The Closeout Warrior

Do you know how to play horseshoes? If you went to my elementary school you would. Apparently people play this well after they’ve graduated from holding the edge of a parachute and walking around in a circle. Who knew?

Shuuz is an arcade game of horseshoes. You take your position, roll the trackball back and then forward to kind of simulate the motions of actually tossing horseshoes, and then points are awarded. Score more than your opponent and you win.

Yee haw.

Yeah, it’s every bit as fun as it sounds. Once. After that you’re going to be finding something else to waste quarters on. It’s not like a real game of horseshoes is all that fun either, so as they say, your mileage may vary.

If you’re like me and couldn’t balance on a skateboard if your feet were glued to it and it was the size of a small Japanese car, then you might have given up all hope of making it at the X-Games. You then might have gone to your local arcade and tried Top Skater. Because just like playing Dance Dance Revolution isn’t really dancing and playing Guitar Hero isn’t really playing the guitar, Top Skater isn’t really like riding a skateboard, but you can pretend that it is.

The machine is just a giant platform with a skateboard bolted to it. A skateboard that you can move left and right or tilt forward or back. Your guy moves along the screen all on his own, and you get to steer with your horribly uneducated feet. Your goal is to go up ramps and do tricks to gain speed. You do tricks by waggling the board around while your character’s in midair. It doesn’t really matter what you do, your guy will just keep doing tricks as you wiggle the board around a bit. The only thing to be wary of is that you need to make sure your angle of entry is perpendicular to the ramp when you land. Otherwise you’re going to be eating the ramp, and losing speed.

The game was ridiculously hard to control, and sticking the landings was nigh impossible. On top of all of that, the game was eight tokens to play (roughly the equivalent of $2). And when you’re first starting out, that’s a pretty big investment for about 5 minutes’ play time. Eventually, since nobody was really playing it, the cost went down to a reasonable level, but it was still not the best investment in the room. Partially because of the extremely fat people, the kind that make dimples in the sidewalk as the waddle past, would try their hand at the game. They’d barely fit between the retaining bars, and the machine would groan in agony as they tried (and failed) to make any significant progress.

Shortly after it broke, it went away forever.

As a rule, I don’t really get into golf games. I just typically don’t find the video versions very exciting.

Golden Tee is a little different, and a bit more interactive than most golf games, so maybe that’s why I played it as much as I did. And when I say ‘interactive’ I mean that the control is a little more… involved than your typical golf game.

In a regular golf game you pick your club, press a button to start your swing, press another button (or the same button) with the right timing to dictate the power. And your golfer does his thing. In this one, you have a trackball, and your motion with it dictates the swing. You roll the ball real fast, and your golfer hits the ball harder. It’s such a simple and intuitive thing that I can hardly believe it took so long to make it into a game.

The main problem I had was that you had to pay through the nose to play this game. In the arcades I went to, you spent three tokens (or quarters) for three holes for each person playing. This meant spending a lot of money just to see the whole course, even with discounts for buying multiple holes.

But that didn’t stop me from playing the first three holes of each course over and over again. Out of the dozens of games I played, I don’t think I ever finished a round. I just didn’t have the desire to pump that much coinage into the machine. But I did manage to get a couple of ‘best shots’ in the demo mode, so that’s got to count for something, right?

Right?

Sports games here you have to be the fastest or jump the highest are kind of hard to translate to a medium where you have to press buttons and waggle joysticks. So you mostly end up trying to press the buttons as fast as you can. And if you can press the buttons the fastest, then you win. Though, with the pulled muscles you’re going to get playing games like this, there are really no winners.

So you, and up to one other person compete in a bunch of athletic events by mashing the buttons as fast as you can. Playing this game made my forearms ache mightily. Your stamina and fortitude will be tested. Play it enough and you might get Popeye-style forearms, but I didn’t play it that long.

I do not understand Kageki. It just appeared one day at one of my local arcades. I watched the attract mode, and couldn’t really tell what it was about, but felt oddly compelled to play it. What I do know is that you play some kind of brawler, and you have to beat up a series of people in a gang. When you beat one, the next one comes in, throws the one that lost in the sewer, and then you have to fight him. This apparently continues until you can beat everyone. Then you win!

The problem I had with this game is that I couldn’t hit anyone more than once or twice before the computer completely unloaded on me, knocking me out almost instantly. Watch this video to see what I’m talking about. He turns off the invincibility cheat toward the end.

I was only stupid enough to play this game two times. One to figure out what it was, and one more time to convince myself that the controls weren’t as bad as I thought. This is the kind of game that I just don’t want to spend the time to get good at, if such a thing is possible.

Until very recently I had no idea that Burger Time, the game about walking across giant burgers and walking weiners, had any sequels. It turns out that it did, and that the sequels were nothing special.

Take Super Burger Time, for example. It’s just like the original game, but more. More levels, more bigger burgers, more detailed characters, and more weapons to choose from. A pepper shaker’s just boring, you know?

Unfortunately for me, I found this game to be just slightly less boring than its predecessor. I was bored after the first boss fight (yes, a boss fight in a game about building giant burgers) and decided that I didn’t need to play this game anymore.

Capcom really loves their fighting game franchises, and not without reason. I would bet money that if I say ‘Street Fighter’ and ‘Ryu’ that you know who I’m talking about. So it makes a certain amount of sense that the more popular characters from the more popular franchises would make it into other games, right?

Right?

Well, they do. In the Super Puzzle Fighter series, for example. This game is kind of like an amalgam of Tetris, and Kirby’s Avalanche. Multi-colored gems drop from the sky and you have to arrange them optimally so that like-colored gems touch each other. Then you have to use sparkly gems to make the normal gems disappear. Doing so will send garbage blocks to your opponent. Your goal is to make your opponent’s stack reach to the top of the screen, and then you win! Like most puzzlers, this game is easier to show than it is to tell how to play so…

Like a lot of puzzle games, I like it, but I’m not very good at it. Unfortunately for me, the computer is very good at it, and I did a lot of losing. I would have really liked to have had someone to crest the learning curve with, but it was not to be. And since there’s no single-player mode, and no practice mode, I gave it up pretty quickly.