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Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker: The Definitive Review (Arcade, Sega Genesis, and Sega Master System Reviews)

November 13, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Of all the licensed games I’ve done up to this point, Moonwalker is by far the longest of long-shots for a modern re-release. Sega can’t even get the estate of Micheal Jackson to come to the table over Sonic The Hedgehog 3’s soundtrack. I thought maybe there was residual postmortem bad blood, since Jackson apparently wasn’t happy with how his arrangements for Sonic 3 sounded on the Genesis. But, that obviously isn’t the hold-up. Jackson later voiced himself in the Space Channel 5 franchise, so clearly no bridges were burned. The real question is “how much could his estate possibly want for chiptunes?” It’s not like this is a previously unreleased Beatles track we’re talking about. It’s a series of harmonious bloops and bleeps that sound sort of like his famous songs. If anything, people hearing them might be inclined to spend money on the real songs. The “arrangements” featured in the video games have zero value to the estate. Again, we’re talking about bloops and bleeps here.

Let me address the planet-sized elephant in the room. No, not that one. NO, not that one either. I’m talking about the lack of Thriller. Even deep into the production of Moonwalker, the designers were under the impression they could use the iconic song and created levels tailored to it. However, they were later informed that only songs personally written by Jackson himself were available. And thus, all three games have graveyard scenes without what is arguably the most popular Michael Jackson song backing the action. It is SO unavoidably awkward, especially since the fully-charged magic dance attack in the graveyard level clearly has the dance moves from Thriller. I don’t listen to Jackson’s songs and even I think this is lame as f*ck.

Good bloops and bleeps, mind you. My mother, a fan of Jackson’s work, could identify what each song was supposed to be in the arcade and Genesis versions. But, that also means they’re good enough to assure Moonwalker will likely never see the light of day again. The closest we came to a re-release was in 2011, when Sega submitted a version of Moonwalker for PEGI rating on the Wii’s Virtual Console, but nothing came of it (it’s unclear which version, but I’m guessing the Genesis one). Presumably it was done by mistake. It happens. No matter what you think of Michael Jackson, this much is clear: he loved video games and was proud of his work with Sega. It’s not like the games paint him in a bad light, and it’s also not like someone would buy this in lieu of a CD. Nobody on this planet is going to say “well, I was going to buy a collection of Michael Jackson songs, but I bought this video game that has electronic beeps arranged in a way that sounds kind of like his songs, so I’m covered!” Can we please do the right thing here and come to the table like grown-ups? Because these games are worth a look today, in 2023. Especially the arcade version. On with the reviews!

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Arcade – Sega System 18
Developed by Sega and Triumph
First Released July 20, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This should be a joke. A borderline parody. But, it’s actually a very good game.

I played the arcade version of Moonwalker after playing the two console versions, but chronologically, this was released first. And now, I’m wondering if the more bland and basic Genesis/Master System versions soiled the reputation of the coin-op. Seriously, why does Moonwalker never come up in conversations about the best licensed arcaders? THIS IS GREAT! I don’t even normally like isometric games. In fact, I kind of hate them. I always get discombobulated trying to walk in a straight line when I play them, and that’s not even the most annoying aspect of the game. Moonwalker features this strange pseudo-auto-scrolling gameplay that makes it feel like you’re getting the bum’s rush through the set-pieces. But, actually, it’s about thirty to forty minutes of perfectly-paced non-stop action.

I have no clue why, but the first level of the game lasts roughly one minute and consists of a single street corner. It’s not as if the game is so complex it requires a tutorial stage, but that’s sort of what it feels like.

It’s probably best to think of Moonwalker as a close cousin to Altered Beast. The same type of slow-scrolling, hoard-smacking fisticuffs, only played from a different angle, with only one button for all striking moves. Gosh, that actually sounds like my idea of the fourth circle of hell. So, you can imagine my surprise that the smile never vanished from my face during my first session with Moonwalker. Part of that is that the enemies aren’t completely brainless. There’s a fairly nice variety of them to smash, and you’re always given enough room to dodge out of the way of their shockingly elegant attack formations. You can also charge-up your attack, though this was the one weakness of the game’s combat. It’s too hard to aim the charged up shots if you move around before unleashing them. In general, you’ll spend most of the time blasting enemies with energy directly with your hand. Most baddies only take two hits to kill, and the levels go by quickly. One or two of the robots were a bit spongy, but not in a deal breaker sort of way.

If you’re turning around while you attack, you do this little spin-attack. So the one-button aspect of the combat is deceptive, because there’s a little hint of nuance to it.

I know what you’re thinking. “Where the heck is she getting an Altered Beast comparison out of that?” It’s because you transform near the end of each stage. For you children of the 2000s, Michael Jackson famously had a chimpanzee named Bubbles that he took everywhere he went. Bubbles shows up where you’re next to the boss for each area. Touching him transforms you into MECHA JACKSON! (imagine a Godzilla roar here for full effect). At this point, you get projectiles and your charge-shot becomes a pair of missiles. This is where the run ‘n gun gameplay takes over, though the “run” part is misleading, since you still move around the screen at the same pace, and usually there’s not too many basic enemies to wax before you encounter the boss. As much as I enjoyed the shooting combat, the bosses are the game’s weak link. They’re generic robotic contraptions that feel like they belong to another game. Not boring to fight, mind you. But they often feel out of place with the set pieces.

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The most memorable aspect of Moonwalker are the bombs. You get one per life and some of the children you rescue will grant you additional ones. When you activate them, all the enemies on the screen join you in a dance number. Even the robotic enemies (including the robotic dogs) do it, and when the dance ends, they all die. While it’s disappointing that you’ll briefly turn back into the human MJ when you activate a bomb as Mecha Jackson, it’s SO SATISFYING to use the dance move. It gives the whole game a music video vibe, and it does a better job of it than the more choreographed Genesis Moonwalker. In the arcade game, I found myself timing it when enemies were standing on the perfect spot to make it look like a performance. I wanted to do it that way. It made the experience more fun.

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Okay, so Moonwalker isn’t the deepest game. But, it is the ideal early 90s arcade experience. A simple action concept with easy-to-understand combat that’s polished to a mirror shine. From a gameplay perspective, the only real “hole” is that the enemy themes don’t always feel like they belong. When your main gameplay issues are slight thematic inconsistencies, you probably have a very good title. You couldn’t make a game like Moonwalker today. It’s too simple. Too short. Too limited. People wouldn’t stand for it. Yet, it’s telling that I, a total non-fan of Michael Jackson, could walk away as satisfied as I ever have been by a game of this type. Even without the novelty of Michael Jackson being the star, Moonwalker is worth the forty-five minutes max it takes to play-through. A perfect example of how to do a licensed arcade game, and especially a game that is really a vehicle for one specific celebrity. I honestly can’t imagine any game could do better at that, really.
Verdict: YES!

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Sega Genesis
Developed by Sega
First Released August 24, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

And you thought the stairs in Castlevania games were frustrating. Holy crap, it’s INSANE how hard it is to just begin the process of walking up a flight of stairs in this game.

Going a completely different direction, the Genesis version of Moonwalker uses a heavily modified version of the engine that powered Genesis launch-window title Revenge of Shinobi. Whereas rescuing children is a side task in the coin-op, this time around, finding hidden children is the entire object. You play fifteen stages of opening every door, window, car trunk, etc, until you find X amount of kids. At this point, all enemies completely vanish and Bubbles the Chimp appears and points you in the direction of the “boss” encounter. It makes the Genesis take on Moonwalker a much slower experience, and one that’s absurdly repetitive.

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I know this is the oddest observation possible about Moonwalker, but the first thing that stuck out to me is the movement of the sprites. The tall, slender characters move around with this spooky fluidity to their locomotion. It’s both unnervingly unnatural and oddly hypnotic. It also looks remarkably like prime-era Michael Jackson’s dancing, which I guess is the point. It’s just a shame the actual combat doesn’t feel more dance-like. While the Genesis game retains the blue “energy” that Michael Jackson emits when he throws punches and kicks, this time around, there’s no OOMPH to it. His standard ground-based attack is the weakest-feeling kick this side of Taito’s Superman coin-op. Part of the lack of weight and gravity comes from the fact that the kick has incredible range, at least if you have enough health to give Michael his magic powers. The more health you have, the more range the fairy dust or whatever it is he sprays from his limbs reaches. In practice, it looks exactly like he stepped in a puddle and is kicking the water off his shoes. WELL, THAT’S WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE!

Actually, it looks more like snowflakes, and it spreads out, too. You can barely see it in this picture, but the fairy dust I kicked out is about to kill this dog. It’s quite a ways from me, too, so it’s pretty powerful.

There’s more than just kicking and punching, but it comes at a cost. Holding the A button down makes Michael spin, which causes damage to anything that touches you, but your health starts to drain. If you hold the spin move for a second or so before letting go, Michael throws his hat, which is an instakill on almost anything it touches. If this had a lot of range, or didn’t cost health, it’d be a fun attack. It has a bit more OOMPH than the fairy dust attacks have. Hell, this should have been the game’s basic attack, but it’s not. It costs health to use, it takes time to activate, AND, unlike the fairy dust, it doesn’t spread out. I never found a single usage for it where I wasn’t better off using the kick. Life is plentiful in Moonwalker. Every kid restores health, so you should always have close to a fully-charged magic kick. The hat is WORTHLESS! Here’s the exact same location from the above picture, only using the hat.

