The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released December, 1991 Developed by Taito NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I’ll say this for Taito’s first crack at the Flintstones: there’s some damn gorgeous sprite work. I’m not entirely sure why they drew some of the Asian enemies in the Chinese themed stage to be literally yellow. Surely this was not cool even in 1991. If Rescue of Dino & Hoppy gets a re-release, it’s going to need someone to go in and change the appearance of the enemies.
The first Flintstones game didn’t release on the NES until a couple months after the Super NES launched in North America. In fact, it barely made it out in time for Christmas the year most NES children were probably hoping Santa brought them the upgraded Nintendo console. If not, Rescue of Dino & Hoppy isn’t the worst consolation prize. Actually, it’s not a bad game by any stretch. Over the course of its one hour or so playtime. There’s only one brief section I consider to be genuinely bad. A literal sliver of a single level that takes maybe fifteen, twenty seconds to complete. That’s pretty impressive for a platform game from this era. The problem is none of the rest of the game rises above being just alright. By golly, this really is an authentic Flintstones experience!
Even the name is bad. Given the heavy emphasis on the hanging mechanic, the name could have been “Fred Flintstone Hangs Around.” I haven’t really watched all that much of the show, so I thought Hoppy might be the name of the saber-toothed cat that throws Fred out of the house. No, it’s the family pet of the Rubbles. Why didn’t they make the game “The Rescue of Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm?” Hey, I like animals as much as the next person, but come on!
The big hook to the game is Fred’s ability to hang from and pull himself up most (but not) ledges. With the exception of moving platforms, all of which can be grabbed onto, the general rule is that a ledge that comes to a point is the one that can be held from. However, there are enough exceptions to that rule that it makes judging what can and can’t be hung onto a little frustrating. Also frustrating is pulling yourself up. You just hold the button and press up, but it doesn’t always work as fast as you’d want it to. This goes back to the “only bad section” I talked about, where you have to climb a vertical shaft that’s rapidly filling with instakill lava. For the life of me, I thought I was doing something wrong in this part and that there was some kind of “quick pull” technique I was unaware of. I wish I had looked it up, because I would have discovered there was a lot more to this Flintstones adventure than I realized.
Superpowers are won by playing three identical games of 1 on 1 basketball. I figured I was winning free lives or coins or something. I think I was half paying attention during my first play session. Oh, and I want to note that I was impressed that they actually worked in a jump shot mechanic AND that Fred flicks his wrist on the shot. I’m gushing over Fred Flintstone having good shooting form in a thirty-two year old NES title’s basketball minigame, and people think I’m some kind of ogre?
I didn’t know that there’s three superpowers I actually did unlock, but I didn’t know I had them. Hey, I never paused the game to discover them. Not that I was missing much. All three superpowers cost coins to use once you have them, so only one of the superpowers is generally useful: the high jump, which allows you to spring off a dinosaur high into the sky for five coins. The other two, a pair of wings and scuba diving equipment, are pretty much worthless because each flap of your arm besides the first one when you activate the powers costs you four coins. In the case of the wings, they’re theoretically useful to save you if you mistime a jump and aren’t falling to your doom, but the only time I tried using them, I died anyway because I didn’t have enough coins to get back up to the platform. In the case of the scuba gear, I never found a single situation where it was useful.
Cost to use the wings? Four coins per flap. Cost to Fred’s self esteem for dressing like a choad just to rescue the family pets? Incalculable.
To the Taito’s credit, they were all-in on the hanging from ledges mechanic. Every single level is built around using this for navigation, start to finish. If you’re going to use a movement gimmick to stand out, Flintstones is proof that you really ought to stick with it, through thick and thin. The hanging carries the game over the finish line, because god knows the combat doesn’t. You would think bludgeoning your enemies to death would be satisfying, especially since it has an accompanying POW! impact bubble with each landed strike. But, the combat in the first Flintstones NES game is kind of awful. The collision isn’t sprite-for-sprite accurate, and it’s not rare for your swings to go right through an enemy. Even worse is that they seem to be given a lot more latitude in hitting your collision box than you do with them. It’s never a deal breaker, but the club feels oddly feather-like and lacks the OOMPH that I desire from such a weapon.
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Sticking with the sub-weapons makes more sense. There’s three, and all are useful at various times. The axe is straight out of Castlevania, thrown in a big arc that goes high in the air before coming down. The slingshot is a straight-forward long range weapon, and then there’s the egg. It’s a literal screen-clearing bomb, and yes, it works on bosses, though with them, it takes a few hits. In fact, I used it to beat all three forms of the final boss. The club can be charged up, but I never really found it all that useful. There’s a couple basic enemies that move slowly and are so ridiculously spongy that I genuinely, no joke, think they only exist to finally give the players an excuse to charge-up the club. Oh, and I used it on the ice level’s boss, but only because I ran out of coins. The bosses also suffer the same collision issues the basic enemies have. Usually, games like this need the bosses to be satisfying to fight. Flintstones is weirdly the opposite: the level design, set pieces, and the small handful of one-time special events carry the day, while the bosses nearly burn away all the goodwill. They’re boring at best, and far too spongy. The collision is mediocre and the movement is slightly sluggish, but it’s not bad, either. Flintstones NES is one of those games that is right in the middle, just above the divider line.
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At only eight levels, one of which doesn’t even have a boss, Rescue doesn’t last long enough to wear out its welcome, and there’s a couple unexpected set pieces that put a smile on my face. The fact that they worked in some cartoon gags, like Fred ducking by his head retracting into his shirt? That’s cute. It’s a sweet-hearted game and it’s okay. The best thing I can say about the Flintstones is that kids who didn’t get to upgrade to the NES had one decent, visually spectacular (by NES standards) game for the 1991 holiday season. While playing Rescue of Dino & Hoppy, it was really clear that Taito wanted to do for Hanna-Barbera what Capcom had done for Disney with titles like DuckTales. In a way, they completely succeeded, since Hanna-Barbera has always been a poor man’s Disney. Sorry fans, but it’s true. Not that their product is bad, necessarily, but they’re always in Disney’s shadow. That’s the case with the Flintstones. It’s fine. It’ll do, but it’s not in the same league as the best 8-bit Disney games. Assuming this really were a Disney game, it’d be a B-Tier one, above Adventures in the Magic Kingdom but below Mickey Mousecapade. In a sense, the Flintstones is one of the most accurate licensed games ever. It’s a b-lister game for a b-lister media franchise. Verdict: YES!
Barney Rubble is clearly high on peyote here. “I told you not to eat that cactus, dum-dum!” Oh and that’s NOT Pebbles & Bamm-Bamm. That must explain why Wilma is in her mourning dress. The kids were probably eaten by a dinosaur while Fred was having his adventure. That also explains Barney turning to drugs. Thank god the review is over, because this is starting to go to the dark place.
The Flintstones Platform: Sega Master System Released November 1991 (1988 on Home Computers) Adapted by Paul Marshall Published by Grandslam Entertainments
Released Only in Europe NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
That green thing above Fred’s head is the paintbrush. I never understood half the jokes in the Flintstones. Logically, the joke that they use living animals to replace electronic appliances makes sense, right? The humor is supposed to be they’re the MODERN stone age family, with all the conveniences a typical nuclear family of the 1960s has even though they don’t have electricity. Instead, animals are their electric can openers, garbage disposals, or laundry machines. In fact, that’s the Flintstones punchline in its entirety. Why a living paint brush though? Why is using an animal more convenient than a stick with hair? Do the Flintstones need the satisfaction of knowing, when they stare at their living room wall, that an animal suffered SO MUCH to make it that color? It’s funny they use an animal that lives under their sink as a garbage disposal, in part because we really used to stick pigs in our outhouses and rain shit down on them. They loved it! They never ate better! But Michelangelo didn’t take one of the piglets and use it to paint the Sistine Chapel! At least when it was still alive. I can’t say with certainty The Last Judgment wasn’t painted with the snout of a dead piglet, but he was definitely not using a living one. It’d squirm too much!
It’s rare that I play a game so bad that I think the developers should be ashamed of themselves, but that’s the Flintstones for the Sega Master System, and presumably the earlier 1988 home computer games that this version copied. An absolutely atrocious, lazy licensed game that has no soul at all. It’s divided into four segments. First, you paint a wall. Do I even need to go on? It’s not even a fun video game type of paint the wall, either. You have to catch the paintbrush, because, well, Flintstones. Then, you have to dip the paintbrush in the paint bucket, which you cannot move. Then, you put some paint on the walls. Then you repeat this step until the wall is done. The challenge is a strict time limit, moving a ladder into the right place, and the fact that Pebbles escapes the crib and draws on the bottom part of the wall, ruining your work. The collision detection makes no sense for where your paint will be, and this is made worse by the fact that your brush runs out of paint really fast. Also, it still consumes paint to do a portion of the wall you’ve already done. It’s awful, but once I figured out that Pebbles being out of the crib too long doesn’t lead to a fail condition, I won pretty quickly. I just painted the top part of the wall and most of the bottom while she sat there doodling. Then I dropped her in the crib, caught the paint brush, and finished the bottom. This was so boring that I’m half surprised level two wasn’t “now watch it dry!”
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The second level is a very quick drive to the bowling alley that lasts under a minute. Over the course of a few screens, you have to hop over rocks. The collision is god awful and the timing is weird, but it’s over with fast. Then, an actual full-sized game of bowling is the third level. It’s one of the worst bowling engines I’ve ever experienced. At the point of impact, the balls and pins are replaced with a BAM graphic. Even when the ball is being delivered right into the pocket, the head pin and other pins COULD be left over. Even with this problem, once you find the sweet spot and the right amount of left hook and power, getting a strike is easy. In my first full game, I had a 230. It should have been a 220, but whoever made this doesn’t understand how bowling works. The 10th frame has a max of three balls. Not complicated, right? Except when I played the tenth frame, I got a strike, a 9, and then got the spare.. and it gave me another ball. Are you kidding me? By the way, the object is to beat Barney’s score, and he’s a terrible bowler. I won 90 to 230. It wasn’t even close, but it might actually be entirely random. While I was learning the mechanics, at one point Barney had a double strike and was neck-and-neck with me. Once I understood what I was doing, I couldn’t miss and Barney couldn’t hit. What a bizarre game.
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After all this, the game suddenly becomes a terrible platformer. Flintstones’ home computer roots show here, as it’s along the same lines of the type of sloppy, unpolished shovelware that my older readers had to slog through to find the rare quality games on their Amigas or Sinclairs. You make your way up a shaft, dodging enemies and compensating for gusts of wind. There’s a helmet that, once you grab it, you don’t even have to bother dodging the nuts and bolts that try to crush you later. Grab Pebbles and bring her back the way you came and.. that’s the whole shameful game. I have played some doozies at Indie Gamer Chick, but Flintstones might be the most cynical. I got the distinct impression this version of the Flintstones was not a game anyone wanted to make. There’s no heart to it. There’s no polish. What little extra effort there is to be like the cartoon is undone by atrocious gameplay. Anything resembling charm is entirely dependent on the connection to the show itself. Like, hey, Fred does his tippy-tingle-toes approach before releasing the ball in bowling. That would be commendable if the game was good, but it ain’t, and so that effort becomes obnoxious instead. The best thing I can say about the Flintstones is it looks the part, but that actually takes on a sinister vibe when the gameplay is as horrendous as it is here. They knew what they needed: the license and the graphics to look enough to get kids to pester their parents to buy it. That’s cruel, isn’t it? The Flintstones is the rare game that’s so bad that it’s borderline evil for it. Verdict: NO!
