Crystalis - Nintendo

If you asked me my ten favorite games of all time Crystalis would definitely be on the list. It would most likely make it in the top five. Probably my favorite NES game of all time, and certainly the one that I remember the most. I remember this game vividly from my childhood, the graphics, the music, the gameplay, everything about this game brings a rush of nostalgia to me.

Here's the thing though, I've never actually beat Crystalis. I don't know how many times I've played Crystalis before, I would guess at least five, but I've never been able to make it all the way through. One of the reasons I started this blog was because about 85% of the games I played up until about three years ago I've never actually beat. I would start a game, then something new and shiny would come along and I would put down the old to usher in the new. That's why I wanted to go through my old games, to actually beat some of these games that I never made it through.

I hadn't planned on playing Crystalis yet, I was holding off on some of my favorite games. Figured I would go through the ones I hadn't really given a chance to. Then I joined a discussion about Nintendo games that you wish were longer, there were quite a few people saying Crystalis. They were mentioning that it was only about five hours long. This made no sense to me, I guessed it was at least a twenty hour game. I remember spending a ton of time as a kid playing this game. I wondered if it really was a five hour game, had all this time I not finished a game that could probably be done in one sitting?

I sat down with Crystalis and it just made me smile. I knew every note of music, I knew pretty much everything people in the first town would say to me, I knew the map like the back of my hand. I played for a good four hours the first night... and that's when I noticed something weird. In those first four hours I had played through a lot of the game that I remember... and the second night when I played again for about another three hours? I made it through to where I had stopped the last time I played the game. The next time I played the game? Well, I beat the game. This game that I had played at least five time since 1990 that I had never managed to beat was actually about eight hours long. Here's the funny part: Crystalis has two save data slots. I used one and left the old save alone, after I beat the game I loaded up that old save to see where I had quit in the game last time. Turns out on that save I was only about 15 minutes to a half hour away from finishing the game. If I had stuck with it for another half hour it wouldn't have taken me twenty one years to finally beat this game.

Crystalis is a really good game, and I don't think that's nostalgia talking. It's a great action RPG with a decent story. It's one of those underrated gems that if you like these types a games and haven't played it before you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. It's one of those games I wish had become a series, or at least had a sequel. Do yourself a favor and find and play Crystalis.

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.

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.

Tales of Symphonia - Review

Just how long is too long? That's the question that I kept asking myself while playing Tales of Symphonia. In my opinion, when I finished it with 90 hours played, Tales of Symphonia was too long. 90 hours played, and keep in mind that skipping a lot of sidequests just trying to finish the game... I imagine that if I had done all the sidequest and done more exploring I would have easily put another 10 or 20 hours into the game.

Don't get me wrong, a game doesn't have to be a set amount of time to be enjoyable. I put 125 hours into Oblivion and enjoyed every minutes. Between my two playthroughs of Fallout 3 I've put in damn near 200 hours. I don't even know how many hours I've put into Morrowind between all of my different games. I enjoyed every minute I put into those games and not once did I wish they were shorter... but they're different. Each one of those games involves a ton of exploring, it's a free and open world and you're encouraged to explore it. And because of this freedom you can spend a lot more time with these games. For those types of games, essentially the skies the limit on how long you can play them... but there's always the knowledge that if you want to finish the game, the main quest is always there to complete. But what about when there is little exploring and the main quest is 70+ hours long?

So how long is too long when it comes to RPGs? It's a hard question to answer, and certainly varies from person to person. I asked my brother that question, he thought that an RPG should be about 25 hours long. I thought that 45 was a good number... though it all depends. I'd gladly play a 60 hour game as long as I enjoy it. But to me, 35 to 45 hours with the possibility of 15+ hours of exploring is a good number.

Along comes Tales of Symphonia. A video game that can easily hit the 100 hour mark... and yet at about the 50-60 hour mark I was really wishing it would come to an end soon. Generally not a good sign.

