Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part Three

April 16, 2024 by 3 Comments

From here out, Atari 50: The Games The Couldn’t Include will be twelve games per post. I originally intended to do more and created the placeholders for several games that either looked interesting or had interesting stories behind them. When I was finished, I had over 250 placeholders. So I did the only logical thing and.. added more. I like doing these. Play them an hour, some a little less, some a lot more, write-up my thoughts. Time flies by. It’s not that different from my LCD features.

And, as always, Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include wouldn’t be possible without the incredible Atari resources out there. Huge thanks to AtariMania for their instruction book library and AtariProtos.com for their directory of unreleased Atari games.

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.

The Activision Decathlon
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1983
Designed by David Crane
Published by Activision

My non-athletic side apparently carries over to digital form.

For all the credit Konami gets for Track & Field, I don’t think those games hold-up especially well. So, it stands to reason the same style of game done with fewer buttons and a lot less horsepower shouldn’t hold-up at all. You can imagine my surprise that Activision Decathlon is the best of its breed I’ve ever played. This squeezes a LOT of potential out of the simple Atari 2600 joystick with ten events that use every style of button mashing or joystick wiggling you can get out of it. Most of the games require you to move the joystick. Not “rotate” or “move left and then right.” Just.. move it, by whatever technique you find most comfortable. I like that. It allows for you to come up with your own strategy. It helps if you use a control stick and not a d-pad, and it REALLY helps if you don’t play this game immediately following an extended session of a Katamari game with blisters all over your hands. But seriously, use a stick for this one.

I let out a cheer the first time I completed a high jump.

There’s really only one event that’s outright boring: the 1500M. In it, the running meter is changed to require a more steady pace for the first 1,300 meters before it returns to the “wiggle the stick as fast as you can” sprint meter for the final 200M stretch. This event takes a few minutes and it’s just lifeless and boring. I’d also recommend against playing the 400M if you value the top layer of skin on your fingers. All the other events hold up pretty well, actually. The shot put/javelin/discus and even high jump/long jump events all feel kind of samey: wiggle the stick, then press the button right before the line. The only real difference in those five events is how much room you’re given to build up speed/power before you have to press the button. The pole vault changes it up somewhat, as you have to press the action button once, but you have to keep the stick movement going until you reach the top of the jump, at which point you press the action button again. I preferred the hurdles event to them, where you at least have an action button to break-up the furious stick twerking.

Before I render a verdict, I might as well do the 5200 version.

The Activision Decathlon
Platform: Atari 5200
Year: 1983
Designed by David Crane
Released in 1983

I’m exhausted from winning this one race by 0.02 seconds. Good lord, these games really do feel like they require athletic ability.

You’d think the Atari 5200 version would utilize the keypad, but thankfully that’s not the case. This is still a one button and stick-whirling experience. The big difference in the Atari 5200 version, besides a respectable graphic upgrade, is the addition of AI competitors. I couldn’t really gauge their difficulty because it seemed like the AI adjusted in real time based on my performance. You see this in the 100M especially, where no matter how I did, the AI opponent and I tended to trade the lead back and forth until the photo finish. You’re still probably better off playing against real players if that’s an option. These days, I have tremors in my hand and slower reaction time. I’m not really the best person to review games like Track & Field or Activision Decathlon. It took me multiple attempts to win the 100M dash, and I only did so by two one-hundredths of a second. I found the 5200 version to require a lot less effort in the stick moving, which was very welcome. I was still exhausted by the time I finished my playtime with these titles. The 5200 version also does a much better job of making the ten events feel distinct from one-another.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

No matter which version you play, Activision Decathlon is one of the most remarkable surprises I’ve encountered in my thirteen years of reviewing video games, because it’s still fun 40 years after release. I love that events don’t have you pressing specific directions. It feels genuinely athletic, where you get better as you improve your form, a form you create and learn all on your own. For all the credit David Crane gets for Pitfall, I honestly think he deserves more for Decathlon. In terms of surviving the test of time, the degree of difficulty is so much higher in any sports game. Pitfall struggles to keep its modern relevance, but Decathlon can make a compelling argument for being the best Olympic game ever, and not just “for its time.” It works as both a casual track & field game, but also provides enough raw gameplay to satisfy hardcore players or button mashing aficionados. Sure, not every event is a winner, but the overall package still offers as much fun today as it did in 1983, and that’s a very rare quality for games of this era. Crane’s legacy is built largely on Pitfall, but it’s Activision Decathlon that proved to me he really is one of the all-time greats. These are phenomenal, and the best their genre has ever had, even four decades later. Wow.
Verdict: YES! and YES!

Airlock
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Published by Data Age

Those pink things are called “torpedoes” in the instruction book. Yes, because torpedoes are famously the ballistic weapon that, when fired, prowl rooms by walking back and forth until someone fails to jump over them.

You’ll remember Data Age as the company who tried to cash in on the Atari fad and then went all-in on the Journey license. And also as the team that put together the sublime Frankenstein’s Monster that really should have been their flagship title since it slaps. Airlock doesn’t slap. It wasn’t originally set to get a review, but then I read the premise. “A boat is sinking and you have ten seconds to exit a room before it fills with water.” That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Sadly, the actual game is like a stripped down version of Mattel’s 2600 stinker Adventures of Tron (also in Part 2). It’s actually weird how closely it resembles that game. You zig-zag from left to right, jumping over one moving object per floor and two bumps. You have to jump up and get a key on both sides, then walk to the elevator. If you play on modes 3 or 4, you have to clear an additional room where the lumps come in pairs.

The ending screen looks more fun than playing the game itself.

And that’s the whole game. It almost sounds like there’s not enough material for anything to go wrong, but that’s not the case at all. The stationary things you have to jump over have inconsistent collision detection. If you short the jump, you’re pushed backwards away from the key you need to get, at least in theory. Sometimes, I was pushed forward, with seemingly no logic behind what causes a push back and what causes a push forward. In the modes where the bumps are doubled, there is a small learning curve towards angling the jump so you don’t just end up getting stuck between them. And of course, you have to jump over the “torpedoes” that offer almost no challenge besides making you sometimes stand still to time jumping over them. The other major problem is the game ends after 5 floors (modes 1 & 2) or 10 (3 & 4). There’s no endless mode. Not that you’d want such a thing for a game this boring, but still, when you reach the top, the game is over. There’s only two modes: 5 floors and 10, each with a two player option. That makes Airlock arguably the shortest platform game ever. I refuse to believe they couldn’t have come up with more modes. Even something as small as giving the torpedoes different patterns (say, jumping up and down themselves) would have given this desperately needed replay value. Airlock feels like the proof of concept for a platforming engine that could be used to create more ambitious games. I’m open to that being the case, given Data Age’s internal issues. By itself, it’s one of the worst on the Atari 2600.
Verdict: NO!

Amidar
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Ed Temple
Published by Parker Bros.

I’m the little Space Invader looking thing. That’s supposed to be a gorilla. Jeez.

I wasn’t familiar with Amidar until I began going through Atari games. It’s essentially Konami’s “what about us?” answer to Pac-Man. To Konami’s credit, it’s not bad at all, and actually is one of the stronger wannabes to follow in Namco’s wake. I’d like it a lot more except it only has two levels and is absurdly hard. The Atari 2600 port from Parker Bros. does the best it can with the limited technology to recreate the point of the coin-op. It somehow both succeeds AND it completely misses the mark and only feels like the arcade game in the sense that you have to avoid the enemies and traverse the map to collect territory. It also lacks the personality of the coin-op, leaving you with a bare bones, no frills experience. You just walk along a grid, and when you completely walk around the edge of a square, you collect it. You have to collect the whole screen while avoiding enemies. Like the arcade game, you can make the enemies jump and run under them. When you convert all four corner boxes, it’s like getting the power pellet in Pac-Man and you can eat the enemies.

Apparently the idea behind the arcade’s second level was too advanced for the 2600.

While Amidar probably ranks among the better Atari 2600 maze chases, I have to imagine that any fan of the coin-op would have been very disappointed with this port. Not only is the charm lost, but the bonus stage is missing AND the gameplay mechanic of the second (of only two) stages isn’t present. The first level of the arcade game involves collecting dots, but that’s gone in the 2600 version and replaced by just coloring-in the pathways. That’s fine, right? It’s functionally the same thing. Well, yea, until you get to the second level. In the arcade’s second stage, you switch from a gorilla to a paint roller, and instead of collecting dots, you.. paint the walkway. Wait, which arcade level is the home version based on, again?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Except, there’s a twist to the paint part in the arcade game: the paint doesn’t work and breaks off if you travel too far before completing a box. This fundamentally changes the gameplay, making those stages slower, more methodical, and much more intense. While you do become a paint roller every-other level in the Atari port, the paint-breaking-off mechanic didn’t make the leap home. So, functionally they’re just the same levels, only with pigs chasing a paint roller. Mind you, I still enjoyed Amidar well enough. I’m sure with enough time, I could clock the enemies and ruin the fun, but in small doses, it’s actually a thrilling and fun game of close-calls. At the same time, I could imagine a child who was a BIG fan of this in 1982 was probably heartbroken playing this stripped-down, nearly completely gutted port. Amidar 2600 stands on its own, but it also feels a tiny bit like a dirty trick.
Verdict: YES!

Arkyology
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Completed (?) Prototype
Designed by Paul Walters & George Hefner
Non-Publisher: Enter Tech Ltd.

Honestly, if you were to adapt a biblical story, Noah would probably have the best potential. Not that anyone has met that potential yet.

Enter-Tech is one of the most generic sounding names ever, so much so that multiple companies with the same name have sprang-up in the years since. This particular Enter-Tech was working with Sparrow Records, a Christian music label famous for a series of children’s albums called Music Machine. Sparrow Records still exists to this day under the Universal Music Group umbrella. It makes me wonder if some accountant at Universal is going over warehoused assets and saying “what the fudge? What the h-e-double-hockey-stick is an Arkyology?” In my head, they would censor themselves while reading a Christian company’s assets. It’s just polite. So, what is Arkyology? An arcade-style action game where stages alternate between opening windows selected randomly one at a time inside Noah’s Ark and then feeding the animals within, again randomly one at a time. The target also changes if you don’t get to the current one fast enough, and you never know which will be the next to “light up.” You have to quickly shimmy up and down ladders while avoiding sliding animal turds and falling porcupine turds. In later levels, baby alligators show up to guard a floor, and you can’t jump over them.

I’m not sure why Noah is dressed like Hugh Hefner (thanks Rafael!) but it makes perfect sense since the toughest part about this game is getting off….. the ladders. The baby alligator is an interesting idea for a game like this, as it will move towards when you start to climb up or down to its platform, then stop moving. It provides a greater challenge than simply going from point A to point B. SMART. See, even the worst prototypes can have good ideas.

You expect religious-themed games to be bad, and yea, Arkyology is horrible. But, it didn’t have to be. Where it goes wrong is in the ladder mechanics, which make you long for the staircases in Castlevania. Getting on the ladder is easy. It’s the getting off them part that isn’t. Even lining up with the platforms isn’t the problem. According to the Arkyology page on AtariProtos, you have to use diagonal movement to get off the ladders, but even that was a coin flip on whether it would work. Well, more like a dice roll, as a coin flip is 50/50, and I spent most of the game stuck on the ladders while wiggling the controller trying to let go. Because the target is constantly changing, this is a deal breaker by itself, but it’s hardly the only problem. While the baby alligators are a good idea, speeding up the action to the degree Arkyology does is a really bad idea. By day four, I found the game unplayable. Collision is a problem, as hitting the latches that open the doors, or feed the animals, was inconsistent. You seemingly have to jump at angles, but often I clipped right through the target and had to complete several passes before it registered. Fix this, and especially fix the ladders, and I think Arkyology might have risen to the level of the best “Christian” game ever. I’m not even joking. It’s not a bad idea for an action-arcade game at all. Unfortunately, with the broken movement mechanics and collision detection, all this brought forth was two of every swear word.
Verdict: NO!

Assault
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1983
Developed by Onbase Co. Ltd.
Published by Bomb
No Relation to Assault (Namco – 1988)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Who the heck is Bomb? Apparently they were the North American partner of Onbase Co. Ltd. Who the heck is Onbase Co. Ltd.? Apparently they were a Hong Kong-based game developer who did a few Atari games. One of them is named “The Great Escape” but it has no connection to the famous Steve McQueen movie. I would have done that one, but it was too generic. Assault had decent graphics, and even if the gameplay is generic, it’s generic within the acceptable parameters. There’s a mother ship that drops enemies onto the playfield, maxing out at three big ones at any time. After a few stages, the big enemies split into two smaller ones. After killing ten of one enemy type, you move to the next wave and next enemy. There were several moments playing Assault where I spontaneously died and I have no clue why. I rewound the game looking for projectiles or some kind of indication. Eventually, I figured out that the meter in the bottom right corner tells you whether your cannon is overheating or not.

As far as I could tell, there’s no way to destroy the mothership. Oddly, the instruction book implies that it’s possible. Really, the game needed more things like the fireballs enemies drop, or it needed to give the mother ship more of a reason to exist. It’s not bad, but it had no chance of holding up at forty years.

It’s not the worst idea for a gallery shooter, as the heat meter successfully discourages spamming the fire button and incentivizes accuracy. Interestingly, firing upwards into the playfield is done just by pressing up. One enemy type can drop fireballs onto the floor that will heat seek the player, and that’s when you press the action button while moving in their direction to shoot them down. Eventually, Assault resorts to that tried and true Atari cliché of off-and-on invisible enemies. Honestly, Assault isn’t that bad a game for budget label release by a nobody developer. Original? Nah. Almost decent? Yea, actually. I wouldn’t want to be stuck with it today, but it’s not a bad little game. Moderately decent scoring system. Moderately decent learning curve. It feels like an actual effort went into it. A reminder that not every samey space shooter on the Atari is drowning in cynicism. I can’t give it a YES! because I wouldn’t actually want to play it today, in 2024. But, I found it comforting that kids in 1983 could buy really cheap games by a no-name developer and not get stuck with unplayable garbage. At a time when Space Invaders was cutting edge, I imagine a game like Assault would have been a lot more exciting. My review system might not take that into account, but my heart does.
Verdict: NO!

Atlantis
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Dennis Koble
Published by Imagic

I love how the instruction book gives an overly-elaborate explanation for all the stuff on the screen. Atari developers really went all-out on their games.

Atlantis as a game isn’t that interesting. It’s like a less complicated version of Missile Command. You control three cannons and have to shoot down enemy ships. The ships fly in a straight line over the playfield, and every time one avoids your gunfire, it makes another, closer pass. Eventually they’ll get close enough to unleash an attack on one of seven structures on the surface. Lose all those and it’s game over. Shooting the center cannon is easy-peasy. Just press the fire button. But, my damaged brain refused to work with the other two cannons, which shoot diagonally. For some reason, my gray matter only made it as far as “if you want a bullet to intercept a ship on the left side of the screen, shoot the left side of the screen!” when really I wanted to shoot the right cannon. It took me a while to get the hang of it. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, and I especially liked how satisfying it was to hit the little ships out of the sky. Not only do they score more points, but they knock out the other ships on the screen. Like many Atari 2600 games, this would have certainty been a much more exciting game when it first released, but the test of time hasn’t been kind to it. Popular in its day, in 2024 Atlantis gets old quickly. Normally I’d render my verdict here, but there’s a funny story about Atlantis. Back in the day, it was part of a competition, and players who scored over 900,000 points were given a “sequel” cart, Atlantis II, for the championship round.

This screen is of Atlantis II.

Atlantis II is really more like a fifth mode for the game with the difficulty set to the extreme. The ships are much faster and the scoring is much, much lower. But, it’s the same game that I couldn’t wait to be finished with. The carts were shipped to homes, and whoever put up the highest score on this cart would win $10,000.. IN GOLD! I’d like to think there were grizzled prospectors out there that devoted their lives towards getting good at Atlantis, all while saying “gimme that gold!” But here’s the really funny part. Apparently, the Atlantis II carts were just Atlantis I carts with a new game in them. They shipped in normal Atlantis I boxes, only these had a plain white sticker stuck on them that bluntly says “ATLANTIS II” on top of the normal Atlantis I art. Guess what the carts themselves DO NOT have on them? No identification they’re Atlantis II at all. So, if you’re reading this and you have a copy of Atlantis on the Atari, your copy could actually be Atlantis II, a highly desired collectible. That story was so much more interesting than the games themselves. Even with bad Atari games, I’m often caught off guard by how much time has passed since I’ve started playing them. With Atlantis, I kept looking at the clock and wondering how so little time had passed. Eventually I decided thirty minutes was quality time enough.
Verdict: NO!

