JohnnyFromVA
Played this version from the Disney Collection on the Switch. It follows all the same beats as the 16 bit console versions level by level just watered down to fit the handheld. For what it is and supposed to be, it works well enough. To be honest, it actually controls and plays better than the Genesis variation which has a ton of control bugs. It’s just hyper basic and watered down. Can be completed easily within a half hour’s time, just enough time for a car ride to your Aunt/Uncle’s house.
1994
This is actually a review for the Game Boy variation of this game which I can not find in this log. It follows all the same beats as the 16 bit console versions level by level just watered down to fit the handheld. For what it is and supposed to be, it works well enough. To be honest, it actually controls and plays better than the Genesis variation which has a ton of control bugs. It’s just hyper basic and watered down. Can be completed easily within a half hour’s time, just enough time for a car ride to your Aunt/Uncle’s house.
1994
To be clear. I have officially played through and completed both the SNES and Genesis versions of this game. The Genesis game has some of the most horrific controls I’ve experienced in a Sega Genesis game ever. The jump is sticky, everything has a chop to it from changing directions to short/long jumps to environmental hazards like collapsible floors, spring jumping platforms, slides, all of it has a horrible degree of separation from anything I would consider crisp, snappy, smooth and fluid. With an automatic built in rewind button present in the Disney Collection on the Switch, I bounced between the 16 bit consoles and after forcing myself to complete the Sega version of the game (a span of 4-4 1/2 hours) I fired up the SNES version to see what was different. Everything about it is the exact same game and everything about it is different. The sprites are larger. The graphics are brighter. The voice clips are way clearer, the audio entirely is superior and the controls, though still chock full of those slippery edges, performs insanely better. There’s even a few more bonus games in this one. It felt like THIS was how I was supposed to be playing it on the Genesis. Plus I played through this version in just a little over an hour. With that, I’m giving the SNES version a solid 3 but the Genesis version is a hard 1 1/2 earning that first star for being the Lion King and looking/sounding adequate. With that, grab the Disney collection, prepare that rewind trigger button and DEFINITELY play the SNES version of 1994’s The Lion King
I had this game on floppy disks and absolutely loved it. All the different potions you could use to keep the monster at bay were very creative for its time!
As a game, SOTC is flawed in many ways. But this was a game that changed my perception on video gaming as a whole when I first encountered it. I didn’t have a PS2. But a friend who appreciated the game as much as he knew I would leant me his system and the game to knock out in a week and I did that. The sheer scale of it, the epic music unlike anything I hard heard in gaming up to that point, the emotionally tugging story and it’s “just enough” approach to telling it so you, the player, has to begin to wonder if maybe it’s YOU that are the true villain by the end of all of it…..
There are complaints of the world being empty. It is. It is and that’s the entire point. I get from a gaming stand point it may not come off as particularly entertaining for most. But for me, it was a level of immersion I don’t think I had ever experienced up till that moment. I was alone. I was alone except for my trusty steed, Agro. I was trying to save this woman (left identified out of game as Mono so the players can decide who she is or what she means to them.) and I was being played a fool to a demon king who’s name is Nimrod spelled backwards and he convinced me to step into this sacred land, this world that hasn’t been touched by anything in a very long time (and we get to see all of that) to murder these giant beasts that have been left to their own devices for who knows how long. The story is complex as it is simple. It’s dark and melancholy. The game is actual art.
When this remake came about I had moved into my folks place in house limbo. My father had a PS4. I didn’t even know the remake existed. I hadn’t played the game since it was released on the PS2 so I was beyond floored when I discovered this. I had a 4 year old little girl at the time. She’s 9 now. But by the time she was just over 5, she knew more about the game and its lore than I did. She knows all of the colossi that didn’t make it into the game. She knows of the fan version working to release those missing colossi to the people. She created her own version of a Colossi. A Guardian Cat. She has a whole background story and power skill set and everything. Her most favorite game today is Hollow Knight. Metroid and Zelda fill out her shoes for the rest of it. She likes characters who are on big epic journey’s on a lone path towards planetary scale change. She’s going to go on her own epic path someday. A path that quite possibly began way back when she fell in love with Shadow of the Colossus the same way her Daddy did.
That’s why this is a top 10 game for me. It’s a game that transcended several generations of PlayStations. It transcended through two friends houses, two life times later finding ourself in the house of a generation before me, to give this game to the generation that follows me.
I did say this game’s story tugs at the emotions.lol
Anyways, if you haven’t. Give Shadow of the Colossus a try. See where Link got his finite climbing stamina and paragliding through a vast open, desolate world to battle giant beasts game came from.
There are complaints of the world being empty. It is. It is and that’s the entire point. I get from a gaming stand point it may not come off as particularly entertaining for most. But for me, it was a level of immersion I don’t think I had ever experienced up till that moment. I was alone. I was alone except for my trusty steed, Agro. I was trying to save this woman (left identified out of game as Mono so the players can decide who she is or what she means to them.) and I was being played a fool to a demon king who’s name is Nimrod spelled backwards and he convinced me to step into this sacred land, this world that hasn’t been touched by anything in a very long time (and we get to see all of that) to murder these giant beasts that have been left to their own devices for who knows how long. The story is complex as it is simple. It’s dark and melancholy. The game is actual art.