Let me get this out of the way. I really enjoyed Tales of Symphonia, I really did. I just wish it had been about 30 hours shorter. It was just too damn long for me. Towards the end I began to feel like some of the quests were not essential and could have easily been cut or shortened and still the game would have been good. In fact, looking back at it there seems like the game could have easily been shortened without losing too much.

There seemed to be a lot of going back to places I had already been, doing quests that I didn't feel I needed to, a lot of back story that seemed like it could have been part of side quests and not as much of the main quest... there's the other problem. I'm not 100% sure what was and wasn't the main quest. As far as I know I didn't stray too far from the main quest, but on the other hand I'm really not sure. I just kind of went where I thought I should go next, or followed the synopsis that they give you in the game. All I know is that it took me 90 hours to finally beat the game.

Like I said, despite the fact that the game felt like it was dragging on in parts and was way too long, the game was fun. I had a very good time playing it as well as beating it. The combat is great, the voice acting is good, the story is good, and overall it's a great little RPG.

Like I mentioned before I originally started playing this game in about 2004 or so and it was a whole new experience. I had never played an RPG like this before. It was like a mix of Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and a hint of Street Fighter during battles. And even though since I have played games with a similar battle system or similar gameplay this game still feels fresh and new to me.

Overall this is a good game and well worth playing, just make sure you have plenty of time to do it.

Squid.

Tales of Symphonia - Nintendo Gamecube

Tales of Symphonia was one of the few Gamecube games that I bought. I remember it being like no other RPG I had ever played, the battles at least. Instead of the Final Fantasy "Choose what attack you want to do from a menu" it was more like a fighting game. It was all real time. I enjoyed this greatly.

Sadly I never beat Tales of Symphonia, I put it down for too long and when I came back I couldn't even remember what I was doing in the game so I gave up. Haven't played it since.

Later on I played Tales of Vesperia for the Xbox 360 and all I could think was "This game is great, I should really play Tales of Symphonia again." I guess now is my chance.

Squid.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - Review

Eternal Darkness was the second Gamecube game I ever bought. I remember playing it and very much enjoying it. The sanity effects were amazing, I remember the first time I got the black screen with the green "VIDEO" text in the upper right corner I scrambled for my remote thinking I had accidentally hit the input button on it. I never finished the game and I always regretted this, it just seemed like such an great game.

I remember this game being incredibly spooky, I remember this game being amazing, I remember this game... wrong?

Having replayed and beaten Eternal Darkness I can honestly say that I don't exactly see what I saw in this game. Don't get me wrong, Eternal Darkness is a good game, or could have been a good game, if it weren't saddled with gameplay problems.

Here's a rule I go by with video games: I should never die due to poor camera angles. Sure, in all games you're going to have it where you might die once or twice because the camera went wonky for a second... but in Eternal Darkness I died many times due to the poor camera angles. It wasn't that the camera angle was occasionally bad, it's that the camera angle was almost ALWAYS bad. I understand that the camera angles in horror/survival games tend to be different, they don't want you to be able to see what's going to jump out at you long before it does. However, Eternal Darkness takes this and makes it ten times worse. When running down a hall the camera should not be facing toward my characters face looking behind me, and yet it was... constantly. The camera angles in this game were absolutely atrocious and got me killed many times, or made the game harder than it needed to be. I was killed several times because the camera was so high above me I couldn't tell what was actually killing my character. The camera wasn't the only thing wrong with this game, but it was certainly the worst thing wrong with this game.

While playing this game there were so many things that aggravated me I started making a list because I wasn't sure I would be able to remember them all. That's a pretty bad sign for a game, so here it is, my list. I'm sure there are still things missing because I started this about halfway through the game.

- Magick sometimes takes too long to cast. In the game you have different powers of magick, ranging from three point to seven point. Three point magick takes the shortest time to cast, and seven is the longest. I'm not going to say that this is necessarily a problem because I know this is how it's supposed to actually be in the game. For the most part it's fine, but occasionally there are times when you just don't have the time you need to cast a certain spell when you need to.

