The Entropy Pump

Secret of Evermore has always been panned by those who still harbor a grudge for Secret of Mana 2 never making it to English-speaking shores, but after playing it I don’t think most of the criticism is deserved. The game basically integrates the battle and menu system from Secret of Mana and adds its own unique magic system (Alchemical spells that require certain ingredients). The story is simple and not that original (a boy from Earth goes to an imaginary world), but compared to similar games on the SNES at that time it feels pretty much unique. Sure, in the end the story is just another save-the-world-plot, but it’s still different in style and tone to other fantasy games. In some ways the feel of the game is that of a much toned down Earthbound, but with an American, 80ies vibe.

My biggest gripe with the game is that it inherited the battle system from its big brother, Secret of Mana. It’s a real-time attack system that forces you to wait until your gauge has fully loaded. If you don’t, your attacks will only deal minimal damage. While this system in theory seems like a clever way to force you to act more tactically, it praxis it doesn’t work too well. Most of the time, due to the limited attack range of your weapons, you’ll miss the enemies. Either you then hack futile at the enemies with a low gauge or you retreat until your gauge has reloaded. This often resulted in my dog killing more enemies than myself, since computer-controlled characters (enemies inclusive) always hit with their attacks at full gauge. Another annoying “feature” of the game is the kickback from getting hit by an enemy, which can throw you a bit and stun you. If you’re unlucky, you get swarmed by enemies and hit until you die without any chance of resistance.

I prefer either round based battle systems or real action-battle systems like in Zelda or Terranigma, which are much better suited to this kind of gameplay. Still, if one manages to live with the annoying aspects of the game, it can be quite fun.

Star Guard is one of these games that looks much better in motion than on still shots. Stylistically it goes for the retro look (as far back as Atari games), but still manages to look good. It’s a 2d-action-platformer that tells its story in shorts text bursts that appear while going through the levels (something about an evil wizard on venus, fun in a pulpy way and reminded me of Burroughs’s fiction). There are nine levels, which are really easy to beat due to a high number of save points and an infinite number of lives. Only the last two levels really require some skill. The controls are well done and despite the low difficulty the game racks up tension quite well on the first playthrough.

Legend of Princess is a neat Zelda fangame by Konjak (maker of such great games as Chalk or Noitu Love) that utilizes a 2d-engine but incorporates most of the stylish elements and some of the items known from Zelda-games. It’s pretty short and all you do is basically going forward killing some monsters and a few boss monsters, but it’s great fun. Especially the extremely well done controls makes this one fun to play. And the graphical presentation is top-notch too.

I fiddled around a little bit with the Doomsday engine, since I wanted to replay Doom, but ended up playing Heretic instead, since my memories of that were much more dim and I wasn’t sure whether I ever completed the game. It’s basically Doom with a fantasy theme, the weapons play similar, the gameplay consists, like in Doom, of finding keys to advance and the main objective is to kill all monsters. What story there is, is told via very small text pieces after you won an episode, but it’s a very basic, generic story that’s really not very important.

Overall a fun game, but it does get repetitive very fast and if you don’t enjoy killing monsters for the fun of it, you probably get bored very fast. Also, the graphics really reach the limits of what can be done with them very early on and despite some interesting sounding names for the levels, they all look very similar, despite the different level structure.

I had long planned to play Ys, but wasn’t sure which was the best version to go. From the older versions the PCEngine one seemed to get the most praise, so thats what I settled on finally. So, how does the game holds up these days?

Well, there are a few nice aspects to the game. A rather unique fighting system where you have to ram enemy sprites. How much damage you’ve inflicted on the enemies or they on you depends on your level and gear. It’s a bit simple, but rather fast and a nice break from the random encounter battle system that plagues so many other jRPGs from the time. The graphics are well done and there’s good music. These are the good points.

Searching on the net one finds nearly unanimous praise for the Ys games, especially for the first two. Consider my surprise when the games turned out to be awful. The story is rather generic and even the few animated video sequences and the extensive voice acting can’t hide the fact that it’s just another generic evil haunting your generic fantasy kingdom story. So, with the story not that impressive, lets turn toward gameplay. Here’s where the game completely falters. Sure, the fighting can be fun initially, but with the endlessly re-spawning enemies turns out to be just another sort of grind. Then there are the mazes.

