Last Retro Game You Finished And Your Thoughts

I've been waiting for a hefty price drop on the Castlevania Advance collection for seemingly ages. I have to admit that I much prefer the older style Castlevania games though, I've tried Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow before and they didn't really keep me interested. I'm open-minded enough to try them again though.

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Last wrestling review for a while.



From all the way back from pro wrestling’s supposed 1998 glory days, I played through WCW Nitro on the PSone. I never had this before finding a cheap copy in G-Force ( ) several years ago. I‘d just tried a OPSM demo, read some honking N64 Magazine reviews where they ripped the pi sh and left it at that for twenty-five years.

If memory serves me right, WCW Nitro came out several months after WCW/NWO World Tour did on the N64. When it was new, World Tour was wrestling’s greatest ever videogame. That’s because it had a massive variety of moves, dozens of unique playable characters, smooth performance and a degree of realism that the WWF games had always lacked. It was a winning formula, acting as a platform on which bonafide N64 belters like WCW/NWO Revenge and WWF No Mercy could develop. That was the famous and much-missed AKI engine at work. WCW Nitro, for some reason, uses a wholly different engine that goes in a totally different direction. Consequently, it ends up being an infinitely less successful game because of it.

Apart from its WCW Thunder sequel, there’s no wrestling game that’s ever played liked WCW Nitro does. Alas, that’s because it’s utter rubbish. Slow, robotic and predictable, there’s no diversity at all between each wrestler’s power and agility or in the moves you can perform with them. This makes gameplay really boring, and makes the wrestlers feel exactly like a bunch of palette swaps from Mortal Kombat, except Lex Lugar is Scorpion and Randy Savage is Reptile (and Glacier is Sub Zero, natch). Barring finishers, lacking a bespoke moveset for each wrestler means that you quickly fall into a set way of playing the game, and quickly work out a reliable way to win irrespective of who you control or who you compete against. The difficulty options barely matter either, as the AI is impressively idiotic. I learned that you can just kick your AI opponent into a corner, continue booting them until their energy bar is depleted and then go for the pin – repeat that ten times and hey presto you’re the WCW Heavyweight Champion.

I can’t imagine a non-wrestling fan having a worse time with a PlayStation game. It’s a badly limited, ugly and clunky load of cobblers. And yet on the other side of the coin, I think it’s well worth checking out if you’ve ever been a wrestling fan. WCW Nitro’s one saving grace is its presentation: all the settings, commentary, music and particularly the personalities that made WCW so successful for that brief window in the late 1990s are presented here with aplomb. The FMV intros on the character select screen are – quite rightly – what the game is best known for:



Terrible, terrible gameplay though. 4/10.

Those FMVs are brilliant, it's sad we won't ever get that kind of cheese from a wrestling game again, definitely a product of its time.

Much like Balla on Castlevania not sure to put here or last game finished, as I played


On Switch via NSO+

Said briefly elsewhere on the forum that I was enjoying Fusion a lot, as I just feel Metroidvanias work better in 2D than 3D and was fun watching some Mando S3 whilst playing this on my Switch in handheld mode.

Why I liked was the parts of the story are told to you instead of just finding lore, the boss fights and the art-style which I do think GBA hold up in general. Thanks to the Switch, I have now finished three Metroid games, bring on Other M Zero Mission which I'm guessing will build on what's here in Fusion?

It's what you've been yearning for: write-ups for old Nintendo 64 games that I mostly typed up in 2020~!



N64 Magazine said: “A real stinker of a Wipeout clone with pop-up, cheating opponents and terrible controls”. 10% in Issue 17, 0/5 in Issue 59.
C&VG Magazine said: “Nintendo should stop tarnishing it’s reputation with titles like this”. 1/5 in Issue 198.

“We love video games! Apart from AeroGauge”.

It received one of the most famous ‘bad’ N64 Magazine reviews back in 1998, yet it’s something that you can see got its fair share of acclaim elsewhere - I'm sure one of the jobber magazines gave it 86% or something. I don’t fully understand that perspective if I’m honest.

That said, I’d probably give AeroGauge a 10% score for originality. There’s this story about an international racing organisation starting up a new league with flying machines, where companies are invited to build a racecraft and sponsor a driver. It’s trying to be F-Zero X and the same time it’s trying to be Ridge Racer Type 4, and while in all fairness it supersedes both of those it’s told in a way that doesn’t affect the gameplay whatsoever. Speaking of which, in its gameplay AeroGuage just another bland futuristic racer with absolutely no pizazz and absolutely no distinguishable personality. There’s hee-haw that’s dynamic or creative in the way that AeroGauge plays.

