Return of the Obra Dinn (Review)

August 29, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

Plot spoilers (but no solutions to the game) ahoy, as this is a four-year-old game and I really want to talk about the plot.

I think a lot of people wanted me to finally get around to reviewing Return of the Obra Dinn because they thought it could contend for the #1 position on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. Heh. Yea, no. It’s good, but it ain’t that good. Hell, it missed leaderboard’s top 50, which I expect to be controversial even if it just barely missed it. For many journalists and gamers, this was 2018’s game of the year. It’s a major tent pole indie and basically unlike any game that has ever come before it. It came with the pedigree of being from the guy who made Papers, Please. And I missed reviewing it in 2018 and getting those sweet, sweet clicks. Oh, I didn’t deliberately skip it. In fact, I even started playing it on Steam when it came out. It didn’t hold my attention and it just fell off my radar. I’m not entirely sure why, either. I like a good mystery game, and there’s NEVER been a mystery game like Obra Dinn.

“You unlock this door with the key of imagination..”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this last week. My Dad, an old-school Macintosh fanboy, saw this on the Switch eShop. He wasn’t ever much for gaming, at least until recently, but the graphics style caught his attention. That same style wasn’t for me at all. I kind of think Obra Dinn is ugly looking. Like so many graphics types, old computer games looked the way they did because the of limitations of hardware at that time. There’s nothing inherently sacred about them. Creators of the legendary PC games of the era would have crawled across hot coals on their bellies to have more colors or higher-resolutions.

The chicken did it. NEVER TRUST THE CHICKEN!

I’m also not so much into high seas adventures. In fact, the only nautical game I’ve ever really enjoyed is Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, and I don’t even know if that counts. Weirdly, it’s my favorite 3D Zelda by a mile. Finally, I’m not huge into nonlinear storytelling. It can be interesting when done right, but when done badly, it can be ruinous. Look at the recent remake of Stephen King’s The Stand on Paramount+. The original made-for-TV mini-series with Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald was badly acted, had terrible special effects, and was nine-ways of awesome. The 2020 remake (an all-time contender for “Worst Timing Ever” given that it’s a show about a plague that was produced before a real life plague hit) begins with 99.9% of the world’s population already already dead. I mean, come on, that’s the fun part! Each episode cuts between different time periods. The Stand doesn’t work at all as a nonlinear experience and it renders the entire nine-episode limited series unwatchable.

Actually, nonlinear storytelling was only one of many problems. That entire series was one of the most embarrassing dumpster fires I’ve ever seen in my entire life. TERRIBLE performances by actors capable of so much better. Even J.K. Simmons is bad in it. Bryan Cranston is uncredited as the President of the United States, doing a voice over that reminds you the man got his start playing the voices of the monster of the day on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Then, there’s the “fresh” takes on characters. Odessa Young’s Frannie is so unlikable that it makes you cheer for the embodiment of all things dark and evil. I have never hated a show I was all set to love more than I hated The Stand 2020.

Obra Dinn leans heavily on nonlinear storytelling. The game opens with the ultimate final fate of the final handful of surviving crew. To its credit, it’s immediately jarring, as you see the captain blow some poor SOB away, which is no doubt the cap to a mutiny. The problem is, Obra Dinn uses the jump-around too much, and not always in service to keeping the player engaged. There’s a moment where most players are like “okay, wait, this isn’t just a ship where a series of random calamities happened” where you see the crew fighting a giant mutant crab monster that looks like something out of John Carpenter’s The Thing. It’s genuinely jaw-dropping, even if my Dad and I both started giggling at how silly the plot was starting to become. By this point in the game, you’d already seen the crew fight a giant squid, but that’s a fairly common nautical trope. Creepy ass giant crab-spider things being rode by spooky, shapeless riders? Not so much.

The design of these is some of the creepiest, most eerie shit I’ve ever seen in a game.

And that element doesn’t have the same impact if Obra Dinn introduced the monsters at any other point. The scene where they’re climbing onto the ship (pictured above) would have still been a “oh shit” moment, but not as startling or meaningful as seeing the crab do its thing. Nonlinear works there. But for the later mermaid attacks, you’re now expecting that type of thing. Seeing that chapter take place at the tail end of the attack (no pun intended) has lost all impact. Once you’ve already seen that the story involves a giant squid and shapeless warriors riding giant spider crabs, it would have been a lot more chilling to see the mermaid attack sequentially. Of course, the game couldn’t do that because of how you see all these events in the first place. The mermaid sequence requires you to go in reverse order, using the “scene within a scene” aspect of the gameplay where you click on freshest carcass in someone else’s moment of death as the go-between of the segments. It’s safe to say that, by the end of Obra Dinn, that sense of awe and foreboding had long since abandoned ship.

You don’t matter, and you don’t matter, and you don’t matter, and you don’t matter..

If Obra Dinn’s plot itself was part of the checklist that you had to solve, the solution would be “RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN was SMOTHERED by TOO LARGE A CAST THAT NEEDED TO BE THINNED OUT BY A PAPER-THIN FANTASY PLOT.” I’m going to go ahead and say it: Obra Dinn’s story absolutely fucking sucks. Once the sci-fi elements and the magical treasure chest that lures the monsters comes into play, the story dies a miserable death. All the intrigue is gone. All the interpersonal dynamics no longer feel like they matter at all. The answer to “cause of death” for around half of the crew was “killed by horrible beast.” And they had to use “horrible beast” as a catch-all for the mermaids, spider crabs, and kraken, because otherwise it would have spoiled that those elements were in the game. I hate that I didn’t like it, or that the game lost a lot of its enjoyment once the treasure/mermaid plot revealed itself, but from that point on, I just didn’t care about the characters anymore. Their lives, their intrigue, and their fates felt arbitrary. I don’t know why it annoys me so much. I guess I thought it was going to play out like I would be Tim Curry in the Clue movie (Cluedo for you non-Yankee types) meticulously explaining that so-and-so set up a booby trap with a barrel of gunpowder and lured someone to their doom with each character, and instead 50% of them were chalked up to death by monster.

And you don’t even need to be EXACT with the cause of death for most of the characters. Hell, for some of them, you don’t even need to get the exact entity that caused the death. This is one of those multiple-outs type of games. So, for example, if a person’s head is shot off with a cannon during the Kraken fight, you can blame the Kraken, or the guy who shot the cannon, and for cause of death, the game accepts “exploded” or “decapitated” or “shot” or many other things. Now, I’m totally cool with having multiple definitions for the same effect, but I thought I was signing up for a tight mystery full of plots and murder most foul. There’s only teeny tiny hints of those things, but most of the solutions come down to “who died during each monster attack?” God, I can’t properly convey how much of a let down that is.

Do you know what I like most about Obra Dinn? I’ve always said “gameplay is king.” It’s been my unofficial motto at Indie Gamer Chick. I can be wowed by incredible stories. I can be dumbfounded by incomprehensible stories. I can be bored by mundane stories. But ultimately, I play video games to be absorbed by compelling gameplay. Return of the Obra Dinn will now forever be the game I point to that shows the power of gameplay to overcome all. For all its flaws, the actual sleuthing in Obra Dinn never gets boring. It works because of the wise decision to only reveal correct answers in groups of three. We got five or six of the characters correct just by guesswork, but always after a process of elimination that left only three or four options. Granted, we did score one group of three where we didn’t have a definitive answer for any of the three, but when the game cut to the WELL DONE screen, we completely lost our minds in celebration, hooting and high-fiving until we were hoarse. It’s never NOT satisfying to see that you’ve correctly guessed the solution, and that’s the hallmark of a great mystery game, shitty story or not.

The zooming in feature was helpful because, a lot of the time, I couldn’t tell the faces apart from each-other. A lot of characters look similar. And the accents really didn’t help me at all. I could NEVER tell those apart, and I’m a stickler for accents in real life. I can’t tell voices apart either, but at least that ruins nothing here, unlike Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

Obra Dinn isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. It feels more like Columbo, where you’re looking for the teeny tiny details that would never actually hold up in court. Ultimately, you’re just picking faces out of a crowd. The cause of death is the easy part. You’ll see the weapon embedded in their corpse, or dialog will say “yep, that guy sure was sick before he died” or something equally on the nose. In fact, there’s a strong chance you’ll have in the neighborhood of 80% of the checklist filled with the causes of death for each face before you have a name to go with any of them, but the game lets you do that. You have to base the rest on how they dress (there’s a glossary included in the journal that explains different ranks and jobs and where those people would be on a ship) or accents or location. Not every character has a 100% “this is the clue to their identity” moment, and instead you score them by virtue of eliminating all (or most) other options. There’s four members of Asian royalty (who helpfully have their very own picture separate from all other characters), four people from China, and X amount of officers that you can suss out once you have the cause of death listed just by rearranging them. Once the game starts thinning out characters, that becomes even easier. You’ll almost certainly get a few just by plugging a placeholder name into a character. EVEN THEN, you feel like you’ve done a good job when you get it right. Obra Dinn might be one of the most immersive games ever because of that sense of accomplishment.

The “scenes” are like walking around a big diorama, and when you think you’ve gotten every possible clue out of one, chances are you’re going to be forced to return because actually there were characters present you didn’t even realize were there.

Sure, the gameplay isn’t perfect. I hate the whole “see a scene for a minute, then it fades out, then you’re back in it” part. You want that shit to end as fast as you can so you can start inspecting in a productive way. I also wish that you could just click something in the book to let you relieve the scenes instead of having to go back to the original spot in the ship. That especially becomes annoying in the end game, when there’s corpses all over the ship, many of which look kind of samey, and keeping track of which one opens what chapter in the narrative becomes overwhelming. Then, sometimes you have to click on one corpse to enter a scene THEN click on even more corpses over and over until you get to the scene you want. The end game is going to require you to go back and look for the clues you missed. There’s just no way you’re going to be perfect the first time around, but it’s not at all convenient to do so. And don’t say it was for immersion in a game where you use a magical pocket watch to see a freeze-frame of the exact moment of someone’s death. Just let us click something in the book to see the scene again. The way it’s set up now is really just creates busy work. I haven’t seen such obvious padding since that time I wore my Mom’s bra when I was 10 years old.

Competitive marathon running claims another victim.

Finally, I hate that there’s two endings. My Dad left the ship too early because we couldn’t figure out what we were missing and because the journal has a chapter that says you can’t see it until you leave the ship. So, he left the ship, and the game ended and we ended up with the bad ending because we hadn’t solved everything. At this point, I absolutely blew a fucking gasket. Not at him, but that it was even possible to do this. We didn’t know the game would say “okay NOW you’ve solved everything you can do on the ship, so now you can leave the ship and see the final parts you missed.” I mean, it doesn’t say it like that, but that’s the jist of it. If we had to start over at this point, this would be the angriest review I’d ever done in my life, but after seeing the bad ending and credit roll, we got to restart where we were without any loss progress. Thank god. But the game should NEVER have allowed this. It’s unnecessary.

When a new scene reveals itself, you have to watch this trail of smoke or light or whatever fuck around on the ship, sometimes circling back around before settling and turning into a dead body that you can then click on. It’s not bad, I guess, but sometimes I wish it used a compass instead. I can’t tell anything apart of a ship. I don’t even know what side of a ship is the starboard side. Just because I cuss like a sailor doesn’t mean I know shit about fuck in regards to boats.

Presumably this was done so when people say “there’s no replay value” smug asshats can say “well, actually..” NO! There’s no replay value, AND THAT’S FINE! $19.99 is a perfect price.. hell maybe undervalued.. for a one-and-done experience. You can even say that the captain killed everyone and net an achievement for it if you’re especially lazy. No, Obra Dinn’s story didn’t “do it” for me. I don’t think this tapped all the possible sea-going calamities, or high intrigue for that matter. The mutiny that climaxes the story but in reality starts the game off is rendered kind of moot in the grand scheme of things. There was no pirate attacks. No drunken fool hitting the whiskey too hard and falling overboard. Nobody croaking from scurvy. Nobody catching a fatal case of the clap from a gnarly wench. No jealous husband killing the wench because that was HIS clap, dangnabit! I know the message is about the perils of desire and greed, but Jesus, really? Mermaids? Spider crab monsters? Eh, fuck it. Obra Dinn is still an absolute must play experience, because gameplay is king. Long live the king.

Return of the Obra Dinn is Chick-Approved
Leaderboard Ranking: #51 of 302
Top 92.9 Percentile of All 636 IGC Reviews
Top 83.12 Percentile of All 302 IGC-Approved Indie Games
*Rankings based on time of publication. Check the Leaderboard for updated standings.

Return of the Obra Dinn was developed by Lucas Pope
Point of Sale: Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation

$19.99 was torn apart by a terrible beast in the making of this review.

Lucas Pope is now officially an Indie Gamer Chick Certified Developer Who Does Not Suck!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with Did you people play no other games in 2018? Game of the year? Really?, Return of the Obra Dinn, Return of the Obra Dinn PSN, Return of the Obra Dinn Review, Return of the Obra Dinn Steam, Return of the Obra Dinn Switch, Return of the Obra Dinn Xbox

Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium: The Definitive Review (Complete 34 Game Review + Ranking)

August 21, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 11 Comments

This is the complete Indie Gamer Chick review of Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium! 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!

Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium is identical to the first stadium in terms of engine and layout. I had to remap the controls quite a lot, and I didn’t appreciate how much I needed that until I played the Nintendo 64 collection on Switch Online, which has no such options. For that matter, the simple yet effective manuals that include visual aides that identify power-ups or provide complete move sets for fighters is much appreciated. Capcom has a history of lazy packages, like Capcom Arcade Cabinet for example. This wasn’t some half-assed effort.

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

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

There’s 32 games in Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium, but really, there’s 34. Three Wonders contains three completely different games, and they were so different from each-other that I chose to review them as their own entities. Capcom Sports Club also has three different games, but they all had the same aim (being fast-paced arcade sports games) and play value, so I chose to count it as one game. Also, I didn’t factor in SonSon towards my ultimate verdict, since it’s free-to-download whether you buy the complete set or not. Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium costs $39.99 for the whole set, while the individual games cost $3.99. Therefore, the set needed to score ten YES! verdicts to win the Indie Gamer Chick seal of approval.

YES!: 20 + SonSon
NO!: 13

Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium doubled what it needed. Thus, it’s Chick-Approved! This is one of the best arcade compilations available on modern consoles. It’s also an excellent package with tons of options for button mapping, presentation, screen orientation, and picture filters. The only feature missing is the one I fell in love with from SNK 40th Anniversary where a full video play-through is included that allows you to pause the video and take over the gameplay. I LOVE that feature and wish more classic sets included it.

There’s tons of options for presentation, including being able to play vertical screened if games originally used it.

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!

Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire
Street Fighter Alpha 2
Super Puzzle Fighter II: Turbo
Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix
Magic Sword
Midnight Wanderers (Three Wonders)
Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge
Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors
Eco Fighters
Chariot (Three Wonders)
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Saturday Night Slam Masters
Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition
Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors’ Dreams
Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters
Rally 2011: LED STORM
Don’t Pull (Three Wonders)
Hyper Dyne Side Arms
1943 Kai
SonSon*
Capcom Sports Club
**TERMINATOR LINE**
Black Tiger
Knights of the Round
Gun.Smoke
Mega Man: The Power Battle
The King of Dragons
Pnickies
Tiger Road
Last Duel
Savage Bees (aka Exed Exes)
The Speed Rumbler
Avenger
Block Block
Street Fighter

GAME REVIEWS

1943 Kai: Midway Kaisen (1987)
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Way back in January of 2019, I named 1943 Kai “Best in Set” for Capcom Arcade Cabinet on Xbox 360/PlayStation 3. Now that I’ve played through it a second time, wow, it really speaks to how weak Arcade Cabinet was done that this could walk away with any trophy. Being the best game in Capcom Arcade Cabinet is like being the most edible item on the menu at an Arby’s. Which is not to say 1943 Kai is bad or anything. It’s a perfectly fine bland shmup, just like 1943 was. The differences are this has six fewer stages and one of the weapons is slightly better. Fewer stages is actually a good thing, as it feels like this cuts a lot of 1943’s gristle out. There’s smarter enemy formations too, so even though this is technically harder, it kind of feels like a more fair type of harder. I prefer the later 194X games, but they were really starting to get everything down pat with Kai.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #19 of 34

Avengers (1987)
aka Avenger, aka Hissatsu Buaiken (Deadly Hooligan Fist)
Designed by Takashi Nishiyama
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Takashi Nishiyama had two pretty sizable hits at Irem before he joined Capcom. One was Kung Fu Master, aka just plain Kung Fu, a pretty influential game. Even I like Kung Fu, and I hate basically everything according to many retro fans. I bring up Kung Fu Master (aka Spartan X) because Avengers is clearly trying to be exactly that, only from a different camera angle. In this case, Avengers is a top-down game. Otherwise, the same concept: punch and kick your way through a hoard of identical baddies, most of whom just want to hug it out with you, but meanly so. Actually the huggers do headbutt you in the hug, but still, it’s a hugging game, with levels culminating in a boss baddie with a gimmick, usually based around a weapon. And it’s absolutely abysmal. I’m genuinely not trying to be hyperbolic when I say Avengers is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. The actual combat features incredibly piss-poor collision detection. I lost count of how many times I punched right through enemies to no effect. It even happens to the stationary garbage cans you collect items from. Besides that, what punches and kicks you hit don’t feel OOMPHful at all. It does try to one-up Kung Fu by having a teeny bit more variety in enemies, but even this blows up in Avenger’s face. Even on the lowest difficulty setting, enemies who throw projectiles have too much of an advantage over you. The power-ups are weak and wear off too fast. Punching is basically worthless, and you can also spam a spinning kick for no cost that I found more effective than normal attacks. You’ve got to feel bad for Nishiyama, who tried to recreate the magic of Kung Fu Master twice in a row (Trojan was the other) and fail, but when I say “even Trojan didn’t suck this badly” that speaks volumes.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #32 of 34

