hylian_elf wrote:Elf game, you say?
its age in a few ways. I wouldn't call it clunky exactly. As the controls and movement are designed around you piloting a giant hulking mech and it doesn't ask more of you than your character can give. But it does become quite hard to dodge enemy gunfire so your health bar can get depleted simply by progressing. Quite difficult towards the final third and avoiding death is mostly keeping your shield up and squeezing off shots. So progress can be a bit slow. The final level (a long trawl over flat ground) is really bad for this. The first half (which is about where my original progress ended) isChief: Monkey, are you there?
Monkey: Hello?
Monkey: This is Monkey.
Chief: I need to interrupt what you're doing so I can give some long, text-based story stuff.
Monkey: OK.
Chief: I should warn you these can come at any point. Start of the level, in the middle of you being surrounded by three or four enemies and you're mid-jump, before, during and after a boss fight. Just whenever I feel like it. Everything will pause so I can do basically nothing other than tell you to keep walking left to right or keep shooting stuff. OK?
Monkey: Sounds annoying.
Chief: Yeah it will be.
Monkey: ...
Chief: Alright. Carry on.
great fun though. Varied and intense and not too punishing, with the sort of space battles and situations that didn't exist anywhere else. Asteroid belts, scrolling shooter bits, a boss fight as you free fall through the atmosphere and then continues in the wreckage from the space ship back on Earth. But it gets tough and was not a game I completed so much as spammed to death with save states until it eventually relented and showed me the credits. Up in the top tier in the 90s, slipping slightly now but still impressing.Chief: Wait!
Monkey: Huh?
Chief: I just remembered something.
Monkey: Right.
Chief: Do you want me to tell you?
Monkey: Do I have a choice?
Chief: No.
Monkey:...
Monkey: Well fucking go on then. Jesus.
Chief: In the mid 90s, anime was red-hot and you loved it. The graphics, soundtrack and world-building of this game were so advanced you thought it must have been based on a real anime that hadn't reached the UK. Remember that?
Monkey: Yeah.
Chief: And you actually loved these text bits as part of the story-telling the game was doing. So although they're clumsily implemented by today's standards, they could actually build the tension and convey the wider context you were operating in. The levels aren't dynamic or anything but when a giant mech bursts on the scene and everyone on comms shits it, that was properly good wasn't it? It actually feels like there's a war unfolding around you in a way that no other 16-bit action shooter thing could do.
Monkey: Yeah I know. That's why I've typed it in this tedious jokey format.
Chief: OK then.
Chief: Carry on.
hylian_elf wrote:You played it even though you decided against it?
Moot_Geeza wrote:YES.
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