My boyfriend is crazy about a chicken finger restaurant called Raising Cain’s. I’ve never eaten there, as far as I know. I think the last time I ate at a chicken-only restaurant was at a Chic-Fil-A as I was coming back from visiting my son in Virginia. This was before the news broke about how awful the company management was, and the restaurant became a cause célèbre for a certain kind of person. So I haven’t eaten there since, and this was at least fifteen years ago.
They just opened one in Enfield (here in Connecticut) a couple weeks back. Kasul hasn’t eaten there since he moved here from Ohio, where it was in his weekly rotation of eateries. We thought we’d make an afternoon of it — eat lunch, then take a tour of the local gaming shops.
Well, the line of cars stretched around the entire parking lot. Two cop cars were there to guide people around. It looked like it might be an hour before we could eat — maybe longer. So we settled for a different restaurant, ate excellent burgers, and left to start mining the ancient archives of video gaming in the retro gaming shops along the Enfield strip.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
I played “The Hobbit” a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it enough to look out for the sequel. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers isn’t directly a sequel. It was a movie tie-in, timed to release the same time as the Peter Jackson movie came out, and features images of the actors throughout.
Players can choose to play as Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas or Eowyn. In the cartridge I found, there were save files for Legolas, Gandalf and Aragorn. It’s not surprising. I went with Legolas.
There is no Fellowship of the Ring game for the Gameboy Advance, so if you’re somehow new to the saga, you won’t find a lot of help in the game to let you know what’s going on. Presumably, the manual would have had some information, but all these games are loose cartridges.
Where “The Hobbit” was full of puzzle stages that broke up the fighting, here, the gameplay is mostly wandering around trying to kill orcs and other fuzzy woodland creatures before they kill you. Sometimes stronger, differently colored creatures come after you, but mostly it’s just firing arrows — for Legolas, at least. Legolas’ arrows have a little bit of a homing feature; as long as you are vaguely facing toward the enemy, the arrows will find their mark.
Enemies drop loot that you can use to upgrade your gear; and yes, Legolas quickly drops his cruddy elven armor and weapons and proudly wears the superior orcish stuff because… Just because. Doesn’t even wash them.
Shrines scattered around let you sell unwanted gear (trashy elf stuff!) and buy items to fill in some slots. There is a short skill tree for active and passive abilities. Unlike “The Hobbit”, food doesn’t play any role in health. Instead, standing still heals your character slowly, though you can spend skill points toward making this go a little faster.
The plot has the party trying to cross the Misty Mountains but being turned back by weather and falling rocks, forcing them to try to cross the mountains from beneath via the fallen dwarven fortress of Moria. As with “The Hobbit”, the balance of the party always runs off ahead, leaving the player character to make their way far more slowly. It doesn’t make any real sense, since in the books, and the movie, the camaraderie between the members of the Fellowship was the best part.
Sword of Mana
Way back when, my kids and I loved “The Secret of Mana”, a real time RPG where two players could play at once. It had a lot of weird things I hadn’t seen before — weapons could level up, fast travel was by being shot out of a cannon, all the merchants would be constantly dancing. It was its own thing, and we all loved it.
The Secret of Mana was the second game in the series; we never played the first. Sword of Mana is a remake of the first game for the Gameboy Advance with a lot of improvements made in the decade since the original (which went under a variety of names, including Final Fantasy Adventure).
I haven’t played much of this yet, but the standard Mana elements are there. Big trees, magic, real time battles. Weapons don’t seem to level up, which is a real shame — it was fun, in the original game, to be forced to try new weapons and techniques.
I’ve only barely started the game, but I already feel like the lack of multiplayer really misses the one thing that made the Mana series unique.
Iridion 3D
I didn’t only play RPGs, back in the day. I was a big fan of rail shooters, too — Panzer Dragoon, Pokémon Snap1, Starfox, I wanna say Descent even though it wasn’t. It still had that vibe. Nonetheless, Iridion 3D was a bit random for me. I thought… I thought the name was cool.
Iridion 3D is a rails shooter for the Gameboy Advance. You are in a space ship, things appear in front of you, you shoot them. It’s really that simple.
The game cleverly uses the ability to draw sprites at various sizes to simulate actual 3D, hence the name. The effect is pretty convincing, and I guess this is what most reminds me of Descent (which was actually real 3D).
After about ten or fifteen minutes of this, I was ready to go back to Pokémon Snap 🙂 At least the Pokémon there don’t rush up and shoot at you. That would be PALWORLD Snap.
- Literally a shooter. With a camera. Still counts. ↩︎
Maybe don’t us ai art for your article talking about real games 🤢
Yeah, I was lazy. I will do better.
I want to say that The Two Towers game was on whatever Playstation iteration we were on at that point because I think I played it, and liked it well enough.
And I am currently playing (sorta, too many games going at once) Secret of Mana on PS5. I think it is Secret. It is one of the Mana games, and it has fast travel via cannon shooting and dancing NPCs, so unless that is a staple of Mana games, that’s the one I’m (sorta) playing!
I think they did redo Secret recently. We replayed that here a couple years back. My son did most of the work; I joined in for some boss fights. Two player couch coop just makes that game so great.
That Two Towers game was everywhere, I think. But, I’ve never played it!
I played a lot of Iridion 3D because it was a launch title and I only had three games for years on the GBA.
It does a lot of cool stuff graphically that blew my mind back then. I played it a couple of years ago and still thought the graphics were cool knowing that the GBA was based on the SNES and that this was a huge step up from Mode-7.
There’s a sequel on the GBA that’s even better.