Reviews

Review – Dance Dance Revolution (PC)

Dance Dance Revolution
PC (Konami)

2 Players

Here’s a little artifact that is probably fairly obscure. There was an official DDR game released for PC a while back. Except it was an exclusive product for a chain of stores not in my area (Fry’s) and to an online store I never shop at (outpost.com). And at only $10 it’s certainly cheaper than the Playstation alternatives. On the other hand it has to compete with free programs such as Stepmania. So how well does this game step up to the challenge? Not very well I’m afraid.

I guess I’ll get the positive aspects out of the way first this time, there’s really only one. The backgrounds are nice. The chance to play this game with moving animated backgrounds and the 3D dancers is a nice change of pace from the static images of Stepmania. However there isn’t really too much variety in the background movies. There are a ton of characters to chose from though. The game includes I believe 16 characters to start with, plus 8 to unlock, and another 24 that can be downloaded. That’s a lot of dancers. Once again, on the down side, the 3D models used are getting pretty dated and don’t look like they’ve been updated since they were first introduced to the series. Also there was supposed to be a 35th downloadable character but I don’t know where it would fit in the list unless there are only 7 unlockables.

Now the bad. This game is buggy as all hell. It’s a very poor port of who knows what. Other than the bugs the game reeks of laziness in general. For example, the song selection screen just breaks the songs into “Group 1”, “Group 2”, etc; No fancy classifications like in Konamix. Also all of the songs are available from the start, instead you unlock new dancers. It took me no time at all to complete all the songs on Heavy with a B or better. Yeah, only B. This game also uses the old style of scoring, anything less than a Full Combo will get you a B. Now this wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t for the numerous game freezes.

I have a pretty good machine, it runs 3D games and software very well, it runs Stepmania beautifully, but this game runs like shit on it. I don’t think I ever have a song where at one point the arrows just stop moving while the song continues. Sometimes I can keep the rhythm pretty well and keep things up but in a game completely dependant on timing and non-freezing gameplay, this is pretty inexcusable. Also I’ve found the first time I load the game each play, the first song will have no music. The whole game is about the music here people, this is a pretty important issue. Also timing in general is pretty flaky. Songs that I easily AA in Stepmania, (My Summer Love, Era) I can’t even A on this game.

Something else of note, the steps for End of the Century on Heavy are off. Like 3 or 4 beats off, it’s REALLY noticible and I’ve tried the song several times on different days so it wasn’t just a fluke or anything. Many of the other bugs seem like they may have been repairable had the game instealled the music to the Hard Drive instead of reading it from the CD (like it seems to do), but these completely wrong steps are just ridiculous. I guess compleyel wrong steps is too strong, they are there, just off their mark. Did anyone play test this at all?

There is also a noticeable lack of features, and songs. This game has 40 songs (see below), most pretty unremarkable bottom of the barrel stuff. Also there isn’t too much in the way of modifiers, only Little, Turn, and Hidden.

Anyway, in conclusion, even if you really want to show your support to Konami by buying this game, don’t. Don’t support this buggy shit software, if you want an official DDR pick up DDR Max on PS2, no PS2? Try Konamix on PS1, the frame rates suck but it’s still decent. If you can’t afford the Playstation versions and still want a home DDR experience just download Stepmania and get all the free songs you want. Just please don’t support this buggy horrible piece of software.

Song List:

Midnite Blaze
Share My Love
Let the beat hit em!
MY SUMMER LOVE
MAKE IT BETTER SO-REAL MIX
MAKE A JAM!,
B4U
BABY BABY
GIMME YOUR LOVE
Don’t Stop! AMD 2nd MIX
Era Nostalmix
Make Your Move,
Orion.78 Ameuro-MIX
WILD RUSH
CELEBRATE NITE
HIGHER
CUTIE CHASER,
Groove,
DEAD END
END OF THE CENTURY
Silent Hill
AFRONOVA
PARANOiA KCET Clean mix
KEEP ON MOVIN’
LOVE THIS FEELIN’
LET THEM MOVE
TRIP MACHINE
AM-3P
BRILLIANT2U Orchestra-Groove
PUT YOUR FAITH IN ME
PUT YOUR FAITH IN ME Jazzy Groove
MAKE IT BETTER
La Senorita
PARANOiA
DYNAMITE RAVE,
BRLLIANT2U
I Was The One
Never let you down
Get me in your sight AMD CANCUN MIX
STILL IN MY HEART
Remember You

Review – Back to the Future (NES)

Feb 27th, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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Ok, let’s cut to the chase, this game sucks.

