Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW // 14th - 20th DEC //

THIRD - Mister Viking [ARC] VCG2000

Mister Viking is an interesting footnote from a time when SEGA ruled the arcades with an iron gauntlet. There’s a lot of little known games that failed to find the audience there better known successes did. In keeping with the majority of this week’s review, the game is competent but nothing special, so VGC wisely doesn’t spend a huge amount of time on it. It’s a simple, serviceable game that doesn’t do a whole lot to offend, but doesn’t do enough to hook a gamer in for repeated attempts.

SECOND - Battletech [PC] Brian


Brian presents the week’s solitary praise review, but ensures he immediately pigeonholes the game as a punishing strategy game. It’s good to get out of the way early to dissuade all the hangers-on. From here, he talks about the huge list of mech options, comparing its depth to an AD&D rulebook. Again, putting this at the front of the review is a very clever ploy because this kind of deep dive is only going to appeal to a very specific subset of gamers, and it’s best to let everyone else log off early. But it’s also a bit of a double edged blade. The review’s pretty heavy going and is probably a bit inaccessible for anyone living outside the niche. I think finding a balance is more or less mission impossible and, as a bit of a strat guy myself (have I mentioned my four million logged hours in X-Com recently?) I find myself appreciating this review more than probably most.


FIRST - Rush'n Attack: Ex-Patriot [PC] Joe

For reasons only Joe can explain, he decides that he’ll spend this week talking about two completely different games bobbing around in that awful-to-write-about 2.5/5 territory. Props to him; he stays his course. Greed is explained as a missed opportunity to bring sci-fi trappings to a genre in desperate need for a change of pace that does little to live up to the potential of its idea. Rush'n Attack: Ex-Patriot is a little more damning; it’s a game no one asked for and no one bought. The company who made that game then went on to kill Silent Hill, lose all their contracts and go bankrupt with only those two games to their name. Aside from the small sense of glee I get in seeing someone else put the boot into Vatra, I think Rush is my preferred review of the two offered. At least with Greed, Joe had wasted potential to talk about but had no such hook with Rush. It was an obscure arcade game no one had heard of and now it’s a remake no one has heard of. You do well to show that the game is at least serviceable, but the inability to trigger alerts in a stealth game where stealth doesn’t really work? Sounds like Team Downpour, alright!

Minor typo:

No one in Ex-Patriot seems to care about you're presence

For us. For them. For you.

Wow, this is the week of review of the weeks!

I can avoid death by not having a life.

If I weren't too exhausted, I would spend way too much energy making a RotWotW topic as a gag. But seriously, thanks guys for catching up on these as we near year's end!

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2