Games Beaten 2024

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Tue Jul 16, 2024 7:59 am

Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat

1~50

51. Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53. Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54. Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55. Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56. Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57. Cocoron (Famicom)
58. The Darkness (PS3)
59. Haze (PS3)
60. Animaniacs (GB)
61. Lair (PS3)
62. Bionic Commando (PS3)
63. Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64. Darkwing Duck (NES)
65. Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66. Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67. Metroid II (GB) *

68. Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)

After all the Pokemon I played last and this year, I was still honestly in the mood for more and didn’t super wanna stop, but anything else I wanted to replay was on DS or other consoles I couldn’t stream while I played them, so it was as difficult as usual to get myself to actually want to play that. Fast forward a bit, and I discovered that this game actually goes for super cheap these days despite being so new, and 1500 yen was a price too good to pass up for an easy way to play another “old” Pokemon game on a console. It took me around 25-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (with my team of Empoleon, Luxray, Honchkrow, Lucario, Carnivine, and Hippowdon).

Brilliant Diamond is the fourth generation of Pokemon as much as it ever was in most ways, and one way it’s effectively still exactly the same is the story. Starting out just out on a local adventure with your hyperactive friend Barry, you quickly find yourself in possession of some Pokemon, and the local Pokemon Professor entrusts you with a Pokedex to fill up. Thus, as is so often the case, begins your journey to become the Pokemon master and save the world from some shadowy organization. Pearl/Diamond’s story is very much just sorta “another one”, in many ways, but it’s a nice steppingstone towards the more serious/involved kind of storytelling we’d eventually be trying in later games. The narrative and gameplay changes made for Platinum are not present here, so Cyrus’s whole plan doesn’t quite have the interesting bite that it does in that game, but I still found his whole thing of “clearly doesn’t actually want to be right about all this” very neat and a fun way to spin a Pokemon villain. It’s hardly the best Pokemon story in the world, but it’s a perfectly fine setup for your Pokemon adventure to take form with.

In most ways, this game is just old fourth gen Pokemon with a new coat of paint. The Pokemon and where you find them are the same, the gym leaders and their Pokemon are (mostly) all the same (outside of how many strong trainers have held items on their Pokemon now), and the routes and locations are all the same too. While these remakes didn’t get nearly the overhaul the previous generations of Pokemon remakes did, there are still some very meaningful quality of life changes and improvements worth talking about. For starters, the most unavoidable change is that you now have a full party experience share on all the time. While it would be nice to have an option to turn it off (for those who want it, as more choices for this kind of thing is always good), I never really had any problem with it. Tough fights (most gym leaders and especially the Elite Four) still felt tuned just right for where my party was in power, and most of what the exp share system meant was that I never had to spend any time grinding up a better party, which I always appreciate.

Other very appreciated quality of life improvements include the ability to access your Pokemon boxes to swap Pokemon in and out almost anywhere, and the elimination of HMs as they used to exist. Now, just like most newer games since Sun/Moon, you just access HMs from your Poke-watch equivalent, so you don’t need HM having Pokemon cluttering up your party constantly anymore. This leads me into another big change, which is the Grand Underground. With more stuff to do, Pokemon to find, and online connectivity, the Underground is more fun and addictive than ever. It’s a really nice improvement on the old version of this, and there were several times I had to pull myself away from peacefully mining away underground because I had to go to bed XD. However, the Underground does have a knock-on effect that’s not so nice. You can find randomly spawned items in the Underground such as TMs, and in order to push you towards using the Underground, this is yet another more recent Pokemon game where TMs are no longer find one, use infinitely as they used to be. It was never a huge problem in my playthrough, as when you find most TMs, you find 3 to 5 copies of it, but it’s still an annoying feature that I wish wasn’t there.

The last little change I want to mention is in how this is technically based off of the Pokemon ruleset as it existed in Sword/Shield. In most regards this doesn’t mean much, as it’s not like they added in new Pokemon that weren’t originally here, but what it *does* impact are the Pokemon already here. Pokemon not only have their move learn sets from Sword/Shield (meaning most everyone has a pretty valid/good move set now), but fairy type now also exists. Fairy type Pokemon and moves existing is one of the biggest changes to trainers and especially your strongest opponents, as they now are much better equipped to handle your dark type Pokemon that used to be able to safely sweep them back in the original DS versions.

Outside of those things, these games really are the fourth generation of Pokemon the same as it ever was, and that’s honestly a positive just as much as it is a negative. Granted, I wanted to play old Diamond/Pearl again, which is why I picked this up. I want to make clear that I explicitly appreciate that commitment to sticking to how these games used to be. At the same time, it’s difficult to ignore a lot of the issues that fourth gen Pokemon has always had. There are around 100 new Pokemon again, but a very meaningful amount of them (more than 25%) are linked to old Pokemon by virtue of being new baby Pokemon evolutions or new final evolutions of old Pokemon. There’s nothing inherently wrong with adding new evolutions, of course, but it creates a new problem for the regional Pokedex of Sinnoh.

Despite this game adding just about as many new Pokemon as Ruby/Sapphire did on the GBA, there is a remarkable lack of actually new Pokemon to find and use in this game as a result of just how many new Pokemon are just evolutions of old ones or are just very hard to find in general (like all the ones you get on honey trees). Just to facilitate all those new evolutions, there are a TON of old Pokemon who *need* to be here, because otherwise you couldn’t get those new evolutions of theirs at all, and that leaves less and less space for just genuinely new and interesting Pokemon. I actually put off playing this game for a good while due to just not being able to pick an interesting team that wasn’t composed of nearly all old Pokemon from the first or second generation of games. The acquisition problems aren’t nearly as significant as Gold/Silver had it back on the GameBoy, but it’s really hard for me to ignore just how weak the overall regional Pokedex is in Pearl/Diamond.

The other main aspect of the original games that drags these ones down is the way the routes are designed. Routes tend to be long and *packed* with trainers. Your team will be getting whittled down so much on every route, even through just bare attrition, that you’ll be going back to Pokemon Centers to heal quite frequently. Admittedly, this is a problem lessened a bit by the full party exp share mechanic, as your party will generally be all around a good level to be swapped in to take on the army of trainers you’re going to be facing. In the older games, if you were swapping in and out strong and weak Pokemon to train up weak ones constantly, you’d be going back to Pokemon Centers to heal even more often, and that’s even more of a big pain in the butt.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about this game about how the exp share mechanic makes normal trainers just feel like fodder, but I honestly think people are diagnosing the problem wrong. The issue isn’t the exp share making all trainers easy (as most every normal trainer in a Pokemon game is just exp fodder for your team, imo), so much as it is the routes just have SO many trainers that things just get naturally tedious as you’re forced to fight yet another one. Much like just how much of Ruby/Sapphire is just boring endless water routes in both the originals and the remakes, this route design issue a very meaningful problem the original games have, and these games really have their hands tied in having any meaningful way to fix them.

I know the aesthetics for this game were quite a controversial topic at its release, but I quite liked them. The overworld and battles are all 3D instead of 2D now, and they’ve kept the old scale of things from the DS games where everyone is chibis outside of battle but more detailed in battle. This was something I found very silly and fun, but I get not really liking how the chibis look. It’s just something that’s going to vary from person to person on how it really vibes with you, but I, for one, really liked it. The music is great as it ever was, though. Pearl/Diamond had a good pile of good tracks, and these new Switch versions of them are excellent new renditions of them~.

Verdict: Recommended. This is something I *want* to highly recommend, but I just can’t really with how strong the negatives are despite how much I enjoyed it. As great as the new quality of life features, slight balance changes, and the graphical facelift are, this is still Pokemon fourth gen at the end of the day, and that fact is these games greatest strength as much as it’s their greatest weakness. If you’re looking for a prettied up version of Pearl/Diamond to play on modern hardware that has a lot of great new quality of life features, then this is a great game to pick up, especially for the price it’s currently marked down to. However, if you found fourth gen Pokemon boring and too drawn out back when it was released, or you just have a hard time going back to the older style of how Pokemon games were designed and balanced, then this is likely not going to do much to change your stance on things.

