Archive for games
I Really Like The Misadventures of Flink
As part of my ongoing research into the depths of mid-nineties platformia, I started playing a Sega CD game game called The Misadventures of Flink. A couple of hours in, a dormant part of my brain suddenly awakened.
The game is gorgeous and has and has a solid, if kind of awkward, physics system. It’s really intuitive, though rather long, and has no save system of any kind. It starts out easily enough, but the platforming gets pretty hardcore later on.
I have started this game over dozens and dozens of times and have not even bothered to use emulator save states as a crutch. I keep getting a little bit further before I run out of continues, and then start from scratch. I can feel the maps slowly burning into my brain as I play them. The old magic is back.
I am not generally a fan of tricky platforming puzzles. I don’t even really like playing Megaman on NES let alone the modern onslaught of impossibly hardcore flash games, Clickteam adventures, and romhacks.
I die in Flink a lot, though. There are the standard pixel perfect jumps, swinging maces, and obnoxious enemies. However, the game has a genuine sense of fairness and for the first time sense I was a teenager I am actually starting to get that old sense of video game mastery back.
There is a clever magic system to combine elements you find around the level to make handy spells to create extra platforms to get to secret places, minions to attack enemies for you, and other assorted trickery.
The game looks incredible. The pixel art is essentially the best I’ve ever seen outside of the Metal Slug series. The world is lush and rich in color and texture. On the Sega Genesis, I’ve only seen Sonic Team and Treasure come close.
The broadband age changed how I felt about platform games. Having 20 years of gaming at my fingertips kind of cheapens the specialness of each individual experience. When I know that each game is not going to be one of the 3 or 4 expensive cartridges that my parents will buy me that year, I don’t feel a need to be patient with every weird quirk of level design. I can just download a complete save to play the special stuff or use a walkthrough from GameFaqs, anyway. Not to mention that being a grownup affords me less time for all day gaming sessions.
It may partially just be my general mood, but I’m making time for Flink.
Sonic Adventure ZX
A video series I created to capture the pure essence of 1998′s Sonic Adventure soundtrack: