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Archive for July, 2007

Puzznic

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Puzznic is, as could be inferred, a puzzle game. You are presented with a stack of blocks in an enclosed space, and have the ability to move a single block either left or right. Move it off the top of a stack and gravity will pull it down. If two or more blocks of the same color touch, then they disappear. The goal is to skillfully manipulate the blocks so that you eliminate them all.

This gets tougher as you progress, there will be moving platforms, odd numbers of blocks and chain reactions to complete to clear the rooms effectively. Though the game fits my criteria for a good puzzle game, it’s got a simple concept, I just couldn’t get into it. I was only able to play this game for about 15 minutes before I got so bored that I decided that I didn’t need to play it anymore. If you have an itch to play it, there are dozens of bad clones of it on the Internet for you to waste a few seconds on.

Posted in Arcade, NES | No Comments »

Jungle Hunt

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

Jungle Hunt was the game that I played the most on my Atari 400. It’s the harrowing tale of a jungle explorer who’s had his girlfriend kidnapped by natives. What to do? Why, rescue her, of course!

You start off you adventure in a tree. You must use your cunning and timing to swing from vine to vine, you miss your next vine and you fall to the ground, dead.

Make it through the vines and dive into the alligator infested river. It’s OK, you have what looks like a penknife to stab the ‘gators. Touch their teeth and you get eaten, dead.

Cross the river and you come to a very large hill that inexplicably has bouncing boulders careening down it. You suddenly have the ability to run, jump, and duck to avoid them. This is pretty important, since touching a boulder is fatal.

Make it up the mountain and you finally find the camp of the two natives that have kidnapped your ladyfriend and are going to make her into some kind of soup. You have to jump over the natives and their spears, you’ve apparently left your knife embedded in the neck of a slain alligator, then you have to jump on your girlfriend, which saves her somehow.

It’s touching, really.

Posted in Arcade, Atari 400 | No Comments »

Bubble Ghost

Monday, July 9th, 2007

You could convincingly argue that there are no new ideas in video games. Snood is a ripoff of Puzzle Bobble, Zuma is a ripoff of Puzzloop, and Tetris… well, they just call Tetris ripoffs Tetris. Bubble Ghost, however, is not quite like any game that I’ve seen before or since.

The Bubble Ghost is a ghost that lives in a castle that is particularly inhospitable to bubbles, there are pointy things, fire, electricity, and fans(?) everywhere. Shockingly, the ghost has a bubble in its possession, and even more shockingly intends to take it through a series of rooms in the castle. You know, the ones with the pointy things. The ghost, as it happens, can’t touch the bubble or anything else, the only way he can interact with his environment is by blowing. He has to blow the bubble around the impressively dangerous castle. To what end? I can’t really say. I couldn’t get through more than a couple of rooms before I gave up on this game completely. Adorable games shouldn’t be this hard!

Posted in Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Marble Blaster

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

This is an article that originally appeared on this site in July of 2005. Enjoy!

Up until I went to my local EB Games and perused their bargain games section, I had never heard of Garage Games or any of their titles. Usually this is a bad sign, one that I should shy away from the game I’m looking at at make a run for the nearest nuclear fallout shelter.

Thankfully, this time it wasn’t.

Marble Blaster is a difficult game to describe if you haven’t played it or something similar. The game is marginally similar to Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball, so if you’ve gotten some play time with one or both of those titles under your belt, you’ll have a fairly good idea what’s going on here. If not, take heart that it’s not a terribly difficult game to just pick up and start playing. The gameplay goes something like this: you control a marble and have to navigate through the varying courses to the goal. Sounds simple and it is.

Controlling the marble is relatively straightforward. It uses the standard WASD control scheme used in many many PC games. The mouse is used to control the camera and the left mouse button uses the various powerups scattered throughout the courses. Easy enough.

The game looks about as good as can be expected. The marble has swirls of color on it, presumably so you can see it move. I don’t really have anything to compare the courses floating in the sky to, of course, but the visuals are acceptably represented. There’s not a lot of detail on any of the surfaces, which helps the system requirements for this game remain fairly low. This game will likely run on pretty well anything you have that has a 3D card in it.

One area where the game is a bit lacking is the sound. Sure, the game has sound, but… Here’s some key points about it:

The music fits, but is just kind of ‘there.’ Often it’ll just blend into the background and I’ll forget it’s even there.
The marble exhibits the same sound no matter what surface it’s rolling on. All the surfaces sound suspisiously like a marble rolling across a table.
There’s an announcer (with an oddly deep voice) that announces what powerup you picked up each and every time you do so. “SUPERBOUNCE!”

