All Together Then: Weirdo Spyro, Part 3

Wrapping up the series with a roar

Right. I promised I'd have a look at the other console Spyros and here I am, look, I'm doing it. As they're not Game Gear games I cannot remain especially interested, but I wil do my level best to be fair. Unfortunately most of these games are... kinda not good, so it will be tough to be neutral about them. Wait, who says I have to be neutral? Let's slag off some crappy games, baby!

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Imagine, if you will, Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon. See how you are now smiling? How you are going "Mmm, yes! Spyro 3! What a great game!" Okay, stay with me. What I want now is for you to... imagine if instead of having a huge collection of bright, fun and action-packed levels, it had a mere eight absolutely rubbish ones. Also it ran awfully with constant framerate problems, controlled like an absolute dog... you get the idea. Anyway, obviously that's Enter the Dragonfly, it's a load of wretched old shit with only a single saving grace - the typically good Stewart Copeland soundtrack. Otherwise just leave it, mate. Just let it sit there and think about what it did. You truly do not need to play this one. It will only sour your positive memories of the series with its half-baked facsimile of what came before. Do yourself a favour and just leave it.

Spyro: A Hero's Tail

This, on the other hand, is awwwright. Not any kind of massive departure, but structurally interesting in that you're using the gems you find to actually buy stuff. Okay, yes, you bought stuff from that bastard Moneybags in previous games, but that was essentially lock-and-key design. Here, you're buying power-ups and other items you can make use of, such as single-use lockpicks. For, erm, keys. Look, it's different, alright? They made Moneybags into a sort of unfortunate Arabian Nights street merchant stereotype, so you've got to put up with that now, but the gameplay is quite fun and leagues better than Enter the Dragonfly. As is syphillis. It's still a nice-looking game, with a similarly iconoclastic attitude to Crash Twinsanity, though I found the meta-humour here to be quite grating, especially since you can't skip conversations. The voice acting is good, mind.

The Legend of Spyro (series)

Ah, see, here. This covers a lot of games, some I've already talked about, but the big console versions are worth mentioning. The problem is that the first two, A New Beginning and The Eternal Night, can charitably be described as "tedious". They're sort of the Spyro equivalent of the awful Crash of the Titans games, focusing on repetitive enemy thwacking over doing anything of any actual interest. Exploration is gone. Collecting is gone. It's all been re-rendered with a moodier, Lord of the Rings-ish tone, one that some people will get a kick out of. Best of the lot is the final one, Dawn of the Dragon, which rather bravely "ages up" Spyro and Cynder, giving them the ability to freely fly in many circumstances, and angling the combat towards the much-more-liberating likes of God of War rather than the rinse they were tossing off before. Anyway, yeah, ignore the first two (or just watch the story on YouTube), but try and play the finale. Warning: the 360 version is, I believe, rather rare and expensive.

Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure

Effectively the death knell for Spyro (until the Reignited Trilogy), Skylanders wasn't even really about the little purple twat. Instead, you'd have to buy a load of poxy action figures that don't even move, in order to place them on a "Portal of Power" (I don't write this shit) to transfer them from REAL LIFE into THE GAME. I know - absolutely mad stuff. The game itself is a quasi-top-down Gauntlet sort of business that is unutterably tedious unless you play it with a friend in which case it's just somewhat tedious, because the whole thing is over in a matter of hours. It's rubbish to be honest, you can't even jump, Imagine that, a Spyro who can't glide, can't even get off the ground without stepping on a "jump pad". A ludicrous display, but a fitting way to wrap up this series of Spyro blogs, no? Unless, of course, I cover the Reignited Trilogy. Which I probably won't. Alright, cheers.