Alright, time to give a little love to Comix Zone. I never played it until recently, when I found it on the Genesis Classics game I bought for Switch. I had heard of it, but not until maybe a year or so ago, in a Sega nostalgia thread. I looked at a couple youtube videos, and... neato! Your character runs around in a comic book world, jumping from panel to panel. Quite an innovative beat-em-up.

It wasn't until I sat down and actually play it that I was absolutely tackled into the ground with nostalgia. This game has an incredible 90s vibe. For god's sake, how was Sega so able to deftly capture the Cool Dude zeitgeist of that era??? This looks nothing like a cynical marketting team of clueless boomers slapping together a Poochie character.

You play an off-beat comic book artist who's equipped with sick karate moves and wise-cracks. The latter is a given, in a media landscape where every character, from commercials to movies, had inexhaustible AT-TI-TUDE!

The start up logo sets the tone of the game, with a faceless sound guy testing the mic, then singing the perfunctory "Seeegaaaaa" in a way that sounds like he's casually humming it to himself in the shower. We transition to the title screen, with our protagonist in a POW!er pose, resplendent with shades, a denim vest, fingerless gloves, blonde pony tail whipping in the breeze.



On comes the opening riffs of the soundtrack, a god damned bona fide grungy bad ass rock song. The rest of the game's music follows suit. \m/

The game makes no pretense of having a plot that makes sense (that kind of effort and sincerity would violate the Cool 90s Kids rules imo). Our hip protagonist, Sketch Turner, is a comic book artist, just chilling one night with his pet rat and drawing some wicked cool comics.





Then, BAM! Lightning strikes, and a Teddy Roosevelt goblin reaches up and pulls Sketch down into his own illustrated pages!









The rest of the game takes place as a side scroller inside the god damn comic! You traverse comic panels and fight monsters that TR draws on the spot.






The game's aesthetic is quite unique, and the concept is innovative. And I can't tell you why, but I love the hell out of this rat. Little buddy!




GAMEPLAY MECHANICS
The game is a beat-em up style. I found myself mostly mashing buttons. There are different sorta combos you can make, but there's not much rhyme or reason to using them, so I found myself just scrolling through them over and over and hoping for the best.

One thing, though. This game is fucking HARD. Like, Ghosts and Ghouls levels of hard. Fuck. I'd have never stood a chance if the Sega Classics bundle didn't let you make save states anywhere. I can't believe this is what kids had to go through back in the day (even though I was one of them). I can't imagine grueling over this for hours, repeating the same stages over and over, getting everything aligned and perfect. This is fucking tantrum fuel.

The game is quite stingy with energy and power ups. Like I had to get by with literally 1 point of health, on more than one occasion. And that's AFTER using save states and busting my ass to minimize whatever damage I incurred. You know what's really annoying? Just hitting walls takes away energy. As in, you need to bust open a door to get to the next room, but oops! Hitting it depletes your fucking life, little by little! In a game where EVERY GOD DAMN TINY SLICE OF ENERGY COUNTS! What a slap in the ass!

Oh well. Frustrations aside, I still had a mother fucking blast with this game. And its soundtrack has been added to my youtube favorites. Go play it, if you find the opportunity.

So, with Mario 35 unfortunately shut down, Nintendo needed something to keep interest up on Switch Online.

And this is what they came up with -- a new battle royale game based on another popular old game, this time Namco's Pac-Man.  This game is really quite fantastic, with extremely addictive pick up and play mechanics and some really cool twists that make it a frenetic and challenging title indeed.  I have not won yet but keep playing anyway, this is awesome stuff!  I've probably already played more of this than I ever did the disappointing Mario 35; sure it's awful that they shut it down, but I never did like it all that much ultimately, and only ended up playing 3 1/2 hours of Super Mario 35.  This one has no deadline date and is, I think, a much better game.  I mean, both games are great but if you're talking about the '80s games I would take Super Mario Bros. over Pac-Man, but for Battle Royale games it's very much the other way around.

So yeah, play this now!  This is a fantasitc Switch exclusive that's a very good reason to subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online, as Tetris 99 also is.

It will stop being sold after today!  It's not only Mario being killed on the 31st...

Insiders have revealed anonymously that Sony intends to close down their online stores across all these older systems for good very soon.  "Play" apparently has limits after all.  This is a far bigger blow to collectors than the shutdown of the DSi and Wii stores, or the original XBox "store".

MS, for their part, probably isn't closing down their store this summer thanks to their desire to go "all in" on BC for their newer systems, and that includes still selling that DLC, but rest assured the writing's on the wall for them too, somewhere down the line.

