Monday, July 18, 2011

Sachenize yourself I: Pyramid/Captain Knick Knack

Alright, it passed too much time since the last time I wrote something. When your house leaks everywhere, it's hard to focus. Anyways, in this occasion I'll start a series of what is going to be several small reviews regarding Sachen's junk. Maybe. I'm too lazy to start things for real.
Anyways, today I'm playing two of the abominations of our favorite Taiwanese company: Pyramid for the Famicom and Captain Knick Knack for the Game Boy.
So let's go!

PYRAMID

Creepy title screen for a puzzle game, huh? I bet Nintendo wouldn't have allowed that :-P Anyways, Pyramid starts fairly well: it gives you the option to turn off the music (oh, why Sachen never did the same for any of their other games??), chose the tarting level and guess what: the title music is actually good. Actually, why don't you listen at it now? Click here to download a MP3 of it.
Now, when you press Start is where the things get real confusing: after hearing a pieces of voice synthesis which greets you with a loud "FURIUFEE" (that's Chinese for "thy turkey's done") you realize Pyramid is a Tetris clone but with totally non-Tetris pieces. How so? Well, the pieces are TRIANGULAR. Who in God's name could come with something like that... Agh, even I know that was a stupid question. Now, this shouldn't be too much of a problem if it wasn't by the fact the pieces are too damn small. You'll need like twenty of them to fill a line and if you put one in the wrong place you're pretty much fucked.


Is that a tornado behind the pyramid?

Fortunately there's still hope for you: the game gives you 5 bombs which you can use to amend your mistakes. Just press B plus the up arrow to launch one.
The Pharaoh won't like this.

Now, in defense of this game I'll say that once you learn to play it, it becomes kinda fun. A draconian kind of fun, but fun still. If only they wouldn't come up with that freaking diamond-shaped piece!

This thing is sent by the Devil (AKA Sachen's programmers) to ruin your game.

CAPTAIN KNICK KNACK
This is probably the most strange shooter I seen in a bit. And I'm not saying that in the good sense. This monochrome GB game made in 1999 was apparently an attempt of Sachen to make a kiddie shooter, so instead of a spaceship or a helicopter you control a turtle. Yes, a turtle. Now, this could have been simply a boring and generic shooter, but noooo. They had to make it a torture for anyone daring to play it.

Wow! A turtle with cannons! It must be because of the Turtle Chow.

When you first start, you'll control a slow turtle (well, what other kind of turtles are anyways?) with two cannons (which is strange, because you can only fire one bullet and it comes from your mouth) and you must obviously evade everything that moves, which will be hard because your turtle is so big that it's hard to dodge enemy attacks. But what's more irritating about this game is the shooting style: it just doesn't works. When you press the button, our dear captain will either do nothing or it will shot a really low-range bullet which will do nothing against enemies. If you want to avoid getting killed every 5 seconds, the best you can do is keep the button pressed: for some reason, this will actually make it shot the right way. Unfortunately, every enemy take many shots to be killed (Does a scissor really needs 3 bullets to be killed? What a country!) and since there's no score what's the point of killing them anyways?

That UFO is coming to steal our floppies! D:

Finally, the game gives three chances to hide in your shell, making you invincible for a few seconds. Of course, it actually makes you look like if you were a UFO but who cares? Now you can touch anything you want. But then, sooner or later the unavoidable end will come once you fall asleep playing this game.

At least it's more fun than Atelier Iris 3.

Well, that's all for today. See you soon, my non-existent readers :-D

1 comment:

  1. Not a big fan of Pyramid myself. At least you get the option to turn the music off though. :D

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