#4 - Super Mario Bros. Crossover

Here we have a modded version of the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES. These guys at "Exploding Rabbit" (for the record that's kind of a fucking stupid name) have taken a bunch of old school characters from NES era gaming, and compiled them into this game. This could have easily been cheesy, or stupid, but instead these guys have managed to put together a pretty sweet game. Now, if you've played all the way through the original Mario Bros. there's not really a whole lot to be had here with the exception of playing these classic levels with all of these different characters. Maybe it had been a while since I've played the original, or maybe this game just has some quality level design that makes these levels fun no matter how old they get. Either way I had one hell of a good time playing this game! My favorite part of the game is that these aren't just skins, slapped over the game. Each of these characters plays as they would in their original game. Not only that, but they upgrade as they would in their game. So Mega Man or Link, they don't just grow in size as they grab a mushroom, or just launch fireballs when they grab a flower, although Mega Man does now that I think about it. So when you're playing as Simon his whip upgrades to the morningstar, and when you're playing as link, his sword launches the laser sword deals that his sword used to back in the day, despite how little sense it made now or then. The biggest problem with this is that if you don't like how a character played in their game, you're not going to like them in this. Simon for example is no less of a pain in the ass to handle here than he was in Castlevania. They include mario in the game too, but where's the fun in that? I pretty much almost never used him unless I was at a part that I needed his specific jumps for.

Now Maybe the grass is always greener but I kind of wished they had included some levels from a few other games. I mean how much fun would it be to fight Mega Man Bosses as Mario, or to fight Death in Castlevania as Link. Now maybe this would have fucked with the formula that I already mentioned about the Mario levels being timeless, but who knows? That's my point. This game could have been boosted from fun flash game, to epic crossover. But on the other hand it could have been taken from a successful project to an extremely over-zealous failure. Who knows... Despite that, Exploding Rabbit has managed to make a pretty kick ass game here, despite that stupid name (let's face it, I've heard much worse.) If you want to check this game out for yourself, you can play it here. and I highly recommend doing so!

That's right, Mega Man's going to get it on with Mario's lady!

#10 - Castlevania

So I Recently decided that I wanted to go back and play some older NES games. this was the first one that i picked up, and I have to say, either I have gotten a lot shittier at games due to being pampered by responsive controls etc., or these games are a lot harder than I remember. Holy shit was this hard! Now, i'm going to be up front about this, i used an Emulator to play this. So I was using my keyboard instead of a controller, but i had access to an Autosave feature, which without I would not have been able to beat it. So go ahead and get your shit talking out of the way, because that's how I'll be playing most of these games…

Despite the games difficulty level, I did enjoy it quite a bit. Simon, the protagonist of the game, is one unresponsive douche! He's the kind of protagonist that if you push jump, and then try to guide him with the directional buttons, he's like "nah man, you pushed jump, so i'm just going to go for it." If you don't push a directional button before you jump then he just goes straight up, and after you ask him to jump, you better have timed it right, because the jump length is predetermined. It's a pain in the ass at first, but you quickly get used to it. His whip is pretty cool, and as you smash shit throughout the castle it gets upgraded. You find these upgrades so easily and so often that i kind of don't get why they're even there, but what evs. Then there's these bonus weapons. I guess they're there to spice up the gameplay, and this does a much better job than the aforementioned power-ups. There's a couple that are really shitty, like the axe and the fire, that i never figured out how to time right. The throwing knife isn't bad, but if you get ahold of the stopwatch that freezes enemies, there's really no need to grab these other things. It actually got to the point where when i had the watch I was avoiding the other stuff because they weren't nearly as good…

The bosses are fun when they're not ridiculously impossible. There's one that looks like Death, and throws these spinning scythes that has to be impossible… like i'm convinced that no one has ever beat this game without an autosave feature, because i had one and this boss took me like an hour and a half to beat. It went from being kind of frustrating that it was so hard, to being kind of fun that it was so impossible. Like every time I landed one more hit than the time before it was a huge achievement! It was super exciting! I will say that there's not much for a difficulty curve though, because the last boss is much easier once you figure out his pattern… but it was still cool.

Playing on the emulator this game took me maybe four hours to beat… Maybe five or six. I'd say given that kind of play length and the amount of fun i had on some of the sections, I'd say the game was worth it, but only by a little bit.