Monster Rancher 2 - Full Review (PlayStation 1 game)

This is no ordinary virtual pet game and, despite comparisons to Pokémon, Monster Rancher has a defined identity with its own tantalizing hook; find your monsters by inputting your own CD disks into your console. Unlike typical ‘pet raising’ games you don’t buy them from shops or trek through jungles in search of powerful creatures. Instead you must put any audio or PS1 game disk into your PlayStation console and, depending on the disk, receive one of over 400 monsters with many of these only being acquired once you’ve earned the right to raise them.

Developer: Tecmo
Genre: Simulation
Release date: 2000
Platforms: PlayStation 1
ESRB: E –Everyone

‘Monster Rancher 2’ is arguably the most successful and popular game in the Monster Rancher series despite later editions boasting better graphics and additional features. Often compared to Pokémon, ‘Monster Rancher 2’, or simply ‘Monster Rancher’ if you have the European edition, puts you in the role of a certified monster breeder where your job is to train monsters to fight in arena style battles. This strangely enticing game has the potential to take up hours upon hours of your time and dozens upon dozens of your old CD disks as you try and unlock the hidden mysteries within your CD and PS1 game collection.

Gameplay and Story

After introducing yourself and taking a short personality test you’re thrown into the role of a certified monster breeder with your assistant, Colt, by your side. The story of Monster Rancher 2 is mostly non-linear with key events only occurring when you choose to engage in them or when you meet specific requirements. The game also never has to end if you don’t want it to as you can carry on playing even after watching the ‘end’ video so this is a fantastic game for the casual gamer. The general aim of the game however is to raise different monsters, unlocking rare breeds and rising through the 6 ranks by beating other monsters in tournaments and cups. 

Gameplay is split into different segments that mostly revolve around training your monster or battling other monsters. After finding and naming your monster, be that by purchasing one of the three available at the market or by finding one on any audio or PS1 games you happen to have, you take it back to the ranch with you. This unusual twist to the game is painfully addictive and you’ll find yourself rooting around the house for any old CDs that you still have but, in this new digital age, I personally lacked enough CDs to get a real variety. Frustratingly a lot of CDs contain a ‘rare monster’ that means you haven’t met the requirements to train it yet but, by playing the game and advancing through it, those rare monsters will be unlocked with enough time and dedication and if anything it gives you an incentive to continue playing. 

 

Almost every aspect of your monster’s training regime can be controlled by you including choosing what food it will eat at the start of every month, all of which have different effects, which drills they engage in or when they should go on an ‘errantry’. All monsters have a collection of stats to be raised; Life, Power, Intelligence, Defence, Speed and Skill but monsters exceed at these in different ways, for example some monsters are intelligence based rather than power meaning rather than brute strength they adopt entirely different attacks that focus on not just damage but reducing the ‘guts’ of their opponent. ‘Guts’ is what you need to attack your opponent so by reducing them in the enemy it means they cannot physically attack you and allowing you to chip away at their health gradually until they either die or the match is up. Battles are won by having a greater percentage of health at the end of the battle, whether or not you K.O your opponent doesn’t tend to come into it as matches are fought on a time limit. 

The battles can, admittedly, be frustrating as luck tends to factor into it quite frequently and often you’ll be battling against your monster’s unwillingness to listen to you. How many opponents you face depends on what kind of tournament it is and there’s a nice round mixture of tournaments where sometimes you’ll be fighting for the most wins and sometimes where you’ll only be battling two or three other monsters who were the winners of previous fights. Whilst occasionally battles can become repetitive there’s a huge variety of opponents that are genuinely quite challenging and, when you enter a new grade or start with a new monster, verging on impossible. Due to the quite steep rise in difficulty level as you rise through the ranks the game is kept constantly challenging and rewarding so there’s no worry of out-levelling any of your opponents without some serious dedication to training. 

The amount of interaction you have with your monsters fighting and training regime is kind of variable as during battles you can choose to control it yourself or allow your monster to fight by themselves. You will always see how the fight plays out but this effects your ability to select the techniques, when to select them and whether you advance or retreat during matches. You cannot use items during battles which may seem a little odd at first but, provided you use them outside of battle, there are still plenty of items that can be used though with unusual effects. Generally however these items don’t affect the outcome of a battle as that depends entirely on how well you’ve trained your monster and how well you can play to their strengths during a match. 

Training your monster involves drills or errantry but you can also select whether to train using light drills or heavy drills. Each light drill will raise a single stat whereas heavy drills will raise two and decrease one as well as tire your monster out faster. When you select which drill your monster will perform it takes an entire week and, with only four weeks in a month, you can at most only get away with three training sessions a month and with one week to rest. During the drills themselves you can either watch the scene of your monster engaging in it, for instance swimming around a course or enduring the force of huge battering rams pounding into them, or you can just skip the cutscene and get straight to the results. Your monster is not just limited to failing or succeeding; they may also cheat or exceed and this often reflects how they are raised or their individual personalities. The way in which you can praise or scold your monster is an added dimension and a contributing factor in how loyal your monster is to you, as well as how spoilt they may be. Monsters that are frequently scolded, refused praise, pushed too hard during training sessions or doing their individual ‘dislike’ such as feeding them something they hate or forcing them to battle when they dislike it will ultimately stress your monster out. A stressed out monster means that they will die sooner, are more likely to fall ill and will frequently be tired and unable to fight properly. Monsters that are stressed out or neglected may even run away and this usually occurs when they dislike you but, on the other hand, a monster that likes you and that has more loyalty is more likely to listen to you during battle. Unlike many ‘virtual pet’ games, if this can be considered that, the fact that the way you raise and train your monster has a huge impact on the game makes it all the more absorbing as sometimes your personality and training regime will clash with a monster. What worked with your previous, precious monster now no longer works for your brand new one who needs to be brought up to speed. What this results in is you and your new monster both hating one another and either this poor partnership continues or you change your tactic and adjust to the new personality and style of this new, baby monster.

