Really disappointed with this 2011 Sonic the Hedgehog ROM hack starring Metal Sonic and uhhh, Somari. I guess buying ROM hacks on cart was bound to blow up in my face at some point -- or in the case of Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, send me flying straight towards the ceiling where I will surely get brained.
The opening two levels, Robotic Isle and Botanic Lake, are pretty solid. Platforming feels great, the sense of speed is satisfying, and these levels do a good job at providing multiple routes through with enough secrets strewn about to encourage exploration. I could do without the Master System/Game Gear Sonic the Hedgehog style emerald collecting, but once you have the route down to each emerald, they're not too hard to grab. So far so good.
However, about three levels in and it becomes apparent that developer Lone Devil could use a lot of work with enemy and hazard placement. They might know how to craft a set piece, but spike pits litter every zone and punish poor reflexes. Enemies are precisely placed to be as annoying as possible, and the amount of crushing traps is insane. You'll frequently need to use raising platforms to progress, but 90% of these are designed to crush you if you don't jump off a split second before they reach the top. For some reason, this stops being the case around the final level, but by this point I had gone through such intense Pavlovian conditioning that I was panic jumping off platforms and needing to backtrack to respawn them. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
I'm good at Sonic games, this is one of the few things I can confidently claim about myself, because instead of trying to form meaningful social bonds or invest time into finding a worthwhile career, I decided to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 fifteen-hundred million times, but I actually did manage to get a couple game overs in Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, albeit fairly late in the game (arguably more irritating.) Eventually, I decided to look up a level select code, except the folks over at Sonic Retro wanted to pull some real cutesy shit and give the hint that it's "the North American release date for Sonic CD." Wow great, one problem, the sound select doesn't go to 93. I tried all kinds of combinations but it turns out you need to break apart each number, so for anyone searching for the cheat code to access level select in Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, I've got your back: 01 01 01 09 01 09 09 03
There's also a "Master Quest" mode which can be activated from the options menu. This remixes the game in some pretty substantive ways, and I honestly found the levels to flow a bit better in this mode despite it obviously being for players who have completed the main game. I think this is perhaps an indication that Lone Devil got better at designing levels over time, but they're still full of cheap crap. It does at least make me more hopeful for Metal Sonic Rebooted, which does appear more polished at a glance. In any case, making a ROM hack, remixing it, and then providing both in the same ROM is commendable, so those who do click with Hyperdrive have plenty of game to chew on.
By the end of the day, you don't need to pay anything to play a ROM hack, unless you're some kind of weirdo actively collecting these things on cart to fill the physical space around him to the extent that he'll one day be found dead under a pile of bootlegs. It's easy to go "yeah this is unnecessarily difficult, doesn't flow well" and just shut it off, so it might be worth checking out to see if you gel with it more than I do. I, meanwhile, will put it back on my shelf, pour myself a nice cold NOS, and seriously ask myself what the hell I'm doing with my life.
Addendum: I am awarding .5 stars for using a 16-bit remix of Smile Bomb as the title theme. If you put Smile Bomb in your game I am obligated to give you at least .5 stars more than I ordinarily would.
The opening two levels, Robotic Isle and Botanic Lake, are pretty solid. Platforming feels great, the sense of speed is satisfying, and these levels do a good job at providing multiple routes through with enough secrets strewn about to encourage exploration. I could do without the Master System/Game Gear Sonic the Hedgehog style emerald collecting, but once you have the route down to each emerald, they're not too hard to grab. So far so good.
However, about three levels in and it becomes apparent that developer Lone Devil could use a lot of work with enemy and hazard placement. They might know how to craft a set piece, but spike pits litter every zone and punish poor reflexes. Enemies are precisely placed to be as annoying as possible, and the amount of crushing traps is insane. You'll frequently need to use raising platforms to progress, but 90% of these are designed to crush you if you don't jump off a split second before they reach the top. For some reason, this stops being the case around the final level, but by this point I had gone through such intense Pavlovian conditioning that I was panic jumping off platforms and needing to backtrack to respawn them. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
I'm good at Sonic games, this is one of the few things I can confidently claim about myself, because instead of trying to form meaningful social bonds or invest time into finding a worthwhile career, I decided to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 fifteen-hundred million times, but I actually did manage to get a couple game overs in Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, albeit fairly late in the game (arguably more irritating.) Eventually, I decided to look up a level select code, except the folks over at Sonic Retro wanted to pull some real cutesy shit and give the hint that it's "the North American release date for Sonic CD." Wow great, one problem, the sound select doesn't go to 93. I tried all kinds of combinations but it turns out you need to break apart each number, so for anyone searching for the cheat code to access level select in Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, I've got your back: 01 01 01 09 01 09 09 03
There's also a "Master Quest" mode which can be activated from the options menu. This remixes the game in some pretty substantive ways, and I honestly found the levels to flow a bit better in this mode despite it obviously being for players who have completed the main game. I think this is perhaps an indication that Lone Devil got better at designing levels over time, but they're still full of cheap crap. It does at least make me more hopeful for Metal Sonic Rebooted, which does appear more polished at a glance. In any case, making a ROM hack, remixing it, and then providing both in the same ROM is commendable, so those who do click with Hyperdrive have plenty of game to chew on.
By the end of the day, you don't need to pay anything to play a ROM hack, unless you're some kind of weirdo actively collecting these things on cart to fill the physical space around him to the extent that he'll one day be found dead under a pile of bootlegs. It's easy to go "yeah this is unnecessarily difficult, doesn't flow well" and just shut it off, so it might be worth checking out to see if you gel with it more than I do. I, meanwhile, will put it back on my shelf, pour myself a nice cold NOS, and seriously ask myself what the hell I'm doing with my life.
Addendum: I am awarding .5 stars for using a 16-bit remix of Smile Bomb as the title theme. If you put Smile Bomb in your game I am obligated to give you at least .5 stars more than I ordinarily would.
After finishing Sonic Frontiers, I was ready to back up over it, peel out, and leave it in the rear-view. I was done, I was out, I had no obligation to play its insipid DLC much less touch the case, except to move it out of the way for RoboCop: Rogue City, a proper damn video game.
But The Final Horizon, Sonic Frontiers' free story DLC, is a strange thing. Complaints about its difficulty and lackluster implementation of Sonic's friends, who hasn't been playable since Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), are common despite its current 3.0 average. Video guides often depict gameplay set to easy mode, and the first walkthrough I pulled up for the Master Koco Trial - an apparently common point of frustration - leads by calling it "unfairly difficult". I know what you're thinking, Sonic Team fumbling the ball? How could that be!
All this has left me with a nagging curiosity, a growing itch on my back that can only be satisfied by reinstalling Sonic Frontiers and experiencing The Final Horizon first hand. I'm a weak man, a cowardly little creature, and so I found myself sitting in front of Sonic Frontiers' title screen, basking in its stupid weepy music yet again.
Before getting into The Final Horizon, let's briefly talk about the state of Sonic Frontiers a year out from release. Loading up the game hits you with a barrage of notifications about what's changed, including adjustable sliders for speed (as always, sliders go to the right), other little tweaks, and the inclusion of birthday bonuses. I'm not a fan of how obtrusive the birthday UI is, but I do like that you can run around and collect tracks from past Sonic games to put into a playlist. Being able to listen to Palmtree Panic instead of the forgettable noise that comprises Frontiers' soundtrack is a marked improvement, and it's nice that I can put on the theme to the Mystic Ruins considering this game still has the pop-in of a Dreamcast title.
Poor draw distancing was already a major problem in the base game, severely impacting the readability of the open zones and often requiring the player to slowly trace geometry as it draws in. The problem only becomes worse in The Final Horizon as Tails, Amy, and Knuckles are all built around verticality, resulting in objective markers being placed far higher or further outside the island's bounds. This clip of me staring at an objective hovering over the middle of the fucking ocean is a perfect distillation of the Frontiers experience, a riddle solved only by remembering what game you're playing.
I don't care much for Donkey Kong 64's roundabout level design and segmentation of collectables and have been told this might pre-dispose me against collectathons. Well maybe there's a nugget of truth there, because The Final Horizon veers into DK64 territory, segmenting its collectables between Sonic's friends, resulting in the player frequently running by color-coded Koco that cannot be interacted with unless you're playing as the corresponding character, who until the end game is likely locked for story reasons. If anything, I think The Final Horizon should've gone whole hog here, litter the environment with color-coded rings, I might respect it more. Not enough non-euclidian design here, if you ask me!
Sonic's friends just aren't fun to play as, either. Tails' flight, Knuckles' glide, and Amy's Tarot Card Goobercycle all have an initiation delay that makes them feel lousy to jump into, and I don't even know what Amy's cycle is meant to offer considering her faster spindash makes it redundant. Knuckles' climbing feels like maneuvering a tank as 'forward' inputs only seem to register in the direction the camera is facing, resulting in him feeling about as awkward to control as he was in Sonic 2006; his glide is incredibly stiff to the point of near uselessness, too. I am not kidding when I say all of these characters played better in Sonic Adventure, though you can make use of some of their abilities to bypass platforming sections to great effect. I'd usually claw my way up to a collectable and then find that I was high enough to simply fly, glide, or hover-jump over to one or two more without needing to actually platform my way through another obstacle course, and frankly I see that as a positive.
In fact, Final Horizon does address a pretty big complaint I had about the base game automating too many of its platforming sequences. The training wheels have been completely blown off the bike - along with my legs - and this is kind of a double-edged sword. You have to actually engage with the game now, and I think that's where a lot of the perceived difficulty is coming from, especially with the trial towers. Sonic fans being asked to actually play their game instead of drinking in the spectacle as it's played for them, you love to see it happen.
Not that my snide, cynical take should rob anyone of their criticisms about Final Horizon's difficulty, but I think the root of the problem is that Sonic just doesn't control well and is unsuited to platforming in an environment that isn't open or which requires precision. There's a reason Sonic Team chose to affix the player and guide them through platforming challenges, and I believe Final Horizon lays bare why.
