After last year's disappointingly short list, I knew I had to step up my gaming. I pulled it off, and this year's list is three times the length of last year's, clocking in at 15 titles. This is, however, still inferior to 2013's 21-strong roster.
Longtime readers will know the drill - I've ranked these games in a rough order from worst to first, but as usual I'm not that great at ranking, although I enjoy doing it - I can usually figure out the worst game and the best game pretty quickly, or at least make tiers, but ordering within a tier is not easy and can often change on a whim. Suffice it to say I consider everything I beat this year save the bottom-ranked game to be at least decent, and the bottom game was at least not offensively bad!
The crop this year is even more old and obscure than usual - 13 of the 15 games are over a decade old, and many of them are over two decades old. I hope to include some more mainstream titles next time, but I do prefer talking about games people don't know about, since you can only write "super mario 64 was a good game" so many times before people stop caring, y'know? Anyway, on with the show.
15: Barney's Hide And SeekSystem: Sega Genesis
Developer: Realtime Associates
Publisher: Sega
Genre: Platformer
Date Beaten: March 31
#Ruined: None, though it's been mentioned in Chatzy every so often.
Okay, let's get this joker out of the way first. As I have in the past (Laura), I intentionally played a kid's game primarily so I had blog fodder. BHAS is a VERY dumbed-down platform game with no enemies and few obstacles. All characters in the game are friendly and you cannot lose or die. The object of the game is to leave the level by reaching either the far left or far right of the screen, but you're meant to find presents and children as well (hence the "hide and seek" part). It's not much of a task to get 100% aside from how long it takes - this game is very slow paced.
Barney's actions are context-sensitive. A, B, and C all do the same thing, but that thing changes depending on where you are. If a platform is nearby, Barney will jump to it. If a child is hiding, he'll flush them out. If there's nothing to do, he'll just blow a kiss. If you try to walk off a cliff, he'll produce a stop sign and show it to you, refusing to move until a moving platform comes into range. He's also incredibly talkative, and has many many things to say about his surroundings. BHAS is a unique sort of challenge - can your patience handle Barney for a full hour?
Probably the most infamous feature of the game is that if you don't press anything, Barney will begin doing the level by himself after a few seconds. He won't collect any presents or find any kids, though.
So obviously this is a game for very young children, but if you want my opinion, kids young enough to be entertained by this would also be entertained by an empty box or a plastic spoon. Most kids are going to want something more exciting, like Pokemon or Mario, even if it DOES carry a terrifying risk of maybe not always winning effortlessly.
System: Sega Genesis
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Genre: Beat-Em-Up
Date Beaten: December 27
#Ruined: None
I remembered beating Golden Axe 1 a couple years back, so I decided to take care of the second game. Oddly, there are two "Golden Axe II" games. There's one called Revenge of Death Adder that came up in Chatzy just a couple days ago, but that one was an arcade game. This one is a Genesis exclusive and features a different villain named Dark Guild. Yeah, that's the villain's name, not the name of his organization. Localizations of video games were generally not that great until the second half of the 90s when text started being more important, more often.
Golden Axe II is playable, I suppose, but the controls are very clunky and stiff and when you get hit it usually feels like it wasn't really your fault. Most of the enemies can move more easily than you and have fast, hard-to-dodge attacks. Winning pretty much requires cheesy strategies like tricking dumb enemies into walking into instant-death pits and abusing the running attack and jump attack. There's a magic system that lets you attack everyone onscreen at once with special attacks, though the standard attack is laughably weak and only the higher magic levels will even defeat normal enemies. Essentially, it's more of the same - if you liked the first Golden Axe, you'll like this too.
13: Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden TreasureSystem: Sega Genesis
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Genre: Platformer
Date Beaten: January 29
#Ruined: None
Now HERE'S an albatross from my childhood that's been nagging me since the mid-90s. A semi-common video store rental back then, Tiny Toon Adventures was often challenged by kid me but never beaten. The best I could manage was to reach the first stage of the last set of levels. Now armed with an emulator, I decided to see about getting this game knocked out for good.