- Finishing moves take too long. When you kill an enemy you have to "finish him" to regain back your sanity that you lost from seeing this enemy. The problem being that for the most part these finishing moves take just a little too long for my taste. If you fight a group of four zombies you can't kill one and finish it, because the other three will wail on you while you do. So you have to kill all four before you finish off the first one... the only problem with that is that if you wait too long to finish them off, occasionally they come back to life.

- Not enough sanity given back. This has to do with my last point. When you see an enemy you lose sanity, when you kill and finish off that enemy you regain sanity... but not enough. It very much feels like you regain about 3/4 of the sanity you lost. I may be wrong, but it just doesn't seem like you get enough back. Which constantly leads to you having to refill your sanity meter via magick.

- Enemies in groups suck. I mentioned above that killing off a group of enemies and finishing them is a hassle, but groups of enemies in general just kind of suck. I had it where they would corner me and kill me and there was pretty much nothing I could do about it. Every time I would try to fight back one of them would hit me interrupting my attack. I had it where one enemy would hit me and knock me back into another enemy who would hit me and knock me back into the first... usually this would end in either my death or serious injury. This wasn't a huge problem and didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough times to aggravate me.

- Targeting kind of sucked. The targeting in this game was kind of awful. I would tend to accidentally attack an enemies arm when I mean to hit his head. And if there was an enemy who had a weak spot I guarantee targeting and attacking that spot is going to be a pain in the ass. And trying to switch from targeting one enemy to another? Forget it.

- Swords are a pain to use in closed quarters. I know, you're thinking "duh... of course they are." and I completely agree... kind of. Any time you were on stairs or in a hall, fighting with a sword was pretty horrible. I only bring this up because for the most part you're almost always fighting in closed quarters, and most of your characters only have a sword for a weapon. See how that could be a problem?

- Moving while using magic stops the spell but still uses up MP. This one I'm kind of torn on, because it makes sense... but still aggravated me. Mostly I don't know how times I accidentally bumped my controller and screwed up a spell. It mostly just got kind of annoying after a while, especially since some spells take a while to cast.

- Speaking of moving... are all of my characters out of shape, asthmatic, smokers? I know this is something that is used in a lot of survival horror games. Your character can only run so far until they have to catch their breath. I guess walking adds to the tension and makes it harder to run away from enemies... but for the love of god, can my character run more than five feet without having to stop and catch their breath? Please? I won't say I'm the pinnacle of physical fitness, but hell even I when faced by a zombie think I could run down a forty foot hallway without stopping to catch my breath. My character however could not.

- Still speaking of moving... that's how you regain MP. This idea seemed kind of cool at first. No health potions, you just regain MP while you move. It seemed like a good idea till I had to cast three spells but only had enough MP for two. You know what you get to do then? Run around in circles trying to regain MP until you have enough to cast that third spell. Boy, sounds like fun doesn't it? I would have enjoyed either MP "potions" or mixture of both. Make it so I regain MP while running but also have potions in the game. As it is, running in circles to regain MP is kind of lame.

- Reloading and moving. This is kind of like the magick spells and moving problems. If you move while reloading a gun you just stopped reloading... the problem being is that you only get to reload when your gun is empty. So if your revolver takes five bullets and you move while you're reloading and have only put in three bullets, you have three bullets and can't reload again until you shoot them. Again, super annoying and serves no real purpose.

- The sanity effects. Okay, I will admit they're still pretty awesome... but they have a ton of them and I saw a small portion, but I did see a lot of them over and over. I went and looked at a list of sanity effect and realized I didn't see about half of them. It would have been nice to see some new ones instead of seeing the same ones again and again.

- The voice acting is kind of crappy. It's not horrible, but it's certainly not good either.

