Video Games

Review – Bionic Commando (NES)

NES – 1 Player – Capcom

If you ever hear someone complain about the “difficulty” of modern games, tell them to go play almost any NES classic. Not only will they find many extremely difficult games, but they will be difficult games by design, not because the computer uses cheap AI to “always win”.

Bionic Commando is one such game. Honestly, this, and any game in the Ninja Gaiden series, are some of the toughest NES games out there. Possibly one of the toughest games ever. The one major pitfall of this game is its lack of password or save features. Yeah, having to write down a 16 digit set of random letters and numbers is a pain but it’s better than starting fresh each time. Of course, a battery back up save file would be even better.

Honestly though, the modern philosophy of save everywhere, save often isn’t something I’ll cry about.

But enough about save files and passwords, let’s get to the game itself. There’s actually quite a bit of variety at work here. On the surface, Bionic Commando is a pretty straight forward side scrolling shooter. It also has this clever gimmick in the Bionic Arm. Your player can’t jump, instead he must use his quick grabbing arm to climb platforms and swing across pits. It’s a lot of fun and ads a lot of interesting twists to the standard philosophy of shooter game play.

The arm isn’t the only thing about this game that helps it shine though. If it was, Bionic Commando would just fall into the category of gimmick game. No, the game play method and philosophy isn’t pretty in depth as well. Between areas or levels, one must traverse an over head map. Levels don’t have to be played in sequential order, in fact, it’s impossible to finish the game if you try to do so. I’m pretty sure there are some levels you have to enter, collect an item, then leave for a different level.

Additionally, some levels are “neutral zones”. You have full regular control, but shooting in these areas will bring down a mass of opponents on both sides of the war. Essentially, you enter these areas to collect information or items.

On top of the standard levels, the map is full of mobile “levels”. These are more like bonus rounds. They play for a top down perspective similar to the older game Commando. Truth is, this game is actually a pseudo sequel to the game Commando, these missions are meant as a throwback to it’s predecessor. If you navigate the map well, you can often avoid these encounters but more often than not, you’ll get stuck in one or two.

Game play isn’t always set out with the standard “finish the level” either. As mentioned, sometimes you simply need to collect an item to proceed. There’s often a communication link you’ll have to hack into in order to gain access to a future area. If you fail to break through, enemy forces will detect you and attack in mass. This ads some level of covert operation to the game play. It’s beneficial to avoid attracting the enemy.

All of this complicates things quite a bit. Add in to this a fairly high base difficulty and a pretty long length and it makes for a game that’s hard to complete. Completing it rewards you with the classic video game scene of, Hitler’s head exploding. Ok, in the US version he’s not technically “Hitler” but the uncensored Japanese version is full of Swastikas and Hitler. In the US version you’re fighting the Badds, in the Japanese version, they are Nazis, of the FUTURE!

Despite its high difficulty, Bionic Commando’s sheer variety of game play makes it a lot of fun to play. Even if you can’t finish it, it’s still worth playing. Heck, the Bionic Arm can be used for all sorts of random fun by itself.

Review – Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (NDS)

Jan 27th, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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Nintendo DS – 1 Player – Level-5

I could have sworn I had already done reviews for at least Professor Layton and the Curious Village but it looks like I am mistaken. Either that or I’ve finally lost a chunk of posts with my constant shifting from one blogging platform to another. Since this is essentially a fresh intro to the series I’ll just touch a bit more on the details instead of straight referencing old content. I guess it’s better style anyway.

At the core, the Layton games are nothing more than puzzle games. More accurately, they are essentially the ULTIMATE puzzle games. With say, Scribblenauts or Tetris, which are also a games of the puzzle genre, you are generally limited to a singular type of puzzle repeated ad nausea with increasing difficulty (usually through a timer since you can’t really die in a puzzle game). In the Layton games, you get a massive variety of puzzles. Puzzles ranging from simple and obvious math problems to complex sliding block puzzles to little riddles where you have to think out an answer.

Also unlike many puzzle games that simple throw out a list of puzzles to work, these puzzles are encapsulated in some sort of story. The larger story is of course, a mysgtery, so it’s a puzzle all in it’s own. The mysteries presented in these games are pretty decent and often feature twists you may not expect. The dialogue is well done as well which helps the presentation even more. The art is decent as well though often the secondary characters around the various locals are… questionably designed. Basically, the core characters all look great and have nice animations when needed, the third level characters sometimes come off like a third grader scribbled a few lines and called it a person. It’s not distracting and overall the art style is great. It’s certainly a refreshing style compared to the usual excessively repetitive “anime” style that often predominates these sort of quirky titles.

The unwound future, if you couldn’t deduce from the title, follows Layton and his apprentice Luke through a time traveling adventure. Though not everything may be quite what it seems. This was one point that kept nagging me going through this game was trying to figure out what’s “really” going on. If you’ve played the previous two games you’ll know that often the most obvious supernatural themes presented tend to be a bit shady in the end. On that note though, the ultimate climax, while quite epic, seemed a bit too elaborate to really fit with the simpler themes present in the series. Still, in terms of overall story, I’d say it’s a bit higher than Diabolical Box (Layton 2) though probably below Curious Village (Layton 1).

The real saving grace for the story was that it dealt with Layton himself and his past. The first game was more of an introduction and history for Flora. The second game was essentially the Temple of Doom for the series having nothing really to do with the core characters, and the third brings us back to give us some history on Layton and the reoccurring Don Palo.

It’s good to get some actual characterization.

The real question I suppose is how are the puzzles. Of the three currently available games I’d have to say that I found the puzzles in this game to be kind of weak and fairly easy. Also of note, the parrot and car mini games were both kind of lame, the car one in particular, which I solved all of in one try.

Overall it’s a game that leaves me with an odd mix of feelings. I like the series and I like the plot. Still, the plot was a little slow at points and the puzzles seemed a bit easy. Still, it’s enjoyable and if you like the series it’s certainly worthwhile to keep going on it if only for the background on Professor Layton’s history.

Review – Final Fantasy X (PS2, PS3, PS4, PC)

Dec 25th, 2017

by Ramen Junkie.

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PS2 – 1 Player

Don’t ask me why it says “X” instead of “10” up there. I guess its just to keep with the idea that all FF games can be abreviated with three letters. Maybe people are just too lazy to put the 0 on the end. Actually it’s probably because everyone knows any name with an “X” on the end is automatically cool. Think about it, we have Malcom X, Jason X, Samurai X, Xyxex, the list goes on. This is one game though that is slick even without the tag-on “Cool X”.

Before we get started with detail, I present some minor trivia. To save HTML coding time I pulled out my FF8 review and just changed all the text and image links. On a semi-related note, if there is a game FFX is more like it’s FF8. Both are the only two FF games so far to use realistic character designs all the way through. Both have a massive “cheat” through the use of limit breaks. Both don’t really have levels. FF8 does, but it’s the Junction system that makes the difference in the end. Until FFX came along, FF8 was the best in the series. Also they both have the same characters!

Ok, ok, stick with me here. Look at Rinoa and Yuna, side by side, same person right? How about Tidus and Squall? Hey hey, you can’t fool us by dying youtr hair blonde boy! Rikku could easily pass for Quist’s younger sister. Wakka and Zell? Hey didn’t we try the hair dye trick once allready? If Lulu isn’t Edea munis the mask and backback thing, I don’t know who is. What about Kimari then. Well uh, I suppose he’s sort of the love child of Red XIII and Yuffie, I mean FF7 isn’t too far off from FF8 right?

Now if FF8 was unbalanced by how strong you can get, FFX has flipped off the scale and is rolling away by now. It starts out a bit difficult at times, but once you fill the Sphere Board with everyone, well, even with your Weakest characters every battle is a simple matter of mashing the Fight Command. Also for the first time you can break the 9999 barrier on HP, and Damage. Not that you’ll need to to finish the game. In fact the end is allready probably the easiest end boss in any FF game to date. For one, the true end boss only has one form. The final battle afterwards is so easy you could beat it with your weakest character with none of the sphere board complete, given enough time. Honestly it’s a feature I could do without, though by that point I could kill everything in one hit anyway. I don’t think any of the final fights caused any damage before I kicked the shit out of them at 99999 a hit. Consider that isn’t just 99999 a round, that is 99999 from three people with Auto-Haste and a speed stat around 200. So for every one attack the enemy dishes out that’s like 10 or so hits of 99999 each. Or more.

Now there is some challenge here. You see there is this Battle Arena. That is where the REAL bosses are. Basically it’s chock full of hidden enemies with several million HP each. The problem here is that most of these bosses can be finished off with the same strategy of casting auto life then attacking. For the most part they all have some sort of gimmick weakspot to thier strategy. Honestly the hardest one, Nemesis, broke down to about an hour of attacking and wasn’t hard at all. I may be wrong on the names but Neslug and Thu’Bin were considerably more of a challenge than Nemesis was. I mean to kill Neslug you had to be able to deal over a million HP in one attack in order to kill is otherwise it would pull into it’s shell and regenerate completely (3 Mil HP total).