Bank Heist
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1983
Designed by Bill Aspromonte
Published by 20th Century Fox

It ain’t much to look at, but this wasn’t that bad. Kind of weird 20th Century Fox couldn’t find a heist movie to tie this to.

On a platform with a plethora of maze chase games, Bank Heist actually does manage to somewhat stand out by changing up the formula. The collecting concept is simple: banks randomly spawn on the map (or appear in preset locations if you toggle the RIGHT DIFFICULTY SWITCH to B). Grab them and score points. The simplicity ends there, and actually, Bank Heist is pretty convoluted with its rules. When you collect a bank, after its score vanishes from the screen, a cop car spawns that begins to either chase you (LEFT DIFFICULTY A) or follow a preset pattern (LEFT DIFFICULTY B). As you move, your fuel slowly depletes, and it also goes down a notch every time you use dynamite. Every time you rob a bank, the meter showing how much fuel you’ll have in the next town goes up a notch. If you drop dynamite in a way that blows up a cop car, another bank will spawn in the town, maxing out at $90 per bank per town. The maze has tunnels just like in Pac-Man that pop you out the other side, BUT, the longer right tunnel advances you to the next town over. If the fuel meter is higher than the tank, you get more gas, up to a full tank if the meter is all the way at the top. If it’s under your current gas line, you get no extra fuel in the new town.

The soundtrack is a terrible car engine noise if there’s no cops, and sirens if there are. It’s awful racket.

Don’t bother with having the cop cars not chase you. There’s no tension at all unless you play on the A difficulty. The cops can’t do u-turns in either mode, and so following them is actually a viable strategy if you need to do tight squeezes. However, you do actually have to kill them in order to build up your fuel, and to do that, you have to let them be right on your tail. The dynamite has a short fuse, and getting the timing of it down is really tricky. This is probably one of the better maze chases on the Atari 2600, and I still didn’t love it. It probably was a good idea to try and make a more complicated maze chase. I’m sure Atari owners were ready for that by this point. But, the final product still needs to be fun, and Bank Heist is just sort of dull. The mazes lack elegance and the type of logic that creates tons of close calls that makes the Pac-Man formula work. It’s the classic mistake that so many of these types of games make: the chase is the fun part. Collecting stuff is just a means to achieve that. So, Bank Heist is a NO!, but it’s near the top of the NO! pile because it plays fine. It’s just not fun in 2024. Close, but not quite.
Verdict: NO!

Barnstorming
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Steve Cartwright
Published by Activision

Besides towers, this is the whole game. And it’s kind of awesome.

Oh for the days when you could release a full-priced game where the average round lasts under a minute. An even more remarkable achievement is that Barnstorming doesn’t even feel like a rip-off. Of course it helps that the game in question is roughly as addictive as crack. Barnstorming’s concept is simple: dodge birds, avoid windmills, and fly a plane through barns. If you just hate life, you can even shrink the clearance in the barn, but we went for the easiest mode. It was tricky enough. If you hit the windmills or the roofs of barns, you recoil. The birds, on the other hand, are pushed forward instead of becoming what I believe professionals refer to as an “engine problem.” It’s actually really smart design. The birds fly in three channels in the sky, and because hitting them slows you down slightly while sliding them forward, the one you hit inevitably remains an obstacle that you still have to dodge. Sometimes, you can really screw a run you’re on by hitting a bird in a way where it lines up with the other two channels, creating a solid barrier. That’s fine if you’re about to dip out of the sky to fly through a barn, but if you’re over a section with several windmills in a row, your final time will hurt for it.

The world record for mode one in Barnstorming is 32.64. So honestly this ain’t bad. I’m not entirely sure what I could have done to do better. My dad and I were usually finishing in the 34 second range, but we did post time of 33.75 (Dad), 33.55 (Dad), 33.54 (Me), 33.52 (Me), 33.99 (Dad), and the above score of 33.25 (Me). We both agreed to stick to pinball for record chasing.

Modes 1 – 3 are preset courses, and while the game is always limited to birds, windmills, and barns, it’s really no different than practicing up at a racing game like Mario Kart. Same concept, different form of racing. You can also play mode four, which completely randomizes the order of barns and windmills. This is one of the cases where having a randomized course doesn’t interest me as much, because I’d much rather play a fixed course and challenge my personal best times. Honestly, for such a small, confined idea, this is a dang good game. It’s ahead of its time too, because it feels tailor made for handheld gaming. I could seriously see Barnstorming becoming one of my go-to “five minutes to kill while waiting in a doctor’s office” games. It’s especially suitable for that, as it requires one of the lowest time commitments of any really good game I’ve played. One other thing stood out to me while playing this: it would make a pretty good LCD game, don’t you think? Well, it turns out that in the 2000s Burger King did put out an LCD of Barnstorming (along with Tennis, Kaboom, and Grand Prix). Some tell this to Itizso.
Verdict: YES!

Beamrider
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1984
Designed by David Rolfe
Published by Activision

The dots on the screen remain completely stationary, but the moving lines combine with them to successfully create the illusion of forward momentum. Clever.

What is with Activision and games that would work well in LCD format? In Beamrider, you move along five channels shooting enemies. The catch is there’s really only one enemy that matters: the white flying saucers that eventually become bashful about putting themselves in the line of fire. Every stage has fifteen of them. Almost everything else that falls on the playfield is indestructible without using one of your limited bombs. You’re incentivized to save those bombs until after you shoot down all fifteen saucers, because then a mothership slowly crosses the top of the screen that can only be blown up by the bombs. You only get one pass before going to the next stage. The mothership is more like an end of stage bonus round where you can still lose a life. Shooting down the mothership with one of your bombs earns you bonus points for every reserve life you have, which can be quite a lot. Also, mines come in and block your shots on it, and like pretty much everything but the saucers, your normal bullets don’t destroy the mines.

There’s a nice variety of obstacles too. There’s a lot game packed into this one.

Another twist is Beamrider is one of the most generous games with extra lives I’ve ever seen. The only catch is.. well, you have to catch them. Sometimes enemies make it impossible, and sometimes YOU make it impossible. If you shoot the extra life that drops, it turns into debris that you have to avoid. You’ll want to stock-up on lives, because as things progress, you encounter a lot more enemy fire, obstacles that shield the saucers from your shots, and even things that, if you miss shooting them, will linger at the bottom of the screen, preventing you from moving (unless you want to die) for a few seconds. Beamrider is actually a lot of fun and one of the best shooters on the Atari 2600. It’s certainly one of the better 2600 games in terms of handling difficulty scaling. It even has convincing 3D graphics, or at least as convincing as this era got. As a post-crash release, it stinks that it doesn’t get more attention as one of the better titles on the VCS.
Verdict: YES!

Beamrider
Platform: Atari 5200
Year: 1983
Designed by David Rolfe
Published by Activision

While the graphics are impressive, it can be hard to tell apart enemy bullets from the ultra-dangerous red mines you’re about to read about.

No surprise: Beamrider on the Atari 5200 is really good. It’s more or less the same experience, with two key differences. From level 14 onward, red colored mines start flying in from around the side of the screen. If you don’t shoot them before they reach the bottom of the screen, they can move one channel over. In a game where you only have five channels to move and there’s more than one obstacle that can clog up a channel, that’s a pretty tough enemy to deal with. Shooting them neutralizes the “move a channel over” part, but they’re still on the playfield, and since they enter the playfield at the midway point, you’re always cutting it close. Combine that with another mine type missing from the 2600 version that forces you to move in the opposite direction it’s moving in, and this should be a MUCH harder game, right?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Well, no. Remember the whole “generous with extra lives?” bit from the 2600 game? The 5200 is even more generous. It wasn’t rare for the game to spit out two lives in a single level, and I think once it even did three. Unless I didn’t notice that I changed level because I completely zoned out while I was playing it. That’s possible. As expected, the Atari 5200 version plays a little slower than the 2600 version. This is especially true of the mothership moments. It’s really hard to shoot them down in the 2600 version, especially after ten levels. The timing is completely different in the Atari 5200 version, not just for how fast the missiles you fire at the mothership travel, but how long it takes for the mines to clear, giving you a clean shot at it. Slower speeds is a trademark of the 5200, but Beamrider is one of the few games better for it. Finally, I should note that I had my best rounds when I used a keyboard instead of a game controller. By far my most common death was overshooting my movement, something I didn’t do on a keyboard. Would THIS have been better with the floppo 5200 stick? So far, Beamrider is one of the best 5200 games I’ve played. Maybe the best. It’s in the discussion. I could see how someone might think it takes too long to build up if you play on the normal difficulty, but I’m fine with it. This scales perfectly, and the absurd amount of extra lives eventually feel just right.
Verdict: YES!

Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em (and various other X-rated VCS games)
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Joel H. Martin
Published by Mystique

This isn’t adult entertainment. It’s satire. It’s a parody. Just, not a very good or funny parody. Also, sorry for the censorship, not that anything looks like it should. The actual game is a very poor version of Kaboom! Nobody ever bought these seeking quality games. A round of Beam ‘Em & Eat ‘Em lasts about ten seconds, and that’s how long it’s funny.

Alright, let’s get this over with. Have you ever heard of Rule 34? I found the exception to that, and it’s ironically the games that are seemingly designed with the intention of being erotic for the Atari 2600. Nobody has ever gotten off on these games. Ever. There’s a handful of these “adult” games that are neither sexy or arousing, and they’re not really fun either, meaning they fail at both as pornography and as a video game. But, there is kind of something they do succeed at, and I don’t even mean ironically. They succeed as novelties. I could totally imagine something like this being sold at a Spencer’s. Is it THAT far-fetched? The whole point of their adult novelty section is for people to buy joke or gag products you show off to friends, soak in the reaction, and then shelf until you’re visited by the next person who you feel comfortable showing that you have a somewhat depraved mind. That’s what these are. Jokes. More expensive jokes than, say, a pack of genitalia-shaped breath mints called “Peckermints” (yes, this is a real thing) but jokes nonetheless. So, actually, I get what they were REALLY aiming for with these, and had they gotten distribution in a place like Spencer’s instead of going the adult store route, they might have been successful. Oh, as games? No. They suck. But, I get it.
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Planet of the Apes and The Alligator People (Atari 2600 Reviews)

April 14, 2024 by 4 Comments

The Alligator People
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Complete (?) Prototype
Designed by John Russel
Non-Publisher: 20th Century Fox
NEVER BEEN RELEASED

Planet of the Apes
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Nearly Completed Prototype
Designed by John Marvin
Non-Publisher: 20th Century Fox
NEVER BEEN RELEASED

This was originally going to be part of Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – The Definitive Review Part Three, but I have a lot to say about 20th Century Fox’s Atari output.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I decided to lump these two games together because they’re spiritually married to each other for the most bizarre reason. Based on a low budget sci-fi film from 1959, Alligator People was discovered by a game collector in 2002. Apparently, this came as an incredible shock to the Atari community, because they thought they’d already had found Alligator People years earlier. It turned out, the game that everyone thought was Alligator People was really Planet of the Apes, another nearly completed but unreleased 20th Century Fox game. Having played the two games, I can’t believe anyone could confuse one for the other, but they did have a valid reason: the prototype cartridge that Planet of the Apes was housed in was labeled “Alligator People.” Even though nothing resembling an alligator is in Planet of the Apes, this is the Atari VCS we’re talking about, where everything is a little abstract. I imagine this situation was the gaming equivalent of a Rorschach test. “I see.. alligators? I guess?” The theory is that the designer grabbed the nearest EPROM cart handy, which happened to be a cart that previously housed a build of Alligator People. Who knew the confusion that would eventually cause?

It’s not much to look at, but this is actually a pretty good game. More importantly, the groundwork for a better game is laid here. I’d really like to see someone remake this “collect antidote, avoid moving walls and enemies, then cure people” action game concept. I’m not joking. With more elegant wall movement patterns and better enemies, this could be an all-time great action game. It feels like that potential is there.

Apparently, poor focus test results with children killed Alligator People before it was sent to manufacturing, possibly because it was too easy for them. Huh? If 20th Century Fox was using little kids for focus testing, they made a grave error in judgment. First off, the game isn’t easy. You can turn on infinite lives by toggling the switches, but as the game progresses, it does get a lot harder. I suspect the kids who played it weren’t interested in it because it was based on a movie they’d never heard of. Alligator People is one of the better unreleased 2600 prototypes I’ve played, but I doubt a preteen from that era would like it. It’s an arcade shooter where you have to cure six people who are slowly transforming into alligators. You have to run around and collect S icons which represent “serum” and little dots, which represent the antidote doses. The serum increases the potency of the antidote, though the effect seems subtle. There’s six people that are changing, and you have to shoot them with the antidote until the word CURED appears in their place. As you do this, alligators come out the sides of the screen. When you shoot these alligators, they die. Pretty basic stuff, right?

At the start of stages, where the humans are at the earliest stage of their transformation, you can probably clear an entire side out with minimal bullets and serum upgrades.

The big twist is that the walls move and are capable of crushing you. It doesn’t seem random as there’s a pattern to it, but even after an hour I had trouble predicting when would be a good time to make my moves or not. In later stages, you have to move fast if you lose a life. Otherwise, you will die almost immediately from getting squashed by the walls. The other twist is that, while serum icons constantly spawn, the antidote bullets don’t refresh unless you’ve collected every one of them. Sometimes, you’ll find yourself needing several rounds to cure a person, and might have to wait quite a while before you’re able to grab the last antidote on the screen and get ten more rounds to appear. As frustrating as it is, it actually does make for an intense action game. Wisely, only your shots fired on the six target humans will deplete your antidote stock. You can shoot the alligators that roam the level without draining your inventory. SMART. That’s something you wouldn’t expect from an Atari game, especially in a prototype.

Yep, I’m dead here.

There’s still some roughness that I imagine would still have made it into the final release, as I have no idea how they would be able to polish it out. More than once, I got stuck on the corner of a wall, unable to move despite having a wide open space all around me. It’s also really hard to keep track of where the enemy alligators are. Finally, there’s no fail condition for transforming humans. If they make it all the way to the alligator form, that just means you need more bullets to turn them back. It could have been a spinning plate element, but given the fact that sometimes you have to wait a LONG time for a clearing, both for grabbing the last doses of the antidote and for a clear shot to cure the humans, maybe they were especially wise to not have the humans act as a ticking clock. If you wish, you can partially cure a human, but if left alone, they’ll keep right on with the transformation. Overall, this is a VERY good action game. Maybe not quite up to the level of greatness, but a solid, enjoyable and highly original arcade experience. It sucks that it never came out. It has cult hit written all over it, and to a higher degree of many would-be cult Atari VCS releases that didn’t pan out like Halloween or Journey: Escape.

This is supposed to be the famous “DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL” scene from Planet of the Apes. It just doesn’t work, does it?

Planet of the Apes is a completely different beast. It feels sort of like a more action-oriented version of the Lost Woods sequence from the original Legend of Zelda. Or, it would if it was actually hard to find your way around. Playing the role of Charlton Heston, you have to mostly move south while shooting, or avoiding, two of the three types of enemies as you make your way to the Statue of Liberty. And yes, I said two of the three. The smallest of the three can’t capture you, damage you, or impede your progress in any way. Whether or not that was intended to carry-over into the final release, I don’t know. I suspect the enemies weren’t entirely finalized, and I base that hunch on the ridiculous scoring system.

Top to bottom: medium ape, medium ape, small ape, big ape, medium ape. Oh, and me-ape. Apparently they’re supposed to be chimpanzees (small), orangutans (medium) and gorillas (large).

