On Doom CD32X Fusion – An Amazing Homebrew Accomplishment for the Sega 32X CD

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Brian

Doom CD32X Fusion is a brand-new homebrew version of Doom for the Sega 32X CD. It’s really amazing with fantastic performance, and makes use of all five CPUs in the Genesis with Sega CD and 32X in order to get the best performance and graphical output possible on the hardware. DJ, you’ve probably heard of it but have you tried it yet?

Features: 100 levels, 96 FM music tracks, a fully redone from scratch port that takes nothing from original 32X Doom, a game which makes full use of a complete Genesis with Sega CD and 32X setup.

In order to run the game, you either need to use the Ares emulator or have real hardware. For emulation, Ares is required because other emulators don’t support cart+cd combo releases like this, only a CD-only or cart-only game. For real hardware, you must have a Genesis with a Sega CD and a 32X, a flash cart like an Everdrive, and a computer with a CD burner and a blank CD. Fortunately I have all of these things. I’ve never actually used my Genesis Everdrive Pro before this, for whatever reason I’d bought the thing a year or two ago but never used it, but now I have.

Yes, it requires both a flashcart and a real Sega CD drive with disc, since the game is a cart game with additional data on the CD so it requires both. The release is entirely legal because it doesn’t come with the Doom or Doom 2 game files; instead, Doom CD32X Fusion is a pair of rom patches and a cuefile. You use a rom patcher to apply the two patches to your Doom and Doom 2 WADs, then prepare and burn the CD with the cue file. Then load up the game rom on the Everdrive while the disc is in the SCD’s drive and the game will load. The game could have its own cartridge and CD, of course, instead of needing an Everdrive or similar and a disc you burn yourself, but I don’t know if this will ever have an official release, I doubt it.

As for why the game requires a working real Sega CD and can’t run through the Everdrive Pro like the cartridge does, that’s a somewhat complex question. Part of this is because the cartridge port is using the cartridge with the main base game data, and I’m not sure if it would be possible to emulate both CD and cart at the same time… but this doesn’t matter, because while the Everdrive can emulate a Sega CD (but not a 32X), you can’t run CD images on an Everdrive with a 32X attached to your console. This is because the 32X locks out some Sega CD access from its cartridge port. The only way around this limitation would be a hardware device which plugs into the Genesis accessory port, and so far no such device exists. And so, as an aside, with an Everdrive Pro basically you have a choice: have your 32X attached to your full ‘tower of power’ setup and be able to play 32X game files, or remove the 32X and be able to play Sega CD images, play Sega Master System game roms, and to use the in-game menu to do things like quicksave. SMS games are disabled because the 32X disables SMS support, but I don’t know why that last one is that way… but yes, for some reason the ingame menu is disabled with the 32X attached. So yeah you lose a lot with the 32X and an Everdrive, but I love the 32X so I don’t know if I’d ever remove it.

And plus, with the 32X you can play this amazing homebrew release, Doom CD32X Fusion! Again this is basically a cartridge game which uses the CD for additional data, so the core Doom 1 files are mostly on the ‘cartridge’, while the Doom 2 files, the other levels on this collection, a lot of FM music tracks, and anything else you add — CD audio music tracks if you want them, additional levels, and such — go onto the CD. For the record this game has a 4MB (32 Megabit) cartridge and a 17MB CD. Could this have been done with a large bank-switched cartridge, instead of cart+CD? Maybe, I’m not sure, but either way on that but this way it’s more like a real Genesis game — the largest Genesis game ever was like 5MB, so a 20MB bank-switched game or something would not be realistic for a real Genesis game, but this setup certainly could have happened. By default there is no CD audio on the disc, but there is a CD audio option for if you add any wave files to the disc (and add in the files into the cuetable, of course). The 3DO Doom soundtrack would probably be an ideal addition. The FM music is good and there is a lot of it — over 90 tracks I believe they said — but not every track is equally good. When comparing this music to SNES Doom music some is better on each platform.

I need to make it clear though, yes, because there is a CD there are load times. All loading is in between levels though, not during stages, and the loads aren’t very long, five or ten seconds or so probably. The way it works is that the cart has the core Doom textures on it. Any level using anything beyond original Doom’s textures puts them into the 32X’s RAM from the CD during the pre-level load. This is ideal because you don’t want to be having to load data from the CD during play, Doom would not be a good fit for live-streaming data I would think, a pre-load into RAM is the better choice. Obviously this uses up 32X RAM so the number of added textures is probably limited, I don’t know the details. Level sizes are also more limited than PC Doom due to memory limitations or somesuch. This doesn’t affect Doom 1, but does affect the other games.

Still, this release is pretty amazing stuff for multiple reasons, and one is the performance. You have some nice graphical options here, including whether to have full textures on the ground and ceiling or to remove them and what resolution to use. The game also has an on-screen framerate display. The framerate maxes out at 30fps, you can’t go over 30. Sure. At the default ‘one step below full screen so there is a decent-sized border but it’s totally playable and is similar to the original SNES or 32X versions of Doom’ screen size the game runs quite well, over 20fps almost all of the time and often close to 30. Turn it up to full screen with full textures though and it’ll often be like 15fps, less in areas full of enemies. Turning off the ground textures bumps it over 20fps though. Comparing this to ’90s console versions of Doom… seriously, this significantly outclasses most of the “more powerful” consoles! This really shows how much power the Sega Genesis’s two processors, plus the Sega CD’s processor, plus the two in the 32X, can do when all used together by modern programmers.

As for in-game features, you start out by choosing to either run Doom (original PC Doom), Doom 2 (straight from the PC!), Resurrection (this is based on Doom 32X Resurrection, which was an enhanced version of original 32X Doom, so it has the cut-down Jaguar level maps and such), run (Mini-)TNT, or go to a file browser to run something else if you put more levels on the disc. TNT is a selection of 5 levels from the TNT Evillution part of Final Doom. A full conversion of Final Doom was abandoned because a lot of its levels are too large to fit into this games’ limited memory size, or something like that, so converting the levels to 32XCD took a huge amount of work. That any of Final Doom at all is here is really cool, though.

Once you choose a game, you can start a new game in either single or multi player. The game supports both two player split-screen and two player link play. I’m not sure how the link cable play works, you’d need quite the setup to try it, but it exists. It’s probably designed to use the Zero Tolerance controller 2 to controller 2 male to male controller cord? I’m not sure.

As for the controls, obviously since this is the Genesis it can’t use L and R for strafing as you could on SNES. Instead, you hold C to strafe. It works but you can’t circle-strafe, oh well. I don’t care. The other two buttons are fire and use. With a 6-button pad Z opens the map and X and Y switch weapons, or you can hold Mode and press a button for instant access to each weapon. The game also has Mega Mouse support, but I don’t have one so I don’t know how well that works. (I really should have the light gun and mouse for the Genesis, but for some reason I don’t…)

You also can “save”, with two save slots, and load your save game. The two slots are universal and it doesn’t tell you which game each file is from, only the level name. That’s a little annoying, but oh well. Also, you can’t save anywhere. Instead this game only saves from the beginning of the level, much like a classic console game. Ah well.

In terms of enemies, everything is here other than the Arch-Vile, Pain Elemental, and SS Soldier. I have heard of the Arch-Vile but don’t know what it is offhand, and don’t know what those other two are I presume they’re from Doom II? Never played it. It does have reverse sides of enemies, unlike the original SNES or 32X versions of Doom, and does have the invisible demon.

Visually, this is extremely accurate to the PC game, except for areas where levels had to be reduced in detail in order to fit in memory. Some things did need to be changed, particularly in the few levels of Final Doom that are here but also some in Doom 2, but it’s as accurate as possible. It has all of the little added graphical details of PC Doom that were missing from the ’90s console releases.

To mention a few other issues with this game, the map is the same as on the PC, so you don’t have the cool Mode 7 map of SNES Doom. It’d be a neat option but I understand sticking to the base design.

Also, while Doom’s levels are here, some of the rest of Doom’s presentation is not here. That is, the map screen between levels doesn’t exist here. There is still some in-between-level text, though, but not really the original episodes given that the map is gone and levels are numbered 1 to 27, not within each episode. You pretty much just play the 27 levels of Doom one after another. That’s pretty disappointing! The original 32X version of Doom was like this as well, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s worse than the PC (or SNES) versions. I hope that the map screens can be added back in at some point, I at least miss them.

Overall, I haven’t played this a lot but I have played it and it’s quite impressive. I’ve never played Doom II before, actually, despite owning it for PC. Maybe I’ll play it now. With a lot of levels and fantastic performance considering — with only minor sacrifices this game runs at a pretty stable 30fps — Doom CD32X Fusion is just amazing stuff! This is the first and only game to make full use of the whole Genesis setup, with a cartridge 32X game with a CD for additional data, and making use of all the processors for the best performance possible. Yes, this release has a few limitations, with its limited level size keeping them from converting most of Final Doom, FM music that is pretty good but sometimes doesn’t match SNES Doom’s greatness, no map between levels in Doom 1 — seriously, this is so unfortunate — and no circle-strafing, but still this game looks incredible and plays fantastic. It’s amazingly PC-accurate with only minor cuts. This is probably the best way to play Doom on a classic console, only the Playstation version compares and it’s stuck with the cut-down Jaguar level maps in Doom 1.

Find the game here:
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/148783-doom-cd32x-fusion/

Posted in 32X, Articles, Classic Games, Genesis, Legos | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Warcraft I Remastered & Warcraft II Remastered: A Badly Broken Dream Come True

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Brian

Just as a note, this is not a full review of Warcraft I or II, so if you know nothing about the game you probably will miss some of the context here.  Sorry about that.  The section about the missing multiplayer features should be clear enough to anyone, though.

Introduction

For many years now, the game I have most wanted was a remaster of Warcraft II. It’s something  I have often thought about… like, how amazing would it be if WCII got a remaster?  It’s one of the best games, it deserves it!  And Blizzard has been making remasters of its classics for years now.  First Starcraft got an amazing remaster, then Warcraft III a pretty bad one, then Diablo II got a great one, and they re-released their SNES games as well… but where was the re-release of Warcraft II, an exceptionally great game deserving of high praise?  Warcraft II has a permanent place in my top 10 best PC games ever list, and I don’t think that’s just because of nostalgia; it really does have some of the best of everything.  I would pick Warcraft II as having the best soundtrack ever in a game, the best voice work ever in a game, and some of the best gameplay as well.  Oh, and its cartoony art still looks absolutely exceptional and barely needs anything more than a resolution boost to match the best sprite art out there today.  Warcraft II is one of the best games ever and deserves an absolutely top-tier remaster, one that isn’t just a nostalgia piece but that brings this top-tier classic to the prominence it deserves.

Well, the good news is, it just got a surprise remaster!  The bad news is, that remaster, while fine for single player play, is very very badly lacking in online features, falling far behind the featureset of Warcraft II Battle.net Edition, a release from 25 years ago.  Ouch.  So let’s begin.

Warcraft II versus Starcraft

First though, I would like to compare WCII to the game I have been most obsessed with again this year, the greatest game ever made.  I should say right now, while I deeply love Warcraft II, Starcraft is the better game.  Starcraft is a work of genius that the industry has never managed to match again. The game is still played professionally for a reason: the game is, while flawed in some ways as all games are, exceptionally special. And yes, unlike pretty much any other game from the 1990s, Starcraft 1 has a very lively pro scene in Korea, for any who don’t know.  The most prestigious tournament happens twice a year; look up SSL Autumn 2024 if you want to watch the most recent one.  Starcraft balances a very high physical skill requirement and a high strategic requirement for what is, overall, one of the most challenging and intense competitive games ever made.  There are plenty of games which require deeper strategy, and some which require faster inputs, but few to none that require more of both.  It is as amazing a thing to watch as it is to play.

But what of Warcraft II?  It is a truly amazing game, accessible and yet deep, fun and challenging.  This remaster makes a few small tweaks to the game, such as increasing the unit selection count to 12 from the former 9, but otherwise it’s Warcraft II as it ever was, just higher resolution.  And there are reasons why Starcraft is the better game.  WCII is simpler, with less strategic depth than SC; is less balanced, with two races one of which is clearly better than the other; doesn’t have different terrain heights; has poor unit pathfinding so you will need to micromanage units to keep them from getting lost; doesn’t have features like waypoints or unit queueing in buildings that build units; has a whole naval component to the game that you will only ever use in certain specific maps but more often will have to ignore; is more random because where in Starcraft a unit may do, say, 9 damage, in Warcraft II a unit will do a range of damage instead, such as perhaps 2-50 or somesuch; and more. Warcraft II is one of the greatest games ever, but it doesn’t quite match Starcraft.

Regardless, Warcraft II IS one of the best games ever and it does have a whole lot of strengths.  For one, since it is simpler than SC, WC3, or SC2, the game should have a bit lower barrier to entry.  Yes, it’s archaic in ways such as pathfinding and unit queueing, but the gameplay’s perfect balance of simplicity and depth makes for something anyone can get into with a little practice.  That is not to say that Warcraft II is easy, though; there is plenty of challenge to be found, both in the expansion campaign and in multiplayer.  The game has significant strategic depth and is incredibly fun to play.  I think that if the online is improved on and if the racial imbalance could be fixed to make Humans as good as Orc, WCII could have a great future as a popular online game.


Warcraft I Remastered (Originally, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans)

Before I continue with talking about the new features and problems of Warcraft II Remastered, however, I should talk about the other new part of this package, Warcraft I Remastered.  This Battle Pack comes with a remaster of Warcraft I, also, remember! Warcraft I is a game I got for my birthday back in 1995, and it is the game that introduced me to the RTS, so I have a lot of nostalgia for it.  Despite that, though, it isn’t a game that I have revisited much at all.  Going back to the original release now, I had forgotten how primitive it was features-wise in a lot of ways!  Warcraft II still feels reasonably modern; yes, it’s missing things like waypoints and unit queueing, but those things are minor compared to the gulf between Warcrafts 1 and 2. Warcraft 1 as originally released didn’t have control-grouping units.  You could save three map positions with Control + F1 to F3, oddly enough, but not save unit groups or buildings.  Warcraft II does have control-grouping units.  WC1 doesn’t scroll when you push the mouse to the edge of the screen, either, only when you click the mouse button down while at the edge of the screen.  You can center-click to center the view on your mouse cursor, though, or move the screen view around with the arrow keys.  Given how awkward scrolling is otherwise these features are important.  WC2 scrolls when you push the mouse to the edge of the screen, as you would expect.  Warcraft 1 doesn’t have right-click support for things like auto-harvest or auto-attack, either, so you need to either use the keyboard hotkey or click the interface button to have a worker mine or cut wood, for example.  Units won’t attack if you right-click on an enemy, either, use that hotkey.  Warcraft 2 changes all of that with right-click commands.  WC1 does have a way to bring up a box to select multiple units at once — you hit a keyboard key to bring it up — but it has a maximum unit selection count of four.  WC2 increased that number to 9, SC to 12, WC3 to 16, and SC2 to infinite.  WC1+2 remaster went with a limit of 12.  But back to the original release of WC1,  even if you have, say, only peasants selected, you can’t give them all a group Mine command; you’ll need to do that one at a time, with each of them.  That is one fault that Warcraft II unfortunately did carry over, you still can’t, say, tell two Paladins to heal one unit if you have both selected.  Too bad.

But as for WC 1, that isn’t even all of it.  For a few things that are both positives and negatives, your basic workers in WC1 cannot fight, at all.  Yeah, if all you have is Peasants or Peons, even one enemy is Game Over, you cannot fight back.  That was something I had totally forgotten.  WC1 is also a 1v1 game only; it’s always one against one, Human against Orc, you against either the computer or another human.  That’s fine.  The game doesn’t have a map editor to make your own maps, unfortunately, though.  It does have the somewhat interesting feature of a unit stats editor, however, so you can modify the game by changing unit stats and play around with that.  It also does let you play single games against the computer on a variety of premade maps.  And lastly, while Warcraft II was originally a high-res- for-the-time SVGA game designed to run in 640×480 or even 800×600, Warcraft 1 is a regular VGA game, running in 320×240 or so, and it has the very low-rez, blocky look typical to VGA games of this detail level.  Visually, Warcraft 1 looks old in a way Warcraft II doesn’t.  WCII was a next-gen game for its time thanks to its SVGA graphics and it holds up much better than this game.  It’s hard to believe that they released only a year apart, it looks like so much more than that.

