Many years ago, so long ago that my Gaming Diary didn’t even exist, I played Golden Sun on my Game Boy Advance. It was great. At least, I remember it being great, but I remember very little about the actual events in the game. I recall the catastrophe at the start, and the village you’re in, and that your friend goes missing and it turns out later on he’s working with (under duress) the bad guys. I remember there was …
Nintendo added a load of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games to their online subscription service this week, and although I’m hyped to get to play through The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap I’m leaving that until I’m done with Fire Emblem Warriors. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d play this. It’s… very easy, isn’t it? Have I really remembered how to play every single minigame, accurately and with skill, from 20 years ago? To the point …
And that’s it. The Unholy Trinity of Game Boy Advance Castlevania Games, all completed. Once again, I found this easier than I remembered. Something else I had obviously remembered wrongly was that I’d thought this was the best of the three games, but in fact, this time around I think I enjoyed Harmony of Dissonance more. A combination of the dash moves, the double castle and the lack of the silly “broken up map” of Aria of Sorrow, perhaps. That’s …
No sooner had I completed Circle of the Moon I made a start on Harmony of Dissonance. Two things are immediately apparent: 1) the background and enemy graphics are much, much more impressive than the previous game, and 2) your main character, Juste Belmont, looks incredibly garish with a clashing outline. The reason for the latter is probably because Circle of the Moon got a lot of stick for being too dark to see on the original GBA. Back then, …
More than 14 years after last completing this, it was re-released on modern consoles as part of the Castlevania Advance Collection along with some of the other GBA Castlevania games (it’s missing the NES Classic original on there) and Castlevania X for some reason. Since it really needs to be played on a handheld, I bought the Switch version and then played it almost entirely on the TV. Tch. The general consensus is that of the three GBA IGA-vania games, …
My new Evercade cartridges arrived! I have no idea why this is the game I played first, but I did, and because it’s very easy, I’d soon completed it too. I’d never heard of Racing Fever before, but it’s clearly an attempt to bring a game like the Neo Geo titles Over Top and Drift Out to the Game Boy Advance (where this first appeared). I think this also marks the first Game Boy Advance title to appear on the …
Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy (3DS) Have I posted about this yet? I can’t remember. It’s the main game-on-the-go-that-isn’t-called-Animal-Crossing on my 3DS at the moment, having started it soon after finishing off Zelda. So far, it’s a slight deviation from previous Layton games, as there are a lot of locations and travel between them. This makes the game seem a lot bigger, but as you’ve the option of finishing up several of the locations in any order (or at …
The other half of Gauntlet and Rampart, obviously. And, like Rampart, it’s an excellent conversion even on a very small screen. I did get stuck on Level 14 though – I had a pocket full of keys (© The Rock) but had to pick up another to progress. But I couldn’t. Thankfully, the old hang-around-for-a-few-minutes trick worked and the walls all turned to exits.
Another of the Play Asia package today. This one is actually one half of the “Gauntlet and Rampart” double game cartridge (which, at the time of typing, you can get for a bargainous £5 from here). And? It is, as it always was, ace. I remember I was on holiday with a friend one summer and we walked three miles to the nearest arcade just to play this. It loses a little with just one player, but still plays fantastically …
This arrived in the post today, along with some other stuff, from Play Asia. And, since ugvm Retro Week has been extended into this week, it was ideal for playing! Or so I thought. It turns out that in the process of simply porting the original Megadrive Sonic game to the GBA, Sega couldn’t help but rape my childhood memories by making it worse than those shoddy “fan-made” Flash-based Sonic games. It has more issues than a journal library. Par …
World 11 was, in fact, the final world. Dark Castle and all! As expected of the final world, many of the levels sort of repeated some of the puzzles and routines of previous levels, although obviously mixed up a bit. Thankfully, there was no SuckySuck(TM) bit either. The end boss, however, did do the usual trick of dying, only to change form and regain all his energy – twice. I wasn’t too bothered though, as each form was very different, …
It seems that World 8 (my next “most likely last level”) wasn’t the final world either, even though it was a castle. It was actually the castle of goodies, not baddies, so clearly there was more to do. I’ve got a few more power-ups now too – a double jump (finally!), and a more powerful, and faster, dash-spin-kill attack thing. Of course, the game fights back to negate some of these when it can with stronger water currents, wind, and …
Didn’t play this for that long today, although I did manage to get as far as World 6-3. It’s still not getting very difficult, but it’s slowly getting more complicated, if you see what I mean. The puzzles (and most levels have at least one) are getting more involved, and I’ve had to solve a couple with trial-and-error simply because I can’t understand what it is I’m supposed to be doing. I was under the impression (although I don’t know …
This really is a most excellent platformer, you know, even though I fear I’m missing out on some totally riveting storyline with the amount of Japanese dialogue going on. Progressed past World 4, killing the Ice/Fire Dragon boss at the end that was somewhat heat bi-polar, and now I’m into Tree Tops World (World 5). Yes, a starfish in the trees, which are conveniently full of water and stuff. I’ve gained the ability to double-jump now too. I did have …
After playing Hide and Seek with some small turtles (or whatever they are), it was time to move on to killing the boss at the end of World 3. It was a thing riding a giant moth. Like the previous bosses, it was pretty easy, and I was soon onto World 4, which is Ice World. So lots of falling ice spikes and slippy floors.
