Games Beaten 2015

by **BogusMeatFactory** Fri Oct 02, 2015 11:50 pm

This makes me happy. At least you understood why you didn't like something. I agree and applaud you for your diligence. Bravo good sir!

by **MrPopo** Fri Oct 02, 2015 11:53 pm

The sad thing is that there's so much that could have gone well in the game. It wasn't just a utter trainwreck; there was a lot that if it had been handled better could have made for a compelling game.

by **BogusMeatFactory** Fri Oct 02, 2015 11:56 pm

Doesn't that make it even more frustrating and less enjoyable when you could see exactly what went wrong. It used tedium in the worst way possible, which was common in that era.

This isn't an argument in game design like fps health bars versus health regeneration, this is more about making design decisions that bore and frustrate.

by **MrPopo** Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:46 pm

First 50:

51. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne - PC
52. Starflight - PC
53. Skies of Arcadia - Dreamcast
54. Aliens versus Predator Classic 2000 - PC
55. Super Star Wars - SNES
56. Shadowrun: Hong Kong - PC
57. Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel - PC
58. The Catacomb - PC
59. Azure Striker Gunvolt - 3DS
60. Mighty Gunvolt - 3DS
61. Catacomb Abyss - PC
62. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - PC
63. Strike Suit Zero - Director's Cut - PC
64. Wolfenstein 3D Spear of Destiny - PC
65. StarCraft - PC
66. Metal Storm - NES
67. Septerra Core - PC
68. Metal Warriors - SNES

Woo! Another quality game down that really makes you feel accomplished when you beat it. Metal Warriors is a mech game by LucasArts that plays similarly to Cybernator, although it has a lot of features that differentiate it. And it's all kinds of awesome.

The first thing you'll notice in game is that it has some really awesome looking cutscenes between missions. Someone took the time to make a youtube compilation of them, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elH2pZBOhD8

Like Cybernator, you pilot a mech through several missions with a variety of goals (though they all come down to either get to the end or blow something up). Your gun can be aimed with d-pad up and down and you have both melee and ranged attacks (melee does more damage). The big differentiator is that there are six different mechs to pilot in this game.

The main mech you will pilot is the Nitro. It has jetpack flight, a beam saber, a shield, and the ability to deploy a temporary shield in midair which can be useful due to being able to shoot through it. The Havok is the premier enemy mech and plays closest to Cybernator; you get a dash, jump boots instead of flight, a larger shield than Nitro, and a whip chain. The main gun also does not fire perfectly straight, which is usually an advantage (can sometimes hit enemies when they can't hit you). It's usually a toss up between which is better in a situation, the Nitro or the Havok.

The other four mechs are more specialty mechs. The first is the Promethius, which is an artillery piece. It's main gun is a solid projectile that flies until you release the fire button, then explodes into a starburst with a long range. The main shell does a ton of damage. It can release aerial mines that float above you that do a surprising amount of damage, it has a flamethrower, and a full body shield. It cannot jump; instead the jump button will spawn a platform in front of you. Levels with the Promethius tend to have a lot of elevators available, though your route can become circuitous as a result. The Promethius takes some getting used to but its raw power is awesome.

The Ballistic is one of the weirder mechs. It moves around in ball form and cannot fire in this mode. It can also do a spindash forward that does a bit of damage. When deployed it can fire a standard shot or charge up for a large plasma shot that can do a lot of damage. It's good for certain areas where you just want to get through fast, but if there's a lot of enemies it falls short. The Spider's claim to fame is the ability to walk on walls and ceilings. The control is a bit hard because the controls are relative to the cockpit, so as you rotate along walls and ceilings the controls do as well. It has a ranged web shield that flies out as long as you hold it to a max range and then deploys, blocking all enemy fire while it's up. Finally, the Drache is a pure flying mech; simply point the d-pad in a direction and it goes that way. The four face buttons aim your guns in that direction like you're playing a twin stick shooter. It also has a dive bomb attack that can one shot many things.

In addition there are a variety of temporary powerups that can be acquired and used in your backpack slot. These include missiles, grenades, gravity inversion, and speed boosts, along with shot powerups. Some of these are in fixed locations while other item boxes spawn random items. Sometimes you'll get exactly what you need and other times you get let down (usually by getting grenades).

Another thing that differentiates the game from Cybernator is the fact that you can get out of your mech mid mission. While on foot most enemies shut down (with the notable exception of the Havok and a late-game ceiling beam turret that will one shot you) and you can squeeze into tight corridors. There are many terminals you can activate while on foot to open doors throughout the levels; some are mandatory while others are to bonuses. While on foot you are equipped with a pistol and a jetpack, and you sometimes need to kill enemy foot soldiers. You can also jump into unoccupied enemy mechs while on foot, and that's how you experience most of the mechs available (you only ever start with Nitro or Promethius on one mission). Be careful though; enemies can jump into unoccupied Nitros and Havoks as well, though fortunately they can't operate the more interesting mechs (which is probably a safety feature due to many of them being mission critical to proceed).

Finally, rather than a health bar the game displays damage by the condition of your sprite. You start out a vibrant red and eventually turn into a dull purple, with progressive levels of looking beat up. When you're nearly dead you can even lose access to secondary features or even your primary weapon. There are health packs in the game, so it can be worth retreating in a near dead mech to heal up.

