Let's start with the number-one arcade game for 1999: Virtua Striker 2. Having recently played Virtua Fighter 2, one of a long string of fighting games that claimed top spot, I presumed that this was some kind of off-shoot of the franchise. Upon my first search, I was surprised to see that it's a soccer game.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for a little change of pace and playing something other than an arcade combat game was deflated as I couldn't find a site to play it. I was bummed and more than a little surprised; I wouldn't have thought that anything from the 90s onwards would be difficult to find online, but I had to settle for watching a video for now. It's crazy how good and smooth this gameplay looks.
Next up: I've always known that Final Fantasy is a big deal but it's just never drawn me in from afar. I was already sufficiently impressed by my introductory gameplay of FFVII, but seeing the big leaps made in Final Fantasy VIII, best-selling console game (for the PlayStation) , has definitely earned a deeper dive into the franchise sometime.
Gone were the cute sprites for characters; we're now into an era in between LucasArts' The Dig and Knight of the Old Republic and it's a cool shift. I can only imagine that this change in style, on top of the cinematic opening, more or less blew people's minds.
One thing that continually surprised me was how a cutscene would end and I'd just be standing there for a few moments before I realized that there was no transition from the scene to gameplay - it just went continuously from one to the other.
As with most every game in this project I'm just playing enough to get a sample, but here I even found that took a little time. I wasn't forced along a path as I had been in VII, and my free roaming ways were rewarded to the extent that while I'm sure there was an important mission to begin, I'd just found a hotel and did some shopping, so let me enjoy my life.
I finally did get to a testing ground of some sort where I faced off against a demon-y kind of mini-boss, but I'd made a fateful decision earlier in giving myself only ten minutes to traverse a volcanic pathway and defeat the demon (I could have given myself up to half an hour, I think), and though I was seemingly doing all right ... I ran out of time. A raincheck, then.
In handheld gaming, Pokémon Red/Green continues to rule the roost. I didn't play it along any further this week.
I did, however, give some time to SimCity, number-one PC game for the year. This is yet another game that is brand new to me (I haven't even ever played any of the spin-off Sims games, but that will be another box checked soon enough).
It's yet another progression forward in world-building games, though unlike Age of Empires or Civilization, this is much more of a world-management game. I put myself into a scenario in which, as you can see above, I had to help get Frankfurt ready to host a big party. That would be easy enough if, while I was looking for a good venue, fires weren't breaking out in the city, forcing me to figure out how to send out emergency services and putting my party planning on hold. Then, naturally, came riots. It's like these people didn't even want me to throw the party at all.
So I never did. After three riots and a bunch of burning buildings, I figured Frankfurters just had their own ideas of fun so I let them destroy their own cultural history while I built many police stations.
I quite enjoyed this game.
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