A huge part of the game and one I particularly enjoy is the feature of combining your monsters into new ones and unlocking more disk stones. Your monster won’t last forever and, depending on the type of monster, will have a lifespan that will decrease depending on how stressed or mistreated they are. There’s no actual way to view the lifespan of your monster so sometimes it can come as a bit of a shock when you wake up one morning, open the barn and find them motionless on the ground. Combining monsters is something of an art and it’s fairly confusing at first as it can be temperamental. The basic idea is that you raise two kinds of monster, the same breed or different ones, you can only have one at a time but you can ‘freeze’ them which is essentially putting them in a cryogenic freezer to be defrosted whenever you want to use them again. Once you’ve got two fine specimens you can then combine them for a flat fee, this merges their DNA to produce you one new monster that is supposed to have traits from its parents including stats, personality and any techniques the parents learnt. To help push your combining in the right direction you can use special items that you’ve picked up from expeditions, won from battles or found in other way. Items can include bits of a broken disk stone which is basically an essence of another, possibly rare, monster. Your new monster will always be back at the lowest grade for battles, level E, but this is doesn’t mean he’ll be lagging behind as the monsters you fight in battles do not raise their stats so, just as his parents did, your new monster can climb the grades and attempt to become a champion. 

Graphics and audio

As PlayStation 1 games go, Monster Rancher is reasonably attractive though not especially detailed. The sprite animations for the dialogue are particularly nice however and each character you encounter has an original look so there’s no rehashes of models. Everybody, including your monster, rae rather animated in their emotions and what’s especially nice to see is that your monster’s personality shows through the way they express themselves and move around. There’s also a noticeable growth in monsters as they age and visual indicators like this are always appreciated. Depending on the breed of monster and the sub-species that they may contain they all look different; colours, textures and features like horns or spines may be integrated into a base monster’s original appearance and this diversity is critical to making each monster feel like an individual. The environments too are pretty decent though the ranch is very unfurnished and mostly consists of just an empty expanse of rolling green hills. The weather is done particularly well in the game and you’ll notice the change in seasons is quite apparent due to the level of light and little things like the hue of the grass, how rainy or stormy it is and whether there’s snow or not. Finally, the battle arenas and town areas are fairly well drawn however, even though most of the buildings in the market do remind me of a bunch of disturbing faces, but overall I’d say the graphics for the game are of a decent level of quality. 

The music is something I particularly enjoy in the game as it’s very atmospheric and, the battle music in particular, changes depending on what kind of tournament you’re playing. It’s a very memorable soundtrack that after several sessions of playing is likely to be stuck in your head forever. There’s no verbal dialogue in the game as everything is done via text but your monsters will make noises that reflect their mood so I guess that’s something.

Overall

There’s a great potential to get hours and hours of gameplay out of Monster Rancher and still not quite understand how the complex calculation system of combing works, but it’s fun all the same. Whilst the graphics aren’t exactly the game’s strong point and gameplay can become repetitive and uneventful there’ s still this sense of achievement when you raise your monster’s rank or find a new, rare creature. The game is a nice level of challenging but is still very accessible and I particularly love how connected you can feel to your monster and how you develop favourites, I hate Pixie’s for example because I personally believe they’re a bunch of spoilt brats who never do what I say and who cheat all the time. Ahem. The game is definitely addictive and extremely time consuming, the original spin of finding your own monsters by using your own disks from home is always a draw for me and there’s a lot of replay value in the game due to how different the monsters are. This is one of those games where you can play it for the long haul or for a short stint but, I warn you, it’s a rare find and will cost you more money than your average PS1 game. If you can pick it up for less than £20 I advise you to buy it, immediately, because it won’t remain that cheap for long.

The Good: 

• Original premise of using your own CDs
• Lots of personality
• Huge selection and of monsters
• Nice difficulty curve
• Addictive gameplay
• Monster combination very fun to toy with
• Monsters are very interactive
• Lots of hidden features to unlock rare monsters
• Some nice quirky events to break things up such as birthdays and expeditions
  

The Bad:

• Can become repetetive and boring
• Training your monster takes a long time
• Graphics are a little grating
• Could use more features and places to go

The Score: 7/10

Final thoughts: "This is the golden age of Monster Rancher, it's really fun, super addictive and just has bags of originality. It's not like Pokémon, I swear."

Theme Hospital - Full Review (PC and PS1 game)

Theme Hospital is a comical and witty game that is quite arguably one of the best simulation games of all time and most certainly the best hospital simulator ever created. A successor to the deeply enjoyable ‘Theme Park’, Theme Hospital takes the boring job of hospital management and turns it into something incredibly addictive and with bucket loads of playability.

