The Closeout Warrior

Skate or Die 2: The Search for Double Trouble

April 24th, 2007

The original Skate or Die! pretty opened and closed the book on 8-bit competitive skateboarding games. Yet, there was a sequel, a sequel that is only tenuously connected to its predecessor. Good enough, I’d say.

Skate or Die 2 does feature a half-pipe that you can do tricks on. You get three minutes or three lives to score as many points as possible, and if you do well enough CJ (one of the characters from the main game) will hang out of her window and cheer for you, doubling your points for a time. The best part of the mode? The hilariously bad ways your character can wipe out. You can miss your landing on a trick and fall through the bottom of the ramp, you can fall off the bottom of the screen into some bowling pins, etc.

The real meat and potatoes of this game, other than the theme song (with lyrics!), is the Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode tells a particularly convoluted story about a series of events that begins with you (our hero) riding your board down the sidewalk and being (quite easily) distracted by Icepick (the local loco), resulting in the squishing of the mayor’s wife’s dog, which causes the number one activity in the city of Elwood, skateboarding, to be outlawed (Major bummer, dude!).

What to do?

Inexplicably, the following sequence of events takes place: you defeat the mayor’s wife with your paintball gun, skating is somehow reinstated, you get a part time job delivering packages to stores in the local mall to pay for a new halfpipe, but the plans get accidentally blown out the window and on to the beach, you collect the plans, but the building permit and your love interest (CJ from the half-pipe) get stolen in the meantime, so you go to the requisite abandoned warehouse to confront Icepick, get back the permit, and rescue CJ. Oh, and Rodney and Lester from the first game (remember the tenuous connection to the first game?) will pop up every now and then to trade the tapes, CDs, tacos and bags of fries you collect in exchange for tricks and updated skateboards.

Amazingly, all of this takes place in four stages with cutscenes to fill in the missing information. And with only four stages, you’d assume that you could finish this game in an afternoon. And you’d be deluding yourself. This game is unforgivingly, brutally hard. Oh, and you only get one life to complete the game. I played this game for weeks and eventually managed to make it to the warehouse, but only just. I’d usually peter out somewhere around the beach level, either succumbing to the body-builders that explode when you hit them with paintballs or running out of time.

I did manage (with a Game Genie to give me unlimited life) to make it far enough into the warehouse to get the permit, but got so completely lost in the ridiculously complex maze that I gave up after a couple of hours. I can only assume that after the end of the game you get your ramp built and it turns out to be the halfpipe in the trick mode, making the game nice and circular.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Skate or Die!

April 23rd, 2007

Skate or Die! is both a mantra to live by and a short-lived video game series. For a time in the 1980s you could hardly walk a couple of blocks without falling over some guys with skateboards. Seemingly realizing this, Electronic Arts cashed in and developed a ‘meta-game’ with several mini-events based on skateboarding. You get to do these events in whatever order you like or you can do them all in a kind of Skateboarding Olympics.

Most of the events are for one player at a time, where you compete for some kind of high score. In the High Jump you mash the A and B buttons to try and jump as high as you can on a half-pipe. Pretty lame, especially if you used a turbo controller like I did.

In Freestyle, you took the same half-pipe and the same ‘mash A and B to gain speed’ control scheme, but this time you added the ability to waggle the control pad and mash the A and B buttons to try and to some tricks. You do more tricks, you get more points. You only get 10 passes on the ramp, so you need to chain together as many ‘things’ as you can without crashing in a hilariously horrible way.

Jam allows you to race down a hill covered with rad-to-the-max obstacles and two (yes, two!) paths you could take: one path is shorter, but much tougher to navigate, yielding more points and a potentially faster time. I would invariably end up falling flat on my face too many times and then purposely make my skater crash into the water just off the conveniently-place dock.

Now we move on to the two-player head-to-head events. Both of them.

First is the Race. This takes place in some seedy back alley. You get to race against Lester, the son of the proprietor of the local skate shop (and former marine) to the end of the very short alley, with a path that branches in an attempt to get to the end of the race faster, but ultimately to score more points. You score points by doing very simple tricks and smashing the trash that’s scattered around the alley (you get crazy bonus points for jumping on the squad car at the end of the alley). You also have the option of punch your opponent to sabotage his run while he does the same to you. This mode is great, but is way too short.

