Stretchmo is another game I've owned for ages and bought on the 3DS a loooong time ago around the time I finished the original Pushmo and then played through Crashmo. I never ended up really getting into it though, as my obsession with the series petered out, and it's been awaiting me on my 3DS ever since. After finishing Pushmo World earlier this month, I thought it was high time I went through this final entry in the series, and I had a blast doing it. It took me around 15 hours to beat all 300 puzzles in the English version of the game on my New 3DS XL.
Stretchmo is more of a return to form after Crashmo, but it's also a very wild spin in other ways. The story is still quite as similar as always. A troublesome agent goes wild and traps a bunch of kids in the Stretchmo in the Stretchmo Park, and Mallo goes to save them. However, there is a twist! And not just presentation-wise, but also via the game's business model. There are 100 levels in Mallo's adventure, but then three other characters from prior games also get their own 50 levels sets, and there's a super tough final 50 awaiting anyone who finishes the previous 250. The initial download of Stretchmo is actually free, and you pay for as many of the four packs as you want with the total price of all four adding up to the same total as what Pushmo and Crashmo were. It's a really neat approach to selling the games, allowing you to pay for as much as you think you'll play, and I think it's a welcome innovation (even if this was the last game in the series). Mechanically, it's much more like Pushmo than Crashmo is, but it's also a lot like a meeting of the two. Where Pushmo was about pulling blocks in and out from a fixed picture with a fixed camera, and Crashmo was about pulling and pushing around blocks that could move and fall and had a rotating camera, Stretchmo is about stretching fixed 3D block sculptures with a rotating camera. It's basically like if Pushmo puzzles were 3D sculptures instead of sets of 2D panels you interact with, and you can pull blocks out from any direction two spaces. That's right, two spaces, not three like Pushmo. It may seem like a small change, but in the grand scheme of things, it allows for drastically different approaches to puzzles when combined with the 3D element, and even though a handful of puzzles return from Pushmo, these new rules make them an a totally new beast to conquer. The four sets of puzzles are also different from one another in theme. Mallo's are very standard, having a mix of "mural" (it's supposed to look like something) and regular "challenge" (it's just blocks that form a puzzle regardless of shape) puzzles. Poppy (the girl whom you help get her birds back in Crashmo) has stages that are all about murals. Papa Blox (the elderly owner of the Stretchmo and Crashmo parks) has his NES Expo all themed around what else but NES sprites. Finally, Corin (the mischievous antagonist-turned friend from Pushmo 1) has his Fortress of Fun, which introduces the very odd addition of enemies to the series. You can ride around on these enemies heads to get you into new areas, and they add a really cool, dynamic mix of gameplay options. His puzzles are also some of the hardest in the game, being that you can actually get killed by these enemies and restart at the bottom of the puzzle. Even though Stretchmo still has the series' rewind feature, Corin's is generally far shorter than the others' rewind clocks, and you can't rewind to before a death. These different characters and different puzzle styles, in addition to helping make the difficulty curve of the game more easily visible and concrete, really help add some variety to the game and keep the experience fresh in a way that none of the other games really approach. The presentation is as cute and bubbly as ever, with relaxing, chill music as your adorable little character solves bright, colorful puzzles. The level editor is also here again, and given that you share puzzles via QR codes and not via the Miiverse, the ability to make and share levels is technically still totally available here (unlike Pushmo World). It's not terribly original, being that it's aesthetically still very similar to the other three games in the series, but as far as I'm concerned: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is the swansong (for now at least) of the Pushmo franchise, and it's easily the best of the bunch. Toting a whopping 300 puzzles, I believe it also has the most puzzles out of any of them, as well as the best variety of gameplay in addition to one of the better difficulty curves. If you only play one game in the Pushmo series, you should have it be Stretchmo. Between the very approachable business model and the general great quality of the game, this is an excellent addition to any 3DS owner's library, and if we cross our fingers, maybe someday the series will even get a Switch port X3
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While I still had the Wii U hooked up, I figured I'd try getting through another game that I'd attempted several times but never finished. ASA is a game that can be played with friends, but any friends I'd played it with had never beaten it with me, so unfinished it remained. This was the first time I'd actually tried playing it by myself, so I finished it wihin a few hours on account of how much easier it is to pilot an affordable spaceship yourself compared to with two other people XD
Affordable Space Adventures sees you as a space tourist with the company Uexplore. Manning your special Small Craft spaceship, you'll take a 3 day tour of Spectaculon, an almost entirely uncharted world that you'll get to claim your own piece of if you get there first! But rest assured, despite the crashed alien vessel and nearly totally unknown nature of Spectaculon, it is COMPLETELY safe as far as Uexplore is concerned. This is all communicated to you with the mock promotional travel video that the game opens with, and as you may've cottoned onto, Spectaculon is actually incredibly unsafe, and the mothership carrying all the Small Craft tourists crashes on Spectaculon, leaving only you alive to try and find an SOS beacon to contact Uexplore HQ with to try and get rescued. Trekking across Spectaculon, through its dark caves, alien wrecks, and extreme environments, can feel pretty tense and spooky at times, and breathtaking at others. Though this is more of a tense game (highlighted by a very unsubtle pastiche of corporate heartlessness towards its customers), its pretty visuals and subtle music make an atmosphere that is very strong and difficult to ignore as you try and make your way to safety through increasingly dangerous territory. ASA is a game exclusive to the Wii U's digital store, and definitely one of the best at taking advantage of the opportunities of the game pad. On your game pad (what the game calls you "Heads Down Display" X3), you have a set of controls that allow you to turn on and off different engines as well as all manner of landing gear, secondary systems, and power levels. All of these systems generate their own levels of heat, sound, and electricity, and you can tap on gauges on your screen to see just what is generating what