Little Nemo: The Dream Master (NES Review)

May 16, 2024 by 3 Comments

Little Nemo: The Dream Master
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released September, 1990
Designed by Tatsuya Minami
Produced by Tokuro Fujiwara
Published by Capcom
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The object is to find the keys. The meta object is to avoid throwing your controller through the screen.

Capcom was able to do some amazing things with the 1983 hardware standard that was really created only to be able to run a convincing version of Donkey Kong. By 1990, they were releasing instant classics like Mega Man 2 & 3, DuckTales, and Rescue Rangers. It’s one of the hottest hot-streaks in the entire history of gaming, so much that a game like The Little Mermaid sticks out so much more because it’s this oddly subdued and kind of boring blip on the radar that’s so clearly on a lower level than the highs they were reaching. I mention that because one game often lumped in with the hot streak is Little Nemo: The Dream Master. It’s one of the most famous NES games, and maybe their highest profile NES game that never got a re-release. And I don’t get it at all. Little Nemo is one of the absolute worst NES games I’ve played yet. A title that has no redeeming value from a gameplay perspective. Sure is pretty though. Well, I mean, assuming you overlook the endless flicker. And then it’s mostly just stark colors in the background. In fact, I’d say this has the most overrated graphics on the NES. Most of the settings are pretty dull and there’s only one set piece that stands out. It’s not ugly to look at, but it ain’t all that either.

I would not have been able to use the bee suit if autofire wasn’t an option. Christ, and I thought the arcade version of Balloon Fight was bad.

You have to search levels for six to seven hidden keys. Well, at least to start, and “searching” isn’t always involved. The sixth level just puts the six keys right next to the exit. You can barely jump and there’s no ropes or ladders to climb. The only “advanced” move you can do is swim. Otherwise, to navigate, you have to use a variety of animals that you put to sleep by feeding them candy. Candy famously being something that puts you to sleep. The implied drugging of animals should have been good for a laugh, but actually playing Little Nemo: The GHB Master is agony. Oh, and everything kills you, INCLUDING the animals that you pacify with your roofies. There’s even a window between feeding them the third and presumably lethal piece of candy and the moment they actually finish swallowing it and slip into a coma where you can still be damaged by touching them. Without the animals, Nemo gets no offensive move until the last couple stages. You can stun enemies by throwing candy at them, but I only found this useful two or three times over the course of the game, especially if there’s no animals around. Capcom usually does such a good job with enemies, so it’s downright shocking that the combat is so boring and so needlessly cruel in Little Nemo.

This is one of those games where spikes are instakills, no matter how much life you have left. Oh, and see that little evil dandelion seed? They all but ruin the game.

What’s truly remarkable is that every opportunity Little Nemo has to ping a cheap shot on players is taken. Enemies are always placed in a way to assure that you will take damage, especially the dandelion seeds that heat-seek you and continuously rain from the sky in several sections. There’s no elegance at all to the enemy design, placement, or combat in Little Nemo. No finesse. No balance to it. It feels like a sadist said “wouldn’t it be funny if we put this enemy here?” Not really, because it just makes the whole game miserable to play. Often with the old NES games that people call “Nintendo Hard” I can at least see some redeeming quality that makes me understand why someone would convince themselves it was a good game. You know, when they were children. Battletoads has some good fisticuffs and amazing OOMPH for a two-button NES brawler. Batman had fun combat and, well, it’s Batman. But Little Nemo? I literally have nothing positive to say about this one. Having decent-to-good graphics becomes obnoxious when the gameplay is as terrible as Nemo’s is.

I quit the US version and switched to the Japanese one on the off chance that maybe it was easier, even though Cutting Room Floor didn’t mention it. Some games have easier versions in different regions, most famously The Adventures of Bayou Billy, which I’ll be reviewing very soon. Sadly, this one was not such a game. The only difference was a couple characters had cigars in their mouths. By the way, in the train stage you need six keys to unlock the door, but it gives you two at the start and two at the finish. Between those two points, the train ride itself, which is the entire stage, offers up five keys. You can actually finish with nine. As far as I could tell, this is the only stage that does that.

The levels themselves aren’t particularly well made. Besides the train level as seen in the above picture, the stages are sprawling, but in a way that makes them feel underpopulated and empty. The one and only consistent theme is dickhead enemy placement. Wherever you have to climb, make a jump, or change screens, enemies will be positioned in a way where you’ll almost certainly take damage. The animal helpers that have means to attack are basically worthless, with the exception of the frog. With it, you can jump on enemies in the classic Mario hop ‘n bop tradition. The others might as well not have an attack at all. The giant gorilla’s punch barely extends beyond its body and has a big recovery delay. The same with the hermit crab, and if you do miss, you end up buried in the sand. Usually if I tried to play offensively, I was just as likely to take damage. This is mostly because your hit box apparently becomes MASSIVE, while enemies, well, aren’t.

And then you have moments like this one, where the animals walk away from you and hide where you can’t get to them WHILE other enemies continue to attack, and you might have to wait quite a while before they actually move back to a useful position. In fact, usually if there’s an animal close by, there’s some kind of targeting enemy zeroing in on you while you’re trying to subdue the animal. The evil dandelion seeds, or these birds dropping eggs on you, or tadpoles if you’re underwater. It always takes three candies to put an animal to sleep, and usually the area where they’re located is closed in and cramped. Remember, the animals hurt you if you touch them. There’s so many no-win situations. I’m guessing maybe 0.1% of all players ever beat this fair and square and most “fans” are fans in the sense they played it for a single rental, maybe two, made it to the second world, third at most, and quit. Unless they had a Game Genie or used the level select code.

The collision might be the worst of any popular game I’ve played. For me, the most telling section in the entire game is when you have a mouse with a mallet that can break through special blocks, but the blocks seem to have a single pixel of vulnerability that isn’t in the center. Even standing right in front of them, the hammer often just plain doesn’t work. It just clips through the breakable blocks like they’re a background wall. At first, I thought they were. I spent a while looking for the right blocks, because it was just unfathomable to me that even the worst Capcom game could mess up such a commonplace gaming trope as “breaking a block that’s in your way with the special block breaking item.” You know, that thing that’s so common, even from games of this era, that it’s a cliché? Well, the first blocks were the right blocks. The breaking block mechanic is just broken. I had to sort of jump at the blocks from an angle to get the collision to register. There’s tons of NES games that could do the “break a block” mechanic. How could they not get this right? This is basic stuff to screw up. I walked away from Little Nemo with the impression that the people who worked on this game didn’t want this assignment and simply didn’t give a sh*t how it turned out.

Right through the blocks.

It really speaks to how popular Capcom was during this era that even Little Nemo: The Dream Master can be famous for being a fun game. I do have a question for its fans: did you actually play this for more than a rental? Did you ever make any progress at all? Without using a Game Genie or Level Select code? Because I kept waiting for this legendary game to show up, and all that happened was one GOTCHA after another. That is, when the world isn’t just a dead maze of spikes or “puzzles” that involve breakable blocks that don’t want to break. Even after the keys are ditched and the combat is opened up, it’s not like you spend most of your time fighting enemies. You still need the animals, which means you’re mostly not using the scepter. Instead, that’s saved for the three spongy, lazily-designed boss fights. Capcom usually does great boss battles, but these are more about sponginess and hard-to-hit attack patterns. Oh, and you have to charge-up the scepter for maximum effect, because of course you do. I have never been more baffled by a game’s popularity than Little Nemo’s. It’s never fun. Not even a little bit. In fact, it feels like the brakes are slammed every time the potential for fun presents itself, as if the developers said “whoa, whoa, let’s not do it like that. Someone might enjoy this!” The big hook, the use of the animals, is subdued and dull because they aren’t really aren’t useful for anything but temporary transportation. You don’t feel empowered in them. It often feels like you’re just opening up whole new ways to take cheap shots and lose lives.

To be honest, I expected the dandelion seeds to rain down on you during the last boss. I don’t know what it says about Little Nemo’s design that the three bosses couldn’t compare to a basic enemy.

This is the one time where I’m completely convinced that nobody actually likes Little Nemo and that they only say they do because critics gave it high marks. That includes other critics, some of which place this on “best of NES” lists. Are you f*cking sh*tting me? I just refuse to believe anyone had fun with this, but nobody wants to be the one standing alone saying otherwise. The attitude seems to be hey, if you’re not having fun, it’s probably your fault you’re not, right? After all, everyone else is having a good time. Why aren’t you? It couldn’t be because the game is impossibly difficult, or that the level design is really empty and boring, or the collision is god awful, or that some mechanics just plain don’t work, or that taking over a fairly large variety of animals isn’t anywhere near as enjoyable as it seems like it would be on a paper, right? Actually, yea, all those things are true and it’s okay to come out and say it: Little Nemo is Capcom’s worst NES game that doesn’t involve Micronics, and hell, I’m willing to say it’s their absolute worst 8-bit game. At least Ghosts ‘n Goblins has a fun theme to it and is remarkably true to the coin-op. Little Nemo doesn’t have that going for it, nor is it so inept that it’s actually kind of funny, like 1942. Little Nemo is the terrible game that walks like a masterpiece, and I absolutely f*cking despise it.
Verdict: NO!

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Nemo (Capcom Arcade Review)

May 15, 2024 by Leave a comment

NemoNemo
Platform: Arcade
Released November 20, 1990
Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Published by Capcom
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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In December, I reviewed Capcom’s arcade anti-classic Willow. A terrible game that everyone goes gaga over that’s directed by Yoshiki Okamoto and based on a middling movie. Six months later and I’m reviewing Capcom’s Nemo. A wonderful game that nobody ever talks about that’s directed by Yoshiki Okamoto and based on a middling movie. When people think of “Capcom” and “Nemo” they likely think of the NES game Little Nemo: The Dream Master. I’ll be doing that one next. Both the coin-op and the NES game beat the film to the US market by a couple years, not that it matters. This is one of those licenses where people should have known the film was going to bust. The joint Japan-US production with a script from Chris “Goonies/Home Alone/Harry Potter” Columbus spent years in development hell, then released four days after I was born in 1989 only to become a historic box office bomb, losing about sixty million bucks (adjusted for inflation). Like Krull before it, this is one of those situations where the coin-op is the best thing to come out of the whole fiasco. Actually, I’d call this easily Capcom’s best arcade platformer from this era. It’s also the rare Capcom coin-op that doesn’t feel like a quarter shakedown. I’m sure the two things aren’t related and it’s a complete coincidence. Uh huh.

If Capcom ever does release this, I hope they restore the two deleted levels that are still there, in the game code. This one especially, where you slide across a rail, is both original and has a sense of childlike wonder about it that few games from the cynical early 90s achieve. I really had a good time playing Nemo. This is exactly the kind of lost classic I started covering retro games for. If you want to play the deleted levels, Cutting Room Floor has the instructions.

Nemo is such a blast, and I say that thinking the movie is BORING. It’s a favorite of my father, who loves anime feature films, but for me, I was like.. man, this ain’t no My Neighbor Totoro. Imagine the degree of difficulty Capcom had in adapting THAT to a viable platform game, but they nailed it! Unlike the NES game, there’s no animal shenanigans this go around. Instead, most enemies can be killed by jumping on them. That old chestnut. If that’s not to your liking, you can also use the scepter from the movie as a weapon that functionally works like a sword. It’s satisfying enough by itself, I guess. It’s not an amazing weapon or anything, but it can be. It can be powered-up by grabbing the famous Capcom pinwheel, turning Nemo red and letting you create a chain reaction with the enemies, IE hitting them back into each-other. Now THAT’S the good stuff, and my only regret is that they didn’t build the game more around this. A couple bosses are, though. Bosses where you can hit them directly, but it’s more efficient to knock smaller baddies into them. During these fights, the pinwheels might even continuously spawn for players. Collision is pretty good all around and the enemies are fun and imaginative. For the thirty to forty minutes or so you’ll need to finish Nemo Arcade, fighting the basic enemies never gets boring. That’s half the battle right there!

You can also pick up and throw crates and barrels. I threw one once that rolled so far that I was racking-up points for a solid 10 seconds even though it’d scrolled off the screen. I LOVE THIS GAME!

And the level design is pretty impressive too. Capcom took a very high risk by not starting off with a basic “move right, jump over pits” type of design you’d expect from a first level. Instead, it’s an auto scrolling train. I hate auto-scrolling, but I loved that stage, and I loved that Capcom took it on faith that players understand the concept of a platform game at this point. After that, Nemo relies on spectacular set pieces, including a memorable haunted forest, a sinking steamboat, and adventures in the clouds. Even when the level design devolves into straight corridors, the enemies are spaced out and fun enough to do battle with that it never gets boring. To further break-up the action, there’s hidden chests all over that reveal themselves after you step on their platform, and unlike many Capcom games, there’s no whammies in them! How come nobody talks about the coin-op Nemo? I hear about the sucky NES game all the time, but this? It’s great! It’s such a shame that Capcom didn’t roll the dice on porting this to something like the Genesis, which could have used a marquee arcade platformer.

I hate that it’s unlikely this will get a re-release. Capcom should just reload the license and then release this with the NES game in a 2 for 1 pack for $14.99. People with fond memories of the NES game will be burned thanks to being drunk on nostalgia. BUT, they’ll have a hell of a surprise by what is the REAL reason to own such a package.

If I have to complain, it’s that there’s not enough upgrades to the scepter. Get this: I didn’t even realize until my second playthrough right before going to press on this that there WAS an upgrade to the scepter. In fact, judging by the screenshots, I even picked it up without realizing it. It gives a subtle, nearly imperceptible electric effect to your attack that doesn’t functionally feel stronger, more energetic, or whatever the hell they were going for. Obviously, since I didn’t even realize I was doing it when I did it. I also think the bosses are too spongy. It’s a Capcom coin-op, so if that wasn’t the case, I’d be shocked, frankly, but it does matter quite a bit. Your scepter often needs several wacks to even cause the boss meter to drop a tiny sliver. For many bosses, hit points are weighed too heavily on extracurricular hits, IE throwing crates or using the red-Nemo power to knock enemies back into them. This is a little troublesome because there’s a learning curve to picking up the objects you can throw. Your sprite might be physically on the object’s sprite, but you’re still not able to pick it up because you’re not ALL the way on it. As a result, some of the bosses cross the line into being.. gasp.. boring. In the case of the 4th boss, a giant gear, really boring, actually. F’n thing took me probably 20% of the playtime by itself. When I noticed the stage timer stopped working on bosses, I literally LOLed because it’s a genuinely laughable solution to the problem. “Well, we can’t get rid of the sponge. We’re Capcom! (shrug) Just stop the timer!”

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On one hand, I’m grateful the basic enemies weren’t also damage sponges since they pretty much sealed Willow’s fate, but on the other hand, balancing bosses is a big deal too. The sponge might also be because Nemo is a co-op game, but I didn’t get a chance to test that. I will update this review if I get a chance to play with someone else, but I can’t imagine it would be any better even with two players. And nothing I just complained about is a deal breaker because most of the bosses, spongy as they are, still manage to be fun. Only the third and fourth ones really feel sloggy, which happen to be the two bosses based mostly around throwing stuff at them. So is the giant tree but the means to do it isn’t something you have to work hard at. It’s such a shame that Capcom didn’t roll the dice on porting this to something like the Genesis, which could have used a marquee platformer in 1990. In fact, Nemo vanished from gaming’s collective memory. I’ve found it on Capcom arcade lists a couple times and immediately forgot about it. Nobody talks about this one, and I don’t get it. After playing both the NES and arcade versions of Nemo, I think the wrong Capcom Nemo game is the famous one.
Verdict: YES!

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Spatter (Sega Arcade Review)

May 14, 2024 by Leave a comment

Spatter
aka Sanrin San-chan, aka Tricycle-San
Platform: Arcade
Released in December, 1984
Designed by Yoshiki Kawasaki
Published by Sega
Never Released in America* (See Caption Below)
Coin-Op Never Re-Released

*Yes, a newly developed port of Spatter was included in the second Genesis Mini, but technically that’s not the arcade game, and it doesn’t do much to help console owners anyway.

Sega threw their hat into the maze chase ring a few times with titles like Ali Baba and 40 Thieves, Congo Bongo, Pengo, etc. I figured I’d played all of them, but I was wrong. I’d never even heard of Spatter until my friend Dave said “you’re going to review Pac-Mania eventually, right? This is like a proof of concept for Pac-Mania.” Hey, I like Pac-Mania! So, I gave Spatter a try and actually, he’s right and wrong. He’s right in the sense that Spatter is one of the first maze chases that features a maze bigger than the screen itself. And he’s also right in the sense that Spatter is one of the first maze chases that offers players an unlimited dodge move. But, the similarities end there, because Spatter offers something most maze chase games don’t: unlimited knock-outs of your pursuers. And it’s so satisfying.

