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[FC] Gimmick!

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[FC] Gimmick!

Unread postby SriK » 05 Jun 2013 11:08

Something I had started writing a while back, but never finished until I suddenly got the urge to tonight.

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★★★★★

Released in 1992 for the Famicom, Gimmick! is an incredibly inventive and technically brilliant platformer from Sunsoft, a company which during its heyday produced some of the best games on the system. Their earlier platformers (Hebereke, Rough World, Batman) had already been marked with a consistent charm, quality, and technical mastery, but here their levels of creativity and polish reached new heights; Gimmick! is more complex, challenging, and detailed than any of their other side-scrolling efforts.

The most obvious difference between Gimmick! and many other Famicom platformers (including Sunsoft's earlier Batman and Rough World) is its protagonist Yumetaro's unconventional means of attack. Instead of punching, jumping, or just firing projectiles straight ahead, he primarily fights by throwing flashing orange stars which damage any enemies they hit. Similarly to the star powerups in the 2D Mario games, these bounce along the ground for a bit before coming to a stop, but there's an ingenious twist: Yumetaro's star also serves as a moving platform itself that you can hop on and ride. This is one of Gimmick!'s defining features. You can throw your star at a wall, jump on top of it as it bounces back to you and ride it for a bit, then jump again at the peak of its vertical trajectory to reach platforms you couldn't with just a regular jump. Or you can aim it so it hits a wall at a low angle, then use its forward momentum as it bounces back to ride through spike pits and other obstacles.

Complementing this mechanic is one of the most advanced physics engine of any Famicom platformer (Super Mario Bros. 3's is the only other one that compares). Gimmick!'s stages feature tons of slopes angled at various degrees, with appropriate inertia and momentum that affect objects walking (or bouncing) on them. You can also push and manipulate various objects (e.g. springs, mini-cannonball launchers), which also obey the game's laws of physics, as well as ride various enemies as they walk or fly (and damage them with your star while doing so, if you time it right). The game even features a simple subweapon system; Yumetaro can equip various items he picks up inside levels, including bombs, fireballs, and health potions.

All of these various subtleties are combined to fantastic effect within Gimmick!'s challenging and often brutal levels. Consider the two following areas, just off the top of my head (and both within the game's third level): 1) an ominous pre-boss cavern where you have to jump across slowly descending flying platforms while also throwing stars to hit jumping ground enemies below (all the while taking into account slope physics so your projectiles bounce to the right places), and 2) a wooden forested area where you have to fire your star into a wall at a precise height and angle in order to gain enough momentum to ride unscathed through a series of unforgiving arrow and cannonball traps, eventually ending up on a small ledge with a cannon, which you have to quickly push into a bed of spikes to disable it before it fires at you. Or consider that, if you're skilled and perceptive enough, you can use the star to build up enough momentum to navigate to special secret areas containing extends — or even skip an entire boss fight (going through the stage so fast that you catch him still sleeping next to his alarm clock, haha!) And all of these examples so far are contained within the first half of the game; later areas get even crazier, employing conveyor belts, rotating gears, minecarts, pushable springs, homing missile launchers, and more. The game has some of the coolest design of any Famicom platformer, and certainly some of the most complex and intricate (beating out all of Sunsoft's other titles in the genre hands down).

Another key aspect that helps the game work is the sheer number of unique enemies and interactive objects within each stage (some are only ever used once or twice); the only other FC platformers which come close to it in this regard are the last two Rockman titles, and those were released even later in the system's lifecycle. Gimmick!'s enemies are incredibly smart compared to the simple walk-then-shoot patterns of your average Famicom platformer; they react to your actions, jumping and moving around to follow you. They even sometimes purposely fake you out, moving away from you (in order to make you start walking towards them) then coming forwards again to catch you off guard! And the bosses are great as well. The third one is particularly memorable; the fight takes place on a steep icy slope where you have to aim your star so it bounces exactly and hits the boss as he rises up from the water, all the while jumping to dodge his projectiles and trying not to slide down the slope into the water yourself! Awesome stuff throughout.

