Mario 3 is a game I’ve played a ton of across various methods and platforms, but I’d never gotten around to enjoying the e-Reader exclusive content that the GBA port got until now. It had always been on my Wii U eShop wish list, as that version came bundled with all of the e-Reader content as well, but I just never got around to it. But now that it’s a part of the Switch Online GBA service, it felt like the perfect time to give it a try~. It took me probably about 7 or 8 hours in total to play through all the levels via the Japanese version, collecting all of the A and e+ coins as Mario with heavy save state and rewind use.
There isn’t really any story to this, being that it was just extra levels distributed via e-Reader cards that you could feed into your Super Mario Advance 4 game. It’s just a bunch of levels that you can play in any order if you so choose that is completely separate from the normal Mario 3 content in SMA4. The levels have a very Mario Maker feel to them, despite being put together so many years before Mario Maker was created. Using mechanics, enemies, and even power ups from Super Mario Bros. 1 all the way to Yoshi’s Island, this does a really cool job of making a ton of totally unique mechanics and animations to SMB3. If only it were any fun ^^; That’s honestly the biggest problem with World e+, as the game calls it. They’re special challenge levels, sure, but they have such a different design philosophy behind them, you can tell that they were made in a totally different design environment from the normal SMB3 levels. Lacking any checkpoints (as this IS SMB3, after all), it just feels mean an not fun as you trudge your way to the same nearly impossible jump again and again or comb over levels again and again looking for that one A coin or extra collectible you missed. Sure, going for the collectibles makes them even harder, but given how many of the stages are mazes of some kind, going for all of them seems like a pretty clear intention of its design to me. I cannot imagine how frustrating this must’ve been on an original GBA with no save states or rewinds, because good gods are so many of these levels overly demanding and unfair towards the player. It’s not quite the hardest Kaizo Mario hacks you’ve ever seen in terms of difficulty, but it’s certainly close enough to that that it’ll keep you from having much fun a lot of the time. The presentation is very SMA4, but the new bespoke assets (like how Mario uses the cape from Mario World but as his SMB3 self) do look very nice and pretty. Other than the cape, though, most assets haven’t had new versions made. They’ve just had the sprite imported wholesale, so there’s not a ton of visual cohesion between SMA4 and, for example, the little blue penguin fellas from Yoshi’s Island you run into. The music is good, but it’s just all stuff originally from SMB3 anyhow, so nothing really special to report on that front. Verdict: Not Recommended. I said it best when I said it earlier: This game mode just fails to be much fun. The comparison to Mario Maker earlier was absolutely every bit as much praise for the concept as it was criticism of the design. It’s not literally unplayable, but it’ll certainly make you wish you were playing a different, better Mario game (like Mario 3!) a lot of the time you’re playing it. I’m glad I didn’t actually pay money for this, as I would’ve ended up feeling quite cheated at the quality of these levels. They’re something neat to check out if you’ve already got the Switch Online’s Expansion Pak service, but your time is ultimately better spent elsewhere with other platformers.
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This is a game I got in some PC games bundle of some kind forever ago. I couldn’t even try to remember which one if I wanted to. But recently a friend of mine got gifted it from a friend of theirs (who very possibly got it from the same place I got it and just still had a key kicking around XD), and she asked me if I would be willing to play through it on stream with her. Both loving streaming with friends and having no idea what this game was (and confusing it with Max Payne for like 2.5 weeks before we actually streamed it XD), I of course agreed~. We played through it in co-op on stream over the course of about 3.5 hours. We played the PC version of it through Steam in English on easy mode.
Kane & Lynch 2 is a sequel to the first game, but that’s a game I have never played and only know the story of via reading the wiki entry. From what I’ve been able to gather, though, this game seems to treat the ending of the last game with some ambiguity. Lynch is living in Shanghai with his girlfriend, and despite how badly their last job together was, Lynch needs Kane’s help for one last weapons deal. Kane really needs the money, so he agrees. Everything goes from bad to worse really fast when a shootout ends up killing the daughter of a powerful gang kingpin, and Kane & Lynch need to wheel, deal, and shoot their way out of the massive sea of shit they’ve landed themselves in. Narratively, K&L2 wants to be something like an edgy, late-2000’s thriller/action movie, but it has none of the writing competence to actually pull that off. Sure, it’s got nudity, sex, torture, racism, but it’s not remotely trying to say *anything* with any of it. It’s just doing it to be shocking because it knows that that’s what edgy, serious dramas do. Both Kane and Lynch just have virtually nothing to their characters, and the story is more so just a sequence of events happening until its over. I’ve read that the devs say the poor quality of some things is intentional, but if they’re telling the truth, they’ve done a terrible job of it. There’s not enough substance here to be remotely called satire or parody of anything. Satire requires clarity of purpose, but I’m not even sure what they’d be trying to be parodying with the quite racist, sexist, vapid action movie they’ve turned into a game. Nothing drove home to me more that the writers simply have no idea what they’re doing than the ending. If they wanted to steal a note from something like the Sopranos or tons of other famous “men wrapped up in organized crime” stories, then the obvious place to end the story is at the end of the penultimate level. When Lynch has just let his feelings get in the way of business, and robbed them of their one tiny chance out of all of this hell. That would’ve been the classy time to cut to black. But instead, we get a whole other level before the credits where they make a very underwhelming escape through an airport and just take off after forcing their way onto a plane. They actually *do* escape, which does a hell of a lot to undermine the more obvious possible takeaway from the story, that being “there’s no easy way out of it for men who live their lives like K&L do”. K&L2’s story puts them through the pace of an action movie that would’ve felt generic 20 years earlier well enough, but it’ll leave you as quickly as it comes. While it’s a story that may unintentionally say some things about the culture and development environment that made it, K&L2 as a narrative isn’t trying to actually say anything, which makes it pretty boring to do anything but make fun of. Something else that makes the game pretty boring outside of making fun of it is the mechanics. Even for the inundation of cover shooters we got after Gears of War, this is a VERY underwhelming one. I’m not even particularly a fan of the genre, and that was still something super easy to see. Guns feel terrible to use and have no kick or impact at all. It’s difficult to even see if you’re hitting the enemies in front of you the animations and player feedback are so poor. You have regenerating health and can take cover behind all sorts of things. You can only carry two guns at a time, but that hardly matters much when they all feel so awful to use. Level design is also extremely linear with no secrets or optional paths/routes to speak of, so it’s almost literally a “corridor shooter” in many regards most of the time. The camera is also TERRIBLE and hella nauseating, especially when you sprint. One viewer of the stream described it as “a camera dangled on the end of a slinky from a