So yes, as announced after the huge (and in retrospect, highly predictable) backlash the original design shown in the first trailer, they scrapped that eldritch thing, and came back today with a new trailer, which shows some new scenes, and a new redesigned Sonic that’s a fuckton more pleasing to look at.
As i said before, i was kinda against this, for two reasons. Continua a leggere “About that redesigned Sonic The Hedgehog…”
While it isn’t very popular in the U.S. (or anywhere outside Europe, i guess), the Asterix & Obelix comic series its fondly remembered here in Italy, and it’s definitely one of the best things to come out of the “Italy VS France” senseless rivarly, as it focuses on a small Gaul village resisting the Roman Empire conquest with the titular heroes and a magic potion of superstrenght.
Many adaptations were made, as animated and live-action movies (the last one came out in 2018), and of course, videogames, from Atari 2600 onwards, and since 2019 marks the 60th anniversary of the series (i guess this the reason), we got a remastered port of 2006 Asterix & Obelix XXL 2: Mission Las Vegum, with an upcoming third game.
And in 2016, Namco Bandai released… this for smarthphones.
I stalled talking about it because there’s really nothing to say. You’ve played any of those Facebook/browser games where you run a farm or something? You’ve played this. You click on things to get resources, you use them to build facilities in the village, you collect characters to stack as fighting fodder in the mindless battles (represented as classic cartoon “scuffle clouds”), use said resources to power them, and fend off the always encroaching roman assaults, which keep happening even if you’re not playing.
Because the timed events, the trifecta of currencies, daily log-in bonuses aren’t enough, let’s really force the hand of “retention” upon the players, either you play this forever every day or fuck you with a rusty menhir. No middle ground.
And to do that you mostly wait out timers or cough up the green, with aggressive in-game ads to boot. At the very least the cartoony graphic style is in tone with the works of Renè Goscinny (RIP) and Albert Udenzo.
Go read those, instead, i highly recommend it!
I do know i wasn’t expecting much when i picked this up on sale for like a buck and seventy cents.
I mean, if you see what other titles Enjoy Up Games publishes, you really won’t expect much from a single pinball table. Yeah, instead of the Pinball Fx/Pinball Arcade/Zen Pinball business model of a free client from where to try, see and get what table you like from their selection, Enjoy Up Games just sold the table for cheap as stand alone download.
Which it’s odd and makes me feel like i’m pickin on a small child, but i don’t feel that bad because this rotten kid is hurling obscenities and throwing shit at me because i dared to exist there and then.
Budget game, yeah, but i expect some competence from a modern release. Jurassic Pinball instead does even less than old compilation on GBA or PS2 did, not bothering to even have a small info section on the missions, the criteria to win or activate them. Just play and aim at the blinky things, eventually you’ll trigger a mission, in most cases by pure chance, because the physics are dung.
Balls either move up at absurd speed giving you no time to use the crap tilt function, or just suddendly lose all momentum in the very middle of the table, because they feel like it. I’ve played old pinball games that require you to get used to the physics, but even old Game Boy pinball games give you a better sense of control, here you always feel in the sclerotic manos of fate.
So, in a way, it won’t matter than the mission are very pedestrian and random, and that there’s literally nothing besides leaderboards. Not even a two player mode.
Don’t bother. Not even on sale.
Yeah, time to reach for some low hanging fruit. If you were born in the 90s, you probably saw or remember this TMNT rip-off from you childhood.
Not that it’s worth remembering.
Then again, you probably didn’t know (or care to know) about this smartphone game, which i stumbled upon when browsing for other stuff in the bowels of the App Store.
Of course it’s a crappy endless runner. Functional, yes, but so bad it doesn’t feel like you’re moving through space in a bike, more like you’re a toy with magnets moved around a crap plastic city by a bored child. It looks like ass, unfinished, and is so cheap it reuses badly cropped images from the old cartoon, because who cares.
This one is so fuckin pathetic it won’t even try to coerce you into using premium currency to retry a level or continue, it knows it’s dung to the max. The game being so shit it pratically begs you to keep playing would be laughable enough for a cheap ass license videogame that exists to mine some some cash from desperate, naive souls.
But i just lost it when i arrived at the first boss, and got stuck in a loop, able to continue from a checkpoint, but since the ammo isn’t recharged when you continue, i kept inevitably smashing into enemies i couldn’t kill. I was gonna quit and end it there, but i kept trying and somehow the game decided to skip me to the boss, which managed to “kill” me with oil puddles… which just didn’t appear, if not for a fraction of a second when hit.
Then i somehow managed to fail the mission entirely, which required me to replay the stage from scratch.
Disinstalled into the void from which it came.
The story of Demon’s Crystals (related in half-assed text scrolls at the very beginning and end) is some evil monsters arrived and changed everyone into monsters, strange since you control half-dragon half human characters, but whatever, kill them all and reclaim your crystals back using magical guns, because it’s a twin stick shooter.
The hordes making up a stage will require you to collect a set number of crystals, kill a set number of enemies, or do both under the time limit, but besides that, it’s very typical of the genre. You get a good array of power ups with time limited usage, a very simple level up system (which makes you take and dish more damage) but there’s not loadout or any sort of customization or depth,
It would be a decent game of this genre, more on the “budget” side (not helped by the “halloween store” aesthetic), simple but fun, with a decent difficulty curve. Shame that the camera is a weird – and bad – compromise between isometric and “bird’s eye”, and in heated moments it becomes hard to tell which are your bullet or the enemy’s (when they don’t get accidentally camouflaged by the level), if you manage to see them coming at all, who knows what specific part of the stage will bother to block them.