sources. This is a very valuable thing to know too, as using your flashlight/scanner, you can scan the many types of robotic alien life out to kill you and see just what kinds of power they're sensitive to. By operating your ship properly and turning on and off different systems when needed, you make your way through your journey in what is definitely one of the more unique puzzle-platformers I've played. This was the first time I'd actually played ASA by myself, and the reason I was able to complete it this time is that, much like one of my favorite games Octodad, controlling anything is often much easier by yourself than with others if solo-control is an option. This is very much the same for ASA, although it's certainly far less of a party game than Octodad can be. Your player 2 will get control of the ship's movement, and then a player 3 will get control of aiming the ship's scanner/flashlight, leaving player 1 with only control of your system operations (as well as when you scan things and fire flares). Given how often you need to precisely move the ship in coordination with altering power to systems as well as how tricky many of the shots to hit buttons with your flares can be, this makes the game FAR more challenging, and while a very cool multiplayer experience, I wouldn't recommend it to those who get easily frustrated (even though the game is quite forgiving with its checkpoints more often than not). Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely something under the ever-shrinking (with all these Switch ports) list of "reasons to own a Wii U". The nature of the control scheme makes me doubt very highly it will ever be ported, and it's a really unique and well crafted puzzle experience, especially if you're aiming to play through it with others. If you've already got a Wii U, I'd say this is definitely a game you shouldn't let yourself miss checking out, and if you've been on the fence about picking up a Wii U (maybe to get some of those games that have gotten ports to Switch and have their base versions way cheaper X3), I hope this might tip you a little over the edge to finally picking up one secondhand. I've beaten Pushmo and Crashmo yeaaars ago, and I picked up this game in the middle of last year but didn't quite finish it. As it turns out, I was only a dozen or so puzzles away from seeing the credits ^^; (although counting the optional puzzles, I had like 100 in total left to do). That's something that counts towards this month's theme for Together Retro as far as I'm concerned XD. According to my Wii U activity log, it took me about 17 hours to beat all 250 puzzles in the game (making this the first of the games in the series that I've actually 100%'d~) ^w^.
Pushmo World is, as the other games in the Pushmo series are, a puzzle platformer about solving picture-like puzzles called "Pushmo". The story is very simple, as this time a bunch of children were playing on the Pushmo puzzles when a mischievous doggo hit all the reset switches, trapping them inside. It's our round, red hero Mallo's duty to go and save all of those poor children! It's a very paper-thin plot, but that's all it needs to be. The aesthetic is very toy-block like in how the levels are constructed, and the music is also excellent (particularly the Mario/NES remix tracks~). Mallo himself is also adorable, and I love him <3 The gameplay itself is one of "easy to learn, tough to master", as the mechanics themselves are pretty bog simple. There are panels in the back of the stage, and you pull them out from the front or the side to hop onto them. You can't a block such that you fall off of the platform you're on, and blocks can only be pulled out up to a maximum of three spaces. There are some extra tools like ladders that teleport you from one block to another as well as arrows that can make all blocks of a certain color extend or retract fully, but it's really a case of the game giving you a simple toolset, and then gradually giving you puzzles that push that toolset farther and farther. They're really cleverly crafted, and the difficulty curve is also very well handled (though the last puzzle genuinely took me like half an hour to solve XD). Thankfully, the game is merciful enough to give you a rewind button you can hold down to turn back time up to several minutes, and it's a great way to quickly undo a mistake, or to test out if a certain solution is even possible without worrying about needing to undo everything you've accomplished up to this point. All puzzles even have a giant reset button you can press (although it'd be nearly impossible to push it on accident it's so far away from the puzzle itself), so you don't need to exit the level if you're truly stumped and just wanna retry from the start. The game doesn't even time your solve times, so there's no pressure at all to solve stuff quickly other than what you wanna put on yourself to try and achieve~. There are also a handful of some "Mysterious Pushmo" for you to solve, which introduce concepts like ALL blocks of a certain color being affected when you operate just one, "ying-yang" blocks that extend when their opposing color is retracted (and vice versa), and even blocks that only stay extended for a limited amount of time. The game only gives you ten or so of each of these, and that's mainly because interacting with them unlocks them in the game's level editor. Once upon a time when Miiverse was still a thing, you could play tons of user-created Pushmo puzzles, but that time is no more. While this game DOES still have 250 puzzles more or less unique from the 3DS Pushmo game, that big pull of user-created content is sadly no longer something you can interact with. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Intelligent Systems really knows how to make themselves a puzzle game, and the Pushmo series impresses as always. They're not the hardest brain benders in the world, but they're great for puzzle-enjoyers of any age with how good the difficulty curve is. The game is pretty cheap and it'll also give you many hours of enjoyment if you're set to try and solve all the puzzles, so this is a very easy recommendation if you want a charming, well-crafted puzzle game on your Wii U (and you don't even need the main screen to play it, so you can just play on the game pad with headphones if someone else needs the TV~). There are a lot of games on my 3DS that I've owned for ages but never gotten around to playing. Whether it was something I was recommended that I just haven't gotten around to, something I got in a humble bundle, or something I got for free through My Nintendo Rewards, there's a lot of 'em, and these were two of them XP. In a somewhat unorthodox review format, I'm gonna review two games at once here! It's largely because they're both SO similar and on the same platform (not to mention fresh in my memory), that reviewing one and then the other would be repeating a lot of the same words. Not to mention, most of the points worth making about the games is in relation to one another, so I figured I might as well make this a two-for-one review~. It took me a few hours each to beat each of the games without really worrying about the extras in either.
