Hydlide - ProJared

I'm playing Highline you hi lied I hate hi lied I hate this game so much the only reason they even know about this game was because my older brother had it and told me that I couldn't play it so he hid it away in his bedroom of course being the crafty five-year-old that I was I still managed to find it and play it and even back then as a kid I knew this game sucked playing it again I've reaffirmed to myself that it sucks it sucks so bad where do I even start how about this this is the title screen your this song kind of sounds familiar doesn't it like it's practically an exact copy of the Indiana Jones theme and it loops every 15 seconds this brief time I've talked about it it's already getting on my nerves but you better get used to it because it's the only song you're gonna hear for the whole game the only other songs are just as short and the only appear at the final boss and if the password screamed and this irritating grating music there is no way to turn it off it's with you the whole time anyway this game is an RPG and what would an RPG be without the plot I'll tell you what it'd be and be hydlide the entirety of the plot is given on the main menu screen ready pay attention you might miss it if you blink I'm sorry did you get lost and confused let me recap that for you there's our dragon and there's a princess and then the dragon his wizard ABBA and the princess explodes into fairies you need to get the fairies to put her back together again and you play as this guide this is the best part seriously I am NOT making this up the character that you play as the main hero his name is Jim Jim the knight real fantasy right there as soon as the game starts up I know exactly what you're thinking hey this looks like zelda and you know what it does to give credit where it's due though highlight originally released on japanese computers one year before zelda came out so hydlide did it first but zelda did it right Zelda's world is massive and filled with secrets highlights worlds a 5x5 square grid is completely uninteresting Zelda has quick moving screens to keep the action going highlight screen shifting is jumpy and awkwardly slow there's something else that Zelda has at Highline dozen what was it called oh yeah fun right at the first screen there are monsters you want to kill some slimes and Nicole so instinctively I go to kill them slapping every button on the controller to attack but what the why is it I'm pressing the buttons why aren't I attacking well it turns out you have two modes holding the a button switches you from defend mode to attack mode while in attack mode you deal a lot more damage but you also take a lot more damage activate attack mode and then you run into enemies and you hope you win I'm sorry can I just talk about how much I hate this as a game mechanic think of every video game ever they all taught you the same thing touching enemies is bad and here highlight makes it the closest thing to game play it has at least with a game like yeast you can see your character swinging your sword so you feel like you're doing something but with highlight you just ask your faces together until somebody falls over on top of that there is zero skill involved it's all based on brute strength it's expected that you are physically stronger than your enemy not smarter or more strategic the only real advantage you can give yourself is to attack an enemy from which makes sense but the problem is that almost all of the enemies don't have a back to attack most of the enemy sprites only face one direction it's a total crapshoot to hit their backs most of the time you don't so the whole point of the game is to collect the fairies you can actually get one of the fairies right at the beginning go one screen south and there will be a bunch of trees a fairy is placed randomly in one of these trees and you just need to touch it but if you choose the wrong tree base oh my god oh my god oh my god Jim the knight killed by bees in case you couldn't tell by the abysmally small bars on the side you start off weaker than an infant so before you can really do anything and I mean do anything you have to grind experience and you were way too weak to fight anything else so you start attacking slimes to increase Oh goddammit slimes slimes killed me I mean the bees yeah I get that but slimes you start killing slimes to increase your experience and the experience bar goes up so slowly that I did the math to get from level 1 to level 2 you have to kill 100 slimes that's a great way to start any game with fizzy work and just to make sure grinding takes as long as possible there's only one way to heal you have to find yourself a nice patch of grass and stand perfectly still call of duty stole this the first goal in the game is to kill a vampire you can only hurt the vampire if you have a cross which you can find laying out on its own nearby be even with the cross the vampire will still kill you instantly which means I need to do more grinding so I start killing bats oh oh I'm sorry Sturge is stolen straight from dungeon and Dragons ladies and gentlemen at least these bats give a decent mod mix but also a are you used to that sound yet because you're gonna hear it a lot there is a save system but it's so messed up in the menu you have a save load and password option naturally you think passwords oh they're dumb I'll just save and yes you do save exactly where you are but highlight doesn't have a battery backup that means you lose your save when you turn it off imagine if you will a little five-year-old projared who is so used to saving in the Legend of Zelda that he saved in highlight and turned