nilkynarfy

Bio: I write reviews that say more about me than the films I watch. That's okay, I think.
Recent Ratings
Check out nilkynarfy's...
85 62% | XCOM: Chimera Squad (2020) - Apr 11, 2023
"Quite a bit more casual and straight forward than the series proper. The story is fairly interesting, in that it shows what day-to-day life in world where the humans won, but we must co-exist with the aliens who had no choice in the invasion. All in all, a good intro to the series, but not especially deep."
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20 4% | The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (2013) - Apr 11, 2023
"Oh yeah, it sucks real bad. Like really really bad. I do love the revisionist history that wants you to forget that this was going to be the main X-Com style and the other one was supposed to be a fun throwback aside."
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55 9% | Dragons of Flame (1989) - Aug 31, 2022
"Heroes of the lance needed to be improved, but I'm not sure it needed to be even more like Zelda II than it originally was."
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60 14% | Dungeons & Dragons: Order of the Griffon (1992) - Aug 31, 2022
"A much better attempt at Gold Box on a console than the NES Pool of Radiance, but it's also much blander than Westwood's Genesis D&D game."
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70 20% | Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun (1992) - Aug 31, 2022
"I love that Caldwell cover. The game is a pretty okay implementation of the RC D&D rules set. As one of only a handful of games to use the D&D rules (note for not-old people: we had two different D&Ds in the 80s and 90s, AD&D was the one with all the videogames), it does a fine job of synthesizing that sweet Elf-is-a-class action. I'm not sure the Ultima perspective was a great fit for a Genesis game, controls were meh too, but the music is great."
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50 7% | Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor (1993) - Aug 31, 2022
"A bland, repetitive ending to a great series that would have been better as a graphical tile set for Hack. Oh wait...yeah, play Dungeon Hack and pretend it's EoB 3. You'll feel better, and there is an automap."
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90 80% | Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (1991) - Aug 31, 2022
"It's always nice when the second game is the best in a trilogy. A shame the console ports didn't come out until everyone stopped caring about this series. The Sega CD version of EoB2 would have been killer! We have here a bigger, funner, prettier evolution over the first game. While EoB1 is rightfully the one regarded as a classic, this is better in EVERY way...it's just not different in ANY way. We still don't have an automap for some reason, but that was the era, I guess."
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55 9% | Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder (2002) - Aug 31, 2022
"EoB is a name so linked to the Black Box style that this iteration's existence is weird. It's not that we NEEDED classic Eye on GBA, and this game was a more welcome idea than a traditional dungeon crawler would have been at the time (the Etrian games still had a few years to prove me wrong). But...the reinterpretation of a dungeon crawler into a tactical RPG only works if the TRPG part is good, and this pales compared to what else the GBA had on offer (I'm def talking about FFT: Advance)."
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75 30% | Secret of the Silver Blades (1990) - Aug 31, 2022
"'The first Gold Box trilogy goes out with a whimper,' is what I wanted to write, but that's not even remotely fair. We get a much less satisfying, more empty experience, but it's still got the same awesome combat with some needed QoL improvements that carried over into my beloved Black Box games.. The continued absence of sound design and graphical tweaks (incremental or otherwise) don't help this game's case either. It still does what these games are supposed to do, but nothing more."
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84 53% | Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989) - Aug 31, 2022
"A scooch easier to get into than its predecessor because of its focus on story rather than exploration. This is a great place to start if you haven't experienced western RPGs from this era, but the experience may feel a little shallow in comparison to other games in the series. The graphics were much improved over the first game, the great tactical combat is already a given at this point, and the writing was good (but, like...there is a faithful novelization you could find for cheap)."
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