Game #979: Alien Hominid

  Crash landing into my childhood.

 Man, what a throwback! I've already written about my early adventures on the Internet and Newgrounds so I won't delve too deep in there, but I will say that Alien Hominid was a blast. I remember hearing about them developing a home console version, but I don't remember why I didn't seek it out. It was probably during my brief PC gaming stint I guess. Regardless, here I am fixing my past mistakes.

 Alien Hominid is, basically, a Metal Slug clone but with a very indie and late 00's edgy look to it. You move from left to run gunning down an endless supply of enemies. The game does its best to add a lot of varied and exciting set pieces to keep everything feeling fresh. Stage 1-2 has you jumping from car roof to car roof as you defeat enemies, then in stage 1-5 you must rebuild your UFO while battling enemies in space, then in 2-3 you ride a friggin' Yeti that punches your soviet enemies to death and eventually, during world 3, you end up in the desert fighting giant vultures and scorpions. That said, the game is super short, like 2 hours long, it makes up for that in its brutal difficulty. The difficulty is set by player, because the brunt of the game remains the same, but the easier the difficulty the more advantages, lives and continues you get. I played the game on easy and I barely finished the game on my last continue. The final stage is a brutal 3 o 4 phase fight against the boss, Jesus. What makes the game so challenging is how you are getting pelted by bullets from every angle. Bosses usually have mooks bothering you, so that charging your shot becomes tougher as you try to avoid damage from your assaulters!

 Jump and shoot is the name of the game, but you get quite a few abilities to help you. L1 and R1 produce a roll, although be wary as you don't get invincibility frames. The alien can also dig underground and drag enemies to their death, but its real use is to avoid some incoming, otherwise unavoidable attacks. As for offense, just like Metal Slug, attacking while next to an enemy will produce a melee attack, and you can find weapons with limited ammo to make mowing down enemies a bit easier. There are grenades, but they uncharacteristically weak, so I relied mostly on my basic shots and the ever useful chargeshot. There are a few other abilities, like riding enemies by jumping on top o them and riding vehicles.

 As I stated before, the game is very exciting, however, at least the PS2 version does suffer from a bit of slowdown. Nothing too bad mind you, but it surprised me how a game that seems so light on processing requirements could suffer from framerate dips on the PS2.

 As you play through the game you can unlock mini-games, some that can be played in multiplayer(The main game can be played in multiplayer too) as well as hats to customize your aliens with.

 Had I played this game back in its heyday I'm sure I would've loved it, but I'm not too fond of hardcore run 'n' gun shooters nowadays. That said, I can recognize quality where I see it, and this game is pretty good and you can tell that the developers had fun coming up with different situations for the players to partake in. Fans of Contra, Metal Slug or even Turok Evolution, for the GBA, will be right at home with this one. 

 7.0

Game #978: Fatal Fury Battle Archives Volume 2

  These guys are still furious.

 Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 2 is the second, and final, compilation of Fatal Fury, and it compiles the next games in the series, the Real Bout series. In my opinion, it should've included Garou, and this version is actually missing the console rerelease of Real Bout 2, Dominated Mind, which included a few bells and whistles, although this version makes up for that in a nifty little way....

 The Real Bout series continues where FF 3 left off, so combo strings are still a thing, but it changed how the games play, as attack buttons were simplified into three: Punch, Kick and Strong, as well as now characters having a double life bar per round. That much remains consistent throughout all three games, but other things change a bit between installments.

 Real Bout: Fatal Fury is the first game here. It has 16 different characters The game looks fantastic, it uses a much more vibrant palette than the previous games and the overall presentation is much more hype. This game introduces ringouts, something I wasn't particularly fond of, although it can make for some funny business, like performing a Burning Knuckle only for your opponent to dodge into the background and you ring outing yourself! It's a fine game, but I could've done without the ringouts.

 Real Bout Fatal Fury Special only adds two new characters, although a few returning characters got new sprites, but the mechanics were changed further and every stage is new, so it feels more like a sequel than a simple upgrade. Ring-outs are gone, thankfully, and we're back to how FF played before 3, as we are back to only having two lines to fight in: Foreground and background, no middle-ground! This game was quite fun, as it retains the best things about RB 1 and changes things, in my opinion, for the better.

 Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 is probably my favorite Fatal Fury that isn't Garou. This game has 23 different characters, and it introduced Rick Stroud, one of my all-time favorite fighting game characters and my favorite boxer. Gameplay-wise, it's pretty similar to RB Special, most differences are more technical and advanced in nature. One thing I always resented was that I was never able to play as Alfred, as he was only playable in Dominated Mind. WELL, you can play as Alfred in this version by holding L1 at the character select screen! That said, White remains exclusive to the Japanese PS1 port, which is disappointing.

