ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

July 18, 2020

Havoc (High Seas Havoc)

Let me just start first wDATA EAST TITLE DETECTED INITIATING MANDATORY MUSIC APPRECIATION POSTS

Uh, r-right.... anyway... To address the elephant in the room here - yes, Havoc gets likened to a bootleg Sonic an awful lot, and to some extent I feel like that's kind of unfair. It's difficult to deny that they ride on some of Sonic's overall aesthetics, and Havoc may have a midair attack that's suspiciously similar to the Instashield, but that's about where the similarities end. The gist of the narrative is that Havoc and Tide, seals living on a desolate island, discover a girl named Bridget washed ashore one day. It turns out she had just escaped the clutches of Bernado, with a treasure map leading to a gem of great power that Bernado happened to be hunting down. So they keep her around and hide the map away to try and keep it safe, but one of Bernado's henchmen tracks them down and kidnaps Tide and Bridget along with the map, leaving just Havoc left to find and free his friends, stopping Bernado along the way. Which is why it weirds me out that Bernado himself is the first boss you fight, which doesn't seem to solve any problems and if you ask me, puts a weird dampener on the agency of the rest of this game. I hate to say it, but Havoc really could have used just a small amount of exposition between areas, if only because the transitions don't feel like they make a whole lot of sense otherwise, and what little we DO get in this game is actually pretty well drawn.

In fact Havoc is just plain nice to look at in general, another one of those games that doesn't do anything groundbreaking visually but doesn't really need to under the heft of its artstyle. The colourful visuals, standard fare gem collecting and cartoonish hurt animations of the seemingly perpetually pissed off Havoc, though, belies a game that really, really wants you to fucking die. One could liken it almost to Ghouls and Ghosts in how it plays difficulty off sometimes just for difficulty's own sake, and doesn't always particularly care for being a fair challenge for it. Most people get their first true taste of this around Burning Hamlet act 1, a trial and error chase sequence where you're being pursued by an invincible, instakill flame while putting out obstacles in your way. Most sane people would just put the game down during Mt Chester, which feature a lot of big jumps over instakill deathpits so lacking in signposting that some of them are completely blind leaps of faith over certain death. Oh, and I didn't even mention yet that I was playing this on the PAL version, which for some reason cut out the opening stage completely - which might have been a good thing, if not for the fact that this stage alone contained something like 7-10 extra lives which you really fucking need.

So yeah, it's definitely the kind of game you play to put hairs on your chest. For bragging rights, if nothing else. I never actually finished it in my childhood, so I guess I'm chalking this one up to another entry in the "games I need to beat the shit out of for giving me such a hard time" bucket list.

July 19, 2020

Slick (The Incredible Crash Dummies)

Yes, I'm probably going to hell for making a Saving Private Ryan joke out of this.

You know, thinking back on it now, it's started to dawn on me that the Crash Dummies never actually got a driving game, and the thought of playing Carmageddon with dummies actually sounds kind of cool? It's a shame that virtually all the Crash Dummies games are platformers and one minigame collection, then. The premise is pretty simple - the big bad Junkman has kidnapped your scientist friend for his secrets, and you gotta go save him. Now it bothered me more than it probably should have that Spin wasn't a playable character in this game, especially since Slick and Spin are practically inseparable anywhere else. The game tries to justify it as "one of them needs to watch the lab while the other's gone", but they ignore that pretty much immediately because they both interrupt the game together every three levels for a road safety PSA, which tend to be written with obvious outcomes they spend way too much time building up to and laden with obsolutely cringe levels of dad jokes.

Behind that though, is a game that has honest to god startled me more than some actual horror games, and never intentionally. When I was re-watching this game for research, I honestly thought I had clicked on a youtube poop by accident, because goddamn this game is LOUD, in ways I honestly did not believe the Genesis was capable of. Every single impact in this game is punctuated by a cataclysmic burst of sound that I'm still not convinced isn't the digitized sound of an actual car crash, regardless of whether it's an actual car or if you're just jumping on someone's head. And many of the worse enemies have a tendency to come out of nowhere or make themselves known with sudden, extremely rapid movements, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that this game could legitimately jumpscare you just for lack of ability to see shit like that coming. The one mercy that Crash Dummies gives you is that it will never instakill you for any mistakes like many other platformers of this kind do, so it's sorta hard to get mad at the game when landmines suddenly gain the ability to JUMP - and in its own way it's sort of amusing that damage in this game isn't represented by a meter, but by how many limbs you have left, forcibly dismembering you whenever you take damage.

It's ultimately an obstacle course above all else, so what you get while playing it is kind of a crapshoot depending on the level, up to and including changing the fucking trajectory your projectiles take (and usually for the worse - it's only in the first and last levels that they follow a somewhat straight trajectory). The bosses all play like some variation of "throw all your spanners, then bounce off their heads over and over and hope you don't take damage for no readily obvious reason", and much like the aformentioned jumping landmine, they'll all tend to have at least one beginner's trap you won't figure out until you're already taken a hit from it - and the less said about the Junk Kastle, the better. Pretty much everything you'd expect from the label "fun but flawed". This also marks the final LJN game on this list too, and thank fuck for that.

July 20, 2020

Bart Simpson (Virtual Bart)

Hoo boy. When people think "licensed shovelware", this is usually one of the first games that comes to mind. In a nutshell, Virtual Bart is a minigame collection, so much like Arcade's Revenge that makes it a little hard to critique because many of them don't even share the same genre, much less general playing style. Thankfully half of them - three in total - function at least somewhat like platformers, so I can start with a problem they all have in common: they're all tedious and repetitive and drag on for ages, way longer than they have any right to. They're also really unforgiving, usually containing nowhere near enough resources to make it through any one section unscathed and rife with fucking annoying trial and error that will end with you being killed instantly, usually without much prior warning - in fact the ENTIRE Baby Bart game will kill you if you touch the ground at all, and sometimes you can fall from a foothold for something as simple as touching a shirt on a clothesline? Virtual Bart does have something that resembles checkpoints... but first, we gotta talk about the game select screen.

So the minigames and this select screen have individual life counters. If you lose all your lives in one of the minigames, you lose a life in the select screen and get sent to a different game. Problem number one: you have almost no control over which game you're sent to, because the cursor is Bart's head and Bart is constantly rotating. and pressing a button only slows Bart down instead of completely stopping him right there and then, so you're literally playing roulette every time you enter this screen instead of just having a functioning menu. The last game you played will usually remember which screen you last game-over'd on if memory serves right (and they're pretty fucking big screens most of the time, so don't think for a second that's generous), but that might not even matter because you only have a CHANCE of landing on a game you already played. And speaking of roulettes, problem number two: one of those squares isn't even a game. It alternates between two different tiles, and depending on what it is when the wheel stops, you can gain or lose a life by landing on it. Isn't that just fucking grand? Virtual Bart is a game so relentless that you can literally die before you've even fucking started playing it, and it won't have anything to do with your own choices.

So that out of the way, let's talk about the NON-platformers. The first one takes place on the eve of a school photo, so Bart sets out to ruin it by throwing tomatoes at everyone in some sort of artillery simulator. The controls for this are postitively arcane - you press the A button and it sends a yellow wave out across the pathway in front of you, and if you press A again it throws a tomato somewhere in the wave's vicinity. This means more distant throws take a lot longer to aim in a way that isn't in the slightest bit intuitive, and by the time you've lined the wave up with where you think a student is going to walk by you will probably have already missed your window to hit them. You can throw to the left or the right of the path, but you can't control how far to the left or right and don't have a point of reference for where they line up with the wave even if you could, so for the most part you can only accurately hit targets directly in front of you - and good fucking luck doing that when adults start showing up and crowding the field, which immediately fail the game if you hit any of them by mistake.

The next one is a Road Rash clone, and honestly it might be my favourite one in Virtual Bart, even if that isn't saying much. It's even got a projectile attack in the form of a shotgun that fires water balloons, which was something alien even to Road Rash at the time. In the Genesis version though, it's a painfully long slog, made worse by the fact that there isn't actually all that much opposition besides the scenery - and honestly, it takes the fun out of a Road Rash clone when you actively have to slow down to avoid every little fucking pebble and squirrel on the road, and even at low speeds that's harder than it sounds because this is like the squiggliest fucking road ever and keeps making straight 45 degree turns for no readily apparent reason. And just as a final fuck you to how long you have to make your health last through the journey, there's an oncoming bus that randomly shows up out of nowhere in your lane and you have only a fraction of a second to react and avoid being flattened.