The first one has three mazes, the second one a bit more, all of them are badly designed. Confusing, needlessly big without much content or variety to make it fun playing through them. If that weren’t enough, the gameplay is dominated by countless fetch quests that force you to traverse the same badly designed mazes again and again. The worst offender in that regard is the last dungeon of the second Ys, which cranks the annoying fetch quest gameplay to the max. Made me nearly give up.

I can understand why people who played the Ys games when they came out can enjoy them, there’s the nostalgia factor involved, but I doubt anyone else will get much out of them today. I rather watch paint dry than play Ys 1&2 again.

This is a stunning kinda vertical shoot’em up for Sega’s ill conceived CD update for the Genesis. It has a rather unique style, dynamic polygon ships and enemy sprites over pre-rendered backgrounds, also done with polygons. This creates the illusion of very advanced graphics for such an old system. The gameplay itself is rather conventional: avoid obstacles, destroy all enemies, chose different kinds of weapons before each stage and confront bosses at the end of each stage. The difficulty is rather high but, with the exception of the final boss, always manageable.

The last boss is the only annoyance the game offers, he’s night impossible to beat. There’s a fine line between hard and unfair, and the final boss crosses that line. He imposes a time limit that even when you know how to beat him (chose anti-matter bombs some levels earlier and never use them so that you have enough to beat the final boss) is far too tight. I’ve tried countless times and never managed it (here’s the ending for those who had similar problems).

Despite that, it’s a great game that offers some impressive visuals: battle fleets engaging each other in the background, gigantic battleships exploding besides you, big meteors hurtling towards you and so on.

This is another port of the SNES Contra 3, this time for the Gameboy Advanced. While still not as good looking as the SNES version, there’s one big change that makes it very worthwhile to play. The game replaces the top-down levels with new side-scrolling levels, a mission on a train and an alien base. The other levels are near 1-to-1 matches to the SNES version and nothing is missing. Overall very fun to play and the new levels are quite good, especially the train level.

This is the Gameboy port of Contra 3/Super Probotector from the SNES. Unlike the first Gameboy Probotector, it’s not a very good game. Factor 5 tried to much to make the game resemble the original, instead of concentrating on making a good game fit for the Gameboy. The graphics look horrible, the smaller screens makes some places unfair, while at other times the game is far too easy. Other changes include a missing level (the fifth) and missing bosses. The difficulty changes merely how many lives you have, the levels and the enemy pattern are unchanged.

Actually, there’s one thing Factor 5 managed to improve compared to the SNES version. These are the top-down levels. Due to the technical limitations of the Gameboy they couldn’t include the rotation functionality and had to redesign the gameplay to fit a non-rotating character sprite. This makes these levels much more fun to play, as the maneuvering of the character is much better.

This is the PAL version of Contra 3. It’s pretty much the same game, the only difference is the replacement of the human characters with two robots. I only mention the game here, because it’s one of those very rare occasions where censoring the game has actually improved it (IMHO), as the robot characters are much more fitting to the setting than the human characters from the Japanese and the American version. The changes were probably made because the killing of human sprites was too much for the PAL-region, which seems kinda laughable in hindsight.

This is the SNES incarnation of the ultra-difficult 2d-actioner Contra. Lengthwise the game is rather short, only four side-scrolling levels and two top-down levels, but due to its heavy difficulty the game will occupy even the most hardened gamers for some time. Beside the high difficulty its the variety that makes Contra stand out from other games. Each of the side-scrolling stages has countless mini-bosses, who will came in any imaginable form. Meachnical beasts, strange mutations, hybrids and many others.

Despite the difficulty, the game is never really unfair, if you learn the layout of each stage and the enemies pattern, you can beat the game. But I advise starting with the lowest difficulty setting, since even that one can be a bitch for beginners and the others settings don’t merely change the number of hits the enemies can absorb but also their attack pattern and speed. The reward for trying to beat the game on the hardest is another cool form of the final boss.

One caveat IMHO are the top-down levels, which I never liked. In their own way they are as ingenious as the side-scrolling levels, but I never had much fun playing them.