The Closeout Warrior

Like a lot of games in my local arcade, The House of the Dead was turned down so low that I couldn’t really follow what passed for a story. I have a hunch, though, that it didn’t really matter. All I know is that two ‘agents’ (‘Rogan’ and ‘G’) have to fight their way in to a mansion, where they have to stop mad scientist Curien. This Curien fellow is apparently some kind of crazy biologist and he’s experimenting on people and other life forms, turning them into zombies, and creating other abominations.

You run through the courtyard and eventually through the lab(s) killing… er… re-killing everything that moves. You do this with your handy-dandy light gun.

The game is a rail-shooter, but with a bit of a twist. Depending on what you hit (i.e. how well your aim and reflexes are) you can go down different paths. Even though they all lead to the same end, they do give you a slightly different experience on your playthrough.

The only problem that I had is that my aim’s not that good. The game requires pinpoint accuracy, and I can only manage blunt pencil-point accuracy on a good day. But, like any good arcade game it can be beaten if you have enough credits. I’d say that this game was easily finishable if you had a fist full of quarters… and a pocket full… and a backup wagon full on standby.

Oh, and the incoherent story? I quit worrying about stories in video games making sense a real long time ago.

It’s unusual to see a game, especially an arcade game, that doesn’t feature you trying to guide your character to some noble goal: saving the world, rescuing folks in distress, or trying to survive in a futuristic maze of death. But Police Trainer doesn’t ask you to do any of those things. Instead it asks you to perform a series of exercises to become a police officer in Metro City.

All this game is is a series of drills designed to make you better at wielding a gun. Though the situations that are presented are strictly police-officer friendly, playing this game will actually make you better at other similar games. You’re constantly drilled on accuracy, speed, pattern recognition, analysis, and combinations of the above. The better you do, the better ranking you get, eventually making your way up to chief of police. And you’re really motivated to do just that, since the last six or so folks who did that are the only ones allowed to put their names in the high score table.

I played this game an awful lot, regularly blowing through my ‘two for one’ token allotment and could actually see a marked improvement in games like The House of the Dead. It’s like investing in one was paying dividends in the other, which was a completely foreign concept to me.

But I think that my favorite Police Trainer moment was during one Saturday night at one of my local arcades. The off-duty police officer that was hired to keep the peace decided to play some games to pass the time, and he decided to play Police Trainer. His reaction time was a little low, but his accuracy was spot on, which is kind of cool, but the image I have of the police officer, in full uniform and in proper shooting stance, playing a video game about police officer training was just ‘meta’ enough to make this one of my all time favorite shooters.

I don’t really know what the story is behind Time Crisis 2. This is partially because I never played the original Time Crisis, but mostly because the game was always turned down so low that the parts that explain what was going on were completely inaudible. But what I do know is that you take control of one of two guys in their quest to rid the world of a militarized evil by running around and shooting everyone that moves… and some things that don’t really move all that much.

The game is a rail shooter, which is a fancy way of saying that you see through your character’s eyes and run along a predefined path, stopping occasionally to shoot lots of bad guys. What’s kind of different about this game is that each person has his own monitor, and his own view of the action. Which might not be very exciting, but it’s actually pretty nice not bumping shoulders with the person you’re playing with.

Unfortunately, I never had enough of whatever arcade’s currency to actually finish this game, or to make it very far at all. So I never got to find out what happened to the protagonists, or why the crisis was a ‘Time’ crisis anyway. I have a feeling that it was just a (not very) clever way of saying that the problem needed to be solved lickety-split. Or the last stage could have been full of clocks.

I could buy either explanation.

Xenos are apparently aliens and in this game you take charge of some kind of alien exterminator and have to kill lots of them. Why? They’ve invaded a series of space stations, that’s why!

There isn’t really much story to this game other than the above. You and up to two buddies have to make your way through a series of increasingly complex space stations and kill the marauding within, and you’re up against a time limit (self-destruct, don’t you know) it’s pretty generic as far as that goes, but what’s really kind of nice about this game is that though three people can play at the same time they don’t have to be in the same room at the same time. The screen is divided into thirds and each person is free to go wherever he wants.

This game is mildly distracting for a few minutes. It’s kind of fun running around shooting aliens, but it gains quite a bit more fun when you have one or even two more people working together with you to clear out the infestations.

And who says playing video games isn’t a social activity.

What can you do with the concept of running around a maze, collecting things, and avoiding other things? Lots!

Rally X, as you probably guessed, is about driving around a maze, collecting flags, and avoiding enemy cars. You have a radar on the right that shows where your car is and where the flags and enemy cars are, but not the layout of the maze or where boulders are. But you’re not totally defenseless, you can fart out some smokescreens to befuddle the other cars, but it depletes your fuel meter. Run out of fuel or crash into something you can’t collect and you lose a car. So it’s part Pac Man, part Radar Ratrace, and part… smokescreen.

I didn’t really play this game that much. It’s kind of fun for a little while, and trying to increase your flag multiplier to get a high score without running out of gas is a fair challenge, but the arcade I found it in had several games that were more fun.

The further you go back in arcade games, the simpler they got, and they don’t get a whole lot simpler than Sheriff. You, the sheriff, stand in the middle of the screen surrounded by bandits. You have to use your trusty six-shooter to kill the bandits without yourself getting plugged. Sound fun yet?

I probably wouldn’t even know about this game, except that it’s an unlockable in the first Wario Ware game. But that still blows me away. Complete arcade games from yesteryear are available as unlockable bonus content in newer titles. That’s just mind-bogglingly awesome.

For a long time you could hardly walk down the street without tripping over Pac-Man games, sequels, remakes, clones, and spin-offs. They were all pretty much the same: guide your pac-person around a maze, eat all the dots, avoid the monsters (unless they’re blue, then you eat them too), and generally try to keep doing this until you get tired, run out of lives, or crash the game.

The main difference here is that the maze is kind of tilted down so it looks more 3-D, and your Pac can jump (but the monsters can, too, don’t worry). Other than that, it’s the same as the old standby.

I’ll be honest, I saw this game at a local grocery store and was completely enthralled by the demo. I mean, Pac-Man, in pseudo 3D, jumping around! Yes! Double yes! Unfortunately, I was unable to weasel any quarters out of my mom that day, so I didn’t get a chance to play it. Then the store closed and I wouldn’t get a chance to play the game again until several years later. Once I finally did, the game was only just kind of ‘Meh.’ But Pac-Man can jump, which is nothing short of amazing since he doesn’t even have a neck, much less anything to actually ‘jump’ with.