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Archive for May, 2007

Mr. Do!

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Mr. Do! is a clown who apparently has a thing for cherries. Cherries that are underground in groups of eight. and that are guarded by these weird red monsters with big heads (evidently called ‘Mini Dinos’).

Mr. Do! is a fantastic digger. He can create paths in the dirt with relative ease in any of the four cardinal directions, but he has to take care to make them both easy enough to get the cherries (if you can get an entire group of eight all at once, you get extra points) and convoluted enough to befuddle the unicorns that are on your trail. You could use the inexplicably-placed gigantic apples to strategically crush them, or you could throw a ball at them (he’s a clown, of course he has a ball (sorry)).

If you collect all the cherries in the stage, you move on to the next one. Clear enough stages and you get a goofy little cutscene. The first cutscene appears after you clear three rounds… I’ve never managed to get to a cutscene, but it should be noted that I haven’t played the game since I was less than a dozen years old.

Posted in Arcade | 1 Comment »

Pole Position

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

If you have a female’s voice that sounds like it’s coming out of a blown speaker that’s underwater and covered with that filler they put in stuffed animals saying, “PREPARE TO QUALIFY!” then you know you’re playing Pole Position.

Pole Position is technically a racing game, even though you’re only really racing against the clock and the score counter. You pick your track from one of the three difficulties, (more difficult = more curves, natch), and race around until you run out of time. You have a super high performance car with super simple controls: gas, brake, steering wheel, low gear and high gear. You get more time by finishing laps, and you lose time by touching anything that’s not ground. You lose time by touching another car or a billboard and having your car explode into a giant fireball. You’ll respawn without a scratch, but you lose your momentum and precious Time Units tick away. I’m never sure where these other cars came from. You’re alone at the starting line, but as you motor along the track, you’ll come across other drone racers that putter along right in your path at about 25 km/h (yes, it’s in metric).

It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s before I was good enough to actually finish more than zero laps around the course, and I still can’t manage to get the high score on the machine. I suppose it might be time to give this game up. Mostly because I can’t find it in an arcade anywhere.

Posted in Arcade | No Comments »

Kid Niki: Radical Ninja

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

Ninja School… will help you! This is the cryptic beginning to the almost as cryptic game Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. Kid Niki, who is affiliated with the aforementioned Ninja school, takes his Spinning Sword and takes on a strange quest to run to the right and destroy Evil. Evil with uncreative names like Death Breath who can blow at you really hard, Spike who has lots of spikes, and the Green Grub who is a giant green grub.

While you’re running to the right, you are constantly assaulted by gaggles of enemies coming from every direction. Thankfully, one hit will kill them, but to be fair, one hit from them will kill you, too.

But all that’s OK because you have the inexplicable Spinning Sword. The Spinning Sword doesn’t spin in the direction you’re probably thinking it does. Its motion kind of looks like a lawn mower blade, which I’d be pretty scared of if I was in the enemy Ninja army.

The game is a quirky kind of fun, but the fragility of your character seriously ramps up the difficulty. You will need excellent reflexes to succeed at whatever it is you’re doing. “Help(ing) you”, apparently.

Posted in Arcade, NES | No Comments »

Solomon’s Key

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

Dana the wizard is on a quest. He’s out to get Solomon’s Key. It’s located somewhere in a mountain filled with rooms. Likely in the very last and furthest room from his starting point.

Since Dana is a wizard, he’s both frail and occasionally powerful. He possesses the fantastic abilities to jump, create and destroy blocks, to destroy said blocks by bashing them with his head, and very rarely can throw a fireball. Unfortunately, for all of his ferocity, he will die if he’s so much as touched by an enemy operative. This is Bad News indeed for our hero, as there are spots in certain levels that will provide an endless stream of monsters.

Your goal in each room is to: 1. Get the key, 2. Go through the open door, 3. Not die. Unfortunately you can die by either touching a monster or letting your ‘life’ run out (it’s a glorified timer).

After you clear all of the rooms, you will gain Solomon’s Key and something will happen. What that is, I don’t know. I couldn’t make it more than about halfway through the game.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

The Game of Life

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Surely you’ve heard of the board game The Game of Life. It’s the board that simulates all the fun of living, working, having kids, and retiring, without the tedium of actually waiting for several dozen years while your actual life plays out.

The video game adaptation of this game is pretty true to the board game version, with the added bonus of there are less pieces to lose. You spin the wheel, drive forward the requisite number of spaces, have some life event happen (you have another daughter!, your house burns down!, etc.), you adjust your funds, and you steadily head for retirement. All the while a slightly cheesy (and very annoying) announcer emcees the whole deal. Pretty standard stuff.

However, unlike the board game (and completely inexplicably) there are little arcadey challenges that occasionally pop up. These completely break the flow of the game, and aren’t really more than tangentially related to the main game. Thankfully you do have the option to turn them off (I think), making it a $20 or so version of a $12 or so game that you can play on your television. What progress!

