Some thoughts on the games I've been playing

I'm thinking of doing a special podcast occasionally reviewing the media I've been consuming.  In the meantime, though, I've been playing a few retro video games and figured I'd write a few sentences about each game.

Probably the most important game I recently played(and finished!) was Dragon Warrior for the NES.  The only JRPGs I've played in the past were Pokémon (love it) and Final Fantasy X (not for me).  If anyone has played Dragon Warrior, it's easy to see how this game paved the way for games like Pokémon. 

You're basically a dude walking around an 8 bit world that looks a lot like Kanto in the middle ages running into random monsters. The mechanics are simple and the story is very basic, but I definitely enjoyed it.  It's a game you can play for 10 minutes before bed or for 10 hours as you mindlessly grind your character while binging Netflix.  There were a few spots where I needed to look up where to go next, as the NPCs aren't particularly helpful and this is one of those games where you have to run your character up against every wall to find the secret passage, but luckily we live in the future where everything's on the internet.

Another game I've been enjoying is Dr. Robotnic's Mean Bean Machine for Sega Genesis.  My wife gave me the @games plug and play Genesis console for Christmas in 2015, and I still haven't worked through the 40 genesis games programed into it.  It's really a great system, especially for the price(around $40 on Amazon).  Just make sure you plan on picking up a wired controller to go with it as the wireless controllers it comes with are basically worthless.

But I digress, Mean Bean Machine is a Tetris-style game with similar mechanics to other games out at the time.  I'm sure it's a clone of a game without the Sonic license, but I haven't done any research aside from my recollection that Kirby's Avalanche for SNES had similar mechanics.  The beans drop in pairs and you can rotate them like Tetris, but in order to make them disappear, you have to match up 4 of the same color.  You also go up against an opponent(A.I. or human) and if you can chain multiple groups of 4, your opponent will get some black beans that don't match up with any colors to clog up their side.  Aside from a few basic strategies of letting my beans pile up to maybe get lucky and setting off some combos, I'm not very good at this game, but it's definitely a good way to unwind at the end of the day.

That's all for now!  Thanks for reading and please be on the look out for new episodes of The Pull List and The Katarn Collection later this week!