One of the more worthwhile candidates from recent years for a Noclip documentary. I can't help but want to peer behind the veil and see how they published and repaired a bad dump of a missing & presumed dead arcade project from 1992. Clockwork Aquario hit my aesthetic taste just right, so I spent a couple of years after hearing of it praying to jeezus for a chance to see it in action; it's a rare treat for something like this to come out at all.
Not much to write home about here. It's okay! Studio Westone's DNA is plenty apparent in Clockwork Aquario's design, very much feeling like a Wonder Boy game with an arcade platformer spin. Chunky sprites and heft to the character movement as you break and throw stuff. It does some fun stuff with its scoring system that encourages greed and dastardly deeds, but on the whole, it's an alarmingly easy game. Vague memorisation of level layouts in its short 20-min runtime will have you chugging invincibility powerups effortlessly, and it even gives you them during boss fights which totally trivialises them. The difficulty settings at the frontend of this release sadly only seem to change your continue count, rather than anything gameplay oriented... vvvv little meat on this bone. Clockwork Aquario particularly shines in its 2-player co-op - some much-needed chaos is filled in by you bouncing off of / getting thrown around the screen by your partner.
Loathe as I am to admit, the urchins at the ""location test" (toesucker convention) were probably spitting a few kernels of truth in their assessment that ultimately buried this game for thirty years; Clockwork Aquario only barely works - and why would I pour coins into a middling platformer when the fightgame scene is blowing up? It's, on the whole, an excellent thing that the gaming landscape has shifted to a point where it's viable to restore and publish niche treasures like this, and I'm very happy for the closure and cute sprites.
Not much to write home about here. It's okay! Studio Westone's DNA is plenty apparent in Clockwork Aquario's design, very much feeling like a Wonder Boy game with an arcade platformer spin. Chunky sprites and heft to the character movement as you break and throw stuff. It does some fun stuff with its scoring system that encourages greed and dastardly deeds, but on the whole, it's an alarmingly easy game. Vague memorisation of level layouts in its short 20-min runtime will have you chugging invincibility powerups effortlessly, and it even gives you them during boss fights which totally trivialises them. The difficulty settings at the frontend of this release sadly only seem to change your continue count, rather than anything gameplay oriented... vvvv little meat on this bone. Clockwork Aquario particularly shines in its 2-player co-op - some much-needed chaos is filled in by you bouncing off of / getting thrown around the screen by your partner.
Loathe as I am to admit, the urchins at the ""location test" (toesucker convention) were probably spitting a few kernels of truth in their assessment that ultimately buried this game for thirty years; Clockwork Aquario only barely works - and why would I pour coins into a middling platformer when the fightgame scene is blowing up? It's, on the whole, an excellent thing that the gaming landscape has shifted to a point where it's viable to restore and publish niche treasures like this, and I'm very happy for the closure and cute sprites.
MagneticBurn
1 year ago