I first saw this game in Japan well over a year ago when scoping out the ones close to where I live. At first, I was utterly shocked that it even got a Japanese release, and was then lowkey dying to know if there was a Japanese dub in it. It took me another 17 or so months before I finally threw down the 300 whole yen to buy the thing (and be disappointed by its lack of a Japanese dub), but now I've played through it as well. It's not a terribly long game, and it took me around 6 hours to beat it on normal mode.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is, as the story goes, a game that was nearly finished before the 50 Cent name was slapped on it. While that may be totally unrelated to how the narrative plays out, the narrative is still as delightfully strange as it is simple. 50 Cent is doing a concert in the Middle East and after the show, when he goes to collect his 10 million bucks payment, the guy who owes it to him can't pay up because all his cash was stolen by gangsters. And not just any gangsters. SUPER bad tough gangsters. Instead, after some threatening from 50 Cent, he gives 50 Cent a priceless diamond-encrusted skull. That skull is shortly thereafter stolen by said SUPER gangs, and 50 goes on a quest to kill as many gangsters as he can to get his skull back. While it is easy to dismiss the story as part of the never ending slew of post-Bush era modern military shooters, which it also definitely is part of, there is a certain beauty to just how 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand's story plays out. As an ego piece for 50 Cent, it is a quite genuinely fascinating look at just what an absolute bad ass he supposedly thinks of himself as despite being such an obviously terrible and amazingly petty person. There is a kind of Tommy Wiseau-esque charm to just how sincerely 50 Cent is portrayed in this, from how basically the entire soundtrack is his own music to even down to how you have a dedicated swearing button you can use to get more points when you kill an enemy. While I certainly wouldn't call the story good by any means, it is endlessly fascinating on many levels to me, and I kind of love it for that XD The gameplay is a pretty solid co-op cover shooter, and that's really all there is to it. There's a point system, which is pretty neat for a shooter released within the last decade, and there are mid-stage mini-missions you can do within a certain amount of time for extra points, grenades, and super explodey bullets. You also get more points for quickly chaining together kills. There's money you can collect from fallen enemies and from boxes around the stages, but from the point system to the money collecting from enemies, the game really emphasizes a speedy and aggressive approach to combat, which is pretty fun~. You can use the money in stages to buy more taunts to throw with your dedicated swearing button, more animations for your QTE up-close melee kills, and of course more and bigger guns. It's not setting the world on fire, sure, but between the license and how well put together the game is generally, it's a cool way to mix up the giant bag of modern military shooters that inundate last gen's library. The presentation is equal parts fascinating (as explained earlier) and grating. The game looks graphically alright for the time, but some of the character models look a little odd in cutscenes. The main female protagonist looks especially broken, and I'd even go as far as to say that her motion capture data was borked and they just had to go forward with what they had regardless XP. The soundtrack being basically entirely 50 Cent's music is kinda soul-draining given the game's 5+ hour runtime, as it really removes any kind of musical pacing to the action and it makes the game feel even more like "distilled video game with 50 Cent added" than it already is. I can't really comment on the quality of the hip hop, it not being a genre I have any familiar with, but I did get a huge belly laugh when I heard one of the songs rhyme "nickname" with "dick game" XD As far as the Japanese version of the game is concerned, it's a really half-assed localization, and that also kinda adds to the charm for me. There's no dub, sure, but there ARE subtitles, and those subtitles are absolutely hilarious in just how little they capture anything unique about how 50 Cent & co talk. Sure, it's' plenty hilarious the first time you see a subtitle say "Fifty-san" or "Cent-san" (translating "Mr. Fifty" or "Mr. Cent"), but just how much of a normal irritated guy the subs make him sound is just so funny to me. I know Japanese doesn't really have swears like most languages, but just how toned down all the "motherfucker"-esque lines that 50 spits are add so much to the oddball charm of this game that I'm still sorta surprised at how well that enhances the overall experience XD Verdict: Recommended. You can probably find this game for pretty cheap these days, and if you want a pretty solid third person shooter with a pretty damn odd theme, this is a really good fit. To yet again use a phrase I say a lot, it's not setting anyone's world on fire, but the odd theme and competent gameplay mesh together to make something quite memorable.
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Back in March, a close friend of mine played through most of NeverDead on stream. He didn't have a great time, but me and his Twitch community made it into a meme that we still use all the time. This being the case, I thought it was my duty to play through the game myself someday as a rite of passage ;b. I really wanted to stream the game myself when I did it, and I finally got a capture card that could properly do that the other day, so this weekend's stream was NeverDead~. I played through half the game on stream and then the other half on my own time (streamed privately to my friends on Discord). I played the Japanese version of the game in basically one sitting over the course of 7.5 hours.
