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.

Blue Dragon - Xbox 360

I wanted to like Blue Dragon. I really did. I didn't go into it with a mindset of "I'm going to detest this game!" but over the forty-five hours I played it, Blue Dragon pushed me to that.

I really need to learn that when I say "It's ten bucks, how bad could it be?" that it really can be not worth that ten dollars. For every The Saboteur I get I also get a Jericho and a Blue Dragon. Games that despite the fact that I paid under ten dollars for I wished I had the time spent playing back.

Blue Dragon was awful. I'm just going to lead off with that.

I played the demo a while back and thought "This is really fun, I should pick this up some time." Apparently Blue Dragon isn't too awful in small doses, but the more you play the more the flaws shine through.

The story in an RPG is essential, that's pretty much the bread and butter of RPGs. Blue Dragon's is pretty much crap. Well that's not fair, the story isn't all that awful but it feels like they took about five hours of story and stretched it out through about fifty hours of gameplay... and that five hours is still kind of light. It's like you get about five minutes of story for every two hours you play. The story just seems incredibly thin and cliche, especially for an RPG. For the most part you do things without necessarily understanding why you're doing something, or at the most have a very flimsy idea why you need to do something. Which leads to my next gripe.

There's no real direction to the game. I can't tell you how many times I wasn't sure what I was supposed to really do next. There were several times when even after checking a FAQ I wasn't exactly sure why I was supposed to be doing what I was doing. This is another time when if the story had been better I wouldn't have been as lost.

This is a minor story gripe, but I'll still air it. Did five year olds write this game? Seriously. I haven't seen this many poop joke/references in a game since... well honestly I don't remember. The story is very simplistic and cliche, but on top of all of that you have poop joke/references littered throughout. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good poop joke, I'll be the first too admit it... but all of these seemed, well, juvenile. Not only are their "Poo Snakes" in the game, one of the final end battles is with a "Jumbo Poo". You also occasionally get the fun of searching through poop for items (with the included "squish, squish" subtitle). It all just seemed rather out of place is a somewhat serious RPG.

The save points... pardon my French, but fuck the save points in this game, fuck them in their stupid asses. I don't remember the last time I saw such horrible save points in a game. I'm not a fan of save points for the most part, I've said this before, but the save points in Blue Dragon are easily one of the worst uses of it I've ever seen. It's not uncommon to go for over an hour without being able to save, and the longest I ever went was just over three hours. Think about that for a second, if you die you have to replay three hours of the game. You also almost never get a save point before a big boss fight, you instead get a checkpoint. This seems like I an okay idea, but I'll explain why it isn't.

So remember that three hours between save points? So that happened in an optional sidequest dungeon. After three hours of dungeon crawling I finally make it to the end boss, I get the checkpoint... and then get slaughtered. I was under-leveled for that fight. So here I have three options: I can just quit the sidequest and waste three hours of my time, I can go back three hours to my last save and re-level to my current level as well as grind out a few more, or I can just keep trying to perhaps get lucky and kill the boss. If there was a savepoint before the end boss I could simply just go to it, grind some levels in the dungeon and try again... but because of their ludicrous savepoint/checkpoint system I can't do that. I ended up trying the end boss a few more times to no avail before just quiting the dungeon and cutting my losses. This isn't the only time something like this happened. Throughout the game there were times when I really needed a savepoint and just couldn't get one. It's frustrating when you need to do something else, or need to be somewhere and there's not a savepoint anywhere to save your game. There were times when I wanted to say go to bed but had to wander around for an hour looking for a place where I could save my game. It just gets incredibly frustrating after a while.

The battle system was rather odd too, not the way you actually did battle, but the way that who was picked to attack next was chosen. On many, many occasions the the order in which the enemies got to attack was completely nonsensical. In one fight that I remember a bad guy got to attack my party eight times in a row... for no real reason. Considering that this enemy could do about 120 damage per attack and my strongest character only had 400 health, he almost completely wiped my party... and I still have no idea why he got to go eight times in a row. If it had been just that one battle I would have called it a fluke, but it happened constantly. I don't know how many times I died in a boss fight because the order would say that the boss would get to attack next and then I was up, only to have the boss attack my party one or two more times without me getting a turn. I still have no idea why this happens, and as far as I recall it was never really explained in any battle tutorial. Overall it just got very annoying and felt rather cheap.