That may seem like a lot, but Warcraft I was a pioneering game at the time of its release! It was one of the early titles in the Real-Time Strategy genre and pushed things forward in quite a few ways.  The interface and controls were more advanced than prior RTSes like Command & Conquer, for one thing.  Another thing was the multiplayer, from this point on an areaa of Blizzard special focus.  Having multiplayer at all in an RTS in 1994 was a somewhat big deal.  The original game supported two player multiplayer by either LAN or modem.  That was pretty cool.  The 12 mission campaigns  were reasonably challenging, too; I remember it taking me quite a while to finish.  The single missions against the AI can be tough as well.  The game is definitely not perfectly balanced — archers are much stronger than melee troops and summons are overpowered — but it was good enough for the time.

So, how is the remaster?  On the one hand, it is single player only, shamefully.  On the other hand, it modernizes the interface across the board, bringing things up to Warcraft II’s level in terms of controls.  Now you can have workers mine by just right-clicking on the mine, you can select up to 12 units just like the WCII Remaster, you can attack an enemy by right clicking on them instead of having to hit A or the Attack button on the interface and THEN clicking on them in order to attack the enemy, you can scroll around by just moving the mouse to the edge of the screen, and more.  It’s utterly fantastic, game-changing stuff that dramatically modernizes this title.  I love the results of this.  You can go back to WC1-style inputs if you want, as a menu option, but the WCII style is so much better that there isn’t all that much reason to.  I’m sure this will lead some to say, well, why couldn’t both games have been further improved with features like the aforementioned unit queueing and waypoints?  And yeah, that’s a fair point, perhaps it should have been.  I know that Age of Empires II has added some modern quality of life improvements, why not Warcraft II?  I don’t mind not having those features, but if most people would prefer them they should be added.  I think that such additions should be limited, I don’t want the game to become too automated, but features from Starcraft 1 like queueing and waypoints would fit well in these games.

But yes, the elephant in the room is that Warcraft I Remastered is single player only.  Yeah. The multiplayer is entirely removed! Warcraft II Remastered’s multiplayer may be shamefully bad features-wise, as I will soon explain, but at least it HAS it!  Warcraft 1 Remastered doesn’t have any multiplayer at all, for whatever reason.  The graphical upgrade looks very nice, with sprite art that is true to the original designs but much higher resolution.  I never thought I’d see HD Wolf Riders, WC1 Peasants, and the like!  It’s pretty cool.

Comparing Warcraft 1 to Warcraft II, Warcraft 1 has a more realistic art style than WC2 went for, with much more of a standard fantasy look, so it’s really cool to see it in higher quality.  At the time I liked some things about WC1’s art design better than WC2’s; it all depends on what you think of realism versus cartoon art design.  It’s also much easier to heal with WC1’s dedicated healers, the Priests, than it is with WC2’s knight/healer hybrid unit, the Paladin, who have to take time from their fighting to heal eachother and heal less per heal.  Warcraft I also has a few interesting cave missions during each campaign where you don’t build a base but instead have to explore and accomplish an objective with just the units you are given.  I wouldn’t want that in every mission, I love base-building, but having a few of these to mix things up is nice.  WCII doesn’t have them, unfortunately.

However, removing the multiplayer entirely is pretty unforgivable.  Is the Warcraft Battlechest worth getting, yes, absolutely, but I very much hope that eventually they patch in the 1v1 multiplayer mode that this game should have had.  Warcraft II is the better game, but it’d be pretty amusing to play WC1 multiplayer online sometime.  Still, this remaster is a lot of fun.  WC1 with WC2 controls was a fantastic idea and it’s great.

Warcraft II Remastered: The Release and Single Player

But anyway, I should get back to the main point here, about Warcraft II.  In terms of interface, WCII Remastered is very similar to the original, with almost no changes other than the aforementioned 9-to-12 selection limit increase.

To reprise, just a few weeks ago, Warcraft II Remastered shadow-dropped, in a Warcraft Battlechest collection including a patch for the very troubled Warcraft III remaster and a remaster of Warcraft I.  Wow, what a deal, two brand new remasters of some of Blizzard’s best games, and fixes for the WC3 remaster as well!  How can it go wrong?

Well, this is modern Blizzard we’re talking about here, a company that is sadly far from its ‘clearly the best game developer in the world’ status that they had from about ’95 to ’03, but hey, the Diablo II remaster from a few years ago was great, so this could be good, right?

Well, unfortunately, it’s not.  Oh, if you are only planning on playing in single player, the remaster is pretty solid.  The interface for selecting custom maps is bad — it shows everything in one list and there is no folder support — but otherwise it’s fine. The music is as amazing as ever, the graphics have a mostly great-looking high definition overhaul and are still beautiful sprite art, all four single player campaigns from the base game Tides of Darkness and its expansion Beyond the Dark Portal are here, and more!  Hours of classic RTS single player fun are here for anyone to enjoy, and I’m sure plenty of people who have not played the originals will enjoy these campaigns.  The new graphics look fantastic, everything is very true to the original designs and look amazing.  I should say, though, that both Remasters call the CD audio soundtracks a “remaster” but they are not, that’s a lie; it’s the CD audio music from the original discs.  The “Original” option is the optional MIDI songs that you could enable if you wanted.  This is a bit unfortunate because an orchestral redo of WCII’s exceptional, Baroque-style musical score is something which the world deserves.  WCII’s music is from a time before all fantasy game soundtracks went for a cinematic-style score and it is better for it.  Warcraft III, for example, goes all-in on cinematic extravagance in its soundtrack and it’s pretty great, but overall WCII’s is better.  And those voices… unchanged is perfect.  They’re the absolute best.  I love how serious the Paladins are, particularly.

The game has some nice new features like a level select screen that lets you start from any level you have reached without needing to remember to save at the beginning of each mission, also.  The mission briefing screens have been redrawn and look good.  The menu fonts are pretty basic but work fine enough.  I will not spoil the stories of any of the games, but they tell entertaining fantasy tales, full of tragedy, violence, and humor.  They are certainly not the most complex plots ever and almost all characters and units are either white men or green orcs, something which bothers some I am sure, but I am fine with this; that’s fantasy genre-accurate, and is pretty much how it would have been had a portal to an Orc world had opened in a medieval European-style kingdom.  If you’re thinking about buying this to play through the single player, either as someone who played it back then or as someone who has never played the game before, I highly recommend it.  It’s fantastic and a lot of fun.  The base campaigns probably won’t challenge a skilled gamer all that much until the later stages of each one, as the challenge doesn’t really start until about the eighth mission of 14, I would say based on playing the game again now, but the expansion campaigns are indeed still pretty tough.  I could never beat them back in the ’90s, they were too hard.  I haven’t tried to play through them again yet but surely will.  I am sure I will do better than I did as a teenager.  It’s unfortunate that the expansion adds no new units or game mechanics other than Heroes with higher stats than regular units, but oh well, at least it added new full campaigns and plenty of challenge.  You will get your moneys’ worth out of the single player.

Unfortunately, however, right now you probably will not be getting your moneys’ worth out of the incredibly basic, nearly feature-free multiplayer.  Despite being quite new Warcraft II Remastered’s online is already sparsely populated.  You will soon understand why.

Warcraft II Remastered: The Multiplayer

The multiplayer in Warcraft II Remastered… exists.  There is a Multiplayer button on the main menu, and it opens a games list.  There you can either join a game in progress, or create a game of your own.  Okay, that’s alright.  The problem is that the list of missing features is insanely long.

  • WCIIR comes with 39 maps, all original Blizzard maps from 1995-1996.  The three maps Blizzard published after the release of the Battle.net edition in 1999-2000 are not included, and nor are any new maps.  So, there are no modern, balanced maps here, only mid ’90s maps with their entertainingly imbalanced designs, where depending on your start point you surely will be at an advantage or disadvantage over some other players.  This is map design that Starcraft’s online map pool weeded out over a decade ago or more.  Yes, I love Garden of War, it’s one of the all-time-great RTS maps, but is every start point as close to equally fair as you can get?  No, of course not.  It isn’t symmetrical, it is designed in a more ‘realistic’ manner without regard to equal balance for all.  But the WCII map editor is included with this release.  It’s buried in a subfolder, is entirely unchanged from the WCII BNE version of the editor, and doesn’t have an icon in the Battle.net Launcher, but it’s there.  So okay, you can solve the maps problem by just making new maps and letting other people download them in-game, right?  Automatic map download has been a feature of all Blizzard RTSes with online play… except for this one.  That’s right, if you create an online game with anything other than one of the 39 built-in maps, nobody else will be able to download the map, so you will not be able to play the game.  In my experience it’s actually even worse than this, and I can’t even stay in the game MYSELF!  The game falsely gives a “map not found” error whenever I try this AS THE MULTIPLAYER GAME CREATOR.  The map in question is in the maps folder on my hard drive, I put it there.  It is not “not found”.  This is a missing feature that absolutely must be fixed as soon as possible, limiting people to only the under 40 maps from ’95-’96 and nothing else is insanely awful.  Of all the missing features this is by far the worst one.  Obviously in custom games Starcraft Remastered has auto-map download, and lets you create custom games with your own maps.
  • WCIIR does not have any kind of replay-save feature.  Of course, Warcraft II never has had a replay system, but Starcraft had one added back in 2001 and WC3 and SC2 have had them from day one. Putting replays into WCII should have been a no-brainer, it’s a hugely useful feature for helping people to get better at the game by studying replays and for remembering great moments.  I watch a lot of Youtube videos of casts of Starcraft replays, and it’s fantastic fun to watch.  There is one channel I know of that frequently posts WCII gameplay, but that channel needs to record from outside the game since, again, no replay system.  It’s just pathetic that BLizzard actually shipped this game without adding replays.  It shows that they don’t care about WCIIR’s success like they should. Starcraft Remastered obviously has replays, and all SC:R replays can be played by anyone with the game since SC has not had a balance patch since 2001.
  • WCIIR does not have an Allies button or menu during games.  In all other Blizzard RTSes, including WCII: BNE as well as SC, WC3, and SC2, there is a menu you can open that shows you a list of all players with their player color.  This menu allows you to change alliances if the game mode allows for it and otherwise allows you to see who is who.  There is also always an easy way with a button to enable Allies-only chat in team games, so you aren’t talking to everyone, and the games distinguish between allied chat and chat to everyone.  WCIIR, as you might be able to guess, doesn’t have much of any of this.  There is no in-game Allies tab, and no listing of who is which color.  Pregame you know which race and which team each player was on, but not their color. There is no way to change alliances in-game.  There is no button for Allied chat, either.  There is a keyboard hotkey for it if you know it, but the game doesn’t show it any differently from other chat so it’s hard for anyone to know which chat is to everyone and which is only to your team.  Again, it’s just pathetic that the game actually shipped without such incredibly basic, fundamental features as this.  Obviously Starcraft Remastered has all the missing features.
  • WCIIR does not have a ladder of any kind.  There is only one multiplayer mode, which opens as soon as you open the Multiplayer menu: a list of games to enter.  When a game finishes, you return to the main menu to play again if you want.  That’s all you get.  There is no ladder, no ranked mode, no player rankings, nothing.  Blizzard doesn’t care and doesn’t want anyone else to care about this game either, apparently, which is strange given how much effort went into the again great-looking graphical overhaul.  Starcraft Remastered has a full ladder with player rankings, a map pool change every 6 months, and automatic matchmaking.  The auto-matchmaking is a particularly fantastic feature addition given that the original Starcraft and Warcraft II: Battle.Net Edition, while they did have online play and a ranked ladder, did not have auto-matchmaking; instead you needed to join games for ladder matches like any other.  This game should have had that too. Surely more people would be playing if it did.
  • WCIIR does not have a multiplayer chat lobby, unlike all other Blizzard RTSes. You can chat in the lobby when you join a game and in-game, but that’s it.  I know that open chat lobbies in online games are less common today so I get why it was left out, but it’s a feature that many in the community expected, I’ve seen many complaints that there isn’t one.  Starcraft Remastered kept its chat lobbies, of course.
  • On a related note, WCIIR does not have LAN support.  The multiplayer is online on Battle.net only.  If you want to do an offline LAN tourney… well, go play the DOS version, you won’t be playing this one.  Starcraft Remastered does have LAN support, surely because of demand for it by the Korean pro leagues which do offline tourneys.  Unfortunately there is no WCII pro scene to demand its inclusion here, too bad.
  • WCIIR doesn’t let multiplayer game lobby creators kick people out of the game or limit access to the lobby with a password. Anyone can join any game, and the creator can’t kick out an unwanted player. Now, given how often in many RTSes people would get kicked out constantly for, for instance, not having the map already and thus not knowing how to play the map yet, I can see a case for this as kicking people for reasons like that is quite frustrating, but ultimately there must be a way to kick someone out who isn’t behaving. No such function exists here, so if one person is MIA or wants to be annoying and won’t team up properly there’s nothing the creator can do. Obviously no other Blizzard RTS has anything like this insane lack of a basic feature.
  • On a related note, WCIIR has very few game mode options.  You can choose the map tileset between the four in the game, change the resource level of the mines on the map, and choose between starting with only a single worker or with a town hall and a worker, and that’s it.  There is no way to set a game for Top vs. Bottom play, or 2v2v2v2, or whatever.  And lobby creators can’t change any players’ team, either, only players themselves can do that and only in the pre-game lobby, too; remember, no teams can be changed during the game, the Allies menu does not exist anymore for some insane reason.  So if you want a team game you must ask people to team up correctly in the lobby before you start. It’s bizarre and incredibly limiting when compared to any other Blizzard RTS, or probably much else in the genre either.  And since there is no TvB mode, where your allies appear is completely random.  Some maps were designed for TvB but too bad here the option doesn’t exist.  Absurd.

Conclusion

So yeah, that is a LOT of critical missing features.  Warcraft II multiplayer games have always been mostly centered around Free-For-All or two to four player team games with four to eight players, and that is very much how WCIIR is today.  In that way, it’s a charming relic of a time when most online RTS games involved a bunch of random players of various skill levels either working together or against eachother on a map that may be decently well designed but certainly isn’t equally fair for all.  It’s great that such things still exist!  However, as much as I like group FFAs or team games, wouldn’t it be better if there was also support for the kind of 1v1-focused ladder play that largely defines the RTS multiplayer experience in the current century, with WCII’s gameplay, unaltered except hopefully for finally a fix for the racial imbalance caused by Orcs’ Bloodlust ability being much easier to use than Humans’ Heal, a problem which causes as much as 80% of players to play as Orc?  I sure think that it would be better that way!

Even so, I mostly am thrilled that the Warcraft I and II Remasters exist.  Yes, the online features are unacceptably limited, but… the game exists at all! It’s Warcraft II, one of the best games ever, with nice 2d sprite-art upscales of its fantastic graphics.  Warcraft II’s oroginal graphics hold up so well that I have sometimes, while playing this, hit F5 to switch to the original graphics and then forgotten to switch back for quite some time because of how great the original looks, and how similar the remaster is, and I cannot think of higher praise than that.  The audio is entirely unchanged from the original, too, so it’s still the best game music and sound effects ever.  The gameplay is a simple and yet deep classic real-time strategy game with some of the best and most fun design around.  Building a base, building an army, perhaps also building a fleet if you are on a naval map, and fighting the enemy is one of the most fun and rewarding things in gaming, and this remaster is the best way to play one of the best games ever.

Overall, Warcraft II Remastered is a dream come true and I am thrilled that this collection was released.  I only hope that Blizzard can be shamed into eventually fixing its online features so that it is worth playing against others a lot more than it is today.

Even so, though, despite its flaws, absolutely buy the Warcraft Battlechest.  Even as it is this is a must-have collection, no question about it.  The single player remaster is fantastic stuff, then maybe play a few multiplayer matches if you can find a game.

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A Review of Tempest 2000, One of Gaming’s Greatest Masterpieces, And its Arcade Forbear Tempest

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Brian

I decided to try to review some of my favorite games.  I’m starting with the classic console game I have played the most this year so far, and one of the all-time best.

Title: Tempest 2000
Platform: Atari Jaguar
Release Date: 1994
Developer: Llamasoft
Publisher: Atari Inc. (1984-1996)
Format: Cartridge in cardboard box (A music CD of the soundtrack was also released later on)

Ports: There are many ports of this game. Emulated ports are in the Atari 50 collection for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One/Series, and PS4/PS5.  Older, more heavily altered ports were released back in the ’90s on PC, Saturn, and PlayStation (as Tempest X3).  This review is of the game being played on real hardware on an actual Jaguar.  I have discussed the PlayStation version of Tempest X3 and the Atari 5200 version of the original Tempest before, but not the Jaguar title or the arcade game itself.