Not only is the hat going right over the damned pooch, but it ate-up health AND takes longer to perform. The guy above me had time to get away while I spun-up the attack. One of gaming’s most worthless moves.

Now, I made a major boo-boo the first time I played Moonwalker. I didn’t know about the all-powerful fully-charged magic attack. It takes literally half a full life bar to unleash and causes all the enemies on the screen to join you in a dance number, just like in the arcade game. My first time playing the Genny Moonwalker, I didn’t want to drain my health and I found the hat-toss to be worthless, so I stayed away from the magic attack. I only discovered the dance-off thanks to my play-through of the Master System game. The magic dance is especially useful for clearing the level “bosses.” They’re usually not bosses in the “big boss” sense, but rather massive waves of basic enemies. When you perform the move correctly and the screen is full enough of bad guys, it does succeed in making Moonwalker feel like a music-based action game. Unlike the arcade game, enemies actually line-up next to Michael to make the dance look more authentic. So, there’s that. Of course, it doesn’t always work, either. For example, the storm troopers in level 2-2 just run away when you begin to dance, and other bosses might be damaged, but not die.

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Moonwalker’s main objective is also the game’s fatal flaw: finding the children in each stage becomes dull after a while. If there were visual clues or some kind of logical way of sussing-out their location, it would be one thing. OR, alternatively, if their locations were randomly generated. Then I could live with the mechanic. But, besides the near-certainty that the upper corners will be hiding spots for them, it’s really just blind searching the first time around, and it grows old quickly. There’s not a whole lot to break up the monotony. The level design doesn’t really become interesting until you reach a laboratory in the very last game world, where there’s teleporters that make the levels a maze. That’s so much better than the world before that, which features caves that you had to go inside of to rescue the kids. Since the majority of the caves are empty BUT you also have to make your way back to the door, it feels more like additional busy work. Moonwalker already suffers from too much busy work just by having to manually walk to the area of the map you fight the boss in. The Sega Master System version cuts that aspect from the game and is better off for it.

The labs are fun levels. Walking through empty stages while Bubbles points you towards the area of the map that doubles as the boss chamber? Not so much.

I really do think the “hide and go seek” gameplay could work if it was only used for one of the three levels in each world. If they had come up with some kind of other gimmick for the rest of the stages, I think Moonwalker would have been a much better game. Actually, they DID come up with a better gimmick. At the tail of my first play-through, I turned into a robot and had to clear dozens of enemies with laser beams. I thought “why wasn’t there more of THAT in the game?” Especially after I played the arcade game, where each level closes with MECHA MICHAEL. Well, it turns out, there’s actually a way to do that in other stages if you correctly pick the right child to rescue first. There’s no way of knowing without consulting a guide which child. I didn’t even know this was possible until my mother, a huge Michael Jackson fan, discovered it in level 3-3. Picking the completely arbitrary correct child makes a blue star fall from the sky, and you turn into a robot who can shoot lasers and missiles. It sounds delightful, but during the 30 or so seconds it lasts, you can’t perform the search behind graves or bushes for the kids. It brings the actual objective to a screeching halt. That’s NOT what I meant, game!

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Then, after fifteen levels of side-scrolling, glorified item fetching gameplay, Moonwalker on the Genesis turns into a stripped-down Star Raiders knock-off for about a minute or two where you fight Joe f’n Pesci. HUH? What? And he doesn’t even have a baseball bat? Boooooo! Oh, and this whole sequence is jarring and terrible and should never have closed the game. Couldn’t they have just had one single normal boss fight? The game comes close a few times, especially in the graveyard. There’s a section where two zombies throw their torsos at you, and that was the only point where I actually died fighting a boss. The Star Raiders section provides no sense of closure. It doesn’t “feel” climatic. It’s so lame.

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I don’t know what to make of Moonwalker. You can tell really quickly that the main reason it exists is to showcase the technical superiority of the Sega Genesis over Nintendo’s NES. And it is impressive for a 1990 game. Especially when the screen fills-up with enemies. Moonwalker just lacks the excitement or structure of a truly great action game. On the other hand, some of the set pieces are fun (especially the graveyard and lab stages) and it’s still a short game, overall. It should take the average gamer today under two hours to finish. What I found to be the most telling thing about Moonwalker is that my non-gamer mother, a huge Michael Jackson fan, preferred the Genesis version to the arcade one. She played through the whole thing and enjoyed it thoroughly (until she got to the spaceship finale, which I had to beat for her). Yep, that says it all: the Genesis game is made to be accessible to everyone, whereas the coin-op is clearly more tailored to what a hardcore gaming fan would enjoy.

Moonwalker’s biggest gameplay issue is the CONSTANT whammies you find in the search for the kids. Being the scoundrel that I am, I used the emulator to bypass a lot of them. Especially in the fourth level, where I’d rewind to avoid entering empty caves. This was probably the game I cheated most playing in 2023. Moonwalker fans, before you clutch your pearls, you might want to wait and see what the end result of that cheating was.

I can’t review from the perspective of my mother. I will say she was blown-away by Moonwalker on the Genesis. She had genuine regret she never played this before I did this review. The question for me is “did I have more fun than not?” The answer is yes, but there’s an asterisk attached to that. I confess that I used cheating to cut out a lot of the bad aspects of Moonwalker. I found it easier to rewind the whammies (or empty caves in the fourth level) than to live with the consequences. Had I not done that, I think I would have given up on Moonwalker during that god awful 4th level. Being able to undo the busy work of manually walking out of the cave saved it for me. So, I’m going to give Moonwalker a YES! because I do believe it’s worth looking at in the 2020s. Not just as a historical curio, either. There’s genuine gameplay merit to had. But, if I didn’t have rewind or save states, I’d likely have scored this a NO! since the emulator itself made the game more fun than it would have been playing on an authentic Genesis cartridge. Make no mistake: Moonwalker was never fated to age well. So, the fact that what’s still here is actually playable and even enjoyable in the 2020s is remarkable.
Verdict: YES!

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Sega Master System
Developed by Arc System Works
Published by Sega
First Released August 24, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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The 8bit Sega Master System Moonwalker was so close to defeating its Genesis big brother that it could taste victory. It features the same “glorified hide-and-go-seek” objective with finding children as the Genesis version and carries over all the set pieces from that game. However, to make up for the hardware limitations, there’s some big changes. Some are very positive. The fairy dust nonsense that took the OOMPH out of the combat? That’s gone. The biggest change is, this time, your kicks and punches have to physically connect to enemies to defeat them. As a fan of video game violence, I appreciated that very much, and Moonwalker SMS was just getting started. The hat throwing? That’s now a power-up you can use for the remainder of a level when you find a Michael Jackson doll while searching for the children. Oh, and it costs no health to use it. Nice. Last but not least: having to manually walk to the area of the map that’s meant to be the boss chamber? That’s thankfully gone. When you rescue the final kid, Joe Pesci taunts you, and you just magically teleport to the boss chamber. These are all positive changes.

Even the laboratory level feels a lot more maze-like. Easily the strongest level in any of the Moonwalker games. That includes the coin-op too. Yes, really! I know, right?

But, the downgrades let the air out of everything. The “boss” fights are limited by the power of the Master System’s hardware. So, at most, only two guys will fight you at any one time. I never had to use the magical dance-off move, since boss battles devolved into me walking left and smacking one guy, then walking right and smacking the next one, then repeating that process until the game told me I’d won the fight. It wasn’t fun to use the dance off move anyway, since the enemies don’t dance with you. Instead, the rest of the screen fades out while you dance all alone. Awful. Moonwalker makes the same mistake so many bad Sega Master System games did: trying to replicate gameplay done on superior hardware, instead of keeping true to the spirit of that gameplay in a way that plays to the system’s strengths, like Castle of Illusion did.

Womp womp.

Even with all those problems, I was so close to going YES! on 8bit Moonwalker. I can’t stress enough how well done the three lab levels were. The best levels in the entire franchise, easily. And then.. it happened. Remember how the Genesis game ends in a bad Star Raiders knock-off? Well, the Master System version ends differently too, but there’s no space battle. Instead, it ends with something that feels like the over-the-shoulder sequences in Contra. You transform into MECHA JACKSON and have to kill roughly four trillion soldiers, give or take. It feels out of place and wrong. I was like “okay, interesting way to end the game that has no connection to the previous fifteen levels of mind-numbing tedium, but whatever.” Honestly, this wasn’t god awful or anything. It just felt like it belonged to another game. BUT HEY, the 16bit version ended in a similar disconnected way, and I said YES! to it, right? Well, 8bit Moonwalker wasn’t done trolling me yet.

This one wasn’t TOO bad.

