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Post by spanky on Jan 25, 2022 21:12:02 GMT -5
Wolfenstein 3D (SNES; First Time; Gave up at Mission 5-6)Really got into the mood to play some Wolf 3D but I couldn't be arsed booting up the game on DOSbox and sorting out the Joy2Key inputs for the controller, so I went with playing the SNES port which my brother had downloaded onto the computer ninety million years ago. Although the framerate is a bit naff, I actually enjoyed playing this a good bit. Having an automap helps enormously with navigating the later stages, and the ability to strafe while moving helps to compensate for the slow turning arc and the damage enemies do up close. I feel Wolf 3D is a game designed in such a way that I totally understand how it can become really annoying, but really quite enthralling if you like those design choices, and this carries through to the port.
Unfortunately, things get really tough around Mission 5 with loads of enemies and scant ammo, which would be tough enough if it weren't for the fact that there aren't any mid-level checkpoints and you can't save. I tried to make it through 5-6, but I just couldn't manage it at all. I managed to get to the actual boss at the end, stuck in corridors so small I couldn't get around them before I got blasted with so much lead I could have supplied a school's stationery supply for an entire year. And since I was playing it on the easiest difficulty, I know that I've got no way of overcoming this wall. So I'll have to leave it at that. Ah well. At least I still enjoyed my time with it.
I played the SNES version of this looong before I played the original release and I was instantly annoyed there was no automap! It's a really neutered version of the game, but when it's all you had...it's pretty fun.
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Post by Snake on Jan 25, 2022 23:07:27 GMT -5
Transformers:Mystery of Convoy, Famicom (Gave up playing legit on Stage 2)
One hit wonder with floaty, slidy controls. It's just a pain to get into sync with the way Ultra Magnus handles. Too many cheap, frustrating deaths with enemies that endlessly spawn. I ended up save stating the shit out of this game, just to get some kind of feel of the whole boss and level design experience. The last boss seems to be Grimlock instead of Megatron? The ending is in Japanese.... romanized letters. Something about getting the Energon Cube and Rodimus back again. And then it loops! This game is so hilariously cheap and bad.
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Post by personman on Jan 26, 2022 2:30:38 GMT -5
Thanks! I watched a few more videos, and I'm more confused now. Figured it out. Turns out if you hold down the formation button for your option things it'll make them circle you forming a shield and damage anything they touch. I honestly have no idea how I got through the game back then without knowing this, especially stage 5 and 6. From what I can see this is the only way to deal with the last boss and the hitboxes for the two weakpoints are stupidly out of reach without doing this move: Stab in the dark but I'm thinking someone layered the hitboxes on top of or just under the level terrain and didn't realized it would cause this. Pretty damn sloppy no matter the case. Oh, so while I'm at it. Aldynes: The Mission Code For Rage Crisis (SuperGrafx, beaten with save states) I just decided to run through this one as fast as I could before work today. I've already seen what the game has to offer for the most part and while I remember liking this one I didn't care for it THAT much so save scrubbing it is. dsparil hit the nail on the head, its big gimmick are the option things having two firing modes and the auto thing is really unreliable, though I found when it works, it works really well... you just have no idea when they'll actually help or get stuck on terrain or ignore the the stuff you actually need help with. Once I found out about the rolling shield though the game became a fair bit easier and more fun. Somewhat. The weapons themselves are terribly balanced with the white weapon being a handy twin diagonal shot that ends up becoming useless at full power, blue is way too weak for how precise you need to be with it, red barely exists and again is way too weak for its short range and then green just obliterates