The Closeout Warrior

As I’ve alluded to in the past, video games from the 80’s were weird. Most of those game couldn’t hold a candle to the weirdness that’s in Battletoads.

The story goes something like this: There’s this group of anthropomorphic toads, Rash, Zitz, and Pimple (yes, they’re named after skin disorders), who are led by an anthropomorphic bird, that are dedicated to defeating the forces of evil. Evil in this case being Silas Volkmire (some weird skull-headed thing, he doesn’t actually appear in this game), the Dark Queen (who looks kind of like Elvira) and their army that consists of Psyko-Pigs, giant rats, and other assorted riffraff. Anyway, Pimple, the largest Battletoad, and Princess Angelica, the princess of… something are out for a cruise in a space car and they get kidnapped by Evil. It’s then up to the two remaining ‘Toads to go down to the planet, beat the Evil into a smear on the landscape and rescue the kidnappees.

With me so far? Excellent.

It’s up to you to take the remaining ‘Toads, who for the purposes of this game happen to look identical save for slightly differing shades of skin tone (one’s a greenish-brown and the other’s brownish-green), through a series of levels with wildly differing themes, goals, and objectives, that are each more impossible than the last. I’m not kidding, this game is unforgivingly, brutally, controller-smashingly hard. It’s partially due to the fact that each level is very different, but it’s mostly due to the various forms of Insta-Death(tm) sprinkled around every level coupled with your paltry allotment of extra lives.

By now you’re probably wondering why anyone would want to play this game. Aside from the engrossing story, varied gameplay, and strangely alluring antagonist. I can think of two reasons: bragging rights, and cartoon violence.

Bragging rights is a given. Being able to make more than a modicum of progress in this game is reason enough to make all but the most modest gamers pound their chest in victory. The real reason (read “the reason I played the game) is the cartoon violence.

The Battletoads have an assortment of ‘finishing moves’ that they can use to deal varying forms of pain to the armies of miscellaneous badness that you have to slog through. Hands that turn into giant fists, feet that turn into giant boots, and having your character turn into a giant wrecking ball injects a little bit of silliness into what is otherwise a game that is an exercise in frustration.

Lolo is a strange creature. He is a blue sphere with hands, feet, and disproportionately large eyes. His mission? Save princess Lala from the top of a tower consisting of a series of floors that each contain a series of puzzles. His weapons? His wits and the occasional magic shot.

Scattered throughout each room are ‘framers’: heart framers that you must collect (some of them give you magic shots), and emerald framers that you can push but not pull. Also in the room is a collection of enemies, most of which start out asleep. Once you collect all of the heart framers in a room, the sleeping monsters spring to life and attempt to stop you from getting the jewel out of the treasure chest that’s also in the room. Getting this jewel will cause all of the monsters in the room to vanish and the door to open, allowing you to go to the next room, and eventually to the next floor.

Solve all the puzzles, beat the boss at the end, and you will have won the game! The only problem is that the puzzles get very hard very quickly. Oh sure, they start out easy enough, and there’s only 50 levels, but the puzzles get mind-bendingly tough after a few floors.

I wasn’t able to get very far… until I figured out that by swapping the second and fourth letters in the passwords that I could skip several levels, and that’s how I finished The Adventures of Lolo without the help of a guide on the Internet.

The original Skate or Die! pretty opened and closed the book on 8-bit competitive skateboarding games. Yet, there was a sequel, a sequel that is only tenuously connected to its predecessor. Good enough, I’d say.

Skate or Die 2 does feature a half-pipe that you can do tricks on. You get three minutes or three lives to score as many points as possible, and if you do well enough CJ (one of the characters from the main game) will hang out of her window and cheer for you, doubling your points for a time. The best part of the mode? The hilariously bad ways your character can wipe out. You can miss your landing on a trick and fall through the bottom of the ramp, you can fall off the bottom of the screen into some bowling pins, etc.

The real meat and potatoes of this game, other than the theme song (with lyrics!), is the Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode tells a particularly convoluted story about a series of events that begins with you (our hero) riding your board down the sidewalk and being (quite easily) distracted by Icepick (the local loco), resulting in the squishing of the mayor’s wife’s dog, which causes the number one activity in the city of Elwood, skateboarding, to be outlawed (Major bummer, dude!).

What to do?

Inexplicably, the following sequence of events takes place: you defeat the mayor’s wife with your paintball gun, skating is somehow reinstated, you get a part time job delivering packages to stores in the local mall to pay for a new halfpipe, but the plans get accidentally blown out the window and on to the beach, you collect the plans, but the building permit and your love interest (CJ from the half-pipe) get stolen in the meantime, so you go to the requisite abandoned warehouse to confront Icepick, get back the permit, and rescue CJ. Oh, and Rodney and Lester from the first game (remember the tenuous connection to the first game?) will pop up every now and then to trade the tapes, CDs, tacos and bags of fries you collect in exchange for tricks and updated skateboards.

Amazingly, all of this takes place in four stages with cutscenes to fill in the missing information. And with only four stages, you’d assume that you could finish this game in an afternoon. And you’d be deluding yourself. This game is unforgivingly, brutally hard. Oh, and you only get one life to complete the game. I played this game for weeks and eventually managed to make it to the warehouse, but only just. I’d usually peter out somewhere around the beach level, either succumbing to the body-builders that explode when you hit them with paintballs or running out of time.

I did manage (with a Game Genie to give me unlimited life) to make it far enough into the warehouse to get the permit, but got so completely lost in the ridiculously complex maze that I gave up after a couple of hours. I can only assume that after the end of the game you get your ramp built and it turns out to be the halfpipe in the trick mode, making the game nice and circular.