Saturday, July 28, 2012

How I Spent My Brother's Summer Vacation

Ok, so my brother and I are about 12 years apart in age, I'm a child of the 80's and he's a child of the late 90's.  He's in high school and he comes to visit me in the summer time since we live on opposite ends of the country.  Before the summer began he and I had a serious conversation about what "old school" games we were going to fire up while he was here.  Here's some of the stuff we played while he was here (in mostly chronological order).

1.  Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES)






This one we had discussed playing months before he ever got here.  This for me is like the last great Zelda game.  I liked the original, the second one was awful, this one was incredible, and then the franchise went 3D and completely left my realm of interest.  My brother was born after this game came out so his desire to check it out was somewhat impromptu.  We got about halfway through the game, got bored, and stopped probably at about the 3rd of 4th Dungeon in the Dark World.  This was one of the big seven when I grew up so I played this game to death in my youth.  We probably could have finished it, we took turns when one of us got tired of playing or died and eventually it got to the point where we both wanted to hand off the controller and the other didn't want to pick it up, so we set this one back on the shelf.

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2. Smash TV (SNES)





This one we played very briefly.  I loved this game in the arcade back in the day and if I'd known it was on SNES back when I was a kid I probably would have jumped at the opportunity to pick it up.  This game has a good balance of twisted humor and good gaming fundamentals.  To me it felt like the video game version of "The Running Man" which is one of my favorite "Ah-nold" movies.  Arcade action, a cool isometric overhead view of the game with great controls and epic boss fights, can't ask for much more than that.  The game suffers slightly in that you essentially have infinite lives and can keep playing until the end so there's no real challenge, I also was disappointed because the game always felt like there could have been more.  That aside, it's a really good port of the original game and I nice go-to game for some raw shoot-em-up arcade style gaming.  We both had played this a lot beforehand and this time played long enough to beat the first boss and then moved on to the next game.

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3. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round (SNES)





I'm a big Final Fight fan and this was a spitting image of that game set in Arthurian mythology.  Now I find that most people tend to favor the bruiser (Percival) who is this game's version of Mike Haggar from Final Fight, but we stuck to the more familiar characters.   Other factors in this decision were that Arthur and Lancelot looked cooler, but also because Percival looked like a lumber jack, he was shirtless with jeans and a giant axe. 

We had a lot of fun with this one, it was challenging but some of the boss fights were confusing and found ourselves having conversations along the lines of:

"You remember the part where King Arthur fought the Samurai?"  "No, must have ran out of time before we could read that part in my classical lit class".

The features were cool, you could "level up" which would give you stronger weapons and armor (which scaled with the bad guys you fought so the game doesn't get easier, you just look cooler in the long run.
Anyway, really fun game, great brawler, and pretty challenging since you have limited lives and continues.  We managed to get to the last boss once or twice before we'd run out of continues and hit a "game over" screen.  What trumped this game however was another Capcom brawler....

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4.  The King of Dragons (SNES)




We had a blast playing this game.  Another Final Fight style brawler by Capcom but this one required a little bit more finesse than the ordinary brawler.  Controls seemed a tad on the stiff side but I think that added to the finesse required as opposed to typical button mashing (unless you're the elf, button mashing is a plus for this guy).  Melee guys have sword and shield which took some time striking a nice balance on how to use them because the timing with the controls is a little awkward.  The Wizard and Elf had decent ranged weapons and no way to defend themselves (no shield or block button).  This one you could also level up which gave you more life and periodically you would get upgraded weapons or shields/bow/ring for the fighting guys/elf/wizard respectively.  Also the bad guys you fought didn't scale quite as quickly so there are parts of the game after an upgrade where you definitely notice things being a bit easier, and then right before an upgrade having to struggle with an improved version of a bad guy that appears for the first time and so forth.  Boss fights are really fun, lots of variety, different strategies for fighting each guy, the game keeps you on your toes for sure.  This game is really long for a brawler (like 15 full levels or more with boss fights and mini boss fights thrown in randomly for good measure).  We were most successful and got to the last stage (I think) with the Wizard and Elf, but we played this over and over and tried different characters and had a lot of fun with this.  Probably dumped a good 20 hours into this game by the time everything was all said and done, to compare, Zelda, an RPG type game that you can save your progress didn't get as much play as this game.  This was the shining star among the other games we played.  Also to my delight, I discovered there is an Arcade version of the game which I'm very curious to try out (3 player simultaneous play instead of the 2 so I'll have to drag a few friends over to try it out).  On that note on to our last and final game for the summer.

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5. Hit the Ice (SNES)


This one we discovered at random because the name was kind of funny.  Turns out it's a hilarious hockey game!  Don't get me wrong it was just OK.  Think NBA Jam, only hockey and not licensed by any official professional sports organization.  The teams were basically just colors (Greens vs. Yellows in the above picture) and I guess they were from random cities but we couldn't determine if the team you chose was the home or visitng team, not that it really mattered, after a mode 7 graphics extravaganza of you zooming in on the arena from an overhead map view, you end up in the same hockey rink you play in every game.  It took us a while to figure out how to actually score goals consistently, but once we got it down we actually won a few games.  The game wasn't as good as maybe Blades of Steel on the NES, but it was fun for what it was, a silly unlicensed hockey game with pretend teams and players.  My brother was hoping the Reds were from the Soviet Union, that did not appear to be the case.  There are fights, and each character has a unique animation where they pretty much maul the opposing team while you're playing defense.  It was fun enough to give it a fair amount of replay value and we only played exhibition games (there was a tournament mode as well).  If you're easily frustrated by somewhat primitive play mechanics and control, or have high standards when it comes to hockey video games, maybe take a pass on this one, but if you have a little patience the game rewards you with a pretty rich and challenging gaming experience.  We had a serious pretend rivalry that we pumped ourselves up over against the "Yellows", and did eventually triumph against them after about 3 or 4 games.  At some point I may do a sports game list, this would make my top 10, top 5 if I do a SNES only list.  Good show Taito, wish I'd known about this game when I was a kid.

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Alright so that's the breakdown of our classic gaming summer.  Not a bad spread if I do say so myself.  We did stick primarily to SNES because the games were the most readily available, also made sure to play games I hadn't played in a long time or ever before so my brother and I would be on equal footing, and we were not disappointed.  Looking forward to what next summer has in store.