The Closeout Warrior

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.

Who doesn’t like Willow? It had all the prerequisites for greatness. A crazy movie set in a bizarre fantasy world? Check. Licensed toys and books? An opportunity to make a quick buck by cashing in on a movie license? Oh, check!

The NES Willow game is an action role-playing game. You take Willow on his quest to rid the land of evil. Sounds pretty typical. Inexplicably, all the information that I could find at the time seemed to indicate that this was a good game. I sat down and began playing, and wasn’t particularly impressed or disappointed. Although, I must admit it was a fantastic effect to have the wind blow through the trees and grass every time an enemy appeared, since we all know that our enemies will never appear without the accompaniment of a slight breeze. This was offset by Willow’s proficiency with a sword, or lack of. I’m not sure if the sword just weighed a couple hundred pounds, or if it was magically enchanted to increase wind resistance, but I certainly got the impression that each move Willow made with his sword was calculated and deliberate (read: slow) to conserve energy.

Oh, and the acorns. You could throw the magic acorns that turn things to stone. Wonderful.

I started the game a dozen or more times, each time getting slightly further, eventually making it to the first boss encounter… where I died. If you die in Willow, it’s Game Over. No problem. You can save, kind of. Unlike most games that span around a dozen or more hours this game does not use a battery-backed save system, it uses passwords. Not so bad if you don’t lose the scrap of paper you scrawled the password on, which I did all the time, but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that the font that the Willow developers decided to use has these ridiculous serifs on them. These serifs combined with the questionable television quality I had to deal with make the normal text hard to read and the passwords indecipherable. Every time I got a password I would write it down twice. Once as the letters I thought I was seeing and once drawing each letter as if it were a tiny picture instead of a letter. Both of these methods failed. To this day I have not been able to successfully input a password correctly, and so the depths of the Willow universe realized in NES form have yet to be plumbed.

Play at your own risk.

In the late 1980s and through the early 1990s, there were dozens upon dozens of weird gimmicky accessories and addons for Nintendo’s grey box. Almost all of them were lame in amazing new ways, but the Power Glove particularly caught my eye. It was a glove (obviously) you wore that (it was said) would allow you to control games just by moving your hand. Big shock: it mostly didn’t work, and the game that it was bundled with to show off its capabilities was terrible.

You had sensor bars for your television that roughly resembled a giant ‘L’. Presumably you would place these on your television (across the top and down the side) and they would be able to translate the glove position and send that to the game, in this case Super Glove Ball.

I don’t really remember that much about Super Glove Ball. As young and gullible I was, I could tell that the controller didn’t work and the game was terrible. Super Glove Ball is kind of like Breakout, in that you have a wall of bricks that you have to destroy by hitting them with some magic space ball. You control this ball by grabbing and throwing it with a giant hand-shaped apparatus, which looks uncannily like your brand new controller.

Playing the game with the controller that designed to play the game was an exercise in frustration. It was kind of fun on the off chance that the controller actually worked. More likely you would move it too fast, or outside the range that the sensors could detect, or at all. Then the game would freak out and you would lose.

The developers were at least kind enough to provide support for ‘normal’ controllers which predictably made the game ridiculously easy. So easy in fact, that it was incredibly boring. Maybe if you really enjoy breaking bricks by throwing a ball at them you might get some kind of joy out of this game.

Don’t count on it.

Although they seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years, there was a time when the console game landscape was absolutely laden with video pinball games. The only possible explanation for this is because you could to things in video pinball games that you can’t really do in traditional pinball games, like putting water hazards, tiny clowns, or bowling pins on the table. Either that or include an RPG mode.

Pinball Quest has the standard tables with the aforementioned unlikely features, but the real reason to pick up this title is the RPG mode. The RPG mode lets you take on the role of a citizen of a kingdom populated by pinballs, out to save the princess from evil. This evil force is holed up at the top of the kingdom, which is conveniently composed of a series of vertical areas outfitted with bumpers and flippers. Your goal is to defeat the monsters in each area, power up yourself and your flippers, and get the princess back. This pinball game has all of the traditional features of a ‘normal’ role playing game: gold pieces, killing monsters to gain power, shops you can steal from, and an actual story (such as it is). That alone makes it worthwhile to pick up, if even to only play once.

