sdelfin

There's something suspicious about that poll...

I remember hearing all the good things about this game when it came out in 1997. I had the Saturn then. I intended to get the Japanese Saturn import and never got around to it. I got a used PS1 in late 1998 and...never got around to it. I have to admit my enthusiasm for the Castlevania franchise was low in those days. A few years later, I did play and enjoy the Castlevanias for the GBA. I didn't play the DS games for a while. I didn't get a PSP until late in that machine's run. I picked up the Castlevania for that specifically for the locked PC Engine version of Rondo(I wasn't fond of the 3D remake). The included Symphony of the Night was a nice bonus and I finally got around to playing it. Did it live up to all the hype? Honestly, yes it did. It's a fantastic game all around as far as I'm concerned, and of of the best Metroidvania games I've played. I do prefer the PSP version's script and voice acting over the PS1, though I'd probably rather have the Japanese audio with accurately-translated text. I'm not into the cheesy acting of the original.

Bring on the One-Character-Kun merchandise!!!!!

I suspect that the missing "graphics" for climbing the block is to obscure that it is cheating somehow, using a machine or something to do it.

In this case, both versions aren't bad to me. Both are well composed for what they're meant to be and succeed as game covers in my opinion. I prefer the western cover. I appreciate that it's depicting a moment of action and tension. I also like that it looks more like it was drawn compared to the Japanese cover which looks more obviously computer rendered. In this case, the overall look of the western art appeals to me more.

I didn't mind the concept of FLUDD and new gameplay concepts. I just didn't like the actual game it ended up being. I didn't enjoy the overall design and found myself fighting with the camera way too much, more than other 3D games of that time. I had only played Mario 64 casually prior to that, but I had the same issues there so I guess they carried over.

While I like how many animals are featured on the Japanese cover, the circular layout and cluttered design of it make it less visually pleasant in my view. I do love the animals though, so it was spaced out a bit more, I might vote for it. But I chose the western cover this time.

"Why are you yelling ta-ta-ta-ta-ta while doing that? The game can't hear you!"

"You are already fit!"

I wonder if there's a secret channelling point to reach full fitness with one touch.

For me, Japan wins easily. I'll give credit to the western design. Things had improved so much from the early covers for Mega Man. The characters still look a bit weird in that style. I've always liked the Rock Man art style going back to the Famicom, so that's a big plus for me. The composition works well for me too.

I voted Japan. That is definitely a sticker in the bottom right, so that takes the cover above Europe's for me. I don't dislike any of the art, but none of them make the best covers, with the US one bing the poorest fit for a game cover to me.

OLED image retention definitely was and still can be a thing. From what I gather, it has improved a lot. The Switch and many phones with OLED now seem to be among the best in this regard and not really worth worrying about. When I do hear of examples of it happening, it seems to be predominantly TVs, and even then that seems uncommon now. Regardless of that, the Switch OLED seems fine with this.

Cool to hear what people have. As I was a Saturn owner for most of its availability, I have a handful of rare and valuable games from that. I even lost a couple. I have Magic Knight Rayearth, Albert Odyssey, and Dragon Force and got them all before they shot up. Same for Aliens Infestation on DS that I saw mentioned a few comments above. I got that used and below retail. Perhaps my favorite rare game is Ninja Five-0 for the GBA. I was heavily into GBA and I just happened to see that it reviewed well and picked it up a few weeks later. Apparently, a lot of people either didn't notice the reviews, or were focused on other things and it didn't see a lot of sales. It's a good game too.

The western cover shows more of what the game is about, but it's a mess in terms of composition and doesn't really work as a game cover. Michaelangelo's teeth are creepy too. The Japanese one is basically a generic promotional piece adapted to the game cover, but I think it works better as a cover simply because it's not a total mess.

@RootsGenoa There's a "popularity contest" element to these lists. Right around the time Shredder's Revenge came out, I played all three of the Turtles games for GBA. I think both of the Konami games are better than Ubisoft's TMNT, and I'd probably pick the first one of my favorite of those. I bet not as many people played it. The Ubisoft one gets a bit of a boost because it was a return to the traditional beat-em-up format, even though I didn't love the execution of it.

@RootsGenoa There were three Turtles games on GBA. Konami made two Turtles games for GBA. Ubisoft got the license later on and made "TMNT".

