The Closeout Warrior

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

May 18th, 2008

I liked the Roger Rabbit movie well enough, and was pretty well enamored with the concept of a game based on the movie, for some reason.

I don’t really remember much about what the story was in this game, but it’s pretty safe to assume that it’s a pretty loose interpretation of the movie. You take control of Eddie as he travels around the city gathering clues and trying to find out where the evil judge has gotten off to. You do this by talking to people and figuring out where the next item is that you need to proceed.

But that was boring.

I had lots more fun just running around and punching people. See, Eddie’s main weapon is his fist. And if you tap the punch button, Eddie does this kind of weird dance thing and charges up his punch. When you let go he unleashes all of his pent-up fury, and if someone’s in the way they get sent flying and their head starts to rattle. Then they get mad at you and refuse to give you their non-helpful clues, which isn’t really that big of a loss.

I tried to play through this game a few times, but never really got very far. Mostly because I’m not that good at figuring out obtuse clues. But that all changed the day I figured out The Password.

I probably got it in Nintendo Power or some such, and I still remember it LL, a bunch of Hs, 3B. I don’t remember how many Hs, but you stop with two spaces left to put in the 3B. Once you put that in, you start with everything you need to finish the game, and can pretty much go straight to Judge Doom and smack him around a bit. Once I got my hands on that, I applied it liberally to this game. Then, after I beat him up a few times, I decided that I was done with the game and took it back to the used video game store.

Posted in NES | 2 Comments »

Blades of Steel

May 17th, 2008

I can tell you over and over that I don’t really care much for sports games, but a cursory glance around here will tell you that I’ve played my fair share of them. And it’s not because I have some kind of secret affinity for them or anything, it’s mostly because folks I pal around with buy them and then I’m obligated to give them a try.

Blades of Steel is a hockey game. And puts you in charge of one of two teams and you hockey around trying to score more goals than the other team. Pretty bland stuff, really, and to be honest, I didn’t really pay that much attention to it. What I did pay attention to was the fighting.

When two guys bump into each other enough times they end up throwing off the gloves and having an old-fashioned fist fight. The loser of which goes to the penalty box. Which isn’t really that much like real hockey, but it makes the game way more interesting.

In fact, when I played this game, the guy that brought it over and I did nothing but get our little hockeydudes into fist fights. It turns out that that was the most fun part of the whole game. I guess if you’re some kind of hockey aficionado or something that there would be more stuff in here to get into. But since I’m not, I just found it to be a kind-of-okay fighting game hidden behind a very clunky interface.

Posted in NES | No Comments »

Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour

May 16th, 2008

As a rule, I don’t like much golf outside of the miniature kind, and even that I can only take in smallish doses. As boring as it is, though, it’s slightly less boring to play… unless you’re talking about video game golf, then it’s slightly more boring to play, somehow. I suspect that because in Actual Golf(tm) if you want to thwack the ball harder, you swing the club faster, but in most versions of Fake Pretend Video Game Golf(tm) you just tap a button to start your swing and tap the same button to stop your swing, and if you’ve timed it just so, you don’t hit the ball out of bounds.

So I usually stay pretty far away from most video golf games. Until I went to my local Toys ‘R’ Us one day. There they had a kiosk set up with the (then) latest Mario Golf on it, and since there were no little kids in my way, I decided to give it a shot. After what felt like ten minutes my arms cramped up, my neck became sore, and I had played the front nine holes on a course. It turned out that far more than ten minutes had passed, if my joints could be believed, and if I lose a big tract of time like that to a demo copy, just imagine what would happen if I brought it home.

And that’s what I did.

The game does play a lot like every other golf video game that I’ve ever played. Pick your club, and then press the ‘A’ button with proper timing to hit the ball. The better your timing is, the better you hit the ball. The system isn’t based in reality so much as it is based on there not being a really good way to simulate swinging a golf club without actually swinging something that resembles a golf club. But the system works well enough for this game.