Developer: Bullfrog Productions (PC) and Krisalis Software (PS)
Genre: Hospital management
Release date: February 4, 1997 (PC), February 1998 (PS1)
Platforms: PS1 and PC (MS-DOS and Windows)
ESRB: E - Everyone

The game was released for the PC and PlayStation 1 though aside from some minor differences like graphical quality and no background music for the PS1 version they are exactly the same game. You’ll play across twelve different hospitals with the task of designing and managing them to success whilst fending off patients with all sorts of strange illnesses and complaints. Theme Hospital is by no means a serious game and in fact it’s a highly original game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. To get you started, here’s the intro to the game.

 

Gameplay and game content

There are twelve hospitals that you will take charge of where you are given nothing but an empty floor plan and the money to start building rooms and hiring staff. You’re given a short amount of time to build the basics of your hospital such as a reception desk and diagnosis rooms like a GPs office and a hospital ward before the time runs out, the hospital opens and patients start visiting. The staff you need to hire consist of doctors, nurses, caretakers and one or two receptionists all of whom will have a short bio such as ‘heckles poor comedians, smells faintly of cabbage, possible liability’ along with their level of skill represented by a green bar. Doctors can have specializations and as you progress through the game you’ll need additional rooms and the doctors with the skill to work in those rooms such as surgeons, researchers and psychiatrists. Consultant doctors can also train their junior counterparts to have their specializations as well as increasing their overall level of skill. Depending on how good they are, their personality and the quality of their room including its size and contents staff may move faster or slower and perform worse and better than their colleagues. 

The game starts out simple and you won’t need many different clinics or rooms as the patients that will be visiting you will only have one of a handful of illnesses though it’s when the patients start showing up that you notice the humour of the game. ‘King Complex’ patients dressed as Elvis are in desperate need of a psychiatrist, patients ailing from ‘The Squits’ from eating pizza found under the oven are sent hurrying over to the pharmacy whilst patients with elongated tongues drooping comically from their mouths are pointed in the direction of a Slack Tongue Clinic; a glorified guillotine crossed with a clothes press. Each new condition or illness you encounter will pop up at the bottom of the screen, along with any other alerts, containing a description of the cause of the illness, the symptoms and the cure and these fact sheets always make me genuinely laugh. The conditions get more and more ludicrous and obscure as time goes by and soon you’ll have patients suffering from hair all over their bodies, radiating a garish and toxic looking green glow and aliens who were once humans and who need a trip to the ‘DNA converter’. 

Your success in this game largely depends a lot on how well you can design your hospital and micro-manage your staff as in later levels you will be absolutely flooded with patients who all require immediate attention. At first the game is quite simplistic and to win the level you simply need to meet certain criteria including number of patients cured, the overall worth of the hospital, a certain bank balance, reputation of the hospital and having to treat a variable percentage of the number of visitors to your hospital. You’ll frequently encounter ‘emergencies’ where a lot of patients with the same condition will all be flown via a helicopter to your hospital and if you don’t cure them by the time the time limit runs out, they all die. This can be fairly simple to manage if it’s something like a quick visit to a pharmacy but when you’ve got eight or nine patients all requiring major surgery you’re going to have a tough time squeezing them all in before their time runs out. Then there’s epidemics to contend with where you can either admit your hospital is infected, pay a fine and take a reputation hit or try to cover it up and cure them all before anybody discovers what’s happened. If you manage to cure them all and cover up the epidemic you’ll get a comfortable compensation bonus for the ‘wrongful’ accusations. There’s always this underlying sense that the hospitals you’re running aren’t exactly trustworthy as there are many unusual methods at dealing with patients and, even more disturbing, an ‘auto-autopsy’ machine in the research department where you can send patients whose condition you don’t understand due to lack of research. The thing is, once the patient is slid into the machine, CAT scan style, don’t ever seem to come back out again, hmm… 

For every new level there’s new challenges and new problems to deal with from earthquakes to vomit waves and the constant changing up of what’s going on in the hospital adds for some really interesting gameplay. A problem with the game is the unpredictable AI of your staff who sometimes struggle to go where they’re supposed to be going, leaving handymen ignoring overflowing bins and puddles of vomit and doctors wandering the corridors whilst a queue of sick patients stacks up outside the GPs office. You really do need to keep an eye on everybody at all times by dragging your doctors, nurses and handymen to where they need to be. Fail to keep on top of things and alongside a dirty hospital you’ll have your patients deteriorating health to worry about. A face above each patient’s head as they get more and more unhappy gradually deteriorates into a ghastly skull which means they’re about to drop dead on the hospital floor only to then float to heaven or be ushered into Hell by Mr Death himself. Thankfully the AI is not always frustrating and usually staff will be on their way to where they’re needed before the announcement woman calls out that a doctor or nurse is required in whichever room. 

Your ability to manage your hospital is fine-tuned to the smallest details and you can place everything where you want to be including radiators, plants, drinks machines and benches in the corridors as well as items and machinary in the hospital rooms themselves such as the desks, bookcases and bins. You can manage your bank account by taking out a loan, paying interest of course, and even decide how much to spend on the heating of your hospital and whether or not to give your staff a raise or a monetary bonus. Not only this, you can decide how much patients pay for each treatment or diagnosis attempt such as a stay in the hospital ward or a visit to the ‘Hair Restoration’ clinic. Despite this fine-tuned managing of the books everything is very simple to use and easy to understand and it won’t take much clicking around and reading of the in-game material to figure out how to do everything. As one of those people who doesn’t like reading a whole load of facts, figures and percentages I tend to bypass the many charts in the game and still can get through it quite happily. 

