The Closeout Warrior

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.

Lolo is a strange creature. He is a blue sphere with hands, feet, and disproportionately large eyes. His mission? Save princess Lala from the top of a tower consisting of a series of floors that each contain a series of puzzles. His weapons? His wits and the occasional magic shot.

Scattered throughout each room are ‘framers’: heart framers that you must collect (some of them give you magic shots), and emerald framers that you can push but not pull. Also in the room is a collection of enemies, most of which start out asleep. Once you collect all of the heart framers in a room, the sleeping monsters spring to life and attempt to stop you from getting the jewel out of the treasure chest that’s also in the room. Getting this jewel will cause all of the monsters in the room to vanish and the door to open, allowing you to go to the next room, and eventually to the next floor.

Solve all the puzzles, beat the boss at the end, and you will have won the game! The only problem is that the puzzles get very hard very quickly. Oh sure, they start out easy enough, and there’s only 50 levels, but the puzzles get mind-bendingly tough after a few floors.

I wasn’t able to get very far… until I figured out that by swapping the second and fourth letters in the passwords that I could skip several levels, and that’s how I finished The Adventures of Lolo without the help of a guide on the Internet.