Now, I don’t have the same nostalgia that a lot of people my age would towards Jurassic Park. I didn’t grow up watching those movies, but as an adult, I’ve enjoyed going back and watching them and have seen Jurassic World which I liked as well. So, has that colored my view of the game? It’s possible that I might enjoy it as well as some because of that, but thus far, I’ve found the game fairly entertaining.

Let me say that I’m not that great at these older games. While most people probably have few issues with them, I have plenty of troubles trying to aim the gun and just navigate through the world. Doesn’t help that I don’t remember where anything is in the world either. But even with that, this has been a fairly fun game. You run around zapping, tranquilizing, and shooting with grenades(?) various dinosaurs. And you get facts about them as you travel around which can be helpful.

The goal of the game is to escape the park or at least get the park back to normal enough that you can escape, and again, I haven’t done well at this objective. I tend to do better a finding the eggs than anything else, because that’s one of the side  quests, finding dinosaur eggs. Really, my goal of the game is to zap dinosaurs, but I probably won’t do well beating the game that way. It feels like there isn’t enough direction to start the game as to what your goal really is, because you’re mainly just tossed into the world. They expect you to identify from your knowledge of the movie what is going on, and continue from there.

That lack of direction isn’t great in this game, because it’s generally open world so you can wonder far before you realize you’ve probably headed in the completely wrong direction and are just running away from T-Rex for no great reason. So that is a fairly major knock on the game because it is  a top down view and you’re wandering through the world, fleeing dinosaurs and such, it means that you can really do nothing in the game for a while. I will say that I had to look on Wikapedia to figure out what the main plot and goal is actually supposed to be, and I still haven’t found where I need to go exactly, because I’ve been fleeing from dinosaurs.

That said, being able to zap the dinosaurs and take down the small ones is a fun time. I probably should feel bad about killing such majestic creatures, but then again, they are trying to eat you. If I was better at aiming the cattle prod, that would make it easier for me to get through the game, but I’m not great at it. The one thing that I haven’t figured out to do and I’m not sure if it’s possible is figure out how to cycle through your weapons as you get them. I’m pretty sure that you just pick up something, use it until it’s gone and you get back to using the zapper. The downside to this is that you need the electricity from the zapper to open up some gates and move a bridge across some water so you end up wandering around some more looking for dinosaurs to use your ammo on. I’ll probably research that to see if I can swap weapons, but if you can, it isn’t intuitive.

Finally, another downside to the game is going into buildings. I realize that the top down view isn’t the best for inside a building, but going into a “goggle” view, since you don’t just have a pure first person view of the whole screen is annoying. The controls are fairly touchy, and while you only have straight ahead to shoot a dinosaur who might show up in front of you, it might take a little bit to get your aim actually right. I would prefer if they had just kept it down and used some sort of fog of war or a view where you could only see the room you were in, instead of changing it to first person.

So, is this a bad game? I don’t think it’s a bad game, because, like I said, it is fun shooting the dinosaurs, and exploring is fun as well. That said, the game needs more direction from what it gives you and while open world can be fun, this is too open for the type of game that it is. I would say, give it a try and give this game a rating of Play on the (Buy/Play/Pass) scale, but it is fairly close to just being a pass. Again, not a bad game, but not great as well. I’ve sat down and played it a couple of times, and I’m sure I’ll play it more, because of zapping dinosaurs, but I’ve played better games for Cartridge Capers and better ones even based on movies for Cartridge Capers.

Have you played the SNES Jurassic Park game? Did you like it? Or did you mainly just find dinosaur eggs like me?

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Let me start out by saying that I enjoy that style of combat. I like picking out what skill I want to use and who I want to target and then letting the combat play out. When it comes to real time combat, I’m not as good because I like to figure out a strategy of who I want to attack whom in the game and figure out tactics. Now, a lot of modern party based combat games, think Dragon Age, do allow for some tactical choices, and I spend time, especially before final boss fights, tweaking the combat to how I want it to be, but in the case of Final Fantasy, you get complete control over it, then you just watch a round of combat unfold.

Also interesting in this game is the need to grind. It isn’t something that you see too often in older video games where you have to spend the time leveling your character up before you can take on a boss, it’s generally assumed that you’ll be at the right level by the time you make it to the boss. However, in Final Fantasy you get to grind. That does mean that sometimes the game just sort of stalls and you are doing the same sort of combat against the same sort of monsters over and over again. That is a bit of downside to the game as you don’t get a ton of experience points for certain monsters so you feel like you are stuck in certain areas of the game or going over the same ground again and again.

