Several years ago I had way more fun that a person really ought to have shooting cowboys with a fake gun. But several years before that, while visiting the arcade at Holiday World (rides? what rides?), I played a game made by the same people filmed in what looks like the same place and with the same cheesy actors.
As far as the game goes, Mad Dog McCree is some kind of gang leader whose thugs have overrun some random town in the Old West and you, some guy with a gun, have to gun down them all before you can get at the Mad One himself. So what all that means, essentially, is that you are presented with a scene in the town and guys pop out of random spots. You have to shoot them before they shoot you. You shoot all of them, you go on to the next area. They shoot you, you go see the undertaker… Literally. He tells you how many lives you have left and then sends you back to the scene where you bought the farm.
I would only play this game one time, mostly because the only arcade I ever found it in was over 50 miles from my house and I didn’t feel like riding my bike that far. But that one time that I did play it, I had a little bit of fun. I was actually kind of impressed with the amount of variety in the game. You’d think that in a game that uses pre-recorded movie clips that stuff would unfold the same way every time, kind of like they do in Dragon’s Lair, but they don’t. In particular I was playing in some kind of barn area where some guy popped out from behind a hay bale and killed me (right in the face). But it was cool, I had one life left so I paid special attention to where the guy popped out from and was ready for him. Then some guy popped out of a different area on the other side of the screen and I didn’t have time to react and, well, I filled up another pine box.
I would have liked to have given this game another chance at some point, but have never seen it an any other arcade before or since. I’d even consider giving one of the home console ports a try, but I never owned any of the systems that it came out on, so that didn’t really work either.
With two Pokémon games under my belt that were fairly similar, why in the world would I want to play the next game in the series? Because I have some kind of compulsion to catch wild animals and make them fight for my amusement, I guess.
Pokémon Sapphire is a whole lot like the other games in the series so far. You take control of some kid that travels the world and tries to be the best Pokémon trainer in the world, oh, and possibly stop the machinations of a power-hungry group bent on world domination. The main differences being that you have a new landmass to explore, lots of new creatures to catch, you can play the game as a boy or a girl, and it’s on a new-fangled system, so it looks a lot prettier.
Yeah, the game’s a lot like the older games in the series, just refined a little more. There are a few additions here and there, like making berries, tag-team battles, and refinements to the breeding system, but it’s largely the same game. Which is fine by me, mostly because the concept was solid to start with, and each iteration just kind of polishes it up a little more.
Now does that explain how I’ve managed to while away over 120 hours at this game so far? Probably not, but that’s OK.
So, Puyo Pop was a pretty good game, so when I was at my local Best Buy and saw a game that featured multi-colored… somethings on a screen that you had to match up and eliminate. And that said game was made by the same people that made the Puyo games, well, I just kind of was obligated to get the thing.
Octomania is kind of the same as Puyo Pop Fever, sort of. Each follows some cutesy heroine on some quest or other. She runs into random people along her way and has to challenge them to the titular puzzle game to proceed, somehow. I don’t really understand how that’s supposed to work, but I’ve played games with flimsier premises before, so I just kind of go with it.
The game has you and your opponent taking control of a square field that fills up with random colors of octopi and grills that have different numbers on them. You control a two by two reticle that can rotate the four octos in it either clockwise or counter-clockwise, and the goal is to take the number on each of the grills and put that many of the same color of octopus on it. Then they turn into smoke that you can add more of the same color of octopus to create chains. Create long enough chains and you give your opponent some garbage.
I found the game kind of hard at first. This is mostly because I have a real hard time keeping track of what’s going where when I’m rotating them around. And that leads me to losing real quick. But that’s OK.
In single-player mode if you lose you can continue, yeah, nothing special, I know. But when you continue you get a powerup. A powerup that changes everything on your screen to the same color. So all you have to do is lose once, continue, let your screen fill most of the way up, use your powerup, clear the whole screen all at once, and then bury your opponent in unclearable garbage.
That might not work on hard mode, but on normal it was real effective, and made the game a whole lot shorter.
Bubble Smile is one of the few games that came with one of my cell-phones over the years that was an actual complete game instead of a demo. But, it’s not really anything to get too excited about.
It’s a really simple puzzle game where you are presented with a screen full of bubbles of various colors, and you have to line up three in a row to clear them from the field (they smile when you do so, clever, eh?). Then the bubbles on the screen collapse down to fill in the empty spots while others fall from the top of the screen to fill up those empty spots. Your only control is to take any triangle of bubbles and rotate them either direction.
