I never mentioned it, but I beat this right before New Year's! It was a fun, if extremely barebones, dungeon crawler, and I did enjoy it, but it's not really anything special and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I was very surprised to see Hirokazu Yasuhara and Naoto Ohshima in the credits, though! This must have been the game they were working on right before they went over to Sonic 1. NEAT! Fatal Labyrinth is impressive for a very, very early console roguelike, and I do kind of like how the game handles "beating" the dungeon, but I don't think the Genesis was really made for a game like this.
Over the holidays, I dropped a bit of Christmas money on quite a few different PSN games, and the one I've been playing over the past week is
Burnout Paradise. I know that this game has a reputation as being THE BEST CAR GAME EVER, and as someone who effing hates driving games of any sort, I was kind of curious as to how I'd respond to it. I
think I'm getting close to the endgame... I've got my A-Level license, so I imagine the Burnout one's after that.
It's... pretty good? I like that it's open-world, and that there's no buggering story or anything – they just let you loose and you can really do whatever you want. I'm having quite a bit of fun with testing out all the different cars, and the world is really gorgeous (especially for a 17-year-old game!). I even have fun with a lot of the missions... but the game sorely, sorely needed more variety. There are only five mission types, and, honestly, once you've done one "smash the cars" event, you've done them all.
And you need to do a LOT of these fucking missions – A- and B-level licenses make you do over 35
each! All the missions reset once you go up a "level", so you can just do the ones you've already done again, but I can't help feel it's all a bit redundant. I love over-world games, but I hate it when you're just given a checklist of stuff to do instead of making a little progress with every incremental task you complete, and Burnout Paradise is basically checklist city. It's fun – it is, and I don't even like these kinds of games! But I just see how many missions I have left and kind of groan.
It's definitely a game made for 25+-year-old men to play a little bit every day after work in the year 2009, which I suppose isn't the worst thing in the world. One other thing I'm not really crazy about is the licensed soundtrack – some of the song they chose are very good, but there's way too much Hell's Angels-wannabe tripe (Twisted Sister, etc.), for my liking. And some of the songs are the buggering radio edits, which makes Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" utterly unlistenable! I honestly just don't even listen to the game anymore, I just play a podcast in the background. SORRY