The Closeout Warrior

Shoot ‘em ups always were a little odd to me. The premise of just about all of them is that there’s some kind of conflict and the last hope for the good guys is to send out a lone, highly maneuverable yet incredibly fragile ship of some sort to go up against the thousands upon thousands of enemy forces, destroy them all, and win the day. ‘Improbable’ doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface on the tip of that iceberg.

Life Force pits your ship against some kind of gigantic alien life form, flying around inside it and blasting it until it stops moving. Though I’ve heard that the story is that you’re trying to eliminate some kind of infection in said gigantic alien life form, but the ending shows pretty conclusively that you blew the sucker to tiny bits (assuming you didn’t choke at the last minute).

I’ve already suspended enough disbelief to be OK with the fact that you can pilot a ship or two made out of eggshells and scotch tape into an orifice of a huge space organism. But you kill a gigantic brain in the very first stage, that usually pretty much means insta-death for most organisms that actually have them. And the stage with the Egyptian ruins where you have to fight what looks like a mask that got separated from its mummy? At that point I quit trying to rationalize it.

But the game is fun, despite its nonsense, or perhaps because of it. I lose track. But I did play this game for hours upon hours, and not only because it was the only game in the house for a time. It was genuinely fun, and I managed to get just a little further each time I played it. It’s like the game was baiting me, stringing me along with its tantalizing carrot.

And I don’t even really like carrots that much.

Since the Wii came out with it’s… erm… ‘Revolutionary’ ability to allow you to purchase and download old games for discontinued systems I’ve taken the opportunity to check out some of the games that I missed when they originally made the rounds for one reason or another.

Kirby’s Adventure has you taking control of a pink ball-like guy with the ability to suck up and copy the special abilities of his enemies. He has to use his fantastic abilities to save Dreamland from not having any more dreams. You know, don’t worry about the story. It’s a whole lot more fun to run around the stages and try out the different abilities.

I sailed through this game pretty quickly. It wasn’t too tough… until the last boss fight. Well, boss fights. There are three final boss fights, each more final than the last. Even better is that the last couple of boss fights ramp up the difficulty so far that your controller might get broken. Unless you paid $40 for a Wii Remote. In which case I suggest you go to your local used video game store, pick up a couple of used and/or already broken controllers, and take your anger out on them.

Castlevania III is a whole lot like the first game in the series with a few key differences. You’re still thrust into the role of a vampire hunter, ancestor of the guy in the other game, as it happens. You still have to kill Dracula with little more than a whip and your reflexes. But this time the world is huge… Well, huger than the original one.

At several points through the game you can choose alternate paths, and the game changes slightly depending on which path you choose. Which is kind of nice, really. The other main difference, and this is the big one, is that you can now take a ‘companion’ along with you. Through the game you’ll meet up with up to three different partners. You can take these partners with you to help you take down Dracula.

Each of the partners has a distinct ability that makes them useful to have around. Grant the pirate can stick to and climb walls and ceilings, Sypha the wizard can use fire, ice, and thunder spells (ice is really handy for freezing and then breaking enemies into lots of little pieces), and Alucard the son of Dracula can shoot fireballs and turn into a bat (he’s not really that useful). You can switch between your characters on the fly which makes the game quite a bit more interesting, even though they both share the same life bar.

Then you have the graphics, music, and story all improved over the first couple of games in the series and you have a winner. A particularly tough and unforgiving winner, but a winner nonetheless.

I don’t really remember the first time I played Ninja Gaiden, but I do remember the summer that I wasted playing it. I played this game daily, sometimes with my cousin and sister, edging further and further through it until I just couldn’t play it any more.

The game is broken into two parts, action parts and story parts. The story parts tell the main story of the game in fantastically (well, for the NES) rendered detail, and the action scenes kind of tie the story parts together. The story is something about a ninja whose father was killed in a one-on-one ninja-off. He has to go to exotic locations, massacring everyone in the way (man, woman, or beast) to unravel the mystery behind his father’s death, a cult, and a statue that possesses the spirit of a demon. Just the kind of thing you might see in a b-grade ninja movie.

The game is one of memorization and reflexes. Enemies appear in the same place every time and you need to perform a precise series of maneuvers to advance. Enemies are placed in just the right locations that they’ll hit you and knock you into a bottomless pit, forcing you to start the level over again. Little cheap tricks like that just kind of make the game seem longer. It’s kind of OK, though. The story segments are cheesy enough that they kind of make it worthwhile.

As a alluded to yesterday I think I was spoiled by Ironsword. I just found the original game to be pretty boring by comparison. This game, its sequel, while being a bit more complex, was a whole lot more fun and required pinpoint accuracy to win. I never actually won, but I got real close, which counts for something, right?

