Game:

Golden Axe (1989)

Duration: 17:09

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Ok, now we are almost about to get religious. Golden Axe. Held by many as the holy grail of beatem' ups. I personally don't agree. I think too many people look back on old games with rose tinted glasses. I played the arcade only a handful of times back in the day and I wasn't very impressed then, and I'm still not impressed. I just played the arcade recently on MAME and no, I still don't care for it.

Anyway lets get to the remake shall we. So here is one of the titles with the high resolution N64 graphics. The landscapes look pretty good actually, and I like the 2.5D side scrolling, it's very Klonoa like. The character models though are atrocious. The character animations are just about as bad. They remind me of early 3D fighting games being slow and kind of unresponsive at times. The programing for the animations were done so lazy that when your character dies, they get back up off the ground and then kneel down and proceed to moan. Other honorable mentions are when you ride the animals, their feet move at a fraction of the speed in relation to their actual speed. It just looks plain stupid really. Also they've included some sort of extended story line. It's terrible. It's all text speech which is fine, but you'll notice that I'm only fighting with one character, and in the cut scenes the other 2 characters magically appear. Then magically disappear after they're done. Notice in the second level I was riding the dragon and all of the sudden it cuts to me slashing some dude with my sword not on the dragon. As an added bonus I lose the dragon after the scene is over. WTF? The cut scenes are also not skippable. This is all ok as I consider the cut scenes to be comic relief because it's done so badly.

Ok so all that stuff sucks, but doesn't really break the game IMO. The game is still very playable. The game has been lengthened significantly because the arcade original is extremely short. I always think that is a good thing. To be honest I had fun playing this version. Yes the graphics and animations are retarded in some places, but I saw nothing wrong with the gameplay. The landscapes are many times better than the extremely flat graphics of the original in which you have no perception of any kind of depth. The original reminds me of a renaissance painting. I died falling of something I didn't even know was a cliff.

So the sound? It's passable. The music is pretty good. I wouldn't say that there is anything here that would make you want to really play it since yet again there are so many other beatem' ups that are way better than Golden Axe. I'm not hatin' on Sega or Golden Axe, because I think Golden Axe 2 and 3 (arcade versions) were way better than the first. I understand that those games came out later so they had better visuals and much more evolved gameplay, but hey, that's progress. Overall I don't think this game hurts the collection, but doesn't make it more desirable either. It's just there. I'd rather have that than it totally sucking like Virtua Racing and Monaco GP. I'm saving that one for last. I dread even having to edit the video footage. That will probably be a 3 minute video.

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