The Clan of the Cave Bague

 

This was the second game I bought for my first Gameboy Advance, several years ago. I remember thinking at the time that it was a pretty vast game to be stuffed onto a tiny little cartridge. In the end, I clocked well over a hundred hours on it but, as I’d missed some side quests, it never felt like I had really finished. Anyway, I thought that, as I was in the depths of a gaming ennui, I’d revisit Golden Sun to remind myself what a proper RPG is supposed to be like (and to take my mind off the slick, glossy, and irritating Riviera).

  

The first thing I noticed is that it’s still one of the best looking games out there for the GBA. Also, due to my habit of punting the Micro’s sound output through the car stereo at lunchtimes, it’s one of the best sounding too (which reminds me – I must get back to Fire Emblem at some point). Best of all, though, it’s a proper RPG with Djinn, summoning and everything

Anyhoo, I’ve started again from scratch and have done the introductory bit and ‘liberated’ the elemental stones from the Temple. Right on queue, those nasty bad people who nicked them the last time popped up and did it again. Curse their evil and predictable algorithms! So, I’ve swiped the last element, legged it from the temple, and said a tearful farewell to my village. I’ve now teamed up with a dodgy little bloke called Ivan and can now read minds, so I’m going to skulk around the village prying on people. Hooray!

Well, except Mario Kart, obviously.

I’m suffering from gaming ennui just now.

Some of the more straight-laced denizens of UGVM swear blind that these don’t exist.

I present the following in my defence.

Case close. Victoly Get.

This is an odd game! For starters, it didn’t cost me anything, and that can’t possibly be bad! It’s a turn based RPG (just what I like) but, well, odd. Rather than freely wandering around world map and dungeons, your characters wander into static screens on their own. At this point, icons mapping directions to directions on the dpad appear. So, to move to the next room to the west, you’d press the right dpad. Pressing A bumps you into look/quest mode, where notable items are mapped to direction keys. Some of these things are marked in red, so you need to expend action points to examine them. Action points are got by defeating enemies. The combat is pretty much your standard affair, with one major exception. You have to choose four items to take with you, and that includes weapons, healing items and armour / buffs. You can also only take three characters into battle. This really takes a lot of getting used to, but that’s not a chore because….

The game is truly beautiful. The sound and music are superb. The story, is standard RPG fare, but the overall production quality is breathtaking. For the first five hours or so, I’ve had a very love hate relationship with it – it’s more tactical than the average RPG. Now that I’ve done the early stages, though, things are starting to look up There’s a strange relationship thing in there too – a bit like Harvest Moon, where you have to keep your girlie companies happy.

So, so far – my little bloke has arrived in Riviera to destroy it, been thwapped around a lot. Lost his memory. Met some girlies. Gone to a castle. Done some thwapping, and is now back at the village. I have a Wise Old Elf(tm) to visit now, so I’m sure some exposition will follow.

Damn you! Damn you to hell, deKay! If evil were distilled, shaped into human form, and given a mangstache, it would be called deKay. At least last night he only scraped a 7-1 victory, but tonight was a round 8-0. Annoyingly enough, I kept right on his tail for most of the races, but was consistantly thwarted by my inability to do turbo starts and deKay’s almost supernatural ability to never make mistakes evar.

I’m going to get him, though. Oh yes, I am. I shall lock myself away in a monastery and get a wise old tibetan monk to teach me TEH KRAT SKILLS and then I shall rain my wrath upon him.

Oh yes.

Or something.

How to begin? Briefly – best version ever of the best racing game ever (even if you hate racing games, like me) on the best handheld ever. With wireless online multiplayer. This is an absolute triumph. It really is. There’s your four basic grand prix races – 16 tracks in total. Then there’s the retro grand pri – another 16, made up of some of the best tracks in the game’s long and noble history. All off which are available in 50cc, 100cc and 150cc classes. Then there’s missions. And time trials. And balloon fight. And unlockable cars and characters. And everything.

 

The online multiplayer mode lets you compete with four players from either a worldwide audience, a regional (i.e. country) audience, people in your friends list and rivals. Rivals is particularly good as it seems to select people who have very similar abilities to your own, making multiplayer fun and challenging in the wee small hours when your more sensible friends are safely tucked up in bed. It’s also remarkably child friendly (although I have seen a couple of slightly dubious emblems floating around – fortunately the colour palette is limited enough to make these non-realistic ).

So far, I’ve completed everything in 50cc mode with really awful D/E ratings. Next I can go onto 100cc mode, then 150. Then I can start improving my ratings. Then there’s time trials. And so on. I can see I’m going to spend just as much time on the DS as I did on the SNES and N64. SUPARACEBEST.

It seems a very long time since we received our positive skills assessment. I’d expected a lot of the work that’s been undertaken in the past few weeks to have been done while the ACS application was being assessed, but with hindsight, it makes sense – had the ACS application failed, a different visa subclass (we’re going for Skilled Australian Sponsored) would have been required, so any work done would have been a waste of time.

Anyway, the Visa application has been lodged today, after being very thoroughly checked by our agents. Now the real waiting game begins.

Evil EVIL stage 2 complet0red. I hate the obligatory underwater bits in Sonic games. Zone 3 is completely fiendish, but at least there’s air

Aaaaaargh! My eyes are bleeding! I’ve just completed the first two zones and first boss and Rush is blisteringly fast. It has the old sonic thing of ‘I’ve got through this level by just holding down left – I must be missing something.’ And, of course, I am. I’m missing a decent score and all the collectibles.

     

The action takes place on both screens with your player popping between the two every now and again. Fortunately, when this happens, the status items stay on the screen the player is on, otherwise you’d go MAD – MAD, I tell you!

So basically, I need to play through level one again, but with the manual in hand, to work out what all the funky moves I didn’t have time to do actually gain you. Why do I like Sonic games so much? I’m crap at them.

Mehh.