I didn't have any trouble with the combat trials and in fact found them to be absurdly easy even on hard mode, but the Master Koco Trial is one of the worst boss rushes I've ever played. I didn't get into it much in my review of the base game, but I think Super Sonic fights are usually the weakest part of any Sonic title, and the fact that all of Frontiers' major bosses are modeled as such made me despise them. So needing to go through them back-to-back, platforming sequences, unskippable cutscenes and all, was just tiresome. You need to perfect parry each boss and trap them in a stunlock using your cyloop which kinda feels like not the way you're supposed to defeat them, but it's certainly the most efficient method. Shoutouts to Knight killing me during the final quick time event because a tiny part of my thumb barely touched the X button enough to register an input, and that's an auto-fail for the entire boss rush. Very cool!
It was about at this point I started to wish Sonic was a Konami franchise, because at least they would've demoted Iizuka to parking attendant years ago.
All of this culminates in a bare-knuckle battle against Sonic's longest, greatest, most deadly adversary: an uncooperative 3D camera. I love to spend the majority of a boss fight requiring perfect parries stuck behind Super Mario 64 trees. At least you get a new Super Sonic form, despite Iizuka refusing to so much as utter the words "Hyper Sonic" in fear that he'd somehow introduce "power creep" to the series, which you might note is literally an insane thing to believe. Mr. Egg Person does finally get a happy ending as he's reunited with his precious daughter, a note that is entirely too sentimental and undeserved for his character. This is a man whose previous years long diabolical plan was to build an amusement park. But, you know, like an evil amusement park, which is bad. I think if Ian Flynn writes hoaky tripe like this regularly then he's just as poor at what he does as Ken Penders, albeit less interestingly so.
I remember people saying that Sonic Frontiers may have issues but it laid out a promising groundwork for things to come. I also remember questioning the wisdom in that and guess what, they followed it up with this.
But The Final Horizon, Sonic Frontiers' free story DLC, is a strange thing. Complaints about its difficulty and lackluster implementation of Sonic's friends, who hasn't been playable since Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), are common despite its current 3.0 average. Video guides often depict gameplay set to easy mode, and the first walkthrough I pulled up for the Master Koco Trial - an apparently common point of frustration - leads by calling it "unfairly difficult". I know what you're thinking, Sonic Team fumbling the ball? How could that be!
All this has left me with a nagging curiosity, a growing itch on my back that can only be satisfied by reinstalling Sonic Frontiers and experiencing The Final Horizon first hand. I'm a weak man, a cowardly little creature, and so I found myself sitting in front of Sonic Frontiers' title screen, basking in its stupid weepy music yet again.
Before getting into The Final Horizon, let's briefly talk about the state of Sonic Frontiers a year out from release. Loading up the game hits you with a barrage of notifications about what's changed, including adjustable sliders for speed (as always, sliders go to the right), other little tweaks, and the inclusion of birthday bonuses. I'm not a fan of how obtrusive the birthday UI is, but I do like that you can run around and collect tracks from past Sonic games to put into a playlist. Being able to listen to Palmtree Panic instead of the forgettable noise that comprises Frontiers' soundtrack is a marked improvement, and it's nice that I can put on the theme to the Mystic Ruins considering this game still has the pop-in of a Dreamcast title.
Poor draw distancing was already a major problem in the base game, severely impacting the readability of the open zones and often requiring the player to slowly trace geometry as it draws in. The problem only becomes worse in The Final Horizon as Tails, Amy, and Knuckles are all built around verticality, resulting in objective markers being placed far higher or further outside the island's bounds. This clip of me staring at an objective hovering over the middle of the fucking ocean is a perfect distillation of the Frontiers experience, a riddle solved only by remembering what game you're playing.
I don't care much for Donkey Kong 64's roundabout level design and segmentation of collectables and have been told this might pre-dispose me against collectathons. Well maybe there's a nugget of truth there, because The Final Horizon veers into DK64 territory, segmenting its collectables between Sonic's friends, resulting in the player frequently running by color-coded Koco that cannot be interacted with unless you're playing as the corresponding character, who until the end game is likely locked for story reasons. If anything, I think The Final Horizon should've gone whole hog here, litter the environment with color-coded rings, I might respect it more. Not enough non-euclidian design here, if you ask me!
Sonic's friends just aren't fun to play as, either. Tails' flight, Knuckles' glide, and Amy's Tarot Card Goobercycle all have an initiation delay that makes them feel lousy to jump into, and I don't even know what Amy's cycle is meant to offer considering her faster spindash makes it redundant. Knuckles' climbing feels like maneuvering a tank as 'forward' inputs only seem to register in the direction the camera is facing, resulting in him feeling about as awkward to control as he was in Sonic 2006; his glide is incredibly stiff to the point of near uselessness, too. I am not kidding when I say all of these characters played better in Sonic Adventure, though you can make use of some of their abilities to bypass platforming sections to great effect. I'd usually claw my way up to a collectable and then find that I was high enough to simply fly, glide, or hover-jump over to one or two more without needing to actually platform my way through another obstacle course, and frankly I see that as a positive.
In fact, Final Horizon does address a pretty big complaint I had about the base game automating too many of its platforming sequences. The training wheels have been completely blown off the bike - along with my legs - and this is kind of a double-edged sword. You have to actually engage with the game now, and I think that's where a lot of the perceived difficulty is coming from, especially with the trial towers. Sonic fans being asked to actually play their game instead of drinking in the spectacle as it's played for them, you love to see it happen.
Not that my snide, cynical take should rob anyone of their criticisms about Final Horizon's difficulty, but I think the root of the problem is that Sonic just doesn't control well and is unsuited to platforming in an environment that isn't open or which requires precision. There's a reason Sonic Team chose to affix the player and guide them through platforming challenges, and I believe Final Horizon lays bare why.
I didn't have any trouble with the combat trials and in fact found them to be absurdly easy even on hard mode, but the Master Koco Trial is one of the worst boss rushes I've ever played. I didn't get into it much in my review of the base game, but I think Super Sonic fights are usually the weakest part of any Sonic title, and the fact that all of Frontiers' major bosses are modeled as such made me despise them. So needing to go through them back-to-back, platforming sequences, unskippable cutscenes and all, was just tiresome. You need to perfect parry each boss and trap them in a stunlock using your cyloop which kinda feels like not the way you're supposed to defeat them, but it's certainly the most efficient method. Shoutouts to Knight killing me during the final quick time event because a tiny part of my thumb barely touched the X button enough to register an input, and that's an auto-fail for the entire boss rush. Very cool!
It was about at this point I started to wish Sonic was a Konami franchise, because at least they would've demoted Iizuka to parking attendant years ago.
All of this culminates in a bare-knuckle battle against Sonic's longest, greatest, most deadly adversary: an uncooperative 3D camera. I love to spend the majority of a boss fight requiring perfect parries stuck behind Super Mario 64 trees. At least you get a new Super Sonic form, despite Iizuka refusing to so much as utter the words "Hyper Sonic" in fear that he'd somehow introduce "power creep" to the series, which you might note is literally an insane thing to believe. Mr. Egg Person does finally get a happy ending as he's reunited with his precious daughter, a note that is entirely too sentimental and undeserved for his character. This is a man whose previous years long diabolical plan was to build an amusement park. But, you know, like an evil amusement park, which is bad. I think if Ian Flynn writes hoaky tripe like this regularly then he's just as poor at what he does as Ken Penders, albeit less interestingly so.
I remember people saying that Sonic Frontiers may have issues but it laid out a promising groundwork for things to come. I also remember questioning the wisdom in that and guess what, they followed it up with this.
2023
AA-games are back! RoboCop is back! Teyon did it, they got Robo loaded up full of baby food and Oreo cookies and put him in a good video game!
It's hard to imagine what RoboCop would've looked like without director Paul Verhoeven, who famously threw his copy of the script in the trash and only dug it out at the insistence of his wife. It is even harder still to imagine Johnathan Kaplan turning down Project X to stay on for RoboCop, or how the film would sound without Basil Poledouris' excellent score, or what shape its themes and humor would take were it not for Michael Miner's thirst for corporate blood. I cannot envision a version of RoboCop absent of Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, or Kurtwood Smith bringing Edward Neumeier's characters and world to life. Making a sequel game intended to be accepted as part of the series canon is a tall task, and it's one Teyon managed to pull off about as well as Terminal Reality did with Ghostbusters: The Game. I don't know what's up with these movie franchises struggling to find their place in modern cinemas instead getting excellent games that actually understand the source material, but I'd buy that for [Sixty US Dollars.]
Obviously, RoboCop makes the most sense as a first-person shooter, and for the majority of Rogue City, that's exactly what you get. Stomping around in open environments, rarely taking cover as you blast junkies into hunks of meat with your Auto-9, because RoboCop can take it. Every firefight plays out like the factory shootout from the first film, homing in on scum while shots glance off your solid metal chassis, occasionally grabbing enemies to fling into concrete walls and through high-rise windows, or chucking cans of gas into crowds, or CRTs into skulls, you know, if you want to be a capital C Cop.
You can pick up a variety of other firearms, but outside of the opening few missions, there's very little practical reason to do so. The Auto-9 gets the job done, start to finish, and it can be upgraded with PCB boards that can increase penetration, damage, and add additional upgrades like bullet split. I ran through most of the game with a board that provided unlimited ammo, an auto-fed clip, and enhanced gore. The end result is, in a word, ridiculous. Teyon ought to be commended for making the Auto-9 feel every bit as good to use in the game as you'd expect it to from watching the movie.
These linear sets of shooting levels are interspersed with trips back to Rogue City's two hub areas: the police station and downtown Detroit. It's during these sections of the game that Rogue City more closely resembles an immersive sim, with dialog trees and skill checks influencing the outcomes of side stories. Blowing up chop shops and de-escalating stand-offs by promising the perp three hots and a cot (a veritable golden ticket out of the hellscape of Detroit) can be initiated at your leisure, usually between handing out tickets and dancing for children. I like to call that serving the public trust.
