I just beat Equinox for super nintendo.
It took me like 2 months.
It is an isometric action adventure game with 8 dungeons.
It is ridiculously hard. The puzzles use confusing perspective, pushing blocks, exploding blocks, levitating blocks that only levitate after you have been on them after like 20 seconds, blocks that begin to fall as soon as you jump on them, floor that pushes you in different direction, blocks that move piled over blocks that dont move, blocks that move piled over blocks that move piled over blocks that move, invisible doors, spikes, pushing blocks on spikes or enemies, spikes that push blocks in different directions, etc, that kind of thing.
The puzzles are not only hard to figure out, they are also very hard to execute, because the controls and movement of the characters are very limited, and the boss fights are hard mainly because you have to hit the bosses a shitload of times, not their patterns.
I played the game because it was made by the same people who made Plok! which is my favorite 16 bit platformer after Rocket Knight adventures, it looked like it had nice graphics on google images, has Tim Follin music, and I read some good reviews in gamefaqs and saw it the top 100 snes list (93) of retro sanctuary.
I legitimately had fun with it the first 4 dungeons. But at the end of the fourth dungeon I was already overwhelmed, as in, this is only half of the game, how much harder can this get?
The rest of the game was like a nightmare which now I am glad is over, I let more than a week pass between dungeons 4-5-6 and beat 7 and 8 the last 3 days because I wanted this to end.
The game is not bad, but I cant recommend it. It is the kind of game that if you beat it you never play it again.
Who said it's ogre? Play Solstice.
You should feel good about yourself, I could never beat this.
>>2806453
chillax a bit with wetrix, that's also by the plok guys
Some other games I beat for the first time this year:
from the ones I liked most to the ones I liked least
10/10
Streets of Rage 2 on the 3ds: as good as a capcom arcade beat em up. Music is great.
Axelay: Great music, especially the first 3 stages, nice graphics and mode 7, I liked the vertical stages dont know what problem people have with them.
Round Vulcan is a very fun weapon.
Ecco the Dolphin on the 3DS: Difficult action adventure game, though nowhere as hard as Equinox, you should beat only one or two levels per day to avoid making the game feel frustrating in the first playthrough, most of the difficulty comes from the controls. Last level is a very very difficult autoscrolling shmup.
9/10
Gunstar Heroes on the 3DS: First I didnt like it much because I expected something like Contra, it finally clicked with me on the shitter. I still dont like much the board game level and the shmup level. I also think games so relient on boss battles dont have so much replayability because you end up figuring out a cheap strategy for every boss.
Music is excellent.
Sonic 2 on the 3DS: First I didnt like it much but I ended up getting quite good at it.
I dont give it a 9 because I dislike Sonic water levels so much I always do my best to take the highest route in Aquatic zone, the last boss fight with eggman with no rings is a huge difficulty spike (up to that point the game seemed easier to me than even Super Mario World) if you try to beat him quickly, or a very slow battle if you play it safe and only attack him when he bends, and one of the last stages, the one with the stars that explode and you running to make a screw go up or down kinda sucked.
I am also not a fun of stages with loops in which for much of them you do nothing but watching sonic gaining speed. excellent music.
I love Equinox, but Solstice is even better.
>>2806424
>Plok! which is my favorite 16 bit platformer after Rocket Knight adventures
RKA is dope af but if "Plok!" is your favorite 16 bit platforming game then I'm lead to believe you've played maybe 5 of them in total. Plok! is hot garbage when compared to the greats of that era and I've only seen hipsters who like to gush about the soundtrack ever talk about it.
Shinobi III on the 3DS: I cant think of anything bad to say about this game. It is excellent, kick ass music. I give it a 9 and not 10 because it is rather easy, as a kid I would have beaten it in a rental, I also dont see much difference in difficulty between normal, hard and expert.
I also expected something faster, it is more of a slow and methodical action platformer.
Rayman 1: Not a 10 because I feel the art design kinda falls apart in the last levels, the game begins with beatiful "rayman universe" levels, and ends with levels that look like abstract platforming challenges.
Also, I used a guide to find the missing cages to unlock the last part, 0 shame.
Games I didnt like much
Zelda Oracle of Seasons: very good dungeons, but the rest of the game feels like a bad romhack of Links Awakening. I didnt like the music at all.
Sonic 1: Ok platformer with a speed gimmick, I would rather play Aero the Acrobat 2.
Streets of Rage 2: Very bad graphics for a 16 bit game, loved 2 but didnt like this one. Excellent music.
