This game follows the style of most Zelda games. Zelda is in trouble, and Link must rescue her. The storyline is that there is a Light world and a Dark World of Hyrule, and many years ago, the Seven Sages of Hyrule sealed the Dark World, and the Triforce forever. Or so they thought. In the beginning, Link wakes up after hearing Zeldas pleas for help in a dream. His uncle tells him that he is leaving for a while. Link goes outside searching for the voice that is calling him. Upon Links arrival to Hyrule castle, in a hidden passageway Zelda tells him of, he finds his uncle dying in the hallway.
Link takes his sword and shield and begins quest. Throughout the game you learn that an evil entity called Aghanim (sorry it's been a while I forget how to spell his name). You must then get three pendants to receive the Master Sword. Then you find that Aghanim is just a puppet for Ganon, who is trying to get the Triforce so he can rule the world. Link must find the descendants of the seven sages entrapped in seven crystals around Hyrule, all guarded by powerful monsters in castles.
Gameplay is very addictive, and in my opinion is the best Zelda game. Graphics are good for the SNES, very much detail on terrain and characters, but most other things are in solid colors with little detail.
<i>A Link to the Past</i> remains one of my favorite games, and I'm sure it will be one of yours too. I rate <i>The Legend of Zelda : A Link to the Past</i> an 8 out of 10.
Vegas Stakes is a game about 5 people, yourself and 4 friends, taking a road trip to Las Vegas, in hopes of getting rich. You arrive at hotel/casino The Golden Sunshine, one of the five casinos available. Your other options on the Strip are:
<b>The Hideaway</b> - a run down, low maximum bid casino, which should be saved as your last resort in Vegas.
<b>The Buffalo Head</b> - A western themed casino with bids close to that of the Golden Sunshine.
<b>The 2020</b> - A futuristic themed casino with moderately high bids.
<b>The Laurel Palace</b> - High bidders only! This elegant casino sports minimum bids of $500, and can make you or break you quickly. This casino comes available to you after you make about $500,000.00
Vegas Stakes incorporates some unique attributes of a casino into it. For starters, this game used the SNES Mouse, making it easier control than a standard SNES controller. One cool concept is that strangers actually come up and talk to you. They can say any number of random things such as they "fell and twisted their ankle so they need you to take then to the hospital", or they'll sell you something. The problem is, they're not always sincere. If someone bumps into you or rubs a spot off your shirt, it could be just that, or it could be a pickpocket. You have to take chances when dealing with these people, they'll scam you, or if they are telling the truth, reward you in a few turns.
There are 5 available games in each casino with varying bids. Slots, Craps, Poker, Blackjack, and Roulette. If you don't know how to play some of these games, the friend that accompanies you can tell you how to play, alos give advice on bidding, slot values, and other useful information. Vegas awaits you, gamblers! Know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Test your judgement to tell if strangers are sincere, or crooks. Play your cards right and you may leave Vegas a Millionaire. If not, well, I have a shirt you can borrow. I give it a 6.5 out of 10.
Almost everyone has played <i>Simcity</i> at one point or another, but just in case you haven't here's what the game is like: You are the mayor of a huge open area of nothing, and your job is to build that from a village, to a town, to a city, to a capital, to a metropolis, and finally, a megalopolis. You build neighborhoods, residential, commercial, and industrial zones, power plants, airports, stadiums, and road and mass transit systems. You get your money from taxes. You must also deal with natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, and floods.</font>
You view your city from a birds-eye view, the buildings don't have a whole lot of detail, but enough to tell what they are. Airports have planes, nuclear power plants have cooling towers, etc. Not a feast for the eyes, but it looks okay.
Gameplay can be addictive if you get into it, especially if you know the money cheat so you can build to your hearts desire. The cheat escapes me now, but it should be easy to find if you look on a search engine.
You are Drake, a hacker in a futuristic world, ruled by computers and The Matrix (no blue or red pills here though). You wake up in a morque and begin your quest. Your journey starts as a quest to find yourself, to find out who you are, you wake up with almost zero memory of your past. After you find the truth, you go to do what you feel is your duty, revenge. During the game you will find several enemies and gunfights. You eventually are able to hire mercenaries to join you for a little while. Some are mages, ogres, and gunslingers of all walks of life.
Graphics and gameplay are very good. Gunfights are realtime, you have to move your crosshairs to the enemy and fire. There is a chance you will miss too. There is free movement, so you can move anywhere you wish. When you kill enemies, you occasionally get money, and sometimes you get a karma point. When you sleep, you can cash in your karma to make your skills better. Gameplay is very addictive, you are driven to find the next step in the game. If you are going to play, prepare to get hung up in some places because it will happen.
I really enjoy this game, however some parts may get you so hung up you may stop playing. This is what happened to me, so I can't say I have beaten it, but the time I had playing it was a lot of fun, and I recommend this game highly.
