fe17
1992
Back in 1992, many games led to controversy in the US regarding their violent and sexual content. Because see, "film like rating systems" did not exist in the games industry until that point, and societal pressure was not there to create something like that until this fateful year and the year after it, where we saw the release of games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and, yes, Night Trap.
Night Trap released on October 15, 1992, was developed by Digital Pictures and is an FMV (full-motion video) game. Teenagers are having a sleepover at a mansion that is infested with vampires, and you, the player, watch surveillance footage of eight rooms in the house and partake in a hundred QTEs to activate traps around the house whenever these bad guys trigger them. You can fail a few times, but fail too often or fail at critical moments and certain characters will die.
Production values here are really poor, and there is never any actual blood seen in the game, though a drill-like device pouring red liquid out of a victim through a tube is the most controversial moment you will find here. The victim doesn't die, it continues on screaming and struggling to get out while she is getting carried out of the room, but it was a moment like this that had Night Trap added to a congressional hearing in 1993 alongside Mortal Kombat and Doom.
The result of this hearing? The creation of the ESRB, a self-regulatory organization that assigns ratings to video games in North America to this day.
Night Trap received a 25th anniversary edition in 2017 and can be played on PS4, PS Vita, PC and the Switch these days. Its ESRB rating? T for Teens...
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Usually with my reviews, I talk about the story first, but I think this game should be discussed the other way round for clarity. As explained, this game is mainly a QTE game. Robbers (vampires) sneak around one of the eight rooms, sometimes on their own, sometimes in pairs. As soon as they reach a platform with a trap, a bar will turn from green to red, which is your cue to click on the screen. This activates the trap and a short clip of them being dropped into the floor, engulfed by a bookshelf or thrown out of the window is played, among others. During all of this, the main characters walk around the house and play out the story, at first oblivious to the dozens of robbers walking around the house.
What makes this game difficult are three things. First, at times, robbers show up on two of the eight screens. The traps don't activate after a set amount of time that they are on the screen. One trap might take 10 seconds to trigger for one robber, the other might just take 3 seconds to trigger it, meaning you might find yourself waiting to activate a trap on the wrong screen, therefore missing the trigger on the other. The game keeps a counter running of "Possible captures" and how many you actually captured. Capture too few and the game is over, requiring you to restart from the beginning unless you reach a checkpoint halfway through.
Second, the story is cheesy as hell but you of course don't know that at first, and when big moments happen, you find yourself suspensefully watching and missing out on the robbers sneaking through other screens in the meantime. Not letting this happen is one part of the challenge.
Finally, you don't just have to wait for a red light for your cue. That would be too simple. There is an additional colored code that you need to have selected for the triggers to work. There is orange, red, green, blue, yellow and purple to choose from. I believe there are 4 or 5 times during the game where the color changes. The only way to know which color you need to be on next is by listening to the characters. At very specific times in the story, they will talk to each other and say things they "I will change the code to green". If you miss this, all you can do at this point is just guess, which usually means you will miss a few traps.
I've heard plenty of things about this game since the release of its anniversary edition in 2017. A lot of it was and is negative. Having played this game myself, unbothered by the controversy and humored by its cheesy story and low production values, I don't really understand the hate. Is it a great game? Objectively, no. Is it bereft of fun? Absolutely not. I played this solo, but I can only imagine how hilarious this would have been had I played it with friends, which I plan on doing some time in the near future for sure.
The gameplay is extremely simple, but challenging and quite simply fun. Perception, quickness and a good memory will be the only skills you need in this game, and I really enjoyed how that translated. My only critique here would be that having to constantly check for robbers means you will not catch a lot of the story. Though I will go over that in the next part of this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The story in this game is cheesy, cringeworthy, trashy and plain bad. Let's get that out of the way first. As someone who can enjoy low production values from time to time though, I had my fun with it. You are part of the SCAT (Sega Control Attack Team for the Sega CD version, Special Control Attack Team for the others), which was alerted to the disappearance of teenagers at the Martin winery estate. As the game starts, a new group of teenagers are invited over to this place.
The SCAT team gives you the overseer role and tasks you with using the traps around the house on any suspicious people roaming about, whilst the overall goal is to keep track of the three teenagers and their two parents as they have a party with a suspected group of victims.
The game takes place in one continouus loop of roughly 25 to 30 minutes on 8 screens, each depicting a different area of the house. As you take care of the robbers/burglars/vampires, you also can simply switch to the screens with the main characters and listen in on their conversations. The problem is that most of the time, robbers are walking around, which means you can rarely listen to them for more than a few seconds uninterrupted. This has one good and one pretty bad point to it.
First, the good. If you fail to trap enough robbers, the game is over and you restart. This happened to me a few times, and with each run, I caught different conversations and learned more about the game's story, which mainly included hints given at the true nature of the hosts.
The bad is that the game's design pretty much doesn't allow you to catch all of the story unless you do dozens of playthroughs. Being stubborn and saying "I'll just listen for this next playthrough" doesn't work, because if you don't spend the time catching robbers, you get the Game Over screen after just a couple minutes. Personally, this wasn't a big deal to me because you don't end up missing much, the story isn't good and the gameplay was the fun part to me here either way, but how you feel about all this will depend on how OK you are with admittedly trashy games like this, which I personally think have their own charm, especially if the gameplay itself is, to this day, pretty unique.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
This is an FMV game. An interactive movie. So while the acting wasn't great, voice acting WAS present here, which in itself is unique for this time. There isn't much of a soundtrack here. Most of what you will hear comes from a specific part of the game where the group of teenagers start singing. There are some horror themes that play whenever you are in a room with robbers though, which added something I'll call "funny tension" because they just walk in the weirdest way possible.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Hard to rate this part considering that this is an interactive movie. I'm giving it a 7 for the following reasons. First, I'm rating the setting of the game and the style of it all. It certainly has that 90s feel to it and is charmfully trashy. Second, the costume design and the walk/crawl mix that the robbers do is hilarious. Finally, the UI, which looks different depending on the version you play but succeeds in giving you a clear overview. Here I can only recommend going for the 25th anniversary edition at this point though, since that one actually has the screens at the bottom show what's going on in each room, while older versions only had a stock image displayed and made you memorize the exact timing and locations of when and where you would find the robbers.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 7/10
If the atmosphere this game was going for was of the "comedy horror" genre, this works. You are part of the SCAT team, and you have sent a teenage girl in to aid you, so sometimes you will find her talking into the cameras and addressing you that way, which is a nice touch.
As for the suspects, they have an ominous presence to them in the way they walk and talk, they drink suspicious red liquid and there are some teases of their true nature every couple minutes which was pretty neat.
The SCAT team pulling the plug on you when you would let too many robbers pass by was also a nice touch, instead of getting a simple GAME OVER screen.
CONTENT | 7/10
There are 100 captures to be done in this game. If you want to try and get all of them, you can play this game for hours. In terms of your first full playthrough, you can expect 1 to 2 hours of gameplay. It's not much, but it's definitely the perfect amount for a game like this. That said, there isn't anything else to it besides the mouse clicking during appropriate times, so this game is what it is.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
You have eight rooms to observe and need to do so with constant focus. Sometimes, the game cleverly takes your focus from you without you noticing, and half a dozen robbers scroll by before you notice. I found this to be a well designed game on that front on most levels, apart from the fact that the story cannot really be properly observed due to the constant interruptions.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
This game was partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB, it is one of the most well-known FMV games of all time and it has the type of gameplay that (almost?) no other game has ever done. I can't say that a series of games like this would work, but for a one-time thing, this was a great concept.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Replay value comes from all those extra story bits you'll get to see that you probably missed in earlier runs and from trying to capture all robbers.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 67/100
If you are OK with the low production values, the cheesiness and the one-dimensional gameplay, there is a good chance that you will have a fun 1 or 2 hours with this game. Personally, I had a blast, and I didn't expect that based on all the negative things I had heard about it.
(This is the 73rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Night Trap released on October 15, 1992, was developed by Digital Pictures and is an FMV (full-motion video) game. Teenagers are having a sleepover at a mansion that is infested with vampires, and you, the player, watch surveillance footage of eight rooms in the house and partake in a hundred QTEs to activate traps around the house whenever these bad guys trigger them. You can fail a few times, but fail too often or fail at critical moments and certain characters will die.
Production values here are really poor, and there is never any actual blood seen in the game, though a drill-like device pouring red liquid out of a victim through a tube is the most controversial moment you will find here. The victim doesn't die, it continues on screaming and struggling to get out while she is getting carried out of the room, but it was a moment like this that had Night Trap added to a congressional hearing in 1993 alongside Mortal Kombat and Doom.
The result of this hearing? The creation of the ESRB, a self-regulatory organization that assigns ratings to video games in North America to this day.
Night Trap received a 25th anniversary edition in 2017 and can be played on PS4, PS Vita, PC and the Switch these days. Its ESRB rating? T for Teens...
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Usually with my reviews, I talk about the story first, but I think this game should be discussed the other way round for clarity. As explained, this game is mainly a QTE game. Robbers (vampires) sneak around one of the eight rooms, sometimes on their own, sometimes in pairs. As soon as they reach a platform with a trap, a bar will turn from green to red, which is your cue to click on the screen. This activates the trap and a short clip of them being dropped into the floor, engulfed by a bookshelf or thrown out of the window is played, among others. During all of this, the main characters walk around the house and play out the story, at first oblivious to the dozens of robbers walking around the house.
What makes this game difficult are three things. First, at times, robbers show up on two of the eight screens. The traps don't activate after a set amount of time that they are on the screen. One trap might take 10 seconds to trigger for one robber, the other might just take 3 seconds to trigger it, meaning you might find yourself waiting to activate a trap on the wrong screen, therefore missing the trigger on the other. The game keeps a counter running of "Possible captures" and how many you actually captured. Capture too few and the game is over, requiring you to restart from the beginning unless you reach a checkpoint halfway through.
Second, the story is cheesy as hell but you of course don't know that at first, and when big moments happen, you find yourself suspensefully watching and missing out on the robbers sneaking through other screens in the meantime. Not letting this happen is one part of the challenge.
Finally, you don't just have to wait for a red light for your cue. That would be too simple. There is an additional colored code that you need to have selected for the triggers to work. There is orange, red, green, blue, yellow and purple to choose from. I believe there are 4 or 5 times during the game where the color changes. The only way to know which color you need to be on next is by listening to the characters. At very specific times in the story, they will talk to each other and say things they "I will change the code to green". If you miss this, all you can do at this point is just guess, which usually means you will miss a few traps.
I've heard plenty of things about this game since the release of its anniversary edition in 2017. A lot of it was and is negative. Having played this game myself, unbothered by the controversy and humored by its cheesy story and low production values, I don't really understand the hate. Is it a great game? Objectively, no. Is it bereft of fun? Absolutely not. I played this solo, but I can only imagine how hilarious this would have been had I played it with friends, which I plan on doing some time in the near future for sure.
The gameplay is extremely simple, but challenging and quite simply fun. Perception, quickness and a good memory will be the only skills you need in this game, and I really enjoyed how that translated. My only critique here would be that having to constantly check for robbers means you will not catch a lot of the story. Though I will go over that in the next part of this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The story in this game is cheesy, cringeworthy, trashy and plain bad. Let's get that out of the way first. As someone who can enjoy low production values from time to time though, I had my fun with it. You are part of the SCAT (Sega Control Attack Team for the Sega CD version, Special Control Attack Team for the others), which was alerted to the disappearance of teenagers at the Martin winery estate. As the game starts, a new group of teenagers are invited over to this place.
The SCAT team gives you the overseer role and tasks you with using the traps around the house on any suspicious people roaming about, whilst the overall goal is to keep track of the three teenagers and their two parents as they have a party with a suspected group of victims.
The game takes place in one continouus loop of roughly 25 to 30 minutes on 8 screens, each depicting a different area of the house. As you take care of the robbers/burglars/vampires, you also can simply switch to the screens with the main characters and listen in on their conversations. The problem is that most of the time, robbers are walking around, which means you can rarely listen to them for more than a few seconds uninterrupted. This has one good and one pretty bad point to it.
First, the good. If you fail to trap enough robbers, the game is over and you restart. This happened to me a few times, and with each run, I caught different conversations and learned more about the game's story, which mainly included hints given at the true nature of the hosts.
The bad is that the game's design pretty much doesn't allow you to catch all of the story unless you do dozens of playthroughs. Being stubborn and saying "I'll just listen for this next playthrough" doesn't work, because if you don't spend the time catching robbers, you get the Game Over screen after just a couple minutes. Personally, this wasn't a big deal to me because you don't end up missing much, the story isn't good and the gameplay was the fun part to me here either way, but how you feel about all this will depend on how OK you are with admittedly trashy games like this, which I personally think have their own charm, especially if the gameplay itself is, to this day, pretty unique.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
This is an FMV game. An interactive movie. So while the acting wasn't great, voice acting WAS present here, which in itself is unique for this time. There isn't much of a soundtrack here. Most of what you will hear comes from a specific part of the game where the group of teenagers start singing. There are some horror themes that play whenever you are in a room with robbers though, which added something I'll call "funny tension" because they just walk in the weirdest way possible.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Hard to rate this part considering that this is an interactive movie. I'm giving it a 7 for the following reasons. First, I'm rating the setting of the game and the style of it all. It certainly has that 90s feel to it and is charmfully trashy. Second, the costume design and the walk/crawl mix that the robbers do is hilarious. Finally, the UI, which looks different depending on the version you play but succeeds in giving you a clear overview. Here I can only recommend going for the 25th anniversary edition at this point though, since that one actually has the screens at the bottom show what's going on in each room, while older versions only had a stock image displayed and made you memorize the exact timing and locations of when and where you would find the robbers.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 7/10
If the atmosphere this game was going for was of the "comedy horror" genre, this works. You are part of the SCAT team, and you have sent a teenage girl in to aid you, so sometimes you will find her talking into the cameras and addressing you that way, which is a nice touch.
As for the suspects, they have an ominous presence to them in the way they walk and talk, they drink suspicious red liquid and there are some teases of their true nature every couple minutes which was pretty neat.
The SCAT team pulling the plug on you when you would let too many robbers pass by was also a nice touch, instead of getting a simple GAME OVER screen.
CONTENT | 7/10
There are 100 captures to be done in this game. If you want to try and get all of them, you can play this game for hours. In terms of your first full playthrough, you can expect 1 to 2 hours of gameplay. It's not much, but it's definitely the perfect amount for a game like this. That said, there isn't anything else to it besides the mouse clicking during appropriate times, so this game is what it is.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
You have eight rooms to observe and need to do so with constant focus. Sometimes, the game cleverly takes your focus from you without you noticing, and half a dozen robbers scroll by before you notice. I found this to be a well designed game on that front on most levels, apart from the fact that the story cannot really be properly observed due to the constant interruptions.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
This game was partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB, it is one of the most well-known FMV games of all time and it has the type of gameplay that (almost?) no other game has ever done. I can't say that a series of games like this would work, but for a one-time thing, this was a great concept.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Replay value comes from all those extra story bits you'll get to see that you probably missed in earlier runs and from trying to capture all robbers.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 67/100
If you are OK with the low production values, the cheesiness and the one-dimensional gameplay, there is a good chance that you will have a fun 1 or 2 hours with this game. Personally, I had a blast, and I didn't expect that based on all the negative things I had heard about it.
(This is the 73rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
1995
(This is the 111th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I didn't think Chrono Trigger, a 1995 JRPG by Square for the SNES, would live up to the incredibly high expectations I had that came from years and years of reading about how Chrono Trigger is still one of the best JRPGs today, if not one of the best games period. I would stumble upon quite a few of these types of highly praised games, only to have their impact lessened by the expectations going in.
With Chrono Trigger, there were two differences for me. First, I have done this challenge of mine for over a year now, starting all the way back in 1990 and arriving in 1995, having played 110 different games in the process, including over a dozen RPGs. So my expectations for what a great game in the 90s looks like were set rather accurately I'd say.
Second, unlike some of the other older games I would hear about and be slightly disappointed by, Chrono Trigger actually aged incredibly well. It won't make you a fan of the JRPG genre if you've tried many other games and don't enjoy the gameplay loop, but for fans of the genre, I'm gonna go ahead and say that there are few JRPGs out there who are as complete a package as Chrono Trigger. From 1990 to 1995, it's absolutely the best one, and possibly my favorite game as part of this challenge I've played so far. If you call yourself a JRPG fan, do yourself a favor and check this game out.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Chrono Trigger uses a time travel theme for its main story. You play as Crono (or however non-canon name you would like to give him), who looks like a DBZ character in the game's cover, which makes sense since the art designer worked on DBZ as well. The game starts in 1000 A.D. You wake up and go to the fair that is in town, where a local girl named Lucca has a transportation device to showcase, which teleports you from one box to the other right next to it.
An accident happens and a girl you were hanging out with, Marle, is sent into a portal that opened up by the power of her pendant. You choose to be the hero and go after her. Soon after, you realize you are now in 600 A.D. That's all fascinating and stuff, but all you want to do is grab Marle and get out of there. Events transpire, and not much later, you find yourself in the future and uncovering something very dark: The planet is dying. With the power of time travel at your hands, it's up to you and your friends to go back and forward in time to do what's necessary and prevent this horrible death.
What impresses the most about Chrono Trigger's storytelling is that it incorporates time travel and does not end up in a jumbled mess by the end. Quite the opposite actually. The time travel theme gives the story lots of options to explore different settings, events and permutations of said events, which lends itself perfectly to the fact that this game has not one, not two but 13 (!) different endings that differ quite notably from each other based on when and where you take certain actions.
Additionally, Chrono Trigger reaches the impressive feat of having a time travel story make sense overall, while also avoiding being as formulaic as JRPG stories tend to be at this time period. The main villain in this game is really interesting and actually scary as shit the more I think about it, and as someone who loves a good villain, that's awesome, though I won't say much more than that. There are also many other villains of which many were well-explored, and the game has a diverse and charming cast of characters. I found some to be one-dimensional, like Robo or Ayla, but the others have some stand-out moments as part of the main story or their own side stories. I wish there would have been more moments where the entire casts interacts like in one singular scene that I found throughout the whole game, but the game is more focused on its plot, which is well-paced almost throughout, and that makes for a great experience as well.
One final note I want to make is that the game does a really great job at foreshadowing certain events, locations and characters, and when you get to the points where they become relevant, it makes for some of the best moments in the game.
As someone who likes well-developed characters as much as a good plot, I would personally have liked a little bit more in that aspect, but the plot is great, characters are easy to root for and there are at least a couple that do have great backstories and development, so if you're looking for a JRPG who ticks these boxes, Chrono Trigger probably comes up at the top of most lists for a good reason.
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
JRPGs have a pretty well-established gameplay loop, and Chrono Trigger does not distance itself from that either, which is understandable considering it was made by the same company that is reponsible for Final Fantasy, the SaGa series, the Mana series and more. That said, what Chrono Trigger achieves is three-fold.
First, Chrono Trigger makes the loop less grindy and cryptic. I never felt the need to farm XP mindlessly for hours to have a chance at a random mid-game boss. There was one boss fight that was unusually tough, sure, but I beat it by adjusting my strategy and was able to continue through the rest of the game. The game also never forced me to use a guide, which, believe me, means something. There is always that one time in these RPGs where I'm stumped as to where to go or what to do, but with Chrono Trigger, I always figured it out eventually, without fail. Talk to all NPCs and you will definitely find your way forward.
Second, Chrono Trigger introduces quality of life changes and general improvements to the genre. Talk to an NPC accidentally? Just walk away mid dialogue without having to click each line away. Don't want to be thrown into random encounters? You don't have to, enemies almost always appear on the screen and you can often just walk past them. Feel like you're usually missing out on the good skills/weapons in JRPGs because you can't find them? The game has "Techs", which the characters unlock naturally as you use them, which are more than enough to overcome any challenge as long as you use them correctly.
Third, Chrono Trigger avoids filler, at least the SNES version does. It adds a lot to the pacing of the story that you're rarely out there searching for item X to supply to NPC Y to unlock Dungeon Z to find item A to supply NPC B to finally meaningfully progress the story. Yes, there of course is still some of that here, but I can't say it was a chore to go through any dungeon this game had to offer because it was well-balanced with progression of the story and your character, and dungeons usually have unique puzzles for you. Both in actual puzzles and in terms of the battles, where you need to figure out how to "solve" a fight before you actually beat the enemy. Certain enemies for example can block almost all of your physical or magical attacks. That's simple enough. Then there are some who first have to be shocked with a lightning attack before they lower their guard and take damage. These "puzzles" get more and more tricky as the game goes on, up until the final boss fight, where the game throws one final curveball at you, though I'll let you discover that on your own.
At the end of the day though, Chrono Trigger is still a turn-based Square JRPG. If you didn't enjoy these before or especially after Chrono Trigger, the "Tech" skills won't be enough to change your mind. Even to me, watching the same attack animations play out slowly over thousands of times in encounters against much weaker enemies is not very fun but rather something you have to do to get to the next big fight, or something you do as part of solving a dungeon. Square still use their Active Battle System, which I dislike as much as ever because it has 0 to do with strategy and one billion to do with being quick on the buttons like a 12 year old Fortnite player building a castle in four seconds. Losing battles can throw you up to an hour back if you die shortly before getting to your next save point (unless you use save states).
So, to put it short: If you enjoy gameplay in JRPGs, you'll enjoy this. If you don't, you won't here either, but it's the most fun non-Shin Megami Tensei (J)RPG I've played that came out in the 90s so far.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
Did you hear that Chrono Trigger has a great soundtrack? Well you heard correctly. I loved this soundtrack from beginning to end. The fair theme and Gato's theme at the start already had me getting earworms for the rest of my first day playing this. The battle theme is great and just doesn't get old. Then there are numerous character and location themes that range from great to perfection. I could name you a dozen songs that I loved and would gladly listen to outside of the game, and others would probably name you another dozen that they remember very fondly. It's a terrific soundtrack and if you want a taste, I recommend you to check out Gato's / Gonzalez's Theme, Secret of the Forest, Guardia Castle, Battle with Magus and probably my favorite, Corridors of Time.
