The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

i still cannot beat the last boss of splatterhouse GRAAAA fuck frig fuck
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[somewhere_else]

This banner was at the top of the page when I opened this thread, and the Stage 1-1 music got stuck in my head the moment I laid eyes on it. About 15 years ago, on a trip to my Grandmother's house, I discovered a cousin of mine had a Gameboy and this game, and I managed to borrow it from him for the duration of my stay. It was the hardest game I'd played up to that point; and when I finally beat it after weeks of staying up past my bedtime playing it by the light on the nightstand, I left the Gameboy on and listened to the music that played over the credits until the battery ran out.

Seeing that banner, I tracked down the ROM and started playing the game for the first time since I was about 10 years old. It's still awesome. I managed to beat it in maybe a half-hour, though I wasn't keeping track of the time. It's funny to think how many things that shocked and challenged me at the time--jumping from one diagonally moving platform to the next over a bottomless pit, the slightly twisty passages in 4-3 where you have to backtrack to avoid crashing--became so conventional in their respective genres.

I did kind of miss the little blurry screen of an original Gameboy, but it was a relief to discover that all the route optimization and secrets I spent time uncovering when the game was new are completely unnecessary to enjoying a trip through the game. I'm half-tempted now to run through the game again for speed or to beat my own score. I did get a little sad though when this name showed up right at the beginning of the credits.

[dessgeega]

super mario land remains, to this day, my favorite mario title. if was definitely made in consideration of the gameboy's limitations, and so it feels o so comfortable on the crisp screen of an sp. i play through it every now and then when i need to unwind; there's so much clever stuff going on in the level design that it is a gleeful experience.
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[Cycle]

yeah i'd feel the same way if it weren't for the god awful controls
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[elvis.shrugged]

707,677 points in Tempest 2000 for the Jag!!! Hell yes.

If my game data clears itself again, I'm going to be pissed.

[dessgeega]

huzzah!

my high is 735,958.
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[elvis.shrugged]

Awesome! Nice job!

I just got the Jaguar about a month ago, but I got into the whole Tempest 2000 thing through Tempest X3 for the PSX. Have you ever played it, Dess? It's pretty weird. The X3 mode is totally different from 2000, but even in the 2000 mode, I couldn't reach the same heights I am now, on the Jag. It's like Minter put some magic touch on his version, or something.

[dessgeega]

anything jeff minter touches is magic. he touched me once.

also,

fuckin one-credited splatterhouse

oh yeah

on the nintendo wii

yeehah
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[elvis.shrugged]

Congrats! I can't wait until the Wii I ordered ships on the 27th. I will be in gaming heaven. Does anyone have any impressions on SMB Blitz and Cooking Mama for the Wii? They were in the bundle.

What's Jeff Minter like in person? I saw his Google Tech video presentation thing, he seems cool.

[Cycle]

I can only get to the last level of splatterhouse with one credit
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[dessgeega]

the last two stages of splatterhouse are fierce.

super monkey ball wii is probably the worst in the series, and it's even less impressive next to kororinpa, which uses the remote brilliantly. i havn't played cooking mama yet but i think maybe nana has?

jeff minter is great. when he talks it feels like he's taken you down to the pub to regale you with tales of his old adventures in and out of the game industry. he makes fun of ea. it's great.
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[elvis.shrugged]

Yeah, I totally want to buy Kororinpa, regardless of whether I keep Monkey Ball or not. Ditto with Wario Ware (that's good, right? I'm so hyped to play it).

And <3 Jeff Minter.

[dessgeega]

i just finished emily short's city of secrets, which i've been playing through for the last week or so.

i've been playing it in gargoyle, which is the first interpreter i've managed to play through the game in without crashing. (though it did, in fact, crash several times.) but wow, gargoyle is gorgeous. most interactive fiction interpreters aren't interested in looking gorgeous, as the games they run are just strings of text, but gargoyle is interested in typography, presentation, and readability. and wow, what a difference.

i also played attack of the yeti robot zombies the other day, which was pretty swell.

i think next i am going to attempt bronze, also by emily short.
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[simplicio]

I took advantage of a couple trade in deals at gamestop and got $18 for Banana Blitz about a week ago. I recommend this course of action, cause the game's awful.