everything and covers nearly the whole screen. You should hold on it as much as you can and things like this annoy the crap out of me. Then there's stage 5 which is just so annoying. It loves to drop all these tiny little enemies on you that are obscenely hard to hit and end up corralling you into fire and trap to a degree that really got on my nerves. I lost the green weapon in the third stage and felt so helpless without it, the stage was clearly designed with it or the white weapon in mind and getting through it was torture. Thankfully stages 6 and 7 were much better. As was mentioned though the game is really bland to look at and only has one song that really sticks out, the rest is completely forgettable. What's there is just... fine. Barely. But with the blunder of a last boss I detailed above and how frustrating stage 5 was even with save states I say this one gets dragged down below average. Not the worst thing in the world but definitely not something I'd recommend. Oh, and concerning the game looping: it does but it doesn't really. After stage 7 you'll get a credits crawl and an ending screen (its really boring) and then it'll start over on the first stage but the stage counter continues. It's like your typical Gradius game only you don't keep your power ups. Lowsy. EDIT: Also the manual art for this says "2020 Armageddon". I just found that morbidly funny.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 29, 2022 10:57:37 GMT -5
Hanii in the Sky (TurboGrafx-16, Overly Difficult Second Loop Final Boss)
For the most part, this is an okay shooter. The title is sometimes listed as Honey in the Sky which is wrong as you play as some kind of sentient haniwa figure. The big gimmick is that you can rotate the weapon you carry, but it only rotates clockwise adding some unnecessary extra difficulty to the game when you have to wait for it to rotate 6 positions clockwise when all you need is 2 counterclockwise. There's an in-game shop accessed from the pause menu that lets you buy consumable items including filling up your "health potion" and speed increases. Those along with weapons and armor are permanently acquired and equipped from a menu. When you die, you lose all your money and consumables, but keep everything else. The final level is big step down down being a bland corridor with spongy enemies culminating in the final boss.
After the credits, you get a somewhat inverted color or maybe just tinted hard loop. Shop prices are doubled, money is lessened and enemies and bosses have more HP. This loop is mostly a slog, but it isn't too bad considering you can grind for the small amount of health restoration the game provides. However, the final boss of this loop requires extreme precision in its last form. Its attacks move about twice as quickly and there's more randomly spawning, HP bloated enemies to deal with. With absolutely no exaggeration, I spent an hour going forward and back by the frame on what amounted to under a minute on the emulator's timer. If this was a game with continues and lives, maybe it wouldn't feel so hard. There is a video of someone doing a complete run of the game without getting hit that I'm not 100% convinced isn't tool assisted, but it is hypothetically possible at least. That video blasts the boss before it has a chance to attack in the last phase, but it's possible for the boss to be off screen for the start of the phase so it isn't a guaranteed strategy either. I really wouldn't have bothered if I wasn't trying to document the looping status of all these games.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 30, 2022 1:46:57 GMT -5
I've coincidently played a few different games by 'FACE' over the last week on emulator though skipped over this one. I put some time into Hanii on the road. I was trying to find out more about the developer since I'm not familiar with them as a whole, but their name makes it difficult to search them.
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Post by dsparil on Jan 30, 2022 7:42:09 GMT -5
I couldn't find any decent info on them either. Their list of games on Mobygames is incomplete too. They don't have a page on GDRI, but Arc did some development for them and has games listed on that site that aren't on MG. I think it's safe to say that they went out of business towards the end of the 90s, but that's about it.