They call me Gato ♪
I have metal joints ♪
Beat me up ♪
And earn 15 silver points ♪
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Thanks to the time travel theme and the many different ages you visit, this game has a ton of visual variety, which helps the game to visually never get stale. Enemy design is great, the world design helps give each age its distinctive properties and while I thought the characters had some weird looks sometimes (Marle doing the squilly face for example), I did like their design as well, though the characters to me stand out a lot more in their avatars than their in-game sprites.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
This game packs so much detail for a game of its time and for any game period. I have one party scene in particular in mind where a unique song just for that scene plays and you got a bunch of characters just dancing as you walk around. I then interacted with Marle, who said something along the lines of "let's party", after which she went over to someone else and started mingling. Talking to her again prompted her to say "let's dance" and she started busting out the moves, and apart from the fact that I interacted with her to prompt these lines and actions, it all felt so natural. Or going to Lucca's home and talking to her mom, only for her dad to show up and then give us an item shortly after. Or the entirety of the millennial fair and how seemingly tiny interactions there are brought up later.
There are tons of small details like that and if you ask me what every great video game has, it is those small details. If you put that much care into those, it's almost a safe bet that the main portion of your game will be quality as well, and that's certainly the case here.
Outside of the details, the game is very atmospheric thanks to its varied locations and use of its songs. Funny thing is, even now a small detail comes to mind, like healing up in the future and getting the "you're still hungry" notification, which is such a small thing but only is added in this era. It helps paint the picture of the life the people who are there are living, and it makes a later moment stand out even more.
CONTENT | 10/10
The game is PACKED with content. It has a lot more content than you will see in one playthrough, that's for sure. It got all the endings, all the different ages, all the different side quests, lots of techs, double techs, triple techs, secret items, optional dungeons, New Game+ (which is a term coined in THIS game) and all those permutations to events you can have depending on your actions, not to mention plenty of bosses, high enemy variety and a ton of interaction that you can have between the ages, which is often optional but rewards you for your time pretty well. If you could only bring one JRPG with you on an island, and you had never played Chrono Trigger, this would keep you busy without you finding all the content in it for quiiite a while.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The pacing in this game is great and the way the game rewards optional exploration is one of the better examples I've ever seen. The fact that grinding is not required even a single bit is a great achievement in itself. If there is one negative I'd have, it's the final dungeon (I played the SNES version, I hear other versions have bad optional dungeons). This dungeon takes a bit too long for my taste and keeps throwing the same enemy at you that disables your tech/items, which turns these battles into boring "Press A and wait for the battle to end" slogs. The final boss form then has a BS attack that insta-kills your party unless they are at full health (2 of my 3 party members died even then), so I didn't enjoy that either, plus the GolemTwins fight was BS, but those would be my only negatives in a game I played for 25+ hours. The least frustrating retro JRPG I've played overall by a mile.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
In many core ways it doesn't differ from contemporary JRPGs, but the time travel mechanic and great pacing help the story stand out, the Tech system is one of the most fun satisfying systems I've experienced in retro JRPGs and the game helped popularize having a lot of different endings and NG+. Even if you are one to play through a game once and that's it, the way you can choose how and when to do things is a terrificly executed in Chrono Trigger.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Don't think I stumbled upon a more replayable game up to this point, Chrono Trigger can be played many times over and present you with vastly different events.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 90/100
Chrono Trigger aged tremendously. If you're a fan of JRPGs and haven't checked this out, I don't even know what to tell you. Is it the best JRPG today? Probably not, but I agree that it's the best JRPG up until the time of its release. And even if it's not #1 today, it still isn't too far from that spot in my opinion. Few games offer such a complete package, and I'm glad I finally got to experience this game.
I didn't think Chrono Trigger, a 1995 JRPG by Square for the SNES, would live up to the incredibly high expectations I had that came from years and years of reading about how Chrono Trigger is still one of the best JRPGs today, if not one of the best games period. I would stumble upon quite a few of these types of highly praised games, only to have their impact lessened by the expectations going in.
With Chrono Trigger, there were two differences for me. First, I have done this challenge of mine for over a year now, starting all the way back in 1990 and arriving in 1995, having played 110 different games in the process, including over a dozen RPGs. So my expectations for what a great game in the 90s looks like were set rather accurately I'd say.
Second, unlike some of the other older games I would hear about and be slightly disappointed by, Chrono Trigger actually aged incredibly well. It won't make you a fan of the JRPG genre if you've tried many other games and don't enjoy the gameplay loop, but for fans of the genre, I'm gonna go ahead and say that there are few JRPGs out there who are as complete a package as Chrono Trigger. From 1990 to 1995, it's absolutely the best one, and possibly my favorite game as part of this challenge I've played so far. If you call yourself a JRPG fan, do yourself a favor and check this game out.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
Chrono Trigger uses a time travel theme for its main story. You play as Crono (or however non-canon name you would like to give him), who looks like a DBZ character in the game's cover, which makes sense since the art designer worked on DBZ as well. The game starts in 1000 A.D. You wake up and go to the fair that is in town, where a local girl named Lucca has a transportation device to showcase, which teleports you from one box to the other right next to it.
An accident happens and a girl you were hanging out with, Marle, is sent into a portal that opened up by the power of her pendant. You choose to be the hero and go after her. Soon after, you realize you are now in 600 A.D. That's all fascinating and stuff, but all you want to do is grab Marle and get out of there. Events transpire, and not much later, you find yourself in the future and uncovering something very dark: The planet is dying. With the power of time travel at your hands, it's up to you and your friends to go back and forward in time to do what's necessary and prevent this horrible death.
What impresses the most about Chrono Trigger's storytelling is that it incorporates time travel and does not end up in a jumbled mess by the end. Quite the opposite actually. The time travel theme gives the story lots of options to explore different settings, events and permutations of said events, which lends itself perfectly to the fact that this game has not one, not two but 13 (!) different endings that differ quite notably from each other based on when and where you take certain actions.
Additionally, Chrono Trigger reaches the impressive feat of having a time travel story make sense overall, while also avoiding being as formulaic as JRPG stories tend to be at this time period. The main villain in this game is really interesting and actually scary as shit the more I think about it, and as someone who loves a good villain, that's awesome, though I won't say much more than that. There are also many other villains of which many were well-explored, and the game has a diverse and charming cast of characters. I found some to be one-dimensional, like Robo or Ayla, but the others have some stand-out moments as part of the main story or their own side stories. I wish there would have been more moments where the entire casts interacts like in one singular scene that I found throughout the whole game, but the game is more focused on its plot, which is well-paced almost throughout, and that makes for a great experience as well.
One final note I want to make is that the game does a really great job at foreshadowing certain events, locations and characters, and when you get to the points where they become relevant, it makes for some of the best moments in the game.
As someone who likes well-developed characters as much as a good plot, I would personally have liked a little bit more in that aspect, but the plot is great, characters are easy to root for and there are at least a couple that do have great backstories and development, so if you're looking for a JRPG who ticks these boxes, Chrono Trigger probably comes up at the top of most lists for a good reason.
GAMEPLAY | 15/20
JRPGs have a pretty well-established gameplay loop, and Chrono Trigger does not distance itself from that either, which is understandable considering it was made by the same company that is reponsible for Final Fantasy, the SaGa series, the Mana series and more. That said, what Chrono Trigger achieves is three-fold.
First, Chrono Trigger makes the loop less grindy and cryptic. I never felt the need to farm XP mindlessly for hours to have a chance at a random mid-game boss. There was one boss fight that was unusually tough, sure, but I beat it by adjusting my strategy and was able to continue through the rest of the game. The game also never forced me to use a guide, which, believe me, means something. There is always that one time in these RPGs where I'm stumped as to where to go or what to do, but with Chrono Trigger, I always figured it out eventually, without fail. Talk to all NPCs and you will definitely find your way forward.
Second, Chrono Trigger introduces quality of life changes and general improvements to the genre. Talk to an NPC accidentally? Just walk away mid dialogue without having to click each line away. Don't want to be thrown into random encounters? You don't have to, enemies almost always appear on the screen and you can often just walk past them. Feel like you're usually missing out on the good skills/weapons in JRPGs because you can't find them? The game has "Techs", which the characters unlock naturally as you use them, which are more than enough to overcome any challenge as long as you use them correctly.
Third, Chrono Trigger avoids filler, at least the SNES version does. It adds a lot to the pacing of the story that you're rarely out there searching for item X to supply to NPC Y to unlock Dungeon Z to find item A to supply NPC B to finally meaningfully progress the story. Yes, there of course is still some of that here, but I can't say it was a chore to go through any dungeon this game had to offer because it was well-balanced with progression of the story and your character, and dungeons usually have unique puzzles for you. Both in actual puzzles and in terms of the battles, where you need to figure out how to "solve" a fight before you actually beat the enemy. Certain enemies for example can block almost all of your physical or magical attacks. That's simple enough. Then there are some who first have to be shocked with a lightning attack before they lower their guard and take damage. These "puzzles" get more and more tricky as the game goes on, up until the final boss fight, where the game throws one final curveball at you, though I'll let you discover that on your own.
At the end of the day though, Chrono Trigger is still a turn-based Square JRPG. If you didn't enjoy these before or especially after Chrono Trigger, the "Tech" skills won't be enough to change your mind. Even to me, watching the same attack animations play out slowly over thousands of times in encounters against much weaker enemies is not very fun but rather something you have to do to get to the next big fight, or something you do as part of solving a dungeon. Square still use their Active Battle System, which I dislike as much as ever because it has 0 to do with strategy and one billion to do with being quick on the buttons like a 12 year old Fortnite player building a castle in four seconds. Losing battles can throw you up to an hour back if you die shortly before getting to your next save point (unless you use save states).
So, to put it short: If you enjoy gameplay in JRPGs, you'll enjoy this. If you don't, you won't here either, but it's the most fun non-Shin Megami Tensei (J)RPG I've played that came out in the 90s so far.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
Did you hear that Chrono Trigger has a great soundtrack? Well you heard correctly. I loved this soundtrack from beginning to end. The fair theme and Gato's theme at the start already had me getting earworms for the rest of my first day playing this. The battle theme is great and just doesn't get old. Then there are numerous character and location themes that range from great to perfection. I could name you a dozen songs that I loved and would gladly listen to outside of the game, and others would probably name you another dozen that they remember very fondly. It's a terrific soundtrack and if you want a taste, I recommend you to check out Gato's / Gonzalez's Theme, Secret of the Forest, Guardia Castle, Battle with Magus and probably my favorite, Corridors of Time.
They call me Gato ♪
I have metal joints ♪
Beat me up ♪
And earn 15 silver points ♪
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Thanks to the time travel theme and the many different ages you visit, this game has a ton of visual variety, which helps the game to visually never get stale. Enemy design is great, the world design helps give each age its distinctive properties and while I thought the characters had some weird looks sometimes (Marle doing the squilly face for example), I did like their design as well, though the characters to me stand out a lot more in their avatars than their in-game sprites.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
This game packs so much detail for a game of its time and for any game period. I have one party scene in particular in mind where a unique song just for that scene plays and you got a bunch of characters just dancing as you walk around. I then interacted with Marle, who said something along the lines of "let's party", after which she went over to someone else and started mingling. Talking to her again prompted her to say "let's dance" and she started busting out the moves, and apart from the fact that I interacted with her to prompt these lines and actions, it all felt so natural. Or going to Lucca's home and talking to her mom, only for her dad to show up and then give us an item shortly after. Or the entirety of the millennial fair and how seemingly tiny interactions there are brought up later.
There are tons of small details like that and if you ask me what every great video game has, it is those small details. If you put that much care into those, it's almost a safe bet that the main portion of your game will be quality as well, and that's certainly the case here.
Outside of the details, the game is very atmospheric thanks to its varied locations and use of its songs. Funny thing is, even now a small detail comes to mind, like healing up in the future and getting the "you're still hungry" notification, which is such a small thing but only is added in this era. It helps paint the picture of the life the people who are there are living, and it makes a later moment stand out even more.
CONTENT | 10/10
The game is PACKED with content. It has a lot more content than you will see in one playthrough, that's for sure. It got all the endings, all the different ages, all the different side quests, lots of techs, double techs, triple techs, secret items, optional dungeons, New Game+ (which is a term coined in THIS game) and all those permutations to events you can have depending on your actions, not to mention plenty of bosses, high enemy variety and a ton of interaction that you can have between the ages, which is often optional but rewards you for your time pretty well. If you could only bring one JRPG with you on an island, and you had never played Chrono Trigger, this would keep you busy without you finding all the content in it for quiiite a while.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The pacing in this game is great and the way the game rewards optional exploration is one of the better examples I've ever seen. The fact that grinding is not required even a single bit is a great achievement in itself. If there is one negative I'd have, it's the final dungeon (I played the SNES version, I hear other versions have bad optional dungeons). This dungeon takes a bit too long for my taste and keeps throwing the same enemy at you that disables your tech/items, which turns these battles into boring "Press A and wait for the battle to end" slogs. The final boss form then has a BS attack that insta-kills your party unless they are at full health (2 of my 3 party members died even then), so I didn't enjoy that either, plus the GolemTwins fight was BS, but those would be my only negatives in a game I played for 25+ hours. The least frustrating retro JRPG I've played overall by a mile.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
In many core ways it doesn't differ from contemporary JRPGs, but the time travel mechanic and great pacing help the story stand out, the Tech system is one of the most fun satisfying systems I've experienced in retro JRPGs and the game helped popularize having a lot of different endings and NG+. Even if you are one to play through a game once and that's it, the way you can choose how and when to do things is a terrificly executed in Chrono Trigger.
REPLAYABILITY | 5/5
Don't think I stumbled upon a more replayable game up to this point, Chrono Trigger can be played many times over and present you with vastly different events.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 90/100
Chrono Trigger aged tremendously. If you're a fan of JRPGs and haven't checked this out, I don't even know what to tell you. Is it the best JRPG today? Probably not, but I agree that it's the best JRPG up until the time of its release. And even if it's not #1 today, it still isn't too far from that spot in my opinion. Few games offer such a complete package, and I'm glad I finally got to experience this game.
A game in the "Endless Runner" genre with a hip hop aesthetic. Whether you want to pick it up or not is basically tied to how appealing you think that first sentence sounds.
To me, the appeal was to find something short that I could achievement hunt in. In that regard, Aerial_Knight's Never Yield was a solid option. Getting all achievements, which requires you to check out all three available game modes, took me about 3 hours overall. That includes finishing the story mode, doing a bonus level and spending 30 (!) minutes in the endless mode.
So what do you do in this game? Well, it's an endless runner game, meaning your character runs to the right of the screen and the challenge is to dodge obstacles whenever they appear within a short amount of time. There are only four different obstacle types that you either jump over, slide under, dash through or jump inbetween by pressing the correct buttons based on the color shown. It's very easy to pick up after completing the first level or two, and once you've seen these obstacles once, you've seen them all. For the rest of the game, they just repeat for a while without really mixing it up. You can turn off your brain and just play, which has its appeal from time to time. The hip hop aesthetic is pretty cool and the soundtrack has some pretty nice tracks to listen to, but everything in this game just gives the impression of "limited". That's not necessarily a bad thing, the game does only last a bit over an hour for a normal story playthrough after all, but that should be your expectation going in.
The endless mode is basically you running from corner to corner in a gym and dodging stuff two times in every lap. I think it took me 150 or so laps to get the achievement there, which, again, took half an hour, so go for 100% achievements at your own risk.
If you just found this game in your Steam library and are thinking off checking it off your backlog, there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon, but also plenty of better ways.
To me, the appeal was to find something short that I could achievement hunt in. In that regard, Aerial_Knight's Never Yield was a solid option. Getting all achievements, which requires you to check out all three available game modes, took me about 3 hours overall. That includes finishing the story mode, doing a bonus level and spending 30 (!) minutes in the endless mode.
So what do you do in this game? Well, it's an endless runner game, meaning your character runs to the right of the screen and the challenge is to dodge obstacles whenever they appear within a short amount of time. There are only four different obstacle types that you either jump over, slide under, dash through or jump inbetween by pressing the correct buttons based on the color shown. It's very easy to pick up after completing the first level or two, and once you've seen these obstacles once, you've seen them all. For the rest of the game, they just repeat for a while without really mixing it up. You can turn off your brain and just play, which has its appeal from time to time. The hip hop aesthetic is pretty cool and the soundtrack has some pretty nice tracks to listen to, but everything in this game just gives the impression of "limited". That's not necessarily a bad thing, the game does only last a bit over an hour for a normal story playthrough after all, but that should be your expectation going in.
The endless mode is basically you running from corner to corner in a gym and dodging stuff two times in every lap. I think it took me 150 or so laps to get the achievement there, which, again, took half an hour, so go for 100% achievements at your own risk.
If you just found this game in your Steam library and are thinking off checking it off your backlog, there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon, but also plenty of better ways.
2023
As a fan of both TES and Fallout games made by Bethesda, Starfield hits on pretty much anything that makes their games so fun to me. There are a lot of quests of main, side and faction variety, a large number of NPCs, a ton of handcrafted locations, four massive cities and an unreal number of optional systems to engage with. Apart from the faces of misc NPCs, the game is a pleasure for the eyes thanks to its beautiful visual design and a pleasure for the ears due to the fantastic work done on the game's general audio and soundtrack.
I've spent my 100+ hours on this game in a large variety of ways and I haven't even come close to getting through all the handcrafted content yet. Not that the game doesn't respect your time or anything, but it offers you so many options of engagement that it truly is for the player to decide how much time they want to spend with it before beating it by seeing the main story through to the end. That main story takes about 25 hours, but obviously, BGS games have a lot more to offer than that, though the main story is one I did enjoy in Starfield.
Apart from doing main quests for 25 hours, I've done side quests for probably another 25-30, I've traveled to and surveyed planets for about 10 hours, built a ship for 2 hours, dabbled with outpost building for another few hours, read books, visited a Museum filled with lore and talked to all kinds of NPCs for 10s of hours, visited every nook and cranny of two of the four major cities, had multiple run-ins with my in-game parents (an optional trait) and many dozens of random encounters in space and on planets.
My expectations for this game were immense, and Starfield met them. If you're wondering whether you will enjoy Starfield, here are two things: 1) you can play it on Game Pass for $10 or whatever a month costs these days. 2) If you don't want to do that, I'd look at whether you enjoyed Fallout/Skyrim and I'd think about whether it bothers you that you can't manually fly from orbit to planet or from planet to planet within a system. If it would take a few minutes to do that each time, would you be one to really spend your time doing it after the novelty wears off? If yes, that's fair and you probably should stick with a more hardcore space sim experience. If not, then I can only highly recommend Starfield to you.
While I'm going to put Starfield on hold now and play Cyberpunk now that 2.0 and PL are finally about to release, I can give Starfield the highest honor I've given Skyrim and Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas as well, in that I found yet another comfort game that I am looking forward to return to at least once a year and check out all the new mods that come out in the meantime as well. But even without mods, Starfield, for the right player, has enough to entertain for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
I've spent my 100+ hours on this game in a large variety of ways and I haven't even come close to getting through all the handcrafted content yet. Not that the game doesn't respect your time or anything, but it offers you so many options of engagement that it truly is for the player to decide how much time they want to spend with it before beating it by seeing the main story through to the end. That main story takes about 25 hours, but obviously, BGS games have a lot more to offer than that, though the main story is one I did enjoy in Starfield.
Apart from doing main quests for 25 hours, I've done side quests for probably another 25-30, I've traveled to and surveyed planets for about 10 hours, built a ship for 2 hours, dabbled with outpost building for another few hours, read books, visited a Museum filled with lore and talked to all kinds of NPCs for 10s of hours, visited every nook and cranny of two of the four major cities, had multiple run-ins with my in-game parents (an optional trait) and many dozens of random encounters in space and on planets.
My expectations for this game were immense, and Starfield met them. If you're wondering whether you will enjoy Starfield, here are two things: 1) you can play it on Game Pass for $10 or whatever a month costs these days. 2) If you don't want to do that, I'd look at whether you enjoyed Fallout/Skyrim and I'd think about whether it bothers you that you can't manually fly from orbit to planet or from planet to planet within a system. If it would take a few minutes to do that each time, would you be one to really spend your time doing it after the novelty wears off? If yes, that's fair and you probably should stick with a more hardcore space sim experience. If not, then I can only highly recommend Starfield to you.
While I'm going to put Starfield on hold now and play Cyberpunk now that 2.0 and PL are finally about to release, I can give Starfield the highest honor I've given Skyrim and Fallout 3, 4 and New Vegas as well, in that I found yet another comfort game that I am looking forward to return to at least once a year and check out all the new mods that come out in the meantime as well. But even without mods, Starfield, for the right player, has enough to entertain for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
1993
Star Fox released on February 21, 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and is a rail shooter that you play in both first-person and third-person perspectives. The special part about it is that this is a 3D game during a time where this was uncommon, and from the get-go you can tell that what Star Fox does is pretty unique, especially for the platform it released on.
It was developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software and has turned into a pretty popular series, warranting multiple sequels from Star Fox 64 in 1997 all the way to Star Fox Zero and, I suppose it is worth counting, a sequel to this original Star Fox game called Star Fox 2 released alongside the SNES Classic Edition. Star Fox 2 never ended up releasing back in the day, but it did exist, so it got its debut all these years later, which is pretty fascinating stuff.
In this original Star Fox, you control the character 'Fox' and his spacecraft, the "Arwing" in scrolling 3D environments. You dodge obstacles in the environment, shoot enemy spaceships and take on boss battles in each stage. Before you begin, you can select one of three routes to take to the final boss on a planet called 'Venom'. I took the Level 1 route thinking it was just the first level. Turns out, no, the Level 1 route is simple one of three routes that all lead to the same ending. The difference is that each route has a distinct difficulty, which is a system that allowed the devs to forgo any difficulty options. Personally, I like this a lot because it adds a lot of replayability to the game. Each route takes you through different planets and missions and therefore not only plays more difficult, but simply different in terms of the design of the levels. In turn though, the routes individually are not very long. The main reason why you might take more than a few hours per route is the difficulty, which even on Level 1 is no cakewalk.