it off so you can go have dinner and then when he came back afterwards everything was gone it's not that it takes a long time it's just that everything is so tedious okay fine I accept that only save while playing the game I'll just get the password end Oh No what is this jumbled mess I know long passwords are something you just have to deal with in older games but come on they couldn't even break it up it's so easy to lose your place in the past we're all reading it what if you write it down wrong I swear everything about highlight is designed to go against what you've been accustomed to as a child killing the vampire gets me a lamp so I can actually see inside the dark caves there's this treasure inside this maze and I'm so terrified of fighting things that I've been using the spell turn to make them run away from me oh yeah that's another thing that sucks magic all of it to cast it you press the B button to cycle through your spells and then you press a and B at the same time to cast it the only useful spell is turn because it makes enemies go in the opposite direction they're currently going it's one of the few ways to help you attack people in the back the other presumably cooler spells fire ice wave and flash those kill enemies awesome right well joke's on you because if you kill an enemy with a spell you don't get any experience for it even worse they don't do anything to some enemies such as all the tough ones you would actually want to use magic on shooting a vampire with a fireball makes sense right well too bad it does nothing so yeah I make everything run away from me in the maze but I can get this chest and inside is a pot yeh don't even know what this is for it makes another cave entrance appear in the labyrinth but that's about it so I make my way through that pothole and find a key and a bunch of treasure chests which you need to take back to the graveyard and open another treasure chest to get a jewel and the jool is extremely important to get because it does absolutely nothing these trees are trying to kill me you nature through enough trial and error I end up at the shore and my next goal is to kill these two wizards but before you do that you need to be strong enough which means more grinding and of course more grinding also means here's the thing about these wizards they have the last fairy and you can only get it if you kill both of them at the same time the only way to do that is to hit them both with the wave spell which goes right through enemies which is all fine and dandy but the waves bail can only be shot left or right but look at the land here there's twice as much vertical space as there is horizontal there's no easy way to do this the only solution I came up with was to distract one into hitting me while the other lines up but the instant the very instant I get the last fairy you got to be ready because they bring you right through a dragon nothing hurts the dragon by the way none of the spells and attacking it only brings I got stuck here I'm stuck between a rock and a dragon place I only figured out that you're supposed to get into the castle because I missed the dragon with a fire spell you're supposed to burn down the tree in front of it to get inside how are people supposed to figure this out you can't burn down any other tree in the game at all except for this one that's not clever that's inconsistent inside the castle is a bunch of monsters in a single gravestone touching the gravestone breaks it I guess which somehow drains all the water outside but what doesn't make any sense is that without the water the dragon suddenly becomes vulnerable I painstakingly kill him by slapping him a few times waiting three minutes to heal and then slapping him some more until he dies when he dies I get the medicine this may be the most important item in the game it makes it so that when you die you instantly get filled back up to full health but it only works once and you need it and I mean need it to beat the final boss if you waste it anywhere else you are completely boned also inside the drain water is a chest that has a ruby which doesn't seem to do anything other than make the final boss yeah this guy appear inside the Dragons castle and fighting him is the worst even at the maximum level with maximum strength it's completely luck if you manage to kill him attacking him causes you to die faster than he gets damaged so you actually need to defeat him in defend mode there is no strategy for this all I could do was throw myself at him until I won which took about eight or nine times but hey it worked the big guy is dead the fairies come together the princess is saved and congratulations my reward is these two frames of animation where to go Jim that's it it just brings you back to the title screen afterwards there's no credits or anything that hurt that hurt to play that's why my final rating for this game is a bee sting out of 10 it's super short and can be beaten in a few hours but for how brief it is it was one of the most painful games I have ever played hydlide only lasts as long as it does because it uses arbitrary difficulty and mandatory grinding to make up for a lack of substance and if that doesn't hurt enough that you're bleeding music will and let's be honest here it isn't fun to play I think my brother knew I think he knew how much this game sucked and let me keep stealing it out of his room as a form of punishment crafty bastard

Channel: ProJared

Views: 3,247,515

Keywords: hydlide, review, proreview, projared, nes, bees, jim, the, knight, worst game ever, normalboots

Id: GxskwhpbLts

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 18 2012