Episode 24: Robots That Shoot Up [Mega Man 2]

At the top of a sky scraper (that we never actually see otherwise), a lone hero stands against the mechanized army of a mad man.  The blue bomber returns!  This time, Zach's on board as we take a look at the sequel to the first game we ever reviewed in a semi-public forum, kicking off sequel month.  Really, that's just an invitation for us to finally start playing some slightly newer games.



Mega Man can't do it, but you can shoot up our Download.

(00:30) Can you defeat Air Man?

(02:10) We play games!  Apparently, Tyler jumped the gun mentioning FTL last week.  Here's an article.  Mega Man X is fantastic.  Related to Awakening.  The Movies is an interesting game.  Also, it occurs to me that we've never linked KoL.  Meat!  Fortune Street.  Seriously, guys.

(12:20) Geremy was wrong, Zach was right.  It's Deus Ex you can't play on a jailbroken device.

(17:20) What makes a good sequel?  Non-linear games are pretty cool, but that's not necessarily the way to go.

(26:00) Zach talks about Halo 2, and how it seems like a multiplayer only game.

(27:00) Difficulty levels in MM2!  The bosses are bossy.

(28:30) We talk a bit about the level designs.  Should insta-death ever be a thing.  Let us know!

(30:00) Metal Man and Air Man are really the only well-themed stages.

(32:30) Are boss rushes a valid game design?

(35:10) Stupid platform section.

(37:30) Apparently, he was based on Santa Claus.

(43:00) Why would you listen to Proto Man?!

(46:30) Mega Man II is better.  Also, what we think would have helped this one.

(50:30) Final thoughts.


Next time, whip it.  Whip it... for more hearts!  It's Castlevania II.

It's a terrible night to not talk to us.  Send us some mail at

Geremy@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Tyler@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Zach@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 or LTOVG@lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 You can also go to the show page at plus.google.com/+LastTimeOnVideogames or comment on the site at www.lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 Also, you can follow our tweets @LTOVG.

Broken Controllers: State of Decay

    What would you do if you returned from a fishing trip in the back end of nowhere to find that the nearby town had been infested with the undead and cut off from the rest of the world? Well the answer to this critical question is often answered with a chattering assault rifle and badass one-liners. Not the case in State of Decay.

    State of Decay takes place in the remnants of a small town where a small number of survivors are trying to keep themselves alive in a zombified world. The game is functionally different from numerous its companions in the genre by giving you control over all the survivors; once you have enough trust with them.

    So to start with the game is third person with both close combat and gun combat. Both work exceedingly well with guns not being superpowered or so pathetic that their limited and hard to find ammo isn't worth the space in your bag. Even with both options available the main way the player is going to take on the undead is with the variety of close combat weapons you come across in the world. These weapons also degrade with use so while you might pick a favorite weapon it will break and finding an exact replacement will be hard to come across. They divided them into three types Bludgeoning; which is a good balance between attack speed and damage, Edged which is fast but doesn't hit as hard so while you are hacking limbs off zombies you aren't knocking them down as much as with others, Finally there are Heavy weapons; these weapons hit with the most force and nearly knock a zombie down with every swing but are really slow. The firearms follow a similar approach but in a very specific fashion that doesn't have as much direct effect coming in variety's of pistol, shotgun, rifle, and submachine gun. Near the end of the game I found a grenade launcher but had no ammo for it and never got a chance to test it out. Guns are limited by their ammo as I stated above, the game doesn't have a generic ammo and each gun needs a certain kind of ammo like 9mm or 7.62.

    Playing the game each character has their vitality and their stamina. Vitality is how much health you have and Stamina is how far you can sprint and swinging melee weapons. Running out in a clustered melee with two or three zombies is highly likely which makes each swing count. Single Zombies are not a threat to the player, the exception to that are the special zombies which I blame Left 4 Dead for introducing.

    All that said that stuff is all fairly standard in zombie games now, what makes State of Decay so interesting and fun is the way it is presented. You have a home base filled with the survivors you have picked up and one of your main tasks is to gather resources in order to build things like an infirmary or workshop or to just keep everyone alive. In fact as you are wandering around you will come across materials and you can do one of three things. Break it down to use for yourself, put it in a rucksack and carry it around or call your home base and they'll send a runner out to gather it up. With the third option every now and then you'll be alerted that your runner is in trouble and needs help. You can always ignore these calls but it may result in your person dying. The other feature that I loved was the open world aspect despite it being the cause of a few of the issues. The game also has a few skills that increase based on use, so the more times you shoot zombies the more your shooting skill goes up. This grants certain bonuses like quicker reloads. The key to all these skills though and it encourages using a few core characters is that each one has a set of background, let's call them feats, that do certain things and bestow certain benefits. Like a character might have the feat that grants the Powerhouse skill or have one that makes it quicker to upgrade the fighting skill.

