The original Yeti Sports game was pretty dumb, but I guess some people liked it for some reason. Maybe it was because of the insipidly simple gameplay, because there wasn’t a whole lot of skill involved. But it was received well enough that it got some sequels, which added some wrinkles to the yeti-penguin relationship.
One of these is Seal Bounce, a little time-waster that has you, as the yeti, tossing penguins upward in a neverending vertical chasm. Along the walls are seals that will give a little boost if the penguin hits them, you have five chances to make the penguins go as high as you can, and your score is totaled at the end.
Since your yeti is on a moving ice-platform thing floating on water, your angle shifts constantly, couple that with the way he winds up to hurl the birds and you have a recipe for not being able to consistently do anything the same way two times in a row, so it pretty much boils down to luck, and playing a game like this long enough to get five lucky penguin tosses in a row didn’t really seem like a good use of my time.
I was actually an owner of a Game Gear for a time, but its battery life of about fifteen minutes made its viability as a portable system kind of suffer. But a few years later I felt that hendheld color video game consoles had made enough progress that I could give it another shot, so I picked up a Game Boy Color. And even though the Game Boy Color could play all of my classic Game Boy games, I still wanted to get something to bask in the more-than-four-shades-of-greenish-grey screen. So I picked up a version of the old standby, Tetris, incarnated as Tetris DX.
This game is really just the same as the pack-in Tetris game I got with my original gigantic Game Boy in ‘89, but with little splashes of color everywhere and some slightly tweaked gameplay mechanics.
But I guess, as the saying goes, it wasn’t broken, so there was nothing to fix. You can still play endless mode until your brain and fingers just can’t keep up, or you can play “B Mode” where the playfield is drastically shortened. Or, if you were lucky enough to know someone with a Game Boy Color and this game and had the forethought to bring your link cable along, then some head-to-head action could be had.
It’s weird, every few years a new system will come out and eventually there will be a version of Tetris for it. Then I’ll inevitably pick it up and realize that I haven’t played the game in quite some time, which will lead to me losing far too many hours to it until the next system comes along and I pick up its version of Tetris.
If this site is nothing else, it should be a lesson to not go to the rental store on a Friday or Saturday night right before they close. All of the good stuff will be gone, guaranteed, and you’ll be forced to play some dreck like Terminator 2.
I saw Terminator 2 the movie and liked it well enough. The Terminators gave off their vibe of being almost indestructible pretty well, so, of course I wanted to be one, or at least control one while he cut a swath of destruction across the landscape. So I picked up Terminator 2 and gave it a shot. It had you taking control of the Arnold Terminator and had to go do the stuff from the movie.
I guess the developers watched a different movie than I did, because this game is nothing like any movie that I’ve ever seen on purpose.
Terminators in the movie are nigh indestructible. The Arnold Terminator in this game is very destructible. Punches hurt him a lot. A robot, with super-strong metal bones, can be destroyed by being slapped around the face by what amounts to meaty clubs. It’s a little disappointing.
I rented this game exactly one time, and in the time I had it I could only stand to play it for one afternoon. I could get through the first part where you run to the right and large groups of identical guys come out of the woodwork and you gently massage them to death. It takes twenty or thirty hits from your super-powered robot fists to down some random guy in jeans and a tee shirt, which is far less than it takes for them to kill you. Seriously, if the robots go down this easy, then that impending war is going to be a piece of cake to win.
After a while, you’ll get to a boss. You can tell that he’s a boss because he’s real big, moves real fast, and you can’t kill him. I said that I played this game all afternoon, and that’s true. I played this game about a dozen times that day and each time I’d get to the boss, and each time he’d somehow manage to stay in a magical area where my punches couldn’t reach him, but his Terminator Disintegrator Fist Technique could hit me soundly every time. Which means that I couldn’t beat him, and that means that I couldn’t get past stage 1. Stage 1!
After that embarrassment I went outside and hit hamburgers with a baseball bat… for distance.
The Helicopter Game is one of those silly little Flash games that makes the rounds every so often. This one’s really, really simple, though. You have a helicopter inexorably flying to the right through a cave of sorts. The cave is filled with obstacles, and you have to try to avoid hitting them. The only control you have is to make the heli go up (gravity makes it go down). As you go along you get points, and the goal is to get a high score. See? Simple!
