Willow (Arcade Review)

December 11, 2023 2 Comments

Willow
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Capcom
First Released June, 1989
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

It looks like it’s going to be so fun. You know what else does? Slot machines. Blackjack tables.

Capcom is credited with keeping arcades alive with Street Fighter 2. Fair enough. But, didn’t they also kind of help usher in the demise of arcades by making games so hard that it’s almost farcical in how money grubbing they are? And it’s not like it’s just the ones you’d expect, like Ghosts n’ Goblins or Gun.Smoke. I just played through Willow, their 1989 coin-op based on the 1988 movie. It’s a highly critically acclaimed game. I have a question, though: did they actually play it past the first two levels? Because after the first two levels, it gives up any sense of fairness or balance or gamesmanship and just becomes a straight-up shakedown for quarters. Capcom had a tendency to do this with their coin-ops, but few are as brazen about it as Willow is. This isn’t a video game. It’s a robber baron.

I preferred using Madmartigan to Willow, even though Willow fires projectiles.

Now mind you, this absurd hardness was after I tinkered with the settings. I dropped the difficulty to the lowest possible. I raised my vitality to the highest possible. I turned on continues. This should NOT have been that hard. I’m fine with a challenge, but there are several sections of Willow where I’m absolutely convinced that there’s no humanly way to get past them without taking at least some damage. This is done so that you have to spend your gold on health upgrades. Yea, this is the rare arcade game that has shops and RPG-like upgrades. At this point, I’ll note that Willow’s levels run on one of the fastest timers in gaming, and that timer doesn’t stop inside the shops. Shops that have eleven items that you need to read the descriptions of. Even cheating, I only had two seconds left when I beat the first boss. It’s not like I was wasting time exploring the level, either. There’s no bones about it: Willow is a greedy game that wants you to keep putting in quarters and will go to shameless lengths to force it.

Buzzer beater.

It’s best to think of Willow as a close cousin of Ghosts ‘n Goblins, only with two characters to play as instead of one. In level one and three you play as Willow. In levels two and four, you play as Madmartigan. Players can choose who they want in level five, while level six has sections for both characters. To Willow’s credit, every major set-piece from the film is here, including a scene deleted from the final film that sees Willow on a rowboat get attacked by a giant fish. So that’s neat. Plus, the play control is tight and responsive, and the attacks are satisfying enough. Willow fires magic projectiles while Madmartigan uses his sword, and both attacks can be upgraded in the shop several times. The combat would be sweet if enemies weren’t so spongy from level three until close to the end-game. You absolutely HAVE to spend your gold on weapon upgrades or you’ll time-out just from the combat alone.

Speaking of timing-out, one of the main ways Willow screws players is by having bosses and mini-bosses hover well out of range of your weapons. It’s not a one-off thing, either. Even the last boss does it. Few arcade games use the timer to squeeze players for lunch money quite like Willow, and it’s not better for it. It’s agonizing to watch them linger and linger and linger, unable to do a thing about it. This dragon here isn’t even the level’s boss. This is basically how the stage starts, and it’s hugely spongy and it will take its sweet time.. well, actually it’s YOUR time.. before it opens itself up for counterattack.

Again, it’s baffling that this got critical acclaim, but if you look at the Wikipedia page for it, it’s one of the most revered arcade games of the year I was born. I wish I played the game those critics played. The one *I* played had cheap shots galore, a short timer and spongy enemies up the wazoo. The third level saw me pump one of the first enemies with so many full-strength magic blasts that I questioned whether it was even possible to kill it. And that enemy was heaving grenades at me that had splash damage that covered nearly a third of the screen. It did die eventually, but as soon as it did, another took its place. Without exaggeration, there were bosses that I took down easier than many of the so-called “basic” enemies. Later in the game, even when I had upgraded the sword as much as possible up to that point, these enemies pushed spiked walls into me while other enemies ran in from behind, all of which took several hits to kill. It wasn’t even pretending to be a game by that point.

The spiked wall guys AND the guys behind you respawn quite a bit too. I imagine if you played this in front of a real Willow cabinet, it would have a boxing glove punching players in the face while telling them “stop hitting yourself.”

Was it fun, at least? Well, no. Satisfying as the combat is, it’s too basic to overcome the unfair design. Maybe the first two levels were fine, but this is a six level game. Even when you’ve fully upgraded your weapons and the sponge goes away, the levels are still tailored towards cheap shots and quarter shakedowns. The final level’s Madmartigan section really goes overboard by having the level be a “maze.” It’s actually not a maze. It’s a blind random chance of selecting which door is the correct path. Not just once, either. It does it with two doors, then three, then four. Pick right, with no clues to help you (I bought a hint in the shop and it didn’t help at all. It just told me this would happen, and nothing more) and you move on. Pick wrong and you go backwards. How far backwards? It depends on the door. Some will send you all the way back to the beginning of the level. By this point, I had long since quit trying to beat the game on its terms. It wasn’t playing fair, and so I didn’t either. Good thing, because each time, I literally opened every wrong door available before I chose right. I even tried to play the meta game of figuring out which one the developers would have chosen. I guess I chose poorly. Wait, wrong George Lucas movie.

I literally LOLed that the final boss’s final attack is an invincible possessed barbecue running around and shooting six projectiles at a time while you wait for her to lower herself enough that you can barely reach her with your attack. You do have a tornado spell that can reach her IF you time the meter right, but the BBQ is designed to make sure you can’t actually get a shot off without taking damage. It’s such a stupid thing, but by this point in Willow, I expected stupid. I realize the evil barbecue is from the movie, but really? You’re finishing on that? Then, queen just floats away and the end credits begin immediately.

There’s a lot of quality licensed games that haven’t been re-released since they first came out that I weep for, and even though I hated it, I still weep for Willow’s status as a lost game. Now that the Disney+ show didn’t do so well, I’m guessing this is low on anyone’s priority for a modern re-release. Apparently the NES game is better, and one of these days, I’ll get around to reviewing it. As for the coin-op, it’s just not fun. And that’s a damn shame because I think the level design is well done and, again, they got all the action set pieces from the movie. They’re not just in the game, but as accurate to the film as a 2D platformer is capable of being. That’s admirable. This is one of the closest-to-the-film licensed games of its era. And, like the film it’s based on it: it’s kind of a disaster. The best thing I can say about it, besides having nice sprite work and a really good soundtrack, is that it has a couple okay boss fights. It’s just too bad you have to play Willow to get to them.
Verdict: NO!

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Q*bert (1982 Arcade) and Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert (Unreleased Arcade) Review

December 8, 2023 3 Comments

Q*bert
Enhanced as Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Gottlieb/Mylstar
First Released in 1982
Included in Q*bert Rebooted (2014)
Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert Never Officially Released

The story of Q*bert’s development is every bit as fascinating as the game itself. Like how it was originally going to be a shooting game called Snots & Boogers. Later, after shooting gave way to strategy, it nearly carried the disastrous name “@!#?@!” which would have been literally impossible to spread via word of mouth. I’m curious to learn a lot more, which is why I just ordered Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Games by the man himself: Warren Davis. $13.99 on Amazon. It’s what I’m treating myself to for Christmas.

Well, I promised this review when I did Krull and Three Stooges, and with 2023 almost up, there’s no time like the present. Q*bert is an icon of gaming. One of those characters that’s reached the zenith of recognition. Yet Sony, the owners of the franchise, really haven’t done a whole lot with him. Mostly, they just license him to appear in movies. Q*bert had a cameo in Wreck-it-Ralph and a prominent role in Pixels. As terrible as that film was, it was still more dignified than the 1980s cartoon that was set in the 1950s where Q*bert was a greaser. I’m sure that’s what children who wanted a Q*bert cartoon were clamoring for: Q*bert meets Happy Days. However, next year marks ten years since Sony really did anything with the adorable little orange thing. Q*bert Rebooted released in 2014 to scathing reviews, with most critics citing the bad controls. They said the same thing about the Q*bert game I had for Dreamcast. The weird thing about the franchise is it’s famous for difficult controls, but I’ve really never struggled with them when I’ve played the arcade game. Actually, Q*bert is maybe the arcade game I was most wrong about. I haven’t always been a fan. But, I have to admit, it grew on me.

The end of my best game ever. 117K. I was proud. As for the iconic swearing, it happened when sound designer David Thiel got stymied by how the synthesized voices needed to be programmed. Each syllable had to be arranged manually, which is harder than it sounds. In Ultimate History of Video Games, Thiel notes that “Bonus Points” sounded like “Bogus Points.” He became frustrated and inserted several random speech banks together, and the end result sounded like alien swear words that something somewhere would exclaim in anger, and they went with it. So, in a sense, Q*bert’s swearing is actually gaming’s greatest rage quit!