Black Tiger (1987)
Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

After suffering a mysterious series of delays, Black Tiger released in 1987 and feels like it’s playing catch-up with Konami’s Castlevania and Taito’s Rastan. An action platformer with a bit of RPG grinding and money collecting thrown in, you have to hop around levels and fight baddies with some of the strangest attacks in history. You have both a whip and a series of daggers, and when I say “both” I mean you throw a barrage of daggers every time you use your whip. It’s so weird. It’s like they wanted to give you the option for one or the other, but they inputted it wrong and wired the game to do both at the same time. The daggers aren’t a finite resource, either. You have unlimited amounts, so much so that they’re often a lot more effective than the whip, since three come out at once and they’re ranged. BUT, even with this, the combat lacks satisfactory OOMPH, and the level design is based around dickish enemy placements and GOTCHA! type booby traps. Capcom seems to have been obsessed with treasure chests that would actually screw the player over, just like in Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. There’s too many whammies in the chests, and even rewinding doesn’t take away the frustration of dealing with them. Grinding up enough money to buy the good items is a slow process. Finally, the jumping is stiff and rigid and leads to many instakill situations. There’s a good game buried in this mess somewhere, but Black Tiger just acts like a total prick too often to be fun.
Verdict: NO!
Second Stadium Ranking: #22 of 34. **TOP OF THE BOTTOM**

Block Block (1991)
Designed by Shinji Sakashita, H.K., and M. Miyao

Simply put, Block Block is one of the worst brick breakers ever made. It’s especially unfit for consoles that lack dial controllers, but that’s just the start of its problems. In my two play sessions with it during Capcom Arcade Stadium 2, I had at least two instances of the ball clipping right through the paddle. In a game where everything depends on the paddle.. you know.. working, that alone is enough to earn it a spot near the bottom of the NO! pile. And I say “at least two times” because I had other instances where the ball was moving so fast that I couldn’t be sure if I barely missed a volley or if the game just stopped working again. It seems to be tied to having bricks underneath the paddle. Blocks underneath the paddle would be a nice twist, but the level design is miserable. I had tons of instances where a ball would travel around unbreakable corridors and then just jam up in the geometry. A funny quirk about Block Block is, if you go too long without breaking any bricks, the game opens an automatic exit to the next level. Of course, the ball has to actually hit the exit. It goes away if the ball bounces too much. There’s neat ideas here, like the paddle breaking into a smaller paddle after so many volleys, but the physics are amateurish and, frankly, brick breakers had existed for fifteen years by time Block Block came out. This SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN THIS BAD, and it’s awful. The final 8-bit Capcom arcade game is also one of their very worst coin-ops. Just a complete disaster in every way possible, and the only thing keeping it from finishing dead-last is the historic ineptness of Street Fighter 1.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #33 of 34

Capcom Sports Club (1997)
Designed by Yoshifumi Fukuda

Unlike Three Wonders, Capcom Sports Club’s three games don’t deserve their own reviews. They can be summed up by saying “fast-paced arcade sports games of middling entertainment value.” Two of the three are fine. The lone stinker is the basketball game. It’s like a 3-on-3 version of NBA Jam without the “on fire” stuff. Or real players, for that matter. Curiously, the game has no shot clock. Shot clocks exist for a reason, and a basketball video game based around a lightning-fast pace not having one is such an unforgivable omission that I can’t overlook it. Stick to the soccer and tennis games. Soccer features a short field and over-the-top animations, and it can be fun in small doses. I’ll note that the game tends to smarten-up the AI every time you win. If a game ends in a draw, it counts as a game over and you have to re-up on your virtual quarters, at which point the AI becomes more reasonable. I’m on to you, Capcom. Meanwhile, tennis game is just a cartoony game of tennis taken up-tempo. Literally nothing about it stands out. Well, actually sometimes it feels like you can’t cover the court fast enough, but that’s kind of the point of Tennis, right? Either way, there’s hundreds of soccer and tennis options out there, and neither of these will rise to the level of a fan favorite among them, but they’re fine.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #21 of 34 **BOTTOM OF THE TOP**

Chariot (1991)
Game #2 of 3 from Three Wonders
Designed by Shoei Okano

The second of Three Wonders’ offerings, this cute-em-up feels like it was probably meant to be the full-blown game that got a solo release, with Midnight Wanderers and especially Don’t Pull being games that barely rose above proof-of-concept and were shoehorned onto this board as an attempt to test a new business model that they straight-up stole from SNK. At least that’s our new working theory. Chariot feels like the most complete of the trio, though it’s still an all-to-brief experience. This time around, it’s a surreal shmup with a zodiac theme. Despite sharing multiple assets and story elements with Midnight Wanderers, Chariot isn’t remotely generic. Cuphead fans will recognize more than one boss encounter Chariot directly inspired, and shmup fans will appreciate the twists in the formula. You have a tail that causes damage if you can dangle it over enemies and bosses, and it also doubles as the indicator of when your charge shot is ready. It a later level, Chariot even does a camera trick that fools players into thinking they’re going to go one way before quickly moving up or down to another area of a map. I wish there was more variety in weapons and I wish the game was longer, but Chariot is among Capcom’s strongest shmups.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #10 of 34.

Darkstalkers Series (1994 – 1997)

Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (1994)
Designed by Junichi Ohno
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1995)
Designed by Junichi Ohno
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997)
Designed by Shinichiro Obata, Hidetoshi Ishizawa, Malachie, Nohah, and Katsuyuki Kanetaka
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection
Vampire Savior 2 and Night Warriors 2 are paired with this review but not included in Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium. Those games are only in Capcom Fighting Collection.

Darkstalkers (1994) Verdict: YES!

Darkstalkers is basically Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo crossed with a Halloween costume store. The story goes that Capcom asked Universal Studios for the license to their famous monsters. Universal, savvy businessmen as always, said no. I mean, why would they want to partner with the company who made the hottest fighting game in the world to make a fighting game with their stagnant lineup of old horror movie IPs? To really hammer home what a colossal failure their rejection of the proposal was, according to the legend, Capcom’s artists then turned out the basic concepts for the ten fighters in Darkstalkers in about an hour. It’s almost unbelievable, especially given how overflowing with personality and charm the roster is. There’s no stinkers in the bunch. I played with the full roster of characters, and they each had their own flare and uniqueness and at least one move or animation quirk that put a smile on my face. That’s rare for a fighter, and it continued for the entire run of sequels. Come on, how can you not love a Little Red Riding Hood lookalike who grabs an opponent from behind and slits their throat with a kitchen knife? It’s so dark! Oh wait.. I get the name now.

Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1995) Verdict: YES!

If you squint, you might not even realize you’re playing a separate franchise from Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. It’s really close, with the major additions being things like being the first Capcom fighting game with airblocks and the ability to move while ducking. There’s also a chain combo system for those who want a more advance fighter and not a button masher, though you can honestly have fun both ways. I played rounds of Vampire Savior with both fighting game vets and a person playing their very first one-on-one fighter and everyone had fun. This is a series that got better as it went along, and by time I reached Vampire Savior, I actually liked Darkstalker as a series more than I liked Street Fighter 2. A more colorful roster, better themes, surreal backdrops, and some of the most pitch-perfect controls I’ve ever experienced in a 2D fighter. Really, this whole franchise deserves to be regarded higher than it is.

Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997) Verdict: YES!

Where it gets weird is Vampire Savior is broken into three different games that switch only a couple fighters out for a couple returning combatants. This was done as an appeasement to series fans due to the limited space in the ROM, though the shady-as-all-hell numbering of these revamps as sequels felt skeezy. People who don’t know the score will see these listed as totally separate games in compilations like Capcom Fighting Collection and be hoodwinked into thinking they’re getting three separate games and not three versions of one game, only one of which is really necessary. Given that it’s 2022 now, you’d think Capcom could use the space age technology of the modern era to just ROM-hack in the missing fighters. Presumably this wasn’t done to appease “purists” but those same purists apparently detested both Night Warriors 2 and Vampire Savior 2 anyway. It’s such a no-brainer and it comes with the bonus of not being intellectually dishonest about how many separate games are included in a compilation. I hate the whole situation because it left a bad taste in my mouth about an otherwise outstanding fighting franchise.
2nd Stadium Rankings
Darkstalkers: #8 of 34
Night Warriors: #7 of 34
Vampire Savior: #1 of 34 **BEST GAME IN CAPCOM ARCADE 2ND STADIUM**

Don’t Pull (1991)
Game #3 of 3 from Three Wonders
Designed by Toshihiko Uda

The shortest and weakest of the Three Wonders trio, Don’t Pull is a 90s remake of Pirate Ship Higemaru, only with the difficulty upped to an extreme. Oh, and will everyone PLEASE stop comparing every single cutesy game that involves shoving boxes to Lolo? Even the Wikipedia page for Three Wonders mentions Lolo as the most similar game. It’s listed first, before Pengo or Pirate Ship Higemaru. This is NOTHING like a Lolo game. Not even a little bit, because Don’t Pull isn’t even a puzzle game. It’s 100% an action game where you run around and shove boxes into enemies. When you shove a box, it slides until it hits another box or leaves the playfield, killing any enemies it makes contact with along the way. If there’s two boxes next to each other and you shove one into the other, the one you shove breaks immediately. The only way this resembles a puzzler is having to strategically break some of the boxes to create a safe space for you that can double as a clear shot at the baddies. If anything, you’ll spend most of your time running away and trying to scratch out enough distance between you and enemies to get a clean shot off. This isn’t made easier by the controls being pretty stiff, and enemies who are tougher to shake than you’d think. Still, this not-puzzler that represents the puzzle genre for Three Wonders can be quite exciting, especially if you manage to shake three or four tails and set up the perfect trap to take them all out with a single box. At only sixteen levels that you can knock-out in barely twenty minutes, Don’t Pull feels like it’s a game that got cancelled halfway through, but it’s fun while it lasts.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #17 of 34

Eco Fighters (1994)
Designed by Keisuke Mori

Eco Fighters caused physical pain in me, and in more than one way. It’s not epilepsy compatible, and even with my seizures under control, I got legitimately nauseated playing it due to unexpected strobe effects after beating the second boss. That type of stuff I could push past or take precautions against, but the cramping of my hands? That part was probably unavoidable. Eco Fighters is a very unconventional shmup where you have a turret that rotates 360° around the ship but NOT like a twin stick shooter (or Capcom’s own Forgotten Worlds). I struggled to find a comfortable button mapping for it, and early on, I kind of hated Eco Fighters. I spent the first twenty minutes wishing it had just been a normal shooter. But, it ultimately grew on me. If you’re using a normal game controller, I recommend slowing the turret rotation speed down in the game’s options for maximum accuracy. Once you get used to the controls, Eco Fighters is a shmup overflowing with personality, excellent set-pieces, wonderful boss battles, and some of the most satisfying guns in the entire genre. I especially liked the arc-welder gun, which allows you to cut through enemies. It’s so cathartic to camp on top of a boss and just lobotomize it with a short laser. I’m not entirely convinced Eco Fighters had a consistent vision, as the later stages dip their toes in lazy bullet hell design. But, even with all these problems, this is probably Capcom’s most underrated 90s coin-op. I only wish it translated better to a standard controller, since dial controllers aren’t an option.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #9 of 34

Gun.Smoke (1985)
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Maybe it’s because I grew-up with a father who loved John Ford and John Wayne movies, but I love cowboy games. I wish there were more of them. Sadly, Gun.Smoke is too hard for its own good. This is a standard auto-scrolling shmup, only with a western theme instead of spaceships. I do like the novel control scheme: there’s three shooting buttons: left, straight, and right. You can slap any of these at the same time to shoot in both those directions. It makes for one of the most unique and intriguing shooters I’ve played. But, even on the lowest setting, the enemy placement is cheap as all hell. This includes enemies that quickly get behind you and thus out of your range, which becomes maddening. Worse yet is how the lives system works: if you die, you go backwards with your items downgraded by one tick, which is especially frustrating if you’re fighting a boss, since you have to cause all the damage in one life. I’d rather have a health meter or just instantly respawn. Weirdly, after I beat the main game with cheating, I became one of only eleven people (as of this writing) to clear Stadium 2’s special challenge for it: scoring 50,000 points on the highest difficulty setting. What’s truly insane is I did it on my very first try. Awesome moment for me, but Gun.Smoke’s difficulty makes the Fun.Broke.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #24 of 34

Hyper Dyne Side Arms (1986)
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto & Noritaka Funamizu
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Remember Capcom Arcade Cabinet? Of the 14 games in that set, I only gave two a YES! One was 1943 Kai. This was the other. Hyper Dyne Side Arms was probably the first good Capcom arcade game, and maybe their first really good game, period, depending on how you feel about their early NES output. Tellingly, it’s also one of their first coin-ops that isn’t stingy with the power-ups. In fact, Side Arms goes the opposite direction: the game is utterly spammed with upgrades, so much so that it’s entirely possible for you to become an unstoppable space tank. I’ve never cared for shmups that do the “shoot both in front of you and behind you” thing all that much, and I was worried that this would be little more than an upgraded version of Section Z. But, the way Side Arms does it works, especially with the wide variety of guns and the fact that you even have reasons to switch between them instead of sticking to just one the entire run. Even the Macross-like robot transformations are fun. There’s a little too much repetition, and the bosses can be obliterated if you choose the right weapons, but otherwise, this is a totally fun and solid shmup, even if it feels like it only exists to be Capcom’s slightly-soulless answer to Gradius.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #18 of 34

Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition (2003)
Directed by Ryota Suzuki
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Hyper Street Fighter II was made to be the ultimate “settle the score” game for the absolute biggest fans and best players of Street Fighter II. It mixes the original five versions of Street Fighter II/Super Street Fighter II together, with players having to choose which version of the game they want from a menu, then selecting their character. So, you can have the Street Fighter II Championship Edition version of Ryu take on the Super Street Fighter II Turbo version of him, and each will play exactly as they did in those games. Like, right down to the amount of frames of animation. That’s apparently a very big deal for professional players, who measure that stuff like scientists. It’s a neat idea for a game. Whether you view this as the ultimate gift to fans or a soulless cash grab is in the eye of the beholder. I’m not so into Street Fighter II that I remotely care about the nuances of what moves can counter what moves based on what frames of animation you’re in, but I guess I’m happy this exists for fans that basically kept arcade afloat in the 90s.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #13 of 34

The King of Dragons (1991)
Directed by Tomoshi Sadamoto
Also included in Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle

The first in a series of four sword-and-sorcery brawlers from Capcom that would eventually carry the Dungeons & Dragons™ label, King of Dragons feels like a proof of concept for better things to come. There’s five fighters to choose from, but the ability to select them between rounds is nulified by the fact that they don’t level-up on par with the fighter you’re using. The characters you don’t select do gain XP, but not at the same rate. So, when my Cleric was a level 11, the other four fighters were levels 5 or 6. Why would I want to swap to them? By this point, the enemies, and especially the bosses, were spongy enough without selecting a character half-as-strong. The King of Dragons is only a three player game too, so some characters will just be stuck trailing the others even if you max-out the co-op potential. That dumb decision was probably the difference between a YES and a NO, because the ultra-repetitive combat could have used the ability to seamlessly swap between characters to take the edge off the monotony. You only get one standard move per character, plus a jump button and a crash attack that eats through your health. Top this off with mostly dull set pieces and underwhelming boss fights and you have the recipe for pure, unadulterated mediocrity. The King of Dragons isn’t a complete wash. There’s a couple decent levels that seem to have been inspired by the works of Ray Harryhausen, but the feathery combat that lacks OOMPH seals the deal. King of Dragons is a gigantic bore.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #26 of 34

Knights of the Round (1991)
Designed by Akira Nishitani
Also Included in Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle

I generally like Arthurian legend retellings, as long as they don’t star Richard Gere as Lancelot. But, Knights of the Round is a bit of a bore. I’ve previously given it a YES for #IGCvSNES, though it’s very close to the bottom of the YES pile and I could honestly go either way at any given time. The issue with Knights of the Round is the same as many Capcom brawlers: being married to two-button combat limits your options greatly. They did try to change it up by having a tilt-the-joystick mechanic where you can do an overhead slash if you attack and then immediately press forward. It makes for fighting normal baddies mostly fun. Then you get to the bosses, who are spongy, don’t play fair, and often just linger at the edge of the screen. Many require you to ping single hits off them with a bob-and-weave attack style, especially since they can cut your health all the way down with just a couple blows landed. They reskin the bosses quite a bit too, with some reappearing as normal baddies over the course of the forty-five minutes it takes to finish this with one player (it feels longer). There’s a horse, but I found actually trying to keep yourself mounted on it is more trouble than it’s worth, especially since I couldn’t line-up with the enemies most of the time while riding it. Like I said, I could see myself going YES or NO at any given time, and this time around, I was just bored the entire time. That tells me that Knights of the Round doesn’t hold up to replays very well. I can only review based on my experience this play through, so I have to go NO! Them’s the rules.
Verdict: NO!
**FLIP!** Previously received a YES! in Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle
2nd Stadium Ranking: #23 of #34

Last Duel (1988)
Designed by Takashi Nishiyama

I wasn’t expecting to run into controversy with Last Duel, a game I’d never heard of before I started this run. There’s apparently multiple different ROM sets, and the one included in Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium isn’t 100% the definitive version. Either way, I can only count the version of Last Duel that was officially re-released. It’s an interesting premise: a shmup where levels alternate between a futuristic car that you have to manually bring up to speed, and a slow-ass generic space shooter. I wish it had just stuck to the car sections, which manage to feel novel and fresh. Once you charge-up your weapons, you should be able to take out most of the baddies while moving at full speed and leaping over pits. In the space sections, Last Duel becomes a poor man’s Life Force (that’s Salamander anywhere but America). Neither style are particularly bad, but the car sections are too cramped and focused on near-misses (like a driving game) while the space sections are just soulless. The Last Duel got lost to obscurity for a reason.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #29 of 34