And I still haven't even mentioned that visually, Gimmick! is gorgeous! It stands alongside Kirby's Adventure and Rockman VI as having one of the best "cartoony" styles (meaning it doesn't use black as its principal color or rely heavily on dithering, like Batman or Shatterhand for example did) ever executed on the system. Sunsoft clearly learned a lot from their preceding game, Dynamite Batman (which, while borderline unplayable, looked amazing also) — Gimmick!'s world is vivid and alive to an extent that few other Famicom titles can match. Practically every screen has some sort of background animation (spinning gears, waterfalls, etc.), and the environments are jam-packed with cool tiny details, such as the flying packs of birds in stage 2 or the aquarium area with the little swimming fishes in the first stage. They're things which seem almost "unnecessary" but make the game's world feel that much more organic and believable. Sprites are fully and smoothly animated as well, which is no small feat considering Famicom limitations and the game's high number of unique enemy types. If there's one complaint I have it's that the bonus areas are a bit graphically below par compared to the rest of the game (which is the opposite of what you'd expect given how they're, well, secret bonus areas), but given how high that "par" is and given how they still look better than tons of other NES/FC stuff, I'm willing to let it slide.

Then there's the soundtrack, probably my favorite of any 8-bit console game; it's rivalled only by Akumajou Densetsu. Similarly to Densetsu, Gimmick! uses an expansion chip to add three extra square wave channels, which are utilized to create rich melodies and chords that would have been impossible with a regular cartridge. And, like some of Sunsoft's earlier games (starting with Rough World), the soundtrack also uses pitched bass samples played through the audio chip's DPCM channel, which help add even more polyphony to the songs. This was the company's signature musical trick, and it would later be mimicked extensively within the NES/FC chiptune community. There are a variety of musical styles on display here as well; from the calming intro music to the exciting jazzy stage 6 theme, Gimmick! creates a memorable soundscape from start to finish.

All in all, Gimmick! was a design and technical achievement, building off all of its developers' previous accomplishments. Unfortunately, Sunsoft never made another good platformer to follow up on it; in fact, aside from a line of fighters I'm not familiar with, during the 16-bit era the company basically stopped making good games entirely. It's a real shame, since if its developers had been able to persist, I can only imagine what kinds of masterpieces they could have given us.

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And here's a banner for the review page that I made out of a bunch of different art files I found (there doesn't seem to be much out there for this game):

bannerB.png
Last edited by SriK on 22 Jun 2013 20:36, edited 39 times in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Jun 2013 23:05

I only skimmed the first paragraph so far, but stuff like this is unacceptable:

SriK wrote:Gimmick! represents the apex of the company's artistic achievement


I can't explain why. It's smarmy idiotic bullshit. If you don't see it, it's either because you are a smarmy idiot, or you just need to spend some more time thinking and reading (and perhaps even writing -- but nothing that will be published on Insomnia), until you get it out of your system.

It's important to be able to assume the correct tone for each subject matter. If you can't, it's a sure sign your commentary will be inferior.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Jun 2013 23:14

Then, I am also wary of teenagers giving history lessons and offering up industry speculation on what happened three decades ago. I am not saying your stuff is wrong, I am just saying I'd need to either have it validated by people I trust, or you'd have to show a lot more signs of knowledge and insight before I would accept it at face value.

Then there is the meandering way you go about saying stuff. Like "the player" instead of simply "you". Or, "This is one of the main defining features of Gimmick!'s design", instead of simply "This is one of Gimmick!'s defining features". I mean "main defining feature"? This is what "defining" means: main!

