The Closeout Warrior

Super Mario Bros.

June 27th, 2008

Super Mario Bros. is the game that put millions of NES systems into homes and really made the Mario brothers household names. I understand that the game has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million copies. Forty million! If I got one copy of the game per second, it’d take me just over 463 days to get that many. Not to mention the pile of cartridges in my back yard might be visible from space.

But do I really need to talk about a game with the kind of ubiquity that Super Mario Bros. enjoys? Absolutely!

Super Mario Bros. set the story for most of the Mario games to come after it. The princess is kidnapped by Bowser and the Mario brothers have to go rescue her. They do this by running (and sometimes swimming) to the right and utilizing their now world-famous jumping ability, and any powerups they can find along the way.

I’m going to assume that you’re familiar enough with this game, so I’m not going to feel any great need to go into too much detail about it.

But a lot of people regard this game as somewhat of a classic. You can hum a few bars of the main theme song and lots of people will immediately know what you’re singing, and probably sing along. Or they’ll tell you about how much fun that they had with the game. But if this game was released today, would it have the same status that it holds now? Would people have fawned over it and held it in such high regard.

I don’t think so.

But it was a very important game, and I think it’s aged pretty well. The gameplay still holds up. If you’ve never played the game before, it’s tough, but beatable. And, in fact, most times that your progress is impeded you can see where you screwed up, and are that much wiser for the next go ’round. Which means that when you start from the beginning of the game each time you get just a little further and a little further until you finish the game! Only to find out that there’s a bonus mode waiting for you where the game’s tougher and the enemies move faster, which is still fiendishly clever. And you don’t really get anything for clearing the harder mode other than the sense of accomplishment that you did it, but what do you want from an over-20-year-old game?

I think it’s probably out of cookies by now.

Posted in Arcade, GameBoy, NES, Super NES | No Comments »

WCW vs NWO World Tour

June 26th, 2008

Since I do enjoy the Wrestling Arts, I give the occasional game that tries to recreate the experience a try, but they all typically have the same problem: you and someone else have to mash buttons as fast as you can, and the person that mashes them the fastest gets to do his move. Which makes marathon play sessions rather uncomfortable. But this one’s different, it features one of the most entertaining referees I’d ever seen, the late Mark Curtis.

There was an updated roster to reflect whatever flavors were popular around the time that the game came out, plus a ton of wrestlers from some overseas promotions that I’d never heard of before. Which actually leads me to believe that the whole game was originally full of non WCW wrestlers, but that the developers just kind of reworked some of them to look like the wrestlers from this side of the pond, but kind of ran out of wrestlers after a couple dozen.

I would only play this game one time, a friend had rented it and decided that I just had to play it. So we made time with two other guys and had at it for a couple of hours… with the game. And after a few hours, once our arms started to get sore, we packed it in. And I haven’t had anything to do with this game since, it was just kind of unremarkable.

Posted in N64 | No Comments »

Killer Instinct 2

June 25th, 2008

The story in the first Killer Instinct game was a little ludicrous, but I’m willing to overlook that because the game was actually kind of fun to play. But if you’re going to make a sequel to a game with a storyline that borders on insanity, it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s going to also be a little bit kooky as well.

See, once Eyedol, the two headed demon-thing that was the boss of the first game, was defeated a hole was ripped in the universe that sent Ultratech, the fantastical company behind the first tournament, and several of the combatants back in time. There, as it happens, another tournament is put on where the fighters have to defeat Gargos, some other demon that had been masquerading as the spirit that guided Jago in whatever discipline of martial arts he studies, and manipulated the tournament to free himself from some prison or other.

Or something like that.

Honestly, the story to this game doesn’t matter so much, and it doesn’t really explain why there’s heliports and medieval castles and a pirate ship in the far-flung past. So try to not think about it so much.

But, apparently, in the past the graphics are better, the music sounds better, the combos get a little more brutal, and the women characters’ breasts animate more realistically. Which is real important if you’re gearing a game to teenage boys.

