively short and straightforward dungeons are and how relatively well signposted the story is, and you have a simple, approachable RPG to help any newbie get into the genre... at least in theory ^^; While I started out with lukewarm but still positive feelings towards Paladin’s Quest’s design, the devil is in the details, and they really came out more and more as I got further and further into the game. There are a few fairly major design choices that really bring down the gameplay experience of Paladin’s Quest to the point that it very well might end up scaring off as many RPG newbies as it invites in.
On the more minor end of things, we have the menu and UI design. While not bad in and of itself, it’s very cumbersome both in and out of battle. Everything being D-pad based makes things easy for doing stuff with one hand, which I certainly appreciate, but it also means you’re doing a lot more button presses with far less efficiency than you would be if you were using both the D-pad and face buttons like a more normal game does. Out of battle, healing is done by going into your inventory and using the healing bottles you’ve got, but after every use, it closes your inventory completely. Given that you’re usually using like 4 or 5 or more charges of these things per healing session, that makes for a very big pain in the butt to lick your wounds after any major fight.
Difficulty in and of itself is a weird thing as well. The game has very little in the way of bosses (much like was the case with old Dragon Quest RPGs and such things). Until the final boss (who is a truly miserable slog and where I did all that aforementioned save state abuse), there’s barely a truly challenging fight through the whole game as far as mandatory fights go. Encounter design, however, is really messed up to heck and back. The end of the game is absolutely lousy with miserably tanky and hard-hitting enemy packs who will often take five or more minutes per encounter to put down (and the encounter rate is not nearly low enough to make that reasonable), but that is in no way an anomaly. In just about every other area, you’ll always be running into really mean packs of enemies who are way stronger and more annoying than anything else in the area who take forever to put down. The battle system just isn’t dynamic or deep enough to make these long, drawn out combats fun or interesting, and it makes random battles a real chore very fast (and they basically never improve).
The biggest problem, however, is one that weighs down on all others, and that’s the way the magic system works. In a rather unusual move for the time, Paladin’s Quest actually has no dedicated “intelligence”-type of stat that in most games would scale your magic power higher as you level up. You also don’t actually learn new spells from leveling up either. Instead, magic as a system is effectively completely segregated off from the power curve of leveling up and split into eight different stat bars (one for each magic element). As you progress through the game, you’ll slowly accumulate more elements you can draw from, and gaining a new element will saddle you with a big new pile of spells for both of your main characters as elements automatically mix to make new spells (getting the water element when you already have earth will give you the water + earth spell, for example).
It’s already very annoying that you can’t actually check what your huge list of spells does in battle. You can only check them in the stats screen out side of battle. However, far more annoying than that is how these spells actually power up. One use of a spell will increase the power of that spell’s element by one point. The higher your power in a particular spell, the more your offensive AND defensive power for that particular element increases (so if you want to have a higher natural defense from lightning magic, you better get spamming lightning spells). However, while your normal levels actually increase fairly quickly, your magic affinities increase *extremely* slowly, and it just comes off feeling like a fool’s errand to try and power any of them up. Add in that magic as a whole tends to do pretty pitiful amounts of damage even with your points in an element completely maxed out, and you have a system that’s a real pain in the butt to try and interact with much (especially when what you’re trying to defend against is some element you don’t have yet or, in some cases, can never possibly actually acquire).
How that magic stuff interacts with that wonky difficulty is also a fairly major sticking point with me for this game. Because the game lacks much in the way of bosses, it’s hard to actually know just how over or under powered you really are. While a more typical RPG from the time would have you grinding until you can safely progress through an area without healing all that much, that’s not really the case in Paladin’s Quest. Your healing reserves run SO deep because your spells consume HP, virtually every dungeon in the game is more of a question of “how deep are your healing resources and are you brave enough to just keep going, trusting that they’ll not run out?” more than how resistant to enemy attacks you really are. This can mean that when you actually *do* get to some huge fact mulching boss (particularly the final boss), it can come off as a real shock even if you’ve been not running away from encounters and have the best gear you possibly can (as I was).