Finally, it's bad form to start the analysis from the "scenario". It's boring, my mind instantly shuts down. If you have to talk about the scenario at all, mix it up with more interesting stuff, in the main body of the review, not at the very start. The first two major words in the opening paragraph (after the prologue), are "scenario" and "cutscene" for fuck's sake:

SriK wrote:The game's scenario, detailed in a cute opening cutscene,
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Jun 2013 23:17

Also, as far as header design goes, the images should by asymmetrical. I explained this somewhere. It just doesn't look good when the "main defining feature" of the image is smack-dab in the middle of the page. Take a look at all the headers on the frontpage and you'll see. The are only a couple that are symmetrical, and I plan to redo them.
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Unread postby SriK » 06 Jun 2013 00:07

Thanks for the feedback, I'll edit the review and the image later today.

icycalm wrote:Then, I am also wary of teenagers giving history lessons and offering up industry speculation on what happened three decades ago. I am not saying your stuff is wrong, I am just saying I'd need to either have it validated by people I trust, or you'd have to show a lot more signs of knowledge and insight before I would accept it at face value.


Yeah, I can definitely understand that. If it helps, here's an interview I found from one of Sunsoft's developers: http://www.siliconera.com/2011/05/04/an ... er-master/

Yoshiaki Iwata wrote:You’ve been a Sunsoft employee for over 20 years now. As a game publisher and developer, Sunsoft was, and still is, a very well known name for game fans worldwide in reference to the games that the company was putting out between the mid 80s and early 90s.

However somewhere during the mid 90s, the name “Sunsoft” more or less disappeared almost entirely from the Western game market until reappearing again recently. What sorts of projects were you involved in during that quiet period? How did Sunsoft as a company change and evolve, and what is the company aiming to do in the near future following this recent revival?


Put simply, I was primarily involved with game development throughout the latter half of the 90s. I worked on games like Albert Odyssey for the Saturn, a number of PlayStation games including Tomak and Hard Edge (T.R.A.G. in the U.S.), several mahjong titles for the PS1 and PS2, the Sunsoft game compilations known as the Memorial Series and several versions of Puzzle Game Shanghai. Aside from that I’ve been working a good deal on the planning, development and management of games for various game sites designed for Japanese mobile phones.

There was a period (during those years) where game sales generally hit rock bottom and the outlook on our prospects for operating as a company in the game business whittled our staff all the way down to a mere 3 people, but I began working on game’s directed at digital distribution on mobile platforms which the company is using as a base in order to rebuild.


I can't find anything that directly/explicitly confirms what I was saying in the opening paragraph regarding Gimmick!, but it seems like a logical conclusion to draw given the sheer amount of detail in the game that I mentioned (even compared to Sunsoft's earlier platformers) and what the company's output actually looks like after ~1992 (here's a list: http://www.ranker.com/list/sunsoft-game ... nce?page=1).
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Unread postby icycalm » 06 Jun 2013 01:49

Basically, with a game as obscure as this, you need to tell me from the first couple of sentences what I am in for. If you are talking, for example, about a mediocre 2D platformer from the '80s, I need to hear from the first couple of lines that I am reading about a mediocre 2D platformer from the '80s, and can thus make up my mind whether I am interested in the subject matter and want to read more. It's different if you are writing about Super Mario Bros. or Halo. Then you have more options about how to start. And it's also different if you are writing, for example, about Planescape: Torment. Or if your name is Alex Kierkegaard. Then the reader knows it's an important title, reviewed by someone who knows a lot of shit, and will have the patience to follow the review no matter how meandering it might appear to be. But neither you nor the title you are reviewing are well-known. The reader will not have the patience to follow you -- AND WITH GOOD REASON. It is up to you then to be as direct and efficient as possible, if you want to hold his attention.
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Unread postby SriK » 08 Jun 2013 07:32

I edited the review, taking your comments into consideration and adding some more stuff as well; I think it's more direct and to the point now. I'll get to the banner later.
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Unread postby icycalm » 08 Jun 2013 19:03

Don't bother with the banner. There's not any appropriate material on the game to make a good one anyway.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2013 04:17

Okay, I just read the new version and it's much better now. Some comments:

to hit the jumping ground ones below


The "jumping ground ones". No idea what that means.

and even sometimes purposely faking you out


Same here.

meaning it doesn't use black as its principal color or heavily on dithering


"Or heavily on dithering." Or heavily what? How does that follow from the previous part of the sentence? It's like you have aspergers or something, trying to say too many things at once with no regard for structure or punctuation.