Introduction

Tempest 2000 is Jeff Minter’s magnum opus.  This exceptional masterpiece is is one of my favorite games ever. T2K is one of those ‘peak of the mountain’ games, one of those titles that shows how amazing gaming can be at its absolute best.  And that’s the problem, for this review at least: praise is hard! It is, sadly, often easier to criticize than to praise, to write or say reams of reasons why something is bad than to write ones why something is great.  I guess we’ll see how this goes, because there aren’t many things to criticize about T2K.

Tempest, the original arcade game, was released in 1981 in arcades by Atari, and was programmed by Dave Theurer, the same man who also designed the famous megahit Missile Command.  It was a successful game, but not on Missile Command’s level of popularity.  While Tempest 2000’s developer Jeff Minter was not involved at all with its development, Minter was an active game developer at the time.  However, at that point he was making smaller games for home computers, not arcade games.  He may not have worked with Atari until the early ’90s, but Jeff Minter is probably gaming’s longest-termed programmer.  He with an amazing record of consistency for spending the last 45 years almost exclusively making simple-looking, pre-crash-styled arcade-inspired score-focused games.  If you look at a Jeff Minter game from the early ’80s such as Aggressor or Gridrunner and then his most recent releases such as Polybius or Akka Arrh, you will see the most consistent record in gaming.  All four titles are easily recognizable as Jeff Minter productions.  I have loved Minter’s games ever since I first played Llamatron 2112 back in the early ’90s.

A Review of the Original Arcade Game Tempest

At its core, Tempest 2000 is a remake of the 1981 vector-graphcis arcade game Tempest.  So, I should discuss the arcade game first.  Tempest is a space shooter, a popular genre at the time, except instead of shooting enemies on the top of the screen, you shoot from the edge of the screen at enemies coming at you from the center.  It was inspired by Space Invaders turned vertical, crossed with a nightmare of Theurer’s about monsters crawling out of a hole. (Source: https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/01/19/atari-tempest-dave-theurers-masterpiece/)

Learning that makes sense, because I have long seen the nightmarish, horror-esque element of this game and Tempest 2000 as well.  Tempest is kind of a horror game.  It isn’t, but it is.  This is a game designed to make you focus, but also to kind of creep you out and instill a sense of dread in the player, as the monsters just keep coming, and coming, out of the depths… until eventually, you get overrun.  Tempest and T2K are maybe the best horror games ever.

Again, the central gameplay of both titles is the same: you control a little ship, and can move around the outer, and upper, edge of the play area, which is called the ‘web’.  The web is made up of lines going from the middle of the screen to the upper edge where you are, connecting them in a vector shape.  Your ship is pointing towards the center of the screen, aiming towards the middle where the enemies come from.  If the enemies reach the top of the web, they move around the top and once either an enemy touches your ship or you run into one of their shots you die and lose a life.

When you move left or right you flip around the edge, moving between sectors of the top of the web.  You can only move in two directions in this game, so while the game is three dimensional in that enemies move up a 3d angled route towards you, you only need to worry about moving horizontally to shoot them.  For controls, the original arcade game used a spinner-style stick, giving you precise analog control of your movement.  You shoot with one button and use the Superzapper, a superbomb which kills all enemies on screen.  You can use the Superzapper once per level.  Once all enemies in a stage are dead you clear it and move on to the next web.  If you die, you restart the stage from the beginning.

The game has 16 stage layouts, and after you clear stage 16 the web color changes.  There are six colors: blue, red, yellow, cyan, invisible, and lastly green.  After level 99 the levels stop increasing and you just play at that difficulty until you run out of lives, if you were so lucky to get that far.  One interesting feature, though, is that there is a continue function of sorts!  When you get game over, you can continue from the last checkpoint level that you reached.  You can select which level you want to start from from the checkpoint levels you have reached.  The game doesn’t save these permanently, of course, so if powered off the checkpoints and scores will be lost, but still it’s a very interesting feature, as continuing in arcade games like that was not really a thing when this game released in 1981.

When enemies reach the top of the web, you have two options. One is to try to shoot them as they flip onto your section of web.  Yes, you can do this, so letting enemies get to the top is not an instant loss, but timing that shot is tricky.  You can also use the Superzapper of course, if you still have it.  It’s much better to get rid of enemies before they reach the top, but sometimes it won’t be possible as you get farther in and enemy counts increase.  Overall Tempest is a great game, with a creepy vibe and a great balance of challenge and the feeling that if you play well you can get far in the game.

As with most pre-crash games, Tempest has no music and simple presentation, but the graphics were groundbreaking at the time.  The graphics are amazing looking with that color vector display, and the sound effects are fantastic and fit perfectly as well.  The striking look of this game is extremely memorable.  Color vector displays were a rarely seen, expensive technical feat, and this game uses that kind of display and it looks amazing!  Still, as was common at the time there is no background other than black space except for some stars that appear while you fly from one level to the next.  The result focuses you on the action.

It is of course an endless game you play for score . Tempest is intense, though.  Where a game of Donkey Kong or Space Invaders can last many hours, the world record for Tempest at its hardest settings is a video about 20 minutes long.  You will die.  There are several different web designs, but the stage layouts repeat after a few stages and then you’re on the endless loop until Game Over.  And while there are a handful of enemy types, there aren’t all that many of those either.  There is no background either of course, just black space.  Still, the wireframe 3d vector graphics look amazing, and the gameplay is a lot of fun.

However… however, I find it hard to play Tempest because as good as it is, I could be playing Tempest 2000, the game that takes Tempests’ model and improves on it in almost every way.  And when I want to play a Tempest game, that is usually what I do: play Tempest 2000.  Tempest 4000 (for modern consoles) is also quite good, but while Jeff Minter has made multiple Tempest-style games over the past three decades and all are great, none quite match the exceptional genius of his first effort.

Tempest 2000: The Fundamentals and Features

Tempest 2000 is a modernized update of Tempest.  The main mode is called Tempest 2000 mode.  The core gameplay is identical, with you moving around the top edge of weblike stages, shooting in at the enemies moving up the web at you.  You again need to dodge their fire while taking them out before they reach the top.  This time there are interesting varied backgrounds, though, as the game has trippy light synthesizer-style backgrounds and pounding techno music.  There are also new powerups, new enemy types, a lot of new maps, an actual ending when you reach level 100, a harder difficulty unlocked after clearing the game, the ability to continue from every few levels so that you don’t need to start the game over every time you get Game Over, and more.  Outside of the main Tempest 2000 mode the game has several other modes as well.  There is a two player multiplayer versus mode; a port of the original Tempest game but of course with regular graphics instead of vector ones; Tempest Plus, a mode which is basically standard Tempest but with T2K’s visuals; and an options menu with some interesting options in it.

The game saves your settings, which levels you can start from, as you can start from the last odd-numbered level you have beaten if you wish — and the high score table.  The game saves everything necessary.  The Jaguar is the first console where almost every single game supports saving, and it’s a hugely important and wonderful change versus what you see on other classic consoles.  Even in years after the Jag’s release a lot of console games didn’t have saving in some genres — no Sega CD shmup supports high score saving, for example, and even some PlayStation shooters don’t.  But on Jaguar all official games save at least scores and settings.  It hugely helps this kind of game for the game itself to keep track of your scores, no need to write down your best scores or take screenshots or something. And because all Jaguar saving is done to EEPROM flash memory chips and not batteries, the system has no problem with old batteries, unlike most of its contemporaries.  I think that that everything saves is the number one most next-gen thing about the Jaguar as a console; even the games that otherwise look like last-gen ports almost always have saving added. Tempest 2000 takes advantage of it well.

In the single player modes Tempest 2000 plays almost exactly the same as the original Tempest, just improved in every way other than losing that amazing color vector display. T2K has the best graphics possible with its regular pixel-graphics display, but vectors do look amazing in a way no regular display can match.  Ah well.  So, as with the original Tempest, you move around the top of levels, shooting at enemies climbing up at you.  All enemies from the original game return, with some new additions to the roster.  New enemies get introduced once you get farther in the game, as well.  As with the original the web colors change every 16 levels, but this time you don’t only see the same 16 levels over and over, new webs are introduced as you progress.  It’s Tempest, but more.

The Controls and Powerups

The controls are, by default, a small step below the arcade game, because the standard Jaguar controller only has a d-pad on it for movement.  I think the digital controls are just fine, as each press moves you to the next section of the web, but if you want analog controls the game does support them, which is pretty awesome — Jeff Minter made sure to include hidden support for a rotary-stick controller, even though no such controller existed for the system at the time other than a homebrew one hacked together.  I do not have one right now, though I really should get one, but it’s just fantastic that the option exists.  It means that controls are even with the arcade game.

As for buttons, T2K uses three, the three regular Jaguar face buttons, for Shoot, Jump once you have it in a level, and Superzapper.  On the last of those, yes the Superzapper bomb returns to help you out, as beofre usable once per stage.  Also, once again, if you die you restart the current level from the beginning.  Otherwise, Start pauses as you would expect.  The keypad is used for muting the music as usual — a keypad music mute feature is common on Jag games with music — and for shifting the view around, adjusting how the web moves on stages that go slightly over one screen in size, adjusting the screen size, and such. It’s a good use of the keypad for something a game for a newer platform would put on a second stick or somesuch.  You won’t need to touch it during play, thankfully.  The Jaguar controller is surprisingly comfortable, I think; its bad reputation is hightly over-stated.  Using the keypad during play is awkward and not great for anything fast-paced, but for games that only use the dpad and three main face buttons, or for games that just use it for options, I think the Jag controller is just fine.  T2K controls well with the regular controller, I’ve never had any issues with it.  I’m sure that the rotary controller controls are even better, but these are quite good.

On top of that, some other new powerups have been added.  These powerups all only last for the current level, as everything resets to default no powerups once you get to the next stage.  The way it works is that some enemies drop a powerup which then moves up the screen.  Get in position to grab it as it flies upwards and you get one level of powerup.  The first enemy you kill in a stage will always drop a powerup, and this powerup gives you a more powerful shot.  It’s essential to get this because the gun without it is very weak. Some time later more powerups will drop.  The next few will give you a Jump button and an AI droid ally.  The Jump button uses your third face button and jumps upwards, moving you out of the way of enemies if they reach the top of the web.  They can’t jump to hit you up there, but you could still get hit by shots, and of course you will need to land somewhere clear at the end of your jump so while helpful the jump won’t keep you alive if there are too many enemies on top of the web.  Still, it’s great.  The AI Droid is similar to the one in Llamatron 2112, and moves around on its own a above the web shooting down at enemies.  It cannot be killed and is fantastic if you can get enough powerups to get it.  There is also a rare random-drop powerup which immediately skips the current level, and once you have all other powerups in a stage further powerups give you a 2000 point bonus.

The Bonus Games

There is one more powerup, however.  Lastly powerup-wise, getting enough powerups in a level will give you a green triangle.  You can only get one green triangle per level.  Once you get three green triangles, you go to a bonus stage.  There are several different types of bonus stages, changing as you proceed through the game. The first bonus stage type has you flying through space, trying to fly through gates.  There are no enemies, you just move with the d-pad to get through the gates.  This bonus game is a lot of fun, it’s very calming after the intense action.  However, if you want the best possible scores you will want to avoid actually completing the bonus games, because if you finish a bonus game you warp forward five levels.  You get a point bonus, but the point bonus is a whole lot less points than you would have gotten if you played those levels.

There are three different layouts of each bonus game, though you will never complete all three in a single game because after a few skips you are sure to have progressed far enough to get to the second bonus game type.  That one I find much, much harder — you have to stay on a green track that curves around a tube that you are driving through.  I must admit,  I don’t think I have ever completed a stay on the green track bonus stage, and if I ever did I sure haven’t again.  Still, it’s fun enough.  After that… well, there is a third type of bonus game later on, but play the game to find out what it is.  The bonus games are fun stuff and do a great job of giving you a break from the frenetic action.  I particularly love the first bonus game, flying down a tunnel through those rings is great fun.

The Enemies and Scoring

When you fire, enemies in front of you and their regular shots die.  That latter point is important: your shots and most enemy shots kill eachother.  Some enemy attacks cannot be stopped, however, so you need to stay on your guard.

The enemies you will face include: basic ones which go straight up one path, heading towards the top; ones which do that but also shoot upwards; larger ones that split into multiple regular enemies once shot; ones which move around between paths as they go, trying to get closer to your position; a strong monster which has these two invincible scythelike limbs it shoots out you before going to the top that you must avoid while trying to shoot the main body; small enemies which stay at the bottom and electrify a whole section of the web, killing you instantly if you are in that section after it lights up; spikes, which can be in lanes towards the centerand will kill you if you run into them while traveling through the web after beating the level; and some more that come in to play later.  There are a total of ten enemy types.  The enemy variety is enough to keep things interesting while remaining easy enough to remember and identify each type.

As you kill your foes you get points, and scoring in this game is simple: kill stuff, get points. There is no complex scoring system and that is entirely fine with me, there’s more than enough here to keep anyone hooked.  As you get points you will earn 1-ups, and there is no maximum.  Your life count is displayed as a row of ship images instead of a number, though, so once you get past about eight lives in reserve you won’t know exactly how many you have.  It’s enough, though, to know that once you know how many lives you have left things are starting to go wrong… heh.

The Graphics in General

Tempest 2000’s graphics are exceptional, and are one of the many reasons why I love this game so, so much.  The visualizer-style backgrounds are incredible, first.  And somehow, T2K has some of the best-looking graphics ever.  Even though the game is running at 320×240 regular graphics, not the ultra-sharp lines of the originals’ arcade vector graphics display on its special vector monitor, it looks exceptionally sharp. I don’t know what wizardry was done here but somehow T2K’s lines look straight and not jaggy. 

Of course the game is made of pixels, and some of them are noticeable square ones, but they are used perfectly — the moving square pixels that form the background’s laser-light-visualizer style show are the exact right thing to use for that job.  Minter would go on to use a similar look for the visuals for his VLM, or light synthesizer, for the Atari Jaguar CD, and my opinion is that that is the best-looking visualizer ever.  And that’s not said because of nostalgia, I did not have a Jaguar or Jag CD in the ’90s. It just looks incredible, better overall than more powerful visualizers do.

Tempest 2000 is similar; sure, newer games, including some from Minter himself such as Tempest 4000 for modern consoles, look ‘better’ than this game and run more smoothly, but T2K’s overall visual style just cannot be beat.  The enemy sprites, the web, the creepy fear this game instills on the player, it’s all nearly perfect.  So, the sharp, clear graphics look unbelievably good.  The game does have problems with dropping frames or slowdown when the screen gets full of enemies, I will admit, and I have died because of this for sure, but despite that I do think T2K is one of the most amazing looking games ever.

Everything works together to make the game both look and play great.  The stage layouts are each interestingly different, giving you something new to look at and changing the gameplay; the enemies are varied and stand out and all look nice and are each immediately recognizable even when the game becomes more cluttered with foes because of their distinct designs and colors; and the sound effects of the enemies and your shots fit perfectly with the visuals.  Jeff Minter definitely likes that early ’80s pixel art slash vector graphics look, so Tempest was a perfect game for him to remake, and he did a fantastic job of it.

Overall, despite the occasional slowdown, as I mentioned I think that T2K has some of the best graphics ever.  While playing T2K I often think, is this the best looking game ever?  The look of this game is just exceptional, every element is done fantastically.  When output via RGB, in my case via a Jag to SNES adapter that I use my SNES component cable with, connecting to a Retrotink 4K that I have attached to my 4K TV, T2K is so amazingly great looking that it is kind of hard to believe that it is actually a game from 1994 and not a 4K remaster of the game on my Xbox Series X, or something.  I do not say that to brag about my setup; honestly, most games don’t really look different enough on the Retrotink 4K to definitely justify the high expense.  Tempest 2000 is the one game that has actually made me think that maybe it was worth the money.

An Aside on the Scanlines Option

The game has a few graphics options, too.  Most notably, you can turn on or off an optional scanline-style effect.  So, CRT television screens work by not drawing every line, but by drawing every other line and having the lines blend together due to the nature of the technology.  For a long time, despite this consoles worked by drawing every line they could, progressive scan style, because that was much easier technologically.  Of course the screen would then display the results with scanlines, so your standard 224×240 or 320×240 console would display at the TV’s effective resolution of 640×480 because of the scanlines doubling the output.

