I actually hadn’t even planned on playing this any time soon, but, going through my Switch and doing my usual checking of the new games on the Switch Online retro services, I found that I’d completely forgotten that this got added to the GameBoy service! One of the few classic Castlevania titles not on that collection that Konami released a few years back, this was a great excuse to finally play through this and see what the last GB Castlevania game is all about~. It took me about an hour and a half to play through the Japanese version of the game with my Switch Pro Controller without using save states or rewinds at all.
Legends follows the story of Sonia Belmont, the original first of the Belmont clan, as she goes through Dracula’s castle to put him down for the (at the time) canonically first time. You bump into Alucard along the way, but it’s a pretty straightforward and simple story that you’d expect from an action game on the original GameBoy. Konami eventually struck this from the canon, and I imagine it was a combination of them wanting to make a larger, grander “The Saga Begins!”-type game later via Lament of Innocence alongside how the little writing this game does have is a bit embarrassing in retrospect (like how in their one conversation together that we see, Sonia is not only Alucard’s protégé but also implied to be a romantic interest for him ^^;). As is, it’s an inoffensive and funny story that does more than enough to set up the action at hand, much like its many classic Castlevania brethren. But stories, silly or no, really aren’t why we go to Classic-vanias after all. We’re here for gameplay! And this game, while certainly not the strongest of the Classic-vanias, is a pretty darn good one! Across the game’s five (or more, if you find the secret stuff, which I did not bother to do <w>), you’ll trek through Dracula’s castle fighting monsters and bosses along the way. Nothing surprising there. Reusing the same formula (and likely the same engine) as Casltevania Adventure, you’ve got your whip that has two upgrades with the second one being a fireball, but this game mercifully decides not to downgrade your weapon upon getting hit like Adventure does. The weirdest part of this game is how it handles sub-weapons. Instead of finding them throughout stages, you get a new one every time you beat a boss, and you can select one from the pause menu whenever you like. You also have a “Burning Mode”, which gives you temporary invincibility alongside a doubling of whip strength once per life, and it’s a HUGE help for the harder fights and sections (especially Dracula). Beyond just the very forgiving addition of the burning mode, boss and level design is overall pretty solid while still trending towards the easier side. There are a few traps or mean-ish placements of enemies here and there, but playing carefully should see you past most obstacles on your first or second try regardless. Even with that, the game’s approach to dying is very kind too. Losing all of your lives and continuing puts you back at the last door checkpoint you went through exactly like just losing a life normally does, making this a very nicely forgiving Classic-vania, and a better game for it, in my opinion. It’s certainly not going to set your world on fire, and it might be a bit too easy if you’re a super fan of much harder, meaner games like Castlevania 1, but if you want something a bit more along the difficulty of a classic Mega Man game like I tend to prefer, then this is a great time to play through. Aesthetically the game is very nice for a late-life original GameBoy game, though it’s hardly the nicest thing in the world to look at. You have lots of big, nice sprites and I never found it difficult to tell what I was looking at, but it’s not a particularly pretty game one way or the other, even if it’s not exactly ugly either. There is some slowdown as a result of all of the detail on the sprites and backgrounds, though it mercifully never really affected gameplay negatively. I usually appreciated the bullet time it provided, more than anything XD. While the graphics may be a bit middling, the music is however excellent. It’s largely a collection of classic Castlevania tunes, and these are some absolutely delightful 8-bit GameBoy renditions of them. Granted, you could quite fairly fault the game for lacking much originality in its soundtrack, I still think that the quality of the reused older songs more than makes up for it, especially in such a bite-sized Castlevania package~. Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not a particularly stunning game one way or the other, I found this to be a really fun one! The wrinkles in its design don’t put it *quite* as high as the second GB Castlevania game for me, but if you’re a fan of 8-bit action games and/or Castlevania, then this is a game you’ll likely quite enjoy spending an afternoon with as I did~.
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As with Fire Watch, this is another game I played alongside my wife as a sort of couples activity for us. However, unlike with Fire Watch, this is a game we actually played together! It’s something she’s been talking about playing together for a good few months now, and she bought us each a copy on Steam when it recently went on sale. I really had no idea what to expect from it, but I absolutely trust her judgment when it comes to looking for interesting games for us to get into together~. It took us about 3.5 hours to complete the English version of the game together.
