Author Archives: stopXwhispering

Die Hard Trilogy

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Continuing on the theme of games based on movies, here’s a review of Die Hard Trilogy for Sega Saturn!

As the title suggests, all three movies are in the game. You get to choose which of the films you want to play (after way too many loading screens…) so I started with the first one.

First of all I was amazed at how AWFUL the graphics were, then again I’m used to either Xbox 360, or the 8- & 16-bit 2D games, so I always get surprised seeing the stages of graphical evolvement in-between there… I’ve played quite a lot of Dreamcast, but this is just before that, where CD was the shit and they put real footage and films into the games to make them look “better”, but it was just awful.. Even the N64 games looks better o_O they at least mainly stayed with the ‘cartoony’ graphics instead of trying to make it look ‘real’.

I also got really annoyed by the controls, it was stiff and really hard to move the dude around, and there was no aim, you just kind of pointed and shot.. however after I while you get into it, and all the violence just starts getting entertaining. All of a sudden I realized I was enjoying the game, and I made it to stage two, but then I died, and after dying you’re game over (!). One life, no continues. That’s die hard.. I guess it’s realistic though, but still, this is supposed to be a game!

So basically the game is about shooting down bad guys and saving hostages and you have to advance through the different floors of the building. But I went straight onto the second movie…

Now this movie had a totally different game style! Instead of third person you go into first person and you can’t steer the camera. You just get on the camera ride through the airport and try to aim and shoot at the… baddies.. (sometimes russian, sometimes german..)

WHOOPS! Still you have to try to save hostages that are being guarded by bad guys, however I tend to keep killing them off.. unintentionally of course ;D

It’s quite brutal at times…

Just look at that skeleton flying towards me!! =D

This game never gives you any instructions.. there was a ticking number that kept occurring during this stage and it said “SAFE”.. Safe what? Is there a safe being broken into at the airport? How do I stop it? I can’t go past the camera angles that the game gives me, so I just kept popping bad guys. The “SAFE” timer usually just counted to zero and nothing happened. But like the fourth time it appeared I was game over after it finished counting.. o_O I don’t know why, so I went on to the next movie instead.

In this game you can just forget everything you’ve learned in the previous two, cause this is once again a whole new type of game. It’s a racing game!

You just get put in a car and have to drive down a linear road, without instructions.. I just stepped on it and tried to make it to the end of the road (cause I figured there must be something I’m heading towards..) as fast as I could, and I didn’t make it…. I had 3 tries here (instead of the previous one-miss-and-you’re-Game-Over type of attitude the previous two movies had), but I still wasn’t close to making it.. even though I didn’t crash or anything in at least one of the tries.. I don’t get it!!!

Shitty shitty game! This just pissed me off! I started liking the first movie, but then the game just thought “Oh yeah? you like this? well fuck you, then we’ll make you play completely different!”

Another reoccurring thing in this game was explosions… everywhere.. all the time.. they just blew shit up.. I guess it’s a “reference” to the movie? I dunno..

Woah, what does that last one remind you of? yikes… O_o but Sega didn’t know at the time :/

So anyway, here’s a movie I put together of the gameplay through the three movies of Die Hard Trilogy on Sega Saturn, check it out ^_^

AVGN made a review of another Die Hard game, it’s worth watching =) It’s Die Hard for NES.

MOVIE GAMES

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Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES) had it’s glory days in the 80’s. Back then game developers sometimes had trouble coming up with new exciting game ideas, so they started making games from popular movies! You would think that this sounds like a great idea, if it’s a great movie with a great story why wouldn’t people wanna buy it and play it to relive those special moments they remember so dearly from the movie screen? Well a lot of people did buy them, and probably got disappointed seeing their favorite actors pixelated in a little blurry dot on the screen with horrible controls, sloppy programming and generally poor reenactments of the original plot/story or scenes. These games were made as a way for the movie and game companies to milk a few extra bucks out of a successful blockbuster film.

