ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

[Blacklightning]

Ranger-X

I'm just going to do the sprite commentary first this time.

Fuck mechas.

I started spriting with the goal of sticking to an artstyle with minimal grain and shading, and with most characters and creatures that isn't a tremendous problem because stuff like joints are mostly implicit - but on a robotic character there's SO much detail that can't be skipped or glossed over because it's an integral part of how it can move, and giving it the same noodle limbs as everything else I make would never look right. Compared to every other character I've done thus far this is an absolutely ridiculous amount of detail, and to be honest if I hadn't gotten fed up and simply sprited one half of it and mirrored it I'm convinced I might have been working on it all day. Please dear god, never fucking make me do this again.

Okay, but the game though? Fucking incredibly and shamefully overlooked. It's a game that has similar hurdles to overcome as Midnight Resistance... and yet, doesn't have 8 way shooting at all. In fact, the solutions it employs are surprisingly simple and elegant. For hitting enemies higher than you, rather than physically aiming your gun up, you're just given a jetpack instead so you can fly up to their level. And for running and gunning? The Dpad doesn't actually cause Ranger-X to turn at all, only to move - instead the A button shoots left, and the C button shoots right. You're always facing one direction until you press the button to shoot in the opposite one, which causes Ranger X to turn.

Boom. Fucking magic. It might sound kind of goofy at first, and yes it might take a bit of getting used to after Contra or even just plain Apogee controls, but once you've adapted to it, it's fucking incredible to play. And the gameplay design isn't even all it has going for it - graphically speaking, both from an artistic and a technical standpoint, it's one of the most beautiful games the Genesis has to offer. Every other level in this game seems to have its own graphical trick, like faux 3D corridors, water that ripples when you walk through it, and some parralax scrolling that seems like a whole other level to most of the competition. The soundtrack is pretty good in its own right, though I'd rate it higher if the game didn't suffer from audio clipping issues in some areas.

Which is why it's such a shame that this game is so god damn overlooked. It's an absolute treat for all the senses, and deserves to be hailed as a Genesis classic all the way up there with Wonder Boy and Streets of Rage. I legitimately wish there were more games of its kind out there.

[Blacklightning]

Sparkster (Rocket Knight Adventures)

I remember back when SA2 was still fresh on people's minds, and people would get on its case because the adventure part of its title had been made essentially redundant with SA1's hubworlds gone. And even though they did have a point, back then I still felt like it was kind of silly to make a fuss over? With the right scenery and instrumentation, even a game with absolutely no diversions from beginning to end can still feel like an adventure in its own right, and if there's a game on the Genesis that demonstrates that better than most others, it'd be Rocket Knight Adventures. Every area in the game looks and feels a whole world away from the last, and in some cases they quite literally are, which personally I think is more important to the concept of an adventure than actually being able to choose your destination.

Semantics aside, the main mechanic of RKA is, of course, the rocket itself, which functions a lot differently than one might expect looking from the outside in. You hold down the attack button to charge it up, and then release to launch off in a direction of your choosing in a straight path. Learning where and when to charge and release is so important to the gameplay that the first level is literally unbeatable without it (which is why it's pretty good that they give you clearly signposted safe spaces to practice bouncing off walls in), but even with that knowledge in hand it needs to be said that this game is bloody hard, sometimes bordering on unfair, and will likely kick your ass into several game overs before you get good enough to make it all the way to the end. I guess your mileage might vary on that one - I personally feel like it's right on the verge between challenging and annoying, but I also acknowledge that some people might not like restarting an hour long game from scratch when they run out of lives.

One might think that lends the game a perchant for taking itself seriously, but it's quite the opposite - few if any people actually die in this game, and the usual effect for hitting people with your sword just causes them to burst out of their clothes and fall offscreen. At least until the last 2-3 levels of the game, this kind of silliness permeates a lot of the game's events, and it's nice to think back to a time when Konami knew how to have fun. Which would probably explain why we haven't gotten more of these games - the series got a mediocre XBLA title after like a decade of demands for it, and then seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. Pity.

[Blacklightning]

Snake Logan (Biomenace)

Biomenace is a game from the makers of Commander Keen and owes everything that it is to the invention of Commander Keen, but does everything in its power to try and convince you it's nothing like Commander Keen. That it's a MATURE platforming game for MATURE people with BLOOD and GORE and DIFFICULTY. Even though Biomenace even runs off the same engine, the ungreatful bastard.

All joking aside, Biomenace is a game that I want to like at times, but it's never going to match Keen on the best of days. It's a game with an unhealthy, borderline Donkey Kong 64-esque obsession with keys. Every individual closed door in the game is fucking locked and requires a single use key to open, most of which are closets that contain items. Occasionally, when they're not useless score items, they may contain a shard, which are colour coded and function as keys in of themselves, in ADDITION to old fashioned key cards for rescuing hostages and circuit boards for actually exiting the level once you do. The entire gameplay loop is a map wide key hunt / fetch quest full of annoying ass backtracking, under the guise of making sure you can't leave unless you complete the level in a very specific order to ensure you collect every hostage in the given episode.

Including Commander Keen.

The inventory system is a complete pain in the ass too. Biomenace is like Duke Nukem II insofar as you have a default weapon, and a bunch of much stronger ones that replace it once you pick them up. Biomenace in particular introduces sub weapons on top of this, mostly hand grenades and have variations of their own. Unlike Duke, Snake can actually hold multiple weapons, and automatically falls back to a lesser one when his current weapon runs dry. However, you can't MANUALLY switch weapons, which is annoying as all hell because many of the weapons the game considers of top importance are actually LESS desirable than the mid tier ones, most notable in the case of these fucking landmines in the grenade slot which come in packs of ten instead of three and only seem to be useful for blowing up these microscopic fucking slime enemies that for some reason are only vulnerable to subweapons because Apogee made a game with enemies that are too fucking small to shoot even while crouching aaaaaaagh

I haven't even mentioned that these are all issues with the shareware version of the game yet. Episode 1 is flawed, yes, but still enjoyable in spite of it. Most sane people though, will turn the fucking game off around the ant levels in episode 2, because the already flawed level design suddenly ramps up to borderline fucking Kaizo difficulty, probably best exemplified by the one level with two collapsing platforms over an instant death pit at the very start, and those platforms never fucking respawn so if you die even once after that point the game effectively softlocks. And on a final fuck you note, here's an issue Monster Bash had in common with this game but I forgot to bring up - it has difficulty levels, but they only affect how much health you have. In Monster Bash it cut your maximum health down by three hitpoints each - 9 for easy, 6 for normal and 3 for hard. Biomenace however, cuts your health in half for normal, from eight to four, and then in half again for hard, from four to two. This, I have to remind, is paired with levels that are only technically beatable even with the maximum amount of health.

So yeah, I guess you'll like this game if you liked I Wanna Be The Guy but couldn't stand its sense of humour. Anyone else would do best to just play the shareware version and consider that the start and end by itself.

[Blacklightning]

Wolverine and Gambit (Spiderman and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge)

Just to give you an idea of the kind of shit I'm about to get into, LJN handled the SNES version of this game. If you don't know who that is, well first of all you need to watch more Angry Video Game Nerd. But the short and short of it is that these guys bought up a shitload of licenses throughout the NES era and proceeded to make a ton of shovelware based on them, presumably because brand recognition alone would sell them no matter what they did with them, even if they were borderline unplayable. If you had even a halfway decent collection of licensed games throughout the 8 and 16 bit times, chances were good that you played an LJN game at least once. And these fuckers loved X-Men games and Spiderman games for all the wrong reasons - enough so, apparently, that they awkwardly contorted them to star together for once.

Arcade's Revenge starts out with Spiderman tracking down a series of mutant disappearances, finding Gambit just in time to be abducted by the titular Arcade. To make a long story short, it ends with Spidey and four of the X-Men - Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm and Gambit - each trapped in a labyrinthine "game" filled with each individual character's personalized villains and fears. Now this is something I really gotta ask about, cos my interest in these characters has never extended to reading the comics themselves. Some of them make sense, like Storm being almost exclusively in water levels trying to avoid drowning and Cyclops in deep, dark caves being hunted by what I can only assume are vampires with guns... and then there's Wolverine, whose levels are filled with fucking clowns. Is Wolvy actually scared of clowns? Is that even canon? It's an interesting twist but now I really gotta know if it's representative of the character or if this is all shit they adlibbed without care for the source material besides occasionally introducing bosses that resemble iconic villains throughout the series (I know Carnage and the Juggernaut are in there at some point, but I either didn't recognize any others or didn't actually make it deep enough into the game to see them).