Little Nemo: The Dream Master Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released September, 1990 Designed by Tatsuya Minami Produced by Tokuro Fujiwara Published by Capcom NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
The object is to find the keys. The meta object is to avoid throwing your controller through the screen.
Capcom was able to do some amazing things with the 1983 hardware standard that was really created only to be able to run a convincing version of Donkey Kong. By 1990, they were releasing instant classics like Mega Man 2 & 3, DuckTales, and Rescue Rangers. It’s one of the hottest hot-streaks in the entire history of gaming, so much that a game like The Little Mermaid sticks out so much more because it’s this oddly subdued and kind of boring blip on the radar that’s so clearly on a lower level than the highs they were reaching. I mention that because one game often lumped in with the hot streak is Little Nemo: The Dream Master. It’s one of the most famous NES games, and maybe their highest profile NES game that never got a re-release. And I don’t get it at all. Little Nemo is one of the absolute worst NES games I’ve played yet. A title that has no redeeming value from a gameplay perspective. Sure is pretty though. Well, I mean, assuming you overlook the endless flicker. And then it’s mostly just stark colors in the background. In fact, I’d say this has the most overrated graphics on the NES. Most of the settings are pretty dull and there’s only one set piece that stands out. It’s not ugly to look at, but it ain’t all that either.
I would not have been able to use the bee suit if autofire wasn’t an option. Christ, and I thought the arcade version of Balloon Fight was bad.
You have to search levels for six to seven hidden keys. Well, at least to start, and “searching” isn’t always involved. The sixth level just puts the six keys right next to the exit. You can barely jump and there’s no ropes or ladders to climb. The only “advanced” move you can do is swim. Otherwise, to navigate, you have to use a variety of animals that you put to sleep by feeding them candy. Candy famously being something that puts you to sleep. The implied drugging of animals should have been good for a laugh, but actually playing Little Nemo: The GHB Master is agony. Oh, and everything kills you, INCLUDING the animals that you pacify with your roofies. There’s even a window between feeding them the third and presumably lethal piece of candy and the moment they actually finish swallowing it and slip into a coma where you can still be damaged by touching them. Without the animals, Nemo gets no offensive move until the last couple stages. You can stun enemies by throwing candy at them, but I only found this useful two or three times over the course of the game, especially if there’s no animals around. Capcom usually does such a good job with enemies, so it’s downright shocking that the combat is so boring and so needlessly cruel in Little Nemo.
This is one of those games where spikes are instakills, no matter how much life you have left. Oh, and see that little evil dandelion seed? They all but ruin the game.
What’s truly remarkable is that every opportunity Little Nemo has to ping a cheap shot on players is taken. Enemies are always placed in a way to assure that you will take damage, especially the dandelion seeds that heat-seek you and continuously rain from the sky in several sections. There’s no elegance at all to the enemy design, placement, or combat in Little Nemo. No finesse. No balance to it. It feels like a sadist said “wouldn’t it be funny if we put this enemy here?” Not really, because it just makes the whole game miserable to play. Often with the old NES games that people call “Nintendo Hard” I can at least see some redeeming quality that makes me understand why someone would convince themselves it was a good game. You know, when they were children. Battletoads has some good fisticuffs and amazing OOMPH for a two-button NES brawler. Batman had fun combat and, well, it’s Batman. But Little Nemo? I literally have nothing positive to say about this one. Having decent-to-good graphics becomes obnoxious when the gameplay is as terrible as Nemo’s is.
I quit the US version and switched to the Japanese one on the off chance that maybe it was easier, even though Cutting Room Floor didn’t mention it. Some games have easier versions in different regions, most famously The Adventures of Bayou Billy (which I reviewed in my Definitive Review of Zapper/Super Scope games). Sadly, this one was not such a game. The only difference was a couple characters had cigars in their mouths. By the way, in the train stage you need six keys to unlock the door, but it gives you two at the start and two at the finish. Between those two points, the train ride itself, which is the entire stage, offers up five keys. You can actually finish with nine. As far as I could tell, this is the only stage that does that.
The levels themselves aren’t particularly well made. Besides the train level as seen in the above picture, the stages are sprawling, but in a way that makes them feel underpopulated and empty. The one and only consistent theme is dickhead enemy placement. Wherever you have to climb, make a jump, or change screens, enemies will be positioned in a way where you’ll almost certainly take damage. The animal helpers that have means to attack are basically worthless, with the exception of the frog. With it, you can jump on enemies in the classic Mario hop ‘n bop tradition. The others might as well not have an attack at all. The giant gorilla’s punch barely extends beyond its body and has a big recovery delay. The same with the hermit crab, and if you do miss, you end up buried in the sand. Usually if I tried to play offensively, I was just as likely to take damage. This is mostly because your hit box apparently becomes MASSIVE, while enemies, well, aren’t.
And then you have moments like this one, where the animals walk away from you and hide where you can’t get to them WHILE other enemies continue to attack, and you might have to wait quite a while before they actually move back to a useful position. In fact, usually if there’s an animal close by, there’s some kind of targeting enemy zeroing in on you while you’re trying to subdue the animal. The evil dandelion seeds, or these birds dropping eggs on you, or tadpoles if you’re underwater. It always takes three candies to put an animal to sleep, and usually the area where they’re located is closed in and cramped. Remember, the animals hurt you if you touch them. There’s so many no-win situations. I’m guessing maybe 0.1% of all players ever beat this fair and square and most “fans” are fans in the sense they played it for a single rental, maybe two, made it to the second world, third at most, and quit. Unless they had a Game Genie or used the level select code.
It really speaks to how popular Capcom was during this era that even Little Nemo: The Dream Master can be famous for being a fun game. I do have a question for its fans: did you actually play this for more than a rental? Did you ever make any progress at all? Without using a Game Genie or Level Select code? Because I kept waiting for this legendary game to show up, and all that happened was one GOTCHA after another. That is, when the world isn’t just a dead maze of spikes or “puzzles” that involve breakable blocks that don’t want to break. Even after the keys are ditched and the combat is opened up, it’s not like you spend most of your time fighting enemies. You still need the animals, which means you’re mostly not using the scepter. Instead, that’s saved for the three spongy, lazily-designed boss fights. Capcom usually does great boss battles, but these are more about sponginess and hard-to-hit attack patterns. Oh, and you have to charge-up the scepter for maximum effect, because of course you do. I have never been more baffled by a game’s popularity than Little Nemo’s. It’s never fun. Not even a little bit. In fact, it feels like the brakes are slammed every time the potential for fun presents itself, as if the developers said “whoa, whoa, let’s not do it like that. Someone might enjoy this!” The big hook, the use of the animals, is subdued and dull because they aren’t really aren’t useful for anything but temporary transportation. You don’t feel empowered in them. It often feels like you’re just opening up whole new ways to take cheap shots and lose lives.
To be honest, I expected the dandelion seeds to rain down on you during the last boss. I don’t know what it says about Little Nemo’s design that the three bosses couldn’t compare to a basic enemy.
This is the one time where I’m completely convinced that nobody actually likes Little Nemo and that they only say they do because critics gave it high marks. That includes other critics, some of which place this on “best of NES” lists. Are you f*cking sh*tting me? I just refuse to believe anyone had fun with this, but nobody wants to be the one standing alone saying otherwise. The attitude seems to be hey, if you’re not having fun, it’s probably your fault you’re not, right? After all, everyone else is having a good time. Why aren’t you? It couldn’t be because the game is impossibly difficult, or that the level design is really empty and boring, or the collision is god awful, or that some mechanics just plain don’t work, or that taking over a fairly large variety of animals isn’t anywhere near as enjoyable as it seems like it would be on a paper, right? Actually, yea, all those things are true and it’s okay to come out and say it: Little Nemo is Capcom’s worst NES game that doesn’t involve Micronics, and hell, I’m willing to say it’s their absolute worst 8-bit game. At least Ghosts ‘n Goblins has a fun theme to it and is remarkably true to the coin-op. Little Nemo doesn’t have that going for it, nor is it so inept that it’s actually kind of funny, like 1942. Little Nemo is the terrible game that walks like a masterpiece, and I absolutely f*cking despise it. Verdict: NO!
Nemo Platform: Arcade Released November 20, 1990 Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto Published by Capcom NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
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In December, I reviewed Capcom’s arcade anti-classic Willow. A terrible game that everyone goes gaga over that’s directed by Yoshiki Okamoto and based on a middling movie. Six months later and I’m reviewing Capcom’s Nemo. A wonderful game that nobody ever talks about that’s directed by Yoshiki Okamoto and based on a middling movie. When people think of “Capcom” and “Nemo” they likely think of the NES game Little Nemo: The Dream Master. Both the coin-op and the NES game beat the film to the US market by a couple years, not that it matters. This is one of those licenses where people should have known the film was going to bust. The joint Japan-US production with a script from Chris “Goonies/Home Alone/Harry Potter” Columbus spent years in development hell, then released four days after I was born in 1989 only to become a historic box office bomb, losing about sixty million bucks (adjusted for inflation). Like Krull before it, this is one of those situations where the coin-op is the best thing to come out of the whole fiasco. Actually, I’d call this easily Capcom’s best arcade platformer from this era. It’s also the rare Capcom coin-op that doesn’t feel like a quarter shakedown. I’m sure the two things aren’t related and it’s a complete coincidence. Uh huh.
If Capcom ever does release this, I hope they restore the two deleted levels that are still there, in the game code. This one especially, where you slide across a rail, is both original and has a sense of childlike wonder about it that few games from the cynical early 90s achieve. I really had a good time playing Nemo. This is exactly the kind of lost classic I started covering retro games for. If you want to play the deleted levels, Cutting Room Floor has the instructions.
Nemo is such a blast, and I say that thinking the movie is BORING. It’s a favorite of my father, who loves anime feature films, but for me, I was like.. man, this ain’t no My Neighbor Totoro. Imagine the degree of difficulty Capcom had in adapting THAT to a viable platform game, but they nailed it! Unlike the NES game, there’s no animal shenanigans this go around. Instead, most enemies can be killed by jumping on them. That old chestnut. If that’s not to your liking, you can also use the scepter from the movie as a weapon that functionally works like a sword. It’s satisfying enough by itself, I guess. It’s not an amazing weapon or anything, but it can be. It can be powered-up by grabbing the famous Capcom pinwheel, turning Nemo red and letting you create a chain reaction with the enemies, IE hitting them back into each-other. Now THAT’S the good stuff, and my only regret is that they didn’t build the game more around this. A couple bosses are, though. Bosses where you can hit them directly, but it’s more efficient to knock smaller baddies into them. During these fights, the pinwheels might even continuously spawn for players. Collision is pretty good all around and the enemies are fun and imaginative. For the thirty to forty minutes or so you’ll need to finish Nemo Arcade, fighting the basic enemies never gets boring. That’s half the battle right there!
You can also pick up and throw crates and barrels. I threw one once that rolled so far that I was racking-up points for a solid 10 seconds even though it’d scrolled off the screen. I LOVE THIS GAME!