 This collection might have less games, but I'd argue that it has better games. I'd argue further that all 7 games should've been on a single DVD and that Dominated Mind and Wild Ambition should've been included too, but I'd just be preaching to the choir. If anything, I'm glad I own legit versions of these games, as Fatal Fury is pretty dope and underrated.

 8.0

Game #977: Dog's Life

 Play fetch: The Game. 

 Dog's Life exemplifies one of the reasons I love the PS2 so much: It's variety, of the weird kind. Back then the weirdest concepts could be turned into videogames because, while companies still wanted money, they were open to experimentation. And experimental this game sure is, you play as a dog. But it's not a cutesy platformer game, oh no, it's a game in which you play as a dog and do dog things. And fart. Sometimes the fart comes with a piece of poop that you can GRAB with your mouth and toss it around. Duke Nukem Forever was too late on the joke.

 Long story short, Jake's, the dog you play as, love interest gets kidnapped so he must come to the rescue. But it ain't that easy, you must get in shape first, and that means collecting bones that make you... perform better? Yeah, the game tells you that the more bones you've got the better you'll perform, but I'm not sure what that means. Maybe it makes the other dogs' AI dumber? I dunno. Oh, and all throughout the game, you'll be able to hear Jake's thoughts, and he's quite a silly dog. Quite clearly, the tone of the game matches its silly premise.

 Believe it or not, this is a semi-open world game, semi because each area is clearly defined by a loading screen transition, however, you can move around at your leisure. That's right, from the moment you take control of Jake you can move all around town, the only thing that prevents you from moving onward to the next town is a mini challenge vs another dog, the pound's dog, for which you must collect bones to outperform him. The final bone checkpoint in the game requires 90 bones, I finished the game with over 120 and I skipped a few since there were smells I just couldn't find, plus, I'm pretty sure the snowball fight bone got bugged since try as I might I couldn't get my bone. 

 While most of the game is played under a 3rd person camera, you'll be frequently entering the black-and-white first person mode because of two reasons: Firstly, it's the only way to spot and collect smells(Yes) and secondly, because it highlights important NPCs or bones. Each area has between 7 to 8 bones, one must be dug up after finding it through the first person point of view, one or two are usually lying around the section, 3 or 4 are gained after a smell minigame and 2 are obtained from NPCs. The smell mini-games are triggered by collecting every smell of a certain color. For example, every section has a 50-purple smell bone for you to obtain, that one's easy since you only need to find every smell, however, if you collect 8 yellow smells you'll trigger a... peeing mini-game against another dog, in which you must pee different spots for points. Green smells trigger a race against another dog, red smells are lame 'cause you don't get a bone out of them but rather a new trick, purple is a chase minigame and orange is a tug-o-war minigame.

 As you'd expect, mini-games are repeated quite a few times throughout the adventure, but they ain't too bad. The simon-says minigames did get on my nerves though, my memory is horrible. After you defeat a dog for the first time instead of getting a bone you get to hijack their body for a short while. To say that they have different abilities would be selling it too highly, as the other dogs play exactly like Jake, however, you usually need them for one of the NPC fetch quests. Maybe a dog is slightly faster than Jake, won't slip on ice, might swim faster, etc. So you can't really say that you get new abilities. Sometimes they play exactly like Jake but the game requires you to use a certain dog for the fetch quest. There's one hijackable dog per area, so solutions are pretty simple.    

 NPC quests are, quite appropriately, fetch quests. Most of the time they want you to find something and bring it to them. Sometimes they want multiple somethings, and since you are a dog... you have to return to the NPC with every item you find, since Jake can only carry stuff with his mouth. I don't know if this was a meta-commentary on fetch quests in videogames or maybe one long joke, but they stuck to their guns. There's this particularly egregious quest in which you must help a girl build a snowman... and you have to fetch her FOUR pieces of coal. That's four trips back and forth, not to mention have to find both arms, a hat and a carrot. And this fetch quest is worth a single bone! That said, these quests aren't too bad most of the time, they are quite decent to be honest, but every now and then there's one like this one. It's not like you have to have absolutely every bone in the game, so you can just skip the quests you don't like.