NeverDead is the story of Bryce Boltzman who, as the title describes, cannot die. He was a demon hunter 500 years ago, but the king of demons killed Bryce's sorcerer wife and made Bryce himself immortal as a punishment for daring to stand against him. Now it's modern day, and Bryce has still been hunting demons to get by. He's a jaded, womanizing, one liner-spitting jerk who works for the National Anti Demon Agency (NADA) with his partner Arcadia. Only one day, they come across a case that keeps escalating and escalating until the fate of the world hangs in the balance, and Bryce seems like he'll have a chance for revenge on the king of demons after all. Narratively, NeverDead really isn't a game with a whole lot to say. Bryce is never anything much more than a selfish jerk, although he does do some selfless acts throughout the game. He's definitely either a character you'll hate or somewhat love because of just what an unashamed jerk he is XD. I played the game in Japanese, and the Japanese voice cast and English voice casts are about the same, all except for the demon Sangria who is 10000% better in English. He has a campy Southern drawl and he also dresses SUPER camp, and his theme is easily the best song in the game. He utterly steals every scene he's in, and he's amazing XD. NeverDead REALLY clearly wants to be Konami's Devil May Cry with Bryce as its Dante, and it just doesn't quite work ^^;. It's not awful, but it's not gonna change anyone's life. It's just another part of what makes NeverDead, as my friend puts it, "an eminently playable game." Gameplay-wise, NeverDead is nine stages of action gameplay (with mercifully almost no platforming at all). But of course, it's all wrapped around the main gimmick of being unable to die, so you have no health bar. Instead, when you take enough damage (and this is entirely up to the game, so it can feel quite arbitrary at times), Bryce will lose that body part. If you still have your torso, you can dodge roll over your limbs to have them sucked back to you, but if you're just a head, you need to find your way back to your neck stump to get your body back (you can't just touch the body anywhere). You can also find a powerup lying around the stages or just wait long enough and the bar in the lower right will fill up, and then you can just pop a new body or regrow your missing limbs out of their stumps and you're good as new~. It's an intriguing mechanic, and being a head able to pick up (but not do anything really with) all four of your limbs and floppily roll around with them is hilarious, but I'm not sure it's ever used to all that much effect, good or bad. Even though Bryce can't die, there is still a fail state mechanic in the game, of course. This comes in the form of the ever present, rolly-polly Grand Baby enemies that come in twos in every combat encounter and will respawn infinitely. If there's a limb you dropped, they'll suck it in like Kirby and run off with it (you can even keep firing your gun and it'll fire using the arm they've taken XD). However, if they get your head, you need to win a mini-game to not die. If you do the timing correctly, it launches you out and you're back to trying to get back to your body, but if you fail, that's it. You've gotta load a checkpoint. Winning the mini-game isn't THAT hard, but it can be finicky, and that one timing mini-game being all that separates you from continuing can be pretty annoying. I don't think the game is all that hard, and the game is pretty good about checkpoints and load times, but it's still one of the biggest irritators with the game. The Grand Babys themselves are actually pretty cool as far as enemies go, as they're actually tiny rolling bombs. If you smack them away with your sword, they'll impact and detonate on whatever they hit, with a much bigger blast if they're on fire. Granted, those blasts can also hurt you, but it's a neat way the game gives you to deal with some more annoying enemies. As far as the combat itself goes, Bryce has both his butterfly blade sword and guns, and you can swap between them with the triangle button. He is always wielding two guns at once, and a cool thing throughout the game is that you can find hidden extra guns to allow you to dual wield some of the nicer ones instead of just using two different ones (which also works nice). You can even find upgrades to your butterfly blade. Your sword works by holding down L1 to enter an attacking stance, locking the camera in front of you/to your target, and then you slash the right stick in a direction that you want to swing the sword. It's almost like Skyward Sword's motion controls but bound to a button. That said, this directional sword swinging is never used for any real gameplay benefit. There aren't puzzles based around it, and not even really enemies who you need to all that methodically fight by tactically slashing. I would just spin the right stick when I was in sword mode and go to town on stuff, which I thought was fun enough XD. One last purely combat-focused aspect the game was quite proud of during its development was its destructible environments. While fighting, you and your enemies can blow big chunks out of furniture, the walls, and even the floors, and if it falls on stuff it'll hurt them. It's not something the game really pushes to the point where it's a defining aspect of the gameplay, but its present enough that it was something I was always looking for when a tough enemy spawner happened to show up. It varies up the combat enough to matter, for sure, but it ain't exactly writing any new books on game design. The game also has an XP system where you get XP for getting collectibles in stages as well as for just killing enemies, and you can use that to buy passive abilities to equip at any time via the pause menu. These can be anything from just stronger gun or sword power to something like adding a new mechanic like being able to remotely detonate thrown limbs. The thing is, I really only ever found going ham on stuff with my sword as reasonably effective in a fight. Guns COULD be okay, but