The Closeout Warrior

Civilization

March 15th, 2007

Although I was introduced to Civilization on the Mac, the majority of the time that I spent with the game came from the Super NES version.

I didn’t even know there was a Super NES version until I happened into my local Waldensoftware, where I found a lone copy sitting on the shelf. Waldensoftware was observing the practice of putting empty boxes on the shelves, and keeping the ‘goods’ behind the counter, so when I purchased it, for some reason I did not get the technology tree insert that told me what technologies led to what other technologies. So I got to learn the entire tree by trial and error. However, I was supplied with an unusually thick manual.

Civilization, at least the original incarnation, places you as the ruler of a tribe of people that you build up into a world power with one of two goals: world domination or launch a rocket into space to colonize another planet.

At its heart, Civilization is a strategy game, and can really be thought of as a glorified board game. Each tribe will move all of its units, adjust its cities, check expenditures, and adjust whatever minutiae, then it’s the next tribe’s turn. You have to manage a somewhat-complex balance of resources, money, citizen happiness, research funding, transit systems, gathering resources, creating trade routes, military training, your war effort, fending off barbarians, diplomacy, and the building of Wonders. It sounds like a lot, but you have no time limit on how long your turn lasts, so you can ponder and tweak to your heart’s content. I had the most fun seeing how many Wonders I could cram into one town.

Each Wonder that you built provided the city that it was built in with specific bonuses, and my capital cities were full to the gills with bonuses. Imagine a town that had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus, J.S. Bach’s Cathedral, the Pyramids, Michaelangelo’s Chapel, the Great Library, and the Great Wall. It was a little crowded, but also completely awesome.

This game is also one of the two games that I own that actually makes use of the Super NES mouse and isn’t Mario Paint. In a game like this, mouse support totally makes sense: you have to point and click to do everything. I’m reasonably certain that this game is responsible for both wearing out my left mouse-button and completely wearing away the textured surface in the middle of the rigid plastic mouse pad.

Posted in Super NES | 2 Comments »

Columns

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 »

Skuljagger: Revolt of the Westicans

March 13th, 2007

I played Skuljagger one time, a pretty long time ago. As a game it was pretty forgettable: you run around some generic island to collect gems and buckle the swashes of some pirates. Oh sure, your power-ups consisted primarily of gum, but gaining powers by eating candy has also already been done by Boys and their Blobs.

It’s probably about now that you’re wondering to yourself, “Well, why would anyone want to play it then?”

Excellent question!

As it happens, in the game’s heyday you could actually call a specially-crafted phone number and Skulljagger himself will insult you. Mercilessly, even. Who would care how bad the game was when you could call a number for free and have some pre-recorded pirate call you a quaking pus-bag? I called the line pretty well daily over the summer of 1992, pretty much every time I went by a payphone. If memory serves, there were only three monologues delivered by our pirate-captain friend. The last one was exceedingly short and sounded like Skulljagger recorded it while sitting on the top of a moving semi on a windy day, and although I can’t remember the exact wording of the message, I do remember the crappy game. That’s worth something, right?

Right?

Posted in Super NES | 1 Comment »

Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror

March 12th, 2007

It’s no secret, I would have no problem putting it on a tee shirt and wearing it out in public: I like, but am terrible at, text-adventure games.

Text adventure games should be perfect for me. I like reading things, I like to think that I’m reasonably intelligent (I may not be, but I like to think I am), and I like solving puzzles. Text-adventure games bring together all three of these things to tell an interactive story that is fueled by imagination. Text adventure games were borne by necessity. Older computers didn’t have the graphical horsepower to push amazing visuals, and even if they did, storage space was at a premium. You couldn’t just put crazy-high resolution pictures in your game. This was in the days before the Internet, so unless it fit on a couple of disks or took more than an hour or so to download from your favorite BBS, then it wasn’t getting played. It was too much hassle.

The classic format of a text adventure game is presented entirely in the second person, putting you directly in the middle of the action. You are the prime mover, if you will. You can envision the entire world as being divided up into discrete ‘rooms’ laid out on a grid. You can generally move in any of the cardinal directions, and sometimes, if you were lucky, the diagonals. Your goal was to MOVE throughout the rooms, PICK UP and EXAMINE items, SEARCH for clues and attempt to solve whatever mystery you were presented with. In the case of Skullduggery the mystery is: Where is the secret treasure that was hidden by your ancestor?

Skullduggery presents you with the standard description of what’s around you, and has the standard one line at the bottom of the screen to type the cryptic commands to your avatar. One of the things that makes it stand out is the map. Skullduggery has a somewhat crude map made out of ASCII characters (letters numbers and symbols) that shows roughly where you are, and largely removes the need to sit there with a pencil and graph paper to keep track of your movements.

The writing in the game is reasonably good, especially taken in consideration with the minimap. They come together to give the locales a sense of scale that is refreshing as you search the countryside to solve the puzzles.