That's in large part to how the game plays. The game is undeniably impressive and ahead of its time, but one negative that comes with that is that you will have to compromise. Compromise in Star Fox rears its head through low FPS (10-15) and below-average controls. Low FPS for a flight sim was very common in 1993 and the years before it, and those games usually had even less, so it's not the worst thing here. But just like many of those flight sims, this makes the original Star Fox slightly harder to play today and means it didn't age quite as well as some other games of its time. That said, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the low FPS apart from the parts where many effects on the screen would lead to slowdown.
The poor controls on the other hand I didn't quite get used to until the end of my playthrough. I dislike inverse control schemes in general, so that wasn't great when I had to decide to move up or down within a second, but often I felt the controls not be very responsive, I felt that it was hard to judge whether I was far enough away to evade certain projectiles and figuring out where to aim to actually hit something always took me a second of shooting somewhere (and missing badly) and then adjusting from there, which wasn't quite intuitive.
Issues like these were exacerbated by the fact that sometimes so much action would be on the screen, that projectiles would not be visible until they were very close, leading to a hit that would take quite a lot of health, so expect to die quite a lot of times early on due to things like that. Otherwise though, the polygonal graphics looked good enough here and were generally quite a big deal at the time. Having played dozens of games from its time before this, I can attest to not playing many games that were graphically impressive like this from a technological standpoint.
You also do get used to the controls, so there is that, but it's never feeling great, so I'm not sure if that's something one would necessarily deem a lot of fun at this day and age. I think it's fair to say that it's easy to appreciate Star Fox even today, but don't be surprised if you turn it off after the novelty wears off. If you really get into the boss fights however, which for the most part are well done and fun to tackle, you might get hooked enough to want to see one route through like I did, for which I recommend the first one. Whichever route you take though, you start on the planet Corneria, which has a great soundtrack, so look forward to that, while I myself look forward to playing Star Fox 64 one day, which I hope brings a lot more to the table at a time when 3D graphics were much more common and for the fact that it is the best selling Star Fox game to date.
(This is the 83rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
It was developed by Nintendo and Argonaut Software and has turned into a pretty popular series, warranting multiple sequels from Star Fox 64 in 1997 all the way to Star Fox Zero and, I suppose it is worth counting, a sequel to this original Star Fox game called Star Fox 2 released alongside the SNES Classic Edition. Star Fox 2 never ended up releasing back in the day, but it did exist, so it got its debut all these years later, which is pretty fascinating stuff.
In this original Star Fox, you control the character 'Fox' and his spacecraft, the "Arwing" in scrolling 3D environments. You dodge obstacles in the environment, shoot enemy spaceships and take on boss battles in each stage. Before you begin, you can select one of three routes to take to the final boss on a planet called 'Venom'. I took the Level 1 route thinking it was just the first level. Turns out, no, the Level 1 route is simple one of three routes that all lead to the same ending. The difference is that each route has a distinct difficulty, which is a system that allowed the devs to forgo any difficulty options. Personally, I like this a lot because it adds a lot of replayability to the game. Each route takes you through different planets and missions and therefore not only plays more difficult, but simply different in terms of the design of the levels. In turn though, the routes individually are not very long. The main reason why you might take more than a few hours per route is the difficulty, which even on Level 1 is no cakewalk.
That's in large part to how the game plays. The game is undeniably impressive and ahead of its time, but one negative that comes with that is that you will have to compromise. Compromise in Star Fox rears its head through low FPS (10-15) and below-average controls. Low FPS for a flight sim was very common in 1993 and the years before it, and those games usually had even less, so it's not the worst thing here. But just like many of those flight sims, this makes the original Star Fox slightly harder to play today and means it didn't age quite as well as some other games of its time. That said, I didn't have a lot of trouble with the low FPS apart from the parts where many effects on the screen would lead to slowdown.
The poor controls on the other hand I didn't quite get used to until the end of my playthrough. I dislike inverse control schemes in general, so that wasn't great when I had to decide to move up or down within a second, but often I felt the controls not be very responsive, I felt that it was hard to judge whether I was far enough away to evade certain projectiles and figuring out where to aim to actually hit something always took me a second of shooting somewhere (and missing badly) and then adjusting from there, which wasn't quite intuitive.
Issues like these were exacerbated by the fact that sometimes so much action would be on the screen, that projectiles would not be visible until they were very close, leading to a hit that would take quite a lot of health, so expect to die quite a lot of times early on due to things like that. Otherwise though, the polygonal graphics looked good enough here and were generally quite a big deal at the time. Having played dozens of games from its time before this, I can attest to not playing many games that were graphically impressive like this from a technological standpoint.
You also do get used to the controls, so there is that, but it's never feeling great, so I'm not sure if that's something one would necessarily deem a lot of fun at this day and age. I think it's fair to say that it's easy to appreciate Star Fox even today, but don't be surprised if you turn it off after the novelty wears off. If you really get into the boss fights however, which for the most part are well done and fun to tackle, you might get hooked enough to want to see one route through like I did, for which I recommend the first one. Whichever route you take though, you start on the planet Corneria, which has a great soundtrack, so look forward to that, while I myself look forward to playing Star Fox 64 one day, which I hope brings a lot more to the table at a time when 3D graphics were much more common and for the fact that it is the best selling Star Fox game to date.
(This is the 83rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
1993
(This is the 87th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I wasn't really all too familiar with or interested in the run and gun / shoot 'em up genre of video games until I played Contra III: The Alien Wars just a month ago. Based on its score, I have it rated as the 2nd best game I've played out of my 1992 playlist, and that score sounds about right, as it is one of the games I most fondly look back on from that year, and will do so in the future as well I'm sure. When I shared my thoughts about that game at the time, I was recommended to make sure that I check out Gunstar Heroes as well, which I had never heard of before but had already been on my 1993 playlist beforehand, interestingly enough.
Gunstar Heroes released on September 10, 1993 for the Sega Genesis and on Game Gear in 1995. It was produced by Mastao Maegawa, and it is the result of him and some of his colleagues at Konami rejecting an idea of a game (presumably similar to this one) that they had, which led to them quitting at Konami and starting up their own development studio, Treasure. Gunstar Heroes is a run and gun video game that players of, say, Metal Slug and of course Contra games will instantly be familiar with. You run forward on a side-scrolling screen and just shoot up dozens of enemies as explosion fill up the screen, until you reach a boss, learn its patterns and defeat it too, which lets you advance to the next stage.
In its basic form, it's the same style of game. If you enjoy a game such as Contra III, you are sure to enjoy this one as well. If you didn't enjoy Contra III or similar games at all, you won't enjoy Gunstar Heroes either.
What makes Gunstar Heroes stand out in this genre in my opinion is its presentation and the variety of weapons you can use. Contra III had about a handful of attacks that you could use and gave you two slots to put attacks onto. Get hit, and you lose an attack but can switch to the other slot. In Gunstar Heroes, you also have two slots, though you don't lose the attack in a slot if you get hit. Plus, these attacks don't just work individually, but you can also choose to use the combined effect of these, which gives you even more powerful attacks, which differ in damage output, range and firing directions. There are over a dozen combination to use this way, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, which adds a lot of replayability to how you want to challenge the tougher fights in this game.
The presentation is also worth highlighting as I mentioned. Some of the bosses look really interesting, like the Bravoo Man, Melon Bread or "Seven Force", which can take upon a variety of forms out of which a couple are randomly chosen whenever you face it. There are also some very cleverly designed levels, such as the final boss rush where the screen is presented as a "TV" on which the bad guys collectively watch you fight their guys. Whenever you defeat one of them, they get mad and you can see the main antagonist sending out the next boss out to face you. Another really well designed level is the "Dice Palace", which reminded me of Cuphead's King Dice boss fight. You roll a dice to see how many platforms you can advance, and each platform has either a boss fight or an item room for you. The bosses vary in difficulty, but most are pretty easy on "normal" difficulty. The second to last platform has you start over (just like in Cuphead) and I had the pleasure to step on it once, losing about 10 minutes of progress. Each major boss you defeat gives you one of four gems, and there is a funny scene that plays with the Dice Palace boss, who, once defeated, throws out what looks like the "red gem" but is actually a bomb. So I had the boss beat, but didn't know it was a bomb, so it hit me and I died, which means I had to start over the Dice Palace. Made me mad at the time, but was hilarious in hindsight.
Graphically, the game looks more than serviceable for the Sega Genesis and makes up for lack of high-tier production values with great enemy design. The game's soundtrack overall is pretty good. It has a few pretty average tracks and is mostly overshadowed by the constant sound of explosions. The highlight for me here though was the "theme of Seven Force", which, as I would like to eloquently say, "slaps".
OVERALL: 72/100
I wasn't really all too familiar with or interested in the run and gun / shoot 'em up genre of video games until I played Contra III: The Alien Wars just a month ago. Based on its score, I have it rated as the 2nd best game I've played out of my 1992 playlist, and that score sounds about right, as it is one of the games I most fondly look back on from that year, and will do so in the future as well I'm sure. When I shared my thoughts about that game at the time, I was recommended to make sure that I check out Gunstar Heroes as well, which I had never heard of before but had already been on my 1993 playlist beforehand, interestingly enough.
Gunstar Heroes released on September 10, 1993 for the Sega Genesis and on Game Gear in 1995. It was produced by Mastao Maegawa, and it is the result of him and some of his colleagues at Konami rejecting an idea of a game (presumably similar to this one) that they had, which led to them quitting at Konami and starting up their own development studio, Treasure. Gunstar Heroes is a run and gun video game that players of, say, Metal Slug and of course Contra games will instantly be familiar with. You run forward on a side-scrolling screen and just shoot up dozens of enemies as explosion fill up the screen, until you reach a boss, learn its patterns and defeat it too, which lets you advance to the next stage.
In its basic form, it's the same style of game. If you enjoy a game such as Contra III, you are sure to enjoy this one as well. If you didn't enjoy Contra III or similar games at all, you won't enjoy Gunstar Heroes either.
What makes Gunstar Heroes stand out in this genre in my opinion is its presentation and the variety of weapons you can use. Contra III had about a handful of attacks that you could use and gave you two slots to put attacks onto. Get hit, and you lose an attack but can switch to the other slot. In Gunstar Heroes, you also have two slots, though you don't lose the attack in a slot if you get hit. Plus, these attacks don't just work individually, but you can also choose to use the combined effect of these, which gives you even more powerful attacks, which differ in damage output, range and firing directions. There are over a dozen combination to use this way, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, which adds a lot of replayability to how you want to challenge the tougher fights in this game.
The presentation is also worth highlighting as I mentioned. Some of the bosses look really interesting, like the Bravoo Man, Melon Bread or "Seven Force", which can take upon a variety of forms out of which a couple are randomly chosen whenever you face it. There are also some very cleverly designed levels, such as the final boss rush where the screen is presented as a "TV" on which the bad guys collectively watch you fight their guys. Whenever you defeat one of them, they get mad and you can see the main antagonist sending out the next boss out to face you. Another really well designed level is the "Dice Palace", which reminded me of Cuphead's King Dice boss fight. You roll a dice to see how many platforms you can advance, and each platform has either a boss fight or an item room for you. The bosses vary in difficulty, but most are pretty easy on "normal" difficulty. The second to last platform has you start over (just like in Cuphead) and I had the pleasure to step on it once, losing about 10 minutes of progress. Each major boss you defeat gives you one of four gems, and there is a funny scene that plays with the Dice Palace boss, who, once defeated, throws out what looks like the "red gem" but is actually a bomb. So I had the boss beat, but didn't know it was a bomb, so it hit me and I died, which means I had to start over the Dice Palace. Made me mad at the time, but was hilarious in hindsight.
Graphically, the game looks more than serviceable for the Sega Genesis and makes up for lack of high-tier production values with great enemy design. The game's soundtrack overall is pretty good. It has a few pretty average tracks and is mostly overshadowed by the constant sound of explosions. The highlight for me here though was the "theme of Seven Force", which, as I would like to eloquently say, "slaps".
OVERALL: 72/100
1991
(This is the 37th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I'm going to guess and say that the majority of you have played this game or, more likely, a game that is pretty similar to the idea that Lemmings puts forward, a puzzle(-strategy) game by DMA Design, initially released on February 14th, 1991 and ported to dozens of systems after its success as an Amiga game. I played the SNES version for this review.
FUN FACT: DMA Design, the developer, today goes by the somewhat known name Rockstar North and are creators of the GTA series.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You control Lemmings, which do exist in real life (small rodents). In this game, they are anthropomorphized, meaning they walk upright and can do human tasks like digging, climbing, jumping down whilst holding an umbrella etc.
There is a misconception in pop culture that Lemmings commit "mass suicide", something the devs seem to have chosen as inspiration for creating this game.
In this game, all lemmings are identical copies of each other, you simply can change their behavior by equipping them with a certain task/skill like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The goal of every level is to rescue at least a certain percentage of all Lemmings that are present in a given level. Once you do that, you can try to rescue the rest or have them blow themselves up and end the level.
Every time the puzzles go up in difficulty level, a little cutscene plays showing the Lemmings move across the screen.
I feel like there was some potential here for these little guys to have a bigger name across gaming than they ended up having because they do offer a certain charm.
But as far as storytelling goes, the game doesn't offer anything beyond the basic goal of each level.
GAMEPLAY
There are up to 120 levels depending on the port you play that are spread between four difficulty levels. In each level, a door opens that releases a set number of Lemmings. The game tells you how many of them you need to save to beat the level.
The lemmings move forward at all times, no matter what, and if there is something that blocks their path, they simply turn around and go the other way. You are equipped with a bunch of "tasks" that you can give to the lemmings and your job is to choose the correct ones, at the correct times and in the proper order to successfully send enough Lemmings to the exit.
For example, in the first level, you have to give your Lemmings the "digging" task, which makes them start digging up the ground beneath them. This opens up a path to the exit once they're done.
With each level, it starts getting more and more complicated of course. You need to mix multiple tasks up at once, figure out how to make a lemming cancel his task to help him escape as well, and well, ultimately decide how much you value your time.
Because as creative as the game design is, and as much fun it is to figure out the solution, it often is not the path to the solution that is hard to figure out. It is the wait.
Once you have the solution, like for example digging open the ground beneath your lemmings, you now have to wait. and wait. and wait until they all slowly make their way to the finish line. I am not joking if I say that it takes minutes a lot of times for things to play out like you already know it will.
I've played for a few hours and a too significant amount of that was spent waiting instead of solving puzzles or applying the correct strategy. That made the game significantly less enjoyable that it probably would be in a more modern release where your characters would probably start moving much faster once the game knows that you opened up the winning path.
It doesn't help that later on, levels often became repetitive and, when checking a YT playthrough, I realized it just ended up being more or less the same over and over again, so I decided that I saw enough after a few hours.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to some high-pitched noises and a few words. "Yippie", "Let's go", "Oh no" are things you will hear quite often, but generally the Lemmings remain pretty silent in this one. The soundtrack features some nice music, including a remix of Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Galop".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The graphics aren't anything special in this one, but the animations are really good for its time. The way the Lemmings hair flies from side to side as they keep digging for example is really detailed.
ATMOSPHERE
Nothing special that I want to mention in this regard. The artistic design of the levels, the kinda cutesy Lemmings, the noises they make, the music, it all combines to make a game with a cozy enough atmosphere but one that can stress you out pretty fast if you ever are stuck with any particular level, especially since it means you will have to blow everyone up to restart.
CONTENT
120 levels, gets repetitive. Too much time is spent waiting on the Lemmings to walk around, too little on actually doing puzzles. It's an effective brainteaser but doesn't translate to a whole lot of fun at too many times.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
You have all those skills I mentioned at your disposal and try to figure out which ones to use and at which point. Some levels only allow you to use specific skills and all require you to get a certain number of Lemmings to safety on each level. It's fun, but the design does get a bit repetitive over time. More skills obviously would mean more variety. The amount available here doesn't really seem to support 120 levels whilst keeping it fresh.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Obviously very innovative in its design, even if it doesn't always translate to a lot of fun. Especially once you figure out how to do a puzzle and are stuck waiting for minutes for your Lemmings to get a move on, the design shows its cracks. But the design could have been taken a number of different directions from here on out, and I'll be honest, as of now I don't know what happened to the series and if there are any spiritual successors.
REPLAYABILITY
Pretty high. You can keep replaying to try and get more Lemmings out of a level, and you can even try your hand at figuring out how to get 100% of them out each time. It involves some advanced techniques that I didn't figure out myself, and one that adds a lot more waiting time to your playthrough, but it may be a worthwhile reward for people with plenty of patience and resilience.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can appreciate the game for its innovation. Unfortunately the way this is designed makes for a slow affair because a lot of the time playing this game is spent waiting for the Lemmings to go from A to B. More QoL improvements in later versions maybe have resulted in cleaner and faster experiences, but as it stands, this game was definitely way more enjoyable in the past than it is today, at least if you're a newcomer to this type of puzzle game.
I'm going to guess and say that the majority of you have played this game or, more likely, a game that is pretty similar to the idea that Lemmings puts forward, a puzzle(-strategy) game by DMA Design, initially released on February 14th, 1991 and ported to dozens of systems after its success as an Amiga game. I played the SNES version for this review.
FUN FACT: DMA Design, the developer, today goes by the somewhat known name Rockstar North and are creators of the GTA series.
____________
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
You control Lemmings, which do exist in real life (small rodents). In this game, they are anthropomorphized, meaning they walk upright and can do human tasks like digging, climbing, jumping down whilst holding an umbrella etc.
There is a misconception in pop culture that Lemmings commit "mass suicide", something the devs seem to have chosen as inspiration for creating this game.
In this game, all lemmings are identical copies of each other, you simply can change their behavior by equipping them with a certain task/skill like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The goal of every level is to rescue at least a certain percentage of all Lemmings that are present in a given level. Once you do that, you can try to rescue the rest or have them blow themselves up and end the level.
Every time the puzzles go up in difficulty level, a little cutscene plays showing the Lemmings move across the screen.
I feel like there was some potential here for these little guys to have a bigger name across gaming than they ended up having because they do offer a certain charm.
But as far as storytelling goes, the game doesn't offer anything beyond the basic goal of each level.
GAMEPLAY
There are up to 120 levels depending on the port you play that are spread between four difficulty levels. In each level, a door opens that releases a set number of Lemmings. The game tells you how many of them you need to save to beat the level.
The lemmings move forward at all times, no matter what, and if there is something that blocks their path, they simply turn around and go the other way. You are equipped with a bunch of "tasks" that you can give to the lemmings and your job is to choose the correct ones, at the correct times and in the proper order to successfully send enough Lemmings to the exit.
For example, in the first level, you have to give your Lemmings the "digging" task, which makes them start digging up the ground beneath them. This opens up a path to the exit once they're done.
With each level, it starts getting more and more complicated of course. You need to mix multiple tasks up at once, figure out how to make a lemming cancel his task to help him escape as well, and well, ultimately decide how much you value your time.
Because as creative as the game design is, and as much fun it is to figure out the solution, it often is not the path to the solution that is hard to figure out. It is the wait.
Once you have the solution, like for example digging open the ground beneath your lemmings, you now have to wait. and wait. and wait until they all slowly make their way to the finish line. I am not joking if I say that it takes minutes a lot of times for things to play out like you already know it will.
I've played for a few hours and a too significant amount of that was spent waiting instead of solving puzzles or applying the correct strategy. That made the game significantly less enjoyable that it probably would be in a more modern release where your characters would probably start moving much faster once the game knows that you opened up the winning path.
It doesn't help that later on, levels often became repetitive and, when checking a YT playthrough, I realized it just ended up being more or less the same over and over again, so I decided that I saw enough after a few hours.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to some high-pitched noises and a few words. "Yippie", "Let's go", "Oh no" are things you will hear quite often, but generally the Lemmings remain pretty silent in this one. The soundtrack features some nice music, including a remix of Jacques Offenbach's "Infernal Galop".
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The graphics aren't anything special in this one, but the animations are really good for its time. The way the Lemmings hair flies from side to side as they keep digging for example is really detailed.
ATMOSPHERE
Nothing special that I want to mention in this regard. The artistic design of the levels, the kinda cutesy Lemmings, the noises they make, the music, it all combines to make a game with a cozy enough atmosphere but one that can stress you out pretty fast if you ever are stuck with any particular level, especially since it means you will have to blow everyone up to restart.
CONTENT
120 levels, gets repetitive. Too much time is spent waiting on the Lemmings to walk around, too little on actually doing puzzles. It's an effective brainteaser but doesn't translate to a whole lot of fun at too many times.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
You have all those skills I mentioned at your disposal and try to figure out which ones to use and at which point. Some levels only allow you to use specific skills and all require you to get a certain number of Lemmings to safety on each level. It's fun, but the design does get a bit repetitive over time. More skills obviously would mean more variety. The amount available here doesn't really seem to support 120 levels whilst keeping it fresh.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Obviously very innovative in its design, even if it doesn't always translate to a lot of fun. Especially once you figure out how to do a puzzle and are stuck waiting for minutes for your Lemmings to get a move on, the design shows its cracks. But the design could have been taken a number of different directions from here on out, and I'll be honest, as of now I don't know what happened to the series and if there are any spiritual successors.
REPLAYABILITY
Pretty high. You can keep replaying to try and get more Lemmings out of a level, and you can even try your hand at figuring out how to get 100% of them out each time. It involves some advanced techniques that I didn't figure out myself, and one that adds a lot more waiting time to your playthrough, but it may be a worthwhile reward for people with plenty of patience and resilience.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I can appreciate the game for its innovation. Unfortunately the way this is designed makes for a slow affair because a lot of the time playing this game is spent waiting for the Lemmings to go from A to B. More QoL improvements in later versions maybe have resulted in cleaner and faster experiences, but as it stands, this game was definitely way more enjoyable in the past than it is today, at least if you're a newcomer to this type of puzzle game.
