Text Review: Pocky & Rocky

Pocky & Rocky

SNES

Pocky & Rocky for the Super Nintendo is one of those games where you might look at the box art and decide not to play it. I mean, come on, the boxart features a little girl with an oddly shaped head and a raccoon, sorry tanuki, with eyes bigger than leopard's testicles. You were taught to never judge a book bye its cover, but unfortunately, with this game you probably did judge this "book" by its "cover." Probably because your parents beat you when you were a child, but I am not 100% sure.

In this game for, as indicated by the box art, you could play as Pocky, a stereotypical Asian girl, who according to wikipedia is a miko, (princess) that throws these playing cards at people. Or, you can decide to be normal and pick the far superior character*, Rocky. Now, Rocky doesn't throw something stupid, he throws leaves. Fucking leaves! I guess they are tipped with razor blades or something.

The story about this game doesn't exactly the greatest story, but then again, what game on the SNES apart from the RPG games head a good story? None. However, the story of this game is that Rocky's group of gang bangers the "Nopino Goblins" are acting up, and its to Pocky & Rocky to figure out why! Yay! Crazy goblins!

The boss of the second level. A crazy bitch that spits fire at you.

So onto the game play. Lemme tell you that later on, this game becomes actually pretty difficult. Not, "holy crap I will wet myself because I cannot beat this game!" but closer to "whew, this game is pretty tough, I might have to take a break." That is just something interesting that you might want to know. Natsume, being the great company that it is, also decided to add co-op to this game. Lemme tell you, apart from Contra 3 and this game there are practically no other games I will play in co-op. I don't know why. That's just the way it is, and if you don't like that, you can set your pubes on fire and eat them...or something, do whatever you want. I don't actually care...

The buttons for this game are all really solid and it controls real well. Never once when I was playing this game was I blaming deaths on the controls. There is you standard move with the d-pad, attack, then there is a move that has a double use factor. You can use it either a really fast melee attack, our you can use it to repel all bullets flying at you. You will be become really acquainted with this move because, if you don't want to die a lot, you need to learn to love it...a lot. Sort of like a cute rabbit, except its not alive. One weird game play choice Natsume decided to go with was to make a regular attack button, and then a rapid fire attack button. The rapid fire bullets do the same damage, its just they come out even faster, so, you will probably never ever use the regular attack function. If someone knows the difference or why they did this, please, please e-mail me at rpgdude17@gmail.com

All in all I would recommend this as a solid buy. You can get it for around $15, but I'm not sure any of you who would read this would actually buy it. The co-op is great, and really adds to the fun factor of this game. If you really don't like the more "cutesy" types of games though, you might want to stray away from this title.

*There is no actual difference, but Rocky is far cooler. Like he will butt-rape your aunt without a problem cooler.