Glover
( I'm aware that this song is uncharacteristically calm for any of the circumstances, but damn it, I need to relax!) Oh, it's not because this game's bad or anything; it's just that I've been beating games like crazy, recently. Hell, there's a good chance that when you see this blog, I'll be halfway through some other game you may or may not have heard of. So instead of writing about something I could beat in the shower (I take long showers), I decided to go with a game that I thought would take a longer amount of time to beat. Then I beat it in a day.It all started with an FMV of a wizard doing some stuff. I don't remember the FMVs in the N64 version I played so long ago, but fair enough. After all, you only see a couple over the course of the entire game, and they're reserved for the few story moments in the game. Oh, right, back to the story. The wizard's doing stuff, but we're never sure what. The obvious guess is that he's trying to give himself a fifth finger, but this is a kid's game, and doing such a thing would give Glover the ability to fuck a girl so hard that she ends up puking semen (or so she'll think). However, something goes horribly wrong: one of his gloves drops into the nearby cauldron and becomes evil, or maybe sentient (it's a right hand, so maybe it's just tired of all the masturbation (I think I set a record for most dick jokes in the space of two sentences)). Being all evil and stuff, Cross-Stich's first act as a living being is to fuck with the crystals that prevent the world from looking like the surface of Mars. (It would've been to do his cool evil laugh, but that seems to be an N64 exclusive. Why?) However, before the atmosphere can leave the planet, good Glover zaps the crystals into balls, bouncing them into the inconsistently themed worlds nearby, conveniently enough. And so, your journey begins. Except for one thing: where's the damn wizard in all of this? He only shows up in the ending with eleven minute credits (WHY!?), and even then, he destroys any thought that he was incapable of doing anything the entire time. Is he a dick or just not good at puzzles?
Oh, right, I forgot: the game's not that polished. (Also, this is the first paragraph du blogge that doesn't begin with the letter I.) Take, for example, the ball itself: you need to use a code to summon the ball back to you. You can point to where it is, in the few levels that don't outright give it to you, for no reason, but if you want to bring the ball directly to you, YOU'RE A DIRTY CHEATER. Go cheat in another game, cheater. Also, you can change the ball for certain puzzles. In fact, let's go through all the ball's forms. First comes the bowling ball, which, aside from the regular bouncy ball, is one of the most used items in the game. It's heavy, so you can break stuff with it and press down heavy switches that never appear because the developers never thought of them. However, it mostly works fine, except for one key issue: it's just as fragile as the bouncy ball. Not to stuff like lava and bottomless pits (they may have a bottom, but the crap draw distance won't reveal that), mind you, but to rolling rocks and other things that regular bowling balls can handle easily. OK, next: the marble. It's tiny and metal. You only use it for, like, two puzzles, and only because it's metal. Next! Wait, the crystals? The ones from the story? They serve an actual gameplay purpose? Oh, wait, they don't; you can roll them around, and then bounce them into the ground for one of the quickest game overs of your life.
And that brings me to another big rough spot in the game: the camera. It stays forever fixated on Glover's ass, but it never seems to point where you want it to point. Even when I fiddle around with the camera manually, I can never get it at an angle that I like. Combine this with somewhat cheap physics (you're almost always glued to your ball, even if you're on a platform and your ball is falling into the abyss directly underneath said platform), and you get a bunch of cheap deaths. Oddly enough, though, the game fixes this by giving you a bunch of cheap lives. They're just lying all over the place, waiting for you to pick them up. Hell, by the time I reached the final boss battle, I had enough of them to be considered immortal. Part of the problem is that there's a point system in place, presumably just so you can get more lives. Why did you guys need to make an already easy game easier? I can already jump around half the barriers, and since I technically don't need to collect a single thing to access later levels, I can finish this game pretty damn quickly. Combine this with the fact that I've beaten the N64 version already, and I now have no reason to revisit this game in the future. (I'm just going to pretend that the PC version doesn't exist, even though I'm clearly using it for the picture.) It's a shame, too, since this is actually a cool game. All it needs is some more polish, and I'd replay the hell out of this game. That's why I give this the Any Romancing SaGa Game Ever Award.
Review Synopsis
- The actual concept of bouncing a ball through tons of levels is actually pretty cool.
- It's just a shame that the execution doesn't do it full justice.
- Also, the music's pretty cool, sometimes. Like right here.
Representing...I don't know, some country, in the competition for craziest country is SirRonLionHeart. I'm sure you've seen both him and Internet rage, but what makes this noteworthy is the many layers of insanity. In fact, I think I have to document the many ways this is completely insane.
Each and every way that SirRonLionHeart's rage at Final Fantasy IV is completely insane.
- Before he says a word, I notice something insane: he's playing a translated version of an already translated game. It seems he is attracted to things that are similarly crazy.
- What accent is that at the beginning? Why does he think dwarfs speak like that?
- Wait, this guy hangs out with Link and goes fishing with him? Of all the things you could do with the hero of Hyrule, you chose fishing?
