The 'Shroom:Issue XCIV/Critic Corner
Director's Notes (Palkia47 (talk))Howdy doodily everybody! :D Welcome to the new year of life and to a new year of Critic Corner! :D Unfortunately, I must announce that this will be my last issue as the director of Critic Corner! With the transition to a new director, congratulations SMB (a!), I will be taking over SMB’s spot as the director of Fun Stuff! Taking over for me will be Dippy, who happened to be a previous CC director! So welcome back to the team, Dippy, and please make her feel welcomed! :D Section of the MonthThe winner of December’s section of the month was Yoshi876 for his Character Review section, with 5 votes! Congratulations, Y876! :D Mario Reviews
Non-Mario Game Reviews
Opinion Pieces
Non-Game Reviews
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Character Review (Yoshi876 (talk))Conkdor Happy New Year ‘Shroom readers! To start 2015 off I decided to review an enemy rather than a full character per se. This is the Conkdor, an enemy that first appeared in ‘’Super Mario 3D World. Its attack method is slamming its head down onto you when you pass it, causing damage. The concept seems cool enough, but they do feel a bit useless, by the fact that so long as you are moving faster than continental drift you’ll get past them without taking any damage whatsoever. Yet this still makes them slightly loveable, because it means they fit perfectly into the cast of Mario enemies that can do diddlysquat unless you’re an idiot. Another appealing part of the Conkdor is the little noise they make before slamming their heads down into the ground. Like quite a lot of other enemies, Conkdors can prove themselves to be quite useful as they can attempt to kill Captain Toad…, I mean break blocks that would otherwise prove to be unbreakable. Speaking of Captain Toad, they also appear in the game ‘’Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker’’ again serving as an enemy to slam its head down onto any poor unsuspecting fungi. I do have some issues with the Conkdor though, and my main one is its name. It is an obvious pun on the bird, the condor, a bird that it shares absolutely no design similarities with. Due to the long neck and glasses it resembles an ostrich more than a condor, so therefore its name should be some pun based off of an ostrich rather than a bird in which it looks nothing alike. Another similarity with an ostrich is its inability to fly, so come on people of Nintendo get yours bird puns right. All in all, the Conkdor is a fun enemy. It’s an adorable creature and a welcome addition to the various birds that populate the ‘’Mario’’ series. In a 3D platformer it’s not really something to pay attention to, but if it appeared in a 2D platformer it could become something difficult to beat. Fangame Reviews (Pyro (talk))Happy New Year, everybody, I hope you're having a smashing 2015. Fulfilling your resolutions and such. I'm still writing 2014 down in dates because I'm stupid. For the first issue of the year, I'll be tackling a highly anticipated Mega Man fangame, Mega Man: Revenge of the Fallen! Is it good...? Not really. It's got quite a bit of good ideas, actually. There's 10 robot masters to take down instead of the usual eight, and each stage has a bunch of alternate paths that can act as shortcuts or lead to goodies. Each stage has 3 pickups in it, the "big item" of the stage (Rush Coil, Marine, Jet, and 7 other upgrades that include 1/2 energy and 1/2 damage and such). The selection of Robot Masters is pretty good (Magnet, Yamato, Stone, Magma, Tornado, Spark, Pharaoh, Toad, Star, Centaur) and most of the weapons are pretty unique. I say "most" because you end up with 3 screen-wide weapons (Centaur Flash, Rain Flush, Tornado Blow). The actual upgrades in the stages are very useful - 1/2 energy consumption, 1/2 damage, a faster slide, a thing that lets you recover your health if you stand still, etc. Unfortunately, the pros end here. Unfortunately this game falls prey to the exact same faults that Mega Man Unlimited - the stages are very long, unfair, and filled with instant death. Seriously, the stages are long. Long. Very. Very. Long. It takes you like 15 minutes to get through one stage without dying. Don't be surprised if it takes you 30 minutes to beat a Robot Master. No stage is fun to get through. Since they take forever to get through you just get stressed out and act like "please please don't dieeeeeee I've come so far". There are only two checkpoints in the entire stage and the stages are sooo loooooong and filled with instadeath. I was able to beat 8 robot masters and couldn't beat two of them (Tornado & Star) because their stages were just too long and hard. I just got frustrated at them. The alternate paths make each stage a pain. There's so many of them and they're so long that the stages feel confusingly big and unusually nonlinear for a Mega Man game. A lot of them require utilities to get to and may or may not be harder than the actual normal path. If you actually want to survive the stages, you probably want to take alternate paths, but you need a bunch of weapons to get to them, which starts to take away the main draw of Mega Man (being able to tackle bosses in any order). Oh, and did I mention the stages are INCREDIBLY long yet?! I can't stress enough how painfully long these stages are! They're insanely long! I'd say they're close to 2 times as long as Unlimited's stages. And there's still only two checkpoints!!!! Why would you do this?! If you have more rooms, add more checkpoints! Don't punish the player for not being godly at Mega Man in a particularly tough section by sending them all the way back to the beginning! This isn't fun! This is the main reason why I quit this game. Even though if you Game Over after a checkpoint you start there instead of at the beginning, the stages are so long that it doesn't feel like much of a boost. Overall, I have a very hard time recommending this game. If you're feeling ballsy and want an incredible challenge, go for it. Unfortunately, the poor stages ruin what could have been a fun and interesting game. See you next time. |
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