Super Smash Bros Melee (NGC)

I’m addicted to this great fighting game. Your favorite characters from Nintendo are here, only to fight each other, with their crazy and exclusive abilities and combos on the table. With 26 (with 11 to be unlocked) characters to choose, this game gonna make your day.

The music is a great aspect in the game.

You have most of Nintendo’s great soundtrack. Like the SMB ground and SMB underground mix in the castle area, and the original SMB ground ported from the NES in Mushroom Kingdom I, SMB2 music in Mushroom Kingdom II, and the Great Bay from Legend of Zelda. The sound effects are well done, you can hear voices of most of your characters, and also every move in the game has its sound effect. Moves from the prequel had their sounds redone for Melee.


The graphics are being the coolest on the GameCube, more excellent than it’s prequel in graphics. It looks more like a mix of cartoonish and real graphics, and the 3D look is great enough to make the game look excellent. Well, no single thing in the graphics looks bad.

And you will ask me “what about the gameplay?” I say it’s the best part of the game besides the music. It’s really the best part in the game. Fighting is a bit different from others. You play in a 2D area like other fighting games, but you have to make your enemy’s damage percentage (which is 0% on start) go higher up by hitting your enemy with the different moves and combos, then at the right percentage, you must knock back your enemy using a powerful move (smash hit). With 26 of your favorite Nintendo characters, including Mario, Link, Samus, Pikachu, Fox and Kirby, and also characters added into this installment of the Smash Bros titles, like Bowser, Falco, and Zelda, you have plenty of characters to challenge, and plenty of characters to play with. Everyone’s combos and moves are different from others, leaving you to try to explore a character’s powers and exploit that character’s weakness points.

Its multiplayer is also another reason for its success. It’s the best game in 4P action. And truly it is. You can play the Melee mode, which is a standard fight for 1-4 human players, with different modes dedicated for it like time, stock, coins. And there is the special melee mode, which makes a fight a bit unusual and more different from a standard melee. One of the special Melee modes is the giant Melee, which will make every character in the field giant. Then here’s the stamina mode, where health (150hp) is used and you have one chance to beat all players on field before you lose your health and become tame. There is also the tournament mode, which is another reason why this game is successful. Gaming tournaments also used Melee’s tournament mode, to the point that some people won high profit out of these tournaments.

And the game’s not limited to fighting, as you have goals to complete, in order to unlock everything in the game, from characters to stages, to trophies that holds information for the player. These goals include doing bizarre tasks, and beating teams of CPUs. Trophies are won by picking them up in 1P classic mode, or by doing a lottery (costs coins), and sometimes for achieving a goal. Some trophies unlock hidden stuff, so try to grab any trophy you see in the game.

CONCLUSION

A crazy fighting game, high end music and graphics, loads of Nintendo characters to pick, learn and play them, great gameplay and the greatest multiplayer mode in a fighting game, this is one of the greatest fighting games ever made for the GameCube.

RATING: 10/10: The best choice!

Pacman World (PS)

It's Namco's arcade classic, Pacman, now transferred from the arcade genre to the adventure genre, and it's not short or easy most of the time! Yet it retains most of the arcade genre features, including maze levels, and even the original arcade version of Pacman, in this game which is the 20th anniversary of Pacman.

It was Pacman's 20th birthday. His friends were coming to celebrate his birthday, but all of a sudden they were kidnapped. Pacman finds his party ruined, and knew that the ghosts were behind that mess and he went to rescue his friends, and stop Toc-Man, the robot Pacman that was behind all that mess.

The theme music is remixed from the original Pacman and some levels have parts of that great music! The theme music is my favorite in the game. The sounds are all realistic and fit to Pacman, yet there are the old nice sounds like his death sound, etc...

The graphics are well done especially for the PlayStation, nothing is blurred out and sometimes the graphics are so colorful. Pacman himself looks astounding and everything is crystal clear. And explosions are real, too.

The gameplay is the greatest part in the game, as in the past two games I reviewed. Pacman is not limited to chomping ghosts now, or collecting pac-dots and power pellets, but now it’s an adventure with mind thinking and stuff like that. You have health and have to keep it up if you want to get past the game. You can do butt-bounces to bounce off trampolines and kill non-ghost enemies, and you can rev-roll to open some doors and fly through a gap by a rev-roll platform, and kill non-ghost enemies using it. He can even throw the pac-dots at non-ghost enemies, and he still has his power pellet to kill the ghosts for a short amount of time. But is that really it? Nope, there is more than just that. The fruits that earn you more points in the original Pacman are used now as keys to doors that might include 1-ups, switches, or even something that will make you advance in the current level. Even Galaxians, are now used as keys to doors that will lead to mazes that are played the same way as the original arcade Pacman mazes, but with the health Pacman World featured.

Finally, you have access to an arcade mode where you play the same exact version of the arcade Pacman we all are used to. Without any additions either! So by having Pacman World, you also have the original arcade version of Pacman at your PlayStation, ready to be played at any time.

CONCLUSION

The story was to rescue your family and stop the bad guy, the music and sound were good, the gameplay is an amazing change in the Pacman world, and the addition of the nostalgia arcade version of Pacman, makes this one of the titles I like and love to play on the PlayStation.

RATING: 8.5/10: Amazing!