Arcade Archives: Golf (1984 Nintendo Arcade Review)

January 9, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

I used to golf quite a lot. I grew up literally right next to a country club that we were members of, but we never went next door to do anything but eat. Then my father had a mild heart attack and the doctor suggested he needed to take better care of himself and take-up a nice, relaxing physical hobby. Guess what he chose? Heh. Yea, because golf has NEVER been known to cause stress, right? I was 11-years old and, content that my father was on the mend and not, you know.. dead.. I went back to my normal routine of staring blankly at the screen while playing video games. I was on my brand-spanking-new PlayStation 2 when my Dad said I was coming with him to take-up golfing too. I refused, and he threatened to repurpose all my disc-based games as drink coasters. I said “you wouldn’t do that” and turned around to find my copy of Eternal Ring sitting under his mug. So, bitching and complaining the entire walk over to the clubhouse, I took-up the sport with my old man. Like most middle aged men suffering a midlife crisis, Dad overdid it with all the best equipment money could buy and lessons from the club pro, and whatever he bought for himself, he bought for me too out of guilt. It didn’t help him at all. His swing is such a disaster that I wanted to learn to play the violin and strum out Nearer, My God, to Thee after every tee-off. “It’s been a pleasure playing with you, Pops.”

Like Satan himself, this goes under many names. It could be called just Golf. It could be Vs. Golf. It could be Stroke & Match Golf. Hell, there’s even a re-sprited version with women called Vs. Ladies Golf that has different holes. Why wasn’t that included in this set? Because it’ll be an extra $7.99 when it inevitably lands on Nintendo Switch. Duh!

Meanwhile, given my size, strength, and complete lack of coordination and athletic ability, I wasn’t too bad a golfer. At my best, I was a 14 handicap. Which, for you non-duffers out there, that means if I were to play a full eighteen hole round of golf with a score of -14 to start, you would expect that I’d finish the round at 0, or even par. In essence, I got good enough where you wouldn’t expect me to bogey every hole. Dad was a 29 handicap. He couldn’t even get halfway to me, and if you don’t think I didn’t take a moment to rub that in his face every single time we hit the links, you don’t know me. None of that has anything to do with golf video games, but what do you want? They’re usually games about stopping a meter on time. YOU try to make it interesting! Really, the only reason to put all this here is to make it clear: I know my golf, and even though I consider myself a mediocre-at-best video game player, I usually annihilate golf games. I played Mario Golf on Switch Online a few months ago, a game I played a lot as a kid, and it was like putting on a comfy pair of old shoes. After a brief warm-up period, I was draining eagles and holes in one like there was no tomorrow. I even had an elusive albatross! It was like no time had passed at all. Mario Golf for the Nintendo 64 shockingly holds up very well to the test of time. I wish the same could be said about the one that started it all.

If some of these holes seem eerily familiar, they should. If you played golf on Wii Sports, you played these holes too. They just took the NES/Arcade Golf course and made it 3D. Yep, really.

Golf was one of the most successful of Nintendo’s Vs. System arcade games, so much so that they had one in the country club before I was born. I’ve heard from people who bought an NES just to have it. So, this is a little more historically big than I thought. And man, talk about a pedigree! Golf was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, directed by Kenji Miki (who also directed NES Open Golf and Wario Woods before going on to be a very prolific producer at Nintendo), and programmed solely by Satoru Iwata. Apparently, Miki got deeply into golf during the Japanese golf boom of the 80s. You wouldn’t know it from this. I know a lot of my readers get annoyed when I talk about the dribblty-ball or other assorted sportsballs, but this is where I have to let the sports nerd in me come out. Because this is a golf game that basically does one thing right, and everything else horribly wrong. And, by the way, if you don’t know anything about golf, you’re going to need time to read the manual and memorize the max shot length. There’s no computer assistance with choosing your club, nor anything on-screen that tells you how much yardage you get out of each. If you don’t know the difference between a 3 Wood and a 6 Iron, you’re on your own to figure it out. There IS a chart in the instruction manual but you have to pause the game for it (which will automatically end your game if you’re playing Caravan or Hi-Score mode), but still, it’s not the most user-friendly golf game. You also always default to the driver at the start of every new hole, even if it’s not a hole where you’d want to bring the thunder. This is golf played exactly like everyone who steps onto the links for the first time: hammer always in hand.

One of the golden rules of golf is it’s better to undershoot than overshoot. A wise man once said you’re not likely to hit a parked car by undershooting.

So, here’s the thing about golf that matters most: any idiot can do a tee shot with a solid 80% accuracy if they practice it enough. It’s not even that much practice you need to learn to drive well enough to not embarrass yourself. In golf, real or video, it’s the short game that makes or breaks you, and Match & Stroke Golf has a pretty abysmal short game. Especially troublesome is chipping. In real life, if you ask any professional golfer what’s the most important club in their bag besides the putter, they’ll almost all agree it’s the pitching wedge. In Vs. Golf, the club is just not calculated right and it makes it unsuitable for chipping and other assorted short-distance shots. In fact, they seem to have designed it to play like a lob wedge, which is not the same thing. A lob wedge is designed to make high-arcing drop-shots that have less bounce and roll. They also allow for more control over the spin if you want to angle it. In Vs. Golf, the wedgie launches the ball high into the air with a tall arc, even if you chip. In a game where there’s no topography outside of the green and you can’t put English on the ball, that kind of shot is totally unnecessary.

The bunkers might as well be repainted fairways for all the challenge they pose in this game.

Yet, if you’re right by the green, you don’t want to use the wedgie. Even with a very light powered chipping stroke, the ball gets too much distance. I found myself using the sand wedge, which I suppose was a satisfactory enough chipper for the purposes of this game. Yes, many people, including pros (famously Phil Mickelson) use the sand wedge on the fairway because of its large-angled face which is great for a variety of different spins. You know what? I honestly found it was a lot safer and accurate to just putt from the fairway if I was 30 yards away. The game at least tells you how far you are from the hole, and anything less than 30, screw it, I putted. Sometimes it would even go in the hole, though this felt entirely like it was luck-based. This doesn’t seem like that big a deal, right? But, it sort of is.

Putting is annoying at first, but you can get SOMEWHAT used to it. The arrows on the green clue you into the slope, and it’s just a matter of figuring out the power to use. But, it’s not a good system. There’s no adjustable power and judging the speed and roll and distance is completely guesswork. Also, sometimes you’ll get a lie that I’m almost entirely certain isn’t possible to make in a single stroke. That happens in situations where you’re putting directly against the slope from a long distance. I had full-powered strokes come to a stop before they reached the hole. Golf doesn’t do any of the short game in a way that feels good, but putting is the worst. It never feels comfortable. Annoying you can learn to deal with it just enough to not be a deal breaker, but you’ll NEVER like it. Okay, maybe this really IS accurate to the sport.

See, you’re not going to be shooting holes-in-one or ironing-out eagles from 150 yards out as anything but dumb luck in Vs. Golf. It’s just not a precise enough game. BUT, you also can’t just chip-in either, and that’s where it crosses the line for me. Putting from a pixel or two off the green isn’t the same as knocking-in a forty-yard chip, and you can’t do that here. 99% of the best moments in golf, real or digital, are not shots off the tee. The most exciting and satisfying shots almost always come after that, and that can’t happen here. Not with these mechanics. Thus, you’re left with a game of video golf that lacks the potential for the most exciting shots. It’d be like a basketball game without dunking or a three point line. That’s the fun stuff! Remember, Golf is the one sport where “close enough” can be exhilarating. One of the single most incredible moments of my life was the first time I shot a ball from a bad lie in the rough and put it about five feet from the hole. Mind you, the putt was for a double-bogey, but I didn’t care. I was 12 years old and it was the first time I’d ever done anything that resembled good golf.

I had to rewrite a few parts of this review because I didn’t even think to pause the game to check and see if there was a shot chart to help newbies. I hate that I keep picking games I ultimately don’t like. I can see why Hamster wouldn’t want me to get review copies. They have a bad winning percentage with me. BUT, I will always give them props for their instruction manuals. They’re never half-assed and I really do appreciate the effort for clear instructions.

Well, the Nintendo Golf doesn’t really capture that spirit well because the short game just isn’t exact enough, and while “close enough” is a staple of golf, it’s also a game of precision. The strongest aspect about Vs. Golf is easily the shots off the tee. This was a pioneer of the standard triple-click swing mechanic that’s so ingrained into the video golf genre that the recent EA PGA game brought it back. It works here, and thank god for that. You can only shoot in sixteen exact directions and have to learn to utilize the slice (curving the ball right) and the hook (curving it left), which is simple to remember: left is right, and right is left. On the final click, if your meter is left of the white target, the ball will slice right mid-flight. If you’re right of the target, the ball will hook left in the air. You have to learn to use this, because sometimes you absolutely just can’t aim at the green the way you want to and have to sort of guestimate the hook or slice. There’s no flight trajectory or any method of helping you. I suppose, once again, it’s true to real life golf: you have to practice to get a feel for it.

Stupid as it is, I did enjoy the standard Arcade Archives five minute Caravan Mode. Yes, it’s even part of Golf. My best was shooting -4 after five minutes. I only barely finished the 6th hole when time expired. My best in the standard mode was shooting -10 for 18 holes. Not too shabby. In my recent Mario Golf session, I shot a 51, or -21 under par for the second-to-last course. My best as a kid wasn’t far off that. I think I did -25 under once. In real golf, one time at a par-3, nine-hole pitch & putt, I shot +1. At the course I played most on, my best ever for a day was +7 scratch. Sounds not too bad, but I was only +1 after nine holes. I gagged away the best nine holes I ever shot in my life, and Dad was calling me “Shark” after famous choker Greg Norman.

Another problem with Vs. Golf is every single shot is essentially a clean lie on the fairway. If the ball lands on a tree, it’s out of bounds and a penalty. Otherwise, even if you’re facing a tree, you don’t have to do anything different. It’s as if the trees aren’t there. There’s not even a rough in this golf game. Rough, aka the tall annoying stuff which is the thing that you’re desperately trying not to hit in real golf. No worries about that here. Instead, you’re playing all-or-nothing golf. It’s feast or famine: you’re either on the fairway, bunker, or green, or you’re out of bounds (or in the water, but at least there you get to take a drop). There’s wind, which barely manipulates the ball at all unless it’s over 10mph. Even sand traps don’t really factor in all that much. I never once hit one that wasn’t right by the green, which would be the only time that would actually hurt. The ball doesn’t get buried in sand, and you don’t have to do anything special besides switching to the sand wedge, which makes them kind of toothless, which defeats the point of having them in the first place. If anything, they’re just a brown-colored fairway that’s easier to chip off of. They’re the one element where it IS safe to chip and not worry about overshooting.

The little fist-pump Mario does when you sink a birdie managed to bring a smile to my face. Sadly, I never shot an eagle this entire review process. Not one. Came close only once, and yea, that was cool. It’s golf! Those moments would be cool no matter how antiquated the actual game is.

So, what do I make of this? Because golf should be frustrating, right? It’s golf, named as such because all the other four letter words were taken (yes, I stole that from Leslie Nielsen). It’d be weird if there wasn’t a steep learning curve. But, I think that this does little more than serve as a good first step towards making video golf a legitimately fun and viable genre. I’m totally certain this was groundbreaking and probably very fun in the mid-80s, like Golden Tee was in the 90s. Nintendo’s Golf is ultimately a very stripped-down game of golf, and while it isn’t totally crap by today’s standards, it’s just not that fun anymore. Vs. Golf is hurt badly by what it doesn’t do. Despite the lack of complex terrain, it lacks for assisted club selection, thus making it not so newbie friendly. But, veterans of video golf will find it too basic. What is Match & Stroke Golf? It’s a really good proof of concept for where video golf would go over the coming decade, and that’s awesome and admirable. But, now it really only has value as a historical curio. Then again, there’s people buying this because this version has music and the NES version doesn’t. Do I recommend it? Well.. no. But, with handicap, it could be a yes.

Golf is not Chick-Approved.

Golf was developed by Hamster Corp.
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$7.99 triple-bogeyed in the making of this review.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Arcade Archives, Arcade Archives Golf Review, Arcade Archives: Golf, FORE!, Golf, Golf Nintendo, Golf Nintendo Review, NES Golf, Nintendo Vs. System, Stroke & Match Golf Nintendo, Vs. Golf, Vs. Golf Review

Arcade Archives: Kangaroo (Review)

January 8, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

This week, I’ve looked at the maze chase. I’ve looked at the gallery shooter. I looked at.. whatever the hell Journey was aiming for. But, what about the Donkey Kong-like platformer? How about Kangaroo? It was released in 2020 as part of the Arcade Archives lineup too, so no need to dip into MAME this time. Believe it or not, Kangaroo was not some kind of historical curio. Despite being made by Sun Electronics, who would go on to be Sunsoft, maker of Blaster Master and the NES Batman, Kangaroo was distributed in America by Atari. Thus, a lot of people think of this as an Atari game, and one that could have gone into my Games They Couldn’t Use feature. Indeed, you’ll be seeing Kangaroo for the Atari 2600 and 5200 in part two of that very series. It was a moderate hit for Atari, and in fact did well enough that it was even adapted into an animated short as part of the legendary Saturday Supercade cartoon block. But, as an Arcade Archives release, Kangaroo deserves its own look. While I’m grateful that Hamster released this as a solo-effort, holy smokes, this is a terrible game. Anyone who thinks I’ve gone too easy on the retro games this week, just wait. I’m going to have a Kangaroo burger here.

Literally the only stage that works without MUCH of a hitch, and it couldn’t be more bland, basic, and boring.

I’ve nicknamed Kangaroo “Sloppy Joey” because that’s how Kangaroo feels. Like a game that wanted to ride coattails, but was made by people who had no clue what they were doing. Kangaroo is made-up of three levels where the object is to climb to the top of the stage to reach your joey, and one level where you can bring the joey to you. It wants to be Donkey Kong so bad it can taste it (what does Donkey Kong taste like? The answer is “chicken” because most everything tastes like chicken, which is why you should NEVER TRUST THE CHICKEN !) but it didn’t seem to understand how to do any of the things Donkey Kong did in terms of movement or level design. I’ll start with the movement, where jumping is mapped to UP but so is climbing ladders. It makes jumping over gaps a pain in the butt. If you fall or jump down even an inch, you die.. in some parts. In other parts you still can’t fall even a single pixel length, but you can jump down to a lower ledge. There’s no consistency except anytime you step off a ledge, you die. Even if the ledge is literally the size of your foot. At that point, it isn’t a ledge, is it? It’s a step, right? But it kills you like you just fell off the Grand Canyon. In general, the movement just feels sluggish and unresponsive. The best thing I can say about it is it’s not as bad the level design, which very much incorporates that death-by-gravity inconsistency.

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The stages of Kangaroo are some the most bizarrely constructed I’ve ever seen. They’re so weird. After a conservative first stage, the second stage begins with having to hop-up a series of uneven platforms, and this is where the game’s biggest flaw reveals itself: the rules are inconsistent. When you ring a bell, it spawns more fruit, though most of it is below you, and you will die if you even attempt to jump lower once you ring the bell in level two. The fruit DOES carry over if you lose a life, but actually going to retrieve it is apparently not possible. I tried it, and if there’s a spot where it’s safe to do it, I couldn’t find it. Normally I’d check YouTube clips to see if I’m missing something but then I was like.. why would they make it so the fruit respawns below you anyway? Wouldn’t it make sense to have the bell on the first floor, with some kind of extra risk element blocking it, and put players at a choice? See what I mean about how this makes no sense? I imagine even in 1982 or 1983 that risk/reward design was a known thing, right? Which again makes this feel like a game by people who were just sticking things on a screen and crossing their fingers that they could reach the goal, sort of like me when I make a Mario Maker level. I did make a good faith effort to try to go lower and get the fruits, but the moment I went any bit lower than the platform I was on, I went into the death animation. BUT, then you get to level four, and there’s a series of ladders and gaps, and sometimes you do have to jump to a lower platform, which is now safe to do. Just what everyone wants from a video game: one that changes the rules as you go along.

Specifically it’s the spot by the broken ladder in the right-center of the screen. You can jump down to the platform left of it. The same drop, even off a jump, will kill you in level two. Kangaroo plays Calvinball. It just makes up the rules as it goes along.

Nothing goes right in Kangaroo. I’ve had moments where I punched an enemy that wasn’t even in its throwing animation and we both died. The collision is bad, especially on the third stage. It wanted SO DESPERATELY to be the non-conventional Rivet Stage in Donkey Kong type of twist. In it, there’s a stack of monkeys holding the platform that the joey is on and you can punch the monkeys out from the stack to keep lowering the platform. You’ll be dodging apple cores dropped from above or thrown at you from the side this whole time, and other monkeys will come and try to join the stack or push back. It takes several punches to successfully dislodge a monkey, but if you’re not lined up right, you’ll punch right through them. Even though logically it should still be a punch. While alone it wouldn’t be a deal breaker, Kangaroo is a series of little annoyances that add up to one hugely crappy game. Like, you jump high enough that you’re clearly above platforms and should land on them, but you don’t. You go through them unless you jump on them from the correct platform. What was even the point of being a kangaroo then?

Also why is THIS the third stage when it has a climatic feel to it? It should have been fourth. It’s like they wanted to make a Donkey Kong-like game without taking any time or effort to figure out why Donkey Kong worked.

Sloppy Joey is ugly. It’s glitchy. It flickers like an Atari 2600 game, which is especially off-putting for an arcade game. It controls like crap. It has illogical design and scoring, especially with how the bell works. It’s also a game that defies challenging for high scores because you’re at the mercy of dumb luck. There’s a giant ape that shows up to box you and, if it scores a punch, you lose your boxing glove. But, it appears seemingly at random. I’ve had multiple instances where I’d go several games without seeing it once. Of course, it yields a high score if you punch it first. Like all Arcade Archives games, the main reason to own this would be to compete on online leaderboards. My high score was the only one in over a dozen attempts that had the great ape appear. So the one element that would make this engaging in 2023 is based on pure random chance. Most annoying: it has legitimate charm that makes you want to like it. Little touches like how, a second after you duck, the kangaroo pops its head up as if to peek and see if the coast is clear. I mean, come on! That’s adorable. And it pisses me off even more because instead of refining gameplay, they wasted their time and energy on crap like that. Of course, that little extra detail is probably what scored this a spot on Saturday Supercade. Fun fact: despite Atari’s status as the undisputed kings of video games during that show’s run, Kangaroo was the only Atari-published game to be part of Saturday Supercade’s lineup. What, they couldn’t come up with Missile Command cartoon? Which, going off how the rest of Saturday Supercade “adapted” video games (such as Q*Bert being basically Happy Days or Grease), Missile Command would probably be set during the Great Depression and be about sentient missiles running a news stand. Well.. okay, I’d totally watch that.

Kangaroo is not Chick-Approved

Kangaroo was developed by Sun Electronics
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation

$7.99 got pounced in the making of this review.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Arcade Archives Kangaroo, Arcade Archives Kangaroo Review, Arcade Archives review, Kangaroo Arcade, Kangaroo Arcade Review

Popeye (1982 Arcade Review)

January 7, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 8 Comments

As the story goes, Nintendo attempted to take a license on Popeye 1981. King Syndicate approved the license.. after the game was too far into production to be reworked. You know that game as Donkey Kong. That’s right: had King Syndicate not dragged its feet, there would be no Mario, no Donkey Kong, and no Pauline. They would have been Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl respectively. Just imagine.. a video game world without Pauline! What would have happened to the Super Mario Odyssey song? Oh and the video game landscape as we know it would look totally different. King did eventually grant the license, but by that point, Nintendo had no clue what they would do with it. It was too late to pull back Donkey Kong and turn it into Popeye, and they also had nothing on the drawing board. All they had was a license. The rest of Popeye’s development is shrouded in mystery, but about a year-and-a-half after the license from King Syndicate arrived, Popeye reached arcades. Sometime between their “oh crap, they gave us the license!” moment and November of 1982, Nintendo somehow managed to make what I feel is the best of their early arcade output.

No early 80s game had such cartoon-like graphics. Well, yea. Shigeru Miyamoto literally watched Popeye cartoons while drawing the sprites. Of course, the backgrounds look more like Sky Skipper’s , which is not a very pretty game.

Popeye is one of those games that grew on me. As I started getting into playing retro games, I began to better appreciate what it accomplished in 1982. It’s the best maze chase I’ve played that’s played from a side-view, and Bluto is the best pursuer the genre has ever seen. You could just as easily retheme this as a Terminator game and it’d work. Bluto stalks you and isn’t limited to the platform he’s on. He can reach down to the platform below him. He can jump up to swipe at you. If you’re two stories below him, he’ll jump down two stories to come at you. If you’re across the screen he’ll throw bottles at you. He will not stop, until you’re dead. He’s an ever-present menace that makes Popeye one of the greatest maze chase games ever. This is a game of close calls, tight squeezes, and a surprising amount of action. As you move about the stage, the Sea Hag throws bottles at you too. Sometimes she does it from both sides at the same time. You have a punch move that doesn’t work on Bluto but it can break the bottles and the bouncing skulls (introduced after a complete level cycle) that come your way. In a maze chase with one of the most relentless pursuers the genre has seen, those moments where you’re forced to stand still and smash bottles become some of the most nerve-racking in all of classic gaming. And it’s awesome!

After completing one cycle of Popeye’s levels, the game goes truly bonkers. You still have Bluto and the Sea Hag to watch out for, but now you also have ANOTHER Sea Hag throwing skulls that bounce randomly around the level. Oh and you lose a life if any of the stuff Olive Oyl throws lingers on the bottom stage too long. It’s Nintendo’s way of saying “okay, you had your fun and rescued Olive Oyl. Now, please get the fudge off the machine so someone else will pay a quarter to play it.”

Popeye also works because you can’t create some kind of a preset strategy to walk the maze. Olive Oyl throws the collectables onto the playfield, which sorta float about. Their speeds and trajectory are completely random. Much like I do through life, they just sort of drift aimlessly until they reach the bottom. Improvising is the name of the game. You have to constantly fight to scratch-out a safe distance between you and Bluto, but you also have to chase down the hearts/notes/letters that your main squeeze tosses down at you, and they constantly shift directions. You can let them reach the bottom floor, but once there, they’ll slowly start to sink into the floor. If they linger there too long, you lose a life. This will lead to moments where you’re making squeeze-plays right by Bluto trying to get to the basement and collect the items with the urgent DU-NU-LUNT-LUNT-DU–NU-LUNT-LUNT music playing that’s right up there with Baby Mario’s crying from Yoshi’s Island in the “MAKE IT STOP!” Hall of Fame.

Despite my attempts to learn the idiosyncrasies of these classic games and what makes them work or not, I’m rarely any good at them. But, in gathering media for this review, I reached the seventh screen for only the second time on the arcade version. I shouldn’t really get nervous because who gives a crap about a high score of a forty year old game played on an emulator that doesn’t count anyway? But, in fact, I ultimately broke for 100,000 points (without cheating!) for the first time playing this and my hands were sopping with nerve-sweat the entire time. It was both disgusting and glorious.

Being Popeye, you can also grab a can of spinach from the edge of one of the screens. When you do, all the action on the screen stops. Everything except Bluto, who will try beat-feet-it away from you. But, annoyingly, you can’t just give chase. You have to do the HE’S POPEYE THE SAILOR MAN! HE LIVES IN A FRYING PAN! TURN-UP THE GAS AND BURN OFF HIS ASS HE’S POPEYE THE SAILOR MAN posing. By time you actually can move, Bluto usually has distance on you. My strategy was to put myself in a do-or-die situation where Bluto WOULD kill me coming up or down the stairs. It might have worked, but I had to pay attention to what position the spinach was in, and how long it’d been there. And I have the attention span of a housefly. My personal best game ever, which I actually had while making this review, would have been even better but I lost two lives mistiming the spinach. When I went to grab it, it was gone, and I had SUCH egg on my face.

About a half-second after this was taken I finally game-overed. I was ten times more excited to have broke for 100,000 than any functioning adult should be.

The three levels are fun and unique, and they each have their own gimmick. In the first level, you can drop a bucket on Bluto’s head. In the second level, you can use Wimpy to launch yourself from the basement to the top floor. The third stage has a moving platform near the top of the screen, and it introduces the Sea Hag’s buzzard, which you can just sock right in the beak for easy points. Of course, three levels makes this the shortest game of that initial Donkey Kong trilogy and leaves you wanting a lot more. But, this is also the Nintendo coin-op with the fewest weaknesses in that initial run. There’s no jumping physics to learn. There’s no objects to jump over. It’s you, a 2D landscape, projectiles flying in from the sides, and the best chaser in the genre. In only three levels, Popeye provides more close-calls and nail-biting moments than any maze chase that’s done from a side angle. Shame about the license, though. It means Popeye is the one Nintendo coin-op that gets no love these days. We were THIS CLOSE to Nintendo’s most important game ever being forever shackled by a license from a company with no passion for gaming. Everything you need to know about how lucky we all are can be summed-up by Popeye being a non-entity in 2020s. For the want of a signature, it could have been Donkey Kong. Then again, maybe this game would have featured a carpenter gathering hearts while being pursued by a gorilla and everyone would celebrate it today while Popeye Kong would be buried, never to show its face again. Life finds a way, right?

Make sure to check out my review of modern Popeye tribute Gon’ E-Choo! It’s so close to Nintendo authentic that you’d swear it really was a 1983 sequel to Popeye that was reskinned.

Popeye was developed by Nintendo

Popeye is Chick-Approved

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Popeye 1982 Arcade, Popeye arcade game, Popeye Game Review, Popeye Nintendo, Popeye Nintendo Review, Popeye review

King & Balloon (1980 Arcade Review)

January 6, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 5 Comments

UPDATE: King & Balloon has been released to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation as part of the Arcade Archives franchise. Read my review of the $7.99 package here.

Yesterday, I looked at one of the two Golden Age gallery shooters that I actually liked. Here’s the other, though it’s nowhere near as complicated. Weirdly, King & Balloon also came out in 1980. It isn’t all that different from Space Invaders, only with a tiny hint of Galaxian thrown-in. Rows of marching enemies with limited attack patterns to shoot (in this case, murderous hot air balloons instead of aliens, which don’t scoff, because people have fought hilarious duels to the death in them), with the same formations restarting after you clear every screen. Besides having enemies dive down at you like in Galaxian, this could have been SO bland and boring. It almost was, but two wonderful twists in the formula turn this into one of the most satisfying and intense gallery shooters to follow in Space Invaders’ footsteps.

It looks like it’s going to be old and dull. Never judge a book by its cover. Except Twilight. Judge that like you’ve never judged before.

Twist #1: If your cannon gets shot, or an enemy lands on it, you don’t lose a life. Your cannon is destroyed but a new one will spawn after a couple seconds. Twist #2: That’s because the object of the game is to protect the King. He’s positioned underneath you and mindlessly walks back and forth, and while the balloons are shooting at you, they’re really trying to kidnap him. They’ll dive down and perch on the platform he’s walking on, and if he crosses paths with one, they’ll start to fly away, with the King literally screaming “HELP!” in one of the first uses of voice synthesis in a game. If you can shoot the balloon that’s got him, he’ll float safely back down to the platform. It’s a formula that makes for a genuinely exciting experience that, to the best of my knowledge, really hasn’t ever been replicated since.

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One thing I’m big on with classic coin-ops is games that allow players to come up with their own strategies. That’s certainly the case with King & Balloon. When the balloons perch to kidnap the king, whether they snatch him or not, they don’t kill you if they touch you as they return to the playfield. So, it’s actually a totally valid strategy to focus on the balloons that remain in their formation while ignoring those who swoop down to take position to snatch the King. Then, you can just pick them off once they grab the King or return to their position, which they eventually will whether they grab the King or not. I found my best games took an offensive minded approach until the enemies become more aggressive, at which point I just focus on dodging bullets and letting the balloons try to grab the king. Since the balloons are harmless when they leave their perch, with or without the King, your best chance at picking them off is during their return. It’s like getting free shots at them. There’s also moments where you can allow yourself to be shot or have a balloon crash into you if you’re confident that you’ll have enough time to respawn and get a shot off to save the King as he’s being carried away. For a shooter with such limited gameplay, King & Balloon is deceptively layered.

Sometimes the enemies Voltronize themselves and make a bigger balloon that takes more shots to kill. If you miss it, it turns into three small balloons to attempt to kidnap the King

Does it get old? Sure. I wouldn’t want to play it for hours and hours on end. But, for a limited burst session when I have a few minutes to kill? I actually have busted this out just for fun, and I have a lot of options for King & Balloon to compete with, so that really says something. If there’s a problem with it, I think the lack of variety in enemies, along with their tactics and formations, hurts to some degree. Really, King & Balloon does one thing, and while it does it really well, it is still just a one trick pony, and one that can get old quickly. That’s why I suggest this for people like me who like to have games on standby to kill small amounts of time with. I also think King & Balloon escalates too quickly. The odds become pretty overwhelming after two screens, and by the fourth, you’ll remember that the point of this was to earn quarters and it’s high time you move off the machine and let the next player have a turn.

When you successfully make the save, it might be the most satisfying shot in gallery shooter history.

Still, this is a very fun game.. and yet, King & Balloon got NO home adaptations except on the MSX of all things. Even Carnival was on every major early-80s platform and was a modest hit on the Atari 2600 and Colecovision, at least enough to make copies of it not remotely rare or valuable. Meanwhile, not a single console got King & Balloon. As far as my research could find, nobody even considered it. Remember Sky Skipper? The cancelled Nintendo arcade game? EVEN THAT got an Atari 2600 port that actually was released. What the hell happened?

Atari owned the rights to King & Balloon through the same deal that scored them Pac-Man for pennies on the dollar, but they did nothing with it. Not even a prototype or anything. And don’t tell me it was the Zilog Z80 processor, because Atari took a crack at adapting-for-home many games based around that. Pac-Man and Galaxian used it, and they’re on the Atari 2600. This genre was smoking hot during this time frame and I think King & Balloon would have found an audience in 1981 or 1982 on the 2600. So, what gives? After pondering this for a while, the only theory I could come up with that made any sense is that they didn’t want to cannibalize Space Invader’s earnings potential. Either that or Taito had a deal that prevented Atari from porting King & Balloon because it was too close to Space Invaders. Or, if not Space Invaders they wanted to shore-up, perhaps it was Galaxian, which Atari did port in 1983. What a shame that is, because Galaxian was fated to be swallowed up by the test of time. King & Balloon meanwhile is one of two arcade gallery shooters from 1981 or earlier to successfully pass that test. At least from what I’ve played. It’s a very good game in 2023 all on its own, without a single “for its time” asterisk. And nobody cares, because it’s been completely shut-out historically.

Of course, when you miss a wide open shot and the king escapes, it’s the stubbed-toe of gaming. Nothing feels worse.

Hell, it didn’t even make any of the original five PS1 Namco Museum releases, being relegated to the Japanese-only Encore before becoming a plus-one to the weird Namco Museums on PSP and Wii. Damn, that’s cold. Maybe because they felt the only worthy aspect was the synthesized voices. No, actually King & Balloon is another contender for most underrated game of its time. I’d even say it’s worthy of a remake. It won’t get one. This is the unloved child of Namco’s lineup. How in the hell is Galaxian in so many of these sets.. even sets that have Galaga.. but this can’t get any love? That they keep bringing back Galaxian anyway is like one of those families that has two kids: one incredible and the other a sleazy ne’er-do-well, and the parents still love the sleaze more just because they’re the first born. My sister is eyeing me with contempt right now. She knows what’s up.
Verdict: YES!

King & Balloon was developed by Namco

Be sure to check out Paul Hammond’s excellent King & Balloon tribute on Pico-8. It’s free to play HERE!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with How about King & Balloon Fight: The Ultimate Crossover?, King & Balloon, King & Balloon 1980, King & Balloon Review

Carnival (1980 Arcade Review)

January 5, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 9 Comments

Now that I’ve gotten deeply into exploring games from before my time, I’ve played a lot of games that existed only trying to ride the wake of whatever the flavor of the month was at any given time. The dozens of maze chases that followed Pac-Man. The dozens of platformers that followed Donkey Kong. The worst for me are those gallery shooters that rode Space Invaders’ coattails. First, there’s tons of actual clones that copied the game beat-for-beat, changing only the name. Those make searching through my MAME library such a delight. Not. But, even after those, there’s games like Galaxian, Galaga, Radar Scope, etc, where gaming has come so far that I just can’t get into them. But, there are two gallery shooters from 1980 that are actually pretty good, so much so they hold up to the test of time without several BUTs or IFs or other assorted asterisks. I’ll get to the next one tomorrow, but for today, let’s look at a gallery shooter themed like.. well.. a shooting gallery. And one that I think is the best in the entire genre for its era.

This is a tribute to the old-timey shooting galleries where you would shoot glass pipes and workers had to repaint the targets every day. I’ve always wondered if anyone was hurt from ricochets or shattered glass from the pipes or if anyone ever shot one of the attendants in the balls, Home Alone-style. We’re an awful species so it’d be right up our alley.

Carnival by Gremlin/Sega has not been re-released since 1982, when it was ported to the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision. In a way, I get it: it wasn’t the biggest hit to begin with. Perhaps the lack of remakes or re-releases is why this might be the most timeless of its breed from this time period. In Carnival, there’s three rows of targets to shoot, with a sliding scoring-scale that goes from the top row to bottom row, and you have a limited amount of ammo. Shoot all the targets and you collect a 50 point bonus for every bullet you have left and move on to the next stage. If you allow too many targets to pass through all the rows, more targets will spawn. The game keeps going until you run out of ammo. It sounds simple, and it is, but for such a mundane-sounding game, it throws in more twists than any other gallery shooter would have for a couple YEARS. Like, seriously, this might be the most deceptively complicated game of the early 80s.

I *HOPE* it’s pipes and not some madman shooting people off a Ferris Wheel. Again: awful species.

First off, you have to shoot all the pipes that are above the playfield. This is the trickiest part of the game because there’s only a small space to the left and right where they’re open to be shot, and the cylinder holding them never stops rotating. Carnival is a high-score chasing game that makes you WANT to post a top-three score, and the key to that really is getting these pipes early. At the start of a stage, their value begins to shrink, so you need to quickly position yourself to pick these off. Of course, there’s going to be three rows of targets in the way as well. While it should be annoying, the difficulty in lining-up, the stuff in the way, and the duck problem make successfully shooting the pipes early-on in a round of Carnival perhaps the most satisfying targets to hit in the entire genre. That’s not hyperbole.

“Wait, what’s this about a ‘duck problem’ Cathy?” Oh, did I forget to mention the ducks?

And you thought Adventure’s ducks were bad! Not until Adam Banks, Charlie Conway, Fulton Reed, Goldberg the Goalie, and Julie “The Cat” Gaffney would ducks be this deadly again.

All the targets in the three rows just scroll-on-by, including the ducks. But, the ducks will randomly come to life and sort of glide back and forth down towards the bottom. If they reach it, they eat some of your bullets. And it’s so spooky when they begin to glide down at you. Seriously, they’re one of the most unnerving Golden Age of Arcade enemies that nobody talks about. Well, nobody talks about them because nobody talks about Carnival. It’s one of the poster children for slipping through the cracks of history. And I haven’t even covered all the twists yet. There’s bonus points to be had if you shoot one of the B-O-N-U-S letters in the rows. In the upper-left side of the screen, there’s the bar-bonus, which can also be the bar-penalty. Sometimes it has extra bullets, but sometimes it subtracts bullets, so you have to shoot especially accurately on that side of the screen. It might also be point based, and again, you could gain or lose points, depending on what it is. It’s also the biggest target in the game and whatever the bonus/penalty is shrinks as it lingers on the screen. I can’t tell you how many times I screamed in agony when I fired a wayward shot that went right through three full rows of targets and hit the damn whammy bar when nothing was there only to have a fully-charged bullet penalty spawn and cost me a good chunk of my remaining shot. At least my family found it funny, the jerks.

Between each stage, you have to shoot bears back and forth. Another bear is added after every round. Every shot is worth 50 points, and I think you can only do like ten shots before they move so fast you can’t possibly hope to get more points. By the way, this is the furthest I ever managed to make it: to stage four. Carnival is not an easy game at all. It’s got teeth.

It sucks that Carnival is apparently lost to history. Maybe there’s some kind of rights issue. I have friends at Sega who weren’t even aware this existed, let alone how good it is. While I admit that it’s kind of cool that I turned them onto it and heard back from almost all of them saying “seriously, where did you find this game? It’s so addictive!” it’s also painful that Carnival isn’t a bigger part of gaming history. It’s not perfect. I think the game tends to go a little overboard with respawning more targets, which is a reminder that this IS trying to make money $0.25 at a time. You’ll have one more target to shoot and then suddenly there’s like five more things that start scrolling onto the stage, which is hugely annoying. I think it’s tied to missing targets after so many passes on the playfield but I couldn’t tell with certainty. Granted, when you’ve reached the phase where the game goes nuts, you’ve been playing around 10 minutes, which means the game has gone ten minutes without being fed a quarter.

You’re not going to believe what this does.

Of course, you could be a jerk and just insert another quarter, which would restart the game to the title screen even if a person was in the middle of the game. Oof. I wonder how many fist fights broke out over that? You know it happened at least once. Anyway, that’s hardly the only problem. I think the random spawning of bullet refills (which come in supplies of five and ten) factor too much into high scores. Oh, and this has the absolute weirdest design with its music I’ve ever seen. If you shoot a bullet on the far right of the screen, it disables the music. Wait.. what? They put the volume muter on the playfield as a target that interacts with your projectiles? In a game where you’ll be chasing targets towards the edge of the screen? WHO WOULD EVEN THINK TO DO THAT? It’s so random and weird. It’d be like if there was a plunger on Donkey Kong that muted the game if you grabbed the hammer and smashed it. Whatever. Carnival is still a lot of fun and long overdue to get the respect it deserves. Or else the ducks might seek revenge. Creepy, CREEPY ducks.
Verdict: YES!

Update: Pico8 legend Paul Hammond created a remake of Carnival, and it’s AWESOME! It’s free to play, too. Go play it!

Carnival was designed by Gremlin
Published by Sega

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Carnival, Carnival Arcade, Carnival Arcade Review, Carnival Review, Carnival Sega, Fear the Ducks but NEVER TRUST THE CHICKENS

Devil World (NES/Famicom Review)

January 4, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 5 Comments

UPDATE: Devil World finally debuted in North America! It was added to the Switch Online NES lineup on October 30, 2023.

When I recently did my in-depth review of the infamous Atari 2600 disaster Pac-Man, I noted that without the chase being fun, maze chases don’t work. I then asked myself if there’s any maze chase game that isn’t true of? I couldn’t think of a single example. The only one that came close is Nintendo’s Devil World, where the chase elements eventually add to the excitement, but they take a while to get warmed-up. Devil World is the 1984 Shigeru Miyamoto classic that was his very first console-exclusive and also the only game of his that still, to this day, has never officially been released in North America. Why’s that? Well, allegedly Nintendo had a strict probation on religious symbols being used in their games, which meant no crosses or bibles. Devil World is a game based entirely around those things. It was too religious for Nintendo of America and thus it never came out stateside. Europe? They got it, because they all live in hedonism and are doomed to burn anyway, I guess. They even got it on the Wii’s Virtual Console in 2008. But, while Nintendo of America re-released many formerly Japanese exclusives, Devil World STILL was kept out of the New World. It’s funny that so many gamers make a big to-do about games that never came out in America. Often, they don’t live up to expectations. But, Devil World is one of the exceptions. Had it come out in the United States when the NES launched, it’s arguable that it would have been the second-best Black Box game behind Super Mario Bros.

I think the Devil is due for a comeback. Make a Yoga game with him! He’s used to doing the poses anyway!

Even by 1984, the maze chase genre was very tired. Nobody really had any fresh ideas and lots of games just recycled the same formula. Pac-Man begat Lock ‘n Chase, K.C. Munchkin, and others. Then someone had the idea of adding gates and turnstiles, and thus games like Super Pac-Man, Lady Bug , and Mouse Trap came along. Having played a lot of these, it’s remarkable how samey they all feel. They all sort of blend together. Then came Nintendo with this maze chase and there’s never been anything like it since. Anyone who has played Smash Bros since assist trophies became a thing will recognize the Devil and the twist in formula he brings. As you roam the level, the maze itself scrolls independently, and you’re at the mercy of it. Also you can now become crushed by the scrolling, which can lead to nail-biting close calls of nearly getting stuck between walls and the edge of the screen. The maze is only slightly bigger than the screen, so as the Devil scrolls the action from, say, left-to-right, if the last dots you need are on the edge of the right side of the screen, in a second or two they’ll pop-out the left side of the screen. It’s a BRILLIANT, one-off twist that has never been replicated and it works wonderfully (well, most of the time). In years and years of playing this genre, this is the only good maze chase where the maze itself is the highlight.

You actually only control the direction of the maze during bonus stages. I really suck at this part and it makes me grateful this isn’t part of the main game.

Mind you, the actual CHASE aspect of this maze-chase game can also be exciting, but at first, it feels like a secondary element. You start with two pursuers, both of which can be easily dispatched. Eventually one of the monsters is replaced by a mini-Devil that can’t be killed (though he’s not on every stage). Finally, after three cycles, one of the green monsters is replaced by a red one that more actively chases Tamagon, the hero of the game. Normally, I’d find the slow escalation of the pursuit to be annoying. But, Devil World’s one-of-a-kind gimmick actually needs to ease you into it. A big part of that is the game is one of the slower-paced maze chases. Tamagon sort of waddles through the stages, and while it’s never too slow, it’s a noticeably more leisurely pace than maze chase fans might be used to. You feel it right from the start too, which I think is another reason why this might never have caught-on the way it should have, and possibly the reason why Nintendo chose not to bring it out to the cocaine-filled masses of North America.

When you’ve messed up, you see it coming. And sometimes, you have to wait.. very.. slowly.. for your death by smooshing.

There’s three alternating level types in Devil World. The first is a traditional “collect the dots” challenge, but even that has a twist to the gameplay. There’s no power-pellets like in Pac-Man, but you also can’t just scoop-up the dots willy-nilly. There’s various crosses scattered around the maze. You have to get one of the crosses to begin collecting dots. While you have a cross, you can also defend yourself by spitting fireballs that turn the enemies into delicious fried eggs that you can eat for points. Eventually the crosses will wear off, but they respawn, and they’re also scattered all over so locating them isn’t really that big a deal. You have to eat all the dots to clear the stage. Despite Devil World nearly being forty years old, and the dot-collecting formula being well-over forty now, this still feels fresh because of the scrolling mechanic. Plus, the characters are loaded with charm and you can make believe like Tamagon is the dinosaur from Bubble Bobble after he goes to Hell for all the cold-blooded murders he committed in that game.

Admittedly, sometimes Devil World can be pretty frustrating. The devil shifts the scrolling at random, and sometimes the screen becomes oriented in a way where you literally can’t do anything except wait for the Devil to pick another direction. Here, I can’t get the final bible into the slot because I physically can’t fit into the gap. What you’re not seeing is the Devil kept scrolling up and down, but not side to side. I had to wait quite a while for the tide to turn even after I shot this screen cap.

The second level is a completely new take on the genre. There’s four bibles that sort of just hover in the corners of the screen. You have to retrieve them and insert them into the four sides of a base that’s usually guarded by a mini-devil (they can leave the interior of the maze, but usually they stick to the base). There’s no dots or crosses in these stages, but the bibles grant you the same fireball ability as the crosses do. You can only take one bible at a time, and because you have to get to the very edges of the screen to collect them, these stages are the most exciting. There’s only three stages Devil World cycles through, and when I say the third stage of that sequence is probably the most intense maze the genre has ever seen, that’s not hyperbole. You have to pick-and-choose your spots to make your move, especially since large sections of the maze feature long straightaways and the high potential for getting squashed. This formula works so well they could have honestly skipped the dot collecting and based the entire game on this. It’s a lot of fun and it’s so satisfying every time you lock a new bible into its spot. After that, you play a bonus stage with six mystery boxes, one of which will have a free life. After you’ve cycled through the three mazes, the game loops until you game over.

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I adore Devil World. It’s everything you want from an early Nintendo Entertainment System release. It certainly does a much better job of creating a fun and exciting take on the maze chase than Clu Clu Land did. Yet, Nintendo of America wanted nothing to do with it, claiming religious symbolism was off-limits. I don’t get it. I really don’t. There’s tons of religious symbols in US Nintendo games, even ones made by Nintendo! They were all over from the start. Link’s shields on the NES Legend of Zelda have crosses on them. Castlevania has a famous cross too. It’s that thing that clears the screen of enemies. As for the Bibles, again, Legend of Zelda has a book with a cross on it that adds a flame to the end of the otherwise totally useless Magic Wand. “Okay, so it’s the Devil that got this ixnayed, right?” Then how do explain all the devils and a final boss literally named Lucifer in Ghosts ‘n Goblins being a-okay? You know what *I* think? I think Nintendo just didn’t want the NES to be seen as too Atari-like. Devil World is the most Pac-Man like game, and people would associate Pac-Man with Atari and the old guard of home gaming. The only other option is falling in line with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Which again, would hold water if a game like Ghosts ‘n Goblins was banned in the United States. But it wasn’t, so I think my theory is accurate. I wish Nintendo would finally put out Devil World for North America. It’s long overdue. Besides, we’re all going to Hell anyway.

Devil World was developed by Nintendo

Devil World is Chick-Approved

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Devil World, Devil World Famicom, Devil World Famicom Review, Devil World Review, Devil World Switch Online, Devil World Switch Review, The Devil Made me do it

Journey (1983 Arcade Review)

January 3, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

No, not THAT Journey. I already did that one.

This is one of my all-time favorite stories from the Golden Age of Arcades. Between 1982 to 1983, Ralph Baer, creator of the Magnavox Odyssey and thus video games as we know them, more or less, was working with the famed toy maker Marvin Glass & Associates. They were the creators of such legendary playthings as Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots and board games like Operation and Mouse Trap. They had recently become a partner of Bally-Midway and created video games like Tapper. Baer had already partnered with MG&A to create the legendary electronic game Simon, and he was with them again for a new project. Baer, always the engineer, invented a relatively low-cost digital camera that could be installed in arcade games to take pictures of players who got high scores. Midway loved the idea of having actual pictures of players. It’s the perfect special attraction for a game, right? Bally-Midway installed a prototype into a game (I couldn’t find confirmation but I believe it was Marvin Glass’s Domino Man) and put it on a popular route they used for testing. As the story goes, day one, the test went great! An otherwise under-the-radar game drew an audience and the test looked to be a success.

On the second day, someone pulled up a chair and stood on it, dropped their pants, waved to the camera, and the test was over. It was the most obvious result in human history, but the contracts were already signed and they had to use the camera somehow. And, it just so happens, Bally-Midway had just made a deal with the band Journey. So, they used the camera to digitize the likeness of the band and shoehorn them into a genre Smörgåsbord that’s recognized as one of the worst games of the Golden Age of Arcades.

Full disclosure: I’m not a Journey fan. My expertise on the actual band begins and ends with the finale for the Sopranos.

Journey is one of those games that’s historically-maligned. I don’t think it’s really good, but it’s also not that bad. It’s one of those “we couldn’t figure out what kind of game this would be, so we just did every game!” situations that produced a jack of all trades, master of nothing game. In it, you select one of five levels, each of which is divided into two parts. In the first part, you must guide one of the band members to their instrument through some kind of unique gameplay mechanic. In the second part, you gain the ability to shoot and you have to blast a path to your spaceship. Or, sometimes you can ignore the enemies and just sprint for the literal finish line you need to reach to beat each stage. I found that was often just as effective. So, let’s look at the five mini-games.

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Neal Schon: This is one of those “lightly feather the joystick with a jetpack” games. You have to carefully navigate a cave to grab your guitar while the “song” Chain Reaction plays. Actually it’s an almost unrecognizable chiptune that neither of my parents, both of whom listen to Journey, could tell what it was supposed to be. As the stage begins, you have to begin to thrust right away, because once you start to have any speed, the gravity is too heavy to really stop you from crashing into the sides or the ground. Once you have the guitar, bugs come out of the sides of the wall and you have to navigate your way to the line at the top of the screen. Once you get the hang of how heavy the gravity is, this isn’t too bad as far as games like this goes. Plus it does give you a teeny bit of mercy, as your collision box isn’t quite as big as you head. Once you’ve run through a cycle, you have to go lower and deeper into the cave to retrieve the guitar. It’s not awful but it’s pretty bland. Actually, that really could describe all five games.

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Steve Smith: While listening to Wheel in the Sky, you must bounce off each trampoline that’s randomly floating around the screen at least once. The trampolines turn blue after you’ve done one bounce and disappear after a second bounce. After you’ve turned them all blue, you get your drums back and have to blast your way to the finish line at the bottom of the screen. I found this to be the most interesting of the five mini-games, and it gets BRUTAL on the second cycle. The thing that bugs me is Journey is such a slow game, with jumping that feels like moon physics. If I hadn’t seen gameplay footage from a real coin-op, I’d have thought my emulator wasn’t handling it well. Is it fun? Not really, but I did have to think about it this time. I mean, not too long. It’s just south of dull, but dull nonetheless.

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Steve Perry: While an alleged version of Don’t Stop Believin‘ plays, you have to first make your way through deadly turnstiles to grab your microphone. Then, the turnstiles turn into full-scale walls that also scroll across the screen and you have to blast your way through them. They spawn really fast, and creating enough distance for your body to squeeze through is probably the toughest challenge of all the games in the first cycle. As you complete more cycles, more get added during that second wave that spin faster in the first part and respawn faster in the second part, and I never finished it. The cynic in me noted how it’s funny the lead singer’s stage is clearly the hardest. Seems like people would be more inclined to choose the singer’s level first, and what do you know? It just so happens to be the one most likely to eat lives and thus force players to drop more quarters! Fancy that.

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Ross Valroy: Probably the most original idea in the game. You start on these boxes that have.. uh.. rainbow-colored robotic dongs that launch you upwards, and you sort of have to spring up to the top of the stage to grab your guitar while listening to the MIDI version of Keep On Runnin’. Once you reach the top, the platforms spring cannons and the game becomes an almost bullet hell, but the point is the same as all the other games: shoot your way to the finish line. It took me tons and tons of tries to get past the cannons on my second cycle, and that was after missing the platforms on the way up. Journey gets teeth after you finish each round once, that’s for sure. Oh, and even though you can literally destroy the platforms the cannons sit-on with enough shots, even those begin to respawn. Okay, maybe this is a terrible game.

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Jonathan Cain: While listening to a bastardized version of Stone in Love, you play a mini-game that’s like a combination of reverse Donkey Kong meets the hurdles event in Track ‘n Field. While automatically running down a series of slopes, you have to press UP on the joystick to jump over miniature lightsabers. Once you reach your piano, you have to shoot your way through a series of balls to reach the finish line. During the second cycle, the bottom row of hurdles starts moving so comically fast that, even while cheating, I couldn’t get past it. There’s so many points during this whole game where I was like “jeez, they ran out of ideas.” Then I came to realize that, there’s only five games and yet I had to say “they were out of ideas” like six or seven times. That really says it all about Journey, huh?

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Journey certainly doesn’t belong on any WORST ARCADE GAMES list. It doesn’t play bad enough for that. It doesn’t control bad enough for that. Okay, maybe it sounds bad enough for that, which has to be embarrassing since the only reason anyone in their right mind would be interested in playing this is because of the musical ties, and it failed completely at that. Going into this, I wondered why they didn’t try to tie this more into some kind of musical gameplay, but the answer became obvious quickly: it couldn’t even if it wanted to. Not with this technology. So, instead we got a really uninspired hodgepodge of mini-games that feel like they’re deleted scenes from Bally-Midway’s Tron game. None of them are offensively bad by any stretch, which by itself is disqualifying for WORST GAME status or even consideration of it. Hell, this doesn’t even feel like a typical music act’s ego-stroking video game. It’s a stupid collection of unrelated game tropes that, together or separate, just plain ain’t fun. I don’t even really think it had potential for fun, either. This feels like a game nobody wanted to make and had no idea what to do with it. Really, the only interesting aspect is the Ralph Baer camera story. Sure, it’s a boring game, but it’s also a game that only exists because someone stood up on a chair and flashed their privates at the first digital camera they ever saw in their lives. Come on, that’s objectively hilarious!
Verdict: NO!

Journey was developed by Marvin Glass and Associates
Published by Bally-Midway

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with I stopped believing, Journey Arcade Game, Journey Arcade Game Review, Journey review, No not THAT Journey

Fire and Rescue (NES Indie Review)

January 2, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Yea, it only took me to the second installment of New Arcade Mondays to wildly stretch the definition of “New Arcade” but hear me out. The launch-window NES library, AKA the thirty Black Box games, were all basically arcade games at home. If an indie developer wanted to make an authentic Black Box-type game, the only way to make it convincing is to have a tunnel-visioned arcade concept. One novel play mechanic that the whole game is based around. It’s tougher than it sounds. Actually, the most common mistake made by games that try to recreate the look and feel of Black Box releases is being too ambitious in their gameplay. The most advanced game in that series is the original Super Mario Bros. If you’re going to make a platformer, skip that Black Box malarkey, because you won’t stand out in that genre if you don’t go bonkers. For all other developers, if you want authenticity, you have to keep it simple. Of course, that also means you’re married to one gameplay mechanic, and if that mechanic isn’t very fun or exciting, you’re kind of screwed.

“Fire and Rescue? Wasn’t that one of the Fisher Price games?” Actually, no. I was thinking of Fisher-Price: Firehouse Rescue.

Fire and Rescue.. actually FIRE AND RESCUE in all-caps like you’re yelling it, but I think it’s a crime to yell “FIRE AND RESCUE” in a crowded review blog.. does authentically feel like an NES Black Box game in terms of graphics and gameplay. Well, sort of. It uses realistic 2D logic of, gasp.. having to actually walk through the threshold of the building you’re entering! So in this game universe, there’s genuine architecture to buildings. When this review is done, you’ll understand why most games toss that kind genuine logic out the window. The object is to put out all the fires and rescue people trapped inside the houses. There’s five levels that keep repeating while slightly escalating in difficulty every time you restart the cycle until you reach Level 7, at which point it just keeps going back to stage 7–1 until you get bored. Don’t worry, you’ll already be bored and ready for it to be over by that point.

Do you know what breaks the illusion of being an authentic lost Black Box game? Had this been a real Black Box, that would have totally been Mario fighting the fires.

While I admire the authenticity Skyboy Games achieved, Fire and Rescue is a complete snoozer. This is mostly due to the constant need to weave in and out of the building to refill your water. If you correctly line yourself up with the fires and time your release perfectly, you can stretch the water out, but you’ll still need to refill. Thankfully, you can jump out windows without dying as a shortcut. It’s the only concession the game really makes to avoid the busy-work. You can only rescue one person at a time, and when you do, you have to bring them all the way back to the start of the stage. I couldn’t believe they didn’t include more means to enter the building. Even after playing thirty levels, I was convinced I was just doing something wrong when I tried to enter through the bottom right window of levels. Apparently you can’t. Plus, these are buildings that don’t have fire escapes being fought by fireman who don’t have fire hoses or fire ladders. Maybe this was set in the 1920s?

Stage 4 and 5 on each level has the water source on the opposite side of the screen, for even more winding-around. Sigh. Also, note the the bottom of water left of the center in this pic.

Sometimes rescuing a person also gives you a water refill. But, the refill spawns where they had been in the stage, and only after you’ve dropped the person off at the ambulance. In three of the five stages, the hydrant is right there anyway. It’d be nice to leave the refill there so you can grab it as needed later, but the only stage you might want to do that, it appears right in a door frame, where there’s no means to jump over it. Only in the two stages where the hydrant is on the other side of the screen do the water refills provide any real usage. But, in those stages, they’re practically laid-out in a way where it’s impossible to miss them. You’re going to have to rescue the first guy, then it’s going to spawn the refill. It’s also possible I was just plain good at this game. So, the item is functionally useless. The whole refill system and the way it was implemented seem to have been a decision made only in service to the co-op mode that I didn’t play. Also, it’s not always a refill. Sometimes, the rescue will spawn a helmet that restores you hit point if you’ve lost it, or give you points if you haven’t. And.. that’s the whole game. As a single player experience, there’s absolutely zero excitement or tension in Fire and Rescue. None.

The closest it comes to that would be the timer. Unless you’re really taking your sweet time, it doesn’t matter early on. Eventually, as in after several cycles of the same five stages, the timer starts low enough that you’ll be tidying up the final aspects of the stage with twenty or so seconds left. Tense? Well, no. I have no problem with recycling stages, but the peril of doing so is players should be able to quickly figure out how much time it takes in each stage to get from Point A to Point B. By the point where levels had a shorter timer, I’d played the stages enough times that I knew how much time I needed, and I knew I’d be fine. And I was! Even playing extremely recklessly, I never came closer to timing-out than in the above clip. This really compounds the biggest issue: the gameplay feels like busy-work after a while. The one-at-a-time rescue situation could mean that, after you’ve put out all the fires, you have to grab one of the people, jump out a window, then return to the building, weave your way through it to the last person, and jump out the window again. It becomes less a game and more of a chore. Gremlins on Atari 5200 had the same “run out of action before you run out of objectives” issue, but at least there the gameplay was fun before the action ran out. Fire and Rescue is a game that is technically fine and works but just plain isn’t fun.

See what I mean? The fire is all out, but I still have to make my way through the whole level, going up a ladder, a room left, up a ladder, two rooms over, down two ladders, grab the guy, then jump out the window and walk the length of the screen. For god’s sake: didn’t anyone issue this firehouse a frick’n axe? We’re fire fighters dog garn it, and we’re allowed to chop through people’s houses to rescue them! It’s heroic destruction!

Fire and Rescue needed to do a lot more than it does. There’s a downward spurt move that I never even needed to use once and I still could breeze right through the levels. I don’t even know what the point of it was. For a moment I was like “oh, this is how you jump up through the window to get into the building and save time.” But that’s apparently not the case either. It’s also actually a pretty easy game. After a cycle or two, one of the fires in a stage will start spitting projectiles at you, but the spitting rate is slow enough that it just becomes a minor annoyance. The only life I lost was from not scooting backwards to give myself enough clearance from a fire after climbing up a ladder. As far as I can tell, there’s no ticking clock element with the people you’re rescuing. Sometimes they appear to be standing right in a fire, but I could still take my time getting to them. This really should have removed the “deliver the people” element and just had the homeowners vanish when you collect them. Turn Fire and Rescue into a puzzle game based on conserving resources or a more action-oriented game where the fires can kill the people and spread more aggressively. Apparently this was made mostly for score chasing in mind, but as an NES game (one that you can literally order as a physical cart) there’s no online leaderboards, so what’s the point? Besides, if a player can make it to level seven without dying, it’s unlikely their game would end at all. Don’t get me wrong: Fire and Rescue isn’t atrocious by any means. It’s just boring. How do you even make fire boring? That shouldn’t be possible!

Fire and Rescue is not Chick-Approved

Fire and Rescue was developed by Skyboy Games
Point of Sale: Itch.io, NES Cartridge
$5 died in a fire in the making of this review.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Fire and Rescue, Fire and Rescue NES, Fire and Rescue NES Indie, Fire and Rescue NES Review, NES Homewbrew Reviews, New Arcade, NEW Indies, Rescue me oh take me in your arms

Dragon’s Lair Trilogy: The Definitive Review (Complete 3 Game Review + Rankings)

January 1, 2023 by Indie Gamer Chick 14 Comments

2023 marks the 40th Anniversary of Dragon’s Lair, a pioneer of “more fun to watch than play” gaming. I was born in 1989, and while Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp technically counts as “my lifetime” really, two-year-old me wasn’t playing anything besides peek-a-boo by that point. Fast forward to the 2000s, when we ended up owning Dragon’s Lair on DVD. “Have I got a game for you!” Dad said to teenage me. He threw it in and handed me the remote control (which was NOT a very good controller) and it was just about the worst thing I’d ever experienced in my life. Even Dad admitted that playing it with a DVD remote control was not the smartest idea. We tried it on a game console but it kept clicking-through to the DVD control menu. Fast forward to Christmas morning, 2010, and waiting for me under the Christmas tree, again from Dad, is Dragon’s Lair Trilogy for the Wii. The look on his face was so precious, a look that continued later in the day when I threw the disc in and proceeded to get totally demolished by the games.

Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace, and Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp are games that never stood a chance against the test of time. They’re famous for three things: being beautiful to look at, being difficult, and barely qualifying as video games. They served as little more than novelties, or “attractions” for arcades. Well, Dragon’s Lair did. In my eleven years on social media, I have never once heard a single person trade a tale of Space Ace in arcades. Not once. On the other hand, I had one reader describe Dragon’s Lair’s reign as king of arcades like a bright, beautiful shooting star. Look away for a moment and you risk missing it completely, but if you saw it, you’ll never forget it. No game that has aged as badly is remembered so fondly by the generation that experienced it in-person in arcades. Sadly, it’s a phenomena I’ll never be able to fully understand no matter how hard I try. When Dragon’s Lair 3D: Return to the Lair released in 2002, to 13-year-old me, it was just another game, and not even a good one. The excitement of actually playing Dragon’s Lair was lost on me and my generation. A “you had to be there” we can’t understand.

Or, maybe not? The only way I can know for sure is to put these games through the wringer.

This is pretty much how my reviewing appears to developers.

Dragon’s Lair Trilogy retails for $19.99 on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, with each individual game being sold separately on platforms like Steam for $9.99. Since that’s the sold-separately price, we’ll round it up and say a quality game in this set is worth $10 in value. I’ll round up the $19.99 price and say Dragon’s Lair Trilogy must get $20 in value to win my Seal of Approval. But, before I figure up the value of the games, I need to look at the slate of extra features in the set. Oh, before that, I have to mention the menus of Space Ace. Take a look at this screenshot from when you pause the game.

What option do you think is highlighted here? Believe it or not, “Continue” is the highlighted option, while nothing is highlighting the bright “quit” option that stands out a lot more in this screen. This is such an obviously bad choice that I’m convinced it’s an accident. That they MEANT for the brightened option to be the highlighted one, but whoever designed the menu accidentally crossed their 1s with their 0s and got it backwards. By the way, in every menu option where there are only two choices, this problem is there. Why not have an arrow? You know, that time-honored symbol you use to point at something and say THIS ONE! The other menus aren’t that much better. For Dragon’s Lair, is purple THIS ONE, or is it red? You would know from the front menu of the game since there’s more than two options to choose from and only one is a different color. But, if you weren’t paying that close of attention when you started the game, you wouldn’t know. Combined with the distinct lack of options for one of the extra features that I’ll get to and you can tell they just didn’t really care all that much about presentation. I would have looked past it and just called this lazy, but then I keep going back to the gold/faded gold highlighting decision. I’ve been playing games my entire life and that’s the absolute worst menu select choice I’ve ever seen. I’m fining Dragon’s Lair Trilogy $5 in value for this. From here out, this will be the standard Definitive Review fine for bad menu design in classic game collections.

EMULATION EXTRAS

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Dragon’s Lair Trilogy provides a few options for playing the games, though the one I wanted most is notably absent. You can choose three or five lives for each game. It really sucks that there’s no option for unlimited lives and a modern-style death counter for these games. There is every possibility that such an option might have made the difference between winning and losing. The lives system only makes sense if this is trying to suck money from players in $0.50 intervals. These days, the fun is in seeing how many times you croak before reaching the ending. It’s been years since this released, but if Digital Leisure wanted to attempt to appeal to modern gamers (and why wouldn’t they? We spend money too!), you don’t have to lower the difficulty. You just have to, you know, make it fun to die.

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There’s also adjustable difficulty for the first Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace and a cabinet mode for all three games that I didn’t like one bit. Having played a lot of retro collections, there’s something about how this set handled scan lines on a TV screen that I found unconvincing. Dragon’s Lair allows you to play either the “Arcade” or “Home” versions. In the arcade version, you move to another screen if you die, whereas in the home version you have to repeat the stage until you complete it. Also included is a “Director’s Cut” option to play Dragon’s Lair II that changes the second-to-last level, making it shorter and nowhere near as memorable. I’ll talk about that more in the review of that game.

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The most important addition is the “move guide” that you can optionally add to the bottom of every game. This is not the same as the flashing-light indicators the games originally utilized to guide your actions. It’s a directional overlay that tells you the exact button press, and you simply have to be quick on the draw. The cabinet mode also has lights that tell you which direction to press located around the joystick. Unless you have the games memorized, you basically have to play with either the move guide or the cabinet mode turned-on. Especially the first Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. Take, for example, the very first scene in the entire game. Dirk falls through the rotten wood on the drawbridge and a monster pops out of the moat. You’re supposed to swing your sword at it, but the sword doesn’t flash yellow. You’re just supposed to know to use your sword, I guess. In fact, both Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace don’t always use the yellow indicators for both the action and the movement, and sometimes you just plain have to make an educated guess. By the time Time Warp came around, they had included it with every move, but even with it, I found I couldn’t make progress at all without the move guide.

