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.

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.

Chrono Trigger - Review

Chrono Trigger is a hard game to review. Everything that could be said about the game has already been said, and probably a lot more eloquently then I could ever put it.

Chrono Trigger is one of those games I remember from back in the day, it's one of the true great RPGs I remember from my childhood. Chrono Trigger, Crystalis, Final Fantasy 3, and Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past are really the games I credit for getting me into the genre as a whole.

It's a funny thing though... out of those four games I've only beat half of them. I never managed to finish Crystalis or Chrono Trigger for some reason.

It seemed odd to me that here's a game that I rank as one of the better RPGs ever made and yet I hadn't even managed to finish it. I thought it was about time to remedy this.

Chrono Trigger is still a great game. As I've said in the past, RPGs from the NES/SNES/Genesis days still hold up fairly well in my eyes. I realize part of this is nostalgia, but part of it is there are just some very good games on those systems.

Chrono Trigger is one of the best. If you ask people the top five games of all time on the SNES I guarantee that Chrono Trigger is going to be near or at the top of almost everyone's list.

The soundtrack is great, there are really two soundtracks to video games that I would actually buy: Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger's soundtrack fits the game perfectly, it's not just background noise it actually feels right for the game.

The story. The story for the most part is great. I will admit there's a couple places throughout the game where the story feels a tad disjointed, but overall it's a great, original story. It's something that you didn't really run into at that period of time in gaming. There were a lot of RPGs with a lot of hackney stories filled with cliches... Chrono Trigger didn't feel like that.

There were tons of different, unique characters across many different lands that all felt like they had a lot of time and thought put into them. All the character felt needed, you may not have used them in your main party, but they all felt like they were needed characters.

Chrono Trigger was also one of the first games I remember that had several endings. There might have been games out there with one or two different endings, but Chrono Trigger had I believe thirteen. Thirteen different possible endings depending on certain things you did throughout the game.

Overall the game is amazing. Like I said, there's nothing I can say about this game that hasn't been said before. It's simply just a great game. Pick it up for SNES, DS, or PSN but I highly suggest you play it.

Squid.

Chrono Trigger - Super Nintendo

What can you say about Chrono Trigger? Phenomenal game, possibly one of the best RPGs for the Super Nintendo. Great gameplay and amazing soundtrack.

Though I don't know if I ever beat it. About five years ago I broke out my Game Genie and decided to essentially give myself God mode to beat some of the games I had never gotten around to finishing. I just don't remember if I did this with Chrono Trigger. As far as I know I didn't.

Either way, it's going to be fun to finally beat this game.

Squid.