Graphics and audio

Graphically the PC edition of this game is superior to the PlayStation 1 port but that’s not to say either game looks bad. The screenshots used here are from the PC version but below you can see a screenshot of the PS1 edition, just for comparison's sake. Overall the graphics are really quite decent and very clear cut. Everything is colourful, very well detailed and a bit quirky with its own sense of identity in the whole design of the game. It’s a huge step up from the slightly blurry, fuzzy graphical appearance of ‘Theme Park’ and for a 90s game it really is impressive. The voice acting mostly consisting of a female announcement voice which is both funny and good quality as she apologizes to the patients about the amount of litter and chides ‘mad patients’ for being too loud in the corridors. Staff and patients don’t ever talk and tend to communicate with you through alerts at the bottom of the screen and symbols above their head, for example if they’re confused or if they’ve just discovered a new illness or researched/improved a new piece of equipment. Everything is very clearly communicated to you via the graphics however and the camera is very flexible and not at all awkward to use.

For the PC version the music is fantastic; nostalgic and catchy it has upbeat tunes that change track as you play the game so it doesn’t become irritating after a long period of time. Whenever a patient is cured you’ll hear a cheer from an unseen crowd and boo’ing when a patient dies, leaves the hospital or is sent home which adds to the light-hearted and interactive feel of the whole game. 

Overall

This is one of my childhood games that is still so addictive, challenging and fun to play now and, even after completing it, there’s still great satisfaction in starting all over again and pouring hours upon hours of my time into it. It’s just the right level of challenging and even if you find it too easy there’s three levels of difficulty so you can always crank it up a notch and struggle with the demands of the hardest ‘Consultant’ difficulty level. I love the humour in this game and it’s not an overpowering attempt to be funny, it’s just witty here and there from the diseases, to the announcements to the weird things you find becoming commonplace like excessively decorated staff rooms and questionable healthcare practices. The customization options are brilliant, it looks and sounds fantastic and overall it’s just so playable and so memorable that I can’t help but rank this as one of my favourite PC games.

The Good:

• Witty, intelligent humour that also borders on the silly
• Hours upon hours of gameplay
• Addictive, almost worryingly fun
• Nice level of difficulty and can be very challenging
• Lots of different rooms and illnesses keeps things interesting
• Very defined appearance makes it instantly recognizeable
• Memorable music that's really upbeat and not at all annoying

The Bad:

• Patients are always freezing.
• Staff AI can be a little dodgy
• More hospitals would have been good, but only because I want to continue playing

The Score: 9/10 

Last thoughts: "So addictive, even now in 2014 this is so much fun to play and is one of the few micro-management games I play religiously."
Note: If you’re interested I have a list of cheats and codes that will allow you to do extra things like play whichever level you want to play, for both PS1 and PC editions, and some extra bits for the PC edition such as unlocking all research and getting extra money. You can find my cheat guide here.

Playing Theme Hospital on new OS systems:

The PlayStation 1 version of the game is very easily obtained on sites such as Ebay and Amazon but the PC version will give you more trouble on newer systems, that said, it’s not impossible. By using an emulator such as DOSbox you can happily play the game as intended or, alternatively, you can use an open source ‘clone of the game called CorsixTH. This clone still requires you to purchase the original disk but it allows you to play the game on OS’s such as Vista and Windows 7. You can download CorsixTH here. 

Disney's Hercules: Action Game - Quick Review (PS1 and PC game)

Unless you are an extreme fan of the Hercules Disney film or Disney video games in general I wouldn’t recommend you add this game to your collection any time soon. It breaks my heart a little to say that as this game holds a great deal of nostalgia for me and, at the time, Disney's Hercules: Action Game was one of my PS1 gaming staples. 

Developer: Eurocom
Genre: Platformer

Release date: November 1997

Platforms: PS1 and PC  

ESRB: E - Everyone

When I first played this game I did find it genuinely fun and, on my second playthrough as an adult, I admit it has its charms but only on account of the nostalgia. When judging it based on its merits it’s hard to see beyond the boring and linear gameplay, annoying film clips and rehashed soundbites taken directly from the film. Overall, it’s an extremely short game and has very few levels that look better than they play, and they don’t look particularly exceptional.

The game is almost entirely in 2D though there are times when you have to walk backwards or forwards into an additional layer of the environment, before continuing with the regular side scrolling that the game exists on. There are ten levels overall but the last two, in the Underworld and the Vortex of Souls, are only available if you’re playing the game on either medium or hard difficulty though their addition does help to bulk the game out a little. There are a couple of levels in the game where you are unable to fight and instead must continually run forward, slowing or speeding up, whilst avoiding obstacles. One of the earlier levels features this rush type gameplay where you must avoid Phil’s hero training obstacles such as sharks, sword wielding dummies and giant stone fists that violently drop from above. This is, admittedly, quite fun to play through on the first attempt especially on the higher difficulty levels since it’s such an iconic scene from the film that you kind of enjoy playing through it, even if it is just for kicks.  

