RoyalFury
Cute little platformer with fun physics and pretty art style. Something short and sweet but well made, nice free grab on Steam.
2012
I lost my copy just at the same time I reached the last level but for what I remember it was the kind of game that I loved at the time, despite the repeptitive combat it's so full of character and silly stuff to do and see, is a game that you don't have to take seriously and just enjoy the camp.
I remembered it recently and I wish I could find that ps3 disc...
I remembered it recently and I wish I could find that ps3 disc...
1997
This game is weird, but in a good way.
I really like the way it looks, I dare anyone to find something more aggressively late 90's sci-fi, the levels all look super cool and there's a lot of interesting stuff that they did with the textures here and there, the levels with gemoetrical and reflective surfaces being what comes to mind first.
Your main character being the sprite of a buff guy with a gun (is it a gun?) for a head running around shooting in a 3d space gives it all an interesting look.
Also I really like the sniper mode, with the robotic breathing and UI, again idk if this guy is supposed to be a cyborg or anything but it just looks cool, like most stuff in this game.
It has a nice sense of humor here and there, which I liked too.
The biggest issue for me were how annoying certain areas felt. This is a short game, but it feels like it has just the right lenght. However, when you realize that there are no secrets and how everything boils down to long hallways interrupted by huge rooms where you shoot stuff, it undermines the experience a bit.
Still, presentation is what this game has the most going for. Dropping from space before every level is fun, gunning down enemies and jumping nonstop like a maniac is exhilarating (I love infinite ammo), dropping the world's smallest nuke is funny (at least to me) every time.
Fun game, fun experience, but not much else
I really like the way it looks, I dare anyone to find something more aggressively late 90's sci-fi, the levels all look super cool and there's a lot of interesting stuff that they did with the textures here and there, the levels with gemoetrical and reflective surfaces being what comes to mind first.
Your main character being the sprite of a buff guy with a gun (is it a gun?) for a head running around shooting in a 3d space gives it all an interesting look.
Also I really like the sniper mode, with the robotic breathing and UI, again idk if this guy is supposed to be a cyborg or anything but it just looks cool, like most stuff in this game.
It has a nice sense of humor here and there, which I liked too.
The biggest issue for me were how annoying certain areas felt. This is a short game, but it feels like it has just the right lenght. However, when you realize that there are no secrets and how everything boils down to long hallways interrupted by huge rooms where you shoot stuff, it undermines the experience a bit.
Still, presentation is what this game has the most going for. Dropping from space before every level is fun, gunning down enemies and jumping nonstop like a maniac is exhilarating (I love infinite ammo), dropping the world's smallest nuke is funny (at least to me) every time.
Fun game, fun experience, but not much else
1999
Women love me fish love me too
Siempre estaba en las salitas de cumpleaños y todos siempre se peleaban por jugar un rato. Ni me gustan los Simpson pero hasta yo me acuerdo que era un juegazo muy divertido lleno de chistes y mecánicas graciosas de ver y de hacer, sobre todo pegarnos entre nosotros. Jamás lo terminé :(
1992
Yeah, the game is very short, being intended for a very young audience, so I was expecting a single sitting and cute experience.
What I did not expect is that this game is surprisingly well put together in a way that tells you that the developers planned everything with meticulous detail. I am saying this because having played later Kirby games, is amazing how even in his debut the movement, mechanics, level design and just the vibe is almost the same as future games, and those future games did just the right changes to expand Kirby's moveset and level lenght for them to count as proper platformers.
What I'm tryint to say is, that even when simple and short, this game is of great quality for what it offers, and the developers knew it enough to improve to the point of the franchise that it is today, while keeping the original core ideas intact.
What I did not expect is that this game is surprisingly well put together in a way that tells you that the developers planned everything with meticulous detail. I am saying this because having played later Kirby games, is amazing how even in his debut the movement, mechanics, level design and just the vibe is almost the same as future games, and those future games did just the right changes to expand Kirby's moveset and level lenght for them to count as proper platformers.