Japan, easily. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good cover, but it strikes me as much less bad than the others. I hate NA N64 covers. The red strip is awful. The top-right corner curl is even more awful. The only thing Europe has going for it is no red strip, but the art is even more cramped and the black border just makes it worse.

Nice to see an update on this. I was wondering recently when more would come out about this game. I have been checking in on this project for about four years. I found out about it by keeping track of Blazing Chrome before that came out. Joymasher had videos of both on youtube. It looks cool, though it always did. I look forward to its release and seeing reviews soon enough.

If the developers see this, I would just like to request that the screen-shaking effect be made optional. For some of us, it's quite bothersome and problematic.

Add me to the list of those who think none of these are particularly good. Depicting Link as a music conductor in that pose on the Japanese cover is just the wrong concept for a game cover. It's not dynamic, heroic, or even interesting. While not a ton better, the sailing is a better concept for a cover. While overly cluttered, I still prefer the Euro cover for the higher contrast which makes Link more visible.

I've definitely noticed his reviews in the past, and tended to agree with his over some others. His profile picture with the hat stood out to me as memorable. Always tragic when people die so young. Extra tragic when it's someone you know or have come across in a meaningful way, such as through his work.

The Japanese art is good, but it doesn't really strike me as a good choice for a cover. It feels like it's missing certain qualities that I, at least, would want from a cover. The two western covers are very similar so it was hard to choose. Both have strong poses and good composition, though are much simpler. I voted for the European cover for the overall package with the background medallion being more visible. Had the Japanese cover been tweaked with Link looking more heroic and dynamic, that probably would have swayed my to vote for that.

I've always like Inti Creates when I've played their stuff. This looks cool. I like seeing them bring back concepts from Portrait of Ruin. I also liked how the trailer was straightforward with lots of gameplay. Also, I didn't see any screen shake that I can recall, so that's wonderful. I liked the origami platform in one part of the video. I agree that the characters are way too chatty, and I do hope they provide some options for that or that the game can be modded. I've always had issues with too much use of voice samples in games. It's definitely a thing where I agree that less is more. It reminds me of Giga Wing 2. I don't know if it was a regional thing or if it was optional, but having the pilots scream out their special attacks over and over made that quite tiresome. Still, I like a lot of what I see here.

@bonjong23 I still love old beat-em-up games and can play them over and over. For some of us, solid core gameplay is the most important thing. Those games don't feel too shallow to me. Newer, deeper games of the type are fine, but they don't make simpler games obsolete for some of us. But I get your point. If this is not deep enough for you, then you have other options.

@MeloMan Yeah, I don't think it would be worth getting this for Super Turrican 2. I have played Super Turrican 2, and I was disappointed. It plays fine, but I had issues with the stage design. The Mode 7 sections felt tedious and out of place. The music was not the energizing stuff I expected and wanted from Turrican. It's not what I wanted from Turrican after Super and Mega Turrican.

Indeed, I seriously have not played Portal. There are many games to play, and even things to watch, hear, do, etc. I recently picked up a bunch of games during the Steam summer sale and and working on a bunch of those. I got the urge to play the first Final Fantasy game. I'm totally going to beat it this time(take that, early 1990s). But feat not! I have seen clips of Portal, and it looks like the kind of thing I'd enjoy, so it is on my list of games to get to.

I voted for the western cover. Japan's is way too messy and cluttered in composition. As someone else mentioned, Hugh's face in profile causes some issues and doesn't really work. It likely would look better without Hugh and with just Dracula there.

I had to think about this one for a bit. I think both designs have pros and cons. The framing of the Japanese one is perhaps too close, but I like the composition and the pose of Samus. The target reticle effect doesn't add much. The western cover had Samus in a pose that's overly stiff and uninteresting compared the the Japanese cover. I do like the background for the western cover. Overall, I prefer the Japanese design, but only by a little bit.

The one thing I liked about the Wii Mini was that it was a top loader. As cost-cutting measures go, that one made a lot of sense. It's a very simple setup and works well. The problem was they cut so much else that it made little sense as a product. Giving it internet access would make sense to me since it came out so late when new releases were drying up.

I haven't been able to jump into Shredder's Revenge yet, though I did buy it on Steam during the summer sale(though it was at it's initial price). I had some hardware issues to work out. But its release got me in the mood to play some Turtles beat-em-ups, which I did and had a blast. I'm glad to see this compilation make these games available in a new way so that people don't have to pay collector prices or anything like that to have them. It looks like it's going to be a good collection, and the game line up is rather good at least.