So what does all that add up to? We have a game with a simple, but not completely original concept that is engaging and easy to play. A game that doesn’t look horrible and sounds decent. To me that sounds like a winner… Or at least one that was worth the $5.00.

Game Name: Marble Blaster
Platform: PC
Purchased from: EB Games
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99
One word summary: Good! I know, I’m shocked too!

Posted in PC | 1 Comment »

Donkey Kong 3

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Donkey Kong 3 is the oddball of the Donkey Kong series. Mario? Gone. Donkey Kong Jr.? Gone. Now we have Donkey Kong grabbing some vines that are surrounded by nests of of bugs, which he agitates. The bugs come out and attempt to make off with the plants at the bottom of the screen. It’s up to the new protagonist, Stanley, to use his canister of bug spray to either kill all the bugs or shoot Donkey Kong in the hinder to make him climb the vines up to the next screen.

Eventually, Donkey Kong will climb up so high that he’ll get his head stuck in a conveniently-placed bug nest and fall down square on his head.

It’s probably worth noting that this game is pretty uncommon. Few people that I talk to have heard of it, and Stanley has not appeared in any other game to date that I know of, though he was immortalized as a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Is the game any fun? It was never my cup of tea, but it might be worth playing once so you know what it’s like.

Posted in Arcade, GameBoy, NES | No Comments »

Donkey Kong Jr.

Friday, July 6th, 2007

It’s pretty obvious from the ‘ending’ of the first Donkey Kong game, that the big ape was incapacitated by being dropped off a multi-story building onto his head. Apparently Mario, being the enterprising carpenter that he was, decided to capture Donkey Kong and keep him in a series of cages in the jungle.

It’s a good thing that Donkey Kong had a son.

Donkey Kong Jr. is easily recognized by the giant ‘J’ plastered on the shirt he inexplicably wears. Donkey Kong himself would later go on to wear naught but a tie, but that’s another story. Jr.’s goal in this game is to climb a series of vines, power lines (?), and chains in an effort to break pops out of jail.

Jr. is almost as fragile as Mario was in his adventure, he can only take one hit and can’t fall more than about 3 feet without dieing. It’s pretty pathetic.

The first two stages are set in some kind of jungle. You have vines to climb, fruit to drop on your enemies, birds that drop eggs on you, typical jungle stuff. The third screen is some weird stage with electricity-themed enemies and computery-sounding background noises. I don’t really understand how this one fits in. The last screen has DK and Mario at the top of the screen, and a series of keys conveniently attached to some chains. Climb up the chains, push the chains into place (while avoiding the birds, of course) and…

Well, you’ll just have to play to find out. Or search the Internet if you’re lazy.

Posted in Arcade, Atari 2600, GameBoy, NES | No Comments »

Donkey Kong

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Everyone knows about Donkey Kong, take Mario to the top of a construction site and rescue the kidnapped damsel in distress from the giant monkey. It’s ubiquity is pretty impressive.

Its ubiquity also means that it was crammed into any system in homes, with as many concessions taken as needed to ensure that every man, woman, and child on the Earth could play this thing whenever they wanted to.

The Atari 2600 was barely capable of displaying anything that resembled… well anything. Imagine what it would look like if you tried to sculpt a monkey out of Play-Doh, though you’d never seen a monkey before and you were actually deathly allergic to said putty.

Levels? Sure, some of them are here. You get the iconic ’tilted girders’ level, you get the ‘kill the monkey by destroying the building’ level (though no actual monkey death takes place). And that’s about it. No pie factory here, folks.

This is just about the shoddiest home version of Donkey Kong that you’re going to be able to find, it’s also going to be one of the easiest. Pass it by and look for something better.

Posted in Atari 2600 | 1 Comment »

Bookworm

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

I enjoy using and learning about words. So it would make sense that I would also like games about words. Not only is Bookworm such a game, but it manages to be halfway entertaining.

Bookworm stars Lex, a worm who likes books and works in a gigantic library. He pretty much just sits on the side of the screen while you try and create words out of the Scrabble-like tiles in the main playfield. You can connect the tiles in pretty much any direction to spell words of at least three letters, kind of like Boggle. Once you’re satisfied with your word, the tiles disappear (Lex eats them) and more fall from the sky to take their place.

Occasionally some ‘flaming tiles’ will appear that will burn through the regular tiles every time you spell a word. If one of these tiles hits the bottom of the field, then the library burns to the ground and it’s game over. Seems a bit harsh, but nonetheless that’s the way things go.