All in all, the gameplay is just really uninteresting and tedious. If the game weren’t very hard, then the simplicity wouldn’t really be an issue worth mentioning, but because the game actually does get not just hard, but very time consuming, we end up with a big negative feedback loop of boring: slow trudging battles to slow monotonous healing to dull interesting story, rinse and repeat for 20+ hours.
The aesthetics are quite pretty and striking, at least in the visuals. I don’t think saying that the graphics look primitive really gets across well enough how they look. It’s almost like they went for a minimalist style that was still 16-bit in nature (what a friend and I dubbed as looking like from a “12-bit” console, halfway between 8-bit and 16-bit). Monster design and world design overall are very cool and unique, and at the very least for visuals, the game doesn’t fail to live up to expectations for a game from late ’92. The music is all around okay, but nothing special. It uses some interesting instruments for its tracks that certainly made them stand out a bit more at first exposure, but there just really aren’t that many songs in the first place. What’s there isn’t bad, but I’d struggle to call any of it particularly good or memorable (especially comparing it to other RPG OSTs that were gracing the SFC that same year).
Verdict: Not Recommended. I was fully planning to ultimately hesitantly recommend this game until the last 1/3rd of it or so, at which point it just really started to sink in just how poorly put together the whole thing was. While it’s not a crime to not excel at anything in particular and just provide an approachable, competent experience for beginners, it really starts being a problem once it starts getting frustrating and boring, and that’s a sin that Paladin’s Quest is absolutely guilty of. It even had me fondly remembering the mind-numbing grinding of Necromancer, which was what really pushed it over the edge for me that this was something I just really couldn’t recommend at all XD. Simply put: Your time is worth more than what you’ll spend playing through Paladin’s Quest. Paladin’s Quest would’ve been underwhelming and filled with outdated, mean design even back when it came out, and time has been nothing but more and more unkind to it since. Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere for your SFC RPG fun times, as there is no hidden classic waiting for you in Paladin’s Quest, just something that’s unremembered for very valid and fair reasons.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
1. Tormented Souls - Switch
2. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II - PC
3. Fantasy Empires - PC
4. Vagrant Story - PS1
5. Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor - PC
6. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - Switch
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project - NES
8. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - PS5
9. Tomb Raider Remastered - PC
10. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - PS5
11. Unicorn Overlord - Switch
12. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Solaris Showdown - PC
13. Princess Peach: Showtime - Switch
14. Fida Puti Samurai - PC
15. Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money - PC
16. Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts - PC
17. Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues - PC
18. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - PC
19. Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road - PC
20. Super Buff HD - PC
21. SaGa Emerald Beyond - Switch
22. Blasphemous 2 - Switch
23. Trepang2 - PC
24. Homeworld 3 - PC
25. Blood West - PC
Blood West is a stealth FPS set in an alternate wild west where the dead and other monsters are swarming the land. You are a recently deceased cowboy, given a chance at undeath to try and cleanse the land of the underlying evil, as your mind remains intact. The game takes a lot of influences from STALKER, though it's not nearly as buggy.
The game is divided into three acts, each of which is an independent open-world area. You start off with a sort of home base where a merchant NPC exists, as well as a rest point to heal up. You need to accomplish a number of fetch quests to unlock the road to the boss of the area; there are also side quests available that can reward you with unique gear. There are only a handful of NPCs to add some flavor; the game is overall quite lonely, and really sells the "damn, this whole area is fucked" feeling.
The player is able to equip a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, three consumables, and three artifacts. And this is where the game sets the tone of how it expects you to engage with it. These weapons are fairly authentic wild west weapons. So we're talking iron sights, single action, and loud. Your rate of fire is abysmal, so you need to be landing those headshots to have a chance. And you don't want to engage groups if you can help it. Bows and crossbows are your only source of quiet takedowns, and you'll want to make judicious use of them. But don't be afraid to bring out the iron on the big enemies; you'll need the higher damage (especially from the special ammos). Unlike STALKER, most artifacts are entirely positive, and make up a good portion of your build. The remainder is in snagging the unique weapons that have special benefits, like healing on landing headshots or dealing more damage as your HP drops. The game also features a basic skill system, where you can buff up your various attributes over time. Things are calibrated such that you can get all the essential skills for your build by end game, so it never feels like you need to grind (except maybe at the beginning, more on that later).
