fe17
1992
As for a lot of gamers, I am a big fan of Hideo Kojima's work. Not just because I find it of high quality and a lot of fun to engage with, but because these days, he is among few AAA game directors who truly try to make unique video games. Not those "focus-grouped to death" copies of each other with a different coat of paint to appear as mainstream as possible, but once in a lifetime experiences where he doesn't care whether it is universally praised or not. See Death Stranding for example, a game literally about making deliveries from Point A to B. Go into it deeper and you will find a way more profound experience with a lot of commentary on modern society (scarily apt during the pandemic that started a year after its release as well), and personally I found the gameplay to be a lot of fun as well.
Just as Hideo Kojima's work over the past couple decades is unique to the AAA video game industry to this day, his work in 1988 with SNATCHER is unique to this day's Hideo Kojima. It's not an Action blockbuster like the Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding games, but it's rather a game in a genre of games Hideo Kojima enjoyed during his own formative years, the visual novel / crime mystery genre that was somewhat popular in Japan at the time.
Snatcher released initially on November 26, 1988 for the PC-8801 and the MSX2, two Japanese personal computers. It then released in a "remade" version on October 23, 1992 for the PC-Engine (exclusively for the Japanese version of the TurboGrafx-16) before it finally got an English release in December 15, 1994 for the Sega CD, which is the excuse I used to add it to my playlist for the challenge I am currently doing. To be honest, I have no idea how it came about to release this game in the West after not having done so in the 6 years prior, especially since the spritual successor 'Policenauts', which also released in 1994, did not get a Western release. But, thankfully, it happened, and with voice acting to boot. These games have a cult following these days and after having finished Snatcher, you can count me in among those who would be happy to see Hideo Kojima do another game of this type as some sort of side project during these modern times.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
If you decide to play Snatcher, you will probably do so to mainly experience its story. If that is not your expectation going in, I'm sure it will quickly become what will hold your attention, as the gameplay is rather typical for a visual novel. It's mainly clicking at prompts and listening to dialogue.
So with that being the case, delivering an interesting story full of interesting characters, plot twists and tense moments is quite important for this game to be worth playing. Luckily, the game delivers on all fronts thanks to its cyberpunk setting filled with a lot of well thoughtout, interesting lore, its compelling premise and its cast of characters.
50 years ago, the explosion of a biological weapon in a research facility near Moscow called "Lucifer-Alpha" killed over half of the world's population in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In the present, a new city on an artificial island in Eastern Asia was made and is called "Neo Kobe City", a melting pot of cultures due to large number of immigrants from China, the USA, Eastern and Western Europe and even more areas of the world. Mankind faces a new dilemma due to the appearance of humanoid robots that are called "Snatchers", because they 'snatch' a person (kill and dispose of them) and take up their spot. They can't be detected due to the fact that they breathe, bleed and sweat like any human and even wear artifical skin to look exactly like the person they are copying. They mainly snatch VIP types however, which presumably means that their appearance goes beyond "AI gone rogue".
You play Gillian Seed, who, along with your wife, is an amnesiac and just got assigned to the JUNKERs, a special anti-Snatcher task force (Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger). Your assignment is to be a runner, an in-field operative taking on the highest of risks by facing these Snatchers head on and eliminating them. To do this, you are assigned a Navigator, a robot that assists you on the field. Navigators get their personalities formed somewhat after the Junker they are assigned to, so yours. Your navigator is called "Metal Gear Mk. II", designed after the "Metal Gear menace from the 20th century", so yes, this seems to play in an alternate future of the Metal Gear universe.
This game is a visual novel, so gameplay looks like this. The first screen you see is that of the Junker HQ reception. A panel of prompts appears at the bottom half of the screen. You can "Look" at things, "Investigate" things, "Talk" and "Ask" if a person is in the room with you and also look at your "Possessions" to "look" and "investigate" them as well. Looking at things and investigating things is different in that investigating them is more analytical. You are often meant to look and investigate things multiple times, as each time reveals new information and thoughts. Some of these options are optionable if you want to get immersed more deeply with your surroundings, and some you are meant to use to trigger a moment that lets you progress, such as uncovering a new clue. As someone who likes to get immersed as much as possible, I have used every single option as many times as I could (at least I think), which not only does what I just told you, but also triggered a few "hidden" moments that I found quite entertaining. In one part of the city for example, Gillian attempts to "pick up women" and if you do so multiple times, one woman turns out to be a Snatcher, which triggers a "Game Over?" screen before it is revealed that Gillian was just daydreaming.
Gillian Seed in general is a pretty odd fellow, though he is more of a poster-boy for how Kojima seemingly wanted the game's atmosphere to be more humane to balance out the fact that Snatchers dominate everything else in this game. Gillian is an amnesiac as mentioned and has a wife called "Jamie", though they don't remember each other. He likes to use humor whenever possible to lower the tension that the entire case and his occupation represents, though balances that out with a get shit done attitude when the situation requires it. The non-serious part of his personality would have felt a bit too "in your face" however, if he wasn't assisted by Metal Gear Mk. 2, who steals the show in this game in my opinion. Both the voice acting and the personality of Metal Gear is perfection, as Metal Gear uses his analytical makeup to save Gillian's butt countless times on the field, but also roasts him every chance he gets when they get a break from the Snatcher-hunting they do. For a guy like Gillian who I can only describe as a "creep" for most parts of the game, I think it was a great idea to have him be accompanied by someone like Metal Gear who keeps him in line as much as possible. I say "creep" because there are 3 female side characters and several other female NPCs in this game, and I don't think there was a single one Gillian didn't make a pass at. For one, you can "look" at any character several times, and doing so once illicits a "she looks great" type response from Gilliant, while doing so more than once prompts the women to say that they feel uncomfortable, which doesn't stop Gillian from making way more straightforward remarks about their apperance. Now don't get me wrong, this type of behavior doesn't usually weird me out and I can see it for what it is, which is entertainment. But with Gillian, it's different. For one, he has a wife, which you can call in this game to tell her how much you want to get to know and to love her again. This creates a very weird situation where Gillian talks to Jamie on the phone, only to flirt with several women over the next hour alone. Second, one of the women includes the 18-year old daughter of a fallen co-worker, who is 14 in Japan's version of the game, so that Gillian doesn't know boundaries whatsoever is pretty off-putting. Otherwise though, his attempts at flirtation are mainly meant to be humorous, and it works since he gets shot down constantly (and gets ridiculed by Metal Gear for it), but on his own he doesn't make a great main character because his personality is mainly doing this shtick.
Apart from Metal Gear, who is the best character in the game for me, there are several individuals who have this mysterious aura around them, like there is more to them than you'd think. Harry the engineer is one of these types, but it extends to the Chief of the JUNKER operation, a bounty hunter named Random Hajile, your wife Jamie, an informer you talk to several times, and Gibson, the only other JUNKER who currently works as a runner alongside you.
With that, I want to get to the main story. I don't want to spoil anything, and in general I think the big story beats flow at a great pace and introduce a lot of twists and memorable moments. However, there is one flaw to the premise of the story that I found to be pretty odd. Actually, there were several over the first couple of hours, but it is worth noting that the plot cleared up plenty of questions I had and actually answered them in a quite satisfactory manner. This one issue that remains though is that this JUNKER operation seems pathetically tiny considering that the "Snatcher menace" presents a huge issue to all of mankind. ALL OF MANKIND. Meanwhile, here you are in the secret JUNKER operation tasked with stopping it and all you have is 5 (five) measly people working there, including just two actual runners. What? Even if Snatchers would snatch up everyday folk, this would be unrealistic, but when VIPs are exclusively involved, you'd think more monetary efforts would be made to make sure the menace was eradicated asap. The game does have an answer to this worry later on at least somewhat I suppose, but I still think that is too unrealistic to have two guys do all the work.
That said, if you enjoy a good mystery story, if you enjoy visual novels and if you like the cyberpunk aesthetic, I think you will enjoy the story that this game tells. It's well executed, I never felt like the game dragged with filler moments and the plot twists were well executed. The pre-1992 version had only 2 acts, but while this version comes with an additional third, which turns this game from one with a cliffhanger ending to one with a complete story. Knowing this, the third act did feel slightly out of place, as the majority of it involves listening to dialogue instead of much player input when it comes to investigation or the like, but the act does end things on a satisfactory note, so I'm glad it's there to give the player a full story to enjoy, though it does leave some room for a sequel.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
This is a visual novel, though not exactly like most modern ones. Instead of listening to a story and just clicking the A/X button to read the next lines, you select options to look at and investigate, so you are constantly involved with what the next set of lines of dialogue will focus on, keeping you more engaged. But of course, gameplay is a low priority in this game overall.
There is only one part about this game that has true gameplay, which is the game's light gun sections. In a 3x3 grid akin to a game of whack-a-mole, enemies appear in one of the 9 spots and you need to quickly react and aim and shoot at the part of the grid that they are on. This is a pretty small part of the game and I found it to be appear just the perfect number of times over the course of the game. I didn't fail once, but I've read that some found these parts to be kind of difficult. There is a rush of enemies in one late-game section of this, which might give you some trouble, if you are slower on the buttons, but I'm not nearly the fastest and got by with plenty of health remaining.
With visual novels, I find that the quality of the story makes the gameplay more or less tolerable, and since I found the story to be so good, I enjoyed taking my time with this one. This involved choosing every option to investigate multiple times, even to just trigger some optional dialogue from the characters.
You don't just choose options however. First, to find clues and progress, you often need to choose specific options multiple times. The order you would usually choose is to look at something and then to investigate. Sometimes though, you look, investigate and then have to look again to trigger an event, which was a weird way to do things, so be wary of this. That said, asking the player to be thorough is not a bad thing on its own, as reading through all the lines that are available adds to the overall context that the player gets.
One final part of the gameplay here are the puzzles. Often, you need to input answers, such as the password to talk to an informant, the name of a person, the really contrived "Oleen" puzzle and more. If a puzzle gives you any trouble, the game guides you to the answer pretty nicely, so don't worry about not figuring them out.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
This game has voice acting!!! An anomaly for games that I play as part of this retro challenge I'm doing. Of course, it's less unique for Sega CD titles, but still a very new thing for video games at the time. Due to this, I was expecting terrible performances, but the majority of characters are genuinely well voiced. These of course do not compare to today's quality, but for 1994, they don't take away from the experience. Some voices I thought didn't really have much emotion in them, such as the voice of Katrina, while the voice actress for Metal Gear did a fantastic job in my opinion. It's a good performance from the cast overall, with some high and low points.
The soundtrack of this game has a very unique sound to it in my opinion, and I mean that in a positive way. This is a cyberpunk / cyber noir themed game, and while I couldn't have told you what that sounded like beforehand, I think the game nails that atmosphere really well. The track that plays when shit hits the fan really gets you off your seat and ready to investigate the crap out of the place you're in, while I have no doubt that I will remember some tracks (like the Junker HQ one) years and years down the line. Liked it a lot overall.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Snatcher has a great cyberpunk aesthetic. Whether its the neon-lit Neo Kobe City, the run-down slums in the otherwise high-tech environment or the presentation of the Snatchers, it has a great visual style, timeless you could even say. The game features some pretty gory sections (decapacitated humans, dead animals), so if you don't like that sort of stuff, stay away. For me, it added a lot to the legitimacy of the Snatcher threat and was not used too much as to be tactless. The presentation of the screens in this game looks pretty good in this remade version of the game, though they are simple-looking for the most part, as the majority of screens had little to no actual movement in them but rather remained still. This didn't take away from the cinematics however, which were well done despite the visual limitations the game had to work with.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Incredibly atmospheric. Cyber noir is presenting "technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality", and that fits the game's theme perfectly. It's a story about humanity's lack of trust in one another and how it is one of our biggest flaws, and it carries that from its beginning all the way to the end. Heck, due to suffering from amnesia, Gillian is partly defined by this, though he hardly is the only one here. The game portrays this theme well several times throughout the game. The cyberpunk part of the cyber noir theme is also well represented here, with the contrast of high tech and the rich parts of Neo Kobe City being compared to the slums ridden with poverty. There are even minor things here, like a group of women taking their artificially enhanced pets to the vet, like a parrot with instant memorization, a dog that barely makes any sound and ... a pigeon? The deep lore that you can read up on on the computer at Junker HQ also is worth going through to familiarize yourself with Neo Kobe City.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game took me about 10 hours to beat, though you can easily beat it a couple hours sooner, if you skip some of the optional stuff. For example, reading through all the lore on the computer at Junker HQ took me over half an hour and is completely optional. There is a lot of good stuff here, and little feels as filler.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
This is a pretty well-paced adventure throughout, with a good mix of investigating, action, comedy and romance, though the last part never really felt right to me due to what I talked about in the Story part of this review. My only issue was that progression was somehow hidden behind a combination of Look / Investigate / Look that felt unnecessary, and some of the puzzles felt really contrived. That said, this is a pretty focused game and does its job well in terms of the design of its structure.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
This is not a new concept, as Hideo Kojima used similar Japanese crime adventures as inspiration for this game. It is unique in that I haven't played it in the 4+ years worth of games I've played as part of this challenge, it is a visual novel, which is a rare breed for its time, especially in the West and it tells a good story that aged pretty well. And I guess it's also worth pointing out that the game does enough to keep the player engaged without making this game feel like a book and without making the limited light gun sequences to feel annoying.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
This is a very linear adventure. If you are going through all options like me, which doesn't take a lot of effort, you will see everything in one go, besides some minor dialogue results at times perhaps. But other than that, one playthrough will give you pretty much everything here.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 78/100
A visual novel that is worthy of being played. If you are a fan of Kojima's work, this is a must play, if you are a fan of visual novels or adventure games, this is well worth a playthrough and if you enjoy good stories in video games, this is in the upper tiers, especially for its time.
(This is the 94th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
Just as Hideo Kojima's work over the past couple decades is unique to the AAA video game industry to this day, his work in 1988 with SNATCHER is unique to this day's Hideo Kojima. It's not an Action blockbuster like the Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding games, but it's rather a game in a genre of games Hideo Kojima enjoyed during his own formative years, the visual novel / crime mystery genre that was somewhat popular in Japan at the time.
Snatcher released initially on November 26, 1988 for the PC-8801 and the MSX2, two Japanese personal computers. It then released in a "remade" version on October 23, 1992 for the PC-Engine (exclusively for the Japanese version of the TurboGrafx-16) before it finally got an English release in December 15, 1994 for the Sega CD, which is the excuse I used to add it to my playlist for the challenge I am currently doing. To be honest, I have no idea how it came about to release this game in the West after not having done so in the 6 years prior, especially since the spritual successor 'Policenauts', which also released in 1994, did not get a Western release. But, thankfully, it happened, and with voice acting to boot. These games have a cult following these days and after having finished Snatcher, you can count me in among those who would be happy to see Hideo Kojima do another game of this type as some sort of side project during these modern times.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
If you decide to play Snatcher, you will probably do so to mainly experience its story. If that is not your expectation going in, I'm sure it will quickly become what will hold your attention, as the gameplay is rather typical for a visual novel. It's mainly clicking at prompts and listening to dialogue.
So with that being the case, delivering an interesting story full of interesting characters, plot twists and tense moments is quite important for this game to be worth playing. Luckily, the game delivers on all fronts thanks to its cyberpunk setting filled with a lot of well thoughtout, interesting lore, its compelling premise and its cast of characters.
50 years ago, the explosion of a biological weapon in a research facility near Moscow called "Lucifer-Alpha" killed over half of the world's population in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In the present, a new city on an artificial island in Eastern Asia was made and is called "Neo Kobe City", a melting pot of cultures due to large number of immigrants from China, the USA, Eastern and Western Europe and even more areas of the world. Mankind faces a new dilemma due to the appearance of humanoid robots that are called "Snatchers", because they 'snatch' a person (kill and dispose of them) and take up their spot. They can't be detected due to the fact that they breathe, bleed and sweat like any human and even wear artifical skin to look exactly like the person they are copying. They mainly snatch VIP types however, which presumably means that their appearance goes beyond "AI gone rogue".
You play Gillian Seed, who, along with your wife, is an amnesiac and just got assigned to the JUNKERs, a special anti-Snatcher task force (Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger). Your assignment is to be a runner, an in-field operative taking on the highest of risks by facing these Snatchers head on and eliminating them. To do this, you are assigned a Navigator, a robot that assists you on the field. Navigators get their personalities formed somewhat after the Junker they are assigned to, so yours. Your navigator is called "Metal Gear Mk. II", designed after the "Metal Gear menace from the 20th century", so yes, this seems to play in an alternate future of the Metal Gear universe.
This game is a visual novel, so gameplay looks like this. The first screen you see is that of the Junker HQ reception. A panel of prompts appears at the bottom half of the screen. You can "Look" at things, "Investigate" things, "Talk" and "Ask" if a person is in the room with you and also look at your "Possessions" to "look" and "investigate" them as well. Looking at things and investigating things is different in that investigating them is more analytical. You are often meant to look and investigate things multiple times, as each time reveals new information and thoughts. Some of these options are optionable if you want to get immersed more deeply with your surroundings, and some you are meant to use to trigger a moment that lets you progress, such as uncovering a new clue. As someone who likes to get immersed as much as possible, I have used every single option as many times as I could (at least I think), which not only does what I just told you, but also triggered a few "hidden" moments that I found quite entertaining. In one part of the city for example, Gillian attempts to "pick up women" and if you do so multiple times, one woman turns out to be a Snatcher, which triggers a "Game Over?" screen before it is revealed that Gillian was just daydreaming.
Gillian Seed in general is a pretty odd fellow, though he is more of a poster-boy for how Kojima seemingly wanted the game's atmosphere to be more humane to balance out the fact that Snatchers dominate everything else in this game. Gillian is an amnesiac as mentioned and has a wife called "Jamie", though they don't remember each other. He likes to use humor whenever possible to lower the tension that the entire case and his occupation represents, though balances that out with a get shit done attitude when the situation requires it. The non-serious part of his personality would have felt a bit too "in your face" however, if he wasn't assisted by Metal Gear Mk. 2, who steals the show in this game in my opinion. Both the voice acting and the personality of Metal Gear is perfection, as Metal Gear uses his analytical makeup to save Gillian's butt countless times on the field, but also roasts him every chance he gets when they get a break from the Snatcher-hunting they do. For a guy like Gillian who I can only describe as a "creep" for most parts of the game, I think it was a great idea to have him be accompanied by someone like Metal Gear who keeps him in line as much as possible. I say "creep" because there are 3 female side characters and several other female NPCs in this game, and I don't think there was a single one Gillian didn't make a pass at. For one, you can "look" at any character several times, and doing so once illicits a "she looks great" type response from Gilliant, while doing so more than once prompts the women to say that they feel uncomfortable, which doesn't stop Gillian from making way more straightforward remarks about their apperance. Now don't get me wrong, this type of behavior doesn't usually weird me out and I can see it for what it is, which is entertainment. But with Gillian, it's different. For one, he has a wife, which you can call in this game to tell her how much you want to get to know and to love her again. This creates a very weird situation where Gillian talks to Jamie on the phone, only to flirt with several women over the next hour alone. Second, one of the women includes the 18-year old daughter of a fallen co-worker, who is 14 in Japan's version of the game, so that Gillian doesn't know boundaries whatsoever is pretty off-putting. Otherwise though, his attempts at flirtation are mainly meant to be humorous, and it works since he gets shot down constantly (and gets ridiculed by Metal Gear for it), but on his own he doesn't make a great main character because his personality is mainly doing this shtick.
Apart from Metal Gear, who is the best character in the game for me, there are several individuals who have this mysterious aura around them, like there is more to them than you'd think. Harry the engineer is one of these types, but it extends to the Chief of the JUNKER operation, a bounty hunter named Random Hajile, your wife Jamie, an informer you talk to several times, and Gibson, the only other JUNKER who currently works as a runner alongside you.
With that, I want to get to the main story. I don't want to spoil anything, and in general I think the big story beats flow at a great pace and introduce a lot of twists and memorable moments. However, there is one flaw to the premise of the story that I found to be pretty odd. Actually, there were several over the first couple of hours, but it is worth noting that the plot cleared up plenty of questions I had and actually answered them in a quite satisfactory manner. This one issue that remains though is that this JUNKER operation seems pathetically tiny considering that the "Snatcher menace" presents a huge issue to all of mankind. ALL OF MANKIND. Meanwhile, here you are in the secret JUNKER operation tasked with stopping it and all you have is 5 (five) measly people working there, including just two actual runners. What? Even if Snatchers would snatch up everyday folk, this would be unrealistic, but when VIPs are exclusively involved, you'd think more monetary efforts would be made to make sure the menace was eradicated asap. The game does have an answer to this worry later on at least somewhat I suppose, but I still think that is too unrealistic to have two guys do all the work.
That said, if you enjoy a good mystery story, if you enjoy visual novels and if you like the cyberpunk aesthetic, I think you will enjoy the story that this game tells. It's well executed, I never felt like the game dragged with filler moments and the plot twists were well executed. The pre-1992 version had only 2 acts, but while this version comes with an additional third, which turns this game from one with a cliffhanger ending to one with a complete story. Knowing this, the third act did feel slightly out of place, as the majority of it involves listening to dialogue instead of much player input when it comes to investigation or the like, but the act does end things on a satisfactory note, so I'm glad it's there to give the player a full story to enjoy, though it does leave some room for a sequel.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
This is a visual novel, though not exactly like most modern ones. Instead of listening to a story and just clicking the A/X button to read the next lines, you select options to look at and investigate, so you are constantly involved with what the next set of lines of dialogue will focus on, keeping you more engaged. But of course, gameplay is a low priority in this game overall.
There is only one part about this game that has true gameplay, which is the game's light gun sections. In a 3x3 grid akin to a game of whack-a-mole, enemies appear in one of the 9 spots and you need to quickly react and aim and shoot at the part of the grid that they are on. This is a pretty small part of the game and I found it to be appear just the perfect number of times over the course of the game. I didn't fail once, but I've read that some found these parts to be kind of difficult. There is a rush of enemies in one late-game section of this, which might give you some trouble, if you are slower on the buttons, but I'm not nearly the fastest and got by with plenty of health remaining.