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69. Eggerland (FDS)

I held off for a while after getting a bit burned out by the sheer amount of Adventures of Lolo I played a few weeks back, but I decided I could hold off no longer when I found I actually did, indeed possess a way to play the original few Eggerland games on Famicom. This is a game I technically beat after its sequel, though given how these games so directly build off of one another, it just makes more sense to break my usual way of doing things and write about them in the order they came out rather than the order I finished them in. For this particular game, it took me about 10-ish hours to finish all the levels in the Japanese version of the game with liberal save state and rewind use on emulated hardware.

This game has a relatively simple setup, like basically all of these games do. There are some fancy extra details in the manual and such, but the fact of the matter is that the evil Lord Egger has kidnapped Princess Lala, and it’s up to the brave hero Lolo to venture into his labyrinth, defeat him, and rescue her. Hardly an original premise, sure, but it does give us an interesting look into the old way these games were designed, a way that they’d ultimately completely abandon.

The building blocks of stages are going to be familiar to anyone who has played Adventures of Lolo. You’re Lolo. You can push green blocks and you die in one hit from enemies. Your objective is to collect all of the heart framers and collect the key from the chest to go to the next level. It’s a timing and combat-focused approach to sokoban games, and it used to be HAL’s bread and butter for a lot of the 80’s. However, rather than the later Lolo games which are all just linear games progressing stage to stage (with the occasional varied way of accessing them, such as how Lolo 3 does), the first three Eggerland games (this game, it’s MSX predecessor, and its Famicom sequel) are actually adventure games too, not just puzzle games!

Instead of just automatically progressing to the next level upon beating the one you’re in, you have the option of going in any of the doors found in the border walls of the room you’re in (or even sailing off on a current with the raft you find, if you don’t mind drowning because you happened to unwittingly pick the wrong invisible current to travel on, at least <w>). You find a map fairly near the start of the game (or at least you *can*), and it’ll show you the roughly 11x11 grid that the labyrinth exists on. This is a good a time as any to mention that while in *most* ways this is a port of the MSX game, Eggerland 2, there are a handful more levels added to this one as well as a final boss fight and larger ending cutscene.

In addition to those 121 levels, there are a handful of time trial special ones you’ll need to find by beating certain levels, and there are even a few special hidden time trials you’ll need to find by pushing a particular block in a particular room (and you’ll need to do all of those if you actually want to beat the game ^^; ). While the adventure game elements do add a ton of interesting aspects to the gameplay loop (such as finding your way to the particular side of a room where the puzzle can actually be completed from, instead of the one you’re currently at where it’s just impossible), it’s also the source of the game’s biggest issues. Perhaps a closer look at the manual would reveal otherwise, but in the game proper, there is absolutely no indication that those hidden time trial levels exist at all.

Additionally, some levels have “hints” indicated in the lower right corner of the screen, and that hint will be a bump in the right direction to figuring out just how to finish that level. Levels with hints are almost always impossible to complete through normal means. These solutions range from the plausibly solvable (such as shooting the “hint” item, something you’d otherwise never do) to the utterly absurdly unguessable (like touching a sleeping hopper 5 times to make a special power up appear), and while they’re certainly something different, they’re very rarely all that fun. I actually didn’t look up any proper puzzle solutions for this game, but I did have to look up quite a few of those hint solutions, as a lot of them were just utterly baffling in what the game actually wanted me to do for them. They don’t ruin the game by any means, but they’re a rather sour part of an otherwise relatively well-balanced Lolo game.

The last thing about this game that’s worth mentioning in the context of the later Adventures of Lolo games is the engine they’re using for it. While there are graphical differences that I’ll get to later, something that will be very apparent very quickly to anyone familiar with the later NES games will be just how different enemy behavior is. Enemy AI is remarkably poorer in this game, and it can both take some getting used to as well as be quite annoying to put up with. Any enemy that tracks you (skulls, hoppers, and metals) has a FAR shorter range of “seeing” you than they do in later games, and they’ll very often get stuck in infinite circle loops despite being just two or three blocks away from you. Getting close enough to actually trigger their follow AI can often result in death, which is one of the main reasons my use of rewinds and save states was so high despite this game being (mostly) much less vicious than most of the later Lolo games.

The Gal (dragons) fire is also nowhere near as fast as it is in later games, they require you being directly in front of them before they’ll fire at you (instead of firing as soon as you cross into their line of sight at all), and skulls are VERY slow compared to later games. None of those imperfections are deal breakers, of course, (certainly not compared to the hidden stuff I mentioned earlier) but it’s just more stuff to add onto the “annoying bull crap” pile that makes the game harder to hop into and enjoy than various other Eggerland games.

The aesthetics of the game are much more primitive than the form they take in the Adventures of Lolo games, but they still have a lot of retro charm to them. The graphics are much more simple than later Lolo games would be. While certainly a far step up from its MSX counterpart, floors are untextured and enemy and environmental sprites are far less detailed than later games would have. It gives the game a very fun old school charm, though the less detailed environmental sprites in particular can make navigation more of a pain than they should be at times. The biggest note about the presentation, though, is the music for me. Not only is the music in this game quite good (as you’d expect in even an early HAL Labs game like this), but there’s so much of it! Unlike basically every Adventures of Lolo game on the NES and Famicom which has like one puzzle solving song each, this game has like four or five of them! It's a small victory, of course, but it was mostly just baffling when compared to just how small the soundtracks of later Lolo games are X3.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as I did enjoy this game, it still shows its age pretty badly. The adventure game stuff is implemented very clumsily, and the difficulty curve on puzzles is all over the places (puzzles go from almost absurdly simple to ridiculously unforgiving at the drop of hat, no matter where they are on the map). While a big fan of the Lolo games like me can certainly find a lot more Lolo goodness to enjoy here, anyone who’s a more tepid fan of sokoban-type games should probably approach with significant caution (if they approach at all) if they’re not prepared to look up longplays on Japanese Youtube to find the solutions to the more unknowable adventure game elements like I did XD

Post by **Ack** » Tue Jul 16, 2024 11:37 am

1. Live A Live (RPG)(Switch)
2. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Action)(Switch)
3. Pathway (Strategy [Tactics])(PC)
4. Rewind or Die (Horror Adventure)(PC)
5. Tomb Raider (Action Adventure)(PC)
6. Remnant: From the Ashes (Action RPG)(PC)
7. House Flipper (Simulation)(PC)
8. Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor (RPG)(PC)
9. Wild West and Wizards (FPS/RPG)(PC)
10. SPRAWL (FPS)(PC)
11. Lunacid (RPG)(PC)
12. PowerWash Simulator: SpongeBob SquarePants (FPS)(PC)
13. PowerWash Simulator: Warhammer 40,000 (FPS)(PC)
14. PowerWash Simulator: Back to the Future (FPS)(PC)
15. Marathon (FPS)(PC)
16. Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force (FPS)(PC)
17. Rome: Total War (Strategy)(PC)
18. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (FPS)(PC)
19. Thief II (Stealth)(PC)
20. Jydge (Top-Down Shooter)(PC)
21. Command & Conquer (RTS)(PC)
22. Iron Lung (Horror Adventure)(PC)
23. Scorn (FPS)(PC)

Command & Conquer

While I don't consider myself done with Command & Conquer at all, I did complete the campaign for the GDI and so am listing this as beaten. Command & Conquer is a classic RTS that was designed by Westwood Studios after their work on Dune II. While it released a year after Blizzard's Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, C&C went with a more modern military approach, taking place in an alternate history in which the NATO-like GDI goes up against the Brotherhood of Nod, made up primarily of countries we would have labeled "third world". The game features one campaign for each side of the fight, but these campaigns have branching options for different levels and take place in different parts of the world, makin both feel wholly unique in their style.

C&C has only one primary resource, Tiberium, along with a secondary Power resource that is more like a set level you can raise and then meet with your construction. You don't have construction units, rather doing everything from an in-game menu as long as you have the necessary buildings, and player construction requires buildings be touching others. The AI operates on a different set of rules, though there are still rules in play that can be manipulated and abused, such as the AI only being able to rebuild structures where they were previously placed, so you can park a cheap infantry unit on top of where that gun emplacement was, and it won't be coming back. There are also super weapons, some of which require certain buildings, others which require conditions to unlock like knocking out all of your enemy's anti-air emplacements. It's an interesting system that feels unique in some respects and classic in others, as some of these ideas were borrowed by later RTS titles.

