The Closeout Warrior

Beast Wrestler

March 25th, 2007

Oh sure, you could play a normal wrestling game, with normal people putting other normal people in various Death Grips(tm), but why would you want to do that when you could play a game that replaces your normal people with Giant Monsters!?

Oh, sure it sounds great. Fighting giant monsters to a state of near death should just about be the most fun that you can have playing a video game. Unfortunately, this game just can’t deliver. You start by picking your monster, picking its few moves, and heading to the fights. Then you… well you fight. In. The. Slowest. Fight. Imaginable. Giant monsters just don’t move real fast.

If you win certain fights, you get to recruit the monster to your team, giving you a little more variety. However, after taking a monster through a few fights, it will get too damaged to continue, and you’ll have to merge two of your monsters into some kind of crazy Super Giant Monster. The game prominently asks you to:

COMBINE
TOW
MONSTERS

And no, that’s not a typo. You pick two monsters from you team and combine them into one creature with abilities of the two originals. Then it’s back to the fights.

I wasn’t ever able to figure out if there was any kind of long term goal beyond just making random monsters slowly bore each other to death, and occasionally smooshing them together. To date I’ve only played this game once, which is plenty.

Posted in Genesis | No Comments »

Kickman

March 24th, 2007

I never really had very many cartridges games for the old Commodore 64, but one that got a lot of play at my house was Kickman.

Kickman, like a lot of the video games in the early 80’s, has a plot that manages to be both simple and borderline insane. You play as the Kickman, a French unicyclist, in France, and above you is a grid of balloons that kind of looks like Space Invaders. These balloons randomly fall toward the ground and you have to catch, stack, and pop them on your head before they hit the ground. If you can’t maneuver quick enough, you have the ability to kick the balloons back into the air to try again, but if they hit the ground, you lose.

Later levels have you stacking the balloons in ever taller stacks on your head, giving you less time to catch balloons and testing your ability to keep balloons airborne. You’ll also notice that some of the balloons eventually get replaced with yellow and blue Pac-Man-like characters that will eat the growing stack of balloons on your head.

Just be aware, the theme song will stay with you for a while after you quit playing.

Posted in Commodore 64 | No Comments »

Crazy Taxi

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 »

Caveman Games

March 22nd, 2007

One of the styles of games that has kind of gone away in recent years is the sports competition game. These games provide some series of mini games or ‘events’ tied together by some theme. One of the more unusual of these was Caveman Games.

Caveman Games focused on a group of Cave-people, including the token female, Crudla, and the nerd wearing glasses, Vincent, participating in the ‘Ugh-lympics’, a series of events with a caveman theme. You get to participate in: Fire Making, Clubbing, Dino-Vaulting, Dino-Racing, Saber Tooth Tiger Outrunning, and the Mate Toss.

Most events are the ‘mash one button faster than the other person’ variety. Fire-making, for example, has you and one other person mashing the ‘rub two sticks together’ button as fast as possible while you strategically use the ‘bonk the other person over the head’ button and the ‘blow on the embers/duck/make yourself dizzy with asphyxiation’ button.

The Mate Toss is a slightly different affair, you grab your mate by the ankles, rotate your control pad as evenly and as quickly as you can, then you press and hold the ‘angle’ button until the desired angle is reached and then release it, letting your mate fly. The goal here being, of course, to throw your mate for as many ‘foots’ at possible. Toss your mate far enough and she’ll do a ridiculous little dance. Interestingly, in the NES version of the game, the female competitor tosses a female ‘mate’, likely because of limitations of the NES hardware, but in the Commodore 64 version she reportedly tosses a male. I haven’t actually ever played the C64 version, so I can’t verify that.

Clubbing is probably the most complicated event in this compilation. You and your opponent stand on a giant flat rock and smash each other about the face and shins with your clubs in addition to using devious tactics (distracting with a point and a ‘Look over there!’ expression on your face) in attempt to make them back up and eventually fall off the rock.

