Hard to ever go wrong with a
sealed game, especially if it's one you really love from your past. And, I know this is shocking to some, but I just love opening sealed stuff. It's like I'm an archeologist that has discovered a new tomb deep under the Sphinx. I can't wait to get in there (and take pictures along the way).
This is the kind of game that, for me, I'd only want to play 2-player I'm pretty sure. And that's not a bad thing. I own Double Dragon II and it's a total blast to play with my son. But not solo. I'm willing to bet your Famicom's version would blow this one away mainly due to the lack of controls on the Amiga joystick. But from what I've seen, this game should
look really cool.
I have a pretty well-oiled system down in place for deciding which games to hunt to add to my collection.
As our own
Game Library is less than 100 games (the way I do them it is very time intensive) I need to carefully research each game that hits my radar before 1) deciding to buy it and 2) determining if it is worthy of a review. Time is precious, so I mainly only focus on games I'm expecting to be pretty good.
The first thing I do when I see a game on Ebay that piques my interest is open a new window for LemonAmiga. Next, I search for the game. Ninety-nine times out of 100 it's going to be there.
Now, please don't take this the wrong way because I LOVE our European brothers and sisters, but - for my process - I then look at the game's
community score with a massive grain of salt. Over half of the members on Lemon are from European countries and I recognize that their machines and experiences were simply different that those in North America
in some cases. If a game is a sim or action based, some games simply didn't play the same (or as well) as they did on NTSC machines, and sometimes the scores reflect that reality. But they wouldn't necessarily reflect ours - where the game may have been designed and developed.
So I don't count those issues against games the way most using the score feature on Lemon might. Also, many of the US-based classics are not rated as often as I'd expect. For example, if a game made in the US in the 80's really required the manual to play, I notice those games are often rated far less or rated rather poorly. But, if you actually
owned the game in the US, oftentimes the game might be considered a classic this side of the pond and be a truly kick ass experience.
It requires analysis. You can't take it all at face value. But I do rely on a combination of the score and comments as one of the key factors in my decision making with the caveats explained above.
Over time, I hope AmigaLove will become a similarly useful resource for the "Top Games" on the platform. I have no delusions of ever logging thousands of games, though. We're trying to do full-on reviews, not just screenshots and data points. But I do value their scores and comments, warts and all. And Lemon is a gold mine for helping me surface some gems I've never heard of before - games I should and eventually will get to know.