racketboy.com

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2025!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)



I beat Mario Party 4 on the Nintendo GameCube this evening!

I only got into the Mario Party series because of my roommate in college. I brought an N64 to our dorm and we used to play Mario Party together. I have rather fond memories of ordering a pizza and playing a 50 turn Mario Party game together. We mostly played the Mario Party 2 and 3 as those were the ones I had. Eventually, I picked up the original Mario Party and even though that wasn't great, it was still pretty interesting. With the N64 iterations finished, it was time to move onto the GameCube ones. So, at my local Retro Gaming Convention in 2023, I decided to pick one up. Looking for a relaxing break after Muramasa, I decided to pop it in and see what it was like.

Mario Party games aren't exactly known for their single player options, so I was happy to find out that this one wasn't bad. You basically play through all of the boards in a shortened 15 turn version of each. You then have a small mini-game between each all the way until the end. Most of the boards are a bit large, so 15 turns is hard to get many stars, which makes the extra stars that more important. Thankfully, the mini-games are mostly well done. A few of them are very skewed and unfair, but most of them are enjoyable and very even. Nothing that made me want to play it for a while, but nothing that made me dread them all. In fact, the mini game selection was really well done. Also, none of them will ruin your GameCube controller either. One of the main hooks in the game is you can acquire Mini and Mega Mushrooms. Mini-Mushrooms make you slow, but you can get access to other parts of the board. Mega makes you fast and stomp over your opponents, but you also miss out on special areas if you pass them by. They hand out the Mushrooms a lot, so you will experience them. They were mostly fine as neither of them were too hurtful or really helpful.

The game has a version of Chance Time. I hate Chance Time.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Mario Party 4. Some of the maps have areas where you just go around in circles and you can't really do anything until the game lets you. But, honestly, that is Mario Party. You are playing with the game and you really only have control over the mini-games and sometimes that is not always true. Still, this is a very solid entry that didn't do anything too crazy or rock the boat too much. If you are looking for a good and simple Mario Party, this is a good one to get!

The Evercade Alphas are also compatible with the Evercade carts.

I finished up my 2024 reviews, and I’m ready to put some games up for 2025! I’m starting out with two all-time classics…

1. Mega Man (DOS)
2. Mega Man III: The Robots Are Revolting (DOS)

Hear me out…The much-maligned games aren’t THAT bad. Sure, they’re not great, and they certainly don’t reach the heights achieved by the NES games. (Not even close!) Also, the brights graphics and choppy scrolling will get your eyes…and the sound effects will hurt your ears.

Still, they control pretty well. They’re fair, and they present a moderate challenge. (The levels, at least. The bosses are incredibly easy.) The first one is really, really short - like 15-20 minutes, maybe - so, it definitely doesn’t overstay its welcome. (I’d have felt pretty ripped off, however, if I bought that game in 1990 when I was a kid.) Moreover, Mega Man III (DOS) has some unique, open, labyrinthine levels like you’d find in a 16-but Sega game (e.g., Sonic 2, Ecco the Dolphin, etc.). Each of them is actually pretty well designed, and relatively engaging.

In short, the games definitely did not live up to their reputations as some of the worst games of all time. In fact, they’re actually pretty fun, and they’re definitely impressive for games designed and programmed by just one person almost 35 years ago.

REPO Man wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:16 am The Evercade Alphas are also compatible with the Evercade carts.

I've picked up a few and they work perfectly, though some of the games don't map so well to arcade controls. It's a nice addition to the package. That and the build quality make it a real competitor to Arcade1up. Evercade Alpha may be smaller and meant for single player gameplay, but being so expandable is a huge bonus.

And given that the Capcom licensing is moving away from Arcade1up and to Evercade and MyArcade, I am pretty sure Arcade1up is done for.

How are the Evercade Alphas? I'd love to be able to snag a couple for my nephews, for whom I got a bunch of Evercade stuff (Capcom Super Pocket, Taito Super Pocket, Evercade VS-R with Tomb Raider 1-3 and six additional carts). It all depends on how well they take care of the stuff I got them.

Flake wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:09 am

REPO Man wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 1:16 am The Evercade Alphas are also compatible with the Evercade carts.

I've picked up a few and they work perfectly, though some of the games don't map so well to arcade controls. It's a nice addition to the package. That and the build quality make it a real competitor to Arcade1up. Evercade Alpha may be smaller and meant for single player gameplay, but being so expandable is a huge bonus.

And given that the Capcom licensing is moving away from Arcade1up and to Evercade and MyArcade, I am pretty sure Arcade1up is done for.

And Iconic Arcade. Apparently they are releasing an "XXL" cab with a bunch of Capcom titles. 9/10ths the size of an "actual" arcade cab.

https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2025/jan ... -cabinets/

If they're using Raspberry Pi 5s then I could probably save some cash by making my own Pi 5-based cabinet.



Kidding, not kidding.

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2025!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)
***3. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)***



I completed The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age on the Sony Playstation 2 this evening!

