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Post by Discoalucard on Oct 12, 2008 18:04:47 GMT -5
Sotenga brings us a detailed look at Quintet's two action-platformer-sim games. (Well, only one of them has sim elements, sad to say...) www.hardcoregaming101.net/actraiser/actraiser.htmThis also ties in with the Quintet article, which covered their ARPGs like Soulblazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma.
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Post by zzz on Oct 13, 2008 0:41:00 GMT -5
An actraiser article has been long overdue. Glad to see it.
Also, holy shit at Actraiser 2's graphics!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 13, 2008 1:21:01 GMT -5
An actraiser article has been long overdue. Glad to see it. Also, holy shit at Actraiser 2's graphics! A: Thank ya. I've had this one in development limbo for ages... more than six months, I think around ten! I'm glad to finally get it off the ground. B: AR2 has damn good graphics, but sadly, that's what the game's best at. Everything else ranges from not-great to frustrating. It's not too bad a game, but as a follow-up to one of the most entertaining and innovative titles of all time, it falls flat on its ass.
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Post by Smithee on Oct 13, 2008 2:40:54 GMT -5
Ah yes, it is finally finished. Luckily I urged you on your quest along the way.
Huzzah!
(If my eyes weren't burning out of my skull right now I'd read...)
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Post by Strider on Oct 13, 2008 10:41:26 GMT -5
Sidenote on Actraiser 1: You mention the 'earthquake' spell a couple times, and say that it will destroy everything on the map. This is not correct. In the sim sections, your houses get better as you cover more area. The best houses will not be damaged by earthquakes, either your version or the version caused by Skull Heads.
Shooting off an earthquake after the largest-size houses begin to appear is actually a bit useful, as more advanced houses hold more people, which in turn gives you more life.
- HC
ETA: the Actraiser 2 review seems kind of disjointed at parts- The ninth paragraph- the one describing the game's difficulty- jumps to mind, and it feels like there really needs to be some kind of transition beteween the second-to-last and last paragraphs.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 13, 2008 10:57:45 GMT -5
Sidenote on Actraiser 1: You mention the 'earthquake' spell a couple times, and say that it will destroy everything on the map. This is not correct. In the sim sections, your houses get better as you cover more area. The best houses will not be damaged by earthquakes, either your version or the version caused by Skull Heads. Shooting off an earthquake after the largest-size houses begin to appear is actually a bit useful, as more advanced houses hold more people, which in turn gives you more life. Hmm! I actually didn't know this, but I've rarely ever had the earthquake occur. Thanks for catching it, Strider. ... hmm... looking at it again, that's not originally how I wrote the article. I'll put up my original draft when I'm at my own computer, and you can compare the two writings.
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Post by Smithee on Oct 13, 2008 11:18:54 GMT -5
... AND I HELPED YOU ON YOUR QUEST!
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Post by justjustin on Oct 13, 2008 12:20:26 GMT -5
I've always found it funny how it was necessary to destroy all the hard work the humans put towards building a functional city... As if to say "Nope, not good enough, do it better next time, I'll kill most of you as punishment." I always cringed when I created an earthquake, but I knew things would turn out for the better. Great game, great article.
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Post by Ryu the Grappler on Oct 13, 2008 13:59:27 GMT -5
ActRaiser is one of those games I've always wanted to play, but never bothered to buy every time I had the chance to purchase it. I even found a used copy that still had the original box and manual some years ago.
Wasn't there supposed to had been an ActRaiser 3 for the Saturn or was that game canned?
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Post by ReyVGM on Oct 13, 2008 15:18:18 GMT -5
No Act Raiser 3. There was a rumor on Gamefan magazine about a possible Act Raiser 3, and they mentioned the Saturn. But Quintet/Enix never said anything about a sequel as far as I know. When Actraiser came out for the VC, someone at Square said that they would like to do a sequel to it.
As for AR2, I think that I would have tolerated the strange controls and high difficulty of the game if the sim elements would have been included. But looking how they botched the action elements I'm pretty sure they would have screwed up the sim elements too.
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Post by Isao Kronos (BANNED) on Oct 13, 2008 15:30:37 GMT -5
i am about to ask a stupid question:
What precisely happened to Quintet, anyways?
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Post by Deleted on Oct 13, 2008 15:39:18 GMT -5
... AND I HELPED YOU ON YOUR QUEST! Yes, yes, that you did. Though if I had lost interest, I officially would have passed the rights onto you. Thanks, Justin! Though, Is it wrong for me to admit that I look at the simulation scenes more like action-sims? I barely ever focus on building my population, merely more concerned with progressing to the next act. A caveat of this is that I get less energy to use in the action scenes, but that's just the way I roll. Jonny, if you can find anything even indicating a rumor of AR3, I will gladly include it in the article. Rey, what you just said is the exact bipartite fault of AR2. The lack of sim elements could have been tolerated if the action itself was good, and likewise, the frustrating action could be tolerated if the simulation scenes existed. Screwing up on one part and omitting the other is unacceptable, and I really think the developers could have done far better with AR2. I tried to put a good spin on it, but I ended up being harsher than I originally intended to when discussing AR2. At the least, the game has fantastic graphics, but like what Bart Simpson said about Milk Duds, it's "sweet on the outside, poison on the inside." It doesn't help that I enabled several cheat codes to pass through the game in order to acquire the screenshots and STILL found a few parts incredibly vexing. I honestly liked AR2 when it came out despite the sting of no simulation sequences, but it got worse every time I played it. I have yet to beat it in earnest, but... I want to do so someday, just because I can. Also, I may be a masochist. This is so far unconfirmed, but it's a likely theory. Isao: No one knows for sure. They just faded into the mists of the virtual jungle. All I have to go on is the (naturally unreliable) wiki source that says they're still around but have done nothing since the early 2000s.
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Post by Ryu the Grappler on Oct 13, 2008 15:39:24 GMT -5
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Post by Smithee on Oct 13, 2008 19:16:00 GMT -5
Uck, now I remember how much I hated the second game. I found the place that you're suppossed to go first ONCE. Other than that I think I go to Gluttony or something and get killed by halves of fat grosso bodies.
I remember thinking the game was still SO cool. Never got a chance to see the first one though...
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Post by megatronbison on Oct 13, 2008 19:45:41 GMT -5
Thanks for the article Sotenga- I ended up putting the first game on and playing right up to the boss gauntlet...and failing 3 times in a row then giving up in anger. Man, I musta had some patience when I last finished this :\
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