The enemies are a variety of undead and related monsters. They wander around areas on various patrol routes, and it is imperative that you approach them intelligently. The melee enemies can kill you in three hits early game through a combination of hard hits and residual bleeding damage. Ranged enemies will lead their shots on you (though the projectile isn't hitscan, so you can correct) and being hit by their fire temporarily throws off your aim. You'll definitely want to make use of stealth, and this game features probably the most informative stealth system I've ever seen. When you are within detection range of an enemy a bar starts to fill as you make yourself noticeable. An icon shows up indicating if detection is going up because they hear you or because they see you (or both). Staying still causes aural detection to go down, while getting out of sight causes visual detection to go down. You can very easily understand when you're being detected and why, so you can properly react. While sometimes enemy layouts can be quite frustrating to manage, the stealth never feels like bullshit.
Another component to mention is how the game handles death. You have one save slot for a character, and upon death you respawn at the last safe zone. You gain a debuff; this gets stronger as you die, stacking up to three times (with the third being extra bad). You can undertake a random "kill/collect X" to clear a full stack, or you can drink a certain potion (which is rare at the beginning). Also, upon death a portion of the enemies in the world will respawn. As far as I could surmise, this seems to be some sort of "for each enemy, X% chance to respawn", as there wasn't any discernable rhyme or reason as to why some areas would stay depopulated after several deaths while others threw enemies back at me.
The game is extremely difficult at the beginning; you have a distinct lack of tools to handle enemies, so you have to do a lot of perfect stealth with little backup. The first boss is the annoying kind where you need to do things to trigger vulnerable periods, and taking too long will cause a nasty enemy to spawn to screw with you (and again, you don't have the tools to handle it quickly). Once you get into act 2 you start to get better artifacts and unique weapons that give you more options for taking out enemies safely, as well as being able to go loud successfully. By end game a player who doesn't take needless risks can fairly easily surmount the challenges the game throws at you. So this is another way that it mimics STALKER. Overall, the game scratches a similar itch, though it doesn't have the horror aspects (zombies do not make a horror game). If you have the patience to get through the first act you'll find a fun experience that really triggers that reward system for overcoming the nasty stuff it throws at you.
1. Tormented Souls - Switch
2. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II - PC
3. Fantasy Empires - PC
4. Vagrant Story - PS1
5. Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honor - PC
6. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - Switch
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project - NES
8. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - PS5
9. Tomb Raider Remastered - PC
10. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - PS5
11. Unicorn Overlord - Switch
12. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries: Solaris Showdown - PC
13. Princess Peach: Showtime - Switch
14. Fida Puti Samurai - PC
15. Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money - PC
16. Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts - PC
17. Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues - PC
18. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - PC
19. Fallout New Vegas: Lonesome Road - PC
20. Super Buff HD - PC
21. SaGa Emerald Beyond - Switch
22. Blasphemous 2 - Switch
23. Trepang2 - PC
24. Homeworld 3 - PC
25. Blood West - PC
Blood West is a stealth FPS set in an alternate wild west where the dead and other monsters are swarming the land. You are a recently deceased cowboy, given a chance at undeath to try and cleanse the land of the underlying evil, as your mind remains intact. The game takes a lot of influences from STALKER, though it's not nearly as buggy.
The game is divided into three acts, each of which is an independent open-world area. You start off with a sort of home base where a merchant NPC exists, as well as a rest point to heal up. You need to accomplish a number of fetch quests to unlock the road to the boss of the area; there are also side quests available that can reward you with unique gear. There are only a handful of NPCs to add some flavor; the game is overall quite lonely, and really sells the "damn, this whole area is fucked" feeling.
The player is able to equip a primary weapon, a secondary weapon, three consumables, and three artifacts. And this is where the game sets the tone of how it expects you to engage with it. These weapons are fairly authentic wild west weapons. So we're talking iron sights, single action, and loud. Your rate of fire is abysmal, so you need to be landing those headshots to have a chance. And you don't want to engage groups if you can help it. Bows and crossbows are your only source of quiet takedowns, and you'll want to make judicious use of them. But don't be afraid to bring out the iron on the big enemies; you'll need the higher damage (especially from the special ammos). Unlike STALKER, most artifacts are entirely positive, and make up a good portion of your build. The remainder is in snagging the unique weapons that have special benefits, like healing on landing headshots or dealing more damage as your HP drops. The game also features a basic skill system, where you can buff up your various attributes over time. Things are calibrated such that you can get all the essential skills for your build by end game, so it never feels like you need to grind (except maybe at the beginning, more on that later).