The water slide minigame is probably the worst one by a pretty fucking wide margin, where you have to make it to the bottom of a big theme park slide and avoid all the other riders along the way. Problem number one is Krusty, who intentionally mimics your movements and is virtually impossible to avoid, so whenever he shows up you're virtually guaranteed to take a hit regardless of what you do. You have a move that makes you dive into the water presumably to go under other riders, but I'm convinced it's fucking broken because I've never actually gotten it to do anything of the sort. Problem two is the pickups, which for some reason you can't pickup just by running into like any of the other games - you have to dive to collect them, and the timing is so tight that I'm convinced it's almost frame perfect. So if you miss this window you just miss the item, right? Nope - it's treated like another rider and you take damage from it. Virtual Bart is a game so relentless you can literally take damage from healing pickups. And problem three, perhaps most importantly - the slide repeatedly forks in two along the way down. Best case, this is just fucking annoying and makes you retreat to choose the correct one. Worst case, you just die. That's it. The end. The whole thing is complete trial and error from start to finish, unless you start picking up on the borderline unnoticable tells for the correct direction, which on the Genesis version is a couple of otherwise innocuous shading lines on a recurring NPC's ass. I am dead fucking serious about this.

So yeah, this probably wouldn't have looked out of place in a Wii shovelware title. The biggest sin of Virtual Bart is that it probably only needed the brand name to sell, which is something the gaming populace took almost four entire generations to notice the pattern and grow out of.

July 21, 2020

Ambulance (Operation: Inner Space)

Now introducing the first Windows game on this list, as well as the only one specifically for Windows 3.1 (though I believe it still worked on 95/98 with a bit of tweaking). Inner Space's premise is probably the most appealing part of it, as it also forms the majority of its gameplay hooks too - it takes place within your actual computer, and the folders and files of your actual hard drive form the contents of the game itself. That's not to say the gimmick is all that Inner Space has going for it. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Inner Space was actually far ahead of its time, to such an extent that the tech of the time really held it back - but even with what it had it still had its own self-contained ecosystem that continues to morph as you keep playing it, and it honestly should be a fucking crime that almost nobody has tried a idea like it since.

The basic gameplay loop of Inner Space is simple - in every folder is an assortment of "icons" based its contents, usually specific file formats like executibles. Every time you enter a folder, up to 8 icons are chosen and spread throughout the play area, and you collect as many of them as you can to trade for repairs, upgrades and weapons in the ambulance, and then leave for another folder. Some folders have hazards like turrets, viruses or an unusual abundance of asteroids, but the highlights would probably have to be the other ships. They aren't necessarily just enemy combatants - every individual ship in the game has their own opinion of you, and you can influence that opinion by allowing them to collect icons and fuel, helping them out (usually with simple things like helping them attack an infected icon or a rival - no side quests or anything)... or of course, just straight up attempting to murder them. Oh yeah, about that "rivals" thing - almost all ships are a part of a distinct faction too, so some may already be friendly or antagonistic towards you depending on your choice of starting ship, and those factions include pirates and police. Yes, this game even has its own system of laws, and yes you can be arrested for breaking them. Though the image of another ship launching handcuffs on you and towing you to the exit is kinda funny, I still have to appreciate the depth of all the systems in play here.

If I had just one complaint, it would be the way your ship reacts to damage. Any time you take a hit of any kind, whether it's a blaster shot, a physical object or a rocket, it forcibly rotates your ship. Depending on the damage, it could be a matter of 10 degrees, or it could be several full loops. But whatever the case, it makes trying to get a bead on someone really fucking annoying when taking the slightest hit in return will completely throw your aim off, but it's honestly a small gripe on an otherwise fucking amazing game. Software Dynamics still sells the game on their website, and has even included instructions to get it running on modern platforms an--

Hold on a second. You can run Windows 3.1 through DOSbox? I didn't actually know that until just now. Mind fucking blown.

July 22, 2020

Okay guys, can I be frank about this? I don't think I like JRPGs all that much. Most of them run on a very tired formula, usually some variation of "spam the free attacks until you hit a boss, then splurge all your mana on them at once", but most of them are hard to develop beyond that in a way that doesn't either come off as micromanaging a dizzying spreadsheet of stats, playing a game of "guess what obscure and untold weakness this next enemy has", or "let's throw QTEs into the combat that distract people from the cool fighting animations we clearly spent so much time on". To most fans of the genre though, this is irrelevant, because they specialize in a sense of scale and scope that is very difficult to portray anywhere else, and even though I personally prefer a game I'm in full control of I still have to acknowledge that this is one of the most efficient formulas for tactfully drawing a game out into a grand adventure.

So now that I've gotten that off my chest? Fuck Final Fantasy. Chrono Trigger is where it's at.

Crono, Lucca and Marle (Chrono Trigger)

Chrono Trigger's development reads like an all stars get-together, boasting veterans of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and even Dragon Ball as figureheads in their dream team - their words, not mine. In many other cases this can actually be a recipe for disaster, with big egos clashing or just simply having too many cooks in one kitchen as the case may be - but not only did it mostly go swimmingly for everyone involved, it turned into an instant classic, widely regarded as one of the single best games of the genre and one of the best games ever created period. Chrono Trigger's biggest claim to fame, gameplay wise, is the ability to combine the special attacks of your party into a single, more effective combination of them - most famous among them probably being the main magic characters Lucca and Marle being able to imbue Chrono's sword with an elemental attack - as well as various mooks and bosses throughout the game being able to do the very same to you.

Speaking of shit that should have ended in distaster, time travel plots? Chrono Trigger makes that shit work. Where most time travel in fiction is used as a total crutch for hack writers that can't cover up their plot holes any other way, in CT it's woven intelligently and creatively throughout the course of any given playthrough, with solutions to certain problems spanning literally generations through the course of human history, not just to uncover the secret of preventing a forthcoming apocalypse but even for various sidequests throughout the game. Even more interesting still is that the narrative is crammed with loaded Chekov's Guns all over the place, stuff that won't make total sense to the player until hours later into the playthrough, often with the time travel mechanic itself playing a big part in uncovering them.

As a JRPG, I find that Chrono Trigger is one of the most perfectly balanced curves of progression I've ever seen in a role playing game - most games of the kind are ridiculously hard until you clear the first boss, and then level you up too quickly afterwards so the near entirety of everything else in the game is a steamroll, and some games make you too powerful right from the get-go so you never experience anything that resembles a challenge at all. Somehow, CT manages such a fine line between the two that you'll never have to break from its intended progression of story for a mandatory grind, yet still manages to be challenging in the process without being completely irritating. Honestly it feels like fucking magic, because I don't think I've ever seen a single other game pull it off this well.

And on one last, SUPER spoilery note:

Spoiler

I admire that this game had the balls to kill off the player's own expy character. Even though there's a way to undo it, it's one of the most involved sidequests in the entire game, second only to the Black Omen. Yes, this game considers saving YOUR life a side quest. I can't think of many other games that are this willing to see you humbled, and on some level I wish it happened more often.

July 23, 2020

Bad Mr Frosty (Clayfighter)

Clayfighter was made right at the height of Mortal Kombat's popularity, and seemingly as a direct knee-jerk reaction to it. Maybe it was making a statement about the then-outrageous levels of violence MK regularly displayed even on a casual level, or maybe it was trying to cash in on a bandwagon with the logic that a game they could legally sell to a broader age range would grant them greater returns, right? Whatever the reasoning is, this is a classic executive mistake, one probably made most famous by the deluge of Call of Duty clones of the X360/PS3 era - you don't make games for the explicit purpose of poaching games from a much greater and more popular franchise, because the people who are interested in a Mortal Kombat game are already fucking playing Mortal Kombat games. They'll not going to flip from a titan of the industry just because an alternative exists, and it takes an absolute monument of marketing just to get on their level, nevermind edge into their playerbase. Of course, it also helps if the people actually making the title have any... well... talent.

To tell the truth, I was honestly contemplating skipping over this game entirely because I thought this writeup would just be a repeat of the one I did for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers - it's a fighting game that only has a concept of neutral and not much else, and most fights can be won simply by picking The Blob, holding forward and spamming Heavy Kick. Apon reviewing the game, though, I was honestly kinda shocked how lazily put together this game is. It recycles shit so much that most light/mid/heavy attacks are literally the same animation, just with different animation speeds or frames cut out. The arcade ladder recycles entire fights verbatim, making you fight Taffy, Tiny and Bonker twice for no apparent reason but to pad it out some more. And just to add the cherry on top, this was another one of those games which didn't bother adjusting the PAL release for 50hz, if nothing else slowing down the music to such an extent that I have seen it induce actual nausea in people.

And then there's the end boss, aptly named... well, "N.Boss". Just look at it. Look at it. It's the actual, almost literal example of "this character exists because the designers ran out of ideas".

It doesn't really even have a moveset to speak of. It just manifests balls that fly across the screen, without even animating anything on the boss's part. In fact, these projectiles just happen independently of their own actions, so they can theoretically attack you during any action. Including blocking. So beating them at all is a total crapshoot of jumpkicking at them repeatedly and praying that you don't eat shit the moment you land because the boss can attack you at literally any time, with literally no pattern and literally no warning, and almost always with the same strength as a heavy kick. Say what you will about MK3 Shao Kahn, at least he has a moveset with actual moves that can have a strategy formed around them. This is just mindless bullshit.

