Wonderful atmosphere, with a purposefully slow and deliberate pacing.
Fantastic voice over performances.
A perfect ending, that wraps up the story without answering all the questions; respecting the intelligence of the player and provoking thought.
Gameplay is pretty repetitive and clearly secondary to the story.
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (PS4)
Completed in August 2015
Got it for free as a PS Plus subscriber; but I can see why people who paid $40 were frustrated with a lack of content.
That said, for what it is, it is a perfect taste of the new Metal Gear mechanics and the impressive Fox Engine.
The main mission is OK, but the bonus side missions are really what made this experience worth it. Lots of variety, and some fun easter eggs as well.
Not necessary to play before Phantom Pain, but if you love Metal Gear it may be worth a look.
Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition (Sega Genesis)
Completed in September 2015
Found this gem at the U-District Pink Gorilla (shout out to @PinkGorillaLLC give them a follow!), and plowed through it in one long, obscenity-laden evening.
My first time playing a Street Fighter game that I can remember, it was an awesome experience.
My 'C' button started to stick, so I had to dismantle my Genesis controller and clean it before continuing, because Vega is TOO DAMNED FAST.
The main roster is fun to fight, I used Chun Li, but the AI bosses are pretty cheap and were decidedly less fun. Little to no stun frames and some infuriating invincibility windows forces you to play ultra conservative, spam, and hope for some luck.
A really good game that I suspect is more fun to play with friends than the AI. I'm hoping to give that a shot soon!
Well, here's a brand new feature for one of these posts. I first played this game over a decade ago when I was still just a wee lad in elementary school. I thought it was visually stunning, acoustically impressive, but also tough as nails. As such, I determined that no sane person could ever beat it.
Nightmare fuel.
Well, it's 2015, and now I have something I didn't have then: the Internet, and an emulator that is capable of save states. "Save states?!" you may say. "That's not really beating the game!"
Well, I agree. And that's why I didn't use them to beat the game, I used them to practice the insane boss fights I could never beat before. After HUNDREDS of attempts, finally, I was able to get comfortable with the last three segments of the game. A luxury little innocent pre-teen Cooper never had.
This game was so ahead of it's time. I mean, JUST LOOK AT THIS!!!
With this help, it was just a matter of putting it all together. Not only did I pull it off, I live streamed it, and I timed it. And should you have an hour to spare (and of course you do!) you can watch it, right here:
What more can I say about the game that you can't see for yourself above. Awesome graphics, awesome music, innovative gameplay and style. This game is so insanely under appreciated,. PLAY IT. PLAY IT NOW. THEN TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO PLAY IT. It's super hard, but it is always fun. A perfect 16-bit platformer in every way.
And just for reading this whole post, *YOU GOT A SECRET BONUS POINT*
Was it meant to be? On a day where I saw a real life USMC Apache helicopter fly over my house, I finally beat a game I've been unable to finish for some fifteen years. And that game is about an Apache helicopter.
Life can be funny sometimes.
I FINALLY BEAT YOUR GAME MIKE POSEHN! DO YOU HEAR ME?!
There's so much I could say about this game that actually has nothing to do with the game itself. Moments, people, certain emotions; it's nostalgia down to it's purest form. This game ranks amongst my top three most nostalgic games (with Earthworm Jim, and Vectorman). When I think of my childhood, or even the 90's in general, I often picture sitting in front of a CRT television with the glow of orange reflecting off of everything in the room and a tiny little green helicopter flimsly flittering around the screen.
I also think of frustration. You see, Desert Strike is a really difficult game. Not so much in the technique, though that is certainly important, but mostly in patience and endurance. These are all things most 8 year-olds lack, and I was no exception.
'Don't be sad fellas! I'll be back in 15 minutes after I fail the mission again!'