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Of course, the downside is, they cover up the animation, which is the whole point of playing these. Instead of watching the whole screen, you’ll inevitably stare at the bottom of the screen waiting for the next prompt. I suppose you can think of this as a trainer to memorize which moves you do on what screen, but that’s assuming you actually want to get THAT good at forty-year-old games. Either way, the move guide is a welcome inclusion, but I’m not at all satisfied with the lack of options. Given how you can watch each scene bit by bit in the media extras, why not let people play and practice them? Why not have the option for a death-counter instead of lives? I would hope a modern re-release of a Dragon’s Lair collection (which would hopefully solve licensing issues and include more games) would do more in the future. As for this specific set, for all the emulation extras, I’m crediting no extra value to Dragon’s Lair Trilogy. If they gave you the option to replace the lives system with a death counter, I would award $5 in credit towards the set, and $2.50 for being able to practice individual scenes.

MEDIA EXTRAS

“The fish was about this big..” “That’s not how a big fish story is supposed to go, Rick!”

Dragon’s Lair Trilogy comes with a couple media extras, the highlight of which is an interview with Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, and Rick Dyer. It runs a little over twenty minutes and, if you’re a fan of this stuff like I am, it’ll leave you wanting a lot more. Not because this lacks the good stuff, but because the interview is so well done. Dyer especially comes across as a cool guy. The type of guy you want to see succeed. A mad scientist who, more or less, invented the FMV format as we think of it today. For better and for worse, I suppose. The problem with this interview is that there’s no option to rewind or fast forward. There’s volume issues, and if you mishear something, you have to restart the whole video and watch it again. That really sucks and I have to cut what I would reward this feature by half as a result. I wish it had been broken into separate segments. It makes no sense why they didn’t, especially since the actual feature does have title cards for each different part of the interview.

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Dragon’s Lair Trilogy’s only other notable extra is a deleted scene for Dragon Lair II: Time Warp. It runs under a minute and is a partially voiced storyboard for a level set on a pirate ship, complete with what parts would flash yellow to indicate an action. The scene looks like it would have been dull. What’s frustrating is that the original Dragon’s Lair had many deleted scenes, including a full new “room” where one-eyed gargoyles hurl spears at Dirk. The scene is shown in the interview above, but you can’t watch it separately. Even more disheartening is the scene was apparently completed and colored by Digital Leisure, presumably with the intent of making it playable, but it’s nowhere to be found outside the interview. A quick glance at YouTube also makes it appear that there were multiple unused death animations that never made the game. It sure would have been swell to have all those. Space Ace gets no deleted scenes.

Dirk the Daring: the one hero in gaming who has irrefutable proof that he actually scootilypooped with the damsel he rescued. Of course, this leads into one of the great mysteries of video games: how the hell did Princess Daphne squirt out ten kids in what looks like a span of ten years and still maintain her figure? Clearly she messes around with the dark arts, which would explain why the forces of evil are always trying to kidnap her. They want to know her secret!

In fact, Space Ace feels pretty unloved by this set overall. Right before I finished this feature, I found out that a conversion kit for Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp was created in 1991 that could turn it into a more difficult version of Space Ace that used diagonal moves. This is not included in this set. Space Ace’s only two “special features” are also included for the other two games: the attract screen and the ability to watch the full game without having to play it. That last one is the best feature, and it really says it all about this set, doesn’t it? The best part about Dragon’s Lair Trilogy is the ability to just watch it without playing it.

They never mentioned which drugs produced the concept for Dragon’s Lair II.

Also, they got the three main guys behind the trilogy together to do a really good interview. Why stop there? DO AN AUDIO COMMENTARY!! Like, duh, right! Angela, future Spielberg of her generation, has helped me to rediscover the greatness of a well done feature film audio commentary. Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace especially could have benefited from hearing how game designer Dyer and animation expert Bluth came together to make one of the most famous games of all time. At one point in the interview, they touch upon how Bluth would interpret Dyer’s storyboards and create animation that didn’t work from a video game perspective (suddenly I have a hunch what went wrong with Dragon’s Lair II). Which scenes? In which ways? We don’t find out, and an audio commentary could have corrected this. Maybe we’ll get one eventually. Anyway, for all the media extras, I’m crediting $2.50 in value to Dragon’s Lair Trilogy. Had they offered more flexibility with how to watch the interview, I’d have called it $5.

THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION

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 Space Invaders’ 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 enough to merit playing today and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

For Dragon’s Lair Trilogy, the final score was as follows:

YES!: 1 ($10 in Value)
NO!: 2
$2.50 in Extra Value
$5.00 in Fines
TARGET VALUE: $20
TOTAL VALUE: $7.50

Dragon’s Lair Trilogy does not earn my Seal of Approval. With only one game worth playing today, and a game that you can buy separately on a few platforms, it’s not worth buying the whole set. Frankly, I’m still stunned that I could give any game in Dragon’s Lair Trilogy a YES! at all. I had previously planned to have “I HATE FMV GAMES” etched on my tombstone. But really, there’s no reason to own all three games, one of which isn’t THAT bad but not good enough and one of which is one of the worst coin-ops ever made. I suppose you can still feel free to grab this set REALLY cheap. Like, under $10 cheap. Even then, I’m sure you can get Dragon’s Lair by itself even cheaper.

GAME REVIEWS

Dragon’s Lair
Released June 19, 1983
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

One of the problems with adapting Dragon’s Lair today, in the 2020s, is people would have a cow about a character like Princess Daphne. As if friendly but vapid airheads don’t exist anymore. Or perhaps they wouldn’t if not for portrayals in media, like this? I think that’s the argument. Frankly, I don’t care. Besides, Dirk himself is completely brain dead too. They are gaming’s most fit couple.

Man, did I ever get it wrong about Dragon’s Lair. I got fixated on the whole “it’s really just playing Simon Says with animated cues” aspect. Which, by the way, is still there. As far as elephants in the room go, this is an especially large one that’ll always be around, like a photo-bombing wooly mammoth. But, when you really stop and look at the set pieces and the timing and themes of Dragon’s Lair, you realize that, more than any FMV game ever made, Dragon’s Lair succeeds at creating the illusion of video game-like interactivity. Not only that, but it does so in a way that is practically clairvoyant. That read the tea leaves flawlessly on where video games would go eventually. It’s ironic that the sequel is called Time Warp, when really, it was the original game that saw the future. The type of boss fights and challenges in games that didn’t exist in 1983 but do now. Come to think of it, many were probably inspired by this!

I think one of the aspects that makes Dragon’s Lair stand out is that literally every single character is memorable. It’s such a shame that nobody has managed to make a truly great game based on this franchise in the forty years since the original. All the pieces are certainly in place.

You can’t talk about any of these games without talking about the Don Bluth animation. Before we start, I want to qualify myself: I am NOT an expert at animation. I just watch a lot of it. People talk about Dragon’s Lair like it’s right up there with The Secret of NIMH or An American Tail or The Land Before Time. But, it’s actually not that high of quality. It’s somewhere between a really expensive Saturday morning cartoon and a feature film. Whenever a corner could be cut, chances are it probably was. There’s a lot of reused animation throughout the game. People, including myself, overlook that, but when you’re paying attention, they stand out. Space Ace is worse about it, but it’s there throughout Dragon’s Lair. On the other hand, I love the use of color and I think the backgrounds are just beautiful. I think they went a long way towards making Dragon’s Lair work. It feels like an adventure because it looks like one.

The later Dragon’s Lair 3D tried to recreate set pieces like this to various success. Had Dragon’s Lair 3D featured the smooth controls and lightning-fast responsiveness of a game like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, for all we know, it might have gone down as one of the all-time greats. But, Dragon’s Lair 3D had sluggish controls, a problematic camera, and this RIDICULOUS recoil whenever you ran into a wall or object. AND YET, it still managed to be just a little bit alright, but nothing special. For a game with that many problems to still step across the “alright” threshold makes me wonder what if? about it. What if it had good play control and didn’t have that absolutely stupid recoil? Would it have been an unprecedented hit and reignited the franchise? We’ll never know, I suppose. I’m sure eventually they’ll re-release it, but I hope they don’t in its present state. Dragon’s Lair 3D turned twenty-years-old in November, and gaming has come a long way. Scrap it and go again with modern technology and maybe, at long last, Dragon’s Lair will be the franchise it deserves to be.

Having said all that, I think the understated part of what makes Dragon’s Lair work, besides the beautiful use of color and the striking backgrounds, is that every room creates the illusion of an interactive video game. The last third of Space Ace and pretty-much all of Dragon’s Lair II come across like watching a movie that someone shoehorned button prompts into. That happens in Dragon’s Lair too, but it’s most rare in this game. The rooms are designed like video game challenges. Swinging left to right (or right to left if the room is mirrored) across flaming ropes. Dodging giant, rolling balls that are set to a pattern. You’re always acutely aware you’re not really controlling Dirk the Daring, but Dyer and Bluth did everything in their power to suspend your disbelief anyway. They even manage to succeed in some rooms, where the framing and directional options are unambiguous: the challenge is right, so move left. The beast is coming at you, so use your sword. It takes proper staging to pull off, but sometimes they did, and suddenly, Dragon’s Lair ain’t too bad a game at all.

The rafting sequence is one such area. The timing of when to press the prompts and the various hazards that take place during this sequence just plain work as a magic trick that makes you feel like you’re in control of an already animated cartoon. I love using the magic trick analogy with Dragon’s Lair, because you never forget what you’re doing isn’t real. It’s not immersive at all. Instead, it becomes okay to allow yourself to play along anyway. That’s what makes stage magic fun, and Dragon’s Lair is basically stage magic as a video game. We know the score, but we’ll pretend we don’t, because we want to have fun.

Dragon’s Lair has more moments like that than any FMV game I’ve ever played. But, that doesn’t always mean the results work. Some of the rooms don’t do enough visual cues to make it predictable what the move will be. Moments where, logically you would think you’re going to press one direction, but really, you’re supposed to press another. Take this moment:

Assuming you weren’t using the move guide, which tells exactly when to press a button and what to press, what way would you press in the above screen shot? The flashing thing is to the left of you, but also in front of you. Hell, in theory, it’s also lower than you, which could imply you have to jump downward towards it, right? Well, the correct answer is you’re supposed to press UP. Even though the flashing target is in the lower left hand of the screen. I can’t imagine how many quarters a person would have needed in 1983 to commit this to memory. One recurring story I keep hearing from people is gathering around to watch someone in an arcade who could run through the entire game effortlessly. I’d not had the patience to get that far at all. I did make a good faith effort to play without the guide, but I couldn’t figure out what moves to do, and frankly I didn’t have any fun trying to figure it out.

In some areas, there’s no way to anticipate what move could possibly be the next move. You have to wait for a cue, or just watch the guide. Well, at least with Dragon’s Lair, I found I could do both.

Oddly, Dragon’s Lair is the only game in the trilogy where you can play with the guide on and still watch the cartoon too. It’s not a visually complex story. There’s not a lot of screen clutter. You don’t have dozens of moving objects, or even if you do, they’re staged correctly to not distract from the point of PLAYING the game. It’s a “clean” presentation that remembers what it’s asking of players: enjoy the show, but also do things based on what the show does. That’s why Dragon’s Lair succeeds even forty years later while Space Ace and especially Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp crash and burn. It IS an interactive movie, like few attempts at such a thing have been able to pull off. Even with the guide, you won’t miss anything with Dragon’s Lair. It’s something I didn’t appreciate until I played the other two games. How I tested this is I replayed each game a third time in three days and had my father and sister quiz me on details of the games. NOTHING unfair, and they understood what I was aiming for and went for details anyone playing the game should notice. For Dragon’s Lair, I answered six out of seven questions correctly. For Dragon’s Lair II, it was two out of seven. For Space Ace, it was only one out of seven, with the one that I got right being from early in the game.

This memorable scene is an example of “this would be so cool if you could actually play it!” that certainly was NOT cool to play when you really could in Dragon’s Lair 3D. And actually, the scene is a little overrated in the arcade game. The patterns the knight taps out on the floor don’t always seem to make logical sense in terms of which button you’re expected to press.

Let me be clear: Dragon’s Lair isn’t a great game by any stretch. Besides the occasional “why would you press that direction at that moment?” issues, the game also makes you eventually repeat each room, only with the animation mirrored so every left/right move is reversed. Of course, if they didn’t do this, a game of Dragon’s Lair would only take about six minutes to complete. The biggest knock I have is against the historically terrible finale sequence. The rooms are all relatively short, which serve as logical checkpoints if you lose a life. In fact, I consider the smallness of the rooms to be a highlight of the game. It makes it feel like a real castle you’re exploring.

That’s probably the most underrated aspect of what makes Dragon’s Lair work: some rooms can be as short as one action. None of that minute-and-thirty-second short film that you have to replay over and over crap from the sequel.