There is one final “boss” battle, and it might be the worst element of any retro game I’ve done up to this point. It’s yet another Contra-like sequence, only this time you take the form of a spaceship. There’s four cannons that open their hatches and fire at you, and you have to destroy them. That sounds reasonable, right? What if I told you the hatches open for only a split second? And what if I told you the projectiles they shoot lock onto you? Sometimes for the entire length of the screen. I have no idea how anyone could have ever finished this sequence without extreme amounts of cheating, because it took me FOREVER just to find an angle where the cannon lasers would barely miss me. Even when this happened, remember, the hatches only open for a fraction of a second. That meant I had to move off the safe spot I’d barely been able to find in order to cause damage to the cannons, which take multiple hits to kill and fire the most accurate heat-seeking shots in gaming history. This sequence burned through any good will the Sega Master System version of Moonwalker earned.

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Not that it was AMAZING up to that point. I mean, it was good enough that I felt retroactively happy for children of 1990 who had the Masters System and couldn’t upgrade to the Genesis. It almost pulled off a convincing impression, too. Well, so much for that. It’s such a sloppy, nonsensical way to end the game. It feels completely unrelated to all the action that happened up to this point. I suppose I could say that SMS Moonwalker is worth playing if you quit as soon as you beat the last normal level, but then I remembered how bored I was making my way through the parking garage or the caves. Unlike the Genesis version, this barely held my attention, even with arguably better combat. The biggest problem is there’s just not enough combat. The hardware limitations mean that you usually only fight one person at a time. It’s not enough to be fun. 8bit Moonwalker is a blander version of a game that’s already toying with blandness.
Verdict: IT’S BAD! IT’S BAD! IT KNOWS IT (THAT’S A NO!)

ActRaiser (SNES Review)

November 11, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

ActRaiser
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Quintet
Published by Enix
First Released December 16, 1990
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE
Terribly Remade as ActRaiser Renaissance in 2021

The last thing a person sees when their parachute doesn’t open.

ActRaiser was one of those games that came up so often in gaming magazines that, when it was released to the Wii’s Virtual Console in 2007, I had to jump at it. The funny thing is, ActRaiser was just a little younger than me and sniffing its second decade by that point, and it was still a one-of-a-kind experience. Actually, it still kind of is. That includes the sequel, which decided to remove the God-like aspects of the original game. I can’t imagine why it isn’t as beloved as this original SNES launch-window game. Nobody learned their lesson, which is why a horrible remake came out in 2021 that added tower defense elements that nobody in their right mind wanted or asked for. And now, playing ActRaiser 33 years after its release, it’s now glaringly obvious it’s a glorified tech demo to show off the capabilities of the new console. That’s not a knock, by the way. Super Castlevania IV and Super Mario World are in the same boat. I like them just fine, and I like ActRaiser too. It’s also a little overrated. Sorry, but it is!

You have to admire God’s determination to follow the rules of etiquette and use both hands on His broadsword, even when He’s leaping. Makes sense why He’d follow such gentlemanly rules. He invented them, after all!

ActRaiser is a roughly 50-50 split of sword-and-sorcery platforming and a stripped-down SimCity/Populous-like world builder. Most people remember it for the action parts, which are sort of like Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, only much easier (unless you’re playing the INSANELY hard Japanese version) and with less stuff to do. This is the third time I’ve played ActRaiser, and one aspect of it that struck me is how fast the levels go. It always caught me off-guard when the boss’s health meter would appear. “Wait? Already?” And that’s fine, by the way, because the combat is as basic as it gets. There’s no finesse to it. None. Despite the controls being pretty good (if slightly stiff), there’s no pizazz to it. You can’t block. You can’t swing the sword upward. There’s no sub-weapons besides bomb-like magic spells, some of which aren’t all that effective. The SNES is a six button controller. Half those buttons go unused. The fact that nobody would accuse ActRaiser of being a button masher is impressive.. because it kind of is one. Especially the boss fights.

And actually, the bosses don’t really hide their mashy nature. They have huge lifebars, but you’re not expected to dodge their attacks, so you would think they have the advantage. Instead, the battles are about getting three or four licks in for every tick of damage they give you. For a legendary game, ActRaiser sure has inelegant combat.

On the other hand, the action stages contain no filler and it genuinely feels like, once they ran out of ideas for each set-piece, they wrapped it up. That’s always preferable to padding a stage for arbitrary reasons. As basic as the action is, it never lasts long enough to get boring. There’s also a hidden complexity, in that you’re incentivized to fully explore the levels and not ignore enemies. In fact, you should slay everything in sight. That’s because every 50 points you score in the action stages increases the potential population of the town by one citizen. Of course, since you score points by the amount of health and lives you have (and lives reset between levels even if you get 1ups), you might not want to just hack and slash with reckless regard on every boss.

The longest level is this climb up a frozen tree.. at least that’s what I think it is. You have to ride these bubbles up to the top. It reminded me of Wizards & Warriors. Say, there’s a review I ought to do one of these days.

I didn’t even know there was a connection between scoring and population until I’d already passed the first two stages, which are the hardest to achieve a maximum population for. Go figure. Since the RPG-like leveling-up system that grants you extra health and extra God-power points in the simulations is based on reaching population benchmarks, points actually matter. Hey, I appreciate that scoring isn’t just included because it’s 1990 and the grown-ups making the games know that kids like to get high scores. I also appreciate that the game is nonlinear. At least to a certain extent. Your ability to visit each land is tied to how leveled-up you are. This was the first time I played the stages in a mixed-up order. It didn’t really make that much of a difference, but I’m big on players having as much flexibility as possible to create their own strategies.

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The main highlight of ActRaiser’s action scenes are the thirteen boss fights. They’re a fun hodgepodge of different world mythologies. A centaur. A minotaur. Dragons. King Tut.. for some reason. Come to think of it, that’s not really a myth. Just some poor kid who was so inbred he had a cleft palate, a clubbed foot, and a curved spine and lived a life of constant, agonizing pain (it’s not like they had Vicodin back then) before dying of malaria at the age of 18. Shit, no wonder he’s aligned himself with Satan to do battle with the personalization of God.

Hell, why bother with the sword? You could probably kill him by coughing in his direction.

While I enjoyed the bosses, they weren’t so good that I was happy when the game ends not with one final level, but with a boss rush. Not all twelve previous bosses, mind you. Just half of them. Specifically, the second bosses in each stage. Well, that sucks, especially since the back-bosses tend to be the least entertaining ones to do battle with. Again, the problem is, without any advanced moves, fights tend to devolve into just spamming attacks and counting on the fact that you’ll score more hits. That’s not just the way I played it, either. I don’t see how else you’re expected to do it. It’s almost comical how sloppy these encounters are. It’s odd that they work so well. Again, it’s the pacing. One or two bosses might take a while to beat (typically the ones that linger near the top of the screen), but otherwise, ActRaiser cuts a blistering pace.

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For the final boss rush, you don’t get health refills OR bomb refills between battles. Thankfully, if you die, you get to continue from the last boss you were facing (but you don’t get your bombs back). It’s still a lazy and underwhelming way to end the game. I suspect this choice was made because the last boss is also the lamest one and someone at Quintet figured that part out. Dammit so much. I hate it when good games fall on their face at the end. Oh well, I had a good time regardless. Unrefined as the combat is, there’s no sword-swinging platformer that feels quite like ActRaiser, and the dazzling set-pieces filled with original enemies seals it. Imperfect, but a lot of fun.
VERDICT: Wait, ain’t I forgetting something?

Oh, right.

ActRaiser’s simulation side feels more like a cousin of Animal Crossing than it does SimCity. As God, your main job is really just to clear debris and point which direction you want people to build each town. Since this is supposed to be an action game, you still fight monsters in the simulation. You have a flimsy bow and arrow, and golly, does it feel out of place. The monsters, which only come in four different forms (bats, blue devils, red devils, and giant skulls) will kidnap village people or burn their houses down, and having to fight them when you’re trying to focus on clearing rocks or sand or marsh feels like busy work. Your ultimate goal is to aim the building paths in the direction of the four monster lairs and let the people seal them up for you. In the entire game, only one time are you given a tool that can seal-up a monster lair the people can’t possible hope to reach. I’d almost prefer if you gained the ability to destroy every lair manually. To the game’s credit, every single time the people reach another lair, it’s so satisfying to see them do their little ritual and make the thing vanish.

If the people can do this but the angel can’t, then really, what does GOD need you for?

Occasionally, the people will pray to you for a specific thing. The leaders of one village have an adventurous son, Teddy. You have to locate the little bastard on the map and bring a loaf of bread to him. LATER ON, when the village decides to draw lots to decide who will be sacrificed to a local monster, the leaders are fine with the concept. Well, until Teddy draws one of the short straws. Oh, THEN they pray to you to intervene. Of course that’s how they’d be. They’re religious! And this exposes the limitations of ActRaiser, because I personally knocked down every house in that village in response to this and they never once grasped that I was pissed at them. I’m GOD, you f’n morons! What are you doing sacrificing yourselves to anyone BUT ME? I didn’t want to save Teddy, but if I had to, I should have had the right to give him and his family the plague. I’m vengeful, angry God over here and I can’t even inflict a hangnail on them? What kind of sissified deity am I? I should have the ability to rain stones on them to show my displeasure. Have horrible boils erupt on their skin and.. you know, actually now I’m starting to see why they decided to take their chances with the monster.

