The other game in this series for Gameboy Color, Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! is one of my favorite adventure games ever. I never even knew a sequel to it existed until a little over a year ago while talking to a friend of a friend about it (I can't exactly remember why). I was so happy to finally find a copy a few days ago, and now that I'm all done with it, I can pretty safely say that it was alright. It's not that it's a bad game, it's just that it doesn't really surpass or equal the sequel in most any way.
I was quite surprised to learn that this game and the previous one were produced by Miyamoto, but given their brilliant simplicity, I suppose that's not really that much of a surprise. There is no combat, and really no dying or failure state of any kind either. Instead, this is an adventure game where the biggest feature is learning Ham-chat, which are special code words that work a little like the information prompts in Final Fantasy 2. Hamtaro, the titular character whom you play as, doesn't talk outside of saying these phrases. You can't use one until you've heard it at least once. Each hamster you talk to and item you interact with has a certain number of them possible to use (with ones you don't have yet represented by a ???). These effectively function as dual passwords/skills that you use to solve just about every puzzle in the game. To get more words, you need to talk to people, so there is a LOT of doing tasks for other hamsters and just talking to them generally to try and learn all the Ham-chat you can. The story is fairly simple, but more complex than the first game in that it actually has an antagonist. Spat, the devil-costumed hamster, is doing his best to destroy all the love (brotherly, romantic, friendship, you name it) among Hamsters (for no other reason than because he's a hateful bastard, I guess). An angel-costumed hamster named Harmony has come to give Hamtaro and Bijou the task of fixing all the love in the land and kicking Spat out of town. The game actually has a lot of really well localized dialogue, quite funny lines combined with quite meaningful and well done scenes of healthy ways to express relationships. Many hamster couples you mend the relationships of are never explicitly gendered either, so I like to give it at least a slightly LGBT-positive notion, even if I'm pretty sure the Japanese version genders the hamsters at least implicitly with gendered speech patterns. One thing this game definitely has over the original is that slightly stronger plot and much better dialogue. What this game doesn't have over the original is the strength in premise. While the original had a weaker plot of just "find all the ham-hams and bring them back to the clubhouse," it felt far more organic to the more fluffy plot of the show. Spat is a fun villain, sure (I gave him a voice of Skeletor, because that's basically who he is), but he hardly makes for a super compelling narrative. A lot of the things he does feel very out of place in the Hamtaro universe due to the other problem this game has of a very poor use of setting. Hamtaro's whole thing is that they're hamsters. So much of the charm in the first game is found in the locations you explore from the perspective of a hamster. A junk yard, a school, a playground, a grocery store. Crawling over and under all that human-sized stuff as a tiny little hamster was just so cool! Other than some big sunflowers, this game might as well not even be a Hamtaro game with the settings it has. A hamster-sized amusement park, a hamster-sized haunted house, a hamster-sized beach resort. ALL the locations wouldn't be out of place if the main characters were humans instead of hamsters. The other bits of wasted premise lie in things like slightly obvious puzzle solutions (at least I certainly remember the original's being harder, but given that this is probably a game intended to be accessible for younger kids I can forgive that) and really uninspired new Ham-chat phrases. Those are really my biggest complaints about the game, and they're fairly small all things considered. Verdict: Recommended. It's definitely an inferior product compared to the original, but it's still a damn fine adventure game for all ages on the GBA. Even if you aren't into Hamtaro, this is still a fun adventure game that'll take you probably 10 or 15 hours to get through
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I've had this game for AGES because it looked cool. It's a Chocobo-themed kart racer by Square. What could be cooler? This month's Together Retro seemed like a perfect opportunity to try it out! However, playing it as soon as I'd bought it would not have even saved my opinion of this train-wreck. It's a beautiful game, but there are key components that absolutely kill it. For the record, I played through the story mode once and it took me about two hours.