The Mighty Switch Force games were developed by WayForward for the 3DS. They're both puzzle platformers that revolve around the titular group (presumably) as they go through levels as cops rounding up escaped prisoners in the first game, and as fire fighters (who seem to have employed the prisoners from the first game) saving civilians in the second game. You go through a level with a radar on your bottom screen saving all five people and then getting to your robot buddy to exit the stage. There are time trial goals (and in the second game, an optional hidden baby to save) in each stage you can also go for, but they're ultimately optional. Each game has sixteen stages, and the main gimmick is the titular "switching" you can do with the A button. Pressing the A button toggles the state of the stage and makes certain platforms disappear and the other ones reappear. You can also jump and fire your gun to get through the game's platforms and enemies as well (in the first game it's just a gun, but in the second game it's a back-mounted fire hose). But you better be careful, as switching the level's state while you're standing in front of a disappeared block will pop you out of the level, sending you back to the last checkpoint you were at (as well as making you lose one of your three health hearts). The level design between the games is pretty similar in general quality, but I'd say the second game has better polish overall in just about every way. A lot of that owes to being a firefighter instead of cop, as there are way more interesting puzzles/obstacles revolving around your firehose than the simple destructible blocks and enemies that the gun solves in the first game. While there ARE stationary fires you can put out, it's more than just that XD. The first game is mostly about platforming and precise timing with your state switches, but the second game cranks that up a bit by incorporating blocks you can fire water though to rechannel water (they have pipes inside them~). There are also blocks in each game that won't disappear if you're standing on them, and doing such will switch which level state they're tied to. With three sets of those as well as some with pipes inside them, the second game's levels can get to be quite the head scratchers at some points. Given the time-trial nature of the game, both games can very sped through with great momentum if you're good enough, but that's far easier said than done XD. Another cool feature each game has is that the 16th level is not just far longer, but it also takes the ability to manually toggle the level's state from you. Instead, your helmet will flash three times before the state toggles automatically, and this makes for some really tense platforming (although it can get really annoying if you're having trouble getting the timing down). It would've been really nice if they'd given you more practice up to that point to get used to automatic toggling, and that's especially true since levels have no true checkpoints. They have checkpoints in a sense, but those are only for if you fall in a pit or get crushed by a block. If you lose all three of your hearts, you're starting that whole level over again, and that can get really annoying for levels with time trial goals of 4+ minutes XP. The game is however merciful on its final stages, each of which have pretty tough bosses at the end, and if you die at the boss, you just restart at the start of the boss. The presentation of the games is a mixed bag, but not in a way unfamiliar to WayForward. Both games don't have a ton of music, but the music they do have is really pumping and heckin' rocks. It's easily one of my favorite parts of the game, especially the vocal remix of the 2nd game's main level theme that it uses for its credits song. The character designs, however, are much more WayForward in how incredibly horny they are. The only character coded male in either game is your cycloptic robot companion, and all the other characters are very skinny, very sexually clothed women (from the main character, to the prisoners you're finding to the civilians you're saving). If that's something you can just blaze past without caring about, more power to you, but I found it really obnoxious in the same way I did with how Shantae does it. Mighty Switch Force Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Mighty Switch Force 2 Verdict: Recommended. Both games are $6 on the 3DS eShop, and for what they are I think that's a fair price, but I think the 2nd game easily outshines the first with what it adds to the formula (even if it is a decent bit harder than the first). Neither are must-plays, but if you haven't tried them yet and the character design I've mentioned hasn't frightened you off, they're worth their price of entry. I'd hesitate to drop the $20 the HD pairing of the two goes for on Switch, but if these both sound like incredible games you MUST play on Switch, then I guess that's your choice to make XP For this month's TR theme of returning to games we failed to beat before, I don't know how I nearly forgot about this one. It was for years what I called my favorite of the Genesis Sonic games, and one I played more than any other on the Sonic and Genesis collections I had as a kid. Developed by Traveler's Tales (who would go on to make the Lego games~) and coming out in the very late year of 1996 and certainly a mechanical oddball in comparison to its fellow Genesis Sonic games, my general distaste for the traditional Sonic games made me gravitate to this one a lot more as a kid, and I'm glad to have finally seen the proper end of it. It took me a couple hours to get all the chaos emeralds and beat the final boss in the English version of the game via my PS3 copy of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection.