The real quirk of Command & Conquer though is just how ridiculous it can be, from sending in APCs full of engineers to take over an enemy base to using a tank to squash enemy infantry in your way instead of bothering to gun them down to finding ways to abuse and manipulate the game's AI. For instance, set your base up behind a field of Tiberium, and watch their infantry die on the road to you, because Tiberium sickness is a thing. Or better yet, put down sandbags. The AI has no idea what to do with sandbags, so you can slowly hem them into their base and starve them of resources or build up an army and invade at the time and place of your choosing. C&C is also considered a difficult game, so feel free to abuse things like this to give you the advantage.

There are some important features that the game also brought, the most vital of which to me is the ability to group units into squads which can be quickly selected between. Having all of your air power at your disposal with a single finger press, for example, is quite powerful, and I'd often juggle between air, armor, and infantry moving in to attack...though eventually less so with infantry, as the AI is really good about running them over. This is a pretty standard idea in modern RTS, but in 1995? This was groundbreaking. It's things like this which make me respect C&C and be amazed by what it accomplished.

So yes, for RTS fans, the original Command & Conquer is a must-play in my opinion. You may struggle at first as you learn the tricks, but there is a solid experience here well worth checking out.

Iron Lung

This is a short horror game that doesn't offer a lot to see, focusing more on your sensory deprivation and claustrophobia to convey its terror. It is the far future, the stars in the universe have died out, and what little of humanity is left is struggling to survive under the remaining ghost light still traveling through space. And then they find a planet with oceans of blood. Somebody has to go down there and explore. Guess who gets to? But oh, your tiny underwater rust bucket can't handle that depth, so your sole porthole is sealed up, and all you have to see outside is a button which takes photos of whatever is immediately in front of you. What could go wrong?

Well, for starters, you could hit a wall of the cave. Or a fire could break out that you don't control fast enough. There are other possibilities too, but that's for you to discover. The most important thing though is that you attempt to pilot your craft. You have an X and Y axis reading, an angle, and buttons to make you adjust angle and go forward or backwards depending on that angle. You also have a map with specific coordinates to reach to take photos for research purposes, though the map is far more useful for approximating what headings you need on the X and Y axis to maneuver. And that's the game, folks. Of course, that doesn't go into the strange array of things that can occur, such as mysterious proximity alerts, strange noises, even teleportation in one instance, but for the most part, this is about your ability to read a map and interpret to guide your small sub through the underwater (underblood?) cave.

Iron Lung is a short experience, but it's delightfully creepy in what it does. But hey, it's a game from David Szymanski, the primary developer of Dusk and creator of multiple horror games. I picked this up specifically because I enjoyed Dusk and wanted to check out more of Szymanski's work, and I was not disappointed. The only thing I'd caution on is that the game sells for around $8.00, so wait for a sale, because it's over pretty quick.

Scorn

Imagine H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński made a puzzle-based FPS. Ok, now remove Giger and Beksiński from the actual development team, and you've got Scorn, a bio-horror game full of bizarre architecture withering away in an unknown dimension, where you are a nameless being trying to reach some end goal and harassed by a nasty parasite. Most of Scorn's gameplay is based around puzzles, but there are a few guns and some combat, so it does eventually end up being an FPS, it just takes a while to get to. There is a lot of blood and gore, including scenes of you potentially using dismembered arms to solve puzzles, shoving dead fetus-like creatures into a juicer, and holding in your own disembowled intestines while trying to make your way to a creepy surgical machine. In short, Scorn is gross. It's also short, so really most of what you're playing this for is the bizarre visuals and the puzzles which will require some thinking to pass. The combat is...limited, we'll say.

What's the plot? Hell if I know. Nothing is said, it's up to you to interpret. I won't speculate on it here. What I will say is that it does offer some incredible architecture and moments of pure ick, and I did enjoy the puzzles. The actual combat wasn't so great, mainly because it feels more laborious than anything, though that is likely intentional. There is a single boss fight that is actually more a puzzle of figuring out how to fight your enemy too, but otherwise, I don't think it was really necessary to the experience. The stress of having a creature literally digging its hands into your guts as it takes you over is far more disturbing than the things I had to shoot with whatever passes for bullets here.

Part of me really likes Scorn. Part of me thinks it could have been better, but the world itself? The visual and auditory? Disturbingly magical, intimately grotesque, parts of this game feel like a European delving into the idea of ero guro. It's a disgustingly beautiful place to play. In fact, I wish the combat was cut out, and I'd just been given a striking puzzle game to play through, exploring the horrors and triumphs of this alien society's science and civilization. As it stands, it's tough to recommend Scorn to most people unless they crave an experience more at the extreme ends of video game art.

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Wed Jul 17, 2024 3:28 am

Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat

1~50

51. Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53. Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54. Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55. Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56. Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57. Cocoron (Famicom)
58. The Darkness (PS3)
59. Haze (PS3)
60. Animaniacs (GB)
61. Lair (PS3)
62. Bionic Commando (PS3)
63. Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64. Darkwing Duck (NES)
65. Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66. Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67. Metroid II (GB) *
68. Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69. Eggerland (FDS)

70. Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)

This is a game I technically played before its predecessor, but, given how I only got around to writing this after I played both this and the game immediately before and after it, it only made sense to write the review now rather than in the order I finished them as I usually do. I was fairly burnt out after finishing all the Adventures of Lolo games a month or so ago, but I recently found a way to play the other Famicom Eggerland games, so I just couldn’t stop myself from giving them a try x3. It had also been long enough since I played through the games after this that it wouldn’t be nearly so much of a pain to go back through puzzles I’d already completed, so that was another big push towards finally playing through these earlier Lolo games. It took me 11-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game with liberal rewind and save state use on emulated hardware.

As the title “Revival of the Labyrinth” implies, this is another take on the basic premise the previous Eggerland game had. Lala has been kidnapped by Lord Egger, and Lolo needs to venture into his giant labyrinth to save her. This revived labyrinth is bigger and better than ever as well. Where the old labyrinth was only an 11x11 grid, this one is a massive 8x16 grid with even more hidden stages than the previous game had! The story is quite light, as most of these games are, but there are actually a lot of Zelda-style “room where a guy just talks to you” in this that make a fair few of the more obnoxious adventure game elements far less unknowable, and it’s a very significant improvement on the last game.

Even though the overall structure of this game is so similar to the previous one (and not just in the way that it’s an action & timing incorporated sokoban-like about collecting the heart framers then the chest without dying), there are a lot of very meaningful improvements from the first Eggerland game on Famicom. The overall difficulty curve has been significantly improved, and the labyrinth has also been sectioned off into several discrete chunks, so it’s basically impossible to just wander your way into what amount to late game puzzles despite having only just started like you could in the previous game.

In addition, as I mentioned before, the adventure game systems are still here, but they’ve been improved a fair bit. That doesn’t mean they’ve been totally fixed, mind you, as there were still a few hint-based secrets that I had to look up because they were just so cryptic and weird (like the one about collecting the heart framers in the right order to progress), the larger adventure game elements are far better explained by those rooms with NPCs in them. You’re actually told about things like the hidden keys you need as well as the secret gods you need to save in order to make it through Lord Egger’s gauntlet at the end, so you’re far less likely to just not even realize they exist and then get to the end of the game only to find yourself stuck against literally impossible puzzles due to not having the gods’ boons.

The game isn’t entirely fixed, granted. Enemy AI is still remarkably poor due to this clearly being the previous game’s engine reused in many ways. You’ve still got to get far too close to enemies to have them chase you, and that often results in death. Puzzles are better designed to the point that you’re less likely to have it be a *very* significant problem like it often was in the previous game, but it’s still an issue. We also still have the problem of large raft-based sections where you’ve just got to guess where to disembark from correctly to go to the next map lest you just die from picking the wrong invisible current. The more streamlined labyrinth makes this not *quite* as bad as it was in the last game, and the mini-game of “guess the current or you’re dead” is a problem every Lolo game has, frankly, but it’s still something very annoying and I’m glad this is the last game to have it in this fashion.

