The Closeout Warrior

Some days when I went to my local arcade with the express intent of playing the sole copy of the Mega Man arcade game that I’ve ever managed to find, I’d only be greeted with a sign saying that it was out of order. In those cases I was pretty well obligated to play the other game in the arcade.

And, yes, I realize that an arcade with two games in it isn’t really much of an arcade, it’s more of a closet with a couple of games in it. But the sign above that closet said ‘arcade’, so that’s the nomenclature I’m going to use.

But, anyway, the other game in the arcade was a little game called Ridge Racer, which was a game that I had heard of before, but never owned any of the systems that the home versions came out on, and had never seen the arcade version of the game in person before or since. Ridge Racer is a racing game, but the hook is that it’s not your bog-standard racing around a track, it’s racing down streets while fishtailing wildly around the course… er, I mean drifting.

I’ve admitted that I don’t really like racing games in the past unless there’s some kind of hook. But the hook in this game is kind of lame.

Maybe I’m the weird one because I don’t find that keeping your car on the razor’s edge between in control and out of control to be a particularly compelling mechanic. It’s like you’re playing a game that consists of you driving a car with tires made of ice full speed around a track, also made of ice, but it’s not quite cold enough to keep them frozen, so there’s slippery water everywhere, which is slightly less control than I like.

Thankfully Mega Man rarely stayed broken for long.

At first glance you’d probably think that the San Francisco Rush games would be about straight up racing, and you’d be kind of right. It is a racing game, but it’s kind of a backhanded slap to your racing game sensibilities.

Now you could race around the tracks against the computer-controlled opponents, but that’s not going to do you much good. Your car, for some reason, is absolutely incapable of attaining the same top speed as your opponents, which makes the race kind of tough to win. To make any kind of headway you have to make exorbitant use of the shortcuts placed around the track. But the thing is, these shortcuts require ridiculous amounts of dexterity and a little touch of luck to successfully maneuver through them. That’s all assuming you can even find the things. The shortcuts are frequently placed in apparently inaccessible or in insane places to get to so you kind of have to race around the track a few times just looking for places to drive off the beaten path to find the correct combination of secret passageways that you have navigate with ridiculous amounts of skill to maybe not come in last.

Translated that means that this game is going to cost you a lot of money to get good at.

Yeah, you could race through the game and not hit any of the shortcuts and have a degree of fun with the game. But also in those shortcuts are these weird coins that you can collect. Collect enough of them and you get to unlock stuff like extra cars. Of course, it’s an arcade game, so there’s no way to save your progress, right?

Wrong!

This game asks you to put in a 10-digit PIN (like your phone number) to use when you’re sitting at that particular machine. And what that did was to track some stats on that machine. Which was actually pretty awesome. Once you go through the registration process one time, every other time you sit at that machine you could just throw in your phone number and away you’d go with your stuff unlocked that you’ve worked so hard to get. Of course that also meant that you’d be spending a lot of time at that particular machine unlocking everything, which was really only good for lining the pockets of the arcade owners. Which I was willing to do fairly regularly.

The story in the first Killer Instinct game was a little ludicrous, but I’m willing to overlook that because the game was actually kind of fun to play. But if you’re going to make a sequel to a game with a storyline that borders on insanity, it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s going to also be a little bit kooky as well.

See, once Eyedol, the two headed demon-thing that was the boss of the first game, was defeated a hole was ripped in the universe that sent Ultratech, the fantastical company behind the first tournament, and several of the combatants back in time. There, as it happens, another tournament is put on where the fighters have to defeat Gargos, some other demon that had been masquerading as the spirit that guided Jago in whatever discipline of martial arts he studies, and manipulated the tournament to free himself from some prison or other.

Or something like that.

Honestly, the story to this game doesn’t matter so much, and it doesn’t really explain why there’s heliports and medieval castles and a pirate ship in the far-flung past. So try to not think about it so much.

But, apparently, in the past the graphics are better, the music sounds better, the combos get a little more brutal, and the women characters’ breasts animate more realistically. Which is real important if you’re gearing a game to teenage boys.

But, really, it’s the same old game, just polished to a fine luster. It’s really, in my humble opinion, superior to the old game in just about every conceivable way. Some people will say that they like the plasticy look of the characters in the old game, but those people wouldn’t know good graphics if they bit them in the face.

