Welcome to the sixth installment of the Rare Replay mega review! This time, we look at Battletoads: Arcade, Killer Instinct: Gold, and Blast Corps. I've never owned a Nintendo 64, so from here on in, the reviews are not impacted by nostalgia - to me, these are new games!
Battletoads Arcade
Initially, I thought this would be the same as the Battletoads I remember playing on the NES. This was not the case. The arcade version of Battletoads is visceral, violent, and very much a fun game. Hard, yes. Fun, also. You get to again, bash things to pieces with muscular, toad arms, then stop gingerly to elegantly stick flies with your tongue through the not so many pauses in combat to keep yourself nourished.
The difficulty for this title in the arcade would have been absolutely brutal, but thankfully for this Rare replay version you don't have to continually shove coins into a receptacle in order to keep playing.
There's some great uses of screen space, with the game really coming to life as enemies fly out from the screen, and Rare have a lot of fun with the sense of scale throughout the game. Its a pretty good reproduction of an arcade game. Its aged well, too.
Killer Instinct Gold
I will start the discussion on Killer Instinct with a simple statement: I've never really enjoyed fighting games. I don't see the point. There's a battle between two seemingly immortal, magical characters, and then some dialogue, and then some more fighting. There's no real progression or character development. I'm not expecting a RPG level experience, or heart breaking story... I just don't get the point.
Killer Instinct falls very much into the bucket of me not getting the point on fighting games. No matter what combination of buttons I seemed to press, I would get obliterated by the enemy. There didn't seem to be a sense of balance at all in the game from my very limited fighting game experience, which leads me to believe that I am not qualified to make any further comments on this game. Not my cup of tea at all.
Blast Corps
Vehicles. Explosions. Destruction. If you've ever been a fan of those shows where a house is moved, Blast Corps is for you. Except, instead of carefully ensuring the things that are in the way of the house are not touched by the load you're carrying, your job is to destroy everything in your path.
This is a lot of fun, and there are a lot of explosions. Along the way, you will use several different types of vehicles, ranging from bulldozers to anime-style mech suits. The one thing that is familiar, no matter what vehicle you commandeer - you will use it to destroy the objects in front of you.
This makes for a remarkable fun game, and the story line is fun and outlandish (though minimal) it doesn't exactly prepare you for a serious, meaningful tale of poor construction workers who put together all that lies before you, ready to be destroyed. This one is a good one. Lots of fun to be had here.
Next time, I'm in for a clear treat: Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark, and a game I haven't heard of, Starpoint Gemini. I can't wait!