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Post by anayo on Feb 21, 2018 22:59:24 GMT -5
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 8 year old me loved this game. The premise of playing as plastic army men just appealed to me. This wouldn't be an N64 game if it didn't have a sick split screen death match mode. I loved the multiplayer stages where you and some friends would fight to the death in some mundane household setting, like a kitchen counter, a bathroom, or someone's back yard. Of course because you're tiny plastic army men, so everything's huge. However, I disliked how this game required a controller pack to save your game, since I didn't own one. So I'd just play the opening tutorial and first stage of the single player campaign over and over again. I tried playing this again more recently and I just couldn't get into it. When you press left or right to make your army man turn, he's so slow he may as well be swimming through molasses. I kept getting killed and finally turned it off in frustration. It's great if you happen to be a kid and it's the late 90's, though.
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Post by anayo on Feb 26, 2018 6:50:58 GMT -5
I just remembered 3 more rentals from 3 different video game generations (Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, and Gamecube). Awesome Possum As a kid it never dawned on me that this game was hot garbage. So when I read scathing reviews for it online in the early 2000's, I thought, "No way, this was a decent game." I loaded it into an emulator to hear the main character spouts these cynical slogans like, "I'm awesome!" and "Don't pollute!" The controls are bad. Like in Sonic or Mario there's this well-tuned way that your character moves about, giving the experience a good tactile feeling. Awesome Possum just slides around everywhere like a greased pig. The animation and sprite work is poor. There's a boss rush at the end. Yet for some reason younger-me ate this up, beating it multiple times. It wasn't like I had no concept of bad video games back then, because I hated Cave Man Games (NES) and Marsupalami (Sega Genesis). Maybe I was into this for the same reason I used to watch insipid cartoons for hours on end. Vigilante 8 The other two games in this post belong to the "bad games I used to think were good" category, so I'm afraid of what I will think if I go back and replay this. In the year 2000, though, this was a lot of fun. It was basically an off-brand version of Twisted Metal. Society has collapsed or something, so that means it's time to strap Gatling guns and RPG's to school buses and buicks and fight to the death. I remember there was a stage that took place in Las Vegas which I thought had cool scenery. There was also a cheat code I got from a Nintendo Power issue explaining how to unlock a flying saucer piloted by a gray alien. The single player campaign was short, so I could beat it during a single Blockbuster rental. Enter the Matrix I think the Matrix Reloaded film is pretty insufferable today, with sloppy, pompous dialog trying way too hard to be deep and metaphorical, WTF plot twists, tacky set pieces (like Morpheus's speech followed by the Zion rave), and pointlessly ostentatious special effects full of poorly-aged CGI. In the mid 2000's the hype machine was running at full throttle, though, and I was a teenager just cognizant enough to think I knew more about nuance and subtlety than I actually did. In other words I couldn't have been more directly targeted by this game if you'd painted a crosshair on my forehead. Elsewhere on this site I've complained about modern games that don't actually challenge your reflexes or present any interesting game mechanics to master, they're just "Cinematic Badass Simulator 2000", existing for no reason other than to let the player fill the boots of a special forces warrior or some equally implausible power fantasy. That completely describes Enter the Matrix. This doesn't challenge one's reflexes, pose any strategic quandaries, encourage exploration, or make you worry about resource management. The whole entire game is like a 10 hour long Shenmue QTE. It feels really cool at first, but if you replay it the pointless, repetitive nature of everything becomes impossible to ignore. To its credit, almost everyone I knew in person seemed to like Enter the Matrix. It was out on all 3 major consoles and sold really well. So I guess it was one of those things most everyone liked until the high wore off. It also did some interesting stuff with live action cut scenes that never really caught on since then (I can think of exactly one contemporary game that uses live action cut scenes like this). I guess that makes it stand out as a historical footnote.
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Post by Ex on Feb 26, 2018 9:51:05 GMT -5
As bad as Enter the Matrix was (and it was IMO), a lot of folks thought this game redeemed the franchise in video game land: I've owned that that on Xbox for eleven years or so. I've never played it of course. I look at it sometimes though.
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Post by chibby on Feb 26, 2018 13:56:38 GMT -5
As bad as Enter the Matrix was (and it was IMO), a lot of folks thought this game [Path Of Neo] redeemed the franchise in video game land: I've owned that that on Xbox for eleven years or so. I've never played it of course. I look at it sometimes though. While I think it's arguably a better experience than Enter The Matrix, and there are some interesting takes on the Matrix universe that I appreciated, something tells me that one didn't hold up. If someone else has played it more recently let me know. I enjoyed it at the time (and by at the time I mean about 5 years after because I play everything late), but I think even then it gets a little repetitive after a while.
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Post by Xeogred on Feb 26, 2018 13:58:42 GMT -5
It's kind of fitting the Matrix games were extremely glitchy. I can't remember which ones I played but they were hilarious bad, yet entertaining as well.
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