And the level design is pretty impressive too. Capcom took a very high risk by not starting off with a basic “move right, jump over pits” type of design you’d expect from a first level. Instead, it’s an auto scrolling train. I hate auto-scrolling, but I loved that stage, and I loved that Capcom took it on faith that players understand the concept of a platform game at this point. After that, Nemo relies on spectacular set pieces, including a memorable haunted forest, a sinking steamboat, and adventures in the clouds. Even when the level design devolves into straight corridors, the enemies are spaced out and fun enough to do battle with that it never gets boring. To further break-up the action, there’s hidden chests all over that reveal themselves after you step on their platform, and unlike many Capcom games, there’s no whammies in them! How come nobody talks about the coin-op Nemo? I hear about the sucky NES game all the time, but this? It’s great! It’s such a shame that Capcom didn’t roll the dice on porting this to something like the Genesis, which could have used a marquee arcade platformer.
I hate that it’s unlikely this will get a re-release. Capcom should just reload the license and then release this with the NES game in a 2 for 1 pack for $14.99. People with fond memories of the NES game will be burned thanks to being drunk on nostalgia. BUT, they’ll have a hell of a surprise by what is the REAL reason to own such a package.
If I have to complain, it’s that there’s not enough upgrades to the scepter. Get this: I didn’t even realize until my second playthrough right before going to press on this that there WAS an upgrade to the scepter. In fact, judging by the screenshots, I even picked it up without realizing it. It gives a subtle, nearly imperceptible electric effect to your attack that doesn’t functionally feel stronger, more energetic, or whatever the hell they were going for. Obviously, since I didn’t even realize I was doing it when I did it. I also think the bosses are too spongy. It’s a Capcom coin-op, so if that wasn’t the case, I’d be shocked, frankly, but it does matter quite a bit. Your scepter often needs several wacks to even cause the boss meter to drop a tiny sliver. For many bosses, hit points are weighed too heavily on extracurricular hits, IE throwing crates or using the red-Nemo power to knock enemies back into them. This is a little troublesome because there’s a learning curve to picking up the objects you can throw. Your sprite might be physically on the object’s sprite, but you’re still not able to pick it up because you’re not ALL the way on it. As a result, some of the bosses cross the line into being.. gasp.. boring. In the case of the 4th boss, a giant gear, really boring, actually. F’n thing took me probably 20% of the playtime by itself. When I noticed the stage timer stopped working on bosses, I literally LOLed because it’s a genuinely laughable solution to the problem. “Well, we can’t get rid of the sponge. We’re Capcom! (shrug) Just stop the timer!”
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On one hand, I’m grateful the basic enemies weren’t also damage sponges since they pretty much sealed Willow’s fate, but on the other hand, balancing bosses is a big deal too. The sponge might also be because Nemo is a co-op game, but I didn’t get a chance to test that. I will update this review if I get a chance to play with someone else, but I can’t imagine it would be any better even with two players. And nothing I just complained about is a deal breaker because most of the bosses, spongy as they are, still manage to be fun. Only the third and fourth ones really feel sloggy, which happen to be the two bosses based mostly around throwing stuff at them. So is the giant tree but the means to do it isn’t something you have to work hard at. It’s such a shame that Capcom didn’t roll the dice on porting this to something like the Genesis, which could have used a marquee platformer in 1990. In fact, Nemo vanished from gaming’s collective memory. I’ve found it on Capcom arcade lists a couple times and immediately forgot about it. Nobody talks about this one, and I don’t get it. After playing both the NES and arcade versions of Nemo, I think the wrong Capcom Nemo game is the famous one. Verdict: YES!
Spatter aka Sanrin San-chan, aka Tricycle-San Platform: Arcade Released in December, 1984 Designed by YoshikiKawasaki Published by Sega Never Released in America* (See Caption Below) Coin-Op Never Re-Released
*Yes, a newly developed port of Spatter was included in the second Genesis Mini, but technically that’s not the arcade game, and it doesn’t do much to help console owners anyway.
Sega threw their hat into the maze chase ring a few times with titles like Ali Baba and 40 Thieves, Congo Bongo, Pengo, etc. I figured I’d played all of them, but I was wrong. I’d never even heard of Spatter until my friend Dave said “you’re going to review Pac-Mania eventually, right? (UPDATE: Here’s my Pac-Mania review!) This is like a proof of concept for Pac-Mania.” Hey, I like Pac-Mania! So, I gave Spatter a try and actually, he’s right and wrong. He’s right in the sense that Spatter is one of the first maze chases that features a maze bigger than the screen itself. And he’s also right in the sense that Spatter is one of the first maze chases that offers players an unlimited dodge move. But, the similarities end there, because Spatter offers something most maze chase games don’t: unlimited knock-outs of your pursuers. And it’s so satisfying.
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Spatter’s object is to grab all eight bouquets of flowers in each stage. As you do this, you’re pursued by chasers in go karts. You can’t jump just anywhere. There has to be a guardrail and not a solid wall. But, if there is a guardrail, Spatter’s incredible twist reveals itself: the jumping move is into the guardrail itself, causing it to bend in a cartoonish fashion. It works both offensively and defensively, and what’s truly bonkers is that it’s equally satisfying both ways. This is especially true if you dodge someone as you’re turning a corner, as it almost feels like cheating at a game of chicken. Hell, if you time it right while taking a corner, the rail will snap back like a rubber band and kill the guy in the oncoming lane. The enemies don’t exactly have the complex algorithms of Pac-Man ghosts. The karts chase you directly, but this is the rare maze chase that built around that, giving you means to dodge AND the instant gratification of bashing them off the road. It really is just as simple as doing a jump when they’re on the opposite side of you, and it has more OOMPH than most karate games from this era do.
Later stages have a lot more solid walls, like this section here. Also, the transparent roads were pretty spectacular as far as 1984 games go. At one point, Spatter was earmarked for Sega’s 3DS program, but it was cancelled because the game was too obscure. Um, hello? I know a way to take something out of obscurity: RE-RELEASE IT!
Mind you, the enemies respawn almost instantly. It’s a maze chase at the end of the day, and not every enemy can be defeated by the rail. A little green bomb robot and a bulldozer eventually enter the maze. The bulldozers are indestructible, but the bombs can be taken out by shoving boxes into them. Oh yea, there’s boxes, which contain bonus items that score you points. There’s a lot of bonus point opportunities, including tons of boxes on the playfield, points for quick completions, points for enemy knockout combos with the boxes, paper airplanes that fly in from outside the maze, and bonus rounds where Spatter temporarily becomes a 2D platformer where you have to avoid drops of water and climb up a series of ledges while collecting fruit. These were the weak links in the game and are so out of place that I wonder if this was originally the concept and they pivoted when they realized it wasn’t very fun. Or challenging, for that matter. I never once failed it. As you get deeper into the game’s 40 levels (which the level count includes the bonus stages), the stages still present plenty of bashing opportunities. I figured they’d up the challenge by eliminating them altogether. Instead, they space them out, but that only serves to increase the enjoyment. Seriously, why does nobody talk about this one?
If the water killed you instead of making you spin out, that’d be one thing. But even when I got hit multiple times, I still ultimately won, and usually quickly. My worst round still had 7 seconds remaining.
As much as I enjoyed the gameplay, I have to concede that Spatter has a massive problem with scoring balance and the risk/reward factor. Especially with the blocks, which score too little points to encourage using them, especially since they take too long to shatter after you kick them. I inadvertently doomed myself a lot more often than I killed enemies with them. There’s also too many points available in the bonus round for the meager challenge it presents. Giving these stages wrap-around screens nerfs the challenge completely. Part of me wonders if Spatter would have been better served removing the Pac-Man-like collecting aspect and instead turning the game into an entirely combat focused type of maze chase.
The paper airplane scores 2,000 points, which is only 1,600 less than you get for getting all the flowers in a level before the time bonus factors in. I wouldn’t know where to begin with balancing a game like this that has such a heavy emphasis on combat, but I know the bonus items are overvalued.
Then again, I did run through all the levels using the infinite lives dip switch and I never got bored with that, nor did I get bored when I limited myself to three lives and three bonus lives. The level design is never dull. In fact, there’s times where I was shocked by the game suddenly presenting a small box as the entire stage, and it was so exhilarating when it happened. Frankly, it’s because the engine is built around close calls, near misses, and great escapes. Even with dumb AI, Spatter soars because the maze designs are built around making that dumb AI work towards a greater good. Jeez, it’s such a shame Spatter got no love from their own developers, then or now. I’m stunned they even bothered with making it a +1 in the Genesis Mini II. Sega tends to re-release the same handful of famous games over and over again. Spatter is good enough to anchor a collection of their hidden gems, because it might be the shiniest of the bunch. Hell, let Nintendo remake it as a Mario Kart spin-off. It feels like kin anyway! Verdict: YES!
Super Pac-Man Platform: Arcade Released September 26, 1982 Designed by Toru Iwatani Published by Namco Arcade Archives Release Included in Pac-Man Museum+ Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet
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Super Pac-Man is the rare game where my review is written for me by the developer, who called it, simply put, “boring.” Well then, I’ll just get back to watching this video of ten hours of silence occasionally interrupted by the Taco Bell dong.
Okay, okay! So, why is Super Pac-Man boring? It’s a little more complicated than “the maze sucks” like I said in my original Pac-Man review. One problem is that it looks boring. Super Pac-Man’s unfathomable decision to replace dots that cover nearly every surface of the maze with large sprites strips a large part of the original’s liveliness. The 240 dots have been replaced by 15 keys that open 37 gates (though not every gate can be opened), 4 power pellets, 2 super pellets, and 31 items. It seems like it’s still a lot of stuff, but the keys don’t even need to be collected in their entirety to move on to the next stage. Huh? A Pac-Man maze chase with optional objects is kind of weird, isn’t it? Oddly, you are still expected to chomp the power pellets and super pellets. Those aren’t optional. And don’t say “keys aren’t food, that’s why!” because neither are tennis shoes but eventually you have to eat those too. Look at the slideshow above. Doesn’t it just seem.. dead? Amazingly, a mess of abstract dots can have a LOT more personality than a series of sprites that look like food. Or footwear.
While ghost movement is more randomized, all the personalities from the original game carry over, along with their “SCATTER” corners. I will say that Clyde seems to follow you more often. In fact, I’d say that he frequently feels like a second red ghost. Also, the ghosts have random seizures now. I mean that literally, too. They freeze up and go all twitchy, apparently some kind of transition between “modes” though it doesn’t seem to be between SCATTER and CHASE. I honestly don’t know what’s happening when it happens.
And the “super” concept was also botched, but not for the reasons creator Iwatani thinks. He’s of the opinion that Pac-Man gets too big, and not that it doesn’t do anything to the ghosts. All Super Pac does is grant you the ability to dash and eat the gates without the need for a key. The dash can work in collaboration with power pellets to eat the ghosts easier via the dash, which is theoretically a gameplay plus. But, when you stop and think about it, it’s really only adding an extra step to the thing you can do anyway from the first game. It’s not fitting for the term “super.” Frankly, it’s a massive let-down. If Super Pac interacted directly with the ghosts by itself, like say, squashing them into the ground, causing them to be frozen in a spot for a while, that would be better than what they came up with. Or, maybe they did come up with it but changed their minds, because something like that happens in one of the cutscenes, complete with new sprites for the crushed ghosts. The whole concept of keys and gates feels like it only exists to justify the giant Pac-Man. Being able to eat as many gates as you can while big was foolhardy. Even in later stages when it wears off faster, there’s enough time to grab the super pellet and then crash through all the center gates (assuming you hold the run button), opening up the tunnel (where the ghosts slow down, just like the first game) with no tension at all.
