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Recordkeeping: Retro Game Crunch's 'Wub Wub Wescue', 'GAIA-ttack' COMPLETE X2
Two more games from this retro collection.
GAIA-ttack only twigged with me when I realized it was supposed to be a four-player multiplayer PvE Smash clone. Your small elemental sprite (in single player you control a different one each world, I don't know how it works in MP) appears at the bottom of an arena and enemies will stream in. You knock the hell out of those enemies with a simple moveset and you climb up as the screen scrolls vertically. Eventually you'll reach a boss, which you defeat.
It was cute and I liked the sprite designs but not hugely engaging. Air-juggling bosses was fun though.
Wub Wub Wescue however was a stone-cold butthole of a game that I oscillated rapidly between loving and hating. It's a very early 1980s-style single-screen puzzle-platformer, along the lines of something like Donkey Kong Jr. or the like. Your pug wants to rescue its owner from the clutches of evil jungle people. To do this, you navigate five acts of something like six screens each.
Your pug can awoo songs from record players scattered around the jungle, each of which negates or alters one hazard: One song puts deadly snakes to sleep, one song makes bats carry you instead of kill you, one slows time to make the timing window on vanishing platforms infuriating instead of impossible, etc.
By the later levels, with tons of hazards salted around the screen and a single sane path between them, I would glare and huff and then stop and check the timing on something and I can do it faster, better, right there if I just ... no that's another death because of the STUPID ARROWS that was my fault try again...
It was tightly designed, infurating, and I never want to play it again but that doesn't make it bad. That was the exact experience it was trying for, I suspect.
But I still never want to play it again.
This seems to be becoming a series. There's three games left I haven't played, let's see if I decide to beat one of those next, or what.
GAIA-ttack only twigged with me when I realized it was supposed to be a four-player multiplayer PvE Smash clone. Your small elemental sprite (in single player you control a different one each world, I don't know how it works in MP) appears at the bottom of an arena and enemies will stream in. You knock the hell out of those enemies with a simple moveset and you climb up as the screen scrolls vertically. Eventually you'll reach a boss, which you defeat.
It was cute and I liked the sprite designs but not hugely engaging. Air-juggling bosses was fun though.
Wub Wub Wescue however was a stone-cold butthole of a game that I oscillated rapidly between loving and hating. It's a very early 1980s-style single-screen puzzle-platformer, along the lines of something like Donkey Kong Jr. or the like. Your pug wants to rescue its owner from the clutches of evil jungle people. To do this, you navigate five acts of something like six screens each.
Your pug can awoo songs from record players scattered around the jungle, each of which negates or alters one hazard: One song puts deadly snakes to sleep, one song makes bats carry you instead of kill you, one slows time to make the timing window on vanishing platforms infuriating instead of impossible, etc.
By the later levels, with tons of hazards salted around the screen and a single sane path between them, I would glare and huff and then stop and check the timing on something and I can do it faster, better, right there if I just ... no that's another death because of the STUPID ARROWS that was my fault try again...
It was tightly designed, infurating, and I never want to play it again but that doesn't make it bad. That was the exact experience it was trying for, I suspect.
But I still never want to play it again.
This seems to be becoming a series. There's three games left I haven't played, let's see if I decide to beat one of those next, or what.