And, like some of Sunsoft's earlier games (starting with Rough World), the soundtrack also uses pitched bass samples played through the audio chip's DPCM channel (the company's signature musical trick, which would later be mimicked extensively within the NES/FC chiptune community) — these help add even more polyphony to the songs.


Let's remove the parantheses so you can see what's wrong here:

And, like some of Sunsoft's earlier games, the soundtrack also uses pitched bass samples played through the audio chip's DPCM channel — these help add even more polyphony to the songs.


This is just bad diction. Good diction would have been to replace the dash with a comma, and add a "which" right after, instead of which you are trying to force a dash to a place where it doesn't belong, and all the parentheses are making it hard for you to see it, because by the time you've read them you've forgotten the earlier part of the sentence, like all bad writers. (And by the way, your opening post in the Brave Earth thread, and also your posts in the News forum discussion thread are rife with unnecessary dashes. You don't seem to understand what the dash is for, and are simply using it to avoid run-on sentences. So it'd be a good idea to reread those posts and try to edit out as many of the dashes as you can. Dashes are for contrast, not continuing a train of thought. For continuing we use commas.)

swan song


I hate this term. The moment I see it I immediately think "teenager who got into games with the PlayStation 2 and reads too much Select Button", and I stop paying attention to what the writer's saying. And I mean, can't you see how ugly it is? It makes you look like a fagot.

But was this game REALLY the last great game on the system, or are you simply making wild claims because you want your review to sound cool? Go start threads on gamengai and Postback and ask the people there what they think, and if there is a general consensus then MAYBE you can keep the comment. Otherwise you can stick it up your ass. And even if you can keep it, you should think hard about rephrasing it using some other expression that's less of a red flag. "The last great action game on the system", for example -- if it REALLY was that. Lying or making shit up is NOT the way to go with criticism.

Also, isn't the star taken from some Mario game? I think I remember it being in Super Mario World, in which case Nintendo took it from Sunsoft? Or was it present in a previous Mario game, in which case Sunsoft took it from Nintendo? Along with the pipes? Or you haven't played any Mario games and just don't know?

Also, what about these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugoi_Hebereke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waku_Waku_7

And also, FC Batman is not great, it's just very good. Josh wanted to give it 4 stars, but the wording at the end of the review was the wording of a 5-star review, so I forced the higher rating on him until he edited the wording -- which he never did. So now that I kicked him out the site I'll have to do it myself. I recall a thread on Select Button where mothman too was surprised at the 5-star rating, and a quick skim of a YouTube video of the game leads me to agree. So, FC Batman is merely good, and you may need to reword your opening to reflect this.

There are also a bunch of grammar/diction issues, but I can fix those if you fix everything else. The most important thing is to learn not to make unwarranted generalizations, which your experience does not allow you to. If you know 5 things, talk about these 5 things, and leave the grand view for someone who HAS the knowledge to take it. I can't overstate how annoying it is to see you do this, or even to SUSPECT that you are doing it. If you HAVE reached a point in some specific areas where you ARE proficient enough to make grand claims, your commentary will be so full of detail and brimming with self-confidence, that the only way to deny it would be for someone to come along who is more proficient in it than you. The innocent bystander will be so impressed by your sheer display of erudition, that he will have nothing to say on the matter and will simply keep his mouth shut. See my review of Flower for an example: Look at all the genres and titles that I am namedropping. There's obviously no other person alive who knows all of that shit, and can make all those connections, so I can make whatever claims I want and no one can challenge me, whereas you do not even appear to have played Super Mario World for christ sake.

I know that you would like some grand statement, some grand summing up, to close the review. But if the analysis is thorough and all the judgements are solid, you don't need anything more to have a great review. You can just end the review right there, and you will still have done a great job informing the reader, even without it. Play a few dozen more important games, and you can make the grand summing up in another review down the line. Or come back and edit this one at that time: adding a couple extra lines is not a big deal.

Still, if you make the gamengai and Postback threads, and get a good reaction, you don't gave to change anything. Or you could link me to some threads on either of those sites where they talk about Gimmick. Take everything into account and edit the review again, and then I will reread it.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2013 04:55

Just in case this isn't clear: this is a good review. You've sold me on the game and I want to play it. The important part of the review is solid -- all my comments are merely details. Fix them, and I'll publish the review.