There are plenty of power ups and collectibles to collect during the levels. Your energy bar can be increased by picking up Hercules action figure dolls whereas your health can be replenished by drinking ‘Herculade’ that you probably remember from the film. Generally, you’re stuck with a regular old sword but you can also pick up power ups for it to give it magical abilities. I’m not sure where they got this idea from but I guess they can add a little creative embellishment in an attempt to make things more fun. These weapons are called ‘Gifts from the Gods’ which basically adds on stuff like a long stream of lightning that you can move about, fire balls that shoot off in any which direction and a sort of sonic blade that sends out a dangerous circular sonic blast, killing anything nearby. Finally, you can grab an invincibility helmet that makes you impervious to damage from a few seconds. There are two forms of collectibles in the game, for starters there are the letters of the name ‘HERCULES’ which are hidden throughout the level in admittedly really good hiding spots ( I haven’t actually found them all yet). Lastly, there are four vases that when found will give you the password to that level so you can replay it. 

Even when trying to find all these collectibles you’ll probably be able to complete this game in just a few hours, and it won’t necessarily be a fun few hours either. Though the game has its quirky moments that are fun for a bit it’s not really a substantial amount of enjoyment and it’s unlikely you’ll ever want to play the game again. Graphically, the game is reasonable and it has some really nice levels such as the early training levels and the dangerous jaunt through the city called ‘The Big Olive’ which has a few moments where you smile and go, ‘oh yeah’ as you remember the context from the film. The audio is a little irritating and the music is very repetitive, but good quality. The inclusion of low quality clips from the film to help explain the storyline can thankfully be skipped as they’re quite frequent and juts feel like a bulking agent to make the game last longer. Overall, there’s nothing particularly offensive about the game, it basically stands as a good little game for children or for those who enjoy knocking out a couple of hours on an old 90s Disney game without high expectations.

The Good:

• Iconic scenes from film fun to engage in.
• Decent levels, nice variety and very detailed.
• Well animated enemies
• Collectibles for the purists is always a good thing.
• Powerups mean you can cleave through enemies quickly. 
  

The Bad:

• Often you're just running to the side of the screen, continuously. 
• Repetative audio and music.
• Quite a bland experience.
• Very short.
• Lack of analog sticks means your fingers will hurt because of stubborn controls. 
  

The Score: 5/10

If you want to play this you can check out my passwords for all levels in all difficulties here. 

Rayman 1 - Full Review (MS-DOS and PS1 game)

The original Rayman game is a devilishly tricky but wonderfully clever little game with bucket loads of likability factor in its colourful and comical world that will have you engaged for hours. This side scrolling platformer was released in 1995 and was also one of the first games to be released for the PlayStation though it also came out on the PC and Atari Jaguar too. The game was an instant hit, becoming the most sold game on the PS1 of all time, and it’s easy to see why; gloriously detailed levels, hours upon hours of content all set an idyllic fantasy land that is both memorable and imaginative. Challenging, quirky and deeply immersive you’ll soon appreciate why this is the game that set off an incredibly successful series enjoyed by generations of gamers.

Gameplay and plot

The game follows Rayman, our lazy and limbless hero, as he tries to restore balance and harmony to the land after a certain ‘Mr Dark’ has stolen the Great Protoon. Without it, chaos has beset the usually peaceful land causing Electoons to be scattered and nasty, unnatural creatures to appear everywhere.  Rayman must rescue the Electoons and defeat Mr Dark to restore order and tranquillity to the land. If you’re familiar with ‘Rayman Origins’ and ‘Rayman Legends’ you’ll instantly recognize certain features like the style of the map, the inclusion of Electoons and of course Rayman but you’ll likely be surprised at how much slower and how much more difficult it is. 

Gameplay consists of navigating through the side scrolling levels to reach a signpost with an “!” on it which completes that level.  The levels tend to consist of lots of platforms and parts of the environment that you can interact with to gain access to otherwise out of reach areas such as bouncing purple fruit that can be used as a makeshift boat. Depending on the level they’ll be different obstacles and environments so it’s not all walking and jumping and quite often you’ll be sliding at top speed, hovering precariously or bouncing off and between objects. Each level is littered with enemies and also the poor, crying caged Electoons which you must release by smashing open their cages open with your fists. There are six caged Electoons on each level and you have to free all of them if you wish to complete the game as only then will you be able to reach and confront Mr Dark in the epic finale. This sounds easy enough, after all you can revisit the levels from the world map, but the Electoons tend to be tricky to find and even more tricky to access. With limited lives, you’re going to have your work cut out for you.

To help you through the game you gain additional abilities from Betilla the Fairy as you progress. The very first abilities you learn allow you to hang from ledges and to throw your fists which is your primary means of killing enemies. The other abilities are all generally very standard and nothing particularly unusual, except one, the helicopter ability. This power utilizes Rayman’s hair as a means of flying and this allows you to travel short distances or to save yourself from what would be otherwise fatal falls. Without the bolstered speed and agility from the more recent Rayman instalments like 'Rayman Origins' and 'Rayman Legends' you’re going to find yourself having to rely on your own accuracy and luck to get through this classic, making these abilities are utterly crucial to your success. 