Let’s face it: Super Pac-Man only exists as wish fulfillment because one of the cutscenes in the first game had you turn into a giant Pac-Man and Namco probably got letters asking “how do you do that in the game?” Oh and the cutscenes are back this time, and they’re fine as always. I still think Jr. Pac-Man’s “boy meets girl” story was just about the most adorable thing I’ve seen in any coin-op. It’s weird because in these Pac-Man games, all the gags land.
I’m not a game designer, but I could easily come up with a better idea for the super dots: eliminate the timer for them. Instead, they only work on one thing. Instead of being able to crash as many gates as you can, you can only do one before shrinking into regular Pac-Man. But, if you hit a ghost while on one, the ghost is taken out for, say, ten to twelve seconds and it activates the roulette star in the center for points. The ghosts experience a slightly longer downtime than they would be if eliminated via a chomp and a return to the ghost house. Also, make it so the effect isn’t diminished as you get deeper into the game, unlike the duration of being energized by the power pellets. This would add so much risk/reward. Anything would be better than how they are now. Actually, it’s the strangest thing, because the super pellets are both overpowered and under-powered at the same time. Under-powered in the satisfaction sense, but overpowered in the gameplay sense. Super Pac-Man is an absolute disaster of a game.
There’s bonus rounds that are of the “clear the screen” variety where you’re permanently Super Pac-Man. The fact that they didn’t have to change a thing and this concept works tells you everything you need to know about how overpowered those super pellets are in the early stages.
But yea, Super Pac-Man’s biggest flaw is the maze just plain stinks. There’s too many short wall segments, which can get even shorter if you open the gates around them. Pac-Man never fully demands you make too tight of turns. Super Pac-Man asks it constantly. It’s also tougher to use the walls as a sort of guider for Pac-Man. The way the walls felt in the original game almost gives the maze a race track like quality. If that’s the case, Super Pac-Man’s maze is more like a parking lot full of U-turns and tight squeezes. It makes for a more frustrating controlling experience. Frustration that increases significantly when you try to aim Super Pac. I’d be VERY impressed if someone was good enough to use it without ever letting go of the sprinting button. Sometimes, it honestly feels like Super Pac’s center of mass isn’t actually in the center. I wondered if maybe it was my emulator, but the problem doesn’t exist at all when you’re normal Pac. It’s so odd that Super Pac-Man doesn’t have a maze tailored to the giant-sized Pac-Man’s strengths at all.
Behold, the one and only time I got the max value of the roulette wheel. You get 2,000 points for matching two items and 5,000 if the two items are that level’s “dot.” Often, I didn’t go for the roulette at all because it was either too high risk to do so OR my only means of escape would have involved using a super pellet when I didn’t want to. I hate this game.
So the tricky controls make Super Pac-Man harder, right? Actually, I habitually get to level 10 with minimal fuss, and have reached as high as level 21 without actually playing what I would consider to be all that good. My best game was 207,820 to my father’s 60,960. On one hand, it’s satisfying to have annihilated a sweet old man who I have it on good authority has a wife and kids. Shame on me. But, I got so many lucky breaks in that score. As in a ghost literally on my tail only to have one of their freeze-and-shake moments, or hell, once they just slowed down for no reason in the middle of the board. Their speed literally reduced and I couldn’t figure out why. It was like they entered a tunnel, but they hadn’t. Now granted, the difficulty can be adjusted with the dip switches, but the maze can’t be. A single aspect of Super Pac-Man put a smile on my face: eating the ghosts inside the ghost house as Super Pac-Man. It’s just funny how rude it is. Otherwise, this is a baffling game that, again, I think only exists because of that one cut scene from the first game. Before starting this review, the only game in the original series I considered worse than this was Pac & Pal. Having played both back-to-back, I’ve changed my mind. Of all the games in the franchise, Super Pac-Man has the fewest redeeming qualities, and if that isn’t grounds for earning the title of “worst of the franchise” I don’t know what is. Verdict: NO!
Pac & Pal aka Pac-Man & Chomp Chomp Platform: Arcade Released July, 1983 Published by Namco Arcade Archives Release Included in Pac-Man Museum+ Included in Arcade1Up’sPac-Man Deluxe Cabinet
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Congratulations Pac & Pal: you’re officially not the worst game in the franchise, try as you might. You are an absolute bore of a game, but I genuinely think there’s something charming about you. Pac & Pal is a fairly problematic game, owed largely to a dull concept. It’s probably best to think of Pac & Pal as a reworking of Super Pac-Man. The gate concept that I thought completely failed the first time around was retained, only now the keys are replaced with playing cards that correspond to one of eleven “chambers” on the playfield. The cards aren’t randomized, and like with Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal starts by placing cards close by their corresponding chamber, IE the cherry card is right next to the cherry chamber. Then, the more you progress, the further you have to travel after turning over a card. So, in later levels, a card in the bottom left corner will likely unlock the upper right chamber, and so forth. That aspect is a big turn-off for a few players, but I think it’s fine. It’s a perfectly logical challenge progression for this type of concept. If it’s not fun, it’s because the base concept is just boring. Even when you factor in the addition of the “Pal.”
Unlike Super Pac-Man, where you can go around and collect all the keys, Pac & Pal caps you at a max of three unlocked items at a time. Also, that orange area in the center replaces the tunnels as the “slow the ghosts down” escape method.
The titular twist is that an NPC “pal” named Miru wanders around the maze until you unlock a chamber. As soon you do, it makes a beeline to the item. The name “Pal” is a bit of a misnomer, as the Pal doesn’t bring the items to you. In fact, it’s more like a kleptomaniac member of the Ghost Monsters that doesn’t help you as a “pal” would. Instead, it drags the item to the ghost chamber, costing you the points for it. You have two advantages over the Pal. When Miru drags an item, it moves at half speed and it’s guaranteed that, no matter where the item is, it’ll cross directly under the ghost house before walking around and entering it. If you can snag all the items without Miru managing to vanish any in the ghost house, you get bonus points. Miru doesn’t hurt you, but it can screw you if it collects one of the power-ups. Also, I found the collision detection to be kind of unforgiving, especially when trying to catch Miru and the item it’s dragging.
Trying to chase down Miru before it gets the items into the ghost house isn’t quite as exciting as I think they were hoping for. Also, it doesn’t matter if you play the version with Miru or you play the version that uses the dog from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. That version was commissioned by Bally Midway, but it was never released in America because, well, come on. They knew this game stank. Thank God for General Computer’s Jr. Pac-Man.
The other twist is that you don’t chomp the ghosts. The “power pellets” are the two items in the center above the cherry and strawberry, and this time around, you fire a short-range projectile that stuns the enemies. It scores the same as chomping, capping out at 1,600 points for hitting all four, but you can actually score a lot more with it. In the early stages, the power lasts longer than the enemies are stunned, and if you time it right, you can continue to score 1,600 points for re-stunning enemies before the power wears off. The problem with it is that it front-loads the scoring to the start of the game instead of the later levels. It’s also probably too powerful, as you can spray your projectile through up to two walls and still hit the ghosts. This includes when they’re in the ghost houses. This is the main reason the game never once feels even a little like Pac-Man. It feels more like Namco wanted a tank game with a Pac-Man heritage.
Are we 100% sure this started development as a Pac-Man game?
Again, I’m open to the possibility that this formula could make for an exciting game, and it’s just that Pac & Pal fumbled the execution, largely because of the terrible shape of the maze. But, perhaps the maze is only terrible because the attack patterns of the ghosts from the original Pac-Man are largely retained. I’ll never understand the logic in that, for this game or for Super Pac-Man. Those behavior patterns were created and then presumably fine-tuned to work specifically within Pac-Man’s 240 dot maze. They make little sense in a game where you don’t have to cover nearly the entire surface of the playfield. They don’t work when mazes have dead ends or hairpin turns. Take Pinky, who is programmed to anticipate Pac-Man’s next move. In Pac-Man, it targets the area roughly four spaces in front of Pac-Man, right? Well, wouldn’t “anticipating your next move” have a completely different meaning in a game where the object is to turn over cards at a max of three of a time, then go grab the corresponding items? Shouldn’t a couple of the ghosts have their attacks be based on, you know, the cards and/or items? Also, there’s now a Dig Dug-like olly olly oxen free moment where the ghosts all go after Pac-Man. Oh, and the “ghosts have seizures” bit from Super Pac-Man is retained. I think they really wanted it to work this time, and while it’s a better game than Super Pac-Man.. it’s not by a big margin. Nah, Pac & Pal sucks.
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Hey look, I’m all for experimenting with established formulas. It’s sort of why I wanted to start Indie Gamer Chick in the first place. But there’s tweaking a winning formula and then there’s forgoing it all together. Pac & Pal, simply put, is not a Pac-Man game. Actually, part of me wonders if Pac & Pal started life as something different altogether. Besides the ghost house, there’s nothing inherently Pac-Manish about the gameplay. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a drawing board concept that they thought would maybe work, and they attached Pac-Man to hedge their bets. But the Pac-Man elements are the problem. The ghosts aren’t fun to be pursued by this time around. The one big change, the power-up, flopped because it lacks the satisfaction that eating had. It’s not a total wash, like I expected going into this. In those rare instances where you have a chance to work with the Pal and not be in a position to race against it, it’s satisfying enough that I get what Namco was aiming for. Maybe if they had tailored the ghosts around that and not just copy & pasted them from OG Pac-Man, it would have worked. One of the great ironies of gaming: Pac & Pal is the Pac-Man game doomed by its own connection to the franchise. Verdict: NO!
Actually, we DID have a lot of fun with this video. My family probably thinks I’ve lost my f*cking mind, but I left it playing in the background and cheered every time it rang. Soon, they were playing along and doing it too. We left it all day yesterday and it was so fun by the end. Every time it rang, we’d burst into cheers and applause. In those rare instances where the bong rings not long after the previous one, we’d go completely bonkers. It’s so smart, too, not overdoing the bong. You really never know when it’ll ring. I’m telling you, this is my new favorite thing.
This review would not have been possible without Chad Birch’s excellent write-up on Pac-Man’s ghosts. A must-read that helped me to better appreciate what Pac-Man accomplished. And I’d like to also give a shout out to the inspiration of that post, the Pac-Man Dossier by Jamie Pittman. If you’ve never read about the ghost patterns in Pac-Man, do me a favor: read those, then play Pac-Man and tell me if the experience feels somehow changed to you. It’s the strangest thing but it feels transformative. I’ve never experienced that before with any game. It’s wild.
