Cybergoth

Hi there! The full German title of this was Pierre Littbarskis Hot Shot: In England it was promoted with Gary Lineker. And I must say they both were deserving a much better game than this Despite me hating sports games, I thought to make an exception for once during the World Cup I actually own a few C64 soccer games still from back in the day, like Microprose Soccer (which I loved) and the first two Kick Offs (which I hated), but Hot Shots is one I never tried before. The style is Microprose Soccer, i.e. the ball is mostly glued to the foot of the actual player, which is a bonus in my book already. In all other departments (graphics, music, gameplay, A.I.) it's lacking the polish of Microprose Soccer though, making it a rather lame clone. There's so obvious bugs like that the timer is running when you're supposed to throw the ball in or when a corner is played, which means if you're in the lead you can just wait until the current half is over The game has only one (very unrealistic) play mode. There's 16 teams divided into 4 divisions and whenever you win a game or two you're climbing into the next higher division. It took me 5 games to make it to the top of the first division, then I got a congratulations message that I won the game The game is also way too easy; I won my first game 9:0 (without cheating!) and the last still 3:0. Well, at least so I was alreadly done with the game after an hour Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another soccer game in the form of "Fighting Soccer", but first it'll continue with something else. Greetings, Manuel

It was mostly bad luck I guess. The voters of the 4 Mega Man titles that got dropped out in the first round most likely gave Mega Man2 the boost to overtake Demon's Crest. Demon's Crest and G'n'G combined had over 10% in the first round, but "unfortunately" they both made it into the Top 10, so the "G'n'G" votes where still divided between those two. I went with BoF II now. It's only coming in 3rd in my rating of the series (IV > I > II > III > V), but it's still better than the other remaining choices IMO

Too bad, Demon's Crest didn't make it into the Top 5 :sad: http://www.capcom-unity.com/jgonzo/blog/2010/06/09/capcom_retro_idol:_choose_your_top_three!

The 3rd quest for my Cleric wasn't any more challenging than the other two, just twice as long. It took less than 2 hours to complete, so my Cleric is done now: I don't feel like trying any of the other classes, since I think I've already done more than enough horse riding by now Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another AD&D game in the form of "Curse of the Azure Bonds", but first it'll continue with something else.

Hi there! Let's have a look at another AD&D title for the NES: Somehow Hillsfar for the NES is probably one of the weirdest games in existance. The original home computer version this is based on was kinda supposed to bridge the waiting time between the releases of Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds. You could basically load single Pool of Radiance characters into Hillsfar and train them there. There's a series of quests to perform (3 for every class) and solving them would level the character up a bit, so your party was a bit stronger in CotAB. Now this was ported to the NES, where export/import of characters is impossible and Curse didn't even come out But well. If you ever wanted to create AD&D RPG characters on the NES from scratch just to train them some in an action game, Hillsfar is your best choice Curious as ever, I tried it nevertheless. Navigating a Cleric through the first two quests tonight, I was even more disappointed though, as the game has little to no substance. E.g. there's no real item management or equipment and no spell casting either. And while the quests have just been a mix of goto and fetch, I spent more time with the growingly annoying horse riding sequence (pictured above) then with anything else. The rest is navigating in realtime through very simple and very small dungeons. (It feels a bit like Dark Chambers for the 2600, albeit with less action... ) There's other action sequences, like arena fights or an archery contest, but unless one's in desperate need of money there's no point in doing them. Well, let's see how the final quest for my cleric turns out tomorrow Greetings, Manuel

Hi there! Finally I'm coming to another 16>8-Bit conversion of a Psygnosis game: After writing about Barbarian and Menace in previous entries, I skipped some others, like Terrorpods or Baal, but this one looked playable again Hm... how to explain the game, as it has two completely different faces, depending on wether you're playing alone or with a friend... Let's start thinking of Air Hockey. That's it basically for two players. Both then control small arrows shooting little balls against a big ball. The first to score three times, wins. There's all kind of stuff on the playfields, like beamspots, bombs, tunnels, walls, bumpers, etc. And there's some extras laying around, although they usually don't do much. Now to the solo player. There the major difference is added gravity. This essentially turns the game into some kind of flipper. The major problem of the solo mode is that after 3 fields you've seen it all. And it's neither really challenging nor interesting to play. The dubious ball physics don't help it either, so your progress way too often feels luck driven. The rounds are short, maybe 1-3 minutes per level. Still it required all my will-power to bite through the 64 levels. Which was all for nothing in the end, as the game then just looped back to the first Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Psygnosis game in the form of "Blood Money", but first it'll continue with something else. Greetings, Manuel

