Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD
After playing through a string of story heavy games, I wanted to take a break from the immense amount of dialogue and play something more purely gameplay focused. While nominating games for the 2020 Steam Awards, reading the most innovative gameplay category made Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD pop into my head (which I ended up nominating for that category). Turns out this was exactly the type of game I was looking for.
While there are some platformer elements, Super Monkey Ball has the unique twist of giving the player control of tilting the stage, as opposed to moving the character on it. The resulting gameplay is unlike any other game and offers a refreshing set of challenges, even to players who have conquered numerous other genres. Being purely skill based, nothing is left to chance, no equipment will make the game easier, and the only leveling up is the skill gained from practicing, failing, and learning. Gameplay is quick to hop into and the perfect amount of time between failing a stage and respawning is enough to think about what can be improved, but not so much that failing becomes an annoyance. There is an assortment of playable characters each offering different stats and the stages themselves are tuned to this, with various intricacies that may make the stage easier or harder depending on the character played.
– Real player with 35.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cartoony Remake Games.
Kinda posting this review a tad late. I don’t think I’ve made my thoughts clear on this game just yet, but I know some people are taking newfound interest in the Monkey Ball series with the release of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania on the horizon, so I want to express my thoughts on this game now.
I’ll just get this out of the way: Banana Blitz is not a fun Monkey Ball game . To many, this game is seen as a pretty good platformer, and I can get by that thought, but the way this game is structured does not fall in line with what makes a Monkey Ball game work, and it’s all because of one fatal flaw in this game’s design: jumping.
– Real player with 27.6 hrs in game
Day of the Tentacle Remastered
A brief overview…
Goal: To stop an evil triangle from taking over the world.
Method: Travel back in time to the day before so that you can stop the triangle from becoming evil in the first place. However, the majority of the story revolves around blowing a large sum of money on a shopping channel product, and finding sources of electricity that you can plug toilets into.
Heroes: The true heroes of this game are a metalhead who has zero book smarts, a trainee doctor who cannot be trusted with her own scalpel, and that nerd from the first game who used to be a coward. This trio receives help along the way from an ex-villain mad scientist, the founding fathers, a hamster and a dead guy.
– Real player with 141.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cartoony Adventure Games.
My previous article on my experiences with working on Day of the Tentacle Remastered cover a lot of my own history with the game, but don’t dive deep into my feelings about the remastered edition itself - after all, the game was more or less finished before I came onboard and I had plenty of time to play through it before I started working on it.
Re-creating low fidelity assets with greater detail removes a degree of ambiguity that different players invariably fill with different impressions. To one person, a few pixels here, might be interpreted as a smooth shape, while to another, the pixel edges define something more jagged - are the ends of Laverne’s fingers square or rounded? Are outlines fixed or varying width?
– Real player with 102.7 hrs in game
Fenimore Fillmore: 3 Skulls of the Toltecs
After i’ve finished the second of Fenimore adventures, i wanted to take back the very older first one,that i abandoned many time ago in its first release, now in this new remastered version it gains new shining light and value revealing to be a really solid game.
Now that i finally was able to complete it i have to say i am amazed and speechless from how good the puzzles were, i never expected this but this first one is even better than the second, altough i was stuck for few days in some nasty puzzles, after solving them i can say that altough the average level here is set on Hard, nothing is impossible or too much illogic, all has its own sense and works like a charm.
– Real player with 28.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Cartoony Adventure Games.
This was one of first adventures I played at the time of release in 1996 and I have good memories of it. There were some serious problems with distribution back then and today the English only copies are very rare collector items and extremely expensive (I saw copies offered for thousands dollars). So it’s good that it is available again for affordable price as a digital copy.
The remastered version was not released in perfect state with some bugs and missing features but developers do care, already improved lots of things and listen to the players suggestions.