Beneath its cute and colourful exterior lies a game that is punishingly difficult and infinitely frustrating. It really does make me wonder who this game is aimed at; children or adults as though on the surface it clearly looks like a children’s game it is just too incredibly challenging for that to be so. You’re probably wondering what could be so damn hard about this game that I keep mentioning how challenging it is, well, lots of things make it difficult. To begin with, you have a very limited amount of lives and acquiring additional lives is a huge challenge as it requires you to collect 100 blue orbs called Tings. When you die, you lose all your Tings collected so far which can leave you in a never ending loop of dying, being unable to get another life, and dying again. To make matters worse the chances to save the game are few and far between. Once you’ve started a level you have to complete it to be able to save again, there is no saving from the menu and there is no auto save feature. I can genuinely guarantee that, even with the one checkpoint they kindly throw in your general direction, you’ll be replaying certain parts of this game over and over until you want to crush the controller between your palms. 

For those of us who don’t mind a bit of gaming masochism, or employing cheat codes, there’s a staggering 70 levels to shoulder through that are either beautifully designed or, in the very least, pretty to play through. There are six different worlds that are divided into two categories, ‘natural’ and ‘imaginary’. The natural worlds take place in a forest, mountains and caves whereas the imaginary levels are set in worlds that are significantly more dreamlike and unusual. There’s a fair bit of freedom regarding which order you play through the levels in but, since the difficulty scales across the worlds, it’s a lot easier to play the game in the intended way.  At the end of each level you’ll have to defeat a boss enemy and the bosses are pretty interesting creatures, which is much appreciated since up until that point you’ve only been fighting one or two variations of enemy. Fighting enemies is purely to get them out the way so you don’t die and there’s no reward for killing them. To make things harder not all enemies are immediately visible. Instead, enemies tend to pop into existence once you’ve stepped foot in their little ‘area’ of the map such as some narrow platforms above dangerous water. What this usually results in is you being knocked back and taking away some life, knocked into some form of trap such as the water or surviving and still being unable to kill them due to the tiny platform you’re teetering on. Rayman can only take three hits before he dies so you need to be extremely careful when traversing the levels as danger can quite literally appear out of nowhere.

Graphics and audio

This game truly does push the PS1 console to its full capabilities as environmentally the game looks fantastic and it has genuinely aged extremely well, even if everything is 2D. I remember playing through Rayman 3 which was in full on 3D graphics and quite frankly, it looked absolutely dire. I probably enjoyed the game because I was extremely young and very forgiving when it came to games but Rayman feels very much like Oddworld in that, despite being 2D, that’s the best thing for it as it allows much more detail and much better graphics. The music of the game is quite lovely, very satisfying and exists as a great background addition that draws you fully into Rayman’s adventure. The soundtrack is a bit quirky but has a strong retro feel that manages to bring you right back to the 90s in an instant. For me, it was an instant reminder of all the times I’d played this game when I was a kid and I absolutely loved it. 

Although everything is quite cartoony ‘Rayman’ has a very clear identity that sets it apart from typical animated games so, rather than it coming across as childlike, it instead manages to portray itself as a mature, yet fun, platforming game. The levels are incredibly varied and though the distinct worlds mean that some levels have the same theme there is a clear difference in the way you get through the level. Rayman is incredibly animated as well and the humour really does make itself quite pronounced through his animation and his own audio. Sit away from the controller for five goddamn seconds and he’s coughing, trying to get your attention to make him move. I genuinely miss that in games and it was quite a common feature to have your character get a little pissed off if you ignored them for a bit, but Rayman does do it so politely. Apart from his impatience he has a wide range of facial expressions, utter terror being the most hilarious of course. Rayman will quite physically chew on his knuckles at the sight of a monstrous enemy and will appear, genuinely, to have his life flashing before his eyes as he teeters over a ledge. All in all, he’s designed and animated very well and he’s incredibly likable whilst his idle animations and emotions really do bring him to life.

Overall

Rayman is an incredibly memorable experience for me and really is the best 2D game that is on the PS1. As a platformer it’s of incredibly good standard whilst the levels are fun and inventive with plenty in them to maintain your interest. It’s very difficult to get back into due to how punishing it is but, and I’m ashamed to admit it, an infinite lives cheat really does ease the way into the game if you just want to play the thing without murdering everybody around you. The controls are so easy and simple to get used to though the lack of analog sticks is a bit of a pain. Though the game does feel much slower and clunkier than the latest instalments it’s still great fun and a whole different game to the Mario inspired 'Rayman Origins' and 'Rayman Legends' you’ll see today, though they are fantastic too.

Score: 9/10

MicroMachines V3 - Full Review (PS1 and Nintendo 64 game)

MicroMachines V3 is truly a forgotton gem of retro gaming. It was the first game in the MicroMachines series to feature 3D graphics in an already successful video game series and it were as though somebody opened the floodgates of awesome driving games. 

Devloper: Codemasters, Novalicious
Genre: Racing
Release date: March 1997 (PS1), 1998 (PC),  Aarch/April 1999 (Nintendo 64 port)
Platforms: PlayStation, Windows and Nintendo 64
ESRB: E - Everyone
 
The game was later re-ported for its Nintendo 64 debut, albeit under a different name because Sega likes to look original and from that point on lots of successful, similar style racing games came out including.. Super Mario Karts, woo. So, the MicroMachines series is a racing game featuring toy cars on somewhat unusual courses that are typically places around the house and garden, since you’re driving miniature vehicles everything is oversized so you feel a little like a teenage Borrower skidding about on somebody’s kitchen table. Overall the game is extremely memorable and comes with bags of personality and nostalgia for those who grew up in the 90s.

