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Was it really that bad? I beat it many times on NES back in the day.

Sarge wrote:Was it really that bad? I beat it many times on NES back in the day.

Gold Batboon casts Defeat.

Ha, yeah, I remember those guys now. Usually, if it was a big group of them, I'd just run and hope it worked. I eventually got a strategy down to take them out quickly, but there was always that chance for a total party wipe.

My strategy for the last area? Run from everything, know the route, conserve as much juice as possible for the last battle. I could probably get through 50% of the time.

So okay, yeah, it was probably tougher than I'm letting on.

Yeah, the end is basically just rolling the dice a bunch of times to make it through, and being willing to die after defeating each of the sub bosses (but don't save when you respawn). And then hoping the final boss doesn't spam Healall.

1. Ultimate NES Remix (3DS)
2. Space Invaders Infinity Gene (iOS)
3. World of Goo (iOS)
4. A Dark Room (iOS)
5. Shovel Knight (WII U)
6. The Room (iOS)
7. Mega Man 10 (PS3)
8. The Room Two (iOS)
9. Braid (PS3)
10. Kung Fu Fight! (WII U)
11. Kung Fu Rabbit (WII U)

Kung Fu Rabbit is a pretty basic "die and retry" platformer with consistent art direction and, with the exception of a difficulty spike when you unlock the "hardcore rabbit" mode, a steadily increasing challenge. I enjoyed it, and since I only paid $2 for it, I certainly got my money's worth out of it. Moreover, it is a fantastic example of the right way to port a F2P mobile game to a home console. There is not a lot of variety, however, I would be hard-pressed to recommend it at its normal, $5 pricepoint.

Forlorn Drifter wrote:1. Cubivore-GCN
2. Deadly Premonition:The Director's Cut-PS3

3. Bioshock: Infinite
4. Bioshcok: Infinite: Burial at Sea ep. 1

Loved this one, though I wasn't the biggest fan of swapping to a two gun system rather than having all the guns at once. Burial at Sea fixed that though. The story was... phew, out there. But then again, I liked it.

1/22 Emily Is Away (PC)
1/29 Dishonored Definitive Edition (XB1)
1/31 Rise of the Tomb Raider - Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch (XB1)

Games Beaten = 2
DLC = 2

2/2 Dishonored - The Knife of Dunwall (XB1)
This is the first part of a two part story arc involving an assassin named Daud. His story takes place parallel to the main game and I feel that so far it is more engaging in it's tale. I like that Daud is a voiced character (played by Michael Madsen) and not the silent protaganist of the first game. I've always felt that was a detriment to most games that use it, so the DLC was already off on the right foot for me.

You have similar abilities to the main game, you can teleport, the swarm of rats is replaced by a call assassin power. They had a stun grenade which wasn't in the main game as well as an arc mine, which seems particularly deadly. I played through "low chaos" again and disabled rather than assassinated my contracts. This first half is three very large levels and was a great start to the adjunct story.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood (DS)

A great RPG from Bioware, in a very unusual choice of license. As a casual Sonic fan and an RPG fan, this impressed on both accounts.

The writing is really great for having been done by Bioware in terms of how it feels like it's from Sonic. As someone who loved Sonic Adventure 2, these characters felt like they jumped right out of that game into this one, and the numerous references to Sonic Battle were appreciated, as someone who likes that game too. In terms of mechanics, taking a page from the Mario & Luigi games, you do mini-games to execute your special moves, but instead of timed button presses, they're more like something out of Osu/Elite Beat Agents, which is actually really fun. Additinoally, you also dodge enemy special moves this way, which leads to my next paragraph.

In terms of flaws, the difficulty is really weird. Because the developers realized dodging enemy special attacks is basically 100% if you're good at the tapping games, enemies get really strong normal attacks, which in about chapter 3 you can start getting people 1-round killed by, when there's virtually nothing you could've done about it. Also, stats being explained a bit better would've helped a lot. Every character gets so many attacks per round, but their number is (with the exception of one special buff Tails can do) are totally set in stone. Sonic and Shadow have 3 attacks per round as soon as you get them, and they always will, while characters like Big and Cream only get 1 and are stuck like that. Granted that is built into the design, it'd be nice if they let you power-game it, considering there IS a stat called 'speed.' Other peeves with the design is that being able to assign an action to a specific turn in a round would be nice, as well as being able to go back to undo the last thing you told someone to do, instead of having to rewrite the whole round's commands to do so.