I rate it 7.5 out of 10. Give it a try, I think you'll have a great time.
<i>Super R-Type</i> is a scrolling, kill-everything-in-sight game. You know the kind. The game details very little, but I'll sketch together what I can remember from the manual. Apparently an alien known as the Womb has captured four ships, and you are the fifth ship that must come to rescue them. Accompanying you through this is a large glowing orange ball of goodness which can fire any number of weapons, from a barrage of fireballs (I call them cheese-balls), to reflecting lasers. Also available are what are called "pits", which hover above and below your ship when found to protect from more angles. Also available are different sorts of missiles which can either be dropped on the ground, or sent out to home in on random enemies.
This game has four different levels of difficulty, Novice, Easy, Normal, and Hard. I prefer to think of them as Easy, Hard, Impossible, and shouldn't-even-be-allowed-to-be-this-difficult setting.
Graphics take full advantage of everything the SNES can do, creating stunning backgrounds, meticulously detailed bosses, and realistic looking weapons. Music is also very catchy, especially in the very first level, gets stuck in your head. I usually don't care for scrolling games, but this one was an exception, very well done.
This game takes a bit of strategy too. You have to maneuver minefields, jets of water, shrapnel from exploding enemies, and a million other threats to your weak little ship, even a minor hit from a weak foe and you and your ship is a cloud of smoke. So it takes a bit of skill to get the feel for how that ship moves and to steerit out of danger. Level 4 consists of a huge Battleship which you must maneuver through. Its difficult by itself, but the ship is moving and you aren't moving with it, also with enemies and bullets flying everywhere, it makes for a great challenge and overall great game.
<i>Super R-Type</i> has been a recurring favorite of mine for many, many years, and I never tire of playing it. The game sucks you in, and the fact that you can die so easily makes it all to easy too say "well, lemme just try that again". Addictive, fun, and challenging. My kind of game. I rate <i>Super R-Type</i> an 8.0 out of 10!
Surely you remember? That magical moment when you first flipped the switch of your SNES to reveal the lush color of Dinosaur World? The first time you saw <i>Super Mario World</i>, a game that would become one of the greatest games ever made.
Bowser has kidnapped the princess while on vacation with Mario and Luigi to exotic Dinosaur Island. Not too long after they begin their journey, they find a friendly dinosaur named Yoshi trapped in an egg. Henceforth, Yoshi would become an invaluable ally, while Mario was riding Yoshi he could swallow turtle shells. Red shells would cause Yoshi to spit fireballs, Yellow shells made him hit the ground and raise dust clouds when he jumped, and blue shells made him sprout wings. A very versatile dinosaur, Yoshi made Marios success possible.
This game, for it's time, is quite large. From the rolling Donut Plains, to the dark and dreary Vanilla Dome. From Cookie Mountain, to the insanely difficult SPECIAL stages, which made you think if you wanted to win.
In <i>Super Mario World</i>, there are seven castles, each inhabited by one of Bowsers seven villanous children (Bowser must be a ladies koopa). You must defeat each of Bowsers children to retrieve a trapped Yoshi egg, and you can then move on to the next level. Along the way you may find doorways ot the useful Star Road, capable of transporting you anywhere in Dinosaur World in mere seconds. Not only are there castles, but also Fortresses and Ghost Houses.
<i>Super Mario World</i> remains one of the best games ever, boasting a lot of great features. Since the Super Ninteno has fallen out of play since the advent of N64, GameCube, and Playstation 1 & 2, this classic game gathers dust on many shelves, but then came the Game Boy Advance! Yuo can once again play this game, and better yet, take it with you wherever you may go!
The game begins with Bowser kidnapping Princess Toadstool (original, huh?), and taking her to his castle. Mario, of course, rescues her about 5-10 gaming minutes later. Just as she is being rescued, a huge sword falls from the sky and plants itself right into Bowser's castle. This is where the game really begins. You come to find that the huge sword is part of an army of the villian Smithy. Now all hell breaks loose in the Mushroom Kingdom and all around Mario's world. Soon, you find that Smithy is attempting to destroy the Star Road, where wishes are granted. In doing this, he wants to make a world filled with weapons and evil. Mario can't have that. During the course of your journey you make four allies. The supposed "tadpole" Mallow, the inhabited doll messenger of the Star Road, Geno, Princess Toadstool, and even King Koopa himself, Bowser joins with Mario. You must defeat bosses like Mack, Bowyer, Yaridovich, the Axem Rangers, and Captain Jonathan Jones to retrieve the seven star pieces, the last held by Smithy. There is so much more to this game, but this is only an overview.
The graphics in <i>Mario RPG</i> are wonderfully detailed and great eye candy, as SNES games go. The music is also quite good, making for a great gaming experience. Even the battle animations are good looking.
If you want to play <i>Mario RPG</i>, quit your job, wait till summer vacation, break up with your significant other, and put a lock on your door because you WILL get hopelessly hooked! This game takes a long time to beat and makes you use your brain in parts too. Once you start, its hard to stop, trust me. I'm a recovering <i>Mario RPG</i> addict myself.
Overall I rate <i>Super Mario RPG</i> a 9.5 out of 10 on the gaming scale, it's really that good. Now go buy it, an emulator just wouldn't do it justice...oh and if you do download an emulation, be sure you have the original cart, or delete it within 24 hours...*wink*.
<i>Civilization</i> is a turn-based war game/strategy game. In it, you begin a civilization of your choice of 18, including the Germans, Japanese, Aztecs, Babylonians, Americans, and Romans. As you play, you build cities and army units with the money you make from mines and city taxes. You add buildings to your cities to make them and your civilization greater. Also, you can build one of several Wonders of the World, each with their own advantages. The Great Wall forces other civilization to make peace with you, while the Pyramids give you all the food you'll need to run all your cities. There are two ways you can win <i>Civilization</i>, one way is to destroy all your opposing Civilizations, and rule the world. The other way is to make it so far into the future, that you build a starship and travel to Alpha Centauri.
Graphics leave something to be desired, cities as well as units appear as squares over a gridded layout map. Attacks show the attacking unit moving and colliding with the opposing unit. But the city screen boasts better graphics. You have the option to view your cities, as well as each building within them, including Wonders, in fairly good detail.
Gameplay is EXTREMELY addictive! I guarantee that when you play this game and get good at it, you'll be hooked for a long time. Because 5 levels of difficulty offer a more challenging game all the time, you'll never get bored.
I give <i>Civilization</i> a 7 out of 10, and highly recommend it to strategy buffs.
In this game, you can pit one on one battles with your favorite Nintendo stars, such as Mario, Link, Kirby, Pikachu, Starfox, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, and Samus Aran. The game starts with all fighters entering the battlefield with 0% damage done to them. As they attack each other with a barrage of vicious attacks, their percentage moves up, and the higher the percentage, the farther the opponent flies after a hit. However, this percentage does not guarantee a winner, your goal is to knock your opponent off of the screen, and that could happen to the one with the lower percentage just as much as it could the character with the higher percentage. Graphics are okay, the backgrounds and characters are well made, but the arenas are a little bit blocky and flat.
<i>Super Smash Bros.</i> is a game that may keep you occupied for a few days, maybe weeks, until you’ve fought everyone against everyone else, found the secret characters, and unearthed all the other goodies. Then you leave it to sit and probably won't play it again for a while. Even still, I give Super Smash Bros. a 6 out of 10.
Mario has a tough job, what with all those evil turtles and freaky walking mushrooms to contend with, and from time to time, he deserves a vacation. Even that can't go right for the world-famous plumber. Upon flying out to island paradise Island Delfino with Peach, they are forced to land short on the runway due to a huge puddle of some paint-like substance. Mario crosses it and asks for help, and he's <i>blamed</i> for the mess! As he approaches a water pump he'll use to clean the mess, it props up and introduces itself as FLUDD, created by none other and Professor Gadd from Luigis Mansion. FLUDD identifies Mario and agrees to help him. Upon cleaning up the mess, the Delfino authorities take Mario away and throw him in jail. He is later released, and is sentenced to clean up all the graffiti which now covers Delfino. But one question lingers, why do they think Mario is behind it? You'll have to play to find out.
Gameplay is very smooth here, controls are straightforward and easy to use. It utilizes the analog functions of the L and R key, if you press R down partially, you can move while spraying, or you can press it down all the way to shoot out a stronger and longer reaching stream of water. Mario has a lot of jumps too, and they are all pretty simple to execute. If you turn the control stick 360 and then jump, you'll do a spin jump which sends you higher than the usual jump, and also gets rid of any goop which may have gotten on you. FLUDD has two functions at any one time, there is the normal spray, then one of three different nozzles can be attached. The HoverNozzle allows you to hover (obviously) for a few seconds, the Rocket Nozzle makes you blast high into the air, and the Tubo nozzle boosts your speed, even when swimming.
This game is <i>not</i> about just cleaning up messes like it may appear to be. There are plenty of puzzles to be solved, some force you to do them without FLUDD to help you.
Alas, as good as <i>Mario Sunshine</i> is, it has its flaws. First, there is a lot of stuff happening on the screen at one time and at times there can be some noticeable slowdown. Also some of the camera angles, even though it moves with Mario, can be constricting and there are some times when you can't even see your mustached hero. But the good far outweighs the bad in this game, the slowdown is only for a few seconds, and only at some times do you have trouble with the camera, otherwise, its a great Mario adventure with lots of puzzles and plenty to do. You'll never be bored in this game.
I give <i>Super Mario Sunshine</i> a 9.4 and if you own a GameCube, this is a game to buy before all others on that game rack at the store. Besides, no Nintendo system is complete without a Mario adventure.
