In case you're some weirdo that never saw it, Cardcaptor Sakura was one of the best cartoons of the late 90s, and is still one of the all-time best magical girl shows. There's also a fair few games based on it, none of which were released in English (to my knowledge), which is pretty strange, as I remember the show being really popular over here in its day.
Of the two I've played (the other one being Clow Card Magic for the Playstation), this is the best. It's set during season 2 of the tv show, when Sakura was turning the Clow Cards into Sakura Cards. Each episode of the show is a stage in the game (except some, which are just cutscenes), and each stage plays differently.
Generally, you'll have to either protect something until a timer runs out, or find something before a timer runs out. There are a few other kinds of stage too, but they all last roughly a minute.
Most of the games are pretty fun, though none are anything special. The main attraction is the graphics: bucking the usual trend for licenced GBA games (and GBA games in general) for having disgusting pre-rendered sprites by having nice colourful graphics with chunky sprites and detailed backgrounds.
Although most of the game is pretty easy, i gave up on it after about 15 or 20 stages when it gave me one of those sliding picture puzzles to solve. Those are never anything other than boring and frustrating.
This is a short post, but I'll do a better one soon, I promise.
Showing posts with label game boy advance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game boy advance. Show all posts
Saturday, 3 November 2012
Sunday, 8 April 2012
Drome Racers (GBA)

This game is a Lego licenced game! This is worth mentioning, because other than a lego logo at the start, you'd never know otherwise. There's no nice friendly lego men like you see in most lego games, just vaguely futuristic-looking cars going really fast.
The coolest and most obviou gimmick this game has is that it uses polygons for the track, rather than the usual mode 7-looking style that most GBA racing games go for. It makes the game look a lot like Virtua Racing, which is kind of funny, since people in the olden days would often joke about how SEGA Model 1 games looked like everything in them was made of Lego! The cars, unfortunately, aren't made of polygons, using the "ugly
blobby pre-rendered sprite" style that was inexplicably popular on the GBA, especially for licenced games. The music is worth mentioning too, having a nice Amiga/C64-esque sound to it.You might think I'm going on about the graphics for so long to put off talking about the game, but that's not true! I just really like this game's graphics. Luckily, the game is actually fun to play, too! There are four championships of escalating difficulty, though you only start with the easiest, and unlock the rest one at a time. Most people
would probably play them in that order, but why force them to like that? Some people might want to go straight for the normal difficulty, and a few might even want to go straight to hard! Tsk.The difficulty curve is almost perfect, except for one problem. The problem being that the AI cars will seemingly have different abilities in each race, meaning that as long as you come in first at least once in a championship, you'll probably win it, since the AI players have so few points because they finish in a completely different place each time. If the AI teams had different distinct skill levels, so there was always one or two of them that were near equal to you from race to race, I think that would have been a great improvement.
The actual racing is pretty fun, and the game mov
es nice and smoothly, too. There are power-ups, in this game, of two kinds: weapons and boosts. They're assigned to different buttons, so you can carry one of each, which is nice. The weapons are the usual racing game weapons: missile, mine, homing missile, etc. They don't really affect the outcome of the race compared to weapons in most racing games that have them. The game probably would have been slightly better had they been left out, even.The boosts, however are very important. There are two kinds: the kind that you can store (only one at a time, though) and use whenever you like, and the kind that are used as soon as you drive over them. Collecting and using the boosts strategically isn't 100% vital to winning, but you'll have a hard time doing so otherwise. It's a good idea to get the instant boosts as much as possible, and to use your stored boosts on every straight. Two other boost-related points: they seem to last a little longer if you can avoid bumping into things, so do that, and if you're boosting when
you go over a hill, you'll soar through the air, which looks and feels really cool.Overall, this game is great, despite the complete lack of tension in the championships.
Oh, and there are also drag races to decide which place you'll start in before each race, but they're pointless, since it's pretty easy to just charge straight into first once the race begins, anyway. And I forgot to mention the completely hateful slippy-slidy ice tracks that appear a lot later in the game. Boo.
Friday, 24 February 2012
Genseishin Justirisers Souchaku Chikyuu no Senshitachi (GBA)
Gen Sei Shin Justirisers is a TV show. I even saw a few episodes of it, years ago, when I first started watching fansubbed tokusatsu shows, and would download every show I could find. I can't really remember many specific details about the show though, other than being like a slightly more seriously-toned version of Super Sentai, with slightly lower budgets.THis is a game of it. It's a simple beat em up, you can pick any of the three Justirisers: Riser Glen (red, has a sword), Riser Kageri (blue, has a katar-like weapon and is the token girl) and Riser Gant (black, has a gun), you get to choose your character at the start of each stage. While you're playing, you can choose between fighting with your fists or with your character's weapon. There's no reaason not to use the weapon at all times
, though. Especially if you're playing as Gant, obviously.You can also jump, do a sliding attack across the ground, and use a special attack. The special attack is powered by an "energy" bar underneath your health bar, but there's plenty of items to top that bar up, and the game's so easy, the only use you're likely get out of you special attacks will be as a way to kill the bosses more easily.
The game shares some similarities with the Playstation Super Sentai games (which I should really get around to, some day), in that it splits the action between fighting as the heroes themselves against human-scale jobber enemies, and piloting a giant robot against giant enemies. The giant robot fights aren't very interesting, though: you tap the B button to build up a power bar until it's full a few times, then press A t
o unleash an attack (there are four attacks, you get the more powerful attacks by filling the power bar more times). In theory, there is an elemen of risk involved in these fights, as the more time you spend building up power, the more likely the enemy monster will attack. Unfortunately, they rarely do, and you can just keep charging up and firing your most powerful attack until the enemy dies.The game is okay to play, it's not horribly broken and it doesn't have any awful chore-like grinding or anything like that, either. It's just absurdly easy. It was probably made for 10 year old boys, but that's hardly an excuse for this level
of feebleness. It's a little more than an hour long from start to finish, and I'm fairly sure I didn't lose a single life along the way, and as I've mentioned before, I'm not really very good at games.
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