When I reviewed the Atari 2600 and 5200 versions in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part Two, I gave the 2600 version a YES! despite the fact that it’s missing a couple key baddies. It gets off to a slow start, but once you reach the levels where the cubes change colors every time you jump on them, I enjoyed it a lot more. The coin-op, on the other hand, becomes overwhelming, especially when a little green imp appears that undoes all your progress. I thought it went too far (heh, I had no idea what “too far” was, it turns out). And for that reason, I initially disliked Q*bert. I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong, and I got arcade Q*bert wrong. More specifically, I had the wrong mindset. I was thinking strictly of both the puzzle and level-clearing aspects and not the high-score chasing side of the equation. That was my mistake and I take it back. Once I focused primarily on challenging my own best scores, I had jolly good time playing Q*bert. Warren Davis.. which I keep typing as “Warwick Davis” because my brain is STOOPID.. created something special here. So did Jeff Lee, the artist who designed the character itself and the stack of cubes he hops across.

The last few cubes are a pain in the ass. Learning the timing for when to use the discs is pretty much everything. Actually, one of the things that helped me was that I started to anticipate when the game was “due” for another one of the jackasses that undoes your progress. A strategy that was foiled by the unreleased harder version of Q*bert.

But, a funny thing happened when I adjusted my attitude. Once I was in the right mindset and treated Q*bert purely as a white-knuckle, score-driven avoider, I actually got further than I ever have before. A lot further, actually, and I could maintain this consistently between games. You get points for every successful hop you make that changes the color of a block. Levels are divided into four stages, and by the third and fourth levels, you’re dealing with blocks that can change back to their original colors. This was previously as good as I could do because of the creatures called “Slick” and “Sam” who revert cubes back to previous colors. This time around, once I got to that point, I took a defensive approach. I was still mindful of the goal of each level, but with my focus more on survival, I came to better appreciate the thrilling close calls. Seriously, the chase element here is every bit as intense as the best Pac-Man games. I loves me some Pac-Man (read my Jr. Pac-Man review) but this offers even more close calls, actually.

The discs of Q*bert are pretty satisfying to use. Actually, I admire the restraint shown. It must have been mighty tempting to have the “turn-the-tables” aspect of Q*bert involve directly attacking the enemies. It’s what was trendy at the time. But, Q*bert is one of the more comical game characters of the era, and getting the baddies to fling themselves off the pyramid has a Wile E. Coyote vibe to it. The arcade cabinets even had an authentic pinball knocker to complete the effect. This was produced by pinball stalwart Gottlieb. They had plenty.

I always got angry around this point in Q*bert. Not this time. I finally said “screw completing the stage! This is too much!” and started trying to scratch out enough distance between me and the baddies. Then, it happened. After about a minute of hopping around, just hanging on for dear life, through sheer osmosis, a path to victory revealed itself. About six or seven hops later, I had won. Wait.. what? The first time it happened, it felt like a fluke. But then it kept happening level after level. As it turns out, the best offense in Q*bert is a good defense. Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t COMPLETELY mindless avoidance, but I also stopped getting angry if I had to leave the area I was “patrolling” for lack of a better term. It was rewarding, because the chases were always exciting. This is especially true as you get deeper into the game, since the speed increases for baddies and you. I liked how the faster gameplay felt so much I longed for a dip switch option to make it permanent. I wish it happened sooner in the game. The one remaining annoyance I have with Q*bert is that I wish there was some kind of warning when new balls/eggs/blobs/whatever are about to drop onto the playfield. Maybe a Looney Tunes-like bomb-dropping noise, a countdown, or shadows. With enough playtime, you eventually learn to anticipate it, but it’s never totally intuitive. Well, at least at the skill level I’m at.

A bit redundant of a title. It’d be like calling me slower, shorter, more lower to the floor Cathy.

Personally, I think the challenge for Q*bert is spot-on, but creator Warren Davis didn’t, and hence we get Q*bert: Sadistic Pants Wetting Nightmare Edition. Actually, it’s “Faster Harder More Challenging” and despite being fully finished and even route-tested, Gottlieb Mylstar’s new overlords at Coca-Cola opted against releasing it. I thought about postponing this review until my copy of Davis’ book arrives to find out the full story, which apparently also involves 7-Eleven and maybe Mello Yello. Actually, no, I guess the Mello Yello Q*bert was a different thing, but hold on, wait.. why Mello Yello? Coca-Cola has owned Minute Maid since 1960. Why not Minute Maid Q*bert? You know, something that actually makes sense? Or maybe they didn’t want consumers to imagine the orange juice they were drinking was actually the blood and bile and various other bodily fluids collected from juicing a member of Q*bert’s species.

🤔

And now that’s all I’m going to be able to think about. Eww. Yea, going with Mello Yello was a good call.

It turns out, I had that ROM too. It’s the exact same game as Q*bert, only it contains 45 mg of caffeine per serving.

Actually, Davis himself released the ROM of FHMC Q*bert to the public in 1996, thus preserving it forever. Now THAT is a guy who gets it. Class act. And I’m really happy he did, because Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert is not simply “hard mode” for Q*bert. I mean, it kind of is, but there’s a lot of changes. The discs now move up and down the sides of the stack of cubes, with a little warning graphic of when the move is about to happen. AND, despite being the hard mode, the discs will reappear after you use them. It’s not an endless supply, and I actually wish there was a counter that showed how many discs were left, but I appreciated it nonetheless. It’s literally the only kindness the game offers. This is one of the most difficult and downright cruel games ever. You know what? THIS should have been the one with a gibberish swear bubble for a name! It’d been fitting.

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Each round in FHMC is built around how the levels work in normal Q*bert. In other words, round 1 is always just permanently changing the colors to the target color. Round 2 is always triple colors with the third color being permanent. Round 3 has colors change back when you hop on them a second time. Finally, round 4 is always triple color with the second and third colors swapping back and forth. I got my wish to have the game speed up faster. But, I made that wish on a monkey’s paw, because the Faster Harder Etc. Q*bert utterly spams the screen with enemies fairly quickly. And while you have more discs, the snakes are a LOT more savvy to them this go around and are harder to lure into jumping off the stack. These twists alone would have been hard enough, but Faster, More Intense Q*bert is just getting warmed up. Remember the green things that undid your progress? Well, they still do that, only they also lock the squares from being changed. How do you unlock them? You have to lure the snake into jumping on them! WHAT? That’s.. that’s sick. You alright, Q*bert?

The blocks with patterns on them are locked. So, go ahead! Get the snake to jump off the stack now! See where that gets you!

And finally, the game introduces Q*Bertha, a love-sick purple member of Q*bert’s species who chases him around the board and undoes your work. Unlike the green things from the original build of Q*bert, this thing lingers on the board, chases you, and has to be killed using the discs. And now I understand why the discs respawn. I reckon the game would become impossible after a certain point without that. It was also around this point I started to comprehend how this didn’t get the best reception in route testing. Without exaggeration, I struggled to clear level 1 – 3. It took me hours of playing to make it to level 3 to even encounter Q*Bertha for the first time. I ultimately made it twice to Level 4 – 2 and I’m convinced that stage has to be impossible to beat without getting an incredibly lucky break. Actually, you’ll need more than one lucky break, since it sort of feels like both games I made it that far, the roads that led to 4 – 2 had many moments of just dumb luck working out for me. Or moments where I’d hopped around the same stack of cubes so long that I just killed myself because it would clear the screen of enemies and allow me to finally get the final few cubes without interruption. I think that pretty much says it all about Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert: that ending your life is a legitimate strategy. This game is EVIL!

It looks so innocent. This is Satan in digital form.

Still, I’m all about historical curios, and Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert, frustrating and seemingly impossible as it is, is still a whole lot of fun. I don’t think it would be worth buying as its own release, but every time Q*bert is re-released, they really ought to bundle this with it. As for the original game, I’m not too proud to admit when I’m wrong. Q*bert actually is one of the greatest of all-time. I’m a big fan of close calls in chase games, and Q*bert offers up more than most golden age arcade games do. It also offers players enough flexibility to come up with their own strategies, which I put the highest premium on. It’s such a shame that the franchise hasn’t survived the test of time. At the start of this review, I called Q*bert an icon of gaming, and I stand by that. But, in terms of general pop culture, it feels more like an oddity of the 80s, instead of an icon of it, doesn’t it? It deserves so much better. Sony really shouldn’t be so stingy with it. They might own Q*bert in the legal sense, but it really belongs to gamers everywhere, and it deserves better than what it has gotten in the past forty years.
Verdict: YES! and YES!

Hell, I didn’t even mention the bonus stage that happens when you beat level 2 in FHMC. You score points for every solid blue block. Oh and the green things have to touch the blocks, so you can’t just intercept them all. Oh and they rain non-stop during it. I got eight once. I was happy to have gotten eight. Even the bonus stage is a kick in the ass. And now that the review is over, I’m going to go cry. Holy crap, how is this even a thing that exists? EVIL!

