Congrats! Super Circuit is a hard game - I can never get back into it and feel that I’m any good due to the need for strategic coin grabbing. Who was your preferred character?
Three of my favorite games in one post!
Went back and finished a new file I started on Super Mario Sunshine over three years ago. There were a few levels I hadn’t gotten the final shine on. Will post proper thoughts over at the Mario 35 thread…
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I was able to miraculously do this on my original GBA cart. Not going to try it ever again haha
I just did it with Toad … as that rank guide suggested he was the easiest (since he has a very low base rank). I was aware Bowser is the fastest, but looking at the stats in game, that didn’t seem the case. Looking it it up now, it turns out the in game stat for “speed” is actually “acceleration” mistranslated. Which makes a lot of sense now! I avoided heavyweights cause i assumed they had bad acceleration, which is always a pain against the AI!
I beat Starlancer!
In The Future, the Alliance (basically space NATO) is struggling against the tyranny of the Coalition (space Warsaw Pact + China and Middle Eastern states - combine that with the narrative’s focus on making the bad guys chronic puppy kickers and you get a game that would get entertaining social media reactions if it was released today). After the Coalition cripples the Alliance’s millitary in a dramatic Pearl Harbor-esque attack, you and a bunch of other civilian yahoos enlist, growing from nobodies to feared daredevils.
Starlancer was a companion title to Freelancer, and while the later was an open-world trade-or-pirate deal, Starlancer is an old school mission-based deal where you play through a series of missions with variying objectives. Unlike most previous military space combat games, Starlancer features fast-firing automatic weapons and your ships have just the right amount of weight and inertia to feel nice to fly, and are nicely differentiated. Things are balanced and doled out just well enough you never just stick to one vehicle and weapon configuration.
A lot of space sims commited pretty hard to immersion and wearing narrative and gameplay together, and Starlancer went extra hard. There are a lot of seemingly pointless features (like the ability to taunt or threaten any random enemies or read news reports on the war effort) that are there to reinforce you’re a living breathing cog in a century-spanning interstellar war and not just a player avatar in a video game. While the game was co-produced by the creator of Wing Commander, Starlancer doesn’t really feature a branching narrative - but sometimes, a ship you failed to take out may come back to haunt you again, and your in-mission performance will affect how you get dressed down in the debriefing. A mission you survived by the skins of your teeth may result in a debriefing that might as well say “Well at least we’re still alive”, while a perfect run may end with a bombastic propaganda report extoling your incredible contribution to the war efforts. While the CGI humans have aged quite a bit, the voice acting and ingame graphics are still good enough to sell the illusion.
Starlancer is pretty damn hard, and not always for the right reasons. You have lot of escorting of targets with paper thins armours while your useless allies jerk off in the other corner of the map, stupid "lol got you"s (targets with stupidly huge blast radius that take you down with them, hitscan infinite range death rays, etc), and the all-too-common flight game sim of throwing multiple (unskipabble!) mid-missions cutscenes in a row, which only end up being disorienting. Frustrations aside, though, Starlancer is definitely up there in the space sim pantheon.
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I never played Starlancer, but Freelancer was incredibly good.
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First time clearing Puyo Puyo 2 and it was on Game Gear Micro. Going to need to rest my eyes now though…
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Sonic the Hedgehog on Game Gear (Micro)!
I thought this was awesome. It never felt like a port or translation of Sonic on Mega Drive, Ancient did such a good job making a game that fit the demands of the portable and its smaller display. Great level design too, though I thought the placement of the last two chaos emeralds was nonsense.
Sonic 2 on Game Gear, on the other hand…I think I’ll skip this one from the first level alone. Feels like it was never designed for Game Gear in the first place…
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Wow that MUCH was a longer endeavour than I first imagined it would be…
Finished all 6 episodes of Wolfenstien 3-D, and all 3 episodes of Spear of Destiny on the “Bring 'em on!” difficulty. It’s surpisingly still fun after all these years, and there is a ton of content to be had… All in, there are 109 levels not counting the bonus levels.
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Baku Baku Animal on Game Gear Micro, Hard mode. Really underappreciated puzzle game, against the hard mode AI it can get extremely frantic, which is just plain fun given the need to quickly connect animals to food and the hierarchies of your blocks.
Finished Sigil tonight!
Really awesome game, it fits in well with Doom as an unofficial episode 5. The levels are sprawling, beautiful and extremely well done. Romero really flexed his design prowess here.
I was a little disappointed at first that it was Doom, not Doom II… But after seeing how difficult it is, and the amount of enemies crammed in there, to have all the additional D2 mobs in there would have been crazy.
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One-credited Gates of Thunder!
One of the most popular PC Engine shooter, Gates of Thunder was made by some former Thunder Force developers… and is basically Thunder Force 3 II… and that’s really not a bad thing, because like its progenitor, GoT is a roller coaster of gorgeous grafx, rockin’ tunes, and fast-paced levels brimming with new foes and tricks at every turn. It is glorious and everything a 16-bits shmup should be.