helicopter”, and I think that fits the bill pretty well. That’s another very deliberate-feeling choice, and they certainly succeeded well in making an awful camera, so good on them, I guess. It may be a factor that we were playing on easy, but the enemy AI was extremely unintelligent. A very winning strategy we found worked a *lot* was that the AI tended to laser-focus on to the first person they spotted, so one person running forward and getting all of their aggro can allow the other player to run forward past them, completely worry-free of enemy fire, as they take them out by just walking around their cover. And that leads me to another thing: For a game with “[Guy] and [Other Guy]” in its naming scheme, it’s a pretty crappy co-op game. This felt much more like a single-player game with a tacked-on co-op mode than a game made for co-op. When your buddy gets down, you have mere seconds to go get them up before they die and you get sent back to a checkpoint. The players also don’t look distinct enough to keep you from firing upon your buddy. We both spent some time playing as each character, and while Lynch is pretty distinct looking with his very balding head and long hair in the back, Kane just looks like a guy in a suit. There we tons of times the Lynch player fired upon Kane because they just thought he was an enemy because he looks so much like the guys you’re fighting against. It’s a problem with the uninspired/bad level design as well, but even the handful of times they split you up, it feels very perfunctory. One player has to fight a ton of enemies while the other guy gives supporting fire from far-ish away, at least until that other guy giving support gets ambushed and killed by enemies out of nowhere with powerful shotguns. The presentation of the game isn’t terribly nice either. Granted, this is one thing in particular the devs say is intentional of the things that people say are bad about the game. The game is very grey-scale and drab looking, and the human models look like downright hideous playdough people (although I think the latter element of that is due to the game being a PS3 game from 2010 than anything else). Like I said earlier, I don’t think they really use this bad stuff they did “on purpose” to any meaningful effect, but I’ll give them an A for effort that they did make a game that looks quite unpleasant. The music is entirely atmospheric and forgettable. The voice direction is also just okay, but they don’t have a ton to work with, so I’d say the VA do a fine job. Sure, they got guys to actually speak Chinese for the Chinese soldiers you’re fighting, but there’s also some very sloppy voice direction work with things like how Kane and Lynch say some names. At one point, one guy tells you the crime boss you’re fighting is named Shansi (pronounced more like /shang suh/), but both Kane and Lynch (who LIVES in Shanghai and has a Chinese girlfriend) say it like /shang see/, which they’d have no reason to do unless they were reading it off of a script and just hadn’t been told how to pronounce it. One last note on performance: It runs *terribly*. Now I’m willing to chalk this up at least a little to how we played it. PC ports were often pretty bad in 2010, and I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt that it runs better on the console hardware they designed it for as well as what PCs were more commonly like back in 2010. But in the 3.5 hours it took us to beat it, it crashed or disconnected at least 4 or 5 times, and if even one player crashes/drops out, it kicks the other from the level, so there were a good few levels we had to redo significant chunks of while we just hoped it didn’t crash again. Animations also glitch constantly as well, but it’s hard to say if that’s a performance bug or if it’s always been that way. At the very least, the Steam version is a pretty crappy way to play K&L2 in 2023 :b Verdict: Not Recommended. Sometimes I’ll play a game with a bad reputation and find that it’s nowhere near as bad as people say. This is not one of those times. Kane & Lynch 2 is a painfully mediocre shooter with a miserably boring story that completely deserves its bad reputation. It’s at least not SO awful that you can’t even have fun playing it in co-op to laugh at it (as we had a pretty good time streaming it together, though more in spite of the game than because of it), but I feel like that’s quite clearly damning with faint praise. Unless you just like experiencing bad games from the 360 generation, or unless you simply must experience something so bad for yourself, this is a game to leave disliked and forgotten in the dustbin of history. A special thanks to my EldritchZoe, though, for playing through it with me and giving me such a fun time with such a bad game <3 I’m a pretty big fan of the Wario platformers, having played through all of them at least once at some time or another. WL3 has always been the one I’ve never really liked very much. When I was younger, I grew up on Wario Land 1 and 4, and then when I was a bit older I played 2, so 3 was the last I played of the original 4, and I was much older when I did. They recently added Wario Land 3 to the Switch Online GameBoy service, and after talking to a friend who was playing it for the first time and really loving it, I decided it was about time to give another go at what I considered the black sheep of the Wario Land quadrilogy. I was hoping if I went into it with an open mind and didn’t just expect it to be like the other three, that maybe I could find some of the enjoyment my friend was having. It took me around 10-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game with fairly liberal rewind feature use.
Wario Land 3’s story is pretty simple and straightforward. Rather than fighting with his main rival of the past two games, Captain Syrup, Wario is instead this time trapped in a music box. His plane crash lands in a forest where he finds a cave. Inside it is a weird music box that, after inspected, sucks him inside of it. Once he’s there, the protector god of the land tells him that he can only let Wario back out into the real world once he collects the five music boxes of the world, and of course Wario can keep any treasure he finds in the meanwhile. Not one to turn a nose down at treasure, Wario sets to work at finding those music boxes to get his freedom and his payday. It’s a simple story that works just fine, although it does get kinda weird, even for a Wario game, by the end, for my money. It’s a perfectly serviceable story that does a fine job of facilitating the action of the game. And what action of the game it is. WL3 is largely taking a further step forward from the design of Wario Land 2, where you once again are exploring stages for treasures but lack a healthbar. Instead, getting hit just sends you back. Whether that’s a punch from an enemy with really mean knockback that throws you down a pit, or setting you on fire or inflating you up in the air to fail the platforming challenge you’re on in some other way, it’s a different way of getting hit making the player lose progress than a game with a traditional damage and lives system. However, this operates much differently than it does in WL2, as instead of more linear stages with a treasure hidden in each, WL3 is more of a Metroid-style game, where the treasure is the endpoint of each stage. Opening that treasure will more often than not give a kind of key item that, rather than granting a move, will just open new paths to explore in other levels. Each stage has four of these treasures to find, so you end up going to each stage at least four times. That is, if you can remember what does what. Collecting one of these key items (be it just an effective key for a lock or a new power for Wario) brings you to the map screen where shining stars will indicate the levels that have changed content so Wario can now progress to the point he can find a new bit of treasure in them. However, they only show you this once, so if you miss it or forget it, you’re gonna be stuck wandering around hoping you can bump into whatever treasure will allow you to progress next. I distinctly remember as a kid *just* how easy it is to spend AGES lost in this game hunting for