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Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Our trip down memory lane continues with this review from July 2005. Enjoy!

It seems like game companies, when strapped for new ideas, will take some scoops out of the pile of their old steaming crap, package them together with something recognizable, and then release it as a ‘retro’ collection. Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced comes with six games: Frogger, Gyruss, Time Pilot, Scramble, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and Rush’n Attack. Each of these games is identical to their arcade counterparts, for good or ill. By putting in the Konami Code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A) you can access something different in each game, ranging from Improved Graphics(tm) to Extra Lives(tm). If you’ve played any of these games in their arcade forms, then you know full well what to expect here. The only difference here is that you don’t have to bring a stack of quarters with you to play.

Frogger

I’ve never liked Frogger. I’ve played several versions of this supposed classic, and I just can’t get into it. I understand that there are fans of the game out there, and if you are one of them, then you might consider getting this collection for this game alone. If you’re like me, however, you’ll look for something else. Your goal in this game is to get your frog (who can’t swim) across a busy highway and then across a busy river, picking up girl frogs and flies along the way. Fairly simplistic by today’s standards, but so were most of the games at the time.

Gyruss

For those who’ve never heard of Gyruss (don’t worry, I never heard of it either until I got this collection) the game plays a lot like Galaga with the exception that your ship can move along all four sides of the screen. Enemy ships will come out from the center in waves, eventually landing in a formation where they will peel off and attack your ship. While playing the game, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had ‘been there, done that.’

Time Pilot

In Time Pilot, you have to take your craft through the unfriendly skies shooting down enemies and rescuing parachuters. Do this enough times, and you can go along to the next era of war and get updated ships. I found the game to be a little slow for my tastes.

Scramble

What is up with the flying games? In the third flying game, your goal is to go through a tunnel and shoot the enemy missles, ships, miscellaneous gee-gaws, and fuel tanks. Shooting the fuel tanks will replenish your fuel supply (obviously) and will allow you to continue on your quest to rid the caverns of their missle problem. This game tries really hard to be fun. It has the constantly-draining fuel mater, the ability for you to shoot in two directions (straight ahead and in an arc downward), and wave upon wave of easily destructible foes. The main problem that I found with this game is the lack of action. The missles come from the ground fairly slowly, and the enemy ships just kind of hang out in their predetermined flight paths. The game just turns tedious right away.

Yie Ar Kung Fu

Proto-fighting game Yie Ar Kung Fu should be one of the stand-out games of this collection. It should be one of the games that makes this package, but it’s probably the game I spent the least amount of time with. Perhaps it’s my lack of experience with the game talking here, but I couldn’t find very much to like about it. I cut my fighting-game teeth on Street Fighter II, so perhaps I’m spoiled. The moves in this game are fairly easy to pull off (e.g. push a direction and press a button) and the fighters control well enough. I was just left wanting more.

Rush ‘N’ Attack

Rush’n Attack is one of those classic action games. Your goal is simple and to the point: “Save the Prisoners of War!”. You are a soldier who can take one hit going up against waves of heavily armed enemies (who, thankfully, also can take only one hit) in your quest to protect freedom for another day. This game is sickeningly hard (or I’m sickeningly bad at it) since enemies are placed such that if you don’t have perfect timing/precision, you’re toast. The amount of cheap kills in this game is staggering. This game (along with Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Frogger) is one of the primary reasons to own this collection.

The only extra feature worth mentioning is the multiplayer. You can play multiplayer versions of the games provided that you have another Game Boy and a link cable (only one copy of the game is required). These games are definitely more fun when you can get someone else in on the action and they’re simple enough that it’s extremely easy to just jump in and play if you’ve never tried any of them before. Once again we have a compilation that takes some mediocre, mixes it with some stuff nobody’s heard of, and manages to throw in a couple of extras. Had this collection been more than Konami’s B-list arcade games, it might not have been so bad, but as it stands, it’s just OK.

Game Name: Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Purchased from: EBGames
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99
One word summary: Passable

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Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex

Saturday, June 9th, 2007

Just for fun, I thought I’d pull out one of the old reviews from my $10 and under days. This has nothing to do with a critical planning error on my part, and not getting a proper post done. Nothing in the slightest. Oh, and the pictures don’t work for now. Sorry about that.

