All right, so I got around to trying the two games I haven't played before.
Okay, technically speaking, I
have played this one—it was just so long ago, and for such a short period of time, that I had absolutely no recollection of it until I revisited it here.
Originally released in 1991,
Yoshi (also known as
Mario & Yoshi in PAL regions) is a
Tetris-like puzzle game developed by Game Freak—yeah, that Game Freak—almost five years before they went on to make
Pokémon.
If you're anything like me, and the premise of a Mario-themed puzzle game completely bores you, then you can safely skip this one. When I first tried it as a kid, judging by the title alone, I was expecting it to be a cool platformer like
Yoshi's Island—a game I was hot off the heels of beating for the first time, and deciding it was one of the best games ever. So you could imagine my disappointment when I discovered it was just a lame puzzle game.
Trying it again as an adult, my impression of the game has only slightly improved—it's a decent enough game, but it still feels incredibly half-assed, and is overall inferior to the other puzzle game featured on the service,
Dr. Mario. Yoshi himself isn't even the focal point—how disappointing is that?
The way the game works involves Mario trying to hatch as many Yoshi eggs as he can by stacking up a variety of enemies between two pairs of columns. If two of the same enemy get stacked together, they disappear. Mario can move from side to side to hold a different pair of columns, or switch the two that he's holding by pressing the "A" button. If a Blooper is about to come down, it's best to find a column that already has a Blooper on it to make them match.
Naturally, a stack of mismatched enemies will threaten to end the game if it gets too high, but you can also use Yoshi eggs to help make things easier for you. Two halves of a Yoshi egg—an upper half or a lower half—will occasionally fall instead of an enemy. Upper halves will always disappear right away if they don't have a lower half to accompany it, and lower halves will only disappear if a second one is stacked directly on top of it. Once the two halves meet, a Yoshi will pop out, awarding bonus points—but the coolest thing about that is that all the enemies between the two halves will be gobbled up, as well, making them useful for those tense situations where you're about to lose.
That's pretty much the whole game, though. It plays fine, but it has a childlike simplicity to it that puts a bad taste in my mouth. You're basically matching shapes, like you're back in kindergarten—which is fine. Kindergartners can have video games made for them, too. But that doesn't mean it has to be so slow and dull. Even the three music tracks it provides are very bland and boring—the Star track is probably the best one, but they all lack that distinctive Mario atmosphere and feel. They put me to sleep.
The game does have a 2-player vs. mode—standard fare for a game like this, though it's still nice to have the option—but overall, this game is just very meh, and not one that I'd recommend. If I had to rank it, I'd place it just above
Baseball and just below
Tennis—making it the lowest ranked 3/5 game on my list.
Try not to confuse this game with
Yoshi's Cookie, a different Yoshi-themed puzzle game (and a far superior one, at that) made a year later by Bullet-Proof Software. That game isn't available on the service at the moment, but I would definitely recommend that game instead if you're interested.
Overall rating:
3/5
Described on Wikipedia as an "open world action role-playing beat 'em-up" game—a humorous yet completely accurate description—
River City Ransom (known as
Street Gangs in PAL) was developed by Technōs Japan in 1989, and is actually considered the third game in the long-running
Kunio-kun franchise—albeit a heavily Americanized version of it. The series seems to be all about gangs, greasers, and high school-age boys trying to survive their rough-and-tumble street life while saving their girlfriends from hoodlums and shit. It's very '80s and very macho, but not in an off-putting way.
The first game,
Renegade (1986), is one of the earliest pioneers of the beat 'em up genre, which games like
Double Dragon would later expand upon. The second game is
Super Dodge Ball (1987), a bit of a departure, while the third,
River City Ransom, is something of a return to form. Honestly, I'm a little upset that this one slipped past my childhood, because it turns out that this game is actually pretty fucking awesome.
Let's break down that crazy genre description. At its core, it's a beat 'em up—and as such, it's going to be nearly impossible for me not to draw comparisons to the previously discussed
Double Dragon. The combat is very similar, but a little more cartoonish (as is the overall graphical presentation). The biggest two things that set it apart are its RPG elements and its open world. The setting of River City is a sandbox, and you can enter and revisit locations at will—there are forks in the road, and if the thugs on the street are beating you up too much, you can always head back to a safer location to regroup. Weapons obtained, like chains, lead pipes, or brass knuckles, can also be kept indefinitely.
