Greatest Genesis Games

I can’t exactly give this game a review as I only have good things to say about it. ..So I’ll try and find bad things to say about it instead!

NICE DIALOG THERE, CHAMP! You super good developer, you. You talented writer and your Princess Salassa. Your Happy Land of two-floor castle! Your “legend has it there is another country beyond this cave” developer, you! Your three houses of next-country-over development. CHAMP.

Good job with your stupid off-screen spawns. Always attacking, left, then right, then left, then right. Move two inches left, attack right, attack left, attack right, attack left. Quick, jump over the– damn it, a bat hit me. Flinching made me jump into another monster. Oh, look. Immediate contact with water hurts me because I can’t breathe under water. My feet can’t breathe under water either. Flinch damage! Good job developers. CHAMPS.

Good job with your stupid kraken there. His tentacles fly way up over his head, against all octopus and squid physics and nature. Plus he throws SUPER WATER at you. Dumb developers couldn’t make heroes durable against splashing? It’s not even ink, developers. It’s water. And water can defeat the heroes of your game. Heroes, developers. A mighty warrior or a master wizard; heroes. And water can cripple them with a little splashing. GOOD JOB CHAMPS.

YEAH. LEG-ZOMBIES. Walkers. Hitting a zombie’s torso effectively neutralizes.. nothing, actually. It does nothing useful! You gotta hit the legs to kill a zombie. These must be black zombies who were basketball players before perishing. Hiddum-in-da-kneez!~ Zombies.

I KILL GEODUDES WITH MY STAFF. I hit them really hard with my wood versus their rock. They die in one or two hits. They’re really strong rocks. Developers made them into giant, dense rocks with eyes and feet who cannot stomach a bludgeoning wound. Good job developers. Paragons. CHAMPS.

MY NAME IS DR. DOOLITTLE. I am a 20th level Wizard proficient in speaking to animals.

Nice last boss there. He doesn’t care that I’m behind him, just swinging his tail on me. I GOT LIKE THREE ELIXIRS OF LIFE PLUS TWO CONTINUES. I’ll hit you with staff + strongest spell in the game which is so strong it doesn’t even have an animation until he dies! Oh yeah, the king is a fake king ‘cuz he’s the Balrog, right? GOOD JOB DEVELOPERS. GREAT WORK. CHAMPS. Saved the country from Balrog. ‘Cuz AAA is the best wizard in all the land. CHAMPS.

This game is a WINNER. This actually might be the best Genesis game, not even of the Genesis, but like the whole generation! This game packs more manliness than a Chuck Norris joke. This game is so manly it needs to be shaved. It turns boys into men, and men into men. This game is manlier than the X-Men, and those men have an X in their name. That’s fuggin’ manly!

This game is a man. Its manliness is sponsored by Irish Spring deodorant soap. Men get into bar fights over Gunstar Heroes. Women get into bar fights over Gunstar Heroes. Girls get into cat fights over Gunstar Heroes. Boys tell each other “Out by the flag pole, 3:15!” over Gunstar Heroes.

This game is so manly it can climb up to the ceiling and shoot downward at its enemies. It’s so manly that it can ride on the ceiling as fast as a train can zoom on its rails. This game will run a train on your girlfriend and never call her again.

You take this game to Chili’s and it orders a stack of Baby Back Ribs like a man. Gunstar Heroes orders a magarita with a fetus in the glass that it will use to collect the salt. It will slam its fork down into the ribeye steak it just ordered after handling the baby back ribs, lift that steak up and down the whole thing in one bite. And then it will pick individual fries up and hit you in the face with them.

This game sends men to bible camp when it suspects those men have taken an interest in it. Particularly at the gym when the game benches all the present weights in the room. Then this game will walk into your Burger King while you’re eating there, big ogre voice at the counter and he’ll say “I want a stacker.” And the girl (of course it’s a girl; Gunstar Heroes doesn’t talk to men) behind the counter replies, “A double or triple stacker?” And Gunstar Heroes is like “I WANT TEN.” Then it punches her in the face for her insolence. And calls her a nerd.

Shining in the Darkness is a breath of fresh air when it comes to labyrinth RPG’s. The alternative back in those days were the Wizardry games, which are good in their own light, but they were hardly considered “RPG” because there was no real role. You’re just a guy who tries to navigate through a labyrinth and find a bunch of random-as-hell characters that speak in riddles. Dumb.

Shining in the Darkness on the other hand, is a better form of Labyrinth play where there actually is a story, and you know what your objective is from the beginning. You know what little quests you have to complete, the tasks at hand and the thing you need to complete it! Those are fun.