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Virtual Boy Wario Land (Review)

December 7, 2023 Leave a comment

Virtual Boy Wario Land
Platform: Virtual Boy. I mean, duh. It’s in the name!
Developed by Nintendo
First Released November 27, 1995
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This one was a lot harder to get action-based screenshots than you would think thanks to how Wario’s tackle/charge move looks.

When I first ran through Virtual Boy’s library back in 2020, two games stood out to me as being pretty dang good. Then I replayed Mario Clash earlier this year and I realized it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I originally pegged it to be. I still ultimately gave it a YES!, but barely so, and I’ve been dreading replaying Virtual Boy Wario Land ever since. It was the other unambiguously good Virtual Boy game, but maybe I’d set my expectations for Virtual Boy so low that it messed with my initial perception. Thankfully, now that I’ve finished my second play session with it, I don’t have to stare blankly at the screen and ask myself if I had a good time or not. It’s really good. And painful to play, but hey, if you’re going to fry your eyeballs out of their sockets, do it with sprites this beautifully done. Shame about it being on Virtual Boy, where it’s fated to linger in obscurity, unloved, until the end of time.

Wario once had a game animated by the same people who did Ghost in the Shell, so it might be audacious for me to say this, but I’m saying it anyway: this has the best sprite work in Wario Land history. Some of the best in Nintendo history, in fact. It’s a solid decade ahead of its time. Very cartoon-like.

At only ten stages and four boss fights, it’s a short game. I’ve never needed more than two hours to finish it. While the levels are sprawling, only a couple I would consider to be “maze-like.” Each of the ten stages has a key and a hidden treasure somewhere in it. In this second play-through, I only one time made it to the exit of the stage without holding the key. Nine of ten times, I just happened upon it through the normal progression of the game. The hidden treasures were a little more difficult. VB Wario Land has six possible endings, the two best of which require you to find all ten of the treasures. Four times I had to do extra exploring to find them. It works, though. Above all else, Wario Land as a franchise needs to feel like a treasure hunt. VB Wario Land pulls it flawlessly. You actually do have to explore, and my only complaint is that there’s only two things to find in every stage. I think perhaps they should have required more than one key to finish a level. I strongly suspect that was planned at some point, but then someone said “do we really want our players to keep their eyeballs on this thing longer than we have to?”

My proof is that there’s more rooms that have this pattern, but they have 1ups instead of treasure. It makes no sense to make a big deal of extra lives since extra lives are plentiful and the game is absurdly easy. No, I think they had more ambitious plans that had to be dropped because of the platform’s ability to broil your retinas.

Of course, a well done treasure hunt doesn’t mean anything if the levels are boring to explore. That’s certainly not the case here. VB Wario Land has some of the best 2D levels Nintendo has ever built. With the exception of the first level, which has no personality or theme to speak of, VB Wario Land has excellent set pieces. Sure, they’re mostly the typical cliches of forests, deserts, waterfalls, etc. But they all feel fresh here. Breathtaking backgrounds and even mundane pathways are drawn with attention to detail. They have this otherworldly quality to them that few 2D platformers achieve quite like VB Wario Land does. It also helps that the enemies all have authentic personalities. Wario is a mischievous character, and this is one of the few times where every aspect of the game feels like it belongs to him, and him alone. It’s so well done.

Go figure that an all-red platform would have some of the best underwater sections in platforming history.

The big twist in this Wario Land is the ability to transfer from the foreground to the background. This is usually done with springs that launch you back and forth. Other times, you’ll access one or the other via doors or pipes. There’s even extended sections that take place entirely in the background. While it’s fun and it works, it’s also one of the reasons the game is so easy. There’s rarely anything in the background that can hurt you. I also feel the mechanic was underutilized. Early in the game, the backgrounds are mostly used as bonus areas where coins or hearts are found. Later, shifting between the foregrounds and backgrounds is more incorporated into the maze-like layouts of the level, and the game truly finds its footing as one of the all-timers. It just takes a while to get there. The springing between the foreground and background is also incorporated into two of the four boss fights, both of which are among the highlights of the game.

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Virtual Boy Wario Land’s weakness is that it’s probably the easiest platforming game Nintendo ever made. I’ve played this three times now. Once on Halloween in 2020, and twice this session, including the “harder” second quest, and I’ve still never lost a single life playing VB Wario Land. Enemies are mostly toothless. In this session, even while playing the second quest, I never took damage from a single basic enemy. In the second quest, I did get hit by the spiky balls that are laying everywhere and I damaged myself on the first mini-boss when I was too slow to attack it, but otherwise, not one single basic enemy ever hurt me. And it’s not because I have mad skills or anything like that. Most baddies don’t hurt you when you touch them, even if you’re not attacking. They just bounce off you. It’s so awkward. I’ve made jokes before about the silliness of the video game logic that enemies are lethal to the touch no matter what they’re doing, but Virtual Boy Wario Land is a glimpse into what gaming would be like if that weren’t the case. There’s also no pits to fall into. The Wario Land that followed this removed the ability to lose a life altogether. I can’t help but wonder if that was discussed for this one, too?

Before each boss, you have to fight these tiny robotic mini-bosses by avoiding their attacks and waiting for them to fly up in the air and crash down on you, which exposes a button. They each only take two hits to kill. In the second quest, you have to hop before they crash, because they only expose the button for a split second. It was the first time (and the only time, come to think of it) that VB Wario Land was anything resembling challenging.

As if the enemy designs weren’t weak enough, VB Wario Land has absolutely no balance when it comes to power-ups. Frankly, they went overboard. The standard Wario bull-charge would have been satisfying enough. It’s one of my all-time favorite game attacks. You can also just jump on enemies, which will knock them out and allow them to be carried, but they’re a bit unwieldy. The charge/tackle move, however, is always delightful. The fact that your butt causes earthquakes that disable every enemy on screen is insanely overpowered and shouldn’t have been included, but it’s Wario. I guess it’s okay! Hell, had they kept it at that, it’s likely the game would have been a contender for Nintendo’s best platformer ever. But, they didn’t. There’s a dragon helmet that breathes fire, though its range is limited to a few spaces in front of you. Some of the blocks can only be broken by fire, and sometimes you need fire to find the special treasure (I’m almost certain you never need it to find the key). It destroys most enemies and has unlimited ammo and would be overpowered by itself. There’s also an eagle helmet that lets you dash in the air and fly for a short distance, which can get you over large gaps. It’s fun to use. So far, that sounds pretty normal, right?

They might as well roll the credits once you have this.

The problem is the dragon and eagle helmets stack to form a winged dragon that can both fly and fire projectiles the full length of the screen. It’s very useful for exploring, since the projectiles it shoots pierces all blocks (though it does stop with enemies), allowing you to clear out entire rooms worth of blocks in a second or two. But, it also allows you to instantly vaporize nearly every basic enemy as soon as you get them within sight. After getting the winged dragon helmet, I almost ran the table on VB Wario Land. The next time I took damage, it was while attempting to score the final hit against the final boss of the game. Once you have it, assuming you actually take your time to measure every jump, the only remaining challenges will be the bosses, since they can’t be damaged by your attack. There’s no particularly difficult jumps, either. Your own recklessness is all that stands in front of you and the end credits. The play control won’t screw you over, either. VB Wario Land handles like a dream. A surreal, all-red, eye-bleeding dream.

Even on the second quest, enemies pose little to no threat. This thing is one of the few that are immune to your projectiles, but it’s not like it’s hard to kill. Really, the second quest could be called Wario’s Adventures in Spiky Ball Land because it’s basically all spiky balls, all the time.

The second quest really isn’t harder so much as it’s just more annoying. The treasures and keys were in the same locations as they were before. Enemies were still nothing more than cannon-fodder. The bosses and even mini-bosses did attack faster and had smaller windows for vulnerability, but otherwise, it was the same game. Only now, there were tons of spiky balls laying around, so many that you literally have to crawl through many sections. Some were even placed in a way where it made getting some coins impossible. Was it harder? Obviously not, since the second time I beat Virtual Boy Wario Land almost exactly thirty minutes faster than my previous session. And the second time around, I skipped the after-level extra lives bonus round (which I don’t think counts towards time anyway). I didn’t need it and still finished with 20 lives. That’s owed largely to the unbalanced power-ups. If Nintendo were to remake VB Wario Land, adding more levels would be a given, but actually, the biggest change I’d recommend making is removing the winged dragon helmet. It’s just too overpowered. Besides, it’s nowhere near as satisfying as the bull charge is (in my head canon, Wario is cousins with Bald Bull).

