#65 - Call of Cthulhu



Growing up, pc Adventure games were pretty much my favorite things in the world. I pretty much played everything that Sierra Online published as well as a large chunk of the LucasArt games. But sometime around college I lost interest in the genre as a whole. I suspect I've missed out on a lot of good games, but if you throw the word Lovecraft on anything, I'm probably going to check it out and it absolutely paid off tremendously with Call of Cthulhu.

It's a pretty standard story for a lovecraftian mystery. A detective is hired to find a missing girl, and discovers a small town where no one trusts anyone. And oh yes, there's a cult trying to summon an elder God. But the story's pacing is perfect for a mystery. It has all the right peaks and valleys to keep you engaged the entire time. And the characters are all very interesting, so once this game grabs you, you will play it until the end.

Plus there are four different, extremely depressing, endings. Each one sad and depressing in its own right. When I played this the first time, there was an impending hurricane off of the Florida coast, so I pretty much just hung out and played games until the power went out (spoiler alert, my power stayed on the entire time). Once I got to the end of the game, I put it away for about an hour, and decided I needed to see more. So I almost immediately went for a second playthrough. And as I've said before, in my book, the best compliment I can give a game is how quickly I return to it.

Oh, and one last thing that's definitely worth mentioning is sanity. When you're in a Lovecraft experience, sanity is always a key and they did some fun and unique ways of integrating your ever decreasing sanity in this game. If it's too low by the end of the game, things won't just be bad. They're going to be really bad. So keep track of the mistakes you made the first time around and you might just keep enough to keep your shit together for the final moments.

PS: you all suck for not playing the tabletop role-playing game version of this with me.

I have the Capcom's Beat em up collection. I'm pretty sure that's the only place I've played knights of the round. Haven't booted up that collection a long time, come to think of it.

#63 - Hyrule Warriors



It wasn't necessarily the Zelda game we wanted, but Hyrule Warriors, AKA Link's Adventure Through the Multiverse, was an absolutely wonderful experience. It was a new game and filled the brim with all the Legend of Zelda nostalgia you could handle.

For me, along with a lot of people I think, it was also my first experience with a Musou/Dynasty Warriors type game. And that was very eye-opening. It was remarkably satisfying to mow down hundreds of weak enemies that could rarely endure more than one swipe of your weapon. It was a good door to open. I've since played some of the other branded Musou games like the ones for Dragon Quest and persona. They've mostly been very good, but I still have to go back to Hyrule Warriors as being my favorite of the genre. I think Nintendo gave it that little extra polish. That makes it better than the others in the series. But hell, what do I know. There's still like a dozen or more out there that I haven't touched.

Also fun side story to go along with Hyrule Warriors, the day I picked it up from GameStop. I also went to Arby's and had the meat mountain sandwich. If you're not familiar with that, it's basically a couple slices of every meat they have in the store, all stacked up on one with a few slices of cheese, and an EMT's phone number ready to be called in case of a heart attack. This sandwich was actually pretty good, but when I waddled through the door after getting home. I looked at Hyrule Warriors and I just had to drop it down on the couch and go lay down and take a nap. The meat mountain conquered my desire for the game. But in retrospect, had I known how good it was, maybe I would have gone ahead and played the first level anyway.

#62 - Little Nemo The Dream Master



During the 8-Bit era, I don't think any company worked better with third-party IPs than Capcom did. Rescue rangers and the rest of the Disney games, Willow, and even the Domino's Pizza Hut in mascot got turned into some really good games. DuckTales I think will always be the definitive classic, but Little Nemo, a game based on a movie that most people didn't even know existed, is right up there as well.

I think I talked about the animated movie that the game is based on before. Really high quality animation aside, it's not particularly good. But that doesn't really matter too much, as it really has more in common with the original turn of the century comic strip than the movie. And hell, that doesn't even matter. Capcom put together a stand-alone adventure game that, in terms of it's whimsical theme, It stands alongside the Mario games, fantasy zone, and any other classic 8-bit game that when you break it down kind of feels like a drug trip.

This was also one of those games that I didn't get to play when it originally came out, much to my own disappointment. Nintendo Power did a feature on it that made Little Nemo feel like a game that you would regret missing out on if you didn't play. And boy did they get that point across. This was one of those games that I always kicked myself for not buying back in the day, and it got really hard to find even once I finally had money as an older teenager in the 16-bit era. I didn't actually get to play it all the way through until maybe 10 years ago. And while admittedly it got obtuse at times, I was happy to wander around levels, feeding candy to animals in hopes of borrowing their powers and seeing whatever the hell was next. It's not often that an 8-bit game holds up to 25 years of hype, but this one definitely did.

Mickey Mousecapades was one of those games that was far better than it needed to be. I remember a friend brought it over and I was set to dismiss it as the stupidest thing in the world, it turned out to be a lot of fun.

I think the only miss they had with all of the Disney games they made was Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. And really, I think the big crime there was they were too ambitious. They tried too many different things.

Never played Nightmare on Elm Street. Though, I think it's kind of interesting to see that the Friday the 13th NES game has developed a cult following over the years. Whenever I scroll through twitch or tiktok, Will run across someone playing it. It doesn't look like fun at all, but there is a group of people who are into it for one reason or another.