Webhead123

Night of the Creeps is one of my wife's favorite shlocky horror movies. I enjoy it a fair bit but I definitely wouldn't call it a personal favorite. To be fair, I didn't grow up with it, so the nostalgia factor is limited but I recognize it as an enjoyable film from a time when monster movies were at their peak. It fits the archetype of the great, gory horror-comedies of the 80's.

It must be said: your father, based on his taste in movies, is an incredible human being!

It wouldn't be Halloween if I didn't put at least some time into Castlevania and Zombies Ate My Neighbors today, so I'll be playing a little bit of those.

Here's a few that come to mind: The Super Star Wars trilogy (SNES) Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures (SNES) Vice Project Doom (NES) Axelay (SNES)

Frog Fractions is great and the best way to experience it is to go in blind. Don't look up any guides or playthroughs. Just download it, play it and enjoy.

True. I wouldn't become a fan of those films until I was 16.

SH2 is the only game in the series I've actually played at all and even then, I've only played it for about an hour and that was almost 20 years ago. So, while my brief and distant memory of it was of being fairly impressed with the creepy atmosphere and Pyramid Head is still one of the cooler-looking horror monsters in recent history, I'm hard pressed to give a meaningful rating to the game. Let's just say 7/10 because why not?

Yes, the Konami "ReBirth" series on Wiiware. Those games were absolutely excellent and I still weep over the knowledge that they basically only exist now on whatever Wii/WiiU harddrives have them installed and haven't yet gone kaput. I've got both Castlevania ReBirth and Contra ReBirth still on my WiiU but I didn't redownload Gradius ReBirth before it all went away. It's a damn shame. They need to get a proper physical release as part of some kind of compilation so that people can experience them.

In truth, it depends on the game. I know that's generally used as a cop-out answer but that's not my intention here. Like the example of Street Fighter II, sure the software is good on its own but it is true that other concerns like quality hardware and social environment can really strongly influence the "experience" of the game itself. Bad games don't (usually) inspire that kind of spirit, so starting with well-designed software is still the foundation but it can absolutely be elevated by other factors. I was never super competitive when it came to arcade games, so, in my case, I'd say games like that were about 80% software and 20% external factors. For a contrasting example, I play a lot of Civilization VI (and strictly solo/offline against the AI). I don't stream or anything like that and I don't pay particularly close attention to the fan community around the game, so the act of playing Civ is a very quiet, private affair where it's just me and the glow of my computer monitor. That's an example of a game where, in my case, the experience (other than necessarily depending on working hardware) is almost entirely (95%) the result of the software itself. The design and aesthetics of the game and the particular form of interest that design evokes from me. My two cents, anyway.

I've played around with Splatterhouse 2 a little bit here and there but haven't committed to trying to beat it yet. Thus, I haven't seen every stage and don't know if I'm qualified to rate it. That said, I'm a big, big fan of the original Splatterhouse and I have beaten that game (as well as Wanpaku Graffiti) and, for as simple as it is, it's a pretty good time. The original gets an 8/10 and everything I've experienced about 2 leads me to think it will rank similarly.

I started playing video games in 1985. At the time, most games weren't "beatable" in the sense that they didn't really have an end. Most were either about chasing a high score or pummeling an opponent into submission. E.T. for the Atari 2600 was kind of an exception for its day, as it had a defined goal and an "ending" as it were. I remember beating that game multiple times (I actually quite liked it, for an Atari game). It is still very short, though, and can be completed in just a couple minutes if you know what you're doing, so I don't know if it really counts. If we're talking about something slightly more (relatively) substantial, it wouldn't be until I got an NES in '89 when I started playing more games which could be described as "beatable". Of them, I think the first one might have been Mega Man 2. The last game I've beaten was Baldur's Gate 3. Top-contender for one of the greatest games I've ever played. Still playing it and will probably complete it two or three more times before I put it back down for a while. In-between? That's a span of what, 38 years? So, half-way (19 years ago) would put us around 2004-ish. Around that time is when I was probably playing Spider-Man 2 and Beyond Good and Evil on Gamecube, so likely one of those.

I've played thousands of games by this point and a good percentage of them are straight bangers, so it'd be pretty easy to live with the knowledge that I can only play those. Sure, missing out on the occasional new hit would be a little sad but a pixelized duck-in-the-hand is worth two in the bush, as I'm sure the saying goes.

Dragon Warrior was my first true RPG and what an adventure it was! I received it as part of the Nintendo Power membership promotion, complete with the posters, guide book and player aids. That was such a neat way to experience the game, as it made young me feel like I was on a real adventure. For the time, the game seemed dauntingly large, likely reinforced by the fact that wandering too far afield could easily get you killed. I played for about 6 months semi-regularly before taking a break for a couple months and finally coming back to finish the game. I'd say it took me about 8-9 months total to beat. Reaching the Dragonlord's castle and defeating him felt positively epic. One of the more memorable achievements of my early gaming years. It may seem primitive now but looking back on it, there were quite a few little design choices that were honestly incredibly smart for how it shapes the player experience. I always looked on with anticipation to play the NES sequels but I never did get around to it. Maybe someday.