With visual novels, I find that the quality of the story makes the gameplay more or less tolerable, and since I found the story to be so good, I enjoyed taking my time with this one. This involved choosing every option to investigate multiple times, even to just trigger some optional dialogue from the characters.
You don't just choose options however. First, to find clues and progress, you often need to choose specific options multiple times. The order you would usually choose is to look at something and then to investigate. Sometimes though, you look, investigate and then have to look again to trigger an event, which was a weird way to do things, so be wary of this. That said, asking the player to be thorough is not a bad thing on its own, as reading through all the lines that are available adds to the overall context that the player gets.
One final part of the gameplay here are the puzzles. Often, you need to input answers, such as the password to talk to an informant, the name of a person, the really contrived "Oleen" puzzle and more. If a puzzle gives you any trouble, the game guides you to the answer pretty nicely, so don't worry about not figuring them out.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
This game has voice acting!!! An anomaly for games that I play as part of this retro challenge I'm doing. Of course, it's less unique for Sega CD titles, but still a very new thing for video games at the time. Due to this, I was expecting terrible performances, but the majority of characters are genuinely well voiced. These of course do not compare to today's quality, but for 1994, they don't take away from the experience. Some voices I thought didn't really have much emotion in them, such as the voice of Katrina, while the voice actress for Metal Gear did a fantastic job in my opinion. It's a good performance from the cast overall, with some high and low points.
The soundtrack of this game has a very unique sound to it in my opinion, and I mean that in a positive way. This is a cyberpunk / cyber noir themed game, and while I couldn't have told you what that sounded like beforehand, I think the game nails that atmosphere really well. The track that plays when shit hits the fan really gets you off your seat and ready to investigate the crap out of the place you're in, while I have no doubt that I will remember some tracks (like the Junker HQ one) years and years down the line. Liked it a lot overall.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Snatcher has a great cyberpunk aesthetic. Whether its the neon-lit Neo Kobe City, the run-down slums in the otherwise high-tech environment or the presentation of the Snatchers, it has a great visual style, timeless you could even say. The game features some pretty gory sections (decapacitated humans, dead animals), so if you don't like that sort of stuff, stay away. For me, it added a lot to the legitimacy of the Snatcher threat and was not used too much as to be tactless. The presentation of the screens in this game looks pretty good in this remade version of the game, though they are simple-looking for the most part, as the majority of screens had little to no actual movement in them but rather remained still. This didn't take away from the cinematics however, which were well done despite the visual limitations the game had to work with.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Incredibly atmospheric. Cyber noir is presenting "technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality", and that fits the game's theme perfectly. It's a story about humanity's lack of trust in one another and how it is one of our biggest flaws, and it carries that from its beginning all the way to the end. Heck, due to suffering from amnesia, Gillian is partly defined by this, though he hardly is the only one here. The game portrays this theme well several times throughout the game. The cyberpunk part of the cyber noir theme is also well represented here, with the contrast of high tech and the rich parts of Neo Kobe City being compared to the slums ridden with poverty. There are even minor things here, like a group of women taking their artificially enhanced pets to the vet, like a parrot with instant memorization, a dog that barely makes any sound and ... a pigeon? The deep lore that you can read up on on the computer at Junker HQ also is worth going through to familiarize yourself with Neo Kobe City.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game took me about 10 hours to beat, though you can easily beat it a couple hours sooner, if you skip some of the optional stuff. For example, reading through all the lore on the computer at Junker HQ took me over half an hour and is completely optional. There is a lot of good stuff here, and little feels as filler.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
This is a pretty well-paced adventure throughout, with a good mix of investigating, action, comedy and romance, though the last part never really felt right to me due to what I talked about in the Story part of this review. My only issue was that progression was somehow hidden behind a combination of Look / Investigate / Look that felt unnecessary, and some of the puzzles felt really contrived. That said, this is a pretty focused game and does its job well in terms of the design of its structure.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
This is not a new concept, as Hideo Kojima used similar Japanese crime adventures as inspiration for this game. It is unique in that I haven't played it in the 4+ years worth of games I've played as part of this challenge, it is a visual novel, which is a rare breed for its time, especially in the West and it tells a good story that aged pretty well. And I guess it's also worth pointing out that the game does enough to keep the player engaged without making this game feel like a book and without making the limited light gun sequences to feel annoying.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
This is a very linear adventure. If you are going through all options like me, which doesn't take a lot of effort, you will see everything in one go, besides some minor dialogue results at times perhaps. But other than that, one playthrough will give you pretty much everything here.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 78/100
A visual novel that is worthy of being played. If you are a fan of Kojima's work, this is a must play, if you are a fan of visual novels or adventure games, this is well worth a playthrough and if you enjoy good stories in video games, this is in the upper tiers, especially for its time.
(This is the 94th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
1993
(This is the 88th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
After going my entire life without having played a singular Sonic title, I have now played Sonic the Hedgehog 1, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and now have even beaten my first ever Sonic game, Sonic CD. Sonic CD initially released on September 23, 1993 for the, you guessed it (I think), Sega CD. It got ported over to Windows and later to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but it is also available in its original form through the Sonic Gems Collection for the Game Cube and PlayStation 2 (which is where I played this) and in remastered shape as part of the Sonic Origins compilation that released in 2022.
Sonic CD was developed to showcase the capabilities of the Sega CD add-on for the Sega Genesis. Sonic CD would end up being the best-selling game for the add-on, selling over 1.5 million copies. It was supposed to be an enhanced port of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but developed into its own thing over time, giving us the debut of Metal Sonic and Amy Rose, as well as the "time warp" feature.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 4/10
A short story in the manual explains the setting for this game. Sonic has a conversation with a "Princess Sally", a character I never heard of and one that apparently never appears in any Sonic game, but is rather introduced in comic books and animated series starting in 1993. She asks Sonic where he is going. Sonic would goo to Never Lake to visit 'the Little Planet'. "The one with the special stones that alter time", Sally says. Sonic mentions how the Little Planet appears of Never Lake on the last month of every year, so Sonic will check it out.
When they arrive there, something is off, as tall trees and bright flowers are replaced with nothingness. As they try to understand what is going on, Princess Sally is kidnapped by Dr. Robotnik and his newest creation, 'Metal Sonic'. Dr. Robotnik is looking to capture all time stones to manipulate time and take over the world and as per usual, it's Sonic's job to stop him.
So, in this game, there are two endings, a good and a bad ending. Each level you visit has three zones and the first two zones can be altered by going to its past and future to destroy 'transporters'. Depending on whether you do this or not, the third zone will either be a "good future" or a "bad future", which is indicated by a change in the song and in scenery, with good futures set in thriving nature and bad futures set in a metallic, dystopian style. If you turn all 3rd zones into good futures, you unlock the good ending. Otherwise, you get the bad ending, like me.
There isn't much 'story' in this game beyond this, but I was surprised with the amount of effort that went into making three distinct versions of each zone of a level and giving us two separate endings as a result. The story is not told through words at any point, but the scenery and the change of tone in the soundtrack do tell a story of their own which represents the actions you take, or don't, which is pretty nice.
GAMEPLAY | 13/20
Sonic CD plays pretty much the same as Sonic 1 and 2, though due to the small features added in 2, I'd say it plays like the middle-version between the two based on the features it has. There isn't really much I can say here that I haven't already said about the first two Sonic games. If you have played those already, you will know exactly what to expect. If you haven't, you probably know how Sonic games look like anyway. As always, you run through levels with three distinct zones, fight a boss on the 3rd zone and try to reach the finish line in large levels with many open and secret areas to access to make progress.
The unique aspect of this game is the Time Warp feature. You can travel to the Past and Future of a zone to destroy certain transporters to create a Good Future in each level's Zone 3 to unlock the Good Ending at the end. This is done by running through a sign saying "Past" or "Future" and then holding a certain speed will running to initiate a "warp". This is certainly a unique feature and while I didn't get Good Futures in most levels, this offers a nice additional challenge for everyone looking to do as much as possible on each zone.
Another way to get Good Futures on every third zone is to collect all "Time Stones", which replace Chaos Emeralds in this game. This means there is no Super Sonic in this game. I haven't been good enough to ever get him in Sonic 1 and 2, so it's not a big loss for me personally, but worth pointing out. To get all Time Stones, you need to finish levels with more than 50 rings each, which lets you enter a special stage where you have to destroy six UFOs within a certain time limit.
While I enjoyed all of this for the most part, I have the same issues with this game that I had with Sonic 1 and 2, and probably on an even bigger scale here. This game focuses more on exploration within given levels than the other two Sonic games on the Genesis, which means it has a bigger focus on having you slow down and look for different paths on each zone. While exploring paths is optional, this does translate over to each level as a whole, as they are pretty massive in this game and can get pretty complex. This plays into one of my complaints with these Sonic games that I mentioned previously.
Sonic has super-speed as his special ability. Unfortunately, a lot of the times this ability plays like its more of a tease, as there are a lot of obstacles that stop you from gaining top speed for more than a couple seconds. While this makes sense from a game design perspective to add challenge to these games, I feel like Sonic's speed offers more disadvantage than fun to me due to this. Whenever I'm on a straight path, I'm thinking I'll take off and get some top speed going, only to have an enemy pop into screen out of nowhere and making it impossible for me to avoid it in time, which leads me into a 2-second animation of hitting the enemy and losing all my rings. Same goes for gaining speed to fly into the air, which too many times leads to me landing on a platform with an enemy on it, which I fall on top of to lose my rings again. Simultaneously, these games have a lot of areas that force you to pick up momentum near a slope to get up there, which takes a couple seconds each time, there are non-stop obstacles which you run into that stop you dead in your track and there isn't a lot of platforming challenge for me here other than exploring and trying to avoid damaging situations that your speeds puts you into. This leads me to take it slower sometimes, which makes me want to play a Mario game instead.
I understand I'm possibly odd for having this type of criticism, but I think it has more to do with me not being the biggest fan of how these Sonic games are designed rather than me thinking that it is actually objectively bad design. Though I do have to say, running at Sonic's speeds to have enemies appear that give you 0.2 seconds to react is not something that I think is that good.
That said, I do appreciate how large the levels are and how, no matter where you go, there is (almost) always a way forward to the finish line. And finally, while I have some subjective complaints, I can conclude this by saying that if you enjoy Sonic's 2D platforming gameplay, you will enjoy Sonic CD in that aspect as well.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
Well do I have stuff to explain here. Sonic CD is in a pretty unusual spot because it does not have one, but two soundtrakcs. The first soundtrack is used in Japan and PAL regions, while the second is exclusively to NA. Why? I don't know if there is an official reason, but I think it is assumed that the American marketing team at Sega thought that American gamers wouldn't react well to the original soundtrack, which is why they composed their own.
Funnily enough, there are many people who heavily dislike the NA version of the soundtrack and who love the JP version. Not just retrospectively, but even at and around the time of its release. I didn't know about the two separate soundtracks, so I only originally rated this game based on the American soundtrack.
Listening to it, I was pretty surprised at its tone. Instead of the usual up-beat sounds of the other Sonic games, this one sounded a lot more ominous and like it wanted to accentuate the danger that Dr. Robotnik was presenting. It sounded more mature I suppose, or at least as if it was intended for more mature audiences than you would think played this game in the majority. For the most part, I didn't actually mind this. There are plenty of tracks here that are enjoyable to listen to and create a pretty nice atmosphere you can actually chill to. Then there are downright scary ones that I can't believe made it into the game, like the Game Over track and especially the track used for boss fights. I can't imagine being a ten year old back in 1993 playing this for the first time.
After playing this game, I listened to the OST again on YouTube like I always do, and while reading the comments discovered that there was a Japanese version as well. Listening to it, you can immediately tell how much more upbeat it is. Each track is different to the US version, I don't think there are any that were re-used, and the tone of the boss fight most notably is very different. Do I think each track in the Japanese version is better? Actually, I don't. While the lows of the US soundtrack are truly god awful, it's still a good soundtrack overall, and I don't mind that the composers went for more atmosphere than funk at times. I think I prefere the Japanese version overall however.
At the end of the day, I think it's cool that there are two full soundtracks that Sonic fans got with one game, though if you are one of the kids who got traumatized back in the day, you probably feel differently.
There are some pretty iconic themes here as well, such as Sonic Boom and the Japanese Special Stage Theme. Finally, since I haven't mentioned it yet, the Past, Present and Future versions of each zone have their own tracks, which means the total length of both OSTs is absurdly long for this game.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
Sonic CD is not a huge graphical jump over Sonic the Hedgehog 2 despite being released for the Sega CD add-on, which I would have expected to offer a little bit more visually. That said, Sonic CD is one of the better looking games for its time regardless.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
Atmospherically, the game suits a Sonic game quite well based on its visuals. What this game does differently though is lean away from the upbeat Sonic style at times to give you a more dystopian glance at the Sonic universe through its bad futures. This is still done in a sort-of funky way through Japan's soundtrack, but you're placed into a downright horrific horror moment through the US soundtrack at times.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game doesn't take too long to beat. It has 7 levels and pretty easy boss fights. Each level is pretty massive though, so you can pad your playtime easily by exploring them more thoroughly. On top of that, looking for those transporters in past and future parts of the zones will add a lot of playtime on top of that, and these versions of the zones also offer different environments on top of that, so the sheer amount of content in this game is pretty wild for a video game from 1993.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
As mentioned, levels are divided into 3 zones and the first two zones are designed three times for the past, present and future, which means there is absurd amounts of work that went into them here. On top of that, levels are truly massive, with tons of paths to explore that will make multiple playthroughs feel fresher than is usual for platformers and even for the first 16-bit Sonic games. Levels are also themed distinctly as always, though I wasn't blown away by any theme here like I was in Sonic 2 and some designs were also copied over from that game. Also, does every first level in a Sonic game start in a green environment? Just noticed that.
Levels being massive is great, but visually, the sheer amount of stuff going on in each visually is just overwhelming sometimes and makes for a messy presentation at times. It's also easy to get lost later on, which I thought was an odd wrinkle to put into a game like this.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
The Sonic team did a great job of keeping this Sonic game feel fresh despite the fact that it's another 2D platforming adventure. The Time Warp mechanic is not only unique to Sonic, but a unique mechanic in general, which I enjoyed to dabble with and which offer a lot of optional ways to tackle this game for each player.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
A ton of replay value here because of the 3 versions per zone that you can explore to your heart's content, because of the Time Stones you can collect optionally and because of two different endings. I don't count the two separate soundtracks in my ranking but for those interested, you can play the game's JP/PAL and NA versions as well to get a different feel each time while playing through the otherwise same levels.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times, though there can be some slowdown here and there depending on which version you play.
OVERALL | 74/100
I've heard mixed opinions about this game online, but I think this is my favorite Sonic game out of the three that released on the Genesis / Sega CD so far. The Time Warp mechanic definitely spices things up, the moment you meet Metal Sonic was pretty scary and memorable, the soundtrack defied expectations for both good and bad reasons and levels are massive, which made for a pretty good Sonic game overall in my opinion.
After going my entire life without having played a singular Sonic title, I have now played Sonic the Hedgehog 1, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and now have even beaten my first ever Sonic game, Sonic CD. Sonic CD initially released on September 23, 1993 for the, you guessed it (I think), Sega CD. It got ported over to Windows and later to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but it is also available in its original form through the Sonic Gems Collection for the Game Cube and PlayStation 2 (which is where I played this) and in remastered shape as part of the Sonic Origins compilation that released in 2022.
Sonic CD was developed to showcase the capabilities of the Sega CD add-on for the Sega Genesis. Sonic CD would end up being the best-selling game for the add-on, selling over 1.5 million copies. It was supposed to be an enhanced port of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but developed into its own thing over time, giving us the debut of Metal Sonic and Amy Rose, as well as the "time warp" feature.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 4/10
A short story in the manual explains the setting for this game. Sonic has a conversation with a "Princess Sally", a character I never heard of and one that apparently never appears in any Sonic game, but is rather introduced in comic books and animated series starting in 1993. She asks Sonic where he is going. Sonic would goo to Never Lake to visit 'the Little Planet'. "The one with the special stones that alter time", Sally says. Sonic mentions how the Little Planet appears of Never Lake on the last month of every year, so Sonic will check it out.
When they arrive there, something is off, as tall trees and bright flowers are replaced with nothingness. As they try to understand what is going on, Princess Sally is kidnapped by Dr. Robotnik and his newest creation, 'Metal Sonic'. Dr. Robotnik is looking to capture all time stones to manipulate time and take over the world and as per usual, it's Sonic's job to stop him.
So, in this game, there are two endings, a good and a bad ending. Each level you visit has three zones and the first two zones can be altered by going to its past and future to destroy 'transporters'. Depending on whether you do this or not, the third zone will either be a "good future" or a "bad future", which is indicated by a change in the song and in scenery, with good futures set in thriving nature and bad futures set in a metallic, dystopian style. If you turn all 3rd zones into good futures, you unlock the good ending. Otherwise, you get the bad ending, like me.
There isn't much 'story' in this game beyond this, but I was surprised with the amount of effort that went into making three distinct versions of each zone of a level and giving us two separate endings as a result. The story is not told through words at any point, but the scenery and the change of tone in the soundtrack do tell a story of their own which represents the actions you take, or don't, which is pretty nice.
GAMEPLAY | 13/20
Sonic CD plays pretty much the same as Sonic 1 and 2, though due to the small features added in 2, I'd say it plays like the middle-version between the two based on the features it has. There isn't really much I can say here that I haven't already said about the first two Sonic games. If you have played those already, you will know exactly what to expect. If you haven't, you probably know how Sonic games look like anyway. As always, you run through levels with three distinct zones, fight a boss on the 3rd zone and try to reach the finish line in large levels with many open and secret areas to access to make progress.
The unique aspect of this game is the Time Warp feature. You can travel to the Past and Future of a zone to destroy certain transporters to create a Good Future in each level's Zone 3 to unlock the Good Ending at the end. This is done by running through a sign saying "Past" or "Future" and then holding a certain speed will running to initiate a "warp". This is certainly a unique feature and while I didn't get Good Futures in most levels, this offers a nice additional challenge for everyone looking to do as much as possible on each zone.
Another way to get Good Futures on every third zone is to collect all "Time Stones", which replace Chaos Emeralds in this game. This means there is no Super Sonic in this game. I haven't been good enough to ever get him in Sonic 1 and 2, so it's not a big loss for me personally, but worth pointing out. To get all Time Stones, you need to finish levels with more than 50 rings each, which lets you enter a special stage where you have to destroy six UFOs within a certain time limit.
While I enjoyed all of this for the most part, I have the same issues with this game that I had with Sonic 1 and 2, and probably on an even bigger scale here. This game focuses more on exploration within given levels than the other two Sonic games on the Genesis, which means it has a bigger focus on having you slow down and look for different paths on each zone. While exploring paths is optional, this does translate over to each level as a whole, as they are pretty massive in this game and can get pretty complex. This plays into one of my complaints with these Sonic games that I mentioned previously.
Sonic has super-speed as his special ability. Unfortunately, a lot of the times this ability plays like its more of a tease, as there are a lot of obstacles that stop you from gaining top speed for more than a couple seconds. While this makes sense from a game design perspective to add challenge to these games, I feel like Sonic's speed offers more disadvantage than fun to me due to this. Whenever I'm on a straight path, I'm thinking I'll take off and get some top speed going, only to have an enemy pop into screen out of nowhere and making it impossible for me to avoid it in time, which leads me into a 2-second animation of hitting the enemy and losing all my rings. Same goes for gaining speed to fly into the air, which too many times leads to me landing on a platform with an enemy on it, which I fall on top of to lose my rings again. Simultaneously, these games have a lot of areas that force you to pick up momentum near a slope to get up there, which takes a couple seconds each time, there are non-stop obstacles which you run into that stop you dead in your track and there isn't a lot of platforming challenge for me here other than exploring and trying to avoid damaging situations that your speeds puts you into. This leads me to take it slower sometimes, which makes me want to play a Mario game instead.
I understand I'm possibly odd for having this type of criticism, but I think it has more to do with me not being the biggest fan of how these Sonic games are designed rather than me thinking that it is actually objectively bad design. Though I do have to say, running at Sonic's speeds to have enemies appear that give you 0.2 seconds to react is not something that I think is that good.
That said, I do appreciate how large the levels are and how, no matter where you go, there is (almost) always a way forward to the finish line. And finally, while I have some subjective complaints, I can conclude this by saying that if you enjoy Sonic's 2D platforming gameplay, you will enjoy Sonic CD in that aspect as well.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
Well do I have stuff to explain here. Sonic CD is in a pretty unusual spot because it does not have one, but two soundtrakcs. The first soundtrack is used in Japan and PAL regions, while the second is exclusively to NA. Why? I don't know if there is an official reason, but I think it is assumed that the American marketing team at Sega thought that American gamers wouldn't react well to the original soundtrack, which is why they composed their own.
Funnily enough, there are many people who heavily dislike the NA version of the soundtrack and who love the JP version. Not just retrospectively, but even at and around the time of its release. I didn't know about the two separate soundtracks, so I only originally rated this game based on the American soundtrack.
Listening to it, I was pretty surprised at its tone. Instead of the usual up-beat sounds of the other Sonic games, this one sounded a lot more ominous and like it wanted to accentuate the danger that Dr. Robotnik was presenting. It sounded more mature I suppose, or at least as if it was intended for more mature audiences than you would think played this game in the majority. For the most part, I didn't actually mind this. There are plenty of tracks here that are enjoyable to listen to and create a pretty nice atmosphere you can actually chill to. Then there are downright scary ones that I can't believe made it into the game, like the Game Over track and especially the track used for boss fights. I can't imagine being a ten year old back in 1993 playing this for the first time.
After playing this game, I listened to the OST again on YouTube like I always do, and while reading the comments discovered that there was a Japanese version as well. Listening to it, you can immediately tell how much more upbeat it is. Each track is different to the US version, I don't think there are any that were re-used, and the tone of the boss fight most notably is very different. Do I think each track in the Japanese version is better? Actually, I don't. While the lows of the US soundtrack are truly god awful, it's still a good soundtrack overall, and I don't mind that the composers went for more atmosphere than funk at times. I think I prefere the Japanese version overall however.