It's just a shame that skill checks and the number of available side quests dry up the further in you get. A lot of it feels front-loaded, though there's still a lot of joy in walking around downtown and seeing the residual effects of those early choices. Near the start of the game, I had the option to let a graffiti artist go or fine him an unreasonable amount of money. I decided to uphold the law and bankrupt his ass, giving me the prompt "RoboCop has made an enemy of the graffiti artist," and later causing a large anti-RoboCop mural to appear in retribution. Don't know how he afforded all that paint. Scumbag probably stole it.
The subversive humor of the movie is alive and well, though the writing is a little flat near the start of the game and some performances are a bit questionable, save for Peter Weller who reprises his role as Murphy/Robo and doesn't sound like he's skipped a day since RoboCop 2. Once things gets going, Rogue City keeps its momentum. Literal bratty children lecturing adults on not voting (who in turn threaten to punch them in the face), letters from prisoners upset that they're forced into a baking program that makes them look soft, and Robo reuniting an elderly woman with her lost cat before destroying all her personal property in a shootout and just leaving is so perfectly in tone with RoboCop. There's plenty of direct references to the movie as well, and they never feel out of place, like the Delta City model one of OCP's executives collapsed into being unceremoniously stored in a supply closet that you can explore, or Kaplan again calling for a police strike in every scene he's in (Cops don't strike!) In any other game these callbacks could feel pandering, but in Rogue City they provide a sense of continuity.
Unfortunately, Rogue City runs about as well as RoboCop does while trying to arrest Dick Jones. I frequently had visual effects stop working, including a screen that was meant to depict a key character during a climactic moment in the game which remained blank. Audio frequently desynced and became covered in a heavy whine that required me to reset the game more than once, and artifacting is noticeably present during camera cuts when characters are talking. Temporal anti-aliasing also rears its ugly head once again, caking Rogue City's visuals in a muddy filter.
If Rogue City were a bit more cleaned up and embraced the immersive sim model more fully, I'd say this is a 5/5, but even as-is, I had more fun with it than most AAA releases this year.
It's hard to imagine what RoboCop would've looked like without director Paul Verhoeven, who famously threw his copy of the script in the trash and only dug it out at the insistence of his wife. It is even harder still to imagine Johnathan Kaplan turning down Project X to stay on for RoboCop, or how the film would sound without Basil Poledouris' excellent score, or what shape its themes and humor would take were it not for Michael Miner's thirst for corporate blood. I cannot envision a version of RoboCop absent of Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, or Kurtwood Smith bringing Edward Neumeier's characters and world to life. Making a sequel game intended to be accepted as part of the series canon is a tall task, and it's one Teyon managed to pull off about as well as Terminal Reality did with Ghostbusters: The Game. I don't know what's up with these movie franchises struggling to find their place in modern cinemas instead getting excellent games that actually understand the source material, but I'd buy that for [Sixty US Dollars.]
Obviously, RoboCop makes the most sense as a first-person shooter, and for the majority of Rogue City, that's exactly what you get. Stomping around in open environments, rarely taking cover as you blast junkies into hunks of meat with your Auto-9, because RoboCop can take it. Every firefight plays out like the factory shootout from the first film, homing in on scum while shots glance off your solid metal chassis, occasionally grabbing enemies to fling into concrete walls and through high-rise windows, or chucking cans of gas into crowds, or CRTs into skulls, you know, if you want to be a capital C Cop.
You can pick up a variety of other firearms, but outside of the opening few missions, there's very little practical reason to do so. The Auto-9 gets the job done, start to finish, and it can be upgraded with PCB boards that can increase penetration, damage, and add additional upgrades like bullet split. I ran through most of the game with a board that provided unlimited ammo, an auto-fed clip, and enhanced gore. The end result is, in a word, ridiculous. Teyon ought to be commended for making the Auto-9 feel every bit as good to use in the game as you'd expect it to from watching the movie.
These linear sets of shooting levels are interspersed with trips back to Rogue City's two hub areas: the police station and downtown Detroit. It's during these sections of the game that Rogue City more closely resembles an immersive sim, with dialog trees and skill checks influencing the outcomes of side stories. Blowing up chop shops and de-escalating stand-offs by promising the perp three hots and a cot (a veritable golden ticket out of the hellscape of Detroit) can be initiated at your leisure, usually between handing out tickets and dancing for children. I like to call that serving the public trust.
It's just a shame that skill checks and the number of available side quests dry up the further in you get. A lot of it feels front-loaded, though there's still a lot of joy in walking around downtown and seeing the residual effects of those early choices. Near the start of the game, I had the option to let a graffiti artist go or fine him an unreasonable amount of money. I decided to uphold the law and bankrupt his ass, giving me the prompt "RoboCop has made an enemy of the graffiti artist," and later causing a large anti-RoboCop mural to appear in retribution. Don't know how he afforded all that paint. Scumbag probably stole it.
The subversive humor of the movie is alive and well, though the writing is a little flat near the start of the game and some performances are a bit questionable, save for Peter Weller who reprises his role as Murphy/Robo and doesn't sound like he's skipped a day since RoboCop 2. Once things gets going, Rogue City keeps its momentum. Literal bratty children lecturing adults on not voting (who in turn threaten to punch them in the face), letters from prisoners upset that they're forced into a baking program that makes them look soft, and Robo reuniting an elderly woman with her lost cat before destroying all her personal property in a shootout and just leaving is so perfectly in tone with RoboCop. There's plenty of direct references to the movie as well, and they never feel out of place, like the Delta City model one of OCP's executives collapsed into being unceremoniously stored in a supply closet that you can explore, or Kaplan again calling for a police strike in every scene he's in (Cops don't strike!) In any other game these callbacks could feel pandering, but in Rogue City they provide a sense of continuity.
Unfortunately, Rogue City runs about as well as RoboCop does while trying to arrest Dick Jones. I frequently had visual effects stop working, including a screen that was meant to depict a key character during a climactic moment in the game which remained blank. Audio frequently desynced and became covered in a heavy whine that required me to reset the game more than once, and artifacting is noticeably present during camera cuts when characters are talking. Temporal anti-aliasing also rears its ugly head once again, caking Rogue City's visuals in a muddy filter.
If Rogue City were a bit more cleaned up and embraced the immersive sim model more fully, I'd say this is a 5/5, but even as-is, I had more fun with it than most AAA releases this year.
A few months after picking up a PlayStation 2 and telling myself "just put games on the hard drive, do NOT go down the rabbit hole of buying used games," I saw the cover of Final Fantasy Origins and was so spellbound by Yoshitaka Amano's gorgeous art that I broke my solemn vow. It's just that meme of the guy looking over his shoulder, my gaze pulled away from my 1TB Western Digital hard drive towards the alluring figure of Final Fantasy Origins... Yeah... Yeah this game's got a great ass...
Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!
I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, andthat's just what daddy wants its really graet. .
More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.
This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.
Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review
Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!
I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, and
More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.
This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.
Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review
2001
I went into Final Fantasy II with trepidation. This is the Final Fantasy game everyone seems to hate. Lot of words out there on the Internet about having to whack your own party members in the back of their plush, malleable skulls until they learn to have better HP. Literal tomes about memorizing complex sequences of key words to further the story, like a child learning to navigate the English language. "Final Fantasy II sucks!" all my friends shout, "Play Alan Wake 2, god damnit!"
"No, no, it's not on disc! I have to play a 2001 remake of a 1988 NES JRPG!" I cry out, seeing no other option.
This game is nearly as old as I am, and like me, it has some good ideas, and a whole lot of poorly aged ones that repulse the youth. For example, every stat from strength and endurance to weapon and spell proficiency is increased based on use, which is where a lot of the advice about hitting your own party members comes from as it seems like an efficient way to simultaneously build your offense, defense, and curative abilities. This system and the criticisms of it have largely informed my perception of the game, but now that I have FFII's 20+ hour campaign under my belt, I can safely say it's all a little overblown.
I was able to get by just fine playing the game like normal, and never once did I feel like I needed to grind. It wouldn't surprise me if the WonderSwan remake - and by extension, the PlayStation port that I played - smooths over and expedites stat progression, but outside of faster gains to weapon proficiency, I couldn't find what exactly was changed and what remained the same.
It's not a flawless system, though. I did find that prioritizing weapons over magic was the best COA (course of action), as you're always building stats into your preferred weapon type whereas each individual spell needs to grow on its own. This makes late game spells like Flare and Holy remarkably weak starting out, incentivizing you to hold the X button and essentially auto-attack through every battle. Swords are also ridiculously good and have a far more varied pool to choose from, including those imbued with elements to bypass physically resistant enemies, and the health syphoning blood sword that initially appears to have meager stats, but which everything in the end game (including the final boss) is severely weak to. About halfway through the game you can safely ditch shields and start dual-wielding, and once you're flailing two blood swords around, there's really no going back. I'm surprised anyone has any trouble with this game's difficulty as I mostly found it to devolves into utter banality, and that's probably where I'd fault Final Fantasy II the most.
One other part of FFII's dated design that gave me trouble was the key word system. You have to "memorize" highlighted words in a conversation and then present them to other NPCs to gain new key words or open up events that progress the story, but god help you if you forgot one key word somewhere in the world. Imagine getting in your car and driving all the way to the grocery store to pick up a refreshing beverage only to find that you hadn't internalized the term "NOS Energy Drink" and are unable to proceed unless you turn around and go find the one random schmuck who can tell you what you want. This has happened to me a lot throughout my life, I think it's a memory problem (probably from drinking too much NOS!), and I don't like it when it's in my video games!
This key word system is at least interesting on paper. Final Fantasy II is far more narrative driven than the last game, so needing to bank highlighted words and present key items to NPCs makes you a more active participant in the story. I get why it's here, it just never materializes into anything valuable.
For all its faults, I don't think Final Fantasy II lives up to its negative reputation, or least this version doesn't. I had fun with it overall, even if I might prefer the original game a little bit more. Should you play it? No! I gave Lies of P a 2/5 and Castlevania: The Adventure a 4/5, I am disconnected from reality. I drench my brain in CMPLX6 and high quantities of disodium EDTA daily, you cannot hope to process video games the way I do.
