Deus Ex: The Conspiracy - Playstation 2

Eleven years ago Deus Ex was huge. Every PC gaming magazine was talking about it. It swept game of the year awards. At one point in time it was named "Best PC Game of All Time." So here's the question... why did it bore the hell out of me?

When Deus Ex was released on PC I played it, and I remember greatly enjoying it. I only ever made it about halfway through the game and I always regretted that. It was an awesome game and I felt I should have taken the time to beat it. At one point in time I even bought it and its sequel on Steam with the hopes of playing it again, I just never got around to doing it. When I first bought my PS2 I went out searching for games I wanted to play, I doubled my library in probably less then two weeks. One day I was at FYE and saw Deus Ex: The Conspiracy for $4, at that price I decided to double dip and get it for PS2.

The first thing I noticed when I started playing Deus Ex was how badly it had aged. The graphics (and too lesser extent, controls) were horrible. Now I won't say I'm surprised about this, it is a nine year old PS2 game, but even still the graphics seemed incredibly bad. We weren't quite in Goldeneye territory yet, but we were close. I was having a difficult time determining if things were enemies from any sort of distance, everything felt kind of dark and washed out (I know that's what they were trying to achieve, but it just felt too muddled), instead of 2002 this game felt very late '90s in terms of graphics and overall feel. (Note: The PC version even without mods looks like it has much better graphics, this seems to be more of a problem with the PS2 version.)

I could have gotten over that if I just hadn't been so damned bored with the game. The story is very interesting, don't get me wrong, it does have a very good story.... but when you mix in the gameplay it starts to go downhill. I know that this isn't the most popular opinion but the game is too long for the story. If they could have streamlined this game just a little bit, a little less of what felt like walking and busy work, a little less going back to the places I had been, I think this game would have felt a lot better. It felt like the pacing was off. When my killswitch was turned on I didn't feel a sense of urgency, I mostly felt like they wanted me to wander from one place to another, I never felt like I really needed to rush to anything. In a game like this I should feel like there's some sense of urgency to get things done, but instead I felt like everything was moving just a tad too slow for the tone. Don't get me wrong, I love stealth games, but a lot of times I felt like I shouldn't be slowly stalking around plotting my next move... but it very much felt like that's what the game thought I should be doing.

The game just felt like it was dragging on. When I look at a walkthrough I should never get dismayed because I realize I'm only halfway through the game and it feels like it has already taken forever... but that was exactly my thought when I was playing Deus Ex.

Maybe it's me, maybe my tastes in games have changed, but Deus Ex just wasn't the game I remembered it being. Instead of enjoying what I remember being an excellent game I felt like I had to trudge through the entire thing. It felt like a chore for the most part. Like I said, it seems like the game should have been a little bit shorter. Instead of the 20 or so hours it takes, if it had been 15 and some of the (what I deem) excess had been removed I think this would have felt like a much better game.

Squid.

Killer Instinct - Super Nintendo

I'll start this review off by saying you can take it with a grain of salt. I've never been a huge fan of fighting games. I've played quite a few of them and they've just never really grabbed my attention for that long. I enjoyed Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, and I remember pumping in a lot of money to Time Killers at the Nicklecade but for the most part they're not high up on the list of games I like to play.

That being said Killer Instinct was okay. Much like WrestleMania I'm not 100% sure how to rate it. Fighting games are something that I consider a lot more fun with a second player, since I don't have one I just have to go up against the computer. Generally speaking the computer either offers no resistance whatsoever or suffers from rubberband AI. Killer Instinct's AI fell somewhere in the middle. For the most part it was fairly easy, with the occasional rubberband AI problem. I managed to get through most of the game with very little problem.

I chose Thunder as my character because oddly I still remember most of the characters you fight/choose from. Not exactly sure why, this game doesn't stick out in my head as one that I played a whole lot growing up. Either way I started off using the strategy I always do in fighting games: button mashing. I managed to beat the first few guys with this strategy, only to decide to mix it up about a fourth way through the game. I decided I should actually learn some combo moves. It was actually kind of a mistake. With button mashing I was actually having a fairly difficult time beating the bad guys, with combos I almost always sailed right through the level. Once I learned combos the game became almost too easy. Sure I didn't have it on the hardest difficulty setting or anything, but at the end of the day I beat every single character and only lost once.