At the end of the day, I think it's cool that there are two full soundtracks that Sonic fans got with one game, though if you are one of the kids who got traumatized back in the day, you probably feel differently.
There are some pretty iconic themes here as well, such as Sonic Boom and the Japanese Special Stage Theme. Finally, since I haven't mentioned it yet, the Past, Present and Future versions of each zone have their own tracks, which means the total length of both OSTs is absurdly long for this game.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
Sonic CD is not a huge graphical jump over Sonic the Hedgehog 2 despite being released for the Sega CD add-on, which I would have expected to offer a little bit more visually. That said, Sonic CD is one of the better looking games for its time regardless.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
Atmospherically, the game suits a Sonic game quite well based on its visuals. What this game does differently though is lean away from the upbeat Sonic style at times to give you a more dystopian glance at the Sonic universe through its bad futures. This is still done in a sort-of funky way through Japan's soundtrack, but you're placed into a downright horrific horror moment through the US soundtrack at times.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game doesn't take too long to beat. It has 7 levels and pretty easy boss fights. Each level is pretty massive though, so you can pad your playtime easily by exploring them more thoroughly. On top of that, looking for those transporters in past and future parts of the zones will add a lot of playtime on top of that, and these versions of the zones also offer different environments on top of that, so the sheer amount of content in this game is pretty wild for a video game from 1993.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10
As mentioned, levels are divided into 3 zones and the first two zones are designed three times for the past, present and future, which means there is absurd amounts of work that went into them here. On top of that, levels are truly massive, with tons of paths to explore that will make multiple playthroughs feel fresher than is usual for platformers and even for the first 16-bit Sonic games. Levels are also themed distinctly as always, though I wasn't blown away by any theme here like I was in Sonic 2 and some designs were also copied over from that game. Also, does every first level in a Sonic game start in a green environment? Just noticed that.
Levels being massive is great, but visually, the sheer amount of stuff going on in each visually is just overwhelming sometimes and makes for a messy presentation at times. It's also easy to get lost later on, which I thought was an odd wrinkle to put into a game like this.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
The Sonic team did a great job of keeping this Sonic game feel fresh despite the fact that it's another 2D platforming adventure. The Time Warp mechanic is not only unique to Sonic, but a unique mechanic in general, which I enjoyed to dabble with and which offer a lot of optional ways to tackle this game for each player.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
A ton of replay value here because of the 3 versions per zone that you can explore to your heart's content, because of the Time Stones you can collect optionally and because of two different endings. I don't count the two separate soundtracks in my ranking but for those interested, you can play the game's JP/PAL and NA versions as well to get a different feel each time while playing through the otherwise same levels.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times, though there can be some slowdown here and there depending on which version you play.
OVERALL | 74/100
I've heard mixed opinions about this game online, but I think this is my favorite Sonic game out of the three that released on the Genesis / Sega CD so far. The Time Warp mechanic definitely spices things up, the moment you meet Metal Sonic was pretty scary and memorable, the soundtrack defied expectations for both good and bad reasons and levels are massive, which made for a pretty good Sonic game overall in my opinion.
1991
(This is the 55th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
We found ourselves our first 1991 Game of the Year contender, ladies and gentlemen. Super Castlevania IV, an iconic platformer by Konami that originally released in Japan on October 31, 1991, is pretty much as good as advertised. And that says a lot considering that it was advertised as "one of the greatest games of all time". In many ways, from atmosphere to soundtrack to the simplicity of its gameplay loop, the game is timeless. In others, such as graphics, controls and features, it obviously lags behind more recent video games, but that's not a comparison we make here of course. For its time, Super Castlevania IV ranks high in those categories as well however.
Here is my in-depth review for the game. For the challenge, we'll be returning to the Castlevania series in October 1993 with Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
If you're a big fan of video games, you will know about Castlevania and the story set-up for its games, at least for most of them. There is a clan of vampire hunters called the Belmont family, who are tasked with defeating the evil Dracula, who resurrects himself every 100 years, when the "forces of the Good mysteriously become weak".
Super Castlevania IV doesn't do things differently, in very large part because this game is actually a remake of Castlevania for the NES from 1986. Or at least kind of it is.
The Japanese version, called Akumajō Dracula (the Japanese name for the Castlevania series), shows both in its name and in its story set-up that this is a remake of the first Castlevania. Simon Belmont, the main character for this game, is described as the young heir to the Belmont clan and prepares himself for its first adventure.
In the USA version, it is said that it is "time once again for Simon Belmont to take up his whip...", indicating that there was a different time when Simon Belmont had been active, which would be Castlevania II. See, Konami USA didn't actually factor in that this would be a remake, I suppose hence the name Super Castlevania IV (IV!), so it was actually considered a sequel all the way until 2005, when Konami released an "Xtreme desktop app" with the canon timeline, which didn't include Super Castlevania IV at all (as it is in essence a retelling of the first Castlevania, which IS included in the timeline).
With that out of the way, what IS the story here? You play Simon Belmont, as explained, who must defeat the evil Count Dracula in 1691 Transylvania. Equipped with a holy whip called 'Vampire Killer', which makes him the heir to the Belmont clan, Simon Belmont makes his way to Dracula's castle.
That's pretty much it. As per usual, story has no big considerations for these early 90 platformers, but there is enough here to set a dark, gothic atmosphere that will be palpable throughout your time with the game. For some additional lore, the manual states that "Simon has found an ancient tome left to him by his ancestors revealing the secret of the whip. In it, he learns that the whip can snap in eight directions." Some tiny little lore to explain a new gameplay mechanic is the kind of attention to detail I like to see, even if the game otherwise doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of storytelling.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
This game is a platformer of the best kind. You know, I have my typical issues with platformers that are almost ubiquitous in the early 90s. Whether it's unfair hit boxes, long-distance jumps that you will die due to unless you can time them perfectly, too many enemies and obstacles on-screen at the same time, unresponsive controls, no ability to jump and hit, not being able to jump and redirect yourself, only having the ability to hit straight, no crouch-and-move function, ridiculously overpowered bosses and many many more things I often find that make these old-school platformers incredibly frustrating.
But Super Castlevania IV manages to elegantly incorporate so many QoL-improvements and the devs seem to have figured out how they can find a great balance of fun and challenging, even if it's not perfect at all times.
Simon Belmont is equipped with a whip. As per usual, you can use it to hit enemies and candles, the latter of which are almost everywhere and drop items. These items are food items, which give you health, heart items, which give you ammunition for special weapons (ok..) and the special weapons themselves (boomerang (goes across screen, comes back) axe (flies in an arc), fire bomb (burns anything in path), dagger (flies straight) and watch (stops most enemies and their attaks for a few seconds)). Next to these, you can also pick up special items that destroy all enemies on screen, grant you invincibility for a couple seconds (called 'invisibility' in the manual, hah), that allow you to shoot twice per ammunition and that increase the power of your weapons. So a nice variety here.
The whip itself has gained new functions in this game, and boy are they useful. First, the whip can be whipped in eight (!) directions now. So up, down, left, right and then in each direction diagonally as well. Second, the whip can be used at rings, which allows you to latch onto them and leap into the air like you're Spider-Man. Third, you can also hold the attack button, which allows you to swing the whip around in a sort of limb state, which is funny and kind of unnecessary, but I appreciated it existing for sure.
What this game really does well, and is what I opened with here, is to keep the cheap deaths to a minimum. Your own hit-box is reduced, so projectiles that graze your hair don't damage you. The enemy hit-boxes are extended, and you can even hit them from below through the blocks that they're standing on. Enemies that would take a lot more hits in previous versions take fewer this time. Jumps on distant blocks are successful, even if one of Simon's legs barely touches the platform. The majority of enemies are easy enough to hit and avoid, and not bouncy and very quick like in previous games. The fact that you can whip in 8 directions makes hitting enemies above and below you so much easier, especially when you're on stairs. Enemies attack slower, and the levels are designed much better in a way that you don't have to worry about fighting multiple enemies AND having to avoid environmental obstacles at the same time.
None of the points above make this game a cake walk. They just make it a lot more fair and a lot more fun without all the hours of frustration that don't really need to be there. Are there still frustrating parts? Sure. When you enter a new screen and enemies jump on top of you immediately, that kind of sucks. When you jump and fall out of the map instead of on the stairs that are right below your feet, that's still annoying. Spikes one-hitting you is kind of dumb.
But for the majority of the game, you actually feel like you can control the action and do so naturally, without having to adjust to the idiosyncracies of a game's particular control scheme.
For some, most boss fights might be very easy, and to me, from what I've seen, I'd place them between Castlevania 1 and 2 in terms of difficulty, though closer to 2. What this game does a lot better than 2 though is that boss fights are actually mostly cleverly designed, or at least each battle has its distinctive challenges it asks the player to overcome. Some bosses you CAN simply brute-force your way through by mashing the attack button, and those definitely could have been improved upon, and the final boss fight does have some annoying parts in particular, but I'd say the boss fights were enjoyable for the most part.
Heck, the whole game was enjoyable for the majority of it. If you're looking for a retro platformer, you'd be remiss to not check out Super Castlevania IV.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
No voice acting. It makes use of the sound engine of the SNES to create a satisfying group of sound effects, but where this game really shines in the aural category is with its soundtrack. Man is it fantastic and does it set the tone. The opening alone sounds so beautifully eerie and mysterious that it sets you off on the right foot before you even press START. The exact same can be said for the Prologue track and then some. That one got me bopping my head. The 'Stage 1 Theme of Simon Belmont' I can only imagine being iconic, but I loved listening to themes like 'Bloody Tears' and 'Beginning', which move the soundtrack from eerie to downright epic. Bloody Tears is originally from Castlevania II and I'd argue it sounds even more epic on there, but I'm glad it got re-used and re-mixed, so I could hear it here for the first time. It's literally one of my favorite video game tracks of all time now, it's like it's straight out of a symphony.
'Beginning' is from Castlevania III, as the NES trilogy's tracks were re-used in part here as you can tell, especially in the later levels.
And you know what else is amazing? When you are in the final stage of the lengthy final boss battle against Dracula and his two strongest goons, when both goons are defeated and Dracula is on his last few health bars, what music kicks in? Simon's theme. Not only is that a badass track to begin with, but the implications of using it just adds to the moment so much, as Simon knows he got Dracula, Dracula knows Simon's got him and now it's on the player to beat Dracula's ass one final time. Beautiful.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
The SNES offers a big jump graphically, and this game makes use of it. Each level looks unique, with a lot of attention to detail in the design of the backgrounds and environments. There are some genuinely unique levels to explore here in terms of technical composition as well, like the rotating level that is powered thanks tothe Mode 7 graphics mode or the stage where you need to hang on to a ring with your whip while the screen itself is rotating. There is also the chandelier level with rotating chandeliers that you need to jump on, but oddly, the background for that level is simply black like it was more common to see in the NES days. These levels are pretty rare and don't really last that long and don't provide a big challenge, but it's still nice to see how creative the devs can get with this technology.
There hasn't been nearly as much work put into sprites and animations I felt like, which both end up feeling and looking like NES models a lot, but Simon himself has gotten some detail added to his sprite when it comes to the armor he is wearing, his hair and the definition in his arm and leg muscles.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
Tremendously atmospheric. The soundtrack and story set-up already put you in the right mood for this one, but thanks to the power of the SNES, there is a lot more attention to detail in the graphical presentation, along with the Mode 7 feature that I just mentioned which allows some levels to come alive more. Now about those cooked meals that are hidden in the walls ...
CONTENT | 8/10
There are 9 numbered and two lettered levels, so a total of 11 stages. A full playthrough for someone who doesn't die once takes a bit more than an hour. For me, it took about 6-7 to get to the final stage, but I couldn't defeat the final boss gauntlet without using save states. These stages are varied in looks, sometimes even in design (keywords, again, Mode 7) but there is no progression system or any special hidden rooms or unique levels with different style of gameplay to mix it up. Regarding the progression system, you literally have all your abilities available to you from the first level and nothing new is introduced apart from different enemies in different stages. But your health stays the same, your strength can be temporarily improved by finding the appropriate items and you don't gain new skills. That's all fine of course, but a little bit more meat on the bone in some way wouldn't have been a bad thing I think.
That said, a game that can be beaten in one or two afternoons depending on your skill set, especially now with the power of emulation, and one that does what it focuses on really well, is a game with great content in my eyes.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
In its core, this is pretty basic. 11 total stages, each with their sub-stages and boss fights, either at the end or sometimes in the middle. What this game gets bonus points for is its execution of the basic, which is simply very well done and shows why this formula has been so popular among devs and players for so long in the first place. Some levels that show off the skills of the SNES in particular add to the variety of it all as well.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
There isn't anything particularly innovative about the core gameplay here. This game simply does a great job of putting it all together and bringing it to the 4th gen of consoles, while adding a lot of QoL improvements, a few very much welcomed additions to Simon's whip and creating a very dark and tense horror atmosphere.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
The main motivation to play this again would be to beat your high score. There are a couple secret rooms to find as well, though all they offer are a bunch of candles to find regular items. This is interestingly a step back for the series, as Castlevania III offered multiple different characters and multiple paths that you could take after specific stages, which added to replayability. Personally, I don't think this is a big deal at all, as I enjoyed the focus on Simon, who now had a lot more abilities, and not having multiple paths allowed for more focus on the fewer stages that had to be created. I'd be lying if I said I would have minded multiple paths for added replayability though.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 76/100
One of the best platformers of the early 90s for sure. It's a tremendous improvement on earlier entries of the series in pretty much every way, it's rather easy to progress in compared to its contemporaries and the much tighter controls along with the greatness that is the game's OST, the majority of you will have a great time playing this I'm sure.
We found ourselves our first 1991 Game of the Year contender, ladies and gentlemen. Super Castlevania IV, an iconic platformer by Konami that originally released in Japan on October 31, 1991, is pretty much as good as advertised. And that says a lot considering that it was advertised as "one of the greatest games of all time". In many ways, from atmosphere to soundtrack to the simplicity of its gameplay loop, the game is timeless. In others, such as graphics, controls and features, it obviously lags behind more recent video games, but that's not a comparison we make here of course. For its time, Super Castlevania IV ranks high in those categories as well however.
Here is my in-depth review for the game. For the challenge, we'll be returning to the Castlevania series in October 1993 with Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
If you're a big fan of video games, you will know about Castlevania and the story set-up for its games, at least for most of them. There is a clan of vampire hunters called the Belmont family, who are tasked with defeating the evil Dracula, who resurrects himself every 100 years, when the "forces of the Good mysteriously become weak".
Super Castlevania IV doesn't do things differently, in very large part because this game is actually a remake of Castlevania for the NES from 1986. Or at least kind of it is.
The Japanese version, called Akumajō Dracula (the Japanese name for the Castlevania series), shows both in its name and in its story set-up that this is a remake of the first Castlevania. Simon Belmont, the main character for this game, is described as the young heir to the Belmont clan and prepares himself for its first adventure.
In the USA version, it is said that it is "time once again for Simon Belmont to take up his whip...", indicating that there was a different time when Simon Belmont had been active, which would be Castlevania II. See, Konami USA didn't actually factor in that this would be a remake, I suppose hence the name Super Castlevania IV (IV!), so it was actually considered a sequel all the way until 2005, when Konami released an "Xtreme desktop app" with the canon timeline, which didn't include Super Castlevania IV at all (as it is in essence a retelling of the first Castlevania, which IS included in the timeline).
With that out of the way, what IS the story here? You play Simon Belmont, as explained, who must defeat the evil Count Dracula in 1691 Transylvania. Equipped with a holy whip called 'Vampire Killer', which makes him the heir to the Belmont clan, Simon Belmont makes his way to Dracula's castle.
That's pretty much it. As per usual, story has no big considerations for these early 90 platformers, but there is enough here to set a dark, gothic atmosphere that will be palpable throughout your time with the game. For some additional lore, the manual states that "Simon has found an ancient tome left to him by his ancestors revealing the secret of the whip. In it, he learns that the whip can snap in eight directions." Some tiny little lore to explain a new gameplay mechanic is the kind of attention to detail I like to see, even if the game otherwise doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of storytelling.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
This game is a platformer of the best kind. You know, I have my typical issues with platformers that are almost ubiquitous in the early 90s. Whether it's unfair hit boxes, long-distance jumps that you will die due to unless you can time them perfectly, too many enemies and obstacles on-screen at the same time, unresponsive controls, no ability to jump and hit, not being able to jump and redirect yourself, only having the ability to hit straight, no crouch-and-move function, ridiculously overpowered bosses and many many more things I often find that make these old-school platformers incredibly frustrating.
But Super Castlevania IV manages to elegantly incorporate so many QoL-improvements and the devs seem to have figured out how they can find a great balance of fun and challenging, even if it's not perfect at all times.
Simon Belmont is equipped with a whip. As per usual, you can use it to hit enemies and candles, the latter of which are almost everywhere and drop items. These items are food items, which give you health, heart items, which give you ammunition for special weapons (ok..) and the special weapons themselves (boomerang (goes across screen, comes back) axe (flies in an arc), fire bomb (burns anything in path), dagger (flies straight) and watch (stops most enemies and their attaks for a few seconds)). Next to these, you can also pick up special items that destroy all enemies on screen, grant you invincibility for a couple seconds (called 'invisibility' in the manual, hah), that allow you to shoot twice per ammunition and that increase the power of your weapons. So a nice variety here.
The whip itself has gained new functions in this game, and boy are they useful. First, the whip can be whipped in eight (!) directions now. So up, down, left, right and then in each direction diagonally as well. Second, the whip can be used at rings, which allows you to latch onto them and leap into the air like you're Spider-Man. Third, you can also hold the attack button, which allows you to swing the whip around in a sort of limb state, which is funny and kind of unnecessary, but I appreciated it existing for sure.
What this game really does well, and is what I opened with here, is to keep the cheap deaths to a minimum. Your own hit-box is reduced, so projectiles that graze your hair don't damage you. The enemy hit-boxes are extended, and you can even hit them from below through the blocks that they're standing on. Enemies that would take a lot more hits in previous versions take fewer this time. Jumps on distant blocks are successful, even if one of Simon's legs barely touches the platform. The majority of enemies are easy enough to hit and avoid, and not bouncy and very quick like in previous games. The fact that you can whip in 8 directions makes hitting enemies above and below you so much easier, especially when you're on stairs. Enemies attack slower, and the levels are designed much better in a way that you don't have to worry about fighting multiple enemies AND having to avoid environmental obstacles at the same time.
None of the points above make this game a cake walk. They just make it a lot more fair and a lot more fun without all the hours of frustration that don't really need to be there. Are there still frustrating parts? Sure. When you enter a new screen and enemies jump on top of you immediately, that kind of sucks. When you jump and fall out of the map instead of on the stairs that are right below your feet, that's still annoying. Spikes one-hitting you is kind of dumb.
But for the majority of the game, you actually feel like you can control the action and do so naturally, without having to adjust to the idiosyncracies of a game's particular control scheme.
For some, most boss fights might be very easy, and to me, from what I've seen, I'd place them between Castlevania 1 and 2 in terms of difficulty, though closer to 2. What this game does a lot better than 2 though is that boss fights are actually mostly cleverly designed, or at least each battle has its distinctive challenges it asks the player to overcome. Some bosses you CAN simply brute-force your way through by mashing the attack button, and those definitely could have been improved upon, and the final boss fight does have some annoying parts in particular, but I'd say the boss fights were enjoyable for the most part.
Heck, the whole game was enjoyable for the majority of it. If you're looking for a retro platformer, you'd be remiss to not check out Super Castlevania IV.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
No voice acting. It makes use of the sound engine of the SNES to create a satisfying group of sound effects, but where this game really shines in the aural category is with its soundtrack. Man is it fantastic and does it set the tone. The opening alone sounds so beautifully eerie and mysterious that it sets you off on the right foot before you even press START. The exact same can be said for the Prologue track and then some. That one got me bopping my head. The 'Stage 1 Theme of Simon Belmont' I can only imagine being iconic, but I loved listening to themes like 'Bloody Tears' and 'Beginning', which move the soundtrack from eerie to downright epic. Bloody Tears is originally from Castlevania II and I'd argue it sounds even more epic on there, but I'm glad it got re-used and re-mixed, so I could hear it here for the first time. It's literally one of my favorite video game tracks of all time now, it's like it's straight out of a symphony.
'Beginning' is from Castlevania III, as the NES trilogy's tracks were re-used in part here as you can tell, especially in the later levels.
And you know what else is amazing? When you are in the final stage of the lengthy final boss battle against Dracula and his two strongest goons, when both goons are defeated and Dracula is on his last few health bars, what music kicks in? Simon's theme. Not only is that a badass track to begin with, but the implications of using it just adds to the moment so much, as Simon knows he got Dracula, Dracula knows Simon's got him and now it's on the player to beat Dracula's ass one final time. Beautiful.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10
The SNES offers a big jump graphically, and this game makes use of it. Each level looks unique, with a lot of attention to detail in the design of the backgrounds and environments. There are some genuinely unique levels to explore here in terms of technical composition as well, like the rotating level that is powered thanks tothe Mode 7 graphics mode or the stage where you need to hang on to a ring with your whip while the screen itself is rotating. There is also the chandelier level with rotating chandeliers that you need to jump on, but oddly, the background for that level is simply black like it was more common to see in the NES days. These levels are pretty rare and don't really last that long and don't provide a big challenge, but it's still nice to see how creative the devs can get with this technology.
There hasn't been nearly as much work put into sprites and animations I felt like, which both end up feeling and looking like NES models a lot, but Simon himself has gotten some detail added to his sprite when it comes to the armor he is wearing, his hair and the definition in his arm and leg muscles.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
Tremendously atmospheric. The soundtrack and story set-up already put you in the right mood for this one, but thanks to the power of the SNES, there is a lot more attention to detail in the graphical presentation, along with the Mode 7 feature that I just mentioned which allows some levels to come alive more. Now about those cooked meals that are hidden in the walls ...
