Dungeon Explorer
Out of curiosity, I decided to boot this game up to see if this was somehow a different version of the English Dungeon Explorer, but nope. It's still Dungeon Explorer, just in Japanese. I wonder why they had to do this.
Fantasy Zone
This is obviously the predecessor to Super Fantasy Zone, which I have on the Sega Genesis. If you're unfamiliar with the game, it's a light-hearted shooter where you can move to the left and right. Gameplay involves you shooting eight target pods where a boss fight ensues immediately after. After each stage, a shop floats around where you can meet up with it and buy power ups. Super Fantasy Zone's formula is almost exactly the same, but I think they have more options in the store. The one thing that bothers me about the Fantasy Zone games, though, are that the power ups are finite. I don't like it when I run out of lasers or beam spreads before I get to the boss. Since I already played Super Fantasy Zone, I only played this game for a quick couple of levels.
Galaga '88
I thought, "It's Galaga. What's there to talk about?" Apparently, a lot. This isn't just Galaga. It's a reworked and updated Galaga. It starts out in typical Galaga formation by having the enemies flying around in patterns while having you shoot them as quickly as possible, but then it starts changing up the formula. It starts to become a more modern top-down shooter with objects such as meteors, background graphics, and even bosses at the end of what I'm assuming is every 10 levels. The graphics have been overhauled as well with lots of new special effects when things blow up. I'm actually pleasantly surprised by this rendition of an arcade classic and look forward to playing more in the future.
Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire
Wow... what a mouthful. No wonder most people just call it Sapphire. So, this is a Super CD-ROM2 game, and it shows. The intro is narrated in Japanese, and I wish there was an English version so I know what he was saying, but what I can make out from the cutscene is that there's a scientist making some kind of time machine thing and a group of people have gone back in time to hunt dinosaurs and now a team of girls have to board their fighter ships to stop this evil force from further ruining history? Of course I could be completely wrong. But as I start to play the game and see that I'm traveling to different times in a ship that says "POLICE" in the cockpit, I'm pretty sure I'm right. This game is the prettiest shooter in the Mini so far making great use of 16-bit pixels and polygonal enemies. The gameplay is pretty good, too, with drone support and you know me and my drone support! But, I think the game's too difficult. There's at times too much going on, and that makes the game frustrating too quickly. I also think the ship's movement could be a bit quicker as well. Still, I want to see what else the game has to offer, so I'll stick with it.
Gradius
Gradius is just as popular as R-Type when it comes to kings of the shoot 'em up genre. And now I finally remembered what I've been calling drones are supposed to be called. OPTIONS! Yes, options. Love those things. Gradius' system lets you get up to four options, but you got to earn them. Instead of just picking up power ups, you stockpile them and cash them in when your power up option bar on the bottom is highlighted to what you want. When you cash something in, the bar resets, so you really need to plan your power up route. I of course went straight to the options. As for the rest of the game, it's still tough as nails hard, and I played through three levels, and they all seem to have the same boss fight, but the approach right before the fight is always different. I don't think I've ever beaten a Gradius game, and now thanks to save states, I may give this one a shot.
Gradius II - Gofer no Yabō -
The sequel to Gradius is also a Super CD-ROM2 game, although I don't know why it needed to be on CD, as the only thing I can think of is the voice before you fight the bosses, but it's poor quality. This game lets you pick your own power up bar, each one featuring different shots, lasers, missiles and bombs. One power up common to all bars is the Speed Up and you know, there is such a thing as going TOO fast! I maxed out my speed and it made dodging things too hard actually, as I was always going too far up or down, smashing into things. And I'm pretty sure I played this game on the Super Nintendo in some form, because I remember that damned ice obstacle level. That was a real bitch! Also, every boss is different, unlike the first, so that I appreciate. But one thing I didn't appreciate was somehow, I lose all my options during the third boss fight. Now I'll have to start gathering options all over again...
Necromancer
Ok, I'm going to flat out say that it was a BAD choice to include RPGs that are entirely in Japanese on an English system. I mean, you can get away with playing a shooter or a hack and slash in Japanese, because dialogue is almost a non-issue. But Necromancer is unplayable for me. I don't know what I'm selecting. Some menu options when I talk to people or go into houses bring up more lines of Japanese. It's also one of those RPGs that won't let you leave unless you talk to an NPC and accept a quest, so I'm unable to even leave the town to go outside and see what combat/dungeon exploring is like. I mean, it's a novel idea to include Japanese versions of games on the Mini, but I really wish they would have gone the extra mile and made a half-assed attempt to translate it.
Nectaris, Neuotopia and Neutopia II
Nectaris is Military Madness in Japanese, and Neutopia I and II are the Japanese versions of the same games. No need to play these.
Ninja Ryūkenden
Translated, this is Ninja Gaiden. It's weird, but I think the version on the NES plays better. I don't know, there's something off about this game. Anyway, Ninja Gaiden reminds me of why we ever thought games like these were OK. Cheap death after cheap death after cheap death just to prolong the length of the game. I mean, seriously you can get caught up in a loop of being hit back and forth by enemies, or being knocked into the pit while being caught with a projectile in the air with nowhere to go. I know I'm being unfair, but I personally can't stand these types of games anymore. Even with constantly save stating, I got too annoyed to care about the game anymore after beating a couple of levels. I never once beat a Ninja Gaiden game, not even the reboot for the Xbox, and even with save states, I may never care enough to try again here.
PC Genjin
For whatever reason, Japan had to get all Japanese with this translation, which is just Bonk's Adventure. Also, this really should have been the English version. I know it exists in English, because I've played a lot of it. Anyway, I just spent enough time here to get through the first level, and it's pretty much exactly what I remember. I think it plays a lot better than Bonk's Revenge, which gave me a fit trying to figure out the timing on those stupid flowers. That's not the case here. They are pretty responsive. Now, the question is, when I was playing the game at a friend's house, did I ever beat it? Regardless, I'm going to add this one to my list of games to beat on the Mini. PC Genjin, though? Really?
Salamander
I knew this game looked familiar! I played this game on SNES when it was called Lifeforce. Clearly patterned after Gradius, it works a little differently in that your power ups and options are granted to you the moment you pick them up. I believe the game switches from side scrolling to top down every other level, which I love. But just like Gradius, it's also hard as nails. The bosses themselves were really annoying as well. Both of them involved me having to continuously move around them in circles while also avoiding their bullets. I can't remember if I beat Lifeforce, so I'm going to make it a point to beat this one on the Mini. I may need to take a break for a while, because I'm really starting to get tired of shooters right now.
Sorry this one was a little longer. Because of several PC Engine games just being Japanese counterparts of TurboGrafx 16 games, I decided to make this one longer so I wrap up the rest in a longer blog tomorrow. As always, thanks for reading!
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
TurboGrafx 16 Mini Part 4
So here we go, the PC Engine games! This should be fun, as I never played PC Engine and some of these games are in Japanese!
Akumajō Dracula X Chi no Rondo
Translated, this is Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and it's one of the Super CD-ROM2 games. Now, get this. The intro has Japanese subtitles, but German audio! How weird... It also won't let me skip it, which I wanted to since I already saw in demo mode. When I started, I had to input my name into a save file and was treated to some really eerie music. I expect this game to have some pretty good music as it was on a CD. Once I began, I was already fighting Death, which was a surprise. Now, maybe it's my ongoing allergies, or maybe I'm just too old now, but I can't appreciate this kind of difficulty anymore. This game's hard because it's so cheap. Also, Super Castlevania IV has spoiled me on all other Castlevanias pre-Symphony of the Night. I miss being able to whip in any direction. I'll eventually return to it when I can build up the patience again. Also, it does this really annoying thing where it does his special move right after doing a save state, and I've no idea why...
Aldynes
Hey, guess what? This game takes place in 2020! I wonder if it has to do with saving the world from a really bad flu virus.... Anyway, it's another side scrolling space shoot 'em up, and already, it's one of my favorites because of the drone support. So far, I now have four, yes FOUR, drones. What I really love about them is you can change the way they act, kinda like R-Type, in case you need fire support from behind or a full on frontal assault. It's not the best performing shooter on the system, as frame rate dips happen a lot, and some of the power ups are run of the mill. It could also use a screen clearing bomb, but that's just my personal preference. I do look forward to playing more of this game in the future.
Appare! Gateball
So this game is very similar to croquet, which means I really suck at it. Just as I started to understand how to play it, the game ended. It also didn't help that this is one of those games where all the text is in Japanese. I was selecting things on the menu that I didn't know what they meant. I did figure out that I was selecting five people on my team, and then I played against five other people. The thing is, it has a power meter when you hit the ball and you HAVE to be spot on or your ball will veer to the left or right by a LOT. I didn't have enough fun with the game to stay hooked, so I didn't bother trying another round.
Bomberman '94
Now this is a better Bomberman! Better level design, better graphics, better gameplay. The one thing I love about '94 is that power up distribution feels more normal. '93 only gave you one power up per board, which was really stingy. Not only can you get a couple of bomb and flame power ups per board in '94, but they also put in a kangaroo that let you jump over blasts, which really comes in handy when you pen yourself in with a bomb. Also, you can select different boards at your choosing when you enter a world, so that's appreciated. I only wish I could play multiplayer with other Mini owners.
