Ok, I know you’re thinking to yourself, A
Game Boy Advance
The [i]Star Wars[/i] franchise is notorious for its crappy games. It’s not very rare that a [i]Star Wars[/i] game turns out to be a rip-off from another title put in a [i]Star Wars[/i] costume and sold like it’s hot stuff. Most of the games are pretty mediocre, with nothing interesting in them other than music and the [i]Star Wars[/i] theme. [i]Apprentice of the Force[/i] is no exception.
You play as Luke Skywalker in this GBA game, and it’s a side-scrolling hack-and-slash game. You go all the way from Tatooine, where [i]Episode IV[/i] starts, to the end of [i]Episode VI[/i].
As you go through your exciting adventure, you gain Force powers such as Healing (which gets useful during [i]Episode VI[/i]), Force Push and two more. Before you get your lightsaber, you have your trusty blaster that you can keep using once you get your saber. Boss fights aren’t too interesting, but the enemies vary from stormtroopers to Tusken raiders to Jabba’s goons.
You also get to fly in an X-wing, or go on a landspeeder. I hated theseA
Final Fantasy IV
Game Boy Advance / Reviews / by
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[i]Final Fantasy IV Advance[/i], the latest in a series of remakes of the brick-and-mortar games in the classic series of JRPGs, provides an experience that scratches both the nostalgic and contemporary gaming itch. Originally released in the U.S. as [i]Final Fantasy II[/i] for the SNES, [i]FF IV[/i] has received some fantastic polish while maintainingA
Farm simulation, yet not quite simulation? That is what [i]Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town[/i] is. I haven’t played any of the other [i]Harvest Moon[/i] games prior to this one, so I won’t be making any comparisons, but I will start off by saying that this is a decent game overall.
The story is pretty simple. You befriended an old farmer some time back, and he died and left his farm to you. So, you start off with almost nothing, and you are supposed to make your farm successful. Between planting crops, raising cattle, fishing, mining, and other activities, you can gain great wealth.
As limitless as this game is in that respect, it kind of falls into the category of those sandbox titles like [i]Nintendogs[/i] and [i]Sim City[/i], where you don’t so much beat the game as much as you just get tired of it. That is what happened to me.
When you start the game, you are limited to just a few items. As you plant crops, go mining, or sell stuff you find, you will earn money. As you earn money, you can use ore from the local mines to upgrade your tools, thus making your job easier. Watering plants one square at a time (everything is grid-like in structure) can be a bit of a pain in the ass. Running back and forth from the water hole to your plants gets tedious as well.
On top of the plants, if you get chickens, cows, or sheep, you have to tend to them every day. This eats up a lot of time, which in a given day you don’t have much of. Then of course if you dig up ore in the local mines, there’s more time.
Time is handled in a pretty good way in this game though. You wake up at 6am and should be in bed by 8pm. If you exhaust yourself before the day is up, you may oversleep, which makes getting everything done the next day a bit more difficult.
Time is a big thing in this game too. The shops in town are only open at certain times of the day and only on certain days. If you need supplies, you need to plan out your schedule. You also need to plan out what plants will net you the most profit, and what animals will do the same.
[i]Harvest Moon[/i] does get a bit tedious. I played about one game-year in the course of a few weeks, and I was starting to find myself rather tired of it. I wasn’t making much progress, and all of my money was just going into making more money. I also couldn’t convince the girl I wanted to actually marry me, which kind of pissed me off. Yes, you can get married in this game, but I clearly was going after the wrong girl. I couldn’t help it. Karen was a cutie!
Perhaps I got tired of the game because it was winter. Since the seasons do change how you spend your days will change as well. You can’t plant anything in the winter, so you’ll spend a lot of time chopping wood for spare lumber and mining for ore so you can make money or upgrade your tools. There’s still plenty to do in the winter, but if you had the right crops, planting them was the best way to make money.
Should you try [i]Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town[/i]? I don’t know. I did enjoy it for a while, but then I just got tired of it. Perhaps it’s because it felt too tedious towards the end and it felt like I wasn’t making any progress. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t even get myself married. Maybe I was just tired of all the mining. I couldn’t tell you exactly.
[i]Harvest Moon[/i] is not a bad game, but due the repetitious nature, it can get tiring. It’s certainly not a game you will play for hours at a time, but I suppose that’s why it played so well on the GBA.