The further you get in the cave, the more it constricts and the faster it throws obstacles at you. You only get one shot to make it, hit anything and it’s game over.
I played this game for roughly twenty minutes and then haven’t really thought about it again until today. So if you have twenty minutes that you don’t need anymore, you could do worse than playing this game.
Most of the games that I’ve played over the years seem to fall into one of three categories: they were extremely easy, they were extremely hard, or they were pretty easy until I got to the end where they ramped up in difficulty so sharply that they were nigh impossible. Unfortunately for me most of the ones that I would rent would fall into the third category. I’d stay up all night playing them, and make it to the end and then get stonewalled by the final boss fight.
Enter Metal Storm, a game that stars a robot that can (and must) change gravity to proceed. It’s kind of an interesting play mechanic, and really twists your brain a bit as you try and make sense of the levels, since they’re all essentially two-in-one.
So you run to the right, and occasionally up and down, to try and kill all the evil robots that stand between you and… um… you not destroying all the evil robots. If there’s a deeper story than that, then I don’t know what it is. It’s not like it matters anyway, your goal is pretty clear.
For the one night that I had this game I liked it a lot. Being able to change gravity up on the fly was pretty interesting, and I made some pretty good progress, but then I got to the end boss. I tried everything. Continuing lots of times, mostly. But I also resorted to my NES Advantage’s ’slow motion’ function and still couldn’t beat it. So, after several hours and a few hundred attempts I gave up.
I’d probably play through it again, but I guess I didn’t realize that it would be such a rare game to find. In the several years it’s been since I’ve played the thing, I have yet to see a copy of the game ‘in the wild’, so to speak. So I just haven’t had the chance.
I liked other games in the Quake series, even though I wasn’t very good at them. So when I found a game in the series that I hadn’t really heard all that much about on clearance at my local department store I snapped it up.
Turns out, though, that this game is a little different than the other games that I’d played. This one is a team-based shooting game. Basically, you take one of the sides from the games, the humans or the Stroggs, and compete in various maps to complete a series of objectives.
I played this game for a couple of hours, but I just don’t get in to this kind of game for three reasons: my aim’s not that good, I don’t want to play an objective-based game with people I don’t know and, I find that completing objectives makes my FPS overly complicated.
I guess I should pay more attention to the games I buy, even if they are cheaper than $10. But I’m a sucker for good graphics, and occasionally compelling box art. And it’s good to play games that I don’t like once in a while, partially to reinforce that I still don’t like them, but also to possibly play something good that I’d have otherwise passed up.
Every time I see a list of the ‘Top X underrated NES games’, Shatterhand invariably makes the list (and Nightshade doesn’t). I just can’t fathom why, unless these people are playing a different version of the game than I did, or if they’ve been hoodwinked somehow to believe that mediocrity is greatness. Because Shatterhand isn’t that good of a game.
Like a lot of NES games, the story in Shatterhand is largely immaterial. All you need to know is that you have a guy who has cybernetically-enhanced arms, making his superpower the ability to punch things real hard.
Yawn…
So you have to take your punchy little guy up against wave after wave of enemies that have projectile weaponry and/or a longer punching reach than you for some reason or another. Oh, and you can choose what order you want to tackle the stages in, Mega Man style!
One of the other things that the zealots will point to is the weird little mech that follows you around. See, throughout the stages you collect little icons with either an α or a β on them. Collect three of them and you get a little robot thing that hovers around you giving you a little bit of support, and a little complimentary projectile attack to your nearly impotent punches.
But, honestly, I stopped caring pretty much right away.
The game is hard, but that’s not usually a problem for me. Unless the difficulty comes from difficult controls or a particularly bizarre game play mechanic. This game suffers from the latter. Your little guy isn’t very maneuverable and he has to get right up in the face of the enemies and try to hit them with your understandably small punching radius. If you’re skilled enough you can have your little floating robot buddies live long enough to meet the bosses, but usually it ends up being you running impotently around the room while the boss leaps around like a maniac and lands just out of range of your Fists of Fury ™, whittling down your health and eventually making you swear off this game.