The enemies are a variety of undead and related monsters. They wander around areas on various patrol routes, and it is imperative that you approach them intelligently. The melee enemies can kill you in three hits early game through a combination of hard hits and residual bleeding damage. Ranged enemies will lead their shots on you (though the projectile isn't hitscan, so you can correct) and being hit by their fire temporarily throws off your aim. You'll definitely want to make use of stealth, and this game features probably the most informative stealth system I've ever seen. When you are within detection range of an enemy a bar starts to fill as you make yourself noticeable. An icon shows up indicating if detection is going up because they hear you or because they see you (or both). Staying still causes aural detection to go down, while getting out of sight causes visual detection to go down. You can very easily understand when you're being detected and why, so you can properly react. While sometimes enemy layouts can be quite frustrating to manage, the stealth never feels like bullshit.
Another component to mention is how the game handles death. You have one save slot for a character, and upon death you respawn at the last safe zone. You gain a debuff; this gets stronger as you die, stacking up to three times (with the third being extra bad). You can undertake a random "kill/collect X" to clear a full stack, or you can drink a certain potion (which is rare at the beginning). Also, upon death a portion of the enemies in the world will respawn. As far as I could surmise, this seems to be some sort of "for each enemy, X% chance to respawn", as there wasn't any discernable rhyme or reason as to why some areas would stay depopulated after several deaths while others threw enemies back at me.
The game is extremely difficult at the beginning; you have a distinct lack of tools to handle enemies, so you have to do a lot of perfect stealth with little backup. The first boss is the annoying kind where you need to do things to trigger vulnerable periods, and taking too long will cause a nasty enemy to spawn to screw with you (and again, you don't have the tools to handle it quickly). Once you get into act 2 you start to get better artifacts and unique weapons that give you more options for taking out enemies safely, as well as being able to go loud successfully. By end game a player who doesn't take needless risks can fairly easily surmount the challenges the game throws at you. So this is another way that it mimics STALKER. Overall, the game scratches a similar itch, though it doesn't have the horror aspects (zombies do not make a horror game). If you have the patience to get through the first act you'll find a fun experience that really triggers that reward system for overcoming the nasty stuff it throws at you.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
-
Markies
- Next-Gen
- Posts: 1430
- Joined: Fri Mar 27, 2015 4:29 pm
- Location: St. Louis, Missouri
- Contact:
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Markies' Games Beat List Of 2024!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***
1. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
2. Jackal (NES)
***3. Evolution: The World Of Sacred Device (SDC)***
4. Skies Of Arcadia Legends (GCN)
5. Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (PS2)
6. Sunset Riders (GEN)
***7. Tactics Ogre (PS1)***
***8. Forza Motorsport (XBOX)***
9. Riviera: The Promised Land (GBA)
***10. Darkstalkers (PS1)***
***11. Splatoon (WiiU)***
12. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (NSW)
***13. Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball (NES)***
14. 3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3)
***15. Puzzle Kingdoms (Wii)***
16. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall Of The Foot Clan (GB)
17. Steel Empire (GEN)
***18. Super Mario Strikers (GCN)***
19. Evolution 2: Far Off Promise (SDC)
I beat Evolution 2: Far Off Promise on the Sega Dreamcast this evening!
I beat the original Evolution as the last Dreamcast game before I beat my Backlog. It was a game that had been sitting on my shelf for many years and I was a little afraid of playing it. Thankfully, I got over my fear and loved it from the start. Naturally, I was then interested in picking up the sequel after I beat my Backlog, which I did last year. Looking for a new Dreamcast game to play, my favoritism obviously made me want to play the sequel. I had heard that the game wasn't solely randomized dungeons, but I was still curious and excited to play the sequel.
