Now Playing: Grand Theft Auto III

 The game that changed everything.

All other GTA games would follow the same style with their covers.

 Grand Theft Auto III changed things when it released, it created a blueprint that many games go follow for years to come, something that holds true to this day.

 It feels good to be back in Liberty City, somewhat. Doing the first few missions did bring a lot of memories back, of going to and fro the initial savepoint as I did missions. It also made me want to play Vice City instead, what can ya do?

 The game has aged a bit, cars control like sack of potatoes, I'd like to have more freedom with the camera and the combat is rather clunky, but the game still has some charm.

Review #505: DICE - DNA Integrated Cybernetic Enterprises

 It hurts how good it could've been... and how ridiculous the title is.

The cover tells you everything that you need to know about it. Well, almost.

 So, apparently, this game is based on an anime with the same dumb name. I don't know anything about the series, nor do I care, but here's what you need to know: In this game you play as any of 11 color-coded Power Rangeresque characters who can get on-and-off their robot vehicle at whim, and can turn said robot into a proper, wheeled vehicle. It sounds awesome, and it could've been awesome, but sadly, the execution left a lot to be desired.

 The game is made up of three different modes: Story, in which you tackle any of 16 missions, Training, in which you contend in Speed and Attack stages for high-scores and a silly, but welcome, VS mode in which you can battle another player or a CPU. The game lasts about 5 hours, and while you need an A or S rank on all 15 missions to unlock the 16th, the game is very generous, so it won't be too tough. Bonus characters, upgrades, Bots and training missions are bought on the 'Garage' menu, but I'm not too sure what triggers stuff to become available for purchase. After finishing the game, with an S on most stages, I was only able to purchase one of the four secret characters, and I don't know what makes the others become available.

Hopefully you like this stage, since you'll be coming here twice.

 The sixteen missions are comprised of three races and thirteen 'action' stages. Action stages are divided in 'Areas', each area acting as a checkpoint. In each area you either have to solve a simple puzzle, like destroying specific objects or enemies, destroying every enemy(The most frequent task) or putting the right sphere on the right hole. It sounds fair, but a lot of environments get reused, there're very few enemy types and most bosses will be fought twice. It helps to make the game grow a bit monotonous pretty early on.

 So how does the game play? Well, first comes the Robot mode, in which you ride your dinosaur. Here you can use your equipped Satellite Bot with the circle button, there's a bunch of different Satellites and they all offer something different, so try to experiment a bit. In my case, I adored the fire bot, great fire power but poor homing. The square button performs your only attack combo, X jumps and triangle is used to switch to your vehicle form. R1 blocks. The thing about your Dinosaur... is that this is how you'll spend most of the game: Riding it. Why? Simple, your dinosaur takes no damage, has a massive area of effect with its combo and can use the Satellite Bot. Damage incurred will instead make the dinosaur overheat, if the gauge fills to the top you'll be ejected and lose a bit of health. This heat gauge can be lowered by not taking damage for a while or simply hopping off your ride.

Your dinosaur robot is slow, but powerful.

 While off your ride most of the controls remain the same, but you lose access to the Satellite's offensive capabilities, instead, now you can use it as a shield. You'll become tiny when compared to your enemies, the range of your attack combo is pathetic and, more importantly, you'll take damage. Death is but a slap in the wrist, you start back at the last checkpoint with full health... but the timer doesn't reset, so it'll only hurt your rank. Maybe. It's possible to die a couple of times and still get an A rank, the scoring system is THAT lenient. But, back to being on foot: You'll never want to be off your ride, and when you are ejected, from overheating, it's in your best interest to just run around until your ride cools off and hop back in. It's entirely possible to fight enemies on foot, but why would you? You'll be bombarded front, right, left and center with energy pellets and only be able to deal pitiful damage within your pitiful range! Plus, you'll notice that you can use your ride's body to block a few incoming attacks as it cools down!

 And that's the biggest flaw with the game, how it squandered so much potential. Besides the three races, there're very few instances in which you'll be required to turn your Robot into a vehicle, which is kind of a loss. And your on-foot form is absolutely useless. They could've implemented a few instances in which they forced you to go on-foot, to add variety. Or even give the on-foot form more advantages, like having a rechargeable shield, or being able to cancel your attack combo with a dodge, thus, you could opt between your slow, but powerful ride or being a nimble threat. It could've been so cool!

The orange-bronze guy was my favorite character. He looked cool.

 And then you've got these eleven, cool looking characters who all play the same. Sure, the combos are different, but in essence, they give you the exact same result. Their dinosaur rides may look different, but they only vary in size and speed, when it comes to attacking they all might as well be the same. Well, I lie, at least two characters have flying rides, but they are a bit hard to control so I only played as them once and never looked back. As for the combat, not only are you fighting the same enemies over and over again, there's no fun to be had always repeating the same dull-looking combo. It doesn't help that you can't turn the camera while attacking. The Satellite Bots are a good addition, but it's not enough when you're left off fighting the same enemies over and over again, on the same environments, repeating the same combo and using the same tactics over and over again. If you like beat'em ups, like me, you probably won't mind too much, but it's hard not to expect a bit more out of such a fantastic idea.