the next place to go (even speaking to several other friends who’ve played this game in the past, they didn’t even realize the star mechanic was a thing in the first place, and I doubt I did as a kid either). While it not being obvious where to go next is hardly much of a critique when the game DOES tell you were to go, effectively, it doesn’t help all of the other issues the game so often has. Wario controls a bit worse than he did in 2 (I also just replayed after this 2, so I say this with a high degree of confidence). He moves more stiffly and less easily, and it just makes progressing through levels feel more difficult than it seems it should be. On top of that, Wario also has such a similar move set to WL2, down to even how his sprite looks. Or at the very least, he ends up with almost the same move set. To make it a game like Metroid, they need powerups and new moves for Wario to have, but in lieu of thinking of up any new moves for him, they just stripped out nearly his entire move set and hid them inside treasure chests. Holding up to jump higher, picking up enemies, ground pounding, breaking blocks with your head, and even swimming have all been taken away from his base moveset. It makes his already awkward controls even more strange, and replaying the same levels even more cumbersome. And that’s the real critical weight of the issues with WL3. In isolation, a lot of them aren’t great ideas, but together they make a whole even weaker than the sum of its parts. A stage-based Metroidvania isn’t a very good idea at the best of times, and these short, nonlinear levels are made even more of a chore to go and re-go through with how often your no-health system-knockbacks force you through parts of them over and over within one playthrough. All of that combined with those muddier-than-usual controls makes for an experience that usually ranges between dull and frustrating, certainly compared to the other Wario Land games of the late-GameBoy era. The presentation is quite nice, at least. Sprites are colorful and expressive, and the music is full of Wario-y goodness as usual. The sprite and animation work in particular are really flexing the power of what a GBC-exclusive game could do with the big pretty sprites, and the look of the game holds up really well all these years later. Verdict: Not Recommended. While I don’t quite have it in me to call Wario Land 3 a *bad* game, I do have it in me to call it the weakest Wario Land game by a significant margin, and not really worth your time. It’s clunky and frustrating enough and its sequels are superior enough that I don’t think it’s particularly worth playing these days. There are so many much better games in this genre, some of them also being Wario Land games themselves, that I don’t really think Wario Land 3 is all that worth playing, even through the convenience of the Switch Online GameBoy service. After really loving Hero Senki a few weeks ago, I was really excited to get to this game, the next in the Gundam & Kamen Rider & Ultraman crossover JRPGs. Not only was it a different company helming the project, but it was Arc System Works! Them guys that make Guilty Gear! Sure, this was a long time before they made that stuff, but I was pretty confident I’d be in for an interesting time if nothing else. Well, now that it’s all over, with my heavy use of save states (for saving time, more than anything else) as well as maps online, I’m just glad Gaia Saver was mercifully short compared to Hero Senki XD. It took me most of the weekend, so some 15 or 18 hours (this is yet another game that doesn’t count playtime) to play through the game via an emulator in Japanese.
Gaia Saver: The Ultimate Hero Operation is, as the title implies, a big operation to save the world! The world is in incredible peril. Under assault from Neo Zeon forces, Shocker’s Army, and all sorts of hostile aliens, the Earth’s livability and population drop significantly day to day, week to week. Earth’s last hope is an alliance of heroes (the Gundam, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman fellas that make up this game’s crossovery premise) who are gonna fight against all the odds to save the world! Your party rotates a lot as the story demands it, but the playable Gundam pilots are Amuro and Seabook, the Kamen Riders are Amazon, Super 1, and Black RX, and the starring Ultras are Ultraman, Ultra Seven, and Ultra Leo. Not that any of it matters, of course. This game’s story is the first primary piece in the absolutely amazing disaster of a game that is Gaia Saver. Characters in your party, and really all throughout the story, are barely characters. When they do get lines, they act wildly out of character, and it’s pretty clear that the scenario writers had almost no familiarity with the properties they were adapting beyond the very basic premises of each. The story is entirely original, and doesn’t really follow arcs or what have you from any of the adapted shows, but that just serves to even more drive home the vapidness of the story you’re going through. The story itself is *incredibly* dark, with hundreds of millions or billions of people dying and large amounts of the Earth becoming uninhabitable (often as a result of your actions), but the tone set by the graphics and music doesn’t compliment that at all. The actions you’re doing that’ll have those consequences are also almost always so poorly telegraphed that you’d have no idea there were even consequences for them at all, making them fairly poor as far as moral choices in games go. I did manage to get the best ending for both remaining population as well as Earth condition (albeit barely), and it was honestly really not worth the effort Xp. That brings us to the general design as a whole, which is similarly pretty damn embarrassing not just for a game from 1994 (the same year that gave us stuff like SMT2, FF6, and Mother 2), but as a follow up to Hero Senki. Case in point is how, in contrast to just how good and forward-facing the “consult” feature in Hero Senki was in reminding you where to go (and just having generally very good signposting), Gaia Saver has chronically horrible signposting. Massive swaths of the game are no better than a point & click adventure game in just how aimlessly you’re expected to wander around hoping to bump into the next NPC you’re meant to talk to. There’s a ton of asset reuse, even in dungeons, so they’re rarely hard to navigate, but that copy-paste philosophy is extended to towns as well, filling them with scads of useless NPCs and rooms they can be in for you to hunt for the next bit of plot within. There also aren’t even dedicated shops, and merchants don’t update, so finding just where to buy stuff in any given town, if it has a shop at all, it also a huge pain. Had I not used a guide for this stuff (as well as which decisions made the fewest people die/Earth get damaged), I’m positive it would’ve taken me at least another five or six hours of wandering around lost as heck just looking for the next NPC I’m supposed to talk to (providing I even realized I’d talked to the right person). And that’s especially thanks to just how awful the encounter rate is, which really adds a lot onto the playtime. Speaking of the random battles, let’s move on to the battle system itself, because it’s also absolutely awful and worth elaborating on (for what little there is to elaborate on). In short, Gaia Saver is an auto-battler, but it’s a 1994 SFC game instead of a modern mobile phone game. The game defaults each turn in battle to your 1-4 turn-based little fellas just picking their own best moves for that turn (no true auto-battle), and for the large, large majority of situations (including bosses), just mashing that button until combat ends will get you out of it perfectly fine. It wasn’t until chapter 6 of 8 that I had to intervene and use some healing items to get through a boss battle, and the remaining four or five bosses in the game I had to do similar for. And that’s all just assuming you get lucky enough for your attacks to hit in the first place, since accuracy of attacks (especially for bosses, but for normal enemies too) is absolutely horrible. My rough guess would be that 40 to 50% of all attacks