What I'm tryint to say is, that even when simple and short, this game is of great quality for what it offers, and the developers knew it enough to improve to the point of the franchise that it is today, while keeping the original core ideas intact.
1995
Really what can I say about this game that hasn't already been said before? Even after finishing it for the first time I can tell what all the praise was about.
As someone who is not very fond of Square JRPGs I was surprised at how this one kept me wanting to go for more, to explore further, to see every character interaction and every new beautiful location.
I think that this is due to two things, firstly and the easiest to explain, the combat. The simple mechanic of double and triple attacks plus how certain moves can chain enemies in a row is a minor detail compared to more complicated games, but the key here is that these are just so much fun. Every time you unlock a new spell you want to try it no matter what, and the crazy animations that they show you are so creative and flashy, it's so action packed!
The second part is of course, well, the world, characters, and story as a whole. I won't go into details just to not spoil (if anyone reading this has not played this old ass game yet by some chance trust me, go in blind), but the more you go the more the world opens up and the more the characters resonate with you and the more the story connects everything together in a way that just feels right.
As a whole this is just the most accomplished JRPG of it's time, and I'm already planning on picking it up again in a New Game+ sometime in the near future.
As someone who is not very fond of Square JRPGs I was surprised at how this one kept me wanting to go for more, to explore further, to see every character interaction and every new beautiful location.
I think that this is due to two things, firstly and the easiest to explain, the combat. The simple mechanic of double and triple attacks plus how certain moves can chain enemies in a row is a minor detail compared to more complicated games, but the key here is that these are just so much fun. Every time you unlock a new spell you want to try it no matter what, and the crazy animations that they show you are so creative and flashy, it's so action packed!
The second part is of course, well, the world, characters, and story as a whole. I won't go into details just to not spoil (if anyone reading this has not played this old ass game yet by some chance trust me, go in blind), but the more you go the more the world opens up and the more the characters resonate with you and the more the story connects everything together in a way that just feels right.
As a whole this is just the most accomplished JRPG of it's time, and I'm already planning on picking it up again in a New Game+ sometime in the near future.
What a way to finish the trilogy, truly.
This game is the perfect combination of the best parts of the previous games and balances them in genius ways, the lesser ammount of things to collect making it a breeze to just explore the levels, and the minigames that add variety but are now separated from the main levels, adding a bigger sense of scale and somehow making them feel less like chores.
Every level seems to want to add something new while maintaining the core mechanics of how Spyro can explore the world, in paper it can seem like a lot but when you play it is just fun, and that's what I think defines this game.
I can feel that this was a game where the main priority was to make it something fun to play, it made me realize how rare that is to come by sometimes in a video GAME, at their core these are just digital toys and Spyro 3 knows it and perfects in on itslef with this as a main philosophy.
Also, this game just looks great, the experimenting of color palettes is insane in some levels and most textures look beyond of what I thought a ps1 could make it look like. This is one of the prettiest platformers I've ever played.
This trilogy has become one very dear to me in the very short time that I have experienced it, and I'm happy I did.
This game is the perfect combination of the best parts of the previous games and balances them in genius ways, the lesser ammount of things to collect making it a breeze to just explore the levels, and the minigames that add variety but are now separated from the main levels, adding a bigger sense of scale and somehow making them feel less like chores.
Every level seems to want to add something new while maintaining the core mechanics of how Spyro can explore the world, in paper it can seem like a lot but when you play it is just fun, and that's what I think defines this game.
I can feel that this was a game where the main priority was to make it something fun to play, it made me realize how rare that is to come by sometimes in a video GAME, at their core these are just digital toys and Spyro 3 knows it and perfects in on itslef with this as a main philosophy.
Also, this game just looks great, the experimenting of color palettes is insane in some levels and most textures look beyond of what I thought a ps1 could make it look like. This is one of the prettiest platformers I've ever played.
This trilogy has become one very dear to me in the very short time that I have experienced it, and I'm happy I did.