Killer Instinct wasn't going to change the way I view the fighting genre. It's still not a genre I get excited about. I understand why people like it, but it's just not really for me. As fighting games go, with two players I'm sure Killer Instinct would have been lots of fun. It's not like I didn't have a good time playing it, it's just that I'm probably not going to go back and replay it any time soon.

Squid.

Metroid - NES

So I have a confession to make. I don't think I've ever beat Metroid in all of the years I've owned it. Sure it's a classic game, sure I've had it since probably the late '80s/early '90s, but for some reason or another I don't think I've ever managed to finish it. Even with the Justin Bailey code I don't recall ever beating the game.

If you read my Shadow Complex review it will come as no surprise to hear that I enjoy Metroid. I've always enjoyed this game. Though when I was young I always thought this game was very difficult. I remember falling down those long vertical corridors because I missed a jump, I remember some of the trickier places where you had to freeze enemies so you could jump on them to make it across lava filled screens. Though in beating the game last night I really wonder how far I actually made it into the game as a child. I don't recall at all ever fighting the two sub-bosses, Kraid and Ridley, and frankly a lot of the places I went to didn't look all that familiar. Perhaps as a kid I had the attention span to play for one or two hours, but maybe not the four or five it would have taken me to get very far in the game.

There's also another problem: while I will say the game itself isn't particularly difficult, the final area to get to the mother brain as well as the escape out are what I would call very difficult. That would be my guess as to why, even with the Justin Bailey code, I never managed to finish the game. The end part is brutal.

You have two problems with the end stage: 1) It's just difficult in and of itself, the metroids can drain your health rather quickly and are kind of difficult to get off. 2) The slow down when there's too many objects on the screen ain't helping. When I got to the last room before the mother brain the slow down made the game almost unplayable. There was just way too much going on for the little NES to handle.

Though as of February 3rd, 2011 I can now say with great pride (okay, not really all that much pride) that I have beat Metroid for the NES. It was a fun game, it was actually just as fun as I remember it being. There's something enjoyable about games that let you explore, that aren't exactly linear. I've always really liked those types of games. Metroid probably wasn't the first game like this and it probably isn't the best, but it's the one that sticks out in my memory and it's the one I remember loving as a kid. If you haven't played Metroid perhaps it's time to dust off the ol' NES and give it a go.

Squid.

Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game - Sega Genesis

I'm not really sure what to say about a wrestling game that takes you about 45 minutes to beat so I'll give you a little look into my formative years when I thought wrestling was better then The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe combined.

Wrestling even today still holds some pretty fond memories for me. I still remember going to my cousins house and renting the Wrestle Mania from that year (probably about 1990) and watching it and loving every minute of it. I remember the action figures, I remember watching it on TV, I still have The Ultimate Warriors autograph somewhere, I remember being absolutely obsessed with the WWF. From the about the time I was eight to maybe the time I was eleven or so I loved wrestling. Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, Randy Macho Man Savage, Jake The Snake Roberts, Earthquake, Andre the Giant, etc. For me that was the heyday of wrestling. Since then Hulk Hogan has essentially become a parody of himself, The Ultimate Warrior is a crazy right wing religious guy who seems about one step away from joining a militia, Randy Savage has... I don't know, faded into obscurity? Jake The Snake may now be homeless and smoking crack considering the shape he was in during Beyond the Mat, Earthquake has been dead now for a couple years as has Andre the Giant has been dead even longer. My point being is that this is the last time I actually kept up in any sort of fashion with wrestling. To me it was one of those things that I loved as a kid but have absolutely no interest in watching now or even by the time I was thirteen. So how do I rate a game based on that?

Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game was released in 1995, this is about two to three years after I had stopped watching wrestling. I actually recognize some of the wrestlers featured in the game though. The Undertaker, Bret Hit Man Hart, Shawn Michaels, Lex Lugar and Bam Bam Bigalow are all names I recognize. Though except for The Undertaker and Bret Hart I don't think I know any of them past there names, I never really watched them wrestle. So I decided to play the game as The Undertaker. I actually quite liked him when I was young.

You never appear to wrestle one on one in this game. It's alway one on two, one on three, and so on. You're always the one. You would think this would make for a rather difficult game, but really it doesn't. For the most part if you're attacking one of your opponents the other guy isn't really attacking you. Sure they sometimes will hit you in the back of the head, but for the most part they seem to wait their turn. Not sure if this is intentional or not, but it is what it is.