- When he realizes that the game took both his Pink Tails, we see his one moment of clarity....interrupted by a fairy voice advising him not to go insane. It's too late; the deed's been done.
- Look at his status screen closely. Not only has he spent over 280 hours with the game (almost two weeks CUMULATIVELY), but all of his stats are maxed. Why does he need the Adamant Armor? I even watched him fight Zeromus; he won by pressing nothing but Fight and wasting Edge's abilities.
- Oh, and he has a Silver Apple. You know, an item that's meant to boost your stats.
- I've seen a lot of Internet rage in my time, but never once have I seen Internet rage that cuts off at the end.
- Apparently, midget's not a swear. At least we can both agree on one thing: Pit Boss fucking sucks. Take that, unlikeable, boring show you only watch when there's nothing else on!
- We then see the return of the late fairy, along with a new character. No, it's not Batman; turns out that it's Cecil. He started this on June 14, 2009, almost a year after the DS remake came out with full voice acting. Also, why does Cecil get the gruff, evil voice? Why not Kain?
- "I will destroy this whole blue planet, if I have to!" He is obviously more than capable of doing that.
- After Batman consoles him, we hear this insane murderer voice. That's supposed to be Edge. There's something deeply unsettling about a person when the voices in their head are less insane than they are.
- How do you even fuck your schizophrenia? Since not even it knows how, this new sexual frustration sends SirRonLionHeart into a dangerous fury.
- Normally, people edit out all the random battles when LPing an RPG; he left a select few in just so he could yell at them. This is all in the original video, mind you.
- Oh, shit, Cait Sith! You just got BURNED!
- He does not fear death; he tells it to go fuck itself.
- He does not fear what he does not know; like death, he tells the Mystery Egg to fuck itself.
- Wait, what was that sound? It sounded like some insane person yelling at the t-..... OH FUCK!
Juuouki
( I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to try to explain this as briefly as I can.) I know you're confused about what that title means, but simply put, it's Altered Beast. It doesn't translate exactly like that (it's actually Beast King Chronicles), but it's the same thing. In its heyday, Altered Beast was ported to just about every system on the planet, including the TurboGrafx-16. Twice, kinda. However, most of these ports remained in Japan, which means we get the weird title that sounds like somebody horrifically failing to say "jerky" with a New Jersey accent.That's only the beginning of the weird, though. This may seem inappropriate, since the story is the same standard "save the princess, also alliterate" shtick we've seen time and time again, but with one major twist: you, the hero, are dead before you even get a chance to rescue the princess. But Zeus is here to rescue your dead ass from Hades and rise you from your grave. Except the version I played didn't have the corny voice acting, so fuck it. Anyway, you, the zombie Manimal, must journey through a Greece adorned with Christian crosses to rescue your girlfriend from a gold-armored Rocksteady. Oh, and your girlfriend transforms into a bird, for no reason. Who wrote this crap, SirRonLionHeart? *remembers the sound* Anyway, you know what the weirdest thing about this game is? It actually feels genuinely Greek. I know that this is a weird thing to mention when I'm writing about manly men punching zombies and wolves the size of tigers, but keep in mind that the ancient Greeks thought the world before man was pretty much Adventure Time. Clearly, the people who were making Altered Beast were on the same crazy shit that Greece was on. (You know what else makes that evident? The fact that Sega allowed this game to appear on a bunch of consoles that weren't the Genesis.)
Wait, how could I go this long without mentioning the transformations? After all, there's a crazy person heading my way, and this is the craziest part of the game. If you just go through the game beating people up, you'll just end up looping forever through the first stage, making the game more repetitive than it already is. In order to beat this game, you must beat down white wolves and eat their innards to become naked and muscley. While this sounds exactly like a Cho Aniki, fight your instincts to avoid becoming a buff, naked hunk of man. You must do it to succeed! Besides, your final transformation cheaply fades you into an animal, like a wolf, a bear, a dragon, a tiger, or another wolf. Hold on, for it gets weirder: they all have the ability either to launch magic projectiles or launch themselves straight into enemies. Sure, it makes the game easier than that sex doll you keep in the closet, but you don't care, because launching a naked manbear into zombies is just so insane and fun, even if it does lack the pig. However, this fun kinda stops once you reach the oddly hard boss battles. Remember earlier, when I said that there's no recovery time? Keep that in mind when you find out that every single boss loves spamming projectiles like crazy. Granted, you can destroy them, but more often than not, you'll just end up getting hit by one in the process. Obviously, you're gonna be rising from your grave a lot, so the final boss has to be the hardest goddamn thing in the world, right? Eh, not really; since he has no projectiles and a pattern easier to figure out than a one-button Simon, you should be able to breeze through him quite easily. That's why I give this game the Fuck Rocksteady Award, since that's what it is: a middle finger to a minor villain from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Review Synopsis
- Nothing about this game makes sense, at least somebdoy describes it to you.
- But then you play it, and it becomes very clear that this is a standard beat-em-up.
- Everything about this game is exactly the same, but oddly enough, Altered Beast manages to hide it we-Shit! He's already here! RU-
Log in to comment