But when I got a few rounds under my belt, I was a little disappointed. Like a lot of games, you don’t get all the goodies all at once, you have to earn them. You have to earn the ability to play as the different characters, and on the various awesome courses. The commercials showed you playing on fanciful Mario-themed courses, with Chain Chomps in the sand traps, and courses in the treetops, and that kind of thing. But you start out with some generic plain grass number that’s just… well, plain. I even unlocked two or three courses, which got a little harder, but all seemed kind of ‘blah’ to me, maybe the cool stuff comes in toward the end, I don’t know.

So I kind of gave up on the game after I couldn’t unlock anything else. I couldn’t unlock anything else because I had some troubles finishing the tournaments in a position higher than last, and that happened because my timing and judgment of simulated 3D space has apparently become highly suspect in recent memory for some reason.

Posted in GameCube | 1 Comment »

Castlevania 64

May 15th, 2008

Castlevania games, even though they look pretty different from each other, are a lot the same. They all have something to do with Dracula, someone related to the Belmont family line, and whips. But, it’s not as kinky as it sounds.

Every single Castlevania game I’ve played has been Good Times ™, with the exception of this one. It stars you, as one of the Belmonts (I forget which one) or some girl with magic hands. And you have to guide him or her to kill off Drac and his minions.

Since I like some good whipping action, I chose the Belmont as my character, and started in on the game. I made it through the first area outside the castle with not too much difficulty, but when I made it into the castle I had two big problems. One was that whipping in 2D space is pretty easy. Whipping in 3D space is really hard. I had a really hard time aiming my whip slashes, and that made it hard to kill things (though the enemies had no such problems). The other problem, which was huge for me, was that due to the wonky camera angles in the game, I had a big problem judging where the ends of platforms were. This, admittedly, wasn’t that big of a problem until I got to a place where there were bottomless pits. Then it turned into a significantly larger problem. Especially once I got to a place where I’d fall into a pit, then suffer a setback, then spend fifteen minutes getting to the same hole, which I’d misjudge again, and then get set fifteen minutes back AGAIN. Then I took the game out of the 64 and haven’t yet put it back.

Posted in N64 | 3 Comments »

Donkey Kong 64

May 14th, 2008

I thought the original Donkey Kong Country game was pretty good, but I never got any of the sequels. They were a whole lot like the first one, or so I understood, but they each expanded the universe a little bit. Eventually, though, I got a system with snazzy new 3D graphics, and after I had that for a while, a new game set in that Donkey Kong universe came out. So I gave it a shot.

Donkey Kong 64 is a lot the same as the older Donkey Kong Country game. It still stars Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong searching around their home island for bananas stolen by King K. Rool. Only this time, they do so in three glorious dimensions! Oh, and they have three more Kongs to help them this time around.

See, to progress in this game, you need to fight the various bosses that are in each of the stages. To get to the boss you need to collect a certain number of bananas that are scattered all over the stage. There are 100 bananas per Kong per stage, and you need increasing numbers of them to proceed. The kicker is that although you can see all the bananas, you can’t collect bananas that belong to the other Kongs. So you have to traipse through each stage at least five times to get enough bananas to fight the boss. But that’s not all!

You also have to find and collect Golden Bananas to open up new stages. These you get for doing certain Kong-specific tasks in every stage. But, it’s just more collecting. If you like running around giant 3D stages and gathering stuff, then this game should give you your fix.

But who are we kidding? The real reason anyone got this game was because of the Monkey Rap.

Yeah, the Monkey Rap was pretty hilarious. And the boss fights were pretty awesome, but all of the mind-numbing collecting in between the awesome bits was really really tedious, and kind of made the game feel artificially lengthened. Especially toward the end, when you unlock the whole Kong family, and then have to go back to the first few stages and collect a few hundred bananas that you couldn’t get to before. Bleh.

But the game also hides within its depths versions of the original Donkey Kong game and Jetpac. And even though Jetpac wasn’t anything special, Donkey Kong was a nice surprise.

I keep thinking that I want to play through this game again, but I just can’t work up the motivation to collect the few thousand bananas that would entail.