 Overall, I'd say the game is fun. I didn't really get tired of collecting smells and finding bones, however, I did give up on a few of the 50 purple smell bones since I just couldn't find one or two missing smells. And while dog minigames are repeated quite a lot, I think they are spread out in a fashion so that it'll be very unlikely to get the same mini-game in two sections that are connected. Thanks to the game's silly sense of humor, the NPC fetch quests don't get too boring either.

 As for what holds the game down... let's start with spotty movement, as sometime maneuvering around can be tough, as turning left or right is more cumbersome than it should. The platforming can be super imprecise too, and sometimes it can be hard to aim your jumps where you want them to go, not to mention that sometimes Jake will refuse to jump just because, so you must take a few steps backward.

 The health system is pretty awful too. You can't actually die in the game, but you can get hurt, for example, by falling down from a high ledge. Getting hurt means Jake's speed will go down immensely, and now you must either find a bone or a treat. Treats are fairly rare, supposedly you can get treats by begging humans, but every time I tried I got scolded. So I had to slowly make my way to a new bone, sometimes, I had to change locations to find new bones. Saving your game, which is done by visiting a doghouse found at every location, should've have healed you to make things more lenient.

 Despite its issues, I found Dog's Life both original and entertaining. There are few, if any, games with a premise as wacky as playing as a dog on a semi-open world collecting flippin' smells. And thankfully, even though it has a few control issues, the game is fun to play, so I'd say that this game is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

 7.0

Game #976: Fatal Fury Battle Archives Volume 1

  These guys are furious!

 Unlike Art of Fighting, I actually like Fatal Fury. Not as much as King of Fighters, but I do like it. I first came upon it through a Chinese NES bootleg of FF 2 and I liked it a lot. I loved playing as Kim Kaphwan and perform his bicycle kicks. Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 1 is a compilation of the first four games, the good, the bad and the ugly. 

 Fatal Fury 1 is definitely the ugly one and the bad one. Like Art of Fighting 1 before it, there's a strong emphasis on the single player mode, in which you can only play as Joe, Terry or Andy as you make your way towards Geese Howard. The game is super simple, a punch and a kick, as well as special moves. The CPU can freely move between the background and the foreground, the only thing you can do is perform a chase attack towards their line, although certain attacks send your opponent to the background too.

 The game is simple to a fault and the AI can be pretty tough even on the easiest difficulty setting, good luck against Billy! Fun fact, this game was the original King of Fighters, not that it makes it any less forgettable than it already is!

 ...but then came Fatal Fury 2. There are eight playable characters, and the spritework is on the level of Street Fighter 2.

 The gameplay was polished, now we get four attack buttons, two punches and two kicks, and the controls are more responsive than ever, which makes pulling off special moves a zinch. Now it's possible for the player to move to the background at will. Fatal Fury 2 is a decent game, but there's no combo system so it still pales in comparison to Street Fighter II, but hey, we are getting there!

 Fatal Fury Special is when the series actually turned good. Uses the same sprites from FF 2, but adds 7 new characters for a total of 15. This version includes more difficulty setting, making it more accessible than ever, although some AI opponents are still a bit rough.

 But what makes this game actually good is that we've finally got combos!! The game's speed was increased too, so now the game feels snappier than ever, and being able to pull off combos makes it very fun. Add to that a large cast of characters, for its era, and you've got and underrated classic.

 And then Fatal Fury 3 came out, and the series became great. The character roster went down to 10, but that's because returning characters(Andy, Terry, Joe, Mai) were redrawn, and these new sprites are more detailed than ever. This is also the game that introduces Blue Mary, a personal favorite, and Yamazaki, characters that would eventually make the jump to King of Fighters alongside Andy, Terry, Joe, Mai and Kim.

 As for the gameplay, this time the battleground is divided into three different lines as opposed to two, background, middle ground and foreground. To be honest, I didn't care about this mechanic in the previous games, and I don't care about it now. But the biggest tweak went towards how it plays. Now characters have pre-set combo strings, like dial-up-combos from Mortal Kombat, and they work pretty well. It helps the game feel faster. And that's something the game's got going for it, landing hits feels really good, the animations are great and the overall game looks pretty darn good.

 Fatal Fury: Battle Archives Volume 1 is definitely a better purchase than Art of Fighting Anthology because, while as far as extras and accessibility goes they are the same, these games are much, much better than anything Art of Fighting could offer. There's good value in this compilation, although why it needed to be divided into two discs is beyond me...

 8.0

Game #975: Art of Fighting Anthology

  Well... the art in the cover is pretty good, the art of fighting however....    