 And that's all I've got to say about DICE - DNA Integrated Cybernetic Enterprises. It's a fantastic concept, and worth giving it a try just to experience it, but it fails to deliver gameplay matching the idea. While it's not very good, I think it's worth a look if you've nothing else on your backlog.
 5.5 out of 10

Now Playing: DICE - DNA Integrated Cybernetic Enterprises

 Not the best name ever...

The red dude's always gotta lead.

 Alright, so the title is a handful. And then you pop-in the disc and you'll be greeted by this cheesy, in a good way, opening song alongside some of the most ridiculous 'trying so hard to be anime' character designs ever. But then you start the game, and it's kinda, sorta cool.

 I love how the characters look like Kamen Rider/Super Sentai hybrid rejects, and I love how you can ride a dinosaur-robot that turns into a vehicle. I swear, the concept is brilliant. At its core, this is a beat'em up, you mash Square to use your dinosaurs and beat up baddies until it overheats and then you do the same but on the ground. Simple stuff, but I think the concept makes up for how simple it is. I think.

 Well, I'm off too scrap more baddies, it looks really promising.

Review #504: X-Men - Next Dimension(PS2)

  Nah, the game is still stuck in the third dimension.

The cover artwork is incredible.

 A few years ago I played X-Men: Next Dimension and I kinda loved it, but my console of choice has always been the PS2, so it was about time I gave it a go on it. I stand by what I said all those years ago, so I will try to focus on the differences between platforms.

 The first difference comes in the form of modes, PS2 has the Story Mode, VS(Player), Arcade, Survival and Practice. Notice anything? Two modes are missing. While I won't miss Time Attack and Team Battle mode, it kinda sucks that we get less stuff. Oh, and the X-Box version gets an exclusive character, Pyro, and apparently, a few exclusive stages. What does the PS2 version have over the other 2? Nothing. That's right, the PS2 has nothing over its peers.

The master of Magnetism against the guy with a metal-coated skeleton, I wonder who'll win....

 I lied, the PS2 version does have an exclusive feature: Excessively long loading times. It's not even funny, switching stages can take upwards 15 seconds to load, which is kinda nuts. I understand that stagess are large and feature multiple levels, but c'mon, the Gamecube managed just fine!

 Luckily, the game is as good as always. The collision detection can be a bit spotty at times but I loved the character roster, I loved having all these differently sized characters duking it out on large, open-ish areas. It's a fun game, but the PS2 port is the worst way in which you can experience it.
 7.5 out of 10

Review #503: Street Fighter Alpha(GBC)

 At least they didn't call it 'Street Fighter Color'.

I love it when Ken gets top-billing. He is my favorite Street Fighter character after all.

 Street Fighter Alpha and X-Men: Mutant Academy on the Gameboy Color have two things in common: They were both developed by Crawfish Interactive and they were both games I wished to own. However, while Mutant Academy was a bit of a trainwreck, Street Fighter Alpha is actually... rather good, for what it is.

 The good news is that the entire character roster has been preserved: Ken, Ryu, Chun-Li, Charlie, Rose, Sagat, Adon, Birdie, Guy, Sodom and the secret characters Dan, Akuma and Bison all are here and accounted for, with all their special and super moves. The bad news is that the game is Single Player only, and there're only two modes: Arcade Ladder and Training. Would it have been nice to have Multiplayer and other fluff like Survival? Yes, but does a Gameboy Color port really need them?

Considering it's a Gameboy Color game... it looks pretty spiffy and the animation is very smooth.

 X-Men: Mutant Academy's controls sucked, they were stiff and unresponsive. Well, being limited to two buttons and being developed by the same developer means that the game pretty much follows suit, depending on how you press the button, a light or a hard tap, changes your punches and kicks into their weak and strong versions. It doesn't work very well, but it's probably the only way they could make it work on the Gameboy Color. On the plus side, while normal attacks are still a bit cumbersome, the game registers inputs much more precisely, it's easy to perform Shoryukens and Hadokens. That said, while I could pull off Charlie's Sonic Boom with no problem, I couldn't manage to get the Sonic Kick for the life of me.

 Street Fighter Alpha con the Gameboy Color is a surprisingly fun game. You can't expect to have the same experience that you would on a home console, but it's rather fun for what it is and what it can do with the hardware it's limited to. The lack of multiplayer doesn't really hurt, since there's little in the way of depth that would make you want to become a competitive Street Fighter Alpha Color gamer.
 5.0 out of 10

Review #502: X-men - Mutant Academy(GBC)

 The only X it deserves lies over the game's title.