Magic Sword (1990)
Designed by Yoshimi Ohnishi, Tomoshi Sadamoto, and Yoshiki Okamoto

Magic Sword is like the black-out drunk version of an ambitious arcade RPG, and I swear to god I mean that in the nicest way. It’s so stupid that it’s endearing for it. Absolutely no finesse is required as you jump around and button mash your way through fifty floors of non-stop side-scrolling sword-and-sorcery action. There’s only one combat button (two if you count the seldom-used-outside-bosses magic attack) and almost all enemies can be killed by waving your sword at them without having to use any strategy. Maybe a couple have weak points that require all the complexity of jumping up to hit them instead of just spamming attacks on the ground. Unlike their early efforts, Capcom was very generous giving out power-ups and the various allies that you can free from jail cells who stand behind you and add boosts to your attack. They’re everywhere with no rhyme or reason in how they were spaced out. You often can free several different ones in a row and have your pick of the litter. But, it’s still a Capcom game, which means booby-trapped treasure chests and cell doors galore. Capcom is like that one asshole friend who keeps giving people the peanut can with spring-loaded snakes every Christmas and laughs until he’s purple in the face every time. That becomes problematic in the final third of the game, when the whammies seem to outnumber the actual items. Even worse is that for a game that’s all-combat, all the time, I kind of wish it felt more impactful. The OOMPH isn’t completely non-existent, but this hardly feels as satisfactorily violent as Capcom games were starting to get during this time period, resulting in attacks being a bit weightless. Still, dumb as Magic Sword is, I’ll be damned if it isn’t fun from start to finish and one of their most underrated arcaders ever. It just never gets slow or boring, which puts it in the upper-echelon of its breed.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #5 of 34

Mega Man: The Power Battle (1995)
Designed by Koji Ohkohara

What a weird idea for an arcade game. Granted, the idea of a Mega Man boss rush is an absolute no-brainer, but it’s the way they did it. Structured somewhere between traditional Mega Man mechanics and a fighting game, Mega Man: The Power Battle features some all-star Robot Masters from the first seven games of the franchise (and some bizarro choices. Who the hell thought fans would be like “OH MY GOD IT’S DUST MAN! TEE HEE!”) and frankly the best versions of the Yellow Devil ever. The issue is the “steal enemy weakness to use on next robot” mechanic feels flimsy and inconsistent, and some enemies (such as Turbo Man) take forever to show vulnerability. This was also one of the rare 90s Capcom arcade games that felt unresponsive, especially pressing the button that switches you to the acquired weapons. I had to press more than once quite often to get it to switch. I actually passed the controller off to my sister to verify I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t. Even despite all the problems, I was right on the edge of still enjoying it. But, the Mega Man 4 – 6 and Mega Man 7 levels were so brutally spongy that they crossed the line into boring. Power Battle feels like a prototype that should never have released, especially compared to the sequel that followed this. Hey, getting it wrong the first time seems like a tradition with Mega Man.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #25 of 34

Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (1996)
Designed by Koji Ohkohara

Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters is a massive improvement over the previous game, a status that bumps it up only to “just alright.” The Robot Master roster is vastly improved and the conventional Mega Man “use weapon acquired from boss X on boss Y” is implemented much better here. Well, sort of. This time, when you find the correct weapon to use, the enemy comically recoils with a little too much pomp, especially the first time you do it each battle. At least you know you got it, I suppose. Plus, it led to one of the most pathetic sequences I’ve ever had in my gaming life where it looked like I was just slapping Cutman down over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Anyway, this is exactly the Mega Man boss rush game I’ve always talked about wanting. It turns out, it already existed. So, what’s the problem? Well, it turns out it’s just not a very exciting format. For Power Fighters, my enjoyment level was a steady “okay” with no highs or lows (besides the still somewhat sketchy weapon switching). It’s a big, splashy Mega Man boss rush, and the best thing I can say about it is that it made me appreciate the actual levels in the original Mega Man games more. The fights with Robot Masters in Mega Man games can be really fun and exciting, but they only really work as the topping of an already delicious sundae. As their own thing, it’s like how every kid eats tries eating just sprinkles at least once. After a few bites you realize they only work along with the ice cream and hot fudge. So, thanks Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters for answering a question I always had the franchise. Oh and for not being crappy, of course.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #15 of 34

Midnight Wanderers (1991)
Game #1 of 3 from Three Wonders
Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto

Three Wonders has three different games that, by complete coincidence, appear in the order of their quality. Midnight Wanderers is by far the strongest of the three. It’s sort of like SNK’s Metal Slug games, only swap the military theme for a fantasy one that leans a little harder on platforming tropes. You run and shoot your way through five levels of various themes, taking out Jabba the Hut lookalikes, jack in the boxes, and endless malicious elves. At first, it feels pretty generic, like one of those endless SNES/Genesis mascot platformers by a third-string publisher who so desperately wants to launch a tent-pole franchise. Think Bubsy or Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel. I braced myself for the soullessness to sweep over me. But, Midnight Wanderer’s exaggerated enemy animations, rock-solid controls, and outstanding boss fights won me over. I wish the game had done more with the hanging-mechanic, where close-call jumps that you short are saved by grabbing onto a ledge by your fingers. Hell, I wish the game had relied more heavily on timed-jump sections, since every instance of those featured here was pitch-perfect and make this a surprisingly intense experience. I get why this ended up in a three-for-one arcade board. Midnight Wanderers never feels like an arcade game, and it’s too short to be an early-era 16-bit home game. Thank god for the home release of Three Wonders, where it can finally find its niche. The forgettable player character lacks soul, but Midnight Wanderers is legit.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #6 of 34
Winner: Biggest Surprise of the Set

Pnickies (1994)
Designed by Masanobu Tsukamoto

In the long annals of well-based drop puzzlers, Pnickies is among the dullest. A slower, plodding answer to the Puyo Puyo franchise, here you link pairs of colored blobs, some of which contain a star in them. Once they settle, the blobs merge with all matching colors they’re touching. If the settled blob has two stars in it, no matter how far apart the stars are, the blob is broken and you score points. It’s a boring formula that might have worked with fewer colors. Maybe. Of course, after a little while it begins adding more colors and becomes next to impossible, especially when the speed quickly escelates to ludicrous speed. Plus, there’s no reason to really get too fancy with chains and combos. It doesn’t even really reward you for cascading chains, instead focusing on shattering larger blobs with more than two stars in them. I figured this might be more exciting as a multiplayer game, but this is one of those puzzlers where the first person to land enough garbage blocks is going to have a massive advantage. Capcom would eventually do better with Puzzle Fighter, but their first attempt at this type of puzzler is among their most boring coin-ops.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #27 of 34

Rally 2011 LED Storm (1988)
Designed by Tomoshi Sadamoto

Buzz has it this unreleased prototype was sent back to the shop for retooling because it went unloved during route testing (the practice of placing near-finished prototypes at a prominent location to gauge earnings potential). Assuming it’s true, the practice failed Rally 2011: LED Storm. Having played both the actual game that came out (known as Mad Gear in Japan) and this original build, they got it right the first time. A sort of F-Zero before that was a thing, racing barely factors in. This is more of a bumper cars experience that hugely emphasizes jumping up and crushing opposing cars. The combat is very satisfying, as there’s something viscerally pleasurable about jumping on a car. You can also transform into a motorcycle, which goes slightly faster but corners worse. It’s not a perfect game by any means. Via rewinding, I was able to determine that sometimes the game deliberately places items out-of-bounds, perhaps to tempt you into driving off the track. That’s a crappy way to add difficulty. Also, there was only one moment in the entire game, a huge jump, that I felt the motorcycle was actually necessary. The transformation gimmick is underwhelming. Stick to the car and enjoy a basic but genuinely exciting car combat game. Fun fact: this and the released LED Storm served as the inspiration for the Autopia for Capcom’s Adventures in the Magic Kingdom NES game.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #16 of 34

Savage Bees (1985)
aka Exed Exes
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Sigh. You know, the Capcom Arcade Stadium format can make some of the most basic games exciting, but it’s not a miracle worker. I did enjoy taking-on the challenge scoring 80,000 points, but, I think it was the challenge I enjoyed more than the game itself. Exed Exes was left out of the original Stadium’s lineup for a reason. It’s an ultra-bland shmup where the nicest thing I can say about it is it’s competent, but it’s so generic that there’s nothing to get excited about. Like many early Capcom shmups, Exed Exes is frugal with power-ups, and even the bomb is weak sauce. Instead of clearing the screen of enemies, this time, it only removes only their projectiles. It’s so underwhelming. There’s one idea I like: a scoring zone right before you reach the bosses with items that turn the stationary skulls on the playfield into fruits you can eat. Then again, you can just shoot the skulls a few times as well for the same amount of points they give you as a tomato. Still, that’s a nifty idea that complements Stadium’s score challenge mode perfectly, and that’s the only positive thing about this otherwise mundane shooter.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #30 of 34

Saturday Night Slam Masters (1993)
Designed by Tetsuo Hara
Directed by Takashi Sado

Over the course of my retro gaming adventures, I didn’t find a single 80s or 90s wrestling game that I found to “good” without requiring several “for its time” asterisks. Then I played Saturday Night Slam Masters, and it was fun. There’s no real wrestlers, but Mike Haggar from Final Fight finally got to be in a good game, so there’s that. It’s kind of hard to do a grapple since it’s mapped to the attack button, and pulling off special moves can be a pain in the butt. Oh and there’s no emphasis on finishing moves, which is sort of a hallmark of pro wrestling. Of course, I couldn’t even tell what wrestling moves were being done half the time because they zip by so fast, so having finishers wouldn’t have made all that big a difference. But, the action is fun and violent and feels exactly like what Street Fighter 2 would be if it had fewer buttons and you had to win by pinfall, submission, or even count-out. I didn’t think I’d enjoy any wrestling game that came out before WCW/nWo World Tour for the Nintendo 64, but Saturday Night Slam Masters proved me wrong.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #12 of 34

SonSon (1984)
Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Free to Play without purchase of Capcom Arcade Stadium 2
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

For Capcom Arcade Cabinet, I didn’t enjoy SonSon at all. I’ve never been a fan of the auto-moving hop-between-platforms style of shooters. But, I’ve had a change of heart with Stadium 2. While I still wouldn’t want to play all the way through this, the format and extra features of this collection actually make SonSon a genuine thrill to play when you go for the challenge modes. Specifically, score challenge, which requires you to put up a minimum score of 100,000 points to get your score listed online. It made me appreciate the simple but elegant scoring system that incentivizes you to kill every enemy in every wave to score bonus points. It’s so fundamental, but it works wonderfully. I genuinely only meant to put about thirty minutes into every release, but right from the first game, I lost almost two hours to trying to hit that damn score. When scoring actually matters, SonSon suddenly becomes an intense, twitchy shooter that heavily weighs risk and reward, especially when chasing down the items, and it’s a lot of fun. I wish movement and controls were a little tighter. I really wish there were power-ups that improved the gun, and I really hate how you don’t blink when you come back to life after dying (SO cheap) but I’ll be damned: I really enjoyed my time with SonSon. Go figure.
Verdict: YES!
**FLIP!** Previously received a NO! in Capcom Arcade Cabinet
2nd Stadium Ranking: #20 of 34

The Speed Rumbler (1986)
Designed by Tokuro Fujiwara & Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Speed Rumbler is sort of like granddaddy of the original top-down Grand Theft Auto games, but not in a good way. This was my least favorite title when I ran through Capcom Arcade Cabinet, and I wouldn’t have been shocked if it finished dead last again. Even cheating, save states, and Capcom Arcade Stadium 2’s challenge formats can’t save this dumpster fire. Spongy enemies. Small enemies that are hard to line your bullets up with. Enemies a lot more mobile than you. All in a game that claims to be based around speed. The irony is, my best runs in Speed Rumbler involved me heel-toeing my way through levels, where I could start to ping enemies as they entered the screen. When I actually took the title to heart and tried to speed around the courses, I was basically just a bullet magnet. Even worse: I didn’t score any points, because enemies take too many shots to kill. The mechanic of being able to jump out of a car as it’s about to be destroyed sounds great, but I got killed soon after every time but once because you’re usually stuck in the middle of a screenful of enemies. They had a great idea with Speed Rumbler, but how they implemented that idea seemed like it was done specifically to remove everything fun from it. Advertise speed, then penalize you for going fast. Absolutely terrible. The scary thing is, there were three games worse than this in this set alone.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #31 of 34

Street Fighter (1987)
Designed by Hiroshi Matsumoto
Directed by Takashi Nishiyama
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Wow. I had actually never played the original Street Fighter, at least for more than a second. I think I fired it up on MAME on a lark once, and then turned it off when I attempted to throw the first punch. Actually forcing myself to play this for a little over an hour made me realize that the tales of how putrid it is really don’t do it justice. You have to experience Street Fighter 1 to appreciate just how awful it is. Press any button on the controller and the game is like “thanks for the suggestion! It will be taken under advisement!” You only get one fighter in single player mode, Ryu, which is fine, since actually pulling off his special moves is like pulling teeth. In fact, I couldn’t deliberately throw a single fireball or dragon punch. I didn’t pull that off until I just started rotating the control stick and start mashing buttons, at which point I was throwing a dragon punch every other move. The enemy AI becomes next to impossible, even on the easiest setting. Worst of all, in my opinion, is the total lack of OOMPH to the violence. The fights have no weight or inertia to them, as if you’re fighting with paper dolls. It’s nothing sort of astonishing that the people who went on to make this trash fire went to make SNK’s beloved Fatal Fury games, while this particular title itself directly led to the single most important video game of the first half of the 1990s. Street Fighter could very well be the worst fighting game ever made, and no review can fully convey just how ghastly it is. Finally experiencing it reminded me of the difference between hearing about a tonsillectomy and actually receiving one. It’s something you can’t really fathom until you live through it. Fans of this (yes, it has fans, but then again there’s fans of everything. There’s fans serrated dildos) will argue that it’s better in arcades, where it had pressure-sensitive buttons. Okay, fine, but ports of Street Fighter 1 can’t do that, so why even bother?
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #34 of 34 **WORST GAME IN CAPCOM ARCADE 2ND STADIUM**

Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors’ Dreams (1995)
Designed by Noritaka Funamizu, Haruo Murata, and Hideaki Itsuno
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

I had never played the original Street Fighter Alpha until this project. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew going into it the series is held in high esteem, but right before I began playing this game, I got warnings that the Alpha games get good after the first one. They weren’t just whistling dixie. It’s not that Street Fighter Alpha is bad or anything. It’s fine. It just feels like Capcom was spinning their wheels, completely directionless. The super combo system from Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is here, along with a super counter-attack that uses your special meter. It’s all fine, but Alpha is nothing special. While I really like the art direction, it also feels a lot less impactful than previous games, and the new fighters are kind of boring. I’ll say this about the new roster: it makes me appreciate the lightning in a bottle they achieved with Street Fighter 2’s lineup. Probably the best thing I can say about Street Fighter Alpha 1 is that it makes an excellent teaser for Street Fighter Alpha 2, a vastly superior game.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #14 of 34

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996)
Designed by Noritaka Funamizu, Hidetoshi Ishizawa, Hidetoshi Ishizawa, and Katsuyuki Kanetaka
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Street Fighter Alpha 2 feels like the complete game that Alpha 1 laid the foundation for. Smoother controls and significantly better OOMPH help make this one of the best games in the series. While it has that unshakable sensation of a retread, the strong roster of fighters, excellent character balance, and the new-to-the-franchise custom combos really make this a standout. The only weak links are some of the character designs are outright boring, but Alpha 2 had my favorite versions of fighters like M. Bison and Ryu, which matters more to me. Plus, Street Fighter Alpha 2 is one of the best entry points for the franchise. Let me put it this way: Alpha 2 is one of the last “pick-up-and-play” Street Fighter games. I got a tension headache trying to figure out what to make of Street Fighter Alpha 3’s multiple play-styles. Comparatively, Alpha 2 feels like the last game that isn’t made specifically for the hardcore fighting fan. All the Alpha games withstand the test of time, but Street Fighter Alpha 2 is the only of the trio that feels like it belongs to everyone.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #2 of 34

Street Fighter Alpha 3 (1998)
Directed by Naoto Ohta, Mamoru Ōhashi, Buruma, and Koji Okohara
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

After playing Street Fighter Alpha 2 and 3, I felt weird because I really liked Street Fighter Alpha 2 more. It turns out, fighting fanatics are split on the duo as well. Alpha 3 gives players three different play styles, which sounds good on paper. In reality, you have to choose which type of special move you want to be able to pull off. Custom combos? You can only do them if you choose V-ISM. But, if you choose V-ISM, you can’t do super combos. Pick X-ISM for stronger attacks, but you can’t do mid-air blocking, custom combos, or alpha counters. A-ISM is the “average” one but the custom combos aren’t there either. While I’m sure professional gamers love all the variety, what if you just want to pick up and play a fighter? Maybe learn a move or two for a couple characters? Street Fighter Alpha 3 is still pretty fun because the base Street Fighter formula is kind of perfect. But, Street Fighter Alpha 3 feels like a game that’s not made for me. It’s for the hardcore fans only. Games like that have a place, and if any fanbase is rabid enough to earn a game this nuanced, it’s Street Fighter fans. It just feels like something designed for tournament play by players of much higher skillsets than I could ever hope to have. The massive roster of twenty-five characters is actually a turn-off because the game is asking me to play three different ways (and that’s not even factoring in whether you’re using Turbo or Standard) to decide which characters to use. Did I enjoy it? Sure, because Street Fighter is awesome. But if I had to describe Alpha 3 in one word, that word would be “overwhelming.”
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #11 of 34

Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix (1997)
Designed by Katsuhiro Eguchi, Naoto Ohta, and Mamoru Ōhashi
Also Included in Capcom Fighting Collection

With its simplified three-button layout and ultra-cute makeover of classic Capcom fighting game characters, you might mistake Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix as being a kiddie release. It’s not. Instead, it kind of feels like Capcom clapping back at hardcore fighting fans and saying “oh for God’s sake, just have fun!” If I’m right about that, they certainly nailed it. Gem Fighter is a wacky, button-mashing, over-the-top fighter based on building strength by collecting gems and hitting big moves. There’s only twelve fighters (plus two hidden ones) and some of the moves are absolutely bonkers. Like Zangief putting on a lucha libre mask and swinging a folding chair, or Chun Li winning by kissing someone with such passion that they faint. It was a different time. Anyway, landing big moves is so satisfying (though getting the timing down is maddening) and honestly I liked this a lot more than I’ve liked Street Fighter in recent times. By the way, while this feels like a fighter made for everyone (as opposed to where Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Street Fighter 3 were taking the genre, which felt like it was only for hardcore fighting fans), there’s still a sophisticated combo and counter system for those who want to put the time into it. Weirdly, this game that I think is a “fighter made for everyone” also has some of the funniest visual gags I’ve seen in any game, including many pitch-perfect subversions of the characters. If you’re not smiling while you play Gem Fighter, you have no soul.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #4 of 34

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996)
Designed by Naoto Ohta and Katsuhiro Eguchi
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection because.. um.. it says “fighter” I guess?