“Bokura” means “us” in Japanese, and has an implication that the people being spoken of (or at least the person speaking) is a boy. Accordingly, Bokura is a story about two boys. The narrative starts with one of them sitting on a train as an adult, on their way home from work. Lost in their thoughts, they start to reminisce about an unforgettable winter they spent with their best friend at the time, and the story begins from that flashback. The thing is, Bokura, as a game, can only be played with two people who each have a copy of the game. It’s impossible to play it by yourself, and each player chooses one of the two boys to play as at the start, and they see the story from their respective boy’s perspective. Most of the story is shown to the both of you, but there are several points where you’re separated and view a scene different from what the other person is seeing (the game even instructs you not to speak to one another during those times apart, which is a very interesting design choice). The game’s main gameplay gimmick ties in heavily with its main themes like this. Seeing the world through your own perspective, and needing to communicate and compromise with those who see the world differently from you. It ties all this together with a much larger theme of dealing with loss, and it’s quite a well told story. It’s got some pacing issues with how long some of the inter-story puzzle sections go on, but it’s by and large a quite well written story that the both of us enjoyed quite a bit~. The gameplay is a co-op puzzle platformer (bold choice for a story-focused indie game, I know ;b). This game isn’t just metaphorically about seeing the world differently. Each player not only has a totally different graphics style for what they’re seeing, but they also have different things in the world that they can see and interact with. A moveable box for one player might be an impassible barrier for the other, while a scary monster for one can be a harmless platforming aid for the other. There are also certain parts of each level that only one player can interact with, making playing through the game twice a not unreasonable choice if you wanted a taste at what the other player got to do while you were in your world. It’s a game that trends surprisingly tough, overall, but it’s a quite fun little puzzle game. I think we finished it a bit faster than some others might because we have a bit more experience with platformers, but that shouldn’t be something that dissuades you from trying it out. This game doesn’t have combat or particularly challenging reflex tests, so even those who struggle with 2D action platformers can absolutely find fun here. My one piece of advice would be that the person with the most experience with platformers should probably choose the boy in the green coat, as we found that he had more difficult platforming stuff than the boy in blue. Similarly, if either of you has issues with seeing blood or gore, then that person should probably play the boy in the blue coat, as the imagery in green’s (while certainly not being a modern Resident Evil game by any means) is a fair bit more graphic than what blue has to deal with. Aesthetically, I think the game succeeds very well at doing what it sets out to do. The normal world along with the two worlds the boys see are all set apart very well in their graphical styles, and it aids the narrative themes and gameplay very well. The game has some slight net code issues here and there, and you can certainly see some weird screen tearing and graphical glitches here and there when things get a bit more animation intensive, but it’s nothing that made the game more difficult to play (even with her on the east coast of the US and me here in Japan). The graphical style is very pretty pixel art, and the music is quite good too~. Verdict: Recommended. I’d like to recommend this game more highly, but it’s a fair amount of little things that keep me from doing that. For sure, it’s far from the only well put together story-focused indie puzzle platformer out there, and that’s certainly part of it, but the fact that you NEED a partner to play through it with in co-op is another big part of it that’s going to be a meaningful hurdle for a lot of people. Add that in with that you also need to have some kind of voice communication ability (whether it’s over Discord or just sitting across from each other) to do a lot of the puzzles, and that’s one more thing that makes this a bit more difficult to engage with simply by the nature of how the game was designed. All that said, if you’re willing to spend a little over 10 bucks (and that’s when it’s not on sale) for something that you and a buddy can spend an afternoon doing together, this is a really great way to do it~. Somewhat continuing all of the Pokemon I played last year (though without the looming responsibility of using the Pokemon within them to beat Pokemon Stadium games XD), this is a game I played a TON when I was in grade school. It’s also, however, a game that I never played through with a proper Pokemon team of six, and it’s also a game that my partner really wanted to parallel play together. This made for a great opportunity to give this a replay for the first time in nearly 20 years, and seeing my partner’s experiences in her version of the game was also a really fun time~. It took me about 33 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (with a team of Blaziken, Claydol, Sharpedo, Plusle, Skarmory, and Shiftry).