Pac-Man Platform: Arcade Released May 22, 1980 Designed by Toru Iwatani Published by Namco Arcade Archives Release Included in Pac-Man Museum+ Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet
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I was born in 1989, and I started gaming regularly when I got a PlayStation for Christmas in 1996. Pac-Man had seen better days by that point. It wasn’t an important character to my childhood at all. Not even a little bit. I’m sure my older readers will have an aneurysm hearing that, but it’s true. I did play Pac-Man games, of course. Soon after I got that PlayStation, but before I got the Nintendo 64 for my 9th birthday in July, 1998 that changed my life and really made gaming my thing, my father got me a pair of the original Namco Museum releases for my PlayStation. Volumes 1 & 3, aka the ones that everyone had. I don’t remember playing most of the thirteen games in them, but I know for certain I only played Pac-Man once. Why on Earth would I want to play that boring old version when Ms. Pac-Man had four mazes and bonus fruits that hopped around the mazes instead of just sitting there lifelessly in the center? To 7 year old me, the original world-conquering Pac-Man held no appeal at all. I’m not proud to say that I stuck to my guns on that long after I had launched Indie Gamer Chick in 2011. Pac-Man? Boring! I didn’t change my tune on it until last summer, when my sister asked me pointedly “how is Pac-Man’s one maze any different from pinball? You wouldn’t complain that a pinball table plays the same game, and only that one game.” I couldn’t believe how ashamed of myself I was at that moment. She was completely right, and I had always been completely wrong about Pac-Man.
Few things in life are so satisfying as the 4th chomp of a single power pellet. And yes, I’m playing with five lives instead of three.
The weird thing is, I kept that bias against the original Pac-Man despite taking the time to better understand the maze chase genre as a whole. It was the Atari 2600 port (which is one of several Pac-Reviews in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include), along with my fandom of games like Popeye and Jr. Pac-Man that helped me to figure out why some games succeed and others fail. It’s all about the chase itself. Not the collecting, or the turning the tables on the enemies, or even the presentation and/or theme of the whole package. The entertainment comes mostly from the close calls and exhilaration you get from scratching out just enough distance to free yourself, or just barely beating out a chaser hot on your heels to win a level. Being charming, looking good, or having memorable characters is nice, but if the chase is no good, it doesn’t matter. I never understood why Pac-Man succeeded where so many others failed, but the really weird thing is neither did Namco, or the man who made Pac-Man to begin with.
There’s so many idiosyncrasies that make Pac-Man.. well, Pac-Man that I couldn’t possibly count them all. For example, the places where I’ve put the arrows are known as “blind alleys.” The ghosts can NEVER travel upward along those specific paths. They can go down, but never up. If you perform it right, you can even park in the lower right hand blind alley and remain safe. The ghosts will never find you. Pros use this to take potty breaks (though the use of this is controversial).
Look at many interviews with Toru Iwatani and he’s sure to conclude that people relate to Pac-Man.. especially women.. because Pac-Man, you know, eats. Eating! That’s a thing people do! Especially us women folk, whereas men are too busy for that, what with all the bread winning, and usually opt instead for good old fashioned photosynthesis. Of course, other games are about eating too, but only Pac-Man became a global icon. Or maybe it was the shape, serendipitously created (discovered?) when Iwatani took a single wedge from a piece of pizza? Or the name, which was originally “Puck-Man” until someone turned the P into an F and Namco had second thoughts. Or was it the ghosts? The colorful, menacing pursuers that were each programmed to have their own personalities? The sound effects? Sure, those all matter, but I think if you leave everything the same but have a crappy maze design and Pac-Man doesn’t blow up like it did. The straightaways at the bottom are the exact right length to make players hold their breaths. There’s no unreasonable twisty-turny moments. The ghosts slowing down in the tunnels lends an almost Hanna-Barbera vibe to the chase where you can imagine the ghosts shaking their fists at you in anger as the distance between you and them increases. The eating part is also only exciting because, YOU GUESSED IT, its effect on the chase. Eating dots slows you down, and there’s so many dots! That’s a lot of space where you aren’t going your max speed. The maze is, frankly, kind of perfect.
My best 5 man game.
My best 3 man game.
Namco figured everything was responsible for Pac-Man’s success, except the maze itself. There, their attitude seemed to be “any maze will do!” They went on to prove this twice in a row. The next Pac-Man game THEY made, Super Pac-Man, turned the abstract dots into the type of food us eating eaters eat. In theory, if eating is the appeal, it should have been a big hit, but it wasn’t. Maybe because the game itself sucked, mostly because the maze sucked. It didn’t lend itself perfectly to the best moments in maze chases. Scratching out distances, close calls, and nail-biting sections? Nope, just a mess of walls and dots with no rhyme or reason. Then they repeated the same folly with Pac & Pal. For all I know, the base concept of those games might be ingenious, but with the mazes they feature, there’s no way to know for sure. I kind of wish a ROM hack existed that changed the mazes. Weirdly, it was a rogue “enhancement board” developer named General Computer that fundamentally got it with Pac-Man and made the best of those early sequels: Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man.
Pac-Man is one of the first cases of the original Japanese script having helpful tips that were lost in translation. Specifically Pinky being “Speedy.” In fact, Pinky doesn’t move faster, but the word for what it meant didn’t have a perfect one-to-one English translation. In Japan, its name is “Machibuse” which roughly means “to ambush” or “being ambushed.” Unlike some bad translations, it’s not a stretch to see how they reached for a word that conveys the concept of an ambush and came up with “Speedy.” The “speedy one” is usually the one ahead, right? Pinky’s attack logic is to use the direction Pac-Man is facing and target an area roughly four lengths ahead of Pac-Man. Clyde (the orange one) is in the same boat. “Pokey” is his name in the US. WTF does that even mean? In Japan, his name translates to “feigning ignorance.”
If the maze design itself is the most important aspect, the chasers are a very close second. When I play a maze chase for the first time, sometimes I need time to figure out if a maze works or not. That’s rarely the case with chasers. If they just immediately make a beeline for you, it’s usually not a good sign. Pac-Man doesn’t do that, and I think that factored really big into why it took off. While the ghosts each have a unique personality and accompanying attack method, all four ghosts collectively run on three “modes” that apply at the same time to all four. The modes are called SCATTER, CHASE, and FRIGHTENED. The main two are SCATTER and CHASE, which run on a fixed timer, with SCATTER running much shorter. Sometimes astronomically shorter. CHASE can last seventeen minutes before giving players another SCATTER, though by that point, you’ll probably just finish the level or die. In SCATTER, each ghost goes to their own designated corner to wander on “patrol” for a few seconds. In CHASE, the ghosts each have a strategy based on using a “target” on the board that refreshes every step they take. The red one always targets the space Pac-Man is currently occupying and takes the shortest route to get there, leading to it feeling like it chases you the most directly. The pink one tries to anticipate your move by targeting four spaces in front of the direction you’re facing. You can use this to scare Pinky off. If you’re near a junction and you move straight at him, his target tile will be BEHIND HIM and cause him to change directions. It works every single time.
The blue ghost bases its position on Blinky (the red one) and Pac-Man’s position, and if Blinky closes in on you, it’s not rare for Inky to be close by. Finally, Clyde, the orange one, really is kind of a coward. If he’s far away from Pac-Man, he uses Blinky’s targeting system, but as soon as he gets within eight spaces of Pac-Man, he retreats to the left hand corner using the same target tile as his SCATTER mode target. While he’s not specifically dangerous as he doesn’t target you, what he’s really doing is cutting off a potential means of escape. There’s a LOT more complexity. Like seriously, read this and try committing it to memory. I made it to Chapter 3 and about two minutes later, as I tried making sense of which tile counted and how each frame of animation mattered a great deal, my ears started dripping blood. I took it as a sign to stop and just enjoy knowing that I could stare-down the pink ghost.
The ghosts in their “SCATTER” patrol zones.
I was wrong about Pac-Man being boring. Now that I approach it the same way I do a pinball table, knowing that I’m playing one specific maze that operates under one specific set of rules, I think I kind of love this game. Maybe someday, I’ll even commit the professional patterns to memory. Right now, I’m just content to practice and get better at anticipating the moves of the ghosts and utilizing it to make the type of moves I once thought were bold, but now I know are completely safe. Besides, I kind of like how good I am at it now, where scoring a 1,600 point 4th chomp is still a big deal to me. I don’t know if I ever want to cross that threshold where scoring 50,000 points isn’t a “good game” anymore. There’s something comforting about knowing just enough about Pac-Man to do alright, but not enough that I could play it for hours, completely zoned out. It’s a game I have to pay attention to, and that’s kind of what I want out of a maze chase anyway. If I reached the point where my brain is calculating what frame cycle I’m currently in so I can pinpoint exactly what direction the edible ghosts will turn, that doesn’t sound as fun for me. Hey, 50,000 is a good score for me. It’s a pitiful score for pros. But I bet I’m the one having more fun. Verdict: YES!
Pac-Man Plus Platform: Arcade Released March, 1983 Published by Bally Midway Included in Arcade1Up’sPac-Man Deluxe Cabinet NO MODERN NON-ARCADE1UP RELEASE
Original Pac-Man Maze
Pac-Man Plus Maze
Pac-Man Plus is the unofficial-official ROM hack that DIDN’T find its audience. It’s unclear how involved Namco was. MobyGames says it was completely unauthorized by Namco. The Pac-Man Wiki says it was actually made by Namco. Everyone seems to agree that Plus was commissioned by Bally Midway to compete with the prevalence of popular-but-unauthorized enhancement kits and ROM hacks (some of which I reviewed in Pac-Man Museum: The Games They Couldn’t or Wouldn’t Include), the most famous being one that just sped up the game significantly. While Plus retains the same maze as the original Pac-Man, the gameplay is fairly heavily modified. Oh, and the maze is teal now. My father speculated teal might be kinder on CRT monitors than the stark blue of the original. Real life Pac-Man cabinets are NOTORIOUS for permanently searing the maze’s shapes and features into the monitors themselves. By 1983, enough Pac-Man units were probably experiencing monitor-scaring that arcade operators requested that it, you know, not do that anymore. That’s just my pops’ speculation, though. Another cosmetic change is that the first item is a can of Coca-Cola, which is apparently one of the first examples of product placement in a video game. Also, when you eat a power pellet, the ghosts now have stems on their head. It seems like a needlessly cruel reminder that, yes, they’re food now. As if being dead isn’t bad enough. The cosmetic changes are fine and honestly, the stem-head thing is cute, but gameplay is king.
“Aww sh*t. We’re food. Wait, how did ole Pinky not change?”
There are three notable changes to the standard Pac-Man gameplay. (1) The ghosts are “more aggressive” now, by which it means they spend less time in the “Scatter” algorithm and more time in “Chase.” They also move faster, but then again, so do you. (2) The power pellets are now red kryptonite instead of green. In other words, you never know what will happen. Sometimes you’ll get the standard “all four ghosts can be eaten” from the first game, but sometimes the power pellets only work on three of the four ghosts. When this happens, one ghost seemingly chosen at random will not be affected. What the hell? Well, this is “professional-proofing.” You see, by 1983, the patterns that skilled players used to manipulate the ghosts and rack up high scores were widely known. Instead of creating new “marching orders” for the four ghosts, having one not become vulnerable completely wrecks the established patterns used by pros. Oh, you can still use patterns, but you will also always need to think on your feet. Other effects also include making the ghosts invisible, making the stage invisible, and making the stage AND the remaining dots/pellets invisible. Because OF COURSE that happens.
Well, it wouldn’t be a mod of an established game from the early 80s if “invisibility” wasn’t one of its tricks.