One of the few games in this feature that I actually grew up with, I had Super Puzzle Fighter for the PS1 as a kid. This, and not Tetris, was my introduction to the well puzzler. My parents picked it out for me, and it turns out, they did a pretty good job. Puzzle Fighter is one of the greats of the genre. It’s a wonderful formula that heavily incentivizes combos and planning ahead. The way garbage blocks are implemented, with a countdown before they convert to standard blocks, allows you to set traps that will pay off. Well, assuming you can keep your head above water while waiting for them to detonate.The frequent nail biting finishes leads to this being one of the most overall exciting puzzle games ever made. Oh, and as a versus game? No puzzler ever has the potential for a match to turn on a dime like Puzzle Fighter. Success requires a game plan, cool nerves, and fourth-dimensional thinking. That I have to think really hard about whether I prefer this to Pokemon Puzzle League is saying a lot. Capcom isn’t a company known for this kind of game, which is weird because they made what might be the best of its breed. My only wish is that you could do a vertical screen mode that makes the well taller. That would make for a truly breathtaking experience.
Verdict: YES!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #3 of 34

Tiger Road (1987)
Designed by Tokuro Fujiwara

Tiger Road is a better version of whatever the hell they were aiming for with Trojan. The two games are close cousins, especially the emphasis on high-speed, stiff jumping. Notice I didn’t say it’s a good game, though. Tiger Road’s positive aspects are minimal. There’s some fun enemy and boss design and the combat can be satisfactory, at least when it feels like they’re trying to rip-off Kid Niki. It does that Capcom thing where some of the items screw you. In this case, both enemies and dispensers drop these bell things that cut your life in half. Then, you get to the moments where the game quits trying to be fun and just straight-up tries to kill you so that you have to insert more quarters. Enemies that literally spawn on the pixel you’re on, with no possible visual cue they’re going to. Forcing you to jump into the pathways where projectiles are coming from both sides. Instakill death traps with those “forced damage” jumps. The entire time I was playing the game, I had it drop exactly one free life and two health refills, though one did come after a section that left you no choice on the damage. Tiger Road was the final straw for any lingering respect I had left for Capcom’s 80s efforts. They had zero interest in making their games fun. They wanted you to game over quickly. The proof that they didn’t give a single shit if you had fun is how toothless the final boss is. I first-tried it without cheating in about 10 seconds. Why bother with effort at that point? They already shook you down for your quarters. Be gone with you, loser. That was their attitude with coin-ops. Of course, this is a company that barely carved out an existence during that era, before the NES saved it. That’s around the time they finally pulled their heads out of their ass and realized that fun games, not unfair ones, make money. That’s when they became.. well.. Capcom. Almost every game before that revelation was basically as ethical as a carnival scam.
Verdict: NO!
2nd Stadium Ranking: #28 of 34

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Retro Reviews, Xbox One Reviews Tagged with Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium, Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium Guide, Give us licensed arcade games you buttholes, Plenty of games for Capcom 3rd Stadium

My Cute Unicorns – Coloring Book (Nintendo Switch Review)

July 31, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Yes, really.

The irony is, I bought this expecting to do a tongue-in-cheek review about the lack of clear objectives, character sprites who were too large, etc. A fun, playful gag review to lighten the mood and put a smile on the faces of my readers. This would be exactly the type of “only IGC” review I used to do back in the day. Then I actually played My Cute Unicorns, and now I have no choice but to do an actual review. This might actually be one of the worst games on Switch. It’s certainly the worst artistic game I’ve ever played. It’s every bit as fun as coloring with the world’s most controlling child. “NO, YOU CAN’T COLOR IT LIKE THAT! PLAY BY MY RULES!” What do I mean? Well..

Here’s six of the thirty pictures you can color. Let’s choose one.

Aww, look at that. Adorable. Okay, I want to make her hair rainbow colored. There’s about eight strands of hair, so I want it to be eight different colors. I want her hair to look like she survived an explosion at the Lucky Charms factory. Sadly, My Cute Unicorns isn’t down with the rainbows. Here, I selected the one strand the cursor shows in the picture and used the autofill tool and..

It painted three strands. That’s not a one-off thing either. It auto-fills colors all over, and there’s no option not to. Why would it do that? I honestly couldn’t tell you since I can’t imagine ANYONE would want a coloring game like this. But, that’s how the game works. In theory, you could do it manually. If you start to paint one area manually, you can rub all over the screen, but only the matching sections that would be filled in automatically will be painted until you lift your finger to do another section. Okay, that’s the solution to the auto fill issue, right? Not so fast. If the “paired sections” or whatever you want to call them are actually next to each-other, like in the next picture, it’s nearly impossible to stay in the lines no matter what tool you use. In this next picture, I wanted to paint one strand of hair with the sparkly space blue. After multiple attempts of just barely poking the very bottom of the strand, this is how close I could come to staying in lines and only doing the one strand:

It’s at this point I realized that my gag review was turning into a review of one of the most pointless, awful, terrible games I’ve played in eleven years of game reviews. And it gets worse!!

What if I want to do the horn multiple different colors? Too bad, so sad. In fact, not only does it color the whole horn one way, but it also fills in the inner-ear’s color with the same color you choose for the horn.

Now look, I’m a 33-year-old train wreck of a person who chose this because it was on sale for a $1.99 and I thought my followers would get a jolly good laugh out of me playing around with a coloring book on Switch that was clearly made for young children. But, what young child wants to have anyone dictate how they MUST fill in colors in a coloring book, digital or otherwise? Isn’t the whole fun with this type of thing supposed to be going bonkers? Making colors that are gaudy for the sake of it? Having rainbow colored horns and hair, or crazy eye colors? It’s a coloring game that restricts you in so many ways that it becomes a rip-off. Take a look at the 30 second clip in this tweet:

Everything wrong with My Cute Unicorns in one 30 second clip. Thankfully, they actually made a template that shows how the game completely smothers creativity.

Click one strap: multiple straps fill-in.

Whites of the eyes? You can't do ANYTHING with them, or the twinkles either. pic.twitter.com/iUMGfVf6yg

— Indie Gamer Chick (@IndieGamerChick) July 31, 2022

I would think even pre-schoolers would be frustrated with My Cute Unicorn’s restrictiveness. It doesn’t encourage creativity. It stymies it. I’m flabbergasted that I bought this game to make my readers laugh and pretend like I’ve lost my mind, thinking there is no possible way a developer could fuck up a coloring book. But, come on! You can’t even make the twinkle in their eyes red? The only work around I could find was just spamming spray paint on the screen over and over, then starting the project from there. But that’s crap, because why wouldn’t you just want to have a fill-in-the-blanks canvas in a video coloring book? It’s a safe bet someone who buys one is signing up to do every strand of hair as its own color, without the game insisting you do multiple strands the same color. I want a rainbow colored horn with blood in their eyes, and the game said no. Like I said, it’s like being stuck coloring with a bratty kid who takes crayons away from you if you don’t do it their way.

This was the best I could do when I made a good faith effort to make a pretty unicorn. The sparkly space background I had to finger paint in. There’s no fill option for those colors for absolutely no reason. You’ll note that I couldn’t make the right wing match the left wing, and also the color I filled in the right wing also automatically filled in the mouth the same color. Wings and mouths are basically the same thing. It’s all magical flying murder horse, right?

So, what’s even the point? This apparently started as an Android game, and maybe it’s more flexible with the options on there. Don’t know. Don’t care. I didn’t buy it on Android. I bought it on Switch. I don’t think even a young child would enjoy this. I think the first time they try to fill in one color in one location and it automatically does the same color in a completely different location, and nothing can be done about it, the kid is going to be frustrated. Your only option is to manually paint it, but it COULD bleed over the line, especially if it’s set up so the two strands will in automatically the same color. So, this game I bought as a joke review? The joke’s on me, because I spent six hours with it trying to find something nice to say about it, and all I can say is not even Voldemort did unicorns this dirty.

My Cute Unicorns – Coloring Book is not IGC Approved

My Cute Unicorns – Coloring Book was developed by Soroka Games
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$1.99 (normally $4.99) colored over the lines in the making of this review.

That was the best Sweetie I could do in this program. Finer points would have been nice.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews Tagged with My Cute Unicorns - Coloring Book, My Cute Unicorns - Coloring Book Review, This is a new low

Avenging Spirit (2022 Release Review)

July 26, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

I had never heard of Avenging Spirit until two months ago, when I completely lost my mind and started running through Game Boy games alphabetically. When I got to Avenging Spirit after roughly 100 other games that started with “A” (Christ, there’s a LOT of Game Boy games), I looked at the cover art and I barfed in my mouth a little bit, thinking of how bored I was about to be. Good lord, look at this and remember someone got paid in real money and not McDonalds coupons to come up with this:

Wow, that looks like a video sleeping pill, right? Just a run-of-the-mill shooting game with a gangster theme. Yea, no, Avenging Spirit is a high concept (well, as far as 1991 goes) cartoonish platformer where you actually play as a ghost who has the capability of possessing every non-boss enemy. Hot damn, congratulations, Jaleco box art designer! It takes a true dedication to being terrible at your job to take an eye-raising concept like this and make it look like off-brand Dick Tracy packaging. Bravo. Golf clap. I’m guessing they saw exactly one screenshot of the ghost possessing one of the old-timey gangsters with a tommy gun and based the cover art on that. I know it has nothing to do with anything, but this is a seriously fun, original concept (at least for its time) and it might have had longevity or even franchise potential if it had found its audience. That box art is a sin against gaming.

This guy right here. He’s one of the first batches of enemies you encounter. The entire Game Boy port cover art.. THE ONLY port this game ever got.. is presumably based on this one character, in a game about a ghost possessing over a dozen different enemy types, most of whom are NOT themed around prohibition era gangsters. Unreal. I mean seriously, for all infamy that Mega Man or Phalanx get, I have to call THIS the worst, because this commits the worst possible sin: it makes a great game look boring.

I loved Avenging Spirit. I was so caught-off-guard by how good it was that I ended up teary-eyed. I love finding an under the radar classic game that’s crazy insane fun, and Avenging Spirit is seriously one of the best games on the Game Boy, and I’d never even heard of it. Now, during that play session, several people replied with things along the lines of “oh yea, well there’s an arcade version, and it’s even better!” This is why you never listen to fans. The arcade game is fine. It’s fun. It’s playful and quick and awesome. Oh, and it certainly looks better than the Game Boy game, but big deal. An X-Ray of a ruptured skull looks better than a Game Boy game. But, the Game Boy game is just the stronger game.

The boss fights are typical of a game like this, with predictable patterns, but hey, the classics are classics for a reason. They work.

The hook of being able to possess any enemy has been done a million times since, but it works in Avenging Spirit because each enemy is totally unique. Some have better weapons. Some have better jumping. Some are not desirable, others highly desirable. It can turn the feeling of the game from Metal Slug-like to a kung-fu type of experience. Contra? Strider? They’re all here, and it’s such a joy to play through. The mechanic works so well that even the crappiest enemies to possess are still fun to mess around with and discover their different abilities.

Look the ghost! He’s so happy, and he’s going to.. uh.. possess bad guys and end their lives. Actually, in this picture he looks wasted.

Here’s the catch. On the Game Boy, you can swap out of the enemies. That mechanic is missing in the arcade version. Once you possess someone, you’re in them until you die. If you get stuck in an especially worthless enemy (and some are), you have to deliberately kill yourself to get to swap. I didn’t realize this at first and kept checking and rechecking the control scheme, certain I missed what button you press to exit the ghost. Ugh. I get why the arcade version is done this way. You can only spend so much time outside of a body. The ghost’s health drains, so you’re incentivized to jump from body-to-body as quickly as possible, but really, it’s a mechanism to cause you to run out of life faster and force players to cough-up more quarters. You have unlimited continues, at least on the difficulties played-through (easy and normal) to take the edge off, but still, the arcade version lacks that one last angle that put the Game Boy version over-the-top as one of the true greats of that platform. The arcade game is merely a fun time and short of being tear-inducing awesomeballs.

PROTIP: before entering ANY door, make sure you’re on a character who you’d want to fight a boss with, because when a boss fight starts, you’re stuck with whatever body you’re in. Even if you die.

Mind you, that’s literally the only thing that makes the Game Boy port superior. The arcade game is perfectly fun as well. Everything about it is unspectacular but decent enough, which I think is actually the point. It allows the possession gimmick to take center-stage without any distractions. The level design is decent. The controls are decent. It runs through every cliché of the genre. It SHOULD be tired and grow old quickly, but it never gets boring or “been there, done that” because you keep switching the play-style. It’s also a super quick game. You should easily be able to finish it under 30 minutes, and the three hidden keys you need to get for the true ending are easy enough to find since there’s no time limit and you can explore freely.

There’s NO balance between the different enemies. Some are worthless. Some are overpowered. There’s really not a lot of middle ground. My favorite was the ninja, who has ranged weapons, good speed, and ultra high jumping.

Plus, Ratalaika Games (yes, the company that was going to do the Indie Gamer Chick Collection of XBLIG classics, which fell through because it just wasn’t going to be economically possible to scrunch that many games from that many developers together) has done a pretty good job packaging it. It costs $2 less than Hamster’s Arcade Archives releases and features save states and rewind, plus the US and Japanese ROMs. They even created an easier-to-use “home experience” if that’s the route you want to take, or you can play the unmodified arcade ROM, with dip switches and everything. Yea, I wish the Game Boy ROM had been included, but I’m still stoked Avenging Spirit has a place in modern gaming. Hell, maybe this will be a best seller and it can finally become a franchise with new releases. Wouldn’t that be sweet? Maybe they’ll even get the box art right this time. Sorry, I’m not letting that go. Putting that cover on this game is so stupid that it’d be like putting Alfred Molina on the cover of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Avenging Spirit is Chick-Approved.

Avenging Spirit was published by Ratalaika Games
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox

A review copy was supplied for this review. Retro re-releases are the one and only exception to the “pay for everything I review” rule.

“I should have been on the Raiders of the Lost Ark poster! Do you know who I am? I am Doctor fucking Octopus!”

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Retro Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with AVENGING SPIRIT, AVENGING SPIRIT 2022, AVENGING SPIRIT ARCADE, AVENGING SPIRIT PLAYSTATION REVIEW, AVENGING SPIRIT PS5 REVIEW, AVENGING SPIRIT REVIEW, AVENGING SPIRIT SWITCH REVIEW, AVENGING SPIRIT XBOX REVIEW, YOU MEAN THE THE SPECTRE RIGHT?

Portal: Companion Collection (Review)

July 24, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 7 Comments

Ten years ago, in a post-seizure stupor that left me unable to get my game on for nearly a full week, I named my gun-to-head Top-10 video games of all-time. I’ve never really been a fan of doing all-time great lists. I know that’s a weird thing to say for a game reviewer who, in lieu of review scores, used to rank all the indies she’s reviewed in the exact order she recommends them. But, the thing with that is, I’ve been documenting how I came to my indie recommendation order. It’s called Indie Gamer Chick. You’re reading it, right now. Hello! Yea, I can’t believe I’ve lasted eleven years either.

I’d use this caption to complain about the endless “cake is a lie” jokes, but I have a plushie companion cube somewhere. I’m part of the problem. Actually, I think Brian bought that for me. Woo hoo, I’m absolved of all guilt!

Anyway, I named Portal one of my ten favorite games of all time, and Portal 2 got to come along for the ride. I hadn’t done a complete run through Portal since 2007, and Portal 2 was, along with L.A. Noire, the last major AAA game I played before starting this very site in July, 2011. I actually liked L.A. Noire a lot more back in 2011. It was the first game I, in my newly-found authority as a pseudo-famous game critic, named my Game of the Year. That probably didn’t age well. I can’t imagine getting any value out of L.A. Noire today, in 2022. Then again, I was certain Portal and Portal 2 would lose their luster playing them again. They’re humor-based puzzle games. Once you’ve heard the jokes and know the solutions to each room, what more can you get out of them?

I was wrong, as I often am when it comes to games and the test of time.