    While exploring they did a very good job of reinforcing the old Zombie genre adage of staying quiet is staying alive. While all my characters carried firearms I always thought hard about firing them because they would inevitably draw more zombies. Driving does this as well so while you get where you are going faster if it is in the same town as you started you may end up with twenty zombies chasing you when you get out. Of course cars make great tools for killing off Zombie hordes as you can simply drive over them all. Health recovery is done through painkillers found in the world and you can recover stamina by snacking.

    Well we all knew we would get to the bad eventually. While the game does look like a full release title and the world is big. I actually give it points for having no fast travel even cross map. The issue is that it occasionally has item pop in. This is worse near the city portion of the map. I'm glad cars don't have realistic damages or else I'd have been walking for a long time during this game with all the walls and items popping in in front of my bumper. The other thing that I wanted was the ability to take additional survivors out with you on your scavenging runs. As it stands you are alone for most of the game while actually exploring. Honestly though I think those are small problems especially with an arcade title that only costs twenty bucks.

    I don't feel that I am doing this game justice as I talk about it but I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in playing a zombie game that isn't all about the action. Picking places to set up your outposts and getting back to base while badly wounded is a great feeling. Well worth the twenty bucks and more.

    Zach Out.

Last Rant on Videogames: A Tale of Two Links

So, I mentioned a while ago that the Oracle games were on sale.  Unsurprisingly, I bought both and have been playing them.  I've gotten far enough in them that I'm going to talk about them briefly, because that's what I do!

This is one of the few Zelda games with what I would refer to as a gimmick.  Essentially, you play two completely separate games, but you can transfer items and powerups between them either by the old GB Link Cable.  If you don't know what that is, you're not missing much.  Basically, way back when, wireless communications weren't really a thing, so you needed an awkward cable that always got lost to link to GBCs.  Pokemon made copious use of it.

That's not super important, but it's kinda neat.  Basically, you have a game system based off of the old Link's Awakening system.  It looks a lot like the original Zelda; it's isometric-ish, 2D, fairly exploration heavy.  The games are unique from each other in terms of story and map, but share common controls and some items.  Some shared items include a bracelet for lifting stuff, seeds of varying effects, and the ability to jump.  Yeah, that last one's an item; it's a dirty feather.

I'm going to keep this one short, so here's the quick rundown.  Basically, Seasons is more action oriented while Ages is more puzzles oriented.  Both are pretty good games, actually.  I have said on more than one occasions that I prefer Seasons, but I don't think I ever gave Ages a fair shake.  After playing them through, Seasons first, I think I actually prefer Ages.

In keeping with the puzzly theme, Ages has complicated dungeons, a bit of weird time travel stuff to be doing on the world map, and not a lot of directed instructions.  Seasons, by contrast, focuses more on making you jump a lot.  The puzzles usually have pretty obvious solutions, and the dungeons are a bit more straightforward.  I found, upon my second playthrough of Ages, that I substantially prefer the dungeons in Ages.  They have more strenuous puzzles and more interesting design.  The last one also does a great job of tying together elements from all the previous ones.

Really, though, if these games stay as cheap as they were, both are easily worth the price.  While I do like the dungeon design in Ages more, the game is really only marginally better than Seasons, and both stand well on their own.  I got at least 15 hours out of both of them (though I don't think time is a good indicator of quality).  They're quite fun, and solid entries to the series.  If you like Zelda games and have never played these ones, I highly recommend grabbing one.  Or both.

Episode 23: Show Me Your Moves! [Super Smash Bros.]

We crash, mash, and clash our way into our first game on the N64!  It's Super Smash Bros., the fighting game classic that defied genre tropes and created a rather avid fanbase.  Amidst all the furiously flying fighters, there are glimpses of what was to become of this series.  Let's duke it out and see how far up the pile this one lands!



KO our Download!

(01:30) Geremy's awkward family moments.  Also, Zach might be building bears.

(05:30) What we've been playing.  Alex plays games!  Lots of ACCF recently.  KSP's pretty fun.  Speaking of space, so's FTL.  1080 is a snowboarding game of some sort.

(14:40) Fortune Street!  I link to a review, but I don't think such a thing can possibly do it justice.  It's pretty cheap on Amazon, so if you have some friends that want to play Monopoly without the suck, the hosts recommend it.

(16:40) Smash Bros.! Surprisingly, it's one of the few crossover game.  Also the brainchild of Masahiro Sakurai.

(21:00) The roster!  The story of Falcon.

(24:00) There are unique target challenges and platform challenges for every character.  It's pretty cool.

(28:30) We talk about Melee for a bit.  It's generally better, to the extent that this game feels like a prototype for it.  It's a pretty good case for sequels.  We later claim it obsoleted this game.

(34:20) Just... why?

(37:20) That shadow eyeball thing from Kirby.

(39:30) People don't like the shotty.


Ever wanted to know how you could upgrade from being Mega?  How about Mega Man 2?