Arcade's Revenge is a difficult game to cover all the issues with in a few paragraphs for much the same reason Sonic Adventure 1 is - it's a game where none of the characters have any common gameplay ground, with one of them (Spiderman) receiving a clear designer's preference over all the others. Everyone in the game has their own individual problems, and most often they're not one or two massive problems that bog the whole game down singlehandely so much as tons of tiny little ones that quickly add up to a total clusterfuck of atrocious game design. If I tried to cover all of them, this section would be the length of an actual review, so instead I'm going to take the biggest ones from each individual character and make a quick blurb about each of them.

Spiderman feels really shallow and limited compared to VS The Kingpin, which had come out around two years ago at this point. I mean sure, they gave you a limited web supply, but at least you could web swing at literally any time you wanted - here you have to be either stationary and grounded or clinging onto a wall to do it. Even just climbing walls is gimped because you can't grip onto the background when it's close enough, and they keep adding surfaces that are unclimbable so they can make the whole level a puzzle of figuring out when and where to webswing to get around it.

Wolverine starts with his claws sheathed, and to unsheath them you have to press up and A instead of just dedicating a button exclusively to it, or I don't know, it's fucking Wolverine the claws are his entire schtick why would you ever want to fight barehanded as him. The game attempts to justify it by making enemies drop hearts if you punch them to death, because I can only assume they didn't know how to program his regeneration into the game. Oh yeah and there's landmines all over the level that are difficult to distinguish from regular tiles, and many are placed in areas that are literally unavoidable if you want to kill the jack in a boxes that are in your way.

Cyclops's levels are chock full of instant death bullshit. There are minecarts all over the place, and the track they run on is electrified and immediately kill you if you land on them. If the game isn't trying to coax you onto them with literal leaps of faith, they're instead dropping mines onto the tracks that will knock you out of the cart if you somehow DO manage to catch a ride.

In Storm's levels it's just hard to see any shit underwater, and because her health meter is her air meter they'll throw bunches of shit that'll hit you a lot presuming you can restore it with air bubbles or by resurfacing later, which gets fucking annoying really quickly. Also Storm always swims horizontally even when going upwards or downwards, which means if you're trying to swim up a shaft and they launch a sea mine from underneath you, you have literally no way to avoid it.

Gambit is... fuck I don't even know where to start with Gambit. His levels always pressure you to act quickly, but punish you with instant death if you make a mistake. His cards are really hard to aim too AND you have limited ammo with them - the only such case for projectile characters in this game - so if you're not conservative with how you throw them you're basically doomed anyway, cos you need that shit to knock down barriers block by block and most of them need multiple shots.

 

Overall pretty much what you'd expect from an LJN title. Bitchin' music, though. They had that going for them.

 

[Blacklightning]

Doomguy (Doom / Doom II)

And here we have the big motherfucker of first person shooters. Not content simply to codify a genre, Id Software put this out 2 years after Wolfenstein, and for the longest time were crowned the kings of it, head and shoulders above all the pretenders and copycats. For years if not decades afterwards, the merits and standards of shooters everywhere were judged by how well they stacked up against Doom, to the point that many would brand them as "Doom killers" just to aspire to be on their level. That's the kind of fame and success we're talking about today,

Today, though, Doom is almost unrecognizable. This was a game that was made long before mouselook was made standard, and during a time that some people didn't use a mouse for aiming at all and controlled it entirely via keyboard, and I'm convinced somebody born after it will do a spittake at the thought of it (just so we're clear, it's not a control method I remember fondly - keyboard and mouse still was and will always be a vastly superior experience no matter what). Also thanks in part to the fact that the game was still not rendered in true 3D, the game comes with quite a substantial amount of autoaim, so often you only need to be looking in the general vicinity of an enemy for a rocket to fly in their direction. You would think this would work against Doom, but quite the opposite - much like Wonder Boy, this level of simplicity allows the designers to focus their attention on the movement aspects of the gameplay, such that it boils down to a mixture of landing shots and weaving between projectiles that are hurled back in your direction in a captivating rhythm that many FPSs- including other Doom games - consistently fail to replicate.

I won't say it's perfect. Everyone seems to have their own individual kryptonite when playing these games. Most people say Arch Viles. Some say Hellknights and Barons. Some even say Cacodemons. For me personally, it's Revenants, whose shots have a random chance to be homing shots which is arguably worse than being guaranteed to because it will constantly catch you off guard, can deal up to eighty fucking damage in a single shot and are almost guaranteed to shoot in retaliation every time you nail them with a super shotgun blast. But the game is still a classic all the same - just one that isn't afraid to kick the shit out of you knowing you can just savescum through almost anything they throw at you. And if you're still not satisfied with the way the game plays? You can just change stuff around to suit your liking.

Yes, it was never going to escape mention - Doom has one of if not the most popular and influential mapping and modding communities on the entire god damn planet, to the point that they're still consistently pumping out new content the entire twenty seven years to this day. And whenever I get bored of my current library, I can always depend on the Doom community to put another new spin on the game to keep it fresh and play through it all over again. Mods for modern conveniences and control schemes. Mods for new mapsets. Mods for entirely new weapons. Mods to make it play like other games. Mods that are literally entirely different games. Just to give you an idea of the sheer breadth Doom modding has to offer, there are several Doom mods that have their own separate entries much later on in this list. That's how fucking crazy it gets. Anyone who has any respect for the FPS genre honestly should dip their toes into Doom mods at least once, just because it's so much value for the twenty dollars you can spend on the entire classic series on Steam before discounts.

Alright, I know someone's going to be asking "but what about modern Doom"? Okay fine, but just remember that you asked for this.

I think it's fucking boring.

Yes yes, I know, spiciest hot take of the century so far. But I legitimately don't understand what people see in these games. I played Doom '16 up to the first Hell section, and I was so bored of all the repetition up to that point that I legitimately couldn't push myself to continue up to that point, which isn't something I can say for many games I've ever played. I was already sick of people jerking off to Brutal Doom and its slow-ass, badly animated glory kills at that point, and modern Doom's solution to that seems to be to make them even MORE frequent, to the point that almost literally every encounter you have with an enemy ends in one, and the constant executions stopped phasing me about half an hour into the game, which annoys the hell out of me because it's practically the game's only unique quirk. Nevermind that Brutal Doom is and always was a caricature of Doom's essence - from people who made the observation that enemies could be blown to pieces and decided that needed to be visualized as literal showers of gore, who made who only remember E1M1 and decided Doom was a constant storm of metal thrashing even though it was an outlier and Doom music was much better known for slower, more tense affairs.

I don't view modern Doom's success as an indication of how far they've pushed the genre, so much as a depressing reminder of just how far the competition has fallen. In my eyes it's the Secret RIngs of shooters, held up on a higher pedestal than the others because the rungs beneath them are all occupied by fucking Call of Duty and its many, many imitators. And after the explosion of awesome FPSs we've had from the mid 2000s onwards it feels like the bare standard of what a shooter should be. Good on Id for deciding against the even more generic, tepid crap they were originally going to try, but Doom - and the genre as a whole - feels like it deserves so much better than that.

[Blacklightning]

X (Megaman X)

Following in what seems to be a running theme of "simple combat gives extra leeway to movement based fighting", X on the surface looks like a totally bog standard shooty platformer, but makes it known really quickly that it won't take shit from anyone who tries to W + M1 through the whole thing. As many have no doubt grasped from the only good Sequelitus video, the intro stage alone is an absolute masterwork of conditioning the player into better handling the game's general style of play later, and relative to the point I'm making here is that four out of the six or so enemy types you encounter in this stage are pretty much guaranteed to hit you if you keep running forward and/or stay grounded the whole time you engage them. Together with a safe space to test out most of X's movement quirks, including the game's signature walljump which it manages to teach to the player without speaking a single word just by exploiting the natural desire to gravitate to the right of the screen, sets the tone of the game right away - you can't take anything for granted, and have to be ready to run or jump out of harm's way at a moment's notice.

