Leger vs. Pinball Fantasies (Amiga)

People hardly had the chance of getting to grips with all the fuzz around Pinball Dreams before Digital Illusions put forth a sequel.

A genuinely classical follow up in that it took pretty much everything from the previous game and pushed it through a progressive filter and worked through the details arriving on the other side until it could be considered more of everything.

The same people behind the computers, the ground was already laid, and thus focus could be on evolving what was already there into some kind of perfection.

Partyland came to be the posterboy of Pinball Fantasies.

With yet another flipper placed on the upper part of the table, now higher than any table found in Dreams, a new dot matrix-panel showing both points and tiny animations in ways the old panel could not manage and an extremely unique audiovisual and aesthetical expressen (amongst it all a laughter of a clown positioned in the midst of the table) the bar was set so high that it felt ridicilous.

Partyland is everything but an easy table to deal with and it takes time to get it to deliver a satisfactory amount of points. Though, thanks to things happening pretty much all of the time the feeling is always present of a huge deliverance.

A deliverance which, finally, I got to experience after I do not know how many rounds of scoring not much at all.

Or at least no more than 20 millions.

But... suddenly it happened and the Mega Laugh mode took turns with the Happy Hour one over and over again, encounters with targets and ramps turned into something like 150 million truly dramatic points and goose bumps all over my body.

The table is truly well balanced and it shows a great evolution of what already had gotten close to perfection in Dreams and its tables Beat Box and Nightmare. Also it feels like a great example of when more actually is more and more lights to lit, more easily activated multipliers and bonuses aswell as a generally more complex attitude makes a huge difference on the experience.

Just as impressive is the Stones'n Bones-table, which in most ways are the Fantasies equivalent of Dreams' Nightmare.

Once again there is a huge focus on ramps and drop targets, much things to active and three ball traps which in two cases acts as final destinations for intense score hunts.

I am having a hard time deciding if Nightmare or Stones'n Bones is the table I prefer, but considering the circumnstances it is a truly pleasurable issue to deal with.

What is left is the racing oriented Speed Devils table and the Billion Dollar Gameshow.

Speed Devils is anything but an easy table to deal with. It severly lacks a natural flow with most of its ramps hard to reach and it is way too easy to get stuck up in the rightmost corner trying to get the most out of its non eventful Pit-Stop area; A lone flipper makes it easy to stay there and by looping over and over again active the PIT lamps which in turn makes the ramp close by being an activator of the next multiplier level.

But that is all there is to do there, all but using its ball trap when so see fit.

Concerning scoring nothing really makes things explode like it eventually will do when playing Partyland. Instead a slow and time consuming buildup is at hand, and to be frank the lack of happenings makes the table rather dull.

You do have the Off-Road mode, but it does not really make the score take off, not even when getting stuck between some bumpers. The Jackpot is quite naff in favour of the Super Jackpot and there is a constant strive for Miles to active the Jump ramp which gives 10 millions. Not even the Turbo mode gives that much time to go after the 5 million reward each of the hard to reach ramps will offer.

While not a bad table it is both time consuming and hard to reach the fun of and it will take time learning how to reach the desired destinations.

What about the Billion Dollar Gameshow?

Well, it continues in the boring trend of Speed Devils but adds some truly complex chains of events focusing on just a few happenings. The result feels like one long struggle to reach the two ramps on the upper part of the table after having activated them by going through a loop activated by going through an easy to reach ramp.

Huh?

Conceptually Billion Dollar Gameshow delivers by having a giant Wheel of Fortune in the middle of the table; First you active a prize and then you try to win it.

It screams of the game shows of the ninties with a stereotypical gray haired man dressed in a suit as a host and its even getting the cringe worthy music right in a way that makes things seem abysmally luxurious.

The problem is that it feels just as hard to live up to this dream as it is hard to do anything of worth on the table.