(This is the 48th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
I think if you're looking to get into the much-beloved Metroid series for the first time, Metroid II: Return of Samus (Dev: Nintendo R&D1 / Pub: Nintendo) won't be the best place to start. The game released in November 1991 for the Game Boy, unlike the original which came out for the NES, and if you really don't want to pass by this game, you would probably be best served going for its remake from 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.
The game isn't 'objectively bad', not even close actually, but it suffers from pretty much all the lack of QoL features that you'd expect from games of this time. This makes it tough to play unless you don't mind looking for the way forward for, potentially, hours at a time, and even then, the future releases will serve you with much more enjoyable gameplay in pretty much every way. But all of that I talk about in detail below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
As in the original, you play Samus Aran, who is a Space Hunter working for the Galactic Federation. Her goal is once again to go to the planet SR388, where she is to exterminate the remaining Metroids after both a ship full of researchers and armed soldiers went missing. All of this can be found in the manual. In the game, you press START and are immediately loaded in and stand in front of your ship and are not given any further information.
The main things you will take away from this game in terms of story/characters are the following
Samus is a badass character just simply based on design and she gets shit done when others can't (not unlike many other one hero vs the world games, but effective)
The fact that there was no color for the Game Boy meant that the devs had to add the round metal shoulder pads to differentiate between her Power Suit and Varia Suit, a feature that has stayed with Samus ever since
POSSIBLE SPOILER: The ending cliffhanger, without dialogue and voice acting, is really well done. Samus finds an egg of a Metroid hatchling, which follows her to her ship. What will this cause in the sequel?
So Metroid II doesn't really do much different from many other platformers / Action Adventure types like this in terms of story, but it does manage to stand out a bit thanks to its ending and its main character.
GAMEPLAY | 9/20
You will most likely be familiar with the Metroid formula by now. Start with limited abilities, explore multi-pathed levels multiple times by leveraging new abilities that you gain constantly as you progress. It's a pretty popular genre, and Metroid games pretty much pioneered them. Unfortunately, early iterations come with some growing pains as the developers looked to find a balance of their vision and what they could realistically expect players to be willing to push through.
Before we get there, here is the gist of how this game plays. You control Samus in a 2D side-scrolling game where you can shoot projectiles, jump and even roll up into a ball to squeeze through holes. Your goal is to traverse this map and find all Metroids, which are parasitic creatures that, unsurprisingly, form the main enemy types in this series. Throughout your journey you get access to new skills and attacks, which not only allow you to stand a chance against later bosses, but to also unlock areas that were previously inaccessible.
I personally have a mixed relationship with Metroidvanias, though "utility-gated progression" usually isn't my main issue but rather the convoluted design of the maps and/or the gameplay itself, and both creep up their ugly heads here as well, though I can excuse it much more for a 30 year old game rather than some of the newer entries into the genre.
Firstly, this is a Game Boy game, and unlike the NES version, Samus covers 1/4 of the screen here, which from the get-go makes for an awkward affair when trying to dodge enemies reliably. Her jumps are not sensitive to button presses at all, so you need to press JUMP quite a while in order to make a long jump, and in areas where platforms are separated by some sort of health-evaporating substance in between, these jumps can become quite unreliable and hence frustrating.
Frustrating is actually a big thing with this game. The reason why you want to take hits as few times as possible is because there are few save points here and they are pretty far from each other, so you will constantly find yourself warp all the way back to the checkpoint whenever you die. And due to the level amount of health you're playing with, you'll find yourself die a lot. There are no immediate do-overs. Die and you go all the way back.
The worst part however is the fact that there is no map. So you either have to draw the map along as you play or have great memory. Plus, progress forward isn't as cut and dry as moving forward. Sometimes, progressing means finding some randomly placed hole in a wall that you can only reach by turning into the balled-up shape I was just talking about. It doesn't help that many areas look exactly the same in this game, adding to the confusion of it all.
Overall, the concept of this series I definitely like. This one just didn't age well and I don't know how children at the time could possibly beat this unless they'd spend dozens and dozens of hours of running through walls and having to rely on magazine guides, and whether it's fun to have to use those sources to beat a game is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. There is an interesting that happens from time to time where the music simply cuts off and you're left playing for a while whilst just listening to the sound effects. It's odd on the one hand, but satisfying on the other because I actually like the various sound effects that you hear, whether it's shooting your projectiles, the sound of each step you take, collecting items and some beep sounds that play that apparently are part of the "Caverns 1 Theme". Whenever the music does play, you've got to understand the limitations of the Game Boy sound engine. So what they managed to do with that is pretty impressive. Obviously, if you give a listen to the 3DS remake OST, you'll see what increased technical capabilities will allow you to do, but the soundtrack here plays into the atmosphere of the levels very well here, and gets downright eerie whenever you get into a boss fight. In contrast, the surface of SR388 theme sounded a bit too playful to me, but I get it considering that's the music that kids will spend most of their time listening to. Do you dare and get further into the game than you're expected to? That's where you are met with tracks that match the increased tension and where this gets a lot more atmospheric.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
If you rate this based on the capabilities of the Game Boy, the game doesn't look all too bad. If you rate it compared to what you would have gotten had this been an SNES game, it doesn't rate quite well. If you go somewhere down the middle, you can appreciate that this game was the reason that the Samus sprite got changes to it that would last until today, that the Metroids look positively disgusting and .. well yeah, that's pretty much it. The blackground is simply black, levels look very similar in design, the sprite size of Samus looks kind of awkward and creating holes in walls that hide progress and not giving any graphical indicator that something might be behind there is just an odd choice. And overall, the game simply doesn't look so good due to being a Game Boy game, which you might like yourself but is what I'd call an "acquired/nostalgic taste".
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game does a pretty good job actually of throwing you into hostile territory filled with vile and disgusting creatures. Whenever the non-music track plays or the tracks that hit the eerie tones of the graphical presentation play, this can become quite atmospheric and immersive, and downright scary I'd imagine for young gamers whenever a Metroid is chasing you down.
CONTENT | 5/10
Many different abilities that you can get your hands on as you play the game. The journey there can be rough however, as you will spend many hours trying to figure out where to go next, which some might call intentional and I'd call boring and not well executed here. Apart from that, there isn't much content here, but if you enjoy the bashing your head against walls aspect of it, this will be enough to keep you occupied for a dozen hours+.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
I appreciate the idea behind this game of having to traverse a hostile environment and find your way through it without any hand-holding. Unfortunately, my idea of a fun game is in contrast to what the game design philosophy of Metroid's creators is, at least for the early entries in the series. No map is tough on its own, but progress hidden in walls (forcing you to check every wall), same looking areas and abilities that don't control all that well (the spider ability) makes for too many (subjective) issues here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The concept remains intriguing, though I'd say the sequel has not yet gotten it to where it will eventually go in this series.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
There isn't really any particular reason/motivation given for replaying this. Chances are, if you somehow beat this, you'll be satisfied and ready to move on.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 53/100
Unless you really enjoyed the original or really, really enjoyed the later entries in the Metroid series, I think this game is very skippable. Even if you did enjoy later Metroid games, you will likely miss the QoL features that will be introduced later. What this game does well is create a tense atmosphere, but I would agree that that's the gist of it, unless you are a big fan of the concept of hitting early wall to see if you can go through some of them, or if you enjoy drawing a map as you go. Otherwise, you will likely have to rely on guides to make progress, and have to do so many times. So right now I would call this a good proof on concept, just like the original, but the next step hasn't really been taken yet in my opinion.
I think if you're looking to get into the much-beloved Metroid series for the first time, Metroid II: Return of Samus (Dev: Nintendo R&D1 / Pub: Nintendo) won't be the best place to start. The game released in November 1991 for the Game Boy, unlike the original which came out for the NES, and if you really don't want to pass by this game, you would probably be best served going for its remake from 2017 for the Nintendo 3DS.
The game isn't 'objectively bad', not even close actually, but it suffers from pretty much all the lack of QoL features that you'd expect from games of this time. This makes it tough to play unless you don't mind looking for the way forward for, potentially, hours at a time, and even then, the future releases will serve you with much more enjoyable gameplay in pretty much every way. But all of that I talk about in detail below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
As in the original, you play Samus Aran, who is a Space Hunter working for the Galactic Federation. Her goal is once again to go to the planet SR388, where she is to exterminate the remaining Metroids after both a ship full of researchers and armed soldiers went missing. All of this can be found in the manual. In the game, you press START and are immediately loaded in and stand in front of your ship and are not given any further information.
The main things you will take away from this game in terms of story/characters are the following
Samus is a badass character just simply based on design and she gets shit done when others can't (not unlike many other one hero vs the world games, but effective)
The fact that there was no color for the Game Boy meant that the devs had to add the round metal shoulder pads to differentiate between her Power Suit and Varia Suit, a feature that has stayed with Samus ever since
POSSIBLE SPOILER: The ending cliffhanger, without dialogue and voice acting, is really well done. Samus finds an egg of a Metroid hatchling, which follows her to her ship. What will this cause in the sequel?
So Metroid II doesn't really do much different from many other platformers / Action Adventure types like this in terms of story, but it does manage to stand out a bit thanks to its ending and its main character.
GAMEPLAY | 9/20
You will most likely be familiar with the Metroid formula by now. Start with limited abilities, explore multi-pathed levels multiple times by leveraging new abilities that you gain constantly as you progress. It's a pretty popular genre, and Metroid games pretty much pioneered them. Unfortunately, early iterations come with some growing pains as the developers looked to find a balance of their vision and what they could realistically expect players to be willing to push through.
Before we get there, here is the gist of how this game plays. You control Samus in a 2D side-scrolling game where you can shoot projectiles, jump and even roll up into a ball to squeeze through holes. Your goal is to traverse this map and find all Metroids, which are parasitic creatures that, unsurprisingly, form the main enemy types in this series. Throughout your journey you get access to new skills and attacks, which not only allow you to stand a chance against later bosses, but to also unlock areas that were previously inaccessible.
I personally have a mixed relationship with Metroidvanias, though "utility-gated progression" usually isn't my main issue but rather the convoluted design of the maps and/or the gameplay itself, and both creep up their ugly heads here as well, though I can excuse it much more for a 30 year old game rather than some of the newer entries into the genre.
Firstly, this is a Game Boy game, and unlike the NES version, Samus covers 1/4 of the screen here, which from the get-go makes for an awkward affair when trying to dodge enemies reliably. Her jumps are not sensitive to button presses at all, so you need to press JUMP quite a while in order to make a long jump, and in areas where platforms are separated by some sort of health-evaporating substance in between, these jumps can become quite unreliable and hence frustrating.
Frustrating is actually a big thing with this game. The reason why you want to take hits as few times as possible is because there are few save points here and they are pretty far from each other, so you will constantly find yourself warp all the way back to the checkpoint whenever you die. And due to the level amount of health you're playing with, you'll find yourself die a lot. There are no immediate do-overs. Die and you go all the way back.
The worst part however is the fact that there is no map. So you either have to draw the map along as you play or have great memory. Plus, progress forward isn't as cut and dry as moving forward. Sometimes, progressing means finding some randomly placed hole in a wall that you can only reach by turning into the balled-up shape I was just talking about. It doesn't help that many areas look exactly the same in this game, adding to the confusion of it all.
Overall, the concept of this series I definitely like. This one just didn't age well and I don't know how children at the time could possibly beat this unless they'd spend dozens and dozens of hours of running through walls and having to rely on magazine guides, and whether it's fun to have to use those sources to beat a game is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
No voice acting. There is an interesting that happens from time to time where the music simply cuts off and you're left playing for a while whilst just listening to the sound effects. It's odd on the one hand, but satisfying on the other because I actually like the various sound effects that you hear, whether it's shooting your projectiles, the sound of each step you take, collecting items and some beep sounds that play that apparently are part of the "Caverns 1 Theme". Whenever the music does play, you've got to understand the limitations of the Game Boy sound engine. So what they managed to do with that is pretty impressive. Obviously, if you give a listen to the 3DS remake OST, you'll see what increased technical capabilities will allow you to do, but the soundtrack here plays into the atmosphere of the levels very well here, and gets downright eerie whenever you get into a boss fight. In contrast, the surface of SR388 theme sounded a bit too playful to me, but I get it considering that's the music that kids will spend most of their time listening to. Do you dare and get further into the game than you're expected to? That's where you are met with tracks that match the increased tension and where this gets a lot more atmospheric.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
If you rate this based on the capabilities of the Game Boy, the game doesn't look all too bad. If you rate it compared to what you would have gotten had this been an SNES game, it doesn't rate quite well. If you go somewhere down the middle, you can appreciate that this game was the reason that the Samus sprite got changes to it that would last until today, that the Metroids look positively disgusting and .. well yeah, that's pretty much it. The blackground is simply black, levels look very similar in design, the sprite size of Samus looks kind of awkward and creating holes in walls that hide progress and not giving any graphical indicator that something might be behind there is just an odd choice. And overall, the game simply doesn't look so good due to being a Game Boy game, which you might like yourself but is what I'd call an "acquired/nostalgic taste".
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The game does a pretty good job actually of throwing you into hostile territory filled with vile and disgusting creatures. Whenever the non-music track plays or the tracks that hit the eerie tones of the graphical presentation play, this can become quite atmospheric and immersive, and downright scary I'd imagine for young gamers whenever a Metroid is chasing you down.
CONTENT | 5/10
Many different abilities that you can get your hands on as you play the game. The journey there can be rough however, as you will spend many hours trying to figure out where to go next, which some might call intentional and I'd call boring and not well executed here. Apart from that, there isn't much content here, but if you enjoy the bashing your head against walls aspect of it, this will be enough to keep you occupied for a dozen hours+.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
I appreciate the idea behind this game of having to traverse a hostile environment and find your way through it without any hand-holding. Unfortunately, my idea of a fun game is in contrast to what the game design philosophy of Metroid's creators is, at least for the early entries in the series. No map is tough on its own, but progress hidden in walls (forcing you to check every wall), same looking areas and abilities that don't control all that well (the spider ability) makes for too many (subjective) issues here.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
The concept remains intriguing, though I'd say the sequel has not yet gotten it to where it will eventually go in this series.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
There isn't really any particular reason/motivation given for replaying this. Chances are, if you somehow beat this, you'll be satisfied and ready to move on.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 53/100
Unless you really enjoyed the original or really, really enjoyed the later entries in the Metroid series, I think this game is very skippable. Even if you did enjoy later Metroid games, you will likely miss the QoL features that will be introduced later. What this game does well is create a tense atmosphere, but I would agree that that's the gist of it, unless you are a big fan of the concept of hitting early wall to see if you can go through some of them, or if you enjoy drawing a map as you go. Otherwise, you will likely have to rely on guides to make progress, and have to do so many times. So right now I would call this a good proof on concept, just like the original, but the next step hasn't really been taken yet in my opinion.
1990
Loom is a point & click adventure game initially released in January 1990 for MS-DOS by LucasArts using the SCUMM engine, with Brian Moriarty as its Designer. There are multiple versions for this game, but the initial release was on a floppy disk and had 16-color EGA graphics with no voice acting, while the version that I played, the "Talkie" version, released in 1992 on CD with 256-color VGA graphics. This version includes voice acting, but some scenes are censored and there are some cuts as far as conversation close-ups and puzzles with multiple solutions go.
There is also a version that came out for the Japanese FM-Towns in 1991 which many fans consider to be the "definitive version", while Brian Moriarty himself considers the initial EGA version to be the "real" edition. If you want to play the game for yourself, I can say the 1992 version compared to the 1990 version will not drastically alter your opinion of the game, so if you value VGA graphics and voice acting, I would go with that.
Anyway, what's this game about?: In Loom, you play Bobbin Threadbare, a 17-year-old who is part of the "Weaver's Guild", a group of people who became masters of woven fabric and over time gained the ability to weave "patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality", meaning they could actually change the color of something, turn invisible and heal, among other things. In this world, many other Guilds that focus on a singular craft exist and the Weavers Guild was persecuted for using "witchcraft", resulting in their escape to an island that became their new home, Loom, called after their guild symbol, a loom (an apparatus for making fabric).
Events unfold and Bobbin Threadbare is born, however in unforeseen circumstances, and the loom's pattern is thrown into chaos as a result. This means that throughout his life, Bobbin is not allowed to learn the Guild's ability to weave, since he is seen as the one who has cursed the guild. He is raised by "Dame Hetchel", an old serving woman, who in secret teaches Bobbin the basics of weaving and when Bobbin turns 17 and the story starts, it is her who gives him his mission.
At the start of the game, the Elders summon Bobbin to the Sanctuary to determine his fate. As he arrives, he sees how the Elders punish Dame Hetchel. They turn her into an egg, only for a swan to crash into the room from a window and turn all the Elders into swans as well. The Elders shout that this is all Bobbin's fault as they fly off to who knows where.
This is where the actual gameplay begins. One of the elders dropped his "distaff" (a stick to which wool is wound for spinning), and Dame Hetchel is still in the room as an egg. You pick up the distaff, point it to the egg, and four notes start playing. You repeat this four-note pattern (called a "draft), and the egg starts to hatch ("open"). Out comes Dame Hetchel as a cygnet (young swan) and tells Bobbin about his mission, about how the "Third Shadow" will cover the world and why he has to find the swans.
So to summarize, you play Bobbing Threadbane, something is wrong with the "loom" and the Elders of your guild blame you. You are left on your own when all Elders are turned into swans and leave the island that you live in, so you pick up the distaff and have to use the "Weaving ability/magic" to try and find the flock and try to stop the world to be covered by the Third Shadow.
This is where Loom is very different to pretty much all other graphical adventures of its time. Instead of an interface with a bunch of verbs and an inventory to store items, you are solely equipped with the distaff. The distaff shows up horizontally on the interface and every few inches of it make up one sound, each being higher than the next. For each "draft" (magical ability), you need to figure out the corresponding four-note sound. For opening something, this sound turns out to be "E-C-E-D". Later on for example, you find for trees with holes in them, and each tree you click presents you with one note. Once you get all four, you have a draft. You don't know what the draft is for until you actually successfully tried it on something. This particular one for example was used to "twist sth". As you progress further and further, you unlock more and more notes on your distaff, which you need to do to be able to play some of the more advanced drafts which may use letters (like "A") that you are not skilled enough to play.
But with that, let's move over to my rating system to discuss all aspects of this game individually.
STORYTELLING: Throughout the story in this game, which only takes about 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you pick (more on that in a bit), you visit many different areas and meet different Guilds like the Blacksmiths Guild or the Shepherds Guild. You visit the Forge, the home of the Blacksmiths, Crystalgard, the headquarters of the Guild of Glassmakers and a cathedral, home of the Guild of Clerics, among many other locations. The world created for this game overall is very unique and to know that this is not just a playground for your main character but rather a world that is actually alive definitely aids the telling of stories concerning both the main quest and of simple side stories. For each Guild you stumble upon, you meet one or multiple characters who tell you what their kind is like, what kind of problems ail them and what goals they pursue. The Glassmakers for example are building a massive Sythe atop the Crystalgard. For what purpose?
The main story that ties all this together is an interesting, yet convoluted one that falls victim to the use of a lot of "this happens so that this can happen" methods of storytelling and especially scenes that should call for urgency just don't and the pacing of it all can fall a bit flat as a result. For example, in the final showdown with Chaos, instead of taking your distaff, with which you are pretty much incompetent, and forcing you to teach him the ways, he just stands there until you do something. Worst of all, the game has been made with a trilogy in mind, and according to Brian Moriarty himself, both himself and others just wanted to do something else after Loom was finished, and they just never got back to it. So expect a cliffhanger ending and change your plans of playing this game if that bothers you. It probably should, but the game is worth experiencing nevertheless I think.
The voice acting in the versions that include it is actually much much better than I would have expected and while the main character's voice actor made him sound a bit whiny throughout, the cast overall did a great job. I played the first chapter without voice first and definitely am glad that I played the voiced version afterwards.
Unlike many other LucasArts adventure games of its time, Loom is more serious and has few humorous elements included (though they are certainly there). As someone who has tried some Monkey Island but didn't finish any of their games prior to Loom, I can say that I prefer the more humorous games and graphical adventures with often odd solutions to puzzles definitely fit the "Comedy" category more.
GAMEPLAY: There is a "Book of Patterns" that comes with your copy of the game, if you indeed do want to buy a copy for $100+ these days. For everyone else, there is the manual online which includes it, and while it's not necessary to be used in my version of the game, the initial release does have a puzzle right at the start that is unsolvable without the manual in hand. Otherwise, the "book" lists a bunch of drafts (spells) and you can use it to write down the notes that the game gives you. Otherwise, it's recommended to write down the notes elsewhere, because the first draft you learn (open) will be needed to solve puzzles in the final third of the game, and writing down is the only option to access it. Almost all drafts are randomized for each playthrough, so you can't look up the notes online either.
Apart from using drafts, there isn't really much gameplay in this game. You walk around, you find items to click on and you either are rewarded with a new draft or you can try to use known drafts on it. Some drafts I didn't really find any use for, so I wonder if they were a) a distraction or b) used for optional puzzles, but the devs found a creative use for most drafts at least twice and sometimes, the game also requires you to think outside the box. How? You learn the draft "twist". But what about when you have to untwist something? In that case, try the draft backwards.
Spelling out a draft can take quite a while, so if you try multiple ones at something to guess the puzzle solution, it can take you a few minutes to go through all of them. This is nothing unusual for games of its time but with no skip animation button it did get boring after a while to wait and see what happens. Being more skilled at these games than me might mean you figure these puzzles out quicker than me though and limit your amount of unsuccessful attempts.