Besides a few minor tweaks, Evolution 2 is almost a carbon copy of the original Evolution. One change is that you start the game in a new town that is bigger than the first. Still has the same amount of shops and you are still working for the Historical Society collecting rare treasures. There is an overall arching story involving your travel companion and that was a nice touch. It added a bit of variety to separate it from the original. The combat is once again very simple and easy to comprehend. I think this series would be a great introduction to RPG's for new comers as well because of the simple and engaging combat. Cute characters and addicting game play add to the enjoyment of the game. There is a randomized optional dungeon, but the main plot dungeons are not randomized as they are set. They are mostly themed on elements, but most of them aren't too bad.
Unfortunately, I would say the Randomized Dungeons were the most exciting part of the original game. Every time I started up the game, the dungeon was different and each room could lead to anywhere. With this one, I had little incentive to go back to dungeons or explore more. With that in mind, I kind of breezed through the game and beat it in about 15 hours. The brisk pace helps, but I think the game's identity and excitement was sacrificed by making the dungeons less random.
Overall, I still really enjoyed playing through Evolution 2. I enjoyed the first one much more because of the randomized dungeons. But, the brisk pace and low difficulty made this enjoyable as well. I am interested in going back to explore the randomized dungeon and to collect everything in the game. Not an exciting or overwhelming sequel, but a good one nevertheless. If you liked the first one or are interested in the series, this is a good one to try out!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***
1. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
2. Jackal (NES)
***3. Evolution: The World Of Sacred Device (SDC)***
4. Skies Of Arcadia Legends (GCN)
5. Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (PS2)
6. Sunset Riders (GEN)
***7. Tactics Ogre (PS1)***
***8. Forza Motorsport (XBOX)***
9. Riviera: The Promised Land (GBA)
***10. Darkstalkers (PS1)***
***11. Splatoon (WiiU)***
12. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (NSW)
***13. Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball (NES)***
14. 3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3)
***15. Puzzle Kingdoms (Wii)***
16. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall Of The Foot Clan (GB)
17. Steel Empire (GEN)
***18. Super Mario Strikers (GCN)***
19. Evolution 2: Far Off Promise (SDC)
I beat Evolution 2: Far Off Promise on the Sega Dreamcast this evening!
I beat the original Evolution as the last Dreamcast game before I beat my Backlog. It was a game that had been sitting on my shelf for many years and I was a little afraid of playing it. Thankfully, I got over my fear and loved it from the start. Naturally, I was then interested in picking up the sequel after I beat my Backlog, which I did last year. Looking for a new Dreamcast game to play, my favoritism obviously made me want to play the sequel. I had heard that the game wasn't solely randomized dungeons, but I was still curious and excited to play the sequel.
Besides a few minor tweaks, Evolution 2 is almost a carbon copy of the original Evolution. One change is that you start the game in a new town that is bigger than the first. Still has the same amount of shops and you are still working for the Historical Society collecting rare treasures. There is an overall arching story involving your travel companion and that was a nice touch. It added a bit of variety to separate it from the original. The combat is once again very simple and easy to comprehend. I think this series would be a great introduction to RPG's for new comers as well because of the simple and engaging combat. Cute characters and addicting game play add to the enjoyment of the game. There is a randomized optional dungeon, but the main plot dungeons are not randomized as they are set. They are mostly themed on elements, but most of them aren't too bad.
Unfortunately, I would say the Randomized Dungeons were the most exciting part of the original game. Every time I started up the game, the dungeon was different and each room could lead to anywhere. With this one, I had little incentive to go back to dungeons or explore more. With that in mind, I kind of breezed through the game and beat it in about 15 hours. The brisk pace helps, but I think the game's identity and excitement was sacrificed by making the dungeons less random.
Overall, I still really enjoyed playing through Evolution 2. I enjoyed the first one much more because of the randomized dungeons. But, the brisk pace and low difficulty made this enjoyable as well. I am interested in going back to explore the randomized dungeon and to collect everything in the game. Not an exciting or overwhelming sequel, but a good one nevertheless. If you liked the first one or are interested in the series, this is a good one to try out!
-
TheSSNintendo
- 128-bit
- Posts: 581
- Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:27 pm
Re: Games Beaten 2024
Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster (Steam)