July 13th, 2007
Laserdiscs were very important. They showed us that a disc the size of a vinyl 33 1/3 record was still a viable medium for entertainment. It also paved the way for video games to be built with the very same technology. Instead of cartoony graphics that didn’t look a very realistic, suddenly you could see the most realistic graphics of all, real life!
Unfortunately, this meant that games that were built using this technology were usually pretty light on content. For every scene that the player saw, the developer had to set up and film the scene for the end user. When done well, the game could be pretty fun, though a bit short. Fast Draw Showdown managed to turn these weaknesses into a pretty fun little game.
The premise of this game (if there is a premise) is that you’re a gunslinger in the Old West, and you’re going to go up against a series of opponents in fast draw competitions. You have a gun in a holster attached to the arcade unit. When the light on the screen turns green, you have to out draw your opponent and shoot him before he shoots you. Your opponents range in skill, from the fumbling drunk old man to the crackshot preacher with a gun hidden in his Bible, and are frequently some degree of silly. Like the man who walks out of the Telegraph office, “Heh heh heh! I just wired your family, you’re dead!”
Eventually, if you manage to best all of the opponents you go up against Wes Flowers, pitchman for the game and ridiculously fast quick draw. When the light goes green, you have less than a second to react, draw your gun, and fire. You’re dead. He’s completely possible to beat if you either have phenomenal reflexes or time it like I used to. (He fires almost exactly 3 seconds after he touches his gun the first time, no kidding!).
Hitting my local arcade showed me that this game has been recently rereleased for some reason. It still stands as one of my all time favorite arcade games, even if you can see a car driving along one of the back roads in the Old West.
Posted in Arcade | 3 Comments »
July 12th, 2007
The Cool Spot was the crazy-cool animated mascot character of 7-Up in the 90’s. It was the little red dot on the 7-Up logo, but with arms, legs, sunglasses, and attitude! It was inevitable, then, that the Cool Spot would wind up following in the footsteps of other odd mascot characters like the Noid and star in his very own video game.
I only played Cool Spot once and even though I’ve managed to block most of the game from my mind, I do remember a thing or two about it.
Thing 1: The game looked good. For a Super NES game, the game looked pretty good. Giant soda bottles looked like giant soda bottles, sand looked like sand, and the two-dimensional animated disc looked like a two-dimensional animated disc.
Thing 2: The game sounded good. Apparently scored in part by one of the least entertaining folks I’ve seen on television, Tommy Tallarico. I don’t find the guy particularly entertaining or insightful, but he’s fairly talented, so there is that.
Other than those two things, I just remember running around and killing things by shooting soda bubbles at them on my quest to rescue other two-dimensional discs from cages. Why couldn’t they just slip through the bars? Then we wouldn’t have much of a game, duh.
Posted in Genesis, Super NES | No Comments »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »