ONM Remembered – #93
“The sun has got its hat on…”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 89 (February 2000)
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“The sun has got its hat on…”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 89 (February 2000)
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I rented Shadows of the Damned and finished it on Wednesday. I kinda knew nothing about the game – all I’d watched was the Two Best Friends Play video of it, and didn’t think much about it. Saw it for rental and thought “why not.” It’s the perfect game for a five day rental!
Garcia F. Hotspur is a demon hunter. The demon overlord Fleming kidnaps his nondescript love interest, so with the help of Johnson, his talking British skull / gun / torch / motorbike / snarky sidekick, he sets out to Fleming’s castle to get her back.
Am I actually talking about a video game’s story in my review? Heavens above! Not that you can really call it much of a story. When I say “he sets out to Fleming’s castle,” I mean the characters basically romp through a series of increasingly disjointed locations with no bearing on geography or sense. There’s a lot of dialogue and a fair amount of movie scenes, but there’s not a lot of actual story going on.
Not that I’m complaining.
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I’m like half a month too late to offer a punctual response, but the blog’s up and running again. Flying Omelette tells me Dreamhost had been upgrading their servers, and that must’ve prompted some crummy coding in the WordPress database to screw up… we think. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, but it’s up again, so that’s as far as I’m concerned.
I really haven’t been up to anything exciting this month, and thus haven’t had anything worth saying. I may as well just play catch up with what I’ve watched recently.
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Given my status as a rampant Nintendo fanboy, you’d think I’d have talked about Donkey Kong Country Returns by now, right? I haven’t even so much as mentioned it since the time it was shown at E3, and the game’s been out, what, over two weeks now in the UK? Well, truth is, I only got my copy on Monday! My brother preordered his but even then thanks to the terrific weather we’re currently having pretty much all postage has been delayed quite badly, so it took a week to arrive even after its release date. Awesome.
The first thing to be asked when talking about a Donkey Kong Country game is this – is it challenging enough to make you utter increasingly-creative expletives? Yes. Yes it is. Is that a good thing? You bet your bananas it is. It’s very relieving to play a game with proper kick-you-in-the-face challenge again. Returns basically takes the tough-as-nails level design of the original trilogy, turns it up several notches, and moulds it into a curveball and expects you to get it on the first shot. This is also why I should be banned from making analogies when I have had barely any sleep. Basically, it’s tough!
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