AeroGauge has plenty of negatives to point out. The worst aspect of AeroGauge is unquestionably it’s AI, which cheats worse than treesmurf did in that Mario Strikers league we had. Basically, the speed in which the AI racers boost off the starting line makes them utterly impossible to catch. You actually can’t win in AeroGuage, I’m certain of it. I legitimately think that AeroGauge is an unfinishable game because of the AI. I had to illegitimately finish it here with a Xploder 64 cheat cartridge. Not that there’s much to finish, mind you; there’s only four courses and a couple of difficulty levels in a basic championship structure. You can actually play everything even if you finish last in each race. It’s accessibly inaccessible, if that at all makes sense.

Another criticism you could level at AeroGauge is the atrocious fogging and pop-up. It needs to be seen to be believed, it might be the worst on the N64 (and, remember, just about every game on the N64 has atrocious fogging anyway). That said, this might have been designed by choice. I think it’s this fogging and pop-up that let’s AeroGuage run as smoothly as it does. Pulling the same trick F-Zero X did later in 1998, everything moves and speeds along quite nicely and pretty responsively, almost fairly impressively. On that same vein I think the graphics and the track design aren’t bad at all either, and there's some very decent tunes here as well.

I felt duty-bound to play AeroGauge because of the “apart from AeroGauge” bit that’s the first thing you see on any GNamer Forum browser search. It’s not something I was excited about playing, and it wasn’t something I was excited about while playing it. It’s not a horrible game though, I’ve played many that are worse. Sorry to disappoint, but AeroGauge doesn’t really deserve an N64 Magazine-style baw-bootin’. 4/10.

Acht, it must be the NTSC review I remember where the reviewer talked about shooting the developer in the head. You wouldn't get away with that nowadays (and justifiably so), but it was hilarious to tiny Balla at the time.

Less hilarious is this review. Only a 4/10? What are we going to put in the search engine text now!?

...never mind. Got it.

The N64 was dreadful for fighters, especially after the SNES and compared to Tekken and Soul Edge on the Playstation, so I think people would take whatever they could get.

I know not 3D like Tekken 3 but the Saturn was the place for top-tier fighters like Street Fighter II Alpha, X-Men Children of the Atom, KoF 95, Virtua Fighter and way more

There’s so many fighters on the N64 too, they make up a big fraction of the whole console’s library. Loads of them are really similar to Mortal Kombat 4 too – it would be hard to tell the difference between it, Xena Warrior Princess, Mace: The Dark Age, Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. and so on if it weren’t for the fact that there’s occasionally a guy who pops up and yells “TOASTY!”.

Saturn might have been the place, but it didn’t even have a place round here. I’ve got no memories at all of seeing anything other than SEGA and EA Sports Saturn games in the shops, nobody was heading to Comet at the industrial estate in Kilmarnock to get Darkstalkers 3. I was well covered for fighters with the PlayStation. Tekken, Soul Blade, Bloody Roar and Dead or Alive were all class!

I know I played the ones on Saturn much later, but it was of the few genres that I did pick games up on and had a grand time with.

Uh, I think you're all forgetting about a little game called G.A.S.P. Fighters' Nextream? Huh? Hello.

I liked Mortal Kombat 4 at the time, mainly as it was a fun addition to the multiplayer weekends I'd have with friends in my early teens. A fighting game where you had weapons that could be dropped, and the opponent could then pick it up and use it felt novel back in 1999, but I imagine it all feels fairly primitive nowadays. The biggest thing for me was the atmosphere of it - it was all rather sinister and spooky compared to the more cartoonish 2D games. It started down that path of ultra-violent fatalities that hit harder in 3D. 5/10 is probably correct.

Jimbob wrote:

Uh, I think you're all forgetting about a little game called G.A.S.P. Fighters' Nextream? Huh? Hello.

I struggle to think of another instance when such a good company made such a rubbish game. It’s inexplicably bad.

On the topic of N64 fighters with a spooky and sinister atmosphere, I’d seen that PIKO Interactive are now the licensor for Dark Rift and that it's been re-released for PC. Look forward to that coming out on the Switch eShop for £14.99, in somehow worse condition performance-wise than its original version. What a time to be alive.

Ah man, I think I need to download one of these, I've been itching to play some form of Puzzle Bobble for a while, it's such an easy to play classic. I did download that Puzzle Bobble 3D they made not long ago and have tried to play it a few times but it's absolute mince, doesn't translate to 3D in the slightest.

Oooh, much like Smurf, that's given me a real hankering.
We encountered a Bust-a-Move machine at a campsite on holiday in Wales, and by the end of the year my grandmother and I had both bought copies for our respective playstations. I know there are plenty of knock-offs but I want the music and the vibes from those days . . . I may check out that version on Switch.

I should have updated that write-up before posting it - since I typed that there's been a two-in-one port of the Saturn versions of those games put onto the eShop. For some reason ININ Games recently added the SNES version of the original Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move game to the eShop for £6.99. WORTH £7 I'm sure but these days it's the sort of thing I'd reasonably expect on the SNES Online app.

If you've got a Bust-A-Move hankering I'd recommending giving the Puzzle Bobble Everywhere demo a go - the full game just came out a few days ago but the trial lets you play it's online modes.