Complaining about some minor elements aside, I do really appreciate the changes they’ve made to this game from the first Eggerland game on Famicom. We’re not quite there with the enemy AI yet, sure, and the hint-based adventure riddles are also far too often just mindless trial and error until you stumble upon the solution, but this is a very improved version of the labyrinth style of Lolo game. I think that ultimately the labyrinth system doesn’t actually make a ton of sense to keep around if you’re not doing the adventure game nonsense that makes it suck, but it’s done *just* well enough here that it almost makes me wish they’d stuck with it a bit longer instead of this being the last game in the series to do it.

The aesthetics of the game are identical to the previous one in virtually every way. The large bulk of the graphics are the same, the music tracks (numerous as they still are compared to later Lolo games) are exactly the same, and the floors are even still untextured. I’m firmly a believer in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, so I don’t really see this as a problem per se, but there’s no evolution to speak of here outside of some minor graphical elements looking a little nicer than they used to.

Verdict: Recommended. This still has enough time wasting nonsense (like with the adventure game hint stuff and the river current guessing thing) that I’d say it’s best for your sanity if you play it with save states and/or rewinds, but this is regardless a far improved version of the previous Eggerland game that I’d actually not hesitate to recommend it to people who aren’t maniacs for sokoban games like this. There are certainly still some puzzles and hint-based things you’ll likely need to look up, sure, but there’s *so* much less crud to deal with compared to the last game that, if you’re going to play any labyrinth-based Lolo game, this is definitely the one to choose.

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71. Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)

The last of the Nintendo console Lolo games I had yet to play, and now I’ve finally played it! I knew it probably wouldn’t be much I hadn’t seen before, given how much of this game I know to have been reused to build the NES Adventures of Lolo 1 and 2, but I figured I may as well finish what I started since I had access to it. As it so happened, it turns out that virtually all of this game was puzzles I’d already seen before, as only two or three of the 50 in this game weren’t later reused for games I’d already played through ^^;. As a result, it took me about 1.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game with no save state or rewind use on emulated hardware.

This is yet another case where Lolo is venturing into a cave or what have you to save Lala from the evil Lord Egger, but this is actually the first time we’ve gotten such a fancy intro cutscene for it! More than that, this is also the first time that Lolo isn’t venturing into a labyrinth, but a linear series of puzzles in (what amounts to) a tower. The level total of only 50 may be pretty wimpy by the standards of the 100+ puzzles in the previous several games, but the game makes up for it with a construction mode where you can make and save up to 16 of your own Lolo puzzles and save them to the memory on the Famicom Disk you’re playing it on. Not much appeal there these days, granted, as there are far easier ways to make sokoban puzzles for your friends than trading a modified ROM back and forth in 2024, but it’s still a very neat addition nonetheless.

The gameplay is very standard Lolo once more, but just in a linear fashion this time instead of navigating a labyrinth. You go around the room, avoid enemies, shoot eggs at enemies, collect all the heart framers, nab the chest, and the level just instantly ends (there isn’t even a final door or staircase to make your way to like all the later Lolo games have). Compared to previous entries, this is Lolo stripped down to its barest components. The adventure game components (hint-based mysteries, a world map, hidden rooms & puzzles) have been completely excised and are never to return. It’s a little bit of a shame to strip the game down quite so much, as the adventure game elements gave a lot of neat flavor to particularly Revival of the Labyrinth, but I really can’t blame HAL Labs for just taking out what worked only partially and keeping the stuff that always worked great.

The rest of the mechanics also heavily resemble later Lolo games too. Enemy AI, in particular, is finally recognizable as it’d be from this point on. Skulls are no longer sluggish and weird like they so often were, all the enemies that move now have regular patrol protocol for when you’re not in their sights, and enemies are *much* better at chasing you down and killing you. I honestly reckon the reason virtually every level from this was eventually recycled and reused in later Lolo games is precisely because they’d finally gotten the enemy behaviors just how they wanted them (compared to some earlier games which would just have impossible puzzles now that the enemies were too smart to leave you alone for so long like they used to). The levels themselves are quite well designed, and none of them are terribly hard either. Much like its direct NES successor (of sorts) Adventures of Lolo 1, there really isn’t any level in this that I’d say is particularly unreasonable or cruel in its difficulty or timing requirements, and that’s something you’ll seldom find in a Lolo game, let me tell you! XD

The aesthetics are once again effectively totally unchanged from the previous Famicom games for the most part. Animations and the general running of the game’s processes have been tightened up *just* a bit, but they’re overall generally unchanged. We still aren’t at Adventures of Lolo 1’s textured floors, let alone on how sprites’ uncolored sections are yet still to be made not transparent. The music, however, is very noticeably different from the previous two games in that this is the first game to adopt what would become a long running Lolo tradition: only one music track for all puzzle solving sections. This is a real bummer compared to just how many songs were in the past two Eggerland games, but at least this song didn’t appear in those games (it’s the same song that plays through all of Adventures of Lolo on the NES).

Verdict: Recommended. It’s pretty hard to recommend this if you’ve already played through Adventures of Lolo 1 and 2 on the NES, as this will be effectively entirely content you’ve already played, but if you’re just making your way through the series through only the Japanese entries or if this is your first one, then this is a really great place to start! The difficulty curve is great, and the puzzles are still a good ways from when HAL started making them quite so vicious, so Lolo doesn’t honestly get much better than this (with or without save states or rewinds XD).

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72. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC) *

This is a game I last played a loooong time ago on a physical cart on my SNES. I had only been learning Japanese a couple years at that point, and this was frankly a bit beyond my abilities, but it was so fun that I pushed through regardless (even if I had to look up a few puzzle solutions because I just couldn’t read what the NPCs were telling me ^^; ). I was actually having so much fun playing this in Japanese and telling my friends about it in English, that this is the game that made me first really consider being a translator and pursuing a university degree in Japanese (so it’s got a pretty special place in my heart as a result). It’s been so long since I played it that I honestly didn’t remember much at all about it, but, given that it was recently put on Switch Online, it seemed like the perfect time to sit down and play through it again~. It took me around 12-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game via the Switch Online service, and I finished with 98% of the sidequests done and 167 luck rocks collected without using save states or rewinds.

Marvelous is the story of a legendary treasure with the titular name. Pirate Captain Maverick, the greatest who ever lived, hid his treasure out at sea with a call to any who’d look for it that they’d need to solve the most devious puzzles and traps ever devised if they wanted to find it, but none ever did. Fast forward a bit, and we meet our three main characters, Dion, Max, and Jack, who are on a school trip to a remote island. In the course of completing their chores for the day, they get entrusted with a great destiny by the animals of the island, and nefarious pirates kidnap their teacher! In order to rescue Jeena sensei, they’ve got to set out into the sea and find the three legendary crystals to open the way to Captain Maverick’s treasure!

The writing is much like something like Chrono Trigger, where it’s not really trying to say any greater message, but it’s a big collection of set pieces to build one larger adventure (though I’d say that that gameplay conceit works more strongly in an action/adventure game like this than it does in a turn-based RPG like Chrono Trigger). Each of the different islands is built around a different theme, and they’re all packed with weird, wacky characters to interact with and places to explore. The writing is nothing truly earth shattering, of course, but it does a great job building a fun, whimsical adventure, and it’s also not afraid to get scary or strange too. It feels very much like an 80’s or 90’s kids movie in that regard, and it’s a great fit for giving you a grand adventure to dive into~.

I know I explained it earlier as an action/adventure game, but I personally describe this more as an adventure/action game. This is the directorial debut of Eiji Aonuma, who would go on to direct basically every major Legend of Zelda title from here on out (and still does), and it’s not hard to see why. However, much more so than a contemporary or later Zelda game, this game has a very big emphasis on puzzle solving rather than combat, and combat is usually just a means to an end for puzzle solving, or a very brief detour rather than being a main part of the gameplay (even if there are a few boss battles to tackle along the way).

