The Closeout Warrior

The Addams Family

April 8th, 2008

I wasn’t that impressed by the 1991 Addams Family movie. Like a lot of big budget movies, though, it spawned a tidal wave of licensed crap including a few video games. Turns out that at least one of them wasn’t half bad.

The Addams Family game for the Super NES is loosely based on the movie. Kind of like how riding a bicycle is loosely like piloting a space shuttle. You take control of Gomez Addams and have to guide him through the labyrinthine mansion to rescue your kidnapped family members (who are conveniently in the far reaches of Creation), restore Fester’s memory, and defeat the bad guys. Simple, eh?

Gomez has two secret powers. He can jump on enemies to make them disappear (a.k.a. killing them) and he has a ludicrous amount of extra lives at his disposal. With these two powers, he’d have to try hard to not win the day.

One of the cool things about this game is that the mansion is absolutely humongous, though a bit linear. But the enemies aren’t particularly tough to dispatch, and the terrain isn’t too tough to navigate. But there’s hidden junk absolutely everywhere. You’ll hardly go a dozen screens without finding some secret passage or hidden door leading to a cache of riches and extra lives.

I rented this game one time and was able to sail through the game in one evening of marathon play, so it’s not too tough. I have to believe, though, that the main reason I was able to finish it off so quickly was because I had more lives than I really knew what to do with. Any time I lost a life, I was only set back a couple of screens, so even the tougher bits were reduced to me trying to brute-force my way through by throwing away life after life at it.

Other than that, though, it was a pretty fun game, and probably one that I would have thought about buying had it not been Nerfed into oblivion by feeding you so many extra lives to blow through it with.

And, yes, I realize I don’t have to pick them up, and that would make it more challenging. But, seriously, that’s like telling me I don’t have to pick up all the $20 bills I find on the sidewalk because that’ll just decrease the challenge of my life. It just doesn’t make sense.

Posted in Super NES | 2 Comments »

.kkreiger

April 7th, 2008

I’m not much of a programmer. I’m familiar with the basics, but couldn’t program a paper bag or my way out of it. But I can appreciate folks wanting to hone their craft by doing challenges.

One of the more impressive challenges that I’ve seen was someone or some group that made a complete game in less than 100K of disk space. A game with music, sound effects, and enemies with (somewhat limited) artificial intelligence in less space than a picture that you might take with your cell phone.

Yeah, the game’s short, and the artificial intelligence isn’t real smart, and the initial load time is kind of long. But it’s a whole game that you can play through in a few minutes, and that only takes a few seconds to download.

Sounds awesome to me!

You can check out the game at its website, here.

Posted in PC, Windows | No Comments »

A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia

April 6th, 2008

Some games have weird storylines, but A Boy and His Blob definitely makes the shortlist. It stars a boy with a backpack full of jelly beans and a blob from another planet as his buddy. The blob’s planet has been taken over by an evil emperor and you have to save it.

How? Well, good thing you asked me! The emperor is deathly allergic to vitamins, and there’s a vitamin store right down the street. But you don’t have any money. Fortunately for you, underneath your house is a subway system, and under that is a treasure-filled labyrinth, fraught with perils. Even more fortunate it that your blob has the amazing ability to turn into a variety of helpful objects to help collect the treasures, which is determined by the jelly bean you feed it. So you go to the caverns, collect the treasures, buy vitamins, and then go to Blobolonia to take care of the emperor. Could it be more straightforward?

The game is kind of interesting. It’s really fun to try and figure out what jelly beans are appropriate for each situation. But the big problem that I had was that your little human guy apparently has shoes made out of softened Crisco. Every time you let off the arrow key he slides forward a good ten feet. This is really inconvenient for dodging the weird snake-things that bounce around all over the place.

I would play this game a lot trying to figure out the giant underground maze. I never made it out of there alive, though. I’d always get a good amount of treasure and then get killed because I slid off the side of a four mile high precipice, or slid into one of those weird enemy things, or I’d fall into the water without the protection of a giant bubble of protoplasm and drown.

You can actually go to Blobolonia and try and knock off the emperor right at the very beginning, but there are all kinds of bizarro dangers there. Killer cherries, killer chocolate kisses, and killer bouncing marshmallows. And not to mention the crazy-fat blob emperor that you won’t actually be able to get to.

But, hey, get beyond all that and it’s a pretty good game.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Rainbow Islands – The Story of Bubble Bobble 2

April 5th, 2008

Bubble Bobble was a bit of an oddball game. Not because of the barely comprehensible storyline, but because of the way it screwed with you.