Finally, when you start the game, there are 3 difficulty levels. PRACTICE, which shows you the letters for each note, which note you hear and it also spells out all four letters at the end. STANDARD, which also shows letters and marks the note you hear, but it doesn't spell it out in the end. It's pretty much the same difficulty level though. EXPERT, which neither shows letters nor which part of the distaff the note comes from, meaning you have to figure out which part of the distaff makes which noise at first and then make out those notes from hearing. It's definitely much harder than the other two difficulties but also more than doable.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: The voice acting is very good. I didn't quite warm up to the voice of the main character, but the rest did a fine job. Especially later on in the game, you could hear the end of the previous dialogue line cutting into the next dialogue line, which got more and more notable right into the finale.
The game's sound design is overall good but has similar issues. When the four notes of a draft play for example, one or more of the note sounds are cut off for a split second almost every time.
The soundtrack has a mystical and classical theme and from what I've read online, it's highly regarded and a big part of the experience for many. It definitely is a big part in enhancing the experience, I agree, but I wasn't quite enamored with it. Sound cutting issues were present here as well and while I understand music was limited to the most important moments due to technical limitations, it didn't help my experience when 90% of the game was played without any music in the background. Overall, it's a solid and fitting soundtrack but the times have raised expectations on what to expect there for sure.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Loom received top or near-top grades for its graphics at the time and even today its sophisticated art design and its colorful, varied landscapes stand out over many other games coming out in and around 1990.
ATMOSPHERE: Music, sound and graphics work well in tandem with the game's lore and world building to create an atmospheric adventure, however the rarely used music due to the technical limitations at the time does take away from the atmosphere, especially whenever you are stuck on a particular puzzle and spend minutes without any sound, whether its from the soundtrack or from the musical notes coming out of the distaff.
CONTENT: There isn't that much here outside of the main story, which takes 3-4 hours to beat, but considering the premise of this game, it works in its favor that the game is shorter than comparable graphical adventures.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Overall the structure in this game works well, but at times the places you find the necessary drafts from to progress seem pretty random. In addition, the final chapter seems rushed and at least to me, the puzzle solutions seemed unintuitive.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The distaff being the key component is certainly unique. I think it's fair to say that it's unlikely that you've played any game quite like Loom. It didn't really stick as a concept, ostensibly, but it shows developers desire to innovate at the time where a more traditional adventure would have been a safer bet. Plus, at worst it makes Loom stand out, since the unique gameplay feature is not something that I would call "bad" at all. The game sold over half a million copies all told from what I've read, so it wasn't a commercial failure either.
REPLAYABILITY: You can replay it once to get a better grasp of the plot and especially to try the game on expert if you played your first playthrough on PRACTICE/STANDARD, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game works fine overall and is completely playable.
OVERALL: You should have probably already played this game if you're a fan of point & click adventures, especially of this day and age. Unlike many other games from this time period, this one does not require you to go through magazine or internet tips on how to solve puzzles in order to complete it. Even the manual says that the devs created this game in a way that they wanted you to complete and fully experience it, so you won't be stuck for too long at any particular puzzle. And that's good, because even if the story is not as mesmerizing today as it might have been in the early 90s, it's still one worth telling and one that a faster pace, by nature of the player being stuck at puzzles far less, does a lot of good.
_____
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- "Unknown Gamer" from the GamePro Issue 41 (Dec 92): "Loom's magic comes mainly from its highly creative and original use of music"
- "Leslie Mizell" from the Game Player's Issue 12 Vol. 2 Nr. 6 (June 90): "[...] sit back and watch the spellbinding graphics as the story unfolds."
There is also a version that came out for the Japanese FM-Towns in 1991 which many fans consider to be the "definitive version", while Brian Moriarty himself considers the initial EGA version to be the "real" edition. If you want to play the game for yourself, I can say the 1992 version compared to the 1990 version will not drastically alter your opinion of the game, so if you value VGA graphics and voice acting, I would go with that.
Anyway, what's this game about?: In Loom, you play Bobbin Threadbare, a 17-year-old who is part of the "Weaver's Guild", a group of people who became masters of woven fabric and over time gained the ability to weave "patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality", meaning they could actually change the color of something, turn invisible and heal, among other things. In this world, many other Guilds that focus on a singular craft exist and the Weavers Guild was persecuted for using "witchcraft", resulting in their escape to an island that became their new home, Loom, called after their guild symbol, a loom (an apparatus for making fabric).
Events unfold and Bobbin Threadbare is born, however in unforeseen circumstances, and the loom's pattern is thrown into chaos as a result. This means that throughout his life, Bobbin is not allowed to learn the Guild's ability to weave, since he is seen as the one who has cursed the guild. He is raised by "Dame Hetchel", an old serving woman, who in secret teaches Bobbin the basics of weaving and when Bobbin turns 17 and the story starts, it is her who gives him his mission.
At the start of the game, the Elders summon Bobbin to the Sanctuary to determine his fate. As he arrives, he sees how the Elders punish Dame Hetchel. They turn her into an egg, only for a swan to crash into the room from a window and turn all the Elders into swans as well. The Elders shout that this is all Bobbin's fault as they fly off to who knows where.
This is where the actual gameplay begins. One of the elders dropped his "distaff" (a stick to which wool is wound for spinning), and Dame Hetchel is still in the room as an egg. You pick up the distaff, point it to the egg, and four notes start playing. You repeat this four-note pattern (called a "draft), and the egg starts to hatch ("open"). Out comes Dame Hetchel as a cygnet (young swan) and tells Bobbin about his mission, about how the "Third Shadow" will cover the world and why he has to find the swans.
So to summarize, you play Bobbing Threadbane, something is wrong with the "loom" and the Elders of your guild blame you. You are left on your own when all Elders are turned into swans and leave the island that you live in, so you pick up the distaff and have to use the "Weaving ability/magic" to try and find the flock and try to stop the world to be covered by the Third Shadow.
This is where Loom is very different to pretty much all other graphical adventures of its time. Instead of an interface with a bunch of verbs and an inventory to store items, you are solely equipped with the distaff. The distaff shows up horizontally on the interface and every few inches of it make up one sound, each being higher than the next. For each "draft" (magical ability), you need to figure out the corresponding four-note sound. For opening something, this sound turns out to be "E-C-E-D". Later on for example, you find for trees with holes in them, and each tree you click presents you with one note. Once you get all four, you have a draft. You don't know what the draft is for until you actually successfully tried it on something. This particular one for example was used to "twist sth". As you progress further and further, you unlock more and more notes on your distaff, which you need to do to be able to play some of the more advanced drafts which may use letters (like "A") that you are not skilled enough to play.
But with that, let's move over to my rating system to discuss all aspects of this game individually.
STORYTELLING: Throughout the story in this game, which only takes about 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you pick (more on that in a bit), you visit many different areas and meet different Guilds like the Blacksmiths Guild or the Shepherds Guild. You visit the Forge, the home of the Blacksmiths, Crystalgard, the headquarters of the Guild of Glassmakers and a cathedral, home of the Guild of Clerics, among many other locations. The world created for this game overall is very unique and to know that this is not just a playground for your main character but rather a world that is actually alive definitely aids the telling of stories concerning both the main quest and of simple side stories. For each Guild you stumble upon, you meet one or multiple characters who tell you what their kind is like, what kind of problems ail them and what goals they pursue. The Glassmakers for example are building a massive Sythe atop the Crystalgard. For what purpose?
The main story that ties all this together is an interesting, yet convoluted one that falls victim to the use of a lot of "this happens so that this can happen" methods of storytelling and especially scenes that should call for urgency just don't and the pacing of it all can fall a bit flat as a result. For example, in the final showdown with Chaos, instead of taking your distaff, with which you are pretty much incompetent, and forcing you to teach him the ways, he just stands there until you do something. Worst of all, the game has been made with a trilogy in mind, and according to Brian Moriarty himself, both himself and others just wanted to do something else after Loom was finished, and they just never got back to it. So expect a cliffhanger ending and change your plans of playing this game if that bothers you. It probably should, but the game is worth experiencing nevertheless I think.
The voice acting in the versions that include it is actually much much better than I would have expected and while the main character's voice actor made him sound a bit whiny throughout, the cast overall did a great job. I played the first chapter without voice first and definitely am glad that I played the voiced version afterwards.
Unlike many other LucasArts adventure games of its time, Loom is more serious and has few humorous elements included (though they are certainly there). As someone who has tried some Monkey Island but didn't finish any of their games prior to Loom, I can say that I prefer the more humorous games and graphical adventures with often odd solutions to puzzles definitely fit the "Comedy" category more.
GAMEPLAY: There is a "Book of Patterns" that comes with your copy of the game, if you indeed do want to buy a copy for $100+ these days. For everyone else, there is the manual online which includes it, and while it's not necessary to be used in my version of the game, the initial release does have a puzzle right at the start that is unsolvable without the manual in hand. Otherwise, the "book" lists a bunch of drafts (spells) and you can use it to write down the notes that the game gives you. Otherwise, it's recommended to write down the notes elsewhere, because the first draft you learn (open) will be needed to solve puzzles in the final third of the game, and writing down is the only option to access it. Almost all drafts are randomized for each playthrough, so you can't look up the notes online either.
Apart from using drafts, there isn't really much gameplay in this game. You walk around, you find items to click on and you either are rewarded with a new draft or you can try to use known drafts on it. Some drafts I didn't really find any use for, so I wonder if they were a) a distraction or b) used for optional puzzles, but the devs found a creative use for most drafts at least twice and sometimes, the game also requires you to think outside the box. How? You learn the draft "twist". But what about when you have to untwist something? In that case, try the draft backwards.
Spelling out a draft can take quite a while, so if you try multiple ones at something to guess the puzzle solution, it can take you a few minutes to go through all of them. This is nothing unusual for games of its time but with no skip animation button it did get boring after a while to wait and see what happens. Being more skilled at these games than me might mean you figure these puzzles out quicker than me though and limit your amount of unsuccessful attempts.
Finally, when you start the game, there are 3 difficulty levels. PRACTICE, which shows you the letters for each note, which note you hear and it also spells out all four letters at the end. STANDARD, which also shows letters and marks the note you hear, but it doesn't spell it out in the end. It's pretty much the same difficulty level though. EXPERT, which neither shows letters nor which part of the distaff the note comes from, meaning you have to figure out which part of the distaff makes which noise at first and then make out those notes from hearing. It's definitely much harder than the other two difficulties but also more than doable.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: The voice acting is very good. I didn't quite warm up to the voice of the main character, but the rest did a fine job. Especially later on in the game, you could hear the end of the previous dialogue line cutting into the next dialogue line, which got more and more notable right into the finale.
The game's sound design is overall good but has similar issues. When the four notes of a draft play for example, one or more of the note sounds are cut off for a split second almost every time.
The soundtrack has a mystical and classical theme and from what I've read online, it's highly regarded and a big part of the experience for many. It definitely is a big part in enhancing the experience, I agree, but I wasn't quite enamored with it. Sound cutting issues were present here as well and while I understand music was limited to the most important moments due to technical limitations, it didn't help my experience when 90% of the game was played without any music in the background. Overall, it's a solid and fitting soundtrack but the times have raised expectations on what to expect there for sure.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Loom received top or near-top grades for its graphics at the time and even today its sophisticated art design and its colorful, varied landscapes stand out over many other games coming out in and around 1990.
ATMOSPHERE: Music, sound and graphics work well in tandem with the game's lore and world building to create an atmospheric adventure, however the rarely used music due to the technical limitations at the time does take away from the atmosphere, especially whenever you are stuck on a particular puzzle and spend minutes without any sound, whether its from the soundtrack or from the musical notes coming out of the distaff.
CONTENT: There isn't that much here outside of the main story, which takes 3-4 hours to beat, but considering the premise of this game, it works in its favor that the game is shorter than comparable graphical adventures.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Overall the structure in this game works well, but at times the places you find the necessary drafts from to progress seem pretty random. In addition, the final chapter seems rushed and at least to me, the puzzle solutions seemed unintuitive.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The distaff being the key component is certainly unique. I think it's fair to say that it's unlikely that you've played any game quite like Loom. It didn't really stick as a concept, ostensibly, but it shows developers desire to innovate at the time where a more traditional adventure would have been a safer bet. Plus, at worst it makes Loom stand out, since the unique gameplay feature is not something that I would call "bad" at all. The game sold over half a million copies all told from what I've read, so it wasn't a commercial failure either.
REPLAYABILITY: You can replay it once to get a better grasp of the plot and especially to try the game on expert if you played your first playthrough on PRACTICE/STANDARD, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game works fine overall and is completely playable.
OVERALL: You should have probably already played this game if you're a fan of point & click adventures, especially of this day and age. Unlike many other games from this time period, this one does not require you to go through magazine or internet tips on how to solve puzzles in order to complete it. Even the manual says that the devs created this game in a way that they wanted you to complete and fully experience it, so you won't be stuck for too long at any particular puzzle. And that's good, because even if the story is not as mesmerizing today as it might have been in the early 90s, it's still one worth telling and one that a faster pace, by nature of the player being stuck at puzzles far less, does a lot of good.
_____
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- "Unknown Gamer" from the GamePro Issue 41 (Dec 92): "Loom's magic comes mainly from its highly creative and original use of music"
- "Leslie Mizell" from the Game Player's Issue 12 Vol. 2 Nr. 6 (June 90): "[...] sit back and watch the spellbinding graphics as the story unfolds."
(This is the 57th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
The Game of the Year, ladies and gentlemen. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, initially released on November 21, 1991 in Japan for the SNES, developed and published by Nintendo, is a fantastic action-adventure and is the Zelda game that has set the framework for the series in so many ways from here on out, and that it has done such a great job with that concept here already deserves a lot of praise (of which it got a lot I hear).
I can talk on and on about the positives, but I'll go over everything in detail in my review. Though I do want to add that I am surprised that Nintendo, after releasing a Game Boy Zelda game in 1993, didn't release another home console game in the series all the way until 1998. That's seven years from now. Of course, releases were almost an annual thing from then on for about a decade, but I am still surprised about this little fact. At release, this game received a 39/40 Famitsu score, the first game to ever get a score so high according to Wikipedia's article on the game, and was the best-selling game in 1991, so it's not like Nintendo wasn't aware of its popularity. Though the gap between BOTW and TOTK was even larger, so it's not any different today. Anyway, here is the review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10
The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past takes a massive leap in narrative in comparison to Zelda I and II. Unlike all the other improvements the game presented with the jump to the SNES, the narrative jump did not have to be this grand. In hindsight, it's what this gaves this game that little something that many games lack in atmosphere and in what players would be able to draw back on years after finishing the game.
While Zelda II simply had a scrolling text to explain the set-up and then have you go side to side until you get the "you won" text, ALTTP goes to great detail (for its time) explaining the mythology of its world.
The setting is Hyrule, which, according to Hylian scrolls, many moons ago was created by mythical gods of Power, Wisdom and Courage. It is said that after finishing their work, they left a symbol of their strength hidden somewhere in Hyrule, a golden triangle known as the Triforce. The Triforce myth, an ancient epic, tells that this Triforce, an inanimate object, may grant the wish of the person who finds it. Its hiding place is the Golden Land, and over time, more and more people, fueled by greed, looked to find it, killing each other in the progress.
One day, by accident more than anything, a gang of thieves led by Ganondorf Dragmire, or Ganon, found the gate to the Golden Land. Ganon quickly vanquished his followers to have the Triforce's powers for himself. It is explained that the Triforce can not judge between evil and good and grants every wish, so while Ganon's exact wish is not known, it did not take long for evil power to flow from the Golden Land and for disasters to beset Hyrule.
This led the lord of Hyrule to sent out the Seven Wise Men and the Knights of Hyrule to seal the entrance to the Golden Land. A war raged between them and Ganon's evil army. As the Knights struggled to find off the army, they did give the Seven Wise Men the required time to magically seal Ganon in the Golden Land. In the midst of this, the people of Hyrule, suspecting that Ganon's power stemmed from the Triforce, created a mighty weapon resistant to magic which could repulse powers granted by even the Triforce. This weapon is called the Master Sword. It is so powerful that only one of pure heart can wield it.
A long time later, you, Link, are woken up by a person who calls herself Zelda. She needs your help. The reason for her pleas? Ganon, while still sealed in the 'Dark World' (the current name for the Golden Land), wants to take over the 'Light World' (Hyrule) as well. To break the seal, he needs the life force of the seven wise men. He uses a wizard, Agahnim, as his pawn to do this, who captures the seven wise men one by one. You need to save them and kill Ganon once and for all.
And that's the back-story. Quite a detailed one, huh? This information can mostly be found in the manual for the game, but each of the seven wise men you are supposed to capture, and Zelda herself especially, tell you these stories in-game as you interact with them, leaving you with no blanks even if you didn't touch the manual.
With how limited the storytelling used to be during this time, I didn't find any of the main plot points for this game to be terribly sophisticated. But what this game did really well was to go in-depth regarding these plot points. To create plot points for all these important parts of the story at all. This is an action-adventure game with lots of puzzles of all varieties, and getting stuck and exploring to find a way forward is what you are meant to do all the time. So having an in-depth narrative like this compared to the majority of games from this time is actually pretty damn useful in motivating the player to keep going.
Out of these plot points, there is a lot to like, but I want to point out the description of the Master Sword in particular, as personally I am a big fan of weapons that can only be wielded by good-hearted people, I think that's a great sort-of requirement to set for all those young people who played this back in the day. For that reason I think when you eventually get the Master Sword, there could have been a bigger deal made of it, but maybe that's something for a later game in the series.
All in all, in terms of the big picture, the plot here is nothing special. It's a much more sophisticated telling of more or less the same story most games of the time used, but with slightly more depth to it and 'gamified' so the devs could use it as a framework for the game they were about to built. The seven wise men for example aren't this mysterious ancient group, they act as seven dungeons that you are meant to explore and beat in the game. It could have just easily been three or four, but the game would have not been as long this way. The Light and Dark worlds are simply two overworlds that you can explore, and instead of having to design two very distinct ones in shape, the same overworld style was used and just made darker and with a few changes to the traversal were made. So if you want to be cynical, yes, the game design shaped the narrative, but I don't think that's a bad thing for a game, especially of its time, and I appreciate the devs for putting in the effort to have the story not just be an afterthought to the gameplay but have it be integrated in everything you do like this.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
This game is an action-adventure and introduces more or less the core design that the majority of the follow-ups would stick to in the Zelda series. It plays from top-down 2D perspective. You control Link and traverse an overworld filled with many secrets, enemies and dungeons. The main gameplay consists of the following loop: You need to enter a specific dungeon. The dungeons take pretty long, have multiple floors and consist of many different puzzles the player needs to solve in order to progress to the boss. During each dungeon, you find a special item, like a Fire-Rod, an Ice-Rod, a boomerang, a staff of invincibility, a hook shot, a magic hammer and more. These not only help you beat the dungeon, but once you do, you return to the overworld and a ton of optional (and mandatory, you just don't know it yet) sections of the overworld now open for you to be explored. The magic hammer for example allows you to pound stakes and obstacles into the ground which had blocked off certain areas before.
During exploration, through which there is a LOT to find, you can open up holes to secret rooms, you can find NPCs who give you side quests, you can find environmental puzzles and hints (a shield says that you should not throw something into a circle of stones, I wonder what happens if you do it anyway), you can stumble upon pieces of a heart (4 of which give you one additional hitpoint) and you find required items to potentially open up other dungeons, like a certain medaillon for example.
There are also many different caves and buildings to go to, as these often offer you optional, but incredibly useful upgrades to your gear. Help a gnome find his way to his partner and you are rewarded with an upgrade to your sword. Find a fountain, throw rupees in and you can increase the amount of bombs/arrows you can carry. You can give certain items you find to certain NPCs, who reward you with different items. "I wonder who would have any use for this mushroom?".
There is quite a lot to do here, and I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't stuck multiple times. Taking a break of more than a week in this game means you're almost guaranteed to start over or use a guide, because a lot of information that you absolutely are required to have comes from one-time dialogue with NPCs often enough. If you don't pay attention or take a break and forget this information, you're going to be looking around for that one elusive item for a while. The game doesn't hold your hand one bit, and that's something each of you will have your own opinion about. Personally, I appreciated this because for the majority of this game, the game design matched this need for exploration by giving you multiple bread crumbs for almost everything you need to figure out. I personally missed some, for sure, and therefore had to make use of a guide a couple times, but if you enjoy the exploration part of this game a lot (and don't want to save some off those minutes to be able to progress through a challenge quicker), I'm sure you can manage to beat it without a guide.
That said, I had two issues here, which I explain more closely in the Level Design part of this review. First, is that the overworld traversal is not perfect and is too reliant on Save & Exit's to not slow the pace down considerably, and the second is that some solutions are not very intuitive. Here is a room which a bunch of tiles. You have to move one tile in a specific direction to make a chest appear. Here are 20 statues with their tongues showing. None do anything after you hit them, pull them and dash into them. Here another dozen. They don't do anything. Here are another 4. One of these opens the door you need to progress. When these are all in the same dungeon and you're stuck, and pretty much anything can trigger anything at times, it can definitely become a frustrating excercise of trial and error.
But these issues don't overshadow the excellent gameplay experience that is on offer here.
The combat is pretty straightforward. You point in one of four directions and can slash forward with your sword. Holding the attack button also produces a 360° attack. You gain a dashing ability pretty early on, which damages the majority of enemies if you dash into them. Many items you find later on also can be used for attacking purposes, so it's rare that you only rely on your sword for too long. Apart from bombs and arrows which you can constantly re-fill, you get a boomerang, fire- and ice rods, three medaillons that produce special attacks and more, some of which drain your 'magic meter', as they'd otherwise be too overpowered. Different enemies have different susceptibilities. Some can only be killed with fire, some need to take an arrow to their eye and late-game skeletons don't fully die unless you kill them with a bomb.
