Welcome back to the final three games in the Action category from Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 released on the Nintendo DS in 2010. I had slightly higher-than-average hopes for these but a combination of letdown expectations, poor game description and implementation, along with a sense of over-hyping the complexity of a game led to mixed feelings all around.
I mean, I guess I should have taken the description for its word because Outlaw is just a person with a gun either shooting at another player, or what I assume to be tumbleweed with some type of obstacle. In the 1-player game, your target is, I think, a tumbleweed that just bounces against the top and bottom of the screen, and you have to either shoot around (Normal) or through a cactus/stagecoach (Blowaway) to hit your target 10 times as fast as you can before the timer reaches 99. After playing the three 1-player games, I decided to see how the 2-player game fared, thinking that I would control one character with the left directional pad and the other character with the ABXY buttons (essentially like the Joy-Con, using the R/L shoulder buttons to shoot, but no. In the 2-player mode, you control both characters with the one-directional pad and they both fire their respective guns at the same time. I could not find a way to control the characters separately.
So we are left with a game where you try to shoot a tumbleweed as frequently as possible with either a cactus or stagecoach as an obstacle that you can shoot through or not or another single-player game where you try to shoot yourself through obstacles.
Verdict: No
Sky Diver is a little bit of what I was expecting, but I am still confused by about half of the game. The game mode selection does not specify if this is supposed to be a single-player or two-player game, but in every mode, there are two planes that are both controlled with the same directional pad and the same buttons. It was not until the second game that I realized that you had to press down on the directional pad to release your parachute, as the entirety of the first game, each skydiver just plunged to their respective deaths. In the second game, about halfway through, I figured out you had to hold down and then try to direct one or both of the skydivers to their respective colored landing pads. There is also a flag in the middle that shows the wind direction and speed which affects your skydiver.
How scoring works in this game, I was not entirely sure even after reading the instructions. I did not know if you are actually supposed to try to land both skydivers at the same time, which seems difficult since both skydivers jump at the same time and are controlled by the same directional pad at the same time. I kind of had to focus on one and hope that I scored. In Game 3, I somehow managed to score a 3-point landing, but because I had the same skydiver crash on the subsequent jump, that fall deducted points apparently? After reading the manual again, it seems like this is designed to be a two-player-only game as there is no option to control just one character at a time.
The presentation here seems poorly implemented. Without a clear way of controlling separate characters, there is no real way to play this game. I could see the Chicken mode being potentially fun when played against an opponent, but here, it is just bad because again, you control both characters at the same time with the same controller and the same buttons.
Verdict: No.
Submarine Commander was the first game in this action series that I was a little anxious about after looking at the starting screen, so I decided that I should probably read the game manual, and after that, I felt even more nervous. In the instruction manual, in just Figure 1 alone, the picture highlights your engine temperature gauge, your directional gauge, your torpedo status gauge, and your fuel gauge. So many gauges and to say nothing about the view from your periscope. The manual actually does a really good job of pumping up the player for all of the aspects of the submarine that they will have to manage while in pursuit of enemy ships and in defense of their country. You have a fuel gauge of 3,000 units, and each torpedo you fire uses three units of fuel, getting hit by an enemy depth charge costs between 300-377 units of fuel or even disabling one of your torpedo launchers, as well as just regular fuel usage when your submarine is in motion. So I was getting anxiously hyped up thinking that this was going to be a resource management game more than anything else.
In games 2 and 3, I decided to play "1-player, destroyer depth charges" and "1-player destroyer and pt boat depth charges" respectively because having something to do seemed more interesting than trying to time my shots against non-aggressive enemies. These modes were a little more interesting as I now had to pay attention to the depth charge gauge, which turned out to be just a thing that flashed, made a lot of noise, and flashed an arrow in, I think, the direction that I was supposed to go away from the depth charge. These modes were a little more manic because I found myself firing torpedoes more often (and wasting 3 fuel per torpedo), moving the submarine more often, and in Game 3, I did get hit by three depth charges because I was not paying as close attention to the arrow.
Submarine Commander was alright, but I think the build-up to actually playing the game, reading the instruction manual, and getting a sense of what the game was envisioned to be was more fun that the actual execution of the game, which ended up just being another shooter where I never felt I really needed to pay attention to any of the gauges or meters I had been warned about in the beginning.
Verdict: No.
What Were We Built For?
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