Shantae

[GamerL]

Nov 7, 2015 1:42:36 GMT -5 ReyVGM said:

Nov 6, 2015 22:04:11 GMT -5 GamerL said:

Electronic Gaming Monthly did not review Shantae at all, which seems pretty unfair, I wonder why?

Also, is Sigma Star Saga any good?

The didn't review Yoshi's Island either.

Are you talking about the GBA port? Because I'm almost positive they did.

Of course now that I think about there were a couple of other GBA games I don't remember them reviewing, including Sigma Star Saga, I can only guess it's because the GBA was so flooded with shovelware garbage that it was hard for them to sort out what was worthwhile.

[🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀]

Shouldn't a gaming magazine of all things be able to sort out the worthwile ones and review them?

[GamerL]

Nov 7, 2015 7:33:23 GMT -5 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 said:

Shouldn't a gaming magazine of all things be able to sort out the worthwile ones and review them?

I don't know, I've never worked for one.

If I may speculate though, there was probably some policy that only GB/GBA/DS games that got a decent amount of promotion (like say, any first party Nintendo titles) would get reviewed while everything else would be ignored due to the fact that it could be shovelware.

This means that some good games slipped through the cracks, which is unfortunate, but considering the piles and piles of shovelware it's understandable, it would probably take too long to sort through all of those games.

[Woody Alien]

Good article, even if I don't understand all the hatred towards 2D scrolling action RPGs. Not everyone hates them, you know!

Nov 6, 2015 2:08:26 GMT -5 Maciej Miszczyk said:

I've only played the second game and while it was fun at first, the amount of backtracking was unreal - especially in such a short game. the background/foreground system was confusing as well. kind of disappointing given how many good things I've heard about those games but then again, I haven't tried the other ones.

Those are the exact same problems I've had with the game and let me not completing it, even if having played similar NES games in the past I was kind of used to it. I still somewhat liked the game, being a fan of both metroidvanias and monstergirls as you might know. The map screen and inventory could have been polished a little more though.
Hearing the article's praise about the third game makes me want to buy and play it right now (never tried the original game to be honest).


I wonder what kind of creature Risky Boobs Booty Boots is? And what does exactly Rottytops want with Shantae?

[TΛPETRVE]

According to the wiki Risky is human, albeit the game seems to insinuate that she might be a half-genie herself, probably one that suffers from a lot of self-loathing .

[ReyVGM]

Nov 7, 2015 5:45:19 GMT -5 GamerL said:

Nov 7, 2015 1:42:36 GMT -5 ReyVGM said:

The didn't review Yoshi's Island either.

Are you talking about the GBA port? Because I'm almost positive they did.

Of course now that I think about there were a couple of other GBA games I don't remember them reviewing, including Sigma Star Saga, I can only guess it's because the GBA was so flooded with shovelware garbage that it was hard for them to sort out what was worthwhile.

No, the SNES version. I had all EGMs and they never reviewed the game.

[GamerL]

Nov 7, 2015 19:44:29 GMT -5 ReyVGM said:

Nov 7, 2015 5:45:19 GMT -5 GamerL said:

Are you talking about the GBA port? Because I'm almost positive they did.

Of course now that I think about there were a couple of other GBA games I don't remember them reviewing, including Sigma Star Saga, I can only guess it's because the GBA was so flooded with shovelware garbage that it was hard for them to sort out what was worthwhile.

No, the SNES version. I had all EGMs and they never reviewed the game.

That's really strange.

[ReyVGM]

Yup. I thought I was going crazy when I couldn't find one, specially since I remember reading one. But I guess I was remembering a review from one of the other mags.

[Malev]

Japan has a neat unique cover art for their physical release.


Is Wayforward still working on porting the Director's Cut of Risky's Revenge to 3DS with that discount to the DSiWare owners?

[pfg9000]

Henk Neiborg did a lot of the graphics and animation in Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse. He's one of my favorite game artists, also responsible for Contra 4, Misadventures of Flink, and The Adventures of Lomax. Lomax is possibly the most gorgeous game I've seen, except maybe for the Metal Slug games. Wayforward really lucked out in getting him to work for them.

More on topic, I enjoyed Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse, but I can't get into the original Shantae. I've played at least partway through the first dungeon but don't recall if I beat that part. It was just such a chore to trek through that forest between Scuttle Town and the water town. It's not the lack of a map that bugs me - I adore the first two Metroids despite their lack of a map. I think it just seemed too difficult, and not engaging enough to make me want to push on through the challenge.