However, at some point in the early ’90s developers started adding interlaced scanline output right into the consoles’ hardware, in order to increase output resolutions. By adding interlacing, you can draw 640×480 for a similar amount of graphical power required for 320×240 without interlacing.  The first model of 3DO in Japan actually has a switch to turn on or off the scanlines; all other 3DOs are interlaced-only.  The N64 and PS2 particularly were designed around interlaced output.  The Jaguar, however, was not, and like a classic console displays a usually 320×240 image drawing all the lines.

However, in Tempest 2000, Jeff Minter tried to program a scanline option to increase resolution, but apparently couldn’t get it to entirely work so instead an option was added which calls itself a scanline option but in fact adds a sideways jitter effect to the screen, blurring the graphics.  The results look alright on a CRT, but I think that on a HDTV, with an upscaler, the interlacing option makes the graphics look significantly worse, as the blurry jitter does not look great.

I do think that the ‘interlacing’ mode performs a bit better, though. I am very bad at judging framerates, but I do think that while the jittering looks kind of awful interlacing reduces slowdown.  While Tempest 2000’s graphics are exceptional and are among the best ever, it is true that things can slow down very noticeably in areas dense with enemies, particularly as you get deeper in the game.  I noticed the framerate problems less with interlacing on, though it negatively affects the graphics so much that I cannot recommend using it.

Some information in this section comes from this this thread: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/51325-why-nothing-beyond-320×240-why-no-interlaced-screens/

The Music and Sound

In addition to everything else, Tempest 2000 has an exceptional soundtrack as well. With an intense euro-style techno score, Tempest 2000 has what is easily one of my favorite game soundtracks ever.  I do like the music CD version of the songs maybe slightly better than the versions on the actual cart, but the music on the cart is shockingly great!  This may be music on a cartridge but it’s some of the best cart chiptunes I’ve ever heard, and it has great variety and dynamism too, as the music changes depending on which level you are on and what’s going on.  There are even vocals in some songs.  On that note, there are also a lot of vocal sound effects in this game too.  Quite unlike your usual budget bargain-basement Atari Jaguar game, and that’s how most exclusives on this console feel, Tempest 2000 feels like a top-flight production for its time, and the audio is very much a part of that.  Every song is just so fantastic! I love techno music and game soundtracks and this is one of the best ever at both.

Strategy

I would say that I am decent at T2K. I’m not amazing at it, but I’m not bad either. My best score is a bit over a million points, which I think is an above average score.  I will admit that my best score on real hardware is a bit lower than on emulator, because in emulator it runs fully smoothly, but despite this I have more fun playing on real hardware so that is what I play now.  My best on real hardware is about 650,000; decent, but I know I can do better.  So what is the best way to play this game? It’s best to keep moving and focus on getting rid of the most dangerous foes.  Always make sure to get out of lanes that are about to electrify, kill those large enemies, and try to keep the web clear if possible and focus on timing your shots correctly to take out enemies on top of the web before they get you if you can’t do that.

It’s fun to just hold left or right and fire and shoot stuff, but this won’t get you very far once you get past the first set of levels.  You need to pay attention and move carefully, though you don’t want to just stay in one place either, that will lead to a quick death.  Balancing this can be difficult given how fast-paced the game is, but quickly scanning the bottom of the web for what foes are coming at you while also avoiding whatever is on top is vital for survival. T2K is the perfect game to get ‘in the zone’ with.  Focus, move to defeat the most important threat at each moment, and stay in the zone, staring at the monster-filled abyss in front of you.  Yeah, again, there’s something about Tempest that is disturbing to look at, but there is also beauty to it.  Hours feel like minutes when you’re in the zone in Tempest.

Conclusion

What more is there to say? Well, I didn’t mention the multiplayer mode, but honestly I’ve never played it.  It’s just a two player versus mode though so it’s definitely not the main attraction.  Beyond that though, Tempest 2000 for Atari Jaguar is the greatest shooting game ever made.  One of gamings’ great masterpieces, T2K is unmatched in its field.  The stunning visuals, the sense of tension this game evokes, the feeling of getting into the zone, the amazing soundtrack, the pretty much flawless controls, the interesting and varied level webs you will face, the varied enemies and how as you proceed new foes are added at just the right moments, everything here is peak.  Tempest 2000 is an A+ classic and is flat-out one of the best games ever made.  This is a top 5 all time console game without question and the only non-Nintendo game that high on my best console games list.

So that’s my review.  I think I spent too much time saying ‘this game is great’ and not enough saying why, maybe I will continue working on improving this.  But that’s it for now.  Also please correct me if I got any facts wrong, which I may have.

 

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How to Unlock Level Select in Eliminate Down (Sega Genesis)

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Brian

Sorry about the long break, the past month was absolutely awful for multiple reasons.  With everything going on I forgot to pay the hosting bill, then I did pay it but the site had multiple technical problems keeping me from accessing the site and posting for a while.  The problems have been fixed now, thankfully.  For anyone who ran into that SSL security error, it’s fixed now.  So here’s one article I’ve wanted to post for a few days now but couldn’t until today since the issues are finally fixed, and expect another one soon, I’ve got more Guild Wars images to post.  Anyway, on to this little article.

Eliminate Down is one of the Genesis’ best shmups.  The game was originally only released in Japan, but finally got a licensed modern homebrew release from Limited Run this year.  I got it and it has a very cool holo-cover.  The game itself is identical to the original, so this applies to either an original or modern re-release copy of the game.  Either way the game is absolutely amazing, with some of the best gameplay and music in any shmup that generation… and it has something that my searching has not managed to find any mention of online, a hidden level select option that you can unlock.  It’s not a full level select as far as I’ve seen, but it’s a lot better than nothing, particularly in a game which has limited continues as this one does.

So, if you go into the config menu, notice how there is a one-line gap in between Mini Game and Exit.  This is where the level select will appear, if you’re good enough.  What you need to do is play the Mini Game and do well at it.

The Mini Game is a twitch reaction test thing.  On the screen there is a grid of boxes with your ship’s image on them, and a cursor selecting one of the boxes near the center.  The boxes will randomly flip over and then back.  Each run starts out slowly, with one box at a time flipping, before speeding up as things go until lots of them are flipping at once by the end.  Each Mini Game run is 60 seconds long, and goes similarly each time though with new random box locations so you can’t memorize it, you just need to get better at reacting quickly.

At first, how to play the Mini Game may not be apparent.  You’ll hit the but ton while a ship is flipping and nothing will happen, then other times you’ll get the explosion marker and get a point.  What’s going on?  Well, the trick is that you have to hit the fire button while the tile in question is flipping BACK to get the point, not while it is flipping forward.   Yes, you have to hit the button in the SECOND half of the animation to score, you won’t get anything if you hit it while it’s flipping over, only back.  Once the animation has finished you have missed your window, so the timing is tight.

With some practice, though, I found myself getting better at the Mini Game.  It’s kind of fun.  If you score at least 30 points in the Mini Game, you get a little musical number and the configuration menu adds a new option in the missing slot, allowing you to start from levels 1, 2, or 3 with each new game.

if you score at least 40 points, there is a longer music piece after the minigame completes, and levels 4 and 5 are added to the round select list in addition to 1, 2, and 3.

You’d think that there would be a third unlock to start from levels 6 and 7, but if there is I haven’t gotten a good enough score for it.  The most I’ve done so far is 52 points, but sadly getting a score over 50 did not unlock anything new.  I’m not sure if a score of 60 is possible, that would be insanely difficult; 50 was pretty tough.  I got it but didn’t unlock anything new, ah well.

So, in Eliminate Down, get a score of at least 40 in the Mini Game and you can start from up to level 5.  Given that this game has 8 levels, limited continues, and no save system, this lets you start from the halfway point of the game.  This is a lot better than having to start it over every time, that’s for sure.  Enjoy!

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Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 14: 2008

Posted on June 30, 2024 by Brian

Yes, Guild Wars returns!  This article will have the twenty screenshots I took in 2008.  As I mentioned in the last two articles, I wasn’t playing GW much anymore but did launch the game once in a while to appreciate the graphics on the much more powerful computer I had gotten and maybe get a bit farther.  I’ll just post all of them even though some are quite similar.  That definitely won’t happen next time, maybe I’ll just have to skip that batch, it’s a mess… but this one has some really nice scenery in it.  It’s just amazing how beautiful Guild Wars’ graphics are and how well they hold up.

1

I wonder why I took this screenshot, by accident? It’s my only screenshot from January and it’s literally empty, either nobody is there or there was a graphical glitch that has caused the characters and skills to vanish — note how the skillbar icons are also missing. Huh. Yes I’m posting it anyway. Why not?

2

This is the first of three shots of this area. This underground area has some seriously impressive art design, with the lighting and giant tapestries, as well as the rest of the environment!  It looks like I’m fighting with the Henchmen and Heroes.  This is a Hero here in the foreground, and a bunch of enemies in the distance.

3

This is the same scene, but it’s a few moments later in the fight now. Cynn, Gwen, and Mhenlo are on screen now as Cynn casts a spell.  Gwen’s a Hero and the other two are Henchies (and main story characters).

4

And now it’s the Assassin hero on screen, while those enemies in the background are now all dead.  The battle has been won.

5

This ceiling is ridiculously good looking, with those V-shaped openings revealing the sky above.  Guild Wars is still a somewhat amazing-looking game even all these years later.  You can’t say that about most 3d games released back in the mid ’00s.

6

What a nice, if absurdly giant, fireplace…

7

And now we have a foggy cavern. How nice, if ominous, what could be lurking here?

8

Ah, it’s Sorrow’s Furnace! It’s embarrassing that I have never managed to beat the boss of this super cool dungeon that they added to the game in later ’05 post-release, but I’m sure I will go back to trying.

9

This is the next bit of the Sorrow’s Furnace cutscene from the last shot. The art design here is just so interesting, with that metal thing from the last shot attached through that high hole in the ceiling by this long chain.

10

And now this piece of the furnace is resetting back up into the fiery ceiling area.

11

Is this the Sorrow’s Furnace boss? If so I’m about to lose again, it’s so hard without a human party with those different spots you need to go to during the fight! It’s possible solo with Heroes and the separate control of them you have, but it’s quite tough to multitask well enough and I’ve never managed it.  Also, yeah, the contrast here between the dark environment and bright red lava is great, good design style.

12

More dark cavern with bright lava. Sorrow’s Furnace is a pretty great looking area, even though it released only a few months after the base game it really stepped up the art design over a lot of what the original game had.

13

And now I’m in an area with giant spider webs.  I admit I forget where exactly this is in Sorrow’s Furnace, but I think this terrain was on the edges of the zone, outside of the main area.  Regardless, it sure does look impressive, with the green tint to the area and whatever that is on the wall in the background!

14

The ‘interiors only’ trend continues with this, another interior in Sorrow’s Furnace. This time it’s not only some amazing scenery, though, but we’ve also got a battle going on between me and my Hero/Henchie party taking on some Charr.

15

By the way, my party is 3 Heroes and 4 Henchmen because at this point that was the limit. At some point you were allowed to purchase, for real money, the ability to use up to a full party’s worth of Heroes instead of having to use Henchmen. I’m not sure if that option was available for purchase in 2008 or not but if it was I hadn’t bought it yet, so I was limited to three. Heroes are much better than Henchies with how you can customize their skillbars and give them direct movement commands, so going for an all-Heroes party is the best approach for anyone who has enough skills unlocked on their account to be able to fill out a whole party of Heroes’ skillbars with good skills. You have to have the skill unlocked on your account for your Heroes to use it, you see, unlike Henchmen which each come with a preset skillbar they will always use.

26

Creepy…

27

No, no, these two screenshots are different, it’s totally worth posting both… :/  Still looks really cool, though!

18

It’s dark out, maybe too dark to see. Heh.

 

19

And now I’m back in the snowy lands, looking at a wall of ice. Nice. Winter is the best!

20

Ah yes, this area. It’s such a great looking zone, I love it. Any real person would need clothing though, that scarpattern ‘armor’ of my characters’ wouldn’t get you far… heh.

 

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Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 13: April – November 2007

Posted on May 30, 2024 by Brian

Introduction

Yes, this series is back, though it surely won’t be as interesting as before due to my interest in the game being highest in its first few years.  This article will be short, with 19 screenshots, but the shots are much higher resolution and detail now as I got a new PC.  The next update, covering my shots from 2008, should have about the same number of images as this one does.  Expect that article soon.

In early 2007, I got a new computer.  No longer was I using a rapidly-aging Pentium 4 with WinME, instead I had a brand new Core 2 Duo machine with the then-new Windows Vista OS. Despite this, I found myself playing computer games less and less.  By 2007 I had mostly abandoned modern games in favor of my growing retro game collection, and that’s  very much where my attention focused.  I remember wondering if the new PC would revive my interest in modern games, but for the most part it did not.  That wouldn’t happen until 2017.

As an aside, while I still have the WinME machine and it still works, though, sadly the Vista computer stopped working several years ago and I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix it.  At first I thought it was the motherboard, but replacing that did nothing.  So maybe I managed to break something in the power supply?  Argh.  Oh well.  I miss Windows Vista and its nice transparent windows, it’s so much more interesting to look at than Windows 10 is on this machine I have now, but… oh well.  If only one of the two older machines could work, it’s far better for the WinME machine to work than the Vista one since a lot of games do not run well on a modern machine but do on that one, while there are very few games that don’t work on Win10 but do on Vista.  Still, I’m one of the few people who really liked Vista, so I miss the PC that these screens come from working… ah well.

But anyway, getting back to Guild Wars, as the article title suggests I wasn’t exactly playing much Guild Wars in 2007 or 2008.  I never would go back to playing hundreds of hours of the game, instead just playing the game a bit here and there instead of playing GW1 all day as I did sometimes particularly in 2004-2005.  And so, the 700-something hours I was at in April 2007 would take a long, long time to get to a thousand.  In fact, checking today, I’m at 1013 hours.  Yeah, barely more than than I had in early ’07.  Oh well.  On the one hand this means that there is a huge amount of content in Guild Wars that I’ve never experienced, including finishing most of the dungeons, playing most of the harder free content they added in the runup to Guild Wars 2, and more, but on the other hand, it means there’ still something to do in the game, you know?

And there are reasons why I  stopped playing.  One is that I particularly loved the random player groups in this game, and after ’06 that element of the game mostly faded away.  These screenshots start in April 2007, right when random player groups were dying off.  One part of that probably was declining interest in the game — most of the people I was playing with at college lost interest within a year or two, for instance — but also it was because of the addition of Heroes, those much more customizable and controllable AI allies Nightfall added.   As I said in a previous part in this series the late 2006 addition of Heroes in the Nightfall expansion was fantastic for solo players and the long-term playablity of the game once the playerbase was too low to rely on other people always being around, but it mostly killed off random player groups so I’ve always had mixed feelings about the change.  I liked the game better before Heroes than I have since, that much I know.

So yeah, to repeat from previous articles, I love the base game of course and really liked the first expansion to Guild Wars, but I wasn’t as much of a fan of the second expansion, late ’06’s Nightfall.  It took me something like ten years to finally finish the Nightfall campaign.  It’s actually pretty good, I should have played the rest of it sooner.  Maybe if player groups had survived 2006 I would have, but they didn’t.  But we’ll get to my finishing Nightfall much later.

Making the whole situation worse, I’m not one to be in a large guild or often be able to play the game with friends after the mid ’00s, so from this point on I was playing mostly solo or in the Random Arenas only.  The problem is, a lot of the later content that ANet added to the game after 2007 is very difficult for the solo player.  With good builds for you and your Heroes, people can beat that stuff solo.  I always preferred to just play the game with whatever build I’ve come up with myself and like and not look up good builds, though, so my attempts at the harder added content mostly ended up in frustration and with me giving up.   I probably should have spent more time looking up good Hero builds, but I didn’t do that enough for them to be good enough to get me through the harder content, and without any other humans to group with like 99+% of the time after 2006, I often found it too hard to proceed.  It’s nice that they added more content after the last of the too-few expansions, but most of it is aimed at the dedicated, very good players with humans to play with and such.  I’m neither of those things.  I love games a lot but never have been great at many of them.  Oh well.

