Mike Castle

That isnt what he did though.

It is what he did though, he just edited it out later on. Fair play he apologized, but he still took the effort to go and hunt out a picture to post. Regardless of whether he deleted it later or not.

It'll run Game Gear games no issue. I've been using it myself for years (though I rarely touch it in all honesty).

I think you've hit the nail on the head there BB. neil's not the "LOL that was awesome" type of comedy. It's just funny how he manages to annoy people just by playing up to people's perception of him without actually abusing his power (and yet somehow getting a group of idiots to whine about the abuse).

Nah, I never watched the intro and wont judge games on it (unless they are unskippable, in which case fair enough as the programmers would have fucked it up). It wasn't anything near a great game, but it was fun for a single run through. It just doesn't have enough replayability to make it worth returning to again to try and beat the thing completely, and to me that's one of the most important things for a game (at least it was back then. Now you just pick up from about 5 seconds before you died).

Okay, I was late on the last one, so I'll hit this one early.

I'd never heard of The Firemen, previously. So I had no clue what I was going in for. When I saw the image of the game when I went to nab the rom, it looked like some top down scroller, so I wasn't sure if it would be good or bad.

What it actually turns out to be is mainly scroller, with what feels like a hint of RPG style of text thrown in to create some semblence of a story.

Before I get into the meat of the review, lets hit the outer shell of it. First up the sound.

Sound wise it's pretty good, it doesn't get in the way of playing, but it doesn't detract, and when you do notice it, it's actually pretty good sounding. I like that.

Graphically, it works well, although it has a very old style Final Fantasy feel about it. Nice and bright, and despite the fact you're pretty much just fighting fire throughout, they've managed to have different sprits mean different things. Very well done considering half the game is orange.

Controls are relatively easy to get the hang of. Though it can be annoying when you're meant to be crawling and you wind up lobbing a water bomb (or whatever those things are) instead.

The intro... I didn't bother with, I could tell right from the off it was going to take way longer than I was prepared to wait to scroll through the text... well fuck that. I don't mind intros in games. When they're done well they are done amazingly well. But when they're slow and take forever to finish (or feel like they are, because you could have read the same line ten times before the next one turns up) I really stop caring.

So I skipped that and got right into the game itself. So was it any good?

Well yes and no.

It was fun, very much so in fact, I was honestly surprised that I was enjoying just going round spraying fire with a hose. Although a lot of the early stuff is made easy in that you don't need to use the main hose and instead can just use the weak spray to keep moving slowly forwards as you go. Switching to the hose really just for bosses and robots.

I also liked the way the levels sometimes changed as you were going through them. While some games from yester-year would simply prevent you going back through a door you've already come through, this one would have in game reasons for it. Like a roof caving in, or an explosion, and I liked that, made it feel like you were constantly doing something, even if it did make it exceptionally linear.

In fact if it has any bad points, it's the one. It's very, very linear. You have to get from point A to point B, then point B to point C. But despite a couple of small areas you can disappear to (then return pretty much to where you were) it's a straight run of rooms to get there. This is fine for a lot of games. Most 2D platformers have no choice but to work that way. But the flaw with this game is that once you lose all your lives it leaves you with the thought of "Do I really want to go through all that again?" And unfortunately the answer is... not really.

I can see me maybe picking it up again in a few months to have another crack at it, but it will only be when I'm bored as hell with nothing to do. Which to me doesn't say a great deal about it's replayability value. Sure it's fun while you're playing, but even while you're playing it's relatively repetitive. So when the time comes that you die and have to start fresh, well if it's repetitive while new challenges turn up, how repetitive will it be to revisit the old ones?

That being said, it is a good game, and while I'd never have recommended it to buy if I'd been playing this at the time it came out (or hell, maybe I would... I liked that damned Asterix game in the past after all), I would heartily suggest downloading it for a one off play at the very least.

So to that end, 5/10. It has a fair bit going for it, and it's been well thought out. It just unfortunately doesn't lead to a game that would be worth returning to again and again.

Been meaning to post my reviews. As I said on the Retro Fusion one, the Christmas period likely knocked a few people for a loop, and starting the one over there at Christmas was likely a bad choice.

Anyway... Super Fantasy Zone.

I'll be blunt right off the bat. I don't like scrolling shooters like this. Never have done. Ever since I was playing them on the Amstrad I've hated them. I even hate Space Invaders. To me just scrolling around shooting at everything is dull.

This game... didn't change my opinion of that. I'll admit the game is challenging, but the style of game doesn't entertain me, and in fact bores me to tears. I could only stand 5 minutes of the actual game before I just switched it off and shifted over to a rom of Sonic 2 with the "removed" levels (read: Names of levels that were meant to be in, and have been basically mocked up, alongside Dust Hill Zone, which requires the creator to be shot out of a cannon into a brick wall which is less than a foot away).

