The Closeout Warrior

I can distinctly remember being bored a lot when I was in school, so I did things that any normal person would do: I created a lot of bad video game ideas, complete with backstories, maps, and diagrams. Fortunately, all of that effort is now lost to the Mists of Time, but I also kicked around the idea of combining together some of my favorite games to make some kind of Dr. Frankenstein-esque super game. This generated quite a bit of discussion around the lunch room tables, each of us throwing in our picks and such. Years later it became apparent that someone at Nintendo was doing the same thing and actually had the means to do something about it. They took some of their most memorable characters from some of their most popular games (also Earthbound) and threw them into an all-out fighting game.

Smash is essentially a Nintendo fanboy’s dream. The best characters pummeling each other to decide who’s the best? Sign me up!

Actually, this game is just about the perfect party game. Four people can play at once, and the controls are very easy to learn. You can just mash buttons and play somewhat effectively, though I don’t really know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing (Although the name “Super Smash Button Mash” seemed to stick pretty well). But it moves fast, and is almost always entertaining to watch, even when the action is so fast and muddled that you can’t tell what’s going on.

Sometimes, perhaps even more so.

I suppose that if I worked for a company like Rare, churning out cutesy games one after the other, then I’d probably want to revolt. To do some kind of horrible things to the cute critters. And that’s pretty much what happened. Take a cute squirrel and insert him into some decidedly uncute scenes, and you have the makings of quite the interesting game.

Conker, our hero, drinks far too much one evening and gets quite the nasty hangover. He then manages to get lost and needs to make his way home to rest and to see his inexplicably attractive girlfriend.

Conker, as his day progresses, finds himself in a variety of increasingly unlikely circumstances, some based on movies, and all a bit on the adult side. Make no mistake about it, this game, though it stars a fairly cute main character, is not for the kiddos. The game features gratuitous references and depictions of feces, urine, adult-oriented portions of anatomy, gore, and oh, so much more. Of course, it’s also pretty funny, especially if you’re into gross-out humor. Which, given the proper position of the moon, I am.

The game is surprisingly long and quite tough. But that’s usually OK since you’ll find yourself playing it just to see the next cutscene. It turns out that there is some kind of overarching story to the thing, but it doesn’t really matter, and it doesn’t even make a great deal of sense.

Although the movie references are getting a little dated, you should play this game if you get the opportunity. Though you’d probably have better luck finding the Xbox version to play.

I have to hand it to the guys at Rare, they managed to create a kart racing game with a plot, something I didn’t think was necessary. Does it make a whole lot of sense? No, not really. But it’s reasonably fun, so that’s what matters.

It turns out that there’s this giant sorcerer-pig on the loose on Diddy’s island. There’s a giant blue elephant-genie that can help Diddy defeat him, but not without making him do a ludicrous amount of work. So Diddy calls his friends and they have a series of races. There are several areas of the island, each with a theme. Each time you win a race, you get a balloon. Get enough balloons and you race the boss of the area (a giant creature of some sort). Keep on winning and you get to go to the next area where you get to do it all over again. I should mention that you don’t just race karts, depending on the stage you can also race airplanes or hovercraft.

Diddy Kong apparently has a lot of friends, friends who are in other games (like Conker the Squirrel and Banjo the Honey Bear) and friends who make their sole appearance here (Pipsy the Mouse, Bumper the Badger, and Timber the Tiger? Anyone?). I have a feeling some of them were all put in there because they’re totally marketable, I’d probably spring for a Tiptup action figure.

Eventually you will race the big bad Wizpig himself. He cheats (he is a villain, after all). If you win the race, you defeat him for good. How does that work? I’m supposing you somehow use the power of the balloons you collected, but my supposition skill needs work.

In the Super Nintendo days, I had heard of F-Zero, but I only played it for about 15 minutes when someone brought it over to my house for my birthday party one year. A few years later when a sequel was coming out I decided to refamiliarize myself with the series.

F-Zero is a game about racing hover-vehicles really fast. The original had four, so it was kind of tame. This version bumps it up to 30. 30 hovercars with aggressive drivers racing extremely quickly on progressively narrowing tracks means that this game gets frantic (and quite frustrating) quickly. There are few things more frustrating than running a race for three minutes or so at breakneck speed only to lose it at the end and crash and burn.

There were two things that drew me to this game, the super fast racing action, and the track editor. My understanding is that the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (that never materialized here in the States) would have opened up a mode where you could design your own tracks. But there is a mode, once you’ve made some progress, where the computer will randomly generate a track. Which makes it extra tough to win, since you can’t practice the tracks beforehand. However, it’s pretty awesome when the computer randomly generates a track with some curves so heinous that even it can’t finish the course.