When this remake came about I had moved into my folks place in house limbo. My father had a PS4. I didn’t even know the remake existed. I hadn’t played the game since it was released on the PS2 so I was beyond floored when I discovered this. I had a 4 year old little girl at the time. She’s 9 now. But by the time she was just over 5, she knew more about the game and its lore than I did. She knows all of the colossi that didn’t make it into the game. She knows of the fan version working to release those missing colossi to the people. She created her own version of a Colossi. A Guardian Cat. She has a whole background story and power skill set and everything. Her most favorite game today is Hollow Knight. Metroid and Zelda fill out her shoes for the rest of it. She likes characters who are on big epic journey’s on a lone path towards planetary scale change. She’s going to go on her own epic path someday. A path that quite possibly began way back when she fell in love with Shadow of the Colossus the same way her Daddy did.
That’s why this is a top 10 game for me. It’s a game that transcended several generations of PlayStations. It transcended through two friends houses, two life times later finding ourself in the house of a generation before me, to give this game to the generation that follows me.
I did say this game’s story tugs at the emotions.lol
Anyways, if you haven’t. Give Shadow of the Colossus a try. See where Link got his finite climbing stamina and paragliding through a vast open, desolate world to battle giant beasts game came from.
2008
This game pissed me off. Games like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Counter Strike and others were super hot around this time. Turok’s biggest strengths were its dinosaurs and crazy weapons of mass destruction. Instead we get to fight military types with snipers and shotguns while getting the same attack cut scene over and over again when fighting what little dinosaurs we got. I didn’t even finish it and will never pick it up again.
If we EVER get a new Turok game, please lean heavily into its Dino’s and arsenal.
If we EVER get a new Turok game, please lean heavily into its Dino’s and arsenal.
This was my very first WRPG. I didn’t understand the full concept of it all yet. This game has so
Many negative things about it (controls, mechanics, glitches, repetition, the list can go long) - but I was completely blown away by the sure scale of it all. The customization. I replayed this game probably a dozen times within my first month of playing and would spend over an hour creating my character. It took me forever to settle and accept that each character had their perks and flaws and my decisions affect their outcomes and the sort of story I want my character to tell or live in. I dumped hundreds of hours into this game. I created a massive binder with everything from my thoughts, the fledgling internet’s thoughts, lore, my own personalized lore, the binder was as thick as an encyclopedia. It’s broken. It’s buggy, it’s glitchy and the series has surpassed this one over and over again.
But it’s story. It’s atmosphere. It’s nostalgia. This one needs to be remade for today’s consoles in a bad way. I’d be all over that!
Many negative things about it (controls, mechanics, glitches, repetition, the list can go long) - but I was completely blown away by the sure scale of it all. The customization. I replayed this game probably a dozen times within my first month of playing and would spend over an hour creating my character. It took me forever to settle and accept that each character had their perks and flaws and my decisions affect their outcomes and the sort of story I want my character to tell or live in. I dumped hundreds of hours into this game. I created a massive binder with everything from my thoughts, the fledgling internet’s thoughts, lore, my own personalized lore, the binder was as thick as an encyclopedia. It’s broken. It’s buggy, it’s glitchy and the series has surpassed this one over and over again.
But it’s story. It’s atmosphere. It’s nostalgia. This one needs to be remade for today’s consoles in a bad way. I’d be all over that!
This is the one that hurt. I’m one of the few Ecco fans out there that genuinely enjoyed and even replay those first two Genesis games. This looked and sounded gorgeous! It was 3D like everything else at the time and the idea of being able to roam freely in the ocean as a dolphin? Let’s go!
It was a broken and unplayable mess for me. To this day, this game has had me dreaming of a brand new 2D Ecco made in the same style as the originals just with quality of life issues fixed. Or even a Metroidvania since it has some of the pieces already to become that. Let’s do it. Just…please, never again like this.
It was a broken and unplayable mess for me. To this day, this game has had me dreaming of a brand new 2D Ecco made in the same style as the originals just with quality of life issues fixed. Or even a Metroidvania since it has some of the pieces already to become that. Let’s do it. Just…please, never again like this.
2017
Hollow Knight has become my daughter’s favorite video game of all time. The first time we tried to play it, we didn’t catch the pun n proverbial bug. When we finally came back to this one, it took a hold of us in such a powerful way. Beyond being a master class in creating a perfect MetroidVania, Hollow Knight has something a lot of these other games/franchises don’t. An insanely dedicated fan base. Hollow Knight doesn’t spoon feed you its entire story. Because of this, you can hop on YouTube and find a slew of people breaking down its lore in such remarkable ways, you’d think they were talking about Tolkien novels. The world building in this game is unbelievable. If you choose to dive into it, there is so much to unlock and discover. Top that with some of the most beautiful set pieces and original soundtracks (a soundtrack I honestly listen to outside of playing the game quite often in a number of different settings) this field of entertainment has ever seen. My daughter has seen just about every YouTube video on the game, draws pictures of all these characters, has collected nearly all of the plushies and even has the Wanderer’s Journal. She’s a diehard fan girl and through playing the game with her and enjoying all the additional fan based content out there has made a massive fan boy out of me. Hollow Knight is a top 10 games of all time lister for me and I can’t encourage you enough to spend some time in Hollownest. It might be slow in the beginning, but it has excellent pacing so once you figure out/master some of the mechanics and start collecting some of the different power ups and abilities, you’ll most likely fall in love with it like we did….just maybe not as fanatically but who’s to say until you’ve given it the proper go!