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Spatter’s object is to grab all eight bouquets of flowers in each stage. As you do this, you’re pursued by chasers in go karts. You can’t jump just anywhere. There has to be a guardrail and not a solid wall. But, if there is a guardrail, Spatter’s incredible twist reveals itself: the jumping move is into the guardrail itself, causing it to bend in a cartoonish fashion. It works both offensively and defensively, and what’s truly bonkers is that it’s equally satisfying both ways. This is especially true if you dodge someone as you’re turning a corner, as it almost feels like cheating at a game of chicken. Hell, if you time it right while taking a corner, the rail will snap back like a rubber band and kill the guy in the oncoming lane. The enemies don’t exactly have the complex algorithms of Pac-Man ghosts. The karts chase you directly, but this is the rare maze chase that built around that, giving you means to dodge AND the instant gratification of bashing them off the road. It really is just as simple as doing a jump when they’re on the opposite side of you, and it has more OOMPH than most karate games from this era do.

Later stages have a lot more solid walls, like this section here. Also, the transparent roads were pretty spectacular as far as 1984 games go. At one point, Spatter was earmarked for Sega’s 3DS program, but it was cancelled because the game was too obscure. Um, hello? I know a way to take something out of obscurity: RE-RELEASE IT!

Mind you, the enemies respawn almost instantly. It’s a maze chase at the end of the day, and not every enemy can be defeated by the rail. A little green bomb robot and a bulldozer eventually enter the maze. The bulldozers are indestructible, but the bombs can be taken out by shoving boxes into them. Oh yea, there’s boxes, which contain bonus items that score you points. There’s a lot of bonus point opportunities, including tons of boxes on the playfield, points for quick completions, points for enemy knockout combos with the boxes, paper airplanes that fly in from outside the maze, and bonus rounds where Spatter temporarily becomes a 2D platformer where you have to avoid drops of water and climb up a series of ledges while collecting fruit. These were the weak links in the game and are so out of place that I wonder if this was originally the concept and they pivoted when they realized it wasn’t very fun. Or challenging, for that matter. I never once failed it. As you get deeper into the game’s 40 levels (which the level count includes the bonus stages), the stages still present plenty of bashing opportunities. I figured they’d up the challenge by eliminating them altogether. Instead, they space them out, but that only serves to increase the enjoyment. Seriously, why does nobody talk about this one?

If the water killed you instead of making you spin out, that’d be one thing. But even when I got hit multiple times, I still ultimately won, and usually quickly. My worst round still had 7 seconds remaining.

As much as I enjoyed the gameplay, I have to concede that Spatter has a massive problem with scoring balance and the risk/reward factor. Especially with the blocks, which score too little points to encourage using them, especially since they take too long to shatter after you kick them. I inadvertently doomed myself a lot more often than I killed enemies with them. There’s also too many points available in the bonus round for the meager challenge it presents. Giving these stages wrap-around screens nerfs the challenge completely. Part of me wonders if Spatter would have been better served removing the Pac-Man-like collecting aspect and instead turning the game into an entirely combat focused type of maze chase.

The paper airplane scores 2,000 points, which is only 1,600 less than you get for getting all the flowers in a level before the time bonus factors in. I wouldn’t know where to begin with balancing a game like this that has such a heavy emphasis on combat, but I know the bonus items are overvalued.

Then again, I did run through all the levels using the infinite lives dip switch and I never got bored with that, nor did I get bored when I limited myself to three lives and three bonus lives. The level design is never dull. In fact, there’s times where I was shocked by the game suddenly presenting a small box as the entire stage, and it was so exhilarating when it happened. Frankly, it’s because the engine is built around close calls, near misses, and great escapes. Even with dumb AI, Spatter soars because the maze designs are built around making that dumb AI work towards a greater good. Jeez, it’s such a shame Spatter got no love from their own developers, then or now. I’m stunned they even bothered with making it a +1 in the Genesis Mini II. Sega tends to re-release the same handful of famous games over and over again. Spatter is good enough to anchor a collection of their hidden gems, because it might be the shiniest of the bunch. Hell, let Nintendo remake it as a Mario Kart spin-off. It feels like kin anyway!
Verdict: YES!

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Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal (Arcade Reviews)

May 12, 2024 by Leave a comment

Super Pac-Man
Platform: Arcade
Released September 26, 1982
Designed by Toru Iwatani
Published by Namco
Arcade Archives Release
Included in Pac-Man Museum+
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet

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Super Pac-Man is the rare game where my review is written for me by the developer, who called it, simply put, “boring.” Well then, I’ll just get back to watching this video of ten hours of silence occasionally interrupted by the Taco Bell dong.

Okay, okay! So, why is Super Pac-Man boring? It’s a little more complicated than “the maze sucks” like I said in my original Pac-Man review. One problem is that it looks boring. There’s no justifying Super Pac-Man’s unfathomable decision to replace dots that cover nearly every surface of the maze with large sprites strips a large part of the original’s liveliness. The 240 dots have been replaced by 15 keys that open 37 gates (though not every gate can be opened), 4 power pellets, 2 super pellets, and 31 items. It seems like it’s still a lot of stuff, but the keys don’t even need to be collected in their entirety to move on to the next stage. Huh? A Pac-Man maze chase with optional objects is kind of weird, isn’t it? Oddly, you are still expected to chomp the power pellets and super pellets. Those aren’t optional. And don’t say “keys aren’t food, that’s why!” because neither are tennis shoes but eventually you have to eat those too. Look at the slideshow above. Doesn’t it just seem.. dead? Amazingly, a mess of abstract dots can have a LOT more personality than a series of sprites that look like food. Or footwear.

While ghost movement is more randomized, all the personalities from the original game carry over, along with their “SCATTER” corners. I will say that Clyde seems to follow you more often. In fact, I’d say that he frequently feels like a second red ghost. Also, the ghosts have random seizures now. I mean that literally, too. They freeze up and go all twitchy, apparently some kind of transition between “modes” though it doesn’t seem to be between SCATTER and CHASE. I honestly don’t know what’s happening when it happens.

And the “super” concept was also botched, but not for the reasons creator Iwatani thinks. He’s of the opinion that Pac-Man gets too big, and not that it doesn’t do anything to the ghosts. All Super Pac does is grant you the ability to dash and eat the gates without the need for a key. The dash can work in collaboration with power pellets to eat the ghosts easier via the dash, which is theoretically a gameplay plus. But, when you stop and think about it, it’s really only adding an extra step to the thing you can do anyway from the first game. It’s not fitting for the term “super.” Frankly, it’s a massive let-down. If Super Pac interacted directly with the ghosts by itself, like say, squashing them into the ground, causing them to be frozen in a spot for a while, that would be better than what they came up with. Or, maybe they did come up with it but changed their minds, because something like that happens in one of the cutscenes, complete with new sprites for the crushed ghosts. The whole concept of keys and gates feels like it only exists to justify the giant Pac-Man. Being able to eat as many gates as you can while big was foolhardy. Even in later stages when it wears off faster, there’s enough time to grab the super pellet and then crash through all the center gates (assuming you hold the run button), opening up the tunnel (where the ghosts slow down, just like the first game) with no tension at all.

Let’s face it: Super Pac-Man only exists as wish fulfillment because one of the cutscenes in the first game had you turn into a giant Pac-Man and Namco probably got letters asking “how do you do that in the game?”  Oh and the cutscenes are back this time, and they’re fine as always. I still think Jr. Pac-Man’s “boy meets girl” story was just about the most adorable thing I’ve seen in any coin-op. It’s weird because in these Pac-Man games, all the gags land.

I’m not a game designer, but I could easily come up with a better idea for the super dots: eliminate the timer for them. Instead, they only work on one thing. Instead of being able to crash as many gates as you can, you can only do one before shrinking into regular Pac-Man. But, if you hit a ghost while on one, the ghost is taken out for, say, ten to twelve seconds and it activates the roulette star in the center for points. The ghosts experience a slightly longer downtime than they would be if eliminated via a chomp and a return to the ghost house. Also, make it so the effect isn’t diminished as you get deeper into the game, unlike the duration of being energized by the power pellets. This would add so much risk/reward. Anything would be better than how they are now. Actually, it’s the strangest thing, because the super pellets are both overpowered and under-powered at the same time. Under-powered in the satisfaction sense, but overpowered in the gameplay sense. Super Pac-Man is an absolute disaster of a game.

There’s bonus rounds that are of the “clear the screen” variety where you’re permanently Super Pac-Man. The fact that they didn’t have to change a thing and this concept works tells you everything you need to know about how overpowered those super pellets are in the early stages.

But yea, Super Pac-Man’s biggest flaw is the maze just plain stinks. There’s too many short wall segments, which can get even shorter if you open the gates around them. Pac-Man never fully demands you make too tight of turns. Super Pac-Man asks it constantly. It’s also tougher to use the walls as a sort of guider for Pac-Man. The way the walls felt in the original game almost gives the maze a race track like quality. If that’s the case, Super Pac-Man’s maze is more like a parking lot full of U-turns and tight squeezes. It makes for a more frustrating controlling experience. Frustration that increases significantly when you try to aim Super Pac. I’d be VERY impressed if someone was good enough to use it without ever letting go of the sprinting button. Sometimes, it honestly feels like Super Pac’s center of mass isn’t actually in the center. I wondered if maybe it was my emulator, but the problem doesn’t exist at all when you’re normal Pac. It’s so odd that Super Pac-Man doesn’t have a maze tailored to the giant-sized Pac-Man’s strengths at all.

Behold, the one and only time I got the max value of the roulette wheel. You get 2,000 points for matching two items and 5,000 if the two items are that level’s “dot.” Often, I didn’t go for the roulette at all because it was either too high risk to do so OR my only means of escape would have involved using a super pellet when I didn’t want to. I hate this game.

So the tricky controls make Super Pac-Man harder, right? Actually, I habitually get to level 10 with minimal fuss, and have reached as high as level 21 without actually playing what I would consider to be all that good. My best game was 207,820 to my father’s 60,960. On one hand, it’s satisfying to have annihilated a sweet old man who I have on good authority has a wife and kids. Shame on me. But, I got so many lucky breaks in that score. As in a ghost literally on my tail only to have one of their freeze-and-shake moments, or hell, once they just slowed down for no reason in the middle of the board. Their speed literally reduced and I couldn’t figure out why. It was like they entered a tunnel, but they hadn’t. Now granted, the difficulty can be adjusted with the dip switches, but the maze can’t be. A single aspect of Super Pac-Man put a smile on my face: eating the ghosts inside the ghost house as Super Pac-Man. It’s just funny how rude it is. Otherwise, this is a baffling game that, again, I think only exists because of that one cut scene from the first game. Before starting this review, the only game in the original series I considered worse than this was Pac & Pal. Having played both back-to-back, I’ve changed my mind. Of all the games in the franchise, Super Pac-Man has the fewest redeeming qualities, and if that isn’t grounds for earning the title of “worst of the franchise” I don’t know what is.
Verdict: NO!

Pac & Pal
aka Pac-Man & Chomp Chomp
Platform: Arcade
Released July, 1983
Published by Namco
Arcade Archives Release
Included in Pac-Man Museum+
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet

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Congratulations Pac & Pal: you’re officially not the worst game in the franchise, try as you might. You are an absolute bore of a game, but I genuinely think there’s something charming about you. Pac & Pal is a fairly problematic game, owed largely to a dull concept. It’s probably best to think of Pac & Pal as a reworking of Super Pac-Man. The gate concept that I thought completely failed the first time around was retained, only now the keys are replaced with playing cards that correspond to one of eleven “chambers” on the playfield. The cards aren’t randomized, and like with Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal starts by placing cards close by their corresponding chamber, IE the cherry card is right next to the cherry chamber. Then, the more you progress, the further you have to travel after turning over a card. So, in later levels, a card in the bottom left corner will likely unlock the upper right chamber, and so forth. That aspect is a big turn-off for a few players, but I think it’s fine. It’s a perfectly logical challenge progression for this type of concept. If it’s not fun, it’s because the base concept is just boring. Even when you factor in the addition of the “Pal.”

Unlike Super Pac-Man, where you can go around and collect all the keys, Pac & Pal caps you at a max of three unlocked items at a time. Also, that orange area in the center replaces the tunnels as the “slow the ghosts down” escape method.

The titular twist is that an NPC “pal” named Miru wanders around the maze until you unlock a chamber. As soon you do, it makes a beeline to the item. The name “Pal” is a bit of a misnomer, as the Pal doesn’t bring the items to you. In fact, it’s more like a kleptomaniac member of the Ghost Monsters that doesn’t help you as a “pal” would. Instead, it drags the item to the ghost chamber, costing you the points for it. You have two advantages over the Pal. When Miru drags an item, it moves at half speed and it’s guaranteed that, no matter where the item is, it’ll cross directly under the ghost house before walking around and entering it. If you can snag all the items without Miru managing to vanish any in the ghost house, you get bonus points. Miru doesn’t hurt you, but it can screw you if it collects one of the power-ups. Also, I found the collision detection to be kind of unforgiving, especially when trying to catch Miru and the item it’s dragging.

Trying to chase down Miru before it gets the items into the ghost house isn’t quite as exciting as I think they were hoping for. Also, it doesn’t matter if you play the version with Miru or you play the version that uses the dog from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. That version was commissioned by Bally Midway, but it was never released in America because, well, come on. They knew this game stank. Thank God for General Computer’s Jr. Pac-Man.

The other twist is that you don’t chomp the ghosts. The “power pellets” are the two items in the center above the cherry and strawberry, and this time around, you fire a short-range projectile that stuns the enemies. It scores the same as chomping, capping out at 1,600 points for hitting all four, but you can actually score a lot more with it. In the early stages, the power lasts longer than the enemies are stunned, and if you time it right, you can continue to score 1,600 points for re-stunning enemies before the power wears off. The problem with it is that it front-loads the scoring to the start of the game instead of the later levels. It’s also probably too powerful, as you can spray your projectile through up to two walls and still hit the ghosts. This includes when they’re in the ghost houses. This is the main reason the game never once feels even a little like Pac-Man. It feels more like Namco wanted a tank game with a Pac-Man heritage.

Are we 100% sure this started development as a Pac-Man game?

Again, I’m open to the possibility that this formula could make for an exciting game, and it’s just that Pac & Pal fumbled the execution, largely because of the terrible shape of the maze. But, perhaps the maze is only terrible because the attack patterns of the ghosts from the original Pac-Man are largely retained. I’ll never understand the logic in that, for this game or for Super Pac-Man. Those behavior patterns were created and then presumably fine-tuned to work specifically within Pac-Man’s 240 dot maze. They make little sense in a game where you don’t have to cover nearly the entire surface of the playfield. They don’t work when mazes have dead ends or hairpin turns. Take Pinky, who is programmed to anticipate Pac-Man’s next move. In Pac-Man, it targets the area roughly four spaces in front of Pac-Man, right? Well, wouldn’t “anticipating your next move” have a completely different meaning in a game where the object is to turn over cards at a max of three of a time, then go grab the corresponding items? Shouldn’t a couple of the ghosts have their attacks be based on, you know, the cards and/or items? Also, there’s now a Dug Dug-like olly olly oxen free moment where the ghosts all go after Pac-Man. Oh, and the “ghosts have seizures” bit from Super Pac-Man is retained. I think they really wanted it to work this time, and while it’s a better game than Super Pac-Man.. it’s not by a big margin. Nah, Pac & Pal sucks.

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Hey look, I’m all for experimenting with established formulas. It’s sort of why I wanted to start Indie Gamer Chick in the first place. But there’s tweaking a winning formula and then there’s forgoing it all together. Pac & Pal, simply put, is not a Pac-Man game. Actually, part of me wonders if Pac & Pal started life as something different altogether. Besides the ghost house, there’s nothing inherently Pac-Manish about the gameplay. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a drawing board concept that they thought would maybe work, and they attached Pac-Man to hedge their bets. But the Pac-Man elements are the problem. The ghosts aren’t fun to be pursued by this time around. The one big change, the power-up, flopped because it lacks the satisfaction that eating had. It’s not a total wash, like I expected going into this. In those rare instances where you have a chance to work with the Pal and not be in a position to race against it, it’s satisfying enough that I get what Namco was aiming for. Maybe if they had tailored the ghosts around that and not just copy & pasted them from OG Pac-Man, it would have worked. One of the great ironies of gaming: Pac & Pal is the Pac-Man game doomed by its own connection to the franchise.
Verdict: NO!

Actually, we DID have a lot of fun with this video. My family probably thinks I’ve lost my f*cking mind, but I left it playing in the background and cheered every time it rang. Soon, they were playing along and doing it too. We left it all day yesterday and it was so fun by the end. Every time it rang, we’d burst into cheers and applause. In those rare instances where the bong rings not long after the previous one, we’d go completely bonkers. It’s so smart, too, not overdoing the bong. You really never know when it’ll ring. I’m telling you, this is my new favorite thing.