Overall, despite how long that flaws paragraph is, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone who likes quirky JRPG's and/or Sonic.

Time for another update. At least it's less than 5 games this time

1. Ys Book II: Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter PSN Vita
2. 3D Streets of Rage 2 3DS eShop
3. 3D Gunstar Heroes 3DS eShop
4. 3D Sonic the Hedgehog 2 3DS eShop
5. 3D OutRun 3DS eShop
6. Mugen Senshi Valis II: The Fantasm Soldier PCE CD
7. Mugen Senshi Valis III: The Fantasm Soldier PCE CD
8. Bomberman PCE CD
9. Rocket Knight Adventures Mega Drive
10. Trax Game Boy
11. Panic Bomber Virtual Boy
12. Arcana Heart 3: Love MAX!!!!! Vita *NEW*
13. Super Monkey Ball Gamecube *NEW*
14. Lost Kingdoms Gamecube *NEW*

Arcana Heart 3: Love MAX!!!!!


Arcana Heart 3 is a fighting game for Vita (and some other platforms too) which features an all-gril cast who kick each others ass for some reason or another. The games major feature comes from it's Arcana system, where you can choose an Arcana to take into battle with you. Different Arcanas offer different benefits, aswell as a selection unique moves, allowing you to choose Arcanas to compliment a characters fighting style, or to try and patch up the character's weak points.

The cast of Arcana heart is varied and interesting, with lots of quirky and unique character designs, including a character who swims inside what seems to be a giant slime, a character who fights with a sketch she drew, a character piloting a massive robot and more. This offers a wide range of interesting fighting styles, but a lot of them have quite a learning curve. I beat the game as the rollerskating demon girl as her super fast aggresive style fits how I tend to play fighting games. I'm sure 'not well' is another way of putting that.

Anyhow, I did use credits for this. The final boss of the game, a giant mech thing with 5 crystals you need to smash and who has several bullet hell style attacks, is infamous for being super difficult, but I actually hd very few problems with him. However, the fight directly before him cause me an absolute ton of trouble.

Arcana Heart is very well animated and looks gorgeous, although I wish they had taken advantage of the widescreen format more. There's no reason to keep to 4:3 resolution that I can see. The sound was decent enough. I'd love to talk more in-depth about the mechanics, but frankly, I don't play enough fighting games to go too in-depth. There are all manners of air dodges, break moves and other considerations here that I'm sure would interest fighting fans, but most of it gets some fairly sparse use from me, and without a human player to play against the advantage of some manouevres is lost I'm sure.

Arcana Heart 3 is a fun enough fighter. It's a bit complex to just dive into for a fighting game amateur like myself, but it's still fast paced and quirky enough that I can still have fun. It's worth a purchase.

Super Monkey Ball


Super Monkey Ball is a arcadey ball rolling game for Gamecube. In it, you must steer your Monkey buddy, entrapped in a hamster ball, into the goal on each stage. You do this by tilting the stage with the control stick, making the ball roll. Although it starts off easy, Monkey Ball ramps up difficulty to some pretty ridiculous degrees.

For the purposes of this list, I count beating Monkey Ball on Advanced difficulty (read 'Normal') as beaten. I also beat it on Beginner mode too, but I'm a long way from finishing Expert. It's nice that each difficulty has a unique set of courses though, and they aren't just longer versions of the lower difficulties.

As a kid, I rented Monkey Ball for a weekend, and couldn't for the life of me clear stage 15 on Advanced. This time round I found I didn't actually have much difficulty there, or for most of Advanced mode either. I guess I've improved since I was 13! The last stage of Advanced mode was my one big sticking point - I had to go to practice and develop a strategy for that one.