I don’t really know how this game ties in with its predecessor, all I know is that you have to kill off fiends in the form of four elementals: wind, water, fire, and earth. Then you have to kill them off again, but all at the same time. The evil wizard from the first game is involved somehow, but don’t worry about that too much.

Each stage has two parts to it. Part one has you meandering around a landscape, killing things, collecting treasure, spending (or gambling away) your treasure in the local shops, all looking for a golden item of some sort. Bird wants an egg, frog wants a fly, etc.

Find the Golden Thingus(tm) and you get to go to the second part of the stage, where the boss lives. There you have to find the spell that… erm… spells doom for the boss (you can’t hurt it without it), find the boss, kill it, and move on to the next area.

Like in the first game, Kuros is almost completely harmless with a sword. You press the attack button and he just kind of waggles it in front of his face. Maybe he thinks that’s menacing enough to scare off the monsters, I don’t know. But he is quite the jumper. You have to carefully maneuver him across the various landscapes. Leaping from tiny platform to tiny platform at breakneck speed. One wrong move and you’ll slide down the most inconveniently-placed slides I’ve ever experienced in a game.

The game does get a bit maddening after a while, but it has some of my favorite music of any NES-era game. A lot of the time I spent watching others play this game was just to hear the soundtrack, which in hindsight sounds kind of sad. But, hey, it was a cheap way to keep two kids entertained for weeks on end.

The title of this game is a little misleading, there’s only one wizard and one Warrior. You get to be the Warrior, Kuros, and have to kill Malkil, the Wizard. Why? Because the wizard’s evil. Duh.

Unfortunately your warrior is incredibly valiant and cunning. I say ‘unfortunately’ because he’s just about worthless in combat, so gets to use his wits to defeat his enemies. At least that’s what I tell myself to justify his completely impotent attacks.

So you guide your little warrior guy through several levels, gathering gems. You need the gems to give to the mysterious knight who won’t let you pass. Bribery works, I suppose. Then you get to kill the boss he’s guarding, all to rescue the damsel of the level, and to get you one step to vanquishing the evil wizard.

One of the weird things in this game is the powerup system. You get various things to enhance your warrior, like a Dagger of Throwing, and a Shield of Blocking, but you can only have one at a time, and you won’t know what’s in a chest until you open it, take the item inside, and irreparably break your current item. So if you have your Shield of Blocking and get the Boots of Force (which let you kick things), you’re pretty much screwed.

I played this game some, but it was the second game in the series that I played. The first game that I played was the sequel to this one, and it spoiled me a bit, I think. The second game in the series is much better, and much harder. Although, for what it’s worth, I did read the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book based on this game. I remember it being pretty terrible, so at least this game is better that that.

“Bubble Bibble” greeted those of us that decided to play this game. It doesn’t really sound like much these days, but in the NES days, it was pretty amazing to hear any speech coming out of the little grey toaster.

As far as a basketball game, this one definitely is. I don’t pretend to know that much about them. Even being from Indiana, I never really followed the sport very much. But here, take a look.

Whenever I played this game I did two things: tried to make half-court shots and did slam dunks to see the sweet animations.

If you take a game like The Adventures of Dino Riki and move the timetable up a few million years, replace the generic cave-person with a generic cowboy person, and replace the throwable hammers with pistols (a blazin’!), you’ve got the makings of Gun.Smoke.

In this game you walk inexorably forward, shooting… desperados, I suppose, until you come across the boss, a super-powered hombre who is much more agile that you are and can take many more hits.

It goes on like this for several stages, with the enemies swarming more and the bosses getting more deadly until you either beat them all, run out of lives, or give up and play something else. Given that by the time I played this game that I had already put significant time into Dino Riki, I gave up pretty quickly.

I think I made it to stage three once.

If you look hard enough, you’re going to be able to find a game about nearly anything you can think of. Bee 52 is a game about bees. Bees collecting honey.

You get to pilot a lone bee as he ventures out into the yard and gathers honey for his hive. You get the honey from the flowers scattered around the yard, gather all you can carry and head back to the hive to drop it off, gather enough total, and you complete the level. It’s pretty straightforward. There are other bugs around to try and make you fail in your mission, but you have a stinger, and the ability to spit things at them to kill them. I don’t really understand it, but hey, don’t worry about it too much. It’s just a game, after all.

I only played this game one time. It was a rental that I got one weekend when all of the good stuff was taken. It turns out that this game is kind of fun for a while, but really easy. I didn’t quite finish it in the two days that I had it, but I got real close. Close enough that I decided that I didn’t need to play it again after I took it back.