For a time, Crash Bandicoot was Sony’s flagship character and spokesperson… er… spokesmarsupial(?). He went so far as to film commercials in Nintendo’s parking lot cracking wise about their console. Given this staunch opposition to all things Nintendo, you’d probably surmise (much like I did) that nothing resembling a Crash Bandicoot game would ever materialize on any of Nintendo’s consoles. Well, we were both wrong.Now, to be quite honest, I’ve never actually played a Crash Bandicoot game before, so I had absolutely no idea what was going on when I flipped this game into my Game Cube. Thankfully, there was a very lengthy video sequence that set up the game. I didn’t time it, mostly because I didn’t want to sit through it again, but it was long enough for me to wonder if I had bought a game or Crash Bandicoot The Motion Picture. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about the story behind this game. Bad guys are concocting a plan to off the hero by releasing ancient evils upon the world. To thwart this evil, you must go through various stages and gather the crystals hidden within. Typical stuff.It’s fairly obvious from looking at and listening to this game that literally several dozen dollars went into its production. The characters are acceptably rendered, and the stages all manage to look fine. They even managed to wrangle some quasi-celebrity talent to provide some of the voices. Before traipsing through a select few stages, some of the Ancient Evils appear to talk smack to you to help keep you motivated. I had to put down the controller and walk away from the Gamecube (and this game) once I heard the voice of R. Lee Ermy coming out of the Water Elemental Mask, Wa-Wa. While at first it appears that there is some variety to the stages, many of them feel suspiciously similar; run around on a predetermined course in a 3D area, grab all the fruits/crystals, optionally bust open the boxes and head toward the exit. Occasionally you’ll control Crash’s sister Coco or pilot the odd vehicle, but those stages are the exception rather than the rule. From what I can gather, this is all typical Crash fare.

This probably won’t come as a large surprise to longtime followers of the Crash series, but Crash is about as durable as a house of cards in a tornado. Touching a seal (or a bat or anything else that moves in this game) spells instant death for our protagonist. This is offset by the ludicrous amount of lives you acquire throughout the game. By the time I got to the seventh stage I already had well over 20 lives in reserve and was in absolutely in no danger of running out in a tough spot; I couldn’t find any. The game isn’t particularly challenging. It’s possible to achieve success by persistence alone, which made for a tedious experience. Eventually I just gave up and decided to move on to Crash Blast, the game that you can download into your Game Boy to supposedly unlock secrets. The game really isn’t anything more than a shooting gallery. The only secret I managed to unlock was an advertisement for an upcoming Game Boy Crash title. Meh. So we have a game that looks OK, sounds OK, and plays OK. What does that leave us with? A game that’s just OK. There’s very little in this game that made me want to keep coming back for more.

Platform: Game Cube
Purchased from: Best Buy
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99 One word summary: Vanilla

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Lunar Pool

Friday, June 8th, 2007

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.

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Bad Dudes

Thursday, June 7th, 2007

“The president has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?”

This is one of my favorite video game related quotes. It perfectly conveys the sensibilities and priorities of the times: the nation’s nearly paralyzing fear of a sudden uprising of ninja activities, and reliance on streetwise martial artists to save the day.

Taking control of the martial artist of your choice, both equally generic but wearing different colored sleeveless shirts (for maximum badness, no doubt) and inexplicably trained to be exceptionally deadly. So much so that one hit will kill most of the ninjas that will swarm on you.

And swarm they will. The ninjas of the Dragon Ninja clan constantly come at you from every nook, cranny, rock, tree, and they even run up on the side of the semi you’re riding down the freeway. They’re relentless. If you can manage to slog through the piles and piles cookie-cutter, nearly completely ineffectual fodder, you get to fight the stage boss, who will put up more of a challenge. He’ll take several hits to kill off, and is much more maneuverable than our heroes. But you will not be thwarted, you must save the president!