Except for the final room with Singe the Dragon, which has no checkpoints, and the game grinds to halt and becomes agony. First, Singe nearly wakes from his sleep, which takes a while of just waiting around and doing nothing. AND THEN, FOR NO REASON, Princess Daphne very slowly explains that you need to retrieve a magic sword that’s in the room and use it to get the key around Singe’s neck. And she’s doing stripper poses the entire spiel. Mind you, this explanation was totally unnecessary. If it was a new and unique gameplay method, FINE, but it wasn’t, so what the hell were they thinking? You’re not doing anything different than you were doing leading up to this. You’re still just pressing buttons based on prompts. If you die.. and you probably will since the timing of this room can be brutal.. you have to watch this whole sequence again, from Singe’s nearly waking up to Daphne’s striptease-instructional video. No means to skip it. It’s torturous to sit through even once since a game about constant action-reaction now suddenly has you just standing around waiting for the game part to start again. AND YOU HAVE TO REWATCH IT EVERY TIME YOU DIE! I get they probably wanted this room to feel climatic, but when you’re playing a game called DRAGON’S Lair and you slay a dragon and rescue the girl, that ought to be climatic enough. It’s one of the worst finales to a game I’ve ever seen. It ain’t a deal breaker, but it almost was. I had to think about it.

I actually didn’t kill Singe here. He died of old age after hearing the unskippable dialog for the three-dozenth time.

Okay, so Dragon’s Lair didn’t exactly stick the landing in its final act. But, everything up to that point is a lot better than I’ve ever given it credit for. It’s not fantastic or anything, but I enjoyed my time with it. Just think, all it took was basically creating the perfect FMV game to get me to finally say YES! to one of these things. And yet, I still wasn’t sure why the generation before me holds this up so fondly. Why they still get starry-eyed as they share tales of epic failure and sessions that lasted under a minute, or gathering around to watch that one weirdo who blew his life savings memorizing every sequence. Despite its relatively short window of fame, brutal difficulty, and all the truly-awful games in the franchise that followed, Dragon’s Lair is still a game you want to enjoy. Why is that? I have to believe it’s for more than just the Don Bluth animation, or the hilarious yelps and squeals of Dirk the Daring, or what is just alright gameplay that is ultimately probably the best the format is capable of. So, I again asked myself: what could have possibly made those memories of Dragon’s Lair echo so loudly across the decades?

These two would go on to have ten kids.

I think I have the answer. Because the set pieces and art and characters all came together to make what players in 1983 wanted games to be like, but they weren’t. Not yet. Although it wasn’t their intention, Dragon’s Lair feels like a promise to gamers: this is where the medium is going. One day, games will look and sound this good and have action this exciting, only it will be you in control. Well, we all know what happened over the next forty years. Dragon’s Lair survives through history because it represents the promise of gaming kept.
Verdict: YES! **FLIP**

Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp
Released June 16, 1991
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

Pictured: Cathy’s brain melting from peeling back all the layers of awfulness from Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp.

If I was too hard on Dragon’s Lair before, I wasn’t hard enough on Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp. Talk about losing the plot! This sequel forgot literally everything that made the original game (and some of Space Ace) work. Dragon’s Lair, for all of its FMV-based flaws, still does everything in its power to look like a video game adventure. Time Warp doesn’t at all. It’s a series of disconnected animated vignettes that completely fails in every imaginable way. In the annals of bad games, it’s astonishing that nobody ever brings this one up. Perhaps because it’s an FMV game and that’s too low of a low-hanging fruit. Perhaps because the Don Bluth animation is so beautiful and vibrant. Perhaps because the nine segments of the game are so memorably bonkers that you wonder if the game was co-written by cocaine. But, actually playing Dragon’s Lair II, it’s shocking how many different ways a simple FMV sequel to the FMV game of the Golden Age could be so bad. How could they get it so wrong?

Time Warp starts off with Dirk’s mother-in-law trying to murder the man who rescued her daughter in the first place and is likely the only person capable of rescuing her again. In terms of intelligence, the apple fell about two inches from the tree on that one.

The most obvious problem with Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp is that it really doesn’t make any effort at all to feel like a video game. In Dragon’s Lair, the game randomized all but the first and last levels of the game. It worked there because they were all short and they all flowed seamlessly into each-other. Time Warp’s nine levels are longer, linear, and with the exception of the first level, have no checkpoints at all. They’re also all, more or less, self-contained animated shorts that don’t fit-in with each-other. The moments where it feels like they were trying to animate some form of a video game trope in order to invoke the expectations of what a game should be like are few and far between. In Dragon’s Lair or Space Ace, whether you were swinging across ropes, timing when to move between spikes, leaping across platforms, or fighting monsters, the designers created the illusion that you were controlling Dirk and Dexter (well, until they forgot to do that in Space Ace too). Time Warp feels like a totally disconnected animated short that someone surgically grafted button prompts onto.

This is Eve. As in Adam & Eve. As in the Garden of Eden, which is the fourth stage of the game. Whereas Dragon’s Lair felt like an actual video game where a knight searches a castle looking for a damsel in distress, Time Warp feels like a series of two-minute-long Silly Symphony clips that someone attached a video game to long after the fact. Which isn’t far off from the truth. The Alice in Wonderland sequence for Dragon’s Lair II debuted on television in 1984 and the game was apparently fully completed between 1984 and 1986. It never came out until 1991 thanks to the bankruptcy of Cinematronics.

They must have realized how poorly flowing this would work as a video game, so in Time Warp, every single move does the yellow flashing prompt. You’d think that would make this the most playable game, but often the actions are too brief and the visuals so loud that you might need a couple lives to see them. Of course, every time you die on a stage, even if it’s the very last move on that level before you finish it, you have to start all the way over at the beginning. These aren’t teeny tiny rooms, like in Dragon’s Lair. These levels last over a minute of basically non-stop quick-time events where one mistake means you have to start over from the beginning. What’s especially annoying is they seem to have animated each level with moments that were clearly meant to be checkpoints. In the first level, you go from being chased by your mother-in-law into entering the castle from the original game, and if you die after the dungeon, you restart from there. Makes sense! Well, even though there’s a moment like that in each of the animated segments that follows, like a turning point in the action, it’s not utilized and you have to start over if you die.

Dragon’s Lair has lots of beautiful art, but it also remembers that players are focused on the game itself. All the stuff happening on the screen is done in service to the gameplay. Dragon’s Lair II is filled with sight-gags and small details that you will die if you watch, because you’re not focusing on the next button prompt. I’m sure this was done in service to the days where people would gather around and watch someone play the game, but it’s a game that constantly forgets it’s game.

It stinks of a game that has no interest in giving players value. Instead, Dragon’s Lair II is completely focused on trying to squeeze as many quarters as possible. But, if you thought the lack of checkpoints was greedy, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp gates players out of the final two levels unless they find all eleven magical items that are hidden throughout the first seven stages. It’s a sleazy move that made me feel unclean as I played it. Imagine playing through this in an arcade in 1991 and being interested in it enough that you spend enough money to GIT GUD and make it past the Ancient Egyptian level (ironically the only level in the entire game that feels remotely like the first game), and then suddenly the game just restarts from the beginning because you didn’t gather all items. In a game where you have a single second to make a decision, and ten times it will flash in two directions at once because one of the choices has the item, and you have to choose correctly, going ten for eleven, or else you.. keep going but actually will now have to replay the whole game from scratch eventually too. What a load of crap. Also, yes, ten times. For the playing card in stage three, they didn’t bother to animate the indicator that it’s one of the items you must get. Even worse: because of the Alice in Wonderland theme of that level, you wouldn’t even think that it’s THE item. It’s just right there and blended seamlessly with the rest of the design. Actually, some of the items that do flash do so in very visually-loud sections. The butterfly in the Beethoven stage is practically invisible!

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I should also note that the arcade game had a scoring system that was removed completely from the home version. I didn’t even know that until I started researching whether the arcade game actually told players anywhere that they HAD to get the treasures to finish the game. It does.. at the bottom of a three-second long instruction screen that is briefly seen during the extended attract mode that runs on an over one-minute long cycle. It’s shamefully greedy on the same level that Ghosts ‘n Goblins forced full-replay was. Even worse: logically the way to not screw players is to make them only replay the levels where they missed an item, right? Well, Dragon Lair II has contempt for its players, so you have to replay the whole game from the start. Wow. Leland Corporation’s bankruptcy was well-deserved after pulling crap like that, and good riddance.

The best scene in the entire game is the eighth level, where Mordroc actually gets the Death Ring on Princess Daphne, who turns into Ganon if Ganon were a drag queen. BUT, if you play the Director’s Cut, this never happens. It starts exactly the same, with Mordroc clearly putting the Death Ring on Daphne and Dirk throwing his sword through his arm. Then, the scene changes from the original, and suddenly Daphne is out of the shot and the Death Ring isn’t on her. In a shorter, more plodding and less fun scene, you dodge Mordroc’s attacks before knocking the ring onto his finger. The one good call this game made was going with the Monster Daphne sequence. Too bad everything leading up to it was an unprecedented disaster.

So, that’s Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp. I have nothing positive to say about it as a game. Dragon’s Lair wanted you to feel like you were in control of Dirk. Dragon’s Lair II feels like it wants you to appreciate the amazing art of Don Bluth while it shakes you down for quarters. We can do that without this button prompt stuff or the schoolyard bully robbing you of your lunch money routine this game pulls. The on-screen action feels completely disconnected from the controller. The item collecting system and lack of checkpoints practically makes Dragon’s Lair II a mugging. It’s astonishing to me that the same people who crapped all over the Sega CD’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers game for having absolutely nothing to do with the on-screen prompts rewarded Dragon’s Lair II with raving reviews when it did the exact same thing . If you want to know whether a game critic is shallow or not, see if they did a review of Dragon’s Lair II, and if they did, see how much they focused on the incredible artwork and not on how it factors into video game logic. Because this is BAD. As in I literally can’t believe nobody brought this stuff up in 1991. Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp should be listed among the worst arcade games ever made. Sure is pretty, though.
Verdict: NO!

Space Ace
Released December 21, 1983
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

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I spent the last three days going back and forth on whether Space Ace would get a YES! or a NO! On one hand, I think it’s the most beautiful game in the trilogy, with a fun theme, an awesome concept, and a white-knuckle pace. On the other hand, like Dragon’s Lair II, it forgets it’s a video game and not an animated short about two-thirds of the way through it. It’s also the most frustrating from a technical point of view, as with-or-without the move guide, the timing of Space Ace in certain aspects feels like it genuinely isn’t lined-up properly with the on-screen action. This game was rushed through production, and it shows.

Fun Fact: Don Bluth himself provides the voice of both the villainous Borf and Dark Dexter, while animator Will Finn (who later worked for Disney during the 90s on basically every one of their good movies from that time period) provides the voice of Ace. I’ve been playing video games my entire life and, trust me, I know how bad things can be when developers grab whoever is handy, be it Sally in Accounting or John from Human Resources to do voice work. For someone who is NOT a professional voice actor by trade, Finn does a dang good job voicing Dexter. I’d genuinely never guessed this wasn’t his actual profession.

As always, the animation is jaw-dropping gorgeous, and the characters are memorable. The story and gameplay also have a tiny bit more going for them. The heroic dude-bro Dexter, aka Space Ace, is emasculated by the villainous Borf and turned into a pathetic weakling. Borf then kidnaps Kimberly and you must go on a daring adventure to rescue her. The twist is that sometimes you can “energize” and turn back into the big, buff, cocky Ace. There are times where, if you don’t do this, you die. But, most of the time, energizing branches the game into different types of sequences. There’s also a lot more “choose a random direction” moments, but since you’ll have to play out every scene anyway, there’s no point in having these. It only creates the illusion of unseen areas. It’s fine, but the problem is that Space Ace doesn’t put it all together properly and sort of ruins the whole experience in the process.

When Space Ace tries to invoke video game tropes like patterns and timing, it might actually be better than Dragon’s Lair. Take this scene in the first “level.” I mean.. look at that! That looks exactly like something you would see in a video game, right? A 2D timing challenge. If you’re going to do a fully-animated FMV video game that aspires to create the illusion that you’re actually controlling the character, yep, that’s the way to do it. But, at some point, it forgot to do these parts.

Like Dragon’s Lair, you have to repeat every major set piece and room once. But, unlike Dragon’s Lair, instead of mixing up the order, in Space Ace (at least on the highest difficulty setting), every sequence that repeats is done back-to-back. You play a room once, and then the screen goes black for a split-second and then it just repeats, only mirrored. It’s so lazy and jarring and it takes the wind right out of Space Ace’s sails. I cringed every single time it happened. Honestly, in Dragon’s Lair, I came to appreciate the mirrored levels. “Alright, I’ve done this room! What was the order?” I’d ask myself. That excitement wasn’t there for Space Ace because I literally just did this section. And, unlike Dragon’s Lair, which is set in a castle that would have many rooms, in Space Ace the narrative doesn’t lend itself at all to the repeating rooms. Not one bit. It’s Dexter running down an identical corridor, being caught in an identical plastic bag, energizing at the exact same moment with the exact same pose.. it’s just so badly done. Not even comically bad, but just sadly bad.

The flashing that was used in Dragon’s Lair and especially Dragon’s Lair II occasionally happens in Space Ace, but sometimes it doesn’t. Like right here, it doesn’t at all. I can’t imagine playing without the move guide, where the timing is totally guesswork. In fact, I’ve heard Space Ace machines had the joysticks wear out a lot from people slamming them in the direction repeatedly. If you were wondering, here you would press LEFT.

