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Post by toei on Jan 5, 2018 0:23:24 GMT -5
Lufia II: Rise of the SinistralsI fully enjoyed my time with Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, and give it the highest of recommendations. Lufia 2 is definitely up there among the SNES RPG classics you mentioned. Dekar is still one of my favorite characters in any RPG. Unfortunately, the series peaked with it; the first Lufia is good, the third is decent *for the GBC*, the GBA spin-off is really crappy and all I know about the remake is that the new character designs are horrible.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 5, 2018 1:06:36 GMT -5
From RB:
So I just finished off The Adventures of Batman & Robin on SNES. I've always loved the feel of the combat in that opening area, and the platforming/ledge-grabbing mechanics and such. Strangely, I think I want to like it more than I do, though. My memories are always of that strong opening, but there's a ton of trial-and-error gameplay. The Joker fight right off the bat pretty much sucks, since that roller coaster bit is pretty tricky with some insta-kill sections, and life is usually at a premium. The Ivy fight doesn't end up being too bad, nor does stuff like Penguin or Catwoman. There's some earlier stuff that's annoying with that, though, like the plunge down the buildings while fighting her and having to grapple to a flagpole to keep from dying. Same with the bit on Scarecrow's blimp, flipping underneath can be pretty tricky. The Riddler's maze is pretty fun, but the Riddler fight is less so; the chess pieces are easy until you take one out, then he starts knocking floor pieces out while the piece tries to push you down it, and Batman's jump doesn't give you a lot of wiggle room. Actually, I'd probably have been better off wall-jumping off the chess piece...
Several bosses at the end are pretty easy to find a pattern and cheese them. Clayface is trivial when you manipulate him properly. Man-Bat is a bit tougher. And Joker? Once you know what he does, you can lock him into a pattern where you jump kick him, start moving to the other side while he jumps over there, and jump kick him again. Repeat ad nauseum.
Being a later SNES title, the game looks fantastic. Great animation, cool use of transparencies and color, and a very good approximation overall of the show. In fact, I'm pretty sure a lot of the episodes are taken straight from the cartoon. I really need to go back and watch those again.
Really, my biggest complaint is that once again, Konami pulls a jerk move and locks the "best" ending behind the hardest difficulty. That one forces you to finish with three lives, three credits, and no passwords. Bleah. Still, knowing what I do now, it's doable, but I don't think after watching the extra bits on YouTube that it's worth my time to power through it. Moving on!
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Post by Ex on Jan 5, 2018 1:29:09 GMT -5
the third is decent *for the GBC Wasn't this the one with the randomly generated dungeons? I remember thinking it had an awesome battle system, but the randomly generated dungeons killed it for me. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate good randomly generated dungeons, but GBC Lufia's were the opposite of good. So bad they made the player want to rush to the exit, but then the player's character levels were too low for bosses. Yeesh, it could have been so much better.
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Post by dunpeal2064 on Jan 5, 2018 6:07:03 GMT -5
Highly enjoyed your write up on Hyper Iria, Ex. The game looks stunning. Definitely moved up on my "to play" list.
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Post by Ex on Jan 5, 2018 13:19:49 GMT -5
Highly enjoyed your write up on Hyper Iria, Ex. The game looks stunning. Definitely moved up on my "to play" list. Thanks man. I really enjoyed Hyper Iria. I'm not sure how others would respond to it though. Keep in mind, I was always a fan of the anime and Iria herself. So my opinion is likely biased a tad.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 5, 2018 13:47:07 GMT -5
I recently updated my patched version of the game. Maybe now is a good time to give it a shot. I thought it looked really cool in SNESDrunk's video, and your writeup definitely makes it sound appealing as well.