Hanii in the Sky is worth playing a little bit since the difficulty isn't too high during the first loop aside from the last stage. Being able to go back and grind a level or two to stock up on health takes some of the edge off too like I said. You get to the shop by pausing and then pressing I. The first menu is "Shop, Equipment, Level Select". The shop is all one screen. Equipment is a sub menu of "Flame (engine), Weapon, Armor, Consumable". The last one is also where rapid fire is enabled once you buy it. It's the cheapest thing in the entire store too and looks like a few upward chevrons. The level select shows all 8 levels, but you obviously can only go to a level you've finished or back to the beginning of the current one. Since dying makes you lose everything in the consumable menu along with all you money. You also can't access the menu during a boss battle although you do get a prompting for it before each boss.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 31, 2022 10:43:45 GMT -5
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (DS; First Time; Gave up around World 2-5)I recently bought a 3DS XL for my birthday, as the one I've had for the past few years stopped playing cartridges some time ago. So I decided I'm gonna try and play through the DS/3DS cartridge games I've not yet beaten over the years. This one is a pretty alright action platformer by a small team at EA Tiburon where you play as an adventurer who can swap to a match-three puzzle game on the bottom screen to obtain powerups, regain health, strengthen your attacks and permanently remove enemies. It's conceptually a very cool game and it plays quite well, but my big bugbear is that levels are way too long. It takes roughly 20-30 minutes to beat a stage, which is unspeakably awful for a handheld game, and even individual sections place checkpoints several minutes apart. So if you happen to die or get overwhelmed by enemies, you have to go so far back that it makes wanting to pick yourself back up too much of a pain. It doesn't help that getting upgrades to your health and powers becomes ludicrously expensive in relation to the pithy amount of cash you end up collecting. This is the kind of game that could really do with a patch to balance out a lot of this nonsense, or even chop up the longer levels into much shorter ones if possible. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (Game Boy Color; First Time; Gave up on my latest attempt, due to that irritating first boss)
I bought Link's Awakening all the way back in 2010 for the GBA I'd gotten some time earlier, and again for the 3DS Virtual Console a few years later. It's a game I've spent countless attempts trying to beat over the years; nothing's ever directly stopped me as such, but I'd always lose momentum and then figured I'd have to start over so I could really appreciate it. The furthest I've ever gotten was around the fifth dungeon. There are plenty of things I like about LA, such as its awesome minimalist soundtrack, the weird characters and crossover nonsense with other Nintendo games, and that scene where Marin talks to you at the hidden shore.
But I've played it too many times, that it's become a dispassionate repeating of patterns, clues and directions. I can't enjoy the actual game sincerely anymore, and I have to move on from this. I gave it one more try a couple of weeks ago, getting as far as the first boss before I gave up from how much it kept throwing me into the basement (all this time later, I still feel that's an absolutely gobshite boss to have at the beginning of the game). I'm done with it.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 31, 2022 10:54:08 GMT -5
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (DS; First Time; Gave up around World 2-5)I recently bought a 3DS XL for my birthday, as the one I've had for the past few years stopped playing cartridges some time ago. So I decided I'm gonna try and play through the DS/3DS cartridge games I've not yet beaten over the years. This one is a pretty alright action platformer by a small team at EA Tiburon where you play as an adventurer who can swap to a match-three puzzle game on the bottom screen to obtain powerups, regain health, strengthen your attacks and permanently remove enemies. It's conceptually a very cool game and it plays quite well, but my big bugbear is that levels are way too long. It takes roughly 20-30 minutes to beat a stage, which is unspeakably awful for a handheld game, and even individual sections place checkpoints several minutes apart. So if you happen to die or get overwhelmed by enemies, you have to go so far back that it makes wanting to pick yourself back up too much of a pain. It doesn't help that getting upgrades to your health and powers becomes ludicrously expensive in relation to the pithy amount of cash you end up collecting. This is the kind of game that could really do with a patch to balance out a lot of this nonsense, or even chop up the longer levels into much shorter ones if possible. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (Game Boy Color; First Time; Gave up on my latest attempt, due to that irritating first boss)
I bought Link's Awakening all the way back in 2010 for the GBA I'd gotten some time earlier, and again for the 3DS Virtual Console a few years later. It's a game I've spent countless attempts trying to beat over the years; nothing's ever directly stopped me as such, but I'd always lose momentum and then figured I'd have to start over so I could really appreciate it. The furthest I've ever gotten was around the fifth dungeon. There are plenty of things I like about LA, such as its awesome minimalist soundtrack, the weird characters and crossover nonsense with other Nintendo games, and that scene where Marin talks to you at the hidden shore.
But I've played it too many times, that it's become a dispassionate repeating of patterns, clues and directions. I can't enjoy the actual game sincerely anymore, and I have to move on from this. I gave it one more try a couple of weeks ago, getting as far as the first boss before I gave up from how much it kept throwing me into the basement (all this time later, I still feel that's an absolutely gobshite boss to have at the beginning of the game). I'm done with it.
