Diablo 3 is a good game to relax to. It’s accessible—especially on console—it’s satisfying, and it’s not too demanding. At least, when you don’t know how to change the difficulty.
Thanks to retro game club I organise, it’s back to the stage-based Castlevania well for the cut-down alternate retelling of Rondo of Blood, Dracula X/Vampire’s Kiss/Akumajou Dracula XX. I previously reviewed Rondo on PSP and it did eventually win me over. I can’t say the same for its SNES sibling.
I’ve played other WarioWares before, but going back to the original showed me how solid the formula was right from the outset, and how subsequent games have only iterated on it or layered extra input gimmicks on top.
December’s game for the retro game club I organise was chosen by @cameronreigle (check out his art!). Although I had to rush through it in four days late in the month, I found it a charming and well-put together platformer with much to recommend it.
Soul of Darkness is Gameloft’s attempt to copy the look and feel of a post-Rondo Castlevania game. And it does a decent job at that! But the review’s not over there, unfortunately. The game’s quite easy (with the exception of the one tedious dragon boss), and betrays its mobile phone origins with a limited scope and animations that don’t live up to the buttery smoothness of its inspirations.
This is November’s entry for the “retro game club” that I participate in with some friends. The nominator claimed this as the most solid entry in the original trilogy, and I can see why. It has established mechanics that are slightly iterated on, introduces a stable ensemble that carries forward into the rest of the series, and isn’t bogged down by the many extra playable characters that the third entry unsuccessfully added to try and keep things fresh.
X was an ambitious tank-based FPS game on Game Boy that I reviewed last year. After stopping off at Argonaut’s successor studio Q-Games’s Starship Patrol, here’s their 18 years-later followup to X. It’s either known as X-Returns, X-Scape, or 3D Space Tank in a regrettable but common act of incoherence between Nintendo regional branches. Anyway, it’s pretty much the perfect sequel to X and highly enjoyable.
Dark Souls is of course known as an unforgiving and perilous game experience. Having watched complete Let’s Plays of 2 and 3, however, I felt I had enough familiarity with the mechanics and what to expect that I was confident. This did help me get over some initial barriers in the game so it helped, but I still did get the Dark Souls ExperienceTM; for one, a lot of the challenge is execution that stems from the player’s mastery of the controls. For another, Dark Souls 1 is actually missing some refinements or mechanics are otherwise changed in the sequels so I still felt out of my depth at first. And of course, I had never seen anything of the content of the game, so I had to come to grips with the level designs and boss patterns myself.
I reviewed the last Rhythm Heaven game here, and much of what I wrote remains true. The games are well put together with a great sense of joy underlying the art and sound direction. It’s not just functional, although it is that too; the audio and visuals being clear and harmonious is important for a rhythm game, but having it be silly and fun and catchy is also important to make you smile and remember it.
Samus Returns… I don’t like that it had to be a remake, but as a remake and a Metroid game, it’s a good one, capturing the feeling well of exploring a hostile alien planet while gradually becoming stronger. It makes a few tweaks to the Metroid formula but they mostly make the game better or more interesting. So, a few quick points.
Using 3D graphics in this 2D game works well, because they use depth in the backgrounds to create vast spaces that look amazing.
On top of the expected addition of the usual Metroid abilities that weren’t in the original Game Boy game, the new Aeion abilities are integrated fairly well into the game. Some aren’t worth bothering with until they’re (infrequently) required, but the Scan Pulse to reveal the map feels the best to use in a game about exploration. On the whole they’re a tad fiddly to use but a useful crutch when needed.
The new 360 degree aiming feels natural, uses the hardware’s controls well, and is incredibly useful. The tradeoff of being rooted to the spot makes it not overpowered. The new melee counter move is also fun and engaging.
Another new addition is the ability to bring the baby Metroid with you at the end, to fully traverse the map and get more items. This turns it into almost a buddy duo platformer, or at least echoes the familiar system from Symphony of the Night, and I love it.
Despite being a Sakamoto-produced project, the game doesn’t continue the Other M trend. It feels like a proper Metroid game, has a detailed game world, and even goes some way to reconciling the Prime and non-Prime games. I think MercurySteam is to be praised for this game; as Zero Mission did before, it’s brought Metroid 2 up to a modern standard and expanded on it in fun ways. My biggest gripe is that they gave Samus’s suit heels; it doesn’t need frigging heels just because she’s a woman! Infuriating! But yes, good game, and a bittersweet last hurrah for dual-screen gaming. I’ll miss you, bottom-screen map.
As an addendum to my Rayman quest, I picked up two different ports of Rayman 2. Comparing the two was informative, as each has been enhanced in different ways (for some good references for this check out the Rayman PC wiki). But first, a brief rundown of the game and my impressions.
Q-Games is primarily known for two things: their Pixeljunk series of games on Sony consoles, and their work on Star Fox for Nintendo. Maybe The Tomorrow Children too. Anyway, point is they also revived the difficult-to-search-for “X” IP, an ambitious 3D shooter on Game Boy that I reviewed here. Dylan Cuthbert of course created the original game, so it’s fitting that his company followed it up years later. Anyway anyway, I played Starship Patrol (aka Starship Defense/Starship Defender, thanks to Nintendo’s utter inability to establish consistent names between regions) because there’s a somewhat tenuous connection to the established X universe which in turn has links to Metroid and Star Fox. I never said I wasn’t a nerdy bundle of neuroses.
This is my first Sonic game! And I liked it! I have tried some of the Mega Drive ones thanks to various collections, but I never got on with them. I couldn’t handle them being either fast and punishing, or slow and tedious. But hey, that’s just me and my shallow understanding of them. I picked this one up thanks to Hideki Naganuma, composer for the Jet Set Radio series and all-around funkalicious dudemeister, who also did the soundtrack for this game. I wasn’t at all disappointed on that front, but to my surprise I really enjoyed the game itself too!
I played Monster World IV for a monthly retro game club I started for an online community I’m part of. My friend @imtherealgibbon nominated the first game, this fine gem of the Mega Drive. I’m glad he did because it pushed a lot of my buttons.
Here’s a Lego game. The episodic structure of the TV show lends itself well to a level-based game like this, but my relative unfamiliarity with the source material rendered it slightly unrelatable on top of the disconnected structure undermining the storytelling. I liked the more modern Lego look and feel for the Star Wars setting, and more versatile characters, but some of the new gimmicks like landing a ship and continuing on foot were lame.