If I were you, I'd get a good long list of all the games you ever wanted to get on those systems that are digital only and get them soon, or at least snatch up all the DLC you feel is worth getting.  Rest assured that while it's just the three stores this summer, the online service as a whole is going away for them soon after.  Remeber that Sony never charged for online play on the PS3.  If they aren't selling anyything on that online storefront, then online service is getting them absolutely nothing.  For my part?  I've been working towards moving my gaming onto PC whenever I can.  Mods and support from GOG (and flat out newer hardware) has gone a long way towards making PC versions the definitive versions of pretty much every game I had previously enjoyed console versions of.  (It's surprising what a little brute force can overcome when it comes to badly ported PS3 era games like the Batman Arkham series.)  That said, remember that there are still tons of exclusives.  For my part, I intend to focus on the Vita far more than I ever did before.  I have exactly two games for that thing and I intend to change that.  I also fully intend to turn my PS3 and Vita into "homebrew machines" and hack them.  I have no reason not to once their services go down, and the Vita memory card was always a rather pathetic format.  There's new solutions that stick an SD card into the cartridge slot of the system and that's what I am going with.

I've finally decided to do a full playthrough of the latest iteration of one of my favorite games of all time, even if LTTP has edged it out a bit in recent years.  In order to do this, I went ahead and played through both the original GB version and the GBC "DX" enhanced edition in the past couple of weeks.  I'm now tackling the Switch version and can give a few early opinions.

Firstly, while the gameplay mechanics are very similar to the Gameboy original, they are tweaked in numerous ways both small and large enough that you'll notice if you're familiar with that game.  For one, it's actually 3D.  This means that little tricks like standing north of pools of water with your sword out to impale fish as they jump "up" no longer works, since they ACTUALLY jump up now.  It also means that you have to be aware of whether an enemy is airborn or not and adjust your attacks accordingly.  In short, all of these little changes actually make combat harder than before, but in a fair way.  One exception are the Peahat monsters.  Since they actually are airborn, they aren't a threat at all to Link any more when they take flight.  They just pass right over him.  It trivializes the enemy to the point where I don't even consider their existance until they land.  I think perhaps they shouldn't have made them go as high in the air so that they can still hit Link as they fly around.  Some enemies have their attack patterns tweaked as a result of the model-based rather than tile-based hit detection.  All the enemies holding shields can't just be defeated by holding out your sword and "lining up" with their head zone.  So, they have a little technique to them now.  Let them hit your shield, they'll recoil and be vulnerable and you can strike them then (or, just sneak up from behind before they noticed you're there, just like you could in the original).  Speaking of, the shield mechanic is changed just so slightly to make it harder.  Before, you could keep your shield and sword out at all times.  You can still hold up your shield and charge your sword, but if you strike something with your sword you temporarily lower your shield for a split second.  If you hold up your shield and just swing, you also briefly lower your shield.  This prevents you from just being a turtle the entire game and encourages a little more strategy and careful watching of projectiles coming your way.

Another set of changes are bosses.  I'm four bosses in and every last one has been tweaked in various ways.  The first boss for example takes FAR fewer hits and fights on a somewhat larger platform, making it far easier.  The second boss, the clown genie, is roughly the same as his DX incarnation in difficulty with the addition of an expanded hint that makes exactly what you need to do to break his bottle entirely obvious.  Yes, even more so than the hint in the DX version.  The third and forth bosses?  The trend for them seems to be making them harder than the original.  I like this, it's a clear difficulty curve that the boss fights were lacking in the original.  The slime now has to be struck specifically in the eyes in order to be split down to that thread, not just anywhere will do.  The fish boss takes far more hits to prevent just instantly finishing it off at the very start of the fight.

Now for those hints I mentioned.  No, there aren't any extra owl statues but the rest of the game seems to overload the player with far too many hints about exactly where to go or what to do.  They aren't as bad as Navi or Fi let's say, but they do come a bit more often than they ever needed to be.  I'd have appreciated it if "Hero Mode" meant keeping the hints only the original GB game gave.

About that, I adore Hero Mode.  It's unlocked at the very start, which is good in a remake.  It prevents any hearts from dropping, or fairies, or the new apples to be found in some trees like in LTTP, and it also halves Link's base defense.  For someone like me who's played this game as many times as I have, it's great for the game to actually feel like a challenge again.  The game also adds autosaves.  Note that I said it ADDS it.  Manual saving still exists which is great when you're going for a no-death run.  If you do want to heal in hero mode, find a fairy fountain or a piece of heart.  You can also find bottles in the game now which let you catch fairies.  Hero mode prevents them from appearing in the wild, but most fairy fountains also have a normal fairy floating around inside now.