miss, with that number going down against very weak enemies, and going substantially up (closer to 60% or higher) against certain tough enemies and bosses. It’s just one more thing that makes combat a miserable chore and not engaging at all, since even sweeping enemies is difficult to enjoy when so many attacks will just do absolutely nothing. It’s never fun, especially when you’re fighting later bosses, for seven or eight attacks in a row to just miss (and I wish that were as rare an occurrence as it probably sounds like). HP even completely refills at the end of battles, so no need to worry about what that does either. MP doesn’t auto-refill, but it does refill when you level up (or walk over a stone circle on the map), and even then, I’m not 100% sure what MP even does. My guys seemed perfectly capable of still casting “spells” even when they were totally tapped out, but they may’ve been a little bit weaker? Even what stats do is fairly confusing. They have weird names like “courage” or “friendship”, and it’s extremely unclear what tons of stats do at all. It’s also very confusing what equipment or items do. Items don’t have a description outside of shops, and it’s also not possible to tell who can equip what items until you just test it out in your inventory (and absolutely nuts thing for an RPG to have in 1994, imo). There isn’t even UI to indicate what effect your new equipment has, as the only way to do that is to look at your stats, write down what they all are, equip the item, and then compare the numbers. Mercifully, just leveling up (or simply stockpiling more healing items) seems to usually be more than enough to get by without caring much about equipment, and the game doesn’t even have treasure chests or side quests to get you extra stuff if you wanted. But it’s yet another confusing waste of time in a game that seems to be primarily an exercise in frustration and misdirection. As described earlier, the aesthetics of the game do nothing to help the tone or plot, and they for the most part aren’t even particularly nice or coordinated on their own. There are maybe 5 music tracks in the game, and they’re all hopelessly generic and forgettable the moment you stop hearing. The music that’s playing in the area you’re in even resets every time you enter a door, so even though virtually every town has identical music, you’re gonna hear the first few bars of the town song SO many times as you scour buildings for necessary NPCs over and over. The general color palette of the game isn’t very nice, and the over-world sprites are also noticeably uglier on the whole than Hero Senki’s were. Even the quite pretty opening cinematic is strange and wrong in how it shows a bunch of Heroes that will supposedly feature in the game (Rider Man, Alex Gundam, Gun Cannon), only for literally all of them to not only never appear in the game, but never even be mentioned. The singular strong point of the game is that the battle sprites and animations are quite nice. Enemy sprites are big and detailed, though they generally lack any animation and also very confusingly have American comic-style “Woosh!” and “Shoot!” effects in English to indicate they’re attacking. Your party NPCs are also very nice looking, and their animations have a fair few little flourishes here and there that make battles at the very least look cool, even if they’re a boring chore to experience. Verdict: Not Recommended. As if there would be any doubt I’d not recommend this after reading this far ^^;. Gaia Saver isn’t quite the worst game I’ve played this year. I’m not sure it’s even the worst SFC JRPG I’ve played this year, as the first Knight Gundam Monogatari game being nigh incompletable it’s so poorly balanced just about takes the crown in that regard. However, it’s easily still one of the worst games I’ve played this year and one of the worst of these mecha/crossover games I’ve ever played. While Hero Senki is a neat curiosity worth checking out for fans of the properties involved, Gaia Saver, mercifully lacking any sort of English translation, is one to stay far, far away from unless you simply must experience how boring and frustrating it is for yourself. After completing Xtreme 1, I of course immediately fired up its sequel, as it was basically the last traditional-style Mega Man game I hadn’t yet beaten that I had any interest in playing. Now, this being a proper GBC-exclusive game, not a black cart game like its predecessor, I expected something at the very least a bit flashier, if not ultimately more of the same. While perhaps not quite what I expected, I certainly got something ambitious, that’s for sure ^^;. It took me about 6 hours to get the best ending with pretty gratuitous save state use, playing the English version on an emulator with an Xbone pad.
The story is once again more or less an excuse to remake a bunch of levels from X 1, 2, and 3, but with a bit more effort put into it this time. X, Zero, and confusingly enough, some crew from the later X games as well go to a mysterious island to learn who has been stealing reploids souls, and they end up having to do battle against the island’s strange inhabitants. It does its job just fine to set up the story as well as give the game excuses to have a lot more original levels and bosses that aren’t from any of the adapted games. For anyone who played the first Xtreme, the setup of this game will likely be very familiar. You once again have 3 routes, with the first two each having half of the bosses, and the 3rd one (unlocked after beating the first two) has all 8 of them as well as the real final boss to fight. However, instead of just differently named difficulties like the last game, now it’s X mode and Zero mode, and then Xtreme mode where you can swap between them whenever a lot like Mega Man X3 does. However, this game is just as much a victim of its own ambition as it is just poorly designed. The adapted levels are ones left over and not yet adapted in Xtreme 1, and its pretty clear that all the best ones had already been taken. As far as both the bosses and the stages go, they feel far more poorly adapted than the previous game’s (including one of the worst bike stages in the franchise), especially ones Zero has to fight who were never intended to be fought with him. What takes the cake though are the original levels and bosses. This is up there with the other worst MM games in just thinking “good Mega Man levels are hard” and running from there. They are unfair, difficult, and grueling trials of memory and attrition, and the true final boss is easily one of the worst bosses in the whole franchise. As far as the presentation goes, this is once again really flexing just what the GBC was capable of. The animations especially look really impressive in just how many frames they get for the player characters. The music is also once again not really anything to write home about, as while its doing its best to adapt the tracks from the games its adapting, the GBC sound chip can only do so much. They’re noble attempts, but I’d stick with the original versions myself. Verdict: Not Recommended. This is easily one of the worst traditional Mega Man games ever made. While it isn’t the absolute bottom of the pile of the ones I’ve played, it’s very very close at either #2 or #3. Even if you’re a big Mega Man fan, this is a game where it’s pretty darn hard to get much fun out of it, and you’re likely better off avoiding it entirely. During my time playing Super Robot Wars, one of my mecha anime-loving friends mentioned this series to me. I told her if she could hunt me down a way to play them, I’d love to give them a try, and she was kind enough to do that for me~. I didn’t really know what to expect from an RPG parody series of SD Gundam trading cards-inspired JRPG that itself is effectively a remake of some earlier Famicom games, but I got what I more or less should’ve expected? ^^;. This is another game that doesn’t count your playtime, but I reckon it took me about 25~30 hours to beat in total. I played the game in its original Japanese emulated with a fair bit of savestate use when things were most optimal to do so (and I will elaborate on just what those parts were in due time, believe me XP).