And also, I see you took out the comments on the scenario/cutscenes, etc. Be advised that if I am reviewing The Super Shinobi, for example, I SURE AS HELL will talk about the scenario and the cutscenes. I just won't do it from the first paragraph. So if these things are important to you in your experience of this game, and you feel they deserve comment (as I do with The Super Shinobi), readd them somewhere that reflects this importance. If they are the most important thing about the game, put them in the beginning. If not, further down, as appropriate. If they are just a nice touch, stick them towards the end, etc. Or if you were simply blathering before and they are nothing special, say nothing.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2013 05:01

Here's an exception:

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/ds/kagenodensetsu/

A cool opening scene, though by no means the best part of the game, yet I still begin the review with it. But see how quickly I do it, and how I use it to jump right to the heart of the game, and all within a couple of sentences: from aesthetics to mechanics and back again, without losing your attention.

You can break all the rules if you are smart enough and a good enough writer. Otherwise, them's the rules, and until you get good enough to not need them, you will need them.
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Unread postby SriK » 09 Jun 2013 11:52

Thanks for the detailed criticism! I'll edit the review soon, maybe tomorrow, but until then here are some comments.

icycalm wrote:The "jumping ground ones". No idea what that means.


I wanted to specify "jumping ground enemies" (as in, enemies on the ground jumping upwards), but it sounded weird to me since I'd already said "enemies" a few words prior. But yeah, I see the problem there, and I'll find a different way to phrase it.

icycalm wrote:
and even sometimes purposely faking you out


Same here.


I meant that the more advanced enemies seem to deliberately mislead you sometimes, by starting to move away from you (in order to make you start walking towards them) then coming forwards again to catch you off guard. Maybe it's just a less well-known idiom than I thought? Either way I'll add in the elaboration.

icycalm wrote:"Or heavily on dithering." Or heavily what? How does that follow from the previous part of the sentence? It's like you have aspergers or something, trying to say too many things at once with no regard for structure or punctuation.


Whoops, I missed a word. I meant to say "rely heavily on dithering".

icycalm wrote:
And, like some of Sunsoft's earlier games, the soundtrack also uses pitched bass samples played through the audio chip's DPCM channel — these help add even more polyphony to the songs.


This is just bad diction. Good diction would have been to replace the dash with a comma, and add a "which" right after, instead of which you are trying to force a dash to a place where it doesn't belong, and all the parentheses are making it hard for you to see it, because by the time you've read them you've forgotten the earlier part of the sentence, like all bad writers. (And by the way, your opening post in the Brave Earth thread, and also your posts in the News forum discussion thread are rife with unnecessary dashes. You don't seem to understand what the dash is for, and are simply using it to avoid run-on sentences. So it'd be a good idea to reread those posts and try to edit out as many of the dashes as you can. Dashes are for contrast, not continuing a train of thought. For continuing we use commas.)


I had been using dashes as an alternative to semicolons, but looking it up it seems I've been using them the wrong way and no one else ever told me (just like putting periods inside parentheses, another punctuation-related mistake which nobody had mentioned before you corrected me on it earlier...seems like the high schools I went to were even worse than I thought, haha).

And yeah, now that you point it out that's really an awfully constructed sentence lol. I'll fix the dash and move the parenthetical statement about the DPCM bass to a separate sentence after the one you quoted, and I'll see if there's anything else like that which I can fix.

icycalm wrote:But was this game REALLY the last great game on the system, or are you simply making wild claims because you want your review to sound cool? Go start threads on gamengai and Postback and ask the people there what they think, and if there is a general consensus then MAYBE you can keep the comment. Otherwise you can stick it up your ass. And even if you can keep it, you should think hard about rephrasing it using some other expression that's less of a red flag. "The last great action game on the system", for example -- if it REALLY was that. Lying or making shit up is NOT the way to go with criticism.


