Okay...
Date: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 15:41:02
From: Hoj
Website: www.flug.co.nr
So, "Pokémon Amber." that sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Well that’s what I thought before I actually got around to playing it. When I did decide to give it a go, 3 minutes later it found itself in the recycle bin. You, as the reader have a choice to make now, do you play it to find out why, or do you read on to find out why?
Well, I hope you decide to do both, read this, and play it, you’ll see exactly what I mean. Or the chances are you already have played it and you know what I’m talking about. What an appalling load of rubbish this game turned out to be.
When this demo of Pokémon Amber was uploaded onto Martin2k, summer 2004, Pokémon games where in the 3rd Generation; Sharpie, Ruby, Firered and LeafGreen on the Game Boy Advance. First of all, the creator of this fan game should have taken that fact in to account. His “Amber” remake should have held similar properties to the real games that were currently being enjoyed at the time. Instead, Liam Seeland decided to use a large screen with disgusting home made graphics that are enough to make you feel sick.
The main menu is the first thing you see, and I know that might sound obvious, but I mean the VERY first thing you see. No introduction like proper Pokémon games, where you see some flying creature swooping or what the hell ever usually happens. It just went straight on to a bad looking menu, which takes up the same amount of space of a GBA screen, but is in a 640x480 window! That, in my opinion alone makes this game an instant FAIL. I was like, “wtf is this?” by this time. I remembered that I had actually downloaded this from the m2k games list and acknowledged that I shouldn’t have expected any better what-so-ever.
After the menu I was greeted by some sad old sap known as “Professor Pain”. Okay, that’s a little harsh a name to give a Pokémon character, don’t you think? Pain sounds more like the name of a sworn enemy. I was immediately more scared or this Pro Pain than team Rocket. Do you blame me? He looks like a goth, and you have to speed read what he’s saying not to get left behind.
The demo’s game play pretty much just consists of running through a linear environment which Liam Seedland (that’s the creator, by the way) seems to have attempted to give it that “Yay I can go anywhere” feel, and FAILING horribly.
After simply walking along the almost clearly marked path way, you come across what I’ve decided must be a Pokémon Stadium of some sort, seeing as all that comes out of it is the collection of your first Pokémon and a battle. It’s horrible though, because you get some sort of leaf. Seriously, your Pokémon looks like a leaf with eyes, and you don’t even get a choice of anything other that this thing. It’s got a strange name that I can’t remember, but that being said, the battle includes fighting a Pokémon with an even stranger name that looks like Pikachu! Now, being honest, it looks more like the first Pokémon you’d expected to get for yourself; not the first one you’d be bloody fighting!
And you know what else? The fight doesn’t even go down very well, you simply wait for it to allow you to attack, it appears turn based, but it isn’t, you just have to wait for it to let you attack after a certain amount of time. If you don’t attack when it let’s you, and wait for like ten seconds, you’ll find that in fact the opponent will just continue to attack. Pretty clever little idea this amateur has come up with to create the illusion of turn based fighting, seeing as most of us just whack the attack options as soon as they appear (Apart from me this time, I was more interested in trying to pronounce the names of the Pokémon in front of me, and laughing at how pathetically sprited they were, a typical Ms.Paint job there).
Anyway, rather than go into too much detail here, I’ll just point out the problems I see with this game. Firstly, the menu is very poor, and it has one option, so why have any at all? The game play is horribly bad, 4 directional movement with acceleration and deceleration where you twitch against walls and trees (I know, I know, built in movement) you just charge around the playfield until you get to where you want to be and then have a PATHETIC battle. There’s NO sound at all, so it’s very bland and boring there, and the game’s graphics are just a combination of ripped rpg sprites and resized trees that probably were originally 16x16 pixels in size!
This awesome game probably lasts about two minutes, but it took me a little longer because I was laughing so hard.
That’s it. Game Over. Good bye.
Hollyhoj Reviews 2008. |
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