Although I invested enough time into this game that I unlocked the random track mode, I never did finish all of the difficulty levels. I just didn’t have the reflexes for it.

Let’s say you have a game that has the word ‘Tetris’ in the title, but doesn’t really involve Tetris at all. Let’s also suppose that you have a massively popular game franchise with highly copyrightable characters. It might occur to you that you want to mix them together. The result would have been something along the lines of Pokémon Puzzle League.

This game is a lot like Tetris Attack. There are only two real differences, and the first one is cosmetic. You can pick which Pokémon you want to represent you in your match, which doesn’t do anything other than change what sounds you get when you do combos and chains. The other difference is the addition of ‘3D mode’. It’s just like ‘normal mode’ except that it takes place on a giant cylinder. It’s kind of a neat novelty, but pretty worthless. Once the game speeds up a bit, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on all parts of the cylinder, and the sheer amount of tiles on it makes it much too easy to do combos and chains.

I should also mention that this game has a mode where you can create your own puzzles and challenge your friends, which is pretty neat, and the timings have been tweaked a bit since the Super NES offering, but you won’t really notice unless you were a real Tetris Attack aficionado. The game was good on its own, but adding the Pokémon characters ensured that people would buy it was a pretty obvious gambit. Thankfully, a version came out some time later with no mascots of any kind.

It’s no greatly-held secret that I’m a pretty die-hard Nintendo fan. So I had to jump and get Nintendo’s very own version of a game that had up until this point had only appeared on consoles I don’t have, and in arcades, which I also don’t have.

DDR Mario Mix is pretty standard as Dancing games go. Arrows work their way up from the bottom of the screen and cross other arrows at the top of the screen, to the beat of the music. You have to stomp on the corresponding arrows on your dance mat (here called the ‘action pad’). But this Nintendo version differs by adding some story and some minigames. The story? Doesn’t matter. You just pick Mario or Luigi and have to use the power of dance to save the day.

There are two kinds of songs in this game: remixes of songs from past Mario games, which sound great, and public domain songs that sound pretty good, but are a bizarre juxtaposition. You have the main theme from Super Mario Bros. 2, and you have some Tchaikovsky. Even with the music mix padded out with freebie public-domain songs, you still only get 29 songs total (30 if you count the end credits, which I don’t). I was able to play through the game twice and unlock everything in under 2 hours.

Perhaps most puzzling about this game is that DDR is best when played against an actual person. The game comes with one mat. If you want to buy another mat you have to either go get another copy of the game or order a mat from Nintendo’s online store, which I’m sure most people don’t even know exists.

This game isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it just left me wanting more. Which has yet to materialize.

If you’ve been reading my last few entries, it might seem that I hate every game I play. That’s not exactly true. I hate a lot of games that are lazy or otherwise poorly executed but there are some games that I do like. Games like Banjo-Kazooie.

The story in Banjo-Kazooie is a little convoluted, but the gist of it is this: Banjo, a honeybear wearing tight yellow shorts, and Kazooie, a ‘Red Crested Breegull’ that lives in his backpack, have to rescue Banjo’s sister, Tootie, who has been kidnapped by the resident evil witch, Gruntilda, for the express purpose of stealing Tootie’s cuteness.

Seriously.

To achieve your goal, you have to make your way to Gruntilda’s castle, but the way is blocked. To unblock the way you have to find golden jigsaw puzzle pieces, called ‘Jiggies’ to complete pictures of the various stages. Each stage has 10 Jiggies to find, and several of them are hidden pretty well. You have to solve the puzzles in each level to get the pieces, use the pieces to complete the picture that opens the way to the next level, and so forth.

Each level presents unique challenges. You have a level set on an island where you search for buried treasure, you have a level set in the woods where you have to climb trees, an obligatory ice level, a desert level, and so forth.

You also will get some help along the way in the form of Bottles the Mole who will teach you different moves that you’ll need to continue, Mumbo Jumbo the witch doctor with the ability to change Banjo into different animals to help you find some Jiggies in out of the way places, and Gruntilda’s nice sister Brenthilda who will tell you some of Gruntilda’s secrets (this comes in handy toward the end of the game).

The game is a solid package. It’s pretty entertaining, has a reasonably engaging storyline, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Makes it a winner in my book.

