Beyond

I finished Beyond Oasis on Genesis last night, and it was still great after all those years! I'd made it pretty far in the game when I was younger, but can't remember completing it. I wrapped things up pretty quickly (about four-and-a-half hours), at a relatively low rank (48) with only a little over 1000 kills, and 32 of 60 gems... So I guess I have some treasure-hunting to do. The game was enjoyable throughout, if a bit easy, but definitely an original take on a genre dominated by Zelda and full of copycats.

I've since started The Legend Of Oasis on Saturn, and I'm having mixed reactions... The graphics are gorgeous at a higher resolution than the original, there are more frames of animation, a much bigger colour palette, the addition of scaling sprites, and a new CD audio soundtrack. Consider some new key characters and core gameplay elements (like a much less forgiving save system and a revamped weapons configuration), and one might think that this game is a solid evolution of the winning original formula... But the writing is just awful, and the combat is neutered. Sure, it's a similar basic story and many of the same attacks return from the first game, but it all just feels so phoned-in. There's no character or cohesion, and it's glaringly apparent in the lack of any fluidity in combat. Another major change that I'm not too fond of is the lack of any real inventory, so health- and magic-replenishing items are used when touched rather than manually picked-up and managed in anticipation of more difficult areas. You can also only carry either one health or magic potion at a time; meaning you can have either your health or magic refill automatically upon depletion... But because the new system no longer allows you to pick things up, if you have a health potion and accidentally touch a magic potion, your health potion is lost forever. Then there're the tutorial obelisks scattered throughout the land; it would be nice if they didn't wait until the second dungeon to explain fundamental game mechanics that have been changed since the original, especially when those concepts are key to unlocking other new fundamental game mechanics that were only available in the first dungeon. Spending time backtracking in a game with a limited save system is something I only barely tolerate from the Metroid series... I don't like it here either. Perhaps these new design choices will make sense down the road, but I'm just not having the same fun I had with the first game.

On the computer front, I'm inching ever closer to purchasing a Core i7 920-based system; especially with the recent release of Bioshock 2. The novelty of owning a top-of-the-line QuickSilver 2002 Mac as kinda worn-off, but it did allow me to spend some quality time with Mac OS X... So now I'm thinking that a vanilla Mac mini (2.26GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 160GB HDD) alongside my forthcoming Windows 7 machine might be a solid idea.