Here's two new trailers. One with action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWEGOvuPdn4 And one with story bits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BauLXoAKD3A

Only very few games really succeed here. In fact I can only think of "The Guardian Legend" right now

Just made it through "Robocop vs. Terminator" on the SNES. It's been pretty good, especially considering that Interplay wasn't exactly famous for making this kind of action games

Ich tippe auf ein respektables 2:1 für uns

Hopefully just a short downtime of the server

Hi there! Yup, it's that time again! Horizontal shmupping! Dark Fusion is one of the rare shoot'em ups from Gremlin, who were mostly focused on Jump'n Runs on the 8-Bitters. Nevertheless it is a pretty solid effort. The player starts out on foot in a hub level. It's pretty dangerous there already, but here he can power up his weapons and enter the space levels through portals. He has to run'n gun to three portals in each level. The first two will open up impressive boss battles like the one shown above. The last launches some Gradius like space level, were you're making your way to the next hub level. Dark Fusion is very hard from the get go, but after a while you learn the tricks to survive. Overall it suffers from being a bit too generic in the audio visual execution. The game ends after four levels: (Thanks for confirming! ) Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Gremlin shmup in the form of "H.A.T.E.", but first it'll continue with something else. Greetings, Manuel

I love Summer.

Hooray! With our strong support Demon's Crest made it into the next round! Even better, it finished in a spectacular 5th place! This gives hope that the red-winged demon might even make it into the round of the final 5! Please keep voting for Demon's Crest again in the next round. To quote Capcom: So if you have a unity account, here's your chance to push Firebrand over the next hurdle: http://www.capcom-unity.com/jgonzo/blog/2010/06/01/capcom_retro_idol:_choose_your_top_five!

According to this interview the WiiWare version was cancelled: http://8th-circuit.com/?q=content/exclusive-earthworm-jim-hd-interview-anne-joelle-casenaz

Hi there! I bet he can't resist this one http://kotaku.com/5551591/trons-nes-certainly-looks-the-part Greetings, Manuel

Eigentlich wird Jogis Job jeden Tag einfacher. Wenn es in dem Tempo weitergeht hat sich der erweiterte Kader bis übermorgen von selbst auf 23 reduziert

Lock requested by topic starter.

Ich denke nicht, dass er die Katastrophen alle geplant hat

Hm... habe ich sowas nicht gerade erst in Englisch gelesen? Wenn der Löw am Dienstag wirklich noch den Gomez heimschickt, dann kann doch gar nichts mehr schiefgehen! Wirste morgen schon sehen, das klappt super. Wobei, da fällt mir ein, zumindest ich werde es nicht sehen, weil meine Frau den Fernseher für die Lena reserviert hat - Weiber!

Sensational! I made my first day one purchase of a Wii game ever! (A couple of older stinkers (marked above) had to go for fundraising though, so I effectively only paid 5 Euro ) No More Heroes 2 finally arrived in Germany today! I need to finish Spiderman asap now, so I can dive into this long, long awaited sequel

Sounds like you need to be the one making recommendations, not asking for one!!! Hah! I see what you're doing here! I decided to skip it, so no first hand experience here. If it helps any, the reason why I skipped it, is because I figured from a couple of reviews that it is totally focused on opening 30 safes. Each of them basically offers a unique puzzle and once you opened all of them you're done. There isn't much of a story beyond the introduction. So it's more of a puzzle game than a real adventure game. I wouldn't mind grabbing a copy on a 10 bucks occasion though

Ah, so you already were here. I'm sorry, I didn't check first when pointing you here I thought it would've been cooler if one had three votes for this round. I'd have chosen BoF as well and probably Bionic Commando third. But well, this way the Mega Man fanatics had to pick one of the six MM titles, hopefully eliminating at least five of them this time