Most of the game can be beaten by using the kick button, the first couple of matches I had I just got a guy in a corner and kicked him into submission, found the second guy and did the same. You could probably beat the entire game this way, but what fun would that be? So I decided to break out the combo moves... and that's when I ran into the problems.

Apparently at some point Sega released a six button controller, this game talks about using it. The problem is that I have the three button controller. So to run? You have to hit A and C... considering there's a B in between those buttons that gets a little awkward. You're having to do two button combos and after a while it just gets annoying I would go back to kicking my opponents. I'm sure with a six button controller it would be a lot easier, but I don't have one.

The graphics are decent for a wrestling game, the sound is sometimes good and sometimes makes me want to shove a pencil into my ears. Overall the game is just kind of average. I'm sure it was fun in the arcade, but I'm not really sure it transfered over to the home game.

With a six button controller and perhaps a second player this game would be decent, but not anything to write home about. Without those two things it's 45 minutes of mashing the C button and kicking Bam Bam Biglow in the balls over an over.

Squid.

Jurassic Park - Sega Genesis

I've played a lot of games in my lifetime. Across every genre, every console, and every generation. I've played games that I consider excellent and I've played games that I consider absolutely awful. I'm not going to say that Jurassic Park for Sega Genesis is the worst game that I've ever played, but I will say it's damn near the top of the list. I will say it's probably the worst game I've played in the last year.

Before I play a game I kind of research it on the internet. Find out what kind of game it is, look at what kind of scores it received, find out what kind of cheat codes there are for it, basically just kind of look into the game.

I was actually kind of excited to play Jurassic Park, on GameFaqs the reviews were actually very good. There's only one review that's negative. Most of them are between eight and tens. I've come to the conclusion that this is either trolling at its finest, or these people are absolutely crazy and or stupid.

Where to start... there's so many bad things about this game. Maybe we should start off with the fact that this game controls like everything is submerged in Jell-O. Though I can't tell if it's because the controls are bad or because every time you try to move more then three feet the game suffers from horrible slow down. Maybe it's a mixture of both, you never really know. All I know is trying to make Dr. Grant land on a very tiny ledge while trying to combat bad controls and slow down? Makes the game perhaps one of the most frustrating things I've ever played.

I also ran into the problem on numerous occasions where for no real apparent reason dinosaurs became invincible. No matter how many darts I shot at the dinosaurs nothing would happen. This was almost always a problem with velociraptors. On the subject of velociraptors it wasn't uncommon for them to knock you down and then proceed to trap you in a corner knocking you down over and over until they killed you. So on top of everything else, the game also had some bugs!

The level design was awful, absolutely horrible, and broken. On several levels there were places where you could fall through the solid ground you were walking on and die. There were occasions where a small fall would lead to you having to jump at the exact right moment, or perhaps land on a small ledge and if you missed it you died. Littered throughout the game were little problems with the level that could easily kill you for no real rhyme or reason. Sometimes over and over again. On the first level there was a spot where you have to crawl out on to a branch, three out of four times I'd live, the other one time? Fall to my death. Nothing changed, I didn't go out farther on the limb I wasn't running, nothing was different. Hell, I even was landing in the same spot... sometimes you just died.

Here's the interesting thing. There's quite a few things about this game that aren't too bad. The music is decent, the graphics are fairly good, the ability to play as Dr. Grant or a velociraptor is cool... I can see it being a somewhat decent game. Here's the problem though: all those problems I listed above? Those are all so irritating, so awful that they make the game almost unplayable. It took me 45 minutes to beat the first Dr. Grant level. I watched a YouTube video on how to beat it and still couldn't. I played it over and over again and just couldn't beat it. It's not that I'm bad at games, it's not that Jurassic Park is hard, it's just that it's broken.

That's the best way to describe Jurassic Park: broken. Not bad, broken. When you're trying to play a game that is broken it starts to become frustrating. It starts wearing on you. You want to beat a level but you just can't because it's broken.

The absolutely best thing I can think to say about Jurassic Park is that it's short. You can beat both campaigns in about two to three hours. In all honesty if the game wasn't broken I would guess that you could beat it in about a half hour or so. That shows you just how broken it is. For the love of God skip this game. It's absolutely awful.

Squid.