WarioWare, Inc. - Mega Microgame$! (USA)-220724-103345

In 2012, I gave WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$ the edge as my personal favorite game ever, but it’s since been usurped by Super Mario Odyssey, and maybe Portal. I do love Portal.

Well, both were just re-released on Nintendo Switch for an absurd $19.99 price tag. Jeez, two of the best games ever for $20? Are you shitting me? It sort of makes Nintendo look like douchebags for putting their old games out for $50, doesn’t it? So, let’s take a look at them individually.

PORTAL (2007)

You know how so many gamers bitch about games “holding their hands?” Portal is THE hand-holding puzzle game. I have never played a game before or since that literally explains how to beat every single puzzle in the game to you like it does. BUT, Portal does it in a way where you don’t realize you’re being told exactly what to do. Listening to the audio commentary included with the game, I was stunned by just how much play-testing went into it. I’m used to playing games from developers who think play-testing means you give someone a copy of your game and then sit and Mommy them through it. You know, tell them exactly what to do if they encounter a problem instead of watching them in silence and re-calibrating based on that. That’s not what Valve did.

I wish more games had audio commentaries. I know they’re mostly used by game developers, but there’s a lot of those these days, in case you didn’t notice. But seriously indie developers, especially those of you lucky enough to make it to the big time, you learned lessons along the way. There will be a generation after you, and you owe it to them to pass along what you learned. It’ll keep our pastime’s light shining bright.

They watched the players and instead of saying “you’re supposed to do this..” their developers did that in the game without actually saying it, and basically created an extended tutorial so amazing that many call it the greatest video game ever made. They used basic psychology and association to train players with visual cues. Were you supposed to build up momentum on a specific spot? They designed the first level where you need momentum so that the spot you start building momentum from is laid out a certain way, then repeated that layout in most future areas where you use momentum. Were players not looking up in an area they’re supposed to look-up? They used retractable walls to call attention to it. Through lighting, staging, and sound design (including GLaDOS’ commentary), they basically guide you towards each room’s solution. Oddly, none of the “waaaaa, games hold your hand too much these days” crowd singles out Portal, even though it’s a game that holds your hand so tightly it turns purple.

The funny thing is, after giving players clues and hidden chambers that give the automated test vibe of the game a subtle eeriness, the final act of the game veers into spooky and unnerving far better than 90% of the survival horror titles I’ve attempted in my lifetime. I think that’s probably why Portal 2 leans much heavier into creepiness. You don’t think of Portal and Portal 2 as horror games, but the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck the entire time, like I was waiting for a jump scare that never happened.

Yet, Portal never feels condescending about it. In fact, you usually feel pretty damn brilliant when you solve a puzzle. Why is that? That’s what’s been on my mind this week: what makes Portal work, that surpasses all generations, and all tastes in gaming? It’s a puzzle worthy of Portal itself, and I was stumped on it. It’s certainly not the genre. Trust me; puzzlers are not a super popular avenue for gaming. Of the twenty least-viewed game reviews I’ve done, over half are for puzzlers, and all but two are IGC-Approved. Then there’s Portal, a game with universal appeal. Even people who don’t like first person shooters will play it, because it’s not a shooter. People who don’t like puzzlers like it. And I have to believe it’s more than just the pitch-perfect humor. Comedy can be awesome seasoning for a video game, but nobody plays games just for their sense of humor.

In my second play-through of Portal, one annoyance and one genuine gameplay problem stuck out to me. The annoyance: I had a tendency to make myself duck when I didn’t want to. I must not have been alone, because ducking was removed entirely from Portal 2. The actual problem: the final boss sucks. I hate it. I hate that it has a time limit. I hate that it goes against the tone of the game. I wish they had just done a tough puzzle to end. They could have easily kept the “retrieve the cores and drop them in the furnace” mechanic. That’s fine, but having GLaDOS shoot missiles at you was like something out of Super Mario Bros. and a poor fit, in my opinion. Portal 2 does basically the same concept, and that fight sucks too.

I came to the following conclusion: Portal is a game that makes you feel good about yourself. It’s you, a sterile room, and some traps, and you have to use your wits for them. It helps that the puzzles aren’t impossibly hard. In 2012, I reviewed a 2D take on Portal called Gateways! that was still one of the top ranked games after over a decade before I closed the leaderboard. It’s a smarter Portal, with the most mind-bending puzzles I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s by far the game I’m most proud of finishing. Yet, it never found its audience. It’s too smart. Portal is Goldilocks smart.. just right. When you finish a level, the “ta dah” moments can be exhilarating, even on the easiest stages (of course, the mechanics also dictate you might not even realize when you’ve finished a stage. I had that happen a few times). Having played hundreds of puzzlers, I can’t think of a single one that does that. Only Portal. A short, linear, glorified tech demo shouldn’t be ageless. Portal is. Portal 2 isn’t. At least as much.

Like the best puzzlers, Portal does what I like to call “the Big Overwhelm” where, at first you’re dumbfounded by the conundrum presented to you. One so vast you wonder if the logic of it will ever reveal itself to you. Hell, some of my favorite puzzlers don’t feature the Big Overwhelm. Most Lolo puzzles don’t. Sleepaway Camp/Friday the 13th Killer Puzzle don’t. Hell, even Escape Goat and its sequel rarely have it. The nature of Portal; minimalist, where everything is spread out, just lends itself to The Big Overwhelm, because it never makes sense.. until it does.

PORTAL 2 (2011)

Portal 2 is a weird cat, and while it seems to survive the test of time, it doesn’t in a vacuum. It needs to be tethered to Portal 1, which is why Portal Companion Collection is the perfect 2022 package for it. But, back in 2011? Not so much. Ideally, Portal 2 would have been packaged with another Valve release, similar to the Orange Box. Turning Portal into a full-fledged game, and one with a story that requires you to know the events of the first game to appreciate it on any level, was bold and not entirely successful. Despite being a relatively short game, Portal 2 feels very padded. But, that’s not what’s bizarre. What absolutely baffled me was how the game could have better, more ingenious puzzles than Portal, and feel less satisfying. That shouldn’t be possible, and yet here we are. I enjoyed my time replaying Portal 2, but unlike Portal 1, I was ready for it to be over when it ended. How’d we get to that point?

Let’s get the co-op discussion out of the way first: I didn’t like it. But, I’m not a co-op person. Ask someone who is. Apparently I’m “hard to get along with” for games that require actual cooperation. Pssh, the nerve of those fucking morons in my house to say I’m difficult and mouthy, right?

Part of it is the setting. Portal 2 is potentially one of the great post-apocalyptic games. Right from the very intro, you’re unnerved. The opening hotel room bit feels exactly like a dark ride at Disneyland, and that’s a sensation that repeated over and over and over again throughout the game. There’s even bits where you’d swear you’re watching a proof of concept video for what the line would look like for a new attraction, with video monitors and running banter from hilarious characters. Hell, there’s even a section that’s fashioned like a roller coaster, and I’m not the first person to notice it looks a lot like Space Mountain. Hey, theme parks are fun, and so is Portal 2.

Portal 2, or Myst? Only my doctor knows.

Yet, the setting is betrayed by GLaDOS devolving from villain to clownish insult comic. When she first comes back to life, it’s a frightening moment. She wasn’t exactly scary in Portal 1, but she had an undeniable menace about her. That’s amplified at the start of Portal 2, and the table is set for her to be an even better villain than she was in the original game. She’s vindictive, cruel, and petty. But, then they went overboard. She starts cracking fat jokes. One would have worked perfectly fine. She’s trying to break you down psychologically, and her cracks about you being an unloved orphan and a terrible person all work towards that. She’s a straight-up bitch, and in my authority as a straight-up bitch, a damn good one.

No. Sorry, but no. If hundreds or even thousands of years have passed, there’s no potato left. I get that they wanted the sight gag and setting up the GLaDOS potato battery bit. BUT, these potatoes wouldn’t just have a tiny bit of mold on them. They’d be gone. No skin. Not even dust. Gone completely. IMMERSION BROKEN!

But, after the first fat joke, she keeps cracking them in subsequent rooms. One worked, two was pushing it, but when they keep coming room after room, suddenly GLaDOS is reduced to a buffoon. The mysterious setting with dilapidated test chambers all work, but GLaDOS calling you fat for the fifth time instead of talking about how much she’s going to enjoy your slow death by torture completely undermines it all. They try so hard to pay it off in the final act of the game when Wheatley calls Chell fat and Potato GLaDOS says “she’s clearly not even a little fat” or something to that effect, but it’s too late. Hours have passed, and her scariness has long since faded. They over-played the pettiness to a mood-wrecking degree.

It’s time for MATCH GAME!! What do you think when you see this picture? If you match the first word I thought of when I saw this, let me know. Highlight here-Nickelodeon-let me know in comment!

Not all the puzzles are exactly brilliant this time around, either. Some are simply a matter of figuring out where to put the portals. When it feels like a maze, that type design works. When it doesn’t, it feels like a glorified hidden object game, only instead of looking for Waldo (that’s Wally for those of you with evil accents), you’re looking for a white panel that you can place a portal on. Also, the final act betrays the concept of Wheatley being the dumbest sentient being in existence. They get it right the first time, with the first puzzle he designs being absurdly easy, and again when his turrets don’t work. But, then he starts “using GLaDOS’s designs” as a means of keeping the actual challenging puzzles going. BUT, logically speaking, he should also fuck those up too, right? Shouldn’t they have done something else? The plot completely goes off the rails, and as a result, all the overly-long interruptions in the test chambers aren’t really worth it.

As illogical and frankly.. sorry.. shitty as Portal 2’s actual narrative is, the gaming gods shined on us and delivered us Cave Johnson. My spirit animal. I would bear his children if he wasn’t fictional and dead from grounding-up and snorting moon rocks. J.K. Simmons is our greatest national treasure. If I had to choose between sparing him or burning down Yellowstone.. hey, most people think Yellowstone is where Yogi Bear lives anyway.

Hey, don’t look at me like that! They’re the ones who told a compelling story that made me care, then totally cratered it by asking me to suspend the logic center in my brain. In a game that leans heavily on brain usage. It needs to be said: Portal 2’s story sucks and is a complete waste of time besides telling jokes that land about 40% less than the jokes in Portal 1 did. Boo! Boo, says I! Boooooooo! AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT, even the most dense fucking moron on the planet.. Cave Johnson, for example.. would realize the best usage of a Portal Gun would be to create a perpetual motion machine. Of course, that would create a feedback loop and destroy the entire universe, WHICH IS EXACTLY THE TYPE OF THING CAVE JOHNSON WOULD DO!! AND FURTHER MORE..

Ahem.

Where was I?

I remembered almost every single joke, bit, and story aspect from the original Portal, even though I played it longer ago. Portal 2? I didn’t remember ANYTHING about the opening of the game. The hotel room? Nothing. Wheatley’s gags? Nothing. Granted, it’s possible the bug zapper in my brain went off and deleted it, but I remembered a lot of the gags once GLaDOS arrived. My theory: my brain had an allergic reaction to Wheatley, one of the most annoying and unfunny characters in any game I’ve ever played, and erased my memory of him as a coping mechanism.

No, it doesn’t matter in the long run. Gameplay is king, and the worst aspects of Portal’s game design are better than 99.99999% of all games I’ve ever played in my life. It doesn’t hold up as well as the first game, but it had to carry a heavier load, too. The jokes still mostly land, and the game is often drop-dead hilarious. At its best, the level design actually outshines the original. Like, seriously, some of the levels are just so massive that it leaves you in awe. That “ta-dah!” sense of accomplishment still hits on a level no other puzzle game I’ve played in my entire life does. Puzzle games should hold-up to the test of time more than most games, and I figured that one out. They make you feel good about yourself. But, they shouldn’t hold up to replay. They should be one and done. Portal and Portal 2 are somehow replayable, and I still don’t have an answer how that’s possible.

Looks like the orange team is winning this game of Splatoon, and someone in the apartment above is really enjoying their porn.

This is one puzzle old Indie Gamer Chick couldn’t solve, even after five days of shaking my head and saying “no, this shouldn’t be possible.” Time is probably a factor. It’s been a decade, and like, I couldn’t tell you what the 14th level of almost any game looks like off the top of my head after a decade, but I don’t think that completely explains it. If I had to guess, I’d say that Portal and Portal 2 hold up to replay because it hasn’t been topped. It’s the king of its genre. The greatest logic puzzler ever. Its inferior sequel was the last of its breed. Sure, there’s a whole modding community on PC still, to this day, coming up with all kinds of absolutely batshit levels. I’ve had about a dozen people this week ask me about them, ignoring the fact that those do absolutely NOTHING for console players. Or, maybe because I’m in a puzzle solving mood, I’m overthinking it. Maybe they hold up because Portal is just plain fun? I think that’s it. When Portal 3 inevitably comes out, it’ll be fun too. Probably. Just as soon as Valve gets that preschool diploma and finally learns to count to three.

IS PORTAL: COMPANION COLLECTION GOOD?

Duh.
Verdict: YES!

Portal: Companion Collection was developed by Valve
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch

$19.99 burned her stuffed companion cube in a furnace in the making of this review.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews Tagged with Portal, Portal 2, Portal 2 Review, Portal Compaion Collection Full Review, Portal Companion Collection, Portal Companion Collection Review, Portal Review, Portal Switch

LCD Games of the 80s VII: The Grand Finale

July 18, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 12 Comments

INDIE GAMER CHICK’S LCD GUIDE
PART I
PART II
PART III: Game & Watch on DSiWare
PART IV: There’s no L in A-R-C-A-D-E
PART V: BEEP MEEP NEEP BONG DONG BEEENNNNN
PART VI: LC You, Wouldn’t Want to D You
PART VII: The Grand Finale
PART VIII: LCDs Take Manhattan
PART IX: RetroFab-ulous!
PART X: Game & Watch – The Definitive Review (EVERY Game & Watch Release!)

Here we go. This will really be the final part for a while, since I’ve run out of material to source from. But, I’ve gone all out here with the most games I’ve ever done for one of these. If your favorite childhood LCDs are still missing.. sorry. Actually, I probably would have done them if someone had emulated them. The issue with that is, someone has to donate a unit to someone willing to program the emulation for this. It’s actually likely they won’t ever get the original back either, because if you want to truly get the emulation and the backgrounds perfect, it might require the physical game itself to be destroyed in the process.

I wanted to do games like Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Super Mario Bros. for Game & Watch, but nobody has done them yet. Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch fetches hundreds of dollars. If I owned any rare LCD, I would donate it for this. The fact is, one day, these will stop working. But, if you donate your rare game now, yea, you lose out on a valuable keepsake. BUT, you’ve also preserved that game FOREVER, for everyone who will ever want to play it. Even shitheads like me who are likely to dump on it in features like this.

I almost added Game & Watch Gallery 4 to this, but I ended up with too many games on here to begin with.

See, no matter what I think of the quality of these games, I’m very happy they’ve been preserved. I love video games, and it’s not cool to believe only the games that I like should be immortalized. LCD games are a not-insignificant part of our heritage, and it’s a shame more haven’t been adapted. I’ve played LCD games where I feel there’s educational value for game designers. Look at the Tiger Electronics version of Gauntlet and its outside-the-box thinking on how to adapt it. Look at the genuinely dazzling Bandai port of Frisky Tom. But, even bad titles like Bandai’s Burgertime serve to show why some ideas don’t work. These could easily give inspiration to a new generation of indie developers. So, if you’re sitting on a mountain of Tiger LCDs, don’t just hoard them. Give them to the world

Special thanks to the Handheld Game Museum for their cataloging of these. Check this site out, seriously. My jaw dropped when I saw just how many games Tiger Electronics did.

Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, to EVERYONE who contributed these games. I’ll try to be nice to them. Okay, that’s a lie, but I’ll be fair, I promise.

LIFEBOAT!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1983)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

Certainly one of the better spinning plate Game & Watch releases, a duel screen affair where you have to rub your head and pat your belly at the same time. No wait, actually you have to watch both screens and catch people jumping off a boat and help them reach the land on either side of the screen. Game & Watch did tons of these style of games, but Lifeboat is genuinely the only one that I couldn’t put down. Seriously, this should have been done a lot sooner than it was. I wanted to lead-off with the very first Game & Watch I’ve ever said is really good without having to qualify that statement with “for an LCD game.” Nah, Lifeboat is genuinely the best Game & Watch, at least of the ones I’ve played.

TOWERING RESCUE!!
Gakken (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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One of the simpler LCDs I’ve played. You just go back and forth and grab people stranded on a building and fly them to safety. You don’t even drop the ladder for them. It happens automatically. You only get one life, so that’s different, and it ended when I pushed left too much and I crashed into a building. It was the first time I saw the idea of “don’t just mash the button, or else” implemented, and it certainly did it better than Nintendo’s take on the same idea. While I wouldn’t want Towering Rescue today, I imagine it was a decent enough time waster in 1981.

SNOOPY!!
Nintendo Table Top (1983)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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Snoopy is the OTHER game I played that penalizes you for moving too far. It’s a spinning-plate game where you have to smash colored music notes generated by Schroeder’s piano. I wanted to like this, because it’s so colorful and.. I mean.. LOOK AT IT! I very much regret that I didn’t grow-up in an era where “handheld” games looked like miniature arcade machines. Well, except for the fact that they mostly suck. Maybe I dodged a bullet, actually. Snoopy is a TERRIBLE game. It’s very sluggish, and positioning yourself to get to the notes is such a chore. It’s basically a revamp of Nintendo’s previous Game & Watch release Vermin, only you need to hit a button to activate the mallet. If you move too far over, you fall to your death. One of Nintendo’s very worst LCDs.