The other events were pretty lame, the Dino-race has you and an opponent mashing the ‘make the dino go faster’ button while strategically pressing the ‘avoid obstacles’ button, the Saber Race has you mashing the ‘make delicious caveman run faster than saber-soothed cat button’ while strategically pressing the ‘throw your opponent behind you’ button, and the Dino-vault has you mashing the ‘make the caveman run faster’ button and strategically pressing and releasing the ‘plant and release the pole vault’ button.

There’s a little bit of pseudo-caveman speak in this game. Distances are measured in ‘foots’, countdowns to event starts go, “3, 2, 1, Ugh!”, and of course the above-mentioned ‘Ugh-lympics’. For some reason I found it incredibly annoying back when I played this game the first time around, and now just find it a mild nuisance.

Caveman Games is one of those games that you can break out when you have a bunch of people around who are clamoring to play some kind of NES game if you don’t have something better around.

Posted in Commodore 64, NES | 1 Comment »

Polarium

March 21st, 2007

Puzzle games are easy to conceptualize: you make the player do some (usually fairly simple) repetitive task over and over until some force makes him stop. The goal being to either not stop for as long as possible, or to solve a series of puzzles, and sometimes both. Polarium satisfies all of these criteria, and brings to light one of the bigger failings with puzzle games: although they are easy to conceptualize, they are hard to make engaging.

Polarium seems to be a puzzle game based around the Nintendo DS stylus, you’re given a grid with squares that are either black or white. It’s your job to make all of the tiles in one line are one color (either black or white). You do this by dragging your stylus from one side of the playfield to the other. You can meander all you want within the playfield, but your start and end points must be on the sides (one on each). Complete a path and all the tiles that your stylus passed over will flip and change color.

The game sounds sufficiently generic enough to be a decent puzzler. It’s got the requisite simple task, the endless mode, and the puzzle mode. But for some reason, or possibly a combination of reasons, this game wasn’t that fun. I might have had something to do with the fact that my hand kept obscuring my view of the play area, or maybe I suddenly don’t like games that require manipulation of colored tiles (not likely). I think the single biggest reason that I didn’t like this game is that it just seems barren and lifeless.

A game like Meteos wouldn’t nearly as fun without the modicum of presentation present. Too bad it’s so completely missing from this one.

Posted in DS, GameBoy | No Comments »

Shadowgate

March 20th, 2007

About a week ago I found out that Shadowgate started life as a game for the Macintosh. I was probably unaware of this since I never actually owned a Mac or used one for more than about an hour. Shadowgate is one of those games that I saw in just about every NES video game guide. The game seemed to be at least marginally interesting. Shadowgate is a point-and-click adventure, which is really just one step up from a text adventure, and all that means is that instead of just getting a description of the room you’re in, you get a description of the room you’re in and a picture of the room you’re in. A picture you can poke, prod, and explore.

Shadowgate tasks you, some guy whose name I forget, to enter some wizard’s castle, whose name I also forget, to solve puzzles in a precise sequence to simultaneously prevent him from summoning some crazy netherworld beastie and become king of the land. And trust me, when I say precise sequence, I mean precise sequence. More often than not, if you do the wrong thing then you = dead, which makes the game slightly more frustrating. Try to get the dragon’s treasure without having a shield = you dead. Break the wrong mirror (there are three) = you dead. Go through a trap door without tieing off a rope to lower yourself down = you dead. Don’t have the mundane item that’s the answer to the obtuse riddle the sphinx-lady gives you = you dead. You let your torch go out = you dead.

You die. A lot.

That’s partially understandable, if you didn’t die and restart from your last save so often, the game wouldn’t seem very long. The constant deaths and restarting the game increased replayability at the cost of broken controllers and sleepless nights spent wondering what to put in Bottle 3.