Upgraded lemons?  We have them! Email us at

Geremy@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Tyler@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Zach@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 or LTOVG@lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 You can also go to the show page at plus.google.com/+LastTimeOnVideogames or comment on the site at www.lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 Also, you can follow our tweets @LTOVG.

Last Rant on Videogames: Alcubierre Was Wrong!

This may not make sense to some of you, but I'll link some stuff and it'll be clear.  This eventually has to do with videogames, I swear.  See, this guy named Miguel Alcubierre came up with a solution to Einstein's field equations.  This is kind of a thing that physicists do from time to time.  It's extremely difficult to find a solution, and there are rather a large number of them.  This and the fact that these equations describe the fundamental working of the universe as we know it, in additional to the weird way small particles behave, have given rise to new parallel world theories.

Not that this really has anything to do with parallel worlds, but it does have to do with a weird byproduct of the solution Alcubierre found.  Basically, in this solution, if there existed some weird form of matter that had negative mass, we could construct a ring of it, charge it (kinda) and warp reality around it.  You could have a ship inside of such a distortion traveling through space as it is compressed in front and expanded behind, and basically go faster than light.  Granted, we have never encountered negative mass.  And using the drive might destroy the universe eventually.  Also, NASA's totally working on it.

However, the actually subject of this has nothing to do with all that, other than showing that FTL, or faster than light if you're not a huge sci-fi enthusiast, is possible.  I mentioned last week that I picked up FTL in the Steam sale.  I realize that, as always, I'm a bit late to get onto big things.  It seems that months ago the entire Internet community was ablaze with commentary about it.  However, I didn't really get it.  I generally like Rogue-like games.  I've mentioned before that I like my Minecraft on hardcore.  Permanent character death has always appealed to me, though it's certainly not for every game.  Ocarina of Time would be a hellish first playthrough.

So, I read some reviews, the official site description, watched some gameplay.  I tried really hard to get excited about it.  However, I just couldn't justify spending any money on a game that I probably wouldn't play.  Something in all the hype was lost, and it just looked like a bland game about space.  Which, actually, puts it above a lot of other games for me.  Space is pretty cool, and not just thermally.  I generally like the fluff in those games, though.  I spent hours reading the setting stuff in Mass Effect, and read the entire dictionary in Until the End of Time.

I ignored it for a year.  However, I visited Ed in Germany this summer, and he was playing it a bit.  I was enthralled by watching it.  It was entirely different the the adventure in micromanagement that I had expected.  It's still pretty heavy on that, though.  I don't know what I got out of watching him play it that I didn't earlier, but it definitely influenced my opinion.

Still, I sat on it for a while, due to have plenty of other things to occupy my time.  Like making a podcast, developing a game, writing a book, and trying to freelance software.  It's amazing how busy unemployment can be.  At any rate, the sale passed around and I bought it.  I can now see what the hype was about.  I've played free games on a certain site that I still lurk that give me equal amusement.  The music pushes this game in to the "I feel alright paying for it" category, though.

Briefly, let's run down what it is.  You have several different ship layouts to choose from at first.  Really, you only have one when you start your first run, but you unlock more as you do stuff in the game.  There are several species, all with different strengths and weakness as compared to humans.

Always it is with the humans.  Tvtropes will destroy you, by the way.

Then, you go through a mostly randomly generated galaxy while fighting pirates, rebels, miscreant aliens, and rescuing/dooming people.  The combat is more tactical than frenetic, especially as the game gives you the ability to pause.  You can collect scrap metal from wrecks to upgrade your ship, which you'll need to do fairly copiously before you reach the end.  The Rebel flagship you must destroy is way stronger than I've managed so far.  And that's on easy mode.  I don't think they know what that means.

Excellent ambient music of the vaguely house variety back up amusing text and a feeling of isolation, despite seeing people every 30 seconds.  Your crew must scurry about the ship putting out fires, manning and fixing systems, and, in the case of one particular Mantis I had, being excellent at mashing buttons so I can fire faster.  Just like Pokemon.

I think the reason the hype didn't really catch me is because it's hard to describe.  The game has a unique feel, though it has elements I've seen before.  It's an ambient gestalt that mesmerizes.  I spent 6 hours solid on my first night; I hadn't realized any time had passed.  It's rather fun, and, in a way, cathartic.

I only hope that one day we, too, may die horrible deaths among the stars.

Episode 22: Cruel or Funny? [Super Dodge Ball]

The 80s.  This was the time of men in short shorts on professional sports teams.  It was a time when a man could throw his balls at another man, and no one cared.  Except certain channels of ESPN.  If you can dodge popular culture, you can dodge this joke!



Bet you can't dodge this download!

(02:20) For your petard oriented edification.

(04:40) What we've been up to.  Geremy has an awesome story later, but Tyler's been on some Diddy Kong Racing.

(08:10) Tyler was wrong about the platform, but Conker's been around for a while.  Sexual dimorphism, by the way, is the tendency for genders in a single species to be physically dissimilar. 