Clay fighter 63 1/3 is the last in a series of not very good fighting games produced by Interplay. A company that decided that it would make a name for itself by producing a series of forgettable games with the hook that the games would be rendered in claymation (a.k.a. stop-motion photography).

I followed the development of this game for months before it came out. The screenshots and preview videos I saw made me salivate for the opportunity to play it. The stages looked amazing, the cartoonish characters had a variety of over-the-top special moves, and the game was voiced by such heavy hitters as Charles Adler, Jeff Bennet, Michael Buffer, Dan Castellaneta, Jim Cummings, Jess Harnell, Tress MacNeille, Rob Paulson, and Frank Welker.

Unfortunately, the game didn’t live up to the title that I had produced in my head. The game is a parody of fighting games, and incorporates a version of the combo system found in Killer Instinct. This basically means that you can string attacks together to create combos, which are appropriately violent. The fighters are clay (“hit ‘em, smack ‘em, they don’t care”) so they look predictably cartoony. There is a clown, a snow man, a disturbing portrayal of a Chinese chef, a bionic rabbit, Earthworm Jim, Boogerman, a token blob character, a shirtless Santa, and some more oddities. There were some other characters that were all over the previews, but didn’t make it in for one reason or another. Which led to a major problem, the game was incomplete.

The game had stages for the characters that were left out, the story had gaping holes in it since the characters had gone missing, the stages had nonfunctional objects that look like they should have done something, the hit detection was way off at times, the characters that were in the game moved and interacted with each other stiffly, etc. Lots more etc.

Some of these problems were fixed in the rental-only (and very rare) Sculptor’s Cut version of this game that fixed almost all of these problems, at the expense of the ‘insane combos’ (300+ hit finishing maneuvers). Unfortunately, since you couldn’t actually buy this version (the good version) what you’re left with is a slow, plodding, unfinished mess of a game.

Wetrix might be one of the more… interesting puzzle games to come down the pike. It’s tough to explain what it’s all about without seeing it in action, and even if you do see it in action, you’re probably not going to know what you’re looking at. I’ll do the best I can to describe it:

You have a flat piece of dirt. Various pieces fall from the sky in differing configurations, called ‘uppers’ and ‘downers’ that will raise or lower the ground respectively. You use these pieces to construct lakes to hold the water that will also fall from the sky. Your immediate goal is to contain the water, if it drains away your drain meter will fill and you’ll lose. You can empty some of the water in the drain meter by dunking a fireball into one of your lakes, evaporating the water within and scoring points.

The learning curve for this game is quite steep. I never made it past being acceptably mediocre at this game. One thing about it I really liked, though, was that at the end of your game you’d get presented with a code that you could enter in the developer’s site and verify your score. Pretty handy for verifying scores if you ask me. But, since the developer, Zed Two, is no longer in business, this feature is significantly less useful.

I enjoyed this game for a bit, it certainly has a bit of that novelty factor that I like so much, but other games quickly came along that wrested my interest away.

For an added bonus today, I’m offering up some of the music in this game in handy MP3 form.

Wetrix Classic Music
Wetrix Pro Music

I am a member of a very exclusive club. I bought a Nintendo 64 and didn’t buy Goldeneye. I did play it, but I could just never really get into it. Fast forward a couple of years and a ’spiritual successor’ or sorts came out in the form of Perfect Dark. I didn’t buy it either until it had been out for some time and I could get it for about $18. By that time I was pretty bored, there was nothing on the horizon that I wanted to get, and my friends all told me how great of a game it was.

Perfect Dark stars super-stealthy secret agent Joanna Dark that you have to guide on a series of missions, each more improbable than the last. The game takes place in the future, and quickly evolves from a standard ‘raid some building/complex, kill all the baddies, and rescue [object]‘ to quite the sci-fi story. I won’t give it away, but ‘Elvis’ does make an appearance.

The game is, at its heart, a shooting game with objectives. You run around shooting things, collecting things, avoiding being shot, and and making your way to the point that triggers the next story sequence. One thing I was particularly impressed by was the sheer level of voiceover work in this game. Every cutscene is voiced, well, the ones I managed to see, at any rate. Just about the time I decided to temporarily shelve the game. I fully intended to go back to it some day, but it’s looking less likely as time goes on, unfortunately.

It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but I couldn’t get into it. It might have been the brutal level of difficulty (not likely, I’ve finished other Rare titles before and since), or it might have been due to the bizarre storyline (again, probably not, I’ve played through weirder games before), but, really, I have to attribute it to not being able to muddle through the control scheme. The Nintendo 64 controller just was not the most ideal for playing this type of game.