Knowing all of this, I still wanted to give the game a try, but to this day I’ve never seen the NES incarnation ‘in the wild’. Fortunately, a Game Boy Color port (Shadowgate Classic) was released some years after the NES faded into history. I played it almost constantly for about a week, trying to catch up on the several year old story, before the puzzles became too obtuse for me to solve without resorting to online assistance.

Was it everything that I psyched myself up to believe it was? No, not really. Was it a good game? Up until the part where the clues range from non-helpful to nonexistent, then it became slightly annoying. But I was too invested to put the game down, so I hinted my way through the last 5% or so of the game. It was worth it.

Posted in GameBoy, Macintosh, NES | 1 Comment »

Wario Land

March 19th, 2007

Yes, I actually own a Virtual Boy. I even bought a few games for the thing. Most of them weren’t too bad, and Wario Land was actually pretty good.

The Wario Land series is kind of like the Super Mario Bros. series with a couple of differences, primarily that Wario isn’t adventuring to achieve some greater good like rescuing princesses or defeating giant spiky-shelled turtles, he wants to get money and treasure. Fair enough.

The story in Wario Land is pretty much irrelevant. You start out in a cave and must work your way across the stage, then up an elevator, then across a stage, then up an elevator. Mix in a couple of boss fights, and that’s pretty well it. What I found weird was that all the stages are laid end-to-end through the entire game, meaning that if you saved while on the last stage and wanted to go back to the first stage to pick up something you missed, you could, but you’d have to go through the entire game backward. It makes some kind of sense, but it’s still a little tedious. Especially once you start trying to collect the hidden treasures. Yeah, there are hidden treasures, one per stage, and you’ll want them all if you want to see the real ending. Awesome.

The thing about the Virtual Boy, the ‘hook’ if you will, was that it could do pseudo 3-D. It used two screens to provide slightly different views to each eye, tricking your eyes into thinking that they were looking at a 3-D image. It was a whole lot like looking at slides through a Viewmaster, except everything was shades of red on a black background. This is why screenshots of Virtual Boy games don’t do them justice. You can only get a feel for the depth by actually playing the games on the actual hardware.

Wario Land uses this pseudo 3-D to make the action happen on two different planes. You can think of each level taking place on a city street. You can walk along the sidewalks leap across to the sidewalk on the other side of the street at particular points, but you can’t actually walk in the street itself. Wario Land uses this to the fullest. You have to use both ’sides of the street’ to solve several of the stages, enemies will pop out of the background, gigantic spiky balls will swing into and out of the foreground. You even have to leap back and forth to fight the last boss of the game. It’s all done really well.

If this had been the pack-in game instead of Mario’s Tennis, would the system have sold better and not have died a premature death? Eh, no, probably not. As good as this game is, it doesn’t overcome the huge flaws in the design of the Virtual Boy: It takes batteries, but needs to be used on a table or other flat stationary surface. It eats six Double-A batteries almost as fast as the Game Gear. It apparently gave some people headaches (although I wonder how many of those resulted from people didn’t know how to properly adjust the focus and IPD). That’s not really a recipe for success.

Posted in Virtual Boy | 1 Comment »

Lemmings

March 18th, 2007

Lemmings is one of those games that just keeps popping up from time to time to give people who have never experienced the simple yet addicting game a chance to play it, and give the older gaming crowd a little bit of the old nostalgia.

For the three of four of you that haven’t heard of this game, the premise is pretty simple: Lemmings fall through a trap door into a stage filled with various forms of Insta-Death(tm). The Lemmings will march forward, only turning around when they hit something. It’s your job to dole out your compliment of jobs to the Lemmings to create a safe path to the exit door.

It sounds easy enough, and in the beginning it is pretty straightforward. The levels are broken up into four difficulty levels: fun, tricky, taxing, and mayhem. The Super NES version also had an additional difficulty level, Sunsoft, that we’ll get to in a couple of paragraphs.