(11:50) Geremy had a sweet Dwarf Fortress tale. This is the tutorial Geremey used to learn Dwarf Fortress. It's a little out of date, but it'll teach you the basics.

(23:40) What makes for awesome game titles? We don't know, but we talk about it.  Fuse is a 4 person co-op shooter thing.  Similar to Brute Force in that respect. 

(28:10) Super Dodge Ball is a game about men and their balls. Seriously, everyone's seen this, right?

(29:20) Cruelty, and therefore dodgeball, is inherently funny.  Michael grokked that.

(30:40) Seriously, Hamlet as a geek makes so much sense.

(31:15) If you want to see how this game plays, check this out.  It's pretty much perfect.

(33:00) A totally unbiased source on banning dodgeball.

(34:40) That thing in London? Westminster Abbey.

(40:28) Double Dragon was incredibly hard to jump in.

(43:30) Final thoughts and suggestions for improvement.

 

Next week, it's the all-start slugfest that reached amazing levels of fanaticism.  It's Super Smash Brothers!

Smash attack our inboxes! Email us at

Geremy@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Tyler@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Zach@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 or LTOVG@lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 You can also go to the show page at plus.google.com/+LastTimeOnVideogames or comment on the site at www.lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 Also, you can follow our tweets @LTOVG.

Broken Controllers: Fire Emblem Awakening

    Well I'm still working through my playthrough of Fire Emblem Awakening but I feel that now is probably a good time to run it down for you at home. Me and the FE series have a tentative relationship simply because they are a Nintendo product and me and Nintendo spend most of our time together eyeing one another suspiciously; I think their design studio died and they seem to think I'm five. This is countered when they release a Fire Emblem game. It should be noted here at the top that I own the special 3DS that they released when Awakening came out and if it hadn't been released I probably wouldn't own one.

    Well let's get into the game shall we?

    The game is a top down tactical game in which you are given a limited number of units on a given map and often your only goal is to eliminate everything that isn't you. The system as Geremy mentioned functions on a RNG, or random number generator, that is influenced by your unit's stats against the opposing unit as well as what kind of weapons the two of you are using. The classes are varied but almost all of them are capped at level 20 forcing you to either use a master seal and upgrade them to a master level class; these are typically more broad classes that enable additional weapons to be used. For example the thief can upgrade into the assassin or the trickster. Both keep his use of the sword but they focus on different stats and add another weapon to the character's arsenal. For assassin that is the bow while the trickster adds a healing staff. Each class change resets the character's weapon skills provided the new class can't use the same weapons forcing them to start out again with the worst weapons in the game. Those classes also grant different skills that can modify the character's abilities. For example the most powerful skill in the game is granted to the dark-flier class; known as Galeforce it enables a character who had already acted on your turn take a second move if they killed an enemy unit.

    The game also prominently features weapon degradation with the most powerful weapons having the shortest lifespan of 15-20 uses. The exception to this rule are a few special weapons that have a lifespan of 5 or fewer often tied to weapons that give an unskilled character much more power than the standard equivalent level weapon. Of course with this system comes an interesting Rock/Paper/Scissors approach to how they behave in game. Axes get bonuses to attacking lance wielding foes while lances beat swords and swords best axes. In previous Fire Emblem games magic also had its own tree but in Awakening that is done away with in favor of a simpler system. The different spells are available but it doesn't tier out at all.

    The biggest change to older games is the way that supports are handled. In other games characters that were supporting each other would need to be within a certain range. If characters were within this support zone they would bestow stat bonuses to each other. Awakening takes a different route and it heavily encourages the player to keep supporting units right next to each other. The reason for this is that in addition to granting certain stat bonuses those characters can also help out in combat from adding another attack to shielding the other character and with permadeath enabled it is a long sigh of relief to see that happen. The odds of it happening go up with the more support level that the characters have with each other, limited to three with one being an exception to reaching four, and instead of one unit "rescuing" the other and carrying them around they pair up as a team and while only the active character engages in combat the other one can help them out. This is a good tool for moving slow units quickly into a hot spot with a faster one.

    In the game's story you play as an amnesiac who is a skilled tactician that uses both magic and swords to start things off. It quickly moves into a situation where you and your band of characters must stop a great disaster from occurring and sending the whole world into darkness; you know a pretty standard JRPG storyline. Each level is up to the player to select from a world map, another new deal from the last one I played, and from there you engage the mission. Contrary to other games in the series you can farm experience in Awakening and end up with units that are functionally around level 60 if you have the patience for it and want to see everything crushed beneath your feet. There are a ton of characters in the game and I lament that the format means that I can't use them all but in an interesting twist even though most of the character is only seen in support conversations every one has a distinct personality to them and are a joy to interact with, if for no other reason than to see how things go with them.

