Second Castlevania game I tried after SotN, and a damn good one as well. Controls very, very nicely, and from the looks of the previous games this seems to have toned down the frustration levels significantly, though of course I'll have to see myself. Atmosphere, music and detail are all incredible too, making it yet another one of those early SNES titles to to a great job showing off what the console could do. Both of these games give me a wonderful impression of both the earlier and later Castlevania series, and I'll definitely be sure to check out more.

Trog! on NES is a port of the arcade game of the same title, unfortunately there was little hope in bringing the claymation graphics to NES, but it still looks pretty great here and I love how goofy Bloop looks dancing in the win screen. We're also down to two playable dinosaurs instead of four in the arcade game, which again I think is fine. It probably would've been troublesome getting four dinosaurs on screen with all the trogs too.

The game itself is a maze game akin to Pac-Man, but the stage design itself kinda reminds me of Bomberman without the destructible blocks. You gotta collect all the eggs and get to the exit while avoiding the titular Trogs, who won't hesitate to knock you out and eat you alive, pretty nightmarish. Over the course of the game the Trogs get smarter and start inventing new ways to try and catch you, like jumping and throwing wheels at you. You defend yourself via punching in your normal form or collecting powerups like pineapples to temporarily turn into a goddamned t-rex to chomp those fucking Trogs or grabbing a fire stick looking thing to be able to shoot fireballs.

The charm and simplicity of this game only served to make me love the shit out of it more. It even features one of my favorite tropes in video games which is enemies getting hurt by their own moves, Trogs get smarter but are also still dimwitted and get flattened by their own wheels or get roasted from walking into fires another one started.

I really didn't expect this one to get me addicted, I would've absolutely loved the shit out of this game as a kid and with a friend it would've been even more fun.

A syllogism:

I don’t like strider.

This game is a lot like strider.

I don’t like this game very much either.

Over the years of my life I've grown to respect others who believe in some form of spirituality or other such things we theoretically just can't comprehend or explain. Obviously it's still important to remain in the real world and believe what's in front of our eyes and keep a proper balance between it and practicality.

With that said, you also really shouldn't trust an NES game made by a bunch of Brits to give you lottery numbers for drawings held in the States, let alone getting an accurate tarot reading. There's also zero gameplay here, so I really feel bad for anyone who wasted money on it back in the day.

At least there's tits.

Before going into this, I want to address the name of this game. This shouldn't be treated as Super Mario Land 3, because the gameplay is quite different compared to the first Mario Land games. While you have your standard bouncing on enemies and bumping blocks for secrets, those games have different design philosophies.

The main focus of this game is gathering coins and finding secret treasures. Of course, you still have to get from the beginning of the level to the end to advance, but you have to collect as much money as you can for the best ending. Not only that, but you also have to use money to progress in levels themselves. In most levels you have to donate 10 currency to be able to end the level. Gathering coins isn't very difficult, you can find them floating around like in any standard Mario game, but you also gain money for destroying enemies with your dash, breaking or activating certain blocks as well as beating bosses which literally showers you with coins. The donation is also required if the player wants to activate a checkpoint in a level, introducing a risk vs. reward system, which I like. Skillful players can keep their cold cash for themselves if they manage to beat a level without dying (as dying will make you lose all the money), or play it safe by activating a checkpoint. You can also use said coins to gamble them at the end of each level. You can try to double or quadriple your reward or lose half of the earnings in a simple minigame where you choose a right bucket or a left bucket and let RNGesus decide wether it's a bag of money or a weight. Another minigame is for getting lives or hearts, which is an alternative to traditional coins, 100 hearts is an extra life. You gain hearts by destroying enemies or finding them in blocks. Anyway, the second minigame is where you can spend money on one of the three courses, one more expensive than the other but has better rewards. You throw a bomb to attempt to hit an enemy, the more you hit, the more you get. I'm not really a fan of this minigame, you don't have control over a power meter which is constantly moving and the timer is ticking so you have to throw it quick. I almost never hit an enemy, maybe if i played it more I would've developed a strategy but I didn't feel like spending the earnings. I did get pretty low on lives at one point, but returning to the previous levels for a missing treasure helped gain some extras, so there was no need in playing that minigame.

Another aspect that separates this game from traditional Mario land games is enemy interaction. Unlike Mario who can't touch a seemingly harmless Goomba from any side except from above, Wario can hit other enemies from any way, as long as that way isn't indicated as spikey, for example hitting an enemy from behind to stun them, then Wario can pick them up and throw at other enemies or use a dash to get rid of them. Of course Wario can still jump on most enemies, incapacitating them for a short time.