This game has a lot more in common with point and click adventure games than it does with something like Link to the Past, in my opinion. While you can walk around and interact with things with the A button, you can also press the A button at any time to bring up a cursor to look around and poke at points of interest (just like a point and click game). Each of the three boys (all of whom effectively have no character, much like Link) falls into a different archetype (Dion is little and fast, Max is stout and strong, and Jack is lanky and smart) and they get various items respectively to solve different puzzles along the way. For example, Dion gets shoes to dash (just like Zelda’s Pegasus boots), Max gets cleats to kick with, and Jack gets a remote control to operate robots with. The puzzles aren’t easy, and a few of them (especially in the last bit of the game) can be a really atrocious pain in the butt with just how much trial and error they involve (I’m looking at you, “guiding the robot across the invisible paths” puzzle =w=), but they’re generally signposted very well, and are good fun to tease your way through.

To explain the little bit at the start, the game has two somewhat optional aspects to engage with. The first is side quests, or as the game calls it “helping people”. You get a ranking at the end of the game for how well you did, and that’s composed of what percentage of people you helped (i.e. sidequests you did) as well as how many luck rocks you collected. So far as I can tell, *most* of the helping people isn’t actually optional. There are only three or four things I can recall in my head that had any kind of optional (or close to it) aspect to them, and they’re so slight they’re mostly quite easy to miss. They’re not a terribly major aspect to the game, but they’re something to give you an impetus to replay the game at some point to try and find them all, I suppose.

Then there are the luck rocks. Luck rocks are yellow crystal rocks that your teacher Jeena sensei loves, and they’re scattered all over the islands you’ll be exploring. Rather than just simple collectibles to unlock some secret at the end of the game (such as Illusion of Gaia’s red crystals do), they’re actually something between a collectible and a consumable. There are several puzzles where you need to use luck rocks as either ammo or money to get past them, and the ship you use to travel between islands also requires an increasing amount of luck rocks as fuel at the end of each chapter. While it’s certainly possible to permanently miss certain luck rocks, it’s thankfully impossible to actually run out of them or soft lock the game. Each of the three main islands has one way or another to collect an infinite amount of luck rocks. It’s a very slow process, sure, but you never need to worry about screwing yourself over because you spent too many on some activity or just weren’t thorough enough exploring as long as you’re willing to dedicate a bit of time to grinding the activities that rewards you with them. Personally, I’d say exploring is its own reward to the degree that you really *shouldn’t* need to ever grind them, but it’s very nice that the option is there at any rate.

The aesthetics of the game are absolutely gorgeous. This is a Super Famicom game that came out in October of ’96, and boy does it look and sound like it. The soundtrack is expansive and excellent, with a few really rockin’ tracks in particular (like King Bull’s theme) that I really loved, but the music in general fits the game’s mood and areas very well. The graphics are also very beautiful. Characters are detailed and expressive, environments are colorful and unique, and this easily has to be one of the best looking games on the system, in my opinion.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it does show its age a little bit here and there in how somewhat clunky the point and click aspects of things can be, this is an all time classic on the Super Famicom. If you’re a fan of Zelda games or action/adventure games (or heck, even old-ish point and click adventure games), then this is one you absolutely owe it to yourself to check out. Despite being a Nintendo game, it appears to still be quite the hidden gem on the console (given how many of my usually retro-savvy friends I spoke about it to had never heard of it), but it’s of such good and timeless quality that it absolutely deserves to be known more widely than it is. This is frankly incredible for a directorial debut, and it’s no wonder that Nintendo entrusted one of their most important franchises to Eiji Aonuma so soon after this came out.

Post by **Note** » Sun Jul 21, 2024 6:32 pm

1. Lufia & the Fortress of Doom (SNES)
2. OutRun 2 SP (PS2)
3. Dynamite Cop (DC)*
4. Soul Calibur (DC)*
5. Melfand Stories (SFC)
6. Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals (SNES)
7. Dynamite Cop (Arcade)*
8. Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil (PS2)
9. Kishin Douji Zenki FX: Vajra Fight (PC-FX)

10. Wild Arms (PS1)

Around the time Wild Arms was released, my close friend that lived down the street from me received it as a gift in the summer, and I had a chance to check out pieces of it when we would hang out on the weekends. I liked the sprite work and the soundtrack, but I didn’t end up purchasing a copy for myself until a few years ago.

Wild Arms is an early PS1 RPG with a slight Western theme that is mixed with tones of sci-fi and fantasy. Your adventure begins by choosing one of the three playable characters, and you have to do a solo mission as each. Eventually the characters unite and your party is formed. There are a few other characters that are central to the storyline and they join you in sections of your journey; however, they are not playable. My understanding is that in the PS2 remake, titled Wild Arms: Alter Code F, some of these characters are playable party members.

The gameplay consists of turn based battles that are styled in 3D. Other than regular attacks, your party also has access to magic and force abilities, which are additional abilities based on your character’s equipment that you can use as your force meter builds up during battle. The force ability usually consists of the character’s strongest attack; however, they do not hold over for your next battle, so you’ll want to use them once the character’s meter has built up. The magic system is unique here too, since you need to find items called crest graphs. For each crest graph you find, you can attain a new spell for your character at a shop in town. Luckily, you can also dissolve and use the crest for a different spell.

Each character also has access to four tools, which are found throughout the game. The tools are used in dungeons or towns, and each one is used to solve different puzzles or get past various obstacles. You can switch between your characters at will and choose which tool they’re equipped with.

In regards to the graphics, the early 3D graphics in the battle sequences are one of the aspects of Wild Arms that hasn’t aged as well, as the main characters appear in a chibi or SD style. However, the 2D sprite work used in the rest of the game still looks great. I really wish the battles were also in 2D, but with the 3D being the rage at the time, it’s understandable.

The soundtrack is very memorable IMO. The music in the various towns are atmospheric and the main battle song is catchy. The different tunes used in the optional boss battles are also well done and get the player pumped up. However, some of the sound effects during battle on the other hand are not impressive. Certain sound effects, such as the sound that plays for a healing spell, just seem a bit off and amateurish.

Other than some of the criticisms listed earlier, I have a few other nitpicks to mention. Regarding the control scheme, I’m not certain why the developer decided to map the run function and search function to the same button, when run could’ve easily been mapped to a shoulder button. Also, there are some odd difficulty spikes later in the game, with enemy characters using a lot of attacks that include status effects. Also, there are a few items you’ll need that you can’t purchase anywhere, you’ll have to grind and use a stealing technique to get them, which includes the basic item that generates MP. I understand needing to do this for special one off items, but for a basic item, it seems like an oversight.

The game’s story doesn’t invent the wheel in any way; however, one of the plotlines did hit me a bit emotionally. The main character Rudy has a tendency to think back to the older man, now passed away, that took him in and raised him, and he sees him throughout his dreams. This actually reminded me of myself, as I think of and dream of my father and the good times we spent together fairly often.

My playthrough of Wild Arms took just under 40 hours. I completed the available sidequests and defeated all the optional bosses. I also spent time grinding at the end of the game, to help with the difficulty spike and to attain some of those necessary items that aren’t available for purchase. Overall, while Wild Arms does have some shortcomings, I think it’s a fun and worthwhile playthrough. Check this one out if you haven’t already!

Post by **prfsnl_gmr** » Sun Jul 21, 2024 8:29 pm

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)
17. Finding Teddy II (Switch)
18. Animal Well (Switch)
19. Runner 3 (Switch)
20. Master Key (Switch)
21. Gargoyle’s Quest II - The Demon Darkness (NES)
22. Gargoyle’s Quest II - The Demon Darkness (GB)
23. Demon’s Crest (SNES)
24. Master Key Picross (Switch)

Gargoyle’s Quest II - The Demon Darkness (NES) is a late-period NES action platformer and the second game in Capcom’s Gargoyle’s Quest series. It stars Red Arremer, the most annoying enemy in Capcom’s Ghouls ‘n Ghosts titles, and you explore the world from an overhead perspective, talking to NPC’s and walking around a tiled map like a DQ game. Despite the appearance of an open world, however, the game is perfectly linear, and you must play each of the game’s side-scrolling levels in a specific order to reach the end. The side-scrolling action levels is where the game really shines, with outstanding graphics and sound, a host of moves (You can hover! You can cling to walls! You can create your own platforms! You can shoot fireballs!), and pretty great boss fights. Released late in the NES’s life by one of the NES’s best developers, Gargoyle’s Quest II is one of the NES’s best titles, and I very highly recommend it.