Then there’s the Pool Joust. I don’t really like the Pool Joust. In Pool Joust, you and another skater (my favorite is Poseur Pete) skate around an empty cement pond, and one of you has a ‘bopper’ (it looks kind of like a giant cotton swab). Your goal is to use the bopper to knock the other person off of their board. After every five passes, the bopper switches between you and your opponent. You knock your opponent off his board the requisite number of times and you win.

So, yes, it’s a party game, kind of like Caveman Games only with kids on skateboards instead of cave people, and not quite so bizarre.

Posted in Commodore 64, NES | 1 Comment »

Mappy

April 22nd, 2007

I’m not going to pretend to really understand what’s going on in Mappy. You have to guide the titular hero, an apparent member of the Micro Police, through a series of houses and get the goods within, presumably before the gang of cats does the same.

Although Mappy is a police officer of sorts, armed with a police-issue baton, the only defense you actually have against the cat gang is whacking them over the head with a door.

And there you have it, one of the arcade games of 1983 distilled down to a couple of paragraphs. And I still don’t really understand it.

Posted in Arcade | No Comments »

Donald Duck

April 21st, 2007

Donald Duck has a problem, he’s broke and he needs to buy some playground equipment for his nephews. So what does he do? He does odd jobs around the town for spending money.

You can do each of the jobs offered around the time for anywhere from one to nine minutes, and the longer you work, the more money you can potentially earn. There are four jobs you can do around town, and you can do each one as many times as you want.

Job number one involves catching and sorting fruits thrown off the back of a truck. Each fruit that you put in the correct box gets you a few cents, while each one you miss incapacitates you for a few seconds.

Job number two has you sorting packages that go by on a conveyor belt and tossing them into the correct bin so they can be loaded on a series of planes. Each package you put in the correct bin will get you a few cents.

Job number three has you routing trains. You have a series of joysticks that control junctions on a giant railroad map. Your goal is to get the trains to their correct destination. Each train that you successfully navigate will net you several cents.

Job number four has you sorting toys at a toy store. You have to put the toys on the correct shelves, while making sure that the back of the shelving is closed when a train goes by. Each toy that you sort gets you a few cents, while every toy that falls on the floor costs you a few.

After you’ve worked a while and earned a few dollars, you get to head to the store and buy things that any kid would love to have on their playground. Stuff like: cargo nets, slides, and cardboard boxes. You then place these objects around their play area and watch them play with the stuff you bought.

So, it’s a tool to teach kids about how to work for money, and then letting them spend it on fun things. Almost like real life. With ducks.

Posted in Commodore 64 | 1 Comment »

Burgertime

April 20th, 2007

There are few things more stereotypically American than burgers, except for maybe apple pie. But since there hasn’t yet been a game called Apple Pie Time, we’ll have to make do with this one.

Burgertime takes the concept of making burgers and instead of taking this concept to its logical extreme, the game takes it to its completely illogical, crazy extreme.

I was never able to figure out if your character was a tiny chef or if the food was just gigantic, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. what does matter is that you have a series of ladders with buns, meat, an lettuce on them. Your job is to assemble the giant burgers by walking along the pieces and making them fall down one level, and eventually create completed burgers.

Hindering you are foods that are the same size as our hero: Mr. Egg, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Hot Dog. They will chase you down and if they touch you, they’ll kill you. Your only weapons are a shaker of pepper with an extremely limited amount of shakes (this will stun the enemy foods) and the actual giant hamburger components (these will squish and temporarily incapacitate the enemy foods).

Your goal is to just last as long as possible, create as many burgers as you can, and get lots of points. Oh, and to try and not go crazy watching the undulations of an ambulatory tube steak.

Posted in Arcade, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, NES | 1 Comment »

Dungeon Lords

April 19th, 2007

Who is D.W. Bradley? A cursory search of the Internet tells me that he is a video game designer from way back, working on such games as Wizardry and Cybermage, games I’ve never played. But there in the store was a copy of D.W. Bradley’s latest masterpiece, Dungeon Lords.

I’m a sucker for a well crafted adventure game. Heck, I’m apparently also a sucker for an adventure game that I’ve only just heard of, regardless of quality.