Posted in N64 | No Comments »

Killer Instinct

May 13th, 2008

2D fighting games are very similar to each other. The basic formula is two characters beating on each other until one runs out of stamina. But the variations that the developers use to differentiate them make it worthwhile to play more than one of them.

Killer Instinct tells the story of super corporation Ultratech and their mysterious fighting tournament that they put on. See, Ultratech has fantastically advanced technology and dabbles in genetic engineering, cybernetics, capturing aliens, opening interdimensional portals, you know, regular stuff. They put on this tournament apparently to test out their projects against whoever wants to participate.

So, pretty standard stuff. But where the game really sets itself apart is the combo system. In other fighting games, if you’re good, you might be able to pull off a combo of 5 or so hits. In this one, lengthy combos are the name of the game.

Nearly every move in this game can be chained with other moves to produce combos. For instance, you do your opening move for two hits, then hit the ‘autodouble’ button for three more hits, then hit the finisher for two more. MASTER COMBO! Longer combos have more impressive names, and are harder to pull off. They culminate in the over-20-hit Ultra Combo that usually finishes your opponent off. This is all mitigated by the combo breaker. The guy getting pummeled has a move that interrupt the combo, and the longer it goes, the easier it is to pull off (you have more chances).

There’s more to this game than that, though, no mercy moves, humiliations, general silliness that I won’t go into here. I ended up playing this game a whole lot in the arcades, mostly because it was similar enough to Street Fighter that I could pick it up really easily, and different enough that I really enjoyed it. It also didn’t hurt that at my local arcades the game was ridiculously popular for a long time, and there were often crowds gathered around. And crowds meant that you got to play against real actual people, which is absolutely the best way to play any fighting game, and, in the days before the Internet, the best way to pass around notes and learn everyone’s moves and finishers.

Later on, I would actually be able to purchase this game for my Super NES. Normally arcade to Super NES ports suffer greatly, but this game came through remarkably similar to the arcade version, which was no small feat. But the real icing on the cake was that this game was compatible with the XBand modem. And what that meant is that even though the players in my neighborhood quit playing this game pretty much as soon as they started I still had an entire nation of willing opponents, each ready, willing, and able to flog me repeatedly. Which kind of sounds like it’d be a frustrating thing, but it really taught me a lot about the ins and outs of the game by collaborating with real actual people. Strange, I know, but that’s how we did it way back in the ’90s.

Posted in Arcade, Super NES | 1 Comment »

Blockout

May 12th, 2008

Given Tetris’s immense popularity, it should come as no surprise that there were tons of spinoffs and clones done by people trying to either cash in on it, or to discover the ‘next big thing. When you combine that with my apparent lust to put a copy of Tetris on everything I own, you’ll discover that I’ve tried lots of these knockoffs in an attempt to sate the urges between releases.

Blockout is, supposedly, the next logical step to Tetris. I won’t bother explaining how Tetris works, I’m pretty sure you already know. But imagine, if you will, that instead of looking at the playfield from the side that you’re instead looking at it from above. And further imagine that you gain the ability to rotate the pieces on both the X and the Y axes. You’d, of course, have to imagine new pieces that would be possible in this strange new space. And then you imagine them slowly falling into the bucket, or pit, or hole, or well, or whatever you want to call it, and your goal is to arrange them so that they complete layers instead of mere ‘lines’. Then you will start to have a grasp on this game.

This game was really hard for me. The different layers are color-coded, so that’s a plus, but I had three big problems with it. One was that my brain just doesn’t seem to work in a way that allows me to see how these 3D pieces need to be manipulated to fit properly in the 3D space. The normal pieces are pretty easy to deal with, but the corkscrew-like pieces just screw with my head, and I invariably panic and put them in the wrong spot. The other problem I had was that I couldn’t keep track of where my gaps were in the puzzle. So if I had a partially-unfinished layer, and had to start another layer on top of it, and then had to put yet another layer on top of that I pretty much forgot where the gaps were in the second layer, and the bottom? That may as well not exist as far as my brain is concerned. The last problem I had was with the perspective. I’m used to playing classic Tetris by lining up the piece where I wanted it and then driving it home, but I just have a real problem doing that with any kind of accuracy in 3D space. So I ended up making lots of bad drops, which makes for a frustrating time.