And jesus christ, this thing is wayyyyy too hard considering the subject matter. While earlier stages are fine, the game starts getting difficult halfway through with the cave-themed levels. By the final world, it becomes outright cruel, and the last stage is incredibly challenging. It consists of a VERY VERY LONG hallway you must run down to avoid getting hugged by Elmyra, and if you make even one mistake, she's almost certain to catch up to you and hug you, which is a one-hit kill. I can only imagine how many times someone managed to escape the last factory stage with a handful of lives left, only to see them all wiped out in less than two minutes on this last level. The final boss, while easier than Elmyra, is no joke either. And on top of all that, even though the game has a password system, the furthest you are allowed access is the first stage of the final world - the last few levels don't have passwords, so you HAVE to beat them in one go. There's no entering a password to instantly get back to Elmyra after she saps your lives. Simply put, I would have NEVER beaten this thing without savestates. The ridiculous difficulty leap means, nostalgia or no, I can't give this game a high rank.
12: 1943 KaiSystem: Arcade
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Genre: Shmup
Date Beaten: February 8
#Ruined: Inspired Widow Maker and DJ Candy's aerial dogfight sequences with their planes.
I played this one via Capcom Classic Collection on PS2. I've always thought it was kinda weird that the 1942 series is Japanese-developed, but features an American plane destroying Japanese military. I mean, I can get why they'd have made it that way, but it's still a little surprising to see.
1943 Kai is somewhat more fanciful than 1942 or the original 1943, of which this is an upgrade of. For instance, a laser powerup has been added, and some of the bosses are giant ships... with tank treads. It's like a little bit of Metal Slug spilled onto 1943. But only a little - there are no aliens in sight.
Overall, it's a pretty standard shmup. Not much to say.
11: MercsSystem: Arcade
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Genre: Run-And-Gun
Date Beaten: February 7
#Ruined: None
A pretty standard military shooter game which reminded me of a less ridiculous Total Carnage, Mercs places you in control of a generic Buff Soldier Guy and sends you into the warzone to shoot five million identical guys and their military vehicles. You can also occasionally hijack an enemy vehicle, which is cool.
To be truthful, this one didn't stick with me very well and I don't remember much. I had a pretty good time, though, I remember that.
10: Super Mario Bros. 1System: NES
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Platformer
Date Beaten: January 21
#Ruined: None
Oh hey, I beat a game people have heard of. SMB1 was a trendsetter in its' day, being one of the first ever scrolling platformers, but it's not quite as amazing today, especially when SMB3 is on the same system and looks positively fancy-pants in comparison. Still, the original Mario adventure is still a solid game, although World 8 is brutal.
...Yeah, I don't have much here. It's Mario on NES, you all should know already what it is and what it's like. Thank you reader, your detailed description is in another entry.
9: Final Fight 3System: SNES
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Genre: Beat-Em-Up
Date Beaten: April 1
#Ruined: Haggar was considered by me as a minor character. He would have been the mayor of Vegas. Eggerman got the job instead, and it works out pretty similarly, so I'm happy!
This is another one where I don't have much to talk about, though it was nice to finish the trilogy after doing Final Fight 2 back in 2013. Of course, I played as Haggar. That dude's great. FF3 is much the same as the previous two games, in which you travel from place to place and beat the stuffing out of everyone who gets in your way until you face the final boss. This is a much smoother beat-em-up than the Golden Axe games, hence its' higher rank.
8: TMNT III: The Manhattan ProjectSystem: NES
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Genre: Beat-Em-Up
Date Beaten: December 30
#Ruined: Manhattan!
The last game to make the list. I picked this game to play because I had vague memories of playing a TMNT game at a cousin's house that had 8-bit graphics and set the first stage at a beach. When I remembered this game earlier this year, some searching led me to TMNT III for NES. I watched random YouTube gameplay videos of old TMNT games, and a video of this one confirmed to me that this was what I'd been thinking of. As a bonus, the game features an amazing plot from Shredder - he somehow lifts the island of Manhattan into the sky, along with April O'Neal. They had no way of knowing about our RP or the plot of Paper Mario 1 on N64, but with those two things in mind this was friggin' hilarious.
TMNT III puts the sluggish Golden Axe games to shame despite being on a much less powerful game system. Gameplay is a lot smoother, and your chosen radical turtle is fairly easy to maneuver. Your moveset is a bit small, but workable - each turtle can do a standard attack, an overhead toss, a jump kick, and a super move, the last of which saps your health.
