May 14th, 2007
I don’t think I’m going to pretend to understand the Mr. Do universe any more. Mr. Do, after both picking cherries underground and ridding his seven-story castle of monsters, makes his way to a series of roller-coasters. Roller Coasters with cherries and ladders. Functional roller coasters that Mr. Do must navigate and collect the cherries scattered about, all while trying to get to the exit (at the top of the coaster, of course) without getting squished by the cars.
I now understand that you don’t have to collect all the cherries to finish the course, which would have made the game slightly easier for my novice hands to make progress. Heck, this knowledge might have given me incentive to play this game more than once, but I seriously doubt it.
Posted in Arcade | 1 Comment »
May 13th, 2007
When it comes to playing video games, my Mom is the epitome of a casual player. She loves the kinds of games that she can just pick up and play for a few minutes in between the few thousand things that she has to do every day. So I was a little surprised when she spent just about as much time with my Game Boy as I did on the Christmas Morning that I got it. But I was even more surprised later on when she decided to play through my copy of Metroid II.
I don’t really remember why or when she decided that she wanted to play it, but it was shortly after I got the issue of Nintendo Power that featured maps to the whole game. I would sit with the magazine splayed open and take on the function of Navigator while she would play the actual game. We spent many afternoons that summer with this setup, and she would eventually make it through the whole game.
So, the game itself? Well, it picks up where the original Metroid game left off: You’re intergalactic bounty-hunter Samus Aran, who travels to planet SR-388 to rid the universe of the Metroids for good. You navigate the twisty passages, all alike, finding upgrades to your weapons and bounty-hunter suit, and killing the remaining Metroids, which are inexplicably mutating into various dangerous forms.
It’s a very good game, and totally Mom-approved.
Posted in GameBoy | 1 Comment »
May 12th, 2007
Mr. Do, after dispensing with his lucrative underground cherry-picking career, apparently decided to retire to his luxurious castle. A luxurious castle that is inexplicably filled with the same Mini-Dinos as his underground adventure. Mini-Dinos that have managed to grow horns and are now called ‘unicorns’. But, I’ve gone off on a secant. Mr. Do’s goal is to apparently rid his castle of these unicorns.
How? Excellent question.
He’s traded his power ball for a hammer, but that alone won’t do the job, each time you whack a unicorn, it just stumbles back slightly. Each floor has sections that will collapse if struck with the hammer. Squish a unicorn with the falling floor section, and it’s gone for good (well, until the next level). Of course, if you miss, there is a hole in the floor that you can try and lure the unicorns into, and they’ll be stuck for a few seconds, flailing around in the hole until they repair the floor. This gives you time to dodge, avoid and then squish them. Once you squish all the unicorns you get to go on to the next level where the unicorns come back, faster and more aggressive.
This was actually the first Mr. Do game that I’ve ever played, and the only one that I’ve ever managed to find in an actual arcade. I still find it to be the most fun game in the series. It’s got a catchy tune and some oddly compelling gameplay. Totally worth the quarter.
Posted in Arcade, Commodore 64 | No Comments »
May 11th, 2007
Mr. Do! is a clown who apparently has a thing for cherries. Cherries that are underground in groups of eight. and that are guarded by these weird red monsters with big heads (evidently called ‘Mini Dinos’).
Mr. Do! is a fantastic digger. He can create paths in the dirt with relative ease in any of the four cardinal directions, but he has to take care to make them both easy enough to get the cherries (if you can get an entire group of eight all at once, you get extra points) and convoluted enough to befuddle the unicorns that are on your trail. You could use the inexplicably-placed gigantic apples to strategically crush them, or you could throw a ball at them (he’s a clown, of course he has a ball (sorry)).
If you collect all the cherries in the stage, you move on to the next one. Clear enough stages and you get a goofy little cutscene. The first cutscene appears after you clear three rounds… I’ve never managed to get to a cutscene, but it should be noted that I haven’t played the game since I was less than a dozen years old.
Posted in Arcade | 1 Comment »
May 10th, 2007
If you have a female’s voice that sounds like it’s coming out of a blown speaker that’s underwater and covered with that filler they put in stuffed animals saying, “PREPARE TO QUALIFY!” then you know you’re playing Pole Position.
Pole Position is technically a racing game, even though you’re only really racing against the clock and the score counter. You pick your track from one of the three difficulties, (more difficult = more curves, natch), and race around until you run out of time. You have a super high performance car with super simple controls: gas, brake, steering wheel, low gear and high gear. You get more time by finishing laps, and you lose time by touching anything that’s not ground. You lose time by touching another car or a billboard and having your car explode into a giant fireball. You’ll respawn without a scratch, but you lose your momentum and precious Time Units tick away. I’m never sure where these other cars came from. You’re alone at the starting line, but as you motor along the track, you’ll come across other drone racers that putter along right in your path at about 25 km/h (yes, it’s in metric).
