Friday 1 April 2011

Power Piggs of the Dark Age (SNES)

Well they're no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Street Sharks, or Samurai Pizza Cats, or Biker Mice from Mars, or Avenger Penguins, or Battletoads... but are they up to the task?

It's a platformer, albeit one with pretensions of transcending the genre, and video games in general for that matter, to become a form of interactive poetry.

No wait it's actually just a crap looking platformer where you have to 'butt slam' boxes.

To be fair it does look slightly better in motion. The guy jumps around with more grace than you might expect, and is actually animated quite well.

It reminded me a lot of the Aladdin platformer weirdly (the one with the sword, not the SNES version). In both games hitting enemies a few times makes them disappear in a puff of smoke, with an 'OOOF' sound. I found it pretty distracting actually.

Not that it'd take much to distract me from this game.

The graphics in this are really flat looking. The background, foreground, objects in the level, everything has a similar brightness to it, though fortunately the characters at least do have some contrast. It'd be helpful if this moving ledge I'm standing on was more visible against the background too.

Those things down there are spikes by the way, though fortunately they're not instakill.

The underground is even worse. This doesn't even count as game art, this is just a brown smear.

Zero g sword fighting! There's a lot of vents in this game, throwing you up hovering on a current of hot air.

Oh crap, foreground archers! I can't kill them, but they're easy enough to evade.

You have to fight this knight in an epic boss fight to get past the first level. And by epic I mean crap.

Level two has even more vents! And some of the weirdest looking trees I've seen in a game.

Fun fact: The developers of this game also made some of the most notorious bad games ever, like Mario is Missing, Mario's Time Machine, Wayne's World, Independence Day... then they suddenly turned around and made Prototype.


But this isn't a notoriously bad game, just a pretty rubbish one. Next game.

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Semi-Random Game Box