The idea they had going forward when making this is a good one, the beat em up/shmup approach I feel works better for a Godzilla game, fighting games are good too but there's something nice about just smashing buildings and spaceships as giant monsters.
Or it should have been had this game been better at balancing stuff.
Godzilla's hitboxes are bad, he gets hit a lot due to his big size, Mothra is smaller and can fly over stuff but every time she gets hit she falls dow to the corner of the screen. This is made worse when you find out this is one of those games that think endgame difficulty is just fillng the screen with enemies and projectiles and repeating bosses over and over again.
Still, spritework is pretty (when hazards don't blend with the background), you can tell which monster is which although sound design could be better.
AND at one point I found out that despite how nerfed she is, you can actually cheese the game very easily with Mothra, just treat the mains stages as a normal shmup but with a bit more patience than usual, and most bosses actually have "blind spots" where you can just sit and spam attacks without them touching you since Mothra is smaller and with her flight can fit in these spots, Godzilla should be used on bosses ONLY in certain cases or when you need a quick kill with the atomic breath in an already weakened enemy.
In the end it could be way better but when I started treating it as a Mothra game is when the moderate fun play really kicked in.
Or it should have been had this game been better at balancing stuff.
Godzilla's hitboxes are bad, he gets hit a lot due to his big size, Mothra is smaller and can fly over stuff but every time she gets hit she falls dow to the corner of the screen. This is made worse when you find out this is one of those games that think endgame difficulty is just fillng the screen with enemies and projectiles and repeating bosses over and over again.
Still, spritework is pretty (when hazards don't blend with the background), you can tell which monster is which although sound design could be better.
AND at one point I found out that despite how nerfed she is, you can actually cheese the game very easily with Mothra, just treat the mains stages as a normal shmup but with a bit more patience than usual, and most bosses actually have "blind spots" where you can just sit and spam attacks without them touching you since Mothra is smaller and with her flight can fit in these spots, Godzilla should be used on bosses ONLY in certain cases or when you need a quick kill with the atomic breath in an already weakened enemy.
In the end it could be way better but when I started treating it as a Mothra game is when the moderate fun play really kicked in.
1985
Decided to replay it after years. Still holds up but I feel is a bit longer that it needs to be.
1999
Games in the pet or monster raising genre are not exactly unpopular, but I do consider them more niche since I feel it takes a particular kind of person to find the idea of a game where hours of grinding is THE core mechanic entretaining. Most of these games have extra mechanics or details to add some variety and make them feel different from one another since the core idea is the same (raise your glorified tamagotchi untill is strong enough to do X thing), and that's where I feel MR2 shines the most, in these extra details and how it balances them.
For starters and to go quickly over this, the game looks fantastic. I was surprised by how good everything looks and the extent that they got for certain details. There's examples like how every single tournament has it's own actually unique and fully modeled 3D trophy, how certain attack animations on hybrid monsters look like a proper adaptation of the actual original animations of the two other monsters it came from, or just looking at your monster wander around in your ranch and catching how some details on the model's textures are way more detailed than what they seemed at first. The game also has plenty of 2D sprites and those look very pretty too, almost like a painting. The whole world of MR2 feel like a combination of steampunk/rural/ancient fantasy that is coated with these warm hues of color all over. I am amazed at how beautiful this game is.
Now talking about the actual meat of the game, I find amazing just how complex it is, the way you can influence every simgle thing you can do with your monster, is a bit hard at the beggining since the game is very vague about how stuff works, and in a game like this it can be frustrating since it can cost you time and money, but I feel that here is where the actual challenge of it is, because once you pick up how things work via trial and error then there's actually a lot of freedom in how to raise different kinds of monsters. You can be cruel with them which can make them stronger in some ways but shorten their lifespam, you can use "steroids", you can be caring and doting with them, you can raise them just to make money while you plan to breed your actual champion, the developers thought about a lot of stuff to keep you entretained. Again, I'm just amazed at how literally every way that you can train a monster has it's pros and it's cons, it's advantages and it's ways to kill your monster, and finding that balance is fun (I don't know why I liked the whole math side of this fun as well, I don't tend to care about specific formulas with games like these). To me the most telling detail is how the pause menu only has the options to go back to play or reset, which you can do even faster than in other games, and since MR2 has a lot of RGN events this feels intentional.
