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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I know I’m not one for modern day game reviews, and that I usually shuffle through my old classic gaming collection, but this week I got a request to review a newly released game. I got my hands on a game from a series that is trying to make a comeback, and in a genre I’ve never really played before. This week I’m reviewing Shadowrun Returns.
Let’s rewind a bit. Shadowrun Returns implies that it was around once before. Shadowrun actually began as a tabletop RPG in the late 80’s, and was played the same way people would play Dungeons & Dragons. Shadowrun was different though, having a cyberpunk futuristic theme to give tabletop gamers a new sort of game to play instead of just constantly sticking to the medieval theme D&D has. From there, the Shadowrun series started its own line of published novels. It then hit the home tv screen once the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were on store shelves, each system having their own Shadowrun game though the 90’s. In 2007, Shadowrun came back as a first person shooter for the Xbox 360, disappointing a lot of the fanbase. Finally, July 25, 2013, the creator of the Shadowrun series helped developers Hairbrained Schemes publish a new tactical RPG for PC, bringing back the old feeling of the Shadowrun tabletop game while having the visual advantage of it being a videogame.
Like any other game, there’s a lot to take in from this one. The game doesn’t exactly throw you in but instead allows you time to figure things on your own. So I’m going to do my best to break the game down for you from how I understand it. Let’s start at the beginning. The game allows you to create your own character with your own stats, similar to how you’d fill out a character sheet in a tabletop game. You’ve got your race, your class, gender, your characters name, profile picture, and customizable avatar. Now that step is easy, you get to be creative and make your character exactly who you want them to be. I was more worried about the stats page(as shown above.) As you can see, there are different categories such as strength, quickness, body, intelligence, willpower and charisma. Each category has different skills you can improve on (such as how much your character can dodge incoming attacks, or if they like using a shotgun they can increase how well they can use it), and you can increase these skills with karma. Karma is earned throughout the game when you complete a task or an objective. At first, the amount of skills I could choose from overwhelmed me, but with each skill and upgrade the game gives you an idea of what leveling a skill up will mean for your character, and if you even want the skill in the first place for your kind of class. It’s a lot easier to manage than writing everything down on paper and trying to remember everything you have on you, what you can and can’t get, and so on. It made creating my character and leveling them to who I want them to be a lot easier, which says a lot since I just get too stressed out with this sort of stuff in normal tabletop games.
I know this parts a tad bit boring, but in the upper left corner of your game screen will be a power button that also works as a compass when you have an objective active. A yellow arrow will appear on the power button to point you towards the direction you need to go to complete your current task, making it easier to not get lost in what you’re suppose to do. You also have your typical yet organized slots for your skills and equipment that you can buy from vendors. Most armor also comes with different stat boosts, such as added health or dodge points. There is no wrong type of armor, so it’s up to you to choose how you’d like your character to look or what boosts you’d like on them.
The combat system is one of my favorite parts of the game. Everyone in your party gets 2 moves before ending their turn, and some actions require you to give up both turns on that character. You’re not timed while in combat, so you have plenty of time to figure who you need to heal up, where you have to move, and who you want to kill first. The layout of battles is extremely simple too. It teaches you within your first battle where your items are located, how to switch items, and where to look for your health. This is a big deal in my opinion for two reasons. One, this was the hardest part to deal with for me in tabletop games. I’d always get lost when trying to figure out whose turn it was, or how much health I had, or what I could use as a spell. I’d always end up being a character that didn’t use any sort of magic just because I’d get so confused and overwhelmed by the amount of things I could and couldn’t do. When Shadowrun gave me a simple list of spells I could use, a turn counter letting me know the next time I could use a spell, and an easy way to find them, I wasn’t afraid to use magic anymore because I wasn’t overwhelmed by it.
Overall, I’d recommend anyone who’s too scared to try games like D&D or any other tabletop game because of the amount of time it takes to get going or even play through one story, or even hardcore tabletop players who wants something to do when your buddies aren’t available. In Shadowrun, there are many different stories to try out, making every adventure different, and even though the game requires a lot of thinking and reading, it doesn’t flood you with so much information that you can’t keep up. In fact, the game is really good about teaching you the basics of how to pick up items, find people that are available to talk to, and finding your way to your next destination. If you have a night of doing nothing, or you have time to kill, this is the perfect game to spend your time with. It’s very player friendly, and I’ll be spending a lot of my time with this game so I can explore the Shadowrun world more for myself. Shadowrun Returns is now available on Steam for $20, so I suggest you go give it a try!
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