Kororinpa and Excite Truck are the best games on the system, as far as I can tell. I base this statement on them being the most proper Wii experiences, ie a type of gaming you won't find elsewhere. But wait on Excite Truck maybe cause a $20 pricetag within the next few months seems pretty inevitable.

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

I bought and then played Mobile XS Light Games Force's The Red Star today and something else, probably along the lines of LEGO and Star Wars or some junk like that, I wasn't really looking at the box on that one, since EB had their '2 for $50' sale going on which they get, like, three or four times a year. The game ain't half bad, quite fun actually though a bit easy so far. I kind of want to go back and play it again after I finish typing this.

It's as much a simplistic run around in eight directions and hit things game as it is a dodge the slow moving bullets (some very Ikaruga-esque blackcurrent-flavoured bullets as well as bullets of other flavours, taste the rainbow) and lasers game that all the screenshots that made fans of games where you shoot things wet all that time ago, when that horrid Acclaim company was still doing the rounds. Even if you can't dodge all the bullets you have a shield to protect yourself until it runs out and you have to dance about waiting for it to refill, same with your weapons if you are too lead-thumbed. So naturally it subscribes to the fight several enemies, fight boss, repeat style of play like all the games of this sort do. Even the bosses are introduced with the WARNING! SOMETHING SOMETHING alerts that everything has these days. It even highlights weakpoints so you know where to shoot.

Of course, the year 2007 dictates that every action game must allow you to level up your abilities between stages because that is what makes action games deeper. And then there is the required mission briefs which are text only, no voices, which is really half-arsed. It's the year 2007, where the hell are my awkward sounding voice actors? And it looks really nice and clean, Neo Contra clean and it controls a damn sight better since you aren't being overwhelmed with asshole enemies all the time. That's what I'll compare it mostly to, an easy Neo Contra with heat gauge-limited gun that you can beat people up in and throw them off ledges or into each other to fill your meter for magic powers. And a funny fake widescreen filter. Sweet! So if you live in one of those countries that it is released in right now and the idea of a game which lets you and a friend if you have one beat, shoot and dodge things of varying speed appeals to you then you should definitely buy it since it will be cheap. And there is no way in hell that I have proofread all that shit.
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[simplicio]

Wait, The Red Star is actually out?

EDIT: Apparently my copy's in transit as of thursday. I'd given up hope!

[Harveyjames]

[dessgeega]

i don't even know what spring break is, and i love excite truck.
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[simplicio]

[a_plus]

i haven't been on the internet at all for a month, and i had a lot of time to play some old pc games. i'll try to remember them all...

i got real bored with the warcraft 3 expansion, real quick. it turns out the parts of the game i liked the most -- building your fort up and all the sim-city like management that comes with it -- are really castrated in the frozen throne, at least from what i played. it throws lots of unique one-off sort of missions at you, dumps new units and characters on you without much time to figure them out, and basically didn't hold my interest like the original game did. too scattered.

zork: grand inquisitor was a surprise to me -- i've had the discs for ages and never played it! i was expecting it to be miserably difficult, like return to zork was, but i only really got stuck once or twice (i didn't know i could look up at one point! i was wandering aimlessly for an hour or so before i found that out). i had a lot of fun in this one, and the cast (including michael mckean and rip taylor!) was amusing. beyond that, it's a pretty standard late '90s cd-rom adventure game.

i found the quest for glory collection a week ago, and breezed through the first two, having playing them way, way too much when i was young. i absolutely loved these games, and it's nice to see that they've aged pretty well! they're much more forgiving than the usual games by sierra of that era, too. being able to import your characters from previous games is a nice touch, i always thought. i'm going down the magic user path now, in the middle of the third one. i never did get through it the first time around (when i was 12 or something). i'm not amazingly impressed with it so far, though. the storytelling in it is a bit more mature than the first two (aside from some questionable language from the tribe living in the savannah), and the fighting is a bit tighter but... i dunno. i have a hard time getting enveloped by this game like i did the previous ones. i think the world map interface pulls me out of it more than it should.
still, i'm looking forward to the fourth one! all the games had great themes and settings: the germanic spielburg, arabian shapeir, some sort of north african/egyptian tarna, so whatever the hell the lovercraftian stuff is going on in the fourth one intrigues me. i'm not sure if #5 ever got released, though...

we also got harvest moon: magical melody for the gamecube and have been playing that a ridiculous amount. i haven't played a harvest moon game before and really regret that now! it's close to what i wish animal crossing was.