The story, as one would expect, is pretty simple. The Flickies are a race of birds that have special powers. Robotnik wants to use them to get the chaos emeralds and conquer the world, so he crams them all into robots and takes over their whole island. Sonic is just trying to stop by Flicky Island to visit his friends there, but finds them all captured by Robotnik, so it's Sonic's job to stop him. A fairly standard premise for a Sonic game that then leads into the rather unconventional gameplay. This game is very unlike its 2D counterparts in many ways. The most immediate difference is that it's more-so 3D than 2D and has an isometric camera angle to boot, which can make it really awkward (and kinda painful) to play on a PS3 D-pad, but it makes more sense on the more circular Genesis D-pad. In my case, I largely played it with the joystick on the dual-shock 3 ^^;. Aside from that, your goal in each mission isn't to just get to the end of the stage, but you need to rescue all the Flickies to do it. This involves killing all the robots in the area (usually) to free them and put them in the big ring at the end of the area, and each Act has 2 or 3 of these interconnected areas. The chaos emeralds are also a bit odd, but more like Sonic 2 in how you get them. You need to find Knuckles or Tails in a level and given them some amount of rings (I believe it's 50 the first time and goes up by 50 each time you want to retry) to enter the mini-game, which is a sort of variation of the Sonic 2 special game as you run forward along a bridge collecting rings, avoiding mines, and not falling off. I personally think the Sonic 2 special game is awful, but this is probably my favorite emerald collecting game of all the Sonic games on Genesis, which is why I actually was able to get all seven of them to then fight the true final boss at the end XD. The only time I used save states in the game was to quickly retry the 6th and 7th emerald trials, and that was really just a time saving measure. You pay all of your rings to Knuckles/Tails to enter the special stage, and all of the rings on the level reset when you exit a special stage. There isn't even a time limit on the levels, so there's really nothing but your patience keeping you from trying over and over in most cases. The controls are decent, but take a bit of getting used to. Honestly, I'd probably recommend playing this on one of the later collections instead of the Genesis (or Saturn) originals because of just how well Sonic moves with a joystick as opposed to a D-pad XD. There are some nuances to how he controls that clearly lend themselves better to a D-pad (the emerald special stages in particular are far better played with a D-pad), but the general movement of the normal stages fit way better to a joystick for how I played it. The level design is overall really solid, as it actively takes into account just how awkward moving Sonic around can be. They never really have you doing anything that requires really precision jumps (or if they do, there's always a way around it), so just how hard it can be to get Sonic to land on a tiny platform is almost never an obstacle between you and victory. The enemies are largely just there to keep the Flickies from you, so your biggest obstacle in completing the game are the stage hazards, and they're also pretty tame. The only time you'll really run into places where you'll lose lives are the boss battles, but they're all good fun and varied in their design, and were some of my favorite bits of the game. Overall, this is a really good Sonic game for people not so familiar with games, as there are tons of extra lives and you don't die often either, generally. It's a pretty easy game, but that just made it all the more appealing to me XD. The game's presentation is pretty standard fare for the Genesis, that being it's heckin' excellent. The music is all fun and catchy, as a Sonic game should have, and the graphics are bright and colorful. As plastic and toy-like the graphics can seem at times (and with how odd some of Sonic's animations can look upon close examination), I think the game looks really good for what it is. Particularly for a Genesis game, I quite like how the game's aesthetic is, but I could understand someone thinking it was utterly hideous XD. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's certainly an oddball among Sonic games, but it's definitely still one I like a lot. If you're looking for a good, weird platformer on the Genesis, even on the original hardware this won't break the bank. I'd still recommend playing it via some collection that gives you a joystick to work with like I had, but it's a great time either way. Not everyone will be able to gel with the controls or the aesthetic, especially if you're expecting a more traditional Sonic game, but if you're willing to take the dive on something just a bit different, there's a ton to enjoy here. An isometric Sonic game on the Genesis could've been a disaster, but I'll be damned if they didn't make a pretty darn fun one. Like Sonic Heroes, this was another game I rented as a kid but never finished all the way through, and it seemed like another perfect fit for both this month's theme of returning to games you failed to finish before, as well as the 3D Sonic kick I've been on recently. I ended going with the PS2 edition, basically only because this version of the game goes for 700 yen in Japan, while the GameCube version goes for more like 4000 yen ^^; (and you don't even wanna know about the original Xbox version XD). I played through the first of the routes on stream and was a bit lukewarm on the game, but as I stayed with it it really grew on me, and I came out of it really respecting a lot more of what the game is trying to do than I anticipated I would going into it. The game doesn't keep a play timer, so I'm not sure exactly how long it took me to beat, but given that I finished it over the course of like a day and a half, I reckon it took me around 17-20 hours to get all the endings in.
Shadow the Hedgehog is more or less the second game (or third, depending on how you view the story in Sonic Heroes) that Sonic Team USA made that was dedicated mainly to the telling the story of Shadow the Hedgehog. Sometime after the events of Sonic Heroes, Shadow is standing outside Westopolis, brooding over why he has no memories of his past. Suddenly, a massive portal opens up in the sky and black and red aliens start pouring out of it. A massive alien calling itself Black Doom appears next to Shadow and tells him that the "promised time" has come, and that he must bring him the seven chaos emeralds. Thinking that this mission will give him the answers to his past that he seeks, Shadow heads off to fulfill this mysterious quest. The game has a branching series of levels where you can generally pick to do either the "good" mission, the "bad" mission, or the "neutral" mission in each stage. Then at the end of each route, you can only pick a good or bad mission to pick what final boss you'll fight. There's no true alignment system, as it just determines what stage you'll go to next, and honestly some of the routes make HUGE leaps of logic with absolutely no explanation of why Shadow suddenly is where he is. Quite frequently more minor things like "I just helped Robotnik but now I'm fighting him as a boss and he somehow didn't even know I was here?" are not uncommon in certain routes. Certain paths make a lot more sense than others (especially if you don't hop between good and bad missions), but that branching mission system definitely makes the story suffer as a whole. There's also a "library" feature in the game, where you can see what routes you've taken and rewatch the cutscenes in order, and while it's a neat feature, they clearly didn't expect you to actually go through all 300+ possible routes in the game to just unlock all those strings of text. Horribly panned at the time of its release for being overly dark and edgy for a Sonic game (which to a point I agree with), I genuinely respect what Shadow the Hedgehog is going for with its storytelling. Shadow's main quest is trying to figure out his history as a means of seeking the answer of why he exists. Along the more logically connected story routes, you have three general possible stories: Shadow goes with the good guys and realizes he was meant to be a defender of humanity, Shadow chases Robotnik and realizes he's just a clone of the real Shadow who died at the end of SA2, and Shadow goes with Black Doom's plan and realizes that Humans aren't worth saving and need to be destroyed/conquered. To me, the main theme of the game is really about how the authority figures around you determine a LOT of how you see yourself and the world around you. You can only be as "good" or "evil" as the environment you're put into, and while a lot of that can be up to your choice, a lot of it also isn't. Shadow's ultimate realization in the true ending (which you get as