I couldn’t get the Commodore 64 game Frank Bruno’s Boxing working. In case you didn’t know, it’s an unauthorized rip-off of Super Punch-Out!! that predates Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! by a couple years.
Punch-Out!! is a legitimate contender for my favorite Nintendo franchise. Actually, the only bad one really is the original coin-op. That would be more impressive if there were more games in the series, but I’ll get to that in a moment. I wanted to start my 2026 at IGC with something big. I was going to JUST review Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, which is one of my favorite video games ever, but I figured “why not do all the pre-Wii Punch-Out!! games?” And if you want my thoughts on the Game & Watch, be sure to read Game & Watch: The Definitive Review, though I should note the Punch-Out!! Game & Watch, sometimes called simply “Boxing” is nothing like Punch-Out!! at all. In fact, the formula used in that game evolved into Urban Champion.
Probably a good idea to cancel an 8-bit/16-bit boxing Definitive Review. Boxing games usually aren’t very good. I’ve tried a couple times to review Rocky for the Sega Master System. I’m a HUGE fan of the movie, the first sequel, the fourth sequel, and I even liked Rocky Balboa and the Creed films. Rocky III and Rocky V suck. The Sega Master System game is for sure the Rocky V of video boxing. It’s bad. It doesn’t belong in this review, and honestly, I don’t think I can possibly get an interesting review out of it. It’s such a nothing game.
I originally intended to include other games in this, but my family vetoed Teleroboxer for the Virtual Boy due to flashiness and eye strain, and my friend Dave talked me out of doing other boxing games. Some of them were literally impossible for me to recreate with my emulator because the coin-ops had unique inputs (Sega did a few that tried to mimic the feel of throwing punches). Others, like the Master System game Rocky or James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing for the Genesis, I really don’t think deserve to be compared to Punch-Out!! because it’s apples and oranges. Those are actual boxing games, and Punch-Out!! is much, much more than just boxing. But I wanted at least one “bonus” review so I found a very good ROM hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! to close this feature. So there’s seven total reviews in Punch-Out!!: The Definitive Review. I hope everyone enjoys! Here are the games reviewed:
Punch-Out!! (Arcade)
Super Punch-Out!! (Arcade)
Arm Wrestling (Arcade)
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (NES)
Power Punch II (NES)
Super Punch-Out!! (SNES)
Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! (NES ROM Hack)
HAS PUNCH-OUT!! RETIRED ON ITS STOOL?
Even non-gamers get references to Punch-Out!! in pop culture. It’s astonishing to me that Nintendo isn’t doing anything with this franchise.
So why isn’t Nintendo doing anything with Punch-Out!! Around this time last year, reports came out that it was due to the roster being filled with ethnic stereotypes. Next Level games later denied reports about this and instead said the format has been taken to its limits and there’s nothing “unique” to do. Either way, I really don’t want to get into politics or political correctness. Anyone who has read me over the last fourteen years can probably guess that I find these things exhausting at this point. BUT, I figure this would be a good place to point out that Nintendo obviously can’t think the situation is THAT bad because Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! are both available on Nintendo Switch Online. If the franchise has been vanished the cornfield, it seems weird to still have the old games with the same characters widely available, doesn’t it? Plus Hamster Co. sells the arcade Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! as part of the Arcade Archives series. Hell, I even suspect that the Wii Punch-Out!! will be re-released before the 2020s are up, possibly with some small modifications. But those are legacy games and the Wii is now old enough to be “retro.” The Wii Punch-Out!! game is over a year older than Angela, for God’s sake.
I kind of hate that there’s so much focus on negative stereotypes because it takes away from Punch-Out!! having one of THE great African-American characters in gaming. In a franchise defined by boxers who, let’s say, don’t exactly follow the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, Mr. Sandman has no time for such tomfoolery. He’s one of three characters who appeared in all four formats (Arcade, NES, SNES, and Wii) and the only Punch-Out!! character who doesn’t cheat or have any aspect of his style, appearance or personality that is illegal under the rules of the sport. Mr. Sandman is just a bad mother f*cker. I was so happy he became the last boss of the Wii game. I liked that it came down to a boxer who wins by boxing. I think he should have been the final pre-dream fight of the NES game because Sandman’s fight is much harder than Super Macho Man’s. Well, except his triple uppercut is probably easier to dodge than Macho’s spinning punch, but one move shouldn’t decide who goes last. I think Sandman has harder timing than Macho for most punches. I know I needed more attempts to beat him than Macho the first time.
So is Punch-Out!! well and truly dead as a franchise? Assuming Nintendo is skittish about the stereotype situation, just ditch basing the characters around nationalities and create new characters that aren’t fated to age badly. Or, instead of new characters, use old ones, but old ones from different games. One of the most popular franchises in gaming of the 21st century is Smash Bros. That could provide the template for Nintendo to revive Punch-Out!! Everyone loved the battle against Donkey Kong at the end of the Wii game, right? There you go! Imagine how many copies a Punch-Out!! where you box Link, Mario, or Samus Aran would sell. Captain Falcon could FALCON PUNCH Little Mac on Little Mac’s home turf. Kirby could eat him. 36 MILLION copies were sold of Smash Bros. Ultimate. Even if this hypothetical Punch-Out!! sold one third of that, it would be considered a smash hit and almost certainly bring back a lot of old school gamers to Nintendo. I can’t think of any franchise as universally beloved, critically acclaimed, and best-selling that is completely shut-out of modern gaming like Punch-Out!! is. What the hell are you doing, Nintendo? Three console games and it still feels like you’ve barely scratched the surface of what Punch-Out!! COULD be. Knuckle-up already and bring it back! ON WITH THE REVIEWS!
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. 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.
Punch-Out!! Platform: Arcade Released February 17, 1984 Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Sold Separately via Arcade Archives
Glass Joe will EVENTUALLY throw his hat in the ring as a contender for the greatest opening stage in video game history. Here, he’s just an early sign of how unresponsive this whole game is.
I reviewed the coin-op Punch-Out!! a little over seven years ago. I didn’t like it then, and while I’m willing to admit I was wrong about Vs. Super Mario Bros. (and I used to have a snobbery streak a mile wide) I was spot-on about the coin-op Punch-Out!! Everything that a person could love about the three console games seems to be here, only it doesn’t really work. If you expect the counter-punching format from the home games, boy are you in for a disappointment. Not that it’s missing entirely. You move left and right to dodge attacks, but the actual act of throwing leather is frustratingly unresponsive. It just takes FOREVER to get the hang of because “counter-punching” in this game literally means counter-punching. You throw a punch, they block and counter-punch, then you might be able to counter-punch and get some stunned punches on your opponents.
You can see in this picture that Bald Bull’s eyes are yellow. No, the hard drinking didn’t finally get to him. This is “telegraphing” but consider those quotes to be of the sarcastic variety. The boxers will just sit still and run out the clock unless you throw a punch, and then you will be the one to trigger them “telegraphing” their punch, which they’re already doing because they’re winding back. What the f*ck do you think he’s doing in this picture? Stretching? Squeezing out a turd? I hate this game.
But whether I played Punch-Out!! on Arcade Archives or MAME, it didn’t matter. The controls are incredibly unresponsive. Many button presses go unanswered, and it reduces Punch-Out!!’s good intentions into a mindless button masher where you’re happy when you land a string of punches. I have problems with the offensive game, but even the defensive one is problematic. Sometimes something as simple as raising or lowering your guard can have a delay in it, and every time I changed my defensive stance, it felt like I was punished on the offensive side of the equation by being unable to throw any punch for a second or two. Maybe they were trying to make it feel more “scientific” or “boxing-like” but it really just came across as responsive. When I don’t like popular games, I get accused of “playing it wrong” but in the case of the coin-op Punch-Out!!, I was constantly questioning it.
Pizza Pasta probably comes the closest to feeling like one of the NES or SNES fights. He does the same “lethal dry hump” move that Aran Ryan uses in the SNES game, and after he finishes he throws a big uppercut. If you dodge it, you can unload on him and he remains stunned EVEN IF you throw the special punches.
Eventually I did at least get good enough to beat all six fighters without cheating, though only about 10% of it felt like the home games that I fell in love with. And it’s not simply the gameplay I dislike. For a boxing game, there’s no sensation of violence at all. The NES game had punches that gave off a violent, impactful vibe and the uppercut in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is so satisfying. Getting punched in the NES game feels devastating too, as it should. The NES game does 8-bit violence just about as good as the console is capable of. None of that is present in the coin-op original. Even when you charge up the KO meter and throw uppercuts and right hooks, it has no OOMPH to it. Neither does getting punched. It feels like people fighting with oversized novelty gloves. Feathery play-fighting, and that’s being generous. Finally, I thought half the roster of fighters were forgettable and generic. Piston Hurricane (who would be much better in the SNES game), Kid Quick, and Pizza Pasta have pretty dull designs and Kid Quick’s fight is just very bland. It’s almost hard to believe they stripped this game down and still managed to turn it into a timeless, cherished NES classic. Punch-Out!! does have jaw-dropping graphics for 1984 and I’m sure it was attractive to arcade goers, but it’s just very fun, you know? Verdict: NO!
Super Punch-Out!! Platform: Arcade Released September, 1984 Designed by Genyo Takeda Developed by Nintendo Sold Separately via Arcade Archives
I expected more of the same, but instead, this is inching closer to what the console games would be.
Super Punch-Out!! is a no-doubt-about-it improvement over the original in basically every way. The previous game was apparently developed as a result of Nintendo having a surplus of monitors, so who knows how much their heart was really into it. With Super Punch-Out!!, it sort of feels like the development team realized that they were onto something and leaned heavier into the more fun aspects. The counter-punching relies more on left-right dodging instead of using your gloves. The big, slicing uppercuts and hooks that the console games would make famous are thrown more frequently here, and finding an extended sequence of wide open “stunned” punches is basically the main object now. The controls are still often unresponsive-feeling but even that’s not as bad. Super Punch-Out!! is immediately, noticeably better.
And actually, the offensive game is now based around the stunned punches.
And it also feels much closer to the console franchise in terms of personality. Annoyingly, the already sparse roster has been cut from six opponents to five, but these five are big in personality and they, you know, cheat. Well, Dragon Chan does (and technically in boxing you can’t ever face away from your opponent, so Super Macho Man’s spinning punch is very illegal). This required an additional dodging move, the duck. Weirdly, I only remember needing it for three out of the five boxers: Bear Hugger, Dragon Chan, and Super Macho Man. Also, Great Tiger doesn’t do his famous “teleporting” move and really just feels like a faster version of Piston Hurricane, complete with the “Hurricane Punches” move from the original game. You can actually feel that they’re starting to experiment and get a sense for what Punch-Out!! SHOULD be, but as an authorized enhancement kit for the original coin-op, they were limited by the problems the original game had.
Just think: by decade’s end Nintendo would be making a deal directly with the U.S.S.R. for the rights to Tetris. I wonder if they knew about “Vodka Drunkenski” at that point. If not, maybe the Steins could have poached their deal by bringing a copy of Super Punch-Out!! with them.
If the first game was a prototype for better things to come, Super Punch-Out!! is the game that confirms Nintendo recognized that and had ideas for how to get there. Punch-Out!! should be about everything but boxing. If it feels like you’re obeying the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, well, it’s kind of boring, isn’t it? Here’s where it gets really weird: I couldn’t wait to be done with the first coin-op. The second game added something to the upper screen: K.O. Time, IE how long you need to knock a boxer out. This added SO MUCH replay value. I was still frustrated by the controls, but nowhere near to the degree I was the first time around. When I knocked out the unfortunately named Vodka Drunkenski in 44 seconds and change, I literally let out a cheer. The time trials also clued me in that I wasn’t fighting Dragon Chan right, as even on my fifth fight against him I failed to put up a good time.
I heard a lot of chatter about Super Macho Man being tougher than Mr. Sandman, but honestly I thought Super Punch-Out was exponentially easier than the original, including the final fight. It doesn’t really FEEL harder until the title defenses. More responsive controls do that every time, you know?
There is a downside to the time keeping: the rematches after you beat Super Macho Man don’t record times, so if you want to treat Super Punch-Out!! like a time trial game, you have to not continue when you get knocked out during the title defenses. Speaking of which, the second wave of fighters I found to be much harder in this game. Hell, I lost the Bear Hugger fight a couple times, and I never actually made it to the second Macho fight. I decided to not reload for rematches because I wanted to challenge my fastest times. That’s what put Super Punch-Out!! over the top for me. While all the problems with the lack of authentic-feeling, painful violence returned from the original, Nintendo got close enough to the Punch-Out!! that *I* fell in love with to win me over. Verdict: YES!
Arm Wrestling Platform: Arcade Released May, 1985 Designed by Genyo Takeda Developed by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This was the very last ORIGINAL Nintendo coin-op. Also, “Stud Horse?” Seriously, is Texas Mac bragging about how well he’s hung? It kinda sounds like it.
Arm Wrestling is one of the few Nintendo coin-ops that Hamster hasn’t brought to Arcade Archives, though I have no clue what the story on that is. I mean, Arcade Archives released Sky Skipper (which I reviewed on my 30th birthday), a game that never got a wide release and which only one unit is known to still exist. A game that rare, and rare specifically because of bad route testing, gets modern love but Arm Wrestling doesn’t? That seemed ominous to me, and then there’s the fact that Arm Wrestling has been shut out historically by Nintendo on the same level as StarTropics and Zoda’s Revenge. No references in any other game. Not even a wink in the Smash Bros. series or a microgame in WarioWare. So, I was a bit nervous, but truth be told, I think I like Arm Wrestling more than Sky Skipper. Maybe. As I type this paragraph, I’m not actually finished with my play session. I’ve only beaten all five fighters once, but Arm Wrestling is positively exhausting, like one of those button mashing Track & Field games. I doubt any game wearing a Nintendo label has been this physically taxing, at least not without some kind of Power Pad or Balance Board.
There’s an excellent guide to the surprisingly complicated rules of Arm Wrestling at GameFAQs. If you give this game a shot, you’ll want to at least read through the basics because Arm Wrestling is NOT intuitive. At all. Even that guide I’m not entirely sure is right. It says that I should press two buttons when the bubble has a “!!” in it but that didn’t do sh*t for me. The only thing that worked for me was pressing RIGHT and I still rarely got 100% of the bubbles.
I can honestly say I’ve never played anything like Arm Wrestling before. Well, that’s not entirely true. This is considered part of the Punch-Out!! franchise for a reason and shares DNA in that both are about counterattacks. But instead of throwing leather, you want to mostly tap the joystick LEFT to try and muscle your opponent’s arm down. Eventually they’ll make a move that’s telegraphed by a facial expression or some other telltale sign, at which point you want to counterattack by quickly pressing RIGHT instead. Doing this will stun them like a Punch-Out!! sequence, at which point little bubbles will appear above the fighter that require you to hit the POW button. A “!” bubble requires a single press while “!!” might require two presses or it might require pressing RIGHT. I honestly never figured it out, but I know that just pressing buttons always seemed to fail. A money symbol does no damage to your opponent but scores points. If a skull appears, you have to wait it out. A “?” is a 50/50 chance for points or a skull. Did you get all that?
Two of the five fighters (Mask X and Alice & Ape III) require you to perform a pull. Mask X’s pull is done by pressing UP. Alice’s “pull” move is basically an instakill and has to be stopped by pressing RIGHT. It’s sort of like the Bald Bull’s Bull Charge, only if you didn’t get up if he hit it.
As noted in the above picture, there’s more to it than just jerking left and right on the controller. Two of the fighters require special finishing techniques to beat, and a few have Punch-Out!! like moves you have to dodge, including the final fighter spitting fire at you. Okay, so Arm Wrestling is unintuitive and physically exhausting to play, but I…….. kinda liked it. It’s also an innovator in a few ways. You know the Mario Kart “hit the gas at the right moment to get a boost” thing? Arm Wrestling did it first! Every match has a starting pistol. If you hit LEFT before the pistol, you get a foul. Two fouls is a game over, but if your timing is true and you hit LEFT on the exact right frame, you can score super quick KOs on opponents. The time trial system from Super Punch-Out returns, and honestly I think it’s more potently addictive here. Plus, unlike Super Punch-Out!!, the second wave of fighters ALSO has time trials that are exclusive to the rematches.
An hour ago, I lost this fight over a dozen times. Now I’m beating it in under 12 seconds, and it’s exhilarating.
And those rematches are no slouches. I literally could not beat the first fighter, Texas Mac, in the first rematch. His fighting style is totally different. When I was just about to wrap-up this review, I went back for one kick at the can, and not only did I defeat Texas Mac II using the Mario Kart trick, but I won the fight IN FOUR SECONDS! I literally screamed.
This was the last fight I won.
Arm Wrestling isn’t perfect. I never got the hang of defending against the skulls. I never got the hang of the timing of the bubbles at all, really. In the rare instances where there was a mix of “!” and “!!” bubbles, I was always surprised when I actually got all five correct. I’m also suspect Hamster took a pass on this because it’ll be bad for analog sticks. I’m guessing even the most durable arcade units took a LOT of abuse from players, which probably explains why Arm Wrestling is a rarity. Still, it didn’t deserve to be historically blanked like it has been. It’s loaded with personality and has some of the most unique gameplay Nintendo has come up with. Yet, it can’t even get a microgame in the WarioWare franchise. I won’t suggest that Nintendo is sitting on a goldmine, but as a unique novelty game, Arm Wrestling deserves better. Verdict: YES!
You’ll note that I didn’t mention the, ahem, infamous sound effects. For over fourteen years now my readers have given me endless sh*t because I often play games muted. Well, have a listen to what I muted this time. HAH HAH! WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?🖕🤪🖕
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! aka Punch-Out!! Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released October, 1987* Directed by Genyo Takeda Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
*A version of Punch-Out!! without Mike Tyson/Mr. Dream was released September 18, 1987 for the Famicom in Japan. Sort of. Only 10,000 units were made but only as prizes for special events or drawings. In this version, Super Macho Man is the final fight. Mike Tyson actually IS in the game code and requires a Game Genie to unlock, and he replaces Glass Joe. Heh, imagine if that’s how it really worked. Talk about tough love training.
I’ve played Punch-Out!! and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! to death. “I need something to make it fresh for me” I thought, so I tried the PlayChoice 10 version (the first time I’ve ever played PlayChoice 10, I think), only the colors on it are, ahem, loud. So I stopped and swapped back to the NES because, no joke, my eyes started to ache.
You know what blows my mind the most about Punch-Out!!? I’ve always known that there’s really only six body types, with King Hippo being the sole one-off and the other ten fighters each being the twin of another (all the Punch-Out!! games but the Wii one do this), but I’ll be damned if it isn’t easy to forget because they did such a good job of hiding it. Like, Glass Joe and Don Flamenco don’t feel alike at all. Neither does Piston Honda and Mike Tyson. It wasn’t until I paid really, really close attention during this review that I started to “feel” the similarities besides the shape of the sprite. Before paying close attention, the only pairing that felt too similar was Mr. Sandman and Ball Bull, who both spin their hands before throwing a punch and look hilarious when you slug them in the gut. There’s also no hiding that their hooks look identical, though oddly I found the uppercut spite to feel unique, even if it really isn’t. For this review, I actually looked for shared moves for the first time and they weren’t hard to spot. Like Von Kaiser and Great Tiger both have an easy-to-exploit weakness when they duck. Glass Joe and Don Flamenco both have the same hilarious knockdown animation where they change directions a few times. Soda and Macho’s big, cutting uppercuts look and feel identical. Yet, my mind is blown because, if you’re not LOOKING for them, it really never does feel completely like a palette swap. There’s eleven fighters, period.
Super Machoiski
Soda Popman. Just seeing if you’re paying attention.
If there’s such a thing as the competition for the best job of “stripping down” a coin-op, the NES Punch-Out!! has to be the outright winner, right? Given the limitations of Famicom, especially when this started development, the “vibe” of the coin-op with huge characters and an emphasis on counterattacking was not only retained by actually optimized in a way the coin-ops never were. In terms of graphics, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! probably had the biggest character sprites seen in a game console up to this point, and they don’t feel like a “cheat” like the gigantic bosses of Contra. These aren’t bits in the background being with an invisible hit box that creates the illusion of size. If the sprites were ugly, it wouldn’t matter. But they’re strikingly memorable and create a real sense of threat. One thing that neither coin-op successfully conveys is a sense of being hopelessly outsized and outmatched. In the NES game, the opponents feel HUGE and you feel so very, very small, and on behalf of small stature people everywhere, thank you Nintendo for that. The violence is also vastly improved. Punches feel authentic and savage, thanks in no small part to some of the best damage sprites 8-bit gaming ever saw.
From spit flying out to Bald Bull and Soda Popinski’s “slot-machine eyes” to just looks of painful surprise, punches feel impactful and important. Since it’s a boxing-themed game called PUNCH-Out!!, getting the violence right is a pretty important thing. And then there’s the match design, where dodging left and right allows a chain of stun-locked punches and it’s SO SATISFYING. In addition to sussing out patterns, you can preemptively stop an attack with a well-timed punch. Doing so often earns a star and allows an uppercut. Again, the coin-op had some weak-ass vibes to its power shots. In Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the sound design and the graphic of Little Mac building up momentum before throwing the punch AND that excellent revving-up sound effect make it one of the all-time satisfying video game attacks. There’s multiple “all-time” accolades for Punch-Out!! Heck, the game starts with one of the all-time great opening stages in Glass Joe. Nobody thinks of him as a “stage” but he’s the perfect introduction to the gameplay. I’d put him right up there with level World 1 Level 1 in Super Mario Bros.
If I have to make one complaint about Punch-Out!!, and I sorta should since it’s my job, I guess I wish it made more logical sense when the opponents are able to dodge the uppercut. For the last five or six opponents, sometimes it feels like they all whiff. I’m fine with missing if I don’t have them stun-locked, but if you’re going to allow the opponents to dodge the big uppercut, stop giving out stars. It feels like punishing players for good gameplay. (shrug)
So what else could I possibly complain about? Well, I guess I wish there were a lot more fighters. There’s a hidden second quest that requires not only a password but a special way of inputting that password, but all it does is take you to a very slight remix of the World Circuit that includes the King Hippo and Great Tiger fights from the Major Circuit. If this changed up the fights themselves, it’d be awesome. It doesn’t. As far as I can tell, the only difference is losing a fight is a game over with no option for a rematch. I guess I could also complain about the logic of “winning by decision.” It’s based on a points system that makes no sense and is the final element that shatters the illusion that Punch-Out!! is a sports game. You could pummel someone into a coma and never get punched once, but if you don’t reach a scoring benchmark, they’re awarded the victory. Some of the points required are so high that I can’t imagine a person can reach them without winning by TKO (or even KO) before the bell rings at the end of the third round, and none of the title fights (or Mr. Sandman) allow victory by decision. I’d say “I wish they got rid of them entirely” but the first time I beat Mike Tyson (well, Mr. Dream, same diff) it was by decision and made me feel like a world beater.
I don’t have a problem with Mr. Dream. I really don’t. I get it. My complaint is “THIS IS THE BEST THEY COULD COME UP WITH?” He’s SO generic looking.
Okay, let’s talk about the rampaging elephant in the room. No, Nintendo is never going to re-up with Mike Tyson. One thing you have to remember is that the deal that landed them Tyson was lousy for him and would never happen again. At the time they made the deal, Iron Mike hadn’t even won his first World Heavyweight Championship yet. As the story goes, Minoru Arakawa was having a drink after hours at the 1986 Winter CES and on the bar’s TV was a match between Tyson and a guy named David Jaco (it HAD to be that match, because it’s the only one that lines up with the CES story). Tyson was just starting to become nationally known and the boxing fan Arakawa, like everyone else who witnessed Tyson, couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Tyson’s body was atypical for a heavyweight. He could be described as “compact strength” in that his muscular build was packed into less space than you would expect. He also had unimaginable speed for the weight class combined with his absurd punching power. He was a completely new style of heavyweight boxer. I wasn’t around for the meteoric rise of Tyson, but my father and AJ were, and they both shake their heads with disbelief when they talk about what it was like to witness it. “When he burst onto the scene, it really felt like he was changing what a heavyweight boxer would look like. But it’s been forty years and there still hasn’t been another combination of a squat frame, speed, and power. There will NEVER be another Mike Tyson. Heavyweights might do some of the things he did, but none of them do EVERYTHING he did.” Minoru Arakawa must have agreed with my father.
My timing is not what it used to be, but it’s a LOT easier to beat Tyson with today’s emulators than the one I used on my Wii back in the day. I fought Tyson eight times for this feature and won twice. I think that means I get a match with Evander Holyfield next to decide who is the greatest Tyson slayer of our time. I promise I won’t bite.
Predicting that Tyson would eventually claim a version of the world heavyweight championship wasn’t exactly as bold or risky as some people make it out to be. During Tyson’s rise in the mid-80’s, the heavyweight division was relatively weak following the retirement of Muhammad Ali and the biggest champion of the transitional era, Larry Holmes, was not a popular national figure (“most underrated boxer of all time” says my father). The welterweight division was where most of the fandom was at with guys like Sugar Ray Leonard. But Arakawa predicted, as did everyone else who saw him, that Tyson had a clear path to the heavyweight championship and his presence, charisma, and domination would revitalize interest in the entire sport. What’s beyond belief is that Tyson’s people agreed to the deal Nintendo offered. The price? $50,000 for three years exclusivity. Not $50,000 a year. $50K, up front, no royalties. Within a year, you wouldn’t even be able to buy a meeting to pitch to Tyson’s people for that price. It was a horrible contract for Tyson even by the standards of the era, and any “yeah but Nintendo was taking a risk” talk is mostly bullsh*t. If there’s such a thing as inevitable in sports, it was Mike Tyson: World Champion in the winter of 1986, and his handlers should have told him $50K with no royalty was a crap deal.
You have to give them credit for a VERY lifelike Mike Tyson sprite. No need to use your imagination with this one. It looks just like him. It’s worth noting that the Jaco match that Arakawa witnessed was only Tyson’s 16th match. Just like today, there were multiple governing bodies that each promoted a world champion along with two unofficial world champions, the Lineal Champion and the Ring Magazine Champion, both of which are taken very seriously. HBO had organized a unification series for the alphabet belts. It wouldn’t be until a dozen matches after Arakawa’s CES story, on Tyson’s 28th match and now under Nintendo contract, where he would be able to claim a world championship, the WBC version. His 29th match would see him also win the WBA title, and his 31st would let him claim the IBF title to be the “Undisputed” Heavyweight Champion of the World. Except it was totally disputed because Michael Spinks had never been beaten in the ring and held The Ring Magazine and Lineal Championship. It wouldn’t be until his 35th match when he beat Michael Spinks in 91 seconds to become the no-doubt-about-it Undisputed Champion. By the way, if you watch the match, Spinks looks like his life is flashing before his eyes before the match even starts. Mind you, Spinks had never lost a match in his professional career and he looked positively terrified. I’ve watched boxing my entire life, with some of my earliest memories being of sitting on my father’s lap while he explained the sport to me, and I’ve NEVER seen a guy with the accolades of Spinks look like he’s about to call the whole thing off like that. My father is right: Mike Tyson will never happen again. We’ll get a second coming of Michael Jordan before we get a second coming of Mike Tyson.
What I can’t believe is that there’re people who refuse to play Punch-Out!! without Mike Tyson, like he alone made the game worth playing and not the outstanding mechanics, authentic violence, revolutionary graphics, or the over the top roster of characters. I wonder if a lot of these stubborn people even beat Mike Tyson? It’s not the most interesting fight in the game. I think the Mr. Sandman fight really is the highlight. If they insist that it was Tyson’s game, I have news for them: he wasn’t even in the original Japanese release. In fact, there is no “Dream Fight” in that version. The game ends with Super Macho Man. It was one of five versions of Punch-Out!! I played for this feature, and there’s subtle differences in that original “Gold Edition” release.
“Gold Edition”
US releases.
Gameplay differences though? I mean besides having no Dream Fight? Nope, there’s none. It’s the same game. And that speaks the highest volume to how good Punch-Out!! on the NES is. I just played through it FIVE TIMES in a single day and I never got bored. Even though I know how to win every fight, I can still play it and have a good time. It might have aged better than any game released for a home console in the 1980s. This gameplay is age proof. I’m fairly certain stuff like Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. 3 will still be fun in a hundred years, but I can’t actually guarantee it. I can with Punch-Out!! Even non-boxing fans love it, and that makes sense. It’s not a boxing game. It just has a boxing theme. What genre does it belong to? Who knows? Who cares! It’s Punch-Out!! I don’t ever render verdicts based on historical importance, but since Punch-Out!! is cruising to an easy YES!, I want to point out that Punch-Out!! represents an underrated leap forward in game technology thanks to the MMC2 chip that allowed for the bigger sprites. It looks like a carton probably more than any game that isn’t on laser disc up to that point. That’s one of many reasons why it’s timeless, and not because of Mike Tyson. And by the way, I think this aged better than the SNES game. Stay tuned for that. Verdict: YES!
Power Punch II Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released June, 1992 Developed by Beam Software Published by American Softworks Sold Separately on Steam Available on Evercade Piko Interactive Collection Vol 1.
Beam Software doesn’t have a reputation for quality games. But, let it be said they at least gave us an excellent Itchy & Scratchy Game Boy title (which I reviewed in Simpsons Games: The Definitive Review Volume Three). It’s like all the unplayable crap they made before that built up to that one game. And it really is fantastic. Go play it. Don’t play this.
Please note that nothing I say in this review is directed at Piko. I’m fine with re-releasing old games. It’s God’s work, even if $8.99 is a ridiculous price tag for THIS. I’m also not blaming the programmers for it, either. They didn’t do the marketing for this. They made a sh*t game, but that happens all the time.
I’ve mellowed out a lot over the years, but every once in a while I’ll play a game that makes my blood boil. What can I say? I hate cynical games, and Power Punch II is maybe the most cynical NES game. If Where’s Waldo or Action 52 doesn’t have that title, it’s Power Punch II, which is clearly trying to imply a direct connection to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! In fact, the original version of the game was even going to have Mike Tyson in it before all his legal problems started and he was removed from the game. There is ZERO question that the intent of all parties was to deliberately trick consumers into believing this was a sequel to one of the best selling and most beloved video games of the 1980s and that a similar quality should be expected. That really pisses me off. Unlike stuff like Where’s Waldo, I actually think in the pre-internet days that average consumers and not just unknowing parents could be fooled by this one. The Tyson name combined with the screenshots of a game that looks kinda like Punch-Out!! probably would have worked. Where they lost any plausible deniability of their intent to deceive consumers came when they had to remove Tyson, they changed the name from “Mike Tyson’s Intergalactic Power Punch” to the much closer to Punch-Out!! sounding name “Power Punch II.” You’ll note there is no Power Punch #1, but does Mom and Dad know that the original game is called “Punch-Out!!” and not “Power Punch?” What a disgusting thing to do.
If the game behind all this was any good, maybe it wouldn’t be so infuriating of a business practice. But coming from Beam Software, Power Punch II is of course a horrible game. This might look like a knock-off of Punch-Out!! in screenshots, but the gameplay never comes even a little close. There is no fine-tuning effort at all in this game, and no sense of OOMPH to the punches. There seems to be a very vague attempt to recreate the counterattack system, only with looser movement parameters. The first opponent you can just throw hands with, with no sense of finesse and no dodging/countering to speak of. The second opponent turns Power Punch II from just bad to outright boring and bad. The f*cking thing keeps backing away from you and the only way to actually win is to wiggle back and forth and hit it one jab at a time since it counterattacks every punch you throw when it’s up close. And it was all downhill from here.
Anyone who praises the character models……. seriously? You think THAT looks good? It looks like Mac & Me is going through a midlife crisis.
It’s rare I do one of these reviews and decide to quit before I finish the game, but I had no interest in seeing Power Punch II through to the end. Absolutely no effort was made towards creating a quality game. It’s the gaming equivalent of a “mockbuster” made by The Asylum, only video games in the 1990s were expensive and it’s not inconceivable a kid who was a big Punch-Out!! fan got stuck with this for their allowance money or as a present over a better game because they thought they were getting the actual sequel to Punch-Out!! I have no problem with studios making terrible games. It happens every day. I have a big problem when you try to tie that game to a legacy you didn’t build and don’t deserve, and Power Punch II goes out of its way to do that, literally. They did it with the celebrity endorsement that fell through. They did it by attaching a sequel number to the end of the name. They did everything possible to make people believe this was the next game in the Punch-Out!! franchise except make a quality game. Disgusting, guys. Shame on you! Verdict: NO!
Super Punch-Out!! Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released October 24, 1994 Directed by Makoto Wada and Yasuyuki Oyagi Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
I didn’t attempt the “pause” trick, and most certainly not because I couldn’t get it to work. Cough.
Reviewing games that I spent a lot of time with in my formative years is always tough, but Super Punch-Out!! is REALLY tough because I got so hooked on it once upon a time that my experience playing it in 2026 bears no resemblance at all to the first time I played it. The fighters that once seemed so intimidating and insurmountable landed a combined total of two punches on me over sixteen fights. And hell, it’s actually possible to beat all sixteen fighters in under fourteen seconds each. Some of them can be beaten in under six seconds, and most can be in under ten seconds. It’s actually not even that hard to learn how to come close. It’s simple pattern recognition with a touch of RNG luck (and a trick using the pause button). Super Punch-Out!! is the easiest game in the franchise to figure out the timing for. By far, actually.
Once upon a time, I could NOT beat this guy. He was by far the fighter that took me the longest to beat. Today I beat him in 21 seconds and change. By the way, I think Super Punch-Out!! ending on two identical, generic muscle guys is a weak ass finale. Nick Bruiser is one of the all-time letdowns of a final boss, and really I think both Bruiser Bros. are too generic. I think a better ending would have been shifting them to the 2nd and 3rd fights of the special circuit and making the game end on Hoy Quarlow. What an amazing, unexpected twist it would have been to reach the final fight and have it be a 78 year old man with a walking stick and a record of like 999 – 0 or something along those lines. It would have made him one of the all-time great finales in gaming. He’s the toughest fighter in the game. He should be treated as such.
I’ve said something to this effect before, but besides other games in the franchise, the video game Super Punch-Out!! shares the most DNA with is actually Shadow of the Colossus. Both games are, more or less, boss rushes based around taking down much bigger, stronger, more capable opponents. Even the opponent count is exactly the same, and both games are damned by losing a significant chunk of the replay value once you know how to win, leaving only time trials as the main reason to come back. Well, except Shadow of the Colossus offers a gigantic world to explore for sightseeing. For Super Punch-Out!!, once Time Trials run out of steam, you have to find your own fun.
Okay, let’s do that. For this review, after beating Super Punch-Out!! with a 16-0 record and needing barely 30 seconds to beat most opponents (I did need 55 to beat Rick Bruiser), I replayed it all the way through, only I didn’t use a single power punch and I didn’t use any interrupting counterpunch. I only dodge-countered and threw random punches. If I accidentally did an interrupt, I rewound it and allowed the punch to land as punishment.
By the way, at sixteen fighters, this is the biggest game in the franchise, except it’s really not. The Wii game’s thirteen rematches aren’t just remixes, but whole new fights. Even the Glass Joe rematch is legitimately difficult, at least the first time. It’s something the older games like this could have REALLY used, and then after them, there’s one last big surprise that made the Wii game probably the best in the series. If only they would re-release it.
As I noted at the end of the NES game, I think it aged better than the SNES game. Even when I didn’t throw uppercuts or hooks, the speed of the enemy punches is much slower and the challenge just isn’t there. I’ll still struggle with some attacks in the NES Punch-Out!!, from Soda and Sandman’s uppercuts to Super Macho Man’s spinning punch. Similar attacks in Super Punch-Out!! are much, much easier to dodge, and there’s more defense options. Ducking is a cinch and moving your defensive stance up and down is intuitive. Because of the slower speed, I never had stress timing dodges too much. The first time you play Super Punch-Out!!, you’ll certainly struggle with some of the fights. A few decades ago, I got my clock cleaned even in early fights and needed multiple attempts to beat every one of the back eight fighters. If I didn’t lose over twenty times to guys Mad Clown, Narcis Prince, and Rick Bruiser, I’d be shocked.
After losing to Mad Clown about a billion times (give or take), I kind of cheated. When he’d throw the balls, I’d pause the game to see where the gap was. Tell me I’m not the only one who did that!
Really, once you know each guy’s attack patterns, there’s not a whole left for Super Punch-Out!! to offer except the time attack. Without throwing a single power punch, I was still able to beat most fighters (but not all) without getting punched once. Did I still have fun? Sure, but not as much as I thought I was going to have. Not even close, and I think what fun I did have is more of a credit to the formula itself. The Punch-Out!! formula is cathartic, you can’t completely zone-out while playing it, and being a tiny person defeating gigantic bullies is boilerplate wish fulfillment. The Punch-Out!! formula itself is the bulletproof thing, at least once it transitioned to a console franchise. The content of a Punch-Out!! game is practically incidental. It’s why I can tolerate generic characters like the Bruiser Bros. or Gabby Jay, but for the record, I think Super Punch-Out!! probably has the weakest roster of the console trilogy. I think EVERYONE would have preferred Glass Joe to Gabby Jay, I think Mad Clown should have been dumped in favor of King Hippo, and as noted in the caption above, I think the Bruiser Bros. are lame as f*ck and Hoy Quarlow should have been the final boss.
To Super Punch-Out!!’s credit, even the weaker character designs usually include one memorable aspect. Heike Kagero is near the bottom of the barrel in terms of character design, but that hair whip move is unforgettable. Still, I can’t help but wonder if this fight was meant to be Great Tiger at some point with the “Mirage Dance.”
Don’t get me wrong. Super Punch-Out!! does a lot right. I marveled over how convincing the palette swaps were in the NES game, but somehow I never noticed that the SNES game does the same thing for all but two characters as well. I mean, of course I realized Bear Hugger and Mad Clown used the same body, and the Bruiser Bros. needed no explanation, but I swear to God it wasn’t until I played today that I realized everyone else but Narcis Prince and Hoy Quarlow share a body with someone else. The pairings are Gabby Jay & Bob Charlie, Piston Hurricane & Aran Ryan, Bald Bull & Mr. Sandman (and they did in the original coin-op as well, duh), Dragon Chan & Heike Kagero, and Masked Muscle & Super Macho Man. I’ve played this for years and I never realized that and now I feel stupid. But, to my credit, none of the fights feel like palette swaps. The Dragon Chan and Heike Kagero fights couldn’t be more different. This has to be right up there with the ninjas in Mortal Kombat in the palette swap hall of fame.
Playing this now, I literally can’t believe I ever struggled with some of these fights. Like Narcis Prince? Even without throwing uppercuts, once I knew how to beat him, he was so easy. I didn’t use an uppercut or an interrupt and still beat him in under a minute with just normal punches. Still, I love his “OWWHOW!” cry when you knock him down. It’s so satisfying to hear.
If not for the fact that I can specifically remember how much I enjoyed Super Punch-Out!! the first time I played it, this would be one of the weakest YES! verdicts I’ve ever given. Again, I had fun but I’m pretty sure this will be the last time I ever play Super Punch-Out!! The magic is, simply put, gone. And I mean gone gone. In order to jog my memory on what my original experience was like, I had to avoid using the fun punches. So Super Punch-Out!! doesn’t hold up like the NES or Wii games. I don’t necessarily think it’s impossible to get bored with this. I played the NES game five times for this feature. I was ready to be done with Super Punch-Out!! halfway through my second run today. It’s too easy. It’s too slow. It’s too clockable. I just played all sixteen fights and didn’t throw a single power punch. My record? 16 – 0 again. Was it worth doing? Not really, actually.
OOF, that was close. This was the only exciting thing that happened playing Super Punch-Out!! today. You know, part of me wonders if this would have held up better if it used the NES’ star system. The meter makes building up an uppercut too easy, and you get unlimited uppercuts until you get hit. Maybe that’s too much of an advantage to the player. Also, I think there’s too many opportunities for interrupts. Even when I was deliberately trying to avoid doing it, I interrupted eleven total punches over the course of sixteen fights just by trying to throw random punches. Most of those came in the World and Special Circuits where the punches come in faster, meaning there’s more opportunities to interrupt-stun.
I did get punched more than twice, and in fact, I got knocked down three times. Bald Bull, Super Macho Man, and Rick Bruiser each got me once with a one-shot knockdown, but otherwise, not one single fight even reached the second minute EXCEPT Nick Bruiser, who I beat with about thirteen seconds left before running out of time. In over fourteen years of writing game reviews, this was without a doubt one of the hardest I’ve ever had to do because I have to go off memories from over a decade-and-a-half ago and remember that, yes, I had the time of my life playing Super Punch-Out!! once. Now, if you’ve somehow never played it, ignore this review, get off your butt, and play it. Super Punch-Out!! is, simply put, fantastic, at least when you play it the first time. Unlike other Punch-Out!!s, there ain’t going to be a whole lot left once you know the game, and it’s not that hard to memorize. By the way, that’s fine. Not every game has to hold up to the scrutiny of endless replayability, and frankly, not every game NEEDS to be replayed at all once you finish it. Give me one unbelievable day with a game over a lifetime with a middling game. Super Punch-Out!! IS one of the all-time greats and it aged well, and once you know what to do, it’s not exciting anymore. Verdict: YES!
Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Released April 20, 2010 (Updated March 25, 2016)
Developed by Master Phred Link to Patch at RomHacking.Net
I use THIS TOOL to apply patches.
Yep, that’s Rick Bruiser! You fight him twice before fighting Nick Bruiser. The first Rick fight is one of the easier ones in the game. The second one? Not so much.
You knew I HAD to do a ROM hack in this feature. Actually, given the popularity of Punch-Out!!, I was genuinely, no bullsh*t stunned that there aren’t a lot more. I mean, people have worked actual magic on Super Mario Bros. 3 to turn it into virtually whole new games, but there’s been tons of Mario games over the years. Since Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, there’s been only two sequels. Apparently, the lack of ROM hacks isn’t due to a lack of interest. I’m not versed in this stuff but from what I’ve gathered, Super Mario Bros. 3 specifically lends itself to this form of game development as a ROM hacking building block in a way Punch-Out!! doesn’t. Re-Spritings Punch-Out!! is relatively easy, but using it as a template for new-feeling gameplay isn’t. So the fact that Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! even exists is kind of astonishing. Don’t think of it as a NEW version of Punch-Out!! but rather a remixed version that changes the speed and tinkers with some of the punches. But boy, does it tinker with them in a way that works.
I’m guessing there’s a lot of inside baseball in this game. I don’t know the story on the developer or the original characters in this. I sincerely thought the manager was supposed to be Dante from Clerks and Ken Barryhil was supposed to be the Angry Video Game Nerd. YOU SEE IT TOO, DON’T YOU?
First off, you feel the “turbo” part of WAIT give me a second…………
Okay, NOW it looks like the Angry Video Game Nerd. Where was I?
You feel the “turbo” part of “Cool Punch Out 2.” The speed is dialed up, which I was worried would make the game feel unresponsive. It doesn’t at all and works WONDERFULLY. That uptick in the speed of gameplay by itself would have probably made this worth a look as a curio, but then Master Phred messed around with the punches in a way that works. Take a remix of Glass Joe/Don Flamenco based around Disco Kid from the Wii sequel. Disco throws off-speed punches that pack a lot of power behind them, but the timing is unlike anything in the NES Punch-Out!! The Bruiser Bros. from the SNES game are here and their punches are especially hard to dodge, some of which barely have any warning at all. I’d be impressed if someone could plow through all fifteen fights on their first try based just on their Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! experience and knowledge. I don’t think it’s even possible. This plays on your expectations, and it does a pretty good job of doing so.
The remixed version of Super Macho Man, who now looks like something out of Futurama, still throws the spinning punch. But the pattern leading to that is new, and the timing is different.
Mind you, nobody is throwing a NEW punch. Everything in Cool Punch Out 2 is done using the already existing assets within the game. The designer couldn’t make the new version of Glass Joe throw Piston Honda’s rapid-fire punches. He couldn’t make Soda Popinski do Bald Bull’s bull charge. He also couldn’t seem to change the rules of the game, which means the Bald Bull fight where you have to score an uppercut STILL needs to be won by an uppercut even though it’s now Rick Bruiser, and this game’s King Hippo stand-in can’t get up when he’s knocked down, nor could he have a different fighting style or even a weakness. For that reason, it’s inevitable that some of the fighters feel like very little has changed.
King Hippo is replaced by Doc Louis. The fight was changed as much as I imagine the developer could humanly do. The “Hippo Dance” that King Hippo rarely does is now done frequently, but you still punch him in the mouth and then the stomach. It’s worth noting the amount of damage done is reduced significantly, which prolongs the fight. I needed two rounds to win. Also, like every fight, the timing is different enough to feel fresh.
So it’s Punch-Out!! with where the punches are tweaked ever so slightly. But, like From Below (a Tetris game staged during a giant squid attack) already proved, small changes can yield BIG gameplay results. It’s a lot of fun, but certainly not perfect. I don’t think the game scales very well. I kept waiting for something shocking to happen in the first Rick Bruiser fight, but it was so easy it could have been a minor circuit fight. Stars are more plentiful in this game. Too plentiful, probably. Not only are there more opportunities for them, but you can now bank seven stars instead of three AND you start every fight with two. To counter this, a lot of the fights are now based around limited stamina. I’ve never turned pink so many times playing Punch-Out!! as I did in this game.
The Tyson fight has been remixed, with the first round having a particularly difficult pattern. Instead of trying to one-shot you in the first minute-and-a-half like in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the new final boss actually has a brutal jab combination for the first minute-and-thirty AND THEN he throws the big KO shots. Okay, so the design was pretty disappointing, but the fight feels very fresh. I was really impressed with this whole effort.
If you set your expectations correctly, I think any Punch-Out!! fan will enjoy what Master Phred has accomplished here. I remember being excited when I found the code for “Another World Circuit” in Punch-Out!! and then being disappointed that all the fights were identical to the ones I’d already done, with only two Major Circuit fighters added to the existing World Circuit lineup. Frankly, when I found out about that code, I was hoping for something like this. So, while I was disappointed by the drought in Punch-Out!! ROM Hacks out there, the one that’s a full remix IS absolutely worth a look. It’s not going to change your life or anything like that, but it’s the “second quest” that fans of the original game have probably wanted for a long time. It turns out, even with all the limitations of ROM hacking that comes with Punch-Out!!, you can get a lot of mileage out of something as simple as playing on the expectations of the timing of a punch. Verdict: YES!
Marvel Cosmic Invasion Platform: All Current Platforms Released December 1, 2025 Directed by Fred Gemus Developed by Dotemu Published by Tribute Games $29.99 Hulk-Smashed baddies in the making of this review. This review was played on a Nintendo Switch 2.
SOME SMALL ROSTER/BOSS SPOILERS AHEAD
Yeah, don’t sweat it. You’ll get lost in the fog of war playing this. I must have attacked my own teammates once or twice every stage. And that’s to say nothing of how many times I walked off the goddamn Bifröst.
Yep, this unofficial sequel to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is everything you want in a Marvel brawler. Old school fisticuffs with new school sensibilities. The fifteen starting characters (you know DLC is coming) all feel completely different from each-other and have unique fighting styles and move sets. HUGE move sets. It could take you a while just to get the hang of one character, let alone fifteen. But even if you have no gaming skill at all, it’s okay. This game’s a cinch for everyone! During a recent get together I threw on Marvel Cosmic Invasion, handed out four controllers, and mostly just watched. I wanted everyone to get a turn, and the sheer joy that everyone had was something to behold. There were a lot of kids and their parents, and what made it cool was the parents recognized the gameplay from their own childhood while their kids were hyped because Marvel is scorching hot right now. Frankly, this feels like a better use of the genre than Ninja Turtles because there’s just so many superheroes to choose from and such a wide variety of superpowers to mine for moves than you can get from four nearly identical reptiles.
After the big group-wide session was finished, we had knocked out this much of the unlockables.
Technically, you don’t just pick one character in Cosmic Invasion. You take two characters and can swap to your second superhero on the fly at any time AND you can execute double team moves with the press of a button. Each character has their own life bar too, so it’s really hard to die. Unless some twerp you’re playing with takes all the health even if they’re full, DAD! Sure, you can mash buttons if you want, but it only takes a little practice to be able to pull off combos. In theory if you’ve got the right group of people, you should be able to easily juggle enemies from one player to another like no brawler ever before. I do have one petty complaint about that: the juggling can continue long after you’ve inflicted lethal damage on an enemy. That sounds like it could be fun, but it eventually became obnoxious while playing with psychotic children who thought it would NEVER get old to keep bouncing the lifeless carcasses of enemies while everyone else waited for them to actually walk forward and continue playing the rest of the game. There was at least one kid every stage who did this, to the point that everyone waiting for their turns had to yell “STOP JUGGLING AND MOVE!” It should never have come to that. Again, cute in theory, but annoying as all hell in practice.
For the most part, MCI (what an unfortunate acronym) avoids having enemies linger on the edges of the screen, which is my #1 brawling pet peeve. But, it does still happen, and a couple bosses even feel tailored around it, like Thanos Finnegan. He has a ballsack on his chin-e-gan. Killed half the universe but they came back again. Poor old Thanos Finnegan-egan-egan.
Other than the juggling stuff, if there’s a means to keep the beat-em-up action from becoming stale, it was probably done here. I can’t stress enough how unique each character in the game feels, which is especially impressive given the roster size. However, I’m not the biggest fan of upgradable stats in arcade-style brawlers. For something like Castle Crashers? It’s fine, I guess. For stuff like this? The problem with them is that upgradable stats discourage players from swapping characters in the middle of a quest, which means it has the exact opposite effect of what a large roster of characters is meant to do: keep things fresh. Go ahead and swap, but you’ll be playing level six or seven or eight with a character still on their base stats. GO AHEAD! SWAP! What, you don’t want to anymore?
Some of the dialog is so self-referential and fourth-wall breaking that you would swear it was meant for Deadpool.
And also, I guess I have to mention that the roster was very disappointing for basically everyone. Missing from Marvel Cosmic Invasion: Thor, Hulk, Captain Marvel, Bucky, Doctor Strange, Falcon, Blade, Starlord, Groot, Gamora, Deadpool, Daredevil, Punisher, Ant-Man, Vision, Black Widow, Colossus, Nightcrawler, War Machine, Beast, Drax, Cyclops, Gambit, Wasp, Shang-Chi, and the entire Fantastic Four, among others. Kind of annoying since characters nobody wanted like Nova, Phyla-Vell (well Sasha the Kid liked her at least), and f*cking Beta Ray Bill (are you kidding me? Over Thor?) are in this. I’m not entirely sure how balanced the characters are. Whoever used She-Hulk seemed to have had the most fun, as she has a wide range of attacks while also having some of the hardest-hitting moves. In general, the whole game does an excellent job of feeling like strikes are impactful and violent. Now, there is a catch: some characters fly, and some don’t. Sometimes enemies feel like they’re tailored for flying heroes, but if nobody is using a flyer? It can get a little frustrating. They kind of reminded me of the Baxter fight from TMNT in that it was hard to line-up with the flyers properly.
There were like twenty people over at our house during that first play session, and two things happened that broke my heart. This isn’t a bit I’m doing as a joke. I literally mean “I got a pit in my stomach” heartbroken. The first thing was that several kids opted out of playing because they had already watched their favorite Twitchers or YouTubers playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion and somehow had gotten everything they needed out of this without ever picking up a controller. Why have fun playing a game when you can watch someone else have fun? I couldn’t believe it. It actually made me almost sick to my stomach that a lot of kids would rather watch some idiot play games instead of playing themselves. By the way, those kids then went on to smugly spoil all the hidden characters, level details, and boss fights for everyone else. They were the absolute worst, to the point that my normally jovial father, seriously the nicest guy in any room he’s in, said something to the effect of “no more games when these Twitch kids are around. They can’t take a hint to not ruin it for everyone else.” And they really couldn’t. Not little kids, mind you. Ages 11 to 14 or 15, and I guess it was their way of showing how smart they were to everyone else that they remembered what happened in a video they saw that week. They kept it up the entire time and simply didn’t give a sh*t how annoying it was. The second heartbreaking thing was that every single kid saw the missing characters as the cynical cash grab for future DLC packs that it was. There’s interviews with the development team that say they really just wanted some oddball selections, but why do that at the risk of alienating fans of MAJOR comic characters unless you were certain you could make up for it later with DLC? For the kids, there was literally no question in their minds that both the missing heroes and the missing supervillains (no Doctor Doom, no Green Goblin, etc) were missing because they’re going to be up-sold later. Again, not a bit I’m doing. There is something tragic that kids are that jaded about why games are the way they are. If that doesn’t hurt your heart, I don’t know what will. I hate cynicism, but it was totally justified and likely accurate. Gaming shouldn’t be cynical for children. It should be magical. I hate that it’s come to this. I know that it’s a business and they have to make money, but don’t turn kids into cynics. It’s not cool.
So what’s there to complain about? Well, besides the juggling and some of the weird character selection options? Honestly, I don’t know what more anyone could want out of a brawler. I guess the tutorial took forever and almost caused the game to get shut off during that party. And some of the extra goals in the game aren’t awesome. Hitting X amount of a specific move using a specific character on a specific level being a check mark? What if nobody picks that character? Or sometimes the goal is not taking any damage from a swarm of enemies. Those goals became so distracting, especially since you have to pause the game to see what the goals are, that we all voted to not attempt them anymore. We also took that pledge when it was just me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid replaying this for this review. And everyone seemed to agree that some of the bosses were letdowns, especially the final boss. I think everyone was so unimpressed with Annihilus as the finale that they really thought someone else would be the final boss (except my nephew who thought he was “very Shredder-like”). Oh and the whole battle against Silver Surfer was a groan-inducing slog that had everyone listless. Actually, none of the bosses that become characters are exceptional. BUT, there’s also a ton of fantastic boss fights in this. I can’t stress enough: we were NEVER bored playing this. It was just so good.
I guess I kind of wish there had been more things like these turrets that you can smack to take out waves of enemies. For the most part, the environments are REALLY well done. I don’t think any 2D game EVER has as many one-off visual gags as Marvel Cosmic Invasion has. There’s so many little winking nods to famous Marvel stories and characters. And luckily we had a few kids who told us when those things were coming before they showed up on the screen. Even after we asked them not to. All while their witless parents had a thousand yard stare, hopefully contemplating all their birth control choices that led to this.
Probably the strangest thing I can say about Marvel Cosmic Invasion is that I was kind of over it as soon as I finished. That seems weird, because while I was playing it, I was thinking “this is probably the best brawler ever made! It does everything right.” I mean, it doesn’t, obviously, but it comes close enough that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could hope to top this take on a 90s style brawler. It’s like an all-star game of all your favorite arcade fist-throwers. Yet, now that I’ve kind of played it twice (during the party I only played two or three levels), I don’t really want to play it ever again. I have no interest in more levels or DLC. I’m good. I had a great time while it lasted. Me, Dad, and Sasha the Kid had fun running through it so I could actually do a proper review. I usually enjoy competently made brawlers, and this goes far beyond competently made. It’s a masterclass in cathartic beam ’em up action.
“MJ is going to be SO MAD when she finds out what we’re about to do. This is her thing. Meh. Maybe she’ll be down with it.”
But it’s also an empty calories game. This genre was perfect for arcades for a reason. It’s video game junk food. That’s fine, by the way. Gaming is a big tent and there’s room for brawlers. For a while, this genre was the dominant genre at this very blog because they’re really easy to review. Give me a variety of eye-catching set-pieces (even if they’re facades), a variety of moves, and OOMPHful hits that feel legitimately violent and I’m a happy camper. The only way you can screw it up is not enough variety, or moving off the formula too much, like what happened with the Digital Eclipse Power Rangers brawler that I didn’t like. Even then, their heart was in the right place. Brawlers can get tiring. I enjoyed playing through Invasion’s fifteen levels. Doing that twice sounds exhausting to me. Maybe that’s why the genre works. I guess that’s why I’m annoyed by upgradable stats in games like this. Who on Earth would want to play this over and over again? It’s perfectly fine for a game to be a one-and-done. Besides, you need good games like that to make those good games you do want to replay again and again mean something. It should be special when a game has replay value. It should be equally special to play a game that’s fantastic, tons of fun, and has no replay value at all. Verdict: YES! This is Cathy Vice reminding you to help control the annoying child population. Have your mate spayed or neutered! Whether they like it or not. Merry Christmas, everyone!
I like Jeff Minter. We both come from very different generations, and in fact, at the time I wrote this, you can reverse our ages. I’m 36. He’s 63. I’m an American. He’s English. He’s a game maker. I’m a game critic. But I firmly believe any two people who genuinely LOVE video games can strike-up a friendship. I got to talk with him a lot over, oddly enough the long lost Atari coin-op that he recently remade: Akka Arrh. I even got to find out about his remake before it was announced. I was puzzled by Jeff’s selection of Atari projects. “Really, Akka Arrh? You’re doing a reclamation project of….. THIS?!” I had just started Akka Arrh and my initial impression was that I was going to give it a NO! Now Jeff wasn’t arguing with me that anything I said bad about the game was necessarily wrong. But he still predicted it would grow on me even though it seemed unlikely. Guess what? HE WAS RIGHT! “How the hell did he know that?” I’ve asked myself. Then it hit me: it probably happened the same way for him.
Jeff Minter, pictured here with his pet human. (whisper) Wait, HE’S the human? No. No, it’s called Llamasoft. (whisper) Awww. Well, that sucks. I thought all of these were the first video games programmed by a llama. I mean, they’re okay games. For human-made games. 🙁 I guess.
I learned from this documentary that he and I look at games the same way in that we’re seeking experiences. It’s not about rules or objectives or reaching an ending. It’s the road traveled. “The actual playing of the game should be the reward in and of itself” he says, and I feel exactly the same way. Jeff wants to make games where the fun comes from the experience of playing. Perfect. That’s the type of games I want to play. He calls it “the feedback loop.” I call it “the tempo.” It’s the same thing, people. That’s why it’s easy to connect to Jeff. He’s a gamer who makes games and has no ambition greater than to make an experience that puts a smile on your face. So yeah, I like Jeff Minter. I like him a lot. I’m happy he has his own set. A set that retails for $29.99 and therefore Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story has to make up $30 in value to win an overall YES! from me. I approached this the same way I did with Making of Karateka and Tetris Forever. I went through the documentary feature and played the games in the order they were presented (though I did go off the path a couple times). I had literally never played 40 out of 41 games in this set before. The only one I’ve previously played is Tempest 2000. So this is almost all brand new to me.
This review was made using a Nintendo Switch/Nintendo Switch 2. It should be mostly valid for all versions of this collection.
A WORD ON EPILEPSY & PHOTOSENSITIVITY
Before I get to the feature, I do have to mention something troubling about this set. Digital Eclipse’s heart was in the right place by including the following disclaimer that you see every time you boot up Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story:
The problem is that they promise to warn players which games are bad with an icon. It’s a BIG problem for reasons I’ll explain. For readers finding me for the first time, I have epilepsy and I’m photosensitive. So warnings like these potentially help me a lot. Ironically, 2025 marked the 20th anniversary of my first seizure, which you can read about here. I don’t speak the King’s English, by the way. I’m from California. I think that’s the opposite of British, but I did that feature with Epilepsy Action in the UK and they ran my editorial through a filter that, among other things, turned the word “mom” into “mum.” Now my mom insists on being called “mum” and I hate you people for it. 🖕HATE!🖕 Either way, I was SO excited that Digital Eclipse included that icon. Except, they couldn’t have bungled it worse. You see, only two games in the entire collection are marked with that icon. It’s the two light synthesizer games Psychedelia and Colourspace. Needless to say, there’s many, many more games that have strobe effects that aren’t marked. One in particular, a collection of six mini-games called Batalyx, has a built in “strobe” toggle that was there in the 1980s that implies it removes the strobe effects:
There’s a few games that do this. Ancipital does as well. Though Ancipital did a better job of removing the strobes, it also wasn’t perfect about it.
But that toggle only removes a couple strobe effects, leaving the vast majority in the game, including ones far worse than the ones removed. I’ll give Jeff a pass because I’m going to assume in 1985 Jeff, like so many developers, assumed that people with photosensitivity didn’t play video games. But in 2023, when this set was first released, Digital Eclipse clearly did know that wasn’t the case. Now you would think a game that has a toggle specifically marked with “Stroboscopics” that still produces violent, frequent strobe effects would have the photosensitivity icon that, again, you see every time you boot up Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, plus an additional warning that the game offers a built-in strobe toggle that doesn’t remove ALL the strobe effects (not even close). But it doesn’t. For either. None of the games in this collection besides the two VLMs have that icon.
Here’s why it matters: when you have an icon to warn people of potentially risky games, games NOT marked with that icon are implied to be safe by omission, and that’s insanely dangerous. That icon suggests to someone who isn’t aware of the risk factors associated with Jeff Minter’s catalog that someone carefully went through the catalog and made a list of risky games and not risky games. That’s clearly not the case. There are SO MANY games in this collection that strobe. I didn’t count them, but it might be as many as half, or more. People like me take calculated risks when we play video games. What this inaccurate, functionally useless warning icon does is screw with a person’s ability to calculate the risks. Let’s say you’re in a plane and the engine goes out and you’re crashing. You’re given two options: jump out of the plane using the parachutes or take the controls and attempt to land it. Obviously you jump for it, because having parachutes implies they work. But what if you’re not told the parachutes are every bit as faulty as the airplane’s engines were, and someone knew that and didn’t say? That’s what I mean by screwing up a person’s ability to assess risk. Here’s a clip from Batalyx.
In this clip, the “stroboptics” toggle starts ON, but then I restart the game and turn it OFF. Do you notice any difference? EPILEPSY WARNING to say the least.