    Quite honestly if you can track a copy down, they were sold out when I first got mine, you should give the game a try. I'll freely admit the storyline is fairly standard but the colorful characters, a thief bribed to aid you with candy, to a jolly russianish mercenary, really make up for the slight shortcomings in the storyline. I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys tactical combat games or just wants to finally get something that isn't Pokemon and good on their 3DS.

Zach out.

Last Rant on Videogames: Aqueous Air

First, a brief aside.  I generally drop these on Mondays, and have done so with relative consistency since I started.  However, I started a new job last week.  Normally, this wouldn't matter, except I ran out of backlogged posts without realizing it.  So, in the true American tradition, I'm blaming external consequences for my own failure (it's still totally my fault, though).

At any rate, it's time for a quick vocabulary lesson.  For those of you who didn't remember much from whatever chemistry classes your were forced to take at some point, or those of you who never did, "aqueous" means, essentially, dissolved in water.  How, then, may we have aqueous air?  Is this some sort of cryptic hint?

Of course it is!  Really, I expected better.  This last week has been full of the glory that is the Steam Summer Sale.  Twice a year, around the solstices, Valve unleash Steam Claus on the world to gift all good gamers ridiculously cheap titles.  This is an amazing time, both for consumers and developers.  Consumers get games cheap.  I picked up FTL and the full soundtrack for under $4 on Saturday, and have definitely already gotten more than the reasonable return on enjoyment for that.

The Steam sales are also the highest selling times for developers.  In addition that they get to sell vast numbers of their games, though at reduced profit, more people are playing the games.  Aside from the immense satisfaction of knowing that someone is enjoying your work, people who play games tend to talk about them, thereby further increasing sales.  I believe I've already posted it before, but the Dustforce team published their sales figures for the first chunk o' time of being on the market.  Relevancy? A vast majority of their sales after initial release came from Steam sales.  I think a large number were actually from being packaged in the Humble Indie Bundle a few times, but that doesn't diminish the power of sales to spread your games.

I've harped before on how expensive gaming is.  There is a weird dichotomy in life.  In order to have enough money to freely do things you enjoy, you have to give up the time you would need to do those things.  Conversely, in order to have time, you really can't have a job.  Such is life, I suppose.  This time of year, though, the normal shackles of societal obligations are cast off, and cheap games are had by all!

That said, if you have the time, hop onto Steam and grab yourselves some cheap games.  There are daily deals, usually 60% or so off of the normal list price, and flash deals.  The flash deals are my favorite; they feel a bit like an auction house.  Basically, the community votes on which games they want to be on sale next, and the majority winners go on 75% discount for 8 hours.  It's incredible.  Bastion, Supergiant Games' rather amusingly coincidental super-giant game, was just over $2 at one point.

Despite the stigma around this company and its slogan, I think it's accurately applied to the events Steam runs, and really its whole distribution service.  Gaseous water, empowering players.

Episode 21: Get Your Brains On [Zombies Ate My Neighbors]

This week we're getting into our backyards and saving totally oblivious neighbors.  It's Zombies Ate My Neighbors!  Grab your super soakers and terribly dated 3D glasses (excluding the Doctor) and shoot some horror themed enemies!



Brains... Downloads...

(02:20) Forza 4's Warthog!

(05:00) 08th MS Team is a pretty decent guy who only afraids of some things.  Freakin' Invincible.

(07:20) WWBP!  Idle diversions are fun!  Fire Emblem Awakening is pretty sweet.

(11:30) Golden league Jigglypuffs!

(16:30) Direct sequels to games that don't normally have them.  I'm looking at you...

(19:30) Platypus Bear!

(21:00) Zombie time.  For reference, Geometry Wars.

(25:50) State of Decay.  It sounds pretty amazing.  It's like a more complicated, but not MMO, DayZ.

(27:30) Not the picture we were talking about, but amusing.

(32:00) Convenience over ammo.  It's a pretty decent mechanic.

(35:20) We mention it being frustrating and hard a couple times.  It's worth noting that it's not really hard, so much as just tedious.

(40:30) Record of Agarest War.  If you like Disgaea, you'll like this.


Next week, Super Dodgeball!

Bold move, Cotton.  Let's see if it works out at

Geremy@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Tyler@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Zach@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 or LTOVG@lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 You can also go to the show page at plus.google.com/+LastTimeOnVideogames or comment on the site at www.lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 Also, you can follow our tweets @LTOVG.

The Ratings: June

It's that time again!  The more I do these columns, the more I understand why reviewers give everything a 7.  The more games you play, the more the mundane ones all sort of blur together.  Rather than give everything a 7 though, my instinct is to give stuff a rating between the 3-4 range.  Whether this is because I have higher standards or just want to defy the trope I'm not sure.  Regardless, hit the jump and see how the new meat fares!


Castlevania 10/10
I've played a couple of games that were better than Castlevania since we started the podcast, but we haven't played any of them for the podcast.  Yet. 

Mega Man 9/10
Same with Megaman, I really didn't expect it to be up this high so long.  It's got a lot of flaws, but it's fun, replaying it has just confirmed that, and I'm very excited to get to some of its sequels.

