The Closeout Warrior

“The president has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?”

This is one of my favorite video game related quotes. It perfectly conveys the sensibilities and priorities of the times: the nation’s nearly paralyzing fear of a sudden uprising of ninja activities, and reliance on streetwise martial artists to save the day.

Taking control of the martial artist of your choice, both equally generic but wearing different colored sleeveless shirts (for maximum badness, no doubt) and inexplicably trained to be exceptionally deadly. So much so that one hit will kill most of the ninjas that will swarm on you.

And swarm they will. The ninjas of the Dragon Ninja clan constantly come at you from every nook, cranny, rock, tree, and they even run up on the side of the semi you’re riding down the freeway. They’re relentless. If you can manage to slog through the piles and piles cookie-cutter, nearly completely ineffectual fodder, you get to fight the stage boss, who will put up more of a challenge. He’ll take several hits to kill off, and is much more maneuverable than our heroes. But you will not be thwarted, you must save the president!

If you can manage to make it through and murder the thousands of ninjas in your way to rescue the president, he shows his gratitude by inviting you to go out with him to get a cheeseburger. The game wraps up with the president holding a cheeseburger and smiling in your general direction, obviously approving of your derring-do. If there’s anything more American, I don’t know what it is.

I’ve never been a very big basketball fan, so I don’t really know why I ever played Jordan vs. Bird. It’s very possible that I ran out of both money and fun games to play.

Jordan vs. Bird is primarily a basketball game where you can take control of one of the titular characters, Michael Jordan or Larry Bird, in a one-on-one basketball contest. Since Bird is apparently known for his 3-point shots, and Jordan for his dunking ability, playing a game pitting the strengths of each of these pros should be pretty close: one player plays well close to the goal, and the other further away. However, Bird is able to dunk, while Jordan has pretty appalling performance from 3-point land, almost completely destroying the already tenuous balance between near range and far range.

Of course there are other things you can do, you can play as either Jordan or Bird in a dunking contest or a 3-point shooting contest respectively. Neither one was very fun, but the song from the 3-point contest is incredibly catchy, in the bad way.

This game is really only fun if you have two players… and you get to be Larry Bird. And even then, only just.

I had never heard of Clu Clu Land during the heyday of the NES, and I wouldn’t until years after the system was out of favor with the masses and I unlocked it in my copy of Animal Crossing. Old NES games in Animal Crossing didn’t come with manuals, so I have to admit that I don’t really know what’s going on. I was able to piece some info together using my game playing knowledge and the description found on my Super Smash Bros. Melee Trophy, but I’m willing to admit that my understanding might be somewhat incomplete.

Bubbles, the protagonist, must navigate what looks like a game of Dots. The ‘dots’ in this case being objects that she can grab onto. She will go in a straight line forward unless she reaches out and grabs hold of one of the dots, or smashes into something to turn around. Grabbing onto the ‘dots’ will allow her to turn and go a different direction. Her goal, it would appear, is to search out and uncover shiny objects that will often be in the outline of a simple shape. She must do all of this while avoiding the sea-urchin things that are pursuing her. Find all the shiny things, move on to the next level where the sea urchins move faster and are more aggressively and the pattern that the shiny things are in changes.

I wasn’t ever able to get past more than about two waves, but I also didn’t really enjoy the game all that much to begin with. I’m not terribly disappointed that I didn’t get to play this during the NES’s lifetime.

If you were a kid in the late 1980s through the early 1990s and had Nickelodeon, or knew someone that did, you were familiar with Double-Dare. I’m talking about the original show instead of the later, and not nearly so fun spinoffs. The show where two teams competed in trivia contests and (often messy) physical challenges in effort to win a sum of prize money and some ridiculous prizes. For those of you not familiar with the formula of the show, it goes something like this: One of two teams of two kids is asked a question, they can either answer it or ‘Dare’ the other team to answer it for ‘double the dollars’, the other team could either answer it or ‘Double Dare’ the first team to answer it, doubling the value yet again. The first team had to either attempt to answer the question or take a ‘physical challenge’ instead. The physical challenges were the real hook for the show, they let the kids do bizarro stunts and get extremely messy in the process.

For the most part, the game was pretty close to the actual show, you answered ridiculously easy trivia questions (with the occasional abnormally difficult one thrown in to almost guarantee a physical challenge). The problems come up when you actually try to play the physical challenges. Running around trying to catch a series of pies in your comically large clown pants just isn’t as fun with a controller as it is with actual pies and pants, and some of the invented challenges, like being shot out of a cannon through some holes in a giant wooden picture of spaghetti would have never made it on television.

Whichever team comes out of the first round with the most money gets to go to the Obstacle Course, which is a series of eight specialized physical challenges in a row that the team gets one minute to complete. Again, not as fun as actually doing the events in person. Also, the events were mostly of the ‘mash one or two buttons repeatedly’ or ‘wiggle the controller/joystick repeatedly’ to complete. One obstacle in particular was something that looked like a giant mound of marshmallow cream that you had to scale, and I could never figure out what combination of buttons and control pad directions that I had to press and wiggle to complete the obstacle. I have never managed to complete the virtual obstacle course to win the virtual crappy prize at the end.

Dana the wizard is on a quest. He’s out to get Solomon’s Key. It’s located somewhere in a mountain filled with rooms. Likely in the very last and furthest room from his starting point.