CONTENT | 8/10
There are 9 numbered and two lettered levels, so a total of 11 stages. A full playthrough for someone who doesn't die once takes a bit more than an hour. For me, it took about 6-7 to get to the final stage, but I couldn't defeat the final boss gauntlet without using save states. These stages are varied in looks, sometimes even in design (keywords, again, Mode 7) but there is no progression system or any special hidden rooms or unique levels with different style of gameplay to mix it up. Regarding the progression system, you literally have all your abilities available to you from the first level and nothing new is introduced apart from different enemies in different stages. But your health stays the same, your strength can be temporarily improved by finding the appropriate items and you don't gain new skills. That's all fine of course, but a little bit more meat on the bone in some way wouldn't have been a bad thing I think.
That said, a game that can be beaten in one or two afternoons depending on your skill set, especially now with the power of emulation, and one that does what it focuses on really well, is a game with great content in my eyes.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
In its core, this is pretty basic. 11 total stages, each with their sub-stages and boss fights, either at the end or sometimes in the middle. What this game gets bonus points for is its execution of the basic, which is simply very well done and shows why this formula has been so popular among devs and players for so long in the first place. Some levels that show off the skills of the SNES in particular add to the variety of it all as well.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10
There isn't anything particularly innovative about the core gameplay here. This game simply does a great job of putting it all together and bringing it to the 4th gen of consoles, while adding a lot of QoL improvements, a few very much welcomed additions to Simon's whip and creating a very dark and tense horror atmosphere.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
The main motivation to play this again would be to beat your high score. There are a couple secret rooms to find as well, though all they offer are a bunch of candles to find regular items. This is interestingly a step back for the series, as Castlevania III offered multiple different characters and multiple paths that you could take after specific stages, which added to replayability. Personally, I don't think this is a big deal at all, as I enjoyed the focus on Simon, who now had a lot more abilities, and not having multiple paths allowed for more focus on the fewer stages that had to be created. I'd be lying if I said I would have minded multiple paths for added replayability though.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 76/100
One of the best platformers of the early 90s for sure. It's a tremendous improvement on earlier entries of the series in pretty much every way, it's rather easy to progress in compared to its contemporaries and the much tighter controls along with the greatness that is the game's OST, the majority of you will have a great time playing this I'm sure.
2017
In Tacoma you play as Amy Ferrier and have the task of retrieving data and the wetware of an AI, ODIN. from an abandoned station, Tacoma, which was struck by a meteor a few days prior. The crew was rescued, so as you collect the data, which happens automatically, you are free to explore the many different rooms in the station, where you can re-watch interactions between the crew members during and immediately after the meteor strike from a few days ago. Doing this, you find out about each member's role, ambitions, backgrounds and relationships between each other.
As mentioned, the devs are behind Gone Home as well. These games are very similar in that there isn't any threat, you can basically just explore a location and piece together the story and the events that unfolded and so, they place a heavy burden on narrative, world building and atmosphere.
It's possible that you can beat the game without really "completing" the story or finding out every truth but I wouldn't recommend it, because the story is actually pretty interesting (way more than Gone Home in my opinion). Beware that this is a walking simulator, so there isn't much in terms of gameplay. You just walk around, read some notes, listen to dialogue, do a few very easy puzzles and interact with a couple other things and that's it. All the value here is in the story and the characters, so your prior experiences with walking sims should tell you, if this game is for you.
That said, that value is quite high, as the game places you in a narrative that is quite thoughtprovoking when it comes to our current dabbles and battles with AI and how it might look like in the future where AI is more embedded into our everyday lives. I don't want to say too much, because as I said, the narrative is very important in carrying your experience, but this is a game that, while it doesn't take that story theme to an unexplored area, does create an interesting and engaging plot where the player feels actively involved thanks to the rewinding / fast-forwarding mechanic that the player needs to use to gather clues on what happened on this station.
Overall, I can recommend it and it's definitely up there as one of the more enjoyable walking sims I've played. This comes from someone who isn't necessarily a big fan of the genre, but whatever that genre needs to do to make up for its lack of gameplay, this game has accomplished.
As mentioned, the devs are behind Gone Home as well. These games are very similar in that there isn't any threat, you can basically just explore a location and piece together the story and the events that unfolded and so, they place a heavy burden on narrative, world building and atmosphere.
It's possible that you can beat the game without really "completing" the story or finding out every truth but I wouldn't recommend it, because the story is actually pretty interesting (way more than Gone Home in my opinion). Beware that this is a walking simulator, so there isn't much in terms of gameplay. You just walk around, read some notes, listen to dialogue, do a few very easy puzzles and interact with a couple other things and that's it. All the value here is in the story and the characters, so your prior experiences with walking sims should tell you, if this game is for you.
That said, that value is quite high, as the game places you in a narrative that is quite thoughtprovoking when it comes to our current dabbles and battles with AI and how it might look like in the future where AI is more embedded into our everyday lives. I don't want to say too much, because as I said, the narrative is very important in carrying your experience, but this is a game that, while it doesn't take that story theme to an unexplored area, does create an interesting and engaging plot where the player feels actively involved thanks to the rewinding / fast-forwarding mechanic that the player needs to use to gather clues on what happened on this station.
Overall, I can recommend it and it's definitely up there as one of the more enjoyable walking sims I've played. This comes from someone who isn't necessarily a big fan of the genre, but whatever that genre needs to do to make up for its lack of gameplay, this game has accomplished.
2016
Man, beating this was more pure determination than actually enjoying myself, at least on the final stage 9-10, which took me 2 hours to beat (mainly because it's hard, but also because I overlooked one specific thing I'll mention in a bit).
Clustertruck is a platformer developed by Landfall Games and released on September 27, 2016 for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch. Landfall Games are also behind Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, so suffice it to say, they've done alright for themselves. The game goes for 14.79€ without a sale, a price point I wouldn't recommend this game at. I played it through Amazon thanks to their monthly free game offerings through Amazon Prime.
Clustertruck is a Truck-themed platformer in which you jump from moving truck to truck and try to reach the finish line without ever touching the ground or anything else that isn't part of a truck. The main campaign has 9 worlds featuring different themes (steampunk, sci-fi, HELL) with 10 levels each, and they progressively get harder with a few unusually difficult levels sprinkled throughout. I've gotten to the final stage 9-10 in about 3 hours, and apart from about a handful of levels, none took me longer than 10 or so tries individually.
The game lets you restart pretty much instantly, which is great in allowing the game to flow pretty well and not interrupt gameplay at any time. When jumping from truck to truck, the abilities you have are, well, "jumping", sprinting to gain speed before jumping and the ability to move directions mid-air. As you finish levels, you collect points, which you can use in an Ability shop to unlock more advanced abilities to help make things easier. I believe each level can be beaten without an extra ability, but you'd be mad to do so without at least the first ability the game offers you, which is the "Dash" ability. There are many more which are presented to you on two sides, and you get to choose one ability to equip from each side. I didn't know you could equip more than one, so for most of the game, I stuck with Dash only.
Going with just this one ability was more than enough to go through 89 levels, and while you will be frustrated during this time, it rarely will be because a stage appears to be impossible. I'm by no means a skilled gamer and I somewhat smoothly made my way through them. Where it gets ridiculously hard though is on the final level, where you truly understand how many weaknesses the game has in its controls. Usually, the game asks you to just sprint and jump from truck to truck and reach an end point, but on this stage, the game asks you to do traditional platforming in that you climb up a flight of 'stairs' aka trucks. Unfortunately, the game does not have smooth enough controls and should really not be doing this. When you jump, it often is hard to control how far you move to each side, as sometimes you'll just move too far even though you barely move the stick, or even though you move backwards, the game will push you forward as if a truck hit you in the back. The game in general is incredibly sensitive to movement and, again, irratic in output as well, so you'll die a lot just because you're fighting the controls, not the challenges in the levels. You can not touch ground nor walls, so you have to be very careful in your input.
So due to this, I spent two hours on the final stage in sheer pain, until I looked through the shop again and bought an ability that slows down time. This made one specific part of this stage actually possible, and not too long after, I finally beat the game. I'd suggest picking that, if you decide to play this.
One final note I want to make is on the game's presentation. Visually, the game is pretty bland, with little detail in the environments. It gets better as you advance through the worlds and they get different themes, but apart from the final level, 'bland' is all I will remember from this game visually. The soundtrack has hints of vanilla as well with a lot of tracks that sound like your average mobile game platforming tracks and two or three that have some good parts in them. Overall though, I wouldn't really want to listen to it again.
So, all in all, would I recommend you to play this? As a pallette cleanser or just a fun little game for an hour or two with friends, sure, I think there is some fun to be had with the game's physics. Would I recommend you to go all 'thickheaded idiot' at this game just to get that satisfaction of beating it like I did? Not really, I think there are better games to waste 5 hours of your life on.
Clustertruck is a platformer developed by Landfall Games and released on September 27, 2016 for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch. Landfall Games are also behind Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, so suffice it to say, they've done alright for themselves. The game goes for 14.79€ without a sale, a price point I wouldn't recommend this game at. I played it through Amazon thanks to their monthly free game offerings through Amazon Prime.
Clustertruck is a Truck-themed platformer in which you jump from moving truck to truck and try to reach the finish line without ever touching the ground or anything else that isn't part of a truck. The main campaign has 9 worlds featuring different themes (steampunk, sci-fi, HELL) with 10 levels each, and they progressively get harder with a few unusually difficult levels sprinkled throughout. I've gotten to the final stage 9-10 in about 3 hours, and apart from about a handful of levels, none took me longer than 10 or so tries individually.
The game lets you restart pretty much instantly, which is great in allowing the game to flow pretty well and not interrupt gameplay at any time. When jumping from truck to truck, the abilities you have are, well, "jumping", sprinting to gain speed before jumping and the ability to move directions mid-air. As you finish levels, you collect points, which you can use in an Ability shop to unlock more advanced abilities to help make things easier. I believe each level can be beaten without an extra ability, but you'd be mad to do so without at least the first ability the game offers you, which is the "Dash" ability. There are many more which are presented to you on two sides, and you get to choose one ability to equip from each side. I didn't know you could equip more than one, so for most of the game, I stuck with Dash only.
Going with just this one ability was more than enough to go through 89 levels, and while you will be frustrated during this time, it rarely will be because a stage appears to be impossible. I'm by no means a skilled gamer and I somewhat smoothly made my way through them. Where it gets ridiculously hard though is on the final level, where you truly understand how many weaknesses the game has in its controls. Usually, the game asks you to just sprint and jump from truck to truck and reach an end point, but on this stage, the game asks you to do traditional platforming in that you climb up a flight of 'stairs' aka trucks. Unfortunately, the game does not have smooth enough controls and should really not be doing this. When you jump, it often is hard to control how far you move to each side, as sometimes you'll just move too far even though you barely move the stick, or even though you move backwards, the game will push you forward as if a truck hit you in the back. The game in general is incredibly sensitive to movement and, again, irratic in output as well, so you'll die a lot just because you're fighting the controls, not the challenges in the levels. You can not touch ground nor walls, so you have to be very careful in your input.
So due to this, I spent two hours on the final stage in sheer pain, until I looked through the shop again and bought an ability that slows down time. This made one specific part of this stage actually possible, and not too long after, I finally beat the game. I'd suggest picking that, if you decide to play this.
One final note I want to make is on the game's presentation. Visually, the game is pretty bland, with little detail in the environments. It gets better as you advance through the worlds and they get different themes, but apart from the final level, 'bland' is all I will remember from this game visually. The soundtrack has hints of vanilla as well with a lot of tracks that sound like your average mobile game platforming tracks and two or three that have some good parts in them. Overall though, I wouldn't really want to listen to it again.
So, all in all, would I recommend you to play this? As a pallette cleanser or just a fun little game for an hour or two with friends, sure, I think there is some fun to be had with the game's physics. Would I recommend you to go all 'thickheaded idiot' at this game just to get that satisfaction of beating it like I did? Not really, I think there are better games to waste 5 hours of your life on.
(This is the 92nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
My experience with the Castlevania series is still very limited. I checked out Castlevania III from 1989, but jumped off it pretty quickly due to what I perceived to be a ridiculously high and unfair difficulty. Then I played Super Castlevania IV from 1991, which still is one of my favorite games from this challenge and a great game in general. In hindsight, having learned a bit more about classic Castlevania since, I understand why fans of the 8 and 16-bit Castlevania games have some issues with Super Castlevania IV, but from an 'outsiders perspective', it is a great game, even if it isn't the 'best Castlevania experience'.
To this day, I thought that that was for the best, and that I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the game if it were another classic Castlevania experience, at least based on my experience playing Castlevania III. Luckily, that fear has proven to be overblown after I recently played and beat Castlevania: Bloodlines, which is your typical Castlevania experience. It released on March 17 1994 exlusively for the Sega Genesis and would be just one of two Castlevania games to ever grace a Sega system alongside Symphony of the Night in 1997. Despite this, I'd say Castlevania Bloodlines is among the best games the Sega Genesis ever produced.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
There is the usual amount of story in this Castlevania game that you would expect. The manual does a great job of providing you with the information on the setting, though an in-game cutscene explains it as well.
It tells the often-told tale of the Belmonts fighting Count Dracula in Transylvania. It also adds that a certain Quincy Morris finished Count Dracula off in 1897, but was fatally wounded during the battle as well. His son, John Morris, and John's friend Eric Lecarde witnessed the fight and would go on to become vampire killers themselves as they grew older. Those skills would be put to the test in this game, as "Elizabeth Bartley", a 'regal countess' who was found guilty of killing a man in 1421 by biting him in the neck, was brought back to life and looks to bring back Dracula as well.
As the game starts, you pick one of the two characters to fight with, after which a great shot is shown of them looking at Dracula's castle from the entrance. Here is where the game begins. From then on, there is little story that is being told. Environmental storytelling is the main thing you will get here, as well as the typical final shot of Dracula's mansion collapsing. The introduction of these two new characters is also nice. John Morris is equipped with the typical whip, while Eric has a spear.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
This game is your typical Castlevania experience. In a 2D environment, you move through levels equipped with a weapon, either the whip or the spear depending on the character you pick at the start, and try to defeat all the enemies and environmental challenges until you reach the boss of a stage. As per usual, this game requires the player to time their movement and strikes well in order to hit the enemy while also avoiding hits yourself. Unlike Super Castlevania, you can't strike in 8 directions anymore, your horizontal attacks are solely supplemented by diagonal attacks upwards only if you jump this time, giving this a more traditional gameplay feel and challenge.
Where the game shines in my opinion, even compared to Castlevania III which I personally didn't enjoy, is that it gets a great balance between difficutly and fairness. This is not designed like a 8-bit rental game, where aritifical difficulty was used to entice players to purchase the game themselves. The game has a higher than normal difficulty here as well, even on Easy, but nearly every challenge in this game has no BS in it and can be beaten simply by playing and learning the game.
There are four power-ups you can use in this game, which is I believe lower than the typical amount, and all of them feel useful here. There is the boomerang, which can be thrown from a pretty safe distance but only moves forward, not up or down. There is the battle axe, which can be thrown in an arc. There is the sacred water, which produces an effect that shoots through nearly the entire level if used as a special attack, making it the most powerful. It expires pretty fast though, while the other power-ups can be thrown as often as the crystals you collected allow (here used as 'ammo', like hearts in other Castlevania games).
Boss fights are great here, as well as the mini-boss fights throughout the stages. Each of them feels different and offers a unique challenge, which never felt like a daunting task like many other games of the early 90s made me feel like. The bosses have specific attack patterns which can change once you have dealt enough damage, and all of them can be dodged fairly reliably once you figure it out. The only boss that gave me real trouble was the last one, but even that one is definitely doable, it may just take a dozen or so tries.
Overall, this was one of the more enjoyable games to simply play because it flows so well, and while there are those thousand deaths you experience because of gravity (featuring enemies that push you off platforms), they rarely feel infuriating because almost all of the time, you actually feel like you can easily avoid it.
There are Easy and Normal difficulties to choose from at the start. I beat it on Easy, but I got pretty far on Normal as well, where enemies mainly appear more often and some are a bit more aggressive. I've read that this game is considered to be one of the more difficult Castlevania games, but I surprisingly think it's not that horrible, unless it's being compared to more modern Castlevania games, which I have not played yet. You have limited Continues and lives in this game, which is a big part of the issue I imagine. I played with those, but you can give yourself 4 additional lives per continue by using a cheat you can find on GameFAQs.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting. Once again, Castlevania Bloodlines gives us a banger Castlevania soundtrack. Probably the part I most looked forward to with this game was to listen to the soundtrack after Super Castlevania IV's soundtrack become one of my favorites ever. It helped that that game reused beloved tracks from the other Castlevania games, and the same is true here for Castlevania Bloodlines, but it brings plenty of original tracks forward that I would gladly relisten to outside of the game (I'm doing that as I am writing this) and has a great soundtrack overall. I wouldn't say it's quite on the level of Super Castlevania IV but I'm confident it will be among my favorites of 94 regardless.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
One of the more impressive games on the Genesis visually. You travel across Europe in this game, and that comes through not just because the game tells you that you are in Italy or Germany but because the environments are so varied. Add to this that there is the typical gothic and medieval Castlevania style here and it just works really well. Backgrounds are detailed and just bring this all together well to create the perfect backdrop for a vampiric adventure. On top of this, the sprite work is really good. For many bosses, you can clearly see how each of their limbs work independently from each other and this effect works really well once they take damage and lose their arms and the weapons they were holding until they ultimately collapse. A great graphical showing for its time.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
Castlevania games have such a great atmosphere. During this time of video gaming where 95% of games would go for light-hearted tones, games like Shin Megami Tensei, Metroid and Castlevania truly are a treat for someone who likes more mature tones. Castlevania Bloodlines creates an atmosphere equally gloomy and haunting as the rest of the series, and the trip through Europe that you take in this game just adds to it really well.
CONTENT | 8/10
You might fault this game for being a bit on the shorter side, and for re-using those few final bosses for a boss-rush at the end instead of creating more unique ones, as well as the more limited number of different enemies present here, but I thought the length was pretty good from today's perspective and overall the quality of the content that is available is pretty high. Three difficulty modes and two characters to choose from which create branching paths offer plenty of time sink material in this game as well.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
Castlevania Bloodlines does a fantastic job with its levels, both because the challenges within them are, despite their difficulty, quite fair and because the challenges themselves are very varied. No stage feels alike and offers something new to overcome all the time, while regularly fitting really well with the setting the game provides. There is the stage for example where you need to climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa while it moves from side to side, or the final stage where a distortion is created which displaces the upper and lower portions of the stage and make traversal really challenging in a unique way.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
It's your typical Castlevania experience, and while I wouldn't say that it has grown stale at this point at all (though I'm looking at it from a 2023 perspective after having played just two of the games), the game also doesn't really innovate a ton here. What it does do though is provide a great Castlevania experience with great visuals, unique bosses and level design and the introduction of two new characters, one of which uses a pretty unusual weapon for a Castlevania game, the spear, which ends up opening new routes due to its special skill of letting Eric jump upwards. So while it's not an innovative concept, Konami did a great job of making it feel fresh and like its own thing that is equal to all other beloved Castlevania games in my opinion.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
You can beat this game with two characters and use their unique abilities to take two different routes and face different bosses and environments. This gives it plenty of replay value after beating it for the first time. Once you beat it (or if you use a cheat), you can go through the game again on Expert difficulty as well.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 78/100
Castlevania: Bloodlines is a great entry into the Castlevania franchise. It succeeds in its gameplay, level design, atmosphere and soundtrack, just like all the best Castlevania games seem to do, and it does so without presenting an unfair challenge for the majority of the game and while requiring the player to overcome obstacles that feel consistently different enough to make each stage feel unique and keep the gameplay interesting. I recommend it to every platformer and retro gaming fan, though the difficulty may be off-putting to players who aren't accustomed to retro games, and there is pretty much no story to speak of here, like in most platformers of its time.
My experience with the Castlevania series is still very limited. I checked out Castlevania III from 1989, but jumped off it pretty quickly due to what I perceived to be a ridiculously high and unfair difficulty. Then I played Super Castlevania IV from 1991, which still is one of my favorite games from this challenge and a great game in general. In hindsight, having learned a bit more about classic Castlevania since, I understand why fans of the 8 and 16-bit Castlevania games have some issues with Super Castlevania IV, but from an 'outsiders perspective', it is a great game, even if it isn't the 'best Castlevania experience'.
To this day, I thought that that was for the best, and that I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the game if it were another classic Castlevania experience, at least based on my experience playing Castlevania III. Luckily, that fear has proven to be overblown after I recently played and beat Castlevania: Bloodlines, which is your typical Castlevania experience. It released on March 17 1994 exlusively for the Sega Genesis and would be just one of two Castlevania games to ever grace a Sega system alongside Symphony of the Night in 1997. Despite this, I'd say Castlevania Bloodlines is among the best games the Sega Genesis ever produced.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
There is the usual amount of story in this Castlevania game that you would expect. The manual does a great job of providing you with the information on the setting, though an in-game cutscene explains it as well.
It tells the often-told tale of the Belmonts fighting Count Dracula in Transylvania. It also adds that a certain Quincy Morris finished Count Dracula off in 1897, but was fatally wounded during the battle as well. His son, John Morris, and John's friend Eric Lecarde witnessed the fight and would go on to become vampire killers themselves as they grew older. Those skills would be put to the test in this game, as "Elizabeth Bartley", a 'regal countess' who was found guilty of killing a man in 1421 by biting him in the neck, was brought back to life and looks to bring back Dracula as well.
As the game starts, you pick one of the two characters to fight with, after which a great shot is shown of them looking at Dracula's castle from the entrance. Here is where the game begins. From then on, there is little story that is being told. Environmental storytelling is the main thing you will get here, as well as the typical final shot of Dracula's mansion collapsing. The introduction of these two new characters is also nice. John Morris is equipped with the typical whip, while Eric has a spear.
GAMEPLAY | 16/20
This game is your typical Castlevania experience. In a 2D environment, you move through levels equipped with a weapon, either the whip or the spear depending on the character you pick at the start, and try to defeat all the enemies and environmental challenges until you reach the boss of a stage. As per usual, this game requires the player to time their movement and strikes well in order to hit the enemy while also avoiding hits yourself. Unlike Super Castlevania, you can't strike in 8 directions anymore, your horizontal attacks are solely supplemented by diagonal attacks upwards only if you jump this time, giving this a more traditional gameplay feel and challenge.
