PixlBit

Dracula’s Revenge

It was common practice for game developers to make radical design changes for the first sequel of a popular game in the early NES days. It was no different with Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. Released in North America in 1988, Konami decided that a few changes were in order. The previous game primarily focused on platforming, defeating the boss of the current stage, and moving on to the next location in linear order. Conversely, Simon’s Quest took the series in a new direction with an open, Metroid-esque style of exploration and a few RPG elements to boot. Castlevania had entered a new frontier.

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A game about busy work.

Car Quest is one of those weird experiences that isn’t particularly fun or engaging, but can tap into your OCD tendencies and keep you playing even when you’d rather not. Its design is rather mundane - you drive around a world collecting an artifact at a time, which opens up a new area of the map where you’ll collect a new artifact, which will in turn open a new area of that map where you’ll collect… well, you get the point. This cycle is only broken on occasion where you’ll gain access to a portal that requires a certain number of batteries to get into. In the portal you’ll do more of what you do in the main world, just on a smaller scale, until you earn an artifact to use back in the main world, where the cycle continues.

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N. Sanely beautiful.

Back when Crash Bandicoot hit the scene, I was a firmly entrenched Nintendo fanboy. Crash, to me, was a second rate 3D platformer that was put to utter shame by the fantastic platformer offerings of the N64. I’ll admit, the N. Sane Trilogy has done little to elevate the core material for me, but it does leave me wishing that other companies would show as much love and care to their older 3D games as Vicarious Visions has shown here.

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Some assembly required

As a small fledgling in the first grade, I liked comic books superheroes, but I wasn’t nearly as familiar with them as I am now. Sure, I knew about guys like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. But for the most part, I had only a narrow understanding of the world of comic books and the heroes within them.

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Angry Birds + Tower Defense + Side Scrolling Beat ‘em up = Concept Over-saturation

When I first downloaded CastleStorm, I was expecting a tower defense game akin to the classic Flash games. What I found, however, was a game crammed with bits and pieces of different classic genres that should have satisfied my nostalgia itch, but failed horribly. With a twist of tower defense, a mechanical snippet of Angry Birds, and a smidge of beat ‘em up, I was left in a state of confusion about what this game desired to be along with horribly cramped hands from the poor control schemes.

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