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Last Topic's Ratings:
Battle Ping Pong - ABB - 17% (3)
Battle Unit Zeoth - BAAGGA - 58% (6)
Dexterity - GAGA - 75% (4)
DuckTales - GABAB - 40% {5}
Shounen Ashibe - BA - 25% (2)
Rolan's Curse - GGAAGA - 75% (6)
DuckTales getting a squiggle bracket was not on my bingo card, much less it almost falling into the low range. Yikes. I'm a bit worried about how other NES ports will fare.
Games for this topic:
Addams Family, The
Daedalian Opus
Double Dragon
Pachinko Saiyuuki
Skate or Die: Bad N Rad
Tower of Druaga, The
I'm kind of curious to try The Tower of Druaga, as it has appeared or been referenced in various Namco games but I don't really know anything about it, other than that apparently it's very important to use a guide. I'm also curious to see how Double Dragon makes the conversion to Game Boy.
Addams Family, The - G
ReplyDeleteDaedalian Opus - G
Double Dragon - G
Pachinko Saiyuuki - B
Skate or Die: Bad N Rad - B
Tower of Druaga, The - A
I expected The Addams Family to be a downscaled port of the SNES game, but it's actually a completely unique and significantly better game. The game is essentially a basic metroidvania, you control Gomez and have to rescue the other family members who are scattered about the game world. Some enemies can be jumped on, but Gomez also carries weapons, initially just a throwing dagger, but every family member you save will give you another one. Some of these weapons are essential for progression, like the Ice Cube, which lets you cross water and lava, while others just do more damage or give you more ammo (weapons have limited ammo before needing a potion to refill), which is still welcome. There are also potions you can get that transform you into different characters, some of which can swim or run fast, which are also sometimes needed for progression, though some of them are effectively just optional powerups. The game generally also controls fairly well and looks decent, the only arguably somewhat weird mechanic is that when you get hit, you can't attack while in the mercy invincibility state, which is probably intended to prevent you from cheesing bosses or something. Enemies are very numerous, but you can take a lot of hits and health pickups are fairly common, so it's not too bad. Probably the game's biggest issue is that the utilization of the game world isn't THAT clever. A fair number of areas don't serve much purpose, sometimes containing just some powerups or something, and the forest, which leads to the Beehive and ultimately the Dracula potion, feels underutilized even though the Dracula potion is very powerful. Still though, for an early Gameboy title this is pretty solid, it's definitely a step up over many of the A-level platformers we've covered so far.
Daedalian Opus is a fairly simple game, but it's one with timeless appeal. This is essentially a gameboy conversion of the "Pentomino Puzzle". You're given a set of pentominoes (blocks made up of 5 cubes), and have to fit them inside a border, rotating and flipping as needed. Sometimes you have more pentominoes than are needed, but on many puzzles you have to use them all. It's an extremely simple concept, but there's tons of possible variations depending on the shape of the frame and they can be very difficult to solve (I was working on one of the stages for over 30 minutes). There are passwords given after each stage, so you can always come back to it, and almost all stages have multiple solutions so it has some replay value. My only real complaint is that I wish they had more puzzles that used smaller numbers of the pentominoes, as you gradually unlock them in the early stages, but you generally get a new pentomino with each stage and you have all of them by stage 12, I feel like there was potential for more puzzles before you got to that point. Still, it controls well and it's a good fit for the system so you can't complain too much.
I didn't expect much from the GB version of Double Dragon, but I was absolutely blown away by the quality of this conversion. In virtually every way, this game is a perfect match for the NES games, the music, control, and visuals are all perfectly intact. I actually can't get over how great this game looks on Gameboy, the sprite and background work here is phenomonal for such an early title. This is actually not a direct conversion of any of the NES games, it's a completely new game that somewhat resembles a mix between NES DD1 and DD2, the level layouts are sort of based on DD1, but it lacks the "level up" system from that game and the moveset more resembles DD2, though without the "directional attack" system from that game, instead the two buttons are just punch and kick. Something I appreciate is that this game actually makes you use both punches and kicks, because there are certain combos that are good against certain enemies. For example, the kick finisher is too slow to hit Abobo, but punches don't stun him well, so the combo you want to use against him is kick kick punch (while moving up and down to get close enough to him to hit the kick). The punch kick punch kick combo is really strong against some enemies as well, and of course there's also a decent number of weapons to use, just like in the NES games. Overall, this is an incredibly solid title for the platform that can almost make you forget you're playing a handheld game, probably the only real nitpick is the lack of checkpoints and the presense of some cheesy jumps, though those are present in pretty much every Double Dragon game. This is borderline-SR quality, easily one of the best early action games on the platform, and quite a bit better than NES DD1. I actually completed the whole game for this review simply because I wanted to see what would come next. The degree to which this obliterates a game like Master Karateka is honestly insane.
