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I do love reading about hilariously poor games from time to time. This Hercules game sounds boring as sin, but this was a thoroughly enjoyable review. -
Since 2007 here, turning 50 this year. Not sure how or when that happened, must've been distracted 🙈 -
Oh dear. I didn't know this. I noticed Sega has been acting real uppity and ambitious for the past year or so (from the announcement of multiple IP revivals last year, to the most recent Virtua Fighter direct, where they seemed unusually committed to make that franchise successful), but this is a step further! We can look at this pessimistically: it's going to crash and burn, just like Ubisoft did. We can look at this optimistically: Sega will manage whatever perks they get, and curate their back catalogue well enough to make this work. It might end up going in more interesting directions. Outside of the NSO, this is the first time we see a Japanese company committed to the concept (I think. Didn't Capcom express some desire to do something similar some time ago? Maybe I'm misremembering something), so they might just take a different path, like a few key partnerships. The Mega Drive NSO is already basically that. 2025 is going to be an interesting year for Sega... It's interesting, because Sega is basically the only publisher in this position: they already have their own subscription app with their properties, but they're not the ones managing it, they're just licensing them. In that sense, their perspective on the market is more privileged than most. Also, didn't they express some disappointment or frustration at the revenue from the Mega Drive NSO some time back? If that's the case, and they're still looking to get into the subscription market anyway, is it possible that their frustration comes from the app not being fully theirs? Whether due to limited revenue, or the inability to fully manage/curate their IPs on their own terms, it's possible that the Mega Drive app may, in fact, be the (Mega) driving force behind this new direction.
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Hercules: The Legendary Journeys NA release: 18th August 2000 PAL release: 6th October 2000 JP release: N/A Developer: Player 1 Publisher: Titus N64 Magazine Score: 66% Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is a TV show that people tend to forget even existed, so much that I always thought that Hercules was a spin-off of the much more popular Xena: Warrior Princess, not the other way round. Xena was a show about characters that grew, while Hercules was a dude punching stuff. That said, even if you had seen the show, I’m not entirely sure you would recognise this game as being based on the show, instead of just presuming that it’s loosely based on the Hercules legend, with a face that looks loosely based on Brendan Frasier (the Hercules show might have been much better with him involved). The initial impressions of Hercules is that this is a Zelda clone. The tutorial explains the concept of a context sensitive button (although it’s much slower to change to an action than Zelda), and when you reach the first area, it just looks like a cheap Zelda game. The trees and tufts of grass (which you can’t pick up), along with the bugs and dust flowing around, look like they’re based directly on Zelda, just far lower quality. However, it doesn’t play like a Zelda game. You do have a jump button, which is hilariously bad. It’s pointlessly high and doesn’t go far, with running jump distance based on the analogue stick. This sounds nice in theory, but there’s only one point this is used, and it’s for a jump that is at the perfect maximum distance possible, and requires such a perfect “full” tilt that even official controllers on official hardware are physically incapable of performing (unless the controller is in pristine condition). It’s that bad that the only guide for the game says to use a gameshark to moon jump over it. The rest of the movement is incredibly stiff and imprecise, and the animation doesn’t fit the game at all. Even equipping items (which have no gameplay use and are just like the trading items in Zelda) is a faff, especially as there’s no reason for the game to just not use the right item if you have it in your inventory, when you want to unlock a door or talk to someone. Combat is equally tedious. There’s a punch, a backwards punch, and a few basic moves. You’ll fight human-like enemies, dog-like enemies, and a couple of bosses. The human-like enemies will have different designs, but all act the same, so there’s no variety. This game is a great example as to why Z-Targeting was so important to Zelda, as the lack of it is very noticeable, making fighting feel incredibly imprecise. Thankfully, it’s quite easy to run past enemies, as you only need to fight them when you need to grind for money. And you’ll be running past them a lot. Hercules consists of a bunch of villages, a few long corridors to connect them, and three “dungeons”. There really isn’t much to do in each place, as there are no side quests or hidden collectables, everything is part of the main quest, even stuff like “I’ve lost my cookbook” or “I’m hungry” that seem like dull side quests. Dialogue is stilted, and NPC designs are repeated heavily – to the point where there’s an entire village of identical NPCs with no names, who say that this is because their father was in the hospital, was “released too