Again, no icon for the above game, or any game but Psychedelia or Colourspace. That’s why I’m going to suggest that developers working on game collections should only issue one blanket warning for the entire collection and leave it at that. Don’t try to say which specific games are risky and which aren’t because stuff will get missed and then it’s kind of on you and not the person playing the games. By having a warning icon, you’re saying “we’re aware this is a problem for some people, but don’t worry because we’ve got your back.” And you don’t. I’m lucky because my doctors made it clear to me, in no uncertain terms: gaming will always be a risk for me, for the rest of my life. You don’t want someone who had a doctor who didn’t spell that out for them to get hurt playing your game. I know I have to take precautions like playing in a well-lit room and having distance from the screen, or in the case of this collection, playing on a Nintendo Switch 2 in handheld mode with the screen brightness turned so far down that it probably affected my overall experience.
Precautions that work for me *WORK FOR ME* but anyone who is or suspects they are photosensitive should talk to a doctor before playing any games instead of trying what I do. Seriously, I’ve had twenty years of figuring this stuff out, but no two photosensitivity cases are the same because brains are kind of unique. The bug zapper in my head? Custom made, bitches! Seriously, be safe and talk to actual experts and don’t do things because some idiot on the internet does it too. I shouldn’t even have to say that but apparently people will swallow spoonfuls of cinnamon or eat Tide pods because they saw someone else do it online.
For the majority of games, I played with my screen brightness toggle set to here and placed my Switch 2 a couple feet away from me. By the way, since distance from the screen is such a key to my safety, it forever makes VR out of reach for me, which means a lot of Jeff’s modern games are ones I can never play.
One final point of photosensitivity: it’s a misnomer that seizures are the most common side effect. In fact, they’re one of the rarer ones. A lot of people are photosensitive and don’t even know it. Ever gotten a headache from strobe lights? Congratulations: you’re likely photosensitive! You should seriously talk to a doctor because it can get worse (and more sensitive) over time. The overwhelming majority of people who are photosensitive never get diagnosed, but one of the most common ways people who suffer migraine headaches experience their first one is through being triggered by light stimuli. I’ve never had a migraine headache, but I’ve heard stories. Strobe effects trigger migraine headaches and other side effects such as nausea, loss of balance, blurred vision, ringing in ears, loss of appetite, confusion, and tons of other things. Nobody should have to stress about those things while playing video games. So be more mindful in the future, please. I’m all about a developer’s creative vision coming before my needs. I’m grateful every time these effects can be turned off with a toggle. If no such toggle exists, I can play a different game. There’s thousands of options. But I do have to draw the line at toggles that don’t work, or icons that don’t accurately identify all the risks thus implying safety where there is none.
And this isn’t anger at Jeff. Guys, Jeff and I are cool. He even gave me a quote for this feature. And I’m cool with the Digital Eclipse guys too. I’d even say I’m friends with all these people. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt playing a video game. Games are people’s escape from the harshness of reality. You don’t want to take that away from anyone, so be smart and be safe, whether you’re a game player or a game maker. It’s OUR pastime. All of ours.
Alright, enough of this serious crap. Let’s talk about llamas and camels and sheep, oh my!
PRESENTATION & FEATURES
Seconds after this photo was taken, Jeff slipped and fell into the waterfall only to be rescued by Superman. Jeff then said “again! Again!” but Superman told him there was a limit of one flight to a customer. True story. They put it in a movie and everything!
Jeff Minter is the original indie developer. Arguably THE face of indie gaming for an entire era. If there were an indie game hall of fame, it’d be housed in a building called the Minter Center or something along those lines. There’s a lovable sad sack quality to his story. The man took forever to make the jump to video game consoles because they weren’t big in the UK. When he finally did, he hitched his wagon to such failed consoles as The Atari Panther and Konix Multi-System. The latter of which eventually evolved in a roundabout kind of way into the Atari Jaguar. Later still, he ended up developing Tempest 3000 for Nuon-abled DVD players. Aww Jeff. Jesus Christ, man. You wouldn’t want to stand next to this guy in a lightning storm. By the way, Tempest 3000 isn’t in this set because Nuon was “a bridge too far” from an emulation point of view. Wait, there actually IS a Nuon? I assumed it was a Sidd Finch-like inside joke among gaming media. Huh. Learn something new everyday.
This feature uses the same engine from Atari 50, Making of Karateka, Tetris Forever, etc. This is my yearly reminder to Digital Eclipse that if you EVER move off this engine, I will muster an army of mutant camels to storm your offices. I KNOW HOW TO NOW! I LEARNED IT FROM THIS COLLECTION, GODDAMMIT! That was dumb of you to teach a nut like me how to do that! Seriously, this formula is just perfect. It’s a guided museum tour and it’s perfect. No notes. Well, actually I guess it would be nice to be able to reset the “percentage seen” stuff. Or having a quick list of video interviews. Okay, well, there is room for improvement BUT KEEP THE STYLE! (points at the mutant camels) They’re hungry for Digital Eclipse flesh. Don’t make me feed them.
But Jeff’s story is a cool one. I kind of wish this was a more comprehensive look at his life, in the same way Tetris Forever was for the guys behind Tetris. There’s fewer interviews than in other Gold Master releases, and the interviews do have some audio/volume inconsistencies. Nothing as bad as, say, Henk Rogers’ rogue mustache hair that was so distracting during Tetris Forever. Let’s see that again, for old time’s sake.
I still can’t believe they let that hair host the 2025 Game Awards. I wonder if Henk got a finder’s fee?
Seriously though, the audio levels in Llamasoft needed correcting, but the actual content in them is really good. Some of them I really didn’t expect, but once again, Digital Eclipse scratched off the taboo stuff. Like the famous tiff between Zzap! 64 game critic Gary Penn and Jeff Minter? That gets a full video that’s pretty frank for a set like this. Especially one that actually includes the offending game, Mama Llama. But I’m happy it’s in there because it shows Jeff has gained maturity as a game designer in the years since then. It gets even better because, alongside the normal box art and advertisements you expect in a collection like this, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story contains the full review from Gary Penn that sparked this whole feud, along with angry letters from fans. This led to Jeff working as a part time columnist for Zzap, and some of those articles are included as well. Full magazine features. Very cool. More of that in future sets please, Digital Eclipse.
What Gary Penn said here really landed with me because I’m kind of in the same boat. I like half of Jeff’s games and didn’t like the others. If you’re a prolific game maker, batting .500 ain’t bad. In the case of this collection, a LOT of my NO! verdicts were based around input lag that’s part of the ZX Spectrum experience. I just can’t deal with it. Subtract those from the tally and Jeff did PRETTY GOOD in this set, I think. UPDATE: I really didn’t mean to offend ZX Spectrum fans with that “part of the ZX Spectrum” line. I guess I’ve had bad luck with ZX Spectrum games and input lag (and in fairness, I felt lag on other computer platforms in Tetris Forever and Making of Karateka) but I’ve been assured that it’s not a universal thing. And yeah, Sinclair computers weren’t the only ones with input lag in this set (Ratman for example).
In total, there’s twelve video interviews that do a good enough job of covering the story of Jeff Minter in a general way that it’s hard to be disappointed in what’s here. I’m more disappointed in what’s not here, IE more interviews specific to the lineup. Additionally, there’s a sizzle reel of all the light synthesizers that Jeff developed over the years called “VLM, Through the Years” that was SUCH a tease since this package only contains two VLMs (well, three if you count the stripped down version of Psychedelia in Batalyx). There’s also a “Gameography” that features Jeff Minter’s game catalog of 61 total games that has at least one screen shot for each game, including ones that aren’t playable in this collection. Again, more teasing (though not as bad as the one in SNK 40th Anniversary, also by Digital Eclipse. HEY, I should do a Definitive Review of that one sometime soon, hint hint).
You also get basic primers on all the platforms that Jeff worked on. Again, I appreciated these. And yes, I already have a picture of the ZX81 with the same text taken from the menu. I didn’t want to post too many “spoilers” from the feature.
Outside the interviews, there’s several little text snippets called “Minter-Views” that were sometimes insightful, sometimes funny, or sometimes taken as a quote from long ago. He cracked me up pretty badly by describing Defenda as “cack.” I need a British word-of-the-day calendar. Apparently that means “sh*t.” You know what? I totally agree with you, Jeff: it IS cack. I admire that he’s tough on his original games. Trust me, I’ve come across plenty of developers who think their cack don’t stink. Jeff is easy to cheer for because he recognizes his own learning curve. Anyway, “Minter Views” are fine but I still would have preferred more videos, even short ones, where he talks about each game in detail, especially since he’s such a great storyteller. He’s personable and charming and easy to root for. Don’t get me wrong: you get a LOT of Jeff’s opinions in other ways. This collection has many of the newsletters that Jeff published called “Nature of the Beast.” Issues 1 – 10 are included EXCEPT Issue #7, which I assume is the controversial issue where Jeff proclaimed that alpacas are just llamas that lack ambition. He didn’t really say that. I did.
There’s SO MANY magazine features in this thing. Now yeah, you can go to the Internet Archive and find all of these, but as a curated list of articles focused on Llamasoft, I enjoyed the inclusion of these quite a lot. And yes, you can zoom in on these. Again, I didn’t want to spoil their special features.
I’m guessing (only guessing) one of the reasons why the documentary stuff isn’t more comprehensive is because this was apparently made in collaboration with another documentary currently in production called “Heart of Neon” that’s about the life of Jeff Minter and his partner Ivan Zorzin, aka Giles the Goat. (I typed that as “Heart of Nuon”.) Maybe Digital Eclipse didn’t want to usurp Heart of Neon’s (yep, did it again) momentum, but what’s here feels like just a sample of a bigger story. With that said, in terms of variety, this offers a pretty dang good cliff notes museum look at the life and times of Jeff Minter. It’s a feel good story. Like, I literally started weeping at one point when Jeff got choked up talking like he couldn’t believe how happy some of his games made people. That really got me. You’re a good man, Jeff Minter.
What’s missing? Well I almost said “Giles the Goat” but he does show up in the final non-Heart of Neon (AHHHHHHH! Mother f*cker, Cathy! There is something wrong withyou!) trailer in timeline, called “Llamasoft’s Later Years.” But the timeline is missing a few things that I would have enjoyed a lot. One of my favorite features in Making of Karateka were the audio commentaries. Now those would be harder to do in non-linear games. No doubt about it, and the majority of games in this collection are arcaders. But, I have faith that Digital Eclipse could come up with a solution anyway. Maybe situational things where the actions pauses to load the commentary when, say, a new enemy first appears or when a level theme changes. Then the action resumes afterward with the commentary playing, then it pauses the game if you finish the stage before the commentary finishes. See, those commentaries not only provide game-specific history lessons for people interested in such things (raises hand) but also can serve as inspiration for the next generation of Jeff Minters out there. Plus they’re just plain cool.
Why did they film this so creepily? I thought Michael Myers was going to pop out and stab someone. Or, what if this machine is actually THE BISHOP OF BATTLE?! And now I kind of want Jeff to make a Bishop of Battle game. Actually he’d probably make it VR and then I couldn’t play it. F*ck it, he should do it anyway. As if *I* could beat the Bishop.
And yeah, there’s a lot of missing games. I’m not the first critic to note that Jeff’s entire post-Tempest 2000 career is missing. And, since I consider this a thing on Digital Eclipse’s end, I would have preferred more Remastered games. The one we got, Gridrunner: Remastered, is really good. Most Digital Eclipse Remastered games are. This formula has literally never gotten a NO! from me. Two games stand out that would have been perfect: Laser Zone and, (sigh) Attack of the Mutant Camels. I didn’t like a single Attack of the Mutant Camels game, but this set wasn’t made for me, either. It’s fan service. There’s also some missing games from platforms they did include like Atari ST that I would have enjoyed playing, even if they were crap. As strong as the documentary was, it’s still clearly the weakest of the entire Gold Master Series yet. I expected to give it less than $20 in value, but I found myself enjoying going through it a second time while I edited this feature. The rich variety of magazine articles and his behind the scenes notes which seem to be written in the same language my hand also writes 😛 were more than enough to satisfy me, even if it left me wanting more. So, for all presentation and features, I’m awarding $20 in value to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, which you can subtract $10 from if you have no interest in old ads, box art, concept art, etc. Even if you’re not into print ads/concept art, don’t forget to read the magazine features included. They’re often pretty interesting.
EMULATION
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As expected, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story offers a nearly fully-charged Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation. Rewind, save states, button mapping, screen filters, etc. There is a catch: not every platform is capable of pulling off every emulation trick. Most of the games you’d want to have rewind have it. Only one lacks save states, and that’s the unfinished proof of concept for Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89, which is a prototype for the never released Konix Multi-System. There’s literally no reason to need save states for that one (the game is like 40% finished), but like all other games, it does have full button mapping. Some games even have cheat code toggles, though some games don’t offer this despite those games having cheat codes for infinite lives.
You can absolutely feel the difference when you turn on Tempest 2000’s 60FPS option. By the way, Atari 50 also offers this for Tempest 2000.
One interesting tidbit is that Atari ST games are actually ports of ST games running on a Jaguar emulator. There’s a lot of extra-effort bells & whistles. Llamatron: 2112 offers twin-stick gameplay. Tempest 2000 offers analog controls and hardware overclocking, bumping its performance up to 60fps. But, as a reminder, if you want to preserve your high scores between play sessions, you have to lay down a save state after you enter your name into the game’s leaderboard and then reload the state when you return. That’s annoying but, in my opinion, not worthy of a loss in value. I do have one major problem: I found out that at least one ROM, for Iridis Alpha, crashes when you reach the bonus stage. Jeff later corrected this, but Digital Eclipse used the original, faulty ROM. I can’t just let that go. (UPDATE: Apparently Batalyx also misbehaves, not allowing you to transfer seamlessly from game to game.) Even if I didn’t like the game, some people did, and those fans deserved the best possible version of it. Actually, collections should contain EVERY version of each game and notes on what was changed from version to version. It is supposed to be like a museum, after all. For all the emulation options, I award the max $10 in value to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, but I’m fining $5 for not including updated ROMs that fixed crashes/bugs. Thank you to my friend Jason for calling this to my attention.
UPDATE: I’ve heard some things about Llamatron: 2112 having issues with sound and just not being a good version of the Atari ST original. I made a note in the review. I can only review the game in the collection and not the game they didn’t include, but in the not too distant future, I’ll revisit the ST games in this set.
I would love to have had a video just about all the failed machines that Jeff was tapped to develop for. The Konix Multi-System especially. It looks like the thing from one of the bumpers in Starship Troopers. “A murderer was captured this morning and tried today. Sentence, death. Execution tonight at 6:00. All net. All channels. WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?”
“INSTRUCTIONS? WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ INSTRUCTIONS!”
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story features some pretty damn complex games paired with some of the most useless instruction books I’ve seen. Okay, so the plots contained within those books are cute and wacky and I enjoyed them well enough. But instruction books should, you know, teach you how to play a game. Gaming is a visual medium, but most instruction books in this set are text only. Frankly, I don’t think that’s acceptable for any video game that isn’t a 100% sound-based game. But plain text explanations of some of these games really isn’t enough. No screenshots. No context. Just words to explain games like Mama Llama or Iridis Alpha. I had to look up YouTube videos of people who understood how to play these games, and when I did, I noticed those videos tended to have a lot of comments along the lines of “I’ve had this game for thirty years and I never understood it until now! Thank you!” If people who are home computer game fans couldn’t figure these games out in literal decades, why the hell would you rely on only them for any generation of gamers? It’s either cruel or lazy. Take your pick. Here’s the Mama Llama instruction book:
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For such a complex, original game, it’s not helpful. At all. That doesn’t have to be a problem. As I type this, I’m playing Jeff’s remake of Akka Arrh and he does now understand how to do tutorials and have proper instruction. Awesome. But just because Jeff didn’t know that in 1983 – 1991 doesn’t mean a collection in the 2020s should leave it that way. Digital Eclipse could have included modern explanation screens like they have for other collections. They didn’t, and this is a collection with a lot of games that are, by design, unintuitive. The games are certainly not presented in a way that maximizes their potential enjoyment. Jeff Minter fans will probably scream bloody murder about that, but imagine this wasn’t a Jeff Minter set. Imagine this was a chess game that offered only text instructions and feels like it’s rolling its eyes at you if you don’t just somehow read the plain text and understand how Chess works. Imagine explaining the concept of castling with just plain text, or how pawns capture, or how knights move. If that’s not cool for chess, why is it okay for a video game? Because the guy raises llamas? Hardly seems right.
(blinks) Okay Cathy, say something nice or the bearded man will transform you into a Human Centilama. Um………. Oh, the story about why the hamster is named “Rory” was adorable. Seriously, no joke, I got a tiny bit teary eyed just because it’s such a sweet little thing Jeff did for a kid out there. What a sweetheart. Well, unless the girl wanted Rory to be the hero and later saw that Jeff made Rory into an evil, malicious bastard. Then the story is kind of hilarious. So, does this mean I won’t have my mouth sewn to the business end of a llama? Cool. (wipes sweat)
I don’t get why a collection that’s trying to honor a person would take such a hostile stance towards having the games make sense. By the way, almost none of these games have a presence on GameFAQs or StrategyWiki either. I’m so disappointed because sets like these should be accommodating to gamers of all skill levels and should be as accessible as humanly possible, and this feels like it’s only for fans Jeff already had who know how to play these games (or maybe don’t, going off those YouTube comments). Even though, logically, those people already own the games and don’t need a collection like this. I’ve been debating what to do about this for weeks, and it’s moot since even if I fined the full price of the set, the documentary and the games make up the lost value. So far, Jeff’s fans have been great, but the lack of modern instructions made me feel like an unwelcome party crasher. So, let’s do this: 41 games times $0.25 a game, round to the nearest dollar. I’m fining Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story $10 in value for poor instructions. And I’ll be using that standard from now on with every collection.
FINAL VALUE BEFORE PLAYING A SINGLE GAME: $15
Whoa. Usually these Digital Eclipse sets already have earned the cost by this point. This is kind of weird. Thankfully, there’s forty two games to play. Or, technically 41 + 1 unfinished prototype.
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. 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.
VALUE DISCLAIMER: The value I award any game in any collection, be it a real collection or a hypothetical one, should NOT be compared to the values I award games in other Definitive Reviews. All values are only relative to the other games in the collection I’m reviewing.
Please note that games are presented in a different order in the documentary. These reviews are presented in the order they’re listed in the collection’s game menu.
3D 3D! Platform: Sinclair ZX81 Year: 1981 Designed by Jeff Minter
It’s actually impressive for the era. I mean, wow, look. That’s a legit 3D game that takes place in a 3D space. In 1981. Wow!
Like many millennials, my gaming life started at the dawn of the modern 3D gaming era. The first video game assembled by Santa’s elves specifically for me was Crash Bandicoot, which I got for Christmas in 1996, the same year Super Mario 64 released. Fifteen years before that, Jeff Minter made this elaborate 11x11x11 3D maze. And 3D 3D! really is just a maze. No ghosts chasing you. No locked doors. No mystical treasure to find. Just “find the exit.” A pioneering 3D game was never fated to age gracefully, but Digital Eclipse did their damnedest to prove otherwise. They added completely optional modern first person 3D controls using dual sticks and hardware acceleration, almost completely eliminating the “draw time” that the original hardware would have required for shading the walls (which you have to turn on manually). And they do help, actually. My biggest problem with playing 3D3D was, shaded walls or not, I found myself constantly becoming disoriented while playing it. It’s hard to retain the concept of forward, up, down, and behind you. It was only when moving left and right that I didn’t feel like I had completely lost my sense of direction. I imagine it would be like trying to navigate one of those McDonald’s style tubes and tunnels playgrounds in zero gravity.
You’re trying to get the lowest final score possible. Every time you use the map, you add ten points. Then, while using the map, any time you ask where the shafts that transfer you upward are, you get pinged another ten points.
The lack of equilibrium made it especially hard for me to cheese 3D3D by just following the traditional “keep your hand on a wall and follow it” rule for solving a maze. Even if my inner compass wasn’t on the fritz, the “hand on wall” rule wouldn’t work without slight modification. The cube twist prevents that. If you choose to use the map, only the shafts that transfer you up a floor are marked. Of course, you’ll want to be moving up and down through the maze. Some of the floors are entirely made up of dead ends on all sides. After I spent the better part of a day having my family scream directions at me while I basically ran laps between the 6th and 8th floors, I started over and fell ass backwards onto the solution. “Jeez, it seems like I went up a lot of floors there. Let me check the map and ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”
I wonder if Jeff is reading this and starting to convulse as he realizes the game lacks llamas.
The fact that I actually felt compelled to finish 3D 3D! at least once for reasons besides the sake of this review probably speaks louder to its value than anything I could write. It’s the type of novelty experience you want to say you completed, just for the sake of it. Yea, it’s an old computer maze game where the bells & whistles are the ability to shade a solid wall in. I don’t really factor a game’s historic status as a curio into my verdicts, but once a game gets that YES! on its gameplay merits, I admit that I’m always a little happy when a pioneering game exceeds my expectations of what can and cannot survive the test of time. I literally can’t imagine what 3D 3D! must have been like for gaming fans in 1981. A taste of things to come? Maybe. I’m just happy that I never got bored. Once I got the hang of the concept of looking up before moving up and then turning my head back to a forward facing position, I actually did have fun. If I’m disappointed by anything, it’s that Digital Eclipse didn’t slap together one of their Reimagined games for this. Otherwise, I have to admit I thought this would certainly be a NO! when I fired it up, and it’s not. We’re off to a good start. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Centipede Platform: Sinclair ZX81 Year: 1981 Designed by Jeff Minter
It’s like playing a game on one of those pocket calculators not made for games.
“Likely fated to age badly” is going to pop up a lot in these early reviews. Forget the test of time. This take on Centipede, with its complete lack of colors and sound effects that the coin-op relies on for all of its charm, probably had little chance of surviving the test of next year in 1981. There’s one gameplay twist to Llamapede that I did find genuinely fascinating: misfired bullets can functionally act as blocks that impede the pedes. In other words, if your timing is just off and your bullet passes just in front of a centipede, it functions like the mushrooms and causes the centipede to drop a level and change directions as if it ran into a wall on the playfield. It’s actually an interesting concept that I’d like to see future games based on Centipede explore further. Unless they already do that and I somehow never noticed.
This whole idea might make for a fascinating Game Jam concept. Have the host DESCRIBE an imaginary game, and then everyone at the Game Jam competes to see who can make the closest to what the host is describing. My review system is not designed to take a bow, but seriously, I’m taking a bow right now to Jeff Minter because, given the circumstances, this is kind of insane, people. He came REALLY close to Centipede without ever having seen it in motion.
Sticking to this version, I just didn’t like it. Even after adjusting to make the game faster or slower, this Centipede has too slow of bullets and demands too much accuracy in your firing. The bigger historic “twist” for this edition of Centipede is that Jeff created this unauthorized port based on screenshots and second hand accounts of what the gameplay was like. He’d never actually played Centipede or even seen it in motion. THAT is amazing and I take my hat off to him. While my heart gives him historic points for one of gaming’s greatest examples of the telephone game (it’s remarkable how close he came to the real deal), this take on the Atari classic isn’t very fun at all. Verdict: NO! But a very, very impressed NO!
Deflex V Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1981 Designed by Jeff Minter
It ain’t much to look at, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t one of the most addictive games I’ve played in one of these sets.
Although it won’t win any awards for presentation, Deflex V sure is a charmer. It’s such a stupidly simple concept: a ball is bouncing back and forth, and you have to lay down walls to deflect it into a target on the screen. Each wall is dropped to cause an immediate deflection of the ball, which makes things a little tricky, as there’s only two dropping buttons: left and right, but they don’t really reflect which way the ball will deflect. since where the ball will go depends on which direction the ball is traveling. I can’t remember the last time such a simple game had such a sharp learning curve. The longer the game goes, the more clogged up the screen gets with walls. The playfield can have a max of twenty walls total. Attempt to lay more than that and a potential seizure-causing penalty screen appears. I’m not sure what’s worse: the screen flashing or the sound it makes when it happens. It sounds like a duck being electrocuted. Not that I would know what that sounds like. 😶 Okay, I do know. I had a weird experience once in Chile. But I don’t like to talk about it.
Remember what I said earlier about how more than just two games should have had that warning icon? Yeah, this is one of them. It only took three games to get there.
The game can be played two ways: with stationary targets and with moving targets. Oddly, when you play the moving target mode, the ball travels at a high speed no matter what difficulty you cue up. Honestly, I felt the stationary target was the stronger of the two modes. There were multiple times in the moving target mode where the ball seemed to hit the target but I didn’t get credit for it. Oddly, the target also disappears for a fraction of a second when that happens. Besides, the stationary target mode felt more like a video sport. By the time I finished my session with it, I was actually kind of stoked to check out the updated versions on this concept still to come in this collection. The only reason I didn’t put more value on this is because it was, in fact, replaced by better versions later on. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Ratman Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1982 Designed by Jeff Minter
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My expectations for Ratman were set pretty low. Why’s that? Because the feature itself has Jeff talking smack on his own game. I thought “well, we’re our own worst critics. How bad can it be?” The answer is pretty f’n bad. Ratman is a game that I would describe somewhere between the words “unplayable” and “broken.” After Making of Karateka, I thought my days of playing games with super-extreme unresponsiveness were over, but this is on an entirely different level. At its (cold black evil little) heart, Ratman is a whack-a-mole game that has more in common with LCDs than most PC titles from this era. The catch is there’s a hole in the ground that doesn’t seem to kill you, but any mice that make it through become “devils” that poke you with spears. The problem is the game simply does not listen to your commands most of the time. I’d say as much as 90% of your inputs go unregistered. I’d tap the button like crazy to swing a hammer, sometimes pressing the button as many as a dozen times (I counted) before the hammer would actually swing. Holding down the button didn’t improve the massive delay in this, or in steps taken. This might be the worst video game I’ve ever played. It’s completely, utterly broken. It’s okay though, Jeff. The Ratman forgive you.. this time. Verdict: NO!
Superdeflex Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Year: 1982* Designed by Jeff Minter
*In the documentary, the games are featured in a different order but, in this feature, they’re listed in the order they’re presented in the games menu.
Like the previous Deflex game, only a lot more complicated and a LOT less responsive.
A potentially superior take on the previous Deflex concept, Superdeflex retains the basic “ball bounces non-stop, drop walls to deflect into targets” concept, but with a few twists and, unfortunately, one major drawback. Here’s the good news: this time, the ball is an alien that you’re guiding to 10 exits per level. Each new level adds extra challenges such as enemies, pits, walls, and clusters of existing walls that can cause domino rally-style chain reactions. The toughest of the obstacles was easily the lightning strikes. At first, I thought they were totally random. They’re not, but you have to look closely to know where they’re aimed. Two tiny little bumps in the north and south walls act as the lightning rods. It’s tough to see them, but once I did, dodging them could have been a lot of fun. Now, for the bad news: like many games in this collection, the concept is failed by laggy, unreliable controls. Timing-based games like this have to either be perfect or, failing that, have a predictable lag that you can clock and account for every single time. Unpredictable and inconsistent lag is something I don’t think I can ever have fun with. It’s just not an enjoyable challenge to overcome because, frankly, you don’t “overcome it.” You just luck out when it doesn’t screw you. Tragically, Superdeflex also had several instances where pressing a button didn’t lay a wall at all. I’m sorry to say it, but for a game like this, that’s a deal breaker. Verdict: NO!
It was at this point I quit working on this Definitive Review for a year-and-a-half. I figured most games would be laggy like these. Thankfully, that’s not the case. Oh, a few more games are ruined by the unresponsive button presses, but it will come to an end eventually. Surely there has to be a way to make these better. You mean to tell me we can explore Pluto but we can’t make a computer game from 1982 not lag?
City Bomb
aka Bomber Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Year: 1982 Designed by Jeff Minter
I got to the point where I could semi-consistently beat the first stage on the lowest setting, but it’s hard to play a game like this when you press the button to drop a bomb and the game is like “fill out these forms and we’ll need two pieces of ID. You can expect a decision on whether or not you dropped a bomb within seven-to-ten working days.”
Based on the famous Atari game Canyon Bomber and the 1982 Falklands War, Bomber was originally titled, and I’m not joking, “Bomb Buenos Aires.” Jeff’s sentiment was actually satirical and anti-war, but that doesn’t translate at all to a game title. It reminds me of a famous Kevin Smith story where he joked to New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick about how he was thinking about suing Tim Burton for ripping off a visual from a comic Smith did in Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake. Smith’s tongue was firmly in his cheek and he was giggling the whole time. The context that he was clearly joking was lost along the way, so the blunt print where it said “he’s currently contemplating legal action” came across as dead serious and caused a little bit of a problem for Smith. And that’s basically what happened here. “Bomb Buenos Aires” is stark and blunt and sounds pretty heartless because there’s no context. Thankfully, this happened in 1982 and not 2025. Jeff was a 20 year old kid in 1982 and, get this, 20 year old video game makers aren’t media savvy.
I’m bummed out because I’ve really grown to dig Canyon Bomber’s gameplay format. It’s addictive.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking “all this hubbub over a terrible Canyon Bomber knock-off?” I can sum up this review really easily: you need games like this to be responsive, and Bomber is not. Sometimes the button to drop the bomb just plain doesn’t work. If the lag was consistent enough that you could adjust to it, that would be one thing. But the delay is unpredictable. It can happen even if you wait a while between bomb drops. I wish when it comes to these old PC games that have lag that, in addition to the original game file, they’d create an idealized approximation of what the intent was. Thankfully, I’ll get to review the real Canyon Bomber (or at least David Crane’s 2600 port of it) when I review Atari 50. Which I swear to God I will eventually. Verdict: NO!
Rox III Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Year: 1982 Designed by Jeff Minter
A great metaphor for the set as a whole.
Well, if nothing else, Rox III provided my family and I with fits of laughter that I’ll never forget. This is sort of like a stripped down version of the Atari 2600 “classic” Atlantis in that you’re trying to intercept incoming enemies from a stationary position. Instead of three different defensive positions, all your missiles are launched from a central platform in three directions: left, straight up, and right. The enemy asteroids, on the other hand, have a few different channels they can travel down and they can change speeds and eventually even lanes. The timing is unpredictable to the point of feeling luck-based. I broke my family because I had an uncanny knack for near misses grazing the target before going right past them. For god’s sake, people of Earth, do not ever put me in charge of planetary defense.
You don’t die immediately if an asteroid hits the ground, as it’s only when they punch through the ground that it’s game over. The distribution is based on pure chance. I had a game where I missed everything but the sky itself in the first wave and still survived to the next round because the asteroids were distributed across the playfield, but I also had a game where I was killed in the first round because the rocks seemed to be aimed at one spot. Where Rox III really confused me is sometimes I missed but the asteroids seemingly did no damage at all to the terrain. A bigger problem is, once again, we’re playing a timing-based game that has unpredictable input lag that sucks all the fun out of a potentially addictive idea. My family did enjoy laughing at me, but that’s not included in the Llamasoft package. What is included in the package is a much, much better version of Rox, coming up in a little bit. Verdict: NO!
Turboflex Platform: Atari 8-Bit* Year: 1982 Designed by Jeff Minter
*They seem to have forgotten to include a portal to this in the documentary. The cover art is part of the timeline, but not a way to play the game. You have to access it from the game menu. A last second addition, perhaps? If so, good call including it.
You’re probably reading this just a few minutes after my last “Flex” review, but I played Turboflex a year-and-a-half after Superdeflex, and I had no muscle memory from my prior experiences. Thus, I had to once again rewire my brain to know which way the ball would bounce. Once I did, yep, this is the superior version of the Flex series thanks to having the most responsive controls. Guide a ball to an exit with two buttons and nothing else. This is bare-bones basic, with each loss of life bumping you to the next difficulty level. If you play on the lowest setting, the exit is stationary at first, then it starts to move after you die. Eventually the ball moves faster and the exit will reverse directions when you lay down a wall. It’s the type of simple but potent time waster that works around the weaknesses of hardware instead of trying to brute-force overcome it. While it doesn’t have all the additional features or obstacles seen in Superdeflex, I prefer this optimized version by a big margin. It’s the best game in the collection so far. One final thought on the Flex series: Jeff was so ahead of his time, because this would have been the ideal mobile game thirty years later. You know, I typed that, then I thought “how would that work?” Suddenly I don’t think it would. Okay. Move along. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Abductor Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1982 Designed by Jeff Minter
My best game came from me defending this one guy on the far right of the screen with my final life. I ended up with 11K. The instruction manual says that super players should be able to get 15K, so I really did try but never came that close.
You know what I love about this set devoted to the games of one single developer? You can literally feel the learning curve if you experience these games in sequential order. Like someone trying to scale the warped-wall in Ninja Warrior who is so close that they’re getting their finger tips on the top. Abductor is a NO! game that can catch the faint aroma of a YES! I enjoy a nice, old school fixed-screen shooter, and Abductor has potential for that. Waves of fast-moving enemies fly onto the screen in single-file formations that twist and turn around. You have to gun them down before they kidnap six humans at the bottom of the screen. The twist is that, for the first three waves, you’ve only got a small gun, but after that, you automatically, and permanently, power-up into a double gun. Yeah, that’s really weird. Even if you die after that third wave, you come back to life as the double. Never seen THAT before. So, what’s the problem? Well, instead of enemies just spawning from the top of the screen, they can also spawn from below, killing you before you can even see their sprite.
Now the patterns aren’t random so you can brute-force memorize Abductor, but I’m still ain’t a fan of that design mentality. I’m also not a fan of the odds that your bullets will randomly fail increasing as you go along. That’s literally a feature in the game, as the manual says “the probability of shots ‘bouncing off’ the Alien ships’ hulls increases (as you progress).” Well fudge, that’s just a very, very bad idea on so many levels, most of all because the enemies in this game are so damn fast moving. The rescue idea is also a little bungled. When the aliens capture the humans, you can have a small window to shoot them down to return the humans to the ground. Well, except during the first three waves, where your starting ship’s bullets literally cannot reach the furthest left and furthest right humans. Hmph. The best thing I can say about Abductor is there’s no lag to movement or shooting, which I wasn’t expecting at all for this phase of the set. This is a very important step towards better games, but this doesn’t hold up. Verdict: NO!
Alright, enough of this crap. Let the masterpieces start to flow, baby!
Gridrunner Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1982 Designed by D.J. Jazzy Jeff. No wait, Jeff Minter.
Ahhhhhh. This is the good stuff.
Gridrunner is arguably Jeff’s most famous game, but I’d never played any version of it. My first thought when I booted up this first of multiple versions of it was “another Centipede? Good God, I’m never going to escape this game.” That lasted, oh, about fifteen seconds. Gridrunner ain’t Centipede. Well, not exactly, but “not exactly” in the best ways. This is one of the most intense and rewarding arcade-style games I’ve ever played, and it’s so good. There’s four versions of the original Gridrunner in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story so I’ll try to be brief and specific to each port after this overview. The basic idea is that Gridrunner is a more “aggression from all-sides” take on Centipede. The most noticeable difference between this and the Atari classic are the two lasers that prowl the sidelines along the left and bottom walls outside the playfield.
Ded.
This is the “grid” part of Gridrunner, because the left one will place a “pod” on the playfield relative to the position of the bottom laser. The pods are the game’s stand-ins for Centipede’s mushrooms, but they’re not just barriers that redirect the ‘Pede. THESE mushrooms will quickly mature into bombs that drop downward. So when the screen fills up with pods, it can be a lot to keep track of, and you still have to watch the lasers too. While the left wall’s laser that places the pod can’t kill you (this changes in other versions), the bottom one’s screen-wide laser will. There’s SO MANY THINGS to keep track of, and for your first couple games, expect it to be overwhelming and maybe even a little demoralizing. At one point I dropped four lives on the first level after a good run, for f*ck’s sake Catherine how could you do that. But thanks largely to some damn impressive-for-the-era scoring balance that makes high score chasing genuinely thrilling, Gridrunner is incredibly fun. Now, everything I’ve just said applies to basically all the Gridrunner games with only minor changes (except the left laser not being lethal). Let’s get to the VIC version.
On every version of Gridrunner, I often had a bitch of a time trying to get the last segment on any stage. That happened more on the VIC-20 build than others thanks to the loose controls. I usually found myself using the right wall to finish off those pesky last segments. It worked so well that I put a note on my phone to try this with Centipede as well.
For the VIC-20, there’s thankfully no lag at all. Gridrunner’s controls are responsive and the graphics are distinct enough that you can tell everything apart. My one and only issue is that the controls are a little loosey-goosey in this build. While it’s difficult to line up with the pods in each build (no analog controls), this is easily the hardest of the Gridrunner games in that regard. Even that has a silver lining of adding both strategic layers and additional risk/reward factors, intentional or not, since avoiding the pods and the points they bring altogether is viable even late in the game. I used a hybrid strategy of not attempting any subtle movements and trying to align my shots by sweeping into place from further away, but if I didn’t get positioned correctly, I didn’t try again and just avoided that pod. Coming up with that was satisfying too and worked for my best scores. Don’t get me wrong, I’d take tighter controllers over this, but it’s not a totally bad thing. The VIC-20 also has the smallest playfield, but again, that might be a plus since it adds to the claustrophobic feeling. The weakest version of Gridrunner still was something I walked away from saying “surely this has to be the best VIC game ever, right?” Jeff would have a couple more of those, though. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Andes Attack
aka Defenda Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1982 Designed by Jeff Minter
Jeff is in good company, because a lot of people tried to get the feel of Defender on home platforms and didn’t quite get it. Also worth noting if this looks a step above other VIC-20 games, there’s a good reason: this utilized a RAM expansion. Most of the games Jeff made didn’t utilize this, as he mostly focused on games that could be bought by every VIC-20 owner and not the fraction of owners that had the expansion.
My longtime readers know that I cherish Defender. If they ever get around to releasing another Midway Arcade Treasures set (my #1 Gold Master Series wish list item), I’ll finally do a review of the coin-op. The fact that Jeff was skilled enough to create a functioning tribute to Defender on the VIC-20 that looks the part speaks volumes to his ability. Sometimes it even comes close to passing the smell test as well. In fact, it’s close enough that I’m guessing huge fans of the Williams arcade classic who owned VIC-20s in 1982 were tickled pink by Andes Attack’s existence. It DOES get a lot right, too. The “defending” part and the consequence of the aliens merging with the people (or, in this case llamas) are here. The mountainous terrain is here. The satisfying bullets that feel like powerful, destructive energy blasts are here. He even has the different enemy types, like the bombers (though they don’t behave the same as the coin-op). This is, frankly, damn impressive.
It’s worth noting that the instructions are missing pages. Digital Eclipse didn’t write their own. Also, there’s no hyperspace as far as I can tell.
Unfortunately, a stunning effort for the limitations and era were fated to age badly. The act of turning around has too big of a delay to it, and the collision detection is not great. I had plenty of instances of bullets seemingly going right through enemies. The worst part was things like starting a new wave or even a new game only to have a bullet or enemy that’s literally right in front of me kill me. As a +1 to this museum of one of the most important people in the history of the medium, I’m happy this is here. Hell, let me be clear: I’m happy ALL these games are here and wish all the missing games were here. I’d given them all a chance. But, is Andes Attack fun in 2025? Not at all, and that’s okay because I learned the word “cack.” I’m guessing, like me, Jeff would probably rather play the real Defender. I’ll whoop your ass at it, Yak. Yeah, no I won’t. Verdict: NO!
Rox 64 Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
This wasn’t due to lag. Nope. This was ALL me, baby!
Like with the Flex games, I’m grateful this set includes a good version of a game where my NO! verdict was decided solely on the basis of input lag. This is the same gameplay concept as Rox III, minus the input lag. It’s NOT the same game, however. In Rox 64, every game is played with a strict sixty-rock limit. In theory, you can play a perfect game of Rox 64 in the same way you can shoot a 300 in bowling. Ooh, that is an interesting idea to really up the addiction factor, and it works. At this point in my review process, I knew I was spending too much time with each game and I needed to speed things along. I told myself “get what you need and move on.” So much for that (in fact, the total playtime of this set ended up being over 160 hours, though it’s closer to 150 since I left the game on without doing anything a few times). I spent two hours with ROX 64 when, realistically, I knew the YES! was locked-in after thirty minutes. That’s despite some very eyebrow-raising warts. Like, sometimes a new game starts and you just spontaneously die.
This happened to me the first time in my second or third game, and I didn’t know what happened. Was I supposed to press buttons during this sequence? This is why scanning instruction manuals instead of assigning someone to type in new instructions is a bad idea. The next game, I just mashed every button during the landing and I survived, so I kept doing that each game afterward. But eventually I spontaneously died at the start again. Now I’m not sure if this is a bug or a practical joke by Jeff. Seriously, would you put it past him? At least it never happens in the middle of a live game. A bigger potential issue is that sometimes the asteroids enter the playfield on a trajectory where seemingly no angle can possibly intercept them at any point, so you either have to use one of your three bombs or, new to this game, you can abort at any time and cash-in for 5,000 points. I’m not a fan of unavoidable enemies in games like this. With that said, the abort idea is actually pretty smart and added a unique layer that turned Rox 64 into a competitive hit in my house. I didn’t expect any game in this collection to be one of those “everyone gathers around and takes turns” games, but Rox 64 was and everyone had fun. When they didn’t die right out of the starting gate, I mean. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Gridrunner Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
Lovely game, even if your ship looks like the tip of the Jolly Green Giant’s favorite play thing. Can’t be unseen. You’re welcome.
The best of the trilogy of old school Gridrunners included in this package, this is the first Gridrunner where the left laser can kill you while it’s producing the pods. Besides that, the biggest change is that the playfield feels huge even if it’s only marginally bigger than on the VIC-20. The movement is also a lot less loose. It’s still tough to align shots, but hell, I suck at getting the last segment on Centipede and basically every Centipede sequel and/or knockoff that lacks power-ups. The last subtle change is that the overall speed is turned down a very small but noticeable notch. I think that’s to the game’s advantage, as none of Gridrunner’s intensity is loss. If anything, I think it allows you to pay closer attention, and this in a game where there’s so much to watch out for. It became apparent to me very quickly why Gridrunner is held up as one of the classic arcaders of the Commodore 64. It’s brutally difficult, but that fine-tuned scoring and pitch perfect enemy balance makes it a fair challenge, and a damn fine one. This might be my new favorite old school Centipede-like (spoiler: it won’t hold that title long). It was also yet another game where I told myself “get what you need” and ended up playing for hours trying (and failing) to break 100K. I never got bored for a second. Some reputations are justified. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
And as a reminder, value is relative to other games in the set. For Gridrunner, it will matter.
Attack of the Mutant Camels Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
In the timeline feature, Jeff makes fun of his camels for not looking like camels but instead “two fat men in a pantomime mutant camel suit.” Jeez, we really are our own toughest critics, aren’t we? I look at the above screenshot and, like, to me that’s a pretty good camel for the limitations. Maybe it looks more like an alpaca. But a mutant alpaca. “Or a pregnant kangaroo!” says Sasha the Kid. Well that can’t be unseen either, can it?
Attack of the Mutant Camels: the game that did what Spaceballs did four years before Spaceballs even released: parody Star Wars. My spoilsport father said “Mad Magazine beat them both to it.” Of course they did. Still, of all the randomly weird things I’ve played, this is certainly one of the weirdest. I’d heard of Attack of the Mutant Camels, but I’d never played it or even seen a screenshot of it. When I saw WHAT it was, I was legitimately startled, and then I thought “why would anyone ever copy Empire Strikes Back?” For whatever reason, Jeff decided that the 1982 Parker Bros. game for the Atari 2600 (and later for Intellivision) had gameplay worthy of attempting to replicate and graphics worthy of satire because a magazine called Computer & Video Games famously described the AT-ATs as looking like camels.
Do they though?
(Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600) In this picture, the AT-AT really has to go pee.
(squints and tilts head) I guess they KIND of look like camels, except, no, not really at all. They’re too leggy. No, those look like 2600 versions of AT-ATs to me, and Jeff’s camels look like camels. The funny thing is, Jeff didn’t see the camel connection either, but he still turned a throwaway joke in a famous gaming magazine into one of his most famous games. One that I was fated not to enjoy because, frankly, I thought the Empire Strikes Back 2600 game was REALLY boring (I reviewed it in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include Part Two). This isn’t a clone, though. Actually, a lot of features are missing. As far as I can tell, there’s no Force bonus if you stay alive long enough. You can’t land to repair your ship and get hit points back. The camels have no specific weak spot for quick take-downs like they do in the Atari game. On the other hand, the Camels’ shots are easier to get a feel for but still tricky enough to keep you honest. Unless you just scroll in a way where the camel’s ass is showing but not its head, like so:
As long as the camel’s head isn’t on screen, they’ll never fire at you. It’s not an entirely safe method since you have to keep a screen-wide distance, which slows your rate of fire, which allows the camels to advance much further towards the base, which applies to the whole herd and basically increases the odds that you will fail. But it does work if you’re low and life and.. oh hey, is that a risk/reward factor? Well I’ll be damned, it is! And I like the scoring system of each camel doubling in value until the end of the level, a combo system which is reset if you die. There’s also a wave of missiles between each stage that you have to dodge (no shooting allowed) instead of just jumping straight to another wave of camels. So it’s not a total wash and if I had to choose between this or Empire Strikes Back, I’d take Mutant Camels for the more nuanced scoring system which should give it more replay value. But, this is still a pretty boring gameplay concept. And they do actually look more like pregnant kangaroos. Darn it Sasha, I hate you. Verdict: NO!
Headbanger’s Heaven Platform: Sinclair ZX Spectrum Year: 1983 Designed by Whatshisface. You know, the bearded guy.
I could totally see myself playing this as a time-waster game with five minutes to kill. I mean, if it worked.
Headbanger’s Heaven is an LCD-like cross-the-road game that actually made me get so angry that I had to stop and count to ten. The object is to get from the left of the screen to the right, grab the money, and bring it back to the left side for 500 points. While this happens, hammers rain down from the ceiling, and if you take a direct blow to the head (not shoulders or arm, but head) while NOT MOVING, you score points and the pain meter fills by one. You can fill the pain meter all the way to nine, but you will die on the tenth one, or if you’re moving at all when the hammer registers. If you take a red hammer to the head, your pain meter is reset. This could have been AWESOME. You know, if your movement registered every single time you pressed the move button, and also if you were guaranteed to move when you pressed that button without delay. I mean, read the description I just wrote. Sounds exactly like a game that 100% no questions asked REQUIRES precision movement, right? Look how full the screen gets!
I should note that my spiritual big brother Dave said that this would have sucked even with perfect controls because the difficulty scaling is ridiculous. See all the hammers above? That’s after just three passes. “What do you mean I would have said it sucked, Cathy? It DID suck! I was THERE! You get to a point not far in where you absolutely can’t move for hammers. It sucked to play, but it was a game meant purely as a joke. I mean it’s pure early Jeff that way and nobody else was doing it, and that joke lands better as a curio in a compilation. Not on a tape you paid six quid for in 1983 money though.”
But, like so many other games in Llamasoft, and I know I’m sounding like a broken record here, the movement can have lagginess, or just as often, pressing the move button doesn’t work on the first time. Or the second. Or the third. Yeah, one time I tapped “LEFT” three times and nothing happened and I died. Again, look how full that screen is. This is not a game where you always want to hold a button down. You’re going to be inching your way across the screen, and that means you need those button presses to work every time. Your window to move forward might only be the time you can press the button once. If you press it and nothing happens and you die, that’s not fun. And I’m getting so sick of this sh*t at this point. I don’t care if the ZX Spectrum does this with most games. I’m not really playing this on a Spectrum, am I? We live in an era where a random guy who isn’t even a professional game designer took the NES disaster Super Pitfall and turned it into a borderline masterpiece. You mean to tell me that’s possible but Digital Eclipse, with their hundreds of collective years of experience, can’t take a forty year old game and make it so when you press a button, something happens every time? THAT’S a bridge too far? Wishful thinking? Impossible? That? Really? Verdict: NO!
Gridrunner Platform: Atari 8-Bit Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
One of those “you won’t get the gameplay from seeing a screenshot of it” games. Jeff made a lot of those, actually.
Hey, I ain’t going to complain about more Gridrunner, though this was my least favorite of the trilogy. Easily. Actually, this is the rare comparison situation I’ve done where my final preference came down to the visual differences. Atari Gridrunner’s gameplay is closer to the C64 build than the VIC-20 game, with only negligible timing differences. It was maybe a little easier to use the walls to pick off the last segments in the Atari 8-Bit build. Maybe. On the other hand, the graphics of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 versions of Gridrunner POP. Ain’t no popping in the Atari 8-Bit build. The blue sprites don’t stand out enough. It’s not an entirely superficial problem, either. Gridrunner is a game where the challenge comes largely from giving a player so many different things to keep track of that it becomes overwhelming. This is difficult enough when the graphics stand out. Here, the blue enemy sprites blend a little too well. This makes the pods especially problematic, as their sprites lack the details that give you an instinctive feel of when they’re about to ripen and drop. It’s STILL Gridrunner and Gridrunner is awesome, but there’s two better builds to play in this set. The Atari 8-Bit build is really just a bonus curio. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Laser Zone Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
I could never rub my head and pat my belly (or is it supposed to be the other way around?) at the same time so I was NEVER going to be good at this game. But I did like it a lot.
When it comes to white-knuckle arcaders, Jeff Minter came up with some great designs. Laser Zone is a gallery shooter played from two simultaneous angles. LEFT and RIGHT controls the bottom turret while UP and DOWN controls another along the right wall, and a life is lost if EITHER turret dies. There’s a lot more to it than that, as you can actually shoot diagonally as well, though there’s a steep learning curve to it. Oh, and friendly fire is turned on and I had an uncanny knack for shooting the other turret. The turrets will come out the other side if you travel as far as you can, which can be used for defense if enemies reach the walls. You also get bombs, with one added to your stockpile for each wave. The most complicated aspect of VIC-20 Laser Zone, and my biggest knock on the game, is WHEN you can shoot. See the little notches under the walls? Those actually matter. I’ll just post the instruction manual screenshot to explain it.
Hey, this is one of the rare instruction books that was actually kinda helpful. No, I’m not giving back the $0.25 fine for this game. Any value semi-decent instruction booklets like this made up was lost by the poor instructions for games like Mama Llama or Sheep in Space, which deserve bigger fines than the $0.25 I pinged them for. That’s why I lazily averaged it out.
Since this shooting limitation isn’t in the Commodore 64 build, I assume this is some sort of bug that became a feature. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, I *never* felt comfortable with lining up my shots the correct “armed” way. Maybe that’s in-part because the movement isn’t quite accurate enough. I wish I could play this with Tempest-like dial controls (seriously, that’d be so sweet). It’s not a deal breaker as I really did enjoy Laser Zone. It’s one of those games that can turn on a dime. I had many instances where I went from being in complete control of the playfield to letting one enemy through my defense and suddenly I was overwhelmed while playing defense and trying to find a diagonal angle to pick off the enemies so I didn’t have to use a bomb. I’ll talk more about Laser Zone in the C64 review but for now, this VIC-20 port is solid and even has an advantage over the C64 version: the playfield feels bigger. I certainly shot my own turrets far less in this version, and it wasn’t even close. I’d still give the edge to the C64 build. Can I just say that I admire that Jeff kept supporting a weaker platform even after the Commodore 64 came out. That’s a “for the love of the game” designer right there. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Matrix: Gridrunner 2 Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
Centipedes AND camels? I mean, if they were centipedes made of camels, the nightmares that would cause would be so collectively traumatizing we might have to just cancel civilization. So, you know, thanks for not doing that, Jeff. Good looking out.
The original Gridrunner might be the lure of The Jeff Minter Story for fans of classic computer games, but Matrix is so clearly the stronger game and one of the absolute best arcaders in PC gaming history. The most important change, at least in my opinion, doesn’t involve a new play mechanic or enemy. It’s the limit of how high you can move up the playfield. I’m going to include screenshots for both versions of each game. For the original game, you’re capped at moving this high (VIC-20 on Left, C64 on Right):
Gridrunner (VIC 20)
Gridrunner (C64)
For the sequel, the invisible barrier is now almost near the top of the screen:
Matrix: Gridrunner 2 (VIC-20)
Matrix: Gridrunner 2 (C64)
This seemingly small change yields massive gameplay ramifications. The dirty little secret of arcade shooters like this is that, as counterintuitive as it seems, the shooting isn’t actually the fun part. It’s the defensive side of the equation that generates most of the excitement. Without the close calls and the bobbing and weaving through enemies and obstacles, all you have left is accuracy of your own shots to generate the fun. That means the entertainment value is totally dependent on how well YOU play the game. But a game with a strong-but-fair defensive design is fun at all skill levels, regardless of how good a player you are. As long as the game keeps the pressure of avoidance going in a fair and logical way, the excitement never lets up. If you don’t believe me, play Gridrunner 1 and 2 back-to-back. In the first game, your defensive space is limited to the lower third of the playfield. It’s still well done, but it limits your flexibility and discourages improvisation. In many situations, your defensive choices are made for you. But with double the space, not only do you have more room to avoid enemies, but you have more options to blend avoiding enemies while attacking others. Matrix has essentially limitless strategic options, and I love it for that because I put the highest stock in games like this allowing players to come up with their own strategies.
This is a very interesting idea. Some of the levels are stampedes of camels. The camels can’t hurt you, but in these levels, you bleed points, earning back only 106 points per camel while your score ticks away. In other stages, the camels remain harmless but can get in the way of the centipedes or pods.
The playfield movement alone would have been enough for me, but I’m playing a compilation of forty games in 2025. I admit that it would make for a lousy sequel in 1983. It’s not exactly something that looks great in an advertisement. So Jeff did what Jeff always does: add camels (see the above caption). He also added shot reflectors and an indestructible little guy at the top of the screen who actually costs you points if you shoot him. I figured “well that must be the guy you’re rescuing” at first. Except, no. He’ll stop and wave if you cross paths with him, and if the bottom turret is under you, it’ll fire. It’s yet another thing you have to keep an eye on, but it totally works!
I was actually kind of nervous going into Matrix. Unlike the original Gridrunner, I’d never heard of it. I figured there had to be a reason for that, but playing it, I couldn’t find one. Gridrunner 2 is so good that it kind of broke my heart that it has no clout in modern gaming. How absurd! It’d be like if Super Mario Bros. 3 was totally engulfed by the original game to the point that hardly anyone talks about it. Surely THIS has to be the best VIC-20 action game, right? And it certainly has a place in a wide assortment of “most underrated” discussions, including “most underrated game EVER made.” It controls fantastic. The enemies sprites are clear and distinct, which I appreciate a LOT more now that I’ve played the 8-Bit Atari version of Gridrunner. I can’t think of anything really to complain about except maybe I think the camels should be worth slightly more points in order to incentivize not letting them escape, which could in theory dial up some minor risk/reward factors. Oh who am I kidding? If there’s such a thing as a perfect action game, this is it. At least on the VIC-20. Indeed, I believe this build is far superior as an OVERALL gaming experience than the Commodore 64 version. Wow, VIC-20 won a head-to-head? Huh. I didn’t see that coming (spoiler: it won’t be the last time). Verdict: YES! $6 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Matrix: Gridrunner 2 Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
If you can get the hang of using the reflectors, I think sideways-traveling shots are better for picking off the last segments of the pedes than the normal vertical shots.
Unlike the original Gridrunner, an argument can be made that the VIC-20 version of Matrix bests the graphically superior Commodore 64 version in every other way that matters except “potential challenge.” I’m prepared to make that argument: the Commodore 64 version is too damn intense. Matrix 64 is much faster in every way, including your own controls. Precision aiming is slightly harder, but that “slightly” is amplified when you consider how fast the enemies can move AND attack. Both versions have centipedes that drop missiles like the pods, but that attack on C64 comes especially quickly. Even the little man at the top that triggers the bottom cannon follows you more closely. This all makes the C64 version of Matrix: Gridrunner 2 the unofficial “hard mode” of what is an already very difficult game. Please don’t mistake that as a deal breaker. Matrix on C64 is also one of the best games in this set. It just doesn’t, in my opinion, offer the balanced challenge that the VIC-20 version did. It makes me happy for those players that didn’t upgrade to the C64. They might not have had the horsepower, but they had the best version of one of the best action games ever on a Commodore platform. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Laser Zone Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
Some games are hard to appreciate from screenshots, so you’ll have to take my word that this is fantastic action right here.
The C64 build of Laser Zone has larger, more detailed graphics, but at a cost: the playfield feels smaller. A lot smaller, actually, and certainly more claustrophobic. This also led to me shooting my own turrets a lot more than I did on the VIC-20 build. There’s a HUGE learning curve to the movement, especially as it relates to diagonal shooting. For my first half-hour or so of gameplay, I died just as much or more from shooting myself than I did from enemies, and that’s no exaggeration. To make up for all of this, the “you can’t shoot unless lined-up with the notches correctly” mechanic was dropped entirely. A wise decision, indeed, because the end result is one of my favorite games in this set. Laser Zone 64 is a seriously addictive shooter. It’s fast-paced, white knuckle, but it also has a lot of risk/reward factors related to the bombs and, yes, the diagonal shooting.
If you did this same game without giving players an additional bomb every time they finish a wave, nah, this wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good. I think this is Jeff’s SMARTEST action game so far, and maybe in this entire set. This for a game with absolutely no modern clout. Why isn’t Laser Zone a bigger deal? It’s wonderful!
I do have two complaints. The first is that you have to shoot enemies dead-solid in the center. Otherwise, bullets pass through them. I’d prefer sprite-based collision. Second is a weird one: the scaling seems kind of off, but not in the way you would expect. Around the eighth wave, it felt like things got easier for a couple waves, and the waves felt shorter before the difficulty ramped up again. It was weird. At first, I figured I just had a lucky run, but it happened again when I nearly broke my high score. “The calm before the storm, perhaps?” my father suggested. Maybe, but it still felt jarring. That’s a REALLY minor complaint though, because I really loved Laser Zone. It’s so good that it made me feel bad that the world never got a Jeff Minter coin-op during this era. Imagine what he could have done in arcades in 1983. Final thought on Laser Zone: Gridrunner is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but Laser Zone is, at the bare minimum, just as good. Yet, I’d never heard of it before this set. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page for f*ck’s sake. Laser Zone being relegated to historic footnote is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice I’ve experienced as a critic. This is why comprehensive sets like the kind Digital Eclipse does are so important. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Hover Bovver Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Something
There’s a decent game somewhere in here, but this ain’t it.
The idea of Hover Bovver is that you’ve borrowed (“borrowed”) a neighbor’s lawnmower, but he wants it back, so you have to cut all the grass without him catching you. You also can’t touch the dog, which, yeah, that’d make quite the mess and, assuming it survives, it’d probably walk funny afterwards and swear vengeance. “Who’s the no good son of a bitch that ran over my paw?” But I digress. The twist to the game is the neighbor can walk through the flowers, but if YOU mow a flower, an angry gardener will come at you. He’s got essentially the same attack pattern as the neighbor, which is to say he just inelegantly heat seeks you. So does the dog when he grows tired of your noisy lawnmower, though the dog can’t go through the flowers. Also, technically the dog works for you, and you can sic ’em on the neighbor up to a certain point. But eventually the dog will become annoyed by the lawnmower and attack it, which means running it over.
It’s kind of insane how many different complications are added. Even the lawnmower itself can overheat and freeze you if you mow too much grass in a row without taking a break. This game feels like a victim of the classic case of a developer who forgets that, during development, they’re the best player in the world at their own game so they keep upping the difficulty to challenge themselves forgetting that everyone else didn’t build the game and thus know how to beat it. Even the best designers do it.
You don’t die if you run over the dog, which wanders around randomly until you call for an attack or run out of “dog tolerance” points. But it was the dog that led to most of my deaths because you’re left stun-locked for quite a long time if you touch it. It’s too stiff of a penalty for a game with such inelegant enemy attack patterns. Sometimes I recovered from the penalty only to immediately hit the dog again because it’s right f*cking there. Although the neighbor can become trapped behind a wall, so can the dog that you might need to fend him off. Later levels have fewer walls and, elaborate as they might be, they don’t feel optimized for exciting gameplay. I think it would only take a few minor tweaks to make Hover Bovver a decent game. Ditch the mower overheating mechanic and the ability to speed-up as you mow, and shorten the penalty for hitting the dog. Maybe. Or maybe I’m wrong. Hell, I dunno. I just play these things, but I know that I really couldn’t wait to be done with Hover Bovver. I also know it’s one of his most popular games but I found it to be really boring. I would’ve liked to have seen this remade with a bigger playfield and smarter enemy/dog behavior, but there’s only one Digital Eclipse “remake” in this set. Verdict: NO!
Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time aka Meta-Llamas Platform: Commodore VIC-20 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
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Jeff calls this “possibly the most stupidly named game of all-time.” I mean, I’ve played through like a dozen Legend of Zelda games and Zelda Fitzgerald hasn’t shown up a single time, but sure, it’s Meta-Llamas, Jeff. 🙄 Okay, so this is sort of meant to be another gag game as the premise sounds like it’s going to be some kind of epic, but it’s really just a very simple arcade shooter. But the joke’s on Jeff…… I think but it’s hard to tell with him…… because Meta-Llamas is actually a solid arcader. It’s neat, as it’s a simple shooter with the twist being that shots are always diagonal and you have to ricochet them to find the angle to zap the spiders. To further aid you in this, you can raise and lower the ceiling. It also has an intelligent scoring system with historically good risk/reward balance. THIS is a joke game? It’s really good! Maybe the best game I’ve ever assigned only $1 in value to. I should also note that the shooting angle on VIC feels completely different from the C64 game. In a shooter based on banking your shots, that’s a big deal because it does authentically make both versions of Meta-Llama worth a look. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Revenge of the Mutant Camels Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by a fever dream, I’m guessing.
These enemies are called “Aggressive Australian Alpinists.” Jeff, what the HELL happened to you while skiing that inspired THIS?