Shooting the smallest ape gives you 3 points. The medium sized ones give 200 points, while the biggest ones, which also shoot at you and drain two of your health points, score only 42 points. Why would the most dangerous apes be worth a little over 20% of the value of the non-projectile-firing medium apes? There’s no way this was intended to be the final scoring system. It’s complete nonsense that eliminates the thrill of high scores from the game because the scoring isn’t based on the challenge. But it gets even worse than that, too. The large apes only shoot up and down, and while in theory that means they make shooting the other enemies more challenging since you have to dodge bullets, that requires the shooters to be on the screen to create the danger element. They often aren’t. Even on higher difficulty settings, the enemies have no attack patterns besides running across the screen in a straight line. It’s too easy to just park in one spot and pick them off as they spawn for easy points. They tend to spawn in the same spots, so not only is the points system broken, but it’s fish in a barrel, or apes as it were. This could have been fixed in so many ways, from limiting YOUR ammo to having your life drain if you stay on any screen too long. Maybe it’s unfinished, or maybe the design is just bad. That’s the rub with reviewing a prototype: you can’t know. In the case of Planet of the Apes, my gut tells me it was never going to get that complex.

L = your life remaining and E = escapes, which is how many times you’re allowed to fall into a pit (there’s pits, though thankfully they’re nothing like those from E.T.) or be caught by the apes but escape from the cage. Unlike Alligator People, Planet of the Apes couldn’t have been released in the state it’s in. Now, how close it was to being ready is up for debate, but there was enough here for me to render a verdict on.

I can only play the version that I have, and because of the poor scoring balance and shoddy action, the game has to stand on its adventure elements, and it can’t. The majority of the game is just about moving from the top of the screen to the bottom. Sometimes you have to walk around trees. Sometimes you have to cross a river. But it’s mostly just walking down. If you get caught by one of the medium/large apes, you get taken to a village where you have to use one of your limited escapes (you just press the action button) to get out of the cage. From there, you have to.. let me check my notes.. oh right, move down several screens. In fact, it’s only when you reach the caves that you have to move in a direction other than down. Your health slowly drains while in the caves, but since you’re passing into the “forbidden zone” from the film, there’s no apes to fight.

Also your character is tripping balls on acid in the caves. That explains the health depletion. Actually, it’s funny I joked about the Rorschach test because that kind of looks like one, doesn’t it? I see.. a string bikini with love handles and sagging boobs. Oh don’t look at me like that. YOU SEE IT TOO, DAMNIT!

What happens next is supposed to depend on if you ever got caught and sent to the village. If you were never caught, you have to move down a screen, left a screen, and down a screen. If you are caught, it’s down a screen, left a screen, then down two screens. But actually, I found that I usually had to move down, left, and then down twice no matter what. When you reach the Statue of Liberty, the screen flashes dramatically as you realize it was Earth all along, then you start over from the beginning and just repeat the same sequence of navigation. So, it’s not exactly a maze game. It’s completely possible that there were bigger plans, but this prototype is pretty far along and the gameplay is really underwhelming. Unless they added a compass and randomized the pathway to the Statue of Liberty, this never had potential to be a good game. No matter how many laps you do, the path to the ending is the same every time. Lame.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Planet of the Apes was cancelled after designer John Marvin left 20th Century Fox’s game development wing shortly before they exited the market. So, we’ll never really know if this could have been a good game, right? Nah, we know. This was dead on arrival whether or not it was released. It doesn’t do anything right except kind of, sort of mimic the set-pieces from the film. While I still believe that gamers today should have legal access to it, it’s hardly a tragedy that Planet of the Apes was cancelled. But Alligator People not releasing is a crying shame. It’s a fresh take on a tired genre, and that was a rarity in the follow-the-leader world of Atari 2600 games. Now, the real question is who is the genius that thought it would be a good idea to base an early 80s Atari game on an obscure 1959 movie that was a throw-in double feature with Return of the Fly? At least Planet of the Apes is a famous, and timeless, motion picture with set pieces that lend themselves to gaming. But Alligator People? Really? That’s just the tip of the iceberg of 20th Century Fox’s head-scratching Atari lineup. In the future, I’ll be looking at games based on M*A*S*H*, Fantastic Voyage, and even the teen sex comedy Porky’s. Yes, really.

Fun for all ages.

So, why do these games exist at all?

During the 80s and 90s, media execs tended to believe that video games were lowbrow entertainment that required no talent to produce. It was easy money. Just tell the suit in charge of your media conglomeration’s game division to make a cartridge based on whatever media property springs to mind. The nerds being paid slave wages who work under the suit push a few buttons on a computer, and out pops a multi-million-dollar profit that your board of directors doesn’t understand the appeal in at all, but golly do they sure love the money it makes. I mean, that’s really not far from the truth of what their attitude was. They didn’t comprehend that actual artistry was involved, especially at the start of the home gaming era. It was hogwash to them. A children’s fad made by sloven computer nerds. Not real entertainers like recording artists or film makers. Dweebs sitting at a keyboard writing computer code. Nothing more, and certainly not art. That’d be like saying Scrabble or Monopoly is art, and we know they ain’t, therefore video games aren’t either. But they sure made a lot of money and they were fine with that aspect. That’s why all the big Hollywood players bailed on gaming at the first sign of market trouble. Warner Bros. Fox. Universal. All of them. They didn’t think twice about a possible rebound. They couldn’t have even if they wanted to, because they didn’t have a clue what they had with their game divisions. They never did to begin with.

Never mind the test of time for just a moment. Spare a thought for gamers of the Atari era. For the most part, they were at the mercy of management who just didn’t f’n get it. Who would look at something like this screenshot and, no matter how much money it made for them, roll their eyes and say “whatever.” While it was inevitable quality games would make their way to the market, it also assured an environment where players would be bombarded with low quality games from media companies trying to strike while the iron was hot, a metaphor that only works if you expect that iron to eventually cool. While the business was cynical, the results weren’t always. The company who made the Veg-o-Matic published games under the Xonox label, and those games felt ambitious, like Robin Hood, pictured above. Their games weren’t actually good, but the effort was there.

Think about it. After the Atari 2600 blew up, Warner Bros. had earnings and profits that were almost entirely Atari-based in 1982, but their executives still promised a five-week turnaround on E.T. because they had no clue how much effort a good game requires. Hell, they didn’t even know what a good game was and wouldn’t have been able to tell apart good ones from bad ones, even if they played them. As far as they were concerned, kids were idiots and would buy anything if it had the right branding on it. They even had evidence of that. Warner Bros. had pre-sold between three to four million copies of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 on name recognition alone, before the first piece of code had been written. The sales proved to them it didn’t matter that the actual game had only a passing resemblance to the arcade hit. This reinforced everything the executives believed. They got the rights to Pac-Man, they told their game people to make a cart of it, and that cart went triple platinum. At that moment, it must have felt like they had a license to print money. That the actual Pac-Man 2600 game was so badly done that it was like unleashing a wrecking ball on Atari’s reputation was beyond their scope of comprehension. It was a cartridge that said Pac-Man and played a video game with ghosts and dots. What more do you people want?

Did kids actually watch M*A*S*H*? The film or the TV show? Doesn’t aiming a game at grown-ups like M*A*S*H* or Porky’s contradict using children in focus testing on games like Alligator People? Did anyone in charge at 20th Century Fox ever pause for one goddamned moment to think about their circular logic?

And mind you, Warner Bros. did better than most, likely on account of having more skin in the game. Atari made the hardware that played the games, while everyone else was riding their coattails. 20th Century Fox had a lot less limitations to work with. I have a hunch that some exec at Fox said “we’re in the game business now!” and went down their film and television catalog identifying what properties they owned that they could sprinkle fairy dust on and turn into one of them newfangled electronic games the kids were raving about. “I saw Alligator People with the girl I was going steady with 23 years ago! I got to second base, therefore I loved that movie, and therefore kids today will love it!” What a coincidence that, of the hundreds of B movies made over the years, they just so happened to pick one that would appear early in an alphabetical list. I’m sure this type of thing happened constantly. That’s what happens when old, out of touch people who mostly make films for grown-ups are tasked with green lighting video games designed mostly for younger people. Gottlieb made a Three Stooges arcade game. Nintendo made Popeye. Famous, recognizable properties, yes, and the games turned out pretty good. But, were they properties that were popular with kids of the 1980s? Not from what I’ve heard. Knowing about something and being INTO something are totally different.

Can you even guess what famous media property this is supposed to be? It’s Flash Gordon. This is the one 20th Century Fox adaptation that DOES make a little sense, since a Flash Gordon film had come out in 1980. Of course, while it made a global profit, it bombed badly in America and again leads to the “out of touch” vibe I get from most licensed games from this era.

So, I have a theory: executives who had no interest in games were still ordering games for themselves. Never to be played or anything like that. God no. Games are for kids. But, they could then brag to their chums at the country club “you know them Atari doohickeys the kids play on the TV? I just greenlit a M*A*S*H* game for them!” A media executive in 1983 couldn’t crow to his golfing foursome that he greenlit a game based on Inspector Gadget. His friends wouldn’t have any clue what that was. But, do you know what they’d all heard of? Fantastic Voyage! They’d seen it when they were young. Then they’d have a laugh, exchange slaps on the back and go back to their putting. Who gives a crap if there’s no audience for a game based on Fantastic Voyage? Games are hot and kids will buy anything, right? Besides, if the kids don’t recognize it, do you know who will? Their parents, who will gravitate towards their familiarity, their children’s interests be damned. Did it work? Obviously not, as that mentality crashed the game industry. The shame is, sometimes it left really good games in a smoldering crater. I can’t imagine a child in 1983, or even their parents, would have cared at all about a game based on a terrible B movie like Alligator People. But, at the end of the day, we’ll never know, will we? A really good game never got released, and nobody is better off for that.
Planet of the Apes Verdict: NO!
The Alligator People Verdict: YES!

Special Thanks to AtariProtos.com. Honestly, without their incredible library, I wouldn’t be able to do reviews of prototypes. They are such a wealth of information and everyone should check it out, even if it’s heartbreaking to see so many games that were finished but never got a release.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

We ♥ Katamari: REROLL (Review)

April 12, 2024 by 2 Comments

We ♥ Katamari: REROLL
aka We Love Katamari: REROLL
First Released June 2, 2023
We ♥ Katamari First Released July 6, 2005
Developed by Namco & Now Production
Published by Namco
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, Steam
Version Played: Xbox Series X

I needed a break from pinball, saw this was on sale, and bought it. I didn’t expect to do this review, but I have a lot to say.

I think everyone said “I have to play that!” the first time they saw a picture or a video of Katamari Damacy. It wasn’t even originally going to come out in America. Too weird. Too Japanese. But, it got a lot of attention at a workshop at Game Developers Conference and the press was swooning over it, so Namco rolled the dice. The next thing you know, it’s a global hit that has spawned multiple sequels. Granted, sequels that have almost none of the charm of the first one, but as long as you avoided the handheld spin-offs, the sequels all played better and had more to do. So when I played Katamari Damacy REROLL a while back, I remember thinking it wasn’t very good as far as remasters go. I was also perplexed as to why they went with the original game when an HD remastering of Katamari Forever, an all-encompassing tribute to the franchise, would have made a LOT more sense. The first game felt like a proof of concept that was short and limited, while the series started to really get good with We ♥ Katamari. Yes, there’s more than just a graphic overhaul, but as a “remastering” that doesn’t remaster gameplay, whatever annoyances were left intact are now especially annoying because gaming has come a long way. It took a while, but the second Katamari game finally got its REROLL, and this one is much better, but only because it feels a tiny bit less lazy. Only a tiny bit, as the problems are still amplified by virtue of age.

We ♥ Katamari: REROLL is the first collectathon in forever that I 100%ed. I suppose that says more about its quality than any review I could write. Just make sure to put bandages on your thumbs BEFORE playing instead of waiting for after. Also, 100% doesn’t mean I collected a million roses or got 100% of the items, but rather I found all the cousins and the hidden Namco stickers.

If you’ve somehow never played a Katamari game, the concept is simple: you control a tiny prince who rolls a ball that everything sticks to.. eventually. The catch is that the ball can only roll-up things smaller than it, but as the ball grows, so does the range of stuff you can roll-up. In preset-benchmarks, the ball “levels-up” and the world becomes smaller, giving you all new junk to collect. You start by rolling up things like paperclips and eventually reach the point where you’re pulling up skyscrapers and landmasses (though that really only happens in the final basic level). Using dual stick tank controls, you have to cause the end of the world, more or less. Oh, the world will be fine, as the ball seems pain free. In the first game, the framing device was the King of All Cosmos got drunk and blew up all the stars in the sky, and every ball you rolled up became a replacement star or constellation. The King of All Cosmos is an overbearing asshole who mentally abuses the prince, but it ultimately gave the prince a sense of pluckiness that had a charm to it. That charm is completely gone in the sequels, because they’re far too meta and self-congratulatory, to the point that even staunch fans began to find it obnoxious.

The first game had this “we had to come up with SOME reason for this bananas concept to make sense” vibe that felt authentically kooky. This sequel, and in fact all Katamari sequels, feel like they’re trying too hard.

In this game, fans of the first game and the concept of Katamari Damacy in general essentially pray to the King of All Cosmos to make their Katamari dream scenarios come true. Much like how I’ve never found a person who brags about having a high IQ to be impressive, I’ve never once found a person or entity that fancies itself as charming to be the least bit charming at all. That’s especially true with all the Katamari sequels, where the characters are just annoying. Actually, the King might be the most annoying character in the history of video games. He never shuts up, ever. When you’re in the zone and trying to focus on beating your best times or your best scores, having the King’s dialog block the screen is ridiculous. You have to press A (or X on PlayStation) to make it quick scroll. If you don’t and just let it scroll on its own it could be quite a while before you have a clear screen again. It might be a funny gag if it happened once per a save file, but every time? Blech. There’s no method of turning it off, either. If you find one of the 39 cousins of the prince for the first time in a specific stage, the King will say the same lines every replay about finding that cousin.

My personal idea of Gaming Hell is a Katamari with only the Cowbear level where the King’s dialog can’t be removed from the screen and the catchy soundtracks are replaced with Baby Mario’s crying from Yoshi’s Island. I’d like to believe that’s what OJ Simpson is playing right now. Satan couldn’t give him a football based-hell since he already played for Buffalo.

We ♥ Katamari has only five basic stages, each of which has two variants based on making as big a ball as possible within a time limit, or reaching a target size as quickly as possible. Those stages are easily the best parts of the game, as each starts you small and in a confined space, but eventually you work your way up to the point that you’re struggling to find new things to grab onto. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors involved, as set pieces constantly repeat, only redressed with new materials to roll up. This becomes especially true if you play the three “Eternal” modes of the game, which are a new addition to We Love Katamari REROLL that didn’t start until later games. Each of the Eternal stages has a hard cap in how big you can get and how much stuff there is to gather. By the time you reach the point where you’re rolling up both clouds and the ground underneath you, the game itself is no longer taking into account all the stuff on the ground. You can even get achievements, presents, cousins, and collectables you’ve missed in the Eternal modes. However, you can’t make new planets, so when you quit, your ball will be turned into stardust for the space level. I wish there were a LOT more themes and areas, but what’s here is fine. The themes are mostly fun locations. If I had to complain, I’d say I wish there were a lot more things specific to each stage.

The racing level is probably my favorite of the special modes. It controls like operating a rocket-powered shopping cart after you’ve slammed all the hard liquor in the world, but it’s crazy fun.

The special stages are what differentiate the Katamari games, and most are fun. In the racing mode, you can’t stop the ball, which has one speed: too fast. It crashes into everything and goes flying off even the slightest hill, but the out-of-control rocket vibe works for a game like this (though I can’t stress enough: I would NOT want a whole game like that). You’d also have to be trying to lose deliberately to actually fail at it. There’s three stages where you have to guess how big your ball is and try to get it as close to the target size as possible. Thankfully We ♥ Katamari isn’t operating under Price is Right rules, so going over is okay. The most memorable stage is probably the one where you have to roll around an oblong sumo wrestler, where the only items that count are food. It’s a shame rolling up people doesn’t count as edible, as a little implied cannibalism is the type of thing that can put a game on the map. The sumo is really tough to roll since he’s not fully round and has a bad wobble. That is, unless you can maneuver yourself so the sumo is completely horizontal. If you can do that, it’s so satisfying to get a long straightaway. Also, that last sumo level is tough. Easily the stage I lost the most on.

