Do you want to win a free Gameboy Color, Gameboy/Gameboy Color game, and a Pikachu figure form the 1990’s?
OF COURSE YOU FLIPPIN’ DO.
We did it! We finally hit 1,000 views on systemshuffle.com! As a thank you to everyone for the constant support, I’m doing a giveaway!
On October 19th, 2013, I’ll be randomly drawing a winner who will receive these prizes: A turquoise Gameboy Color, A Pikachu figure from the 1990’s, and a mystery Gameboy/Gameboy Color game!
Click here to learn how to enter!
At the end of the year 2003, Sega released a brand new Sonic the Hedgehog game for GameCube, Playstation 2, Xbox and PC. Japan got the first taste of this newly released game on December 30, 2003 while America was given the game on January 5th, 2004. Europe then received the game a month and a day later, and while everyone was excited to play Sonic Heroes, little did the world know how much a mess this new game would be.
I remember it being sort of a rainy day outside when my little brother Miles and I went to Gamestop to pick up the new Sonic game, and while at the time I didn’t think anything of the weather, I now think the world was trying to tell me something. My brother and I would always look at the manual and case of any new game we bought, so I recall looking at the back of the Sonic Heroes case and thinking how awesome this game was going to be. “They brought back old characters from Sonic Adventure and the Chaotix team?! You can play as 3 at a time?! New levels, new music, I can’t wait to get home! Maybe this game will have a Chao Garden!!” (Needless to say, I was very disappointed when I discovered that there was no Chao Garden.) I don’t remember much about when I played Sonic Heroes as a kid though. In fact, all I remember is getting really angry (which is strange, since I’m not an angry gamer). So recently, almost 10 years after Sonic Heroes came out, I was talking with my boyfriend Mark about how much he and other players hated Sonic Heroes. I didn’t understand why, and it bugged me that I couldn’t say if I hated Sonic Heroes or loved it. Not knowing bothered me so much that I picked it up for this weeks review.
There are 4 different teams to play as, meaning that there are 4 different storylines to play through. Each team consists of 3 characters, each having their own special trait. One character will have a flying trait that allows them to fly to high places and shoot down flying enemies. Another character will have the running trait, so when they’re selected your team moves much quicker. (WARNING: When going through loops and different parts of levels with the speed trait, be careful! The game can be very glitchy at times, and will send you right through the stage if you’re going too fast or if you move your joystick the wrong way.) The final trait is the power trait that allows the 3rd team mate to smash through obstacles along the way. The power trait is very over-powered (no pun intended), since the character with this trait can kill enemies much faster and easier than the flying and speed character.
I decided to start with the Sonic team, since it’s first in line. The storyline takes place a few months after the Sonic Adventure 2: battle plot, where we find Sonic running through a canyon of some sort. His best friends, Tails and Knuckles, fly down next to him in Tails’ plane to give him urgent news: Robotnick, their worst enemy, has returned! Robotnick sent Sonic and his friends a letter explaining that he has finally created the ultimate weapon, and that in 3 days, he will take over the world and he invited Sonic and his friends to try and stop him. After reading the letter, Sonic gets excited and goes “Sounds like an invitation!” Wait, hold on, pause. I don’t know about you guys, but if I had a device that I was completely sure could destroy the world, I wouldn’t invite the one guy who has foiled ALL of my past attempts at ruling the world to try and stop me, since odds are that HE’S GOING TO STOP ME.
While you can switch between characters at any second, you can only be one character at a time. Each different character also has their over team fighting stance. For example, when you play as the speed traited character, your other two team mates will follow directly behind you. If you’re the power traited character, each teammate will stand on either side of you, and when you’re the flying traited character your teammates hold onto you from below you. These different stances can make it easier for you to get rings throughout the game.
In Sonic Heroes, there were a lot of moments where fighting enemy robots could get very overwhelming, especially since the game can sometimes flood the screen with them. The solution to this problem was to level up your characters to fill up your team blast bar. “How do I level up my character to raise my team blast bar?” When you kill bad guys (or occasionally when you go through a checkpoint), colored orbs will be dropped for your characters. These orbs raise your characters level, making them more powerful while raising your team blast bar. Each character has a special colored orb: Speed has a blue orb, flying has a yellow, and power has a red colored orb. Once your team blast bar is full, you can press the Z button to use a special move the destroys all enemies near you. Note: Some of the levels in Sonic Heroes are very long (10-15 minutes depending on how fast you go), so I suggest that if you want to just get through the level as fast as possible, don’t kill enemies unless you absolutely have to. (There will be plenty of areas that won’t let you through without killing some robots blocking your path.) You’ll still get plenty of orbs along the way to use the team blast move, so don’t worry about that. If you’re going for a good grade on the level, good luck to you. There’s a time bonus at the end of the level that helps a lot, but if you’re sticking around killing robots for points, it’s going to slow you down by quite a bit.
