Psst, hey kid... you wanna buy a video game?
Walking into the bar and decking the single meanest looking guy they can find this week is South Park: Snow Day, the third of the South Park RPGs! The first two were legit good (albeit characteristically crass) RPGs that made good use of the license, this'un appears to be a Souls 'em Up with some *real spiffy* visuals.
And it's South Park so "Real Spiffy" is hard to properly gauge, but, like... it's there; bein' spiffy.
The other game this week before we get into a heapin' helping of re-releases and spiritual successors is Terra Memoria, and I realize as I say that that this is enough to make me squint and say "Is... is this Breath of Fire?" I don't know how valid of a comparison that is, beyond having an isometric view and a cast largely, but not primarily, made up of varmints. It brags about being a cozy adventure, but it also shows what is definitely a battle scene showing you smashing a bunch of monsters with a magic spell.
So... I am kind of unclear what to expect here; but I already compared it to Breath of Fire and its within my Impulse Buy threshold, so chances are *pretty good* I'll be giving it a try.
Remember how they made a brand new Ufouria earlier this month? Did you play that and think "Well I wish to learn all about the origins of these wonderful characters!" well GOOD NEWS, sorta, BECAUSE NOW YOU CAN! Hebereke: Enjoy Edition is out and it's a port of... the Famicom version of that game which was largely the same as the European version but with a bunch of graphics changed and not slowed down to accommodate PAL TV inputs! It also includes the English version (complete with the... Scandinavian instruction manual) and a handful of modern amenities like save-states and a rewind option.
Ufouria is among the best troids on the NES and this is about as extensive of a port as you can reasonably expect, so I say "Oh good!"
Grab a rope dangling out of a birds bird-hole and throw your entire damn eyeballs at an enemy today, why don't you!
Speaking of ports of weirdly good NES platformers, we have Felix the Cat, a collection of the NES and Gameboy Felix the Cat games, neither of which I have played before but both of which I understand to fall under the heading of "Inexplicably good?"
I know Felix is objectively The Funniest Cat, but my exposure to him begins and ends with "Having watched the 90s cartoon that was a kind of Ren & Stimpy thing?" so I can't speak with any familiarity beyond "He kind of sounds like Lexington from Gargoyles".
Felix a Cat, why don't you?
Now if you're no great fan of cats but *are* a great fan of missiles (and it's a binary, if you're not one, you're the other), next we have Missile Dancer 2, a game that says "Hey... ain't no law against making a new Afterburner game and calling it something else!" and so... they DID! I mean, there's *some* other differences (your plane looks more like Jetfire from Transformers than Tom Cruises Plane from Top Gun, and there's Boss Monsters), but this is otherwise a Super Scaler game where you have a jet and a real desire to instigate a meet-cute between an implausible number of missiles and a sky full of BAD GUYS.
You'll be saying "Hold Me Close, Missile Dancer" today!
And we're STILL talking about spiritual sequels to games I love, albeit less so, as next is Pepper Grinder, which certainly looks like a new Drill Dozer! Trying the demo, It's actually not. It's more of a whole game made out of using the Digging Power from Ori and the Will of the Wisps?
Yer a gal with a big honkin' drill and a yen to use that drill to PIERCE THE HEAVENS/DIRT/MONSTERS HEADS in a general high speed platformer kind of setting.
And speaking of cracking things, that's what you do to Eggs. And what better way to honor the humble Egg than with a new Old Japanese PC RPG release like Egg Console: XAK. I infer it's something akin to Ys and, like most other Egg Console games, it's mostly in Japanese so unless you're passingly fluent, you may have a hard time with it!
And finally, we have an NSO update, this time for the GBA, and it's... a game I thought we had already, honestly; the launch title F-Zero: Maximum Overdrive, which I don't know for certain was a modified port of the original F-Zero, but maybe it was. It was certainly an early showcase for the stark visual upgrade the GBA was capable of compared to its proud poppas.
Go around a big, ludicrously dangerous race track *real fast* a whole lot... and also blow up constantly because Maximum Overdrive is a very difficult game even by F-Zero standards, but you look amazing doing it, by 2001 Handheld Game standards.
I guess that's everything you're getting out of me. Go to bread.