God, how I hated these levels. Also taking the extra 24 seconds here got me a whole mm bigger. Did I mention I hated these levels?

On the flip side, when the special stages are bad, they’re really bad. One of them has you collecting fireflies that just sort of linger without any real rhyme or reason besides a few sections where more than an average amount swarm. One has you build a snowman and it’s SO tedious. The above one has a fire that goes out if you don’t collect items fast enough. And there’s a big river right in the center of the stage with a sloped edge, and if the ball falls into the river, you get punished by the vengeful king, who REALLY never shuts up when you fail a stage. There’s a stage where the items have a numeric price placed on them which is really just the same thing you’ve been doing for several hours, only with items having often arbitrary values. Then there’s the end-game special levels where you have to roll up all the planets you’ve created over the course of the game, and one where you have to roll-up countries and then catch a comet that’s about to hit the earth. They both sound more fun than they are, which is not at all. But, by far the worst stage is the Cowbear stage, which has to be a contender for the worst level in a good game ever. So, of course THAT stage got brought back for Katamari Forever (the finale of the console franchise as of this writing).

You can’t see it, but I’m about to run over a teeny tiny statue of a bear. Trust me, that’s not a good thing.

In the Cowbear stage, the level ends as soon as you roll up your first bear or cow. You don’t get the option to keep rolling with your current ball. And also the game has a very odd definition of what is a cow or a bear. A road cone that has the marking of a dairy cow? That counts and the level is over. A vending machine with the markings of a dairy cow? That counts and the level is over. Teeny tiny little toy bears? Those count, and the level is over. It turns Katamari; one of the most fast paced, frantic, exciting game concepts, into a slow paced, unfriendly bore. You have to literally inch your way around a stage where things that are painted in a way vaguely resembling the patterns of hair on cows are scattered everywhere. Your starting positions in most stages are semi-randomized, and in the Bearcow stages, the designers usually surround your starting ball with the smallest (thus lowest-scoring) bear or cow objects. And mind you, it’s not like you have perfect visibility. Most of the time, the ending of the stage took me by surprise. I usually spent a minute or so staring at the screen while trying to figure out what exactly I touched that counted as a bear or a cow. Since your goal is to create a massive ball that blocks most of the visibility in front of you, this was a VERY dumb idea. So dumb that it should have been killed on the drawing board before development even began, and the person who proposed it should have been fired. By that, I mean they should have been loaded into a cannon and fired out of it, preferably into a brick wall. This is an example of taking the quirk too far.

What did my parents get me? MALIBU KAT-A-MARI!! I’m a ballerina! GRACEFUL!

Along for the ride in this REROLL are five “new” stages, or rather five new challenges that recycle We ♥ Katamari’s existing settings, that literally have no consequence: the Royal Reverie stages. While they keep high scores, you’re not creating new planets to roll-up or anything. In terms of quality, I’d rank all these new stages a couple Everests above the Cowbear level but several Matterhorns below the levels that are actually fun. All five, at best, feel like ideas that never made it past spitballing at the initial planning meeting. Besides hiding stickers in them (more on those next), the crappy reward for completing them is costumes for the Prince not good enough to be costumes in the original release. In the screenshot above, you have to find four ballerinas in the zoo. In another, you have to find five hidden musical instruments in the school, with the catch being that the school is full of ghosts that end your round if you touch them. One is a car stage that actually allows you to stop, where the only item that counts towards your score are any tires. One is a quick one minute sprint in the bedroom and HOLY CRAP were they ever stretching for ideas there. The final one recreates the firefly stage that’s already second-to-last in the terrible idea department, only the fireflies are replaced by actual fire that represents your FIGHTING SPIRIT to quickly drain an opponent’s health bar. These levels are AWFUL and not worth a new purchase if you still have your PS2 copy.

I chose to use this pic to show the sticker challenge because it can’t spoil the locations of them for you. Seriously, this was what kept me playing for four straight days.

Easily the coolest addition to We ♥ Katamari: REROLL is that nearly every level has between one to three stickers of classic Namco characters. They’re divided into one for each “challenge” in the game for a lack of a better term. Like how each of the five basic stages have a How Large challenge and a How Fast challenge? Well, each of THOSE has a sticker in a different location somewhere on the map. You don’t roll them up. Instead, you have to equip the camera present (it should be the first present you get) and, when you find one, you have to snap a photo of it, which removes it from the stage and adds it to your collection. This is a “just for funsies” thing that has no achievements or practical usage, but holy cowbear, did I ever have a good time finding them! The stickers turn the world of Katamari into a 3D version of a Where’s Waldo book, and I mean that in the most complementary way possible.

This totally makes up for the fact that they took the second worst level in the game, changed it from night to day and pretended it was a new level. The “Fighting Spirit” stage is even worse than the firefly original.

It’s such a thrill to find the stickers, especially in the bigger levels. They’re almost never in an arbitrary spot. By time I got to the bigger levels, I had an understanding for the “logic” of the type of the places they’d be hidden, so it wasn’t like a needle in a haystack. Actually, the difficulty was nearly perfectly balanced, to the point you’d think they were pros at it. Mind you, you have to operate within the rules of each stage while snapping the pictures, which is why the tutorial, car stage, and space levels have no stickers to find. Thankfully, unlike presents and cousins, you keep the stickers you snap pictures of win, lose, or quit. But, like with the fire stages, you have to keep your Katmari fire burning while you search. If there’s a time limit, you have to work with it. Cowbear? You still have to avoid touching cows and bears, which is probably good life advice in general. There is a problem with the sticker search: it seems to have inconsistent stability. I’m going to spoil ONE sticker location for you because it’s one a lot of people are having problems with. Not so much the “finding” part as the “getting credit for finding it” part. It’s this one:

This was the second-to-last sticker I found, in one of the “pick up a million roses” bonus stage that doesn’t actually expect you to pick up a million roses in a single setting. I’m only spoiling this because of how crappy it is to get it.

And yes, that’s the hockey mask from Splatterhouse. You’ll also note I took a picture and didn’t get the sticker. I have no idea why. Several times, I collected stickers from quite a distance away, partially obscured, off-center, and not completely in frame. I still got them. But, in this specific instance, the camera simply didn’t register that I had taken a pic of it and thus collected it. So, how did I get it? I honestly don’t know! The house was out-of-bounds, so I couldn’t get as close as I wanted to. No matter where I stood, it wouldn’t register. This had happened once before with a previous sticker, but then I quit the stage and restarted it and, the next time, the camera worked on the first try and the sticker was collected. Not this time. I was really worried that the game was glitched, and if it didn’t work a year after release, it was likely to never work at all. I know the camera is sensitive enough because on the cowbear level, I collected the sticker by accident when photographing something that turned out to be wrong, but the real sticker was in the frame and I got it anyway even though it wasn’t REALLY visible. Meanwhile, the Jason mask wouldn’t register even though I took several unobstructed photos. I kept bumping up and down against the fence over and over and over and even tried a selfie with it. Finally I found a gap between the fences and, after several attempts to bump myself as close to the invisible barrier as possible, the stupid thing actually registered and I collected it.

This is the tallest you get in this Katamari, or maybe one click higher. But future editions of the series had you transition from the Earth to rolling up continents to rolling up space. This one has the Earth stuff and space in separate levels, and the space one doesn’t tell you how big your Katamari ball is. Instead, it just tells you how many objects you’ve rolled up. Fun fact: in the EU versions of We Love Katamari, and ONLY the EU versions, each of the cousins you found got their own planet for the space section. REROLL is the first time the cousin planets get a global release.

My biggest complaint about the sticker concept besides mechanical issues is that there isn’t more of it. I would love for the photography to be a major part of the Katamari series. In keeping with the Where’s Waldo-like feel of the Namco sticker hunt, they could use the photography feature in the same way the checklists at the end of Waldo books add replay value. “Take a picture of a flying elephant! Of a bear playing the piano! Of a swordfish poking out of a life ring!” That type of stuff. I’d still be playing it, and having the time of my life. Seriously, I kind of want a 3D Waldo game now because of Katamari. It just works, and it’s such a tease that there’s not more of that in the game. Just the cousins and presents, of which there’s nothing new hidden in the stages. No new cousins, and all the new costumes are tied directly to completing the five Reverie stages. They’re not presents hidden inside them. If nothing else, it’d been nice if they changed all the locations of the cousins and presents, or just added more. I say that because they’re so fun to find. If I had just played the levels until they were beat, there’s only a couple hours of content in the game. With the cousins, presents, and especially the stickers, there’s several multiples more.

I came two milliseconds short of having the clock read all 2s and I was so proud I took a picture, even though it means nothing. I think I need help.

For all my whining, I have to admit that I couldn’t put We ♥ Katamari down, and I’ll regret it for days to come as the blisters all over my hands heal. Katamari is a fill-in-the-blanks game. Whatever you want out of it, be it a relaxing game to chill out with or a white knuckle high score challenge, this will do. When I wasn’t treating it like a 3D Waldo game, I was challenging my own best times and highest scores, and the only time I ever got bored was on the Cowbear level and the firefly level (and its Reverie rehash), both of which are glaring blemishes on an otherwise pretty dang addictive game. It even has a lame as f*ck versus mode if that’s your thing, but there’s something for everyone here. I didn’t like the remaster of the original game at all, but the additions of the stickers (there’s also two in each of the five new levels), significantly faster load times (at least on Xbox Series X) and less technical hiccups make this a solid $29.99 investment, or in my case, under $10 investment. At the same time, it’s still the same game from 2005.

My favorite of the “mop everything up” type of levels is the Hansel & Gretel level.

The thing about Katamari as a franchise is there’s really only been three console games and one all-star compilation. The handheld games were REALLY bad, which is probably to be expected since those had to make all kinds of concessions based on the hardware. The last console release, Katamari Forever from 2009, was made up almost entirely of older levels and challenges. Touch My Katamari, a game ruined by the rear touch panel on the Vita, was the last non-mobile game, and it was another game made up of older levels. And that was it! This blog is younger than the latest new console Katamari game, and this blog is thirteen years old this year.

The cloud stage is one of the stages that didn’t make the cut for Katamari Forever.

While the existing Katamari games are a ton of fun, this is a frustrating series because it feels like it hasn’t peaked yet. Fans of the franchise, I ask you this: doesn’t it feel like the perfect Katamari video game is still waiting to be released? What I think happened is Keita Takahashi and his team burned out after releasing three Katamari games in a three year span, the last of which had massive production issues. Beautiful Katamari, aka the one where critics started turning on the series, only released on Xbox 360 (it’s still for sale on the Xbox Store), but it was originally going to be on Wii and PS3 too. The PS3 version ran into “porting problems” and, because the PS3 had lower sales, they canned it and focused on a Wii version that also never saw the light of day. Also, the Xbox 360 version was SLAMMED for having DLC levels coded into the disc itself, where the DLC fee was really just to unlock content already on the disc. It felt cheap, because it was. That’s why the PS3 got Katamari Forever, which was mostly a retread of Beautiful Katamari with some content from the first two games sprinkled in.

2024 and I’m still playing new releases (or in this case, remasters) where the camera gets stuck behind a solid object that drowns out your entire field of view. This is a VERY common occurrence in We Love Katamari.

That’s why these re-releases really frustrate me. Games are just better now than they were in 2005. 3D games especially. Do you think a game like Katamari could benefit from, say, a better camera? How about better fluid simulations? Handling more moving objects at once? Being able to give moving objects more elaborate moving parameters? Well, that game doesn’t exist. Even with the visuals now having less jaggyness and real time shadows, this is a 2005 game, and it feels like it. Everything that moves does so using shallow, preset parameters. Objects are CONSTANTLY clipping through surfaces, and the camera is just plain bad at what it does, to the point that you often can’t see what you’re doing. Hey, I had a ton of fun with We ♥ Katamari, even if I can’t eat salty foods without searing pain in my fingertips for the next couple days. Needless to say, I’m happy with my purchase, especially since I got it on sale. I’m also happy the first two Katamari games got a modern re-release. I’m all about preservation and legal access to older games, and I have no objection to those older games getting quality of life mods and bonus content. BUT, I really hope they have something better planned for Katamari Damacy. I hope the next Katamari isn’t a REROLL, but a completely modern Katamari that feels modern. I say that because I can’t say I’ve played a game that maximizes the Katamari concept’s potential. I don’t think it exists yet.
Verdict: YES!
$9.89 (normally $29.99) got rolled up in the making of this review.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , ,

The Storied Sword (NES Indie Review)

March 28, 2024 by 2 Comments

The Storied Sword
AKA Project Sword
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Bite the Chili Productions
Music by Raftronaut
Coming Soon to the NES
The Storied Sword at itch.io

I’m not the biggest Princess Bride fan. My parents are, so when I saw this screenshot and said “oh cool, a Zorro game” I was disinherited. Seems a little harsh, but I’m not worried. There’s no way they’ll manage to file the proper paperwork before the poison takes effect.

Attention Please: I’ve never had to open a review with a disclosure like this before, but here it goes: this game ain’t out yet, and it’s still technically in development. In fact, it’s going to be part of a Kickstarter campaign shortly after this review goes live, and this review is hitting before they’ve even announced a release date, as far as I could tell at least. The Storied Sword is mostly finished, but there’s a strong chance I might have to do an update to this review in a few months. I don’t want to make a habit of reviewing games this early, but I had such a good time that I felt like writing this up. This is NOT an endorsement of the crowd funding campaign. This is a game review. If you like what you see and read, go ahead and head over to the campaign page. All I care about is how good the game is. Spoiler: pretty dang good.

Ninja Gaiden fans will want to pay attention to this one. Batman NES fans too, though I’m not very familiar with that one as of this writing. Thankfully, they’re not talking about the PC Engine Batman.

So yea, this is Princess Bride with the serial number filed off and built around an engine that’s sure to remind players of NES games like Ninja Gaiden or Strider. On paper, that sounds like it could have a problem standing on its own merits, but thankfully Storied Sword is a very good indie. One that I wish did a little more than it does, but I’m very happy with the time I put into it nonetheless. Ninja Gaiden really is the closest cousin to it, especially if you play as the male hero. Cedric, who is most certainly NOT Cary Elwes (the fact that this is a quality production in the 2020s should have told you that), has a nifty little horizontal sword slice that’s straight out of Ninja Gaiden and sure to satisfy. You can power-up the sword once via shattering the right vases in the levels, and doing so adds a little sonic wave to your attack that increases your range. That’s where the Strider comparison comes from, as it looks like a scaled-down version of that game’s attack. Meanwhile, Orchid, the female character, has a vertical slice instead. Remember the Lion in Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap where its special animal super power was acknowledgement that upwards is a thing that exists? That, only with less fur and more breasts.

Is it just me, or does the bad guy underneath me look like Hank Scorpio from The Simpsons?

Does this actually make any game play difference at all? Yes, but it’s so subtle that it took me four full game sessions to verify to myself it wasn’t the placebo effect, AND EVEN THEN, I needed to verify what I observed with the developer. Orchid’s extra range mostly works from a defensive point of view. Almost all the enemy projectiles can be stopped with a correctly timed swipe of the sword, and Orchid simply covers more area with her sword swing. To balance this, she gets a smaller max health bar than Cedric. Small enough that she’ll die instantly from any contact with spikes, while a fully healthy Cedric can survive one shot from them. To be honest, I’ve never seen any game that measured a character’s health bar based on the damage spikes do, so points for originality. Since spikes are a constant nuisance, bordering on being the primary hazard of the entire game, I preferred using Cedric even with his weaker range.

BUZZ! This screenshot clearly shows a violation of the “no pointy things in the background that don’t kill you in a game where pointy things kill you rule.” Section 19, Paragraph 3. Check it yourself. The developers owe me two laps around a track.