This is doubly true of the boss fights, which exist in a realm of challenge all their own. This too, is nearly flawless in its design, a knife's edge balance between hard to beat and being cheap and annoying in the process. With some outliers (Launch Octopus comes to mind), most of the bosses have clearly communicated patterns and attacking quirks that are hard to feel bad about falling for, but can be adapted to all the same. If I had to voice just one complaint about the game, though, it's that it doesn't really benefit from the ability to pick stages nonlinearily like it clearly intended to, thanks in large part to the fact that every weapon in the game is designed to be a specific boss's hard counter - so once you know which weapon beats what, it simply becomes a matter of identifying the weakest boss in the game (for most people, usually Chill Penguin), beating them for their weapon and using it against Spark Mandrill for their weapon and moving up the chain until they're all dead. What is the actual point of picking any level you want if they're clearly designed to be beaten in a very specific order? I know this isn't an issue specific to X, but that only means it persisted in about 6 games already up to that point - and they're still fucking doing it today.

Once again though, in the scheme of all that X does right, it's an incredibly trivial nitpick. From a design standpoint, it's one of the best games that Capcom has ever made. It's just a shame that they screwed the pooch from X6 onwards, because I'd kill for a MM11-esque resurgence to be able to experience that all over again. Or a reboot, because frankly after X7 the X series probably really needs it.

[Blacklightning]

Thor (God of Thunder)

God of Thunder is a DOS-made, top-down, very loosely Norse themed Zelda-alike that doesn't refuse to take itself seriously so much as it revels in absolutely taking the piss. Out of its setting, out of its puzzles and solutions and even its own NPCs. And any character in the game - especially Odin, the resident exposition magnet and hint giver - is liable to flaunt the fourth wall at any given moment like it's a totally ordinary and expected thing to do. This isn't to say the game is spectacularly written so much as visibly self loathing, but even though the humour may be dated there's still a few moments here and there that elicited a giggle out of me.

Gameplay wise, God of Thunder's combat almost feels like an afterthought compared to the abundance of exploration and puzzle based gameplay, but what might come as a surprise is that even today, many of these puzzles are actually really goddamn challenging - so much so that there's a keybind for killing yourself, because doing some of them wrong can actually softlock you otherwise and the game mercifully has infinite lives, and dying only returns you to the start of the current screen anyway. Playing this as a kid felt like my brain was melting trying to create a route around these goddamn instakill green worms with deceptively simple mechanics like pushblocks, and it's if anything a testament to just how much we've taken these for granted over the years when most modern solutions in adventure puzzle games have boiled down to "this is a path you need a specific item to cross, go find the item first and come back later".

It's an alright game overall. Music gets annoying after a while, and I don't think for the full game I'd drop an entrance fee of wait what the hell do you mean it's free now

As it turns out, after straying into the comments of the longplay I was watching for research, I figured out the game was rereleased on Steam for absolutely nothing at some point, so I guess you don't have to take my word for it! If you have a few hours of free time and are prepared to get stumped a lot, knock yourselves out.

[Blacklightning]

Jetpack

Not to be confused with Jetpac of Rare fame. Jetpack is a DOS platformer with shades of Pacman in its design - you have to gather up all these green gems scattered all over the screen, and then make it to the exit without dying. Right away I have to say that the presentation of the game is nothing special, in fact it might honestly be its weakest point - all levels are a single screen size with no scrolling, which means making the sprites absolutely microscopic to make anything fit, and audio wise there's no music at all with a scant few sound effects that are bound to get grating when played over and over. Honestly, any other time a game like this might be completely unremarkable, and were it not for the following factoid I might have skipped over this game entirely: it is the earliest game I can think of with an in-built level editor. And not just that, but the mechanics of the game are deceptively robust and enable a ridiculous amount of creativity, perhaps earliest demonstrated with the level titled Ride the Snake.

One thing to remember about the enemies of Jetpack is that they can use teleporters and switches just like you can, and this level exploits it brilliantly. Because the marble enemies are incredibly simple, they will always move in a straight path and follow one another, but because there's an odd number of them, they will always leave the blue switch in a different state than it started when the whole string finishes moving through it. This toggles the blue block above on and off, which will affect the facing of the marbles when they hit the magenta teleporter below the switch, in turn causing the string marbles to take several different routes throughout the level instead of just bouncing back and forth on one Y axis. Rudimentary programming like this makes up some of the best level design in Jetpack, lending its mechanics a satisfying level of syngery - and occasional sadism - that one could liken to Super Mario Maker today. And that shit made it hella popular. They put Jetpack in classrooms, for crying out loud.

As for the game's own level ladder, it comes with a hundred inbuilt levels, so suffice to say I've never come close to actually beating it, and honestly I'm not convinced it's worth it. The best fun you'll ever have with Jetpack is making your own, or sharing levels amongst yourselves. Like God of Thunder, it's also freeware now, so give it a whirl for yourselves.

[Blacklightning]

Skunny is a series of DOS platformers that wishes it had the same fame that Bubsy did. Now I know some of you just WTF'd on hearing that, and I know what you're going to say next:

"But BL, Bubsy is widely reviled and considered a legendary joke throughout the industry both in and out", right? To which my response is: did I fucking stutter? Yes, Bubsy is considered one of the fastest falls from grace out of any mascot platformers in history, and most people will argue that it fumbled right out of the starting gate - and Skunny wishes it had that level of recognition, Because at least that way, people would actually remember him. Even though it's a franchise of something like eight games, I struggle to even remember any of them beyond vague details like "one was about saving pizzas" and "another one had a stage editor that would've been alright if it was any semblance of user friendly".

But there's one exception.

Skunny (Skunny Kart)

Yes, a fucking karting spinoff is more memorable than anything they wanted to be more memorable for intentionally. Following the same school of "drive five laps around a bitmap faster than like seven other dudes" as Super Mario Kart, it's kind of a struggle to pick any one facet of it to talk about in depth because there's just so much wrong with it. It runs like crap, AI racers don't drive so much as follow a predetermined route single file behind one another, and the artstyle looks so much like Mario Kart's that I'm not convinced it hasn't actually just stolen some of their tracks verbatim. Which wouldn't actually be out of character for the developers, come to think of it. More on that later. For now, just feast your eyes on this absolute mess of a character select screen and let's just digest everything that's going on together:

Jesus christ, that font. Making every letter a different random colour is bad enough, but it's not even consistently random, to the point that some letters will be the same colour next to each other and break their needless rainbow motif. All text in the game does this, and it serves no purpose but to be fucking distracting. But ignore that for a sec and direct your attention downwards. See that narrow strip at the bottom? That's your character select. Now yes, having a grand total of eight characters probably wouldn't amount to much anyway, but like 5/6ths of the screen is wasted space when they're arranged like this, filled with information that at this point is completely irrelevant against a bland black background, This probably sounds like nitpicking until you compare it to Mario Kart again, and realize just how much you can do with exactly the same cast size:

You might also notice that the character name has (Fast) in parenthesis next to it. Characters in Skunny Kart aren't differentiated by weight, or acceleration, or handling, because that would imply that these guys know how to program individual stats for them. No, the only difference is their "speed" - and only two characters, Handbag and Skunny, have a Fast speed, so congratulations, you now have no incentive to use 6 characters out of the cast of 8, who now serve only to be filler in races between the main two. Which I'm pretty sure just looking at them that's what they were designed for anyway, I'm not convinced any of them existed outside of this game and they all read like "goddamnit I guess I have to do this" when they realized they actually needed enough individual characters for a full roster.

Since items take up most of the screen anyway, let's talk about them. Gotta love how there's a whole five items in the roster built specifically to punish whoever picks them up. That's red flag number one already. Number two is that they don't have designated pickup spots on the track, or at least don't appear to, instead being scattered around the place at apparent random without regard for the flow of the track. There's two items I want to talk about specifically, just for how monumentally fucking stupid they are as design decisions - the missile and the clock. The missile is essentially your Red Shell expy and is the only method of directly attacking in the game, but rather than just fire it and have it home in on the next racer ahead of you, you have to manually lock it on to somebody by holding the fire button and pressing left or right to move a reticule over them to make it actually launch. "Aren't those the steering buttons?", I hear you say. And that's just it - you can't motherfucking steer while aiming, in a genre that's all about taking corners as tightly as humanly possible, so your only real recourse is to be facing your target right when the reticule goes up and hope it fires immediately, which is frankly all it should have been to begin with.