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Pac-Man and Pac-Man Plus (Arcade Reviews)

May 10, 2024 by 4 Comments

This review would not have been possible without Chad Birch’s excellent write-up on Pac-Man’s ghosts. A must-read that helped me to better appreciate what Pac-Man accomplished. And I’d like to also give a shout out to the inspiration of that post, the Pac-Man Dossier by Jamie Pittman. If you’ve never read about the ghost patterns in Pac-Man, do me a favor: read those, then play Pac-Man and tell me if the experience feels somehow changed to you. It’s the strangest thing but it feels transformative. I’ve never experienced that before with any game. It’s wild.

Pac-Man
Platform: Arcade
Released May 22, 1980
Designed by Toru Iwatani
Published by Namco
Arcade Archives Release
Included in Pac-Man Museum+
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet

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I was born in 1989, and I started gaming regularly when I got a PlayStation for Christmas in 1996. Pac-Man had seen better days by that point. It wasn’t an important character to my childhood at all. Not even a little bit. I’m sure my older readers will have an aneurysm hearing that, but it’s true. I did play Pac-Man games, of course. Soon after I got that PlayStation, but before I got the Nintendo 64 for my 9th birthday in July, 1998 that changed my life and really made gaming my thing, my father got me a pair of the original Namco Museum releases for my PlayStation. Volumes 1 & 3, aka the ones that everyone had. I don’t remember playing most of the thirteen games in them, but I know for certain I only played Pac-Man once. Why on Earth would I want to play that boring old version when Ms. Pac-Man had four mazes and bonus fruits that hopped around the mazes instead of just sitting there lifelessly in the center? To 7 year old me, the original world-conquering Pac-Man held no appeal at all. I’m not proud to say that I stuck to my guns on that long after I had launched Indie Gamer Chick in 2011. Pac-Man? Boring! I didn’t change my tune on it until last summer, when my sister asked me pointedly “how is Pac-Man’s one maze any different from pinball? You wouldn’t complain that a pinball table plays the same game, and only that one game.” I couldn’t believe how ashamed of myself I was at that moment. She was completely right, and I had always been completely wrong about Pac-Man.

Few things in life are so satisfying as the 4th chomp of a single power pellet. And yes, I’m playing with five lives instead of three.

The weird thing is, I kept that bias against the original Pac-Man despite taking the time to better understand the maze chase genre as a whole. It was the Atari 2600 port (which is one of several Pac-Reviews in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include), along with my fandom of games like Popeye and Jr. Pac-Man that helped me to figure out why some games succeed and others fail. It’s all about the chase itself. Not the collecting, or the turning the tables on the enemies, or even the presentation and/or theme of the whole package. The entertainment comes mostly from the close calls and exhilaration you get from scratching out just enough distance to free yourself, or just barely beating out a chaser hot on your heels to win a level. Being charming, looking good, or having memorable characters is nice, but if the chase is no good, it doesn’t matter. I never understood why Pac-Man succeeded where so many others failed, but the really weird thing is neither did Namco, or the man who made Pac-Man to begin with.

There’s so many idiosyncrasies that make Pac-Man.. well, Pac-Man that I couldn’t possibly count them all. For example, the places where I’ve put the arrows are known as “blind alleys.” The ghosts can NEVER travel upward along those specific paths. They can go down, but never up. If you perform it right, you can even park in the lower right hand blind alley and remain safe. The ghosts will never find you. Pros use this to take potty breaks (though the use of this is controversial).

Look at many interviews with Toru Iwatani and he’s sure to conclude that people relate to Pac-Man.. especially women.. because Pac-Man, you know, eats. Eating! That’s a thing people do! Especially us women folk, whereas men are too busy for that, what with all the bread winning, and usually opt instead for good old fashioned photosynthesis. Of course, other games are about eating too, but only Pac-Man became a global icon. Or maybe it was the shape, serendipitously created (discovered?) when Iwatani took a single wedge from a piece of pizza? Or the name, which was originally “Puck-Man” until someone turned the P into an F and Namco had second thoughts. Or was it the ghosts? The colorful, menacing pursuers that were each programmed to have their own personalities? The sound effects? Sure, those all matter, but I think if you leave everything the same but have a crappy maze design and Pac-Man doesn’t blow up like it did. The straightaways at the bottom are the exact right length to make players hold their breaths. There’s no unreasonable twisty-turny moments. The ghosts slowing down in the tunnels lends an almost Hanna-Barbera vibe to the chase where you can imagine the ghosts shaking their fists at you in anger as the distance between you and them increases. The eating part is also only exciting because, YOU GUESSED IT, its effect on the chase. Eating dots slows you down, and there’s so many dots! That’s a lot of space where you aren’t going your max speed. The maze is, frankly, kind of perfect.

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Namco figured everything was responsible for Pac-Man’s success, except the maze itself. There, their attitude seemed to be “any maze will do!” They went on to prove this twice in a row. The next Pac-Man game THEY made, Super Pac-Man, turned the abstract dots into the type of food us eating eaters eat. In theory, if eating is the appeal, it should have been a big hit, but it wasn’t. Maybe because the game itself sucked, mostly because the maze sucked. It didn’t lend itself perfectly to the best moments in maze chases. Scratching out distances, close calls, and nail-biting sections? Nope, just a mess of walls and dots with no rhyme or reason. Then they repeated the same folly with Pac & Pal. For all I know, the base concept of those games might be ingenious, but with the mazes they feature, there’s no way to know for sure. I kind of wish a ROM hack existed that changed the mazes. Weirdly, it was a rogue “enhancement board” developer named General Computer that fundamentally got it with Pac-Man and made the best of those early sequels: Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man.

Pac-Man is one of the first cases of the original Japanese script having helpful tips that were lost in translation. Specifically Pinky being “Speedy.” In fact, Pinky doesn’t move faster, but the word for what it meant didn’t have a perfect one-to-one English translation. In Japan, its name is “Machibuse” which roughly means “to ambush” or “being ambushed.” Unlike some bad translations, it’s not a stretch to see how they reached for a word that conveys the concept of an ambush and came up with “Speedy.” The “speedy one” is usually the one ahead, right? Pinky’s attack logic is to use the direction Pac-Man is facing and target an area roughly four lengths ahead of Pac-Man. Clyde (the orange one) is in the same boat. “Pokey” is his name in the US. WTF does that even mean? In Japan, his name translates to “feigning ignorance.”

If the maze design itself is the most important aspect, the chasers are a very close second. When I play a maze chase for the first time, sometimes I need time to figure out if a maze works or not. That’s rarely the case with chasers. If they just immediately make a beeline for you, it’s usually not a good sign. Pac-Man doesn’t do that, and I think that factored really big into why it took off. While the ghosts each have a unique personality and accompanying attack method, all three ghosts collectively run on three “modes” that apply at the same time to all four. The modes are called SCATTER, CHASE, and FRIGHTENED. The main two are SCATTER and CHASE, which run on a fixed timer, with SCATTER running much shorter. Sometimes astronomically shorter. CHASE can last seventeen minutes before giving players another SCATTER, though by that point, you’ll probably just finish the level or die. In SCATTER, each ghost goes to their own designated corner to wander on “patrol” for a few seconds. In CHASE, the ghosts each have a strategy based on using a “target” on the board that refreshes every step they take. The red one always targets the space Pac-Man is currently occupying and takes the shortest route to get there, leading to it feeling like it chases you the most directly. The pink one tries to anticipate your move by targeting four spaces in front of the direction you’re facing. You can use this to scare Pinky off. If you’re near a junction and you move straight at him, his target tile will be BEHIND HIM and cause him to change directions. It works every single time.

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The blue ghost bases its position on Blinky (the red one) and Pac-Man’s position, and if Blinky closes in on you, it’s not rare for Inky to be close by. Finally, Clyde, the orange one, really is kind of a coward. If he’s far away from Pac-Man, he uses Blinky’s targeting system, but as soon as he gets within eight spaces of Pac-Man, he retreats to the left hand corner using the same target tile as his SCATTER mode target. While he’s not specifically dangerous as he doesn’t target you, what he’s really doing is cutting off a potential means of escape. There’s a LOT more complexity. Like seriously, read this and try committing it to memory. I made it to Chapter 3 and about two minutes later, as I tried making sense of which tile counted and how each frame of animation mattered a great deal, my ears started dripping blood. I took it as a sign to stop and just enjoy knowing that I could stare-down the pink ghost.

The ghosts in their “SCATTER” patrol zones.

I was wrong about Pac-Man being boring. Now that I approach it the same way I do a pinball table, knowing that I’m playing one specific maze that operates under one specific set of rules, I think I kind of love this game. Maybe someday, I’ll even commit the professional patterns to memory. Right now, I’m just content to practice and get better at anticipating the moves of the ghosts and utilizing it to make the type of moves I once thought were bold, but now I know are completely safe. Besides, I kind of like how good I am at it now, where scoring a 1,600 point 4th chomp is still a big deal to me. I don’t know if I ever want to cross that threshold where scoring 50,000 points isn’t a “good game” anymore. There’s something comforting about knowing just enough about Pac-Man to do alright, but not enough that I could play it for hours, completely zoned out. It’s a game I have to pay attention to, and that’s kind of what I want out of a maze chase anyway. If I reached the point where my brain is calculating what frame cycle I’m currently in so I can pinpoint exactly what direction the edible ghosts will turn, that doesn’t sound as fun for me. Hey, 50,000 is a good score for me. It’s a pitiful score for pros. But I bet I’m the one having more fun.
Verdict: YES!

Pac-Man Plus
Platform: Arcade
Released March, 1983
Published by Bally Midway
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet
NO MODERN NON-ARCADE1UP RELEASE

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Pac-Man Plus is the unofficial-official ROM hack that DIDN’T find its audience. It’s unclear how involved Namco was. MobyGames says it was completely unauthorized by Namco. The Pac-Man Wiki says it was actually made by Namco. Everyone seems to agree that Plus was commissioned by Bally Midway to compete with the prevalence of popular-but-unauthorized enhancement kits and ROM hacks (some of which I will be reviewing soon), the most famous being one that just sped up the game significantly. While Plus retains the same maze as the original Pac-Man, the gameplay is fairly heavily modified. Oh, and the maze is teal now. My father speculated teal might be kinder on CRT monitors than the stark blue of the original. Real life Pac-Man cabinets are NOTORIOUS for permanently searing the maze’s shapes and features into the monitors themselves. By 1983, enough Pac-Man units were probably experiencing monitor-scaring that arcade operators requested that it, you know, not do that anymore. That’s just my pops’ speculation, though. Another cosmetic change is that the first item is a can of Coca-Cola, which is apparently one of the first examples of product placement in a video game. Also, when you eat a power pellet, the ghosts now have stems on their head. It seems like a needlessly cruel reminder that, yes, they’re food now. As if being dead isn’t bad enough. The cosmetic changes are fine and honestly, the stem-head thing is cute, but gameplay is king.

“Aww sh*t. We’re food. Wait, how did ole Pinky not change?”

There are three notable changes to the standard Pac-Man gameplay. (1) The ghosts are “more aggressive” now, by which it means they spend less time in the “Scatter” algorithm and more time in “Chase.” They also move faster, but then again, so do you. (2) The power pellets are now red kryptonite instead of green. In other words, you never know what will happen. Sometimes you’ll get the standard “all four ghosts can be eaten” from the first game, but sometimes the power pellets only work on three of the four ghosts. When this happens, one ghost seemingly chosen at random will not be affected. What the hell? Well, this is “professional-proofing.” You see, by 1983, the patterns that skilled players used to manipulate the ghosts and rack up high scores were widely known. Instead of creating new “marching orders” for the four ghosts, having one not become vulnerable completely wrecks the established patterns used by pros. Oh, you can still use patterns, but you will also always need to think on your feet. Other effects also include making the ghosts invisible, making the stage invisible, and making the stage AND the remaining dots/pellets invisible. Because OF COURSE that happens.

Well, it wouldn’t be a mod of an established game from the early 80s if “invisibility” wasn’t one of its tricks.

(3) The bonus items aren’t just for points anymore. They’re functionally extra power pellets. Not just power pellets, but SUPER INVISIBILITY Power Pellets! When you eat them, the ghosts become edible, but they turn invisible (facepalm) until the blinking starts. If you eat them, they score double the points they normally do: 400, 800, 1600, 3200. Being able to fully utilize this requires you to have a fairly good understanding of the behavior of the ghosts running the “FRIGHTENED” algorithm, since you won’t be able to eyeball which direction they take. Wait, how does FRIGHTENED work? Oh, the directions the ghosts turn are based on a pseudo-random number generator. Well crap. So unless you memorize the frame-by-frame gameplay to be able to predict the behaviors of the ghosts, chomping them with the item is pure luck. Anyway, I played Pac-Man Plus a few years ago and I didn’t really like it all that much, but now that I’ve taken the time to understand the idiosyncrasies of Pac-Man, actually.. it’s okay! It’s not an amazing upgrade. It’s fine, but it is something you have to be really into Pac-Man to appreciate. I can also understand why purists wouldn’t like it. I had a decent enough time messing around with it, but it’s no surprise why Ms. Pac-Man is the official-unofficial ROM hack that became a hit and Pac-Man Plus was relegated to the status of historic curio.
Verdict: YES!

Ignore the “high score” which was done via cheating tomfoolery. This was my legitimate high score.

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Sunman – The Never Released Sunsoft NES Superman Game (Review)

May 6, 2024 by 2 Comments

Sunman
aka Superman
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Never Released Nearly Complete Prototype
Directed by Kenji Eno
Developed by EIM Group
Non-Publisher: Sunsoft

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Sunsoft might be most famous for their Batman games, but did you know they tried their hand at a Superman game as well? Sunsoft turned to the studio best known in America for a game called Panic Restaurant. EIM Group was led by Kenji Eno, who tragically died in 2013 at just 42. Their game, known at this time as simply “Superman” had the engine mostly finished and the first level programmed. The prototype even features an impressive chiptune take on the iconic John Williams Superman theme. So, what happened? According to Eno, DC Comics rejected the game because Superman “can’t die” and “can’t take damage.” Maybe he was told that, but I don’t buy that’s the real reason that Sunsoft removed Superman from their Superman game. Taito’s Superman arcade game was already a few years old by this point, and spoiler: Superman can take damage and die. Also, would this be a good time to point out that Sunsoft planned this for a late 1992 release. What storyline did DC Comics have planned for the Man of Steel in late 1992? (checks notes) Ah yes, Superman takes damage and dies. More than likely, Sunsoft had simply lost the DC license, and perhaps never had the Superman license at all. Either way, Sunsoft ordered the game to be changed to a generic superhero: Sunman.

Sunman is more powerful than a locomotive. Impressive for someone who is approximately one foot tall. That or this locomotive is HUGE. Also, while playing this game, I kept thinking “if Daredevil wore a cape.”

Another possibility is that DC inspected the game and found it to be boring. The sad truth is, I was pulling for Sunman to be a quality lost treasure of a game because it was designed by someone who died young. Instead, I’m thinking my YES! for Eno will have to wait for Panic Restaurant, which I will review in 2024, but I’ve already played it once and it was AWESOME. Seriously, one of the most underrated NES games. Ever. I have to do that before I do his NES “port” of Altered Beast which, yes, exists and.. wow. Yea, that sure is a game that.. happened. Sunman would have gone down as a very middle of the road, bordering on outright bad superhero action game. A game that, oddly enough, has a lot more in common with Nintendo’s Kirby than Sunsoft’s Batman. Hear me out. The big hook with Sunman is the ability to fly at any time. Using that ability, you can circumvent large sections of a couple of the levels, just like you can in the early Kirby games. Unlike Kirby, you might want to fly over the levels rather than play them “honestly” because the brawling is just terrible in Sunman.

I found most of my entertainment in Sunman came from laughing at all the different ways the developers worked to nullify their own gameplay concept. You’re “Superman” and you can fly anywhere, and you generally move faster than the bad guys. What do you do so that people actually play the game? Well, you raise the platform high off the ground, and then you can put an invisible ceiling at where the camera view ends, thus funneling the player into direct conflict with enemies. And this is why a 2D Superman action game can’t work. Eh, at least it’s better than that Kemco abomination.