an option to play when you've seen all 10 other endings) is that while he is certainly responsible for his sins in the past, it's up to him to decide what he does in the future, and that his history does not need to define who he will be in the future. A lot like Sonic Adventure 2, I think this story may not be high art, but it's got a lot of heart and I respect it for that. It may be a bit broody and angsty on the surface (especially the game's intro, omg), but I don't think they're just blowing hot air with the story they're trying to tell and actually manage to make a meaningful point with it at the end of the day if you give it a chance. Mechanically, this game is far more in the vein of Sonic Adventure 2 than it is Sonic Heroes (thank heck), but more based around Shadow's stages in that game. You have the aforementioned mission system (which I'll get to in a bit), vehicle sections, but most infamously you have the main new gameplay mechanic which is the addition of guns and melee weapons that you can pick up and use to fight enemies with. The weapons do feel like a bit of an afterthought in terms of the larger level design and boss design, but they do make dealing with many enemies a lot more efficient than your standard jumping homing attack, and getting new beefy guns to heck up aliens or military soldiers with is always good fun. While the camera is a bit wonky from time to time in certain stages, it's generally about as good as SA2's camera was (that being "acceptable" in quality XD). One of this game's strongest bits of design is its bosses, and it easily has some of the best bosses in a 3D Sonic game of this generation as well as the best true final boss of those as well. One final note on the combat is that it adds probably one of my favorite innovation in one of these 3D Sonic games: it changes how rings work. You no longer lose ALL your rings when you get hit, but a maximum of 10 at once. Now they're more like a health pool rather than a one-hit shield between you and death, and it makes the game flow a lot better. Especially for a game with wider levels more about ranged fighting, I think it's an ingenious innovation for the classic formula. The level design is something of a mixed bag when paired alongside the level design. Going for neutral missions, which usually just involve getting to the end of the stage, I think the game is pretty strong in how it builds its levels. The levels have a lot of combat bits intermixed with running fast, and they're good fun to blaze through as quick as you can (especially through replays) just like the Sonic and Shadow levels are in SA2. The missions, on the other hand, are much more of a mixed bag of quality. It doesn't really feel like they had great ideas for the missions themselves, so much as they really liked the idea OF missions, and a lot of the missions are either finding hidden objects in a level or killing most/all of a certain faction of enemy. Those aren't usually too hard, but it can be really frustrating when you're using the warp-point checkpoints to hunt through an entire stage for the one enemy/item you missed. It can be fun to try and speed run those as well once you've done them once or twice, but a couple stages (the Central City bombing mission in particular) just have really awful, maze-like missions that drag on forever and just aren't fun. The missions are neutral in quality more than they're bad, but I feel the emphasis on them harms the game as a whole. I honestly also think that they either added more stages or rearranged them at some point in development to give you more mission options, and that's the main reason that the story feels so often disjointed in many routes. Now, the big elephant in the room here is the 10+1 endings. If you wanna finish the game's true ending, you've gotta see all 10 endings, which involves doing the good and evil missions each of the five final stages (with the game having 22 main stages and and other 1 for the final true ending). While this IS a lot of level repetition, it's also fairly in line with how prior 3D Sonic games have approached their level design in terms of asset reuse. Sonic Heroes and especially Sonic Adventure 1 use this exact same sort of "the same level but a bit different) approach to their game design, and I think Shadow does it the best out of any of the three of them. A lot of the different missions minorly or majorly affect how you'll play through that stage (not unlike how different characters handled different stages in Sonic Adventure 1), and taking different routes to play as many unique missions as I could was a fun element to going for those ten endings. I personally think that having no alignment choices on the final missions so you only had five routes to play through would've been a much better design choice, but I don't think that what we got is unforgivable, and I found it fun trying for the different missions in a stage and trying to improve on your letter grade rankings for ones I had to repeat wholesale. The presentation is pretty solid on the whole. The characters and graphics look as good as Sonic ever had on that generation, looking more polished like they did in Sonic Heroes but not nearly so cheap looking (at least most of the time), and the pre-rendered CGI cutscenes look great too. The music is also quite good again, having some really nice remixes of SA2 tracks and some really banging new vocal tracks. It's good enough I've seriously considered hunting down a physical version of the soundtrack XD. The game has some difficulty with its visual language from time to time (leading to some more maze-like levels or seeming dead-ends), but the NPC dialogue (whose repetition at times can get quite annoying) often points you in the direction of what to do so you never have to outright look up how to progress when it's in fact something really simple. In regards to the Japanese PS2 version I played, I have a few final comments. DO NOT play the PS2 version of this game or any other multi-platform Sonic game, because it is easily the worst versions of these games to play (as was so common for games of that generation). The game is capped at 30 FPS but still manages to chug in somewhat more crowded areas, and while it thankfully never seriously affects the gameplay, it's still really jarring and unpleasant to look at. The Japanese version of the game, on the other hand, is really nice. I had really wondered for previous Sonic Team USA games if they'd been written in English or Japanese first, but this game really confirmed for me that they're written in Japanese first. I had the Japanese audio but English subtitles (mostly for the convenience of viewers of my stream, but also for me), and the English translation is very often awkward in its syntax and overly simple in how it erases nuance in the original Japanese. It's not unforgivable or "so bad it's good" in English (any more than Sonic usually is, anyhow XD), but I definitely think the Japanese script communicates the story better, and I'm glad I played with it. Verdict: Recommended. When I first decided to play this game again, I didn't think there was any way I would give it more than a hesitantly recommended rating here, but as I played more missions, fought more bosses, and saw more of the story, it grew on me more and more. At this point, I'd even say it's outright better than Sonic Adventure 1. This game was certainly a product of its time: "linearity" was a four letter word in games criticism, people were OBSESSED with "replayability", and media in general was trending towards more edgy and serious stories. That said, I think it was really unfairly panned given how lauded the comparatively terribly Sonic Heroes was a couple years before. If you like 3D Sonic games (or really just the two Sonic Adventure games), I think it's absolutely a mistake to sleep on Shadow the Hedgehog if more gameplay like that is what you're after. It makes plenty of mistakes, sure, but its overall polish and quality should not be ignored for people who like 3D Sonic, and this is easily among the better 3D Sonic games in my book. It won't be one of my all-time favorite games or anything, but this will definitely go down as one of my favorite surprise enjoyments of the year. This is the last game on these Genesis collections that I played a fair bit of but never beat as a kid. It was certainly the Sonic game (other than 3D Blast) that I got farthest in as well, making it all the way to Robotnik before losing my last life against him immediately XP. I decided this would be another great entry for this month's TR of finishing games we failed to beat before, and managed to get to the end of it (mostly) without save states~ (I saved before Robotnik so I wouldn't need to fight Silver Sonic over and over if I wanted to try again XP). It took me a few hours to get through the English version of the game on the PS3 version of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection.