Revenge of the Mutant Camels is a satire of a satire, and also a pseudo-sequel to Attack of the Mutant Camels. Spoiler: there’s a sequel to this coming up. Admittedly, I’m afraid of booting that game up. I’m terrified that it could unleash the dreaded satire-sequel-satire-pseudo-sequel-satire-satire singularly and destroy the entire universe, leaving nobody alive to hear the Big Rim Shot that expands out to form a new satire-based universe shaped like a pie-to-the-face where all physics and matter is governed by Mel Brooks. What I’m saying is, yes, Jeff Minter might possibly kill us all. (nods) In this game, YOU control the camels and have to survive waves of increasingly wacky enemies, including Pac-Man and the Ghost Monsters and even clones of Jeff Minter himself. SEE! HE’S TRYING TO KILL US ALL! Oh wait, the camel in this is probably evil. It’s one of those “play as the villain” games, isn’t it?
And I didn’t even get an energizer.
In all seriousness, this is one of Jeff’s more famous games, but I didn’t like it at all. Going back to what I said about Gridrunner 2 and how action games are dependent on a strong defensive game, Revenge of the Mutant Camels could be exhibit A of that argument. I really like side-scrolling shmups in case you haven’t noticed, and the idea of one where you run around the ground and have to jump to avoid things instead of flying all over the screen? It’s been done well before, but you need good physics and nimble movement. This has neither. The camel handles slowly and awkwardly. I get the sense that you’re not expected to avoid all damage and maybe barely hold on for dear life before reaching the end of a wave, where you get SOME life back. While I like that there’s tons of enemy sprites with different attack patterns, frankly I didn’t think the shooting felt great either. This was probably my least favorite C64 game in the set. Verdict: NO!
Hellgate Platform: VIC-20 Year: 1984 Designed by Jeff Minter in collaboration with Satan himself.
You, sir, are a filthy, stink’n liar! You sleep on a bed of lies! And memory foam! But memory foam that’s also made of lies!
I sincerely admire that Jeff experimented heavily with his games. A lot of the focus goes on the silly llamas or camels, but the truth is, he did do some bold experiments. Some worked better than others and Hellgate is with “the others” in that regard. The idea is you control four turrets at once that have to shoot at enemies that spawn in the center of the screen. The turrets are controlled in pairs. You move the side cannons with UP and DOWN while the top and bottom turrets are moved with LEFT and RIGHT. You can’t sit still or you’ll overheat. Since this is a lot to handle, the game offers one kindness: bombs are fired automatically when an enemy touches you. Okay, now kill all baddies and enjoy the pounding headache that comes with keeping track of all these things.
For what it’s worth, this will EVENTUALLY make sense, but it takes practice. Lots and lots of practice.
Hellgate on the VIC-20 might actually be the single most intense arcader I’ve ever played. At first, I was certain this would get a NO! I’m happy I stuck it out because I slowly started to improve to the point that rounds were enjoyable. Oh, never to the point I was “good.” Even my best rounds never passed the 80K mark. I think some players might legitimately be physically incapable of playing this well. The problem isn’t just the four turrets but the fact that one side moves the opposite direction of the other, IE moving the left turret up also moves the right turret down. It’s overwhelming. I do think Hellgate is a worthy experience for anyone who enjoys arcade-style action games. I make no guarantees you’ll actually have fun, but as a test of the absolute limits of your hand-eye coordination? If you’re ready to really find out, this might be the game for you. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Hellgate Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1984 Designed by Jeff Minter
One single speed adjustment sucked all the fun out of the C64 build.
Hellgate 64 is yet another Commodore 64 upgrade that seems to provide a kinder, gentler experience over its VIC-20 counterpart. I mean relatively speaking, of course. This is still a MADDENING game that requires a full rewiring of your gray matter if you hope to fully control all four turrets. But the movement is a little more accurate on C64 while the pace of the enemies being released is a little slower, allowing for quicker adjustments and, in theory, more time to set your shots. Okay, so it should be the better version, right? Not so fast, because you sure seem to overheat a LOT more quickly on the C64. Now in theory you can prevent this by staying in constant motion, because you don’t gain heat if you keep moving. In practice, all that does is leave you open for enemies. Most of my deaths on the VIC were via running out of bombs and dying to the enemies. The overwhelming majority of my deaths on the C64 were due to overheating. This really was one thing too many to keep track of. As if having to move four things to control at once (two of which have the controls inverted, mind you) while having enemies come at you from all sides wasn’t tough enough. I learned to live with it on the VIC-20, but here it proved to be ruinous for any and all entertainment value. Verdict: NO!
Sheep in Space Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1984 Designed by Jeff Minter
See, when I took LSD, the walls melted. No flying camels.
Sheep in Space is a more complicated version of Defender. So complicated that I was worried I would never have that “ah, I get it” moment. It took a while (seriously about an hour of playing and dying) before I “got it” because I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to bomb the power generators or guard them. It’s guard them. Again, modern instructions would have been nice. Sheep in Space has the same basic concept as Defender: kill all the enemies in a large battlefield by using radar to hunt them down. Instead of kidnapping people, enemies take power stations to charge what’s essentially a bomb that will blow up the planet. So far, so Defender, but the complications are about to start. The playfield, which is much, much larger than Defender’s, is divided into different speed zones. If you’re in the center of the screen, your sheep does an impression of a bat out of hell. But, the further away you are from the center, the slower you travel due to the planetary gravity. It’s SUCH a neat idea. Hell, even your shots become drawn to the floor and ceiling due to gravity.
I never survived the penalty for not killing all the enemies before they blew up the planet. It’s a punishment for a reason.
It sounds great, and it can be! I’m giving it a YES! along with one of the highest values in this set. I really had fun. But there’s one mechanic in this that I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time and knock Jeff over the head with a shovel before he added it to the game. While you do all the combat, your sheep becomes progressively more hungry and requires you to stop and land to feed it. There’s designated grasslands on both the floor and ceiling that the sheep will eat at what could generously be called a “leisurely pace.” It takes FOREVER to recharge its hunger status and it just sucks the f*cking excitement out of what is otherwise one of the best twists on Defender I’ve seen.
You can’t defend yourself while you’re eating, either. Put a little pep in your step, buddy! Don’t savor it!
The good news is, in counter to the ridiculously slow feeding stuff, there’s some additional mechanics to help increase the tempo of the action. At first, I thought the planets were too damn big. Make no mistake, they’re HUGE, especially compared to Defender. But Jeff built in not one, not two, but THREE hyperspace options that are different from any other game in this genre. In games like Asteroids or Defender, hyperspace usually places you in a totally random spot that could be lethal. You only use hyperspace out of desperation when you’re out of options. Here, the hyperspace is designed specifically to speed-up gameplay by warping you to a random enemy, with two additional styles of hyperspace that specify targets on the ceiling or floor. It works without feeling like too much of a shortcut since you still often have to give chase to the baddies.
Screenshots don’t really do this justice. It’s a lot of fun.
The best way I can describe Sheep in Space is “what if most Defender encounters felt like drag races?” The different speeds of the screen WORK and there’s few things as satisfying as running down an enemy in the center of the screen, then doing a u-turn and shooting it. Or even colliding with it, since unlike Defender, you can absorb damage and get so many hits before you die. Most of my deaths were a result of the planet blowing up and being unable to survive the manic wave of enemies that you get as punishment for allowing it to happen. So don’t mistake Sheep in Space as a copy of Defender. It’s a love letter to it. It’s one of the reasons I’m not deleting Llamasoft from my Switch after I finish this. I think it’ll be Sheep in Space that I come back to when I have a Defender itch and want something different to scratch it. It’s a lot of fun. I just wish the sheep ate quicker. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Attack of the Mutant Camels Platform: Atari 8-Bit Year: 1984 Designed by Jeff Minter
This camel is second only to Joe Camel in the annals of evil camels.
One of the best games in the set is immediately followed by possibly the worst game in the set, at least among the games where the controller actually listens to you. Although this is structured like the previous Attack of the Mutant Camels and remains a satire of the Atari 2600’s Empire Strikes Back game, this plays far, far worse than either of those games. Unlike the Commodore 64 game, you can’t disable colliding with the camels. The playfield is more compact and the controls are VERY touchy. This is supposed to be much more inertia-based than the original Attack of the Mutant Camels build and closer to how the Star Wars game played. Except impacting a camel sends you flying like both the camel and the ship are made of flubber. Same with the bullets. EVERYTHING sends you flying quickly backwards with extreme violence. Because of how little room you have to dodge anything combined with the insane knock-back, an already mediocre-at-best gameplay concept is rendered completely unplayable. Maybe Jeff just hated Atari’s home computer line. (Cathy from the Future: if that’s the case, he had a funny way of showing it.) Verdict: NO!
Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time aka Meta-Llamas Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1983 Designed by Jeff Minter
Two levels into my second game and I found a “sweet spot” to stand that allows for easy cheesing of Meta Llama’s first eight or so stages. Call this the conservative strategy designed to preserve lives (no extra lives in this game) for later levels. Just position your Llama above the O and U in “BONUS” then lower the ceiling a little bit and hold the fire button down. You won’t die for the first few levels and you’ll not completely be hosed on points, though you certainly won’t earn what you CAN earn. Once you can no longer stand still, don’t sweat it. You’ll only have to move a little bit for the next few levels after that. I didn’t have to be more careful until a dozen or so levels in. In literally only my second game, I put up a score of 149,467 and made it all the way to level 18. In my third game, I got to level 19 and 167,084. Each of Jeff’s instruction books have a target score for “good players” and for Meta-Llamas, it’s only 100K. In my sixth game, I broke for 211,796. Good for me, but six games to DOUBLE the stated target score? Yikes.
(spikes football, moonwalk in end zone) I’m going to Disneyland!
Now, here’s the good news: like the VIC game, Meta has a very well-crafted scoring system that discourages what the above video showed. If you shoot the spider directly off its web, it’s only 100 points. The web scores between 700 and 200 points, depending on how quickly you shoot it, and landed spiders score 600 points. So each enemy, all-in, is worth potentially 1,300 points. This is a fantastic risk/reward design because, once those spiders land, it’s hard to find a good angle for them. Close range ones are especially tough. I often finished levels doing a little dance of wiggling from the left to right sides of the screen using the screen-wrap. Once I understood that…….. I died more quickly. Never did end up topping that 200K game. Oh well. Like the VIC game, this is fun in small doses. Oddly enough, if I had to pick one or the other, I think I’d take the VIC version. Thankfully, I don’t have to make such a choice. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Ancipital Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1984 Designed by Yak the Hairy
“Not a breadhead.” (Googles “breadhead”) You know what? I believe you, Jeff.
It’s bonkers how many games in this collection had “all-timer” potential that’s squandered for no good reason. Ancipital is in the same boat as Sheep in Space in that it’s got so much going on that it’s overwhelming at first, but it eventually reveals itself as one of the most unique games in the set. The idea is that you’re in a gigantic maze with one hundred rooms. In each room you have to manipulate enemies in a way that transforms the walls into pathways to the next room. The actual action is a frantic shooting/platforming hybrid where you have to swap gravity on the fly. You can walk on all four walls and I loves me some anti-gravity games. However, Ancipital has a very steep learning curve to its gravity gameplay. You have to swap direction mid-air, and the speed of movement is too damn quick. Plus you can NEVER touch a wall with anything but your feet. This means you have to practically avoid the corners altogether. It’s an instakill otherwise. It’s really touchy too, so I admit this was the game I cheated with the most. Even cheating, I couldn’t survive long enough to beat the game (maxed out at like 65% of the maze) because the enemies pull some damn dirty pool.
The three yellow walls are pathways to the next room. BUT, you can’t actually use them until the timer for the room (represented by the T in the status bar) runs out. A lot of games in this collection have that “minimum indie badness” to them, but this crosses the line. This feels like a game with contempt for players.
By far the biggest problem with Ancipital is there’s often no elegance at all to the enemy attacks and no means to defend yourself. Even spamming attacks doesn’t work because the enemies will still hit you. Around the time you have knocked-out about a third of the maze, the enemies become far too aggressive. Too many rooms have the enemies either heat-seek you in a way that you could never hope to avoid, move too quickly to reasonably dodge, are unaffected by your weapon, outright life-slap you when you spawn in a room, or some combination of those. While the game offers life refills when you open up a wall, it doesn’t really matter because a game that’s focused on combat has boring combat. Fighting enemies that behave the way these ones do isn’t fun. Again, defense is where the excitement is, and this game feels like defense takes a back seat to trollish design. Consequently, what should be an engaging, addictive concept for a game that appeals directly to my escape room fandom actually isn’t fun at all. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I really thought the action in this was too frustrating to be enjoyable.
This was my best non-cheating run. I got 40% of the maze and two of the hidden goats. I wanted to at least finish the maze, cheating or otherwise, but then I saw in the instruction book that even Jeff only finished 86% of his own f*cking game. That didn’t clue you in to maybe dial back the cheap shots, Jeff?
You can’t just have enemies rain down on the player like Ancipital does constantly. The nail in the coffin was the room timers are too long and tick away too slowly. What should be a fast-paced action game grinds to a slog when you have to just avoid enemies that resist being avoided in underhanded ways while the clock its ass off at you. Removing the clock alone would have probably turned Ancipital into a contender for best game in this set. With a slow clock and enemies THIS punishing? I didn’t think it was fun at all. The shame is, the basic navigation concept had me sit up in my seat. Hidden somewhere within the maze are five magical goats and camels that act as keys that unlock solid walls. This is one of those “you’re expected to make your own map” games and I intended to play along until I realized that the action was not getting better. I’d love to play a remake of this that has more reasonable difficulty. Mind you, I played this on easy. There’s not only a good game in here but possibly Jeff’s best game. No other NO! in this set hurt more than this one. Verdict: NO!
Hover Bovver Platform: Atari 8-Bit Year: 1984 Designed by Jeff Minter
Three times in a row. The dog froze me three times in a f*cking row right here. All dogs BETTER not go to heaven.
Hover Bovver on the Atari 8-Bit is a slight improvement over the C64 build. It’s a little easier to scratch-out distance between you and the neighbor and the controls are slightly but perceptively better. It still suffers from all the same problems of inelegant enemy design and too stiff a penalty for touching the dog. In this version, the dog tolerance seems to run out faster, too, and when that runs out, the dog beelines for you. Actually, the best thing I can say about the 8-Bit build is that it made it more clear the “dog tolerance” mechanic is the problem. The neighbor and a randomly moving dog is tricky enough to avoid without the dog turning on you having an insanely long stun lock to worry about. I think a better way to have balanced the challenge was to just shrink the amount of attack time you get with the dog. Either way, I didn’t like either version at all. Verdict: NO!
Psychedelia Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1984 Designed by Jeff Minter
Look! I made a jackalope!
I didn’t see this one coming. Psychedelia is NOT a video game. It’s the first of two “light synthesizer” programs in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. You can use a variety of tools and preset shapes to create a pattern of colored lights. These days, this would be like a mini-game in an art-based game. Like I could totally see something like this being in a modern version of Mario Paint. It’s easy to use, too. Keyboard functions were mapped to a menu using the trigger buttons. It’s very intuitive, which I didn’t expect. I messed around with it for a couple minutes and, while grabbing screenshots, I got the above picture and was satisfied enough. You can see the jackalope too, right? See, it’s got a bunny face and antlers. “It looks more like a devil version of a beaver or some kind of rodent to me” said Sasha the Kid, who I’m THIS CLOSE to renaming “Sasha the Killjoy.” Fine, it’s a beaver with devil horns. Whatever. What I didn’t expect was, when I showed Psychedelia to my family, everyone wanted a turn.
Look! I made a Galaxian! Or maybe Galaga!
From 10 year old Sasha the Kid (“you know I’m not 10 yet, right?” I’m rounding up. I totally know your birthday. Nod. Just don’t quiz me on it!) to my godfather, AJ. He’s pushing 80 years old and he’s not a “gamer” but he took a turn, and everyone in all ages in between. Everyone took a turn, and everyone loved it. It reminded me of the Rotoscope Theater feature from Making of Karateka. Less a game than a digital toy. I watched as the controller got passed around and everyone fiddled with it for a minute or two, giggling and enjoying it. It’s not going to be like Hidden in Plain Sight or Chompy Chomp Chomp, IE games we bust out during the holidays. But for fifteen-to-twenty minutes, my family enjoyed making pretty lights dance on our TV, laughing and smiling the entire time and I watched, realizing “I’ll look back on this moment someday and smile, and I think the kids will too.” You know what? Dammit, that counts for something in my book. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
I would have added more but Colourspace offers the same concept with more options.
The next game was so critically lambasted that there’s a video about the negative response to it in the feature. Additionally, the negative review that sparked the controversy is included in the documentary timeline in its entirety. Wow. You know what? Props to Jeff and Digital Eclipse for keeping it real. Okay, let’s do this! My body is ready!
Mama Llama Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1985 Designed by Jeff Minter
This looks kind of complicated. That’s okay, though. I’ll just open up the trusty instruction book that no doubt clearly explains what this is and how to use it, especially since nothing like this has been in any other game. I mean, can you imagine if it didn’t explain how to play this with visual aides? You know, since gaming is an all-visual medium? But nobody could possibly be reckless enough to make a game like this without giving clear, unambiguous instructions on how to play it, and especially nobody could possibly take it personally when people don’t “get it” and think the game is, at best, frustrating and boring and, at worst, convoluted and outright pretentious as all f*ck. (nods) Okay, I’m opening the instructions now and………
My body wasn’t ready. I spent the better part of a day trying to make sense of Mama Llama. I read the instruction book (as a reminder, the original books are the ONLY instructions offered in this collection) but it didn’t have a single gameplay visual aid. It’s almost beyond belief considering Mama Llama one of the most convoluted games I’ve ever seen. It’s totally inexcusable and grounds for a NO! by itself. Imagine any instruction book for something that’s not a video game. Let’s say it was a ham radio kit with all the parts to build the radio, a fairly complicated piece of machinery. Only instead of telling you what each of the components in the kit is, the instructions just described all the different parts. There’s no diagrams of what goes where using which screw or fastener and the kit just expects users to somehow know based on words with no context. Anyone would be f*cking furious about that. It’s frustrating that Jeff took negative reviews so personally once upon a time given how overly complicated the game is versus the amount of proper instruction players were given. Taking the ham radio thought experiment further, it would be like the person who made the prototype of the ham radio saying “how come YOU can’t build the thing? *I* know how to build it!” Well no sh*t you do! You made it! But you didn’t do a whole lot for everyone else playing it!
After all that, it’s like………. A point and click shooter kinda? But also kind of an avoider? And it’s played with a cursor, but it doesn’t use a mouse?
If figuring out how to play Mama Llama was fun or rewarding by itself, I wouldn’t complain. Nor would I complain if the gameplay itself or the objective were intuitive. It’s not at all. I THOUGHT I had figured it out, but then I ultimately needed to find a YouTube video that clarified the gameplay. I was also relieved to see a couple comments in that clip of people saying they’d tried for years to make sense of the game and couldn’t until they found that clip. Even after I realized that you’re going through waves with different gravity and objectives and using a cursor to kill enemies while trying to keep your baby llamas alive, I didn’t think it was worth the effort or fun at all. Like Ancipital, the attack patterns lack elegance. Also like Ancipital, some of the rooms require you to figure out the actual objective, IE how to kill the enemies. Jeff seemed to have understood how unintuitive some of the rooms in Ancipital were and included help screens. There’s no such thing in Mama Llama. There’s no help at all really. Whatever. I thought the action was sloppy and boring and the controls were some of the worst in this entire set. I wish I had just abandoned ship and moved on to the next game sooner than I did. Any critic who shat upon this in 1984? You’re vindicated. This was crap. Though I’m happy Jeff came to terms with it. I’ve met plenty of developers who never have that come to Jesus moment with their bad games. You’re a good dude, Jeff Minter. Verdict: NO!
Colourspace Platform: Atari 8-Bit Year: 1985 Designed by Jeff Minter
Take everything I said about Psychedelia and multiply it by three or four. Jeff famously visualized colors and shapes moving to the beat of Pink Floyd. I speculated that he had an experience with what’s called Chromesthesia as a child but Jeff disagreed that it was anything neurological and actually gave me a quote for this feature (I added some commas only).
I think it was just that the synth riffs and filter sweeps of some of Floyd’s music inspired in me abstract dynamic geometric visualizations in my imagination, and I’d lie in the dark listening and imagining this stuff. And as I grew up, whereas most kids daydream about playing guitar in a band or whatever, I would imagine that one day someone would make some kind of “instrument” to externalize these things and I’d be “playing” that. It was only years later having learnt to code and started making games I realized that I could use those tools to try making such a thing myself.
In a way I consider that my real life’s work, as it goes back deeper than before I ever saw a video game, and I am still developing the idea to this day, and always will be, until I’m planted. In later years the games stuff and the lightsynth stuff have drawn closely together, and in my new engine they pretty much fully intertwine.
-Jeff Minter
I’ll tell you this: Jeff wanted to give people an experience like he had. He succeeded. Even if Jeff’s motivation for these wasn’t to make a video art toy, that’s what they are, and damn fun art toys at that. Like, I got a Spirograph for Christmas one year. I bet a LOT of you reading this did as well, and, of course, Jeff had one too. These light synthesizers are essentially video game versions of a Spirograph type of toy. Only I never could quite get things to look good with my Spirograph. Mostly I just made bland circles and had no clue what I was doing. I equally had no clue what I was doing with Colourspace but it’s a lot easier to “make art” with it. After watching everyone in my family take their turns, I used the built-in music overlay, tweaked a few of the options, and got this thirty second clip. Okay, so it’s not going to be played on loop in the Louvre, but I was pretty happy with it!
And if that looks too good to be Atari 8-Bit, you’re right. Digital Eclipse added a few options, something that’s not advertised anywhere in the package, as far as I could tell. They then used the updated Colourspace to generate all the backgrounds in The Jeff Minter Story’s menus. It’s hypnotic and beautiful. Simply beautiful. Okay, so there’s a LOT more options for Colourspace, even a two player mode. More options means a steeper learning curve than Psychedelia. But after playing Mama Llama, trust me, this thing is Pong levels of intuitive in comparison. Besides, the learning process is fun by itself since you get to see the effects of each toggle play out in real time. Most importantly, everyone had a great time with this, from children as young as Sasha the Kid to my nearly 80-year-old godfather. Again. Jeff gave me two experiences with a family of non-gamers who were smiling and laughing while complementing each-other’s efforts, and I’ll never forget it. Will I ever play it again after I finish this project? Maybe not, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if I busted this out from time to time to show people how easy you can make art with a mere “video game.” Deciding the value relative to the other games in this collection was hard, so I decided to go off the fact that Colourspace made everyone I love happy, and dammit, that matters a whole lot to me. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Batalyx Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1985 Designed by Jeff Minter
This is six different, smaller games, so I’ll just treat this like six separate reviews. And I’ll note that you’re apparently supposed to be able to switch to different mini-games on the fly and that was lost in translation. I can only review the game I’m presented with, not what I’m supposed to be able to do. But take this review with a grain of salt because apparently Digital Eclipse messed this up.
The rare game where I had to deliberately die off and I almost gave up on that, except I wanted my high score 😛
SPLIT DECISION: Hallucin-O-Bomblets
Have you ever blown up a balloon then let go of it and watched it fly around the room as the air let out of it? Okay, Hallucin-O-Bomblets is like that if you put a gun on the balloon. Which I tried once, and my parents are still pissy with me. Oh come, Mom! You can barely notice your limp! H-O-B is not the deepest game but it’s enjoyable enough as a time waster. The idea is you only move via the blow back of your gun, so you’re pushed in the opposite direction you shoot. I had enough fun that I have to give it a YES! but I need to also point out that, in only my second round, I seemingly built-up so much life from playing well (and I played kind of conservatively) that I basically couldn’t die. I think that’s what happened, anyway. Once I reached 4.7 million points, I noticed that I wasn’t dying from crashing into enemies. Oh I was losing more progress, but I could get that right back. In fact, my “health” was barely ticking down at all. I still have a ton of games left to review and I needed to move on, so I gave up on playing carefully and just held diagonally on my controller. Despite crashing into one enemy after another, it took me over five minutes to game over and I finished with 4.9 million points. IN MY SECOND GAME! There’s an excellent arcader in here but the challenge and health system needs to be completely retooled. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
The camels can lay down. Yeah, smart move to not put this as a solo release.
SPLIT DECISION: Attack of the Mutant Camels II
For what it’s worth, this sequel does somewhat improve the combat of the Attack of the Mutant Camels/Empire Strikes Back formula because the camels do something besides lumber forward. They also now jump, duck, and sometimes new ones fall from the sky. It’s raining camels, which is ridiculous. It’s like Moses’ brother wanted to one-up him for the frogs and gnats and just took it too far. “For f*ck’s sake, brother! God was planning on wiping out the first born of each Egyptian and you somehow did worse THAN THAT! AND THERE’S CAMEL JUICE EVERYWHERE!” Anyway, their projectiles are also much more balanced instead of being too quick to reasonably avoid. So yeah, this is an overall improvement, but the problem is, it’s the same formula for Empire Strikes Back that I found to be really boring. And that part is unchanged. Verdict: NO!
You’re supposed to light up the pyramid. Bad idea. People will strip the surface for its precious, precious limestone.
SPLIT DECISION: The Activation of Iridis Base
This is kind of like a Dragon’s Lair type of game. You’re given a direction to push, and you have to push it. It mostly didn’t seem to respond to my button presses. Especially with the fire button. I tried holding the button and pressing the direction. I tried pressing the direction and the fire button at the same time. I’m almost certain I NEVER succeeded when the fire button was involved. Then again, I’m pretty sure most of my left-directions also failed. I had a couple other people in the family try this one out and they experienced the same thing: the fire button stuff never seemed to work. Maybe we’re playing it wrong, but if that’s the case, maybe you should have included better instructions, Digital Eclipse. We tried rewinding the fire button stuff and redoing it every possible way and it still failed. Whatever. I doubt anyone is buying this collection to play this. Verdict: NO!
Babe Ruth was famous for saying “I hit big or I miss big.” I feel that’s where Jeff is with the weird, experimental stuff. The big misses like Mama Llama I’m fine with never playing anything like them again. The big hits, stuff like this? I’d like to see it explored a lot more.
SPLIT DECISION: Cippy On The Run
Easily the most compelling game in the set and one of the most original in the entire Llamasoft collection. Using the same gravity engine that Jeff previously implemented in other games, the object is to guide a goat across a floor and a ceiling. Walking on any gray tiles turns them colorful. The object is simply to change all the gray tiles to colored tiles. The enemies don’t actually screw with you but they can cost you by changing the tiles into the dreaded green-blue titles (anyone who plays Magic: The Gathering knows that green-blue players are inhuman creatures made not of flesh and blood like you or I but instead out of pure, unadulterated evil) that cause you to reverse gravity. Or they do other undesirable and seemingly random effects like send you away from the section you’re working on. It’s actually totally possible to play this without shooting and still have a good time.
Maybe this goat is the inventor of Samus Aran’s speed booster?
The only way you can die is by falling in a pit. At first, I thought you moved too quickly for a game with pits, but then I noticed the radar that gives you more than ample warning that they’re coming. When I kept an eye on the radar, I suddenly felt this exhilarating rush as I was able to run without stopping, swapping from the ceiling to the floor and experiencing a sense of speed that few games of this era offered. The controls are responsive enough that Cippy almost feels like a precursor to a certain blue hedgehog in terms of the velocity at which you can play this. Cippy feels like a prototype for a potentially historically awesome game. I wish it did more, but what it does was pretty addictive, actually. I’d like to see this concept explored more. A lot more, actually. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Best Game in Batalyx
What’s with the “II” you ask? Apparently the original was included in a magazine called Commodore Horizons.
SPLIT DECISION: Syncro II
I can honestly say I’ve never seen a concept like Syncro II. You have a 8×5 grid of mats that are functionally like treadmills that you can set to move in eight different directions. Moving one of a color moves ALL of that color (and matching patterns). While you do this, orbs are bouncing around the playfield, and the object of the game is to simply get the orbs to stop moving. It’s a really neat idea that’s failed by some maddeningly loose controls. It’s too damn hard to move the cursor one space. This in a game where you probably want to make small movements since the idea is you’re trying to create a pathway that will guide the orbs into a treadmill that is the exact opposite speed and trajectory they’re moving, which is what stops them. If movement was accurate, I’d given this a YES! in a heartbeat for pure, charming originality. Instead, pressing a direction pad might move two or more spaces in that direction instead of one. It’s too loose for a game where precision is so necessary. Verdict: NO! Seriously, redo this with better controls and I’m in.
These things are kind of like a Rorschach test, huh? Well, let’s put that to the test. I asked everyone what they saw. TJ: “the Predator.” Angela: “a spider.” Dad “a bug.” Sasha: “a bug shooting laser eyes.” Mom: “like something in Avatar.” AJ: “a perched dragon fly.” Shay: “a monster with (laser) eyes.” Sarah: “a dream catcher.” My friends Saud and Oz said “a spider or scarab” or “a GlaDOS-like robot.” I have to say, I don’t see a spider, Angela and Saud, but I can see everyone else’s things. Sorry, Sis. Sorry, Saud. I think Oz was the winner, though he picked the wrong fictional robot. “See ya later, Navigator!” (smiles) YOU SEE IT!
SPLIT DECISION: Psychedelia
The only reason I’m giving this a NO! is because this version of Psychedelia has a lot fewer options than the other version of Psychedelia. You can sort of see the “horizon effect” here that you can adjust to look a variety of different ways. It’s fun for a minute or two but nothing compared to the full Psychedelia release, and coming after Colourspace, it’s really got nothing left to offer. Tellingly, nobody really wanted to play this build. They wanted more time with Colourspace. Actually, I kind of think I could go back and change the original Psychedelia to a NO! as well since NOBODY wants to go back and play it, but everyone kind of wants to replay Colourspace. I’m not going to retroactively drop the original build’s YES!, but really, if you play with just Colourspace, you won’t miss out on anything. Verdict: NO!
Total Value for Batalyx: $3
Iridis Alpha Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1986 Designed by Jeff Minter
Apparently Uses Incorrect ROM
Oh thank God. This is the final game in the collection with a reputation for being confusing. Thankfully, I found a YouTube video that did a pretty good job explaining it. Good job, Highlander71. Hey, wait. How can you be the seventy-first highlander? I was told there could only be one! You ruined the canon for me forever! YOU SON OF……
The game that I kept calling “Idris Elba” is yet another experimental, high concept shooter that I thought just wasn’t worth the effort of learning. The idea is that you control a ship in two channels at once and have to transfer energy between the two. It’s kind of like Defender in that each wave requires you to destroy X amount of ships, but it’s not “Defender-like” in the same way that Sheep in Space was. Since the playfield is split in two AND has to accommodate a status bar, the playfields are really cramped and I felt that made the action pretty bland, actually. It’s too hard to avoid enemies or things you don’t want to collect. Unlike Llama Mama, I decided to not spend an entire day trying to force myself to understand what exactly Jeff was aiming for here. Iridis Alpha made me appreciate what a vast, open playfield does for games like Defender, because I thought this was difficult to the point of being demoralizing and f*cking boring as an action game. When I reached the fourth level and died, respawned and immediately died again, I thought “I have never enjoyed a game that does that type of design. What am I doing with my life?” Not playing this anymore, that’s for sure. Thankfully, the end of the convoluted games has arrived. Verdict: NO!
Revenge of the Mutant Camels II Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1987 Designed by Jeff Minter
Mutant camel? Bullsh*t! I know the Loch Ness Monster when I see it.
Holy smokes! I like a Mutant Camel game! This is a BIG improvement over the original Revenge of the Mutant Camels. Movement is still stiff, but it’s not as sluggish as it was. Most importantly, you move faster and the enemy attack patterns are much more elegant. This is what I think he wanted Revenge 1 to be and it wasn’t. Plus, you’re not stuck to the ground with only a heavy jump at your disposal. This time, the camel can fly. It’s a little awkward to get the hang of, but after a few minutes I was able to bob-and-weave around enemies, and the eight-way shooting is more responsive too. Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t exactly Konami SHMUP levels of satisfying. But it’s still a vast upgrade, and there’s even more.
On one hand, those eyes are crossed. On the other hand, this color scheme made me think of Tales From the Darkside, a show that I was TERRIFIED of as a child. The theme music scared me so badly I couldn’t be alone in a room until I was like 30 years old. And now I’m hearing that music in my head. Well I’ll be hiding under the blankets for the next few weeks now, thank you so much Jeff.
You can enter a shop between stages to buy extra lives, health refills, or temporary upgrades to guns. Two of those upgrades I wasn’t impressed with: heat seeking bullets that you don’t even really shoot and ones called “yo-yo bullets” that return to you. Hell, some levels you can’t even use the heat seeking ones because you don’t actually want to kill some things, but you can’t know that until you go into the stage. Seems kind of like a dick move to even include that option but whatever. I didn’t like using them anyway. The gigantic bullets, on the other hand, were really satisfying. Honestly Jeff should have considered making them permanent.
I was kidding about the Tales from the Darkside thing before! This is literally the next stage! IT’S EVEN WORSE! I WAS KIDDING! (hides under blanket)
Now, the catch to the shop is that you only get a limited amount of currency even if you play the levels well, and each time you buy something, the price goes up for the next time. This means you’re incentivized to use the shop sparingly, since nothing besides lives and health carry over between stages. I don’t know if the prices are necessarily properly balanced, but the idea does work. Yet, I kind of wish the big bullets were just a thing the game did. I was even able to test this.Revenge of Mutant Camels II is one of a handful of games in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story that offers cheat code toggles. The toggle for this game? Unlimited currency. So after trying (and failing) for several hours to beat the game on its terms, I decided to turn on the toggle, crank up my lives, and see how much fun I could have with just the big bullets. And I had a LOT more fun with those bullets. I also still died a whole lot. The game would have sacrificed essentially nothing by just making them THE bullets. Either way, I liked this. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
At this point, the documentary had a clip for another light synthesizer called “Trip-a-Tron” that’s not included but it looks positively tantalizing. I’m guessing this is one of those “only works with a mouse and keyboard” things, except the documentary says it works with a joystick. Awwww. What a tease.
Voidrunner Platform: Commodore 64 Year: 1987 Designed by Jeff Minter
Yet another game where screenshots don’t do it justice. Trust me, this is the good stuff.
As the finale of the Commodore 64 era of this set, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting swan song than Voidrunner. The third game in the Gridrunner series is the best yet and, yet again, one of the best arcaders ever on a home computer. Don’t worry though, because Voidrunner has enough newness to not give me “broken record” syndrome. Actually, it feels very modern in many ways. Take the existing Gridrunner formula and sprinkle a little WarioWare on it. Just a little. Voidrunner’s twist is that you control four ships at once. For the first level, they’re lined up with the middle two ships together and two more flanking their corners. All four are pointed at the ceiling and you just fire away at the standard Gridrunner/Centipede arrangement with four times the firepower. Okay, that alone is interesting for a minor upgrade, though I admit at first I was like “that’s grasping at straws for a sequel.” But then the second level had the same aligned formation, only with the ships pointed downward, and I sat up in my chair. Then in the third level, this happened:
You got my attention, Voidrunner!
And yes, the formation changes every level. Like I said, it makes Voidrunner feel slick and modern in a way few games from this era do. Hell, Voidrunner could have stuck to the same enemy attack formations and it would still feel fresh from the player formations alone, but Voidrunner doesn’t do that. Each stage genuinely does feel like it tailors the enemy attacks to the stage’s formation. There’s no sense of being arbitrary. I thought “surely it’ll run out of steam at some point.” It doesn’t because there’s so many twists along the way. Some stages have ships that can be separated, with one or more ships moving the opposite direction the primary ship (which is always green) does. Sometimes the ships are arranged in pairs that face each other with only a tiny gap between them that requires you to sandwich enemies.
You’d think this would be frustrating, but I enjoyed this level. I’ve never played an arcader like it.
Now, there is one annoyance: I hated the static-like background. THAT’S NOT A VOID! It’s too visually loud, and having the pods match the color of the little static dots in the background can be very annoying. A lot of Jeff’s games, especially these days, tend to be “graphically noisy” for the sake of punishing players for not paying close enough attention. Voidrunner feels like the first game in this collection where that idea is leaned heavily into and, maybe, is meant to be the main challenge. It was an idea too ahead of its time, as I really think I would have liked the game more if I could have turned this off. That’s little more than a nitpick though. Honestly, I feel like Voidrunner is the game where Jeff Minter proved that Gridrunner or Laser Zone weren’t flukes. With Voidrunner, he proved beyond any lingering doubt that he’s an ELITE game designer. It’s not even as hard as you would think, either. It’s one of his most balanced games. It’s like everything that I’ve played so far led up to this: a game with all of the best action and none of the garbage. A pure action masterpiece and a killer app for this package. Verdict: YES!– $8 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Awarded “Killer App” Status for Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Super Gridrunner Platform: Atari ST via Atari Jaguar Year: 1989 Designed by Jeff Minter
Yeah, this is fun. Very hard. Very, very hard. But fun.
When Jeff’s in the mood to make an intense game, he really puts his back into it. Among the YES! games in this collection, this is probably second only to Hellgate in terms of difficulty. This is the result of having a much more compact playfield. There’s not a ton of room to dodge, and after just a few levels the enemies can fly onto the screen VERY fast. Like, I’ve used fast forward on some emulators before to get past boring parts in games and the fast forward wasn’t as fast as the enemies in this game. I’m not a fan of that, by the way. I really think the status bar at the bottom is too big at the cost of the playfield. It’s a claustrophobic game, and sometimes that works out, but I don’t think it’s to Super Griddy’s benefit. Again, look how fast enemies can enter the screen.
And mind you that, when you kill enemies, they become pods that eventually drop missiles. But the pods also become solid surfaces that can change the direction of the other enemies. When they move that quickly, it’s asking a lot from players since they inevitably deflect off their deceased comrades. I could have used a bomb there, except, there’s a catch. Smart bombs in Super Gridrunner are called in the game’s instruction booklet, I sh*t you not, “Voluntary Martyrdom.” You lose a life, your ship turns into a ghost for ten seconds, and all enemies on the screen are turned into bonus points, you don’t have to restart the stage, and you get to keep your multiplier. Thankfully, the game offers a lot of flexibility to make up for the tomfoolery in the form of being able to turn the nose of your ship into a turret.
How come the nosecone fires bigger shots than the ship? Just make the ship out of nosecones! DON’T YOU WANT TO WIN THE WAR?! (I presume there’s a war)
Inspired by R-Type, the nosecone function can be used two ways. You can either set it up as something that you shoot to “augment” your bullets and launch them in different directions that you manually set. The other option is what I mostly opted for: placing the nosecone on one half the screen while I stayed in the other half. There’s a sharp learning curve to positioning it, but it works and is a nice touch. Sigh. Honestly, the gameplay is probably the most flawed of any game that put over $2 in value into the pot because I really do think that some of the enemy patterns and especially their speed is trollish. But the action is also REALLY good in this, and it certainly offers the most intense challenge in the franchise yet. I think Voidrunner was more worthy of the “Super” title but this version of Gridrunner is fine. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89* Platform: Konix Multi-System Unreleased Work-in-Progress Prototype* (Ver 0.4) Designed by Jeff Minter
*Because this is so early into production that it doesn’t have win/fail conditions or even a title screen, I’m not issuing a verdict for it. It’s in the proof of concept stage of development, so please consider Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89 to be a special bonus for the collection and not a featured game.
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The Konix Multi-System was an ambitious and powerful game machine designed by some Sinclair castaways who founded a company called Flare Technology. The Konix started life as a platform/standard called “Flare One” that was used in a handful of unsuccessful arcade units before it became the Konix Multi-System. After the Multi-System was cancelled, the team didn’t give up and developed the Flare II, which did eventually get bought and released under a different name. You know it now as the Atari Jaguar. My sister said it best: “these guys should sell their life’s story. There’s a wacky dramedy in there somewhere.” Yeah, especially since at least one of them didn’t recognize Tempest 2000 as a good game. That actually explains a lot, come to think of it. Jeff developed this updated Mutant Camels game for it, but what’s here isn’t even close to a finished game. Be warned: I died just seconds into my first game when I got hit by a rocket. Not that it matters. There’s no lives and no limits to how often you can switch your guns. A BIG variety of guns, mind you, most of which are satisfying to use. It also controls well, but this isn’t close to finished. It makes for a one-of-a-kind curio though and is worth a look. I’m awarding $1 in bonus value to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story for it.
Llamatron: 2112 Platform: Atari ST via Atari Jaguar* Year: 1991 Designed by Jeff Minter
*UPDATE: I’ve gotten a few people who noted that this version is not a very good approximation of the ST original. Specifically the sound is considered exceptionally bad in this build. For collections like this, my review is for the version IN the collection. Sometime in the near future, I will try to play the original Atari ST build via an ST-specific emulator.
I wish every good game was also “uncomplicated good” like this.
Aww jeez. While watching the shareware portion of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, Jeff choked up when he talked about Llamatron, and that had me wiping tears. Unlike many shareware products of the 90s, Llamasoft just gave away the full Llamatron game and said “if you like it, please register it for £5.” Approximately eight hundred people did, but some didn’t just send him a “fiver.” They thought it was an underpay and sent him more. I didn’t know what to expect except a game that directly satirized the legendary Williams arcade classic Robotron: 2084. And it’s basically that, only with power-ups, warps, and a ton of wacky humor. There’s some genuinely inspired twists on the formula. Even environmental ones, despite keeping strictly to the Robotron formula. Like this:
The raindrops are lethal, but if you touch the closed umbrella that bounces around the stage, it stops raining. And if you find a pair of toe socks on your roof, please mail them back to me because this charmed my socks off.
Now, all is not perfect, as I don’t think the difficulty curve is well balanced at all. It starts off pretty good and feels like it scales properly, but then at level 18 (which you can warp to from level 13) the game straight up says “alright, you’ve had your fun. Now you must die.” I thought it was because I had warped, so on my second playthrough, I wasn’t going to…… only the damn item to warp sort of drifted over to me and I did it anyway. AND THEN IT DID IT AGAIN IN THE THIRD GAME! In the fourth game, I cheated and used save states to make sure I could finally play levels 14 – 17, and my hypothesis was wrong. Those levels scaled, more or less, how they should have, and then level 18 is just a gigantic wall with the words F*CK YOU! written on them.
If you’re playing on a console, yes, you can use classic Robotron twin-stick gameplay. Evercade users are kind of SOL there.
The good news is you get three continues, so it’s not like I *died died* on Level 18. I just burned through all the lives I built up, and then everything after level 18 feels like the game spontaneously switched from NORMAL to EXTRA HARD. As frustrating as that is, holy cow, Llamatron has a legitimate argument for being the best game in this entire collection. I’m not quite going there because I think Voidrunner and Tempest 2000 are exceptionally strong games, but please don’t mistake this as a Robotron clone (and actually please delete the word “clone” from your gaming vocabulary unless you’re talking about a literal carbon copy clone). But Llamatron is clearly in the top three. I wish there were a little more in the way of power-ups and I wish some elements didn’t flash as badly so I could have seen things better, but I really enjoyed this a lot. And by the by, since I know you’re reading this Digital Eclipse: will you get off your butts and get the Midway/Williams/Bally license so we can get a modern Midway Arcade Treasures? Please? Pretty please? Verdict: YES! – $8 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Awarded “Killer App” Status for Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Revenge of the Mutant Camels Platform: Atari ST via Atari Jaguar Year: 1991 Designed by Jeff Minter
That’s supposed to be Jeff Minter throwing llamas at me. I thought this was supposed to be a game about Mutant Camels, not based on the story of this Definitive Review.
I’ve heard that some people aren’t thrilled with the Atari ST emulation in this set, which runs through the Atari Jaguar’s emulator. For Llamatron (shrug) I pointed at something and it died. But for this final Mutant Camel game in the collection, there’s a pronounced sluggishness. Maybe that’s on brand for the Mutant Camel franchise, but jumping almost straight from Llamatron to this game, I felt the difference in responsiveness and wasn’t happy at all. So I must have hated Revenge of the Mutant Camels ST, right? I did at first, but once I got over the controls, I have to admit that I went from wishing to be done with it so I could FINALLY play Tempest 2000 to not being sad that I needed a few more rounds. The twist: an NPC helper (that can double as player two’s character if you go that route), worked well. I like how it works too: you can leave it to its own devices and let it just wander around and shoot things. Or, you can lay down and the goat will ride you, and it’ll target things more smartly.
The power-ups can become screen-filling if you upgrade them enough. By the way, those apples are shield refills. Apparently twelve is a full shield. I think it’s too small of increments for a game that controls this stiff and has this much action without this much movement flexibility. A division of eight would have been preferred.
The items did too, including some pretty inspired ones. Some items even do things like speed up the scrolling, which is useful in a game that’s about distance covered and not enemies slain. There’s even layers to the NPC too, since it can collect items independently that benefits you both. I still preferred having the goat ride me, but I’m all about player decisions and strategic flexibility. Meanwhile, while the level themes from the original Mutant Camels return, they just play better here, with more elegant enemy attacks (though not as good as Revenge II in my opinion). I’m still not happy with the movement, and there’s too many whammy items that screw with that movement, but the final computer game of this collection is a good finishing note. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Llamasoft – The Jeff Minter Story
Tempest 2000 Platform: Atari Jaguar Year: 1994 Designed by Jeff Minter
Also Included in Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration (Core Set)
I’m a fan of Tempest already, but this? It’s addictive in a way the original game isn’t. I also didn’t think I’d ever have a game this good (level 32, baby!) but this is easier to get the hang of than I expected.
When Jeff Minter met one of the architects of the Jaguar hardware, they were apparently unaware he was the designer of Tempest 2000 and proceeded to slam the game to him, saying it didn’t show off the potential of the Jaguar and was a “make-weight game” which I didn’t know what that meant but apparently it’s the same as me saying some games are +1s to collections, only without any potential for positivity (hey, I’ve praised many +1s). Anyway, the Jaguar designer wasn’t done, telling Jeff he thought it was “rubbish.” This isn’t one of those situations where I’m clutching my pearls saying “I can’t believe someone who was responsible for the Jaguar said that about Tempest 2000!” Actually, I could believe someone responsible for the Jaguar would say something so clueless because, going off the architecture of the Jaguar, it’s clear the people behind it wouldn’t know a decent video game if it sat on their face and had a little wiggle. Tempest 2000 is a bonafide masterpiece, Jeff’s finest hour, and one of the greatest video games ever made.
And the best part is, if you want just the original, no frills Tempest, only updated for the Jaguar (and without the spinner, obviously), that’s here too. Or, you can play Tempest Plus, which also offers features like a permanent CPU assistant. I thought this made the game a little too easy since the CPU is one of the better independent CPU drones in an action game. It IS reliable and doesn’t just blindly follow you around. But really, the meat of the game is the Tempest 2000 mode that has power-ups. The main one is a gun that’s better at carpeting the channels with bullets while moving. One brings back the drone from Tempest Plus and it’s just as useful and intelligent as it was in that game. And then one grants you the ability to jump. A jump with TONS of hang time that allows you to rain bullets on enemies that have reached the surface. I loved this jump. I’d put it right up there with Pac-Mania’s jump in the annals of all-time underrated gaming jumps.
Some of the shapes are hard to know which channels the things are on. Thankfully you can pull the camera back, but I rarely used it.
Even better is you get a bomb EVERY stage, and you also get an extra life every 20,000 points. You can even build up more lives than the game is capable of displaying. It’s one of Jeff’s most generous games, and it’s not as hard as you would think. It does eventually show its teeth, but it takes a while to get there. Maybe a couple dozen levels, but it’s never boring even when you have to start over from the beginning. I mean, you don’t HAVE to start over. The game offers a “key” system that allows you to continue from a previous point. Honestly, I preferred just to start over. The action in Tempest 2000 is just amazing. It’s so much more balanced than the coin-op original. This is the rare arcade-like game that remembers that it already has the player’s money and isn’t trying to siphon as many quarters as possible. It’s balanced, and it’s so fun. Believe all the hype on this one. Well, almost all of it.
Somewhere in Titus’ headquarters, their executives were playing Tempest 2000 and someone actually liked the bonus stage and said “I feel like Superman flying through these rings.” And then a light bulb went off. A horrible, horrible light bulb. Yes, I’m blaming Jeff Minter for Superman 64. I blame Jeff for everything. I stubbed my toe while waking up this morning and shook my fist. “GODDAMMIT JEFF!” I don’t know why my family is looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. There really is a Jeff Minter! He lives on a magical llama farm and he makes pretty lights flash on the TV screen! “Sure he does, sweetie. You’re still taking your medicine, right?”
Yeah, the two bonus stages I managed to find weren’t very good at all. One of them involved flying through rings while the other involved staying on a green road. Neither of them feels at all connected to Tempest in any way, shape, or form. The cynic in me figured these were mandated by Atari to show off the 3D capabilities of the Jaguar but Jeff told me I was wrong and that he just figured players would want a break. I’d preferred bonus stages that were still twists on the shooting action. But it’s not a deal breaker. Tempest 2000 is the rare shooting gallery-style game that feels like it’s fun for everyone. And hell, if *I* could get nearly 500,000 points (though I never did end up getting #1 on the leaderboard, which is that 500K mark) anyone should be able to. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story even allows you to overclock the Jaguar emulator to play at 60fps AND you can turn on analog controls. It’s never looked or played better. What more can I say? Sometimes, legends live up to the hype. Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
But, if you already own Atari 50, you can remove this entirely from the tally. It won’t matter. WINNER: Best Game in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
Gridrunner: Remastered Platform: Reimagined Year: 2023 Designed by Mike J. Mika Published by Digital Eclipse
I wish I had cut straight to this game after finishing the original Commodore 64 Gridrunner, which this game utilizes the code for. It would have been a delight if I had put my whole play session with it immediately following the C64 game. But, after playing Matrix and Voidrunner, it feels like a reduction.
Yeah, this is weird because it wouldn’t have been my first choice to get the full remastered treatment among the games in this set. I’d preferred something like Sheep in Space, Voidrunner, or even Laser Zone for that. Hell, even Hellgate would have been preferred. Don’t get me wrong: this is the best version of the original Gridrunner in this collection and a damn fun game in its own right. It’s much easier to tell when the lasers are going to fire. It’s much easier to tell when the pods are about to ripen. I was even able to deal with the last segments of the centipede better. It looks fantastic and modern. Getting the kids to try the “old” games in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story was challenging, but if you paint over that old game with new graphics, it’s a cinch. I know this because the kids wanted to try it, and they liked it. A lot. Much like the Yars’ Revenge remastering in Atari 50, there’s nothing inherently sacred about the way the game looked in 1983. If Jeff could have made it look like this, he would have. Hell, he would have made it even more trippy. But a fun game is a fun game. That’s all I care about. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
One hundred and sixty-one hours of gameplay later and I’m finally done. Sigh. I made it.
*I* thought Tempest 2000’s versus mode was a lot of fun. In theory at least, but nobody else in my house liked it so I couldn’t get quality time with it. I was stunned because this seemed like the type of pick-up-and-play game that I can usually get at least a half-an-hour out of them with. The idea is you’re on opposite sides of the tube and you can either win by shooting them down OR generating enemies that eventually get them. Again, I’d have loved to have played more but I had no willing opponents. Maybe I’m wrong because literally nobody else in my house liked it. Jeez fam. And people think *I’m* hard to please.
FINAL TOTAL
YES!: 25 NO!: 16 Total Game Value: $92 (including the $1 bonus for the Konix prototype) Features & Emulation: $30 Total Fines: $15 Target Value: $30 Actual Value of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story: $107
This is one of the best collections in terms of value for your dollar I’ve reviewed so far. Let’s play around with the combinations. As I noted above, if you already own Atari 50, go ahead and cross out $15 for Tempest 2000. Even removing the highest earning game in this set and you’re still at three-times the value of the price. And let’s say you really don’t give a squirt about old magazine ads or concept art. Drop the Features & Emulation total from $30 to $20. You’re still at $82 in value. God damn! Okay, let’s add back that $10 because you SHOULD think concept art and magazine ads are cool. What if this was “Gridrunner: The Jeff Minter Story” and it only featured games from that series? The Gridrunner franchise by itself earned $35 and made up the price of the setby themselves.
Since Tempest 2000 is in the best-selling Atari 50, I gave Voidrunner and Llamatron separate “Killer App” status awards. If I had only picked one, I would have gone with Voidrunner because I think it offers a more elegant twist on Centipede than Llamatron does with Robotron. And ultimately, Voidrunner is the reason why I’m not deleting the collection from my Switch 2 to save space. I’m not entirely sure I would fire up Llamatron again.
Commodore 64 games earned $35 in value. Commodore VIC-12 games earned $15 in value, for a combined value of $58. Sinclair fans, please don’t hate me. These were not the best games to show off your favorite 80s PC. The ZX Spectrum earned $0 while the ZX81 at least got on the scoreboard with $1. Atari platforms earned $35, with the ST putting up $13 of that, $15 from Tempest on the Jag, and Atari 8-Bit computers getting $7. So what if you’re NOT a fan of old computers? Uh, hello! Guys, I’m 36! I grew up with Windows. I’ve literally never touched a real Commodore computer. If I can enjoy these games, anyone can. Almost all of them are arcade games in everything but name. This isn’t a set for old timey computers. It’s a set for great video games that anyone can enjoy. It’s a fantastic set made by a fantastic designer of games, and I’m happy to have finally played through it.
The Rocky Horror Show Game Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Steam Released October 20, 2024 Developed by Freakzone Games $9.99 kept incorrectly adding the word “Picture” in the making of this review. It’s JUST “The Rocky Horror Show Video Game.”
The Nintendo Switch version was played for this review.
OH MY GOD! It’s…..It’s….. It’s the villain from Congo! Get ’em away from me! Yuck! I hated that f*cking movie!
In the interest of full disclosure, I’m friends with Freakzone Games, which is one guy: Sam. Now, I never factor friendships into the verdicts of my reviews, but I figure you should know that I like Sam as a person and as a game maker, in that order. That’s in contrast to the 1975 motion picture The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I don’t like at all. It bores me, but it’s nothing personal. I just don’t like musicals. I usually don’t watch them unless they involve Disney animation or, more rarely, giant carnivorous plants and evil dentists. Now I’m from a family of cinephiles and the lone hold out in my family for Rocky Horror fandom, so it’s not like I’m unfamiliar with it. Rocky Horror Picture Show for me is in the same boat as other “cult” movies like The Room or Manos: Hands of Fate (ironically another flick that Freakzone adapted) in that I have tried so many times to sit all the way through it and have never come close to finishing the film in a single sitting. It’s not for me, which in theory means the game isn’t for me, right? Well, it’s not that simple. Even if you’re not a fan, I can explain why you’ll want to keep reading with a single screenshot. This one:
Actually, change that, because I meant “it’s actually a satire of games using a Rocky Horror foundation.” Don’t mistake this for Castlevania because it doesn’t play anything like any of those games. The gameplay is more like the Sega Master System/Game Gear classics starring Mickey Mouse that I genuinely think are some of the best 8-bit games ever. Specifically the 8-bit Castle of Illusion and Land of Illusion games (Legend of Illusion sucks) where you pick up crates that can be thrown at enemies or stacked for platforming. Take that gameplay concept and turn it into a death-count punisher and you have The Rocky Horror Show Video Game. The best thing I can say about Rocky Horror is that it confirmed to me that throwing crates at things is just about the most satisfying attack method a 2D platformer can have. It’s hard to screw up, and Sam didn’t. It controls great too. The two biggest things that he had to get right, action and play control, he nailed.
I died about, oh, one microsecond after this picture was taken.
The gameplay is little more than a skeleton for plenty of saucy humor and a satire on classic gaming at large. Yep, like his (fantastic) Angry Video Game Nerd games (has it really already been four years since I reviewed those?), Sam used Rocky Horror to poke those precious, precious memberberries with a stick. The Rocky Horror Show Video Game is overflowing with gags and direct homages on video games and game design. It apparently even kind of takes shots at the culture surrounding the Rocky Horror film. Sometimes it’s really subtle. I’m tone deaf so take this with a grain of salt, but I could swear I heard a tiny riff from the soundtrack of the Capcom NES classic Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers at one point.
There’s six of those disco balls in the game, which I think can become permanently out of reach if you die trying to get the crates to build a ladder to them. I got 3 out of 6 in my two sessions.
Now any satire like this is ultimately going to devolve into “hey, you know that thing you know about? I too know about that thing you know about and I made reference to it in my thing!” Sam isn’t THAT lazy about it and puts a small little twist on his references, but they are still just references at the end of the day. If you’re someone who laughs at those types of jokes without fail, you’ll probably like Rocky Horror even more than I did. That stuff doesn’t really land with me, but that’s kind of liberating because it allows me to focus on JUST the gameplay. For the Rocky Horror references, my sister Angela, a fan of Rocky Horror, was kind enough to watch me play and, while she had a valid criticism that I’ll get to later, she said that fans of the film will recognize lines, and the timing and delivery of the Rocky Horror-related humor was, more or less, on par with the film. Now whether fans of the film would want to play a punisher-platformer is another matter altogether. Angela was stunned by the genre. She thought the game would resemble something like Undertale, which would lend itself more to the film. “I don’t want to play a hard game where I’ll die a lot. I want a Rocky Horror video game experience. I won’t be able to finish this!”
I’m pretty sure there’s only three basic enemy types: the skeletons pictured here, brains that float at you, and ghosts that have what I assume is a famous scream from a sound library. It’s not a very big variety which is a bit of a bummer since the combat is satisfying.
As a raw video game, Rocky Horror is good but not great. It’s not at all gripping like the Angry Video Game Nerd 1 & 2 Deluxe was. The gameplay and level settings are too repetitive for that. Unlike AVGN, I really think the license here was too limiting for anything really imaginative. This is a standard point-A to point-B game with no items to find. There are health upgrades but they’re literally given to you at the start of stages or during one boss sequence. Only one boss is really played differently from the others, as it’s done like an avoider (this was the joke that landed best with Angela, though she missed the Donkey Kong joke that was attached to it). There’s no lives and no fail conditions. You can’t game over, so if you die, you restart from a nearby checkpoint, and the game is VERY generous with checkpoints. Rinse and repeat until you defeat Tim Curry three times and the credits roll.
After beating the game once, you unlock “new game plus” which pays homage to the midnight screening culture of Rocky Horror where people dress up and scream things at the screen. As far as gags go, I suppose this is a pretty fitting one. If you’re into that sort of thing. Angela suggested a “fill in your own dialog” option to be a true tribute to this culture.
My biggest knock easily is that the game gets off to a slow start. The structure of the film had to be obeyed, so the game starts with one character (representing two characters) hopping through some shockingly bland level design. That part had me very worried. The twist is that Rocky Horror has three playable characters, but while the gameplay is identical with all three, you’ll eventually replay some of the levels you already experienced, only with additional obstacles or enemies. For what it’s worth, that opening level that I thought was BORING actually becomes a very good stage when you factor-in all the stuff that will eventually be added to the replay later on with a different character. But this also means Freakzone Games sacrificed the first level to this concept. You can’t do that sh*t! The first level IS your first impression, and if it’s too bland, it could be the only impression you ever make. There’s nothing stopping a player from turning off the game and never turning it back on.
Sam, do you see me making games? No? Then DON’T DO MY JOB FOR ME! You stay in your lane, and I’ll stay in mine.
It’s also a really short game. Like, you should be able to finish your first play session in a couple hours at most, even if you die a lot, with a lot of that time eaten up by unskippable cut scenes. I died over 100 times and I still finished it in less time than it took to watch three episodes of Welcome to Derry, aka “why did we pass on Stranger Things?” Most of the level design comes down to stacking blocks to jump over walls or reach staircases or timing-based traps. Most of the obstacles aren’t enemies but rather spikes. Spiky balls that appear and disappear. Bigger spiky balls that fall from the ceiling when you get near them. The bosses are Mario 2/Castle of Illusion “throw the crates at the thing until you win” fights. Boilerplate stuff, but well-made boilerplate stuff. Seriously, if you want a perfectly decent platformer that costs $10 or less and will eat up three hours or less of your life (in theory I bet a person could beat this in an hour on their first try if they play well enough), this isn’t a bad choice for that just on its gameplay merits. The Rocky Horror theme or video game parodies that didn’t land with me could be the icing on the cake for you.
The other big “obstacle” is limiting the visibility to a spotlight that follows the player. I’ve never been a fan of this, but it’s fine here. It didn’t change my mind about this overused and overrated trope. It’s okay, or more accurately, tolerable in Rocky Horror.
Did I have fun? Yes, and since this wasn’t made for me, I guess that speaks volumes to how good Sam is at this, right? That’s assuming my original “not made for me” hypothesis is correct. But what would a Rocky Horror fan say about this? “I don’t get it,” said Angela. “Rocky Horror is defined by being a musical. Making a game that’s anything BUT a musical means it’s not really Rocky Horror, is it? It’s just something that looks like Rocky Horror.” But Angela isn’t a gamer and has no real vested interest in gaming history or culture. And NOW I get it. I was wrong about not being this game’s target audience. I either am or I’m a generation shy of that audience. What Sam did here isn’t made for Rocky Horror fans first and foremost. It’s a game for people like me who wonder “whose bright idea was it to make a Back to the Future NES game? That doesn’t work as an action game! It’s a f*cking fantasy romance! The structure is complete f*cking wrong for the type of game they made!”
And that’s really the thing about the Rocky Horror game. These sprites could have been for anything, for any movie license, and the same applies for the video game reference jokes that were made. The same jokes could have been made if this was a platformer based on It’s A Wonderful Life or Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Why not? The sprites just happen to look like Rocky Horror sprites because that’s the license Sam was using. I did have fun. I really did. But the actual gameplay of The Rocky Horror Show Video Game is as generic as it gets. Sorry, Sam. I hope you know I love you. Seriously folks, Angela and me have been working on a superhero TV show concept for years now, and if it were to actually get made as a TV show and we were to ever license it for THIS type of platform game (even though it wouldn’t work as that but this is a hypothetical), Sam would not only be my first choice for developer, but he would be my only choice. If we offer him the license to make our superhero show as this type of platforming game and he says no, the game doesn’t happen. Ever. That’s how much stock I put in his ability.