The presentation of this game is freaking awesome. All the characters are cute and chibi. There are 8 default characters (Chocobo, Moogle, Black Mage, White Mage, Golem, Behemoth, Fat Chocobo, and Goblin) and then several more like Bahamut and Squall whom you can unlock by going through story mode repeatedly. The music on the tracks (there are 8, one for each character, by default and more you can unlock just like the characters) are all cool remixes of tracks in other Final Fantasy games. The graphics are pretty, and pop-in isn't really a problem either, despite that it's noticeable. The story is also funny and light-hearted, and a very pleasant parody of a grander, typical Final Fantasy plot line. It's a fantastic localization job, and probably one of the best I've seen in the era that I can remember off the top of my head. The controls are also totally customizable and I thought they were very tight and responsive. Where this game really falls apart into an unrecommendable level for me is the power-up system. There are little item balls scattered around the stages just like in Mario Kart, and you can bump into them to pick them up. They each correspond to different spells from Final Fantasy like fire, ice, thunder, doom, mini, and even ultima. They'll drag behind you, and you can have several at once (I never had more than two, but maybe you can have more. I'd guess three). You can even steal ones from opponents by bumping into the item trail behind them (though that is VERY hard). However, you can also combine all of these spells (save doom, I believe) into a combo of up to three stages (like Fire, Fira, and Firaga) with increasing effectiveness. The first stage is very localized and almost useless, the second one is usually a far better chance to hit, and the third one is a guaranteed hit on EVERY OTHER RACER. This means that ANY power up can be a Mario Kart-esque blue shell on EVERY racer, not just the guy in first place. Ultima also ALWAYS affects every other racer, just with varying degrees of badness with each level. Add to this how your characters have special ability bars and a selectable pre-race ability, once of which is "mug" that allows you to steal a random rival's item whenever it fills up (it fills on a standard timer that cannot be increased), and you have a system that not only makes the game insanely dependant on your luck of your enemies not getting good items and nuking you from halfway across the map, but also a system that can be heavily stacked in one player's favor. The game even knows how stupidly broken mug is. The fourth level in the story mode (of nine) is where it's introduced along with the ice item. At this point, there are only four racers in these races (out of a possible six) and only the first three items (boost, fire, and ice). Unlike any other new character's skill, the game explicitly tells you what Goblin's ability mug does because it is SO fucking broken and they know it. Due to how few items and how few racers there are, Goblin will get an item for one he's already dragging just about every single time he uses mug. With so few racers, this makes it so he'll ALWAYS be stealing from you as well before you can get up a level three power to fight back with, so he has a total monopoly on those ultra power ups. That level is such an ungodly difficulty cliff that I nearly stopped playing the game right there after some seven tries where he stole victory from me right at the last 5 meters of the race by getting a last second third level ice attack that not only completely stops you but spins you around (usually into a wall). You can't race better. You just need to get lucky to win that stage. The story mode took me 2 hours to beat. 45 minutes for stage 4, 45 minutes for stage 9, and 30 minutes for the other 7 stages. Verdict: Not Recommended. This is almost a great game, which is why I hate to crap on it so much, but the power-up system is so damn broken that the only real appeal this game has is its presentation. If you can live with a 2-player kart racer where the 4 AI opponents will thrash the shit out of you with their cheap power-ups, then feel free to check this one out, but with SO many fantastic racers, kart racers or otherwise, on both PS1 and N64, this is a very easy game to skip. I've been watching Let's Play videos of the original X-com for years. I bought the game years ago on the thought that I might one day play it myself, although I was a bit too intimidated to ever give it a real try. However, my confidence increased when I started watching another series a few weeks ago and started getting so frustrated at their misplays that I thought "Surely I can do better than these idiots" . They were playing The Final Modpack, to be fair, which make the game WAY harder. I tried that at first, but deduced after some more reading that it was way too hard for me. Already having Openxcom installed to play that mod-pack, I used it to play through the vanilla game mostly in tact, with most of alterations just being quality of life things.