Utilizing a variety of items without pausing, and mostly removing the "scrolling screen" mechanic, is a huge bonus that makes this game feel far smoother without constant interruptions.  It's THE way to play the game honestly.  No, it doesn't make the game super easy just because you can do this, especially on Hero mode.  In fact I wish they'd gone further.  The feather definitely should have had it's own dedicated button (such as RZ, which right now just does the same thing as R, shielding).

Every one of the mini-games has been overhauled, mostly for the better.  The crane mini-game uses an entirely new layout which prevents the old "this is the sweet spot" trick from working.  Mind you, there are now NEW sweet spots for you to memorize, but you have to memorize new ones for each item location now, which at least provides variety.  I love that.  Getting the claw to grip the item just right is also appreciated for just that extra bit of physics, BUT I hate one thing.  A lot of items you can get like rupees and heart pieces are pretty flat, and even if you perfectly grasp them there is a random chance it may just slide right out the open sides of the claw the moment it starts moving.  I found I had to intentionally get my grip a little "off" just to knock those flat items over at an angle so they wouldn't slide out like that.  I can USUALLY get all 5 items accurately and clear the place out now, but that little bit of unpredictability can be annoying.  The fishing pond has also been greatly expanded.  The fishing itself has more elements to keep track of to make it more engaging, and there's a lot more new challenges and kinds of "fish" to catch.  I love all that, but what I hate is how random it is when the rarer fish will even show up in the pond in the first place.  There's no control over that.  The river rapids game is a very similar only slightly tweaked layout.  I have only just reached it, so I haven't really gotten the hang of it yet, but it looks like the changes are meant to optimize two new challenge modes: a "collect as many as you can" mode, and a "racing" mode.

Dampe's dungeon building fun is well.... I'll be frank.  It's amusing the first time you mess with it, but the joy is in building the dungeons, not in actually completing one you just built and thus know all the ins and outs of.  The biggest failing of this mode is that you can't actually try anyone else's dungeons (that and other small things like not being able to control how stairs link up or what's inside each chest).  It kills it dead.  Also, Dampe fits just fine as the character who runs the place, but it's a little disappointing they couldn't come up with a brand new character and just went with a recognizable one from other Zelda games.  He sticks out because of how creative the rest of this old game's characters are, including the photo taking mouse in the DX version who's utterly missing now.  SOME of the scenes that previously involved the photographer are still in the game, but minus the photograph collecting which was pretty fun all told.  It's a shame to see content removed like that.  Don't worry, the color dungeon is still in the game, with the added bonus that it lets you change your outfit back to green if you'd prefer not to have a powerup after all.

The seashell mansion has been greatly expanded.  Not only are there a lot more seashells hidden across the island (as well as a lot more pieces of heart), there's also a lot more rewards like a "seashell tuner" you can turn on or off (I keep it off since I haven't found every new seashell yet) to find using them.  Much like the compass, all the tuner does is tell you if there's a seashell on the screen you're on, not where it is.

There are a few sections that are more open (one of the plants you had to kill to enter the swamp dungeon is now a stone, so you can actually get back inside dungeon 2 if you feel like it far earlier which is appreciated), but a few that are more closed. You can no longer get to the signpost maze with just the dash boots, you need the hookshot for reasons I don't really understand.  The item shop also hosts a rather odd restriction.  You can no longer obtain bombs at all until after you've completed the second dungeon, at which point the item shop will start selling them.  Considering the game otherwise has the exact same progression and puzzles as the original, I don't understand why they'd restrict you like this.  In particular, there is a hidden room in the first dungeon you need bombs to get inside.  It's optional, but it's nice to simply quickly purchase the shovel, then find a few bombs and get that hidden chest completed while you're in the dungeon the first time around instead of having to go back later.

That's it so far.  I'll add more to this as I go along.

Edit: And I've 100% completed the game now.  The trends mostly continue but I wanted to add a few things.