Quick, without searching the Internet, do you know who Master Higgins is? I’m willing to bet that the majority of you don’t, or you think you don’t. Master Higgins is the shoeless, shirtless, hero of the Adventure Island games.

The first Adventure Island game is the only game that I’ve ever played in the series. It stars Master Higgins as the hero, running to the right to rescue his girlfriend from the evil witch doctor. Master Higgins, you will discover has a life bar. However, Higgins like most video game characters, is incredibly fragile and will expire in one hit. So, why does he have a life bar? My best guess is to power his feet.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Master Higgins’ feet are constantly in motion… unless he’s on a skateboard. When he walks, his feet move so fast that they’re a blur. All that movement takes precious bars off his life meter. Well, that and tripping over rocks. You refill the bar by eating the fruits that are floating in the air all over the island, or from inside giant invisible dinosaur eggs. Incidentally, the eggs can also contain things like more powerful weapons or the aforementioned skateboard (complete with safety helmet). Did I mention this game is weird?

I played this game off and on for a period of several weeks. Eventually, after logging several dozen hours of play time, I managed to get to the dreaded witch doctor, and to vanquish him. Instead of getting to watch the ending sequence after all my hard work, I was treated to Area 2. I would later learn that I had spent all that time to experience one eighth of the game’s content.

I haven’t played the game since.

I’m not sure what drew me to this game. The game masquerades as an adventure starring a big-headed kid in a brown leotard that throws Implements of Doom at prehistoric flora and fauna. However, the game is a shooter starring a big-headed kid in a brown leotard that throws Implements of Doom at prehistoric flora and fauna. The difference is small, but it’s vital.

Shooting games (Shoot ‘em ups) typically star your character piloting some kind of vehicle, typically one that flies. This gives the game an excuse to constantly move the screen forward: no forward momentum, you crash. Dino-Riki, on the other hand, just moves inexorably up until he either kills or gets killed by the giant dinosaur waiting for him at the end of his path. Why does he walk toward the dinosaurs instead of going the other way? What drives him? If I had a manual and knew his backstory, would that have made the game better? Probably not.

There really isn’t too much memorable about this game except for its mediocrity. It’s not bad enough to avoid entirely, but not good enough to seek out, either.

Blaster Master for the NES is one of the finest games for the platform. The catchy music from the first stage alone is enough to bring back memories to any NES aficionado worth his salt. The story for the Americanized version of the game is supposedly demonstrably different from the original Japanese version, but finding accurate information to corroborate that statement is itself an exercise filled with high-adventure. As it stands, then, we are saddled with the story of Jason, Jason’s frog, a box of nuclear waste in Jason’s back yard, and a sink-hole that reveals a tank and power suit.

Pure gold.

Backstory insanity aside, we have a pretty solid, and fairly challenging game. Like many games your tank starts out with just enough firepower to gun down errant mutated mosquitoes, but by seeking out and destroying giant brains, giant frogs, giant crabs, and giant… mobile blocks you gain the missing components of your tank. Toward the end of the game, your tank becomes actually somewhat useful. It can scale walls, hover, dive underwater, and… unlock doors. However, getting to that point is so ridiculously difficult that most people will never achieve it. You get 3 lives and 5 continues, 15 chances to navigate a meandering maze of insanity.

The different areas are all distinct and have a different feel. As long as you don’t question why there are forests, giant technology centers, and sky in a supposed sinkhole in some kid’s backyard, then it’s quite enjoyable.

Sequels and spinoffs were made for the Genesis, Game Boy, and PlayStation. Of those, I’ve only played the Game Boy sequel, which certainly tried hard to capture the feeling of the NES original, but fell short for some reason that I can’t quite grasp.