Gargoyle’s Quest II - The Demon Darkness (GB) is the GB port of Gargoyle’s Quest II. It is exactly the same game as Gargoyle’s Quest II on the NES, but with two major differences: (1) it features only monochrome graphics; and (2) it has two extra, optional levels. Although the NES version is very strong, I actually preferred the Gameboy version slightly. It was released only is Japan, however; so, while it has a fan translation, players in Europe and North America may have a harder time accessing it.

Demon’s Crest (SNES) is a gorgeous action platformer that is the last game in Capcom’s Gargoyle’s Quest series. Released in 1994, Demon’s Crest’s sprite work is almost on par with 32-bit titles like CV:SOTN, and its soundtrack is on par with the SNES’s best. It also controls wonderfully, like the best action-platformers, and it gives you a large variety of abilities to make your way through its varied levels. (One complaint…it gives you too many abilities, and some of them end up being pretty useless.) The levels feature branching paths, and you can play them in almost any order, making it, arguably, the SNES’s second best metroidvania. Moreover, the game has multiple endings and plentiful secrets, and like the very best games, the reward for exploring it is more of the outstanding game. You can beat the game without finding everything, but the reward for finding everything is more challenging bosses and an extended ending. (Another complaint…while most of the game is pretty easy, the true final boss is way too hard.) Finally, it features some of the SNES’ best set-pieces and some truly outstanding boss fights. Demon’s Creat is easily one of the SNES’s best games, and I’m a little embarrassed I hadn’t played it until now. Highly recommended.

Master Key Picross (Switch) is a bonus feature in the absolutely brilliant and criminally underrated Master Key. Since the game is rendered in monochrome, all of the sprites are easily recreated as Picross puzzles. The developer realized this apparently, and includes 150(!) Picross puzzles as a bonus feature. They range from moderately to very challenging, and it took me hours to get through them all. I loved Masterr Key, and the inclusion of so many really great Picross puzzles was just an amazing bonus feature. I couldn’t recommend this game highly enough before, and the Picross puzzles pushed it into the number one position for my GOTY.

Post by **SpaceBooger** » Mon Jul 22, 2024 7:16 am

02/17/24 - Fallout 3 (PS3)
03/09/24 - Phantasy Star II (Genesis)
05/05/24 - Tales of Phantasia (SNES)
05/30/24 - Bioshock (NSW)
06/10/24 - Fable (oXBOX)
06/19/24 - Faxanadu (NES)
07/11/24 - Metal Gear Solid (NSW)
07/22/24 - Beyond Oasis (Genesis)

Beyond Oasis was the 5th and final game on my Summer Challenge list. I'm just updating my running beat list. I posted my review on the Summer Challenge post.
Up next: Fallout New Vegas with my son. I will get a head start playing since I'm on the PS3 and he is playing on PC.

Post by **SamuraiMegas** » Mon Jul 22, 2024 7:14 pm

I just beat Chibi Robo on the gamecube, though I still have to go back and finish a few things.

It's a great game, with a wonderful setting, but dear god, did the controls piss me off the entire time i was playing it. Constantly grabbing the plug when I don't want to, terrible camera angles for precise jumps, not jumping where you want, etc. It sill holds up well but there was a lot of times I was cursing at the screen because of them.

Some of the stuff is not explained very well- it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn how to throw away trash because it won't let you throw it away up top next to the can which made me think i needed to wait for an item... also took way to long to learn how to soak up water with the squirter but that's probably on me. Also some spots were pretty hard to figure out how to climb or where you could climb.

I'll probably check out some more titles in the series now,, but I hope they fixed some of those things.

7.5/10

Post by **PartridgeSenpai** » Tue Jul 23, 2024 12:40 am

Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat

1~50

51. Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53. Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54. Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55. Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56. Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57. Cocoron (Famicom)
58. The Darkness (PS3)
59. Haze (PS3)
60. Animaniacs (GB)
61. Lair (PS3)
62. Bionic Commando (PS3)
63. Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64. Darkwing Duck (NES)
65. Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66. Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67. Metroid II (GB) *
68. Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69. Eggerland (FDS)
70. Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71. Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)

73. Legendary Starfy (GBA) *

The Starfy GBA trilogy are games that I picked up on the way cheap when I visited Japan over a decade ago, and while I actually did play through this game at some point on that cartridge, I remember finding it to be a very underwhelming and dull experience. It was so underwhelming and unmemorable, apparently, that I actually completely forgot that I had already played through this (and a good chunk of its sequel as well) once before! XD. Anyhow, now that the Starfy GBA games are all on the Switch Online service, it seemed a good a time as any to finally (re)play these games and give them a sort of (re)appraisal now that I’m older. I thankfully ended up liking the first Starfy a lot more this time around, and I liked it so much that I actually did the whole post-game too to get the second ending. All in all, it took me around 8.5 hours to complete the Japanese version of the main game and post-game on the Switch without using save states or rewinds.

Legendary Starfy is the tale of the titular Starfy. The prince of the Heavens (Pufftop Palace, in the eventual English localization of the fifth game), he’s a clumsy but good kid who spends every day carefree around the palace. However, one day, his clumsiness gets the best of him. While carrying some important treasures from one part of the palace to the other, he trips and falls, dropping the very important and mysterious pot he was carrying. Releasing the ancient evil stored inside, a massive storm strikes the Heavens, and it causes Starfy to fall allllll the way down into the massive ocean below. Found by Robu Jii-san, he begins his quest to climb back up to the Heavens and stop whatever big evil thing threw him down here in the first place.

The story isn’t some incredible work of art or anything, but it’s a lot of silly fun! Starfy’s eventual best friend and companion Kyorosuke (Moe, in English) is a cowardly yet boastful friend and a very enjoyable source of comedy. He reminded me a ton of Whisper from the Yokai Watch games, and that’s a very similar kind of humor to these (despite coming out like a decade later). You don’t need to know any Japanese at all to actually play the first Starfy game, but getting to interact with all the wild and weird folks you meet across the sea definitely made me enjoy the game a lot more than I did the first time.

Mechanically, Starfy is a platformer that most resembles Kirby (to me, at least). Though he lacks a copy ability (and instead totes a spin attack, jump, and flutter abilities), the relatively simple level design has always reminded me a lot of the early Kirby games in how enemy placement is done, bosses are designed, and how objectives are constructed. Also very much like Kirby, while the main game is fairly easy as far as platformers go, if you want a real challenge, you’ll find that in the post-game. There are a ton of enemies to fight and obstacles to overcome in Starfy’s quest over both land and sea, and the game is balanced quite well to facilitate that, even if the start is a bit easier than I’d personally like.

The main game is made up of nine quite long stages, but there are special blocks scattered around them that aren’t breakable until the post-game. These blocks hide the post-game’s objectives, and while it’s certainly annoying in some of them that they kick you entirely out of the level when you get the treasure at the end (Mario 64-style), the obstacles between those sealed blocks and your treasure are platforming challenges to really cut your teeth on. Upon getting all the treasures but the last in a stage, you’ll have to fight a harder version of that stage’s boss to get it, which is also a neat feature and allows you to fight some genuinely quite challenging bosses.

The overall design of Starfy is really solid, and it makes for a very fun time for newcomers or veterans alike. My only real complaint is how the buttons are mapped out. Swimming faster in the water is done with A, and jumping is also done with A. Those basically never overlap meaningfully, so there’s no real problem there. However, running on land is done by holding B, but pressing B is also how you do your spin attack. That spin attack takes a while to wind down to the point where you can start moving/running normally, and this can make some of the more difficult land-based platforming challenges far more annoying than they need to be due to how you’ve got to wait to stop spinning *just* right for some of them to run properly. Why you couldn’t just bind a secondary dedicated run button to one of the shoulder buttons is completely beyond me, as R and L are literally used for nothing at all in Starfy. This isn’t a game-breaking flaw or anything, but it certainly feels like a very unforced error on the control scheme that makes the game way more frustrating than it needs to be in the land-based platforming sections.

The aesthetics of the game are delightfully cute, which is another thing that has always given me big Kirby vibes about Starfy. Starfy and friends are very expressive and cute in their animations, and the big goofy eyes he makes when he runs are a personal favorite. Stages are colorful and uniquely designed between the game’s nine levels, and enemies have a large and interesting variety too. The music is also good fun. Not *quite* to Kirby levels of good, I’d say, but they’re still great tunes that make for a very fun background to your platforming.