Sonic 2 is, of course, the sequel to Sonic 1, and brought a lot of things to the series that would become staples of the franchise. Tails is brought in as your player 2, bosses are now at the end of Act 2 instead of being their own stages, Robotnik's machines became more elaborate, and there were now 7 chaos emeralds instead of 6. There's also a new, different mini-game to collect those chaos emeralds, although I'm really not a fan of it compared to the mini-game in Sonic 3 (and I only ever managed to get 1 chaos emerald in this game and have no intention of going for more XP). The level design is tightened up significantly from the first game, with a much higher emphasis on going fast while carefully making your way through levels instead of the speed mixed with precision platforming that so defines Sonic's first adventure. Sonic 3 would go on to make exploration of levels a much larger aspect of the game's design, but I really don't care for that design much either. Between Sonic 1's awkward meshing of speed and not-so-great platforming and Sonic 3's massive maze-like stages that take at least 5 minutes each to complete, Sonic 2 is a great sweet spot for me of polish without sacrificing that quick gameplay pace. The game is also much more generous with extra lives and mid-level checkpoints than the first Sonic, and that goes the same for continues as well. It might not have the save system that Sonic 3 has, but Sonic 2 is a really good mid-point of reasonable challenge in its difficulty as well (for the most part). Sonic 2 isn't completely without fault though. I actually got a game over with my first run because Tails kept getting me killed so often, as he'd so frequently hit bosses or enemies right before I would that I'd end up having nothing to bounce off of and fall into the death pit below XP. Thankfully, you can turn off Tails in the options menu, but the options menu is fairly well hidden on the title screen ^^;. And if you're with a second person, Tails somewhat trivializes the difficulty of the game, as he is completely invincible. Your Player 2 can risk life and limb without fear of punishment fighting bosses or enemies while Sonic just hangs back and stays alive as best he can XD There are also a few more mean bits of the game where not knowing what to do in advance is definitely going to get you killed, and the biggest example of that is the final fight against Robotnik. There are no rings in the entire stage, and you need to fight the robotic Silver Sonic EVERY time you play the stage, so every time you want another chance at Robotnik, you gotta go through him first (whittling away your precious extra lives). It's a really unfortunate difficulty spike right at the tail end of a game that otherwise has a really nice difficulty curve throughout (even if some stages like Oil Ocean can drag on a bit too long at times). The presentation is fantastic, as is to be expected of a Sonic game on more or less any Sega console. 1992 is really when Sega's first party entries on the system started to kick into high gear, with games like Streets of Rage 2 making their predecessors released just a year before look like glorified Master System games, and Sonic 2 is in many ways no exception. It's a very pretty game full of beautiful sprites and great, memorable tracks. This era's Robotnik will always be my favorite aesthetically, and this game really helps bring him to life with little animations like his cowardly running and sinister laughing. It really helps bring the all around package together into something that feels much more than Sonic 1's more simple fare. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I'm still not a huge fan of 2D Sonic, but this is definitely a game I quite enjoy. I'll never like 2D Sonic as much as I like 2D Mario, but this is for sure the best 2D Sonic game of the Genesis days for my money. Quick speed, fair challenge, and more straightforward levels make this a really fun action platformer well worth your time if you're like me and somehow still haven't gotten around to playing through these games yet X3 A very cool inclusion on the Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, this is a game I've been meaning to get to for a very long time. Given that I played through Neutopia 1 and 2 earlier this year (and that I already had the PS3 hooked up), this seemed a good a time as any given that GAW, like Neutopia, is a pretty shameless clone of Zelda 1. It does have its own spins on the formula it brings to the table, but to paraphrase someone in the Slack chat, Sega were very content to rest on Nintendo's laurels ^^;. The game doesn't keep play time, but I reckon it took me around ten hours to beat with very heavy save state usage (for reasons we will get to later, oh don't you worry XD).
