phantom_leo said:

OMGOMGOMOGOMOOMM$^%##@!$#^*&Y*T^&R&UI&T^&*T&*T(*Y*YS*YS*&^&S^*TS(*Y*SO ! ! !

OGRE BATTLE 64 COMING TO VC SOON!!!!!!!

OMGOMGOMGOMHONIH IHIOHOIU()*&(AD*%^^(D^A^D^DS&&S&S&S&*S*S*S*(S^%S

OMG ! ! !

Never played it, should I be that excited.

Dvader said:

phantom_leo said:

OMGOMGOMOGOMOOMM$^%##@!$#^*&Y*T^&R&UI&T^&*T&*T(*Y*YS*YS*&^&S^*TS(*Y*SO ! ! !

OGRE BATTLE 64 COMING TO VC SOON!!!!!!!

OMGOMGOMGOMHONIH IHIOHOIU()*&(AD*%^^(D^A^D^DS&&S&S&S&*S*S*S*(S^%S

OMG ! ! !

Never played it, should I be that excited.

I was going to reprint Greg Kasavin's glowing GameSpot review of the game...

It was something like 9.6...

...but it seems to have been removed from the site...

VERY ODD and SUSPICIOUS!

You click on the review link and it brings you to a preview...

Dvader said:

Never played it, should I be that excited.

phantom_leo said:

1. Super Metroid
2. CastleVania: Symphony of the Night
3. Ogre Battle 64
4. Vagrant Story
5. Metroid Prime
6. The World Ends With You
7. Super Mario Galaxy
8. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
9. Street Fighter IV
10. Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II Plus
11. SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium
    
12. Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
13. Street Fighter Alpha 3
    
14. Contra III: The Alien Wars
15. Super Street Fighter II Turbo
    
16. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
17. CastleVania III: Dracula's Curse
    
18. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
19. Metroid Zero Mission
20. Metroid Fusion
21. Resident Evil 4
    
22. Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice
23. Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga
24. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
25. Demon's Crest  

Yodariquo said:

Allow me to tilt this ridiculously towards Mario and Zelda.  I'm ignoring ports and sports games.  But crap, top 25?  I don't keep track that far down, so this will be difficult.  This is based almost entirely off of my weighted review scores and not personal preference.

1     Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
2     Perfect Dark
3     Meteos
4     Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
5     Super Mario Bros. 3
6     GoldenEye 007
7     Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past
8     Super Mario Bros.
9     Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
10     Super Smash Bros. Melee
11     New Super Mario Bros.
12     Resident Evil 4
13     Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
14     Super Mario World
15     Baten Kaitos Origins
16     Pokémon Gold/Silver
17     Legend of Zelda
18     F-Zero GX
19     Super Mario Galaxy
20     Ogre Battle 64
21     Street Fighter 2: Turbo
22     Wario Ware Inc.
23     Advance Wars 2
24     Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
25     Legend of Zelda: Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

These things always screw the niche games. I still love you, Baten Kaitos Origins

Dvader said:

phantom_leo said:

OMGOMGOMOGOMOOMM$^%##@!$#^*&Y*T^&R&UI&T^&*T&*T(*Y*YS*YS*&^&S^*TS(*Y*SO ! ! !

OGRE BATTLE 64 COMING TO VC SOON!!!!!!!

OMGOMGOMGOMHONIH IHIOHOIU()*&(AD*%^^(D^A^D^DS&&S&S&S&*S*S*S*(S^%S

OMG ! ! !

Never played it, should I be that excited.

 It's kinda hard to find in the original format, so most people revere it.

Yodariquo said:

aspro said:   

 It's kinda hard to find in the original format, so most people revere it.

It's revered because it's awesome, not because it's rare I have the original cartridge, but will be downloading it if only because I just can't deal with the N64 analogue stick anymore.  Fine for its time, but much too painful now.

EDIT: It's revered because it's awesome and it's kinda hard to find. 

darthhomer said:

Jack Bauer said:

Hey Jack, isn't there some dude you're meant to be beating up right about now? Because that bomb's still ticking dude...

Half of the worlds terrorists come from Australia.

Don't tempt me...

edgecrusher said:

Jack Bauer said:

edgecrusher said:

This man has been exposed to a deadly neurotoxin. Damnit somebody help him.

LOL Minda_Cubed also liked it more than Wind Waker. As did that ass Pedro.

And you're all on the terrorist watchlist.

*enters code on PDA*

Chloe are you reading this?