Verdict: Recommended. Starfy is likely going to be a bit *too* easy for some more experienced veterans, but for someone just starting to play these kinds of games (or to someone who doesn’t mind an easier time), this is a short but sweet game that’s a really fun time. You don’t need to know any Japanese to play this game, so if you’re just interested in the platforming and don’t mind missing out on the story, not being able to read the text is a perfectly acceptable way to approach this cute little platformer on the GBA. It’s hardly the best game on the system, but it’s a great way to spend a couple of afternoons~.

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74. Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)

I had a good enough time with the first Starfy that I decided to go right on into the second one. As it turns out, I’d completely forgotten I’d played like half of years ago, just like I’d forgotten the first one XD. Still, even though I didn’t remember basically any of this game, it was a very fun surprise to have enjoyed it so much this time around. This is a *much* longer game than the first Starfy, about twice as long I’d say, and it’s got a fairly meaty and quite challenging post-game just like that game did. I once again did the whole post-game too to get the second ending, and it ended up taking me about 18-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game via the Switch’s GBA service without using save states or rewinds.

Legendary Starfy 2 is another story about the titular Starfy. Happily back with his family and new best friend Kyorosuke up in the Heavens, Starfy spends all day playing while his defeated nemesis, Ogura stews about his defeat in his pot-shaped prison. However, Ogura has a trick up his sleeve to get out on his own this time! Ogura is too big to get out of the pot himself, but his kids (he apparently had the whole time? <w> ) aren’t! Sending out all ten of them, he whips up a massive storm, escapes again, and kidnaps Starfy’s mom all while daring Starfy to come after him to rescue her. Starfy ends up falling all the way back down into the ocean among all his frantic crying, and so begins he and Kyorosuke’s journey to kick Ogura’s butt back into the pot once more.

This is another mostly very silly game in its writing, but it’s going for a bit more heartfelt too. Starfy still doesn’t speak at all, so Kyorosuke is still effectively the voice of our main party once again, but he’s given a fair bit more sympathy than simply being the butt of the joke all the time like in the first game. Kyorosuke’s genuine care for his younger siblings and Starfy is really sweet, and him being a somewhat more nuanced character (not to mention how surprisingly grim they make the flashback in the second ending) really made the writing a lot better in this game. It’s not the best thing in the world, of course, so it’s hardly some hidden GBA magnum opus you’re missing if you can’t read it, but it’s definitely a point in the game’s favor if you’re someone who can read Japanese.

Mechanically, Starfy 2 is a classic case of “bigger and better” than the first one. Rather than the nine quite long stages of the first game, Starfy 2’s stages are relatively short, but there are WAY more of them. Starfy 2 boasts 11 whole worlds with 4 to 6 stages each, and the post-game stuff adds another 4 levels to each! You start off with Starfy having effectively completely forgotten his move set from the first game (not even having the flutter he started the first game with), but you slowly get them all back and then some after the course of the game. New additions are a new level 3 spin attack, a double jump, the ability to duck and slide after a run, and the ability to chain bounce off of enemies. All of this combined with a much more land-focused approach to level design (rather than the mostly underwater first game) make Starfy 2 a very different experience from the first game, and all around quite a bit harder (especially in the post-game challenges).

While I would easily say that level and boss design is on the whole a fair bit better than the first game, there are still some issues left weirdly unresolved. Namely, the whole “press B to both spin attack and hold B to run” is still a part of the control scheme, and it’s even more frustrating than ever now that there is *so* much more land-based platforming to tackle compared to the first game. R and L continue to go totally unused, so it continues to baffle me that there is not some dedicated secondary run button to help with the platforming sections you need to use the running slide to succeed in. Once again, it’s hardly a game ruining flaw, but it’s very annoying. At any rate, I’m certainly glad that I played these on Switch and didn’t buy them on GBA physically to play via my GameBoy Player, because I can only imagine how awful it’d be to try and do the post-game challenges on this game with the awful little GameCube D-pad XD

Additionally, while it’s not a problem, per se, there is a lot more in this game that really does require some level of Japanese to get past easily. There are quite a few puzzles you’re going to have a hell of a time brute forcing your way through if you can’t read the solutions as they’re given. There’s even a section where you need to play visual shiritori in order to progress, and if you don’t know how to play that and/or just don’t know the words for these objects in Japanese, you’re just going to have to guess the combination until you get through it. Starfy 2 is still certainly *possible* to play through without knowing any Japanese, but it’s going to be a significantly harder challenge to do so compared to the first game which required no reading at all.

Aesthetically, we’ve upgraded things just a bit more here as well. Music is still good, and there are a lot of returning tracks, but everything has just a bit more complicated compositions than the first game. Graphically, things look very similar, but just a bit shinier and prettier. They only had about a year to make this, so there is a LOT of asset reuse here to make this as efficient as possible a sequel to make. That said, there are still a TON of new enemies, environments, and graphics despite the first boss being just a copy and paste return of an old boss from the first game.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. While the first Starfy was good, the second Starfy is downright great. It’s got a fun and touching story, feels great to play, and has great level design. They really took the time to polish things from the first game, and it shows really well here. The beginning might be a bit slow for veteran platformer fans, and the post-game stuff might be a bit too hard for newcomers, but this is an excellent evolution of the first game’s systems, and an excellent platformer on a console with no shortage of great entries in that genre.

Post by **Ack** » Fri Jul 26, 2024 7:44 pm

1. Live A Live (RPG)(Switch)
2. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Action)(Switch)
3. Pathway (Strategy [Tactics])(PC)
4. Rewind or Die (Horror Adventure)(PC)
5. Tomb Raider (Action Adventure)(PC)
6. Remnant: From the Ashes (Action RPG)(PC)
7. House Flipper (Simulation)(PC)
8. Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor (RPG)(PC)
9. Wild West and Wizards (FPS/RPG)(PC)
10. SPRAWL (FPS)(PC)
11. Lunacid (RPG)(PC)
12. PowerWash Simulator: SpongeBob SquarePants (FPS)(PC)
13. PowerWash Simulator: Warhammer 40,000 (FPS)(PC)
14. PowerWash Simulator: Back to the Future (FPS)(PC)
15. Marathon (FPS)(PC)
16. Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force (FPS)(PC)
17. Rome: Total War (Strategy)(PC)
18. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (FPS)(PC)
19. Thief II (Stealth)(PC)
20. Jydge (Top-Down Shooter)(PC)
21. Command & Conquer (RTS)(PC)
22. Iron Lung (Horror Adventure)(PC)
23. Scorn (FPS)(PC)
24. Killer Frequency (Survival Horror)(PC)
25. Intravenous (Top-Down Shooter)(PC)
26. Outlast (Survival Horror)(PC)

Killer Frequency

Here is a horror game done in a very different manner. You are a radio DJ starting a new job in a small town, having left your old gig in Chicago on what sounds like not the best of circumstances. And it's a really small town, only a few hundred people, but it's a town with a dark past involving a masked killer who was active around the end of the 1950s/1960s. And here you are, in a pseudo-1980s, and the killer suddenly pops back up again. And since you only have one 911 dispatcher, and she has to go to the next town over to get the cops, and it's gonna take a while, guess where she decides to route the calls.

That's right, Killer Frequency is a slasher film where you have to discover clues and try to help the callers survive encounters with the masked killer as they pop up all over town. You can find items throughout the radio station to give you helpful info, which in turn will help victims fight back and live...or you can screw up and listen to their gristly murders, which are also being broadcast over the airwaves. Some of the solutions are quite creative, like figuring out how to get a frat party to visit next door or go through a list of teenagers to figure out who should do what part of a very complicated plan, and each character feels unique if not always the most interesting of folks. And then you can play music or occasionally go to commercial.

It's not perfect, of course. The 1980s aesthetic unravels quickly when you realize that people couldn't possibly have these phone conversations on landlines while they're also running around, including one where a guy calls from inside a dumpster, but considering the holes in the plots of many slasher films, it feels kinda par for the course. There is some blowback about the game not being VR compatible, which was apparently promised, but I'm not into the VR scene and found it perfectly enjoyable as is. I can see why folks who wanted that feature would be upset about it not being present though. But I did have fun with a game that offered a fresh approach for me.