Bomberman Panic Bomber
This is a puzzle game very similar to Puyo Puyo or Puzzle Fighter II, but it's all in Japanese, so it took me a while to figure out how the mechanics worked. Once I found out that you clear pieces with at least three like colors horizontally, vertically or diagonally, I started to have some fun. What I like about the game is that when your opponent dumps trash on you, they're bombs, and you have bombs that periodically fall down that you can use to blow them all up at once, which can lead to combos. I really like this game, but I'm playing on Easy as I don't have the mind like I used to for puzzlers. Great presentation as well.
Chō Aniki
This is most definitely the weirdest shooter I played on the system so far. There's so much random stuff going on, it seems like the developers just picked random graphics out of a hat and threw them into the game. It's another shooter that has drone support, which I love, but believe it or not one of the drones is a bodybuilder in a tight speedo... why? The levels are full of mid-bosses and end with a boss of their own, but after a couple of levels, I was already getting rather bored from it. The game also has really weird music, especially for the boss battles. I'm not sure if I'll come back to this game.
Daimakaimura
So this is Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, known by old school gamers as one of the toughest games around. It's super cheap, and that means I can't get anywhere without save states. But, I have this on the Sega Genesis Mini and I've made further progress in it than here, so I just played one level to see how it runs. I think based on memory, the Genesis version is actually better, but I could be wrong. Weird, though, that they couldn't put the English version of this on the Mini instead.
Dragon Spirit
Remember back when I said that a good shooter needs to find a balance between annoyance and difficulty? This is one shooter that does not have it. I cannot for the life of me find a safe way to beat the second boss, this lava bird that has these meteors orbiting around it. What I also don't like is how the more powered up your dragon becomes, the larger target you become. Being a large target in a shooter is a no-no. I should have liked this game, because I love dragons and I love shooters, but honestly, this game proved to be far more annoying than fun.
More to come. As always, thanks for reading!
Akumajō Dracula X Chi no Rondo
Translated, this is Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and it's one of the Super CD-ROM2 games. Now, get this. The intro has Japanese subtitles, but German audio! How weird... It also won't let me skip it, which I wanted to since I already saw in demo mode. When I started, I had to input my name into a save file and was treated to some really eerie music. I expect this game to have some pretty good music as it was on a CD. Once I began, I was already fighting Death, which was a surprise. Now, maybe it's my ongoing allergies, or maybe I'm just too old now, but I can't appreciate this kind of difficulty anymore. This game's hard because it's so cheap. Also, Super Castlevania IV has spoiled me on all other Castlevanias pre-Symphony of the Night. I miss being able to whip in any direction. I'll eventually return to it when I can build up the patience again. Also, it does this really annoying thing where it does his special move right after doing a save state, and I've no idea why...
Aldynes
Hey, guess what? This game takes place in 2020! I wonder if it has to do with saving the world from a really bad flu virus.... Anyway, it's another side scrolling space shoot 'em up, and already, it's one of my favorites because of the drone support. So far, I now have four, yes FOUR, drones. What I really love about them is you can change the way they act, kinda like R-Type, in case you need fire support from behind or a full on frontal assault. It's not the best performing shooter on the system, as frame rate dips happen a lot, and some of the power ups are run of the mill. It could also use a screen clearing bomb, but that's just my personal preference. I do look forward to playing more of this game in the future.
Appare! Gateball
So this game is very similar to croquet, which means I really suck at it. Just as I started to understand how to play it, the game ended. It also didn't help that this is one of those games where all the text is in Japanese. I was selecting things on the menu that I didn't know what they meant. I did figure out that I was selecting five people on my team, and then I played against five other people. The thing is, it has a power meter when you hit the ball and you HAVE to be spot on or your ball will veer to the left or right by a LOT. I didn't have enough fun with the game to stay hooked, so I didn't bother trying another round.
Bomberman '94
Now this is a better Bomberman! Better level design, better graphics, better gameplay. The one thing I love about '94 is that power up distribution feels more normal. '93 only gave you one power up per board, which was really stingy. Not only can you get a couple of bomb and flame power ups per board in '94, but they also put in a kangaroo that let you jump over blasts, which really comes in handy when you pen yourself in with a bomb. Also, you can select different boards at your choosing when you enter a world, so that's appreciated. I only wish I could play multiplayer with other Mini owners.
Bomberman Panic Bomber
This is a puzzle game very similar to Puyo Puyo or Puzzle Fighter II, but it's all in Japanese, so it took me a while to figure out how the mechanics worked. Once I found out that you clear pieces with at least three like colors horizontally, vertically or diagonally, I started to have some fun. What I like about the game is that when your opponent dumps trash on you, they're bombs, and you have bombs that periodically fall down that you can use to blow them all up at once, which can lead to combos. I really like this game, but I'm playing on Easy as I don't have the mind like I used to for puzzlers. Great presentation as well.
Chō Aniki
This is most definitely the weirdest shooter I played on the system so far. There's so much random stuff going on, it seems like the developers just picked random graphics out of a hat and threw them into the game. It's another shooter that has drone support, which I love, but believe it or not one of the drones is a bodybuilder in a tight speedo... why? The levels are full of mid-bosses and end with a boss of their own, but after a couple of levels, I was already getting rather bored from it. The game also has really weird music, especially for the boss battles. I'm not sure if I'll come back to this game.
Daimakaimura
So this is Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, known by old school gamers as one of the toughest games around. It's super cheap, and that means I can't get anywhere without save states. But, I have this on the Sega Genesis Mini and I've made further progress in it than here, so I just played one level to see how it runs. I think based on memory, the Genesis version is actually better, but I could be wrong. Weird, though, that they couldn't put the English version of this on the Mini instead.
Dragon Spirit
Remember back when I said that a good shooter needs to find a balance between annoyance and difficulty? This is one shooter that does not have it. I cannot for the life of me find a safe way to beat the second boss, this lava bird that has these meteors orbiting around it. What I also don't like is how the more powered up your dragon becomes, the larger target you become. Being a large target in a shooter is a no-no. I should have liked this game, because I love dragons and I love shooters, but honestly, this game proved to be far more annoying than fun.
More to come. As always, thanks for reading!
Monday, May 25, 2020
TurboGrafx 16 Mini Part 3
Parasol Stars
One of the older TG-16 games in the collection, Parasol Stars is an arcade style action game where you play as a little chubby fella with a rainbow parasol who uses it to capture enemies and raindrops and fling them at baddies. Every enemy dispatched relinquishes food that can be gobbled up for points. The game's easy to control, fun to play and fast paced. What I really love is when you finish a board, instead of waiting for the next to be loaded, the little chubby fella spins around and flies to the next one so there's never a break in the gameplay. I'm actually pleasantly surprised by this one. I look forward to playing more.
Power Golf
After four holes with 54 strokes, I'm done. I don't have the patience to get good at this game. Golf games have evolved so much since that this is almost unplayable. There's no real way to discern just how far your drive will go. The power and hit indicator's WAY too fast to be precise. Maybe if this was the only golf game you had at the time, you'd put up with it, but it's just too frustrating for me to keep at it. Plus, the music really gets on my nerves. Leave this one in the sand trap.
Psychosis
After save stating like crazy during the second boss fight, I found this game more annoyingly difficult than fun. Shoot 'em ups need to find a balance of annoyance and difficulty, and this game does not have that balance. I'm also not much of a fan of the game's power ups, finding them not as powerful as they should be. For instance, when you have drones that fire lasers, above and below you, mere projectiles can still pass through them and blow you up. I think with a little more refinement, it could have been one of the better shooters on the system, as I really do like the designs of the first two levels. I just REALLY couldn't stand that god damned second boss. I can only imagine how people got past him without save states...
R-Type
If you played even just a few shoot 'em ups in your lifetime, chances are you've played R-Type. R-Type is one of the greatest shoot 'em ups in the genre with extremely tight gameplay. It's tough as nails, but it also provides you with great support in the way of drones and power ups, one of them being the reflective laser, perhaps the greatest power up of all time. I just finished level three, one of my favorites in the game, where you spend the level destroying an alien battleship top and bottomside, and then precariously lower yourself right in front of its eye to destroy it for good. Such great fun! My reflexes simply aren't as good as they used to be, though, so of course I abused the save state. But that's what it's there for right?
Soldier Blade
Now this is a shooter more my speed, and after a minute or two with the game, I know exactly why. It's clearly a redesigned Blazing Lazers, which I love. It has one of its power ups, and the first stage is almost exactly the same as BL. It also has a support drone, but I would have appreciated at least one more. What sets it apart, though, is that there are special moves based on which weapon type you're currently using. I like the bosses as well. I'll look forward to playing more of this game after I finish Blazing Lasers first.
