Monday, 20 August 2007

recent videogame purchases

Well, I went round a lot of 2nd hand shops and a car boot sale last week and came away with a load of cheap games. Here they are:







Yoyo's Puzzle Park is a strange little game, it's by irem (I was just playing R-Type Final too..) and is unusually named after the bad guy! It's very much in the style of old 2D single-screen platform arcade games such as Snow Bros and Bubble Bobble, and has these extraordinarily cute characters wandering round jumping on bombs to kill monsters, and saying "Nanoda!"

I, too, was going round saying "Nanoda!" for ages, afterwards.

Fighter Maker is a beat-em-up-construction-kit. It makes 3D fighter games to the level of... well, my brother thought Dead Or Alive (1) looking at the graphics, but then we agreed it was more Last Bronx when we looked at the game in motion.

Rox (which I suspect must be called that because of the Japanese number 6) is a puzzle game that makes NO SENSE at all if you try folowing the in-game instructions. It makes a bit more sense if you read the instruction manual, but by that time I wanted to try another game (nanoda?!). Watch some in-game footage and see if you can work out the pattern. Makes just as little sense in English as not being able to read Japanese. What you have to do is trap the same number of blocks in between matching numbers as is on the matching pair. e.g. you have [4][1][2][3][5][4] and they'll disappear. Or [3][5][4][1][3] and they'll disappear. does that make sense? Yes? No? It seemed too much of a brain-ache to be fun, to me.

Treasures Of The Deep is a game by Namco that gave away a free demo of Point Blank. But mine is missing that. Apparently it's a pretty good game, but I haven't tried it yet.

Last Battle is a Hokuto No Ken game for Megadrive, but has had all the Hokuto No Ken-ness removed from it, like many of the graphics, the names, the story, and the blood / exploding heads. I'm not sure which Hokuto No Ken game it was as there are so many of them, I picked it up because of the novelty value and because I felt a loss at not being able to play Fighting Mania. It could do with better collision detection.

Spider-man is actually "The Amazing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin", but it doesn't say it's that one.

Flashback is a classic platformer with really nice fluid animation for the main character, reminding me of Impossible Mission and the 1st Prince Of Persia game. Unfortunately, my copy just has a copyright notice and then I get a black screen. T_T Apparently Fade To Black is supposed to be the sequel, though. I guess my copy is ahead of itself, as fading to black is all it does! T_T

Revenge Of Shinobi is cool, that's why I got it. ^_^

The 3 Gameboy carts there are Magical Drop (GBC), Doraemon Kart 2, and the game with the torn label is Holy Magic Century. Although there's an RPG called Holy Magic Century for N64, this game for GB is quite obviously a rebranded clone of one of my all-time favourite arcade games: Mr. Do!, though it's not as good because the ball you throw doesn't bounce off walls, and you can't turn round immediately and fire when you need to. I got it for free, though, the lady at the stall I got it from just gave it to me as a gift when I asked if she knew what it was.

And finally, I got a cart of Sonic 2; during my mis-spent days at university I played the Sonic games a lot with a close friend of mine, using a rom on a megadrive emulator called Genecyst. It was always graphically glitchy on the levels containing liquids, and that was annoying. I have this game as part of a few compilations for later consoles, but I wanted a copy for the actual Megadrive now I own one of my own.