You're completely right; for some reason I had stupidly thought that Gimmick! was one of the last decent games on the system, but I looked it up and the claim was completely unsubstantiated and dumb. Sorting the list of released Famicom games by date (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fa ... uter_games), it turns out that Rockman 5, Rockman 6, Recca, Kirby's Adventure, Gargoyle's Quest II, and Fire Emblem Gaiden were all released later and I didn't realize it! Seeing the Rockman titles in that list makes me feel particularly retarded, as I've already played through and enjoyed them; in fact, I even explicitly compared them to Gimmick! in the review when talking about the number of enemy types and interactive objects (and Kirby's Adventure when talking about the graphics), without making the connection that, hey, maybe those games actually came out afterwards! And I've wanted to play Gargoyle's Quest II (and Fire Emblem Gaiden as well, just because I've enjoyed all of the games in the series I've played so far) for a while after seeing some screenshots and noticing the high-quality graphics (given system limitations). So sorry about the mistake, I shouldn't have even made that statement in the first place.

icycalm wrote:Also, isn't the star taken from some Mario game? I think I remember it being in Super Mario World, in which case Nintendo took it from Sunsoft? Or was it present in a previous Mario game, in which case Sunsoft took it from Nintendo? Along with the pipes? Or you haven't played any Mario games and just don't know?


The star in the Mario games is an invincibility powerup, and I don't think there are any other powerups in the 2D Mario games which function similarly to Gimmick!'s star (the closest I remember is a powerup in New Super Mario Bros. Wii which lets you fire ice balls that freeze enemies into platforms, but I don't think there's any connection there). The star in Gimmick! bounces like the fireballs in the Mario games, but I think that's the closest connection there is (other than the shape).

There are some pipes in Gimmick!, but they don't function exactly the same as those in the Mario games; you jump into them and automatically move through, rather than standing on top and pressing down to go underground. If anything they remind me more of the tubes in some levels of the Sonic games rather than the pipes in Mario.

And actually, now that I've looked it up, Super Mario World was released in 1990 and Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991, both before Gimmick! was! I hadn't realized this before despite playing both games several times before, so maybe I'll want to add some comparisons there.



I know practically nothing about fighting games, so someone else would need to come in and deliver a judgment on them. Since I haven't played these games and probably wouldn't be able to tell how they are from looking at a video, the stuff about Sunsoft only making mediocre stuff during the 16-bit era might be another unwarranted generalization (though to be fair the first game wasn't on the list I linked earlier), so I'll remove that part from the conclusion, or change the statement to "mostly mediocre" or something.

icycalm wrote:So, FC Batman is merely good, and you may need to reword your opening to reflect this.


I played through it around a year and a half ago and actually did think it was great (and the review on this site doesn't note any major negatives), but that's not really an argument, so I'll change it.

icycalm wrote:I know that you would like some grand statement, some grand summing up, to close the review. But if the analysis is thorough and all the judgements are solid, you don't need anything more to have a great review. You can just end the review right there, and you will still have done a great job informing the reader, even without it. Play a few dozen more important games, and you can make the grand summing up in another review down the line. Or come back and edit this one at that time: adding a couple extra lines is not a big deal.


You're completely right here as well. I think the feeling that I needed to open and close the review in some grandiose way was what led to a lot of the problems and stupid statements (most of them seemed to be in the introduction and conclusion), so I'll definitely keep this in mind for the future. I guess that on some level it's also because I'm reviewing an old game, so I felt the need to build it up in order to justify its high rating (since in spite of everything it still feels weird to me on some level giving both this and Serious Sam 3: BFE five stars, despite both being great cutting-edge games respective to their time period and genre), and in my case trying to do that seems to lead to meandering and using phrases like "apex of the company's artistic achievement" to describe an 8-bit 2D platformer from the '90s. Kind of stupid, but it's the best reason I can come up with in retrospect for why I wrote some things the way I did originally.

icycalm wrote:And also, I see you took out the comments on the scenario/cutscenes, etc. Be advised that if I am reviewing The Super Shinobi, for example, I SURE AS HELL will talk about the scenario and the cutscenes. I just won't do it from the first paragraph. So if these things are important to you in your experience of this game, and you feel they deserve comment (as I do with The Super Shinobi), readd them somewhere that reflects this importance. If they are the most important thing about the game, put them in the beginning. If not, further down, as appropriate. If they are just a nice touch, stick them towards the end, etc. Or if you were simply blathering before and they are nothing special, say nothing.


