Archive for the ‘Arcade’ Category

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Bump ‘n’ Jump

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

On the surface Bump ‘n’ Jump is your standard driving game. You take your car down the road and try to get to the end of the level with the eventual goal of rescuing your kidnapped girlfriend. You have the ability to bump other cars off the road that might be in your way, scoring precious points. The road you’re on inexplicably goes through rivers and other obstacles, but you’re fine. As you may have been able to glean from the title, your car has the ability to jump.

You primarily use your jump to avoid the suddenly-ending road, but you can also squish opposing cars for extra Bonus Points. However, you have to keep an eye on what you’re doing. If you are too busy squishing cars to pay attention to the obstacles, there’s a good chance that you’ll jump directly into the river/ocean/other obstacle.

The game has discrete levels, but I was not able to determine if it actually ever had an end. As interesting of a concept as this game had, I couldn’t play more than about five levels at a time before I got tired of it and moved on.

Posted in Arcade, Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Super Pac-Man

Sunday, April 1st, 2007

Pac-Man has become quite the icon, and like any good video game icon, he’s been in his share of spinoffs, sequels, and clones. Most of these didn’t deviate too far from the standard formula: guide your favorite Pac-person through a maze, avoid the ghost-shaped monsters, eat everything in the maze, proceed to next maze.

Although Pac-Man’s traditional food is dots, in Super Pac-Man you eat actual foods. The problem is that these foods are behind locked doors. How do you open these doors? Well, there are two ways. The obvious way is to eat the keys scattered throughout the levels, each key opens one or more doors letting you get inside. The other way is to eat one of the two giant ‘Super pellets’ in each level (which are conveniently behind locked doors). Unlike traditional power pellets that turn the monsters blue so you can eat them, the Super pellets turn Pac-Man about double his actual size, allowing him to break down the doors, collide with the monsters without getting hurt, and utilize bursts of super speed.

And that’s it. Eat the foods, clear the levels, and move on to the next stage. Continue in that manner until you manage to run out of lives. Fun times.

Posted in Arcade | No Comments »

Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja

Monday, March 26th, 2007

I guess cavepeople are easy targets for game developers: they have an established image, they are inaccurately portrayed as living side-by-side with dinosaurs, and, perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to pay a license to anyone to put cavemen in your game. Like Joe and Mac. Caveman. Ninja.

Although my understanding of the Ninja Arts is limited, I saw neither Joe nor mac performing many ninja-related activities. Unless you count bonking a tyrannosaurus upside the head with a giant stone wheel, which, for the sake of this discussion, we don’t.

The story for the game goes something like this: Some rival tribe of cavemen has kidnapped all of the cavewomen from Joe and Mac’s tribe. You have to run to the right, and sometimes up, killing anything that moves to get them back. Along the way you’ll find weapons that you’d expect cavemen to have: clubs, boomerangs, fire, the afore-mentioned stone wheels, and the very rare powerup that throws a shadow version of yourself at your enemies… like a ninja. You’ll also find a variety of foodstuffs strewn about the level because although you have a health bar, just existing makes it go down (i.e. your caveman apparently metabolizes food amazingly fast and gets hungry all the time).

Boss fights at the end of the stages are your typical ‘fight a giant version of a regular enemy’. One in particular, the Giant Carnivorous Caveman-eating Plant… of Doom, is rumored to yell an expletive when it’s hit. I never really heard it until someone told me that, and it’s a bit of a stretch.

Naming oddities aside, the game’s actually kind of fun with two players, two players who can actually hurt each other with their Bonk Sticks. Just make sure that if you play it with two players that you play it with a complete stranger. That way when you ‘accidentally’ kill him off so you can bash in the skull of a giant thingus at the end of a level and get all the points, he can’t find you to bug you for the quarter you apparently now owe him because he ‘wasted it’ by getting in a game with you without asking first.

Posted in Arcade, Super NES | 2 Comments »

Crazy Taxi

Friday, March 23rd, 2007

Crazy Taxi was an anomaly in arcades when it was released. As you got better at the game, you actually could play longer. This directly opposite of other arcade games like Generic Racing Simulator 2000, where as you get better the shorter your game is, or Sports Game XX: X-treme X-citement or Rhythm Game: MAX BEATS where your time is pretty much going to be the same no matter how good you are.

So what is Crazy Taxi? In a nutshell, Crazy Taxi is a game that tasks you, the taxi driver, with picking up customers and dropping them off at their destinations throughout San Francisco and collecting their fares. What keeps this game from sinking into the Pits of Ho-Hummery is the presentation. Your goal is to get people where they need to go as quickly as possible by any means necessary. You have to barrel full-bore down crowded streets, jump over traffic and buildings with strategically placed ‘jump trucks’, and power-slide around hairpin turns. Near-misses and skillful driving will earn you tips, and get you to your destination faster. Crashing into other vehicles and maintaining a leisurely pace will ensure that you’ll have a quick, and unprofitable, day.