This doesn’t mean that all movie themed games are bad, there’s also a lot of examples of games based on movies that are in fact quite brilliant, sometimes even more enjoyable than the movie itself! Like Aladin for Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis), or most of the Batman games across all platforms.

But from my experience, the majority of games based on movies are horrendous experiences. Even back in the Atari age some movies made it into the gaming scene..  such as E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.. there are no words of describing how BAD this game is. I might try to show you sometime in another post. Some other really bad movie themed games have been reviewed amazingly by AVGN (Angry Video Game Nerd) such as Independence Day, Rambo, Terminator and all the Spielberg games. Visit the links to watch his movies.

Still today most big movies get turned into a game, and there are more shitty ones than good ones in my opinion.. Like the Golden Compass.. horrible >_< The control’s are worthless, and it’s frustrating. Even though it was super cheap (I guess they figured out quite quickly how shitty this game was) it still wasn’t worth the money..

I was surfing around and found some youtube movies and forum talk about a NES game that was based on the old 80’s series Full House, they called the game Full House Tournament Fighter, and it took some surfing around before I realized it was a spoof, the game never existed. Though it wouldn’t have surprised me if it did! This made me think about some big 80’s movies and what they would have looked like if they were made into NES games. Here’s my ideas:

Imagine if they would have made The Shining into a NES title, wouldn’t that have been awesome?? That’s a movie themed game I would definitely have gotten. You would start off playing as the Kid, avoiding ghosts like the twins and other supernatural things trying to survive and at the end change to play as Jack and try to hunt down your family with an axe through the maze. That would have been amazing and original!!

 

 

Another awesome NES game would have been the Poltergeist! They could have made a supernatural-looking environment where the game plays out in the world where they have taken the little girl, and the goal would be to have the girl find her way back to the light and her family in a platforming adventure kind of style. Just imagine! =D That would have been a scary and different game! With references to the movie, a great soundtrack and some cutscenes it would have been awesome!! “They’re here..”

 

Now here’s some examples of games that would have been awful if they ever would have been  converted to the NES!

Thank god they never made this, however so many other shitty games were made based on movies that one more wouldn’t really have made a difference..

Awful…

Or this:

Yikes!

Now I’m off to edit some gaming clips of my next review. Feel free to comment if you have any other fun ideas of games based of movies never made, or opinions about some movie games I didn’t mention ^_^

Lemmings 3D! WTF!!

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Tonight I started trying out all my new Sega Saturn games. The first one was Lemmings 3D. I like Lemmings, the old ones for Sega Mega Drive (a.k.a. Genesis), so I figured this couldn’t go wrong. Lemmings, in 3D!! Just the thought of it was blowing my mind.. how disappointed was I…

This game was the biggest WTF-experience for me this year, how they were even allowed to release this kind of shit eludes me.. The graphics are horrible, however I guess they were restricted by the capacity of the Saturn, but I mean, there are better looking games for that console. The controls are indescribable, nothing makes sense and no matter what you are trying to press nothing happens that advances the gameplay. I just moved around the camera angle for 30 minutes and could hardly get that to work in my favor..

Why did they even try to make Lemmings anything other than a 2-D side-scroller, this is what works best for this type of game, why change something that was already good? They could have just enhanced the graphics and maybe added some quirky extra actions with the evolved Saturn controller that had more buttons?

Well just watch this video I made of the gameplay and you will understand why this game sucks ass…

Castlevania Legends – Game Boy

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Castlevania Legends for Game Boy is a really great Castlevania game, compared to the first Castlevania Adventures for the same platform the movement is smoother, it feels like the character is a bit faster, the whip responds better and most importantly of all: THE HEARTS DO NOT GIVE YOU HEALTH! Like we have learned in previous Castlevania games, the hearts you collect are used for your special ability. In Castlevania legends you receive special abilities after each stage, instead of collecting them through candles, and they’re called soul weapons. You use them like normally in Castlevania games, by pressing up and attack. But there are also a few hidden weapons, like the holy water, throwing dagger etc, hidden in certain candles in a secret area of the maps of each stage (not really secret, mainly just a detour from the standard route).