Posted in PC, Playstation | No Comments »

Puzzle Bobble

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

Puzzle Bobble (known in some parts as Bust-a-Move) is not your typical puzzle game, instead of building up a puzzle from the bottom of the screen, you have worry about a puzzle coming from the top of the screen, and once it crosses the bottom, you lose. Puzzle Bobble stars the dinosaurs from Bubble-Bobble along with some supporting characters. Their mission is to shoot the colored bubbles at the advancing wall of colored bubbles, with the eventual goal of lining up three or more to pop them. Why? It differs from game to game, but it’s usually to drive off the forces of evil. How does besting an evildoer in a puzzle game save his planet? I don’t know. I try to not wonder about these things and just play the game.

Posted in Arcade, N64, PC | No Comments »

Pac-Man

Saturday, May 5th, 2007

Nearly everyone who’s ever heard of video games has heard of Pac-Man. There have been sequels, ports, and spinoffs for just about every video game system ever created, and this ubiquity virtually guaranteed that no matter what video game system you owned that you’d never be very far away from Hot Dot Munching Action ™. Unfortunately it also guaranteed that not all of the ports would be, shall we say, good.

The Atari 2600 was especially suited to mediocre ports of good games, and Pac-Man was no exception. The game was superficially identical to its arcade namesake: it had one unchanging level, it had ghost-shaped monsters, the main character is a roundish disc that must eat everything in the maze to progress.

There weren’t too many problems with this game. The maze layout was completely different than the arcade version, there were only three ghost-shaped monsters instead of four (and they were all the same color), the dots looked more like wafers, the sounds were completely wrong, there were no fruit-bonuses (but there were some bonus square-shaped things), the escape tunnels were on the top and bottom of the screen instead of the left and right sides, there were no acts between levels, and the game was ridiculously easy.

But otherwise it was completely identical.

Posted in Atari 2600 | 2 Comments »

Bejeweled

Friday, May 4th, 2007

I do not like Bejeweled in the slightest, and I can’t really fathom why some people do. Bejeweled is purportedly a puzzle game, but it’s a very basic one. You have a grid, and this grid is full of jewels of various colors. You can swap two jewels either horizontally or vertically, if and only if (and this key) they complete a grouping of at least three like-colored jewels in a row. If it doesn’t make a match, too bad! You don’t get to make that move. If it does, then great! They disappear and new jewels fall from the sky to take their place.

My biggest beef with the game is that it’s nigh-impossible to plan for anything. Since semi-random pieces fall from the sky, two things tend to happen when I play: 1. in the first couple of levels I clear the whole stage from making one or two clears, the pieces that drop in create an accidental Super Combo. 2. The later levels get next to impossible, mostly due to the fact that all of the clears are gone and the pieces that drop from the sky are no longer able to be cleared easily without a ludicrous amount of forethought. Exacerbating the problem is that if you are idle for more than about 20 seconds, pondering your next move, is that the game will show you a legal move, presumably to kickstart your brain if you can’t find the next match. The only problem that I found is that it’s usually the wrong move to make, ensuring that my game will be thankfully short.

All of that’s a shame, because I do enjoy a good puzzle game, and the popularity of Bejeweled made me think that it might be a good game. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Posted in Mobile, PC | No Comments »

Hook

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

I’m sure that there are several people out there, perhaps up to a dozen, who will remember Hook as that crappy movie from the 90’s that featured a grown-up Peter Pan. Slightly fewer people will remember the movie tie-in.

And for good reason.

Hook (the game, I never actually saw the movie) is terrible. It was so horrendously bad that I couldn’t make it past two stages before I gave up completely. You take control of Peter Pan (you know, that kid that can fly) and have to go through the various stages that comprise the island in search of various items. Presumably this is for the climactic showdown with Captain Hook, the game’s titular character. In the movie, Peter Pan was played by Robin Williams. In this game, Peter Pan looks more like Ben Stiller dressed up as Eddie Munster.

Your Pan is well-armed to fight off the gigantic insects, wild animals, and pirates wielding swords that are as long as they are tall. He has a dagger. A dagger that’s not so much a ‘dagger’ as it is a ‘dulled letter opener’. When you ‘thrust’ the ‘dagger’ at the ‘enemies’ you really just kind of show them your letter opener. You’re not a threat to much of anything other than the delicious food that is scattered around the island for one reason or another.

I managed to collect the requisite amount of Quest Items in the first stage of the game to move on to the second. Right after immediately I got frustrated at the inability of Peter to not crash headlong into every sharp thing he walked by. About halfway through stage 2 I began to walk directly into the pirates’ scimitars, and then decided to never play this game again.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Plaque Attack

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

Most of the games for the Atari 2600 were some degree of odd, and Plaque Attack has got to be one of the oddest.

Plaque Attack takes place inside a gigantic mouth with eight gigantic teeth. Your job, as an impossibly-tiny tube of toothpaste is to stop the squadrons of flying foodstuffs from decaying and eventually destroying your beautiful teeth.

Just like real life food, the flying foodstuffs in this game can be brought down and completely obliterated by shots from your tube of toothpaste. If you miss shooting the food, it gloms to a tooth, and will eventually destroy it.

I only played this game one time, and at the time thought it was pretty lame. It was way too easy, and the concept was just silly (and not ’silly in a good way’). However, I now know that it’s a semi-rare game that is sought after by collectors. I can’t fathom why they would want it. I thought it was terrible when I was eight years old, and odds are fairly slim that it’s gotten better with age.

Posted in Atari 2600 | No Comments »

The Closeout Warrior