Another difference that makes Cedric my preferred character is that he has the better starting sub weapon. You hold UP and press B to throw it, just like Ninja Gaiden or the NES Castlevanias. Cedric has a throwing knife while Orchid has a boomerang. Orchid’s boomerang is probably the least satisfying attack in the game. All the weapons have full screen range except her boomerang, and since it moves so quickly and one shot kills most enemies, the return effect I found to be rarely useful. Maybe it would be if you regained the item point you have to use to throw it, but you don’t. Then there’s Cedric, and on my first usage of his throwing knife, I was just a little off, but it worked out for me anyway. The knife flew over the enemy’s head, hit a wall, then ricocheted off and killed him. I didn’t know it did this and I literally let out a cheer when it happened. It was awesome! Even better was that there are several spots in the game where, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear they placed enemies specifically to take advantage of the ricochet.

You can tell these guys really hated the ravens in Castlevania, because they’re a primary enemy in Storied Sword. There’s a big variety of them, to the point that birds got their own section in the instruction manual.. which is immediately followed by a recipe for chicken. Yes, really. That’s darker than I was expecting.

It’s too bad I usually didn’t have my throwing knife. If you pick up one of the other two sub-weapons, you lose the throwing knife and don’t get it back until you die. It’s never in one of the vases you break. I really wish they’d made it so you could swap between all the different sub weapons you’ve collected. The ability to SELECT them if you will, but I understand that doing so would require some sort of SELECT-specific button. It’s not like the NES would have thought to include such a button before we reached the space age we live in now with our flying cars and hoverboards. At the very least, allow swapping for the starting weapons, since those are unique to each character. Yes, it’s petty and nitpicky, but hey, when you make a damn decent game that does so little wrong, you invite this kind of shallow yet vindictively petty criticism.

See where I’m standing? I threw the boomerang, but it stopped just short of killing the guy in front of me. You can see its max range right next to his face. With her, I preferred the throwing ax, though it costs a whopping three points to use (UPDATE: Actually, the book says 3 points, but it’s really 2 points.) Oh, there’s item points that are random drops from enemies. I guess this attack specifically is the Batman NES tribute.

As for the basic attacks, even without the ability to aim them, they’re satisfying enough on their own to carry the game through six levels without ever growing old. This is true even if you’ve not picked up the one and only upgrade for the swords, and this is owed to a healthy variety of enemies and the fact that the studio wisely didn’t make them spongy. This is an action game, as classic and clichéd as it gets, though in the best way possible. If I have to complain, and I totally do, it’s that the enemy placement is often done in a way to cause maximum annoyance. On the normal difficulty, Storied Sword’s challenge relies on placing enemies on platforms with edge-of-ledge jumping, or at the top of a tall wall jumping sequence. Usually, those lethal-ass spikes will also be involved. I swear if I actually owned the NES cart, the thing would say “stop hitting yourself!” during these sections.

Storied Sword has no “absolute last pixel” jumps that I noticed. Instead, the emphasis is more on jumping accuracy. Thankfully, Bite the Chili fine tuned the leaping physics. They’re a joy to use because I quickly stopped thinking about them and just acted by instinct. That’s the mark of a great platformer.

Maybe they did go a bit overboard on the cheap enemy placement. But, and I can’t stress this enough, it’s never a deal breaker, especially since you have unlimited lives. Storied Sword instead utilizes a post-game death counter and tells you your completion time. There’s also adjustable difficulty, but I think NORMAL should be fine for most people. (UPDATE: The EASY mode has less knock-back. To be honest, I didn’t think the knock-back on NORMAL was that bad.) On the hard difficulty (which must be unlocked), check points seem to be fully removed. BUT, the challenge is not insurmountable and the action is never tedious. I’m not a fan of Ninja Gaiden at all (probably, I really need to get around to reviewing them). But I really liked the swordplay in this, basic as it is. It’s not easy to have a game go six levels without the action losing a bit of its zing, so I was impressed. Of course, combat alone wouldn’t have been enough to get Storied Sword over the finish line. If the levels were boring, it would have been all for naught. Thankfully, that’s not the case.

The swordplay IS a little let-down in the boss fights, but that might not be true of the version that’s ultimately released. The sound design for Storied Sword is 95% pretty good, but in the version I played, the sound for striking a boss was so wimpy that I wondered if it meant that my hits were being either blocked or not landing “the correct way.” That wasn’t actually the case. The version that reaches customers might have a different sound effect. Speaking of bosses, there’s seven of them that ranged from fine to inspired. The battles that make-up the last boss functioned exactly how a last boss should: as a chef’s kiss. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so I’ll just say, I was a smiley, happy Cathy. Very good.

Where the game really shines is in the jumping physics and level design. See, despite the swordplay, the action in this game isn’t fully combat focused. In fact, most of the game is tailored around platforming and especially the wall jump ability. While the combat is a direct homage to Ninja Gaiden, the use of interacting with walls doesn’t feel like Ninja Gaiden at all, and thank god for it. That’s the part I hated about those games. Bad wall physics can ruin the whole experience if developers don’t put the time in to fine tune the controls for it. I’m happy to report that Storied Sword’s wall jump is one of the most intuitive and practical I’ve encountered. I think the developers realized they nailed it too, because the whole game is built around it. In fact, their placement of platforms and walls turn Storied Sword into something resembling an acrobatic puzzler at times. You get a tiny extra nudge over a standard jump when you use the wall jump, and they made the most of this multiple times throughout the game.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

It’s not a gameplay gimmick that the developers stuck in one or two spots and called it a day. There’s even sections where you have to just walk off a platform, then turn around and kick off the platform you were just on. Again, some bullish enemy placement can sometimes sour the exhilaration, but for the most part, this feels very modern in terms of accurate play control and reliable jumping physics. It turns Storied Sword from a heartfelt tribute specifically made for Ninja Gaiden fans (or Princess Bride fans, for that matter) into a game that’s genuinely doing its own thing. And it does its own thing quite well. By the end of the game, you’ll face tall climbing sections that have timed spikes coming out of the wall, but Storied Sword has done such a good job up to this point that I instinctively knew how much hang time I would get and all the places on the wall I could land. I ended up clearing what felt like a tough section on my first try without cheating, and it felt great! It’s a surprisingly intense game, and while I won’t say it never overwhelms, it never feels like it’s just trolling for the sake of trolling.

This section is such an example. The player should instinctively know this is not something your jump can handle. There’s not enough clearance. Instead, you have to walk off these platforms and use the wall jump so you don’t just hit the ceiling and fall down to your doom.

My biggest complaints about Storied Sword are what’s NOT in the game. I had so much fun playing its six levels that I wish there were just a couple more. I wish there were more sub weapons. What’s here is fine, but a couple more would have been cool. I also wish there were more collectables or secrets, or any at all. I smacked every single wall with weapons and found nothing. The game doesn’t necessarily hurt for the lack of them, but I also admit that if I wasn’t reviewing this, I wouldn’t have played it a third and fourth time. With level design this strong, the game was practically begging for hidden bonus collectables, and they’re nowhere to be found. I think of Garbage Pail Kids and how enjoyable finding all the cards was, or getting all DK logos in the Donkey Kong Country games. The gameplay lends itself to exploration, but there’s almost no exploration in Storied Sword. They certainly have a good foundation to build off of if they ever want to go that route. This is where the Princess Bride tribute part of the equation might actually hurt it more than it helps, because they’re limited to recreating set pieces from the film. I really hope Bite the Chili follows this up with a fully original game that uses an advanced version of Storied Sword’s gameplay, because this gameplay slaps. It’s just a very charming, likable game that feels both authentically NES-era, but just modern enough to work for players of all ages.

Princess Bride fans will giggle at the set pieces for sure.

I’m sure everything that feels like it’s missing is that way because Storied Sword is a completely linear game. The levels are laid out in a way that leaves little room for exploration. I’m okay with that. Hell, that’s Castle of Illusion, and nobody argues against it being an all time classic. You’ll probably beat the game in around an hour, ninety minutes at most, on your first go around. That can be shaved down quite a bit. I think speed runners will especially enjoy this one. When I cheated, I finished the game in just under thirty minutes, and I messed around so much I was kind of stunned when I saw the final time. I’m fine with a short game, by the way. There’s TONS of games to play out there, so it’s not like I’ll be hurting for something to do. But, Storied Sword right now offers little in the way of replay value if you’re not a speed runner. There’s “achievements” but that will never be as satisfying as collectables or hidden secrets.

Since granting neo-retro licenses is all the rage these days, I really hope Nathan scores his dream license. He’s certainly got the talent to do a big tentpole neo retro licensed game.

retrosealWhile the lack of replay value is a mild downer, even if that type of thing matters to you, I’d still say this is worth a look. I don’t even have to think twice about it. Everything Bite The Chili Productions and Raft Labs Interactive had to get right? Needless to say, they got it right. Excellent gameplay mechanics. No collision issues. Satisfying combat. Intuitive jumping. Fantastic level design. One of the best 8bit wall jumps I’ve experienced. Boss battles that feel important and climatic, and one of my favorite last bosses in a game of this type ever. I’m open to the possibility that, like Böbl before it, the developers realized they had a fantastic NES game and decided to walk away winners. And that’s fine if it’s true, by the way, because Storied Sword is non-stop fun for the full length of the game. There’s nothing cynical about it. This is a labor of true love, and that doesn’t happen every day.
Verdict: YES!
A Review Copy was provided in the making of this review.
The Storied Sword will be re-reviewed if a substantial patch is applied.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki (Super Famicom Review)

March 22, 2024 by Leave a comment

Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki
Platform: Super Famicom
Developed by Technos Japan Corp.
First Released August 12, 1994
Never Released in the United States
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Special Note: I played the ROM Translation by KingMike

This is one of those “you want it to be so much better than it is” games. Well, actually I suppose that’s true of every bad game, but it really hurts here.

I’m currently on an “American media properties with Japanese-exclusive games” kick, having just finished reviewing New Ghostbusters II for the Famicom and Batman for the PC Engine. That’s not the only streak I’m on. Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki (“Tale of Seahag -The Wicked Witch”) is the third review in a row featuring a game I was sure after the first ten to fifteen minutes was heading towards an easy YES! and then it just stopped being fun. Hell, maybe it’s me. This Japanese exclusive Popeye is easily the best of the three games in this streak, and it’s still a mostly forgettable, mostly generic platform game starring the sailor man. There’s two things that stand out about it, the most prominent of which is the board game facade the game’s built around.

White spaces OFTEN do nothing, red spaces are always a negative thing, and blue spaces always are a positive thing. The levels each have their own themed icons. A few times, white spaces still led to a brief Bluto encounter where I had to jump over him three times before spinning again. It’s a complete waste of time.

Each of the game’s five worlds are giant board games. You spin a roulette wheel to decide how many spaces you move, anywhere between 1 and 6. The spinner is not random, and in fact, you can clock the timing of it. Even with my recent issues with reaction time, I was able to clock it, which tells me anyone should quickly be able to. You’ll need to get good at it, because you have to move the exact number of spaces you spin. Each time you move back to a previous space you already walked on, it re-adds the space to the amount of spaces you must move. Well, unless you go in a circle that includes spaces you already walked on. There are items that allow you to move around the map, but they don’t count towards landing on a space, nor do they allow you enter any encounters with the enemies that walk the map. In fact, they don’t allow you to take any shortcuts or enter caves that occupy the map, either. The object of the game is to land on all the spaces that have hearts, find the hearts within those levels, and also battle mini-bosses who may or may not have hearts. You actually don’t know until you fight then.

I really thought I’d soft-locked the game at this point. I had to knock out two more steps, but I didn’t have two new spaces to walk on, as boulders were blocking all the paths around me (and the above space would have added to my count instead of subtracting from it). But, the boulders were temporary, and if I waited a while.. quite a while.. they would eventually go away. It’s so badly handled. Stuff like that is constantly happening in Popeye SFC.

At first glance, the board game idea seems inspired, but the way navigation works is so inelegant. The above situation highlights the main problem: the board’s happenings aren’t directly tied to your own movement. Enemies move around the map whether you’re moving or not. The boats that appear as shortcuts in every level arrive and depart while you fumble through the cumbersome menu. You have to press a button to cue-up the spinner, then you have to spin it, then you have to press a button to remove the spinner from the screen before you start to move, and then you have to tuck the game in at night and read it a bedtime story. There’s also TONS of levels that have nothing to do with collecting hearts. They might have hidden shortcuts inside them that take you to a different part of the board. Sometimes, they might only move you a few spaces over. Sometimes they might take you to a level that normally has a heart, but the heart won’t be there until you land on the heart space properly, via a spin. Worst of all, the spaces stay “active” once you’ve finished them, with no actual way to tell which ones you’ve finished or if you’ve activated switches in them that change the board game map. The only exception is the HEART icons are removed from stages you collect hearts from, the hearts remain. I hope you’re paying close attention, because you’ll need to replay some levels multiple times just for the sake of progress.

I swear that, sometimes, it feels like the game is glitching out. The pathways are invisible here, and then you have to wait for time to pass if you want to exit this structure.

As for the actual level gameplay, SFC Popeye is as generic as platforming gets. Most enemies can be killed by jumping on their head, but you also use an anchor tied to a chain as a whip. It’s satisfying enough. Whips are fairly bulletproof as far as gaming weapons go. You have to really crap the bed for them to be dull. Popeye almost does that, as there’s no upgrades for the whip and ALL basic enemies that can be killed will die from only one shot anyway, be it jumping on them or hitting them with the anchor. There’s three items that temporarily change YOU that are tied to the anchor. One uses it as a helicopter and doubles as the item that lets you skip around the board. One turns you into a car, where you’re SUPPOSED to be invincible, but it’s hit and miss when it actually works. Both of these control so miserably that I found them to be more trouble than they’re worth for the platforming sections. Hell, as far as I can tell, there’s no attack at all for the helicopter, which controls like a cross between a shopping cart and a rock sitting on a medium-power air hockey table.

One of the few times I thought to use the helicopter was going backwards through a level that I knew had a heart. Only, there was no heart, because I didn’t “land” on the space. I got there via a warp from another level.

The third power-up is a frog that basically copies the Frog Suit from Super Mario Bros. 3 in that it makes swimming faster and easier, except in this case, it turns you into an actual frog. This works great for the underwater levels, of which there’s a lot. It also allows you to fit into small spaces, though most of those are in underwater levels. The downside is that, when you’re a frog, it’s one hit deaths no matter how much life you have left. Also, it seems glitchy as all hell, as sometimes the level would stop scrolling up or down while I was using the frog, and I had to turn it off (thus losing it) in order to proceed. This doesn’t seem like it was intentionally done, as there’s nothing in the level design that logically indicates I’ve reached any sort of cutoff point. It just sort of blocks you from continuing. The other power ups nuke the enemies that walk around the map, and I hate them because they TEASE a fun thing. Like one anchor says ZAP and has a lightning bolt. You think it’s going to be some kind of electric mega-charged whip that shoots sparks or something. Nope. When you activate it in a level, a little window opens up that shows a random mini-boss getting nuked. But they come back quickly, so, like, what’s the point?

Apparently in the roughly two trillion hours this game felt like it lasted, I never got a single screenshot of the frog using its tongue. Well, it uses its tongue as a weapon. It works too. What I find bonkers is the frog looks NOTHING like Popeye. Like, they couldn’t at least give it a corncob pipe? A butthole chin? SOMETHING that would have been charming?

Oh, and those mini-bosses don’t actually fight you unless you’ve already spun and removed the spinner from the screen. If you stand still on the game board, they’ll walk right by you. Since they sometimes have multiple hearts (and seriously, if you’re three or four hearts short of finishing the level, you might get them all from a single mini-boss battle) you’ll want to fight them. But, the thing is, there’s no way of telling which ones have hearts to give you and which ones are just going to drop a full health restore and a coin. Some of those mini-boss battles take FOREVER too. There’s a robot at one point who took so many hits to kill that I paused the game and loaded up a guide at GameFAQs to make sure I was actually doing damage to the damn thing. You’ll inevitably fight the same mini-bosses multiple times in a single world, and sometimes they have different attack patterns, but most of the time, it’s the same crap you’ve already done several times and it’s SO repetitive and boring.