"No, no, it's not on disc! I have to play a 2001 remake of a 1988 NES JRPG!" I cry out, seeing no other option.
This game is nearly as old as I am, and like me, it has some good ideas, and a whole lot of poorly aged ones that repulse the youth. For example, every stat from strength and endurance to weapon and spell proficiency is increased based on use, which is where a lot of the advice about hitting your own party members comes from as it seems like an efficient way to simultaneously build your offense, defense, and curative abilities. This system and the criticisms of it have largely informed my perception of the game, but now that I have FFII's 20+ hour campaign under my belt, I can safely say it's all a little overblown.
I was able to get by just fine playing the game like normal, and never once did I feel like I needed to grind. It wouldn't surprise me if the WonderSwan remake - and by extension, the PlayStation port that I played - smooths over and expedites stat progression, but outside of faster gains to weapon proficiency, I couldn't find what exactly was changed and what remained the same.
It's not a flawless system, though. I did find that prioritizing weapons over magic was the best COA (course of action), as you're always building stats into your preferred weapon type whereas each individual spell needs to grow on its own. This makes late game spells like Flare and Holy remarkably weak starting out, incentivizing you to hold the X button and essentially auto-attack through every battle. Swords are also ridiculously good and have a far more varied pool to choose from, including those imbued with elements to bypass physically resistant enemies, and the health syphoning blood sword that initially appears to have meager stats, but which everything in the end game (including the final boss) is severely weak to. About halfway through the game you can safely ditch shields and start dual-wielding, and once you're flailing two blood swords around, there's really no going back. I'm surprised anyone has any trouble with this game's difficulty as I mostly found it to devolves into utter banality, and that's probably where I'd fault Final Fantasy II the most.
One other part of FFII's dated design that gave me trouble was the key word system. You have to "memorize" highlighted words in a conversation and then present them to other NPCs to gain new key words or open up events that progress the story, but god help you if you forgot one key word somewhere in the world. Imagine getting in your car and driving all the way to the grocery store to pick up a refreshing beverage only to find that you hadn't internalized the term "NOS Energy Drink" and are unable to proceed unless you turn around and go find the one random schmuck who can tell you what you want. This has happened to me a lot throughout my life, I think it's a memory problem (probably from drinking too much NOS!), and I don't like it when it's in my video games!
This key word system is at least interesting on paper. Final Fantasy II is far more narrative driven than the last game, so needing to bank highlighted words and present key items to NPCs makes you a more active participant in the story. I get why it's here, it just never materializes into anything valuable.
For all its faults, I don't think Final Fantasy II lives up to its negative reputation, or least this version doesn't. I had fun with it overall, even if I might prefer the original game a little bit more. Should you play it? No! I gave Lies of P a 2/5 and Castlevania: The Adventure a 4/5, I am disconnected from reality. I drench my brain in CMPLX6 and high quantities of disodium EDTA daily, you cannot hope to process video games the way I do.
1994
Shaking and crying, begging Yu Suzuki to make a good game.
All he has to offer me is a dispassionate "no."
All he has to offer me is a dispassionate "no."
It's become something of a tradition in the Sonic community for industrious fans to pull apart Sega's games and make all sorts of little changes to improve the experience of playing them. Project 06 might as well be the poster child for this, but even games like Sonic Superstars are benefitting from alternate soundtrack mods that attempt to wash away the stain left by Jun Senoue's bootleg Genesis snare drums. While a lot of these efforts are driven by the passion of fans and amateur modders, Sonic 3D Blast: Director's Cut is a unique case where the game's original designer, Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales, has gone back to retool their work. Unfortunately, it's still Sonic 3D Blast. fart_noise.flacc
I was actually pretty excited to try this out, even grabbed a reproduction cart of it in lieu of a legitimate copy of Sonic 3D Blast (you can toggle the mods off and play the game like normal, which for me makes this the ideal copy to have), but all the quality-of-life improvements in the world can't cleanse this game of its stink. Director's Cut makes improvements to movement speed and momentum, tweaks how Flickies function so that they're easier to find and don't all drop at once, and even adds Super Sonic, but the core design of 3D Blast is still the same. Jump on enemies, collect bird, hop into ring. I don't find this loop to be very compelling and would prefer something closer to a traditional Sonic, but the isometric perspective really hinders navigation and stage readability even in the time trial levels, which do ditch Flicky collecting for something more straight-forward.
For every improvement Director's Cut makes, which there are many, it just highlights the parts of the game that don't work for me, and those parts are so fundamental that you'd enter Hedgehog of Theseus territory if you started to uproot and replace them. Jon Burton, to his credit, changed about as much as he could, and the Director's Cut is the most approachable version of 3D Blast for his efforts. Changes to hit detection and the way damage operates does smooth over some the base game's key problems even if I may still be hung up on the more immutable aspects. It is unreasonable to expect Burton to alter level layouts to be more conducive to traditional Sonic gameplay, but changing how far the camera pans when running does help me avoid jumping directly into pits of lava in Volcano Valley, so I guess this is my preferred way to play.
In true Traveller's Tales fashion, I'm left weighing how impressive the game is on a technical level against how much fun I actually had playing it, and while I do think Jon Burton smoothing over nearly 30-year-old rough edges if worthy of some praise, I still find Sonic 3D Blast a struggle to get into. Very excited to pull this off the shelf in another five or eight years and walk away with the exact same opinion, because unlike 3D Blast, I never change.
I was actually pretty excited to try this out, even grabbed a reproduction cart of it in lieu of a legitimate copy of Sonic 3D Blast (you can toggle the mods off and play the game like normal, which for me makes this the ideal copy to have), but all the quality-of-life improvements in the world can't cleanse this game of its stink. Director's Cut makes improvements to movement speed and momentum, tweaks how Flickies function so that they're easier to find and don't all drop at once, and even adds Super Sonic, but the core design of 3D Blast is still the same. Jump on enemies, collect bird, hop into ring. I don't find this loop to be very compelling and would prefer something closer to a traditional Sonic, but the isometric perspective really hinders navigation and stage readability even in the time trial levels, which do ditch Flicky collecting for something more straight-forward.
For every improvement Director's Cut makes, which there are many, it just highlights the parts of the game that don't work for me, and those parts are so fundamental that you'd enter Hedgehog of Theseus territory if you started to uproot and replace them. Jon Burton, to his credit, changed about as much as he could, and the Director's Cut is the most approachable version of 3D Blast for his efforts. Changes to hit detection and the way damage operates does smooth over some the base game's key problems even if I may still be hung up on the more immutable aspects. It is unreasonable to expect Burton to alter level layouts to be more conducive to traditional Sonic gameplay, but changing how far the camera pans when running does help me avoid jumping directly into pits of lava in Volcano Valley, so I guess this is my preferred way to play.
In true Traveller's Tales fashion, I'm left weighing how impressive the game is on a technical level against how much fun I actually had playing it, and while I do think Jon Burton smoothing over nearly 30-year-old rough edges if worthy of some praise, I still find Sonic 3D Blast a struggle to get into. Very excited to pull this off the shelf in another five or eight years and walk away with the exact same opinion, because unlike 3D Blast, I never change.
Let's go back to my place, we'll put on some Koji Kondo and drop Wonder Seeds.
I'm not sure which is a greater triumph: the fact that Nintendo put out a good 2D Mario game for the first time since World released in 1990, or that they've finally started to release worthwhile hardware in the Switch's twilight years. Pikmin 4 and Mario Wonder have both swooped in during the 11th hour to justify buying this thing back in 2017. Better late than never, I suppose.
I ran through Mario World not more than a month before picking up Wonder, and while I wouldn't say Wonder topples it as my favorite 2D entry in the series, it does come awfully close. Platforming feels incredibly tight, every character has the right amount of weight and momentum, and levels are thoughtfully designed around unique gimmicks to keep the game feeling fresh every step of the way. I was also not expecting the Wonder Seeds to come with as much variety as they do. Not only do they heavily alter a significant portion of each course, but Wonder is pretty good about making them unique to the courses they appear in, even in the rare instances where certain ideas and mechanics are reused. My personal favorite comes pretty early with the Piranha Plant Parade.
There are a number of smaller courses that lack Wonder sequences, like badge challenges and Wiggler Races, but they never feel lacking for it. I could do without the "search party" levels, though. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to design stages where you have to habitually jump around looking for hidden blocks like you're playing The Lost Levels, but I wound up pulling a guide open for these just to expedite the process. If Nintendo removed these and retooled a couple of the secret world stages (the one where you have to bounce on bubbles to navigate your way over a pit as a Goomba is heinous), then this might be a perfect 5/5 for me.
Wonder almost earns that half star back with its roster of playable characters. Of course, you've got Mario, Luigi, Peach, and (THREE!!) Toad(s), but they finally put Daisy in one of these games and I'm ecstatic about that. She's my favorite Mario character, which I know might be a weird thing to say considering most characters in these games have little personality past saying "wowie zowie" (big Zappa-heads, these guys) and their own name like a Pokemon. I just get this weird energy from Daisy. Peach will spend all afternoon baking you a cake, but Daisy will just drive to Kroger in her Ford Taurus that hasn't had an oil change in six months and buy you a sheet cake, start eating it in the car, then mash the two ends of the cake back together and crudely smooth over the icing to hide what she's done. I "fuck with that," or whatever the hell it is you kids say.
Unfortunately, the Yoshis (and Nabbit) are lackluster as they can't make use of power-ups. In the past, I've lamented the fact that I like Yoshi but he's never the star of good games, so it's disappointing that he and his multi-colored brethren have these arbitrarily imposed gameplay limitations in Wonder. Don't really care about Nabbit, far as I'm concerned there should be a wonder sequence where he's placed in a hydraulic press.
Mario Wonder is pretty much a must-have for the Switch and one of the best games released all year, and I think it's safe to say it breaks into my top five entries in the series. High praise from someone who ordinarily needs very little reason to dunk on Nintendo and drag them through the mud, but even I've got to admit they've put out something wonderful here.
