Critical Acclaim +: Open Mic

[HandsomeDead]

It's weird that Outrun 2 was even made. This game was put together during a time when Sega were taking Sonic characters and sticking massive hand cannons in their Micky Mouse-esque gloved hands and riding around on biker bikes. It was a time when gaming was trying to shed away its innocence as a whole. It was gaming's teenage years, or it's second stage Pokemon evolution... or whatever, but for some reason, against the focus groups, Outrun 2 happened.

Outrun to is a dream game; it's pure escapism. You have a Ferrari, an enthusiastic blonde in the passenger seat and the road with a Miami beach, some Pyramids, Paris and some hillside road that looks like the the ones in Cumbria (except with an added ziggurat) all within a 50 second drive from one another, most of which accompanied with that unmistakable Sega Blue Sky.

If you get into the Outrun fiction the game is about helping the blonde escape her dull rich life; she provides the car for this orange shirt and white chinos sporting 80s throwback chump, and it's up to him to use it, to 'take her far away'. I'm fairly sure that's the fiction... I could have made it up and forgot I did but I can't be bothered to root out the manual. But it's about being provided all the means to escape, and enjoying the ride.

It plays like most drift racers, I guess. I'm not an expert on them so I can't say how it compares to others. I didn't have a Saturn or access to an arcade and the Dreamcast versions of the likes of Daytona USA or Sega Rally 2 just past me by. Outrun 2 and a couple of Ridge Racer games are all I have as a reference point. There are also the Burnout games, but none of those have the personality of Outrun 2. In Outrun 2 not only do you have a time trial leaderboard pushing you forward to be as quick as possible but also the chance of seeing the unicorn/pegasus between tracks.

Outrun 2 is about the joy of escapism and it commits to that fully. It's not innocent in a Nintendo way, but has an innocence of those late 80s early 90s boyhood dreams of what they want when they grow up. I mean Outrun 2 is pretty much Cliffy B's life (except he's more of a Lambo guy) so I bet Outrun 2 was his dream growing up.

Oh, and it's pretty fun to play. *screech*

[HandsomeDead]

I've just had a thought.

Outrun 2 is the Raspberry Beret of Video Games.

[Sly Reflex]

Golden Sun.

[Bob]

I assume the series as a whole? My brother loved the first two on the GBA, they had some really cool feature where they crossed over, or something. I never played a great deal of them. I played the first one up to some big tree and it was a really nice, charming JRPG. It had all the bits and bobs to make it fun, but it wasn't especially challenging in any sense. There was some peril and some fighting but everything was going to work out just fine in the end and I couldn't really see the point in playing it.

I was playing the one on the DS recently and it was the exact same thing. There was lots of hand holding, everything was really bright, the combat had lots of options and it had user friendly features like regenerating MP and being able to get the background of pretty much every place, person and event in the series up to this point by pressing on the word. However it was all just bit dull and I couldn't see how my time would be rewarded for playing it more than the few hours I did.

I reckon I would have loved it if I had been a bit younger when I played it though. If it had come along before the PS1 Final Fantasy games. I think by that point though I wanted something as dark and broody as I was deep inside my blackened teenage boy soul.

[DANGERMAN]

I don't really like racing games on the whole, or at least it's rare I play them, but I loved Outrun 2. I never really liked the first game, and other for pining for something incredibly Sega after the death of the Dreamcast, I'm not sure what convinced me to give it a chance, but I loved it. i never finished it though, it got too hard, if I remember right it was one of the challenge stages than an actual race that stopped me.

Golden Sun I very nearly loved. I got it after the sequel was out so I knew it was supposed to be good, and it was made by Camelot who made the awesome Shining Force games (not the recent stuff). It looks great, I remember being really impressed that a GBA could put out a game like that. It had a good concept behind it too, you have 4 characters but you also collect djinns (I'm probably spelling that wrong), little creatures you could assign to characters to give them power. so there was an electric djinn, a water djinn and so on.

The problem was it just never really clicked with me. Every time I went to a new dungeon I expected it to be the one where the game kicked on, but it just didn't. It was a decent game, and maybe that it felt like a throw back to older rpgs after a generation of Final Fantasy dominating it scratched an itch for people, but it never really did it for me

edit: Me and Bob have both said the same so it must be true

[Sly Reflex]

Soul Calibur II.

[RoboticMonk3y]

soul calibur 2?

yea, it's good

it's the first fighter game where I realised there was more to it that furiously hammering at the buttons or spamming out the 2-3 "cheap" moves you remembered.

[Sly Reflex]

I think that's exactly why it was so good. Simplifying the controls to horizontal, vertical and kick meant that you really only had two button combos and it was a case of each character having a moveset where depending on the range of your opponent depended on what action you should take. I mean theoretically you could still button mash and win, but specific characters were obviously designed to react and punish.

The way the adventure mode makes you play as specific characters makes you realise that to be successful you're going to have to learn where characters excel and where they lack. Learning that you could step in and out meant that you could strafe players that committed to a combo and start your counter attack. For added risk you could try and bait them near to a ledge and then trick them before booting them up the arse or launching them in the air before poking them off to their doom.

Blocking attacks I liked better than any other fighter as it seemed dependent on the attack you were trying to block had different stun durations so that you had to time when to retaliate in between the flurries of metal going back and forth.

It's really the only fighter I spent any time with and grew to understand, the usual simple to play but hard to master trick used by many games got it's hooks deep into me. I played this game extensively on all systems too, it was a firm favourite of the lads whenever we got together.

It gets bonus points for having a few sets of lovely titties and being able to press a button to shout "Bastard!" More games need commands that let your character swear. Swearing is rad.