The Legend of Zelda 9/10
And the Legend of Zelda, man the best videogames on the NES were great, but part of me wishes we hadn't played so many of them so soon.  I know there are some undervalued gems out there somewhere, I just hope we play them sooner rather than later. 

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars 8/10
Finally, some new blood making it high on the charts.  Super Mario RPG is a simple but fun title from the end of the Super Nintendo's lifespan.  Graphically it's sort of impressive, however like all early 3d games, it looks terrible in comparison to what we have today, where as most 2d games still look pretty decent, having a vintage look.  The game married Super Mario's art style to an RPG pretty well, although they added a bunch of stuff that feels off tonally.  Still, this inspired games like Paper Mario that capture the Mario universe perfectly.  SMRPG almost beat out Zelda on this list, however the pacing is really funny.   It starts slow, starts compressing super fast in the middle, then slows way down for the end, which starts to make it feel like a slog on the back end.  Still, a great game and I recommend it for anyone with interest in Mario, RPGs or the Super Nintendo.

Doom 8/10
I really didn't expect Doom to stay this high this long, but it has one thing that a lot of first person shooters lack these days.  First and foremost, it's fun.  It doesn't let anything get in the way of that.  The story is stupid, not having to reload guns is stupid, and the heavy metal and demon themes are childish, but it all adds up to fun, which is a thousand times better than being "realistic."

Gradius 8/10
Speaking of things I didn't expect, I haven't played Gradius once since that episode, when it's really the sort of challenging game I love.  I think these sorts of games work best for our assignments, since they encourage being played a lot in short bursts, but don't consume a whole lot of time.  Still if you haven't grabbed it, I suggest you throw it on your 3DS. 

Metroid 7/10
Metroid is another game I didn't expect to be up here all that long, since I didn't really love it.  I liked it enough to complete it, and I don't regret that at all, but I don't think I'm ever going to play it again.  Still, for an NES title it's quite complex, and likely inspired more than one modern title. 

Super Mario Bros. 7/10
Ironically, the baseline game I wanted to compare everything else to ends up being a 7.  Super Mario Bros., while not a complex game, is still a great one though, and one anyone interested in the history of videogames or what makes them good should play.  

Final Fantasy 6/10
Maybe after I finish my Mario binge I'll go back to Final Fantasy.  I liked what was there, and got less than a quarter of the way through, but technical problems made the game so hard to have fun with.  And I'm a guy who plays Dwarf Fortress.  Oh well.  

Gunstar Heroes 6/10
Don't really have anything to say about Gunstar Heroes I haven't already.  It's fine.

Excite Bike 6/10
I wish I'd gotten Excite Bike on the 3DS instead of the Wii virtual console.  It's a very simple game, but quite fun and would be great on a phone.  It's actually really easy to get into a sort of zen state while playing it, which makes it fantastic for doing things like listening to podcasts.  That said, while fun, it's really simple, and I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't curious already. 

Kirby’s Adventure 5/10
Kirby's Adventure gets the role I envisioned Super Mario Bros. having.  The middle of the road.  It's a technical marvel, colorful, and has a huge number of interesting power ups.  Unfortunately, it's also incredibly easy, to the point of being boring.  This was by design, it was supposed to be a game for  kids, but I don't think it quite holds up.

Harvest Moon 5/10
The first assignment I didn't complete, Harvest Moon has a similar problem to Kirby in that it's boring.  However, it starts out fun, the game simply doesn't have enough going on to entertain you to completion, at least Kirby has new levels and enemies. 

Sonic the Hedgehog 5/10
And here we have the corner of games that were good ideas but just messed something up really bad.  At the top, Sonic, a decent platformer that gives you all sorts of interesting super speed options and punishes you for using them.  I've been too scared to play Sonic 2 again since we played this, but I remember it being much better and recommend you try that if you want a Sonic game. 

F-Zero 4/10
Two racing games in one month is too many, they're just too similar.  I'll admit, I didn't really play enough F-Zero, only an hour or two, it just never grabbed me.  If I'd played it more, it might actually be lower on this list, as it never really did anything that annoyed me, I just never got super into it.  F-Zero X is a game I loved, and I'm eager to see if it holds up or just feels like more of the same.

Act Raiser 4/10
I've said my piece on Act Raiser a thousand times.  Great concept, interesting themes, lousy execution. 

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja 4/10
And now we get to the games that are just sort of boring in general.  Mystical Ninja has co-op and is a fun afternoon with a friend, but that's sort of an easy add on for any game, and many have done it better sense.

Comix Zone 3/10
Man, Comix Zone, such a cool premise that doesn't deliver at all.  The enemies are bland, the story stupid, the characters forgettable, and the game play frustrating.  The music and graphics are acceptable, and the game is short which is a sort of mercy, but damn is it not worth playing.  Skip it.

Ogre Battle 3/10
Again, great ideas, a fun tactical system, but just frustratingly hard game play that ruins it all, it doesn't even have the mercy of at least being short.  If the idea of controlling an army of wizards and golems sounds interesting, play Ogre Battle 64 instead. 

Double Dragon II The Revenge 2/10
Another co-op game with almost nothing going on, terrible controls are what hurt Double Dragon 2 the most, but honestly, it's just not fun.  I hear good things about Double Dragon Neon, try that one if you're curious about the series. 

Double Dragon 2/10
Imagine Double Dragon 2 with no co-op, and terrible looping music that makes you want to kill yourself.  Ta-dah, Double Dragon! 

Ghosts ‘n Goblins 2/10
Which is still better than Ghosts 'n Goblins.  Incredible difficulty, power ups that are a detriment more often then a help, and you have to play it twice.  It's notoriously hard, but also incredibly poorly made.

Phantasy Star 1/10
Bleh.  Phantasy Star sucks.  There I'm done, tune in next month, where hopefully I'll be in a better mood.

Episode 20: Go Big or Respawn [Bases Loaded]

Take us out to the ball game!  Take us out to the crowd with no animation!  Buy us some surprisingly complex pitching mechanisms and horrible batting.  We don't care if we ever come back!  Bases Loaded is the NES classic about hitting balls with sticks.



It's a home run! Take your walk to the download!

(1:10) Zach's finally made it to SC2 Silver League.  Geremy's playing everything.  This includes Word Realms.  It sounds pretty cool. 

(10:45) Sports games!  NFL Blitz is pretty fun, as is NBA Jam.

(15:00) Control schemes!

(19:00) Totally a Dreamcast.

(22:00) Man of Steel!  Kind of a specific marketing campaign.

(25:35) Bases Loaded.  It simulates baseball!  Fielding needs an active player indicator.  Apparently, newer baseball games are better.

(34:00) Final impressions of the game.  It's... not super fun.  Or regular fun, really.

(38:50) Tangent time!  Megatokyo is a pretty decent and incredibly long running story based web comic.  Watch the train go!

(40:00) Simulation and how much is necessary.  Dwarf Fortress is a thing.  Missteps in GTA.

Next week, Zombies Ate My Neighbors for the SNES. Grab your movie supplies for undead bashing!

Need some help in the zombie apocalypse?  Email us at

Geremy@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Tyler@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 Zach@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
 or LTOVG@lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 You can also go to the show page at plus.google.com/+LastTimeOnVideogames or comment on the site at www.lasttimeonvideogames.com.
 Also, you can follow our tweets @LTOVG.

Broken Controllers: Crafting the Stars

    So I've mentioned that I'm playing a lot of Starcraft 2 and I felt that it would be a good entry into our Last Rant segment; stealing some of Tyler's thunder. Starcraft as a, I hesitate to call two and a half games a series, game and I have an interesting relationship. Which basically means I suck at it. The game is in my personal opinion the best real time strategy game that is currently available followed closely by only Starcraft Brood War.

    Now that is a pretty big statement I know but keep in mind that Starcraft, the original, is STILL sold in stores on the shelf fifteen years after its original release. Its staying power can be easily attributed to the sheer balance of the game. When the first game released other strategy games like Age of Empires were built around a basic setup of every "race" had the same units with maybe one or two unique and special units. Starcraft changed the formula and each race has its own playstyle and strengths. For the record all three hosts played Terran. Each race also contained a variety of units that could be used to differentiate themselves and play well, Tyler preferred nukes while me and Geremy leaned toward more conventional options.

    You said it was about Starcraft 2 not 1!

    Yes I did, and in this case I wanted to give some basics.

    Starcraft 2 Maintains this same paradigm with some of the star units making a reappearance in the second game. Terran still get Marines and Siege tanks but can no longer build foot medics, they're now the dropships, or Goliaths. While Protoss lost the Dragoon and the Reaver but kept the Zealot and the High Templar. On the front of the evil Zerg they did not lose their icons of Zergling and Hydralisk but they received, as did the other two, more units with new jobs.

    One thing that really causes Starcraft 2 to stand out as a unique game is the difference between its campaign mode and its multiplayer mode. Currently only the second campaign has been released, the Protoss is the final one that we are all waiting on. The two are different in many ways. The Terran Campaign included units that were completely unavailable in multiplayer while the Zerg included upgrades to their units that weren't carried over. Personally this intrigues me since Starcraft is a game about practice and reaction but campaign, other than teaching the very basics, doesn't teach good multiplayer habits which in many other games I've played generally does. While that isn't a terrible thing it is a little strange. Of course as my fellow host pointed out when we were discussing the game it does allow the guys at Blizzard to throw in some things that may have been thrown out of development into the game. Well lets roll into some more interesting things shall we?