Space Harrier
Well, look at that! Fourth shooter in a row in this blog! Something tells me I know what T-16's most preferred genre is... Anywho, this is Space Harrier, and you've probably played a version of it sometime in your life on some platform, whether it's in a compilation or an arcade machine in Shenmue. If you somehow never played Space Harrier, it's a third-person space shooter where instead of flying in a ship, you're holding on to dear life on a rocket that's also your gun, and things are flying at you rather quickly. I played this game on the Sega Genesis Mini, and as far as I can tell, it plays and runs exactly the same. But, I did finally have a reason to turn on my turbo button! Since I already have progress on the Genesis Mini, there's really no reason to play anymore of this version.
Splatterhouse
Ahh, the classic macabre beat 'em up that probably sparked its own video game violence debate! If you ever played this game, you most likely never beat the third stage boss. Well, I did! After several save state reloads... Even then, it was such a bullshit boss fight. Even after being given a fully loaded shotgun, you had to risk bodily injury to punch/kick this headbag wearing dual chainsaw wielding manic several times before he finally went down. Anyway, I don't remember the arcade version that well as it's been at least a couple decades since I played it, but this version seems to be up to snuff. Now that I finally beat this damned chainsaw boss, maybe I can see the rest of the game. God bless you, save states!
Victory Run
Victory Run's a single player race against the clock checkpoint to checkpoint racer. It's a little like Outrun in that you can see your car getting flipped should you crash into an object fast enough. You can also modify your part stats, allocating points to tires, engine, brakes, etc., so there's some customization to the gameplay. I tried to play it a few times, but it got a little too frustrating for me. I hate manual gearboxes in racers and it always slows me down way too much to downshift and upshift time and time again. I can see how it may have been fun back in the day, but it's clearly been outpaced by better racers in the 16-bit era.
Ys Book 1 & 2
This will have to be revisited at a later date. I just spent way too much time grinding money because I thought I had to buy a better sword when all I had to do was equip it, which I found out way too late. I know that the Ys series is significant in the RPG genre, and I want to find out why. It has a weird combat system in that you just bump into enemies you see in the field. If you hit them head on, you do more damage than they do, but if they get you from behind or corner you, you're done for. I've never played an RPG where the combat was that simple. Also, this is the second and final Turbo CD game in the American collection. As such, it actually has a voiced intro. That must have made Ys feel even more special back when the game first came out.
So that's it for the TurboGrafx 16 games. The next blog I'll begin playing games from the PC Engine collection. As always, thanks for reading.
One of the older TG-16 games in the collection, Parasol Stars is an arcade style action game where you play as a little chubby fella with a rainbow parasol who uses it to capture enemies and raindrops and fling them at baddies. Every enemy dispatched relinquishes food that can be gobbled up for points. The game's easy to control, fun to play and fast paced. What I really love is when you finish a board, instead of waiting for the next to be loaded, the little chubby fella spins around and flies to the next one so there's never a break in the gameplay. I'm actually pleasantly surprised by this one. I look forward to playing more.
Power Golf
After four holes with 54 strokes, I'm done. I don't have the patience to get good at this game. Golf games have evolved so much since that this is almost unplayable. There's no real way to discern just how far your drive will go. The power and hit indicator's WAY too fast to be precise. Maybe if this was the only golf game you had at the time, you'd put up with it, but it's just too frustrating for me to keep at it. Plus, the music really gets on my nerves. Leave this one in the sand trap.
Psychosis
After save stating like crazy during the second boss fight, I found this game more annoyingly difficult than fun. Shoot 'em ups need to find a balance of annoyance and difficulty, and this game does not have that balance. I'm also not much of a fan of the game's power ups, finding them not as powerful as they should be. For instance, when you have drones that fire lasers, above and below you, mere projectiles can still pass through them and blow you up. I think with a little more refinement, it could have been one of the better shooters on the system, as I really do like the designs of the first two levels. I just REALLY couldn't stand that god damned second boss. I can only imagine how people got past him without save states...
R-Type
If you played even just a few shoot 'em ups in your lifetime, chances are you've played R-Type. R-Type is one of the greatest shoot 'em ups in the genre with extremely tight gameplay. It's tough as nails, but it also provides you with great support in the way of drones and power ups, one of them being the reflective laser, perhaps the greatest power up of all time. I just finished level three, one of my favorites in the game, where you spend the level destroying an alien battleship top and bottomside, and then precariously lower yourself right in front of its eye to destroy it for good. Such great fun! My reflexes simply aren't as good as they used to be, though, so of course I abused the save state. But that's what it's there for right?
Soldier Blade
Now this is a shooter more my speed, and after a minute or two with the game, I know exactly why. It's clearly a redesigned Blazing Lazers, which I love. It has one of its power ups, and the first stage is almost exactly the same as BL. It also has a support drone, but I would have appreciated at least one more. What sets it apart, though, is that there are special moves based on which weapon type you're currently using. I like the bosses as well. I'll look forward to playing more of this game after I finish Blazing Lasers first.
Space Harrier
Well, look at that! Fourth shooter in a row in this blog! Something tells me I know what T-16's most preferred genre is... Anywho, this is Space Harrier, and you've probably played a version of it sometime in your life on some platform, whether it's in a compilation or an arcade machine in Shenmue. If you somehow never played Space Harrier, it's a third-person space shooter where instead of flying in a ship, you're holding on to dear life on a rocket that's also your gun, and things are flying at you rather quickly. I played this game on the Sega Genesis Mini, and as far as I can tell, it plays and runs exactly the same. But, I did finally have a reason to turn on my turbo button! Since I already have progress on the Genesis Mini, there's really no reason to play anymore of this version.
Splatterhouse
Ahh, the classic macabre beat 'em up that probably sparked its own video game violence debate! If you ever played this game, you most likely never beat the third stage boss. Well, I did! After several save state reloads... Even then, it was such a bullshit boss fight. Even after being given a fully loaded shotgun, you had to risk bodily injury to punch/kick this headbag wearing dual chainsaw wielding manic several times before he finally went down. Anyway, I don't remember the arcade version that well as it's been at least a couple decades since I played it, but this version seems to be up to snuff. Now that I finally beat this damned chainsaw boss, maybe I can see the rest of the game. God bless you, save states!
Victory Run
Victory Run's a single player race against the clock checkpoint to checkpoint racer. It's a little like Outrun in that you can see your car getting flipped should you crash into an object fast enough. You can also modify your part stats, allocating points to tires, engine, brakes, etc., so there's some customization to the gameplay. I tried to play it a few times, but it got a little too frustrating for me. I hate manual gearboxes in racers and it always slows me down way too much to downshift and upshift time and time again. I can see how it may have been fun back in the day, but it's clearly been outpaced by better racers in the 16-bit era.
Ys Book 1 & 2
This will have to be revisited at a later date. I just spent way too much time grinding money because I thought I had to buy a better sword when all I had to do was equip it, which I found out way too late. I know that the Ys series is significant in the RPG genre, and I want to find out why. It has a weird combat system in that you just bump into enemies you see in the field. If you hit them head on, you do more damage than they do, but if they get you from behind or corner you, you're done for. I've never played an RPG where the combat was that simple. Also, this is the second and final Turbo CD game in the American collection. As such, it actually has a voiced intro. That must have made Ys feel even more special back when the game first came out.
So that's it for the TurboGrafx 16 games. The next blog I'll begin playing games from the PC Engine collection. As always, thanks for reading.
Sunday, May 24, 2020
TurboGrafx 16 Mini Part 2
J.J. & Jeff
I don't know what to make of this game. It's a very bizarre platformer where you're supposed to be detectives solving some kind of case. The action involves - and if you never heard of this game I am not making this up - kicking street lights to get fruit out of them, getting crapped on by birds, finding actual crap in breakable walls, meeting strangers in bathrooms to resume health, kicking your partner's ass whose always hiding out in a costume for whatever reason, and I'm sure a shitload of crazier stuff in the later levels. I don't care for the controls, nor the gameplay in general. It's a shame, because it has such a goofy aesthetic, but it's clearly a product of late 80s platforming that should remain in the bygone era.
Lords of Thunder
I really want to like this game. It has great graphics, action, music, gameplay. You can choose whatever stage you want and you can select from four different armors: Water, Earth, Wind, and Fire. Each armor has its own offensive style. The problem with the game for me, though, is that its one life and three continues. It means I don't have the patience for it. If I ever feel like playing this game, I'm going to have to save state the hell out of it. Also, I don't like the fact that you basically have to die to spend your collected gems in order to buy shields and bombs instead of gathering them out in the field like most shooters do. Maybe if the game was a little more forgiving and had a better system of progressing, it could hold my attention but nowadays, I don't have time for games like these anymore.
Note: This is the first Super CD Rom game I came across, and the animation was different this time, still showing a cart being inserted, but then showed a CD drive spinning up. I really like the little touches.
Military Madness
Fans of Advance Wars would probably like this game. It's a turn-based strategy game where you pit units together and they enter into a little animation as they battle each other. It has all the other elements of strategy games such as terrain advantages, capturing bases. etc. It's a bit too primitive for my taste these days, but if I had the time for it, I'd definitely play more of it. It also had some weird math I didn't quite get as I had the clear advantage in terms of offensive attack, defense, and terrain advantage and yet still lost more tanks than the enemy did when it attacked me. Oh well.