And then you get to the areas where the on-screen action stops feeling like a video game and starts feeling like an animated short that someone just super-glued button prompts onto. This is the game I could make the least progress on without the guide. The game just plain quits helping sometimes, and guessing which direction was the correct direction, or WHEN to press the buttons for that matter, was purely luck-based. But, even when the indicator lights do flash, at some point a clear disconnect between controller actions and story narrative happens. The motorcycle sequence and the battle with Borf feel like just an ordinary cartoon where you have to press a button every couple seconds to make it play. It’s no longer directed like a video game. It’s just a cartoon by that point. Which.. I guess that’s what all three of these games are, but what I mean is that it no longer feels like you’re playing Space Ace. You’re just advancing it.

The end sequence sealed the NO! for this one. As an animated short, it’s satisfying, but as a video game, it’s a bit of a nonsensical disaster.

To Space Ace’s credit, it provided one final gaming highlight for me in 2022. I’d partially written these reviews for an abandoned article in 2021, and I needed to replay the games just to make sure I could. With my reaction time fading, it was basically now-or-never for this feature. While playing Space Ace, I game overed fairly quickly. Well, it turned out to be my only game over. To my absolute shock, I ran the table from there, losing a couple lives but still beating the game without needing another continue. What the fudge? ME? Are you kidding me? That felt really amazing. No joke. The lives I lost were of the “something about the button timing and the animation doesn’t seem to match-up at all” variety, but I didn’t mess-up after that. It felt great!

By the way, there’s both a Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace animated series by Ruby-Spears. In the Space Ace cartoon, which unlike Dragon’s Lair was done as part of the Saturday Supercade lineup, Kimberly is voiced by Nancy “Bart Simpson” Cartwright. I tried to watch these cartoons but I found them to be poison for the brain.

On the other hand, I pulled this monster final score off by not even watching the cartoon at all and instead focusing completely on the move guide. That’s what ultimately made the difference with these two games. With Dragon’s Lair, you can both enjoy the spectacle and play the game at the same time. It’s not a visually busy game. Space Ace always has a LOT going on, and if you take even a microsecond to appreciate that, you might find yourself losing a life. And now, it makes sense why nobody trades tales of Space Ace despite looking every bit as visually impressive as Dragon’s Lair. The fact that the first game proves you can get away with a visually nice animated game guided by a series of quick time events means I can’t excuse it for Space Ace. It needed to take a less-is-more approach, and it didn’t. Most telling of all: while I thought Dragon’s Lair II was more distracting, I actually scored lower on Space Ace in my quiz test. This was the game where Dyer and Booth lost their way.
Verdict: NO!

FINAL RANKINGS

How I determined the rankings is simple: I took the full list of games, then I said “I’m forced to play one game. Pick the one I could play the most and not get bored with.” That goes on top of the list. Then I repeat the question again with the remaining games over and over until the list is complete. Based on that simple criteria, here are the final rankings. Games above the Terminator Line received a YES! Games below it received a NO!

Dragon’s Lair
**TERMINATOR LINE**
Space Ace
Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp

I seriously can’t believe I did that score though.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Retro Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with Dragon's Lair 2 Review, Dragon's Lair II Review, Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp Review, Dragon's Lair Review, Dragon's Lair Trilogy Nintendo Switch Review, Dragon's Lair Trilogy PlayStation Review, Dragon's Lair Trilogy Review, Dragon's Lair Trilogy Steam review, Dragon's Lair Trilogy Xbox Review, Dragon's Lair Trilogy, Space Ace Arcade Review, Space Ace Review

LCD Games VIII: LCDs Take Manhattan

December 27, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 8 Comments

INDIE GAMER CHICK’S LCD GUIDE: PART I – PART II – PART III – PART IV – PART V – PART VI – PART VII

Who would have thunk it? My four LCD features were some of my most-viewed in 2022. It turns out, I didn’t QUITE tap myself out, as there was a handful that I skipped. So, as one final thank you for making 2022 my biggest year in almost a decade, here’s one last plunge into your childhoods with eight more LCD games. Suddenly, I wish I had my Game Boy Color here to kiss it and say “thank you for not being these.”

PENGO!!
Bandai (1983)
Gameplay Type: Action-Arcade

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I figured there was no way that an LCD could recreate the block-shoving, enemy crushing gameplay of Pengo and I was.. absolutely correct. Oddly, it’s not the lack of animation that makes this fail. In fact, they solved any potential issue that could cause by having enemies be frozen in place the moment you shove a block. If they’re lined-up with the block when you press the button, it’s a kill. That was a wise choice. The problem is the playfield is just not big enough for the game to work. There’s only a couple blocks you can actually shove, with the rest being stuck against the wall. With a playfield only seven columns across, that’s just not enough. Miss even a single time and you’ll probably lose. This is made worse by the fact that enemies can destroy the blocks too. It’s not worth getting the hang of because the game feels too cramped and low-energy. This was a bad idea to attempt.

ASTRO COMMAND!!
Epoch (1982)
Gameplay Type: Shmup

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A typical LCD shmup with the twist being one extra type of enemy and a weapon to deal with it. You shoot enemies on the right side of the screen while also dropping bombs on the enemies who will strut underneath you in the bottom row. The issue is the enemies positively spam the screen with gunfire, but when you fire any of your ammo, you’re locked in-place until the bullet hits, which makes it impractical to weave through their barrage of bullets. Also, this is one of those games that absolutely required animation that the format isn’t capable of. The timing of when you can and can’t dodge out of the way never felt consistent, as sometimes I pulled off a skin-of-my-teeth evasion, and sometimes it felt like I was practically instakilled by a bullet. It’s not a total wash. Picking off the enemies has a satisfying blink/ping, but this needed more fine-tuning to get the timing more intuitive.

APOLLO 13!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Quickdraw-Dodger

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Houston, we have a problem. We sat around trying to figure out how to play this game for an hour. Or, rather, Dad did. I quit after like five minutes. Finally, we (well, he, but hey, we’re a team, right Daddio?) figured out that, to beat the first level, you have to line up the LEM and with the crosshairs and press the capture button five times in a minute. If the movement controls or thrust controls do anything here, we couldn’t notice it. In the second level, you have dodge rocks, but here we kept gaming over in just seconds. We were colliding with rocks so quickly that we didn’t even have time to figure out if we were supposed to be using the directional pad or the left/right thrust controls. The problem with the Archive is it didn’t include the instructions. I tried to track down the instructions, but go figure, this is one of the very few games that has no listing at the comprehensive Handheld Museum. They certainly were ambitious here, but the resulting game isn’t remotely intuitive, and honestly, the first two stages aren’t fun. Presumably there’s a third stage where you deploy a parachute but we couldn’t survive ten seconds on the second stage to find out. If you’re going to make a complicated game that requires instructions, make sure it’s fun. Apollo 13 appears to be just run-of-the-mill LCD gameplay, only overly cluttered and rendered unintuitive.

VINDICATORS!!
Tiger Electronics (1989)
Gameplay Type: Shooter

Based on the 1988 Atari Games coin-op, it’s a three-channel shooter where you can move left and right while aiming your gun three different ways separately. It’s a nice twist and it actually works. Once the enemies start firing upon you, you have to quickly bob and weave your way around. Some enemies can be picked-off from multiple angles, while others you to position yourself under them AND aim your turret correctly. You can only move forward (with extremely poor scrolling.. seriously this is motion-free) in the center channel, and sometimes I found it better to just ignore enemies. Tiger added some elements to make it feel true to the arcade game, like having to get a key to exit through the gate. I always appreciate it when they make that extra effort, even if it’s a teeny tiny thing that ultimately doesn’t affect gameplay that much. Vindicators isn’t mind-blowing or anything, but it’s a nice little time waster.

NEBULA MASK MACHINEMAN: LIGHTNING STRIKER!!
aka Machine Man
Bandai (1984)
Gameplay Type: Dodger/Shooting Gallery

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I was worried at first this was just a rehash of Ultraman. It almost was. The gameplay is split into two parts. In part one, you’re a car that has to dodge bullets fired from a factory. To the game’s credit, it’s yet another LCD (or in this case, VFD) that proves that I was wrong: this format absolutely can create a sense of speed. It just needs the right “animation” and sound effects. So, Machine Man has that going for it, and it’s one of the most convincing illusions of movement I’ve seen yet in over one-hundred LCDs. Unfortunately, the gameplay isn’t any good. You have to make your way to the factory, with the speed increasing the further right you move on the screen. While you do this, the factory lobs bullets at you that you have to dodge. It’s really dull. Once you get to the factory, you transform into a robot and the game becomes a simple five-channel gallery shooter that doesn’t nothing original. According to the Handheld Museum, this is one of the rarest LCD/VFDs out there, and knowing what goes into making these emulated versions, I’m heartbroken I didn’t like this at all. It’s really boring. Great sense of speed, though! Can’t stress that enough.

ZACKMAN!!
Bandai (1982)
Gameplay Type: Action-Arcade

Zackman, which is apparently based on an arcade game called The Pit, is sort like Dig Dug. You have to burrow through blocks to reach a purple canister and return it to your ship. The Dig Dug aspect comes from the various rocks scattered throughout the level that you can use to crush enemies. There’s also a gun hidden on the stages, but in a dozen or so sessions, most of which I went several levels deep, I only found it once. It’s bizarre how many obscure coin-ops got the LCD/VFD treatment. Maybe it came with the contract when you sign-up to make arcade games. “Sign here to acknowledge your game will eventually be trashed forty years later by a silver-spoon licking California girl. And sign here to have your game completely bastardized and made into an LCD or VDF that’s barely recognizable for all the hard work you’ll be putting into your arcade game. And please initial underneath that to assure that also will also be trashed forty years later by some silver-spoon licking California girl, possibly the same girl but that’s subject to availability. Congratulations, you’re now officially an arcade game maker and OH look at that, the arcade market crashed. Sorry for all the paperwork.” Anyway, it’s nice that Zackman’s playfield is actually scrolls. I wish that Pengo did that too. But the game is just not fun.

HOOK!!
Tiger Electronics (1991)
Gameplay Type: Combative

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Based on the Steven Spielberg movie that he hates but I’ve always kind of adored, this is a game played in three parts. In part one, the Lost Boys launch garbage at pirates, and.. I’m not even sure you can lose this section. You just hit the fire button and they come at you in a straight line and just keep pressing fire. Eventually, Captain Hook will show up and raise his sword up and down, but if this is an attempt to block your projectiles, it never worked for me. Even when it seemed like I might have mistimed things, I still got the pirates and never took damage in this section. This whole “level one” goes on forever, with only one part of your soul escaping to continue playing to the next level. The rest of my soul is stuck just pressing one button with no challenge for all eternity. The bit of my soul that moved onto part two had to swing back and forth on a rope and kick pirates in the face while avoiding their sword attacks. You need to collect two keys to begin the section where you battle Captain Hook as Peter Pan. Here you cross swords, dodging and attacking and trying to knock Hook’s health down. In multiple attempts, I never got a single hit in. I would have kept trying to but the sheer agony of having to play to that part is like being stuck with an unstoppable cut scene. It seriously is a couple minutes, and it’s misery. What were they thinking? You earned no BANGARANG on this one, Tiger!

SKELETON WARRIORS!!
Tiger Electronics (1994)
Gameplay Type: Combative

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The total inconsistency of Tiger’s ambition is so weird. Hook, a movie based on a grown-up Peter Pan? Three unique levels that all play differently. Skeleton Warriors? Just press the button when something is next to you to kill them. I suppose you do have to walk right too, and they try to have LCD debris scattered around to create that illusion, but it fails badly. There’s almost no ambition here, like their mandate was to just dump something out using Game Template #2B so that this reaches the market in time for the cartoon’s premiere. There’s a sword to pick up, but it doesn’t seem to do anything besides change what weapon you stick out when you kill things. If it does more, I didn’t need it. There’s no ammo, and in fact, I only needed two gameplay sessions to be able to play this without taking any damage. Hell, the only reason I took damage the first time was attempting to capture screenshots. It feels like it was aimed at really young and possibly brain damaged children. When Tiger Electronics phoned-in a license, they REALLY phoned it in. This is just lazy and shameful.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Apollo 13 Tiger Electronics, Astro Command, Bandai LCDs, Bandai Machine Man, Hook Tiger Electronics, Machine Man, Pengo LCD, Skeleton Warriors Tiger, Skeleton Warriors Tiger Electronics Review, Tiger Electronics Reviews, Tiger Undercut, Vindicators LCD, Vindicators Tiger, Vindicators Tiger Electronics Review, Zackman Bandai

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Dragon’s Lair Trilogy: The Definitive Review (Complete 3 Game Review + Rankings)

EMULATION EXTRAS

MEDIA EXTRAS

THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION

GAME REVIEWS

Dragon’s Lair
Released June 19, 1983
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp
Released June 16, 1991
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

Space Ace
Released December 21, 1983
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

FINAL RANKINGS

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EMULATION EXTRAS

MEDIA EXTRAS

THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION

GAME REVIEWS

Dragon’s Lair Released June 19, 1983 Designed by Rick Dyer Directed by Don Bluth

Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp Released June 16, 1991 Designed by Rick Dyer Directed by Don Bluth

Space Ace Released December 21, 1983 Designed by Rick Dyer Directed by Don Bluth

FINAL RANKINGS

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Dragon’s Lair
Released June 19, 1983
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp
Released June 16, 1991
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth

Space Ace
Released December 21, 1983
Designed by Rick Dyer
Directed by Don Bluth