[dessgeega]

zork grand inquisitor really isn't as bad as it could be for something as heretical as a graphical zork retcon. for me, though, the most interesting thing to come out of the game was zork: the undiscovered underground, a text if epilogue to the zork series by marc blank and mike berlyn that was released for free to try and get texty people to buy the game. it's a far better send-off to the series than grand inquisitor is.

if the gamecube harvest moon is the one i think it is, it's really a digression from the rest of the series, and you should at least try the snes original.
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[a_plus]

oh, you know, i really need to play undiscovered underground. i've known about it for ages and haven't looked into it..
i also found my old zork anthology cd -- the five text adventures (and planetfall as a bonus). i wish i could play them in gargoyle, though! there must be Z files of infocom stuff somewhere around.

[dessgeega]

there are but they're totally contraband and whatnot. i'm trying to download a torrent of all the infocom games (which i technically own, but not in z format) which is like eight megabytes but it just won't go because no one is seeding it.
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[Cycle]

so is The Red Star really worth it? I also saw it at EB and almost picked it up. Only $30, but I don't like spending even $10 on something I'm not going to enjoy.

Also I just realised the wii needs a game that involves stabbing.
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[captaincabinets]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[dessgeega]

so my copy of road rash 2 (ninety-five cents plus three dollars shipping!) arrived today. i love that game because of the moment-to-moment interactions: with other riders, with traffic. carrying out a fistfight with another biker while weaving in and out of cars. and public enemy no. 1 (<3).

the interface is so cryptic, though. after completing the level 1 tracks i bought a new bike with all the money i had. since i had no money left, the game silently game-overed me and started me at the first track of level 1.

i turned it off and went to play some excite truck. that game still makes me grin stupidly. i picked super excite mode back up: i cleared the first four courses of the silver cup and then flailed against the fifth for an hour. i don't like to walk away from a game frustrated but repeatedly missing the goal by three points starts gets mocking pretty quickly.

so i played some more road rash. i'm still hopeless at level 2.
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[Cycle]

road rashfor the playstation is one of my favourite games. i love the feeling of freedom and speed and reckless diving and fighting. plus a early-mid 90s rock soundtrack to boot. i still want to try road rash 64, but can never find it. not even a rom! anyone got a rom?

also rero, that sounds pretty cool. i guess it should be worth 30 bucks.

also how are those zone episodes coming

also exctie truck is still awesome. played some more two-plaeyr last night with my bro. I own him with super tree runs, but he still kicks the shit out of me with drifts. I almost always need to come first to get the extra edge.
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[Six]

Stop taunting me! I'm still a bit bummed the secondhand copy I got didn't work.

[dessgeega]

played through excite truck on excite difficulty with custom songs. you havn't lived until you've played this game to the pillows. then i cleared that track on super excite that was giving me so much trouble yesterday with "born to be wild" playing, using the kodiac, probably the fastest truck in the game (i still have two to unlock), which i unlocked today.

so now i'm up to the gold cup on super excite. i was too scared so i went and played road rash instead. i feel i am making some progress with level 2, but i keep getting pulled over by o'connor. she can pull me over anytime though, rowr.
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[Cycle]

wait how do you use a custom soundtrack
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[dessgeega]

put an mp3 on an sd card, put the sd card in the wii. before the start of each race bring up the sound options menu (i think it's the + button) and pick a song!
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[Cycle]

So I went to the store today and bought The Red Star! It's kinda funny, I put it down (since there were like eight copies left) and rumaged through the other games to see what else I could find for the 2 for 50 deal (I ended up getting a controller for my PC which I've been meaning to get for about six years), and my lady friend who always likes rummaging with me and bringing things to my attention picked up a game and said "hey, this looks kinda stupid but also kinda cool!" and it was The Red Star!!!