The combat system is sort of JRPG-ish, with its many random encounters and turn-by-turn fight/magic/item/run system. As far as character vs. monsters, this particular labyrinth game is very balanced. It can be challenging, especially if you keep going the wrong way and aren’t familiar with the maps. It’s typical in the RPG sense of entering an area, testing the waters to see if you can handle it, and if you can, trying to endure the many monsters until you reach the end.

Something I really love about this game is the charm of the characters. You’ve got humans, wolfmen, lizardmen, elves and people with really big goddamn noses! They really look like they fit the scenery and the music. The dwarven shopkeeper looks like he’s about to swallow all the oxygen in the present room the way he looks at your inventory when you’re about to sell something to him.

Shining in the Darkness is described that way best: charming. And something neat I found out, is apparently there is even an editor program for it where you can change the labyrinth maps and make your own Shining in the Darkness mod.

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I love this game. It’s not a huge open world like some of the games nowadays, but none of the games nowadays reflect the world of this particular version of Shadowrun.

Right from the beginning, they toss you into this world of thugs. A world of crime, spawning from gunpowder and brute force, all the way down to digital corruption. It doesn’t take very long for squadrons of shooters to come blasting caps with your name on it.

Now, I’m sure the way I play the game is wrong as I usually never even play the story. I just do enough of the story that I can go wherever I damned well please, getting jobs and guns. That’s a good method, right?! If Shadowrun were like real life, I would have laid about a thousand people on their backs for a better keyboard. ‘Cause it’s awesome! Heading into the matrix, snatching up bank account numbers, hidden project details, corporate accounts and security logs. Selling them!

Maybe you’re a practical decker. Walking into hostile territory just isn’t enough for you. Maybe you have to hack into their security network and disable their cameras and alarms, or crash their system entirely so their MAG-locked doors fling right open.

Mr. Johnson

A Mr. Johnson is an anonymous title for an employer who contracts Shadowrunners to do dirty work. They’re a middle-man between the customer and the worker.

You obviously start around a small-time Mr. Johnson, this one’s name being Gunderson, and for the most part, his jobs suck. They’re quick and easy, but can at least help build your characters quickly. Though, the best thing to do is to get that cheap $200/$2000 decker and have him hack into random networks to download and sell their files. Great for cash really early in the game.

But anyway, after you do a bunch of jobs for Gunderson, you’re obviously gonna wanna move up and that’s where these other Johnsons come in. But you don’t always just know about them. Most of the people you can talk to have some kind of contact that you need to pay for. Information is not free in the world of Shadowrun! So your prime objective is.. well. To get your money in the best, most efficient way possible, right?

I mean, you need money for: weapons, illegal weapons, a permit to carry those illegal weapons, best cyberdeck + upgrades available, LEVELS of Magic to make your caster strong, ARMOR, clips, medkits.. And it’s as if you need all of this as early as you can get it. The sooner the better. So learning the balance between Mr. Johnsons and the matrix download methods are the key to wrecking this game.

Character Development

You gain Karma for doing jobs and getting kills. Obviously, doing jobs will get you a lot more karma for stats. It’s really not even important to do a job for money if you’ve got another method for making money, like.. I don’t know. The matrix! You could max out every stat, though it would take a very long time. You just wanna be awesome as early as possible.

You really just gotta pick a character type and the two party members you wanna get. More importantly, you have to be able to work for those party members. They’re not free! Gotta pay for them by the run, or lifetime partners.

Screenshots

I’m bound to put a Let’s Play of this game up sooner or later.

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Warsong is awesome. It’s like Shining Force if Shining Force had noticeable bushes of hair on its face, chest and back, and constantly needed a woman-servant grooming the manliness into a publicly presentable visage. Warsong is one of those games that might frustrate you at first because you’re stupid and don’t know how to play, but once you get the hang of it, the feeling of awesome hits you so hard it blows your whiskers back. You just wanna take your platoon and knock your enemies senseless one by one!

I just started a Let’s Play series on Warsong. Take a look!

The gameplay is heavily unit-based rather than the typical Tactical RPG style of a character growing in levels and having more stats and stuff. For the most part, levels don’t even do anything in this game except allow you to be a different class of some sort later on. A level 1 Garett is really no weaker than a level 9 Garett.

The way this game works is, your character’s troops must be in range of his influence to gain his bonuses in combat. So, Garett, the main character, starts with a bonus of +2 to Attack and Defense, with a range of 3, meaning if a troop exceeds a range of 3 squares from Garett, they won’t get the +2 attack/defense bonus, which severely limits their ability in combat. You can have 10 troops in a single unit, which is basically a unit’s “HP”. If a troop is adjacent to the commander at the start of a turn, he gains 3 troops back, meaning it’s very important to decide which troops run and which troops fight. Definitely a game about harassing your opponents!

Keep up with my Let’s Play series on my YouTube Channel. I’m going to be making so many more videos filled with fun, adventure, and occasionally vocal anger! Fun for the whole family. I promise.

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