The fact is that I even activated the Digital Illusions code to make the ball stay on the table forever and after some hour or so of training I truly started to resent the design; Time consuming, hard and with extremely little in the form of fun Billion Dollar Gameshow manages to be the first table in the series which I would call genuinely bad.

Instead of the journey Dreams offer, an experimental one from beginning to end where the wrongs gets right along the way while never truly standing in the way of the experience, the one in Fantasties feels way more extreme.

Two fantastic tables which continues exactly where Dreams left off, one quite unbalanced table which takes a bit too long to deliver any outcome of worth and one table which completely misses its mark and is no fun at all to play.

Unlike the later AGA version this earlier one of fewer colours manages to feel a bit more relevant thanks to the wonderful and almost Amiga defining introduction which the AGA version lacks.

The intro is iconic, with its heavenly music from Olof Gustafsson aswell as the logos and the graphical menu where the tables are presented. The AGA version even misses out on the the high-score tables.

Also worth mentionning is that the original graphics by Markus Nyström looks more natural with fewer colours, in ways that makes the AGA graphics seem like an afterthought (while never ugly, they do seem a bit forced in ways the grahics of the later Illusions never do since they were designed with more colours in mind).

While not as well balanced as Dreams, Fantasies still manages to feel relevant thanks to Partyland and Stones'n Bones. And while I do hesitate to push up the score a notch I just have to do that very thing thanks to the truly magnificent presentation of this original version of the game.

I mean, it is not really that hard to just ignore the two lesser tables and spend time on the fantastic two instead.

 

Leger vs. Wii Play (Wii)

To say that Wii Play is something even remotely close to an essential experience would be ridicilous.

As the fith best selling game on the Wii the reason for this very thing should be nothing but the fact that it came as a bonus when buying a Wii Remote, not matter what reality has to say about it all.

Almost 30 million copies sold, which is quite insane numbers, even qualifying as one of the best selling games of all time.

A truly smart move on Nintendo's part.

Wii Play is a collection of tech demos evolved into minigames to demonstrate the functions of the Wii Remote aswell as defining the Wii universe Nintendo created. All the characters are presented in Mii fashion, and the ones created on the system will appear in the game in one way or another.

Nine minigames are available and apparently vary wildly in depth and quality. At first only one minigame is accessible, but when certain criteria are met in the minigame the next one is unlocked.

Good results are awarded with medals (bronze, silver, gold and platinum, and I have not managed to get one single platinum yet) and to further expand on the longevity multiplayer is available where two players can battle it out.

I guess that the fact that the very first minigame, Shooting Range, turns out to be something of a modern version of Duck Hunt is everything but conincidence; Back in the eighties when Nintendo launched the NES Zapper Duck Hunt became an instant classic when released.

The Wii Remote is in many ways a NES Zapper in disguise, so to let the generation of players having grown up with Duck Hunt enter the zone of nostalgia when blasting ducks and clay pigeons feels logical.

This time, however, the experience suddenly ends after five stages. No matter the inclusion of shooting balloons, going Hogan's Alley by juggling cans or trying to save your Mii's from being abducted by aliens, the game has a beginning and an end and after that nothing is left but trying to perfect one's run.

From here on out it becomes obvious that the minigames lack true depth, with one exception which I will come back to later.

Find Mii is a take on Where's Waldo where it is up to the player to find identical Mii's or Mii's doing their shit in ways different than the others. Sometimes in the dark, sometimes swimming in water and sometimes just standing there on an escalator, and it all happens under the pressure of time.

Sometimes it all seems to get stuck in waiting mode, just hoping that the Mii's you are trying to find will appear on the screen at the same time, all while losing precious seconds.

Even simpler is Table Tennis, where you have to bounce back the ball as many times as you can while more and more Mii's appear as audience.

Pose Mii showcases the rotation function of the Wii Remote. Bubbles with Mii's in one of three poses falls to the bottom of the screen while the player have to match the pointer acting as a silhouette with the Mii's in the bubbles.