If you have liked [i]Harvest Moon[/i] games in the past or you like having a free-roam type of experience in your games, then [i]Harvest Moon[/i] will likely suit you. If semi-simulated farming doesn’t do anything for you or you prefer the “beat bad guy X and save girl Y,” then perhaps this game is not for you. If that is not the case, then maybe you will enjoy it. The upside though is that it can be found at a pretty decent price. It’s been out for a while, so you shouldn’t expect to pay too much for this game if you’d like to try it out.
Why is there a RPG in my tennis game? Who put it there, and, perhaps more importantly, why? The Mushroom Kingdom’s latest foray into the wide world of sports takes place on the tennis court, and while it provides a slightly entertaining diversion in multiplayer and Exhibition Modes, it is the game’s excruciatingly dull and cumbersome single player RPG train wreck that truly drags down the experience. The game tries to do too many things rather than focus on perfecting a single facet of the gameplay, and as a result Mario Tennis: Power Tour just misses the mark and ends up serving up a shallow, forgettable game.Which is a shame, considering how much fun the game’s GameCube incarnation proved to be. Granted, the already mentioned multiplayer and Exhibition Modes do bring some of the fun of the console version to the portable screen. You have the residents of the Mushroom Kingdom lobbing balls back and forth in both singles and doubles matches, complete with daring dives and earthshaking special moves. Unfortunately the single player mode is hampered by spotty A.I. that is inconsistent on its best days, and exhibits holes that are too easily exploited after only a short time spent with the game. For example, many times while serving from the right, by pulling your character to the far right before hitting the ball you are almost always guaranteed to send it past your opponent for a free point. Sure, so-called cheats such as these don’t have to be used, but the fact that Camelot even let this slip below the radar is questionable.
Thankfully human opponents are much more difficult to predict, and as such these multiplayer bouts serve up the most fun this game has to offer. Camelot has also included the ability to link up to four players together either via the archaic GBA Link Cable or the Wireless Adapter for some heated action. Here players can pick from a selection of Mushroom Kingdom staples, as well as whatever generic anime kids that have been unlocked in the Story Mode. Without question, the game’s multiplayer component is the soul of Mario Tennis: Power Tour. It’s too bad this couldn’t be extended to the rest of the game.
Sadly, the meat of the experience – an RPG that would bore even the most open minded role-playing enthusiast – excels only at being tepid. The story follows Ace and Clay, two up and coming tennis players at some Tennis Academy. But wait, isn’t this a Mario sports title? Why yes it is, but you’re better off putting a pin in that notion, because here at the Academy you’ll instead be going head to head against a laundry list of generic anime characters, every one as forgettable as the last. Better still, once you defeat these cookie cutter characters at tennis on your road to stardom, they become selectable in Exhibition Mode. Finally, a game where you can pit Yoshi against Meg. The whole experience is the videogame equivalent of Lunesta, and those players looking for a digital sleep aid need look no further.
Playing as either Clay or Ace, you gain points by besting opponents in an array of tennis matches, each one slightly more difficult than the last. When you finish a challenge, these points can then be applied and – in the case of doubles – divvied up between the two characters so they will go up in level and thus become better at their craft. As they progress, both Ace and Clay will gain bonuses to their various stats, including Power, Control, Side Spin, and Speed. They will also get more proficient at the various types of shots in the game, including Serve, Stroke, Volley, Top Spin and Slice.
However, it’s hard to care about this development when you cannot care less about the characters in question. Most players who suffer through the Story Mode will likely do so simply by going through the motions, balancing out points and button mashing their way through the benign dialog just so that they can work their way to yet another tennis match versus unfamiliar characters. The mechanics are sound, but they are wrapped in an experience without any personality. Sure, eventually the story intersects with the Mushroom Kingdom we all know and love, but the game would have benefited by having this familiarity in place from the onset.
Mario Tennis: Power Tour is simply not a very good game. While it’s presentation bears all of the hallmarks of the Mario franchise, the game itself falls far short of expectations. With spotty A.I and a forgettable story serving as the game’s biggest failings, even a robust and entertaining multiplayer component cannot save this title from being best forgotten. The tennis itself is decent, as are the mini-games that crop up now and again, but there just isn’t enough here that is compelling enough to justify a recommended purchase.
