Planet Bob

Whoa! ;)

 

I'm pretty sure most of you remember this scene here from "Dawn of the Dead":

 

That's one of the few battles the "Quick" combat couldn't win tonight, so I had to do them 30 zombies all by myself! After half my party was slaughtered, I got them (albeit slowly) by barricading in this building. I had two fighters guarding the exits and two priests that would both heal the fighters and turn the zombies (and a few ghouls)!

 

Seems to be a very good tactic against undead enemies, in case you ever try playing this game

 

Other than that I visited another dungeon tonight, the "Old Thieves' Guild". Not much in there it seemed, besides an "Emerald key". I've heard a rumour about this one in a tavern, so I'm sure it will proove useful later on!

There wasn't much to report yesterday, except maybe the cleaning of yet another dungeon called Gozaroths Mansion.

 

Playing today was totally dreadful. When entering the final dungeon, I kinda hit a brick wall. The enemies made such an incredible jump in difficulty, they had me slaughtered immediately with no idea of a chance.

 

I tried a couple of times, but then gave up and went leveling up instead. For over 2 hours I did nothing but running aroud and killing everything in "Quick" combat, greatly improving both my party members and their equipment.

 

Last action today was then testing my party in the final dungeon again and BAMM! Same result, almost sudden death!

 

Very frustrating. Made me decide to bail out of this game after "Playing..." it the 5th day.

 

Meta Thought for a rule for this series of articles: If I don't finish a game within 5 days, I will make a descission wether I will continue or not.

 

Overall I don't think this has aged too well. The story bits are too thin, the game is needlesly complicated for most things, using more keys than the average flight-simulator, the graphics are horrible and music is non-existant.

 

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see the "Faery Tale Adventure", another top-down rpg, but first it will continue with yet another adventure.

I'd be interested in your take on The Faery Tale Adventure; I've been spending the last few weeks trying to gather information on Genesis games so I can make some better buying decisions.

 

I've found that gamerankings.com is absolutely essential for buying modern games; individual reviews are almost worthless, but when you average a bunch together you can get a much better feel for whether a game is worth buying or not.

 

But anyway, no such beast exists for pre-N64/PlayStation systems, sadly.

 

The one thing I don't understand is that everyone thinks Strider is the bee's knees, so I dropped $5 and bought it a few weeks ago, and absolutely thought it stunk after 30 minutes of play. Very pretty, large graphics and looks like an accurate port of the coin-op, but the choppy animation blows and the control wasn't great. Maybe the coin-op just wasn't as good as I remember - I'm going to give it another chance one of these days.

I'd be interested in your take on The Faery Tale Adventure; I've been spending the last few weeks trying to gather information on Genesis games so I can make some better buying decisions.

 

Fine, I'll play the Genesis version then

 

I've found that gamerankings.com is absolutely essential for buying modern games; individual reviews are almost worthless, but when you average a bunch together you can get a much better feel for whether a game is worth buying or not.

 

But anyway, no such beast exists for pre-N64/PlayStation systems, sadly.

 

Using emulation here for those

 

More serious, sooner or later will mobygames fill this gap. They already have a ranking system ready and people are already entering more and more old magazine reviews into the database.

 

THe Strider entry has 5 magazine ratings for the Genny for a random example:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/genesis/strider

 

The one thing I don't understand is that everyone thinks Strider is the bee's knees

 

Being asked I'd rave about it as well, though it's been like 15 years since I last played it. I absolutely loved it back in the day, but maybe it hasn't aged that well