Same cover as the PS1 game, but not even half as good.

 Putting fighting games on a 2-button handheld is quite the task, but back in the day, it was our only choice when it came to fighting games. X-Men Mutant Academy was one that caught my eyes, reviews were pretty negative, but the screenshots looked oh so very pretty. And now, about... 15-ish years later, I can hold the game's cartridge in my hands and... I wish I couldn't.

 In the game's defense it offers a rather surprising amount of modes: Story Mode, in which you battle against every character, Versus Mode, if you have another person that owns the game, Battle Mode, 3 on 3 team-based battle against the CPU, Survival and Training. Honestly, it's a nice selection and way more modes than one would expect out of a Gameboy Color game. As for characters, there're 10 different characters: Cyclops, Wolverine, Gambit, Storm and Phoenix are the good guys, while you get Magneto, Sabertooth, Mystique, Toad and Apocalypse from the bad guys. Every character is outfitted with 2 special moves and a single super move.

The game only looks good in Screenshots.

 A punches and B kicks, and you have two types of each attack, one by tapping the button and another, stronger but slower attack by holding down the button. Each character has two super moves, but the controls can be rather stiff and unresponsive, charge attacks are nigh impossible to pull off. Supers can be performed once your rage bar is full, and this is done by pressing A and B, and only A and B, and the same time. The control scheme is, well, the only thing they could do with the Gameboy Color's limited buttons, but the unresponsiveness of the special moves leaves a lot to be desired.

 The game as an overall package is heavily lacking, however, for instance, the game doesn't have an internal battery, so you have to input the obnoxious codes to unlock Apocalypse and Phoenix every single time you boot up the game. Character sprites are very ugly and are oddly proportioned, which compliments the absolutely awful sound design.

Both of those things are supposed to be Gambit. They kinda nailed it. Kinda.

 It's a fact that you can't do much with only two buttons, but even then the game is devoid of any fun. I know that some of us clamored for fighting games on the go back in the day, but maybe that was a dream not meant to come true, at least until the Gameboy Advance entered the scene. Mutant Academy on the Gameboy Color is a terrible game that's better left off as a curiosity, it's more fun to see how they 'de-made' and crammed the 32-bit counterpart into this 8-bit cart than to actually play it.
 2.0 out of 10

Archile's Grab-bag: Christmas Cometh Earlier Edition

 It's been a while...

 It's been a while since I did one of these, but that's simply because I haven't been buying in bulk, and it'd be kinda lame to write a new entry for every individual purchase I make. Buuut a lot of mail has piled up, so it's time for another grab bag!

 DICE - DNA Integrated Cybernetic Enterprises: This is an animu game... I think. I'm not too sure, but I saw some gameplay and it looked pretty decent. Characters looked like Kamen Rider rejects that could ride robotic dinosaurs. Robotic Dinosaurs. Can you blame me?

 Grand Theft Auto III: Playing this game for the first time was a revelation, there was nothing quite like it at the time, even Driver 2 fell short of what GTA III did. Which makes it so interesting that sandbox style games have become the norm nowadays, and it was all because of this little game. I loved GTA III, but I think that my love for it diminished after playing Vice City, there simply was no going back.

 BloodRayne: I used to LOVE this game back in the day, there was so much fun stuff that Rayne could do, shredding enemies to bits while in slo-mo, jump around and shoot at two different targets at the same time, and feed from an enemy while using his body as a shield... fun stuff. I also distinctly remember being amazed at the graphics involving drapes and flags.

 BloodRayne 2: As much as I loved BloodRayne 1, I didn't play much of the sequel. I owned it on the PC, but it simply didn't charm me as much as the first one did.

 Fear Effect: I clearly remember not being interested in the Fear Effect saga at all when I was younger, as tantalizing as the ads for the second game were. But for whatever reason I got interested in the games a few days ago, so I'm gonna take them for a spin.

 Disney's Treasure Planet: One of Disney's most underrated films, I've been bitten by the Disney bug, so I'm gonna try out a few of their games.

 Disney's Treasure Planet:  ....which includes both versions of Treasure Planet. I might look into the Gameboy Advance game as well....

 Medievil II: I was never too interested in the Medievil franchise but I do remember giving Medievil 2 a chance and it failed to capture my interest. But I'm a bit curious about the game now, so...

 Medievil: ....so I'll be giving them another chance come Halloween 2018.

 Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas: San Andreas was the PS2 GTA game that I liked the least. I remember being so hyped about it, since you were going to be able to customize CJ, expand on the melee system and the ability to swim! But... the gang & thugs storyline didn't do it for me, having to mind CJ's weight was annoying and the melee system meant that you could only switch between styles. If you asked me, Vice City is still the best.

 God of War 2: After rediscovering how good God of War was I was left wanting more. So... it's time to replay God of War II!