If you can manage to make it through and murder the thousands of ninjas in your way to rescue the president, he shows his gratitude by inviting you to go out with him to get a cheeseburger. The game wraps up with the president holding a cheeseburger and smiling in your general direction, obviously approving of your derring-do. If there’s anything more American, I don’t know what it is.

Posted in NES | 1 Comment »

Lemonade Stand

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

There have been many, many Lemonade Stand-esque games, but the first one that I played was on the Commodore 64. These days, however, I can’t find much info on it, so I’m probably mis-remembering some of the details, but here we go anyway.

What kid doesn’t want to own a lemonade stand over the summer? Aside from all the normal kids, that is. As much as I wanted to earn money by selling ridiculously overpriced glasses of lemonade, I didn’t because I didn’t want to sit in front of my house in the scorching heat while nobody ever walked by. Thankfully, the old C-64 was able to provide me with an adequate simulation that I could run in the comfort of my house.

In Lemonade Stand you are the proprietor of your very own lemonade stand (duh). You have a sum of starting money, a weather report, and a shopping list. You need to determine how many lemons, how much sugar and how many cups you need to buy, as well as what what you want to charge for a cup of your swill.

It’s all a balancing act, you can sell more sweet lemonade than unsweet, but you can’t sell any lemonade without cups. You’ll sell more lemonade as it gets hotter, whether it’s sweet or not, and not so much in the rain, but the weather report may or may not be accurate (just like real life!). Your goal is to reduce expenditures and expand income in an effort to maximize profit… in a game geared toward children… that was actually fun.

Brilliant!

Posted in Commodore 64 | 1 Comment »

Dig Dug

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

Dig Dug has a problem, he has to clear the monsters out of the ground by any means necessary. The means that he has available to him are: smashing them with boulders, and using his air pump to inflate them until they explode, sounds pretty gory.

Dig Dug can dig (and, by extension, dug) through the ground either up, down, left, or right and needs to make his way toward the pockets of monsters, and to carve out traps to make use of the strategically-placed boulders. The only weapon he has, other than his fantastic cunning and smart white jumpsuit, is an air pump. He can send out a line, lodge it into a monster, start pumping away, and the monster will inflate and burst.

The monsters start out pretty stupid, but they quickly remember that they have the ability to travel through the dirt, where there are no paths, straight to Dig Dug, who is likely going to be immobilized because he’s busy inflating something or other. Then he dies.

I may be being a tad harsh on the game, it’s actually fun for a few levels, before the ridiculous amounts of enemies surround you before you can form a plan. But that may be just me.

Posted in Arcade | No Comments »

Centipede

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Centipede is one of the old classic games that people hold in abject reverence. Everyone and their grandma has heard of Centipede, and they will likely tell you that it’s one of the best games of the 1980’s. I played it, and I didn’t really like it.

Centipede is a game about destroying centipedes in a garden of mushrooms. You play the part of some kind of thingus that can move around on the bottom portion of the screen and shoot toward the top. At the top of the screen are centipedes of various lengths and colors that work their way down the screen. They descend slightly when they either hit the edge of the screen or hit one of the mushrooms. Your goal is to shoot all the segments of the centipede and proceed to the next level. You have two problems: you shoot the head segment and it turns into a mushroom, making the centipede descend a level, and if you shoot the middle, the middle part turns into a mushroom, the centipede splits into two where you shot it, and both parts come down independent of each other.

Compounding this problem are the spiders that flit around on the bottom part of the screen at irregular intervals. They touch you, you = dead. Of course, you get more points the closer the spiders are to you when you shoot them, but their erratic movements make them particularly dangerous.

Later on, there are fleas that drop from the top of the screen, littering it with more mushrooms, which makes the centipede descend faster. And scorpions that poison mushrooms. A centipede that touches a poison mushroom will immediately head directly toward the bottom of the screen. What fun!

The game was designed to use a trackball, and is really the only way to play it, joysticks don’t really do the game justice. That’s assuming, of course, that you can actually want to play this game.

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Mario’s Picross

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

It’s always refreshing to come across a puzzle game that doesn’t involve sorting things that inexplicably fall from the sky. Picross has you using your brain to uncover a hidden picture.