But, really, it’s the same old game, just polished to a fine luster. It’s really, in my humble opinion, superior to the old game in just about every conceivable way. Some people will say that they like the plasticy look of the characters in the old game, but those people wouldn’t know good graphics if they bit them in the face.

I would end up playing this game easily as much as I played the first one, probably more. That shouldn’t be too big of a surprise, since I liked the first one so much, and this was the logical next step for the franchise. I played it so much that I was actually passably good at it, but the most memorable moment I have with the game actually happened to a friend.

There’s this character featured in the video above, Jago. It seems that he has a move that allows him to store a portion of his lifebar in kind of a ‘reserve pocket’. Once he goes down for the second time, and when most of his opponents think they might have won, he gets up with his sliver of reserved health for a last-ditch salvo. My friend did that particular maneuver in a match with an opponent who matched his skills fairly closely, but was unfamiliar with said move. So once opponent guy thought he won, he took his hands off the controller, and then my friend’s Jago stood up and then laid down some hurt.

Needless to say, opponent guy was a little miffed.

It was at that point that friend guy started to get a bit nervous. He told me later that he thought the guy was going to start a fistfight with him over it. Thankfully, he cooled off enough that he didn’t actually make any fist-cranial interactions, but friend-guy decided to not use that particular maneuver with his favorite character again. Unless he was playing with people that he actually knew personally. Which I thought was a particularly well thought-out course of action.

Posted in Arcade | No Comments »

PaRappa the Rapper

June 24th, 2008

PaRappa is a two-dimensional dog-like thing in a three-dimensional world with a problem. He’s got a date with some two-dimensional flower-thing. But he doesn’t have any money. Or a car. Or a cake. So what does he do? He sings a lot of songs of course!

Now it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for him to just belt out a song and get a driver’s license or whatever. What he has to do is find a teacher who sings a song to him in little snippets that he has sing back to them with style and panache. Doing that will somehow give him the skills to cut in line to use a port-a-potty, along with the other nearly insane tasks you have to make him do.

I guess the ridiculous story kind of makes sense in its own universe, but that doesn’t really make much less insane.

I’ll admit, though, that I was pretty awful at this game. Mostly because I only played the store demo and then played it one time on my sister’s PlayStation. I’ll attribute the fact that I was pretty awful to my lack of familiarity with the PlayStation buttons. The controller sure felt like a Super NES controller, and I was real familiar with those, but the PlayStation controller is not a Super NES controller. Instead of A, B, X, and Y, we get a circle, a cross, a square, and a triangle. And I never could remember which ones were where. So after I failed spectacularly at the first couple of stages, I just decided to let my sister play through the game while I watched.

Which is way less creepy than I just made it sound.

Posted in Playstation | No Comments »

Wii Sports

June 23rd, 2008

Wii Sports is the game that is packaged in with the Wii, and the impression that I get is that it’s just kind of there to teach you how to use the remote. You just kind of take your Miis and thrust them into a few different sporting events, simplified so much that pretty much anyone can play them and do reasonably OK at them.

Like Baseball. One person tosses the ball by swinging the remote, and the other swings the bat by… swinging… the remote. The goal is to swing for the fences and get a home run, a home run = one point, otherwise it’s an out. After so many outs, you and your opponent switch sides, and the person with the most points wins.

Or Bowling. You kind of swing your remote like you would a bowling ball and then your ball gets tossed down the alley and knocks down the pins. Whoever knocks down the most is the winner. Easy.

Or Golf. You just kind of swing your remote like a golf club while trying to to thwack a tiny ball in such a way that it goes into a slightly less tiny hole that’s several hundred feet away. I didn’t really play this one that much.

And then there’s Boxing. You hold your Remote and the Nunchuk in your hands and swing them kind of like you’re actually trying to punch the guy on the screen.

And that’s it! Four mini games made to familiarize yourself with the crazy new-fangled controls that the Wii brings to the table.

