I've been a little preoccupied playing a little something that I'll be discussing on the blog very soon, but I've been trying to squeeze some SNES Online in between sessions. Today's discussion revolves around one SNES title that I've discovered to be rather addictive. BACKGROUND:
Like any other Nintendo plebeian, the only reason I know what F-Zero even is was thanks to one Captain Falcon being a character in Super Smash Bros. Apart from two of the tracks from the original game being available as DLC in Mario Kart 8, all of what I know of F-Zero is pulled from Smash. I've never played F-Zero, either, so I was excited to see where it all began. SUMMARY: F-Zero is a racing game where you pilot futuristic hover-car-things and travel at blistering speeds in various tracks. "Blistering" is not an exaggeration here, because at the game's fastest, it becomes extremely difficult to react to turns or obstacles unless you've memorized the course layouts. You can select from one of four vehicles (including Captain Falcon's signature vehicle: the Blue Falcon), and they each have different stats. Once you've made your choice, you select a "league" (essentially the game's difficulty setting), and go on a grand prix consisting of five tracks, each with five laps. There's a good variety of tracks, each with pretty varied layouts, distinct color palettes and backgrounds, and awesome music. When you're in the race, you'll have to watch out for sharp turns, obstacles (like sand, land mines, magnetic traps, and other things that have no business being in a race track), and other racers. There's a cutoff displayed throughout the race, and if you place lower than the specified position, you lose automatically. However, in a fast-paced environment such as F-Zero, winning is the least of your worries. Remember what I said about "blistering" speeds? Well, when shit's going too fast, you tend to hit your vehicle against objects, and in this game, that can lead to disaster. Smashing into walls or other vehicles drains your Power (indicated by a sort of health bar on your HUD), and if the bar goes to zero, your vehicle explodes and you lose the race. As terrifying as that sounds, there is a way to replenish your Power, and that's by driving over special tracks on the road. That said, it only heals so much, and if you want to survive, you'll need some quick reflexes to avoid crashing into things. If you manage to survive all five races, your race records (lap times, etc.) are saved in the aptly named Records menu. If you want to really optimize your times (or just learn the track layouts), there's also a practice mode where you can race in a selected number of tracks at your leisure. Though things are usually moving too fast for me to really register anything, there are a few moments during races where I can really appreciate how good this game looks. As with Super Mario Kart, I'm quite impressed with how they were able to pull this 3D racing game off with sprite-based visuals. VERDICT: As limited as the number of vehicles and modes are, F-Zero is still a blast to play on the merit of its thrilling, high-speed racing action alone. Skilfully navigating the challenging tracks at top speed with the killer soundtrack playing is incredibly satisfying, and that was more than enough to get me to replay races over and over. I now understand why there's a vocal minority of Nintendo fans calling for a new F-Zero game, because this game's pretty fun. - end -
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Next up on my SNES Online is a decidedly unexpected addition to the launch library. This game's presence in the service, to me, signals that Nintendo is willing to go further for the SNES than they did for NES Online. BACKGROUND: I've already explained my brief history with the Puyo Puyo series in my blog entry on Puyo Puyo Champions, and since then, my interest in the series has grown. As such, I was delighted to see that Super Puyo Puyo 2 was a launch title for SNES Online. Now, what I didn't know was that this game was originally never released outside Japan, which piqued my interest even more. SUMMARY: Puyo Puyo 2 was so wildly popular back in the day that the rulesets carried over into the later games, so if you've played any of the more recent Puyo Puyo games, nothing about Super Puyo Puyo 2 should be surprising. The core gameplay of dropping and clearing Puyos to send garbage to your opponent survived to this day for a reason, and that reason was in large part to this game. Remember when I said that this game was never released outside Japan? Well, that brings us to the actual culture shock of the game: it was never localized. Everything is in Japanese. While I recognize hiragana/katakana (the latter less so than the former), I don't actually know the language, and I had to stumble around the menus to figure out what was what. After the initial confusion, though, I was good to go. There are a number of multiplayer modes (which I should try with