The game's default difficulty is brutal. There are no weapons or powerups, just a very rare pizza slice that fully restores your HP. The pizza is never found in the place you SHOULD be putting healing items (ie right before a boss fight) - instead, the pizza tends to show up after defeating a miniboss. With only three lives and three continues, I expected I'd wind up quitting this game. Fortunately, there's an easier level of difficulty available via the Konami Code that makes things much more manageable but still far from a cakewalk. Even with Easy mode on, the bosses take a boatload of hits and are tough customers. However, what gets this beat-em-up ranked above others is that it is more reasonable with its' enemies. Yes, there's a lot, and yes they are tough, but unlike Golden Axe, where it felt like the enemies were simply better than me, the majority of the enemies and bosses in TMNT have patterns and weaknesses you can learn and exploit. It does a fantastic job at making the game feel less cheap and more fun. Some of them, however, are a lot more annoying to deal with. In particular, the Mouser enemies (those little hopping robots with big bitey mouths) are a pain due to being so small and quick. There are hopping ball-like robots that shoot lasers that appear in the last stage and are similarly irritating. Overall, though, I had a good time!
7: Pokemon Trading Card Game OnlineSystem: PC
Developer: Electrified Games/Sleepy Giant Entertainment
Publisher: The Pokemon Company
Genre: Strategy
Date Beaten: May 16
#Ruined: Connected to my Pokemon card obsession, which ebbs and flows but has been much stronger than usual in the last few years, reaching a fever pitch last year.
I was into this game for a time, though I stopped shortly after clearing the single-player mode. PTCGO is exactly as it says - it's an online, digital version of the Pokemon card game, which has continued nonstop for over a decade and a half with expansion after expansion long after most kids stopped collecting sometime around the Neo series. The game is familiar in some ways to the way it was in the first generation, but a lot has changed. One of the more recent additions was the introduction of extremely powerful "EX" Pokemon that don't need to evolve to be played, even if the Pokemon on the card normally evolves from another. They are incredibly powerful on average, easily overpowering Stage 2 Pokemon, but they do at least have a major drawback - defeating one rewards your opponent with two Prize Cards instead of the usual one, and you still only need to win six Prizes to win the game.
Anyway, the single-player is very limited - you're not allowed to use your custom decks and instead must use a pre-made theme deck. Of course, theme decks are generally garbage, full of worthless Pokemon and weak item cards. However, I was able to claim victory thanks to the Dark Hammer theme deck, a Fighting/Dark deck that is actually quite good and boasts some fairly strong Pokemon. It would still fold easily to a "real" deck, but it had little trouble handling the AI, even when they began acquiring EX cards to try and turn the tables.
I dabbled in the multiplayer as well, making a fun deck centered around Gourgeist and Gardevoir. The deck performed well for a time, but I must have won too much, because I soon began getting drawn against decks that were far faster and more powerful, and I couldn't keep up.
6: Kirby's Dream Land 2 System: Game Boy
Developer: HAL Laboratory
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Platformer
Date Beaten: December 19
#Ruined: Well, Kirby's in it...
I've had this one sitting around for quite a while, and only now did I finally finish it off. This is one of the three slow-paced puzzly Kirby games, alongside KDL3 and K64. All three games are less focused on the fast-paced action that Super Star, Adventure, Squeak Squad, and others popularized in favor of some tricky platform/enemy bits mixed with difficult "how do I get 100%" puzzles. If all you want to do is finish the game, though, it's not too bad. There are some surprisingly tough parts but the game is very generous with extra lives to make the going easier.
This game is notable for introducing Kirby's animal friends, who he can ride on. Combining different powers with different partners yields different results. This gimmick was expanded on in KDL3 when more partners were added, then replaced with Kirby being able to combine two abilities by himself in K64, until the gimmick was dropped forever along with the "slow Kirby game with Dark Matter" subgenre.
5: Bare Knuckle IIISystem: Sega Genesis
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Genre: Beat-Em-Up
Date Beaten: February 5
#Ruined: Mr. X's robot double, seen in RP, is a boss fight in this game.
After ignoring the other two games in the series for far too long, Goopsbro and I decided to tackle SOR1 and SOR3 together to complete the series. But we didn't do them in order. First we played SOR2 for old time's sake. Then we tried SOR3, and lost miserably.