There are two modes in this game, Skilled and Timed. Timed is over when you run out of time (duh). Skilled is over when you have done a certain amount of moves, but if you set up chains you get more moves. The thing is, though, that most of the time the chains that I would do would be large and unintentional. They’d be completed by the random bubbles falling from the sky. Heck, about half the time I would start a new game and then be unable to play for at least 30 seconds while the random screen generation got a few dozen chains/combos.
Lame.
I played this game a whole lot because I somehow fooled myself into thinking it was kind of good. As it happens the only reason I really played this game was because it was free and it was the only game I had on my phone at the time.
One day a friend of mine decided that he needed to buy Pac-Man World 2, which is itself pretty uneventful, but that game came with a bonus mini-game called Pac-Man Vs, and that is actually kind of interesting.
Pac-Man Vs is a little weird, but the gist is you take control of Pac-Man or one of three ghosts and have to try and get some points. The first one to get to the threshold wins! But here’s the thing. The guy playing as Pac-Man has to use a Game Boy connected to the Game Cube via its connector cable. The three guys controlling the ghosts use the Game Cube controllers and look at the screen which shows a blown up maze with just the immediate area around them visible. Pac-Man has to try to eat the dots, the fruits, the power pellets, and the ghosts if they’re blue. Nothing too far out of the ordinary.
Now the guys that control the ghosts can also eat the fruits, and if they do their field of vision slightly increases. And if they manage to eat the Pac himself then the person that does the deed and the guy playing Pac-Man swap controllers and the game continues.
The game is actually a whole lot of fun. If you’re playing Pac-Man you have to try and outwit your friends and get the score. If you’re the ghosts, you have to simultaneously work with them to trap Pac-Man and then backstab them all to be the one that does the yellow fool in. Then the Pac-Man player has to quickly form a shaky alliance with the other ghost players to get revenge on the fourth person.
Now, try to tell me how that’s not fun. Plus, I understand that this game came with a reasonably good adventure game for free, too.
Like a lot of games that I played over the years, I had no idea what was going on in Hero of the Golden Talisman, and the title screen didn’t actually help me understand it at all.
What I do know is that you’re a guy and you have to run around a labyrinth collecting flags and trying to find and defeat dragons. The flags somehow increase your firepower, which is kind of important because the dragons are kind of strong, and you have to kill off the dragons to get back the pieces of the titular Golden Talisman to… uh… I don’t really know to what end. I guess to win the game.
I played this game a fair number of times, but didn’t really make much of what you might call progress. This is due to two main things. Firstly, the map to this game is huge! A lot huger than I actually knew, and the impotent mini-map that’s provided to you is absolutely worthless. And somehow it never dawned on me to actually make a pencil-and-paper map to find my way around the place, which would have been a really smart idea.
Now, you might notice by looking at that map that there are lots of vertical shafts that have ledges that you need to jump on. Thing is, though, that you can’t directly control yourself after you jump off a ledge, but you instead bounce off the walls, which brings me to my second thing. I had a real hard time lining up my jumps correctly. I’d invariably mis-time it, and miss the ledge I was aiming for by a few microns, then plummet far out of my way. Then I’d take the several minutes to make it back to the original ledge to jump it off again, only to mis-judge it the other way and still miss the jump.
Then, after missing the same jump a few dozen times, I just kind of got bored with it and decided to put in something that I was a little better at.
You might think, given that I like Street Fighter II and its derivatives so much that it would be a no-brainer that I would like the 3D fighting games too, but it turns out that I’m pretty terrible at them. And I think the reason is that I just have too much to worry about trying to maneuver my guy in 3D space. Take Tekken Tag for example, you have two punches, two kicks, a block, and can move around a bit forward and backward as well as in and out of the background. And it moves a little slower, which should be a good thing.
Most fighting games have some kind of flimsy story as the explanation for the characters fighting each other, but if this one does, then I wasn’t able to divine it. It appears that this game was just an excuse to have a big lineup of lots of Tekken characters just slugging it out because that’s what they do, and I can respect that. But this time they do it in teams of two, and you can switch them up at any time
Now, I’m fully willing to admit that I’m not very good at these kinds of games because I don’t play them enough to get good at them. And the main reason I don’t play them is because of what happened at one particular arcade one Saturday night.