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I get the impression VB Wario Land is meant for a much younger, less experienced audience. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a 2D platformer that’s better suited to introduce young children to 2D exploration-based platforming than Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo should fully colorize it, restore its original name (Wario Cruise) and give it a modern release. They won’t, but they ought to. I’m not sure re-releasing this in the state it’s in would be the wisest move. I wanted to test this on my nieces and nephew. They were excited, too! But, I decided to cancel the plan because my eyes were hurting after playing it. I’m not making a joke here, either. I’ve been rubbing them and squinting a lot ever since I finished, and I’m not going to put them through that. The same thing happened to me when I played Mario Clash earlier this year. What the hell was Nintendo thinking when they made Virtual Boy? I wasn’t even playing on a real one and my eyes are killing me. Don’t tell me the designers at Nintendo didn’t experience the same thing during its development. There’s no way they didn’t. But, despite legitimate eye soreness, I can honestly say what hurts worse is that VB Wario Land is unlikely to ever see the light of day again. Even though it lacks difficulty, the joy of exploring the levels and finding the treasures is undeniable. Maybe it’s not the absolute best “lost” Nintendo game, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to forever wallow in obscurity. As far as their hidden gems go, it shines among the brightest. Maybe that’s why my eyes are so sore right now.
Verdict: YES!

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The Three Stooges (Arcade Review)

December 6, 2023 1 Comment

The Three Stooges
aka The Three Stooges in Brides is Brides
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Mylstar Electronics
First Released in 1984
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Subtitled “Brides is Brides” which made me think it was based on a specific short. It’s not.

So, this happened. There’s a Three Stooges coin-op from 1984. Yes, really. I wanted to find the story on how exactly this came about, but as far as I can tell, nobody has really talked about the history behind it. I think I can fill in the blanks myself, though. Three Stooges was developed and published by Mylstar Electronics, the company who did the Krull arcade game that I already reviewed, who you might better know as the linear continuation of pinball juggernaut Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s smash hit arcade release was Q*Bert, which I promise I’m going to get around to doing very soon. Gottlieb had been owned by Columbia Pictures since 1976, but in 1983 Coca-Cola purchased Columbia Pictures. Coca-Cola’s first act seems to have been renaming Gottlieb “Mylstar” to move away from pinball and fully onto arcade video games, which were trendy at the time. And Columbia Pictures just so happened to be the studio who produced all those Three Stooges films. So, my working theory is someone very out of touch at Coca-Cola saw that they owned both a video game company AND the Three Stooges IP and said “kids these days love them newfangled electronic games. And if I know anything about pop culture, and hell, I must know a lot because I now work for a company that owns a movie studio and that’s how it works, there’s nothing children love more than the Three Stooges! It’s what MY kids watched when they were children, which was forty years ago!” This ended about as well as you would expect. I don’t know when in 1984 Three Stooges came out, but I do know that Coca Cola closed Mylstar in September in 1984, barely a f’n year after changing their name. What a farce.

On a real arcade machine, there’s three joysticks: left is Larry, center is Moe, and right is Curly. On the PC I use to capture media for these reviews, I could only be Larry (except when I plugged in a second controller). Nobody wants to be Larry. Larry is the Zeppo of the group. However, in the game, he’s clearly the best character. Look at those eyes. Those cold, dead eyes. Those are the eyes of a man not to be trifled with.

This particular game is unrelated to the more famous PC/NES game by Cinemaware. The coin-op game is a lot more like the Atari arcade classic Food Fight, only with a lot more to do. The object is to collect three keys in every stage. The keys are hidden behind various furniture and other assorted fixtures. You have to grab a hammer and then just walk into the objects to demolish them, revealing either loot (dollar bags/stars/award statuettes) that scores points or the keys. Once you grab all three keys, an exit will open up. As you do this, you have to avoid “villains”, cops, and prissy old ladies who can also grab the hammer and smack you on the head. If you run into someone holding a hammer OR a police officer catches you, you lose a life. There’s also a dog and a waiter walking around that aren’t worth any points and just seem to be there for the sake of chaos.

After two stages, you have these levels where singers belt tunes and their music notes damage you. Annoyingly, the last one’s notes linger too long. I almost always lost a life on it. On these stages, you can ONLY use pies, which are quite hard to aim.

You can defend yourself with a slap if you’re Larry or Curly or an eye-gouge if you’re Moe. This stuns enemies and fellow stooges, allowing you to pass by them. If you have the hammer in your hand, you actually drop it quite a ways from you in order to use the defensive smack. However, you can walk into the “villains” with the hammer, giving them one of those cartoonish lumps on their head. This permanently knocks out NPCs for the rest of the level, so it seems like it should be your primary strategy, right? Well, the game has collision issues up the wazoo that I need to talk about. There’s also tables that have a limited supply of pies sitting on them that you can pick-up and throw to stun enemies, but again, every other character on the screen can do the same to you. I also found the pies INCREDIBLY hard to aim since they’re off-center from where your sprite is. They weren’t worth the effort or the comedic effect at all, since all they do is briefly disable baddies (I think the dog’s purpose is to lick the pie off their faces). If you’re playing with anything less than three players, the other stooges will wander around, and they’re enemies now. They’ll chase you down, get in your way, and even cost you lives. I’m not feeling the brotherly love, fellas. On the other hand, NPC stooges can also destroy the fixtures and reveal the keys as well. They can’t collect the keys, but it becomes a viable strategy to dodge baddies and let the NPCs do the smashing for you.

I appreciate that they went to the effort of having different objectives in some stages. In these ones, you not only have to get the keys but you also have to rescue one of your sweethearts from a cell. The problem is, on this level, the cops typically would get to them about one second after I grabbed the final key. If this happens, you have to keep replaying it over and over until you finally do rescue her. Being a dummy, it took me a while to remember to grab the key closest to her cell last.

To be frank, I kind of figured that the Three Stooges would be a terrible game. Just the fact that literally not one person on my timeline had ever seen a Three Stooges cabinet in the wilds of 1980s arcades was ominous enough. But, what was even more alarming was that many were shocked it even existed at all. This coin-op has NO presence in gaming’s collective memory. A complete non-entity. So, you can imagine my surprise that whether Three Stooges is a bad game or not isn’t cut and dry. The sound effects really carry the day here. The digital voice samples don’t sound anything at all like the actors, but a small handful of quips are here AND they come in three different pitches to differentiate the stooges. “Wise guy, eh?” Here. “Cheese it! It’s the cops!” Here. Wait, that’s a Three Stooges quote? I figure it was a gangster film thing, but it’s here. “Yuk Yuk” is here too, though it’s so sad. It sounds like a duck with laryngitis, and I’m not even exaggerating. There’s also various satisfying snaps and slaps that season the violence. Violence that feels comically authentic to the franchise. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not exactly Street Fighter 2 levels of OOMPHful, but it’s nice to just haul off and slap the crap out of someone. Honestly, for a 1984 game, this does a remarkable job of staging a believable Three Stooges short film-like gaming experience.

There’s even an ending of sorts. Given that each cycle of levels feels identical to the one before it, that’s really not a very big deal.

Unfortunately, collision detection is inconsistent. When I had the hammer and tried walking into anyone, I usually had to shimmy back and forth to register that permanent knock-out hit. If the NPCs also had a hammer, forget it. I legged it. It’s not the worst collision I’ve seen, but lining up strikes was harder than it should be. And that’s not even the biggest problem. It’s too easy to get caught-up in the scenery. This is one of those games where if you clip into something, be it the walls or one of the fixtures, the computer doesn’t know what to do so it sort of pushes you backwards. But, you’re still moving towards it, and it causes the sprite to stutter-walk. Do you know what I’m talking about? That thing? It does that thing. Movement in general lacks smoothness to it. If this had Robotron or even Food Fight like gracefulness, I don’t think I would have even had to think about Three Stooges getting a YES! or a NO! I’m shocked at this phase in the review, I’m still debating it. If only it had something to put it over the top. Yes, if only.

This was my best non-cheating single player game. It was one complete cycle, at which point the game found its teeth and I barely lasted past the first stage.

Well, guess what? Three Stooges does manage to make it into the end zone. What makes it truly unique is how multiplayer completely changes the gameplay. When you play with more than one player, each key is assigned to a specific stooge (in two player mode, there’s a wildcard key either can pick up). You can all smash the furniture (if you find a hammer) to your heart’s content, but only Larry can get the silver key, while Moe collects the blue one and Curly the green one. THIS is so much more interesting. Three Stooges almost becomes an entirely different experience, and one that works WONDERFULLY! Friendly fire is on and all times, so you can play cooperatively or play cutthroat. I’m stunned to report that this was one of the funnest multiplayer experiences I’ve had in 2023.

Holy crap. I didn’t see this one coming. I’m stunned.

