I’m currently playing through Xanadu Next, which is a top-down dungeon crawler with a very carefully crafted world - no random dungeons here.
For a game where you furiously click on enemies to attack them, the combat is just the right combination of requiring skills and stats, and the world design is really what’s keeping me engrossed. It’s a tough game and you’ll need to be smart about fleeing danger at the right time. While the puzzles are generally too simple to be of any note, the world is very cleverly interconnected.
I also started today Final Fantasy II on GBA, but decided to save it for later in favour of the rather delightful Freshly Picked: Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland.
Edit: Forgot to mention I played a couple of hours of Glory of Heracles, which is fine but not as unique as I hoped it would be. Ancient Greece setting aside, I’ve seen its mechanics before in dozens of RPGs, so I’ve put it on hold.
Got round to started FFII on GBA, played an hour of it. Not enough to comment on the game as whole but it has been surprisingly terse compared with, say, FFIV that followed in its footsteps. Back when I was playing the games for the first time via their TOSE-developed GBA ports, IV blew me away coming from II, but I wonder if I’ll think differently this time around when you consider how FFIV never really followed through with the deaths of its major characters. I think they were all fake-outs. So far FFII has been setting up a lot of plot with a little, which I appreciate more now.
It’s blown me away. I hadn’t played its forebears and while the included original 1970s game is more functional today than engrossing high score this arranged version is incredible - frantic while also testing your ability to keep locations in the map in memory while playing, it requires fast-paced strategic thinking in the same vein as Pac-Man.
Been playing Camelot’s first person dungeon crawler game Shining: The Holy Ark after reading @Laevateinn’s thoughts on it. I’m in love with it, just finished the mansion and catacombs dungeons.
At first I was wowed by the presentation and level design, which are very ambitous for a game of its ilk released in 1996, but disappointed by how easy enemy encounters were. That soon changed once I got to the Enrich dungeons, after then I was getting wiped out every couple of encounters! Because of this difficulty spike which has persisted since, you’re forced to properly learn the game and utilise the Pixies (more on that later) rather than to play sloppily.
My favourite thing about the game is its commitment to the first person perspective and the consistency in its presentation. This gives the surrounding world a sense of presence despite the rather abstract tile-based movement. Walk into the pub and you’ll see everyone drinking in front of you as animated sprites, talk to a shop keeper and the camera (you!) looks down at wares which are laid out in front of you. It’s impressively immersive in a different way that menu driven dungeon RPGs rarely are.
This also ties in the ability to use spirits called Pixies to strike pre-emptive damage on enemies when they appear in front of you in the game world. Because everything takes place in the actual game world, with no cuts to separate scenes, enemies in dungeons will often appear from crevices, fly in from behind you, or materialise from puddles on the floor. This looks impressive but it also has value in demanding your total concentration while exploring dungeons because in order to strike pre-emptive damage, you need to have selected the correct pixie type, then hit the A button while you see an enemy appear on the screen. So you’re always kept on your toes as you’re exploring, looking out for potential areas enemies can appear, and swapping your pixies to suit. If there’s a wall to your left you know it’s unlikely for enemies to appear from the left, for instance.
So far, then, this is a very clever game that wasn’t just content to live in the shadow of its peers, even today it sets itself apart from the first person dungeon RPGs put out by the likes of Zerodiv, Sting/Aquaplus, Atlus and Experience Inc. Three out of four of its game designers went on to work on Golden Sun, the similarities in approaches to design are there.
If you’ve popped in to the Game Boy thread you’ll know the answer - I’ve been uncovering more games I missed out on in the 90s. Thanks to you folk for the recommendations!
Also played some Double Dragon II on Famicom, I adore the controls, which from what I understand were heavily influenced by Technos’ own Renegade?
I started WRC Rally Evolved (PS2) tonight. I’d been putting it off because of video issues.
It’s easy to get it outputting progressive scan using GSM, but I had to adjust position (mostly horizontal) in both GSM and my scaler and also horizontal scale the narrow image to almost fill my LCD. With a CRT it would just work.
I started playing Dropship United Peace Force. I had this game for 2 years but for some reason my two copies wouldn’t load past the initial loading screen until I got my rad2x cable. It’s a futuristic flight game where you play as an agent for a militaralized future UN and take part in various combat and resupply missions in various national hotspots.
On paper it should be a game I love: it’s got a cool understated theme, very nice graphics andthe winning combination of simple-ish controls with complicated tasks and simulation sensibilities. Unfortunately, Dropship is very dissapointing.