Sunman has a collision problem. When you fly, it’s hard to punch the enemies who also fly. Your collision box is essentially a square that’s bigger than not-Superman. This box shrinks when you’re not flying and instead walking along the ground. But of course, you have to fly a lot. The level design is built around this, and the combat is just awful as a result. The flying fisticuffs were sloppy at best. There’s also a distinct lack of enemy variety. It’s mostly generic guys with guns flying in pairs and shooting lasers. If not them, it’s usually a little robot that’s firing a laser beam up. The “platforming” stages are never fun. They always feel like a Superman game that hates that it’s a Superman game, because it’s so limited. And, even worse, there’s no power in those stages besides flying. Maybe Sunman would have been too easy if Superman could use his heat vision, but who cares? I’d have had a LOT more fun if I could have zapped enemies out of the sky. There’s also no item pick-ups at all, including health refills. If you’re low on life, you have to beat the boss of that stage. Don’t worry, only one is really hard. Maybe two. As far as I can tell, there’s no point in exploring. Just the same handful of enemies to punch until the five stages are up. There’s occasionally crushing obstacles you have to time your movement to avoid, but even those had terrible collision detection on their edges. Good lord, a Superman game that needs to baby proof corners.

This, the final boss, presumably would have been General Zod if this had gone forward as a Superman game? I assume? He teleports around the room, so I don’t suppose you can discount Lex Luthor in a power suit or perhaps Mxyzptlk.

Occasionally, Sunman trades the platforming sections for all-flying sections. Some of them are still brawlers with the crappy air punch. Others take a shmup approach and now you can fire your laser eyes. Which actually begs the question: why Superman, or hell, “Sunman” would allow himself to take damage on the platforming stages to begin with? The first stage’s boss is a giant helicopter that you shoot. Oddly, in the Superman prototype, you fight this from a laying down position. This is changed in Sunman to the standing position, increasing the difficulty because there’s so much more of you to take damage. I figured they got rid of the laying down sprite altogether, but that’s not the case. After you fight ANOTHER boss with an entirely different standing up sprite that’s not suitable at all for a shmup boss, you finally lay down to heroically fly through a speed tunnel. And it’s horrible. Seriously, this would be like Battletoads speed bike levels of infamous if it had ever come out. It’s the last section before the final boss, but it moves too fast and the squeezes are far too tight. I tried playing it with save states, but I got bored and swapped them for rewinding after about fifteen minutes of dying. One spongy last boss later and the credits were rolling to what would have been a truly boring Superman game.

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I don’t think Superman is necessarily doomed to always produce mediocre games. But, it’s sad that, had Sunman come out, for all its problems, it would have been one of the better Superman games of the 20th century, or ever, really. And it’s just a barely more interesting take on the same type of combat that was already tedious in Taito’s coin-op. If DC really did pass on Sunsoft Superman, I’m leaning more towards DC’s licensing department recognized it wouldn’t have gotten the type of acclaim the Sunsoft Batman games got. Instead, it would have fed into the idea that Superman is an inherently dull character. And he’s not, so I get it if that’s why they said “no.” What’s bonkers is that we’ve made it to 2024 and Atari still can legitimately make a case for having made the best Superman game (scroll to the second-to-last game in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part One for my review). It came out a full ten years before I was born, and with all the technology that has come along, how is THAT still the best console Superman? It’s shameful.

And, as boring as Sunman is, it could have been a LOT worse.

Frankly, it’s not a mystery why Atari’s Superman is THE video Superman. It’s the only Superman game that feels like it’s Superman doing Superman things. Rescuing Lois Lane, changing in a phone booth, repairing a broken bridge, and jailing Lex Luthor. They even managed to work in either x-ray vision or super vision, depending on how you look at it. The Kemco game TRIED all that, and as maligned as their Superman game is, they really did give an honest effort at creating a Superman adventure with all the traits you’d hope for. The only problem is the engine itself is just pitiful. The talent just wasn’t there to create a game that matched the vision. That’s basically what went wrong with the infamous Superman 64 as well. Focusing on his flying is a bad idea. Focusing on combat is too. Superman is an adventure character. Treat him like it and the action side will take care of itself.

This is the real “level complete” screenshot of Sunman. “GRATE!” Oh my god.

I really get a feeling that Superman is an assignment few game designers want. His invulnerability and god-like powers are considered to be too creatively limiting. So, like, why not make it not about living or dying but about saving people or not saving them? Make the Baba Is You of superhero games. Give players multiple possible solutions to a series of adventure challenges where you’re just trying to save the dam from bursting, or stop a missile, and yes, maybe sometimes throw hands with villains, and make the antagonizing factor time itself. “Will Superman make it in time to save the day?” is the quintessential Superman story. Just do that as a game! And don’t have him have to punch waves of identical baddies along the way. It’s Superman! If he’s punching them, shouldn’t their brains be in orbit?
Verdict: NO!

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Batman: The Video Game – The Definitive Review (NES, Game Boy, and Genesis Reviews)

May 3, 2024 by 2 Comments

I’ve reviewed four Batman games so far. I’ve done the coin-op by Atari Games and the never-released in America TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine version that’s a strange top-down action-maze game. Then there’s the incredibly bland Batman Returns Atari Lynx game that, let’s face it, is never coming out again. None of those games got a YES! and frankly, none of them were the Batman games anyone wants to see a modern release or review of. In fact, I’ve only awarded one YES! to the Dark Knight so far. That was for the also never released in America version of Batman Returns for the Sega Master System. But, nobody really wants THAT game either. The one everyone wants is Batman: The Video Game for the NES. But, there’s actually two other games that share the name. Even weirder is that they’re entirely original games. Sunsoft created unique versions of Batman for each platform. Then, those games got a sort of sequel, called Return of the Joker if they’re 8-bit or Revenge of the Joker if they’re 16-bit. Eventually, I’ll do a Definitive Review of them too. So, let’s take a look at the three games that wear the name Batman: The Video Game. Also, for the first time, I’m going to assign value to a set that doesn’t yet exist.

GAME REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

Batman: The Video Game
Platform: NES
Released December 28, 1989 (JP) February 13, 1990 (US)
Developed by Sunsoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Where does he get those wonderful graphics?

Batman: The Video Game is one of the most celebrated licensed titles on the NES, and one of the most influential games for the current crop of indie developers. Seriously, I totally understand now why The Storied Sword cites it, even if its gameplay has more in common with Ninja Gaiden. When anyone talks about bad licensed NES games, you can bet your bottom dollar that “Batman was good” will be a counter to that. And it’s especially weird for two reasons. The first is that this feels like a generic sci-fi platformer that was repurposed as a Batman game. For all anyone knows, that might be the legitimate story. Journey to Silius, a Sunsoft-developed NES game currently available to Switch Online subscribers, was intended to be a Terminator game, but the license expired before the game was finished. If nothing else, it shows flipping one property to another is something Sunsoft was experienced with. Batman: The Video Game has so little in common with Batman: The Batman that it’d be almost comforting if they just plugged the Dark Knight into an existing sci-fi build and called it a day. Even the cut scenes, which are the only aspects where you’re like “hey, look, Batman!” are bad. A+ for the Batmobile. That looks just like the movie. The Joker, on the other hand, looks more like the late, great David Warner. Or Guy Fawkes. Or Steve Buscemi.

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The second reason that I’m kind of surprised by the reverence of NES Batman is that it eventually becomes maddening. One of those releases that the generation who made strategy guides and Game Genies a viable business call “Nintendo Hard.” In fact, this and Battletoads are among the most commonly cited “I love that game! Never could get past the X level” titles on the NES. I don’t get it. So, let me get this straight: you love the game, but not enough to actually finish it? Are you sure “love” is the word you want? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say you had a crush on Batman: The Video Game, but then it turned out to be a bitch and you lost interest? Not that my generation is any better. It’s always strange to me when I beat a five year old Xbox game and discover that the achievement for finishing the game is one of those ultra rare ones with the angelic chime, because only like 1% of all owners ever bothered to get that far. The hell? Doesn’t anyone finish games anymore? Well, *I* finished Batman: The Video Game, and I can see why someone who rented the game for a weekend when they were a kid might say they “loved it.” I can also see why people didn’t finish it.

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Oh, I cheated like crazy with save states and eventually rewind, but I did finish it. Batman is a moderately decent sci-fi platformer that just completely loses its mind in the last two (of only five) levels in the game. This is mostly owed to a series of jumping “puzzles” with two elements that would be considered challenging enough on their own being stapled together. The first is having sections of the walls be lethal to the touch. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with forcing players to aim their jumps. That’s sort of the point of a platformer. The second is placing enemies at the top of columns you’re jumping up. Hey, that’s fine too when your player always has three projectiles they can throw mid-air. Combining the two elements would be stretching it, but Batman: The Video Game isn’t done yet. How about cranking up the hit points on the enemy at the top of that column? What about then giving that enemy at the top a lethal projectile spray that it fires in rapid bursts, and then having the column you climb be absurdly high up, so if you fall, you have to start the whole process over. At this point, it feels like the idea of making a fun game had long since been abandoned in favor of straight-up trolling players.

See that little thing hanging from the platform? They drop fast moving drones that can be used to “farm” weapon point refills and health, but they’re also a legitimately threatening enemy, especially when you’re given little movement clearance and surrounded by health-draining pools of acid on both sides. So, you would still prefer to kill it instead of grinding up resources? Have fun with that. They take well over a dozen hits with your high-powered items to kill, enough to drain half of a full 99 point item reserve. What the hell? It feels like the designers got one note too many from management and cranked all enemy stats to the max out of spite. Batman desperately needs rebalancing more than anything else.

On its own terms, I’d call Batman: The Video Game unplayable after the third world. Enemies are too spongy and too cheaply placed. The bosses of those later stages are even worse, and with the exception of the Joker, there’s absolutely no effort to theme them in a way that makes sense for a Batman game. Seriously, for all the teasing I did about the NES Ninja Turtles having little to do with the franchise, Batman is easily the gold standard for shoehorning a license into a game that has nothing to do with it. Because of that, this is a game that should have aged a lot worse than it did. But, thanks to all the bells & whistles of emulation, Batman is a better game now than ever before. Since all the pieces were already in place for a good game, and maybe even a great game, I really enjoyed the “modern” NES Batman experience. That’s because I was able to set my own terms.

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In order to not to completely trivialize the challenge, I only used save states when I reached new floors. Sometimes my placement of where I saved wasn’t ideal for challenge making, but I wouldn’t have had fun with Batman if I didn’t take steps towards nerfing it. Not to the point of killing the difficulty, but just enough to ease the burden. In fact, I only used rewind during one section of the game, which was actually the final vertical shaft right below the final boss chamber. That’s the one I whined about above. Otherwise, I played in a way where death did result in me having to redo large sections of stages. As an unlimited lives experience, Batman worked. I think eliminating lives, adding a death counter, and bumping up the checkpoints would turn this into a borderline masterpiece.

These baddies have unpredictable jumping patterns. I wasn’t a fan, but at least I could tell myself they were Killer Croc.

It’s worth noting that the way I played  Batman: The Video Game wasn’t even my original plan, as I had a ROM hack called Batman (Easy) that I intended to also include in this feature. My plan was to play the original 1989 build of Batman as it was originally designed, then pivot to the ROM hack. I wanted to really show off the power of having emulation work in tandem with modern designers to unlock a game’s fullest potential. But, I found Batman (Easy) was too easy. Item drops were worth too many item points and a lot of the platforming challenges were too nerfed. If you have kids under 12, I’d recommend it for them, easily. For everyone else, it probably took the concept of a kinder, gentler Batman too far. Somewhere between my self-created save state checkpoints and that ROM hack is probably the best version of the game, but that doesn’t exist yet.

It wasn’t until I reached this point of the game that I abandoned save states and used rewind to brute-force my way up this final platforming challenge before the last bosses. Those black gears are lethal to the touch, and several platforms have spongy enemies on them. At the top of this IS an item farm, but even that isn’t a gimmie, as you have close-quarters to try and build up health and weapon points before facing generic sci-fi boss #5 and finally the Joker.

When Batman: The Video Game is fun, it’s really fun. Oddly enough, Batman’s strength isn’t really in the wall jump. The best part was the combat! Batman’s punch is often as effective as the three projectiles, and it was satisfying enough. Of the three projectiles, the batarang was the most useful. Even with limited range, it used the fewest item points and felt like the closest the game came to a Batman-like experience. The second weapon is a gun with relatively slow bullets that I almost never used, except I wouldn’t have come close to finishing the third boss without it. Finally, there’s a weapon that look like a gun, but its bullets quickly split into three projectiles that continue on in a wider horizontal trajectory. This is easily the coolest looking weapon, but it was only really useful when I couldn’t expect to aim a shot. All the items are fun to use, but there is one thing that annoyed the hell out of me: item select is mapped to START while pause is SELECT. Over the course of two hours, my brain refused to remember that and I was constantly pausing the game when I meant to change weapons. It was annoying at first, but by the end of the game, it really just felt like another example of Batman: The Video Game trolling players.

If we go off my theory that Batman was a generic robot sci-fi platformer that they barely reworked in order to be a Batman game, I would have initially guessed the Joker was the one element not on the drawing board, since it’s a guy pointing an enormous gun at you. HEY, JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIE! But then he calls down lightning strikes, and it feels more like a Dracula fight from a Castlevania game. So much for that theory.

This is one of the stranger verdicts I’ve had to render since I started doing retro reviews, because my answer of whether or not Batman is worth money today, in 2024, is entirely dependent on the emulator. And actually, just the ability to save and load states isn’t enough. Batman needed quick save/quick load. I even tried this, making myself pause the game before activating save/load, and it did more harm than good. I’m mostly thinking of that final vertical wall-jumping maze, and having to pause to undo a costly mistake was too much. I prefer mapping quick save to left stick click and quick load to right stick click. You can’t possibly hit those buttons by accident, especially since I’m using a D-Pad. I assume that’s what most people will use when playing an NES game. If you’re using a retro platform without that barest minimum of options, fuhgeddaboudit. Batman’s fun will likely stop about 60% of the way in. If a Batman Sunsoft collection is put out by a company who stubbornly refuses to include that, or only allows, say, two seconds of rewinding (not calling anyone specific out), I would give Batman: The Video Game a NO! But, I didn’t play it that way. I played Batman on MY terms. With a thirty-second rewind and/or quick save/quick load, I found that Batman works both as a fun, peppy sci-fi platformer AND as a historical curio. It’s actually really weird this game wears the Batman label, and there’s enough amusement in how bonkers it gets that it kept a smile on my face for most of the two hours I needed to finish it.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to a hypothetical Batman collection.
BONUS: Throw in another $5 if they also included a ROM hack similar to Batman (Easy).

Batman: The Video Game
Platform: Game Boy
Released April 13, 1990 (JP) June, 1990 (US)
Directed by Cho Musou
Developed by Sunsoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Super Wayneio Land

It’s probably best to think of the Game Boy version of Batman: The Video Game as Super Mario Land 1 with a gun. It doesn’t have much to do with the movies either, but at least you knock Jack Nicholson into a vat of chemicals. Hey, the NES game didn’t do that! The NES game also didn’t feel like a “break the blocks” platformer with Batman heroically saving the Mushroom Kingdom. Okay, so this is not the Batman game anyone would want. That’s why I feel especially silly making the following statement: of all the early era Game Boy games I’ve played, which admittedly is a small sample size, Batman is probably the best of the bunch. I enjoyed it a lot more than I liked Super Mario Land. Like, it’s not even close actually. I swear, these Sunsoft Batman games are so weird.

Batman does the old “invisible gap” trick that was all the rage in the 8-bit platformers. But, actually this does it better than most. The areas where the invisible gaps are have incredibly subtle tells, and once you figure it out, it feels like an earned challenge element and not a gotcha. Surprising and kind of wonderful. Hey Simon’s Quest: you were just bitch-slapped by puny Batman.

Batman: The Video Game on Game Boy is really short, at only about thirty minutes to finish, and it’s probably more suitable for younger children. Replace the “jump on the enemies” gameplay of Super Mario Land with Mega Man-style guns, then lobotomize the challenge and you get the idea. You get unlimited ammo, but you can only carry one gun at a time, which you find by shooting dark-shaded blocks. One pick-up, “the short gun” is functionally a whammy, as it leaves you stuck with a weapon that has no range and can’t pierce platforms and walls. Try to avoid them. The other guns are mostly fun to use. The power gun is basically a Mega Man pea shooter that can shoot enemies through walls. The wave gun is like the power gun but the bullets travel in a shallow sine wave. The “T” gun, which is presumably tear gas, is a large projectile that pierces walls AND can break three blocks at once. You’ll rarely need to break that many blocks. My favorite gun easily was the batarang gun, which is weirdly designated with an “R.” It shoots powerful batarangs out. Really, all the guns but shorty are fun to use. The one thing Batman HAD to do was have the action be fun, and it is!

Also, if you pick up white gun icons, you increase how many bullets you can shoot at once. I have no clue what the max is, but it goes up to at least 6. There’s also dark gun blocks that decrease your ammo by one. By the time I reached the Joker (pictured), I was essentially a tank with pointy ears.