I just couldn't enjoy this game. Graphically it's pretty damned good, sound wise it fits for the type of game, hell even the controls do work well. But I got bored fast.

In short. It's likely a perfect game if you like this sort of game. I can't stand them.

3/10. As they actually appear to have put some effort in, and I can't fault them for their efforts in this like I could with some games.

I forget that Michaels/Taker video. Throw a nomination in for that from me too.

Roller coaster Tycoon 3.

Only just picked that up myself,

Hogan in TNA. There was so much potential and so much interest, yet after the first week pretty much nobody gave a shit.

Cena joining Nexus. Again, so much potential, and it pretty much built to a "I peed in your coffee" gag.

Dolph Ziggler Vs Daniel Bryan - Bragging Rights

Jan. 4th X Division Cage match

Bret Vs Vince.

TNA Hardcore Justice

Wade Barrett

Daniel Bryan

Though Wade surely has this one sewn up already.

Nexus debut

Miz cashing in MITB

It's a two horse race between these two for me.

The Miz

Wade Barrett

Dolph Ziggler

Daniel Bryan

John Cena

Typical, Pat reads my previous post and responds just as I post the review that got it working lol

That got it. Shame it only does the Point And Click type of games really. Anyway... somewhat of a review:

In short... not a fan.

Oh, you want more than that? Okay.

Basically, while graphically it's not bad for the time it came out, rather nice backgrounds in general, the actual characters look very blocky, which lets the graphics down.

Sound wise it's a bit too annoying for my tastes. It just feels bland and uninteresting as background music. Not quite soft enough to just be decent background noise either, it's like it actively tries to make sure you hear every note even when the characters talk...

and oh fuck do they talk... and don't shut up. At all. Ever. I don't mind some point and click games, the Discworld ones are phenomenal, and hilarious. This is annoying with the voice acting before we even get into the game itself.

And before I get into the game itself, the intro... is just too damned long, get the hell on with it. I want to play a game here, if I want to watch a video I still have an entire DVD of "Do Not Adjust Your Set" to get to, along with about two dozen movies I've yet to watch. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for entertaining intros, again, Discworld II has one of my favourite game intros yet. But it's entertaining, and it's funny. Simon 2 tries to be entertaining and funny with it's intro, and fails majorly, to the point I was just willing it to hurry up until I gave up and began trying every key to see if it would skip the damned thing (turns out it's Escape guys).

Onto the game... and my biggest annoyance is it's sooo dammmmnnnned slooooooow.

I mean for fuck's sake, get a move on! It takes an age to do anything, when I was in the tent with the wizards it took about 5 minutes just to work my way around them all, despite the fact only one of them had anything worthwhile to say. The others I could have lived with if something slightly funny came out of any of them, but it didn't.

As for the main character himself, I already was expecting to take a disliking to the guy due to the comments in here, but the second I walked into the town square and spoke to the morris dancers I actively wanted to see Simon fail. That's not the way to write your lead character. Rincewind is great because he's sarcastic, but still the guy running away from things. Simon feels like a z list celeb's take on Rincewind, and they couldn't get the rights. Instead of making sarcastic comments, he seems to just be a jackass for the sake of being a jackass. I don't care about him as a character, and I don't want to know more about his story. And that's after 10 minutes of playing.

It's possible if I had tons of free time to spend playing the game I would get some enjoyment out of it, but when I have so many other top quality games that I still have to get round to playing, fighting my way through the slow plodding gameplay of Simon 2, and getting more and more annoyed at the fact that for every 30 seconds of gameplay there appears to be 5 minutes of talking with piss poor attempts at humour does not feel like a good way to spend my time.

So for that being said, I'll grant them a point for the background graphics, and a point for actually turning up to make the game to begin with.

2/10.

Far as I'm aware, that should be all it would take.

Unfortunately I've been unable to get any version of Simon The Sorcerer II to run on my system, so I wont be able to give it a review . Apologies guys, but I have trouble getting old PC games running at all on this thing, and I tried the Amiga version, but WinUAE just refuses to accept an ISO file (which is what the rom comes as).

In the past Ian has said what he has a good idea of what will happen, preventing the incident happening.

I once had a chat with a friend about how I thought terrorists were going to blow up Big Ben, after that it never happened. How great was it that I stopped it ever happening?

New Week up Simon the Sorcerer II

 

Some one let me know where to get the game and get it working? Through PM's cheers

Ditto.

I guess I should also add another game to the melting pot.

So... to that end, how's about some Clock Tower on the SNES?

It's a Japanese only game... but thankfully I have a version which has been edited into English, so we can play even if we can't read Japanese

(And I bet some bastard doesn't like it, despite it being scarier than a lot of more recent games )

Seems like we have stark contrasts on what we enjoy in a game, what with Pirates! Gold being dull as fuck to me, and you not liking Skweek at all.

I doubt we'll ever get a game all three of us score well.

And I still count Skweek in my top 10 games of all time, so there