My main gripe is that since you can only slash forward, hitting the target can sometimes be an issue, though not too often to make it annoying. For example, some enemies have a shield or other forms of frontal protection. The shield may be on the right hand of the enemy, which means you need to place yourself further down to hit their left side, which exposes you to a hit for half a second. Then there are enemies that start producing shock waves at random times, and there is no warning for it, so way too often, you'd swing and in those couple frames between swing and hit, the shockwaves can activate and cause rather significant damage to you. Also, there are many enemies that cause knock-back. Since dungeons often have holes that you can fall into, hitting enemies and falling into them can be annoying, but avoiding the fight usually solves that issue. Finally, this is another one of those games where you need to regularly open up your inventory to change weapons, which is a common issue with games that use multiple items like this. It's not too bad but noticeable when you fight particular bosses, especially Ganon at the end.
In terms of controls, this game plays and controls pretty fluently. You want to do something, and Link does it. The only instance where I felt that the controls were truly unfair were on tight platforms where you could fall off to the sides. For some reason, walking and turning had this slippery feel to it, and instead of making a sharp right or left, Link would need a few steps to gain momentum to that side, which often leads to him falling down. On ice-y platforms I understand, but on regular platforms this was odd.
Overall though, this game offers great gameplay and exploration. It proves why it's so popular, as it is several times more polished than other action-adventures of this time.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting. And I'm glad, at least for the SNES version, because the constant screaming of Link in the GBA version I definitely couldn't have survived for 15+ hours.
The sound design and soundtrack are both excellent here. There are some sound effects, like the discovery of a secret door, that is so iconic that even I, someone who didn't really play any Zelda games before, instantly was able to notice it. In general, there are sound effects for pretty much every action and they all sound clean, which is not something that was to be expected from games on this level at the time. The soundtrack is great for the epic journey that this is supposed to be, with many epic tracks fitting the scneario. I would have wished for more tracks to use during dungeons to make them more distinct on an auditory level, but I also would understand those who say that listening to fewer tracks increases the 'bond' with them on a nostalgic level. Many games today opt for fewer tracks as well, so I wouldn't call it a negative.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10
The graphical jump here from Zelda II to ALTTP is obviously absurd, but apart from simple image quality and resolution, the art design here also stands out. Bright colors, beautiful 16-bit graphics, excellent sprite work, diverse environments and very solid special effects. Apart from just the eye-candy perspective, the game incorporates a lot of environmental puzzles to its exploration, and the tells from the environmental design are excellent as well. Here is tiny half-circle that indicates a platform, here is a small crack in the wall that is not noticeable until closer inspection, but very noticeable thereafter, indicating a secret area.
You explore all types of different areas in the game, from distinct dungeons and, to be overworld specific, forests, deserts, mountains, swamps, castles and more, and you have few, if any games that look quite like this on such a scale at the time.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
You truly feel like a hero embarking on an epic journey in this one. The graphics and soundtrack set a great stage for your travels, and there is a lot of attention to detail in the world-building that one can only appreciate. A cute thing for example was when I passed the controller to my six year old brother for a while. He started swinging his sword at a bird in the Dark World that just would not die, and to our amazement, after a few dozen hits, dozens of the same bird started flooding the screen and attacking us. Small details that most players won't experieence are always fun to find. One additional thing I enjoyed is that there is actual in-game meaning to the items you find. You don't find a generic book, you find the Book of Mudora, which can translate inscriptions. You find Staffs of Somaria and Byrna, you find three magic medaillons like the Bombos, which only the hero bearing the master sword can retrieve. It's really basic at this point of course, but it does add to the immersion.
CONTENT | 10/10
Few games are so chock-full of stuff to find while exploring. The great part is that the majority of the overworld does have stuff to find. The overworld is seperated through screens, and I wouldn't be surprised if there is something useful or interesting on each screen.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
You have specific dungeons to go to, which are marked on your map. That's all that is marked though. You need to find your way there on your own and sometimes, you need to find specific items that unlock your entry to the dungeons themselves. This is all paced really well.
The overworld is differentiated in two versions, the Light World and the Dark World. These are basically the same overworld, but with different looking environments, different obstacles and more enemies on the Dark World part. For example, in the Light World, there is a Kakariko Village to the west, and in the Dark World, the same area is called Village of Outcasts. You can switch between these worlds in two different ways. You can either use a 'Magic Mirror' to switch from Dark to Light, or, since you can't switch back this way, you need to find a warp portal to switch from Light to Dark.
All in all, the game is really well designed. My only issue here is how annoying traversal can be at times. Unless you want to run across the map for the umpteenth time, you have to rely on 'Save & Quit', which allows you to select a location to spawn in (when in the Light World) once you enter back into the game, or which places you at a specific spot near the middle of the overworld (when in the Dark World). Later, the flute item allows you to fast travel to specific locations in the Light World. But this is a minor issue overall and a subjective thing for sure, though more interconnectivity that opens up shortcuts later on would have been amazing.
One additional point I want to make is that some items are very hard to find or making progress can be tough to figure out at times. And while my complaint is not that part, it's that crucial information is often given once and as an aside, so not paying attention once or simply forgetting about something hours after getting the information means you can be stuck for a while. I don't think a journal that notes the most important stuff would have been the worst thing in the world.
Overall, the game balances it game quite well though. You'll get a great dose of exploring, of making your way through large dungeons, of battling and do so in a very good pace for the majority of it.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
Inner-series, the jump from Zelda II to ALTTP is incredible, but even generally, there was no game quite like this at the time, or at least none that managed to put it together quite as well in an action-adventure setting. There is greated attention given to storytelling and world-building, the soundtrack is great, the graphics are cream of the crop, the dungeons are uniquely designed and offer a fun challenge and exploration is incredibly rewarding.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
There are more than a few side quests you can still find on subsequent playthroughs, as well as heart pieces. Even improving your sword or upgrading your bomb and arrow space are completely optional parts that are easy to miss, so there will be plenty to discover. The story is linear however and most special items you can find are mandatory.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 86/100
You want to know what the best game of 1991 is? You've probably just read the review for it. Few games during this time allowed for this much exploration and managed to for the majority of the game to balance the joy of discovery with the potential frustrations of being stuck this well by offering breadcrumbs of info in its NPC dialogue and environments that attentive players take to their advantage to continuously make progress. The dungeons are distinct, large and filled with environmental puzzles and combat challenges to overcome. The soundtrack is very good, the graphics great in comparison to its contemporaries and while the overworld design does get somewhat tedious from time to time, you're going to get a very good and prototypical Zelda experience here. If you like Zelda games and you didn't play this, I don't know what you're doing. If you're unsure, future releases will likely offer plenty of QoL improvements that will make them more newcomer friendly, but even if you start your Zelda journey somewhere else, don't forget about A Link To The Past.
The Game of the Year, ladies and gentlemen. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, initially released on November 21, 1991 in Japan for the SNES, developed and published by Nintendo, is a fantastic action-adventure and is the Zelda game that has set the framework for the series in so many ways from here on out, and that it has done such a great job with that concept here already deserves a lot of praise (of which it got a lot I hear).
I can talk on and on about the positives, but I'll go over everything in detail in my review. Though I do want to add that I am surprised that Nintendo, after releasing a Game Boy Zelda game in 1993, didn't release another home console game in the series all the way until 1998. That's seven years from now. Of course, releases were almost an annual thing from then on for about a decade, but I am still surprised about this little fact. At release, this game received a 39/40 Famitsu score, the first game to ever get a score so high according to Wikipedia's article on the game, and was the best-selling game in 1991, so it's not like Nintendo wasn't aware of its popularity. Though the gap between BOTW and TOTK was even larger, so it's not any different today. Anyway, here is the review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10
The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past takes a massive leap in narrative in comparison to Zelda I and II. Unlike all the other improvements the game presented with the jump to the SNES, the narrative jump did not have to be this grand. In hindsight, it's what this gaves this game that little something that many games lack in atmosphere and in what players would be able to draw back on years after finishing the game.
While Zelda II simply had a scrolling text to explain the set-up and then have you go side to side until you get the "you won" text, ALTTP goes to great detail (for its time) explaining the mythology of its world.
The setting is Hyrule, which, according to Hylian scrolls, many moons ago was created by mythical gods of Power, Wisdom and Courage. It is said that after finishing their work, they left a symbol of their strength hidden somewhere in Hyrule, a golden triangle known as the Triforce. The Triforce myth, an ancient epic, tells that this Triforce, an inanimate object, may grant the wish of the person who finds it. Its hiding place is the Golden Land, and over time, more and more people, fueled by greed, looked to find it, killing each other in the progress.
One day, by accident more than anything, a gang of thieves led by Ganondorf Dragmire, or Ganon, found the gate to the Golden Land. Ganon quickly vanquished his followers to have the Triforce's powers for himself. It is explained that the Triforce can not judge between evil and good and grants every wish, so while Ganon's exact wish is not known, it did not take long for evil power to flow from the Golden Land and for disasters to beset Hyrule.
This led the lord of Hyrule to sent out the Seven Wise Men and the Knights of Hyrule to seal the entrance to the Golden Land. A war raged between them and Ganon's evil army. As the Knights struggled to find off the army, they did give the Seven Wise Men the required time to magically seal Ganon in the Golden Land. In the midst of this, the people of Hyrule, suspecting that Ganon's power stemmed from the Triforce, created a mighty weapon resistant to magic which could repulse powers granted by even the Triforce. This weapon is called the Master Sword. It is so powerful that only one of pure heart can wield it.
A long time later, you, Link, are woken up by a person who calls herself Zelda. She needs your help. The reason for her pleas? Ganon, while still sealed in the 'Dark World' (the current name for the Golden Land), wants to take over the 'Light World' (Hyrule) as well. To break the seal, he needs the life force of the seven wise men. He uses a wizard, Agahnim, as his pawn to do this, who captures the seven wise men one by one. You need to save them and kill Ganon once and for all.
And that's the back-story. Quite a detailed one, huh? This information can mostly be found in the manual for the game, but each of the seven wise men you are supposed to capture, and Zelda herself especially, tell you these stories in-game as you interact with them, leaving you with no blanks even if you didn't touch the manual.
With how limited the storytelling used to be during this time, I didn't find any of the main plot points for this game to be terribly sophisticated. But what this game did really well was to go in-depth regarding these plot points. To create plot points for all these important parts of the story at all. This is an action-adventure game with lots of puzzles of all varieties, and getting stuck and exploring to find a way forward is what you are meant to do all the time. So having an in-depth narrative like this compared to the majority of games from this time is actually pretty damn useful in motivating the player to keep going.
Out of these plot points, there is a lot to like, but I want to point out the description of the Master Sword in particular, as personally I am a big fan of weapons that can only be wielded by good-hearted people, I think that's a great sort-of requirement to set for all those young people who played this back in the day. For that reason I think when you eventually get the Master Sword, there could have been a bigger deal made of it, but maybe that's something for a later game in the series.
All in all, in terms of the big picture, the plot here is nothing special. It's a much more sophisticated telling of more or less the same story most games of the time used, but with slightly more depth to it and 'gamified' so the devs could use it as a framework for the game they were about to built. The seven wise men for example aren't this mysterious ancient group, they act as seven dungeons that you are meant to explore and beat in the game. It could have just easily been three or four, but the game would have not been as long this way. The Light and Dark worlds are simply two overworlds that you can explore, and instead of having to design two very distinct ones in shape, the same overworld style was used and just made darker and with a few changes to the traversal were made. So if you want to be cynical, yes, the game design shaped the narrative, but I don't think that's a bad thing for a game, especially of its time, and I appreciate the devs for putting in the effort to have the story not just be an afterthought to the gameplay but have it be integrated in everything you do like this.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
This game is an action-adventure and introduces more or less the core design that the majority of the follow-ups would stick to in the Zelda series. It plays from top-down 2D perspective. You control Link and traverse an overworld filled with many secrets, enemies and dungeons. The main gameplay consists of the following loop: You need to enter a specific dungeon. The dungeons take pretty long, have multiple floors and consist of many different puzzles the player needs to solve in order to progress to the boss. During each dungeon, you find a special item, like a Fire-Rod, an Ice-Rod, a boomerang, a staff of invincibility, a hook shot, a magic hammer and more. These not only help you beat the dungeon, but once you do, you return to the overworld and a ton of optional (and mandatory, you just don't know it yet) sections of the overworld now open for you to be explored. The magic hammer for example allows you to pound stakes and obstacles into the ground which had blocked off certain areas before.
During exploration, through which there is a LOT to find, you can open up holes to secret rooms, you can find NPCs who give you side quests, you can find environmental puzzles and hints (a shield says that you should not throw something into a circle of stones, I wonder what happens if you do it anyway), you can stumble upon pieces of a heart (4 of which give you one additional hitpoint) and you find required items to potentially open up other dungeons, like a certain medaillon for example.
There are also many different caves and buildings to go to, as these often offer you optional, but incredibly useful upgrades to your gear. Help a gnome find his way to his partner and you are rewarded with an upgrade to your sword. Find a fountain, throw rupees in and you can increase the amount of bombs/arrows you can carry. You can give certain items you find to certain NPCs, who reward you with different items. "I wonder who would have any use for this mushroom?".
There is quite a lot to do here, and I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't stuck multiple times. Taking a break of more than a week in this game means you're almost guaranteed to start over or use a guide, because a lot of information that you absolutely are required to have comes from one-time dialogue with NPCs often enough. If you don't pay attention or take a break and forget this information, you're going to be looking around for that one elusive item for a while. The game doesn't hold your hand one bit, and that's something each of you will have your own opinion about. Personally, I appreciated this because for the majority of this game, the game design matched this need for exploration by giving you multiple bread crumbs for almost everything you need to figure out. I personally missed some, for sure, and therefore had to make use of a guide a couple times, but if you enjoy the exploration part of this game a lot (and don't want to save some off those minutes to be able to progress through a challenge quicker), I'm sure you can manage to beat it without a guide.
That said, I had two issues here, which I explain more closely in the Level Design part of this review. First, is that the overworld traversal is not perfect and is too reliant on Save & Exit's to not slow the pace down considerably, and the second is that some solutions are not very intuitive. Here is a room which a bunch of tiles. You have to move one tile in a specific direction to make a chest appear. Here are 20 statues with their tongues showing. None do anything after you hit them, pull them and dash into them. Here another dozen. They don't do anything. Here are another 4. One of these opens the door you need to progress. When these are all in the same dungeon and you're stuck, and pretty much anything can trigger anything at times, it can definitely become a frustrating excercise of trial and error.
But these issues don't overshadow the excellent gameplay experience that is on offer here.
The combat is pretty straightforward. You point in one of four directions and can slash forward with your sword. Holding the attack button also produces a 360° attack. You gain a dashing ability pretty early on, which damages the majority of enemies if you dash into them. Many items you find later on also can be used for attacking purposes, so it's rare that you only rely on your sword for too long. Apart from bombs and arrows which you can constantly re-fill, you get a boomerang, fire- and ice rods, three medaillons that produce special attacks and more, some of which drain your 'magic meter', as they'd otherwise be too overpowered. Different enemies have different susceptibilities. Some can only be killed with fire, some need to take an arrow to their eye and late-game skeletons don't fully die unless you kill them with a bomb.
My main gripe is that since you can only slash forward, hitting the target can sometimes be an issue, though not too often to make it annoying. For example, some enemies have a shield or other forms of frontal protection. The shield may be on the right hand of the enemy, which means you need to place yourself further down to hit their left side, which exposes you to a hit for half a second. Then there are enemies that start producing shock waves at random times, and there is no warning for it, so way too often, you'd swing and in those couple frames between swing and hit, the shockwaves can activate and cause rather significant damage to you. Also, there are many enemies that cause knock-back. Since dungeons often have holes that you can fall into, hitting enemies and falling into them can be annoying, but avoiding the fight usually solves that issue. Finally, this is another one of those games where you need to regularly open up your inventory to change weapons, which is a common issue with games that use multiple items like this. It's not too bad but noticeable when you fight particular bosses, especially Ganon at the end.
In terms of controls, this game plays and controls pretty fluently. You want to do something, and Link does it. The only instance where I felt that the controls were truly unfair were on tight platforms where you could fall off to the sides. For some reason, walking and turning had this slippery feel to it, and instead of making a sharp right or left, Link would need a few steps to gain momentum to that side, which often leads to him falling down. On ice-y platforms I understand, but on regular platforms this was odd.
Overall though, this game offers great gameplay and exploration. It proves why it's so popular, as it is several times more polished than other action-adventures of this time.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting. And I'm glad, at least for the SNES version, because the constant screaming of Link in the GBA version I definitely couldn't have survived for 15+ hours.
The sound design and soundtrack are both excellent here. There are some sound effects, like the discovery of a secret door, that is so iconic that even I, someone who didn't really play any Zelda games before, instantly was able to notice it. In general, there are sound effects for pretty much every action and they all sound clean, which is not something that was to be expected from games on this level at the time. The soundtrack is great for the epic journey that this is supposed to be, with many epic tracks fitting the scneario. I would have wished for more tracks to use during dungeons to make them more distinct on an auditory level, but I also would understand those who say that listening to fewer tracks increases the 'bond' with them on a nostalgic level. Many games today opt for fewer tracks as well, so I wouldn't call it a negative.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10
The graphical jump here from Zelda II to ALTTP is obviously absurd, but apart from simple image quality and resolution, the art design here also stands out. Bright colors, beautiful 16-bit graphics, excellent sprite work, diverse environments and very solid special effects. Apart from just the eye-candy perspective, the game incorporates a lot of environmental puzzles to its exploration, and the tells from the environmental design are excellent as well. Here is tiny half-circle that indicates a platform, here is a small crack in the wall that is not noticeable until closer inspection, but very noticeable thereafter, indicating a secret area.
You explore all types of different areas in the game, from distinct dungeons and, to be overworld specific, forests, deserts, mountains, swamps, castles and more, and you have few, if any games that look quite like this on such a scale at the time.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
You truly feel like a hero embarking on an epic journey in this one. The graphics and soundtrack set a great stage for your travels, and there is a lot of attention to detail in the world-building that one can only appreciate. A cute thing for example was when I passed the controller to my six year old brother for a while. He started swinging his sword at a bird in the Dark World that just would not die, and to our amazement, after a few dozen hits, dozens of the same bird started flooding the screen and attacking us. Small details that most players won't experieence are always fun to find. One additional thing I enjoyed is that there is actual in-game meaning to the items you find. You don't find a generic book, you find the Book of Mudora, which can translate inscriptions. You find Staffs of Somaria and Byrna, you find three magic medaillons like the Bombos, which only the hero bearing the master sword can retrieve. It's really basic at this point of course, but it does add to the immersion.
CONTENT | 10/10
Few games are so chock-full of stuff to find while exploring. The great part is that the majority of the overworld does have stuff to find. The overworld is seperated through screens, and I wouldn't be surprised if there is something useful or interesting on each screen.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
You have specific dungeons to go to, which are marked on your map. That's all that is marked though. You need to find your way there on your own and sometimes, you need to find specific items that unlock your entry to the dungeons themselves. This is all paced really well.
The overworld is differentiated in two versions, the Light World and the Dark World. These are basically the same overworld, but with different looking environments, different obstacles and more enemies on the Dark World part. For example, in the Light World, there is a Kakariko Village to the west, and in the Dark World, the same area is called Village of Outcasts. You can switch between these worlds in two different ways. You can either use a 'Magic Mirror' to switch from Dark to Light, or, since you can't switch back this way, you need to find a warp portal to switch from Light to Dark.
All in all, the game is really well designed. My only issue here is how annoying traversal can be at times. Unless you want to run across the map for the umpteenth time, you have to rely on 'Save & Quit', which allows you to select a location to spawn in (when in the Light World) once you enter back into the game, or which places you at a specific spot near the middle of the overworld (when in the Dark World). Later, the flute item allows you to fast travel to specific locations in the Light World. But this is a minor issue overall and a subjective thing for sure, though more interconnectivity that opens up shortcuts later on would have been amazing.
One additional point I want to make is that some items are very hard to find or making progress can be tough to figure out at times. And while my complaint is not that part, it's that crucial information is often given once and as an aside, so not paying attention once or simply forgetting about something hours after getting the information means you can be stuck for a while. I don't think a journal that notes the most important stuff would have been the worst thing in the world.
Overall, the game balances it game quite well though. You'll get a great dose of exploring, of making your way through large dungeons, of battling and do so in a very good pace for the majority of it.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
Inner-series, the jump from Zelda II to ALTTP is incredible, but even generally, there was no game quite like this at the time, or at least none that managed to put it together quite as well in an action-adventure setting. There is greated attention given to storytelling and world-building, the soundtrack is great, the graphics are cream of the crop, the dungeons are uniquely designed and offer a fun challenge and exploration is incredibly rewarding.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
There are more than a few side quests you can still find on subsequent playthroughs, as well as heart pieces. Even improving your sword or upgrading your bomb and arrow space are completely optional parts that are easy to miss, so there will be plenty to discover. The story is linear however and most special items you can find are mandatory.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 86/100
You want to know what the best game of 1991 is? You've probably just read the review for it. Few games during this time allowed for this much exploration and managed to for the majority of the game to balance the joy of discovery with the potential frustrations of being stuck this well by offering breadcrumbs of info in its NPC dialogue and environments that attentive players take to their advantage to continuously make progress. The dungeons are distinct, large and filled with environmental puzzles and combat challenges to overcome. The soundtrack is very good, the graphics great in comparison to its contemporaries and while the overworld design does get somewhat tedious from time to time, you're going to get a very good and prototypical Zelda experience here. If you like Zelda games and you didn't play this, I don't know what you're doing. If you're unsure, future releases will likely offer plenty of QoL improvements that will make them more newcomer friendly, but even if you start your Zelda journey somewhere else, don't forget about A Link To The Past.
Shin Megami Tensei if... (...it were Seinfeld. I mean seriously, listen to the songs) is the third and final SMT game on the SNES and considered to be the third mainline title in the series.
Unlike SMT 1 and SMT 2, the game features a smaller-scale story that takes place in a school setting and a place called The Expanse, where you go through several dungeons named after the seven deadly sins, like the World of Pride, Gluttony and Sloth, which is where I eventually abandoned this game. (There are additional areas you unlock through a NG+ route). Still, I have some thoughts here as someone who did manage to finish SMT 1 and SMT 2 (and enjoyed both), so here goes.