I mentioned this game doesn’t have Levels. That’s one of it’s big “new features”. Thing is, it DOES have levels. it just doesn’t keep track of them. After each battle you gain AP that go towards Sphere Board points. For each Sphere Point you can move one space on the Sphere Board to gain stats. These are all just fancy names for levels. In the end it breaks down to a lot of busy work for the same +2 Str and +3 Dex you would have gotten anyway for making it to level 5 (etc). The idea here is that you’ll be able to customize your characters. Anyone can learn Black Magic, you just need ot get to that point on the board. If you complete it, you’ll have a powerhouse specialty fighter that is faster than greased lightning and can cast all sorts of White and Black magic. The problem is that there are locks all over the board. Chances are you won’t be able to deviate from a characters preset path till about halfway through the game. Also after two plays through, I’ve found you won’t complete a characters initial path till around the end of the game. At this point you’ll be needing around 20,000 AP to gain an S-Level. Don’t worry though, there are multiple tricks to gain AP quickly and the enemies in the final dungeon are fairly easy for around 3-4 S-Levels per battle on even the strongest characters.

But where would a Final Fnatasy game be without mini-games. I can’t say I’ve ever been too fond of mini-games myself. They always come off as useless filler. It’s like the characters suddenly decide to take a day off from saving the world so they can play some sort of lame Chocobo/Moogle themed race/guessing game/shooter/whatever. Also the prizes are usually pretty useless. Not in FFX. Oh no, if you want to outfit all of the fully powered (read:useful) versions of the ultimate weapons you’ll have to complete every mini game in this baby. Not only that but in order to get materials for customizing perfect armor easily, you’ll have to complete the battle arena. But wait! There’s more! You see, FFX has the hardest, most excrutiating mini games in ANY game EVER. LEt’s start easy. The Cactaur Hot and Cold game is not that hard. Be sure to save between each cactaur and you’ll be able to catch them all without being caught pretty easily. But how about say, dodging 200 lightning bolts. Another one that in the end wasn’t that hard. You just NEED Enc-None and decent reflexes. It takes about 20 minutes to do this if you find a spot with consistant lighting strikes on the map. Now on to the worst couple. Butterfly Racing. Run along a tree and catch blue butterflies. Sounds easy right? You have a time limit though, and there are red butterflies that initiate combat. Not to mention that in this 3D world it’s pretty much impossible to tell where the butterflies actually are and if you hit even one red butterfly or deviate from the EXACT path you’ll come up .1 seconds short of winning (every time). After say, 20 or 30 runs you should have the path memorized enough to make it throught this thing.

Now for the final big offender before we get into the one fun mini-game. Chocobo Racing. Anyone who has played this game knows that Chocobo Racing is impossible. The chocobos steer like drunk blind cripples, the birds appear right on top of you all the time and unless you hit the exact pixel of the Balllon you won’t pick it up. Did I mention you have to complete this game with a time of 0 seconds? It takes about 36 seconds to run the race, if no birds hit you and you just run it. Each bird subtracts 6 seconds (3 at the end, 3 in actual run time) and each baloon adds 3 seconds (at the end). so you have to pick up at least 12 baloons without getting hit plus 2 for each bird you hit. Sound complicated? You bet! Difficult? Absolutely. This game requires no skill. You’ll play for 500 runs and get times varying from 2 seconds to 2 minutes. Eventually you’ll finally manage to get lucky and all the birds will be gone and the baloons will all be right in front of you and you’ll get the perfect time of 0 seconds. Thing is at this point this victory will feel empty and hollow as it came from no amount of skill on your part.

Now we are getting a bit long here, but there is one more point to touch on. Blitzball is the main mini-game of this game. FF8 had Triple Triad, FF9 had Tetra Master, FFX has Blitzball. Basically it’s underwater soccor (that’s Underwater Football for you Brits) and while it starts out a bit difficult, once you dump the entire original team and recruit a few good players you’ll be dominating the sport. The only problem with this game is that you have to win somewhere between 50 and 1 billion matches for all of Wakka’ Limits and Ultimate Weapon pieces to come up. I’m pretty sure the numbers are random so you could be playing a LOT of Blitz. As fun as it is for a while, it gets REALLY old after about 200 games.