I have long pushed this game as the worst game I have ever played, though I’m not so sure about that anymore. Back to the Future is was a pretty bad ass awesome film, even back when it was new when this game came out. You’d think that some of that would translate to the game on SOME level but it didn’t. It’s essentially a bastardized version of Skate Or Die that has almost zero to do with Back to the Future.

So admittedly, the expectations of what makes a video game was somewhat different back in the days of the NES. There weren’t highly detailed cinematics and for the most part, gameplay was pretty straight forward and unvarying for most games once it got rolling. The whole idea of the stages mixed with mini games presented here is actually pretty dynamic and an interesting idea. If only it didn’t feel so divided from the plot of the movie it’s based on.

Marty traverse across Hill Valley battling foes straight out of the film such as giant killer bees, and guys with panes of glass and armies of bullies. He fends them off with his trusty bowling ball. I’m not sure there were ever any bowling balls in any of the movies even as background items. But then yeah, it’s an 80s video games, so some liberties with the plot are probably needed. There really isn’t a genre of game that would really work for a Back to the Future Game. Most people just want to drive the Delorean, which these days is best accomplished with a GTA Mod.

The real killer on this game, has to be the excruciating difficulty. A lot of old school NES games are pretty difficult. Blaster Master, Ninja Gaiden, these are all pretty tough games which require some skill to beat. Completed Back to the Future takes a miracle. The first issue is the dual timers. Each stage has a timer, this isn’t too bad, it keeps the player from lollygagging through the stage and encourages being reactive. The game also has a second timer in the form of the fading photograph. The photograph lasts between stages but is refilled by these little clocks. The issue is that these two mechanisms often work completely against each other. Picking up enough clocks to keep the photo alive will often result in the stage timer running out.

There is also the whole deal of powering up to the Skateboard. Marty starts out on foot but can pick up a much faster skateboard. Losing the board is pretty much a guaranteed loss vs the timer.

If you can manage to keep your skateboard and beat the timer, you get to face off against some ridiculously tough mini game “boss” stages. Throwing beers at bullies or catching kisses and musical notes.

The icing on the cake in this excruciating run is the music. The exact same 30 second crap repeats endlessly from more or less the moment you turn on the console to the moment the game ends. It’s like Chinese Water torture for video games.

The whole package is just one big terrible mess. Probably the only reason I played it as much as I had was that at the time I owned something like 5 NES titles. It’s a pretty crappy game, but it’s still one I remember very well for this very reason.

Review – Eufloria (PC)

Feb 13th, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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Most real time strategy games involve military conflict of some sort. It’s part of the genre really, one military force against another, at war, requiring the player to take strategic command. Eufloria does an interesting job of almost breaking this mold. Technically it’s still centering around a conflict, though instead of tanks and soldiers you fight with plant seeds.

The conflict is certainly more peaceful when it involves plants. The light graphics and airy music and sound effects make this a fairly relaxing and serine experience to play.

The object is to control a region of planetoids before the opponent destroys your forces. In order to control a planet you will have to sacrifice some of your seedlings to plant new trees, the trees will in turn spawn more seedlings over time. Most of the trees will anyway, there are also defensive trees which will instead provide protection from enemy forces. The planets themselves have different energy levels as well and will spawn faster or stronger seedlings depending on the planet’s attributes.

In the early stages it is fairly easy but over time the enemy colonies become more aggressive and will have better defenses. The real key to combat is advantages in numbers, which means owning more planets. Unfortunately, this is where the game play starts to fall apart. Later stages become quickly and easily overwhelming, especially as the enemy starts deploying the large flower pods which can easily wipe out even a large army of seedlings with little to no effort. Much of the play time involved is essentially just sitting and waiting for more seedlings to spawn. When one of the notes in the update is “Updated the gameplay to be faster-paced and more interesting, with more strategic balance” you’ve got issues. Thankfully they put some effort into correcting it. Even so there is a LOT of “sit and wait” gameplay here, especially when you start facing defensive trees which will require large numbers of seed pods to overcome them.

Another minor issues I’ve had, the game doesn’t seem to always record progress made properly. This admittedly may have been an error on my part though it was a bit frustrating when I found I had to replay the first ten or so levels after I’d already completed them.

Generally the game is a fun departure from the traditional strategy game. The design is simple though definitely more complex than it seems on the surface. It is hindered somewhat buy it’s slowish pacing but it’s still a pretty enjoyable experience. My recommendation however would still be to look for it on some sort of sale as the base price of $15 is a little high for what you get

Review – Bionic Commando (NES)

Feb 3rd, 2018

by Ramen Junkie.

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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 – 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.