Ok, I guess it's only funny to me. Good job to whoever designed the cover art, though. You attracted a mostly non-gamer!

Anyway, I like this game so far and recommend it, especially for its price. It's very polished and snazy so far. First, how it looks. This game actually uses some effects very cleverly to make the game look better than it really is. The general aesthetic, for example, has a nice cel-shaded look to it, but environment textures look pretty shit when you get even remotely close to them (which doesn't happen often). But the cleverness lies in things like, a depth of field effect when a boss is firing far in the background that makes it look really badass, or on a ice level, there is some frost surrounding the edge of the screen. Oh, and the screen will go staticy when fighting bosses because THE EXPLOSIONS ARE JUST SO FUCKING HUGE YEAH WOO

They also use the different perspectives the game uses pretty cleverly in conjuction with the graphical tricks. For example, on the second level you hear a big air ship and see it's reflection on the ice on the ground. Cool! Even cooler is seeing the reflection of bombs dropping from the sky. So yeah, colour me impressed when it comes to using effects and perspectives in interesting and exciting ways!

Sound wise, the game isn't as impressive. I wish explosions were louder, and in general sounds could have been given a lot more oomph, but they are more than adequete. i wish the soundtrack was a mix of DRAMATIC ORCHESTRA AND OPERA MUSIC PLUS ELECTRONIC BEATS N STUFF or whatever, like in the trailer, to really get in the soviet mood, but we're left with some rather generic action game music, but hey.

game-play wise, this is great. i think they did a great job of mixing beat-em-up with shoot em up gameplay. they made lots of great design choices to help balance them out. for example, if you use your gun too much it will over-heat and you won't be able to use it, so you have to learn how to pace it with melee especially against bosses. you can also only charge your special meter by using melee moves. special moves are simple and easy to remember and pull off, as they should be. the enemies also really compliment your range of moves, as well as the moves of other enemies. if that makes any sense. BUT I really hope that this game either has a hard mode or is fairly long. it really feels like they are holding back on me. they have all the enemies they need, and if they threw the right ones, at the right number at the right time together, they would make for some very tense scenes, but right now it feels like they have all the ingrediants but aren't using them. so i'm hoping it either starts getting harder REAL soon or there is another mode.

but man, i love impaling someone, spinning around and hitting everyone, throwing him at his teammates (or throwing him off a cliff) and flamethrowing the survivors. this is just real fun.

i'm also not really down with this upgrading between levels stuff, even way back when i played super off-road. on one had, it gives the feeling of choice and achievement, on the other hand it also makes the design feel a little looser and i'm always left wondering if i should have upgraded that other gun for this level instead. fortuantely it doesn't seem to get in the way much.

there is some kind of story going on between the levels but I haven't paid any attention to it. it's nice they bothered to include something though, and even nicer that they let us quickly avoid it without fuss!

if i had to make one more complaint, i wish there was more soviet stuff. like the music, as i mentioned, plus just more symbols and flags and stuff. it feels pretty toned down right now, although some of the levels have the right atmosphere going in their backgrounds, such as tne war torn city.

there is no way in hell i'm proof-reading this. well, i'll proof-read tomorrow. i'm only writing this now because i can't sleep. i have no idea if any of what i just wrote makes sense. i'll probably re-write it tomorrow and cross post at SB.

also super excite mode is pissing me off.
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[SuperWes]

[ryan]

Armored Core 4 (360) is randomly kicking the crap out of me. I'm either strafing and shooting, beating a mission in about three minutes, or jumping around like a madman trying to dodge the three dozen incoming projectiles, cursing as I tweak my unit's weaponry before trying the mission again.

Puzzle Quest (DS) is getting some play, but I tend to turn it off after the computer takes its 10th turn in a row.

Rome: Total War - Barbarian Invasion (PC) eats up the rest of my free time. The Western Empire campaign is tough. I have Vandals and Franks eating up the West with Rebel Empires in the East. I'm still -80,000, and my troop count is slowly being grinded down. I've already seen the (horrible) ending, but I would like to make it just a bit longer.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[dhex]

oh crap i got sucked back into crawl.

gaaaaaaah!
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[SuperWes]

I'm up to 18 hours and 4 gym badges in Pokemon Pearl. Soooooooo good. I think Pokemon is my guilty pleasure.