SNOOPY’S TENNIS!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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Probably the most famous Game & Watch that hasn’t been adapted to any Game & Watch Gallery, Snoopy’s Tennis is, surprise, not actually a Tennis game. It’s a spinning plate title where Charlie Brown lobs tennis balls to one of three channels and you have to hit them off the screen above him. You have to time it right, because if you miss, you have to wait an extra frame of animation before you can swing or move again, which is a nice touch. Occasionally Lucy Van Pelt, the biggest bitch in all of fiction, will block the lane with either a high or low racket that bats the balls back at you. On Game A, it takes FOREVER for the action to get intense, so go straight to Game B, though even that is kinda slow. I get the impression this was targeted specifically towards younger kids, and as a result, it’s pretty slow to get going and overall quite boring. On the plus side, it has the funniest death animation in Game & Watch: Snoopy just goes to sleep. It’s the first time anything related to The Peanuts actually made me laugh.

TURTLE BRIDGE!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1982)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

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While spinning plate type of games are the most common LCD game type, cross-the-road games are the surest bet for quality gaming. Well, relatively speaking. It’s not a sure bet by any means. Take Turtle Bridge, a slog of a game where you have to deliver a package from one side of the river to the other by hopping across the backs of turtles. There’s two catches. #1: fish draw closer to the turtles, who will eventually submerge to grab a bite to eat, and if you’re on them, or jump to them, you die. #2: the asshole who you’re supposed to deliver the package to has his mind wander and he disappears from time to time, leaving you stranded on the bridge and watching for fish while the person finishes taking his dump or whatever he’s doing. It sounds intense, but it’s just a boring, annoying slog of a game. Turtle Bridge has fans, but I’m not one of them.

BASEBALL!! and ENGINE ROOM!! and DEFENDO!!
Vtech Explorer Time & Fun (198?)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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Vtech Time & Fun is basically generic off-brand Game & Watch that was sold through Sears. They’re one of the most prolific makers of LCDs, some of which directly rip-off Nintendo’s gameplay, only suckily. These games though? Their Explorer line, though, is just desperate. I started cracking-up so hard because it has a compass and a teeny tiny little LCD flashlight built into it. That’s the most pathetic grasping at straws for a competitive edge I’ve ever seen in my life. “Gentlemen, how can we compete with Nintendo?” “I know.. hear me out.. you know how boring camping is? Well..” And it was a whole series of games! While they did a deluxe Baseball model that probably plays closer to the actual sport’s rules, their Explorer Baseball is really just a spinning plate game. Move your batter left and right and hit the balls. There’s no action button, and nothing else to do with baseball. It’s NOT baseball. You just have to intercept the balls, and rarely one will curve. You know, for challenge. It’s far and away the most basic LCD I’ve done in this now seven-part series, but they did the same exact game two more times, more or less. Engine Room has you shoveling coal as it reaches you, while Defendo has you thumping soldiers rushing your tent. I guess they had to skimp on the gameplay and pass the expense on to a tiny toy compass and a flashlight about as bright as a lobotomized Kardashian.

ROLLER COASTER!!
Vtech (198?)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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Another in the Explorer series, but the only one that actually had different gameplay. This is a juggler-variation of a spinning plate that’s closest cousin is Nintendo’s Game & Watch legend Fire, which gets closed a lot. Roller Coasters go across a broken track and you have to stand over three channels and juggle them to safety. It’s a toothless bore, but at least it’s more interesting than the other games in the Explorer series. I had planned to ignore it, but then I found a Vtech game that more directly rips off Fire, only it completely botches it..

CONDOR!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

See the three birds in this picture? The one on the left is about to cost me a life because the very next frame is it hitting the ground. It’s just awful design because it looks like it has one more frame to go before it hits the ground. Vtech’s direct rip-offs of Game & Watch games scream “we don’t understand what we’re doing at all!”

See?

Another straight-up rip-off of a Game & Watch design, in this case a mirrored version of Fire. You’re a caveman, and baby birds fall out of a nest above you, which you then CLUB TO DEATH WITH A HAMMER and then juggle their carcasses to the other side of the screen. Holy crap!! I can’t believe I can say this about an LCD game but Jesus Christ that’s so insanely violent!! Plus, they completely fucked-up Fire. Birds that are higher up on one channel will hit the ground faster than birds lower on another. Like Banana did with Manhole, they took one of the better Nintendo games and made it a lot worse. And more grotesque.

PIRATE!! and MONKEY!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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These are the exact same game with different sprites, and easily the most basic of the higher-end Game & Watch rip-offs. They’re the most basic spinning plate style games, where you have three channels to block people climbing up things. For Monkey, it’s coconut trees. For Pirate, it’s your ship. I’m going to assume they just recycled the programs from this for some of those Explorer games from above, and other games still to come. I wouldn’t want to play these, but at least they’re faster paced than other three-channel plate spinners and feature fun themes with awesome sprites, especially Pirate. See, I can be generous. But, let’s keep it real.. even their games that play fine are nothing compared to Nintendo’s.

PARACHUTE!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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It’s not simply the “name brand” aspect. Sorry all wannabes, but Nintendo just plain made better games. Here’s THEIR three-channel plate spinner. Parachute!! is the exact same gameplay as Vtech’s Pirate and Monkey, but it just plays faster, has better graphics, a more fun theme, and even little details like an LCD shark that occasionally pokes its fin and head up. The shark doesn’t even factor into gameplay, but it’s that extra touch towards making the experience as fun and playful as possible. As dirt simple a concept as this is, not to mention insanely easy from a gameplay perspective, it’s one of the best Game & Watch games and probably the best plate spinner ever made. It’s like popping LCD bubble-wrap.

PANCAKE!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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Another that looks like a Game & Watch. Remember, in 1981, before the NES, it was a lot easier for a parent who had a kid asking for a Game & Watch for Christmas to instead get one of these. It feels skeezy to me. It’s another Fire/Chef clone, and of all the direct rip-offs of Game & Watch releases, Pancake plays the best. It’s still boring though.

BANANA!! and SLEEP WALKER!!
Vtech Time & Fun (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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Vtech was pretty shameless about ripping off many of Nintendo’s Game & Watch designs. The iconic Manhole by Nintendo is pilfered here not once, but twice, only with much worse gameplay as the timing of when you have to make cover a path is all wrong. Given how Nintendo is famously litigious, I genuinely can’t believe they didn’t sue Vtech for some of their designs. Then again, this takes a famously decent Game & Watch and makes it nearly unplayable. Maybe they considered it free quality advertising?

ESCAPE!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

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It looks a lot like a real Game & Watch, and I think the actual gameplay is original. Then again, I haven’t played every Game & Watch so maybe I’m wrong. It’s sort of like Turtle Bridge, except without the crossing-back part. The idea is you’re sneaking prisoners out of a jail. The gate opens and closes, and there’s two lanes of guards that have five total openings. As long as the guards are on the bricks, you’re safe to move. If they pass through one of the five archways, they can see you. It’s not a bad concept, honestly. It’s one of Vtech’s stronger games, but I still didn’t really enjoy it. It would have been better with clearer-marked safety zones. Yea, I’ll go ahead and call this the best Vtech Game & Swatch.

BOMB FIGHT!!
Vtech Mini-Time & Fun (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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It’s extremely hard for any of these games to actually get me to zonk out on, so imagine my surprise when this turned out to cost me over fifteen minutes. It’s not even better than other spinning plate games, really. Some dude chucks bombs at an elephant and you move the trunk and squirt them back at him. That’ sit. It’s easy. It’s so stupid, yet I just totally zoned out playing it, and next thing I know the Secret Base video on the Utah Jazz I was watching had finished and I was still playing. Maybe it’s because it’s so cramped and that adds to the intensity. Actually, no, here’s why: because it’s the only LCD juggler I’ve played where you can get ahead of the bounce. The water spray works at any distance. It doesn’t feel like you have to wait until the object is right on top of you to deflect it. Never seen that before, and it makes the game more exciting than artificial close calls. Wow. Even Vtech made a decent LCD. It proves my theory: EVERYONE who made many of these (and Vtech had over a hundred) had at least one winner.

RUSSIAN GAME & WATCH CLONES!!
Angstrem (1980s)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

A real 1984 Mickey Mouse Game & Watch, later reskinned as Egg.

Even though I’m not at all a fan of the Game & Watch anti-classic Egg, aka Mickey Mouse, I had to include this in my series of LCDs of the 80s. In Soviet Russia, the USSR authorized Game & Watch clones to be manufactured. 18 were made, and legends of the franchise titles like Octopus (released there as Mysteries of the Ocean) and Chef (released there as Merry Chef) were cloned pixel-for-pixel. Then, there’s Mickey Mouse, which not only got a pixel-for-pixel clone, but the exact same game code was reused ELEVEN MORE TIMES! Here’s the three examples I’ve been able to play.

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Why make two-thirds of your entire LCD game lineup the same game? There’s two reasons for that. The first is these we made on a fraction of the budget and the factory making them could only produce one type of circuit board. The way LCD games work, you can have the exact same game code but shape the actual lights differently, and that’s what they did. The second reason, and the most interesting: in Russia, they actually sold kits that allowed you to change the theme of your Game & Watch. It would still be the same game of Egg, of course, but the appearance would be different. That’s neat. While I personally don’t like Egg at all.. and I also don’t endorse cloning (in this case, it’s the appropriate use of the term).. part of me is happy kids from he other side of the Iron Curtain had their own Game & Watch series. For some reason, that puts a smile on my face. Gaming is truly universal.

MICKEY MOUSE!! and DONKEY KONG CIRCUS!!
Nintendo Game & Watch Panorama Series (1984)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate/Juggler

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In the very first LCD Games of the 80s feature I did here at IGC, I gave a snarky one-line review to these games, but they deserve better. I consider all juggler-type games to be part of the broader spinning-plate theme, and this is a prime example of it. As Mickey or Donkey Kong, depending on which version you play (though after checking a couple times, I’ve determined they’re the exact same difficulty either way), you move back and forth and juggle pineapples or batons that drop through five different channels. Drop one and you lose a life. Here’s the twist: there four actual spots you can stand on and your hands are stuck over two different channels as fireballs (or burning batons) fall onto the playfield, and if you touch the fire, you also lose a life. It’s awful because (1) there’s no sense of momentum. They could have easily added above and below motion lines to show you which direction the objects are going. (2) The timing of when the fire will hit your hands is so touchy and often synced perfectly with a falling object you have to juggle. I hated these. I really hated them.

PENGUIN LAND!!
by Bandai (1983)
Gameplay Type: Versus Action

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This could have been one of the greats, but I didn’t get a chance to play it two player. It’s a battle type game. Bombs fall onto the playfield and the penguin has to catch them and throw them back at the walrus and wait for ice cubes to spawn on the left side of the screen. Stack three ice cubes to reach the top of the screen and score points. It’s a lot of fun, actually. A different concept. But I couldn’t get the anyone to play it with me. Oh, and despite being based on the Doki Doki Penguin Land series, this isn’t a puzzle game. That’s so weird.

WILD MAN JUMP!! and MONKEY JUMP!!
Vtech (1981 and 1982)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

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Vtech actually could rip-off with the best of them, but to their credit, their Donkey Kong is a closer LCD Donkey Kong than the crap that Coleco came up with. It LOOKS so much like Donkey Kong that I’m stunned this wasn’t a major lawsuit from Nintendo, who DID in fact sue over Tiger’s King Kong game (and Tiger’s King Kong game sort of jump-started the whole Nintendo/Universal fiasco, with Tiger Electronics being the first company to actually ask Universal “hey wait, do you even own King Kong to begin with?”). Ironically, this is a LOT closer to Donkey Kong than King Kong ever was. Both these games play functionally the same, though I feel the colored game is a lot more unresponsive. I managed to reach the top of both games only when I stopped trying to grab the items and just legged it to the top. They look like Donkey Kong but there’s nothing fun about them.

DONKEY ANGLER!!
Gakken (1982?)
Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

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I got so excited when I heard the name. I pictured Donkey Kong in a tacky fishing jackets. One of those fuzzy fishing lures that I’ve never actually seen (and I’ve “gone fishing” with my Dad a dozen times, though if you never get a bite, does it really count as fishing, or did we really just drive off to stare at body of water while contemplating if it’s worth impaling yourself “accidentally” with a hook if it’ll get you home to your TV and video games faster?). But actually this is just a three channel spinning plate game. The thing that really strikes me about this is just how much it looks like a Game & Watch. Even the sprites look exactly like Nintendo’s Mr. Game & Watch-type sprites. It’s so close it gets uncomfortable. Anyway, boring game but at least a little faster-paced than your typical plate spinner.

GRAB MAN!!
Unknown Developer (1980s? 90s?)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

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This is literally the same game as the Toby Pac-Man, with the same “must be facing the dots rules” that I showed in LCD Games of the 80s IV. UPDATE: I actually got the game working once I realized I had to actually hold the movement buttons down. Also, I might be DUMB for not figuring that out since I literally have done 100 of these games and should have known that. Anyway, it’s weird that, of all the games to copy, the weird Pac-Man where you can’t eat dots if you’re facing the wrong direction was the one.

LAS VEGAS!!
Bandai (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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I probably shouldn’t have even included this one, but the theme boggled my mind so much that I had to. You hear the name “LAS VEGAS” and you naturally assume “card games, maybe dice, maybe roulette.” Nope. It’s a minimalist spinning plate game. Three careless slot jockeys are playing and when they hit a jackpot, you’re a degenerate grabbing the coins that slip pass them, I guess? There’s only three channels and the game tells you what they’re getting. It’s so weird and stupid. Why? Why would you even make this game? It’s boring and it feels like it should be a different name. Slot Jockey! There you go!

TOM & JERRY POPPER!!
Gakken (1983)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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Another spinning plate game, though this one is a bit more challenging by virtue of how the sprites are done. They’re supposed to be balloons that Jerry is launching at you, and they sorta bob around and shrink like they’re fading into the background. It’s hard to clock. Here’s what’s REALLY weird: it’s a three channel plate spinner, but there’s a huge gap between the second and third panels. You don’t step on that gap, mind you. You jump from the 2nd channel to the 3rd like normal. It makes it feels like this “we gotta fit this all in to a small screen” haphazard design. Tom & Jerry’s not fun, but it’s notably weird.

MOTOR CROSS!!
Unknown Manufacturer (19??)
Gameplay Type: Racer

Remember the “TWO WEEKS” scene from Total Recall? Well, “GET READY FOR A SURPRISE!”

This feels like a cruel joke, because it’s shaped just like a Game Boy. It feels like something designed to dupe witless parents too stupid to realize they didn’t just find the bargain of the century while trying to find little Timmy a Game Boy for Christmas. I get that this phenomena exists in all forms of entertainment, from Asylum Mock Busters to Mega Super Rangers to alarmingly red Game Boy knock-offs. But the really batshit thing? Motor Cross is, no joke, the first racing LCD I’ve played that doesn’t suck. I can’t believe it at all! It makes me feel unclean to heap any praise on this obvious attempt at confusing unaware consumers, but Motor Cross’ gameplay is rock solid, genuinely exciting, kind of addictive, and yes, even fun.

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Motor Cross actually does feel like a race, with an accelerator, breaking, laps, and fuel consumption. Huh. Even wilder is just how many objects on screen you might have to weave around. Sometimes, the entire course fills with bikes, and successfully navigating through it feels incredible. Finally, Motor Cross does what I didn’t think was possible in an LCD game: creates a sense of speed. There’s three speed you can use, and I shit you not, they work to make it feel like you’re on a bike traveling at a high velocity. I don’t think it quite beats Frisky Tom, but it’s one of the best LCD games I’ve ever played. Goddamnit, I have no choice but to declare Motor Cross the greatest LCD racing game until a more ethical option comes along.

ISIDORO & SONJA – CACCIA AL LADRO!!
aka HEATHCLIFF & SONJA – HUNT THE THIEF
Vtech (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

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Apparently “Heathcliff or Garfield” was a debate before I was born. I didn’t even know Heathcliff existed by time I was a Saturday Morning Cartoon watcher, but they still reran Garfield & Friends on TV. Game, set, match. Garfield wins. Fatality! But, hey, at least Heathcliff has a pair of games that are marginally better than the Konami Garfield LCD. This is the weaker of the two. You have to throw bombs up at someone raiding fish out of garbage cans. Occasionally a dog gets in the way, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to move it. I thought throwing a bomb at the dog would get it to move, but it doesn’t. It seems to move randomly, and that means you can’t defend that can. The fish remaining are presented by sprites. Vtech seemed to specialize in action-defense (oxymoron, I know) but this was not good.

ISIDORO & SONJA – IL FUOCO!!
aka HEATHCLIFF & SONJA – FIRE
Vtech (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

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Remember the “spray the bombs with the elephant trunk?” game from above? Same concept turned upside down. As Heathcliff, you spray drops of fire with a hose. Like Bomb Fight, you don’t have to wait to stop the drops of fire. You can destroy the fire at any spot of progress instead of waiting for it to be on top of you like a typical Game & Watch game. It changes it from feeling like a spinning plate game into a genuine defensive-oriented game. It’s not as fun as the bomb game though. It feels less claustrophobic and thus isn’t as exciting. I’m leaning towards not liking this, but let it be said: Heathcliff’s best LCD absolutely curb stomps Garfield’s.

CRAZY CHEWY!!
Vtech (1982)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

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Once I remembered this is a Pac-Man clone and held down the movement buttons instead of pressing them like a normal LCD game, I found Crazy Chewy to be, far and away, the best Pac-Man LCD clone ever made. It’s not very hard, and the power-pellets last a generous amount of time. But, it’s actually not a bad little knock-off, and I’m only not awarding it my seal of approval because I just personally ain’t a Pac-Man fan. Generic and soulless and I imagine many a kid said “that’s NOT Pac-Man!” on Christmas mornings, but if you were a mega-sized Pacmaniac during this era, you had a pretty solid clone of it here.