Pokémon Blue was a pretty good game. I really liked playing through it, catching all of the monsters and formulating strategies. But I got kind of bored after a while. The crux of the game is battling your little monsters, and since I didn’t have any regular opponents (i.e. real life opponents) and didn’t really want to start the game over and lose all of my progress, I was pretty well stuck.
A while later, though, and all that changed.
Pokémon Stadium is a lot of things, but primarily it’s a pretty 3D interface to your generic pokémon battling. See, when you fight in the Game Boy game, you just get a static picture that might waggle around a little, but pretty much doesn’t do much. This game, though, has your hordes of monsters rendered in glorious 3D fighting it out. And as an added bonus, you get to transfer the team you’ve slaved over on your portable system to the 3D system. And you’ll have to do just that to get the full enjoyment out of this game.
The game throws several dozen scenarios at you to test your battling mettle, which is pretty nice… if you like that kind of thing. You have to have a special affinity for managing statistics and probabilities to really have much success at these battles. I only kind of do, so I only kind of had success at the battling. But it was an ever-present challenge, so that’s something.
The other thing you could do to break up the constant battling was a collection of minigames. Which are mostly kind of lame, but are a reasonable distraction for a while.
I liked this game a lot. I liked trying out my different combinations of monsters, and I really liked being able to use the enhanced organization features that this game offered (the organization feature of the Game Boy version was pretty much nonexistant). But, since you really needed to have the Game Boy version to get the full enjoyment out of it, I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t have played it.
I played Life Force an awful lot, even though I’m really bad at those kind of games. But I ended up liking Life Force in spite of my inadequacy at it, mostly because the developers were kind enough to include a code to let me have 30 tries at completing it. A few years later, I learned about the sequel, Graduis III, being developed for my new (at the time) pet system, the Super NES.
This game is more like Gradius, Life Force’s prequel, than Life Force itself. But all that really means is that you’re not flying around inside some giant space creature, and there is a mysterious preponderance of Moai statues. Other than that, the game is pretty much functionally identical, but it looks a whole lot better.
I rented this game a few times, but never really managed to make a good amount of headway. I did OK at it, and every time I played, I made it just a bit further, which is good, I guess. But I never made it past stage 7 (out of 9, if you’re keeping score at home). Once I made it that milestone, I just got bored with the thing. I’d seen the first couple of stages well over a hundred times at that point, and stage 7 twice. I just didn’t want to play through those first few stages again just to make a few more inches worth of progress in the game. So I kind of gave up on it, thinking that I would come back to it someday.
While growing up, a weird little casino game made its way around the neighborhood called Vegas Dream. It was pretty much your standard casino game fare, play virtual games with virtual dollars and try to virtually strike it rich at the casino’s games. Although this particular casino has a paltry selection of games, four to be exact: blackjack, slot machines, roulette, and keno. They’re all pretty much self-explanatory, except for maybe keno (which isn’t too complicated). But the little wrinkle comes in the… we’ll call them ‘events’.
Occasionally while you’re gambling someone will walk up to you and strike up a conversation. There could be someone downstairs that wants to talk to you. Do you meet them, and go down the perilously steep stairs? You might fall down them and end up in the hospital or you might find out that you have gotten an inheritance to add to your bankroll. Some guy propositions you to buy some ‘hot stocks’. Do you take him up on his insider information? The stocks could be big winners or big losers. It’s real similar to the stuff that happened while playing Vegas Stakes. Except that in this game whatever happens will end up on the local news. How a tourist falling down the stairs, getting married, or buying stocks is newsworthy is beyond me, but I found it to be pretty hilarious.
I guess I didn’t realize it at the time, but the goal here is to make a cool ten million by using your gambling moxie. And since I don’t really have any of that, I didn’t quite make it that high. I would run out of money quite frequently, betting it all on a lousy hand of blackjack, dumping it in the slots, betting on all the numbers on the roulette wheel all at once, or picking all the wrong numbers in keno.
Once you run out of money, which I did all the time, you get your ‘one last chance’ to pull a slot machine and not walk away a complete loser. I hit it big on the final slot one time, won big, then immediately lost it all to the keno table. Then the guy that actually owned the game moved away and I never had the chance to play it again.
