First Impressions: The Addams Family

This one is a platformer in which you play the part of Gomez Addams.

It’s actually a pretty standard platformer. Collect the treasures, avoid the enemies and spikes.

I’m not totally sure what the goal is, since I couldn’t quite work out how to exit the level, but I doubt it’s anything special. This game does seem to have rather uneven level designs. The above pictures show the usual screens: walk right and jump over the bad guys, or bounce off of their heads. On the other hand:

This is way too many spikes for a single screen. I couldn’t get through this part after a few tries, so I gave up and tried another screen.

In all, this is an average platformer with nothing special to set it off from the rest, as far as I can tell from playing the first level. Try it if you want to play every platformer ever, but otherwise the mario games are much more worthwhile.

First Impressions: A Ressha de Ikou

A search on Wikipedia tells me that Maxis released this game in the US as A-Train, and it is a simulator in which you build a railway system.

Well, I like the old SimCity games, so I like Maxis, so I should like this, right? Let’s see:

Well, it doesn’t look bad so much as it doesn’t seem to have any interface. Playing with the buttons didn’t seem to do anything, but not to worry; there is a help screen:

Unfortunately, the help screen isn’t very helpful. Still, I persevered, pressing buttons at random on the theory that a million monkeys playing a million copies of A-Train will eventually figure out the controls. The biggest change I made was causing it turn turn to night:

Actually, I’m pretty sure that that was either timed, or just based on how many buttons I’d pressed, rather than any particular action of mine. I couldn’t work out what to do with this before my patience ran out, so I quit. Japanese people play pachinko games too, but that doesn’t make them good games; it’s no surprise that this game was a dismal failure in the US, despite its huge success in Japan. Avoid it.