Not too special, I was only using it as an introduction for describing the game. What's far more important to me than the scenario or the opening cutscene is the level of visual detail put into the game's stages, which I already went over in the third-to-last paragraph.

So I'll incorporate these things into the review later (I need to go to sleep now, it's 7AM here). And again, thanks a lot for the critique.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jun 2013 20:31

SriK wrote:I meant that the more advanced enemies seem to deliberately mislead you sometimes, by starting to move away from you (in order to make you start walking towards them) then coming forwards again to catch you off guard. Maybe it's just a less well-known idiom than I thought? Either way I'll add in the elaboration.


Everyone knows what faking means, the question here is WHAT is being faked and HOW. "He faked me out." What did you understand from this? Next to nothing.

SriK wrote:The star in the Mario games is an invincibility powerup, and I don't think there are any other powerups in the 2D Mario games which function similarly to Gimmick!'s star (the closest I remember is a powerup in New Super Mario Bros. Wii which lets you fire ice balls that freeze enemies into platforms, but I don't think there's any connection there). The star in Gimmick! bounces like the fireballs in the Mario games, but I think that's the closest connection there is (other than the shape).


That's what I am talking about. If I were reviewing the game the similarity would have jumped out at me immediately and I would have mentioned it. And the pipes too. They just LOOK like they've been lifted straight out of Mario -- and doubtless they were. I wouldn't spend an entire paragraph talking about them, but since I would assume the reader had played Super Mario World, I would have cited that game (or a previous Mario game, or the Mario series in general) to establish the connections and help the reader more easily visualize these aspects of Gimmick.

You seem to think that comparisons should only be made when the two features being compared are IDENTICAL, otherwise the critic should not say a word. I don't know what to say about this. It's just stupid. Borrowed features are almost never identical.

SriK wrote:I know practically nothing about fighting games, so someone else would need to come in and deliver a judgment on them. Since I haven't played these games and probably wouldn't be able to tell how they are from looking at a video, the stuff about Sunsoft only making mediocre stuff during the 16-bit era might be another unwarranted generalization (though to be fair the first game wasn't on the list I linked earlier), so I'll remove that part from the conclusion, or change the statement to "mostly mediocre" or something.


Not being able to deliver a judgement does not equal ignoring the existence of the games and hoping no one notices that you ignored them while you claim that the company stopped making good games in the 16-bit era. Can't you see that that's deceiving the reader? Can't you just simply state the truth? (i.e. "they stopped making good games apart from a line of fighters I am not familiar with" or "they stopped making good side-scrollers"). Is that such a hard thing for you?

If you really wanted to be comprehensive without playing the fighting games you could have sought out the opinion of someone whose judgement you trust in the genre (i.e. an EXPERT, NOT Wikipedia), and incorporated this into your review, but that would again be a completely different thing than deceiving the reader into believing the games did not exist and/or were shit.

SriK wrote:
icycalm wrote:So, FC Batman is merely good, and you may need to reword your opening to reflect this.


I played through it around a year and a half ago and actually did think it was great (and the review on this site doesn't note any major negatives), but that's not really an argument, so I'll change it.


Yes, the fact that the review does not mention any negatives, plus its last few sentences, give the impression of a 5-star review instead of a 4-star one, which is why I forced that rating on Josh. Still, it's not always necessary to mention negatives for a sub-5-star rating. As long as you are not being exuberant with your praise, you can give a lower rating on the basis that the positives are simply not too positive.

And how is it not an argument if you thought the game was great? You need to make up your mind on how you feel about that game, and rephrase that part accordingly.
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Unread postby SriK » 22 Jun 2013 20:32

I edited the review again, taking the issues you mentioned into account and also changing some other minor things.
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