Knight Gundam Monogatari wasn’t just trading cards. It was also a manga that had four different stories through the time of its publication, and this game’s four chapters cover the events of the first of those four stories (as well as the events covered in the first two of the three Famicom KGM games). You play as the titular Knight Gundam who crash lands in the kingdom of Lakuroa, and are given a mission by the king to save the kidnapped Princess Frow Bow who has been kidnapped by the evil Satan Gundam. The whole thing is a giant, silly fan service-y exercise in turning events from the original U.C. Gundam series into a Dragon Quest-style JRPG, and it hits its mark pretty well. The actual story beats are played pretty straight, but the inherent sillyness of things like partying up with Minister Guntank, your first caster party member, is difficult to ignore. It succeeds very well (in its 1991 JRPG way) of realizing that story in an entertaining way, so it’s hard to give it much flak for being relatively narratively shallow. Mechanically, it’s just Dragon Quest in a flavor of something similar to DQ4. You have a party of characters who come and go as the story progresses, they each have their own inventories (and the inventory management is an appropriately cumbersome nightmare, I assure you), some party members are more melee-focused while some are more magic focused, battles are done in a first-person view, you go through dungeons and you even talk to the king to save your game. This game is in no way trying to reinvent the wheel, and it really didn’t need to. The only places that really becomes a problem is when it runs into problems presented by that old DQ formula. In some ways, this is present through the bad inventory system and how shops don’t tell you if the weapon you’re buying is actually better than the one you have, but it’s especially present in the game’s difficulty balancing. The game becomes absolutely brutal in chapters 3 and 4 despite being very pleasantly balanced in the first two chapters. The signposting also takes a nasty hit in those bits too, and it all feels much more down to deliberate choice rather than any kind of not knowing any better due to how young the genre still was. The game also has a ton of taking party members away and returning them significantly later exactly as strong as they were before, and that’s a big reason chapter 3 is so brutally awful. You’ve gotta rely on some pretty godly RNG luck to be able to level up your awful new main character in that one, and the game makes it about as hard to do that as it possibly could be (and that’s where I ended up save stating a lot). Encounters in general just get way nastier and meaner in the game’s back half, and it ended up having the game end on a really sour note compared to how much I’d been enjoying the first half. Presentation-wise, it’s hardly the prettiest SFC game, and the music is also pretty forgettable, but being only 1991, it’s easy to forgive if not exactly overlook that. But even then, the most fun aspect is seeing all those familiar Gundam characters in their DQ-ified forms. Tons of care has been taken to recreate iconic DQ monster poses and armor designs in all sorts of styles, and it adds a ton to the charm. However, that does sorta put a restraint on the game’s appeal. Compared to something like Super Robot Wars, you’ve really gotta have a pre-existing knowledge of and fondness for U.C. Gundam and Dragon Quest to really appreciate the aesthetics of this game. If you don’t fall into those categories, particularly the former, you’re probably not going to get a ton of enjoyment out of this game unless you’re a massive retro JRPG fan. Verdict: Not Recommended. This game’s aesthetics are cool and well designed, but it’s ultimately too held down by being too darn much of a DQ clone for its own good. The bad design and brutal difficulty in the game’s second half make it really hard to recommend but to the staunchest of U.C. Gundam and retro JRPG fans. If you’re one of those kinds of people, you may get a fair bit of fun out of this one, but if not, I’d say just look up the original CardDasu trading card Knight Gundam art and appreciate that on its own, as its more or less the exact art they took to use for everything in this game anyhow. Forgetting that I had ways to play other Genesis Shining games via my PS3 Genesis collection, I went out and found a couple Shining games on Saturn to play for this month's TR. Shining Wisdom was one of those games I found, and I was pretty excited to see that there was a Zelda-like action/adventure game in the series, as I'm a big fan of that style of game. AJ warned me it wasn't very good, but I've never been one to be terribly deterred by how bad a game might be. Hoo boy, was I in for a surprise XD. It took me about 10.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The story follows you, the son of the dead dragon-slaying hero Jiles, as you're about to be inducted into the royal knights of the realm of Odegan. However, events unfold on your first day on the job that get you embroiled in the center of a plot by the evil Dark Elf to unseal the evil djinn and revive the great slumbering giant who rests beneath the kingdom and will destroy everything if he's woken up! The game was originally supposed to be a Genesis game, but it was bumped up late in development to be a Saturn game, so there really isn't all that much story. It does a fine job setting the stakes, but there just isn't really enough there to really get engaged with, and what is there I had a hard time getting all that interested in (they really like to flap their gums a lot about not much at all Xp). As a last note on the writing, it's also pretty rough at signposting, with many characters only telling you where to go next a single time, and then not repeating it upon speaking to them again. The gameplay though, that's where this game goes from mediocre to the worst game I have played all year. The list of things wrong with this game are long, but I'll start with the most important of them all to get right to the good stuff. This is a pretty typical top-down Zelda-like action/adventure game in that you have a life bar, sub-weapons, an overworld to explore, NPCs to talk to, dungeons to conquer, and bosses to fight. Most of the basic trappings will be very familiar to anyone who has even glimpsed at things like A Link to the Past (which itself predates this game by about four years). What is very not typical about it is how below your health bar you have a gauge with a series of numbers, and that is your running gauge. You need to mash the B button (or the X, Y, or Z buttons) to get up to running speed, and then you can hold the B button to keep that speed, but you'll slow down if you get hit (and the hit detection sucks, your sword's range is awful, and you just know that almost every enemy is far more mobile than you right from the start of the game). That running gauge is also your magic charge gauge, and casting a magic attack also means that your running goes to zero along with your magical charge. This all means that you are constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, mashing the B button for well over half the playtime of this game. It makes the game physically uncomfortable and even painful to play with how much you have to mash it. I honestly have no idea why they thought this was a good idea compared to just holding the button down to charge it or just having it auto charge and running just being automatic (walking is SO slow you'd never want to do it). It makes just playing the game a constant, painful chore, and the playing of the game (as we're about to get to) is not even a great time in the first place. I already mentioned that your sword's range is awful and hit detection is pretty spotty, but you have tons of sub weapons you can use as well (with many such as the "magic hand" clearly in some way being the inspiration for how games like Golden Sun would design environmental puzzles many years down the road). The main issue with this is that ALL of these weapons are bound to the C button. A handles consumable items, B is the eternal mashing button, and that leaves only C as the button to which everything else (jumping shoes, kicking shoes, sliding shoes, your sword, your magic hand, and much much more) all need to be constantly juggled between the C button. This is really annoying and takes a ton of time to do, and it also means that you're often totally defenseless when puzzle solving because you don't have your sword equipped. Because this was originally a Genesis game and was pushed to Saturn very late in development, those three buttons are all you really get (X/Y/Z only mirror B, and R and L only work in one menu), and it's another thing that makes the game a consistently annoying chore to play. The game's overall design is pretty rough as well. As mentioned before, signposting is pretty bad on the information level, but it's even worse on the map design level. Very often you'll be told to go to a location with only the barest (if any) indication of where that place is, leaving you to wander around the map until you happen to stumble into it. The game has no world map (such as A Link to the Past does), and the map in the manual is so vague that it's virtually useless, so you're on your own