The only thing that keepts it from being an all-time classic (instead of a “period classic”) is the difficulty balance: like many older shooters, Gates of Thunder is one of those games where the challenge is tough but fair when you’re fully outfitted. But like Thunder Force, you lose your support drones and you currently-equipped when you bite it - and the former punishment is particularly deleterious. This comes to a heel in the penultimate level where you can very quickly go from being in control to losing 5 lives in a row because you’re piddly starting ship just can’t kill the enemy before it kills you. I think that could have been handled better.
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Finished up Doom 64 tonight!
Man, what a game… it’s so fun, and even though the developer, sounds and graphics are all different, it’s still a fitting take on the franchise that’s still well worth playing to this day.
It was a pre-order bonus for Doom Eternal, but you can buy it for $5 on steam. Easily worth checking out.
3 Likes
Not sure how I missed this but yes this is basically the Speedthru game! Shame Speedthru is more po-faced though - the game over animations seem more unintentionally hilarious XD
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-Finally- finished 3D Streets of Rage 2 this evening - can’t believe I didn’t play this until now, what an intense brawler that’s clearly been meticulously designed on every single level to challenge and entertain. Despite the seemingly simple controls and level design it’s incredible how much the developers get out of this - perhaps it’s because of this restraint in design, much like how Kirby’s Dream Land on Game Boy is better off for not overloading the mechanics.
Every encounter can play out differently each playthrough, and the enemy combinations thrown at you continuously up the ante throughout the game. I’m still learning new ways to deal with the same enemy types in different situations.
The ending music almost made me cry.
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I’ve beaten Gundam Encounter IN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE
Back in 2001, Bandai’s licensed game sweatshop BEC released Gundam Journey to Jaburo, a third-person action game that adapted the earthbound portions of the original Mobile Suit Gundam Anime, roughly covering the territory of the first two compilation movies. Encounters in Space adapts the remainder of the material, being centered around the war in space that is the climax of the MSG 0079 storyline. While Journey to Jaburo was a fairly slow game that felt like a souped-up PS1 release in scope and feel, Encounters in Space feels much more fast and fun.
Encounter in Space basically plays like a dumbed down (and honestly, more fun) Zone of the Enders: most of the stages being with a short rail shooter sequence before you transition to the freeform “battle sphere” where you can shoot and bash enemies to your heart content courtesy of a generous autolock system. Your ammo is unlimited and the melee systems boil down to mashing the triangle button as your big robot quickly lunges at the nearest enemy so you can inflict more damage. There’s a simple scoring system (basically: destroy the subsection of enemy battleships, shoot battleships after they’ve already exploded for more points, killing multiple enemies with your charge shot gives a small bonus) that’s tied to the ranking system that unlocks more stuff if you get the highest ranks, and you can barrel roll to dodge enmies and cancel their lock on. It’s not all that deep but it sells the fantasy of being a slick one-man army well enough.
The game is frigging loaded with stuff. The main “White Base” mode isn’t very long, lasting about one hour and half with cutscenes but if that doesn’t satisfy you, subsequent replays unlock new scenes and branching paths (the third level especially has a ridiculous number of tergiversations) . And if you get A ranks on every levels or have a safe file from Journey to Jaburo, you can play through that same campaign in “TV Mode”, featuring minor differences to account for the changes made between the compilation moves and the original TV series. And if you get bored of that, there’s an original story called the Thoroughbred mode that deals with a brand new character. The fact that it deals with a decently unexplored event in Gundam lore makes the predictable and threadbare storyline all the more regrettable, but the actual mode is fun enough.
And if you get bored of that, there’s an “Ace Pilot” mode that features 8 campaigns of variying lengths starring the Zeon villains, deep cuts from the extended Gundam universe, and the main actors of the 0083 Stardust Memory OVA. Those missions have about as much effort put into them as the main campaign (beside Char’s campaign - half of it is just fighting the Gundam in the same missions you fought Char in the main mode, which is kinda lame) and flesh out many obscure events and storyline from the Universal Centure universe.
And if you get bored of that, there’s the Mission Mode, that has you “train” a character you create by playing through 8 randomly-generated missions. When you complete a mission, you acquire points and can spend them on leveling various attributes and purchasing skills for your character. When you’ve played through your 8 missions, you can save the character and use them in “Versus mode”, a multiplayer mode (also playable with bots) where you can play 1 vs 1 bouts with everything you’ve unlocked in the other modes and a few guests from After War Gundam X, G Gundam and Wing. Phew!
This is the kind of licensed game where if you have no attachment to the source material you might go “yeah this is pretty fun” but if the sentence “anavel gato is a playable character and you can play through what made him called the nightmare of solomon” is even vaguely comprehensible to you, then it’s the best thing ever
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And I finished it to see the Staff Roll.
It’s a gem of a game.
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