>>2806539
As a kid I had a NES with Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, a SNES bundled with Super Mario World. I also had Mega Man X, and a Gameboy with Mario Land, Mario Land 2, Wario Land and Megaman 2.
Perhaps It is a personal taste thing, but the game clicked with me from the first playthrough.
>>2806529
Next time try to give more thought to your reviewing instead of scoring. It starts off with a short, non-descriptive sentence, and then you end up doing a (comparatively) long discussion of your arbitrary choice of '9' for Sonic. It's not interesting. Don't rely on meaningless scales, we'd rather read more insightful comments on your experience.
>>2806539
Yeah you're lead all right.
>>2806424
Yeah Equinox is gorgeous. But yeah it's kind of aggravating.
I didn't like it too much... tried to beat it maybe a year or two ago, and gave up in the end. Not because it was too hard but because it was too tedious. It's an okay game but yeah it wears on a person. Its mechanics and level design don't live up to its graphics.
I liked Solstice a lot though, and actually finished it as a kid. Haven't played it recently but it's probably worth trying.
Also yeah Wetrix is pretty fun.
>>2806553
So you only had Marios and Mega Men then... Not a lotta variety there, no wonder your tastes are so unrefined. Not the guy above but I'm sorry to tell you Plok doesn't even qualify as a good game, it's just slightly above Bubsy on the platforming spectrum.
Castlevainia was the last game I beat in general. Fuck the part before fight the grim reaper, That took me an entire night to get past.
Ok, I beat "James Bond 007" on the gameboy about 3 hours ago.
I had it as a kid, but never really got that far, I made it to Tibet, which is about halfway through the game.
Its much easier then I remember. Its very "Zelda-like" in that you do a lot of trading sequences, and have some really basic combat. You even end up with a shield and a machete and go around going Medieval on people with guns. But for the most part you just stick with your Machete for the majority of the game, and hack people to bits like you're in a Mexican Cartel.
There are guns, but their mileage varies. The Handgun is worthless because unlike the Machete it doesn't stunlock and does the same damage, killing enemies in 4 shots. The machine gun kills in 2, and rockets/grenades kill in one.
Some of the stuff is laughably stupid like crawling through catacombs to snipe a dude with a tranquilizer rifle while he plays baccarat, then going all the way back to the casino and looting his body while the 2 other dudes continue to play baccarat with a dude just sleeping there.
Some parts also feel really awkward. Theres a "fight" sequence in Tibet where you fight a shitload of Sumo's and you basically cannot die and its just really long and tedious. The Oddjob boss fight is also pretty long and involves you just standing there knocking his hats around with a shield, again, you can't really die.
There are a few sections that are just mazes which only serves to stall out the game further, and add some backtracking in them, which is a little annoying.
It does kind of have that "James Bond" movie feel where you're globe trotting and stuff.
I'd give it a 6/10. Nothing super offensive besides some backtracking (and losing all your medkits I had like 10 banked), but nothing super noteworthy here either. Maybe worth a play through since my Clear time was 3:18:28 and I didn't need a guide. The games also pretty cheap, I think my copy was 5 bucks or so on eBay. Probably not a lot of people played it.
>tfw I haven't beat any retro games recently
Time to finally beat Streets of Rage 2 I guess.
>>2808603
I bought Maximum Carnage from a guy on the /bst/ and it always made me mad when I rented it or played it my friends house.
I wanna beat it, but I'm pretty sure its almost impossible.
![Golden Axe (W) (REV01) [!]-image.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/j8o16qI.jpg "Golden Axe (W) (REV01) [!]-image.jpg")
I beat Golden Axe a few days ago. Always interesting to revisit games I played as a kid, I always thought I was hot shit back then of course but it's so funny to realize how mediocre I actually was.
Got to the final boss and died the first time through, didn't realize the final boss' minons have unlimited? (or practically so) health so you just have to ignore them and damage the boss. Second time through I cleared it.
Good music, so-so gameplay. The most effective strategy is to just spam the running jump attack over and over again, which doesn't really make for interesting gameplay but you pretty much have to play this way if you want to beat it.
I guess it's good I could never beat it as a kid because the whole game was only like ~45 minutes, probably less.
>>2806573
>>2806539
He said it's his second favorite, not the second best. It's his very own personal opinion and he can have that.
But it's very apparent that he has shit taste since he considers RKA to be good.
>>2806424
I kept considering really sinking some time into this game because it always interested me. That ad stuck with me for decades too for some reason.
>>2808648
>(or practically so)
They have 255HP each, Death Bringer has about 120.
Just finished GTA and GTA London on the Playstation. Its a solid game if you can get past the learning curve.