    As I said above this game is all about the practice and rewatching games that you have played to see where you could have done better. I'm terrible at this game and it is difficult for me to see where I made a mistake especially in games that I have won. Clearly if I won I made the right choice. Well in Starcraft that isn't quite the case. I've found even when looking at games I've won I can find some things wrong with my actions. A classic tale that I had was I scouted a opponent and saw he was probably looking to go air harassment and armed with that knowledge I did absolutely nothing about it. I won the game but it was a moment that even as I type I'm trying to facepalm. You see each build and unit has something that can hard counter it. My prefered Marine, Marauder, Medivac can be hard countered by protoss colossi or enough Ultralisks. The game is just so well balanced that while people can claim that things are overpowered but in reality most are just a new challenge that you have to deal with.

    You've heard me mention that I was a Bronze League hero and you may have wondered what that meant. Well Starcraft 2 employs a matchmaking system that often will put a player up against another one of equal skill. Now this can feel broken especially after you go three games straight without a win but stepping back shows that it recalculates and often you'll be facing down people on your level or at least near it. Eventually of course you will jump to another league and keep moving. At time of writing I have jumped into Silver league which means I'm no longer in the true scrubs division but still nothing to really brag about. And while I haven't played really any the game continues to have games that are geared towards one specific thing that doesn't affect your ladder rankings. This is the arcade, as I stated I have no experience with it but I assume it consists of all kinds of game modes that people dreamed up.

    All things considered my only real criticisms of the game stem from the need to login to battle.net, Blizzard's multiplayer system, to play the game and earn any kind of achievements. The other is that I don't care for the game's menu layout. I had to look up on their website how to create a game to practice against computers, which isn't really a truly big problem but it was annoying and I shouldn't have had to.

    In short if your computer can run the game go buy it. It is hands down the best game that has made its way onto this blog or podcast thus far. Even if you don't play the multiplayer the varied units and characters will make the campaign fun to run through multiple times.

    With that I leave you with. . .

    Nuclear Launch Detected.

    Damn it Tyler!

Last Time on Videogames: Sandboxes and Simulators

While S&S is harder to say and sounds distinctly dirtier than D&D, it's actually a genre mashing that I think goes fairly well together.  Run around and do anything?  Check.  Do it realistically, or within some very tight bounds?  Well, that's all the difference between a sandbox and a simulator.

Sandbox games, for those who have been devoid of an Internet connection until just now and therefore don't know, basically allow you to do anything you want.  This is generally a core aesthetic or gameplay component, and may actually be the entire point of the game.  If this sounds awesome, the rest of the world agrees with you.  GTA, being one of the first decent ones that achieved popularity, spawned a multibillion dollar franchise and numerous clones.  The imitators, however, were not as good.  More recently, however, some better ones have been made, but I don't know that they have the ability to challenge the giant.  One might argue that Saints Row is a knockoff, but the less pointed gameplay appeals to me more.

Simulators, for the purpose of juxtaposition, generally give you a very specific set of rules to follow.  Additionally, there tend to be concrete goals and not a whole lot of do-what-you-want-ery.  There are simulation games for basically every activity, from trucking simulators to fishing games.

While I generally dismiss games of this ilk as boring and poorly made, at least as far as videogame standards are concerned, there are a few good ones.  One that we'll likely get to eventually, and one that filled quite a bit of time in my youth, is Pilotwings 64.  Basically, it's a light density flying simulator.  It gives you multiple vehicles and a fairly expansive terrain to explore, and sets you loose.  You have to accomplish some missions first, but the rewards for many of them simply give you access to a new vehicle to cruise around aimlessly with.

While this game is neither a true simulation nor is it dense enough to be a real sandbox, it's pretty fun.  Thinking about this recently, however, has gotten me to think more about what makes a simulator distinct from a sandbox game.

After much pondering (about 5 minutes), I've decided that simulators are only called such when the game mechanics are so incredibly detailed that they're no longer an abstraction of reality.  With videogames, some actions should be incredibly complex for the character to perform.  The player, however, shouldn't need to know how to do these things.  That's the point, really.  So, to make it easier to engage the player, we map crazy backflip-sword-swipes to a single button.  Bam!  Instant abstraction.

Simulators make individual actions easy, but there are about 500 things you need to keep track of, making more complex tasks scale at least linearly, if not exponentially.

Sandboxes, by contrast, have the same open worlds that simulators sometimes show, but they're much more dense.  There are a lot of things for the player to interact with, usually in the form of destruction and mayhem with modern incarnations.  Minecraft, for example, can be treated as a sandbox game.  You can do basically anything, especially in creative mode, and every single block can be interacted with.  Barring bedrock, I suppose.

I was basically just thinking about how a simulation is really different from a sandbox game, but I don't think they are in terms of mechanics or gameplay.  I think the focus is mostly on aesthetic.  In sandbox games, the emphasis is placed on a feeling of empowerment and expression.  Simulators focus more on immersion.  It's really a matter of taste, but the popular preference is almost overwhelmingly for games oriented to be sandboxes.

I wonder whether this would change if simulators had higher production quality.