Download - Defunct Games

Publisher : Graffiti Entertainment
Developer : Sabarasa Entertainment
Release Date : 12/6/2006
Rating : Teen
2.5 of 5
Review by Wanderer
Genre(s) : RPG
Category : Time Paradox
# of players : 1
You could be forgiven for thinking Mazes of Fate is a repackaged
ten-year-old PC game, sort of like Astonishia Story on the PSP.
It’s got all the earmarks of a classic first-person dungeon stomp,
right down to a somewhat unfair difficulty curve.
The weird thing is that it’s a brand-new game. Sabarasa
Entertainment, out of Argentina, is the first Latin American
developer to make a title for a Nintendo console. I’ve been
following this game for a little while, and they’ve been up front
about what they wanted to do. They played a lot of classic dungeon
crawlers, and were hoping to make a game that was a distillation
of what made those classic titles fun.
Mazes of Fate, as such, is aimed strictly at hardcore retrogamers.
Think of Wizardry, Dungeon Master, and Eye of the Beholder, and
you’ll get some idea of what Mazes of Fate is all about. You begin
in a small village, with no greater ambition than surviving long
enough to become a hero. Early conversations serve as teasers
for what’ll eventually become the game’s driving plot — a battle
against a race of evil goatmen to save humanity from extinction at
the hands of the gods — but you start off as J. Random Adventurer,
with a hundred gold crowns, a simple weapon, and the life
expectancy of a snowball in a cyclotron.
You pick up on quests by talking to the people around town, who
show up as hand-drawn images whenever you enter a building, and
who you interact with through conversation trees. Most of these
quests will take you into caves, crypts, dungeons, towers, and
forbidden temples; in other words, you go to many of the usual
places where evil things with fat loots tend to hang out.
Exploring those areas forms the bulk of the gameplay in Mazes of
Fate, and this is where the retro kicks in. You interact with your
environment by pressing B, then moving a hand icon around the
screen and pressing A, to pick things up, take objects, pull levers,
or what-have-you.
When enemies show up, you take them on by calling up a combat
menu. It looks like the combat should be real-time, but it’s turnbased,
and its conflict resolution system seems to owe more to
pen-and-paper RPGs (or maybe to early computer games that were
essentially based on pen-and-paper RPGs) than to anything else.
You should expect to miss a lot, but then, so should the enemies; at
the same time, you may drop an enemy in one lucky hit, but they
can sometimes do the same thing to you. You need a few levels
under your belt before you can really expect to survive without
convulsively saving the game every couple of feet.
That may be the biggest problem Mazes of Fate has. It’s an
unapologetic throwback of a game, and it faithfully recreates
an entire bygone subgenre... including a few of the bad parts.
It’s riding the boundary between being challenging and being
completely ridiculous. That, on top of a generally unpolished
presentation (the script’s full of minor translation problems, and
there’s a certain amount of input lag on all the menus), is enough
to dock it a point and a half. There’s a hell of a sequel lurking
somewhere in Mazes of Fate, but for now, how much you like the
game may depend on how fondly you remember the PC RPGs of the
late eighties.
Rating: 3.5 of 5
2nd opinion by Jeremy • Alternate Rating : 1.5 of 5
Due to dim dungeons, a slow pace, and choppy battle, this is only recommended for Eye of the
Beholder fans. Curious players should wait for a price drop, while the rest can safely skip MoF.
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Alongside Contra and Gunstar Heroes,
Metal Slug has always stood for runand-gun
action on an awesome level.
Throughout its seven installments
(Metal Slug 3D/Evolution doesn’t count,
though I can’t quite bring myself to
loathe it outright), expertly-animated
hand-drawn sprites populate the
screen, leaving you and a friend to
shoot them down without getting
shot yourselves.
For the most part, all six Metal
Slugs (and Metal Slug X) are all
reproduced faithfully on the Wii.
It even lacks much of the slowdown
that the NeoGeo games had. There’s just one niggling
bit that the developers left out: when enemies with large
amounts of hit points are shot, they’re supposed to flash. In this
anthology, that rarely happens. Sure, it adds some challenge, but not
in the way it should.
The presentation itself also shows signs of being rushed. The menus
are bare-bones, not even going to the trouble of giving you visual
diagrams of the control schemes. Also, is it asking too much these days
for developers to provide high-resolution official art as unlockables
instead of small, blurry images? The unlockable arranged music is a
plus, lack of online play is a minus.
Seven differing control schemes have been included, and the
developers went all out. Some are welcome additions, such as the
one that moves your character with the nunchuck while letting you
shoot with the Wii Remote’s trigger, and chuck grenades by flicking
2nd opinion by Ashura • Alternate Rating : 3.5 of 5
I am probably the biggest Metal Slug fan here, and the lack of a classic controller config (or GC d-pad) and
hit-flash brings MSA down. The collection is great despite its flaws, however, and well worth picking up.
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Review by Racewing
Publisher : SNK Playmore Genre(s) : Retro Shooter Compilation
Developer : Terminal Reality Category : Leave No Cute Soldier Girl Behind
Release Date : 12/14/2006 # of players : 1-2
Rating : Teen (Blood, Violence)
your wrist. Some are just crazy enough to work, like
the Nunchuk-Only mode that lets you play
one-handed. Some are well-intentioned
flops, like the Arcade mode that asks
you to hold the remote as if it were
an upright arcade joystick. Finally,
some just outright fail, such as the
one that asks you to tilt the Wii Remote
left and right to move your character.
However, depending on your point of view,
these control setups are either
MSA’s biggest draw or biggest
flaw. For all of its ways to play, the
developers neglected to include a
traditional mode with digital control
and three buttons. The closest it gets
is with the Gamecube controller, and
D-Pad support for it was disabled, along
with Classic Controller support. This means
that people wanting to play with a control pad or an
arcade stick are pretty much SOL.
Is this a ballsy move, or just developer idiocy? You be the judge.
The lines have already been drawn regarding this one by the fans.
Personally, I got the game for the Wii-specific controls, and have other
ways to get my Slug on, normal-style. Therefore, I’m not complaining.
If you absolutely, positively must recreate a “true” arcade Metal Slug
experience, you’re best off looking for a different version of MSA in
the months to come. If, however, you like your shooters with added
comedy and play variation (trying out all of the different controls is a
blast with friends), then you might want to give this a shot. You bought
your Wii to play games in non-traditional ways anyway... didn’t you?
Rating : 3.5 of 5
3.5 of 5
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