![]() I cruised through the first two, marveling again at the challenge and simplicity of the vibrating-crystal puzzle in the third level - and by the time I hit my first failed run at "Sky Tides", I was developing some serious respect for my twelve-year-old self for having the tenacity to beat the game. Although Ecco II is my go-to has-everything game, if you put a gun to my head I'd still have a hard time telling you whether it, Phantasy Star IV, or Sid Meier's Pirates! Gold should be declared king of the Sega Genesis.īut in spite of all that, I couldn't help but marvel at how really rather absurdly difficult even the first few levels of Ecco II are. How the team managed it in the wild west of this still relatively early console development I have no idea, but there is something magical about this period in game history, something that produced genius. And riding that knife-edge of balance and challenge is wickedly difficult. You never, at any point, truly feel that you can't win. This is a delicate, stunning balance, an invisibly momentous achievement - the challenge pushes you to your absolute limit, but with every play you feel yourself getting just a little bit closer. The very best games are the ones that are brutally hard but don't allow you to put them down. Realization #2 is perhaps what Tides of Time in particular is so well-known for, which is unfortunate. This time around I was struck by two things: 1) the flow and progression of this game is actually completely brilliant 2) how in the world did they get away with shipping a game that was so incredibly hard? I've played this game many times (though admittedly rarely all the way through). I unpacked the Sega Genesis (not my family's original - a used system picked up on ebay a couple of years ago) for a little book launch party this past weekend, and as inevitably happens when I'm left alone with a Genesis, when the party was over I fired up Ecco II: The Tides of Time. ![]() And, like most exceptionally well made video games, it contains the secrets of the universe. What makes Ecco really stand out, though, is that as a game it was so phenomenally well crafted. ![]() The record burned through our hominid brains, a universal call for the sacred mysteries of nature, and it's a short hop from there to the illustrative work of Robert Wyland, whose depictions linking whales and far galaxies look like concept art for Ecco. Dolphins and whales in general were high on the mainstream consciousness through the 70s and 80s, with Songs of the Humpback Whale debuting in 1970, the first human-recorded sounds of whale communication, and going on to sell a multiplatinum thirty million copies in the following decades. Produced by Ed Annunziata and developed by the international Novotrade International team (later Appaloosa Interactive), the first Ecco the Dolphin came out early in the age of Sega Genesis. Originally posted at Looking for answers? Dianetics, The Secret, The Seven Deadly Foibles of Unrepentant Sociopaths? The revelations that you seek are in Ecco the Dolphin.
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