Big Sky Trooper - Super Nintendo

I have very good memories of playing Big Sky Trooper on SNES. I never owned the game but I do remember renting it more then once. I also distinctly remember playing it when I was big into ROMs when I was a teenager. I loved Big Sky Troopers. One of my favorite genres is Action RPGs and with the mix of that, it's uniqueness, and brilliance of LucasArts I remember thinking this was an absolutely amazing game.

When I first started doing this blog one of the first things I did was buy Big Sky Trooper, I figured I should really beat a game that held so much nostalgia for me. I didn't play it right off the bat because I wanted to kind of mix favorites with games I had never really played. Finally I figured I should get around to playing a game I remember so fondly.

Then it all went horribly wrong. Big Sky Trooper was exactly how I remember it. The humor was there, the art direction was there, there was just one thing missing: the fun.

It wasn't that I was remembering the game differently from what it was, it was exactly how I remember it. It's just that in the decade since I had last played it apparently my wants and needs in a videogame had changed.

The controls were the first thing I noticed, they were absolutely awful. When you entire combat is based on shooting lasers at a slimes you better make it as good as possible. Unfortunately they didn't. Shooting slimes can actually be somewhat difficult. Any direction you shoot it's rather difficult to hit them and for the most part you have to get so close to the slime you end up bumping into them causing you to lose health. Shooting and killing things is actually somewhat difficult and can be frustrating. And flying the spaceship? It was like trying to navigate a aircraft carrier through a slalom.

The levels were pretty bad as well. You're beamed down to a planet and are given a small area of land to eradicate slugs from. The land is much like old Warner Brothers cartoons, everything is on a repeating background. You go to the bottom and come out the top, you go to the left and come out the right. This got real old real quick. Instead of making a couple large planets to explore you get a bunch of really tiny planets to do the same thing over and over on.

Big Sky Trooper is actually kind of confusing as well. This could just be because I didn't have a manual, but there were quite a few things that I had no idea how to do and basically just kind of had to trial and error figure it out myself. It wasn't a big deal but quite a few things that I feel should have been explained to you just weren't.

It was odd, I never have run into this before. This was a game that I had a lot of nostalgia for, a lot of good memories about, and yet I wasn't having fun. It was almost a complete reversal of what I was expecting. I just wasn't having fun.

After about fifteen hours of play I just didn't really want to go on. I almost called it quits. Finally I decided to just pull out the Game Genie and power my way through it. With infinite health and a few other codes I was able to speed through the rest of the game, and you know what? It didn't get any better. I really thought it might pick up and get better, but it didn't.

Big Sky Trooper wasn't good or fun. Replaying the game just took all of the great memories I had of the game and shattered them. It went from a great, fun RPG to being a horribly frustrating, boring mess. It's a shame, but it's one of the reasons I'm doing this.

Squid.

Clockwork Knight - Sega Saturn

Clockwork Knight is one of those games that I've owned for well over a decade and have probably never played, or if I have played it it's for maybe a couple of minutes. Want to know how I know this? Because you can beat this game in about an hour. Maybe a little bit longer if you play it on a harder level.

I'm going to get this out of the way: I'm not a huge fan of platformers. Sure, there are quite a few that I really like but for the most part I don't really enjoy them. For every Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog there's about 100 platformers that don't control well, are difficult because they're way too short or just because of gameplay problems, or have a level that involves ice and moving platforms... you get the idea. I guess the thing is, when platformers are done well I don't mind them, but for the most part? They're just not done very well. They seem like the kind of games that are made to be made. Want a movie tie in? Platformer. Want to make some kind of shovelware game? Platformer. Want to make a kids game? Platformer. I don't think it's the genres fault that it has a lot of bad games to its name. It really just seems like developers tend to use the genre to occasionally make a quick buck.

So what category does Clockwork Knight fall into? Kind of in the middle. It's controls were okay, but not great. They felt kind of stiff. You would look at a jump you needed to make and wonder if you could because Pepper the Knight just doesn't control really how you want him to. Clockwork Knight was okay, but completely forgettable. About the only thing it had going for it was it's somewhat unique atmosphere as well as some pretty good cutscenes with some decent original songs.