Even if I think of Batman GB strictly as a children’s game, it’s a damn good game. Little kids need games too, and Batman has satisfying pew-pew action and enjoyable level design. The most impressive thing is how well balanced the platforming and the gun play is. It really feels like equal parts both. What completely nerfs the game is the shields you can pick up. If you see a Batman icon (his symbol), it creates a shield that spins around you. You can pick-up as many as four bats to circle you, and then you can even pick-up pills that make them spin faster. Although they do minimal damage upon making contact with an enemy, having four that spin like a figure skater on her tippy-toes can make you almost unstoppable. Almost. In what feels like the wisest choice the game made, the shield isn’t so effective that you can just walk through enemies with impunity. As easy as Batman is, you actually do have to make an effort. When I made it to the final boss, I tried to cheese him by just spamming the attack button to let my six batarangs fly at him. I almost lost a life doing this, as I was damaged down to my last hit. BUT, I did win!

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Batman shares even more DNA with Mario Land, as like Mario Land, it has two shmup levels that feel like they belong to a completely different game. Unlike Mario Land, the two stages where you pilot the Batwing are played back-to-back. They’re the game’s entire world 3. Also unlike Super Mario Land is the fact that I actually liked Batman’s auto-scrolling shmup levels. Like most of Game Boy Batman’s stages, they’re both too easy. The closest this build comes to putting up a challenge is the final level. Batman ends on an auto-scrolling platforming stage that often forces you to sacrifice your shields since its platforms are usually small, usually have an enemy on them, and usually leave you with little time to stop and aim your jump. And that’s fine, because the last level should put players to those kinds of risk/reward decisions. Batman’s two standard bosses are kind of boring, but otherwise, I’m surprised. I’d already played this before and remembered it being just okay. It’s a little better than that. In many ways, I liked this more than the NES game. It’s still pretty generic, but it also packs a lot of fun into very little game. I didn’t expect the Game Boy Batman to be one of the highlights of this feature. Sunsoft’s best decision was creating a new game that played to the Game Boy’s strengths instead of trying to copy a technologically superior game to a less capable platform.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to a hypothetical Batman collection.

Batman: The Video Game
Platform: Sega Genesis
Released July 27, 1990 (JP) June, 1991 (US)
Developed by Sunsoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Rain, rain, go away. My rubber suit is already enough of a pain.

The final installment of the Batman: The Video Game trilogy is also the only one that’s unambiguously based on the Tim Burton film. Actually, at times it feels sort of like Sunsoft was trying to create a more complicated home console approximation of the Atari Games coin-op. Which is actually impossible since this came out first. Maybe it’s the other way around and Atari Games was trying to make a better version of the Genesis game. Either way, the end result is a strange brawler-platformer hybrid that never quite feels like it gets out of first gear. And that’s kind of weird because it does feel like a Batman game. You use a grappling hook, punch generic crooks in the face, the batarangs don’t actually return like boomerangs, and you pilot both the Batmobile and Batwing in convincing fashion. All the pieces are in place for the Genesis version to stand tall as the only authentically Dark Knighty version of the franchise. And yet, this is easily the worst of the three titles called Batman: The Video Game.

The first stage is a literal straight line. No up and down movement required, unless you jump up ONE TIME to pick up an item refill. Otherwise, it’s a long ass street where you walk right, punch enemies, then walk right and punch enemies, etc, etc until you reach a boss. It took one level to realize that Sunsoft phoned this one in.

Genny Batman is an incredibly boring game. The combat is so flavorless, as you only punch and do a leg sweep type of kick. You can punch when you jump, but I never really found this useful and usually took damage when I attempted it. You only get one item in the platforming segments, the aforementioned non-returning batarang. While it completely trivialized a few of the boss fights (including the last one), it lacks the visual satisfaction that the NES game accomplished with a lot less horsepower. I also found the “block” move where Batman puts up his dukes to be generally ineffective. Without decent fisticuffs, Batman absolutely needed quality platforming gameplay to carry the day. Unfortunately, the platforming is even worse than the brawling. I’ll start with one of the worst double jumps I’ve ever seen. Early in the second level, I found myself unable to get past a stack of crates (“CRATES! MY ONLY WEAKNESS!”) until I dug up the instruction book via Sega Retro. That’s when I learned that if you quickly press the jump button a second time, Batman does this flippy move that’s more about helping to cover horizontal distance instead of jumping higher. Allegedly some enemies can be damaged by pouncing on them, but it feels like it was a coin flip on whether I’d damage them or they’d damage me.

This museum must pay through the nose on insurance premiums.

The biggest hook in the figurative sense is a literal hook in the corporeal sense: the grappling hook. It can only be used in designated spots and is little more than a manually-operated elevator. It put the slightest smile on my face that the hook actually does work like real life grappling hooks do, where you have to overthrow and hope the hook snags on a surface. Like.. yea, that’s how it would work. I can’t believe they put that in the game. Neato. But, the problem with using real life logic is that, while you wait for the hook to bind to a surface, you’re likely being shot at by a bad guy. In fact, late in the game, the areas where you’re supposed to use the hook are populated by enemies specifically placed to cause damage during the process. It takes a little bit to go through the motion of throwing the hook up. Also, when you finally start to make the climb with it, it’s like a bungee cord that fires you upward. So of course they put spiked ceilings around the hook areas in the final climb before you fight the Joker, and sometimes you haven’t scrolled the screen enough to be able to know they’re there. So, the hook doesn’t really work to differentiate the Batman games. It’s really dull and badly implemented.

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Therefore, the highlight of Genny Batman is the Batmobile. A basic but competent auto scrolling car combat section where you shoot enemies. Here, your batarangs are replaced with missiles that are fired two at a time. If there’s two enemies on screen, the missiles will each target a different one, and they’re so satisfying to use. The missiles also show up in the Batwing section, but I found that to be a frustrating slog. The problem is the Batwing’s sprite is too big, especially when you bank up and down, which you will since it’s a shmup and you’re trying to avoid getting shot. It leads to major issues with screen cramping. Come to think of it, Sunsoft really got it backwards. It’s the Batmobile that should feel cramped and claustrophobic with larger sprites to mimic navigating the narrow streets of a major metropolitan U.S. city, while the action in the skies over Gotham should feel more free and open on account of, well, it’s the literal f’n sky! Anyway, the Batwing stuff is pretty awful but it’s over with quickly. The Batmobile is a little more complicated. The action starts fun enough. Really fun, actually! But then the stage refuses to end. By the time the Batmobile has overstayed its welcome, you’re just over halfway done with it. So the best part of the game still manages to become boring. They should have broken it up into chunks of sixty seconds or less, then inserted those between every level. Dumping this all into one overly long segment was the price to pay for following the Tim Burton movie’s set pieces in film order.

I actually had to rewind to get a screenshot of the Joker shooting at me. The first time I played the last boss, he barely got a chance to run on the screen, as I all but stun-locked him with my batarangs for the easiest last boss victory this side of Shredder from Ninja Turtles.

It’s not that the Batman Genesis game isn’t ever fun. Actually, the best thing I can say about it is, besides the Batwing section, I never found it to be an actively bad game, at least mechanically speaking. It’s just so lazy and uninspired. The level design is basic, and the combat is basic, and the driving section is basic, and are you catching a theme here? During the NES review, I often wondered if the extreme difficulty was blowback from the development team getting one note too many from management. With the Genesis game, I wonder if they were all just burned out on the Dark Knight by the time they needed to develop the Sega game. This is a total paint by numbers licensed game that does just a good enough job that any child in 1990 could say “yep, that’s a Batman game.” But, Batman: The Video Game on the Sega Genesis never stood a chance at passing the test of time. Maybe Sunsoft was onto something by replacing the movie set pieces with robo-ninjas, guys dressed like mechanical bugs, and Contra-style bosses. They should have ended Genny Batman with Bruce Wayne throwing batarangs at a giant heart while alien spiders nibble at him. I’m picturing a stoned Jack Nicholson playing the game in his apartment and being like “wait, was this in the movie I made?”
Verdict: NO!

Bahmah?

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The Fall of Elena Temple (Review)

May 1, 2024 by Leave a comment

The Fall of Elena Temple
aka Elena Temple 2.
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Playdate
Released April 30, 2024
Developed by GrimTalin

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Most games don’t require the most in-depth reviews. Take GrimTalin’s new indie sequel to their cult hit The Adventures of Elena Temple. That game was based on searching a fifty-screen map for treasure. This time around, Elena stars in a single-screen puzzler based mostly around the concept of falling. And it’s a really, really short game at only twenty stages. I don’t know exactly how much time I needed to finish them all, as I knocked out a few stages at a time, then did something else, then turned on the game and knocked out a few more, and so forth. The fact that I played The Fall of Elena Temple like that and still finished the whole experience in a single day says something. All in? It probably took me an hour-and-a-half. A really fun and perfectly acceptable ninety minutes, mind you. I can honestly say I was never bored. Unlike the previous Elena Temple adventure, this is 99% a puzzle game, with only the faintest hint of platforming, making this feel more like a spin-off than a proper sequel.

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This is especially true thanks to the graphics looking a bit like Game Boy and a bit like Playdate. The previous Elena Temple was themed around a game by a hapless game developer who kept making their flagship game for the wrong platforms. This time around, it’s more like “hey, remember Game Boy?” You can zoom as far in or out as you wish. I needed to zoom all the way in, but your mileage may vary. The object is to collect all the coins and then get to the exit. The big twist is that most rooms have an item that grants you the ability to undo your previous fall from a platform, only you get to keep any progress you made towards the whole coin collecting. It’s actually a pretty good twist, but it’s also one that puzzle aficionados should be able to reverse-engineer with only a bit of trial and error. It’s intuitive to use, at least. The amount of falls you’re able to undo varies from room to room, and each fall is numbered so you know where the undo button is sending you. It works wonderfully and it does make for a fun gimmick. In fact, it’s so fun that I was sorry when it wasn’t in a room.

Probably the best thing I can say about Elena 2 is that it successfully creates “THE BIG OVERWHELM” which is my term for puzzle games where, at first, a level seems so vast and multi-dimensional that you initially think “okay, maybe time I’ve met my match.” The beauty of THE BIG OVERWHELM is that it doesn’t require a complex puzzle, but only the appearance of one. Look at Portal, where none of the puzzles are THAT hard, no matter how the scenario is presented. The payoff is, when you actually finish the stage that looked so overwhelming at first glance, it’s that much sweeter. The Fall of Elena Temple pulls that off, which is pretty impressive for a minimalist puzzler. Plus, Elena 2 keeps throwing twists at you the entire length of the game. Crumbling floors. Disappearing/reappearing floors. Boots that let you skip a space. Hearts that let you absorb one hit of damage. Keys. Snakes. Spiders. All of it paced out so that there’s something new in nearly every level, right to the bitter end. Actually, past the bitter end. I couldn’t believe my eyes when a never previously used magnet showed up in one of the three bonus stages, and then even more stuff is added after that. Hey, finally “bonus stages” that live up to the name. I can’t stress enough: this is GrimTalin’s best game and one of the absolute best puzzlers I’ve played in the last few years. The Fall of Elena Temple is really good.

Even with THE BIG OVERWHELM, Elena’s levels are rarely actually as overwhelming as they look. Oh, and it took me about half the game for my brain to stop needing to tell itself “you can’t climb the vines, stupid.”

But, there’s really two big problems with the whole “stay fresh until the end” design mentality. The first is that, when you only have twenty levels, by necessity, the learning curve is going to be more like a gentle slope. You need the difficulty to scale, so you can’t do simple tutorial levels with the new items, but you also can’t really go completely bonkers with them either. Which, don’t get me wrong: I prefer Elena’s scaling to something like Gateways, where the learning curve was more like a straight wall made out of middle fingers (and mind you, that’s a game I liked a lot). But, there were also maybe, at most, only three or four levels that really had me scratching my head, and one of them was a “bonus” stage. The other big problem is that most of the ideas for special items are fun, but with the exception of the undo mechanic, they all feel underutilized. The twenty-three levels combined absolutely does not feel like it stretches the limits of what this puzzle formula can do. I suppose GrimTalin could do DLC, or a special edition later on like they did with the first Elena Temple. Hell, I’d be fine if they released level packs at $1 a pop for, say, ten new stages and just kept releasing new ones for quick cash, since that initial $3 felt underpriced to begin with. $3 for ninety damn fine minutes of puzzle goodness? What else are you going to do with $3? For me, I had to decide on a large lime slushie or this. I’m sure I made the right choice. Pretty sure. No, wait.. yea, I’m sure.
Verdict: YES!
$2.99 was parched in the making of this review.

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Akka Arrh (Arcade Review – Atari 50)

April 29, 2024 by 1 Comment

Akka Arrh
Platform: Arcade
Year: 1982
Unreleased Prototype (Compilation Debut)
Designed by Dave Ralston & Mike Hally
Included in Atari 50
Includes Dip Switch Options? No

If you glanced at screenshots, it looks kind of like Robotron. This doesn’t even share the same DNA.

This was meant to be in Atari 50: The Definitive Review – Part Two but I had a lot to say about Akka Arrh, so it’s getting its own review. And yes, I’ll do the Jeff Minter remake sometime soon.

Apparently the victim of a poor reception in route testing, Akka Arrh made its retro collection debut with Atari 50. The whole situation with it reminds me of one of those stories you hear about a baby being abandoned, only to tearfully reunite with their biological family years later when they’re all grown-up with a family of their own. After four decades of all but pretending like this never happened, it finally feels like Akka Arrh was welcomed into the Atari family with open arms. It even got a widely-promoted remake led by certifiable legend Jeff Minter. That type of fairy tale ending almost never happens with cancelled games, but it does beg the question: were those players who tested Akka Arrh in 1982 the real villains or did they get it right all along? A little of both, actually.

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The idea is you’re a turret in the center of a series of zones that gets bombarded by waves of enemies. In the larger overhead shot, you have a chance to wipe out entire sections of the swarm by bombing the segment they’re in. If any get through, you have to zoom in to defend your turret directly. Atari 50’s menu says that Akka Arrh borrows gameplay elements from Missile Command, but really, the similarities end with the game’s use of trackball-controlled crosshairs. Also, if you’re on consoles, sorry, but you have to use standard controls, though they work fine, really. The camera is NOT automatic and it’s up to you when you change views. It takes a LOT of getting used to, and at first, I didn’t like Akka Arrh. It’s not intuitive like the best coin-ops of this era are. You almost have to rewire your brain for this specific play style. Once you do, it’s actually not a bad little game at all. Easily the best part is how the overhead combat works. In the overhead view, the entire section that your crosshairs are currently aimed at is highlighted. You don’t have to aim directly at the clusters of enemies. A single shot on any part of the currently highlighted area kills every enemy within. And it’s AWESOME!

As you get deeper into the game, some of the overhead patterns get downright ridiculous (not to mention confusing), and it lessens the potential for those oh-so-satisfying big shots. It’s still a lot of fun, though.

So, half of Akka Arrh is really fun and so incredibly satisfying that it’s almost unbelievable that it didn’t get released. Then you get to the close-up view of the turret, where you have a standard gun, and you’re stuck with gameplay that just isn’t very fun. Despite the fact that your bullets don’t stop at the crosshairs, you do need to actually aim the crosshairs on the enemies in order to kill them. Total bullsh*t! The problem is the enemies are too fast and often move too erratically, no matter how fast or slow you set the crosshair in the options. Even worse is that there’s no pizzazz to the turret part of the game. The enemies are very generic, and they don’t have satisfying POPS to them when you successfully shoot them. At least with the overhead part, you get a rush when you hit a big wave. The turret has none of that charm. Even if you zoom in to watch yourself use your once-per-level center-clearing bomb, it doesn’t feel like you accomplished anything. For such a beautiful game, it somehow has NO personality, and that’s just weird for this era of Atari.

I think a lot of the problems with Akka Arrh could have been fixed if the shields placed by the enemies weren’t as spongy as they are. The enemy patterns are hard enough without them hiding behind what can become a lot of shields.

But, do you know what’s even odder? For whatever reason, Akka Arrh’s close-up gameplay just didn’t feel as intense as the stakes seem to dictate it should. The turret is protected by a shield that enemies have to ping their way through. When that becomes heavily damaged, you should be sweating every time baddies make it through your initial volley of shots in the overhead view, but you don’t. It’s just not exciting at all, and this is one of those times where I don’t have a satisfactory theory on why that is. Maybe it’s because the warning noise is this underwhelming “boop boop boop” sound, or maybe it’s because the game quickly becomes too overwhelming to the point of hopelessness, or maybe it’s just because the enemies are so bland that they don’t command a sense of urgency.  More than likely, it’s all the above. Another issue is that when the turret playfield is full of enemy shields, just recognizing the enemies becomes a challenge. They don’t stand out very well. Robotron: 2084 proved you can spam the screen with things and still be able to tell specific characters and enemies apart. Here, it just all bleeds together. It’s one of the most visually noisy games of this era.