CHICKY WOGGY!!
Vtech (Tini-Arcade 1981/Arcade Time & Fun 1982)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

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Chicky Woggy is basically reverse-Pac-Man. Instead of eating the dots, you lay them down. You start with one wolf chasing you, and eating one of the two worms are like power-pellets that let you eat the wolves, but they only last a second or two. Like, on just the second level, I ate a worm, moved up only two spaces and the wolf killed me. Even considering that, I was able to clear multiple levels. Like other Vtech games, this got two releases: one as a premium color-picture tabletop similar to Nintendo’s Panorama or Coleco’s tabletops, and one as a simple LCD with a dial. Looking at the dial, ugh, can you imagine trying to play an LCD with that thing? Anyway, I’m giving it a pass for the same reason I did Chewy: I’m not a huge Pac-Man fan to begin with, but if you were a little kid in the early 80s who was gaga for the Pac, I imagine owning these would have passed the time in a car ride a lot better.

GALAXY II!!
Epoch (1981)
Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

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I had this hunch that a Space Invaders-like LCD would be excellent. I’m grateful for Galaxy II, which proved I was 100% right. Actually, this is really like a better version of Coleco’s take on Galaxian. Even the sprites look very similar. But, this is a much better game that’s a lot of fun. A gallery shooter where the aliens dive down at you. I wish the controls were a little more responsive, and I wish it was just a channel or two wider, but otherwise, this is a solid shooter. A kid who opened this on Christmas morning in 1981 was a very lucky kid, especially compared to most of the larger fluorescent tube games. They usually suck, but Galaxy II is the best gallery shooter in LCD gaming that I’ve played and behind only Frisky Tom and Frogger on my top games list.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with LCD Games, LCD Games of the 80s

LCD Games VI: LC You, Wouldn’t Want to D You

July 16, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 8 Comments

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

Let’s finish the second IGC LCD trilogy!

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG!!
Tiger Electronics (1992)
Gameplay Type: Combative

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All credit where it’s due: Tiger didn’t half-ass their Sonic effort. They probably recognized this as a game that needed to achieve play-ability to help boost their reputation and earn further sales for their line. There’s ambition here. There’s levels. There’s a moderate variety of enemies that require different tactics to beat. There’s not one but TWO boss fights! There’s water hazards. You can get high-speed boosts and invincibility. The issue is, it doesn’t feel at all like Sonic. Even by 1992, Sonic bopping enemies wasn’t the hook: speed was. This isn’t a fast paced game. It’s plodding as hell. It takes forever to get to a boss. Worst of all, the gameplay is boring. Then again, how does one do a solid platformer that doesn’t have animation? I have no clue.

BACK TO THE FUTURE!!
Tiger Electronics (1988)
Gameplay Type: Racer

Based on the TV series, but actually more like it’s based on the movie, or not. You have to dodge rocks and oil slicks to presumably get the Delorean up to 88 mph, but I never got over 70 mph. I was bound and determined to get this, but I never even saw the rescue mechanics. I have no clue what I wasn’t doing right. This was one of those weird “the background isn’t there” but I imagine that didn’t matter. This was boring.

INDY 500!!
Tiger Electronics R-Zone (1995)
Gameplay Type: Racer

R-Zone was, I guess, Tiger’s low-rent version of Virtual Boy. I used to see it in clearance bins in toy stores. It’s hilarious that Tiger Electronics took serious the device that everyone else was snickering about under their breath. Really, it was just more LCD gaming, only with “carts” which is something Atari abandoned with Cosmos in the early 80s. Indy 500 is a super bland driving game that simply isn’t fun. You have to shift gears, stay on the road. Snore. I wanted to recognize R-Zone since this is likely the last LCD game feature I’ll be doing, but this is the only one I could find.

DORAEMON!!
Bandai (1983)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

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Bandai is kind of the greatest maker of LCDs ever, and nobody knows it. In Part V, I found their finest work in Frisky Tom, the greatest LCD ever made. BUT, they also have the best maze chase LCD I’ve played. And yes, these are really not LCDs, but rather “Vacuum Fluorescent Displays” or VFDs, but tomato/potato. LCD is a format of gaming, and whether the screen is physically LCD or VFD, the gameplay is done in the standard LCD format. Either way, this game, based on the popular Japanese franchise, features you moving around a maze and grabbing bells while dodging mice. You’re given enough time if you find a mouse next to you to dodge it, and that cushion makes this so much more playable than most Tiger or Coleco chasers. It’s not exactly the most exciting game, but I was happy playing it.

ULTRAMAN
(1983, Bandai)
Gameplay Type: Dodger/Spinning-Plate

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Okay, so not all Bandai games were good. In fact, their Burgertime was pretty shitty. Ultraman isn’t good either. It’s boring as hell, but at least there’s ambition here. The problem is you have to wait to score 500 points before you get to transform into Ultraman. That’s 50 slow moving bullets you have to just move out of the way of. Then, you have to grab some energy thing (despite being a Power Rangers/Sentai fangirl, I’ve never watched Ultraman) that transforms you. Then you have to fight the villains, and the game kind of becomes a spinning plate game where you have to stop them from destroying the city by karate chopping or kicking them. It’s not the worst concept, but getting to become Ultraman is such a boring slog. When the game forgets to count a point, which happens, you feel like crying. If not for that part, this wouldn’t be the worst effort. Sadly, Ultraman is more like Mediocreman

ROBOCOP 2!!
Tiger Electronics (1990)
Gameplay Type: Combative

BOOM! HEADSHOT!

I can’t believe this franchise was marketed as heavily to children as it was. Yea, I know it was made into a cartoon too, but I’ve never met anyone who associated the Robocop with the cartoon. They associated it with the ED209 blowing some poor fucker into giblets, and Robocop 2 features a child drug kingpin who nearly kills Robocop. The game is just a massively sluggish, unresponsive shooter. It’s one of those LCDs that Tiger phoned it, which was par for the course for them. Naturally, they made a sequel..

ROBOCOP 3!!
Tiger Electronics (1992)
Gameplay Type: Combative

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This does a little more with the shooting than a normal Tiger Electronics game. In fact, it’s oriented more like a spinning plate game. There’s a few channels that you have move up and down and shoot punks. There’s scrolling but you don’t even need to do that, as the boss will come to you after you shoot X amount of punks. After two levels, you also have to rescue a girl that’s captured by the boss. Robocop 3 has smart scoring and the pace is fast enough that it’s not a typical bore. Golly, would look at that.. Robocop 3 isn’t Robocrap. Wow. I’m stunned. I mean, I know Tiger was capable of doing decent games, but I wasn’t expecting Robocop 3 to be one of them. Never assume.

SWAMP THING!!
Tiger Electronics (1991)
Gametype: Combative/Adventure

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I think the emulation for this must have been broken, because half the time, the game wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. If I pressed attack, the game ducked. If I tried to use a special move, the game ducked. I even switched my keyboard, but it kept happening. When the game actually worked, this is one of those “effort was made” Tiger games that has depth. You scroll right, but there’s also pipes you can take, Mario-style. There’s a punch move that NEVER worked (every time I tried it, the game like did the animation for it for a split second before going back to being stun-locked in a ducking animation) and a fire move where you melt into the ground and two columns of fire rise up on the sides the screen. If this is how the real Swamp Thing played, YIKES, terrible! But, if it was emulation, damn. This had a shot.

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

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One of the absolute most boring LCDs I’ve experienced in this entire run. The gameplay is based on the second level well sequence from the NES game. Ravens fly by and you have to punch and kick them, while faces blow tornadoes at you. After FOREVER, you reach the bottom, where the Evil Queen shows up to.. uh.. I’m not entirely sure but I never seemed to be able to hit her. You can switch between the different characters, which in theory is nice, but the game takes your button presses as friendly advice that can be ignored. Like, I would hit the ravens and it would count as a hit, but then I’d take damage anyway. Apparently there’s a boss, but I never got to it even after over thirty minutes of gameplay. The real pain in the ass? Both times I reached the Evil Queen section, I didn’t die by losing life. I ran out of time. Are you kidding me? I’m so mad that this is what they came up with for Battletoads: a port of the most overly long and terminally boring part of the game. Yikes. I’ve never liked a single game in the Battletoads franchise, so when I say “Battletoads deserved better” that’s saying something.

JUDGE DREDD!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Combative

When you think there’s no bottom, Tiger Electronics comes through with another low. In Judge Dredd, you walk, wait for an enemy to come within range and then kick or punch them. If they’re to the edge of the screen, you have to hop-up an ever-present ladder and wait for them to step closer. Then you drop down, punch them, and they’ll drop their weapon, which you actually have to press a button to bend over slowly to get, because of course you do, because this is shit. Then you walk forward and try to use it. BUT, if you get shot, you lose the gun. And you will get shot, because there’s a massive lag between the command to shoot and the shot being fired. It’s a boring premise to begin with, but this is trash with the controls. Absolutely Dreddful.

THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS!!
Tiger Electronics (1993)
Gameplay Type: Dodger

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Wow. This is the most incredibly boring game I’ve ever played in my entire life. They were aiming for a dodge-type game where you duck under bulbs and hide behind a Christmas Tree if a gnome shows up. Then you have to hop across roof tops and time the button to grab candy. This is so goddamned boring that I legitimately almost dozed-off playing it. Tim Burton must be spinning in his coffin. He’s not dead, but I just picture Tim Burton sleeping in a coffin.

SUPER DOUBLE DRAGON!!
Tiger Electronics (1993)
Gameplay Type: Combative

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Sigh. Well, at least you’re not kicking Lex Luthor in the balls. Guys show up. You jump up and kick them. You can stay on the ground and kick them but it’s much more effective to just jump up and do it. You’re less likely to take damage that way. Sure, Double Dragon is about fighting the same guys over and over again, so the LCD game should be a close approximation to it. But, the thing that makes Double Dragon fun is, frankly, the violence. You need animation for violence. For that sense of OOMPH, and for a variety of moves. Here the moves are a punch, a kick, and allegedly the ability to use special moves or grab weapons, but every time I tried to get them I took damage. The only good thing I can say about Super Double Dragon: it’s better than just plain Double Dragon was as an LCD. A lot less Lex Luthor.

THE INCREDIBLE CRASH TEST DUMMIES!!
Tiger Electronics (1993)
Gameplay Type: Racer

Want to do a racing type of game? Why would you make an LCD game like that? Something that isn’t capable of creating a sense of speed? Here, the idea is you’re trying to build up enough speed to deliberately crash yourself through the air, and you can build up speed by reaching out and petting a dog, I think? I got my speed one tick away from the top, but never got all the way there. Like so many LCD games, it takes too long to get to the hook of the game. I never managed to crash, and after twenty minutes of trying, I didn’t want to play this anymore. Holy crap, is this boring.

BATMAN FOREVER: DOUBLE DOSE OF DOOM!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Combative

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You have to punch or throw the Baterang at Two-Face if he’s in front of you. If he’s to the left of you, you have to call in Robin, who swings in and hits him (regardless of whether he’s above or below you). You also have to hop over pits, because when you think of Batman, you think pits. This is just a boring retread of the same type of game they’ve done to death. Enough with the brawlers! It’s not happening, Tiger. This is just boring. Really, really boring. I’m barely hanging on by this point.

MC HAMMER: U CAN’T TOUCH THIS!
Tiger Electronics (1991)
Gameplay Type: Rhythm

It’s just a dance-off where you have to match the moves that Hammer does. It’s Simon or Touch Me with a flash in the pan’s branding on it, and it’s boring. It should be called MC Hammer: U Should NOT Touch This!

Only two decent games this time? Fudge. I need a part VII, don’t I? Yea, I do. Part VII coming Sunday.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Holy crap tiger sucks, LCD Games of the 80s, LCD Reviews

LCD Games Part V: BEEP MEEP NEEP BONG DONG BEEENNNNN

July 16, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 10 Comments

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

Let’s do another, and for the first time, let’s move largely out of the 80s. This is basically “all-Konami edition” with a few other games sprinkled in.

GARFIELD!!
Konami (1991)
Gameplay Type: Dodger

I always wondered how Garfield, who is established as being grotesquely overweight and out of shape, is also ninja-like when he stands on the fence to do his comedy routines?

You’re on a fence and you have to dodge pies and shoes and get lasagna Jon makes for you. Like so many LCDs, this feels like a generic gameplay template that any theme could have been plugged into. Does it feel like Garfield? Um, no. Is it fun? Not really. It’s so bland and the scoring is so slow and not unexciting. One thing I admire about Nintendo’s Game & Watch series: it has really smart scoring. Here, dodging shoes and pies doesn’t really earn you anything, even though that’s what you spend most of the game doing. I’m not on the fence for this one: Garfield is lame.

KINGMAN!!
Tomy/Tandy (1982)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

They could redo the graphics and make this a Toronto Raptors game.

A putrid, broken Donkey Kong rip-off (it looks like Donkey Kong mixed with Darth Vader. Darth Kong? Donkey Vader?) with some of the most unresponsive controls I’ve seen. I spent fifteen minutes trying to make it to the top, but the piles of poo that take the spot of the barrels come down in perfect intervals to prevent any progress, and it’s impossible to time anything when there’s no certainty the controls will actually respond to your commands. I wonder how many “Mom, Dad, this isn’t Donkey Kong” cries went out on Christmas mornings when kids unwrapped this unplayable knock-off. I mean, not that the Donkey Kong table-tops were better. They weren’t, but at least they were authentically awful.

GOLDENEYE 007!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Combative

No clue why did one didn’t have a background.

Run right and shoot left and right, or sometimes throw a karate kick. Typical effort-free Tiger Electronics dump. Wow, Rare Ltd. sure had their work cut out for them, here. I think the Nintendo 64 game had a more exciting menu than this game.

SPACE JAM!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Basketball

How hard can it be to make a basketball game, for Christ sake? But I never even saw my own basket in multiple sessions with this. Space Jam seems to be oriented like a cross the road game, but I never successfully pulled off a steal, never got a shot or a pass off (and only once saw Daffy Duck the entire time). Jesus wept. I’m sorry, Your Airness.. I failed you. And you thought the Bad Boy Pistons did Jordan dirty. Ouch.

C!!
Konami (1989)
Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

No, Up Up Down Down doesn’t work. I tried.

C in this case stands for Contra. I’m not sure what I expected, but C is just a five-channel gallery shooter that has various meaningless LCD doodles pass by to give the illusion of forward movement, but really, this is just “line up with thing and shoot.” It’s no guarantee that’ll actually work. Multiple times my bullets went right through something, for apparently no reason. Maybe because we both switched channels, but if we switched channels and the bullets are animated in that channel that the alien is in, and they pass through the aliens, how is that not a hit? Terrible game. Practically broken.

BATMAN!!
Tiger Electronics (1989)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

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This is sorta like a spinning plate game as an action game. There’s two channels of enemies and you have to dodge the attacks of one while taking out the other. I found it to be quite dull and there seemed to be massive lag with the timing after you came off the wall. I don’t know if that was a bug in the emulation or not, but this was practically unplayable.

GRADIUS!!
Konami (1989)
Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

I really want to do a Space Invaders type of game but haven’t been able to find one. The closest so far is probably Gradius, which is nothing like the classic Konami shmup it takes its name from. This is another five-channel gallery shooter, only with a much bigger emphasis on dodging than Contra’s LCD did. You have to shoot enemies while avoiding cannon fire from enemy islands above and below you. It’s quite competent but very boring and very unambitious. I know that Konami didn’t really make these, but they were among the cream of the crop in gaming at the time and they put their names on these games. Oh, it gets worse..

THE ADVENTURES OF BAYOU BILLY!!
Konami (1989)
Gameplay Type: Combative

Replace the snake with a honey badger and this could have been The Gods Must Be Crazy: Part II

I’ve done a LOT of LCD brawlers now, and Bayou Billy (based on a somewhat obscure NES genre smorgasbord) might be the worst yet. It’s SO sluggish and it feels like it’s only registers every-third button press when you’re on attack, even if you haven’t already just attacked. When you have a snake attacking you from one side and what looks like Strong Bad if he just totally let himself go attacking you from the other, it’s like the game can’t decide what to let you do, and chooses to let you do nothing most of the time. I’m starting to see why legitimate gaming magazines didn’t give LCDs the time of day. Imagine all the money that they could have saved people if they had though.

BUCKY O’HARE!!
Konami (1991)
Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

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Another gallery shooter, and one that gets old even quicker than Gradius. BUT, oddly enough, this does more to feel like Gradius than Gradius. There’s bosses, and you even switch characters after you beat the first boss. I got to the second boss a few times and he was a bullet sponge. You get generous hit points and lives yourself, a stark contrast to Bayou Billy’s “40 health, when it’s gone, Game Over” setup. Everything is in place for this to be Konami’s best LCD, except strong gameplay. Bucky O’Hare actually bored me right out of the gates, and if not for the bosses, I’d of quit long before I did. ENOUGH WITH THE GALLERY SHOOTERS, Konami. Try a spinning plate game or something. At the time I’m writing this, I haven’t played Blades of Steel yet. It’s up next, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s a sudden death hockey shoot-out arranged like a gallery shooter. I really wouldn’t. Let’s see..

BLADES OF STEEL!!
Konami (1989)
Gameplay Type: Dodger/Reflex Tester

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Whoa. Hold on. Okay, so I was partially right. It is sort of oriented like a shooter, but it’s not a gallery shooter. It’s not really a hockey game either, but it’s actually a not awful concept for an LCD hockey-themed game. There’s no defense involved. You’re just trying to score as many goals in the time limit as possible. You have to take the puck, wait for a clearing and wait for the meter behind the goalie to flash a star, at which point if you fire, you’ll get a goal. It’s actually a clever way to make the extremely limited LCD hardware feel kinda like the NES game, and it works! Yea, this is only good for an LCD game, but I could see myself losing track of time playing this. Absolutely. Clever idea. I’m impressed. At this point, I’m convinced every LCD manufacturer had at least one “who’d of thunk it?” quality game.