The joke is that if they had made a Rocky Horror game in 1988 to 1991 at the peak of the NES, it’d be like this, only without the swearing and innuendos. As a quick aside, I hate it when games like this cuss. I know that sounds weird coming from me, but it breaks my immersion that I’m playing a lost game from that era. Either way, Rocky Horror doesn’t fit the platforming genre at all. THAT’S THE JOKE. The fact that a decent game is attached to that joke is just a bonus. Rocky Horror didn’t sell well, but I think it could be rescued because point-of-sale eShops are not the way to sell this thing. What Sam and his partners on this project need to do is find a publishing partner who will distribute physical copies of this in places like Spirit Halloween or Spencer’s Gifts. Spencer’s actually has a board game section with satires like Tipsy Land (a drinking game version of Candy Land). Why not video game satires? At least, that’s how you land casual fans. For everyone else? Yeah, it’s going to be problematic.
I didn’t want to spoil this but I think I have to. The opening dialog is framed like Legend of Zelda, right down to the music sounding just similar enough to fire-up your memberberries. It’s well done. I think people who see THIS would immediately get “oh, this isn’t a Rocky Horror game. It’s a game satire with a Rocky Horror theme.” But it doesn’t mean squat if you can’t even get the target audience to view a trailer or click the eShop page. Even media coverage won’t make a difference with non-fans because, AGAIN, the non-fan still has to click through and stay focused long enough to find out IT’S NOT JUST ROCKY HORROR GAME! I don’t know how you do that. A different logo maybe? Maybe it can’t be done.
So like, how do you get the word out on games like this? How do you get someone who would like this type of parody but not a Rocky Horror game to click the game’s page on an eShop? How do you get someone who isn’t a Rocky Horror fan to click a trailer? Because, gang, those are the questions that need answers if we want this to be a viable genre, and I think we do, right? More importantly, if you want rights holders to famous non-gaming IPs to give small developers like Sam these big licenses to work with, SOMEONE has to figure out the answer to that, because I really want more indie devs to land these famous licenses. I want stuff like this to keep coming out. But if I hadn’t been friends with Sam, I’d never even given this game a second thought. A license by itself is only going to appeal to the fans of the license. That’s why you get the f*cking license in the first place, right? But, depending on the license, it can be just as much a barrier to your target audience as it is an attraction. With all due respect Sam, it’s not up to me or anyone in gaming media to get the word out that Rocky Horror isn’t ROCKY HORROR in capital letters. You have to do that……… somehow. How? I dunno. Hey, you’re the one who wanted this license. You figure it out.
I hope what I wrote about the game doesn’t make it sound bland or anything. When Rocky Horror finds its teeth, it’s a damn solid platformer. It’s not amazing, but it’s not average, either. Especially the home stretch with the wheelchair guy. FYI, it controls exactly the same. There’s no skidding or anything like that. It’s just a different sprite, but the challenge is pretty high once he shows up, and I enjoyed it very much. Sometimes I just want a simple, stupid, no frills platformer that controls perfectly, you know?
Every single maker of games who nabs a famous but audience-specific license, from AAAs to small indie studios, is going to face the same “getting the word out that our game is actually FOR EVERYONE” problem. The recent Garbage Pail Kids game certainly struggled with that. I have no idea how well GPK sold, but I don’t think it did great, even though it’s a very good video game. I LOVED IT, and I’m not a fan at all of Garbage Pail Kids as a franchise. For the studio and publishers behind Garbage Pail Kids, that sounds like a dream scenario, doesn’t it? Even a non-fan loved it! But the truth is, if I had not been a game critic, I would have never played Garbage Pail Kids. Judging by how the review has done, I don’t think many non-GPK fans have read it, either. I only started playing it because I thought I could get interesting content out of it. I had no clue how much I would like it. Maybe they’re proud I liked it and gave it a glowing review, but 99.99% of your audience isn’t making content. They just want a fun game for their money, and maybe your license isn’t the blessing you thought it was. How do you get someone who thinks Garbage Pail Kids are stupid but loves NES platformers to play a really well made NES platformer with a GPK license? Good question, and I don’t have the answer.
Same with Rocky Horror. If Sam and I hadn’t been friends for over a decade (he even put an IGC easter egg in his Spectacular Sparky game), I wouldn’t have played it. I had fun with these games, so presumably gamers like me, and I consider myself the average gamer, would enjoy them too regardless of their love or hate of the IP. I feel horrible that this didn’t find its audience, because I know that the potential pool of satisfied customers is massive. A solidly designed platform game? Excellent play control? Fantastic chiptune soundtrack (UPDATE: Angela could easily recognize several chiptune renditions of film’s songs, which this review originally mentioned but I accidentally cut that line. My bad!). Decent enough combat (wish there had been a bigger variety of it). Good challenge? Doesn’t wear out its welcome? Yeah, this is a good, solid game. I don’t even mind the length since the amount of obstacles and enemies is so limited. If he wasn’t going to add more, I’m happy he didn’t just keep recycling for the sake of padding the playtime. The worst thing I could say about Rocky Horror is that it’s a bit of a slow riser, which hurts a little since it’s such a short game, but that’s not a deal breaker. I liked this regardless of the license, but that might not be the win for Sam that it sounds like on paper. The license doesn’t target everyone, does it? It targets Rocky Horror fans. A movie famous for taking a long time to find its audience and not doing well upon release. I’m guessing Sam wasn’t aiming for THIS direct of a tribute. Verdict: YES!
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind Platforms: Everything. I think even refrigerators have it. Released December 10, 2024 Developed by Digital Eclipse $34.99 has a headache in the making of this review.
The Nintendo Switch version was played for this review.
That’s not Zordon. That’s the sit-up champion of the 27th century. Hold on, this DOES have time travel! Holy sh*t, is this a Bill & Ted game? HOLD ON, Bill and Ted are teenagers with attitude too! Dude. Someone make this crossover happen.
Last year, I reviewed all twelve Mighty Morphin Power Rangers games of the 1990s. Of those twelve games, two out of twelve scored YES! votes and ten scored NO!s. And hell, one of those YES! votes was for Jetman, a Super Sentai with no ties to the “Mighty Morphin” era that I only included because “why not?” So the bar to clear for “best Mighty Morphin Power Rangers game” is set so low that I’m pretty sure the Tyrannosaurus Zord breaks through the bar when Jason summons it. There’s NO WAY Digital Eclipse could screw this up. They’re Digital Eclipse! They ran the table for original games in Atari 50! They did Alice in Wonderland for the Game Boy Color, a difficult movie to translate to video game form, and they nailed it! They seem to know what they’re doing! Sigh. After playing Rita’s Rewind, I’ve come to the conclusion Power Rangers is a cursed video game franchise. There’s no other explanation. I would have bet all the money in my pocket against all the money in yours that Digital Eclipse would have knocked this f*cker out of the park and created the hands-down best Power Rangers game of all-time beyond any dispute. They didn’t, and I’m still going with the Game Gear release for that title. What happened?
Oh right, that happened. And a lot of other “that happened” happenings happened.
When it sticks to the brawler parts of the game, Rita’s Rewind is mostly okay. Mostly. The combat, borrowing liberally from the classic arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle games, has a nice high-impact OOMPHfulness to it that feels weighty and violent. The puddies make for good Foot Clan stand-ins and come in a wide variety, including three-headed giant-sized ones. They could have done the whole game like this with a single Megazord sequence and I think the reception would have been much more enthusiastic. By that, I think people would have universally said “meh, it’s fine” and yeah, it probably would have been the best Rangers game. Don’t get me wrong: Rewind’s brawling segments are nowhere near as good as Shredder’s Revenge. Don’t expect that. Not even close. The level design isn’t as strong, the combat is a step below, and some of the level settings are pretty damn dull. The best stage is easily one set in a carnival. As for the rest? Well, um…….. Oh boy, that carnival level was nice!
The big hook, the “time disruptors” are bombs you have to ping to death before they blow up. When they do, the action is rewound and you have to do everything in that screen again, only the damage you caused to the jar remains. The good news is, if you used a bomb before the explosion, you get the bomb back. Either way, the kids hated this part. Even Sasha the Kid says if she could cut one thing, this would be it, even more than the instakills or the length of the zord levels.
And there’s some really irritating decisions that were totally unnecessary, like losing every drop of your bomb charge if you fall off a pit. That’s too damn stiff a penalty for such a mundane thing. If your meter is charged all the way and you fall into a pit, you lose the bomb. F*ck that sh*t! Just take a tick off health! That’s tradition! Sucking possibly a whole bomb bar dry is borderline player abuse. Digital Eclipse made a big mistake there, because, get this, BOMBS IN BRAWLING GAMES AREN’T JUST BOMBS! They’re monotony breakers. When the same old fisticuffs start to wear thin, the meter is charged and you can unleash a satisfying, screen-clearing mega shot, and suddenly the punching and jump kicks aren’t as dull as they felt a second ago. Taking THAT away from your players as a penalty for such a run of the mill screw-up as falling into a pit is absurd, especially when a health slap makes sense on every possible level. Why would falling into a hole take away power from the f*cking Power Rangers?
And the bombs are SO cool too.
Having a variety of rangers doesn’t help thanks to an especially annoying level-up system. Their heart was in the right place, but if someone doesn’t finish a stage, they earn no XP and thus no upgrades. The system also discourages switching characters between levels because the stats are linked to the characters and not the players, which in essence blocks players from freshening up the experience. I know Sasha and I wanted to change rangers BUT we didn’t want to reset our stats, locking us into the Pink and Red Rangers for the full length of the quest. So an element that in theory should keep the game fresh and engaging instead does the complete opposite. Again, great in theory, but not so great when you factor in the ramifications of it.
There are a few cute touches, like if you smack a swing hard enough, it’ll go around the top bar. Cool.
But the brawling is still the main attraction, warts and all, and sometimes it does rise above average. There’s plenty of health refills and just enough moves to change things up. Decent boss battles with plenty of platforming-like timing attacks. The final boss, Robo Rita, incorporates the classic “knock the enemy’s energy blast back at them” trope, which I’ve never seen done in a brawler before but it worked wonderfully. In general, the brawling is never bad, but it never wowed me, either (outside of the Robo Rita fight. A very well done final boss). On the other hand, there’s tons of hidden stuff to find. Stuff that’s more well hidden than in Shredder’s Revenge. In that game, only once did we have to replay a stage to find something we missed. In this game, we never found everything, so they must have actually put effort into it. If you have a better time than I did, that should add to the replay value.
I really did enjoy most aspects of the brawling bosses, which often lean heavily into forcing players into timing-based jumping sequences to avoid their hits. Like here, Turkey Jerk spins around with this laser and it’s like the Sweeper event from Wipeout. I do think some of the attack sequences went too long or had too many invincibility frames but, meh, the brawling bosses are fine. They just never “do it” for me the same way TMNT does.
If they had just left it at the brawling, I could end the review here and call Rita’s Rewind a YES! and maybe, possibly, the best Power Rangers game ever. But the game does a lot more than brawling. There’s multiple other gameplay styles in Rita’s Rewind, and not as mini-games. Oh no. We’re talking either full levels or extended sequences within levels. The best of them is probably a section on a roller coaster fashioned like a shooting gallery. You move crosshairs to blast puddies out of the sky and ultimately fight a version of Eyeguy on the ride. Even though it lasts longer than I expected, it’s fun. The one kid who stuck with me for the full length of the game, Sasha the Kid, also enjoyed it the most of any of the non-brawling stuff. It controls great and there’s no sponge to the enemies. The roller coaster setting worked. This was arguably the highlight of the game.
Everything else is kind of a (day of the) dumpster fire. The Zords sequences had me so pumped the first time they started-up, a feeling that intensified when I felt how good they controlled. It’s basically Star Fox 64, only with Power Ranger zords. The excitement didn’t last very far into the first stage, though. These three levels are just not exciting at all and go twice the length or longer than they should. That’s not to mention that the Star Fox 64 comparison only applies if you’re using the Pink Ranger and flying the Pterodactyl Zord, which is, more or less, a stripped-down Star Fox Arwing. Since she flies, it makes for a much more fun, combat-focused experience where you don’t have to worry about, you know, dying instantly. If you’re curious how the other zords work, well, you have to jump like an endless running platformer mixed with Star Fox 64. This is pretty important, because the level design incorporates the occasional gap or narrow bridge you have to cross, and if you use any other character but Kimberly, you run the risk of falling into the pit. In the Zord stages, falling into a pit doesn’t just take off a tick of health and reset you. You lose a life.
The Zord levels have their moments, but those are few and far between.
Between this and losing your bomb meter from pits in the brawling stages, most of the kids said “peace out” and refused to continue even when we reached the Megazord sequence (more on that later). I did convince them to come back for the next brawler level, which was followed by a motorcycle level that’s sort of like Road Rash with Power Rangers. It seemed fun at first, until even more instakill traps that come on faster and are harder to spot arrived. The kids’ lives drained out and it was at that point they were done for good. And I mean for good, as they didn’t even want to hop on and off for the brawling levels because they were furious about the penalty for the pits. Sasha and I started over with me as the Pink Ranger and her as the Red Ranger and we did finish the game, and it was just barely okay as a two player experience from start to finish. “Are you giving it a YES!?” she asked, and I honestly didn’t know until I went back to playing single player to gather media for this review. I was thinking of giving it a split decision.
I didn’t discover until I switched over to a different save file that Sasha and I, by beating the game, unlocked a bunch of bonus options that include, among other things, eliminating the time disruptions that *I* thought was the game’s most clever twist but the children HATED. Perhaps the most important unlock is “Equal Rangers” which eliminates the poorly thought-out level-up system that really doesn’t mix well with levels that can end with one player dying via pits, meaning they don’t earn XP to upgrade their stats. I made one final pitch to bring the children back to the game with these options and they declined, saying “let us know when you’re ready to play Marvel Cosmic Invasion.”
Playing Power Rangers solo was a total f*cking slog that made it feel like I was watching my own green candle burn out. The game is too optimized for multiplayer, yet the Zord levels really, really don’t lend themselves to multiplayer either. One person will have the desirable Star Fox-like Zord, and everyone else has to deal with jumping on stages where jumping ain’t fun. There were only two aspects of the game that worked better while playing solo. In my opinion, the two motorcycle levels were much, MUCH stronger playing them alone. Far less chaotic, which made it easier to keep track of the barriers that are instakills. Hell, I’d even say they were the best stages in the entire solo game, like those levels were meant to only be single player all-along. The other strong design is the first-person Punch-Out!!-like Megazord sequences. Those really are just like Punch-Out!!, only from first person and with the ability to move forward and backward.
Telero-Megazord.
“How does it work in multiplayer?” You take turns. None of the kids liked that format at all, but I’m really not sure what else they could have done. When I played with Sasha the Kid, rather than alternate so we’d both be half-invested in the action, I just let her take both controllers and do the Megazord stuff herself. The format causes several extended breaks in the action and screws up the tempo because there has to be a pause to switch players. Then, after you fill up all four Power Sword meters, you have to button mash to charge up the energy of the power sword, though this seems to be a “for funsies” thing that doesn’t make or break you if you fail to score the killing blow. The stage ended either way and we still got an “S” ranking one time when we failed to destroy the boss. Let it be said we both kind of liked the Megazord stuff, especially the third and final one, which I won’t spoil for you but you can probably guess what it is. Here’s a hint: do…do-do…do-do-do.
The settings for the Zord sequences are pretty dull. I wish there had been one running through the city.
This was so tough to come up with the verdict for because it was either going to just barely be a YES! or just barely be a NO! After careful consideration, I’m going with the NO! I didn’t have more fun than not with Rita’s Rewind. Its lows are easily lower than the highest highs, but it was the mostly valueless single player side of the equation that was the deciding factor. Rita’s Rewind is one of those Jack of All Trades games that has strong aspects but, unlike Megazord, it just never comes together. Every aspect that works is rendered a little less potent by all dull sections, and NONE of the gameplay types, even the shooting gallery stuff that we enjoyed, mixes well with any other gameplay element.
Ugh, I mean look at that. It LOOKS boring doesn’t it?!
The Zord levels needed their length cut by at least half, and even then, they lack the interesting settings. They’re even more boring in single player. Like in the first Zord level, it feels like it takes FOREVER to drain Goldar’s health, turning the first Zord encounter into a chore. There’s other things that held me back. In the brawling sections, the rangers never feel distinct enough, something that could have been fixed with some unmorphed sequences. If you use the power weapons, I never noticed it, or figured out how to. There’s no Dragonzord in Fighting Mode with his sick ass drill sword. There’s no Ultrazord. There’s no Power Blaster. In the zord mode, the items wear off too quickly and having one character who flies and four who don’t feels like a good way to start fights among friends. The biggest problem of all is you need multiple people for maximum enjoyment, yet the Zord levels and the motorcycle levels are noticeably less fun because of how visually loud the explosions are. We ALL struggled to keep track of where we were in the Zord levels, even me and I was flying. Yet, YOU NEED EXPLOSIONS or it ain’t Power Rangers.
You remember how the Juice Bar had arcade machines? Yeah, you can play those. They include a combative racing game, a game I will talk about after the verdict, and this knock-off of Time Pilot (which I reviewed in Konami SHMUPs: The Definitive Review) that I didn’t really like at all. Two of the three games were really dull and one led to the absolute stupidest hour of my entire life.
I think there’s a problem inherent to Power Rangers as a franchise that prevents it from being a great video game. It’s not the cheese or being a children’s show. It’s all the crap you have to include to make it feel like a Rangers game. To Digital Eclipse’s infinite credit, they did try to fit it all in here, but Star Fox 64-like gameplay is not compatible with a brawler. Not even in a wacky juxtaposition type of way, especially if you have a multiplayer focus because some players will inevitably prefer one style of game over another, and possibly dislike another style so much they no longer want to play. That’s what happened at my house. A developer’s only other option is to, in theory, optimize to one specific aspect of the show for a game, except it’s been tried before, and it doesn’t work either.
The Zord sequences where you have to blow up these bases didn’t go over well with anyone.
There was a Power Rangers Dino Thunder Gamecube game that was pretty mediocre that was just the Zords. It was boring. The SNES disaster Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie: The Game: The Ride: The Broadway Musical was just the Rangers with no Zord gameplay at all and it was heartbreaking to the point that any lingering goodwill the game might have earned from previous highlights was totally erased. Famicom’s Zyuranger didn’t have Megazord stuff either. You kind of NEED the Megazord stuff, or it won’t feel like Power Rangers. But you also need the weapons and you need the rubber suit monsters and you probably even need the teenagers with attitude unmorphed for that sense of empowerment. They’re kids turning into superheroes, but if you don’t actually get to proactively make that change, it’s not really like the show then, is it? Hell, even Digital Eclipse skipped that part. There’s no unmorphed action at all in Rita’s Rewind. Even if it had just been at the start of first level, just for contrast’s sake, it would have been preferred to having no unmorphed action at all. So, I don’t think Rita’s Rewind is more fun than not. It’s a slightly better than average brawler with multiplayer, but it’s not JUST a brawling game. Add up all the ways this does work and subtract all the ways it doesn’t and you end up with more boredom than fun. Maybe that’s because Power Rangers just doesn’t lend itself to gaming. Verdict: NO!
And by the way, the most fun I had with this set was one of the three arcade games in the Juice Bar, Karate Chopshop. You have to karate chop a variety of objects by using up as little of a meter as possible. Digital Eclipse could probably make some decent scratch by releasing this as a stand alone mobile game. It’s pretty addictive. It was the most fun I had with Power Rangers, even more than the peaks of the brawling sections. I couldn’t put it down. But, come on, it’s not worth close to $34.99 or even 80% off that by itself.
Once Upon a Katamari Available on All Major Platforms Played on an Xbox Series X Released October 24, 2025 Developed by RENGAME Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment $39.99 smacked into a wall in the making of this review. This Review was played ONLY on an Xbox Series X.
IMPORTANT: As I was finishing this review, it was announced that UPDATES AND DLC ARE COMING, but unless they add more original, fresh level concepts, it won’t flip my verdict. The DLC is just more music and accessories. Nope, that won’t be enough. But, I try to be fair so I will play post-patchwork and write an update in the near future. This is why you stopped reviewing new games, Cathy, ya dummy.
SPOILER WARNING THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES LEVEL THEMES, THE END GAME, AND SPOILS THE PLOT SHORT SUMMARY: AN UNSATISFYING REHASH MY VERDICT IS A FIRM NO!
Party like it’s 2005! Let’s all wear Ugg boots and gossip about Paris Hilton! In fairness, this is one of two new concepts I really enjoyed. The innovation? Wind. The theme? Tumbleweeds. That’s not a bad idea. There’s a lot of “not a bad idea” ideas in Once Upon a Katamari. I can’t believe I didn’t like this more.
“I hope the next Katamari isn’t a REROLL, but a completely modern Katamari that feels modern. I say that because I can’t say I’ve played a game that maximizes the Katamari concept’s potential. I don’t think it exists yet.“
That’s what I said in my review for We ♥ Katamari: REROLL. Cue the sad trombone noise, because THAT game still doesn’t exist. Once Upon A Katamari, the first brand new Katamari game on a console since 2009, still looks and feels like a game from twenty years ago. It’s not like Katamari Damacy ever felt cutting edge to begin with (even if it actually was), but it could get away with it because it was such a novel concept of a game. Now it’s 2025, and Katamari as a gameplay mechanic is established and even part of pop culture. So my demoralizing disappointment in Once Upon a Katamari mostly confirmed my suspicion that I would not be nostalgic for the way games looked in the PS1/PS2 era. But it’s not just the outdated graphics that deflated my experience. I was enjoying the new game when I first started playing it. The idea that I would be writing such a largely negative review never entered my mind, but as the game went along, I realized I wasn’t having as much fun as I thought I would be. Finally I had to admit that this is too much of a rehash and I’m kind of over the same old thing.
I did plow through to get 100% of the achievements. The final unlock was a second stage based around rolling up the cousins, and ONLY the cousins. Those were both two of the most boring Katamari stages I’ve played. You can also see my create-a-cousin at the bottom. That was the best I could do at making a cousin who looks like Sweetie, my mascot.
Now, I really, really love the core gameplay of the Katamari Damacy franchise. I was VERY excited when it was announced. I want you to keep that in mind because I didn’t expect to be as unhappy with Once Upon a Katamari as I am. I’m so frustrated that, rather than rebooting the franchise with a much-needed graphics overhaul and a greater emphasis on high-score chasing and speed running, they just made a glorified level pack. One that, frankly, doesn’t care all that much about scores or times and is still as self-congratulatory about its characters as every other game in the series after the first one. What used to be a charming and addictive experience is now shackled by a publisher and developers that dig their heels in and refuse to evolve Katamari past its original style.
Never change. Seriously, never change and continue to be a B-list game with middling sales. I feel like an idiot for caring. Here’s a thought: for those fans who buy these games because they think the obnoxious characters are the bees’ knees, make them optional. Let players who only care about high scores and fast times toggle-off the pop-up dialog.
The time travel theme had me hyped, and while it proves that it can work at times to freshen up the concept in a “whole new settings” kind of way, the gameplay is firmly stuck in 2004-2009. The different eras rarely feel utilized to their fullest effect, with levels that often don’t play up to their strengths and instead just recycle the same old gimmicks. Rolling up dinosaurs? Sign me up! Using that setting for the dull-as-hell “collect only 50 objects” level? Not so much. Besides, after over two decades, the camera and the physics just are not getting better, which is going to override any sense of newness the time travel theme could have added. The action is constantly being obscured by walls, with many stages being worse about that than others. Too many indoor settings are based around closed-in spaces, which doesn’t really work in a game where you continually grow in size and are incentivized to grab everything in sight, including stuff stashed against walls.
Even when the ball is small and you’re inside areas that are hypothetically vast and open, it doesn’t matter because things will inevitably block the camera, and that’s not even counting all the pop-up texts that happen dead center in the middle of the playfield. If you don’t think cameras have come far in games, try playing Super Mario 64 and Mario Odyssey back to back. Camera development in 3D games has come a long way since 2004, and that’s why Once Upon a Katamari’s style of throwback is obnoxious instead of nostalgic.
Like, hey, there’s a level set in ancient Egypt where you have to roll up mummies? That sounds awesome! Crying shame about how they closed in the walls so tight that you’re constantly unable to see what you’re doing. Characters and moving objects are still set along tracks and have no complicated behavior and look as blocky and ugly as they last did in 2009, and all those problems ultimately work against the satisfaction of rolling mummies up. It’s weird that they didn’t comprehend that things that weren’t big problems from 2004 to 2009 are going to be big problems in 2025 because gaming has come so far.
Even the “roll-up the planets you made/meteors you earned/stardust” is back and basically the same as before. I’d say they pulled a Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens but even that at least felt like a rehash that utilized modern technology.
There is no better feature a sequel can have than embracing innovation. We’ve already experienced Katamari with all these problems. You know what we haven’t experienced? Katamari WITHOUT these problems. That’s what they should’ve done to freshen up the gameplay. They could have recycled the same old gimmicks until the cowbears come home and it still would have felt new and modern if they had fixed all the problems that have been part of this franchise from the start. Give us the smoothest, most intuitive and hang-up-free Katamari of all-time. They didn’t. Don’t get me wrong: new levels and themes are great, but if all the bad parts come along for the ride and some of the levels are so similar to old ones that they feel more like remixes than outright new stages, well, then it’s just an expensive level pack, isn’t it?
And the objectives mostly are direct rehashes (like Cowbear) or variants of old ones (instead of a sumo wrestler, it’s now a Samurai). Very few feel genuinely original.
I don’t know if the problems are genuinely worse than ever, or if it only seems like it. A good example of what I mean is the act of climbing. Climbing has always been hit or miss in Katamari. You won’t know until you reach the top of what you’re climbing if you’re going to be knocked-back off by an invisible wall or a tiny bump in your Katamari ball. This has been a part of the franchise since the beginning and it seems to be even worse now. I was constantly banging and recoiling off the top of all walls great and small, including ones I should have been big enough to climb. In the old west level, one of the crowns is hidden on a roof. I needed to replay the stage three times because I would bang off the top of the ladder and get knocked back down. Since the knock-back when you bang can be brutal, sorry but after twenty years, they needed to fix it. Even WHEN you need to climb feels inelegant or outright wrong. Topography that by all rights should be small hills, bumps, lips, or ramps aren’t, even late in the game. Like this:
You can see the 12M checkpoint barrier a little in front of me. You’ll also note I’m close to 2M bigger than the checkpoint AND EVEN THEN I have to slow-climb up this tiny little bump in the terrain that outright failed to activate more than once. It’s terrible level design.
What you’re seeing in that picture should be a bump or a slope, but it’s a wall that requires you to press up against the surface and slowly push up it. I mean, if you’re lucky. Sometimes the climbing mechanic just straight-up doesn’t activate. This is one of those situations where I thought maybe my controller was broken (I did end up wearing out an analog stick playing this game, but that controller was old). I had tons of moments where I attempted to climb a small hill or a ladder and the damn ball just idled without moving at all despite the fact that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I could excuse crap like that for twenty year old versions of this game, when the idea and gameplay was still new. Katamari ain’t new anymore. How could they not fix anything after twenty-one years? Arguably the only improvements are the draw distance is well done, at least on Xbox, and there’s now a single button you can press to dash. However, if you dash too many times in a row you lose it for a stretch.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that in 2025 it should be possible to have action not be obscured like this.
I also don’t remember getting jammed as much in any Katamari game. It’s not just because of the items, the magnet and the rocket, either. The magnet has a similar effect to the King Shock from Katamari Forever, and it can absolutely trap you in areas, especially if you grow big enough to no longer be able to squeeze past any exits. It happened a few times, because the magnet has range and is able to pull things past gaps the ball already can’t fit past. While it’s still very fun to use and adds a lot of post-game high score chasing, it also is capable of ruining your run and has an undeniable inelegance to it. But again, at least that backfire effect feels kind of like a video game type of hazard. Getting stuck between two objects though? Not so much, but it happens enough to be notable. In Once Upon a Katamari, I got stuck in ways that I literally couldn’t believe I couldn’t wiggle out of, like this:
Yeah, I’m really stuck there on basically nothing, and remained stuck long after that clip ended. I have no clue how I did it. Oh sure, the one time it feels like my Katamari doesn’t bang off something I can’t roll up and I become ensnared by it. Maybe it’s just a product of poorly thought-out layouts. While wrapping up this review, I realized only two stages made me sit-up in my chair. In the biggest Katamari game ever. There’s like fifty stages, give or take, and two really stood out. Two. And I had a week to think about that, too. Sigh. The best parts of Once Upon a Katamari are undeniably addictive in that “just one more game” kind of way, but they’re also unmemorable. The best levels are, you know, fine. The magnet is fun and probably the highlight of the game because it added the most value to the experience. There’s also a time-freezing stopwatch that, yes, also stops the timer and adds some much needed strategic flexibility. Though I’m not entirely convinced that the locations of the items were precisely chosen to maximize player options and decision making, the game is better off for having them. The other two items are nowhere near as fun. The rocket just led to a whole lot of banging into things and the radar lasts too long.
Here’s a tip for those who actually give a squirt about your scores: any item you haven’t used when you finish a level will carry over to the next stage you play, no matter which stage it is. After I finished all the levels and found all the hidden crowns/cousins/presents, I would play Make It Bigger 1 and bank a magnet, then go play the level I’m score chasing. Additionally, if you reset the stage or finish it and choose to replay it instead of banking the final result, you’ll get the item back! You can replay it as many times as you need with that starting item.
Also, while the radar item remains valuable in levels where you’re searching for specific items (like “Tag You’re It” Cousins-search levels or Pharaoh’s Request), for other levels, it’s rendered useless once you’ve found the present, crowns, and cousins. The game could have rewarded players for 100%ing those stages by replacing the now useless radar with another magnet or rocket, or hell, player’s choice! That’d be cool! But nope, the radar remains and since it takes a while to wear off and you’re capped at one item at a time, it becomes another thing you actively want to avoid. It’s just another sign of how little thought was given to the big picture of the player’s experience. Hell, the level layouts feel like that in general. They might as well just make the stages randomly generated for how inelegant the object placement is. And while I’m whining about items, the camera pulls away when you grow enough to reach a checkpoint to show the physical location of it, and it doesn’t instantly teleport back to you. It moves through the playfield while the timer is going and the game is live. It only takes a split second, but if an item is active, you might lose some of the time you get with it.
I thought all the “find all the specific things” stages were middling at best. In Ancient Rome, you have to locate eight philosophers. If their locations were randomly generated, I might have liked these more. But they’re not, and there’s also no online leaderboards. Once I got an S ranking for this stage and all the items out of it, there really was no point in coming back to it since it just isn’t very fun after the first time. The layout is later recycled for “collect roses” which is much more enjoyable.
Everything about Once Upon a Katamari reminds me that Namco is the same company that didn’t understand why Pac-Man was a hit and bet on the wrong aspects of it for the first couple sequels. The gameplay and the high score/fastest time chasing are why Katamari is a viable release for Namco in 2025, and they didn’t even know that. You can’t see what your high scores/best times are or even what your rankings on levels are from the quick travel menu. That really solidifies my theory that neither the developer nor the publisher understood what keeps players coming back to Katamari. I mean, to not even have the rankings listed? To have no quick access list of what levels you’ve S-tiered or gotten the three benchmark coins from? Here’s what the quick travel menus look like:
You have to manually go to the level, and not just the level, but then you have to click the level and do a “skip dialog thing” to load the “confirm you want to play this level” pop-up and THAT’S what lists your scores. You can also go view “the cosmos” but that’s several steps as well. What the hell? There’s also nothing that lists which levels you’ve earned meteors on, or if you even can earn a meteor at all on a level. I *love* getting those meteors. It always feels like an accomplishment. That they’re not even listed in the cosmos screen, a “bonus feature” in the hub world’s “S.S. Prince” spaceship is just mind blowing. There’s no leaderboards at all, local or online so you can only see your absolute #1 biggest size or fastest time, assuming you didn’t trade a best time for a lower score for whatever reason (you can do that). Hey Namco, you might not realize this, but you have the perfect old school arcade scoring game here. Twenty years later and you still don’t see that?
I earned multiple meteors on some stages. Before I got down to 16 seconds, I got meteors with different names (I think) for slower times. So, like do they ALL count? Only the best one? I’d like to see a list of which ones I got, but Namco and RENGAME seem to believe nobody cares and people are just here for the soundtrack (and I thought this was the weakest soundtrack of any of the console games, easily) and the self-congratulatory story.
Once Upon a Katamari is the least concerned with your best and worst times of any game in the franchise so far. There’s not even an achievement for getting all S-rankings either, which, hey, I guess that means you don’t have to stress doing good on stages that aren’t fun, which is like half the stages anyway. The one thing they did add is three tiers of object-collecting benchmarks for most stages that earns you coins that you can spend to get new facial expressions or gestures for the create-a-cousin feature. The currency system is fine but benchmarks are just dumb and you can only earn the lowest available in each run, plus it only starts after you beat a level for the first time. I would have preferred hiding the coins in the stage. Oh and, once again, you can’t check and see what levels you have or haven’t got the coins from using the quick travel menu. It gets worse. The big climatic stage where you roll up the universe and all the stars? That has no recorded score attached to it at all. I’m not kidding! Oh, there’s a score. Look, it shows it and everything!
Look, a score! There it is, in the corner!
But it doesn’t record that score. It just lists the level. Who cares? It’s only the climax of the f*cking game, with a level populated by objects YOU created. Why would you want to keep track of how well you’ve done with that? Pssh, what are you, some nerd who actually cares about scores? AND IT GETS EVEN WORSE! Three eternal stages are included, like in past Katamari games. In older games, while they were “just for funsies” levels, they still kept track of your high scores. Once Upon a Katamari’s eternal stages don’t. Again, they tell you a score, but they don’t record it. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t complete the object catalog using eternal levels. I mean, unless I rolled up everything in Eternal 3 and somehow didn’t get a single new object for the catalog. So the eternal modes serve no purpose at all except to create stardust that will be inserted into a level that also doesn’t keep track of high scores. WHY EVEN INCLUDE THEM THEN?
They really leaned heavily into the action-blocking dialog in this one.
The poor menus, lack of caring about the actual scores, and baffling DLC model that’s focused almost entirely on music instead of gameplay makes me think that Namco and RENGAME are operating under the mistaken belief that people play Katamari for anything but the gameplay. That the real appeal is limited only to the famous soundtracks or the “humorous” and/or “quirky” King of All Cosmos. The music of this Katamari is the least catchy in the series so far. Not a single earworm. Nothing like, say, Katamari on the Swing from We Love. As for the King? Holy f*ck. Okay, maybe he was cute and funny in the first game, but he’s since become the single worst character in the history of video games. He just ruins everything. His bullsh*t isn’t funny. It’s just obnoxious. It’s 2025 and the King of All Cosmos still has dialog blocking the screen. If you don’t move your hands from the dual stick tank controls (in a game where you usually don’t want to stop moving, mind you) to skip the dialog that blocks the screen during live gameplay, it might linger on the screen for quite a while. Here’s me beating As Fast As You Can 2 in sixteen seconds.
See how much of that sixteen seconds had text blocking the screen? It begs the question, ahem, WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK IS WRONG WITH YOU DEVELOPERS? Did you not get attention as children? This is about as charming as a clown honking a horn, spritzing water, and pieing people in the face at a mass casualty funeral for stillborn puppies! People have been complaining about this since 2004 and they just keep doubling down on it like it’s the thing that got the game to 2025 and not, you know, the ball and the rolling stuff up part! Like every other Katamari game, the same dialog repeats every single level. Whether you’re rolling up cousins or ninjas or bowling pins, you will see the same dialog block the screen every single goddamned replay, and this in a game that heavily encourages replaying levels. The only exception are the presents since, once you have found them, they don’t return in each replay.
And in this game, it’s not just the King of All Cosmos that blocks the action. For whatever reason, they placed the “your Katamari is as big as…..” boxes in the center of the screen even though there’s plenty of non-action-blocking room at the bottom of the screen. What the actual f*ck? What….. the actual…… f*ck?!
Speaking of doubling down, levels that completely go against the frantic nature of Katamari are still here and horrible as ever. Cowbear, the level that ends the very first time you roll up a cow or bear because ain’t that quirky is back. Just like previous games, the developer’s definition of what constitutes a cow or a bear is trollishly open to interpretation. Run over a single carton of milk that you couldn’t see because the camera is still one of the worst of any 3D action game? The level is over because a carton of milk counts as a cow, even though there isn’t a cow on the package. Well that’s just ridiculous. Saying a carton of milk counts as a cow is like saying a yeast infection is a baby. What’s really infuriating is that the king states the rules require you to catch a cow or a bear. Um, milk isn’t a creature. You don’t “catch” it, nor is it caught in the “catch!” sense. They’re sitting on the ground. YEAH, I’M BEING THAT PETTY! This gimmick f*cking sucks and they keep bringing it back! Petty disappointment is all I’ve ever gotten out of it.
How does touching a piece of cardboard with a picture of a cow or bear on it constitute catching a cow or bear?
Either way, the fast-paced, intense Katamari gameplay is dropped and you’re forced to inch your way through the level while trying to avoid signs that have pictures of cows or tiny little bear wind-up toys, because those count. It wasn’t fun the first time in 2005, and twenty years later it’s still a slog. The best thing I can say about it: at least the level layout isn’t as bad as it was in We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever. BUT, it’s still a pretty boring layout and it’s just not fun. It was never fun, and I don’t get how anyone could enjoy it. It feels like a completely different game. Other returning stinkers include several “only pick up 50” levels. Again, you have to heel-toe your way through the levels despite spotty physics and a terrible camera, trying desperately to avoid the tiny things. I don’t like them, but I could have tolerated having one in the game. There’s (checks notes) more than one, so now I hate the whole concept of 50-only because too many of them replace the type of levels I want to play, which were really just “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels.
It looks like a Koosh Ball but actually it’s just one of the laziest levels in the history of Katamari, where the object is to roll-up icicles. It’s also one of the smallest levels ever in a Katamari game. This was so uninspired that I was genuinely embarrassed for the developers after playing it. It was kind of sad, really.
Sadly, it’s not the only “high concept” stinker. New to this game (I think, at least, my brain seems to have deleted all the handheld games from memory) is a level where you have to roll up sweet, sugary food objects and avoid non-sweet foods. Instead of just trying to create a large ball, you’re trying to maximize the sweetness of the ball to 100%. The setting is a vast open air market and food court, and things like plates don’t count towards the objective.
The drinks? They’re like milkshakes or something. Those are what you want. The things with the caps? That’s mayonnaise. Not sweet, and they come with a hefty penalty. Okay, now go have fun with this totally well thought-out level!
That doesn’t sound like a terrible idea at all, but such a specific concept requires beefing-up the graphics, play control, and camera so that it’s easier to tell things apart and you’re not constantly getting screwed by a camera. Oh and maybe ditch the King of All Cosmos for levels like this since this requires closely paying attention to what’s in front of you instead of just rolling up everything tinier than you. And this is why doubling down on boxy retro graphics, the same 2004 “enemy” behavior patterns, and the screen-blocking text of the King of All Cosmos crosses the line from a bad idea to outright self-sabotage.
In America, ketchup is legally a vegetable.
What could have been a highlight in a modern game is a terrible level when you’re a glorified expansion of a 2000s game. Telling sweet things apart from non-sweet things isn’t intuitive. You have to replay the level and brute force memorize a good portion of the items to know what column they count in. Telling a pepper apart from an apple would be easier if you used that space age technology to actually look good. Not only that, but the scoring system sucks, because most of the sweet things only cause an incremental bump in the sweetness of the ball (with exceptions, like the shaved ice), but the wrong foods come with a harsh penalty. So while building the sweetness is slow, losing it happens too quickly. You know, I wish I could play this layout without the gimmick. It would have been one of the more fun layouts.
Yeah, yeah, you’re supposed to play it multiple times and get a feel for what’s sweet and what isn’t, but nuts to that. The “tofu” looks like a dessert to me. Also, would this be a good time to point out there’s tons of sweet variants of tofu. I once had a tofu custard that was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had, then I forgot the specific name. I think it was Douhua. Try it if you ever see it on a menu! It’s fantastic! It also kind of proves that this whole “sweet/not-sweet” formula needed to be completely unambiguous. How about adding stink lines to the wrong stuff? Oh wait, that would probably somehow ruin the retro look.
Not every new concept is a dud, though most of the “new” gimmick stages are just reworked versions of old stages. Remember the snowman level? They took the same basic “cover as much of the ground as possible” concept and made it worthwhile by theming a stage around rolling a water ball around a desert. The hook is that you have to continuously dunk the ball in water sources to keep it moist. While it diverges from the core Katamari gameplay and that normally annoys me, it’s fine as a one-off side quest. The racing stage that I loved before returns, only this time it’s a boat race, and it’s just as fun and just as easy. Come to think of it, the whole game is crazy easy. I only failed on one level in my entire week-long play session, and it’s another returning stage: the fireball that you have to build up to light a central end-goal fire, which might be the single worst-designed layout in any Katamari game, and given how lazy that Koosh Ball level is, that’s saying something.
The only bright spot is I’m pretty sure the fire can’t just spontaneously go out. But I died multiple times on this stage from running into water. I never once lost on any other stage and usually got the S ranking within three attempts.
The “light the fire” stage takes place in Roman times and has a coliseum setting. But, they fashioned the layout like a maze, and I don’t mean like a Pac-Man style maze, but an actual “how do I get out of this thing?” maze, only while using the people in the audience as the walls. You have to build up the ball as big as you can and find your way to the center to light a fire. I’m almost certain you won’t ever be able to get big enough to roll people up and the object is to wiggle around the maze. It’s a really boring idea because there’s no room for spontaneity or to really even create your own strategy. It’s too narrow and too railed. It’s a f*cking maze, and Katamari is at its best when you’re in a big, open area where all the corridors are wide. The type of stages that are so vast that it’s overwhelming at first and you have to discover the best path to grow the ball. Also, the thing about mazes is they don’t usually offer replay value once you know the solution. This one is no different. Once you know the routes, the thing that made the stage “special” is over, but unlike other stages, the act of collecting isn’t fun. The pathways are too compact.
In this level you have to not only make the ball bigger, but you need to score X amount of beverages. Other stages have you grab coins or wooden objects and you can still fail if you don’t get the minimum, regardless of the ball size. This isn’t a horrible idea to evolve the gameplay. I still never lost from it, but there were a few close calls. Like “one over the number I needed at the last second” close. It was exciting, and that’s when the game works. They didn’t do that enough to justify $40 or even $20 in my opinion. If I had paid $15 for this, I don’t think I’d be as disappointed. Frustrated and angry? Sure. But not disappointed.
The things that would make up for what the game doesn’t do aren’t here. Again, no online leaderboards. No local leaderboards. The “take a picture of the Namco characters” thing from We Love Katamari REROLL that completely hooked me is gone. Each stage has three hidden crowns but they’re stupid easy to find. The cousins are too, while the presents offer a bit more of a challenge sometimes. For one, I had to look up the location, and it’s because it’s buried in an arbitrary spot on the snow level and only occasionally pops out like a prairie dog. We Love Katamari REROLL and 2009’s Katamari Forever’s hidden trinkets were so satisfying to find. The crowns aren’t, and I know they could have done a lot more. Like, why not hide record albums that unlock the legacy soundtrack? That would have kept everyone, including myself, playing after the credits rolled. Well, there is a legacy soundtrack, but sold separately as a fairly expensive DLC set that doesn’t even add new levels. Right before I published this, updates with new DLC were announced, but they don’t add new levels or new hidden items.
The coin stage is an example of a potentially fun level that keeps tripping over its own feet.
Let me be clear: Once Upon a Katamari isn’t some kind of face-palming disaster. If you’re incapable of getting bored playing this series, this is the biggest game in the franchise yet. There’s tons of levels and all the hamfisted quirkiness that’s been so awkward and exhausting since the second game was a love letter to itself is still here. If you just want a time travel-themed expansion pack of We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever, that’s basically what this is. And actually, I still think you’ll be disappointed. The main “As Big As You Can” or “As Fast As You Can” levels are limited to one setting, Japan, where it scales five times over the course of the game. Other themes might have “As Big As You Can” levels, but they usually don’t scale, and certainly don’t five times. Among the gimmick levels, I’m pretty sure only the returning “feed someone to make them fat but really it’s just an oblong starting ball” has three distinct tiers that open new areas. It really makes it clear that the theme is mostly skin deep, because the primary “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels are so similar that I couldn’t really tell a difference between the new one from Once Upon and the old ones from past games. The big climax is rolling up the King, Queen, and the King’s father. It’s been done.
For what it’s worth, I did enjoy these levels, even if they have frequent camera issues because this time around, the settings are mostly indoors and involve going up and down flights of stairs. The “feed someone” theme is also kind of messed up when you think about it. Like, imagine if, instead of a sumo wrestler or a samurai warrior, it was a goose and the object was to force feed it to create foie gras. It would be the single most controversial game of the decade. But it’s a human and they’re asking for it so it’s okay. I mean, unless you intend the human to be foie gras, because that’s just delicious wrong. I meant wrong! Really!
Even the plot of the King of All Cosmos accidentally blowing up the Earth is here. “OMG he did it juggling a relic and being a show off! LOL, right?” Yea, I guess? I mean, that’s almost the exact same joke as the first game, ain’t it? I don’t get it. To me Katamari Damacy as a series is no different than one of those stand-up comedians who has used the same fifteen minute set for their entire careers. When your job is to literally make jokes, why are you telling the same jokes after twenty years? It gets old. And the joke of the Katamari games really isn’t funny when the characters and their “quirks” cost the actual gameplay so dearly.
A stage in the “present day” time era is basically “roll up all the food stuff, then roll yourself into a deep fryer.” This was the best level in the game, and the most fresh-feeling. What made it stand out is that it’s almost laid out like a platform game, with timing-based moving platforms and a heavy emphasis on very narrow pathways and pits that reset you beneath you. There’s never been anything quite like it from this franchise, and it feels fresh, and they decorated it in a way that’s memorably bonkers without feeling like they’re trying too hard.
Why does Katamari Damacy as a gameplay mechanic even need a plot? The Mario Kart games don’t have a plot. They didn’t come up with a reason for all the Mario universe characters to race. They just do it, and Katamari could be that way. Why not? You don’t have to drop the characters. Just drop the bullsh*t around the characters. Let the players play the game. Focus on high scores and fast times. That’s the fun, not the plot, and if after twenty years they don’t get that, they’ve lost the plot. Hell, they might as well have done this as DLC for We Love Katamari REROLL because, mechanically, the differences are so subtle that nothing really stood out to me, and I played the sh*t out of both. You’re also not appealing to anyone new to the franchise. This is made only for the fans, and that’s no way to grow a brand.
This release makes no sense at all. I was hyped for this, maybe too much. A big reason why this review took me forever to finish was I was genuinely stressing whether or not my disappointment was because I gave my hopes up for something better. My family didn’t help. The kids, the oldest of whom is 14, think Katamari looks fun, but not in a “drop what you’re doing and try it out” type of way. They actually thought I was weird for being so excited about Once Upon A Katamari during its introduction during the July 2025 Nintendo Direct. It’s just not a big deal to them. None of them needed to play it the way my generation did. I didn’t get a straight answer on why, either. They all agreed it looked fun, but not enough that any of them wanted to play it with me. That tells me the freshness is gone for good as long as THIS is Katamari. But, creatively dead doesn’t mean dead-dead. Katamari is still the PERFECT format for a raw, no-frills high score driven, fastest time franchise. If arcades could do games like this in 1980, Katamari’s gameplay would have been a Pac-Man level hit. Don’t be old school in body. Be old school in the soul. That’s where the good stuff comes from. Verdict: NO! *If you can get it for $14.99 or under, and you lower your expectations, and you have plenty of disposable income, meh, whatever, it’s fine for that. $40 for the same old game and very few bells & whistles like leaderboards or even proper menus and high score tracking is a slap in the face.
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon Platform: Game Boy Advance Released March 21, 2001 (JP) June 11, 2001 (US) Designed by Koji Horie Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Advance Collection
Bats are basically just sacks of blood, apparently.
I got Circle of the Moon on the day the Game Boy Advance launched in North America. Oh, I didn’t play it then. Did you ever watch the White Walker battle in the final season of Game of Thrones? Probably not, even if the TV was tuned into it, because you couldn’t see a damned thing. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was kind of like that when it launched. Even after my father installed one of those aftermarket, warranty-voiding light kits to my GBA, visibility wasn’t very good and I still didn’t play it. Actually, because the Game Boy Advance screen was so impossible to see, I didn’t play a lot of GBA at all until the SP and the Game Boy Player (for my younger readers, this was a device that let you play Game Boy Advance titles on the TV via a GameCube) came out in 2003, both of which came with the novelty of being able to see the games you bought. Well, the Game Boy Player did. The original SP was front lit, because Nintendo never admits to mistakes until they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. But, for me at least, the killer app of the Game Boy Player was Circle of the Moon. In fact, I binged the three Castlevania GBA games back-to-back-to-back. And it was a couple of the happiest weeks of what would be a very crappy year for me. So, I cherish the Castlevania GBA trilogy. But, did they age well?
Find the right enemies and grinding can go so quick that it’s kind of shocking. Does it still count as “grinding” if you can get a couple levels in under five minutes?
As the second “Metroidvania” game in the series and the first since the legendary Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon had a LOT to live up to. Circle of the Moon doesn’t attempt to be quite as RPG-like as that game. Actually, it’s more like a noncommittal hybrid of a traditional Castlevania game and a Symphony of the Night-style adventure. While the actual map is massive and sprawling, your only primary weapon is the Vampire Killer whip. Apparently this is not THE whip of the Belmont clan and instead is called the “Hunter Whip” but who gives a f*ck? It’s the Vampire Killer, period, and there’s no permanent upgrades for it and no alternatives. Luckily, the whip is one of the most satisfying of any Castlevania whips, with plenty of OOMPH and a lot of magical spells to buff it and the standard assortment of Castlevania subweapons to complement it. The action is top-notch. Controls really well, too. This is one of those games that plays so well that it completely lives and dies on the merits of the design.
This was my map when I finished the game. Dracula is directly to the right of the first yellow block from the left. With his room filled in, this is a roughly 90% complete map, and I have no idea how many HP/MP/Heart boosts I missed along the way. I didn’t use a guide for them, and actually, I only used a guide for which enemies drop which weapons.
Instead of finding weapons, there’s only armor and accessories which are dropped by enemies. In fact, each individual enemy drops only two potential things, one common, the other rare. I’m not the biggest fan of this design because I hate having this type of thing come down to tracking down lottery tickets. Like, the second best armor in the game is dropped by an enemy that exists only in one specific room. Also, the base drop rate for this armor is 0.5%, and since there’s only one of these enemies in the entire game, if you don’t get it, you have to leave the room and come back and fight it again. Something about that is really inelegant to me, and for this game, I decided not to play along. Instead, I used save states to make some of the drops go quickly. Sometimes it made a big difference, but other times? I’m not at all encouraging you to watch this whole video, but even cheesing the game with save states, it could take quite a while for the item I was seeking to drop.
By the way, the dice seem to be rolled the moment the fatal shot is THROWN, not LANDED, so if you have a boomerang about to kill an enemy on the return trip, reloading the state won’t change whether or not the enemy drops something or not. Speaking of the Boomerangs, they’re pretty rare in this. I’d recommend holding onto them when you first get one because they’re seriously overpowered for all bosses.
Additionally, some enemies drop cards that allow you to cast spells. Unlike armor, card drops happen only once, but if you want to do THAT, logically the first kill against the target enemy should result in a drop. It doesn’t. Lame. There’s two tiers of cards that have to be combined. These mostly enhance your whip. For the most part, I only used two combos, one of which gave me a fire sword and one of which made my whip twice as long. I might switch to one that increased the damage I inflicted by 25% for bosses, but otherwise, I mostly stuck to those once I had them. The problem is the same as the accessories: they’re random drops from enemies. Every treasure that can be found (besides post-boss upgrades) are either upgrades to hit points, magic points, or max hearts you can carry. I didn’t start cheesing the game with emulation trickery until over halfway through the game. If the drop system had been remotely rewarding, I would never have done it. Random drops might be great for the surprise factor, but I can assure you, it gets old. I really think it would have been more satisfying to hide the big armor and accessories as treasures in the castle.
Mercury Card + Golem card ended up being, no joke, my favorite Castlevania whip ever. It reaches nearly half the screen and, although it comes at a cost of speed, it sure made backtracking a lot less painful.
So, this is awkward to say, but I found the RPG elements of Circle of the Moon to be some of the worst in a good game I’ve ever played. Too many enemies that are pushovers pay off too many experience points. Like this room here:
That “frozen shade” paid off so much that I was able to grind up about ten levels in under half-an-hour. It’s not up to players to use the honor system to protect the integrity of the game from lazy design. Designers are supposed to discourage that through challenge, right? Clearly that enemy was not something I was supposed to be fighting then and there. It had easy-to-dodge attacks and, with the fire sword spell and the star bracelets it dropped for me, I was wasting it in four or five hits, before it even fired at me. And since magic refills slowly (another bad choice, in my opinion) I didn’t have to hold back while fighting it. I have no idea how they determined some of these XP totals, but it makes Circle of the Moon one of the most exploitable RPG systems in the entire history of gaming.
One neat thing that it does do is replace weak enemies with strong ones as you make progress, though it waits a little too long to do this, and it doesn’t implement it nearly enough. If you want to put such a heavy emphasis on backtracking, you need more of this. These enemies are at the start of the game, but they don’t show up until you’re nearly finished.
There’s just absolutely no sense of balance, and no balance means no risk/reward to calculate. This is where you have to give turn-based RPGs props. In those, if you encounter an enemy that pays off so huge that you can hypothetically grind out hours worth of leveling-up in under half-an-hour, a punch-for-punch battle would see you go tits-up, lights-out in probably the first attack the enemy got on you. Action games can be that way too, but if you don’t PERFECTLY distribute the enemies or accessories, at some point the opportunity to cheese the game will present itself. Circle of the Moon does that a few times. It’s really badly done in that regard.
Don’t get me wrong: finding the hidden stuff is f’n awesome. I cracked a smile every single time a wall broke.
Now here’s the good news: the level design is mostly pretty good. There’s a ton of annoying backtracking and not nearly enough fast-travel tunnels. According to the game’s clock, it took me six-and-a-half hours to finish the Circle of the Moon, and I’d guess at least a third of that was spent making my way back to areas just to get one previously inaccessibly stat upgrade or find an enemy who dropped a card I missed. If the combat wasn’t so damn satisfying and the level design some of the best in this genre, I wouldn’t have been up for it. Yet, there’s a lot of really weird design choices that made me shake my head. Stuff that shattered my immersion that I was a badass vampire hunter exploring a castle. Like, this for example:
Are you kidding me?
One of the very last items you get from defeating a boss is the ability to shove boxes. Okay, that’s a time-honored staple of the genre. EXCEPT, one of the very first upgrades you get in Circle of the Moon is the ability to shatter stone blocks with a dash move. So, let me get this straight: Nathan Graves (hero of the game) masters the ability to shatter stone with his shoulder before he learns how to push a wooden crate out of the way? I had a spell that turned my whip into a goddamned flaming sword that, by all rights, should have set the box on fire, but I had to wait until the game was almost over to schlep a box? And by the way, they put a lot of those boxes throughout the “levels” of the game, so after getting this upgrade, if you want to boost your stats you have to spend about an hour just making your way to them so you can push them out of the way and pick up the boosts.
When the game is over, you get a series of passwords that allow you to replay the game in a different way, though the hero sprite is still Nathan. Thankfully, you don’t have to beat the game to get these, but honestly, they’re all really boring and feel like the type of challenges that pro gamers come up with to keep themselves amused. The Wizard (pictured here using a spell that turned me into a skeleton) is activated by putting FIREBALL as your name, which is also the name of Angela’s dog. Funny. The wizard is weak in everything except magic, and you start the game with every card so you basically have to magic your way through it. GRADIUS is the fighter, who can’t cast spells but his strength is insane. CROSSBOW is the “shooter” who has weak stats and has to use sub-weapons (including a new version of the dagger) that come at half the cost of hearts to use. This is one of the worst ways to ever play a Castlevania game. Finally, THIEF has weak stats but enemies drop stuff at a significantly higher rate. Sorry, no upside-down castle this time.
In terms of a pure action game, Circle of the Moon is clearly one of the most elite launch games in the history of the medium. It’s actually astonishing to think about: this was a day one Game Boy Advance game. I mean, pity about the vision thing, because the wide variety of enemies, settings, and huge boss fights make this legitimately a pretty good Castlevania adventure. While the RPG aspect is a complete airball in my opinion, the epic scale of the boss fights almost makes up for it by itself. This includes one of the best Grim Reaper fights of the 21st century, a memorable encounter with a gigantic minotaur that’s practically trapped in a pillory, and an even more gigantic two-headed dragon. Sadly, after several top-notch boss fights, the game ends with back-to-back AWFUL fights: the battle against Nathan’s rival, the insufferable Hugh Baldwin (who was originally going to be a playable character) and one of the most sloggish Dracula battles ever. Seriously, the final form of Dracula includes this dashing attack where he’s invulnerable and it’s just the worst. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon sticks the landing about as well as that pole vaulter who landed ass-first on the pole.
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Okay, so Circle of the Moon wasn’t as good as I remembered it. Not even close. I can’t stress enough: this WAS the killer app for the Game Boy Player twenty-two years ago. It was the reason I wanted to own one in the first place, and I suspect I wasn’t alone in that. In 2003, at the age of thirteen/fourteen, it felt like it lived-up to my high expectations. But, it certainly didn’t hold-up perfectly two decades later. As great as the map is, it’s not an optimized map. More fast travel points would have been transformative of this game. Hell, just get rid of those and turn the save stations into fast travel points. Why not?
I’m a complete idiot, because it turned out I had the ability to do this much sooner and I just somehow skipped past that card.
Plus, the lack of balance really shows a roughness that I never noticed the first time. Like, the first time I played the game, I beat levels out-of-order because the way you clean the toxic water out of that level is so far away and disconnected from that area that I actually missed it back in 2003. I beat the toxic water level without ever cleaning the water. I just thought it was a really hard stage. That’s on the designers. Actually, knowing where to go next is not intuitive. The first time you play this, expect a LOT of aimless wandering. Thank god for the combat. Circle of the Moon is lucky that Castlevania’s core combat is so bulletproof that you can tack on a terrible RPG system and some haphazard Metroidvania progression and still have a good game. But I’ve been wrong for the last twenty years, because I thought Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was great. It’s pretty good, but nowhere near great. Verdict: YES!
Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review took hundreds of hours of gameplay and writing. If you enjoy this and want to show your support, please consider a donation to your local food bank. If you’re in the United States, you can find your closest food bank using the tool provided by Feeding America. I’m also a big fan of Direct Relief and the Epilepsy Foundation. And just remember that there’s nothing that improves lives and costs nothing quite like kindness. Be kind to each-other.
Everything you need to know about Tetris can be summed up in the language used to describe its creation. Games are something that are usually “made” or “developed.” Super Mario was made. Minecraft was developed. But Tetris? It’s so ubiquitous that it was “invented” just like indoor plumbing or the light bulb. I’ve been really excited for this interactive documentary because I have much love for Tetris. What’s not to love? When the first chapter of Tetris Forever declares Tetris to be the “perfect game” it’s not hyperbole. It IS the perfect video game. Perfect for all ages, skill levels, and levels of interest or disinterest in video games. Even the shapes themselves are perfect. When other games (including ones that wear the Tetris label) try to tinker with the roster of seven blocks, the result is almost always disastrous. Not that the core gameplay by itself is perfect, as you’ll learn from my reviews of the actual games, including the bonus reviews of titles not included in Tetris Forever. But, the basics of Tetris are certainly the perfect foundation to build an amazing game on.
Tetris Plus might not be in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review, but only because I found so many amazing Tetris games that I have to do a Part Two with around 45 more bonus games. Tetris Plus WILL be in Part Two, along with games like Tetrisphere, Tetris DS, and more.
There’s not very many games that I would consider to be absolutely perfect. Tetris, Pac-Man, Portal, a strange NES one-off indie called Böbl, the pinball table Attack From Mars……. and that’s the list. Well, at least MY list, and only two of those are really perfect for everyone. If you don’t love pinball, AFM isn’t going to “do it” for you. Böbl is a one-and-done 30 minute experience, and let’s face it: Portal is perfect for gamers, but if my mother tried to play it, it wouldn’t be pretty. Tetris is clearly the most perfect, because I’ve met plenty of non-gamers who love it. That’s why it’s the ideal game for the Gold Master Series, because it’s not just the perfect game, but also a perfectly fascinating game. Who needs an in-game story when no other game has a legend quite like it? Or, to put it another way, Pac-Man is awesome, but it didn’t signal the end of the Cold War. Of course, as I found out playing the nineteen games in the collection, and the slew of extra games I added for funsies, Tetris as a concept is inherently perfect, but the execution matters a great deal more than I realized. This was probably my favorite review process ever, because I think I walked away with an understanding of what makes Tetris great.
Tetris Forever retails for $34.99 and therefore needs to create $35 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 Tetris Forever, 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. I’m not setting fixed value on any YES! game, but I’m limiting the max value to 50% of the goal.
The guided tour menu that Digital Eclipse created for Atari 50 returns, and that’s fine with me because it’s pretty much the greatest interface in gaming history. Someone had to say it, and it might as well be me. This is perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Guys, it’s impossible to improve upon this. Don’t even try to. In 2094, when you do a Gold Master Series based around the first batch of games developed by heads in jars, so help me mother of God, you better be using the same menu or my jar is going to bubble so much at you.
