The Closeout Warrior

I really liked Super Mario Kart. Still do, actually. It’s one of those games that’s easy enough to pick up that anyone can play it, and complex enough that you can spend hours upon hours learning its intricacies.

So what is it? It’s a series of kart races, starring characters from the Mario universe. Why are they racing? Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you have to take your go-kart of choice and try to win races set in courses themed after locations in the other Mario universe games.

To make it a little more exciting, you can get coins to slightly boost your speed, but the real fun comes with the items you come across. You have shells to throw at your enemies, mushrooms to give you a boost of speed, feathers to jump real high, etc. It makes the game just a little unpredictable, which adds excitement.

There’s also a ‘battle mode’ where you and a friend scoot around a track, hunting each other down and trying to pop balloons on your opponent’s kart by hitting them with the items.

I played this game a lot when I bought it, but I really got my enjoyment out of it from the XBand modem. After playing with my circle of friends for weeks upon weeks, I thought I was pretty good at this game (and I was, really). But there were some folks on that network that were leaps and bounds better than me. Though I still won my fair share of matches.

I still like to pick it up occasionally, though finding opponents is getting tougher and tougher these days. They want to play the new games in the series, which I can’t really fault them for.

Every once in a while you will run across a game that tries to straddle two genres. If done right, this can make for a slightly more interesting experience. Actraiser combines city building and side-scrolling action into a game that manages to do both passably.

The game is about a god who has to help his followers. I don’t really remember why, and I’m not going to bother looking it up, but I do remember that it has something to do with smiting evil. Such is the way of gods, I suppose.

Half the time you’ll be directing the development of your civilization, telling them where to build things, and taking whatever treasures they can find (powerups, natch). Occasionally you have to go down and take matters in your own hands. This involves sending your spirit down to inhabit one of the statues representing you and using it to vanquish the Threat of the Day. You alternate between the two styles until you’ve smited everything.

I guess the neatest thing I remember about this game is that when you go down to the statues, the game uses the Super Nintendo’s zoom to kind of fly down to the surface. I always thought that was neat. Other than that, the game was dead easy, up until the last couple of bosses, which you get to fight in a row, and where I gave up in frustration.

I should probably feel worse about that.

I may lose a couple of points on my Geek Score Card, but I’m going to go ahead and admit it, I never really got that into the whole Star Wars series. I watched and enjoyed the movies, but never really felt some great connection to George Lucas.

I suppose, then, that I only played Super Return of the Jedi because it looked cool in my issue of Nintendo Power. It’s more arcadey than some of the Star Wars games that I played on the NES, and it even came with a high score table (which reset itself when you turned the power off, such a buzzkill).

The game itself has you taking the characters from the movie in generic levels reenacting the different scenes of the movie. I’m sure that if I’d have obsessed over the movies more I could spend hours pointing out how the minutiae of the levels differed from the minutiae of the movie, but I won’t bore you. I just assume that liberties were taken to make the game more interesting to play than a straight port of the movie scenes and leave it at that.

I should have known that this game would be exceptionally hard. Lucasarts hard is a special brand of difficulty that I’ve only experienced in Star Wars games. Without fail the games in the Star Wars universe have been mind-bendingly, tortuously, diabolically difficult to progress in, and even tougher to complete. This game is no exception. I don’t really remember how far I got before I gave up on it, mostly because the developers were kind enough to leave in some cheat codes to allow me to play any stage that I wanted. So what I did after a couple of days of making non-progress was to use the codes, see all the stages (and fail at them horribly) and then start on the last stage repeatedly until I finished it. I’ve seen the ending to this game, and that makes me happy.

The Simpsons have been around for, in entertainment terms, absolutely forever. Every couple of years or so a new, maniacally difficult, game comes out based on the series. 1992’s game was Bart’s Nightmare.

In this game, Bart is staying up late doing homework and eventually drifts off to sleep. He dreams that his report gets blown out the window, so he jumps out and tries to rescue it. Once he gets down to the street he enters an inexplicable dreamworld, filled with confusing imagery. It’s also apparently very windy in dreamland, as the missing report pages are flying around everywhere. You’d think it’d just be a matter of collecting the pages and moving on with your life, but it’s not that easy. When you find a page you have to play a minigame. Win the game and get a page. What could be simpler?