Basically te point here is, that you should own three games for PS2. Metal Gear Solid 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, and Final Fantasy 10. Everything else is just garbage filler. Then for 2003, be sure to pick up Metal Gear Solid 2.2, Grant Theft Auto 3.2, and Final Fantasy 10.2 (Kingdom Hearts or I suppose Final Fantasy 10 International). man I see a trend here. Here’s hoping 2004 briungs MGS3, GTA4, and FF12. What, you say I missed FF11? No, Square just decided to skip making a good game for that one.

Review – Final Fantasy IX (PS1)

Dec 6th, 2017

by Ramen Junkie.

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It’s amazing how something so good (FF8) can be followed by something so bad. Rumor has it, people complained about FF8 a lot. They complained because it was so different from the “classical aspects of the series” that Square decided to give the fans what they really wanted. In reality Square (hopefully purposely) created a bad remake of all of thier previous FF games all rolled into one. Pretty much every aspect of this game is based on some other game. Surprisingly it seems to draw the most from FF1.

The biggest setback in this game was the return to Munchkin Land. Even FF7’s munchkins looked more normal than these characters do, though I think it was mostly due to FF7 having pretty humanoid characters in battle. I kept expecting the Lolipop kids to pup up and tell me to “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”. They also all seemed ot have really weir mouths. The graphics were pretty nice though for other aspects. Like Black “I am Hell Incarnate” Waltz No 3, who should have been the star of the game.

Instead we get a comical adventure that takes us through a quick history of the FF series. We get to see Garland from FF1 again, The Black Mages return in a new flashier form. The Gurgu Volcano that once housed Kary, Feind of Fire returns complete with a rehash of the original 8-bit music. Too bad they didn’t bring back the good spell names like Ice3 and Lit2 or even “XXXX”. It’s always great eradicating your foes with a hardcore porn spell. The Characters themselves are so so. There’s Garnet, her Tinman, Steiner, the Scarecrow, Vivi, the cowardly “What – the – fuck – is – that – stupid – thing – and – why – does – it – have – its – tongue – sticking – out – like – that?” Quina, the half naked Moogle girl Eiko, the Lord of the Dance herself, Freya, and of course the main character Zid-“I don’t use a big sword like my predecessors”-ain.

Of these charachters the most likable ones are oddly the ones that seem to have less to do with the plot. Steiner’s constant baffonish heroics get old after the 1000th time you see the same joke repeated; The whole thing with Vivi seems like it just sort of vanishes halfway through the game; Freya, what the heck is she there for? Oh right, classic Vengace. Then of course Quina. I have no idea whay this thing is in this game but personally it’s worse then the infamouse Cait Sith of FF7. I mean What the hell is up with this creature. All it does is eat, it looks very androgenous, it says dumb things, it looks stupid, it sucks in combat, and generally it’s useless. I don’t know what they were thinking when the designers decided to make Quina a party character instead of someone 100 time more interesting and useful like say, Beatrix. Oh wait, if they added Beatrix it would be like having two Steiners except one is a girl. You definitely don’t want two similar characters to choose from, I mean it’s not like they haven’t been making everyone identical for the last 4 games give or take.

Not that you could really use two identical characters in this. Another major drawback is unbalanced gameplay. This gets escpecially bad near the end of the game.Not since Chrono Trigger have I played a game up to the very last save point and given up on it for a year and a half or more out of enraged hatred.Basically ech character has thier own specialty, which means in battle at any given time with the most effecient all aound party, you’ll have 2 useless characters.An Optimized party being one that you’ll never end up with 0 useful characters. I mean you COULD put Zidain, Steiner, Freya, and Aramant all in one party, but then you’d have a hell of a time against anything strong tophysical attacks and you’ll never be able to easily heal. Not that you’ll really use Magic much for healing. Even a good ways intot he game chances are you will still be constantly short on Ethers ot retore MP and with the incredible high cost of Summoning by your healers, you’ll need to save everything you’ve got for those boss battles. The Black Mage Vivi was the only character I managed to get halfway self sufficient since he could not only heal but restore MP using Drain and Osmose.

So with it’s unbalanced game play and rehash plot line, FF9 manages to crap itself up pretty badly. I think I may have started out liking this game quite a bit but by the end It was just too much work to bother with. Unfortunately it seems Square hasn’t learned with FFX, which started out fantastically excellent and is slowly turning into a trudging shitfest of long boring pointless random encounters.