Now I do have some little, nit-picky things to complain about with this game. For starters, the controls are extremely slippery in this game. There are lots of moments in the game where it wants you to come to a sudden stop, but since you can’t just stop on a dime, you end up slamming into a wall and sliding around until your characters decide to finally stop. Also, unlike other Sonic games, enemies need to be hit multiple times before dying. They have a health bar, and can take up to 3-4 hits to finally destroy. This can prove to be rather obnoxious. My final complaint is the fact that the voice acting is just flat out awful. I know a lot of people complained that Sonic Team got new voice actors for Sonic, Tails, and others, but that’s not where my problem stands. It’s not that I’m not used to the new voices, it’s the fact that the new voices are wheezy, nasally and sound like they’re 4th graders having to read out loud in english class. Knuckles sounds like he’s screaming the word “Sh*t!” when he punches enemies, and when Tails flies he shouts “WHEE”, making him sound like he’s going to lose his voice from yelling. It stresses me out.
Overall, this isn’t a bad game, but it’s definitely not a game I would want to voluntarily play again. While the gameplay itself isn’t the greatest, the soundtrack is one of my favorite soundtracks from any Sonic game. I can now understand why my brother and I would get so angry over this game, especially after all the countless times we’ve fallen through stages due to a glitch, or have gotten killed due to cheap hits that the enemies got off on us. The storyline is nothing special, and is in fact extremely predictable. (Hmm, I wonder if the guy who get’s defeated in every Sonic game got defeated this time! Probably.) Sonic Heroes is available for less than $10 on Amazon for Gamecube, but unless you’re a Sonic fan who hasn’t played this, I wouldn’t buy it if I were you. Try it out at a buddies, or watch gameplay of it. Don’t put yourself through the amount of frustration this game creates.
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Super Monkey Ball 2. Is that not one of the strangest game titles you have ever heard?
“Hey man whatcha playin?”
“Oh you know, Super Monkey Ball 2.”
“Oh… What do you do?”
“Uh well, you’re a monkey… that rolls inside of a ball through mazes…”
“…But why a monkey?”
“Dude go ask Sega, I don’t know.”
I’m in love with this game, and have been since I was in my pre-teen years. I didn’t play much of the first Super Monkey Ball until years after discovering Super Monkey Ball 2, which came out for Gamecube in 2002 for North America. The Super Monkey Ball series was developed by a second-party developer of Sega’s called Amusement Entertainment, and Amusement Entertainment released the first Monkey Ball game as an arcade game. It wasn’t until 2001 that the developers decided to bring the game to home consoles.
Super Monkey Ball 2 has plenty of different ways to be played. You have Story Mode, Challenge Mode, Practice Mode, and 12 different mini games to unlock and play. Since each mode is played differently, I’ll break everything down for you. Let’s start with the different modes and leave the mini games alone for a moment. The controls for all the modes are the same, and they’re easy to learn as well! You move your ball around with the joystick, and there’s a little map in the lower right corner that you can zoom in and out of by pressing the A button, but that’s it when it comes to controls! Your objective in all of the different modes is to go through different mazes and obstacle courses to reach the goal at the end in 60 seconds. It may not sound like a lot of time, but all of the courses are short enough to get through within the time limit. There will be levels that you’ll need to practice a bit before you can get an idea of how to beat the level (timing, different routes, ext), but with practice you’ll be a pro in no time! Now, let me explain what’s so different about the different modes you can play:
Story Mode
The story begins with an evil monkey named Dr. Bad-Boon appearing over an island in a blimp. He then takes a giant vacuum and sucks all of the banas out of the village all for himself, which Ai-Ai and his gang aren’t happy about. As Dr. Bad-Boon then goes to make his escape, Ai-Ai and his friends then use a magic spell to put themselves into balls and fly around the island (No, you can’t actually fly around while playing the game. Disappointing, I know.) The game then brings you to a screen with 10 different courses to play through. You can go through them in any order you please, but in order to get to the next area you have to complete all 10 courses. There are no bosses in this game, and there aren’t lives either so you get an infinite amount of chances. There are also play points that you can earn. The more you play, the more points you earn! You can then trade in these points to unlock more lives for challenge mode, or to unlock more mini games.
Challenge Mode
Have some friends over that want to play, but none of you want to play any of the mini games? No problem! In challenge mode, there are different sets of levels to play on that are similar to the levels you go through on story mode. The only thing different about challenge mode is that it’s multiplayer and you all have a certain amount of lives that you can use. Don’t worry too much, you do get continues even if you lose all of your lives. “Well then what’s the point of lives if they’re just going to give me continues anyway?” Well reader, if you get through all of the challenge courses and don’t use a continue, you get to move onto the bonus stages! How’s that for motivation?