Gameplay

There is no real skill required in playing this game and in that sense it’s very simple to play. Saying that, this is a really funny and enjoyable party game and the more people you get involved the more fun you’ll find it. You can pick which vehicle you want to race out of a pretty wide selection including ice cream trucks, offload trucks, racing cars or big rigs and then race them across crazy, oversized courses that take place in various mundane settings like on a school desk or on the breakfast table. These places are mundane in theory but agonizingly dangerous when you’re essentially a matchbox on wheels as the courses often take you over perilous bridges made out of rulers and baguettes or through deep trenches of sticky honey. To make things more interesting some of the courses are on the surface of a pond meaning you get to race in speed boats rather than ground vehicles which is great if you want to change things up a bit.

The diners must be pretty immature to line their vegetables up like this.

But it’s not just the environment that’s there to slow you down; your opponents too have the ability to send you hurtling off the table top to your demise. The game a good amount of healthy competition as you can pick up plenty of weapons and power ups to help you win the race. If you like you can pick up a mallet power up that will quite literally stick an enormous car-smashing hammer onto the front of your vehicle, there’s something greatly amusing about chasing your friends around the course and beating them to a plastic pulp. So, the game doesn’t just have a mallet to pick up but your standard power ups too like turbo boost and force fields, that stop your friends from beating you into plastic pulp, there’s also some particularly destructive items like explosive mines and dynamite that can ricochet off solid bits of scenery and hit you slap bang in the face if you’re not careful.

I imagine this is how pond-skippers settle their differences.

The gameplay is generally fun but only if you’re playing against human opponents due to the excessively simple AI of the computer opponents. A fairly frustrating element of the game is that if you fall too far behind the other cars you just automatically respawn close to the others and this can take away a lot of the challenge and, especially when playing against friends, can take away a lot of the competitiveness. There’s no split screen feature, which may be why the cars respawn rather than fall back, but on the Nintendo 64 port you can have up to 8 people playing using pad-share which greatly enhances this game’s status as a party game.

Graphics and race tracks

Even though the graphics of this game are dated now the levels are still looking undeniably great. The race tracks of the game are split between various themes such as the breakfast table, in the garden, on the surface of a pond and on a snooker table with each theme having thoughtful little design features. Sticky honey that will slow you right down and milk that will send you skidding off the table to your death are really quaint features of the breakfast table level and it’s great how even the borders of the track change with each area. Whilst the breakfast table has chocolate cereal outlining where you’re supposed to stay the pond has little drops of algae and the wine stained cloth of the restaurant table has peas and carrots instead. It’s all very cute and very charming with great little touches like a snail retreating into its shell when you bump into it and giant frogs and dogs to the side of the track.

That's either an extremely tiny note or the scaling is way off.

My only criticism of the levels of this game is that they can quickly become repetitive as many tracks are rehashes of the same few themes which results in the cuteness and personality of your surroundings wearing off, leaving you feeling a little bored due to the unchallenging gameplay. Despite this, there are 48 different courses and they have varying difficulty levels like beginner and master. You can also attempt the time trials and challenges that they game sets you or you can try your hand at a tournament which is great fun with lots of friends, all in all there’s a lot packed into this game so you can get quite a few hours out of it by trying to complete everything.

I'm not sure if that's supposed to be cheese or extremely round butter. And why is that bread miniture?

Conclusion

MicroMachines can wear on you a little if you’re playing by yourself as most of the fun comes from the competiveness of racing with your friends rather than beating the AI. Despite this, it’s a fun racing game with lots of playability and some great features that can be easily overlooked. The menu system and tutorial are fun and quirky and give the game a feel good factor that you don’t often get with driving games and the different driving modes like time trials and tournaments add in a much needed variation to the standard winding around a memorized track. The camera angles are a little dodgy but tolerable and quite common in late 90s games. The fact that this game is a PlayStation childhood staple means it is worthy of having a few modern day flaws here and there and overall it’s still a fun, eccentric miniature car racing game that will get everyone involved. 


The Good:

• It's always fun being this tiny
• Fast paced, competitive racing
• Quirky and original
• Nice looking maps, very detailed
• Decent variety of vehicles including boats
• A good party game with lots of people
• Fun 'beat em up' power-ups

The Bad:

• Despite lots of courses, maps feel repetitive
• A little grating after a while
• Boring on your own
• Camera can be rather temperamental 

The Score – 7/10

If you're playing this game maybe you want to check out the PS1 cheats and debug mode codes for MicroMachines V3, find them here.

Rugrats: Search for Reptar - Full Review (PS1 game)

Note: This was my April Fools Day post.The rest of the review is overly positive but does contain real info :D

Rugrats, Search for Reptar is a gem among all the other PS1 games of its time. If you love the television show or watched one of the films then I’m sure you’re familiar with the characters; this game brings back all that childhood charm into a well formulated little puzzle game with three great game modes and numerous storylines that will keep you entranced. Ok so the camera is a little odd and it doesn’t recognize the analog sticks on my PS2 controller but who needs forward facing vision and working fingers anyway? Years of retro gaming have deformed my hands to that of extreme double jointed-ness and partial muscle damage anyway so I barely feel the strain of mashing on the D-pad to navigate difficult terrains in this incredibly clever game.