One thing Clockwork Knight had against it was that it was incredibly short. I started playing it late the other night figuring I would get a couple levels in before bed. The first problem with this plan was that there are no save games, passwords, anything to save your progress. Annoying, but it didn't really matter because there was a cheat that would allow you to warp to any level. The next day I boot up Clockwork Knight, input the code, and that's when I realize that the level I stopped playing at the night before was in fact the last level of the game. If I had continued on for about fifteen minutes I would have beat the game. I would say that you could easily beat the game in under an hour if you were even somewhat decent at it.

Here's the problem, I don't know if I should dock points for that. I really enjoy Contra but I can easily beat that in under a half hour. The original Super Mario Brothers is a pretty short game... on the other hand Super Mario World is actually a pretty long game, so are a bunch of other platformers. There doesn't seem to be a set length when it comes to the platformer genre. If I bought an RPG and could beat it in an hour I'd think it's too short, hell even five hours might irk me... but platformers seem to be able to get away with it. Either way, here's letting you know that if you do play Clockwork Knight, don't expect a lot of time or replayability out of it.

Clockwork Knight just comes off as a mediocre kind of game. Nothing really stands out about it, and the few things that aren't too bad are kind of deflated by it's length and control issues. Maybe I did play this game when I first got it, maybe Clockwork Knight is just that forgettable. It's not a horrible game by any means, but it's also not what I would consider good. Clockwork Knight sits in the middle, somewhere between good and bad... and sadly, that's the best thing I can think to say about the game.

Squid.

Faxanadu - NES

I have an odd nostalgia when it comes to Faxanadu and I'm not really sure why. In my head I remember it from my childhood, I remember the first few screens and almost nothing else. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea why. There's a possibility that I rented it as a kid, but I don't specifically remember it. I also honestly only remember the first few screens, really the first town, after that I couldn't tell you one thing about the game. So either I rented it and played the first few screens and that's what I'm remembering or I've somehow invented the nostalgia in my head. Either way, it's about time I actually played and beat this game I remember parts of oh so well.

To show how little I (possibly) remember of this game, I didn't realize it was a side scrolling RPG in the vein of Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link. Honestly I've always kind of enjoyed that genre, I loved The Adventure of Link as well as Castlevania II. After learning this I was rather excited to get into Faxanadu.

Faxanadu isn't as good as either of the games listed above, but it still is a rather solid game. The story is a little light, but that applies to about 90% of all NES games so I can't really hold it against it. It doesn't add anything huge to the genre, and borrows nicely from the big names. It's basically in every way just kind of average. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I've enjoyed a lot of games like that, but Faxanadu isn't never going to reach that status of a game that just sticks out in your mind as a shining jewel of a particular genre.

One of the things I did enjoy about Faxanadu was the way it handled experience points and gold. In quite a few games I've played they've had it where if you die you lose XP or Gold or perhaps both, and in Faxanadu you do as well... but with a twist. There are experience levels in the game and when you hit that you maintain that level with XP and Gold if you die. It's hard to explain, but let's say you need 2000 XP to hit level two and 3000 XP to hit level three if you have 2300 XP and die you don't lose all your XP, you just go back to your previous level, so 2000 XP. It works the same way with Gold as well, you just go back to the set amount of Gold for your current level. So like above, you die and come back with 2000 XP as well as perhaps 500 Gold instead of dropping back to zero or just constantly losing some. It was an interesting way of handling it. It also is unfortunately rather exploitable. With a little bit of grinding I was able to hit the highest level which meant that when I died I came back with 15000 Gold. This meant that I could just buy all the armor and items I wanted and when I ran out of money I would just save and restart or die and come back with 15000 more gold to buy the rest of what I needed. Sure it was exploitable, but I always enjoy something new if it works.

Did Faxanadu meet my nostalgia memory requirements? Kind of. I still remember it in my memory, but what I played and what I remember didn't quite meet up. The first part was still how I remember it, but as I said nothing else rang any bells. Part of me wonders if I never really played it as a kid. There's a good possibility I played a little bit of it as ROM as a teenager or something and that's what I'm remembering it from.

Overall Faxanadu was fun, but nothing really to write home about. There weren't a whole lot of side scrolling RPGs (that I remember) so any game in that genre that is even somewhat decent is a welcome edition to my gaming library. Faxanadu was a decent game if you are a fan of the genre or even the RPG genre in general. If you like those types of games you should give it a try, but it's not amazing enough that I would suggest it to everyone.

Squid.