Last Retro Game You Finished And Your Thoughts

It's definitely a shame that lightgun games went the way of the dodo. VR games have effectively superseded them and it would be class to see a VR Time Crisis title. I saw in this month's Retro Gamer a bit about the GCon2 and that this game is a must-play with it but it's cool to hear it's a fine game without it.

Time Crisis reminds me of the cinema as many would have one in the lobby, or you'd see one languishing at a bowling alley next to Dance Dance Revolution. Another institution of videogaming that has died out.

Yeah going to say VR is the place for them but Switch would work with Joy-Con even PS4 and PS5 with Light Bar at a push.

They sort of got Duck Hunt working on the Wii - but it relies on cursors I guess.

Ooh - I did a thing. You want an open world game with romance options? Are you thinking of Bethesda or BioWare probably? Well, before all that, there was Data East with

Joe and Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics

I say open world... after the tutorial level you can do each of the 5 "in the middle" levels in any order. Romance options? Well, in the hub village, the shop has, as well as the health restoring items, the option to remodel your hut (I think there's a picture of some other Data East goon in the background) or Flowers. "THEY'RE FOR A LADY" says the shopkeeper. Purchase the flowers, and you're presented with 3 curtains, with a pair of feet visible at the bottom. Pick 1, the curtain will raise, most of the time you'll see a miffed cavewoman "SHE DIDN'T LIKE THEM", but once, a smiling one "SHE LIKES THEM" - you're then married, and, should you go back to your hut, your wife sprite will be standing there, with the handy game caption "THEY ARE IN LOVE". Beautiful and life-affirming I guess.

I don't know why this is in the game - unless I've missed something, there's no other use for this whatsoever. Well that covers it, I guess.

Oh wait, the actual game? It's an arcade platformer, where the sprite's too big, and you can't see shit to get out of the way in time. It was a 6/10 then, and it's a 6/10 now. Oh, and the final level has a boss rush.

Aww, how sweet! I'm all for unrealistically successful depictions of marriage in games.

That's a fair write-up for Joe & Mac 2. I couldn't understand (re: couldn't be arsed) with all the romance stuff, but it's a decent playthrough on SNES Online with or without it. Anyhoo, from one SNES platformer to another...




Earthworm Jim 2! I’ve been meaning to properly play this for over twenty years. I really liked the 1994 original back then but I skipped its first 1995 sequel for a whole load of reasons – timing, expense, on the count of it being “last gen”, that type of excuse. It’s had loads of ports and rereleases since then but I’ve dug out the tatty SNES cartridge that I picked up in CEX  a few years ago. Here’s my thoughts.

The first Earthworm Jim gained its notoriety as a rock-solid and highly polished platformer with a surreal sense of humour and bucketloads of personality. Ticking all the boxes that I’d want from a game, it’s an easy recommendation from me to you. More of that would have been good, more of that would have been enough. Yet annoyingly the developer of Earthworm Jim 2 really piled on the gimmicks and wackiness without letting it be a rock-solid platformer. It’s mechanics change from level to level, and in this regard Earthworm Jim 2 is a very unfocused game.

It tries it’s hand at being lots of things. You begin with a level that’s got the same run ‘n gun gameplay as the first game, albeit with more weapons to find and more areas to explore. That’s all good and well, but you lose sight of that in the second level, which has you shooting your way through falling dirt and making your own path out of the level under tight time constraints. It’s quite clever…but then that’s followed up by a level where you’re saving puppies that are being thrown out of a window, a la the old Game & Watch Fireman game. Then you’re onto level 4, called Jim’s Now A Blind Cave Salamander. In total, only three of the game’s ten stages are your standard action platforming, and they’re very good. But the other seven levels either last too long, become repetitive or are just plain annoying. There’s a few bits that are just too hard as well – hooray for invincibility cheats!

All the same, Earthworm Jim 2 is conceptually inventive enough to be worth experiencing for yourself. It reflects that the developers had a good time making this, and on balance I had a good time playing it. 7/10.

Once again Cappa, that's an entirely accurate description of Earthworm Jim 2. It felt like the game was a joke that we weren't in on. The music was excellent though - although that was probably Ludwig van Beethoven's work more than Tommy Tallarico's.