Long ago, a race of giants threatened to take over the world, but the mighty hero wielding the Golden Axe slew darn near all of them. But one, Death Adder, yet remains and has come back and conquered two kingdoms. The kingdom of Firewood (yes, really) is a peaceful nation protected by its nine sacred crystals, but one day a greedy minister sells the crystals to Death Adder and the country is quickly overrun by his armies. You play as the titular Golden Axe Warrior (whom you give a name to) in his quest to save Firewood and the world from Death Adder's reign of terror. There isn't really a meaningful story in the game, per se, but it does have a smattering of towns, named NPCs, and information givers who help you in your quest (using some of the best looking text I think I've ever seen on an 8-bit console). In grand old Zelda-clone fashion, you've gotta go to each of those 9 dungeons collecting each crystal gem and getting new items in each as well as exploring around the world map for more items as well. It has some pretty neat things over Zelda 1, but mainly its use of both a sword AND an axe as usable weapons, as well as a series of magic spells you can acquire, is the biggest leg-up this has over the game it takes so much from. It also incorporates things like towns and shops from Zelda 2 and such, so you can buy consumable items if you need them (although the main one that matters is the single full-heal you can buy). That said, I think GAW brings a lot more negative to the table than positive. While the dungeons are competently designed enough and the world map is big and varied, the biggest issue GAW has is its difficulty. The game's puzzles and cryptic clues for new items aren't quite as bad as Zelda 1's (save for the pretty dick move of being unable to upgrade any of your equipment in the hidden dwarf caves until you happen upon the ONE dwarf that you gotta help before any of the others), the game is very routinely difficult to a fault. I used save states a TON in this game because you are constantly being overwhelmed with very powerful enemies who can rush down your health really quick if you aren't suuuuuper careful and lucky. This is all down to a number of compounding factors. Your character is right-handed, so he actually sticks his sword out directly in front of him slightly to the right. His sword also isn't very thick, so it can be very tricky to hit things unless they're directly in front of you and to the right. The axe, by contrast, has a swinging motion allowing you to hit things in front of you and to the side, but it also has half the range of the sword, and this is a big problem when combined with how very fast both you and all the enemies move. Running around so fast that you bump into an enemy (especially the ones that need to be hit from only one side) is a very common experience, and a lot of the enemies in the game (particularly earlier ones) have AI that make them randomly bumble around. They don't go for you in particular, so trying to hunt them down with your too-fast running (which is made even faster halfway through the game) and short ranged weapons is a real pain to deal with in a game where health is such a scarce and valuable resource. This is further worsened by just how aggressive all the enemies are, how weak your weapons often are, and how many enemies you're usually fighting at once. Dungeons are not only full of rooms where killing the enemies MIGHT give you something you need to progress (but you have no idea if they do or not), but also rooms that are simply dead-ends full of enemies to beat you up. This extends to the bosses as well, with basically all of them across the board being various levels of miserable to fight for similar reasons (too fast, random AI, tons of health), with the red giant in particular being a really horrible slog of RNG and you've gotta fight him 3 times in the game. Death Adder, paradoxically enough, is actually one of the easiest boss fights in the game, and he took me 1 whole try with no save states to beat ^^;. I had to constantly use save states to have any hope of finishing this game in any reasonable length of time because it is just so constantly obsessed with spilling your blood in any way it can. The magic spells in the game are interesting, but ultimately repeat the mistake of bombs in the original Zelda in that they're not much use as a weapon because you need them for puzzles. The earth magic, one of the first ones you get, is needed to break destructible rocks, and these rocks very often are the triggers to unlock doors in dungeons. You need to kill enemies to replenish magic, so it's quite a precious resource you can't afford to waste. It's nice that you have magic and all, but you're really heavily discouraged from using it with how dangerous it is to fight enemies for more magic and how little magic you can afford to waste. The presentation of the game is adequate to quite good in many ways. It's quite funny seeing 8-bit, Zelda-ized versions of so many familiar Golden Axe enemies, and this is a very pretty Master System game. The text, as I mentioned earlier, is really really well detailed and they can fit a ton on screen at a time, and the sprite art too looks quite nice as well. Even down to the little speedy swishing of your character's feet below them (like a Peanuts character X3), this is a really nice looking 8-bit game (which you'd hope for one released when the Genesis was about to have its 3rd birthday). The music is pretty forgettable on the whole, but it's not actively bad or anything. It's very standard fantasy fare that sets the mood as well as it has to. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Though I certainly criticized far more than I praised in this review, there is still some fun to be had here. If you don't mind a much harder Zelda-like experience, this game might be right up your alley. Aside from the difficulty, it's a really well done Zelda clone, but because the difficulty IS there, it's at the bottom of the barrel of Zeldas or Zelda clones fo the 8-bit era. If you've got one of the collections it's on, it's certainly worth giving a look, but it's physical cart is a really pricey pick up, and I certainly can't recommend it at that price. This, like Gain Ground, was another favorite of mine on the PS2 Genesis Collection growing up that I'd never managed to beat. I could get to the final stage just barely, but could never beat the time constraints on it. I decided to take another crack at it because of this month's TR, and in a morning I wasn't even planning on finishing the game, I managed to beat it! :D . It took me around 40-50 minutes to play through the English version of the game.