The sequel, I should have guessed, likes to screw with you just as much… perhaps more. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

It stars the two dinosaurs from Bubble Bobble, now restored to their little boy forms. They have to make use of their magical rainbows to kill enemies and work their way to the top of a series of islands. Then you go on to the next one.

But the game, it screws with you!

See, kill enemies, work your way to the top of the stage, kill the boss, go on to the next stage. Pretty straightforward, right? Now you might notice that occasionally a jewel will appear, one for each color of the rainbow. Collect them all and get a bonus. Now, if you collect them all in the color order of the rainbow (Roy G. Biv) then you get a super bonus, get to bypass the boss of the level, and get a super gem. You have to get all the super gems to complete the game properly. But they appear randomly, right? No, no they don’t!

Jerks!

See, you need to carve up the screen into seven vertical slices. When you kill an enemy it flies through the air and the seventh of the screen that it lands in will determine the color of gem that will appear. You need to skillfully kill the enemies and collect the gems and then work your way to the door at the top of the stage to access the secret stages and to see the ending properly. Where does the game tell you this? Nowhere! At least nowhere that I was able to divine.

Man, this game screws with you big time!

I’m jealous…

Posted in Arcade, PC | No Comments »

Quake III Arena

April 4th, 2008

Quake II was pretty fun, but I only really played the multiplayer portion, and I know I’m not alone in that. And when the next game in the series finally rolled around it was nothing but multiplayer deathmatch stuff, which I always thought was kind of odd.

Quake III is a game where you go around shooting stuff. It’s apparently the far-flung future, so there are humans, aliens, cyborgs, that kind of thing, all trying to kill each other faster, better, and more efficiently than everyone else. It’s something that I had only experienced as the multiplayer facet of a full game. It was just kind of weird to play it as the focus for a change, and I’m not really sure I liked it better.

I ended up playing this game quite a bit, but never really got very good at it. I just don’t really have the aim for it, or the patience to play the game enough to build up the aim to be very good at it. So why do I continue to play games like this? Mostly because my friends did, and that’s what all the cool kids did at the LAN parties I went to. And if I didn’t play them, there wouldn’t be much to do at the local LAN parties.

Posted in Linux, PC, Windows | 2 Comments »

Bookworm Adventures

April 3rd, 2008

The original Bookworm game was really fun… if you like words. Which I do. But the game was a little, I dunno, lacking variety, I guess. I mean, you just spell words in the same old library until the library burns down. And, while watching the library burn down is pretty exciting, until you get to that point it’s pretty blah. But, I still invested far too many hours in that game than I probably should have. On the upside, I now know lots of little words that I haven’t actually bothered to find out definitions to. Like ‘qua’.

A few years later I saw that there was an addition to the Bookworm universe, an adventure game of sorts. And since I like words and adventure games, I felt an obligation to give it a once-over.

As it happens you, the titular worm, have to slowly work your way to the right spelling words to vanquish foes. Your goal is to eventually rescue Cassandra, who’s in some kind of trouble or other. It doesn’t really matter much, it’s just a pretext to explain the Greek-themed backgrounds, characters, and monsters.

One of the biggest steps in the right direction for me was the slight change in the way you select letters. In the previous game all of the letters had to be contiguous, which made it much tougher. This time the letters can come from anywhere on the board, which makes it much much easier to smith your words.

Although I only played the demo, I ended up playing it several times over. I just really liked the concept of being able to slaughter waves upon waves of foes by being particularly loquacious and sesquipedalian. Something that I also enjoy quite a bit in real life.

I guess I should probably look at purchasing the full version of the game, but I’m kind of concerned. I mean, I lost more than one evening to the demo. If I get the full version of the game I might miss work for a few days.

But that would be an awesome few days.

Posted in PC, Windows | No Comments »

Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom

April 2nd, 2008

Looking back now, the arcades around my hometown never had some of, what appear to be, the best arcade games to come out during their heyday. Up until very recently (within the last year) i didn’t even know there was an arcade game based on the Dungeons & Dragons universe, much less two. When I found out about it, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. “How can D&D work as an arcade game?” I thought.

Pretty well, it turns out.

The game is essentially a sidescrolling beat ‘em up with D&D elements tacked on. You walk around, mostly to the right, and beat up pretty much anything that moves. Doing so will get you precious Experience Points. Get enough of those and your character becomes a little stronger, and able to end the lives of the Evil Hordes more quickly. You also have an inventory to manage, but it’s pretty basic. You’re supposed to be worrying about slaughtering monsters, after all.

There are other role-playing elements in here too. The story branches at a few key points and you have to decide which path to take, which will affect the story a bit. It’s nothing that couldn’t have been done without the D&D license, but having it there kind of lets you know what you’re in for. Kind of. I mean, this game isn’t really that much like playing actual Dungeons & Dragons, kind of like Guitar Hero isn’t really like playing an actual guitar, but I don’t think that gets in the way of it being a really fun game for a while.