Where the game shines in my opinion, even compared to Castlevania III which I personally didn't enjoy, is that it gets a great balance between difficutly and fairness. This is not designed like a 8-bit rental game, where aritifical difficulty was used to entice players to purchase the game themselves. The game has a higher than normal difficulty here as well, even on Easy, but nearly every challenge in this game has no BS in it and can be beaten simply by playing and learning the game.
There are four power-ups you can use in this game, which is I believe lower than the typical amount, and all of them feel useful here. There is the boomerang, which can be thrown from a pretty safe distance but only moves forward, not up or down. There is the battle axe, which can be thrown in an arc. There is the sacred water, which produces an effect that shoots through nearly the entire level if used as a special attack, making it the most powerful. It expires pretty fast though, while the other power-ups can be thrown as often as the crystals you collected allow (here used as 'ammo', like hearts in other Castlevania games).
Boss fights are great here, as well as the mini-boss fights throughout the stages. Each of them feels different and offers a unique challenge, which never felt like a daunting task like many other games of the early 90s made me feel like. The bosses have specific attack patterns which can change once you have dealt enough damage, and all of them can be dodged fairly reliably once you figure it out. The only boss that gave me real trouble was the last one, but even that one is definitely doable, it may just take a dozen or so tries.
Overall, this was one of the more enjoyable games to simply play because it flows so well, and while there are those thousand deaths you experience because of gravity (featuring enemies that push you off platforms), they rarely feel infuriating because almost all of the time, you actually feel like you can easily avoid it.
There are Easy and Normal difficulties to choose from at the start. I beat it on Easy, but I got pretty far on Normal as well, where enemies mainly appear more often and some are a bit more aggressive. I've read that this game is considered to be one of the more difficult Castlevania games, but I surprisingly think it's not that horrible, unless it's being compared to more modern Castlevania games, which I have not played yet. You have limited Continues and lives in this game, which is a big part of the issue I imagine. I played with those, but you can give yourself 4 additional lives per continue by using a cheat you can find on GameFAQs.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
No voice acting. Once again, Castlevania Bloodlines gives us a banger Castlevania soundtrack. Probably the part I most looked forward to with this game was to listen to the soundtrack after Super Castlevania IV's soundtrack become one of my favorites ever. It helped that that game reused beloved tracks from the other Castlevania games, and the same is true here for Castlevania Bloodlines, but it brings plenty of original tracks forward that I would gladly relisten to outside of the game (I'm doing that as I am writing this) and has a great soundtrack overall. I wouldn't say it's quite on the level of Super Castlevania IV but I'm confident it will be among my favorites of 94 regardless.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
One of the more impressive games on the Genesis visually. You travel across Europe in this game, and that comes through not just because the game tells you that you are in Italy or Germany but because the environments are so varied. Add to this that there is the typical gothic and medieval Castlevania style here and it just works really well. Backgrounds are detailed and just bring this all together well to create the perfect backdrop for a vampiric adventure. On top of this, the sprite work is really good. For many bosses, you can clearly see how each of their limbs work independently from each other and this effect works really well once they take damage and lose their arms and the weapons they were holding until they ultimately collapse. A great graphical showing for its time.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
Castlevania games have such a great atmosphere. During this time of video gaming where 95% of games would go for light-hearted tones, games like Shin Megami Tensei, Metroid and Castlevania truly are a treat for someone who likes more mature tones. Castlevania Bloodlines creates an atmosphere equally gloomy and haunting as the rest of the series, and the trip through Europe that you take in this game just adds to it really well.
CONTENT | 8/10
You might fault this game for being a bit on the shorter side, and for re-using those few final bosses for a boss-rush at the end instead of creating more unique ones, as well as the more limited number of different enemies present here, but I thought the length was pretty good from today's perspective and overall the quality of the content that is available is pretty high. Three difficulty modes and two characters to choose from which create branching paths offer plenty of time sink material in this game as well.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
Castlevania Bloodlines does a fantastic job with its levels, both because the challenges within them are, despite their difficulty, quite fair and because the challenges themselves are very varied. No stage feels alike and offers something new to overcome all the time, while regularly fitting really well with the setting the game provides. There is the stage for example where you need to climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa while it moves from side to side, or the final stage where a distortion is created which displaces the upper and lower portions of the stage and make traversal really challenging in a unique way.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
It's your typical Castlevania experience, and while I wouldn't say that it has grown stale at this point at all (though I'm looking at it from a 2023 perspective after having played just two of the games), the game also doesn't really innovate a ton here. What it does do though is provide a great Castlevania experience with great visuals, unique bosses and level design and the introduction of two new characters, one of which uses a pretty unusual weapon for a Castlevania game, the spear, which ends up opening new routes due to its special skill of letting Eric jump upwards. So while it's not an innovative concept, Konami did a great job of making it feel fresh and like its own thing that is equal to all other beloved Castlevania games in my opinion.
REPLAYABILITY | 4/5
You can beat this game with two characters and use their unique abilities to take two different routes and face different bosses and environments. This gives it plenty of replay value after beating it for the first time. Once you beat it (or if you use a cheat), you can go through the game again on Expert difficulty as well.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 78/100
Castlevania: Bloodlines is a great entry into the Castlevania franchise. It succeeds in its gameplay, level design, atmosphere and soundtrack, just like all the best Castlevania games seem to do, and it does so without presenting an unfair challenge for the majority of the game and while requiring the player to overcome obstacles that feel consistently different enough to make each stage feel unique and keep the gameplay interesting. I recommend it to every platformer and retro gaming fan, though the difficulty may be off-putting to players who aren't accustomed to retro games, and there is pretty much no story to speak of here, like in most platformers of its time.
1998
After putting Metal Gear Solid off for waaaaay too long, I finally sat down and devoured the entire game in just 2 days, putting 11 hours into it overall. Before this, I've spent a year playing about 100 games between 1990 and 1994, so I'd like to think I got a good idea of what gaming looked like at the start of the 32-bit era. Yes, some fantastic and ambitious games came out in the years between 1994 and 1998, where Metal Gear Solid released, but I can confidently say that Metal Gear Solid was and still is a truly special game.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
I'm probably the one millionth individual who is about to give a story synopsis for Metal Gear Solid, so I'll cut it short, because the setting of this game is not as impactful as the countless plot twists, bombastic moments, fantastic cutscenes and diverse, iconic characters in this game.
You play Solid Snake (again, for those of you who played Metal Gear 1 and 2 for the MSX, which I doubt you did, if you still haven't played MGS 1 to this day), and Solid Snake is brought in again for a high-stake covert operation. This time, it takes you to Alaska, and the Shadow Moses Island to be more precise, where a nuclear storage facility is situated. It was captured by a certain Liquid Snake and other members of FOXHOUND. They are holding two important officers hostage there, who both have a password each that Liquid Snake and his gang need to make true on their threats against the US government. These threats? Launching a nuclear strike with the help of a secret war tank with capabilities of launching missiles that was secretly being developed in this facility, called Metal Gear REX. Input the two passwords and it gets activated. Solid Snake is tasked with freeing those two officers, but when he gets to them, they mysteriously die by a heart attack, though not without telling Solid Snake that the bad guys got both of their passwords and are ready to launch. Solid Snake is informed that he needs three card keys to deactivate Metal Gear REX again.
Again, this does not do any justice to how wild it gets. Storytelling in some video games has come far, but in 1998, few games match what Hideo Kojima achieved with Metal Gear Solid, and I'd venture to say that no game achieved it by using such well put together cutscenes as he did with this game. The story becomes convoluted, though that's probably an overexaggeration, if you ask any Metal Gear veteran, who are, I hear, used to much, much "worse" after having played all the other canon Metal Gear entries that would follow.
As with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake from 1990, Hideo Kojima uses themes linked to real world issues. The nuclear arms race, the vicious circle of war, its affects on the surviving soldiers and our genes and how (and if) they define us as people. There are several moments in this game that really get you thinking, though this might be lost on you if you take the complete opposite of these moments too seriously. Because in something that Kojima become famous for, Metal Gear Solid is filled with silly interactions and immature moments to mix in with the more serious parts of storytelling. The Yakuza series comes to mind as another that mixes these two parts really well together. I've seen some people take offense to some of it but I think that's taking something way more seriously than you should be. Yakuza games have some of the most impactful main stories I've had the pleasure of experiencing in video gaming, and a side quest where you deliver a pizza even though a foreigner wanted to say visa doesn't diminish that one bit. One point I've read about a couple times is that Solid Snake is a dick for flirting with every female character in the game. While I'm unbothered by it for many reasons (they flirt back or flirt first for example), it also helps round out Solid Snake's character and makes his development more impactful as the game goes on. All the other silly moments in this game help create a similar situation for other characters later on, or are just simply there to lower the tension at a few points.
Characters in this game are very diverse and a lot of them have their own times to shine, including some really beautiful moments, especially for some of the bosses that you end up defeating. The death of one particular boss was really touching and the presentation of it was literally perfection. When these defeated people utter their final words, they give you a peak behind the killer, as they tell you how their own messed up fates led them down the path they took. It makes you feel for them, but it also is another form of meta storytelling, as these kinds of people are formed every single day in the world we live in as a result of war. I can imagine how impactful this must have been for all those people playing it close to release, especially those at a younger age who were mainly used to playing games for the gameplay before this. And while the game has some supernatural elements included, it's always nice to see more "grounded" stories in this medium, which feel like more and more of a rarity.
If there is anything I didn't enjoy here, it's probably the fact that Meryl's character is inconsistently written and that there are some awkward parts in the game's writing.
GAMEPLAY | 17/20
Great storytelling with great gameplay is always the best possible mix, and it's present here. As someone who did play Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake before this, I was surprised at how familiar it felt. This game truly is Metal Gear 2 in 3D, so much so that certain boss fights and challenges were used in pretty similar fashion. The differently-colored walls that can be blown up, the shape-shifting key, the mine detector part and several boss fights felt more modernized and had some slightly different challenges tied to them, but Hideo Kojima did re-use some of his ideas for a brighter audience, not to say that it is a bad thing at all.
Metal Gear Solid's gameplay is a lot of fun and it is pretty challenging. It's extremely challenging, if you choose one of the higher difficulties, but even on Easy you will die plenty of times (like me). Enemies have a certain field of vision that you can track on the radar in the top right, and stepping into it alerts them to your position. You avoid them by, well, staying out of the FOV, but also by crawling under tanks, tables and other objects, by disabling security cameras with chaff grenades, by shooting them with a silenced pistol and more. It's a stealth game pretty much, and one with little to no similar games to lean on for influence at that.
There are a lot of optional items to collect as well that can make your life easier in this game. You can find them by exploring or by backtracking to areas and opening up doors that were previously inaccessible to you. You acquire key cards with different security levels to do so. There are some smaller items to grab, like Body Armor, cardboard boxes, night-vision goggles and more, but also some more important items can also be optional pick-ups if you want to make it harder on yourself for whatever reason, such as the suppressor to your pistol, the mine detector, diazepam (removes trembling when you aim with your sniper) and even the gas mask is optional I believe, though I might be mistaken on that.
Generally, there are enough ways to make your way through areas undetected, though I suspect the number of options will increase by a lot in the upcoming sequels. What's most important however is that you always feel challenged, the gameplay maintains a level of tension that keeps it from ever becoming boring and at the same time, punishment for being detected is not instantly fatal depending on your difficulty, so even players who aren't the most skilled should get through this game with not much issue.
An optional part of gameplay, if you want to call it that, is interacting with the Codec. It leads to dialogue, so gameplay is pushing it, but as you are free to move around, you can use the Codec to make dozens upon dozens of optional calls to your contacts to learn more about your mission, the characters and the Metal Gear universe as a whole. Talking to Nastasha for example gives you a lot of information about the nuclear arms race, while talking to Master Miller leads to tips addressed to both Snake and the player himself, such as not staying up too late because your reflexes would be slowest at 3 am in the morning.
Overall, the 10-11 hours flew by thanks to well balanced story and gameplay segments and generally a fun gameplay loop.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
The voice acting is surprisingly great in this. I knew David Hayter nailed it as Snake, but nearly the entire cast did a great job. I think Mei Ling's VA takes the cake though with her reading of "SNAAAAAAAKE". The best voice acted line in gaming history I think. The sound design is not even worth mentioning here because everyone knows how iconic it is, while the soundtrack is equally fantastic. The track that plays at the end of the game gave me goosebumps, but a lot of tracks here are very memorable.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
The graphics judged by modern standards are obviously not great. Judged by 1998 standards, the graphics are solid (heh) but what makes the game stand out is its presentation first and foremost. There are better looking games by 1998 but few that are as well put together in a cinematographic sense. Many beautiful setpieces are present here as well, but it didn't set a new benchmark visually like it did in many other aspects.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
By now, if you've had any experiences with the series, you'll know what a Metal Gear game feels like, and obviously, this game feels like quintessential Metal Gear, a unique type of feeling to this day. It also makes you feel like a stealth operative on a mission thanks to its presentation, but it feels like it could have been expanded upon by putting you in more memorable locations for some of its bigger story beats. There are a couple of those, but mainly the gameplay takes place in warehouses and blue/grayish buildings.
CONTENT | 9/10
Don't get me wrong. I love modern gaming. But from time to time, it's nice to play a game with no collectable distractions. Just one, linear main story and paced in one specific way. That pacing is phenomenal for the majority of the game. There is one annoyance though, which is the backtracking you have to do. It's not a lot of backtracking, don't worry, but it's enough that it made me yawn a couple of times. It's not egregious though, and if there is a silver lining, it's that it sends you back to certain special locations where you defeated bosses, and not seeing them there anymore is a pretty cool, yet sad visual.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The backtracking is not great, as established. But the level design overall is great otherwise, and there are plenty of unique levels to mix things up. Rarely are you doing the exact same thing twice, and levels are designed in a way that makes sense. They're also not too small that there is just one clear path forward, and not too large that they just end up having a lot of empty space. If there is one improvement I would like, it would probably be that there are more alternative routes through the levels a la Deus Ex for example, so that the player can feel clever as they discover them and so that levels feel more replayable.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
We could debate ad nauseam how influential Metal Gear Solid has been. I'd say it has a unique concept more than it is influential, but I also would say that it is pretty influential. First and foremost, conceptually, this game is fantastic. Really well balanced story/gameplay segments, a cinematic approach to storytelling, a unique style of gameplay (stealth) that was pretty rare at the time and a game that tackles multiple real world themes. The stealth gameplay and cinematic storytelling approach might be the two most influential parts about this game, and I'd say they increased the value video games provide for me, which is all I'm looking for for a 10/10. The latter part might have been overdone in future entries (I'll be the judge of that when I get to playing them), but it's very well balanced here.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Higher difficulties, finding some hidden items in future playthroughs, engaging in more optional Codec conversations and ... well, I think that's it. Not a lot of replayability here in terms of new stuff to find and do after beating it initially.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 89/100
It's definitely among my absolute favorite games of the 90s, and you could say among my favorites all time as well, as great games don't age in my opinion. I got wowed and moved by the story and characters several times, I laughed, I was in deep thought about some of the real world issues the game brings up and I had a blast with the gameplay. It left me very satisfied with the story conclusion and hyped af for the sequel with that after-credits scene. I think I'll jump right on that after posting this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
I'm probably the one millionth individual who is about to give a story synopsis for Metal Gear Solid, so I'll cut it short, because the setting of this game is not as impactful as the countless plot twists, bombastic moments, fantastic cutscenes and diverse, iconic characters in this game.
You play Solid Snake (again, for those of you who played Metal Gear 1 and 2 for the MSX, which I doubt you did, if you still haven't played MGS 1 to this day), and Solid Snake is brought in again for a high-stake covert operation. This time, it takes you to Alaska, and the Shadow Moses Island to be more precise, where a nuclear storage facility is situated. It was captured by a certain Liquid Snake and other members of FOXHOUND. They are holding two important officers hostage there, who both have a password each that Liquid Snake and his gang need to make true on their threats against the US government. These threats? Launching a nuclear strike with the help of a secret war tank with capabilities of launching missiles that was secretly being developed in this facility, called Metal Gear REX. Input the two passwords and it gets activated. Solid Snake is tasked with freeing those two officers, but when he gets to them, they mysteriously die by a heart attack, though not without telling Solid Snake that the bad guys got both of their passwords and are ready to launch. Solid Snake is informed that he needs three card keys to deactivate Metal Gear REX again.
Again, this does not do any justice to how wild it gets. Storytelling in some video games has come far, but in 1998, few games match what Hideo Kojima achieved with Metal Gear Solid, and I'd venture to say that no game achieved it by using such well put together cutscenes as he did with this game. The story becomes convoluted, though that's probably an overexaggeration, if you ask any Metal Gear veteran, who are, I hear, used to much, much "worse" after having played all the other canon Metal Gear entries that would follow.
As with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake from 1990, Hideo Kojima uses themes linked to real world issues. The nuclear arms race, the vicious circle of war, its affects on the surviving soldiers and our genes and how (and if) they define us as people. There are several moments in this game that really get you thinking, though this might be lost on you if you take the complete opposite of these moments too seriously. Because in something that Kojima become famous for, Metal Gear Solid is filled with silly interactions and immature moments to mix in with the more serious parts of storytelling. The Yakuza series comes to mind as another that mixes these two parts really well together. I've seen some people take offense to some of it but I think that's taking something way more seriously than you should be. Yakuza games have some of the most impactful main stories I've had the pleasure of experiencing in video gaming, and a side quest where you deliver a pizza even though a foreigner wanted to say visa doesn't diminish that one bit. One point I've read about a couple times is that Solid Snake is a dick for flirting with every female character in the game. While I'm unbothered by it for many reasons (they flirt back or flirt first for example), it also helps round out Solid Snake's character and makes his development more impactful as the game goes on. All the other silly moments in this game help create a similar situation for other characters later on, or are just simply there to lower the tension at a few points.
Characters in this game are very diverse and a lot of them have their own times to shine, including some really beautiful moments, especially for some of the bosses that you end up defeating. The death of one particular boss was really touching and the presentation of it was literally perfection. When these defeated people utter their final words, they give you a peak behind the killer, as they tell you how their own messed up fates led them down the path they took. It makes you feel for them, but it also is another form of meta storytelling, as these kinds of people are formed every single day in the world we live in as a result of war. I can imagine how impactful this must have been for all those people playing it close to release, especially those at a younger age who were mainly used to playing games for the gameplay before this. And while the game has some supernatural elements included, it's always nice to see more "grounded" stories in this medium, which feel like more and more of a rarity.
If there is anything I didn't enjoy here, it's probably the fact that Meryl's character is inconsistently written and that there are some awkward parts in the game's writing.
GAMEPLAY | 17/20
Great storytelling with great gameplay is always the best possible mix, and it's present here. As someone who did play Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake before this, I was surprised at how familiar it felt. This game truly is Metal Gear 2 in 3D, so much so that certain boss fights and challenges were used in pretty similar fashion. The differently-colored walls that can be blown up, the shape-shifting key, the mine detector part and several boss fights felt more modernized and had some slightly different challenges tied to them, but Hideo Kojima did re-use some of his ideas for a brighter audience, not to say that it is a bad thing at all.
Metal Gear Solid's gameplay is a lot of fun and it is pretty challenging. It's extremely challenging, if you choose one of the higher difficulties, but even on Easy you will die plenty of times (like me). Enemies have a certain field of vision that you can track on the radar in the top right, and stepping into it alerts them to your position. You avoid them by, well, staying out of the FOV, but also by crawling under tanks, tables and other objects, by disabling security cameras with chaff grenades, by shooting them with a silenced pistol and more. It's a stealth game pretty much, and one with little to no similar games to lean on for influence at that.
There are a lot of optional items to collect as well that can make your life easier in this game. You can find them by exploring or by backtracking to areas and opening up doors that were previously inaccessible to you. You acquire key cards with different security levels to do so. There are some smaller items to grab, like Body Armor, cardboard boxes, night-vision goggles and more, but also some more important items can also be optional pick-ups if you want to make it harder on yourself for whatever reason, such as the suppressor to your pistol, the mine detector, diazepam (removes trembling when you aim with your sniper) and even the gas mask is optional I believe, though I might be mistaken on that.
Generally, there are enough ways to make your way through areas undetected, though I suspect the number of options will increase by a lot in the upcoming sequels. What's most important however is that you always feel challenged, the gameplay maintains a level of tension that keeps it from ever becoming boring and at the same time, punishment for being detected is not instantly fatal depending on your difficulty, so even players who aren't the most skilled should get through this game with not much issue.
An optional part of gameplay, if you want to call it that, is interacting with the Codec. It leads to dialogue, so gameplay is pushing it, but as you are free to move around, you can use the Codec to make dozens upon dozens of optional calls to your contacts to learn more about your mission, the characters and the Metal Gear universe as a whole. Talking to Nastasha for example gives you a lot of information about the nuclear arms race, while talking to Master Miller leads to tips addressed to both Snake and the player himself, such as not staying up too late because your reflexes would be slowest at 3 am in the morning.
Overall, the 10-11 hours flew by thanks to well balanced story and gameplay segments and generally a fun gameplay loop.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10
The voice acting is surprisingly great in this. I knew David Hayter nailed it as Snake, but nearly the entire cast did a great job. I think Mei Ling's VA takes the cake though with her reading of "SNAAAAAAAKE". The best voice acted line in gaming history I think. The sound design is not even worth mentioning here because everyone knows how iconic it is, while the soundtrack is equally fantastic. The track that plays at the end of the game gave me goosebumps, but a lot of tracks here are very memorable.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
The graphics judged by modern standards are obviously not great. Judged by 1998 standards, the graphics are solid (heh) but what makes the game stand out is its presentation first and foremost. There are better looking games by 1998 but few that are as well put together in a cinematographic sense. Many beautiful setpieces are present here as well, but it didn't set a new benchmark visually like it did in many other aspects.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10
By now, if you've had any experiences with the series, you'll know what a Metal Gear game feels like, and obviously, this game feels like quintessential Metal Gear, a unique type of feeling to this day. It also makes you feel like a stealth operative on a mission thanks to its presentation, but it feels like it could have been expanded upon by putting you in more memorable locations for some of its bigger story beats. There are a couple of those, but mainly the gameplay takes place in warehouses and blue/grayish buildings.
