Remember?Net Yaroze! 5/8- Fatal Fantasy VII edition!

TwoLines

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Edited By TwoLines

Did "Fatal Fantasy VII" draw your attention to this little blog? Well you've been tricked. Cheated, conned, played, bamboozled (my favourite one). Okay, there is a game with that title here. #50 "Fatal Fantasy VII", and it's pretty scary how close its gets to the source material. But first, a little introduction to the horrible world of..

Net Yaroze. A PS1 development kit responsible for 84 games shipped on PS1 demo discs. For every good game you stumbled across, there were ten awful, awful ones waiting around the corner. I'm more than half way through, and I couldn't be any happier. You see, most of these 'things' after the 30th one aren't even games. People sent out their tech demos, and pre alpha versions of their homebrew products. I enjoy bad games, I laugh a litte bit and move on. But there's nothing funny about tech demos. Ironically (Bender would disagree) the first game on today's list is..

#45
"Tunnel Demo"
A fitting name, it's a demo of a racing game (that rhymed!). Now, a demo consists of actual gameplay, or so one would think, but what awaits us here is a short tunnel (hence the name) and a ship. Now, make no mistake, there are NO other opponents. Which is kind of sad really. It's just you, no music, no sound effects, no goal. You- going in circles. The controlls are bad. Worse than you might think, by pressig up you speed up, strangely enough you go straight to your maximum speed, and that means it leaves you with only limited controll of the ship. You turn left and right with circle and square. Again, why the weird controll scheme? Left and right too normal for you? You had to make it more fancy? You can go to the 'track viewer' and view the one track. So that's all I can say about this game. Or should I say "steaming pile of.. garbage".

#46
"Pune Yaroze"
Homebrew games have a tendency of being treated as direct clones of other games. In many cases that may be true, but this is actualy a quite interesting game. It's

Snake. Yeah, that goes against everything I said in the previous sentence, eh? Well, sue me. It's Snake, but for two players. It' ain't bad, it's actualy FUN. Something I can't say about most of these.. things.

So, if you're not familiar with the gameplay, let me lay it out for you. You're a snake (duh) and you grow constantly (or after eating an apple/some other fruit) and your goal is to eat enough fruits to unlock the door and reach the exit. Here though, you don't eat apples. You just grow. In fact, your ass doesn't move even an inch from the place you start. So you're this humongous line that keeps growing and you need to close your opponent in a tight space from which they cannot escape.

It's like someone would combine Snake with Tron races. Hmm.. there was this great Tron races game on Linux.. Damn, I'm starting to think about better games again. Sorry 'bout that. So yeah, this is fun. Now, what was that Linux game called..?

#47
"Car Demo"
No sense thinking too much about this one. It's from first perspective, it's ugly and it handles really bad.

#48
"Between The Eyes"
What would you get if you'd cross previously mentioned Tunnel Demo with a hooker's wardrobe? Between the Eyes.

This is how this game would look like if it existed.

A game with a style so hideous and the controlls so bad, it would put all the makers of the previous Yaroze racing games to shame. "You can do worse that that!" it would say. It would laugh at them, cause the would be producer of such a game- let's say a man named Lewis Evans- to shoot himself, as he created the most foul, disguisting and terryfying game that has ever roamed the earth. Hundereds would die from swallowing their own tongues in seizures, as the game would constantly switch colors inducing epilepsy. Such a game would be cursed, CURSED for all eternity. Thank God that game was never made. And that's how I'd like to end this little paragraph. Nothing happened here, there's nothing to see here folkes. Go home.

#49
"Second Offence Demo"
They meant Tech Demo. We're greeted by the mechanical voice that says the name of the 'company'(?) "MOBIOUS CODEWORKS" it doesn't stop after saying it once, no,

it's actualy a part of the remixed tune that repeats itself throught the demo. Then we see a shiny doughnut rotating hopelesly in the vacuum. ANd then a scary lady. Well, to be fair, all this stuff looks really nice, considering PS1's capabilities. But.. why? Let's mov--"MOBIOUS CODEWORKS"--e on.

#50
"Fatal Fantasy VII"
Hahaha.. really, I'm not joking here. Fatal Fantasy VII.