You get the occasional mission, like this dead guy in the middle of the third stage. First, you have to clear the sand using rain. Then, you have to guide their construction in his direction. When they find the corpse, your civilization discovers music. In the town next to them, people are turning evil or something, and you have to take the music from this town over to them to get them to stop being hateful towards each-other. I was just burning their houses down.

The closest you can come to an old testament style God is the fact that you need to knock down the old homes so they have to rebuild new, higher capacity ones. See, every time you seal one of the first three monster lairs in an area, the “civilization level” for that town goes up. Which just means the buildings look more sophisticated and start containing more people. And yes, you’ll want to actively destroy the old houses, since there’s a limit to how many buildings can be on the screen. Once you get to a high enough level, you’ll want to use an earthquake, which breaks all the Level 1 – 2 houses while leaving the max level 3 homes standing. Oh, and you’ll want to be careful planning the paths. You want to minimize the bridges in the first two levels, since nobody lives on them, but they count as structures. I didn’t know this, and I ended up maxing-out twelve people short of reaching the highest possible level.

Not that I missed that last bar or two of life during the final boss battle, but I still wanted to get a 100% completion and came 12 people short. Maybe next time.

I actually really enjoyed the simulation side of ActRaiser. Simple and limited as it is, it’s just so dang charming. Just its existence alone is enough to make me giggle. Like seriously, who saw the potential to combine THOSE action stages with THIS God sim? It’s absurd. They don’t even pair that well together, either. I can totally understand why someone at Enix would be like “maybe lose the sim parts” for the sequel. Yet, I can’t think of a better example of complete gameplay dissonance working like ActRaiser manages to pull off. Two completely incompatible gameplay types that most certainly are NOT working together in harmony, and yet, the end result is the rare bonafide gaming legend that holds up to the test of time. It’s not as good as you remember. The action is even more rudimentary than the simulation side of things. But, ActRaiser’s two gameplay styles are incompatible, and it still works. A game oozing with religious themes made me a believer, because ActRaiser not being an unmitigated disaster is proof that miracles are real.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with ActRaiser, ActRaiser Review, ActRaiser SNES, ActRaiser Super Nintendo, SNES Review

South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball (Pinball FX Table Review)

October 16, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball
Platform: Pinball FX
Set: South Park Pinball ($9.99)
Included with Pinball Pass
Designed by Peter “Deep” Grafl
Originally Released October 14 2014
Awarded a Certificate of Excellence by The Pinball Chick Team

Keep in mind that our team’s fandom of South Park as a show is all over the place. Dad (Oscar) and Dash are 100% complete lifetime non-fans. Myself and Jordi are lapsed fans, while Dave is somewhere between the two groups. Only Angela is a modern “never misses an episode” fan of the show and even has viewing parties with friends. Some of us factored in the theme, others focused on the table. One odd note is that Zen is just weeks away from releasing Pinball M, their M-rated Pinball FX spin-off (oh.. hey, I get the name now), but this South Park is rated E 10+ by the ESRB. There’s not even bleeped cussing in here. Weird.

South Park’s tables being returned to Pinball FX after a six year absence is proof positive that all bets are off with Zen Studios. As if getting the World Cup and Indiana Jones licenses didn’t already prove that, now they’re bringing back their long-lost Pinball FX2 pins as well. South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball is probably their most famous pre-PinballFX3 pin (it’s either it or Plants v Zombies). It’s back, and it plays well with the new Pinball FX engine. Super-Sweet pinball is a smooth-flowing finesse table only somewhat held back by a brutal difficulty combined with modes that demand too much perfection in what is an imperfect art form.

The Vices (that would be myself, Angela, and Oscar for those keeping track at home) have put 30+ hours into Super Sweet Pinball. For all the whining you’re about to endure, we all really enjoyed it. However, some of the angles are too impossibly risky. Chef’s door is a whole other level of “WHY DID YOU STICK THAT THERE?” mind-f*ckery. Unlike Dash and Angela, I never considered moving off my GREAT rating. The risk/reward balance is too screwed-up for that.

Super-Sweet isn’t entirely an original table by Zen. Hold a mirror to the layout and it’s a close approximation to Stern’s Simpsons Pinball Party. I don’t know if that was meant to be a “Simpsons Already Did It” joke or not, but given that Ant-Man is a mirrored version of Theatre of Magic, probably not. The similarities are mostly superficial in nature, though South Park does take after Simpsons with multiple highly stackable modes. Unlike Simpsons, you can’t go into the settings to adjust the hurry-up times. The biggest problem with South Park is how damn unforgiving it is. It’s not enough to activate the modes. The modes have to be finished to achieve the S-O-U-T-H-P-A-R-K lights that are the ultimate object. That’s nine modes, with three additional modes (one of which is a grindy multiball). Finishing four of them lights an extra ball, but even on our third day, it wasn’t all that rare for each of us to finish games with only one light (typically it was the Kenny light, which is a lay-up). And, we really don’t suck at pinball. Hell, I’m the reigning Arcade mode world champion on this table at the time I’m writing this, and I finished that game barely halfway there. They’re a LOT of work just to get started, THEN you have to.. you know.. beat them!

The Stan and Kyle scoops are deceptively hard shots. For Kyle, if you have a gentle roll on the right flipper, a backhand is a relatively safe option. Stan? Not so much. If there’s a low risk angle for it, we haven’t found it. Annoyingly, despite being a very high-risk shot, Stan’s hurry-up is too short and very undervalued relative to its difficulty. Really, the only value it has is it gives you the S light. Lighting four of the S-O-U-T-H-P-A-R-K lights will light the extra ball target. My suggested order is Kenny, Sarcastaball (which has an additional extra ball attached to it), School Bus Multiball, and Manbearpig. You can sub Stan’s Hurry-Up (annoying as it is, once it starts, it’s one shot to complete) for any of those. The Vices NEVER successfully completed Kyle’s mode (Mr. Hankey Multiball) or Chef’s mode. Not once.

Let me pick an almost random example: the School Bus Multiball. To get it, you must shoot the school bus ramp NINE times. You must then lock four more balls shooting the same ramp. THEN, you must complete the shots for all four of the boys AND sink the balls back in the bus ramp you had to grind nine shots out of to begin with. I’m fairly sure that you need to only lock one of the balls to get the “R” letter, but either way, this is massive grindy time investment. I can’t stress enough: the most successful pinball tables of all time kept their “doors” lit whether or not you were successful in the mode or not. That’s the kind of pinball that generated the biggest success the medium has ever had BY FAR, so why wouldn’t you do that, Zen? You have 110+ tables on Pinball FX, and you expect HOW BIG a time commitment towards “git’n gud” at them? Kyle’s requires you to get the K-Y-L-E lights, then 3 locks on the sarcastaball-ramp, THEN you have to get a super jackpot in multiball. AND IT’S ONLY WORTH A MILLION POINTS for that super jackpot.

The super skill shot is quite risky. I had a lot of shots go straight down the drain off it. You should have the ball save lit, but still, it’s a bitch. When this target isn’t standing, it’s replaced by a TV target that requires you to hit it.. I’m not making this up.. 247 times just to light an extra ball. Come on, Zen. Now you’re just straight-up trolling. It’s worth noting the “episodes” you get from hitting this add to your end-of-all bonus as well. If I shoot a target 247 times, I expect the table to gain sentience and eat me. Though actually, at one point, I had an EB light that I couldn’t figure out where it came from. It’s entirely possible it was from this.

Compare the relatively low scores of the other modes to the T-I-M-M-Y mode, which is NOT for one of the letters but yields the highest scores. By far! Timmy’s easy-to-get lights are along the flipper lanes. After lighting them, you have thirty seconds to go nuts on a single shot next to the Kenny loop. Use the left flipper and a cherry-bomb shot, and you’re gold, OR, you can use the bat flipper. Yep, the best target in the game can be shot from both the left primary and the bat flipper, and boy, does it score points. You only need to hit it once and you’ve got a cool million points, and it adds another million every time you repeat it. Do the TIMMY shot twice, and you’re made three million points. Three times? Six million. Four times? Ten million. And so forth. And so forth. You can grind that one shot, 30 seconds at a time, and still score hundreds of millions of points. You can use this as an excuse to light the C-A-R-T-M-A-N lights, since that shot feeds you a softball for the bat flipper to shoot the TIMMY shot. Oh, and if you miss it off the bat flipper? You’re either hitting the Kenny Loop, Randy Ramp, or if you’re way off, you’re hitting the J-I-M-M-Y lights for the kickbacks! It’s so badly balanced. My arcade world record right now is probably 40% to 50% made of that one shot. That’s not balanced. I should note my father disagreed with me all weekend about how low-risk it was, since the Timmy target is a cherry bomb shot straight over the drain. I almost never lost a ball from it. He’s just plain wrong.