early” and that his “time ran out”, which seems to be Player 1 calling out Titus for rushed development. There’s also a needless amount of pointless backtracking. Now, backtracking is inevitable for adventure games, but this game is just ridiculous. To demonstrate, I’ll explain everything you do from completing the first village to the first dungeon. The gate leading to the hub village is locked, so you need to go back a bit to an area with vines. Hercules can’t climb vines, so you need to swap to his sidekick to get up there. You go through a corridor section to the second village. Here, the mayor has been trapped in magic light and needs a magic gem to free him. If you speak to the NPCs, one will mention something glimmering in a pond. You can’t see this glimmer, but if you stand in the right spot, a prompt will pop up to pick up a key. You’ll need this later. A girl has lost her cat, so find and return it. She’ll then bake you a pie if you have flour (which hopefully you picked up from the first village). Take this pie to a hungry woman, and she’ll let you use her secret passage to get to a chest with the stone. Return to the mayor, and he’ll give you the key you need to get past the first village. Return to Hercules and use the key on the gate (this one door keeps re-locking itself, so you need to equip the key and read the same dialogue every time), go through the corridor to the hub village. Here you need to find the one NPC that isn’t a vendor. He sells you a cow hide, which you need to return to the first village to get made into a coat (you need to trudge through the long corridors every time). Unfortunately, this coat is too small for Hercules, so you need to swap to his buddy in Hub village. Now you can take the long corridor to the snow village. None of these people will talk to you, only Hercules, with the exception of one guy selling a deer hide. I think you can guess what’s coming. Trek back to Hercules, swap over, travel to the first village, then back to the hub village before going to the snow village. Here, you need to give a letter (which you hopefully got from a random NPC in the first village) to someone to get a special torch, which will open the dungeon in the hub village. Almost the entire game is just that: meaningless random fetch quests, and absolutely nothing compelling to learn or discover. The lack of side quests means that you often have to travel between villages to do a single action. It’s like the game world and engine exist (barely), but they forgot to make the actual game. The dungeons (supposedly all labyrinths from Greek mythology) don’t fare any better. The three of them are made up of brick corridors with no puzzles – unless you count opening chests in a specific order (with the number in their sequence clearly signposted) as a puzzle. They all have the same boss – a minotaur that you beat a bit and then throw into lava. The third also has a load of traps (which are glitchy and can lead to instant death). If you die in a dungeon, you go back to your last save – and you can only save in villages. So save states are pretty much mandatory. After you defeat all three minotaurs, you are ready to face the Titan. Not as Hercules, but a centaur lady you’ve never encountered in the game before. She has a bow and arrow, which you can use to attack enemies while Z-targeting. I couldn’t hit enemies while using this, and found that hitting them from a distance (when they’re just standing still) to be the only way. After getting through some enemies in this corridor, you’re thrust straight into a boss fight with the Titan. It turns out, the poorly explained Z-targeting is required to hit a load of targets dotted around the arena. I had to look it up elsewhere. You have to hold A when there’s a red bar on the arrow meter. Then you use the analogue stick to set a green bar to the exact level (you have to be really precise) in order to make a shot. The main rule for mechanics like this is to provide a safe way to get used to it before it’s required. Here, it’s the only major boss of the game. After this, you go to Mount Olympus (with a slight detour of fighting a dragon as the centaur, she has more unique enemies than Hercules) and fight the final boss , Ares, who is a regular-human like enemy with a bigger health bar. He sends a few waves of regular enemies at you, and then copies himself into three. This game was clearly rushed towards development, but while Superman 64 had some ideas that had potential, this has absolutely nothing. Hercules isn’t broken in any way (well, other than some dodgy hit detection for traps and the jump issue), which makes how bad it is even worse in a way, as it means it’s bad entirely on the merits of the game’s design, which has nothing exciting or interesting in any way. This is the worst game Titus have published on the N64. Worst Remake or remaster? I’m sure someone clever could port this game into the Ocarina of Time engine to give it better movement and combat, but even then, there would be nothing worth playing. Official ways to get the game. There’s no official way to get Hercules: The Legendary Journey. -
Sega don't seem to care about their games vanishing, they've even put brand new games exclusively behind subscriptions and haven't bothered releasing them after the exclusivity wears off. They made a Chu Chu Rocket remake that was just deleted after a short time.
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