Practice Mode
Practice Mode is exactly what you think it is. You’re able to go into practice mode and play any level you’ve reached in story mode and replay through it. Even though you can replay the level as many times as you want, you don’t get to record your score.
Let’s talk about this games mini games for a second. A lot of these mini games are broken and unbalanced, to the point of being unfair. In most of these games, there are items with different helpful actions, but the moment you turn them off is the moment you’re doomed. In racing with items off, there is no possible way for you to catch up if you’re in last place. In boxing, the items they use can be 1 hit KO’s to your enemies, which sounds like a fine thing for you but the moment one of your opponents gets a hold of one of those power ups, you’re through. Some of these games are poorly explained, or can make playing the game nearly impossible (lack of speed, courses that are impossible to read or figure out, and in some cases the game controls your character for you). My suggestion? If you’re playing Super Monkey Ball 2 with friends, go play challenge mode.
Overall, I’d give this game a 8/10 rating. The story line is cheesey, but the game isn’t played for the story but more for the levels themselves. The mini games are unfair, but can sometimes be fun if you’re playing with a group of friends who won’t take the game seriously. if you can laugh off how badly designed some of the games are, I think you’ll be just fine playing them. As for the games courses and controls, you always have full control over your monkey and the game does a brilliant job of teaching you how to improve rather than making some levels easy and some of them impossible. Most courses even have different routes you take for those who want the easy way through or for players who want a challenge. There are buttons hidden in the back of some levels as well that slow the level down to make things easier, but of course it’s all optional. The game is less than $10 used on Amazon, so go get yourself a copy!
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There have been 4 different Animal Crossing titles released throughout the years, the most recent being Animal Crossing: New Leaf that was just released on June 9th, 2013 for the 3DS. Go back a bit further and you’ll find Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii, Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS, and the game that we’re reviewing today; Animal Crossing for Gamecube. The game was published and developed by Nintendo and released in 2001, around the same time as the Gamecube itself. In fact, did you know that Animal Crossing was originally released in Japan on the N64? By the time the game was translated to english, the Gamecube was released, and Nintendo decided to release Animal Crossing for Gamecube in America to show off the new game and system. The game also came with a new memory card with enough memory to make an Animal Crossing file for those who had the system but nothing to save their data on yet.
“So, what do I do in this game? How do I win?” Animal Crossing is an open-ended game, meaning that there’s really no way to beat it nor does it ever end. Think of it as a “second life outside your own” type of game, where the game runs on real time, making everyday a new day. Because the game is in real time, there are also holidays that give you special items or hold events and game for you to play. You move into town with no place to live, so the local general store owner (Tom Nook) offers to put you on a loan program and give you a house so you have someplace to live while paying it off as you play. “How do I pay off my loan?” Well, the currency in the game are called “bells”. You earn bells by selling furniture, fish, bugs, fossils, or doing favors for your animal neighbors. Your neighbors are all animals, while you’re the only human in the game. Favors include running house to house picking up items they may have borrowed from each other, or finding a certain bug or fish for the neighbor to enjoy. After you’ve collected enough bells to pay off your first loan (yes, first), you then have the option to increase the size of your house… for a cost. And so, the bells needed for each new size increase and get more and more expensive, but you can end up with a lot of space to make your own personalized home with hundreds of furniture to collect and choose from.
Let’s go a little more into neighbors. What kind of neighbors can you get? Are they all the same? Will I always have the same people in my town? You can have chickens, alligators, cows, dogs, cats, sheep, hawks, wolves, frogs, and other types of animals as your neighbors! Each neighbor has their own catchphrase, name, gender, and personality! There are the cranky, lazy, snooty, normal, and peppy types to meet and greet in Animal Crossing! Don’t like a certain neighbor? Don’t worry, if you visit a friends town or wait until some time has gone by, there’s a chance you can start the game and find a letter from said neighbor letting you know that they’ve moved away and won’t ever forget you. The sad part of this is that if there’s a neighbor you love, there’s a chance they can leave as well, and without any warning.
Here’s a little list of things you can do in game:
Overall, I grew up with this game. I adore every bit of it, and I have a lot of memories behind it as well, but if I had to choose between the classic Animal Crossing and the newer versions, I’d have to go with Animal Crossings newest release. Nintendo did a great job at listening to the fans about what they wanted added to the next Animal Crossing games, and in doing so they made every version of Animal Crossing an improvement of the last. If you compared the original Animal Crossing to its sequels, it would actually look like there’s not as much to do. Nonetheless, I would recommend this game to anybody. Any age, any gender, anyone who wants a joyful escape from reality for a little bit. The games have aged extremely well, and I still find myself going on my Gamecube to stop by and say hello to the neighbors I’ve grown up with and love oh so dearly.
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