Oh Henry Hatsworth is so not an Apollo game! 20-30 minutes to beat a stage later turns into nearly 2 hours by the end. The devs even apologised stating EA pressured them to bring closure to development before it was complete and so the difficulty wasn't properly balanced, particularly in later stages. It' has a great concept, and I would even say it's a great game...until it's not and becomes a giant all too punishing chore.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Jan 31, 2022 14:01:00 GMT -5
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure (DS; First Time; Gave up around World 2-5) Oh Henry Hatsworth is so not an Apollo game! 20-30 minutes to beat a stage later turns into nearly 2 hours by the end. The devs even apologised stating EA pressured them to bring closure to development before it was complete and so the difficulty wasn't properly balanced, particularly in later stages. It' has a great concept, and I would even say it's a great game...until it's not and becomes a giant all too punishing chore. Two hours?! Good God. I really did spare myself from a horrible fate, huh? It really does suck that EA pressured them to rush development, though in a way that does sum up the bittersweet feeling of that brief period from 2007-2010 when EA published quite a few risky original games like Hatsworth, Skate, Mirror's Edge and Dead Space: there's the freedom for the devs to experiment and do cool shit, but EA's still EA no matter their attempts to improve their nonsense and keep them on a damned leash. No wonder they went right back to being their usual selves afterwards, but now with extra scummy 2010s practices. Yeesh.
On a lighter note, I'm really amused at you saying Hatsworth is so not an Apollo game. I was chatting to some friends from the World Animation Discord last night about the idea of "me-core" cartoons, basically which cartoons you'd identify as having or being something that really resonates with you personally. So this type of question popping up on here is the weirdest, best cosmic coincidence lol. I wonder what the "Apollo-core" list of video games would look like...
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2022 8:13:15 GMT -5
Oh Henry Hatsworth is so not an Apollo game! 20-30 minutes to beat a stage later turns into nearly 2 hours by the end. The devs even apologised stating EA pressured them to bring closure to development before it was complete and so the difficulty wasn't properly balanced, particularly in later stages. It' has a great concept, and I would even say it's a great game...until it's not and becomes a giant all too punishing chore.
On a lighter note, I'm really amused at you saying Hatsworth is so not an Apollo game. I was chatting to some friends from the World Animation Discord last night about the idea of "me-core" cartoons, basically which cartoons you'd identify as having or being something that really resonates with you personally. So this type of question popping up on here is the weirdest, best cosmic coincidence lol. I wonder what the "Apollo-core" list of video games would look like...
Only you can answer that I would say. Though I did come across a game called Airblade on PS2 the other day which I thought seemed like it would be something you'd play.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Feb 3, 2022 17:53:12 GMT -5
Jumping Flash! 2 (PS1; First Time; Gave up at World 6-3)I've had a plan for some time of checking out the sequels to some of the games I checked out last year, and started with this as I was hankering a bit more Jumping Flash action. It's pretty much the same as the original, with trickier levels. That was mostly fine, although the PS Classic's D-Pad legit hurt my thumb when making turns. This especially became a problem with the boss at World 6-3 where I constantly had to run round their ranged attacks while trying to hit their legs, to the point where I just couldn't manage it. I know that there's basically a second quest mode that I'd have to beat in order to consider it completed by the Game Finish thread's rules, and that would involve fighting that boss again. So no thanks. Good game, but it ain't for me.
Rhythm Heaven/Rhythm Paradise (DS; First Time; Gave up at Level 4-1: Munchy Monk)I got this many years ago, but got stuck somewhere round the end of the third batch of levels. I was hoping this playthrough would be an easier time, and it honestly was. The levels are all some variation on tapping the screen or flicking upwards in different combinations, resulting in plenty of unique challenges that nevertheless felt doable cuz they're all rooted in the same basic concepts. This let me appreciate how varied the visuals are, and the songs work quite well in getting me into the groove. And then I got to Munchy Monk. Oof.
It's one of those stages where you try to learn a mechanic, but you can't wrap your head around even the basic principles of it before you're thrown into the deep end. And holy shit, they don't even give you a couple of bars to figure out the rhythm before you're being thrown all kinds of mad combinations. When things get too much for me from a sensory perspective, I lock right up and do absolutely nothing, and that's exactly what happened here. After a few frozen seconds where I watched the game carry on its merry way, I shook my head and sighed as I knew there was no way I was gonna be able to overcome it. So I shut it off, and that's pretty much it as far as trying to beat this is ever gonna go.