I was on team UP before seeing the reveal. The art is problematic, but the window is more upright if you view it as going up the stairs. If you consider Mario going down the stairs, then the window would be extremely slanted relative to the stairs.

When referring to the occasionally frustrating camera controls in Sunshine, if by occasionally, you mean every time I decided to play the game, then I agree. I didn't "rage quit" the game in any spectacular fashion, but I did reach a point where I just realized I was having much less fun than frustration and decided "never again"(like Battletoads). Obviously, many people like the game a lot, but it was also notable for Nintendo to miss the mark with this game for so many people. But we're never going to all like the same games, regardless of their quality.

My vote was for a sharpened pitchfork, which sounds like it would offer more fun than I had with Mario Sunshine.

@RR529 while I agree, they still maintained the looks of the characters in the western art, I find the art to be extremely static for what are supposed to be action scenes. I'm not taking issue with your comment. I just always thought the attempt at depicting action in those covers fell flat.

I voted for the Saturn collection with the MD Super Street Fighter a close second. All the anime ones are good. There are good elements to the US art. It's technically sound at least. It's funny how the SNES original, along with Turbo, and Special Champion Edition for Genesis all depict what are supposed to be action shots, yet they come across as the most static, like there's no action or energy even happening in that moment. I don't get any sense of motion from those, which is a problem since that it what the artist was going for.

Fun to hear more about this. I have not seen it, but have always heard it was pretty good, especially for a video game adaptation. I did pick it up fairly recently on DVD(yes, DVD!!!) and look forward to checking it out when I find the time. The reception was good enough I figured I'd give it a shot. Oddly enough, I've been revisiting old Alice in Chains in recent months. I used to listen to them a lot, but it had been a while. I was listening to a handful of songs yesterday and Them Bones is always among my favorites and has been in my head in recent weeks, in a good way.

Regarding the shower scene, as I said, I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can only speak in generalities. I can't speak for other people, but for me it's got nothing to do with being uncomfortable with the female form. To me, the issue is simply whether it's gratuitous or not. Plenty of movies just stick in nudity for the sake of titillation. That's fine, but it just feels like pandering and manipulation to me. In such cases, it takes me out of the plot to some degree. There are plenty of ways to get that sort of thing, but when I'm watching a movie, I find it often detracts. That's the way it feels to me. Now, whether this particular shower scene is gratuitous is debatable and there were some good defenses of it as helpful to the story in previous comments. I doubt this particular one will detract much for me as I've seen plenty of anime of this sort.

This is very impressive stuff which I had never seen before. The video itself is quality too. The channel seems like it could be quite the rabbit hole and I don't have the time, but I may have to check out a few videos because of how amazing it is.

Congrats to them. I picked it up on Steam last week. Not all my machines can run it(GPU issue I think), so I've had to work a few things out and found at least one computer that supports it(though it crashes after the opening FMV, so I need to skip it). Such is the nature of PC gaming, and on Linux, but I wouldn't have it any other way. It did look and play very well though for the few minutes I had it running a couple of day ago. I'm looking forward to finally playing it properly this week. The developers provided a nice set of options too. I appreciate the toggle for scree shake. I'm glad to hear they've found success with this.

Congrats to them. I picked it up last week with a bunch of other games, but was playing a couple of other games first. The game doesn't run as well as the original 2017 version of the base game on my laptop, so I'll have to install it on a different machine to play it. The brief time I had with it reminded me why I liked the original so much.

I've played this one in the past, both the arcade(and PS1) version and the PC Engine version. I ended up liking this one a lot. It's nicely designed with the interesting twist on the genre. I recommend it. Between this one and Phelios, I really like Namco's approach to shooters around this time.

I think the Japanese cover just misses the mark. The minimalism is disappointing here. The angle with the prominent view of the tire treads make it look like they're on farm equipment rather than a go cart. Between the US and EU versions, both have issues, but I think the NA is too cramped. EU might be a bit too zoomed out, but only slightly. It's still my favorite of the bunch.

