The Simpsons have been around for, in entertainment terms, absolutely forever. Every couple of years or so a new, maniacally difficult, game comes out based on the series. 1992’s game was Bart’s Nightmare.
In this game, Bart is staying up late doing homework and eventually drifts off to sleep. He dreams that his report gets blown out the window, so he jumps out and tries to rescue it. Once he gets down to the street he enters an inexplicable dreamworld, filled with confusing imagery. It’s also apparently very windy in dreamland, as the missing report pages are flying around everywhere. You’d think it’d just be a matter of collecting the pages and moving on with your life, but it’s not that easy. When you find a page you have to play a minigame. Win the game and get a page. What could be simpler?
As it happens, these minigames are quite lengthy and quite difficult. And you have to clear them all to get all of the pages. The more pages you get, the better of a grade you get on the paper the next day. How exactly this works is beyond me. But since I wasn’t ever able to get enough pages to get more than a ‘D’, I decided to not worry about it too much.
I thought the Virtual Boy was kind of neat, but I suppose folks just couldn’t wrap their heads around a system that took batteries but wasn’t portable. It was kind of cumbersome to use, and gave folks that didn’t know how to set it up properly eye strain. You also couldn’t really get a sense of the pseudo 3D the system could do from the screenshots, which, at the time, was pretty impressive despite its cumbersomeness.
Due to these factors, there weren’t a lot of games for the system, and of the games that did come out, several of them didn’t really do the 3D very well. Games like Red Alarm.
Red Alarmis a pretty generic shooting game. You take a ship through various areas, blowing up anything that moves. It’s pretty unremarkable, really. However, you’ll notice quite a flaw pretty quickly: everything is made of wireframes. Which is to say that everything looks like it’s made from straightened paperclips.
It could be due to the way my brain works, but since I could see through absolutely every structure in the game, I had a really hard time telling where the solid surfaces were and where the open areas were. In a game where you fly through cave-like structures, this becomes pretty important. I spent more time flying into walls that looked like they had tunnels in them than I did actually playing the thing. And as fun as it is to recreate what happens when a housefly gets stuck behind a window, I can immediately think of several dozen things are more fun.
There was a time when computers came with an environment to allow you to learn a rudimentary programming language. They weren’t particularly powerful or intuitive or anything, but they got the job done. One of the demos that came with versions of QBasic, the programming environment that came with some versions of DOS, was a weird little game that involved gorillas.
QBasic Gorillas, colloquially known as Gorilla.bas (which was the name of the program file), is a simplistic little game featuring gorillas standing on buildings and exploding bananas.
In Gorillas you take turns with your opponent tossing bananas back and forth, trying to hit each other. You can input the angle and power behind each toss, and if you manage to hit the other gorilla then you win the point.
Yeah, it’s simple, real simple. But it is free, and was installed on just about every computer in every lab that I used during my high school years, so it almost goes without saying that I put in quite a bit of time with this game. Mostly because it’s more fun than WordPerfect.
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.
The Atari 2600, though revolutionary in its day, was a pretty simple system. This dictated that the games had to also be pretty simple. Take Barnstorming, for example. It’s a game about flying a biplane through a series of barns, avoiding birds and inconveniently-placed windmills. Your goal is to fly through ten barns and set a low-score record. Hitting windmills and birds just slows you down, so you don’t want to do that.
I like looking back on games like this and marveling at its simplicity. It’s almost like peering through a gateway to a simpler time. There is no deep, complex storyline, there are no cutscenes, heck, the main character doesn’t even have a name (as far as I know). It just takes a simple idea and recreates it in electronic form without getting too wrapped up in itself.
Sometimes that’s all it takes to be entertained for a few minutes.
It’s no huge secret that I’m a fan of the Professional Wrestling Arts. Have been for most of my life. Video games based on the spectacle are usually pretty hit or miss, and more often than not miss.
WWF Raw is the first wrestling game that I ever played on my Super NES. I was pretty excited because the last console wrestling game that I played was pretty awful, and a new game on a new system means an all new way to disappoint me.
The game is more or less like you might expect: take your chosen grappler through a series of matches that increase in difficulty to become champion. You win the matches by beating your opponents senseless and pinning their shoulders to the mat for three consecutive seconds. Each character also has a ’signature move’ that he or she has purportedly perfected to such a degree that it is extra damaging.
You might notice that the characters in this game all appear to be about the same height, weight, and build. Luna Vachon (5′ 5”, 135 pounds), the lone female in the game, and Yokuzuna (6′ 4”, 538 pounds) somehow manage to stand eye to eye and are about the same width. I’m sure there’s a technical reason for that, but I’m not going to be bothered finding out what it is.
In this game you perform the wrestlers’ moves by first initiating a ‘collar and elbow tie up’ (that thing they do where it kind of looks like they’re hugging each other real high up), then pressing a direction and a button as fast as you can. Each combination of a direction and button will do a different move, assuming you managed to press the button faster than the other person.
I told you that story so I could tell you this story. This is (thus far) the only game that I’ve ever injured myself playing. On New Year’s Eve in 1994 I, along with a friend of mine, decided to rent this game to pass the time until midnight rolled around. I don’t know how many matches we played, but it was a lot. Each match was essentially several minutes of pushing the buttons as quickly as I could with my thumbs. About six hours of this and we rang in the new year and went to bed. About an hour later, I woke up with the most unusual pain in my forearms. It turns out that I had pulled the muscles that ran from my thumbs all the way to my elbows. Since the place I was staying at had no pain killers on hand, and I wasn’t yet old enough to drive I had one recourse, soaking my arms in cold water to numb the pain enough so that I could get about an hour’s worth of sleep. Then I’d wake up and repeat the process.
That would be the day that I decided to no longer play games in which you have to press the buttons in direct opposition to another player to win. Hopefully that’s a decision that will stave off carpal tunnel for another day.
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.
Cell phones are somehow turning into a mobile gaming platform. I’m not sure you can even buy a cellular phone these days that doesn’t have a demo of some game or other installed that will try to entice you to buy the full version (or better yet, more games!). The game that came with my LG phone was a little junket called ‘Space Ball‘.
Space Ball is a game that’s a lot like Hustle in that you are controlling a snake-like creature that travels around the screen. Your goal is to clear the screen by collecting all of the balls that are scattered around. Each ball you collect lengthens your snake a bit, but if you collect three of the same color, then they disappear. This becomes important since as you get more segments you run the risk of trapping yourself in a corner. This is bad. Also, if you get too many segments you lose. This is also bad. You also have a time limit, letting it run out is yet another bad thing.
There’s this powerup thingus that appears occasionally that does one of several random things, but to be honest, I got really tired of this game real quick. I played it three times, and the last time I cranked up the difficulty to the maximum (level 20) and won handily. I have no real desire to pick it back up.
Adult Swim, the late night ‘mature’ programming block on the Cartoon Network is putting out some… interesting games on their site of late. One such game is the Candy Mountain Massacre.
I’m not going to pretend to understand the story in this game, mostly because I didn’t bother reading it. But the gist of it seems to be that there are some cupcakes that live on Candy Mountain that are being held hostage by the native fauna, and you have to rescue them. At your disposal is a small but effective arsenal of weaponry including a machine gun and a rocket launcher.
The game is a whole lot like Quake, it’s fully 3D and essentially is just you running around and shooting anything that moves, collecting powerups, and trying to dodge incoming fire.
Despite what this game looks like, it contains some (fairly mild) profanity, and makes gratuitous use of blood and gore and is absolutely not, in any way, shape, or form, for the kiddies. If you’d like to get a taste of what the game’s like, there’s a video you can see here, but you’ve been warned.
I’m pretty blown away that this game can be run in your web browser, and if your computer is sufficiently powerful it doesn’t work half-bad. The game is really short, weighing in at a whopping 3 levels, though there is the promise of more levels coming at some point in the future. I found the normal difficulty to be a little more than I could handle, but was able to blow through easy mode without much of a problem. I’m not sure if the difficulty needs some adjustment or if my shooting game skill have deteriorated in the last few years. But I did get about a half-hour of fun out of it before I finished what game is there, which is a lot more than I typically get out of those silly little browser games.
I’ve never been a huge comic book fan, but I am familiar with some of the characters and situations. Captain America, soldier with a shield. Hawkeye, bow and arrow guy. Iron Man, rich guy with fighting armor. Vision, android. I learned all of that from the arcade game starring the four of them, Captain America and the Avengers.
So it seems that the dastardly Red Skull has used his mind control device and massive wealth to gather a team of supervillians. Goal? World domination, of course. So Cap and his buddies have to save the planet the only way they know how, by pummeling the villains senseless.
The game is pretty straightforward, run to the right, savagely destroying everything in your way. There are comic-style interstitials between the levels and what might possibly be the cheesiest voice acting ever recorded (I’m pretty sure there’s just one guy doing all the voices, and his range is… less than impressive). So it adds to the cheesy-appeal factor. Lots of characters across the Marvel universe make cameos to help out, so if you’re into that kind of thing, it might be kind of fun to try and spot them all. But I just play it because Captain America has a hard time saving the world without my help, and it’s nice to feel needed.