to bump and stumble into where the next area to go is. Dungeon design ranges from mediocre and threadbare to overly convoluted and filled with poorly signposted puzzles. The game has tons of puzzles where you need to use a magically charged version of one of your many items to progress, but exactly how you do it and with which one is up to you to trial and error your way through, and that's if there's any indication a puzzle exists at all (the goddess statue that only appears when the sand is stone is the worst offender here). Upon looking up the solution to a lot of them (after a ton of fruitless trial and error), it was often a logical solution, but how you'd think to even do that feels like something out of an point'n'click adventure game. The game also has a lot of items that are very easy to miss or out of the way to find (on the way to where you're *actually* going next), so it's also very easy to get caught up in trying every which'a'way to solve a puzzle not realizing that you don't even have the tools to do it. And this is all while you're being constantly assaulted by infinitely (and quickly) respawning enemies that are very annoying to kill. The only small mercy here is that the penalty for dying is only being sent back to the start of the dungeon you're in. You don't even lose any money, which is a nice silver lining I suppose. The game overall is very forgiving, with the ability to carry TONS of healing items and the bosses being (for better or worse) universally very easy, which is again a nice consolation with how annoying all of the normal enemies are. The presentation is a mixed bag. The environments are all 2D, but the character and enemy models are this sort of 3D-to-2D look that at times looks alright and at other times (such as on larger enemies and bosses) looks pretty rough. Character portraits when important characters are talking are well detailed and don't look bad, per se, but they often rarely look much at all like the character who they represent, even down to the skin color of the character being clearly different between the in-game model and the portrait. The music is all around pretty good. There are a few dungeons with fairly boring tracks, but overall the music is basically the only part of the game that gets a passing grade from me. Verdict: Not Recommended. As I said before, this is the worst game I've played all year. At first I was in doubt whether this game was REALLY worse than Maken Shao, but by the end of it I was absolutely positive. This is a game that is simply never fun to play, and is constantly putting obstacles in the way of you enjoying your time with it even a little. The music may be alright, but decent music alone does not a tolerable game make. That just means that you're not having your ears assaulted during the otherwise awful experience. Whether you're a fan of Zelda-style games or the Shining series in general, this is a game to completely avoid unless you deliberately want to give yourself a bad time. Also known as "Revelations: Persona" in English, this was the next game chronologically in my journey of playing through the early SMT games. Where Devil Summoner keeps SMT If's more grounded setting and stakes while throwing away the spirit guardian system, Persona famously turns the spirit guardians into its titular system and runs with that instead! I usually just put the English title for the games I beat on here that have them, but in this case, the game is so different between Japanese and English that I felt it was more appropriate to put the Japanese title there instead. I played through the Sebek (normal) route, and it took me about 55-ish hours to beat it with the good ending playing a real PS1 disc via my PS3.
Persona 1 (as I'll be calling it from now on for the sake of brevity) follows you, the main character, as well as several of your friends as you all do a ritual after school to try and summon a "Persona" demon. Well it works, and you wind up getting hurt, but only briefly. But after you wake up and go to the hospital to visit your sick friend Maki (who has a chronic illness that keeps her in the hospital a lot), she suddenly has a turn for the worse and while she's in the ICU, the hospital gets all jumbled around and demon filled! From here, things get more and more demon-y until you're forced to make a soft-choice on which of the two main story paths you'll follow. One is the Ice Queen, which is a time-limited quest that follows Yukino (another friend of yours) and was cut out of the American localization of the PS1 version, and then there's the normal Sebek route which follows Maki, and that's the one I took. Your quest with Maki always includes her, yourself, and your friends Mark and Nanjou-kun, but (much like in SMT If, this game's predecessor) you also get a chance to bring along a 5th party member, three of whom are quite easy to get and one who requires a very specific sequence of events to get (and he's the one I got). Granted I only saw Maki's route, but overall I really enjoyed the writing. This game is still very much a descendant of SMT If more so than it is the previous SMT games, and that can be seen from broader things such as the high school setting to more granular details like the reasons the main bad guy is doing what they're doing. However, the spins they take on those things here evolve those concepts significantly, and it very much feels like a brand new adventure and not some retread. You're very much a tertiary part of the story, and honestly so are Nanjou-kun, Mark, and your 5th member. The real main character is Maki, and the rest of you are just supporting members of her story. However, that's not a dig at the writing at all. The game does a really good job of making Mark and Nanjou-kun in particular feel like meaningful and fleshed out characters despite the fact that they never really get any sort of character arc. The only real sore thumb of the bunch is you, as you're given front and center attention very often despite mostly not saying much and effectively doing no more than Nanjou-kun or Mark, but you're the main character, so of course you're the most important by default. That's really my only complaint with the writing though (aside from some light transphobia with the people who run the casino, who are very Atlus-brand casual transphobia). Maki's story may be difficult to see the genuine ending of (getting the true ending requires answering some fairly innocuous questions correctly, and it's for prompts like that that I used a guide), but the ride there is full of well-written dialogue that is fun and engaging all the way~. Where I have more, and it's a LOT more, complaints, is with the mechanics of Persona 1. While SMT If was in many ways a rushed-out mess of a game, with poorly thought out new mechanics stapled onto the skeleton of SMT 2, Persona 1 is a very bold attempt to build on those new systems in a whole new way. However, there is a lot more passion here than polish, as those more developed systems are very often developed without really considering how the rest of the game functions around them. To start off with one of the game's few mechanical silver linings, however, they removed the requirement for guns to have limited ammo, so you can once away blast away to your little heart's content~. To get down to proper business, though, here's thing from which all other problems arise: The leveling system. It's not the most intuitive place, I know, but it really is the one thing that, if fixed, the rest of the game would benefit massively from. Instead of summoning monsters, SMT-style, you have a party of five members who summon personas made by fusing the monsters you befriend. These five party members have two sets of experience points: points for general levels, and points for persona levels. The prior gives three stat points every level up to assign to five skills just like most SMT games have (although all of your non-main character party members have theirs assigned automatically) as well as dictates what demons you can befriend, as you can't befriend a demon higher than the party's average level. The latter dictates the maximum persona you can have assigned to you, and persona levels are gained by using your personas more in battle instead of normal weapons or guns. That all sounds simple enough, but where it all falls apart is that EXP in both cases is divided out based on who participated the most in battle (which is generally about doing the most damage, but can also be around support spells used). What this means in practice is that a grindy game gets even grindy-er. There aren't many personas in the game, ultimately, so getting new ones that your character can actually use can be tricky and time consuming as you grind persona levels to just be at a high enough level to use a new persona you've fused (and then you've gotta hope that the character's alignment is the right one to be even able to use the tarot type of that persona, which isn't indicated to the player at all and even the manual just tells you to figure it out via trial and error). Even weak demons can fuse into high-level personas though, so your early game is really brutal because getting new usable personas at all is really tricky even with a lot of demons to fuse. Demons also tend to be much higher level than you, so if you want