Oh yes, the puzzles. Like any good text-adventure game there are puzzles. You have to PICK UP and USE the right items in the right order to proceed. The only problem is that many times you have either no clues to help you or the clues are so obtuse they may as well be written in Esperanto. For example: One part of this game has you putting a corpse (I won’t even go into how you even get the corpse in the first place) on a Ouija board, killing yourself, crossing the river Styx, fishing a bottle out of the river, filling up the bottle with river water, going to the other Ouija board, getting the corpse (the Ouija board is apparently a magic portal of sorts), taking it to an altar, setting it on fire, putting the ashes into the jar of river water, setting the ashy river-water on the Ouija board, letting the Grim Reaper resurrect you, going back to the first Ouija board, retrieving the jar, and using the contents as one of several ingredients in a magic potion. As a wide-eyed kid playing this on his monochrome computer, I figured out how to to cross the river and get the water. And that’s about it. And it wasn’t for lack of effort, I poured at least two dozen or more hours into this game, and just couldn’t make any headway.

Years later, in January of 2007, I found a text file on some website with the solution and a copy of the game from an old shareware site. I downloaded both, played through the game, and finally know what happens to the protagonist when you don’t have him commit suicide out of frustration. It turns out that if you know what you’re doing you can finish the game in about two hours or so. All in all, it was a good afternoon.

Posted in DOS, PC | 5 Comments »

Radar Ratrace

March 11th, 2007

Way back in the 80’s you would be hard-pressed to find a video game with a plot. What passed for a plot in those days was usually no more than a line or two explaining some improbable situation, and if you were lucky you would get some instructions. Case in point: Radar Ratrace.

Radar Ratrace is a game of cat and mouse. You, a mouse, must navigate a maze and collect cheese while avoiding the cats. Get all the cheese, clear the maze. Touch a cat, lose a life. Utilize the ‘mouse holes’ in random corners of the maze to elude your pursuers. Oh, and the radar. You can only see the immediate area around you in glorious detail, but you can see the entire maze on a smaller mini-map. It’s a simple game with pretty good execution.

In searching for information about this game, I keep finding references to some kind of magic mouse dust that your character can litter the maze with to confuse the cats, making this an almost direct rip-off of the Namco arcade game Rally-X. For the life of me, I don’t remember that, and my TI is mothballed somewhere. We also had a copy of the game for the Commodore 64, and I don’t remember seeing it there, either. I suppose it’s not inconceivable that I didn’t know about some features. We never had any manuals or anything. But it’s tough for me to imagine that it didn’t occur to me to press the joystick button at some point. Of course, when I was playing it I was about nine years old. It was about that time I willingly slept in a closet for a couple of months.

Posted in TI-99/4A | No Comments »

Tetris Attack

March 10th, 2007

Puzzle games in general have one thing in common: they are conceptually easy to grasp. The better puzzle games are deep enough to compel you to keep playing to learn new strategies.

Tetris Attack is one of those games. The credits of Tetris Attack say that the game was inspired by the original Tetris. I’m pretty sure this is a… slight fabrication. As far as I can tell, the only thing that this game has in common with the original Tetris is the title. It seems to me that they just tacked the word ‘Tetris’ onto this game to sell more copies from name-recognition. Slightly underhanded, but that’s fine. This is a good game on its own merits.

Like a good puzzler should, Tetris Attack has an easy-to-grasp concept: multi-colored blocks rise from the bottom of the playfield, you have the ability to move them left or right, and you make them disappear by lining up three or more of the same color. Easy. And indeed, you could play this way and have a good enough time. Keep playing and you’ll discover that with careful arrangement of your pieces you can set up chain reactions or groups of far more than three to be cleared at a time, both critical moves to know in multiplayer mode.

Perhaps the thing that makes puzzle games compelling is that there is no defined end. The game lasts until you can’t last any more. You can always do just a little bit better, and are really competing with your self for the high score. Unless you’re playing multiplayer mode. Then you’re competing against someone who desperately needs to be taken to Tetris Attack school.

Yes, I like this game. I like it enough that I have four versions of it for four different platforms. And if there’s ever a Wii version, I’ll probably have that too.

Posted in GameBoy, N64, Super NES | 4 Comments »

Indigo Prophecy

March 9th, 2007

Indigo Prophecy is a very peculiar game, possibly because it came from France. I had never actually heard of it or knew anything about it until recently when I saw a review on the former Video Game Channel. What I saw made me want to check it out. The only problem was that it was for the PS2 and XBox, consoles that I didn’t (and still don’t) own. So I promptly put it into the back of my mind and went about my business. Some months later I found a lone copy of the PC version I didn’t know existed sitting on the shelf at my local EB Games.

Indigo Prophecy initially places you in control of the main protagonist, Lucas. Although, initially, ‘control’ may not be the right word. You begin the game by helplessly watching as your avatar commits a pretty grisly murder that you’re powerless to stop. When you come to your senses you have to hide the body, evade the police, and figure out what’s going on. In short order, you get introduced to the two other main characters, Carla and Tyler, who are the police officers trying to solve the murder.

It all sounds a little weird on paper, and there are some interesting moments in the game, like when the main characters interact with each other, but overall it comes together surprisingly well.

There are four things that stand out about this game: the animation, the camera angles, the controls, and the story.