And the clocks? You're probably wondering what they mean by "add" and "loose" time. No, it's not affecting the speed of the game or any of the other racers, because that would actually make sense.  Instead, it affects your actual clear time at the end of the race, and not by a small amount either, we're talking like five entire seconds per pickup. And since your rank is dictated by your clear time instead of the order racers cross the finish line, you can actually be bumped up or down several ranks after the race despite your actual placing. Let me just repeat that for emphasis in case your brain hasn't melted out of your ears from the sheer stupidity of it yet - YOU CAN OUTCLASS EVER OTHER RACER IN THE GAME BY FIVE WHOLE SECONDS AND STILL LOSE BECAUSE YOU ACCIDENTALLY PICKED UP AT LEAST ONE RED CLOCK ON THE FIELD. YOUR ACTUAL PERFORMANCE IN THIS GAME DOESN'T ACTUALLY DEPEND ON HOW GOOD YOU ARE AT RACING, JUST WHETHER OR NOT YOU CAN CHEAT AND FUCK UP THE END TIME FOR EVERYONE. IT'S STUPID. SO STUPID. HOW DID ANYONE GET AS FAR AS PROGRAMMING THIS INTO THE GAME THINKING IT WAS OKAY. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Nowadays, Skunny Kart is only remembered as being the distant retarded cousin to Wacky Wheels, and in fact the only reason Skunny Kart even exists is because the developer that pitched it to them made the mistake of sharing the source code that would later become Wacky Wheels before deciding the terms sucked and ditching them for Apogee, and Copysoft - I swear that's their actual name, no I'm not making that up - decided to use what they'd given them anyway. So how do they compare? Well, I've played Skunny Kart for hours and Wacky Wheels for like 10 minutes, and I think that should tell you all you need to know.

Namely, that I only needed 10 minutes to figure out that Wacky Wheels was a much better game.

[Blacklightning]

Superman (Superman: The Man of Steel)

On some level, I feel kinda bad for Superman. The very nature of his being - a nigh-indestructible motherfucker who can punch through solid steel like it's paper, and seems to have an 11th hour superpower for every situation imaginable - seems to prohibit him from being adapted faithfully to an interactive medium without being incredibly boring or tedious in the process. And that's with the technology we have today. The 16 bit era couldn't even dream of a game where your player character effectively has permanent god mode, let alone simulate the collateral destruction a single one of his attacks could realistically accomplish. So the next best thing for most developers was to stick Superman into a relatively standard brawler and suspend disbelief enough to put forward the idea that any individual thug could be a threat to him - and yet somehow, somehow, there hasn't been a single game yet that can do even that right. It's like the whole fucking IP is cursed or something, because the whole essense of Superman's nature is antithetical to decent game design.

At the very least, the presentation of Superman's Genesis outing is pretty damn good. The artstyle is well done for what it is, but the level transitions are what really sells this game for me, with headlines from the Daily Planet stylishly bookending the start and end of most of the levels in the game - and even the ones that don't make up for it with really neat transitional cutscenes. And although the soundtrack doesn't go as far as to license any of the themes Superman was best known by at the time, the songs are all still fucking awesome in their own right, assuming you get far enough into the game to hear them all.

Yeah, about that - this game is actually pretty fucking hard, and not necessarily for the right reasons. There's probably something that could be said for the amount of damage enemies can actually inflict on you, but I'm going to take another angle to this and point out that most of Superman's attacking options don't even involve the attack button - when jumping, you have a hitbox around your hands while ascending and one around your feet when descending, and you're required to know this in order to hit enemies directly above or below you. Oh, but make sure your body doesn't actually overlap an enemy while you're doing it, otherwise you'll take a hit too. Oh, but if you jump too softly, the hitbox will wear off before you actually contact them. It seems needlessly finicky guesswork when you could simply just... hold a direction and attack and have Superman attack in that direction. Or I don't know, actually fucking fly on command so you can physically bring yourselves to their level first.

Yes, this game decides for you whether you get to fly or not. Which means that there are a lot of sections in the game where you're awkwardly grounded and have to jump around to get anywhere, which seems like an incredibly bizarre design decision for a licensed game of a character best known for flying when he's not known for punching. He also has his heat vision in this game, but only during the flying sections. It would be like if a Sonic game pick and chose when and where you get to go fast instead of trusting in the player's judgement and the level design to handle it, and oh wait that's right they actually did that in 06 nevermind forget I said anything

The game overall is just annoyingly stiff and janky to play, and really could have done with a ground-up rework of the game's mechanics. Oh well, I'm sure Superman will get their Batman Arkham Asylum eventually. Until then, there's always Megaton Rainfall.

[Blacklightning]

Mark Hooper (Teenagent)

Teenagent is a point and click game somewhat more on the obscure end of the spectrum to Space Quest, and has a perchant for taking absolutely nothing seriously. I mean, one could say much the same about Space Quest, but Teenagent is on a whole other fucking level. The premise of the game is that gold has been vanishing out of bank vaults - literally vanishing, right under people's noses - and the RGB, a organization that specializes in "odd" problems, gets called in to investigate it. They run out of leads too, so because they'll try anything once, they hire a fortune teller to pick a name at random out of a phone book, who just so happens to be Mark Hooper here. It's an absolutely ridiculous premise, and that's a good thing - unfortunately, this level of silliness extends to its puzzles, which makes large portions of the game borderline fucking unplayable without a walkthrough handy. Here's an example that happens not even half an hour in, which I'm spoiling just in case people think they can figure it out by themselves:

Spoiler

In basic training at the start of the game, you're tasked with hunting down the drill sergent in a game of hide and seek, and the only location he can possibly be is in the cafe owner's back room, which he refuses to let you into. You have to mix sleeping pills with breadcrumbs, then use them to incapacitate and capture a wild pigeon, fill a mug with mud from the obstacle course - but you can't just fill it up from the sidelines, you have to climb up, fall in and then fill up otherwise it doesn't work for some reason - then release the pigeon into the cafe and cause it to roost on the owner's radio, which allows you to swap the cafe owner's mug with the mud filled one, which sorta just... causes them to fall over when they take a sip.

Mind you, that's one of the tamer examples in the game. Later on there's a section where you have to prevent yourself from being spotted from a bad guy by, and I cannot stress enough that I'm not making this up:

Spoiler

climbing down and hanging from the fucking FOURTH WALL.

I find that the writing quality also just generally takes sudden dips and dives the longer you play it, with events in the game and narrative making less and less sense the deeper you get into it, and the translation (I didn't know at the time, but apparently the game was made in Poland?) gets steadily more half assed too, like they either had a deadline or just plain wanted to be done with the game. Either way, it shows. By the time I did eventually finish it, I didn't have any respect left for Teenagent, and I hate that because it had such a strong start for what it was. Why do point and click games always have to have some kind of really stupid catch?

[Blacklightning]

Samus (Super Metroid)

Super Metroid is one of two games that coined the "Metroidvania" sub-genre, and for good reason. A good Metroidvania has a clearly defined route through most of the game, but challenges you to test its limits all the time to find secrets, goodies and entirely new routes throughout. Of course, a good metroidvania also knows exactly what its limits are, which is why you'll often see then teasing you with shit you obviously can't get yet or routes you can't breach under the promise of returning there later with a brand new toy that can fish it out. Super Metroid balances the both of them quite well in a way that's honestly kind of hard to criticize - I think the only thing I'd really change in that regard is a means of inspecting your surroundings in a way that doesn't involve bombing and rocketing every individual tile in the area. Even when you do get the scan visor it's kinda flow breaking because you have to stand completely still for it and awkwardly pivot your view up and down instead of just, I dunno, revealing secrets in a certain radius around you when triggered on.

Even besides simply establishing a genre, though, Super Metroid has an attention to detail most other games didn't at the time. Most games of this type would simply consider themselves a collection of blocks fashioned into a labyrinth, but every area in Super Metroid is practically its own biome and its own ecology sculpted carefully to fit, right down to the piles of refuse around where the bats nest, and most games that have occured in the genre since have followed this example pretty closely, even very recent games like Hollow Knight and Subnautica. And I have to give a special mention to how the game establishes boss fights, especially Kraid - because a lot of people have taken for granted just how much of an achievement it is to create a boss so large it can't fit onscreen in its entirety, a centrepiece of the tension and unease the worldbuilding has built up to that point to culminate in a "how the fuck am I supposed to kill this!?"

I'd also like to give a shout out to Randomizers while I'm here, of which Super Metroid has a variation of - I don't think there's any better demonstration of how open ended a game's world is built that you can completely swap all the items around with only minimal caveats and still be completely playable from start to finish. It won't be the last such example on my list, but it's probably one of the first notable examples off the top of my head.

[Blacklightning]

"Gameplay always comes first".