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Akka Arrh is that rare game that’s lesser than the sum of its parts. But, that ultimate sum is still pretty fun. Once you get the hang of it, Akka Arrh feels like it manages to succeed despite itself. The scoring is well handled, with further away zones in the overhead view scoring more points, but at the cost of a small-but-pronounced delay in when you can fire your next shot. This opens the gameplay up to allow players to come up with their own strategies, and I’m all about that with arcade shooters. Further enhancing the risk/reward gameplay is the fact that you score the most points in the significantly harder and more dangerous turret view. If you’re feeling brave, you can allow the enemies to reach the core and pick them off there for 4x the points. There’s also the timing factor, as you’re given one bomb per level that can be used to bail you out and clear the core if too many enemies reach the center.  When and why to use that bomb is up to you. Even better is you don’t have to zoom in to use it. The only downside is you can’t bank unused bombs. They got around the logic of this by calling it a “power blaster” that recharges between levels, implying that it has a max charge. Hey, this is war! Get some more batteries or something!

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Each level has a different layout on the surface and consists of three waves of enemies. The third wave is always made-up of enemies who, instead of attacking the turret, drop things around the turret that eventually clog-up the playfield and make it more difficult to shoot the baddies who aggressively attack. Once again Akka Arrh presents a perfect risk/reward scenario. So, what do you do? Kill the attackers with the bomb, or kill the things that aid the defense of the attackers in later rounds? In terms of raw gameplay, Akka Arrh is deceptively deep. Really, I just wish the core turret gameplay was a lot more fun than it is. The really heartbreaking thing is something as small as increasing the size of the enemies or the size of your bullets could have made this a lot more fun. Sure, it’s frustrating when the enemies straddle the dividing line of the barriers on the surface, but there’s some genuinely fun and amazing ideas at play here. It took a lot of time, but once I got the hang of Akka Arrh, I couldn’t put it down. What was supposed to be one final hour long play test before I wrote the review turned into the best six hours I spent with Akka Arrh. It just finally worked for me.

Normally, Akka Arrh would use a trackball, and if you’re playing on PC, that’s still an option. If you’re on consoles, you’re going to want to adjust the sensitivity of your analog sticks, as the default is just not fast enough for the gameplay. I found moving the slider to where I have it in this screenshot worked best for me. Fast enough to react to most enemies, but still accurate enough to not overshoot your targets. I also highly recommend that players experiment with ASSISTED toggled both on and off. When it’s on, your movement is automatically slowed down while you’re actively shooting. My Dad preferred it on. I easily had my best games with it turned off. The best thing I can say about Atari 50 is that they loaded every imaginable controller option.

At the same time, I totally get why this wouldn’t have been a hit in 1982. The learning curve is one of the steepest of any coin-op shooter I’ve seen. Everything that makes for great arcade gameplay is here, except the instant gratification. It takes a while to figure out when to switch views, and why you would. On top of that, learning the enemy patterns and getting a feel for the game’s flow takes longer than normal because everything is so damn generic looking. It doesn’t help that the two styles of graphics, for the overworld and the turret, look nothing alike. You’d swear this is two games combined into one. It sort of is! For players weaned on Asteroids, Space Invaders, Carnival, King & Balloon, etc, I imagine Akka Arrh was like the difference between driving a truck and driving a tank. Despite what the menu in Atari 50 says, Akka Arrh isn’t really all that much like Missile Command, or any other game from this era. It’s a one-off. While I ultimately did find the fun in Akka Arrh, it took me multiple play sessions over the course of sixteen months to get to that point. I guess that best answers the question of why Akka Arrh failed in route testing.
Verdict: YES!
$39.99 couldn’t get that episode of Dinosaurs out of her head in the making of this review. “Akka Arrh I’m dying you idiots!”

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The Making of Karateka- The Definitive Review (Includes Bonus Reviews of the NES & Game Boy Karateka)

April 27, 2024 by Leave a comment

Before starting this review, I’d never played Karateka. I didn’t even know what genre it was going to be. Apparently I wasn’t alone. The first video in the museum features legendary designers of games saying they weren’t sure what to expect when they saw Karateka on shelves. Some thought maybe it would be like Karate Champ or a similar one-on-one fighter. I was thinking it might be more like Kung Fu, aka Kung Fu Master, aka Spartan X. Actually, we were all right AND not even close. I decided, for this review, I would go in completely blind, and I’m going to review all the builds and prototypes in this set in the actual sequential order they’re presented in the program’s five chapters. This includes a review of every prototype and every build of the games Karateka, Death Bounce, and Asteroid Blaster, the final two of which never released. Each game review below was written immediately following the specific build was played, before I moved on in the museum’s narrative. The sections on Presentation & Features and Emulation were written after the game reviews were completed.

The Making of Karateka retails for $19.99, and therefore it has to create $20 in value to win my seal of approval. After I finished reviewing the games, I assigned extra value for the emulation quality and the quality of what would be called “extra content” or “bonus content” in most other collections. For The Making of Karateka, that content is equal to the games themselves, but I’m still going to treat the games like they’re the reason people would buy this. Like with Atari 50, I’m not setting fixed value on any YES! game. Instead, I’ll say what I think it’s worth.

I used the Nintendo Switch version for this review. I’m pals with many people at Digital Eclipse, but that doesn’t factor into this review.

PRESENTATION & FEATURES

For the purposes of this review, any video game prototypes or features that require actual gameplay are scored separately.

Wow, where do I begin? Using the same menu system created for Atari 50, The Making of Karateka is essentially part book, part documentary, and part whatever you call all the other extra features you’d typically find on a Blu-ray or DVD. It’s really not JUST a Karateka feature, either. It’s probably best to look at this as “Jordan Mechner and The Making of Karateka” because Jordan’s background and entrance into game design takes up the entire first chapter (of five total). This really is an all-encompassing experience. I’ve heard Making of Karateka get compared to Criterion Collection, and that’s spot-on. Name something you’d want, and it’s here. I’ll start with the typical things you’d expect. Making of Karateka is overflowing with the usual “drawing board” items like concept art, graphs showing the sprites, deleted ideas, box covers, instruction books, and advertisements. I’m hugely into this type of stuff. Some people aren’t. If pencil drawings or old magazine ads do absolutely nothing for you, it’s fine to knock $5 off the value I award at the end of this section.

Don’t look at Making of Karateka as game design 101. This is specifically about Karateka and Jordan’s path to getting it made. Some aspects are very educational (especially Mike J. Mika’s audio commentary track and a feature on music), but for the most part, the package is focused more on being inspirational. Like with Rotoscoping, you’re not getting a full history on the technique. Instead, you get only the smallest of primers on what it, where it came from, and how it works, with the majority of the video dedicated to how Jordan used it. If you’re interested in rotoscoping, this is my favorite video ever on it and how it was used to create the 1940’s Superman animated films.

Going a step beyond concept art, there’s correspondence between Jordan and the publisher of his Death Bounce prototype, including the results of a focus testing. You never expect to see that type of thing, even in a feature like this. It feels almost taboo, and I loved them. By the way, viewing these documents is intuitive and easy. As far as engines designed to read documents using video game controls, I can’t imagine doing better than this. Of course, the main highlight is several documentary-style interview segments. Thankfully, only two are the usual fluff like having famous designers talk about their love of Karateka and what it meant to their gaming upbringings. Actually, one of them cracked me up pretty good: where the famous creators talked about the, shall we say, less than enjoyable aspects of Karateka. When Tom Hall talks about the gate or the bird, the look on his face and his body language do not match the praise he’s giving, which gave me a terrific giggle. I mean, look at him!

Oh, I’m sure he loved Karateka. I’m cherry picking the hell out of this and leaving out the parts where his admiration and love for Mechner’s body of work are plainly obvious. But, where’s the fun in that? For just one brief-but-glorious second, he completely slips into this mode, where his mouth says one thing, but his face says “you know what? You’ve made your fame and fortune and now it’s forty years later, so now admit it, Jordan: you were a bit of a turd with that bird!” Hmm, actually, now that I think about it, maybe Tom pirated his copy. You’ll get that joke if you listen to the Karateka: Remastered audio commentary.

The behind-the-scenes stuff is some of the most educational gaming features I’ve seen. The three main subjects of the clips are creator Jordan Mechner, his father Francis (who did the music), and Veda Cook, who led the first two ports (Commodore 64 and Atari 8-Bit computers) after the original Apple II build. All three of them are so dang charming that you can’t help but like them. For me at least, it totally made me scream fewer cuss words at some of the more infuriating design choices of Karateka. I especially liked Francis, who is one of those renaissance man types where you hear his story and all the things he’s done with his life, that it makes you reevaluate your own life. He was a concert pianist, research psychologist, a  famous creator of game soundtracks, invented the question mark, and convinced Wendy’s to use square-shaped patties. I made up those last two but you could believe otherwise with this guy. But what makes it really special is Jordan is next to him, and he has the eyes of a man who is so proud of his father. I found myself wiping away tears just seeing that look. You can tell that having him there to talk about what they achieved together meant the world to him. I loved these interviews. And I loved the information in them, too. Cook gets one of the longer videos to talk about the challenges in the ports. There’s a clip devoted entirely to rotoscoping. There’s some interviews explaining things from Brøderbund’s side of the project. They covered more bases than I expected.

One of the best features is this nearly seventeen minute long breakdown of the Francis Mechner musical score for Karateka by Kirk Hamilton. He does an EXCELLENT job of explaining how it’s not like Jordan’s daddy just threw together a series of bleeps in a harmonious fashion. Oh no. Think of this as a crash course in the style of music used, along with how and why music is incorporated into both film and games. All of it in plain layman’s terms that even a tone deaf moron like me can understand, and it’s so well done that I tracked down his podcast. When people talk about going the extra mile, THIS IS that extra mile, where Digital Eclipse didn’t just present the music, but found someone to explain what kind of music it is and why it matters. Nobody would have asked for this before Making of Karateka, and now I’ll be disappointed if this type of concept doesn’t show up again in future prestige releases.

There’s one non-interactive audio commentary included, for the Apple II version of Karateka. The commentary features Jordan & Francis Mechner and runs close to twenty minutes. I’m all for more Francis in this set, and he’s all over this commentary as his musical cues are discussed in his own words. Combined with the feature in the caption above, and I really feel like I came away from Making of Karateka having learned actual applicable lessons about the usage and implementation of music in visual media. So, hot damn, I didn’t expect that. There’s also behind the scenes footage of how they actually created the rotoscoping effect, using Francis as the model for the hero. This directly ties to one of the coolest features I’ve ever seen in anything like this, which I suppose you have to lump-in every DVD/Bluray I’ve ever browsed: Rotoscope Theater. Using sliders, you can manually adjust the Super 8 footage shot for the rotoscoping with Jordan Mechner’s line drawings AND the final sprites of the game. It’s such an inspired idea. We ended up spending close to ten minutes just playing around with these four short segments. My family is really big into filmmaking and learning about the production side of things, and the two Rotoscope Theater parts of the presentation were a BIG hit in my house. Everyone was so happy fiddling around with them. Just when I thought Digital Eclipse had gone the extra mile, it turns out the extra mile had extra miles.

I’d like to see more things similar to this, even without the rotoscoping factor.

What’s missing? Jeez, I had to think quite a while about this. I guess I’m semi-curious what Jordan’s final grades were at college since that’s such a big part of the feature. Really, the only major thing I would have loved to have listened to was audio commentaries from Veda Cook for the Commodore 64/Atari 8-Bit versions she ported. Preferably both, but I’d settle for one. Or maybe Cook alone for one, and Cook with Jordan in the other. Maybe they felt the six minute feature on the ports was enough, but I still would have enjoyed it. And of course, I’d have liked if the “bad” versions of Karateka were included. I guess fans call the original three the “holy trinity of Karateka” and Mike said in the audio commentary of Remastered that ports like the one to the Atari ST didn’t “get it.” I’ll have to take his word, because they ain’t here. Not that I would have wanted to play Karateka a dozen times, but I am morbidly curious why they’re so disdained by the fandom. Otherwise, even if you ignore the games, there’s easily three hours worth of material here and not a stinker in the bunch. This is as good as a prestige collection like this gets. For all the features in the main presentation, I award the max $20 in value to The Making of Karateka. And like I said, if you’re really not into concept art or marketing materials, you’d probably want to deduct $5 off that.

Max value is fixed to each set’s MSRP, so future sets might get a higher value for such features.

EMULATION

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The Making of Karateka has a fully-powered Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation: save states, rewind, button remapping, optional hardware enhancement (in this case, enhanced frame rate for the Apple II & Commodore 64 versions of Karateka), display options/screen effects, and full gameplay videos with optional jump-in. It’s worth noting that enhanced frame rate is NOT an option for any prototypes. It’s also not an option for the Atari 8-Bit version, but I can’t penalize that as it’s not a platform you can really do that without fundamentally altering the core gameplay in negative ways. You can also change the CRT effect of the ground in Karateka. The most important feature, besides the hardware buff, is the option to change the standard one/two button combat into a Street Fighter-like six button scheme. It works fine, too, but oddly enough, I actually liked how the one button gameplay for Commodore 64/Atari 8-Bit worked and preferred it to the six button. But I also very much enjoyed replaying the Apple II with the six button scheme. For the emulation, I award The Making of Karateka $10 in value, which is my standard for having all the bells & whistles.

GAME REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account, at least for the games themselves. For The Making of Karateka, historic value absolutely will factor into my review of the prototype-based content. Otherwise, I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

Asteroid Blaster
Platform: Apple II
Year: 1981
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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Asteroid Blaster is why I love the Gold Master Series concept as much as I do, as even if the games get a NO!, Digital Eclipse is certain to more than make up for it with the extra features. In the case of Asteroid Blaster, it’s only here because it’s the introductory game to Jordan Mechner’s career. At just the age of 16, he wrote.. and sold.. this visually impressive take on Asteroids. At a time when the market was flooded with wannabes of varying quality, I can’t imagine the astonishment of the people at Hayden Software when they first played this. It looks more like the vector graphics coin-op original than any other Asteroids port of this era. The biggest problem with Asteroid Blaster is the speed. It just never has the same level of pep in its step as the real mccoy. This becomes especially pronounced when you’re a couple levels in and the controls begin to suffer greatly from input lag. Because of it, moving around too much is a bad idea. Even with the lag, the difficulty feels like it stops scaling after just a couple stages. It’s too easy to point straight down at an asteroid and tick off most of its particles before they have a chance to separate. It’s still Asteroids, with gameplay better than the 2600 version, easily, but I’d not want to play this for entertainment in 2024. It’s still a damn shame a giant asteroid with WARNER BROS. LEGAL DEPARTMENT stamped on it prevented Asteroid Blaster from releasing, as this probably rises to the level of being satisfying enough in 1981.
Verdict: NO!

Star Blaster
Platform: Apple II
Year: 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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In an attempt to stave-off the giant WARNER BROS. LEGAL DEPARTMENT asteroid, Mechner changed the UFOs in Asteroids. The bigger, slower one is now a smiley face. As ridiculous as that sounds, much like Berzerk’s Evil Otto, there’s an undeniable creepiness to it. Meanwhile, the little UFO is now a mushroom that looks like something from Super Mario Land a full seven years before that game was released. That’s not the only change from the previous build of his Asteroids knock-off. The game plays much faster this go around, and it was certainly a nice touch to have final pieces of rubble speed-up. This is so close to getting a YES! that it can taste it. One thing that impressed me a lot is how accurate the collision detection is. As far as I could tell, it’s pixel-perfect. But, the input lag is still an issue, and you really don’t want input lag in a game like Asteroids. What I find particularly astonishing was that Hayden Software’s proposed solution to get around Atari’s ownership was to eliminate the shooting and create an avoider-type game. Seriously? Hey, avoiders can be fun. Some LCDs successfully built games around it, but if people see asteroids, they’re going to want to shoot them. Mechner knew that and offered to turn the asteroids into soap bubbles (clever!) but Hayden declined, and that was the end of this project. If *I* was running a game company and a 16 year old brought me a remarkably convincing Asteroids port, I’d hope I would recognize the long term potential he had as a game maker and not let him get poached by the competition. Hayden no longer exists, as a software developer OR a book publisher. I can’t imagine why.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – “First Prototype”
Platform: Apple II
Dated April 28, 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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Building off his Asteroids engine, Mechner reached out to Brøderbund with a spin-off of the concept that replaced deep space and rocks with bouncing balls and physics that feel more akin to playing Asteroids on an air hockey table. It’s not the worst idea by any means, but it just wasn’t as fun as you’d hope. At first, I was convinced that the collision detection was off. Upon closer inspection, this seemed to be an optical illusion where the animation of the gun combined with the high velocity the balls move to give the appearance of the bullets traveling through the side of the balls. Or, maybe I’m wrong and any shot but dead center scores a kill, but I’m willing to accept that Death Bounce is creating eye trickery. Instead, the main issue is that the targets are just too small. With the exception of a giant white ball that appears every few seconds, all the targets are equal in size to the smallest pieces of rock in Asteroids. I did like how the shield works, as you go skidding off when the balls collide with you in a way that makes you look like a hockey puck. A bigger problem is that the giant white stalker ball appears too close to you sometimes. As a first build, this isn’t awful, but I’m grateful he kept working on it.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – Colored Balls Prototype
Platform: Apple II
Dated June 5, 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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Death Bounce’s second version changed the stalker ball to a stalker ship, and now the balls that were already hard enough to shoot take multiple shots. Once again, it’s not the worst idea by any stretch, and this time around, your shield’s fuel has a very helpful gauge that refills between stages. So nice to have. But, I actually preferred the first version. Both builds of Death Bounce thus far have an issue with the stalker spawning too close to you, but it happened a lot more often in the second build. Because the game speeds up to the degree it does, moments like the one in the above slideshow happen constantly. Expecting players to react in the literal small fraction of a second they were given isn’t a reasonable challenge. It’s just not. This was inching closer to being a good game, as I think the formula would work. This is why I hate reviewing beta builds. I feel like a bitch for all these NO!s.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – Little Man Prototype
Platform: Apple II
Dated August 4, 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

Stick a fork in this one.