The third Pokemon game starts and plays out very similarly to the previous two. You’re a young person (you get the choice of a boy OR a girl this time, carrying forward the trend started in Crystal) going out on an adventure to become the regional Pokemon League champion. You arrive in the Hoenn region having just moved there from Johto to here where your father is a gym leader, and you quickly set off on your quest to be the best like no one ever was. It tries a few new things with the narrative writing, like how we’re not fighting Team Rocket anymore or how there are a few more characters with a *little* more meat to them, but it’s by and large very similar to how these games had always been up to that point. That absolutely isn’t a bad thing, mind you, as I certainly don’t mind a Pokemon game with a thread bare story if it’s otherwise fun to play, and this one absolutely fulfills the being fun to play. Gameplay-wise, it’s still Pokemon. You catch them, you train them, you fight trainers, win badges. It’s something you’re almost certainly already well familiar with by now, and the third generation of Pokemon doesn’t really rock the boat too much on the fundamentals and plays very similarly to the first two generations. That said, while some of the more fundamental problems with Pokemon still haven’t been cleared up yet (most prominently, the stat a move scales off of is still tied to the move’s type and isn’t particular to the move itself), there are a LOT of quality of life changes as well as general polish to the design that makes this game WAY easier to go back to than its GameBoy predecessors. The game as a whole is so much easier to play now. You still have an inventory limit, yeah, but it’s far larger than Gold & Silver’s was, and inventory management is far less of a constant burden. You also no longer need to swap your Pokemon boxes manually, so you can catch Pokemon to your heart’s content without ever needing to worry about running out of space in your computer. Lastly, while it’s still not perfect, the running shoes are a VERY welcome addition to the bicycle to make getting around a lot faster and easier. Sure, it sucks that you still can’t run inside, but being able to zoom around in outdoor areas really helps the pace of the gameplay significantly. As for the topic of polishing design, the overall experience has been fine tuned very significantly from the previous game, and a lot of more burdensome design choices of past games have been either ironed out or removed entirely. On the topic of the latter, wild Pokemon no longer run away from you unless they’re one or two very special cases, which makes catching Pokemon FAR less of a burden than it once was. Additionally, while there are still 8 HMs in this game, far less of them are actually needed to progress, so you need to spend a lot less time worrying about juggling HM users or trying to find space for crappy moves in your team. The biggest and most important change, however, is not only all of the new Pokemon, but all of the new moves. We’re still not quite there yet, but the moves added in these games make SO many Pokemon types SO much more viable now that they actually have move sets. Poison and bug types are still SOL, sadly, but most other types with really weedy move sets (especially dark types) are finally far more usable than they’d ever been, and the game balance is SO much better for it. We’ve still got some important stuff to clean up, but we’re at least at the point where Pokemon isn’t just fun to play, it’s easy to play, and that’s a milestone worth celebrating in and of itself. Just about every main line Pokemon game is a big presentation upgrade, and this game is no exception. With the power of the GBA, Pokemon look bigger, better, and more detailed than ever before. The GBA’s sound chip is infamously under powered compared to the graphics, but this game still manages to have a really fun and memorable soundtrack either way, even if it’s not the best the music would ever be. Verdict: Recommended. There are still some quality of life features and design shortcomings that make Pokemon games from this era a chore to go back to compared to more recent entries, there’s no doubt about that, but the advances we’ve made by this point really cannot be understated. If you’re looking for some retro Pokemon fun, this is a really good game to sit down with, even if all the kinks in the series still wouldn’t be ironed out for another game or two. Like Pulse which I played earlier in the year, this is a game that I actually Kickstarted aaaages ago back in high school but just never got around to finishing. As was also the case with Pulse, I figured it was high time that I actually sit down and finish this game, because I’ve certainly owned it for more than long enough to justify it XD. It took me about 7.5 hours to finish the game doing just about everything I possibly could, though I’ll freely admit I would’ve finished it a LOT sooner had I not been stubborn about not using a guide when I got stuck.
Dropsy is a story of the titular character, Dropsy the clown with a quite scary face. As the intro cutscene shows, his life used to be happy and fun, loving being at and being in his family’s circus every day, but it all came to a horrifying end one day when the circus tent burned down and his mother lost her life in the accident. Now living in the old, dilapidated circus tent with his dad and little doggy, Dropsy sets out to make a better place of a world that fears his face (and maybe just do something incredible while he’s at it). Dropsy’s “story” is a weird thing to write about, as this game actually has no text at all. Outside of the title card itself, you’ll never see any text in the game until the credits roll, not even in the save menus or title screen. Characters communicate with speech bubbles that have pictures in them depicting what they’re talking about, and that’s how you as Dropsy interact with the world around you. The story that is there is remarkably well put together despite these self-imposed limitations, though it does fall a bit short, in my opinion. While the game’s main message of how doing good deeds brings good deeds back to you in return (and of course that you can’t judge a book by its cover) is one I quite like and think it does a good job at portraying, but they really fumble it in the last hurdle. I won’t spoil what the ending is here, but in taking the path they do for the ending, they end up muddying the waters of what the entire game is meant to say, and it just doesn’t logically parse with what the story has been up to that point. I’m not sure if they even are purposefully trying to have a point or message with the ending they went for, and they may’ve just been