What makes the story of Tetris so amazing is that these two are just about the most likable game developers out there. Alexey Pajitnov is like a big ‘ole friendly St. Bernard. This is shallow and superficial, but I’ve always thought that Pajitnov has the kindest eyes of any major gaming pioneer, and whenever he talks about the story of Tetris, even when I know his story and I know it has a happy ending, I find myself pulling for him as if it’s the first time I’ve heard it. His eyes are so soulful and deep, but above even that, his eyes are filled with gentle kindness. It’s in the eyes. It’s ALWAYS in the eyes. Then there’s Henk Rogers, who dresses like Willy Wonka crossed with Al Pacino, and I mean that in the most flattering way possible. He oozes charm and tells his story with such passion that I found myself saying “thank God the right guy found Pajitnov.” The story works because of them. Tetris will always be Tetris, but I don’t think the legend of Tetris would be what it is today without Rogers being the one who found it.
But, Tetris Forever isn’t just the Alexey Pajitnov story. It’s equally the story of Henk Rogers, who is also a fascinating character. He basically invented the JRPG with his bestseller The Black Onyx. Granted, the emergence of JRPGs was inevitable, but someone had to be first! Rogers transitioned to game producing, and proved to be a savvy, intelligent businessman with a keen eye for both talent and trends. He recognized the value in Tetris and he just so happened to have a direct pipeline to Nintendo thanks to his love of the game Go. Everything you need to know about how personable and friendly Rogers is can be summed up with his unlikely friendship and relationship with Nintendo’s famously private President, Hiroshi Yamauchi, which is touched upon in Tetris Forever. One important note that Rogers rarely got proper credit for before Tetris Forever: he’s basically the co-creator of Tetris as you and I know it, because the scoring system was totally different before Henk’s first builds. As you’ll see in the game review section, you originally didn’t score points for creating lines. Scoring was based entirely on speed (how fast you drop the blocks) and how high the stack was in the well. Tetris was a game based around efficiency, and consequently there was absolutely no risk/reward dynamic to it. The multipliers for doubles, triples, and Tetrises was Henk’s idea, and that’s what opens up Tetris as a proper video game. I honestly didn’t know that about Henk Rogers. So, there’s a lot new info to be found in Tetris Forever even for those familiar with the story.
When Henk Rogers says that Tetris is the video game that will outlast all other games, I believe it. It’s easy to imagine Mario, Link, etc. getting lost to time eventually, but people will still be playing Tetris in a thousand years.
Tetris Forever features more interviews than any previous Gold Master release, and, in my opinion, it has the BEST interviews they’ve ever done. Even if you lump-in Atari 50 (which isn’t TECHNICALLY a Gold Master Series release), the interactive documentary/museum aspect of Tetris Forever is far and away the best this emerging genre has seen. The full story is covered, from Tetris’ creation in Russia to the insane publishing rights fiasco up to the modern game of Tetris and how protective they are of what a Tetris game must be. The interviews are riveting, and I could honestly say that they make up nearly the entire value of Tetris Forever by themselves. Digital Eclipse has really figured out this format and realized their audience is made up of people like me, who want to hear the stories and not just get the broad picture of history.
I want to scream about that one damn hair that is so distracting. You’re very successful now, Digital Eclipse. Hire a mustache groomer for future Gold Master Series installments.
Tetris Forever discusses a LOT more than I thought it would, and I’m blown away by the pacing and the amount of people they get involved. Despite his heavy Russian accent, Pajitnov is a compelling speaker. We’re forty years removed from the creation of Tetris, but he still has this sincere humility, like he can’t believe that he made this thing that is so beloved the world over. Rogers and his daughter Maya are equally well spoken and clearly passionate about gaming and Tetris, and it just makes for a wonderful interactive museum. I found myself wiping tears frequently and at one point even openly weeping because this is the rare story where you can cheer almost every aspect of it.
I went bug-eyed when I saw that there were three versions of Hatris in this release, but then I found out each version plays differently enough that it really is like three different games. The PC Engine and Arcade versions of Hatris aren’t in Tetris Forever, but I reviewed them in the bonus section.
Tetris Forever features seemingly every single print advertisement of Tetris ever made, along with items like box art, instruction books, and more. To give you an idea of how far this went, among the treasure trove of box art and magazine ads, Tetris Forever includes the full instruction manual for a never-released Genesis port of Tetris. There’s also a video covering Tengen Tetris and the litigation surrounding it, which to be honest, I thought that would be so radioactive that Digital Eclipse, Atari, and the Tetris Company wouldn’t touch it. I’m happy to report I was wrong. As with Making of Karateka, if you have no interest in box art or advertisements, you can safely knock at least $5 off the value at the end of this section.
The Simpsons is nearly as old as Tetris. I’d be weird if they hadn’t mined it for a joke at some point.
What’s missing? The most obvious answer is “games” since the Game Boy version is cited in the feature itself as the most famous (and maybe the best) version of Tetris. This is one of those situations where you wish Nintendo would allow at least the Game Boy version of Tetris to appear in this, even if it’s going to be on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. I’m pretty sure the Nintendo “brand” wouldn’t have been damaged if they allowed a 35 year old port of a game that has appeared on over a hundred platforms to appear in an interactive documentary that celebrates two of their most important partners. Hell, what a flex that would have been! “Our brand is so strong that we can put one of our catalog titles on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam!” It would also do wonders towards building goodwill for a company that isn’t considered very fan-friendly at times. But, Nintendo stuff isn’t the only games missing. They have several Spectrum Holobyte games, but there’s no Faces, Super Tetris, etc. Hell, I would have wanted to try them, even if they sucked. I’m not deducting any value for missing games, but they’re the elephant in the room for sure.
Why didn’t Digital Eclipse/Atari include this? You cheap ass mother f*ckers! I paid my $30 and I want a twenty-nine story tall version of Tetris that has to be played a mile away from the site! I fine Tetris Forever one hundred bazillion dollars! Everyone bang their spoons on the table until they patch this is! Boooo!Boooooo! ATTICA! ATTICA!
Another aspect of the Tetris mythos that’s mostly ignored is Vladimir Pokhilko, for obvious reasons. I’m 100% totally fine with that part of the legend being left out. The story of Tetris is a feel-good story, and there’s nothing good about the ending of Vladimir Pokhilko, his wife and 12 year old son. I can tell you that I was 9 years old and lived just a few miles away from where those murders happened, and it was terrifying. People here still talk about it all the time. If it still leaves a scar on our community a quarter of a century later, yea, I don’t want it to scar the story of Tetris. Good call, Digital Eclipse/Atari. I would have also liked to have seen more games that Pajitnov designed that aren’t Tetris on here, which is why I opted for an extended bonus section for this review feature. He didn’t just make Tetris. He’s done a lot more games than people realized. Have you ever played Hexic on your Xbox 360? That was Pajitnov! Come on! Certainly Bullet-Proof Software, or “The Tetris Company” owns more than just Hatris. But, beyond that, this section is specifically about the feature, and I wish they had at least an interview on all the non-Tetris stuff he’s done. But, overall, Digital Eclipse really has outdone themselves with this format. For all the features of the interactive documentary, I’m awarding Tetris Forever $25 in value. If you’re really not into box art or old advertisements, knock $5 off that.
The Game Boy titles offer Super Game Boy enhancements, but you have to select it before starting the game. There’s also a variety of looks if you opt to play the Game Boy titles colorless.
EMULATION
Tetris Forever features a nearly full-powered Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation for most (but not all) games. Two gems are missing entirely from the gauntlet, though there’s a good reason for it. There’s no optional hardware enhancements, but this is Tetris we’re talking about. Overclocking would likely have unintended consequences, and it wasn’t ever really necessary anyway. There’s also no full gameplay videos with jump-in. Again, it’s Tetris, not a linear game, so that wouldn’t work even if they wanted to include it. All seventeen emulated games have screen filters and size options. Some of the games allow button remapping, including the infamous Famicom Tetris, though that’s a monkey’s paw “be careful what you wish for” type of deal that I’ll get to in that review. For all the emulation features, I’m awarding the max $10 in value to Tetris Forever. HOWEVER, The biggest problem with Tetris Forever is games that featured battery back-up, such as Tetris 2 + BomBliss/Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss, sometimes just plain didn’t save my progress. I thought it never did, but then I went back and played a couple games, and the save files were there. (Shrug) If you want to keep your progress, remember to use save states, and never hit “reset game” because I think that might have been my problem.
When the games have mapping, I appreciate that the menu is as clean as it gets. The menus are accessed by right-clicking, by the way. It took me a while to figure that out. My dear friend Elias didn’t tell me how to do it. Why would you think that? I found it all on my own.
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. 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.
Quick warning: there’s no translations for the Japanese games. Brush up on Japanese, or have a translator ready on your smart devices. Any games that have Japanese menus, there’s a walk-through in the menu (it’s titled “HOW TO PLAY”), so I don’t think you’ll ever need a translator outside of Tetris Battle Gaiden, which has some Japanese that appears in real time.
Special Note: I am NOT an expert at Tetris. Part of the reason this review took so long to finish wasn’t just the volume of games, but rather because I quickly realized that what makes or breaks Tetris isn’t the core gameplay. It’s the idiosyncrasies like rotation of blocks, whether you can perform “wall kicks” and the drop algorithm (literally called THE RANDOM GENERATOR or the 7-Bag, which is what I’ll call it from here out). I wanted to discover those things for myself through gameplay and not look them up. That takes time. I approached this feature the same way I did Pac-Man/maze chases or LCDs: I don’t know what I’m doing or what I’m looking for, but I want to know those things. I did the best I could to familiarize myself with what is and isn’t expected of a Tetris game or a falling block game in general, and I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. I hope you are too!
ALL 19 GAMES INCLUDED IN TETRIS FOREVER
Tetris (Electronika 60 recreation, 1984)
Tetris (MS-DOS Prototype, 1996)
Igo: Kyū Roban Taikyoku (Famicom, 1987)
Tetris (MS-DOS, 1988)
Tetris (Apple II, 1988)
Tetris (Famicom, 1988)
Welltris (MS-DOS, 1989)
Hatris (Famicom, 1990)
Hatris (Game Boy, 1991)
Hatris (NES, 1992)
Tetris 2 + BomBliss (Famicom, 1991)
Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss (Super Famicom, 1992)
Tetris Battle Gaiden (Super Famicom, 1993)
Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss Genteiban (Super Famicom, 1994)
Super Tetris 3 (Super Famicom, 1994)
Super BomBliss (Game Boy, 1995. Okay, I sort of skip this one.)
Super BomBliss DX (Game Boy Color, 1999)
Super BomBliss (Super Famicom, 1995)
Tetris Time Warp (2024)
IN ORDER OF RELEASE
Tetris Platform: Simulation of Electronika 60 Recreation Developed for Tetris Forever Originally Released June 6, 1984 Recreation Released November 12, 2024 Designed by Alexey Pajitnov Developed by Digital Eclipse
Can you tell that I forgot “hard drop” means “HARD DROP” and not “speed-up the fall?”
Much like how there’s really no emulated version of Pong in any collection, it’s impossible to directly play the real version of the original Tetris that started it all. But, a perfect recreation works fine. While the core gameplay is still Tetris in all its glory, the scoring and rules will be unfamiliar to anyone who played the more famous wide release versions. The most obvious example is that the idea of doubles, triples, and Tetrises scoring more points wouldn’t be invented for another four years after this. All this version of Tetris does is keep track of how many lines you’ve cleared, while “scoring” is based on how many hard drops you make. The higher up in the well the block is when you press the hard-drop, the more points you score. And it makes a BIG difference, fundamentally changing the feel of Tetris as you or I know it. It practically swaps genres and becomes a quick-draw type of game.
This incoming Tetris is worth nothing but a +4 to my line count and whatever the hard-drop scores. Huh.
Tetris without dynamic scoring is a game with almost no risk/reward factor. There’s no incentive at all to stack the well in any way but the most efficient, line-for-line manner. The one exception is that, the taller the stack is in the well, the more points hard drops score. It’s a lousy risk/reward element because of the figurative low ceiling for strategy the literal low ceiling creates. Trust me when I say, it’s something you have to experience to appreciate, especially if you’ve played a lot of Tetris over the years. My instinct told me in my first game to play Tetris the way I always have. Create a “dam” leaving a single-segment gap between the pile and the wall to slide the Tetris Makers into. It took me a couple games for my brain to not go straight to my Tetris muscle memory, but I wanted to play along. Without dynamic scoring, why bother to try for a Tetris? Since the points are awarded by quick drops, I tried to stack as flat as humanly possible. I was convinced I’d be bored. I wasn’t. It speaks volumes to how addictive Tetris is that, even with a completely inferior scoring system, my brain still went into Tetris mode. I would never want to play this version again, but as the first game in the collection, this really warmed me up for the better stuff yet to come. Verdict: YES! – $2 in Value added to Tetris Forever
Tetris Platform: MS-DOS Developed in 1986 Unreleased Nearly-Completed Prototype Designed by Alexey Pajitnov Ported by Vadim Gerasimov Developed by AcademySoft
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Ironically, what will likely be the worst game included in Tetris Forever (Cathy from the Future: HAH, wrong!) is also the version of Tetris we wouldn’t be here without. This port, made in less than a week by a teenager, spread like wildfire through Moscow and ultimately throughout the Soviet Bloc, where a version in Budapest caught the attention of a western game developer. We owe EVERYTHING to this version of Tetris, but I don’t factor history into my game reviews. And, as far as Tetris goes, this is one of the weakest builds I’ve ever played. The scoring system from the Electronika version returns, which is fun once, but only once. I’m too spoiled by modern Tetris scoring to get excited for it a second time. But, it all comes down to the lack of responsiveness. I’m one of those people who likes to start on level 0 and build up from there. Level 0 on this version of Tetris is ultra-laggy. Tetris with lag is unplayable. It just is, and that’s enough to earn this a NO! by itself. That’s before I get into the tiny little idiosyncrasies common to the Tetris I grew up with that aren’t here. Like having the walls of the well block rotation is tough. I was raised on Tetris with “wall kicks.” I can adjust to the lack of that, but it combines with the lag and the hard drop to make Tetris so much less intuitive than I’m used to. The lag is better on higher levels, but it’s never perfect. I’m very happy this version is included, because it’s an important stepping stone to Tetris becoming the game we all know and love. But, I wouldn’t want to ever play it again. Verdict: NO! But, I will be awarding bonus value following the Spectrum Holobyte version.
Igo: Kyū Roban Taikyoku Platform: Famicom Released April 14, 1987 Designed by Henk Rogers Developed by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
What the hell just happened? Did I win? Did I violate one of the 103,719,406,297 rules and/or etiquette of the game of Go? I have no clue! You mean to tell me Digital Eclipse, the greatest retro game compilation studio in the entire world, couldn’t do an English ROM hack of this?
The game above was my first game of Igo. I won before a single piece was captured. The computer just surrendered to me. That was nice of it, especially since I lost the next dozen or so matches. Igo: Kyū Roban Taikyoku is a simplified version of the game Go. For those unfamiliar, Go is the oldest continuously played recreational game in human history. There are older games, and tools like dice easily predate Go, but no specific game has an unbroken link of continued popularity. By the time Jesus was born, there was twice as big a gap between his birth and the creation of Go than your birth and the creation of the United States. So, it’s a pretty old game. Even more astonishing is that, in its 2,500+ year history, Go’s basic rules appear to have remained, more or less, unchanged. Most ancient games we lost the rules to, but Go’s popularity and the fact that it wasn’t something played exclusively by the ruling class (which was common practice for ancient board games) creates an uninterrupted connection from the ancient game to the modern day. It’s only the standard size of the board that has verifiably changed. Most ancient Go boards and writings confirm that it was played on a 17 x 17 grid. Today, Go’s standard playfield is a 19 x 19 grid. This Famicom game is the first console version of Go, and the grid is 9 x 9 because Go is so complex that the Famicom, at least at the time, couldn’t have hoped to calculate a 19 x 19 board. It’s included in Tetris Forever because it was Bullet-Proof Software’s foot in the door for Nintendo. And here’s the English instructions in their entirety:
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Even with the simplified 9 x 9 board, Digital Eclipse and Atari seem to be taking it on faith that anyone who boots up Igo will be familiar with Go, and there’s no logical reason to assume that. This is supposed to be an interactive museum, right? Educate us! I have no idea what the rules are, or if I’ve won or lost a game. Did I win this game?
I don’t know what a winning condition is. I don’t know how scoring works. Maybe Igo: Kyū Roban Taikyoku was an excellent teaching tool for a Japanese child in 1987. This is probably one of the best looking board game adaptations up to this point. The presentation is good. The ninjas are a fun touch, and the interface is clean and simple, but visually satisfying. I’m sure Henk Rogers, a competitive Go player, was very happy with this. But, I’m playing this on a collection of games in 2024. Not only do I have no clue what I’m doing, but there’s nothing in Tetris Forever that can help me to figure it out. If I want to learn this, I have to go somewhere else to figure out the rules. There’s a reason why people need teachers to learn Go! Because the written rules are so vast and complicated that, when I attempted to read them, my tear ducts started pouring blood. I expect better from Digital Eclipse. Verdict: NO!
Tetris aka “DOS Tetris” Platform: MS-DOS Released January 29, 1988 Directed by R. Anton Widjaja Developed by Spectrum Holobyte
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For 1988, and for the types of games that could be popular on computers during this era, I’m sure the first commercial Tetris was fine. The presentation is fantastic. There’s no music, but hey, I’m notorious for playing most games muted anyway (I’m tone deaf, literally. It’s called amusia, which is funny because there’s nothing amusing about the isolation that comes from not hearing most music the same way everyone else does). It’s like this version was made for me! The decision by Spectrum Holobyte to lean heavily into the Russian theme was indeed a wise one. But, with all that said, I’m still not feeling this build of Tetris. It lacks dynamic scoring, as your points are only based on both hard drops and how high in the well the drop is made. Granted, scoring multipliers based on doubles, triples, and Tetrises wasn’t the original intent by Pajitnov, but it opens up Tetris as an actual video game instead of a glorified fidget spinner. I’m going to repeat myself a lot in this feature, but that’s the nature of the beast, so I’ll say it again: there’s no incentive to go for Tetrises, because you are not rewarded for them in any way. It turns an intense game of quick decisions and calculating risk/reward into a game of efficient stacking, and nothing more.
I was constantly finishing in the 90 to 95 range, but in probably fifty or more rounds, I never got over the hump and got 100 lines. This game looks like it’s going to happen, but I was dead not long after this screenshot. Tetris is famously a game where good games go south quickly. MS-DOS Tetris really exemplifies that more than most.
I could still get behind that because the core Tetris gameplay is as rock solid as any foundation in gaming history. But, the rebuild of the original Electronika that led off the feature is the only game so far with one-to-one movement accuracy we all want from a game of Tetris. DOS Tetris isn’t quite there yet. MS-DOS Tetris has a speed issue that greatly affects the long game. Once the stack reaches a certain height in the center, there’s simply not enough time to rotate AND move. The point of no return is lower in the well than you really need to maximize excitement. One of my favorite aspects about the modern game of Tetris is close calls and last second saves. Well, that’s not really possible in this build because movement isn’t fast enough. There’s no 7 bag generator in this version, which is the algorithm that assures even distribution of the seven blocks. Multiple times I got situations like four or five squares in a row, or even four Tetris Makers in a row. This game of Tetris was certainly good enough to launch the craze in 1988, but it doesn’t hold up today. Verdict: NO! But, I’m awarding $1 in bonus value for including the MS-DOS games because of the extra effort (and headaches) I know Digital Eclipse and Atari had to jump through to get these games in the collection and make the story of Tetris as they are able to tell it that much more complete. Happy they’re here as bonus features. Doesn’t mean I want to play them.
Tetris aka “Apple Tetris” Platform: Apple II Released July, 1988 Programmed by Dan Geisler Developed by Spectrum Holobyte
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Jeez, and we think the Nintendo Switch has hung around for a spell. That’s nothing compared to the Apple ][, which was eleven years old when Tetris landed on it. Sadly, this port comes from the same company that did the MS-DOS version, and thus it has the same scoring as the previous game. No bonuses for lines, and no incentive to go for anything greater than a single. Scoring is based on hard drops and how high the stack is in the well. So, I hated Apple Tetris, right? Well, it’s a lot more complicated because the controls are much more responsive. You have more time to save a game at the top of the well. Even with graphics so blurry and bright that they made my eyes water (seriously, switch to the monochrome version), Apple II completely annihilates the MS-DOS build. I peaked at 90 to 96 lines in my best games on MS-DOS, but my scoring average was higher than that on the Apple II because I had enough time to cover for mistakes or make tight squeezes. I still think the scoring system is lame as all hell, but this is the best way to experience an authentic emulated (oxymoron) classic PC Tetris. Verdict: YES! – $1 in Value added to Tetris Forever
Tetris aka “Famicom Tetris” Platform: Famicom Released December 22, 1988 Programmed by Bob Rutherford Developed by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
Dynamic scoring! WOOO! And.. lives? What the f*ck?
The first ever console version of Tetris (assuming you don’t count MSX as a console) is also one of the weirdest builds of Tetris I’ve ever played. First thing’s first: I love how Digital Eclipse felt compelled to put a warning that the controls are so stupid that players will want to change them. It doesn’t say it like that, but it’s not wrong. In this Tetris, pressing DOWN rotates the blocks, while the buttons do hard drops. I assume they did it this way because people hit DOWN accidentally. I sure have, but I’d prefer doing that sometimes to how the controls are set up. It’s worse because the only remapping is via the emulator itself, and while it is an option, remember that changing what button is the hard drop means that new button, presumably DOWN, is now “enter” for the menus, and now you can only scroll one way when you enter your name. So awkward, but the weirdness of Famicom Tetris is just getting started.
Dad called this “Christmas Tetris” because of the color scheme.
So yes, dynamic scoring is here and players FINALLY have some measure of risk/reward to deal with instead of just stacking for efficiency. But, there’s a catch: this Tetris is played in 25 line intervals. There’s no uninterrupted marathon mode, and also I might have a concussion for banging my head on the desk. It’s honestly incredible how many versions of this game needed to happen before the Tetris we all love emerged. I’m six games into this feature, five of which are Tetris games, and I’ve still not reached a Tetris that feels like my Tetris. And the weirdness keeps coming in the form of lives. You get to fail three times, and when you die, you still get all the points you earned for this 25-line interval, but then you restart with a new 25 line target. You also don’t get to know how well you’re doing until the breaks, as the score isn’t tallied until you die or reach 25 lines. It’s like Game Boy Tetris’ B-Mode as a solo game.
My motto of “find the fun” took a little longer with Famicom Tetris. The 25 line or bust gameplay engine put up a fight. But then I realized, screw it, embrace it by jacking up the handicap to the max. And lo, the fun was found.
Not strange enough for you? If you play with handicap and clear 25 lines, whatever progress you’ve made is retained for the next 25 line batch. But if you die, you start from scratch with a fresh pile of garbage blocks on the playfield. I don’t recommend playing on level 0, as it’s just not fun. Even if you use handicap, start on at least level 5 for speed. This is one of the rare Tetris games where the garbage blocks are the best part of the game. Without a marathon and a much slower sense of progression, challenging tall stacks of garbage is the best thing Famicom Tetris has going for it. What stood out to me the most about Famicom Tetris is how everyone involved still had no idea what they had with Tetris. I appreciate that they realized what they were doing, and what Spectrum Holobyte had done, was certainly not maximizing its potential. This was a big step, and while they had a ways to go, I did manage to “find the fun” by treating this as a hybrid of a logic puzzler and Tetris. BUT, if you just hate the standard Tetris B-Mode, feel free to imagine this verdict flipped, because this is ALL B-Mode. Verdict: YES! – $2 in Value added to Tetris Forever
Welltris Platform: MS-DOS Released November, 1989 Concept by Alexey Pajitnov & Andrei Sgenov Designed by Dan KaufmanPublished by Spectrum Holobyte
It’s really hard to explain how the gravity works. The best way I can explain it is “imagine the bottom is a continuation of any wall.” So a block that enters the well from the left wall will slide all the way to the base of the right wall. It’s not intuitive and takes forever to get used to. Hey, maybe that’s why the set is called “Tetris Forever!”
It took me about ten seconds to figure out why Welltris didn’t “take” as heir to Tetris. Tetris conquered the world because it’s one of the few abstract game concepts that both offers instantly intuitive mechanics and instant gratification. Neither of those are true of Welltris. Movement, the drop mechanics, and how the well reacts to cleared lines? Not one single aspect of it is intuitive. It takes a long while to get the hang of Welltris, and even when you have it, jeez, this is one slow and clunky game. The idea is simple: the walls are where the blocks enter, but they’re not part of the playfield. The bottom is the only playfield. There’s no layers, and if a block is, ahem, blocked and gets stuck on the wall, you lose that wall for a few turns. Lose all four walls and it’s game over. Even after hours of playing, my brain refused to adjust to the transitions from wall-to-wall. I was constantly seeing blocks get hung-up on the corners. Of course, I was also doing things like changing the shapes of blocks in the corners as well, and the Digital Eclipse-provided “how to play” tab didn’t tell me why. I had to revert to prehistoric gaming and use the instruction manual like a savage, presumably read by whale blubber candlelight in my cave while the men hunt a woolly mammoth for supper. There, I learned how to use the corners to distort blocks. Like in this slide show, you can see me turn a “T” block into an “L” block.
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How’d that happen? I didn’t have a clue at the time, but it wasn’t intentional. Truth be told, I panicked! I wanted to stick the block in one of the corners and accept that I was going to lose another wall. But then, as the block entered the playfield, it seemed to warp and distort, and by the time I was out of my panic attack, the block suddenly had a different shape and fit perfectly in the spaces around the corner. What the fudge? Well, the manual describes it as “its segments go in a direction appropriate for the wall” which now I think I understand.
In other words, since each wall has a different “bottom of the well” on the playfield, having the blocks fall in the corners, with pieces on both sides, creates two simultaneous bottoms that essentially divides a single block into two or more pieces. It’s something I never got a real feel for. Also, when the blocks enter the playfield properly, the wall is capable of creating an overlapping situation, and in such an event, the extra block is just deleted from existence. Again, none of this is intuitive and I never quite got the hang of it. To be perfectly frank, even after many, many hours spent trying, I never could DELIBERATELY make the corner move work out as well as it did that first time, which was an accident. Actually, when I was trying to use that technique, I mostly ended up screwing things up worse. By the way, is anyone else getting a “it’s not a bug! It’s a feature!” vibe out of the whole corner thing? Because I sure am! I have a sixth sense about these things.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the Tetris game that introduced the strange shapes (like the Plus Block, the Staircase Block, etc.) to the franchise. I hate all the non-standard seven blocks. But, they’re fully optional.
Welltris has other problems. It doesn’t control smoothly at all, which combined with the speed increases that come through the progress AND the latency inherent to MS-DOS emulation, makes Welltris’ mid-to-late game pretty miserable. There’s a noticeable unresponsiveness in movement and especially in rotating the blocks (in fairness, most MS-DOS games in any Gold Master Series thus far have lag). It’s always there and it’s very frustrating. I also found the score sheet to be too conservative. The scoring is a mix of the original Tetris’ emphasis on fast drops and the later games’ emphasis on lines and combos. I’d love to play this with a more logical, elegant scoring system. Oh, and like many early Tetris games, this one charges a semi-hefty tax for having the “NEXT BLOCK” feature turned on. I think Pajitnov’s heart was in the right place with that idea, but all forms of Tetris are better mental exercises with the next block feature. Is Welltris any good? I think it could potentially be. The roughness of this build, with the latency in movement is what ultimately pushed my opinion into the NO! column. But, Pajitnov did right the wrongs here with the coin-op version (reviewed in the bonus section down below). Welltris MS-DOS is boring, but as a proof of concept for a better game, I’ve seen a lot worse. Verdict: NO!
Hatris (JP Version) Platform: Famicom Released July 6, 1990 Designed by Alexey Pajitnov and Vladimir Pokhilko Programmed by Akira Kobayashi Developed by Bullet-Proof Software
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If I didn’t know that Hatris was designed by Pajitnov, I’d have guessed it was one of the dozens of “gimme some of that cheddar” games that followed in Tetris’ wake. Jeez, can you imagine having to follow up Tetris? Whatever sequels followed in its immediate wake were certain to disappoint. In fact, the game is so different in every way but the well and gravity that they should have divorced it entirely from the franchise. “Hatris” sounds like a parody of Tetris, impossible to take seriously and certainly not a game one should expect to pay good money for. It’s an unfortunate name, because honestly, Hatris is decent as its own game. Well, actually some versions are, but not this one. The object is to create stacks of five hats. The hats enter the playfield in pairs and you have to sort them in a way where the pile doesn’t become too high. What complicates things is that, while matching hats take up minimal space, mismatches eat up space. The playfield is only six columns wide, so mismatches become inevitable. A final twist is that if one hat binds to any stack, the second hat can still be moved independently until it reaches another stack.
I tried to play on higher levels, with stacks of garbage blocks already on the playfield. I used this specific level ten times and the closest I got was six matches from the shop.
While the type of hats in the games changes in each separate version of Hatris, what really differentiates each port is how it handles special powers. The Famicom Hatris is the most conservative among the ports included in Tetris Forever. After collecting twenty five matches, you get to enter a shop and remove any one hat from the board entirely, but once a hat is chosen from the shop, you can never pick it again in future visits. While it does add a layer of strategy, it’s just not enough help. Once you reach the full variety of hats, there’s seemingly nothing resembling the modern Tetris’ “7 Bag” algorithm to assure that luck doesn’t completely screw you over. Six channels is not enough when you get no extra help until you pull-off 25 matches. And you know what? I think BPS and everyone involved agrees with me, because the Game Boy and American NES versions of Hatris give you many more options that open-up the gameplay beyond luck-based stacking. Good for them, too. Because what’s here isn’t completely abysmal, but you never shake the feeling that it’s entirely luck-based. Verdict: NO!
Hatris Platform: Game Boy Released May, 1991 Designed by Alexey Pajitnov & Vladimir Pokhilko Developed by Bullet-Proof Software
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Much like the trajectory of Tetris, Hatris needed time to figure out how to make the gameplay more dynamic and video-game-like instead of “Busy Work: The Game.” Game Boy Hatris’ addition of two gameplay mechanics opens-up a more arcade-like risk/reward feel. In the Famicom version, there’s no reward for creating two set matches from a single drop. On Game Boy, it earns you a fireball. The fireball can then be used to clear any one hat that’s on the top of a stack, with the exception of the fireproof crowns. If you build up a stockpile of three fireballs, they’re automatically used up to create a helmet that can crush an entire stack down to the bottom of the screen, with the exception of crowns. These two additions alone yank Hatris out of the cellar and make it a genuinely decent game.
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However, there’s a big catch to the helmets: they remain on the playfield and require four additional helmets to clear. Logically this means that having to (1) create, at the barest minimum, fifteen total fireballs (2) crush the same pile five times, since there’s no diagonal matching. It’s too big of a commitment, and the shame is, there’s multiple ways they could have changed this to work. Make special rules for the helmet that make it three to clear instead of five. If it was three helmets, the temptation of clearing a stack versus getting rid of the dead weight of the used helmets would be agonizing, and awesome. If Digital Eclipse is reading, what you guys could do is create a new Hatris that has a bigger playfield to accommodate wide screen TVs, and then use our space age, futuristic computing power to allow different match requirements for different hats. Hatris has so much potential thanks to the unusual way pieces stack into each-other. The concept has legs, but unlike Tetris, Hatris was abandoned before it ever reached its fullest potential. Flawed and limited as Hatris for Game Boy is, I put a lot more time into it than I figured I would. Verdict: YES! – $2 in Value added to Tetris Forever I’m going to go out of order and wrap-up Hatris for Tetris Forever. There’s two more Hatris games in this feature but they’re in the bonus section.
Hatris (US Version) Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released April, 1992 Programmed by Akira Kobayashi Developed by Bullet-Proof Software
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Unbelievably, Hatris for the NES regresses from the Game Boy version and goes back to the Famicom’s system of not giving bonuses for clearing matches with both pieces of a single drop. There’s no incentive at all to do anything besides stack and clear hats with as much efficiency as possible, and thus there’s no risk/reward. Which isn’t to say that this version of Hatris is the same as the Famicom, because it ain’t. The “clear all of one type of hat” bomb is replaced by the characters Alexey and Vladimir. Alexey allows you to remove any five hats from the playfield, with the only catch being the options are limited to the bottom of each stack. It’s still a very valuable power-up. Vladimir allows you to swap the positions of any two stacks, which is less valuable, but there’s one final bonus: if the current piece dropping is set to screw you thanks to the lack of matches, activating a helper removes it from the game. After the power is used, gameplay resumes with whatever was the next piece in line. I found myself using the helpers (especially Vladimir) just to junk the current piece as often as I was because I needed their powers.
My first game felt like it took hours to finish.
This is the Hatris that offers the most power-ups of any of the three Hatris games in Tetris Forever, and it’s not even close. Each character has specific hats that charge their meters. It only takes five matches of their hat types to score one use of a helper, and you can bank up to eight usages. Consequently, this is probably the easiest of the three versions of Hatris, as the long game is more survivable if you play your cards right and save-up your powers for the end game. Did I have fun? A little. More than enough to score a YES!, but I’m still pretty baffled by the lack of incentive to go for doubles. It’s such an obvious oversight, but oddly one that would be repeated in the coin-op and PC Engine ports. Without question there’s SOMETHING here with the Hatris formula. The varying sizes of the hats and how they interlock and stack is unique and novel. Yet, none of the versions I’ve played feel specifically optimized for maximum gaming pleasure. The same was true of early versions of Tetris, but lots of people kept working with it until they got it right. That ain’t happening with Hatris. I’ll still give the edge to the Game Boy version, even if the ideal Hatris is probably a mix of this version and it. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Tetris Forever
Tetris 2 + BomBliss Platform: Famicom Released December 31, 1991 Directed by Koichi Nakamura Developed by Chunsoft Co., Ltd. Published by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
The “C” Mode debuts in Tetris 2, where garbage blocks rise up out of the ground in regular intervals. I was constantly dying at 60 – 70 lines on it. Once you get too close to the top, you’re likely to lose your ability to rotate the block. Whenever I died, it was almost always from a situation I would have survived in a modern Tetris game.
The “Tetris 2” in this title is not related to the Nintendo-developed game we call “Tetris 2” in the west, which is called “Tetris Flash” in Japan (reviewed below, in the bonus section). This sequel is labeled “Tetris 2” specifically in terms of the Famicom’s Tetris, and it’s a marked improvement over the original. This is the first Tetris game in the collection with left and right rotation instead of single-direction rotation. That alone makes a huge difference. But, I still wasn’t in love with this version of Tetris. Last second saves are hard because your ability to rotate is limited. The block must be entirely on the screen to be able to turn, and it must have clearance to turn. So obviously advanced moves like t-spins wouldn’t be possible in this build. The biggest innovation here is that blocks make a noise when they land, but they’re not locked in yet. You still have a grace period of being able to move then until they settle. Tetris 2 is actually okay, but Tetris still had a long way to go. You really can’t appreciate how much the 7-bag algorithm transforms the game of Tetris until you get a string of four square blocks followed by three more after a break of one other block. So, the only reason to play this is BomBliss.
I sure hope you enjoy BomBliss as much as I do. Otherwise, Tetris Forever’s lineup might not “do it” for you.
In the west, we know BomBliss better as “Tetris Blast.” Classic Nintendo consoles only ever got one version of it in the West, so it’s a bit startling that there’s six total versions of BomBliss in Tetris Forever. Six!! For those not familiar, it’s basically Tetris, only some of the individual segments are bombs. If you make a line, it doesn’t necessarily clear that line. But, if there’s bombs in that line, the amount of lines you clear at once increases the explosive powers of the bombs. You really don’t want to get just singles, as a single might leave behind garbage in the line you cleared. Only bombs clear the blocks, so you have to cluster them up in 2 x 2 squares to create bigger bombs and/or strategically align all the bombs to maximize explosive power. After a while, the game starts utilizing new shapes of blocks besides the standard seven block roster. I couldn’t put BombBliss down. I don’t recall ever playing Tetris Blast, and I figured there had to be a reason why this was such an uncommon game today. I have to assume it vanished due to oversaturation (six versions?! That’s more than Hatris WITH THE BONUS REVIEWS), because actually, I really liked this. I’ll get more into it in the next review. I wasn’t going to issue a verdict because the next game is essentially the same game, only in 16-bits. HOWEVER, the next game’s Tetris I don’t feel is entirely on the up-and-up, so.. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Tetris Forever
Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss Platform: Super Famicom Released December 18, 1992 Directed by Masayoshi Takatori & Toshihiko Kitazawa Developed by Tose Co. Ltd Published by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
This was my best game because I kept things nice and flat. But I was done after just one screw-up soon after this pic was taken. Once things start flying, the rotation begins to feel unresponsive, and without wall kicks, it’s too easy for a block to get jammed by the stack and be unable to rotate.
Let’s get this out of the way first: I have never in my life seen the likes of a game of Tetris like. One that just refuses to spawn Tetris Makers like this version does. I’m convinced that some kind of rigging is going on. This is a Tetris game made before 7-bag. Tetris Forever talks about how 7-bag is required if you want to become a Tetris licensee (one of the video segment subjects is essentially about how protective of “the brand” they are). You can feel the lack of 7-bag in many of these early Tetris games, but it’s taken to a whole new level here. I had multiple instances where the game started me with two or three Tetris Makers in a row, at a point when I couldn’t possibly have made a Tetris, then never gave me another one. Ever. Now sure, the odds are theoretically 1-in-7 that any given block will be a Tetris Maker, but over the course of a game, even random chance should level out. That almost never happened. It was specifically Tetris Makers the game would not give out. Okay, so rotten luck, right? I shouldn’t be surprised, because having historically bad RNG is probably the biggest running gag in Indie Gamer Chick history. But, I’m not entirely sure it’s really legit 1-in-7 RNG. I think Super Tetris 2 is cooking the numbers a little bit.
This was basically the highlight of Tetris 2/Super Tetris 2 for me. This was the only Tetris I ever got this high up the well. That’s partially because Tetris Makers become impossible to rotate after a certain height.
Please note that everything I’m about to say absolutely can be chalked up to rotten luck, and not EVERY game had me get hosed. But, it did happen consistently enough to talk about. First, there’s just the obvious observation that it’s specifically Tetris Makers the game often refused to spit out. If I had perfect L-shaped gaps, the game gave them to me about the rate you would expect. No unexpectedly long gaps between the necessary fit. Same with perfect gaps for any other shape. No, it was only the Tetris Makers, and it wasn’t just one game that I filled the well to the top and never got them. It was several games. But thanks to the magic of rewind, I noticed one really peculiar quirk with those games. As long as I kept the gap open, the odds that I got a Tetris Maker were very slim.
But, with UNCANNY consistency, if I opted to clog the hole, creating a layout where a Tetris Maker was the least-optimal block for the current stack, suddenly the RNG wasn’t stingy with the Tetris Makers. Rewound again to unclog, and the game would go back to not passing out Tetris Makers. It didn’t happen every game, but it did happen a lot. This is in addition to a bad “random generator” that tended to do things like start games with twelve-straight Z/Reverse-Z blocks, or four Tetris Makers in a row. And hell, that’s not even talking about Super Tetris’ uncanny ability to give you the worst block for any situation. No place to fit a Z block? HERE’S FIVE OF THEM IN A ROW! Combine that with the lack of a wall kick and how bad the top of the stack plays in the late game and I gotta say, I didn’t care for Super Tetris 2 at all. Also, this is nitpicky but there’s no wrap-ups telling you how many Tetrises/Triples/etc. you got each round.
I was nearly as addicted to BomBliss as I’ve ever been to Tetris. This is a seriously underrated game.
Once again, Bombliss carries the day. There’s two ways to play it, though games have the same object: clear the screen entirely. In Mode A, there’s a starting pattern, and you’re given 100 randomly-assigned blocks to clear the field. Scoring is based around how quickly you’re able to clear the screen. The second mode is a puzzle mode where you have a limited supply of specific blocks spit out in a specific order. Both modes I found to be every bit as addictive and satisfying as the main Tetris. BomBliss is no second banana, but it does have a sharp learning curve to it. It took me a while to be able to judge how much damage and range any bombs bigger than singles would get me. It’s worth getting good at though. Realistically, you can skip the Famicom game and just play this one. It’s the same game, more or less. Combined, they’re worth about five bucks, so I’ll say.. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Tetris Forever
Tetris Battle Gaiden Platform: Super Famicom Released December 24, 1993 Directed by Richard Rogers Developed by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
You’re going to have to trust me: this makes sense.
If I had to guess which review will be the most controversial among the Tetris Forever titles, it’s a sure-fire bet this is it. Because I really didn’t like Battle Gaiden at all. If you have people near you of roughly equal skill level, take this whole review with a grain of salt, because Tetris with local-only multiplayer isn’t worth much to me. Among other things, and this isn’t trying to sound like a flex but there’s nobody in my home who can possibly hope to take me. Dad and my nephew TJ, who have each both won exactly 0 games of Tetris 99, were told to practice specifically at this game. I annihilated both of them so fast their heads were spinning. Mind you, when they played each-other, it was exciting to watch as they were, more or less, evenly matched, and a couple of their bouts went pretty long. If one best of three series didn’t go fifteen minutes, I’d be stunned. That wasn’t the case with me, and although it gave me a tiny hit of self-esteem to hear my father mutter “holy crap” when I played the first match against TJ, the reality is I’m a 35 year old defeating an 11 year old who didn’t play his first game of Tetris until I basically paid him to last month. My best chance at giving Tetris Battle Gaiden a YES! was against the computer, but it quickly became clear a YES! was not happening.
At first, I thought if Tetris Battle Gaiden’s extracurricular ideas had a little more pep in their step, I’d probably have given it a YES! anyway. But the deeper I looked at the character roster, the more I realized where Tetris Gaiden REALLY goes wrong.
There’s four major problems with Tetris Battle Gaiden. The first is that the power-ups completely interrupt the gameplay. There’s too much non-gameplay graphics involved. If the powers worked with a quick, snappy effect, it would have been so much better. But the characters linger on the screen too long, and the effects they create can take too long to apply. This leads into the second problem: there’s just too many power crystals available. Instead of basing the power-ups on how well you play, the game comes down to waiting for blocks that have the crystals and entering into a series of staring contests with your opponent, trying to time it so you’re the one getting the blocks with the crystals. This is caused by the third problem: you both share one pool of blocks. Normally, this would be a good idea. Hell, a GREAT idea, but it doesn’t work with the crystal system. The superpowers they unleash are so potentially devastating that even a novice player knows to base their actions around trying to get blocks that have the crystals, which you get just by clearing single lines. You get them regardless of whether you create gaps in the stack. They’re far too common and far too easy to get, and their presence absolutely murders the flow of Tetris Battle Gaiden. The game never recovers. “Staring Contest” is wrong. It’s a game of chicken, but a slow one. Really slow.
Even on the default difficulty, I lost a lot of matches to the AI with some of the characters. But, with the Princess, I flew through the game undefeated, and never came close to losing a single match. I wouldn’t normally consider one overpowered character to be a deal breaker in a local-only multiplayer game, because anyone can make house rules (show of hands, who here has uttered the phrase “no Oddjob!” in their lives?). But Tetris Gaiden was already not a good game. This just seals it.
The three issues above would be enough to lock-in a NO! for Tetris Battle Gaiden. Where it becomes historically inept is in the characters themselves, and more specifically, their game-breaking superpowers. Each character has four unique powers that cost between 1 and 4 crystals to use, and the one good thing I can say about Tetris Gaiden is it doesn’t let you carry more than four crystals at a time. Hell, the actual Tetris playing would just stop if that were the case. I found one character specifically to be so overpowered that I told my family “you better ban me from using her.” It’s the Princess. Only her first power is balanced: clearing a 3-segment long column from the stack, basically creating a giant canyon in it. That’s fine. It’s the other three that are absurd. Her level 2 power is a shield that not only blocks the next use of a superpower by an opponent, but actually reverses it onto them. This was especially effective when playing humans, who might not glance over to your side of the screen to see you’ve used a power.
Hope you can read Japanese, because otherwise you won’t be able to read this curse by a boss. It randomized the buttons, so up might rotate, and left might use your superpower. There are NO English ROM hacks in Tetris Forever. Brush on your Japanese, folks. It’s fun!
Her third power is more useful than pretty much everyone else’s most expensive power. For the low cost of three crystals, you can prevent your opponent from being able to rotate pieces for the next three blocks. Her final power is the ability to turn your stack into an exact copy of your opponent’s stack. When a superpower is activated, both players lose their next block, and the player who activated the power gets whatever is the next piece in the chute. So if your opponent is about to hit a Tetris, not only do you block that from happening, but YOU GET THE TETRIS. It’s too much, but I already hated Tetris Battle Gaiden anyway. It takes away from Tetris gameplay instead of enhancing it, which makes it one of the worst versions of Tetris I’ve ever played. I take a lot of comfort from the fact that Alexey Pajitnov agreed, saying that they rushed this out without balancing it. Oh god, don’t tell me they were trying to beat the release before the Street Fighter II craze ended. Man, talk about misreading the moment. They completely misjudged who their market was on this. They were essentially creating a new genre, along with Puyo Puyo’s emergence as a multiplayer favorite. Crying shame. Verdict: NO! But good job on the instruction screens, Digital Eclipse. The best ones in Tetris Forever, in my opinion.
Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss Genteiban Platform: Super Famicom Released January 21, 1994 Directed by Shunichi Nanto & Shinichi Oguri Developed by Tose Co. Ltd Published by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
Same old rigged game of Tetris. Bleh.
This is a limited edition reprint of Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss. It’s the exact same crappy version of Tetris and the sublime BomBliss, only there’s new puzzles for BomBliss. I chose a couple random puzzles and each time the puzzle was different from its Tetris 2 + BomBliss counterpart, so that’s a good thing. Hey, I like BomBliss’ puzzle mode. I like it a lot! However, no improvements were made to Super Tetris 2. In my one and only game of it, the game started with three square pieces, and the stack was well over halfway full before I got my first Tetris Maker, then I didn’t get another until my stack was practically reaching the ceiling. If Digital Eclipse had included a list of which puzzles had been changed or added to BomBliss, or more importantly, what puzzles in this game ONLY appear in this game and none of the three versions of BomBliss still remaining in this collection, I’d been more inclined to play it more. I suspect some of these “limited edition” puzzles will be recycled in the coming games. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Tetris Forever
Super Tetris 3 Platform: Super Famicom Released December 16, 1994 Directed by Shinichi Oguri & Tarou Matunaka Developed by Tose Co. Ltd Published by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
Look how big the stack is. Look how many blocks are clustered together. Folks, that Tetris Maker is the first Tetris Maker I got in that round. It spit out doubles of identical blocks six times leading up to that, including three squares back-to-back-back.
For games with “super” in them, the Super Famicom versions of Tetris sure are middling versions of the game. I’m not even sure why they bothered with Super Tetris 2 or Super Tetris 3. Like the two previous Super Famicom “Super Tetris” games, the Tetris game is mediocre at best, at least in comparison to other Tetris games. Boring look. Boring backgrounds. No advance moves, or 7-bag algorithm. The best thing I can say about it is at least the B-Mode (called “classic mode”) has a wrap-up between stages telling you how many Tetrises you got. Of course, it’s all based 100% on luck, assuming the game isn’t outright rigged. There’s a four player game of Tetris called Familiss that I barely got to play. It, along with a Tetris variation and a BomBliss variation, would barely be noteworthy as modern DLC, let alone starring in a full release.
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“Sparkliss” is just BomBliss, only if the bombs exploded very slightly differently. Instead of being explosions with a blast radius, the bomb blocks in Sparkliss explode more like bombs do in Bomberman games, in straight lines. In fairness, some of the stages and puzzles feature blocks that now require two blasts to destroy. I enjoyed this fine, but goddamn this is weird. A solo BomBliss game would release for the Super Famicom (and the Game Boy) almost exactly three months after this. Why wasn’t this game saved for that? It would have made sense in Super BomBliss. Magicaliss is probably the worst Tetris variation in Tetris Forever, or second worst, depending on how you feel about Tetris Battle Gaiden. The fact that anything can compete with that trash fire is sad, indeed. What an airball Magicaliss was.
Meh.
The idea is that there’s three colors of blocks: red, blue, and green. There’s also steel blocks that are made only of single, double, or triple segments instead of the standard seven blocks of Tetris. Steel blocks can contribute to a line, but they don’t shatter when you make a line. There’s also wildcard blocks, and the big twist is if you can make a line out of a solid color (including wildcards but excluding the steel blocks), that entire color is cleared from the board, then all the steel blocks are converted into the color that was vanished. It just doesn’t work, folks. It’s BORING. While the blocks come out random in colors, you can change them into the color you want by rotating them 360 degrees (or a single twist counter-clockwise). When I realized that, in my next game I cleared 300 lines. Even then, I never got a feel for the gravity. I’m pretty sure the stack falls after matching single-color lines, but I wasn’t 100% certain on that, and the English instructions Digital Eclipse included don’t mention cascading at all. Either way, this is a slow, boring version of Tetris. The standard 25-line B-Mode was closer to decent, keeping Battle Gaiden in Tetris Forever’s cellar, but it’s closer than it should be. Super Tetris 3 is the first game in Tetris Forever that screams “soulless cash grab.” I feel bad for people who bought this in 1994, but as a +1 to Tetris Forever, eh, at least Sparkliss has the same type of puzzle mode as BomBliss, with 100 unique puzzles to solve. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Tetris Forever
Super BomBliss aka Tetris Blast Platform: Game Boy Released March 17, 1995 Directed by Shinichi Oguri Developed by Tose Co. Ltd Published by Bullet-Proof Software
There really is no reason to play the original Game Boy build of Super BomBliss. The DX version is identical to it, only it has more colors (the original has an optional Super Game Boy-style four-color mode) and a puzzle mode that’s copied, puzzle-for-puzzle, from the Super Famicom game. I make a lot of jokes about sets like Tetris Forever having games for the sake of a +1, but this really is a case of this being a meaningless +1. Verdict: NO!
And I’m going to go out of order again.
Super BomBliss DX Platform: Game Boy Color Released December 10, 1999 Directed by Shunichi Nanto & Takashi Tanaka Developed by Tose Co. Ltd Published by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
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There IS a reason to play the Game Boy Color versions of Super BomBliss. And really, the only actual difference between it and the Super Famicom game, besides the graphics, is what’s called “Fight Mode.” It’s actually a very clever idea that should have been a slam dunk YES!, but haphazard coding and one really bad idea complicates that. Fight mode is essentially “what if there were boss fights?” You fight eight different characters who are physically on the stack, trying to either win by blowing them up enough times to eliminate their health bar OR to completely clear the entire stack, which is an automatic win. This is a GREAT idea I’d love to see explored more, but there are issues. Mostly based around this guy:
Each of the eight characters has a variety of moves and attacks that complicate the game. They might raise the stack, drill through existing blocks, or eat bombs. That’s in addition to the starting configurations of the stacks never being optimized for creating lines, so those moves are challenging enough. But, the 7th boss has one additional ability that was absolutely infuriating. He has the ability to stun-lock your movement for several seconds. ONE SECOND would be brutal enough, but having to wait four or five seconds before you can move again, when the drop speed is already pretty fast (probably level 7 speed), meant the move often gave the thing an automatic win. I couldn’t even cheat to beat this f*cking thing and lost multiple times. I had quit, and it was only when I went to grab a better screenshot of the “haha you lose” move that I finally won. When it happened, it feels like the only reason I was able to win was the game randomly spit out the right blocks for me to not get clogged up immediately. That should have been the last boss, because I beat the actual finale on only my second attempt.
I think this guy must be my mascot Sweetie’s ex. She refused to look at the screen.
A problem with the Fight Mode in general is that scoring hits never feels entirely accurate. I only ever scored a hit with singles if it happened at the bottom of the well. Anywhere else, singles almost always missed, even if the blast radius was (apparently) in the center of the enemy’s body. Hell, this happened a lot even with doubles that blew up with larger blasts. The bombs could explode and cover 90% of the baddie’s body and still not register a hit. For a while, I thought maybe it was required that you stun-lock the enemies before blasting them. This is done by dropping a piece on them, at which point this turns into Dig Dug, where the baddies become a pair of eyeballs that migrate through solid surfaces to the top of the stack. While they’re easier to hit this way, it turns out that it’s not necessary. It’s just sloppy coding and inconsistent collision detection, as sometimes I could damage anywhere, and other times I couldn’t. That, along with the unoptimized starting stacks makes Fight Mode an extremely frustrating experience. And yet, there’s something here. I’d love to see this explored more with better collision and more characters. Because this game is SO MUCH better than the god awful Super Famicom version of Super BomBliss, I’m giving it more value that I probably should. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Tetris Forever If you’re REALLY nostalgic for Game Boy’s look, add $0.50 in Value for Super BomBliss
Super BomBliss Platform: Super Famicom Released March 17, 1995 Developed by Tose Co. Ltd Published by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan
Very funny.
Super BomBliss’ only unique feature over the Game Boy Color release is that it replaces Fight Mode with a versus mode, including one where you fight the computer. What ruins it is the starting positions. They would be bad enough in single player, but as a competitive game, it’s awful. The computer moves at superhuman speeds, so you can’t really use the “next piece” to plan ahead since both players share the bag. But, against the computer especially, the starting stacks are some of the most trollish, counter-intuitive arrangements, like something out of a sadistic ROM hack. These starting stacks would be difficult enough to work with if you had the standard seven Tetris blocks, but there’s multiple gigantic pieces, and since it’s totally random, I found even the computer was unable to make more than single lines in the Jason Voorhees level. LOOK AT IT!
Kiss my f*cking ass, game.
Why even bother with a versus COM mode if you want to be a complete c*nt about it? Games of it are slow, boring, and usually end when the computer tops out even if you never do anything. Which you really can’t in most of the stages because they didn’t build starting levels around exciting gameplay. They built them to be as obnoxious as possible. The only time I ever did well was when I got lucky with the blocks it gave me. Some levels, that’s not possible on. How did I beat the Jason Voorhees level? I dunno. I never made a single line. The computer died because it dropped blocks faster, but it never was able to arrange a bomb in the right position to drop the stack. HORRIBLE! This was not a game designed to be fun. Super Bombliss is a game that’s actively hostile towards players. It’s reprehensible. Since all the puzzles are in the Game Boy Color game, there’s really no reason to recommend playing a game that seems to loath itself like Super BomBliss SFC does. Okay, this time for real: THIS is the worst game in Tetris Forever, and I’ve never said this before about a retro collection, but Digital Eclipse should patch it out and leave the space that occupied it blank. Stick with Super BomBliss DX. Verdict: NO!
Tetris Time Warp Exclusive to Tetris Forever Released November 11, 2024 Designed by Jason Cirillo
I imagine I saw this right before I was born.
I have much, much love for Jason Cirillo, designer of the best reason to own Atari 50: Neo Breakout. Knowing Jason, I suspect that doing a Tetris game was on his bucket list and getting the call to make this was a dream come true for him. With that said, Tetris Time Warp, made with the best of intentions, was just sort of alright for me. Oh, it wins “best in set” easily. That seems like a tradition with the Gold Master Series. The Digital Eclipse originals show these old games what’s what. Time Warp is the only MODERN Tetris in this collection, IE holds, ghost pieces, wall kicks, T-Spins, etc, etc. And it’s a pretty good version in terms of play mechanics. There’s enough time for me to spend a solid minute sh*tting my pants and holding on for dear life near the top of the stack during the end game, which is my personal favorite aspect of modern Tetris. I wish someone could make a game that was ONLY that. Call it “Tetris Crush” or something. All yours, whoever wants it! If it makes you a billionaire, kick some bucks to epilepsy research or something. But, let’s say you really wanted the old version of Tetris for the Game Boy. Jason built a tribute to that build with a 150 line marathon mode. It’s very convincing, and while it’s not exactly the game everyone was hoping for, it’s pretty close, you know?
For everyone complaining about the lack of Game Boy Tetris, this is “1989 Marathon” mode. One of four single-player modes in Tetris Forever. It’s the physics of the Game Boy game, but the blocks aren’t exact matches (notably the Tetris Makers), and cleared lines are swiped out instead of blinking out. But the music and sound effects are mostly accurate. Also, the game ends after 150 lines. There’s no other modes, so it’s NOT the Game Boy Tetris, as there’s no “B Mode.” But, it’s pretty close, and more importantly, it’s pretty good. I’m awarding $2.50 in bonus value just for this.
Time Warp mode is sort of like Tetris meets WarioWare. It’s a mostly a standard modern game of Tetris, with the twist being “time warp blocks.” Every time you reach ten lines, the next block will be a time warp block. These blocks cannot be held, but otherwise they function exactly like Tetris blocks. However, when you clear any one part of them, you “time warp” to one of three different eras: Electronika, some bomb-based Tetris that’s kind of like BomBliss, and the Game Boy release. You’re not just playing those eras like normal Tetris, either. There’s one specific goal for each. The Electronika version is always “get four lines.” The Game Boy version is always “score a double.” The bomb Tetris that isn’t quite BomBliss is always “detonate a big bomb.” You have twenty seconds to finish each of these goals, and completing them scores a lot of points. It’s a fun idea, but the problem is that you only can play all three modes if you drop the time warp block when it’s in its Electronika configuration. Drop it in the Game Boy configuration, and you get to play two. In the bomb configuration, and it’s only that one mode. My gut feeling is that, with only three destinations, this was an ambitious idea that didn’t quite pan out as the developer hoped. It’s just too limited, to the point that I began opting to use the gold part of the time warp blocks, which doesn’t “send you back in time” and instead creates a cascade that, more importantly, erases all the gaps you’ve left.
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Nearly every game I played of the marathon mode lasted roughly twenty minutes and ended around level 15. I just couldn’t get further than that. It becomes too hard to time the time warp blocks to get the gold side, but the crappy part is, the blocks go too fast to really play the Electronika version. By the time the game started, the first block had already dropped and screwed me up. A single half-second long grace period would probably fix this, and it would do wonders for the long game. It might very well save the endless version of the game. The best part of Tetris Time Warp for me was the three minute mode. With it, I found the potently addictive side of Time Warp that makes Tetris work. It’s not as fun to marathon the Time Warp mode as it should be. But, once everything became a race against the clock, suddenly Time Warp found its groove. Wisely, the primary timer pauses when you activate a time warp, so three minutes is really like four or five minutes, but that’s perfect for this format. I really hate to come across like I’m disappointed in Time Warp, because I really did enjoy it a lot. What a tall task Jason Cirillo had: not only paying tribute to Tetris’ past, but making a game that feels slick and modern while doing so. He certainly didn’t fail, but it’s not exactly a rousing success, either. Again, this is the best part of Tetris Forever’s game lineup. But I don’t think Time Warp will be a Tetris I come back to after this. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added + $2.50 Bonus for the Game Boy rebuild – $7.50 Total
FINAL TALLY – NINETEEN GAMES (following 12-20-24 update) YES!: 11 games totaling $26.50 in overall value (including bonus value). NO!: 8 games. + $35 for Main Feature & Emulation GOAL: $35 in Value FINAL VALUE: $61.50 $29.74 (normally $34.99) fell down a well in the making of this review.
BONUS REVIEWS
THESE ARE NOT INCLUDED IN TETRIS FOREVER! THESE DO NOT AFFECT THE FINAL VERDICT! THIS IS JUST FOR FUNSIES! IN ORDER OF RELEASE
And I want to thank my friend Dave Sanders who acted as my special consultant for the bonus reviews. Meaning he found roughly 25% of the games featured here and shot me puppy dog eyes until I agreed to review them.
BONUS REVIEWS OF GAMES NOT INCLUDED IN TETRIS FOREVER
Tetris (MSX, 1988)
Tetris (Atari Games – Arcade, 1988)
Tetris (Sega – Arcade, 1988)
Tetris (Sega Mega Drive, Unreleased)
Tetris (Tengen – NES, 1989)
Tetris (Game Boy, 1989)
Flash Point (Arcade, 1989)
BlockOut (Arcade, 1989)
Tetris (Nintendo – NES, 1989)
BlockOut (NES, Unreleased)
Nintendo World Championships 1990 (NES, Competition Cartridge)
Pyramid (NES, 1990)
Tetris (Nintendo Game Watch, 1990)
Pipe Dream (Arcade, 1990)
Bloxeed (Arcade, 1990)
Klax (Arcade, 1990)
Klax (Atari Lynx, 1990)
Columns (Arcade, 1990)
Hatris (Arcade, 1990)
Klax (Atari 2600, 1990)
Knight Move (Famicom, 1990)
Klax (NES, 1990)
Dr. Mario (NES, 1990)
Dr. Mario (Game Boy, 1990)
Klax (TurboGrafx-16, 1990)
Columns II: The Voyage Through Time (Arcade, 1990)
Pipe Dream (NES, 1990)
Klax (Tengen – Sega Genesis, 1990)
Klax (Namco, Sega Genesis, 1990)
Welltris (Arcade, 1991)
Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen (Famicom, 1991)
Hatris (PC Engine, 1991)
Puyo Puyo (Famicom, 1991)
Yoshi (NES, 1991)
Wordtris (SNES, 1992)
Oh My God! (Arcade, 1992)
Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine/Kirby’s Avalanche (Sega Genesis, 1993/SNES, 1995)
Poto Poto (Arcade, 1994)
Tetris 2 (SNES, 1994)
Tetris & Dr. Mario (SNES, 1994)
Bust-a-Move (SNES, 1995)
Baku Baku Animal (Arcade, 1995)
V-Tetris (Virtual Boy, 1995)
Virtual Lab (Virtual Boy, 1995)
3D-Tetris (Virtual Boy, 1996)
Tetris Platform: MSX2 Released in 1988 Developed by Rowan Software Ltd. Published by Mirrorsoft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
THAT is a damn good looking game of Tetris right there.
UPDATE: I messed up and credited this as an original MSX game, but this is, in fact, the MSX2 version of Tetris. I will try to include the original MSX Tetris in Part Two.