July 24, 2020

USP Talon (Tyrian 2000)

Tyrian is great at so many things that I honestly can't comprehend why it's as obscure as it is. It's incredibly feature complete, jam packed with content, still has a ridiculous amount of replay value AND had the backing of Epic Megagames, today one of the biggest players in the gaming industry. And all of that is ON TOP OF being one of the best games ever made in the genre. What the hell happened?

Let's back up a bit. Tyrian is one of the first schmups to my knowledge that you can control entirely with the mouse. That might sound somewhat silly to some of you, but it really can't be overstated just how much better the game controls when your ship is essentially a cursor with guns, capable of making movements both quick and precise whenever one or the other were necessary. It wasn't like you needed many buttons to play it - just left click for main guns and right click for subweapons. There are times throughout the game where I swear this kind of fluidity is borderline necessary just to progress, nevermind to get through without taking otherwise avoidable hits, and it's super strange to me that Tyrian is an outlier for this kind of control scheme for how much better it makes the game play.

One of the other things I appreciate about this game is that it's one of the only games of its type that genuinely incentivizes playing for score, in that the score also forms the basis of the game's currency. In between levels (at least, if you're not playing the arcade mode), you can use money to acquire, swap and upgrade equipment for your ship, including not just the aformentioned weapons but also shields (which act as a rechargable buffer on top of your armour), generators (which all of your weapons and shields draw from, limiting your overall effectiveness if you don't invest in these early) and even brand new ships (which tend to have more efficient armour ratings than previous ones). My only real complaint with this system is that for the sheer amount of choice this game gives you for weaponry, you don't often have much incentive to swap for the situation, even WITH the fact that swapping weapons gives you a full refund on your previous one including all its upgrades. Many weapons are just so objectively better than the others, such as the lighting gun and the Zica Laser that you never have any reason to use a different one, and once you get the Laser (yes, that's a separate weapon to the Zica Laser) you might as well just tape LMB down and attach the mouse to a metronome because there isn't much left in the game that can challenge you after that point.

Tyrian also has an... interesting way of handling its plot. It occasionally gives you text exposition between certain levels, but most of its worldbuilding and narrative unfolds through "data cubes", pickups that you can find on the course of a mission and read through the upgrades screen afterwards. Tyrian pokes fun at this limitation pretty early on - there's a level where most of the enemies show pretty dated tech compared to yours, with gigantic blimps and WWII-esque planes that mostly fire bullets and occasionally try to ram you Kamikaze style. It's only after the level that you can read the datacubes that tell you that these enemies were only trying to flee from the main boss of the level and you happened to be in the way, most likely wiping them out in its stead. However, the fact remains that you can miss collecting these datacubes completely if you're unlucky, and you only have to miss a handful of them to no longer have any fucking idea what the hell is going on anymore.

Even when it's completely senseless, though, Tyrian is still a classic in my eyes and I don't have any hesitation recommending it to anyone, even if you're not much into the genre. It's an especially good breath of fresh air in the climate of schmups today, which for some reason seem obsessed with one hit deaths and flooding the screen with more projectile than backdrop.

July 25, 2020

Ness, Paula, Jeff and Poo (Earthbound)

Earthbound might just be one of the worst first impressions I've ever seen a videogame give. Its marketing, at least in the west, made out like the game was quite literally gross, which is such a ridiculous misrepresentation of the game's setting and humour that I'm not convinced anyone in marketing had even seen it, let alone played it. Even playing it, though, it quickly paints a picture of relative mediocrity, where most of the fighting isn't animated at all, fights that frequently kick the shit out of you without recourse until you grind levels, and even then seem to depend on how many turns the enemy wastes on useless actions more than anything else. After a while and some amount of patience, though, it just... clicks, for lack of better description. It's an RPG that's unconventional by its very narrative and design, culminating in a struggle against a concept of evil so profound it literally transcends comprehension.

Having a bigger party seems like a requirement for doing well in this game, which is why it sucks so much that you acquire party members at such a glacial pace only to repeatedly cut your party down to size at various intervals throughout the game. Poo in particular is introduced so late that you only have a few mcguffins left to collect at that point, and that annoys me because stupid name aside he has some of the coolest abilities in the game, including the ability to outright transform into other enemies on the field Ditto style. Contrary to his Smash counterpart, Ness is mostly a battle healer in this game with a side of debuffs, his only direct offensive technique being the PSI Rockin' series which attacks all enemies for a tremendous cost of PSI points. It's a very unusual focus for a party lead character, but a welcome breath of fresh air all the same. Lord knows the early game would have been much harder if PSI Hypnosis wasn't an option on Franky, an absolute jerkass who doesn't seem to have a problem with stabbing kids.

As I alluded to earlier, Earthbound has a sense of humour very atypical of JRPGs of the day, and even today has only seen a resurgence thanks to the likes of Undertale. Like pathways being blocked off by statues of pencils, which can only be removed by way of a device called a Pencil Eraser, which then later throws you for a loop when statues of erasers start to appear. Like all the NPCs in the game being able to communicate with you, including the dogs, one of which is apparently an expy for the developers. Like being forced to stand perfectly still for five actual minutes to access the lair of Master Belch, a sentient pile of vomit that is capable of making your party members sick... okay, maybe there's some truth to the grossness thing. The point is, there's really no other game of its time like Earthbound, and the game itself is all too aware of that fact, which is probably the best kind of weird that a game can be. It belies a unique, sometimes even relatable charm that keeps the game memorable all these years later, in spite of the poor introduction the game gives you up until around Twoson or so.

July 26, 2020

Donkey Kong (Donkey Kong Land)

Not to be confused with Donkey Kong Country, which was the SNES title that this Gameboy cart was based off of. Considering it's a handheld with only like four shades of grey to work with, Land actually does a pretty good job of replicating its graphical style, but it also forms the game's second biggest weakness, at least if you're playing on Gameboy Pocket or earlier - because of the ghosting and blurring issues on OG Gameboys, most of the best GB titles have relatively simple and flat graphics where everything that absolutely needs to pop out, doesn't have a problem doing so. With all the grit and grain in DKL's graphics, it doesn't take much to devolve into indecipherable mush and completely lose track of where you and the hazards of the stage are. Okay, but that's the system's fault, so as long as you emulate or get a Gameboy Colour you're fine, right?

Well, there are several games on this list that would otherwise be unremarkable but for one or two ridiculous, monumental fuckups that can singlehandedly ruin games and pose important game design lessons all on their own, and DKL is one of them. It's a punishing platformer to be sure, even once you get past screen issues, but that's just par the course for Donkey Kong games - the real problem is its handling of the KONG letters which, like Country, are individually spread out over the course of the level. I forget what they did in Country, I think they gave you an extra life or something? But in Land, they don't give you anything until you complete the level with all four of them in your possession, at which point you're awarded with... the ability to save your game.

Nevermind that the game doesn't just autosave when you complete a level. Nevermind that it isn't even a point of convenience somewhere along the journey, like a specific save station on the map. You have to go out of your way to EARN the ability to do something as simple as updating your fucking save file. On a system with limited battery life, to boot. I'm sorry, what??? Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? How did it even get through QA? The game did almost everything else just fine so it clearly was tested. Who put it into the game thinking it made it better, and who put up with it thinking it wasn't such a big deal??? Why is this game remembered as a classic in spite of it??? Why is the sky green?????? Just trying to make any sense of how any of this happened makes my head hurt.

July 27, 2020

Robin (The Adventures of Batman and Robin)

Yes I mained Robin, and Batman was already taken. Sue me.

This was one of two games I know of that were styled after Batman the Animated Series. I feel like a lot of people gave this game a pass because they had the same name on both the SNES and the Genesis, which I wouldn't blame for thinking that would make one a port of the other, even though in reality they were COMPLETELY different games. This post is about the Genesis version, which was styled more after Contra than anything else, which is something you'd think wouldn't fit for a Batman game. In fact, Adventures Genesis does a LOT of shit that really shouldn't work for Batman, but somehow it just... does? By default your attack button throws your ranged weapon, usually either a Batarang or the bolas pictured here (nobody in their right mind picks the shuriken intentionally), and you can aim them in 8 directions like a Contra game, but if there's an enemy right up in your face, your character just punches them instead. It's very rare that you do one or the other unintentionally, and I swear it never stops being satisfying to pull off. The same goes for the jump kicks, which are fairly similar to the ones in Gunstar Heroes if memory serves me right. Just a nice, punchy THONK every time. I love it. Genesis Adventures is a treat for all the senses honestly, even if audio speaking it's... again, pretty unconventional by Batman standards.

Yep, that's a hardcore techno soundtrack by Jesper fucking Kyd. That just happened.