Assuming the mini-table doesn’t glitch out on you and ruin your game (and it might), you’ll want to get good at it since the extra ball light is that cow up at the top of it. The biggest pinball mistake Angela will ever make is letting me see how she cracked the super skill shot. Here’s how: let the ball “settle down” on the right (lower) flipper before flicking. It should bounce off the target and roll around the goal post. Grind this up to a 10 million point level and then complete the super skill shot on the main playfield to light an extra ball. Takes practice but I can now do it almost every time. It’s HIGHLY clockable. The balloon part? Not so much. Another tip: don’t shoot the tethered balloon directly. Use the same strategy as I stated above and DO NOT shoot the balloon directly. ANY contact with the balloon will light the S-A-R-C-A-S-T-A-B-A-L-L lights, even if it’s on the return. Now, when the balloon is cut loose from the tether, sorry friend, but you’re on your own. I sucked at it.

Will someone in charge at Zen Studios tell their table designers to tone it the f*ck back, already? Because the tables aren’t better for demanding this much commitment out of them. The tables aren’t ever more fun because of the repetitive grinding. They’re less fun. Nobody is going to devote six months towards one table to get good enough to get the wizard mode. Look at how few people are posting wizard-level scores on Zen Originals versus Williams pins (that don’t require endless grinding with no forgiveness for failure) and ask yourselves which tables people are having more fun with? I know I’ve been whining about this a lot lately, but it’s an issue. People aren’t finishing these tables. GOOD PLAYERS aren’t. That’s not a virtue.

This screenshot alone is PACKED with incredible shots. Dad coined the Kenny loop a “shoelace loop” or “The Ritchie Shoelace” which is a close cousin of “The Ritchie” as seen in tables like Black Knight, High Speed, etc. Oh, and Kenny is probably the easiest letter on the entire table. Or, you can shoot the Randy loop, which is a bit tougher and activates the super-grindy Bat-Dad mode. Or, one shot on the Randy Loop also lowers the blimp to activate Sarcastaball and grant access to the mini-table (where an extra ball can be nabbed). OR, you can get the T-I-M-M-Y lights and then shoot the Timmy vertical target, which is potentially the most valuable shot on the table. Finally, the J-I-M-M-Y lights that activate the valuable kickbacks are just under the Randy shot, though it’s nearly a blind-angle off the bat flipper.

Now, with that whining out of the way, I should probably note that we all loved the layout for South Park. Of all the “super difficult” Zen originals, South Park is probably neck-and-neck with Clone Wars for having the best transitional flow. While South Park is absolutely packed with modes and mini-modes, the transitions from shot-to-shot are smooth regardless of what modes you’re aiming at. And, unlike Whirlwind, we could use post transfers to great effect this time. You’ll need passing for this one, as the key modes are timed. Cartman’s Anal Probe requires thirty spins of the spinner in sixty seconds (approximately four flush shots), and at that point, you’re only halfway there. You then have hit three UFOs in thirty seconds. Manbearpig is ten shots, then a straight-shot up the middle, THEN collect six piles of gold, THEN one final cherry bomb up the center. Bat-Dad is the hardest by far. You have to shoot a high risk cardboard target to “throw a jab” which ticks off a little bit of his health. To “throw a haymaker” and do extra damage, after hitting the cardboard target, you have to very quickly connect on a follow-up flashing light shot. I have no idea how many times you have to do this. We never came close to finishing it. We never finished the Chef’s mode. They were too high risk, and it made more sense to shoot the TIMMY lights for maximum yield.

The Terrance & Phillip themed bumpers are incredibly violent and, when their mode is charged-up, high-yielding. Angela at one point banked nearly ten million points off them in a single shot based solely on pure blind luck of getting the ball jammed between them. There’s also a Lawlor Path between them that acts as Stan’s Hurry-Up shot, as well as additional Canadian Multiball and Manbearpig shots. However, it’s a very high risk shot, and the bumpers, fun and profitable as they can be, may also murder your ball via the right outlane or even a drain plunge. I held my breath every time.. which feels oddly fitting for fart-themed bumpers.

The big question is “can non-fans enjoy South Park?” I actually think it might be true of both non-show fans and non-pinball fans. Don’t mistake my usage of “super difficult” for being “impossibly difficult.” It’s not that bad. Actually, South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball is an incredibly fun table. Strangely generous too. Take the Cheesy Poof bag, for example. It’s the score multiplier and it’s right next to two necessary shots: the left Manbearpig/Canada/Cartman orbit and the school bus ramp. If you brick either of those shots, you get rewarded with the Cheesy Poof bag, which is fairly low-risk to hit. In fact, the entire left side of the table is so tame and workable that it’s practically gentle. You’d never imagine that South Park is a steel ball serial killer. Oh, it is, and it can be maddening in how many different shots can kill you. But, while I still firmly protest how much work Zen expects people to do to earn wizard modes, all credit where it’s due: it never gets boring, at least with this table.

Cathy’s, who took the crown from Angela, who took it from Cathy.

Cathy: GREAT (4/5)
Angela: GREAT (4/5)
Oscar: MASTERPIECE (5/5)
Jordi: GREAT (4/5)
Dash: GREAT (4/5)
Dave: MASTERPIECE (5/5)
CERTIFIED EXCELLENT BY THE PINBALL CHICK TEAM

Filed under Pinball, Uncategorized Tagged with South Park Pinball, South Park Pinball FX, South Park Pinball FX review, South Park Pinball FX Table Review, South Park Super Sweet Pinball FX, South Park Super Sweet Pinball Review, South Park Table Review

Pinball FX: The Addams Family – The Pinball Chick Hurry-Up Review

February 19, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Pinball FX is out now on PlayStation and Xbox. We have over 100 tables to do. A full look at Addams Family is coming, but I want to start getting content up for it and I’m experimenting with a new format for that. Check out our ratings for Addams Family now over at The Pinball Chick!

The Pinball Chick

With over one-hundred tables at launch, I have a lot of work to do to get Pinball FX’s content up. I also have to wait for my team to put their scores in. So, I’ve come up with the concept of a Hurry-Up Review. This is a quick look at the tables as the Vice Family plays them. And, what better table to experiment with this format than Addams Family? We’ve already reviewed the Arcooda version, which we awarded straight Masterpiece rankings for. Of course, that’s a premium priced build designed specifically for those with full-fledged digital tables. This is the version of Pinball FX that works on PlayStation, Xbox, and Epic Games (standard non-table view only), and will be updated when the full team’s scores are in.

We’ve also reviewed the standard Pinball Arcade build. The big news is that Angela and myself flipped our previous rankings from…

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Wizorb

June 29, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Indie Gamer Chick turns 11 Years Old on July 1, and the big review posting that day is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. It’s been well over ten years since I last reviewed a new release by Tribute Games. The last time? September 29, 2011, just about three months after I started IGC. Check out my review of Wizorb! It’s still around and still fun.. if you’re into that sort of thing.

Indie Gamer Chick

Wizorb has several things going for it. First, it has style to spare. It’s one of those rare retro games on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace that tries to look like an NES game and actually succeeds without in some way pulling back the curtain so that you can see we’re still on the Xbox 360. Second, it has an honest to God gaming pedigree, having been designed by Jonathan Lavigne, who worked on the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World game. And third, just look at this fucking promotional art by Michael James Brennan.

Wow. Who wouldn’t want to buy a game with flyers that look like that? That’s some sexy ass promotional art there. Of course, all the credentials, artwork, and prettiness can’t mask the fact that Wizorb is still a brick breaker. There’s really only so much you can do with that genre. Shatter on the Playstation…

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Black Rose Sets Sail to the New Pinball FX

February 28, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

My team at The Pinball Chick was tasked with announcing the latest table that will be part of Pinball FX’s launch lineup. Head over to the Pinball Chick to read this special feature!

The Pinball Chick

The team at Zen Studios has chosen The Pinball Chick Team to announce to the world that Black Rose, the 1992 Williams piracy classic, will be part of Pinball FX‘s launch lineup! When they tapped the six of us for this task, we had a meeting to discuss what highlights of the table. In the debate that followed, we came to realize that Black Rose is one of the most deceptively loaded pinball tables of all-time. It has something for everyone. Thusly, all six of us have something different to talk about! Why should YOU be excited to experience Black Rose on Pinball FX?

A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME
by Dash

In the theme department Black Rose is a masterpiece.

But what makes a great theme?

Some might say “call-outs, toys, and artwork! Duh!”