Moto Roader
Dear god, what a bad game. So, this is a top down racer like Micro Machines and RC Pro Am, but nowhere near as good as either. There's some depth to be had in this game for sure, but the thing is, there's this really annoying mechanic where if you're lagging behind the pack, you're slingshotted forward in order to catch up to them, but very frequently at your detriment. You're also put at a severe disadvantage early on by not having enough money to afford decent car parts, so the competition is already ahead of you right out of the gate. This means you're ostensibly behind and always being flung forward. I didn't even bother to try to select any other modes. That's how done I am with this game.
Neutopia
This is unabashedly a Legend of Zelda clone. And well, it's not really a good one, either. My issue is the combat. You can only thrust forward and you have to line yourself up very carefully or you'll miss and get hit, and the game's very chintzy with health power ups and gold. A health potion costs two hundred gold, and I barely had more than that when I finished the first dungeon. As Zelda clones go, I guess it's not entirely bad. I just have to get used to the combat, but it also has an annoying alarm when you get down to low life that I really can't stand. I'm curious to see what the other dungeons look like, although I wasn't impressed with the first one at all. I'll probably return to this game if I play my Mini again.
Neutopia II
This one's a little more playable. The graphics and animation are improved, as should be for a sequel, plus I can move diagonally and attack diagonally, but there's still no swipe of the sword, just the forward thrust like in the first game. The formula of the game starts out the same as well. Check caves to talk to people. Waste bombs to break open caves to talk to people who tell you things you already know. Find the hidden room where the girl heals you before the dungeon. Head to the first dungeon, find the crystal ball, the key, the bronze armor, kill the boss and get the relic. Also, it has a low life alarm as well, but it's not nearly as obnoxious as the first game. I think the first dungeon was better designed, and it had a better boss as well. I'd probably return to this game to finish if I ever get around to finishing the first.
New Adventure Island
The only Adventure Island I played was Super Adventure Island, and from my memory, it's far superior to this game. The thing about SAI that stood out to me was just how great the music was. I was hoping the music would at least be as catchy as SAI, but it's not. Still, it's one of the better platformers I've played on the T-16 Mini so far. It's fast and has somewhat decent controls, but it's also pretty damn hard. Maybe it's not that hard, and my old school gaming skills simply aren't existent anymore, but yeah, I save stated the hell out of this. I'm enjoying it, so I'm going to add it to my list of games to beat.
Ninja Spirit
So far, this is my favorite game on the Mini. As someone who loves Shinobi, I really do appreciate a good ninja game, and what makes this game so damn fun is the spirits you get to help you out. Think of support drones in a space shooter. It's a combination of a side-scrolling hack 'n' slash and shoot 'em up and the three levels I've been through so far have been great. The bosses themselves are really cool as well. Man, I just love jumping, which he can do really high, and have my spirits attacking where I used to be filling the screen with projectiles. The only thing about the game, though, is that performance starts suffering once you got too much going on. But us old schoolers appreciate frame rate dropping in shoot 'em ups as a blessing. I'm definitely going to return to this game to finish it!
More to come. As always, thanks for reading!
I don't know what to make of this game. It's a very bizarre platformer where you're supposed to be detectives solving some kind of case. The action involves - and if you never heard of this game I am not making this up - kicking street lights to get fruit out of them, getting crapped on by birds, finding actual crap in breakable walls, meeting strangers in bathrooms to resume health, kicking your partner's ass whose always hiding out in a costume for whatever reason, and I'm sure a shitload of crazier stuff in the later levels. I don't care for the controls, nor the gameplay in general. It's a shame, because it has such a goofy aesthetic, but it's clearly a product of late 80s platforming that should remain in the bygone era.
Lords of Thunder
I really want to like this game. It has great graphics, action, music, gameplay. You can choose whatever stage you want and you can select from four different armors: Water, Earth, Wind, and Fire. Each armor has its own offensive style. The problem with the game for me, though, is that its one life and three continues. It means I don't have the patience for it. If I ever feel like playing this game, I'm going to have to save state the hell out of it. Also, I don't like the fact that you basically have to die to spend your collected gems in order to buy shields and bombs instead of gathering them out in the field like most shooters do. Maybe if the game was a little more forgiving and had a better system of progressing, it could hold my attention but nowadays, I don't have time for games like these anymore.
Note: This is the first Super CD Rom game I came across, and the animation was different this time, still showing a cart being inserted, but then showed a CD drive spinning up. I really like the little touches.
Military Madness
Fans of Advance Wars would probably like this game. It's a turn-based strategy game where you pit units together and they enter into a little animation as they battle each other. It has all the other elements of strategy games such as terrain advantages, capturing bases. etc. It's a bit too primitive for my taste these days, but if I had the time for it, I'd definitely play more of it. It also had some weird math I didn't quite get as I had the clear advantage in terms of offensive attack, defense, and terrain advantage and yet still lost more tanks than the enemy did when it attacked me. Oh well.
Moto Roader
Dear god, what a bad game. So, this is a top down racer like Micro Machines and RC Pro Am, but nowhere near as good as either. There's some depth to be had in this game for sure, but the thing is, there's this really annoying mechanic where if you're lagging behind the pack, you're slingshotted forward in order to catch up to them, but very frequently at your detriment. You're also put at a severe disadvantage early on by not having enough money to afford decent car parts, so the competition is already ahead of you right out of the gate. This means you're ostensibly behind and always being flung forward. I didn't even bother to try to select any other modes. That's how done I am with this game.
Neutopia
This is unabashedly a Legend of Zelda clone. And well, it's not really a good one, either. My issue is the combat. You can only thrust forward and you have to line yourself up very carefully or you'll miss and get hit, and the game's very chintzy with health power ups and gold. A health potion costs two hundred gold, and I barely had more than that when I finished the first dungeon. As Zelda clones go, I guess it's not entirely bad. I just have to get used to the combat, but it also has an annoying alarm when you get down to low life that I really can't stand. I'm curious to see what the other dungeons look like, although I wasn't impressed with the first one at all. I'll probably return to this game if I play my Mini again.
Neutopia II
This one's a little more playable. The graphics and animation are improved, as should be for a sequel, plus I can move diagonally and attack diagonally, but there's still no swipe of the sword, just the forward thrust like in the first game. The formula of the game starts out the same as well. Check caves to talk to people. Waste bombs to break open caves to talk to people who tell you things you already know. Find the hidden room where the girl heals you before the dungeon. Head to the first dungeon, find the crystal ball, the key, the bronze armor, kill the boss and get the relic. Also, it has a low life alarm as well, but it's not nearly as obnoxious as the first game. I think the first dungeon was better designed, and it had a better boss as well. I'd probably return to this game to finish if I ever get around to finishing the first.
New Adventure Island
The only Adventure Island I played was Super Adventure Island, and from my memory, it's far superior to this game. The thing about SAI that stood out to me was just how great the music was. I was hoping the music would at least be as catchy as SAI, but it's not. Still, it's one of the better platformers I've played on the T-16 Mini so far. It's fast and has somewhat decent controls, but it's also pretty damn hard. Maybe it's not that hard, and my old school gaming skills simply aren't existent anymore, but yeah, I save stated the hell out of this. I'm enjoying it, so I'm going to add it to my list of games to beat.
Ninja Spirit
So far, this is my favorite game on the Mini. As someone who loves Shinobi, I really do appreciate a good ninja game, and what makes this game so damn fun is the spirits you get to help you out. Think of support drones in a space shooter. It's a combination of a side-scrolling hack 'n' slash and shoot 'em up and the three levels I've been through so far have been great. The bosses themselves are really cool as well. Man, I just love jumping, which he can do really high, and have my spirits attacking where I used to be filling the screen with projectiles. The only thing about the game, though, is that performance starts suffering once you got too much going on. But us old schoolers appreciate frame rate dropping in shoot 'em ups as a blessing. I'm definitely going to return to this game to finish it!
More to come. As always, thanks for reading!
Saturday, May 23, 2020
TurboGrafx 16 Mini Part 1
Many many months ago, Konami decided that it was going to join in on the trend of scaling down classic consoles by announcing the TurboGrafx 16 Mini. It was supposed to launch March 19th, just a day before the world release of Nintendo's biggest Switch title of the year, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the factory manufacturing it had to close, so it was delayed. Originally, Amazon had forecast its new release date somewhere in January of next year, but luckily, it didn't take nearly that long. It arrived today, so lets start talking about!
If you read my blogs on the Sega Genesis Mini, you'll know that I did it in parts. I spen at little time each day with a handful of games until I played each one. I'll be doing the same here. So let's start with talking about the physical aspect.
Now, as far as Mini consoles goes, this is the largest of the five I own (NES, SNES, PSOne, Genesis, T-16). It's about as wide, maybe wider, than the NES and SNES side by side, and about as thick. I never owned a T-16 until many many years after it went defunct when I bough a brand new Turbo Duo off eBay for a few hundred dollars, so I have no idea just how big the original T-16 was.
The first thing I noticed after taking it out of the box was the back cover. It's a removable plastic shell where you thread your HDMI and power cable through, and I believe the original console had this as well. Regardless, I hate it. It's cumbersome, and I wish they forwent this bit of nostalgia and just let me plug the cords directly into the back. Speaking of cords, I was disappointed to learn that it uses a different USB power cord than my other Mini systems, which means I'll have to keep the other one nearby instead of keeping this one in its box.