At least one of those problems could probably be somewhat alleviated by practicing the game more, and there’s a practice mode just for that where there’s no ‘gravity’ and you can play as quickly or as slowly as you like. And I had a degree of success with that. But not being able to reliably keep track of where the gaps were made it difficult for me to really make any kind of headway. But I’ve grown to accept that my brain just doesn’t quite work that way, I can’t even reliably solve one side of a Rubik’s Cube. But I still have fun trying.

Posted in DOS | No Comments »

Tetris & Dr. Mario

May 11th, 2008

It should be pretty obvious by now that I have an unhealthy affinity for puzzle games, specifically puzzle games that have you arranging things that are falling into some kind of container. So when I saw that I could get two of my favorites for $20, I was pretty well obligated to seize the opportunity.

Tetris & Dr. Mario is, fairly obviously, a combination of the two titular games, with only minor graphical and audio upgrades. Single-player, multi-player, it’s all the same, really. But the real draw is what’s called ‘mixed mode’. In mixed mode you and another player compete in a little Tetris, a little Dr. Mario, and then a little more Tetris. This alone justified the purchase for me.

If nothing else, the game’s just a way to have two puzzlers in one convenient package. And, since everyone knows how to play Tetris, and nearly everyone knows how to play Dr. Mario, it’s pretty easy to pick up and play, too. Bonus.

Posted in Super NES | No Comments »

Goldeneye 007

May 10th, 2008

It’s true, I’m one of the few folks that bought a Nintendo 64 and didn’t buy Goldeneye. The game that I heard time and again was the greatest game on the console. The game that I still hear about today when fans talk about what game they’d most like to see on the Virtual Console or Xbox Live Arcade. Of course, neither of those things is likely to happen, and that suits me fine.

Goldeneye follows the plot of the Goldeneye James Bond movie, which I also haven’t seen. But the gist of the game is that you go through the various parts of the movie through the eyes of Mr. Bond himself completing whatever ridiculous objectives are thrown in your way.

I played the demo of this game a few times, and just couldn’t get into it. The big problem that I had was that the controls were a little wonky. I just couldn’t wrap my head around trying to move around with one thumb and aiming with the other. I just found it clunky, and not a lot of fun when I was dieing all the time.

But people assure me that it’s the finest Nintendo 64 game ever made. That it’s the best example of blocky guys shooting each other with heavy artillery you can find on the console, or possibly any console before or since. Which are both statements that I can’t really endorse, at least not while my palm lies here ungreased.

Posted in N64 | 3 Comments »

Meteos

May 9th, 2008

A while back I mentioned that I really liked Tetris Attack, the game about matching up puzzle pieces to make them disappear from a steadily rising stack. A few years later and I would find out that a similar-but-not-quite-the-same game was making the rounds called Meteos.

Meteos, like Tetris Attack, has a grid of multi-colored blocks that you have to manipulate in such a way that three or more of the same color are lined up together. In Tetris Attack the pieces disappear, but in Meteos the matched pieces start to fly off the top of the screen, taking any on top of them with them. But the key gameplay difference is that in Tetris Attack you can only move your pieces left and right, but in Meteos you can only move them up and down.

There’s a story mode that tries to help explain the story behind the game, something about multicolored meteors plummeting onto the planet and you having to match them up to send them back into the ether, but it’s really mostly unnecessary. It just kind of gives you an excuse for the space-themed backdrops and characters.

I really should have liked this game a whole lot, given that I like Tetris Attack and its derivatives so much. But I guess that my mind is set against trying to play the game in a way where I have to think along the y-axis instead of the x-axis. And as a result, the only time I played this game, I did really poorly at it. Couple that with the fact that one of the people I was playing the game with was able to get a degree of success by scribbling on the screen, kind of made me suspect its worth as a puzzler.

But maybe I’m being too hard on it. Maybe it is a great, awesome, compelling, and addictive game. But I have no desire to play it any more to find out.

Posted in DS | No Comments »