I, being a complete newbie to the game, was just kind of jacking around with it, learning the ropes and trying to feel my way around. Then some jackass comes up who’s apparently pretty skilled at the game and throws money into the machine (without asking me if I minded, of course). So he picks his guys, I pick my guys and we start fighting. Round one ends with me getting a pretty savage beatdown, but that’s OK. I can take a loss to a better player. Round two started and then WHAM! He hits me with some kind of move that I had never seen before (I was completely new, remember?) that completely KO’d me in one hit. I was a little upset and probably yelled a little. “There’s a move in this game that KO’s your opponent in one hit? That seems a little unfair.” “Only if you’re dumb enough to get hit with it,” he answered. Right then, I decided that if the game had moves that unbalanced in it, then it was a game I didn’t need to be playing, especially in an arcade where, if I’m hit by said moves, I blow through my $0.75 in less than two minutes, including time at the character select screen. And I’m no economist, but that doesn’t seem like the best use of my dollars.
So say you have some vikings, one that can run real fast, one that is good with a sword and a bow, and one that’s tough and has a shield. Let’s then suppose that said vikings get kidnapped by aliens for some kind of experiment or other. Then we can further suppose that the experimentees get rowdy, like vikings occasionally do, and begin to plot their escape. Once we have all of that down we have a game called The Lost Vikings.
So you have to take all three of your viking buddies through the various rooms in the spaceship, all filled with lots of forms of insta-death, and use their unique abilities to proceed. You can and must switch between the three guys at will to try and maneuver your way around the dangers. Olaf, the one with the shield, can block things or use his shield as a stepping stone for the other guys. Erik, the skinny one, can run real fast, jump real far, and crash headlong into things and break them. And Baleog, the other one, can pretty much just run around and kill things. Of course, the real fun is trying to use their abilities in unorthodox ways, which is actually required to make progress in this brain-bending game.
I thought that this game looked pretty good when I saw it in the game magazines at the time. But what I guess I didn’t know was that you have to control all three of the boogers at roughly the same time and all three of them must survive every level. Which wouldn’t be too bad, except that if you make a misstep (i.e. get one of the vikings killed off in some hilariously tragic fashion) then the level becomes unsolvable. You do get unlimited continues to mitigate this somewhat, and I needed every one of them.
Unfortunately, I only had this game for one evening on a rental, which is not nearly enough time to get intimately familiar with the sort of arcane dance routine you have to do precisely in each level to win. I only managed to get through the first few stages before I gave in. And by ‘gave in’ I mean ‘took the game back to the rental store’.
Some time not too long ago, Blizzard rereleased this game for the Game Boy Advance, and put up a demo of the game here, which you can check out if you want to get a taste of sweet viking action.
Racing games where you race around some kind of track with some realistic-handling cars are just kind of boring to me, so I tend to play the more… eccentric racers, if I play them at all.
Cruis’n USA takes you driving the car of your choice down your choice of highways/streets against a slew of other cars and trying to get to the goal. The thing is, though, that the places that you go through are only kind of like the real-life places in the USA. But that’s fine. You get to go real fast down almost-real streets in an indestructible car, which is a lot different than I can do in real life.
One of the cool things about this game is that when you finish the race in first place you get to keep going, until you finish your cross-country tour, I guess. I played this game in my local arcades quite a bit, but was never quite able to get more than a few races under my belt until I stopped coming in first. And then the game starts to cost a whole lot more (a dollar for about 2 minutes of game time or about $30 per hour, ouch!). So I’d usually play this one to warm up my arcade muscles before I moved on to something a little more interesting.
I’ve really liked most of the games in the Castlevania series, with the odd exception. So when I found out that the series was making its way to the Game Boy, my then pet gaming system, I immediately wanted it. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually have anything resembling an income at the time, so I had to wait until it made its way to my local used video game store, and then get it there for a pittance.
I don’t really know much about the story, other than Dracula has once again gone from being dead to not being dead, and you have to take the Belmont du jour to go and try to kill him again.
I’ve grown accustomed to Belmonts not being the most nimble folks in the world, but the Belmont in this game just seems, I don’t know, more plodding than most. He can barely run and jump, which is kind of a problem since there are several gigantic enemies that you have to try and avoid. And you’ll be able to, but only just, and only with pinpoint timing.
One of the things that’s kind of hard to convey in videos and screenshots is that the original GBA had a really smeary screen, which isn’t really that big of a problem until you have reasonably-detailed backgrounds like you do in this game. Then it becomes a big problem when you start to scroll the screen to the left and to the right and all of the backgrounds begin to blur so bad that they obscure absolutely everything on the screen, goodies, enemies, platforms, and everything. Then it gets real hard to figure out where you are, where the enemies are, and where the edges of bottomless pits are. Combine all three of those things and you have the makings of a fairly frustrating game. And, as a result of that, I never really made it much past stage 2 (out of 4!) before I decided to take it right back to the store I got it from.