But I would argue those are merely ingredients, and without the right recipe a great…

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LOVE 3 (Nintendo Switch & PC Review)

January 11, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Wow. Few games leave me speechless the way Love 3 has. I’ve thrown out so many drafts of this review, I nearly matched my LOVE 3 death count (give or take a few hundred). LOVE 3 has put me in a strange position. Really, there’s no point in getting too in-depth here. LOVE 3 is pretty much a stand-alone expansion pack to Kuso with twenty-five extra levels. If you didn’t play LOVE 1 or Kuso (LOVE 2), fear not: they’re not only included in this, but there’s remastered versions of the previous games. My one issue with that: they’re unlockable. If LOVE 3 had given me the option, I would have selected the LOVE 1+2+3 Remastered game and played through all the levels at once from the start. I really think this is something Fred Wood should consider, but, as the creator of one of the most sadistic platform games on the planet, I imagine he’s off doing evil things like blowing up frogs with firecrackers or running for office.

The art style is pretty striking, but you’ll quickly get a feel for the rule of “if it’s white, it kills you.” There’s so many inappropriate jokes I could make there, but being the classsy bitch that I am, I ain’t.

At this point, you should probably go read my Kuso review. Go. I’ll wait.

Look, I can see my page views. I’ll know if you’re reading it.

What do you mean “you already read it?” Read it again!

Did you? LIAR!

Whatevers.

LOVE 3 (all caps, like you’re screaming, and trust me, you will be) really is just a +25 to Kuso. I don’t endorse LOVE 1, as it has some iffy design choices, like blind jumps or straight-up GOTCHA-type deaths. Kuso and LOVE 3 are lacking those entirely. Which is not to say LOVE 1 is all bad. Just, enough bad that I can’t in good faith recommend it. It’s the type of punisher that becomes demoralizing instead of intense. Kuso and LOVE 3, meanwhile, are about as perfect as the subgenre of punishers get. The fifty “rooms” they contain are really just a series of unrelated vignettes tied-together only by the fact that it’s the same game with the same engine. Sometimes you’re dodging projectiles. Sometimes you’re precision-jumping. Sometimes both. There’s lots of pattern-solving, and tons of timing-based challenges. Despite the stripped-down graphics, the set pieces can be downright awe-inspiring. Hell, I almost said “WOW!” as often as I laid a checkpoint down. See, that was a variation on the joke from the first paragraph.

It’s nothing short of remarkable how many different themes and jaw-dropping set-pieces are squeezed into this entire set. Just when you think “okay, NOW it has to be out of ideas” something original and fresh hits. It’s bonkers. Three games, 67 levels, and it never gets old the entire time. Amazing.

The concept of setting your own checkpoints really pushes the franchise onto the top of the punisher mountain for me. It’s the perfect game for finding your own difficulty level. You can be bold and lay few, if any, and increase the thrills of playing the stages. Or, you can be a total coward and lay them down like you’ve got checkpoint-shaped diarrhea. If that’s not enough “do it yourself” challenge, can even play in arcade mode, with a limited amount of lives, and YOLO mode, which gives you only one life. This is REALLY screaming for a multiplayer survival/race mode. You can also level-select for all three games and their enhanced editions upon completion of them, and every stage has a hidden coin that unlocks an alternate ending. Amazingly, of the 67 stages included in the entire package, despite the same basic concepts repeating, nearly every level feels completely fresh and unique. Once more, for old time’s sake: WOW!

This level I had one small gripe with. The concept here is you have to use buttons to aim the cannons on the level to break the barriers of blocks. It’s a nice twist on one of Kuso’s most memorable stages. But, there’s a barrier of blocks above you that you can’t see, and once you reach them, you have to go back and jump up and down until the camera scrolls enough to get the gun’s projectiles to blow them up. It’s not exactly a GOTCHA because you have a (relatively) clear path there and back to it, but it feels like busy work.

Now, it’s not all sunshine. LOVE 3 has problems that the nearly-perfect Kuso didn’t. Two, in fact. The first is there’s levels based around “guiding arrows” which function like trampolines. There’s a section where you must use these while dodging a huge chain. Here, the normally-intuitive controls become hard to grapple with. It took me a long time to realize you’re best served going totally limp and letting the arrows do their thing, but even that doesn’t completely work, and it crosses over into that line of frustration. The other point of contention is the addition of helicopter-like bubbles in some of the levels that lack the smooth, instinctive movement physics the franchise is known for. The controls are too fast, too loose, and too sensitive, and I never got used to them even after finishing the game twice. Neither of these things are deal breakers, but they’re annoyances that I can’t ignore, because those sections weren’t fun. All the other levels, some BRUTAL, are incredible.

This is a 100% true story: I once saw the go-kart attendant of a little highway amusement park get run over by a terrified six-year-old who couldn’t take her foot off the gas. The young, scruffy looking park worker went to check her seat belt AFTER starting the motor, and the poor kid, who had never before been in a go-kart, discovered the gas pedal and was startled by the sudden acceleration of her kart. The guy’s panicked, blood-curdling screams of “LET OFF THE GAS!” only further scared her into putting the pedal-to-the-metal. I was reminded of that dark day when I tried to use the helicopters here, which go from 0 to light-speed pretty much instantly and replace the blind jumps of LOVE 1 as the worst aspect of the whole series, if only because they reminded me of that poor guy whose foot I probably broke that day.

Did I underrate Kuso in 2019? Perhaps. I debuted it #14, and it ultimately ended up #19 before I removed it from the leaderboard to merge it with LOVE 3’s ranking. Despite being nearly flawless, I said, “Kuso still feels like it’s more about the dying, and not the surviving.” I stand by that. But, my views on gaming are always evolving. At one point, I disliked Cuphead. Now, I have it in my top five, and it’s obviously a game where the body count seems to have been the point. I’ve come to learn “that’s okay, as long as you’re having fun.” Well, let me tell you: LOVE 3 is fun. Not only that, but it’s one of the best packages in all of platforming, punisher or otherwise. It comes with its two predecessors, and tons of options and extras to go along with them. Including both the original games is such an unexpected, atypical decision, but Fred is clearly proud of his work and wants to show it off. And that decision makes this statement undeniable: LOVE 3 is the best pure indie platformer ever made, and, as of this writing, one of the ten best indies I’ve ever played. I can feel the love.

LOVE 3 was developed by Fred Wood
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Steam

$9.99 fell in love in the making of this review. Typically to her death, but sometimes she stuck the landing.

LOVE 3 is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

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Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Review)

October 14, 2021 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

I actually get why some people don’t like the Smash Bros. franchise. I don’t agree with them, but I do understand them. Gameplay can become an unimaginable clusterfuck of visual spam that looks like effects from multiple different genres were spliced together in a way sure to cause a tension headache. If you find yourself in a match on one of those massive platforming-stage-type arenas with Pokeballs and Assist Trophies set to max, keeping track of the action or even where the hell you are on screen, even with ID tags on, is a pain in the ass. Plus, despite varied move sets, most non-professional players tend to spam the same attacks over and over and over and that can get boring.

Still a better ending for this dragon than the ones from Game of Thrones got.

So yea, I do get how someone could not buy into the hype. Frankly, the only reason I didn’t is because I couldn’t get my epilepsy under control for years, and Smash Bros is to photosensitivity what a Big Mac is to dieting. In my pre-epilepsy days, I played TONS of Melee on my GameCube. It was easily the Cube game I put the most time into. I got every single trophy and loved every moment of it. Then came epilepsy, and I realized halfway through Brawl my Smash days were over. I never even made it far enough to unlock Sonic The Hedgehog, and I didn’t even bother trying with Smash on Wii U. I didn’t like the 3DS version at all. I hated how it felt, and I put it down after less than an hour, never to return.

Now, I have my epilepsy under control. This last week, my Dad and I watched the Sora reveal trailer. My Mom and sister were out of town, meaning it was just the two of us. My Dad just started gaming full-time within the last couple years, and after seeing the trailer, he wanted to know if it lived up to the hype. As I type this sentence, he’s putting somewhere around hour #70 into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It’s safe to say, the hype was lived-up.

Good lord! Of course, there is room for four more fighters after Sora drops. Hmmmmm. Nah, I’m sure this is it. Probably. Who knows? It’s weird that there’s still space there.

In that time, I’ve mostly been struggling to wrap my head around the sheer amount of content. Yea, I’m disappointed that the single player campaign doesn’t more closely resemble Brawl’s design, and I preferred collecting trophies in Melee to “spirits” in Ultimate, but otherwise, this is such a massive game. It took us just under 40 hours to complete World of Light and score a 100% completion on Normal difficulty. Along the way, you collect “spirits” that are basically static JPEGs of characters from all over the video game spectrum. And I mean ALL OVER! In fact, there’s really one Nintendo game that gets no love at all: StarTropics. There’s NOTHING for StarTropics. Hal’s Adventures of Lolo also never shows up, but Lolo & Lala (or rather Lololo and Lalala, the Kirby bosses) appear in a background on the GameBoy stage, so in a way they’re here. As of this writing, there’s 1,499 spirits with more coming in the Sora update, and it’s likely more will be added even after Sora drops this next week. Sadly, there’s no biographies for them. They’re just static pictures that also work as buffs for fights in the adventure mode or for the “spirit board” where you aim to collect even more spirits. It’s like you’re a gaming version of Ghostbusters, which is funny because the first thing my Dad asked is “are the Ghostbusters in this?” I said “no.” He said “there’s a Ghostbusters video game!” He’s a delight.

I’m really not a fan of the whole “time and shoot to get the spirit” shit. Maybe if there had been a larger variety of ways you had to finally unlock the spirit, it’d be okay. But, after having to battle some of the harder, four-star level spirits, needing to do this one last thing became a major pain in the ass.

Beyond the spirits, there’s several other collectables. There’s a boatload of Mii Fighter costumes, new songs for the soundtrack, tons of optional challenges, and more. Hell, the roster itself is a collectable. In fact, when you first boot-up Smash Ultimate, you only get the original roster of fighters from the Nintendo 64 game (plus any DLC characters you’ve bought). That means you have to unlock SEVENTY characters over the course of the game. You can do this in few ways. We got ours mostly through the World of Light campaign. Anytime you “wake-up” a playable character, you gain access to them in all other modes. Or, when we’d quit out of World of Light, it’d usually say “A NEW FOE APPEARS” and we’d unlock another. This would happen while we cleared-out the Spirit Board as well, but it was hugely annoying when that happened. The Spirit Board works on a timer, and after five minutes, the spirits reshuffle. Apparently you can also unlock fighters through the Classic Mode, which I’ve actually decided is the weak link of the game. Compared to all the other modes, it’s just old fashioned anymore. But, I was annoyed that the target practice stuff was gone too. I’m sure if I really, REALLY think about it, I’ll remember how hard and frustrating some of those were, but in the spirit of Smash Bros. fandom, I’m just mindlessly complaining right now. Also, they could have made the alternate costumes of the fighters collectable too. That’s.. like.. 623 more things they could have made you collect. I mean, fuck it, why not? Literally every single new thing you get feels special. When has that ever happened in any game?

Dad, mad bastard that he is, bought EVERY Mii Fighter costume. The thing is, you still have to create the Mii that goes with the costumes and manually create the fighters for them. Really, each of these costumes should have come with a prefabricated Mii and just been added to the menu for the Mii Fighters. I mean, you DID pay for them!

Of course, all this stuff is predicated on whether or not you like playing Smash Bros. If you don’t, none of it matters. I really like Smash Bros. I hate doing this type of thing, but if I had to do the “describe the game in one word” thing, the one word would be “cathartic.” It’s the poster child for my beloved “OOMPH”, the idea that violence in games feels like it has weight and gravity and isn’t just pixels and polygons painted on top of each-other. A fighting game without oomph would be awful (see Clayfighter 63 1/3 for an example). Smash might be the most OOMPHful game ever. It feels so violent, and it’s fantastic! But, I was already sold on the concept back in 1999. Even with the worst box art of any Nintendo first-party game, I totally fell in love with Smash Bros on the Nintendo 64. Super Smash Bros. Melee spiked the ball and would easily make my top five GameCube list. I didn’t need any convincing. I mean, I wasn’t as bad as those fans who declared this their Game of the Year before they even played it, but I knew I’d have a good time, and I did. That’s not why this is a special game.

The shop, like the spirit board, is limited to a max of ten randomly-chosen items at a time. You can’t just grind-up resources. You also have to wait for the stuff you’re missing to appear. I get the idea is to keep players coming back to the game after they’ve finished all the content, but it’s still really annoying that you can’t just knock-out the music or the Mii Costumes first.

No, how I know Smash Bros. Ultimate is something special is my Dad, in his 70s now and brand-new to gaming, is totally hooked on it. Yea, it’s the reward mechanism thing of unlocking something new basically every minute. Sure. But there’s more to it. The simple play mechanics ease newcomers into the action and slowly reveal to them depth and nuance on a scale someone watching would never imagine. My Dad started by mashing buttons and now he’s stringing together combos and feeling mighty proud of himself. Sure, you can mindlessly mash buttons if you wish. That’d probably be enough to get you through the single player modes. But for those who journey deeper, you’ll find one of the most satisfying and balanced fighting games ever made. In fact, Smash does such a good job of being newbie friendly that it opened my Dad’s eyes to the entire fighting game genre. He wants to get into this style of game now.

Wow!

Some of the spirit battles are absurdly difficult. The one that took us the most attempts was Pauline from Super Mario Odyssey. Here, Princess Peach runs around trying to avoid you, and on a short timer, you must knock her out while dealing with Mario and Donkey Kong’s attacks. It’s maddening, but what really was a kick in the ass was that, after dozens upon dozens of failed attempts, we only won because Peach accidentally killed herself after missing a jump. She had ZERO damage. Dad checked, and apparently this has happened to multiple other people who have struggled with this level. It makes us wonder if they secretly built in a mercy feature. Come to think of it, the other extra-hard battle, for the spirit of Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid, also killed itself.

Yea, there’s stuff that bugs me. I really do wish they’d done something like Subspace Emissary. I wish the map for World of Light had been less abstract and easier to find your way around. I think the larger stages are boring and the camera is often panned too far back for the action. Also, I can’t imagine how brutal playing this must be for those poor souls who have to use their Joycons instead of being able to buy the GameCube controllers. (Speaking of which, after 70+ hours, the wireless GameCube controller we bought for Ultimate is still on its original Duracell batteries. Holy moley! The Energizer Bunny wept in despair). But honestly, I’m happy that I got Smash back. It’s fan service and full of really lazy Memberberries (even I geeked out at a picture of the girl from Eternal Darkness. OH MY GAWD LOOK! THE GIRL FROM ETERNAL DARKNESS!) that are devoid of all context. Playing Smash Bros Ultimate often feels like watching an episode of Big Bang Theory without the laugh track. LOOK, IT’S THAT THING OR CHARACTER FROM A GAME YOU PLAYED! But, you know what? It got me. It got me because it’s fun! It feels like a labor of love that wanted to figure out a way to include everything, and did. Except StarTropics. After five games, it’s the one that gets no love. God, what the fuck did StarTropics do to Sakurai? Did it run over his grandma or something?

Super Smash Bros Ultimate was developed by Sora
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$59.99 + a lot more in DLC sang GRANDMA GOT RAN OVER BY A STARTROPICS in the making of this review.

Smash Bros. Ultimate is Chick-Approved! Non-indies aren’t eligible for the IGC Leaderboard.

Sorry the formatting sucks. WordPress keeps getting worse and worse.

Filed under Uncategorized Tagged with Smash Bros review

A Decade Later

July 1, 2021 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

Thank you Waff for the amazing job! Check out his online store and follow him on Twitter!

I’ve been staring at my screen for the last hour, trying to find the words that best sum up the last ten years. I’ve typed stuff and deleted it. I’ve changed the title dozens of times. No matter what I say, it doesn’t feel like it properly conveys the love and gratitude I have for the hundreds of game developers and thousands of readers who have made the last ten years so special to me. I still can’t find anything that feels powerful enough, so I’ll simply say “thank you!” It has truly been my pleasure.

I’m not the same person I was ten years ago, and the next ten years are going to be.. interesting to say the least. For those that don’t know, I found out last year that I’m among the ten-million people on Earth living with Parkinson’s Disease. I’m healthy right now. In fact, in many ways I’ve never been better. I haven’t had a seizure in eighty days as of this writing. That’s four-times longer than I’ve gone at any point since I was sixteen-years-old. So that’s really cool. I’m showing some symptoms of Parkinson’s, but nothing drastically interfering in gameplay as of yet. That won’t last, though. There’s going to be changes. My reaction times will inevitably slow. Thumb-accuracy will likely be an issue. But, I’m not quitting gaming. Fuck that. I’ll find stuff I can play.

Probably not stuff with motion controls.

It’s just another phase of my weird journey as Indie Gamer Chick. But the beauty of gaming is there’s something for everyone. Even people fated to be professional Jiffy Pop poppers. If I’ve learned one thing in my ten years spent reviewing games, it’s to have faith that good stuff is always coming soon to a device near you. I don’t get when people say gaming used to better “back in the day.” Back in the day, gamers couldn’t bring off-trend, off-beat projects to consoles all on their own. Indies and digital distribution have really brought us into a golden age for gaming. For all the bitching we all do (myself included) about too much DLC or microtransactions, I can buy a $20 giftcard and walk away with a handful of games on pretty much any gaming format, with at least one or two near-certain quality releases. I couldn’t do that as a kid on my Nintendo 64 or PlayStation 2 or Dreamcast. What an amazing thing we all have. What a time to alive!

“Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. It’s my least favorite quality, and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”
-Conan O’Brien on his final Tonight Show

That’s my favorite quote. I love it because it’s true. It’s so weird, because a lot of people found me via scathing reviews of games that cost $1 – $5 on their Xbox 360s. I’d get angry and I’d get confused and I’d tear a game a new butthole for baffling design. On the surface, I’d come across like the stereotypical angry gaming critic. There’s a few notable ones, but most of them are a dime a dozen and fade into obscurity just as quickly as they start. I think the difference with me, the thing that’s kept me going for ten years now, is that I’m not cynical. I’ve always kept faith that the best game I’ll EVER play is somewhere off in the future. I used to say it would be tragic if, in my mid-20s, I’d already played the best game I’ll ever play. I’ll be 32-years-old next week, and I’ll never be as healthy again as I am right now. And yet, I still believe in my heart-of-hearts the best game I’ll ever play is still yet to come. I think that’s what makes me different. I think a lot of gaming people these days are too cynical about the future of our pastime. That the best days are behind us, and that nothing will ever be as good as it once was.

But, I look at what I’ve played over the last ten years, and I look at the incredible artists who made them, and I ask how anyone can be that jaded? These guys and gals have given me every reason to believe gaming’s future is brighter than a supernova. I have faith in their drive and their creativity and their homespun moxie. They’re going to assure our future as gamers will be as vast and limitless as our imaginations can conceive. And I’m so very excited, and I want you to be too!

For the adventures coming.

For the challenges we’ll conquer.

For the kingdoms we’ll save.

For the villains we’ll slay.

For the quests we’ll complete.

For the puzzles we’ll solve.

For the dreams we’ll see come true.

Have faith, my friends. The best of gaming always belongs somewhere in the future.

-Cathy Vice
July 1, 2021

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Cthulhu Saves Christmas (Review)

April 2, 2021 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

As I crawl to my 10th Anniversary as Indie Gamer Chick (it’s been pointed out to me that it’s actually my 9th anniversary, as your starting date isn’t your first anniversary. Yes, fine, I’ll have been IGC for ten years on July 1 is the point), something dreadful is overcoming me. And I don’t just mean the grim specter of Parkinson’s disease, a thought that gives me trembles. I mean sooner than it’s supposed to. No, I’m talking about nostalgia. Oh Christ, are you telling me that I’m now old enough and the world has gone to shit enough for me to long for a simpler time? Already? Ten years isn’t that long ago! But, yea, I’ve sort of reached that point where it’s almost unfathomable that I was once prolific and cranked out almost five-hundred game reviews in a a two year span and wish I could go back to THAT time.

The self-aware humor is so non-stop that even Deadpool would be like “yo, slow down! Let the jokes settle!”

So I started browsing through the literally hundreds of Nintendo Switch indies I’ve bought but never played and saw Cthulhu Saves Christmas. Oh hey, that’s a Zeboyd game! They made XBLIGs! I remember XBLIGs! I reviewed XBLIGs! They made Cthulhu Saves the World for XBLIG! I played it! I reviewed it! This is a Cthulhu saves game, only it’s NOT an XBLIG! That’s exactly the type of nostalgia my prematurely decrepit ass has been longing for. So, I fired it up and immediately started getting warm and fuzzy feelings of familiarity playing one of their self-aware satirical RPGs. The exact same kind that I started playing in 2011 when I started Indie Gamer Chick. You didn’t see a lot of games like this back then. Ten years later and there’s actually too many “haha, you’re playing a game, isn’t that quirky?” experiences. We’ve come far, and I figured Cthulhu Saves Christmas might run the joke into the ground eventually. But, I was wrong. They actually ran it into the ground right away. That’s the joke.

If you’re looking for “hardcore” RPG experience, something tells me you’d know enough from the title to realize you’re not getting it here. Or, if you’re familiar with Zeboyd’s work for that matter. Not that they can’t do damn fine RPG mechanics. Honesty, their Penny Arcade titles probably outclassed anything the Xbox 360 ever offered. But, even with really fun combat mechanics, you’re never going to be immersed in this world. In fact, the humor landing requires you to be as detached from the goings-on as humanly possible. That’s sort of the point. And yea, it’s really fun to play Cthulhu Saves Christmas. The set-up of having some attack options being chosen at random, while others you can organize and optimize for making battles be breezy is quite satisfying to build and implement. Besides, it moves at such a blistering pace that you never even have time to be bored. Things like exploring towns are shit-canned in favor of having to choose a handful of events between each stage which will give you a pre-set reward. It does feel rushed at times, but there’s always a disarming joke to go along with the feeling, as if the devs are letting you know “game makers get bored too, you know?”

CSC does actually do satire as well as any game. Its parody on the Final Fantasy “we must depart forever” trope had me laughing so much my eyes stung from the tears.

To CSC’s credit, it never gets boring, and writing is always absurd enough to hold your attention. Yet, I can’t help but get the distinct feeling that Zeboyd couldn’t believe they were still making games like this after a decade. Their magnum opus, Cosmic Star Heroine, did well enough but wasn’t exactly a world beater as far as RPGs go. Cthulhu Saves Christmas has the feel of a game that says “couldn’t you pricks have saved us from making games like this?” Or maybe I’m reading it wrong. Maybe they’re every bit as nostalgic for a simpler time as I am. I usually disclose friendships earlier in reviews, but I guess now’s the time to note that I love Robert & Bill Zeboyd. They’re my friends, but more than that, they were partners in that weird and often frustrating world of Xbox Live Indie Games. We were on different sides of the table: they were makers of XBLIGs, while I was a critic XBLIGs. But we all struggled to get attention for the community together. They certainly made my job easier, to the point that I actually felt sorry for them. They seemed too good to be stuck hocking their games for 240MSP to 400MSP (MSP is Microsoft Points. 80 Points = $1). When they were chosen to become Penny Arcade 3 and 4’s developer, but with their games still stuck on XBLIG, part of me smiled, but most of me felt heartbroken for them. “Jeez, really? Even with the license, they’re going to be stuck on the same sales page as vibrator apps?”

You have three permanent attack slots that aren’t selected by a randomizer. I placed “attack all” attacks in the first slot of each and just mashed A for the most part. Your mileage will vary on how much you get out of CSC, especially since you can adjust the difficulty.

It never occurred to me that any developer would remember that time as fondly as I did. I guess what I’ve taken away most from Cthulhu Saves Christmas is that was a happier time. For all of us. When we were all plucky upstarts, with the best yet to come sometime down the line. Who knows? Parkinson’s or not, maybe I’ll eventually reach higher highs. Zeboyd, on the other hand, certainly will. Hell, whenever I pester AAA studio heads, they’re probably the developer I name drop most. “Oh, you have an old RPG property and you don’t know what to do with it? Well, I know these guys. They’re a bit batshit but they’re good..” I suspect that they’re still destined for gaming superstardom. Even ten years later, the best days of Zeboyd feel like they are ahead of them. I guess it’s reassuring to know that those old days we spent on Xbox Live Indie Games meant as much to them as it did to me. It makes me feel a little less pathetic to be nostalgic for it.

Cthulhu Saves Christmas was developed by Zeboyd
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Steam, Coming Soon to PS5
$9.99 is an old one now in the making of this review.
Cthulhu Saves Christmas is Chick-Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

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Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker: The Definitive Review (Arcade, Sega Genesis, and Sega Master System Reviews)

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Arcade – Sega System 18
Developed by Sega and Triumph
First Released July 20, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Sega Genesis
Developed by Sega
First Released August 24, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Sega Master System
Developed by Arc System Works
Published by Sega
First Released August 24, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

ActRaiser (SNES Review)

ActRaiser
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Quintet
Published by Enix
First Released December 16, 1990
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE
Terribly Remade as ActRaiser Renaissance in 2021

South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball (Pinball FX Table Review)

South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball
Platform: Pinball FX
Set: South Park Pinball ($9.99)
Included with Pinball Pass
Designed by Peter “Deep” Grafl
Originally Released October 14 2014
Awarded a Certificate of Excellence by The Pinball Chick Team

Pinball FX: The Addams Family – The Pinball Chick Hurry-Up Review

Wizorb

Black Rose Sets Sail to the New Pinball FX

A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME
by Dash

LOVE 3 (Nintendo Switch & PC Review)

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Review)

A Decade Later

Cthulhu Saves Christmas (Review)

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Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker Platform: Arcade – Sega System 18 Developed by Sega and Triumph First Released July 20, 1990 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker Platform: Sega Genesis Developed by Sega First Released August 24, 1990 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker Platform: Sega Master System Developed by Arc System Works Published by Sega First Released August 24, 1990 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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ActRaiser Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Quintet Published by Enix First Released December 16, 1990 NO MODERN RE-RELEASE Terribly Remade as ActRaiser Renaissance in 2021

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South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball Platform: Pinball FX Set: South Park Pinball ($9.99) Included with Pinball Pass Designed by Peter “Deep” Grafl Originally Released October 14 2014 Awarded a Certificate of Excellence by The Pinball Chick Team

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A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME by Dash

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New at Indie Gamer Chick

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Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Arcade – Sega System 18
Developed by Sega and Triumph
First Released July 20, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Sega Genesis
Developed by Sega
First Released August 24, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
Platform: Sega Master System
Developed by Arc System Works
Published by Sega
First Released August 24, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

ActRaiser
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Quintet
Published by Enix
First Released December 16, 1990
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE
Terribly Remade as ActRaiser Renaissance in 2021

South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball
Platform: Pinball FX
Set: South Park Pinball ($9.99)
Included with Pinball Pass
Designed by Peter “Deep” Grafl
Originally Released October 14 2014
Awarded a Certificate of Excellence by The Pinball Chick Team

A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME
by Dash