Despite that, though, and despite that I haven’t really played Guild Wars at all in several years now, I deeply love this game and know I will get back into it sometime, like how I’ve really gotten back into Starcraft for the past month or two.  And so, here it is, my mostly-forgettable screenshots from 2007.  Though maybe that’s wrong; I really like the last two, they look great…

My Guild Wars Screenshots, April to November 2007

1

Here I’m talking with some random group party member about how much we’ve played the game.  As mentioned, between declining interest and Heroes random groups were dying by this point but you could still find one once in a while.

2

The map, showing my progress in the city.  Yes, I was continuing to play through Factions again instead of playing Nightfall, even though I’d finished Factions before and very definitely not Nightfall.  It was probably the right decision, Factions is a great campaign…

3

733 hours played since launch? That’s not much higher than my last hours count.  As I said it’s only at 1013 hours today.  But yeah, I’m back to playing as my main, Talindra, some.  That skillbar’s very similar now to how it is in this 2007 screenshot, and my character’s costume, the 15k scarpattern set, is unchanged.

4

Here is a shot of the first panel of my inventory.  Look, it’s a birthday gift!  ANet gave characters one each year.  Now you just get a birthday voucher, which is still nice I guess.

5

This is very similar to the last shot, but note the sellers in chat. For some reason the Nightfall main city, Kamadan, quickly became the main community hub in Guild Wars, a position it still retains.  I honestly have no idea why.

6

Looking at how weird it is that some things disappear underwater while others don’t is endlessly entertaining.   Why does hair disappear, for instance?  How strange.  Anyway, this is the Random Arena hub area.  Player populations have clearly declined, given how it hasn’t found a match.

7

Well, it finally found a match, and here we are fighting in the Random Arenas.  I hope the match went well…

8

Bah, that run must not have gone long.  It looks like we won that last match but not many, if any, more.

9

I’m probably looking at my Ranger’s two year birthday present now, and maybe exploring Seared Ascalon some as well.

10

A timed mission? I’ve always hated timed modes in games unless the timer isn’t tight. I don’t think this one was bad, though.  The graphics sure do look a LOT better on this computer though, don’t they?  The post-processing effects and such add so much.  Guild Wars’ exceptional art design has held up extremely well, this still looks great.

11

Run…

12

Here we get to some of the best-looking GW1 screenshots I’ve taken.  The ‘disable the interface for this shot’ command results in some impressive stuff at times. This winter forest scene looks beautiful.

13

And for another of the best shots in this update, an image of the sky and the crescent moon.  Guild Wars really does have some of the best art design ever.

14

Winter is my favorite season.   I’ve never been in an ice structure or cave like this but I’m sure it would be quite beautiful. The one in Guild Wars sure are.

15

Don’t get too distracted by the scenery, watch out for those ice golems… they’re not hard, sure, but still, in this game you can never be too careful.

16

It’s a new environment in this ice area, with a lot of squared-off somewhat diamond-like ice blocks.  Impressive stuff.

17

Some of my AI party members, running through the snow.

18

The rest of the shots I have from 2007 are from this tournament from a quest. You fight the tourney here against a bunch of your Henchman allies, including some members of the main four heroes. I took screenshots of a bunch of the text lines because I thought it was interesting to see their thoughts about the tourney.  Each character says something before and after your match against them.  I won’t post most of them for now, though; play the game yourself instead of being spoiled!

19

I’ve got to post this one, though. A Joe & Mac reference, really? Heh, that’s random… amusing, however!

And with that, my screenshots from 2007 end.  I would not play the game much in 2008 if my screenshots are to believed; I’ve got just one shot from January and only 18 for the rest of the year combined.  I hope some are as good as some of these are.

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Happy 20th Birthday, Guild Wars! A Return of Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots, Part 1.5: E3 for Everyone Character Creator Screens

Posted on May 10, 2024 by Brian

Introduction and Update: A Few Thoughts on the Anniversary

Yes, 20 years ago today E3 2004 week began, and with it started Guild Wars’ first public test, the amazing E3 for Everyone event that got me excited for, and addicted to, this incredible game.  My memories of E3 for Everyone are strong, but time sure flies, huh… nothing we can do about that, though.  Anyway, most people would say that Guild Wars released in May 2005, but while that was its formal release, I’ve always thought of it as pretty much ‘releasing’ a year before that, when the regular public tests began.

It’s actually kind of funny, recently I was looking back at some old posts of mine, and I found a thread from April 2004 where I was defending World of Warcraft’s art style and sounded interested about its gameplay even though I wasn’t into MMOs.  While reading that thread, I couldn’t help but think, less than one month later my world would change because of this game, Guild Wars.  I mean, of course I was interested in WoW, Blizzard was my favorite developer and it was their next game.  But, once I’d played Guild Wars, my interest level in WoW went down significantly and never recovered.  As I said in my sidesstory article in this series about WoW and PSO, I did try WoW a bit, but quickly lost interest and mostly ignored the game because of how much less interesting it was to me than Guild Wars.  Guild Wars 1 looks better than WoW did then, plays better, and just plain is better.  Almost everything about it is amazing and fits what I want from a game better than anything else in the online RPG genre, from the lack of required grind to the lack of a monthly fee to the strategy of putting together an 8-skill build.

I do still love Blizzard, and have gotten back into their games over the past year, particularly the game that still is easily the best game ever made, Starcraft Remaster (expect a Starcraft article on this site in the not too distant future!), and also Diablo II Remaster and Diablo IV, a game I am still playing a whole lot of — I got back in on Season 3.  But World of Warcraft?  Sorry, it’s the Pokemon of Blizzard to me, an extremely popular thing by one of my favorite game companies that I don’t like much if at all.  That is partially because of what WoW is, a game in a genre that just is not for me due to being too open-ended and aimless, but also because of how exceptional Guild Wars is.

So yeah, Guild Wars is 20 now as a publicly playable game.  I’ve been thinking about the upcoming anniversary all year, and decided that I would restart Guild Wars Memories and Screenshots to commemorate the event.  This won’t be just one article, thankfully to everyone probably because THIS update is unlikely to interest much of anyone, but at least several.  As I said when I suspended the series there were several reasons I did that.   One were the sexual harassment allegations towards the games’ composer.  They are credible, and I think it was right to suspend this series for a while after that, but that isn’t why it took so long to return; he had already been fired from Arena.net before that and he has not gotten work in the industry again since.  ANet even replaced his Guild Wars 2 compositions.  Guild Wars 1 is still one of the best ever and the music is only one part of it.

So no, that wasn’t the main reason.  The most important was that I was past the time period where I played the game a lot, and past the pre-release tests, so what I’ve got from 2007 and beyond is in most ways much less interesting from the updates I did previously.  Of the time I’ve played Guild Wars, the vast majority was the thousand-or-so hours I played between 2004 and 2006.  Since then? It’s a game I go back to every once in a while, since it is one of the best games I’ve ever played and still is quite amazing in a lot of ways, but those times are sporadic and what I did in the game ossified down to mostly just solo content, mostly with my main Necromancer character, mostly with the same skillbar.  Considering that anyone who plays the game today can see this same content but with better graphics, random screenshots of this or that are, I think, not nearly as interesting for the most part as the pre-release content is.  Even so, I took some here and there and have always meant to get back to posting them.  I will do that, but first…

First, I decided to go back to my pre-release screenshots and post some more of those, because that is what is the most historically important.  I mentioned back in the first E3 for Everyone that I took an oddly large number of screenshots in the character creator.  Here are most of them.  Thank you?  After them are a handful of shots I didn’t think were interesting enough to post before.  One, at least, is actually reasonably interesting.  The others aren’t really but I’m posting them anyway to celebrate the anniversary.  I really should play Guild Wars again; it’s been a little while, I have to admit.  There are too many games… but I will get back to it, I always do.  Guild Wars has a permanent place in my top ten best games ever for a reason.  And that all started twenty years ago today with the E3 for Everyone public test.  Celebrating that important anniversary of this game I love with a bunch of boring screenshots is questionable indeed, but it’s what I’m doing, because I do have some more from E3 for Everyone and I’d like to get them out there.

Guild Wars E3 for Everyone Character Creator Screenshots

The first twelve screenshots show all six classes in both genders, looking as they did at the start in E3 for Everyone.  Please note that the secondary class has no effect on the look of the characters, only the primary class determines that.  Also, yes, Guild Wars has somewhat limited customization.  All you can do is choose between a few skin colors, hair styles, colors, and faces, and change your body scale on a slider.  Characters of the same class won’t all look the same, but will look similar.  I posted some of theswe before, but am posting the character creator shots all here again for completion.

One Shot of Each Class

First, the female characters.

The female Elementalist has the skimpiest outfit and most sexualized look of the classes.

Mesmers have a somewhat Victorian-ish style, and you see that here but with the front of the dress cut away either for looks or supposedly for easier movement.

This outfit isn’t the female Necromancer’s best, but it’s a good one which fits the class well.

The embroidered patterns on Monk clothing look cool. GW still impresses visually after 20 years…

My first choice of class was this one, the female Ranger. It’s a good design though certainly not her best outfit in the base game.

Breast plate! It’s not realistic, actual armor like that would not function. I get why games design this, it’s for looks and games don’t need to be realistic, but it looks silly if you know anything about armor.

Now the male characters.  These will be the only shots of male characters in this article.  Sorry about that.  Complain to the me of 20 years ago… heh.

The male Ranger has a good design.

The male Warrior, surely the most common character class choice in E3 for Everyone.  He’s even bald by default, fitting with the ‘bald soldier guy’ theme of ’00s games… heh.

The male Monk is somewhat iconic of the game.

The way the male Necromancer’s head sits on his body from this angle is kind of funny looking…

The male Mesmer here fits with the ‘somewhat Victorian-ish’ theme of the class well.

The male Elementalist is pretty plain looking, much less flashy and sexualized than the female.

(Female) Characters: Changing Some Options

Next, I’ve got some shots of what happens when you change some of the as-I-said-few customization options on a few characters.

Female Warrior, from behind and made much taller, look at that height slider. You can rotate the character in the creator but not turn them up or down.

Changed hair color and hair style.

Changed skin color

This is the palest skin color.

Brown skin

And here is the darkest color.

It looks similar, but this is a different female Ranger hairstyle from the first one.

This is actually the same as the first female Ranger hairstyle, it just looks different thanks to a color change. It’s surprising how much variation having only a few customization options can get you.

Monk side view, showing this ‘one side shaved, long on other side’ hairstyle.

And the front view.

While similar to the first Necromancer hairstyle, this one doesn’t have the things dangling from her hair.

This might be the first female Mesmer hairstyle. From behind that dress sure fits the class’ theme.

Again this looks similar-ish to the first hairstyle, but isn’t that one.  The reverse probably looks more different.

The reverse of the female Elementalist, with a different hair style and color.

The shots in between the last one and this just cycle through several of the skin color options and rotate the camera again.  I’ll skip those (there are seven more! Why?  I did not play as this class in this test…). This one with the blue hair and greyer skin is different, though.  This is the same hair style as the last shot, just from the front.

And that’s all that’s at all worth posting from the character creator.

Other E3 for Everyone Shots Previously Not Posted

While I did not take a lot of screenshots during E3 for Everyone, there are a couple more shots I didn’t post before that are of at least a little interest.

This is from the Stormcaller (Nolani Academy) mission lobby area, now after the mission timer started, it’s about to begin. I posted the shots before this in the original article, but skipped this one. I’m posting it now because these characters are kind of amusing looking.

Just before I Firestormed the Gargoyles, one of them threw this fire burst at me. If you go to the original article you’ll notice I took some damage in between this shot and that one.

… This has got to be one of the least interesting screenshots I’ve ever taken… no wonder I skipped it before.

And that’s it.  Literally the only other E3 for Everyone shots I have are the rest of the nearly identical character creator shots, a second one of the main menu just a moment after the first one from the original, and the shot a moment before I brought up the interface, in that same hallway at the start of Stormcaller but without the interface on screen.  So yeah, that’s really it for E3 for Everyone.  I will conclude with that other menu shot; I like it slightly less than the other one as the redness in the upper left part of the sky is less noticeable.

The week of E3 for Everyone was one of the most surprisingly fun weeks I think I’ve ever had in gaming…

 

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RIP, Wii/3DS Online, and particularly Splatoon 1 and Mario Maker 1…

Posted on April 7, 2024 by Brian

This is not going to be a long article, but I need to discuss this topic.

So, tomorrow’s the day, Nintendo turns off Wii and 3DS online servers next morning.  I may have played a lot more Mario Maker 2 than Mario Maker 1, but even so I’m quite sad about this.  I know that with purchasing disabled online play being turned off as well was inevitable as few companies would spend money on servers forever for no return, but even so, it’s awful and should remind everyone yet again about how horrible for preservation our now ‘physical media is mostly dead’ world is.  Sadly, only hackers can save us from companies shutting off servers the moment a game or platform becomes un-economical, and not all games or services get such work.  I’d rather companies keep the official servers on forever, that is the best way.  That isn’t going to happen, though, so all we can do is rely on other means to save exceptionally amazing games like Mario Maker 1 from the deletion of almost all of its content.

The thing is, though, I do not like having to install hacks or such and still haven’t put custom firmware on my 3DS or Wii U, though I should soon now that it’s been fully shut down and Nintendo has left us 3DS and Wii U fans no choice.  And yes, I do still love these systems, and still use my 3DS almost every day.  I love DS and 3DS puzzle games that control with the stylus!   I just do not like touch controls designed for a finger anywhere remotely near as much as those designed for a stylus due to how much more precise styli are.  There’s a reason why we write with pens and pencils, and don’t dip our fingers in ink: increased precision is much much better.  It’s the same with games.  I understand the reason for having a cellphone with a touchscreen for using basic internet functions, but for the precision you need in a game there is no contest at all between 3DS or Wii U touch, with their respective styli, and the finger touch design of the Switch or Vita.  But anyway, I know I’ve said this before, and most people either don’t care or don’t agree.  That is truly unfortunate.

I don’t think there is much else to say about this topic, though, really, I’ve said it all before.  It is awful and will continue to happen more and more often as most media is now digital-only and thus can be deleted from existence much more easily than it could before.   All it takes is a company who wants to cut costs or get a tax writeoff and presto, that thing you liked is gone forever now unless pirates saved it!  Only consume new products, not anything old, that doesn’t make companies as much money.  Capitalism is a fine system, overall better than any other economic system humans have invented (particularly with some socialist elements mixed in), but this problem needs to be solved: we must stop the destruction of media.

Fortunately this time all of the Mario Maker 1 levels that are about to be deleted by Nintendo HAVE been backed up by the community, but other times, such as that new Road Runner movie that WB decided to delete out of existence without releasing, things just vanish forever without any kind of reason.  I know that the videogame market isn’t growing as fast as it was previously, while costs and development times continue to spiral out of control, so companies are trying to protect what profits they have, but some solution that allows for the continued existence of media must be found; we are going to lose too much of value otherwise.

Shutting down online play is one thing, and it’s sad; I deeply love Splatoon 1, it is my most-played Wii U game by a good margin.  Sure, the game got partially ruined by hackers, but it’s an amazing experience regardless and it is one that its sequels do not come close to; I still greatly prefer Splatoon 1 over 2 or 3.   That Splatoon 1 disc I have will be rendered mostly useless without online and most of its content will become inaccessible, as there is no botmatch mode.  But at least that content exists ON that disc.  Deleting millions of Mario Maker levels is something worse because they only exist on Nintendo’s servers.  Sure, many of those levels are awful, but many others are great.  A lot of truly amazing, fantastic levels were made for that game, levels which advanced the platforming genre in interesting ways.  That Nintendo is getting rid of all of it without any kind of official way to back it up provided is horrible.  Because we can’t assume that future consoles will all be hacked; some surely won’t be.  Anything deleted from those platforms will vanish entirely.  This day is another reminder of the great challenges game preservation now faces.   I hope that somehow preservation wins.

Posted in Articles, Modern Games, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U | Leave a comment

The Worst Game I Own For Each Platform I Have

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Brian

Uh, yeah, it’s been too long.  I haven’t been playing retro games much, honestly, other than Starcraft: Brood War, by far the best game ever made, which I got back into last week.  I should write something about that game sometime, though given how terrible I am at it it wouldn’t be the most insightful.

I have written this, though.  It’s an article about the worst game I own for each console I have, kind of the opposite of my ‘favorite games’ lists.  However, I didn’t go back and play all of these games before writing this, so a lot of this is based on my memories of playing these games years ago and the score I’ve given them.  Sorry about that.  I hope that at least some of the list is interesting despite that.  I know that my tastes do not always align with that which is popular, which is fine with me.  Everybody is different.