Walking into the bar and decking the single meanest looking guy they can find this week is South Park: Snow Day, the third of the South Park RPGs! The first two were legit good (albeit characteristically crass) RPGs that made good use of the license, this'un appears to be a Souls 'em Up with some *real spiffy* visuals.
And it's South Park so "Real Spiffy" is hard to properly gauge, but, like... it's there; bein' spiffy.
The other game this week before we get into a heapin' helping of re-releases and spiritual successors is Terra Memoria, and I realize as I say that that this is enough to make me squint and say "Is... is this Breath of Fire?" I don't know how valid of a comparison that is, beyond having an isometric view and a cast largely, but not primarily, made up of varmints. It brags about being a cozy adventure, but it also shows what is definitely a battle scene showing you smashing a bunch of monsters with a magic spell.
So... I am kind of unclear what to expect here; but I already compared it to Breath of Fire and its within my Impulse Buy threshold, so chances are *pretty good* I'll be giving it a try.
Remember how they made a brand new Ufouria earlier this month? Did you play that and think "Well I wish to learn all about the origins of these wonderful characters!" well GOOD NEWS, sorta, BECAUSE NOW YOU CAN! Hebereke: Enjoy Edition is out and it's a port of... the Famicom version of that game which was largely the same as the European version but with a bunch of graphics changed and not slowed down to accommodate PAL TV inputs! It also includes the English version (complete with the... Scandinavian instruction manual) and a handful of modern amenities like save-states and a rewind option.
Ufouria is among the best troids on the NES and this is about as extensive of a port as you can reasonably expect, so I say "Oh good!"
Grab a rope dangling out of a birds bird-hole and throw your entire damn eyeballs at an enemy today, why don't you!
Speaking of ports of weirdly good NES platformers, we have Felix the Cat, a collection of the NES and Gameboy Felix the Cat games, neither of which I have played before but both of which I understand to fall under the heading of "Inexplicably good?"
I know Felix is objectively The Funniest Cat, but my exposure to him begins and ends with "Having watched the 90s cartoon that was a kind of Ren & Stimpy thing?" so I can't speak with any familiarity beyond "He kind of sounds like Lexington from Gargoyles".
Felix a Cat, why don't you?
Now if you're no great fan of cats but *are* a great fan of missiles (and it's a binary, if you're not one, you're the other), next we have Missile Dancer 2, a game that says "Hey... ain't no law against making a new Afterburner game and calling it something else!" and so... they DID! I mean, there's *some* other differences (your plane looks more like Jetfire from Transformers than Tom Cruises Plane from Top Gun, and there's Boss Monsters), but this is otherwise a Super Scaler game where you have a jet and a real desire to instigate a meet-cute between an implausible number of missiles and a sky full of BAD GUYS.
You'll be saying "Hold Me Close, Missile Dancer" today!
And we're STILL talking about spiritual sequels to games I love, albeit less so, as next is Pepper Grinder, which certainly looks like a new Drill Dozer! Trying the demo, It's actually not. It's more of a whole game made out of using the Digging Power from Ori and the Will of the Wisps?
Yer a gal with a big honkin' drill and a yen to use that drill to PIERCE THE HEAVENS/DIRT/MONSTERS HEADS in a general high speed platformer kind of setting.
And speaking of cracking things, that's what you do to Eggs. And what better way to honor the humble Egg than with a new Old Japanese PC RPG release like Egg Console: XAK. I infer it's something akin to Ys and, like most other Egg Console games, it's mostly in Japanese so unless you're passingly fluent, you may have a hard time with it!
And finally, we have an NSO update, this time for the GBA, and it's... a game I thought we had already, honestly; the launch title F-Zero: Maximum Overdrive, which I don't know for certain was a modified port of the original F-Zero, but maybe it was. It was certainly an early showcase for the stark visual upgrade the GBA was capable of compared to its proud poppas.
Go around a big, ludicrously dangerous race track *real fast* a whole lot... and also blow up constantly because Maximum Overdrive is a very difficult game even by F-Zero standards, but you look amazing doing it, by 2001 Handheld Game standards.
I guess that's everything you're getting out of me. Go to bread.