you generally wanted to save your bullets (especially in your good guns) for bosses (who are by and large pretty or entirely resistant to sword swings because of how quickly they break you apart when you get close). You get plenty of XP to buy more abilities, but you can equip quite few at a time, and going into your inventory to swap them out is a pretty clunky experience. The ability system is neat and has some cool aspects to it, but overall it feels like the most half-baked of NeverDead's mechanical arsenal. Presentation-wise, it has a very Darksiders sort of "colorful post-apocalypse" vibe going on to it. It doesn't look terrible on the PS3, but it has no shortage of screen tearing, and you can also hit some pretty decent framerate dips if there's a LOT going on, but they never affected gameplay that meaningfully for me. There aren't a ton of enemy types, but what's here is fine for the 7-8 hours you'll spend with the game. The main theme for the game was written by MegaDeath, and is kinda very funny (it feels like it'd be in a 3D Sonic game or something XD), but the game's instrumentals that play during battle are on the whole pretty good. There are a couple tracks like Sangria's that are really stand-out excellent, but for the most part it's just fun butt-rock that's a nice back drop to monster killing. Verdict: Recommended. I'm really torn on how much to recommend this game, because for as much as I enjoyed playing it, NeverDead reviewed and sold poorly for a reason. It's not a game really "for" anyone in particular. It's a decent action game without any really compelling hooks, it's got a really forgettable multiplayer mode online (now defunct, I believe), and the story is just whatever. It's great for the used bargin bin these days, but I have a very easy time understanding while people were very underwhelmed by it back when it first came out in 2012. Given what a good time I had playing it and my friends had watching it, I'm gonna give it a recommended verdict here. While it's not gonna set anyone's world on fire, it's a pretty fun way to spend a Sunday with a game you spent five bucks on. After quite enjoying the first Drakengard last month, I rushed out to pick up the second one. I took a little while getting through it, but here I am 23.5 playtime hours later at the end and all I can really say is that I understand why this game is all around ranked lower on numbered scores than the first game is XP. I played through the Japanese version of the game on normal mode. I only got one ending, but I will still be getting fairly into plot spoilers for this review as they don't matter all that much.
Drakengard 2 takes place (kinda) after ending A of Drakengard 1, the ending where you arguably saved the world and put a new seal in place to replace the old one that was lost. 18 years have passed since then, and a new Knights of the Seal have been established to protect the various magical seals placed around the world that prevent the final seal from being awakened in the first place. You play as Nowe, a young man newly admitted to the ranks of the Knights of the Seal, but he's special: He was raised by a dragon. Very specifically, he was raised by the black dragon Inuart had in the last game, and this story follows him on his quest to save the world. The production of Drakengard 2 virtually didn't involve the original game's director Yoko Taro at all. As a result, the game we get here has a narrative far more mainstream and typical of a Japanese-developed fantasy game in the early-mid 2000's. This MAY be the story of Nowe, but it's really more like the story of Mana, the bewitched antagonistic little girl from the first game who is now all grown up. The game doesn't have all that many returning characters (not that there were all that many to return in the first place), but most characters act fairly to very illogically compared to how you'd expect them to act given their characterizations in the first game. Even Yoko Taro acknowledges this, as the story was later retconned canonically to fit along the Ending A to alternate events of Drakengard 1, as it so poorly reflects the world that game set up (even if you were going to set the canon ending as Ending A). The pacing of the game is all over the place with how it builds up to things, and the game is FLUSH with padding (as we'll get to more later), but it really feels like the game has like 3 or 4 climaxes one after another rather than one logical build towards a conclusion. Additionally, the way the game deals with its messaging in both Mana's psychological trauma as well as Nowe's relation to the dragon that raised him are both really hamfisted and clumsily done. They carry some ultimately really toxic notions about what mental illness is as well as the ideal relationship of a parent to their child. Drakengard 2's narrative isn't just nowhere near as daring in how it approaches the nature of storytelling in games, but it also isn't even very well told for an early/mid-2000's fantasy game. The gameplay of Drakengard 2 can be most easily described as an effort to take the "Musou + Ace Combat + Fantasy RPG" ideas that were presented in the first game and make them work better in a more typical action game's format. They fix the camera in the ground sections (thank heck) to work like a normal 3D camera instead of the aerial and ground sections sharing their flight sim-esque "looking to each side of you temporarily" nonsense the first game has. They also make the acquisition of weapons less difficult and also make them far more immediately useful with a genuine gear curve this time around. They also make use of magic more intuitive, add more characters (different characters use different weapons instead of the main character being able to use all of them), add consumable items, a shop system, and even passive items you can equip. Unfortunately, many of the other additions and changes since the first Drakengard do not actually enhance the experience of the game, and in many cases the attempts to make the game more complex cause far more harm than