Fun is pretty easy, almost mind-numbingly so. It introduces you to the game, how the controls work, and what all the different jobs do. You almost have to try and not complete these stages.

Tricky is slightly tougher. You’ll have to learn how to corral your Lemmings and send a lone wolf over to construct the path to the goal.

Taxing starts to ramp up the difficulty. Your allotment of jobs will be smaller than you want, and the Lemmings will begin to find ways to kill themselves almost immediately after landing in the stage. Controllers may get thrown.

Mayhem is just cruel. Your time is shortened even more than Taxing, so you get to work faster. There are paths made of steel that you can’t burrow through and are filled with various Lemming-killing devices that you won’t see until a Lemming is working away and is unceremoniously squished, just half a screen from the goal. A goal which, incidentally, is placed in a place that’s not immediately obviously easy to get to.

And then there’s the Sunsoft levels. Bonus levels created by the team that ported the game to the Super NES. They’re hard, but not quite as hard as the Mayhem levels. Well, except for the very last one. It was hard enough that I decided to call a Nintendo Game Play Counselor after nearly breaking my controller in half. It turns out that the solution is pretty easy once you know what it is, but the extremely short time limit still makes it pretty tough to complete, so I never did.

This game has spawned a number of sequels and spinoffs on almost every computer and game console, but I never played any of them. For me, the Super NES version is the definitive version of Lemmings.

Posted in Super NES | 1 Comment »

M. C. Kids

March 17th, 2007

Games based on the mascots for food products are nothing new. Terrible games based on the mascots for food products are also fairly easy to some across. Now, a game that’s based on a mascot for a food product that’s not awful? That’s something special.

The story of the game goes something like this: The Hamburglar hamburgles Ronald McDonald’s magic bag that he uses to do… magic things. Ronald is apparently pretty useless without his magic bag, so he enlists the help of two kids, Mick and Mack, to get it back.

You can’t just wander around McDonaldland willy-nilly to look for the bag, you have to scour the areas for ‘cards’. Collect enough cards, move on to the next area. It’s pretty standard as far as platform games go, but it’s the execution that makes this game stand out. Levels are large and the activities are varied. Rather than just make a mad dash to the end of the stage, some of the stages force you to use your brain a little. I particularly remember a stage that consists of a large number of false exits, and going through any of the fake ones will immediately end the stage but not let you continue. Some stages even play with the gravity. With gravity reversed, you will lose a life by falling off the top of the screen, adding an extra dimension to parts of the game.

This game apparently did not sell well, which is going to make it a lot harder to find nowadays, and that’s a bit of a shame. If you happen by it, by all means give it a whirl.

Posted in NES | 1 Comment »

Kid Chameleon

March 16th, 2007

The premise to Kid Chameleon sounds like it should be a pretty good game: You play the part of some kid that’s really good at video games, natch. There’s some new Virtual Reality game on the block that happens to be kidnapping kids, so you go in to beat the game, and maybe get the kids back. Nothing too out of the ordinary there. The hook is that you, Kid Chameleon, can use the different helmets scattered throughout the levels to get mysterious powers.

So, the basic flow of the game goes something like this: Enter level → find helmet(s) → collect diamonds → use power(s) granted by the helmet(s) to find the exit → repeat. The levels don’t really have a flow to them, they’re all pretty generically interchangeable. The do seem to get more difficult the further you progress in the game, however.

The main problem I had with this game was not the disappointing powers granted by the helmets or the derivative platforming/collecting action, but it was the unforgiving nature of the game itself. Extra lives in the game are nigh nonexistent, and continues are incredibly precious. You spent three hours getting to level 40? Out of continues? Too bad, you get to start over. Each time you play, odds are you’re going to get just a little bit further, which is normally a good thing. When each trip through the game can take easily two or more hours, then it starts to become tedious.

And then there’s the ending… or lack of. For a game as long and difficult as this one is, it’s slightly disappointing.