trying to be weird/shocking, but at any rate, I think choosing a different conclusion would’ve done the game a world of good. As things are, I think the story is certainly good, but decidedly not great. The gameplay of Dropsy is a point and click adventure game through the island that Dropsy calls home. Exploring the circus, the forest, the military base, and the nearby city, you’ll control Dropsy as he goes around trying to progress the main plot as well as give hugs to as many (consenting) folks as he’s able to (with the game’s dedicated hug button!). Hugs are your side objective, and Dropsy will slowly decorate his room with more and more drawn pictures of those whom he’s made friends with. A neat feature is that Dropsy isn’t alone on his quest. There’s his clown make-up wearing doggy you start the game with, but you’ll also acquire a mouse friend and a bird friend too, and swapping between them to accomplish tasks only they respectively can is a neat way many of the puzzles are designed. However, this is at the end of the day a point and click adventure game, and this game is absolutely not free from the pit falls this genre so often finds itself in. While I was able to do *most* things without consulting a guide, I ultimately had to, as some puzzles are just that unclear on how you’re meant to do them. This is made an even more serious issue, of course, by the whole “no text” gimmick the game has going for it. This means that you are entirely on your own for figuring out what items do and sometimes what they even are, and I think the game really would’ve benefited from *some* kind of way to analyze items in your inventory to help give the player a good kick in the right direction when they needed it. It’s far from the hardest point and click out there, but it’s certainly not going to convert anyone who already doesn’t gel well with this genre. The presentation of Dropsy is wonderfully surreal and one of the coolest things about it. While it’s especially the case for Dropsy himself (with all of his weird, wiggly animations and mannerisms), the whole world is populated by strange and delightfully stylized people who act and move like caricatures come to life. The sound design adds to this surreal nature very well, and seeing what there is to see in the world you’re adventuring in is definitely one of the biggest highlights of playing Dropsy. Verdict: Recommended. While this is certainly not one of my favorite games, and I certainly have my reservations about the story, this is still a game I had quite a good time with even when I was really stuck. The message of value kindness in the face of adversity is done in a way I found very endearing, and the unique approach to storytelling and surreal world design help make it an adventure that’s easy to really get into and want to see the next step of as soon as you can. If you’re a fan of the genre, this is totally one worth trying, but if you’re really turned off by point’n’click games, this is probably one to just watch a Let’s Play of instead of playing it yourself. This is a little game I’ve been meaning to play through for ages, but I’ve never really gotten around to it until now (and receiving it for free on the Epic Games Store also made for a very nice excuse as well, of course ;b ). Just like I really love metroidvanias, I’m also a huge fan of 2D Zelda-like games, so this was something right up my alley from the start. It took me about 2.5 hours to beat the game and toy around with the post-game endless mode a little too.
As the title suggests, this is a game about Turnip Boy (a boy who’s a turnip) who’s unhappy with taxes. When the evil Mayor Onion uses some obscure tax law nonsense to steal his green house, Turnip Boy sets out on a document-burning adventure to get his green house back and take out the evil mayor. The game is extremely silly and wears its nonsense proudly upon its sleeve (as the title is ever so helpful demonstrating). There isn’t *nothing* behind its silly writing, though it is a little hard to deduce if the anti-tax/anti-government messaging of the game is more coming from the devs being anarchists or if they have more libertarian leanings. At any rate, just enjoying the nonsense and the delightfully strange world of the game is good fun for the few hours of fun the game will give you, and that’s more than enough for me. The gameplay is a pretty straight forward 2D top-down Zelda like. You get several weapons and tools that you’ll use to solve puzzles both optional and mandatory, and there are lots of NPCs to talk to and do little sub-quests for, but this game isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or anything. The combat was surprisingly challenging for what I otherwise would’ve expected, but this is far from a terribly difficult game. As long as you aren’t afraid to take your time with fights, bosses are generally really good about giving you health mid-fight to make even the tougher fights nothing too daunting. It’s a perfectly competent Zelda-like that doesn’t outstay its welcome, though it doesn’t have much to set it apart from better, longer games other than its zany concept. The presentation is, like the rest of the game, perfectly adequate. The art style is simple and not flashy, but just stylized enough to be memorable where it counts. The music is similarly nothing to write home about, but it fits the mood of the respective locations nicely nonetheless. Not much to go wild with praise over, but not much to really complain about either, really. Verdict: Recommended. I feel like I’ve repeated myself a million times saying this already, but this game is a short, sweet, and to the point that does a good job not outstaying its welcome. If it were any longer, I think they’d be laying the joke on way too thick for how much mileage their premise ultimately has, but the devs were smart in making something juuuust long enough that it doesn’t feel tiresome. If you’re a fan of the genre, this will be a fun thing to spend an afternoon on as long as you don’t expect anything super hilarious or life changing. This is a game I’ve effectively owned in one form or another digitally for quite some time, and it’s also one that I’ve been meaning to get to actually playing forever. Recently, though, my partner needed a palate cleanser from the visual novel she was playing, so she decided to play through this. I love being able to chat with her about stuff we play together, and given that I was in the mood for something of a palate cleanser myself, I thought what better time to finally give this a try. It took me about 1.5 hours to beat the English language version of the game after doing as much around the island as I could be bothered to do (and getting 17 feathers in the process).
