Hi, I'm Dranzerstorm
Welcome to the Video Game & Music Lounge
This world is dedicated to Video Games and Music as I'll be showcasing the following.
Video Game Reviews set to the same tones as Retro Retrospective's Anime Reviews
Music reviews of Anime Openings & Closings
Western Cartoon music
Vocaloid Classics.
We may even have some Top Tens
I hope this World entertains you.
It's surprising how much Disney seems to pop up in my gaming history.
Pixar Rush Adventure
Two of these games are former Kinect games, for the uninitiated, Kinect was a motion sensor control system for the xbox 360, it never caught on so this game and Disneyland Adventures were permanently dumped on Game Pass minus the motion controls and it shows by how much easier both games are.
Pixar for the most part is a collectathon where you go through set pieces in the given Pixar franchises from loose adaptations from the actual movies to original stories made for the game, Ratatouille suffers the most with this, the fact that each scenario is told by a kid, you can forgive for getting things wrong or throwing in original characters.
B-Tier Game.
Disneyland Adventures
In your life time, you should really only do Disneyland twice, once as a child and again with your own children, the game presents itself as another collectathon but manages to create that sense of wonder that comes with going to Disneyland, couple of things I found particularly jarring was 1. Pirates of the Caribbean didn't have Jack Sparrow but an original character called Black Barty and 2. They had characters from Song of the South.
For those who don't know, Song of the South is the only film in Disney's history to be quietly banned worldwide and the whole Black Barty thing with Pirates of the Caribbean tells me that they couldn't get the rights to Jack Sparrow.
Despite being insultingly easy, it at least functions better than Kinect Pixar Rush.
B-Tier Game.
Disney Dreamlight Valley
Dreamlight Valley is just Animal Crossing with Disney characters that's been in early access for a year now, the story tells of a ruler who returns to a ruined forgotten valley emphasised by dark thorny plants, in what essentially is calling out the adult Disney fans for forgetting the magic, it's the first time I've seen a Disney property communicate to it's growing adult audience, the game is the best example of a free game done right however you play it the same way a Beta tester does.
A-Tier Game.
The so called spiritual successor is an intriguing concept, you take a video game franchise that is no longer active and team members of that original game build a sort of cheap ass sequel if you will and today's subject is the Danger Zone + Dangerous Driving series by Three Fields Entertainment.
Spiritual Successors can work, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night being the best example, while plenty of Project Gotham Racing's influence has shaped the racing genre for the last decade, Burnout falls under the same camp with Wreckfest and some of more recent Need for Speed games.
Three Fields of course being made up of ex-staff of Criterion, the makers of Burnout wanted to relive those glory days by starting with Burnout's very much missed crash mode that sets up a stunt track to create the biggest crash possible, the first game Danger Zone did everything in a make shift test lab before going to public roads in Danger Zone 2 and finally making the Burnout clone in Dangerous Driving.
This is where the comparison to Burnout ends as these games start missing the elements that made Burnout a complete game.
For Danger Zone 1 and 2 its the lack of raw destructive power that comes from unleashing a crashbreaker as well as a very janky set of physics that could make you fail instantly, not to mention a lack of music because Three Fields were too cheap to afford a composer, this problem is prevalent in Dangerous Driving as well although that one has much more glaring problems by the fact it looks and plays cheap, granted a team of 7 compared to a team of 70 does make for an unfair comparison but remember that these games were built on the remnants of a 19 year old game in Burnout 3 and there are smaller teams that have made solid games such as Among Us, Untitled Goose Game, Stardew Valley and Omno just to name a few, there really is no excuse for such mediocrity when the tools available can make alot of quality titles, budget or not.
Danger Zone 1 and 2 are both C-Tier titles while Dangerous Driving is a D-Tier, I call that generous considering that this studio doesn't have an original idea among them, even the re-releashed Burnout Paradise is doing better than them.
For this selection were getting into the more well known titles.
Full Throttle
In this quirky point and click by the Monkey Island master himself puts you in the shoes of Polecats Biker leader Ben as his gang is framed for the murder of the president of the last domestic motorcycle manufacturer, with a wannabe journalist capturing the murder on camera, Ben has to clear his name and stop vice-president Ripberger from stealing the company.
The game mixes point and click with a few sections of actual bike riding, it's pretty standard stuff and I'd call it the weaker of the Tim Schafer games compared to the others.
B-Tier Game
Celeste
You take control of Madeline as she attempts to hop, skip, jump and climb up Mt Celeste all the while fighting the personification of her crippling depression; considering how hard this game is, the fact that the game is about overcoming depression is oddly appropriate, and with such a well crafted narrative that anyone can relate to, you forget that the character you've been furiously throwing up the mountain is transgender. If it wasn't in the same camp as other rage titles like Jump King, I'd give it a higher tier.
