| NovemberJoy's Last 10 Game Comments (view last 100) |
King Neptune's Adventure
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How is this game on the top rated list in the RGR? I wish I knew.
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Brick Wall, The
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All in all, this game's just another brick in the wall
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Nutshack, The (GBA Video)
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why?
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Mobile Phone-Beast: Telefang Power (English v110)
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It's amazing just how much of a difference a better translation can make.
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Diablo (prototype)
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I really don't know if this is actally a beta for a Game Boy port of Diablo that was planned to be completed and commercially released, or if it's just a homebrew pretending to be a prototype. I guess it doesn't matter, though.
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Final Fantasy 5 - Strategic Battle
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This game doesn't seem finished...trying to open the menu crashes the game, and the game also crashes every time you try to get into your first fight.
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Link: The Faces of Evil
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This game is so bad, it actually causes the emulator to have serious issues. I guess the emulator must be thinking "Link:The Faces of Evil?! I'm not running that!"
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ExGFx Hack v2
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This isn't really a game, it's just showing off the fact that the creator can insert custom backgrounds and music into a SMW ROM. Not really worth putting on here.
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Rockman X5
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This is just the same as the Castlevania and Golden Sun GBC pirated games...how lazy can you get?
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Super Mario Dark World part 2
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Awful hack. I'm convinced the second level is impossible to beat.
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| NovemberJoy's Last 5 Game Reviews (view last 25) |
Super New Year Cart 15-in-1
05-19-17 02:33 AM
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A bizarre bootleg that doesn't do anything right
I play a lot of bootleg games. They're fascinating to me - instead of making a game with the approval of the company that manufactures the system they're making the game for, they do everything themselves, without relying on anyone else. They're almost like indie games, except most of them are soulless cash-grabs designed to rip off unsuspecting buyers. Occasionally, though, you can find a bootleg game that's great in its own right, and they're a joy to play. This, however, clearly had no effort put into it at all - it's a multicart, the most loathsome kind of bootleg you can find. What kind of madness have I dug up this time?
First of all, even the title is a pure lie. The title advertises that it contains 15 games, and it supposedly does - but it relies on obscure, ridiculous methods to randomly choose what it shows. Will the menu be in English or Chinese? Will it show fifteen games, or will it show eight games? Only God knows what you'll find when you turn this cartridge on. For whatever reason, I can't seem to get it to show the other seven games that I'm missing out on, so this review may be partially incomplete, but there's more than enough stuff to complain about in those eight games. Let's break it down, game by game:
1 - THE LEGEND - Not as legendary as you'd think
Upon pressing start, you'll be greeted with a freakish abomination that'll be sure to haunt your nightmares, which looks like a Sonic fan-character you'd find on DeviantART. Even the title screen music is stolen straight from Sonic the Hedgehog! When you start actually playing the game, though, you'll see why it steals from Sonic - because it IS Sonic. It's not extremely similar to Sonic. It's not another game with Sonic sprites pasted over the originals. It's a port of Sonic the Hedgehog to the NES. As impressive as it may be, there are far too many problems to list, most of them having to do with the physics - the Sonic ripoff you control constantly slides like he's o... Read the rest of this Review
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Titanic (english translation)
04-07-17 01:10 AM
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A Titanic failure
James Cameron's Titanic is a very, very well-known film. Even if you haven't seen it, you've probably heard of it, and its immense popularity made an impact on the world of movies - it's still the second-highest grossing movie of all time, only beaten by Avatar in terms of money-making. However, there's one issue that always comes up when popularity and money exist - ripoffs. I'm sure you've seen bootleg products of all shapes and sizes meant to trick people who don't know what they're buying into lining the pockets of less honest businessmen, and that's probably not going away any time soon.
Knowing that popularity and money are the main things that attract bootleggers, the existence of this game is even more puzzling. James Cameron's Titanic was released in 1997, around the time where the Playstation and Nintendo 64 were kicking strongly, and it might have been a smart idea to release an unlicensed game for either of those systems shortly after the release of the film. What I can't understand, though, is not only making a game about the movie eight years after the film's release, but also releasing it on a system that was two decades old. Its existence is a mystery that makes no sense, but is it a serviceable game?
The graphics really aren't that bad for a bootleg. As far as I'm aware, not a single bit of them is stolen, which is a major achievement for a game like this, and they're not too badly drawn to boot. The palette is used fairly well, and it's not hard to tell what you're looking at, although some things can be confusing with their appearance. You can find two types of power-ups in this game that both look like hearts, but neither of them actually restore your health, which is odd considering that they're hearts. The animations are also a bit jerky and stiff, and it's obvious that most of them are just looping over and over again with no effort put into making them loop smoothly. They're just barely above-average for an NES game, but th... Read the rest of this Review
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Super Mario World (Full Version)
02-17-17 12:56 AM
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Not so super?