DeleteI didn't realize it, but Pachinko Saiyuuki actually has the same developer as Pachinko Time and is somewhat similar to it. The basic gist of the game is exactly the same - you travel to various pachinko parlors and have to completely run the machines out of balls, with the main difference being that you no longer have to beat the same machine a ton of times, generally you now make some progress every time you beat a machine, which is better, but it's still not great. Beating machines still takes far too long and the power decay mechanic is still utterly obnoxious, especially because there's no way to see how much power you're actually launching the balls with so it feels like you have very little control over the game. Most of the machines have some sort of "fever" state which is essential to ever beating them, as your ability to make any kind of profit the rest of the time is limited, but this makes the game significantly more boring since basically nothing ever happens until the fever state is triggered. In general, this is still just significantly too mind numbing and it's still not even close to A even though this is a slight improvement over the previous game. At least it does show that they're making some effort to improve, though.
Skate or Die is much more Bad than Rad. Contrary to what you'd usually expect from the series, rather than being a skateboarding game this is really more of a platformer, albeit one with a lot of bad gimmicks and poor controls. The game has 6 stages which are split into two types, sidescroller platforming stages and top down action stages, though neither are particularly good. I suppose the sidescroller stages are "better", they control mostly okay, though the speed at which you move leads to a lot of cheap shots that require you to memorize the level layouts and the control sometimes doesn't feel all that responsive, like when trying to jump off the falling platforms near the end of stage 1. Fighting enemies and bosses also generally feels terrible due to the controls and just in general this entire game sort of feels like it was a bad idea. The top down action stages are way worse though. For starters, to accelerate in this mode you have to hold down. These stages are timed and you sometimes get chased by stuff, so there's almost no situation where you ever don't want to accelerate, it probably should have just been automatic. The bigger problem though is that the controls here are very delayed. They tried to give "weight" to the skateboard's movements and it just feels awful, especially when you have to swerve from one side to the other, which you have to do often, it feels extremely slow. This just requires even more course memorization, which is especially problematic in stage 5, which is very tough and usually requires you to start turning long before you actually need to do so due to the instant kill pits and slow controls. There's really not too much more to say about this game other than that it's simply not fun to play. Menace Beach was a significantly better skateboarding action game and it still wasn't good.
DeleteTower of Druaga is quite a bit better than on NES, but it still has a number of issues. First, I'll explain the basics, because the game is fairly unintuitive. The basic idea in Tower of Druaga is to climb the tower by finding the key on each floor, then proceeding to the exit. However, this is actually only a small part of the game and you can't make it very far by doing this. The actual gameplay revolves around finding the hidden treasure on each floor. To do so, you have to complete a hidden condition which is not told to you by the game in any way. Sometimes these are intuitive, like just killing a few enemies, but often they require you to do weird stuff like use the pickaxe enough times to break it or other things that you could never figure out without a guide. In order to attack enemies, you must hold down the A or B buttons, simply pressing it does nothing, which is unintuitive as it looks like the animation of swinging the sword should do damage, but it works well enough once you understand it. A big upgrade over the NES version is that you have HP in this version and don't simply die in one hit, which makes this version quite a bit more playable even if the obscure rules for getting the treasure does still make it tedious to play. There's not really too much else to say about it. I feel if they told you the rules to get the treasure in game (and made some of the super cryptic ones more sane, like the one involving your score), it might be closer to G or at least a better A. This is still one of the better ways to play the game, but it's also an easy game to skip unless you really want to experience it for the historical value.