Way back at the end of 2013 and the very beginning of 2014, I played through The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. With my favorite game being Final Fantasy X, I rather enjoyed playing a game that blatantly ripped off its battle system. And with me being a large Lord of the Rings fan, it kind of was a perfect match up. The game is rather short as I finished it in less than 25 hours, so I never did learn all of the skills because you have to use each one in battle and they take quite a long time. So, I always wanted to replay the game since I enjoyed it so much and to finish off earning the skills. Well, almost 55 hours later, I was finally able to do that!

Playing through The Third Age is a very enjoyable experience. You play as this no name character and you go through the major plot points of the film trilogy. So, it does kind of feel like you are able to live out the movie. You go from area to area, completing quests and leveling up your characters fighting famous fights and monsters. You also get little scenes narrated by Gandalf with scenes from the movies. It's not exactly a ground breaking experience, but it is very fun for what it is. You get a party of six characters and you can swap them out at any time. You can see whose action is coming up and it really is the battle system from Final Fantasy X. Once again, nothing groundbreaking, but I always loved the system, so it was very fun for me. You gather equipment throughout the game and when you add it your characters, their look changes and that is something new and unique in JRPGs. Also, there is an Evil Mode where you can play as the bad guys and beat up your team. Very therapeutic.

For you to enjoy this game, you have to set your expectations correctly. You do not control the Fellowship, but you are a smaller party that is helping them out and following them with whole new characters. The battle system is borrowed from another game. There is nothing new or even really distinct about the game besides it being Lord of the Rings.

Overall, with my expectations lowered, I still enjoyed my time with Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. I would not recommend learning every skill because that just added unneeded hours to the game and added very little. But, I would recommend playing through at least once, especially if you are a fan of Final Fantasy X or Lord of the Rings!

Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat

1. Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)

I'd never heard all that much about this game until looking through the games written by one of my favorite authors, Takumi Miyajmia. He's the writer either wholly or partially responsible for several of my favorite RPGs (like Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World), so I was naturally very curious about the other things he'd done since that stuff. The few things I *had* heard about this game were that it was both tough as heck as well as possessed an infamously terrible (particularly for 2009) English localization, so I went in optimistic at least given that I was playing the Japanese version ^^;. It took me around 80 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game doing nearly every sidequest (save for the last super boss) on real hardware playing with a GameCube controller.

Arc Rise Fantasia is the story of L'Arc, a young mercenary in the Meridian Imperial Army. Falling off of their airship fighting off a horde of dragons, he's saved from the dragon's final death explosion (which they just do in this world) by the magical singing of a mysterious maiden, Ryfia. Upon questioning her, he finds Ryfia knows virtually nothing about the world other than where she apparently wants to go to an Imperial town at the bequest of her late mother. With the help of L'Arc's best friend, the Meridian prince Alfonse, the three of them set out on a world changing and world saving adventure.

There is so, so much I could talk about with the story of this game, but it basically all comes down to "it's excellent! Just only in Japanese!" XD. The English script may be terrible, but the Japanese original is genuinely one of the best RPG stories I've ever had the pleasure of going through, and it's probably the closest I'll ever get to experiencing a magnum opus by one of my favorite authors. ARF deftly weds the best political narrative and character arc narratives from Miyajima's previous best works into something truly great. A thoughtful and contemplative tale about how morality is something you leave up to others at your own peril. Making your own choices is difficult, but doing the work to decide things for yourself is ultimately the only way things are going to get any better. The choices presented to you are rarely the only ones truly available, but it also lies on you to own up to your mistakes when you make them (even if others led you into making those mistakes), because living life trying to outrun your mistakes will only lead to your own destruction. L'Arc, Ryfia, and everyone else are a delightful cast that bring a masterfully woven story to life. I just wish it had an English script worthy of translating what a well considered story it is! XD

Thankfully, the gameplay translates just fine. As far as games from the PS2-generation and onward, this is easily one of the hardest RPGs I've beaten that isn't a Megami Tensei game. I'd heard that this game was not just hard, but very grindy, and I'd quite firmly dispute that. If anything, the EXP drop off is so relatively steep once you start fighting enemies close to you in level that grinding is mostly just a waste of time. ARF has a lot of systems at your disposal that you can use in tandem to take down baddies, and managing your resources as well as those systems well is the real key to victory. I could easily dump 1000+ words just detailing the specifics of the mechanics (like I often do ^^; ), but I'll try to keep it as brief as I can to give a rundown of the most interesting parts XD

First up is a magic system. Like a lot of older games, magic spells are expensive to cast, but in this game that goes double as you don't have normal MP: You have Final Fantasy 1-style spell charges. Unlike FF1, however, anyone can have any spells, as spells are determined by which magic gems you've slotted into each character's spell cage. Then, how many slots each person's cage has as well as how many charges of each magic level are upgraded at certain shops in most towns. It gives a lot of flexibility while also being relatively simple once you get the hang of it. Similarly, weapons don't actually have stats unto themselves the way armor does (e.g. a shirt can give you +4 armor as an intrinsic aspect of it, but weapons don't work that way). Instead, all weapons have Arm Force gems: Black ones that can't be moved, and colored ones that can be moved once you level up the weapon highly enough. Leveling up weapons to unlock Arm Force gems and then mixing and matching different gems in different weapon grids is a more minor part of your toolset, but it's ultimately super important, and is often the difference between victory and defeat if you tool your loadout the right way.

