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Gaming is such a great hobby to me. You can buy a game you never heard of and who knows if it's any good? I picked up a game called "Stone Protectors" one day and so I went home to play it. To my astonishment, the game was pretty decent. Years later, I end up making this site and I do more research on the companies involved with the game...and you know what I find? A whole boatload of interesting information I never knew before! I had heard from GameFAQs SNES forum buddies that the game had toys made after it, but it also has Genesis boxart (a prototype might exist) and a cartoon as well! On top of this, I learned things about Ace Novelty and Eurocom. It's always a good thing to learn more about a game than you would expect. You can find more info at this link, but let me give you the simple story rundown. Princess Opal of Mythrandir is in danger because Zok, evil fiend that he is, seeks the power of the "Great Crystal". To prevent Zok from having it, she splits the legendary Great Crystal into six pieces. Zok manages to get one piece, but the other five go to the heroes of the game. They are Clifford, Cornelius, Chester, Angus, and Max (Maxwell). They become the Stone Protectors and soon head out to save Princess Opal.
The graphics are excellent for the most part. The game moves fluidly, the enemies are fairly detailed, the animation is decent and the environments are quite detailed. If you are in a cave, you see the bats flutter around near the ceiling and water drops fall to the rocky cave floor. The first stage has excellent yet simple snow effects. The game uses some cool effects, especially in the opening intro. As the evil saurians (name of the evil fools that support Zok) fire their laser guns down the hall, you can see the light from their guns brighten up their faces. Niiiiiiiiice. As a whole, the game looks nice. The music has an acquired taste. The sound quality is clear, so it's not like the music is coming out of a can or anything. That's good to know...however, some tracks can be somewhat repetitive. The music is meant to sound like something coming out of some mid 80's, early 90's kind of cartoon and it succeeds. Since you play with a rock band group, the music is obviously geared to those who like rock/metal music. The music is fair, though the opening theme is good and I dig it. The sound isn't overly engaging, but it should be able to hold your attention while you play the game.
You get to choose from five heroes who not only have different strengths and weaknesses, but they also fight differently too. As you progress through the stages, the game will tell you how to do a new technique for the character(s) you happen to be using and the techniques are unique to the character(s) you happen to pick. You can also attack with the A, X, and Y buttons which makes fighting techniques wide and varied. You can do a charge attack with each of those buttons too that vary in usefulness (and take damage off of your character to use). You can also pick up various objects when you come across them, but each character has an item that they can't pick up and that item depends on the character you are using. By pressing and holding A+Y at the same time, you can make the character enter a blocking stance and the game has 10 stages and is long for a beat-em-up. The challenge is fair, the game has a "tournament" mode, and the main game is two player cooperative (you can pair with the CPU if you want). The game also has a different ending on a high difficulty setting (five stars).
The game offers a lot, but the problem most people find with the game is that it is too long for a beat-em-up. On top of this, you fight a lot of the same enemies throughout the game and because of this, the game feels a bit repetitive. The "tournament" mode is nothing more than a simple fighting game mode that lacks any real depth. However, since the tournament mode isn't the focus of the game, it is acceptable. The game is also very affordable in most circumstances (complete copies range greatly). If you are looking to try a different beat-em-up, Stone Protectors may be what you are looking for.
- Written by Vyse the determined - |