Review – Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)

Nov 28th, 2017

by Ramen Junkie.

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Playstation 1 – Squaresoft – 1 Player

Sometimes you play through a game, and for some reason you just know you’ve played a really good game. One good way to know that a game has got to be at least marginally good is if over the course of playing it your opinion of it completely changes. With little or no effort, you find a game you expected and did hate suddenly becomes something you enjoy playing. That is the case of Final Fantasy 8.

Before playing this game, as far as I could tell from what others were saying ti was crap. They got rid of long term things like MP. The chrachters look “realistic” insetad of like squatty SD people. The setting was very much modern and futuristic, even more so than FF7, and th eplot was supposed to be a sort of “Love Story”. In general, the whole thing changed a fair amount of long term aspects and it all seemed like a bad idea. I even went to the extend of making a running gag out of pretending the game didn’t exist on usenet.

So I finally just bought the game. I think my former employer had the game on it’s Buy One Get one sale at the time so I picked up FF8 and Coolboarders 3 (Crap). Even after playing for a good deal fo the game I really hated it. I hated the characters and constantly berated them through the game. Basically I had played all the FF games previous, and much of FF9 at the time, I figured it would be a good idea to get 8 out of the way. The characters were annoying at first, they would say and do idiotic things. Squall would blow everyone off and not care at all. They just generally seemed like a really dumb set of people. Somewhere along the plot that seemed to change. But then there had to be something to keep intrest up. That, is gameplay.

The gameplay is the strongest part of this game. For starters, the levels are pretty much unnessesary. They are still there, but the monsters level up with you. This means that if you want to run from every battle, you won’t end up getting slaughtered by the next boss you fight. In fact you can learn an ability that will disable random encounters all together. This does wonders to speed up the actual plot. I mean really, I can’t imagine anyone really plays an RPG for the chance to fight 1000s of enemies in a menu driven simulator. There are action games that are much better suited for killing baddies with more active control by the player. An RPG is something played for the story. There are still quite a few bosses to fight, but the end of th egame will be just as easy at level 7 as it is at level 100. You can still fight all those battles if you like though, I did, Squall is at level 100 (the max) and everyone else is in the mid 70s. Levels occur every 1000 exp.

So without levels, how are you supposed to become stronger? Well that is where the next gameplay aspect comes into play. You Junction magic to different stats. This requires a charcter to junction with a Guardian Force (GF, summon monster). Each GF allows a chrachter to junction a different stat, and each GF can learn new abilities as well (so you can junction to more stats, among other things). In battle and junctioned GF can be summoned at anytime assuming that GF still has HP remeaining. These usually do a lot fo big damage, however it’s better if you don’t rely on GFs a lot and rely more on Limits.

Limits, first created in FF7 return here again. if you’ve played FF9, they called this sort of effect a Trance and in FFX it’s called an Overdrive. Basically a Limit is a super powered specialty attack. Each charchter has thier own type of limit and the limits in FF8 are fairly interactive. Squall’s requires you to press the R trigger for real damage, Zell’s has the player inputting fighting game type moves, while Selphie uses the classic slot type attack seen in other FF games.The limits occur more often when HP is low, but unlike other FF games they don’t rely on the filling of a bar based on damage or anything. In fact the clincher is the spell Aura, which allows a charcter to Limit much more easily, even at full 9999 health. Generally it’s best to use Limits as a primary mode of attack witht he occasional summon thrown in. Due to junctioning Magic, you usually don’t want to use too much of it, but by the end of the game, basic spells like Thindaga and Firga aren’t used with the best junction combination, so cast all you want.

But what about the story, RPGs play for thier story not thier gameplay right? Of course. FF8 has a pretty decent story backing it. You control a group of teenagers raised by a military organization called SEED to be mercenaries. What starts out as a fairly routine mission ends up leading tot he destiney of SEED itself. Characters that start out annoying and childish grow over the story and become more mature and likeable. There is nice exposition during wonderful CG movies. The music in this game is top notch (Though I think I prefer FF7’s music really). I don’t really want to spoil the plot or anything too much. It is a sort of love story between the main charchetrs Squall and Rinoa. The others do take a backseat in chracterization to Squall and rinoa, but it is there.

So in otherwords, if you would like a great Console RPG, FF8 is a good choice. While it looses some of the “traditional RPG feel”, it makes up for it with some nice new innovations. If you like th enewer FFX you’ll surely like this game as they share a lot of similar aspects in terms of gameplay and story and look.