– Real player with 27.4 hrs in game
Garfield Kart - Furious Racing
Thirty seven hours, thirty seven hours is all it takes to see god. Have you ever seen something so magical, so wonderful, that your mind cant help but look back on what could have been. In my thirty seven hours of game-play in “Garfield Kart - Furious Racing” my soul felt as though it left my body. Soon all I could see was Garfield, my toilet, Garfield, my table, Garfield, even my entire house was transforming into Garfield. It was at that moment I realized, it was him, right behind me, staring into my eyes menacingly. I tried to run away but my world began to crumble, the floors collapsed as I fell fifty feet into what seemed to be a massive cooked lasagna, the landing was rough but I seemed to come to my senses quickly. It was then I turned to my left to see Garfield’s massive dong swinging from side to side, his eyes locking onto me as he slammed it down onto the lasagna, I tried to run as quickly as possible but his dong began to suck me in, I screamed as I tried to escape, but no one could hear me. Soon I was being slurped down by his massive sausage, my screams slowly becoming muffled as everything turned black, it was over. Although I am still currently engulfed in Garfield’s massive nuts I cant deny loving every second of it, if your a fellow Garfield lover and love big nuts covered in lasagna please by all means purchase thirty seven copies for you all of your friends, 10/10 would play again, oh also nerf Odie that dude OP as hell.
– Real player with 44.6 hrs in game
“I do not assume any phrase can give an explanation for a person’s existence,” says one of the searchers thru the warehouse of treasures left in the back of with the aid of using Jonathan Arbuckle. Then we get the well-known collection of pictures main to the closeup of the phrase “Garfield” on a kart that has been tossed right into a furnace, its paint curling withinside the flames. We keep in mind that this become Arbuckle’s adolescence kart, taken from him as he become torn from his own circle of relatives and despatched east to boarding school.
– Real player with 20.4 hrs in game
Montezuma’s Revenge
Great nostalgia product. I played this game on my Apple //+ back in the 80s on a monitor without color. So the green and red keys had the same shade of green back then. I learned to hook the Apple //+ to a color TV, and that changed things!
This version is just like the old product, with some changes:
1. A bat will show up if you linger on a screen too long.
2. Each level has three masks, randomly hidden in the levels, which you can optionally find. These give points / new life.
3. There is new artwork. But I prefer to play with the ‘retro’ setting.
– Real player with 271.2 hrs in game
This game takes me back. This was one of my favorites that I had back in the 80’s on the Apple //e on a 5.25 inch floppy disk lol. I used to play this like crazy on a monochrome Apple Monitor III green monitor long before I got the RF color adapter for my system to play on a regular TV or monitor and seeing it then in color. Wow…those were the days. Back then, I was using a joystick to play the game instead of using a keyboard.
The keyboard controls are basic and responsive but takes a little getting used to for some areas of the levels. I haven’t tried the game yet with a controller to see if it would work or not but so far, it’s quite playable and I’d recommend the advanced graphics over the retro look.
– Real player with 12.4 hrs in game
Crash Bandicoot™ N. Sane Trilogy
The PC version of Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy offers all the content and patches found in the other versions of the game. On top of this, you get the ability to play at unlocked framerates, 4k resolution, native support for all major controllers (Xbox One / 360 / Dualshock 4 / Steam Controller) along with a move set for keyboard and mouse.
If you’ve played the PS4 version, the multiplatform release brings a slew of fixes and one piece of additional content. A new level “Future Tense” which incorporates elements from an unfinished level found in the original Crash Bandicoot from 96’ – dubbed the “waterfall level”.
– Real player with 66.3 hrs in game
I have completed the entire trilogy on PS1 several times since the original release in 1996, and I played through the N-Sane Trilogy twice, 100%, since it’s PS4 launch in 2017.
The PS4 version was enjoyable, despite the 30 FPS and weird collision detection on boxes (which surprisingly seems to have been fixed in the PC version, and rope running on the bridge levels is now easier to do consistantly again).
Since the game finally has come to PC, I decided to give it another shot, and I can say, without a doubt, that this is the definitive way to play it!
– Real player with 55.8 hrs in game
Pac vs Ghosts
it has a lot of bugs! But the game does work!