The early Castlevania games are some of my all-time favorites. I tried booting this game up for a few minutes and...no. Just no. Nothing about it feels like Castlevania anymore, except maybe the basic atmosphere of monsters and a mansion full of traps. The graphics and sound are unappealing and the controls were pretty lousy.

It seems no matter what I do, the journey to complete DuckTales is just going to fight me every step of the way. I figured out that part of the reason I was having trouble in spots on the NES version was the slightly sticky controls combined with the at-times very demanding collision detection. It would create jumps and pogo bounces that were deceptive to a point of being frustrating. So, I remembered that I had the remastered version on Steam and thought I'd give that a spin. And while I do miss the original 8-bit aesthetic and the excessive talking/cutscenes do get in the way of just playing the game, overall it has been a very pleasant experience. Plus, they seem to have resolved the control and collision issues. Alas, it seems I'm still destined never to finish this damn game because now I keep hitting some random bug that will cause the game to momentarily freeze and when it resumes, the game now only registers every second button input. It's as if my controller is toggling between "on" and "off" modes. I press the jump button and it executes the jump but then immediately shuts off all controller feedback, including d-pad/analog stick responsiveness. If I press the jump button again, nothing happens, but now all control is restored. Repeat. The worst part is, I can be playing for 10, 20 or 30 minutes and the game will work just fine. Then, in the middle of a stage or even during a boss fight, the bug shows up and the only solution seems to be exiting and restarting the game (which means starting the whole stage over again). So, I've had to put it down for a while. It was just too much aggravation. Just when I was starting to dig it...

This conversation reminded me of a really interesting behind-the-code look at Fester's Quest, why its design was so frustrating and how minor changes could have dramatically improved it. Absolutely worth a watch:

Yes, if you want to give the game an actual shot, you just have to bite the bullet and spend 5-10 minutes at the starting spawn point grinding power ups until your weapons don't suck. ...And for the love of god, don't accidentally grab the "downgrade" power ups. Ugh!

I don't think I've ever gotten a blister from gaming. However, there was a time a couple years ago when I was playing WAY too much Overwatch and repeatedly striking the Space Bar so much started developing a callus along the side of my thumbnail on my left hand, which became a bit painful. Thankfully, I've come to my senses and stopped wasting time on that game and my thumb healed nicely. Meanwhile, the thumb of my right hand sounds like a cement mixer when I bend it and it occasionally locks up. My mother and I have jokingly called it "Nintendo thumb" for years because it is almost undoubtedly the result of millions of button presses since I was a kid.

Which wasn't helped by the terrible weapon design in the game. The fact that your projectiles can be stopped by level geometry combined with the wide, wavy patterns of most weapon stages makes for an absolutely agonizing experience in many parts of the game. Using the whip becomes almost mandatory until you get the gun upgraded to the final levels.

This was one I had in my collection as a youth. Even at the time, my brother and I used to use it as a poster child for what a "funny-bad" NES game looks like. Janky as hell, way too difficult for all the wrong reasons and not particularly good-looking either. Good music, though. Never had the stamina to beat it, despite multiple attempts over the years. Despite its numerous and crippling flaws, or in fact, because of them, it played such an influential role in my youth that I have a certain fondness for it. Yeah, it's a bad game but it's a bad game that's almost like watching The Room or Samurai Cop. It can be enjoyed for all the ways in which it tries to be cool and fails miserably. 5/10

I'll be curious to hear your thoughts. I quite enjoyed Dusk and can appreciate the smartness of a lot of its design. I've never liked the feel of the Quake engine and it's imitators as much as the Doom or Build engines though and that was the only part of Dusk that I had personal quibbles with. But that's such a minor and completely petty nitpick that I don't dare hold it against the game.

Yeah, one thing I can appreciate about the original Build trilogy is that they mostly toned down the hitscan enemies knowing how frustrating of a design they can be. That's not to say they didn't have their own obnoxious, run-ending foes...like the dynamite zombies in Shadow Warrior or any enemy equipped with rockets. There's also the perpetual threat that the player represents to themselves when using similar weapons. Collision detection and map/object boundaries can be deceptive. Yeesh!

Yeah, when I heard about this I was jazzed but then remembered that I'd cancelled my NSO subscription over a year ago. Next free trial period, though...

Pretty much. One of the most impressive things about Build Engine games back in the day was how (relatively) large and complex some of the stages were. This is great for making the player feel both challenged and rewarded but because those games could also be unapologetically brutal, it meant that unless you wanted to replay a whole 10-20 minute stage all over again every time you die, you're gonna want to save constantly. I still haven't played Ion Fury but I intend to at some point. My favorite of the original Build Engine trilogy is Blood by far, with Shadow Warrior very close behind and Duke 3D last but they're all excellent. Blood is a solid contender for my favorite FPS ever, actually, neck-and-neck with Doom. Obviously, the two games are separated by 4 years of technological and design advancement in the industry, so in that way, I feel Blood has the benefit of using Doom's foundation to craft a deeper and more engaging package but a big part of Doom's strength is in its simplicity, so it's hard to truly compare them.

I've heard about the series for years and have always been slightly curious but I'll probably never play any of them.