The game is ridiculously easy to just pick up and play, and teaches you quite a few new words. Trying to randomly put some tiles together, I spelled ‘qua’ which, unfortunately, has yet to make it into my working lexicon.

Posted in GameBoy, PC | 2 Comments »

Tapper

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

For a game that I played somewhat extensively as a youngster, Tapper hasn’t aged very well.

You take charge of a bartender in a series of bars, each with multiple… bars. Each bar in each bar has a door at the end that lets in thirsty customers. It’s your job to get them a cool, frosty mug of a beverage (either beer or root beer, depending on the version). You draw the draft and fling the glass down the counter where a customer will catch it and be knocked back a bit. Your goal is to fling the drinks down the counters and knock the patrons out of the bar, satisfied with drink in hand. If you break a glass, by either throwing it when nobody can get it or by failing to catch an empty glass thrown back at you, you lose. Allow a patron to get to the end of the bar without throwing them a drink, then you lose.

The game gets pretty hectic relatively quickly, so hectic that I end up losing by breaking glasses more than anything else. Mostly because some patron would finish off his first and then just sit there for a couple of seconds, pondering the aftertaste, while the new drink I threw at him sails right past.

Posted in Arcade, Commodore 64, GameCube, N64 | No Comments »

Rayman Arena

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

Today’s post is from one of the first games that I reviewed on the original version of this site. It was part of the genesis of the site itself. Enjoy!

Rayman. Wow. I don’t even know where to begin. My only experience with the Rayman franchise is on the demo disc that came with my Dreamcast. From that experience, I thought that the series could do at least one thing well: look really good.

The Good

Rayman Arena has been or will be released for just about every modern console on the planet. All the different versions, I imagine, are pretty close to the same, but I’m not going to compare them. I’d have to buy them all, or at the very least rent them all, and that’s not on the agenda. I checked it twice to be sure.

Rayman Arena plays as a pretty solid game. There are two modes to choose from: Race and Battle. In Race mode, you take control of one of the trademarked characters from the Rayman 2 universe and run around a track. The first to make 3 laps wins. Easy. I only played the first 3 race stages. By myself. The races themselves are nicely done. I enjoyed playnig the stages on practice mode, but got spanked when I tried to play against the computer. Battle mode is a little different. It’s 1v1 (or 1v1v1 [or 1v1v1v1]) with one of 3 goals: Grab the shiny thing (Lums), Beat Each Other Senseless, and Hold on to the Shiny Thing for as Long as Possible. Grab the Shiny Thing is pretty straightforward. The only weapon you get is the ice…something. It freezes your enemies in place for a few seconds. It’s borderline fun. Beat Each Other Senseless is a little more action oriented. Don’t go into the match expecting Unreal Tournament Deathmatch, and you won’t be horribly disappointed. Each of the players gets 5 ‘life points.’ Knock off all 5 of them and you get a point. 5 points wins. There’s weapons all over the place, but you won’t know what they are until you actually pick them up, so you will have a hard time staying away from the lamer items. I got bored before I played HOTTSTFALAP, so here’s a picture of me waking up at a LAN party.

Rayman Arena PC looks pretty decent. The game has modest enough system requirements that it will run well on a lot of computers. I poked around the menus for several minutes and couldn’t find a place to jack up the level of detail in the game. But as it is, it didn’t make my eyes run away in terror, so it’s acceptable.
The box for the game claims that it supports LAN play, but I couldn’t convince anyone else to get a copy, so I’ll just have to take the box’s word for it.

The Not So Good
Rayman Arena has an inconsistant control setup. why the designers decided that there should be one setup for Race and another for Battle is beyond me. I get used to one scheme, and then have to switch it up for the other mode. The designers were gracious enough to let you configure the controls to your liking, but using the mouse+keyboard combo, I couldn’t get them both to the same.

Rayman Arena also comes on two discs. No big deal, right? The copy-protection scheme, however introduces a whole host of headaches. Well, really just one. When you start the game, it does the obligatory CD check. But here’s the fun part: you have to put in both CDs. You can reduce this annoyance by putting the second CD in a second drive, but if you don’t have one… well, just get used to switching them out.

The Verdict

Overall, this game is not too bad. I’m sure if you had some friends with this game at a LAN party somewhere, it’d be a great way to pass a few minutes. I’ve played worse games. For that matter, I own worse games.

Title:Rayman Arena
By:Ubi Soft
Price I paid for it: $3.31
Price I would be willing to pay for it now: $3
Grade: 7 out of 10. This game would be a world better with a unified control shceme and without that annoying CD check.

Posted in PC | No Comments »

The Closeout Warrior