It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s before I was good enough to actually finish more than zero laps around the course, and I still can’t manage to get the high score on the machine. I suppose it might be time to give this game up. Mostly because I can’t find it in an arcade anywhere.
Posted in Arcade | No Comments »
May 9th, 2007
Ninja School… will help you! This is the cryptic beginning to the almost as cryptic game Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. Kid Niki, who is affiliated with the aforementioned Ninja school, takes his Spinning Sword and takes on a strange quest to run to the right and destroy Evil. Evil with uncreative names like Death Breath who can blow at you really hard, Spike who has lots of spikes, and the Green Grub who is a giant green grub.
While you’re running to the right, you are constantly assaulted by gaggles of enemies coming from every direction. Thankfully, one hit will kill them, but to be fair, one hit from them will kill you, too.
But all that’s OK because you have the inexplicable Spinning Sword. The Spinning Sword doesn’t spin in the direction you’re probably thinking it does. Its motion kind of looks like a lawn mower blade, which I’d be pretty scared of if I was in the enemy Ninja army.
The game is a quirky kind of fun, but the fragility of your character seriously ramps up the difficulty. You will need excellent reflexes to succeed at whatever it is you’re doing. “Help(ing) you”, apparently.
Posted in Arcade, NES | No Comments »
May 8th, 2007
Dana the wizard is on a quest. He’s out to get Solomon’s Key. It’s located somewhere in a mountain filled with rooms. Likely in the very last and furthest room from his starting point.
Since Dana is a wizard, he’s both frail and occasionally powerful. He possesses the fantastic abilities to jump, create and destroy blocks, to destroy said blocks by bashing them with his head, and very rarely can throw a fireball. Unfortunately, for all of his ferocity, he will die if he’s so much as touched by an enemy operative. This is Bad News indeed for our hero, as there are spots in certain levels that will provide an endless stream of monsters.
Your goal in each room is to: 1. Get the key, 2. Go through the open door, 3. Not die. Unfortunately you can die by either touching a monster or letting your ‘life’ run out (it’s a glorified timer).
After you clear all of the rooms, you will gain Solomon’s Key and something will happen. What that is, I don’t know. I couldn’t make it more than about halfway through the game.
Posted in NES | No Comments »
May 7th, 2007
Surely you’ve heard of the board game The Game of Life. It’s the board that simulates all the fun of living, working, having kids, and retiring, without the tedium of actually waiting for several dozen years while your actual life plays out.
The video game adaptation of this game is pretty true to the board game version, with the added bonus of there are less pieces to lose. You spin the wheel, drive forward the requisite number of spaces, have some life event happen (you have another daughter!, your house burns down!, etc.), you adjust your funds, and you steadily head for retirement. All the while a slightly cheesy (and very annoying) announcer emcees the whole deal. Pretty standard stuff.
However, unlike the board game (and completely inexplicably) there are little arcadey challenges that occasionally pop up. These completely break the flow of the game, and aren’t really more than tangentially related to the main game. Thankfully you do have the option to turn them off (I think), making it a $20 or so version of a $12 or so game that you can play on your television. What progress!
Posted in PC, Playstation | No Comments »
May 6th, 2007
Puzzle Bobble (known in some parts as Bust-a-Move) is not your typical puzzle game, instead of building up a puzzle from the bottom of the screen, you have worry about a puzzle coming from the top of the screen, and once it crosses the bottom, you lose. Puzzle Bobble stars the dinosaurs from Bubble-Bobble along with some supporting characters. Their mission is to shoot the colored bubbles at the advancing wall of colored bubbles, with the eventual goal of lining up three or more to pop them. Why? It differs from game to game, but it’s usually to drive off the forces of evil. How does besting an evildoer in a puzzle game save his planet? I don’t know. I try to not wonder about these things and just play the game.
Posted in Arcade, N64, PC | No Comments »
May 5th, 2007
Nearly everyone who’s ever heard of video games has heard of Pac-Man. There have been sequels, ports, and spinoffs for just about every video game system ever created, and this ubiquity virtually guaranteed that no matter what video game system you owned that you’d never be very far away from Hot Dot Munching Action ™. Unfortunately it also guaranteed that not all of the ports would be, shall we say, good.
The Atari 2600 was especially suited to mediocre ports of good games, and Pac-Man was no exception. The game was superficially identical to its arcade namesake: it had one unchanging level, it had ghost-shaped monsters, the main character is a roundish disc that must eat everything in the maze to progress.
There weren’t too many problems with this game. The maze layout was completely different than the arcade version, there were only three ghost-shaped monsters instead of four (and they were all the same color), the dots looked more like wafers, the sounds were completely wrong, there were no fruit-bonuses (but there were some bonus square-shaped things), the escape tunnels were on the top and bottom of the screen instead of the left and right sides, there were no acts between levels, and the game was ridiculously easy.
But otherwise it was completely identical.
Posted in Atari 2600 | 2 Comments »