Tag: Nintendo

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The GRcade Twitchcast Episode 28 – Catching up and Checking In!

This week the hosts of The GRcade Twitchcast are Doom Spoon, Pedz and Victor Mildew.

This is the first Twitchcast in a while and the idea was to have a shorter podcast and just have a catch-up.

The guys start off talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons. What’s discussed is how often they play it, if they’ve stopped, what he game is like for them, what hole it fills in their gaming life compared to other games and simply if they like it.

Moving on from Animal Crossing and the discussion turns to Half-Life: Alyx, where Victor explains how the gameplay and also lets us knows how thoughts about the game in how good it is, how he feels it would be without VR and just his general views on its general quality.

After that talk turns to puzzle games, where The Witness is briefly mentioned before it turns to chat about Picross S4 and the Picross series in general and how there are just certain games whether you like games or not that partners just seem to really enjoy playing together.

Talk turns a little more serious with some talk about the Corona Virus. The chat is more about how everyone is coping with the isolation or, having to work in a place where getting the virus could have some serious impacts. The guys say that there is a thread on GRcade that if you need to chat about the impact that the isolation on you mentally then you should absolutely go there and talk, talking can really help when emotions are running high or mental wellbeing is low, so please if you need to come and talk in the ‘Depression, Anxiety, or other Mental Health Conditions’  thread.  There are also helplines to call if you need to talk to somebody to help you through this time. a quick google search will bring up tons of results for your area and beyond.

If you would like to listen to the audio file only: Click!

This is a community podcast streamed live to Twitch. The community is the video games forum GRcade. Why not check out the forum and get involved with the discussion about Games + Stuff?

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SNES Game Review 47: Street Fighter 2 Turbo

Sports games were no strangers to the regular update system, but there was a time when they were pretty much the only thing to receive this kind of treatment, sure there would be sequels to games in every genre but the following game will always be accused of being the game which brought on the situation we now find ourselves in, the situation of having improved versions of games, DLC ecetera, I am of course talking about Street Fighter 2 turbo.

Street fighter 2 turbo basically took the world warrior, increased the speed, let you play as the boss characters and had some slight balancing related changes, it wasn’t a whole new game it was simply an improved version of the original with a few bells and whistles tied on to it. No one really minded what it was because well an improved version of one of the greatest games of a genre who is going to complain about that? It is important to note though that while some of us moan now about DLC and about paying Extra to add a few new characters back then plenty of people brought Street Fighter 2 turbo for 40quid or even more if they were over excited and importing it.
I was young so importing it or buying one of the imports that was being sold in some of the gaming shops near me for figures around 80quid was out of the question. I didn’t expect to get it for a long time, one of the fortunate parts of both of my brothers being older than me though was that sometimes one of them would get something I wanted. I walked in one of the local games shops with my brother and they ran a system where games were kept in different sections in relation to their worth.. Now someone must have been looking at a Japanese copy of turbo and put it in the wrong section because it was in a section for 20quid games. The shop owner ran a policy where you could swap any game of yours for one of the shops games for 3quid if they were worth the same. The store owner was out and his wife was running the store and so my brother swapped some old game he had for Japanese Turbo for 3quid.
We went home and played the living heck out of it, for at least 2 weeks my house became the place to be, friends of mine and friends of his kept popping round to challenge one of us. I owned world warrior at the time and although Turbo was great I couldn’t help but think that it was in no way worth the massive amounts people were paying for it. It hadn’t moved on enough from World Warrior but then again it wasn’t a sequel was it. I think I enjoyed the attention and the way it brought everyone together almost more than the game. It did become the new version played at every party well at least until Super street fighter 2
As a side note I remember a special pad being made a pad which had buttons which could with 1 press cause your characters to do there special moves, I didnt need one of these as I was very good at the game but the whole idea fascinated me, they were also programmable so you could programme combo’s into a single button press. I messed around with this pad no end seeing what I could do with it not just on Street fighter 2 but on any other game. I did use the pad for training purposes though. There was a friend of mine who would always be Ken and would spam fireballs he had gotten it down to a fine art, he could do them so fast it would seem inhuman. He was a great person but he began to get a little too cocky with it and it started running friendly get togethers as he would fireball so much that no one seemed able to beat him, no matter how much you dodged or blocked it would get you in the end. So I got my brother to use the street cheater pad against me till I could perform fireballs at insane speed. Then I was ready it was Ken against Ken and I taught him a lesson about how boring fireball spamming can get… this in itself put me off street fighter for a little bit though.
I could talk about the graphics, the sound the characters but I did it all when I talked about world warrior, all I would be saying is a little better , a little faster, the same ohhh and you can play as the bosses. I gave world Warrior 8 out of 10 and yes this is better but it’s only just better really so I’d Give it 8.5 out of 10.
If you do decide you want this version and on cartridge then it will set you back around £10 which is well worth it but again you might want to stop and consider all of your options first (If you own a ps3 or xbox 360 then for £15 to £20 you can get the Ultra version of Street Fighter 4).  This game is also available on the Wii U as a download but then so is Street fighter alpha 2, a much latter street fighter game with more characters and a lot harder and costlier to track down on the SNES … as the price is the same if you want a downloadable street fighter for your Nintendo system that is the one I would go for.
Was this game the start of a dangerous trend though?
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SNES Game 43: SimCity