Graphically speaking it's amazing too. The character sprites look a little squashed, granted, but there's a lot of amazing technical trickery going on in the backdrops that is so far second only to Ranger-X on the Genesis, and even just by their own merits they're so consistent with the show's visual style that there are some scenes that honestly wouldn't look out of place on it at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure some of them are direct nods to elements and environments of the show, such as the opening stage being a dramatic retelling of the show's intro where you're fighting off goons and bank robbers right in the thick of a massive heist by the Joker's goons.

I just love the setpiecing in this game, so can I just nerd out about my favourite level for a bit? I'll spoil it just in case people would rather experience it fresh, but the point is our introduction to Two Face in this game is fucking incredible.

Spoiler

Alright so the entire first level in Two Face's lineup is an elevator level. You know the type - platform goes up, enemies drop down on you. Normally I would hate this kind of autoscroller, but not only does Batman do it pretty well on its own, it also foreshadows the gimmick of the upcoming boss by having Two Face regularly ropeladder down to throw a handful of TNT sticks at the platform, in specific patterns and formations that leave a single small safe spot or a narrow opportunity to weave between two waves of TNT. This all culminates at the peak of the elevator, where Two Face drops down on a giant blimp, armed with four big turrets with their own individual health values. This is where Two Face promptly gets sick of your shit and, in between barrages from the turrets, throws an entire fucking bundle of dynamite at you, causing the ground to buckle and slant back downwards. And every time the explosives come out, the ground buckles further and you sink down another floor or so.

Once you finally blow up all the turrets and start being able to attack the ship itself, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's smooth sailing from there. Not exactly - the next time the TNT comes out, the platform can't take anymore and GOES INTO FUCKING FREEFALL. Thankfully this doesn't give you an actual time limit to finish, but the franticness that it inspires, from the scenery rapidly slipping downwards, the blimp falling almost offscreen as it struggles to keep pace, and still having to dodge waves of explosives while trying to finish the blimp off is just a thing of fucking beauty.

It's just a shame that the absolute nadir of the game follows immediately after it, going from an amazing boss setpiece to a twenty actual minute long schmup section. I have honestly lost muscle memory in the time it takes to get to the next area proper, and I wish I knew what possessed these guys to drag it out so long, if for no other reason than the fact that everything from then on needs a really firm grasp of your abilities and limitations to survive. Oh, yeah, this game WILL kick your ass the first few times. Add another one to the "games I need to beat with my newfound adulthood powers" bucket list, then.

July 28, 2020

The Riddler (Batman Forever)

Okay, so first of all I should probably explain this... monstrosity I created for today's sprite. Much like Mortal Kombat, Batman Forever uses digitized graphics - which is to say, they recorded a bunch of actors striking poses IRL, then converted that data into ingame sprites. So I figured, how hard could it be? I'll just take a still from the movie, shove it in Aesprite as a reference layer and trace over it and all's good, right? Dear god, I have no idea what the fuck I was thinking. There's probably a really good reason that realistic human proportions aren't attempted often in low-res sprites, because it's SO HARD to make it look right. That being said, it looks fucking hilarious and it felt sorta dishonest to put this much work into it without showing off the result, so I put it up anyway for good measure - with another one in my normal style for comparison. Right, so back to the game.

When you hear about Batman Forever from the outside, it honestly sounds like it has most of the details down-pat. A beat em up that draws mainly loose inspiration from the movie, rewards curiosity and investigation with extra routes and goodies and has a wide assortment of gadgets to choose from? How could they fuck that up? Big clue - it's not just the graphical style Forever aped from Mortal Kombat, but the fucking gameplay engine too. An engine which, you can probably deduce, isn't at all suited for tasks like life-or-death platforming, striking precise areas with arcing projectiles or even so much as a grappling hook that you can fucking aim. That grappling hook in particular is a point of contention for nearly everybody who played this game, because by default it launches at a diagonal angle that will hit almost nothing that isn't explicitly designed to be hit by it. Most of the time you need to grapple directly upwards, which is done by pressing up and the grapple button at the same time, but most of the time you can't do that because the up button makes your fucking character jump, so you have to press the two buttons so close together that it might as well be frame perfect. This, at least, can be inferred with a bit of intuition and experimentation - to drop down from a platform, something you need to do just to get through the first level, you need to press down and C, which in additon to also being frame perfect it isn't even so much as hinted at by the game in any fashion.

And all those cool gadgets the game teases? Not only are they also hidden behind insane and obscure button combinations, you can only bring two of them at a time into any given level. Why? Who the fuck knows? Why would you give them independant button combinations AND an inventory limit when you could just standarize the inputs for those given slots or I dunno, not arbitarily limiting your character's fucking moveset for no perceivable reason? Worse still, the game doesn't even display what the button combinations ARE for any of the gadgets - you have to dive into the manual to see them, which a second hand copy of the game might not even have.

The game does look nice, all things considered, but most of it is window dressing because the level design is fucking horrible, culminating in the circus level which not only requires you to beat every enemy on the screen to progress AND requires blind leaps of faith to god only knows where to make them spawn, the entire level is on a fucking time limit which immediately kills you and forces you to redo the entire level if it hits zero. And it's a very strict time limit too - I only ever cleared this level because screen transitions had a tendency to glitch and overflow the clock if you went between areas in a certain way. This is still tame compared to the SNES version, though, which has one major difference - instead of losing a life if the clock runs out, THE GAME IMMEDIATELY FUCKING ENDS, EVEN IF YOU HAD LIVES TO SPARE.

Honestly, they should have just made it a vanilla beat-em-up game, like the arcade version did. It's still not fantastic by any stretch of the imagination, but by the standarsd of 90s licensed videogames, it's goddamn magical by comparison.

July 29, 2020

Speedy (Tails Adventure)

Now introducing the first - and only - Game Gear game on this list, a Sonic-themed spinoff starring a side character in an island trekking prequel metroidvania. Whew, that's kind of a fucking mouthful. In spite of its flaws, I fucking love this game because it's a sense of exploration I wish more modern and mainstream games could benefit from, where you have genuine incentive to move any direction besides right and could unlock entirely different levels depending on your route through them - the ability to find extra tools to add to your kit along the way in this case is just an added bonus, and kind of expected from a metroidvania game.

What puts Tails Adventure a step behind the giants of the genre, like say Super Metroid, is its inventory system. You can only equip four different items at a time, and you have to pause the game to scroll through them - which as I've probably covered on previous games, is irritating and flow breaking all by itself. What's worse is that you can't change your equips mid-level - only at Tails's House, so if you happen apon a dead end and don't have the right tools equipped, you have to manually backtrack all the way back to the closest exit for the level, go all the way back home, swap all your tools around and start the level totally from scratch. Compare and contrast Super Metroid, through which most of Samus's upgrades either fire alongside all the others as an arm cannon upgrade, function as a natural part of her movement or at worst, segregated to a single row of alternate fire modes to toggle through. Considering most of Tails's frequently used kit in this game is several varieties of bombs, I find it strange in hindsight that they weren't all folded into a single bomb that you can upgrade with the other special bombs you find along the way, just like Samus does with her Ice, Spazer, Wave and Plasma Beams.

And because you have to double up on bomb items so often with your limited inventory space, you're often not afforded a whole lot of room to experiment, play around or even so much as use an attack that's more straightforward than throwing bombs at everything. Tails has two melee attacks you can unlock later, but both of them take up an inventory slot. You can unlock the spindash late into the game, which is as dangerous to you as everyone else and hilarious fun to use, but that takes up an inventory slot too. Night vision? Inventory slot! The ability to run? Inventory slot! Warp out of the level and head back home at a moment of your choosing? Inventory slot! A fucking useless boom box that only changes the BGM playing over the current level? You guessed it, that takes up its own separate inventory slot! The only things that DO actually stack in this game are Chaos Emeralds, which are this game's equivalent of Energy Tanks - they extend your hitpoints, and increase the length of time Tails can fly for on top of the sad 2-3 seconds worth you start with. God damn, this game could have done with a lot of streamlining thinking back on it now.

Even still, I love it to bits. Conquering the island little by little is a satisfying experience in its own right, and with what little experience I have with the Game Gear it's honestly the only title on the system I can still recommend over its console-based brethren.

July 30, 2020

Sketch Turner (Comix Zone)

In case you're not following the obvious motif yet, Comix Zone follows the brief tale of Sketch Turner, a comic book artist thrust into his own creation through... some kind of freak accident? The intervention of the comic's main villain? A mixture of the two? Honestly, the game doesn't make that part terribly clear. What IS clear, though, is that the game absolutely weaves the comic book setting into both its aesthetics and its gameplay, and many people seem to hold Comix Zone in high regard for this reason alone. Characters repeatedly banter mid-fight through speech bubbles, big impacts are sold with visible THWACKS that usually send people sailing into the opposite wall, and screen transitions are all handled through literally leaping between the panels of the comic, if not occasionally tearing right through them. Which is why I wish I could say I love this game, I really do - there's absolutely nothing wrong with it mechanically, but its mechanics conceal inventory management puzzles tantamount to Sierra levels of bullshit.

Every now and then, the level drops you single use - and I do mean single use - items that take up one of three inventory slots. Thankfully unlike Batman fucking Forever above, they're each assigned an individual single button command to activate (with the top row X Y Z buttons respectively), so credit where credit's due, there's absolutely no fiddling around with this system - you have an item, you have a button, you press button to use item. It's honestly crazy that it took this long for someone to impliment a system like this. The problems start in how the items are specifically used. One could be forgiven for thinking they're just there to give you a trump card in fights when things aren't going your way. Occasionally, they are. But more often than not you're expected to hold onto them until you find an obstacle that can't be cleared any other way, and the game doesn't always make it clear whether or not you have a choice in the matter - so sometimes that bundle of TNT you get early on might get wasted on something inconsequential before you realize you needed to save it for the NEXT FUCKING STAGE.

For many problems the game throws at you, they at least offer the alternative of brute forcing it in case you didn't have the foresight to - and I can't stress this enough - use items that don't even belong to the same LEVEL as the one you're currently in. Some of you might be thinking "then why are you bitching? Just bash everything open if you're not going to perform speedrunner levels of prep work?", and there's a very simple reason for that - attacking breakable objects drains your mother fucking health. I mean, I guess fair enough if you're doing that to incentivise doing puzzles the "correct" way, but some panels require you to do this whether or not you want to. It's possible to make it all the way to Kung Fung without taking a single hit, and still lose about a third of your HP because of this stupid, stupid, fucking moronic gameplay quirk. The only purpose any of this serves is to artificially inflate the game's longetivity by way of fake difficulty and beginner's traps, and in my eyes it ruins what otherwise should have been a fantastic beat em up, right up there with Streets of Rage.

July 31, 2020

Octolris

This is a game so obscure and insignificant that I honestly struggled to find what year it was made in. What will probably come as a surprise to nobody is that the reasons for this, among many, include that it's bad in a way that other games struggle to be if they have any kind of oversight at all. Given the obscurity of the developers and the game in question, it's hard not to feel like picking on such a tiny and unknown game like this for being so poorly designed is sorta like bullying and preaching to the choir - but at the same time, I feel like it's genuinely important to remember a few games like this in your lifetime, because without them most of us have no way of realizing just how much we take the simplest, most basic standards of videogames for granted.

"How basic", you might ask? How about a platforming game with physics that resemble any kind of actual jumping? In Octolris, they're basically scripts - jumping horizontally basically just plays an animation and shunts you forwards a set distance, stopping once you collide with a solid object. Obviously this means either making the level design around that exact jump distance, or inspiring frustration because your jump keeps passing right over the single block wide foothold you need to land on to progress further into the level, of which Octolris seems to employ both of at once. Even just jumping forwards, though, is a fucking chore in of itself, because by default jumping only makes you jump directly upwards, which considering there aren't any drop through platforms in this game is almost literally useless. Even IF you're already holding forwards when you press jump, you'll still jump directly upwards and not forwards - you have to press both buttons simultaneously, which is irritating and unreliable. The developers were absolutely aware of this, because they made separate fucking buttons for jumping left and jumping right.

And worse still? Those buttons were bound to fucking Home and PageUp, and weren't rebindable. Here's a little experiment you guys can try for yourselves, right now - hold your left hand over the arrow keys, and put your right over the block where Home and PageUp are, That's fucking uncomfortable as hell, right? Now imagine playing a game like that. And then imagine being the fuckers that designed the game to play like that, and somehow did not fucking comprehend how uncomfortable it is to play like that.

And then we get to the climbing mechanic. Yes, according to Octolris, that's a feature. And it has its own fucking keybind. And that keybind is the slash key. Was this game designed for actual octopi or something? It's legitimately impossible to have your fingers on every key at once and still have enough dexterity left to press any of them on demand - and that's not even the worst part! Climbing is a fucking finite resource in this game! Fucking CLIMBING! There's vials of slime scattered all around the place, and once you run out of it, you just can't climb anymore. That's it. It's not even like you climb anything exciting like spidermanning up walls or around cielings, this is just for fucking ladders and grilles in the backgrounds. Some of you might be asking "wait, if you can just run out of the ability to climb ladders, won't you get stuck?", and the answer is absolutely yes! In fact, there are regular sewer mazes in this game that are almost exclusively climbing, and are so confusing to navigate that running out of slime and soft locking is a genuine threat! Holy shit, how do you design a system like this and not realize this is a thing that can happen? Why the fuck do you even need a system where you need to collect pickups to climb fucking ladders??? Just let the octopus climb ladders AAAAUGH

August 1, 2020

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem 3D)

Finally we get to the best known, and frankly best overall, Duke game out there. It was a HUGE shakeup in the identity of the franchise, jumping from Shwarzenegger expy to full blown, voiced-over character, from platformer to first person shooter, and perhaps more importantly, from juvenile fun to blood, gore and even sexual themes. For the most part, that's not why I'm bringing the game up, because ultimately it's just window dressing for all the areas the game excelled in above most of its competition of the day. I honestly can't think of many games of its day that depict level design in the urban jungle quite like Duke 3D did, and even today I'd say it's held to pretty high regard considering the state of the genre - hell, the industry in general - today. I also think it's pretty important to remember that this isn't just down to bunch of squares and textures arranged to resemble rooms either - the environmental interactivity this game boasts is sorely taken for granted, from little things like being able to break every bottle, hydrant and extinguisher you see to practical shit breaking open vents and blasting right through walls to uncover entirely new routes through the level, even if said walls are ultimately predetermined. It obviously needs to be said that I fucking love Doom, but Duke's world was practically breathing by comparison and I can't help but appreciate it all the more for it.

Duke's sense of humour can be... admittedly a little hit and miss from Duke 3D onwards. The overwhelming majority of Duke 3D's voiceovers, and even segments of the level design and progression, read like a love letter for 80s and 90s pop culture, and there are a lot of points where the game absolutely fucking nails it, whether it be a very timely quip or a much more subtle reference, like the submarine in the first episode being the very same one from Hunt for Red October. But sometimes it's just references for reference's sake, and it's not unheard of for Duke to just straight up steal another IP's catch phrase without any of the context that made it memorable in its own medium, and sometimes it makes it difficult to believe Duke even has any character of his own beyond being a physical amalgamation of other people's one liners. 3D gets away with it more often because its references are older and more obscure, to the point that many people still haven't made connection them and their original inspiration.

And although the arsenal of the game is pretty good overall, the latter half of it gets... somewhat questionably gimmicky compared to the ever reliable Ripper, RPG and even the remote detonated Pipe Bombs. The Freezethrower seems pretty cool the first time you get your hands on it, but on most enemies it can't actually kill them singlehandedly, just bring them down to 1HP - which means until you switch weapons or get right up in their face and Mighty Boot them, frozen enemies physically obstruct your Freezethrower shots and actually serve as BARRIERS for enemies behind them, which is a limitation I don't feel like the weapon actually needed. Likewise, Tripbombs seem to serve virtually no purpose in a singleplayer campaign, and because of some strange engine weirdness the Devastator actually causes enemies to approach you faster for some reason, which on a rapidfire splash damage weapon is a surefire recipe to having your own fucking face blown off.

To be clear though, these are just nitpicks - at the end of the day, it's still a classic in its own right, and for its day a technical marvel... that might have well been just a day, though, because the next game on the list blew Duke away on the technical spectrum REAL fucking quickly...

August 2, 2020

Ranger (Quake)

As it turns out, "I ain't afraid of no Quake" is a particularly delicious choice of famous last words on Duke's part.

There is plenty to digest on Quake's own merits, like its use of lovecraftian themes and monsters, well balanced weaponry and a soundtrack composed by Nine Inch Nails, but most people will remember Quake for being the first of many things. It's one of the first true fully 3D shooters, from environmental objects to weapons and characters, and even some of the projectiles. It's one of the first games to finally break the mold of levels designed from the top down only, to the point that it blew people's minds that rooms could now be placed above other rooms. It invented many techniques that other games would preserve for years if not decades to come, such as the bunny hop and the rocket jump. And with its ability to record times and save easily sharable replay files, it could even be credited as the birth of competitive speedrunning as we know it today. This is of course, on top of all the things Doom already did well, such as the concept of online Deathmatches, several expansions and the modding ability that is practically customary of iD titles of old.

That kind of pedigree makes it a game that's really difficult to criticise - this was a genre that was no pun intended, already turning into an arms race, and the introduction of Quake practically tipped the whole genre on its head once more and raised the bar for everyone else involved all on its own. I mean, maybe I could say that certain enemies are particularly cunty, like the Spawn (which blows up on death, and is basically guaranteed to be hogging your personal space when it does) or the Vore (which fires homing missiles with a tenacity unheard of even for fucking Doom Revenants). I could say it's not made clear how you actually beat the final boss, or that the final teleporter has a moving destination that is seen literally nowhere else in the entire game and that taking it at the wrong time will just dunk you into lava. I could say that shotguns could stand to feel a bit less wimpy than they are here, even considering that the single shotgun is your starting weapon in this game. But once again, it's nitpicking - nothing that keeps Quake from being iD's kick up the ass to the FPS genre once again.