Almost any developer worth their salt will follow this motto, or at least some close equivalent of it. Sure, it's nice to have a game that looks good, or has a great soundtrack, or a nice narrative, but focusing on those things at the expense of a gameplay vehicle to drive them is a recipe that often leads to failure and ridicule. But there are exceptions. Not often - maybe twice a generation, a game will emerge that doesn't do most things particularly well, but it so good at one particular thing that the game will singlehandedly prop itself up on that one trait and brush off everything else wrong with it. Most games of this type, sadly, tend to be cult hits at best, so I don't judge anyone for having no recollection of them. Today's sprite is of our first example of such a game.

Lt Marta Velasquez (Traffic Department 2192)

So let's just get straight to the point here - TD2192 isn't a game that plays especially well. It's a top-down shooter where you pilot a weaponized "hover skid", so you would think facing your skid in a certain direction would be as simple as holding the arrow keys in a certain direction, or using left and right to turn while up and down causes you to accelerate or reverse respectively, but this game goes for a really awkward middleground between both approaches - you turn to face the direction you're facing, unless it's the opposite direction you're currently facing, at which point you just go into reverse instead. You would think that this would get you killed a lot, and it probably would have if the AI wasn't amazingly dumb - rather than actively follow and engage you, most enemy skids will just drive circles around the city block you're in and open fire if you happen to be in their path at the time. And because screen space is at a premium in this game, you'll be shooting at enemies from offscreen most of the time anyway, tracking enemies by the tiny individual pixels they occupy on your minimap instead.

Add onto that an artstyle that looks like someone tried to digitize magazine clippings and a main leitmotif that is near lawsuit levels of Star Wars soundalike, and you have what probably should have been a recipe for disaster.

And yet, the writing in this game is fucking phenomenal for its time. The overall gameplay loop may essentially devolve into an awkward mixture of "kill x targets" and "defend y trucks from x targets", but there's something about the text-based exposition between missions that is just so captivating that I can't help but stomach the game's bullshit for it as if it's the price of admission. You play as the recently orphaned Velasquez, an officer of the titular Traffic Department, currently the only remaining obstacle between the warfaring Vultures and the conquest of their planet. This is a stereotype I hate using word for word, but Velasquez is practically the textbook definition of a loose cannon - ignoring and blowing off her superiors, screwing with terminals to give herself more favourable missions, and taking even the most neutral elements of conversation as an excuse to invent a creative insult against somebody. Even this by itself I've always enjoyed in the way they've spun it, and just to emphasize it, I'd like to present my favourite part of Episode 1 without context:

Of course, the plot isn't all smooth sailing - it takes all kinds of crazy twists and turns that I can't help but get excited for what's going to happen next every time I return to base. Sometimes it's just a sneak peak into the next scheme the Vultures hatch up to be rid of you, sometimes it's just Velasquez and her CO at each other's throats, and sometimes shit happens that's so serious it changes the optics of literally everything that happens afterward - and without spoiling too much, there's a very good reason I drew Velasquez from perspective today. She grows a lot as a character over the course of three episodes, and I would legitimately kill to experience it in better circumstances and modern days, with a control scheme that doesn't feel like it's constantly swapping between two different playstyles. It's criminally underrated and deserves a lot more love than it actually got.

[Blacklightning]

Hugo (Nitemare 3D)

This character is probably better known for the Hugo trilogy - Hugo's House of Horrors, Hugo II Whodunit?, and Hugo III Jungle of Doom. They can be generously described as adventure games along the lines of the earliest in the genre before even the likes of point and click, controlled entirely via keyboard and all interactions with the environment done through a rudimentary text prompt. They were pretty basic games overall, with their longetivity based in in their bafflingly unfair sense of difficulty, because with the exception of the second game (and even then, only because of an incredibly large and obnoxious hedge maze), they can all be finished in just over 10 minutes if you know exactly what you are doing. If it sounds like I'm being gentler on these games than they deserve, it's because they're all exclusively the brain child of a single developer, one David P Gray - the games would never stand up to titans of the genre, but the ability to create a game singlehandedly at all is a talent I can't help but respect regardless of the end result. Nitemare 3D is a game in the same franchise by the same developer, and is on this list for similar reasons, albiet with some help in the art and music department this time around.

Rather than continue the trend of adventure games, though, Nitemare 3D jumps a bandwagon and takes itself into FPS territory instead, creating a Wolfenstein clone with similar stylings of Halloween cliche as the very first game in the series, House of Horrors. Again, like the first three games, it was never going to be revolutionary - Doom had already come out by this stage, after all, so it was well behind on practically every conceivable level. One thing it did have to its credit, though, was the way it handled its selection of weapons. In Wolfenstein, and even to an extent in Doom, weapons were essentially incremental upgrades to one another, to the point that there were often weapons that you never considered using again except maybe to conserve ammo for a much better gun. Nitemare's arsenal, however, remains both specialized and widely effective enough that none of its three weapons remain truly useless, with a wand that can take down witches quickly, a pistol that dispatches vampires with silver bullets, and a plasma pistol that does decent damage all around.

Unfortunately, the enemy design and map design as far as gameplay is concerned clash badly in a way that makes this game really obnoxious to play. Like Wolfenstein, damage scales with distance, but there's no RNG factor beyond that - which means if you encounter a witch-themed enemy in close quarters, as you usually will because Gray loves to hide these fuckers right around corners, you can expect to lose at least half of your health in a single shot without any chance of recourse at all, with the ones highest up in tier doing even worse things to you. Not that they're any less threatening in a long corridor, because the wand - their intended counter - is a projectile weapon and all ranged damage from enemies is exclusively hitscan, so trying to spray them into a stunlock Plasma Rifle style will lead to you taking unavoidable hits anyway. The worst offenders though are the fucking flame-wielding skeletons, which also possess a pretty damaging long range hitscan attack, are almost never encountered alone and are typically sprinkled into wide open rooms with no cover to hide behind, so it's not uncommon to walk into a room and be immediately shot by 3-4 of these fuckers at once before you can even switch guns.

Outside of all this the Hugo trilogy and Nitemare 3D remain interesting anomalies on this list because David Gray is still selling all four games to this day - not through a digital distribution service, but through his own website, which has been running for nearly twenty years to this day. So if for some reason you still feel like supporting the developer, you can buy the games from him directly without fear of a publisher taking a cut of the sales.

[Blacklightning]

Wario (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3)

Right from the get-go, Wario is very much penned as the anti-Mario - rather than venture out of altruism, heroism or even just for adventure's own sake, Wario's goals are almost always some form of hoarding and self-enrichment. And it's always interesting to see the effects it has on his games when coins usually exist only for signposting and as extra life tokens in almost any other platforming game. Even here you'd be forgiven for thinking all that wealth is equally meaningless in Wario Land, but even putting aside the fact that Wario can weaponize money in this game, it keeps a running count of all the coins you manage to smuggle out of a level alive, and your wealth affects the end result of the game when you finally get there. While it would be nice to actually know that ahead of time, I still love it when games add incentives like that to ever so subtly influence your behaviour to match that of the character you're playing as.

If there's any reason I ever hated playing this game, it was never any fault of the game itself - the Gameboy Pocket's screen ghosting issues are practically legendary already, and there are many elements of the game that are especially unkind because of them. The first level of Stove Canyon and the boss of SS Tea Cup, already challenging in of themselves, are especially fucking annoying to deal with when all the pixels start blending together into an unrecognizable blur. Thank fucking god the Gameboy Colour's screen is such a massive improvement over it, otherwise this game would probably not be playable anymore without emulation.

Real shit though? This is probably one of the original Gameboy's best games, right up there with Kirby's Dreamland. That might not sound like much with the library bloated with shovelware and licensed trash, but it's another one of these games I struggle to say much about simply because I can find almost no actual faults with it. It's perfectly paced and designed exactly the way it wanted to be, well worth a playthrough if you haven't touched it yet even if you don't generally like handheld games.

[Blacklightning]

Hocus (Hocus Pocus)

Boy, it's been a while since we covered an Apogee platformer, hasn't it? Hocus Pocus is a little more on the basic spectrum when you compare it to Biomenace further up the page, and honestly if it has anything in common with any of the Apogee games I've covered so far, it'd be Duke Nukem 1 all the way back at the start of the list. You have a single projectile type, and a powerup that allows you to have more of them on the screen at once. That's it. The only distinctions Hocus gets is the ability to shoot directly upwards, and a potion that waives the projectile limit and fires full auto as if mashing the button frame perfectly. This brand of simplicity, you'd think, would lend it to prioritize movement in fighting like Wonder Boy and Megaman X earlier, but sadly this game is just plain brainless, taking the same 3-4 enemy types and the same tileset and constantly sprite-swapping them to portray the illusion of progress instead of doing anything genuinely interesting when the locales swap over. There isn't any fanfare when you complete a given area, or even so much as a boss fight until the very end of an episode.