Since Dana is a wizard, he’s both frail and occasionally powerful. He possesses the fantastic abilities to jump, create and destroy blocks, to destroy said blocks by bashing them with his head, and very rarely can throw a fireball. Unfortunately, for all of his ferocity, he will die if he’s so much as touched by an enemy operative. This is Bad News indeed for our hero, as there are spots in certain levels that will provide an endless stream of monsters.

Your goal in each room is to: 1. Get the key, 2. Go through the open door, 3. Not die. Unfortunately you can die by either touching a monster or letting your ‘life’ run out (it’s a glorified timer).

After you clear all of the rooms, you will gain Solomon’s Key and something will happen. What that is, I don’t know. I couldn’t make it more than about halfway through the game.

I’m sure that there are several people out there, perhaps up to a dozen, who will remember Hook as that crappy movie from the 90’s that featured a grown-up Peter Pan. Slightly fewer people will remember the movie tie-in.

And for good reason.

Hook (the game, I never actually saw the movie) is terrible. It was so horrendously bad that I couldn’t make it past two stages before I gave up completely. You take control of Peter Pan (you know, that kid that can fly) and have to go through the various stages that comprise the island in search of various items. Presumably this is for the climactic showdown with Captain Hook, the game’s titular character. In the movie, Peter Pan was played by Robin Williams. In this game, Peter Pan looks more like Ben Stiller dressed up as Eddie Munster.

Your Pan is well-armed to fight off the gigantic insects, wild animals, and pirates wielding swords that are as long as they are tall. He has a dagger. A dagger that’s not so much a ‘dagger’ as it is a ‘dulled letter opener’. When you ‘thrust’ the ‘dagger’ at the ‘enemies’ you really just kind of show them your letter opener. You’re not a threat to much of anything other than the delicious food that is scattered around the island for one reason or another.

I managed to collect the requisite amount of Quest Items in the first stage of the game to move on to the second. Right after immediately I got frustrated at the inability of Peter to not crash headlong into every sharp thing he walked by. About halfway through stage 2 I began to walk directly into the pirates’ scimitars, and then decided to never play this game again.

Video game versions of pinball games, for whatever reason, are hard to get right. A lot of times they just ‘feel’ wrong. Pinbot feels adequately like a real pinball machine, and for the most part feels like the real machine that it’s based on.

I’m not really sure what the story behind Pinbot is supposed to be. There’s this giant robot grafted to the middle of the table that has five buttons on his chest. You hit each of the buttons five times and the robot’s visor opens. You shoot the balls into his eyes to lock them in place. Once you get the balls into his eyes he can ’see you’ (the game actually speaks the words “Now I see you!”) While in multiball, you get the chance to advance to harder tables.

And this is where the game starts to depart from and semblance of reality. When you go to a harder table, the current table fades away and is replaced by a harder table (it’s a different color, it must be harder), and enemies begin to appear. Enemies that chew up your ball and spit the pieces down the drain. Enemies that shoot missiles at your flippers (one hit makes the flipper turn grey and slow, and a second hit will destroy it). Enemies that grab the ball and carry it away, off the table.

But that’s not all.

The game is set in space, and you make multiple ‘trips’ around the solar system, make enough trips and your balls change shape, from spheres to triangles to cubes. And each one moves slightly faster and bounces slightly weirder.

I’ve never actually managed to play the pinball game that this game is based on, but given the the physical limitations of the machine, I’m not sure that I want to.

As I’ve alluded to in the past, video games from the 80’s were weird. Most of those game couldn’t hold a candle to the weirdness that’s in Battletoads.

The story goes something like this: There’s this group of anthropomorphic toads, Rash, Zitz, and Pimple (yes, they’re named after skin disorders), who are led by an anthropomorphic bird, that are dedicated to defeating the forces of evil. Evil in this case being Silas Volkmire (some weird skull-headed thing, he doesn’t actually appear in this game), the Dark Queen (who looks kind of like Elvira) and their army that consists of Psyko-Pigs, giant rats, and other assorted riffraff. Anyway, Pimple, the largest Battletoad, and Princess Angelica, the princess of… something are out for a cruise in a space car and they get kidnapped by Evil. It’s then up to the two remaining ‘Toads to go down to the planet, beat the Evil into a smear on the landscape and rescue the kidnappees.

With me so far? Excellent.

It’s up to you to take the remaining ‘Toads, who for the purposes of this game happen to look identical save for slightly differing shades of skin tone (one’s a greenish-brown and the other’s brownish-green), through a series of levels with wildly differing themes, goals, and objectives, that are each more impossible than the last. I’m not kidding, this game is unforgivingly, brutally, controller-smashingly hard. It’s partially due to the fact that each level is very different, but it’s mostly due to the various forms of Insta-Death(tm) sprinkled around every level coupled with your paltry allotment of extra lives.

By now you’re probably wondering why anyone would want to play this game. Aside from the engrossing story, varied gameplay, and strangely alluring antagonist. I can think of two reasons: bragging rights, and cartoon violence.

Bragging rights is a given. Being able to make more than a modicum of progress in this game is reason enough to make all but the most modest gamers pound their chest in victory. The real reason (read “the reason I played the game) is the cartoon violence.

The Battletoads have an assortment of ‘finishing moves’ that they can use to deal varying forms of pain to the armies of miscellaneous badness that you have to slog through. Hands that turn into giant fists, feet that turn into giant boots, and having your character turn into a giant wrecking ball injects a little bit of silliness into what is otherwise a game that is an exercise in frustration.