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Nov 09, 2015
Another Terrible Fighting Game That Should Be Knocked-Out!
0 of 3 found this helpful Cosmic Carnage SEGA 32X Game Review
A prison ship in deep space is in trouble. The wretched convicts onboard are loose and have taken over the vessel. Disaster strikes and the ship must be abandoned, but only a single escape pod remains. Who will occupy this galactic life raft? A fighting tournament is hastily assembled to determine the sole survivor of the doomed ship. Well, it's certainly no sillier than the narratives that drive most fighting games, is it?
Cosmic Carnage is an original fighter for the SEGA 32X, designed to take advantage of the extra power provided to the Genesis by the add-on, although you will be hard-pressed to really spot any technological wow in the seven minutes you'll play before jettisoning it from your console. The game is slow and clunky; it's hard to imagine that SEGA also made games like Virtua Fighter and Eternal Champions after suffering a few hits from Cosmic Carnage.
The cast of alien convicts is perhaps the most interesting thing about the entire production. You have a colorful motley crew that includes a space samurai, an alien gorilla-bot, a mantis, and a half-woman/half-robo-snake that will likely remind you of Golobulus from G.I. Joe: The Movie (when he's out of his floating pod, naturally). Before each round, you can make slight adjustments to your fighter by adding armor, but the more you add, the slower your warrior. It's actually kind of cool to have customization in a fighter, but Cosmic Carnage's is so shallow it feels like an afterthought. The fighters are made up of individual pieces that move independently. This feature is supposed to make the fighters move naturally, but it looks strange to see just pieces of the body move while others remain still.
The fighters are large, colorful, and decently detailed. But SEGA does a weird thing with them. To prove the 32X can scale, pieces of the sprites will come toward the camera to fudge some sort of 3D effect. For example, the snake has a tail whip that flashes into the camera as it comes around to slap the other fighter. When the tail comes toward the screen, it gets big and blocky. The detail is washed out. When you beat on a rival enough to remove armor, it also flies toward the camera as it fall off-screen. The camera will often zoom into the action when fighters get close and grapple, too, and the same fuzzy/blocky effect kicks in again. It doesn't look good at all but the game uses it over and over. And when it does happen, the game often chugs
Cosmic Carnage's actual fighting engine is very weak. There are basic punch and kick attacks as well as special moves and grapples. But because of the fighters' independent pieces, the timing seems all off. Hitting the tail attack with the snake, as an example, seems to take a moment to actually register -- and then you have to factor in time for the animation. Naturally, a computer rival does not need to worry about this kind of stuff and can pretty much block and counter without hindrance. And so the game feels cheap. You can win some by mashing buttons or win others by loading up on armor and blocking excessively. Some matches it's just luck. Rarely does a victory ever feel like the result of skill.
Cosmic Carnage may be a 32X exclusive, but it does nothing to justify the add-on. The fighting is lame and the visuals purposefully turn ugly. Only the general concept is remotely intriguing and some of the fighter models look good (when viewed in the character select screen). The rest of the game is bad and should be avoided. Games like this are one of the reasons the 32X failed. And after playing Cosmic Carnage, it's easy to see why.
Jan 21, 2016
Flip your tiles, be bored, win the game.
Yes, another Maj-Jonng game. But I review as I see them!
The ancient fascination of Maj-Jonng meets the cutting edge of video games in the most captivating strategy game to challenge the Western world - Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye. Calculate your moves! Beware the art of maneuver. An intricate ever-changing layout of ancient tiles marked with mysteriously eye-catching designs challenges your every move. Think before you make your move - it could be your last. Clear the board! Snap off matching pairs until the board is empty. Looks simple enough... but looks can be deceiving. The next tile you need may be buried five deep. Choose from 13 deceptively simple tile formations and 9 unshakably addictive tile sets with surprising animation, exciting sounds and enchanting musical themes. Master the basics, and then confront the ultimate challenge: Dragon's Eye!
Nov 09, 2015
Zombies is better than regular 'Deadheads!