(3) The bonus items aren’t just for points anymore. They’re functionally extra power pellets. Not just power pellets, but SUPER INVISIBILITY Power Pellets! When you eat them, the ghosts become edible, but they turn invisible (facepalm) until the blinking starts. If you eat them, they score double the points they normally do: 400, 800, 1600, 3200. Being able to fully utilize this requires you to have a fairly good understanding of the behavior of the ghosts running the “FRIGHTENED” algorithm, since you won’t be able to eyeball which direction they take. Wait, how does FRIGHTENED work? Oh, the directions the ghosts turn are based on a pseudo-random number generator. Well crap. So unless you memorize the frame-by-frame gameplay to be able to predict the behaviors of the ghosts, chomping them with the item is pure luck. Anyway, I played Pac-Man Plus a few years ago and I didn’t really like it all that much, but now that I’ve taken the time to understand the idiosyncrasies of Pac-Man, actually.. it’s okay! It’s not an amazing upgrade. It’s fine, but it is something you have to be really into Pac-Man to appreciate. I can also understand why purists wouldn’t like it. I had a decent enough time messing around with it, but it’s no surprise why Ms. Pac-Man is the official-unofficial ROM hack that became a hit and Pac-Man Plus was relegated to the status of historic curio. Verdict: YES!
Ignore the “high score” which was done via cheating tomfoolery. This was my legitimate high score.
Sunman aka Superman Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Never Released Nearly Complete Prototype Directed by Kenji Eno
Developed by EIM Group
Non-Publisher: Sunsoft
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Sunsoft might be most famous for their Batman games, but did you know they tried their hand at a Superman game as well? Sunsoft turned to the studio best known in America for a game called Panic Restaurant. EIM Group was led by Kenji Eno, who tragically died in 2013 at just 42. Their game, known at this time as simply “Superman” had the engine mostly finished and the first level programmed. The prototype even features an impressive chiptune take on the iconic John Williams Superman theme. So, what happened? According to Eno, DC Comics rejected the game because Superman “can’t die” and “can’t take damage.” Maybe he was told that, but I don’t buy that’s the real reason that Sunsoft removed Superman from their Superman game. Taito’s Superman arcade game was already a few years old by this point, and spoiler: Superman can take damage and die. Also, would this be a good time to point out that Sunsoft planned this for a late 1992 release. What storyline did DC Comics have planned for the Man of Steel in late 1992? (checks notes) Ah yes, Superman takes damage and dies. More than likely, Sunsoft had simply lost the DC license, and perhaps never had the Superman license at all. Either way, Sunsoft ordered the game to be changed to a generic superhero: Sunman.
Sunman is more powerful than a locomotive. Impressive for someone who is approximately one foot tall. That or this locomotive is HUGE. Also, while playing this game, I kept thinking “if Daredevil wore a cape.”
Another possibility is that DC inspected the game and found it to be boring. The sad truth is, I was pulling for Sunman to be a quality lost treasure of a game because it was designed by someone who died young. Instead, I’m thinking my YES! for Eno will have to wait for Panic Restaurant, which I will review in 2024 (UPDATE: the review is up!). I have to do that before I do his NES “port” of Altered Beast which, yes, exists and.. wow. Yea, that sure is a game that.. happened. Sunman would have gone down as a very middle of the road, bordering on outright bad superhero action game. A game that, oddly enough, has a lot more in common with Nintendo’s Kirby than Sunsoft’s Batman. Hear me out. The big hook with Sunman is the ability to fly at any time. Using that ability, you can circumvent large sections of a couple of the levels, just like you can in the early Kirby games. Unlike Kirby, you might want to fly over the levels rather than play them “honestly” because the brawling is just terrible in Sunman.
I found most of my entertainment in Sunman came from laughing at all the different ways the developers worked to nullify their own gameplay concept. You’re “Superman” and you can fly anywhere, and you generally move faster than the bad guys. What do you do so that people actually play the game? Well, you raise the platform high off the ground, and then you can put an invisible ceiling at where the camera view ends, thus funneling the player into direct conflict with enemies. And this is why a 2D Superman action game can’t work. Eh, at least it’s better than that Kemco abomination.
Sunman has a collision problem. When you fly, it’s hard to punch the enemies who also fly. Your collision box is essentially a square that’s bigger than not-Superman. This box shrinks when you’re not flying and instead walking along the ground. But of course, you have to fly a lot. The level design is built around this, and the combat is just awful as a result. The flying fisticuffs were sloppy at best. There’s also a distinct lack of enemy variety. It’s mostly generic guys with guns flying in pairs and shooting lasers. If not them, it’s usually a little robot that’s firing a laser beam up. The “platforming” stages are never fun. They always feel like a Superman game that hates that it’s a Superman game, because it’s so limited. And, even worse, there’s no power in those stages besides flying. Maybe Sunman would have been too easy if Superman could use his heat vision, but who cares? I’d have had a LOT more fun if I could have zapped enemies out of the sky. There’s also no item pick-ups at all, including health refills. If you’re low on life, you have to beat the boss of that stage. Don’t worry, only one is really hard. Maybe two. As far as I can tell, there’s no point in exploring. Just the same handful of enemies to punch until the five stages are up. There’s occasionally crushing obstacles you have to time your movement to avoid, but even those had terrible collision detection on their edges. Good lord, a Superman game that needs to baby proof corners.
This, the final boss, presumably would have been General Zod if this had gone forward as a Superman game? I assume? He teleports around the room, so I don’t suppose you can discount Lex Luthor in a power suit or perhaps Mxyzptlk.
Occasionally, Sunman trades the platforming sections for all-flying sections. Some of them are still brawlers with the crappy air punch. Others take a shmup approach and now you can fire your laser eyes. Which actually begs the question: why Superman, or hell, “Sunman” would allow himself to take damage on the platforming stages to begin with? The first stage’s boss is a giant helicopter that you shoot. Oddly, in the Superman prototype, you fight this from a laying down position. This is changed in Sunman to the standing position, increasing the difficulty because there’s so much more of you to take damage. I figured they got rid of the laying down sprite altogether, but that’s not the case. After you fight ANOTHER boss with an entirely different standing up sprite that’s not suitable at all for a shmup boss, you finally lay down to heroically fly through a speed tunnel. And it’s horrible. Seriously, this would be like Battletoads speed bike levels of infamous if it had ever come out. It’s the last section before the final boss, but it moves too fast and the squeezes are far too tight. I tried playing it with save states, but I got bored and swapped them for rewinding after about fifteen minutes of dying. One spongy last boss later and the credits were rolling to what would have been a truly boring Superman game.
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I don’t think Superman is necessarily doomed to always produce mediocre games. But, it’s sad that, had Sunman come out, for all its problems, it would have been one of the better Superman games of the 20th century, or ever, really. And it’s just a barely more interesting take on the same type of combat that was already tedious in Taito’s coin-op. If DC really did pass on Sunsoft Superman, I’m leaning more towards DC’s licensing department recognized it wouldn’t have gotten the type of acclaim the Sunsoft Batman games got. Instead, it would have fed into the idea that Superman is an inherently dull character. And he’s not, so I get it if that’s why they said “no.” What’s bonkers is that we’ve made it to 2024 and Atari still can legitimately make a case for having made the best Superman game (scroll to the second-to-last game in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part One for my review). It came out a full ten years before I was born, and with all the technology that has come along, how is THAT still the best console Superman? It’s shameful.
And, as boring as Sunman is, it could have been a LOT worse.
Frankly, it’s not a mystery why Atari’s Superman is THE video Superman. It’s the only Superman game that feels like it’s Superman doing Superman things. Rescuing Lois Lane, changing in a phone booth, repairing a broken bridge, and jailing Lex Luthor. They even managed to work in either x-ray vision or super vision, depending on how you look at it. The Kemco game TRIED all that, and as maligned as their Superman game is, they really did give an honest effort at creating a Superman adventure with all the traits you’d hope for. The only problem is the engine itself is just pitiful. The talent just wasn’t there to create a game that matched the vision. That’s basically what went wrong with the infamous Superman 64 as well. Focusing on his flying is a bad idea. Focusing on combat is too. Superman is an adventure character. Treat him like it and the action side will take care of itself.
This is the real “level complete” screenshot of Sunman. “GRATE!” Oh my god.
I really get a feeling that Superman is an assignment few game designers want. His invulnerability and god-like powers are considered to be too creatively limiting. So, like, why not make it not about living or dying but about saving people or not saving them? Make the Baba Is You of superhero games. Give players multiple possible solutions to a series of adventure challenges where you’re just trying to save the dam from bursting, or stop a missile, and yes, maybe sometimes throw hands with villains, and make the antagonizing factor time itself. “Will Superman make it in time to save the day?” is the quintessential Superman story. Just do that as a game! And don’t have him have to punch waves of identical baddies along the way. It’s Superman! If he’s punching them, shouldn’t their brains be in orbit? Verdict: NO!
I’ve reviewed four Batman games so far. I’ve done the coin-op by Atari Games and the never-released in America TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine version that’s a strange top-down action-maze game. Then there’s the incredibly bland Batman Returns Atari Lynx game that, let’s face it, is never coming out again. None of those games got a YES! and frankly, none of them were the Batman games anyone wants to see a modern release or review of. In fact, I’ve only awarded one YES! to the Dark Knight so far. That was for the also never released in America version of Batman Returns for the Sega Master System. But, nobody really wants THAT game either. The one everyone wants is Batman: The Video Game for the NES. But, there’s actually two other games that share the name. Even weirder is that they’re entirely original games. Sunsoft created unique versions of Batman for each platform. Then, those games got a sort of sequel, called Return of the Joker if they’re 8-bit or Revenge of the Joker if they’re 16-bit. Eventually, I’ll do a Definitive Review of them too. So, let’s take a look at the three games that wear the name Batman: The Video Game. Also, for the first time, I’m going to assign value to a set that doesn’t yet exist.
GAME REVIEWS
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
Batman: The Video Game Platform: NES Released December 28, 1989 (JP) February 13, 1990 (US) Developed by Sunsoft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Where does he get those wonderful graphics?
Batman: The Video Game is one of the most celebrated licensed titles on the NES, and one of the most influential games for the current crop of indie developers. Seriously, I totally understand now why The Storied Sword cites it, even if its gameplay has more in common with Ninja Gaiden. When anyone talks about bad licensed NES games, you can bet your bottom dollar that “Batman was good” will be a counter to that. And it’s especially weird for two reasons. The first is that this feels like a generic sci-fi platformer that was repurposed as a Batman game. For all anyone knows, that might be the legitimate story. Journey to Silius, a Sunsoft-developed NES game currently available to Switch Online subscribers, was intended to be a Terminator game, but the license expired before the game was finished. If nothing else, it shows flipping one property to another is something Sunsoft was experienced with. Batman: The Video Game has so little in common with Batman: The Batman that it’d be almost comforting if they just plugged the Dark Knight into an existing sci-fi build and called it a day. Even the cut scenes, which are the only aspects where you’re like “hey, look, Batman!” are bad. A+ for the Batmobile. That looks just like the movie. The Joker, on the other hand, looks more like the late, great David Warner. Or Guy Fawkes. Or Steve Buscemi.