The next two have to deal specifically with dying:

- You've died, it takes too long to back to the game. You've died. You now have to see the Nintendo logo, the dolby surround sound screen, the main title screen, the load screen, choose a game to load, are you sure you want to load this game? Part of what makes a survival horror game scary is being in the moment... when you have to do all this crap to get back to the game it takes you out of the moment. Couldn't you just give me a simple "reload from last save?" option when I die?

- Die right before a cut scene? You get to enjoy it again! I hate this in games. Cut scenes should be skippable for this very reason. I don't want to HAVE to watch a cut scene more than once.

The next two are going to be about the story/game itself:

- The story is too long. I know, I know you're all going "He's lost his mind!" but hear me out. I probably spent about twenty-four or so hours beating this game. Towards the end it felt like a chore. The game felt like it dragged on. There was definitely a few "Congratulations! You've made it to the point B! Now go all the way back to point A because you can open up a door there now!" There seemed to be a lot of backtracking. If this game would have been 15-20 hours long I don't think that some of things I found so aggravating would have felt that way.

- The story is also a little garbled. I paid attention and still was somewhat lost. I think it's because there are WAY too many characters. You control twelve characters throughout the game, each in a different time period and each telling a different part of the story. In my opinion it was just a few too many people to keep track of. I think the story would have been a lot better if you had cut out about half of the characters and fleshed out the rest. None of the characters stories really stood out to me because I only got to play them for a brief period of time before I had to control a different character and learn their story.

Like I said, this is a good game that was ruined by its gameplay. I can understand why they did the story the way they did, and overall it wasn't a bad story. But if you take a pretty good story and pile on a ton of aggravating gameplay aspects you get a bad game that could have been so much better.

Squid.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem - Gamecube

I've decided to play something on the Gamecube because I miss being wireless. Eternal Darkness is one of the few Gamecube games I own, but from what I remember it was awesome. I don't remember it being all that scary, but I do remember that the "tricks" the games starts playing on you were amazingly cool. Hoping that this is a game that actually was awesome, and this isn't just nostalgia talking. I guess we'll find out.

Squid.

Contra - Review

Last night I beat Myst and was looking for something quick and fun to play. Then it hit me: Contra. I love Contra. It and Iron Tank were the first NES games that I owned. I also find Contra fascinating because while it's a pretty big series with games spanning almost all consoles since the NES, most people seemed to have only played the original. Hell, I'm a huge gamer and I think I've only played one other game in the series. But the general consensus on Contra is that it kicks ass.

And despite one major flaw, it does kick ass. What is that major flaw you ask? Well last night I sat down and beat Contra in 26 minutes... and I wasn't even really trying all that hard. Can you imagine if any company now released a game that was 26 minutes long? People would be up in arms. But you know what? Despite being only 26 minutes long, it was an awesome 26 minutes... hell it still is an awesome 26 minutes.

Contra is a game that will be cemented in history for one thing though. The Konami code. Contra wasn't the first game to use it (Gradius was in 1986) but I'll be damned if everyone remembers it from this game.

So you know what, if you haven't played Contra do so. It's a part of gaming history, and hell even if you don't like it, you only wasted 26 minutes of your life.

Squid.

Iron Tank - NES

I've decided on my first game for the 2010 video game challenge. Iron Tank for the NES. I chose this because it was one of the first games I owned. When I originally bought the NES it of course came with Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt, but my parents also bought my brother and me Contra and Iron Tank.

I oddly remember that day fairly well for how young I was. We bought our NES at Lionel Playworld when I was probably about eight or nine, maybe a little older. I remember getting those two games and coming home and playing Contra and being blown away by it. Up until that point all my video games had been on the Commodore 64, so this was a huge step up.

I have very fond memories of Iron Tank, I don't remember playing it tons or playing it over and over but I do remember having a very good time playing it. Being a two player game I remember playing it a lot with my brother. I guess we'll find out if it holds up to the test of time.

Squid.