Wario himself is quite different from Mario, instead of being quick and nimble he is obviously a power character with his dashing ability and being able to pick up enemies. While he isn't as capable at platforming as Mario, the level design is mindful of his abilities and while he may be slower, he still controls pretty well, jumping and dashing work pretty well and the levels are built with those abilities in mind, and controlling him becomes natural after some time. Unlike Mario, the power-up system is also different, now sporting hats giving various abilities. A bull hat that allows to dash for longer, break tough blocks in one hit as well as groundpound, a dragon-kinda hat that spits fire (or stream of water when underwater) that destroyes enemies and blocks even in air, and a jet hat that allows to move faster, dash in air and underwater for an extended time, giving platforming advantage. These hats are utilized to uncover some of the hidden treasures that can't be obtained by plain boring Wario. I usually prefer a jet hat thanks to its enhancements to the platforming, but other hats can be beneficial depending on the situation.

The levels are fairly engaging, though they may seem slow at the start. The game has got a pretty good variety in setpieces, like beaches, underground and watery areas, ships, trains and castles. The variety is pretty nice, and the level design is pretty solid and can be pretty creative. The hidden treasures are an optional reward for exploration, most of them aren't very difficult to find and you'll likely to come across most of them if you care for that sort of thing on your first playthrough. There's only one I can recall being particularly well hidden behind an invisible door, but it was hidden in a clever way. The game has a pretty good amount of content, a whole 40 stages, some are optional, including an entire world of Sherbet Land, unlike Super Mario Land 2 I didn't feel like this game was too short, and I had a lot of fun playing through the game and obtaining all the treasures.

As for audio and visual department, Wario Land absolutely excells. The graphics are some of the best that can be found on a 2-bit colored handheld, the backgrounds are rich on detail, some of the sprites, including Wario himself are big, detailed and well animated. The music is also pretty great. As I'm not good at describing music, I'll just say that some of the music is pretty memorable and offers some bangers, my personal favorite is train level theme.

Of course Wario Land isn't perfect. A few of the hidden treasures a quite backtracky, requiring to go back after you find a key to obtain a hidden treasure. Occasionally, the enemy hitboxes don't trigger properly when trying to land on them resulting in getting hit, and quite a bit of flicker, which isn't major but can be distracting. The bosses for the most part are just alright. One of them can be skipped by entering a door if you lose a power-up, the other can be dashed into and be thrown out of the arena in a matter of seconds. Generally they aren't very memorable, though to be fair they weren't a strong suit of Super Mario Land 2 either. But overall, I'd say Wario Land is a pretty good game, one of the best Game Boy games I've played in fact. It's not like much beloved Super Mario Land 2, it's different but being different isn't necessarily a bad thing. While this may not be a great Super Mario Land 3 game, this is definitely a solid Wario Land game, a great start for the series, and a good game in its own right.

I love everything about Ghostwire: Tokyo, except for actually playing it.

The game has massive Vibes, and feels almost like a first-person action spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei. The blend of supernatural elements and technology is interesting (transferring spirits via payphone devices is very SMT), and the art design is top-notch. The story is good enough, following a guy who is brought back from death by a spirit that co-inhabits his body. There's nothing incredible there, but the banter between the two can be entertaining.

It's unfortunate, then, that everything else doesn't live up to the game's style. The combat, where you launch various projectiles via hand-signs, looks pretty, but has no sense of impact. Your default "rapid-fire" attack, Air, particularly feels like an ineffective peashooter. Water is far more useful, being the equivalent of a shotgun, and Fire is your "rocket launcher". They can all be upgraded, but that's another issue...

See, almost every upgrade only exists to make the game feel slightly less sluggish. Normally, when you damage enemies enough, you can rip their cores out to finish them. You don't actually have to, but it gives you some ammo back. Kind of like a Glory Kill from DOOM or something. The problem is that enemies can interrupt this animation. So the game's solution? Give you a bunch of upgrades that make it faster. Or give you other core-ripping abilities that can't be interrupted. My solution? Just stop doing it and hit them a couple more times to kill them.

Other upgrades are similar: higher rate of fire. Slightly wider splash damage radius. It's all very incremental and feels like a waste of time. That's appropriate, though, because most of this game feels like a waste of time. If it had simply been a straight-ahead, linear first-person action game, the combat's flaws could be more easily overlooked. However, because More Hours = Better Than, the fine folks at Tango Gameworks (or, speculating, their parent company Bethesda) decided this should be an open world game with copy-pasted sidequests and, uh... 250,000 spirits scattered around the map to absorb.

Yeah. 250,000. Sure, those are in bundles of, like, 100-300 at a time, but holy cow, that's still a LOT of things to absorb!