I completed Wing Island, a 2007 Wii game that was developed by Hudson Soft and published by Nintendo themselves. Pilotwings had been sitting dormant for about a decade before Wing Island came out, and pre-release there were a lot of games writers touting it as a potential Pilotwings 64 successor. The inspiration is clear, but how does Wing Island match up?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. Well, not to Pilotwings anyway: definitely don’t think of this as a fourth, super-secret Pilotwings game. More accurately, Wing Island is exactly like the Air Sports minigame from Wii Sports Resort, just if it were fleshed out into a fuller game but three years prior and without MotionPlus. It takes on the structure of a more typical flight simulator, and it’s even got it’s own story. To begin, you inherit your aging grandfather’s handyman business and biplanes, and then carry on the family tradition of carrying out various jobs for everybody else on the island. These jobs include handing out fliers to islanders, transporting precious cargo from one destination to another…and then go from capturing runaway cows to extinguishing the fires on a flaming cruise ship. Such tasks are surely well outwith the remit of a typical handyman that’s described on the National Careers Service website, but then again you’re controlling a fleet of talking sparrows piloting wee cartooney biplanes, so I guess all of that goes out of the window.

Being such an early Wii game (it was a 2006 launch title in Japan, natch), you’re of course using tilty motion controls to fly and steer your planes. There’s some light acrobatics needed at times, but mostly all your needing to do is occasionally increase and decrease your speed and change the formation of the five planes that you control simultaneously. Happily, none of this is very complicated and the movements are quite gentle. Adding to that, while the game does present some challenge from time-to-time, it’s mostly a fairly relaxing experience. That’s enhanced by the very comfortable controls: as I’d said, this is exactly like the Air Sports minigame from Wii Sports. If you remember how that played, then you’ll be right at home with Wing Island.

Critics tore Wing Island a new arsehole when it came out – it’s actually got a lower Metacritic score than FlingSmash, at only 47. Back in 2007, I can understand why it got such an unenthusiastic response. Wing Island looks no better than a Dreamcast game from 1999, there’s only a handful of mission types, it has little to explore and has a lifespan of maybe three hours. Still, I enjoyed those three hours quite a bit. Going back to that Metacritic score, I think you can add 20% on top of it - especially these days when a fully-boxed copy only costs a couple of quid. Wing Island was a pleasant surprise, it’s a pretty good Sunday afternoon kind of game. A high 6/10.

That’s another playthrough of WWE SmackDown! Vs. Raw 2006’s GM Mode done. The main game itself is very good and I go back to it every so often, but I must have completed the GM Mode ten times by now. I did it differently this time though – I tasked myself with winning the GM of the Year Award with the worst roster that I could choose.

In the initial draft, all the wrestlers have popularity ratings that I think were quite close to life back in 2005. Reflecting the TV product, the likes of Triple H, John Cena and The Undertaker are the highest ranked superstars in the game. Conversely, the jobbers that you’d always see losing on Heat and Velocity – Mark Jindrak, Robert Conway, Snitsky, those types of folk – have popularity ratings that are merely a fraction of the main eventers. I wondered what happens when you pick all the worst folk while letting your competition hoover up the best ones.

I was surprised that I won the ratings war! It was rough going for the first six months of the year, watching my viewer ratings plummet and my shows repeatedly get a 1 star out of 5 rating. The tide slowly turned though, and eventually several of my roster members began to become big fan favourites. About nine of months in, I was seeing that Rene Dupree became the most popular wrestler on both shows, and that Scotty 2 Hotty, Charlie Haas and The Hurricane were beginning to make me a lot of money and bring in a lot of viewers. Danny Basham won the dual-brand Royal Rumble, setting me up very nicely for Danny Vs. Orlando Jordan as my championship WrestleMania main event. That was a 5 star match; some honours are richly deserved.

Even when you play under challenging conditions like I did, WWE SmackDown! Vs. Raw 20006’s GM Mode is not a hard game to be honest. All you need to do is keep your roster happy and healthy, put them in long feuds and stipulation matches, promote their merchandise and sometimes feature them in main events for championships. Everything takes care of itself. Still, it’s quite compulsive and very easy to get into. For how little effort it would take, it’s a complete mystery why 2K haven’t put something like this into any of their WWE games. I love GM Mode, 8/10.