Last gripe, I promise. So I made it to the last set of boss fights in the game, only to have my team just get continually killed in one. I couldn't beat it. I could come close but due to the attack order mentioned above I just couldn't seem to beat it. That's when I decided to check a FAQ and see if it had any helpful hints. It did, it told me I should be at level 50-55 for this boss fight. Only one problem, my highest level character was 37 and my lowest level character was 32. Here's my problem with this. I would occasionally walk around bad guys to skip a fight, and I skipped a couple of the optional sidequests, but not many... and yet I was 15 levels lower then I should have been at the end of the game. I'm not saying that you should never have to grind in an RPG, but you know what? You should never have to grind that much. In any RPG you should probably never be more than two or three levels then you need to be if you're playing correctly and following the story path. In Blue Dragon to be the correct level I needed to be I would have probably needed to never skip a fight, do every single "optional" sidequest and still probably grind for a little bit. Boy howdy does that sound like fun. So here I am at the final battles and I have two options: go back to my last save point (about an hour and a half ago) and pretty much grind levels for probably 3-4 hours and then play to get back to where I was, or call it quits... so I quit.

That's right, Blue Dragon is now the second game I haven't finished. If I had liked Blue Dragon I would have suffered through the 3-4 hours of grinding, but at the end of the day I found it to be at best a mediocre game. It had potential, it really did. I enjoyed the shadow aspect of the game, I enjoyed the game world... but it just had so much working against it. I didn't even bother including things like timed missions and escort missions in my gripes because it already had so many things going against it I didn't think I needed to even bother bringing up more.

I quit and then watched the end battles that I missed on YouTube. That way I could at least tell if the story got interesting or at least better, and you know what? It didn't. It stayed the same stale game that I put forty-five long hours into.

A lot of people really liked this game. On many of the forums I visit no one had anything to say but great things about Blue Dragon. I found it to be mediocre at its best and frustrating and tedious at it worst. There's tons of great RPGs out there for the Xbox 360. This isn't one of them.

Squid.

P.S.

This is the song they play during every single boss battle in the game. Yes, that is the lead singer of Deep Purple. That song is three minutes and fifty seconds long. Sometimes boss battles will last twice that long. They just repeat it over and over until you win. It's practically torture.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 - Xbox 360

I hadn't planned on playing The Force Unleashed 2, but it just kind of fell into my lap. I was house sitting last week and had planned on playing Blue Dragon, when I noticed they owned Force Unleashed 2. I figured I might as well give it a shot while I had it instead of renting it.

I should have enjoyed The Force Unleashed 2. I really should have. They seemed to have changed some of the things that I disliked about the first. And despite its flaws I still really enjoyed the first Force Unleashed. Though for some reason I just couldn't get into The Force Unleashed 2... something just didn't click.

Even though they fixed a lot of the things I complained about in the first one, they still didn't fix them all the way. The annoying quicktime events? Still there, sure there are less of them, but they're still there and they're still annoying. The targeting? Still not what I want it to be. Occasionally you just can't target the stormtrooper you want to, and that can be a problem. Why you ask? Because The Force Unleashed 2 is significantly harder... kind of.

It's not that the game is harder, it's an artificial difficulty. The bad guys aren't more difficult to kill it's just that there's more of them, and their attacks are more annoying. Then they do things like mix bad guys, ones who can't be hurt by the force with ones that can't be hurt by lightsabers. So you're trying to attack some with lightsabers and others with force magic, and that's where the problem of targeting comes in. You're trying to do to much at once on a game that just doesn't handle like you want it to. It's not a horrible problem but overall it detracts from the game. You will end up dying a lot more then you did in the first one... but all of your deaths will feel kind of cheap.

The game is also still way too short. I started playing it at about three o' clock in the afternoon the day I got there, and with some major time not playing I still manged to finish it by morning of the next day. I would say there's maybe five to six hours of gameplay... padded gameplay. I would say at least an hour or so of that was spent on two boss fights: The Gorog and Darth Vader. Those two boss fights may be the most padded boss fights I've ever seen. It got to the point that they were so long I got bored. And on top of everything else for the most part they're long because they're confusing. You're vaguely told what you have to do and left to kind of fill in the blanks. On both fights I had to consult a walkthrough to see what the hell I was supposed to be doing. I'm okay with a game being short if there's a high amount of replayability or some sort of multiplayer. With The Force Unleashed 2 you get a really short game and that's it.