A Short Hike is the story of Claire, whose aunt May has taken her to a favorite family nature park. On this island are many hills, including the highest point on the island, Hawk Peak. Claire is awaiting a very important phone call, but the island has basically no cell phone reception. Her aunt tells her that the only place on the island she’s likely to get signal is at the top of Hawk Peak, which luckily for her is only “a short hike” away. And so our hero sets off on her (relatively) short journey to the top of this nearby mountain to get the reception needed to receive this phone call. A Short Hike is a relatively simple and short game both gameplay-wise and narratively, but it’s a very heartfelt little adventure all the same. What you choose to do, where you choose to explore, and whom you choose to help on your way up the mountain will very much make your Claire’s journey feel unique unto itself. There are all sorts of friendly tourists and staff around the island to talk to, help out, and play with, and their dialogue is so fun and charming that I had a lot of fun just finding new people to talk to. Another game I played earlier this year, Lil’ Gator Game, clearly takes a LOT of inspiration from this, so it was hard not to compare the two, but as the sort of progenitor to that later (and for my money, better) game, I think A Short Hike is a lovely story about reflecting upon growing up and how you relate to other people. As for the gameplay, A Short Hike is mostly about exploration. Your only real goal is to make it to the top of the mountain, but to do that, you’ll need to be good at climbing. While you can jump and glide right from the start, if you want to be able to jump again in mid-air or scale walls, you’ll need to find a gold feather, and you’ll gain more mid-air jumps and climbing time the more feathers you collect. Exploring around the island, you’ll find all sorts of other folks to help or interact with, and they can give you little side quests that’ll reward you with money, feathers, or other goodies. Exploring is often its own reward as well, as you can find money, tools, and even gold feathers just lying around to add to your arsenal of treasure hunting. The island is big, but not overwhelming, and it makes for a fun little adventure even if you’re just trying to get to the top as fast as you can. Now I played this on PC, and while you *can* use the arrow keys, I very quickly abandoned them for use of my Xbone controller. The platforming and such is hardly difficult, and there isn’t even really a fail state to worry about at any point, so if you don’t have a controller available, it’s not the end of the world. That said, using a joystick was just so much better than the arrow keys that I really have to recommend using a controller for this if at all possible. The presentation of the game is absolutely adorable. You can tell that the creators are huge Animal Crossing fans, as all of the animal fellas populating the island often look like they could’ve popped right out of it x3. Solidifying that theory for me was how you can not only find a shovel to dig up buried treasure, but the X’s on the ground look just like the Animal Crossing ones, and the shovel sound is even almost exactly the same to boot x3. This isn’t a bad thing at all, though! They do a great job of making that style feel fresh to this game (which the very different mechanics from Animal Crossing also help a lot with), and the very chill music helps add to that whole vibe wonderfully as well~. Verdict: Recommended. This wasn’t a game I super duper loved and adored, but I’ve had a lot of competition for that sort of thing this year. As it is, A Short Hike is a bite-sized narrative and gameplay experience that achieves what it sets out to do very nicely. The story is cute, the gameplay is fun, and if anything, it was just a bit too short and left me wanting more! Which, out of any problem a game can have, I think leaving you wanting more is far from the worst one you could possibly be stuck with. While I’ve played the Mario 64 to all 120 stars some four or five times now, until now I’d never so much as owned, let alone played, Pilotwings 64, the other launch title for the N64. After finding it at Book Off for 100 yen a few days back (and myself having a 100 yen off coupon), I felt it was high time to correct that gap in my play experience. It took me about 7 or 8 hours in total to get gold badges on all of the normal stages sans the last rocket belt one, and I also got silver (and sometimes gold) on all of the extra games as well to unlock all of the content. I did it on the Japanese version of the game, and I played it all on real hardware.
There really isn’t any narrative to speak of in Pilotwings 64. Perhaps there’s some in the manual or something, but there’s certainly none in the game at the very least. Regardless, the premise is perfectly clear without it. You’re here to get your flying certification! Well, certainly not a pilot’s license, as you never actually fly any planes, but something similar no doubt with all of the time in the air you’re doing XD. You have your choice of six characters (who are only cosmetically different save for some very small exceptions) to go through all four tiers (Beginner, A Class, B Class, and P Class) of three activities: Hangliding, rocket belt-ing, and gyrocoptering (which is like a plane a bit, I suppose). Each class of activity has one to three tasks you need to complete, and each task has a score of 0 to 100 for you to go for, and depending on your total score, you’ll get a badge rank at the end (average of 70 is bronze, 80 is silver, 90 is gold, and all 100’s will get you a perfect score badge). Additionally, getting silver or better in all three activities of a rank will unlock a respective Extra Game activity to try out (which are cannonball, skydiving, and Jumble Hopper). Getting a silver or average in each of the three ranks of a respective activity will even unlock you a free flight mode for one of the game’s four different maps, so you can do victory laps to your heart’s content~ (quite literally). It’s a very simple game, to be sure, but it’s good fun! Being a launch title, it’s not hard to see that Pilotwings 64 was a game explicitly made to carry on the legacy of the original Pilotwings on the Super Famicom. The N64 version