I'm not sure which is a greater triumph: the fact that Nintendo put out a good 2D Mario game for the first time since World released in 1990, or that they've finally started to release worthwhile hardware in the Switch's twilight years. Pikmin 4 and Mario Wonder have both swooped in during the 11th hour to justify buying this thing back in 2017. Better late than never, I suppose.
I ran through Mario World not more than a month before picking up Wonder, and while I wouldn't say Wonder topples it as my favorite 2D entry in the series, it does come awfully close. Platforming feels incredibly tight, every character has the right amount of weight and momentum, and levels are thoughtfully designed around unique gimmicks to keep the game feeling fresh every step of the way. I was also not expecting the Wonder Seeds to come with as much variety as they do. Not only do they heavily alter a significant portion of each course, but Wonder is pretty good about making them unique to the courses they appear in, even in the rare instances where certain ideas and mechanics are reused. My personal favorite comes pretty early with the Piranha Plant Parade.
There are a number of smaller courses that lack Wonder sequences, like badge challenges and Wiggler Races, but they never feel lacking for it. I could do without the "search party" levels, though. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to design stages where you have to habitually jump around looking for hidden blocks like you're playing The Lost Levels, but I wound up pulling a guide open for these just to expedite the process. If Nintendo removed these and retooled a couple of the secret world stages (the one where you have to bounce on bubbles to navigate your way over a pit as a Goomba is heinous), then this might be a perfect 5/5 for me.
Wonder almost earns that half star back with its roster of playable characters. Of course, you've got Mario, Luigi, Peach, and (THREE!!) Toad(s), but they finally put Daisy in one of these games and I'm ecstatic about that. She's my favorite Mario character, which I know might be a weird thing to say considering most characters in these games have little personality past saying "wowie zowie" (big Zappa-heads, these guys) and their own name like a Pokemon. I just get this weird energy from Daisy. Peach will spend all afternoon baking you a cake, but Daisy will just drive to Kroger in her Ford Taurus that hasn't had an oil change in six months and buy you a sheet cake, start eating it in the car, then mash the two ends of the cake back together and crudely smooth over the icing to hide what she's done. I "fuck with that," or whatever the hell it is you kids say.
Unfortunately, the Yoshis (and Nabbit) are lackluster as they can't make use of power-ups. In the past, I've lamented the fact that I like Yoshi but he's never the star of good games, so it's disappointing that he and his multi-colored brethren have these arbitrarily imposed gameplay limitations in Wonder. Don't really care about Nabbit, far as I'm concerned there should be a wonder sequence where he's placed in a hydraulic press.
Mario Wonder is pretty much a must-have for the Switch and one of the best games released all year, and I think it's safe to say it breaks into my top five entries in the series. High praise from someone who ordinarily needs very little reason to dunk on Nintendo and drag them through the mud, but even I've got to admit they've put out something wonderful here.
1996
For the longest time, I've only been familiar with the Genesis version of Sonic 3D Blast, with the Saturn release being a more unknown factor. Sure, I could've changed this at any point by simply emulating it, but I can count the number of times I've thought "gee, I want to play Sonic 3D Blast" on one hand. An intrusive thought that I'd give about as much weight to as "you should start an electrical fire," it's best to disregard it entirely. Unfortunately, sanity doesn't always prevail and sometimes our hands are guided more by our inner darkness than our conscious mind.
Right out of the gate, the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast features a number of improvements, including a full CG intro cutscene that may not be as technically impressive as the one that opens the Genesis version, but which isn't so garbled that it can't be understood by human eyes. Levels also feature more complex surface textures and expanded color pallets, and I really love all the small background details, like monkeys climbing up trees in Green Grove Zone or tiles wobbling beneath Sonic's feet in Rusty Ruins. These touches add a lot of life and vibrancy, and not to knock the Genesis version for working within its limitations, but I think 3D Blast looks much better on the Saturn as a result.
It debatably sounds better, too. There's no question that Jun Senoue's score is filled to the brim with memorable tracks, but Richard Jacques has his own style and it's a damn good one. I'd actually compare this to Sonic CD in that they're radically different yet equally suited to the game, and I can see myself slipping into similar territory where my preference is constantly vacillating between the two. Rusty Ruins and the special stage themes have been stuck in my head all weekend.
Speaking of the special stages, the Saturn version of 3D Blast ditches the Genesis' piss-easy runways in favor of something more akin to Sonic 2, so if you can't stand dodging bombs and collecting rings along winding halfpipes (it's me, I hate it, I am referring to myself here) then I'm afraid I've got some bad news. Being fully 3D and running on more capable hardware does make these stages more manageable, but there's still plenty of instances where the track is made unreadable thanks to sharp turns and poor camera angles, so you can still expect to get blindsided by bombs pretty frequently. A lot of people seem to love these special stages, but I'm not one of them. I'm a Blue Spheres guy, not a Halfpipe guy.
The rest of the game is, regrettably, Sonic 3D Blast. I got a little more mileage out of the alternate soundtrack and improved graphics, but dealing with Sonic's unwieldy controls and awkward hitboxes makes collecting Flickies a chore no matter which console you play it on.
Right out of the gate, the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast features a number of improvements, including a full CG intro cutscene that may not be as technically impressive as the one that opens the Genesis version, but which isn't so garbled that it can't be understood by human eyes. Levels also feature more complex surface textures and expanded color pallets, and I really love all the small background details, like monkeys climbing up trees in Green Grove Zone or tiles wobbling beneath Sonic's feet in Rusty Ruins. These touches add a lot of life and vibrancy, and not to knock the Genesis version for working within its limitations, but I think 3D Blast looks much better on the Saturn as a result.
It debatably sounds better, too. There's no question that Jun Senoue's score is filled to the brim with memorable tracks, but Richard Jacques has his own style and it's a damn good one. I'd actually compare this to Sonic CD in that they're radically different yet equally suited to the game, and I can see myself slipping into similar territory where my preference is constantly vacillating between the two. Rusty Ruins and the special stage themes have been stuck in my head all weekend.
Speaking of the special stages, the Saturn version of 3D Blast ditches the Genesis' piss-easy runways in favor of something more akin to Sonic 2, so if you can't stand dodging bombs and collecting rings along winding halfpipes (it's me, I hate it, I am referring to myself here) then I'm afraid I've got some bad news. Being fully 3D and running on more capable hardware does make these stages more manageable, but there's still plenty of instances where the track is made unreadable thanks to sharp turns and poor camera angles, so you can still expect to get blindsided by bombs pretty frequently. A lot of people seem to love these special stages, but I'm not one of them. I'm a Blue Spheres guy, not a Halfpipe guy.
The rest of the game is, regrettably, Sonic 3D Blast. I got a little more mileage out of the alternate soundtrack and improved graphics, but dealing with Sonic's unwieldy controls and awkward hitboxes makes collecting Flickies a chore no matter which console you play it on.
Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
Batman has always been my superhero of choice. I'm pretty sure my mom still has pictures of me absorbing the 1960's show six inches from the damn screen, my eyes like thin sheets separating the Batusi from my brain. This hyper-fixation on Adam West's rippling physique resulted in me developing a very narrow taste in superheroes. Burt Ward's dog food is the only brand I'll feed my pup, that show still has me all fucked up!
One of the few Marvel heroes to break through and leave some sort of impression on me is Spider-Man, which is great because nobody seems interested in making good Batman games anymore. Rocksteady has been engaging in self-sabotage for almost a decade, but at least I can count on Insomniac to put out a good game, even if it maybe trends a bit too close to the previous Spider-Man and it's (better) expansion, Miles Morales. I wasn't on Backloggd dot com when I played them, so I never had a chance to share my thoughts. In short: they're both very good, quite possibly the best Spider-Man games to have been released up to that point.
The first 60% of Spider-Man 2 plays it incredibly safe. It's more of the same, albeit with fewer gadgets and less superfluous challenges scattered throughout New York. Although you now have two Spider-Men you can freely swap between - assuming this doesn't crash the game, which happened to me frequently - Spider-Man 2 feels much more focused than the previous entry. I think Insomniac learned a lot of good lessons from Miles Morales, which similarly trimmed a lot of fat and was far better paced and more manageable for it. There's also a whole lot less time spent paling around with the cops. In fact, they're practically non-existent now, unless you count the ghost of Jefferson Davis haunting the halls of his son's mind.
Things really pick up in the later half, however. The Symbiote suit comes with several new powers for Peter which helps refresh his gameplay, and the story picks up and veers into some very goofy territory that results in some really fun set pieces and battles. My only complaint here is that Venom spends a little too much time as a slobbering rage monster and that Tony Todd is severely under-utilized. Also, you know, heavily basing everything off existing stories and then not crediting those authors is kind of a dirty move. Sorry Donny Cates, all your ideas have been syphoned out of your head and are no longer yours... Just like Riddler's Box from the hit movie Batman Forever! Ohh... Batman...
Traversal is also as good as it's ever been, and I think this was already a strong point of the first game. The inclusion of a wingsuit initially feels as though it might trivialize navigation, but once you understand how it can be used to build or maintain momentum, you can chain it into swings and start doing some really crazy acrobatics. It's also useful for bridging the river that separates the two islands or maneuvering over open spaces like the park and suburbs of Queens, which means no more awkwardly swinging through trees. Everything just feels a lot more fluid.
Side content is more of a mixed bag for me. The Emily-May Foundation quest is dull and is mostly used to support a core plot thread about Peter and Harry's startup. It's a little more believable when Peter is actually helping with the Foundation than simply paying lip to it, but tepid shooting sequences and clunky gene splicing minigames aren't my idea of fun. I am also generally not a fan of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man missions, most of which I found to be trite in their efforts to tug on your heart strings. The Internet absolutely lost it over Finding Grandpa, but I could not get past Gramps' put-on frail old man voice which sounded about as good as something I'd do as a joke. Perhaps I'm a heartless monster for not getting misty-eyed about it, I ate some of the Burt Ward dog food and it might've done something chemically to my brain.