This is especially noticeable during the few boss fights, especially the final one, which – on top of being cheap and frustrating – may obscure half the screen, when its routines don’t bug or glitch out.
When the game doesn’t randomly crash at the continue screen, which it loves to do – a LOT – at the final boss. Lovely.
You have local co-op, some competitive online modes and a survival mode, but… yeah, play Ruiner or anything by Housemarque, instead.
Copy Purchased
Platform: PS4
Developed By: Natsume Atari
Players: 1 – 4 (online multiplayer only)
Yeah, the one that spawned the “Godzilla is approaching the generator!” meme, as popularized by “Angry” Joe Vargas.
And keeping that in mind, is worth noting that the obnoxiously repeated observation is also pointless, because you can check the “health” of the generator just by looking at how many of the spinnings parts of it are red and unmoving.
Just so you know this is shit from the start.
Bring your shovel, there’s a lot of whatsit to plow through. Continua a leggere “Godzilla PS4 [REVIEW] | King Of The Dumpsters”
Don’t worry, i’m not gonna go into a tirade about the recently revealed trailer about the Sonic The Hedgehog live-action film.
But let me say, i’m honestly kinda intrigued, this looks like a more than fitting candidate for the “so bad it’s good” category, it looks like a mess, one made in the 90s alongside the Super Mario Bros live-action movie (back when they really didn’t had any precedent or clue of how to make a videogame-to-movie adaptation), almost intentionally so, “a cult movie in the making”, which seems like the case, it doesn’t look like it’s done on purpose to be a cult hit (it doesn’t work that way).
I don’t particulary care about Sonic as a franchise or a character, and i’m honestly ready to close this apparently unending “nostalgia for the 90s” trend and move on (good lord, we let Busby resurrect with not one, but TWO games, yeah, there’s another coming), but Jim Carrey as Eggman/Robotnik is a fun choice, and i’m eagerly awaiting it, this has all the elements of a potential disaster on all fronts, a supreme bad movie that becomes legendary, a gift, in a way.
Not that we needed/wanted it, at all, but since it’s coming out anyway…
Also, kudos to the director Jeff Fowler (at it’s first feature length film) for at least taking the criticism (well deserved, i mean, just look at it and try to tell me it’s a good design) on the chin and promising to fix Sonic’s design. Which is already been fixed in edits by random people on twitter (and i doubt it will be actually done, i don’t want crunch to happen because of this), but still, i respect the willingness to address this and not just ignore it.
Which would be quite understandable, given how people on social media react to anything.
I’ll be back with a couple of reviews soon enough!
Copy Gifted By Friend
Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Developed by: Three Rings
Players: 1
Ok, since World Seeker is launching tomorrow, time to write another review of One Piece: Romance Dawn for 3DS (for italian readers, here’s my old review, if you really wish to read it, i don’t recommend doing so), which i’d say it’s the worst One Piece game i’ve ever played, and – maybe – the worst of them all so far (not counting crossover titles like Jump Force, i saw the cutscenes and i almost couldn’t believe that was basically launching in a week). Continua a leggere “One Piece: Romance Dawn (3DS) [REVIEW] Kuso Kuso No Mi”
Copy Purchased
Platform: Playstation 2
Developed by: KAZe
Players: 1-2 (local)
Akira has actually received more videogame adaptations than expected, but this is most well known, since the visual novel for the Famicom never left Japan, the Super Nintendo/Genesis/Jaguar version ended up cancelled and only the Amiga (and Amiga CD 32) version eventually came out in 1994.
Hell, even this game is kinda baffling in itself, not just for the choice of genre, but for the reason it was made: to coincide with the 2002 japanese remastered DVD release of the movie. Not exactly a labour of love made to celebrate the movie in grand fashion, but then again, it’s a game about of a (then) 14 year old movie, it’s quite odd anyway. Continua a leggere “Akira Psycho Ball PS2 [REVIEW] | Capsules Multiball Run”
If you like Zuma, you’ll probably enjoy Sparkle 2, i assume sequel to “Sparkle”, if this wasn’t given as one of PS Plus monthly “free” games, i wouldn’t even know it exists.
Yeah, it’s a “Zuma clone”, which isn’t a bad thing at all, as we aren’t (or ever were) exactly drowning in them, and unlike the original Zuma, this one doesn’t become frustrating and obscenely difficult towards the end, punishing you for just wishing to beat the game. This is a lot better, since it actually cares a lot more about being fun to play than being difficult for the sake of it.
To differentiate itself a bit, Sparkle 2 lets you equip passive abilities for the orb slinger, which – besides being more numerous than expected – are just unlocked as you go, and can be quite useful. The presentation is simple but nice, even if the story amount to you being in a fantasy place on a quest to obtain 5 keys that will unlock.. something, with “screensaver cutscenes” accompanied by a good (albeit not exactly ecstatic) narrating voice.
While i appreciate that it’s really trying to give me more “bang for my buck” (it also has a Challenge Mode and Survival Mode, leaderboards, harder difficulties), in the long run i wish Sparkle 2 campaign was shorter, it boasts 92 levels, sure, but after a while they start to repeat themselves (and so do the nice music and backgrounds), just harder with faster moving orbs and more colors to match.
Even if i wish they didn’t try to make so many levels when they clearly couldn’t (hence the “need” to recycle them for filler purposes), i found myself getting back to it time after time and i gladly played it to the end.
Overall, a more than decent “Zuma clone”, and a fun one.
Wise Cafe (International) 