First I played with the usual gang of idiots: Dad and Angela. Dad, goody-good he is, earnestly tried to collect keys while Angela and I resumed our sibling rivalry from Vs. Balloon Fight, “accidentally” killing each-other until it became crystal clear to all observers we were most certainly committing fratricide on purpose. All the while our father was yelling at us to stop being chowder heads and get our keys, ultimately giving up with the words that will live in Vice Family lore for generations untold. His exact quote: “alright, f*ck it! I’m killing you both!” And he did. About thirty minutes into our session, my nieces and nephew came over to the house, saw us playing, and they wanted in. Hell, my mother and even my crotchety old AJ wanted in. We took turns dropping in and out, and while there is a sharp learning curve for younger children (or non-gaming old farts like AJ), we had such a great time. I want to say Three Stooges isn’t a great game, but I’ll be damned if this wasn’t one of my favorite games I’ve played in 2023. I figured it would be cynical and soulless and awful. It’s none of those. Honestly, it could use more polish, but it has an intangible charm and makes for a one-of-a-kind multiplayer experience you absolutely don’t want to miss. Who owns the rights to this game now? Is it Sony? Holy crap, I think it’s Sony! Hey Sony, re-release Three Stooges! I’m telling you, you’re leaving tens of dollars on the table.
Verdict: YES!

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Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball: (Pinball M Table Review)

December 5, 2023 Leave a comment

Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball
Platform: Pinball M
Set: Death Save Bundle ($19.99)
Individual Price: $5.49
Designed by Grego “Rockger” Ezsias
Originally Released November 30, 2023
❄️🔥POLARIZING TABLE🔥❄️

Insert any Duke Nukem quip HERE. I’ll do it: “I’m an equal opportunity ass kicker.” Now just repeat that every time the ball touches something.

Right off the bat, I need to inform you, my beloved reader, that none of the Vice Family are Duke Nukem fans. That doesn’t mean we’re against the franchise. It just doesn’t interest us. Taking it further, Oscar and Angela have no experience at all with the games (Dad might have played 3D at some point but only briefly). Having been squirted into the world in 1989, I was born at the wrong time to really care about the IP. So, we all deferred to Dash, our resident Duke Nukem fanboy. He both enjoyed the pinball layout Grego Ezsias and the team at Zen Studios created AND he also believes that Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball canonically fits alongside the rest of the franchise. In other words, he could believe that this was an official release by Duke’s creators. Jordi, also familiar with Duke Nukem, agreed. From the theme integration to the call outs to the modes: this could be a legitimate stand-alone Duke Nukem release and it’s unlikely any fan of the series wouldn’t believe it. It’s a fitting tribute to Duke Nukem 3D and if you’re a big fan, what’s here should be authentic enough that you’ll feel at home. So, I’m just going to focus on the pinball stuff.

Unique among Zen’s pins is that Duke Nukem has no traditional driver. The Cinema shot is low-yielding as its own thing and has a mini-mode attached, but we were mostly using it as a dumper to safely gain control of wild balls. Lighting the D-A-M-N letters off the right ramp and shooting the toilet scoop starts modes, but you’re given so much freedom to explore the layout that it never really feels as if you’re being queued into the modes. Odd.

With the exception of Dash, the main issue we all took with Duke was the ball return. Whenever the ball transfers from the bumpers to the main playfield, it goes through a hidden habitrail before exiting out underneath the DAMN ramp. And it returns at an angle where the ball sort of lobbed carelessly. It’s so off-putting. It’s treating a pinball return the same way a slob wads up trash like hamburger wrappers and casually throws them in the general vicinity of a garbage can, unbothered by whether or not they actually go in the can. It never comes out at the same speed or trajectory, and since the ball inevitably hits the slingshot, the probability that any returned ball could become unplayable is higher than any made shot should be. The fact that the design specifically drops the ball into the highly lethal left slingshot is incredibly frustrating. There was no rational or logical benefit from any design perspective for having it do this besides punishing players for wanting to play the table in the first place. Hey, if Zen wants pins to be less fun than they can be, I suppose that’s their god given right, even if I don’t get it.

One of the three main modes (Kick Ass and Chew Bubble Gum) is a glorified video mode that pays homage to the Duke Nukem franchise. Aliens will pop-up in one of four stations, and you have to use the flippers to aim and the action button to fire three shots into each. In the main mode, you have to kill twenty aliens (8 in the first phase, 12 in the other). Not only does it take forever, but none of the Vices EVER failed at it. Not once. In fact, all three of us quickly reached the point where we didn’t even take damage. I should note that Oscar, normally the member of The Pinball Chick Team who whines about video modes, actually enjoyed Bubble Gum the most. Taking it further, he declared that this is what solidified his GREAT rating. Whatever floats your boat, Pops. But again, it’s a video mode that takes 60 total shots to finish. SIXTY. Holy crap. What is wrong with Zen’s new crop of designers? Did they not get enough attention as children? Did the cool kids dunk their heads in toilets and this is revenge?

The sad thing about the sloven ball return is that Duke Nukem would be a difficult enough table without it. Killer slingshots that spoon-feed the brutal outlanes are just the start of it. Duke Nukem is a brick-layer with high risk angles and cardboard targets that crowd the drain. Now granted: if any video game franchise’s theme lends itself to a design that feels like it’s trolling players, it’s Duke Nukem. But we put more time into this pin than any pin we’ve ever reviewed, and we still couldn’t really make any progress. Even after 50 combined hours and multiple world records set by the three of us, the amount of things we didn’t experience with Duke Nukem is staggering. As of this writing, I’m the arcade mode World Champion and we have three other first place standings on challenge leaderboards, but we were never able to complete all three modes in a single game. In fact, none of us defeated the second boss. We never opened Ready For Action multiball. My father and I never once earned a single extra ball (Angela earned two EBs over the course of 100 or so games). FIFTY HOURS. WORLD RECORDS. How is it even possible we didn’t come halfway to finishing the three main modes in a single game? Well, it’s because even if you clock the difficult angles and drill the shots into muscle memory, eventually the ball return WILL kill you. You can only get lucky so many times. When you reduce your table to dumb luck, it becomes impossible to finish or even come close. Duke is a table where random chance will ALWAYS supersede skill.

The radioactive symbol’s spin disc is the highlight of the table, in my opinion. It’s a clever idea. Balls that land in the black zones will be fed to VUK and count towards a random award. Balls that land in the yellow zones will instead be released into the bumper area of the table. Good idea. I sure wish it didn’t require six spins on the right zones to do anything.

The Vice Family is probably Zen Studios’ best case scenario for players. A family that shares a love of the sport and competes with each-other, all three of whom are capable of challenging for world records. We’re far removed from the best players, but we ain’t slouches. If we couldn’t do these things, who exactly are these tables designed for? Zen’s original tables these days rely on mind-numbing grinding combined with made shots still having the potential to kill you because the ball return is done in a way where it might be unplayable. Presumably their design team thinks this is the key to engagement, since mobile games are about mindless grinding and random odds. But, like.. it’s pinball, gang. I know I sound like a broken record, but your best sellers are adaptations of old Williams/Bally pins that might be hard (nobody can accuse Indiana Jones, Twilight Zone, or Addams Family of being too easy) but they don’t require players to practically earn a bachelor’s degree in that table just to experience everything.

After completing each mode, you have to charge up the left spinner and then shoot the toilet scoop to activate “boss fights” which feature cardboard targets, the big one of which takes roughly fifty billion hits to kill, give or take. It’s actually over a dozen hits combined for the minions and big boss. While it does have a ball save attached to it, the ball save is going to come out under the damned DAMN ramp, again reducing your survival to random chance. If Duke Nukem has a feature that COULD have been fun, you can bet your sweet ass the designer made it require so many hits that it becomes a joyless slog. You can also shoot the toilet scoop to use a gun, but this feature is incredibly confusing and frankly underwhelming. The targets are there, but we’re encouraged to shoot elsewhere? Huh?

I originally had Duke Nukem as GOOD, agreeing with everyone else that Duke has a fun, downright frisky layout with nice ramp placement, a unique and memorable skillshot, and genuinely thrilling side-targets. It’s a damn fine layout, besides the way the ball return is handled. It even incorporates zone-style design by having the bumpers being completely segregated from the rest of the table. Even more striking is that Duke Nukem doesn’t feel like it’s aping Williams or Stern. It’s the rare Zen original pin that feels genuinely original. Even though the flow is left-side heavy, it avoids having the feel of a table that’s been cut in half, like A Samurai’s Vengeance suffered from. And Oscar would disown me if I didn’t single-out the fine-tuned scoring balance, which my daddio was positively swooning over. It’s so precisely balanced that it would have made the late, great Lyman Sheats proud. Don’t take my rating to imply any lack of talent. They DO have talent. So much that the problems Zen has with forced grinding and dickhead ball returns are much more frustrating than they should be. If they had no clue what they were doing, it’d be excusable. They’re so good at making pins that the faults are inexcusable.