I would end up playing this game easily as much as I played the first one, probably more. That shouldn’t be too big of a surprise, since I liked the first one so much, and this was the logical next step for the franchise. I played it so much that I was actually passably good at it, but the most memorable moment I have with the game actually happened to a friend.

There’s this character featured in the video above, Jago. It seems that he has a move that allows him to store a portion of his lifebar in kind of a ‘reserve pocket’. Once he goes down for the second time, and when most of his opponents think they might have won, he gets up with his sliver of reserved health for a last-ditch salvo. My friend did that particular maneuver in a match with an opponent who matched his skills fairly closely, but was unfamiliar with said move. So once opponent guy thought he won, he took his hands off the controller, and then my friend’s Jago stood up and then laid down some hurt.

Needless to say, opponent guy was a little miffed.

It was at that point that friend guy started to get a bit nervous. He told me later that he thought the guy was going to start a fistfight with him over it. Thankfully, he cooled off enough that he didn’t actually make any fist-cranial interactions, but friend-guy decided to not use that particular maneuver with his favorite character again. Unless he was playing with people that he actually knew personally. Which I thought was a particularly well thought-out course of action.

If you’ve never seen a Laserdisc, it kind of looked like a giant CD. And since folks had some kind of fascination with putting games on CDs that consisted of nothing but video clips, it only made sense that they could also use the Laserdiscs to make video games that were also made by stringing together video clips.

But why stop at boring regular live-action footage when you can have cartoons!

Dragon’s Lair is a fully cartoon-animated game that features you, not really playing as, but more like directing Dirk the Daring on his quest to rescue princess Daphne. But, it’s a little bit different from any game that I’ve really played before of since. You pretty well just kind of sit there and watch the movie unfold. Occasionally a glowing spot will pop up on the screen or Dirk’s sword will glow. This is your cue to move the joystick in the same direction that you saw the glow, or if his sword lit up, hit the ’sword’ button. If you do the move with the correct timing, then the movie continues, but if you get it wrong (and the timing window is ridiculously small), then you lose a life in a comically tragic fashion.

I would only play this game one time at my local arcade, and that wouldn’t happen until several years after it had left most other arcades in the country. It was only there for about a week before it disappeared again, so it kind of makes me think that the game was taken back to the owner’s personal collection.

But the time that I was there and was able to play it, I had a degree of fun with it… until the windows to input the actions based on the cues came too fast for me to react to them. Which meant that I’d have to, essentially, memorize the game if I wanted to succeed, and that wouldn’t be too big of an issue for me, but the game disappeared before I got the chance, so I guess I’ll never know how good I might have gotten at it.

But, in my brief stint in the video game industry I was co-workers with the guy that programmed the game. And that’s just about as good as mastering the game would have been. At least, that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.

Several years ago I had way more fun that a person really ought to have shooting cowboys with a fake gun. But several years before that, while visiting the arcade at Holiday World (rides? what rides?), I played a game made by the same people filmed in what looks like the same place and with the same cheesy actors.

As far as the game goes, Mad Dog McCree is some kind of gang leader whose thugs have overrun some random town in the Old West and you, some guy with a gun, have to gun down them all before you can get at the Mad One himself. So what all that means, essentially, is that you are presented with a scene in the town and guys pop out of random spots. You have to shoot them before they shoot you. You shoot all of them, you go on to the next area. They shoot you, you go see the undertaker… Literally. He tells you how many lives you have left and then sends you back to the scene where you bought the farm.

I would only play this game one time, mostly because the only arcade I ever found it in was over 50 miles from my house and I didn’t feel like riding my bike that far. But that one time that I did play it, I had a little bit of fun. I was actually kind of impressed with the amount of variety in the game. You’d think that in a game that uses pre-recorded movie clips that stuff would unfold the same way every time, kind of like they do in Dragon’s Lair, but they don’t. In particular I was playing in some kind of barn area where some guy popped out from behind a hay bale and killed me (right in the face). But it was cool, I had one life left so I paid special attention to where the guy popped out from and was ready for him. Then some guy popped out of a different area on the other side of the screen and I didn’t have time to react and, well, I filled up another pine box.

I would have liked to have given this game another chance at some point, but have never seen it an any other arcade before or since. I’d even consider giving one of the home console ports a try, but I never owned any of the systems that it came out on, so that didn’t really work either.