Man, I hate the actual act of playing video games sometimes.
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Post by Apollo Chungus on Feb 10, 2022 14:32:38 GMT -5
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (PS1; First Time; Gave up at World 3)
Felt like playing this to see if I could get to the final boss, as my previous attempt ended as soon as I ran into the jetpack stages that make up the game's climax. I played it through my computer's emulator with an Xbox 360 controller, which I think might've contributed to my problems as it controlled like arse. Neither the D-Pad nor the controller help with the more precise movements, making even basic concepts like moving platforms an overwhelming pain. That sucks cuz this is quite the good game otherwise.
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Post by alexmate on Feb 17, 2022 8:20:43 GMT -5
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (PS1; First Time; Gave up at World 3)
Felt like playing this to see if I could get to the final boss, as my previous attempt ended as soon as I ran into the jetpack stages that make up the game's climax. I played it through my computer's emulator with an Xbox 360 controller, which I think might've contributed to my problems as it controlled like arse. Neither the D-Pad nor the controller help with the more precise movements, making even basic concepts like moving platforms an overwhelming pain. That sucks cuz this is quite the good game otherwise.
I've beaten this back in the day on PS1, even the controls on that are quite slippy and it suffers camera problems on a bit were it's an aztec ruins level and you have to make loads of jumps.
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Post by dsparil on Feb 17, 2022 12:58:24 GMT -5
Ordyne (Arcade, Last stage annoying to beat)
I already posted about the PCE version which I technically beat, but either Mednafen has some specific issue with the game or the most common dump of the both the American and Japanese release is a bad dump. I had to use a lot of save states as the game would have graphical corruption, freezes, reboots and even levels automatically finishing themselves. It is a little friendlier than the arcade version though since it gives you five lives per continue instead of the arcade game's three. This isn't an issue for the most part in the arcade version, but the last stage has no checkpoints so it got annoying having to constantly restart the stage. It's an okay game with some nice rotation effects in a few spots, but it almost feels like there was a weird schism in the team between people that wanted to make a sci-fi shooter and those that wanted to make a cute'em'up.
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Post by spanky on Feb 18, 2022 11:19:13 GMT -5
Brawl Brothers (SNES via NSO, Never Beaten)
Made it to the final boss before I lost all my lives and continues. I could have used the rewind feature or savescummed my way through this but I chose not to for the genuine 16-bit brawler experience. Making it to the very end of a game, only to lose your last life and have to start at the very beginning is an experience that you don't see in many modern games. There's a melancholic disappointment to the whole thing.
Anyway, this is the sequel to Rival Turf! While RT was pretty much a straight Final Fight clone, this installment attempts some original ideas. For starters there are 5 selectable characters which is quite a bit for the era. At the onset of the game you select two of them and the rest are kidnapped and brainwashed. They serve as the bosses of the first 3 levels. You can actually switch characters between levels which is something I wish more beat-em-ups offered. I like the designs too! My personal favorite is the hulking judoka guy. Why does Slash cosplay as M. Bison though...? Brought over from Rival Turf is the somewhat goofy "angry mode" where you become temporarily invincible and get super throws after taking enough damage. Some of the ideas don't work though - a few levels throw in mazes...which really don't work in a game like this.
This is ultimately a Jaleco product so despite some cool ideas, the game is B-tier through and through. The combat is not nearly as solid feeling something you'd get from Capcom or Konami. You sort of float around as you're mashing the attack button. Also, enemies are really bad about grabbing you and you have no way to counter this. I do like how you can OTG foes though. The game overall is quite lengthy and tough, taking over an hour to beat, which is a bit too long for a beat-em-up in my opinion even though I sort of enjoy zoning out on the couch for something like this. There's much better games like this on the SNES but much worse ones too. Not a bad way to kill a morning. 6/10.
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