The Closeout Warrior

There have been two games called Punch-Out!! and two games called Super Punch-Out!!. They both appeared in arcades, but a home version appeared on the NES and Super NES respectively. Further complicating matters is that the arcade versions and the home versions are very different, even they both share the same character roster.

So, what is Super Punch-Out!! all about? Boxing. Cartoony, video-gamey, over-the-top boxing.

You play the role of Little Mac, an inexplicably tiny boxer out to win the WVGBA (World Video Game Boxing Association) boxing titles. Mac has to take on boxers who are easily 3 or 4 times as big as he is, and are often stronger and faster as well. Nobody said it would be easy.

Each of the 16 boxers in the game has a particular quirk, and identifying and understanding these quirks will expose a weakness and allow you even the playing field. Bear Hugger, for example, is real fat, so punches to his stomach don’t do anything. Narcis Prince is very protective of his face, but if you can hit it, he takes extra damage. Etc. Etc.

So you have to study your opponent. Learn his tells, punch, counter punch, dodge, parry, uppercut, and win! Okay, so it’s not that easy, but perhaps this video of me getting all of the opponents punch-drunk will give you some confidence.

Once you get good at the game, and learn how to fight each of the opponents, it does get a little on the short side. It’s totally possible to beat all of the circuits in about an hour, usually less. The real ongoing challenge is figuring out how to eke out a better KO time or a better score. This is one of the few games that I still keep my Super NES around for.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the characters from the Mega Man universe decided to settle their differences with games of soccer instead of blowing each other apart? No? Well, I hadn’t either until I played this game.

Mega Man’s Soccer is exactly what the name implies: it’s a soccer game where the players are some combination of Mega Man and the various Robot Masters from some of the NES Mega Man games. Each Robot Master has different attributes: size, speed, and the like. Where they stand apart is that, like traditional Mega Man games, each one has a special ability for you to use. Bubble Man, for example, can encase someone in a bubble, incapacitating them for a couple of seconds.

The only really interesting part about this game is mixing the various Robot Masters into your team, balancing strengths and weaknesses, until you have your super-awesome unbeatable team. Other than that, it’s pretty standard soccer with Mega Man and his pals roaming around.

Harley’s Humongous Adventure was a very peculiar game, not merely because the characters are animated with digitized stop-motion animation, but from the subject matter. Harley, a scientist, managed to shrink himself down to bite-size and in the process break his shrinking machine into pieces that inexplicably wind up in various rooms in his house.

I did not know this before I started this game, but when you’re small, things become exponentially more dangerous. The tops of tin cans fly off and hit you, thumbtacks are always sitting on the ground point-up, Bunsen burners are always shooting impressively tall flames, etc.

Your goal is to search in and around Harley’s house for the missing parts of the shrinking machine, reassemble them, and get back to adult-scientist-in-a-green-jumpsuit-size. Inexplicably, each and every piece of the machine is guarded by a large mouse that you have to fight. In each battle you blow off one of its extremities and it scurries off to guard the the next piece, replacing what you blew off with whatever household item it finds along the way.

I only rented the game twice, and was never actually able to restore Harley to his normal size. I was, however, able to blow off the mouse’s arms, legs, and face. That made me feel good inside.

Vegas Stakes is merely one in a previously inexplicably large genre of Las Vegas Casino games. The draw of which is that you get to experience all the fun of Casino games without actually spending any of your dollars. Except the dollars you spent on the purchase price, of course.

Vegas Stakes has a story, but it’s pretty vacuous. You and your friends are driving to Las Vegas to ’strike it rich’ by playing the casinos. By making smart bets, and playing the games well, you will add to your bankroll and eventually become a ‘high-roller’. Play the games poorly, and you’ll be playing in the dives for $2.00 minimums right before you’re sent home with empty pockets and unfulfilled dreams.

Maybe it’s not that dramatic.

You will, however, get to play some of the classic casino games like Blackjack, Roulette, Slots, and 5 Card Stud Poker. You also get the chance to play Craps, which I never could figure out. The game had a help system that can only be described as ‘existent’.

Craps aside, this game was pretty nice in that it supported the Super NES mouse, you know, the one that came with Mario Paint. In fact, I understand that if you had four mice and a multi-tap you could all four use mice at the same time, with different pointers. This was quite a feat for the Super NES, today’s computers can’t even do that, well, not easily.

If you like pretending that you’re playing these casino games, then this might be for you. You get to bet your fake money and hopefully get great piles of fake money in return. There are certainly worse video casino games out there, and it’s almost certainly less expensive than going to a real casino. I hear those things are difficult to take money from.

Zoop, I hate Zoop. It’s terrible in almost every way that matters, it even managed to be bad in ways I had never conceived.

Rather than write something new about it, here’s some impressions from 2002.

Zoop is not your typical puzzle game. Viacom decided to deviate from the classic puzzle game formula: stuff falls from the sky and you have to arrange it in one (or more) piles.

I would love to try and explain how you play this game, but the words to adequately describe the experience do not exist. Let’s just say this, you shoot colors from your triangle and similarly colored “things” disappear.

Sounds fun. And for the first two or three levels it is. Unfortunately, there are (according to the manual) somewhere around 100 levels.

The thought of 100 levels with that musical score is enough to keep me up at night. As far as I can tell, there are two variations of the same theme: when the game is on, and when the game is off.

Zoop was released for just about any system you could think of. Apparently Viacom thought that if they released a crappy game for 3 dozen systems, they might be able to recoup the $15 they spent making it.

I fished this out of the bargain bin for $10. If I had it to do over again, I’d talk that clerk at Kay-Bee down to $5. Don’t go out of your way to find this game. If you do find it, don’t bother playing it, trust me, it’s not an experience that will significantly alter your life, at least, not in a good way.

In the 90s you could hardly turn on a television without seeing a commercial about Sonic the Hedgehog, the standard bearer for the Genesis. His main claim to fame? He moved real fast. The competition, the Super NES just couldn’t keep up, so they said.

So one day someone at Sunsoft decided to make a video game starring a cartoon character who is also known for excessive speed, the Road Runner (of Warner Bros. fame), and put it on the system that, if the advertising was to be believed, just couldn’t make him as fast as he should go.

If that’s the case, then some system engineer must have worked some kind of voodoo, because the Road Runner can go quite fast.

The story to the game is a relatively tepid affair, and doesn’t stray from its cartoon roots: Wile E. Coyote wants to catch and eat the Road Runner. It’s your job to ensure that experiences comic failure by evading capture and sabotage.

The Road Runner uses the fantastic power of Birdseed to power his fantastic extreme speed. He can run forward, back, up, down, and jump all over the roads (and the road-like structures) to get to the end of the, with the coyote always in some kind of pursuit. Each set of levels will culminate in a large machine needing to be dismantled/sabotaged in some way by you, which will fail, the coyote will get hurt, and the Fat Lady will come out and attempt to sing (har, har). The coyote stops her, and you go on to the next themed area.

You will notice, pretty much right away, that this game is HARD. This is partly due to the limited amount of lives you get, but also is a side effect of the collision detection between the Road Runner and the platforms. It’s tough to explain, but the gist of it is that when he jumps, he spreads out his legs so that he looks quite like a hyphen, but he will go right through a platform unless the center of his body touches it. So, even though his feet touch the platform, you go right through it. Fun!

Hit detection issues aside, the game is kind of fun, but brutally hard. I did manage to finish it a few times, but that was after months of playing from the minute I got home from school until dinner time (I did homework at school, don’t worry).