[DANGERMAN]

I think Soul Calibur 2 was the last time I enjoyed Soul Calibur, and even then I preferred the original. I thought it worked really well on the gamecube pad, and Link was a perfect fit (he did have more moves than everyone else though), so it's a bit of a shame that the WiiU isn't getting a HD port like the PS3 and 360.

It's definitely a fuller game than the original, I played it for weeks and weeks when I was at uni. I'm not sure I hold it to quite the classic status of the original but I'm not sure why, possibly it just felt a bit less refined, certainly the series went on to suffer from the same problems a lot of fighters do, adding more and more stuff

[Sly Reflex]

I've got to be up at stupid o'clock tomorrow, so I'm putting the next game up now.

Also, this thread is winding down, we've a handful of games to cover and then it's over. It's a shame that what's left in the list everyone hasn't played. Oh well, that's how the cookie crumbles and all that jazz.

Next game up is Ni No Kuni.

[DANGERMAN]

every now and then a game comes along from a genre that hasn't been as popular for a while and gets people excited, people treat it like the 2nd coming when in fact it's doing what a lot of others games have done it's just the first time they've paid attention to it in years. I thought Ni No Kuni was going to be that, I was still interested in playing it because I like jrpgs, but the artstyle and Ghibli connection made me dubious about how much of the hype was justified.

As it turns out Ni No Kuni is a genuinely brilliant game, a bit too twee maybe, and the potential characters is relatively limited, so there's not as much depth in terms of move list as their could be. It also back loads the depth of the battle system, the way you play the game after 40 hours is different from 20 hours, but then that's kind of its strength, it's not a short game so having something new to play about with stops it from just being a case of using the same techniques all the way through. You end up having to be incredibly involved in battles, you can't just leave it to your monsters, you have to respond to what's happening in the fight in real time, decide what would be most effective.

the only real issues I had with it are that some of the side mission stuff got a bit tedious, having to catch specific monsters in specific ways, or pissing about with the digital version of the book just to answer a question. Genuinely brilliant game, and while part of me would love a sequel, I kind of don't mind if we only get the one game

[Sambob]

Cant disagree with any of that, in my opinion it got tired more quickly than you say. Its a massive shame that the Ghibli animation ran out after about 2 hours, it still had that identity to it throughout mind, but it made the early experience so much better, and the lack of it really contributed to the game feeling flat near the latter stages.

[Bob]

I have played this for about 7 ish hours so make of that what you will. I want to go back to it but I am not really compelled to do so. The story, graphics and all that are really lovely. It is one of the prettiest games I have played this generation. The gameplay is where it really fell down for me, or rather the approach to that gameplay. I really liked the battles and the puzzle bits with the different spells outside of battles. Seven hours in though and everything I did was explained to me in horrifically boring detail before I got a chance to do it. That game really treats the player like a fucking idiot, telling you exactly what to do before you even get a chance to do it over and over again.

At the moment I am being a really annoying pretentious hipster about game design. Thinking about how games should teach us to play through clever design, not by just spelling it out in Welsh accents. So Ni No Kuni really got it wrong there for me(in fact I should probably avoid anything Japanese). I barely felt like I was playing it, because although I was performing these actions, I was only allowed to do so after the game told me exactly how to do it. Sometimes twice. So although technically it was interactive, I felt about as involved as when I turn a page in a book. I loved the rest of it and I really want to go back to it so if someone can tell me that if I push past 10 hours I will be rewarded with being allowed to actually think I would be incredibly grateful.

[DANGERMAN]

I don't remember it being especially handholdy, but then after 80 hours or whatever I played the start of the game was a distant memory. I guess that means that it does get better at it, or you go longer without it feeling the need to teach you something

[Sly Reflex]

This one is something someone from here played recently, I saw him taking pictures of it on twitter. No carpet though. /sadface

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

[retroed]

I wonder who that was?

I am currently playing this, and for the first time properly too. It's early days so I can't really say much about it, but it's a game I've always meant to have gotten to at some point. It's supposedly the pinnacle of the Castlevania series. I've only played Super Castlevania IV and the DS/3DS games, and have enjoyed all those, so I'm hoping for some good times here. I have the GBA ones to play one day, too.

[Hendo]

I never played it way back when. Bought the XBLA version and finished it a couple of years ago.

Other than looking a bit rough and some awful voice acting, I think it really holds up.

[DANGERMAN]

some great voice acting more like.

Same as Ed and Hendo, I didn't play it first time around, but got it when it came to 360 and really enjoyed it. I definitely deserves its classic status, although I'm not sure I would have been old enough/experienced enough as a gamer to appreciate it fully when it originally came out, I think I'd have ran in to a dead end and stopped playing. Which is kind of the problem I had with it, between its release and the time I played it I played 2 similar GBA games, both really good, and 2 DS games (I think Order of Ecclesia came after), and while on one hand they stood me in good stead for what Symphony of the Night was all about I'd already kind of played it in arguably more refined form.

I say arguably because I think I preferred Portrait of Ruin and at least one of the GBA games, but I suspect most people, particularly if they played the series in order, would prefer Symphony

[Sly Reflex]

I played it first time around on a pirate copy. I know, I'm a bad person.

It was actually my first taste of Metroidvania as those twats like to call it. I don't think it's as strong as the Metroid games myself, but it's still pretty stellar. I've nothing really more to say about the game other than I agree with Ben with the classic status it's attained. I can't think of many other games from that time frame daring to do what it did and getting it as well as it does.

On topic of voice acting, I think it suits the game, similar to how the terrible voice acting and dialogue suits the early Resident Evil games. I certainly wouldn't change it for something 'better'.

[spatular]

Bit late but ninokuni is ace, yeah it's not perfect and I agree with some of the criticism above. I bought it because of the ghibli connection, half expecting to not like the gameplay at all, but it turns out I really enjoyed it.