These are the 3 codes I always have saved in my mind. Except I never know which button to hold down in S1, so I just press them all. And if for Sonic Chaos MS it's RLRL or LRLR.
About Sega Rally...rally racing is not my thing to begin with, but I got the DC version of SR2 a few weeks ago and after 3 days of struggling to enjoy it, I quit. The learning curve's more annoying than it is legitimately hard, it doesn't help you in any meaningful way on determining car performance at a glance without being a gearhead, and there's not much of anything to do. Daytona Dreamcast had about the same number of modes and less tracks but scads more variety. Not to mention that empty numbing feeling coming from the presentation - is the AI trying to race me or just be there?
Now I have heard that this game's considered to not just suck on G.P. but sucks for a Sega Rally game, so, what? Was this a fluke, or am I missing something, or should I forget this rally ridiculousness and scoot back to Daytona?
Heroic One wrote:So how'd you find it? Google our site and accidently click there, or what?
I actually Googled "Green Hill Zone Castle of Illusion" because IGN recently did an article on it. I remembered someone saying something about the game here at The GHZ in an old thread, but ended up, much to my horror, finding this other site instead.
I've never played Castle of Illusion, but I loved World of Illusion as a kid. I always played it with one of my sisters (like we did with Chip 'n' Dale). I played WoI again in recent years and found out it's not as great as I remembered it, but it was still kinda fun with 2p. It's just that it's so damn easy.
World of Illusion wasn't really as good. The controls and level design weren't as tight. You should dig up a rom for Castle. It's aged, but if you can imagine playing it in 1990, it's pretty nice (though not very graphically impressive even then). It gets pretty tough around the last stage - I don't remember ever beating it (but I could be wrong).
I remember Land of Illusion for the Game Gear. In fact, it and Baku Baku were the only non-Sonic games I owned for that console.
I remember it being somewhat difficult at the time - although I've since gone back to it and been able to get pretty far into it before I get bored. Nevertheless it was miles easier than the OTHER game I got with the Game Gear at the same time (Sonic 2... goes without saying, really).
I was really surprised at the time with the way they handled the end of the game when you beat it on different difficulty settings, with the number of bosses you fight, and I think there might even have been some levels you didn't do on Easy. I don't know if it's true or not (the release dates match up) but I heard that Castle of Illusion, not Sonic, was actually Sega's main push against Super Mario World in Japan.
It's a really great game.
A lot of the Capcom Disney titles were really good too, Kotaku had a figure the other day that Ducktales and Chip n' Dale on the Famicom had sold more copies than any of their Megaman titles (Megaman 2 & 3 were the best sellers of the series).
Yeah, on easy mode you'd only play like three or four stages and there was only one round in each.
Those old Capcom Disney games were awesome - I think Ducktales was the first game I ever actually beat. Now that you mention it, they were all really similar to Mega Man except for the shooting. I bet they recycled alot of the code.
Actually, now that I think about it, almost all Disney games were pretty good until about the mid 90's.
That Donald Duck one for the Game Gear was the first video game I ever owned. I remember there was a point like the the sirens in Launch Base where a constant stream of enemies you could kill to get power-ups where I'd just sit there for maybe 15 minutes, just trying to get the shuriken-esque discs instead of the awkward hammer. Good times.
Green Gibbon! wrote:
Those old Capcom Disney games were awesome - I think Ducktales was the first game I ever actually beat. Now that you mention it, they were all really similar to Mega Man except for the shooting.
I dunno. Ducktales, Chip and Dale and Talespin seemed to all have different gameplay formulas, but as for Darkwing Duck, i'll agree with you there. It's Megaman with the sprites replaced with Disney characters. Still my favorite Disney NES title, though.
Mickey Mouse was my childhood hero up until around Sonic 3. So I owned Castle and Quack Shot and frequently rented World of Illussion and any other Disney Genesis game I could get my hands on. Quack Shot was a house favorite for a long time. I'm not sure if it really holds up nowadays. Castle, I think, was the first game I ever beat (and I mean the full game, not easy mode), with Sonic 1 a few months afterwards back in early 1992. I remember Castle being very difficult and it's probably even more so nowadays.
I think these games are usually left off of all these "best of" lists because most gamers dismiss them based on their theme. They don't make too many decent license games these days, especially ones based off of cartoons.
Screw you, I found QuackShot immensely entertaining. Despite the fact that I first bought and played it in 2007.
Honestly, licensed games in general seemed better at the time. Getting away from the Disney franchises, Animaniacs for the Genesis was sweet. It had the whole "three players to your team who you can swap between at any time" gameplay years before Sonic Heroes tried it out, and unlike the latter game, it worked EXTREMELY well. The only gripe I have is Yakko's paddle-ball move, which seemingly has no use at all (at least, until you realize it's the only attack that works against Ralph).
Also, Garfield was a surprisingly competent knock-off of Aladdin for the Genesis (seriously, the controls are exactly the same - jump, swing a sword and throw a projectile). Aladdin was better, but Garfield still worked.