CONTENT | 9/10
Don't get me wrong. I love modern gaming. But from time to time, it's nice to play a game with no collectable distractions. Just one, linear main story and paced in one specific way. That pacing is phenomenal for the majority of the game. There is one annoyance though, which is the backtracking you have to do. It's not a lot of backtracking, don't worry, but it's enough that it made me yawn a couple of times. It's not egregious though, and if there is a silver lining, it's that it sends you back to certain special locations where you defeated bosses, and not seeing them there anymore is a pretty cool, yet sad visual.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10
The backtracking is not great, as established. But the level design overall is great otherwise, and there are plenty of unique levels to mix things up. Rarely are you doing the exact same thing twice, and levels are designed in a way that makes sense. They're also not too small that there is just one clear path forward, and not too large that they just end up having a lot of empty space. If there is one improvement I would like, it would probably be that there are more alternative routes through the levels a la Deus Ex for example, so that the player can feel clever as they discover them and so that levels feel more replayable.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10
We could debate ad nauseam how influential Metal Gear Solid has been. I'd say it has a unique concept more than it is influential, but I also would say that it is pretty influential. First and foremost, conceptually, this game is fantastic. Really well balanced story/gameplay segments, a cinematic approach to storytelling, a unique style of gameplay (stealth) that was pretty rare at the time and a game that tackles multiple real world themes. The stealth gameplay and cinematic storytelling approach might be the two most influential parts about this game, and I'd say they increased the value video games provide for me, which is all I'm looking for for a 10/10. The latter part might have been overdone in future entries (I'll be the judge of that when I get to playing them), but it's very well balanced here.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Higher difficulties, finding some hidden items in future playthroughs, engaging in more optional Codec conversations and ... well, I think that's it. Not a lot of replayability here in terms of new stuff to find and do after beating it initially.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 89/100
It's definitely among my absolute favorite games of the 90s, and you could say among my favorites all time as well, as great games don't age in my opinion. I got wowed and moved by the story and characters several times, I laughed, I was in deep thought about some of the real world issues the game brings up and I had a blast with the gameplay. It left me very satisfied with the story conclusion and hyped af for the sequel with that after-credits scene. I think I'll jump right on that after posting this review.
1993
(This is the 84th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Less than a year after the Game Boy and overall debut of Kirby with Kirby's Dream Land, Nintendo released Kirby's Adventure on the SNES on March 23, 1993. Oh wait, what? It's an NES game? 2 1/2 years into the SNES' existence? Interesting.
What started as a request to simply port over Kirby's Dream Land to the system turned into something much grander when director Masahiro Sakurai chose to take advantage of the increased storage capacity available on the NES. Why it released on the NES instead of the SNES, I don't know. Some suggest that more people having the NES played a big role, and that it makes the game more accessible to children that way, though I can't comment on that.
They did do it however, and did take over some features of the Game Boy game while adding plenty more. Kirby, just like in Kirby's Dream Land, can inhale enemies and spit them back out, and Kirby can inhale air to fly. The game also remains on the easier side, though criticism about the game's lack of difficulty has been heard by making the game a bit tougher, which I can attest to, having played Kirby's Dream Land just a month or so ago before this. What has changed is that Kirby is now, for the first time, presented in color, and I think it's a fun fact that Shigeru Miyamoto initially thought Kirby would be yellow when Kirby still was only known to people in his monochrome form. What has also changed is that this game is significantly longer than Kirby's debut showing. A first-time playthrough will easily take an average player close to 6-8 hours, if not 10+, if you're on the less skilled side. That's partly because some sections can be a bit more difficult, partly because of a few annoyances with the game's controls we will get to in a bit and partly because the game is pretty long, with 41 levels over 7 worlds. Kirby's Dream Land sported only 5 levels.
The most notable other addition in this game is the "copy abilities" feature. To put it plainly, Kirby has two ways to kill enemies, when he inhales them. Either spit them back out or swallow them. Having come off a recent playthrough of Shin Megami Tensei 1, I can't say I've seen such brutality in that game and Kirby scares me ever since.
In all seriousness though, what swallowing enemies does is give Kirby the enemy's ability, which is a really fun feature. This allows Kirby to, for example, spit fire, wield a sword, roll up into a ball and roll through the map, take an icey form to produce ice cubes or even swallow lethargic enemies to take up their power of ... taking a nap and not doing anything for a couple seconds. I can imagine how limitless the possibilites are with such a feature and having not played any other Kirby game besides the first two, I'm excited to find out. In this game in particular, there appear to be 25 abilites Kirby can copy, though I found that most of the time you have access to about 10 of these in particular. There are multiple enemies carrying these abilities spread through each level, with them getting more and more diverse as you progress through stages, and usually you can pick and choose the ability you like best and progress through almost all areas using those. Sometimes, certain enemies are specifically placed in certain locations where their ability would prove to be most useful, like a wheel enemy near a slide. I found two locations that I don't think I could have progressed without using the enemy's ability placed nearby, but I think otherwise it's optional which one's you choose.
Apart from this feature, what is most impressive about Kirby's Adventure is that they were able to cram it all on the NES. Visually and in terms of gameplay it is one of the most impressive games on the system for sure (and the last NES game I will play as part of this challenge I'm doing, so it's nice to end the NES era on a very positive note). However, this does come with one caveat, which is performance. As retro gamers are well aware, whenever there are too many sprites or too many effects on the screen, the game experiences slowdown, and it happens often enough in this game to become annoying. There is a workaround though, which is playing the Nintendo 3DS version, which fixed all these performance issues. One other possible side-effect is the issues you will experience with the controls. I am not sure if this happened because of the slowdown or not, though I'm pretty sure it's part of the game's design that once you inhale, you are locked from turning Kirby around for a good second, which is an eternity, especially during boss fights. Input seems to also not respond immediately at times, so a lot of boss fights would just become way harder than they should have been because I would fight the controls for most of them. Similarly, whenever you jump down too far, an animation of Kirby falling on his face plays and you once again can't control him for a second, which allows enemies to easily get a hit in while you recover. For a game such as this, this was an odd thing to include, and I can't say I see that sort of jumping penalty a lot, perhaps ever, in these types of platforming games.
The boss fights are enjoyable enough apart from this. Some boss fights one will remember, if you've played Kirby's Dream Land, such as the tree called "Whispy" and, of course, King Dedede, who both use the same attack patterns pretty much. Boss fights happen at the end of each world, but there are several mini bosses in the 5 or 6 levels per world that you have to go through. End of world boss fights definitely feel like a bigger deal though, and are significantly tougher. I wouldn't call them hard at all, I also wouldn't call some of them pieces of cake, mainly because of the aforementioned performance and control issues.
The levels themselves are incredibly varied visually and again, I was just so impressed with how good this game looked on the NES. I'd say it's one of the best looking games on the system for sure. Apart from the main levels, there is an overworld for each world where you can also enter minigames and other small areas, such as one's that offer you a selection of enemies whose abilities you can then take into the main level, which is useful if you died and are left without an ability before a boss fight for example. The art style of the entire game is very appealing, especially to kids, but also to everyone else, as it just presentes itself as a laid back, relaxed, casual experience. Each new world is also introduced through a short little thematically fitting clip of Kirby in that world, which is pretty nice. Finally, I enjoyed the soundtrack but I wouldn't say it's among my favorites on the NES due to the lack of memorable tracks. Vegetable Valley 1 and Butter Building are worth highlighting. My favorite sound-related thing in the entire game has got to be the Mike ability, which you can use three times to damage everyone on the screen by having Kirby scream into a microphone. The scream was cute in Kirby's Dream Land already, but here they've added to it by making the third scream have a bit more oomph and Kirby leaning the mic forward like a rockstar when he screams into it, which was just adorable and got a chuckle out of me.
OVERALL | 73/100
Kirby's Adventure is definitely still worth playing today, and best enjoyed using the 3DS version due to the performance issues that are fixed on there. I would call this one of the best games on the NES for sure, so I'd recommend it to any and all platformer and retro fans. The "Copy Abilities" system was pretty fun and added replay value thanks to the amount of them available, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Nintendo builds on it, though I'm not sure if it's next mainline title, Kirby's Dream Land 2, can replicate it on this level due to being a Game Boy game.
Less than a year after the Game Boy and overall debut of Kirby with Kirby's Dream Land, Nintendo released Kirby's Adventure on the SNES on March 23, 1993. Oh wait, what? It's an NES game? 2 1/2 years into the SNES' existence? Interesting.
What started as a request to simply port over Kirby's Dream Land to the system turned into something much grander when director Masahiro Sakurai chose to take advantage of the increased storage capacity available on the NES. Why it released on the NES instead of the SNES, I don't know. Some suggest that more people having the NES played a big role, and that it makes the game more accessible to children that way, though I can't comment on that.
They did do it however, and did take over some features of the Game Boy game while adding plenty more. Kirby, just like in Kirby's Dream Land, can inhale enemies and spit them back out, and Kirby can inhale air to fly. The game also remains on the easier side, though criticism about the game's lack of difficulty has been heard by making the game a bit tougher, which I can attest to, having played Kirby's Dream Land just a month or so ago before this. What has changed is that Kirby is now, for the first time, presented in color, and I think it's a fun fact that Shigeru Miyamoto initially thought Kirby would be yellow when Kirby still was only known to people in his monochrome form. What has also changed is that this game is significantly longer than Kirby's debut showing. A first-time playthrough will easily take an average player close to 6-8 hours, if not 10+, if you're on the less skilled side. That's partly because some sections can be a bit more difficult, partly because of a few annoyances with the game's controls we will get to in a bit and partly because the game is pretty long, with 41 levels over 7 worlds. Kirby's Dream Land sported only 5 levels.
The most notable other addition in this game is the "copy abilities" feature. To put it plainly, Kirby has two ways to kill enemies, when he inhales them. Either spit them back out or swallow them. Having come off a recent playthrough of Shin Megami Tensei 1, I can't say I've seen such brutality in that game and Kirby scares me ever since.
In all seriousness though, what swallowing enemies does is give Kirby the enemy's ability, which is a really fun feature. This allows Kirby to, for example, spit fire, wield a sword, roll up into a ball and roll through the map, take an icey form to produce ice cubes or even swallow lethargic enemies to take up their power of ... taking a nap and not doing anything for a couple seconds. I can imagine how limitless the possibilites are with such a feature and having not played any other Kirby game besides the first two, I'm excited to find out. In this game in particular, there appear to be 25 abilites Kirby can copy, though I found that most of the time you have access to about 10 of these in particular. There are multiple enemies carrying these abilities spread through each level, with them getting more and more diverse as you progress through stages, and usually you can pick and choose the ability you like best and progress through almost all areas using those. Sometimes, certain enemies are specifically placed in certain locations where their ability would prove to be most useful, like a wheel enemy near a slide. I found two locations that I don't think I could have progressed without using the enemy's ability placed nearby, but I think otherwise it's optional which one's you choose.
Apart from this feature, what is most impressive about Kirby's Adventure is that they were able to cram it all on the NES. Visually and in terms of gameplay it is one of the most impressive games on the system for sure (and the last NES game I will play as part of this challenge I'm doing, so it's nice to end the NES era on a very positive note). However, this does come with one caveat, which is performance. As retro gamers are well aware, whenever there are too many sprites or too many effects on the screen, the game experiences slowdown, and it happens often enough in this game to become annoying. There is a workaround though, which is playing the Nintendo 3DS version, which fixed all these performance issues. One other possible side-effect is the issues you will experience with the controls. I am not sure if this happened because of the slowdown or not, though I'm pretty sure it's part of the game's design that once you inhale, you are locked from turning Kirby around for a good second, which is an eternity, especially during boss fights. Input seems to also not respond immediately at times, so a lot of boss fights would just become way harder than they should have been because I would fight the controls for most of them. Similarly, whenever you jump down too far, an animation of Kirby falling on his face plays and you once again can't control him for a second, which allows enemies to easily get a hit in while you recover. For a game such as this, this was an odd thing to include, and I can't say I see that sort of jumping penalty a lot, perhaps ever, in these types of platforming games.
The boss fights are enjoyable enough apart from this. Some boss fights one will remember, if you've played Kirby's Dream Land, such as the tree called "Whispy" and, of course, King Dedede, who both use the same attack patterns pretty much. Boss fights happen at the end of each world, but there are several mini bosses in the 5 or 6 levels per world that you have to go through. End of world boss fights definitely feel like a bigger deal though, and are significantly tougher. I wouldn't call them hard at all, I also wouldn't call some of them pieces of cake, mainly because of the aforementioned performance and control issues.
The levels themselves are incredibly varied visually and again, I was just so impressed with how good this game looked on the NES. I'd say it's one of the best looking games on the system for sure. Apart from the main levels, there is an overworld for each world where you can also enter minigames and other small areas, such as one's that offer you a selection of enemies whose abilities you can then take into the main level, which is useful if you died and are left without an ability before a boss fight for example. The art style of the entire game is very appealing, especially to kids, but also to everyone else, as it just presentes itself as a laid back, relaxed, casual experience. Each new world is also introduced through a short little thematically fitting clip of Kirby in that world, which is pretty nice. Finally, I enjoyed the soundtrack but I wouldn't say it's among my favorites on the NES due to the lack of memorable tracks. Vegetable Valley 1 and Butter Building are worth highlighting. My favorite sound-related thing in the entire game has got to be the Mike ability, which you can use three times to damage everyone on the screen by having Kirby scream into a microphone. The scream was cute in Kirby's Dream Land already, but here they've added to it by making the third scream have a bit more oomph and Kirby leaning the mic forward like a rockstar when he screams into it, which was just adorable and got a chuckle out of me.
OVERALL | 73/100
Kirby's Adventure is definitely still worth playing today, and best enjoyed using the 3DS version due to the performance issues that are fixed on there. I would call this one of the best games on the NES for sure, so I'd recommend it to any and all platformer and retro fans. The "Copy Abilities" system was pretty fun and added replay value thanks to the amount of them available, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Nintendo builds on it, though I'm not sure if it's next mainline title, Kirby's Dream Land 2, can replicate it on this level due to being a Game Boy game.
1992
I enjoyed the first Streets of Rage, and pretty much the same is true for its sequel, Streets of Rage 2, which released on December 20, 1992 for the Sega Genesis and later for the Game Gear and Master System. Developed by Sega, Streets of Rage 2 is pretty much the same game with a few minor and one major change.
First, instead of 3, you now have access to 4 characters to choose from, each with their different stats. Second, instead of everyone having the same special attack, each now has an individual one. However, this time, using a special attack drains your health, adding a quite significant penalty to using it. Third, there is an Easy mode in this game that is ACTUALLY easy. I managed to beat the game on my first time through using one continue on the final stage, and that's mainly thanks to the fact that Sega cooled it with the ridiculous bosses that felt like they were designed to swallow coins on Arcade machines due to their unfair difficulty. In Streets of Rage 2, unfair enemies are still a thing - especially on harder difficulties - but it's not on the same ridiculous level to the point that you won't manage to beat the game within 10 hours.
The soundtrack here is another great one and the levels are varied and good looking. The game looks prettier than the original, with bigger and better looking sprites and more detailed backgrounds. This creates the right atmosphere for this game where, once again, the whole city turns into chaos due to an evil syndicate taking over. This time it is Mr. X, who you face in a pretty cool final stage.
In terms of its gameplay, it has a fun loop but becomes pretty repetitive after a while. There is no dodge button, no guard button or anything of the sort, which means there is little you can do in terms of defending yourself in gameplay. The trick to being successful in this game is to time the enemy attack patterns and strike at the right time, at least that's what I would assume. Since that is much easier said than done, a lot of the game for me was spent either breezing through all normal enemies or getting into a slug-fest with one of the tougher enemies, where I would usually lose one life and try to out-damage the enemy. There aren't a lot of combos you can do either, so overall, I can't say I enjoyed pressing the same button over and over again for the entirety of the couple hours I've spent with the game.
All in all, it's a solid beat 'em up game I can recommend if you're a fan of the genre, but I didn't have as good a time with it as I would have hoped.
(This is the 80th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
First, instead of 3, you now have access to 4 characters to choose from, each with their different stats. Second, instead of everyone having the same special attack, each now has an individual one. However, this time, using a special attack drains your health, adding a quite significant penalty to using it. Third, there is an Easy mode in this game that is ACTUALLY easy. I managed to beat the game on my first time through using one continue on the final stage, and that's mainly thanks to the fact that Sega cooled it with the ridiculous bosses that felt like they were designed to swallow coins on Arcade machines due to their unfair difficulty. In Streets of Rage 2, unfair enemies are still a thing - especially on harder difficulties - but it's not on the same ridiculous level to the point that you won't manage to beat the game within 10 hours.
The soundtrack here is another great one and the levels are varied and good looking. The game looks prettier than the original, with bigger and better looking sprites and more detailed backgrounds. This creates the right atmosphere for this game where, once again, the whole city turns into chaos due to an evil syndicate taking over. This time it is Mr. X, who you face in a pretty cool final stage.
In terms of its gameplay, it has a fun loop but becomes pretty repetitive after a while. There is no dodge button, no guard button or anything of the sort, which means there is little you can do in terms of defending yourself in gameplay. The trick to being successful in this game is to time the enemy attack patterns and strike at the right time, at least that's what I would assume. Since that is much easier said than done, a lot of the game for me was spent either breezing through all normal enemies or getting into a slug-fest with one of the tougher enemies, where I would usually lose one life and try to out-damage the enemy. There aren't a lot of combos you can do either, so overall, I can't say I enjoyed pressing the same button over and over again for the entirety of the couple hours I've spent with the game.
All in all, it's a solid beat 'em up game I can recommend if you're a fan of the genre, but I didn't have as good a time with it as I would have hoped.
(This is the 80th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
(This is the 85th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
In this challenge I'm doing, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or 'Zelda 3' is still my 2nd favorite game I've played up to this point. Knowing that its sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, was released on the Game Boy, I didn't have too high expectations because I've come to realize that most games on the Game Boy have not aged well due to the handheld's capabilities. Looking at Super Mario Land 2, I expected this to be one of the better games on the system though, and after having played it for a good while, I can confirm as much. It's absolutely one of the best games on the system. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much fun with this game as I would have liked, and it mainly has to do with the slow pace of it at all, mainly due to one issue.
Story-wise, Link's Awakening starts off as a follow-up to A Link to the Past in that Link travels by ship to other places and, on his return home to Hyrule months later, has his ship destroyed by a storm and washes ashore on a place that is not actually Hyrule, which makes this game the first Zelda game to not play in Hyrule. The island he is on is called "Koholint Island", and he is taken home by a girl called Marin, who tends to him until he wakes up. When he wakes up, Link can talk to Marin's father, Tarin, who looks suspiciously like Mario (and also likes mushrooms) to recover his shield. He makes his way to the beach to recover his sword, where an owl tells him that he needs to wake the Wind Fish, which is in an egg crowning the large mountain of this island. Only this way can Link escape the island. To do this, Link needs to collect 8 instruments out of 8 dungeons.
It's a pretty neat setup for this game and it's nice to see it be different from the typical save Hyrule from Ganon plot, which is by no means bad, but from there, the game plays exactly like A Link to the Past, but on the Game Boy. This is luckily also not a bad thing, as the concept put forth by A Link to the Past is rightfully praised all over. It is, however, on the Game Boy, so it just plays like a smaller version with fewer features. In addition, I want to say it is designed for children in terms of its difficulty, but one constant issue that "pops up" (pun intended) makes me think this was designed for 6-year olds, though even 6-year olds are unlikely to need this much help on this front.
What I am referring to are "message pop-ups" that constantly, and I mean constantly, interrupt your gameplay, to the point it drove me to near-madness and made me end my playthrough, as it just made the game straight-up unenjoyable. The way these games are set up is in a Metroidvania-style where you lack all abilities at the start and therefore can't enter certain areas until you find suitable items elsewhere. For example, pots and stones can not be carried unless you equip a "Power Bracelet". This presents the two main issues I had with this game. First, there are many items in this game (just like in 'A Link to the Past') but here, instead of having them be passive skills, you need to constantly manually equip the items you need at a given moment, with two items equippable at the same time. You need to switch a lot, which slows the game down too much for me and has led to many annoying deaths over the time I played. Second, which is the worst part, EVERY time you accidentally run into any item that you cannot interact with, a message screen pops up telling you that you cannot do that. I KNOW. And it's not like the message goes away once you have the Power Bracelet. No, every time you don't have it equipped, you get the message again. Why? For whom? You also get the same message about the same items you pick up in each dungeon explaining their functions. It takes so much time to constantly have to wait to skip through them and just felt so odd throughout.
Perhaps my fixation on these pop-ups was exacerbated by the fact that I found the puzzles in this game to be less clever (and more annoying because of the constant item-swapping) and "whimsical character wants an item to trade" as puzzle-solving multiple times didn't really translate to enjoyable content to me at some point. I think overall, it just felt like the worse version of A Link to the Past that it is and it couldn't really excite me enough to see through the story, which hadn't really moved along at all at the time I stopped playing apart from the Owl constantly sending me to different dungeons to collect instruments. It definitely didn't help that all of this was happening on my computer screen instead of on a handheld like initially intended, but I'm also not a kid anymore, haven't played this game back in the day and after thousands of games, both by and not by Nintendo, that copied Zelda's charm, as well as the monochrome graphics, I just couldn't really get excited about most of what I was seeing and playing.
OVERALL | 66/100
To call The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening a competent game would be my way of saying that it is not a bad game at all, and if you love Zelda games, you will really enjoy this one as well (though I'd opt for the remake at this point). But calling it competent is also my way of saying that the game did little 'wrong', however the things it did do wrong (message pop-ups, item switching) hampered my enjoyment of the game a lot. It doesn't help that this game follows the same rigid collect a certain number of things to beat the game like seemingly all first-party Nintendo Game Boy games (which I presume is due to the limitations of the Game Boy), so even though it had the Zelda coding on it, I couldn't help but feel unimpressed from an enjoyment-perspective. From a technical perspective, it is undoubtedly impressive how much the devs were able to get out of the Game Boy with this game.
