Tuesday, March 23, 2010

In Defense: Cave Story

Here's a game I've wanted to write about for a while, but I figured that I may as well wait until it was finally released on the Virtual Console of the Wii on March 22nd. This game was announced for the WiiWare service quite a while ago, and fans such as myself have been itching for it to finally come out on the system. This was easily a day 1 (actually, hour 1) purchase for me, as it hearkens back to the 16 bit era in colour and art, and takes pages out of the books of a few amazing classic games and amalgamates them into an amazing composition.

First, some history. Cave Story has actually been available for about 6 years now because, if I'm not mistaken, it was released as a freeware game downloadable from the Internet in the year of 2004. This game was created by exactly one guy, who goes by the name of Pixel to his fans, and it took him about 5 years to complete it...but Pixel made everything for it. He programmed it, created the art and sound effects, and wrote the story all by himself. This in itself is quite a feat, and shows that this guy likes games for the sake of games. It's not like he was expecting payment for his creation...he just wanted people to download it and enjoy it, and to experience video game design for himself. I don't expect that he figured it would ever become as popular of a cult hit as it did, but I'm damn glad it got the recognition it deserves because it's actually one of the best sidescrollers I've every played, period.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

World Ten: Top 10 weapons

Be aware that this list may contain mad ****SPOILERS****

My first top ten list is going to be a short list of the weapons that I still think of to this day. Basically, means of killing enemies that have made an impact on me, causing me to reflect and think "Okay, yeah, that was awesome." Sure, there are a ton of these lists floating around, and I'm sure that you're likely able to predict a few of them right off the bat...but I'm hoping there'll be a few surprises in here. Just bear in mind that this is my personal opinion, of course, and the selections I choose may not be as obvious as one might think.

The biggest problem is figuring out what order to put the damn things in, as a number one weapon of all time is extremely hard for a gamer who started back in the 80s to decide upon. A game with weapons is, in my opinion, defined by that weapon set, since they're clearly the tools that you're going to be using the most to get out of sticky situations. The right tool needs to be chosen properly...but then at the same time, maybe a game player establishes a soft spot for a weapon that's not entirely convenient but tries to make the best use of it. This is one of the tough parts of weapon selection...finding that balance between what's useful, and what you just plain enjoy using. For example, I don't want to go through a modern shooter using 76 different kinds of machine gun with different fire rates and recoil...that just becomes boring for me, but I know that certain gamers prefer to pick the most efficient weapons. Personally though, I tend to use the oddball ones just because they're fun...even though I might send myself to the grave with them more often than I likely should.

Anyway, on to the list.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

In Comparison: Megaman 9 and Megaman 10

Alright, so a game came out on Monday that I've been waiting for ever since the last entry in the series. Megaman 10 was released on WiiWare, and I downloaded it as soon as I possibly could get my grubby little hands on it and managed to finish it that very same day. Clearly this fits in the whole retro revival theme that this blog's supposed to be about...plus it's fucking Megaman, so how could I even possibly resist writing about it! Rather than just cover MM10, however, I'm also going to go into Megaman 9 and compare the two. Although they are both Megaman games right down to their cores, they are clearly inspired by different entries in the series, which makes the dynamics of both games differ radically.