Battles are simple and fun but can have a surprising level of strategy to them sometimes, not much more to say about them.
This game has so much charisma as well, I found myself liking some of the monsters designs way more than I expected, maybe since you spend a lot of time with them and going through multiple events together and seeing them react to things helps you warm up to them.
And speaking of events there are so many, some necessary to unlock certain things but other that you can do just for the fun of it. Minigames, expeditions, upgrades etc. If you play the game normally you are bound to experience a bunch of them, but this is also a game from the era of super cryptic event based rewards that you can only get if you have a guide or knew a friend who did them too, and I like those games and I feel that in this case it adds to the mistery of this world.
This is a game that for some people is gonna be fun but are gonna be burnt out by in a while, but for others (like me) is gonna check every point of what makes this genre of sims so fun and worth to keep playing, and I don't think I can say the same about many other games like this...
Or maybe I have an addiction problem, idk.
For starters and to go quickly over this, the game looks fantastic. I was surprised by how good everything looks and the extent that they got for certain details. There's examples like how every single tournament has it's own actually unique and fully modeled 3D trophy, how certain attack animations on hybrid monsters look like a proper adaptation of the actual original animations of the two other monsters it came from, or just looking at your monster wander around in your ranch and catching how some details on the model's textures are way more detailed than what they seemed at first. The game also has plenty of 2D sprites and those look very pretty too, almost like a painting. The whole world of MR2 feel like a combination of steampunk/rural/ancient fantasy that is coated with these warm hues of color all over. I am amazed at how beautiful this game is.
Now talking about the actual meat of the game, I find amazing just how complex it is, the way you can influence every simgle thing you can do with your monster, is a bit hard at the beggining since the game is very vague about how stuff works, and in a game like this it can be frustrating since it can cost you time and money, but I feel that here is where the actual challenge of it is, because once you pick up how things work via trial and error then there's actually a lot of freedom in how to raise different kinds of monsters. You can be cruel with them which can make them stronger in some ways but shorten their lifespam, you can use "steroids", you can be caring and doting with them, you can raise them just to make money while you plan to breed your actual champion, the developers thought about a lot of stuff to keep you entretained. Again, I'm just amazed at how literally every way that you can train a monster has it's pros and it's cons, it's advantages and it's ways to kill your monster, and finding that balance is fun (I don't know why I liked the whole math side of this fun as well, I don't tend to care about specific formulas with games like these). To me the most telling detail is how the pause menu only has the options to go back to play or reset, which you can do even faster than in other games, and since MR2 has a lot of RGN events this feels intentional.
Battles are simple and fun but can have a surprising level of strategy to them sometimes, not much more to say about them.
This game has so much charisma as well, I found myself liking some of the monsters designs way more than I expected, maybe since you spend a lot of time with them and going through multiple events together and seeing them react to things helps you warm up to them.
And speaking of events there are so many, some necessary to unlock certain things but other that you can do just for the fun of it. Minigames, expeditions, upgrades etc. If you play the game normally you are bound to experience a bunch of them, but this is also a game from the era of super cryptic event based rewards that you can only get if you have a guide or knew a friend who did them too, and I like those games and I feel that in this case it adds to the mistery of this world.
This is a game that for some people is gonna be fun but are gonna be burnt out by in a while, but for others (like me) is gonna check every point of what makes this genre of sims so fun and worth to keep playing, and I don't think I can say the same about many other games like this...
Or maybe I have an addiction problem, idk.
1994
Having Sky in the name is perfect because the main character is very floaty in his movements, but it feels very good to control! The platforming is perfect for the ways you can move around and it expands more with the power ups you unlock, this really is one of the more fun SNES platformers I've played so far.