Most of the animation in this game has been motion-captured. This make every movement look eerily realistic, and you can look past the rather lackluster character models. Interestingly, I understand that the animators used puppetry techniques to animate the faces of the characters, making them more expressive than I’m used to seeing in a game. I’m so used to expressionless zombies wiggling their lips when they talk, that I was pleasantly surprised. It helped complete the suspension of disbelief, and certainly made the game more engaging.

The camera angles in this game are unique to any game that I’ve ever played. Very often, you will get several different camera angles of the same bit of action all at the same time. I’ve never watched the series, but I understand that it’s very similar to the techniques used on the show 24. The camera angles are used to draw attention to something important in your immediate vicinity, like a phone ringing or someone you’re needing to stealth your way past. They also might show the same thing from several different angles to paint a more complete picture of the action.

The game’s controls make use of the analog sticks in a unique way to perform many of the motions in the game. The actions you have to perform on the sticks roughly equate to the actions you’re wanting your character to do. For example, you want climb up a structure, you move the right stick a quarter-circle right-to-up then the left stick a quarter-circle left-to-up, repeat until ascended. There are other mini-games that take place that require you to keep your balance by tapping the shoulder buttons, or following along with a bizarre Simon-like interface that pops up during action sequences.

Many points in the story have you making moral choices, each of which will cause the story to play out in a slightly different way. None of the choices will impede you from making progress, but they will affect what the characters say and do, kind of like an interactive ‘Choose your own adventure’ kind of way. In a rather lengthy discussion, the developer indicates that his original vision was for the game to be told over several smaller installments, or episodes, but that didn’t come to pass. I didn’t really notice this until about the last quarter of the game where the pacing of the story gets completely out of whack, completely skipping over large chunks of time/exposition, which left me a little confused, and then the game just ended rather abruptly.

The game itself felt kind of short, which is probably due to a combination of being very engaging, and that the game was scaled down from its original epic scope to fit into one ‘episode’.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this game to anyone, except to maybe preschoolers.

Posted in PC, Windows | No Comments »

Haunting Starring Polterguy

March 8th, 2007

I don’t really remember much of the story behind Haunting Starring Polterguy. What I do remember is that you play the ghost of someone that died through the actions, or inactions, of some family (it was a rental and didn’t have the manual). You decide to get revenge by doing what all ghosts do: you haunt things.

You start with the ability to haunt small stuff: knickknacks, kitsch, and the like. Once you jump into something you gain the ability to make it do something scary. Your immediate goal is to scare the people as they meander around the house. The more scared they are, the more power you get. The more power you get, the bigger things you can haunt. Haunt the big things like the furniture and the floor, and you might scare them out of the house. Scare them all out of the house, and you win! Well, you win that house. The family apparently then moves to a new house where you get to start all over again.

Possessing mundane objects and making them do clichéd horror movie things is kind of neat at first, but for some reason, it gets old fast. I made it through the first house before I gave up. A friend I was with at the time managed to get to the third house before he succumbed to the Undying Mediocrity. I understand now that he was close to the end of the game. I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of the game, it’s easy enough that I could probably blow through it in a couple of hours, but once you’ve seen what each of the possessed items do, the novelty wears off fast, and then you’re just button mashing for the win (BMFTW) instead of genuinely having fun.

Or, at least I was.

Posted in Genesis | No Comments »

Willow

March 7th, 2007

Who doesn’t like Willow? It had all the prerequisites for greatness. A crazy movie set in a bizarre fantasy world? Check. Licensed toys and books? An opportunity to make a quick buck by cashing in on a movie license? Oh, check!

The NES Willow game is an action role-playing game. You take Willow on his quest to rid the land of evil. Sounds pretty typical. Inexplicably, all the information that I could find at the time seemed to indicate that this was a good game. I sat down and began playing, and wasn’t particularly impressed or disappointed. Although, I must admit it was a fantastic effect to have the wind blow through the trees and grass every time an enemy appeared, since we all know that our enemies will never appear without the accompaniment of a slight breeze. This was offset by Willow’s proficiency with a sword, or lack of. I’m not sure if the sword just weighed a couple hundred pounds, or if it was magically enchanted to increase wind resistance, but I certainly got the impression that each move Willow made with his sword was calculated and deliberate (read: slow) to conserve energy.

Oh, and the acorns. You could throw the magic acorns that turn things to stone. Wonderful.

I started the game a dozen or more times, each time getting slightly further, eventually making it to the first boss encounter… where I died. If you die in Willow, it’s Game Over. No problem. You can save, kind of. Unlike most games that span around a dozen or more hours this game does not use a battery-backed save system, it uses passwords. Not so bad if you don’t lose the scrap of paper you scrawled the password on, which I did all the time, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that the font that the Willow developers decided to use has these ridiculous serifs on them. These serifs combined with the questionable television quality I had to deal with make the normal text hard to read and the passwords indecipherable. Every time I got a password I would write it down twice. Once as the letters I thought I was seeing and once drawing each letter as if it were a tiny picture instead of a letter. Both of these methods failed. To this day I have not been able to successfully input a password correctly, and so the depths of the Willow universe realized in NES form have yet to be plumbed.

Play at your own risk.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Quarth

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 »