What I'm getting at is that most of the setpiecing in this game seems to have been thrown in as an afterthought. You can only advance to the next level after collecting every crystal ball in the current one, and it feels like that's the only consideration that the level design was given because the overwhelming majority of it just feels like stairs, corridors and flat platforms over lava without any variation in between. Enemies don't physically have a presence in the level so much as spawn in when you hit a trigger Serious Sam style, and the triggers start getting incredibly predictable not even two levels into the game - if there's a long corridor monsters will spawn roughly every screen length, and if it's a series of individual platforms over lava you better believe that they'll spawn monsters on Every. Single. One. Of them. It gets boring as all hell, especially when most of the enemies are bullet sponges on top of it.

What really gets me about this game, though, is that even simple movement doesn't feel like it's competently made. Just walking left or right is incredibly jerky, moving at about half block increments instead of anything that resembles a smooth motion, and although jumping height has diminishing returns to resemble some kind of physics, if you walk off a ledge or hit a cieling you'll drop at immediate terminal velocity. This will frequently throw you off on jumping sections, and will often require you to redo a whole sequence if not backtrack for another chance or outright harm you for messing up. What exactly was going through their heads that made them go back on everything other Apogee titles had built on up to this point? I honestly don't have a clue. Either way, this game is just really boring, repetitive and irritating.

[Blacklightning]

Zero: The Kamikaze Squirrel

Nono, don't walk away. I swear that's the actual name.

The premise of Zero is that you're a henchman of one Edgar Ektor (yes, this is an Aero the Acrobat spinoff, no I didn't know that when I played it) when you get a letter from your GF at the forest you call home - it's currently being deforested by a big bad dude running a counterfeiting operation, so you ditch being a bad guy to go and save your girl and your home. Honestly, I like it. It's exactly as simple as it needs to be, preferring to tell the rest through the opposition you fight along the way, because it's mostly just a vehicle to drive the gameplay anyway.

Zero actually has a deceptively complex moveset as far as platformers are concerned, and when you come from Sonic like I do it really pleases me to say that almost all of it is movement based on top of being pretty good attacks in their own right. Your doublejump has a hitbox, and you can perform a swooping move in the air to hit low and pass under low cielings, but probably the most use you get out of a move in this game is the Dive, which causes Zero to flip downwards and hit the first thing he runs into along the way. The start of the move has an almost instashield-like effect which hits basically anything you run into, and you can chain it with other moves or into itself if you play your cards right, and I swear it just never stops being fucking satisfying to pull off. I do sort of which Zero had a "normal" attack - the closest equivalent is his nunchuks, which you have to crouch to use for some reason but trades off with that awkwardness with being able to break through almost any defence in the game - but you know what? This is fine. Fighting almost exclusively through acrobatics is still badass, and something even games today don't do enough of if you ask me.

Probably the biggest trick Zero can pull off is the Super Dive. You press the dive button while already diving and you flip horizontally, then again to flip vertically upwards like a super-charged swoop, converting downward momentum into sideways and upward momentum based on how long you were diving downwards for. Casually speaking it's a great way to cover ground and uncover secrets when the level design is open enough to allow for it. The problems start, however, when the game starts requiring you to do this just to progress in the form of "Super Jump Tests", often in the form of a narrow U-shaped corridor that you have to fling yourself through without hitting any walls and still having enough momentum left over to reach an overhang on the upward bend. Best case scenario, you have to retry over and over because even with a clear trail of score pickups to act as signposting, it's very difficult to time the Super DIve to the very narrow window of opportunity you get to fly sideways through the bottom of the dive, sometimes like just two character heights in size just to fuck with you some more. Worst case scenario, there's a hazard at the bottom of the dive and you just straight up fucking die every time you fail it. So yeah, there's some trial and error involved. Super Dive Tests are just the most egregious and noticable example of it, not the only incidence of it - don't even get me fucking started on the autoscrolling jetski levels.

If it weren't for this level design jerkery, I would honestly have pegged the game right up there with Sonic the Hedgehog. It's just that fucking good, when it works. If your standard of a good Sonic game is Sonic 2, though, you'll probably love Zero regardless. Just be ready to lose lives for incredibly stupid reasons.

[Blacklightning]

Bonk (Super BC Kid)

If I could pick just one game in the whole list as the recipient for a "what the fuck, Japan????" award, it would probably be this game. Better known to many people as Super Bonk, it's a game where you can eat candy to grow giant, decapitate yourself and have your giant head roll around like a boulder flattening anything it touches, eat meat to turn into a dinosaur, turn invisible and wipe out a school by running through it, eat another candy to turn tiny, scream so loud the words become physical platforms to ride to unreachable areas, fall into a river and then get eaten alive by a shark with gigantic lips and have to manuever your way through its intestines alive. And I swear I'm only describing those events slightly out of order! Is it a bad game? Hell no, it's pretty fun in its own... incredibly strange way.

Bonk's main - and usually only - method of attack is his own thick skull, with a grounded headbutt and an aerial flip that causes Bonk to dive and bounce off the first enemy he hits along the way, not terribly unlike the same dive we discussed just above with Zero. I feel like what people usually remember him most for, though, is the ability to cancel the dive before the dive part of it even happens... and in button mashing the attack button, cause Bonk to flip repeatedly to basically helicopter through the air and slow his descent all the while. In some ways it honestly feels like an exploit, but the developers seem to have embraced it as a happy accident and openly encourage people to spin through the air as the levels allow for it.

If I had to voice a few specific complaints about the game, it's that it doesn't let you go wild with crazy shit as much as it really ought to. In fact, it has a bad habit of inconveniencing you for temporary difficulty spikes and artificial longetivity, such as squishing you to turn you into a crab (seriously what the fuck Japan?) with no wall/waterfall climbing ability and a shitty pincer attack and making you take a lengthy detour to find a way to change yourself back and then backtrack to the waterfall out of the area which was right next to the spot where you got transformed. Or forcing you to turn tiny whether you want to or not, usually for the aformentioned "ride on your own shout" sections which are surprisingly difficult to work with because of the way it interferes with normal jumping physics, and you can lose a good two whole minutes of progress if you fail some of these jumps. And the second last level has a boss rush, and some of these bosses are definitely not quick affairs, just in case you weren't convinced they still didn't have enough padding yet.

And the bonus stages? Honestly, they're actually pretty good - most other games would use it as an excuse to insert an entirely different game in, like Sonic tends to do with its special stages, but all of Bonk's bonus stages are simply creative spins on its existing gameplay, like making it to the top of a platforming section where all the platforms are bouncy clouds you can't stand still on, or using your headbutt dive on a pump to inflate a giant balloon, or launching a series of plants into a giant basketball hoop by bouncing them on your head and flipping to throw them. But there's way too fucking many of them. In the first level alone there's a section where you can find a bonus stage right before an area transition, and then another one right as you enter the next area, and I swear you can never really be rid of them anywhere you go.

Still a neat game besides that though. Just don't expect it to make a single bit of sense.

[Blacklightning]

Aero (Aero the Acrobat 2)

I briefely namedropped this guy during Zero's segment, so now I get to talk about its inspiration proper. And right away I have to say, this is a goddamn gorgeous game - maybe not quite in a technical sense, but it's got a great artstyle, the level tropes are generally neat and varied (though I'd say the music-themed level is a bit out of place and is a bit more drawn out than it needed to be), and perhaps most importantly it's got some bloody good animation going for it that portrays a lot of character all by itself, almost like what Fantasia was going for with the distinction of not being incredibly bad at it.

Now that being said I hate to say it, but Zero was actually the better game. Whereas Zero had many different cool moves to use based on the situation and/or the level design, Aero has one move he can use in three different directions - drill diagonally up, drill diagonally down, or drill directly down. Why those specific directions? Why not just allow you to drill in any direction? Fucked if I know! But it makes Aero feel a lot more limited by comparison, and the impacts don't sell quite as well because among things, it sets your momentum to a static value instead of acting in addition to it like most of Zero's do. What's more annoying is that you have absolutely no control over your character after you do land a hit, so you will inevitably come to a complete stop just for engaging enemies at all because you bounce off them like an idiot and have to wait until you hit the ground for Aero to respond to anything - the only thing you can do after a hit is another drill, which resets your momentum anyway. If it seems like I'm comparing this game to Zero an awful lot, it's because Zero released first and I still can't believe these guys - the same developers - didn't seem to think it was worth applying any of the same lessons and design philosiphies they learnt from it.