Bonanza Bros. is about two brothers, one short and tall who wears red, and one short and round who wears blue, who wear sunglasses and steal objects of high value. There very well may be more story in the manual, but in the game itself that's all you really get. It's a simple (albeit clearly Blues Brothers-inspired) concept that works just great for an action game from 1990. You go to all sorts of exotic locations stealing the required items in each stage and then getting to the exit to escape in your zeppelin. The perspective of the game is sidescolling, but also somewhat like Super Mario Kart in that the game is always in split-screen even when you aren't doing co-op play. The map for the stage that shows where the objects you're collecting are are displayed on there, which makes it distinctly harder to know where to go in some of the harder stages if you have two people as the time requirements on those stages are really strict, and BOTH players need to make it to the end to win the level. That's not an issue playing single-player though. You can't just walk in and take the stuff though. There are tons of guards, cleaning staff, guard dogs, and bomb-throwing Bluto wannabees between you and your prize. Thankfully, you have a heckin' GUN to shoot 'em with! Unfortunately, all it does is briefly stun them, while their bullets/attacks kill you with one hit ^^;. The game takes place on two planes you can step back and forth between, and you need to step into the back drop to go around obstacles, hide behind walls, and go up staircases, and that second plane is often a more valuable way to tackle enemies than your gun could ever be. Escaping to another floor (so they'll give up the chase) or hiding until they've passed by (or turned their back so you can shoot them) is often far more efficient in taking care of enemies. However, you only have 3 minutes to complete each level, and your character walks pretty slowly (all the characters do). While you can instantly respawn (if you have lives remaining) if you're shot to death, a time up means you gotta restart the whole level. It makes for a very tense heist game with high risk/reward for if you wanna take your chances booking it past an enemy or if you wanna try and knock them out first. The presentation is, as a friend of mine put it, "like MegaBlox said ACAB" XD. Characters look a lot like, well, MegaBlox toys, with big, round, shapes plunked together for the characters and environments all packed with bright, Genesis-y colors. It has a lot of cute little touches as well though, like if you press up against a wall to hug against it, a fly will come and rest on your sunglasses and your character will smack it X3. The music is nothing super impressive, but it sets the atmosphere well enough. Verdict: Recommended. Like Gain Ground, this is a fairly simple and short game, but it's also very unique as far as games for the time go (I'd argue far more unique than Gain Ground in many ways). It's a gameplay loop that I adore, and it'll always be one of my favorite games on the system. The slow-ish paced heists won't be for everyone, but it's definitely worth checking out if you have one of the many compilations its on or happen to come across one of the (quite rare) physical carts~. This was a favorite of mine on the PS2 Genesis Collection when I was a kid, but I could never beat it. I'd even gotten good enough at it to get to the final boss without losing a single life, but I could just never beat that bugger. For this month's TR of returning to games you gave up on previously, I played this on my PS3 Genesis Collection and was finally able to put that lousy final boss in the ground (and on my first try, no less ^w^)! I already knew I could get to the end of the game with all the characters before, so that wasn't important to me (I used save states after levels to help me get to the final boss as stacked as possible X3). What I wanted to do was beat the final boss without save states, and that ended up being mission accomplished ^w^. It took me a couple hours to finish the game on my PS3.
Gain Ground takes place in the far flung future where humanity is so peaceful that the world government built a big simulation called Gain Ground to help people keep their fighting spirit. But one day, the super computer goes berserk and takes a bunch of citizens hostage, so it's up to three of humanity's bravest soldiers to go in and rescue everyone and shut down this rouge machine. I actually never really realized the game even had a story as a kid. The first time I learned about the story was when I was playing through the Gain Ground level in Project X Zone many years after the fact, and I had to look up the plot synopsis for this story bit here XD. That said, the plot isn't totally meaningless, as it leads into one of the most interesting bits of the game's design. Gain Ground is a top-down action game with 50 screens (in a very old-school arcade style). No scrolling levels here. Just a mission you need to either get all your soldiers to the EXIT of or kill all the enemies within. The nature of it being a simulation lends to the game's fairly unconventional system of lives. You don't really have extra lives, but instead have different soldiers (20 different kinds in total, with several copies of each in the game too), and when they're dead, you can't use them anymore. Except that you can! You only start the game with 3 soldiers, but little captured soldiers appear in predesignated places in each level, and if you touch one you can drag it to the exit to have it playable in the next level. You can only drag one at a time though, so sometimes you will need to use several characters who can both get to the POW they gotta rescue AND to the exit, which can be tricky in some maps, since the level ends if you kill everything. You MUST get the POW to the exit to have them in the next stage, but that also goes for characters who "die". If a character takes a hit, they turn into a little POW token that can be rescued. Granted, if someone who is rescuing dies, the POW they were rescuing is erased and they become a POW to rescue. You don't have infinite chances, but it's very refreshingly forgiving for a game from 1990. The characters themselves are all very different, albeit not balanced all that well. They all have a standard fire, which can shoot any direction and is often quite short range, but then everyone has their own special fire as well. Sometimes it can shoot in any direction, sometimes it gives you range across the entire screen, sometimes it can fire onto an upper level (a very very valuable skill, as many enemies hide on roofs safe from your normal bullets and most characters' special attacks), and sometimes they even take the form of a sort of shield of bullets. All the characters also have varying walk speeds and even different hands they hold their weapon in, meaning firing JUST around a corner with your default weapon may be easier with some characters than others depending on if they use their right or left hand. There's a lot of trial and error in figuring out exactly what each character can do and how good they are (but that's what save states are for XD), but it means that you need to constantly reassess how you're going to approach a stage if one of your MVPs gets taken down and has to be rescued. There are a couple characters who are like WAY better than most others (like the yellow bearded viking guy) as they have upwards-firing specials and area also very fast with good range, but well balanced or not, you'll need those soldiers if you wanna have a chance at seeing the end of the game. The game's presentation is pretty underwhelming, as one might expect from an arcade conversion fairly early in the Genesis' life. There aren't many songs and those that are here are pretty forgettable background noise for the most part, but they aren't actively bad. The graphics are quite nice though, with the character portraits being nicely detailed, and the bullets and sprites always being very clear so there's very rarely any ambiguity for what killed you. Verdict: Recommended. I'll admit a decent portion of it is nostalgia coupled with this being a sort of action game that fits my style very well, but this is one of my favorite Genesis games. It's not terribly long (and it's quite an expensive game if you're hunting down the physical cart), but it's really good fun. The gameplay won't be for everyone, but it's well worth a try if you have one of the many Genesis collections its found its way onto over the years. |
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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
April 2024
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