Daiktana is not a first person shooter. Okay, most of the game takes place in first person and involves you shooting stuff. But the intention was clearly to be more of an action adventure game that used FPS as its 'action', as opposed to a strictly action focused game like Doom or Quake. This is the reason for the much-maligned companion characters, why the greater emphasis on story and exploration, why the RPG style stats and leveling up system. When you go into the game with this expectatio
I have been playing Crazy Taxi on and off for twenty years. Just like any good arcade style game, it keeps me coming back. Also just like any good arcade game, I've never really mastered it. Sega always excelled at arcade games, and Crazy Taxi is one of the best of the lot. It first came home to the Dreamcast console. Given that I had a Dreamcast at the time, Crazy Taxi was an obvious purchase for me, and is still my preferred version of the game.
When it comes to genres, Crazy Taxi’s is hard to nail down. I wouldn’t really call it a racing game, but you are driving a car. You're a cabbie, and your goal is to pick up passengers, and drop them off as quick as you can, by any means possible. Your are timed, and when time runs out, the game is over. In addition, each passenger has a set time limit for getting them to their destination. You can earn more overall time by getting them to their destination faster than the limit. So the gameplay is a constant cycle of picking up a passenger, driving them to their destination, usually causing mayhem along the way, dropping them off, looking for a new passenger, and repeat. Wikipedia calls it a “score attack racing game”, which I suppose is fair enough.
One word. Doom. It's a simple name that can invoke a lot of things. Deathmatch, modding, programming. Doom is and was a lot of things to a lot of people. It's also known for being ported to everything. Why is this the case? Why Doom and not its older brother Wolfenstein 3D? I have compiled a list of six reasons why I think that's the case, based on my own knowledge of Doom and programming in general.<
I'm getting really tired of Nintendo, for one big reason: I can't buy any of their products.
I'm sure you remember the buzz around the launch of the Wii. The Wii was huge, everyone was talking about it, and it was a giant success for Nintendo. At the the time, I really wanted one, but I wasn't able to get one until a couple years after launch. "Not a big deal", I thought, "it was a huge seller, so it makes sense that stores couldn't keep it in stock." Now, I'm not sure if this was actually the case, or it was intentional under stocking by Nintendo, but Nintendo seems to have taken this idea and run with it in later years.
Some games fall into a category I call “mystical”. These games inspire the imagination and there seems to be more to the world than what you can see at face value. One of exemplary game series are that of the character Rayman. Just look at Rayman himself, he has no arms or legs, so his body parts just float! When I first played the demo for the Dreamcast version of Rayman 2 at nine years old, I knew it was something special. Though strangely, I didn’t really play Rayman 2 until this year. Perhaps it’s because when I rented Rayman 1 many years ago, I was put off by the crushing difficulty. Thankfully that’s not the case with the second one.
Doom is one of the most iconic games ever made, the forerunner of all FPS. Equally iconic, is its soundtrack. A mix of thrash metal and suspenseful tones, the soundtrack really set the mood for the game. Probably the most iconic of those songs (we're all three levels of iconic now), the song to the very first level: E1M1. Standing for Episode 1 Map 1, this was every Doom player's first taste of the action. The track itself is actually called "At Doom's Gate", which is a fitting name since the first level is really the entryway into the game. (The first level of Doom 2 is called Entryway, as it turns out). The song itself is very evocative of the map it represents; it's a very quick and action packed song. Keys and environmental tricks like lifts (barring secrets) aren't introduced until the second level. For E1M1 it's just run 'n' shoot. To celebrate this track, we've compiled a list of covers of this song, everything from comedy, to intriguing, to full on headbanging enjoyment. Catch 'em after the break.
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Originally Metroid IV, now Metroid 8(ish), Metroid Fusion marked a dramatic change in the style of Metroid games. Prior to this, the Metroid series had been pretty minimalistic, with just a spattering of story to tell you why Samus was exploring this alien world. During gameplay, the only narrative was the one you supplied yourself. Metroid Fusion brought in ideas like other characters, a railroad plot, and, most obviously, changed the look of Samus. This game also released side-by-side with Metroid Prime, and had the ability to connect through the GameCube-GBA link cable.
Here's a real quirky one for ya. Have you heard of the Game and Watch series from Nintendo? Really? You haven't? And you already have two badges? In the early 80s and beyond, Nintendo got its first taste of the handheld market, not with the Game Boy, but with these weird, single-game units that for some reason had an alarm clock in them. Ahh, Nintendo, why do you put alarm clocks in everything? They were ugly, they weren't comfortable, and they weren't even that fun… But we still remember them fondly because we're gamers and make poor decisions I guess.
When it comes to the Crash Bandicoot series, I have a long history. We got a PlayStation when I was a little kid, and one of the first games we got for it was Crash Bandicoot. Like a lot of kids at that time, we played stuff out of order, so the second Crash game I played was actually Crash Bandicoot: Warped (the third one; not sure why they didn’t just call it “Crash 3”). Despite the fact that the third builds heavily off of the second, which itself has quite a few differences from the first, I never really found the transition jarring. Chalk it up to childhood, I guess. But the transition probably should've been pretty jarring -- Crash: Warped is an interesting take on how to evolve a platformer series. They say variety is the spice of life, and they certainly added lots of variety to the gameplay for the third installment. I'm not entirely sure it was worth it, though.
Last week I briefly discussed how I used to love to explore in Super Mario 64. Well, some games are built around this idea of exploration. This has become quite a ubiquitous thing in gaming these days, what with all the "open world sandbox" games that come out. However, in a much simpler (and more memory-limited) time, we had the so-called "Metroidvania" genre. My most recent trek in this genre came by way of Metroid Prime 2, which incidentally would be a terrible game to be introduced to the genre through. Not because it's a bad metroidvania game or anything but more on that later. I have played Metroid Prime, the first one, but since I played this one much more recently I feel it'd be a better review if I talk about the second game instead.
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