I did another one of these. In case you don't remember the premise, and don't want to dig for my other ones, here it is: I pick one Genesis game I haven't played before for each letter of the alphabet, play them for 10 minutes, then write a quick paragraph and rate them. I try to avoid RPGs, sports games, and sims (I don't always succeed).
There are no entries for Q, X, and Y, because all the Genesis games on the list that begin with those letters were ones I already played.
Not a very good crop this time.
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Alien Storm - Wow, this is so blatantly based on Golden Axe that they didn't even bother to hide it. The swings of my empty flamethrower looked just like a barbarian sword chops. Not that there's anything wrong with copying Golden Axe and broiling aliens instead of skeletons (the aliens are much easier to kill, by the way), it's just pretty much the same game with a tweak or two. 7.5/10
Beast Wrestler - No, this game is exactly what you think it is. It's monsters wrestling in WWF style. You know, like King of the Monsters, except not awesome to watch or anything. Boring, slow, impossible to control, and ugly. My squid monster fighter and my gargoyle-jet opponent went at it for 5 minutes, and the only move I could figure out was "tentacle rape". Seriously. 1/10
Chakan, The Forever Man - It's kind of good. Chakan has pretty good control over his twin swords, and to be honest, I had more fun fooling around with his swordplay than playing the actual game. Except for being pretty demanding with jumps, I didn't see any real problems with it. 7/10
Dinosaurs for Hire - Ignore the cheesy title for a moment. Picture Contra. With dinosaurs. Shooting at ninjas. Manufactured awesome is still awesome, and I didn't really see any problems with this, it was pretty fun. 7.5/10
Earnest Evans - The title character appears to be half Terry Bogart, half Indiana Jones, and half Vectorman, and it's the bad halves of all three. Seriously, the guy moves like a puppet, and it's really distracting. He searches caves, swings a whip around...standard stuff, but it's really hard to control. Not THAT bad, just kind of clunky. 5/10.
Fatal Rewind - Uh...I don't know how to describe this game. It's the Pixar lamp with a gun climbing up before lava kills it, being attacked by squares and other floating shit. What it isn't is fun, and what's worse, the name has nothing to do with the game...but now there can't ever be a good game with the badass name "Fatal Rewind". 1/10
Gargoyles - Very, very average. Kind of fun tearing the fuck out of annoying enemies, and once you get the hang of the controls, it's not so bad. But I wasn't feeling it, if you know what I mean. 6/10
High Seas Havoc - You know, making a good "mascot animal platformer" in the style of Sonic isn't really that hard. Charming animal main character (I think it's a seal, I'm not sure), one button controls colorful worlds, upbeat music, and simply but not insultingly simple gameplay. This game gets them all right, it was a blast to play. Definite sleeper game, go try it out. 9/10
Incredible Hulk - You know, it's hard to make a video game starring a character who's supposed to be so fucking invincible, hurting him only makes him madder. So I understand. But it should take more than 2 guys with guns to completely stymie the Hulk. I'll admit it is kind of fun to pick guys up, walk them over to a bottomless pit, and drop them in. But other than that, it's kind of boring. 5.5/10
James Pond - THIS GAME MAKE NO FUCKING SENSE!!!!! 0.5/10
Ka-Ge-Ki Fists Of Steel - Did you ever think to yourself "You know, Ring King would be a GREAT game to convert into a Double Dragon style fighting game!". If you did, that apparently makes you the second, and I really wish the first guy to think that didn't work for a game company. It was mostly just really, really annoying to play, after EVERY knockdown, the characters just writhed in place for 5 seconds while a stock digitized clip said something. Bleh. 1.5/10
Lawnmower Man - I don't know what the hell the point of this was. I never saw the movie or anything, but it was Badly Digitized Guy and Badly Digitized Girl flying through poorly drawn 3D mazes to get to horrible side-scrolling shooting scenes, and everything kills the fuck out of you cheaply. 1/10
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein - Bad. Not godawful unplayable like some games, but boring and confusing. There just doesn't seem to be a point. And why does Frankenstein have a magic blue orb? 4/10
No Escape - I'm really not sure what to think of this, except maybe it's some sort of Prince of Persia/Flashback/Out Of This World style adventure game? I just know you start out with some villagers chasing your ass for some reason, and that's kind of fun. I'm just not sure what to do with this game. 5.5/10.
Outlander - Seemed like a fun idea, drive a car, shoot guys on motorcycles. Really kind of liked how when someone came up next to you, a little side window popped up that let you nail that bastard with a shotgun. Didn't seem to be any point, and when I ran out of gas it let me get out on foot (and get killed really quick), but looked like a fun concept at least. 6.5/10
Pocahontas - Yep. I hate this game. It was one of those Prince of Persia inspired adventure games, except the controls were all weird, there seemed to be little to no point to anything I was doing, and while I could switch out to the pet raccoon, this idea of working together to solve puzzles was only used once (the raccoon was way more fun to screw around with). I spent most of the 10 minutes trying to kill Pocahontas off. I did not succeed. Also, Colors of the Wind is irritating enough without it repeating endlessly in 16 bit audio. 2.5/10
Rolo To The Rescue - Wow, this one wasn't stupid. It was simplistic (can we keep 1-hit kills out of our kiddie games, please?), but had a kind of unique concept...Rolo is a baby elephant freeing his woodland buddies from cages...and while Rolo can't do squat, once you free his friends you can switch to them and use their abilities to help you free the rest. A good game hiding under a downright silly exterior. 8/10
Saint Sword - This one was fun. As soon as I saw Taito, I had a good feeling. It started out looking like one of those Rastan clones, walk right and slash with sword, until I picked up a random power up, used it, and turned into a MOTHERFUCKING CENTAUR! HELL yes! There's a few transformation options and they made the 10 minutes extremely fun. I don't know how much longer it would hold my interest, but still. 8.5/10
Todd's Adventures In Slime World - This game has two apparent favorite pasttimes - killing you with absolutely no warning, and killing you for no apparent reason. The controls were ugly, the sound was absolutely fucking annoying, and when I say "cheap as hell", well, you have no idea. It gets some points for having one idea I thought was cool - different "modes" of play, like "Logic" (no gun), "Exploration" (find stuff), "Suspense" (time attack), and so on. But all the modes I tried were the same: "Fuck you, have an instant death monster hiding in the floor!" 3/10
Uncharted Waters - It's a sim, which means without an instruction booklet, you're pretty screwed. It's an interesting idea, you're a ship captain. I wandered around town, went sailing, ran out of water, and then died in a curb stomp battle against some Portugese merchants I thought I could pirate up. It was fun enough, I'm just not into this kind of game. 5.5/10
View Point - An isometric shooter game, if that makes any sense. To me, space-shooters are either too frustrating to play because they're so hard, or too boring to play because they're so easy. This is one of the boring ones. They try to make some cool 3D effects, but the result is the game slows way down when more than just your ship is on the screen. Yes, really. 4/10
Weaponlord - Just another bad Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat clone, using barbarians. Yay. 2.5/10
Zero Tolerance - An interesting looking first person shooter. The controls sucked, which means the game kind of did too, since an FPS where you can't move around freely isn't really playable. But nice effort. 5/10.
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