This is the game that most people think about when they think of the Wii, and it’s the game that I always see when I see some kind of news story or other where they talk about some retirement home or something using the Wii as a rehabilitation tool. And that’s not too surprising, really. The games are extremely simplified, but need you to perform a range of motions to pull them off successfully, which kind of makes it a no-brainer for that kind of environment.

But I think that a lot of places that get this game get it with the Wii, and then use it for its rehabilitation powers, and then don’t get any other games for it. Which is good in a way, but kind of not good in others. There’s more than one game for the system, and some of them are actually passably good.

Posted in Wii | No Comments »

Paperboy

June 22nd, 2008

I was a paperboy in my neighborhood for the better part of a year, and while I certainly weathered my fair share of hazards, there was nothing that quite compared to what I saw in the video game adaptation of my boyhood profession.

In the video game version of Paperboy you took control of some paperboy riding his bike on his route, and you have to deliver papers to your customers. And his route is just a straight, couple-of-blocks long street. Sounds pretty easy, right.

You don’t know how wrong you are.

Somehow this neighborhood is full of people, animals, and the occasional lawn mower all bent on keeping you from delivering the papers to your customers. Colliding with anything that’s not a bundle of papers (more on that in a second) and you’ll lose one of your chances. But you’re not completely defenseless, you can use your arsenal of tightly-rolled papers as weapons, refilling as you find paper bundles inexplicably strewn all over your street. Just make sure that you keep enough for your customers, they each need a paper on their doorstep, too. It’s actually a whole lot to think about.

You can also use your papers to break the windows and cause general destruction in the yards of the non-subscribers (hey, they’re not your customers, screw ‘em). If you do well, and you get papers to all your customers, then some of the non-subscribers will subscribe to the paper, but if you miss a few, you might lose a few customers, which means you get more windows to break. Kind of a win-win, really.

Of course, you also get to do this ‘training course’ at the end of each day’s route that’s, I guess, there to help you to hone your skills when you’re out doing your deliveries, but I just found that it was a way to liberate me from my quarters.

So, in short: this game is harder than a real paper route, and a little less lucrative.

Posted in Arcade, GameBoy, NES | No Comments »

Castlequest

June 21st, 2008

A while back a friend of mine invited me over because he has this rad to the max video game that he was just dying to show me.

Said game, Castlequest was a game about exploring around a giant castle. All throughout the castle is a series of color-coded locked doors and you have to find the correctly-colored key to unlock the correct door, the catch is, though, that you don’t want to necessarily unlock all the doors you find willy-nilly. If you do, you’ll probably run out of keys, and if you run out of keys, you’re pretty well stuck with an unsolvable game.

Not only that, but there’s tons of stuff in this mysterious castle that’s instantly fatal to your guy in spite of the fabulous enfeathered fedora he’s sporting. Which means that, even though you start the game with what appears to be a generous allotment of 50 lives, it’s not going to be nearly enough to get through this mess.

This is one of those games where it should have dawned on me to make a map of some sort to make sure that I unraveled the mysteries of the castle. That I could decipher the precise sequence that I’d have to collect keys and unlock doors in. Perhaps then I’d have been able to finish this monstrosity of a game. But I was young, and lazy, and didn’t actually own the game or anything. So instead of actually making a map, I just kind of never really played this game again. And, really, I’d consider that breaking even.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Dragon’s Lair

June 20th, 2008

If you’ve never seen a Laserdisc, it kind of looked like a giant CD. And since folks had some kind of fascination with putting games on CDs that consisted of nothing but video clips, it only made sense that they could also use the Laserdiscs to make video games that were also made by stringing together video clips.

But why stop at boring regular live-action footage when you can have cartoons!

Dragon’s Lair is a fully cartoon-animated game that features you, not really playing as, but more like directing Dirk the Daring on his quest to rescue princess Daphne. But, it’s a little bit different from any game that I’ve really played before of since. You pretty well just kind of sit there and watch the movie unfold. Occasionally a glowing spot will pop up on the screen or Dirk’s sword will glow. This is your cue to move the joystick in the same direction that you saw the glow, or if his sword lit up, hit the ’sword’ button. If you do the move with the correct timing, then the movie continues, but if you get it wrong (and the timing window is ridiculously small), then you lose a life in a comically tragic fashion.

