The Closeout Warrior

For a time, every Disney show on in the afternoons after school had a game based on it and published by Capcom. This is not in itself particularly unusual, what was unusual was that these games were pretty good, though slightly on the easy side.

Chip ‘n’ Dale has you taking the titular heroes on a romp through some varied stages. Sometimes running to the right, sometimes climbing up, but always inexorably toward the boss character at the end. The story? What story? You had to go through various locations that would be easily recognizable to all but the most casual viewer of the show, fighting stage bosses that were lifted directly from the series, and culminating with the criminal fat cat himself… erm, Fat Cat.

You picked your favorite chipmunk and ran through the stages, generally avoiding baddies and/or throwing things at them. The rest of the characters make small cameos, and all come together at the end for one of those ‘everyone look into the camera and chuckle knowingly’ moments. Because, though you smacked Fat Cat around with a super ball a few times, he’s probably not giving up his evil ways.

The Back to the Future movies were pretty straightforward, and were more silly than anything. The game based on parts 2 and 3 of the trilogy was not only not straightforward in the slightest, it was quite tough.

The only thing that these games had in common with the movies were that the characters were named the same things that they were in the movies, though they didn’t look very much like their namesakes, there was a time-traveling car that flew around, and you had to stop Biff and restore the timeline.

What you had to do was travel around the different times to find different object rooms in the city. These object rooms would have some kind of object to find and a challenge that you had to complete. The challenges were mind-bendingly difficult, and didn’t make any sense whatsoever. They were mostly the variety of collecting a set number of objects in a certain amount of time.

You travel through time to access different areas in the city. If a ledge is too high, you can plant an acorn in 1955 and climb a tree in 1985. If a gap is too large to jump in 1985, go back to 1955 where the street hasn’t eroded yet.

There are something like 50 of the ridiculous item rooms for you to find and complete, and doing so will reveal the answer to a puzzle that lets you access the second half of the game, which is apparently just like the first part except that you’re stuck in 1855 and you’re wearing a cowboy hat. I don’t really know that much about the second half of the game, I was only able to play through about half of the first half.

Normal pool is normally not particularly exciting to play or watch, and often doesn’t translate well to the video game medium. That’s not entirely true. Technically, it translates just fine, but pressing buttons just doesn’t really feel like pool. So steps might be taken to jazz up the game. Steps to play with the fundamental rules of the game and the laws of the universe. Steps that would end up giving you Lunar Pool.

Lunar Pool is a lot like regular pool. You have a cue ball and lots of differently colored balls. It’s your job to whack the cue ball around in such a way that it smashes into the other balls and knocks them into the holes into the table, but is not itself knocked in. Lunar Pool differs in two key areas: table layout and basic physics.

In normal, non-lunar pool the table is a rectangle with holes in the four corners and in the middle of the long sides. In Lunar Pool the sky’s the limit! Within the confines of the NES’s ability to render graphical splendor, you’ll find tables that are square, oblong, round-ish, or shaped like a tangram puzzle, with pockets that might be against the rail, in the middle of the table, or possibly behind bumpers. It’s kind of like mini-golf, but without the putters.

In boring normal pool, you are a slave to friction. This makes the balls behave predictably, and eventually stop rolling. In Lunar Pool you can turn that pesky friction up for a greater challenge or down for a… greater challenge. You could even turn it all the way down to ‘off’ and the balls will not stop until they are all off the table, which isn’t really all that fun since you only get to hit the balls once and then you lose, even though it does take a while.

I was never able to figure out where the ‘lunar’ part came in.