You see, even though SOR2 has perfect difficulty levels that cover all ranges of gaming skill, SOR3 ruined it all with its' own difficulties. Bare Knuckle III, the Japanese version of SOR3, is much easier than the American game. Basically, BKIII's "Hard" is SOR3's "Normal". So not only is everything turned up a level, but if you play on SOR3's "Easy", the game ends early with a taunting message, and you have to increase the difficulty to go further than that - meaning that you're forced to play on, at MINIMUM, BKIII's "Very Hard" difficulty level.
But it gets worse! In the American version, enemies do more damage at higher difficulties. They don't in the Japanese version. So that means SOR3's "Normal" is actually harder than BKIII's "Very Hard".
So basically, screw that noise. We played BKIII instead. We even found an English translation of it.
BKIII is a pretty good game, but the music isn't that great - which is incredibly disappointing considering the soundtrack is a huge selling point of the other games in the series. The enemy variety is good overall, but SOR2's enemies felt more... how do I word this... "sensible"? Like, in BKIII there's not much rhyme or reason to the enemy health bars - you'll see big fat guys with a tiny sliver of health fighting alongside wussy-looking mooks with lifebars twice as big as your own. It feels... off. Off the same way I said Sonic CD felt "off" compared to Sonic 2 and Sonic 3&K. Like it was made by people who knew what to do to make a Streets of Rage, but not how to smooth it out to make it truly great.
4: Streets of Rage 1System: Sega Genesis
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Genre: Beat-Em-Up
Date Beaten: March 24
#Ruined: I used many elements of the SOR series in RP, but Mr. X's offer to join him during the Mr. X plot is the most obvious element pulled from the first game.
SOR1 is pretty bare bones compared to other beat-em-ups - with small graphics, crude voice samples, a tiny enemy roster, and some lazy bosses (one boss is just "that boss from a few levels ago, but now two of him" and another is a recolor of a player character). However, the game excels with nice setpieces, good pacing and design, and a marvelous soundtrack that's still excellent to this day. The game is rough in spots but not unfair, and although I never made it to Mr. X on my own, Goopsbro and I were able to pull it off without TOO much trouble when we teamed up.
Even though it's not nearly as impressive technically as SOR3, I think I had a better time with SOR1 overall. The music and superior design help a lot.
3: VindicatorsSystem: Arcade
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari
Genre: Shmup
Date Beaten: February 1
#Ruined: None
I had to toss in a surprise for the lategame, didn't I? Released in 1988, Vindicators is an awesome space shooter in which you control a tank and blow up a bunch of enemy space stations. The game is, as I've said of so many others on this list, a toughie - but doable. It's also much longer than a game without a save system should be, but you can skip levels in certain situations, and this is definitely recommended.
It's pretty much your standard tank shooting game, sort of a proto- Assault Heroes, but it's a lot of fun. The player must search the level for a key and use this key to get to the exit, collecting fuel along the way to keep your tank healthy. When you die, you start back at the beginning of the stage you died at, so you have to be able to get through a stage in one go, but every time you finish one, that's a checkpoint. The levels are short, too, it's just that there's a lot of them. You also collect stars. Between levels, you can use your stars to buy upgrades for your tank, which you will need to succeed. Stars are also how you skip levels - you can buy passage to later levels when completing a world.
I tried to beat Vindicators over a decade ago and was stymied by an area I couldn't figure out how to progress past. That issue never came up this time, thankfully, and I'm happy I was able to finally take down this old opponent.
2: Pokemon Omega RubySystem: 3DS
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: RPG
Date Beaten: January 5
#Ruined: Not much specific to this entry, but we did have Courtney appear in RP to be Matt's Neo Kobber, and I would have used her myself if Matt had been a significant character earlier in Season 5.
Nope, not awarding number one to a 3DS RPG again. Omega Ruby does a lot of things right and makes some interesting additions to the series, but it also made a few missteps and I don't feel quite right giving the top spot to a remake, even if it's a good one.