Yet another continuing problem with Zen’s originals is that they include mini-fields with gaps so wide you could drive a steamship through them. Seriously, it’s remarkable how they’ve gotten into these company-wide bad habits. Grindy modes. Harbor-sized flipper gaps. By the way, Zen, a drain pin doesn’t help when the physics of the mini-table make the ball feel limp. Duke being accused of having limp balls seems like the type of thing that would make him fly into a rage, but I’ll take my chances.

Saying that I know Zen is capable of better than this is an understatement. Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball has a layout so awesome that it should have been a cinch for a GREAT rating from me, and really, MASTERPIECE should have been in play. It has everything I like in a layout. It’s telling that none of us even considered MASTERPIECE. That was ruled out really early. I don’t know why anyone would make such a great creation and then destroy it by discouraging table exploration like Duke does. The multiball modes seem fun. I wish I could justify going for them, but activating them takes so many hits and requires you hold your breath and hope the ball return doesn’t screw you over that it’s not worth attempting. Grind. Grind. Grind. Why on Earth do you want people to have to shoot targets so many times to accomplish ANYTHING? I don’t get it. Imagine you were golfing and you sank a long putt, but instead of that being a good thing by itself, you then had to spin a wheel where there’s a 20% chance the hole would fire the ball into the closest water hazard and force you to start over. That’s how Zen’s original tables have been lately, and I’m sick of it.

Duke Nukem is left-side dominant. In 50+ hours of playing, to the best of my knowledge, none of us got the random award from hitting the targets behind the spinner 100 times. Yes, ONE HUNDRED HITS. The bumpers were equally bad. They’re laid out in a way where the ball just goes dead and rolls lifelessly to the lethal ball return hole under the DAMN ramp. Zen, seriously, it would be so easy to salvage this. Sure, the ball return is busted and you can’t fix that, but just cut the requirements for modes and hits the bosses need by at least half. Don’t want ANYONE to finish this shit? One or two players in the entire world see the wizard modes on any given Zen original, and you think that’s a good thing? Because it seems to me average or casual players would consider it so far out of reach that it’s not even worth exploring. How likely do you think they are to recommend your pinball games to other people? Probably not very likely.

I’m done rewarding these grindy tables with positive reviews. Enough with modes requiring so many shots to finish that it’s practically sarcastic. Enough with requiring an entire lifetime of devotion just to see everything a table has to offer. Do you want to unlock one of the multiballs? Well you have to shoot the spinners a couple dozen or so times AND light the C-O-O-L targets and.. oh you already drained out? Too bad. Want a random reward? Well you have to shoot the toilet scoop ten times (without starting any other modes) and then shoot the.. oh, you already drained out? Too bad. Want to start “I’m the Cure” mini mode? Well you have to shoot the black colors on the spin disk 6 times then hope the wall randomly wiggles enough to get 60 hits on the NEST targets to light the.. oh you already drained out? Too bad. Enough is enough. Look at the leaderboards. Those scores are pretty low. Clearly you didn’t want anyone unlocking much, so hey, you didn’t unlock a positive score from me. I’m rating it BAD.

As of this writing, this is the highest score ever recorded for Arcade mode, one of two primary play modes. The previous high was Angela, using an entirely different strategy. That’s reassuring. The best thing I can say about Duke Nukem is it offers enough flexibility that multiple different strategies are viable. Angela chose to charge-up the two-ball multiball and just repeat it over and over. Of course, the score Angela put up that I beat required an absurd amount of grinding that, by her own admission, was the least fun way to play. “Hey, I’m the world champion though so HAH.” She’s going to wake up to find that’s not even the case anymore, as I literally just put this up before publication.

Again, I’m the lone hold-out here. Everyone else, despite their frustration with the same stuff I’m whining about, had fun. A really good theme, excellent layout, satisfying shots, and fine-tuned balance really do make Duke stand out in a crowded field. For all the bitching you just sat through, even I had fun. I mean, up to a point, but every time I started really enjoying the table, Duke went back to obnoxious grinding and random chance deaths. I just had one of my best games. I was hitting my shots. I couldn’t miss, really. I set a new world record. But all three balls drained from the ball return hitting the left slingshot, which sent the ball into the right slingshot, which sent the ball directly down the left outlane. It wasn’t just three times, either. IT WAS FIVE TIMES. Twice I had protected the left out lane with a kickback. It didn’t matter, because eventually you have to give up skill and simply cross your fingers. When I did, the result was predictable: ball return, left slingshot, right slingshot, left outlane, dead ball. I’m done. Five outlanes in one game where I couldn’t have shot better. Duke Nukem pinball doesn’t want to be fun. It wants to be a troll. One of the best layouts Zen has ever done and the final product is more obsessed with being a prick than it is being fun. Zen, if you want your original pins to require a marathon of shots to make anything happen, that’s your prerogative, and I’ll never understand it. This isn’t pinball. It’s a war of attrition.
Cathy: BAD (2/5)
Angela: GOOD (3/5)
Oscar: GREAT (4/5)
Jordi: GOOD (3/5)
Dash: GREAT (4/5)

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Eyes (1982 Arcade Game Review)

December 2, 2023 2 Comments

Eyes
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Digitrex Techstar
Published by Rock-Ola (US) Zaccaria (Europe)
First Released in 1982
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

You can practically feel the cynicism during the planning session. “Pac-Man is popular. What’s Pac-Man? A mouth! Well, what else is on a face that we can turn into our popular game?” “A NOSE!” “A nose, Greg? Goddamn, a f*cking nose? You’re fired! Anyone else?” “Uh.. eyes?” “EYES! Make a game where an eye eats things!” “Eyes don’t eat. They see.” “THEN MAKE A GAME WHERE EYES SEE THINGS! JEEZ LOUISE DO I HAVE TO SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU?”

Eyes holds a minor significance in my life as the first ever game I remember playing on MAME. The name stuck out to me. Some companies went all out with catchy names that grabbed your attention. Q*Bert. Zaxxon. Even Centipede, which is actually a real thing, still pops on a game list. This has none of that. EYES. It’s practically like saying “yep. Just ‘Eyes!’ Deal with it!” In a sense, it stood out by not standing out. Published by Rock-Ola, the famous jukebox manufacturer that’s still around to this day (they turn a century old in 2027) and developed by Digitrex Techstar, I initially pegged Eyes as a soulless Pac-Man coattail rider. But, I was wrong. Actually, it’s not even really a maze chase. I mean, it wants to be one, I think, but actually It’s a run-of-the-mill tank game, and not a very good one.

I’m the eye at the bottom of the screen.

Eyes features eight screens but really only one single maze where you have to fire projectiles from your eye to both kill enemies and also collect.. or possibly destroy, it’s not clear.. the things in the mazes. Like Pac-Man, the object is to collect all the objects. You’re not just being chased, as the other eyes shoot at you. Your projectiles are unlimited and travel the full length of the screen but disappear if they hit something. Likewise, the enemies can and will shoot the full length of the screen as well. Once you clear the 8th stage, that level seems to repeat forever. There’s undoubtedly something here that makes you want to enjoy it even if it does feel like it’s trying a little too hard to be 80s arcade quirky. The problem is, it’s just not fun.

The fact that you can fire more than one projectile at a time seemed nice until I realized what the developers must have: the game would be impossible after a certain point without it.

The biggest issue is that the “maze” just isn’t that interesting, seemingly tailored for neither excising chasing nor exciting tank combat. Once enemies become more aggressive and fire on you faster, you have no choice but to play conservatively and squeeze out distance between you and the baddies, usually one row at a time. By the sixth level, gameplay in Eyes is reduced down to bobbing back and forth like you’re doing the hokey pokey, waiting for enemies to peak around the corner and tagging them in the split second they’re exposed, before they’ll turn the corner and shoot you. Ironically for a game called EYES, enemies don’t blink when they respawn, and they will fire immediately upon spawning. Each enemy spawns in a specific location and always respawns there a second or two after you shoot them, but since they all look the same, the main challenge becomes keeping track of which is which and where they’ll respawn. Does that sound fun? Cuz it ain’t.

