Last week I briefly discussed how I used to love to explore in Super Mario 64. Well, some games are built around this idea of exploration. This has become quite a ubiquitous thing in gaming these days, what with all the "open world sandbox" games that come out. However, in a much simpler (and more memory-limited) time, we had the so-called "Metroidvania" genre. My most recent trek in this genre came by way of Metroid Prime 2, which incidentally would be a terrible game to be introduced to the genre through. Not because it's a bad metroidvania game or anything but more on that later. I have played Metroid Prime, the first one, but since I played this one much more recently I feel it'd be a better review if I talk about the second game instead.
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Making sequels is probably pretty hard. I've never had to do it myself, but I can imagine. Especially when said game is pretty far into the franchise, and from a different developer. Probably one of the worst ways to handle this would be to essentially remake the last 'main' game in the franchise again. You've probably put together the pieces by now: That's exactly what Traveller's Tales did when they made Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex.
I have a long history with Crash Bandicoot. When I was only 5 years old, my dad came home with a Sony Playstation. One of the games he had gotten for it was the original Crash Bandicoot. Our whole family loved that game, and we even got the sequels. I have fond memories of my mom with the strategy guide for Crash 3 reading from it to my father, who was playing the game. The kids sat and watched. Can you imagine that? The kids sat and watched our dad play through the game! We all got our turns, of course, me probably more than anyone. My favorite was Crash Bandicoot 2. My friend Kyle and I played that one the most, and Kyle was really good at finding all the secrets without any help. I was amazed when he showed me the secret warp room in Crash 2, and how to get there. Crash 2 remains my favorite.
Anyway, back to Wrath of Cortex.
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It's no secret that we here at Retro of the Week love our Dreamcast games. Either in their natural habitat or ported to other, more successful consoles, the Dreamcast had a huge library of great games. One of those beloved titles is Ikaruga, an extremely fast vertical arcade shooter with a rather interesting play concept. Instead of just shooting at everything you see, and avoiding obstacles, you have to switch the polarity of your ship to either destroy opposite colored enemies, or absorb si
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