Posted in Arcade | 1 Comment »

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

April 1st, 2008

I’ll just come right out and say it: Yoshi’s Island is probably the finest 2D game in the Mario universe that has yet been devised.

The story goes that while The Stork is on its way to deliver baby Mario and Luigi he gets accosted by the Forces of Evil. Luigi is captured and Mario is dropped onto an island inhabited by Yoshis. The Yoshis decide to try and get Mario to his destination using a baby bucket brigade system. Which is one Yoshi will carry Mario to the end of the level, pass him on to the next one, and the cycle repeats. With a few boss fights thrown in, of course.

Your Yoshis are nigh-invulnerable, but if they get hit Baby Mario will fly off its back and start wailing. His crying, incidentally, might be the most annoying sound ever put into a video game. If he cries too long (i.e. you run out of Stars) then he’ll get kidnapped too.

But you’re not totally defenseless. Yoshis have the super amazing ability to eat just about anything and turn it into an egg. So as long as you have a steady stream of enemies lumbering around you have plenty ammunition to dispatch them with.

Probably one of the first things you’re going to notice when you play this game is that it’s simultaneously gorgeous and adorable. Everything in the game is well detailed, fluidly animated, and extremely colorful. It really does look a lot like you’re playing an interactive cartoon.

There is really a lot crammed into the cartridge. The Yoshis can transform into a variety of vehicles to make progress through the levels, and that’s fun enough. But this game also uses (more or less) the same chip that allowed the Super NES to push 3D graphics for all kinds of interesting effects. Like blocks that squash and stretch, and enemies that grow to fill nearly the whole screen. Really, the whole game is a visual treat.

I really can’t understate how fun this game is. I got it one Winter and a friend and I spent a good portion of Christmas weekend alternating playing each level. Then we discovered the hidden levels and spent yet more days trying to unlock them all.

And if some of the music sounds like it came from a 1930s era cartoon show? Eh, doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

Posted in Super NES | No Comments »

Harvest Moon

March 31st, 2008

Harvest Moon is a little odd for a game. It’s more like a kind of ‘life simulator’. The premise is that you’ve inherited a farm and have to do some work on it to get it productive. Along the way you interact with the folks in the neighboring village to build relationships. So you have to strike a balance between working on the farm to gain an income and going to the town to have a social life. Just like Real Life(tm).

A typical day will have you collecting eggs, milking the cows, plowing the field, watering the crops, harvesting the crops, going to the town for supplies, checking out the local town events and, if you have time, try to woo a wife.

It’s actually kind of tough to balance time in this game. Time goes by incredibly quickly. While you’re building up your farm you’re going to run out of daylight every day, then the town’s going to be closed and you just have to go to bed. After a while, though, once you start piling up a good income and the farm becomes self-sufficient you can go into town and make nice with the mayor, or do one of the festivals, or give gifts to the girl of your choice to try and court her and start a family.

It’s kind of weird how the game starts off so slowly and then ramps up to something interesting. I was tempted to give up after a while of just planting a few plants and pulling a few weeds before bed. But you just have to give it a little time, then the little charms start to slowly leak out of it until you’re so busy doing stuff that you’re going to lose track of it all.

I guess the only bad thing is that the story has a definite arc. After you get done with it you can keep playing to try and get your farm built up, but that’s about it. It’s more fun to go back and start again to try and change the outcomes of the different relationships, and to try to make your farm be better.

And no, it’s not really all that exciting, but it is oddly soothing and relaxing, and not like my own life, which is pretty awesome.

Posted in N64 | No Comments »

Taboo: The Sixth Sense

March 30th, 2008

Calling Taboo a game is a bit of a stretch. There aren’t any goals or anything, and it’s hardly interactive.

What it is is a tarot reader simulator of sorts. And does that sound boring?

You betcha!

So you start out by entering some info, name, birthdate, sex and a question. All of which is completely irrelevant. Then you get treated to the cards shuffling against a trippy background to some okay music, and then they’re dealt into positions. After that you get to see them one by one with its description, then you get some (unguaranteed) lottery numbers. And then you get to start over.

Riveting!

I thought this game looked kind of interesting when I saw it in some magazine or other. It’s too bad that I didn’t realize that you could go through a whole game in a few minutes. After I did realize that (i.e. after I played it once) I played through it a few more times just to see all the different cards. Once that hour was over I broke the game out a few more times to show to friends, but it never got much more play time out of me. Then I sold it back to the second hand store I got it from and got something fun.