A text review of F-Zero Maximum Velocity for Game Boy Advance

 So if F-Zero X made me a fan for life, how did this game slip under my radar?

A text review of F-Zero X for Nintendo 64

Come to think of it, probably one of the other reasons I never bought F-Zero in the SNES era was because I only got to play it near the end of that generation, and by then the hype for the then called Ultra 64 was at fever pitch! All my pocket money was being saved for those tasty Silicon Graphics. Nintendo was on fire with their early N64 releases and so when F-Zero 64 started to appear in lists of upcoming games, you can bet I was excited!

A text review of F-Zero for Super Nintendo

Who else misses old games magazines? I would read and re-read my magazines as a kid and truly miss those days. A video review is nice sometimes too, but often there isn’t as much detail about the game as you’d like in these reviews. This review of F-Zero aims to be a bit like an old one you might read in a magazine, with a bit of personal history thrown in for good measure.

Konami Brawlers That Didn't Make the Cut.

You know, I remember a day when I used to see the Konami logo and hear the little tune and immediately think to myself:

Oh yeah, good times are coming baby

Rocket Knights, Tiny Toons, Sunset Riders (in the arcades), Contra and a bunch of others.  It was a mark of quality.  Now though.... Let's move on shall we?

So continuing on with my Brawlers list, I will add in Konami games here.  They made a fair few and initially this was going to be a post about why the Turtles games didn't make it, but I decided to broaden the spectrum for reasons which will soon be very clear.

AquaShooters! 12 Kit build

 

Well, for something different, I thought I would go through my building process of these little Gachapon Aqua shooters figures which I have been somewhat enamoured with the past few years.  For a 500 yen roll, you'll find yourself blessed with either a kit action figure, to be assembled, or some kind of weapon set, also to be assembled.

Admittedly, like the GashaponQuest  items, it feels kind of crap if you just do a single roll and just get a a weapon set, which is exactly what happened to me on my first try when I discovered these super late only to find the weapons were the only two left in the machine. Sigh.  Oh well moving on.

I'll be building the Aquashooters! 12 series Izumi Motohashi, the one that took me longest to get (I think)... I went a bit overboard with these guys and I think I got the whole set a lot earlier than I thought.

Moving on, let's build a figure! (and weapons!)

Capcom Brawlers that Didn't Make the Cut.

 

So as a bit of a continuation from my Brawlers Top 10 post, I assume there might be some readers that wonder why certain games didn't quite make the cut.

Which I can totally understand.  Often these top 10 kind of things are highly personal and many people have many reasons for preferring one over another.  

Therefore, I am going to do some follow-up posts on popular games that I suspect many people would include in their top 10s and give a little explanation on my thoughts about them and why they didn't make the cut.

Naturally, in the Brawler and Fighter genres, CAPCOM is pretty well known.  Heck in my top 10, CAPCOM made 4 out of the 10, so that must say something!  So todays post is about CAPCOM brawlers that didn't tickle my fancy.

Beat 'em Ups; A top 10

I’ve played many, many games over the years and I often find myself attracted to 2 main types, the good old platformer and Beat Em Ups.  I’ve recently been referring to Beat Em Ups as "Brawlers" as I’ve never really liked their genre definition.  “Fighting game” doesn’t fit, as something like Virtua Fighter, DOA and Street fighter all fit into that mix and are very different.  A few years ago I was introduced to the term “Belt scrollers” which is just a stupid term; people defended it as the characters often travelled along the screen as if they were on a conveyor belt and they had the ability to move left/right and up down in the playing field.  Yeh? Well guess what, Zaxxon does that, 1942 too, it's just a vertical conveyor belt, Paperboy,  the list goes on and on.  Essentially it doesn’t describe the game play at all, just the movement of the screen and therefore something like Kung-Fu master nor Altered Beast fit in that classification.

So here I will refer to them as Brawlers, as I think it fits well indicating the often chaotic nature of their gameplay and the fact that you can often punch more than one enemy at a time.

Firstly though, I have to remind myself about the brawlers I have played over the years.  I am sure I am missing some, but after scrolling through a few lists, these are the ones I have played enough to be confident I have a pretty solid idea of what is going on in them:

Alien Storm	Ninja Combat NEOGEO
Alien VS Predator	PuliRuLa
Altered Beast	Red Heat
Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja	Sailor Moon (arcade game)
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs	Spiderman: The Video Game
Capt America and the avengers	Streets of rage 1,2,3,4
Capt Commando	Target Renegade
Comix Zone (on reflection, this doesn't fit)	Tenchi WO Karau II (Warriors of Fate)
D&D 1,2	The Combat Tribes
Die hard Arcade	The Crow
Double Dragon C64	The Crows, Battle action
Double Dragon II (NES)	The Ninja Warriors (+ Again)
Dynamite DUx (C64)	The Punisher
Final fight 1,2,3	The Simpsons
Golden Axe 1,2,3	TMNT arcade 1
GA Revenge Of Death Adder	TMNT Hyperstone Heist
Guardian Heroes	TMNT Shredders revenge
**I'm sure I've missed some**	TMNT Turtles in time
King of Dragons	Two Crude Dudes (CrudeBusters)
Knights of the Round	Under cover cops
Mighty Final Fight	Vendetta (Arcade Game)
Nekketsu Oyako	Xmen (konami arcade game)

A lot of the games above I've probably played on multiple formats, such as Double Dragon, Final Fight and even Golden Axe, so I have tried to avoid doing that because:

1. The list would be way too long.

2. For my purposes it is unneeded, because if a particular version is in my top 10, I will state so.

3. I probably can't remember them all.

So, due to popular demand (heh) here I am with a nice little list of my top 10 Brawlers on various platforms that I have played over the years.  