Dungeon Lords is probably the most generically derivative medieval-themed adventure game that you’ll ever play. That may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your tastes. I don’t really know what the plot to this game is, I couldn’t stomach enough to learn very much.

Without going too deep into the specifics, I’m going to try and explain how this game works, or more accurately, doesn’t work at all. After the extremely basic character creation, you’re plunked down in the middle of some Generic Woods near a Generic Bonfire and get your first Generic Quest from the Generic Messenger to get into the Generic Castle-town. From here you have two options: wander through the woods aimlessly while slaughtering things or wander around the woods toward the castle while slaughtering things.

In an obvious nod to the Diablo series of games, you will be equipped with weapons and armor befitting a warrior of your chosen class. These items will lose durability with use and eventually break. This is important to note.

The real meat and potatoes of any adventure game is the amount of ’stuff’ to do, and the enemy encounters. I can’t really comment about the ’stuff’ part, since I never got more than one quest. The enemy encounters, on the other hand… Well, let’s start by calling them unbalanced.

Enemy encounters come in two types: creatures standing in a specific place on the map, and creature ‘waves’ that assault you every so often. Creatures standing in a specific place are by far the least common types of enemies. They guard bridges, guard huts, guard anything you might want to look at or explore. They’re a moderate threat.

The other way you might encounter monsters is in ‘waves’. Every so often, seemingly every five minutes or so, you will be assaulted by three or so monsters appropriate to the area. You defeat these monsters, move on a bit, get assaulted by more monsters, move on a bit, get assaulted by yet more monsters, etc.

Getting assaulted every few dozen steps wouldn’t be so bad except for a few things that cascade together into a gigantic mess of design:

Every time you get into a fight, your stuff goes down in durability, and you have no way to repair it until (presumably) you get to town. I never actually made it to town.
Since your stuff is perpetually decreasing in durability, it will eventually break. The monsters drop wearables so rarely that once your starting armor does break (and it will break) you will have that much less armor
Since you are wearing progressively less armor, you take progressively more damage from the area monsters
Since you take more damage from the area monsters, you die a lot. When you die you have a chance to not only lose some experience, but statistics as well. Statistics that govern your effectiveness as a fighter. Stats that can only be increased by leveling your character, making you weaker overall.

The game has other failings: the art direction, the sound design, the voice acting, the limited variety of monsters, and the ridiculously obtuse controls, but they’re not really worth going into. The biggest flaw with the game is the game itself. The design at its core is flawed, and the rest of the game just turns into a gelid mass of failure.

It’s worth noting that I actually got the Deluxe Edition of the game, the version of the game that had features that didn’t quite make it into the first game, like a map. Too bad they weren’t able to put any fun into it.

Posted in PC | No Comments »

Jeopardy!

April 18th, 2007

Jeopardy! is itself an American game show institution. Its borderline-insane longevity and popularity mean that eventually someone somewhere is going to have to cash in on it and bring the game to homes in whatever way possible. Ways that, since the 1980s, include the home video game market.

Jeopardy! is an example of a game that takes the absolute bare-minimum concepts of the thing that it’s based on and comes just shy of failing miserably at it.

Jeopardy!, in accordance with the television show, allows you and up to one of your friends to compete to provide the question to a series of answers that are provided to you. The harder the answer, the more points the question is worth. Answer wrong and you lose points. Nothing too out of the ordinary here.

This game also features the hypnotically-addictive Jeopardy! theme song (apparently titled “Think!”) that plays during key moments, and it even had a picture and the voice of Alex Trebek! For the Super Nintendo, this was quite the feat. Even if Alex Trebek sounded like he was bound, gagged, and locked in a closet full of packing peanuts, you got to hear his ACTUAL VOICE saying: “The answer is…”.

The problems are few, but very important.

There aren’t very many categories. I played through this game three times, and was already seeing repeats of categories. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but you had the same answers in the same positions every time the category came up. So the first time you saw the $600 answer for the category ‘European Leaders’ you were always going to know what that answer is. Plain text should have been trivial to put into this game, but I have to believe that most of the space on the apparently budget cartridge was spent on the ridiculously ‘high-res’ pictures of Alex and your character avatars and the super-amazing voice sample.

Perhaps more of a glaring issue is Final Jeopardy!. In Final Jeopardy! you and your opponents take turns answering the same… answer. The problem here is that you have to answer by selecting letters with the control pad, and you have to be able to see what you’re typing in to check for typos. The problem with that is that everyone in the room that can see the television will get to see what you put in for your answer is. Unless you play the game ‘no peeksies’ style, the first person to put in the correct answer will give everyone else the correct answer.

Oh, but the game does allow you to set the number of players to zero and watch the computer play a game of Jeopardy! against itself. And it’s not as boring as it sounds. It’s much, much worse.

Posted in Super NES | No Comments »

Klax

April 17th, 2007

In the 90’s it was time for a new puzzle game, it was time for Klax.

At least that’s what the tag-line told me. I couldn’t really fathom how this game was different from most puzzle games, since it involved sorting things, but that’s what the game told me, so it must have been true.

Klax prominently features a large conveyor belt with a mobile sorting apparatus over a 5 x 5 bin. Multi-colored tiles march down the conveyor belt, and it’s your job to catch the tiles and drop them in the bin in such a way that at least three of the same color tile match up and disappear. This maneuver is called a Klax. Your goal is to complete a specific number of these Klaxs, or to fulfill some other ridiculous requirement, like making a ‘Big X’.

There are a couple of things that are striking about the audio in this game. The tiles scream when they fall over the edge of the conveyor belt, presumably to their doom. Each color of tile makes a distinctive sound as it is coming down the conveyor belt, providing the only ambient sound in the game, there is no ‘puzzle music’. And when you finally lose the game a crowd exclaims, “Awww!”

Klax is also unusual among puzzle games in that it does have an end, level 100. What happens if you complete level 100? No idea. I’m not that good of a Klax player.

The NES version of Klax comes with a ‘game’ called Blob Ball. It’s less of a game, and more of a ‘thingus’. You have a blob, some spikes, a moving platform that looks like it came straight out of Pong, and a blob-like ball-thing. You can control the platform and try to deflect the ball away from the spikes, you can control the blob and bounce around and try to hit the spikes, or the platform, or the walls. The ball screams when it hits the spikes. The whole ‘game’ is very odd, and I didn’t spend very much time on it. I get the impression that it was thrown in to take up room on the cartridge.

Posted in Arcade, NES | No Comments »

Pipe Dream

April 16th, 2007

Pipe Dream (a.k.a. Pipe Mania, or about a thousand different clones), I’m constantly surprised that more people haven’t heard of it.

Pipe Dream is a puzzle game that does away with the standard ’sort things and make them disappear’, and instead has you creating a network of pipes from random pieces to contain the flow of a mystery liquid. What the liquid is changes in each incarnation, but it really doesn’t matter what it is.

The liquid will start flowing shortly after the stage starts, with the length of this initial delay diminishing as the levels progress. Depending on the version and the level, you will have one or two goals to achieve: make the liquid flow through a certain number of pipes, and make the liquid flow through a certain number of pipes while making it to the end pipe.

It sounds easy enough, but you can quickly start to panic as you realize that the liquid is slowly but surely progressing and you aren’t getting the piece you need to connect the two halves of your pipe network.

Not that that’s ever happened to me.

Posted in Arcade, Commodore 64, DOS, GameBoy, Macintosh, Mobile, NES, Super NES | No Comments »

City Connection

April 15th, 2007

I’ve tried, and I can’t really wrap my head around the story behind City Connection, or at least what I can glean from playing the game.

Let’s assume that you have a big cylinder. On this cylinder you have a series of parallel broken lines with a solid line at the bottom, each of which is a road that is being viewed from the side. Your goal is to get into your car with the super-amazing ability to jump and paint at the same time, and paint all of the roads from one color to another. The police officers, obviously, don’t want you to do this. They chase you down to stop you from your vandalizing ways. Your only recourse, other than avoidance, is to collect cans of oil that you can throw at the police cars, spinning them out and making them temporarily vulnerable.

Inexplicable plot aside, this game is good old-fashioned fun. For a few minutes, at least. Then it devolves into good old-fashioned tedium.