Wow it’s been really thee months since I last wrote anything not pertaining to my life state! Fuck! So let’s fix this. The last game I wrote about was Flicky so that means it’s time to talk about Aladdin for a bit. I rented the Genesis version as a kid, never did beat it as a kid but as an adult i did it! It’s a good game that I think gets too bad a rap because Virgin Interactive was of middling quality of the era and the SNES Aladdin was an Immaculate Capcom Disney Game. Sega Aladdin does have its flaws in the form of some inscrutable platforming and hitboxes, a huge difficulty spike at level 5 that just drops back down to fair right after the stage is done and the Iago boss fight just being cruel chaos incarnate. I recommend this game good taste child me!
Next up is James Bond Jr what a fucking dogshit ass game! It’s based off the very short lived James Bond Jr franchise staring James Bond’s nephew James Bond Jr. Don’t think about that one too hard. The game is as messy as the IP with it staring you out on some weird tutorial style level and then hard cutting to a shoot em up section with no explanation. It’s the worst thing ever sweet lord! Shoot em ups should never have windup and wind down when you move but these sections do and you end up just dying all the time due to terrain collision! Platforming is just as bad! You can never see oncoming enemies, some enemies you cannot kill without specialized items and you cannot attack and move at the same time, you MUST be standing still if you want to use your primary attack. You do have a jump kick but since it deals only one point of damage and the most common enemies in the game have two you just end up getting hurt yourself. This game was so bad I turned on game genie cheats to get though it to see how utterly awful it gets and oh dear god it’s the worst. Required resources to get though levels and boss fights and if you run out of them then you have to die, exceptionally unfair enemy placement and a general feeling of the devs and QA just not caring after the fifth level. Absolute dogshit; if burning plastic wasn’t utterly harmful to literally everything I’d say destroy every copy you see so we could be free from this curse!
Next was Snake Rattle N Roll! I can recognize this as a solid video game but I physically cannot play it because my vision and brain has a real bad time comprehending isometric platforming oh no! Rare did make an interesting video game here so I gotta give them props and I can recommend this game if the controls and viewpoint doesn’t throw you off, and also how hard it is this game is so hard dude.
Then it was spooky month where I played thematic games! First was I don’t remember Ghostbusters for the Genesis let’s go with that. I played the special edition romhack that adds in Winston Zeddmore and a bunch of quality of life stuff. I enjoyed it, the romhack is good and my only real complaint is that the burning house level is a Sega Game Difficulty Spike level and it’s really rough to get through.
Hey then I played Decap Attack! Another solid sega exclusive that has a horrible difficulty spike in the middle of the game! No really, every level after five was substantially easier than all of level five. Since I did cheat I didn’t see the ending but it’s fine it was still a good time!
Then I played Castlevania 64! It was a video game! I cannot call it a good game with its aggressively frustrating platforming made harder by a drunk camera you cannot control and time mechanics that the game gives you no real indication of but I didn’t hate it? One day I’ll play the sorta release Curse of Darkness but for now I can say I did the thing and had middling enjoyment!
Then it was Circle of the Moon, the first Igavania for GBA! I still really like COTM but it is the weakest of the three GBA Castlevania but this is a good thing since it showed Iga and the people who worked on these were constantly improving from game to game. I think the dss system is neat but it’s a bit too cryptic and most playthroughs won’t even see half of what is offered due to the fact that cards are fairly rare drops from certain enemies.
Alas after cotm i had a family emergency and had to take it easy so a bunch of one off games happened and they were all fun! Just hard to make an entire stream out of just playing one of those games per stream. After that I still was not feeling playing the rng game so I decided on playing through the Sega 6-Pak: a late Genesis release of six early Sega games that are all good. The pack has some weird issues but hey it was something kid me loved so I’ve ate well as a child.
And that’s the catchup! The RNG portion of the project will return in the new year!