That sounds like a lot of fun. I like the idea of a mode like that, but most of the Wrestling management stuff I've looked into seems way too complex.

In other news:

How did you manage to bite your analogue stick off!?

I think my 30 second Sunshine review would be 30 seconds of dying in Pachinko

Balladeer wrote:

How did you manage to bite your analogue stick off!?

Well, technically, I just bit the rubber part off. The controller was still usable, but it was like having two c-sticks.

My mental image of you ripping the entire stick out of its socket may be ruined , but I still don't quite understand how it got into your teeth in the first place!

I didn't have the same problems with the pachinko that everyone else seemed to have, for whatever reason. I think I did take to wall-kicking up the initial shaft after a while.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

Danny Basham won the dual-brand Royal Rumble, setting me up very nicely for Danny Vs. Orlando Jordan as my championship WrestleMania main event. That was a 5 star match; some honours are richly deserved.

I may have laughed out loud at this.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

For how little effort it would take, it’s a complete mystery why 2K haven’t put something like this into any of their WWE games. I love GM Mode, 8/10.

You're right. The GM Mode is class and could even be a standalone game. Wrestling Manager 2006 is probably not going to do gangbusters but to just scrap such a popular mode for no reason is the dumbest decision in wrestling since [insert any moment from last week's Raw].

SD Vs. Raw 2007 had a smarter GM Mode that allowed you to script storylines, face/heel turns and book longer and shorter rivalries, but it's a lot more work and a lot less accessible. SD Vs. Raw 2008 went back to basics but it was too easy to cheat and outsmart the game, and simply had too small a roster. ECW would only ever have four or five folk for a three-match weekly TV programme, they'd always get hammered. 

I was convinced that 2K would bring back GM Mode after the popularity of Xavier Woods and Tyler Breeze's YouTube show about it, but nah, they didn't bother their arse.

Ohh yeah Eofgizmo did not do well with ECW on brand wars.

The Cappuccino Kid wrote:

I was convinced that 2K would bring back GM Mode after the popularity of Xavier Woods and Tyler Breeze's YouTube show about it, but nah, they didn't bother their arse.

Wait for it. They never cotton on to something popular until way too lait. Do you remember how long it took them just to put out a couple of t-shirts with the RKO Outta Nowhere meme?

Thanks again to Buskalilly for his excellent Secret Santa gift of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle on the Wii. Despite having a (worse, heavily censored UK) copy in my collection for nearly a decade, this present gave me the prompt to finally start and finish what I should have sat down with a long time ago.

Reflex-heavy combat games seem to have come a long way in the last ten years, well beyond my simplistic gaming tastes. Back in it’s day though, I thought that it couldn’t get any wilder or crazier than No More Heroes. On the whole, I thought that the first No More Heroes was an excellent game. However, it had several low points that made me unenthusiastic about playing it through again, and reluctant to commit to playing through it’s sequel either. That was clearly a mistake on my part, as all the worst bits about No More Heroes were either removed, streamlined or redesigned for Desperate Struggle. There’s no more mincing about a deserted Santa Destroy, carrying out naff and repetitive part-time jobs, or grinding for cash and paying for your battles. Instead, you’ve got an efficient menu system that takes you straight to your destination without a bike ride, many varied and fun NES-style minigames that take the tedium away from mowing the lawn and collecting coconuts, and instantly-accessible battles as you work your way through the game’s (completely mental) story. I didn’t know any of this beforehand – it was a really pleasant surprise to see that the developer’s had made all of these sensible changes. Of particular note to me is the NES-style minigames: no joke, I think several of these would rank among the best games on that system, they’re that good.

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is refreshingly focused and considered, screwing in many aspects of its prequel’s gameplay without losing its excessive personality and style. It’s an excellent present, for sure. However, knowing that there’s a upgraded HD remaster on Switch, I just can’t recommend you play No More Heroes 2 on Wii.