The Super Nintendo version of Sim City was the first console game in the Sim City Series, it was also apparently a launch title for the system. I have to admit though I never saw it in the early days, in fact I think I got it very late in the day.   It was developed by Nintendo EAD under license from Maxis and published by Nintendo (in 1990). I think the fact that Nintendo worked on it themselves shines through into the final product. This is far from a hasty cash in conversion, its a very specialized version of the game tailored towards SNES owners and it shows pretty much straight away, I know this is giving the game away early but I have to admit that this is actually my favourate version of Sim City. I fell in love with it from more or less the instant I played it.

The gameplay is similar to the PC version, but every step possible seems to have been made in order to make it easily playable with a jupad, there are also more buildings and scenarios added to the game so in a way you can consider this a sort of Sim City 1.5. There are lots of other little style based changes which the average user would not notice unless they have played both the SNES and PC versions, one example is that the buildings  present in the SNES version resemble those in Japan  as apposed to the typical North America styled ones in the PC version.
The best thing about this for me in comparison to the PC version is the adviser they have added to the game who goes by the name Dr. Wright, he is supposed to be a cartoon parody of Will Wright the creator of the Simcity Series, obviously I know that now but as a kid I never realized that, I just took him as a new cutesy fun Nintendo character and I actually wondered if he would ever turn up in anything else. He is basically there to offer you advice and to tell you things such as the population growth of your city. To add to the Nintendo related flavor Nintendo also sprinkled one of two little touches in there  the Godzilla attacks from the PC have been replaced with Bowser attacks and if you can reach a particularly high level of  growth then there is an unlock-able Mario Statue that you can place in your city .
The graphics are functional but cute, the music is a little twee but its also catchy, I have the main music from this game on my MP3 player and actually find it quiet relaxing. For those of you who haven’t played this the whole point of the game is basically to make a thriving city which grows and grows in size, but how you do this and what tax rate you set, how you choose to lay out the city all of these things are left to you. This is great as you can build a giant city have fun with it and then decide to do it all again this time setting it up in a completely different way. There are lots of different maps, you essentially put a number in and it decides a map for you, you then get to say Yes or No to this map.
In some ways this game was the 90’s equivalent of console Minecraft. I mean this in the way that you would spend your time building an impressive world which you could then show off to your friends. This is and was a great game if you had friends to share it with as you will all use the same basic game, the same basic framework but yet end up with a totally different city, to an extent your city is a reflection of yourself. One of the best things about the game was that there was very little like this on the system. If you were sick of all of the platformers, one on one beat em ups, sports games etc then this was something different something original, and for that I think it deserves a place in everyone’s SNES collection. This is pretty much the only PC to SNES conversion where I can say with utter confidence that I think the Super Nintendo version is the superior version. I am going to give it a 10 out of 10  that is how deep my love for this game is, I don’t think there is anything else really like it and I think that it is almost infinitely re-playable.
If you want to buy this game then it will cost you about £8 for a pal cart. Which I think is an absolutely brilliant price considering the fact that the enjoyment you can get out of it can be practically limitless.