The controller also feels nice and solid. It's been many years since I held my Duo controller, but based on my very sketchy memory, it seems to be a 1:1 replication. Select and Run buttons are soft. I and II buttons are clicky, and the turbo toggles are nice and firm. That's the one thing I always appreciated about the T-16 was having built in turbo toggles as a standard in their controllers. Now, let's turn it on!
The first thing you'll be greeted with when you turn the system on is the language select. You're given six languages: English by default, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Once you select your language, you're brought into a nicely presented game select screen with some catchy 16-bit music. The game covers look like they're rendered as CD boxes, but maybe that's how the game cards came in? It's been too long for me to remember. You can also sort the titles by the year they were released, alphabetically, or by game format. There's also two different game select screens: one for US TurboGrafx games and the other for EU/Japanese PC Engine games, which has its own music. Lastly, you can select the menu graphics when you're in the PC Engine side of things to either PC Engine (which is white) or PC Engine Core Grafx (which is black). It's really nice to see a way to customize your game select screen for a mini console.
With all that said, I'm going to start my way alphabetically through the T-16 games and then go into the PC Engine games. Let's begin!
Note: When I started my first game, I was treated to a nice little animation of the game cart being inserted into the machine. Really cool!
Air Zonk
So the first to get played is Air Zonk! What happens when Bonk gets bored and decides to go airborne and turn himself into a shoot 'em up? You get Air Zonk! Now these cartoony shooters are the type of shooters I really love. Full of charm, clever power ups, colorful cartoony bosses. I also love the friends system that lets you get drone support in the form of another cartoon character or transforms you completely. It's a hard game, though. I ended up using save states several times just to get to level three. When I return to my T-16 Mini, I'm going to make it a point to finish this game. Really a lot of fun! I love Hudson Soft's work!
Alien Crush
When I was shopping for a Turbo Duo, I was asking a friend of mine which games I should get with it, and Alien Crush was one of them. I don't remember if I actually did play it back then, but as the game stands now, it's a decent 16-bit pinball game. It only has one board so far that I know of, but there's a lot going on with it. It has two levels, and each has at least a couple bonus levels that you can find and start racking up bonus points. I played a few times, stopping after getting a score of over 3.5 mil. There's also a couple different music tracks you can select, and they're both pretty good. The thing is, it could be my imagination, but I think I detected some input lag as the flippers seemed just a little sluggish. I got used to it over time, and could probably get a much higher score if I played it again.
Blazing Lasers
This was another game recommended to me by my same friend. I do remember playing this game on my Duo, and I remember it being pretty hard. I don't think I really got very far at it, probably due to a lack of patience, but ah, the miracle of playing on mini systems: save states! So I used a few and kept on going. I stopped after Stage 3, because I felt like I could spend the whole day playing this game until I beat it. There's always a sign of playing a good space shooter, and that's when you get those "Holy shit, how did I survive that!" moments, and I've had a few in just the first three stages. I love the game's variety of weapons and support systems. Music and graphics are pretty solid for a game of its time as well. Just a very good game overall.
Bomberman '93
What can I say? It's Bomberman. Drop bombs. Blow up walls. Don't get caught in your own explosion. Obviously, it looks better than the NES game, but from what I can remember, the SNES version is the far superior version. Better graphics, better sound. Probably better controls. I played through the first world and killed what looked like a teleporting goomba wizard. It had a cute little picture at the end of it. What's interesting is that in the title screen, there's the option to play COM-LINK. Not surprisingly, COM-LINK doesn't work since I'm pretty sure there's no way to connect two T-16 minis together. So, you're stuck at a screen that shows two Bombermans connecting each other's TurboGrafx Expresses together, which I thought was pretty cute.
Bonk's Revenge
I just noticed something. Aside from Air Zonk, this is the only Bonk game on here. Mario is Nintendo. Sonic is Sega. Bonk is NEC. You would have thought that there'd be at least two of the mainstay Bonk games. Now, I remember the first Bonk as a kid, and I'm not sure I ever played any of the others. I own Bonk 3, but I don't think I ever played it. I have to stay, this is not really my kind of platformer. Mario has really spoiled me when it comes to platformers, and in my opinion, Bonk just doesn't have what it takes precision-wise to be a fun platformer. For instance, I hate the timing on the springy flowers. I get very frustrated with them! I know Bonk is adored by many old school gamers, but I guess he never clicked with me. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with him like I did with Mario and Sonic. Who knows? Maybe I'll come back to it and give it another shot.
Note: So, watching the demo mode run, I happened to notice it does have what looks like the first Bonk, but it's Japanese on the PC Engine side, and it's called PC Genjin? Yeah, weird. Anyway, I'll get to that later when I start playing the PC Engine games.
Cadash
This is one I'm just not going to bother with again. It's a side scrolling action RPG, which is actually a port of an arcade game, so the cheap gameplay actually makes sense. You have to endure many a cheap shot. Very early on when you enter the cave, there's a slope you have to go down and there are skeletons coming up. Well, I could not figure out any safe way to engage them, and the game spawns off-screen enemies, so there are skeletons coming from where I left. I could go back up the slope and and fight off the skeleton that came up at me, but there'd only be another on the way back down. I tried with all four characters and ended up meeting the same fate. I thought, "Naw, couldn't be me. Couldn't be this bad, can I?" So I go look up a gameplay video on YouTube, and the player's solution? Get hit and just keep moving. Wow... fucking... wow. Fuck this game.
Chew Man Fu
So I'm guessing the "chew" part of the title indicates these giant colored balls I'm moving around is gum. If that's the case, you're using your kung fu to take out baddies by kicking giant balls of gum at them. The ultimate goal is to roll all four different colored gumballs onto the respective colored tiles. Once you manage that, a new level begins. In a way, I can kinda see Bomberman influence in this game, which makes sense as a it's a Hudson Soft title. I actually had a lot of fun with this game as I enjoy the puzzle element of moving things around while not getting cornered.
Dungeon Explorer
Dungeon Explorer, as its title suggests, is pretty generic. It's a top down dungeon crawler where you can select from a surprisingly large number of jobs, and then you proceed to get overwhelmed by enemies pretty quickly. I think it's designed to be played primarily with other people, which makes playing by yourself rather disadvantageous and ultimately not that much fun. Plus, the music's rather obnoxious and doesn't really fit the style of the game very well, and the text is just atrocious. "The bridge to Water Castle is broken. Come back after more battle." Also, they spell gnome "knome", which I'm not sure if they did that on purpose or if it was a mistranslation. Anyway, I won't be coming back to this one.
There will be more to come. I'll try to do eight games per entry Thanks for reading!
If you read my blogs on the Sega Genesis Mini, you'll know that I did it in parts. I spen at little time each day with a handful of games until I played each one. I'll be doing the same here. So let's start with talking about the physical aspect.
Now, as far as Mini consoles goes, this is the largest of the five I own (NES, SNES, PSOne, Genesis, T-16). It's about as wide, maybe wider, than the NES and SNES side by side, and about as thick. I never owned a T-16 until many many years after it went defunct when I bough a brand new Turbo Duo off eBay for a few hundred dollars, so I have no idea just how big the original T-16 was.
The first thing I noticed after taking it out of the box was the back cover. It's a removable plastic shell where you thread your HDMI and power cable through, and I believe the original console had this as well. Regardless, I hate it. It's cumbersome, and I wish they forwent this bit of nostalgia and just let me plug the cords directly into the back. Speaking of cords, I was disappointed to learn that it uses a different USB power cord than my other Mini systems, which means I'll have to keep the other one nearby instead of keeping this one in its box.
The controller also feels nice and solid. It's been many years since I held my Duo controller, but based on my very sketchy memory, it seems to be a 1:1 replication. Select and Run buttons are soft. I and II buttons are clicky, and the turbo toggles are nice and firm. That's the one thing I always appreciated about the T-16 was having built in turbo toggles as a standard in their controllers. Now, let's turn it on!
The first thing you'll be greeted with when you turn the system on is the language select. You're given six languages: English by default, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Once you select your language, you're brought into a nicely presented game select screen with some catchy 16-bit music. The game covers look like they're rendered as CD boxes, but maybe that's how the game cards came in? It's been too long for me to remember. You can also sort the titles by the year they were released, alphabetically, or by game format. There's also two different game select screens: one for US TurboGrafx games and the other for EU/Japanese PC Engine games, which has its own music. Lastly, you can select the menu graphics when you're in the PC Engine side of things to either PC Engine (which is white) or PC Engine Core Grafx (which is black). It's really nice to see a way to customize your game select screen for a mini console.
With all that said, I'm going to start my way alphabetically through the T-16 games and then go into the PC Engine games. Let's begin!
Note: When I started my first game, I was treated to a nice little animation of the game cart being inserted into the machine. Really cool!
