We start to dig into the meat of sequel month with a game that forever changed a franchise. Whip yourselves into shape to explore the most inscrutable logic in a Castelvania game, and embark with us upon Simon's Quest!
I bet you can't find the way to the download without a guide.
(01:30) A quick shout out to the only guy who has left us an iTunes review:
Newtosmartphones966842266! Thanks, random person!
(03:15) We've been playing games! (gasp) Tyler's been binging on FTL and City Folk still, with a dash of Oracles. Multi-stage bosses are totally a thing. Zach's been playing XCom, in which Geremy and I are both genre savvy, but not dangerously so.
(12:30) Goddamn built-in graphics cards. Also, laser keyboards! Also, also, pop-up buttons on your touch screen!
(14:15) Geremy's been playing a decent amount of KoL, Mega Man X, Mega Man 2, a new Dwarf Fortress run, Red Dead Redemption, and Fortune Street.
(17:20) Also in that list, but deserving its own mention, a Flash-esque visual novel game called Save the Date. Mess around for about 10 minutes with the save state functions; that's how you play the game. It's not groundbreaking, really, but worth a look if you're feeling introspective.
(18:15) It's a brief mention, but Zach actually picked up State of Decay. Here's the most recent installment of Epic Battle Fantasy on Newgrounds. I highly suggest checking the top picks of the game portal every month; Super Meat Boy debuted as a Flash game here back in the day. Speaking of Flash games, Gemcraft 0 is pretty epic, as are the others in the series.
(21:30) The game Geremy's talking about here is Receiver. Burning Wheel, for the interested, is a fairly unique tabletop RPG system.
(23:50) Our least favorite sequels.
(27:30) A quick reference to the Spoony Experiment. Watch his FF series.
(28:30) First impressions of Castlevania 2. You can't play it without a walkthrough.
(31:00) Insta-death: hero or menace?
(34:10) Our favorite term for old games, apparently: economy of retries. We talk about dying in this game.
(37:30) Castlevania 2 as an adventure game. It actually does this pretty well. It has some location consistency issues, though.
(41:20) Zach learns most platformers let you alter your jump arc mid-air.
(45:00) Comparison to Metroid. This one is less forgiving.
(47:00) This gets really old.
(55:00) Final thoughts. Really, this game isn't as bad as people say it is, but it's not great.
Next week, we wander back to Hyrule to fight Ganon. It's Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
Want to explore a conversation? Send us some mail at
Geremy@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
Tyler@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
Zach@lasttimeonvideogames.com,
or LTOVG@lasttimeonvideogames.com.
You can also go to the show page at plus.google.com/+LastTimeOnVideogames or comment on the site at www.lasttimeonvideogames.com.
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