The Worst Game I Own For Each Platform I Have

3DO – Shadow: War of Succession. This absolutely terrible barely playable disaster is maybe the worst game I own. This is a fighting game and it’s as bad as games can be to the point where it’s honestly surprising that it actually got published. Shadow is a Mortal Kombat clone, which was popular at the time, but it has the absolute worst controls, moves, and gameplay of any MK knockoff I have ever seen, and it’s not close.

Apple II – I don’t have any bad Apple II games but uh… Fight Night, because I dislike the genre, I guess. It’s a boxing game and probably a good one given that it’s well thought of, but I’m just not interested in the genre at all.

Apple II GS – Another system I don’t have any bad games for. The weakest is The Hunt for Red October. It’s average.

Atari 2600, 2600 – Freeway. This is a boring Frogger knockoff where you can’t move left or right, only forward or back. Lame. This awful game is one of Activision’s worst ever. The idea was to make a multiplayer-focused game but not being able to move left or right just makes this game miserably dull.

Atari 5200, 5200 – I don’t have any bad 5200 games, but the least good one I’ve got is James Bond 007, which is below average. This side-scrolling vehicular action game tries to do interesting things, but fails at pretty much all of them. It’s a pretty big disappointment with confusing objectives and iffy-at-best controls and design.

Atari 7800, 7800 – RealSports Baseball. This is an awful baseball game, which is sad given that the 5200 game of the same name was pretty good. They are similar but in a lot of ways this one is a huge downgrade. The speech samples and more are gone from this one.

Atari Jaguar CD, JCD – Space Ace. This may be a classic, but I’ve always hated Dragon’s Lair, and this game seems even harder and worse than that one is. Sorry, I can’t stand this game at all, it’s awful.

Atari Jaguar, JAG – Kasumi Ninja wins here for me, easily. The insanely awful jumping — this is a fighting game where you cannot control your jump in the air like NES Castlevania or something — alone justifies giving this game in a very low F tier score. The rest of the game isn’t much better. This is the worst Jag game I have by a good margin. I’m honestly shocked that you don’t see the insanely weird jumping system this game uses mentioned more when people talk about this game because it’s probably the most unique, and worst, thing about the game.

Bandai WonderSwan Color, WSC – There are a lot of very boring anime RPGs and adventure games for this platform, so should I just call it a tie between most of those for worst WSC game? This platofrm’s library is one of the least interesting around, for me! But of the very few WSC games I’ve actually cared enough about to play, I guess One Piece Grand Battle: Swan Collosseum is the weakest. It’s a very mediocre, below average fighting game. NGPC fighting games absolutely crush this subpar effort with its bad controls and gameplay. This game isn’t an F-tier game but I don’t like playing it.

Bandai WonderSwan, WS – Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousen Sha is the worst Wonderswan game I’ve played. I am sure there are worse Wonderswan games — some of those anime RPGs surely aren’t any good — but I haven’t played those games so I can’t rate them. This game is infamously mediocre, and indeed it is; it’s not a total failure, but it is a bad game with poor controls, level designs, and more. You really can tell that this game had little involvement from Capcom, which indeed it did not. Bandai got one of the developers of some of the Game Boy Megaman games to make this game, but this game is dramatically worse than any but the second of the GB Megamans. And as bad as it is at least MMII for GB controls well, so it’s better than this game by a good margin. Rockman & Forte for Wonderswan is as poor as its reputation suggests. Still, though, it’s a playable game that series fans (like me) probably should try anyway. Just expect it to be one of the worst Megaman games ever — it is.

Colecovision, CVIS – Facemaker is an okay little kids’ game, but it’s the worst “game” I have for Colecovision because it’s so, SO basic. You just make a silly face basically by selecting from premade upper, middle, and lower part options. If you do not count this as a game, and it really isn’t one, it’s edutainment, then Super Action Baseball probably gets the ‘honors’ here. That game is a well below average, forgettable game not worth playing at all today. The special 4 button controllers it needs really aren’t worth such a mediocre, multiplayer-only baseball game. Play RealSports Baseball for Atari 5200 instead, it’s much better.

Commodore 128 – There are C128 games? I have a 128, but like most people with one I don’t have any C128 games. The only releases from its lifetime were text adventures you can get on many other formats. Is this the worst library ever in a popular, well-selling machine? Probably.

Commodore 64 – There are a lot of bad C64 games, but I haven’t played most of them; I don’t use my C128 much. Of the few C64 games I have and have played, um… I don’t know. It’d be something average but not bad like Radar Ratrace, Speed / Bingo Math if you count that as a game, Keypunch Software’s Adventure Pak, or something like that… I need to play some actual bad C64 games I guess, there are lots of them… though probably fewer here than in Europe, they got a lot more C64 games than we did.

Commodore VIC-20 – As with the C64, the worst I’ve played for this system is something slightly below average. I’m going with The Sky is Falling, a mediocre title for sure but not awful.

Dreamcast, DC – Rippin’ Riders Snowboarding wins here by a wide margin. This is a game that, objectively, is probably merely below average, but subjectively I absolutely hate. This is one of the least pleasant to play games I’ve ever played, it’s absolutely terrible. Perhaps the worst thing about the game is the announcer that constantly insults you, but the course designs and gameplay are barely any better. This game is from the CoolBoarders (PS1) developers, and I don’t think they ever figured out what snowboarding is, their games aren’t anything like it at all.

Game Boy Advance, GBA – Cruis’n Velocity is a quite terrible early polygonal 3d racer for the system. It’s nothing like past Cruis’n games and is pretty terrible in every way.

Game Boy Color, GBC – M&M’s Mini Madness is my pick here. How this platformer is so awful I don’t know, isn’t that an easy thing to do a tolerably okay job at? But this is not tolerably okay at all, it’s terrible.

Game Boy, GB – While there are surely worse GB games, my pick here is somewhat based on nostalgia. The worst game I bought for Game Boy in the ’90s was Toy Story, and that is still my choice for worst Game Boy game. Objecively are there worse games, surely. But for me there aren’t. With an excruciatingly slow framerate, awful controls, and confusing objectives, this game is terrible. Some people have fond memories for this title, particularly on console, but I’m sorry I have nothing but bad memories of this awful disaster of a game.

Game Gear, GG – If you count it, and you shouldn’t because it isn’t a game, House of Tarot wins this easily. This title is a tarot card reading title only released in Japan. Yeah, it’s a horoscope program. In Japanese, on Game Gear. You don’t get much worse. If you want an actual game though, it’s close but maybe I’ll go with World Series Baseball? It’s just such a terrible baseball game, the fielder movement is ridiculous — the first, second, and third basemen are glued to their bases, while you move everyone else together. What. I also need to mention Taz-Mania though, the game is just about as bad and has what is almost certainly the worst soundtrack of any title released in the US on any platform.

Gamecube, GC – Genre fans may get something out of it, but for me it’s an easy pick here: Whirl Tour. This skateboarding game does basically nothing to teach you how to play. YOu already know how to play Tony Hawk, right? You’d better before playing this game. This game is pretty bad all around on top of that too, so no, I don’t know how to play and don’t want to learn. This is a learning curve not worth attempting.

Mattel Intellivision, INTV – Sharp Shot is a bad minigame collection consisting of three very basic games. It’s aimed to be for young children, but even they will probably be bored in ten minutes. Even so, this game isn’t utterly dire; it’s merely bad, not a total failure. You might be mildly entertained during some of those ten minutes.

NEC PC-FX, PCFX – The video quality may be great, but as a game I hate Battle Heat about as much as you can dislike something. The ‘FMV fighting game’ concept does not in any way work, as you see with games like this or Supreme Warrior. What you end up with is an extremely frustrating game that requires extensive memorization, as the only way to not lose is to know exactly what move to use at each moment. The video might be nice but the gameplay is abysmal. But hey, at least it’s a game, unlike most of the visual novel-focused titles on this disappointing console… I may love books, but visual novels have never interested me at all.

Neo Geo Pocket & NGP Color – Almost all of the NGP and NGPC games that I have are good, but the NGPC version of Pac-Man is sadly disappointing. The core of this arcade classic is here, but either you play with unpleasantly tiny graphics or the game zooms in so you can’t see where the ghosts are. This is an unsolvable issue of the screen resolution of a ’90s handheld, but it is an issue that kind of ruins Pac-Man.

NES – My pick for worst NES game that I own is the quite subpar beat ’em up/action game Phantom Fighter. Some people like this game. That’s fine, I can see why someone would, but I am not one of those people. This game has awful controls and is incredibly repetitive and basic! The game is just so boring, I don’t have any fun at all and don’t find playing it rewarding. I know there are even worse NES games out there than this, infamous titles I mostly do not own, but this one should be in the running for being on the list of bad NES games at least. I have to mention another game too, and it’s one everyone agrees is bad. Transformers: Mystery of Comvoy for Famicom is every bit as bad or worse than Phantom Fighter, and it’s a lot more infamous too. This game deserves every bit of its terrible reputation. Controls, gameplay, level design, enemies, the off-the-charts difficulty… everything here is awful. This is kind of the amusing kind of bad, though, the kind of bad game you walk away from thinking ‘yeah, playing bad games is fun’. And in a weird way it can be.

New 3DS, N3DS – The New 3DS doesn’t have any retail exclusives, but there are digital exclusives. A lot of those are pretty mediocre indie titles. On my list though, I’ve got the lowest scores by two* games which I gave failing ratings to: Stack ’em High and 3D Retro Dungeon Puzzle Challenge. The latter is a little mini first person dungeon game, which may sound good but it isn’t. The game has almost no content, and all levels except for the last are exceptionally easy. The last of the dozen or so stages does present a challenge, but when it’s the only one that does at all and teh actual gameplay is extremely basic FPS-ish stuff there’s no reason to actually keep trying to beat it.

As for Stack ’em High, it’s a competently made but very annoying dexterity puzzle style game. Various objects drop from the sky and you need to try to stack them up without too many falling off of the little platforms they are falling onto. It’s a solid idea that some games do well, but I just thought that this one is way too frustrating for its own good. You will lose, over and over, and it won’t feel fair; no matter how good your stacking is, they’ll fall off every time. Avoid this poorly executed failure.

Nintendo 3DS, 3DS – The worst game I’ve got for the 3DS is actually a physical cart release, and not one of the hundreds of digital 3DS games I reviewed in my 3DS digital download game opinion summaries series: Dream Trigger 3D. This game is an absolutely awful rail shooter-ish game and the neat 3d effect in no way saves it. This is a really really bad game, avoid it. As for downloadable games, the worst two I played are Space Defender – Battle Infinity and Bricks Pinball VI, which are both F-tier games mostly for bad controls. Both have solid classic arcade style game concepts, but with controls as poor as they have you won’t want to play them.

Nintendo 64, N64 – Sadly, Elmo’s Number Journey and Elmo’s Letter Adventure are probably the worst games on the N64. It’s not that I’mn too old for kids’ educational games; I can enjoy those if they’re good. The problem here is that these titles are exceptionally short, with maybe a half hour of content each, and are barely educational. Literally all you do in each game is walk around and touch dozens of a specified letter or number. The game says ‘touch 20 R’s!’ so in that level you touch all the R’s, avoiding other letters. And that’s the whole game. I know this is for young players, but seriously, this is far too basic a concept to work. There’s no math here, no reading beyond letter recognition, nothing but literally just “hit button by specified object for a few minutes then win”. It’s really bad.

If you don’t want to count those two as games, next worst on my list is War Gods. I guess some people don’t totally hate thgis game, but I do. War Gods was Midway’s first attempt at a 3d fighting game and I’d say that it’s probably the worst Midway game I have ever played. It’s kind of humorously incompetent, but absolutely nothing about it, not the poor graphics, lame characters, or anything, makes me ever want to play it, and nor should you. Sure, the game functions so it’s not as bad as say Shadow: War of Succession for 3DO, but the fun factor is about as low as it gets.

Nintendo DS, DS – L.O.L. and Legend of Kay are at the bottom of my list for the DS. The former is barely really a game, it is a messaging chat program thing, except not online of course. This “game” is local multiplayer only, it has no single player. With this cart you can text chat with other people nearby on your DS, if they also have this thing. Except… the DS has a built-in app for doing that! This is just that except with a few more features and a few awful multiplayer-only minigames, but given that text chat between DSes sounds like about the most useless thing ever to anyone not living in 2004, this cart isn’t worth the plastic it is made with. Avoid at all costs.

As for Legend of Kay, for those who remember the pretty decent console game, this Nintendo DS title is entirely different. The developers of the handheld Legend of Kay game made the strange decision to make this handheld adaptation of a third person action-adventure game into an overhead stealth game where you cannot attack enemies, at all, ever. Like, the perspective change makes sense. The genre change, though… why? I don’t get it. This is NOT a good stealth game, either, it’s probably the least fun one I have ever played! I have no idea why this game was made the way it is, but it’s unfortunate that it was. If it was actually a decent stealth game maybe it could have worked, but while it’s been some time since I played Legend of Kay I sure remember that not being the case.

Nintendo DSi, DSi – I do not have any of the couple of retail Nintendo DS games, but for its digital library, of the relatively few I have played Wizard Defenders disappointed me the most. This game is certainly not the worst DSi game, I’m sure there are some truly terrible little games released digitally for the platform. It’s just the worst of the relative handful I have actually played. This game is a blockdropping-style puzzle game with wizards of various colors as the ‘blocks’. It has some good ideas and almost could have been good, but ultimately it just isn’t, at all. If you like being frustrated and annoyed at unfair, random puzzle games which will make you lose without seeming to make any mistakes, go ahead and try Wizard Defenders. I do not find that my idea of fun so this failure is the worst DSi game I’ve played. That the concept seems interesting but the game isn’t that great surely is part of why the score ends up being that low.

Nintendo Switch, NS – The worst Nintendo Switch game that I have actually played is probably a digital-only release, Hover Racer. I like futuristic racing games a lot, but this exceptionally low-budget affair is so simple and boring that it barely even feels like a real game. The game has a decent if very simple look, but the gameplay is about as simple as you will find as you drive along the games’ narrow, simplistic floating roads, trying to finish in first. Slowly drive, that is, because there isn’t much sense of speed here to be found. It’s obvious that this was a game probably made by one or two people, and that’s fine, but it’s just too bland and basic to really be worth much playtime, unfortunately.

For physical releases, the easy pick is the one Pokemon game I have, Brilliant Diamond. I gave this game a try for some reason but I’m not sure why I did, it did not change my opinion of the Pokemon games one bit. I do keep thinking of trying the new ones since they change the classic formula, but the older ones like this thing? As with all Pokemon games before, what, Black or something the story is so simplistic that it barely even deserves to be called a story, and the gameplay is the same ‘do you know the rock-paper-scissors-ish unit counters’ turnbased RPG game that Pokemon has always been and I have never had even the slightest interest in trying to learn. If I hate any Switch game this one is it, it’s just so unbelievably boring! I know this is probably the most popular franchise of the last 30 years but sorry, that won’t make me like them any more than I ever have. With that said though, the Pokemon Ranger games on the DS were pretty good, I liked that spinoff, and there are some good Pokemon puzzle games. I don’t hate everything Pokemon just because it has the franchise on it. I just don’t like the gameplay much, don’t care about “catching them all” in any way, don’t find “collect all the creatures” an interesting gameplay hook, and find the barely-extant plot a zero out of anything as far as story goes.

Nokia N-Gage, NNG – It’s a tough one with this platform, on this thing just about everything is terrible with its awful phone screen and ludicrous button layout! But of the whole five N-Gate carts that I have, the worst is Sonic N. It’s a port of the well below average (I would say) GBA game Sonic Advance, except it’s significantly worse on the N-Gage since with its vertically-oriented screen you can barely see anything in front of you. If you enjoy fast-paced platforming where you can’t see anything in front of you, try this game. Otherwise stay far away.

Odyssey 2, O2 – I like the Odyssey 2, it’s a weird but good old console. Of its library, though, I have Thunderball! scored the lowest. It’s a pinball game, which is fine, except the physics are extremely poor and the screen layout very simple. Most early pinball games are like this, but this is one of the weaker ones of them. The physics and layout are just too basic to hold my interest at all. Thunderball!’s sadly pretty bad.