Your character—either Alex or Ryan—has an extensive list of stats (like speed, punch strength, and what have you) that can be boosted throughout the game by visiting restaurants—all of which sell different things for different purposes. There are fast-food joints, mom & pops, sushi parlors, and book stores from which you can learn new fighting skills. Some of the food places also serve as takeout, so whatever items you order remain in your inventory of items for later consumption, which I thought was pretty novel. Items from shops are purchased with money taken from street thugs, and certain valuable items are very expensive, so you will have to do some grinding in this game if you want the strongest character.
Not everything in the game costs money, though—in some shops, you can ask the waitress to smile, which is "free."
That's the most adorable thing I've ever seen in a game of this genre.
Characters in the game are very expressive in general, giving it a pleasant
Dragon Ball-ish atmosphere that comes across as rambunctious and boyish, but also happy and cheerful—even if the plot does revolve around rescuing hostage high schoolers from a terroristic gang leader. The game's sheer levity is infectious, and the plot seems to have a little bit more to offer than I initially thought, so I'll be coming back to this one very frequently.
The game is also one of the few on the service to feature simultaneous multiplayer, where both player 1 and player 2 can work together on the same screen. Both players will control a separate character who has their own money, stats, and inventory—but they have to be careful, because they can injure each other, which can lead to some friendship-testing moments if you're not willing to cooperate with each other. This must have been one of the last games to feature a password system, too—because both players can input a
33 character password (featuring both uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and a comma) to save their shit, which is pretty insane—but it's all made unnecessary with the Switch service's suspend point feature anyway.
The controls, compared to
Double Dragon, feel overall much smoother and more satisfying, but they're not always perfect. There are some light platforming segments in the game, where you'll enter a warehouse with a boss inside of it, and in order to reach him, you'll have to climb over these crates in the background—but they're so tightly snug together that it makes it pretty difficult to jump on them without bouncing off and having to start over. On top of that, jumping is done by hitting "A" and "B" at the same time, which is pretty awkward when you have to angle it just right.
You can also dash to run a lot faster by double-rapping left or right on the D-pad, but you lose some control—so you have to know to stop before you run into a solid object, because running into solid objects will not only stun you, it'll drain a little bit of your stamina as well. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally killed myself by running into something I didn't meant to run into. It's an annoying punishment, especially when the game's "camera" never has your character in the center. He's always on the near right edge of the screen, making it extremely difficult to see what's coming ahead of you.
The game also suffers from the same classic issue that most other beat 'em ups suffer from—it kinda just gets boring after a short period of time. The music is only okay, and the repetitive and grindy-nature of the gameplay itself does get monotonous and won't be everyone's cup of tea—but the game has so much going for it, that I'm actually willing to take this one all the way to the end.
I was not expecting to enjoy this one as much as I did, and I'm very excited to rank it up just above
Super Mario Bros. and just below
Balloon Fight. I almost wanna put it above
Balloon Fight, too, but I think that game is mechanically tighter, whereas
River City Ransom is a little more rough around the edges, and not always in the best of ways—but it's still a very solid title that you should definitely give a try.
Overall rating:
4/5
All right, and it seems we already know what games we're going to be receiving for the rest of the year on this service. That's... honestly no fun, but whatever. I can briefly mention them here and I'll review each when they actually come out.
For October, we're getting the following:
Solomon's Key (1986), a unique, clever, and highly underrated puzzle game by Tecmo
NES Open Tournament Golf (1991), which isn't all that exciting, if I'm completely honest
Super Dodge Ball (1988), which I just talked about earlier, interestingly enough
For November:
The legendary
Metroid (1986)Tecmo's
Mighty Bomb Jack (1986), a weird but kinda mediocre platformer
A previously Famicom-exclusive game called
TwinBee (1986), which I don't know shit about
For December:
Wario's Woods (1994), a decent puzzle game and the last licensed NES game ever produced
The infamous
Ninja Gaiden—because they seem to be going hard on the old-school Tecmo shit
Adventures of Lolo (1989), another weird puzzle game, featuring that one Kirby boss that's older than Kirby itself
Of these games, I'm actually mostly intrigued with
TwinBee, because this is a game that was previously unavailable outside of Japan—at least, for the original hardware. I think it's available on 3DS with some enhancements, but as far as the original game, it was never localized. I find this exciting for many reasons—the potential for Nintendo to release some previously region-exclusive games that have been hidden from Western audiences for over three decades has me absolutely pumped. This could lead to us getting a localized version of the original
Fire Emblem game, for example—how cool is that? Hopefully these opportunities aren't squandered.
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