But that's the beauty of maturing. You become stronger, smarter, more persistent, never willing to be defeated by a simple play thing! Well, except for the couple times I rage quitted last night. But today was different! Today I had a purpose! And when I looked up and saw that Apache helicopter fly o're head, I knew what I must do!
Grind! A lot! And keep grinding until somehow I fluked my way to victory. Albeit I killed my own co-pilot once, was shot down by running into buildings a few times, and wove a tapestry of curse words that could be seen from space ('A Christmas Story' refernce for ya there). But in the end I succeeded. I SHOOK GEORGE HERBERT WALKER TEXAS RANGER BUSH'S HAND!
Now onto the game itself. This game, despite what I said above, is surprisingly short. 4 missions to be exact. Each mission has a set of objectives to be completed in order. You fly around, shooting missiles or a chain gun, at various targets across a large isometric map. You have limited ammo and fuel which you must monitor throughout the mission, and replenish by picking up items scattered and or hidden across the map. You can also pick up health items to repair your helicopter, as well as a few *very rare* extra lives. You are initially given three lives to finish the mission, and if you run out of lives it's 'Game Over' and you must start all over.
Thankfully, if you do finish a mission successfully you are given a password so that you can resume from the last uncompleted mission. This was something I did not comprehend as a child, and thus why I never could beat this game. For whatever reason, in my small little underdeveloped brain, passwords were for cheats. The idea of using them as a checkpoint was so foreign and beyond me, I never really had a chance. And this would haunt me and my ability to beat old games for a long time.... but that's another story.
I saw this a lot as a child.
Thankfully I'm not such a puritan anymore. I happily used those passwords and HOLY HELL that makes the game a lot more bearable. Now I just have to take things a mission at a time. And that's what I did. All in all Desert Strike is still a lot of fun. I think it has held up a lot better than most games from the early 90's, and visually it still impresses me for a Genesis game.
Whether or not I would recommend it to a casual fan of games? Probably not. It's not long enough, nor rewarding enough for the effort it requires to see it through. But if you had a Genesis/Super Nintendo and somehow missed this game, it is absolutely worth a look. I know I feel much better about finally checking this one off the list.
Oh, and it has a rad theme song too:
In conclusion, I'm just glad it's over. It was so stressful! But now I don't have to worry any more because there's definitely not a sequel for....
This week's song is from another game I had lots of experience with growing up.
Desert Strike is a really innovative game in that it takes the traditional 3rd Person aircraft shooter game, and turns it into a sandbox/open world type experience where you get to determine how you wish to complete the objectives necessary for a successful mission.
Often brutal, and certainly time consuming, this game really hit the spot back in the 90s by riffing off of the collective consciousness of Americans who had been glued to TVs watching the First Gulf War play out in front of them.
It also had music that entirely captured the 'tude mindset of the decade.
Hello all. Sorry again for not posting on schedule, but school is straining my abilities to keep up on everything. So to catch up, here is an all-in-one post for last week.
First the Song of the Week:
This gem of a track comes from one of my personal favorite games, Earthworm Jim. This is the Sega Genesis version of this song, "Use your head", by esteemed composer of many games, and the brain trust behind the concert series Video Games Live, Tommy Tallarico.
This is a little different from art I've previously showcased here, as this a direct copy of the Age Of Empires box art. I selected this piece because one, it has a really wonderful sense of balance and color, and two, the original Age of Empires doesn't get nearly the love it deserves. I understand why, since AoEII was a RTS masterpiece, but still the original deserves some love.
Finally, we have last Saturday's (Oct. 6th) Replay!
In this Replay! we get to hear an intriguing debate about the merits of Banjo Kazooie vs. Mario 64, Ben Hanson declares his favorite N64 game is one he never played half of, and Tim Turi faces off with an obscure Japanese computer adaptation of Super Mario in a new installment of Stress Test.
This is one of the best Replay episodes we've gotten in recent months. ENJOY IT.
