Tag: Retro

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Retro Monday – Tomb Raider: Curse of the Sword

Another week in which I get a game I know nothing about,  Tomb Raider: Curse of the Sword was released in 2001 on the Game Boy Color and was Developed by Core Design and published by Eidos, it’s also a sequel to Tomb Raider on the GBC.

Where do I begin with this? It’s hard to say because I disliked pretty much everything about it. Let’s talk visuals. The visuals in the game to me are pretty bland when it comes to the backgrounds and the like, the sprites while not the prettiest have great animations, Lara is really fluid and the animation of her hitting a wall and bouncing off and hitting the floor is great – but there wasn’t much to look at elsewhere.

The sound wasn’t much better. It starts off with this pretty good tune in the title sequence and then you have a cut scene with some more appropriate music, then you get to the level and no music, you just get sound effects of Lara running and that’s about it, and the sound effects of her running aren’t great either.

The gameplay to me was pretty boring, it’s a side-scrolling platformer where the controls are unbelievably awkward. You press up to jump and half the time you’ll jump forward instead of straight up. which can lead to you jumping off a platform, or you’ll run to jump a gap press up and boom, you didn’t jump and just fell to your death. What’s also odd is if you jump forward, even if you don’t press up again, but hold forward you keep hopping forward like some deranged frog. Honestly, I looked at reviews and see it got 7.5s and 9s and so on back in the day. Was gaming that bad back then that trash like this got highly rated? Or is it the case the game improves in the later stages? After what I played I’m not willing to find out if the latter is the case. A game needs to start off at least good/interesting to keep someone entertained to get to the best parts and sadly Tomb Rader: Curse of the Sword completely failed to do so.

Verdict: Avoid.

Join Pedz for Retro Monday on GRcade’s Twitch channel every week, and vote on what he plays next on GRcade

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Retro Monday – Descent

 

This week will be no review for Descent. I, unfortunately, didn’t get to play it myself due to my better half accidentally spilling coffee over my mouse and keyboard breaking both. Luckily Cheeky Devlin was able to step in and take over for the stream, so while there’s no review there is a stream that you can watch and enjoy.

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Retro Monday – Michael Jordon: Chaos in the Windy City

Michael Jordon: Chaos in the Windy City, was a Super Nintendo Entertainment System game that came out in 1994 and was made by Electronic Arts and as usual in the EU it came out in 1995 and was published by Ocean.

Yet again it’s a Retro Monday where the game in question I haven’t played, honestly, I haven’t even heard of it until it was put in the thread for people to vote on. MJ: CitWC is an action-platformer where you take the role of the titular basketball star and Make your way through varying levels trying to rescue your teammates who have been abducted by the Evil Dr. Max Cranium, to what ends I don’t know. I only got to the 3rd part of the Dungeon levels, so didn’t get very far,  but I did get the gist of the game from my brief time with it.

You run and jump through stages, with a basketball taking out the enemies, which are zombies, spiders and other things. Did I mention that the Zombies heads have been replaced with basketballs? It’s a cool twist with the zombies taking their ball heads off and throwing them at you. There are other cool touches like baskets being throughout the levels that you can slam dunk your ball into that will do various things like, clear the enemies, give you coins, or power-ups. Talking power-up’s, they seem to be different types of balls, you can get ones that home in on enemies, or split into 3 balls, or even a bowling ball which seems to kill enemies in 1 hit. The game is actually pretty decent, it’s not a bad game at all, but where I was enjoying it at first, by the time my hour was up, I had grown bored of the game. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, but something didn’t quite mesh right. It has the makings of a good platformer, but the levels I played were a little bland in their design.

The levels and sprites all look OK, they’re neither good nor bad, and Michaels animation seems fine to me. The problem is I didn’t get to get out of the one area, so I don’t know how much variety there is in the visuals being as I saw only the dank looking dungeon area. Musically, the game is ok, it does its job, but is ultimately forgettable and a little tiresome after some time. I thnk it’d be worth looking into the game, and maybe with more varied later stages, my interest would come back.

Verdict: Neutral.