I have an article I have been meaning to write for months now, about the game Castle Crisis. It is an arcade-perfect translation of Warlords for the Atari 800. If you had a 2600 (and any taste!) you probably played Warlords for the 2600, as it was quite common. The paddle controllers are in perfect form for the game, and it remains an excellent party game.
I picked up Warlords for the 360 (install size: ~35MB, cost: 400 points or $5) and after a long ummmmmmm I come right back to the problem I have trying to do spinner games without a spinner: you need a spinner!
So I don’t know. Is it even worth debating this one? hygraed, in the BBS, told me that there IS a spinner controller for the Xbox, and if I am going to keep doing this thing (get games that require a spinner – next up, Discs of Tron) then maybe it would be a good second controller for my system.
Let’s debate it anyway. Warlords for the 360 comes in two styles: classic and evolved. Amazingly, like real-life evolution, the latter is worse for all the human tinkering. Graphically — and please keep in mind I am on a 19″ screen until I finish my next text game — it’s a cramped mess, with some kind of weird mechanized robotroid post-modern thing going on. (Put it this way: the presentation sort of reminds me of what Sentinel Returns did on the PC years ago.) Because we’re all used to the crisp and clear graphics of regular Warlords, anything else that gums up the works is not necessary. In the (physical) arcade version of Warlords, it pretty much takes one hit to destroy one block. Not so with the evolved 360 version! No idea why!
So, Warlords is an amazing game that suffers from control issues on the 360 with the standard controller. My opinion of this game is INCOMPLETE until such time as I find a spinner, or some humans to play against on-line.