Now that MSX is starting to get some modern love, hey Digital Eclipse, Atari, and The Tetris Company: if you keep updating Tetris Forever with more games, or even if you just want a +1 for DLC, this version is absolutely worth a look. Okay, it’s just Tetris and a close cousin to the Famicom version, but judging purely by the look, this is the better game. Annoyingly, it has a similar control scheme to the Famicom Tetris. You press DOWN to rotate while the face buttons (or space bar) are hard drop. My brain couldn’t make the adjustment and so I kept clogging up the damn playfield. This is basically a more colorful version of the Famicom game where the “B-Mode” is the only mode. You’re clearing 25 lines per a round and you have lives. One slight idiosyncrasy: MSX Tetris appears to be a 10×22 grid, but the blocks spawn at the 3rd segment from the top, making this a more common 10×20 grid. The first two rows are inaccessible and will lead to you dying. So the top of the well is NOT the top of the well. Otherwise, if Tetris worked for you on the Famicom, you might want to give this version a try, because it’s more or less the same game but more beautiful, in my opinion. Verdict: YES!
Tetris Platform: Arcade Released in 1988 (?) or February, 1989 Designed by Ed Logg Distributed by Atari Games NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Don’t listen to anyone who says this is, more or less, the same as the NES game. It’s not. At all.
I almost skipped this, and in fact, I’m writing this review a few days after having played and reviewed Tengen Tetris for the NES (coming up soon). I barely liked Tengen Tetris and hung my YES! purely on its co-op mode. I decided, for the sake of thoroughness, I better boot-up Ed Logg’s coin-op original, just to make sure. Thank God I did. This thing has a lot more going for it, and in fact, is not just Tetris. The game is broken up into bite-sized chunks that end after X amount of lines. After just a few levels of normal Tetris B-Mode, twists start coming. Actually, one is there right from the start: this is the first Tetris to incentivize having the stack be as low to the floor as possible when you clear the final line, for bonus points and a celebratory Russian dance. Then, after a few levels, Atari Tetris becomes a more refined, quick and punchy version of Tetris’ B-Mode, with garbage blocks. Okay, so what? I’ve played that mode in over twenty different games now. Then, this happened:
I’ve circled the “magic garbage pixel.”
Brand new garbage pixels appear every few block drops. Just one at a time. Okay, THAT is a one-off twist that I’d like to see explored more. The placement of them does seem to be completely random. If I rewound and did it again, it would appear in a different spot, with the only rule seemingly being the pixel always appears on top of whatever is the highest block in a column. It’s a super small change, but as I learned when I reviewed From Below, tiny changes in Tetris can yield big gameplay results. What I liked about it was that the pixels can both help and hurt you, depending on blind luck. I might have had no “clean” area to place the Z block or even the square block that was next, but then the game randomly bailed me out by placing a pixel in a way that saves me from needing to create a gap. Sure, it screwed me sometimes, but I still totally dig this idea and would like to see more of it. In fact, that gimmick isn’t in this version of Tetris enough! It only happens in a few stages. Atari Arcade Tetris also has levels where the blocks rise up, and the garbage block patterns aren’t random. This is a strong, varied build of Tetris, and I really liked it.
FOUR Tetris Makers in a row. You absolute bastard.
Even the pace is better than most Tetris games. The Atari Games build gets some pep in its step much faster than its NES little brother. You’re going to see this regularly in this feature with arcade games. They need to make money, and players camping on them for hours on a single quarter isn’t a viable business strategy, so they have to kick you in the ass. My father and I placed bets on how long my average first game in arcades would be, no cheating allowed. I said twenty minutes. Dad said seven minutes. In this version of Tetris, I would have lost under Price is Right rules, as I lasted about thirteen minutes before the blocks started coming out too fast for me to work with. BUT, you can continue by ponying up another quarter. Good call that was. You’re reading this second in the bonus reviews, but I’m writing this part last: having gone through all these different Tetris games, Ed Logg’s arcade build scales the best of all the coin-ops, and maybe the best in all of Tetris. The only thing it’s missing is the usual stuff: missing 7-bag, left/right movement late in the game, shapes falling in clusters. At least the blocks are more colorful than the bland NES ones, and the cane coming out and grabbing the dancer cracked me up. I’m about to be pretty hard on the Tengen Tetris, or as hard on it as YES! games get. But for the coin-op, I didn’t even have to think about my verdict. All parties involved really need to figure out the rights situation with this, because this build deserves to be celebrated in the 2020s. Verdict: YES!
Tetris Platform: Arcade – Sega System 16 & Sega System E Released December, 1988 Developed by Esco Boueki NO MODERN RELEASE*
*Included in Sega Ages 2500 Vol. 28 for the PlayStation 2 exclusively in Japan
31 lines. Goddamn, Cathy. Yikes.
Yep, this is a hard version of Tetris. It’s also practically deified by Japanese Tetris players. There’s a LOT of lore surrounding Sega’s Tetris. For example: it’s one of the few Tetris games that players can form a concrete strategy for. Why’s that? Because it will give you the same order of bricks every time you turn it on. It’s called the Power-On Pattern. They have a list of the first 1,000 blocks you’ll get! Whoa! It’s also probably the first Tetris with “lock delay” meaning you get a grace period to move a landed block around before it fuses to the stack. No lock-delay = no ceiling crush, which is my favorite part of Tetris. So, you know, thanks Sega for accidentally inventing the part of Tetris I like most! But, I really don’t get the worship of this version of Tetris. Sorry, fans. Yea, I’m resigned to the fact that this is the review that’s going to get me skinned alive.
SPLIT DECISION – Sega System 16
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Again, this is the first version of Tetris that is basically “Tetris – Hard Mode.” Even on easy, the gravity feels heavy and sluggish with the lock delay, and the speed picks up very quickly. Too quickly, for my tastes, but then suddenly slows down, too. Weird. I like to start on level 0 and tapper-up gradually, but there’s none of that in Sega Tetris. Whether you’re using the legendary starting seed of blocks or not, I found this had one of the worst block algorithms. There’s just too many runs of nearly identical blocks, or large runs of only two types of blocks. Want to know why Tetris Time Warp scored $7.50 in value? In large part it’s due to the 7-bag algorithm. It quickly became apparent to me in the main Tetris Forever review that it was an invention almost equally as important as the game itself. Tetris before then could be pretty demoralizing, and I found Sega’s arcade Tetris, cherished and beloved by generations before me as perhaps THE iconic Tetris, to be not very fun. Verdict: NO!
SPLIT DECISION – Sega System E
The Sega System E version has the same rhythm and similar whiplash-like speed, only with much older-looking graphics. And it’s a better game of Tetris.
Sigh. Yea, this is going to get people mad at me, since I know the reputation is this is the “inferior” version of Sega Arcade Tetris. But, whereas I barely didn’t like the System 16 build, the System E build is a little more kinder and thus I liked it just enough to push it over the threshold. The punishing gravity takes a bit longer to kick in. Whereas I was constantly being wiped-out in 60 lines or under on the System 16, I could get to 70 or 80 consistently on this one. The problem is, by that point the blocks won’t even turn most of the time. Not EVERY time, which is weird. It makes me wonder if I broke something. It’s certainly a blander presentation, but actually I think I prefer the stark, colorful presentation of Tetris – System E to the photographic backdrops of the System 16 version. In my heart, it feels like the two versions are neck-and-neck, but the reality is I wouldn’t hate playing the System E version again, whereas I’m never playing the System 16 version, and that’s about as clear a win as it gets. Verdict: YES!
Tetris Platform: Sega Mega Drive Completed Unreleased* Prototype Intended for Release April 15, 1989 Programmed by Naoki Okabe Developed by Sega NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED**
*Less than ten copies are known to exist of Tetris for the Mega Drive. The carts on the collector’s market were created for press/media to evaluate and review for magazines ahead of release. Carts manufactured and distributed to press/media should not count as “released.” **The version of Tetris included in the Sega Genesis Mini is NOT the same game.
This was with “items turned on” though it doesn’t tell you what they do. It’s just a blinking block that randomly gives an effect if you make even a single line with it. By the time I got to around 260, I couldn’t really get full rotations. Thankfully this game gave me an absolute ton of reverse L blocks that I could lay down. Well, until I couldn’t rotate them even once.
Genesis/Mega Drive fans: if I were you, I’d save your $30,000. The holy grail for Sega collectors is this cancelled at the last possible moment version of Tetris that never got past the first push of the manufacturing button. I assume there’s a button and a machine with a speaker that plays Powerhouse. And if that’s not true, please don’t tell me. I need this to be true. Anyway, “under” ten copies are known to exist. The version that’s on the Sega Genesis Mini is NOT related to this. That version is basically a direct port of the System 16 coin-op I just reviewed. For all of this version’s problems, it IS a home port that scales properly instead of needing to knock you out in ten minutes or less. The only similarity that the holy grail version has to the Mini’s Tetris is that it uses the “Sega Rotation System.” That’s described on the Sega Retro page as “rigid” and I’d agree. MD Tetris has some of the most wildly imbalanced block drops I’ve experienced. One game I got so hosed on Tetris Makers that, even after 100 lines, the meter for it was nearly at the bottom. In the above game, the reverse-L blocks lapped the damn meter with plenty of room to spare. I found this Tetris to generally be unresponsive and poor with its rotation mechanics. Sega rushed this one through production, and it shows. The Tetris created for the Genny Mini is superior, for certain. Verdict: NO!
Tetris Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released May, 1989 Designed by Ed Logg Developed by Tengen (Atari Games) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
In the game of Go, “Atari” roughly means “check” but my understanding is nobody actually says it except novices. I think it’s actually a social taboo to declare “Atari.” Rude, or something like that. Either way, Atari Games originally had been the arcade division of Nolan Bushnell’s Atari until Warner Bros. sold the company to Jack Tramiel. It’s really best to think of it as Warner split the company into two, selling the home video game and computer division to Tramiel while retaining the coin-op division, which was called “Atari Games” in arcades. But, they couldn’t call themselves that for home video games, so they needed a new label, and thus TENGEN was born. In keeping with the Go theme, Tengen is the center of the Go board. After he was fired from his own company, Nolan Bushnell started a new company named Sente, the equivalent of “checkmate” in Go.
Tengen Tetris is one of the most (in)famous games ever made, and one of the biggest casualties of the whole rights fiasco with Tetris. In a nutshell: Atari Games sure thought they had the rights to Tetris via a flow chart’s worth of sub-licensing. To this day, people who were at Atari Games at the time insist the Russians knowingly double-dipped, but the facts don’t back that up. It turned out, the guy who started this whole sub-licensing tragedy, Robert Stein, only *thought* he had the world-wide rights to Tetris. Why did he think that? Well, it’s because he had the “computer” rights. And, because technically all video games are computers, that essentially means Stein had all the rights, right? From there, Stein licensed the rights to Tetris to Mirrorsoft, who then sub-licensed portions of the rights all over the world. Often, those sub-licensors then ALSO sub-licensed their sub-license. For example, the Sega arcade Tetris came about from them getting the license from Atari, who believed they owned the worldwide arcade rights. The thing is, all Stein really had, in the most generous interpretation of it, is a letter of intent and not a contract like you or I would recognize as a standard contract. What he had, issued from Soviet Russia, would never have been considered legally binding in a million years. Whether or not Stein knew that isn’t entirely clear. Through all of this, the Russians had no idea about any sub-licensing or that Tetris was a hit, and possibly didn’t even realize that their royalties on Tetris were downright lousy. They needed more practice at capitalism. They were about to get it.
Stein comes across as a buffoon in the film, and even a villain if you just read the plain text of the story of Tetris. Like some kind of greedy miser who did nothing but sub-lease a game like a digital slumlord or something. From everything I’ve heard, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the best privileges I’ve had at Indie Gamer Chick is I’ve gotten to befriend a LOT of gaming legends, a few of whom crossed paths with Stein over the years, and they all really liked him. My friends who met him all said Robert Stein was a good man. And he did find Tetris.. for all of us. So, I’d like to ask everyone reading to take a moment and lift a glass to Robert Stein, who passed away in 2018. 🍺 Cheers to Robert Stein! Thank you for bringing Tetris to the world! 🍻
And then, Henk Rogers showed up in Russia to personally negotiate and secure the HANDHELD rights to Tetris for his partnership with Nintendo. See, Rogers had already been burned by Tetris, believing he had secured the arcade rights in Japan from Atari via Mirrorsoft via Stein (you really need a flow chart). But then Sega came in and, going over Atari’s head, undercut him with a bid to Mirrorsoft for Japanese arcade rights. Rogers had already started development of the arcade game, but it was dead. All he had was PC and console rights in Japan. Rogers wanted to ensure that couldn’t happen with Game Boy Tetris, so he would get the rights directly from the Soviets. By the way, you absolutely could NOT just go to Russia at the time to talk shop. You needed diplomatic permission and lots of other paperwork that he didn’t have. He knew he could have been arrested straight out of the airport and detained without trial, maybe even get accused of being a spy, but he went anyway. When Rogers dies, they’re going to need a forklift to stand-in as a pallbearer due to the weight of his massive balls. Once there, Rogers brought to the Soviets’ attention the existence of consoles and the differences between them and home computers.
YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARD OF A GAME! Seriously, how did it take Tetris so long for anyone to invent 7-bag?
This is where the story gets so insane that they made a movie about it: unknown to Rogers, Stein showed up the same day Rogers did in Russia, hoping to have the Russians clarify the terms of his contract, unaware Rogers was just a few rooms over. With help from Rogers, the Russians drew up a new contract on the fly that unambiguously defined the differences between computer, console, and arcade games, and then pressured Stein to sign it. They also changed a few of the numbers around, which is all Stein really focused on. He was pissed, but he needed this signed, sealed, and delivered. Everything depended on it, because he had already sub-licensed Tetris so many times, so he signed it. What Stein didn’t catch was the new definitions of what a computer game was, so when he signed the papers, he didn’t realize he’d essentially admitted the only rights he’d ever held were PC rights. With the stroke of his own pen, Stein invalidated nearly every sub-license he AND Mirrorsoft had ever sold. AND THEN, a third guy, Kevin Maxwell of Mirrorsoft, the #1 sub-licensor of Tetris, showed up AT THE SAME TIME, again without the other two being aware of it. He was trying to secure the handheld Tetris rights from Stein with the intent to then sub-license that sub-license to Atari for the Lynx. The Maxwells recognized Stein’s contract wasn’t legally binding, and Stein was already delinquent with the Russians on royalty payments because the Maxwells were broke and not making payments to him. Kevin Maxwell was there to grease the skids with the Soviets to make sure everything became official. Mirrorsoft was offering the Soviets $1,000,000 Maxwell didn’t have as their company was insolvent at the time and soon to be charged with massive fraud. The movie implies that the Soviets would understand the money would never come to them because capitalism = evil and it was really a trade of Tetris for the Russian publishing rights to Collier’s Encyclopedias. I mean, JESUS CHRIST, what a clusterf*ck!
How Tengen Tetris handles scoring is weird. You don’t get any consequential points during live gameplay for lines. But, in thirty-line intervals, you get a wrap-up bonus, then return to the stack you had. The problem is, as you level-up, the values for things like Tetrises don’t increase. It’s better than the old computer scoring systems, but not THAT much better.
When the Russians showed Maxwell a copy of Bullet-Proof Software’s Tetris for Famicom, he told them he didn’t authorize it or know about it and “it must be a bootleg!” With just that statement, Maxwell inadvertently proved to the Russians (1) that Mirrorsoft considered consoles separate from computers (2) that they had no clue what rights they or anyone else held to Tetris (3) had been offering licenses they never had in the first place (4) had very little product knowledge of the worldwide Tetris market and (5) were actively undercutting other good faith licensees, which even the Russians could grasp was bad for business. Because Henk Rogers brought this whole situation to Soviets’ attention and presented himself as an honest guy who genuinely knew and cared about the game, the Russians shocked him by offering him a chance to bid for the worldwide VIDEO GAME rights to Tetris, which he secured with an assist from Nintendo. And that was the end of the story. Oh, wait a second..
Uh oh.
Atari Games thought they already had the video game rights via Mirrorsoft via Stein, and had already essentially finished their own NES Tetris to be published under their Tengen label. Nintendo and Atari Games were already in court over Atari’s unauthorized NES carts when they had to go to court over Tetris as well. Nintendo wanted Atari to stop making their version, since they had the rights. One thing not mentioned in Tetris Forever is that Nintendo’s licensing agreement, straight from the Russians themselves, was so irrefutable that the judge took one look at the contract and immediately cancelled the entire trial, declaring Nintendo the sole owners of the Tetris license. Tengen Tetris had to be recalled, making it a cherished collectable today. The shame is, a lot of people considered Tengen’s build of Tetris to be superior to Nintendo’s.
I’m not among those people. In fact, I think this is one of the weaker console Tetris games. While it has a few bells and whistles, like telling you how many of each block you’ve gotten, there’s no 7-bag algorithm to keep it balanced. I was constantly getting clusters of the same blocks. It’s also one of the uglier games of Tetris. Just very bland on the presentation thanks to the limits of the NES forcing the stack to turn gray instead of the blocks remaining colorful after being locked, like in the coin-op. Worst of all, while this Tetris might offer more flexibility with its modes, the lack of progressive scoring hurts greatly in my opinion. A Tetris is worth 2,500 points whether the speed is at 1 or 9, and that just isn’t interesting for me. Neither is the versus mode. It’s really just two players doing their own games side-by-side, each interrupting the other whenever they reach the thirty line break period.
Now THIS got my attention.
Cooperative mode is the real treasure of Tengen Tetris. Both players control their own block as they place them in an extra-wide well. Actually, it’s 12 segments wide instead of 11, so one segment wider. I’m not sure if that counts as “extra wide” but it’s nice. You can play with the computer, but the AI is absolutely moronic, only going for singles and constantly getting in the way. But, with a second player? It’s an interesting experience to say the least, especially if you’re both game. If you don’t have a second player, I think Tengen Tetris is massively overrated. It comes with the pedigree of being made by the guy who made Asteroids and Centipede, but this is a very boring version of Tetris. Boring scoring. Boring presentation. It also takes FOREVER to get going. In my first game, I scored the most tedious 371 lines I’ve ever had in a game of Tetris. I genuinely can’t believe a lot of people consider this superior to Nintendo’s. I think people want to cheer for it, myself included, because of the story behind it. Everyone loves a plucky underdog, but gun to my head, I’d rather have the Nintendo version. Cooperative is the only aspect worth a look, but in fairness, it is worth a look so.. Verdict: YES!
Tetris Platform: Game Boy Released June 14, 1989 Designed by Masao Yamamoto Developed by Nintendo Included with Nintendo Online Subscription (Standard)
7 Tetrises is enough for you. Die now.
It’s the most famous version of Tetris. It’s one of the most famous video games EVER. It’s likely the most played version of Tetris ever made. It’s Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov’s favorite version of his own game. It’s also the last game in this feature that’s older than me, by only 27 days. For many people, THIS is Tetris. And it’s one of the most frustrating versions to review, based on that towering history. Is it good? Sure. If this had been Tengen Tetris, with its ultra-bland presentation, nah. We wouldn’t be here today, talking about Tetris as one of the all-time greats. I’d be reviewing Tetris for the Game Gear or Lynx, saying it’s fine but nothing special. Nintendo was really the first studio to bring out the best in Tetris. That said “yea, blocks can have personality!” That it’s not just the Russian angle, but the kinetic energy of Tetris that makes it work. With that said, this certainly isn’t a perfect game of Tetris.
My best game, and note that I started this one on Level 9. The T block on the bottom right side was the end. My highest total of lines was 212. It’s worth noting that the world record is 441. HOW?!
I tried to play as many games of as many versions of Tetris as humanly possible for this feature, and the Game Boy Tetris was one of the absolute worst for simply not giving enough Tetris Makers. There are versions of Tetris where I walked away convinced that the game was rigged, and GB Tetris was worse about distribution than they were. I don’t think it’s rigged, though, because when I used rewind, I noticed that it gave the same blocks. It just doesn’t evenly distribute the blocks. Regardless of the game, Tetris Makers are just distributed less. This combines with some of the hardest left-right movement in the franchise. In my best game, I was very happy to keep the stack low, and after a certain point, I just couldn’t get the blocks down into the right wall, even if the stack was nearly empty. I got good enough that, with conservative play, I could reach 200 lines or close enough every time. 202. 208. 205. But, I never got more than 212. I don’t remember the left side ever giving me problems, but my trick of flipping the block to get it to the right side of the board stopped working, and as soon as I got an assortment of blocks that I would need to eat more than a couple gaps, the game was over.
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The first time I played the B-Mode on level 9-5, I thought “there’s no way I’m going to finish this.” I even wrote a note that I’d have a section in the review discussing it. But then I got both a favorable arrangement of garbage blocks AND the right assortment of blocks. Happened quickly too, on only my third game. But, make no mistake: I did get lucky. I’m convinced that 9-5 can spit out arrangements that are unbeatable. You just can’t move left/right fast enough. Really, that’s the Tetris Game Boy experience in a nutshell: you’re going to need luck. It brings all the best traits and worst traits for those early Tetris games. It has personality, with charming graphics and music, along with satisfying effects for line clears (my father says that the Tetris noise “sounds like an elephant stepping on a nail”). It’s also one of the few Tetris games in this feature that routinely saw me die at under 50 lines. I was convinced I’d never be that bad at Tetris again. If you only like the modern version of Tetris, you’ll probably hate this game. The blocks lock faster than any other version I’ve seen. It’s the cruelest of all those early versions. That’s why I think fans of modern Tetris should lift a glass to Game Boy Tetris. I have no doubt it inspired the modern game through the sheer volume of people whining about the same things I just did. That has to count for something! Verdict: YES!
Flash Point Platform: Arcade – Sega System 16 Released July 28, 1989 Developed by Esco Boueki Distributed by Sega NO MODERN RELEASE*
*Included in Sega Ages 2500 Vol. 28 for the PlayStation 2 exclusively in Japan
I was excited to play Flash Point in multiplayer, but it’s actually not head-to-head multiplayer. It’s just two separate games played side-by-side. Smart, I guess. It means one machine can accommodate two separate single players at the same time, though I imagine that was crowded. With that said, I gave my father a five minute head start and said I’d race him to level 10. I forgot how damn hard level 9 is.
You know what’s neat? This has a 1 in 31 chance of having been released on the day I was born. So much for that. Missed my birthday by 17 days. Anyway. I didn’t enjoy Sega’s legendary Tetris arcade game, but this spin-off that uses the same engine? I enjoyed it well enough, warts and all. Flash Point (and its sibling Bloxeed) is certainly one of the most underrated games in the Tetris “franchise” for lack of a better term. It shares a lot of DNA with Nintendo’s Tetris 2, aka Tetris Flash (review coming up), but with smarter patterns and the standard roster of seven blocks. Each level has a starting stack with two “flash points” and the object is to knock them out as fast as possible via traditional Tetris mechanics. I’m pretty sure that each level gives you the same blocks in the same order every time, as even when I died, the next virtual quarter I inserted led to the same blocks being spit out in the same order. That’s fine with me. This is a Tetris game where the emphasis is on puzzles. It’s also got a lot more personality than many early Tetris games, featuring cameos from Alex Kidd, Opa-Opa (the ship from Fantasy Zone), Flicky, and Ninja Princess. Hey, this might be the best game Alex Kidd was ever in.
I had played this stage for over four-and-a-half minutes before winning. I literally cheered when I finally got it. The next level I beat in 24 seconds. Flash Point’s difficulty curve is all over the place.
What I wasn’t fine with is Flash Point’s tendency to spit out strings of similar blocks. It’s one of the most prone to “block parades” in Tetris history. Since each level has blocks that come out in specific orders, I have to imagine it’s intentional. With that said, the biggest issue is probably the up-and-down nature of the difficulty. Granted, I didn’t always make the best decisions, but some levels took me quite a bit of work to dig myself enough space to create a line that could clear the flash points. It was uncanny how I could spend four minutes on one level and beat the next stage in a few seconds. But, it was always exhilarating either way. I have one more game in the trilogy of Sega Tetris games to go in this feature, but seriously, Flash Point is good enough that I want to appeal to my friends at Atari and Sega: call each-other, sit down, and figure this sh*t out, because Flash Point (and Sega’s contributions to the legend of Tetris in general) deserves to be celebrated. If it takes doing a $9.99 or even $14.99 DLC set that only has the three arcade games and the unreleased Genesis game, plus a couple Sega-based interviews, I think it’s worth it. Please, figure it out. Verdict: YES!
BlockOut Platform: Arcade Released October, 1989 Designed by Aleksander Ustaszewski & Mirosław Zabłocki Developed by California Dreams Distributed by American Technos Included in Technos Arcade 1 for Evercade
Man, the surprises keep coming with this feature. I would totally recommend anyone who’s skeptical that a Tetris/falling block marathon like I’m doing wouldn’t get old fast, try it for yourself! You’ll be stunned at how rewarding it is to feel the incremental evolution of not just Tetris, but all the games based around it. This is my favorite feature EVER in the history of Indie Gamer Chick. I’m just so happy I don’t know what to do with myself! There’s a reason why I kept adding games. It ain’t for you guys. It’s for me! I’m having the best time and I can’t believe it! LOOK AT ALL THE YES! VERDICTS IN THIS FEATURE! I’ve died and gone to gaming heaven.
At the beginning of this project, I was completely certain that no 3D Tetris would score a YES! And I’m not counting Tetrisphere as a 3D Tetris game. I mean this, Welltris, the Virtual Boy game, etc. Hey, I keep an open mind and give every game a clean slate, but my prior experiences with any attempts at 3D Tetris games was a total disaster of unintuitive controls and incomprehensible wire-frames. Well, here’s the first of its breed, beating even the first official 3D Tetris, Welltris, to the market. Barely, but barely counts. As both a high concept puzzler AND an early attempt at 3D gaming, I did not, would not, and could not believe that this could possibly hold up. And I was wrong, wrong, WRONG! BlockOut is fantastic, even with some of the more common problems of 3D falling block games. It’s hard to adjust to the controls. Even after a few hours, I *still* didn’t have an intuitive feel for the rotation, which is why I struggled on harder stages. The wire-frame problem also happens, and when BlockOut starts dishing-out twisty-turny blocks that poke in different directions in multiple dimensions, that’s when I really struggled. Tetris might be the perfect game, but BlockOut surely isn’t.
This is one of the twisty-turny blocks I’m talking about. I really think that if they had stuck to primary shapes and just increased the speed, BlockOut might be remembered as one of the all-time greats today.
Now, with that said, BlockOut is a very good video game. I think the secret sauce is in the wide variety of wells. Instead of one standardized playfield, there’s a huge variety of wells of different sizes and shapes, so any strategy you have doesn’t apply across the board. Despite being an arcade game, it doesn’t go for the throat immediately, like most of the coin-ops in this feature do. I wonder if this was unpopular among arcade operators, who tended not to like long plays, and I can’t imagine someone lasting under fifteen minutes once they get, at minimum, a feel for the controls. Hell, if the game becomes more instinctive for them than it does me, I could imagine a player lasting quite a while on a single quarter. Makes for a good game, but maybe not a good business model.
That’s nightmare fuel. My sister called it “The Lawnmower Man starring John Malkovich.”
BlockOut does bite off more than it can chew in later stages. A problem in general is that it’s hard to know where you’ve left gaps or not. Some kind of stain on the top block of a column to alert you of a gap would help. The limitations of the graphics are BlockOut’s weakness in general. They just aren’t detailed enough to pull off some of the more advanced shapes. The wire-frames are made of a single, solid color with no shading. A sense of depth only really happens via rotating, and it works fine when the blocks all have flat sides to them. When you remove those flat sides from the equation, it’s the death knell for BlockOut’s appeal. By the time those blocks are introduced to the game, the blocks are also dropping pretty dang fast, so rotating doesn’t help all that much. The best way to describe BlockOut’s place in history is “astonishing for its time, and tragically ahead of its time” Shading, almost by itself, would have fixed every problem with BlockOut, but the tech wasn’t there yet. It’s nothing short of miraculous that, for all its problems, it still manages to outclass many of the early 3D Tetris games that followed in its wake. Verdict: YES!
Tetris Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released December, 1989 Developed by Nintendo Included with Nintendo Online Subscription (Standard)
I was happy to make it to 150 lines and astonished that I still got a Tetris. It would be my last one, as I was dead not long after this screen was taken. Looking at this screen, I realize I had remarkable luck with block balance.
The long game of NES Tetris is one of the shorter ones if you’re not using a classic NES controller and capable of doing one of the advanced controller methods, like “speed-tapping” or more recently “rolling” which is like using the controller as a reverse drum. See, Tetris on the NES is notorious for its slow left and right movement speed on the higher levels. Even a non-hardcore Tetris-head like me could literally feel the difference while playing it. I made it to 100 several times, but I didn’t get to 150 until I played very conservatively. Then I got bored with that and went back to trying to make Tetrises. Got one, but then I screwed up a single brick, and I did it in a way where I couldn’t possibly hope to get a brick over the right of it. The drop was faster than the horizontal movement speed, which was fine if I kept the stack low enough. This was no longer “low enough” and that was all she wrote. So, this is a tough cookie, especially compared to the wimpy Tengen version. I spent the better part of a day trying to get 25 lines in the notorious B-Mode’s level 9, height 5, and the biggest problem was simply getting the blocks against the walls when I needed it.
And this is why Nintendo would never in a million years let their version be on Tetris Forever. Though the Bowser, Link, and Donkey Kong in this look, well.. we’ll say “off-model.”
For a Tetris with no 7-bag, no wall kicks, and near instant brick locking, I’m surprised this is one of the most revered among Tetris fans. By the way, there IS a bag, but the bag has 224 pieces, an even mix of the seven blocks except for one less Tetris Maker. For the purposes of strategy, it’s like having no bag at all. I think it’s the stellar presentation combined with the necessity for unorthodox controller skills that makes this an elite game of Tetris for some. It’s probably the single most studied version of Tetris ever made. These days, it’s probably more famous for how the game begins to break on higher levels in ways the developers never intended, like turning the color contrast of the blocks down to being nearly invisible. This is one charming game of Tetris. But, I don’t think it’s the best 8-bit console game of Tetris out there. Hell, I think the Famicom sequel Tetris 2 + BomBliss is better. Not by much, and it’s certainly not as captivating, but it does ultimately play better, I think. It doesn’t matter much to me, because this isn’t my style of Tetris. But, even I admit this version oozes with charm, has one of the best Tetris themes on the planet (it’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy!) and cameos by Nintendo stars for clearing the B levels on level 9. Everything is polished here except the gameplay, but at least it’s endearing for it. Verdict: YES!
BlockOut Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Nearly Complete (?) Prototype Targeted for release in Winter, 1990 Developed by Technos BlockOut at Lost Levels NEVER BEEN RELEASED
Well, it wouldn’t be a Definitive Review without at least one unreleased completed prototype.
A few years back, someone shopping at a Goodwill found this never released prototype of the surprise arcade gem BlockOut. Wow! It was actually the second known prototype of BlockOut for the NES, but the first one was not complete. This one appears to be. The Goodwill buyer sold this to a game collector for a cool $2,000, and that guy, Steve Lin, immediately dumped this ROM, preserving it forever. Class act, right there. Thank you, Mr. Lin! Unfortunately, it’s clear why BlockOut was never released. This is a case of an arcade game with a technology weakness suffering further technological downgrades in the journey home. The coin-op also had three face buttons to control rotation and a fourth button (located on top of the joystick itself) to activate a hard drop. For whatever reason, the designers opted not to utilize select for the third rotational axis. Too much is sacrificed, and it’s actually remarkable how much quality game is left intact. Shocking, really.
Underutilized buttons is one of the worst gaming problems of the 90s. I constantly encounter games that have multiple actions mapped to two buttons on even the Genesis and SNES, leaving one or more buttons completely unused. Not even START or SELECT. Face buttons! I know so many developers from that era and I’ve still never met anyone who can explain how this kept happening in a rational way. Developers of the era (or at least their bosses) seem to assume that gamers were idiots. Like they think their players would have panic attacks if they had to use more than two face buttons. “Studies show even monkeys can use three buttons, even without opposable thumbs!” “Yea? Well give them $50 and see if they spend it on Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball.” “We already tried that, and they bought Super Metroid instead.” “I rest my case!”
BlockOut on the NES doesn’t scale remotely close to the coin-op, where the object is to get X amount of “faces” (completed floors). The game has two modes, each with three sets of maps and three block sets that the player chooses. Mode A is your typical marathon mode, while the object of Mode B is to have an all-clear, however long it takes. The A mode is fatally flawed thanks to the lack of buttons. It just takes too long to rotate the blocks using only two buttons, and once the stack gets to a certain height, that becomes impossible. Like in the arcade game, the blocks “clank” against the stack, and blocks that could be inserted into a gap in two rotations or less in the coin-op take a LOT of work on the NES. Why didn’t they just use select? Sigh.
The B-Mode works better.
It’s not a total wash, because I think the B-Mode is a little stronger. Trying to score an all-clear in this format is tougher than it sounds. Although I had a tiny bit of fun, I have to concede that it often comes down to luck of getting the right blocks when you need them. The best thing I can say about BlockOut in general is it’s easier to work with blocks you don’t need in a 3D space. There’s more room to stack and strategize to get rid of those blocks later. Honestly, I thought the two button set-up, even though it was slower, worked well to start. Strong enough that I thought “maybe they should have released this!” But as the game sped up, it became clear that this just wasn’t going to work. Good try.. really good try, actually. But cancelling BlockOut on the NES was the right call. Verdict: NO!
Nintendo World Championships 1990 aka “NWC 1990” Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released in 1990 Developed by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
COME ON YOU F*CKER!
Got five-to-six figures in cash lying around to spare? The Nintendo World Championship cartridges are the holy grail of game collectors. Personally, for six figures I’d rather buy ten brand new Stern pinball tables, but to each their own. I think when the Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition launched earlier this year, based on the name, most people were hoping for something more like this than NES Remix with all the non-speed running stuff removed. The Nintendo World Championships was part of a traveling Nintendo-themed convention, and for extra money you could try your luck to become the World Champion of Nintendo. I’m friends with the guy who won it, who has the greatest name of any of my friends: Thor Aackerlund. You hear that name and you feel like you can punch through a safe. Which is funny because Thor’s a sweetheart. As for the game, what can I say? You have to speed run through three games, one of which is so random that I honestly can’t believe it’s part of this.
I finished Super Mario 1 on this screen almost every time, unless I screwed-up earlier in the run. I was pretty much hosed when that happened and reset the game.
First, you have to collect fifty coins in Super Mario Bros. After this, you jump to Rad Racer, which.. huh? It’s not exactly a game that makes you think “iconic Nintendo game.” It’s not even developed by Nintendo. It’s a Square game that was only published by Nintendo in North America. Square handled it themselves in Japan, where the game is known as Highway Star. After you complete the first course, you jump to Tetris, which is where all the points are really scored due to the imbalanced scoring rules. Your Mario scores are whatever you get. Rad Racer’s scores are multiplied by 5, while Tetris’ score is multiplied by a whopping 25. The carts had arcade-like dip switches that set the timers, with the standard challenge being 6 minutes, 21 seconds. I don’t know how they came to that number. I thought maybe 21 seconds burned up from the buffer-screens, but they’re a lot longer than 21 seconds combined. Also, I found out I initially didn’t have the correct 6:21 timer. It was five minutes and a couple seconds, which hey, my 500K game feels a lot better now. Regardless of which setting you use, the sheer amount of downtime is beyond annoying. It eats up roughly a minute by itself. Here’s the complete list of unskippable down time.
The “GET READY” followed by the “PLAY SUPER MARIO” screens that start it.
The title screen of Super Mario Bros.
The “Level 1 – 1” title card.
The level wrap-up and point accumulation when you get the flag in Super Mario Bros., including fireworks if you touch the flagpole at the right time (in this case, at the wrong time).
The Level 1-2 title card.
Entering the pipe to actually get back to gameplay in level 1-2.
Playing the “Mario Victory Theme” when you reach 50 coins.
A screen saying “GOOD JOB!” with your score.
A screen that says “PLAY RAD RACER! COMPLETE THE COURSE!”
Rad Racer’s title screen.
Rad Racer’s course map.
The red light/green light countdown before you can actually start racing in Rad Racer.
The car slowly brakes and runs off all its momentum when you finish the course in Rad Racer.
A screen saying “GREAT RACING” with your score for Rad Racer.
A screen that says “PLAY TETRIS! (Type A) GET HIGH SCORE!”
Tetris’ title screen.
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That’s a hell of a lot of downtime. SIXTEEN separate stoppages that a player will encounter, and that’s not even factoring in how screwed you are if you lose a life playing Mario or crash the car in Rad Racer. I crashed so badly once in Rad Racer where it took about ten seconds for the car to finish tumbling, roll back over, then slowly move to the middle of the road. So agonizing. But, the biggest problem by far is how unoptimized NWC is. The first two segments are essentially a race, and then with all the time you have left, you have to score as much as you can on Tetris. Why not be more optimized? Have the game logos in the transition screens instead of showing them separately?
This was my best game. Not bad for five minutes instead of the standard 6:21.
I have two big issues. The first is that I found the version of Tetris on this specific build to not be as smooth as the normal Nintendo NES build. I thought something had gone wrong with my controller and swapped it a few times. I changed emulators. The problem was there every time: it was like there were invisible brakes being applied to the blocks. I have no clue what that’s about. A much bigger issue is that you’d think they’d rig it so everyone gets the same blocks, but it seems to change from game to game. I experimented with this, and I noticed the blocks came out the same every time as long as I rewound up to the Rad Racer-to-Tetris transition screens, but if I went to Rad Racer, the blocks would change. There’s no 7-bag, and during a few sessions, I simply didn’t get a favorable arrangement of blocks. There’s only once where I got hosed on Tetris Makers, but still, imagine paying money to compete in a world championship only to get hosed by the algorithm. Out of thousands upon thousands of participants, at least a few of them must have had bad luck. God, I can’t believe people pay six figures for this thing. Verdict: NO!
Pyramid aka Pyramid II* Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Both versions released in 1990 Designed by Ma Li-Cheang Developed by Sachen Pyramid Published by American Video Entertainment Inc. Pyramid II released only Asia NO MODERN RELEASE
*I’m not playing the adult-oriented “hacked” version. I still have SOME dignity.
Oh how I hated these C-shaped blocks. BUT, once I figured out how to build for them, it wasn’t THAT bad. Some dude on GameFAQs did an extensive mathematical theory based on this game, and it’s worth a read even if you’re not a math geek.
Pop quiz: which developer was the single most prolific maker of NES games during the natural lifetime of the Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System? Nintendo? Capcom? Konami? Well, obviously you can guess the answer based on why I’m asking it here. It’s Sachen, a company located in Taiwan that produced games at a high rate and sent them out into the market, often unfinished. While some games made it to the US, they were mostly either sold in flea markets or through non-traditional means, but others were published by companies who refused to cooperate with Nintendo. American Video Entertainment Inc. was one such company, and while Pyramid is not among their most famous games, it’s certainly the most interesting to me. This is a very original take on the Tetris concept, where all the blocks are, in some way, triangular. You’re still trying to make lines, but it’s significantly more complicated thanks to the wide variety of sizes and potential angles you can rotate each block.
This is Pyramid II, which I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the multiplayer for. The game doesn’t end when the other player tops out. It’s just a game two people can play, independent of each-other, on the same TV at the same time. It’s the same gameplay, but with more options and a couple more power-ups. Most importantly, it also seems to spit-out a lot less of the C-shaped blocks that annoyed the hell out of me.
I can’t give Pyramid a YES! because it’s such a sloppy mess. One of the most inelegant falling block games I’ve seen when it comes to how compatible the blocks are with one another. And yet, there’s something oddly satisfying when you do manage to fit the pieces together. You know how it feels when you carve out the perfect gap for an L-block in the stack on Tetris, and then you actually get the L-block? It’s SO SATISFYING! Well, Pyramid is full of moments like that. Seriously! Maybe it’s because, with all the different sizes and angles, actually finding the perfect spot for any given brick feels like a big moment. But, it takes quite a while to build up the lines (which are just normal Tetris-like lines even with the triangles). You do get a few missiles that can be used to break the stack if you leave a gap, which get refilled if you score the max amount of line clears possible with a single brick: two. In an hour of gameplay, I only pulled it off once, but thankfully the game starts you with five missiles. Once I figured out when to use them and when not to, I wasn’t bored with Pyramid. Don’t mistake that for liking it. It completely lacks excitement. Still, I think this game gets a bad rap, as most people talk about it like it’s one of the worst “Tetris Clones” (I hate that term) but I’ve played a lot worse. Clearly there’s SOMETHING here. Had this been a modern indie game, I would have begged the developers to keep working on it, because I think there’s not just a good game buried in this tomb, but maybe even a GREAT game. Shame that we’ll never know. Verdict: NO!
Tetris Platform: Nintendo Game Watch Released in 1990 Developed by Nelsonic Industries Published in Partnership with Nintendo Available to play at RetroFab
One of two Tetrises I got over the course of thirty minutes.
I’ve already reviewed one LCD Tetris, and a recreation of a never-released Game & Watch Tetris at that. Had that been released, a Tetris game with a clown theme would have been the final Game & Watch release, but Nintendo cancelled it. My hunch tells me it was because it was no good, with too short of a well. See Game & Watch: The Definitive Review for that review. This is the Nintendo-branded LCD Tetris that actually made it to shelves, and instead of having a wide but short well, this time it’s a tall well that’s narrow. In fact, you have to press a button in this wearable game of Tetris to see the top of the well. But, it’s a little more complicated than that. Even though the well is two screens tall, if you top-out on the bottom screen, you still game over, but it’s easy enough to swap screens.
Sigh.
Not that it matters. A six-segment-wide well is a very unplayable game of Tetris. The seven pieces work great, assuming you have 10 or 11 spaces to arrange them. Six spaces just isn’t enough. No 7-bag either, so runs of three or four Z blocks or square blocks are particularly destructive in such a narrow well. When I first booted this up, I thought “okay, well, I guess it’s kind of cool that kids could play Tetris on their wrists” but it became clear really quick this is one of the worst games of Tetris ever. It makes me appreciate the value of well width. Verdict: NO!
Pipe Dream Platform: Arcade Released in 1990 Directed by Jun-ichi Niwa Developed by Video System Distributed by LucasFilm Games NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I wish I could lay pipe faster, because the game climaxes too quickly for my tastes.
I liked the coin-op Pipe Dream more than I thought I would. Whether it’s called Pipe Dream or Pipe Mania, I’ve not enjoyed my previous (albeit limited) experience with the series. I’m wondering now if I even realized you could throw a block on top of another block, destroying it. It eats up time to do it, but you don’t have to perfectly place every block you get. For the unwashed masses, Pipe Dream’s object is to connect a starting pipe to a finishing pipe. The catch is that there’s a minimum number of pipes, but in this arcade version, it’s called NORM here instead of MINIMUM. At first, I was confused about that and was really proud of myself when I finished the level more efficiently than normal. Nope, I died. You must use the minimum number of blocks, and that usually means using the cross-shaped sections that allow you to double back and zig-zag around the playfield. You get bonus points for every cross-shaped piece that is fully used vertically and horizontally, and then get penalized for any blocks you place on the playfield that aren’t part of the network of pipes the sludge passes through.
I literally cheered when I finally beat this one. Sadly, the game kept going.
Pipe Dream isn’t a falling block game, but it has the same problem those have: you’re completely at the mercy of the random assortment of blocks you get. Nearly every time I died, I had constructed an elaborate arrangement of pipes, but it never fed me a piece that I could connect to the finishing piece, or anything that could have eventually led to that piece even in a roundabout type of way. There’s nothing to rig the drawing to assure an equal mixture of pipes that go up, down, or sideways. I was stunned at how far back I could rewind and see how many elbows I would get that pointed down or sideways pipes, but nothing that pointed upward.
I’ve been playing video games daily since I was 7 to 9 years old, and Pipe Dreams exposes my weaknesses as a gamer just about worse than any other game.
That type of thing sucks in Tetris, but it’s ruinous in Pipe Dream. The late game is especially broken once it introduces one-way pipes, which is where the upward block drought I was given happened. This adds more blocks to an already bloated block roster. Before the one-way pipes, I think Pipe Dream wasn’t half-bad. I also fully concede that Pipe Dream is a game that doesn’t play to my strengths. I have a poor visual imagination, and Pipe Dream is a game where your ability to imagine something before it’s there is an absolute requirement. My father is a big fan and he told me that this plays better with a mouse. Noted. This was a tough call for me to make. I think a similar algorithm to 7-bag would make Pipe Dream not just a good game, but a great one. Verdict: NO!
Bloxeed Platform: Arcade – Sega System 18, Sega System E Released January, 1990 Designed by Esco Boueki (?) Distributed by Sega NO MODERN RE-RELEASE*
*Included in Sega Ages 2500 Vol. 28 for the PlayStation 2 exclusively in Japan
Unlike Flash Point, the final game in the Segatris Trilogy features competitive head-to-head play. Sadly, as a coin-op, there’s no handicap to even the odds between two players of varying skill. Also worth noting is, unlike Sega’s Tetris, the different arcade models don’t make any game play difference. Or at least that I noticed.
Man, did Sega stretch their Tetris license to the absolute breaking point. Realistically, both Flash Point and Bloxeed would be separate modes in a normal game. This is Tetris meets Arkanoid, with a very heavy emphasis on power-ups to complement the standard seven block roster, and I’m there for it. This is also one of the better head-to-head Tetris games. Not only do you send garbage blocks to the other side, but scoring a Tetris costs the other player whatever their current dropping block is. Unlike Tetris Battle Gaiden, this doesn’t slow the pace to a crawl, but enhances it. Instead of a staring contest, it creates multiple moments that feel like a race. That’s in addition to the power-ups, which can wildly swing momentum in games, but never in a way that feels overpowered, like Battle Gaiden. The power-ups are assigned frequently within the blocks themselves, and come out in regular intervals regardless of what you do.
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The sheer variety of power-ups surprised me, and they add so much excitement to Tetris’ mid-late game. The weakest is the bomb, which is still effective for digging to a gap that’s nearly the top of the stack. There’s a satellite that slowly falls towards the stack, but you can move it back and forth and shoot away any individual segments you want until it crashes. The opposite is a Flicky, star of the 1984 Sega coin-op, that behaves like the satellite, only it drops individual segments of blocks instead of shooting them. A sixteen ton anvil clears a three-column wide section of the playfield, while the final power-up just clears four lines in the stack at random. Again, it’s a Arknoid-meets-Tetris, and that’s a team-up I’m down for. Even with the power-ups, this is still Sega Tetris, which speeds up quickly, then weirdly slows down. The blocks are still a little too heavy, too. I’m giving the slight edge to Flash Point as the best of the Sega Tetris games, but Bloxeed is right behind it, and it’s EASILY the best competitive Tetris in this entire feature so far. Verdict: YES!
Klax Platform: Arcade Released February, 1990 Designed by Dave Akers & Mark Stephen Pierce Developed by Atari Games NO MODERN RELEASE
My God!!
Klax doesn’t get a lot of love, historically speaking, and part of me gets that and part of me doesn’t. It’s one of the best looking games of this breed in this era. It’s gorgeous. It’s also certainly the most intense of the games that followed in Tetris’ wake. It’s a coin-op and it’s the first of the arcade games on this list that feels like it doesn’t pretend like it’s just a kind-hearted little puzzle game. The arcade Tetris’ and Sega’s Trilogy do become intense. Like I noticed that I could last about ten minutes or so regularly on Sega’s games before the drop becomes super fast. But Klax? It goes for the throat sooner than I expected. You know the “next block” window in Tetris? Klax feels like the first game built around the concept of the next block. You watch the blocks flip down a conveyor belt, and you can hold five pieces at a time. In theory you can match three to five pieces vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. In practice, each level has specific conditions that must be met in order to move on. Some levels might be creating five diagonal matches. Others might be “deal with 50 blocks, by whatever means necessary.” That was probably wise, because that was the only thing that kept me going after the gameplay steps on the gas.
The scoring is incredibly imbalanced. You only get 50 points for a vertical match, 1,000 (20x the value) for a horizontal match, and 5,000 for a diagonal match (100x the value). Ridiculous, especially considering that you’re lucky to even get a vertical match in later rounds. If anything, vertical is the hardest to do. I was ACCIDENTALLY getting diagonal matches all the time, but you basically cannot accidentally get a vertical match. Klax, in my opinion, has the worst scoring of any “major” game in this genre.
I’m much more interested in the home versions of Klax, because the coin-up becomes out of control far too quickly. The paddle you move back and forth can store five blocks, and you drop them in reverse order from when you caught them, IE the latest block you caught is the first that you will drop off the stack. You really have to plan out moves ahead of time, and your only defensive option is the ability to throw the top most block halfway up the chute, but that’s just delaying a problem. I found that if I leaned too heavily on tossing blocks back, I almost certainly died from it. The blocks come out in a way where you can pretty much always catch them, but that ain’t the case with throwing one back. In fact, on later levels where the whole chute is covered in pieces, it all but assures two blocks will reach the end of the chute at the same time, forcing you to drop one. However, throwing blocks back was a highly effective way of making your final move. Plus, there’s only five channels that can be stacked five high. It’s just not a big enough playfield, especially since the game scales-up the amount of blocks to unimaginable levels. Klax coin-op has unlimited continues, and part of me thinks that the draw is rigged if you die and reload a quarter, because I noticed that I almost never needed more than one second chance to beat any level, no matter how badly I screwed the pooch in the first attempt. I think maybe only twice I died a second time. But, by the end, I was beating levels one at a time. But, the question isn’t “how hard is Klax” but “how much fun did I have?”
You’re kinda at the mercy of the random draw, but in the case of Klax, since you have so many options to clear the blocks, it doesn’t feel as luck-based as, say, getting a drought of Tetris Makers does.
And you know what? As crappy as Klax’s scoring system is (and it’s an F – people, as bad as scoring in a video game gets), the objectives were good enough to keep me interested. Klax is one of the most unsung games of the early 90s. Yea, the words “Klax” almost always appear alongside Tetris, but this bears little resemblance to Tetris. I talk a lot about “shared DNA” of games, and taking the analogy further, Klax shares DNA with Tetris in the same way humans do with shrews. It’s there, but pretty far down the line. Klax’s closest gaming relatives are actually the type of spinning plate games more commonly found in LCDs. It’s not enough to stack the blocks correctly. That’s actually the easy part. The challenge is that you’re managing the stack on your paddle while also keeping your options open in the playfield’s stack WHILE you also watch the blocks making their way down the chute. Again, no game in this field is more intense, but breaking Klax into bite-sized chunks makes it work. The funny thing is, Klax wasn’t even part of Midway Arcade Origins. In fact, it’s only gotten one official release since 2003, which was as part of Lego Dimensions of all things. Assuming that Digital Eclipse gets the Midway license, I would love for their Gold Master of Midway (which includes Williams and Atari Games) to focus on wide-screen remakes of classic games. I want to play Klax with a bigger playfield. I think it would be transformative. Verdict: YES!
Klax Platform: Atari Lynx Released in 1990 Designed by Greg Omi Developed by the Atari Corporation NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This is played exclusively in the Lynx’s vertical configuration. I think, at least.
Atari Lynx fans, I haven’t forgotten about you, even if I really have no reason to include Lynx Klax in this feature. It doesn’t give me anything to complain about! It’s one of the best games on the Atari Lynx, and if it isn’t the platform’s single best coin-op port, I’d be floored. Klax is one of the most popular Lynx games, and for a good reason. The Lynx version of Klax is a remarkably arcade-accurate port, right down to the voice samples. It seems to have the same levels, the same scaling issues, and even the same phenomena of me only needing a single replay to beat most stages. Also, like the coin-op, you get unlimited continues. For the time and the platform, this is really well done. It’s colorful, controls well, and it shows off the vertical angle of the screen perfectly. What I really want to ask is “what if they could have packed the Lynx with this instead of California Games?” Not that I think Klax is as strong as Tetris. It’s just not, but it would make a hell of a pack-in. Of course, Klax came out about a year after Lynx, but the safe bet for Atari would have still been to swap out California Games for this, or even do what Sega did with Sonic The Hedgehog to great success: offer a free mail-in copy to Lynx owners who bought the Lynx before Klax. This was their best bet, and they didn’t take the bet. Now, the Lynx had a LOT of problems besides a weak pack-in, but still, it makes you wonder “what if?” Verdict: YES!
Columns Platform: Arcade – Sega System C Released March, 1990 Based on a Concept by Jay Geertsen Designed by Takosuke Developed by Sega Included as bonus game with Sega Ages: Columns II ($7.99)
The cascades often felt like dumb luck.
Columns is Sega’s answer to Tetris, and it has its fans. When I was younger, I thought this formula was hella boring. Now that I’m decrepit, hey, it’s okay. Three-segment-tall blocks fall into the well and you can only change the order of the colors. There’s no rotation at all, which makes planning for moves tough. While matches can happen in any direction, including diagonally, there’s not a whole lot of flexibility to plan for complicated chain reactions. I’m not amazing at well puzzlers, but I can hold my own. With Columns, every big combo I got was unplanned. I basically tried to keep colors somewhat close to each-other and hope for the best. Whenever I attempted to make any kind of plan, it fell apart. Six colors is quite a lot, and since you’re completely at the mercy of the random drop, all the best moments in Columns happen incidentally. With that said, Columns is fine. When the big chains happen, planned or otherwise, it’s always a thrill. This is right on the border of being decent or bland, and sometimes that goes against a game. This time, I’m giving it the faintest hint of an edge. I’m curious to see where the franchise goes from here. There’s a LOT of Columns games. How much can they squeeze out of this formula? I guess I’m about to find out. Verdict: YES!
Hatris Platform: Arcade Released June, 1990 Developed by Video System Distributed by LucasArts NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Blue fire makes all the difference.
I have no clue why the arcade and PC Engine builds of Hatris were left out of Tetris Forever. Weirdly, this is yet another version of the game with a tiny but profound change. Well, actually it just combines two power-ups from existing versions: the Game Boy’s fireball along with the Famicom’s “shop” that clears an entire type of hat every X amount of matches. Unlike with Game Boy Hatris, you don’t need to do something amazing to earn a fireball. They just appear randomly in the mix. Sometimes it’s stingy with them, and other times you get a run of having a heavy mix of them. The fireballs burn every matching hat in a stack until it reaches a new type of hat. But, there’s also now a blue fireball which is very rare. In my best game, I only got three of them. Again, I think it appears randomly, and it will burn the entire stack. Or, at least the stack until it reaches a crown, which is fireproof. Every problem inherent to the Hatris formula is still lingering, though you do get points for doubles. On the other hand, even after messing around with the dip switch settings, I struggled greatly with separating the dropping hats. I never got a feel for moving an individual hat after stacking the first. Honestly, Hatris is never going to be a fantastic game by any stretch, but this version was okay. Verdict: YES!
Klax Platform: Atari 2600 Released June 4, 1990 Designed by Steve DeFrisco Published by Atari Never Released Outside of Europe NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Thank you, Atari 2600 for laying the foundation for one of the greatest passions in my life. Cheers!
Behold: history! Klax was the final game ever released for the Atari 2600 during the console’s “natural lifecycle.” Technically the 2600 wouldn’t be discontinued for another two years, but Klax was the last game developed and released, and hell, it never even made it out in America. That’s a damn shame, too. Some of the later arcade adaptations for the VCS are pretty painful. Double Dragon, Rampage, etc. That’s why I’m nothing short of astonished that Klax is a damn good effort. I’m flabbergasted, really. So very little concessions had to be made. This plays just like the arcade game, with the same waves in the same order as the arcade game. You can toss blocks back onto the chute. You have unlimited continues when you die, and hell, “easier after death” seems to be present too, assuming that’s even meant to be a thing and I’m not imagining it.
What a hell of a game to turn the lights out on one of the most important consoles of all time.
The only change is as positive a change as any game can get: the scoring is improved. 50 for a vertical match, 100 for a horizontal, and 500 for a diagonal. SO much more balanced, creating proper risk/reward metrics instead of the outlandishly unbalanced arcade scoring. Thus, if you’re anything like me and you put a lot of stock in scoring systems, then you’re looking at the best version of Klax, even with simplified graphics and sound (no voice samples). The graphics look exactly like I imagined they would in my head, BUT, I imagined that blocks would just poof out of existence instantly from a match. No, they blink out with different sound effects, depending on the type of match it is, just like in the arcade. What Steve DeFrisco achieved here belongs in game design school. I was literally wiping away tears thinking about how fitting an ending this was for the Atari 2600. A console that blew up based on quality, albeit stripped-down ports of coin-ops, and destroyed by poorly made ports of coin-ops, ended with one the most accurate and incredible ports on the entire console. It’s unfathomable that a game like Klax would be this good on this platform, but it is. The fact that it didn’t get a global release sours it somewhat, but Klax is the perfect series finale for THE Atari. Verdict: YES!
Knight Move Platform: Famicom Disk System Released June 5, 1990 Designed by Alexey Pajitnov Developed by JV Dialog Published by Nintendo Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
“BOO!” indeed. I’m so frustrated right now I could spit nails.
If you’re curious which game I played the least in this feature, this is it. For all the wrong reasons. I’d never heard of Knight Move, a Famicom Disk exclusive by Alexey Pajitnov himself. When I was coming up with a pool of games for the bonus reviews, I thought “I have to include his non-Tetris games, and this one was published by Nintendo themselves!” But, it turns out this game is completely unplayable for me and probably anyone who is even a little photosensitive. That’s because this simple, otherwise charming high-concept puzzler is also possibly the single most strobe-heavy video game I’ve seen on the Famicom/NES, and that includes the Jetsons. I’m not exaggerating. If you play the game well, the flashing seen in this video (HUGE epilepsy warning) happens every.. single.. goddamned round.
That’s five uninterrupted seconds of an intense, violent strobe happening as often as every thirty or so seconds. This goes beyond epilepsy, because even people who don’t have seizures are at risk to get a headache or any number of side effects from this. The idea is, you’re a constantly hopping chess knight and you have to use the L-shaped movement of a knight to hop around a board until you land on a heart. If you land on a single tile on the floor three times, it breaks the tile and scores you points, but you die if you land on that space again in the same round. The knight has serious hang time, but its speed increases as you go along, and you have to aim the cursor to the right square. It seems like it’s going to be a really fun, quirky game. At first, I thought “oh my God! Now THIS is a hidden gem!” And then the strobes started, and they kept happening in increasingly faster intervals thanks to the game’s natural speed-up. I played this three or four minutes before my family yanked the controller away. My father played it for about ten and he complained about his eyes hurting. What were they thinking? Were they even thinking at all?
Whether you play the A-Mode or B-Mode, the insane strobing happens. It might happen a little less in the B mode, but it’s basically guaranteed that the strobes will happen every minute. Unreal.
Since breaking as many tiles as you can without dying is the object of the game and the only way to rack-up serious points (including combos for breaking two or more floor pieces in a row), you cannot avoid the strobe effects. It only takes breaking a single tile to trigger the end-of-round strobe effect. Rounds are short too, even in the B-Mode, so the strobing will repeat every few SECONDS, not minutes, and last a few seconds when it happens. The gameplay speeds up, but not the agonizingly slow and ultra-flashy round wrap-ups. Just, f*cking wow. I can’t believe Nintendo allowed this, even in 1990. I’ve never said this about any game, but in the case of Knight Move, I’m thrilled that it seems to have flopped in sales. It deserved it. Knight Move seems like the type of game I’d have a ton of fun with, and in case you can’t tell, I’m pretty angry that nobody put a stop to that insane strobe effect. Awesome job, developers. Just what everyone wants when they play simple, quirky little action puzzle games: a headache. And that’s at the very least. The best thing I can say about Knight Move is it reminded me how far we’ve come, because this sh*t wouldn’t fly today. Knight Move is beyond the f*cking pale and everyone involved in the production of it should be ashamed of themselves. Verdict: NO! and had this been in Tetris Forever unaltered, I would have been furious. Seriously, I’d love a remake of this that isn’t trying to kill me.
Klax Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released July, 1990 Designed by David O’Riva Developed by Tengen NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Wild how the Lynx version looks so much better than the NES one.
The NES version of Klax includes a game called “Blob Ball” for absolutely no reason. It’s a broken single player version of Pong, more or less. Not hidden or anything. It’s in the options menu. I’m not even sure why. Meanwhile, the version of Klax included is certainly one of the uglier versions of Klax I’ve played. I also found the timing of when to catch the blocks coming off the conveyor to be, for lack of a better term, off. I have no clue why I struggled in this specific version and not the coin-op or Lynx. Those had a learning curve, but I adjusted. I never got a feel for the NES drop. But, that one little niggling annoyance notwithstanding, this is still Klax. Klax is a good game. It was never a great game, but it’s enjoyable in spurts. What I find equal parts annoying and fascinating is that none of the home versions rebalanced the difficulty for the home game (except the 2600 build, go figure). It makes sense for the coin-op to become diamond-hard quickly. It’s trying to earn quarters. Why be so vicious with the home versions? A slower build-up would be preferable. Weirdly, you can disable difficulty ramping on the NES, but I think this takes it too far and nerfs the difficulty. Apparently, Klax is a hard game to balance. Verdict: YES!
Dr. Mario Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released July 27, 1990 Designed by Takahiro Harada Developed by Nintendo Included with Nintendo Online Subscription (Standard)
They make me jack up my handicap. They wouldn’t play against me otherwise. So unfair.
Dr. Mario is one of the greatest concepts of all time. Match four segments of the same color, be it a pill or a virus, to score a clearing. There’s three color pills that match three viruses. It’s so simple, but genuinely one of the most elegant game designs in this entire genre. Dr. Mario started as a game called “Virus.” While Mario was still the pitcher and dressed like a doctor, the game had a lot less personality. But, the three-color scheme was apparently there from the start. Blind luck on Nintendo’s part? Because it can’t be self-evident. My problem with Columns was there’s too many colors. Six is too much. Hell, five would have been pushing it. It’s amazing Nintendo settled on three right from the start. Three colors gives you the flexibility to form strategies, but is still barely enough to assure that the luck of the draw and having to think on your feet still factors into the gameplay. Apparently, three was just the magic number. “I don’t think it’s serendipity,” my father said, “I think it’s because they knew Game Boy was coming and they could only create three shades for it.” Crap, I didn’t think of that. Anyway, Dr. Mario is one of the all-time greats. I have three more games to explain why. Verdict: YES!