After three prototypes, I’m now fairly certain that Death Bounce, as the concept stands, never had a chance of working out. This build wisely sets the shield to holding down the button instead of toggling it on and off. That was smart. It also adds lines that make the balls look like tennis balls and gives the game a sense of motion. Also, now there’s an animation of a little guy running into the ship every new life. Adding a little flavor is never a bad idea, but, all the gameplay problems that have been there from the start are pretty much still here. The stalker ship can still sometimes spawn too close to you to give you a reasonable chance of defending against it. I haven’t even mentioned the frame rate drop when too many objects appear on the screen at once. This is then countered by everything moving too fast when the screen starts to empty. But, the biggest problem of all is that Death Bounce just plain isn’t fun. I still think the concept could work, and I believe the dullness here is mostly tied to the targets being so small and hard to aim at. All the main targets are the same size, over and over and over. The stalker ships are not at all effective in breaking up the monotony. Having targets of different sizes would have gone a long way towards helping with that even if they didn’t shrink between each shot. This is boring, and I think it would have been considered boring even at the time. It’s bizarre too, because Jordan went from making a version of Asteroids so convincing that Atari had to stomp it out to making a less dynamic, significantly less fun version of Asteroids.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – Space Train
Platform: Apple II
Dated January 20, 1983
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype of an Unreleased Game

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I take back what I said! I TAKE IT BACK! Had THIS version of Death Bounce ever been released and, you know, actually gotten purchased by anyone, it would have gone down in history as one of the worst video games ever made. Where do I even begin? You have two movement speeds: faster than light, and stop. So, imagine playing an Asteroids-like shooter with bouncy walls where the slightest press of the thruster takes you from the center of the room to up against the wall. And mind you, that was the absolute fastest tap of the trust button I ever did. Most of my other attempts at barely touching the button gave me enough thrust that I bounced off the top wall, then the bottom wall, then made it halfway back to the spot center spot I started on. Holy crap!! Is the ship greased with Clark W. Griswold Jr.’s kitchen lubricant?

Changing the enemies to birds was a positive. Now, the balls are bombs the giant birds spit out that eventually hatch Joust-style into more of the basic birds.

Now, take THOSE movement parameters and play the same game seen in the previous three reviews. Except this time, the enemies are much bigger and easier to crash into. If you use your shield, you’re going to go flying from the impact, usually hitting a couple walls before you come to a stop. Use counter trust, you say? I tried. It didn’t work. I just instantly went flying in the opposite direction. The intuitive Asteroid-like physics are gone. The only time movement isn’t miserable is when you die, ironically. That’s because in order to be able to use your extra lives, you have to guide your character to the right door. Fail and it’s game over no matter how many lives you have left. Now THAT isn’t a bad idea at all, and thankfully the controls support it. And finally, in this version, when you finish all the enemies, you have to exit the left door. Have fun with that. Just the act of moving to the next room is agony. Now I know why he abandoned this for a karate game. After playing Death Bounce, I was in the mood to hit something too!

Oh, and once you finish all the levels, a Metroid-like timer starts and you have to sprint for the exit. Actually, this is the earliest build of any game I’ve seen do that, so that’s something at least! Of course, had I not allowed myself to die against the final bomb, then respawn with a straight line towards the exit, I would never have made it. There wasn’t enough time for even one mistake.

Okay, so it goes without saying..
Verdict: NO! BUT..
While the entertainment value of the six non-Karateka prototypes isn’t there (honestly the best of the six was probably the third version of Death Bounce), as a critic of games, I did enjoy experiencing first hand the linear progress of this whole project, including the correspondence between Jordan Mechner and his publishers. For that final version of Death Bounce that I deplored, there’s even a letter that details the result of a focus testing. Presumably a focus test that ended with the subjects killing and eating each-other in protest. The important thing is I’m pretty sure this is the closest I’ve ever come to getting into the mind of a young, aspiring game designer from this era. For the all Asteroid Blast/Death Bounce prototypes and their presentation, I award a bonus of $3 in value to The Making of Karateka.

Funny, because after playing that last build of Death Bounce, I said the exact same thing. But, there’s one last note on Death Bounce. Digital Eclipse wanted to take a crack at it.

Death Bounce: Rebounded
Platform: Reimagined Series
Year: 2023
Designed by Dave Rees and Jeremy Williams
Published by Digital Eclipse

It looks like pure chaos.. but this is the good stuff.

The creators of VCTR-SCTR, Haunted Houses, and Swordquest: Airworld from Atari 50 took the base ingredients from Death Bounce games, especially the fourth version, and created a wonderfully slick and modern twin stick shooter as a bonus game for Making of Karateka. Even I admit I was a little worried when I saw that was the inspiration, but worry not, dear reader. Every wrong there is righted here. The controls are amazingly intuitive. The collision detection is god-tier. The pacing is intense. The shooting is satisfying. I even enjoyed getting all the fake achievements. Mind you, this is an all-but-ignored bonus game that basically got no promotion or hype, even as publications were declaring Making of Karateka the best thing since the invention of carbon. NOBODY would have bought the set for this game, but actually, it’s one of the most enjoyable shooters I’ve played in recent memory. The type of game that would be heir-apparent to Geometry Wars if sold separately.

The bomb sequences make thrilling climatic moments. Having players crash deliberately into the opening was a stroke of genius.

It’s a really simple game, too. You fly through the space train from Death Bounce’s final build, shooting the enemy birds that you need to clear out to progress. You get bonuses based on how quickly you clear each room. Each train has a different number of cars, but the final car is always a bomb with a protective shield around it. The “Death Bounce” name isn’t just there as a hold-over from the prototypes. Rebounded is almost like a twin stick shooter set inside one of those inflatable castles. The effect on your ship is subtle, but the effect on your bullets is what makes it work, as you can ricochet your shots. It’s still a teeny-tiny bit annoying to get through the door after you clear each stage, but thankfully it’s not even in the same galaxy of annoyance as the fourth Death Bounce prototype. Meanwhile, every aspect of the bomb rooms is so exciting. Once you pump enough bullets into the bomb’s core, you have to crash your ship into it, and oh, it’s so satisfying. Really, the whole game is. Even the little touches help, like how you’re temporarily invincible when you first enter a room, but the enemies aren’t, and crashing into more than one gives you bonus points. That’s one of those ideas that feels like it’s a band-aid over the potential problem of cheap enemy placement, only it would be like if that band-aid gave you super powers.

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It’s not perfect. When you lose your last life, it still does the “escape to the door” bit. There’s probably an Easter Egg or some kind of one in a million chance of getting an extra life, but in a couple hours of playtime I never did it. Having the last life still end the same way every life does is completely immersion breaking. Besides that, and besides the lack of online leaderboards, the only complaint I really have is one of the same ones I had for Jeremy Williams’ VCTR-SCTR: no time attack mode. Weird that Digital Eclipse keeps making games perfectly suited for such modes, yet is failing to capitalize on it. BUT, that’s so nit-picky. Really, Death Bounce: Rebounded has amazing movement physics, excellent scoring balance, and a breakneck pace. Death Bounce: Rebounded is one of my favorite gaming surprises ever. Hey, I found a LOT of enjoyment in Making of Karateka, but the reason it’s not being deleted from my Switch after the review is completed is Death Bounce: Rebounded. It’s the type of game I want to keep on stand by for when I have ten minutes to kill, or when I just have an itch for a really good twin stick shooter.
Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to The Making of Karateka
You only get initials, guys? TWO? I ought to fine you ten bucks for that 🤪

Karateka – Jordan’s Prototype
Platform: Apple II
Dated May 1, 1984
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress/Proof of Concept Prototype

We’ve arrived at the main course.

This demo was, to the best of my knowledge, my first experience ever with Karateka. My first initial thought was “gosh, I hope the finished game plays faster than this.” (Cathy from the future to Cathy from the past: “wish into one hand..”) Yea, yea, old computer game. I know they go to the beat of their own drummer. Oddly enough, for a game that runs so slow, Karateka’s combat has decent, bordering on good, OOMPH. For my first-time readers (who are hopefully going to end up just plain ordinary readers), that’s what I call video game violence that feels like it has real world weight and impact. Karateka achieves this by having gigantic impact stars when you land a hit and a satisfying noise that I’d describe like the sound I make when I flip down on my oversized bean bag chair. Which, hey, I love that sound! I just wish I loved the rest of the game as much.

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So, the birds. This is one of those “good idea, less than ideal execution” situations. Between the fights, and near the end of the game, you have to fight a bird. And this bird’s collision detection has absolutely no logical visual cue or basis on its sprite OR your sprite. The moment when it’s actually vulnerable to attack is completely arbitrary. Something a player has to figure out by trial and error while also programming their brain to ignore the logical point of impact, AND, you have to factor the lag it takes to stop moving and get into your fighting stance AND the lag that happens when you throw a punch. It’s a deal breaker for me. The weird thing is, it was around the time I started whining about this that a few people started coming out and saying that, neat as this Gold Master Series kick-off is, Karateka has always been kind of a crappy game. Apparently the birds are so notorious that a parody account exist on the former Twitter centered around them. Well, that’s ominous. See, this isn’t a “GIT GUD” thing. If the sprites for what you’re trying to punch or kick don’t directly tie to the collision of the object you’re trying to hit, that’s just bad design, no matter how many times you rotoscoped your father jumping over a car. And I didn’t even really get into how the controls are very unresponsive. There’s this frustrating lag and slowness to everything. So bad was this prototype that I cancelled my plans to not touch any of the other Karateka builds, just to make sure it gets better. It does, but the version I could enjoy most wouldn’t release until 2023.
Verdict: NO!

Karateka – The Brøderbund Prototype 1 & 2
Platform: Apple II
Dated July, 1984 and August, 1984
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype

I made the mistake of not keeping the screenshots organized and had to make new ones.

The first time I went to attack in the first Brøderbund prototype, I pressed the kick button, and then about two seconds later the kick actually happened. The next time I did it, I literally counted it out, pressing the attack button and saying “ONE-ONE THOUSAND, TWO-ONE THOUSAND” before the kick actually began. Holy mother of god. This was input lag on a scale I’ve never seen before. And that’s assuming the button press even worked at all. Sometimes it didn’t. Have you ever tried to load up a new game on an old computer? That’s what playing that prototype was like. Do I even need to waste a NO! to explain further? So, I loaded up the second prototype, which is supposed to be near complete, and thankfully it played much better. It’s still really slow though. At this point, I decided to quit the work-in-progress builds and begin playing the Karateka games properly, as I was afraid the prototypes would sour the overall experience for me.
Verdict: NO! but I’m again awarding $3 in bonus value for the inclusion of the prototypes, along with all the documents and correspondence related to them. Mostly because I want to see more of this in future prestige releases like this.

Karateka
Platform: Apple II
Release Date: December, 1984
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Published by Brøderbund

If the Princess Diaries taught me anything, it’s that true love happens when your foot pops. Sadly, MY foot didn’t pop for Karateka.

After hours of pre-Karateka prototypes, production notes, interviews, lessons on rotoscoping, and even an audio commentary from a music expert where I actually learned things about film and game musical scores, I finally got Karateka. About ten minutes later, my brain said “all this hubbub over a game that’s not even that good.” Put down your pitchforks and torches, classic computer gaming fans. Nothing I can say should be able to ruin your childhood memories. If me saying Karateka isn’t very fun in 2024 makes you angry, that says a lot more about you than it does me. Besides, it’s not like I didn’t want to enjoy it. I don’t remember ever being so heartbroken by a game, but to say that Karateka didn’t live up to the hype would be an understatement. It was unlikely Karateka, a game that pushed the boundaries of PCs in 1984, was going to survive the test of time. I just didn’t think I would end up questioning the test of 1984.

This gate is an infamous moment, but thankfully I can just cheat via rewinding. I only failed at it once too. I wish I could say the same about the bird.

I wanted to like Karateka, especially after watching all the videos of Jordan Mechner and his adorable father. While it might have been jaw-dropping in its day, if a game released tomorrow that had as much unresponsiveness and lag as Karateka, it would be critically lambasted as one of the worst games ever made. The really weird thing is there’s universal agreement that Urban Champion is bad, right? I mean, not completely universal, because I actually gave it a YES! on the grounds that it felt like two angry guys throwing hands on a street, and I enjoyed the satisfaction of knocking a guy into the sewer. Karateka is sort of cut from the same cloth as Urban Champion. The fights ideally should have that rock/paper/scissors vibe, since you have six forms of attack: punches and kicks that can be thrown high, low, or middle. No blocking. So far, so good, at least for a game from 1984.

The last boss was weird, because first you had to kick a door down to get to him, but upon entering the door, he cheap shots you. I guess that’s realistic to how an actual villain would be, so I’ll allow it. You ultimately end up in the previous room for the final showdown. Then, you die if you don’t run into the princess’ arms. She kills you if you approach her in your combat stance. So much for gratitude.

The problem is any amount of finesse or strategy is almost entirely negated by the input lag. Lag that happened even after I turned on the optional “enhanced frame rate.” This DID make things better, but the lag still got progressive worse the closer I got to the final level. By the end, the lag was so bad that the fights were practically choreographed by satellite delay. Because of that input delay, you can’t really plan to counter your opponent’s move because by the time the game registers your movement, the enemy has already done the move you’re planning to counter and might even already have started the animation of their next move. The end result is you’re forced to button mash and really just hope the stuff you press lands.

The notorious bird, where the collision box isn’t logically bound by the sprite, wasn’t even that big a problem. In theory, you can eventually adapt and learn to clock when it’s vulnerable or not. Except you can’t after you factor in the input lag. It really does reduce landing a hit to random chance. I’d never finish this without being able to rewind. Then again, I wouldn’t have wanted to play this at all without it.

I tried playing this like a martial arts movie, with deliberate and graceful strategy, and maybe on a couple of the earlier fights, that’s totally doable. But by the time you’ve entered the dojo, the enemies are too advanced. Anything but button mashing isn’t going to work. I would normally complain about the lack of a block button, but in the case of Karateka, the lag wouldn’t allow for a working block anyway. It’s a reminder that all the revolutionary aspects of Karateka, from the rotoscoped graphics to the “cinematic” presentation, all came at a very steep cost to the gameplay. Maybe the trade-off was worth it in 1984, but it’s 2024 now, and it’s just not acceptable for a game to be this unresponsive. Even the best emulation money can buy from Digital Eclipse couldn’t fix it. I salute Karateka and Jordan Mechner for their contributions to the pastime I love, but I would also never have wanted to play Karateka at all outside a set like this.
Verdict: NO!

Karateka
Platform: Commodore 64
Release Date: June, 1985
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Ported by Veda Cook
Published by Brøderbund

Wait a second.. is that Ico?!

After the Apple II version, I genuinely didn’t think I’d enjoy any of the three original versions of Karateka. It wasn’t long into my session with the Commodore 64 that I realized that might not be the case. The control scheme, assuming you use the default controls, is the biggest part of that. The Commodore 64’s joystick only had one action button, but Karateka was written as a two-button game. To compensate for this, the port by Veda Cook has an ingenious solution: tap the button for punches and hold the button down for kicks. I loved this, as it finally gave the tiniest hint of finesse to the fighting. The input lag from the Apple II version takes longer to arrive, but it does arrive. The effect is just less pronounced because instead of you having to time two separate button presses, if you stick to the kicks, you only have to do one. Instead of mashing attacks, you almost guide them via the joystick. Just having that as an option made all the difference in the world.

Well, at least until the end.