The last aspect I think is important to talk about is the SP system. As magic is so expensive to cast (and can generally only be healed at inns or specific special healing save points), your more typical strong attacks are Excel Art attacks, which cost a certain amount of SP to use. SP is maintained between battles, and you get more of it by dealing and taking damage. Characters can even unleash super attacks if you all use an Excel Act on the same enemy (which you're gonna wanna be doing a LOT, since these bosses are *tough*). As a whole, the game's systems (even down to its position-based combat not unlike a game like Shadow Hearts Covenant uses) are a lot to take in at once, but it thankfully deals them out to you slowly over time, and even as someone who generally really dislikes very complicated turn-based RPGs, this was at a fine pace even for me, so I reckon most other folks will deal with it just fine~.

My biggest criticisms of the combat system and game design largely lie in regards to its difficulty. As I mentioned a few times earlier, this is easily one of the hardest RPGs I've played (and I've played no small amount of them), and that comes largely from being tuned quite difficult rather than being unfair, at least. That said, while I don't mind a hard game (and the tuning in this game is generally very solid and well done), and learning the tricks to take down a boss generally only takes a try or two, there are a few things that certain dungeons do that make life more annoying for the player than they need to be. It's often for reasons to prevent you from messing up time-dependent plot events and/or to keep you from soft-locking yourself beyond a temporary door of no return, but there is a weirdly high amount of dungeons with no save points beyond the one right at the front door. There were a fair few times that I got ganked by a mean boss and then had to go all the way back through a 10~20 minute dungeon to get back to the bastard. It's not a super consistent problem, and the game's hardest fights mercifully don't have this issue. It's also very nice that the game's difficulty only really extends to boss fights and not normal enemies (no random enemies to snipe you with instant death bullshit like in SMT or anything, thankfully). That said, it's still quite annoying and pretty difficult to excuse in a game made by veterans in the industry in a pretty high budget game made as recently as 2009.

Aesthetically, the game is super pretty! It's got a few rough edges and uncanny designs, being a Wii game, but generally the game looks very nice from the animations to the character designs, and this is easily one of the best looking games on the Wii (or, at the very least, certainly one of the nicest looking games not published by Nintendo). The music is also very solid, and it makes an excellent soundtrack for your adventure. The English VA is infamously awful, as I've said before (and the script attached to it is hardly great either), but the Japanese voice work is really well done! They got a lot of big names attached to this project, and it helps the story come to life magnificently.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an excellent game, one I enjoyed a ton, and one of my new favorite games ever, but all of that praise comes with a pretty heavy asterisk ^^;. The English version's script is *so* bad that I really cannot in good conscience recommend that version nearly as highly as I can the Japanese version. If you're very bold, I understand there's a fan patch out there that at least replaces the English VA with the Japanese VA, so at the very least you're not stuck with the bad English VA, but there's only so much it can be fixed. In Japanese, at least, while this game may've been a victim of the platform it was on (it's not like people were exactly buying Wiis to play RPGs on, after all), they really missed out. This is one of the best RPGs of that console generation, as far as I'm concerned, and it's a spectacular hidden gem on the platform. I probably never would've played it had my poking around online not led me into it, and, needless to say, I'm super glad I ended up picking it up~. I just wish I could say the same is likely true for most of the people potentially reading this review (who presumably don't know Japanese ^^; ).

1. Growing My Grandpa! (Point-and-Click Adventure)(PC)

Growing My Grandpa! is an unusually named point-and-click horror game about a school counselor talking with a troubled young girl over the course of several weeks, a girl who has unwittingly begun raising a demon in her basement that is taking the form of her deceased grandfather. This involves her rooting through garbage, feeding the thing moldy food, teaching it words, and eventually making the decision to offer blood sacrifices in exchange for it replacing her parents...or failing to fulfill the contract, and then nasty stuff happens.

Bottom line, don't raise demons in your basement. And don't make your children clean basements where bizarre scientific experiments have been done on demons nicknamed Whiskers.

Yes, it's a fairly simple and straightforward game. There isn't really much in the way of puzzles beyond the teaching game and figuring out a few relatively easy combinations of activities to do. Like each week you need to make grandpa puke so you can find whatever treasures are in its stomach contents to further your exploration in hopes of completing (or avoiding) the blood contract.

Hey, it's a grody lo-fi horror game. It's the kind of experimental weirdo experience that I like, and though it was pretty short, I enjoyed myself.