Shantae also holds a special place for me as being my best "in the wild" find. I saw a loose cart at a used game/movie/music shop a few years back for $5, when the game was going for just over $100.

[derboo]

Whaaaat? I did not know that. Nieborg is one of the greatest pixel artists from the European Amiga scene! Always thought some of the environments in Risky's Revenge had a bit of an Amiga vibe (especially the plants and rocks in the outdoor areas), guess that's why.

[jjc14]

This was a great overview of a series I knew little about. Possible material for a future digest?


Minor corrections:

cute purple hair genie,

(Might be a regional thing, but would "purple-haired" read better?)

Taking place in an Arabian-inspired setting, featuring 2D gameplay in an open-ended world.

However, while the aforementioned titles suffer from poor translations and little-to-no story, Shantae has some basic yet creative and entertaining lore to back up your quest, all told in-game by NPCs (it also helps that the game was developed in North America, meaning that it didn't need to pass through translation woes).

(Long sentence. Might flow better making the part in parenthesis a separate second sentence.)

Scuttle Town's nocturnal Dance Parlor is basically a mini-DDR, Oasis Town's Gecko Match is an interesting yet pretty basic new spin on the classic game of dice, Water Town offers both special Fighter Equipment (which add extra moves to Shantae's arsenal) on its shop and the Firefly Shrine, which challenges the player to a game-long sidequest of collecting twelve fireflies, Rottytops at the Zombie Caravan challenges you to a mandatory, extremely infuriating footrace and the Thieves' Hideout offers you an optional new transformation if you run the game on a GBA or the GameCube GBA Player, making Shantae one of the few late GBC games that has extra features available only on Nintendo's then-next-gen portable (the color palette is also expanded and generally brighter in GBA mode, to compensate for the original model's infamously dark screen).

(Now this is a LONG sentence! Semicolons would help, as well as making the part in parenthesis a separate second sentence.)

This is where things get interesting, as as the small multi-segmented Dance Meter lights up

You can give the "wrong" baby squids to a mother and they won't even bat an eye ("Err... Is that really my baby? They look all the same!", they proclaim), though, indicating that there is a severe case of careless parenting going on among Sequin Land's Warp Squid population.

Its GBC emulator was especially modified to suit the game's intensive hardware requirements,

("especially" or "specially"?)

HG101 said:

(Shantae: Risky's Revenge / Shantae Risky's Revenge: Director's Cut title does not display a year.)

An undisclosed amount of time after the original game's ending, and everyone's favorite archaeologist/mad scientist sets up a mysterious Genie Lamp as an exhibit in his yearly Relic Hunter Expo.

As short and scaled back as it is, Shantae: Risky's Revenge is still a great game and one of the finest side-scrolling action games of the 2000's, but it falls flat in comparison to its extremely unique predecessor and its grandiose sequel, but it's worth playing for the tight plot connections it shares with Pirate's Curse alone.

(Run-on sentence. Perhaps break off the last part into a separate sentence?)

The other islands include the spooky Spiderweb Island, where you meet Rottytops and her family; Tan Line Island, a desert with a huge pyramid; Mud Bog Island, which contains the entrance to the game's equivalent of the underworld; and Frostbite Island, which in addition to the snow mountains, also has a gigantic flying fortress named Propeller Town.

(No issues here, just calling this out as a good use of semicolons for the excerpt mentioned earlier.)

From a pure puzzle-solving standpoint, these subquests rarely really make a whole lot of sense,

and the goal is simply to leap off the tree with Monkey Bullet skill and nab the floating gem.

Occasionally they're they'll run into events, like enemies and puzzles, that you need to make decisions on.

[Deleted]

No mention of the Sabrina GBC games which were the engine tge first Shantae ran on? There're even parts where you control Salem that are just like Shantae's monkey transformation.

[Weasel]

Dec 28, 2015 14:45:26 GMT -5 @bugman said:

No mention of the Sabrina GBC games which were the engine tge first Shantae ran on? There're even parts where you control Salem that are just like Shantae's monkey transformation.

I feel like, if anything, there should be an entire article solely for WayForward licensed Game Boy titles. Then we could also call out how the Scorpion King game on GBA borrowed The Rock's sprite from WWF Betrayal on GBC. =P

[Neo Rasa]

Nov 7, 2015 7:33:23 GMT -5 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 said:

Shouldn't a gaming magazine of all things be able to sort out the worthwile ones and review them?

This would explain why they didn't review Sigma Star Saga.