Now, I’ve got a lot of love for the Shin Megami Tensei series. One of the things that doesn’t get talked about a lot, however, are the totally awesome Game Over sequences. It’s better that they’re impressive, I think, because you’ll be seeing them a lot since the strength/weakness balance in these games is insane.
I don’t have that much to say about these, but here’s some screenshots and an explanation anyway. Some of the screenshots are a little blurry, I apologize.
Double Switch is the spiritual successor to Digital Pictures’ other (sexier) FMV game, Night Trap. Like most FMV games, Double Switch is a good idea poorly executed. You and a rather sassy kid are trapped in a mansion/apartment building, besieged by mobsters. Armed with a surveillance system and rooms full of traps, you must protect the residents by dropping the thugs into pits, swinging things into them, etc. Looking at the game’s components singly, it all seems pretty cool: Using the surveillance system is novel. The mansion is large and full of sarcophagi, stone statues, and other weird décor. The characters are spunky, including a cute girl reporter, an old woman dressed in slinky Egyptian pajamas, and a band that you can watch rock out whenever you want. And there are lots of scenes to see, which add up, more or less, to a fun conspiracy-type plot about an Egyptian curse.
Now, the first thing you will likely notice about this game is that it has horrible art. This is true. But considering it’s a sim/resource management game, you won’t be paying much attention to that after awhile since you’ll be too busy crunching numbers. If you don’t like to crunch numbers and manage resources, you will not like this game, because that is literally all that is going on.
The hardest RPG I’ve ever played, Dungeon Magic (the NES one), and the easiest, Knight Quest, were both made by Taito. Knight Quest is a frothy little RPG that even Wanda could beat (that’s unfair actually, she beat Persona, which looks pretty cruel). Usually I’m all about unforgiving difficulty, but there is something comfortable about Knight Quest that rubs me the right way.
Battlemaster is a real-time squad-based strategy game (with some RPG touches) that is balls hard in every way. Your troops are always outnumbered, underpowered, and at the mercy of killer traps. The mechanics are opaque, the puzzles are obscure, the controls are terrible, and it’s is exhaustingly long. It’s the perfect test of your patience and tactical nads.
wandaelektrix
willyelektrix
Last Human Family 