Elkin gave me the idea to name all the soldiers after Racketboy peeps, so I did! Much hilarity was displayed in the RPG Progress Thread and the Slack chat about it over the past week or so. The mods I started the game with were very simple quality of life things like zooming out the camera for more visibility and letting you position all the buildings in your first base when you start the game. I made the mistake of playing the game with Openxcom's ironman mode enabled, so even though I did ironman this, I did end up turning on a mod near the end that forced a line-of-sight to do PSI-attacks, just because I REALLY wanted to finish the game and not have to totally restart. In the end, it took from the start of 1999 to September 23rd when we finally blew up the final alien stronghold. X-com is a bit of a grand SRPG. Managing bases all over the world, designing them, telling them what to manufacture and research, all on top of launching fighters to take down alien ships and ground teams to assault the survivors is a LOT to take on and it can be really intimidating. That said, it's not the most complex game out there in that space, and is far more easily taken on with the help of a wiki or some quality of life stuff like Openxcom's launcher provides (both of which I used extensively). Verdict: Recommended. I'd definitely say that Openxcom makes it far more playable for modern tastes, if only because of that option to zoom out the camera on missions. Then using Openxcom's built in options and mods to make the game just as hard or easy as you want is a very nice way to ease into it for players of any seriousness. Xcom is definitely a game that rewards already knowing its systems going in, so going in blind isn't super recommended, but it will certainly give you some crazy war stories if that's the route you go This is a game that is a Magicka II-style action game by the studio behind the Trine series. I heard it, via a podcast, described as a more colorful and deep Magicka. Upon seeing gameplay, it definitely did seem to be a Trine-ified Magicka 2, and as that's one of my favorite games, AND it was on sale on Switch at the time, I slapped down the money for it right then and there. Given that it is a game about moving, aiming, and shooting in that way, it does require two joysticks to play, and therefore cannot be played with just one joycon. I really wanted to play with a friend, so I picked up a Switch Pro Controller as well. I played through the first half or so with a friend last night over around four hours, and then went through the last half myself this morning in about another 3. It certainly isn't Magicka II, or even Magicka 1, but it's something I enjoyed my way through regardless.
This game basically has no story. You're one of a group of students in a magical academy. An explosion goes off in a tower, releasing six magical parchments which contain spells into the world, bringing horribly violent and unstable magic along with them (while you retain 3). Your chosen mage(s) go off on an adventure to prove yourself to the head-master of the school to retrieve the six parchments (bringing your total up to nine) and save the world. The three parchments you start with are your three starting spells, and your starting spells differ by character. The characters have some veeeery loose characterization with one or two dialogues between them per level (of 32 levels), but the story is really just a dressing for the action gameplay. The way the game plays is like a combination of Trine's visual aesthetic combined with Diablo III-style skill trees and active abilities all put into a very linear Magicka-style co-operative action game with an emphasis on friendly fire. Though I would say this shares most of its DNA with Magicka 2, this is nowhere near as hard to play or hop into. Unlike Magicka 2, the only face buttons that do anything for your right hand are a dedicated button for jumping (a kind of dodge, as this game has virtually no platforming), and a blink that has 2 charges which refill over time. Melee is also far, far better in this game than in Magicka. The biggest difference, however, is how this game treats its spellcasting. There is also no combining elements to make spells of certain kinds in Nine Parchments. What you have instead is a series of active offensive spells, each with their own respective mana pools, which just require aiming with the right stick and a click of the right trigger to set off. There are five different spell elements (frost, fire, lightning, death, and life) and four general types of spells (channeled beams, lobbed bombs, close-range burst, and rapid-fire missiles) with each element's take on that type being slightly different compared to another (frost freezes, fire does more damage/more aoe, lightning jumps between enemies and stuns, etc). This, coupled in with a few strange oddities like a small aura you put down that buffs anyone's attacks inside it for a few seconds until violently exploding on them as well as a "steam" beam (which I think is just a non-elemental beam?) make up your spell list. However, you only get new spells when you complete a level boss that is guarding one, and even then you only get to pick from three random choices (though I believe different characters have different biases as to which 3 they will get a choice from at the end of a stage), and this method of doling out spells can be a REAL pain. The games doesn't have a terrible variety of enemies. There are only around 10 or so types, but basically all of them have a move set that incorporates some number of the possibles spells you, yourself can get. Mix that around with all the spells the game has, coupled in with how they are not only immune to their element but also later get, auras of group-immunity to a different element, auras of pulsing elemental damage to which they are immune, or even just personal elemental shields of temporary immunity to a different element, and it adds up to a status where if you don't have the right spell load-out, you can really get fucked by some encounters. If you're too eager to get a certain