The art direction is great, is so weird seeing a fantasy world inspired by Hindu aesthetics and mythos, and visually it looks beautiful, the spritework is very pretty, and I personally really liked the enemy design, the fantasious approach is very good, and the creative approaches in the design of the bosses is something I loved.
I really liked the power ups and you can use them in surprisingly creative ways in some places. This makes the game very easy sometimes but honestly I like when you're a bit overpowered in games, is fun as long as it's fair and this is a good example, with the most basic instance how you can sacrifice using a power up in exchange for health, how certain bosses become laughably easy with the correct attacj pattern, so on and so forth.
The only things that push this game down for me is that one, this game is ridiculously short, and if you knowwhere to go in the two labyrinth levels then you can basically finish this game in around two hours, there seems to be some hints that MAYBE there where plans for it to be even a bit longer, with stuff like the flying levels being so short and few.
The second problem I feel is some slight dificulty spikes, which I put in the category of "very easy but very stupid", you know the ones, where you can see that the mistake was on you but the game is made in such a way that making said mistake is also thanks to the way the game itself works. The prime example whpuld be the true final boss which literally consist of just two attack patterns but if you get hit you can die in one or two hits. This however happens very few times across the game.
Overall this is a very good package of a game that had the potential of being more, but is very nice just as it is anyways.
The art direction is great, is so weird seeing a fantasy world inspired by Hindu aesthetics and mythos, and visually it looks beautiful, the spritework is very pretty, and I personally really liked the enemy design, the fantasious approach is very good, and the creative approaches in the design of the bosses is something I loved.
I really liked the power ups and you can use them in surprisingly creative ways in some places. This makes the game very easy sometimes but honestly I like when you're a bit overpowered in games, is fun as long as it's fair and this is a good example, with the most basic instance how you can sacrifice using a power up in exchange for health, how certain bosses become laughably easy with the correct attacj pattern, so on and so forth.
The only things that push this game down for me is that one, this game is ridiculously short, and if you knowwhere to go in the two labyrinth levels then you can basically finish this game in around two hours, there seems to be some hints that MAYBE there where plans for it to be even a bit longer, with stuff like the flying levels being so short and few.
The second problem I feel is some slight dificulty spikes, which I put in the category of "very easy but very stupid", you know the ones, where you can see that the mistake was on you but the game is made in such a way that making said mistake is also thanks to the way the game itself works. The prime example whpuld be the true final boss which literally consist of just two attack patterns but if you get hit you can die in one or two hits. This however happens very few times across the game.
Overall this is a very good package of a game that had the potential of being more, but is very nice just as it is anyways.
1981
Whenever I was invited to a friend's birthday in one of those entertainment centers I always went straight to the Galaga machine, it was so much fun :)
2006
Music is good (obviously), and the visual presentation is adorable, there's more content than it seems so you have a lot to do even if the songs themselves are short.
However I will NOT go for a perfect in The Bon Dance you cannot make me.
However I will NOT go for a perfect in The Bon Dance you cannot make me.
I finished this game 100% earlier this month, but I didn't log it as Mastered then because I still needed to finish all the Skill Points, and then my file got corrupted and I lost all my progress, so I finished the game again 100% for real. I think this should tell you how fun the game is and how much of a breeze it is to finish, especially since how well Spyro controls compared to the first game.
It has some problems, a couple of the things you have to do to get all the orbs are a bit repetitive and not very fun, but most are. I personally prefer the more fantasy look of the first game compared to this one, although it still has some nice views.
Still, I am very impressed with how this game is truly a natural and technical evolution of it's predecesor, and an excellent game by it's own as well.
It has some problems, a couple of the things you have to do to get all the orbs are a bit repetitive and not very fun, but most are. I personally prefer the more fantasy look of the first game compared to this one, although it still has some nice views.
Still, I am very impressed with how this game is truly a natural and technical evolution of it's predecesor, and an excellent game by it's own as well.