 Alright, so... I've never really liked Art of Fighting. I played every game in the series, I played multiple console ports, I gave it as many chances as I could yet I never liked it. With Art of Fighting Anthology I decided to give all three games another go and... it made me appreciate Street Fighter II all that much more.

 Firstly, this are straight Neo-Geo console conversions, so brutal difficulty and no advantage bonus on continuing a match so... good luck. On the other hand, you can edit the colors of every playable character by game, so that's pretty neat! 

 Art of Fighting 1 is fairly interesting because it's focus is on its story mode. Heck, the Arcade version didn't even have a VS mode, but since this is the console version you actually get a VS mode with the other characters. Regardless, in single player you can only play as Robert and Ryo, and every two fights you get a bonus round that can help you increase some stats of your character!

 This game has huge sprites, and character faces get bruised as they take damage, which was a neat little detail. Sadly, spectacle is most of what the game has going for it. You have three attack buttons, a punch, a kick and a 'Strong' attack. Strong punches and kicks are performed by tapping either punch or kick quickly after the strong attack button. It's... unconventional to say the least. Special and Super moves require energy from your energy gauge, and this is AoF's claim to fame as it was the first fighting game with an energy gauge! You have to charge it by holding down buttons, and you can sap energy from your enemy by taunting them.

 I'm not gonna lie... Art of Fighting 1 is boring. I really like Ryo and Robert as friends trying to rescue Ryo's sister, and I love how both of them alongside Yuri and King made it to King of Fighters, so I really like some of these characters, but the rest of the game is so... limited, clunky and forgettable.

 Art of Fighting 2 is a proper fighter, doing away with the bonus rounds and the stronger story element and turning it into a more standardized arcade ladder. The game is much faster, which I really liked, but the difficulty setting... my god, I thought Mr. Karate was nigh impossible on the easiest difficulty setting, but he has nothing on the AI from this game.

 The sprites look more detailed than before, and the bruising returns which is pretty neat. On the other hand.... strong and weak attacks depend on how long you hold down either punch or kick button. It works about as well as you'd expect. So, in some ways the game is a bit better, more characters, better sprites, but in others is a bit worse, since the weak/strong inputs are too imprecise. There's still not a proper combo system, so it's mostly one off attacks and special moves.

 And then came Art of Fighting 3 which just like SF III and Garou is made up of mostly an entirely new cast of characters, joined by Ryo and Robert. Since this was the final game it's the easiest of the bunch, and while the games still lack a proper combo system, now you get 'chase' attacks by mashing buttons. Attack buttons were changed again, now it's a punch, a kick and a strong attack, making for the simplest game in the series, but considering how weird the previous games played, it's not necessarily a bad thing.

 The graphics are a mixed bag. Bruising is gone, sprites are smaller but more colorful than before. Some animations look super smooth but... others look super stiff. Most of the idle animations are terrible, and something about how Wyler's sprite is angled makes him look off. It's so weird, I was pleased and disappointed with the overall look!

 Yeah, I still don't like Art of Fighting. I think all three games were outdated even at the time they came out for the first time. However, and I must stress this, as much as I dislike the series, I really liked the story elements from the first game, Ryo and Robert's friendship(which feels like a more realized version of Ken and Ryu's), the Mr. Karate reveal, the fact that King is actually a woman, etc. And I do think that the characters they brought over to King of Fighters(Except, maybe, Eiji and Mr. Big who were quickly forgotten) flourished much better over there. As for this collection itself, I wish it was more accessible when it came to difficulty settings!

 4.0

Game #974: Shrek SuperSlam

  It's never Ogre.

 The myth, the meme, the legend... It's Shrek SuperSlam! This game has quite the reputation because as a joke some people ran competitive tournaments of SuperSlam... but the joke turned all to real, because the game was actually really flippin' decent. Just yesterday I played Barbarian and mentioned how as decent as the game was... it was missing something. Well, this game's got it.

 Shrek SuperSlam is a 3-D arena fighter in which up to four fighters duke it out. There's no traditional health system, instead, you land attacks to fill your SLAM gauge, and once full you can perform a Slam attack for points. There are a few bonus modes, like Slamathon in which every attack is a Slam or King of the Hill. At the start you've only got 10 characters and about 8 stages, but you can unlock another 10 character, another 8 stages and even a few costumes for some of the characters. Content, this game's got it.