Air Zonk
So the first to get played is Air Zonk! What happens when Bonk gets bored and decides to go airborne and turn himself into a shoot 'em up? You get Air Zonk! Now these cartoony shooters are the type of shooters I really love. Full of charm, clever power ups, colorful cartoony bosses. I also love the friends system that lets you get drone support in the form of another cartoon character or transforms you completely. It's a hard game, though. I ended up using save states several times just to get to level three. When I return to my T-16 Mini, I'm going to make it a point to finish this game. Really a lot of fun! I love Hudson Soft's work!
Alien Crush
When I was shopping for a Turbo Duo, I was asking a friend of mine which games I should get with it, and Alien Crush was one of them. I don't remember if I actually did play it back then, but as the game stands now, it's a decent 16-bit pinball game. It only has one board so far that I know of, but there's a lot going on with it. It has two levels, and each has at least a couple bonus levels that you can find and start racking up bonus points. I played a few times, stopping after getting a score of over 3.5 mil. There's also a couple different music tracks you can select, and they're both pretty good. The thing is, it could be my imagination, but I think I detected some input lag as the flippers seemed just a little sluggish. I got used to it over time, and could probably get a much higher score if I played it again.
Blazing Lasers
This was another game recommended to me by my same friend. I do remember playing this game on my Duo, and I remember it being pretty hard. I don't think I really got very far at it, probably due to a lack of patience, but ah, the miracle of playing on mini systems: save states! So I used a few and kept on going. I stopped after Stage 3, because I felt like I could spend the whole day playing this game until I beat it. There's always a sign of playing a good space shooter, and that's when you get those "Holy shit, how did I survive that!" moments, and I've had a few in just the first three stages. I love the game's variety of weapons and support systems. Music and graphics are pretty solid for a game of its time as well. Just a very good game overall.
Bomberman '93
What can I say? It's Bomberman. Drop bombs. Blow up walls. Don't get caught in your own explosion. Obviously, it looks better than the NES game, but from what I can remember, the SNES version is the far superior version. Better graphics, better sound. Probably better controls. I played through the first world and killed what looked like a teleporting goomba wizard. It had a cute little picture at the end of it. What's interesting is that in the title screen, there's the option to play COM-LINK. Not surprisingly, COM-LINK doesn't work since I'm pretty sure there's no way to connect two T-16 minis together. So, you're stuck at a screen that shows two Bombermans connecting each other's TurboGrafx Expresses together, which I thought was pretty cute.
Bonk's Revenge
I just noticed something. Aside from Air Zonk, this is the only Bonk game on here. Mario is Nintendo. Sonic is Sega. Bonk is NEC. You would have thought that there'd be at least two of the mainstay Bonk games. Now, I remember the first Bonk as a kid, and I'm not sure I ever played any of the others. I own Bonk 3, but I don't think I ever played it. I have to stay, this is not really my kind of platformer. Mario has really spoiled me when it comes to platformers, and in my opinion, Bonk just doesn't have what it takes precision-wise to be a fun platformer. For instance, I hate the timing on the springy flowers. I get very frustrated with them! I know Bonk is adored by many old school gamers, but I guess he never clicked with me. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with him like I did with Mario and Sonic. Who knows? Maybe I'll come back to it and give it another shot.
Note: So, watching the demo mode run, I happened to notice it does have what looks like the first Bonk, but it's Japanese on the PC Engine side, and it's called PC Genjin? Yeah, weird. Anyway, I'll get to that later when I start playing the PC Engine games.
Cadash
This is one I'm just not going to bother with again. It's a side scrolling action RPG, which is actually a port of an arcade game, so the cheap gameplay actually makes sense. You have to endure many a cheap shot. Very early on when you enter the cave, there's a slope you have to go down and there are skeletons coming up. Well, I could not figure out any safe way to engage them, and the game spawns off-screen enemies, so there are skeletons coming from where I left. I could go back up the slope and and fight off the skeleton that came up at me, but there'd only be another on the way back down. I tried with all four characters and ended up meeting the same fate. I thought, "Naw, couldn't be me. Couldn't be this bad, can I?" So I go look up a gameplay video on YouTube, and the player's solution? Get hit and just keep moving. Wow... fucking... wow. Fuck this game.
Chew Man Fu
So I'm guessing the "chew" part of the title indicates these giant colored balls I'm moving around is gum. If that's the case, you're using your kung fu to take out baddies by kicking giant balls of gum at them. The ultimate goal is to roll all four different colored gumballs onto the respective colored tiles. Once you manage that, a new level begins. In a way, I can kinda see Bomberman influence in this game, which makes sense as a it's a Hudson Soft title. I actually had a lot of fun with this game as I enjoy the puzzle element of moving things around while not getting cornered.
Dungeon Explorer
Dungeon Explorer, as its title suggests, is pretty generic. It's a top down dungeon crawler where you can select from a surprisingly large number of jobs, and then you proceed to get overwhelmed by enemies pretty quickly. I think it's designed to be played primarily with other people, which makes playing by yourself rather disadvantageous and ultimately not that much fun. Plus, the music's rather obnoxious and doesn't really fit the style of the game very well, and the text is just atrocious. "The bridge to Water Castle is broken. Come back after more battle." Also, they spell gnome "knome", which I'm not sure if they did that on purpose or if it was a mistranslation. Anyway, I won't be coming back to this one.
There will be more to come. I'll try to do eight games per entry Thanks for reading!
Thursday, April 23, 2020
The Newest Update for AC:NH Illustrates a Major Problem With Patching Games
Animal Crossing: New Horizons 1.2 update is here, and we're all excited! This brings us the return of Redd and his shifty art dealing schemes. Leif also returns selling a wide selection of flowers and shrubbery. We have new events as well, such as Nature Day and more. The museum will also see an art exhibit expansion after you donate your first painting. Truly, lots to be excited about! However...
There is a downside to this patch. As most of us know, there's a time traveling mechanic in AC:NH, a mechanic that has existed in every AC game before. It lets you reverse time to go back and catch fish and bugs you may have missed, as well as jump ahead in case you can't wait for fish and bugs to arrive. This is great for the players who don't have the time to play the game the way it's intended due to busy schedules and time restraints. What time traveling also does, unfortunately, is let people abuse it to get filthy stinking rich.
Enter the time travelers. One way to get rich is to keep time traveling to the next month after you amass 20 million bells and then you'll earn 99K bells in interest just for signing on. For some reason, Nintendo saw this as a major problem, so they have reduced the interest rate considerably. Now, you can earn no more than 10K bells every month. For starters, 99K bells was only a pittance for those who already had 20 million+ in their bank accounts, but it was a nice bonus just for signing on at the beginning of every month. What makes matter worse is that people weren't evening utilizing time traveling for that purpose. They were using it to skip ahead for better turnip prices.
The other thing I noticed was that the peacock butterfly spawn rate has been reduced. When I first started the game, the moment I got some hybrid flowers, I noticed peacock butterflies spawning around them, and I also noticed they spawned a lot. I found out I could make round 80K in a half hour's time, and I was able to very quickly pay off my home loans and my bridges/inclines and start saving for spending money later. But now, it seems the spawn rate has been reduced and I'm not the only one to have noticed this. This really sucks, because I designed a garden for the sole purpose of farming butterflies.
I know there are better ways to make money than relying on monthly interest and gathering butterflies, but the latter was at least a great way for starting players to make money quickly. I just don't understand why these changes needed to be made in the first place. Why should Nintendo care if someone wants to make money really fast so they can get more enjoyment out of the game sooner? Let them play the game how they want. They spent 60 dollars on your game. They should be afforded that right.
These two changes illustrate the problem of patching games after release. People will argue that this is a necessary evil for the purposes of balancing, but to me, there's no such thing as balancing. Whenever you adjust something in a game, it affects something else for someone else. "Balancing" is a very popular thing in patches for fighters and MMORPGs and I've seen many discussions boil over regarding things breaking as a result of things being fixed. I expect things like these to happen in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Final Fantasy XIV, but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd see "balancing" happening in Animal Crossing of all games.
Again, even though 99K bells a month isn't much for people who already have 20 million, what does that actually accomplish? It's not going to stop time travelers, because they aren't time traveling for the interest anyway. All it does is remove a nice little bonus for the legit players. And why take away a quick source of income in terms of quickly reappearing butterflies, especially since there are far better ways of making bells later on? It just makes the start of the game more of a slog for new players. These were changes that simply didn't need to made because there was no benefit to the player whatsoever. You can be rest assure that Nintendo will be changing other things in the game in the future as well.
Oh, I forgot to mention. To make up for not making a million+ in interest a year, Nintendo gave us a bell bag rug. It's a permanent reminder of how much money I lose at the start of every month (which again isn't much, but still). Anyway, I'm very happy about the rest of the update. I just needed a quick vent about the "balancing" changes to get it off my chest. As always, thanks for reading!
There is a downside to this patch. As most of us know, there's a time traveling mechanic in AC:NH, a mechanic that has existed in every AC game before. It lets you reverse time to go back and catch fish and bugs you may have missed, as well as jump ahead in case you can't wait for fish and bugs to arrive. This is great for the players who don't have the time to play the game the way it's intended due to busy schedules and time restraints. What time traveling also does, unfortunately, is let people abuse it to get filthy stinking rich.