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Post by Ex on Jan 6, 2018 0:43:25 GMT -5
4. RoboCop Versus The Terminator | Genesis | 1994 | 6/10
RoboCop Versus The Terminator is a licensed action-platformer released on a variety of game consoles. The Genesis version was the original lead development platform, and was programmed by Virgin Games USA, making use of David Perry's Genesis engine. (One of the biggest differences between the Genesis version, versus the SNES version, is the Genesis version has blood / gore, the SNES version does not.) The plot is loosely based on the 1992 four-issue comic book mini-series of the same name. The story boils down to, you guessed it, RoboCop shooting to death tons of Terminators and of course taking down SkyNet. No John Connor needed here folks, RoboCop's got this.
RCVTT's gameplay is standard side-scrolling run n' gun, with platformer jumping. RoboCop can alternate between two given weapons at any time. Weapon drops are randomly found as the game is played. Most of the time, the player will be trying to spread bullets across the screen as much as possible. Occasionally the player must climb ladders, or jump over deadly obstacles, to continue their rampage. Occasionally stage designs will encourage rescuing hostages, but the best I could tell, this wasn't mandatory. As RoboCop stalks and eviscerates, he sometimes finds health pickups and new weapons strewn about. RoboCop's ultimate goal for every stage (of ten), is to walk right, murder everything in his way until he reaches the stage boss, and then murder it too. If you're looking for complex gameplay, forget it. RCVTT is pure brainless arcade action. And sometimes that's all one wants in life. Brainless as it may be though, RCVTT is certainly not toothless.
That is to say, RCVTT's is HARD. But hard for a dumb reason, I'll explain. Traversing stages is simple enough, if you spray enough bullets in every direction, you'll do fine. Think of RoboCop as a broken bullet hydrant. Extra lives come fairly often, and most of RoboCop's weapons are extremely powerful. However, fighting the end stage bosses is another matter entirely. Once the player reaches ED-209, the developers pull a nasty trick. If you don't have the right weapon, boss fights start taking FOREVER. As in, the boss's health (which the player can't see) is massive, and any weapon but the "right" one, will do hardly any damage. So if the player reaches the boss, but doesn't have the right weapon, they're screwed. Dying means RoboCop loses any weapons he had, and he's stuck with his default (useless against latter bosses) leg pistol. And of course the final boss SkyNet is only able to be killed by one particular weapon. I won't say which one, because should you play this game, you should have the "joy" of discovering that for yourself. (After spending ten minutes wasting your life raging about why a stupid 1994 boss won't. just. DIE.) The one caveat is, there are continues, though they are limited. Thankfully(?) when you continue the whole stage starts over again, so you have a chance to reach the boss with a different weapon load-out. Good luck next time.
It's a travesty the boss balancing design is such trash, because had that not been the case, I would hesitantly recommend RCVTT. If you're a fan of the two movie series, it's easy to be impressed with RCVTT's aesthetics. The detailed sprite work, the dystopian backgrounds, the gritty FM OST, all of it works convincingly to capture the tone of both film series. Bosses visually are taken from either franchises, and look stunning. If you enjoy gore, you'll love how the human enemies explode like piƱatas filled with blood sausages. Many of RoboCop's weapons are plenty of fun to maraud with (I particularly enjoyed the fly-by-wire grenade launcher). Thus if all you want out of a game is to shoot, kill, and shoot some more, RCVTT has you covered. If only RCVTT's game design, particular the boss balancing, had enjoyed as much attention as the presentation did, we'd have a winner here. Instead, we have merely a decent incarnation of two amazing franchises, ruined by a terrible idea for making bosses difficult. RCVTT is far from the worst use of RoboCop or Terminator IPs, but it's a real shame it falls so short of the excellence it could have been. If you are a fan of these films, and you enjoy gritty Genesis games, give RCVTT a try. But keep in mind, the robo bosses might just terminate your patience before you reach the end.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 6, 2018 19:13:18 GMT -5
I polished off The Great Circus Mystery. It's a fun little jaunt, but it's also a good bit easier than the first game because of in-place respawns. Bosses are a cinch now.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 7, 2018 17:05:07 GMT -5
1. Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (Genesis) 2. Darkwing Duck (NES) (bad end?) Just knocked out Darkwing Duck. Definitely for the Mega Man fans, the Capcom touch is here for sure. But I did have a few issues. It took me awhile to realize that holding up causes Darkwing to raise his cape for a shield that blocks some projectiles. That is fine, except that you do this while jumping too. I didn't even notice this until the end of the game but I think this is the main reason why jumping and shooting was often problematic. If you're accidentally holding up and he's using the cape, you're not going to be firing at anything in front of you. The jumping and precision isn't quite as good as Mega Man either. There's also some vertical scaling sections except that, once the screen pans up, if you fall back down... you're falling to your doom. So the area doesn't pan back down towards the ground or wherever you started the climb. Overall it was harder than Mega Man (maybe not 1) to me, since Darkwing can only take four hits. It's easy to get health drops throughout though that fully restore your health and extra lives aren't too hard to grab, usually one per level. Some of the bosses were a real pain namely because of the controls not being as smooth as you'd want... more than several of these bosses will often shoot some projectile upwards that falls down to hit you from above, while you're dodging stuff on the ground and trying to hit the boss. No health bars on the bosses either and they take quite awhile to knockout. The final boss was a huge pain and the beginning is kind of pure luck, it's similar to say... the Super Ghouls true boss or Mega Man X's final Sigma form, you have to scale upward to hit something while these two orbs are constantly respawning and shooting crap at you while knocking you down. But you can get into a cycle of shooting both the spawning bots and hitting what you need to hit for the boss. If that makes sense. I did enjoy the hanging mechanic, Darkwing can jump and hang onto some objects or the bottom of some platforms you can then jump upward onto. This led for some cool puzzle areas as well. But, you will probably rage a little with a few accidental deaths due to the controls here and there. Overall, very cool for sure though and I liked it more than Castle of Illusion for the two I've beaten so far.
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Post by Xeogred on Jan 7, 2018 19:22:36 GMT -5
1. Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (Genesis) 2. Darkwing Duck (NES) 3. Batman* (NES)* = replay Most anticipated replay of my lifetime. Batman is a game I rented a lot as a kid and somehow, I beat this game when I was 4 years old off and on. I can't compute how but I just know I played the heck out of this game and could defeat the Joker. Despite being a big fan of this at my young age, it's one I don't think I've touched much at all 25 plus some years later. I'm sure I emulated it off and on at some point, but the only memories I have of this game are very specific playing it at my grandparents on their huge wooden brown TV before my parents and I moved to another state and I wasn't even in kindergarten yet. Dang! It holds up extremely well and I've never doubted it, because it's Sunsoft. The graphics and music are A+ quality. Batman controls well and the walljumping is awesome. Although in one of my pics there from the last level, that clocktower area was a huge pain and lots of trial and error. The third boss was brutal as well, but going in with full health, tons of weapon ammo to burn, and then he's not too hard. The other bosses were pretty easy, though with Joker you just can't get hit by his gun which does a huge 3 damage to your health. I eventually realized the ceiling pods that dropped out infinite enemies were basically a lot like those pits in Metroid that keep spawning those bug flyers, so it was easy to refill health and ammo at those points. Well... I say easy, but you have to be careful with the timing of taking out these things here. You often didn't have much platforming space to maneuver around them, so I was often getting some health only to get hit and even stun locked a bit while trying to escape their little spawning patrol. And sometimes my punches wouldn't land on them or other enemies. I'm noticing when I go back and emulate some stuff, I can't rapid fire button mash like I normally would, but have to get a rhythm down so the actual inputs register against hitting an enemy. There were a few moments I laughed, remembering that I knew some of these technical tricks when I was kid. Farming for ammo/health at points in this and other games (TMNT, the sidescroller came to mind), or even manipulating the screen a bit to make some enemies disappear without having to defeat them. Happened a few times while playing Batman. I used save states but I just wanted to finally revisit this one and it was a blast. I actually don't think I've ever played Return of the Joker. But I do remember playing the cool beat em' up Returns. I'll probably check those out soon. But I'll always have a soft spot for the original Batman - The Video Game! An NES essential for sure.
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