So, things OR does right! They added a ton of Pokemon to catch including many old legends, making it easier than ever to complete your Pokedex even if you can't play Pokemon games older than XY. You can fly to specific routes now, which is one of those things that was so simple to add and yet helps so much. More Mega Evolutions were introduced, many of them for Pokemon that needed the help. There's also additional content in the form of the Delta Episode, that basically exists to work in some elements of Emerald and to explain Rayquaza's Mega form, as well as allow for a previously-event-only Pokemon to finally be captured in a legit, non-event way, which was a FANTASTIC idea. I also applaud the change to the Safari Zone - it's now just an extra route to catch Pokemon on, since the "Safari Game" from gens 1, 3, and 4 was never, ever fun, it was just luck-based time-wasting.
OR still commits the series trademark sin, however: it takes away things from previous games. Namely, we lost the ability to customize the player character. Considering that the player character has literally no personality or lines EVER, it doesn't seem like such a bad thing to allow them to be customized by the player, and I was hoping for more custom options in future installments, but its' abrupt removal makes me think that it's never coming back (except in whatever the next Kalos game with the new Zygarde forms is). I also disliked how much of a pushover the evil team admins are - I would have given them larger teams and a more menacing remix of the normal evil team theme. Courtney's only Pokemon being a Camerupt that faints in one hit is not impressive. In general I think the "boss" characters should all have big teams - even if the Pokemon on said teams aren't very strong, making the fight bigger gives it a more bossy feel.
1: Robot Arena 2System: PC
Developer: Gabriel Entertainment
Publisher: Infogrames
Genre: Vehicle Combat
Date Beaten: September 2
#Ruined: My minor villain Skinner Box was deliberately designed to be possible to recreate in Robot Arena 2. He's not very useful, though.
Let's be real here: Pokemon Omega Ruby is a better game overall than Robot Arena 2. But! I wanted to give due respect to this humble vidya for giving me so much play time and entertainment, so I awarded it the top spot. Also, I hold Pokemon to a high standard - it needs to be addressing series issues at this point, and if it makes mistakes, I'll point them out. Even if it's ultimately just nitpicking.
I first tried Robot Arena 2 years ago and wasn't impressed, declaring that it was "too hard" to make a working robot. However, I spent some time experimenting this year and figured out how it works, and it's really less complicated than I thought, though still not wholly intuitive. And the freedom it affords lets you make a much wider and more interesting variety of robots than the limited choices in Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction.
RA2 plays similarly to AoD, but it has a better engine and physics system (self-righting isn't a one-in-a-hundred miracle, for instance). Your robot is pitted against up to three others in one of several arenas and must either destroy them, immobilize them, or acquire more points than them. Points are used in place of judge's decisions, and you get points with every successful attack. The better the attack, the more damage it does and the more points you earn. Unfortunately this system is unfair to flippers - because flipping wedges don't score points, flippers are at a big disadvantage. However, you can use the flexible robot builder to get around this by putting weapons on your flipper and dealing damage that way.
I had a ton of fun with this game. I was initially complete shit at building, but with time, experimenting, and looking at premade robots, I began figuring things out, and soon I was able to build robots that could easily defeat every opponent in the game. Looking for more, I found bonus content packs that add much more dangerous enemies and all sorts of goofy overpowered weapons and parts, and the fun began all over again as I missed around with ridiculous ideas like:
* Sith Lord, a small lightweight robot that uses high-speed spinning laser blades capable of killing an opponent in seconds - if Sith Lord can get to a vulnerable spot
* Sanic, a box with monster truck wheels that moves so quickly it often destroys itself or clips out of the arena
* Nuclear Disaster, a robot with googly eyes that uses nuclear waste barrels for wheels and swings around a fish on a pole as a weapon
There's not a lot to do. There are glitches, and sometimes the game crashes for no obvious reason. The graphics and sounds are nothing special. But this old game is being given away as freeware now - I didn't even pirate it - and it brought me hours and hours of goofy entertainment. I'm considering it worthy of my top spot this year - but I will make sure to emphasize that Omega Ruby is a close second, and did a lot right!
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GB's Game of the Year 2013: Pokemon Y (3DS)
GB's Game of the Year 2014: Bravely Default (3DS)
GB's Game of the Year 2015: Robot Arena 2 (PC)
Maybe OR would have won in a world where I didn't already name two 3DS games my favorite the last two years, but since this "award" doesn't really mean anything, why not have a little variety? :V
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