PC (1981-1990) – I don’t actually own all that many retail PC games from the ’80s; we got our first PC in ’92. I played a lot of shareware and freeware games from the ’80s, but didn’t buy most of those so those aren’t on this list.  There are a lot of ’80s PC games I don’t find interesting; I think computer games got a lot better in the ’90s.  The problem is, I have never played most of those games enough to be able to rate them.  So what’s the worst ’80s computer game?  I don’t know.  That freeware racing game motorman.com sure wasn’t any good; it’s one of those ‘drive along and jump over buses on your motorcycle’ games,  but… you don’t need ot jump over the buses.  You can just land on them and will pass right through.  All you need to do is just learn how to land and the game is over in minutes.  As for retail games, though, looking at my list, the lowest score for an ’80s game is a game that is actually pretty good if you like the genre, the highly regarded RPG classic Dragon Wars. I scored it relatively low because I got it in a collection in the late ’90s, and didn’t like that you need to draw a map on paper instead of the game including a map in the game (this was sadly common in ’80s first person RPGs) and that you need to go read paragraphs in the manual sometimes in order to save space in the game or something.

PC (1991-2000) – My pick for this, the best decade of PC gaming by far, is Beast Wars: Transformers. This PC/PS1 third person action game is one I first played a demo of back when it first released, and I thought that demo was was probably the worst retail game I’d ever played. That first impression stuck, which is why it’s scored the lowest here. I’m sure some people have fond memories of this title, but I think it’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played. The graphics are extremely bland, gameplay is exceptionally basic ‘walk around and shoot everything with your lame laser weapon and stuff’, voice samples really annoying — I can still remember some of them, and not in a good way! Yeah, this game’s just awful, awful junk. The game was obviously designed for the PS1 first and this PC version is an afterthought, the bad graphics show that pretty clearly, but it’s the core gameplay that is the main reason it’s on my list here. The runners-up, which are only barely worse, include VR Sports Powerboat Racing (I know, some people like this game. I stand by my opinion that is is atrocious.) and Test Drive Off-Road, the worst retail PC game I actually owned in the ’90s. TDOR is another PS1-first game that’s an unfun disaster of zero-fun design.

PC (2001-2009) – For this decade of the PC’s decline and fall, what choice is better than a game based on the Star Wars universe’s decline and fall to the Sith, Star Wars: The Clone Wars — Republic Heroes? This game tries to be kind of like the TT Games Lego games, except without the Lego license. The results sadly is a significantly worse game than those decent-but-unspectacular beat ’em up-styled games. And yes, I’m sorry, but I’m not a big fan of the TT Lego games. They’re okay I guess but I have never found them very interesting. Anyway, this one’s worse. Republic Heroes is a boring, by-the-numbers beat ’em up-ish action game. You play as several of the characters from the show, including Anakin and Ahsoka, and walk along defeating enemies and sometimes jumping between platforms. That sounds fine, but I thought the game was about the most boring one of these I’ve played in decades, which is the main reason I am mentioning it here. Additionally, this game does NOT have drop-in or drop-out multiplayer, and you can’t choose your character either. Instead, at the start player 1 is Anakin and player 2 is Ahsoka. Want to have things the other way around, or play as one player as someone else? Sorry, you can’t. It’s pretty lame. This game is awful and one of the worst retail PC games I’ve played.

PC (2010-2020) – For physical games, the lowest score I see on my list is a game I gave a solid above average score to, TES V: Skyrim. I just don’t have many physical PC games from after the ’00s, they died out sadly quickly in favor of digital. Bethesda games aren’t my thing but they’re fine, Skyrim included. For digital games, though, I’ve got plenty of actual bad game options. The worst on my list is one that a lot of people love but I absolutely hated, as I said in my summary about the game on the site: Terraria. Why do people love this, again? It’s the worst of Minecraft and side-scrolling platformers smushed into one. I have absolutely no interest in Minecraft since I hate crafting and don’t like its visual look or aimless, objective-free design, and this game is very much that but maybe even worse, with boring generic sprite graphics and absolutely nothing to make me interested in playing it at all ever. I find this honestly one of the worst I’ve ever played. It well deserves its place on this list.

PC (2021-present) – Honestly, I don’t have enough PC games released in 2021 or later to be able to say anything here. Looking at my list… uh, sorry, I haven’t played enough recent PC games to say much. And when I do play PC games it’s mostly good ones.  The few 2021-or-newer PC games on my list have high scores.

Philips CD-i, CDI – The worst CD-i game I’ve played is simple: Dark Castle. Yes, it’s every bit as unplayably awful as you probably have heard. This games’ controls make some shreds of sense on a computer with keyboard and mouse, which it was originally designed for, but on a console where you either use a d-pad, mouse (but NOT keyboard), or awful remote wand thing, it doesn’t work at all. You need to somehow move and aim your arm at the same time, and you really can’t without multiple sticks or keyboard and mouse, and this console doesn’t have that. The game was not adjusted much to account for this and the result is that an already not very good computer game became one of the most infamously terrible console games of its era for both Genesis and CD-i. Just try to control this game… it won’t go well. The graphics are somewhat bland and gameplay not all that great as you slowly move around the screen and try and try to not die quite as quickly this time, but it’s those controls that really make this game terrible.

PlayStation 2, PS2 – If we’re going purely by personal bias and not by actual game quality, my pick here is Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. This game is an F-tier game, but it’s certainly not the worst game ever objectively; it’s just yet another bland, easy, and mediocre God of War knockoff. I mostly hate this game for being a Gauntlet game, a game in one of my favorite classic franchises, that plays so little like Gauntlet and instead takes its main inspiration from a game I strongly dislike, God of War. Ugh. It’s the wrost for being a boringly easy and bland game that plays nothing like how it should: Gauntlet.

But if you ignore that because it’s not actually the worst, then my pick is Space Channel 5: Special Edition. I know, this is another popular game, but I’m sorry, I found it completely impossible. In this music game you somehow need to know which button to push at which time even though the game doesn’t tell you what to actually do. It makes absolutely no sense and while people have attempted to explain this game to me before, I’m sorry but it’s one of the worst I’ve ever played. Shouldn’t the bare minimum for a music game be, like, TELLING YOU WHAT TO PRESS AND WHEN? This game doesn’t do that, then punishes you for failing to have correctly guessed what buttons it didn’t tell you when to press. It’s just absurd design. No.

If you want something else, that most people would agree is bad, the next worst PS2 game I have is Legion: The Legend of Excalibur. I really don’t remember much about this game other than it’s yet another generic, forgettable third person action/beat ’em up game, but worse than almost all of them. Todd McFarlane’s Evil Prophecy is a similarly awful beat ’em up for PS2 as well.

PlayStation 3, PS3 – For PS3, the worst game I’ve played is Twisted Metal (2012). The gameplay is mediocre and forgettably average-at-best car combat — I have never enjoyed playing Twisted Metal games at all and this one did not change my mind about that at all, I’ve always thought they are poor to bad — but the main reason it’s on this list is for the game’s theming. This game is exceptionally obnoxiously hateful. The main character, the iconic clown guy face of the franchise, is an evil clown who is a serial killer. Does he suffer for his crimes? No, of course not. The other characters are no better. Twisted Metal is all about being edgy and blowing through the borders of good taste, and while I’m okay with dark themes where they are appropriate, how is a mediocre car combat game an acceptable place to have such excessively over-the-top hateful themes? It’s not okay. I don’t want to actually act out, as the protagonist, that kind of story. I will never play this game again.

PlayStation 4, PS4 – Of the relatively few PS4 games I’ve played, the worst probably is the below average digital-only title The Five Covens. It’s a not very good 3d platformer with some fun wizard theming but bad controls and subpar gameplay and stages. Skip it. For disc games I haven’t played many games for the PS4 and haven’t played any bad ones. I’ve got Bloodborne scored lowest of them, but that’s only because I don’t enjoy Dark Souls games much. It’s clearly well made. If I had to play a Playstation Dark Souls game though I’d rather play Demon’s Souls… I do like medieval settings better than pseudo-Victorian ones.

PlayStation Portable, PSP – For the PSP, the lowest-rated games I’ve played are Rush and Generation of Chaos. The former is another one of those “I know it’s not ACTUALLY terrible, I just hate it for being not at all what I wanted from one of my favorite franchises” titles. Rush is a port of LA Rush for PS2/Xbox, a generic and forgettable tuner racing game from the tune racing boom that uses the name of the exceptional San Francisco Rush racing game series, my overall favorite racing game series ever. And then they made THIS, a mediocre tuner game with barely any cool big jumps and average tuner-car driving. It’s boring and below average for sure, but terrible? Probably not, unless you hate it for misusing its license as I do.

As for the other game, Generation of Chaos is the first game of a franchise of confusing and hard to get grips with strategy games from Neverland. That studio made some good games and some bad ones, but after trying to figure out this game I eventually decided that it wasn’t me, it was the game. It plays a bit like the Saturn classic Dragonforce, just worse, as you control units that act as groups of soldiers in little animated battles. This game feels low budget and has a lot of issues, though the confusing design is first among them. The game is very poorly explained and neither the game itself or its manual are of much use. Even if you figure it out, though, I somehow doubt that it’d be worth it. There are probably worse PSP games out there than this one but it’s certainly not a GOOD one.

I have to mention third place; it’s another somewhat popular game I can’t stand, the PS1 “classic” MediEvil. Why PS1 fans tried to convince themselves that this awful game was anything other than terrible I’ve never understood but I do not share that opinion. Gameplay, graphics, controls, design, it’s all bad on either PS1 or PSP.

PlayStation Vita, PSV – Of the PSV games I’ve played, two have failing grades: ModNation Racers: Road Trip and Tearaway. The former is a generic and mediocre racing game held back by issues such as excessively long load times and extremely generic Mario Kart-but-worse gameplay. The latter is the bigger disappointment, as the platformer Tearaway had some hype but I didn’t find it fun at all. This game got good reviews… why? I’m sorry, but it’s awful. It has your usual terrible Media Molecule controls and awful physics that ruin all of their games, but this one is worse than most of their games as it doesn’t even have the “but you can make your own levels!” hook of their other games… skip. Do not buy. I wish Media Molecule understood how to make a platformer that feels good to play control-wise, but they do not. At all.

PlayStation, PSX, PS1 – I’ve got a lot of options for this console, there are quite a few utterly abysmal games for this bad game-laden console. The worst on my list, though, is Largo Winch. It’s one of the least fun stealth games ever made. It’s so bad that it just barely edges out a bunch of other atrocious games, including Die Hard Trilogy (this game is one of the top games on my ‘why do people say this utterly atrocious disaster of a game is decent?’ list), the awful 3d platformer Psybadek with its horrible floaty controls, Robotron X and its far too close in camera to be at all playable, and RushDown, the utterly dull and boring extreme sports racing game that manages to be even worse than one of my most disliked series of that era, the 1/2/3Xtreme trilogy. (Where’s MediEvil? I don’t have the first one for PS1, but even if I did it’s nowhere near as abysmal as these games are. That game gets a higher F score than these by several points.)

Saturn, SS – For the Saturn, the pick is easy: TNN Motorsports Hardcore 4×4. This multiplatform racing game is a mediocre effort on both PS1 and Saturn, but the Saturn version is dramatically worse thanks to one of the least playable framerates I’ve seen in a game this side of a polygonal 3d game on the Super Nintendo. Heh… sorry Race Drivin’ for SNES. This is about as slow as that or worse, and is much less playable. This is another one of those games where I’m confused about how it actually released in this state. I know that with time you can get used to low framerates, but this is SO SO low that I have trouble imagining that anyone actually could enjoy playing this game. Even if you could its ‘drive 4-wheeler trucks down narrow canyons in boring races’ design isn’t any good, but the framerate takes it from merely poor to all-time terrible.

The top honorable mention for me on Saturn is another all-time terrible game, the reviled fighting game Criticom. Criticom’s no match for Shadow: War of Succession for bad fighting games, nothing is, but short of that this game is one of the worst ever. Criticom is a legendarily terrible early 3d fighter with some of the worst design you’ll ever see. The developer would go on to make Dark Rift for N64, another one of my ‘why do people say this terrible game is okay?’ list titles. It’s slightly better than Criticom but not by much.

Sega Genesis, Gen – Mallet Legends Whac-A-Critter is an unlicensed Whack-A-Mole game for hte Genesis. The company actually released a little whack-a-mole controller for the game, which surely makes it a bit less horrendously unplayably terrible, but with controller this game is absolutely dire and I doubt that the special controller helps all that much. You press the d-pad in a direction with the button to hit the nine available spots. That’s fine, but the game is absurdly, brokenly hard far beyond any sanity. This game is unlicensed for very good reasons, did it get any play testing? Even when it’s not hard the concept is so basic that it’s not a very good home console game, but the broken difficulty finishes off any chance of it being decent.

Sega CD – If I had the Sega CD version Supreme Warrior would “win” here, but I only have the 32XCD version of that game so instead Midnight Raiders takes it. It’s a bad ‘move the sight around the screen and shoot the enemies’ FMV game. Memorize when to shoot where or die. Or quit and don’t play games like this, that would be a better idea. There are a lot of really awful FMV games on the Sega CD, including Midnight Raiders, Tomcat Alley, Night Trap (though this is another one I only have the 32XCD version of and not the Sega CD versions), and Double Switch. Yes, I do consider all four of those to be VERY VERY VERY bad games. I’ll say why for Night Trap in the 32X section, but its sequel Double Switch is basically the same thing but with a new setting. It’s just as awful as the first one.

32X (cartridge games) – Cosmic Carnage. This is a decent game which gets a passing grade for sure. It’s below average but is far from terrible, and has some pretty interesting ideas. This is a 2d fighting game and its neat concepts include being able to equip different armor types onto your characters and some cool scaling effects on some of your moves as your limbs spin around in 3d as you swing. It’s a decently amusing time, but the mechanics are poor so here it is on this list, undeservedly. The actual worst 32X games are the two FMV games below.

Sega CD 32X – Supreme Warrior easily wins here. This FMV fighting game may have very nice video quality in this 32XCD release, but unfortunately the gameplay is the same. This is a first person FMV fighting game, and you play by memorizing which move to use against each enemy in each specific video clip they play against you. If you don’t know the right move, you get hit. It’s a nearly impossibly hard game unless you spend a LOT of time memorizing video clip inputs, and I can’t possibly imagine that time being worthwhile in any way. This is seriously one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

Night Trap may be a highly memorable “classic”, and again this version has nice video qualiyt, but its core design is about going to empty rooms, memorizing exactly when to be in those rooms, and hitting the correct button at exactly the right time each time in order to defeat the enemies. Meanwhile, on other monitors videos play telling the story, but don’t try to watch them much! You’ll miss the enemies if you do. It makes no sense to make a game like this, and why some people (hopefully ironically?) claim to like it makes even less sense. It’s a really, really, REALLY bad game, one of the worst.

Sega Master System, SMS – This might be a popular pick, but … F-16 Fighting Falcon is definitely not very good. The graphics are basically the visuals of a SG-1000 game, and the gameplay is incredibly dated, and was pretty much from day one given the limited visuals. The actual loser for the SMS though is probably the Sports Pad controller, which is the worst, least responsive trackball that I have ever used.

Super Nintendo, SNES – This may be another controversial pick, but for me the adventure game Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures takes the crown here for worst SNES game I’ve played. In this game you control a cursor as you watch Pac-Man go around the screen and do stuff. You cannot control him, only interact with things on screen to make things happen that hopefully he will react to in the way you need to solve the current puzzle. It’s a concept, but it’s a bad concept because the little guy will rarely do what you want. If you could just control the character this would be a totally okay puzzle adventure game, but having to basically play this second or third person as you try to make him do the things you want without being able to control his actions at all is just so incredibly frustrating and obnoxious that I can’t stand this game at all. It’s awful.

Second place on the SNES is a very forgettably mediocre racing game, Kawasaki Caribbean Challenge. There are two Kawasaki racing games on SNES, and this is the bad one. It’s a bad top-down racer with extremely bland graphics and poor gameplay. I love top-down racing games when they’re good, but this is the opposite of that with boring tracks, graphics so poor you can barely tell this is the Super Nintendo, and gameplay very far from the better games in this subgenre. You’ll play one or two races then turn this game off forever.

