The Closeout Warrior

The Super NES is not a 3D gaming powerhouse, but to be fair, it was never designed to be. It’s actually pretty amazing to think that the system was able to create a totally playable 3D experience, although fairly primitive by today’s standards.

Stunt Race FX was not the first 3D game to grace the venerable Super NES, that would be Star Fox. Star Fox and Stunt Race FX used a specialty chip built into the game to provide the Super NES with the ability to perform rudimentary 3D functions. Don’t worry, I won’t get into the particulars here. These resultant 3D scenes were small, featured no texture-mapping, and were not fluidly rendered, but none of that mattered. You were doing things that nobody thought the system could do.

Stunt Race FX puts you in control of one of a number of cars, complete with cartoony eyeballs, that race around a series of tracks. Your goal, as is the case with most racing games, is to reach the finish line in first place while not wrecking your vehicle, and you will crash your vehicle. Mostly, you’ll overcorrect every time you go around a corner, weave down the road, and slam into the wall. It’s inevitable, especially when you are using your Boost(tm). Thankfully, there are red globe-like things all over the place that will fix some of the damage that you will certainly incur (there are also some blue ones that refill your Boost meter). This is important, if your car gets too damaged, it will be knocked out of commission and lose.

So, where does the ‘Stunt’ part come in? Your vehicles can jump… and there are half-pipes. Stunts.

Okay, so the stunt part is kind of lame, but the game is actually decent. After you play for a few hours, you hardly notice the choppiness.

Mario Paint isn’t really a game, although it did have a game of sorts in it. It’s more of a rudimentary multimedia production tool. Since it would be difficult to make a drawing that doesn’t look like it came from an unskilled Etch-A-Sketch user, it was packaged with a mouse and mousepad.

There were three basic activities you could do, drawing, animating, and composing music. At its most basic, you can use the assorted pens, fill tools, geometric shapes, and 16×16 pixel ’stamps’ to create your own scenes or to simply color a few existing pictures. Or, you could edit your own set of stamps to provide an extra level of detail in your drawings, or even to animate.

To animate, you pick from either three, six, or nine frames of animation, fill in the frames accordingly, and choose a path on your crafted scene for the animation to follow. You can optionally play a musical score.

Your music composition options are fairly limited: you can compose in either 4/4 or 3/4 time, can play up to three notes at a time, and can only place quarter-notes on the staff. Different instruments are represented by some of the stamps from the drawing-mode. Mushrooms and hearts provide some percussion, Starmen provide high-pitched xylophone-like sounds, and then there are the baby faces, cars, and geese that make sounds that those things don’t really make in real life.

And if you could somehow get bored creating all of this glorious multimedia, you have the option of playing the bug-swatting mini-game, Gnat-Attack. In Gnat-Attack you have to swat 100 bugs of varying degrees of deadliness with naught but your handy flyswatter. After you’ve swatted the 100 little bugs, you get to swat the giant mechanical fly that takes significantly more swats to dispatch (just like in real life!). Then you get to proceed to levels 2 and 3 that are slightly more difficult, and then it loops back to level 1.

Although I can in no way be considered an artist, I played around with this thing extensively. So much so, in fact, that I ended up wearing off a good deal of the textured surface of the included plastic mousepad.

I only bought Kirby’s Avalanche because it was compatible with the Super Nintendo XBand, and I was aching for a new game to play on it (but that’s another article). Mostly, I bought it because I managed to find a copy for around $20.

Kirby’s Avalanche is one of the many games in the ’sort things that fall from the sky’ puzzle sub-genre. This time, you’re sorting little blobs of colored jelly (they’re called ‘Puyos’ in the games that this is based off of). Blobs of the same color glom on to each other, and when four or more of them stick together they disappear. Depending on which mode you’re playing you have either one or two goals. The first goal is to continuously clear the screen so that it does not fill all the way up, if the third column from the left fills up, then it’s game over. By way of strategic blob-laying you can create chains of clears for Super Bonus Points ™. In two player mode, and in the Inexplicable-Story Mode, creating these chains will cause ‘garbage blobs’ to rain on your opponent. Your goal is to make their third column from the left fill up so that they lose.

With enough practice you will be able to make monster chains before your opponent can think, which makes the games go by quicker, and ensures that nobody will want to play with you anymore.

Jeopardy! is itself an American game show institution. Its borderline-insane longevity and popularity mean that eventually someone somewhere is going to have to cash in on it and bring the game to homes in whatever way possible. Ways that, since the 1980s, include the home video game market.

Jeopardy! is an example of a game that takes the absolute bare-minimum concepts of the thing that it’s based on and comes just shy of failing miserably at it.

Jeopardy!, in accordance with the television show, allows you and up to one of your friends to compete to provide the question to a series of answers that are provided to you. The harder the answer, the more points the question is worth. Answer wrong and you lose points. Nothing too out of the ordinary here.

This game also features the hypnotically-addictive Jeopardy! theme song (apparently titled “Think!”) that plays during key moments, and it even had a picture and the voice of Alex Trebek! For the Super Nintendo, this was quite the feat. Even if Alex Trebek sounded like he was bound, gagged, and locked in a closet full of packing peanuts, you got to hear his ACTUAL VOICE saying: “The answer is…”.

The problems are few, but very important.

There aren’t very many categories. I played through this game three times, and was already seeing repeats of categories. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but you had the same answers in the same positions every time the category came up. So the first time you saw the $600 answer for the category ‘European Leaders’ you were always going to know what that answer is. Plain text should have been trivial to put into this game, but I have to believe that most of the space on the apparently budget cartridge was spent on the ridiculously ‘high-res’ pictures of Alex and your character avatars and the super-amazing voice sample.