Almost anyone can tell you who Mario is, whether they play video games or not. He's basically the video game equivalent of Mickey Mouse - colorful, designed for children, and its parent company doesn't always do the right thing. Super Mario World is one of the most recognizable games out of the entire franchise, though, and that's a major accomplishment for something as popular as Mario. Designed to show off the power of the Super Nintendo, it represented a huge leap forward in video game technology that some gamers consider to be the best era for gaming, although a lot of people would disagree. With success, though, comes imitators. Bootleg games are very common, and they come in many different forms. One of the most common forms a while ago was bootleg Famicom cartridges containing multiple games and cheaply done hacks of different games. There are numerous hacks that are just other games with a slightly altered title screen and Mario pasted in, but there are also other bootleggers that go above and beyond the call of duty and create new games from scratch. Okay, they're not really new - they're just imitations of other games - but they're as new as you'll get in most cases. That's where this comes in - a semi-faithful port of Super Mario World to the original Nintendo Entertainment System. How does the SNES's less super father handle this game? Let's see...
In terms of graphics, it's actually pretty impressive for the NES. They tried to take the original game's graphics and make them work with the NES's limited capabilities, and it worked surprisingly well. The animations are faithful to the original, the sprites look great, and the palette choices were made very well considering the limited number of colors there were to choose from. Flickering and slowdown are common, though, and some objects just weren't ported correctly, such as the giant Banzai Bills from the SNES original. Even with these flaws, though, the graphics continue to be impressive for th... Read the rest of this Review
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Atlantis
01-06-17 08:20 PM
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The hardest game you'll ever play, but for all the wrong reasons
Mystery of Atlantis, also known as Atlantis no Nazo, is a good example of the worst that the 1980s had to offer in platforming games. The game is notable, however, for two major reasons. For one thing, it was featured in the very first episode of Game Center CX, a Japanese show that focuses on a man named Arino and his attempts to beat various classic Japanese games, and it was shown just how incredibly poor the game design is, to the point where a guide was required to even come close to defeating the game. The other thing that this game is notable for is that it almost came to America as Super Pitfall 2. Yes, this game's American version was going to be a sequel to one of the worst and most poorly-programmed games in the entire NES library! Thankfully, it never came to America, but I can only imagine that people would have the same complaints for this game as they did for the original Super Pitfall.
Graphics:
Well, they certainly aren't as bad as Super Pitfall, but they're far from impressive either. There's not much detail to be seen, the sprites aren't very large, the backgrounds are sparse, and the foregrounds don't have all that much variety. One of the worst parts about the graphics, though, is that they actually trick you - in some of the cave levels, there's spikes lining the floors and ceilings. You'd think the spikes would harm you, right? Well, they don't. They're just background objects that LOOK harmful. Overall, the graphics aren't at all impressive, even for 1986. The Famicom had already been out for three years at this point, so there isn't much of an excuse.
+They certainly aren't as bad as Super Pitfall
-Graphics are unimpressive
-Background graphics that deceive the player
Sound and Music:
Like the graphics, they certainly aren't as bad as Super Pitfall. Like the graphics, they also aren't particularly great. Despite having 100 le... Read the rest of this Review
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Contra - Black Dawn
12-26-16 05:17 PM
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One of the worst ROMhacks I've ever played.
ROMhacking tools have existed since the days when DOS was the most common operating system, and they have only gotten more common and more feature-rich since that time. ROMhacks are tricky to talk about and even trickier to review. Should they be judged in comparison to their original game, or should they be judged by their own merits like a totally original game? At the same time, there are many different types of hacks. Some hacks are practically entirely new games with many new features coded from scratch, while some hacks look like they were thrown together in just a few minutes by someone who was very bored. Which category does this fall under? I'll let you take a guess from the score. (Hint: it's the latter)
The graphics are mostly the same as the original game. Why do they get a 1, then? Well, there's two major reasons. The palette hasn't been altered very much, but it has been altered, and the alterations look very ugly, especially alongside the original palettes. The more important reason, though, is that they clearly received no testing at all - if you finish the first level, most of the second level's graphics have been overwritten, resulting in a revolting mess of random tiles. How could you possibly miss something like that unless you didn't playtest your hack? On a more positive note, though, the music and sound haven't been altered, so the developer was nice enough to not violate my ears while violating my eyes.
The gameplay has been altered in the worst possible ways, which is very unfortunate. First of all, the level design was altered...but only for the first level, so that's a bad sign already. The first level has now been filled with difficult jumps and poorly-placed obstacles, along with extremely illogical water. The illogical water just seems to do what it wants, and it's very easy to end up in a situation where you have no choice but to fall through it and commit suicide, which should never happen in a game like this.
Read the rest of this Review
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