That said, the mission with Howard's pigeons is a highlight and was actually emotionally moving, and none of the side quests are so abundant or tedious as to be annoying. I was able to platinum this game without it ever feeling inconvenient to do so which is a marked improvement over the first Spider-Man.
Much like the gameplay, the overarching plot of Spider-Man 2 struggles to get going and only really picks up in the second half of the game. Maybe it's because I don't recognize any of these people anymore, but I had a really hard time getting invested in the interpersonal drama of Peter, Harry, and Mary Jane, which the game sinks a considerable amount of time into slowly developing. Some of that is to do with Scott Porter's performance as Harry, which makes the character sound a bit too phoney. He's very chipper, really leans into this "yeah, we're going to save the world! Let's go, team!" attitude that doesn't feel genuine. My friend Larry Davis also pointed out that he looks a lot like Matt Johnson from Nirvana the Band the Show and I can't purge this from my mind, so I need to pass the curse onto all of you. A lot of what Harry's arc is building up to does pay off in the end, but it's hard to unpack all of that without getting into spoilers. Spoiler is a character from Batman, she later becomes Robin and then a corpse.
Mary Jane is at least given more to do, although her atrocious stealth sequences are back, and I don't know who the hell asked for more of them. She's got a stun gun now, but these missions are still so tedious. Just the shallowest take on stealth you could possibly imagine, but even sneaking around as the Spider-Men feels like it has regressed and is nowhere near as enjoyable as it was in the last two games. At least Miles can turn invisible, which speeds things up, and I don't think any of these sections have automatic fail states if you're caught, so nothing's stopping you from getting into a brawl.
Speaking of Miles, I think I prefer his side of the story and find him a far more interesting character than Peter. This has been the case for me since Miles Morales, and I really liked seeing how his character, relationships, and powers evolved in this game. His struggle for revenge against Martin Li threatens to pull him into places just as dark as where Peter goes when dressed in the Symbiote, and this pent-up aggression is explored in more compelling ways. I also think Insomniac has done a better job of embodying what it means to be a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in MIles, whereas Peter is a bit more absorbed in his own world. The story does play with the idea of Peter possibly passing the torch onto Miles, and if the third game embraces that more fully by making him the lead, that'd be alright by me.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 might be the best in the series, if only marginally so, but it has left me excited to see where Insomniac goes with the third and presumably final entry. Even if it ends up just being more of the same, that still means we'd be getting a great game. Or they could fuck it all up, give Spider-Man the Spider-Mobile and force you into a ton of shitty tank battles with it under Green Goblin's city-wide fart cloud.
One of the few Marvel heroes to break through and leave some sort of impression on me is Spider-Man, which is great because nobody seems interested in making good Batman games anymore. Rocksteady has been engaging in self-sabotage for almost a decade, but at least I can count on Insomniac to put out a good game, even if it maybe trends a bit too close to the previous Spider-Man and it's (better) expansion, Miles Morales. I wasn't on Backloggd dot com when I played them, so I never had a chance to share my thoughts. In short: they're both very good, quite possibly the best Spider-Man games to have been released up to that point.
The first 60% of Spider-Man 2 plays it incredibly safe. It's more of the same, albeit with fewer gadgets and less superfluous challenges scattered throughout New York. Although you now have two Spider-Men you can freely swap between - assuming this doesn't crash the game, which happened to me frequently - Spider-Man 2 feels much more focused than the previous entry. I think Insomniac learned a lot of good lessons from Miles Morales, which similarly trimmed a lot of fat and was far better paced and more manageable for it. There's also a whole lot less time spent paling around with the cops. In fact, they're practically non-existent now, unless you count the ghost of Jefferson Davis haunting the halls of his son's mind.
Things really pick up in the later half, however. The Symbiote suit comes with several new powers for Peter which helps refresh his gameplay, and the story picks up and veers into some very goofy territory that results in some really fun set pieces and battles. My only complaint here is that Venom spends a little too much time as a slobbering rage monster and that Tony Todd is severely under-utilized. Also, you know, heavily basing everything off existing stories and then not crediting those authors is kind of a dirty move. Sorry Donny Cates, all your ideas have been syphoned out of your head and are no longer yours... Just like Riddler's Box from the hit movie Batman Forever! Ohh... Batman...
Traversal is also as good as it's ever been, and I think this was already a strong point of the first game. The inclusion of a wingsuit initially feels as though it might trivialize navigation, but once you understand how it can be used to build or maintain momentum, you can chain it into swings and start doing some really crazy acrobatics. It's also useful for bridging the river that separates the two islands or maneuvering over open spaces like the park and suburbs of Queens, which means no more awkwardly swinging through trees. Everything just feels a lot more fluid.
Side content is more of a mixed bag for me. The Emily-May Foundation quest is dull and is mostly used to support a core plot thread about Peter and Harry's startup. It's a little more believable when Peter is actually helping with the Foundation than simply paying lip to it, but tepid shooting sequences and clunky gene splicing minigames aren't my idea of fun. I am also generally not a fan of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man missions, most of which I found to be trite in their efforts to tug on your heart strings. The Internet absolutely lost it over Finding Grandpa, but I could not get past Gramps' put-on frail old man voice which sounded about as good as something I'd do as a joke. Perhaps I'm a heartless monster for not getting misty-eyed about it, I ate some of the Burt Ward dog food and it might've done something chemically to my brain.
That said, the mission with Howard's pigeons is a highlight and was actually emotionally moving, and none of the side quests are so abundant or tedious as to be annoying. I was able to platinum this game without it ever feeling inconvenient to do so which is a marked improvement over the first Spider-Man.
Much like the gameplay, the overarching plot of Spider-Man 2 struggles to get going and only really picks up in the second half of the game. Maybe it's because I don't recognize any of these people anymore, but I had a really hard time getting invested in the interpersonal drama of Peter, Harry, and Mary Jane, which the game sinks a considerable amount of time into slowly developing. Some of that is to do with Scott Porter's performance as Harry, which makes the character sound a bit too phoney. He's very chipper, really leans into this "yeah, we're going to save the world! Let's go, team!" attitude that doesn't feel genuine. My friend Larry Davis also pointed out that he looks a lot like Matt Johnson from Nirvana the Band the Show and I can't purge this from my mind, so I need to pass the curse onto all of you. A lot of what Harry's arc is building up to does pay off in the end, but it's hard to unpack all of that without getting into spoilers. Spoiler is a character from Batman, she later becomes Robin and then a corpse.
Mary Jane is at least given more to do, although her atrocious stealth sequences are back, and I don't know who the hell asked for more of them. She's got a stun gun now, but these missions are still so tedious. Just the shallowest take on stealth you could possibly imagine, but even sneaking around as the Spider-Men feels like it has regressed and is nowhere near as enjoyable as it was in the last two games. At least Miles can turn invisible, which speeds things up, and I don't think any of these sections have automatic fail states if you're caught, so nothing's stopping you from getting into a brawl.
Speaking of Miles, I think I prefer his side of the story and find him a far more interesting character than Peter. This has been the case for me since Miles Morales, and I really liked seeing how his character, relationships, and powers evolved in this game. His struggle for revenge against Martin Li threatens to pull him into places just as dark as where Peter goes when dressed in the Symbiote, and this pent-up aggression is explored in more compelling ways. I also think Insomniac has done a better job of embodying what it means to be a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in MIles, whereas Peter is a bit more absorbed in his own world. The story does play with the idea of Peter possibly passing the torch onto Miles, and if the third game embraces that more fully by making him the lead, that'd be alright by me.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 might be the best in the series, if only marginally so, but it has left me excited to see where Insomniac goes with the third and presumably final entry. Even if it ends up just being more of the same, that still means we'd be getting a great game. Or they could fuck it all up, give Spider-Man the Spider-Mobile and force you into a ton of shitty tank battles with it under Green Goblin's city-wide fart cloud.
Although it's by no means a requirement for my big playthrough of the Sonic series, I've been sprinkling in fan games here and there that I've been wanting to check out for a while, like Sonic and the Fallen Star. I generally find what fans are doing with Sonic to be more interesting than anything Sega is cooking up these days, and some fan games are of such high quality that they can exist comfortably next to official releases. Well, now I'm doing straight up ROM hacks, so perhaps there's something else motivating me to take these little detours, like wanting to play around in the "classic era" a little longer and put off getting to crap like Sonic Heroes.
Oh no! Someone got Sonic Heroes in my classic Sonic! AhhhhSHIT, it's all over the place... God damnit. Vector the Crocodile is in Aquatic Ruin now, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?
Sonic Classic Heroes is exactly what it says on the cart. One of the most straight-forward ROM hacks I've ever sat down with, and hardly any more transformative than sticking Shadow the Hedgehog or Princess Sally in Sonic the Hedgehog, something that has been done to death. But sometimes all you need to justify playing a game you've already experienced nearly a hundred thousand times is being able to run up the walls in Marble Zone as Espio and skip the whole damn stage.
That level of focus really is to Classic Heroes' benefit. A lot of the fun comes from having these expanded options for traversal that you can freely swap between, allowing you to break open familiar levels in new ways. There are a sparse number of new alternate routes and an added Sonic 1 style special stage that's a total bastard to clear, but otherwise, it's Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 stitched together with some new characters and Heroes-esque hot-swapping. You could argue that these levels should be more substantially altered to suit a speed/power/flight dynamic like in Sonic Heroes, sure, but I'd argue that this hack is everything it needs to be.
Now, I could have just grabbed the ROM for this and thrown it on my Raspberry Pi (in fact, I might've already done that), but you know me, I'm a strange little Genesis game collecting imp, so I had my guy send me a reproduction copy on cart. The first thing I noticed was how substantial the cartridge feels. It's got heft to it, so much in fact that I had to open that sucker up and see what was going on with the board. These chips really make use of all the real estate available to them. I guess that's necessary when you're essentially smashing two full Genesis games together and adding four new characters, shields, and an extra special stage, but when I look at it bare like this, it doesn't even register to me as a game so much as a device. If any technically-minded reader can identify what the UV-strip looking cells in the center of the lower chip are for, I'd love to know.