Also to be perfectly frank, Aero 2 just has pacing issues in general, and just drags on and on long after it ceases to be fun. An average playthrough will last about two hours, which is kind of ridiculous for a game without any battery saves (mercifully it has a password system with only four characters in it, otherwise I probably would have been meaner about it). Every zone has three stages and a bonus stage and tbh I'm not really convinced it needs them? And this was the Genesis version too, which had another entire act added on top of that. Cut it down to two acts and it probably wouldn't overstay its welcome quite as much if you ask me.

You wanna hear something funny, though? The jump button on the Genesis version defaults to B, whereas most other platformers in the Genny library default to C. You CAN rebind this, but... there's a scripted section directly after the final boss where Aero jumps on a button, then up onto higher ground to reach an end of level portal to finish the level proper. This is a pretty basic sequence where most of the lateral movement is handled by the stage autoscrolling and pushing Aero along, playing a series of simulated button presses to advance the sequence along. You wanna know how I know that? Because this simulated inputs uses the default controls, not what you actually bound them as - so picture yourself in my shoes one day, having played the entire two hour game in one sitting up to the final boss, and then doing any of the thing described, Aero jumps once, throws two stars, and then gets crushed by the fucking autoscrolling and dies, causing the game to softlock. Yeah, needless to fucking say, I was pretty bummed too.

[Blacklightning]

Ecco the Dolphin

I'm sure there's a great game buried in Ecco somewhere, but the more I look at it the more I see a perfect storm of bad marketing, bad timing and just plain bad luck. It says a lot that I'm bringing marketing into this, because I fucking hate appealing to marketing when it interferes in a game's creative process - but can you imagine being in the room when this was being pitched to Sega execs, who prided their brand on being cool, edgy and character focused, and someone says "hey guys let's make a game about a dolphin with absolutely no defining characteristics"? No really, I'm convinced Ecco really needed a unique look going for it, because the outside perception that the entire game was basically just a dolphin sim and nothing more REALLY hurts this game more than it probably deserves. Had I known from the outset that Ecco had elements of cosmic fucking horror in it I probably would have been at least invested enough in the game to figure out what they meant by that.

So yeah, full disclosure, I never actually finished this game or even made it particularly far in, because 1) I was an impatient kid last time I played it, 2) as it turns out, this game is actually pretty fucking hard, and 3) there's no battery saves, and writing down an 8 letter password every time you cleare a level is a pain in the ass. Probably the most infamous aspect of Ecco difficulty wise is the gigantic octopus in the second stage, which literally slaps your shit if you swim past it any quicker than an absolutely glacial pace, and the tension isn't made any easier by the fact that you're slowly drowning in the meantime. Oh, I didn't mention that you can drown in this game? Sure, it's accurate to actual dolphins (hence the "dolphin sim" comment I made earlier), but it's always a concern in this game and a constant source of stress no matter where you are in the game.

Usually when I played Ecco I would get as far as the third level and get bored or fed up with it, because most of the level has a strong upcurrent and you need to awkwardly push rocks into it and swim behind to protect yourself from it, which is actually a lot more awkward and finicky than it sounds. That's even assuming you know exactly where to go once you find one, which more often than not you won't, even with the sonar map ability. I dunno, it's probably a game I should give another shot sometime - it's definitely a game that would have performed much better in today's climate, and supposedly the developer has been trying to get a new Ecco off the ground so... here's hoping?

[Blacklightning]

Okay guys, I gotta be honest about this one - today's game I'm bringing up mainly to make a broader point. That point is that the fighting game genre gets away with a lot of shit most other genres would get rightly laughed at for. Learning curves so nonexistent that people sum them up as "get good" unironically, movesets so complex and inconsistent that learning how to get anything done requires you to wail on a defenseless dummy for literal hours, and for the longest time, the victor of any given fight was based on which one happened to know all the cheat codes. Now before you say that's hyperbole, there's something you should know - that movelist you just skimmed over wasn't actually a movelist at all, but rather the cheat codes for Biomenace. And the fact that you could not tell the difference without being told as such should honestly tell you something about the way these games are designed. I hate it, and I hate that it's become the standard for the genre through games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, to such an extent that the genre as a whole still suffers from it today.

Another reason I'm bringing up this specific game is to acknowledge the alternative was worse.

Megazord (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers)

First, we need to discuss the concept of "neutral" in fighting games. The neutral, as the name might imply, is a state of being in which neither fighter has a clear advantage, and is usually considered the default mode of playing before anything else. Usually this means that both fighters are still fishing for an opening to hit the opponent, and take an advantage state for themselves, but sometimes advantage doesn't even mean hitting the opponent at all - advantage state can also mean simply having more options than the enemy at that given moment in time, or restricting the opponent's in such a way that makes it difficult to land a hit or escape. A big mistake this game makes - and a rookie mistake for a lot of early fighting games - is that the balance of the game is almost exclusively neutral, and the overwhelming majority of the meta revolves simply around being able to land one single hit consistently at a time.

The most obvious reason for this is that, with the exception of a few jabs, nearly every move in the game causes a knockdown, and you're completely immune to damage while being knocked down until you recover back to your feet again. Another reason is that characters in this game never really branch out into specific archetypes, usually just some variation of "projectile move, physical move, shoryuken expy". Some of this is down to the Rangers being recolours of each other, obviously, but even the monsters don't really do anything interesting besides Goldar and Cyclopsis, and even then only because they're just broken as fuck instead. The short and short of it is that this game is fucking boring and doesn't really do anything but the bare minimum to be considered a fighting game.

On the subject of Power Rangers specifically, it needs to be said that not only are the Rangers themselves playable characters, but so is the Megazord, Dragonzord and Cyclopsis. Which if you've paid any attention to the show, highlights a pretty significant size difference between the former and the latter. The singleplayer mode gets around this by fighting every monster once with a ranger, and then again with a 'zord to take advantage of the fact that Rita can make them grow, but does the 2P mode let you fight whoever with whatever? Nope - if either player picks a ranger, the 'zords and Cyclopsis are removed from the roster entirely, and vice versa. Can you even imagine a character counterpick in any other fighting game precluding your opponent's ability to pick one of their own? Canon be damned, it's fucking stupid. It's bad enough that the rangers can only be fought with on a single stage while you're at it.

[Blacklightning]

Venom (Spiderman and Venom: Maximum Carnage)

It's that time again: another LJN title, this time a sidescrolling Streets of Rage-esque beat em up. To be totally honest with you though, it came as a shock to me when I learnt that LJN published this one because Maximum Carnage isn't... a bad game? I mean, it didn't exactly set the world on fire, but it's competently made, has plenty of character, and knows how to pace itself before certain kinds of encounters start getting old. That's enough for some people to call it LJN's magnum opus, which sounds ridiculous, but you have to remember that its other points of comparison is trash like Arcade's Revenge, and legendary trash like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, so a game that simply works at all is fantastic by comparison. There's definitely elements of it I like on their own, like how every enemy in the game has a name - not every type of enemy, I mean every individual enemy, right down to the dozens of mooks that you beat up every level. Granted, there's some noticable overlap, but it's an effort that I appreciate and it's something I wish more beat em ups did. There's also loads of little details in the fighting to discover that aren't immediately obvious, like the fact that your backflip deals damage, or that you can grab two enemies at once and slam them into each other with a bit of setting up, which can instakill certain bosses.

Of course, it's LJN, so it still has flaws - just much less of them than usual. Prime among them would have to be the game's difficulty. It isn't so bad when you're fighting mooks and lesser bosses, but the headline supervillains will absolutely kick your shit in, and to this day I'm still not entirely sure of how to fight them safely - especially Demogoblin, who I swear is just fucking impossible to hit without immediately taking a retaliatory claw to the face. There's also a super move that'll instantly KO most mooks and deal ridiculous damage to others, but you have almost no control over when it triggers - sometimes your healthbar just flashes and it'll replace one of your jabs without any apparent rhyme or reason, and you can only use it once at a time so more often than not you'll waste it completely because you had no way of being prepared for it. You already have a crowd clearing move bound to jump+attack, was it really so hard to bind the super to a different button combination? Or I dunno, just holding the fucking attack button down?