Three specific issues that I probably wouldn’t have given a second thought prior to the 2020 rerelease really stuck out to me on this playthrough. Firstly and visually, on Wii this is a really dirty looking game. Suffering from a colour palette that badly lacks vibrancy and darkens your play area too much and too often, it becomes very annoyingly hard to see what’s going on. Secondly, the framerate in the Wii version is pretty rubbish too, tanking a few times while I was in busy boss battles (and even sometimes when I wasn’t). It’s framerate is never smooth and it’s rarely stable. Furthermore, I also think the motion controls are quite unsatisfactory here as well. Still using the original 2006 Wii Remote, the controls have lost some of their functionality from the first game while asking you to do lots more with them. It’s just as well that Desperate Struggle can be played with a Classic Controller, although I’d have preferred playing this with better technology like Wii MotionPlus, or even the JoyCon. I’m almost certain that my problems with the Wii version’s visuals, framerate and controls would have been cleaned up for Switch. Did they sort the camera on Switch though? Because that’s mince too.

I don’t know names, but I remember a few forumites on NGamer saying that this was a bit of an inessential sequel. A couple of folk pointed out that it was just a boss rush and that it really didn’t need to be made. I kind of agree. I’m playing several other games at the moment that have captured my imagination and attention much more than this did. And while I think it’s an improvement on No More Heroes, I don’t think Desperate Struggle will live long in my memory as much as the original did. And yet, No More Heroes 2 is undeniably good fun.

On balance, I recommend this to a whole load of people, such as those who enjoyed the original and those who are looking forward to No More Heroes III later this year. If your neither, perhaps consider this: “palate cleanser” is a phrase that gets lobbed about here all the time, and No More Heroes 2 is your proverbial Limoncello Sorbet. You can finish all this in well under ten hours and have a brilliant time doing so. 8/10.

This is the first time I've ever seen a game compared to a limoncello sorbet. Acht, I'm missing going to restaurants now...

NMH2 didn't click with me in the way the first did. All of the bobbins stuff you describe from the original was bobbins, and yet somehow it added pacing to the experience. I'm not sure I would have said NMH2 was a boss rush that didn't need to be made, simply because I didn't get that far; whereas I finished the original despite it in theory not at all being my cup of tea.

I can well imagine that it's an 8/10, mind. I notice that the jobs are back for NMH3, which I'm up for but I'm guessing you (Cappa) might not be.

I've never played NMH2, I was really hoping that we would get some sort of physical on Switch.

Balladeer wrote:

NMH2 didn't click with me in the way the first did. All of the bobbins stuff you describe from the original was bobbins, and yet somehow it added pacing to the experience

100% this! The barren empty world deserves all the criticism it gets for being barren and empty, yet it feels missing from the second (it is a funny joke however that the first game has a free roam map with menu-based shops, while the sequel has a menu-based map but lets you free roam in the shops!). The NES-style job minigames are undoubtedly better playing than the first game's overly repetitive and janky jobs, but them being overly repetitive and janky sort of felt like the point - this is especially noticable in comparing the gyms between the two. Stylistically they are very similar but small differences favour the first game - the transition freeze-frames are two colour thresholded in both, but in the first they will be layered with various photo textures whereas the second keeps flat colours and puts a loading symbol slap bang in the middle. That sums it up for me - more poliished, less punk. No More Heroes is all about being punk.

NMH2 is a great game though and undoubtedly plays better from a pure gameplay perspective. Switching weapons on the fly and them actually being different is so good! It also deserves maximum praise for the DS subtitle despite being on the wii

Clearly you should also get Sakuna OR: it has the same 'theoretically boring downtime that somehow improves the experience' thing going on.

I'm glad you dug it, Cappa.

Much like Balla, at the time of release I felt the removal of all the weird unnecessary open world stuff and the boring jobs took away some of the charm. On the other hand, I wonder if replaying them in 2020 as a 30-year-old with a very different relationship to free time would change my mind . . .

I replayed NMH and played NMH2 for the first time last year on Switch. I think the modern tendency to bigger and bigger open worlds made me remember the time you spend in the open world as longer than it is. As long as you remember the bike has a boost button...

OrangeRakoon wrote:

I think the modern tendency to bigger and bigger open worlds made me remember the time you spend in the open world as longer than it is. 

That's very true, but either way I really felt that Desperate Struggle was "refreshingly focused and considered" because it completely did away with an open world. It's got 0% body fat, it's just pure 'game'.