Do NOT lie to me about it. I have watched every episode of Lie to Me, I am an expert in body language. I will detect your falsehoods and I will destroy you.
I bring this up because I feel it's important to point out that I played Classic Heroes on real Sega hardware, so these comments about performance and behavior might not be consistent with your experience assuming you played via emulation or even with a different version number. Overall, I found Classic Heroes played surprisingly well, though particularly busy screens did introduce slowdown not present in either of the original games, especially when going super. Both of the water levels - Labyrinth (incredible) and Aquatic Ruin (vomiting) - struggle the most and feature really wonky collision detection on corners and switches, which resulted in me drowning several times as my characters got stuck.
Team Chaotix also introduces a number of pallet issues, often darkening and color-swapping badniks and other elements, but that's pretty minor and will only bother you if you have bugs in your brain like I do. I also noticed a lot of stray flickering pixels, which hasn't helped my growing anxiety about failing capacitors, but which I am pretty sure is just the result of a ROM hack with an excessive amount of characters crammed into games never intended to contain them running off a board that has like, ten pounds of computer chips welded on. I'm over here with a bunch of after-market AC adapters juggling foreign voltages in a single power strip, it's a god damn miracle I haven't burned my entire house down as a consequence of my horrendously jerry-rigged system and library of straight up bootlegs.
"If you paid for this game, you have been SCAMMED!"
Buddy, trust me, Idon't know what I'm doing.
Oh no! Someone got Sonic Heroes in my classic Sonic! AhhhhSHIT, it's all over the place... God damnit. Vector the Crocodile is in Aquatic Ruin now, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?
Sonic Classic Heroes is exactly what it says on the cart. One of the most straight-forward ROM hacks I've ever sat down with, and hardly any more transformative than sticking Shadow the Hedgehog or Princess Sally in Sonic the Hedgehog, something that has been done to death. But sometimes all you need to justify playing a game you've already experienced nearly a hundred thousand times is being able to run up the walls in Marble Zone as Espio and skip the whole damn stage.
That level of focus really is to Classic Heroes' benefit. A lot of the fun comes from having these expanded options for traversal that you can freely swap between, allowing you to break open familiar levels in new ways. There are a sparse number of new alternate routes and an added Sonic 1 style special stage that's a total bastard to clear, but otherwise, it's Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 stitched together with some new characters and Heroes-esque hot-swapping. You could argue that these levels should be more substantially altered to suit a speed/power/flight dynamic like in Sonic Heroes, sure, but I'd argue that this hack is everything it needs to be.
Now, I could have just grabbed the ROM for this and thrown it on my Raspberry Pi (in fact, I might've already done that), but you know me, I'm a strange little Genesis game collecting imp, so I had my guy send me a reproduction copy on cart. The first thing I noticed was how substantial the cartridge feels. It's got heft to it, so much in fact that I had to open that sucker up and see what was going on with the board. These chips really make use of all the real estate available to them. I guess that's necessary when you're essentially smashing two full Genesis games together and adding four new characters, shields, and an extra special stage, but when I look at it bare like this, it doesn't even register to me as a game so much as a device. If any technically-minded reader can identify what the UV-strip looking cells in the center of the lower chip are for, I'd love to know.
Do NOT lie to me about it. I have watched every episode of Lie to Me, I am an expert in body language. I will detect your falsehoods and I will destroy you.
I bring this up because I feel it's important to point out that I played Classic Heroes on real Sega hardware, so these comments about performance and behavior might not be consistent with your experience assuming you played via emulation or even with a different version number. Overall, I found Classic Heroes played surprisingly well, though particularly busy screens did introduce slowdown not present in either of the original games, especially when going super. Both of the water levels - Labyrinth (incredible) and Aquatic Ruin (vomiting) - struggle the most and feature really wonky collision detection on corners and switches, which resulted in me drowning several times as my characters got stuck.
Team Chaotix also introduces a number of pallet issues, often darkening and color-swapping badniks and other elements, but that's pretty minor and will only bother you if you have bugs in your brain like I do. I also noticed a lot of stray flickering pixels, which hasn't helped my growing anxiety about failing capacitors, but which I am pretty sure is just the result of a ROM hack with an excessive amount of characters crammed into games never intended to contain them running off a board that has like, ten pounds of computer chips welded on. I'm over here with a bunch of after-market AC adapters juggling foreign voltages in a single power strip, it's a god damn miracle I haven't burned my entire house down as a consequence of my horrendously jerry-rigged system and library of straight up bootlegs.
"If you paid for this game, you have been SCAMMED!"
Buddy, trust me, I
2019
Nope. I barely had enough patience for Shenmue and Shenmue II's meandering bullshit, I am tapping out here.
I played about three or four hours of this, maybe less. Might've just felt like I put that amount of time in, it's hard to tell when you're stuck in the Shenmue time-dilation chamber. Not that you need to play much to get a sense of what this game is going for. Shenmue III is incredibly faithful to the previous two entries, and so authentically captures the feeling of those games that you could tell me it's a cleaned-up build of an unreleased 2003 game and I might just buy it. Ryo still controls like a car, you still spend an inordinate amount of time running around asking people for information, and characters still talk in a way that feels like they're engaging in two disparate conversations at once.
"Hi there. Do you know where Shenhua is?"
"Ah, don't tell me that!"
"I am looking for Shenhua, have you seen her lately?"
"I go to bed at 7pm."
"Ok. Thank you."
That may not be line-for-line, but it should give you an idea of what I mean. Yu Suzuki's writing hasn't aged a day, and whoever the voice director is clearly still has The Touch, too. None of the actors sound like they were ever in the same room as one another, even Johnny Young Bosch is giving a performance that feels plucked from the original game. Toe to tip, this is a Shenmue!
That's not to say there haven't been any changes to the formula, however. The Virtua Fighter-style combat is much stiffer this time around, and there exists a sort of disassociation between input and action that really makes it feel crummy. Juggling a ton of enemies at once with Shenmue's lousy camera was never fun, and actually lining yourself up with a target was clumsy, but I actually felt like I embodied Ryo more than I do here.
Ryo also suffers from stamina drain now, and if he doesn't eat eight god damn pears every five minutes he'll whittle away to bone. This is the mechanic that threw me off Shenmue III, and I can't imagine anyone actually likes it. I haven't run across anyone posting apologia for it in the wild, and I'm not going to seek out stamina defenders if they even exist at all. Running around, fighting, and breathing chews away at Ryo's health at a pace I've never encountered in a video game before, the man is straight up hemorrhaging energy. I get it, Shenmue is a series that seeks to emulate the mundanity of life, so naturally Ryo needs to have himself a little snack every now and then, but if someone out there is pulling whole cloves of garlic from their pocket and eating them with half the same voracity as Ryo, I'm gonna assume they have a medical condition.
Early in the game, you have to beat up a carny to get intel, but the dude can chip off nearly a quarter of your health with every blow. Ryo practically destroyed the Kowloon Walled City with his bare hands in the last game, so this dude is just jacked, he's a genetic freak and he's not normal. Every time I lost to him, I had to restore my health before trying again, which meant going back to the store to buy more food that barely heals a pip of energy. Only now Ryo is so low on health I can't run, so I get to take an excruciating stroll up the hill, back and forth, hoping to God I don't run out of money and get forced into a shitty wood chopping minigame so I can earn a few bucks. I'm not Goku, I shouldn't be undergoing intense physical and spiritual training disguised as errands so I can defeat Shenmue's version of Cell, who is some fuckass running an illegal Lucky Hit booth.
A few hours of this and I realized I had to make a choice. I could stick with Shenmue III for another 20 hours or whatever, or accept that the likelihood of the game improving mechanically or actually going anywhere meaningful narratively is slim and that I could spend that time doing something else. Like playing Final Fantasy II. I've slogged my way through two Shenmue games, what do I have to prove at this point? I spent three dollars on this, the price of a delicious hot dog from Tom's, is it really so bad to be out that much money?
I can't imagine Yu Suzuki is ever going to make another one of these, I don't see there being a resolution to Shenmue in my lifetime, and while I do appreciate that he was so uncompromising on his vision that he didn't truncate the story, the fact that all roads out of Bailu Village lead to a dead end is a compelling reason to drop Shenmue III. Helps too that it's just a bad game.
I played about three or four hours of this, maybe less. Might've just felt like I put that amount of time in, it's hard to tell when you're stuck in the Shenmue time-dilation chamber. Not that you need to play much to get a sense of what this game is going for. Shenmue III is incredibly faithful to the previous two entries, and so authentically captures the feeling of those games that you could tell me it's a cleaned-up build of an unreleased 2003 game and I might just buy it. Ryo still controls like a car, you still spend an inordinate amount of time running around asking people for information, and characters still talk in a way that feels like they're engaging in two disparate conversations at once.
"Hi there. Do you know where Shenhua is?"
"Ah, don't tell me that!"
"I am looking for Shenhua, have you seen her lately?"
"I go to bed at 7pm."
"Ok. Thank you."
That may not be line-for-line, but it should give you an idea of what I mean. Yu Suzuki's writing hasn't aged a day, and whoever the voice director is clearly still has The Touch, too. None of the actors sound like they were ever in the same room as one another, even Johnny Young Bosch is giving a performance that feels plucked from the original game. Toe to tip, this is a Shenmue!
That's not to say there haven't been any changes to the formula, however. The Virtua Fighter-style combat is much stiffer this time around, and there exists a sort of disassociation between input and action that really makes it feel crummy. Juggling a ton of enemies at once with Shenmue's lousy camera was never fun, and actually lining yourself up with a target was clumsy, but I actually felt like I embodied Ryo more than I do here.