good. The biggest issues the game has can be summed up by saying that the game frequently think the systems it has are far better than they actually are, so you almost always feel woefully unequipped for the task at hand. You're more maneuverable in the air, so they made flying enemies nimble and burly enough to the point where most air combats are a grueling fight for your life just hoping that you aren't suddenly taken out by something you couldn't've seen coming. They made ground combat a bit more technical so you're constantly being overwhelmed by hordes of enemies who are constantly staggering you and shaving off HUGE chunks of your HP. Even once I realized the game had a mid-air recovery mechanic by pressing block in mid-air when you're being juggled, just how quickly enemies can take a swing at your (especially when they enter an unstaggerable stance) caused me more pain than I could've reasonably mitigated. Then take into account that the aerial lock-on camera control is worse than useless, and you somehow still have no lock-on method for ground combat, and you have a game where simply keeping your enemy in view so you can even try to hit it is one of the most difficult combat challenges you face. The game's new characters are somewhat meant to mitigate that difficulty because of their extra health bars and natural strengths and weaknesses to certain enemy types, but the narrative so often takes these characters away from you that it is quite uncommonly any help at all. The characters and their weapons also all have different stats and levels, and they only get experience points when they fight, so you're both encouraged to use them all but also dissuaded from branching off too much because otherwise your overall power might be too weak to combat whatever you're gonna go up against next. The characters DO have different stat lines, like being better in magic or physical strength, but it's not like they can share weapons or anything, and it's also not really like enemies have obvious weaknesses to physical or magical attacks, so the differences between the playable characters doesn't really amount to much more than cosmetics at the end of the day. The game's difficulty curve is all over the place, with several really mean enemy types (such as the gorgons in the air and the skeletons on the ground) appearing throughout the game but feeling like they have the difficulty of late-game enemies. This is all made even worse by the fact that your characters may not share health but they also have relatively small health bars, and these levels regularly take 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Especially if you're trying to get the weapons hidden in these levels (and you will, because you'll need that extra power more often than not), you'll wanna stick your neck out in more dangerous situations, but that just leads to a LOT of time being taken up replaying long levels that have no checkpoints. You also can't replay story missions until you beat the game once, so if you want those weapons, you either gotta get 'em NOW, leave them to rot, or go grind on the (weirdly quite difficult) free play missions until you're strong enough to get them. This game also not only has narrative padding but tons of mechanical padding too, taking you back to the same stages over and over for some new contrived narrative reason, and having to slog through those same stages (even with sometimes different enemies) gets old fast. At the very least the game keeps the XP you've gained for your characters (who don't share levels) and weapons (which now level on XP rather than number of kills), but it's a small consolation with how small those stat increases often are compared to the peril you're up against. Honestly, the addition of the consumable items you can use mid-stage feel more like an admission that the game is far too often unfairly difficult rather than an option for you to utilize mid-fight. The presentation is generally a step up graphically, but not artistically. The enemy and character design is graphically prettier than the first game, sure, but their designs are far more standard and boring. The new characters especially look by and large like they were pulled from some scrapped Final Fantasy project, with Nowe in particular looking like a dead ringer for Tidus. The music also may be more listenable than the first game's, but it's more often than not just boring and forgettable, with only one track (the one that plays in the first mission of chapter 11) really catching my ear at all. Verdict: Not Recommended. Drakengard 2 is very much an exercise in completely failing to appreciate what made the things in Drakengard 1 work the way they did. From the combat misunderstanding that sometimes complex is not actually better to the narrative both being more typical and worse told, it's a significant step down from the first game in just about every way. While there are certainly aspects of it that have promise, it just can't deliver on its best ideas and winds up being bad or simply mediocre at everything its trying to improve on from the first game. Even if you're a fan of Yoko Taro's work and wanna see this as a curiosity, I think your time (not to mention money, looking at the price of an English copy of this) is likely better spent watching a synopsis video rather than putting yourself through the frustration of playing it yourself. This was a game I rented as a kid but never ended up beating all the way. I beat a couple of the campaigns, but could never finish the other two (let alone get all the Chaos Emeralds. Heck I don't know if I realized those existed in the first place XP). This and my trend lately of playing old 3D Sonic games made it seem like a perfect fit to save for this month's TR of Games Not Beaten. I was only going to try and go for the true ending if getting the Chaos Emeralds seemed doable, and the answer to that turned out to be yes! It took me around 12.5 hours to beat all four campaigns and collect all the Chaos Emeralds to beat the true ending of the Japanese version of the game.
