SUPER MARIO LAND 2: 6 GOLDEN COINS
What more can you honestly say about Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins other than it’s probably the single greatest Game Boy title ever created. The original Super Mario Land game was groundbreaking when it was released alongside the Game Boy system, but by the time Super Mario Land 2 was developed, Nintendo’s developers had a much stronger grasp of the system’s hardware capabilities and were able to do things in this sequel that just weren’t thought possible when the original title was created. This game contains everything a great Super Mario Bros. title should contain and proves that the Game Boy system is fully capable of a full-blown Super Mario adventure, even on the system’s small screen.
KID DRACULA
Kid Dracula was originally intended as a spoof of Konami’s popular Castlevania series, but it turned out to be a pretty amazing game itself. The game brings many of the classic platforming elements made famous by the Castlevania titles and adds in a few new game play twists to make it stand out from the crowd. Kid Dracula can not only shoot out his energy bullet, but he can also turn into a bat and fly through the air for a short amount of time. This adds a unique play control variable to an already solid platforming experience. Couple all of these elements with some of the zany bosses the game features and you have what is easily one of the most overlooked platforming experiences of the era. Given the rarity of this title, it would make a perfect addition to a DSi Virtual Console service should one ever exist.
METROID II: RETURN OF SAMUS
Many game fans dismissed this Game Boy sequel to the NES hit action title as being nothing more than a cheap way to cash in on the success of the NES release. But what they didn’t know was that not only was Metroid II every bit as good as the original NES release, in some ways it was even better. The game takes everything that was great about the original Metroid and packages it into a more compact design. All of the trademark Metroid game play remains intact and the overall scope of the game is just as big as the original title. For those who just can’t get enough of the original Metroid, this sequel offers up plenty of additional action and you can even take it with you on the go. Anyone that thinks that this is nothing more than a dumbed-down portable Metroid experience needs to take a closer look at this amazing Game Boy release.
DRAGON WARRIOR MONSTERS
The Dragon Quest/Warrior releases were already well established franchises by the time Enix released their spin-off of the series Dragon Warrior Monsters. Combining Pokemon-like monster capturing abilities with many of the RPG ideas from their Dragon Warrior titles, Enix was able to create a very unique and wildly playable gaming experience. Not only does the title offer up countless hours of monster-raising action, but it offers an almost endless amount of replay value as well. There are hundreds of monsters to capture, breed, and train and the game even offers up a unique story line to go along with it. Whether you’re a Dragon Quest fan or not, you owe it to yourself to at least give this unique and charming game a try.
KID ICARUS: OF MYTHS & LEGENDS
It’s not very often that a Game Boy release actually eclipses an NES release when it comes to visuals, but Kid Icarus: Of Myths & Legends does just that. Not only does it feature some impressive Game Boy graphics, but it’s also got the game play to back it up. The Game Boy release didn’t exactly light up sales charts, so it’s little wonder that many gamers missed out on this Game Boy release the first time around. That being said, it’s a real shame as this is one of the better releases for the system and a testament to just how visually capable the system truly is when in the right hands. All the mythological-themed platforming returns and the game is every bit as tough as its NES counterpart. If you’re a fan of the original release, you absolutely must track this game down. It’s as good now as it ever was.
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Mental Repairs, Inc. is a point and click adventure game in the style of classic LucasArts releases, created by Renzo Thönen with the help of the Wintermute Engine. You play the role of a machine psychiatrist named Henrik Liaw, who received an innocent emergency call during the night from a large corporation requesting for repair works to be done on their main computer with haste. Nothing ever goes smoothly in an adventure game, and once you’re inside the building you quickly find yourself trapped with no clear exit from your little predicament in sight.
As a machine psychiatrist, you repair defective electronic devices by entering the machine’s psyche and treating them from the inside. This involves using a wrench-like tool called the Katharsis Interface to establish a mental connection with the machine’s articificial brain, then finding a solution to the problem before returning to reality once you’ve managed to sort things out.
There are less than twenty rooms to explore in total, and the game probably won’t take longer than an afternoon to complete at most. You can also highlight interactive spots and exits by pressing the space key or clicking on the green magnifying glass icon on screen.
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How incredibly annoying it is when publishers, out to make a quick buck, create a cheap port of a full console title to handheld. It’s ostensibly the case on PSP, and even a few better titles like God of War, Grand Theft Auto and Tekken are effectively PS2 games shoehorned onto Sony’s little system, if not technically mere ports. Is this really how we want to partake in our portable gaming, with watered down, half-baked retreads of whatever we play at home?
Rarely, however, is the situation reversed. We’ve seen some PSP titles ported up to PS2, but they were arguably more at home there in the first place. No, we’re talking products genuinely suited to handheld which have been released on the home machines, lazily burned to a disc and thrown out the back door for unsuspecting consumers to misguidedly purchase. It wouldn’t bear mention that to count them using two hands would be overkill, but here is one shining example. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time is a middling DS game. Not great, but by no means awful, and possibly worth a look for fans of the series or those hungry for some online adventuring on the move. Fine – but this is not a DS review and on Wii it’s a different story altogether, though the game itself is unaltered.
That’s its biggest problem. The game is unaltered. As in, entirely the same videogame. The boot screen boasts a “Multi-Platform Development Engine”, but that’s in essence a byword for “We can now develop games for DS and stick them on Wii for next to no money”. Game critics are often targeted for not playing the games they give bad scores to (or even very good ones in the case of a certain Killzone 2) for long enough, but it’s so hard to persevere with Echoes of Time on Wii that there’s no point in pretending otherwise. The crux of what makes it so unpleasant is the insistence on ham-fistedly forcing televisions to output two displays at once, one on the left and one on the right, rather than a full, single screen. There’s a reason every other game ever made doesn’t do this, and that’d be because it strips away any potential enjoyment from the word go.
Concessions have been made, but they’re ineffective. The – and + buttons on the Wii remote maximise the left and right screens respectively, but even then it’s a hassle to continually switch between the two, and attempting to engage in dialogue descends into farce. Because of the way it’s set up to take advantage of the DS’ lovely, clear display, outputting on two relatively small standard definition screens means players have to squint to see text properly even at its largest, and given that replies to NPCs’ chatter, which appears on the left-hand screen, are selected using the second screen, major problems arise. The load times, also, are suspiciously long, and it debatably takes longer to actually start playing from the moment the system is turned on than Assassin’s Creed and its ridiculous, splash-screen concealed boot-up time.
Both visually and aurally, the Wii version is lacking. On the handheld, the slightly blocky character models and basic textures are understandable and much less prevalent. Blown up for the television, conversely, they’re offensively bad. Astonishingly, there’s still massive screen tear, and it’s a wonder things like this didn’t get ironed out if the insistence was to display both screens concurrently. The Wii game’s sound is very tinny, and the music also appears to have been of whatever quality could fit on a DS cart. It’s a wonder this version wasn’t independently developed, with the same core content and a full sized main screen, but the ethos here was doubtless to quickly and cost-effectively get the game out on a disc as well so that the “proper” Wii Crystal Chronicles game, The Crystal Bearers, could be prepared for a Winter release.
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