Another different thing about Castlevania Legends is that you play as a girl, called Sonia.

Through the Super Game Boy for the Super NES they have improved some graphical aspects of the regular Game Boy games, such as giving Castlevania Legends this really neat interface with pillars and stone around the screen instead of the normal boring “Game-Boy-Look-a-Like” screen.

Also the stages have different colors, which makes it feel like you’re really advancing through the game. Here’s some of the stage colors, and in the bottom right corner is the standard sepia/brown that the Game Boy games had as a standard through the SNES.

Some downsides of the game… the bats are annoying as usual and they come in groups and respawn on the screen when you are trying to advance upwards, creepy flying black shades pop from nowhere and have a really annoying pattern which makes it really frustrating to try to hit them, stupid big ass knights that charge you and take way to many hits to kill and hurt you way too much, (SPOILER ALERT!) Alucard is actually one of the bosses (even though he’s a friend to the character, Sonia, he needs her to prove her strength) but he is way too easy to beat =(, Alucard is supposed to be kick-ass!! There are also some special candles that have a different color than regular candles, DO NOT HIT THESE, since they will make you fall into a pit of bad guys which won’t let you out until you are almost drained of health.. stupid…

Apart from this Castlevania Legends was a really great game, but Aria of Sorrow for Game Boy Advance is still my favorite ^_^

Here’s a video I put together of the music, the gameplay, the stages, the bosses and so on.. enjoy! =D

Girl’s Gaming Weekend!

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So this weekend I’ve been in Stockholm, playing games with Miss Deluxxe and Ninjabrite, and here’s a little recap of what we were up to! =D

We started off by playing Trine 2. Me and my two closest gaming friends are always on the lookout for nice co-op games for at least 3 people where we can all get achievements. This is not a very easy task. During the years we’ve been going through most of the arcade games which have these aspects, such as TMNT 1983, Turtles in Time, Castle crashers of course and many many others. So when Trine 2 recently came out we were excited and had been waiting to play it until this gaming weekend together. We played for a while, achievements popped for different things some of us were doing, and after some time we realized that all the achievements only went to one person, the player 1 who started the game! The only way for all of us to earn achievements would be if we were playing it on three different xboxes online. Stupid.. why do most games discourage local co-op?!  So we stopped playing it, and will wait until we are once again in different cities only being able to play with each other online. It’s like gaming companies don’t want gamers to actually meet up IRL to play, they make it so much more attractive to play online..

Another game that instead really exceeded our expectations was Fairytale Fights! I’ve had this game for quite some time, but never played it, since me and my friends have been waiting for the next gaming weekend to play it together, and now we finally did! In this game you are fairytale characters that beat up other fairytale creatures. It was funny, filled with gore and blood, brutal, full off events of fun frustration and lead to a lot of laughs. We would also all earn achievements, both story related and personal objectives. This is a fun game that I would recommend to anyone who likes playing together with friends co-op in quest mode or friendly fighting, since the game also has an arena mode where you can see who can kick who’s ass the most ^_^

These were our characters: Snow white, Little Red Riding Hood and the Naked Emperor. Hilarious, I just had to be the Naked Emperor ^_^
I mean, just look at him!! So awkward!

Miss deluxe also showed us her progress in Skyrim, since me and Ninjabrite hadn’t seen it yet, and when she started her last save file something weird happened.. her character was headless. Anyone encountered this before? lol…

Well now it’s back to editing the Castlevania videos! Hopefully I’ll be done soon.. ^^

update and stuff …

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Sorry for not having posted any reviews on the Castlevania games yet, I just started using new equipment to record what’s actually on the screen when I play, and now I have hours of video to go through, haha ^^ I will hopefully be finishing up the cutting and editing soon, however I’m away this weekend in Stockholm for a girl’s gaming weekend with some friends, I might be posting about that first ;D