Perhaps more of a glaring issue is Final Jeopardy!. In Final Jeopardy! you and your opponents take turns answering the same… answer. The problem here is that you have to answer by selecting letters with the control pad, and you have to be able to see what you’re typing in to check for typos. The problem with that is that everyone in the room that can see the television will get to see what you put in for your answer is. Unless you play the game ‘no peeksies’ style, the first person to put in the correct answer will give everyone else the correct answer.

Oh, but the game does allow you to set the number of players to zero and watch the computer play a game of Jeopardy! against itself. And it’s not as boring as it sounds. It’s much, much worse.

Mario Paint isn’t really a game. It’s not really educational either. What exactly it is might be a little tough to actually define, but I think ‘creativity tool’ might be as close as anything.

Mario Paint, which was bundled with the Super NES mouse, was a glorified paint program for your Super NES, but you could do more than just doodle on the screen. You could: be the aforementioned screen doodler, create limited animations, color, make simple songs, create 16×16 pixel ’stamps’, and combine all of the above into a project. Oh, and you can swat flies.

The fly-swatting is a tutorial on how to use the mouse disguised as a mini-game. Flies of differing sizes, shapes, and dangers will appear on the screen, and it’s your job to swat them. There are a scant three stages, each with multiple waves of flies that culminates with a battle with the crazy-big mechanical boss fly thing (you have to swat it a lot before it breaks, just like real crazy-big mechanical boss fly things!). Once you win, it starts you over again from the beginning and the flies are a little faster and a little meaner.

By far the most fun part of this package is working within the limitations of the program to try and produce a scene utilizing the drawing, a repeating six-frame animation, and short 4/4 music segments.

Evolution as a concept is intriguing. Implementing it in a game is not unheard of. Basing a game around the concept, now that’s something else entirely.

EVO places you, a prehistoric creature of some sort (you begin as some kind of fish thing) vying for survival. You must kill weaker creatures and feast on their remains to gain ‘evolution points’. You spend these points to upgrade your body parts to be bigger, stronger, or more useful. Your goal? Survive the geologic age, and prove that you’re the ultimate being to Gaia, the spirit of the Earth.

Each age is very different, and a strong body in one age is excessively weak in another. Your sleek fishy physique is pretty useless on land, so you get to change to multi-legged dinosaur form. Your rough and tumble en-fanged dinosaur head with Flesh Rending Razor Teeth(tm) will do nearly zero damage to the new-fangled Warm Blooded Mammals, so you get fur and rodent teeth.

Interestingly, throughout the game you’ll find these mysterious crystals that bestow gifts that range from Big Points ™ to forms of real-world creatures that you get to use for a limited time (they’re super powerful, after all). There is some implication that there is an alien force at work directing evolution for its own unknown motives, motives that I was really never able to divine.

The other interesting thing is that once the appropriate age is reached you can choose to evolve into a human, and eventually into a mer-person. Just like Real Life Humans, the human walks around with a club and is particularly physically weak with a comparatively weak constitution. In other words, don’t evolve into a human. It makes the game much harder, unless you like that kind of challenge. In fact, evolving into a human is a one way street. You can’t go back to the piecemeal animal forms you had been using, and half of the fun is making some crazy patchwork monstrosity and seeing how it will fare. The game even lets you save pictures of your favorites.

I’m not sure that a game has been made since that covers the sheer scope of history that this game does, but it would be fantastic to see this game remade or a sequel to come out. The original was apparently a bit of a low-seller, so it’s tough to find these days and rather expensive if you do.

Lemmings is one of those games that just keeps popping up from time to time to give people who have never experienced the simple yet addicting game a chance to play it, and give the older gaming crowd a little bit of the old nostalgia.

For the three of four of you that haven’t heard of this game, the premise is pretty simple: Lemmings fall through a trap door into a stage filled with various forms of Insta-Death(tm). The Lemmings will march forward, only turning around when they hit something. It’s your job to dole out your compliment of jobs to the Lemmings to create a safe path to the exit door.

It sounds easy enough, and in the beginning it is pretty straightforward. The levels are broken up into four difficulty levels: fun, tricky, taxing, and mayhem. The Super NES version also had an additional difficulty level, Sunsoft, that we’ll get to in a couple of paragraphs.

Fun is pretty easy, almost mind-numbingly so. It introduces you to the game, how the controls work, and what all the different jobs do. You almost have to try and not complete these stages.

Tricky is slightly tougher. You’ll have to learn how to corral your Lemmings and send a lone wolf over to construct the path to the goal.

Taxing starts to ramp up the difficulty. Your allotment of jobs will be smaller than you want, and the Lemmings will begin to find ways to kill themselves almost immediately after landing in the stage. Controllers may get thrown.

Mayhem is just cruel. Your time is shortened even more than Taxing, so you get to work faster. There are paths made of steel that you can’t burrow through and are filled with various Lemming-killing devices that you won’t see until a Lemming is working away and is unceremoniously squished, just half a screen from the goal. A goal which, incidentally, is placed in a place that’s not immediately obviously easy to get to.

And then there’s the Sunsoft levels. Bonus levels created by the team that ported the game to the Super NES. They’re hard, but not quite as hard as the Mayhem levels. Well, except for the very last one. It was hard enough that I decided to call a Nintendo Game Play Counselor after nearly breaking my controller in half. It turns out that the solution is pretty easy once you know what it is, but the extremely short time limit still makes it pretty tough to complete, so I never did.

This game has spawned a number of sequels and spinoffs on almost every computer and game console, but I never played any of them. For me, the Super NES version is the definitive version of Lemmings.