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サーフィン CLASSIC VIDYA REVIEW

Astro Boy Omega Factor
(Completed on 29 May 2024)

  • Is this THE most slept-on game on the GBA??? I don’t remember anyone talking about it in its’ time but WOW is it awesome
  • I cannot recall another action game besides maybe NES Ninja Gaiden which is this satisfying to control
  • Rough summary of what’s going on: You are Astro Boy, and you are trying to save the world from…. something? (The plot makes no sense anyway if you’re not familiar with the manga, which I am not). In order to save the world, you must fight your way through stages which are sometimes beat-em-up style and sometimes shooter style. Many stages contain bosses at the end. There are unlimited lives and unlimited continues. Absolutely nothing in the game is missable. Since you’re a robot who is trying to develop a soul, you power up when you meet people, talk to them, solve their problems, etc.
  • Sometimes feels like it’s only a boss rush style game, which is a good thing, because that is when combat is at its’ best
  • Makes you do 2 loops in order to fully beat it, and this is one of the few instances where I had absolutely no problem at all with that. It’s not easy, but it’s so, so much fun that you can’t help yourself. When the first loop is done you don’t want to stop playing anyway.
  • Very creative bit of game design / plot device: Loop 1 is entirely linear, and only after beating it, a “stage select” screen opens up. Without spoiling anything, there are plot reasons that you can now go to any stage you want. This matters a lot with regard to progression, because in Loop 2, you have to do things out of order, search for specific people to talk to, replay stages in different ways, etc. You would think it would be stale but it absolutely isn’t.
  • Music was kinda hit or miss but maybe I’d like it if I had seen the show? Doesn’t really matter anyway because the game is so fast paced, and each individual level is so short, that nothing overstays its’ welcome
  • Unfortunately, the good people at Treasure may have swung for the fences a little too hard when it comes to graphics. There are quite a few slowdowns, especially with lots of enemies on the screen, but IWABH I had stockholmed myself so hard that I started to welcome it, because it at least gives you a little more time to think when tons of stuff is flying at you at once.
  • Not just one of the best games on the GBA! It is one of the finest action games ever made. Highly, highly recommended.

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I bet this is really nice if you're not already entrenched in vim or something

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サーフィン CLASSIC VIDYA REVIEW

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze
(Completed on 15 May 2024)

  • At 10 years old, this has got to be the newest game I’ll ever post about on here. I really did not know what I was getting into with this at all, just happened to find a good sale on it
  • When I started Tropical Freeze, I didn’t even know it was a sequel to “Donkey Kong Country Returns.” Call me a Donkey Kong Kasual I guess.
  • On this play through, I didn’t sperg out about getting all the extra levels, but did manage to find a few. Honestly, the secret levels are kinda the best thing about this game. Especially the -K ones, those are tons of fun
  • As a boomer, the controls and “feel” of this game do not resemble Donkey Kong Country to me in any way. Tropical Freeze kinda falls victim to some of the exact stuff that Cranky Kong himself was complaining about 30+ years ago. There are so many animations for every little thing, that it makes character movement feel really slow. But not in that intentional way like Castlevania where levels are designed around this.
  • Here’s a specific example of the above point: There will be many, many occasions where you’re standing on the edge of a platform and you need to jump over to a platform where there’s an enemy. You know you can’t get enough height to hit them in the head, so you have to wait for them to move away from you, THEN jump on the platform, THEN jump on their heads. However, this is all timed in such a way that when you arrive at this platform, there is not anything you can do besides sit and wait for the enemy to slowly walk to the other side. It feels like a huge disruption to break momentum for no reason like that. This is especially unwelcome considering how long a lot of the levels are.
  • This happens so often that I started to think maybe I’m missing something. I went and watched some videos of how real pros play this game, and every single time, they got caught where I did, with nothing to do while you wait for an enemy to move away from where you need to jump. This wouldn’t be so bad if it looked like a rare oversight that the QA team just so happened to miss, but it happens CONSTANTLY, which makes me think that for some reason it is intentional.
  • Like the levels, the boss fights also drag on FOREVER. Remember in DKC2 how the final battle with K.Rool feels? Like he has infinite different patterns and every time you die how much it SUCKS to get all the way back to where you were to try and memorize the next one? That is how every boss in this game feels.
  • A small ray of sunshine though: brother David Wise did do the soundtrack to this, so while you may be annoyed at big swaths of it, you at least get to listen to some incredible music during.
  • Overall impression: I like the really hard levels and probably will come back to them, but outside of that, some of the only times I wasn’t bored was when I was annoyed.

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