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game
Hardly works. It’s a simple game where you control a sausage covered in a Russian flag to squish copyright infringing ghosts. If you run into anything the camera goes insane and can get stuck or break the game. Starting over doesn’t fix this, you need to exit the game fully to fix the issue. Oh, and there isn’t an exit button in the game because reasons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znk2uPRSd-Q
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
The Curse of Monkey Island
My favorite game of all time, hands down. I play it every year or so since I first played it, probably in 2000 where I bought it at a store that sold used video games that came in CD cases (this was a 2-CD game). There is one significant problem with this game: I’ve been searching for its equal ever since, and I’ve never found it. The gentle mix of humor, of lightheartedness, challenging puzzles, voice acting by Dominic Armato, the beautiful graphics and amazing musical score… Nothing comes close. I don’t think that the folks who created this knew what they were making at the time, it was just another game from LucasArts. Bill Tiller did the graphics, and there is something so soothing about the visuals. I think most importantly is the intelligence of the puzzles, where each item you get will be put to use in some creative form later on in the game in a way that makes you think about what you’re doing and what is possible, but doesn’t go too far in difficulty nor is it too easy, either. The fact that all of this came together in one game is truly remarkable feat.
– Real player with 25.1 hrs in game
I never got the chance to play one Monkey Island game until now, and this is actually my first eventhough it’s the third xD. I’m clearly missing a lot of references to the first and second game, there are some characters that I can tell is not the first time “we” met so I’m clueless to most of the funny bits regarding these ones.
The humor is the best part of the game, at least to me. I had lots of fun with the dialogs and incredibly horrible dad jokes. Puzzles are sometimes hard to understand, there may be very very very little objects you thought you clicked on but you didn’t , maybe you thought you could solve the puzzle certain way because it’s the most logical to you but NOT and the solution is one of the silliest you could ever think of. So yeah, puzzles are not exactly unfair but rather… weird? You just gotta get used to the game’s logic, that’s all.
– Real player with 11.9 hrs in game
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy
I’ve been eagerly awaiting Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy since it was announced for re-release on the PC by THQ Nordic, it looks and feels just like I remember, however, on a 1440p monitor, the GUI elements are extremely small. It’s good that they don’t stretch unnaturally, but the subtitles and button display are quite small and currently have no options to increase them. Developer Swyter has confirmed on the Community Hub that this will be fixed. I’ve only experienced one minor freeze so far, but I think this happened when my Xbox Controller suddenly became disconnected from the computer.
– Real player with 49.5 hrs in game
Well this has been a long time coming. This game brings back so many childhood memories. My biggest question is WHERE IS THE 2ND GAME!!! A second game needs to be made. Alright enough ranting for part 2 let’s get into the review.
Let’s start with the pros:
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Beautiful graphics
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Very solid story line
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Simple and easy controls
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Not too difficult (Gameplay wise)
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Excellent music
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Very fun overall
Now for the cons
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Very short (Completed it in almost less then 12 hours)
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Very little to no voice acting
– Real player with 41.9 hrs in game
Rainbow Hills
Rainbow Hills is a true old school platformer inspired by the classics of the 80s. It focuses on a tight controls, smart level design, and a good retro game feel!
Main Features
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Pure retro-style platforming.
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Simple 2 button gameplay mechanics that can be used in creative ways!
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Bubble-centric gameplay that rewards skill.
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Ton of collectibles, power-ups and secrets!
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Super cute and colorful art style in the vein of the classic cutesy platformers.
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Speedrunning-friendly level design.
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Fun and unique boss battles.
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Original retro soundtrack by Michael Adels.
Rainbow Hills might look like a children’s game, but it’s a challenging old school platformer. Anyone can play it but it has gameplay depth for gamers and speedrunners too. Beating it requires practice and skill. Rainbow Hills tells a story of a small brave octopus that faces a colorful world of full of cute and quirky creatures. He can go on by running and jumping, by using power-ups, and more often than not, bubbles. With bubbles he can trap enemies, reach high platforms, collect power-ups, light up dark places, and even manipulate the environment. Mastering the art of bubbles allows players to interact with the game world in many interesting and creative ways.