From Aubs:
“So I just had to rip a baby bunny out of Geikes mouth. It ripped in half and I had the head and she had the legs. It was awful. She is happy.”
“I shit you not, she tried to swallow the thing repeatedly while I tried to get it away from her. She was gagging and then I was too. Thanks, Lil’ Miss.”
This will be a short review because, honestly? This is a short game. Difficult as hell, but short.
Like Mega Man, you begin the game with a select screen targeting some of the Surfer’s greatest enemies. Or, you know, just a grab bag of odd dudes. Possessor, Fire Lord, Mephisto, and many more. They all hold pieces of a “Cosmic Device” that Galactus wants and so you blast through 5 stages divided up into three levels to collect the bits of a random machine. Once complete, Galactus sends you through a portal to the Magik Domain to get the last part from a giant purple dude with a machine gun and his army of leprechaun hats.
This “bullet hell”-lite game is notoriously difficult but, honestly, with a little patience and some good memorization skills, you can tear though this game in very little time. The trick is to keep moving. But you have to be mindful of your surroundings at all times and that’s where the difficulty spike really comes into play. Some levels are top-down and other are side-scrolling, and never is there a time you can breathe. Between enemies, bullets, walls, rubber ducks, and just general activity in every inch of the game field, the Surfer can’t stop, can’t slow down. To stop moving is to die, but, then again, to move too much is to die as well. It creates moments – such as the top-down level over a large body of water – where the tension is overtaken by the general unfairness of it all, resulting in numerous deaths to unseen enemy fire, a tree, or – hell – the tip of the Surfer’s board just touching anything wrong. Or at all.
The game uses a pretty generous password system, a decent number of lives-per-points, and enough power ups that, once you get the hang of it, the game actually gets fun. Blasting ghosts and jack-o-lanterns in hell is almost a treat. Even if most levels are just random enemies with little rhyme or reason throughout the very short run-time. Seriously, you can beat this in 30 minutes if you’re good at it. I got good at it.
There is a second quest-type thing to do after but there is very little incentive, since the game offers enough of a challenge without increasing the difficulty. Once you beat the purple dude at the end, you won’t be eager to jump back in. And why is the boss a purple dude but the icon is Mr. Sinister?
I’m glad I finally beat this game, but my god. Will I never, ever touch it again. I will, however, always love the soundtrack to this game. God damn is it good.
Final Thoughts:
The boss fights in each stage’s third world are all easy. EASY. The real boss battles are the two levels that precede each boss fight, just getting through them. Jesus, the Emperor alone is such a joke.
Aubrey: still love you after all these years like it was the first day!
sure do wish it was this time 10 years from now, when my basement will be back in working, functional order.
OH WELL.
In other news, I’ve grown so much but there are still old wounds that will mever fully close.
Mostly, I am referencing the pain of loss, both permanent and impermanent.
And impeppermint.
But I accomplished this, so how bad could it be?
Never came close as a kid.
Expect a “Review” soon!
So I just found out that there is a 4th season of Full Metal Panic!, this stupid anime about giant robots and high school that I watched, well, when I was in high school. Haven’t seen any of it for nearly 6-7 years, when the 3rd series was up on Netflix, and I didn’t remember any of it.
Turns out? Funimation has the first season (at least) with subtitles and dubbed for free on YouTube:
Threw this on and the theme song came on and I was back in Harvard, NE in my gross tan bedroom sitting on an overly-worn couch drinking A&W Cream Soda and watching these DVDs. My god. How the time passes.
Holy shit.
Yeah, I’ll be watching all of this in preparation for the new stuff. You bet your ass.
“A Way Out” is a simple game with a simple story told a very, very simple way. Two characters end up in prison together and attempt to break out and hunt down the man that wronged them. One is a father, the other is a father-to-be. Their individual levels of implicitness in previous crimes differ as well as their levels of violence regarding their unique methods of freeing themselves from captivity as well as how they hunt their prey.
The difference between this game and any Telltale game (Walking Dead, Minecraft, Batman, etc.) is that, rather than one player managing Leo and Vincent, the game’s main characters, you play online (or couch co-op!) with a buddy. In this instance, I played with my older brother because our birthdays are right next to each other, but geographically he and I aren’t. This title also does the rare thing of requiring only one player to actually own the game, which is nearly unheard of.
As stated, “A Way Out” is basically a two-player Telltale adventure game; in split-screen (which shift and changes sizes depending on the actions taking place to keep both players focus at all times) Leo and Vincent complete button presses, walking simulation exercises, puzzle solving, and dialogue trees. This furthers both of their plots as well as intersecting early in the game and then never really separating until the credits roll. But don’t assume that means both players are on the same see-saw all game (although you do get to interact with a see-saw at one point). No, this game wisely keeps the actions different and varied enough to make things interesting. Examples included one character scaring fish while another one stabs at them in a stream with a spear, one character interacting with one member of his family while the other helps fix a motorbike, or two different angles with obstacles being run during a high-stakes chase in a construction zone. It’s fairly engaging and rarely overly repetitive.