In addition to the main game, Monkey Ball has several mini games to enjoy too - Monkey Fight is a simplistic but fun mini-game where you must use a boxing glove on a spring to knock opponents of the platform for points. Monkey Race does what it says on the tin. Monkey Target is the best of the 3 party games by far, and involves you shooting off a ramp, flying to a target and trying to land on it for points. There's lots of finesse needed to pull of the higher scores, and I still lack a lot of it.

There are some additional mini games that can be unlocked with points too - Bowling, Golf and Billiards. These are basically just versions of those games but with a Monkey in the ball, so you see it from a much closer perspective. They all work well though, and are fun to play.

Super Monkey Ball is an excellent little package, and huge fun in multiplayer. The single player is pretty fun too, but can mega frustrating on harder levels, like trying to thread a needle. For the insanely low prices it commands, it's a must have for the Gamecube and should be in everyones collection. It's kind of odd that it took so long to join mine to be honest!

Lost Kingdoms:


Lost Kingdoms is an action RPG for Gamecube where you summon monsters from cards to fight. It was developed by From Software, of The Adventures of Cookies and Cream fame. Oh, and they developed Dark Souls I guess? Like anyone cares about that. Also some King's Field games, but literally no-one plays those

Cards come in several varieties - weapon cards deal a quick direct attack, and can often be used more than once. Independent cards summon a creature who moves around the battlefield independently and attacks/support/does whatever it does. Summon cards make a monster appear and do one big attack or support magic before burning up. These are generally better for dealing with crowds compared to weapon cards. All cards come in one of 5 elements, which have a chain of weakness and resistances. Fire beats wood beats earth beats water beats fire, with the 5th element neutral cards having no advantages or disadvantages against other elements.

Lost Kingdoms plays out in a more linear fashion than it's sequel. Whilst both games are split into fairly linear levels, once a level is beaten in 1 it can't be replayed until the post game, whilst 2 lets you go back and forth at will. In addition, 1 feature semi-random encounters (they're fixed to specific map points) which lock you into a battle until you win whereas the second game has all the monster freely roaming the map. Overall, the 2nd game improved on the first in a lot of ways, but that doesn't mean the first is bad - far from it! It's a ton of fun and it feels very focussed.

One thing that seems fairly clear when playing the game is that it probably had a low budget for development. The music is quite nice, but nothing amazing is in there. Graphics though, are pretty poor, even for an early Gamecube title. They look a bit like a late era N64 game, or a very early and kinda rough Dreamcast title. Textures are pretty low quality and monsters have low polygon counts. None of this stops the game being hugely enjoyable though.

The game has some flaws - running out of cards is a pain in the ass, and means you have to be careful with deck building for a long time. The way the game deals with random battles emphasises the issues - because you can't run when you're running low on cards, running out on a boss fight is far more common than you might like, especially early in the game when means of restoring cards is low. In addition, if you don't want to use a card and discard it, it's unavailable until that battle is over, even when you run out of other cards, which is really dumb. In the second game, unused cards just loop to the bottom of the deck.

There are also a few areas where the game just feels a little cheap, with enviroments that slow you down and make dodging enemy attacks pretty much impossible. This is irritating as taking damage will drop your level ranking, which is used to recieve more cards at the end of a match, increasing your odds of getting the boss card which is often rare and powerful.

Anyhow, despite it's issues, I really love Lost Kingdoms. The second game is better, but comes with it's own flaws which are different to this game's. I beat it when I borrowed it from a friend as a teenager, but this is the first time I've owned it myself, and I finished it whilst obtaining all cards and all fairies in the game. Lost Kingdoms is another dirt cheap Gamecube game that should be in everyone's collection, because a game this good, this unique and this fun for that price shouldn't be missed.

alienjesus wrote:Also some King's Field games, but literally no-one plays those

alienjesus wrote:Lost Kingdoms is another dirt cheap Gamecube game that should be in everyone's collection, because a game this good, this unique and this fun for that price shouldn't be missed.

Totally agree with this statement. I beat it myself not too long ago and had a great time with it. Very entertaining dungeon crawl/CCG hybrid.