And then, if all that wasn't bad enough, there are segments of the game where you're separated from your Ghost Man, so you have none of your shitty little magics, and instead have to rely on the Very Good™ stealth.

I liked talking to the Tanuki. They were cool.

I came to this late as I was always a Sega kid in the 80s/90s. I admit I am surprised this has held up so remarkably well to the point that I would say the first Castlevania is the best of the NES games released despite being the original. I can only imagine how ahead of it's time this game must have felt at release, I'm kind of gutted I missed it.

For those (somehow) unaware, the Castlevania series started with this title in 1987. The games (mostly) follow the Belmont clan and their never ending quest to fight the hordes of darkness and defeating Dracula whenever he resurrects. It's a side scrolling action-adventure platformer fighting a variety of enemies and bosses getting progressively harder as you travel through the 6 stages. This game is pretty hard, at least for me. Enemies do a lot of damage and come at you from awful angles making it hard/impossible to hit them or avoid damage. Simon Belmont also has (for a man in a small loincloth) all the agility of an overloaded pallet truck, slow to move, can't jump off stairs etc. making it all the more difficult. Definitely a product of the times.

Simon is equipped with a whip for combat called the Vampire Killer. You can power this up as well as use various sub weapons found in breakable candles. These weapons use hearts you collect as ammo to fire including throwing daggers, axes, a cross etc. Due to their type for angles and impact having the right one for the right boss really matters. A lot of this game is more about learning the levels and tactics to beat. A little too tough for me in places, especially the final couple of bosses that can be brutal.

Despite the difficulty this game is still good fun. The level locations are varied, the bosses are all unique and the atmosphere is still fantastic, the great usage of colour with the art to make the castle come to life. Underground caves, entrance halls, clocktowers, it genuinely looks great. Playing Castlevania 2 afterwards and it takes such a hit visually to me it feels like these games were made in the wrong order. The music is also still sublime. That opening song Vampire Killer has become such an iconic piece of music for the franchise managing to incorporate that gothic horror tone with action at the same time. With various remixes and new versions in each game as well as fans for 30 years.

Overall it's still a pretty great game that's a little rough around the edges due to the passage of time, but hey, aren't we all?

Recommended.

+ Amazing atmosphere.
+ Decade spanning musical score.
+ Surprisingly good visuals.

- A little too hard for me.
- Simon feels very stiff to use.

I can't rate this. It's a magical initial 20 hours, followed by a slow petering out with insane zigzags in quality near the end. It's a gorgeous world and you can find adventure in any direction you go, but the rewards start feeling less and less substantial the further you are, especially when you realize how unbalanced and contrived some of the underlying stat systems are. For everything enjoyable here, there's something annoying or detrimental to the experience. I really want to love it, but there's too many forks in the road for me to remember it as the studio's masterwork (the way most people seem to be treating it).

But enough about Breath of the Wild,

If you're in your 30s or 40s and owned a Megadrive / Genesis? This could be the collection for you.

Sega over their history no matter what people think of them now have had some smashing games. Of the consoles they released though, by far and large my favorite of these was the Sega Genesis / Megadrive. Nostalgia factor aside there are some truly quality titles here spanning across all genres that will take hours to actually finish and at a good price.

Writing a mini review for each game would take too long, so lets just say there are some amazing games here. Not all the games in this compilation are gems though (I'm looking at you Alex Kidd and Altered Beast) however there are certain games on here that are almost worth the price on their own such as the brilliant role playing games Shining Force and Phantasy Star series which to buy an original of isn't cheap. There are classic beat 'em ups like Streets of Rage and Golden Axe, platformers like Ristar and Sonic, rare adventure titles like Beyond Oasis etc.

On top of all the original games Sega went one further with the original master system release of Phantasy Star so all 4 are in one set as well as arcade versions of Shinobi, Altered Beast and Space Harrier as a bonus throw in. A rating system for each game has also been included so the player can see what they like as they scroll through the list, a nice touch. There are also plenty of developer interviews about some of the original games and what they were trying to do back at the time as well as original box art for almost every title. Not bad going considering the RPG's alone will take a good 20 hours each never mind every other game.

Overall there are 49 games in this collection along with trophies and all the bonus features. There are few games that will give this sort of value for money and I for one would have paid double just for the Shining Force and Streets of Rage games. Now I wish Sega would release a Saturn and Dreamcast set with games like Panzer Dragoon Saga, Burning Rangers, Nights, Skies of Arcadia etc.

+ Great value for money.
+ Includes some very hard to get hold of titles....

- ....not all of which are worth playing.