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During the bird attack that’s the penultimate fight before the final boss, the lag was the worst it had ever been on the C64 up to this point. The problem is that the bird itself moves faster than the input lag, often not leaving you enough time to factor in both the lag and the position of the bird. This is where the “hold a button down” works as a determent. Since I couldn’t land a single punch on the bird, I ended up having to switch control schemes and utilize the six-button layout provided by Digital Eclipse for these ports. EVEN WITH THAT, I never would have gotten the bird without rewinding. Thankfully, rewind is an option that Digital Eclipse was wise enough to provide instead of being one of those companies that screams “GIT GUD” at old games. Karateka is an all-or-nothing, win every fight and get past every obstacle in one life or start over from the beginning. That doesn’t work for me, so for all the fights except the one with the bird, I utilized save states at the start of encounters. If I died, I’d start the fight itself over from the beginning. And low and behold, I had a good time in that format, where it was okay when I died, and a thrill when I finally won a bout. Still a challenge, but not the type of insurmountable one I’d never want to face on its own terms.

The final boss wasn’t the hardest guy, oddly enough. The bird is easily harder, but one of the last minions I had a much harder time landing shots on.

Surprise! I actually had more fun than not with the C64 version of Karateka. It’s still a problematic experience. I played with the enhanced frame rate option turned on, and the game still felt like the emulated device playing it could catch fire at any moment. A lot of ambitious games from this era made sacrifices to the visual experience in order to optimize the gameplay. Karateka didn’t do that, and the “cinematic experience” comes at a massive gameplay cost. The input lag has this strange “it’s a feature that makes the game harder, not a bug that makes the game less polished!” vibe to it. To believe that, you’d have to believe that it was possible the game might NOT have had the lag and it was a conscience decision to allow it, just to increase the game’s challenge. Such a decision would get a game burned at the stake by critics today. I can overlook that to a certain degree because the fights are fun AND, indeed, cinematic. Fighting games age badly, and games that cross the limitations of their era age really badly. That there’s something enjoyable left in Karateka in 2024 is a small miracle. It wouldn’t take a lot of modification to turn Karateka into a convincing Enter the Dragon licensed game. That counts for something. Not much, but something.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Making of Karateka

Karateka
Platform: Atari 8-Bit Computer
Release Date: October, 1985
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Ported by Veda Cook
Published by Brøderbund

The final installment of the original three Karateka ports started with so much promise.

At first, the 8-bit Atari port of Karateka seemed like it was going to run away with the title of best version of the so-called “holy trinity.” For about the first third of the game, it doesn’t suffer the horrendous lag that the other two versions do. It allows you to appreciate what feels like the first elegant and authentic MMA-style fighting game. The “hold the button to kick” gameplay from the C64 port is back and it’s awesome, and those first handful of fights where the game plays at its maximum frame rate are such a joy to behold. I could never get bored playing THAT Karateka. If that type of pace lasted until the end of the game, it would have gone down as one of my favorite martial arts retro games ever. Of course, it doesn’t last, but what I wasn’t prepared for was how bad it gets.

This is the moment the frame rate collapsed. It returned to something resembling the full speed the game started with in the middle of the dojo before again falling into a constant state of severe input lag. Damnit.

For a brief, shining moment, Karateka was everything I wanted it to be. A satisfying, hard-hitting karate game where the snap of your foot landed right on your opponent’s noggin is a joy to behold. A pleasure that vanishes completely just so the game can paint a door at the end of the hallway you’re on. A door. A DOOR! That’s the source of the lag. Let’s measure the potential for enjoyment. Option 1: full-speed karate action. High-impact punches and kicks that the player feels like they have direct control over due to the lack of input lag, with a beautiful mountain in the background as you walk forward towards rescuing the princess, and then the screen turns to black after you reach the end of the scene because you’ve entered the next area. Hell, create a new screen that’s just the door and let players walk through it, without any encounters. Still cinematic, but gameplay is still given the sense of importance it deserves. Option 2: slow motion karate action where sometimes it might be as much as two-to-three seconds before your button press translates to an on-screen action as you inch your way towards rescuing the princess, ending with the illusion of walking through a static door. You can’t even say “at least it’s more immersive” because there’s NOTHING immersive about control lag. Do you know what’s a lot more immersive than walking through a door? Pressing a button and having the action happen instantaneously.

The bird crossed the line, even with rewind.

The amount of end-game lag for Karateka on the Atari 8-Bit was almost a deal breaker. The brilliance of the early fights feels like a tease by the end. Yes, having to kick open a door is fun, but only someone dangerously high on their own vision would choose that and laggy primary gameplay over no door and lag-free, enjoyable karate action. To give you an idea of how bad it is, take the bird encounter, where, depending on where you’re standing, you basically have to choose which of the three channels you’re going to attack before the bird even shows itself. The lag wasn’t consistent, either. Sometimes it lasted one second, and sometimes I’d press the button, the bird would cross the room and attack me, AND THEN I’d throw the kick that I’d cued up when the bird first entered the room. Release a game like that today, and no matter how celebrated or decorated the designer was, the press would lop their heads off. And yet, when the fights are fun, they’re really fun. If the frame rate had held, I’d say this is a $7.99 game even in 2024. But it didn’t, and it ain’t. It’s just barely better than the C64 port.
Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to The Making of Karateka

Karateka: Remastered
Platform: Reimagined Series
Release Date: August 29, 2023
Designed by Mike J. Mika
Published by Digital Eclipse

This has some of the most subtly beautiful graphics of this type I’ve seen.

Don’t go into Karateka: Remastered looking for an entirely modern remake of Karateka in the same way Yars’ Revenge: Remastered was in Atari 50. While there’s large aspects of it that are decidedly modern, such as having a checklist of extra goals and a very flexible lives system, this is not an attempt to create a 2020s version of the early 80s classic. Instead, think early-to-mid 90s. In the audio commentary for Karateka: Remastered, designer Mike J. Mika revealed that he was inspired by two driving forces. The first, and likely the biggest, was how letdown he was in his youth by hypothetically more advanced ports of Karateka that just didn’t capture the essence of the original. Second was he wanted to capture how he felt when he first experienced the upscale that happened between Prince of Persia if you went from an Apple II to PC. In essence, he created the Karateka that he always wished for that never happened. Karateka: Remastered is the PC version that never was, based around what a hypothetical computer running Prince of Persia in that era from that era could do. This was apparently one of his dream projects. No pressure or anything.

Part of me loves Mike to death, and part of me wants him to be cursed with armpit breath until his dying day. How did the guy who conceded that lives are a good thing, despite his own personal inclinations to not include them, also not factor in that, yea, it’s a game where you instinctively press DOWN a lot, so maybe it’s not the wisest choice of button assignments for how to replay the chunks of commentary?

Speaking of the audio commentary, it’s not something you can detach from the game itself, like you could with the commentary for the Apple II version with Jordan & Francis Mechner. This commentary is context sensitive, sort of like the kind found in Portal. I loved the commentary track. Like the best filmmaking tracks for movies, it features a passionate creator mixing the right blend of personal history, technical explanations given in layman’s terms, anecdotes, and oddball factoids. I actually did learn things I didn’t know even after I finished the entire Making of Karateka presentation and walked away with a greater appreciation of what Jordan Mechner accomplished with it. But, the track does create its own set of problems. First off, you actually DO have to play the game, and if you want to hear the whole track, you have to beat it. Commentary plays automatically when you reach an activation point, and it’s reactivated by pressing DOWN. In a game where you often want to press DOWN to perform low attacks, that gets very annoying very quickly. In the final rooms, there’s TWO spots in each room, meaning if you want to engage in low attacks, you have to retreat and straddle the two context sensitive spots. Sadly, unlike the emulated versions, there’s no button mapping. Logically, you’d want the replay button to be something you wouldn’t expect to be able to hit on accident. Clicking the right joystick makes the most sense to me, since you don’t use the right stick at all. Maybe Mike factored in the 0.01% of PC players who will use a retro controller versus the 99.99% who use a standard dual-stick controller. Or, maybe he has a sick sense of humor. It’s probably that one.

Despite the “cinematic” quality, really, Karateka is a game of subtleties, whether it’s “remastered” or not. Six moves. No block. The most advanced it gets is the dick move “the princess kills you if you don’t run into her arms” bit. The story is basic and cliched. Simple sound effects. The most dramatic aspect is easily the musical score, but even that is nuanced instead of overpowering. Complexity isn’t necessarily a virtue. Karateka is proof, because in terms of gameplay and presentation, there’s really nothing all that complicated about it, yet it’s one of the defining games of the generation that came before me.

As for the gameplay, yea, this is the version of Karateka to play. It’s more or less the same game I’ve already played three times, only without any hiccups to the frame rate. The input lag is still there, but it’s different this time around. Because it’s not based on the performance of the hardware being emulated, you quickly realize that it’s based on when you’re moving or standing still. Once I understood that the movement happening or not happening was based on things I was doing instead of what the hardware was doing, it became predictable and avoidable. In fact, it was so predictable that I realized that if you handcuffed yourself to a copy of the original three versions, you’d probably know when the input lag would happen and adjust accordingly. It would take a while though, and it would never be as immersive as it could be. That’s ultimately what I love about the Remastered version: without performance issues, you can finally lose yourself in it.

If you DO handcuff yourself to Karateka, you’ll probably enjoy checking off all these extras, which are based on the things Mike and his friends used to challenge themselves to do back in the day.

On some level, Karateka is the type of game I’ll never fully be able to appreciate in the same way my older readers do. The closest I can come is to remind myself that, once upon a time, I didn’t know what made a game good or bad. The first ever game I got after I got my first console for Christmas in 1996, the original PlayStation, was Bubsy 3D. Do you know what? 7 year old me didn’t comprehend I was playing a bad game. Handing Karateka to 34 year old me is like handing Banjo-Kazooie to my nieces and nephew today. If they enjoy it, it almost certainly won’t be on the same level I did when I was their age. Not with those pointy polygons, foggy backgrounds, and occasional.. okay, fine, FREQUENT.. slowdown. Hell, even I’m like “wait, was it really this bad when I was their age a quarter-century ago?” Yes, Cathy, it was.

I’m stunned I beat this on my first attempt. Well, I did crank up the lives to 11, but still, I was happy.

That’s why something Mike said in the audio commentary stuck out to me. He said something to the effect of “games that defined your childhood are rarely as good as you remember them” and that, For Karateka: Remastered, he wanted to make a version of Karateka that lived up to his own memories. And you know what? I could feel that even before I played the game with the commentary turned on. He wanted to make a version of the game that was enjoyable for those who grew up with Karateka, for crotchety millennials such as myself, and for the wide-eyed children of Gen Xers like my niece, Sasha. She’s only 8 years old, and yet, she was positively dazzled by Karateka: Remastered. Sasha practices Taekwondo and knows her Asian martial arts, so I wanted to get her opinion. When she, a child who has never seen a hand-drawn Disney film release in her lifetime and who calls any 2D video game “retro”, saw that the stances and technique of the punches and kicks looked like what she’s taught in her dojo? Wow. She was so overjoyed that it was worth the $19.99 price for the look on her face alone. And for just a brief second, Karateka: Remastered gave me a glimpse into what seeing the original game for the first time four decades ago must have felt like. So, maybe not every version of Karateka holds up to the test of time, but the heart of the game clearly must.
Verdict: YES! – $10 in value added to The Making of Karateka
$10 in bonus value awarded for the style and content of the audio commentary track.
And I’m issuing a $2.50 fine for the lack of input options and a $2.50 fine for using what I feel is the wrong button to replay the track.
$15 in total value for Karateka: Remastered
FINAL VALUE: $71
$19.99 flipped the bird to the bird in the making of this review.

BONUS REVIEWS

Hey, Digital Eclipse worked hard on Making of Karateka, so it’s only fair that I do the same with my review. So, I present to you my reviews for the NES and Game Boy versions of Karateka that never came out in the United States. Remember, these are NOT included in The Making of Karateka. This is just for funsies.

Karateka
Platform: Famicom
Released December 5, 1985
Published by Soft Pro International
NEVER RELEASED IN AMERICA

Wow.

You’d think a publisher in the United States would have been all-over Karateka for a US release. One of the best selling PC action games of the era and they passed on it? Even Acclaim? If you think there must be something horrifically wrong with Famicom Karateka that NOBODY would roll the dice on it, you’d be right. On the plus side, no lag. On the negative side, the game is broken. Specifically, the gate just plain doesn’t work in this version. Even the guide I found at GameFAQs describes the process of trying to trigger it to drop so that you can eventually run through it as “nearly impossible.” And, yea, actually that was my experience. I spent AN HOUR wiggling back and forth next to the damn thing, throwing every type of attack in my arsenal at the air in front of me. It never triggered unless it was killing me. Even with the virtue of having rewind and save states, this just didn’t want to activate. And mind you, if you take too long or step too far away from the gate.. which isn’t very far at all.. it spawns a new enemy. I thought “maybe you have to defeat X amount of enemies before it works.” That doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Spare a thought for the poor bastards that tried this WITHOUT rewind or save states. It’s not like this is the only problem. Punches are basically worthless, and even when it seemed like I should have been landing them, instead, they went right through enemies. In general, the look and feel of the game is like a stripped-down form of the game everyone remembers. It’s easy to get why no NES publisher ever picked this up, and why Digital Eclipse didn’t bother.
Verdict: NO!

Master Karateka
Platform: Game Boy
Released December 28, 1989
Developed by Tose Co., Ltd.
NEVER RE-RELEASED

Well, at least it’s different.

What’s with this “MASTER” Karateka malarkey? It seems almost presumptuous, doesn’t it? Logically, shouldn’t this be one of the weakest versions of Karateka? Well, yes and no. In terms of audio-visuals, honestly this does a much better job replicating the look and animation of the holy trinity of Karateka than the Famicom/NES version did. The walk animation has the PC-like fluidity that the NES version didn’t even attempt. That’s not nothing. And this brings the best aspect of the NES game: no lag. To be honest, I didn’t expect that from the Game Boy of all platforms. In fact, this might be the fastest version of Karateka I’ve played, including the Remastered game. It might be. That really depends on you, and how YOU play it. See, the big twist with this version of Karateka is you choose your own load-out right from the start.

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Despite what the screenshot says, I put the lion’s share of my points into power, and it reduced the fights of the game into trivial encounters where three to four strikes were enough to take enemies down. Otherwise, this is the same basic Karateka game I’ve already reviewed seven times. There’s three levels, a bunch of guys with different helmets, cut scenes, a bird, a gate, and a last boss. A few of the enemies.. as in I remember it happening three times.. throw ninja stars you have to block, but otherwise, it’s the same old Karateka. OH, and one final key difference: you can block in this game. I never needed to, as it only seems to be there because the enemies use it. The ones who seemed like they blocked everything had an easy to figure out exploit: just step back. When they step forward, perform a middle kick. This helped me to make minced meat of the normal fighters. Like the NES game, punches are basically worthless, but kicks do the trick just fine. It wasn’t until I reached the gate that I actually struggled at all.

Did I win or lose here? You’d be surprised.

The gate, like the NES version, is so bad that I can’t believe anyone ever beat this game without the virtue of rewind. It makes me appreciate how clockable the gate in the three holy trinity versions is. I only needed to mess up once on those before I was able to get past it, and while it would have been VERY frustrating if I had to start over when I died, I don’t think it’s a challenge that I would have so little patience that I could never overcome it. That wouldn’t have been the case on the Game Boy, where I would have needed around 100 attempts to get it right, and when I finally won, it almost seemed like I clipped through the damn thing.

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You might have noticed there’s a space for “items.” What’s that about? Beats me. I just finished the game twice and the only “item” I found was a jar laying on the ground at the start of the third level that did nothing. Like all other versions of Karateka, your health slowly refills if you do nothing, and I had a full health meter on account of having just started the level anyway. I didn’t bank it, either. I’m not even sure what it did. On my second playthrough, I punched and kicked the air between enemies and nothing ever showed up. I consulted the FAQ at GameFAQs and it doesn’t even contain the words “item” or “jar” anywhere. Maybe this is a relic of an earlier concept that got deleted. I have no clue. Anyway, the final boss blocks every single attack you throw. To beat him, you have to walk back into the previous room, which is actually something that sort of happens in other Karateka games, only the “blocking” is replaced by sucker punching you as soon as you walk into the room. The final battle usually happens in the room where you fight the bird. Only, in those games, he follows you into the previous room immediately. On the Game Boy, you might have to wait quite a while. Like, over a minute, maybe two. Ridiculous. Even worse: the moment he enters the room, you might as well drop the confetti because the game is over. He won’t attack and he likely won’t successfully block your shots. In short, every addition to the formula Master Karateka makes is undone by some haphazard design. Interesting concept, and the execution was SO close to earning the faintest YES!, but that last bit with the final boss sealed it. What were they thinking with that wait time?
Verdict: NO!

“That fish was about yay big.” “That’s not how you tell a big fish story, Dad!”

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