Maybe I'm just negative when it comes to this stuff, but I hate gimmick puzzles/solutions. That includes the map thing in Phantom Hourglass. It's clever in one way, but dumb in another. I always felt the same about the Psycho Mantis fight in Metal Gear Solid(which I also hate). Sure, the solution is clever on one level, but I wouldn't call that good game design, especially when you have to break immersion to do it. Same can be said about resetting the "computer" in X-Men on the Genesis. Developers get too cute for their own good sometimes.

As more more traditional puzzles, I remember being less than impressed with the puzzles in Syberia 2. The puzzles seemed less logical than in the first game which I had played right before. With that said, I do like some games. One might consider Cuphead a type of puzzle(of pattern recognition) and I like that a lot, despite its difficulty. And I do yell at that game sometimes.

@Funneefox The patches mentioned in the statement here include a "casual" mode that allows for continues, at least on one difficulty setting. So that is no longer as much of a sticking point as it was upon release. The patch notes on Steam are worth reading to see the tweaks and improvements. There are only three and they're not terribly long. I'd say, after the patches, I'd be more likely to give the game a shot, but I would want to see it go on sale first.

I just bought it on PC over the weekend. I wanted to return to Cuphead by now, but didn't get around to it. Ended up playing a lot of original NES in the last couple of months. But, as I was taking advantage of the Steam sale, I've been playing a lot of Streets of Rage 4(love that CRT filter), Panzer Paladin, and Steel Assault, first. TMNT Shredder's Revenge won't run for me as of yet, but I'll work on that. I expect to be on the Cuphead DLC within a couple of days. Cuphead was definitely hard, but its difficulty was often overstated, in my opinion, partly because games like that aren't so common anymore. So far, Steel Assault feels on par, or perhaps tougher. I loved the base Cuphead game, and I expect to enjoy the DLC. I hope the DLC does well for the developer considering how labor intensive their current style seems to be.

I appreciate what they were going for with the US cover. It's more dynamic for sure. The artist tried to convey more action to match the game. But it's not nearly as dynamic as it could be. The art is stiff. The designs are not the best in my opinion.

The Japanese art has, perhaps, a worse layout. It's more static. But the mecha designs are very strong and striking. I love Japanese robot designs, especially from that era. To me, the strength of that carries it entirely. Japan was my pick this week, and it was an easy choice.

Some good games in this batch, even if some have quirks. Wily Wars has some nice exclusive content and custom weapon load out. Zero Wing has, in addition to great justice, solid gameplay and killer music, especially toward the end.

For me, any update or remaster is incomplete or inadequate if it did not offer gamepad controls like the original. I loved the control scheme of the first two games. I hated the control of Prime 3.

@KingMike He was against RPGs and 2D games in general, as I recall.

Sega itself was a mess on its own, but I have nothing good to say about Stolar. He was a terrible businessman who only knew how to do one thing, product launches. Once the product was out, he didn't care. Inexplicably, he left Sega with nothing at all to sell for over a year in North America. I always suspected, based on things I remember reading at the time, that he thought Sega of Japan was further along with the Dreamcast and thought he could force their hand early. That didn't work out so well.

I have found the OST to be a mixed bag so far. As a previous poster said, it's not especially memorable to me and many tracks don't really stand out. The biggest issue I have are the tracks with vocals. I've never been particularly fond of that in video games in general and especially for beat-em-up games. I find it gets tiresome much faster. Luckily, on the PC version of the game, it's apparently very easy to change the music and I intend to do that to some degree.

I don't like any of them. I want to like the US version because the art is good in some ways. I like the black shadows and coloring. The pose isn't dynamic enough to work as a cover. Leon himself would look better with a bit more of an anime treatment than he actually got there. Europe and Japan's covers are incredibly close. Europe's looks slightly blurry, but that's likely the image used and not the actual box. There's a bit more space than the Japanese one. Today, I pick Japan because Japanese writing looks interesting. That's all I got.

@Uska I love that old anime aesthetic. I won't watch something just because it's from that time, but I'm much more likely to keep an open mind just because of it. It just speaks to me in some way.

@JimmyFleck At least you know. I always hated that stuff, even when I was that age. I was never into that. As I said, you have the ability to lower the voice-over volume as a counter punch. That was something I wanted to make sure was available before buying because that could get annoying quick, even with normal play.

@JimmyFleck I'm not familiar with the Switch version, but is it possible it's a button-mapping issue? When in doubt, you could always turn down the voices in the sound options. Speaking only for myself, voices get tiresome after a while if they're a bit too frequent in such games.