Laser Hockey plays out in a similar way, almost Pong style, where the player controls a rotatable paddle to bounce a puck into the goal of the opponent. Unfortunately one frequently have to deal with the issue of getting the puck stuck in the behind of the paddle when doing quick movements just to score a self goal when trying to shake it loose.

Then comes the depth movement, which is presented through the Billiards minigame aswell as a fishing pond. Both minigames do a good job of showcasing how the hardware completely lacks the ability to properly register how the player move the Wii Remote closer to, or further away from, the sensor bard.

Getting a shot to register in Billiards feels like pure luck, and trying to adapt the strenght of the shot just do not work. The same becomes apparent when trying place the fishing rod in a desired position and this issue completely ruins the minigame.

For the last two minigames a cow racing racer and a tank shooter introduces on one hand the gyro in the Wii Remote and on the other the Wii Nunchuck.

Tilting the Wii Remote in either direction, while holding it as a NES controller, makes the coves move to left, right, speed up or slow down and even making a jump if quickly shaken upwards. All while trying to plow down all the scarecrows and jumping over hurdles.

The tank shooter presents itself as a 2D, top-down shooter, where one is aiming with the Wii Remote and moving the tank with the analogue stick on the Wii Nunchuck. The tank can also drop mines and the projectiles fired can use the walls to change its direction once with a bounce.

Different enemy tanks behave in different ways, the stages are varied in their layout and as many as a hundred are available.

Unlike the other minigames Tanks! almost feels like a small game which could have been released on Wii Ware with just some small adjustments and additions.

The main problem with Wii Play is how quickly one can unlock all the minigames, and most of the minigames lack the depth to keep playing them until a platinum medal is achieved.

While multiplayer can be enjoyable in short bursts the package simply fails to reach beyond the feeling of being more than some simple tech demos put togheter to form a game.

I can not think of any reason why more effort was not put into making progress in the games seem relevant and fun by introducing, say, checkpoints aswell as more unlockables.

Sure, playing Find Mii for extended periods of time will introduce some new type of situations to deal with and the difficulty constantly rises, but reaching a late stage and getting game over does not really make it attractive to go through all the easy stages again.

Trying to beat all the one hundred stages in Tanks! feels just as daunting and tiresome, even though the mechanics of the game are solid all the way through.

Wii Play may have been huge success, selling loads, and looking at is almost as a freebie along with a Wii Remote it does it job.

As a game, as a collection of minigames, it falls short in pretty much every way possible besides the presentation which is quite solid throughout.

But managing to showcase one of the worst aspects of the Wii Remote, the horrible depth perception, is in no way a good thing and the longevity of the experience for the single player hardly lasts beyond the initial session no matter the optional (boring) medal hunting.

Passable, I would say, aswell as a curiosity considering its context.

 

Leger vs. Final Fantasy (Playstation Portable)

Not that I browsed through the Swedish Nintendo Magasinet looking at pictures of Japanese Role-Playing Games dreaming of what these games had to offer me.

Instead I drooled over the fact that I knew exactly what they represented and what they had to offer me.

I had been spending time with one of the first JRPGs imported to the west, Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord, aswell as the more action oriented Ys: The Vanished Omen and the visually and technically stunning Phantasy Star.

All on the Sega Master System.

The western alternatives on computer such as Ultima, The Bard's Tale, Wizardry and whatnot AD&D in the hands of SSI always seemed to be standing with one foot in the land of pen and paper RPG and the human imagination to fill in all the blanks.

Many of these western experiences I found extremely hard to get into and with a distinct lack of direction in ways that made the often more story oriented and semi linear Japanese variants to seem like a less rough way to familiarise with the genre.

Unsure of what Final Fantasy actually came to symbolise more than being one of those games we over and over again were told that we missed out on.