A-Tier Game
Undertale
You control a human named Frisk who awakes in the Underground, they are confronted by Flowey who attempts to kill you in the tutorial before being saved by your guardian Toriel or Goat Mom, Toriel attempts to stop you from going to the surface but fails as you piece together what happened to humanity and what has become of the world's monster race as you meet a quirky cast of characters. Unlike most RPGs where you kill everything to get to the end, in order to get the best ending, you can't kill anyone, instead you are given options to talk and convince your enemies not to fight you, in fact killing everyone nets you the bad ending.
Both endings have a very tough final boss battle, the mechanics also require you to dodge bullet hell style to survive any battle. Along with an absolute killer soundtrack by Toby Fox, you'll find yourselves in the most unique RPG you'll ever play.
A-Tier Game
Normally I do three games in this feature but this game has such a unique history, I dare not leave it out.
Carmageddon
In the entire history of video gaming in the United Kingdom, only five games were ever banned.
Manhunt 2, The Punisher and Carmageddon were all banned on extreme violence while Sex Vixens from Space and Omega Labyrinth Z were banned for sexual content but even that is debated.
Punisher and Manhunt were let off with censors while Carmageddon was censored temporarily until the developers challenged the age ratings board and won, getting the game reinstated to it's original form.
Sex Vixens from Space was quietly destroyed by customs meaning it never had an official ban as in the eyes of the regulators it never existed, that leaves Omega Labyrinth Z which was banned on the grounds of being a borderline Hentai game with ambiguously aged characters making it the only officially banned video game.
As to why Carmageddon was banned in the first place, it's a game that borrows heavily from the Death Race film franchise as the object of the game is to either win the race, kill all your opponents or kill every pedestrian roaming about the sandbox style race track with a host of colourful psychopaths in equally ridiculous cars and weapons, this was released back in the late 90s when a few years after Mortal Kombat opened the flood gates for violent games with age ratings and Doom created a darker more gritty era of video gaming, everyone was trying to push the boundaries to what was acceptable in terms of violence, however Carmageddon found itself becoming a scapegoat when a real incident of a driver killing a number of pedestrians made national news, leading to the BBFC, Britain's regulatory body to ban it unless the violence was removed, this led to a time where the pedestrians were replaced with zombies, some time passed and Carmageddon did get it's original content back mostly because the BBFC saw how ridiculous the concept was when stuff like Grand Theft Auto had you do just as bad if not worse, this is because Carmageddon is a pretty shit game and it only had popularity through it's own controversy; I was too young at the time to get the original Carmageddon and finally played it in 2021 with Max Damage, a crowdfunded reboot of the franchise, but other than graphics, nothing really changed, the cars are still just as janky to drive, the physics seem to stop trying at times and all that violence that got it banned in the first place was tame compared to even death scenes in 12 rated games, in the 90s it would be a B-Tier game but it's now a D-Tier Game bordering on F-Tier.
Whether were all de-sensitized to violence, or we kinda want more meat with our blood and guts, but even after the first game, it was already sliding down the ratings and out of the eyes of the people in barely a year.
It's probably why, when I did a case study on this subject back in 2004 when I was learning work skills that the instructor mentioned how much she hated the game and how vitriolic that hatred was, and all I can think of at the time was. "No one talks about that game anymore? Have you even seen what's on the market these days (2004) I'm pretty sure I alone have played worse"
It's too easy to use a scapegoat whether it be heavy metal, video games or even anime (Thats it's own story in the UK) but there is something else at work in a psychotic person's brain than just their interests, the silly pixel blood fest isn't the one with the knife, firearm or vehicle in this case and the trigger for such violence could be something as mundane as not liking Mondays.
This is why you need to better fund mental health services.
Taking a break from the grind of Xbox achievement hunting to explore some of the just as weird games on the Switch, in fact alot of the future Xbox entries started on the Switch.
Cruis'n Blast
Leave it to legacy companies like Raw Thrills to revive all the best 90s racing titles, and you can't get more 90s than the Cruis'n series from the N64 era. This current version takes all the madness and loudness from the arcade cabinet version giving you short bursts of arcade madness as each race can last as little as three sometimes one minute as the ridiculously fast pace of the game shows often in environments with giant set pieces, much better in multiplayer.
A-Tier Game
What the Golf
This game does everything with the concept of golf physics except actually play real golf as each level adds a twist to the formula everything from a video game reference to driving the actual golfer into the hole, cleverly made if a little absurd in places.
A-Tier Game
Smashing the Battle
Yes, I'd certainly like to Smash, robots are running riot in a giant industrial complex as you take command of one of two large powerful ladies, Sarah O'Connell the Survivor with a giant spanner and Mary Lucy the Chaser with a giant hammer, while the game is certainly very appealing, it is just a typical hack and slash more akin to a slower, jankier Bayonetta.
B-Tier Game
