yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

It’s a fairly rough looking indie where you play as a pig farmer who the mafia use to get rid of their bodies. You tell em you want out, they give you an ultimatum to carry on, the game is you then spending your time between that convo and them coming back to see what choice you’ve made. It’s pretty short, fairly low budget looking but really engrossing.

It's most notable for being written by Duc Burford who also did Paratopic. He's fairly well know for being a writer and narrative consultants who has loud opinions on things. Not necessarily bad ones either. His blog can be pretty good.

Tempy wrote:

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

It’s a fairly rough looking indie where you play as a pig farmer who the mafia use to get rid of their bodies. You tell em you want out, they give you an ultimatum to carry on, the game is you then spending your time between that convo and them coming back to see what choice you’ve made. It’s pretty short, fairly low budget looking but really engrossing.

It's most notable for being written by Duc Burford who also did Paratopic. He's fairly well know for being a writer and narrative consultants who has loud opinions on things. Not necessarily bad ones either. His blog can be pretty good.

Yeah, Doc's alright. Don't always agree with him, but he clearly thinks through his ideas. Adios is good.

Sonic Drift (Game Gear) - Sonic and friends decide to have Mario Kart-style races on Sega’s 8-bit handheld. None of the little woodland cunts can steer properly so you must master the art of the drift to get to the top of the podium. Each character also has an individual Mario Kart-style power-up they can activate by pressing up to consume two rings - however, these are pretty much completely useless.

The game isn’t great. The one thing I will grant it is that it manages to pull off Mario Kart style circular tracks while also having an impressive sense of speed for such poorly spec-ed hardware. But it’s not very fun and you can rattle off full completion on both difficulty levels really quickly. I didn’t have a Game Gear back in the day but I would have been disappointed if I’d paid good money for this in the ‘90s. [4]

Quake II 64

Completely different levels/story to Quake II proper, but plays identically, moment to moment.

I think the limitation of the host hardware means that they had to make smaller levels, which actually goes in this version's favour - they're much more easily navigable, and you can generally figure out where you have to go without resorting to checking the compass. Plus the coloured lighting effects are as good here as they were in Quake 64.

On the downside, the AI are basically psychic - they'll hit you as soon as they round a corner, and towards the end of the game, a few too many baddies are hidden in monster closets or in places that are awkward/near impossible to hit. Coupled with the aforementioned laser accuracy, it makes some parts really brutal. I could count the number of deaths I had in the PC version on my fingers, and most of those were environmental. The N64 version succeeded in doing what Daikatana never did, and made me its prison wife.

It's worth playing, if only to compare and contrast, but the positives and negatives when compared to the original cancel each other out when it comes to over all quality.

[8]

? Quake [8]

regmcfly wrote:

Oh Quake 2 is it

It's good, but Quake is better.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

I had the ET game for my atari 2600. Console and games were bought second hand (though now looking back with wiser eyes, 'off the back of a lorry' may be more accurate) so didn't have manuals for any of the games we had.

Had absolutely no clue whatsoever what was meant to do in the ET game. ERE's description talks of far more gameplay than i ever discovered. Falling down holes, slowly levitating out, and often falling straight back in is all i can remember of the game. don't recall ever playing long enough to find bits of phone, sweets, special powers or even fbi agents. it was a [1] even back then to a young child on their first console.
edit: looking at screenshots, the fbi agent does seem to ring a bell but the others I still don't recall.

RamSteelwood wrote:

Blue Swirl wrote:

EvilRedEye wrote:

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600)

Oooh oooh, do Superman 64 next!

Superman on the atari 2600. it's an all time classic in comparison to ET!

I saw Superman on a list of best Atari games that didn’t make it to Atari 50.

Yars’ Revenge (Atari 2600) - Completed both unique shield formations on every single-player permutation of the game. This is pretty decent. You play an angry space insect attempting to destroy a Qotile base in retaliation for the decimation of one of your planets. Evade the homing missile, wear down the shield and then fire your Zorlon Cannon into the base to destroy it. A spectacular (for the 2600) neutral zone lies across the playing field, flashing through rainbow hues - within you can’t be damaged by the missile but cannot fire either. However, you can still be damaged by the deadly Swirl attack that flies out from the Qotile base at high speeds.

This plays well and just generally feels like an accomplished product - you even get an elaborate comic packed with it to set up the story. It looks as good as anything on the 2600 and the constant spacey sound it makes adds to the aesthetic. The second level with the shifting shield is kinda cool in how it works. Destroy the base and a spectacular explosion fills the screen.

It’s quite simple and eventually pretty repetitive but it’s a fun game that utilises the 2600 hardware very effectively and it’s not surprising it’s seen as one of the highlights of the catalogue. [7]

Oink! (Atari 2600) - Met the criteria to receive the Oinkers patch as stated in the manual. This is like a cross between Tetris and reverse Breakout themed after the Three Little Pigs. You’re trying to patch up a horizontal wall running across the screen and you can drop bricks down to fill the gaps. The wolf continually blasts gaps in the wall and, once a big enough hole is made, tries to capture you with his tongue (the manual says he is blowing breaths [???] but a pink line comes out of his mouth in-game). As long as a few bricks are in place stopping the hole from being too big, even if you get caught by the wolf there isn’t enough room to drag you through the wall.