is here to show off not just the console’s 3D capabilities for vast, open spaces, but it’s also here to showcase just what precision you can pull off in a vehicle using the N64’s snazzy new joystick tech. If you’re just here to see the credits, all that takes is getting bronze or better in each class of the main 3 activities. But if you’re like me and really wanted gold ranks, it’s going to take you a fair bit longer, and it’s also likely going to be a fair bit more frustrating to boot XD The gyrocopter controlled the most intuitively to me, as it’s basically a plane in how it has acceleration and tilt and such. This isn’t anywhere as sim-like as an Ace Combat game, but it’s certainly closer to a flight sim than something like Star Fox 64 is. Hangliding was what I found consistently the hardest, as relying on only thermals to blow you upwards and having no other method of acceleration makes not only the flying challenges difficult, but it also makes landing very difficult to, as you only have one shot to get that approach correctly. Rocket belt missions usually weren’t too hard, but they easily have the hardest final challenges in the P Class rank. Landing will usually be your biggest challenge, as taking off is the easy part, but rejoining with the ground is harder. Landing, after all, isn’t just an important part of flying, but it’s also usually 30 to 40% of your score (both the accuracy of your landing on the bullseye or runway as well as how smooth a landing you did). I wasn’t nearly out of my mind enough to go for perfect scores, but I’m sure someone dedicated enough out there is going to have a whale of a time trying to get Pilotwings 64 completely perfected. The Extra Game activities very much feel like the extra content that they are. They’re neat ideas using the existing physics and locations in interesting ways, sure, but they’re also pretty much one-trick ponies compared to the main three flying activities. The very oddly named Jumble Hopper is a pair of super jump boots you need to use to jump to the designated space as quickly as you can, but landing in water loses you points, and landing on too hard a slope or hitting an obstacle will send you flying and also lose you a TON of time. Skydiving has you trying to align yourself with your fellow divers five times before making a hangliding-like landing on a target. Cannonball is easily the worst of them for my money, as it has you trying to use angles and an NES Golf-like power meter to hit a distant target. It’s just trial and error, and it’s both the most easily mastered of the activities in this game while also easily being the most frustrating and least fun. Like I said before, they’re a neat distraction, but they’re definitely not worth of main activity status. The game overall runs just about as well as it needs to. You don’t need to have very well adjusted eyes to see that the framerate is struggling REALLY bad a lot of the time, but the game is thankfully tuned well enough that this shouldn’t usually be a problem. The only place I’d say it’s possibly a problem is in the hit detection, as there were quite a few points where I effectively went through (literally) target rings instead of actually passing through them in a way the game recognized. It is my hypothesis that the really bad framerate was very likely either causing that collision issue, or at the very least it made it harder to judge than it should’ve been where the target I was aiming for actually was. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s just one more frustrating part of an already often frustrating game, and the fact that tasks lack a quick-retry button just makes it all the more of a pain to retry when you mess up (particularly for the four minute+ missions later on in the game). The presentation is pretty darn good for what it is. The music has a lot of fun tracks that fit the air of chill flying very nicely. It also has some of what I can really only call Banjo Kazooie-style weird tracks that add some strange if not unwelcome levity to their respective missions. The graphics are quite simple of course, as you’d expect for a launch title of this era, but they’re stylized enough that I think they hold up just fine. Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not an all-timer like Mario 64, that’s some really stiff competition as far as launch titles go. On its own merits, while it may not be the most content-rich game in the world (for those of us who aren’t score attack maniacs), Pilotwings 64 is still a really fun little game. For framerate and ease of access reasons, it may be more appealing to play a more modern port of this game (such as on the N64 Switch Online service), but the N64 version is still plenty fun. Even for someone not super into flying games like me, I had a quite good time with it, and I reckon you probably will too~. This was a game I picked up on a whim after finding it for just 100 yen at my local Book Off. The cover looked neat, the pictures of it on google looked cool, and the handful of old review scores I found for it were positive on both the English and Japanese side of things. Even if it ended up being terrible, it was still just 100 yen at the end of the day. My final game-clock was 2.5 hours, but that doesn’t seem to count times in pause menus or cutscenes (of which there are many) at all, so I’d reckon my actual time with this game was something closer to like 4-ish hours. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The year is 2096, and humanity has been colonizing the solar system for many decades now. Several days ago, the titular Beltlogger 9, a research and mining station in the asteroid belt, sent out a distress signal, and nothing has been heard from them since. You play as Sergeant Patric Salu (that’s how they spell it <w>), the singular surviving member of the beta assault team of the small military contingent sent there to figure out just what’s going on in this research station that is clearly not what it seems to be. Bursting with cutscenes and voice acted dialogue, Beltlogger 9 is really pushing the limits of what storytelling in games could be in 1996 with this relatively new CD-based format. Tech-wise, nothing it’s doing is particularly new or special, of course, but it regardless uses what it has very adeptly. I’m not sure I’d go *quite* as far as to call this an outright horror game, but they’re definitely taking a lot of inspiration from sci-fi horror films of previous decades to create the atmosphere of grim isolation the game takes place in. It’s a relatively short story, but it does a lot with its small cast and quick pacing. It didn’t have quite as dark an ending as I was predicting (or as its genre conventions would otherwise lead you to predict it would), but I really liked what they did with it either way. It’s a well told story with a nice and interesting moral at the end, and a good story is certainly not what I was expecting from a PS1-developed Quake-like game from 1996. Now while I haven’t played Quake myself, I’m more than familiar enough with id’s shooters to know that Beltlogger 9 is quite clearly going for that style of gameplay (at least in the broad strokes of things). It’s a sci-fi 3D FPS game that’s largely corridor-based, where you explore one stage at a time (22 in total) looking for keys to doors, finding new weapons and passive options to equip, and fighting the nasty robotic enemies that come your way. You also have a shield you can manually activate to guard yourself when you’re not firing, and while it’s not the hardest thing in the world, it does take some practice to get used to switching between raising your shield and counter attacking against more aggressive enemy types. You have 5 different weapons (a rifle, a laser, a missile launcher, a heat-seeking missile system, and a big AOE bomb super weapon) that you can switch between on the fly as well as find new variants of that switch up things like fire rate and power. You can also find stuff like health and energy upgrades, miscellaneous items, audio logs of the crew, and even upgrade bits to simply make your existing weapons stronger. Those extra optional passives are no joke either, as they can do anything from make your energy weapons take less energy, your energy itself recharge faster, or even let you run WAY faster. What it comes down to is that exploration generally feels very well rewarded, and I always wanted to see what was around the next corner (even if it was just a new enemy to mulch my face off XP). The game isn’t *that* hard, ultimately, though for someone relatively inexperienced with FPS games (especially pre-analog stick aiming ones like this), that was very much appreciated (though it’s certainly worth pointing out that this game’s English-language cousin, BRAHMA Force: Assault on Beltlogger 9, *does* have a significant difficulty boost compared to this version that I played). The bosses were easily the toughest general parts of the game, but those were also some of the coolest parts for sure as well, and new boss fights were always a treat to encounter if only to see their mechanical designs. The mechanical designs and presentation in general are really good in this game. A large reason for the former is that they actually got one of the major mechanical designers for Z and ZZ Gundam to do the robot designs for this game, and it really shows with just how striking they look (with the final boss being a particular favorite of mine). The music is also very fun, with the bosses having some great tracks to fight them to, and the general ambient music making for a great creepy atmosphere to explore the base in. Having to use R2 and L2 to look up and down just added to that whole vibe of “in an awkward battle mech in a weird place” too~. The game is still visually absolutely an early-life PS1 3D game (complete with the texture warping in the walls that that kind of thing entails), but it really rocks the look, imo, and it made for a really fun time~. Verdict: Recommended. Even though this sort of thing is generally quite far from my genre of choice, I ended up having a really great time with it! It’s worth keeping in mind that the localizations are a fair bit harder (and less fair, from the sounds of things), and I can’t speak to the quality of the localization either, but in Japanese at least, this was a really cool sci-fi action game with a story I really enjoyed my time with. If you like sci-fi or just FPS games and you don’t mind having to use pre-analog stick aiming controls, this is a really fun and short game that’s really worth checking out~. As a little break after a case in Ace Attorney 3, I decided to play through this little GB puzzle game that I nabbed for 100 yen at Book Off a week or so ago. This was a game I had on SNES as a kid, but never played all that much of. This seemed like a good a time as any to fire up the ol’ Super GameBoy and finally see what this Nintendo Tetris-wannabe was all about~. It took me about 1.5 hours to play through the first hundred stages and reach the credits, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
As said previously, this is one of the many wannabe Tetris clones from the 90’s, and one of the several that Nintendo themselves put out (and on the very handheld that Tetris itself helped make famous, no less). Mario and Yoshi are running a cookie factory, and they need your help to guide them to help the cookies not overflow the factory. At the very least, that’s what I could gather, narrative-wise XD. It’s a simple points-based falling-block puzzler, so it’s hardly worth much caring about the story, but it makes for a cute aesthetic at least~. In a bit of a change from usual puzzle games (though a fair bit like one of the games that Gunpei Yokoi would later make for his Wonderswan, Gunpey), you don’t have blocks just coming from the top of the screen, but from the right side as well. Lines of new blocks come simultaneously from above and from the right, and they pause while you’re clearing lines. The only way to clear lines is to shuffle pieces around so you have a complete, unbroken line of pieces (usually cookies) of the same type from one end of the cookie cluster quadrangle to the other. This is dependent on the end, as well, so if your quadrangle is currently 3 by 6, you can much more easily make a match on the 3-long side than the 6-long side. This comes with a catch, however, as should either side of the quadrangle extend beyond the edge of the screen, it’s game over for you. It’s a quite good puzzle game, as it is! My main complaint would really be that it’s a bit too easy, at least on slower speeds (I played on low speed and didn’t