The biggest problem is the controls. For some inexplicable reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to assign thrust controls with the square button braking your craft and X accelerating, Triangle fires your machine gun. The L1 button changes target and R1 change weapons. It’s such an uncomfortable and illogical assignement when the first Ace Combat way back in 1995 had already wrote the book on button assignements for this kind of game and Ace Combat 04 put on the finishing touches. It’s especially strange because the dropship drops speed and stall outs very quickly whenever you try to drop speed and pull off some actual air combat maneuvers, so you thought they’d have prioritized having you be able to keep your thrust levels balanced at all time - but nope. And of course, the game has no control options whatsoever.
Also inaugurating Sony’s proud tradition of ruining flight combat games with lamebrained controller feature, the game makes heavy use of the Dualshock’s 2 pressure sensitive buttons. To ignite the afterburn, you’ll have to hammer that X button hard. It legitimately hurts the fingers.
However, there are problems beyond what they decided each buttons should do. The lock-on function just sucks - hitting the “change target” button to lock on an enemy right in front on you (so that you can fire your missile at them), the game may instead decide to target an enemy out of frame. When you destroy an enemy, you’ll stay locked on to it instead of immediatly switching to a valid target, which wastes precious time with how tight the timing on every of your objectives is. Damage is inconsistent - the same missile may kill the same enemy in one or three hits and if there’s a method to the game’s madness, it sure doesn’t tell you. You may fire a ATG missile at a building and it looks like it hit but the target will have no damage. It’s just needlessly frustrating in all the worse ways.
I finally played my first session of Ring Fit Adventure this morning. Because I am cocky when it comes to workouts, I put it in the hardest difficulty and played through the first world.
Ya… this is insane. It’s a real workout. I was soaked. I burned hundreds of calories and hit the showers.
Fun game with a unique premise. Just traversing the overworld by running in place is a real joy. An endless runner like this would be amazing.
That first day knackered me too, haha. Takes a while until you catch up with the game’s demands, it’s great that you’re always unlocking new workouts to switch in too.
Been playing moon: Remix RPG Adventure on the Switch lately. It’s the sort of conversion I appreciate given the context of the game - presented (almost) exactly as it existed in 1997 on PlayStation, no tweaks or content additions.
And it’s a really interesting title that must have gone on to influence the likes of Majora’s Mask. The plot sees you play through a Dragon Quest-like title, fighting your way to save the world, only to be sucked into the game world itself.
You’re then recast as an invisible character and it’s your job to clear up the mess the hero made, who is portrayed as a merciless killing machine that destroys monsters and barges through townsfolk for the purposes of gathering items and experience.
It’s basically an adventure game where you have to get to know the NPCs (who all live on a day-night weekly cycle) and solve their problems, while also trying to figure out how to get out of this game world and save its populace.
It’s really good - hoping to finish it this weekend. Just make sure you have a notepad handy to record any details you find out about people’s routines or anything you notice that’s out of the ordinary. There isn’t anything like the notebook in Majora’s Mask.
Having recently got Super Runabout for Dreamcast and not really feeling it I’ve decided to go back to the series origin on PS1 and play them all - to whatever degree in feeling it - in chronological order.
Felony 11-79 aka Runabout (PS1)
Runabout 2 (PS1)
Super Runabout (DC)
Runabout 3 (PS2)
Crash City Mayhem (3DS)
This morning I finished Felony 11-79 (aka Runabout) and it was short but very sweet. Lots more cars to unlock and secrets to discover, so I’ll play it a bit more before moving on.
Runabout 2 is every bit a better game, despite being handled by another developer (Graphic Research) they definitely understood the original (by Climax Entertainment) and what made it great and built it again but better.
More of everything in this 2nd one, better graphics, framerate, handling, models, UI; more music, humour, missions, secrets, levels. And more difficult.
Just wrapping up Runabout 2 tonight and safe to say that it’s up there in my list of all-time favourites.
It has so much presence and humour, you can tell it was built with love and the team had a great time doing so. It looks great, and plays very well considering it’s age - analog/dualsock and even neGcon support is in there. The loading screens and game are 240p, but the menu is hi-resolution (640x480?), so on my setup that equates to with and without scanlines respectively.
Really just a brilliant little game. Apparently it can be speed-run any% in 30 minutes but I took my time and did all missions (with involved some back tracking after you finish the first time). Total time all missions about 5 hours. Many more if I wanted to unlock everything. I’ll try for a few cars.
So I think I’m close to my limit on Runabout 2. Some of the unlockables require completion of stages with zero damage. I could probably do those in my infinite time bachelor years, but not with my current adult responsibilities. but I’ll try to do most of the other challenges.