Enter the time travelers. One way to get rich is to keep time traveling to the next month after you amass 20 million bells and then you'll earn 99K bells in interest just for signing on. For some reason, Nintendo saw this as a major problem, so they have reduced the interest rate considerably. Now, you can earn no more than 10K bells every month. For starters, 99K bells was only a pittance for those who already had 20 million+ in their bank accounts, but it was a nice bonus just for signing on at the beginning of every month. What makes matter worse is that people weren't evening utilizing time traveling for that purpose. They were using it to skip ahead for better turnip prices.
The other thing I noticed was that the peacock butterfly spawn rate has been reduced. When I first started the game, the moment I got some hybrid flowers, I noticed peacock butterflies spawning around them, and I also noticed they spawned a lot. I found out I could make round 80K in a half hour's time, and I was able to very quickly pay off my home loans and my bridges/inclines and start saving for spending money later. But now, it seems the spawn rate has been reduced and I'm not the only one to have noticed this. This really sucks, because I designed a garden for the sole purpose of farming butterflies.
I know there are better ways to make money than relying on monthly interest and gathering butterflies, but the latter was at least a great way for starting players to make money quickly. I just don't understand why these changes needed to be made in the first place. Why should Nintendo care if someone wants to make money really fast so they can get more enjoyment out of the game sooner? Let them play the game how they want. They spent 60 dollars on your game. They should be afforded that right.
These two changes illustrate the problem of patching games after release. People will argue that this is a necessary evil for the purposes of balancing, but to me, there's no such thing as balancing. Whenever you adjust something in a game, it affects something else for someone else. "Balancing" is a very popular thing in patches for fighters and MMORPGs and I've seen many discussions boil over regarding things breaking as a result of things being fixed. I expect things like these to happen in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Final Fantasy XIV, but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd see "balancing" happening in Animal Crossing of all games.
Again, even though 99K bells a month isn't much for people who already have 20 million, what does that actually accomplish? It's not going to stop time travelers, because they aren't time traveling for the interest anyway. All it does is remove a nice little bonus for the legit players. And why take away a quick source of income in terms of quickly reappearing butterflies, especially since there are far better ways of making bells later on? It just makes the start of the game more of a slog for new players. These were changes that simply didn't need to made because there was no benefit to the player whatsoever. You can be rest assure that Nintendo will be changing other things in the game in the future as well.
Oh, I forgot to mention. To make up for not making a million+ in interest a year, Nintendo gave us a bell bag rug. It's a permanent reminder of how much money I lose at the start of every month (which again isn't much, but still). Anyway, I'm very happy about the rest of the update. I just needed a quick vent about the "balancing" changes to get it off my chest. As always, thanks for reading!
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Still a Long Way Away from the Perfect Game
When we think of long running Nintendo franchises, we tend to think of Mario and Zelda. Star Fox and Samus. Donkey Kong and Kirby. But there's one franchise of Nintendo's that's been around nearly 20 years - in fact, today marks the series' 19th anniversary - that doesn't have any platform jumping, shooting, smashing, slashing, or sucking up baddies and stealing their powers. This long running franchise of Nintendo's decided to take things at a very leisurely pace, spending the first few weeks, even months, having the player slave away at fishing, catching bugs, selling fruit, even trading turnips all to pay off one dubious raccoon. This series is Animal Crossing.
Animal Crossing, as mentioned earlier, began its life 19 years ago to the date on the Nintendo GameCube and was unlike any game Nintendo released before. A simulation game where you were human but surrounded by anthropomorphic villagers, you began life instantaneously in debt. You had a museum to contribute to, trees to plant, relationships to build, and special events to attend to as you very slowly worked towards everyone's virtual and real life dream of owning your own home. As the series evolved, we saw installments grace the DS, the Wii and the 3DS each bringing their own new improvements and innovations. (We don't talk about Amiibo Festival for the Wii U...)
We didn't really see a major reworking of game mechanics until New Leaf on the 3DS, though, and even then, it wasn't too long until the usual trapping began to show. Now Animal Crossing has released for the Switch in the form of New Horizons and introduced many, many improvements to the franchise. Yet, all the new improvements have only illustrated just how far this franchise still has yet to go to become the perfect life simulator.
There's so much to talk about in terms of quality of life improvements that quite honestly, I have no idea where to start. Let me just begin talking about what I left off doing in the game as I had to dock my Switch to charge.
Terraforming
A brand new mechanic introduced in New Horizons lets us make cliffs, create ponds, rivers and waterfalls, and paths of varying textures all at will, and all for free. You'd think this would be amazing to play with, and for the most part it is, but it's not without its drawbacks. For starters, let's talk about how long it takes should you have any major landscaping projects you want to undergo.
Let's say you have to chip away into an upper tier. You can only clear one square at a time instead of holding down the A button and just pushing your way through the cliff, as if you were moving furniture. Next, there's an issue with cutting terrain at the precise angles. For waterscaping, it's impossible to make a perfect V. You'll either take a square chunk out of the land, or slice an adjacent square of land in half, but if you want the other size of a V you're carving, that point will either be filled in the next time you hit the A button, or a square chunk of land will be removed. I was trying to terraform a Triforce pond and although you can still make it out, it's nowhere near the level of perfection I wanted. As far as making waterfalls, you cannot make waterfalls round the corners, which is a shame as that would make for some really cool waterscaping.
Relocation
I kinda wanted to put this under Terraforming, as it involves moving things around your island, but it's not using the terraforming app, so I decided to give it its own section. So a new feature with New Horizons is moving your buildings around. You're given the ability to place any building wherever you want (accept for the Resident Center, which is anchored in place for all eternity). If you're not happy where a building is, you can relocate it, but it's not as simple as a drag and drop.
Before I continue, I want to talk about how AWESOME it is to be able to very easily redecorate your house in New Horizons. Supposedly taken from the 3DS's Happy Home Designer, which I don't consider to be a mainstay Animal Crossing game, you can enter a mode in your house that lets you move everything around your rooms from the floor to the walls with ease. You can even move multiple items at a time, which make decorating SO EASY. But then you go outside, see all the work you need to do on your island... and slowly revert back into your home, pull the curtains and succumb to an anxiety attack....
Because that's how I feel right now trying to redo my island. I was up late last night fretting over trying to get my land prepared to accommodate a bridge and make sure it wouldn't interfere with the relocation of one my neighbor's homes. Before I knew there was a limit on bridges, I had already built the allotted eight. My plan is to move all my residents around my resident center to creat a neighborhood, but that involves relocating six residents, three buildings (at 50k a pop, so that's 450k in relocation fees) and destroying and rebuilding four bridges, as I'm building a moat around the resident center. I know it takes a day to move a building, but it also takes a day to destroy a bridge, and then another day to build it again where I want.
It'll take around nine or 10 days to get everything done the way I want. So now, I'm left with an unorganized mess, and I don't even want visitors over right now. So when I think of how easy it is to move things around in my house compared to how painful it is to move anything on my island, I get highly discouraged. But, I committed myself to it, so I'm going to see it through. I just hope that Nintendo patches in a map editor mode like they did with their home editor. It would alleviate a lot of headaches. I also get that some might say it's not realistic to be able to move buildings around at the drop of a hat, but let's be honest here. This game is far from realistic. I mean, you can put a giant Godzilla statue in your pocket and create mountains and rivers at will. Come on...
Crafting and Storage
New to New Horizons is the crafting element. Also new to New Horizons is built-in storage in your room. Now, you no longer need to throw a dresser or a refrigerator in your room to access your storage; it's readily available anywhere in the house and greatly increases with each upgrade to your home. Both of these elements need work, though.
So let's talk about crafting. Crafting is a lot of fun, I'll admit. You can make a lot of things on your own without spending a single bell at the store, all from resource gathering. It's cool to be able to make something no one else can, especially if it's a unique item not found in stores. The one major gripe I have is the fact that you can only craft one item at a time. Batch crafting is something that NEEDS to be implemented as soon as Nintendo can do it, because if you've ever tried to craft 30 fish baits, you know how tedious it gets. Hell, after the Bunny Day event was over, I had so many eggs, I crafted over 330k bells worth of Bunny Day furniture. Just try to imagine how long THAT took! Batch crafting: MAKE IT HAPPEN!
As for storage, yes it's readily available within your house, but it came at a weird trade off. Now, every piece of functional furniture that you used to use for storage, such as a freezer, now serves the purpose of being a closet to change your clothing. Why anyone would be changing in their freezer is beyond me; it's just nonsensical. So what I would like to do is for Nintendo to revert the storage items' original purpose back to accessing storage for one major reason: setting storage items outside of your house. Today, I made a cool 5.6 million bells selling bugs to Flick, but it was a very long and tedious process going back and forth to the house. You can also only select one item at a time to remove from storage, so I would also appreciate letting us select multiple items from storage at once. But imagine how much easier it would be to drop a storage item next to Flick, pull out forty bugs at once, and then sell them with Flick standing right next to you. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Bring Back New Leaf Components
It's obvious that New Horizons feels like a major extension of New Leaf, because New Leaf had an island you could visit whereas New Horizons is one major island. Yet, we're left in disbelief as one of New Leaf's most awesome features, swimming, was left at the bottom of the ocean. If you don't know by now, yes, you can no longer swim and dive in New Leaf. This means no hunting for sea cucumbers, anemones and anything else on the sea floor. This also means no more cool wet suits.