Nothing is really difficult and failure generally results in not much more than a few seconds of set back, or to the start of a set piece. Really, only two action sequences gave us any kind of difficulty spikes and they were near the end of the game, with a motorcycle chase sequence and some light shoot-outs, and that was more to do with controls and too much happening on two screens to keep straight who-was-who. Minor nitpicks, but still – when I say nothing was too difficult, this can also be a nitpick, because I’m OK with an easy game if it is in service to the story (Telltale’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” for example is easy as pie but has a compelling narrative that makes up for this). “A Way Out” has… a bit of a narrative problem, so this does factor into the title’s larger issue.
Again, the story is simple – two criminals escape jail to go after the man who got them falsely imprisoned. This can be OK if it is told well, but this game is more interested in character beats and settings than this story. This leads to poorly written dialogue and some extremely silly voice acting as a result. Both of the main characters have moments of sheer stupidity in their writing and then the VA’s have to come up with compelling ways to say their lines and, what with the accents, tone, and setting – these lines come across as parody rather than played straight. This destroys the immersion, somewhat, but the real hit the game takes as a result is that the storyline never gets a chance to break free from the shackles of cliché and rest way too comfortably in that realm. What could have been an interactive game equivalent to Heat or the Departed ends up coming across like a cheap knock-off, at least in the story and presentation department.
Having said all that? Still worth the price of admission in my opinion, but only if you’re willing to go through it once. You’ll never really want to play through the whole game again because the games’ two endings are both determined in the final seconds, never in the choices, actions or events that transpire in the title’s 6-8 hour runtime leading up to the over-written and over-choreographed finale. And once you know all the game’s tricks, story beats, and hidden secrets and twists, a second play through with another friend is mostly worthless, at least for you. But that first time through, exploring the settings, interacting with everything you can click on, and seeing what you can get away with? It’s pretty fun and if you can find it on sale, absolutely a worthwhile investment of your time and money.
On a technical level, though, the most impressive thing was how the game looked (much better than a Telltale game, but obviously not top-shelf as far as games are concerned, these days) while running online across the country in two different states. We never had it freeze and the game didn’t stutter or lag. A lot can be said about our respective connections, but at the end of the day, for what this game attempted and accomplished, this feat alone made it worthwhile. I’ve lost connection playing “Bubble Bobble” over PSN before. “Bubble Bobble” didn’t have shootouts and car chase. So, kudos!
Final Thoughts:
There is a Legend of Zelda secret in this game so stupid it is only topped in idiotic magic by a musical secret you can find five feet away from it in one of the games’ middle stages. That farm house bit is my favorite part, even if it is ridiculous and cliché-ridden to hell and back.
COME ON TWIN PEAKS
COME ON DAVID LYNCH
GET THEM NOMS!
UPDATE:
Snubbed!
Like my SNES Classic (which I’ll get back to, eventually…) I’m also moving through my modded collection on the NES Classic in alphabetical order from whatever game I started with. Since I started with Kirby’s Adventure, next up? The “amazing” Kung Fu.
It isn’t amazing. In fact, it’s mostly cheap and short.
A port of the arcade game “Kung Fu Master”, the NES version shows its origins well. It is a dirty, nasty game designed to keep you from winning at any cost, with a barrage of never-ending bad guys with a variety of abilities (seriously, screw those hornets or bees or whatever they are. Screw them) and it is meant to get you to master the game’s combat, which is really just “punch” and “kick” with a jumping and a crouching version of each. Its horribly simple. You have very little health, few lives, and the bosses (oh god the bosses) have so much health that even if they didn’t hit like a goddamned truck you would still lose.
There is no story, aside from getting Thomas (the titular “kung fu master”) to his girlfriend after beating Mr. X, the game’s fifth and final boss. You then get to see them kiss and the game starts over. And don’t expect to enjoy replaying these levels, they are the exact same color and layout, just changing your direction depending on where the staircase ends up. The enemies are also not varied enough to be interesting. None of it is interesting.
I managed to get through this game twice in under 11 minutes and then promptly shut it off and will likely never touch it again. I’m sure that, as a kid, if I’d had this game the challenge would have been more worthy and the trial-and-error combat would have been more engaging. But at 33, I’m just equipped to figure it all out and move on. There is nothing engaging and there is no nostalgia to experience aside from “man, remember when video games were cheap dicks?” and, you know, I get that feeling from Bloodborne and Dark Souls and those games are actually engaging, so…
Don’t bother modding this on to your system unless you’re desperate to relive a memory or you are a completionist.
Final Thought
-Mr. X has a voice clip of himself laughing and, actually, despite the looping nature of it, it’s pretty good for an old NES title.
skylerbartels 