Minigames: I mostly love the expansions to the original.  They make the mini-games more than just one and done affairs and motivate you to return.  Unlike say The Completionist I actually really like fishing in Zelda games.  What I don't like is waiting for a random fish I'm looking for to spawn and reloading a save over and over until it does.  If there was a way to buy bait and toss certain kinds into the pond to attract specific ones to replace the ones you fish out, that would have been great.  The river rapids game is far better, now that I understand why the map was altered a bit.  It was to make use of the hookshot which is now utterly critical to navigating it especially in the new "time trial" mode.  It makes the rapids far more engaging and gives the player a lot more agency.  Working out that perfect path is also a dream, and not a bit of randomness to be had.  The figurines you can decorate the town with?  They're appreciated, but it would have been nice if the crane game layout actually changed to a new one with every new figurine they added.  As it stands though, at least the realistic physics make gripping each figurine a somewhat unique experience.  The pokey and piranha plant figurines in particular are especially challenging.  I do miss a number of the story scenes cut out when they removed the camera mode and frankly having done EVERY single challenge in Dampe's tomb I can safely say the only actual puzzle is placing each room.  Actually going through the dungeons you built after the fact is nothing but grunt work at that point.  The dampe dungeon mode is clearly just an experiment, not a finished idea, and frankly I would recommend just not even bothering once you get the bottle reward.

Each of the bosses gets a retooling and as I went further I did enjoy that for the most part they're more challenging as a result.  The best expansion has got to go to Facade (the Nick Jr. Face from the Face Shrine.... oooooh FACE!), who now actually seems to use strategic pattersn of hole dropping that gets faster and more elaborate as the boss takes damage.  The face itself actually damages you if you step on it and it appears in different spots on the floor too.  The final nightmare boss has comparitevly smaller changes to each of the forms.  Tweaks really, but they're appreciated and a few require additional hits to beat compared to the original.

Music is amazing.  The indoor theme sounds weird in handheld mode but through TV speakers or a plugged in headset you catch all the intended beats a lot better and it sounds much more charming.  The ending credits theme is everything you could ask for, right down to tossing in a few "retro" beats off the Gameboy version.  The end boss originally had a unique form right up until it's final form which just kicked in the standard boss music.  Now it has a unique track for that final form.  Further, when Marin is following you the overworld themes for the field, the forest, and the mountains all have a variation with new intstrumentation just for her.  I love the creative ways they hid the new shells and heart pieces as well.  By the way, yes the addition of new pieces of heart objectively makes the game easier.  I recommend playing the game in hero mode for everyone here to counteract that.  The "extra hints" in the game turned out to be few after the halfway point.  Again, I'm not sure what the point of that was considering Ulrira gives you hints any time you want.

There's a bunch of tiny touches the original GB versions had that they seem to have missed in this version.  That's a small complaint because they are tiny touches, but a bigger one since it's a lot of them.  Things like how when you traded the dog food for bananas one of the bananas on Sale's shelf disappeared, which doesn't happen in this version.  While I love how much more individualized the insides of most of the houses are, I'm not as big a fan of removing all doubt about that zora hiding in animal village or that someone's living in that cave on the shoreline long before you ever get the magnifying glass.  The game already gives you clues something's up (in the DX version they added that Zora just so he could tell you someone like him is hiding on the beach), which I feel was enough.

Controls.... Let me just say right now they are a massive improvement, but it feels like they didn't go far enough.  There are little things they could have done to make them even better.  For one, the d-pad!  It gets used in menus but you can't use it for movement on the field.  When the game isn't "true" analog movement and is still locked into 8 way, a d-pad just works better.  As I mentioned before, having more buttons free to assign to different items would have been appreciated.

Mechanically I can add a few things.  Your bombs hurt you now, and falling into water before you can swim does too.  They hurt worse in hero mode, and they ignore the bonus armor from your blue tunic.  Careful!

In some of the most exciting game industry news in... I have no idea, a decade or more probably, somebody... leaked out a late, probably as much as 90% complete beta version of the N64 version of Rare's lost classic Dinosaur Planet!  This nearly feature-complete but extremely broken build is from December 2000, close to the point where Rare moved development over to the Gamecube after Nintendo decided that finishing and polishing the N64 game would have pushed it out of the first few months of 2001, and they wanted the N64 dead well before its time so it was moved over to Gamecube instead of releasing as one last N64 hit in, I would guess, summer '01 or such.  As the N64 fan that I am I have always found Nintendo's quick abandonment of the N64 in early 2001 extremely disappointing; we could have had a bunch of amazing things on the system had they just released them!  Dinosaur Planet's the big one, but a US release of Sin & Punishment is another huge one, and we could have had Animal Forest too if they had localized it quickly.  (And why didn't we get one of the Custom Robo games at some point, here in the US?  But anyway.)  There were other N64 games that were cancelled and moved to the next generation too, such as Resident Evil Zero and Eternal Darkness, but Dinosaur Planet was the farthest along of all of them.

And making it worse, the choice to move the game to Gamecube caused a full two year long delay, followed by a game, Star Fox Adventures, that was deeply disappointing.  Star Fox Adventures is an action-adventure game with strong Zelda influences, but without Zelda's freedom or gameplay quality.  Instead, the game is totally linear and gameplay is boring and flawed.  The conversion to a Star Fox game never did entirely make sense, it clearly isn't something originally Star Fox-themed.  Worst of all, one of the two protagonists, Krystal, was dropped and turned into a girl you (as Fox) have to rescue.  That was just an awful, AWFUL decision!  Just leaving Krystal in fully playable would have made SF Adventures better, though it wouldn't have saved it.  The game released right as Nintendo made probably its biggest mistake ever, allowing Rare to be sold to Microsoft, and the game was clearly pushed out the door before the deal closed.  The game had been in development for a long time, since probably like 1998, but it felt felt rushed and unfinished. 

So, similar to many others I have always considered Start Fox Adventures to be a boring, average game with poor combat and story and only okay gameplay.  However, at the same time,  I have also always thought that the original N64 version would have been great, it's always been one of the very top titles on my "lost games I very badly wish had been released" list.  It's in my top otwo on that list for sure, along with Zero Racers on Virtual Boy.  I don't know, I know that the final game (SF Adventures) is nowhere near Zelda quality and most of the desgin is based on Dinosaur Planet -- this game is also mostly linear and has similar combat and such to Star Fox Adventures -- but... I don't know, for some reason I've always had this feeling that Dinosaur Planet wuold have been awesome.  Ocarina of Time awesome no, but awesome.


And now... now we can actually play it.  Well, kind of.  Because here's the thing -- again, this build is NOT finished, and it is very broken.  The first hour of the game is fully playable, as it was made that way for press previews and such, but everything after that is a mess.  It seems that at this point in development everything was coming together in terms of building all of the parts of the game, but nobody was actually piecing everything together into a coherent whole yet and making things connect in-game.  Additionally, everything that is there is super buggy and crashes constantly.  The game still needed everything to be put together and connected so you could play more than the first hour, and it needed polishing and bug-fixing work, but it was nearing content-complete status at this point in December '00... just before Nintendo decided to ditch the N64 and move this mostly-finished game to GC, even though it'd surely have been finished and released before the Gamecube's launch date that November, instead of having to suffer through two years of delays due to Rare struggling with the generation transition followed by that deeply disappointing final version.

Oh, this build of the game actually has Fox in it as the main male player character.  Sabre, the original male lead, exists and you can switch to that model, and they often call Fox "Sabre",  but Fox is in the game.  Nintendo of Japan had apparently made the 'let's make this Star Fox" decision clear to Rare back at E3 2000.  It's kind of amazing just how much stuff is in this build of the game though!  There are lots of cutscenes, all fully voice acted of course... probably all of the areas... etc, etc.  It just needs to be made to function correctly and, in some areas, finished.

The soundtrack is incredible as well!  It's exceptional work from Rare's all-time-great music team.

So what can I say of what is there in the game?  Well, it is a lot like Star Fox Adventures, but yes I like this more.  Part of that probably is that it's on the N64, my favorite console.  Part is that Krystal is playable and you'll spend at least half of the game as her.  Part is that the story seems to make sense here, since there's a lot less Star Fox shoehorned in, Fox himself aside.  The gameplay is a classic N64 action-adventure game from Rare, during their shortlived period as one of the best developers in the world (I would say this period lasted from 1994 to 2001), and is fun.  I can't say anything conclusive until the community manages to actually finish the game, but yes, this game is good. That's not something I'd say about Star Fox Adventures.

For anyone who is wondering, there is a Discord for people working on trying out the game, finding bugs, and trying to patch stuff and such.  It's open so anyone can join if you're interested.  (I mean, I'm no programmer or rom hacker, I just want to play this game, but I'm in there...)

But yeah, this is just incredible stuff!  Of all of the game prototypes that were out there but not released, this is probably the most exciting one out there to see.  I mean, that is unless there's some actual mostly finished Super Mario 64 2 rom out there, but I'm sure that game didn't get anywhere near that far.  It's just awesome stuff!

ABF!  ABF I had no idea!  When you stun the gibdos in Link's Awakening you can pick them up and toss them around!  ABF!  If you toss two in a pit on the bottom floor of Eagle's Tower it kills the spark thingy in the room.  It KILLS it!  You can't kill those!  But it kills it!  I didn't know, but now I do!  Link's Awakening is, well, it's a good game is what.