Ryo also suffers from stamina drain now, and if he doesn't eat eight god damn pears every five minutes he'll whittle away to bone. This is the mechanic that threw me off Shenmue III, and I can't imagine anyone actually likes it. I haven't run across anyone posting apologia for it in the wild, and I'm not going to seek out stamina defenders if they even exist at all. Running around, fighting, and breathing chews away at Ryo's health at a pace I've never encountered in a video game before, the man is straight up hemorrhaging energy. I get it, Shenmue is a series that seeks to emulate the mundanity of life, so naturally Ryo needs to have himself a little snack every now and then, but if someone out there is pulling whole cloves of garlic from their pocket and eating them with half the same voracity as Ryo, I'm gonna assume they have a medical condition.
Early in the game, you have to beat up a carny to get intel, but the dude can chip off nearly a quarter of your health with every blow. Ryo practically destroyed the Kowloon Walled City with his bare hands in the last game, so this dude is just jacked, he's a genetic freak and he's not normal. Every time I lost to him, I had to restore my health before trying again, which meant going back to the store to buy more food that barely heals a pip of energy. Only now Ryo is so low on health I can't run, so I get to take an excruciating stroll up the hill, back and forth, hoping to God I don't run out of money and get forced into a shitty wood chopping minigame so I can earn a few bucks. I'm not Goku, I shouldn't be undergoing intense physical and spiritual training disguised as errands so I can defeat Shenmue's version of Cell, who is some fuckass running an illegal Lucky Hit booth.
A few hours of this and I realized I had to make a choice. I could stick with Shenmue III for another 20 hours or whatever, or accept that the likelihood of the game improving mechanically or actually going anywhere meaningful narratively is slim and that I could spend that time doing something else. Like playing Final Fantasy II. I've slogged my way through two Shenmue games, what do I have to prove at this point? I spent three dollars on this, the price of a delicious hot dog from Tom's, is it really so bad to be out that much money?
I can't imagine Yu Suzuki is ever going to make another one of these, I don't see there being a resolution to Shenmue in my lifetime, and while I do appreciate that he was so uncompromising on his vision that he didn't truncate the story, the fact that all roads out of Bailu Village lead to a dead end is a compelling reason to drop Shenmue III. Helps too that it's just a bad game.
2019
Those demonic bastards are gonna pay for turning my girl into a texture.
I haven't been having a good October. My tulpa has been out there opening new lines of credit in my name, and the spooky games I picked out have all ranged from middling to bad. I swear the plan wasn't to theme the whole month around mediocre horror. I actually thought I'd like Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and I didn't expect to fall off so hard with Fatal Frame's combat. At least I'm finishing the season strong with Blood, which was recommended to me several months ago, around when I was starting to post reviews for the classic Doom games.
I can definitely see why Blood was suggested to me, as it sticks pretty close to the boomer shooter script as laid out by Doom. You have a shotgun that acts as the centerpiece of your arsenal, levels are often maze-like and require the collection of keys to progress in, and you'll need to claw your way through hordes of demons in one perfect run to the exit button - unless you're a save scummer, like me. Some of the weapons aren't quite as good as what you'd find in Doom, but for my money, Blood has the best dynamite in any first person shooter I've played, and the inclusion of alt-fires for almost every weapon adds a lot of versatility. Your normal shotgun can fire off single bursts or you can empty both barrels at once, for example, and I'm not sure any other shooter at the time was playing around with ideas like this.
There's also a lot of Duke Nukem 3D in here, specifically with Blood's protagonist Caleb, who loves to mouth off and amuse himself with corny little one-liners. Caleb is great. He's such a weird little freak. Stephan Weyte's performance is on the same level for me as Jon St. John, and I love the way he holds on certain syllables when growling out his lines. The way he says "Llllocked!" or "I need a keyyy" is tattooed on my brain, and Caleb's "Ohhh myyy, what a WONderful smell I've discovered~" when entering an outhouse (and just before diving into the toilet) is going to stick with me. Caleb may be very Duke-like with his shamelessly sourced movie quotes ("DON'T play it again, Sam..."), but his sense of humor is more off-kilter and suited to his role as an amoral former cult member.
Holding Blood back from being as great as Doom, however, is the whole of Episode 3, "A Farewell to Arms," which drills into Sandy Petersen territory with how labyrinthine and confounding many of its levels are. I got stuck for an unreasonable amount of time in the level "Spare Parts" because a grey elevator door blended in with the rest of the scenery, looking indistinguishable from a non-interactive wall. "Raw Sewage" and "Monster Bait" are dull levels that overstay their welcome and contribute their fair share to Episode 3 being a drag, with the highest point probably being "The Sick Ward" which is mostly just fine.
Episode 4 brings things back around with shorter, more focused levels, and though the Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage expansions included in Fresh Supply do have some levels that are a bit too meandering, they are mostly solid, so Fresh Supply does recover from that mid-game slump. It is a shame that the expansions lack the same janky CG 3D cutscenes as the core game, though. There were better looking real-time graphics in 1997, I love it and can't imagine Blood any other way. The real-time shadows and lighting in the game itself do look great, though, so at least Blood looks good where it counts.
I have no idea how to tie all these thoughts together and wrap up this review, so I'm gonna hit this exit switch, listen to a bunch of dudes go "ohhhh owwwww!" and just reflect on how Blood saved my October.
I haven't been having a good October. My tulpa has been out there opening new lines of credit in my name, and the spooky games I picked out have all ranged from middling to bad. I swear the plan wasn't to theme the whole month around mediocre horror. I actually thought I'd like Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and I didn't expect to fall off so hard with Fatal Frame's combat. At least I'm finishing the season strong with Blood, which was recommended to me several months ago, around when I was starting to post reviews for the classic Doom games.
I can definitely see why Blood was suggested to me, as it sticks pretty close to the boomer shooter script as laid out by Doom. You have a shotgun that acts as the centerpiece of your arsenal, levels are often maze-like and require the collection of keys to progress in, and you'll need to claw your way through hordes of demons in one perfect run to the exit button - unless you're a save scummer, like me. Some of the weapons aren't quite as good as what you'd find in Doom, but for my money, Blood has the best dynamite in any first person shooter I've played, and the inclusion of alt-fires for almost every weapon adds a lot of versatility. Your normal shotgun can fire off single bursts or you can empty both barrels at once, for example, and I'm not sure any other shooter at the time was playing around with ideas like this.
There's also a lot of Duke Nukem 3D in here, specifically with Blood's protagonist Caleb, who loves to mouth off and amuse himself with corny little one-liners. Caleb is great. He's such a weird little freak. Stephan Weyte's performance is on the same level for me as Jon St. John, and I love the way he holds on certain syllables when growling out his lines. The way he says "Llllocked!" or "I need a keyyy" is tattooed on my brain, and Caleb's "Ohhh myyy, what a WONderful smell I've discovered~" when entering an outhouse (and just before diving into the toilet) is going to stick with me. Caleb may be very Duke-like with his shamelessly sourced movie quotes ("DON'T play it again, Sam..."), but his sense of humor is more off-kilter and suited to his role as an amoral former cult member.
Holding Blood back from being as great as Doom, however, is the whole of Episode 3, "A Farewell to Arms," which drills into Sandy Petersen territory with how labyrinthine and confounding many of its levels are. I got stuck for an unreasonable amount of time in the level "Spare Parts" because a grey elevator door blended in with the rest of the scenery, looking indistinguishable from a non-interactive wall. "Raw Sewage" and "Monster Bait" are dull levels that overstay their welcome and contribute their fair share to Episode 3 being a drag, with the highest point probably being "The Sick Ward" which is mostly just fine.
Episode 4 brings things back around with shorter, more focused levels, and though the Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage expansions included in Fresh Supply do have some levels that are a bit too meandering, they are mostly solid, so Fresh Supply does recover from that mid-game slump. It is a shame that the expansions lack the same janky CG 3D cutscenes as the core game, though. There were better looking real-time graphics in 1997, I love it and can't imagine Blood any other way. The real-time shadows and lighting in the game itself do look great, though, so at least Blood looks good where it counts.
I have no idea how to tie all these thoughts together and wrap up this review, so I'm gonna hit this exit switch, listen to a bunch of dudes go "ohhhh owwwww!" and just reflect on how Blood saved my October.
Oh, right, I guess I wasn't done with the Game Gear games. Sometimes I forget Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine had a handheld version, as I suspect most people do. Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone would play this version of the game today unless they really want to wring all $40 of value out of their copy of Sonic Origins, or if they've made the commitment to play every Sonic game they possibly can, like a certain bean-loving fool.....
Anyway, I think it's fucked up I can beat this on normal difficulty, whereas anything higher than easy on the Genesis version kicks my ass. I wasn't even paying that much attention when I beat Dr. Robotnik, I accidentally got a 5-chain combo and he sorta just died.
That's one of the key differences between the Game Gear's Mean Bean Machine and its Genesis counterpart. The CPU is much more prone to making mistakes and it's pretty easy to bury them under a pile of junk pieces early, though abrupt changes to the drop speed ofpuyos beans late in the game and the poor responsiveness of the controls can make this more challenging as your well starts to fill up with fumbled beans. The CPU is far less inclined to cheat, but everything else is considerably more unwieldy.
I prefer the Genesis version for its higher fidelity and smoother controls, but I wouldn't say Mean Bean Machine on the Game Gear is bad. It's just that you have better options, and this should be pretty far from your first choice if you're in the mood for a little Puyo Pop.
Why'd you spill your beans, Robotnik.... Why'd you spill your beans...?
Anyway, I think it's fucked up I can beat this on normal difficulty, whereas anything higher than easy on the Genesis version kicks my ass. I wasn't even paying that much attention when I beat Dr. Robotnik, I accidentally got a 5-chain combo and he sorta just died.
That's one of the key differences between the Game Gear's Mean Bean Machine and its Genesis counterpart. The CPU is much more prone to making mistakes and it's pretty easy to bury them under a pile of junk pieces early, though abrupt changes to the drop speed of
I prefer the Genesis version for its higher fidelity and smoother controls, but I wouldn't say Mean Bean Machine on the Game Gear is bad. It's just that you have better options, and this should be pretty far from your first choice if you're in the mood for a little Puyo Pop.
Why'd you spill your beans, Robotnik.... Why'd you spill your beans...?