TI-83+ Calculator – While the TI-83+ is a great graphing calculator, it’s a terrible games platform. I got one of these in high school for math and liked it for that, but for games? I know a lot of people like TI calculator games, but I never did. I actually got a PC-to-TI cable a few years ago to try more games than the handful I had on my TI-83+ originally — I only had, like, Snake, Drug Wars, and Tetris, I think — but… well, I couldn’t get most of them to work and the few I did were as terrible as expected. Who knew that a screen with an extremely slow refresh rate not designed for moving graphics, on a platform with no sound support, would have utterly unplayably awful action games? Huh, strange… :p

So yeah, I’m sure there are worse, but Flappy Bird for TI-83+ is an unplayable wreck of a game thanks to that refresh rate. How is this actually supposed to be playable? It’s not. I know “games running ON A CALCULATOR and I can play it in school during math class!” was part of the appeal, but… I’d rather have just paid attention in class and went to play some Game Boy later, you know? On that note it’s not like Tetris for TI83+ is very good either, it isn’t. The GB version is like a thousand times more playable.

TI-99/4A – This classic computer is one I like, for some reason. The lowest score I have for a game is Blackjack & Poker, a completely acceptable single player only card game collection. It scores low because I have zero interest in poker and this is a very bland old blackjack game which does nothing that a thousand newer blackjack games don’t do better, so there is no reason to ever play it. For other genres, probably the weakest is The Attack. It’s not an utterly awful game, but it is below average and boring. Of the TI99/4A overhead ship shooting games, and the system has a good number of them, this one is easily the worst — it’s got awful, ear-piercing audio and very slow and boring gameplay with minimal challenge. You just wait for the enemies to spawn from blocks, wait some more, wait a little longer, and then easily shoot them once they finally appear. Zzzz.

TurboGrafx-16, TG16 – Battle Royale wins it here. This game is a pretty bad wrestling game with weird controls and only one mode. You pick a wrestler, go into the match, and try to throw the other people out of the ring. The throw input’s awkwardly weird, read that manual if you want to get anywhere. This game has 4 player multiplayer, but after a match or two most people will never want to play this extremely slight, forgettable game again. There’s zero depth and even less gameplay of any note.

Next worst is another early TG16 game, Takin’ It To the Hoop. This basketball game is confusing, and honestly I never figured out how to play it well. This game tries to be somewhat realistic so it’s 5-on-5, but they really hadn’t figured out yet how to make basketball games fun, and this one sure isn’t. It also isn’t simple or intuitive, and learning how to defend, shoot, etc. is much harder than it should be. I don’t think this game is worth learning how to play. NBA Jam is the great classic basketball game, not this. This is also a lot worse than other simmish basketball games like Double Dribble (NES), as well, with more confusing and slower gameplay.

Turbo CD, TCD – For Turbo CD, the lowest score I have is for Bikkuriman Daijikai. This is barely a game, though — it’s a trivia game based on the Bikkuriman anime/manga franchise, in Japanese. I’m sure people who like that anime and can read Japanese might like this trivia game but I am neither of those things. Otherwise, Sailor Moon Collection is also almost equally awful. It’s a minigame collection with a handful of bad, extremely basic little minigames. There are a bunch of good Sailor Moon games out there, including beat ’em ups and an RPG for the SNES, but this one is one of the worst, unfortunately; this is basically one of those extremely basic minigame collections aimed at a young audience, and it won’t interest anyone else.

Virtual Boy, VB – While there are a few bad VB games, I do not own them. The “worst”, I guess, is Virtual Fishing, purely because I have absolutely no interest in fishing games. It seems like a very solid classic fishing game, but the subject matter’s a massive negative for me so here it is.

Wii – I have to mention Metroid Other M here for what its story does to Samus’s character. It’s a well deserved worst for that alone. Next worst is Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing, a PS2-port racing game with the worst motion controls I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. I like good motion controls, and a lot of Wii games have good motion controls and benefit from them. This games’ are the exact opposite of that. It’s one of the most unplayable games I’ve ever played, and no, there isn’t a stick-based option; the controls are motion-only and are basically broken. Even beyond that this game is exceptionally low budget with really bad graphics and very basic environments, but it’s the controls that are the worst and most memorable thing about this game. Play it if you want to dislike motion controls even though when done well they’re great.

A few other games near the bottom of my list for Wii are Soulcalibur Legends (a sadly boring and bad beat ’em up in the Soul Calibur franchise with very few playable characters) and another music game some people love but I absolutely hate, Rhythm Heaven Fever. That’s another game I can’t play at all, I don’t think I have ever beaten a stage of that awful game. If you like it that’s nice for you. I do not and think of it as one of the worst I’ve played.

Wii U – This is another controversial one, but for me it’s no contest: the worst Wii U game I’ve played is easily Tekken Tag Tournament 2. I have always hated Tekken games, I think most of them are absolutely terrible to play with controls I strongly dislike, and this one is no exception. The PS1 games are probably the least bad Tekken games, but everything after that is just awful with few redeeming qualities. I’m sure many people like this series’ ‘each button is a limb’ control system, but I hate it. I got this game despite knowing I might dislike it because it was neat to see a Tekken game actually release on a Nintendo console, but unfortunately it did not change my mind one bit about this franchise. Quite the opposite, I think I might have hated this game even more than the other Tekken games… though I don’t know, I found all of them from 4 on quite awful. This is a game on my worst fighting games I’ve played list. (Tekkens 4, 5, and 6 are also F-grade games for me, but slightly less bad than this one. I haven’t played 7 or 8.)

Xbox – The worst Xbox game? It’s probably Kabuki Warriors, another game on the ‘awful fighting games’ list. Kabuki Warriors tries to be a cool MK-ish fighter, but it doesn’t work, at all. It’s a painfully bad game to play. Second worst is the racing game Pulse Racer. This game has a potentially interesting mechanic where there is a pulse meter, and if it goes too high your character will black out. Unfortunately, while a neat concept it doesn’t work well at all in practice. The tracks and gameplay aren’t very interesting either, dragging this game down into this very low F tier, but the pulse meter is the main thing here and it it’s like… “have too much fun and you’ll lose!”. Why would I want that?

Xbox 360, X360 – It’s easy, the worst X360 game I have is again Tekken Tag Tournament 2, followed by Terraria. I’ve mentioned those already for other platforms, though. The worst exclusive is probably Bomberman: Act Zero. The core gameplay is fine, but the aesthetic is just so comically wrong for Bomberman that it almost ruins the game. That isn’t the worst thing here, though, the game design is: you basically get only one life. Die and you start the game over. It’s ludicrously unfun nonsense. Play any other Bomberman game instead of this.

Xbox One, XONE – While I have played a fair number of games for this system, I haven’t played any really bad X1 games. There’s nothing I’ve played for X1 I’d give a failing grade to. The lowest scores I have are some slightly below average scores, for Sea of Thieves (I just don’t find it fun, it’s too aimless) and Killer Instinct [2014] (I’m awful at long combos and just cannot memorize them, which is why I’ve never liked KI games. This one sadly is no exception. It’s not the game, it’s me… but I definitely don’t like it.)

Xbox Series X, XSX – The worst game I’ve played for this system has to be Gears 5. Gears 5 isn’t terrible, but it is a bad game for sure in a bad franchise. I remember not liking the first Gears of War game at all, but hadn’t played any after that until this one. I was somewhat shocked at how similar Gears 5 is to the first one; it feels basically like the first one with only minimal changes other than better graphics and a few more moves and such. Hide behind waist-high walls, shoot, repeat. Fall asleep from boredom because of how dull this game is. So yeah, I still don’t find it fun at all, this is just as bad as the first Gears with minimal changes. I had to quit after an hour or two because of how tediously dull and unfun this game is. It’s clearly well made, but how much does that matter when a game is this disappointing? This game isn’t an F-tier game, but it is well below average. Given how successful this franchise is, obviously my tastes in games do not align well with what’s popular, heh…

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2023 Game of the Year

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Brian

What I Have Been Playing This Year

I’ve been sick this week, and while I’m getting better I’m not quite fully recovered yet so this will be shorter than it otherwise probably would be. This year, I bought as many games as ever, but did I play them? No, I often didn’t. I’ve spent far too much time this year just watching Youtube and such and not playing anything.

And when I do play games, it’s mostly the same things. For example, my most played game this year is, surprise surprise, Super Mario Maker 2. According to my Switch I’ve played something closing in on 300 hours of that game this year. That number may be a bit high but it should be close. Second place on my list, for playtime, according to the ‘what did you play this year?’ pages that Sony, MS, Nintendo, and Steam put up, is Diablo IV. It says that I played 200 hours of that game on Xbox, which definitely seems too high; I know I’ve left my Xbox on more than a few times while actually watching Youtube, that’s going to add to the time. However, I certainly did play a lot of Diablo IV. I wrote that two-part review for a reason, I finished the game and kept playing it some after that.

After those two, though, there’s a big dropoff from second to third; my next couple of most played games are in in 50-something-hour range, namely F-Zero 99 for Switch next and then Dead or Alive 6 for Xbox. The first of those games I love, the second … not so much, I just play it sometimes anyway.

The other games that would be in this category if they were on those listing sites are Nintendo 3DS games — I played many hours of 3DS puzzle games. Specifically, digital ones. Most nights I play a few minutes of 3DS puzzle games before bed. I’ve finished a lot of the 3DS Picross games now, I only have a few left. Other digital 3DS puzzle games I played a lot of include Wordherd, Block-a-Pix Color, Link-a-Pix Color, Sudoku Party, and 505 Tangram for DSiWare on 3DS. I’ve also played a bit of Angry Birds Trilogy on 3DS cart. I’ve finished all the puzzles in Link-A-Pix Color and Wordherd, and am close to finishing Block-a-Pix Color. I’ve come to love puzzle games in a way that I didn’t when I was younger, and the 3DS is the best portable format ever for them thanks to the stylus. It’ll be pretty sad once I run out… the 3DS is still amazing and has yet again been one of my most-used devices this year.

What PS4 games did I play this year? Well, my Sony year in reviewsite said that I played 12 hours total of PS4 games this year, so the answer is unsurprising, not many. The most played of the bunch is the Star Ocean: 2nd Story Remaster.

As for retro games, I haven’t been playing them as much as I should, but the one system that I have been returning to is one that’s on a lot of people my age or older’s thoughts these days, the NES. I’ve returned to it after many years of mostly ignoring the system for probably the same reasons as others. I mean, even though I didn’t own a NES as a kid, I played it a lot, it basically was console gaming in my childhood. How well does it hold up? I know that there are some things about the NES that I don’t like very much, most notably overly inscrutably confusing and “just wander around and figure it out” game design. However, there are also a lot of games that are still good. I turn my NES on and play something or other on it on a regular basis. I got a Famicom Disk System for my NES last year and a while ago finally got an accessory to allow for expansion audio to work without needing the internal mod, so I try out FDS games sometimes as well. All I don’t have is a way to play Famicom 3D System games, I’ll probably need to give up on the dream of an adapter to make those glasses work on a regular NES, since to use them on a NES you would need to make a homebrew cable that connects to certain pins on the bottom port, and just buy a Famicom at some point. Oh well.

With that said, here are my top lists for the year.

The Best New 2023 Releases
—
1. F-Zero 99 (Switch)
2. Akka Arrh (played on XSX)
3. Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch)
4. Diablo IV (played on XSX)
5. Caverns of Mars Recharged (played on XSX)

My Favorite Older Games that I First Played in 2023

This won’t be the interesting list that it often has been in the past; while I bought a lot of retro games this year, again, I never actually got around to trying most of them. So… uh, I guess this handful of 3DS eshop games will have to do, and maybe a couple of other games.

505 Tangram (DSiWare)
Art Style: DIGIDRIVE (DSiWare)
Gotta Protectors (3D eshop)
Mighty Flip Champs! and Mighty Milky Way (DSiWare)
Bookworm (Nintendo DS version)

The Best Remasters of the Year

There were some fantastic remasters this year.  These are the best among them.

  1. Metroid Prime Remastered (Nintendo Switch)
  2. Towers II: Enhanced Stargazer Edition (Atari Jaguar remaster of an Atari Jaguar game)
  3. Star Ocean: The Second Story R (played on PS4)
  4. Quake II [Remastered] (played on XSX)

Overall Game of the Year

1. Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo Switch) – For me, is this the unsurprising pick of the century? Perhaps. But I really do deeply, deeply love this game, it’s the most perfect game concept ever. The execution needs work, and I hope it gets that work in a third Mario Maker release someday. Even as it is, though, with its issues and its declining userbase, SMM2 is incredible. I’m still loving this game as much as ever, and continue making levels for it. I made a new stage this month that is probably one of my better ones.

[It is not new, but perhaps here I should mention that I finished Super Mario Bros. for the NES on real hardware for the first time this year. I’d beaten the easier GBC version back in ’00, but the NES version had always eluded me because of how hard getting through world 8 is. Well, decided that I can do it, and put in the effort. Eventually I won and it feels very good. The game is certainly one of the best ever.]

2. F-Zero 99 (Nintendo Switch) – The surprise of the year by far, Nintendo’s shocking announcement and immediate release of this new, SNES-style online-only F-Zero game was some of the best news I’ve had from gaming in a long time! I really, really love the classic F-Zero games — the first two are nearly perfect 10/10 classics in my book, and are both among the best racing games ever. Due to its online nature requring a large player base to be at its most fun, which you can never count on, I don’t think that this game quite matches either of the originals in overall greatness. Even so, F-Zero 99 is a truly exceptional game. It’s easily my favorite new release of 2023! I’m amazed and thrilled that this game was released.

3. Akka Arrh (played on Xbox Series X) – Legendary developer Jeff Minter’s latest release is this game.  This is a title that’s a modern re-imagining of a cancelled Atari game from the early ’80s.  Or rather, this is a game loosely based on that title, but if you look at the original prototype and this game you’ll see how different the two are.  The core concept of both is that you are defending a turret from enemies attacking you from all around, and that, like in Tempest, each stage has a new shape.  Also, in both games if certain enemies get past your defenses they attack the tower from below, and you have to zoom in and fight them off there.  However, Minter’s take changes the fairly simple ‘shoot the zone to kill the baddies’ gameplay of the original for something much more like the brilliant ’00s arcade-style game Every Extend.  Somewhat like in that game, you shoot bombs that create spreading explosions within the zone you shot at.  Each enemy destroyed by a bomb creates its own chain explosion, and your chain bonus counter resets if you shoot another bomb.  You also have bullets, with limited ammo that replenishes with enemy kills, and bullets don’t reset your chain.

Because of instant-death enemies that rapidly zoom at you and everything going on on screen with the numerous game mechanics Akka Arrh is probably one of Minter’s harder games and the skill ceiling is high, but it’s a brilliant concept done well.  Expect to be very frustrated but also addicted.   I find that I often find it hard to tell when I’m about to die and when I can take a hit, but otherwise I absolutely love this game!  Akka Arrh has beautiful classic arcade-inspired visuals, that classic Jeff Minter flare, compelling gameplay, and great design.  Nobody does classic arcade gameplay plus synthesesia better than Jeff Minter.  Perhaps this is unsurprising considering that he’s been a game developer since about 1980,  working in the same genre the whole time, but it’s true.  Akka Arrh is incredible, play it immediately if you haven’t.

4. Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch) – I wrote a review of this game last month as well, so I don’t think I need to repeat myself. Mario Wonder’s a mostly easy but otherwise great game that any Mario fan should consider a must-play.

5. Diablo IV (played on Xbox Series X) – When I think of my XSX, which by the way I got via mail order on its day of release since I was so fortunate as to get a preorder in from Microsoft.com that one day that they were available, I think of a system with a fantastic controller and amazing graphical capabilities, but few games that really compel me to play them in the way that Nintendo games do. The Switch is junior-grade compared to the Series in controller build quality and graphics, but in gameplay Nintendo, for me, are the unquesitoned masters of console game design. With that said, though, Diablo IV is a fantastic game. I didn’t play it that maybe as much as 200 hour playtime I mentioned earlier for no reason, I played it because of how good this game is. Diablo IV has some major issues with its story, its overlong boss fights, and some of the seasonal content, and more. The core gameplay is fantastic, though. The controls, action, skill systems, and more are compelling and very well designed.

6. Nintendo 3DS puzzle games, and, since I finished it and really liked the concept, perhaps Link-A-Pix Color in particular. There is a game on 3DS with the same concept as this title, but without capacative touch it’d surely be much worse…

Honorable Mention: This year’s outstanding remasters of Metroid Prime and Star Ocean: The Second Story are absolutely top-tier.  Metroid Prime is one of the best games ever made and this remake is extremely impressive.

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