I suppose I could give some "pros" and "cons" of Virtual Hydlide.

Pros:

1. It's much more playable than NES Hydlide. You can actually swing your sword, so none of that confusing "bump into enemies from behind" stuff.

2. I haven't encountered any glitches so far. I know that sounds like feeble praise, but the NES Hydlide had some bad glitches, like walking one screen over and having an enemy that was offscreen pass through you as the screen scrolls, causing an instant death. And your character never just keels over for no apparent reason. I got criticized for saying in my review of NES Hydlide that my character would sometimes keel over when I was just standing and doing nothing and no enemies were anywhere near him. People told me that that simply does not happen, but I KNOW it happened to me twice. The first time it happened, I wondered if something hit me that I just didn't see. But the second time it happened, I knew for sure that I wasn't imagining things. Since people insist that this has never happened to them, I chalk it up to being a glitch.

3. Graphics and sound (especially sound) are a huge improvement over Hydlide. Not that the graphics are "great", but at least you can tell what everything is and you don't just have a tiny window in which to view everything. The sound, although certainly not the greatest soundtrack ever, is actually quite good. There's a nice symphonic overworld score, none of that "Indiana Jones rip-off theme being played on a child's music box".

4. It's kind of fun exploring the overworld. The map shows your current destination, but you have no idea what it will be until you get there. I kind of like that.


Now the cons:

1. The game is very simplistic and not very challenging. Check your map for the goal. Walk to the goal. Enter the "dungeon", check your dungeon map for the goal again, then walk to the goal. Enemies in these dungeons don't pose much of a threat, and in most cases, you can just run past them.

2. Some of the bosses are rather lame. The last one I beat was a wizard that floats around the room, and is only momentarily vulnerable when he lands on the floor. The thing is, he NEVER fights back! And you don't even take damage from him if you touch him. The whole fight is just following him around and waiting for him to land. Stupid.

3. The camera can sometimes be annoying when you turn around. For some reason, it will inexplicably convert to a first-person view rather than the standard over-the-shoulder view, and it's difficult to see what's going on if you're in a battle with an enemy when that happens.

4. This might be a pro or a con, depending on how you look at it, but there seems to be no real penalty for getting a "game over". You get sent back to the beginning of a dungeon (which may not be a bad thing if you were trying to exit the dungeon anyway), but you don't lose anything, not even your score points or items found since your last save, etc.

5. Up until I got to the Sealed Mine, exploring the dungeons wasn't so bad, but this one is particularly huge, and has a lot of little alcoves. Most are dead ends, and it takes forever to explore all of them, but I'm afraid of missing something important if I don't because a few do have treasure chests.

Also, Virtual Hydlide has multiple difficulty levels, but it looks like the only difference is that the higher levels remove the goal markers from the maps. Ugh....I can't imagine playing this game without the goal markers. On the one hand, if the game continues at this pace, that may be the only way to add any challenge to it. But it would take hours upon hours of exploring the overworld to find everything, and I can't imagine that not getting boring.
I Crawl and 1000

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