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The one remarkable thing about Eyes is that, despite using the same maze with the same target locations and the same enemy starting points, it doesn’t feel like it’s only one maze. That’s probably because the scaling is so badly handled. The first four levels or so are too easy, while level five is the only one that has a nice balance to it. From the sixth level onward, it’s all wiggling back and forth, all the time. Since your projectiles and enemy projectiles don’t cancel each-other out, you’re left with no choice but to camp and wait. The enemies realize this too because eventually they’ll just sit on the other side of a wall YOU’RE parking on and wait as well. I suppose in that sense, Eyes is one of the first cover-based shooters in gaming history. But it’s dull and the scoring balance isn’t very rewarding and there’s just no tension to it. It’s a slog. One of those games lost to history because it wasn’t all that good in the first place. Certainly nowhere near the worst arcaders. God, no. Actually, I think there’s potential here, but Eyes can’t decide if it’s trying to be a thrilling maze chase or an intense tank combat game. Maybe you can do both, but not this way.
Verdict: NO!
I avoided using the following cliches: if looks could kill, the eyes have it, the eyes are windows to the soul, eye-eye captain, and so-forth. You’re welcome.

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Colored Effects (Indie Review)

November 26, 2023 Leave a comment

Colored Effects
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Steam
Developed by TacSou
Published by Flynn’s Arcade

The graphics are nice, clean, and distinctive. TacSou never put the trees in locations that would be distracting. It’s a game that allows you to process everything quickly with no visual loudness.

I’ve had a bitch of a time trying to write this review for Colored Effects, an indie puzzler where you have to dip your character in superpower-granting paints in order to solve logic puzzles. I’ve not been struggling because Colored Effects is bad or boring or anything scandalous like that. Actually, it’s really good. I can’t stress enough how good the controls are. Colored Effects has accurate, intuitive movement physics, effortless jumping physics, and some of the best box-shoving mechanics I’ve seen (with one tiny but annoying exception, see the next caption). Seriously, I hope developer TacSou wrote down the recipe for this (I assume video games are made with recipes) because the controls are gosh darned perfect.

This is the one and only exception to the controls/movement being flawless. Here, a box I wanted to fall through a trapdoor when I activated a lever didn’t fall, instead defiantly balancing on a single pixel. Take that, Newton!

The color concept works great, and it’s largely because of those intuitive controls. You can only be one color at a time, and each color has unique special abilities. Green allows you to clone yourself and claim a carbon tax credit. Yellow gives you a dash move and grants you immunity from Green Lantern’s ring. Turning red lets you throw fireballs and gives you dictatorial authority over all other Power Rangers (unless it’s the Alien Rangers or Time Force squad, where you’re relegated to field command). Purple allows you to warp just far enough to pass through nearby walls and also will make televangelists speculate as to whether you’re supposed to be “the gay one” or not. Dipping yourself in blue gives you a double jump and also assures you’re a shoe-in to win California’s electoral votes. There’s almost no learning curve to any of the superpowers and their limitations. The clones of yourself are lifeless blocks that vanish if you leave the bubble surrounding them. The warping ability is the neatest, because when you’re choosing the direction to warp, the game doesn’t pause, so you can be hovering mid-air. Yes, this is worked into the level design, too! These are really basic platforming/puzzling tropes, but they’re used so cleverly.

There’s a few technical annoyances. There’s checkpoint billboards you can use. See the box with the little character below the two switches on the left of the picture? That’s it, and it’s 100% optional to activate. They’re much appreciated, but they also come with a monkey’s paw-like glitchy drawback. Sometimes I’d activate them only to realize I’d made the wrong move, so I’d pause the game and restart the whole level from scratch. Then I’d go about puzzling, realize I’d made another mistake and hit the quick restart button, which should start the whole level over, right? Only, it wouldn’t. The game would revert back to the previous checkpoint I’d already deliberately erased, which meant I had to pause the game and click the restart level option again. That happened constantly and it was so annoying.

And the puzzles are fun little test chambers that mostly accomplish what I call “The Big Overwhelm.” That’s my term for levels so big and vast and multifaceted that the first time you see the layout, you think “there’s no way I’ll ever make sense of it.” Which is awesome, by the way. The Big Overwhelm is the secret sauce that makes classic puzzlers Portal and Baba is You work. I dare say no logic puzzler can be great without it. Not every level of Colored Effects pulls it off. In general, any puzzle game can usually be sussed out by figuring out what the final move of a level is and reverse-engineering it from there. Well, quite a few stages in Colored Effects suffer from “First Move Syndrome” where a puzzle is too easy because the first move is so obvious that the rest of the design logic instantly reveals itself. Even late in the game this happens. Scaling is super hard to do in a puzzler. You can add extra steps or red herrings till the cows come home, but it’s just so hard to gauge what is going to throw someone off. Scratching your head is an entirely personal experience, and unless a developer is able to use something along the lines of focus testing to reorder levels based on average completion times, you’re going to end up with a difficulty curve that looks like the recordings of a seismograph. It’s kind of inevitable.

This was really the only boss I enjoyed fighting because it was the only one that felt like a PUZZLE in this PUZZLE GAME that ended when you solved the PUZZLE instead of having to redo certain steps because it’s a boss and bosses are supposed to have “hit points.” This boss requires you to actually stop and think. Good stuff.

TacSou’s concept was you’d earn new colors by fighting bosses. Solid idea if the boss battles are true to the rest of the game. But, only the one I pictured above accomplishes that, while the rest don’t feel right for this game at all. And the pacing is truly strange. Colored Effects has 40 levels. Which levels have the bosses? 2, 6, 10, 14, and 40. Yes, really! You go from three levels and a boss fight to a twenty-five level gap between them. And I’m not complaining, by the way, because the levels are fun and the bosses, well, aren’t. The final boss has roughly fifty-thousand goddamned different phases (but who’s counting?) and goes on FOREVER because each color has its own segment, and it never feels puzzley. Not for a single second. Mind you, there are no enemies in the puzzle stages, yet you have to fight airplanes shooting bullet hell-ish projectiles at you to finish the game, and it’s so out of place. None of the bosses are bad in the traditional sense. It’s only by virtue of how wrong they are for Colored Effects that they’re unwelcome speed bumps, with that one exception above. And that one exception is why I can’t overlook this, because TacSou proved they COULD make bosses that combined genuine logic puzzle goodness with traditional game bosses. The rest are so cookie cutter they feel like any generic platformer’s bosses. Shame, because this is NOT a generic game!

In the first few levels, you have to collect gems that open gates to the room exit. Then, Colored Effects adds a twist. Some of the levels require you to reach the exit once with each color available, at which point you come out the starting door and have to do it again as a different color. Once you’ve gone through the door in a color, it’s checked off, but you can’t go through the exit as that color again. It works and it’s unique, but these also tended to be the puzzles that were easiest because either the first move or the last move you’d make became too obvious. Oh, and if you’re curious what color blind mode looks like, here it is.

80% of the bosses being lame aside, Colored Effects is a very good puzzler. I really don’t have too many notes on the puzzle logic itself, because movement and the box shoving physics are so accurate that you don’t even stress them. There’s no pixel-perfect jumping required. I can only think of one single level where I felt the timing of activating switches and special moves at the correct moments was so precise that novice gamers might struggle with performing it even if they figure out the solution. No, this is actually nearly perfect as far as this genre goes because the movement/timing is so fine tuned that it really becomes your wits versus the puzzle design, and the controller isn’t a factor at all. And they’re really good puzzles too. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to enjoy Colored Effects. In many ways, it’s the ideal Nintendo Switch puzzler. The toughest part of Colored Effects for me was writing this review, really. What can I say? It’s hard to write about a game that does so little wrong.
Verdict: YES!
Colored Effects is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.
$3.99 (Normally $4.99) were dipped in brown paint and rolled in bread crumbs in the making of this review.
A Review Copy of Colored Effects was supplied by Flynn’s Arcade. Upon release, a copy of it was purchased by a member of the Vice Family. Two, in fact! I bought my nephew one, too. Hopefully he can put down Fortnite long enough to try it.

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Mario & Wario (Super Famicom Review)

November 15, 2023 1 Comment

Mario & Wario
Platform: Super Famicom
Developed by Game Freak
Published by Nintendo
First Released August 27, 1993
Exclusively Uses SNES Mouse
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Now that Devil World finally got a US release, the question is “what is the biggest Nintendo-published game to never get a US release?” Obviously most Nintendo fans would say “Mother 3.” But, I’m going to disagree. The thing is, that’s not really among the A-lister Nintendo franchises. Not like, say, Mario. And there is a Mario game that never came out in the United States. Not just any Mario game, either. It’s a one-of-a-kind Mario game from the creator of Pokemon. AND it utilizes the SNES Mouse. It’s called Mario & Wario, and it never saw the light of day outside of Japan. It has been referenced a few times, especially in the Smash Bros. series, but otherwise, it’s a non-entity in Nintendo’s library. It’s also likely to never be re-released again. Well, assuming Nintendo doesn’t do some kind of NES-Mini type of plug-and-play with the SNES Mouse for Mario Paint. Which, jeez, that sounds like a license to print money to me. If they did that, maybe they would include Mario & Wario with it. It’s not like there’s a need for Nintendo to create an English translation. All the text and even the logo for Mario & Wario are in English. Even though the game’s code includes a Japanese logo. The theory is that Nintendo accidentally manufactured and shipped the version meant for America to Japan. See kids, even the big boys make mistakes.