Gameplay and plot

So the game starts out with Tommy, chief baby guy, losing all his Reptar puzzle pieces out of his Reptar shaped puzzle holder. Oh no! You have to find all the puzzle pieces by completing a series of mini-games and earning them back. There are other game modes though and the puzzle piece main storyline makes up a large chunk of gameplay. The main game includes the storyline, side storylines and the occasional mini-game type activity. This is the game mode you want to play because, let’s face it, you just can’t wait to play so you don’t want to waste time on the mini-games. The other two game modes include a training level which is a mish-mash of some of the episodes along with advice on dealing with things like ice and lobsters, essential information as the game is really difficult in some parts and you need all the help you can get. The final game mode is the mini-games which I mentioned above, these are four bonus levels that are technically available in the main game and includes modes like an Easter egg hunt, a race against Angelica and two types of game that’s like playing piggy in the middle with chocolate milk or cookies.

Incredibly realistic Pickles house makes you feel as though you're a part of the episode.

You start the main game in your play pen in the Pickles house and from that point on you have free run of the house and garden. You can only open the doors to the garden but any closed doors only like that temporarily and open up when the side stories are taking place. All around the house are some sparkling items and by interacting with them you can start an episode which is what the side stories are called. There’s quite a few of them, one for every room of the hosue so approximately 12 episodes to play through as that’s how many puzzle pieces you need. After the puzzle is complete you get a special level where you play Reptar himself, destroying a city in a Godzilla type fashion. During the episodes you will control different characters including the dog, at one point you’re able to ride Spike like some kind of stubby horse and, in another episode, you will float through a space station so the variety is good and I like how you’re not restricted to just playing Tommy.

The game takes a decidedly weird twist when you’re in the episodes as they are very surreal. At one point I had been transported into an upside down version of the house and had to traverse the ceiling and climb up the stairs to go to the ground floor. The episodes vary in difficulty and some of the harder ones include floating about through a space station with creepy talking aliens, chasing down a goose that’s stolen Grandpa’s teeth in a weird hedge maze as Tommy and trying to avoid a creepy robot doll who wants to be your friend. Easier episodes includes a game of hide and seek, playing Chuckie who had his glasses stolen and a golf course that is toy and sweet themed, aptly named ‘Ice Cream Mountain' because when you win the gold tournament you win an actual geological wonder, I never knew people took Crazy Golf so seriously until this game!

It looks as though they're trying to decide which mount is more efficient.

The interactivity in the game is brilliant! You can pick up and throw a variety of items and all of them make an appropriate noise like the guitar or the ball bouncing. If you’re not feeling so agile you can also just put stuff down again without throwing it, essential skills for a baby to learn. If you’re feeling particularly creative you can play a miniature piano or if you feel quite athletic play fetch with Spike in the back garden. There’s a couple of curious things in the Pickles’ house like an overactive popcorn machine and a weird bubble maker in the garden. Wandering around the place Tommy usually has a fair bit to say about his surroundings but the Pickles house is just kind of the menu in between the games. Just like the television series the missions of the game are pleasantly set from a child’s point of view where you, as an adult, can see what’s really going on that makes the game so enjoyable. Any game can string together a few mini-games and call it a game but this one has such a weird perspective and series of storylines that it’s pretty intriguing, if not plain trippy. The ghosts in the house are just Tommy being afraid of the dark and, as he desperately searches for the light in the fridge, his kiddies flashlight is the only thing that will make them disappear. Fail to get rid of them and your health will deplete until Tommy gets too scared and starts crying; forcing you to restart the level.

Graphics and environment

This game is for the PS1 and though the Rugrats doesn’t exactly stretch it to its capabilities it’s still amazing to look at. The areas are all designed in perfect correlation with the original 1991 – 1999 television show, even the starting cutscene is the same, and the house is as close as you’re going to get to being in the actual TV series. The colours are great; playful, fun and accurate and all the characters look just like the real thing so the transition between watching the show to playing this game is absolutely seamless. It's basically as though they made the TV program interactive with a controller it's so realistic.

I never thought I'd see a flying fish, this game makes fantasy reality!

The game takes place in several different areas depending on which side storyline you’re playing. Whilst a lot of the game is set in the Pickles house and garden you’ll also visit the supermarket, a toy shop, the park, a space station, an upside down version of Tommy’s house after going into ‘mirror land’, a golf course and a sort of sewage plant where you play Spike, the dog. The environments are pretty varied and even though several side quests are set in the Pickles house they’re all under completely different circumstances. In one instance you’ll be exploring the house at night whilst ghosts roam the hallways, in another you’re confined to the basement where Tommy’s inventor father has accidentally created lots and lots of Mr Friend toys who just want to befriend Tommy.

For some reason, Tommy doesn't seem keen on the idea.

Overall

The game sounds great; the theme music is the same and the voice actors are the same as the television series and the films so everything will be just the way you remembered it; only with edges so sharp you could cut yourself on them. All in all though it’s a fun, silly and weird game that will give you many, many hours of entertainment and frankly I’m still working on it because some of the levels are too hard for me to get past! Even though it’s really frustrating trying to kill those ghosts I keep playing because the storyline is so appealing to me and quite complicated that, by skipping a level, I’m sure I’d lose track of what was happening. This game deserves much more attention than it’s been getting and for that reason, I highly recommend you play this right now.

Score: 4/10