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The second reason that I’m kind of surprised by the reverence of NES Batman is that it eventually becomes maddening. One of those releases that the generation who made strategy guides and Game Genies a viable business call “Nintendo Hard.” In fact, this and Battletoads are among the most commonly cited “I love that game! Never could get past the X level” titles on the NES. I don’t get it. So, let me get this straight: you love the game, but not enough to actually finish it? Are you sure “love” is the word you want? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say you had a crush on Batman: The Video Game, but then it turned out to be a bitch and you lost interest? Not that my generation is any better. It’s always strange to me when I beat a five year old Xbox game and discover that the achievement for finishing the game is one of those ultra rare ones with the angelic chime, because only like 1% of all owners ever bothered to get that far. The hell? Doesn’t anyone finish games anymore? Well, *I* finished Batman: The Video Game, and I can see why someone who rented the game for a weekend when they were a kid might say they “loved it.” I can also see why people didn’t finish it.
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Oh, I cheated like crazy with save states and eventually rewind, but I did finish it. Batman is a moderately decent sci-fi platformer that just completely loses its mind in the last two (of only five) levels in the game. This is mostly owed to a series of jumping “puzzles” with two elements that would be considered challenging enough on their own being stapled together. The first is having sections of the walls be lethal to the touch. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with forcing players to aim their jumps. That’s sort of the point of a platformer. The second is placing enemies at the top of columns you’re jumping up. Hey, that’s fine too when your player always has three projectiles they can throw mid-air. Combining the two elements would be stretching it, but Batman: The Video Game isn’t done yet. How about cranking up the hit points on the enemy at the top of that column? What about then giving that enemy at the top a lethal projectile spray that it fires in rapid bursts, and then having the column you climb be absurdly high up, so if you fall, you have to start the whole process over. At this point, it feels like the idea of making a fun game had long since been abandoned in favor of straight-up trolling players.
See that little thing hanging from the platform? They drop fast moving drones that can be used to “farm” weapon point refills and health, but they’re also a legitimately threatening enemy, especially when you’re given little movement clearance and surrounded by health-draining pools of acid on both sides. So, you would still prefer to kill it instead of grinding up resources? Have fun with that. They take well over a dozen hits with your high-powered items to kill, enough to drain half of a full 99 point item reserve. What the hell? It feels like the designers got one note too many from management and cranked all enemy stats to the max out of spite. Batman desperately needs rebalancing more than anything else.
On its own terms, I’d call Batman: The Video Game unplayable after the third world. Enemies are too spongy and too cheaply placed. The bosses of those later stages are even worse, and with the exception of the Joker, there’s absolutely no effort to theme them in a way that makes sense for a Batman game. Seriously, for all the teasing I did about the NES Ninja Turtles having little to do with the franchise, Batman is easily the gold standard for shoehorning a license into a game that has nothing to do with it. Because of that, this is a game that should have aged a lot worse than it did. But, thanks to all the bells & whistles of emulation, Batman is a better game now than ever before. Since all the pieces were already in place for a good game, and maybe even a great game, I really enjoyed the “modern” NES Batman experience. That’s because I was able to set my own terms.
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In order to not to completely trivialize the challenge, I only used save states when I reached new floors. Sometimes my placement of where I saved wasn’t ideal for challenge making, but I wouldn’t have had fun with Batman if I didn’t take steps towards nerfing it. Not to the point of killing the difficulty, but just enough to ease the burden. In fact, I only used rewind during one section of the game, which was actually the final vertical shaft right below the final boss chamber. That’s the one I whined about above. Otherwise, I played in a way where death did result in me having to redo large sections of stages. As an unlimited lives experience, Batman worked. I think eliminating lives, adding a death counter, and bumping up the checkpoints would turn this into a borderline masterpiece.
These baddies have unpredictable jumping patterns. I wasn’t a fan, but at least I could tell myself they were Killer Croc.
It’s worth noting that the way I played Batman: The Video Game wasn’t even my original plan, as I had a ROM hack called Batman (Easy) that I intended to also include in this feature. My plan was to play the original 1989 build of Batman as it was originally designed, then pivot to the ROM hack. I wanted to really show off the power of having emulation work in tandem with modern designers to unlock a game’s fullest potential. But, I found Batman (Easy) was too easy. Item drops were worth too many item points and a lot of the platforming challenges were too nerfed. If you have kids under 12, I’d recommend it for them, easily. For everyone else, it probably took the concept of a kinder, gentler Batman too far. Somewhere between my self-created save state checkpoints and that ROM hack is probably the best version of the game, but that doesn’t exist yet.
It wasn’t until I reached this point of the game that I abandoned save states and used rewind to brute-force my way up this final platforming challenge before the last bosses. Those black gears are lethal to the touch, and several platforms have spongy enemies on them. At the top of this IS an item farm, but even that isn’t a gimmie, as you have close-quarters to try and build up health and weapon points before facing generic sci-fi boss #5 and finally the Joker.
When Batman: The Video Game is fun, it’s really fun. Oddly enough, Batman’s strength isn’t really in the wall jump. The best part was the combat! Batman’s punch is often as effective as the three projectiles, and it was satisfying enough. Of the three projectiles, the batarang was the most useful. Even with limited range, it used the fewest item points and felt like the closest the game came to a Batman-like experience. The second weapon is a gun with relatively slow bullets that I almost never used, except I wouldn’t have come close to finishing the third boss without it. Finally, there’s a weapon that look like a gun, but its bullets quickly split into three projectiles that continue on in a wider horizontal trajectory. This is easily the coolest looking weapon, but it was only really useful when I couldn’t expect to aim a shot. All the items are fun to use, but there is one thing that annoyed the hell out of me: item select is mapped to START while pause is SELECT. Over the course of two hours, my brain refused to remember that and I was constantly pausing the game when I meant to change weapons. It was annoying at first, but by the end of the game, it really just felt like another example of Batman: The Video Game trolling players.
If we go off my theory that Batman was a generic robot sci-fi platformer that they barely reworked in order to be a Batman game, I would have initially guessed the Joker was the one element not on the drawing board, since it’s a guy pointing an enormous gun at you. HEY, JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIE! But then he calls down lightning strikes, and it feels more like a Dracula fight from a Castlevania game. So much for that theory.
This is one of the stranger verdicts I’ve had to render since I started doing retro reviews, because my answer of whether or not Batman is worth money today, in 2024, is entirely dependent on the emulator. And actually, just the ability to save and load states isn’t enough. Batman needed quick save/quick load. I even tried this, making myself pause the game before activating save/load, and it did more harm than good. I’m mostly thinking of that final vertical wall-jumping maze, and having to pause to undo a costly mistake was too much. I prefer mapping quick save to left stick click and quick load to right stick click. You can’t possibly hit those buttons by accident, especially since I’m using a D-Pad. I assume that’s what most people will use when playing an NES game. If you’re using a retro platform without that barest minimum of options, fuhgeddaboudit. Batman’s fun will likely stop about 60% of the way in. If a Batman Sunsoft collection is put out by a company who stubbornly refuses to include that, or only allows, say, two seconds of rewinding (not calling anyone specific out), I would give Batman: The Video Game a NO! But, I didn’t play it that way. I played Batman on MY terms. With a thirty-second rewind and/or quick save/quick load, I found that Batman works both as a fun, peppy sci-fi platformer AND as a historical curio. It’s actually really weird this game wears the Batman label, and there’s enough amusement in how bonkers it gets that it kept a smile on my face for most of the two hours I needed to finish it. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to a hypothetical Batman collection. BONUS: Throw in another $5 if they also included a ROM hack similar to Batman (Easy).
Batman: The Video Game Platform: Game Boy Released April 13, 1990 (JP) June, 1990 (US) Directed by Cho Musou Developed by Sunsoft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Super Wayneio Land
It’s probably best to think of the Game Boy version of Batman: The Video Game as Super Mario Land 1 with a gun. It doesn’t have much to do with the movies either, but at least you knock Jack Nicholson into a vat of chemicals. Hey, the NES game didn’t do that! The NES game also didn’t feel like a “break the blocks” platformer with Batman heroically saving the Mushroom Kingdom. Okay, so this is not the Batman game anyone would want. That’s why I feel especially silly making the following statement: of all the early era Game Boy games I’ve played, which admittedly is a small sample size, Batman is probably the best of the bunch. I enjoyed it a lot more than I liked Super Mario Land. Like, it’s not even close actually. I swear, these Sunsoft Batman games are so weird.
Batman does the old “invisible gap” trick that was all the rage in the 8-bit platformers. But, actually this does it better than most. The areas where the invisible gaps are have incredibly subtle tells, and once you figure it out, it feels like an earned challenge element and not a gotcha. Surprising and kind of wonderful. Hey Simon’s Quest: you were just bitch-slapped by puny Batman.
Batman: The Video Game on Game Boy is really short, at only about thirty minutes to finish, and it’s probably more suitable for younger children. Replace the “jump on the enemies” gameplay of Super Mario Land with Mega Man-style guns, then lobotomize the challenge and you get the idea. You get unlimited ammo, but you can only carry one gun at a time, which you find by shooting dark-shaded blocks. One pick-up, “the short gun” is functionally a whammy, as it leaves you stuck with a weapon that has no range and can’t pierce platforms and walls. Try to avoid them. The other guns are mostly fun to use. The power gun is basically a Mega Man pea shooter that can shoot enemies through walls. The wave gun is like the power gun but the bullets travel in a shallow sine wave. The “T” gun, which is presumably tear gas, is a large projectile that pierces walls AND can break three blocks at once. You’ll rarely need to break that many blocks. My favorite gun easily was the batarang gun, which is weirdly designated with an “R.” It shoots powerful batarangs out. Really, all the guns but shorty are fun to use. The one thing Batman HAD to do was have the action be fun, and it is!
Also, if you pick up white gun icons, you increase how many bullets you can shoot at once. I have no clue what the max is, but it goes up to at least 6. There’s also dark gun blocks that decrease your ammo by one. By the time I reached the Joker (pictured), I was essentially a tank with pointy ears.
Even if I think of Batman GB strictly as a children’s game, it’s a damn good game. Little kids need games too, and Batman has satisfying pew-pew action and enjoyable level design. The most impressive thing is how well balanced the platforming and the gun play is. It really feels like equal parts both. What completely nerfs the game is the shields you can pick up. If you see a Batman icon (his symbol), it creates a shield that spins around you. You can pick-up as many as four bats to circle you, and then you can even pick-up pills that make them spin faster. Although they do minimal damage upon making contact with an enemy, having four that spin like a figure skater on her tippy-toes can make you almost unstoppable. Almost. In what feels like the wisest choice the game made, the shield isn’t so effective that you can just walk through enemies with impunity. As easy as Batman is, you actually do have to make an effort. When I made it to the final boss, I tried to cheese him by just spamming the attack button to let my six batarangs fly at him. I almost lost a life doing this, as I was damaged down to my last hit. BUT, I did win!
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Batman shares even more DNA with Mario Land, as like Mario Land, it has two shmup levels that feel like they belong to a completely different game. Unlike Mario Land, the two stages where you pilot the Batwing are played back-to-back. They’re the game’s entire world 3. Also unlike Super Mario Land is the fact that I actually liked Batman’s auto-scrolling shmup levels. Like most of Game Boy Batman’s stages, they’re both too easy. The closest this build comes to putting up a challenge is the final level. Batman ends on an auto-scrolling platforming stage that often forces you to sacrifice your shields since its platforms are usually small, usually have an enemy on them, and usually leave you with little time to stop and aim your jump. And that’s fine, because the last level should put players to those kinds of risk/reward decisions. Batman’s two standard bosses are kind of boring, but otherwise, I’m surprised. I’d already played this before and remembered it being just okay. It’s a little better than that. In many ways, I liked this more than the NES game. It’s still pretty generic, but it also packs a lot of fun into very little game. I didn’t expect the Game Boy Batman to be one of the highlights of this feature. Sunsoft’s best decision was creating a new game that played to the Game Boy’s strengths instead of trying to copy a technologically superior game to a less capable platform. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to a hypothetical Batman collection.