other people at some point), a single player story mode that I'm sure I'd appreciate more if I understood a lick of Japanese, as well as various options to adjust the gameplay. Facing off against CPUs in this game is a terrifying ordeal, because they play the game like a goddamn supercomputer and wreck your shit in 15 seconds. VERDICT: Language barrier aside, Super Puyo Puyo 2 is a good place to start if you want to get into the Puyo Puyo series. There aren't any fancy gimmicks, so you get to focus on the core Puyo-stacking gameplay, and there are a variety of single player or multiplayer options that you can get into to hone your skills. If you want to spare yourself the trouble of figuring out the Japanese menus, Puyo Puyo Champions is worth a look. More on that via the blog entry I linked at the top of this post. - end - It took nearly a year, but Nintendo finally stopped sitting on their hands and made SNES games available for Switch Online subscribers. As somebody who deeply enjoys these classics, I couldn't be more thrilled, and I'm gonna be spending the next few weeks going through all of that. On that note, I must address how I'm going to be covering SNES Online on this blog. Since SNES games are generally more robust than most NES titles (barring NES games like Zelda and Mario, which take a while to beat), and with the monthly release schedule for these services being scrapped, I can no longer do what I did for the NES Online blog series where I just briefly talk about multiple games in one blog entry. Thus, I have decided to talk about every title individually, like any of my regular game "review" posts. I have also created a new blog category specifically for SNES Online, so if you want to tune in to this blog series specifically, take note of the new link on the sidebar. Anyway, enough expository horseshit. Let's talk about the first game. BACKGROUND:
Mario Kart is a legendary series with many titles under its belt, and it all started here, with Super Mario Kart. I've put in a lot of hours for a lot of the later entries (particularly Mario Kart DS, Wii, 7, and 8), but I've actually only played the original briefly via emulation. Now that I can play it legally, I have the opportunity to really sink my teeth into it. SUMMARY: If you're old enough to read and have access to a device that can display this blog to you, chances are that I don't really need to explain the concept of Mario Kart to you. In the off chance you don't, it's racing with Mario characters, and you can pick up items like shells and banana peels that you can use to fuck up other racers. Even if you haven't played any Mario Kart game specifically, this formula has been repeated by other developers in all sorts of titles that I'm sure most people who are aware of video games understand how it works. Being used to the more recent Mario Kart titles, Super Mario Kart's considerably more slippery controls took a bit of getting used to. Aiming items like green shells was challenging, and drifting isn't as easy as it is in later games. I did get the hang of it after a few races, and while the CPUs are pretty tough to beat, I started to get 1st place pretty consistently. Of course, the SNES Online emulator has a rewind feature, and if you wish to cheese the game that way, I won't judge you. Unlike later games, Super Mario Kart's track selection is limited, with only five tracks per grand prix (of which there are four). Some of these tracks only change in layout but not in aesthetic, but it's honestly enough for this game. A lot of them are classics, and the music is topnotch, so I see no sense complaining about the variety. In the same vein, the item selection in Super Mario Kart is as basic as it gets. You've got mushrooms, green and red shells, coins, bananas, the star, and the lightning bolt. It doesn't get any more classic than that. There's also the feather (from Super Mario World) that makes your kart jump high, and I didn't remember that power-up at all. The roster is understandably small as well, with only the most essential characters playable.... plus Donkey Kong Jr. and Koopa Troopa. Kart customization wasn't a thing back then, so what you see is what you get. I'm still quite impressed how well this game looks. I remember the first time I saw this game long ago being blown away that this sprite-based game runs and feels like a bona fide 3D game, and that sense of awe was still present when I revisited it here. It also helps that I fucking love 16-bit era graphics. VERDICT: Despite having substantially less content compared to the newest Mario Karts, the original Super Mario Kart aged remarkably well presentation-wise and is still as fun to play. If you've never played a kart racer before, what better place to start than the game that essentially pioneered the genre. And if you've played a Mario Kart game before, revisiting where it all began is still an enjoyable experience. - end - |
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