Wow. First thing that caught my eye, is that this "game demo" was produced by the same people behind "Terra Incognita" which I reviewed back at the very begining. That's great- I thought- the english translation of TI was absolutely hillarious, so this is going to be even better. I was a little dissapointed when I've figured out there's no way to switcjh from Japaneese to English. Well, whatever, let's take a look anyway.

You press start and there it is, does this remind you of something..?

Yeah, yeah.. it does. It swirls around for a bit too. Okay, how about this then:

This is starting to get a little creepy. And then you turn around.

Hey, look, Cloud's STOKED! Goddamn! For once in his miserable emo life. I'm glad, really. You walk around some more, exit the bathroom and go into another dimension

This dimension is famous for its bathrooms.

(apparently to take a whizz you have to cross the gates of oblivion itself- as my friend stated) and end up in a nice garden. This is where the first battle would take place.

I said 'would' as this is the end of the demo. The 'Final' (*nudge* *nudge* get it?) screen reads: "Fatal Fantasy VII, coming in december?" No. No it's not. Never again have I heard anything about Fatal Fantasy or Team Fatal. The history of this project remains a mystery.

So that's all I've got to say about Fatal Fantasy VII. It was a great dream. And it's amazing how the graphics in the game look like the graphics of the original, I'm actualy impressed. Maybe that's why they did this? To get Sony's attention? I hope these guys were hired by Squaresoft. As far as I'm concerned, they've earned it.

Thanks for making Terra Incognita and Fatal Fantasy VII guys, wherever you are!

I'll just post this on some FF7 fan site and say that you can get here after breeding six golden chocobos.

#51
"Fujiyama"
What a HUGE step down from FFVII. This is a weird one, it's aprogram that allows you to view Mount Fuji from couple perspectives. There are about twenty pictures of ths glorious volcanic cone, but it's pretty useless today (although it was useless back then too I suppose). I'd rather look up the "Thirdy-six Views of Mount Fuji" on the internet. Case cl--"MOBIOUS CODEWORKS"--osed.

#52

Uhh.. yeah. This one's a top down shooter. It's impressive, although it doesn't have music nor sound effects, but that's really frequent among Net Yaroze games. Either way, it's enjoyable, it has nice 2D graphics, balanced gameplay, powerups, and cool enemies. Overall it's pretty good.

#53
"Appointed Station"
I really wsh I could say something about this game, but there's SO much going on, I can barely see anything. It's chaos. You're a ship flying through space, shooting things,

there are space birds here and there.. flying.. but.. they don't don't hurt you, and.. well.. that's it. Erm.. Yeah.

#54
"Sam The Boulder Man"
Another Boulder Dash clone, but made by the same guy(s) behind "Clone" reviewed earlier. So that means.. the same sound effects? Yeah.. yeah it does. The music, the sound effects, it's all there. So, again, I don't like Boulder Dash very much, so I've got nothing to say about this title. Apart from the fact that it looks pretty decent.

#55
"Gravitation"
Developed in 12 weeks- is always a good sign with Net Yaroze titles. I'm not being sarcastic, most of these games were apparently done within days. A longer hatching period means a better game (there are exceptions to this rule,a nd I'm sure one game in particular is a world record braker in this discipline) and that's the case with Gravitation.

It's fuuuun. This is a multiplayer only game. To describe it, I'll have to use other games again. It's like asteroids, but it's a two player game. So the objective of the game is to kill each other. There

are 8 different maps, and each one is like a maze, it has it's shortcuts, and strategcly placed holes in the walls- through which you can shoot down the second player. The tricky part is to kill your rival, while manouvering through the maze. Most of our lives were wasted by crashing into the walls, but when your opponent collects a powerup, well, you're pretty screwed. They range from switching your left-right directions (which means instant death) to bullets being shot from each side of the opponents ship, making a previously simple act of destroying his ship almost impossible.

What can I say, my friend is rather picky about his games, and he said this game's alright. We also went through all of the eight maps. And that's the best recomendation for Net Yaroze game I can give. Just don't play "race" play "dogfight".

Untill next time,
TwoLines.

14 years ago