The robot mini-boss was one of three times I actually lost a life, too, and it takes more hits to kill than any boss except the last boss. One of the most mind-numbingly dull boss fights I’ve seen.

And that’s the problem with Popeye SFC: after the first world, the game keeps repeating the same notes over and over, until the game becomes completely boring. Even the attack patterns of the bosses are variations of the same thing over and over, and the actual levels run out of ideas really quickly. There’s only a handful of tropey themes like forests, plains, houses, castles, etc, that repeat endlessly until the final credits roll. But even the specific levels start to feel repetitive and samey. There were times where I questioned if either they were recycling sections of previous levels or if the game had randomly generated stages. They’re so samey and generic, and I can’t remember a single point during any of them where I thought the layout was clever. MAYBE a section where you step on these gigantic switches that activate trap doors above you that rain enemies and/or items down, but even that gets repeated several times during the course of the game.

There’s no hidden pathways or breakable blocks. Some of the barrels take you to other places, but that’s it. Oh, and some of the levels might last as little as under ten seconds. I don’t mean in a “speed runner” type of way, but as in the start and exit are right by each other. Yes, really. I’m almost certain the developers gave up.

And it’s not even really effective as a treasure hunt game. The hearts are usually just laying around in a normal spot instead of being cleverly located. Every time I thought the game was about to do something fun, like shooting Popeye out of a cannon, it doesn’t really do anything. Using the cannon just takes you to a different spot on the map. When you take a pipe from the foreground to the background, the level isn’t cleverly designed to fully take advantage of it. Popeye SFC might have the least imaginative levels I’ve experienced on the Super NES/Super Famicom yet. The one novelty that does sort of almost work is the Seahag will occasionally curse you. This does one of two things: it either just automatically takes a hit point off you, which might be the laziest thing I’ve ever seen a game do. The other thing is the screen resolution will become heavily pixelated. It can even happen on the map screen and might be the only clever thing the game does.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

At least, it would be clever if not for the fact that it happens completely randomly. It never once interfered with me making progress. If the game had built around these kinds of effects always happening during specific sections, they could have tailored the gameplay around it. In fact, they probably did that anyway, but in the worst way possible: they kept everything predictable so that the curses don’t completely screw you. Combine this grindy repetitiveness with some spotty controls and inconsistent collision detection and you’ve got a recipe for a game that feels like it never peaks. Take a look at these screens and, mind you, I took damage in them.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I should have comfortably been safe there. It didn’t even graze Popeye’s pixels. Now compare THAT to this moment from the final battle against Bluto, where I clipped him several times and I didn’t take any damage at all. Mind you, I didn’t even get screenshots showing my body completely covering his fists, where I couldn’t believe I didn’t get hit. The whole game is like this. You can’t use the character or enemy sprites to gauge the collision boxes at all. That lack of consistency is really frustrating. EVEN WITH THAT, I only lost three lives the entire time and finished with over sixty. I was winning prizes from the slot machine without even needing to match three. 100 coins nets you a free life, but it only takes 3 coins to bet, and I only needed to buy a health refill once. The levels are pretty generous with them.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

It’s not that Popeye is necessarily a bad game. It has a ton of personality. When you finish pinging off enough damage on bosses, they drop a can of spinach, which allows you to grab them and perform a finishing move. There’s only three of them, but still, it’s right out of the cartoon. Actually, there’s one final thing each of the last three games I’ve reviewed have in common: they’d probably make great games for young children. Popeye SFC might even be ideal as a child’s first semi-complicated game, what with all the board game stuff. But honestly, I think even little kids might get bored with this one before the end. It just runs out of ideas so quickly that it can’t overcome its sloppy collision and repetitive level design. Long before even the second world is finished, besides a couple mini-bosses, you’ve experienced the whole game. The levels are as basic and bare bones as gaming got in this era and, even as you near the end of the game, they don’t feel like they escalate in difficulty. It’s just too dang easy and too dang simple for its own good. It really has one good idea: using the anchor as a whip, and even that novelty wears off quickly. Even with all its problems, I was this close to giving it a YES!, but then I realized I was in that “barely decent” territory for more than half the game, which is really a polite way of saying I was bored. In other words, Popeye wasn’t strong to the finish. Hell, he wasn’t strong to the halfway point.
Verdict: NO!
I’d rather have had a 16-bit update of the coin-op, frankly.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Batman (PC Engine Review)

March 20, 2024 by 6 Comments

Batman
Platform: PC Engine
Developed by Sunsoft
First Released October 12, 1990
Never Released in the United States
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

“Gotcha nose!”

What Sunsoft-developed, Batman video game based on the 1989 Tim Burton movie were YOU expecting? Sunsoft actually made four completely different games based on the film, and I’m fascinated with how one company made four games that look and feel and play nothing like each-other, all based on one movie. Actually, it’s pretty smart when you think about it. If you make one core game, then mold it to fit each platform, gamers would probably be inclined to buy only the most “advanced” one, and MAYBE the handheld version. But, if you make unique games for each platform, each game is potentially bought four times by the parents of spoiled children. Score! Of course, that wouldn’t really work if the games aren’t all decent quality, and it really, really wouldn’t help if one of them doesn’t come out in America at all. As scorching hot as Batman was during this time frame, you have to wonder why this Batman didn’t come out on the TurboGrafx-16. Actually, yea, why didn’t it? It doesn’t suck, does it? Sigh.

You can only cross the roads using the crosswalk. Hey, the Dark Knight is many things, but a jaywalker isn’t one of them.

In this PC Engine exclusive, you guide Batman through 48 stages of mind-numbingly dull mazes searching for that specific stage’s MacGuffins. In level two, it’s actually Mario Sunshine a decade early, as Batman has to wipe the Joker’s paint off masterpieces at a museum. The actual things you’re picking up (or wiping off) don’t matter, as they don’t enhance the gameplay and you’re really doing the same thing in every level. While you do this, a small handful of enemies attack you, but you have a significant advantage over them: your batarangs. They don’t actually kill the enemies. Not because Batman doesn’t kill. Oh no, they stun the enemies so Batman can kill them with his bare.. well, his gloved hands. Actually, they fly off the screen like cartoons, but that’s better than poofing out of existence.

“Look, my hand’s a dog! Arf! Arf!”

You can upgrade the batarang via pick-ups that increase the distance and amount of batarangs you can throw at once. I hope you have fun with them, because Batman has one button gameplay. The batarang is your entire offense, with both buttons throwing it and no other usable inventory items. There’s a handful of other pick-ups, like bombs that clear the screen, speed-ups, timer increases, and invincibility. Oh, and a Joker icon that I only saw once that takes away all your upgrades. But, no other fun bat gadgets, unless you count the warp blocks in later stages as using a grappling hook, because that’s how they’re animated. Still, a Batman game where Batman doesn’t have tons of fun Bat-toys just sounds boring, doesn’t it? And while having just batarangs MIGHT have been okay, the problem is you have an unlimited supply of them. Part of me thinks just the act of significantly limiting the amount of ammo you have would have saved the game. It would have given Batman PCE a sense of strategy, and likely several exciting moments of having to flee from enemies instead of just mindlessly smacking them with a batarang and walking into them. You also don’t lose your upgrades when you die. Presumably you will if you game over, but that won’t happen, so don’t sweat it. As long as your timing is accurate, the PC Engine Batman is an absurdly easy game. I had so many lives that the counter was stuck at x9 for a while, even though I was losing lives.

Further cementing how easy this is, you can throw your batarangs through walls to stun enemies. You’re also given a very generous grace period to finish them off after this.

The Wikipedia page for this game describes it as “reminiscent of Pac-Man and Bomberman” because, presumably every top-down 8bit game that takes places in a maze must be called as such. But, you really shouldn’t mistake this for a maze chase game. There’s no tension at all. With enemies this outmatched and extra lives as plentiful as they are, Batman is a slog. Even when the enemies move faster, the maze structure of the game usually gives you plenty of time to turn around and wait for them to get you. The hardest of the chaser-type enemies, the ones that rush directly at you, still rarely got me. Players are at too much of an advantage. There’s no adjustable difficulty, mind you. As far as I can tell, there’s not even a second, harder quest. This is it. This is the whole game.

All the cool things you’d hope for in a Batman game, like the Batmobile, are relegated to cut scenes between worlds. Lame.

In the few times where I actually lost a life, it was usually because I spammed the attack button at the wrong time and was stuck in the throw animation waiting for my batarangs to return to me. Once I remembered to pace myself, I never lost another life until the finale. Some enemies have guns, but without hyperbole they have the slowest moving bullets I’ve ever seen in a game like this. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the bullets move slower than the slowest moving enemies walk. To the game’s credit, they did incorporate this into the level design with little spaces to duck into while you wait for bullets to pass, but even this doesn’t make things any better. When PCE Batman shows a rare example of being clever by putting the shooters on an island and thus possible to stun but impossible to kill, it wasn’t as exciting as I was hoping for. Their bullets are so slow and the batarangs stun enemies so long that those areas went by faster than when I had to fight enemies directly.

Batman claims the four Triforces and dominion over Hyrule. Hey wait a second.. there’s only THREE Triforces! IT’S RIGHT IN THE NAME! TRIforce. Then again, Four is in there too. Well, FOR is.

The level design feels pretty repetitive too. Whether the stage is set in buildings or city streets, the novelty of a rare Batman game never released in America wears off fairly quickly thanks to samey map logic. The 48 stages are divided into four game worlds of 12 levels, followed by one final boss wave. Maybe mixing and matching themes like in Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle/Roger Rabbit would have helped. Hell, worlds 1 and 4 are both labeled “Gotham City” which.. I mean, I took it for granted that was the case. Where else would we be? Metropolis? Coast City? Apokolips? Hell, worlds 2 and 3, despite being labeled as a museum and a chemical factory, were probably also in Gotham City, because, you know, Batman! Wherever you’re at, the idea is the same: find all the doohickeys. They’re not ever cleverly placed and they don’t do anything. They just lay around. Sometimes.. rarely, really.. more territory opens up if you clear-out an entire area, but that mostly happens at the start of the game and the concept is abandoned quickly. It’s not enough. We’re talking about a Batman game where he fights the Joker. They could have done something clever, like the Joker booby trapped the target items, so you need to find the matching item to disarm it first. Something to lend an actual puzzle element to this. I’m so frustrated by how unimaginative this is, and it came out nearly a year after the Batman movie was screened in Japan. It’s not like they had to rush to make a deadline.

I died the most fighting the first of three bosses the game ends on. He’s only vulnerable when he’s jump kicking you. Of course, you’re stun locked yourself when throwing your weapon. We basically had a series of draws and I came out on top by virtue of having more lives than it did. I lost a few lives to the Joker too. Second boss can be beaten in one or two hits if you play it right.

In some levels, there’s triangles that act as warp blocks, and sometimes they take you to different spots depending on which way you walk into them. That sounds fine, but it further interrupts an already sluggishly paced game by having you watch the animation of Batman firing off his grappling hook to leave the block, then fall gracefully at the next location. Also, when you land, you’re invincible as long as you don’t move. You can even throw batarangs and the enemies will still pass through you as long as you sit still. This was presumably done to prevent cheap deaths, but a tiny grace period would have been preferred. It might have even made the game exciting. I swear to god, it’s like the development team was gung-ho to make another game but got pissy when Sunsoft’s overlords said “no, not a platformer. The NES is getting one of those” and sabotaged the game.

The final battle with the Joker involves chattering teeth bombs and a big gun. Oddly, the game ends with three bosses in a row when there were no bosses up to this point. Why didn’t they spread them out over the course of the game?

I read a lot of lists of “best hidden gems/Japan exclusive” types of lists. It should have been a massive red flag that I don’t think I’ve seen the PC Engine build of Batman on any of them. You’d think a Japanese exclusive release of a definitively American property such as Batman would be one of those legendary lost classics, right? And it’s not even like this Batman does anything BAD, exactly. It controls fine, never does cheap shots, and would probably be much more enjoyable for young children who love the franchise. But, it’s just so uninspired and soulless. I didn’t like Sunsoft’s Gremlins 2 NES game, but I’d prefer something adventurous like that over this uninspired drivel. A game where Batman doesn’t punch and the Batmobile and Batwing only show up in cutscenes between levels? Seriously? That’s what annoys me most about Batman for the PC Engine: this could have been ANY property or a generic game with boomerangs as weapons and it would have changed absolutely nothing. Say what you will about the coin-op from Atari Games (I certainly have) but there’s no doubt about it that you’re playing a game based on the Tim Burton movie. I’d call it a soulless cash grab, but I suppose it can’t even be that if they never brought it to the US, so it’s even worse than that. It’s just soulless.
Verdict: NO!

I don’t know why, but this cracked me up.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

New Ghostbusters II (NES Review) and Ghostbusters II (Game Boy Review)

March 15, 2024 by 2 Comments

New Ghostbusters II
Platform: NES/Famicom
Developed by HAL Laboratory 
First Released December 26, 1990
Never Released in the United States
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Ghostbusters II
Platform: Game Boy
Developed by HAL Laboratory
First Released October 16, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Slimers in this game look like their eyes have been sewn shut. It’s creepy.

There are three 8-bit versions of Ghostbusters II on Nintendo platforms. The one released by Activision and developed by Dan Kitchen is universally regarded as the inferior game, but because of licensing rights, that’s the one and only NES version that was released in the United States. HAL Laboratory had the global handheld rights to Ghostbusters II, but only the Japanese and European Ghostbusters II rights for the NES/Famicom console. In terms of long term reputation, it was probably the best possible thing to happen to title christened “NEW Ghostbusters II.” Being the one that never came out in America elevated it to the status of hidden gem. An out-of-reach treasure. A status it absolutely does not deserve, because folks, New Ghostbusters II isn’t really that good a game. Or much of a game at all, for that matter.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

First thing’s first: the NES and Game Boy versions of Hal’s Ghostbusters II have a similar play style, but the Game Boy release isn’t a port. It’s an entirely different game and plays like a much more ambitious version of the Famicom release. Then again, there’s so little ambition in the Famicom game that it honestly feels incomplete. I’m not even kidding. It seriously plays exactly like a proof of concept or prototype that’s maybe 75% finished. One of those prototypes where all the action is there and (mostly) complete, but all the bells and whistles are still lingering on the drawing board, waiting for someone to add them to the code. You do one thing and one thing only on the Famicom’s Ghostbusters II: control a main Ghostbuster of your choosing who stunlocks ghosts with their proton pack, then you press a button for the AI-controlled NPC to throw the trap out. Clear a room of ghosts, then walk to the next room and do it again. Rinse and repeat until the credits roll. There are bosses, but the only difference with them is you have to hold the proton stream on them until they change color before throwing out the trap. The final boss doesn’t even have the trap part. All the normal baddies are done-in with a single zap and a trap.

For what little it’s worth, it actually does capture all the set pieces from the movie, like the two ghosts from the courtroom scene.

And.. that’s the whole game. There’s no items (except an occasional points bag that seems to happen in random rooms). There’s no upgrades. You have unlimited proton pack energy and unlimited traps. Despite adding tons of scenery that’s begging to be searched, like filing cabinets, chairs, etc, you don’t search for anything. Just zap, trap, and move on through five levels, four of which have bosses, then you fight Vigo and that’s the game. When you first fire-up New Ghostbusters II, it really does feel like you’ve found buried treasure. It is satisfying to catch a ghost in your beam and then suck it into the trap. But, that wears out very quickly. There’s nothing to break up the tedium. It’s not even a maze game, really. Even if the room has multiple doors, a gigantic arrow appears in the center of the screen and points you to the next room after you bust the current room’s final ghost. While there’s a nice variety of ghosts, some of which throw projectiles, the offensive game of New Ghostbusters II is just too limited. As far as action games go, New Ghostbusters II is one of the most tedious, mind-numbing grinds in the entire NES/Famicom library. It gets so boring doing the same thing over and over, in stages that feel like they’re taking forever.

The best level is probably the second one, where you fight ghosts in minecarts, but even this wears thin.