Galvatron - Generations Selects, Toy colour version

 

Hooo, boy.  This little fellow I waited a while for.  Some reason when I saw the original colour version of this guy from the EarthriseKingdom (all those lines blended together there...) line, I just had a feeling that there was a white version on the way eventually.  Thus I held off buying and bided my time; lo and behold! I was blessed by the news that the toy coloured version (this one) was planned.

Kingdom is the purple one.  I decided to not link to the TT page, as it'll eventually disappear.

Woot!  Now I just had to pray to the Plastic Gods that Taktom saw fit to release him here. And they did, as a TT Mall exclusive (which there was a lot of going on at the time).  While the exclusives were a pain, it did mean that I just had to be on the internet ball to get one.

Obviously I did. And here we are now.

More preamble to follow:

Legacy Core Class Megatron

 

Just as a heads up, this toy is called "Energon Universe Megatron,"  however, when the old Armada/Energon/Galaxy force trilogy was happening, I ended up seeing more episodes of Superlink and Galaxy Force than their English counterparts.  I also had just discovered the joys of Hobby Link Japan and the internet, which was coupled with a decent Aussie dollar, and so imported a lot of my figures.

Where am I going with this story?  Excellent question.

Well, in Superlink/Energon, the main leader of the Decepticons was missing for a while and Scorponok was the leader, then Megatron eventually returned.  However, since they carried on from Micron Densetsu, Super link Megs was called Galvatron from the start.  I also imported the JP version of Galvatron as it was a smaller size and the Hasbro one was oversized.

As a result of all this, I will probably be calling this figure Galvatron a lot of the time, despite the fact that is not it's official name.  Hasbro also have plans to release a Galvatron coloured version (With extra purple bits) later as well, just to add to the possible confusion.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Sludge of the Studio Series variety

 

Moar DINOBOTS!  Goddam life is good.  Sludge is one that I always wanted as a kid and never got.  I didn't get any of the Dinobots actually, until I got a gold box Snarl.  The Studio series took the wind out of Takaratomy's Generations Selects coloured versions made from the POTP figures, but with nicer paint, and personally I appreciate that as these Studio Series ones are looking good and a leader sized = Darn bigguns.

Shattered Legacy Sideswipe review

 It's been a while, make sure your shoes are one, we're gonna look at some Shattered Glass, Sideswipe!

Gashapon Quest Wave 3, Portal to the Beast Kingdom

 Land, Kingdom, place, whatever.  Where the beast folk live.  

So here I am with a review of the wave three of Gashapon Quest plastic model figures.  Amazingly these things come from Gacha machines, yep, they're not cheap, but they're pretty cool.  I managed to get 3 of the 4 waves released from the machines, most of it was done through Bandai's online Gashapon site, which I didn't do, because:

1. It's kinda annoying
2. I kept missing the ordering cut-off dates...
3. I think I discovered them kind of late.
4. After market prices are OBSCENE!

So here is the first set I managed to complete myself.  

God Of War 4 Completed

 I had to go back and check this, did I post about this game's experience when I started?  Not in and individual post, but I did start in my yearly gaming post.

So, now that it's done, what's the final verdict?

A resounding "meh, it was all right."

Doing a wee bit o maintenance.

 Hello there everybody.

I have recently discovered that some posts from a certain time are looking a little shakey. In that when you view their page where the image thumbnails are meant to be, there is just a filename.  It looks a bit like this:

Long story short, while the thumbnails don't display, if one clicks the link, it will take you to the appropriate picture.

Annoyingly a decent amount of the Generations Selects translations I did fall into this time.  So if you want to read them, rest assured they are still there.  I am going to slowly run about fixing up the affected posts, but as you can imagine, it's a bit of a PITA.  

Howevrm there we go.  No great problem, as nothing has been lost.  Woot.

Thank you for your patience.

Sonic Frontiers: Final Horizon - Finished

 Oh boyoboyoboy.

I was not terribly impressed with this DLC when I last posted about it. It was half arsed, to put it nicely... My main gripe was about the controls and shitty writing.  Well, they gave an update (yay) which fixed up most of the controls (yay) but not much they could do about the writing.  Seriously, the main story was so much better.

So with the controls fixed, I decided to get back into it and found things a little bit better. There is still much frustration though.

Transformers Legacy Snarl, of the nature of Core class

 

Ye olde Snarl would have to be my favourite Dinobot.  There is no doubt about the fact that Stegosaurs are cool!  Even to the point of me having a few different versions of the grumpy arse loner fellow now.  Yes, I have the Leader version stashed away somewhere.  Anyway, despite not really liking the concept of combining Dinobots... I did pick up Core class Swoop a while ago and was suitably impressed with the little bugger.  Therefore, Snarl should be on the get list as well.

I have no intention of getting the rest of the team as some of them look stupid and I feel that just because they are thematically similar, it doesn't mean they have to combine into a big super robot.

So, here we are with my post about me chatting about Snarl.

The small one.