game over a single time in my quest for the credits), but when it gets harder, it’s impossibly hard. The cookies themselves are fairly easy to tell apart on the GameBoy (even the Super GameBoy) monochrome color palette, but once you extend beyond the first 10 rounds (which are ten stages each, so that’s the first 100 levels, effectively) using the code they give you after the credits, the piece shapes can change. For me, I decided to see how hard round 99 would be, and it’s unsurprisingly absurdly difficult XD. A thing I didn’t mention before is that matching a given piece type five times will get you a wild card cookie that will match with anything. In those later rounds, you’re given a special sixth type of piece to deal with, but you’ll never get more of that type dropping from the edges. You MUST get rid of it by matching it with wild cards, and that is incredibly difficult to do. It also doesn’t help that the piece shapes change from cookies to sprites from the GB puzzle game Yoshi (or Mario & Yoshi, if you’re in PAL regions), which look far more similar to one another than the usual cookies do (making it far easier to make mistakes). The presentation of the game is really just what you’d expect for an early-life GB puzzle game. Simple animations but relatively detailed sprites make the little cutscenes you get between rounds extra cute, and the normal cookie pieces, at least, are well distinguished and easy enough to tell apart, even in a rush. There aren’t many music tracks, but the ones that are there are good songs and fun to listen to while you puzzle away. Verdict: Recommended. It’s not gonna set your world on fire, sure, but this is a perfectly fine puzzle game on the GameBoy. There are certainly other puzzle games I’d recommend before this one, if given the chance (from Tetris itself to even the aforementioned Yoshi), but that doesn’t take away from this game’s general competency. While it probably shouldn’t be your first choice of puzzle game, it’s a great little way to kill time and a perfectly fun enough puzzle game to include in your GB library~. While I was at it with playing PS2 action games that are sequels to games I’d beaten earlier, I thought why not play Klonoa 2 as well. I enjoyed the first Klonoa a fair bit, but it certainly had a fair bit of room for improvement. I’d heard nothing but great things about its sequel here, so I figured it was high time I finally get to checking out what Klonoa’s second big adventure was all about. It took me around 7 hours to beat the game getting all of the doll pieces in each stage, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Klonoa 2’s narrative follows our titular character as he’s pulled into a mysterious dream world to save it from the encroaching forces of darkness. He must help his new friends ring the five bells scattered around the land while constantly keeping the nefarious sky pirates at bay as well. It’s something that very much feels like something out of a Japanese children’s film or OVA series of the era, and it’s got a lot of the same writing beats and such that you’d expect to see as a result, and it does a pretty good job at executing upon them. Learning a valuable lesson from the first Klonoa, it cuts down on the cast a LOT and that does absolute wonders for the narrative as a result. Nonetheless, I still think the game has a bit *too* much text in places, and it makes for some very stop-and-start pacing between the action & story telling that I grew to find grating far before the game’s end point. Though, at least in my case, that may be because the overall themes it’s going for are things I’ve seen quite a few times in other games and done better in them. The story certainly isn’t bad by any means, goodness no, but given how heavily I’d had this game’s story hyped up to me as a super well done emotional narrative, I found it decidedly lesser in that regard for my tastes at least. Mechanically, I can’t really sum it up better than saying that this game is absolutely a successor to the first Klonoa. You still have a 2.5D action platformer centered around grabbing enemies and objects and using them to launch yourself up and around stages. There are 6 special goodies to collect in every stage, and collecting all of them will unlock a couple of far harder challenge stages to play (which unlock you the sound test, just like in Klonoa 1), but that isn’t to say the main game isn’t difficult on its own. While some stages (particularly the burning city) are *far* harder than the rest of the game, the usual source of the game’s difficulty usually comes from how you only have a health bar of 3 hits before you die. The platforming itself isn’t usually that hard (indistinct contrast to Klonoa 1), but that 3 hits between you and death is more often than not what will lead to your death, particularly in boss fights. It’s a very well constructed little platformer with some fun gimmick levels to spice things up, and while it’s overall not quite as hard as Klonoa 1, it’ll still provide more than adequate challenge for any seasoned veteran of the genre looking for something a bit meatier to sink their teeth into. The aesthetics are also very much more Klonoa, but as this is a game with the power of the PS2 (albeit one released barely after the console’s first birthday), we’ve dropped more or less any 2D stuff for all 3D models. Klonoa and friends, all the characters really, have wonderfully adorable designs that my friends watching me play described as having Dreamcast aesthetics (which I’m inclined to agree with). The dream world itself’s designs are also very pretty, and it all makes for a great adventure. Also adding to that is the soundtrack, which is also excellent. Verdict: Recommended. While Klonoa 2 didn’t live up to the super hype it’d been sold to me as, it’s still a quite good game nonetheless. If you’re into 2D action platformers and don’t mind a relatively difficult time, then this is absolutely one you shouldn’t sleep on. However, if you’re someone who is less comfortable with 2D platformers but still love the aesthetics of the game, it might be worth looking at some bits of a playthrough online before you run out and buy the remasters recently released for modern systems. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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