Music's still bitchin', though. LJN still has that going for them.

 

[Blacklightning]

Yeet and Boik (Boppin)

Sorry if I'm getting into this too fast, but I have to get right into the gameplay style first because it carries quite possibly the most insane coincidence on this list. It's a huge oddity of a game, probably most closely related to Puzzle Bobble in gameplay style, but even that doesn't quite adequetely describe it, because rather than sitting at the bottom with a cannon you physically walk around the screen holding a block, using elevators to help with angles where necessary and bouncy blocks that launch your thrown blocks in a different direction when hit. So let me unpack this for you - this is a puzzle game where you throw blocks at other blocks to match and destroy them.

And the main character is named Yeet.

This game was made in 1994.

In all seriousness let's back up a bit. The game actually has a pretty interesting premise, opening with an "infinite universes" concept, where a universe is created and maintained by the will and imaginations of their own inhabitants and inhabitants of other universes. Yeet and Boik were creations of an arcade game in a neighbouring arcade word, and their fandom appreciated them so much that they were made real and ran an arcade of their own. One day out of nowhere, all the monsters have vanished from their games - kidnapped by one "Hunnybunz", presumably in objection to the violent nature of videogames. But without any antagonists, there are no videogames, and their respective protagonists, who are very much living people in this universe, are effectively jobless if this isn't fixed. So they ask Yeet and Boik as neutral parties to help them out, because they're heroes by trade and can't be seen rescuing their own villains. Like I said, I think it's a neat concept, I just think it's a bit... much, for what the game ultimately is? Most of this is explored in a cutscene in the opening and pretty much never revisited, treated as window dressing and an excuse plot for everything that follows, which feels like a tremendous waste of worldbuilding to me.

For better AND worse, this legitimately feels like a game that was designed by aliens. The stage design has no real running theme, which makes sense in its own way - after all, you're exploring many different kinds of videogames, so they have no reason to be cohesive with one another. But they can get incredibly abstract pretty often, and it never ceases to catch me off guard, like levels that take place in vectors, blueprints or pieces of handwritten, hand drawn paper, among other things that just make you say "who the fuck would think to make a level like that???". It's sad to think, then, that somewhere down the level ladder, eventually, the designers just stop trying and make levels with matchable tiles that are practically indistinguishable from the walls and platforms, or just a mishmashy clusterfuck of shapes in a void, which are an incredible headache to LOOK at, let alone solve. And then there's the music.

Even the music sounds so alien it's practically a genre all its own, and the only description I have for it is "loud, gaudy, high pitched organs that devolve into note salad halfway through before realizing that music is supposed to have structure". And I hate so much that I can't tell whether that's a good or a bad thing??? But if their intention was to be odd and different on that front, they definitely fucking succeeded, that much can't be questioned. And I imagine that was the intention, because they have this piece of work plastered over their startup sequence:

"Determined to disturb" is definitely not a bluff, either. I haven't even mentioned what happens if you fail too many throws and run out of hitpoints yet - rather than simply fade away or cut to a game over screen, Yeet takes off his sunglasses and proceeds to eat gun cake, graphically commiting suicide by gun with blood and all. Artistic integrity be damned, whoever made this wasn't right in the head.

[Blacklightning]

Ian Paul Freely (Rise of the Triad)

Rise of the Triad actually has five main characters that are given near-equal billing, and the one I usually went with was Taradino Cassatt, but the one everyone remembers is the one that's a direct reference to a Simpsons prank call. Go figure. =V

ROTT is to my knowledge, one of the last mainstream FPS games developed in the Doom style - that being, mostly flat geometry, heavy autoaim and no jump button. Coming out this late gives it a few neat quirks to edge it over Doom, like for example, the fact that your view will physically shift up or down if you're targetting an enemy that isn't level with you (whereas in Doom you had to guess whether that rocket you just fired will fly straight, upwards towards the Caco you wanted to hit, or directly at your feet cos it was trying to hit one over a cliff face), but its engine for level design has a habit of really holding it back because the geometry is exclusively tile based with all rendered floors being on a single y axis, and all the verticality - of which there is quite a lot of despite this fact - is almost always handled by 2D sprite platforms that are pretty difficult to guage whether or not you'll land on. Why a first person shooter has nearly the same depth of level design as an RPGmaker title this late I don't understand - at least it made some kind of sense when there wasn't a Y axis at all, but now it's just plain silly.

Despite all its mature themes and gore, ROTT is actually a bit on the silly side gameplay speaking, chock full of arcade-esque powerups that, among things, bestow armour lined with asbestos, remove all friction and make you bounce off the walls, induce a hallucinogenic and probably seizure inducing trip, grant you the legendary Excalibat, turn you into a dog that gibs people with its howls, and a God mode that literally turns you into God. But what I want to talk about most is its... interesting handling of its regular weapons. There are only three "normal" weapons in the game, and they all have infinite ammo - the rest are all rocket launchers with some signature quirk, like having more ammo, homing, multi shots or the game's signature Firewall, which drops to the ground and creates a deadly wall of fire that quickly spreads and travels across the room, incinerating anything in its path. You can only hold one rocket launcher tier weapon at a time, and there aren't any ammo pickups, so one would think this would make the game a psuedo ammo management puzzle of locating weapons, falling back to them as necessary to help clear rooms and using your bullet based weapons only as a fallback... but once you get the MP40, which honestly isn't terribly hard, it can singlehandedly stunlock most enemies without any real downside most of the time, so you run out of reasons to use anything else unless a fucking huge crowd pops up.

The main reason I bring up this game, though, isn't anything related to the game - it is honestly, without hyperbole, a contender for the greatest videogame soundtrack of all god damned time.

This soundtrack comes from some composers that would have their claim to fame in Doom and some that would later go on to work on Duke 3D, but this in my mind is some of their greatest work and carries with it a style they either couldn't or didn't bother to replicate anywhere else, sounding almost like they're juggling two lead melodies at once and somehow, against all odds, never actually clashing with one another. And even once you put that aside, there is just so much range to be seen in the soundtrack, from bombastic to sombre to smooth and jazzy, all without sounding it's ever out of place. It's long outlived the game it was made for, and I think that should say a lot about how goddamn good it sounds. Go ahead, listen to the whole thing, even quote me on that, I don't give a fuck. That's a hill I'll proudly die on.

[Blacklightning]

Vince (Megazeux)

A direct sequel to the even lesser known Zeux 1: Labrynth of Zeux, Caverns of Zeux follows on immediately after having obtained the previous game's mcguffin, the Silver Staff. Apon trying to leave with it, though, the staff emits a flash of deadly rays and causes a cave-in, trapping Vince within the caverns, and the overarching goal of the game is simply to escape. Speaking technically, Caverns is in kind of an odd place, running on ASCII graphics and PC speaker sound effects, but it also has a soundtrack composed in MOD format? It's an odd mixture, but I don't think it brings the game itself down any. It's a servicable game for what it is, brought short only by little things like annoying ice physics, tedious boss fights and a capacity to softlock the game at several points throughout (though the sole author of the game, Gregory Janson, helpfully leaves notes before these sections so you know to save in advance). You might notice that so far, I've been referring to the game as Caverns of Zeux instead of Megazeux. See, Megazeux is the engine that Caverns was built of off, and was pretty much the flagship - and most well known - title built off of the engine. And it's because of the engine that I'm talking today.

Why? Well quite frankly, I'm convinced it's the origin of my wishes to build a game of my own someday. All Megazeux games, even the shareware Caverns, come with a complimentary editor. One aspect of this editor are Robots, which can be programmed from scratch in a BASIC-esque language and have unrestricted control over almost any aspect of the game, from simple stuff like variables, inventory and dialogue to crazy, all encompassing shit like the game's graphics, music, level contents and even the player. It singlehandedly brings the editor beyond a simple level editor and above and beyond the ability to create entirely new and different games, a testament to versatility only emphasized further by the fact that people can make games in entirely different genres with the creative freedom that Robots give you, sometimes in ways I still struggle to wrap my head around.

...oh, what's that? I used present tense there? No, that's not a typo - people are still making games in the Megazeux engine even today. It may not be a community as big as Doom's, but they're every bit as dedicated to their engine and their craft, constantly pushing the engine's limits to levels difficult to fathom with limitations such as a grand total of two different colours per tile. And this all started with one developer. Gregory has every right to be proud of the community he's fostered to this day.