Retro Gaming Moves: Screw Attack [Metroid]

One of the most famous classic gaming moves, Screw Attack, is one of Samus Aran’s best power suit moves in Metroid. It was powerful enough to kill most enemies by contact; one hit for one kill.

What makes this special attack at retro gaming classic is its well balanced game play style. Although Screw Attack is enormously powerful it required Samus to jump at full length to trigger. On more than one occasion gamers would use their Screw Attack to kill an enemy easy to find they don’t have a great platform to stand on and land in the lava, in a worse situation than they started.

Game developers knew they had a hit on their hands, as Screw Attack makes an appearance in many of the future Metroid games after the original NES release. The power up had the ability to trigger at will, if somersaulting of course, yet requires skill and respect to use to perfection.

Screw Attack gives gamers a nice piece of mind, knowing a risky jump won’t end you with a tap from a flying enemy and a bath in the lava. You could freely jump and destroy annoying little enemies whom have no other goal but to get in your way and slowly take away energy with each tiny hit.

On one hand Screw Attacks main purpose is to allow a gamer to jump through areas in levels quickly without an extreme annoyance from starter enemies strategically placed to add challenge. As Samus grows in power the beginning enemies aren’t the true threat and thus are wiped from the level as you go. You become more worried when encountering new, stronger enemies who cause real harm to you and your super suit.

This retro move is placed perfectly in level progression, making you feel a great sense of accomplishment when aquiring it (it’s not just another missile pack) and allows you to progress into deeper caverns without utter fear at every tap. Powerful enough to invoke when needed but weak enough to leave you vulnerable in closed quarter battle.

Screw Attack, a Retro Gaming Move.

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Mega Man 9: Initial Impressions (Xbox 360)Mega Man 9: Initial Impressions (Xbox 360)

With a few hours of Mega Man 9 under my belt I’ve got to admit, this game is FREAKING HARD. I’ve played many games since the original Mega Man series was released on the NES and later on the SNES and nothing compares to Mega Man 9 in terms of sheer difficulty. This new franchise title looks and acts like the original with all the glitches, colors, bleeps and effects of the original games.

This game is much like chasing your kids around the yard, you forget how “old you are.” Mega Man 9 challenges reflexes, hand-eye coordination, patience and persistence. You are constantly awarded with death upon death and level restarts. Just when you think you’re getting close to a leader you’re actually just encountering a harder portion of the stage.

Between the start of a stage and the final boss you’ll encounter larger single-screen microbosses who challenge your patience and skills. As it turns out, I’ve got very little of both attributes. Upon defeating a little boss I am handed another like boss which is a little tougher. Upon defeating this slightly tougher boss (after many level restarts) I’m rewarded with yet another more difficult microboss.

Mega Man traditionally allows you to wonder all of the selectable stages out of the gate but each one gets easier as you build your characters weaponry. The trick is finding that “easy” level to get you to a boss, defeat said boss and acquire a weapon of mass awesomeness. Alas, I’ve done none of these.

You can find online video walk-throughs on the Internet which can give you tips for getting around the stages but the end result is the same: patience, persistence and accuracy. Mega Man 9 teaches you that nobody is a game master without consistent practice.

The first time through a stage is a destructive mess of failure. As you restart the stage over and over you’ll learn some of the tricks to getting you through the initial enemies without taking damage. You’ll build up your arsenal of tricks for hitting enemies before they’re on the screen and mashing the fire button to freedom… until you hit your first spike.

Spikes are the bane of the Mega Man character. Mega Man isn’t a fan of little pointy objects which result in instant death. You can hit the jump button quickly for shorter jumps and longer for bigger jumps; jumping technique is required to move you through spike infested levels.

You learn quickly to never turn your back on an enemy. Turn around, ever so slightly, and walk back on the side-scrolling screen and forward again will result in the rebirth of all enemies you’ve killed. This includes bomb wielding birds, rock tossing baddies and hells fury in the form of red and green cannons.

If you’re looking to discover all the ways you can possibly lose in a game, feel your inner child emotionally crushed under the weight of 8-bit bad asses, Mega Man 9 is the game for you. The achievements will make you laugh and the difficulty will invoke that old controller tossing nostalgia.

Mega Man 9 is a challenge. If you wish to take on this challenge and prove your 8-bit weight in the world of high resolution graphic fairy tales this may be the title for you!

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One of the great downfalls of an acquisition or merger, in the game industry, is the loss of great franchise titles. Sierra, or Sierra Online, once stood on its own as a company with great gaming titles but later fell into the depths of Hades under many different company names.

Sierra’s last stop on the acquisition highway was Vivendi, years after much of Sierra’s steam had slowed. Now, they’re part of Activision Blizzard so we had high hopes they’d find a great use for some of the old Sierra properties long since collecting dust. Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and especially Gabrielle Knight were some of our favorites, but times have changed.

“We are retaining only those franchises that are a strong fit with our long-term strategy including Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype and a second game that has not yet been announced. We will not publish any other titles that previously were part of the Vivendi Games portfolio and we are currently reviewing our options regarding those titles,” says Activision Blizzard (joystiq)

This is unfortunate news, Activision Blizzard now has a large set of franchises on their hands, many of which have collected dust for years. Those dust collecting franchises could rise from the dead and reinvigorate their old fan base… or be dropped to the earth as unwanted scrapes after a big hunt with the vultures awaiting their take (sorry, too much watching of Animal Planet)

A reworked Kings Quest or Gabriel Knight could have seriously awesome potential in this time and age, imagine a dark comedy version of Gabriel Knight or a huge scaled world in King Quest using todays graphic engines. Although, these titles could also go the way Atari has gone and taken a well remembered franchise and made mud of its great name (*cough* Alone in the Dark).

Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know the distance an old franchise could go in this new world. We’ll have to pull out an old copy of our prized posessions and remember just how great they once where.

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Jeff Tunnel Productions published the first Incredible Machine games from 1993 to 1995 while Sierra Entertainment published all the rest of their titles all the way up to 2001. What is The Incredible Machines all about? It’s a game where you must build a series of Rube Goldberg devices in a “needlessly complex fashion” all to perform some simple tasks. That is the entire point to a Rube Goldberg device, which was originally defined as “accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply.”

I think everyone has seen a Rube Goldberg device, their are examples in science museums, and entire Myth Busters Episode about them, they appear in many movies (Goonies used one to open the fence to let in Chunk after he does his dance as did Doc Brown in Back to the Future to cook his breakfast and get his dog food).

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