I really enjoyed the first Force Unleashed game. It's probably one of my favorite Star Wars games. Yet somehow they managed to take the second one, add things to make it better, and somehow end up making it not as much fun. Sure there were some things I enjoyed: I started off with all my powers, the rage meter thing was kind of fun, and the story was pretty good... but overall I just didn't have as much fun as I did with the first. I've played the first game four times, after I beat the first one on light side I instantly played it again to get the dark side ending. With the second one I had no desire to replay it, maybe sometime down the road but certainly not after I had just beat it. The Force Unleashed 2 isn't a bad game (though I would say it's not worth $60), but I didn't get as much enjoyment out of it as the first. I would say it's worth a rent, but I wouldn't expect a lot out of it.

Squid.

Shadow Complex - Xbox Live Arcade

Yep, yet another XBLA game. About a year ago I bought Shadow Complex knowing almost nothing about it. I remember reading a review for it and hearing about its similarities (gameplay wise) to Metroid on NES. I didn't think much about it until a couple months later when I saw it on sale for half off. What the hell, it looked fun so I picked it up... and then proceeded to not play it for a year or so.

I was looking for a game last week and nothing was really peaking my interest. So I decided to look through my Arcade games. Shadow Complex, eh, why not.

The first half hour or so started out badly for me. I just couldn't get into the game. The aiming felt off, the controls felt a little awkward, and I wanted to see more of the screen... I wanted a more widescreen feel. A little more left and right.

Thankfully I continued playing because suddenly it all came together. It all made sense to me. Suddenly I was transported back to the fun I was having playing that NES classic so many years ago. I understood why they were often compared to each other. It feels like Metroid. Sure you can draw the obvious conclusion that it's because it has same type of gameplay, but it's more then this. It's the exploring. It's the realization that you can now open a door or enter a new area because of this brand new power up you just got.

Shadow Complex drew me in. I didn't want to just play this game. I wanted to play it and see everything. I wanted to see every secret room, I wanted to open every locked door, I wanted to play all of this game.

I can tell a game is good when I become a completionist. When I want to play all of a game I know it's a good game. There's a lot of games that are very good but that I don't feel like finding and doing everything. When you don't really want a game to end you know that it's a step up from the rest. That's Shadow Complex.

I had this game for a year at least and never bothered to play it. This is a damn shame. I spent twelve hours playing and beating Shadow Complex and I have to say it was an incredibly good time.

Go out and buy Shadow Complex. Especially if you enjoyed Metroid as a kid. Overall it's just a really fun game. It's a game you want to play. A game that you want to find everything. A game that knows you want to explore so it lets you. Seriously, do yourself a favor and don't miss out on this one.

Squid.

Castle Crashers - Xbox Live Arcade

Okay, I know. I'm only about two years late in saying this: Castle Crashers kicks some serious ass.

I played the demo of Castle Crashers when I first got my Xbox and thought "Wow, this is a great game. I should totally buy this!" Then didn't for about two years. Hell, I've actually played the demo since then and still never got around to purchasing it. Not exactly sure why, I've had 2400 MS points sitting around doing nothing for about a year now.

Then last week I was over at my brother's house. Most everyone in the house was sick with some sort of cold and we didn't feel like going anywhere. My brother decided to pick up Castle Crashers because it was on sale for 600MS points. We started playing it co-op and it wasn't long till we were hooked.

Simply put, the game is an amazing amount of fun. Especially when you consider it's basically a side scrolling hack 'n slash. Everything about it is just fun. That's the best word I can use to describe Castle Crashers. Game: Fun. Music: Fun. Art Style: Seriously Fun. It's the kind of game that throughout you're noticing little details here and there that all add up to make the game so damn great.

I had so much fun that when I got home that night I bought it myself... and then played until about midnight. Then went back to my brother's house the next day and beat the game there. You know what we started doing after we beat it? We went around and collected animal orbs and weapons. You know what we did after that? Started playing through again as a different characters. We did this and I was still going home at night and playing my game on my Xbox. I don't remember the last time I did that with a game. Not only have I beat it, I've continued playing it again afterward.

In the last week I've beat Castle Crashers twice, and have another character about halfway through it. On my game I have every single animal orb and weapon I can get. I've unlocked a lot of the characters and done every achievement I could. I don't know the last game I completed so throughly. And you know what? It's still fun. I'm still having a good time playing it.

Most games I beat and then maybe play again a year or so later. With Castle Crashers I beat it and immediately went back for a second helping, and you know what? I may go back for thirds. It's just that fun of a game.

Seriously, if you haven't played this game already you need to buy it. I can't imagine anyone not enjoying this game... unless they're some sort of heartless bastard.

Squid.