Zombies Ate My Neighbors Sega Genesis Review
Zombies Ate My Neighbors. This LucasArts-developed co-op run-and-gun is a cult classic that first arrived on the SNES and Genesis back in 1993. At the time, it wasn't particularly well received -- but its audience has grown considerably over the years, to the point where this game has been one of the most requested additions to the VC selection since even before the Wii launch. We were asking for it over three years ago ourselves. And now, it's finally here.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors is a love letter to B-grade horror films. It's filled with all sorts of goofy monsters and second-fiddle villains, and the whole thing's played more for laughs than scares -- you'll come up against shambling zombies, of course, but also alien pod people, knife-throwing munchkins, madmen with chainsaws and colossal, 20-foot-tall babies. It's quite a collection.
And all the while your job is to outrun each and every one of these enemies and be the first to reach the titular neighbors, a set of helpless non-player characters strewn throughout each level that you rescue from a terrible, brain-eating death by simply running up and touching them. Each level in Zombies Ate My Neighbors, then, plays out a bit like an action game and a bit like a scavenger hunt -- you're blasting baddies to bits all over the place, but you're also scouring the map from top to bottom and side to side at the same time, looking in every little corner for those hidden, helpless neighbors.
Old Mr. Voorhees always gets a little over-zealous with his gardening next door. Zombies Ate My Neighbors is well regarded for several reasons, so I can do a quick run-down of the high points. First, it includes support for two-player cooperative play. Having you and a buddy both on screen at the same time, working together to take on the endless amount of undead, is a lot of fun -- the run-and-gun genre in particular always seems to work better when friends can play together.
Second, the arsenal of items available here is unparalleled in variety. Your main weapon is a squirt gun filled with holy water, which is already wacky enough. But then you get exploding soda cans, rotten tomatoes, popsicles, plates and cutlery, a weed-whacker and a bazooka to use in creaming the creepy corpses -- and there's more where that came from. Medical kits restore your health, keys open locked doors, and there are even inflatable clowns that you can deploy as decoys, to get enemies chasing after you to stop and attack the bouncing Bozo instead.
And, last, the presentation here is just spot-on. The B-movie vibe is re-created wonderfully, the look and animation is done very well and the soundtrack is filled with impact right from the start.
So, overall, an incredibly solid experience -- and one that certainly deserves its cult classic status.
Now, let's pause here for just a second. The text you're reading right now wasn't a part of the original published review for Zombies Ate My Neighbors -- I'm adding this after the fact, because an error was brought to my attention after the first version went live. I originally shifted gears, at this point, to talk about some of the game's negative aspects. But, it's been pointed out to me, my criticisms weren't fully informed.
I first complained about the game's diminishing neighbor count. Because, in the game, you start off with 10 neighbors to save in Level 1 -- but if you don't manage to save them all then your total count will decrease. So you could start Level 2 with only 9 people to save. Then 8, then 7, then all the way down -- you could find yourself halfway through the game, but with only one single neighbor left to locate in each level. I thought this was a bit unfair, because it made the game nearly impossible to finish past that point -- you'd almost certainly be forced to start over from the beginning. It was brought to my attention, though, that you can actually win back lost neighbors. If you earn a high enough score in any given level, the game will reward you with a bonus neighbor -- replacing one of those you might have previously lost. In this way, you can work that total neighbor count all the way back up to the maximum of 10. A pretty reasonable counter for what I thought was a low point of the design.
Second, I complained that the very nature of hunting down the hidden neighbors could be frustrating -- that there was no way to know where the neighbors are to be saved without just walking around the entire level and stumbling across them. Well, I was wrong about that too. The game has a radar built in (it just needs to be toggled on, since it's turned off by default) and it can help you get a fix on the locations of the remaining, yet-to-be-rescued civilians. The radar isn't a perfect solution, since it doesn't display the entire level at once -- so there's still a bit of roaming around required. But it is a solution, rendering my original complaint pretty moot.