I would only play this game one time at my local arcade, and that wouldn’t happen until several years after it had left most other arcades in the country. It was only there for about a week before it disappeared again, so it kind of makes me think that the game was taken back to the owner’s personal collection.

But the time that I was there and was able to play it, I had a degree of fun with it… until the windows to input the actions based on the cues came too fast for me to react to them. Which meant that I’d have to, essentially, memorize the game if I wanted to succeed, and that wouldn’t be too big of an issue for me, but the game disappeared before I got the chance, so I guess I’ll never know how good I might have gotten at it.

But, in my brief stint in the video game industry I was co-workers with the guy that programmed the game. And that’s just about as good as mastering the game would have been. At least, that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.

Posted in Arcade | No Comments »

Rampart

June 19th, 2008

I kind of have an unhealthy affinity for one versus one games. I just kind of like having a one on one contest where the better person emerges. Oftentimes that ends up being the player that’s not me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy them, right?

Rampart is a game about castles, wall building, and heavy artillery. You, and up to one of your friends (up to two in the arcade version) each take control of a castle with a wall around it (a rampart, don’t you know).

So, first, after you pick a castle, comes the ‘place your cannons’ phase, and then the shooting phase. Your goal is to use your cannons to bust up the ramparts of your opponents while they’re doing the same to yours. After a few seconds comes the rebuilding phase.

In the rebuilding phase you have a limited amount of time and some tetris-like blocks that you have to use to reconstruct your walls. Your goal is going to be to surround your cannons with a complete wall, but you can also extend your walls to claim other castles to use in your battles. More castles = more cannons at your disposal, but you also have to make sure you claim at least one castle, or it’s game over for you!

There’s also a single-player mode where you get to go up against boats controlled by the computer, but that’s way less fun.

I really had a lot of fun with this game. You really had to use your noodle a little bit to strategically destroy the wall in a way that the weird tetrimino-like wall pieces would have a tough time to fill. But you also don’t have a whole lot of time to do much in the way of scheming, the game just moves too fast for that.

But you have plenty of time for trash-talking whoever’s sitting next to you while you tear their walls down, which just kind of loses something if you do it over the Internet.

Posted in Arcade, NES | No Comments »

Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball

June 18th, 2008

Before I found Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball, I had never actually played a video softball game. In fact, the only thing I knew about softball at the time was that it was a whole lot like baseball only with a bigger ball and the guys pitched underhanded instead of overhanded. Even so, it was a sports game, which I don’t normally get into so much, so I don’t really know why I decided to give this one a try. Probably because I was drawn in by the art on the back of the box or something.

It turns out that this game takes a few liberties with the game of softball.

The games you play each take place in places other than baseball stadiums, places like a schoolyard and a cliff-side. That means that the different fields not only actually look different from each other, but they have other ‘house rules’ that makes it actually worth playing on the fields. Stuff like, if the ball rolls under the fence and off the cliff, then that’s a ground-rule double. They just kind of spiced things up.

The other thing that I thought was pretty awesome was that several of the players had different abilities. Most of the folks in the game were bog-standard hoo-mans, but there were some that could, for example, walk better over rough terrain (they hopped a lot), or some that could jump in the air and float there, stuff like that. But there were others that brought odd implements with them to bat with. Brooms and spiky clubs are what I remember seeing the most. And on top of all of that the players actually looked different from each other, rather than being the same guy with a different number on his shirt, as is what you get with most other games like this.

This is actually the only sports game that I can remember that I rented more than one time on purpose. Mostly because the game was pretty silly, silly enough that I could overlook the fact that I was playing a game that was, essentially baseball, but with less rigid rules. And I can completely get behind something like that.