In this challenge I'm doing, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or 'Zelda 3' is still my 2nd favorite game I've played up to this point. Knowing that its sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, was released on the Game Boy, I didn't have too high expectations because I've come to realize that most games on the Game Boy have not aged well due to the handheld's capabilities. Looking at Super Mario Land 2, I expected this to be one of the better games on the system though, and after having played it for a good while, I can confirm as much. It's absolutely one of the best games on the system. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much fun with this game as I would have liked, and it mainly has to do with the slow pace of it at all, mainly due to one issue.
Story-wise, Link's Awakening starts off as a follow-up to A Link to the Past in that Link travels by ship to other places and, on his return home to Hyrule months later, has his ship destroyed by a storm and washes ashore on a place that is not actually Hyrule, which makes this game the first Zelda game to not play in Hyrule. The island he is on is called "Koholint Island", and he is taken home by a girl called Marin, who tends to him until he wakes up. When he wakes up, Link can talk to Marin's father, Tarin, who looks suspiciously like Mario (and also likes mushrooms) to recover his shield. He makes his way to the beach to recover his sword, where an owl tells him that he needs to wake the Wind Fish, which is in an egg crowning the large mountain of this island. Only this way can Link escape the island. To do this, Link needs to collect 8 instruments out of 8 dungeons.
It's a pretty neat setup for this game and it's nice to see it be different from the typical save Hyrule from Ganon plot, which is by no means bad, but from there, the game plays exactly like A Link to the Past, but on the Game Boy. This is luckily also not a bad thing, as the concept put forth by A Link to the Past is rightfully praised all over. It is, however, on the Game Boy, so it just plays like a smaller version with fewer features. In addition, I want to say it is designed for children in terms of its difficulty, but one constant issue that "pops up" (pun intended) makes me think this was designed for 6-year olds, though even 6-year olds are unlikely to need this much help on this front.
What I am referring to are "message pop-ups" that constantly, and I mean constantly, interrupt your gameplay, to the point it drove me to near-madness and made me end my playthrough, as it just made the game straight-up unenjoyable. The way these games are set up is in a Metroidvania-style where you lack all abilities at the start and therefore can't enter certain areas until you find suitable items elsewhere. For example, pots and stones can not be carried unless you equip a "Power Bracelet". This presents the two main issues I had with this game. First, there are many items in this game (just like in 'A Link to the Past') but here, instead of having them be passive skills, you need to constantly manually equip the items you need at a given moment, with two items equippable at the same time. You need to switch a lot, which slows the game down too much for me and has led to many annoying deaths over the time I played. Second, which is the worst part, EVERY time you accidentally run into any item that you cannot interact with, a message screen pops up telling you that you cannot do that. I KNOW. And it's not like the message goes away once you have the Power Bracelet. No, every time you don't have it equipped, you get the message again. Why? For whom? You also get the same message about the same items you pick up in each dungeon explaining their functions. It takes so much time to constantly have to wait to skip through them and just felt so odd throughout.
Perhaps my fixation on these pop-ups was exacerbated by the fact that I found the puzzles in this game to be less clever (and more annoying because of the constant item-swapping) and "whimsical character wants an item to trade" as puzzle-solving multiple times didn't really translate to enjoyable content to me at some point. I think overall, it just felt like the worse version of A Link to the Past that it is and it couldn't really excite me enough to see through the story, which hadn't really moved along at all at the time I stopped playing apart from the Owl constantly sending me to different dungeons to collect instruments. It definitely didn't help that all of this was happening on my computer screen instead of on a handheld like initially intended, but I'm also not a kid anymore, haven't played this game back in the day and after thousands of games, both by and not by Nintendo, that copied Zelda's charm, as well as the monochrome graphics, I just couldn't really get excited about most of what I was seeing and playing.
OVERALL | 66/100
To call The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening a competent game would be my way of saying that it is not a bad game at all, and if you love Zelda games, you will really enjoy this one as well (though I'd opt for the remake at this point). But calling it competent is also my way of saying that the game did little 'wrong', however the things it did do wrong (message pop-ups, item switching) hampered my enjoyment of the game a lot. It doesn't help that this game follows the same rigid collect a certain number of things to beat the game like seemingly all first-party Nintendo Game Boy games (which I presume is due to the limitations of the Game Boy), so even though it had the Zelda coding on it, I couldn't help but feel unimpressed from an enjoyment-perspective. From a technical perspective, it is undoubtedly impressive how much the devs were able to get out of the Game Boy with this game.
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.)
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is an adventure game / RPG developed by Horror Soft and released by Accolade in March 1990 for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. It is named after the movie that released in 1988. A sequel was released in 1992, which already gives us a hint that this game must have done alright commercially.
And sure enough, the reception for this game was very good. On Wikipedia you won't find a score below 4 stars or 81% and it received the Computer Gaming World RPG of the Year Award for 1991. Not sure why it won a year later, but know that the competition wasn't light at the time.
In Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, we play, well, ourselves, called upon by Elvira to prevent her great-great grandmother Emelda's return from the dead. The game plays in a castle and has multiple elements. It is part point & click adventure with its typical verb-interface (open, unlock, look in), part action game with real time combat and part horror game as it uses a lot of gore and has some scary surprises in store overall.
If you don't know Elvira, as a non-American I didn't before today (though her style does look familiar), she is a character portrayed by Cassandra Peterson and was most popular in the 80s. She is most known for her gothic, cleavage-showing wardrobe and her edgy humor.
I checked out the movie before playing and thought it was a funny movie, though a lot of gore and horror is present in it, so I wasn't sure what to expect with this game. Sure enough, it's a lot of tense, creepy horror interspersed with Elvira's edgy humor.
In the game, you control your character by clicking forward, turn right, turn left or turn around. Whenever an enemy approaches, you start in attack mode and have to click LUNGE / HACK to strike. Depending on a variety of stats and some RNG, your strike hits or is blocked. If you hit, often you get a second attempt (again, depending on your stats vs the enemies) but if you are blocked, you go over to Defense Mode and have to BLOCK / PARRY.
But let's dive deeper into that whilst we go through each category in more detail.
STORYTELLING: You start the game by moving two steps forward before being arrested. In a humorous little scene, your character is in his dark prison cell as light shines in and the characters jaw DROPS. In comes Elvira, and she quips that you were sent to save her, but instead she is saving you. She brings her to her room in this castle, in which she is a prisoner. Her great great grandmother Emelda is about to awaken from the dead, so you have to help prevent that from happening.
Elvira then is found in a kitchen where she can mix spells for you, she can also climb into a little hole if you find her some light for that and there are a variety of other things that she does / expects you to do, but most of the time, she is not gonna be on screen. She is pretty much her witty self from the movies and TV shows and it works well.
Then there is the guy who arrested you, who seemed to be on drugs or something, and later an old woman who takes over the kitchen, meaning you have to "scare her off", otherwise Elvira will not mix any more spells for you.
Depending on how you stand on her edgy humor and a horror story like this one, this might work or it might not. It's not particularly advanced story telling and most of the game is spent in combat or exploration, with some environmental storytelling as well to be fair. There isn't that much here overall, but it's solid.
GAMEPLAY: Combat took a while to get used to, especially defense. Your enemy reaches back for a swing for a second before striking to your left or your right. From what I figured out, BLOCK or PARRY is assigned to one side during a specific fight, so when he attacks left, you BLOCK for example. However, I believe stats matter here too and sometimes, I would click it too early or too late and the swing would hit me anyway. Considering that you have 99 LIFE to start, you can lose it all rather quickly, especially because the tougher enemies can be found very early on. But the game has a real time combat system that was uncommon for the times and even if it isn't great, it's still unique.
This means that the entire game is filled with trial and error moments that you will die to dozens, if not hundreds of times. Make sure to save often.
The rest of the game is puzzle solving and exploration. For example, outside in the garden area, a man stands with a bird on his arm. When you get too close, the bird jumps into air and flies at you. Within this time, you have to figure out how to defeat it. Turns out, there is a very specific way to beat it, and if you don't have the item, a bolt, go and find it. The game doesn't indicate that you need it though, but this is one of the easier "puzzles" to solve. Problem is, your aim is terrible, so you can't hit it. What do you do now? The manual has a tip regarding that if you're stumped, but even though the answer is very "game-y", it kinda makes sense.
Many puzzles are like that. Often they do make sense and you'll get them eventually. The problem is, figuring out where item A is to use it with item B to get the wanted result can take a long time and will involve a lot of dying. Considering your life points are rather low, even saving a lot will still mean losing a lot of time to find this random item. Games back in the day did this a lot I notice to add an additional "challenge" for people looking to complete games, so you probably will either have to use a guide or look for hours and get lucky. Not the most fun.
To complete puzzles and for combat purposes, you have an inventory and can drag and drop items in and out of it. The manual says that you have a lot of space and shouldn't be shy when picking things up, however there are a lot of necessary items to collect and going over the invisible quota happened quicker than I would have liked. If you are over encumbered for too long, you become too tired and the game ends, so it's actually important to pay attention. Luckily you can simply drop items anywhere and then pick them up later. But there's a lot of inventory management without a lot of "reliable" management to be done.
Plus, there is a kitchen where Elvira mixes you spells, but once you visit and exit for the first time, the kitchen is blocked by an old lady and you need to find an item later to get her out. Until then, no spells. That means you shouldn't go there for a while, but if you don't, you gotta keep the ingredients in your inventory, which means you have to manage dropping them somewhere and getting back to them later. There is some strategy involved here, but to me it wasn't the most fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is a little line by Elvira when she first talks to you, but it's not even linked to what she is actually saying, so it's not much more than a noise and not worth discussing.
The sound design is solid. From the sound of swords clashing to the sound of enemies shouting when being hit (though the sound is the same for both man and monster), not to mention the sound when you beat a sharp wooden stick into the chest of a vampire with a hammer, the sound design works well in line with the game's atmosphere.
The real highlight of this game though is its soundtrack (for the Amiga version). There are three or four tracks that you hear based on the location you are in and all set the mood perfectly. The track in the garden especially I could definitely listen to outside of the game. The music is creepy, unsettling truly does the most work to make this game feel like a horror game. I can recommend a listen.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Oh man, what can I say here? I think it's safe to say that this game is one of the bigger gore-fests of its time. The first character you meet that imprisons you for example has no pupils. Or the first time you are in combat, you realize that whenever the enemy's health depletes, cuts in his chest become visible. But that's the harmless stuff.
Because whenever you die, your character's demise is shown in very graphic ways. When the bird manages to kill you, it takes your eyeballs and you see your character in that particularly gruesome image. When a vampire bites you, you have bite marks in your head. When the old lady gets her hands on you, your head ends up swimming in a cooking pot. There are many more unique ways you die and even the most basic death is hard to look at, not to mention that your character is bloodied in every scene.
ATMOSPHERE: The grotesque design mixed with the tense music and the appearance of a bunch of in-theme characters make this one of the more atmospheric games of 1990.
CONTENT: If you know what to do, this game takes a bit over an hour. If you don't, you'll probably be busy closer to 10 if you use guides sparingly. 10 hours will be filled with a lot of reloading and guessing on which way to go in which order, in addition to inventory management, so a shorter length or a bit less complexity in the level design would have done this game good I think.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: As I mentioned, the design is too complex at times and a lot of it has to do with the dungeon (here: castle) being small overall, but filled with enemies that are too strong at pretty much every second door, meaning you will go into the wrong direction or enter the wrong room on a very regular basis.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The amount of gore present here is certainly noticeable and I'm gonna say it's unlikely that there were many other games like this back in the day where you had so many different ways of seeing your character's death. If you enjoy horror games, this definitely pushed the scene in the right direction, but if you're in it for the RPG mechanics, it'll probably not be as welcomed.
REPLAYABILITY: Once you have finished the game, there is some replayability in approaching puzzles slightly differently or of course trying to beat your previous time (or limiting the amount of reloads), but generally the game is fairly linear in how to solve things.
PLAYABILITY: The game is perfectly playable.
OVERALL: The focus on puzzles in addition to the RPG mechanics present in this game make for awkward gameplay mix. If you're a fan of one genre but not so much of the other, this will probably be off-putting to both fronts. If you enjoy both genres however and don't mind experiencing how a mix between the two would work, and especially if you don't mind but rather welcome the horror elements in this game - which set a great atmosphere - you'll likely enjoy the game for what it's worth, however the complexity and the reliance on save states may be frustrating to you.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Leah Wesolowski for Computer Gaming World Issue 82 (May 91): "these images are simply not acceptable for two-year-olds (in reference to the gory scenes) No shit, Leah.
And sure enough, the reception for this game was very good. On Wikipedia you won't find a score below 4 stars or 81% and it received the Computer Gaming World RPG of the Year Award for 1991. Not sure why it won a year later, but know that the competition wasn't light at the time.
In Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, we play, well, ourselves, called upon by Elvira to prevent her great-great grandmother Emelda's return from the dead. The game plays in a castle and has multiple elements. It is part point & click adventure with its typical verb-interface (open, unlock, look in), part action game with real time combat and part horror game as it uses a lot of gore and has some scary surprises in store overall.
If you don't know Elvira, as a non-American I didn't before today (though her style does look familiar), she is a character portrayed by Cassandra Peterson and was most popular in the 80s. She is most known for her gothic, cleavage-showing wardrobe and her edgy humor.
I checked out the movie before playing and thought it was a funny movie, though a lot of gore and horror is present in it, so I wasn't sure what to expect with this game. Sure enough, it's a lot of tense, creepy horror interspersed with Elvira's edgy humor.
In the game, you control your character by clicking forward, turn right, turn left or turn around. Whenever an enemy approaches, you start in attack mode and have to click LUNGE / HACK to strike. Depending on a variety of stats and some RNG, your strike hits or is blocked. If you hit, often you get a second attempt (again, depending on your stats vs the enemies) but if you are blocked, you go over to Defense Mode and have to BLOCK / PARRY.
But let's dive deeper into that whilst we go through each category in more detail.
STORYTELLING: You start the game by moving two steps forward before being arrested. In a humorous little scene, your character is in his dark prison cell as light shines in and the characters jaw DROPS. In comes Elvira, and she quips that you were sent to save her, but instead she is saving you. She brings her to her room in this castle, in which she is a prisoner. Her great great grandmother Emelda is about to awaken from the dead, so you have to help prevent that from happening.
Elvira then is found in a kitchen where she can mix spells for you, she can also climb into a little hole if you find her some light for that and there are a variety of other things that she does / expects you to do, but most of the time, she is not gonna be on screen. She is pretty much her witty self from the movies and TV shows and it works well.
Then there is the guy who arrested you, who seemed to be on drugs or something, and later an old woman who takes over the kitchen, meaning you have to "scare her off", otherwise Elvira will not mix any more spells for you.
Depending on how you stand on her edgy humor and a horror story like this one, this might work or it might not. It's not particularly advanced story telling and most of the game is spent in combat or exploration, with some environmental storytelling as well to be fair. There isn't that much here overall, but it's solid.
GAMEPLAY: Combat took a while to get used to, especially defense. Your enemy reaches back for a swing for a second before striking to your left or your right. From what I figured out, BLOCK or PARRY is assigned to one side during a specific fight, so when he attacks left, you BLOCK for example. However, I believe stats matter here too and sometimes, I would click it too early or too late and the swing would hit me anyway. Considering that you have 99 LIFE to start, you can lose it all rather quickly, especially because the tougher enemies can be found very early on. But the game has a real time combat system that was uncommon for the times and even if it isn't great, it's still unique.
This means that the entire game is filled with trial and error moments that you will die to dozens, if not hundreds of times. Make sure to save often.
The rest of the game is puzzle solving and exploration. For example, outside in the garden area, a man stands with a bird on his arm. When you get too close, the bird jumps into air and flies at you. Within this time, you have to figure out how to defeat it. Turns out, there is a very specific way to beat it, and if you don't have the item, a bolt, go and find it. The game doesn't indicate that you need it though, but this is one of the easier "puzzles" to solve. Problem is, your aim is terrible, so you can't hit it. What do you do now? The manual has a tip regarding that if you're stumped, but even though the answer is very "game-y", it kinda makes sense.
Many puzzles are like that. Often they do make sense and you'll get them eventually. The problem is, figuring out where item A is to use it with item B to get the wanted result can take a long time and will involve a lot of dying. Considering your life points are rather low, even saving a lot will still mean losing a lot of time to find this random item. Games back in the day did this a lot I notice to add an additional "challenge" for people looking to complete games, so you probably will either have to use a guide or look for hours and get lucky. Not the most fun.
To complete puzzles and for combat purposes, you have an inventory and can drag and drop items in and out of it. The manual says that you have a lot of space and shouldn't be shy when picking things up, however there are a lot of necessary items to collect and going over the invisible quota happened quicker than I would have liked. If you are over encumbered for too long, you become too tired and the game ends, so it's actually important to pay attention. Luckily you can simply drop items anywhere and then pick them up later. But there's a lot of inventory management without a lot of "reliable" management to be done.
Plus, there is a kitchen where Elvira mixes you spells, but once you visit and exit for the first time, the kitchen is blocked by an old lady and you need to find an item later to get her out. Until then, no spells. That means you shouldn't go there for a while, but if you don't, you gotta keep the ingredients in your inventory, which means you have to manage dropping them somewhere and getting back to them later. There is some strategy involved here, but to me it wasn't the most fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is a little line by Elvira when she first talks to you, but it's not even linked to what she is actually saying, so it's not much more than a noise and not worth discussing.
The sound design is solid. From the sound of swords clashing to the sound of enemies shouting when being hit (though the sound is the same for both man and monster), not to mention the sound when you beat a sharp wooden stick into the chest of a vampire with a hammer, the sound design works well in line with the game's atmosphere.
The real highlight of this game though is its soundtrack (for the Amiga version). There are three or four tracks that you hear based on the location you are in and all set the mood perfectly. The track in the garden especially I could definitely listen to outside of the game. The music is creepy, unsettling truly does the most work to make this game feel like a horror game. I can recommend a listen.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Oh man, what can I say here? I think it's safe to say that this game is one of the bigger gore-fests of its time. The first character you meet that imprisons you for example has no pupils. Or the first time you are in combat, you realize that whenever the enemy's health depletes, cuts in his chest become visible. But that's the harmless stuff.
Because whenever you die, your character's demise is shown in very graphic ways. When the bird manages to kill you, it takes your eyeballs and you see your character in that particularly gruesome image. When a vampire bites you, you have bite marks in your head. When the old lady gets her hands on you, your head ends up swimming in a cooking pot. There are many more unique ways you die and even the most basic death is hard to look at, not to mention that your character is bloodied in every scene.
ATMOSPHERE: The grotesque design mixed with the tense music and the appearance of a bunch of in-theme characters make this one of the more atmospheric games of 1990.
CONTENT: If you know what to do, this game takes a bit over an hour. If you don't, you'll probably be busy closer to 10 if you use guides sparingly. 10 hours will be filled with a lot of reloading and guessing on which way to go in which order, in addition to inventory management, so a shorter length or a bit less complexity in the level design would have done this game good I think.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: As I mentioned, the design is too complex at times and a lot of it has to do with the dungeon (here: castle) being small overall, but filled with enemies that are too strong at pretty much every second door, meaning you will go into the wrong direction or enter the wrong room on a very regular basis.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The amount of gore present here is certainly noticeable and I'm gonna say it's unlikely that there were many other games like this back in the day where you had so many different ways of seeing your character's death. If you enjoy horror games, this definitely pushed the scene in the right direction, but if you're in it for the RPG mechanics, it'll probably not be as welcomed.
REPLAYABILITY: Once you have finished the game, there is some replayability in approaching puzzles slightly differently or of course trying to beat your previous time (or limiting the amount of reloads), but generally the game is fairly linear in how to solve things.
PLAYABILITY: The game is perfectly playable.
OVERALL: The focus on puzzles in addition to the RPG mechanics present in this game make for awkward gameplay mix. If you're a fan of one genre but not so much of the other, this will probably be off-putting to both fronts. If you enjoy both genres however and don't mind experiencing how a mix between the two would work, and especially if you don't mind but rather welcome the horror elements in this game - which set a great atmosphere - you'll likely enjoy the game for what it's worth, however the complexity and the reliance on save states may be frustrating to you.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Leah Wesolowski for Computer Gaming World Issue 82 (May 91): "these images are simply not acceptable for two-year-olds (in reference to the gory scenes) No shit, Leah.
1992
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the sequel to, surprise surprise, Sonic the Hedgehog, both of which released on the Sega Genesis. This sequel released just 1 1/2 years later and with only 9 months of development time, but it not only helped Sega claim a lot of market share held by Nintendo at the time, but it also solidified Sonic as the iconic video game mascot we know today and as Sega's answer to Nintendo's Mario.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was developed by Sega Technical Institute released on November 21, 1992 for the Sega Genesis and, at the time, was the first Japanese game ever to have a simultaneous worldwide launch and popularized this concept at the time. It also become the fastest-selling game at the time, breaking video game records. It's also interesting to note that Sega wasn't quite sold on Sonic like you might think, which is interesting because one thing I felt while playing this game was "this feels more like the big deal that I expected Sonic the Hedgehog 1 to be".
The game does what a sequel should do. It realizes (most) of what ailed the original and improves upon it without taking anything away from everything else that made the original what it is. Now, I can't say I loved the original game, which I played just a few months back for the first time ever, but it was enjoyable and the 'speed' gimmick for Sonic certainly made the game stand out.
With Sonic 2, I have more positive, but somewhat mixed feelings still. It absolutely is one of the standout games of 1992 and deservedly called a classic and one of the greatest games of all time. Its gameplay is timeless in the sense that it is still very easy to pick up and play the game today. My complaint mainly is that I still didn't get quite as comfortable with Sonic's gimmick as I might have had I been introduced to him in my childhood.