Something of a more complex entity than The Legend of Zelda, Star Tropics and other more adventurous titles which actually had little to do with the JRPGs other than on the surface. Not going further than some few bits and pieces included, of a bigger puzzle, which over time came to act as the foundation of the genre.

They felt serious, rather heavy, the games in the Final Fantasy series and the competition found in the Dragon Quest dito.

But, unfortunately, most of all they made me feel that the Swedish distributor Bergsala really was not a friend of mine by not pushing titles from the genre to be released here. Rather, it felt like they made an error in their judgement of the market in Sega's favour. Too much English, too much to read and too hard to play.

This feeling, no matter how true to reality, no matter Nintendo of Europe, Square, Enix or any other of the Japanese forces to be reckoned with within the genre, bothered me to no end. Especially since one of the reasons for me learning English as early as I did was because I wanted to understand the games I was playing, I wanted to understand the clues they were giving me to get further into the experience.

Furthermore it felt like a way to make it written in stone that video games were something for kids, no matter seeing people of all ages all around me playing.

My first hours spent with Final Fantasy probably had something to do with Nesticle, an early NES emulator, later experimenting with ZSNES to reach the parts of the 16 bit era Sweden never really got to know.

At the time other commercial alternatives felt alien, and this probably due to me lacking money to spend on importing games and video game consoles. This was a free alternative leaving me with money to spend on what was actually commercially on offer over here.

In truth, however, I do not really remember exactly how, when and what in the context of me getting to know Final Fantasy as a series and playing the games. The more I try to make a mental map over my experiences the harder it seems to get things right.

There is a reason for me looking back like this and that reason is that when I got to play Final Fantasy for the first time I had already got to experience the genre and much of the progress it already had made.

It made Final Fantasy feel archaic, annoying to play, when hitting enemies in battles could result in hitting air if someone in the party had managed to kill the enemy beforehand. It made battles slow and tedious and the whole experience grind to a halt.

Revisiting the game again, for the first time in ages, through Nintendo's Virtual Console on the Wii did nothing to change my point of view.

A good thing, then, that Final Fantasy has been rereleased, updated, remastered and remodeled many times since its arrival on the market.

This particular version on Playstation Portable is a logical evolution of the earlier Game Boy Advance updates of the first two games, where a beastiary and bonus caves could be found, now with impressively updated high definition graphics.

No longer one is at risk of attacking nothing in battles and the gameplay feels ridicilously fast compared to Final Fantasy on the NES.

Besides some early grinding to have a chance of actually making some progress of worth in the beginning of the game the party almost feels unstoppable all the way to the very end. There is not really much need to grind since exploring the environments and not escaping from the random battles gives more than needed to stay ahead of the challenge.

In no time the party have access to loads of money and all that stands in the way of buying everything is the levels of the characters, their class and wether they have evolved from a lower class to a higher one.

The only true challenge seems to be a couple of bosses and knowing where to go and what to do next. Caves, castles and other places to explore never get frustratingly huge and by having a healer along for the ride potions to restore health are seldom needed.

If lack of challenge equals unattractiveness chosing diffent classes than those in the proposed party can make or break the difficulty of the game completely. However, bringing along two warriors and two red mages, alternatively one white mage and one black mage to get access to the strongest magic, one can be sure of being up for the task at hand.

A problem with this kind of party, not taking into consideration of being able to put most effort into what the game does best (the adventuring, the exploring), is that the battles quickly gets repetitive and pointless.

The battles turn into a matter of holding down a button to go Attack until all the enemies are killed. There is seldom a need to use magic or an item. It feels so easy to plow through it all that the biggest risk is reaching the end severly underpowered running into a wall which needs some serious grinding to break.

Because suddenly the need of strategical use of magic is a thing, using items effectively during battle, being able to revive fallen characters and keeping the health of the entire party constantly high since a single attack by a strong foe can wipe out everyone in an instant.