-Wes

EDIT: I was actually up to 18 hours, not 14. DAMN!
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[Scratchmonkey]

Had a bit of fun with Morriwind last night, going through a grand tour of Daedric shrines. I went into one in the south central portion of the map, just up from that big inland lake area. After killing some daedra, I went inside, offed 3 orcs and started wandering around, wondering if there was anything to this place other than the standard statue/offerings setup.

After finding the requisite chest and scrolls lying around, I decided this was probably it. Then suddenly at least 5 thieves appeared around me, one of which fell into an open lava pit and presumably perished while the rest of the remaining thieves surrounded me and started hacking away. After killing one of them, my health (already depleted from the orcs) was low enough that I had to cut and run. After recuperating outside the shrine, I went back inside and knocked off the two thieves that I found. I'm certain that this leaves at least one thief unaccounted for and while I suppose more of them could have fallen into the lava when I ran away, it appears that there are some open ledges high up in the shrine that could possibly be where the thieves originally came from, whether they were using flying potions or what.

I particularly like that Morrowind has plenty of situations like this, where the game takes you by surprise and there's any number of possible explanations as to why it occured. It's really nice in comparison to Oblivion, which is about as straight-forward as you can get.

[dessgeega]

i've been playing panel de pon ds. the more i play it the more i love it.

my short review is it is gorgeous and plays like i've always wanted panel de pon to play.
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[elvis.shrugged]

I seriously can't wait for that to come out here. It has Wifi, right?

[Lasa]

I'm conflicted about Hitman: Blood Money. It probably has the best level design in the series, but it feels quite a deal more constricting than Hitman 2 and 3.

[dessgeega]

[Swimmy]

I just played through killer7 again. My official opinion, now that I've played through it twice, a long time apart: it's not a bad game, it's just that half the levels are designed horribly. When smiles can come at you from more than two directions and around corners, it's just. . . ugh. The levels that are more linear are pretty damn fun.

Now I'm playing Dragon Warrior Monsters. The idea is to mix Pokémon with DW, except: randomized dungeons around a central hub, monster breeding (which came later for Pokémon), quick DW-style battles (which is wonderful), and much lower chances of getting a monster to join you (which is annoying beyond belief). On the bright side, most boss monsters automatically join you, which gives you a great advantage early on. Also, I have a built-in affection for the monsters that I never got with Pokémon, because I"m a complete DW whore. So back to it.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Cycle]

I played through MDK today. It was the PSX version so some parts were very frustrating due to slowdown issues and bad collision detection, but for the most part it was a solid port.

I still think it's a very brown game, apart from a few areas, but I think that's kind of the point. It seemed to be a parody of the games there were coming out at the time. Even the initial advertising campaign reflected this. I really love it, though. Just a series of connected action set pieces where you have to figure out how to get to the next one. Great sense of humour and I love the incredibly mixed soundtrack.

In conclusion, this is the ROTT of third person shooters.

The PSX version has the kickass intro which I mistook for actual gameplay when I first saw it all those years ago, but it's unfortunately missing the awesome music video at the end of the game that's in the PC version! You know, the one with the singer who moves her eyebrows just a little too much. Here it is for those interested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVvlkNrBT4k

I love videogames shown in music videos.
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[SuperWes]

6 Badges, 23 hours.

-Wes
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[dessgeega]

i also finished noobow today - a adventure game by irem for the green-and-black gameboy, based on a kids' manga and anime. you can walk left and right, climb obstacles of one "block's" height, and lift and carry items. they do a lot with this, though: sometimes you need to rearrange boxes to be able to cross difficult terrain, other times you'll need to pick up a particular object - like a giant leaf - and use it to pass under a stream of heavy water. it's very charming, partly because of its dialogue-less storytelling (aside from cutscenes between chapters) and partly because of dot matrix magic.

i've also found myself inexplicably hooked on the gameboy advance port of manic miner. (while doing research for that post, i discovered that the software projects release of the game has incredibly bizarre cover art.)
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[Harveyjames]

[dessgeega]

[Cycle]

I can't get past Eugene’s Lair
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[dessgeega]

i can't get past the kong beast
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