SMT if... is a game that I'm glad exists. It features a school setting for the first time, and it introduces the Guardian system, which are special demons given to aid you. You get your first when you die the first time and they change each additional time you perish. Both of these points are what became common in the now much more popular Persona series, a series that includes some of my favorite games of all time. That said, nothing else you will be familiar with is included in this game, apart from the combat and demon-fusing gameplay of course, meaning no in-depth character interactions, social bonds etc.
And that's OK. This is an SMT game after all. What I wanted from this game, just like the previous two, was an addictive gameplay loop, a depressing atmosphere in hostile environments, an interesting plot filled to the brim with symbolism and metaphors and overall, enjoyable enough dungeon crawling. If you really liked SMT 1 and/or 2, SMT if... has a lot of the same features that will appeal to you. That said, for the 8 or so hours I played this, it features less plot and, as mentioned, less high-stake plot, to pull you along. Worst yet, it features some horrific dungeons, namely the World of Sloth, which I quickly learned was something the community unanimously agreed on. The dungeon is a test of endurance in the worst way, a test I did not pass, and I'd imagine the majority of you will feel similarly. If you, however, are someone who loves to suffer, I invite you to take a shot at it yourself.
SMT if... is the precursor to the Persona series as I mentioned, so it did more than even the developers would have probably thought at the time, because other than that, it doesn't really bring the series forward in a meaningful way. It plays like a worse SMT 2 for the most part, and it even has a lot of the same tracks and of course the same mechanics and visuals. There is a route you can choose for a NG+ playthrough which actually introduces completely new dungeons and songs, which after reading up on it, sounds pretty interesting, but I'm not going to force myself through one normal run to experience it.
Finally, to those of you who still want to check it out, I recommend the Reiko route, which based on the story synopsis for the routes available at the start, seems to offer the most content.
(This is the 102nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Unlike SMT 1 and SMT 2, the game features a smaller-scale story that takes place in a school setting and a place called The Expanse, where you go through several dungeons named after the seven deadly sins, like the World of Pride, Gluttony and Sloth, which is where I eventually abandoned this game. (There are additional areas you unlock through a NG+ route). Still, I have some thoughts here as someone who did manage to finish SMT 1 and SMT 2 (and enjoyed both), so here goes.
SMT if... is a game that I'm glad exists. It features a school setting for the first time, and it introduces the Guardian system, which are special demons given to aid you. You get your first when you die the first time and they change each additional time you perish. Both of these points are what became common in the now much more popular Persona series, a series that includes some of my favorite games of all time. That said, nothing else you will be familiar with is included in this game, apart from the combat and demon-fusing gameplay of course, meaning no in-depth character interactions, social bonds etc.
And that's OK. This is an SMT game after all. What I wanted from this game, just like the previous two, was an addictive gameplay loop, a depressing atmosphere in hostile environments, an interesting plot filled to the brim with symbolism and metaphors and overall, enjoyable enough dungeon crawling. If you really liked SMT 1 and/or 2, SMT if... has a lot of the same features that will appeal to you. That said, for the 8 or so hours I played this, it features less plot and, as mentioned, less high-stake plot, to pull you along. Worst yet, it features some horrific dungeons, namely the World of Sloth, which I quickly learned was something the community unanimously agreed on. The dungeon is a test of endurance in the worst way, a test I did not pass, and I'd imagine the majority of you will feel similarly. If you, however, are someone who loves to suffer, I invite you to take a shot at it yourself.
SMT if... is the precursor to the Persona series as I mentioned, so it did more than even the developers would have probably thought at the time, because other than that, it doesn't really bring the series forward in a meaningful way. It plays like a worse SMT 2 for the most part, and it even has a lot of the same tracks and of course the same mechanics and visuals. There is a route you can choose for a NG+ playthrough which actually introduces completely new dungeons and songs, which after reading up on it, sounds pretty interesting, but I'm not going to force myself through one normal run to experience it.
Finally, to those of you who still want to check it out, I recommend the Reiko route, which based on the story synopsis for the routes available at the start, seems to offer the most content.
(This is the 102nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
1990
(This is the 30th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Silver Surfer is a scrolling shooter released exclusively in NA regions for the NES in November 1990. It was developed by Software Creations (defunct since 2004) and published by Arcadia Systems and it's based on the Marvel Comics character "Silver Surfer".
I have watched my fair share of Marvel movies, have played my fair share of Marvel hero games, but I'm by no means a Marvel expert or anything beyond a novice in Marvel lore. Just a quick glance of Silver Surfer's description however already tells me that the game doesn't really seem to fit the character.
The game is a slow scrolling shooter where you have to fight hordes of enemies from all types of angles, and a single hit kills you. You'd think the sections where nothing happens for a few seconds is great because it gives you a breather, but instead it creates a dichotomy where, in one moment, your forehead is sweating and your finger hurts from pressing A all the time, and in the next, you are bored to tears from sloooowly waiting for the screen to scroll far enough for enemies to appear.
Looking at the Silver Surfer description on Wiki, it says that he can travel faster than light on his surfboard-like craft. Looking at his Marvel Fandom description, it gets even worse. Under Powers, they list "Godlike Strength". In this game, my guy dies by lightly tapping any wall or obstacle, not to mention that, again, HE ONLY HAS ONE HIT POINT.
It is such a weird way to design a scrolling shooter like this and, if it weren't for emulators and their save state capabilities, I definitely wouldn't have been able to experience every stage and the ending of this game. It wouldn't have mattered either way, because the ending sucks, but still.
Wanna know how the ending sucks? Well the story of this game involves Silver Surfer, Galactus (who gives him orders) and an unidentified villain who apparently will destroy the world if Silver Surfer doesn't stop him and some Cosmic Device that Silver Surfer has to assemble. Beat the final boss and Galactus drops a line like "now the Cosmic Device can be ALL MINE", which is a classic final-boss-twist-reveal type of line, right? Instead, Silver Surfer says "No, no one can have it, it's too dangerous, I will hide it" and the game just fucking ends. This game is insignificant enough for this to not matter but it is a fitting ending to a bad game.
Despite the one-hit wonder that is Silver Surfer, I think this game isn't as difficult to beat as some other games I've played out of 1990. I think through enough repetition of maybe 10-15 hours or so, you'll beat this game, but it's really not worth the effort and it doesn't hide the fact that the devs idea of a challenge was to simply make their game unfair and death your first time through inevitable at nearly all moments.
What I did like about the game though is the sound design and a kick ass soundtrack. Graphics didn't look too bad either but most levels didn't look too realistic and especially the over the top levels just were a jumbled mess of assets and colors.
OVERALL
Hard for the sake of being hard without providing a fair or fun challenge. If you want to experience any of this game, I'd recommend just going to YT and looking up the OST of this.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Martin Alessi or EGM, Issue 17 (Dec 90): "The graphics are nothing special, but the soundtrack is absolutely awesome." | A different reviewer from EGM said the "cinema storyline is cool", there literally was nothing in here other than 10 lines of "I've seen this a billion times before, and a million of those did it better" type storytelling, even from a 1990 perspective
- Slo' Mo for GamePro, Issue 20 (Mar 91): "To beat Silver Surfer, you probably have to be an outer space being yourself." | Or have save states
Silver Surfer is a scrolling shooter released exclusively in NA regions for the NES in November 1990. It was developed by Software Creations (defunct since 2004) and published by Arcadia Systems and it's based on the Marvel Comics character "Silver Surfer".
I have watched my fair share of Marvel movies, have played my fair share of Marvel hero games, but I'm by no means a Marvel expert or anything beyond a novice in Marvel lore. Just a quick glance of Silver Surfer's description however already tells me that the game doesn't really seem to fit the character.
The game is a slow scrolling shooter where you have to fight hordes of enemies from all types of angles, and a single hit kills you. You'd think the sections where nothing happens for a few seconds is great because it gives you a breather, but instead it creates a dichotomy where, in one moment, your forehead is sweating and your finger hurts from pressing A all the time, and in the next, you are bored to tears from sloooowly waiting for the screen to scroll far enough for enemies to appear.
Looking at the Silver Surfer description on Wiki, it says that he can travel faster than light on his surfboard-like craft. Looking at his Marvel Fandom description, it gets even worse. Under Powers, they list "Godlike Strength". In this game, my guy dies by lightly tapping any wall or obstacle, not to mention that, again, HE ONLY HAS ONE HIT POINT.
It is such a weird way to design a scrolling shooter like this and, if it weren't for emulators and their save state capabilities, I definitely wouldn't have been able to experience every stage and the ending of this game. It wouldn't have mattered either way, because the ending sucks, but still.
Wanna know how the ending sucks? Well the story of this game involves Silver Surfer, Galactus (who gives him orders) and an unidentified villain who apparently will destroy the world if Silver Surfer doesn't stop him and some Cosmic Device that Silver Surfer has to assemble. Beat the final boss and Galactus drops a line like "now the Cosmic Device can be ALL MINE", which is a classic final-boss-twist-reveal type of line, right? Instead, Silver Surfer says "No, no one can have it, it's too dangerous, I will hide it" and the game just fucking ends. This game is insignificant enough for this to not matter but it is a fitting ending to a bad game.
Despite the one-hit wonder that is Silver Surfer, I think this game isn't as difficult to beat as some other games I've played out of 1990. I think through enough repetition of maybe 10-15 hours or so, you'll beat this game, but it's really not worth the effort and it doesn't hide the fact that the devs idea of a challenge was to simply make their game unfair and death your first time through inevitable at nearly all moments.
What I did like about the game though is the sound design and a kick ass soundtrack. Graphics didn't look too bad either but most levels didn't look too realistic and especially the over the top levels just were a jumbled mess of assets and colors.
OVERALL
Hard for the sake of being hard without providing a fair or fun challenge. If you want to experience any of this game, I'd recommend just going to YT and looking up the OST of this.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Martin Alessi or EGM, Issue 17 (Dec 90): "The graphics are nothing special, but the soundtrack is absolutely awesome." | A different reviewer from EGM said the "cinema storyline is cool", there literally was nothing in here other than 10 lines of "I've seen this a billion times before, and a million of those did it better" type storytelling, even from a 1990 perspective
- Slo' Mo for GamePro, Issue 20 (Mar 91): "To beat Silver Surfer, you probably have to be an outer space being yourself." | Or have save states
1990
(This is the 29th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Game #2 of the release day offerings for SNES release day in Japan. F-Zero is a futuristic racing game developed by Nintendo EAD - developers of the early Super Mario games and Legend of Zelda games as well - and F-Zero is just yet another example of how much talent Nintendo had at the time (still has of course). It released on November 21st, 1990 and seemingly was used to as a tech demo of sorts to show what the SNES is capable of.
Going into this, I had heard of F-Zero before but to be completely honest, though it was a JRPG or something like that and not simply a racing game. To see it mentioned that often for 'just' being a racing game, I thought this must be pretty good. Opening the game up and looking at the title screen, I then started to think that this game was probably popular based on nostalgia and the advancements in technology for racing games will probably make F-Zero a frustrating and bland experience.
Oh boy, was I wrong.
F-Zero has a total of 15 tracks in 3 different "leagues" of 5 tracks each. You choose the league and the difficulty and face off against multiple other cars, though I'll get into that a bit more later. You start with 3 continue's, a full life (power) bar and on track #1. You have to go through 5 laps to finish a track.
During the race, your car can crash into the walls, you can lose power by driving over the edges, which are filled with power-zapping tiles of sorts, and you can bump into other cars, which either throws you into the sides or at worst, has you almost reverse as well.
There are other cars that drive with you, both cars that actually participate in the race and others that just seemingly drive on the track for fun, just so you can bump into them when they stand in your way all the GODDAMN TIME. GET OUT OF THE WAY JACKASS, THIS IS A RACE TRACK!
I can't really say if I enjoyed the existence of these cars for the additional challenge, or if I despised the fact that they made me lose both my speed and my life bar by being so annoying. Oh wait, I can say how I feel, and that is that the existence of these sucked.
The other cars in the race are not that present as these non-racing ones, because the non-racing ones keep spawning and keep doing so in front of you, no matter what place you're in. Out of the other cars that are actually participants, the fastest car (the yellow one) is usually the only one you see after the 2nd lap, unless you crash really bad.
But the game doesn't actually have these cars drive at a certain speed once you get past them, but rather has them show up as soon as you lose your top speed for as little as a second. And once they overtake your spot, they start driving at slower speeds than you again. This means that in reality, you should be 20 seconds in front of the second spot by Lap 5, but instead a tiny crash means you can lose the race even though you just broke your record and had won the race the previous time you tried, where it took you 10 seconds longer. This was pretty annoying because having any car in front of you in these tight tracks meant that you could lose your full power bar within the last two laps simply because the other cars love to screw with you. The controls don't really allow you to crash them into the sides to gain an advantage yourself because unless you're incredibly skilled, it will be YOU who loses control from any kind of contact.
To get one more bad thing out of the way about this otherwise really good racing game, there were a couple maps that I didn't really like but none were as frustrating as the White Land maps. Especially the second one. 10 tries and I still can't make that one jump.
But enough about the bad, let's talk about the good. And there are two things about this game that are really good.
First, it's the pace. The game does a great job of translating pace and if you'd ask me about anything about this game that is timeless, I would have said this is it. However, there is something even more timeless here, and that is the soundtrack. Almost every song here is so good, and I'd almost be inclined to put some of them in the GOATed tier. The Port Town song immediately became a favorite of mine, and after listening to the entire OST on YouTube, I've become a big fan of Big Blue and Fire Field as well.
But going back to the gameplay, the game has really tight controls and plays at a smooth 60 FPS (played it on Steam Deck), and it's really up to your skill on how you perform, though again, those stupid non-racing cars did get me annoyed a lot.
I found myself starting this game up about once a day even though I've "beaten" it for the purposes of this challenge 3 days ago, that's how much fun I'm having with it, and I'm sure the sequels build on this in all the right ways, though I was saddened to see no new F-Zero game in almost two decades.
Finally, I quickly want to mention that the game records your best times for each map, which I think is a great little feature to add to this game, because it gives even more incentive to play these tracks over and over again, and I can only imagine how many hours kids of yore put into beating their own records back in the day.
OVERALL
If you're looking for an old school, fast paced racing game with a great soundtrack, this is it. Especially on a portable device, this is a lot of fun overall.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Ed Semrad or EGM, Issue 25 (Aug 91): "The perspective used really gives [...] a sense of speed and the scrolling is superb."
- Speedy Buns for GamePro, Issue 30 (Jan 92): "F-Zero shows what the SNES can really do, with futuristics racing action and head-spinning 3-D graphics."
Game #2 of the release day offerings for SNES release day in Japan. F-Zero is a futuristic racing game developed by Nintendo EAD - developers of the early Super Mario games and Legend of Zelda games as well - and F-Zero is just yet another example of how much talent Nintendo had at the time (still has of course). It released on November 21st, 1990 and seemingly was used to as a tech demo of sorts to show what the SNES is capable of.
Going into this, I had heard of F-Zero before but to be completely honest, though it was a JRPG or something like that and not simply a racing game. To see it mentioned that often for 'just' being a racing game, I thought this must be pretty good. Opening the game up and looking at the title screen, I then started to think that this game was probably popular based on nostalgia and the advancements in technology for racing games will probably make F-Zero a frustrating and bland experience.
Oh boy, was I wrong.
F-Zero has a total of 15 tracks in 3 different "leagues" of 5 tracks each. You choose the league and the difficulty and face off against multiple other cars, though I'll get into that a bit more later. You start with 3 continue's, a full life (power) bar and on track #1. You have to go through 5 laps to finish a track.
During the race, your car can crash into the walls, you can lose power by driving over the edges, which are filled with power-zapping tiles of sorts, and you can bump into other cars, which either throws you into the sides or at worst, has you almost reverse as well.
There are other cars that drive with you, both cars that actually participate in the race and others that just seemingly drive on the track for fun, just so you can bump into them when they stand in your way all the GODDAMN TIME. GET OUT OF THE WAY JACKASS, THIS IS A RACE TRACK!
I can't really say if I enjoyed the existence of these cars for the additional challenge, or if I despised the fact that they made me lose both my speed and my life bar by being so annoying. Oh wait, I can say how I feel, and that is that the existence of these sucked.
The other cars in the race are not that present as these non-racing ones, because the non-racing ones keep spawning and keep doing so in front of you, no matter what place you're in. Out of the other cars that are actually participants, the fastest car (the yellow one) is usually the only one you see after the 2nd lap, unless you crash really bad.
But the game doesn't actually have these cars drive at a certain speed once you get past them, but rather has them show up as soon as you lose your top speed for as little as a second. And once they overtake your spot, they start driving at slower speeds than you again. This means that in reality, you should be 20 seconds in front of the second spot by Lap 5, but instead a tiny crash means you can lose the race even though you just broke your record and had won the race the previous time you tried, where it took you 10 seconds longer. This was pretty annoying because having any car in front of you in these tight tracks meant that you could lose your full power bar within the last two laps simply because the other cars love to screw with you. The controls don't really allow you to crash them into the sides to gain an advantage yourself because unless you're incredibly skilled, it will be YOU who loses control from any kind of contact.
To get one more bad thing out of the way about this otherwise really good racing game, there were a couple maps that I didn't really like but none were as frustrating as the White Land maps. Especially the second one. 10 tries and I still can't make that one jump.
But enough about the bad, let's talk about the good. And there are two things about this game that are really good.
First, it's the pace. The game does a great job of translating pace and if you'd ask me about anything about this game that is timeless, I would have said this is it. However, there is something even more timeless here, and that is the soundtrack. Almost every song here is so good, and I'd almost be inclined to put some of them in the GOATed tier. The Port Town song immediately became a favorite of mine, and after listening to the entire OST on YouTube, I've become a big fan of Big Blue and Fire Field as well.
But going back to the gameplay, the game has really tight controls and plays at a smooth 60 FPS (played it on Steam Deck), and it's really up to your skill on how you perform, though again, those stupid non-racing cars did get me annoyed a lot.
I found myself starting this game up about once a day even though I've "beaten" it for the purposes of this challenge 3 days ago, that's how much fun I'm having with it, and I'm sure the sequels build on this in all the right ways, though I was saddened to see no new F-Zero game in almost two decades.
Finally, I quickly want to mention that the game records your best times for each map, which I think is a great little feature to add to this game, because it gives even more incentive to play these tracks over and over again, and I can only imagine how many hours kids of yore put into beating their own records back in the day.
OVERALL
If you're looking for an old school, fast paced racing game with a great soundtrack, this is it. Especially on a portable device, this is a lot of fun overall.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Ed Semrad or EGM, Issue 25 (Aug 91): "The perspective used really gives [...] a sense of speed and the scrolling is superb."
- Speedy Buns for GamePro, Issue 30 (Jan 92): "F-Zero shows what the SNES can really do, with futuristics racing action and head-spinning 3-D graphics."
1991
(This is the 40th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
This review of Battletoads comes months after I initially played the game, as I took a break from the challenge shortly after, so I might be iffy on some details in this review. One thing I know for sure though is that I was impressed by it and how, in a lot of ways, Battletoads did things I have not seen any other game do up to this point. At the same time, it's ridiculously difficult, which is counterintuitive when the developers clearly put a lot of energy and passion into creating all the levels this game has on offer.
Battletoads released on June 1, 1991 for the NES and later got released for the Sega Mega Drive, Game Gear and Game Boy. It's a beat 'em up / platformer game, was developed by Rare and just a few years ago, in 2020, actually got a reboot, but released to an underwhelming reception. One thing that is critized about the reboot is that it lacks the difficulty of the original, however, having played the original, I can't say that in itself is a bad thing, considering that this game goes way overboard with that. But if you want to reboot a game like this and take advantage of the name recognition among its fans, you need to realize that those fans most likely remember this game FOR its difficulty, so I guess that criticism is justified in that regard.
However, all my thoughts about the game you can find in my review below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10
There is very little story here apart from the set-up. There are three Battletoads called Pimple, Zitz and Rash. Yeah I know, very endearing names. They are escorting Princess Angelica. Pimple and Princess Angelica find themselves kidnapped by the Dark Queen and her gang, so Rash and Zitz are sent to rescue them. Rash and Zitz are differentiated in color but in this game, there aren't really any other differences between the two. The SNES game that released in 1993 actually gives each character different powers.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
This is a very fun game to play, at least over the first third/half of the game. Most levels are actually unique in design, in some you just beat up enemies, in one you climb down a "wookie hole" and fight enemies whilst hanging from a rope, then there is an ice level where you dodge rocks and throw snowballs, a level where you surf, where you climb snakes, where you have to quickly run through tubes while large gears try to mow you down and much, much more. There is incredible variety here, and so much creativity in the design of each level, that you just have to wonder why they decided to make this game so difficult.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Battletoads would have done just fine, if its levels were actually beatable without having to spend dozens and dozens of hours to collect the muscle memory to beat this thing. For the majority of players,, most of the levels this game has to offer will simply be unachievable, whether through lack of skill or 'willpower', though I'd rather call it thickheadedness to put oneself through the torture of perfecting every button press in order to win.
In one level for example, you have to race a rat to the bottom of the map. The rat is so fast, that you simply will not beat it unless you figure out when exactly to move exactly where in the exact millisecond to avoid losing momentum. I simply could not do it after hours. That includes using an emulator and rewinding every time to try and get it down perfectly. To think that people had to do it through trial and error and with limited continues, and the thought of that just makes me nauseous.
Somehow, I got to the next level however, which is actually the penultimate level in this game. Here, you hold on to a tire and have to run away from a lollipop-like looking circle that rushes after you. To not lose your speed, you need to move left, right, up and down through many many corners and have to press the appropriate button at the exact moment that you reach the edge of the line that you are currently driving on. Miss it by a tiny bit and you already lose speed and I think just a couple of those misses are already enough to have you be outrun and overrun. It's just brutal and a little more leeway would still have this game last many hours, but actually be beatable in a proper amount of time.