For this play session, I used Mario exclusively. I strongly advise anyone playing this to do the same thing. The princess is far too slow, eliminating what little excitement Mario & Wario has, and Yoshi is impossibly fast. It’s not like this is a typical mouse cursor you’re using. Especially for the smaller blocks, I had difficulty lining up Wanda to work her magic. I should also note that I have tremors these days, and by that, I mean my hands shake. I don’t have giant mutant worms attacking me. Almost every death I suffered was the result of clicking errors on my part, but your mileage may vary how much that factors in.

Mario & Wario is sort of like a more fast-paced, proactive, action-based version of Lemmings. Wario swoops over Mario at the start of every world and drops some form of a bucket on his head. You take control of his guardian fairy/glorified cursor, Wanda, who has to clear a path for Mario to reach Luigi. If you tap Mario directly, he changes directions, but otherwise all the interaction is with the stages themselves. There’s a wide variety of blocks that you have to click. Some of them stay on the screen until you click them again. Some are already on the screen and clicking them permanently removes them. Some run on a short timer before vanishing. Others work like switches and clicking one removes all of that variety while activating another color of blocks. There’s also tons of ladders that Mario will always take if he steps on them. Finally, there’s a small handful of enemies, some of which you can kill by clicking, while others you have to work around while making sure Mario avoids them.

These bats, for example, can be clicked four times when they’re perched or once individually when they take flight.

The actual “puzzle design” of Mario & Wario takes quite a while to find its footing. At the start of every level, you’re allowed to scroll around and get a lay of the land. It seems like most of the levels are straight-forward, with the path Mario needs to take already laid out, and you simply act as a caregiver. Assuming the level is maze-like, victory usually comes down to determining what is the final ladder and/or spring you need to use to reach Luigi and reverse-engineering from there. It takes a LONG time for the game to reach the point where I’d consider it to be genuinely challenging. You can play any of the game’s first eight worlds in any order you want, which is an ominous sign for the lack of difficulty scaling. There’s ten levels per world, and once you clear the first eighty levels, you have to play through two more worlds to finish the game.

I found it amusing that the bucket falls off Mario’s head when he falls. Really, Wanda could shove him out of the way at this point and the level would be solved. While I’m on the subject, Wanda’s magic wand can make blocks appear and disappear and can defeat enemies. Why doesn’t she just make the bucket disappear?

It’s not until the ninth and tenth world that truly meaty puzzles come into play, though some of those levels are annoying. There’s stages that have a glue-like substance that you slowly walk through, and you have to click the blocks to turn them over. They’re smaller blocks, and the small blocks in general are the hardest to do, so I hated those. I also wasn’t a fan of the levels where you just slap Mario back and forth like he’s in some kind of frat initiation as you wait for the obstacle to move out of the way. Mario & Wario mostly isn’t a puzzle game in the Baba is You sense. It’s not even really Lemmings-like, even though everyone lazily uses that comparison, myself included. It’s just the easiest comparison. In the entire 80 levels before the final two worlds, maybe a half-dozen stages required me to stop for even a moment and think about what moves I’d need to make. Maybe. It would have required more if I actually went for the four stars in every stage, but those only grant you an extra life. I didn’t need that many lives even when I made multiple clicking errors. It wasn’t until world seven that I died twice on any level, and I never died more than twice before world nine. I also never timed-out once over the entire 100 stages, though I had a couple close calls.

Given the locations of the stars, I get the impression that, at one point in development, they were essential towards beating the stage. The “puzzle” elements of Mario & Wario are more often than not designed around THEIR placement. The typical path to victory is too much of a cinch. If you factor in the stars, suddenly the game seems more elegantly planned. But, they’re just for 1ups. The game doesn’t even track how many stars you collect in each stage after the fact. A modern game would allow you to replay every level and go for perfect scores. On the off-off-off chance Mario & Wario is ever remade, I’m sure the game would be like that, where it charts how many stars you collect each level.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Mario & Wario a dull concept, because I did enjoy the game enough to play it from start to finish. It’s just not a thrilling experience. Especially early levels. World 1 is so bare bones it doesn’t even feature the stars at all. The opening stages of each new world are glorified tutorials that introduce whatever new element that world introduces. There’s cannons that you can click to change their direction, but you can also click their projectiles to eliminate them. Or perhaps there’s indestructible spiky balls that you have to dodge. But, once you have your path laid out, it’s rare that you have to stress obstacles that might interfere with that. Genuine excitement doesn’t really show up until you’re over eighty levels in. EIGHTY! Holy crap. That’s a lot of slogging through okay-but-mundane levels while waiting to get to the really good stuff.

This specific sequence here was the one that gave me the most problems. To beat it, you have to time when the spiked balls are inside the timed block. BUT, you also have to keep Mario close enough to the edge that he starts to fall before the block vanishes and releases the spiked ball you trap. Mario doesn’t just fall off ledges instantly. Players are given a tiny grace period where he hangs over the edge before falling. Without this grace period, Mario & Wario would be next to impossible.

Mario & Wario isn’t the most brainy of puzzle games. It’s more about staying calm and thinking on your feet. You can’t make any moves outside of the present screen you’re on, but for the most part, they didn’t incorporate that into the puzzle design. Only two or three levels are dependent on you making a move that won’t factor in until later in the level. The most notable one is level 8-10. On it, you start the stage next to a ladder. Below you are two fireballs, and if you don’t close them in immediately, you won’t be able to beat the stage after you spend quite a bit of time making your way to the exit. That’s really the only stage where victory is determined the moment you start the level. On one hand, that means there are no GOTCHAs in the game. On the other hand, there’s no real challenge, either. It’s the least bold possible design they could have done for a game like this.

And really, once you click these two squares, the rest of the level is a lay-up.

Had I played Mario & Wario outside of an emulator, I don’t think I would have liked it as much. There’s no save files, so the entire game must be beaten all at once. I wasn’t limited to beating in a single sitting thanks to save states. Even then, I almost stopped playing when I realized I’d have to redo all the early world that I already played once in 2020. They’re too easy, and the novelty of playing a lost Mario game had long run its course for me. Thankfully, I didn’t play deep last time. The promise of unseen levels was enough to get me to put the time into Mario & Wario. This go around, I beat the whole game. I’d say a little over half the levels are, while not exciting, certainly compelling enough that Mario & Wario holds up slightly more than it would have just as a historic curio.

The last twenty levels are genuinely hard. I wish there had been more stages like this, because I had such a fun time figuring them out. I also started losing lives, but by this point I had built-up close to thirty of them, so there wasn’t any tension.

You would think Nintendo would have done something with Mario & Wario by now. It has one of the finest pedigrees in gaming, and Nintendo has a touchscreen console that would work perfect with this type of gameplay. They’re remaking Mario vs. Donkey Kong, but a Mario & Wario remake would make even more sense, wouldn’t it? It has that tantalizing “forbidden fruit” aura about it. An unreleased-in-America game that utilizes unconventional controls and has gameplay unlike anything else in the entire franchise. Oh, and it was almost even weirder. Mario & Wario was originally conceived as a Super Scope game. Yes, really! The stumbling bucket-headed gameplay was still there, along with creating a path for Mario to reach Luigi, but you’d also fire nets at the screen to capture enemies.

Despite the name of the game, there’s no direct encounter with Wario except during bonus levels, where you click-mash Wario for bonus coins. There’s no final boss battle. The game just ends after 100 stages. By that point, you should be more than ready to be done with it. A little bit of Mario & Wario goes a long ways. It must have been MADDENING to play this without saving.

The only reason Game Freak moved away from making this a light gun game was because TVs were getting bigger and the Super Scope was losing its universal compatibility. Frankly, it’s a miracle Mario & Wario exists at all, as it seems like it came close to being cancelled altogether, instead of just cancelled globally. It’s not clear why this never came out in the United States. It got previews in magazines like Nintendo Power and the SNES Mouse was in more homes than the Super Scope, which got four or five exclusive games. Maybe it was because Mario and Wario barely matter in a game called Mario & Wario. Or maybe because they felt American fans associated Mario with action games, and Mario & Wario is a mild-at-best puzzler. A fun one, but certainly not a great one. Mario & Wario is just alright. Even though it has gameplay merit, really, the curio factor is the main reason anyone would want to play this in 2023. Yet, the formula this created seems like it has potential to live-on. Will the SNES game ever be re-released? Probably not. Will Mario & Wario be remade as a touchscreen game? I wouldn’t bet against it.
Verdict: YES!
Check out my review of Mario Clash for the Virtual Boy!

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

November 13, 2023 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!)

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ActRaiser (SNES Review)

November 11, 2023 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!

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