The story this time around is way more simple than the previous two games, but it follows four teams of heroes all going along their own journeys (sort of). Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles of Team Sonic get a letter from Eggman saying he's gonna conquer the world in three days so they need to stop him. Amy, Cream, and Big of Team Rose are trying to find Chocola the Chao and Froggy. Shadow, Rouge, and a new character Omega the robot of Team Dark are trying to stop Eggman as well. Finally, Vector, Charmy, and Espio of Team Chaotix are following instructions from their mysterious employer towards a goal that also happens to be on the Egg Carrier. There are a few cutscenes and voice lines throughout the game, but it's ultimately very fluffy and light on any content at all. They were aiming for something closer to the Genesis games in tone, and they achieved it. That said, I would argue it is all around worse because of that pursuit. The first two Sonic Adventure games aren't high art by any means, but their stories do lead up well to their final epic conclusions, and certain characters even have reasonable or somewhat thought provoking arcs. It's not a high bar of storytelling, sure, but it suits each game's purpose well enough. Sonic Heroes uses Metal Sonic as a secret antagonist who has kidnapped Eggman and has orchestrated the whole game, but he's barely in the story at all before the final ending other than a few brief, looming appearances. The absence of any meaningful interaction between the four teams on top of Metal Sonic's sudden introduction at the end of the story make the big team up to his fight in the final route hit really flat and make for a very unengaging final confrontation. Mechanically, the game has some interesting design choices but they don't really go all that far with them. The four teams each have three characters whom you can switch between at any time. A speed character, a flying character, and a power character. They try to diversify how the teams play a little bit (Knuckles and Omega follow one archetype while Big and Vector follow another, Espio and Amy can't ring dash but Sonic and Shadow can), but it doesn't really make that much of a difference. The bigger difference is in how each of their campaigns are designed, with Team Rose being easy mode, Team Sonic being normal mode, Team Dark being hard mode, and Team Chaotix having levels more structured around missions rather than simply getting to the end of the stage. The team aspect feels not terribly well developed, and a lot of that is due to the stages themselves rather than the mechanics of any one team in particular. The level design is one of the spots where the game suffers greatest mechanically. Unlike Sonic Adventure 1 where characters had different enough objectives and play styles that going through the same stages that the repeated levels didn't feel THAT similar, or Sonic Adventure 2 where everything was outright individual levels with extra missions afterwards, Sonic Heroes has four teams playing through 14 very similar levels. There are some minor changes for difficulty, like how Team Rose's levels are roughly half the length of the others, and Team Sonic and Dark have respectively progressing difficulty of enemy placement, platform placement, and number of checkpoints, but on the whole it reallly does feel like playing through the same game four times. While each level only has one extra mission as opposed to SA2's four extra missions, given how similar the four campaigns are to one another, it feels a lot more like Sonic Heroes has 14 total stages with each having like 7 extra mission to be done in it. As if the game didn't feel padded or unpolished enough, a lot of the fundamentals of the level design feel really sloppy. While the characters themselves play just fine, and the first couple levels show off the different routes available to the speed, flying, and power playstyles pretty well, after that the slightly different routes through levels rapidly start disappearing and you're left with levels focused around gimmicks that range from decent (like the jungle stages) to annoying and awful (like the canyon stages). There are even tons of telegraphed auto-running segments that lead you into hits or even instant death pits you couldn't've seen coming. Then take into account that you're playing through all of that annoying frustration at least four times and you have for a game whose padding is downright exhausting. Even the final battle takes place in a floating environment with no textures on the invisible walls or floor to help get your bearings, so even if you give a dang about fighting Metal Sonic, you're gonna have a fairly vexing time doing so. The presentation is a bit of a mixed bag. The CGI cutscenes look a bit weird in how they're animated, but that's likely due to them making what was effectively the first multi-platform Sonic game (at least the first multi-plat from conception, Sonic game). The character models look a lot sharper and crisper than previous games, likely due to them being developed to work on a GameCube or Xbox rather than the Dreamcast, but they also feel