Besides the combat in this game, how is the story and game play?

The story is pretty straight forward, you are going around trying to gain various orbs and rescue the princess, but the rescue the princess quest feels more like a learn the game mechanics quest and figure out that you do need to grind some. It sounds like there are more quests in the game, but at this point in time I’m still grinding away. I do like the fact that I get to name my characters and choose what classes they are to build up my party of characters. That means that I can focus it how I want to, though, I feel like having a good blend is going to be what makes the difference at the end of the game.

The non-combat game play is pretty straight forward. You’re running around a map looking for combats. And by looking for combats, I mean having them randomly drop you into one. This can make it a bit tricky at times because you aren’t sure when you are going to find a combat, and depending on the area you are in, you aren’t sure if you’re going to be able to handle the combat. So at times you’ll be running as fast you can to get back to the inn and save the game so that your characters and rest and heal up.

Will I continue to play this game?

While I do find how you get into combat a bit wonky and there is a lot of grinding for XP that you seem to have to do. I do plan on finishing this game. It feels like a classic, it’s easy enough to play, and my party of Dave, Boo!, YaYu, and Gary need to prove that they can actually become capable fighters. It’s also a very relaxing game to play, sure it’s a bit annoying when Boo! is doing melee damage 1 point at a time because I’ve run out of spell slots and then Boo! misses, but all the combats are easy to see what’s going on, and the run away mechanism keeps the party alive most of the time.

It’s a classic, it’s a fun time, and while it might take me a while to get through, I’ve enjoyed my time with it. If you are interested in the Final Fantasy games and want to try the original, it certainly isn’t a bad idea to jump into this game and give it a whirl. And, like I said, it’s not that stressful a game to play. Once you get leveled enough it makes it pretty easy to grind out more levels, it just takes time.

Game Suggestion: Own

[Game Suggestion
Own: Own it, it’s a classic and fun to play
Play: If you can find it and it’s your type of game check it out
Pass: This game sucks, why did they ever make it]

Mortal Kombat is one of the classic fighting games. You are going through a tournament trying to become the greatest fighter. With my skill level thus far at the game, I am far from the greatest fighter. However, games like this are fun to sit down and play, because I’m not that good, but I can button mash and sometimes accidentally stumble across a special move.

Mortal Kombat featured unique ways in which special moves were performed, being the first game to introduce special moves performed exclusively using the joystick. Most special moves were performed by tapping the joystick, sometimes ending with a button press.

As the Mortal Kombat Wikapedia link talks about, these special moves are what make characters that otherwise fought basically identically seem different. Since I’m playing with the Retron system with a Super Nintendo, I am going to have to learn the special moves myself. I was able to figure out a throw, and then immediately forget how that worked.

Like I said, one of the things that I like a lot about this style of game is the ability to just sit down and play it. It isn’t anything all that difficult to learn, and while the special moves require knowing how to do them, you can still get a fun experience from it. I’m also not playing this game on any sort of difficulty so that I can actually get through a few fights.

It’s a game that will continue to get more play and a game that I’m going to actually glance through the manual that game with the game. Another game that I picked at Heroic Goods & Games in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I got this one as part of a sale, I think it was minimum 10% off for the sale, and roll a D20 (twenty sided die) to see if you can get a higher percentile off, I am pretty sure I got 17% off. The game cam with the box and with the manual. So I flipped through it just to see what it looked like, but it’s probably going to be one of the spots to really get the story of the game. Since it’s basically just a fighting game, they don’t have much in way of story development in the part of the game that I’ve played. However, in the “attract mode” screen, the screen that plays in arcades or while the video game is waiting for someone to play it, it does tell some of the story. The Wikapedia article has some more about the story.

One final thing about this game, it uses screen capture for actual actors in the fighting. I remember this from some video games like Return to Zork that I played on a computer, but on a gaming system like the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) they don’t look as good. This was something that I always found interesting in games how they would use them sometimes just for cut scenes. But when they would blend them into the game it was generally an interesting choice. It works in a game like this as it stands out from the standard graphics for NES/SNES games.

I’m trying to figure out how to wrap up these articles on the Cartridge Capers. Normally I’d give it a grade, which I think I’ll do, but do classic games like this need a grade? I’m going to ask if people have played the games, but it feels like there needs to be some sort of metric as I play through more common/well known games now, but will eventually end up playing more obscure games, because I’ve picked up some random ones.