The game consists of 9 missions of varying difficulties. Things start to ramp up in mission 3, mission 4 is more annoying as you can consistently beat it once you realize what the failure condition is, but starting with mission 5 things heat up. Mission 6 is a three part mission to infiltrate a facility, steal the Drache, and escape. Mission 7 is a two parter that consists of getting to a target and defeating a trio of bosses. Mission 8 is the so-called secret mission where you must infiltrate a facility and steal codes. However, the condition for getting to it is supposedly never dying up to that point, but I get to it every time no matter how much I die. Mission 9 is the final mission and is another two parter. The first part is breaking into the enemy HQ and the second part is navigating through it to the final boss. After beating the final boss you have to race the pilot out of the facility to the last remaining Nitro to escape before it goes kablooey.

The game makes great use of giving players freedom to take multiple paths through levels and swap across mechs. Cybernator ends up feeling much more straightforward in comparison. The game also has some solid music. I highly recommend it, though I believe it's become expensive as fuck.

by **Key-Glyph** Sun Oct 04, 2015 3:41 pm

1. Pokémon SoulSilver (DS)
2. Sushi Academy (DS)
3. Alcahest (SFC)
4. Comix Zone (GEN)
5. Lost Vikings (GEN)
6. Beautiful Katamari (360)
7. Toejam & Earl (GEN)*
8. Final Fantasy Legend III (GB)
9. Toejam & Earl [2-player] (GEN)*
10. Mass Effect 1 (360)*
11. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (N64)
12. Pokémon Diamond (DS)
13. Donkey Kong Country (SNES) -- Summer Games Challenge!
14. Earthworm Jim (GEN) -- Summer Games Challenge!
15. Phantasy Star III (GEN) -- Summer Games Challenge!
16. Super Mario Bros. (NES) -- Summer Games Challenge!
17. Metroid (NES) -- Summer Games Challenge!
18. Ranger X (GEN)

19. Paperboy (GEN)

Ah, now here's a white whale I've been meaning to properly beat for at least a decade.

My family never owned Paperboy for the NES, but we borrowed it more than once. I have almost no memory of a time when local stores stocked NES games for rent, but the one thing I do remember is the intense feeling of joy that resulted from actually persuading my older brother to pick Paperboy as his rental title one weekend. My affection for this game was srs bsns.

And this is why, sometime in mid-to-late nineties, I saw the Sega version of Paperboy on clearance in Toys R' Us and thought, "WOW! Paperboy! For only a few bucks! And it's on the Genesis so that means it has to be even better hahahaha!" As a Sega devotee I felt like I'd won some kind of small but respectable lottery.

Well, right off the bat I thought the game felt a little funny. I kept running into obstacles I thought I'd cleared, or running into obstacles that didn't seem to exist. I couldn't exactly tell what part of my character was the hitbox, and the controls -- especially when angling from side to side -- felt clunky and strange. Trying to slam on the breaks and winding up unexpectedly veering into something was a common problem. I played the heck out of the game because it was still fun in its way, but it didn't have the charm I remembered from the Nintendo version. I also believed I'd never be able to clear it on anything but the easiest settings, and in the end I'm honestly not sure I ever cleared it at all.

To be fair, it had definitely been a while since I'd played the NES port when I first picked up this Genesis version (and it's been even longer now). It's possible that the NES game possesses the same issues too, but that I'd been too young when I was playing it to really notice or care. What matters, though, is that I finally decided to pick up my Genny copy again and managed to clear each of the three levels on Normal difficulty. The only thing that the difficulty setting changes is the point number at which you earn an extra life.

What I've learned from my Paperboy experience is something I've always suspected: I greatly prefer games that rely more on player improvisation than straight memorization. So many crashes in Paperboy were due to my forgetting that the game had hidden an enemy behind another enemy after a certain day of the week, or that seemingly parked cars would start pulling forward on certain days and then back up on later ones. If you forget these details, basically nothing will save you. When I was a kid I would never have committed to this kind of direct memorization... which is probably why I never beat Paperboy until now.

The controls still handled weirdly, however. I'm really curious to compare it to the NES version sometime in the future.

* = replay

by **Exhuminator** Tue Oct 06, 2015 9:24 am

I am up to 57 games completed so far this year. Here's the up to date list:

by **prfsnl_gmr** Tue Oct 06, 2015 10:30 am

He's back! Good to hear from you again, Exhuminator.

I also saw that you beat some of the Lone Wolf games. I obtained an R4 from my Racketboy Secret Santa this year, and the Nintendo DS versions of those games were th e first games I placed on my R4. I was looking forward to playing them, and I am even more excited about them based on your reviews.

by **MrPopo** Tue Oct 06, 2015 11:21 am

prfsnl_gmr wrote:He's back! Good to hear from you again, Exhuminator.

I also saw that you beat some of the Lone Wolf games. I obtained an R4 from my Racketboy Secret Santa this year, and the Nintendo DS versions of those games were th e first games I placed on my R4. I was looking forward to playing them, and I am even more excited about them based on your reviews.

You beat me to the "he's not dead!" post.

by **Exhuminator** Tue Oct 06, 2015 11:38 am

Ha ha, no I wasn't dead. I was mainly busy with my dayjob being extraordinarily demanding in the past two months. As well as developing my own PC game. (If the link in my sig actually works, anyone who wants to play said game can do so as it's free.) I'm back for now to stink up the place again.

@prfsnl_gmr

The Lone Wolf game books really do hold up well. I played them using this free Android port:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... blio&hl=en

IIRC that version lets you play the first 12 games in the series.

I've also been mildly addicted to Tin Man Games' renditions of the Fighting Fantasy series on Android. Stellar stuff. (Though a tad overpriced.)

by **Ack** Tue Oct 06, 2015 11:40 am

Exhuminator wrote:(If the link in my sig actually works, anyone who wants to play said game can do so as it's free.)

I am currently unable to download the game since I am at work, but I want you to know that the link does work. Also, I appreciate you offering proof that your game is virus free.

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