Although you can visit separate "mystery islands" (I'll talk about those later), they aren't like the island in New Leaf. For one, you can't travel to one with a friend. Because of that, you can't also partake in mini games with your friends. Multiplayer is still here in New Horizons, but without anything to really DO together like in New Leaf, it gets boring after a while. We NEED mini games to return.
What I also don't get is why the foreign exotic fruits like durian, lychee, persimmons and bananas have not returned. I really enjoyed having a wider variety of fruits, so to see New Horizons revert back to the original six was disappointing. Maybe we'll see them return? What I would also love to see the return of is the megaphone. It was so handy to call out a villager and hear them call back so you'd get an idea of where they were. In fact, just gives us a real time display of where they're moving on our mini map. That would be ideal. Also, give us back the credit card. That was so handy!
Make the Mystery Islands Worth Something Each Trip
Now, I can kinda understand that some people will be happy the way the mystery islands work, as it's all random, so landing on Tarantula Island will be very exciting, but there are too many islands that just aren't interesting at all. These plain islands offer nothing new in the way of flora or fauna, and a string of bad luck will see players waste tons of Nook Miles tickets. After the first several waves of Nook Miles milestones are achieved, miles come in very slowly in the form of tasks, and sometimes it can take an hour just to get enough miles to get one ticket. I see this area of the game as needing a lot of improvement, because something good should always be given when that much time is spent gathering miles. I'm not saying every island should be Money Rock Island or Tarantula Island, but you should at least land on a foreign fruit island for your troubles.
Let Us Change the Camera Angle
I know this might seem like a big ask, but it's time. It's just time. They let us look all around in our room, so why not all around our island? At least we have a more overhead view, but still, the camera options in this game is very limited for a franchise that's almost 20 years old. It would be really nice to look around all your trees to make sure you didn't miss a fossil spot or a piece of fruit that fell. If we don't get any new camera options, at least make things transparent when we're behind them.
Give Us More Inventory Space
Ok, now I'll admit this one is just plain greedy. The game starts you out with 20 slots, which is five more than any other AC game and after your second upgrade, you're up to 40. That is a LOT of inventory space, but I still find myself running out of space when I'm doing chores. I plant a LOT of fruit, and I never have the space to carry it all in one trip, and it's annoying to have to stop what you're doing, haul everything to the store to free up space, and then remember where you left off. True, this is done far less with 40 slots than in older games with 15, but it's still happening, and when your franchise is improving, you don't want inconveniences to lessen; you want them gone.
There's a few ways to alleviate this. One would be to let everything stack to 99 like weeds. It's weird to me that fruit only stack at 10, but wood can stack at 30 and fence pallets stack at 50. You're telling me I can hold FIFTY pallets of fencing in one slot, but only TEN fruit?
So you can see that if one thing can stack at 99, then it's possible for everything to stack at 99, and yes, I mean everything. "But not fish! Surely, not fish!" Yes, fish, too. Why? Because those sea shells you're picking up, they're alive, and they stack. You can stack corals, and sea dollars and giant clams. You can stack flowers, weeds, fruit. These are all living, so why not make bugs and fish stackable as well? Don't believe me? Play an MMORPG. I think it would help pacify everyone's anger about wasting so much space with sea bass.
Make Sea Bass Extinct
Make Sea Bass Extinct
But seriously, back to inventory. Another way to increase inventory is to give us a tool box. We now have more tools in New Horizons than we do any other Animal Crossing game. In fact, we have more tools than we have spaces in our tool ring, which should also be upgraded. You have your shovel, axe, stone axe if you're looking not to chop down trees, fishing rod, net, slingshot, watering can, umbrella, musical instruments, party favors, ladder, pole vault and lastly, the magical wand. If you decide to carry one of everything, that's three inventory slots used up just in tools. Having a tool box - or utility box, or even utility belt - take just one space would be a godsend. Or you know, the new backpacks we can wear should hold more stuff too...
Implement Better Planning With Events
Let's be honest here. The last two events, Bunny Day and the Fishing Tournament, were not that good. Bunny Day was such an atrocity, Nintendo had to patch in measures to tone down the number of eggs spawning. I got so many eggs and recipes the first couple of days, I had everything I needed, so I had ten more days of coming across eggs I didn't want. Maybe when one of the game's core mechanics is resource gathering, don't replace people's main sources of income with bunny eggs so much? It would have been better to just do special tasks for Zippy or Zipper or Zippideedodah and then he'll give you the recipe to make instead of searching for balloon after balloon to only get 30 more sky eggs.
The fishing tournament was also lackluster. To begin with, it wasn't really a fishing tournament. It was just spamming the same "fish as many times as you can in three minutes" over and over again. I spent several hours doing this to get all the "swag" and sadly, I wasn't even impressed by it. There were a lot of different pieces of furniture missing from the set, like a table or a record player or something. I was disappointed with most of the stuff he was handing out, so I'd like to see more thought put into better seasonal items that's worth more of the player's time. ALSO, it was a BAD idea to do this while the Bunny Day event was still going on. You shouldn't be pulling up water eggs when you're under a time limit to catch fish. Real bonehead move there. And the countless interactions with C.J. brings me to my next point.
Let Us Skip Repetitive Dialogue
I swear, one of the worst things about the fishing tournament was having to keep interacting with C.J. After you caught your fish, you had to talk to him THREE more times to start the next tournament. It didn't need to be split up into three separate conversations, and once you're having a conversation, if it's dialogue you've already seen, you should be able to just skip right over it. This goes beyond C.J. This applies to every damned denizen on the island. So much time is wasted in the shop, with Blathers, talking to Nook, your villagers about Bunny Day. We really don't need to see the same chatter each and every time!
Let the Net Catch Multiple Bugs at the Same Time
This would definitely come in handy. How many times have you seen a bug you wanted, went for it and swung, but another bug got in the way and your prize flew away? Or what about the time you were on Tarantula Island and were able to sneak up on two tarantulas and caught one only for the other to bite you? I mean, we see the net pass through both (or even three bugs) at the same time, and we know that in real life, a net would catch those bugs at once, so why not just let us catch multiple bugs at the same time?
Rework the Tool Durability System
What I really want is just no more damn breakable tools, but I get why they're there, and like the breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild, they're never going to go away. But, we should at least be given a durability meter or some sign that our tools are going to break. I remember in the older Animal Crossing games, you actually saw your axes start chipping before they broke. And well, the real prize are the golden tools, and I'm sorry, but golden tools should simply not break at all. Gold ore is SCARCE. I can go a whole week without finding one. You think I'm going to waste these things on tools that will eventually break? Either let those golden tools become unbreakable, or boost the drop rate of gold ore.
Provide More Interactivity With More Items
I'm sure we've all come across awesome items that didn't do much, or even do anything at all. I would love to see more thought and effort put into making more items do stuff. For instance, I spent 5k Nook Miles on a pool that I can't even wade in. I know this may be a lot to ask considering no one knows how many items are even in the game, but I'm hoping that they're at least thinking of making more items do things in future patches. I don't ever want to sell a cool looking item just because it doesn't do anything.
Give Us Rideable Items
How many times have you gotten a bike that you would love to ride? It's time. We should be able to ride bikes and scooters around our islands. Or hell, even a go-kart. I'm not asking to go fast. I mean, we don't even need to go faster than running speed, but I would love to have some kind of locomotion in Animal Crossing. Speaking of locomotion, how about a train? I would LOVE to have a train where you could lay out the tracks wherever you want.
Get Rid of the 20 Percent Tax on the Dropbox at Nook's Cranny
This one gets me. When I first started the game, I LOVED being able to come to Nook and sell anything I got any time of the day. God, I remember the old days of the first Animal Crossing where I stored all my fish in the basement when I got off work, because the store closed before I got home, and I would wake up and quickly sell my fish the next day before I went back to work. But when Nook upgraded his tent into a resident center and diverted commerce to Nook's Cranny, hours of operation returned, which was disappointing.
Yet, there was good news. There was a drop box you could deposit items in and have them sold off hours, but the store took a 20 percent fee. For what?! Considering you have so much storage in your house now, you might as well just store everything and sell it the next day when the store's open again. This penalizes players who can't play during prime hours and since the game starts out with the store open 24/7, it really should stay open 24/7.
Well, there you have it. I'm sure I've forgotten a few things and will probably think of them a few minutes after I post this, but I got a lot off my chest. Now, before anyone gets upset over me criticizing their beloved Animal Crossing, let me just say that I've been playing the hell out of it and really enjoy it so far, but I've always been the type to see improvement in everything. The fact that New Horizons has done so many quality of life enhancements is testament to the fact that they can keep improving the game, and should so since we live in the days of post-launch patches and expansions. I'm sure we'll see a few of these things and other improvements no one thought of in upcoming patches. This is just a list of things I'd love to see myself.
Anyway, thank you all for reading. I know this was a long one, so extra special thanks for that.
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