So let me take this opportunity to bitch about Quake II instead. Why did they throw everything out almost everything unique the game did for a sequel that had almost nothing in common with it? Why wasn't this its own IP? Why did they never revisit the concepts that Quake 1 started with? Why is both the machinegun AND the minigun so awkward to use? What is WITH this inventory system it uses that forces you to scroll through items one at a time to get to one you need for that given situation? Just about everything about this sequel feels like a downgrade to all the areas Quake 1 excelled in, and I can't stand how Quake 2 is not only held in such higher regard, but that it's formed the basis of every Quake game that came thereafter. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Quake 1 was absolutely iD's shark jumping moment in the industry - it was an incredible breakthrough, to be sure, but the only way to go from there was down.

August 3, 2020

The Adversary (Death Rally)

Top down racing is a genre that seems to have just completely disappeared with the advent of 3D, and on some level I'm not entirely sure why. In fact with racing as a whole being as absurdly stagnant as it is right now, as well as gamepads becoming a standard of control much preferable to the keyboards this game ran on, I feel like this kind of game could honestly stand to make a comeback. Death Rally, simply put, comes from the Road Rash school of racing premises, which is to say 1), attacking and wiping out the competition is a genuine option, and 2) you're playing for money, so coming anything less than first isn't the end of the world as long as you still have a functioning car and aren't dead last. You might think that's a lot easier when you're driving cars instead of bikes, but Death Rally ups the ante by giving every car mounted guns as a bare minimum, with the option to buy temporary perks like land mines and spiked bumpers between races.

Most of the risks in Road Rash are self evident, as obstacles, cars and cops, but most risks in Death Rally are presented to you as offers and sponsors, because yes this is a publicly broadcasted blood sport thank you very much. Some of them are straightforward, like execs paying you for winning streaks or the grim reaper giving you a bonus for wasting every opponent in the race, to borrowing money from a loan shark or being tasked with taking out a specific racer, under threat of punishment if you fail. And sometimes you might genuinely need that kind of money because not only do you constantly need to keep on top of repairs, you need to keep upgrading your car to keep up with the big guys of any given race, as well eventually being able to take down Death Rally's mysterious champion that is The Adversary himself. Quick side note on the upgrades in particular is that this game really has a way with words on everything that costs money in this game, and I swear some of the descriptions could pass as downright pornographic when read out of context.

Honestly, I think my one complaint for Death Rally is that it's built with keyboards in mind and doesn't have any local multiplayer. It's nothing that can't be gotten over with a little practice, but this is the kind of game that's just dying for a console port of some kind because honestly, consoles would probably have handled its feature set a lot better all things considered. Death Rally would eventually get a modern remake helmed by Remedy, but honestly it's not the same to me and I really wish I had the words to explain why - it just feels... off. That's it. Probably has something to do with the fact that it was built with mobile platforms first.

August 4, 2020

I just want to pause here real quick, because this game represents to me, an important milestone in this project - the final Genesis game on this list. When I first started making these, I never imagined I'd have the persistence to make it this far, let alone do a sprite every single waking day without fail ever since starting. It's given me a lot of things to reflect on, a few ideas on things I could improve on given more time even despite my intentionally simple style, a few design lessons and revelations I honestly hadn't been expecting to make in hindsight - and let's be honest, an overwhelming amount of nostalgia for times long since gone. And I guess I just wanted to take a moment to thank the few of you that have been following this journey so far. We're still far from done, but the Genesis games on my list probably represented one of the most densely populated clusters on it, so thing should move a bit faster from here on out. Stay tuned after this for my... admittedly brief trek through the N64 period.

So, back to the game.

Woody (Toy Story)

Probably to the surprise of few people who just read "final Genesis game on the list", Toy Story utilizes a lot of graphical trickery to pull its look off and does so on such a consistent basis that I'm surprised it never drops frames as a result of it. I mean, it'd be so easy to point at the buttery smooth digitized animations for all the characters and enemies represented, but even on a casual level the backgrounds love to show off faux 3D backgrounds on a level even Ranger-X and Adventure of Batman and Robin never quite achieved, and on some level that makes me a little sad because I honestly never noticed until I had it pointed out to me many, many years later.

To be honest though, design wise this game employs a LOT of trial and error, especially these fucking autoscrolling sections, and I'll be the first to admit that most of the game's replay value is taking one too many hits that you couldn't avoid without foresight of what's coming, or tasks that require you to act quickly on things you will only be able to if you already know they're there. And while one can't help but appreciate the technical prowess that Traveller's Tales had on show throughout this game, it's hard not to feel like the game devolves into a tech demo at several points throughout to show it off, and the game part of the game usually suffers for it. It quite often ceases to be a platforming game entirely because of these segments, turning into top-down driving, auto-scrolling, an Outrun clone and at one point even an honest to god first person segment wherever it fits the narrative. It performs better than just about any other first person game on the Genesis but why in god's name was it made for THIS game???

So if ever there was a lesson to be learned from Toy Story, it's probably the simplest and oldest lesson of them all - graphics should never, ever trump gameplay. For a LICENSED game it's alright, hell, as far as the Genesis is concerned it's probably one of the better ones, but you better make sure you keep passwords handy because you're going to die a LOT and not have any idea how to avoid it until after it's already happened.

August 5, 2020

Max Damage (Carmageddon)

Let's not beat about the bush - Carmageddon is fucking stupid. Its characters and naming conventions are stupid. Its premise is stupid. Its gameplay is stupid. The AI is stupid. The balance is stupid. The track design is stupid. But honestly? Sometimes, there's nothing actually wrong with that. Sometimes you want a game where you can just switch your brain off and have dumb fun, without much regard for the game's flaws. Of course, this being a reflection on the game's traits and flaws, I still have to cover them in a somewhat unbiased fashion. I'll get to that in a minute.

Yet another game from the Road Rash "destroying the opposition is a legitimate option" school of racing games, Carmageddon goes out of its way to encourage you to run over pedestrians and ram into other racers at high speed, by way of giving you a limited amount of time in any given race and adding time to the clock for every person you run over and every damaging impact you land on another racer. In addition to full 3D rendered environments and cars, Carmageddon stands out because of its damage system, where taking hits to certain areas will cause your car to physically and dynamically deform in shape, as well as inhibit parts of your car's actual functionality. For its time, this kind of system was straight up unheard of. Hell, even today there are games that don't often go to this kind of trouble for calculating and showing vehicular damage.

So what's the problems with it? Let's start with the simplest one first - the draw distance is crap. A natural part of dealing heavy damage to another racer is having the opportunity to build up enough speed, which means putting plenty of distance between you and your target - but this is really hard to do when you can't fucking see anyone in the distance, so often this means gunning it on certain straightaways, narrowly missing other racers a lot because you don't see them promptly enough to correct course, and running into walls like an idiot. This segues into our second problem - the AI fucking cheats and warps around the place whenever you're not looking. You can pause the game to bring up a map screen which shows the current positions of all the living racers, but there's no guarantee that they'll be anywhere near that position even as you're speeding directly towards it. This simple inability to line up and ram anyone from beyond draw distance draws out fights a lot longer than they have any right to.

Which brings me to the biggest issue with the game - the track design. Carmageddon doesn't have tracks so much as environments they re-use constantly, spreading checkpoints and markers around the map to differentiate one race from the other. These environments are so open ended that you only have to lose sight of one checkpoint to completely lose the plot, nevermind the time it takes to get back into position if the checkpoints are placed on an elevated position, demonstrated as early as the second level. It's not uncommon to lose sight the actual intended route, nevermind the other racers, for extended periods of time. And honestly, a big part of why combat in this game drags out so much is that the routes are designed to extend far beyond the draw distance in the first place. Carmageddon still works alright if you're playing it for simple fun and don't overthink it too much, but it could have done SO much better for itself if it just abandoned any pretense of being a racing game and just threw all the cars into an arena to smash each other up, because a demo derby is clearly exactly what they wanted Carmageddon to be anyway.

August 6, 2020

Fox and Peppy (Lylat Wars)

Better known as Starfox 64 in the states, this marks our first entry into the N64, and most people's introduction to Starfox in general. With the exception of certain bosses and gauntlets, the game takes place almost entirely on rails as you skim the surface of a selection of planets (and a sun!) from the cockpit of an Arwing, the signature one-man fighter planes of the Starfox crew. Although there's a tutorial to help grasp the fancier moves your plane is capable of, like hard turning and somersaults, the structure of the game is pretty simple otherwise - you go to a planet, blow up as much of the enemy en route to the boss as you can, and certain actions or routes taken during the level will determine your ability to change your route through the solar system to another planet once you've completed the level. Some of these are obvious, such as preventing the destruction of a landmark during one of the aformentioned gauntlets, whereas others are more obscure, like flying your ship through narrow openings in the level geometry to trigger an event or triggering secret, psychedelic warps that lead to the opposite side of the galaxy.