As it is, the game is incredibly varied in its level design, a lot of fun, but incredibly frustrating altogether.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
There is no voice acting. Both the music and sounds are not really anything special in my opinion as far as the NES goes. Playing this game for dozens of hours to beat it will of course burn the music for the first few levels into the players brains, and I personally found the first few songs to be the best (best being slightly above average) but the overall soundtrack to be average, if not below average.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
This game looks good graphically for an NES game. Where it is very good is in the sprite quality and especially in its animation. I chuckled the first time I saw Rash's jaw literally drop to the floor when he saw a strong enemy. But even apart from that, good animation work is omnipresent in this game and it definitely adds a lot to the presentation here.
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The vibes in this game are pretty positive based on the presentation. Sounds, graphical design, level design and soundtrack combine to trick you into thinking this will be a fun little affair, but then you add the difficulty to the mix, which we frankly have to as it is such a big factor in this game, and it starts to get a little weird. I can't tell if it's positive or negative weird.
CONTENT | 5/10
On the one hand, I want to give a much better score here because the content is so varied and original, but on the other hand, the majority of these levels come with the caveat that they are simply very, very tough to beat without hours and hours of frustration and/or the use of the rewind feature of an emulator of your choosing.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
I got similar feelings here as in the "content" section, however, I'm gonna be a bit more friendly here because the levels are just that creative. You gotta think though, was the design choice to make it so difficult made before the levels were designed or after? Either way, I'd like to know what the devs who designed these thought about the choice to make the game so difficult, because it really is a waste of the creativity and passion put on display here for the latter levels.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
Few games are these varied and creative during this time period of gaming, especially amongst platformers. Many devs however chose to make their games more difficult than they would in a world where making games last longer without the added difficulty had been possible.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
Unless you're a masochist, you're not replaying this after/if you beat it.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 64/100
A fantastic showcase of how creative developers were at this time in video gaming history. They pulled a lot out of the NES and then some, made each level unique, put a lot of love and attention to detail, only to decide to make this game tough as nails and not allow most of the players to even see the majority of levels the devs spent so much time on designing. Very weird, but it's clear why Battletoads has its hardcore fans. I'd say absolutely check it out, but don't be surprised if you don't make it far before you drop it.
This review of Battletoads comes months after I initially played the game, as I took a break from the challenge shortly after, so I might be iffy on some details in this review. One thing I know for sure though is that I was impressed by it and how, in a lot of ways, Battletoads did things I have not seen any other game do up to this point. At the same time, it's ridiculously difficult, which is counterintuitive when the developers clearly put a lot of energy and passion into creating all the levels this game has on offer.
Battletoads released on June 1, 1991 for the NES and later got released for the Sega Mega Drive, Game Gear and Game Boy. It's a beat 'em up / platformer game, was developed by Rare and just a few years ago, in 2020, actually got a reboot, but released to an underwhelming reception. One thing that is critized about the reboot is that it lacks the difficulty of the original, however, having played the original, I can't say that in itself is a bad thing, considering that this game goes way overboard with that. But if you want to reboot a game like this and take advantage of the name recognition among its fans, you need to realize that those fans most likely remember this game FOR its difficulty, so I guess that criticism is justified in that regard.
However, all my thoughts about the game you can find in my review below.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10
There is very little story here apart from the set-up. There are three Battletoads called Pimple, Zitz and Rash. Yeah I know, very endearing names. They are escorting Princess Angelica. Pimple and Princess Angelica find themselves kidnapped by the Dark Queen and her gang, so Rash and Zitz are sent to rescue them. Rash and Zitz are differentiated in color but in this game, there aren't really any other differences between the two. The SNES game that released in 1993 actually gives each character different powers.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
This is a very fun game to play, at least over the first third/half of the game. Most levels are actually unique in design, in some you just beat up enemies, in one you climb down a "wookie hole" and fight enemies whilst hanging from a rope, then there is an ice level where you dodge rocks and throw snowballs, a level where you surf, where you climb snakes, where you have to quickly run through tubes while large gears try to mow you down and much, much more. There is incredible variety here, and so much creativity in the design of each level, that you just have to wonder why they decided to make this game so difficult.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Battletoads would have done just fine, if its levels were actually beatable without having to spend dozens and dozens of hours to collect the muscle memory to beat this thing. For the majority of players,, most of the levels this game has to offer will simply be unachievable, whether through lack of skill or 'willpower', though I'd rather call it thickheadedness to put oneself through the torture of perfecting every button press in order to win.
In one level for example, you have to race a rat to the bottom of the map. The rat is so fast, that you simply will not beat it unless you figure out when exactly to move exactly where in the exact millisecond to avoid losing momentum. I simply could not do it after hours. That includes using an emulator and rewinding every time to try and get it down perfectly. To think that people had to do it through trial and error and with limited continues, and the thought of that just makes me nauseous.
Somehow, I got to the next level however, which is actually the penultimate level in this game. Here, you hold on to a tire and have to run away from a lollipop-like looking circle that rushes after you. To not lose your speed, you need to move left, right, up and down through many many corners and have to press the appropriate button at the exact moment that you reach the edge of the line that you are currently driving on. Miss it by a tiny bit and you already lose speed and I think just a couple of those misses are already enough to have you be outrun and overrun. It's just brutal and a little more leeway would still have this game last many hours, but actually be beatable in a proper amount of time.
As it is, the game is incredibly varied in its level design, a lot of fun, but incredibly frustrating altogether.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
There is no voice acting. Both the music and sounds are not really anything special in my opinion as far as the NES goes. Playing this game for dozens of hours to beat it will of course burn the music for the first few levels into the players brains, and I personally found the first few songs to be the best (best being slightly above average) but the overall soundtrack to be average, if not below average.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
This game looks good graphically for an NES game. Where it is very good is in the sprite quality and especially in its animation. I chuckled the first time I saw Rash's jaw literally drop to the floor when he saw a strong enemy. But even apart from that, good animation work is omnipresent in this game and it definitely adds a lot to the presentation here.
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
The vibes in this game are pretty positive based on the presentation. Sounds, graphical design, level design and soundtrack combine to trick you into thinking this will be a fun little affair, but then you add the difficulty to the mix, which we frankly have to as it is such a big factor in this game, and it starts to get a little weird. I can't tell if it's positive or negative weird.
CONTENT | 5/10
On the one hand, I want to give a much better score here because the content is so varied and original, but on the other hand, the majority of these levels come with the caveat that they are simply very, very tough to beat without hours and hours of frustration and/or the use of the rewind feature of an emulator of your choosing.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
I got similar feelings here as in the "content" section, however, I'm gonna be a bit more friendly here because the levels are just that creative. You gotta think though, was the design choice to make it so difficult made before the levels were designed or after? Either way, I'd like to know what the devs who designed these thought about the choice to make the game so difficult, because it really is a waste of the creativity and passion put on display here for the latter levels.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
Few games are these varied and creative during this time period of gaming, especially amongst platformers. Many devs however chose to make their games more difficult than they would in a world where making games last longer without the added difficulty had been possible.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
Unless you're a masochist, you're not replaying this after/if you beat it.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 64/100
A fantastic showcase of how creative developers were at this time in video gaming history. They pulled a lot out of the NES and then some, made each level unique, put a lot of love and attention to detail, only to decide to make this game tough as nails and not allow most of the players to even see the majority of levels the devs spent so much time on designing. Very weird, but it's clear why Battletoads has its hardcore fans. I'd say absolutely check it out, but don't be surprised if you don't make it far before you drop it.
I have now played 5 Spider-Man games starting in 1990 as part of this challenge I'm doing. The previous 4 are among the worst rated games I've played in my life, 2 of which I'd consider worst and second worst as part of this challenge for sure. Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six is another absolutely horrendous crap taken on everyone's favorite wall-crawler, and I am now one game away from having my own Sinister Six of shit Spider-Man video games of the early 90s. Awesome!
This game is another one by Bits Studios, which is slowly but surely turning into my most disliked development studio (I didn't even consider disliking one before this day) and I'm not at all surprised that they went out of business in 2008. It doesn't help that the publishers behind this are Acclaim Entertainment, who were behind two of the other 4 Spider-Man games I've played. They literally got the licensing rights just to slap his name on a video game cartridge, make no effort whatsoever to have the games even feel like Spider-Man games, and just profit from all those kids who love Spidey from the comics and are blinded by his appearance on both cover and title. These games were literal cash-grabs, and while I give this no thought again until the next, likely terrible, Spider-Man game I'll play (because I'll play them all damnit!), I just want to use this opportunity to say that Acclaim Entertainment can RIP where the P does not stand for peace, as they went bankrupt in 2004.
Now with that rant out of the way, let's get into why Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, which released in October 1992, is another brutally bad Spider-Man game. First off, let's go over the same points of criticism I can give you for all Bits Studios / LJN / Acclaim Entertainment Spider-Man games. Spidey looks like he is suffering from a disc prolapse in all of these games due to his weird hunched forward posture. His movement is odd at best, he controls like crap and he controls like crap. Oh I mentioned that twice? How did that happen?
The game, at least on the NES (the Game Gear version looks very slightly better), looks terrible. Bright green and bright red dominate the first stage, blinding red was used for one later stage for no good reason, sprites look bad, environments look (1) bland at best and (2) unrealistically designed and half the time, you have no idea if you are jumping on top of a platform that you can actually stand on or if it is supposed to be part of the background.
The soundtrack, which has some OK tracks, is the highlight of this game and that's not supposed to be a compliment. The lowlight on the other hand is the aforementioned controls. You can jump up. You can jump up higher if you hold down the jump button. You can also move while in air, at least that's something, but only in the direction that you're facing. That's somewhat more realistic, but stupid for a video game. You can sommersault forward as well, you can climb up walls and chains and you can shoot webs, if you have enough web fluid. Most of the time, you don't, like in some of the other Spider-Man games, and I ask once again, why make a Spider-Man game where you barely ever have any web fluid?
Spider-Man can do web-swinging here as well, but the controls here are so bad. You have to press B to jump, hold it and then press A to release the web and try to connect it to something. All this does though is let you swing left to right. You won't get up to a higher platform this way, limiting its use significantly. Letting go also doesn't carry you forward thanks to momentum, but instead drops you straight down. There were multiple occasions where I fell to a lower platform, and I literally could not bring myself back up by jumping or using the web. I suspect there are literal game-breaking pits that you can not fall into, if you ever want to get back up, but I suspect I won't find my answer to that officially because I doubt anyone cares enough about this game to share that anywhere on the internet, and I'm not gonna spend more than the 5 minutes I did unsuccessfully trying to get out.
Then there is the combat. You press A and do a punch. You double tap A and the punch animation gets cancelled for a jump-kick. This catapults you forward as well, so when you are near an enemy and frantically press A twice, you do the jump-kick instead of punching, which not only carries you past the enemy, but also happens above most enemies head, so you can't even touch them. Punches don't connect half the time unless you press it from the exact correct angle, and if you do connect, enemies blow up into a thousand pieces. That's right, Spider-Man kills in this game, and he does so non-stop. Try to find another studio that gives as few fucks about Spider-Man as Bits Studios, I dare you.
The story is explained in two sentences. Dr. Octopus wants to rule the world, so he calls on the Sinister Six, Electro, Mysterio, Hobgoblin, the Sandman, Vulture and himself. No one can stand in their way apparently, only Spider-Man. Done. Unlike the Game Boy games, especially the first one that was not developed by Bits Studios but rather by Rare, this game has 0 charm in its presentation. There are no cutscenes, no witty dialogue between Spidey and the villains, nothing. You finish a level, a simple image is showing the next boss with a sentence like "Sandman appears with a fist of fury" and off you go to the next level. It's just bad and shows how little Bits Studios cared when making this.
Finally, I want to touch upon the boss fights. My god. I didn't beat the game because the controls were doing my head in, but the first boss fight itself should tell you all you need to know about how much thought went into them. You fight Electro, but you actually don't. What I mean by that is that you stand there while Electro is simply chilling at the bottom of the screen and out of reach. Sometimes he decides to pay you a visit and come up, at which point you need to fight both him and the controls to somehow successfully jump-kick him, and while I did eventually just beat him on my first attempt, I can't say I have experienced boss fights that were much worse before. I suppose what the devs wanted to accomplish was for Electro to be out of range and shoot his lightning bolts at you, but it ends up looking like the game is bugged and he is flying around somewhere where he shouldn't. It doesn't help that he is literally under the platforms in a 2D game, which just would make no sense, but it doesn't matter because this all just sucked from start to finish.
To conclude, if you like to torture yourself with terrible Spider-Man games that aren't even bad in a funny sense, give these 1990 to 1992 Spider-Man games a try, but something tells me 1993 won't deliver different quality here. Oh wait, there is another game in 1992 already, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge... Why am I doing this to myself again?
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10
- Story is explained briefly in the manual and opening in-game screen
- Stages start with the boss introducing himself in one short, uninspired sentence
- Spider-Man kills dozens of enemies in this game and has no dialogue, rendering him a soulless guy in a red suit
GAMEPLAY | 4/20
- Controls are horrendous
- You rarely find web fluid and its uses are very limited
- Boss fights are just sad
- Spider-Man just feels like a name given to a random protagonist
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 4/10
- No voice acting
- Sound design ranges from OK to terrible. The sound of rats is haunting, especially when you are stuck next to them trying to get a handle of these darn controls
- Soundtrack is OK, with at least some tracks that don't make me want to turn the sound off completely
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 2/10
- Graphics are straight up ugly
- Spider-Man looks like an old guy with back problems and all sprites look bad
- Why did they choose to go with super-bright green and red colors? And did their little children draw the backgrounds?
ATMOSPHERE | 2/10
- Locations just feel like random places that have no realistic properties
- The Spider-Man license is also noticeable thanks to the enemies names, the ugly portrayal of Spider-Man and his web-swinging ability
CONTENT | 1/10
- 6 bosses with their own levels with multiple stages
- The game's biggest offense is that it exists in the first place
- None of the content is fun to engage with
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 2/10
- I guess there is some visual variety at places, even if it is hideous
- There are walls placed that you can crawl, crates in mid-air that you can web-swing off of I suppose
- I can literally not come up with another quarter-compliment
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 1/10
- This is the worst kind of your typical NES platformer
- I imagine this is what gaming would look like if Nintendo didn't save the industry
- This game is so conceptually bad that they didn't even bother to make use of the Spider-Man licence
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
- Zero replay value
PLAYABILITY | 3/5
- The controls make this nearly unplayable at times
- I literally could not get out of certain holes because I couldn't jump far enough and the web-swinging ability just did not allow me to reach a higher platform
OVERALL | 21/100
Congratulations to Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, which just became the worst-rated game of this challenge, beating out a Spider-Man game, which had previously beaten a different Spider-Man game. Man, the video game industry did a number on this guy. Actually, it mainly was LJN / Acclaim Entertainment published games that did the deed.
(This is the 75th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
This game is another one by Bits Studios, which is slowly but surely turning into my most disliked development studio (I didn't even consider disliking one before this day) and I'm not at all surprised that they went out of business in 2008. It doesn't help that the publishers behind this are Acclaim Entertainment, who were behind two of the other 4 Spider-Man games I've played. They literally got the licensing rights just to slap his name on a video game cartridge, make no effort whatsoever to have the games even feel like Spider-Man games, and just profit from all those kids who love Spidey from the comics and are blinded by his appearance on both cover and title. These games were literal cash-grabs, and while I give this no thought again until the next, likely terrible, Spider-Man game I'll play (because I'll play them all damnit!), I just want to use this opportunity to say that Acclaim Entertainment can RIP where the P does not stand for peace, as they went bankrupt in 2004.
Now with that rant out of the way, let's get into why Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, which released in October 1992, is another brutally bad Spider-Man game. First off, let's go over the same points of criticism I can give you for all Bits Studios / LJN / Acclaim Entertainment Spider-Man games. Spidey looks like he is suffering from a disc prolapse in all of these games due to his weird hunched forward posture. His movement is odd at best, he controls like crap and he controls like crap. Oh I mentioned that twice? How did that happen?
The game, at least on the NES (the Game Gear version looks very slightly better), looks terrible. Bright green and bright red dominate the first stage, blinding red was used for one later stage for no good reason, sprites look bad, environments look (1) bland at best and (2) unrealistically designed and half the time, you have no idea if you are jumping on top of a platform that you can actually stand on or if it is supposed to be part of the background.
The soundtrack, which has some OK tracks, is the highlight of this game and that's not supposed to be a compliment. The lowlight on the other hand is the aforementioned controls. You can jump up. You can jump up higher if you hold down the jump button. You can also move while in air, at least that's something, but only in the direction that you're facing. That's somewhat more realistic, but stupid for a video game. You can sommersault forward as well, you can climb up walls and chains and you can shoot webs, if you have enough web fluid. Most of the time, you don't, like in some of the other Spider-Man games, and I ask once again, why make a Spider-Man game where you barely ever have any web fluid?
Spider-Man can do web-swinging here as well, but the controls here are so bad. You have to press B to jump, hold it and then press A to release the web and try to connect it to something. All this does though is let you swing left to right. You won't get up to a higher platform this way, limiting its use significantly. Letting go also doesn't carry you forward thanks to momentum, but instead drops you straight down. There were multiple occasions where I fell to a lower platform, and I literally could not bring myself back up by jumping or using the web. I suspect there are literal game-breaking pits that you can not fall into, if you ever want to get back up, but I suspect I won't find my answer to that officially because I doubt anyone cares enough about this game to share that anywhere on the internet, and I'm not gonna spend more than the 5 minutes I did unsuccessfully trying to get out.
Then there is the combat. You press A and do a punch. You double tap A and the punch animation gets cancelled for a jump-kick. This catapults you forward as well, so when you are near an enemy and frantically press A twice, you do the jump-kick instead of punching, which not only carries you past the enemy, but also happens above most enemies head, so you can't even touch them. Punches don't connect half the time unless you press it from the exact correct angle, and if you do connect, enemies blow up into a thousand pieces. That's right, Spider-Man kills in this game, and he does so non-stop. Try to find another studio that gives as few fucks about Spider-Man as Bits Studios, I dare you.
The story is explained in two sentences. Dr. Octopus wants to rule the world, so he calls on the Sinister Six, Electro, Mysterio, Hobgoblin, the Sandman, Vulture and himself. No one can stand in their way apparently, only Spider-Man. Done. Unlike the Game Boy games, especially the first one that was not developed by Bits Studios but rather by Rare, this game has 0 charm in its presentation. There are no cutscenes, no witty dialogue between Spidey and the villains, nothing. You finish a level, a simple image is showing the next boss with a sentence like "Sandman appears with a fist of fury" and off you go to the next level. It's just bad and shows how little Bits Studios cared when making this.
Finally, I want to touch upon the boss fights. My god. I didn't beat the game because the controls were doing my head in, but the first boss fight itself should tell you all you need to know about how much thought went into them. You fight Electro, but you actually don't. What I mean by that is that you stand there while Electro is simply chilling at the bottom of the screen and out of reach. Sometimes he decides to pay you a visit and come up, at which point you need to fight both him and the controls to somehow successfully jump-kick him, and while I did eventually just beat him on my first attempt, I can't say I have experienced boss fights that were much worse before. I suppose what the devs wanted to accomplish was for Electro to be out of range and shoot his lightning bolts at you, but it ends up looking like the game is bugged and he is flying around somewhere where he shouldn't. It doesn't help that he is literally under the platforms in a 2D game, which just would make no sense, but it doesn't matter because this all just sucked from start to finish.
To conclude, if you like to torture yourself with terrible Spider-Man games that aren't even bad in a funny sense, give these 1990 to 1992 Spider-Man games a try, but something tells me 1993 won't deliver different quality here. Oh wait, there is another game in 1992 already, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge... Why am I doing this to myself again?
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10
- Story is explained briefly in the manual and opening in-game screen
- Stages start with the boss introducing himself in one short, uninspired sentence
- Spider-Man kills dozens of enemies in this game and has no dialogue, rendering him a soulless guy in a red suit
GAMEPLAY | 4/20
- Controls are horrendous
- You rarely find web fluid and its uses are very limited
- Boss fights are just sad
- Spider-Man just feels like a name given to a random protagonist
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 4/10
- No voice acting
- Sound design ranges from OK to terrible. The sound of rats is haunting, especially when you are stuck next to them trying to get a handle of these darn controls
- Soundtrack is OK, with at least some tracks that don't make me want to turn the sound off completely
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 2/10
- Graphics are straight up ugly
- Spider-Man looks like an old guy with back problems and all sprites look bad
- Why did they choose to go with super-bright green and red colors? And did their little children draw the backgrounds?
ATMOSPHERE | 2/10
- Locations just feel like random places that have no realistic properties
- The Spider-Man license is also noticeable thanks to the enemies names, the ugly portrayal of Spider-Man and his web-swinging ability
CONTENT | 1/10
- 6 bosses with their own levels with multiple stages
- The game's biggest offense is that it exists in the first place
- None of the content is fun to engage with
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 2/10
- I guess there is some visual variety at places, even if it is hideous
- There are walls placed that you can crawl, crates in mid-air that you can web-swing off of I suppose
- I can literally not come up with another quarter-compliment
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 1/10
- This is the worst kind of your typical NES platformer
- I imagine this is what gaming would look like if Nintendo didn't save the industry
- This game is so conceptually bad that they didn't even bother to make use of the Spider-Man licence
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
- Zero replay value
PLAYABILITY | 3/5
- The controls make this nearly unplayable at times
- I literally could not get out of certain holes because I couldn't jump far enough and the web-swinging ability just did not allow me to reach a higher platform
OVERALL | 21/100
Congratulations to Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, which just became the worst-rated game of this challenge, beating out a Spider-Man game, which had previously beaten a different Spider-Man game. Man, the video game industry did a number on this guy. Actually, it mainly was LJN / Acclaim Entertainment published games that did the deed.
(This is the 75th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)