The wolf generally doesn’t move around that much which means that you’ll inevitably start to fall behind as you move around to collect bricks from somewhere else to stop up the steadily increasing hole in one section of the screen. Eventually the game becomes a desperate fight for survival as you valiantly but inadequately try to fulfil the impossible task of stopping up the devastatingly large hole that has opened up before, inevitably, you fail and the wolf eats you. Oddly, once the wolf has captured you, you politely walk out of the front door, perhaps to meet your death with as much dignity as you can muster, like that episode of Doctor Who where Clara dies.

Once the wolf has killed the pig that lives in a house of straw, he moves onto the house of sticks and the house of bricks, the graphics changing accordingly. Paradoxically as the houses become made of more solid construction, the wolf’s demolition speeds up, making prolonged survival on the earlier stages desirable.

It’s a simple but effective game that becomes heart-pounding tense in its late stages. There is a second difficulty mode that makes you walk up to the wall to install bricks instead of dropping them down the screen but this makes prolonged play impossible and it seems like the lower difficulty is meant to be a main one (it seems physically impossible to earn the Oinkers patch on the higher setting). Good simple fun. [7]

Do Kaboom! and River Raid next!

Nice work dude!

Metal Slader Glory (Famicom) - Metal Slader Glory is largest and most graphically ambitious game for the NES/Famicom. It weighs in at one megabyte and uses Nintendo’s most advanced memory management controller chip. It look four years to make, largely taken up by the effort required to optimise the many large and elaborate pieces of pixel art into the system’s limited graphical memory.

The game is a sci-fi visual novel not entirely dissimilar to Snatcher. You play Tadashi Himukai, a 17-year-old who is drawn into a conspiracy when you purchase a used worker mech from a local dealer in the hopes of starting a construction company. The resulting mystery takes you from Earth to outer space colonies and the Moon. The plot eventually becomes quite engaging, although is a bit simpler than Snatcher and ends quite abruptly, perhaps due to the limitations of fitting the game in the cartridge.

Unfortunately, like many classic visual novels, Metal Slader Glory features significant misogynistic content. The game starts sexualising the main character’s 12-year-old sister before you can even finish reading the manual, you can disturb your girlfriend with your sexually predatory behaviour and can sexually harass pretty much every female character in the game. The ‘Look’ feature in visual novels is usually used to produce a simple textual description of the item you are looking at - in this game, it is clear when you ‘Look’ at a woman that you are eyefucking her, perturbing the in-game characters in the process.

It is a shame that this content somewhat overshadows the game’s aesthetic achievements, which are significant - the game is a sumptuous treat by the standards of the NES/Famicom. Massive illustrations fill the screen. Characters’ lips animate in sync with rudimentary synthesised speech, the absolute closest the NES/Famicom can come to producing anime-style production values. Mechs fly across the screen with elaborate animations. Aside from the use of synthesised text beeps instead of full voice acting, the game wouldn’t be out of place on the likes of the Mega CD. The production values are unrecognisable from those of the Portopia Serial Murder Case, the first ever visual novel, which was released on the NES five years earlier.

The game invites comparisons to multiple other things - Snatcher (obviously), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (the game prophesies some of its major plot points despite being released years before it began broadcast), even Shenmue (an admittedly quite dull search through an office building is quite reminiscent of the detailed exploration of the FREE system). The game is an easy recommendation for fans of classic adventure games, for whom it may currently have escaped noticed due to a lack of fan translations until very recently.

Metal Slader Glory was the brainchild of Yoshimiru Hoshi, who carried out the bulk of the work on the project, assisted by none other than Satoru Iwata. Hoshi worked at HAL Laboratory as a contractor and was due to be paid in royalties for the game - unfortunately the advanced specifications of the cartridge meant only a single small print run was able to be produced. The game was not able to earn back its costs and HAL Laboratories faced bankruptcy. Nintendo salvaged HAL on the basis that they became a second party studio and promoted Iwata to its president. The rest is gaming history.

Today we can look back on Metal Slader Glory as something of an extravagant folly. To this day, Yoshimiru Hoshi sells Metal Slader Glory merch on his website in the hope of one day being able to continue the story - perhaps the game truly was the Shenmue of the NES era. While some of its content has aged very badly and the depth of the story is still hampered by technical limitations despite pushing the console to its limits, Metal Slader Glory is still worth a look, both as one of the closest comparables to Snatcher and as a spectacular showcase for the NES/Famicom’s capabilities. [7]

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Sounds like an undertaking. Do you play with a step by step guide or just check occasionally? (or not at all)

Also can you explain the Deep Space Nine bit for fairweather Trekkies pls.

It’s not actually a particularly long game. The only time I checked a guide was towards the end because you can actually die in that section and I didn’t want to game over and start the last section again. There’s a spoiler-free guide on GameFAQs.

I can’t explain the DS9 thing without providing ruinous spoilers so fair warning to everyone: the following spoiler tags contain genuine spoilers, don’t read if you intend to play the game.

So yeah, have actually now finished Adios, and no it did not get any better. What shite. Did not succeed at drawing me in, looked awful, played awful, gameplay elements were broken (eg clay pigeons being hit regardless of where you shoot), no invert, ending was nonsense. Fuck you all for saying it was good. It was not good. [4]