The Closeout Warrior

Ninja School… will help you! This is the cryptic beginning to the almost as cryptic game Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. Kid Niki, who is affiliated with the aforementioned Ninja school, takes his Spinning Sword and takes on a strange quest to run to the right and destroy Evil. Evil with uncreative names like Death Breath who can blow at you really hard, Spike who has lots of spikes, and the Green Grub who is a giant green grub.

While you’re running to the right, you are constantly assaulted by gaggles of enemies coming from every direction. Thankfully, one hit will kill them, but to be fair, one hit from them will kill you, too.

But all that’s OK because you have the inexplicable Spinning Sword. The Spinning Sword doesn’t spin in the direction you’re probably thinking it does. Its motion kind of looks like a lawn mower blade, which I’d be pretty scared of if I was in the enemy Ninja army.

The game is a quirky kind of fun, but the fragility of your character seriously ramps up the difficulty. You will need excellent reflexes to succeed at whatever it is you’re doing. “Help(ing) you”, apparently.

Arcade games in the 80’s were weird. Let’s take Marble Madness for example. Your character is a marble and it’s your job to guide it through a series of ‘races’ within a time limit. Extra time you have on the clock carries over to the next race, so it’s in your best interest to get to the finish line as quickly as possible.

Beyond the normal hazards that one would expect to find in a racecourse in that exists in a nondescript space (like hills, precipices with no walls, and hovering platforms) you also have to contend with bizarro enemies like marble-dissolving acid puddles, marble-eating green tube monsters, and aggressive black enemy marbles.

Oh, sure, the game seems short, with its six stages and simplistic goal, you might expect to breeze through this game in a matter of minutes, but you would be mistaken. Sorely. The difficulty level in this game blows way past brutal and borders on sadistic. I would presume that the massive difficulty is to compensate for the shortish game. It’s so hard that it just seems crazy-long.

In the 90’s it was time for a new puzzle game, it was time for Klax.

At least that’s what the tag-line told me. I couldn’t really fathom how this game was different from most puzzle games, since it involved sorting things, but that’s what the game told me, so it must have been true.

Klax prominently features a large conveyor belt with a mobile sorting apparatus over a 5 x 5 bin. Multi-colored tiles march down the conveyor belt, and it’s your job to catch the tiles and drop them in the bin in such a way that at least three of the same color tile match up and disappear. This maneuver is called a Klax. Your goal is to complete a specific number of these Klaxs, or to fulfill some other ridiculous requirement, like making a ‘Big X’.

There are a couple of things that are striking about the audio in this game. The tiles scream when they fall over the edge of the conveyor belt, presumably to their doom. Each color of tile makes a distinctive sound as it is coming down the conveyor belt, providing the only ambient sound in the game, there is no ‘puzzle music’. And when you finally lose the game a crowd exclaims, “Awww!”

Klax is also unusual among puzzle games in that it does have an end, level 100. What happens if you complete level 100? No idea. I’m not that good of a Klax player.

The NES version of Klax comes with a ‘game’ called Blob Ball. It’s less of a game, and more of a ‘thingus’. You have a blob, some spikes, a moving platform that looks like it came straight out of Pong, and a blob-like ball-thing. You can control the platform and try to deflect the ball away from the spikes, you can control the blob and bounce around and try to hit the spikes, or the platform, or the walls. The ball screams when it hits the spikes. The whole ‘game’ is very odd, and I didn’t spend very much time on it. I get the impression that it was thrown in to take up room on the cartridge.

I’ve tried, and I can’t really wrap my head around the story behind City Connection, or at least what I can glean from playing the game.

Let’s assume that you have a big cylinder. On this cylinder you have a series of parallel broken lines with a solid line at the bottom, each of which is a road that is being viewed from the side. Your goal is to get into your car with the super-amazing ability to jump and paint at the same time, and paint all of the roads from one color to another. The police officers, obviously, don’t want you to do this. They chase you down to stop you from your vandalizing ways. Your only recourse, other than avoidance, is to collect cans of oil that you can throw at the police cars, spinning them out and making them temporarily vulnerable.

Inexplicable plot aside, this game is good old-fashioned fun. For a few minutes, at least. Then it devolves into good old-fashioned tedium.