This week's piece is a little different from previous selections. Instead of pulling some artist's masterpiece off the inter-webs absent of context, I decided to jump into the catacombs of video game advertisements in an effort to link the two. One of my favorite things about older games, looking back, is seeing the concept or box art of a game compared to the actual in-game graphics. Case in point, this ad for Golden Axe II on the Sega Genesis:
Sega Advertisement from 1992
This was the box cover to the Mega Drive version of the game, painted by fantasy artist Boris Vallejo.
These days, a character's concept art often looks more or less like the end product. Not so for our 16-bit protagonists. It's intriguing to see what the developers envisioned these worlds looking like, and what their technology would actually allow. Obviously, we've come a long way.
For more of artist Boris Vallejo's work, check out his page here.
I'm posting this a day late as a result of being out of town.
Fortunately, there wasn't much for me to say about it. Brent Weinbach is obnoxious, and Kyle Hilliard is really bad at talking and playing simultaneously.
Matt and Tim try to overcome this but it's not enough to save this episode; which is unfortunate because "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" is a really cool game. Oh and there's a unicycle game, too. Yup.
This is the first song of the week piece I've done for this blog, so excuse me for being sentimental and selecting something a little obscure.
As I noted in my very first post, one of the first games I owned was Vectorman for the Sega Genesis. Vectorman was a real eye-opener for me. At four years old, I hadn't really been around long enough to understand what the sci-fi, futuristic, post-disaster Earth genre was really about. And I certainly knew nothing about techno.
By far, my favorite song from the Genesis era came from this robotic side scroller. After a frenetic start, blasting through sludge pilots, downing a HUGE hover plane, and a VectorTrain vs. WarHead fight, you are suddenly dropped into an ocean world. The sun is setting, and the waves are strangely majestic. Then the music hits:
The composer for Vectorman, Jon Holland, is even more obscure than the songs he wrote. I know literally nothing about him except his name and association with this amazing music. However, after some digging, it seems after Vectorman he didn't do anything else of note. Well, except for the equally intriguing music for Vectorman 2.
After BlueSky Software, the developers of Vectorman, shutdown in 2001, Jon Holland was out of the video game soundtrack business.
For those completely confused by the title, I direct you to this nugget of awesomeness:
"Rise from your grave," Zeus commanded... and so a generation of gaming was born.
A little back story: Altered Beast was released in 1988 as a stand-up cabinet game. Across all of Japan, Altered Beast ruled supreme in the local arcades, munching away at coins, leaving millions of small Japanese children bento-less. But then something special happened. Altered Beast was soon ported (i.e. re-released) on a little black box called the Sega Mega Drive. This little toy would come to be known in the US as the Sega Genesis.
With the success of Altered Beast on the new console, Sega was given the start it needed to forge ahead and ultimately release 914 more games for the console. In total, Sega sold some 40 million Mega Drives/Genesis' (Genesi? Genesises?). I was lucky enough to have received one of them.
It was Christmas. December 25th, 1995. I only vaguely remember that day. I was, after all, only five years old. But what I do remember was unwrapping a big box only to lay my eyes upon a strange contraption that at first I could not fully comprehend. Indeed, it was a Sega Genesis; a gift from my Aunt and Uncle in California. With it came two games:
The rest, as they say, was history.
Over the last 18 years of my life, I have played hundreds of games. Of those hundreds of games, I've completed about a hundred. I've probably spent thousands of hours playing games (I cried a little on the inside when I wrote that). And yet, still, somehow, I've managed to miss so many of the classics.
The Zelda series, the Metroid series, the early Final Fantasy games, and all of the 3D Mario platformers, just to name a few.
This blog is a record of my attempt to finally bring clarity to my video gaming blind spot, and keep track of my gaming exploits as I attempt to conquer these leviathans of the digital sea. One pixel at a time.
It's also a place to exchange memories, news, and other awesome gaming related things. So pull up a tweed couch, a 2-liter of Surge, a can of Pringles, and LETS DO THIS.
