Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Bananadine"]Has somebody done this one? Oh well maybe nobody is left to call me on it (if somebody has). Hi I just played through Super Mario Bros. It was fun! I finished it many times as a kid and also I've finished The Lost Levels, so I thought this game would be too easy. It wasn't too easy! It forced me to recall that as a kid I relentlessly abused warp zones, probably none of which I even discovered on my own, and that The Lost Levels has a save system. I had to try four times I think. Things I did not appreciate as a kid: The first several Bowsers are fakes, and you remove their disguises by beating them! Or something. Also you can pause during cutscenes! YOU CAN PAUSE DURING CUTSCENES I am pretty tolerant of games that make you work to reach the save point, but no player should ever be more than oh twenty seconds from a potential pause point, unless there is an extraordinary reason for it. That is my version of Ice Cream Jonsey's hard line on saving anywhere. My lifestyle doesn't include events that require me to unexpectedly be away from my personal electronics longer than I am willing to leave them turned on. But anyway Mario is good. When I played it I had just finished Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also for the NES, and in that game there is lots of weird flickering, and the controls are sloppy, and the hit detection is very sloppy. Super Mario Bros. is not sloppy in any way. It felt like the advanced sequel to something, just because its developers did the job right, even though they were also inventing a new genre! That is cool. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was okay. Probably nobody here cares about it outside a Cable or two. Due to nostalgia I cannot test it timewise. All I can say is that the terrible <a href="http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/avgn-teenage-mutant-ninja/170283">early AVGN review</a> of it is terrible. He only complains about stuff that's easy! He shows the insane, instant-death spike room so that he can complain about the pizza in it, rather than the <b>spikes</b>! Other than maybe that, the only part of the game that's genuinely too hard comes just before the end, and he doesn't even bother to reach it. The AVGN really sucked when he started. But probably no one cares about that either, outside Cables. Also I played <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMIK3M7xmls">Equinox</a>, a SNES puzzle game with 3D isometric dungeons and awesome sprites and cool atmospheric music. It is the sequel to Solstice for the NES, which I loved but have not recently played so maybe that one isn't as good as it was (but I suspect it actually is). Equinox is okay but it adds a life bar and a magic power bar and an overworld and colored doors that correspond to colored keys, and all of these things suck. Most of the puzzles are confined to single rooms, and those are pretty good. But the colored doors and keys amount to a puzzle that spans many rooms--and to solve this puzzle, you just need to draw a map. Drawing a map SUCKS. I claim. More objectively: It's easy enough that a kid can do it, but tedious enough that most players wouldn't even want to try. As for the hit points: They are actually lives, since touching an enemy causes you to lose everything you've done since you entered the current room. (This is even true during boss fights, which are, in spite of this terrible-sounding feature, kind of fun.) The need to solve any puzzle within a room without getting hit adds interesting tension to the game's action challenges, many of which are jumping puzzles involving spikes. That was the main source of challenge in Solstice too. But here, you can always replenish your hit points by killing monsters in the overworld, which is almost always within easy reach. So you basically have infinite lives. Mapping challenges plus jumping puzzles that must be executed perfectly plus infinite lives equals CRAP. I claim. The game was unpopular enough, though, that seemingly every YouTube commenter except me only remembers it because they loved it.[/quote]