The game just dumps you in to a city and tells you to start answering phones for missions, which is basically what you DON'T want to do straight away unless you know the missions backwards and forwards and know where to grab all the necessary items along the way. Normal people just hopping in the game will want go searching for multipliers, body armor, and get out of jail free cards, which can be a real pain in the ass since there is no in game map (more on that later) and finding information online is difficult. The interesting thing about missions is that you can fail them and you don't get a game over or have to retry them. Your boss just calls to chew you out, and you keep playing the game.
The lack of an in game map is a real drawback. It matters less in later levels, but the first 2 take place in Liberty city, which is 3 islands connected by bridges and when the only guides you have are an arrow that points you to an objective without a clear path or foreknowledge of where the objective is, a lot of missions you fail by virtue of not knowing the solution in advance. This gets better in the later levels of San Andreas and Vice City, where islands are less of an issue and the streets form more of a grid that lets you get from one side of the city to the other without too much hassle.
(cont.)
>>2809217
The objective of the game is to score enough points to meet the goal for the level, and this can be done by doing missions, selling stolen cars at the docks, or causing general mayhem. The key to passing a level is to get your multiplier higher, which functions in a way that your rewards are multiplied by x2, x3, x4, etc every time you get a multiplier bump, which you can get from either finishing a mission or finding one in an item box. Once you have reached the goal, you can either continue to run up the score, or you can go to a particular location to end the level and get a short cut scene.
The game also had 2 expansion packs, London 1961 and London 1969, of which only 1969 was released on the playstation. London 1969 actually fixes a lot of the difficulty problems with the base game, such that most of the missions are possible to finish blind without knowing where a particular target is spawning and knowing what direction that are moving and having a fast car on hand to catch up to them.
Overall the game is pretty solid, definitely worth a play through for GTA fans who want to see where it all started.
Skyblazer was fun. Best think were the graphics and the cool setpieces. Everything else was decent and well made. Nothing special, besides the aestheticand setting. - 7/10 won't replay
Rocket Knight Adventures has such an incredible fun premise, but I find the execution lacking. The level design doesn't really take adventage of the powers, which are really fun to use. Graphics and soundtrack were good. - 7.5/10 will replay
Sparkster: Rocket Knight Adventures 2... did not enjoy it. The new charge mechanic works well, maybe better than before, but level design just seems worse than before. I was just flying all over the place, which was incredible frustrating. Bosses aren't as fun. Difficulty is higher, to the point of being frustrating. Level 3 was just an annoying maze. Skipped that via level password and level 4 was just stupid and unenjoyable. Not that hard, but definitely unenjoyable. At that point I didn't want to continue. - 4.5/10 playable, but not enjoyable
Looking forward to Sparkster on the SNES.
>>2808581
Yeah that hallway is brutal. Memorization and patience is key.
ActRaiser 2
The stages themselves are well designed, but I feel the enemy placement is off. Played the PAL version first and by default it's set to easy (and sound on mono). Found it very enjoyable. But then I played the American version on default difficulty, which is normal and found it to be way more frustrating. The difference in diffculty changes three things, the amount of lifes, health of monsters and the amount of monsters. In my opinion these additional monsters weren't well placed at all. Like you had to jump from one platform to the next and a monsters was immediatly attacking you.
The amount of extra health could be tedious. It was very noticable on monsters who very usually a one hit, but now needed two. Makes a serious difference in the pacing of the game.
The PAL version also got 2 extra lifes on every difficulty, that means per default you get 7 lives in the PAL version, which is more than twice as much compared to the standard of 3 lifes on the American version. I actually didn't complete my play through the American version. There was this level were you ahve to run through an outscrolling section and skulls are flying seemingly randomly through the air, knocking you back and getting you killed by the moving screen. Really frustrating.
That level also contains my most hated mini boss. The gargoyle with sword n shield. I just can't reliably kill the fucker and I don't find the fight to be very enjoyable. Bosses in general weren't that great. Most mini bosses had simple patterns and bosses could easily be cheesed with the downward slash. Those invicibilty frames are glorious. But I still thought they were entertaining, mostly. My favorite boss is the flying goblin sorcerer. Most engaging boss fight. I mean, you can make his super attack blow up in his face. Fucking amazing.
I enjoy the game, but moreso on easy than on normal.
>>2806550
>The game feels like a bad rom hack
>Bad music
I sternly advise you to reconsider your opinion on this subject, faggot.
>>2806550
>Sonic 1: Ok platformer with a speed gimmick, I would rather play Aero the Acrobat 2.
FInally I meet another fan of Aero.