As it happens, these minigames are quite lengthy and quite difficult. And you have to clear them all to get all of the pages. The more pages you get, the better of a grade you get on the paper the next day. How exactly this works is beyond me. But since I wasn’t ever able to get enough pages to get more than a ‘D’, I decided to not worry about it too much.

It’s no huge secret that I’m a fan of the Professional Wrestling Arts. Have been for most of my life. Video games based on the spectacle are usually pretty hit or miss, and more often than not miss.

WWF Raw is the first wrestling game that I ever played on my Super NES. I was pretty excited because the last console wrestling game that I played was pretty awful, and a new game on a new system means an all new way to disappoint me.

The game is more or less like you might expect: take your chosen grappler through a series of matches that increase in difficulty to become champion. You win the matches by beating your opponents senseless and pinning their shoulders to the mat for three consecutive seconds. Each character also has a ’signature move’ that he or she has purportedly perfected to such a degree that it is extra damaging.

You might notice that the characters in this game all appear to be about the same height, weight, and build. Luna Vachon (5′ 5”, 135 pounds), the lone female in the game, and Yokuzuna (6′ 4”, 538 pounds) somehow manage to stand eye to eye and are about the same width. I’m sure there’s a technical reason for that, but I’m not going to be bothered finding out what it is.

In this game you perform the wrestlers’ moves by first initiating a ‘collar and elbow tie up’ (that thing they do where it kind of looks like they’re hugging each other real high up), then pressing a direction and a button as fast as you can. Each combination of a direction and button will do a different move, assuming you managed to press the button faster than the other person.

I told you that story so I could tell you this story. This is (thus far) the only game that I’ve ever injured myself playing. On New Year’s Eve in 1994 I, along with a friend of mine, decided to rent this game to pass the time until midnight rolled around. I don’t know how many matches we played, but it was a lot. Each match was essentially several minutes of pushing the buttons as quickly as I could with my thumbs. About six hours of this and we rang in the new year and went to bed. About an hour later, I woke up with the most unusual pain in my forearms. It turns out that I had pulled the muscles that ran from my thumbs all the way to my elbows. Since the place I was staying at had no pain killers on hand, and I wasn’t yet old enough to drive I had one recourse, soaking my arms in cold water to numb the pain enough so that I could get about an hour’s worth of sleep. Then I’d wake up and repeat the process.

That would be the day that I decided to no longer play games in which you have to press the buttons in direct opposition to another player to win. Hopefully that’s a decision that will stave off carpal tunnel for another day.

It’s kind of hard to tell where Castlevania IV falls into the timeline of the Castlevania universe, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a reimagining of the first game meant to show off the power of the then new-fangled Super NES.

The story is typical for a Castlevania game, Dracula is back and Simon Belmont must use his whip and his wits to kill him again. Only this time the characters are bigger, the locations spookier, and Simon is marginally more maneuverable.

Out of all of the original batch of side-scrolling Castlevania games, this one is my favorite. It takes the basic idea of the original and ramps it up into an (almost) epic side scrolling game. It also doesn’t hurt that it lays on the Super Nintendo Mode 7 effects pretty heavily (rotating rooms, trippy backgrounds, and enemies that change size as you hit them? Yes, please!). And to top it all off, the music is pretty catchy. Ok, I know that doesn’t really sound like a ringing endorsement, but the game really is good. You’ll just have to trust me on that.

I decided long ago that I just wasn’t hardcore enough to finish the original Battletoads game. Why, then, would I attempt to play a sequel? Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, maybe I’m eternally optimistic to think that I’ll have a chance to be better at a sequel, maybe I’m a sucker for pretty graphics, or maybe I just wanted the chance to play as Pimple, the unplayable ‘Toad from the first game.

The story is very similar to the first game in the series. In that game a princess and a Battletoad (Pimple) got kidnapped, and the remaining team had to go to the planet and save them. In this game the daughter of some guy and a Battletoad (Zitz) got kidnapped, and the remaining team had to go into a virtual reality simulator to save them.

