|
 On 06/17/2023 at 09:59 AM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
Only three games this week as I played EDF 2025 to the point of exhaustion, but I'm done with that for now.
Soul Hackers 2: I played this as part of Game Pass Rewards. I played for an hour or so and got into a few battles to get the points. I was happy to. It's a lot like Persona. I remember playing a similar game on DS where you talk to demons and recruit them to fight for you. I think that mechanic is neat. Here you acquire demons, equip them, and gain new spells to use in battle. The graphics seem pretty old school, but I like the gameplay a lot. It's almost like a turn-based first-person dungeon crawl but in 3D and free-roaming. Environments are pretty limited in scope though, and so it feels pretty linear and not far removed from a maze. I liked it. May return to it.
Earth Defense Force 2025: I was working really diligently on my Wing Diver, trying to get the Hard difficulty completion achievement, but I failed. I hit a wall in single player around level 52 and in multiplayer around level 89. I continued to grind on lower levels at various difficulties hoping to get a new weapon and build my armor rating, but eventually fatigue set in. This game really demands way too much grinding. I think, though, with the right four member crew, I could beat those last levels, but it's always difficult to get two random players who are the right level and skill. Often lower armored players come in and do nothing. But, I did have a good run when I was a Ranger, so maybe another time I'll try again and hope for a good team. Fun though, I wish more of the games in the series had made it to Xbox because I'd be playing them now.
Darn dragon got me again!
Atari 50: Learned more about the late 80s, early 90s Atari systems and games. I'd love to have a Atari Junior. I love smaller consoles. I learned that the Atari 400/800 computers were really souped up gaming machines, which makes me interested in them now. I played several games made for them including an upgraded Star Raiders.
However, I'm mostly interested in the Atari 7800 and its games. I played Dark Chambers for a good while. It was originally called Dandy and is a direct inspiration for Gauntlet. Or, you might say, Gauntlet totally ripped off Dandy. There was even a legal case settled out of court over this similarity. I immediately noticed the similarity. Dark Chambers is nearly identical to Gauntlet except that it's much easier, which was refreshing. I think I like it better than Gauntlet. One thing that's different, though, is that when you shoot a monster it morphs into a lower level version. Like, a skeleton, once shot, turns into a ghoul, which is the lowest form and after that disappears. Everthing else is identical to Gauntlet.
I'm hoping Crossbow is in this collection somewhere, It was ported from arcade to 7800. When I finish the interviews, I'll look at the entire library of games and see.
One of my cousins had a 7800 for a while so I had already played that before this collection. But I'm happy we got 7800 games on here. I'm also really happy we got some Jaguar games on here, since I never really played that one.
I don't remember seeing Crossbow on the Atari 50 collection. The arcade version was made by Exidy, so I doubt it's on here. I hated the arcade version of Crossbow because those screams in the game freaked me out.
There were fewer games on Atari 50 than I expected but it was still fun to play games for 400/300, 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar.
I feel like I've played Crossbow on another collection. I'll have too look it up, but yeah, those screams are kind of disturbing.
I really enjoy Atari 50, but part of that is because those are the games I played before the NES came out. In particulary I was happy to see a few Atari 8-bit games on in this collection, namely Miner 2049er and Caverns of Mars. Thanks to my uncle giving me access to questionably legal Atari content back then, I also had a copy of the Atari 8-bit prototype version of Millipede when I was a kid, and I sitll enioy playing that. The remasters of Yars' Revenge and Haunted House were great as well. The Lynx and Jaguar games are interesting. And I did play Dark Chambers back in the day as well; it was originally an Atari 8-bit game.
It was also awesome that they got Solaris for this colleciton. Solaris is one game that almost never appears in Atari collections. It has appeared on a few versions of the Atari Flashback, but this is the first time I've seen it in a collection for consoles or PC. It originally started out as a video game tie-in to The Last Starfighter - Atari made another game for the Atari 8-bits that they tried to tie into that movie before they retitled it as Star Raiders II. Doug Neubauer, the author of Solaris and creator of the original Star Raiders, held onto the rights to Solaris, and so I guess Solaris's appearances are dependent on how nicely Atari talks to him.
Speaking of Star Raiders, the version included on Atari 50 is easily the best console version of the game. Star Raiders has never translated well to consoles because its controls were hugely complicated, requiring either a keyboard as in the original 1979 release, or the 9-button 5200 controller. Even the 2600 version came with its own controller. The version included in Atari Flashback Classics was a huge pain in the butt to play. With this version, they gave it a very controller-friendly interface, and it is finally as fun to play on modern hardware as it was on my Atari 130XE. I do kind of wish they'd included more 8-bit content, including Final Legacy (which was in Atari Flashback Classics). A little bit of third party content would have been nice as well. Frogger and Jungle Hunt have been included on older Flashback consoles under license from Konami and Taito, respectively, and it definitely would have been nice to see a few Activision games. The 5200 version of Pitfall II was a huge game. But overall, it's an awesome collection.
I also believe that one of the producers on this collection, Frank Cifaldi, was a 1UP staff alumnus.
This time I didn't play Star Raiders too long. I usually have to refresh my memory by reading the instructions, but I wasn't into doing that this time. It's a little confusing until you read the instructions, then it gets fun.
I forget about Final Legacy even though I've played all the games in the Atari Flashback collections.
Some of my favorite Atari games are from third parties. I'm looking for a classic Atari console now so I can play them again.
I remember that name from 1up.
Comments