Picross takes place on a grid. For every row and column on the grid, there is a series of numbers like “4 2 3″. These numbers tell you that there is a stretch of four continuous squares filled in, some amount of blank space, two more squares filled in, some more blank space, and then three squares in a row filled in. You have to use your ‘logic’ to determine which squares to fill in. Your result is a nice little picture of some sort.

Your only tools, besides your brain, are the ability to mark (or unmark) a square that you don’t want to fill in, and the ability to fill in a square. You want to make absolutely sure that you are filling in the right square, because every wrong square you chip away will remove precious minutes on the clock. You run out of minutes, and you get to start the puzzle again.

Oh, and for some reason, Mario’s an archaeologist. I kind of just don’t pay attention to that.

There is an insane number of puzzles to be had in this game. I spent several dozen hours with this thing, and only managed to complete about half of the puzzles. I still pick it back up every now and again to do a few more puzzles. It’s got some got some pretty good staying power, I’m just kind of disappointed that none of the other games in the series managed to make it to my collection.

Posted in GameBoy | 1 Comment »

Altered Beast

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

I’m not going to try to disguise it in the least, Altered Beast is a terrible game. It was terrible when it was new and now, over a dozen years later, it’s still terrible.

In Altered Beast you play a warrior. A dead warrior. A dead warrior who is temporarily revived by Zeus to save Athena from the forces of the underworld. So, you begin to walk to the right (you actually have no choice in this, the screen scrolls perpetually to the right, independent of your actions). Along the way you will fight throngs of evil… things, almost all of which can be dispatched by a punch or a kick. You may be an ancient Grecian warrior, but you don’t get any fancy swords, shields, or armor. You get to fight demons with naught but your bare hands and feet. Occasionally one of the thousands and thousands of identical enemies will drop some kind of power orb that allows you to power up. Powering up makes your guy stop, say, “Power UP!”, and get a sudden increase in muscle mass. Get 3 orbs and you will change into some kind of fearsome beast, suitable to take out the boss of the stage. This is convenient, since the boss will not appear until you are in crazy bloodthirsty beast form. After you beat the boss, the main bad guy, ~~Hades, I guess,~~ Neff (who?) steals your precious power orbs, leaving you as a weakling again. So you go to the next level and repeat the process over again, this time turning into a different animal once you grab the 3 power orbs.

That is, of course, if you can stand to play for that long. Two levels was certainly my limit.

Posted in Genesis | No Comments »

Stunt Race FX

Friday, June 1st, 2007

The Super NES is not a 3D gaming powerhouse, but to be fair, it was never designed to be. It’s actually pretty amazing to think that the system was able to create a totally playable 3D experience, although fairly primitive by today’s standards.

Stunt Race FX was not the first 3D game to grace the venerable Super NES, that would be Star Fox. Star Fox and Stunt Race FX used a specialty chip built into the game to provide the Super NES with the ability to perform rudimentary 3D functions. Don’t worry, I won’t get into the particulars here. These resultant 3D scenes were small, featured no texture-mapping, and were not fluidly rendered, but none of that mattered. You were doing things that nobody thought the system could do.

Stunt Race FX puts you in control of one of a number of cars, complete with cartoony eyeballs, that race around a series of tracks. Your goal, as is the case with most racing games, is to reach the finish line in first place while not wrecking your vehicle, and you will crash your vehicle. Mostly, you’ll overcorrect every time you go around a corner, weave down the road, and slam into the wall. It’s inevitable, especially when you are using your Boost(tm). Thankfully, there are red globe-like things all over the place that will fix some of the damage that you will certainly incur (there are also some blue ones that refill your Boost meter). This is important, if your car gets too damaged, it will be knocked out of commission and lose.

So, where does the ‘Stunt’ part come in? Your vehicles can jump… and there are half-pipes. Stunts.

Okay, so the stunt part is kind of lame, but the game is actually decent. After you play for a few hours, you hardly notice the choppiness.

Posted in Super NES | 1 Comment »

The Closeout Warrior