You even have similar locales: Speeder Bike Level, Tree Level, Giant Snake Level (Karnath’s Lair), Clinger Winger-like stage, and a Race-to-the-bottom-of-a-shaft-to-diffuse-a-bomb level. All ripped unceremoniously from the first game, given a face lift, and crowbarred into this one. The only original stages are the first stage and the bonus levels (where you inexplicably slide around on a giant checker across a chessboard, avoiding rats and collecting bowling pins for extra lives).

So what you end up with is essentially a remake of the original game, distilled down to its ‘greatest hits’, and polished up to a fine luster. But what about the difficulty? The first game is monstrously difficult for my addled game-playing skills, and this one is too. But I’m not sure if it’s a combination of the reduced stage count or the slightly increased opportunities for extra lives, but I was actually able to complete this game, several times, in fact. Though, oddly enough, due to the bizarre button layout, I was only able to to that by using my Super Advantage joystick controller.

I guess that Bubsy the Bobcat was supposed to be Accolade’s version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Bubsy is a bobcat with attitude, evidenced by the white shirt with the giant red exclamation point on it that he always wears.

The only Bubsy game that I ever played was the debut game for the Super NES, and it was clearly inspired by the Sonic series. Bubsy runs fast, collects things, and has an evil mastermind to defeat.

The story was pretty typical for a video game: aliens have invaded and are stealing the world’s supply of yarn. Bubsy’s a cat, cats love yarn. Bubsy goes out to save the day. Unfortunately, this game suffered from some pretty serious design flaws that made it ridiculously frustrating.

The levels in this game are freaking enormous. You have to go in the general direction of ‘to the right’ collecting the insane amount of yarn on the way (hundreds per level). Problems become apparent once you dive in. Since Bubsy runs real fast, he gets KOd a lot by things that he can’t see. Or rather, things you can’t see fast enough to react to. Add in the jumps where you’re essentially jumping off a multi-screen high platform to an unseen destination with only the trail of pickups to guide you. You’re going to die. A lot.

You’ll notice that at the beginning of each stage, ol’ Bubs will say some snarky phrase. For the first few levels he says, “What could possibly go wrong?” You’re going to hear this phrase no less than two hundred times as you muddle your way through the game, dieing at every opportunity. It’ll drive you to the brink of madness.

And, what do you get if you suffer through the entire game, memorizing stage layouts and sacrificing several thousand bobcats to defeat the invading aliens? You get the most unsatisfying ending I’ve ever seen for the amount of effort involved.

Do. Not. Bother.

I’m a sucker for console role playing games. Give me a good one and I’ll be dead to the world for a few weeks. And when I played Earthbound? I was dead to the world for months.

Why did I like the game so much? It’s hard to say. At first glance it appears to be pretty atypical as far as role playing games go. It’s set in the 90’s instead of some medieval period, the graphics are far from stellar, and

The game starts when Ness, a kid with psychic abilities, is awakened by a meteor crashing down near his house. He goes to investigate, and is befriended by a bee sent from the future who tells him that he’s destined to save the world. He’s then accosted by a robot who was sent back to deal with Ness and the bee.

Then it gets weird.

In your quest to guide Ness to save the world, you’ll encounter street gangs, zombies, aliens, dinosaurs, sea monsters, monkeys, and… ambulatory cups of coffee. Most of these bent by the will of Giygas, the ill-defined evil entity and antagonist of the game. Of course, in typical role playing game fashion, you have to defeat them all, and do a little time traveling to win.

I suppose what I like about this game is that it’s exceptionally well written, and never takes itself too seriously. Sure, there’s a world to save, but no reason to not throw in a gag every now and then. Check out the dialog at about 4:30 in the following clip.

So what we end up with is a game that’s almost completely incomprehensible, yet makes a strange amount of sense in its own universe, and it still manages to somehow mostly come together in the end. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this game to anyone, but you can’t find it. It enjoyed exactly one release here in the US, and all other sequels haven’t made it over here for some reason, likely because of dismal sales of the original, despite a fairly vocal fanbase. Which is a real shame.

And, no, my copy is not for sale.