I first played New Ghostbusters II a while back, when I was sampling NES/Famicom games. It seemed like it would be decent. Who knew that I’d already, more or less, experienced everything the approximately hour-or-so runtime had to offer. From the second level onward, the only excitement I had was whenever a new enemy first appeared, excitement that lasted about as long as it took for me to perform the zap and trap on it. I figured “maybe this was made with co-op in mind. Everything is better in co-op, right? Then again, I don’t remember an option for two players..” Well, guess what? There’s no co-op. What an absolutely baffling oversight. Would it have saved the game? Maybe. It certainly would have helped. You’re stuck with an AI partner who can generously be described as “often confused.” With the exception of the second-to-last boss, the only challenge in New Ghostbusters II comes from those times where your partner can’t figure out how to walk through the narrow gap you just walked through. Other times, it might require wiggling back and forth with your beam before they get themselves in a position to accurately throw the trap. They might as well have one character do both. The only positive thing I can say about your partner is that, in the Famicom version, they’re completely invincible, and I didn’t appreciate how wise that decision was until I played the Game Boy version.

I mean god damn, Venkman,, it’s a wall. You, Peter Venkman; one of the most witty film characters in movie history, are being outwitted by a wall. A WALL! Not even a haunted wall!

Ghostbusters II on the Game Boy lost “New” in its title, but added basically everything the NES version desperately needed. Alternative weapons? Here. Being able to play as all four Ghostbusters in a single play session? It does that. Game worlds are also no longer gigantic maps that you zig zag through. Instead, they’re broken up into levels where you must find and catch a specific amount of ghosts. It sounds fantastic, especially since it retains the core zap-and-trap gameplay from the Famicom game that would have been so fun if it wasn’t literally the only thing you did, with no upgrades or alternatives. So, go figure that it’s one of the worst Game Boy games I’ve played so far, and it’s ALL on your NPC partner.

Well, mostly the partner. The enemy design is weak, too. There’s two types of enemies that are invincible while they’re spinning, a message they seem to have gotten loud and clear. Sometimes they spun so long I worried the game had glitched out. I have a feeling stuff like this might be possible, because when you run out of time, you actually don’t die. Instead, the enemies all turn into the Ghostbuster logo and become absurdly easy to zap and trap. So really, timing out is practically a reward for doing a terrible job. Ghostbusters II on the Game Boy was letting people fail upward before that was cool.

This time around, your partner is vulnerable. This would make things difficult enough by itself. But you also have to deal with the fact that the collision detection is also weirdly inconsistent. The majority of the times my player or especially AI partner got hit, it took me by surprise because they weren’t really that close to the enemy. Like, several times where I rewound the game trying to figure out what exactly caused me to take a hit. Usually, it happened when myself and the AI player had to double back and we crossed over each other, as if the act of doing that gave us both bigger collision boxes. Other times, I literally could have so much of my sprite on the enemy that there was more of me than there was of it on screen and nothing happened. I even went so far as to walk back and forth on the enemy, practically offering it a free hit, and all that happened was I did a little dance with it. I might as well have, since my attacks weren’t working either. It was like the most unintentional stalemate of my gaming life.

See!
Pretty bad, huh?

And the poor collision also combines with the fact that, unlike the Famicom game, you can’t push the trap through the wall, or most solid objects for that matter. The beam works fine, but the trap typically can’t have anything obstructing it. But hell, sometimes the AI had a wide open shot at the damn ghost and STILL couldn’t hit it unless I jiggled MY character around like I was trying not to let hot coals burn my feet. It’s so frustrating because this is the game doing what I so badly wanted the NES game to do. If you see a character hanging out on a wall, you can tag them in, an act that often grants you an item. Besides the invincibility shields, those are mostly all really fun to use. You get what I think is a Dust Buster that allows you to suck up ghosts for a few seconds without bothering with the AI partner. I was always happy to get that, and there’s also a gun that just vaporizes the ghosts, again circumventing the AI partner. There’s a pickaxe that lets you knock down a wall. I really wish they’d done more with that. The only item that’s missing is a radar that points you towards where the ghosts are. Sadly, Ghostbusters II overly relied on restocking rooms you’ve already cleared out, which reduces the game to a mindless grind by the end.

Uh.. hey wait a second.. is that a Suezo? By the way, enemies lingering in the walls, where your trap can’t reach, is so common an occurrence that you’re really better off just walking away and coming back later. So frustrating.

But, the worst part is so stunning that I honestly feel the game should have been cancelled if this is the best they could do, and that’s simply the act of the AI partner following you. Because, well, they can’t. They get stuck behind everything, and just getting them to follow you in and out of a room is a fight half the time. If anyone wants to make a list of the worst uses of an NPC partner in gaming history, the movement alone seals it for Ghostbusters II. Hell, about halfway through the game, I realized why the tag team-like “walk up to a Ghostbuster and swap places with them” is a feature in the game. It’s not really because it’s more fun to cycle through the full team. That’s just a bonus. No, the feature is really a band-aid to compensate for a situation that I think would have certainly been a soft-lock otherwise. This part.

Maybe if the ability to do a swap hadn’t been there, I could have come up with some other way to wiggle my partner out of the mind-bending jam of “being able to walk next to something” that’s right up there with the three body problem. But, I’m thinking there’s probably at least a couple swap locations in the game that were put in place to prevent soft locking. And, I can’t stress enough, your partner also takes damage, and can end your game. If they lose all their hits, YOU game over, regardless of how much health you have. Health refills are plentiful, but still, given how problematic the AI is in general, having them be vulnerable was a bad idea. Thankfully, they’re invincible against the bosses. In fact, during the battle with Vigo, I found hiding behind them to be a successful strategy. So, hey, you’re not totally useless, AI partner. You’re 99% useless.

While it doesn’t look different, this screenshot is from a nearly finished US prototype of the game, before Activision chose to go their own direction, presumably. Honestly, I could see an executive in 1990 playing this and saying “it’s boring. We’ll take our chances on something else.” I have much love for the Kitchens and Dan’s brother Garry is a good friend, so I take no pleasure in saying I’m not a fan of Dan’s version of Ghostbusters II, either. But, damnit, at least it tried to change things up instead of settling for a slog. And that’s what HAL did. They gave up and settled when it’s clear they had bigger plans.

Another thing neither game does that would have added some much needed depth is having the Ghostbusters each have unique abilities. The Famicom game even lets you play as Louis, but that version has no swapping. The two characters you pick are locked-in for the whole game, and in the same role, too. But, whether the game has four characters or five, they all play identically. This is where they really left a lot on the table, as they could have built around special traits or weapons for each Ghostbuster. While I greatly admire the ambition shown in the Game Boy release, both games could have done so much more. I really think a lot of the Game Boy version’s problems come down to having characters be too big for such a small screen. In a way, they probably got the two games mixed up. The console game should have been the more complex one and the Game Boy release should have kept things as basic and simple as humanly possible. As limited and dull as the Famicom game is, it would probably have been considered an elite-for-its-time handheld game. Meanwhile, all the problems on the Game Boy I’m guessing are largely due to the platform itself. The same mechanics would have probably worked better with the Famicom’s ability to take place on a bigger playfield.

You’re just going to have to take my word for it that there’s a guy in that little force field above my head. Also, during boss fights, items rain from the sky, including a very valuable one that allows the invincible AI to fire bullets. Oh, forgot to mention, you fire bullets in boss battles. No trapping or beam this time.

And that’s ultimately what the story of New Ghostbusters II was for me. Somewhere between the Game Boy and NES games is the perfect 8-bit version of Ghostbusters II. The NES version’s AI is touchy, but never completely worthless. The biggest problem is the game does one thing and one thing only. On the Game Boy, it feels more like a normal game instead of the most basic concept of a potential game. The biggest problem is, well, nothing really works right. Combine the AI of the NES game with the mechanics of the Game Boy release and you’d have a quality licensed video game. But, that’s never going to happen. Your options are a bare bones action game or a game that feels like trying to lead a drunk through a crowded shopping mall. I mean while fighting ghosts.
Verdicts: NO! and NO!

“I, VIGO, DUUUUUUUUHHHHHHH!!”

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

DuckTales 2 and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 (NES Review) BONUS – Disney Afternoon Collection Final Verdict + Rankings!

March 5, 2024 by 2 Comments

DuckTales 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released April 23, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

Rescue Rangers 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released December 10, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

In DuckTales 2, you can upgrade your cane. Remember the episode of House where he gets a cane with flames on it so that it looks like he’s “going fast?” It’s like that, only it actually works. Actually, DuckTales is basically exactly like House, what with all the racial stereotyping and verbal abuse of employees. Presumably a lot less pill-popping though. It’s a children’s television show, after all.

It’s not exactly Earth-shattering to call DuckTales and Rescue Rangers two of the best games on the NES and two of the best licensed games of all-time. Oddly, both games got sequels that nobody talks about. This is largely chalked up to the fact that both games were released late in the Nintendo Entertainment System’s life cycle. In the case of Rescue Rangers, very late, as in it and Bonk’s Adventure ushered in the final year of its active support. Now that we’re in the future and have access to the Information Super Highway, you’d think that wouldn’t matter anymore, but these sequels still get almost no attention. They don’t make “best of” lists, except the occasional “hidden gems” ranking. It felt a little bit like a red flag to me. Maybe fans of the originals know something I don’t. Since they used the same engine as the originals, appeared to use the same sprites, were made by the same developers, and feature the same gameplay (more or less), I was kind of figuring DuckTales 2 and Rescue Rangers 2 would feel more like expansion packs for the previous NES games.

In Rescue Rangers 2, the red ball is missing from the boss fights, having been demoted to “bonus game novelty.”

In the case of Rescue Rangers 2, it’s remarkable how much it feels like a modern DLC expansion pack made up of levels deleted from the original release. By that, I mean the levels deleted for a reason. These levels are bland, the enemies are placed in uninspired ways, and there’s an overall sense that the energy from the original is missing. There’s nine stages this time instead of eleven, but in the entire play through, there was only one single moment that made me sit up in my chair and say “okay, this is different!” It involves operating a mine cart. Even this was sloppy, as whether or not you’re “bound” to the controller of the cart was touch and go. I lost a life by walking right off the cart when I meant to use the brakes.

When this worked, it worked REALLY well, as far as 8-bit set pieces go. However, when it didn’t work, it meant death.

Meanwhile, DuckTales 2 feels like a legitimate sequel with level design that easily avoids having a “deleted scene” quality about it. A few new moves have been added. You can pull certain blocks with your cane by doing the golf swing into them, and speaking of that, you can do the golf club swing with your cane mid-jump. The jumping swing never feels “right” and was my least favorite aspect of the sequel, but at least one big hidden object requires you to do it. There’s also hoops and other assorted platforms your cane can hook onto, which is such an obvious idea that I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t in the original game. Like the original game, there’s only five main levels, one of which doubles as the setting for the final boss of the game. Really good levels, but they’ll leave you wanting a lot more. If Mega Man games can have 8 bosses PLUS Dr. Wily’s stage, why can’t a DuckTales game get over the five-main-stage hump?

You’re not just walking into walls to find secrets anymore, either.

Instead of finding the two expansions for your health capacity somewhere in the levels, you have to purchase them in a store that you visit between the levels. You can also buy 1ups, extra continues, cake that restores your health any time you want (which you use by pausing the game) and a safe that lets you keep all the gems you collect if you lose a life. While I miss finding the health upgrades in the levels, Capcom replaced them by hiding upgrades to your cane in three levels. The upgrades allow you to pull larger objects with the cane or break formerly indestructible blocks. It’s actually a cool idea that’s very underutilized here. I think it would have been better to have those upgrades be rewards for beating stages. Maybe they couldn’t come up with two more. That’s probably more likely, since they barely managed to create excuses to use the upgraded cane.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

However, props to Capcom for going all-in on level exploration and hidden rooms. Remember the two “hidden treasures” in the first game, and how it was weird to only have two hidden treasures in a game with five levels? Well, there’s only two high-valued hidden treasures in the sequel too. HOWEVER, each level also has a hidden map piece somewhere in it. You start the game with one piece, and there’s a piece that must be purchased from the store. The other five are hidden in the levels. Upon grabbing the seventh and final piece, you are immediately teleported from whatever level you’re in to the hidden area under the castle. This is a sixth stage that has a repeat of the boss from the Scotland level, but the level getting there is an entirely new one. No having to go back and forth to Transylvania, like in the first game. Well actually, you do briefly return to the pirate ship for the final battle. Again, they could have done a Dr. Wily-like final trial, but no, just a return to the pirate ship and a relatively straight walk to the final boss. DuckTales 2 rights a lot of wrongs, but it still feels like Capcom left a LOT on the table with the franchise.

The bonus area is one of the best parts of the game, too. Nice.

Since the best aspect of DuckTales 1 was the level design and how exhilarating it was to find the hidden trinkets, I’m really happy that it plays such a big part in the sequel. I sort of wish it didn’t immediately kick you out of the level when you find the seventh one. Also, you actually do have to get the seven map pieces before fighting whatever is your fifth boss, since it would appear the game takes you immediately to the final battle against Glumgold after you get the five primary treasures from beating the bosses. It’s sloppy, especially for Capcom, but otherwise, there’s nothing about DuckTales 2 that makes it a lesser game than the original. The level design is stellar and, despite using the same engine as the original, it worked in a few puzzles and surprises along the way. Besides Little Samson, I can’t think of any NES game that got the shaft worse than DuckTales 2. Okay, so the soundtrack isn’t as good, but that shouldn’t matter when the gameplay is quantifiable better. This is probably the best “hidden gem” on the NES.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I wish I could say the same about Rescue Rangers 2, but it’s just not as good as the original. Besides being able to pick up stunned enemies and use them as weapons, the one and only added move (at least that I could find) is being able to power-throw the crates if you get a running start. That sounds like a fine idea, but in practice, the amount of times I found it useful were few and far between. You can’t jump and throw a power shot, nor can you angle it in any direction but straight forward, and any deviation besides walking straight forward takes away the power. Since most enemies, you know, move, moments where I was able to build up the momentum for a power shot without falling off a ledge, walking into another box (or an enemy), or having the enemy simply jump out of range were so rare that I spent the entire forty-or-so minute run time questioning why they even bothered with this move. Most enemies die from one normal hit anyway, and the ones who don’t? Well, it’s fun to pick up stunned enemies and throw them at the next baddie. There’s no point in the game where several enemies are in a row, either. It’s one of the most worthless video game moves ever invented.

The throwing of stunned enemies was, admittedly, very fun.

What’s most notable about Rescue Rangers 2 is all the stuff removed from the original formula. The map is gone. The salt and pepper shakers are gone, but then again, so are the apples and other heavy objects that the shakers make lighter for you. On the other hand, a positive removal was most of the indestructible metal boxes. They were so overpowered that they all but ended the challenge for the original game, but in Rescue Rangers 2, they’re a true rarity (and there’s even a gag where one gets taken from you via a magnet). It’s weird they made these changes but kept the “ducking into a crate and letting the enemies walk into you to kill them” thing that severely nerfed the first Rescue Rangers. Oh, and the red ball you fight the bosses with that was SO FUN to use is gone. You fight bosses with crates or other assorted debris. Decent bosses, mind you, but they all lack that feeling of BIGNESS or finality that the first game did better than just about any Capcom Disney game. Hell, maybe better than any NES game.

The best “set piece” isn’t really even a set piece. The most fun I had in Rescue Rangers 2 was using the baseball, which is thrown in a high arc, like a lawn dart. I almost wish they had eliminated the crates entirely and instead required players to carry a single item through the levels like this. THAT would have been cool and different and made up for the ho-hum level design. Some ROM hacker ought to get on this idea. Dear NES development community: I freely give you the idea of a Rescue Rangers game where you have to manage a single item across whole levels with no crates or other throwing objects. Make me proud!