My biggest complaint with the original for example was that way too often, speeding through a level was disrupted by countless obstacles, and you'd need to constantly jog back to gain momentum to run up a steep slope. The developers apparently recognized this and added a skill that allows Sonic to gain momentum for a second with a dash-like bump to his speed, which definitely helped a lot. Still, to activate it, you need to step back a bit to not be on an inclining area of the platform, then you need to stand still for a second, then press 'down' and then press the appropriate button to charge up the dash.
My other issue is that the obstacles could have been made much less frustrating. When you run up a slope and fall on top of any enemy, you are the one that takes damages and lose all your rings. Why? Because flying up in the air and falling on top of an enemy (or a power-up) is not registered as a 'jump'. To actually be able to hit them, you need to actually press the 'jump' button, which seems to me like it's the same thing and would have helped make the game a smoother experience. On the other hand, the game was called 'easy' at the time in its current state as well, and it certainly isn't the most difficult game I've played, so allowing for hits to be recognized without pressing 'jump' might have made things too easy. Though, with that being the case, you can see what my issue is with these game's design. It's not necessarily an objective flaw, just a subjective opinion on how it feels to play the game.
That said, this was certainly still plenty of fun. The soundtrack is as good as the first game, the levels are even more varied (the Casino zone is especially memorable) and there are more challenges to spice up the gameplay, like the underwater levels, trap platforms that you can fall through and the "half-pipe courses" that were added as a bonus stage to collect the Chaos Emeralds which turn Sonic into Super Sonic.
I really liked the design of most zones, though some felt a bit too busy. Some also include certain tubes that suck you up and shoot you around the level for a while, which takes control out of your hands and makes you wait for a bit, which quickly gets repetitive after a few Game Overs. But each level introduces its own challenges and themes, and there are many branching paths you can take to mix up each playthrough, which shows the high production values in this game compared to almost all competitors in the genre.
This game is also the debut of Tails, who has a very cute design but, unless you change it in the hidden "Options" menu, for some reason runs around with you even in 1P mode and just seems out of place.
Overall, I think most people will have a fun couple hours with this game at least and it has aged pretty well. I think even today, you'll get more or less the same out of it as people from 30 years ago did, especially if you're a kid, which isn't something that can be said about many games of this time period. Personally, I can't say these initial Sonic games suit what makes a video game a lot of fun for me because I find that the factor of 'speed' runs opposite to the countless obstacles that make you stop and play it more slowly, but I still had fun with it.
(This is the 79th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was developed by Sega Technical Institute released on November 21, 1992 for the Sega Genesis and, at the time, was the first Japanese game ever to have a simultaneous worldwide launch and popularized this concept at the time. It also become the fastest-selling game at the time, breaking video game records. It's also interesting to note that Sega wasn't quite sold on Sonic like you might think, which is interesting because one thing I felt while playing this game was "this feels more like the big deal that I expected Sonic the Hedgehog 1 to be".
The game does what a sequel should do. It realizes (most) of what ailed the original and improves upon it without taking anything away from everything else that made the original what it is. Now, I can't say I loved the original game, which I played just a few months back for the first time ever, but it was enjoyable and the 'speed' gimmick for Sonic certainly made the game stand out.
With Sonic 2, I have more positive, but somewhat mixed feelings still. It absolutely is one of the standout games of 1992 and deservedly called a classic and one of the greatest games of all time. Its gameplay is timeless in the sense that it is still very easy to pick up and play the game today. My complaint mainly is that I still didn't get quite as comfortable with Sonic's gimmick as I might have had I been introduced to him in my childhood.
My biggest complaint with the original for example was that way too often, speeding through a level was disrupted by countless obstacles, and you'd need to constantly jog back to gain momentum to run up a steep slope. The developers apparently recognized this and added a skill that allows Sonic to gain momentum for a second with a dash-like bump to his speed, which definitely helped a lot. Still, to activate it, you need to step back a bit to not be on an inclining area of the platform, then you need to stand still for a second, then press 'down' and then press the appropriate button to charge up the dash.
My other issue is that the obstacles could have been made much less frustrating. When you run up a slope and fall on top of any enemy, you are the one that takes damages and lose all your rings. Why? Because flying up in the air and falling on top of an enemy (or a power-up) is not registered as a 'jump'. To actually be able to hit them, you need to actually press the 'jump' button, which seems to me like it's the same thing and would have helped make the game a smoother experience. On the other hand, the game was called 'easy' at the time in its current state as well, and it certainly isn't the most difficult game I've played, so allowing for hits to be recognized without pressing 'jump' might have made things too easy. Though, with that being the case, you can see what my issue is with these game's design. It's not necessarily an objective flaw, just a subjective opinion on how it feels to play the game.
That said, this was certainly still plenty of fun. The soundtrack is as good as the first game, the levels are even more varied (the Casino zone is especially memorable) and there are more challenges to spice up the gameplay, like the underwater levels, trap platforms that you can fall through and the "half-pipe courses" that were added as a bonus stage to collect the Chaos Emeralds which turn Sonic into Super Sonic.
I really liked the design of most zones, though some felt a bit too busy. Some also include certain tubes that suck you up and shoot you around the level for a while, which takes control out of your hands and makes you wait for a bit, which quickly gets repetitive after a few Game Overs. But each level introduces its own challenges and themes, and there are many branching paths you can take to mix up each playthrough, which shows the high production values in this game compared to almost all competitors in the genre.
This game is also the debut of Tails, who has a very cute design but, unless you change it in the hidden "Options" menu, for some reason runs around with you even in 1P mode and just seems out of place.
Overall, I think most people will have a fun couple hours with this game at least and it has aged pretty well. I think even today, you'll get more or less the same out of it as people from 30 years ago did, especially if you're a kid, which isn't something that can be said about many games of this time period. Personally, I can't say these initial Sonic games suit what makes a video game a lot of fun for me because I find that the factor of 'speed' runs opposite to the countless obstacles that make you stop and play it more slowly, but I still had fun with it.
(This is the 79th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
(This is the 86th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
As is tradition with early 90s Spider-Man video games, Spider-Man 3: Invasion of Spider-Slayers is among the worst games I have ever played, and it possibly tops the list. As per usual, this was developed by Bits Studios and published by Acclaim Entertainment (or LJN at the time), possibly the worst grouping of developer + publisher of its time that actually made professionally developed video games. Spider-Man 3 released for the Game Boy and is the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which, up to this point, I would have called the worst game I've ever played, especially within this challenge I'm doing. That game, and I'll use any opportunity I can to bring it up, got a 98% from Consoles +, a French video game magazine. Spider-Man 3's Consoles + review score is unknown, but it got a 6.1 Moby Rating, which is on the poorer side on the site.
The first level of this game is all you really need to know about. With each iteration in this Game Boy trilogy, the fudges given have gone down more and more, and it's apparent in many ways. The first game was developed by Rare and was awful in most aspects but at least had competent level design and started each level with witty dialogue between Spider-Man and the stage's boss, which gave it some charm. The second game, made by Bits Studios, didn't have this dialogue anymore and was even worse in all other aspects. Its level design was also just dull and lacked any sort of creativity and passion. This third game went down yet another level that I didn't think was possible. Instead of having some sort of love put into an opening 'cutscene' where Spidey reads that he is being framed, like in the second game, this third game just starts with Spider-Man saying that he will take a walk in the park. Then a white image with black text says that you should defeat 20 muggers. That's it. Then you walk around awkwardly from left to right looking for these men.
1) Spider-Man looks and walks as awkwardly as in all of the other 6 Spider-Man games I've played
2) Spider-Man controls as horrificly as in all of the other 6 Spider-Man games I've played
3) The level looks as bland as toast
4) There are nearly no assets on this whole level. The tiny space is only separated by a random wall placed in around the middle part of the level, which you can jump over to get to an area that looks and works exactly the same
5) There is a singular depiction of a man walking around the park endlessly. The challenge on this level is to figure out whether the guy is innocent or a "mugger". You wait for 2 seconds for the man to pull something out of his jacket. If it's a newspaper, he's innocent. If it's a gun, well, you do what Spider-Man does. Kick him in the nuts once and watch him vanish into thin air.
6) If you're too close to the man, your kick just goes through him. You have to stand a specific distance away from the man to kick him, or you'll miss.
7) KIDS ON SKATEBOARDS roam the area and run into you, unless you jump over them. Pressing the jump button comes with input lag, meaning it takes an extra second or two to actually do the jump, meaning you need to time it pretty early. Even then, it's likely you'll touch the back of the head of the kid and still take damage.
8) SPIDERS FALL DOWN OUT OF THIN AIR and damage you, if they fall on top of you
9) THIS IS THE DUMBEST SHIT I'VE PLAYED IN MY LIFE.
It's not even creatively bad. It's the same type of bad platformer that you saw in the thousands in the late 80s and early 90s, it's just among the least competent that was made by an actual professional development studio and backed by a professional publisher, LJN, who, as you might know, have had and still have a terrible reputation. I now know why. People complain about Zelda 2, Castlevania 2, The Zelda CD-I games, ET and that N64 Batman game, and for good reason, but man, I wish I could be playing any of those games instead of these never-ending Spider-Man games that all are of the same ilk and just get worse.
TLDR: Shit.
As is tradition with early 90s Spider-Man video games, Spider-Man 3: Invasion of Spider-Slayers is among the worst games I have ever played, and it possibly tops the list. As per usual, this was developed by Bits Studios and published by Acclaim Entertainment (or LJN at the time), possibly the worst grouping of developer + publisher of its time that actually made professionally developed video games. Spider-Man 3 released for the Game Boy and is the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which, up to this point, I would have called the worst game I've ever played, especially within this challenge I'm doing. That game, and I'll use any opportunity I can to bring it up, got a 98% from Consoles +, a French video game magazine. Spider-Man 3's Consoles + review score is unknown, but it got a 6.1 Moby Rating, which is on the poorer side on the site.
The first level of this game is all you really need to know about. With each iteration in this Game Boy trilogy, the fudges given have gone down more and more, and it's apparent in many ways. The first game was developed by Rare and was awful in most aspects but at least had competent level design and started each level with witty dialogue between Spider-Man and the stage's boss, which gave it some charm. The second game, made by Bits Studios, didn't have this dialogue anymore and was even worse in all other aspects. Its level design was also just dull and lacked any sort of creativity and passion. This third game went down yet another level that I didn't think was possible. Instead of having some sort of love put into an opening 'cutscene' where Spidey reads that he is being framed, like in the second game, this third game just starts with Spider-Man saying that he will take a walk in the park. Then a white image with black text says that you should defeat 20 muggers. That's it. Then you walk around awkwardly from left to right looking for these men.
1) Spider-Man looks and walks as awkwardly as in all of the other 6 Spider-Man games I've played
2) Spider-Man controls as horrificly as in all of the other 6 Spider-Man games I've played
3) The level looks as bland as toast
4) There are nearly no assets on this whole level. The tiny space is only separated by a random wall placed in around the middle part of the level, which you can jump over to get to an area that looks and works exactly the same
5) There is a singular depiction of a man walking around the park endlessly. The challenge on this level is to figure out whether the guy is innocent or a "mugger". You wait for 2 seconds for the man to pull something out of his jacket. If it's a newspaper, he's innocent. If it's a gun, well, you do what Spider-Man does. Kick him in the nuts once and watch him vanish into thin air.
6) If you're too close to the man, your kick just goes through him. You have to stand a specific distance away from the man to kick him, or you'll miss.
7) KIDS ON SKATEBOARDS roam the area and run into you, unless you jump over them. Pressing the jump button comes with input lag, meaning it takes an extra second or two to actually do the jump, meaning you need to time it pretty early. Even then, it's likely you'll touch the back of the head of the kid and still take damage.
8) SPIDERS FALL DOWN OUT OF THIN AIR and damage you, if they fall on top of you
9) THIS IS THE DUMBEST SHIT I'VE PLAYED IN MY LIFE.
It's not even creatively bad. It's the same type of bad platformer that you saw in the thousands in the late 80s and early 90s, it's just among the least competent that was made by an actual professional development studio and backed by a professional publisher, LJN, who, as you might know, have had and still have a terrible reputation. I now know why. People complain about Zelda 2, Castlevania 2, The Zelda CD-I games, ET and that N64 Batman game, and for good reason, but man, I wish I could be playing any of those games instead of these never-ending Spider-Man games that all are of the same ilk and just get worse.
TLDR: Shit.
1991
(This is the 46th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Streets of Rage is Sega's answer to Capcom's very popular Arcade game Final Fight from 1989. In many ways, it's actually pretty much a copy of that game. It does have three reasons however, which make me happy about its existence. First: The challenge started in 1990, so I didn't play Final Fight. Second: The soundtrack in Streets of Rage is not only better, but it's one of the best soundtracks this challenge has seen so far. Third: The gameplay, while dated today, is actually quite addicting anyway.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10
A criminal organization has taken over the city, and only three brave police offers are there to try and stop them. Adam Hunter, Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding. Wasn't expecting this much, let alone more from a game like this. They are slightly different from each other in terms of Power, Speed and Jump, and they specialize in a different fighting skill according to their bio, but from what I can tell their move-set is pretty much the same.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
If you've played Final Fight, you've played Streets of Rage. It's a side-scrolling beat 'em up game where you walk through eight different locations, fight enemies and ultimately a boss. You use your fists, punch and slam combinations and melee weapons that you can pick up off the floor to beat up hostiles until they are knocked out. You have three lives per continue and three continues. There is one special ability you have that is the same for every fighter, which is police back-up that shoots a missile from far away to one-shot all enemies (excluding bosses) and to damage bosses significantly.
Overall, difference in characters is slim and there aren't many features here in general. You'd think that this makes the game very boring, and if you've played modern versions of this genre, it might be, but for someone who doesn't play beat 'em ups much, this was pretty fun. Combinations of combo attacks, followed by german suplexes and flying kicks can look pretty satisfying when it flows well. The simplicity of the gameplay itself even is enough to turn this into an enjoyable loop, though I do hope that next year's Streets of Rage 2 manages to build on everything, as that kind of potential is quite evident here.
Boss fights are a mess though. The majority of them are stupidly hard to even hit, so you often simply have to take the death and use the 1 special attack you have available after each time you die. You damage them enough this way to go to the next level. Unfortunately, this always meant the end for me at Level 6, which I assume is where the majority of players are stuck at, because fighting these bosses ultimately necessitates finding a way to "cheese the mechanics" and kind-of get bosses stuck in a loop they can't get out of. Even if you succed there, it doesn't really feel like you accomplished something, so there is lots of room for improvement here.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
Voice acting is limited to the "screeching sounds of death" as I'd like to call it, which seems to become a familiar sound for Sega Genesis games. I don't know if it's the soundboard on the Genesis, I assume it is, but the synthetic screetchy sounds are definitely ones I still am getting used to. These screeches are also your indicator for having killed/knocked out enemies, and it's also the sound your character makes after a particular combination of moves. Apart from that, on the sound design aspect, I feel like punches could sound meatier.
The soundtrack however is the true highlight of this game. It already starts with the vibey main menu track , and it continues into the character selection screen. Even the first thing you hear when you start a new playthrough, that kick, will get you into buttkicking-mode instantly. And it just continues to be kick-ass from there. Great soundtrack.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10
The game definitely makes use of the Genesis' 16-bit tech by going into great detail with the environment itself. The first level, which plays on a street at night, has pretty much all buildings/stores in the back and their signs well-lit and has them flickering into different colors all the time to showcase the color-palette available here. In other levels, you are able to see the big city lights and buildings shine from afar and the lights reflect into the water even. What is less impressive here is the design of the enemies. There aren't many enemy types here, though enough of them do act differently, but instead, enemies are recycled by just changing the color of their clothes and/or hair to signal more difficult versions.
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
It's Streets of Rage alright. You listen to kick-ass beats, kick ass and enjoy varied and partly beautiful, dark yet shiny environments.
CONTENT | 6/10
There are 8 levels, which is actually a pretty good length. Unfortunately, the boss design is supbar and I can't really say any boss fight has been enjoyable here. Fighting through hordes of enemies is fun before you get to those bosses, but the game does lack variety there or at least a better conclusion to those levels in terms of better bosses. Better, easier to fight bosses, a few more levels and less recycling of enemy assets wouldn't have hurt. Maybe in the next one.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
This is pretty simple level design for the time. Side-scrolling beat 'em up action with bosses at the end of each level. The game does well to change up the scenery enough to counteract the repetitive nature of the gameplay a tiny bit, but ultimately, where it fails is with the boss fights, which absolutely could and should have been less of a crapshoot in terms of "can I actually touch the boss before he evaporates all my health in a couple of hits?".
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 2/10
Can't really give many points here when all of this has pretty much been done in a shockingly similar fashion in Capcom's Final Fight. It's a simple and fun concept, but nearly completely copied nonetheless.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
There are three characters to mix new playthroughs up with, albeit limited in differentiating factors. Other than that, the main motivation to play again after beating this is to up your score.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 60/100
You got one of the best soundtracks of the early 90's here and some simple, fun gameplay. Unfortunately, the boss design isn't great, the gameplay is extremely similar to Capcom's Final Fight and these days, you're likely better off trying newer iterations in the series, though it's worth starting here if you haven't experienced Streets of Rage yet, simply to hear the soundtrack in action.
Streets of Rage is Sega's answer to Capcom's very popular Arcade game Final Fight from 1989. In many ways, it's actually pretty much a copy of that game. It does have three reasons however, which make me happy about its existence. First: The challenge started in 1990, so I didn't play Final Fight. Second: The soundtrack in Streets of Rage is not only better, but it's one of the best soundtracks this challenge has seen so far. Third: The gameplay, while dated today, is actually quite addicting anyway.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10
A criminal organization has taken over the city, and only three brave police offers are there to try and stop them. Adam Hunter, Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding. Wasn't expecting this much, let alone more from a game like this. They are slightly different from each other in terms of Power, Speed and Jump, and they specialize in a different fighting skill according to their bio, but from what I can tell their move-set is pretty much the same.
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
If you've played Final Fight, you've played Streets of Rage. It's a side-scrolling beat 'em up game where you walk through eight different locations, fight enemies and ultimately a boss. You use your fists, punch and slam combinations and melee weapons that you can pick up off the floor to beat up hostiles until they are knocked out. You have three lives per continue and three continues. There is one special ability you have that is the same for every fighter, which is police back-up that shoots a missile from far away to one-shot all enemies (excluding bosses) and to damage bosses significantly.
Overall, difference in characters is slim and there aren't many features here in general. You'd think that this makes the game very boring, and if you've played modern versions of this genre, it might be, but for someone who doesn't play beat 'em ups much, this was pretty fun. Combinations of combo attacks, followed by german suplexes and flying kicks can look pretty satisfying when it flows well. The simplicity of the gameplay itself even is enough to turn this into an enjoyable loop, though I do hope that next year's Streets of Rage 2 manages to build on everything, as that kind of potential is quite evident here.
Boss fights are a mess though. The majority of them are stupidly hard to even hit, so you often simply have to take the death and use the 1 special attack you have available after each time you die. You damage them enough this way to go to the next level. Unfortunately, this always meant the end for me at Level 6, which I assume is where the majority of players are stuck at, because fighting these bosses ultimately necessitates finding a way to "cheese the mechanics" and kind-of get bosses stuck in a loop they can't get out of. Even if you succed there, it doesn't really feel like you accomplished something, so there is lots of room for improvement here.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
Voice acting is limited to the "screeching sounds of death" as I'd like to call it, which seems to become a familiar sound for Sega Genesis games. I don't know if it's the soundboard on the Genesis, I assume it is, but the synthetic screetchy sounds are definitely ones I still am getting used to. These screeches are also your indicator for having killed/knocked out enemies, and it's also the sound your character makes after a particular combination of moves. Apart from that, on the sound design aspect, I feel like punches could sound meatier.
The soundtrack however is the true highlight of this game. It already starts with the vibey main menu track , and it continues into the character selection screen. Even the first thing you hear when you start a new playthrough, that kick, will get you into buttkicking-mode instantly. And it just continues to be kick-ass from there. Great soundtrack.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10
The game definitely makes use of the Genesis' 16-bit tech by going into great detail with the environment itself. The first level, which plays on a street at night, has pretty much all buildings/stores in the back and their signs well-lit and has them flickering into different colors all the time to showcase the color-palette available here. In other levels, you are able to see the big city lights and buildings shine from afar and the lights reflect into the water even. What is less impressive here is the design of the enemies. There aren't many enemy types here, though enough of them do act differently, but instead, enemies are recycled by just changing the color of their clothes and/or hair to signal more difficult versions.
ATMOSPHERE | 8/10
It's Streets of Rage alright. You listen to kick-ass beats, kick ass and enjoy varied and partly beautiful, dark yet shiny environments.
CONTENT | 6/10
There are 8 levels, which is actually a pretty good length. Unfortunately, the boss design is supbar and I can't really say any boss fight has been enjoyable here. Fighting through hordes of enemies is fun before you get to those bosses, but the game does lack variety there or at least a better conclusion to those levels in terms of better bosses. Better, easier to fight bosses, a few more levels and less recycling of enemy assets wouldn't have hurt. Maybe in the next one.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
This is pretty simple level design for the time. Side-scrolling beat 'em up action with bosses at the end of each level. The game does well to change up the scenery enough to counteract the repetitive nature of the gameplay a tiny bit, but ultimately, where it fails is with the boss fights, which absolutely could and should have been less of a crapshoot in terms of "can I actually touch the boss before he evaporates all my health in a couple of hits?".
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 2/10
Can't really give many points here when all of this has pretty much been done in a shockingly similar fashion in Capcom's Final Fight. It's a simple and fun concept, but nearly completely copied nonetheless.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
There are three characters to mix new playthroughs up with, albeit limited in differentiating factors. Other than that, the main motivation to play again after beating this is to up your score.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 60/100
You got one of the best soundtracks of the early 90's here and some simple, fun gameplay. Unfortunately, the boss design isn't great, the gameplay is extremely similar to Capcom's Final Fight and these days, you're likely better off trying newer iterations in the series, though it's worth starting here if you haven't experienced Streets of Rage yet, simply to hear the soundtrack in action.