to recruit new demons to fuse into personas at all, you'll be grinding a LOT to get your party's average level up to even have a chance to recruit the demons you're encountering, as going back to early-game areas is almost always impossible due to story progression. These problems are bad already, but they're made even worse because of the way EXP is distributed. Powerful characters (be it due to either good weapons, guns, or persona spells) are just going to keep skyrocketing in levels compared to their friends because they're doing all the damage. This is even further compounded by the range system used in the game. This game tries to put a new spin on the two-tiered row system that SMT used by having both your and the enemy's party be on 5x5 grids and having your weapons, guns, and spells all bound by where you're standing on it. Sometimes that means enemies have a harder time hitting you with mean, close-range instant-death spells, but it more often means that due to how the enemies spawned or how they happened to die, one or more characters simply need to wait and defend because none of their attacks are in range to actually hit the enemy. And of course, what game with an annoying range system would be complete without a total lack of information to the player on ANY move or weapon's range capabilities? The UI overall is pretty awful for 1996, and that's outside of the woefully inadequate weapon and spell information described earlier (although at the very least they tell you what power level and how many times they hit). They don't just let you not compare weapons in shops to what you're currently using, they don't even let you see who can use what item in the shop. They also don't let you look at your current persona level when in the persona fusing Velvet Room, so if you wanna do that, you've gotta go back out and check it, and then go back in and hope you remember (and the same goes for various other persona stats and player stats and such). The shop comparison stuff in particular is absolutely inexcusable for that period in gaming, as it'd been the standard set over five years before, not to mention one actually met by Devil Summoner which had been released a year earlier. The terrible disrespect for the player's time doesn't end there though. The difficulty curve is terrible, with the first boss easily being one of the hardest in the entire game, and other awful difficulty peaks continuing here and there from that point (particularly if you're going for the good ending, as there's a lot of extra content beyond where the bad ending stops). Dungeons are also quite large even pretty early into the game, and they very rarely have save points anywhere but very close to the start. You do, however, have a constant mini-map instead of having to use the Mapper spell, and they've even made it much larger. However, what that also does is make dungeons effectively navigated entirely by mini-map, and it makes the first-person dungeons feel pretty pointless in general. It's no surprise that this is the only Persona game to have first-person dungeon crawling, as it just works really poorly here. They've also removed dungeon-escape items and your singular save-anywhere item from Devil Summoner, so exploring dungeons is once again far more time consuming and far more dangerous. Making all of that EVEN WORSE (I realize I say that a lot in this review, but it's worth mentioning every time XP) is that this game suffers from something that tons of early CD-era JRPGs suffer from in how damn long battle animations take. Particularly for persona attacks and enemy animations, battle animations take FAR too long, and battles are far too dangerous to ever safely use the auto-battle command. This means that a game that already has an awful EXP and money grind amplifies that by having battles that can take super long due to their awful difficulty and the animations that take place. This isn't really the hardest SMT game up to this point (that's easily SMT If, which has far more inexcusable crap in it), but it's easily the one that will wear you down the worst with just how miserable the grind in it is. One of the only more neutral changes to the whole formula is how demon negotiations work in this game compared to previous ones. Where prior games had more of a conversation between you and the demon, now each character has four actions they can do to try and interact with the demon. Each demon has some combination of the game's eight personality traits, and depending on that combo (and also the phase of the moon and also just RNG in general) the monster will get a rise in a different one of four emotions indicated in the upper left of the screen: rage, happiness, terror, and interest. Interest is the one you want if you're trying to recruit them, happiness will often get you free stuff, and terror will often make them flee, but rage will get them more hopping mad to kill you than ever, so you've gotta be careful. This makes for a system that's not worse or better than the old one so much as it is just different, because the real change it brings to the table is that demon negotiation is FAR more about simple trial and error than it used to be. It's a bastard learning which moves with which characters work to interest which demons, but once you know those things, they'll work virtually every time. You can even do like I did and just get fed up and look up what different monsters respond positively to online, since there's nothing random about a particular demon type's personality distribution, so you can very easily talk your way past really hard enemies if you so choose. It helps give Persona just one more thing to make it stand out from SMT, and it also ultimately makes the game a bit more forgiving and easy in certain ways, but it's still just "different" rather than "better", and it will probably depend on the player for just how much they find this system appealing compared to the traditional way SMT had done things. With all the mechanical woes, it's nice that at least the presentation, like the writing, is also generally quite nice, even if it is a mixed bag at times. The music is pretty darn good and very funky, with the character themes being particularly good. It's overall not quite as good as Devil Summoner's soundtrack, but it's still got some real boppin' tracks. The only downside is that the encounter rate is SO high in this version of the game that you rarely hear any music in dungeons other than the singular battle theme that they use for every non-boss encounter in the game, and while that song is a pretty good one, it gets old after a while, and the game really could've benefited from some more battle themes. The graphics are VERY pretty though. The dungeons look nice, but the isometric NPC areas are very pretty as well as NPC portraits themselves. The real star of the show is the monster animations, though. Overly long as they may be, they gave a ton of beautiful attention to detail in bringing these monsters from unmoving front-facing sprites to moving isometric enemies, and the love and care put into those sprites and animations were the start of the visual show for me. The differences between the Japanese original and English localization are numerous and in some cases very infamous. Most notable among the hall of infamy is how they made the character models look "more American" in trying to de-Japan-ify the game, and making certain characters look more white and they even went as far as to make Mark black in the English version. The other notable thing in the Japanese version is that it's an even more grindy mess than the English version because the random encounter rate is *even* higher in this version. Granted both versions still have awful cash flow problems, but that's something that makes this version of the game that much harder to recommend despite it not suffering from all the writing issues the localization has. Verdict: Not Recommended. Honestly, had I played the Super Famicom SMT games without save states or rewinds, most of them (particularly SMT If) would've been not recommended as well, but this game wouldn't even be saved with save states or rewinds. While I may have enjoyed the story, the mechanical road you need to take to get there is just so damn brutal and grindy that I think most people are going to find it VERY hard to justify the time investment unless they are a HUGE fan of SMT and just have to see the early parts of the series. You're going to need a lot of patience and willingness to put up with old game nonsense to make it through this game's meanness, because it's mean EVEN for an SMT game. I didn't ultimately hate my time with the game, sure, but this is one you better be darn sure you're up for before taking the plunge, because you're going to have a very rough ride otherwise Xp I'm always a sucker for Bomberman games, and I've been on the lookout for these later 3D adventures of his ever since playing through most of the N64 games last year. I finally found this for a price that was way above just being right (beautiful condition, even came with the sealed trading cards, for only like 700 yen), and that made it a perfect addition to my pile of games to play for GameCube month. It took me about 10 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game and also beat the secret final boss.