The soundtrack is a bit on the silly side. It tries to show off how extreme to the max this game is by playing a mixture of Offspring and Bad Religion songs constantly. Well, that and the guys with giant mohawks that want to go to Tower Records.

In short, yes, this game is fun. If you go through the basics of the training, that is. Without knowing how to do at least the Crazy Dash (immediately going to full speed), or the Crazy Drift (powersliding through turns), your games will be short, uneventful, and boring. Learning and practicing these maneuvers, however, turns the game into a totally different experience. An experience that actually sold me my Dreamcast.

I had a copy of this game for the Dreamcast for over a month before I actually bought one, partially because I found it on clearance for $15, and partially because I was tired of pumping quarters and tokens into the slowly breaking and disappearing arcade units. It might be worth noting that I spent upwards of $15 on the arcade units after my purchase of a this game, so I didn’t really save any money, but at least I got some practice in at home.

Posted in Arcade, Dreamcast | 1 Comment »

Columns

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

For one Summer I actually owned a Game Gear. I ended up selling it pretty quickly after I bought it, partly because I couldn’t afford to keep replacing the 6 AA batteries with a lifespan of about two hours if you were lucky (no exaggeration), and I thought that being tethered to a wall by using the AC adapter completely defeated the purpose of owning a hand held system in the first place. Mostly, it was because I became absolutely sick with the pack-in game, Columns.

Columns was the game that would spend the most time with, mostly because I couldn’t afford to buy any other games after blowing all of my funds on a system, an AC adapter, and a backpack full of batteries. I’m not going to lie, spending the amount of time I did playing Columns might have influenced my decision to get rid of it.

Columns is a typical puzzle game. You’re given pieces that consist of three panels stacked up to form a vertical bar. You must, for reasons unexplained, sort the bars in such a way that three or more of the same color line up in any direction so they can disappear. You can change what ‘column’ the piece will land in, as well as the order of the colors in the piece. You play until you can’t fit any more pieces in the playfield.

I logged a couple dozen hours in the game within a few weeks, and then hit on a strategy that, in retrospect, should never have worked. Heck, even then I thought that it shouldn’t work. I decided to just play the game by randomly filling up the field on both sides, leaving a one-column wide hole in the middle. I would then fill up this hole and attempt to make matches. I wasn’t trying to win, I was just goofing around with the game. I ended up playing this strategy for over two hours. I played so long that we had to switch to AC power just before the batteries died. I played so long that my hands went numb. I played so long that I decided that I never needed to play Columns again in any incarnation.

Posted in Arcade, Game Gear, Genesis | 1 Comment »

Quarth

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

I know that look. You don’t know what Quarth is. It’s okay. Not very many people have even heard of Quarth, much less know what it is. That’s what I’m here for. To help.

Quarth is an arcade game (with a port to the original Game Boy) that’s an interesting combination of vertically-scrolling shooting game and a puzzle game. Your ship is in a fixed location across the bottom of the play field, and various shapes of blocks descend inexorably toward your ship. If they cross the line at the bottom of the screen, you lose. What do you do? Thankfully, your ship is equipped with armaments that shoot smaller blocks. You use these smaller blocks to fill in the gaps in the larger pieces. Once you have built a piece into a square or rectangle, the piece is eliminated from the play field and is no longer a threat.

That’s it. Simple, fun, and addicting. Until you accidentally fire one too many blocks down the middle of a U-shaped piece, and then frantically move to build up the rest of the shape to match.

But that’s only if you panic.

Posted in Arcade, GameBoy | No Comments »

Hatris

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

During the Tetris phenomenon of the late 80s. Puzzle fanatics were clamoring for the ‘next big thing’ from its creator, and he needed to come up with something to satiate their appetite. Unfortunately, over twenty years later we’re still waiting for the ‘next big thing’.

But at least we can play Hatris.

Hatris charges you, the player, with sorting the groups of hats that fall from the top of the screen in pairs. Hats of the same style stack well, while hats of differing styles do not. Stack five hats of the same style on top of each other, and they disappear (are sold) and you get points (money).

The problem? It’s just not fun. It’s difficult to plan ahead in any fashion, the gameplay is shallow, and stacking hats in video game form is every bit as exciting at stacking hats in real life

Nothing has quite matched the ubiquity of Tetris to date, and if spinoff games like Hatris are indication, nothing will.

Posted in Arcade, GameBoy, NES | 1 Comment »

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