Caltrops - Deleted Posts





	[quote name="Mischief Maker"]The plot and setting are gay beyond belief and the less said abou them the better. The meat of the game is gathering "chips" for your battles. Basically these battles are like realtime Magic: The Gathering. Mega man and the bad guys face each other, each able to move only to select squares on their 9X9 grids. Mega Man can fire at will with his pea-shooter gun that does a pathetic 1 damage each hit (while the weakest enemy has 40 HP) or can do 10 damage if you hold down the fire button in the time it takes to fire off 12 shots. Every 10 seconds or so you get access to a random selection of 5 cards from your deck (chips from your folder) from which you can select 1 (sometimes more, but the rules behind them are too complex to go into here) to give to mega man to use on the field. These cards do substantial damage, have a rules effect, heal damage, etc. and the undercurrent to the game's plot is collecting as many of these cards as you can so you can get the rare badass cards. The game fails because of one game mechanic above others for me. When megaman or an enemy opponent (They're called Navis) move from space to space, you do not see them shift to different squares and thus allow you to aim and react accordingly. No, they just pop instantly onto the new square, making fighting one a case of sitting still and praying you hit the fire button as soon as they blink into your sights. Enh. I don't hate it totally, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back in my doomed quest to find a good and long-lasting GBA game other than Advance Wars 2. BONUS REVIEW: LOTR: The Two Towers sucked. Yet all they set out to do was make a Diablo clone with the LOTR characters plunked into it. How can you fuck up Diablo? By making your characters "miss" 75% of their attacks because their "accuracy" stat is in fact their percent chance of success. The only way to play the game is to put EVERYTHING into accuracy, no matter who you play. When your accuracy gets into the 70s, you'll notice that despite your low strength, you're slaughtering enemies with scant effort because their game balance depended on you missing all the time. Active skills are a waste of time. Find the one passive skill that adds +1 to damage and put everything into it until it reaches 20. Legolas is rediculously easy because his arrows auto-target enemies. Gandalf is actually the least fun to play because his spells don't autotarget and are painfully hard to aim. Frodo gets ditched by the fellowship right at the start of level 1 and ends up slaughtering just as many thousands of orcs as everybody else. He also puts on the ring at least 500 times during the game and would do it more if it didn't bring the penalty of summoning badly animated ringwraiths to jerkily stab at him. The much-touted smooth animation is only present in the very beginning enemies. As the game progresses, the rush job of it all becomes more obvious. Uruk-Hai have 3 frames of animation. Plus being an adaptation of the movie the colors are all grey and washed out and the music sounds like a tinny midi knockoff of the real soundtrack. The game's payoff is a choppy 5-second clip of scenes from the Helm's Deep battle. A pox on the mastrubation hand of every game reviewer who said, "Woah, a movie adaptation video game that's actually good." [/quote]