 The core gameplay feels like a weird hybrid between Barbarian and Smash bros. You've got weak and strong attacks that can be chained together for different combos with different properties, you have a shield that breaks if held for too long, you've got evades and air dashes. Stages offer all sorts of interactivity, from tons of breakable objects, hazards as well as power ups and weapons to fight your enemies with. I'd like to mention just how creative stages are, there's one on top of a giant's table that has all sorts of wacky stuff, like being slammed inside a giant's shoe through a hole in its sole to come out through a torn between the sole and the actual shoe, you can also grab the giant fork and throw it around, and all sorts of crazy hijinks. No, really, the stages really are something else. As for the characters, there are plenty of characters from the movies, like Puss in Boots, Prince Charming, Donkey, a Dronky, Human and Ogre Fiora... but also characters created exclusively for this game, only the cyclops feels a bit out of place.  

 Regardless, this game with its concept has no right being as fun as it is. Landing hits lacks a bit of oomph, but the game is so chaotic that I don't really mind it so much. Power ups and weapons are fun to use and the basic gameplay is surprisingly fun, in no small part thanks to how fast and Arcadey everything feels. That said, everything does feel a bit floaty, a mark of most Smash clones that can't get the physics right, but I think it's not too bad considering how fun it can get.

 The game looks really good and the framerate holds up well, but the best part about the presentations is the absolutely badass soundtrack. There are so many good tracks in this game! I almost feel like they are wasted in this game.

 And I haven't even started on the wealth of content that this game has. I'll admit, unlocking stuff takes a bit more time than I would've liked, but that's because of how the game is setup. In Single Player you have a Story Mode, a Story Mode that is fully voiced and has cutscenes setting up each situation, and through story mode you unlock costumes. You have a Training Mode that teaches you how to play, a Trophy room to admire the trophies you amassed and, Challenge Board, which is were the characters and stages are hidden. There are a ton of challenges, like throwing ginger bread men into the over, having a back and forth deflecting projectiles with your shield, having to protect and NPC, traditional tournaments or pushing every golden egg outside the bowl they are in. There REALLY is a lot of stuff to do, and a lot of variety, they really went above and beyond what a game like this required!

 Shrek SuperSlam is definitely more than a meme game, it's actually fun, and a lot of love and care was put into it, for whatever reason. I mean, I don't care about Shrek, so I liked this game despite the license, it's that good! My only gripes with the game would be the floaty physics and how much work you need to put in to unlock everything, everything else is just fine. 

 7.5

Game #973: Shrek 2

  For never after,

 Another game from the heap of shovelware I picked to make room to store some Wii games, I've a short story to tell about Shrek 2! While I enjoyed Shrek 1, by the time 2 came out I had already outgrown it, so I never cared about it. But, but, Club Nintendo, the magazine, sang the game praises so I wanted to try it out so I got the game on PC.... which turned out to be completely different. Not one to give up, over 10 years later I'd eventually get the game my childhood self wanted to play. It wasn't worth it. 

 This game is a very loose retelling of the plot from the second movie, adding a lot of filler as well as justifying the four-man party, for Shrek 2 is a multiplayer action game-thing in which you play as a four-man party at all times. Which characters make up your party depends on the stage, and there's a reason for that, as every character has slightly different abilities that are required to solve that stage's puzzles. For example the Ginger Bread man's aerial attack is a projectile that is needed to hit far off targets, and is the only character that can do it. Fiona can slow down time, Shrek can pick up heavy objects, etc. Hopefully you like Shrek, because I think he's the only character that is playable on every stage.

 I lied about playing as a party at all times, as most levels have this weird 'Hero Time' section at the end in which you play as a single character... which I think was a terrible idea if they meant this game to be a multiplayer game. For instance, the Wolf's Hero Time section is rather tough, so other players are just supposed to wait? That's lame!

 Speaking of that... the game received recent reviews at the time, it's the reason I wanted to play it in the first place! But... I played the entire game by myself, and it was so boring. The AI is pretty much useless, they do nothing, and only hit back if they are hit, and by hit back they just start spamming their basic attacks. The last level is absolutely dreadful 'cause they get killed very easily, so if you mess up that's that. It doesn't stop there, y'see, this isn't a beat'em up, it's sort of a party-action thing game, for each level has multiple tasks. Some are simple platforming or getting from point A to B, but there are other wackier tasks, such as herding chickens. But the CPU won't help you, so it's just you doing every menial task but yourself, so in turn, it takes an unnecessary amount of time to perform very repetitive actions that are probably fun with other players.

 I was very let down with Shrek 2, as I had such a boring time with it. I'll give it this, I think I can see how this game COULD be fun with another player, but honestly, I didn't care too much about it since, well, I don't care too much about Shrek to be honest.

 4.0