I think I’m going to have to admit defeat and call it a day
with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. It was getting to the point where I
wouldn’t even want to put my PS2 on for thought of having to deal with that
asinine game, and I found myself thinking: Time to move on. Play something
else. And get rid of that game.
(If and when I get rid of my games that I don’t play
anymore, it will probably be all at the same time. In the UK there is a
service called Music Magpie that will take some old games and CDs etc off your
hands for a relatively small amount of money – but they will take them, and if
there’s more than 20 items, the delivery is free. That’s how I’ll probably sell
my games when the time comes. That’s also why I’ll hang on to the game long
enough for me to give it another go if the mood takes me.)
So here are just a few things that are wrong with it:
The biggest problem I’ve had so far has been with the health
recovery system. You either use Stim Packs, which will restore roughly ¼ of
your health, or you can stand still for about 5 minutes and your health will
recover automatically. The former is by far the quicker option, but if you do
this, you will burn though your health packs very quickly and they need to be
saved for the bosses. The latter sounds great until you start doing it after
every 5 enemies or so. They drain a lot of your health if they hit you, which
of course they will. I spent ages standing around waiting for my health to
recover, and it would have been incredibly boring had I not had my laptop on at
the same time and spent the downtime watching videos on Youtube. What I did
before Youtube I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to play this
game and have nothing else to do!
Also, some of the set-pieces are very lazy. Quite early on
in the game you have to escape from a cave that is crumbling around you and
rocks are falling down on to you from overhead. The idea is to get you to hurry
up while you’re leaving, which you do, until you realise that not a single one
of these rock falls – which occur once every six seconds or so with EXACTLY THE
SAME ANIMATION – has even the remotest chance of hitting you. All it’s actually
doing is getting in the way of your field of view. Granted, given the size of
the level, having any of them hit you would have made escape almost impossible,
but it could and should have been handled a lot better than this.
Aside from this, the game is just outright dull. Other than
the main questline, the quests are absolutely ridiculous (I can’t imagine that
a prostitute in post-apocalyptic America is going to be too worried about the
whereabouts of her cat, even if it is called Mr Pussy,) the characters aren’t
likeable by any stretch of the imagination and the combat is repetitive and
boring. I imagine the game would be more fun played in 2-player co-op,
but
what isn’t? I bought it on the strength of the Fallout games – which up until
then had been very good – but in hindsight; I’d have done better leaving this
one alone.
Time for some fun...
Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection
This is a collection of games I’ve got on an Xbox360 disc of
about 40 games for the Sega Mega Drive,
better known in the rest of the world as the Sega Genesis. I owned a Mega Drive years
ago – and some of these games - , from when I was eight up until about
nineteen, when I traded it in for an Xbox. (This was 2005 and retro gaming was
HUGE in the UK
at this point.) I figured, in the spirit of the challenge, that it would be a
good idea to play through some of these.
Now, some of these old Mega Drive games are very hard to
complete. On at least one of them, it actually can’t be done (because it is a
Tetris-style puzzle game and will carry on indefinitely until you lose.) Some
of them are astonishingly difficult to manage. And some of them are simply
better games than others. While I like enough of the games to want to keep the
actual disk, in some cases all I will be looking for is the Achievement Points
for it.
Here are the games I’ve won achievement points on so far, and
what I had to do to get them:
- Alex
Kidd: Collect 1,000 in currency
- Altered
Beast: Collect 100,000 points or higher on the first level
- Bonanza
Brothers: Reach 40,000 points on the first level
- Columns:
Get 20,000 on Easy mode
- Comix
Zone: Complete the first episode
- Doctor
Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine: Complete the game
- Ecco:
Talk to another dolphin
- Fatal
Labyrinth: Progress to the 5th level of the labyrinth
- Golden
Axe: Collect 20 magic power-ups
- Kid
Chameleon: Collect Maniaxe
- Shinobi
III: Complete the 1st level without using continues
- Sonic
Spinball: Get 10,000,000 points on the first level
- Sonic
the Hedgehog: Obtain a Chaos Emerald
- Streets
of Rage: Complete 1st level using all 3 characters.
- Super
Thunder Blade: Score over 1,500,000 points on the first level
So, without further ado, here are the games I’ve been
playing and how I managed with them:
Streets of Rage
I’d actually already got the achievement for this, as
playing through the first level with all three characters isn’t actually all
that hard. However, as far as brawlers are concerned, the Streets of Rage
series was as good as they ever were or ever would be. In fact the second game
is my favourite game of all time. I hadn’t completed it though, (at least, not
on normal difficulty) and I’ve got this thing where I have to play through all
the games in the series in order, so I thought I’d start with this one.
Streets of Rage, while not superbly balanced, includes a
surprising amount of strategy for a brawler. But I guess that’s what games were
like back in the early 90s. In order for it to be a challenge, the game was
designed in such a way that you couldn’t just button-mash. You had to think
about what you were doing, and how you’d tackle the various different enemies,
particularly the bosses.
For example, at the end of level 2, you come across a guy
with Wolverine-style claws. The way to deal with him is NEVER to jump, because
as soon as you do he rushes at you with a slash and knocks you out of the air.
Instead, approach him from above if you can, and get him in a hold. To maximise
the damage output, flip over him while holding him, do the first couple of
moves of the hold combo then throw him.
To deal with the big fat guy who breathes fire on level 4,
you have to make sure you’re at the opposite height of the screen to where he
is (i.e. if he’s low, be at the high end,) intercept him from behind as he’s
breathing fire and do the hold combo. But whatever you do, don’t try to throw
him or he’ll fall on top of you and you’ll damage yourself.
By far the hardest enemy in the game is Mona and Lisa, two
fighters who in this version are re-skins of the playable character Blaze. If
these two hit you, it will hurt – more than a third of your health bar will
disappear – and the only way to hit them is to use your back attack. If you try
to attack them head on, they will simply jump away from you. This requires a
lot of skill to manage, and a character with a good back attack.
And then there are the characters themselves: Adam, Axel and
Blaze, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game purports to help
you out with this on the selection screen; Adam is strong and has a good jump
attack but is not very quick, Axel is strong and quick but doesn’t have very
good jump attacks, and Blaze is quick and has jump attacks but is not very
strong. But they all have different things about them that you can only
discover through playing the game yourself – or reading a wiki. In my case it
was a mixture of the two.
My favourite character is Adam, but I think this has a lot
to do with the fact that he doesn’t appear as a playable character in Streets
of Rage 2 which I owned years ago. I always enjoyed playing the different
character. He’s good enough to take out most of the enemies in the game, but
sadly not quite quick enough to get out of their way when they’re doing their
fast attacks, and I tend to die before I get to the end of the game.
Axel is quite average and was great in the second game but
in this one he’s lacking in ranged attacks. He has to be right up close before
he can do any significant amount of damage, and this is the case for his jump
attack and back attack as well, making him almost useless for some of the later
bosses. It’s kind of ironic that the character that was the face of the game
was also the least useful.
I actually finished the game with Blaze, in the end. She’s
quick enough to dodge most attacks and she’s got good jump and back attacks as
well. Her regular attacks are less powerful but this is a small price to pay
because you just need to do more of them. Also – and this is where some balance
issues come in to it – she has the best throws out of the three of them as
well. So she’s fast; useful; and if you get close enough she can do a huge
amount of damage. She’s actually therefore the best character in the game.
The game also lets you choose a ‘Bad’ ending. The idea of
different endings wasn’t unknown for the time, and you’d usually have to do
something extra to get the good one – play on a higher difficulty level,
collect all the Chaos Emeralds and such – but in Streets of Rage, you actually
have to work harder for the bad one. At the end of the game, you have to choose
whether you want to become Mr X’s right hand man, and if you decide that you
do, he drops you down and you have to play the last I think three levels again.
You then have to beat the last boss anyway, which is surprisingly easy. I’ve
seen both endings; I completed the game years ago and got the bad ending on
Easy mode, but for this play-through I wanted to play it on normal and get the
good ending. It was satisfying to beat it again after so long!
Bonanza Brothers
This game appears to be about two brothers who steal things
from various guarded locations, and what has to be one of the first games with
a ‘Stealth’ mechanic. You could hide from your enemies, or shoot them, which in
actual fact would stun them for around 5 seconds. The levels were timed and
there would be a bonus in your score for beating the level quickly. Time-based
scoring like this was quite common in those days, I think.
I never owned this game on the Mega Drive and to be honest, I’m not
enjoying it too much now. The controls are quite clunky and the theme is
something I’m struggling to care about. I might give it another go at some
point, but now that I’ve got the achievement for it, it won’t be any time soon.
Alien Storm
Another brawler. Don’t be fooled by the fact that all the
characters have guns; they are short ranged energy blasters that don’t go more
than a few feet. The idea behind the game is that aliens have descended on to
earth and are disguising themselves as bins and post boxes, and you have to kill
them all with your weapons. Or, as is commonly the case with Mega Drive games, mash the B button. The
A button does the usual super-attack, but the C button is what sets this one
apart from regular brawlers. Rather than jumping up, this one actually makes
jump forward, which you can combine into a quick attack in the form of a
forward roll. It’s useful, provided you understand where you’ll end up and make
sure there are no enemies there, and quite a bit different from the usual jump
attacks. But you do find yourself missing the notion of a jump keeping you out
of harms way for a valuable second while you decide what to do next. The game
also has ‘first person’ sections, where you control a crosshair to aim at
various different aliens coming at you and shoot crates to get power-ups.
This game is OK but not as good as Streets of Rage. For one
thing, the things that are supposed hide alien life – bins, etc – are things
that in any other game you’d smash to get an item; trying to do so in this game
almost always results in an alien appearing out of it, taking away any element
of surprise. You also need to collect energy for your guns, which is a peculiar
thing to put in a brawler because that potentially means you could derail the
whole game by running out of ammo. It is also very hard. I can’t actually get
the achievement – I have to make it to the end of the third level without dying
even once. Something always manages to kill me, either by ganging up on me to
the point where I can do nothing but use a super-attack to deal with it, or by
being a horribly hard boss fight.
But, for a game that was obviously designed for arcade, this
is not too bad at all. It is fun, if a little frustrating, and it’s nice to
have a slightly different take on what you would normally expect from a
brawler. I’ll keep going at it until I get that achievement, but whether I’ll
make it to the end I don’t know.
Dr Robotnik’s Mean
Bean Machine
This is an absurd but surprisingly fun game using characters
from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. (For those of you who don’t know, Dr
Eggman was originally called Dr Robotnik. I don’t know why it was changed for
the later games!) In fact, some of the characters who appear in the game were
also from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog TV series, which I used to love
when I was about 8 or 9 and for quite a long time afterwards! It is a
tetris-like puzzle game, where you have to group four or more ‘Beans’ of the
same colour in order to ‘free’ them.
What makes this game different is the adversarial nature of
the game. The Scenario Mode pits you against a ladder of 12 different robots that
are also playing the game, and the idea is to make them fill their playing field
before they do. As soon as that happens, it’s game over, but there’s a twist: Each
time you free a group of coloured beans, it creates a group of colourless “refugee”
beans that drops on your opponent. These cannot be grouped in the usual way, and
the only way to get rid of them is if they are next to a group that they are freeing.
The more beans you get rid of in one shot – or the higher your combo – the more
refugees are dropped on your opponent. Drop enough of them and you can knock them
out straight away, though more likely you’ll be very disruptive to the combos they
were planning. Of course, they can do the same to you, and trust me, they will…
The robots you fight are a colourful bunch, and feature
Scratch, Grounder and Coconuts from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog amongst
others. All the robots say something to you in a text-based format before their
level begins, and I can’t help but wonder if the script-writer ever actually watched
the show; most of the characters that feature here are devoid of their usual personalities
in the game. They are all supposed to have different strategies and tactics in order
to make life difficult for you, but to be honest, the only ones that gave me any
significant amount of trouble were Dynamight (Level 7,) and Spike (Level 9.) The
rest of them… well it wasn’t exactly easy, but when I won, I felt it was more
to do with luck of the draw than skill. I actually beat Dr Robotnik on my first
go.
The game also features a 2-player versus mode, which caused some
horrific rows between me, my brother and some of my friends in my younger days!
(Dropping a load of refugees on each other was never taken in good grace, and even
now seems something of a ‘dick’ move.) I guess that can be fun if played in the
spirit it was intended. There is also a training, or ‘free’ mode, which can be
one or two players and does not feature refugees. I guess that could be fun too,
but with Columns on the same disk, there’s not much point…
I had a lot of fun with this, but now that I’ve got the achievement
(Complete the game,) I doubt I’ll be coming back to it any time soon.