Bosses were never DuckTales’ strong suit, so the fact that DuckTales 2 has a couple marginally decent bosses is actually a really big improvement. I even died fighting one of them (the pirate ship’s boss), as opposed to DuckTales 1, where I think I took two or three hits of damage total the first time I ever played it (this doesn’t count Remastered, where the boss fights were scaled-up to the level of OMG awesome!) I only died against one boss in Rescue Rangers 2, and like what happened with the mine cart, that was largely due to haphazard design. Rescue Rangers 2 is just a fundamentally forgettable game. The level design is much more conservative. The enemies aren’t as menacing. The themes for the levels are mostly a big step down. In the first game, there’s multiple unforgettable characters and moments. I’m having trouble remembering anything in the sequel AND I JUST PLAYED IT! Besides the mine cart, the biggest twist is one stage runs on a three minute timer., and I beat that level with over two minutes left on my first attempt. Admittedly, I figured the game would cut it close and so I bolted for the exit, ignoring enemies and items, but it turns out, there was no need to rush.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Only a complete hater would call Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 a bad game. It’s not bad. It just feels like a step down from the first game. Actually, a really big step down. The levels aren’t exciting in the same way the original game’s were. I’m confident that nearly any player who experienced both Rescue Rangers titles for the first time back-to-back would rank most of the sequel’s levels on the bottom. It’s telling how fun the basic Rescue Rangers gameplay is that it’s still an okay game (see Mickey’s Dangerous Chase for an example of the formula being outright bad), but even hitting enemies with crates feels less thrilling this time EVEN THOUGH THE CRATES break on impact. The satisfying WOOOSH sound design of slaying baddies is replaced with an incredibly underwhelming “ppf” sound. Oh, the WOOSH is still there, but it’s limited to when you daze an enemy. Why’d they do that? Eh, Rescue Rangers 2 is fine, but I can totally understand why it never became a big deal.
Rescue Rangers 2 Verdict: YES!

For the first time, an NES version of a DuckTales boss got me. I lost a life fighting Quackbeard. I don’t know if that’s its name, but it’s DuckTales, so I’m guessing so. (Checks) Apparently no, it’s just called Cap’n. That’s lame.

The game that really got screwed historically was DuckTales 2. It’s just a better game than the original. Yep, I went there. It’s more bold with its level design. Its bosses are (marginally) more cunning. There’s a LOT more hidden stuff. Even the controls are improved. Transitioning to and from the pogo hopping is so much smoother this time around. It’s why the jumping golf swing stood out so much. It’s the only janky element left. Otherwise, DuckTales 2 is the superior DuckTales game and one of the biggest casualties of the 16-bit era. If this had come out a year after the original, I have no doubt in my mind it would be universally regarded as the best Disney game by Capcom on the NES. A lot of late NES games got done dirty by being ignored in the face of 16-bit gaming, but none got quacked-over quite like the sequel to DuckTales, a great game that nobody talks about.
DuckTales 2 Verdict: YES!

DISNEY AFTERNOON COLLECTION
BONUS FEATURES

I know they couldn’t use a picture of an NES controller, but wow, this looks like the bumper for a cartoon series in 1990 got drunk and threw up on your monitor.

Disney Afternoon Collection has TONS of bonus features. There’s a gallery that includes box art, concept art, advertisements (that usually feature the same art from other galleries) and even a few references to the Game Boy ports of these games. The Game Boy references are actually annoying since those versions of the games aren’t included. Hey, I didn’t like DuckTales at all on the Game Boy and I’m not even going to bother playing Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin, or DuckTales 2’s GB ports, but having them would have added value even as a curio. Disney Afternoon also allows you to listen to the full soundtracks for the games, and holy crap, I appreciate it because it confirmed to me how bad the soundtrack for DuckTales 2 is. It’s one of the worst soundtracks for a quality game ever, and you would NEVER expect that from Capcom. I have a tin ear so nobody should listen to me about anything music related, but seriously, this soundtrack is BAD. Awesome feature though.

I wish there was a lot more behind-the-scenes stuff for the games, but what’s here is, you know, fine.

Along with the absolutely essential button mapping, the two biggest features are a time attack mode and a boss rush mode for each game. Both features have online leaderboards that allow you to watch replays of any recorded run. Awesome. I’m not so much into speed running, but I’m left gobsmacked by how good some people get at cheesing games. If you’re not into speed running and just want to own the six Disney Afternoon NES games, you’ll have the option to rewind and use save states. It’s one of the best versions of rewind I’ve seen in a collection like this, too. Just hold the button down and you can go back as far as you want. That’s how it should be. Awesome. For all the special features, I’m crediting $10 in value to Disney Afternoon. I’d credit it more, but half the MSRP is the max value for a retro collection.

FINAL VERDICT ON DISNEY AFTERNOON

The full game is going to get a YES! either way, but I’ve set a value of $5 per quality game because that’s usually where I put NES games at. At $5 per quality game, it needed just two out of six games to get a YES! for me to recommend Disney Afternoon Collection. If you read this review, you already know it won, but for the record, the final tally was:

YES!: 4 – $20 in Value
NO!: 2
Bonus Value: $10
MSRP of Disney Afternoon Collection: $19.99
Final Value: $30
Final Verdict: YES!

DISNEY AFTERNOON RANKINGS!

It’s still a game about two billionaires fighting over $5,000,000 worth of stolen plunder.

  1. DuckTales 2
  2. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers
  3. DuckTales
  4. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2
    **TERMINATOR LINE**
  5. Darkwing Duck
  6. TaleSpin

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Disney’s Aladdin (Sega Genesis Review)

March 2, 2024 by 5 Comments

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Sega Genesis
Developed by Virgin
Published by Sega
First Released November 11, 1993
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection
SPECIAL NOTE: This review is of the FINAL CUT version.
Read the Video Game History Foundation’s article.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

If I was told I could only make one change to the Sega version of Aladdin, I think I’d have defeated enemies fall off the screen, like they do in the SNES game. Poofing them out of existence hurts the sword-based combat, which is the defining difference between the two 16-bit versions of Aladdin. I’m a big fan of Capcom’s version, while I’ve never really cared for the Sega Genesis version, and the combat is a big reason why. It’s some of the most inelegant and feathery sword combat I’ve experienced. My father enjoyed the game and told me I was expecting too much, but nuts to that. 2D games could do sword fighting pretty good by this point, and while it’s not Wizards & Warriors levels of bad, it’s nowhere near as swashbuckling as they were aiming for. Unlike the SNES game, apples are lethal in Aladdin for Genesis, so if I was facing a more aggressive enemy, I opted to use them. You also have to use apples to defeat the bosses. In a game that puts such a premium on sword combat, closing with the apples tells me they knew the sword was no good.

The final battle against Jafar is one of the worst in the entire history of 2D gaming. In the first phase, he sucks you in with his magic staff (kinky) and you have to scratch out distance and throw apples. Then, in his final form, you have to stand with the giant snake off-screen to be able to jump up and hit it until it says LEVEL COMPLETE. Oof. Horrible.

In general, I don’t like Virgin’s style of level design. It always has the feel of using a plug-and-play template of platforms and walls to create a zig-zaggy maze from point A to point B. That’s fine if the combat is fun enough to carry the workload, but if it’s not, you’re left with repetitive gameplay and no stand-out set pieces to make up for it. Which isn’t to say there were never moments where I wasn’t enjoying this alternate take on Aladdin. I liked the magic ropes that fly you up to different platforms. I liked the Abu mini-games. And uh.. that’s about it. The fast, flowing action of the SNES game is gone, and instead, Sega’s Aladdin’s level design is so basic, samey, and lacking in set pieces. Even something like hanging from ledges would have helped. Genesis Aladdin never feels spontaneous, which is why it never feels like an Aladdin game.

The escape from the Cave of Wonders scene might as well cut to Dragon’s Lair. The genie’s fingers point where the rock is coming. Well, unless it flashes a “?” and then it’s pure random chance if you live or die.

It’s not like they never got experimental. Actually, this version had better ideas for level themes than the SNES version did. Instead of a stage based around Ancient Egypt, there’s a stage based around Aladdin escaping the dungeon, which sort of happens in the movie. Capcom could have used that for a level and didn’t, and Capcom could have used the magic carpet for the actual platforming levels, another omission that Virgin was wise to include in their game. That said, the similarities are astonishing. Both companies had the same idea about setting the post-Cave of Wonders level inside the lamp. But, whereas the SNES version of this concept is surreal, colorful, and creative, the Genesis version is really drab, cold, and kind of janky. The main platform is this blue substance that’s functionally like quicksand that you sink through if you don’t keep jumping. Granted, I imagine the inside of his lamp would be more like the Genesis version, since it explains why he wouldn’t want to go back to it.

It’s basically magic quicksand. This is a reminder that original ideas aren’t necessarily good ideas.

I don’t really have much more to say about Disney’s Aladdin on the Genesis since I already sort of reviewed it once when I reviewed the original Disney Classics Collection. It’s pretty, I guess, but the much-touted hand drawn animation cost the game weighty combat and accurate collision detection. I’d rather have both those things than “cartoon” animation. Besides, the animation wasn’t on par with the film. It was more like a really cheap Saturday morning cartoon. Cutting edge for 1993, but fated to age badly. Ultimately, it’s just really boring. I have a whole list of Disney games I have to play for this marathon, and the ones I dread most are those by Virgin. Their games are all style and little substance, and certainly nothing worth celebrating. The most frustrating part of their involvement with Sega’s Disney games is that Sega produced one of the all-time greats in Castle of Illusion. Why did they turn to a third party for this, and especially why Virgin of all studios? Apparently it was because Global Gladiators impressed them. So, as with most things in life, blame the most overrated 16 bit game ever made on McDonald’s.
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , ,

Disney’s Aladdin (SNES Review)

March 2, 2024 by 6 Comments

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 21, 1993
Designed by Shinji Mikami
Developed by Capcom
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection

In a game loaded with entertaining hop ‘n bop action, there’s something about swinging off a peg and kicking a baddie that is SO satisfying. I put a lot of stock in combat that feels weighty.

I’m not a big fan of the Sega Genesis version of Aladdin. It’s not horrid or anything, but it ain’t all that. This is very much a minority opinion. Get this: even Shinji Mikami, certifiable legend of gaming and lead designer of the SNES version of Aladdin, says the Genesis version is superior, citing the animation and the sword. Seriously? Because the Genesis version of Aladdin also has GOTCHA cheap shots galore, boring level design, and the animation comes at the cost of having no OOMPH to the combat. Meanwhile, the acrobatic antics of Aladdin on the SNES makes for one of the best children’s games in the history of the medium. As close to perfection as a platform game gets. It’s actually one of the few games where the biggest problem is what’s missing, not what’s here. What’s here is nearly flawless.

There’s more “punch” in the act of springing off pegs than there is in the entire Genesis cart.

Make no mistake: Aladdin on the SNES is a children’s game. I’m a huge advocate for games aimed at young people, because, get this, I used to be young myself. But, being a game directly aimed at young children doesn’t have to mean “fun for only the target demographic.” I think the best family games are ones that nobody can be bored with. If you can cruise through a game designed with 9 year olds in mind without ever risking a game over and still have a good time, isn’t THAT the mark of a great game? And that’s Aladdin on the SNES. Unlike the Genesis game, combat here is traditional “jump on the bad guys” hop ‘n bop action. There’s no sword, and while you can throw apples, they don’t take out every enemy. For the human baddies, the apples daze them and open them up to attack. I prefer that to throwing apples that poof the enemies out of existence. You can also kick enemies if you’re swinging on pegs.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Combat isn’t the focus on the SNES. If there’s a pointy object sticking out of the ground, Aladdin can probably do a handstand-flip off it. On the Super Nintendo, Aladdin’s acrobatic gameplay feels more spontaneous than on the Genesis, and that’s why I think it feels like the better version of Aladdin. Unlike yesterday’s game, Mickey Mouse III, the level design in Aladdin is fully optimized for the handspring, and it’s awesome. This is probably the closest any 2D platformer of this era came to feeling like a genuine parkour-focused game. Aladdin can hang from ledges, swing from rings or pegs, and transition seamlessly from bouncing off pegs to bouncing off the heads of enemies. It really helps that the controls are smooth and responsive. When you miss a leap, it’s always on you. My one knock is that the parachute that allows you to glide is an item that must be found. Once you have it, you keep it until you die, but there’s always one lingering around near checkpoints. Making it a collectible was a mistake and they’d been better served adding replay value by hiding more trinkets to find.

The auto-scrolling area of the Cave of Wonders level is one of the best of its breed, and I say that HATING auto-scrolling in games.

For me, the biggest problem with Aladdin isn’t what the game does, but what it doesn’t do. There’s only seven “worlds” and one of those is a glorified bonus stage based around the iconic Whole New World scene. I’d say Aladdin on the SNES is one of the most true-to-movies video games ever made, but then you have an entire world that takes place inside the Genie’s lamp (it’s the highlight of the game, easily) and a stage set in what appears to be ancient Egypt. I checked my notes and I’m almost certain Egypt is not, in fact, close to Baghdad, the setting of Aladdin (technically it’s a fictional version of Baghdad, but that’s only because Disney changed it due to the Gulf War). Great levels, mind you, but the game is too short. After the first world’s boss, you don’t fight another until a two-part battle with Jafar at the end of the game. You mean to tell me they couldn’t come up with some wacky, creative boss for inside the Genie’s lamp, or the Cave of Wonders? Really, the only “extra effort” incentive is an alternate ending if you collect over half of the red gems scattered throughout the game. The whole thing takes under an hour to complete, and while it’s an hour of non-stop fun, it’s also such a massive let down when you reach the end of an area and it does the “here’s your password” thing without any pomp or circumstance for clearing an entire stage.

There’s two magic carpet sequences. One is the harrowing escape from the Cave of Wonders. The other is this, a non-level with no enemies and no way to fail. I really do think the way the gems are placed on the stage could have been more elegant.

The Genesis version of Aladdin is famous for being rushed, but I get the impression the SNES version probably was too. It would explain why the game is so short, and especially why levels end anticlimactically. Capcom, famous for their boss fights, could only do three bosses? Really? I don’t buy it. Then again, maybe they realized that the levels and gameplay that made the final cut was as close to perfection as platforming in this era got and walked away winners. Maybe. It’s also entirely possible that, knowing the Sega Genesis was marketed towards preteens and older, Capcom decided to hedge their bets on a game that was easier, less frustrating, and more conventional than what Virgin was coming up with for their take on Aladdin. For all the talk about Aladdin’s “superior, hand-drawn visuals/animation” on the Genesis, I really don’t think the Sega version looks better than the SNES game. It looks different, but I actually prefer the traditional sprite work of the SNES version to the hand-drawn animation of the Genny’s Aladdin. Ironically, it feels more alive, and it certainly aged better. Plus, the SNES Aladdin using sprites means it doesn’t have the issues with collision detection the Genesis version does.

Since the movie didn’t have enough action scenes, they had to add content. Oddly, both games had similar ideas, like literally traveling inside the lamp. The Super NES version leans heavily into the surreal and is easily the best level in the game. The Sega Genesis version of “inside the lamp” is a complete disaster.

I’m not a big fan of the “Virgin Interactive” level design style, where levels are sprawling and you zigzag up and down walled-off sections of a gigantic stage. They did it with Aladdin, Lion King, and Jungle Book. Those games feature much fewer stand-out moments or set pieces and it gets boring doing the same stuff from point A to point B. Virgin’s Disney output always feels so.. generic. Meanwhile, I’ve played the original Prince of Persia, and I really think Aladdin accomplishes what it was trying to pull off, only better. Quick paced platforming action that’s fast, fluid, and thrilling, and it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. I had to remind myself that there’s very few games I’ve played where being too short is a bad thing. This is one of the few where that’s frustrating largely because what’s here is sublime.

Seriously though, this could have used more bosses.

Maybe critics and players voted for the Genesis Aladdin with their wallets thirty years ago, but if the same two games were put head-to-head today, I think the Capcom game would win. So what if this is made for little kids? Isn’t that quintessentially Disney? And most importantly, would players today prefer Capcom or Virgin’s take on Aladdin now that the whole “hand animated” thing is no longer a technological marvel? I was curious, so I put Aladdin to the test with my nieces and nephew, ages 8 to 12. They unanimously voted for the SNES game and questioned how long the levels went on for in the Genesis game. By the time they found the lamp in the Sega version, they wanted to do anything else with their time. Having just replayed both myself, I can’t believe anyone picked the Genesis game over the SNES game. That’s why Capcom’s Aladdin is the winner of the only test that I care about: the test of time.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →