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Post by Sarge on Jun 24, 2023 19:38:38 GMT -5
Gave Spark Man some run. Man, it's so close to being good... but it's absolutely ruined by the lack of i-frames. Your health just melts away, even faster than Richter Belmont's in Dracula X. As it is, it turned into quite the slog at the end, and the last boss was just completely unfun. I'll charitably give this a 3.5/10.
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Post by toei on Jun 24, 2023 20:40:09 GMT -5
It's actually really easy when you get a little familiar with it for the most part, but the health bar is useless cause 90% of the time, if you get hit, you die, since you won't get a chance to move. And yeah, that last boss. The pattern is simple, and you can tell what you're supposed to do, but it's really hard to hit the guy with the damn grenades/bombs. It's annoying that instead of having a dedicated button, they only drop when you haven't fired for a couple seconds or more, and getting back on the platform after getting hit is super tricky. I played through it a few times so at the end I had the pattern down, but yeah, it was still tedious.
I made it to just before the final castle in Cadash arcade and I left it at that. It's still a 5/10 to me. Cool concept, but it's too cheap, slow, and limited in terms of movement to be a good action game, and too small in scale and basic in terms of world, story and characters to be a good RPG. I don't remember how it was in the TG-16 version, but the arcade version starts out with enemies you can deal with without mandatory damage with a bit of skill, then completely loses it by the second part of the third area (the cave with the gnomes), where suddenly absolutely everything hits you all the time while you just mash the attack button. There's no way to avoid getting hit at all - they walk faster than you, they don't get knocked back or even stop walking when you hit them, you don't even jump high enough to avoid them. It's just balanced like a turn-based RPG, I guess, where you have to get hit as often as you hit. Doesn't make for a fun action experience. You just get poisoned all the time from that point on, too, it's ridiculous. I think you have a few lives per credit, though, cause I started dying pretty often from there, and I still didn't run out of the 5 credits I had put in in the beginning. I just got pretty bored with it. It's not an hour long, probably closer to 1h45 or 2h. Kind of a lot for a single playthrough that can't be paused.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 24, 2023 20:52:20 GMT -5
Yeah, maybe it would be a little better with practice, and treating it less like Contra and more like Rolling Thunder, despite having diagonal fire.
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Post by Xeogred on Jun 24, 2023 22:46:09 GMT -5
Who plays Cyberpunk 2077 and Ultima Underworld II on the same day? This dude right here...
For now maybe consider this a sampling. I'm not sure how hard I'm diving into this one yet, this is definitely a MOOD kind of game. But I was itching to give it a look finally after knocking out System Shock Remake. Literally going back 30 years!
The biggest hangup is that there might be some kind of weird mouse control config I need to tinker with. It's like the main character is constantly and very slowly moving forward or backward. Yet using the mouse to navigate the screen still feels normal and all the keys to move around work well. So I just wonder if there's some weird sensitivity option. I think this and the first game did have mouse support but it's still from an era where people probably played fully off the keyboard initially.
The other weird thing is that this game starts off, way different than the norm from this stuff. The story is that you saved the day from the last game (or maybe Ultima 7?), so you and everyone are going to the castle to see the King and celebrate... then some giant corporate "blackrock" enshrines the castle with you and others trapped inside. So the castle is the new "tower" of dungeons/floors. But you start off in like a hub world and are swimming in items, gear, you can just casually pick up. Talk to NPC's, etc. This is typically something you don't see until at least a few hours into games like this. You'd usually start off naked in some cell and have to slowly find armor, weapons, piece by piece until you see signs of life. But what do I know, this was 1993 so there wasn't a rulebook just yet haha. But yeah... it's just weird and the beginning isn't very addicting so far. But I think I've found where the dungeon portion of Level 1 really gets going. I already found some weird paths to Level 2. I'm guessing there's about 8 if it's like the first game.
GOG has a lot of extras with this release, including some "hint book" that's like a full straight up Prima guide. That's cool... but I got to the near end of the first game stubbornly on my own. So the only thing I looked up so far were the controls. I want to figure things out on my own and fill out the map myself, even if this is from a different era haha.
I'll chip away at it a bit more and see how it goes. Contrast to my usual playstyle in these, I picked a mage class instead of a fighter or whatever. I remember the spells were really weird to figure out in the first game, maybe just because my character couldn't use them well? No clue.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 24, 2023 23:35:38 GMT -5
Ultima Underworld is still on my list to play in earnest someday.
I made some progress in Shadowrun again after not having played it for like a month. I mean, TotK, y'all. Anyway, pretty big progress - I've gotten a lot of money and gotten the Boosted Reflexes, which greatly increases my fire rate. I got the Heal spell, which is a big deal - I can survive a whole lot more now. And I spent time in the Dark Blade mansion's catacombs and killed tons of ghouls, which keep spawning, so lots of Karma to spend on boosting my stats. I have Heal fully powered up, and a 12 in both Body and Magic, so I can take a lot of hits and restore a lot of life. Now to track down this stupid Jester spirit...
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Post by Sarge on Jun 25, 2023 14:39:18 GMT -5
A bit more progress - I've hit the top of Drake Tower. Can't actually do anything there, though, unless I get a keyword elsewhere, so back to the Jester Spirit plotline. Got some money out of the deal, though. I've also gotten several more spells - Powerball, Freeze, and Invisibility. That last one is really useful in Drake Tower when all the machine gun dudes are stun-locking you. You can beat them without it as well (which I did for quite a few floors), but towards the end it made things really easy when I finally decided to give it a shot. I still like the game, but the combat is pretty lackluster overall. It's almost a game that could have had a turn-based system instead - while there's a little positioning strategy, most gunfights devolve into standing there shooting each other, and your weapons, armor, and RNG determine the victor. (And nicely-timed heal spells, assuming you're not stun-locked by four machine gun dudes like what happened on the ship that I'm about to go back to...
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Post by toei on Jun 25, 2023 21:21:32 GMT -5
I tried all those other Data East games. Edward Randy is just as I remembered - it's all spectacle and it's probably impressive for 1990 but the gameplay is just so mediocre and uninvolving. Act-Fancer is kind of cool in concept but it's too slow and I don't like it quite enough to bother trying to get good at it (it's really hard and only kind of intriguing). Night Slashers is so close to being good, as Sarge sometimes says. Data East really stepped up their production values around that time ('94 or so) and the graphics are first-rate. Horror-themed beat-'em-ups aren't that common (well, there's Splatterhouse 3 that's a lot better), so at least it stands out, and I found some interesting moves after messing around with it for a while. Lots of beat-'em-ups have a jumping down+attack move; usually it's weaker than a plain jump kick, but it doesn't knock the enemy down, so you can segue into a regular combo from there. In Night Slashers, it's actually super powerful, as it buries the enemies in the floor up to their neck, where you can kick their heads. This usually finishes them off much faster, and it even works against most bosses (though some enemies can actually attack you while buried!). You can also hold the attack button to charge up power moves, the inputs prior to releasing the charge leading to various attacks. Most of them are kind of weak and leave you vulnerable, but if you grab a boss while charged and do a super throw, it will sometimes have special effects on them (on top of being more powerful); they might be stunned afterward, leaving them open for a full attack combo, or in the case of the stone golem boss, it will actually expose its core, which you can hit a few times for heavy damage. So those are some pretty cool moves. I've even gotten somewhat used to the weird delayed death animations that can often throw you off in the beginning. My problem is that I've rarely played a beat-'em-up where you're as ill-equipped to fight off hordes of monsters. Your attack combos are all really slow; jump attacks are even worse, so much so that you have to plan ahead when using them (one thing that sometimes works is knocking a monster down with regular attacks, then jump attacking in their direction right away - it's so slow that you'll hit them when they get up!). Meanwhile, there are tons of enemies, and many of them have moves that hit you from afar or interrupt your combos somehow. Your health bar is pathetically small, with each attack taking a quarter to a third off your life - throws will sometimes take half, and you can't use your special move to stop them. Maybe it's manageable in two-player, but even with practice, lots of genre experience, and careful playing, it's still a total quarter muncher. I think it took me 11 credits to beat it, which is wild. I've beaten a ton of arcade games, including many, many beat-'em-ups, and this is a lot. Typically, games that eat quarters like that are broken garbage like Double Dragon 3 arcade or Silent Dragon or DD Crew - random failed beat-'em-ups no one likes. This one isn't like that. Ironically, the boss battles are actually fun, and not so hard, but it's very difficult not to die against large group of regular enemies. You have to use you special crowd move a lot, even though it costs so much health, because you'll die anyway. Just an example of how unfair the game gets: at one point, I started hitting an enemy. He blocked all my hits after the first before killing me. Never mind that I can't block, but they can; what's unfair here is that I was hitting him from behind the whole time. He didn't turn around, he just put his arms up in front of him while I kicked his upper back, and somehow that protected him. Just bullshit. I'd give it a 5.5, cause it's just almost decent.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 25, 2023 23:38:46 GMT -5
Finished Shadowrun. More detailed thoughts later, but good game, could have been better. But happy to have knocked it out.
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Post by Sarge on Jun 26, 2023 0:22:36 GMT -5
Alright, let's talk about Shadowrun for a bit. I've had this game for a long, long time, and I always thought it looked cool in Nintendo Power. And in all truth, it is, but it's not without its flaws.
The game starts with you trying to figure out who it was that tried to kill you (you awaken in a morgue), and through a long sequence of events... well, I won't spoil it. I don't actually think the plot itself is terribly interesting here, but it may be because I've seen its ilk many times. Cyberpunk was a lot more fresh back when this was released, though. And the setting is certainly solid. There's a lot that NP didn't cover that gets way weirder - I didn't know the universe had stuff like vampires and dragons and such. Not a traditional cyberpunk setting, it would seem!
Graphically, the game is pretty understated. It looks fine, just has small sprites. You can tell the vibe, at any rate. And doing some reading, apparently there are a couple of revisions of the game out there - one is a bit more censored than the other (which turns out to be my own cart as well as the ROM I used), and one has a bit more innuendo sprinkled in a conversation or two. Not a huge difference, but interesting to note. I liked a lot of the tunes here, although they can get quite repetitive.
Really, though, your enjoyment of the game will hinge on whether you like adventure games or not. It may play with a controller, but it absolutely feels like it should be on PC with a mouse. It's still plenty playable, but it's a lot clunkier on a controller. Most game progression is finding an item or a keyword in a conversation and taking that to another area/person, and you keep rolling until you, well, roll credits. Of course, there's combat and hacking along the way, which are the two ways the game mixes up the adventure game formula.
Combat sees you basically pull up your crosshairs, put it on an enemy, and blast away. This is how most encounters go. They will get easier as you buy new weapons and equipment. It's worth being careful with your money, though - you don't have enough cash to buy everything, and not all of it is worth the steep asking price. But snagging the Mesh Jacket early on is a must (you wouldn't think a single point helps that much defensively but it does!), and the shotgun will be your friend for a while. Boosted Reflexes will also really up your attack speed. At any rate, I didn't spend much money on Shadowrunners for my team, saving the cash for the upgrades I wanted. They're not permanent additions to your team, and you can pretty effectively solo the entire game.
You're gonna need that cash, too. Stuff is expensive. You can kill mooks for it, but even in the endgame, they don't drop a lot. Most of the money will instead come from the Arena in the caryards, or from hacking computers in various buildings. (There's also an infinite money glitch that isn't necessary, but nice that it's there.) The hacking is more of a minigame, and I think the best way to describe it is, uh, Minesweeper? When you go into cyberspace, you move around in a top-down view, and as you walk, the game tells you how many "ICs" are around you. They will defend the CPU, but you can't see them. You can hit your combat button anywhere, but you'll lose a small amount of HP doing so. Early on, you can take chances and not check tiles, but as the game progressed, failing a combat drains a LOT of HP, so it's worth spending the small amount of life to make sure you check in front of you and kill an IC. (You'll also occasionally fail combat, which isn't great, so boost that Computer stat!)
Regular combat will earn you Karma, which is this game's version of experience. Downing enough enemies will earn you points, and some enemies will give you quite a few. You'll spend them when you rest, and you can boost your HP/MP, magic spells, and even abilities that will make Shadowrunners cheaper to hire or keep around longer. It becomes particularly important to upgrade Invisibility and Freeze - the former makes most fights child's play, and the latter is pretty important for fighting Drake, who does a heck of a job stun-locking you so healing becomes a real crapshoot.
So yeah, the game is pretty much an adventure game with RPG elements, and I like a lot of what's here. Progression can certainly be cryptic at times, but that seems part and parcel of the genre. I figure I spend 10-15 hours to see credits roll. I'd give the game a 7/10 at least, maaaaaaybe a 7.5 if I'm feeling charitable. It's good. I hesitate to call it great, though - the game needed to smooth out some rough spots to hit that tier. Still, one of the better RPG-style games in the SNES library.
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Post by Ex on Jun 26, 2023 9:58:54 GMT -5
It may play with a controller, but it absolutely feels like it should be on PC with a mouse. It's still plenty playable, but it's a lot clunkier on a controller. A ROMhacker added mouse support with patch: www.romhacking.net/hacks/6653/Yeah it's a weird design idea for a console game. I played this once back in, 2001 or so, and bounced off it. Good on you for sticking through. It's interesting how the SNES, Genesis, and Mega CD versions of Shadowrun are all so different.
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