Updates done

1up said said:

Take my word on this: There's something incredibly sleazy about playing The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and 3D Dot Game Heroes back-to-back. It's basically like going on a comfortable date with your long-time girlfriend, taking her home, and then sneaking out to spend time with some crazy stalker chick who dresses exactly like your girlfriend in order to catch your attention. And you've been dating your girlfriend for 20 years and you really like her, but after all that time you can't help but feel like your relationship is getting a little stale and predictable. And the stalker chick is a lot younger, and specifically styles herself to look like your girlfriend did back when you were in junior high and she was the class hottie who you thought was way out of your league -- plus, the stalker adds an extra touch of daring, modern sexiness that your girlfriend never would even consider, conservative and modest as she is. And you feel kind of guilty about it, but --

-- actually, you know, let's start over. I'm straining an analogy that wasn't very strong to begin with, and someone's going to get hurt. In simpler terms, 3D Dot Game Heroes wants to be a Zelda game. And not just any Zelda game, but the original NES Legend of Zelda. You control a little hero in a top-down world where you can only swing your sword in cardinal directions, battling through more than half-a-dozen dungeons scattered about a vast overworld in a quest to reach an evil overlord who lives at the peak of the northern mountain range. Along the way, you'll collect a boomerang, and bombs, and faeries, and money, and accidentally blast open hidden doors where the residents insist you pay them for the door repair charge. It's not so much that Heroes wears its influence on its sleeve as it is that it butchered the original Zelda, skinned it, and started wearing its skin as clothing.

Of course, there is a significant difference between Zelda and Heroes: The latter game is a PS3 title, and it makes full use of the system's tricks and gimmicks. Oh, it doesn't push the hardware by any means, but Heroes is fully 3D and sports lots of interesting graphical effects. Depending on your choice of camera angle, you may see the game world with a shallow depth-of-field that centers the focal plane on your hero, with foreground and background elements fading into blurriness, like miniature photography. Light shimmers across the surface of water. There's even HDR lighting, so that when you exit a dungeon the overworld looks briefly blown out until your hero's eyes adjust. It's kind of overkill, because the entire world is designed in a blocky style that looks exactly like an NES game thrust into the third dimension. Destroy an enemy and it'll even explode in a shower of tiny cubes.

The visual style could be little more than a cheap gimmick, but Heroes does a pretty good job of selling it. Although it's very deliberately designed to resemble the original Zelda, there are a lot of modern RPG sensibilities lurking beneath the surface. The game is crammed with sidequests, and the hero has a lot more options for upgrading than simply finding the next more powerful sword. In fact, your first quest is to go acquire the legendary sword; after that, you're basically just investing money into improvements. And in the style of post- Japanese RPGs, the hero's weapon is ludicrously huge. No, really, when fully charged up, it spans more than half the screen. The tradeoff is that once you take a bit of damage, your sword powers down and becomes much smaller. Also, Heroes moves a lot faster than Zelda did, so enemies pose more of a threat. Bosses are particularly dangerous, soaking up a ton of damage and offering no quarter.

Did I mention that the bestiary is ripped straight from the original Zelda, too? There are red octopi that spit rocks, four-legged spiders that bound about the room, dog-faced goblins that fire arrows, and up in the mountains you'll encounter leonine centaur creatures who chuck swords at you. The second boss is a giant bee surrounded by a ring of smaller bees, like those infuriating minibosses in Death Mountain.

But lest you think Heroes stops at replicating Link's first NES adventure, don't worry. Its inspiration ranges further. The first enemies you'll fight will be bunnicorns ripped straight from the Dragon Quest series -- which is also where the magic-casting sound effect comes from. And yeah, speaking of the audio, the overworld theme is hilariously similar to the Zelda overworld theme, while the file selection music is basically the Dragon Quest file selection tune with a few notes shuffled around on the sheet music.

"OK, I get it," you're thinking. "From Software is toeing the line between ripping off and paying tribute to some great NES classics. But so what? I played those games 20 years ago. Why would I want to play them again now -- fancy visual effects notwithstanding?" This is a totally reasonable question. The answer is that once you look beyond the obvious references and creative pillaging, 3D Dot Game Heroes is actually a pretty smart piece of work. It's not simply about recapturing the look and mechanics of classic NES games but also their innate design philosophy. Great as the Zelda franchise is, few would deny that it's built itself into a formula and has shed some of the charm and mystique of the adventure that launched the franchise in the first place. Heroes recaptures a bit of that feeling, offering a pleasantly stripped-down game that nevertheless is anything but barebones. And again, it's not a slavish imitation of the original Zelda; it foregoes many of the original game's more annoying elements in the name of playability and minimizing player frustration. It also incorporates a good many ideas from later Zeldas, from dash boots to magic spells, without necessarily adhering to the formula set down by A Link to the Past.

Take away all the graphical flash and what you have is basically Zelda II from another universe -- a universe where the follow-up to Zelda wasn't the oddball Adventure of Link but rather a game that served as a conceptual bridge between the first and third games in the series. There's little question that 3D Dot Game Heroes is going to appeal primarily to those of us who spent long adolescent nights sorting through the abstract mysteries of Hyrule 20 years ago, but hey -- we deserve to be pandered to a little, too. Atlus will be publishing 3D Dot Game Heroes in the U.S. in May at the very friendly price of $40, and anyone who still gets a kick out of classic NES adventures should look forward to it. Just don't let Zelda know about your little fling.  

As usual there is non one around.

Innuendo or what?