Lylat Wars is a game designed to have quite a bit of replay value, and this is one reason among many - a single playthrough in the game can take about an hour, but there are many, many different routes you can take through the galaxy to get there, and even an alternate ending if you manage to enter Venom, the final planet, through Area 66. You can even unlock a harder, arranged version of all the stages after playing for a certain score requirement on all of them, giving you a longer term goal even after you've seen and completed every level in the game on its base requirements. All in all it's a game that's very difficult to tire of completely, and it's always a game I'll see through to the end if I ever pick it up again - there aren't many games I can say that about and mean it, and I think it's a testament to how misguided much of the industry has become in regard to the longetivity of games, which seem to nowadays be seen as the literal amount of time it takes to complete a game rather than whether or not the player ever wants to touch it again after the fact.

I dunno if there's a whole lot I can critique about it, but if there were any flaws at all to pick on, most of them would be in the multiplayer. For one, I think the inability to fly the campaign same-screen co-op is a huge missed opportunity, especially with the overacrching teamwork theme they have going with helping out your fellow wingmen in a jam. The "meta" in the multiplayer is explored briefely in the fights with rival gang Star Wolf, which teach you that you can somersault to get behind an enemy that's stubbornly on your tail, but in an actual multiplayer game they can get around that by... just also doing a somersault when you do, resetting the situation back to exactly the way it started. And because there's not much in the way to solve this stalemate, duels overwhelmingly end in the favour of the first pilot to get behind someone. The VS mode could really have done with a much quicker and less involved U-turn move, so you actually have a chance to get shots off on people directly behind you and encourage approaches from different angles besides directly behind.

Even that being said, the singleplayer campaign is clearly the star attraction of the game and the multiplayer something of a bonus and an afterthought - so I guess it makes sense that my thoughts on the latter stay as an afterthought, too. Bottom line, this is a game you'll be compelled to play many times over, and that's something every game could do with more of.

August 7, 2020

Boggy B (Worms 2 / Armageddon)

The whole Worms series could probably be best described as "Scorched Earth with a sense of humour". And that sense of humour permeates practically every facet of the game's design, where physically blasting enemy worms all over the landscape is a strategic choice, the weapon choices range from mundane Bazookas and Shotguns to wacky shit like Banana Bombs, explosive Sheep and the legendary Concrete Donkey, and all the worms having voice clips for loads of different situations and even being able to choose from a selection of voice packs or making your own. I can still remember installing and booting it up for the first time, and my preeteen ass practically pissed themselves laughing at all the intro scenes the game had to offer.

More importantly though, Worms 2 is the first game I ever played online with other living people, and this introduced me to a concept that had so far escaped me - the concept of game balance, or more specifically what can go wrong if it's handled badly. See, my dumb ass had a tendency to play with all weapons enabled and infinite uses, and Worms 2 went a step further in that you could adjust the individual stats of every non-superweapon in the game - so naturally I had most stuff turned up to max, and it wasn't uncommon for certain weapons to be nearly (and literally, in the case of the Mortar) capable of shredding an entire level in a single shot when adjusted this way. I found it hilarious fun, but most people when given the option, shied away from it - instead choosing to abuse the Super Banana Bomb, which was a cluster bomb that could be manually detonated, effectively guaranteeing an instant kill against just about any worm without much real risk to the wielder. Needless to say, this was frustrating as all hell to deal with on a consistent basis, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I didn't really have anyone to blame for it but myself, because those were my weapon settings that they were abusing.

I don't think I ever played a whole lot of Worms in the way it was actually intended to be played, so there's really not a whole lot else I can speak on besides the humour, aesthetics and my own personal experiences. The vanilla game more closely favoured the Scorched Earth method of playing, which was to use the Bazooka as an artillery cannon and carefully calculate trajectory and wind to strike at otherwise obscured enemies, which is something I don't think I was ever great at - so all in all, it's a niche that not everyone will probably get, even with the state the franchise is in these days. If you have a bunch of mates though, it's always good for a bit of silly fun even if you're not a crack shot with the Bazooka and Grenades, and sometimes it pays not to overthink your problems anyway and just drop a stick of TNT on their heads instead.

August 8, 2020

Beard and Mad-Dog McCoy (Forsaken)

I fucking love late 90s ambience in videogames, and for the life of me I wish I could explain why. It's certainly not because they were anything complex in implementation - most of the time it's just a 5-10 second loop that broadcasts in selected areas, in reaction to no other gameplay or environmental element in particular besides noise for noise's sake. But the sound design itself is something you hear almost none of anymore, even with more recent trends of intentionally invoking design and graphical standards of that era for nostalgia baiting, which really eats me up inside because it's the sound design that aged the best out of any other facet of these games besides the gameplay. It's definitely one of my favourite things about Forsaken in particular, right from the word go. It's the kind of game best played with no music at all, with just the rush of derelict air drafts and the pewpew of Pulsars to back it.

Gameplay wise, it'll be immediately familiar to anyone who's played Descent before - it's a first person shooter with HEAVY emphasis on the vertical element, taking place within weaponized hoverbikes that are completely unaffected by gravity. To those who are more used to their Dooms and their Quakes, being able to strafe in four different directions might be a little disorienting at first, and the level design often twists and contorts in a way that feels unnatural in any other shooter. This is all stuff that can be adapted to, with time - my first issue with Forsaken is that the very first level has a time limit that automatically fails you if it expires. Why would you even do that before the player has a chance to adapt to the controls and mechanics? Fucking hell, Acclaim, give the player some room to breathe first before you start testing them like that. It's not quite awful to the same extent that say, Driver abuses you with, but it's definitely not the best first impression to set with a game that is already quite unconventional among most of its peers in the genre.

Second complaint would definitely have to be homing missiles - something like every 3rd or 4th enemy has them, and although they move slow and can be shot down in transit you're notified every single time one is fired and tracking you down. It can often feel like a struggle to have a decent firefight with regular enemies when you're constantly distracted from the fighting by the nagging pings of homing missiles locking onto you and following you wherever you go. I would legitimately rather be fighting fucking Revenants than these things, and that's saying a hell of a lot. Legitimately, everything mechanically about this game flows fine EXCEPT these fucking homing missiles and you would do the entire game a whole lot of good just by scrapping these things entirely.

The game is notable for being abandonwhere until relatively recently, when the game was re-released and remastered by NightDive Studious for the sake of more modern conveniences and compatibilities. The thing is, I'm honestly not sure I can justify spending much money on this game? The singleplayer campaign is actually incredibly short - you'd have to gamble on having a lot of friends to play the multiplayer VS with, because you can bet your ass that the public lobbies are still long dead.

August 9, 2020

Bass (Megaman and Bass)

When I saw this game so late in the list, I honestly had to do a double take. Nope, as it turns out I didn't make a mistake - this game was made for the SNES after the N64 and Playstation were already on the market. In fact, there were already Megaman games on next gen systems at this time, to the point that much of this game's spritework is directly lifted from one of them. The hell happened here? Did they not expect the Playstation to be a smash success or something? I'm at a genuine loss for words here and only discovered much of this just now - because I'll be honest with you guys, I only played this game emulated long, long after the fact, as I'm sure a lot of people outside of Japan did.

Let's back up a bit. The animation is probably the best part of this game, and I don't mean that just because much of it is lifted from a stronger system - even most aspects that Megaman and Bass holds all to itself are splendidly animated, and although I'd argue the run cycles don't quite match the pace at which the characters move, everything just pops out in this game in a way that none of the other Megaman games I've covered so far have really managed. And although I feel like the soundtrack is somewhat tonally inconsistent, there's little denying it all sounds great by its own merits, if a bit overly peppy in places.

Naturally, it suffers from similar problems I already criticised Megaman X for, with the stage progression being one of them - but M&B goes a step further and keeps all but three levels locked at the start, which just seems to defeat the point even further because now you have even LESS incentive to pick anything but the weakest of the three to start with (ice boss again - is this like a running theme with Megaman games or something, where the ice boss is always the weakest?), then progress down the rock/scissors/paper roulette by always challenging the boss who's weak to the weapon you just acquired from the last one. The weapons themselves are... a mixed bag, honestly. A common complaint I have with Megaman arsenals is that the weapons you gain are often incredibly underwhelming compared to all the kit the boss wielding it has in their arsenal - take Bubble Crab from X2 for instance, who has a really handy bubble shield AND a pair of energy blades to punish anyone who approaches him, but defeating him gives you a wimpy-ass bubble gun whose projectiles pop like a character's width away from where you fired it. M&B has practically the opposite problem - they're wild and unique, but come off as gimmicky and over-specialized in doing so. Between summoning pushable walls of ice, phantom duplicates of yourself that rapidfire from place you activated it at, and a literal screen clearing blast, sometimes you find yourself longing for a straightforward weapon you can just shoot at people without having to go through extra hoops.