element of spell and get it over represented in your loadout, some later battles can become damn near impossible with just how much you literally cannot use spells to hurt your enemies. If you don't pick one, you can even end up without a healing spell on a solo-playthrough, which would reallllly bone you. On top of ALL of that, on anything other than easy mode, random enemies are "epic" varieties, with more health and two elemental resistances that make them just that much more tough to kill. This is kinda balanced out by how their own damage pulses can hurt their buddies and how their fields of immunity can apply to you as well, but the times where those benefited me and not the enemy were easily counted on one hand in my playthrough. And this gets us onto characters and their spells. This game has eight playable characters (a jack-of-all trades, one focusing on each of the five elements, a melee-focused one, and a better jack-of-all trades(? - I never unlocked him, for reasons I'll get to later) with each one having 3 different costumes with a level cap of 40. Each of the 3 costumes gives variations on their starting spell load-outs in addition to unlocking another skill tree which any of the costumes can use to allocate points into if so desired. You don't need to stick to one skill tree and can put points between them all, but with the stuff more near the bottom being the best by far, it's best advised to. Each one also has a 4th costume to unlock by completing levels and challenges in hardcore mode (it's the hardest difficulty but a game over means you start from the beginning) with its own unlockable staff and a level cap of 60 instead of 40. This would all be great if unlocking stuff didn't S U C K. Edit: After mucking around a bit more, I have discovered that the costumes themselves do not have levels, but characters have persistent ones (think Castle Crashers). If you beat a game with one character, then start a brand new game with them (not even NG+), they will have all the levels and abilities they had before. Edit2: I can also confirm that the notion that different characters get different biases for spells to pick was wishful thinking. Apart from the non-healers getting a healing spell in their first pool, it seems totally random. Also, the 3rd staff for each character is found by doing the quest/action to get it on hard or hardcore mode. The level linearity, the method the unlockables are done, and the way you gain new spells are the three most sour points of this game by far. Sure, the game has eight characters and each of them has their own staff, but this doesn't mean jack shit because this 4-player co-op game only has two characters (the first costume of the jack-of-all-trades and the heal-focused one) unlocked at the start. To unlock any more other than just costumes, you need to not only find their staves in the levels (one of which I never even found, which is bullshit for a reason I'll get to later) and then find their statue in a level to go on a quest to unlock them permanently. The levels are insanely linear, so the only real way of hiding stuff is behind background scenery, but even then stuff is just shockingly hard to find at times. Put on top of that how you can't even change characters other than when you start a new game, and it almost seems like the game was designed for one person to go through by themself before they even tried to play it with their friends. This game also has NO chapter select, so if you missed something, you'll have to play through the WHOLE game to try again at it (the 8th character requires a full replay, as his staff is on the last level, but his unlock area is in the 4th to last level). You also can't respec your skill points at any time, so if you wanna try and get a different passive to help you through the area you're stuck at, that's literally impossible. There's also no confirmation or undo button for assigning them, so once that A-button is pressed, that skill is yours until you do a new game+ (aka the only time you can reallocate your skill points). You do, luckily, have other things to find in each level that helps with that a little bit. One thing to find are quills, and the more quills you collect, the more staves (which give a passive) you unlock. These staves unlocked through finding quills are reskins of the student's standard staves, but these reskins can also be used to get into their unlock areas if you happen to miss the mini-quest of finding their normal one. I never found the electric-mage's standard staff, despite how easy it should be to find this stuff with the extreme linearity of the levels and lack of things like scale-able cliffs, unprompted environmental puzzles, or destructible walls. The other things to find in each stage are chests, but chests just give one of a random collection of hats that are purely cosmetic or just a small (I'm talkin' REALLY small) amount of bonus EXP. Quills are your friend. Quills should be collected. This game also has a weird issue of bosses never really being that hard while normal enemy packs and ambushes are REALLY tough. I think this is probably down more to how difficult the elemental immunity can make enemy packs and that the bosses don't have these, but it nonetheless still makes for some very anticlimactic boss battles, and that includes the final boss. Verdict: Recommended. Despite all of its flaws, Nine Parchments is a game undeniably designed to be played in multiplayer. With more players, the issue of poor element coverage and getting boxed in by enemies is severely reduced. If you have some friends (online or local) to play with and you want some more Magicka II action, then this is a great pick up for any console (it's on everything iirc). It's certainly nowhere near as good as Magicka II in terms of humor/story, mechanical depth, or balanced design, but it's a great first try from the studio, and I'm very hopeful that they will give this style of game another try and evolve on the lessons learned here. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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