ActRaiser

ActRaiser

1991

Quintet/Enix

Action/City Sim

I've been watching some old episodes of Nick Arcade on Youtube lately, and two things stand out to me about that show now. One is how little a show called Nick Arcade actually featured gaming, and the other is how when they actually did have any gaming, it was usually ActRaiser. From these segments I thought that this was another run of the mill action games, but it ended up being one of the most innovative games that I've played, to this day.

You start this game flying around an overworld. There are about 5 different cities, but they only become available at a certain level. The overworld music is hauntingly beautiful (I read that this game's soundtrack was in fact award winning when it came out.) You start with the first city of Fillmore

A helpful little angel tells you that you have to rid the city of monsters before people can start inhabiting it, so you enter the first action sequence.

In the game's action sequences, the angel inhabits a statue with a sword and is controlled by the player. These sequences are actually the weakest part of the game, but they are still enjoyable and present a decent level of challenge, especially the boss at the end of the action sequence. It took me 4 attempts to beat the boss, so you actually do get a sense of satisfaction from it.

After beating the monster boss, people begin moving into the city. This is the point where the game gets really innovative. It switches from a straightforward action game, to a god simulator/urban planning game. I don't think that very many games from this era featured such a high level of genre bending. When in the city planning stages, you control the angel in a zoomed in version of the overworld and you can use the angel to shoot arrows at assorted flying monsters.  You can also direct the citizens of the city to expand their road network in various directions and to destroy the lairs of the flying monsters which stops the monsters from spawning. You occasionally have to use your god powers to assist the citizens as well (Lightning to clear brush so that the city can expand further, rain to put out burning buildings, etc.)

This continues until you level up and are able to go to the next city. I honestly really enjoyed playing this game and played it for a quite a bit longer than usual for my reviews. Up next, we will see if ActRaiser's sequel can live up to the innovation of the original.

9/10

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters

1995

Realtime Associats/Viacom New Media

Genre: Action

Alright, this entry is probably going to be pretty short, that's how it goes when you play relatively mediocre licensed platform games. I've never played this game before despite being a big fan of the show it was based on back in the '90s. The characters, like on the show are the three young monsters Ickis, Krumm, and Oblina. In this game you take them on a mission to retrieve items for the Gromble at their monster academy.

As you can see, rather than choosing a character to play as beforehand, all characters are available at once, and you can switch between them with the L and R buttons. This is probably one of the more interesting aspects of this game, but it is not handled as well as it could be. The characters have slight differences in ability, but the differences are small enough that they tend to be more annoying and lead towards trial and error rather than being able to use your gaming savvy to instinctually know which monster to control in which situation. The graphics appear crisp and true to the original cartoon which is all that you can ask for in this sort of game. The audio was adequate. While the music wasn't overly catchy, it wasn't overly annoying either, it made for decent background noise while playing. My one qualm with the audio was the lack of audio clips of the monster's voices and well known sound effects from the show, it seems that in a licensed game this would be an important aspect. Overall the game couldn't keep my interest for more than ten minutes, and although it wasn't bad, it really wasn't good either.

3/10