I also happened to like Asterix and the Great Rescue, although it's a pretty damned flawed game. The first "area" of levels is RIDICULOUSLY long, and the boss of the area takes one hell of a beating with little indication that you're doing any damage to him, the boss of the third area has no hint as to how to kill him at all (you have to randomly mash buttons or else he'll log-roll you off the edge of the screen), you never actually get to fight Caesar (the final boss is a fight against two tigers who just waggle their each of their heads out of one of three doors, then pounce to the next door over, ad nauseam), the music isn't really anything to write home about, et cetera. Still pretty fun despite that.
Getting back to Disney, Toy Story for the Genesis was damned fun. Actually, I'll just openly admit that pretty much every game Traveller's Tales have made that I've tried, I've enjoyed somewhat. Toy Story, Sonic 3D, Sonic R, Lego Star Wars, et cetera. I'm aware they have some stinkers, though, like Rascal... But then, I haven't played that. ;P
Green Gibbon! wrote:I actually don't think there's ever been a very good game with Donald as the star, which is depressing.
Mickey and Donald 3 came close to being good, but it was still the weakest in Capcom's trilogy of Mickey Mouse platformers on the Super Famicom. The first two were actually pretty good, too.
Quackshot wasn't a great game or anything, but it was certainly better than that god-forsaken Fantasia game that came out the same time period.
I'd have to save that Animanics wasn't particularly great (I'd take Sonic Heroes over it). It started off alright, but then it stopped being so interesting for me after a couple of levels. I would always play up to one level where there was simply no where to go. I could probably GameFAQs it nowadays, but back then that really frustrated me.
Mickey Mania was also good, but no Castle of Illusion. It had much sharper graphics and went through various Mickey cartoons throughout his history.
When I was a kid, I used to have World of Illusion and Quackshot for my Mega Drive, and I found them really fun games (and I still do). World of Illusion even more so because of how the worlds change depending on the character settings. When I read you guys talking about Castle of Illusion and Mickey Mania and calling them better than the former two (Gibbon mostly, anyway), I decided I must have been missing a whole lot and thus went and downloaded both games!
The results were not good.
I seriously cannot grasp how you appreciate these games. What I find most hilarious is that you call them "hard" and "challenging". What I saw was stuff like trying to swing on a vine in order to cross a pit, and slamming directly into a skeleton with no chance to react, trying to make a hard jump between two distant platforms and getting instantly nailed by a dashing bat, jumping on slides that send you flying directly into instant-death waste, bosses that kill you before you have a chance to figure out what the hell they're actually doing, stupidly erratic obstacles that require split-second timing to evade, and my favourite, the stupid enemies that crawl on the ground and jump up at lightning speed and hit you before you have a chance to hit them or even put yourself into attack form. And the list goes on and on, just go grab the rom and play for a few minutes (try clearing two levels, if you can).
Then it just hit me. I was playing Sonic Advance 3!
For some reason, you like these games which employ bad controls, unfair enemies and obstacles and horrible level design and calls them "difficulty", yet you bash recent Sonic outings for all these flaws. What gives? Does Sonic really have cancer now? Can it no longer be appreciated no matter the situation?
And before you come at me saying that all games in the 80-90s were this difficult, Contra these games are not. At least in Contra you could see the enemy that was going to lead to your impending doom before it actually happened; when you failed it felt like it was your fault and not the game's.
Also, there was that stupid trolley thing in Mickey Mania. You rode on a dashing trolley while the level autoscrolled at an incredible pace, and you needed to jump or crouch depending on the upcoming obstacle. This was doable, but every three seconds or so a pit came up and you had to time your jump onto another trolley -- if you were off by a split-second you'd miss, land on the floor next to it and then, for some reason, you lose a life. It's incredibly laughable that if you lose all the lives on your current continue, the game shows you a message saying that Mickey broke all the trolleys but still managed to get through, and puts you on the next stage. If nobody at beta testing could get through it on their first playthrough, why the hell did they keep the level?
I don't know if I'm ever going to play Castle of Illusion again. I was in the (final?) dungeon level and lost my last lives to those stupid instant-death obstacles. I noticed how World of Illusion was basically a better version of the same game and with more levels and with multiplayer and with much better graphics (good god that Mickey sprite is horrible), so what's the point? Feeling good about myself for managing to clear it? I already lost a lot of my childhood with Tazmania due to that. I think that was torture enough.
I only got to the third level in Mickey Mania (the one with the moose) so I might try that again to see how sucky it eventually gets. It already did the horrible "run away from your impending doom while you dodge obstacles that are only on-screen for about a second before they hit you and slow you down considerably and collect... apples in order to keep your stamina up", so how bad can it get? I might just watch that speed run at TASvideos instead. Yeah, I think I'll do that.
I know this post is a mess, but anger does not convert into words properly very often. tl;dr Micky Mania and Castle of Illusion suck, lurk moar
I just tried Castle of Illusion on Hard using an Xbox 360 controller (which means, I go with some serious disadvantage on the control department), and can't find your whining any less than unjustified. Some enemies are small and hard to detect, but that's about it. I'll try it extensively throughout this weekend.
I think even on Practice this game still pounds World of Illusion into the ground when it comes to quality gameplay (even though WoI did get a little challenging on the later levels back then), but that's just a first impression.
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