So, I think I’ll try this:

Final Thoughts on the Game

This is one of the classic arcade games, and while on the SNES it’s a little bit cleaner because they didn’t want the blood of the arcade version, it’s been a fun time playing it. Along with the likes of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat is a classic fighting video game and there’s always going to be a spot on my shelf for games like it because of the nostalgia factor, even though I didn’t grow up with a gaming system. They were the games that had that “attract mode” screen that was eye catching when you’d walk past it in an arcade or looked the coolest when you saw people playing them.

Game Suggestion: Own

So instead of doing my normal grading, I’m going to go with Pass/Play/Own. Own is the highest rating meaning that I think it’s a good one to have and keep in a collection. Play means that the game is fun and worth a play, but I wouldn’t go out hunting for it. Pass means that the game isn’t all that interesting to me or has some weird mechanic or annoying part to the game and I wouldn’t recommend it.

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Cartridge Capers

Is going to be a new series or articles that will come out from time to time as I play through classic NES/SNES games. I might make it through the whole game, and I might not. It’ll really depend on the game, because there are some poor ones out there. We’ll also get to learn about how well I can play these old games, and generally the answer will be not that well. I didn’t grow up on these systems so now I get to be a kid again and play through a lot of them for the first time.

Beyond that, why do I want to do this?

Reason #1 Because it’s kind of a crazy right now. Nintendo has put out their own retro systems, you can build or buy a RetroPie or you can find the old games.

For those who might want to do it, which would I recommend. Being a not to nostalgic, but liking to have the cartridges myself, I went with an option that isn’t fully up there. I have a RetroN gaming system from Hyperkin. It’s something that’s fairly new and fairly cool in that it allows me to play both NES and SNES games on the same system, and it has the unique controllers for both. However, I have played on the RetroPie as well, which is an emulator that can play basically any system with everything loaded onto it. It’s generally built on a Raspberry Pi micro computer. It’s also fun, and allows you not to have to buy specific games. However, you have a single controller for a lot of systems, so you do miss out on the feel.

Reason #2 I didn’t get to play these as a kid. Now that seems kind of goofy, why would I want to play them now? I grew up playing a number of computer games like Jazz Jackrabbit (which was awesome), other side scrolling platformers or side scrolling shooters but I didn’t have a gaming system. I don’t think I was a kid who really cared that much that I was missing out on that, but looking back on it, I want to know what I was missing out on, plus, I like that style of game a lot better than a fair number of modern games, because they can make me motion sick at times (the modern ones that is). It’s annoying.

I also like the idea of a game being “simple” enough that I can sit down and play for a few minutes without feeling like I have to learn a massive specific lore. I love games that do that, Dragon Age, for example, has tons of lore and adventure to it, but often times I like to get my stories through other mediums like TV Shows, Movies, and Books. So having a game that is easier to just play and have my brain turned off for, that’s great.

Reason #3 There’s an awesome little retro shop with retro video games, a lot of other off the wall stuff, and a big board game selection. So naturally I had to go and check it out. That’s where I stumbled across the RetroN system and decided that I should get one. Mainly because I could look at their selection and see games like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Super Mario, Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles, Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, Ducktales, Mortal Kombat, and so many more. I’ve played some of those now, but I want to play even more.

Also, let me plug the shop a little bit. Heroic Goods and Games is an awesome little shop. I already said that, but I think I deserves to be repeated. The owner of the shop is really friendly and loves the shop. They almost always have a ton of inventory, in fact, they’ve had so much that you can go in there decently often and find that they are having a sale on retro video games. Put it’s the little store that you can come in and find whatever you want. Last time Kristen and I were in there, there was a family from Wisconsin who was in there, and they had been looking for things at larger game stores in Minneapolis and St. Paul but hadn’t been finding what they wanted. They had just stumbled across this place and were finding so many things and loving it. It’s a wonderful place to shop, and if you want to sell your old games, or maybe get even more old video games, they have a great selection. It’s a small town place in the heart of the big city, and it’s amazing.

I think those are good reasons to be wanting to do this, also it’s going to help me play through some of these games that it might take me a bit to get to otherwise. But the big question coming out of this, and check us out on Facebook/Twitter, what game should I play first? Facebook and Twitter will each have polls.

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