This is MOSTLY petty stuff, though, compared to the level design. It's absolutely atrocious, some of the worst that I've ever experienced in the series, where much of the challenge comes from instakill spikes and death pits even as early as the fucking intro stage. Worse still, it's overwhelmingly built to favour one character, Bass, who has both a one-button dash AND a double jump to get over and through most of the game's bullshit. Certain stages, like Magic Man and to a lesser extent Burner Man, are borderline fucking unplayable without that kind of mobility. Megaman still has his classic slide, but still has to press down and jump for it for some reason??? There are sections where you need to boost a LOT to avoid damage, especially in King's fight, so it beggers belief that Megaman's slide and Bass's dash weren't just assigned to the same button, because Megaman desperately needed an edge in this game that wasn't "make the bosses not suck".

Oh, I didn't mention? The bosses in this game have absurd grace invulnerability, remaining immune to damage for several whole seconds at a time before you can shoot them again, on top of some of them having phases where you just can't hit them at all anyways. For Megaman this isn't a huge problem because he has his charge shots, so he can deal burst damage appropriately - Bass's arm cannon is full auto, which is normally a godsend everywhere else, except it only deals a single point of damage per shot. This can be negated somewhat by having the weapon they're weak to, but it still means beating at least one of them to get that rock paper scissors roulette going - and the easiest boss for Bass, still Cold Man, has invincible frames AND grace invulnerabilty, dragging the fight out an entire 2-3 minutes longer than Megaman's who can just charge shot him between attacks. I'm all for characters that excel in different areas, but not to an extent that it makes one method of playing the game boring, annoying and tedious at any fucking point.

So yeah, it absolutely plays like a game Capcom had to rush out to milk the absolute last bits of relevance the SNES still had at the time. Or one that was in dev hell and had to be wrapped up regardless. I don't know which it is honestly, only that both possibilities have the same end result.

August 10, 2020

Let's set the stage real quick - you're incarcerated aboard a prison starship. When you say you want to escape, you have to be careful what you wish for, because the only opportunity you get occurs when you narrowly survive the ship crashing on an unknown planet, and only even make it out of your cell because it knocks the power out. Bruised and dehydrated, you make your way outside, scavenging what you can along the way to find that not only is most of the wildlife hostile to you, you've crashed right in the middle of one alien race invading and subjugating another - and your only true escape is through them.

Welcome to Na Pali.

Prisoner 849 "Gina" (Unreal)

Unreal is the namesake of Epic's long-touted Unreal Engine series, and not even just for its technical accomplishments alone. Like Forsaken, it's a game I strongly appreciate for its atmosphere, but this is so much thicker that you can practically drink it, touting level design that actively rewards you for absorbing your surroundings and taking in all the sights and sounds around you. And scattered all throughout are text logs intercepted by your Universal Translator, granting both important clues and interesting lore in equal measure the more of the game you uncover. It might not be nearly as open as a whole, but if you're a fan of Metroid Prime, you'll feel right at home here. Unreal's levels alternate a lot between mostly linear and wider and more open, and at several points throughout the game simply explode into GARGANTUAN landmarks that take a lot of exploring and uncovering to traverse through and a lot of different options and rewards for doing so, with the Sunspire and Bluff Eversmoking probably being the most famous examples. Make no mistake, as far as old school shooters go, Unreal is an adventure of then-unprecedented scope.

Another credit this game has to its name is that it's probably one of the best arsenals an FPS has ever had, and shines even better nowadays thanks to the genre's insistence of differentiating guns as just varying tiers of machinegun with slightly different stats. Every weapon in the game has both a primary and secondary fire mode bound to the left and right mouse buttons, and most of them have tremendously good synergy with one another - probably most iconically in the form of the Flak Cannon, a mortar lobbing beast that allows you to detonate the shells within the gun and launch the shrapnel at enemies like a shotgun, and the ASMD Shock Rifle, which allows you to shoot the projectile from its secondary with the hitscan beam from its primary to create a devasting explosion. It's an arsenal that caters to a very wide variety of applications and personal tastes, something even developers of the day struggled to match.

And then you get to the Skaarj. Granted, the rest of the enemies roster is nothing to scoff at, but make no mistake, the Skaarj are both the primary antagonists and main headliners of the game. A lot of games like to brag about how smart their AI is, but the Skaarj don't need to boast - they come in a lot of different varieties, but they're all always constantly moving based on their situation, able to see and dodge around incoming rockets, harrass the player into keeping on their toes themselves, and recognize exactly when the best opportunity is to lunge into clawing distance, almost like enemy combatants in an actual deathmatch - and that comparison draws even closer still later into the game, where they gain the ability to wield all of the same weapons you can. And lemme tell you, a Skaarj with a Flak Cannon or an Eightball Launcher is a genuinely scary opponent. Even with pissy little Dispersion Pistols and Stingers, they're still nothing to scoff at. Nothing of the industry then could compare to it. Few things TODAY can compare to it.

Honestly, I think Unreal is the closest I've ever seen a game come to achieving genuine perfection. There's a few oddities here and there, like the pistol not having a manual reload, or having seeds that you have to deploy and wait to grow into healing fruit rather than just straight up having portable medkits, and some of the final levels being an intense gauntlet of infinitely respawning Skaarj, but honestly? I don't think there's anything I'd trade Unreal for. And with Epic Games more and more losing touch with the gaming public and their own base in more recent years, I think it's important to remember that sometimes, just sometimes, being a great game doesn't always mean making all the money conveivable in the process.

August 11, 2020

Adam Drake (Body Harvest)

Body Harvest is an early N64 open world game, and a lot of the usual culprits are there - plenty of jank, noticable framedrops, lots of fog, awkward animation, the works. To some extent it seems a bit unfair to judge it by standards we have today. It's by no means an awful game, but it's coming on in age, and it definitely doesn't come off as impressive as it once did. Your main objective is to travel through time and prevent the deaths - or harvests, hence the name - of as many people as possible at the hands of an alien race that understands and employs time travel much better than you do. And sometimes that objective trumps simply getting to the end of an area and defeating the boss, taking sudden diversions like buildings catching fire and having to backtrack to a nearby town to find a fire engine to put them out. The main reason I bring up Body Harvest, though, isn't to talk about Body Harvest - because its development is an important cautionary tale, of why you should never, ever take your business partners for granted.

Look, I have nothing but respect for Nintendo's software output, but it would be disrespectful to beat about the bush on this part: during the earlier eras of their gaming life, they were total bastards to work for. Parts of this make sense in context: they are largely seen as the saviours of the entire gaming market after the crash that Atari caused, and one measure they took to avert another one was essentially having a de-facto monopoly over the cartridge format their games were made on, using that leverage to limit the amount of titles - and ergo, shovelware - a single publisher could put to market. But they weren't below interfering in other projects if they thought it could benefit them, and unfortunately for DMA Design, Body Harvest's developer, they were one such interference.

See, the N64 was going through a drought of RPG titles at the time compared to their competition - Square's Final Fantasy 7 was just over the horizon at the time, and even the Sega Saturn was swimming in them whenever Legendary Asshole Bernie Stolar(tm) allowed them to see the light of day overseas. Rather than make a title of their own to fill that gap or re-pivot one of their own already in development, they chose to single out Body Harvest and insist it be remade into an RPG. Yes, you read that right. They wanted a nearly finished 3D open world shooting game to change to a completely different genre, just to plug a gap in the N64's release schedule. DMA of course, were rightly pissed the fuck off about this, but there wasn't much they could do about it because Nintendo was funding the game in the first place - and even THAT stalled when NoA and NoJ couldn't agree on what exactly they wanted the game to be, so they ended up cancelling it and nearly destroying the developer outright in the process.

Thankfully, they were able to pick up Midway to publish and finish the game off, and as a final fuck you to Nintendo, refused to localize it for a Japanese release. But the story doesn't end there. As time passed they would get back on their feet, rebrand as Rockstar North and created Grand Theft fucking Auto. The latest installment of which, if you're keeping score, is literally the single most profitable piece of media ever made in the history of planet fucking Earth. And Nintendo missed out on that, because that grudge is still very much alive today. This wasn't even the first rival Nintendo had inadvertently created through executive meddling and sheer fucking arrogance - the Playstation itself also exists because Nintendo fucked Sony over on a disc based system that also would have been theirs if they had just treated people with some god damned respect. THAT's why you never take anyone you work with for granted, even if you believe them to be below you - because many will take the opportunity to bite the hand that feeds, and use it to sever the whole fucking arm.

ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

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