Intravenous

Imagine if Hotline Miami was less absurdly violent 1980s Miami Vice and more absurdly violent 1970s Death Wish. That would be Intravenous. It considers itself a stealth game, and that is a major focus, though rapid gunplay is also a way to approach any given level. In fact, missions often start in stealth, and if something goes wrong, it can all go loud rapidly into a massive and nasty firefight. You do have a little more survivability than Hotline Miami, but so do your enemies, and even the best body armor ain't gonna save you from taking two barrels of buckshot at point blank.

The game apparently has stirred some controversy over its plot, and I can see why; you play Steve, a regular guy whose brother dies after a mugging by drug addicts. Queue Steve grabbing guns and going full vigilante, hitting up different locations from slums to mob casinos to take down and get revenge for his dead sibling. It pulls from a style of action cinema that has its roots in Westerns and Film Noir but really took off in the 1970s with exploitation cinema and the poliziotteschi in Italy. Movies like Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, and They Call Her One Eye are the feel of the squalor, cynicism, and violence in Intravenous. Hell yeah, I loved it. And you don't have to kill everyone either; death is often a choice.

Here's how it works. At the start of the level, you get to decide your loadout (not always, but usually). You decide whether to carry a primary firearm, a sidearm, body armor, and any additional gear. Tasers, medkits, flashbangs, claymore mines, throwing knives, the game gives you some fun options to play with, and they're all worth exploring and seeing how well they work. For guns, it's a mix of assault rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, and pistols, some of which have silencers that dampen but don't fully quiet a gunshot. This means you have to be mindful in your stealth, because an enemy on the other side of the wall may still hear when you fire off a silenced .45, because even quieter, it's still a freaking .45 going off. This is actually a realistic approach, and I appreciate the thought put into it. Build your loadout according to how you like to play the game.

The criticism I have for Intravenous is how overly sensitive enemies can be. If you leave a door open, they notice. If you turn off a light in a room that they can see into, they notice. And when they notice, they get cautious. And they stay cautious, grabbing buddies to help them look around, changing their routes, actively seeking you out. It's cool to see them do it, but it never ends. There's never a shrugging of the shoulders or anything over a light having been turned off. Nobody thinks about the power bill in this game. They also notice things like blood on the ground, broken windows, corpses, and so on; this all makes sense. It's just the overreaction to little stuff that's odd. Of course, you can simply sneak up on them and choke them out or pistol whip them, but those systems are sometimes a little touchy and narrow, like you have to aim perfectly to pull it off despite being directly behind your target.

There are also a lot of menus in the game, because this is how you interact with objects on the ground. You can unload weapons, move bodies, curb stomp stunned enemies to kill them, and even collect your empty magazines to throw as a distraction. The issue is that you're gonna end up having to navigate menus to do this, and when you're trying to sneak around or in the midst of a firefight, it's annoying to suddenly have that pop up while swinging around. Also, you can shoot out lights, which is cool, but they can also get in the way when you're trying to target an enemy. No, I don't want to pop the lamp, I want to kill the guy with the AK who is about to turn around and teach me about human perforation.

And yet, this is small potatoes compared to how much fun I've been having. I've actually played through Intravenous multiple times now, doing runs to kill everyone as well as not kill anyone beyond the people the game forces me to. I'm enjoying myself, and that's what matters to me.

Outlast

Outlast is another game on my Summer Gaming Challenge. I wanted to try it for a couple of reasons: it spawned a successful horror franchise, and it explored a subgenre of survival horror, where you can't fight, you can only run and hide. The Clocktower series, Haunting Ground, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and Hellnight are all examples of this subgenre, but Outlast also stands out for going the first person route. Yes, Amnesia: The Dark Descent did it earlier, but that would be computer-only until three years after Outlast, so at least on consoles, Outlast beat it to the punch.

That said, it didn't really endear itself to me. Outlast focuses on journalist Miles Upshur as he investigates corporate malfeasance at Mount Massive Asylum. Once he gets there, he finds the inmates debasing themselves, mutilated corpses are everywhere, and there may or may not be some kind of supernatural forces at work. Also, he gets chased by two naked dudes who want to eat his liver, which I nicknamed the Bobbsey Twins. There is a lot of gore for gore's sake, and the game plot eventually goes the F.E.A.R. route, which I wasn't a big fan of. Too much gets explained.

Thankfully the game is short. This is key, because it's a game where you spend a lot of your time running like the devil through hallways and over obstacles, or sneaking past inmates who want to wear your skin to their tea parties, and the novelty does wear thin. And that's something the devs were smart about, because right as I started feeling like things were running long, they changed a few things up for freshness and then ended the game. The pacing works as a result. I could have done without other things, like having a couple of fingers chopped off with urinal scissors from a naked mutant CEO in a shop apron, but hey, nobody's perfect. I just really liked those fingers.

Would I recommend Outlast? Eh...are you really into horror games? Because this is one that I feel you need to be to really appreciate it. Otherwise, it's just fodder for YouTube stars to make bad jumpscare streams to on Twitch...which they did, I'm sure. I do intend to go back to check out the Whistleblower expansion at some point. But it will be a bit, because I'm having more fun with Intravenous, and because I have other games still to play.

Post by **MrPopo** » Sun Jul 28, 2024 9:21 pm

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
26. Marathon - PC
27. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord - PC
28. Little Kitty, Big City - PC
29. Dread Delusion - PC
30. Alan Wake 2: Night Springs - PC
31. PO'ed: Definitive Edition - PC
32. Space Cats Tactics - PC
33. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - PS5
34. Balatro - PC
35. Afterimage - Switch

Afterimage is a Metroidvania I first saw at SGDQ this year; it looked solid, so I picked it up as it was on sale. Unfortunately, this appears to be the sort of game that's more fun for speedrunners than it is casually. There are some decent bones here, but the total package is a mess.

I'd like to tell you what the story is, but it's pretty incomprehensible. A mixture of writing that is overloaded with jargon and a dodgy translation means that you don't really have a good sense of what's going on. As best I can tell, the basic setup is a massive disaster struck the world, but the specific nature of it is vague. Your role in events is even more vague. I'd like to think the original dialog is clearer, but even if we're talking an overly literal translation, the script itself is overwritten.

When it comes to the gameplay, you start with your standard SotN-inspired title. You pick up a variety of weapons in six classes, can equip two at a time, and will be dashing all over the place. You start with an air dash, which gives a fair amount of mobility, and later on you'll pick up multi jumps, a wall climb, and the jump to the ceiling move, among others. I do have to give the game credit for the weapon system; each of the six weapon classes is very distinct, with different attacks for standing, crouching, and jumping, and each has several unlockable special moves which tend to give some major coverage.

Unfortunately, those special moves are mostly unavailable on the boss fights. Not because the game disallows them, but rather because the special moves tend to have a wind up, while bosses have very narrow vulnerability windows and their attacks have very wide ranges. Your dash does not come with i-frames (until a late game upgrade, and even then there's a second-long cooldown), so you need to learn boss patterns so you can get out of range of their attacks. And as HP drops, boss attack sequences get longer, with additional follow ups or extra ranges. A lot of attention was put into this, but it often feels like you just need to face tank stuff.

The worst part of the game is the signposting. It's absolute garbage. You often have three different directions to go, in terms of which zone to traverse next, and no indication of which way is the right way. Not only that, you can often stumble into much higher level areas as part of natural exploration. My understanding is the original release didn't even indicate this; you just were supposed to figure it out by getting utterly trashed. Now the game shows an icon when enemy levels are too high, which at least removes some guess work. But since you only get a handful of "go here" goals, you have to bounce around areas you've already visited to find the next area whose level makes sense so you can get the next mobility ability.

It's a real shame, because there was clearly a lot of work put into this game. The visuals are quite nice, and as mentioned a lot of work was put into the bosses to make them interesting. But it's clear this is a young studio that didn't get enough fresh feedback when developing it; it's easy to fall into a trap of having played the game so much when making it that you stop seeing the pain points.

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