Dr. Mario Platform: Game Boy Released July 27, 1990 Designed by Takahiro Harada Developed by Nintendo Included with Nintendo Online Subscription (Standard)
Pretty good use of shading to create distinctive pills and viruses.
Pretty good use of shading to create distinctive pills and viruses.
I found Dr. Mario on the Game Boy to be a very impressive effort, at least in audio/visual terms. Oh, this is absolutely the worst game of Dr. Mario ever, period, end of story. Do not mistake this as being 100% identical to the NES game, because it’s certainly not. In addition to the timing feeling entirely different, there’s one tiny change that yields profound results: the playfield is shrunken. Barely, but that barely matters a great deal. Dr. Mario on the NES uses a 16×8 playfield. The Game Boy’s Dr. Mario is 15×8. I would never have even thought to count it out except I kept losing immediately on the high levels. Sometimes there’s not even enough room to fight the viruses at all. You absolutely feel the crunch, and for a good reason: despite having a smaller playfield, the game deals you the same amount of viruses as the NES on the max level, only you have one less row to fight them. Thank god, too. That justified my time put into this. Hooray, Dr. Mario on the Game Boy sucks, at least if you want the maximum possible challenge. Verdict: NO!
Klax Platform: TurboGrafx-16 Released August 10, 1990 Programmed by Jun Amanai Developed by Tengen NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I could swear this is the most rigged version of Klax.
In true-to-the-arcade fashion, the TG-16 build of Klax is really stingy with giving you the colors you need. Every time I attempted to build a five-across anything, diagonal or horizontal, the game would stop giving me that color. It was uncanny. After finishing Columns and now Dr. Mario too, it got me thinking about Klax. Would the game be better with fewer colors? Klax becomes so overwhelming, so quickly. The TG-16 version seems fine, but I still think the Lynx version looks better. This one’s graphics just don’t POP like the coin-op or Lynx builds. The colors almost look muffled. But, it’s fine. The timing issues that plagued me on the NES aren’t present, and the “throw back” was easier and more intuitive to clock than any console version except the Atari 2600 build. Another solid Klax release. Verdict: YES!
Columns II: The Voyage Through Time Platform: Arcade – Sega System C Released September, 1990 Designed by Hisaki Nimiya Developed by Sega Sold Separately on Nintendo Switch ($7.99)
The three missing gems in the stack are actually there. They’re the target blocks.
Sigh. I probably shouldn’t have included so many sequels in this feature. It would have been less work for me, but it’s also fascinating to witness and, more importantly, feel the progression, even if it really is only incremental. Columns II didn’t even get its first release outside of Japan until 2019 on the Nintendo Switch. It offers two games: a super boring competitive game of Columns, and “Flash Columns” which is just Columns where you only have to eliminate the blinking jewels already on the stack. I literally told my friends that using target blocks is “as bullet-proof a sub-genre as there is in gaming.” Impossible to screw up, or so I thought. Columns II proved me wrong. It’s just not fun, dammit. Like with this:
I wish I could claim some kind of meticulous master plan that set that up, but it’s Columns! As always, I got lucky. All the limitations of the original formula are in full force, and having a goal in the form of the flash gems doesn’t improve that. If anything, it sort of makes the situation worse, since that means creating levels, which means having starting stacks of increasing size, and of course, increasing numbers of target gems. You can smoothly, logically escalate a game like Dr. Mario, with its three colors in a 16×8 well. Columns is a 12×6 playfield. Significantly smaller, but with twice as many colors, and as if that’s not bad enough, the game added randomly generated skull blocks. When matched, accidentally or intentionally, the skull blocks shrink the height of the playfield by raising the stack one story. An already too cramped, too luck-based game has its cruelty amplified, not its difficulty. I barely tolerated the first Columns. This one? Too hard and too reliant on stupid, blind luck for its own good. Verdict: NO!
Pipe Dream Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released September, 1990 Developed by Distinctive Software, Inc. Published by Bullet-Proof Software NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
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Pipe Dream on the NES really has no end point. It removes the goal entirely and instead challenges you to simply make as long a pipe as possible. As a (mostly) blank canvas game, I enjoyed it well enough. Even after the one-way pipes were introduced, which is where the arcade version started to lose me, I stuck it out with the NES. At the same time, it feels like a rudderless game concept that runs out of steam. Once you get the hang of the different pieces, all that’s left is being entirely at the mercy of the random draw. That’s because Pipe Dream really doesn’t give you a lot of time before the sludge starts flowing through the pipes. Even though you can see five pieces ahead of time, there’s really not enough time to move the pieces around the board, even if you have the type of visual imagination that Pipe Dream requires (and, as stated before, I do not). The NES version of Pipe Dream also includes this God awful drop-puzzle type of bonus round where you stack the pieces, but can’t destroy them. A dumb concept that fails in every imaginable way that’s thankfully just a bonus points thing. NES Pipe Dream is so stripped-down that I *want* to give a NO! to because it just doesn’t do anything. The same thing over and over again. But I also wanted to put an hour at most into Pipe Dream and I ended up playing a few hours. That blank slate-style of gameplay clearly works, dull as it sounds on paper. Verdict: YES!
Klax (Namco) Klax (Tengen) Platform: Sega Genesis Released Sept. 6 (Tengen) Sept. 7 (Namco) 1990 Developed by Namco and Tengen Namco Port Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Tengen Klax
Namco Klax
Goddammit, Klax!! You just had to go out of this feature being weird. This is one of the strangest cases I’ve come across since I started doing retro reviews. Two completely different versions of Klax, made completely independently from each-other, by two completely different companies, released on Sega Genesis in back-to-back days in 1990. What the f*ck?! It’s so weird! These are the final installments for Klax in this feature. While the fear that I’d run out of things to say pretty much came true, one other fear didn’t: I never got bored with Klax. Sure, the unbalanced scoring frustrated me. Something that Dave insisted I was just plain wrong about. “Klax’s scoring imbalance is entirely deliberate and there to prove a point. Go for the ‘safe’ option of nothing but verticals and you should get peanuts because you can’t achieve anything else with them, and can’t plan ahead to any real extent with a well only five tiles deep. This is especially true for the points stages; you should be dissuaded from trying or having to rely on verticals. It’s the default ‘ohcrapcrapcrapcrapcrap’ option when you’re in a panic, or refusing to play Street Fighter with anyone other than Ryu, you BORING BASTARD.”
Tengen’s version.
I absolutely don’t agree with him, because the game already incentivizes other match-options via the levels. Some levels force the diagonals. Some levels force you to simply deal with X amount of blocks. That’s all you need! Overloading the scoring system towards diagonals is overkill. My father offered a second theory: overvaluing the high-risk, harder-to-set-up diagonals provides insurance against skilled players. Klax is a coin-op, and coin-ops make no money if a professional parks on one too long. Forgoing balance and loading the points by several factors onto the diagonals goes a step beyond incentivizing high-risk gameplay. It makes it a virtual requirement. Fine, and I’ll accept that excuse for the coin-op. But for the home version? It’ll always irk me how unbalanced a scoresheet Klax has.
(Namco)
The strange case of Genesis Klax doesn’t have any weird twist of one version being lightyears ahead of the other. The Tengen version has more options. The Namco version has a versus mode that’s just a race, that nobody in my family could hope to touch me on even if we jacked-up the handicap. Personally, I thought the Tengen version’s timing was a little harder to clock than the Namco build’s, though it occurs to me that whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing is in the eye of the beholder. Some people might want it to be harder to juggle the tiles as they come off the conveyor. Others might want the challenge to be focused on the stack and not the coming blocks. It’s kind of neat that the Genesis is the only console that offers both. So, while *I* give the edge to the Namco version, I totally understand why classic gaming fans often consider the Tengen build to be superior. Really, the winner is Klax fans, because it just ran the table. Seven total versions of it. Seven YES! verdicts. That’s damn impressive. Verdicts: YES! and YES!
Welltris Platform: Arcade Released in 1991 Directed (?) by Alexey Pajitnov & Andrei Snegov Developed Video System Distributed by Bullet-Proof Software NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
See, I knew Welltris had potential.
Unlike the MS-DOS original, the coin-operated Welltris is instantly, classically intuitive, just like Tetris should be. That’s why I totally recommend game design schools use Welltris in their courses. Show students the MS-DOS version, then show the coin-op. There is so much educational potential that can be learned from studying the two games. The coin-op retains nearly identical gameplay and objectives from the original build, yet it couldn’t feel more different. So, how did the coin-op pull off making Welltris an instantly understandable experience? The answer is so easy that I overthought it at first and needed my friend Andrew to set me straight. In the PC version, you cannot control the direction of the block once it leaves the wall and enters the playfield. However, you continue to steer the block in the coin-op even after the transition. It’s really that simple, and the reason it’s intuitive is because the player isn’t disconnected from the stack in the coin-op. They directly interact with it.
Hey hey! I scored a Tetris! I never came close on the MS-DOS build!
I could see this when I tested the MS-DOS and arcade versions on my family. I had them play games of both, with some playing the PC build first and others the arcade. The arcade players learned the game faster, and the PC players didn’t “get it” until they had their turn on the arcade. The only part that still made no sense to the new players was the corner warping/distorting. Which, as I stated in the MS-DOS review, gives me a “it’s not a bug! It’s a feature!” vibe. But, in Dad’s first game of Welltris on MS-DOS, he had seven lines. It was thirty-nine on the coin-op. Everyone enjoyed the arcade game. Nobody enjoyed the MS-DOS version.
As much fun as I had, it’s not hard to figure out why Welltris flopped in arcades. This really should have been on platforms like the SNES instead.
By the way, while the game does step on the gas a little too quickly, it’s one of the most shockingly generous coin-op puzzlers I’ve seen. There’s “bonus blocks” where making even a single line with them clears the entire playfield, essentially giving you a full reset, only with your score intact. The rules of screwing up are changed, as the segments that stay on the wall are deleted, and instead of losing whole walls when you screw up, you lose layers to the walls, giving you less room to maneuver blocks. It makes for an exciting, fast-paced game that’s IMMEDIATELY intuitive. Which is the literal complete opposite of the MS-DOS version. It’s FASCINATING!
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Assuming it was Pajitnov who directed this, then Welltris coin-op is where his bonafides as a game designer and not a one-hit wonder are proven. Welltris for arcades is one of the best arcade drop-puzzlers ever made. After spending an entire day with a bad build of Welltris, it was such a joy to play a good version of it. I have no idea why Atari/Digital Eclipse and the Tetris Company couldn’t include the arcade build in Tetris Forever. My friends, you need to figure this out, because EVERYONE should get to celebrate Welltris. I was absolutely convinced that Tetris as a 3D experience could never be fast or fun. Welltris is both, and one of the best games to wear the “Tris” name I’ve played. I have no problem eating crow if it’s served to me deliciously. Verdict: YES!
Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen Platform: Famicom Released April 12, 1991 Designed by Yukinori Taniguchi & Takashi Shibuya Developed by Compile Published by Tokuma Shoten Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Thanks, Dash! I had never heard of this game, and I almost didn’t include it in this feature. I’m really happy I did, because this is one of the strongest of the early high-concept falling block games that tried to ride Tetris’ coattails. Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen (Gorby’s Pipeline Mission) actually got diplomatic permission from the Soviet Union’s embassy to use the likeness of Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The USSR wasn’t long for this world by the time this was released, but if the story of Tetris is one of the power of video games as diplomatic tools, then this game deserves to be part of that story. And it helps that it’s a pretty dang great game, too! This hybrid of Tetris and Pipe Dream has players trying to simply connect a water supply from one side of the screen to the other, which is supposed to represent a pipeline from Japan to Russia. Two linked blocks fall at a time and can be rotated clockwise and counter-clockwise. There are no gaps allowed, so if you drop a block on the top of the stack in a way where the other block is hanging above the stack, it breaks free and you continue to control its descent and still rotate it. The right side only has one source of water which starts at the bottom corner. If at any point the pipe you’re working on is blocked, it becomes plugged and the next available source from the bottom becomes active. If the stack tops off, or if all available sources of water are lost, game over. To win, twice a level you have to do this:
It’s not just enough to make a line. You have to bring that line into one of the green pipes on the wall. There’s going to be a lot of garbage on the screen when you’re done. This is a game where I would be VERY impressed by anyone who can create pristine well conditions, like you can in Tetris. Good news is, you score a lot of points doing this. Any blocks that are underneath the pipe become blue blocks that score points after you finish the stage.
I don’t think Gorby does enough to help players clean up the playfield. I also think the game gives you too many elbows and not enough flat pieces. Based on rewinding, blocks are randomly generated, apparently including the valuable (and occasionally disastrous) items. The straight pieces (or the L/reverse L pipes) are more valuable but come out less frequently because there’s more ways to configure elbows. The items aren’t exactly balanced, either, nor is there any apparent way of triggering getting them. They just end up in the draw, every bit as randomly as the blocks do but with much less frequency. The drill allows you to remove one column from the stack. Mind you, if you choose a column that has your current pipe, that pipe will be cut in half and have to either be reconnected or abandoned for a new pipeline. A water bottle (which can only be used by smashing it directly in front of the front of the current pipe you’re building) fills the playfield under the pipe with water blocks that can’t be used and eats up a ton of the playfield. But, they score a lot of points when you complete the pipe. Finally, there’s what I call the “automatic win” item. It’s a drop of water, and if the pipeline is currently facing a wall with a pipe and you place the drop of water in front of the end of your pipeline, you not only get credit for a pipe but you get a mostly clean playfield. On the negative side, by using it, you don’t score as much as you could. But it will bail you out.. literally, and it saved me more than once. It’s too overpowered, in my opinion.
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Even without balance to the block distribution and one ridiculously overpowered item, I was completely hooked on Gorby. If you want to know why this feature took so f’n long, lost treasures like Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen are a big reason why. I didn’t originally have this as one of the 6, 20, 40, or 70+ games I had intended to cover in this review, but part way through my work, Dash really pushed hard for it to be included. Boy, I’m happy he did. This was fantastic! I intended to play Gorby for an hour or so and it cost me nearly an entire day. It’s almost every bit as potently addictive as Tetris is, and every bit as rewarding. It is such a thrill to see a particularly zig-zaggy pipe finally complete. Is it a bit janky? Sure, but not like Pyramid was. This is the “we’re onto something and we know it, we gotta get this out NOW” jank. They were trying to strike while the Tetris iron was hot, so it lacks the polish it would get today.
If you think this is a weird geopolitical game connection, just wait until you hear about Wordtris!
Also, had this come out today, Gorby would have no-doubt included some form of an algorithm and more balanced items, including more stuff to help clean up the playfield. With that said, wow, what a genuine hidden gem. If anyone from the Tetris Company is reading this feature, I would advise you to track down whoever owns the rights to this (presumably D4) and buy it. I’m sure you’re thinking “DLC” for Tetris Forever, and if you go the Atari 50 route for DLC, one of the bonus chapters has to be about all the wannabes that followed in Tetris’ wake. A lot of them were derivative and uninspired, and I expected that from Gorby. Hell, I LOVED this game, but even I concede the use of Gorbachev’s likeness feels like a desperate ploy to make the game more closely resemble Tetris’ heritage, as if being tied to Russia was the sweet sauce that made Tetris a global hit and not, you know, historically amazing gameplay. That’s cynical and I hate cynicism, but it’s so obviously true, too. Either way, Gorbachev isn’t the star of the game. Charming gameplay is, and I think it would be a great fit for a legitimate release in Tetris Forever’s DLC. I doubt it would be that expensive, and Pipeline could be a big franchise with today’s audiences. It never had a real chance, and that’s a bonafide gaming tragedy. Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen isn’t just a great game, but one of the best games in this entire feature and it deserves a second chance on the perfect stage for it. Verdict: YES!
Hatris Platform: PC Engine Released May 24, 1991 Developed by Micro Cabin Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Thank God. I’m finally done with Hatris.
I’ve played enough Hatris to last a lifetime and I’m never playing it again after this. Ever. Hatris is the absolute middle of the road falling block puzzler. Five f’n games and not one of them has been an outright GOODgame. As a series, it’s barely okay at best. The PC Engine version is basically the arcade version I reviewed above, with both the shop element and the red and blue fireballs. But, this version also is much easier to separate the hats after dropping one, so this is probably the best version of Hatris. That’s like being the best slice of Wonder Bread in the loaf. Even though I’ve now played Hatris to death, I was never really good at it. But, I must have practiced enough to become okay at it, because for the first time, I actually saw something resembling an “ending” once the crowns were introduced. Look! Here it is!
As far as accomplishments go, I was about as excited as I normally am when I treat my garbage can like a basketball hoop and make whatever I’m throwing the first time. Not elated. Not even a sense of accomplishment. Content, but only because I don’t have to bend over and pick up whatever I threw now. That’s really the closest analogue.
And I’m not even really sure *I* did it so much as I got lucky with the random drops. Dave told me “keep the big hats on the sides” as if it’s THAT easy. My main strategy was “when the crowns are in the playfield, keep them together, even if you ruin a stack of four doing it.” Like all other versions that use fire, the crowns can’t be burned. Since crowns stack the thickest out of all the hats, whatever damage I do to myself by wrecking any other stack will be nothing compared to the damage the crowns do by becoming garbage. It helps that it takes a while for PCE Hatris to get going. Hell, if you start at level 0, it doesn’t even add the fourth hat (the top hat) to the assortment until two visits to the shop. That can be adjusted, but I’m one of those people who like to start at the bottom and build-up from there. From that sense, Hatris might be the slowest-building game in the entire genre.
The blue fire is probably over-powered, but the PC Engine version is as stingy with it as the arcade game is. It’s 100% totally random. The red fire is generous enough. I don’t know how I feel about having this stuff be random, but at least it helps with the tempo.
I’ve played five versions of Hatris now, and not one of them is in the least bit exciting. Relaxing? Maybe. I suppose I did “zone out” playing Hatris every time I booted it up. But it never stops feeling like Busy Work: The Game. Its only contribution to the genre, the ability to separate blocks by breaking one off at a higher point on the playfield, is nice. But, that sort of feels like an inevitable evolutionary step. Before Tetris Forever, Hatris had sort of slipped through the cracks of history, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not dynamic. It’s not fast-paced. If you crank-up the speed, it feels artificially quick, but not “up-tempo.” The most remarkable thing about Hatris’ entire existence is that it IS just a boring idea that, through sheer force of will, was turned into a passable game. On one hand, I’m bummed that Digital Eclipse didn’t take a pass at remaking it. On the other hand, what could anyone possibly do to make this better? It’s not my job to answer that. All I’m supposed to do is say if a game is good or not. With that, the PC Engine build is, by the tiniest fraction of a unit of enjoyment, the best game of Hatris I’ve played. And it’s not in Tetris Forever, go figure. Verdict: YES!
Puyo Puyo Platform: Famicom Disk System Released October 25, 1991 Directed by Masanobu Tsukamoto Published by Compile Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER (?) BEEN RE-RELEASED
The personality was still being worked on.
Puyo Puyo is one of the most famous games in the entire genre, and that’s why I think its fans are going to have heart attacks when they find out I’m not the biggest fan. But, I wanted to include this original release because it’s such a neat story. In Japan, there was a magazine dedicated to the Famicom called “Famimaga” that periodically included free games. Famimaga published six total games between March of 1990 and December of 1992. I thought of including some of them in this, especially “Clocks.” Which is a drop puzzler with minute/hour hands.
I uh.. have no clue what I’m doing.
Clocks (or “Clox”, as it’s called both sometimes) was the 4th game in that series. Puyo Puyo was the fifth. Yep, one of the most famous puzzle franchises started life as a throw-in for a magazine. I still have a lot of indie developers who read IGC, and I tell them this: you never know. You can very much feel that this game is a prototype/low budget affair. Clearly Puyo Puyo was NEVER meant to be a big franchise, and to hammer that home, they weren’t even certain it was going to use slimes as blocks (taken from an RPG called Madō Monogatari) or humans who stood on shoulders and linked hands. Because, get this, that’s in this game!
Yikes!!
Now, Puyo Puyo is going to evolve A LOT over the coming years, with a heavy emphasis on the versus matches. Which I totally get after playing this Famicom Disk System game solo. I’m just not a fan. I think Puyo Puyo is really boring and I don’t get it at all. I think the well is too small, and I think the cascades aren’t as exciting as some people think. It’s not a total wash, because I really like how many options this comes with. You can change how many colors there are, and you can even change whether you want a giant slime as a bonus item (which crushes two columns) or if you want a Pikachu-looking thing that changes the colors in the stack to create a match. I also deeply admire the effort here. As a proof of concept that was never meant to be anything but an advertisement for your RPGs in a gaming magazine, jeez, this is a pretty amazing story, isn’t it? But it’s safe to say that the early versions of Puyo Puyo aren’t for me. Verdict: NO!
Yoshi Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released December 14, 1991 Directed by Satoshi Tajiri Developed by Game Freak Published by Nintendo Included with Nintendo Online Subscription (Standard)
Do you know what strikes me most about Yoshi? This could have been the PERFECT falling block Game & Watch. I mean besides Tetris, which obviously was practically made for LCDs, but Yoshi isn’t too far behind. It requires very little animation (hell, the blocks here fall in a way that looks LCD-like) and not much in the way of graphics. It’d probably be a little hard to get four distinct characters + the eggs into cells, but see, I have faith someone could come up with it, and it’s basically idealized for the format.
I’ve reviewed two games already from Satoshi Tajiri and Game Freak. Mario & Wario, a Super Famicom-exclusive puzzler that used the SNES Mouse, was alright but certainly not some amazing hidden gem. His first game was his real masterpiece: Mendel Palace, a one-of-a-kind action arcade game, which I covered in Namco Museum Archives: Volume 2: The Definitive Review. I named it both “Best in Set” for Volume 2 and ranked it #1 among the twenty-two total games between the two collections. Plus, of course, Tajiri invented Pokémon. In fact, this is the game that bankrolled the development of Pokémon. Nintendo had passed on Mendel Palace, but they wanted to work with Tajiri and Game Freak, and they reached out saying “we need another puzzler, ASAP!” Sadly, the game isn’t as interesting as the story behind it.
It’s not a bad looking game, but I think I would have preferred a plain wall to a checkerboard one.
The concept, simply put, doesn’t work for the marathon mode. In Yoshi, players have to shuffle four different channels while icons featuring four enemies from the Mario franchise fall onto the playfield. Those are Goombas, Piranha Plants, Boos, and Bloopers, and while matches can only be made vertically, it only requires a pair to clear them from the stacks. The placement of where pieces fall is totally random, but there’s no limit to shuffling the stacks. The twist is that two halves of Yoshi eggs randomly fall alongside the blocks. The bottom halves will join the stacks (and can also be cleared with a simple match) while the top halves vanish if there’s no bottom half of an egg on the stack they land on. The object is essentially to make sandwiches with the eggs, and the more enemies you stack between the bottom and top pieces, the more points you score. The problem is, if the game doesn’t spit out the top halves of the eggs, you’re hosed. It’s totally random, and you’re at the mercy of pure random chance.
It makes for a frustrating marathon mode, and I thought this was going to be one of the easier NO! games in this feature. And then I played the B-Mode, and things got complicated. The B-Mode plays the same, only your goal is now to get an all-clear. It took a little while, but eventually it became clear to me that Yoshi works better as a level-based game. The same RNG problems plague B-Mode, but having a clear end-goal adds layers of strategy and, consequently, excitement. Especially on later levels, where it is genuinely thrilling to start with a large pile of debris on the playfield and whittle it down to nothing. I still found myself getting screwed by runs of non-matches or not spitting out the tops to the eggs. What I’d really like to see is this game redone as a widescreen game, with more channels. That could be said about a lot of games, but four just isn’t enough for Yoshi’s format. But either way, Yoshi still won me over. My motto is “find the fun” and I found the fun in the B-mode. Barely, but barely counts. What a turnaround, because I thought for sure after a couple marathons this was heading for a NO! See, it ain’t over till it’s over. Verdict: YES!
Wordtris Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released November, 1992 Designed by Sergei Utkin, Vyacheslav Tsoy, & Armen Sarkissian Developed by Sphere Published by Spectrum Holobyte NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I totally meant to do that. Planned it out and everything. I didn’t fall ass-backwards into it. Why would you think that? I use “EIO” in conversation every day. I bring up Old McDonald a LOT. (nods)
Wordtris has a unique distinction: it’s the only video game co-developed by someone who went on to become a head of state. Armen Sarkissian was elected President of Armenia in 2018. Presumably this was done to keep him from making another game. Wordtris is, simply put, a bad idea that should never have been released. First off, the playfield is too small, and even though this is the only game in this entire feature that goes “below the stack” it’s still not enough room. Especially when there’s blocks for every single letter (including Z, X, V, Q, etc), plus items like bombs and dynamite. Also, the game is a bit of a prick about certain things. Like, I spelled “ZEBRA” for 425 points. Awesome, right? But the game insisted on giving me more Zs, and what can you do with a Z? So I spelt ZEBRAS with an S for a measly 240 points. Oh, come on!
Presumably I scored less because I used a ? block, though once you place one of those, it doesn’t remind you which one was originally a ? block. This game B-L-O-W-S.
Another problem is that the game automatically scores words. This might sound like a weird complaint, but there’s so many three-letter words. Thousands of them, actually, and bigger words are typically made of smaller words. Anyone who plays Scrabble knows this. To counter this, the game uses combos that allow words to be created when you make a word and the under-stack raises up. The amount of luck, three-dimensional planning, and the sheer EFFORT required isn’t worth it. And then you have things like words not counting. RUM doesn’t count, because I guess alcohol is offensive? But there’s other forms of rum, you know? Butter rum? That’s one of my favorite flavors of Life Savers. You know, a candy eaten by children? Rum cake? Rum doesn’t have to be devil’s brew, you know?
Look at that board. At this point, I went a LONG time between vowels. It had given me something like four Ps in seven drops. Wordtris isn’t the worst drop puzzler ever made, but it’s close.
Of all the games in this feature, I think Wordtris has the lowest overall potential. I’ve reviewed some pretty bad Tetris-inspired games, but I think most of them could have been tinkered with and made fun, or at least tolerable. I don’t think Wordtris could have ever been fun. I think the concept is dead on arrival. Maybe a widescreen format with a bigger well could have helped. Maybe a more consistent, predictable dictionary. Maybe a 7-bag style algorithm (which I presume there IS a method to the madness since I didn’t get difficult-to-work-with letters very often) that assures the ability to make words, or maybe not scoring a word until you manually hit a “score all words” button. Hell, it’s not my job to figure out how to fix games. I just care whether old games stand up to the test of time, and in the case of Wordtris, I can’t imagine anyone ever had F-U-N with this. I think it’s a terrible game. A-W-F-U-L. In a universe where there’s no Virtual Lab, this is the worst falling block game ever made. Verdict: NO!
Oh My God! Platform: Arcade Released in 1993 Directed by Kazutoshi Ueda Developed by Atlus Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Why did they pick that name? It’s a snake-based puzzler! They couldn’t come up with a name? Oh and that sign that’s displayed? If you slither the blocks like that, it activates a special move.
This is yet another Dave Sanders choice, and one of the rarest coin-ops out there. Only four copies are known to exist, all of them as circuit boards instead of dedicated units. There’s a reason for the rarity. Unlike a lot of the games Dave recommended, he knew this one was no good. Certainly not the trash fire I initially had it pegged as, but it’s pretty unintuitive, which is typically the death knell for any game like this, and Oh My God isn’t good enough to overcome that. Think of it as Puyo Puyo if the blocks had to be slithered across the screen, like a snake. Almost like a train of segments that you have to curve around. It’s also the puzzler that has the longest grace period before the blocks lock to the stack. Thank god for it, because there’s a HUGE learning curve to the movement. This is one of those games where managing the physical shape of the stack is every bit as important as matching the colors, since you can create a dead end that prevents you from being able to align the blocks.
My family didn’t want to play long enough to learn the movement. They just straight-up hated this game.
The biggest lesson I’ve taken away from Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review is that the quicker a game is able to be learned, the better it usually is. I had to play several games of Oh My God to get the hang of it, but once I did, I didn’t hate it as much as I initially did. I still didn’t like it, but I respected that they tried something better. I can also understand why some studios rolled the dice on anti-intuition games. How the hell do you stand out in THIS genre? Especially with these match three games! I mean, how many different ways can that be changed up? You have to create some kind of gimmick with the blocks, and you can’t really know if the gimmick works until the game is done. You don’t become one of the rarest games ever made by bombing in sales. You get there when the studio themselves recognizes that the game isn’t good. So, I admire that Atlus was willing to experiment. It didn’t work, but as far as failed experiments go, I’ve played alot worse. Verdict: NO!
Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine aka Kirby’s Avalanche aka Super Puyo Puyo Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Genesis ver. Released December, 1993 SNES ver. Released February, 1995 SNES ver. Directed by Kazunori Ikeda Developed by Compile and Banpresto Published by Sega and Nintendo Included with Nintendo Online Subscription (Standard)
(Kirby’s Avalanche)
The first American version of Puyo Puyo is one of those games I’ll never understand the appeal of. The playfield is too small for the amount of garbage blocks that combos drop. The playfield is only 12×6, making Puyo Puyo both too short and too narrow. The first moderate-sized combo you make is going to essentially end the other player. The chances for comebacks are slim, since you still (1) need the game to give you the right colors (2) need to create whatever matches you can get around the garbage blocks (3) do all this before the other player, who has a full playfield, makes even a single chain or combo to further plug-up your efforts.
(Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine) I honestly think the SNES version looks better. More colorful. Sharper. It’s an overrated game either way.
Not that I think every single puzzle game needs the same ebb and flow, but whether it’s called Super Puyo Puyo, Kirby’s Avalanche or Mean Bean Machine, I find Puyo Puyo to be too small and too fast paced. The only way I can spin it in a way that makes sense is that the race to hit that knockout punch that’s nearly impossible to recover from holds appeal to some. I don’t get it, but I’m nowhere near a pro. I won my fair share of Tetris 99 games, but I’d get tuned by legit pros. With Kirby’s Avalanche (and later with Puyo Puyo Sun), I played with my family, just like I did with nearly every multiplayer game in this feature. To say the least, Puyo Puyo, in every form it took, was not among their favorite games. “Would you guys believe that, in Japan, this franchise is every bit as big as Tetris is?” Their reaction was universally “this?” I took some comfort from that. If you’re in disagreement, leave a comment and explain it, because I’m trying to figure it out. It can’t just be because it has Sonic characters, right? Verdict: NO!
Poto Poto Platform: Arcade – Sega System C2 Released March, 1994 Designed by Makoto Yamamoto Developed by Sega Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Sega could have sold a sponsorship to Spree. You know, the candy?
I’d never heard of this one. Chances are, if a game in this feature is really obscure, it was recommended to me by one of my best friends, pinball designer Dave Sanders. It’s almost a punch in the gut how many unique block puzzlers sit on the edge of oblivion. My instinct tells me to describe Poto Poto as a sort of reverse Bust-a-Move crossed with the Price is Right game Plinko, but that description doesn’t do the game justice. While the object is to match four same-colored hexagons, how you’re dealt the blocks is unlike pretty much any game ever. For better AND for worse. A character with a wheelbarrow walks back and forth and tosses the pieces onto the stack. You can slide a block across the stack, but as soon as it reaches an empty cell, it falls into the cell and locks into the stack, unless it’s part of a match-four, in which case it clears. If any other blocks aren’t attached to the stack or a wall, they collapse, attacking the opponent in a fashion that will feel very familiar to Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble fans.
You’ll want to do standard, no-frills clears in order to spawn bombs that blow-up the cell they’re above plus all the cells around them, potentially dropping a massive part of the stack on your opponent.
The twist.. well, actually this whole game is so weird it practically is a twist, but regardless.. is that the person throwing the pieces doesn’t wait for you to position one before throwing the next. There’s a chance you’ll have multiple pieces sliding on the playfield, and you only control the lowest one. It’s pretty hard to get the hang of Poto Poto. The sliding-based movement is certainly not elegant, and it’s really easy to accidentally have the piece you’re guiding end up in a cell you weren’t aiming for. It’s also one the strangest tempos for a versus-style puzzler. While games can turn on a dime, it’s too dramatic. I went from “in complete command” to “instantly dead before I knew what hit me” more than once. Other times, games were over in under a minute and totally one-sided. The big problem with Poto Poto is that exciting, give-and-take matches were very, very rare. This was one of the few puzzlers where I didn’t have an insurmountable advantage over my family thanks to having the most experience. I lost as many games as I won. The lack of excitement had nothing to do with the ability gap. Playing against the AI was the same thing: one-sided until the victory, or one-sided until the surprise instant loss. Poto Poto’s formula just doesn’t inherently lend itself to exciting competitive gaming. It’s either total domination or a complete blind-siding. And now I know Poto Poto fell into obscurity for a reason. Verdict: NO!
Tetris 2 aka Tetris Flash Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released July 8, 1994 Directed by Masao Yamamoto & Hitoshi Yamagami Developed by Tose Published by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
You know how I talk about gaming DNA? Well, Tetris 2 only shares DNA with Tetris in the same way a human being is technically a distant relative to the fungus that causes athlete’s foot. I originally put down that this is the bastard love child of Tetris and Dr. Mario, but that isn’t the case either. Tetris 2 is Dr. Mario’s offspring that he and Nurse Peach gave up for adoption to avoid triggering a scandal at the clinic. Lines do nothing for you here. You have to match three same-colored segments. Instead of taking out viruses, you have to take out personality-free target blocks. The catch is that, at the bottom of every stage, three of the target blocks, one of each color, shimmer. Breaking one of the shimmering blocks destroys all the blocks of that color. So in theory, the first to clear those three wins. In practice, it can be tough. Some of the blocks have disconnected segments that can be separated and moved independently. Depending on how congested the stack is, this can make even higher levels end in seconds. It should be hell of satisfying, but Tetris 2 is so subdued that this is the first Nintendo-published game that feels graphically comatose.
In the two player mode, in addition to matching blocks, you have to maintain a water level. In several games, only once did we feel the water level REALLY decided who won or lost. What a waste of a mechanic.
Nintendo really shot themselves in the foot by using the Tetris name and license for this, and why the hell would they invoke that game to begin with? Tetris 2 never feels like Tetris except only in the most vague sense. Like, a couple blocks are similar to Tetris blocks, but really, they should have just made this a Dr. Mario sequel. Dr. Mario was over three years old by the time the NES version of Tetris 2 came out. Just call it Dr. Mario 2! Granted, Dr. Mario is better than Tetris 2, but there’s legit value here. The multiplayer mode is a little misguided, especially with the water level concept. The instruction book promises it makes things “like a tug of war!” That’s code for “so back-and-forth that it’s basically useless.” But, Tetris 2 has quality puzzle mode to make up for the mediocre multiplayer game. It’s one of those BomBliss style puzzlers where you have X amount of blocks to clear the entire screen. I always dig those. Hell, they single-handedly carried BomBliss to a YES! more than once. Tetris 2 is fine. Nothing special, but still a damn shame about the Tetris license being a pair of concrete shoes weighing it down. Oh, and Debbie.. pastels? Verdict: YES!
Tetris & Dr. Mario Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released December 30, 1994 Developed by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This is the closest Nintendo has ever come to a commercial release of the Nintendo World Championships from 1990.
Tetris & Dr. Mario is Tetris and Dr. Mario. I mean, duh. In North America, this was the only way to get Dr. Mario for the SNES. It was a solo release in Japan, both as a cart and as the final ever game broadcast on the Satellaview accessory. And, you know, it’s a good version of Dr. Mario with the standard 16×8 well. The version of Tetris included is also decent but unspectacular. It doesn’t have 7-bag, that’s for sure. During a two player mixed-match, the game seemed almost deliberately trollish, giving us somewhere around seven Z-blocks. In a row. The same block. I mean, come on. But, that’s not a rarity. It CONSTANTLY identical blocks in clusters. Maybe more than any other game. Otherwise, eh, it’s fine. But the real main event is mixed matches. They’re structured like the NWC 1990 trio. First, you do the B-Mode in Tetris, setting the amount of lines required to anywhere between 1 and 30. Then, you do Dr. Mario, and with all the time remaining, you just score as much as you can in Tetris. Unlike NWC, there’s no multipliers for the stages, and winning/losing is decided by your raw combined point total. The only penalty for dying on any stage is losing all the points you had and having to start that stage over. I couldn’t really experience a good match. Even when I jacked up my family’s handicap, I still whooped them. But, the concept is fine. I mean, in theory. Verdict: YES!
Bust-a-Move aka Puzzle Bobble Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released January 13, 1995 Directed by Shōji Takahashi Developed by Taito Sold Separately on Nintendo Switch
Whether it’s called Bust-a-Move or Puzzle Bobble, there’s so many different versions of it that it would put the overabundance of Klax ports to shame. So, I decided to focus on this first home port which is, you know, fine. Aim a pointer that fires bubbles that ricochet off walls. The bubbles stick to the stack, and a match-3 clears them. There’s a million sequels that are essentially the same game, only the developers slapped a progressively higher number on the title screen. Yea, yea, there’s more to it than that, which is why I have the sequel in coming in Part Two of this feature. But there’s not that much more to it. As a single player experience, there’s no doubt that there’s something serene about Bust-a-Move. It’s low-frills but satisfying enough. The special bubbles are what I found strange. Instead of matching them, you only have to shoot them. Something about that took the satisfaction away. Bust-a-Move is at its best when you have to twist the pointer to a really sharp angle to squeeze a matching shot in. Hitting those shots is gaming nirvana. It’s one of the most simple games on here, but in this genre, simple works. Verdict: YES!
Baku Baku Animal Platform: Arcade – Sega Titan Video Released April, 1995 Directed by Yasushi Watanabe & Yuri Usami (?) Developed by Sega NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Hey! A gimmicky puzzler that actually works! By the way, Sega Titan is basically a cartridge-based Sega Saturn. Why carts instead of discs? My father guessed heating issues, which Dave confirmed. “Cooling is an unnecessary expense. Baku Baku doesn’t require CD-quality music. It doesn’t require streamlined cutscenes. The system wasn’t powerful enough to need fans, and optical drives fail. It’s a puzzle game, not a technology showcase.”
In this feature, I’ve played some pretty high-concept puzzlers that were simply too complicated to be enjoyable. Baku Baku is the rare high-concept game that keeps things so simple and so peppy that you can’t help but like it. Blocks are dropped in random pairs. The twist is that sometimes a block is food and sometimes it’s an animal, and if an animal is linked to its food source, it eats the entire cluster. Baku Baku shares DNA with Pac-Attack, but unlike Pac-Attack, the eating is less restrictive. The food source doesn’t need to be in a straight line to be collected, like Pac-Attack. If the animal is touching a misshapen-but-touching cluster of their food, the whole cluster gets eaten. Smart, especially since it opens the door for ultra-satisfying cascade-style combos. I just wish that kind of thoughtful design was all over Baku Baku, but it’s not.
My father said “it looks like a cardboard juice commercial from 30 years ago.”
As far as YES! games go, few are as problematic as Baku Baku. There’s seemingly no 7-bag-style algorithm. Sometimes it was astonishing how long the game would go spawning food blocks for a specific animal without spawning the animal to eat them. One time I had just about the most elegant stack of blocks I’d done in Baku Baku. A mountain of bananas that would have given Donkey Kong heart palpitations, and I ended up dying because it never gave me the monkey the entire game. It also speeds up faster than any coin-op I can remember. By the fourth stage, the blocks are almost instantaneously on the floor, assuming you haven’t lost a match. If you die, the speed resets. I’m frustrated by Baku Baku Animal, because it’s such a clever idea, but the end result is just okay. The concept is so much more fun than the execution. It is fun enough to get a YES!, but not as enthusiastic a YES! as it should be. Baku Baku desperately needs an algorithm. Fingers crossed for the Game Gear version coming up. Verdict: YES!
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V-Tetris Platform: Virtual Boy Released August 25, 1995 Directed by Norifumi Hara Developed by Locomotive Published by Bullet-Proof Software Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
With this Tetris, I finally did what I never thought I’d be able to do.
Of all the versions of Tetris for me to check off one of my gaming bucket list moments, it would be the one that gave me bloodshot eyes. Indeed, the Japanese-exclusive V-Tetris became the first ever game of Tetris where I maxed the scoreboard out. All 9’s, including 999 lines. It helps that the game never became impossibly fast, capping-out long before I was finished. Now, my eyes are killing me. Worth it. What’s really strange is that V-Tetris really is just run-of-the-mill Tetris. I guess when you clear lines, they pop out of the screen. Who the f*ck would want a normal Tetris on the Virtual Boy? Well, there is one slight variation that’s basically Tetris wrapped in a cylinder. The gag with it is you can create full lines that don’t get cleared if you rotate them off the screen before the line “settles” to the stack. When you rotate already completed lines onto the screen, they don’t disappear until you make at least one line.
Mode C
Mode C
It’s actually not as interesting as it sounds. In fact, it’s pretty boring. There is a twist to keep players from treading water: the game penalizes you for making singles. If you clear only a single line at any point, it drops a block on the opposite side of the stack, where it will likely create a giant gap in the stack. Of course, thanks to the cylinder, clearing gaps has never been easier. There’s almost always a place for the next block, which completely neutralizes the challenge of Tetris. Technically, V-Tetris is fine. It’s a boilerplate, completely pedestrian form for the game that has absolutely no reason to exist. I should have saved this version for last because my eyes are just on fire right now. This isn’t a comedy bit I’m doing over here. My eyes are legitimately f*cking throbbing. What the everloving hell were they thinking with the Virtual Boy? Thanks for letting me pop my perfect game cherry, V-Tetris, but I didn’t need to pop my eyes while I was at it. Verdict: NO!
Virtual Lab Platform: Virtual Boy Released December 8, 1995 Developed by Nacoty Published by J-Wing NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This MIGHT have been okay if not for how the drops work. Three blocks at once? THREE? Why?
Virtual Lab is largely considered the worst Virtual Boy game. Now there’s a truly pitiful title. Okay, so I haven’t played every Virtual Boy game, but I’m still guessing the title is accurate, since this is also the worst game in this entire feature. Granted this is one of the only games in this feature that is essentially an underdeveloped prototype made in eight days that was sent to manufacturing without bug testing. I want to say “hey, a playable game in 8 days isn’t bad” but, well, I’m not sure I’d call this “playable.” What I assume are intestines fall from the sky that have between one and three openings. You have to keep building off them until you’re able to cap every end with the single-opening blocks, at which point they clear from the stack. The only kindness the game offers is that the floor and walls count as “caps.”
You can see that I had multiple large structures, but you have to deal with the blocks you’re given. By the way, what the HECK is even remotely 3D about this game? What the heck is this doing as a Virtual Boy game?
It’s actually a neat idea. Really! At least it’s different, but the concept is ruined by the game dropping two or three blocks that are often incompatible at a time. Even though you have the ability to shuffle the order of the blocks and rotate them, you have to move them together until one of them settles, and that almost always means permanently ending the “match” potential for some part of the stack. See, any opening that faces a non-opening of another block becomes essentially impossible to get rid of. This means that even perfect play can see you hosed by having three blocks spawn at once, since it could inevitably lead to a single blocked pathway, which is all it takes to ruin an entire structure you’re working on with no hope of recovery. And again, that’s assuming you make all the right moves, because on top of all this, the controls are the absolute loosest I’ve ever experienced in this genre. Calling Virtual Lab “broken” feels too generous. The worst game in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review? Yep, and it’s not even close, in fact. Could something be made from this idea? Well, yea. In fact, it already kind of happened. Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen for the Famicom or hell, any version of Pipe Dream is basically the same idea done better. This is just those games without any sense of fine tuning. Verdict: NO!
3-D Tetris Platform: Virtual Boy Released March 22, 1996 Developed by T&E Soft Published by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Those Tetris characters are nightmare fuel only made worse by the all-red color.
3D-Tetris is an eyesore, but it’s Virtual Boy so that goes without saying. It’s actually not all that different from BlockOut, to the point that it’s really best to think of 3D-Tetris as an evolution of that game. The only difference is this is a legit 3D game with a camera that automatically spins around the playfield. My big problem with Blockout was it wasn’t easy (if possible at all) to know where you screwed up and where the gaps were. The well itself had no sense of depth to it. That’s not the case here, as there’s five “maps” on the side of the screen that show the current stack’s layers. There’s also a wider variety of modes, including one where you have to build around the dead center of the well, because the stack is only cleared once you insert a block on top of that center square.
I’m pretty sure the absolute limit is a triple instead of a full Tetris. Which is fine because I never came close to it anyway.
My problem with 3D-Tetris is that it’s an unintuitive nightmare. Classical versions of Tetris work because it’s a concept that takes all of twenty seconds to “get.” Hell, if that! But, I played 3D-Tetris for several hours and still had no feel for rotation or block movement. And that’s before I get to the whole symmetry rule thing for the “center fill” version of the game, which is one of the most convoluted, confusing and overly complicated game mechanics in the history of video games. This is a prime example of developers who completely lose the plot. “Let’s take one of the most easy to understand video games ever created and give it rules that, when read out loud, makes it sound like the person is speaking in tongues.” Enjoy making sense of this sh*t:
I stuck to trying to simply craft lines. You know, that thing that people play Tetris for? On those terms, honestly it really is just a more complicated version of BlockOut. But, even with three different buttons to control the rotation (one of which would normally be a second D-pad, so you’ll want to tinker with your emulator mapping to find a comfy configuration), I never reached the point where manipulating the blocks felt natural. I don’t know if it’s because the camera is always slowly rotating around or because the blocks are wireframes, but it just felt like I was disconnected from the game. It doesn’t help that the blocks can take on some difficult-to-process shapes. This Tetris even has blocks that come out in pairs or even four small blocks at a time, but it’s really difficult to “separate them” like in games such as Hatris or Tetris 2. I wanted to break apart the single-blocks and slide them into the gaps, and I don’t think I pulled that off even once.
The closest 3D-Tetris comes to being “fun.”
Now, 3D-Tetris isn’t a total flop thanks to the “puzzle mode” which is the closest any Tetris game has come to mimicking the Tetromino Box-style puzzle that was Alexey Pajitnov’s direct inspiration for Tetris. The game presents you with a 3D shape and X amount of blocks to create that shape. There’s no easing players into it, either. It was a true brain-bender right from the start. Ironically for a game that was basically limited to one player shoving their face into an eyeball air-fryer, this was a game that I enjoyed playing with my family. We worked together to solve a few of the puzzles before everyone started complaining that the game was hurting their eyes. Jeez, if Virtual Boy games on a television cause eye strain, just imagine what it did to people who stuck the monitor next to their face. What were they thinking? I don’t think 3-D Tetris is worth playing in the 2020s, but there’s probably legs for the puzzle mode to be expanded upon. With colors besides red, hopefully. Verdict: NO!
I’M NOT DONE YET!
PART TWO WILL INCLUDE THESE GAMES!
Puzzle & Action: Tant-R (Arcade, 1993)
Yoshi’s Cookie (SNES, 1992)
Pac-Attack (SNES, 1993)
BreakThru! (SNES, 1994)
Puzzle & Action: Ichidant-R (Arcade, 1994)
Taisen Puzzle-dama (Arcade, 1994)
Wario’s Woods (SNES, 1994)
Super Bomberman: Panic Bomber W (Super Famicom, 1995)
Panic Bomber (Virtual Boy, 1995)
Magical Drop (Super Famicom, 1995)
Tetris Attack (SNES, 1995)
Puzzle & Action: Treasure Hunt (Arcade, 1995)
Tecmo Stackers (PlayStation, 1995)
Baku Baku (Game Gear, 1996)
Tetris Plus (PlayStation, 1996)
Bust-a-Move 2: Arcade Edition (PlayStation, 1996)
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (PlayStation, 1996)
Tetris Plus 2 (Arcade, 1997)
Columns ’97 (Arcade, 1997)
Money Puzzle Exchanger (Arcade, 1997)
Tetrisphere (Nintendo 64, 1997)
Puyo Puyo Sun (Nintendo 64, 1997)
Star Sweep (PlayStation, 1997)
Tetris: The Grand Master (Arcade, 1998)
Wrecking Crew ’98 (Super Famicom, 1998)
Kirby’s Super Star Stacker (Super Famicom, 1998)
Wetrix (Nintendo 64, 1998)
Tetris DX (Game Boy Color, 1998)
Magical Tetris Challenge (Nintendo 64, 1998)
Gunpey (Wonderswan, 1999)
The New Tetris (Nintendo 64, 1999)
The Next Tetris (PlayStation, 1999)
Tetris: The Grand Master 2 – The Absolute PLUS (Arcade, 2000)
Our Pinball FX and Pinball M reviews took a lot of playtime and revisions. If you enjoy what you read, or even if you hate it, please consider making a donation to your local food bank. For my American readers, you can find your closest one by using the search tool at Feeding America. A cash donation to your local food bank buys exponentially more food than donating canned goods. I also support Direct Relief, and in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, they could use some help. They have a page up just to explain their hurricane response. They’re worth it. Thank you, and enjoy the review. Or hate it.
PLEASE NOTE THAT NINTENDO SWITCH’S VERSION OF PINBALL M ISN’T SPECIFICALLY INCLUDED IN THIS FEATURE YET. WE WILL UPDATE BEFORE 2024 IS UP WITH ANY IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT PINBALL M ON NINTENDO SWITCH. THIS FEATURE WILL BE UPDATED AS MORE MEMBERS OF MY TEAM SUBMIT THEIR RATINGS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE AND ENJOY THIS FULL REVIEW GUIDE TO PINBALL M!
LAST UPDATED – November 5, 2024
Camp Bloodbrook’s review is up!
Jordi’s rating for The Thing and Camp Bloodbrook are in.
A NEW GOLDEN AGE
For all the bitching and whining I’m about to do, we’re sort of in a new golden age of pinball. Pinball tables are probably second only to pool tables in terms of the most desirable high-end furniture-like gaming devices for family rec rooms or man caves. The problem is real pinball tables cost a LOT of money. Thousands and thousands of dollars for a noisy, heavy gaming device that plays one game, and one game only, forever. And that’s before you get to the hidden costs of owning a pinball table. They require maintenance. Waxing. Replacement of the rubber rings. And if something breaks down and you don’t know how to fix it yourself, it could cost quite a lot. They wear out too, and if something happens and the playfield is damaged, you either have to live with the damage or replace it entirely. That’s what our very own Dash had to do with his Swords of Fury table. He picked it up for $3,500, then needed to put an additional $1,500 to restore it. Pinball is a very expensive hobby.
Average cost of repairs for an old table, give or take.
With digital pinball, anyone can afford the fun of pinball without the cost or hassle. You can spend $7,000 to $12,000 to score a mint condition real life Addams Family table, or you can buy the digital version in Pinball FX for $9.99 that has the same playfield, same targets, same call-outs, and same ROM, and the physics are 85% to 90% there, and hopefully climbing (no Christopher Lloyd though, much like Pinball Arcade). To put this in perspective, a rubber ring replacement kit for a real life Addams Family will cost you over three times the cost of Addams Family on Pinball FX by itself. So, how much is that final 10% to 15% difference in realism worth to you? And I’ll sweeten the deal for you. In Pinball FX3, you could only play with true-to-life table dimensions on PC or Nintendo Switch. With Pinball FX and Pinball M, no matter what platform you’re on, vertical screen options are available and so easy to set up. So your $9.99 game of Addams Family goes from looking like this:
To looking like this:
Those screenshots both come from the same copy of Pinball FX on an Xbox Series X. Wow! As of this writing, there’s over 135 tables in Pinball FX and Pinball M, and while we rate five of Pinball FX’s tables OUT OF ORDER (none for Pinball M), every table can be played vertically. You can absolutely feel the difference, especially in shooting accuracy and timing. You don’t need an expensive digital table to do this, either. Just turn any TV or Computer monitor on its side and use any game controller. It works with Steam, Epic, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch and every table can feel like you’re viewing a real pinball table. And, if you want the full DIY digital table with arcade flipper buttons, Pinball FX and Pinball M are excellent starting points. There’s a LOT of problems with Pinball FX and Pinball M, but the addition of universal vertical access overrides all of them and makes Zen’s output our favorite digital pinball experience. I’ll talk more about the problems with Zen’s adaptations of real life tables in the Pinball FX review, but all you need to know is by turning your monitor on its side, this:
Becomes this:
And you don’t have to spend a penny more to do it. Very cool.
WHY PINBALL M?
Zen Studios wanted blood, guts, and swearing in pinball. I mean, those things are already part of pinball when I play.. one way or another. But, adding those things to Pinball FX not only bumps that to an M rating, which I’m guessing almost certainly violates contracts they have with Disney regarding the Marvel/Star Wars licenses, but it would outright prevent release in some countries due to censorship laws. You’ll note that many of Pinball FX3/Pinball FX’s Williams pins have had superficial alterations to the artwork to remove anything risque. If I have to choose between them making changes so minuscule that neither Dad nor Angela could spot changes without being told what they were or not having the Star Wars/Marvel pins, I’ll take the Star Wars/Marvel pins and the “censored” artwork every time. But, making new pins that would potentially breach existing contracts they have AND cut off their ability to sell family-safe tables in some markets wasn’t an option until now. Zen’s solution is an entirely different pinball platform. The advertising and table selection suggests that this is really a horror-themed pinball program. As of this writing, 6 of the 8 available tables are themed around horror, with only Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball and System Shock representing traditional M-rated games (and System Shock is pretty much horror too).
Is this necessary? Probably not, and weirdly enough, it’s Zen that proved that. A sanitized version of Pinball M’s best table, System Shock, is also on Pinball FX and plays identically. Wrath of the Elder Gods is also on both platforms, but.. well, one works and one doesn’t. We’ll get to that. But really, it’s just tables with cussing, boozing, and red paint smeared all around. In the case of a table like The Thing, it isn’t even all that gory and wouldn’t have taken that much modifying to earn a T rating or even E rating on Pinball FX. Just change the B-O-O-Z-E name to T-H-I-N-G, remove the red, beep the cussing, and it’s the same table. Even the Duke Nukem table isn’t that risque. We’re comfortable letting my 9 year old niece Sasha, heir apparent to this very blog, play everything on Pinball M so far. There’s nothing that isn’t too intense for a child to play while supervised by a grown-up. It’s pinball, for god’s sake. So, what other differences make Pinball M worth the download?
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SPRUCE-UP YOUR COLLECTION
As you play and make progress, you earn in-game currency that can be used to buy custom upgrades to tables that have no effect on gameplay. You can change some of the sound effects, the look of the ball, the appearance of the motion trail that follows the ball, the room lighting, and the look of the cabinet housing the table (which only matters in the menu). I was slowly making progress on these until I posted a seventeen-trillion point game of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which gave me enough currency to buy everything (and level up my profile to the max level of 120) with 1,015 currency points to spare for Camp Bloodbrook later this month. If you’re into customizing pins, you’ll dig this a lot more than me. The only knock I have is that there’s no option to randomize the balls or sound effects. That would be nice.
There’s also power-ups for the arcade and campaign modes that, in a return to how they worked in Pinball FX3, require leveling-up. That means grinding. My family and I agree that we prefer Pinball FX’s way of doing it, where power-ups have a fixed value that doesn’t slowly upgrade as you accomplish menial tasks in the tables. It means we can compete on a fully level playfield right out of the hypothetical box without having to spend what could take over an hour to build up the boosts we want to use. This is one of those things that feels like it’s done to boost “engagement” without thinking of the ramifications that 99.999% of all owners will never bother and some might feel the work required isn’t worth the time or effort and give up on Pinball M altogether. The customization stuff is a good idea, but leveling-up boosts is forcing players to do busy work in order to be competitive on some leaderboards.
Five new challenges, three of which are fine, one of which is silly, and one of which is dumb.
NEW CHALLENGES/FEATURES
In addition to the usual rigmarole of 200 flip challenges or five minute challenges, Pinball M adds a whopping five new challenges to compete on. In Dread, you have one minute to score a benchmark of points. Reaching the benchmark adds a minute to the time and sets a new benchmark. This goes on until you run out of time. This is one of the good ones. So is Rescue, which is a race to see how fast you can reach a lone benchmark. Times, not scores, are posted to the leaderboard. The same goes for Survival, but that’s the worst of the five challenges, easily. In it, you have so much time to start building up your score before you start “bleeding points.” IE your score begins trickling away at an increasingly faster rate. Eventually, you’re bleeding points by the millions and games end in seconds. It’s just not fun. Madness has more going for it. It’s a unique multiball challenge that utilizes whatever the table’s max is, but it’s NOT a quick pass to the wizard mode. Instead, the more lights you shoot, the faster the values of jackpots increase. This is insane, chaotic, and everyone’s favorite new challenge. Yes, even me. And then there’s Shiver, which is “pinball in the dark. Practically blind!” Here’s what it looks like:
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Pretty lame, Millhouse. Now, your mileage may vary depending on how bright your settings are, but since the table’s lights still work, come on, you’re not going to miss much. But hey, three-for-five ain’t bad. The challenges are also part of the new campaign mode. The campaign missions are mostly easy (some can be finished in literally under one second), and they’re not that hard to complete. In fact, we’ve only missed getting one completed on the high level. It’s a Survival challenge for Texas Chainsaw Massacre that requires you to stay alive for four minutes. By time you reach 3:30 – 3:50, you’re bleeding MILLIONS of points every second. I shot the lights out one game and still came four seconds short. Dad and Sasha both put up similar numbers when THEY shot the lights out. Under 20 people in the world have cleared this, according to the leaderboard. We will. We just have to wait for Angela. Anyway, it’s all about the tables.
TABLE REVIEWS
Our system is simple. MASTERPIECE– Our best score. 5 out of 5. GREAT– Better than GOOD, not quite a MASTERPIECE. GOOD– Even though this is the lowest passing grade, it’s still a passing grade. BAD– A table that particular rater thought wasn’t deserving of an overall positive rating. THE PITS – The reviewer felt the table has little to no redeeming qualities.
I then average the scores, and if the average is 3.6 to 4.5, the table is awarded a Certificate of Excellence. My team has agreed a Certificate of Excellencewinner is worth the price of a $14.99 set by itself. If it’s a stand alone table that costs $14.99, get it, because it’s a very, VERY fun table. A table that scores higher than 4.5 enters the Pantheon of Digital Pinball. These are the cream of the crop. The elite. Very few tables make it in. As of this writing, Zen has only made four non-Williams tables that entered the Pantheon. They are Star Wars: Battle of Mimban, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Epic Quest, and Fear Itself, with Mimban being our near-unanimous choice for Zen’s best table ever. Their versions of Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, Getaway: High Speed II and the Pinball FX3 build of Monster Bash are also Pantheon Inductees. But, one more Zen creation might enter the Pantheon today, hint hint. A table that receives all positive scores but isn’t good enough to be certified excellent is still awarded a Clean Scorecard, which is pretty hard to get. A Clean Scorecard means we think it’s a safe bet the average player will enjoy the table more than dislike it. And finally, a table that scores an average of under 1.5 is declared a Certified Turd, but as of this writing, no Pinball M table is even that close to it.
Camp Bloodbrook Coming October 24, 2024 Designed by Daniel “Dolby” Vigh Stand Alone Release ($4.99)
They should have armed the killer with a nail file because this sucker can file off serial numbers like no other.
I assume that Zen Studios started preliminary work on a Friday the 13th table only to find out they weren’t getting the license. Instead of repurposing it, Police Force style, they just made a generic masked slasher table set at a lake. I’m all for it, and my only question is why didn’t you do that with Jaws? Without the music, hell, it could be ANY shark attack table, right? Anyway, Bloodbrook is Dolby Vigh’s best table yet and one of Pinball M’s best tables. While we currently consider the Pinball FX build to be so busted that we classify it OUT OF ORDER, the Pinball M version works great. The difference is in the mode start locker.
Signature Shot – Mode Start Locker: In Pinball FX, in “realistic physics” mode, this locker will drop the ball straight down the middle, right between the flippers, with alarming consistency. That doesn’t happen in Pinball M. In fact, this is a good shot in Pinball M.
Ignore the name. This IS the Friday the 13th table everyone has expected since Pinball M was announced, and it does a much better job with theme integration than anything in the Death Save Bundle. In fact, as far as horror goes, only Texas Chainsaw Massacre is better at matching a pinball layout to movie theme. The use of two dead end lanes on a single table, one for starting modes and one themed as a lake (it’s so small it looks more like a kiddie pool) adds to a sense of claustrophobia, but in a good way. This layout slaps, as the kids say. A multitude of good to great shots, but the fun stops there. Camp Bloodbrook speaks volumes about how far you can get simply by having a mistake-free layout. Pretty dang far. As if it’s channeling the spirit of 90s Gottlieb, it’s the ROM and the scoring system that nearly takes a machete to Camp Bloodbrook.
Signature Shot – The Lake: I get that the lake shot has to be round for the canoe spinner to work, but how many lakes are perfectly round? Immersion BROKEN. I kid. Actually, it IS satisfying to spin the canoe, though like so many aspects of Camp Bloodbrook, it’s underutilized. It’s just a glorified ball lock that doubles as a lane shot for the various modes. If you’re going to have water on a table, you need a satisfying splash down, or what’s the point? Zen has done it well before, or at least I think so. I personally find Pacific Rim’s splash down satisfying, something my family vehemently disagrees about. We’re all in agreement that Camp Bloodbrook’s water is missing something. Having Not-Jason snatch the ball would be nice for a third ball lock, but I don’t think it works for the first and second. It would be neat if each of the three ball locks did something different. Also, the release for Lake Multiball is lame too, but the actual shot itself is nice. One of the few Zen Studios shots where a backhand is consistently effective.