Bomberman Jetters is a game based on an anime of the same name. That said, the plot is still really simple. The bad guys are tired of Bomberman ruining their plans constantly, so they make a giant meteor to smash into Planet Bomberman. Bomberman and MAX set out in their spaceships to stop this clearly bad thing from happening. It's a really thread bare and unimportant story, ultimately, although it apparently doesn't really follow characterizations in the anime, which is very odd. It has lots of voice acting which is well done and help bring the quite flat characters to life in a fun way, so that's nice at least. The game itself is a 3D action game (kind of a platformer?) divided between 5 worlds of 6 levels each. Four levels in each world are proper stages, while two of the stages are just boss battles. The mini-bosses (stage 3) of each stage can even be beaten or weakened in certain ways (sometimes requiring re-fights using tools you didn't have yet) to fight an extra, secret final boss at the end. You can also find and unlock animal companions to join you, who give you certain passives and can be leveled up to give you better passives. You can even unlock new and particular elemental bomb types to give you an edge against each world boss. The game plays somewhat like the Baku Bomberman (aka Bomberman 64, in English) games on the N64, but like a marked step backwards. Jetters's biggest problem is that it really just doesn't play very well and the level design is generally quite weak. They give you much more 360-degree freedom than they did on the N64, but this amounts to making throwing and kicking bombs into enemies a far more difficult task than it already was. I can't even count the number of times I missed a bomb or blew myself up instead of an enemy. Bosses also range from trivially easy (which is most of them, to be honest) to nightmarish and frustrating due to how exact you need your bomb throws to be (like the secret final boss who is in no way shape or form worth fighting). The animal companions and elemental bombs also feel very half-baked, as they all range from totally useless to absolutely essential and grinding up the level of the more essential animal companions gets to be a real pain. The presentation of the game is fine, but very uninspired. For a mid-life GameCube game, Jetters doesn't exactly look ugly, but it's very uninspired. The music is also generally okay if a bit surreal and weird. The whole game is just a huge, flat "OK", and the presentation is no exception. Verdict: Not Recommended. This game is actually okay, but that's all it is. It is one of the most aggressively mediocre games I've ever played, and it's just really hard to care about either way because of that. You probably won't hate your time with it, but it'll likely be hard to prompt yourself to actually finish the game unless you're very dedicated to beat it because you can. Your time is better spent playing other, better 3D Bomberman games than this. Not feeling like my quest to engage with earlier Mario Kart games was done, I decided to fire up my Super Famicom Mini and give a go at trying to complete the original game in the series as well. Where Mario Kart 64 was a game I owned for many years as a kid and played on and off many times, Super Mario Kart was never a game I played all that much. I picked it up when I was much older, and never really put much time into it beyond just seeing how it played (and bouncing off of it very quickly). I don't really know what I was expecting this game to be, given how much I didn't really care for its sequel, but I still blown away at just how rough a first entry this was. I only used rewinds on the final track (to finally free myself of the torment XP), and it took me a little under 2 hours to get gold on all the cups in 50cc and 100cc.
Boasting a mighty 20 tracks (5 in each cup) as well as a battle mode, there's quite a hefty amount of content in this game compared to its sequel (at least on paper). Just like 64, Super Mario Kart has a co-op two-player mode as well as Vs. features, the basic mechanics of racing work quite well, and it has a very cool split-screen design for its races. If you're doing 2-players, you each get a portion of the screen, but if you're playing by yourself, that bottom screen becomes your mini-map of how the other racers are doing (although you sadly get no mini-map if you're playing with a friend). However, outside of these clever touches, there is no small amount of glaring issues that would've frustrated players even at the time. First off there are small things that make playing the game a little more frustrating than it feels like it needs to be. First of all are small touches that its sequels would also struggle with in how it's often hard to distinguish between holes in the track and the actual track because of how the Mode 7 tracks are displayed. Then you have issues like how this has a life system, and you get only so many lives in a cup before you just get a game over. This isn't like F-Zero, where you can fall off and outright die, but you actually NEED to get 4th place or higher (out of 8 racers) or else you just need to redo the track. This can be a nice redo feature if you're in a situation where you need to beat a certain opponent to win, but it more often comes off as a needless frustration, especially with a scoring system that often calculates to you "winning" the cup via points even if you would get 0 points on the current track. Then there are much deeper seeded problems in how the AI works aside from just how brutal their rubberbanding is (and let me tell you, it's extreme). In Mario Kart 64, it often feels like the AI are playing a different game to you, but in Super Mario Kart, they very observably are playing a different game to you, and them appearing on your track to interact with is often more of a formality. The same CPUs will often win tracks because items don't work for them as they work for you. While you are limited to a single item per lap (of which there are five per track), they all get items for free after a certain amount of time depending on characters. DK. Jr. gets free bananas, Toad and Peach get mushrooms that make you small until you get run over (meaning you've basically lost if you hit one on 100cc), Mario & Luigi get invincibility stars, and Koopa amazingly enough gets shells both red and green (meaning you really need to play him if you want a chance at winning single player races at all). AI don't even get boosts in tracks (they'll drive over them but get no effect) and drive right through thwomps as well. The only thing they do interact with is the edges of the stage, and I only won a couple tracks because I was lucky enough to have Luigi (the eternal AI 1st place favorite) get stuck against a wall for most of the race. Your items on the other hand are, as mentioned, very few and often quite weak, as lighting bolts still only temporarily slow instead of stop your opponents, and red shells still go as the crow flies (making them useless unless you have line of sight, and this is another Mario Kart where the AI will start cheating their butts off as soon as they escape your line of sight). This is another case where if you start losing, it's nearly impossible to catch up because they get so many automatic advantages, and it makes the single player content very often miserable to try and engage with. The presentation is quite good, at the very least. The graphics are bright and colorful (especially the racers), and the Mode 7 effects on the tracks looks nice when it isn't confusing you on where the floor is actually solid. The music is also very good, although there aren't a ton of musical tracks in the game in the first place. Verdict: Not Recommended. Where there is some enjoyment to be gotten out of a game like Mario Kart 64, Super Mario Kart is a game I'd argue wasn't even good when it came out. It is an easily inferior game to F-Zero (which is older than it by about two years), and looking back it is amazing which series ended up continuing so far given the quality of their first entries (discounting things like the unstoppable popularity of Super Mario himself, of course ;b). This is a game that does not warrant returning to unless you simply have to experience where the series came from, as there is very little fun to be found here outside of conquering all of the crap the game puts in front of you. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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