Having the best, or really good, equipment makes a huge difference at this point aswell as knowing how to deal with poison, darkness and petrify.

Using Haste, Temper, Protect.

The nullifying magics to reduce the damage dealt by fire, wind, death and so on.

Maybe some items to temporary boost some stats of the characters during a tough fight.

And at the very end it suddenly because painfully obvious that the lack of a really strong fighter can create a situation comparable to hell.

Final Fantasy is an extremely unbalanced experience, with the early and late hours being where most of the challenge resides with all the hours in between acting as a void to breeze through.

Though, it never reaches any kind of extreme in either direction and the time needed to grind the party up to par with the challenge never went past the hour.

Of the eighteen hours it took to beat the game one hour of grind in the beginning and one in the end was all that was needed. Compared to the grind needed in Final Fantasy 3, Dragon Quest and Phantasy Star 2 this is nothing, hardly worth mentioning.

Visually Final Fantasy on the Playstation Portable looks really nice.

Going iOS and the iPad, which this version later did, made the graphics look way worse. Not only did the perfectly smooth scrolling of the PSP version get thrown out of the window, also the graphics went blurry and the aesthetics of the menues did not seem to match the one of the game.

Here everything looks crisp, colourful and unified. Something Square Enix would prove themselves to have huge problems with in many of their later productions.

While it is sometimes hard to see the game behind the graphics (which surpasses anything seen during the 16-bit era) in many ways still keeping true to the 8-bit original, it is obvious that no matter what quality of life updates this remake offers the game still feels quite... old.

Not that strange of a feeling considering it is way past its 35th birthday and alongside Dragon Quest truly kickstarted the genre no matter previous attempts.

Such is the naivity of the story aswell, in ways of feeling old. Four heroes of the prophecy, destinied to save the world with the help of four crystals. But it does not matter, because it is never within the story or the delivery of that very thing that the point of the experience resides.

It could be much thanks to the simplicity of it all, that so much still seems to fall into place. Unbalanced or not, the intense journey on foot, by boat or soaring high up in the sky riding an airship... all while eploring generic yet cosy environments... is charming and the sense of freedom lacking the linearity of many later jrpgs paves way for a more personal experience.

Not that Final Fantasy is truly open from the start, and not that it with rather simple design decisions creates logical limits which the player are allowed to explore within... but it does so in an impressively seamless fashion. Looking at a post V part in the series showcases a world of difference in attitude for all the good and bad that comes along for the ride.

But, yeah.

All kind of different cities, caves and castles spending their time in water, cold, fire and air.

Fantasy, in sharp contrast to sci-fi.

Musically presented the way you would expect.

Mainstays in the series, such a strong and unique expression to already be found, shaping a familiar feeling although the context at this time had not become well established.

What is hardest to look past is the grinding, the constant battles. No matter how unintrusive it may seem at first, it just seem pointless at times and close to frustrating when having to backtrack through places with low level monsters.

Today one would expect such pointless time consuming aspects of games to be offered to be skipped entirely by paying a hefty sum of real money, like instead of having to wait 10 hours to get access to a phat armour pay $10 to instantly be able to put it on.

If talking mobile gaming, that is.

Boring and time consuming aspects of gaming are not more motivated just because you can not buy yourself past them, or because they were a part of the genre at the time.

Which is why I think it seems locigal to include a beastiary, to create a motivation to engage in battles. It is just percentage rising, while adding more and more enemies and their data to the list, but trying to fill it up completely will most certainly have whomever to want to smash the head into the wall possibly having to deal with some blood pouring out of a wound.

But, well... uhm... just plowing through the fights by holding down a button seems an okay activity, anyways, especially if sitting there in the sofa watching some shit on Netflix.

Cookie clicker, kind of.

Most certainly.

And just thinking of playing the regular bonus caves some four times, at least, just to beat all the bosses residing within (four caves with four bosses each, I think) is so tiresome I could not bother.

The bonus caves are horrendous in their design and the final bonus dungeon exploring the concept of working against a time limit while shutting down the use of some gameplay elements (not being able to flee, not being able to do x or y) had me turning my back towards expanding my playtime beyong simply beating the game.

Which felt all fine and dandy, just simply beating the game.

Too bad.

 

Leger vs. Blaster Master: Overdrive (Wii)

Some twentytwo years since the launch of the series and a decade since the previous entries (Enemy Below and Blasting Again), Overdrive arrived out of nowhere in 2010.

Sunsoft had been somewhat dormant, just like Blaster Master, so had it not been for the indie boom and the era of digital stores making room for smaller projects not seldom looking to initiate activity in the nostalgia nerves Overdrive might not have been.

Though, no matter how many digital licenses sold Overdrive went on to be mostly forgotten aswell as considered a black sheep in an already uneven series, making fans having to wait another seven years until Zero hit the market.

I do want to go to the territory of discussing unfair critique, however, arguing that Blaster Master Overdrive did most of the things the old NES game did wrong right.

While Blaster Master did play an important part in the shaping of the audiovisual mastery Sunsoft went on to pride themselves with, it never got the gameplay quite right.

Upgrades making the game harder to play, the level design not taking the off center shooting into consideration in the overhead sections, pathetic bosses taking forever to beat and a huge Metroidvania attitude combined with lack of a save function or password (with the western release even going as far as making the continues limited).

Blaster Master on the NES may look the part, but it is a chore to play and has always been.

Overdrive is not a chore to play.

In some ways it almost feels like a remake of the very first Blaster Master with similar upgrades (a block crushing boost attack, the ability to hoover with the vehicle, a hookshot to grapple roofs and walls aswell as a wall climbing feature amongst others) and 1:1 gameplay.

With some side scrolling section to tackle by foot or in the vehicle and some overhead ones playing out like a labyrinthian shooter.

A save function makes progress up to that point permanent, a simple map function makes navigating the caves easier and the bosses are no longer uninspired but rather huge, intense as hell (even mildy touching upon the bullethell mentality of shmups aswell as going more aggressive the more hurt they are, just like bosses in later Ys games do).

I do love the bosses found in Overdrive.

But, yes.

The loss of firepower when being hit in the overhead section is still a thing, making room for some not always funny trips through caves to collect weapon upgrades.

But for every thing Overdrive does right, not having mentioned the SNES sounding soundtrack which is not afraid to deliver new versions of old classics, it seems like it could have been doing things more right in other areas.

Compared to the colourful NES original Overdrive is a very gray and brown experience. Most locations looks like monotonous caves in different colours, with the cold and icy one aswell as the one dealing with lava not doing all that much to make a difference.

While never ugly, the lack of aesthetical OOOMPH makes traversing the caves back and forth to explore whatever parts not yet having been explored in the hopes of finding something new quite... meh.

And the enemies, they are really not that varied. Or, actually... they are, but not visually. To make things even more retro some are even working with the palette swapping of old.

Killing something but bosses seldom results in big and visually pleasing explosions, rather small... POOFS.

Though, had Overdrive gone the same aesthetical route as the NES game like Zero did many years later I do believe it would have been more fondly remembered.

Ending up on Wii Ware, a service which besides holding some of the most unfairly hidden gems of the era hostage (Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth, for example) also having shut down since a couple of years leaving no commerical availability of many of the games it hosted, is a thing certainly not helping.

Neither is the lack of Classic Controller support (because while the finger bending control scheme of the wiimote when switching weapons or activating the side stepping in the overhead sections is manageable it could have been that much smoother).

Quite sad, actually.

Especially since Overdrive is a quite good Blaster Master, certainly a good game overall, with some flaws making it a bit hard to get into.

But if you do you will find a well designed, nice sounding and at times quite intense Metroidvania that is well worth sticking with until the very end.