Bloodbrook’s modes are pretty average and underwhelming overall. This table reminded me a LOT of Chucky’s Killer Pinball. It’s so close that, if it were a cookie, it feels like it was made out of the same batter. It even has the mode where the antagonist walks onto the table and you have to shoot lanes without accidentally shooting him, only it’s a poorer version of it. Unlike Chucky, “the killer” of Camp Bloodbrook takes quite a while to lumber into place before the shot becomes lit. It’s annoying. This happens in the wizard mode too, where the instructions specifically tell you the object is to shoot him, but he’s not, for lack of a better term “lit”, until he waddles to his designated spot. There’s four main modes, one of which is shooting the bad guy, followed by a final mode where you once again shoot the bad guy, followed by a wizard multiball. The modes are NOT balanced, so they probably should have been forced to be played in sequential order. In fact, the fourth mode, Escape Plan, pays off so much and has so many lit shots (where even the false lights are worth a million points) that all four Vices play it first.
Signature Targets – STORM! Targets: Angela said the placement of the live multiplier targets and the ease of use makes these shots “like rewarding bricks.” It’s absolutely true that you can light these mostly via missing the actual lanes themselves. BUT, I like that for a reason. Sometimes I’ll find myself at the end of a mode and I’ll notice that I’m only one or two of the S-T-O-R-M-! targets away from activating the 3x scoring multiplier. It becomes mighty tempting to try and activate the multiplier before completing the mode for a windfall of points. Dolby’s Thing table has a similar set-up, but the table doesn’t blow wind that messes with the ball in Camp Bloodbrook. Also, it’s much easier to activate this multiplier because the lights don’t turn off if you shoot them a second time. We were split on if this was a good choice, or if it’s TOO powerful. Oscar really thinks x3 was too much and a progressive that starts at 1.1 to 1.5 and grows with each new STORM! activated would have been preferable. I agree that x3 throws the balance off too much, especially since the modes themselves aren’t even close to balanced, and would have been fine with it being x2 scoring. But, x3 it is, and I enjoyed the targets more than I disliked them.
The live multiplier is pretty much it for high scoring. There’s no progressive scoring for completing the modes, and doing well in the modes doesn’t enhance scoring in the wizard. In Angela’s Xbox world record-setting game (2,311,291,577), she completed multiple full mode cycles, and was scoring the same throughout, and part of the reason why she started playing recklessly (she had earned four extra balls on her third ball), was she just got bored. The shame is, this is probably the least difficult of any of Dolby’s pins too, but without dynamic scoring mechanics, it gets old. Even x3 scoring gets boring if the modes pay off the same whether you’re on your first cycle or seventh. The only progressive-scoring mode seems to be Lake Multiball. And that mode only consists of two shots: the lake and the ramp directly left of the lake. They probably kept the overall scoring low and non-progressive because the STORM! x3 buff isn’t very hard to trigger. By the way, for all my complaints, we all REALLY liked Camp Bloodbrook. While I didn’t love the rule sheet, there’s no grinding and it doesn’t fundamentally feel like it takes forever to do anything. All the side-modes go super fast. The pace works, if not the scoring itself. I might not consider Bloodbrook to be Dolby’s best, but by scoring average, it easily is. Cathy: GREAT (4 out of 5) Angela: GREAT Oscar: GREAT Sasha: GREAT Jordi: MASTERPIECE (5 out of 5) Scoring Average: 4.2 – CERTIFIED EXCELLENT
Chucky’s Killer Pinball Released November 30, 2023 Designed by Zoltan Vari Set: Death Save Bundle ($19.99)
Links: Pinball FX Wiki
Kickback – Jordi: As Chucky says: “If they don’t let us play, they all go away.” This table doesn’t let me play. The skill shot makes no sense since it’s undervalued and overly risky, but it’s only the first of many killer issues on this table, and I don’t mean that in the “killer, dude! Radical!” way. The central Voodoo targets are designed to return the ball straight down the middle, and the right orbit is absolutely lethal if the ball doesn’t make it all the way up there. So many balls go just over the right flipper and down the drain, and with how unreliable nudging is with the new engines (shared by both Pinball FX and Pinball M) defense is nearly impossible. I really wanted to like this table. When a mode works well, it is not a grind unlike in most of Zen’s new tables, the theming is spot on, and there are so many references here that just work. Sadly, Chucky is let down by a table that refuses to let me play even a single session without stealing a ball or two. “Are we having fun now?” No.
Despite the blood, swearing, and innuendos, Chucky’s Killer Pinball feels like it could have been an ideal trainer table. Chucky is a smooth shooter with multiple satisfying shots, the greatest of which SHOULD have been a humped ramp themed like a roller coaster that’s always a thrill to complete. The problem is it doesn’t always complete, and there’s no rhyme or reason why sometimes it doesn’t make it over the second hump or not. Since it’s the finale of the Tiffany mode, and completing the full circuit is the first jackpot in multiball, it’s kind of important that you can’t count on a shot working every time. The weird thing is, we weren’t 100% sure whether or not the point was to create a ramp circuit that could only be completed off a batted shot or not. If it was deliberate, it’s a very bad idea. If the intent was that the ball should finish the circuit every time, it’s just a run of a mill fail. What a shame. That should have been a historically awesome shot. To make up for it, the sequence shot used to lock balls is one of Zen’s finest ideas. You have to shoot the left side’s locker, which triggers a razor blade flipper that then bats the ball up into the lock. SO satisfying to hit, except it goes back to that circuit that doesn’t always complete. PLEASE fix that, Zen. It needs it!
Signature Mode – Marble Prank: I don’t know what to make of this multiball mode. The concept is unique: after so many bangs of the bumpers, a jar full of marbles rises onto the playfield near the Voodoo targets. When you break the jar, it releases five glass marbles onto the playfield that behave like faster mini-balls. If you can hit the marbles hard enough with the pinball, it breaks them for a million points each plus a million for each marble broken so far. The other extermination method is to use the razor flipper to fling them at the multiball lock, which is 10M + 10M instead. It sounds great, but the problem is the jar hangs directly over the drain, and it’s not rare for several of the marbles to immediately drain. While the pinball has ball save the entire time the mode is going, the marbles don’t. A neat mode but not worth the effort, really.
Originally, the Vices all had Chucky’s Killer Pinball rated at GREAT, but the more we played it, the less we liked it. While the roller coaster not working every time is what sealed Chucky’s fate, all it really did was make all the little annoyances stand out that much more. Like the VOO-DOO targets resetting if you accidentally start another mode. I already hated them anyway. Vari-targets are my least favorite type of pinball shot, and this has not one, not two, but THREE that act as the mode start and hang right over the drain. Yes, there’s a ball save that protects you, but only if you push one in all the way. There’s repetitive callouts galore (we adore Brad Dourif and Jennifer Tilly, but even they become annoying after saying the same stuff over and over) or blood splatter blocks your view during the Marble Prank. Most of all, Chucky’s Killer Pinball features scoring so imbalanced that it assured Oscar cement his rating to GOOD even if they fix the coaster. Jordi was right about the skillshot leaving a lot to be desired. Going off his body of work, I suspect Zoltan Vari isn’t a big fan of skillshots in general. Chucky’s is a difficult to clock, super high-risk skillshot, and when we actually got it, we were stunned by how little value it is for the challenge and risk it involves. It certainly tracks with the rest of the table’s poor factoring-in of risk and reward. Dad ain’t wrong about that.
Signature Mode – Olly Olly Oxen Free: Of the three main modes, this is the worst, easily. In it, Chucky jumps onto the playfield and you have to avoid hitting him. A single hit ends the mode. This is potentially problematic because the game doesn’t just give you the ball to start. It kind of sideswipes it towards players, so that it reaches the flippers as chaotically as possible. Because, say it with me, “Zen Studios’ designers are hostile towards ball control.” Well, sometimes the ball might hit the slingshots and violently fling around the table until the ball pops up and hits Chucky, ending the mode before you even get your first shot. Yea, getting hit by the slingshots counts as “shooting him.” To the game’s credit, this is extremely rare, but it’s a completely unnecessary thing to happen in the first place. Just give players the ball! I’d say half the time the ball ends up in the drain before your first shot, though it doesn’t instantly kill-off the ball save. I have a feeling they realized how badly some aspects of Chucky handle and used ball save as a band aid instead of a feature. System Shock is like that too.
Other than the mode in the caption above, Chucky’s modes are pretty well done. No grinding. They make use of the full table. If there’s a downside, it’s that each of the three main modes is a “tour the table” type of mode, only done slightly differently. “Chucky Says” is just “hit the lit shot” and nothing more. It’s not timed differently. It doesn’t play differently. It’s too simple. I would have preferred the modes play out sequentially like Getaway: High Speed II, but I’m not going to complain too much about a table that does what we want: have fun, non-grindy modes. And the wizard mode is a ton of fun. Spoiler: you hack Chucky up bit by bit, and it’s awesome. Chucky’s table is really well done in many aspects, so we REALLY want to give this table higher scores. But, until the coaster’s fix is in, we really can’t. If it was intentional, GOODis Chucky’s ceiling (unless you’re Angela. She LOVES that it’s hard to complete the circuit. She insists it makes it more exciting). Also, yea, I’m pretty peeved that this is one of the few tables I put a MAJOR marathon into with a world record pace only to have the game glitch out and start taking away points from me instead of adding them. I wouldn’t have reconsidered my score, but my GOOD would be a very enthusiastic one. Even though this wasn’t our highest-rated pin, we want to make it clear: the lack of grinding and quick modes are a very positive thing. More of THAT please, Zen! The best thing I can say about Chucky’s Killer Pinball is it feels like the prototype that gave us System Shock. Worth it! Cathy: GOOD Angela: GREAT Oscar: GOOD Jordi: BAD Dash: GOOD
Sasha: GOOD
Elias: BAD* (Nintendo Switch) Overall Scoring Average: 3.0 – GOOD
*Nintendo Switch Scores not factored into average. This will be updated at a later time.
Dead by Daylight Released November 30, 2023 Designed by Gergely “Gary” Vadocz Set: Death Save Bundle ($19.99)
Is it ironic that this is a pinball table licensed on one of the most license-heavy video games ever made?
Dull by Daylight, according to Angela and Oscar, is the worst Pinball M table so far. Hell, it’s the only table among the original five launch tables that doesn’t have its own Pinball FX Wiki page as of this writing. It’s second-to-last for me. A slog of a pin in desperate need of some spit shine. On literally our first shot ever taken on this table, Angela valleyed the skillshot, and no amount of nudging could free it. Even after patchwork, in the final sweep of tables before we published this feature, we valleyed balls on the tall ramp, and the only difference seemed to be a gentle nudge dislodges the ball now. While it might not break the table, it speaks volumes to how unpolished this one is. Plus it has some of the most frustrating rails and outlanes around. Even when the ball seems like it doesn’t have the energy to carry on, it still manages to crawl across the rails and slither down the outlane. This on a pin where nudging feels especially ineffective. But, none of that matters, because Dead by Daylight has a much, much bigger problem: it’s just a boring table. One of those instances where the shot selection is less than the sum of its parts.
CORRECTION: In the original review, I said the patched table valleyed the skillshot. That was wrong. Originally, we were valleying (coined by Oscar from a term borrowed from roller coaster lingo meaning “gets stuck midway through the circuit” that we’re trying to add to the pinball lexicon) on the skill shot, but that doesn’t happen anymore. Instead, the valleys happen at the top of the tall ramp. Sorry for the mix-up.
Signature Feature – Survivor/Killer Loadouts: Dead by Daylight is one of those tables where you choose a buff before the game starts, just like the video game it’s based on. Survivor mode has four, while Killer has three. Oscar is a big fan of the concept of loadout buffs, provided they’re balanced enough that there’s not one logical choice. The loadouts you can choose for every Pinball M’s arcade mode (IE enhanced multiball, bumpers, ball save, etc.) have this problem. According to Dad’s theory, if you had a 100 different buffs and 98 were weak and only two were beneficial but equally balanced, it’d still be worth it because it means players have a legitimate choice with pros and cons that can be tailored to the player. On the flip side, if you have seven choices, six of which are equally balanced with each-other while one stands out as the no-brainer choice for all players of all skill sets, it wrecks the whole concept. With that in mind, myself, Oscar, and Sasha decided to play a bunch of games with every load out, and all three of us consistently had our best standard games (Classic/Arcade) using KILLER – EASY SACRIFICE as our buff. I should note the one exception to this was I put up the #6 all-time arcade score with SURVIVOR- EASY SKILL CHECKS. This feels like a one-off fluke as my other games were all on the lower side with it. The other exception is the special challenges, where putting up points fast matters, in which case we all scored higher using SURVIVOR – FAST GENERATORS.
Dead by Daylight’s biggest problem is there’s just no good shots on the table and no sense of flow. Maybe that makes sense since the shots mostly represent distance closed in a cat and mouse chase regardless of which side you pick. This is what we call a “pick ‘n flick” because, despite the heavy use of hurry-ups, this is a game where you’ll want to trap the ball and aim carefully, because accuracy and not volume of shots will win the day. But, a pick ‘n flick table absolutely needs thrilling shots to succeed, and that’s not here. The closest it comes is smacking crates to increase your distance if you’re playing as a survivor, while the killer has a giant bear trap that you want to shoot before you start shooting orbits, since it leads to a faster capture. But even the bear trap is a massive let down. It’d be more fun to build a two ball multiball around it where it captures the first ball and then you have to smack it several times to open it back up. Oddly enough, the limited shot selection would make for a better multiball table if not for the aforementioned outlanes and rails. Oh and you have to shoot very bland drop targets that appear in the center of the table to score a capture.
Signature Mode- Survivors: It seems fairly unanimous in my house that playing as the Survivors instead of the Killer turns Dead by Daylight into a more well-rounded pinball game. There’s five generators that require a full table tour. They are (1) the spinner (2) flashing lanes (3) the marked sinkhole (4) the flashing lanes, again (5) the bumpers. What becomes annoying is the video mode “Skill Check” pauses a live ball. The video mode itself is quick. You just have to stop a meter in time, with a zone close to the edge scoring more points. But, the mode can interrupt play, and it’s even happened to us when the ball is on a flipper. When this happens, it can screw with your timing when the mode ends and play resumes. We’re honestly not sure if this was a deliberate choice or something that needs to be patched out, but assuming it’s a bug, it wouldn’t change any of our ratings.
The center loop that acts as the skillshot, the multiplier increase, and sometimes the key shot for modes is just too clunky to be satisfying. We split on whether the tall ramp in the center was too rejection-heavy or not. Actually, the argument was more about whether the rejections were based in reality or if it was just Unreal Engine living up to its name and throwing back shots that had the angle and velocity to complete the ramp. Unlike some faulty ramps in Pinball M or Pinball FX (the teardrop from Texas Chainsaw for example), I didn’t feel it was clear one way or another. I’m open to the possibility that the design is inherently flawed. Either way, this became one of Angela’s least favorite pins and she can’t believe we don’t consider Dead by Daylight to be Han Solo/Safe Cracker levels of bad.
Signature Shot – Bear Trap: Talk about a letdown. When we saw the bear trap for the first time, we were imagining the possibilities of how this could be used as a sick M-rated ball lock. Nope. You just clank it a few times until it opens, then you shoot lanes before it closes. That’s it. It’s not a ball catch. It’s not a decorated cellar. It’s a bland digital target, and nothing more.
The lack of targets and poor flow from shot to shot means that Dead by Daylight was fated to grow old quickly. Our suspicion is the limited shot selection was done to make the differences between Killer and Survivor more pronounced, and to Gary’s credit, the two modes do feel different enough, but Killer offers a lot less flexibility since it makes logical sense to arm the bear trap before shooting any other target. Individual strategy for that side of the equation begins and ends with what loadout you want. We spent the better part of two days playing this and trying to find the fun. Sasha liked it, as she felt the chase aspect worked well regardless of what side you choose, plus she liked the shot selection more than we did. The rest of us were just really bored. Dead by Daylight probably does an admirable job of feeling like the video game, but as a pinball table, it was dead on arrival. Cathy: BAD Angela: THE PITS Oscar: BAD
Jordi: BAD
Sasha: GOOD Elias: GOOD* (Nintendo Switch) Scoring Average: 2.0 – BAD
*Nintendo Switch Scores not factored into average. This will be updated at a later time.
Angela has dubbed this “Duke of Whirl” because of the merry-go-round. She’s a fan of rotating targets in general and thinks it’s one of the most underused concepts by Zen Studios. I pointed out that it wouldn’t be a big deal if it showed up regularly as a featured target. She said “why would the best type of target stop being fun?” We dueled to settle who was right. She won 4 to 0. She always wins.
Duke was a sort of breaking point for me, where I’d had all I could stand and I could stands no more. Zen has a tendency to go overboard with shot requirements, and they finally crossed the line of reason with Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball. It’s as if someone at Zen is saying “why have a mode require five shots when it could instead require ten? Or hell, why not twenty?” And the answer is “because you also want to have hyperactive slingshots that are aimed right at the outlane and it’s not reasonable to expect someone to keep the ball alive during this.” I think Duke Nukem is a terrible table. Serial killer slingshots with hair triggers aimed right at the outlanes combined with modes that need their shot requirement clipped by 80% at least. A typical game consists of the ball hitting the slingshot and going into the outlane about six times, or possibly ricocheting off one of the many cardboard targets, skipping across the rails and going down the outlane. It’s all defense, all the time and it’s SO exhausting and boring. Every mode is that way.
Signature Mode – Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum: In this video mode, you have to alternate between four channels and press the launch button three times when a target pops up. Do this twenty times. It’s not exactly a first person shooter, and the novelty of it looking like Duke Nukem 3D wears off pretty quickly. There’s no tension at all. Even when we’ve played it poorly, we’ve never fallen under 60% health. I imagine if someone had a stroke while they were playing this, or if they were attacked by swarms of murder hornets in the middle of a game, they might lose it. Maybe. Some of Zen’s video modes aren’t so bad. This thing is such an unfathomable slog to get through, and it has nothing at all to do with pinball. You know, that thing we’re here to play. I wouldn’t mind this if it lasted only a few seconds and involved shooting one enemy and maybe avoiding its fire, but it’s nothing like that. It’s just a shooting gallery with a generous amount of wiggle room.
By reputation, Duke Nukem is one of the hardest tables Zen has ever made. I have no problem with a hard table if it’s fun, but Duke Nukem also requires a massive grind to accomplish anything. Want to get an extra ball? Hit the NEST targets 100 times, which can only be shot off a toe shot right next to the drain and in which case the ball is likely to go off a slingshot and die, or get into the secret room ten times. How do you get into the secret room? Well, first you need a pipe bomb. How do you get a pipe bomb? You have to complete one of the three side modes. Oh, side modes? That sounds quick. What do you do? Well, for “I’m The Cure” you have to score 6 sinkholes in the merry go around, which has six slots, half of which don’t feed the sinkhole. You then enter an “alien nest” where you have to get 60 spins of the spinner. Then you get the pipe bomb? No, 60 spins spawns four more targets which raise up and down. THEN do you get the pipe bomb? Well, maybe. It’s a random award. Could be the pipe bomb. Could be something else. Doesn’t that sound like boring ass busy work? Uh, yea? And if you want that extra ball from the secret room, you only have to get lucky with the random award for all that work ten times over. You won’t be able to. See, the designer thought it would be hilarious if he aimed the slingshots at the outlanes and gave them a hair trigger. And also have the ball return sometimes come in from the side at a sharp, sideswiping angle that could go down the outlane or onto the slingshots which can also send the ball into the outlane. Having fun for your $19.99 for the Death Save Bundle yet?
Signature Shots – Cardboard Targets: The soldiers in front of the boss targets take multiple shots to kill, then the boss takes a ton of shots to kill. Hypothetical future bosses past the first one are even spongier AND and they have more minions in front of them AND those minions require more shots. Let’s pretend that Duke Nukem doesn’t have extremely lethal slingshots and kickbacks that require five shots each to light. Let’s pretend that you have a ball save lit the entire fight and instead the only factor during the boss fights is your health. That’s a thing that exists on this table, by the way, but don’t worry because you’ll die long before your health runs out anyway. But, pretend that health was the only factor and not the drain or outlanes. Wouldn’t shooting these static cardboard targets get boring anyway? It’s not like it’s two or three hits on each. The bosses can take as many as 18 shots to kill, and that’s after you get through the spongy minions in front of them. No shot on a boss counts until the minions are clear. Didn’t anyone stop and say “wait.. is this fun?” Because it’s not! It’s such a mindless chore that it’s practically a holistic lobotomy.
I’m sure that someone has gotten in the ear of Zen’s design team lineup and told them “making tables harder is good! Making it take as many shots as possible to get anything going is good! It increases engagement!” It actually doesn’t. At all. It just makes your table boring, so that people who aren’t in the pinball bubble like me, my family, and my friends won’t want to spend their time with it. So, how’s Duke Nukem’s ruthless difficulty working out for it? Well, a few minutes ago, I had a game of Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball where I beat the first boss. So basically I finished a single mode. I completed zero side modes and made only one skill shot. That game, where I barely accomplished anything, is the 17th highest score on the Duke Nukem arcade mode leaderboard right now. Not for the week. It’s #1 for the week. It’s #17 all-time. One boss alone got me a top 20 all-time score. That’s engagement? Because to me, that sounds like Duke Nukem is a barren wasteland of non-engagement. BAD was too generous for a table that I’ve honestly never had even a tiny bit of fun on. I can’t rate a table based on the fun I could have had if its designer hadn’t made it such a slog to make anything happen. I can only rate the table as it exists, and I think Duke Nukem is currently the worst Pinball M table. I stand alone in my group on that opinion, but hey, I’m used to it. Just wait until you see the Knight Rider review. Cathy: THE PITS Angela: GOOD Oscar: GREAT Jordi: GOOD Dash: GREAT Sasha: GOOD Elias: GOOD* (Nintendo Switch) Scoring Average: 3.0 – GOOD *Nintendo Switch Scores not factored into average. This will be updated at a later time.
System Shock First Released February 15, 2024 Designed by Zoltan Vari Stand Alone Release ($5.49)
Links: Pinball FX Wiki
If the mark of a truly magnificent licensed pinball table is one that makes non-fans of the featured property interested in finding out more about it, System Shock must be one of the very best digital pins ever. My father, now in his mid 70s, purchased the recent remake based on his experience playing Zen’s tribute to it. Fans will appreciate that they nailed the creepy menace of SHODAN and the sense of isolation, but you absolutely don’t need to be a fan of 1994 PC classic to enjoy the thrilling shots of what is easily Zoltan Vari’s greatest triumph (sorry Fear Itself). While the build we played had that expected launch-window Zen clunkiness, we still couldn’t put down our copies of Pinball FX and Pinball M, playing nearly a full week of duels. Eight months after its release, in October of 2024, we again couldn’t put it down. Few tables from Pinball FX or Pinball M are easily classified as a modern pinball triumph. System Shock is. In fact, there’s only one thing that takes it out of the conversation for best Zen Studios pin ever. So, let’s do a caption and get that out of the way.
Signature Brain Fart – Laser Mode & SHODAN Battle: In the annals of “what were they thinking?” this one is the most peculiar, because it’s so silly that I literally laughed. First off, let’s talk about Laser Mode. It’s one of four checkmarks players must knock out before the final battle with SHODAN. Getting to Laser involves completing the harrowing three-shot journey up the spiral tower (maybe add a fourth shot if you haven’t hit the Serv-Bot yet), at which point you play a brick breaker style video mode. That’s fine. It’s a fun mode. Well, it’s also the wizard mode and the final battle with video game icon SHODAN. The only difference is instead of killing two enemies, you have to hit SHODAN twenty times with the puck before you drop the puck twenty times. Yep, really. That’s the wizard mode. Presumably Zoltan Vari won a bet.
Oof. On a table where every angle, orbit, and ramp is fun to shoot, not having a tour-the-table wizard is almost beyond belief. Zen has a history of bad mini-tables, but given how amazing the layout and the shot selection is for System Shock, it’s a safe bet that ZV was on a roll and he could have pulled off a sick boss fight mini-table for this one. And yea, SHODAN’s value is potentially so high if you hit all nine targets (“collecting items”) on the roto target that it negates the rest of the table. BUT, since the Wizard is easy to get, we’re cool with it. Oddly enough, this might be the most generous Zen table ever. Not only are extra balls plentiful, but so are ball saves. The tower is the obvious center piece, but get this: there’s a target behind the entrance to the tower that activates a magnet that assists in teeing-up the ball for the bat flipper that shoots the tower AND gives you a split-second ball save if you drain within the next second and a half. That feature was hotly debated in the Vice Household regarding whether or not it nerfed the table too much. Oscar was THIS CLOSE to dropping his vote to GREAT. The fact that every Vice ultimately rated System Shock a MASTERPIECE should make it clear it wasn’t a deal breaker even for the challenge-frothing Oscar or Angela.
Signature Shots – The Tower: Actually, every Vice had their own “I almost dropped this from MASTERPIECE” feature. This was mine. Specifically, the second level of the tower. This both doubles as the super jackpot in multiball while also functioning as a crank which rotates the base of the tower. The base features stand-up targets that function as the tools you collect to increase the value of multiball and the final battle with SHODAN. There’s 9 total targets and 3 cellars that are the ball lock. The reason I almost dropped the score from MASTERPIECE is the crank has a tendency to go nuts. In theory, it should only do one quarter rotation when you hit it. But, it frequently goes more than one crank, or sometimes it’ll crank forward and then backwards. When you create experimental targets, things go wrong. It wasn’t a deal breaker by any means, and the more I thought about it, the more I questioned whether I was even frustrated by it. So, while it didn’t factor into my rating, I wouldn’t shed a tear if they fixed it so it was always a quarter-turn of the base. Also, and this is very nit-picky but I wish there was better representation of the nine tools you collect. Better use of lights that tells you which targets you haven’t hit, because you do have to hit all nine specific stand-ups on the roto-target, whereas any of the three sinkholes count towards a ball lock.
System Shock is that rare table where nearly every shot is thrilling. This is further enhanced by the fact that the four “modes” you must complete to open the SHODAN fight require minimum grinding. The one that requires the most work is probably “COMBO” where you have to shoot the front-right ramp several times, which places three unique balls as targets just above the flipper zone. Two are fakes that explode on contact while one is a real “rubber ball” with its own unique physics that must be sunk in the sinkhole above the right flipper. This lights the two front ramps, at which point a single crisscross combo gives you the COMBO light. It’s a lot of work and probably the toughest light to get, but it’s also a light you can get through natural progression instead of grinding. Oddly, after you’ve finished the wizard, you can skip all the steps I listed above except the single crisscross combo to relight it. The second wizard takes a LOT less time to reach. There’s a small but very annoying (not to mention potentially game ruining) glitch attached to it if you’re playing one of the modes that allows you to use the Ball Save buff. If you screw up hitting the real ball before time runs out and you have a maxed-out Ball Save buff, it could take five or more minutes before you get another shot. Another annoyance is sometimes, when shooting the final shot that earns you the “REACTOR” light, the ball begins slowing down as it starts to “complete the shot” only for it to fall back down. In theory, you should be home free once it reaches the point where it slows down since it seems to be something that the game does and not the physics of your hit.
Signature Mode – Cyborg Attack: I have a gut feeling that it didn’t used to be four checkmarks before fighting SHODAN. My hunch tells me it started as five, and this was the fifth. In it, you have to just shoot the same front-left ramp you’ve shot multiple times to activate it. This also happens to be the hardest mode in System Shock. Nothing else is even close. Oscar calls this a Fastest Gun in the West type of mode because you don’t really have time to set-up shots. You have to ready and aim yourself in a split second, because when the cyborg locks onto your ball, it fires a laser at the ball which sends it flying. Try trapping and even if you begin the shot by letting go of the flipper, the Cyborg will hit the ball, which is a big outlane risk at that point, and it also halts all other modes while the attack is going. Cyborg Attack only awards a nominal amount of points. but the real reward for it is it lights valuable magna saves. This is a prime example of well thought out risk/reward. It was wise to have this be separate from the main modes thanks to the difficulty spike, as was attaching a genuinely desirable award to it. You can even earn the right to stack additional magna saves if you complete mode. Fantastic. More of this type of thoughtfulness with side modes, please.
The worst thing most of us accuse System Shock of is being a flawed MASTERPIECE. That still makes it a MASTERPIECEand, statistically speaking, the best table in Pinball M so far. The only other table in Pinball M that has even a MASTERPIECE vote from anyone on my team is Texas Chainsaw Massacre (two of them, in fact). Only System Shock stands tall as a table entering the Pantheon of Digital Pinball. Oscar said that System Shock reminded him of the pace Getaway: High Speed II has, only if the modes were non-linear. He’s not wrong. Not that System Shock shoots as well as Getaway, but what does? I want to stress once more that you certainly don’t have to be a fan of the original game to enjoy this pin. My father had never played System Shock and Angela and Sasha had never even heard of it. If you feel old now, you’re having the right reaction. But, this is exactly the type of licensed table Zen should be doing. Non-punishing. Easy to understand objectives. No grinding. A table even an average player should be able to finish. But also a table with strategic flexibility and options that measure risk and reward. Sure, you can postpone getting multiball until you collect all nine tools, but if you drain, game over. System Shock offers that constantly. It’s Zoltan Vari’s best table and, indeed, the best Pinball M has offered yet. So naturally it’s also on Pinball FX as well. Go figure. Cathy: MASTERPIECE Angela: MASTERPIECE Oscar: MASTERPIECE Jordi: MASTERPIECE Dash: GOOD* Sasha: MASTERPIECE Elias: MASTERPIECE** (Nintendo Switch) Scoring Average: 4.71 🏛️PANTHEON INDUCTEE🏛️ *This feature will be updated as soon as Dash gets time to explain his GOOD rating. He’s been swamped with work stuff. **Nintendo Switch Scores not factored into average. This will be updated at a later time.
John Larroquette’s opening narration from the original movie is here. They got that, so how come they couldn’t get him to do the callouts, too? Just call his cell and ask “hey, can you say MULTIBALL into the phone and maybe MULTIPLIERS INCREASED? What’s this for? We’re doing a pinball table based on Night Court and you’re the only cast member still alive. No, we’re not counting Karen Austin. Hello? Helllllo?”
Texas Chainsaw is currently the #2 ranked Pinball M table, and it’s certainly worth the $5.49 asking price because it’s not possible to get bored with it. The longest single game of pinball I’ve ever played in my entire life was on Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s arcade mode. I gamed the boost level-up system by maxing-out BALL SAVE, then I reached the wizard mode. With the fully-charged ball save boost, I only needed to convert one shot every ninety seconds or so to keep the ball save lit. After a ten hour long wizard mode (including all the breaks I took to ice my hands, and I’m not even kidding), I was the world champion, and then I laid down the next four balls instead of risking Pinball M crashing. There’s not a lot of tables I would play for ten hours straight. It’d be boring, even if I was on a world record pace. That alone speaks volumes to how amazing Chainsaw’s shot selection is. We were rough on newcomer Hezol’s first table, A Samurai Vengeance, but you could see this guy was going to be legit too. Chainsaw proves it.
Persistent Problem – Physics: When ramps in Pinball M or Pinball FX go bad, it’s usually very bad. For example, the teardrop ramp, which is a pretty big shot on this table. It opens a mode and it’s the skillshot. But, the ramp doesn’t work sometimes. I don’t know if it’s too steep or too tight a curve, but we’ve broken it more than once, and thankfully we got a clip of it. Not only did the ball get stuck when it should have had the speed to clear the ramp, but the ball began wiggling. How does a ball wiggle on an incline? It never stopped, either. The clip doesn’t show it but the ball was stuck wiggling at roughly the same speed for quite a while. The wiggle prevented the ball from resetting, and it was jammed so badly that nudging wouldn’t knock it loose. I almost tilted trying to. In fairness, this happened during a silly challenge in the game’s campaign mode. Had this happened during the (former) world record game, I’m not even sure I would have remembered it.
Besides the teardrop ramp, every shot is well-placed and properly satisfying. The highlight is the subtle but sweet chainsaw ramp. It’s one of the shorter ramps in Pinball FX or Pinball M, but it’s also brilliantly angled and works as both a traditional shot and as a toy. The severed head moves along a diagonal track but never feels like it’s angled in a trollish way. The “set ’em up, knock ’em down” modes where you bank points that you then earn via a “massacre” jackpot is an inspired concept, and the only downside is that they don’t pay off enough. Oscar wasn’t a fan of the score imbalance, as he feels the modes were a little more than checklists to get you to the high scoring multiball and wizard modes. When I countered “so does every table, including System Shock” he said fired back with “the shots aren’t as good as System Shock.” They’re really not, but it’s a safe bet that some people will find the shots too conservative and bland. Thankfully there’s minimal grinding and Chainsaw has one of the easier-to-reach wizards Zen has done. That was very wise, given the lack of value for standard modes. Had the scoring been more balanced, this would be a contender for the Pantheon. I think that Hezol is going to work out just fine. Cathy: GREAT Angela: GREAT Oscar: GOOD Jordi: GREAT Sasha: MASTERPIECE Elias: MASTERPIECE* (Nintendo Switch) Scoring Average: 4.16 CERTIFIED EXCELLENT
*Nintendo Switch Scores not factored into average. This will be updated at a later time.
The Thing First Released November 30, 2023 Designed by Daniel “Dolby” Vigh Set: Death Save Bundle ($19.99)
Links: Pinball FX Wiki
The weirdest thing is that Zen’s Godzilla table looks colder than this table that’s literally surrounded by ice. Oh and please note that, right now, only the ratings for the main version of Thing are from the four Vices. This review will be updated in late October, 2024 when the review for Camp Bloodbrook is added.
The consensus seems to be that either Thing or Dead by Daylight was the worst table of Pinball M’s launch. Personally, I’d rather play either of those over Duke Nukem, but to each their own. I don’t think Thing is that bad. It’s a very frustrating table, and one I’m not enthused enough with to argue too passionately in favor of, but bad? Nah. My pops and I are in total agreement: Thing has something going for it, though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what that is. One thing about THE Thing that we all agreed on was the layout didn’t do the movie justice. A traditional Japanese fan layout probably wasn’t the right way to go for a pin based on this specific flick. The 1982 John Carpenter film is one of the most imaginative horror movies of all time. How does it do it? Claustrophobia. What is the Thing pinball table? A vast, wide open playfield where every made shot can be followed-up by almost any other orbit. In pinball terms, that’s the literal opposite of claustrophobia. Hell, the Dead by Daylight table would have been a more accurate representation of The Thing’s tone than this. I get a lot of guff from my friends, family, and readers for not putting more stock into theme integration. I think it’s rarely notable unless a table does exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Thing is exceptionally bad, at least in terms of replicating the emotions of the film, and I say that while noting that I think it’s an okay pinball table.
Persistent Problem – Bad Mini-Tables: Zen Studios has a mini-table problem, and the only good thing I can say about Thing’s mini is that at least it’s not another bland-ass circular table. I get that Dolby was probably aiming to replicate the tight, claustrophobic vibe of the movie with this mini’s shots, but it’s too tight, too limited, and over too fast. If Zen is going to keep insisting on having mini-tables, they should allow players to practice them off the menu instead of having to play a practice game and grind your way to them. Actually, I wish they overhauled their practice mode altogether. Basketball players looking to improve their free throw shooting don’t have to play entire games for the opportunity. They just go up to the line and shoot during practice. Let us do that for all your modes and shots. Do that and you’ll see scores increase across the board.
The real problem with Thing is basically the same problem all tables by Daniel “Dolby” Vigh have, to the point that I could probably cut and paste this review from any other review of his tables: punishing difficulty to the point that it becomes exhausting instead of exciting. Slingshots with hair triggers that only need a single pop to send the ball flying into outlanes faster than you can nudge to defend against it, not that the nudge is all that effective. A ramp’s wall hover directly over the drain in a way designed to funnel balls from the bumper zone straight down the drain, and since it’s right over the middle, often a nudge can’t save you anyway. Sharp toe shots being too essential to the gameplay. Rails where the ball constantly gets cruel bounces instead of kind ones. Modes that take far too many shots to complete given the extreme difficulty. I’m talking about The Thing, but that could apply to Snoopy, Kong, World War Z, Terraforming Mars, and Princess Pride. All middling tables at best, but in six tables he’s not yet gotten his first Certificate of Excellence, and World War Z we consider one of the worst tables in Pinball FX, and I think Princess Bride is just a boring slog. The shame about all this is I think Dolby has the chops to craft great shots. I think Terraforming Mars is far and away his best pin, but I’m not finishing modes on that either. Going off the leaderboards, not many people are. If players are quitting before accomplishing anything in your pin, that shouldn’t be a badge of honor. They’re not giving up because of the difficulty. It’s because it’s boring.
Persistent Problem – Blocked Shots: The physics engine of Pinball FX and Pinball M is far from perfect. The bounce you get off objects never feels quite natural. Often the ball just goes limp, as if the target was heavily padded. Consequently, it’s unpredictable what even an aimed shot will do. This becomes a problem when any Zen designer creates a table that’s ultra-punishing of missed shots, then has modes where targets block the orbits. When you really think about it, it’s a rejection that counts as make, isn’t it? But, logically wouldn’t the ball be likely to react the same way as the average miss or rejection? Uh, yea! If a table has angles and shot placement designed to increase the likelihood of a near-miss draining or outlaning, it feels like digital targets are artificial difficulty taken to an extreme degree.
The thing with Dolby’s pins is that high scores feel lucky instead of skillful. Like after dozens of games, I finally had one where the bounces fell my way. Maybe if the physics were completely overhauled, this wouldn’t be so bad. But Thing even has a mode where wind pushes the ball left and right. A table like Zen’s own Jaws can get away with that, but not a table like Thing that’s specifically meant to be as punishing as humanly possible. I don’t think Dolby is completely misguided in this stuff. For all the sh*t I’ve given him over this mentality, he’s only made one table that’s unambiguously a trash fire: World War Z (and likely Princess Bride too, but we’re waiting for patches before writing-up the final review). My team has awarded CLEAN SCORECARDS to Kong, Snoopy, and Terraforming Mars, meaning those pins didn’t get a single negative rating. I even gave TM a rating of GREAT, and so did Angela. He’s not a hack. But he has to decide if he wants to be the guy that makes tables so difficult the ceiling of enjoyment is low or if he wants to be elite. Nobody accuses Steve Ritchie of making soft tables, but they didn’t feel like they only exist to ice players right out of the starting gate.
Persistent Problem – Out of Reach Wizards: It’s not hard to figure out how many players have reached the wizard mode in any given pin. You just reach the wizard in the Practice Mode, look at your score, and see how many players are in the ballpark of that score on the leaderboard. The above screenshot is Thing’s Wizard, and you can see I have about 136M, so if you give me 30M to account for extra stuff I did, we’ll say 100M is the “range.” For The Thing exactly 20 players EVER have scored over 100,000,000 points in Classic Mode, and not all of them presumably reached the Wizard unless they both somehow shot VERY efficiently while also losing their balls immediately after completing modes. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s 12 to 15 wizards and 5 more who were close. Out of everyone who has bought the original bundle of table. That shouldn’t be a positive thing for designers. Oh, and you can’t use the achievements as a barometer because they were broken for a long time and didn’t work, but for what it’s worth, 0.02% of all players on Xbox have the achievement for the wizard mode in Thing. We don’t have it. Comparatively, that’s exactly the same percentage for Pinball FX’s Xena: Warrior Princess, Battlestar Galactica, and Knight Rider, all of which we have earned. This should be alarming. Again, I assume their designers had it pounded into their skulls “extreme difficulty and mind-numbing grinding is good for engagement” when all evidence says that’s just not the case and you’re boring players away, and when they’re bored away, they probably ain’t coming back for non-Williams pins no matter what license you guys score. I want Pinball FX and Pinball M to stick around, but stuff like this worries me.
The main modes last so long they become boring, and if you fail them, they don’t stay lit. On a table with so many drain angles, that’s a recipe for a middling pinball experience. The side modes aren’t much better. Like there’s a mode where a fire spreads from lane to lane and hitting shots puts the fire out. Only it might relight less than a second later. I can’t imagine why people are frustrated with Zen Studios pins lately. People like challenges, myself included, but after a while it just becomes demoralizing and a downer to play. I was sure I’d be giving this a score of BAD, but once I moved off the standard CLASSIC mode and onto ARCADE, the table had a lot less lethal angles and the outlanes weren’t so murderous. Was it actually fun? It was okay, and I’ll take okay. Now if Zen Studios is happy with okay, that’s troubling. Also, while stringing together the orbits was satisfying, that’s always satisfying regardless of the pin. Modes are what makes each table unique, and Thing’s modes are just alright. Dolby, you have got it in you to go down in history as one of the best pinball designers of the 21st century. You don’t suck, but some of your tables do, and they didn’t have to. It speaks volumes that a table as unlikable as Thing still won me over because it shoots pretty good. I think you have a gift, Daniel. And if you squander it, it’s on you, because everyone is waiting for you to make a table that cares more about being fun than it does being hard. Cathy: GOOD Angela: BAD Oscar: GOOD Sasha: BAD Jordi: GOOD Elias: BAD* (Nintendo Switch) Primary Scoring Average: 2.6 – OKAY AT BEST *Nintendo Switch Scores not factored into average. This will be updated at a later time.
Wrath of the Elder Gods: Director’s Cut First Released November 30, 2023 Designed by Gary Vadócz
Links: Pinball FX Wiki Free to Play with Pinball M Installation
Kickback – Angela: Elder Gods just edges out Chucky to earn my vote for the second best Pinball FX table so far. And it’s free! What’s unique about this pin is that Wrath of the Elder Gods feels much more like a modern Stern-era arcade release in terms of the pace of the modes. Nothing lasts too long, and the table is equal parts offense and defense. Although the left outlane is a touch on the gnarly side, Elder Gods has an effective nudge and kickbacks that aren’t a chore to light, so playing defense isn’t fighting windmills. I really don’t get everyone’s problem with the multiball. So what if it’s a snap-shooter? It’s a shooter’s table! How else would you wizard it? Wrath of the Elder Gods proves Zen can still make fun-for-everyone pinball tables when they don’t go overboard with grinding or shot requirements. It might not be the best table in Pinball M right now, but I think it better represents their potential than System Shock.
The paid version of Wrath of the Elder Gods on Pinball FX has physics and orbits so busted that it’s one of only five tables on Pinball FX we’ve declared to be OUT OF ORDER. Thankfully, the free-to-play, M-rated version of Wrath of the Elder Gods mostly works. And it’s, you know, fine. I think they were aiming for “eerie” and did a good enough job with it. Oddly, you’d expect a Lovecraft-themed table to be a little slower and more deliberate, but the opposite is true. This could have just as easily been themed around the Road Runner because the ball runs so fast. It’s what we call a “Kinetic” pin because the speed and the angles are designed specifically to make snap shots instead of trapping and shooting. In recent years, Zen Studios’ design mandate seems to be that ball control is the absolute worst thing a designer can allow. It’s frustrating as all hell, but in the case of Wrath of the Elder Gods, at least the table makes sense to be anti-ball control.
Signature Shot – Strange Structure: Doesn’t this look like a fun front-and-center target along the lines of something you would expect from Brian Eddy? This COULD have been an all-time great toy target, but it’s too conservative in its design. There’s little to no feedback when you hit it. A moan. A weird chant in an alien language. Something. ANYTHING. Occasionally, it opens up, but even hitting it doesn’t do anything. The eye creepily follows the ball, and that’s fine, but it’s not enough. This table needed its own version of Raul Julia’s callouts from Addams Family. It should have been wickedly over the top. For what it’s worth, the u-turn surrounding the Strange Structure is fine. I like u-turns in pinball. Always fun to shoot.
The biggest problem with Wrath of the Elder Gods is that it wants to both be a multiball-heavy table while also making multiball as difficult to enjoy as humanly possible. In the wizard mode, balls fly onto the playfield at the speed of light, and there’s just so many balls that you can’t possibly hope to juggle them since the auto plunge is tailored specifically to interfere with shooting. The balls are likely to bounce back in the direction they came too, making shots on the left side of the table especially difficult. Five balls total, on a table that runs fast and has fairly dangerous outlanes. Oh, and what lane is one of two lit during the first part of this insane five-ball multiball? The one that the balls are auto-plunged onto, on the left side, which of course prevents the shot from being made if you’re not in complete control of all five balls at once. God, I really hope the giggles Gary had in Zen’s offices when he came up with that outright trollish crap was worth it. I’m sure the excuse was this would come across as chaotic madness in line with the Lovecraft theme. Instead, it’s the total opposite, because when you can’t get a shot off in pinball, the table becomes really boring. Wrath of the Elder God’s wizard mode is basically like a five year old child trying to shoot a basketball, only to have Shaquille O’Neal slap down every attempt and then taunt the child to “git gud.” Well, at least while the ball save is lit. Oddly enough, the best strategy is just flick away while ball save is going, but then settle it down to a two-ball multiball after the protection fades. I should note that Angela LOVES this style of multiball. She’s adopted, in case you couldn’t tell.
Thanks everyone for reading the Pinball M feature here at Indie Gamer Chick or The Pinball Chick. Whichever you’re using!
Wrath of the Elder Gods has the theme, layout and modes to be an all-timer. It’s the mechanics that ruin all the fun. The slingshots are SO violent. The kickbacks are SO violent. The auto-plunge is SO violent. Anytime the table itself takes over the ball movement, the fun stops and the recovery process begins. The end result is a table that’s both fun and a trash fire. Despite what Angela insists, there’s too much defense on Wrath thanks to the fast speed, violent slingshots, and bouncy rails. Balls are so drawn to that area around the left flipper’s lane rails that you’d swear there’s a vortex there from another dimension. I guess I can’t rule out that’s actually the case with this table, but the table isn’t better for it. I’d also like to note that any goodwill this table built up by being the freebie of Pinball M is burned away as long as the paid version on Pinball FX is unplayable. It literally just drops the ball right between the flippers. This does NOT happen on Pinball M’s free to play version. This is weird, Zen! You know, it’s been almost 600 days since Sky Pirates came out and it still hasn’t been patched. Do you really think fans are still angry over Pinball Pass or not getting legacy tables they already paid for once for free on the new platform? Maybe the anger is more about the feeling that you’re giving us a giant middle finger with the lack of urgency to fix stuff people already paid for, or the overall direction your original pins have taken. You recently re-released Super League Football, and it got everyone excited. Maybe it’s because that table comes from an era where your designers weren’t obsessed with trolling players and just wanted to make fun shooting tables. You need to call a meeting of your designers and remind them that you’re making pinball, not Dark Souls. Cathy: GOOD Angela: GREAT Oscar: GOOD Sasha: GOOD Elias: BAD* (Nintendo Switch) Primary Scoring Average: 3.25🧹CLEAN SCORECARD🧹 *Nintendo Switch Scores not factored into average. This will be updated at a later time.
REVIEW COPIES WERE SUPPLIED FOR SOME MEMBERS OF THE PINBALL CHICK TEAM WHILE SOME TABLES WERE PAID FOR OUT OF POCKET BY THEM OR BY A MEMBER OF THE VICE FAMILY. PINBALL M TABLES PLAYED BY MY FAMILY WERE PAID FOR BY OSCAR, WHO IS VERY CROSS WITH ME FOR MEMORIZING HIS CREDIT CARD NUMBER. FOR BOTH PINBALL FX AND PINBALL M, WE LIKELY PURCHASED BETWEEN 2 TO 3 VERSIONS OF EACH TABLE, IF NOT MORE. WE ALSO PURCHASED A FULL YEAR MEMBERSHIP OF PINBALL PASS. IT TURNS OUT WE SHOULD HAVE SPENT THAT MONEY ON TABLES INSTEAD.
Cash Cow DX Platform: Nintendo Switch, Steam Released February 16, 2024 on Steam
Released September 26, 2024 on Switch Developed by Pixel Games Published by Flynn’s Arcade $4.79 (Normally $5.99) had a cow in the making of this review.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
I sure loved Donut Dodo. Boy, what a fun game that was. Not just one of the best indies I’ve ever played.. not just one of the best neo-retro games I’ve ever played.. one of THE best games I’ve ever played in my entire life. Cash Cow DX is by the same developer (who also developed the middling, decent but bleh Sigi) and.. boy, I sure loved that Donut Dodo. I don’t love Cash Cow DX. Or like it at all, really. It’s just an endless series of cheap shots and dick moves that might work if this was an authentic 80s arcade game trying to earn $0.25 per play. Or would it? If I game-overed twenty seconds into my first play of a coin-op, and had no fun at all during that twenty seconds, I think I’d be unlikely to put a second quarter in it. The biggest mistake developers designing ultra-challenging games make is assuming the challenge is the attraction. It’s not. Do you know why someone in 1980 put a quarter into Defender, lasted only a minute, and then put another quarter in it? Because during that one minute, when they weren’t dying, they were blowing sh*t up and having the time of their life. Cash Cow DX, which mashes up elements from Mappy,Mappy Land, Popeye, and Pac-Man, gives players a high body count and plenty of aggravating moments, but without any dynamic gameplay. It’s just flailing against overpowered enemies with too much to collect and not enough means to defend yourself. It feels like a game that forgot somewhere along the way that it’s supposed to be fun, and consequently it’s one of the most miserable experiences I’ve had reviewing an indie game in recent years. A big reason why I’ve moved away from reviewing indies is I don’t like doing reviews like this. It’s not fun for me to tell someone I respect that I hate their game.
In fact, I wouldn’t have even played enough to go forward with the review if I hadn’t taken a review code weeks ago. I played it for a few minutes, hated it, and thought “okay, maybe I’m not feeling it today.” After a few weeks of this, I thought “oh crap, I really am stuck having to play this thing enough to review it.” I couldn’t even get my niece to play the game with me and she’s been asking to help with an indie review for weeks.
Mind you, all this stuff I have talked about and will talk about is on the mode labeled “EASY.” As opposed to what? What could possibly make this harder? Presumably on NORMAL the enemies have projectiles and on HARD the game lights your hands on fire. How the hell did anyone put this down as an EASY mode? I’m guessing that Cash Cow DX is one of those games where the developer forgot that, while they’re in the process of making their game, they’re the best player in the world at their own game. It happens all the time. Developers don’t realize that it makes perfect sense that YOU, the developer, can easily beat a level YOU created that YOU’VE tested 5,000,000 times. Or maybe they only have one or two play testers and they watch them beat stages too easily during their 50th hour of playing. Because they forget that, they begin upping the stakes to make it harder, as if the game was easy in a vacuum. This continues until your own game is fun for you, the developer, who knows exactly what to do, where to go, and what enemies will do. But, you’re going to eventually hand it off to consumers who haven’t devoted their entire lives to the game, and you expect them to have as much fun as you did? Yea, no.
The deaths happen so quickly and so out of nowhere that it’s hard to learn from them and improve. When you’re about to die in a game like Mappy or Pac-Man, you see it coming, and that gives you a chance to imagine where you went wrong. That anticipation is part of the excitement of the genre. The chase matters most. The “chase” elements of Cash Cow DX are limited to tiny bursts due to the most of the things that you die from having been off screen a second or two before you died. This should be re-themed as a horror game because, without hyperbole, I experienced more jump-scares playing this than I did that Blair Witch game. Other times I had to record a clip to figure out where I could have dodged.
The biggest problem with Cash Cow DX is the cheap enemy placement and abilities. I’m guessing most players will die within the first second or two of their first play session when they’re killed by a green fireball that, like you, has the ability to jump across platforms. Players are wired to move right when they start a level. And what do you know? The first enemy is timed to be synced perfectly with the very first platform 90% of players will jump to, in a way that you can’t anticipate even with an arrow warning of it. It screams of a developer who said “this part is too easy. I’ll fix it” for every square inch of the game. No, you didn’t fix it. You broke it, and immediately set a tone of hostility towards players. This feels like a game that isn’t meant to be fun, but rather simply be as difficult as possible.
I’m on one story. The enemy was down on a different story and can’t jump up to my story. I died anyway because it can jump just high enough to kill me from below, and that blue thing next to me is a wall, so I can’t dodge left. Scratching out distance often isn’t even enough. The rules and mechanics are stacked too much in favor of the enemies. Imagine if Pac-Man’s ghosts or Mappy’s cats could kill you when there’s a literal wall and/or story separating you and them. Popeye does it, but you can always see Bluto and work around him, whereas here, enemies move fast and come from off-screen.
I have nothing positive to say about this one. Even the graphics aren’t a net positive because the character sprites are too big, the visible playfield too cramped, the platforms often too small, and the enemies (and you) too fast, which means that almost every death will be something you couldn’t anticipate. When you fall through the floor, you get a very brief grace period of invincibility, but that hardly matters when enemies (who can jump, mind you) are placed on the shallow platforms you’re going to land on (and they can fall through the floor too) and the level layouts are tailored towards trapping you in situations where avoiding enemies is unlikely. The game counts on springing enemies on you when you’ve already committed yourself to an action. Actually, this game shares a lot of DNA with Sonic The Hedgehog. You might not move Sonic-fast, but you’re pretty fast, and so are the enemies, only there’s nothing like Sonic’s rings that allow you to continue when you run into enemies. You die and get moved back to the starting space. So, this is kind of like Sonic as a maze chase, without rings. That sounds awful, and it is.
The worst part of all of this is I genuinely think Cash Cow DX would have been a lot of fun if the game had eased you in during the first cycle of levels instead of just immediately going for the throat. Imagine any of your favorite maze chase games, only if the first couple cycles of levels never existed. Imagine Donkey Kong starting on the third or fourth cycle of levels, with the barrels coming at a continuous stream, or the springs, or the fireballs. Does Donkey Kong still become an all-time cherished classic? Probably not to the same degree. There was absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by making Cash Cow DX so punishing right from the start. It just turns a likely good game into a historically bad one. I’ve been reviewing games for over thirteen years now, and I’ve never played a game with so much potential, with so many seemingly fun ideas that went so far out of its way to prevent fun right out of the starting gate. It made me sad, because it didn’t have to be this way.
And even after factoring-in the fast movement and shallow jumping, Cash Cow DX continued to pile on limitations to further up the challenge. Like, say you’re on a ledge and there’s a ledge below you and you want to, without jumping, just run off the ledge you’re on and fall at an angle to the ledge below you. Well, when you get to the edge, your character will automatically hesitate for a split second, losing most of their forward momentum and preventing you from getting to the platform you wanted. It’s subverting a player’s instinct for the sake of making the game harder, but without adding anything positive to make up for it. Ain’t nobody allowed to have fun on their own terms with this one. It feels like there’s limited potential to craft your own strategies. Again, everything here could have been fun if the difficulty had been toned-down and scaled like a normal coin-op does. Each stage has its own unique gimmick, all of which would normally be a ton of fun, but the enemies have too much of an advantage while you have every conceivable movement disadvantage except the ability to barely jump over an enemy. Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t work falling deaths into the equation. Because the difficulty is so relentlessly intense, there’s not enough breathing room to actually study and learn the rules to the movement and enemies. This game does not scale. It’s an immediate brick wall that’s presumably followed by taller and thicker brick walls.
Found a bonus stage. Didn’t even realize the game had bonus stages, but it transitioned quickly from the main stage to this before I even realized it happened and then I died in about 0.1 seconds from walking off the edge.
Cash Cow DX is one of the most unlikable indies I’ve ever played in my life. Movement is too loose, jumping too shallow, and there’s not enough “turn the tables” elements to make the chase part fun. One per stage. ONE. Good lord. It’s like the polar opposite of Portal, where its designers used play-testing to fine-tune it to intuitive perfection. Cash Cow feels like it was fine-tuned so that every platform, jump, enemy and obstacle is as mean-spirited as possible. Let’s game this out: what was the benefit to all this? What the f*ck did Cash Cow DX have to gain by making the first series of five levels this ridiculous? Nothing. I have no objection if the second wave of levels was this hard. But the first wave? The best case scenario is that you’ve made a game that fits a VERY small niche market of people who want a Dark Souls-like challenge in every genre. Where “fun” for them is to never be able to relax and smile for a single damn second. If you want an arcade punisher that isn’t specifically enjoyable on its gameplay merits but offers the satisfaction of just surviving, you might actually like this. For everyone else, the GOTCHAs and cheap deaths just make the whole thing pretty boring. I don’t want an arcade game like this where I have to constantly be in a state of caution. Even games that eventually become hard like Pac-Man or Popeye aren’t 100% all intensity all the time right from the start. They ease you into it. There’s no sense of that here. This is like teaching a kid to ride a bike by plopping them on the seat and pushing them into rush hour traffic. Donut Dodo wasn’t easy either, but everything could be seen on screen at once. You were almost never blindsided. This is a game of constant blindsiding, and that’s actually not exciting. It’s just very boring.
I wouldn’t have even seen the last two levels (of five total) if not for the game’s “practice” mode which still uses a life system anyway. Normally I’d keep playing until I finished the whole game, or at least a full cycle, but I actually didn’t feel I was close even after a couple hours of gameplay and I want to be done with this and go back to the projects I’m actually having fun with.
And if I seem mad, I’m really not. I just know Pixel Games is better than this. You can’t make a game as good as Donut Dodo by accident. It has to come from a place of genuine talent. I also know that maze chases are a tougher genre to pull off than people realize. That genre has become such a major part of my gaming existence that, for my site’s 13th birthday, I reviewed 40 different versions of Pac-Man games. I LOVE a good maze chase, but Cash Cow DX violates just about every rule that goes into a fun maze chase. I actually wonder if a Defender-like radar instead of the almost-worthless arrows would have made a difference. Or maybe if the game had utilized a wide screen. Or maybe if the game had not had a confusing “Inertia Mode: Modern/Classic” option. Instead of making two versions of one game, just get one version right, for God’s sake. I don’t know what the difference is between the two. The default is “modern.” I switched to “classic” and it seemed like maybe movement was a little easier, but all the blind jumps and OP enemies were still there. It’s a massive dick move to put an enemy who jumps towards you on a platform with a gap so big that you can’t see what’s on it. The warning arrows were often only indicators I was about to die because they showed up too late. It’s a mean game, and I’m so glad to be done with it. But, for all the hatred I just showed on Cash Cow DX, it was classy that Pixel Games put an option to disable screen flashing. Their next game is a cartoonish tribute to Lunar Lander, one of my all-time favs. Will I be there for it? Yep. Sure, Pixel Games has gone 1 for 3 at IGC, but so what? Do you know what you call someone who bats 1 for 3 in baseball? An all-star. And Pixel Games is an elite developer who made one amazing game and one terrible one. They’ll be back, and I’ll be there when they are. Verdict: NO!
A Review Copy was supplied for this review. Today, a copy of Cash Cow DX was paid for by me at the discounted launch sale price of $4.79. I also bought my niece Donut Dodo so that she’d have a game that’s fun too.
Punch-Out!!
Super Punch-Out!!
Arm Wrestling
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Power Punch II
![Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch (USA) (Beta) [b]-260109-001242](https://i0.wp.com/indiegamerchick.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/mike-tysons-intergalactic-power-punch-usa-beta-b-260109-001242.png?w=311&h=311&crop=1&ssl=1 "Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch (USA) (Beta) [b]-260109-001242")
![Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch (USA) (Beta) [b]-260109-001258](https://i0.wp.com/indiegamerchick.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/mike-tysons-intergalactic-power-punch-usa-beta-b-260109-001258.png?w=311&h=311&crop=1&ssl=1 "Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch (USA) (Beta) [b]-260109-001258")
Super Punch-Out!!
Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!!
Marvel Cosmic Invasion
Even then, their heart was in the right place. Brawlers can get tiring. I enjoyed playing through Invasion’s fifteen levels. Doing that twice sounds exhausting to me. Maybe that’s why the genre works. I guess that’s why I’m annoyed by upgradable stats in games like this. Who on Earth would want to play this over and over again? It’s perfectly fine for a game to be a one-and-done. Besides, you need good games like that to make those good games you do want to replay again and again mean something. It should be special when a game has replay value. It should be equally special to play a game that’s fantastic, tons of fun, and has no replay value at all. 
3D 3D!
Centipede
Deflex V
Ratman
Superdeflex
City Bomb
Rox III
Turboflex
Abductor
Gridrunner
Andes Attack
Rox 64
Gridrunner
Attack of the Mutant Camels
Headbanger’s Heaven
Gridrunner
Laser Zone
Matrix: Gridrunner 2
Matrix: Gridrunner 2
Laser Zone
Hover Bovver
Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time
Revenge of the Mutant Camels
Hellgate
Hellgate
Sheep in Space
Attack of the Mutant Camels
Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time
Ancipital
Hover Bovver
Psychedelia
Mama Llama
Colourspace
Batalyx
Iridis Alpha
Revenge of the Mutant Camels II
Voidrunner
Super Gridrunner
Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89*
Llamatron: 2112
Revenge of the Mutant Camels
Tempest 2000
Gridrunner: Remastered
The Rocky Horror Show Game
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind
Once Upon a Katamari
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
Tetris
Tetris
Igo: Kyū Roban Taikyoku
Tetris
Tetris
Tetris
Welltris
Hatris (JP Version)
Hatris
Hatris (US Version)
Tetris 2 + BomBliss
Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss
Tetris Battle Gaiden
Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss Genteiban
Super Tetris 3
Super BomBliss
Super BomBliss DX
Super BomBliss
Tetris Time Warp
Tetris
Tetris
Tetris
Tetris
Tetris
Tetris
Flash Point
BlockOut
Tetris
BlockOut
Nintendo World Championships 1990
Pyramid
Tetris
Pipe Dream
Bloxeed
Klax
Klax
Columns
Hatris
Klax
Knight Move
Klax
Dr. Mario
Dr. Mario
Klax
Columns II: The Voyage Through Time
Pipe Dream
Klax (Namco)
Welltris
Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen
Hatris
Puyo Puyo
Yoshi
Wordtris
Oh My God!
Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine
Poto Poto
Tetris 2
Tetris & Dr. Mario
Bust-a-Move
Baku Baku Animal
V-Tetris
Virtual Lab
3-D Tetris
Camp Bloodbrook
Cathy: 
Chucky’s Killer Pinball
Cathy: 
Dead by Daylight
Cathy: 
Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball
Cathy: 
System Shock
Cathy: 
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Cathy: 
The Thing
Cathy: 
Wrath of the Elder Gods: Director’s Cut
Cathy: 
Cash Cow DX
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