a lot more flat and boring. How much of that is down to the almost total lack of a narrative and how much of that is due to the actual artistry present is up for debate, but at any rate I certainly prefer the style of the older games over this one. Even the music is pretty darn subpar, with only the main theme and final-final boss theme really being notable at all, and the rest of the instrumental and even vocal tracks being pretty forgettable. Verdict: Not Recommended. I had remembered this game being not as good as SA2, but not THAT bad, but I had my memory proven very wrong. This game isn't nearly as embarrassingly unfinished-feeling as something like Sonic '06, but it's not that far away and was very much a sign of things to come for the series. What was also a sign of things to come was the very idea that was the conception of this game: They weren't making a sequel to Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, they were making a 3D throwback to the Genesis games. Sonic had never been all that comfortable in 3D, and Sega so quickly deciding to look back rather than forward for ideas on how to make Sonic work makes it pretty clear why his 3D games have the poor reputation they frankly largely deserve. Sega's unwillingness to iterate began all the way back in 2003 and it haunts them all the way to today, really. Even if you like 3D Sonic games, you're way better off just looking up the Sonic Heroes theme and What I'm Made Of on Youtube and giving the game itself a pass, because there is very little fun to be found here. This is a game I got for free via the My Nintendo service aaaages ago (like, 8 years, according to my 3DS' time log XD) back when they still did gold points for games from time to time. I've had it sitting half-finished in my 3DS for ages, and after doing Super Mario's Picross a few weeks back, I figured why not go through and finally finish this off as well. It took me a total of 38 hours, according to my activity log, to beat all(?) 256 puzzles in the game.
Mario's Picross is one of Nintendo's first attempts to get Picross popular outside of Japan, and it didn't really catch on. That said, it's still a fine Picross game. It has 264 puzzles of 5x5, 10x10, and 15x15 sizes. 64 are beginner "Easy" Picross, then there's the larger and more difficult Mushroom and Star rank puzzles of which there are 64 each. These are standard puzzles where you have a 30 minute time limit and errors are corrected and subtract from your time. Then, when you beat all of those three sets, you unlock Time Trial mode. Time Trial mode has you playing without error corrections and no time limit (like Wario's puzzles in the Super Famicom game), but with a bit of a twist. There is no level select for Time Trial mode. You just get another selected puzzle from the set of 64. I actually wasn't counting, and there's no way to know if you've actually done them all, but I played a LOT of time trial mode and eventually the puzzles started repeating, so I assume I've beaten them all? XD . At any rate, they very confusingly rank your best times against one another and you can enter your initials, which is pretty weird given some of those puzzles are much easier than others, so ranking the times against each other has no real point, but the random assortment (picked from the list of 64 of ones you haven't done yet) does give this a good deal of replayability if it's all you've got for a long car ride. The downsides of this really come down to its age and its platform. For starters, the most obvious problem is that this is still in the age before the numbers you'd filled in were filled out automatically. What's even worse is that unlike the Super Famicom game, you can't even cross out those numbers yourself, so it's all counting in your head. Given that the biggest puzzles are 15x15, that isn't SUCH a huge problem, but it's still a pain. Then beyond that the limitation of the GameBoy's resolution meaning 15x15 is as big as the puzzles get is a little disappointing, but it's not a really big deal, and it helps the games go faster too. The presentation is fine. There are a good assortment of puzzles of Mario things as well as all sorts of other objects (from the Grim Reaper to a Mario Mushroom to even a sake jug with the kanji for "sake" written on the side XD). There are no animations on the finished puzzles like the Super Famicom game, but that's really to be expected. The music is also not amazing and really forgettable, but it's Picross, so you could really always put on your own music or a podcast these days. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. The lack of QoL features compared to more modern Picross games makes this more of a difficult game to recommend than the SFC game. It's a good puzzle game for the GameBoy, but you're probably better off just going with a more modern Picross game given how cheap they are on the Switch (or even on your phone) compared to what you'll have to pay for this game. It's not a bad game, but age and the popularity of Picross haven't been very kind to this otherwise quite solid entry in digital puzzledom. |
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