subhumanzoids

A magical, tiny Japanese man dropped this game off at my house yesterday and I’ve played about an hour of it so far. I’m on the second chapter or so, which means I at least got a chance to fight the first boss.

Wow, the visuals alone are worth digging into it for, even if the combat seems like it could get sort of repetitive. Still, just when I thought I would get sick of the desert backgrounds, I get thrown into a gorgeous and lush forest in the next set of levels.

For those that don’t know, the game’s combat takes place on circular planes. Since it’s 2D, picture an old game like Defender and you can probably get a clearer picture. Once you clear one ring, you can diverge off into other paths until you eventually reach a boss. There’s lots of beating people up, but the enemies don’t have any fall-back reaction animations, so you really need to keep your distance and stay on your toes since they can strike right back at you.

The first boss, after you fight two really cool Horse-head-like (Zelda II) mini-bosses, is a massive dragon that takes up a good portion of the screen. The artwork on this and everything else doesn’t really register with my brain properly. To me, it’s so clean and crisp that my mind reads it as some cleverly manipulated 3D trickery! Then I try to digest the fact that it’s all hand-drawn or whatever and my mind snaps again.

These are just first impressions and all, but is anyone else tired as hell of alchemy? I’ve never been a huge fan of it, but it seems like game developers feel obligated now to slip it into every moderately RPG-like game structure. Boring and tedious.

Have you longed for its essence? Crawled the alleys searching for some sort of life-giving pod that could replicate the feeling it delivers to your mind and body? Well, we’re back.

Go, friends! Flock there and subscribe so that it may rain down upon your chest on a regular basis!

Here’s something fresh that should be way up on your “grab dat” radar, if you don’t have it already.

This is a sexy little set! It’s pretty pricey, but if you dug Kikaida at all, this is a follow-up that really jams in as much as possible to the existing formula. Thought Hakaida was cool? How about a whole Hakaida Force?

Nab it.

While it may be fun for a boss to meticulously lay out a plan for dispatching whatever would-be hero happens to be trolloping their way, the greatest of props are delivered to those that just prefer to duke it out and see whose energy runs out first. Still, while it seems a bit savage, there’s strategy woven even in these bare threads.

Por exemplo, the boss is, nine times out of ten, at an advantage with this method. If the minions and traps peppered throughout his domain have done their respective jobs, then the hero(es) should be a bit worse for wear than their adversary; likely waiting patiently with goblet (or a jug of Midnight Train, depending on their evil social status) in hand.

It’s also just plain gnarly, right? The hero dashes in expecting some drawn out battle and suddenly the two are just lashing and stabbing back and forth until one falls. These are probably the most “realistic” boss fights.

The first games that should come to mind in these cases are the above pictured Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden series, though the former stopped using this technique for the most part once it started leaning more toward exploration, and the latter since it stopped being 2D.

These are what got me on this mental kick, specifically the badass NG2&3 runs by Jim Hanson.

No spoilers, folks, just some quick listin’ for you sexy, potentially homeless list whores.

5. Heroes (s1) – Sort of fun, yet incredibly anticlimactic.

4. Veronica Mars (s3) – I guess the show is over for good? Great series, but that was a sad ending with little closure.

3. The Shield (s6) – Hell of a season; completely intense and brutal. The wrap-up only semi-closed one major arc, though, so it’s more of a bridge to the final season than anything else.

2. 24 (s6) – Though it was probably the most uneven day yet, the 2-part finale was as explosive as any summer blockbuster, and the last scene packed some major emotional punch. I’m more interested in them potentially taking the show outside of LA next time.

1. Lost (s3) – Fantastic.