Batman: The Video Game Platform: Sega Genesis Released July 27, 1990 (JP) June, 1991 (US) Developed by Sunsoft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Rain, rain, go away. My rubber suit is already enough of a pain.
The final installment of the Batman: The Video Game trilogy is also the only one that’s unambiguously based on the Tim Burton film. Actually, at times it feels sort of like Sunsoft was trying to create a more complicated home console approximation of the Atari Games coin-op. Which is actually impossible since this came out first. Maybe it’s the other way around and Atari Games was trying to make a better version of the Genesis game. Either way, the end result is a strange brawler-platformer hybrid that never quite feels like it gets out of first gear. And that’s kind of weird because it does feel like a Batman game. You use a grappling hook, punch generic crooks in the face, the batarangs don’t actually return like boomerangs, and you pilot both the Batmobile and Batwing in convincing fashion. All the pieces are in place for the Genesis version to stand tall as the only authentically Dark Knighty version of the franchise. And yet, this is easily the worst of the three titles called Batman: The Video Game.
The first stage is a literal straight line. No up and down movement required, unless you jump up ONE TIME to pick up an item refill. Otherwise, it’s a long ass street where you walk right, punch enemies, then walk right and punch enemies, etc, etc until you reach a boss. It took one level to realize that Sunsoft phoned this one in.
Genny Batman is an incredibly boring game. The combat is so flavorless, as you only punch and do a leg sweep type of kick. You can punch when you jump, but I never really found this useful and usually took damage when I attempted it. You only get one item in the platforming segments, the aforementioned non-returning batarang. While it completely trivialized a few of the boss fights (including the last one), it lacks the visual satisfaction that the NES game accomplished with a lot less horsepower. I also found the “block” move where Batman puts up his dukes to be generally ineffective. Without decent fisticuffs, Batman absolutely needed quality platforming gameplay to carry the day. Unfortunately, the platforming is even worse than the brawling. I’ll start with one of the worst double jumps I’ve ever seen. Early in the second level, I found myself unable to get past a stack of crates (“CRATES! MY ONLY WEAKNESS!”) until I dug up the instruction book via Sega Retro. That’s when I learned that if you quickly press the jump button a second time, Batman does this flippy move that’s more about helping to cover horizontal distance instead of jumping higher. Allegedly some enemies can be damaged by pouncing on them, but it feels like it was a coin flip on whether I’d damage them or they’d damage me.
This museum must pay through the nose on insurance premiums.
The biggest hook in the figurative sense is a literal hook in the corporeal sense: the grappling hook. It can only be used in designated spots and is little more than a manually-operated elevator. It put the slightest smile on my face that the hook actually does work like real life grappling hooks do, where you have to overthrow and hope the hook snags on a surface. Like.. yea, that’s how it would work. I can’t believe they put that in the game. Neato. But, the problem with using real life logic is that, while you wait for the hook to bind to a surface, you’re likely being shot at by a bad guy. In fact, late in the game, the areas where you’re supposed to use the hook are populated by enemies specifically placed to cause damage during the process. It takes a little bit to go through the motion of throwing the hook up. Also, when you finally start to make the climb with it, it’s like a bungee cord that fires you upward. So of course they put spiked ceilings around the hook areas in the final climb before you fight the Joker, and sometimes you haven’t scrolled the screen enough to be able to know they’re there. So, the hook doesn’t really work to differentiate the Batman games. It’s really dull and badly implemented.
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Therefore, the highlight of Genny Batman is the Batmobile. A basic but competent auto scrolling car combat section where you shoot enemies. Here, your batarangs are replaced with missiles that are fired two at a time. If there’s two enemies on screen, the missiles will each target a different one, and they’re so satisfying to use. The missiles also show up in the Batwing section, but I found that to be a frustrating slog. The problem is the Batwing’s sprite is too big, especially when you bank up and down, which you will since it’s a shmup and you’re trying to avoid getting shot. It leads to major issues with screen cramping. Come to think of it, Sunsoft really got it backwards. It’s the Batmobile that should feel cramped and claustrophobic with larger sprites to mimic navigating the narrow streets of a major metropolitan U.S. city, while the action in the skies over Gotham should feel more free and open on account of, well, it’s the literal f’n sky! Anyway, the Batwing stuff is pretty awful but it’s over with quickly. The Batmobile is a little more complicated. The action starts fun enough. Really fun, actually! But then the stage refuses to end. By the time the Batmobile has overstayed its welcome, you’re just over halfway done with it. So the best part of the game still manages to become boring. They should have broken it up into chunks of sixty seconds or less, then inserted those between every level. Dumping this all into one overly long segment was the price to pay for following the Tim Burton movie’s set pieces in film order.
I actually had to rewind to get a screenshot of the Joker shooting at me. The first time I played the last boss, he barely got a chance to run on the screen, as I all but stun-locked him with my batarangs for the easiest last boss victory this side of Shredder from Ninja Turtles.
It’s not that the Batman Genesis game isn’t ever fun. Actually, the best thing I can say about it is, besides the Batwing section, I never found it to be an actively bad game, at least mechanically speaking. It’s just so lazy and uninspired. The level design is basic, and the combat is basic, and the driving section is basic, and are you catching a theme here? During the NES review, I often wondered if the extreme difficulty was blowback from the development team getting one note too many from management. With the Genesis game, I wonder if they were all just burned out on the Dark Knight by the time they needed to develop the Sega game. This is a total paint by numbers licensed game that does just a good enough job that any child in 1990 could say “yep, that’s a Batman game.” But, Batman: The Video Game on the Sega Genesis never stood a chance at passing the test of time. Maybe Sunsoft was onto something by replacing the movie set pieces with robo-ninjas, guys dressed like mechanical bugs, and Contra-style bosses. They should have ended Genny Batman with Bruce Wayne throwing batarangs at a giant heart while alien spiders nibble at him. I’m picturing a stoned Jack Nicholson playing the game in his apartment and being like “wait, was this in the movie I made?” Verdict: NO!
The Fall of Elena Temple
aka Elena Temple 2. Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Playdate Released April 30, 2024 Developed by GrimTalin
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Most games don’t require the most in-depth reviews. Take GrimTalin’s new indie sequel to their cult hit The Adventures of Elena Temple. That game was based on searching a fifty-screen map for treasure. This time around, Elena stars in a single-screen puzzler based mostly around the concept of falling. And it’s a really, really short game at only twenty stages. I don’t know exactly how much time I needed to finish them all, as I knocked out a few stages at a time, then did something else, then turned on the game and knocked out a few more, and so forth. The fact that I played The Fall of Elena Temple like that and still finished the whole experience in a single day says something. All in? It probably took me an hour-and-a-half. A really fun and perfectly acceptable ninety minutes, mind you. I can honestly say I was never bored. Unlike the previous Elena Temple adventure, this is 99% a puzzle game, with only the faintest hint of platforming, making this feel more like a spin-off than a proper sequel.
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This is especially true thanks to the graphics looking a bit like Game Boy and a bit like Playdate. The previous Elena Temple was themed around a game by a hapless game developer who kept making their flagship game for the wrong platforms. This time around, it’s more like “hey, remember Game Boy?” You can zoom as far in or out as you wish. I needed to zoom all the way in, but your mileage may vary. The object is to collect all the coins and then get to the exit. The big twist is that most rooms have an item that grants you the ability to undo your previous fall from a platform, only you get to keep any progress you made towards the whole coin collecting. It’s actually a pretty good twist, but it’s also one that puzzle aficionados should be able to reverse-engineer with only a bit of trial and error. It’s intuitive to use, at least. The amount of falls you’re able to undo varies from room to room, and each fall is numbered so you know where the undo button is sending you. It works wonderfully and it does make for a fun gimmick. In fact, it’s so fun that I was sorry when it wasn’t in a room.
Probably the best thing I can say about Elena 2 is that it successfully creates “THE BIG OVERWHELM” which is my term for puzzle games where, at first, a level seems so vast and multi-dimensional that you initially think “okay, maybe time I’ve met my match.” The beauty of THE BIG OVERWHELM is that it doesn’t require a complex puzzle, but only the appearance of one. Look at Portal, where none of the puzzles are THAT hard, no matter how the scenario is presented. The payoff is, when you actually finish the stage that looked so overwhelming at first glance, it’s that much sweeter. The Fall of Elena Temple pulls that off, which is pretty impressive for a minimalist puzzler. Plus, Elena 2 keeps throwing twists at you the entire length of the game. Crumbling floors. Disappearing/reappearing floors. Boots that let you skip a space. Hearts that let you absorb one hit of damage. Keys. Snakes. Spiders. All of it paced out so that there’s something new in nearly every level, right to the bitter end. Actually, past the bitter end. I couldn’t believe my eyes when a never previously used magnet showed up in one of the three bonus stages, and then even more stuff is added after that. Hey, finally “bonus stages” that live up to the name. I can’t stress enough: this is GrimTalin’s best game and one of the absolute best puzzlers I’ve played in the last few years. The Fall of Elena Temple is really good.
Even with THE BIG OVERWHELM, Elena’s levels are rarely actually as overwhelming as they look. Oh, and it took me about half the game for my brain to stop needing to tell itself “you can’t climb the vines, stupid.”
But, there’s really two big problems with the whole “stay fresh until the end” design mentality. The first is that, when you only have twenty levels, by necessity, the learning curve is going to be more like a gentle slope. You need the difficulty to scale, so you can’t do simple tutorial levels with the new items, but you also can’t really go completely bonkers with them either. Which, don’t get me wrong: I prefer Elena’s scaling to something like Gateways, where the learning curve was more like a straight wall made out of middle fingers (and mind you, that’s a game I liked a lot). But, there were also maybe, at most, only three or four levels that really had me scratching my head, and one of them was a “bonus” stage. The other big problem is that most of the ideas for special items are fun, but with the exception of the undo mechanic, they all feel underutilized. The twenty-three levels combined absolutely does not feel like it stretches the limits of what this puzzle formula can do. I suppose GrimTalin could do DLC, or a special edition later on like they did with the first Elena Temple. Hell, I’d be fine if they released level packs at $1 a pop for, say, ten new stages and just kept releasing new ones for quick cash, since that initial $3 felt underpriced to begin with. $3 for ninety damn fine minutes of puzzle goodness? What else are you going to do with $3? For me, I had to decide on a large lime slushie or this. I’m sure I made the right choice. Pretty sure. No, wait.. yea, I’m sure. Verdict: YES!
$2.99 was parched in the making of this review.
The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy
The Flintstones
Little Nemo: The Dream Master
Nemo
Spatter
Super Pac-Man
Pac & Pal
Pac-Man
Pac-Man Plus
Sunman
Batman: The Video Game
Batman: The Video Game
Batman: The Video Game
The Fall of Elena Temple
Verdict: 
Indie Gamer Chick 
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