The old saying goes “talent borrows, genius steals”. If that’s true, the developers of Dinosaur King have IQs in the thousands.
Over the years we’ve seen many companies try to beat the success of Pokemon, each with their own set of cuddly and heavily market researched monsters. Of course, nobody can beat Nintendo at their own game, but that hasn’t stopped Sega trying with Dinosaur King, based on a popular 4kids cartoon series, as well as arcade and (naturally) trading card games.
What better gift this Christmas than the best articles from the brightest stars in video game blogging? Let’s get on with it!
On the first day of Christmas, Julie Maloney gave to me, "How I Lost Sixty Pounds", posted at The Cool Mom Guide.
On the second day of Christmas, Nikhil Mahajan gave to me, "Falling PC Game Demos", at Free Full Version Download Games & Buy Games.
On the third day of Christmas, Tony Huynh gave to me:
10 Greatest Video Game Designers Part 1;
Call of Duty: World at War Through the Eyes of a Game Designer;
Pimps at Sea err I mean Age of Booty & Gen 13 Cosplay;
My Student Films 2: EverQuest Documentary and Guilty Gear Isuka Trailer;
Best Games of All Time by Genre Part 2
and Low Skill Cap and Luck (RNG) in World of Warcraft PVP!
On the fourth day of Christmas, Scott Davis gave to me, "Call of Duty: World at War – Game Review" and "Video Game Survey: I?m Not as Big A Geek as I Thought" at ZombieChatter.com.
On the fifth day of Christmas, Fiona King gave to me, 50 Video Games Your Girlfriend Will Like at Nerds Do It Better, THEN gave me 50 Best Video Games for Senior Health at U.S. PharmD.
On the sixth day of Christmas, Gene Simmons gave to me, $100,000 Flash Game Experiment – part 1 at Accumulate Profit Margin Invest Destroy.
On the seventh day of Christmas, Alvaro Fernandez gave to me, "Games for Brain Health – Novelty, Variety and Challenge" at SharpBrains.
On the eighth day of Christmas, Glen Despaux gave to me, "Gears of War 2 Review" and "Starting Up" at GameQuery, saying "This is my new blog dedicated to helping gamers. I am hoping to draw attention and have people submit queries to my blog."
On the ninth day of Christmas, Michael Puskar gave to me, "Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash!: All Your Free Time Are Belong To Us" at Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash!". The tag reads "the beginning of a Five Part Series dedicated to video games of different decades and systems."
On the tenth day of Christmas, Eclipse gave to me, "Winning, Losing, and Fun Factor" and "Geeky Christmas Songs and Videos", at Gaming My Way.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, Morscata12 gave to me, "Unconventional MMOs – Why Not?", at Morscata12, saying "article discussing the prevalence of fantasy/scifi themes in all modern MMO games".
On the twelfth day of Christmas, Ben Roper gave to me, "Review: Gears of War 2", at The Only Review.
On the thirteenth day of Christmas, I gave to myself, The Sega Top 50, a list of the greatest games ever made.
If you’d like to see your gaming posts up here in lights, simply fill in the Blog Carnival submissions form. It couldn’t be easier!
I’d like to wish all our contributors and readers a very Merry Christmas and a happy and productive New Year. Look for the next Carnival here on January 22nd!
A straightforward hack and slash action RPG, Shining Soul II may not be the Shining series’ finest moment but it remains a highly enjoyable game in its own right.
A decent multiplayer action-RPG is hard enough to find on any console, but especially on GameBoy Advance, but with a few friends Shining Soul II stands out as a rewarding and exciting adventure that would be right at home on DS or PSP these days. Collecting speech bubbles, consoles and Sega logo letters is a dream come true, although deciding who gets them is often more violent than the combat itself.
The range of characters, equipment and skills prevent SSII from becoming too repetitive, the difficulty level is well judged and the next level up always comes just in time. I’ve already written fairly extensively about it in Truly Under-rated Games: Shining Soul II and Sega’s DS Surprise: Best Case Scenario, so all that’s left to say is that it’s Sega’s strongest action RPG and, in my eyes, one of their finest (yet overlooked) games in the past five years.
Too easily dismissed as a Zelda clone, this Saturn sequel to the 16-bit original is a beautiful blend of combat action, puzzle and platforming.
On the surface it’s clearly inspired by Zelda, with the real time combat featuring a range of moves and items such as bombs and arrows, and the top-down, free-roaming map system bears some similarities too, but these features aside it’s totally different (though that sounds slightly sarcastic!) The stronger emphasis on the RPG trinity of HP, MP and EXP and the use of ferocious elemental attacks sets this apart from little Link, and the use of spirits in puzzles is quite inspired – you start off lighting torches to open doors (hmm…) and later have to float on clouds and zap lightning bolts. If you’re here searching for the rumoured seventh spirit, Baluu, I’m afraid you’re out of luck: it doesn’t exist. Sorry.
Atmospherically the game deserves strong praise, with the dungeons each possessing a rich artistic quality that complements the Disney-like main character Leon. There are elements of Ray Harryhausen present too in the cackling skeletons and other undead warriors, although these are tempered by some poor sprite-scaling in places. Aurally, Story of Thor II is extremely good, with a rich and rightly-praised soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro, by this point well out of his Mega Drive dance days. There are no RPG-style melodies here or mock-historic tunes, just a subtle backdrop of sound that enhances the atmosphere no end.
With an expansive world to explore and some tremendous ideas and gameplay touches, Story of Thor II is worthy of a place alongside Zelda in the action adventure genre. Surely it’s about time we had the second sequel, though?
Full of fantastic set pieces like the train roof battle and boss fights against Godzilla and Spider-man, Revenge of Shinobi’s class shows from start to finish. Much slicker and more polished than many other games at the time, Revenge of Shinobi has more of a shooting element to distinguish it from Sega’s other famous sidescrolling series, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage.
A simple story – a lone ninja on a journey to rescue his girlfriend from an evil crime syndicate – provides plenty of opportunity for out of the ordinary locations and enemies, with one of my favourite stages being the level set in a car pound, your ninja garb looking slightly less than stealthy amongst the compacted steel and machine gun bullets. Your enemies also vary from run-of-the-mill grunts to highly trained kunoichi, with some traditional Shinobi themes thrown in for the bosses.
The soundtrack cemented Yuzo Koshiro’s reputation as a master of Mega Drive melody, and the “bad” ending was the first moment a video game ever made me feel genuinely sad. I remember watching Naoko die, having a drink to calm my nerves (it was milk – I was only about ten) and going straight back to save her. It’s still one of my fondest memories of any game; a completely unexpected moment in what, on the surface, seems a straightforward action game. I guess a ninja game should deceive along the way, though.
My name is James Newton, and this is my website - a collection of my writings about
videogames, music and all my other thoughts.