DOUBLE DRIBBLE!!
Konami (1989)
Gameplay Type: Dodger/Reflex Tester

Yes, the iconic Double Dribble dunks are in the game. Kinda.

Basically the same concept as Blades of Steel, only now you’re playing a 1-on-2 basketball game. You have to just break free of your defenders and time the meter above the basket. Here, the timing is a lot different than it is in Blade of Steel. You want to shoot when the meter is white so the ball’s arc drops in as the meter is lit for a goal. I liked Blades of Steel a lot more, but this is also a perfectly acceptable little waste of time. Gosh, I wonder if the NFL Football game will be along the same lines.

NFL FOOTBALL!!
Konami (1989)
Gameplay Type: American Football

Better than strips of red lights, no?

Easily the most ambitious LCD I’ve ever played, there is nothing half-assed about NFL Football. The funny thing is, they could have done that. The most successful LCD ever was the legendary Mattel Electronic Football that was a major fad in the late 70s (along with Coleco’s Electronic Quarterback), and a barely updated version of that would have worked, but instead, NFL Football focuses trying to make it feel like the sport. You only play offense and can choose between four plays (five including field goals when you’re in range) and have to scroll around the field looking for openings. It works and legitimately feels like the evolutionary Electronic Quarterback, and the problem is, I just never had fun with those. My Godfather’s son had both the Mattel and Coleco games. I still have them around here somewhere, and I never thought they were any fun. But, all credit where it’s due: while I didn’t have fun with this, I imagine kids of the era probably enjoyed it for what it was.

THE LONE RANGER!!
1989 (Konami)
Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

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As you know from my earlier bitching, gallery shooters are all over LCD. Which one has the most channels? Konami’s Lone Ranger, with a whopping ELEVEN different channels to take shots from. Each angle works towards taking out a bandit from a different angle or distance, and for me, I actually did kind of enjoy memorizing which channel hit which person from which distance. Even better: the characters come up with their hands up, and some will surrender and just disappear. You’re only supposed to shoot the ones who draw their gun on you. It’s so smart and makes the game kind of twitchy. Yep, this is the best of its breed. So far the best LCD shooter I’ve experienced. The funny thing is, Konami made a vastly underrated NES game based on the character, and their LCD game is probably one of the stronger LCDs out there. You’re even incentivized to fire accurately, as you only get 40 bullets. Well, what do you know? They actually did make a really good gallery shooter. So what’s the story on Contra and Gradius being so boring, gang?

FRISKY TOM!!
Bandai (1982)
Gameplay Type: Action-Arcade

We have a new LCD Champion!

This should have gone Part IV, along with the other arcade games, but the truth is.. I’d never heard of it before. I don’t know how good the arcade game is, but as an LCD game, this is really very fun without having to qualify that statement. This is actually the best LCD game I’ve ever played by a mile. It’s sort of like Donkey Kong Jr. meets Pipe Dream. You have to shimmy around this mess of pipes, collect the pipes that are knocked down by evil mice that are total nightmare fuel, and replace where they go. The ultimate object is to fill a tub full of water. It’s crazy addictive, exciting, and so much fun.

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I played this game for over an hour on Saturday. I just couldn’t put it down. I wish it had more dynamic scoring, and I wish the collision was a little better, but I only wish for those things because this is the most addictive, exciting LCD I’ve ever played. Take a bow, Bandai. You’re the new champion of LCD gaming at Indie Gamer Chick. For the first time, I can say an LCD game is genuinely outstanding, and I never thought I’d use those words to describe an LCD. Wow. I’m blown away over here. It turns out that truly great LCD gaming wasn’t a pipe dream after all.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Darth Kong is my new spirit animal, LCD Games, LCD Reviews

LCD Games of the 80s – Part IV: There’s no L in A-R-C-A-D-E

July 16, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 9 Comments

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

What can I say? I’m a glutton for punishment. Previously, I’ve covered twenty-four LCD games (check the links above) and not liked a single one of them. Today’s feature includes seventeen more LCD games of the 80s (and a few from the 90s). I promise that I will name not just one, but FOUR quality LCD games before this feature is over.

Today’s theme: arcade conversions.

PAC-MAN!!
Tomy (1982)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

Like so many arcade games, multiple companies did LCDs of Pac-Man. Coleco did one too, up next.

Certainly one of the stronger LCD games I’ve done. Is it anything like the arcade Pac-Man? Oh god, not at all. Is it fun? Not really. But at least there’s a concept here that has legs that I’d like to see an actual ROM hacker try to recreate. Here, Pac-Man is always facing to the left, and this is worked into the play mechanics. If you pass over a dot from left to right, you don’t eat the dot, since Pac-Man’s mouth didn’t get it. You must pass over it right to left. It’s a one-off type of gameplay mechanic I’ve never even thought of before that certainly got my attention. Not as good is the super unresponsive controls and how I could never, even after four or five attempts, successfully eat a ghost after grabbing one of the stars. Yea, it’s awful, but I appreciate the unexpected twist.

PAC-MAN!!
Coleco (1981)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

Part of their famous table top line, Coleco made some beautiful facades that housed some terrible versions of popular coin-ops. Pac-Man at least is a stronger game than Donkey Kong, but it’s still pretty miserable. The ghosts all look like they’ve already eaten Pac-Man and it’s jarring as all hell. It’s PRETTY close to Pac-Man, but it’s also one of the uglier LCD games and I can’t get over how they look like some kind of virus that has absorbed Pac-Man.

PAC-MAN 2!!
Entex (1981)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

This is a little more close to the arcade game. There’s only two ghosts, but it functionally feels like a Pac-Man LCD. It doesn’t matter which direction you’re facing when you slurp up dots. I kept having a ghost get the jump on me early on, probably because I left the center dots there as the last dots to get. Even though this is the best controlling LCD Pac-Man, I think it’s boring, but then again, I was never really a standard Pac-Man fan to begin with.

MS. PAC-MAN!!
Coleco (1983)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

WHY DOES IT LOOK LIKE THIS! OTHER COMPANIES DID GAMES THAT DON’T LOOK LIKE THIS! IT’S CREEPY!!

It’s the same “organisms that ate other organisms as viewed from under a microscope” look that Pac-Man had, but to Coleco’s credit, this is basically the same game as Pac-Man with more responsive controls. It’s still crap though.

DIG DUG!!
Gakken (1983)
Gameplay Type: Action-Arcade

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Awful. Just plan awful. This might be the worst LCD yet. Nothing works. The enemies get too much a jump on you. In six games I never once successfully defeated an enemy with the pump or kill one using a rock without killing myself. It feels NOTHING like Dig Dug at all and has to be one of the worst games I’ve ever played in my entire life. I don’t dig this. See what I did there? UPDATE 7-18-22: I figured out how to play it. So, you have to actually hold the direction you want the pump to go. So, unlike the arcade game, you can pump enemies above and below you. Once I figured this out, I was able to clear a few levels. Total screw-up on my part and I’ll change my opinion on Dig Dug: from worst-ever contender to merely a cramped slog that is vaguely like the arcade game.

GALAXIAN!!
Coleco (1982)
Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

I’d love to review this for y’all, but I couldn’t stay alive for a single second without being shot. If you die, the aliens don’t stop firing bullets and I respawned right into the path of them. Maybe the emulation is bad, but given my experience with Coleco’s LCDs, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

ZAXXON!!
Bandai (1982)
Gameplay Type: Shooter

Could be some weird space tennis game too for all I know.

I’ve never really cared for Zaxxon, so I was surprised that the LCD is one of the least bad LCDs. Notice I didn’t say “good.” I’d still rather suffer rectal prolapsing than be stuck with this as my only gaming option. BUT, at least this is a semi-competent shooter that feels somewhat vaguely like the arcade game. Shmups might actually work as an LCD. I’d like to try Space Invaders in this format, honestly. Maybe for Part V in 2024 (after making this joke, I posted the next three parts within 24 hours, go figure). Anyway, Zaxxon just doesn’t have excitement to it, which a shooter needs, but at least it’s fair and doesn’t just bleed you out right away like Galaxian does. Not awful, still not fun. Next!!

BURGERTIME!!
Bandai (1983)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase/Action-Arcade

One of the better character sprites for sure, if nothing else.

Burgertime feels a lot closer to getting it right, but like so many LCD games, the enemies just catch you too fast. A really weird aspect here is that the “drop the food” gameplay is here, but you have to press a button to cause the buns and patties to collapse. I don’t know why! Wouldn’t it make sense to just be able to walk across them like in the game? Yea. But, it doesn’t work that way. I couldn’t make any progress because the enemies are faster than you and you only get five salts, but the salts only work if they’re right next to you, and if they’re right next to you that means they’re about to score a contact with you and cost you a life. The #1 thing about LCD games: they shouldn’t try to directly adapt any game that REQUIRES animation. Burgertime does, and it’s unplayable as a result.

MORTAL KOMBAT!!
Tiger Electronics (1993)
Gameplay Type: Fighter

Yea, no. Let it be said: I put in a good faith effort here, but I’ve yet to play a single Tiger Electronics fighting/brawling game that I thought had any value at all. Myself and the computer AI were throwing punches and landing basically nothing. I was surprised at how many moves are offered (the full range: high and low kicks and punches) but the fact that I wasn’t getting a single hit in on the lowest difficulty (the AI beat me to the punch every time) and that all my matches ended with a time-out? I’m FINISHED with this one. Quality Gaming loses. Fatality!!

DOUBLE DRAGON!!
Tiger Electronics (1989)
Gameplay Type: Combative

What Superman should have done years ago.. drop kick Lex Luthor in the balls.

Walk left and punch and/or kick Lex Luthor until he blinks out of existence. Then walk left more and punch and/or kick Lex Luthor until he blinks out of existence. Then walk left more and punch and/or kick Lex Luthor until he blinks out of existence.. occasionally Lex Luthor is inside a door, but then you just punch or kick him until he blinks out of existence. And you thought Double Dragon III was the shits. Oh my God, what a piece of shit game.

GOLDEN AXE!!
Tiger Electronics (1989)
Gameplay Type: Combative

This one broke me. You walk left, and swing at enemies as they appear. If a skeleton shows up behind you, instead of doing the sensible thing, IE turning around, you instead dislocate your shoulders and just swing the sword that way. Good lord!! I started laughing so hard that I thought I might crack a rib. The funny thing about these Tiger games is that LCD games had been around for a decade, and the formulas that worked to create playable, somewhat enjoyable games were well established. They didn’t bother with ANY of that shit. This and Double Dragon are so stupidly brain dead simple that I can’t imagine anyone not under a fog of laughing gas could enjoy them.

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

“ARRRHH! I’M GONNA EATCHA LITTLE BIRD! ARRRHH!”

The thing that bugs me about Tiger Electronics games are they’re often so unimaginative. Move left, press fire button, keep moving right. There’s nothing dynamic or thrilling about this. Say what you will about Nintendo’s Game & Watch games, but they feel like there’s challenge and effort made. These are just so lazy and uninspired. This shit would have bombed in arcades in the 70s, and as a release made after a decade of figuring out how to make LCD game? It’s insulting and kind of disgusting, really. Karnov, based on a little-known arcade and NES game, feels so lazy. It’s a move right, jump and shoot game that they copied ad nauseam in lieu of, you know, effort.

ALTERED BEAST!!
Tiger Electronics (1990)
Gameplay Type: Combative

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You walk right and punch things to the left and right of you. There’s almost no gameplay here. BY GOLLY THIS IS A 100% ARCADE ACCURATE LCD! I kid. Actually, this might be the worst of all the punching-based Tiger games I’ve played so far, except maybe Mortal Kombat where literally nothing would happen for several excruciating minutes. There’s a horrible lag to it and it just feels like you’re barely interacting at all. If not for Dig Dug or Galaxian, this would be the worst game I played today.

BY GUM, THERE’S DECENT LCD GAMES!!

SPACE HARRIER II!!
Tiger Electronics (1990)
Gameplay Type: Shooter

By golly, they actually did it.

Do you know what frustrates me most about Tiger’s lazy, shitty, effortless shovelware? They actually were capable of making decent games. Take Space Harrier II, which will now be given the distinct honor of being the first ever LCD game I wouldn’t rather be dead than be stuck with. And mind you, I don’t even like Space Harrier, but this LCD gallery shooter actually works. It feels vaguely like the arcade game and retains the fun. It even has boss fights! How about that? It’s not very exciting and the timing is a bit jank, but this isn’t awful by any stretch, and for kids from households who couldn’t afford a Game Boy, they wouldn’t have to be embarrassed playing this one. It’s fine. Hallelujah!

Q*BERT!!
Parker Bros (1983)
Gameplay Type: @!#?@!

Well shiver me timbers: Q*Bert makes a great LCD game! Q*Bert by Parker Bros is a close approximation to the arcade game and not too bad at all. Once you get used to the controls (shit, it really is Q*Bert!), it feels like an LCD version of the arcade game. It works! Shifting the cube colors, dodging the eggs and snakes, and even jumping on the discs feels like an animation-free take on the original game. I’d basically rather play anything else, but this isn’t the worst thing to happen to me today. It’d not want to light myself on fire if I was stuck with only this for more than an hour. Good job, Parker Bros. Kids who had this in 1983 wouldn’t have to murder their parents if they were gifted this.

FROGGER!!
Coleco (1981)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

Fitting for a format where cross the road style games are probably the easiest to make quality games for, the king of cross the road is actually the most arcade-accurate LCD game I’ve ever played by a mile, and probably the greatest pure LCD game ever made. It works. It’s arcade-accurate. It didn’t have to compromise hardly anything from the arcade original. Most importantly: it’s actually really fun to play! If you were a kid who got Coleco’s table top Frogger under the Christmas tree in 1981, you were a pretty lucky kid. This is the best of gaming’s worst format, and the only LCD game I’ve ever gotten to say is fun without adding several “buts” to it. BUT, it’s also not my personal favorite..

GAUNTLET!!
Tiger Electronics (1989)
Gameplay Type: Adventure/Combative

Hail the Champion of LCD Gaming. You could say the (puts on shades) Gauntlet has been thrown down. Sorry.

Hey, wait a second.. this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Tiger Electronics is objectively shit. They’re not supposed to have a genuinely interesting concept, fun and exciting gameplay, and a release that I could find myself playing for fun, on my own time, without doing it for a special feature for this blog. What is happening here? Something is wrong. I’ve slipped into another universe or something. A universe where Tiger Electronics made a good game: Gauntlet.

Is it arcade accurate? No. It’s a totally different take. Basically a third person game, but it features a dynamic 3D maze, satisfactory combat (as far as animation-free combat goes), and it’s fun to locate keys and figure out uses for them. After I finished the final game I played for this feature, I reloaded Gauntlet and kept playing it. That really says it all, doesn’t it? Honestly, the existence of Gauntlet put a smile on my face, but it also infuriated me to no end. That they could get THIS creative with their work and chose not to? Disgusting, really. I’m absolutely floored that anyone longs to see this format make a comeback, BUT, if they had a game like Tiger’s Gauntlet (as opposed to pretty much anything else by them) I could understand how they see their childhood spent getting these LCD games from misguided aunts and uncles who knew you liked those newfangled video game thingies with slightly rosier-tinted glasses.

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UPDATE: Guess what? The prediction came true.. I found myself playing Gauntlet even more, just for fun. Seriously, I can’t stress enough what an impressive effort this is. There’s even secrets and bonus rooms and more than one breed of enemy. Calling this “shockingly fun” really understates how much I enjoyed this. It actually gives me hope for some of the games that haven’t been included in this now seven part feature. There’s a LOT of hype on Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, and others have name dropped Metal Gear, Mega Man II, and more. Look at how many games they made. It’s stunning.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with I want to play LSD games of the 80s., LCD Game Reviews, LCD Games of the 80s

Beasts of Maravilla Island (Review)

July 15, 2022 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

I spent a good part of 2021 drooling all over New Pokemon Snap. It was my no-doubt-about-it Game of the Year of 2021, because all I’ve ever cared about with video games is having the time of my life and not being “moved emotionally” or whatever everyone else’s choice did for them. The thing is though, people mistook my love of Snap for a love of photography gameplay. It wasn’t. New Pokemon Snap is really just a rail shooter where instead of firing bullets you’re capturing photons. Plus, I’m a sucker for Disneyland-style dark rides and New Pokemon Snap is basically a series of interactive dark rides that you don’t have to wait in line for an hour to ride. The secret to New Pokemon Snap’s magic is that it’s not just about the photography. That’s just the means to the end, like how the New York Knicks only really exist these days to keep tabs on Spike Lee’s whereabouts and to promote shitty indie bands.

Beasts of Maravilla Island uses the same formula as Pokemon for creating unique creatures: animal + unrelated animal = Thingamon. Like this otter mixed with a crocodile creature where the first thing that popped into my head was “thunder.. THUNDER.. THUNDERCROCS! HOOOOO!”

But, once New Pokemon Snap had me and my family roped in, the thing that kept us playing it FOR WEEKS (and hell, my Mom still plays it every day and has some global-ranked scores) was trying to get the highest scoring pictures. If you’re a game where the core gameplay mechanic is photography, but the actual pictures you take don’t matter at all, you’re really just a glorified scavenger hunt that’s going to run out of steam quickly. That’s Beasts of Maravilla Island, the indie photography game I snapped up (see what I did there?) for Nintendo Switch because it’s currently discounted. Really, comparing it to New Pokemon Snap isn’t fair, since they’re two different genres. Snap is a rail shooter, but Beasts is a full 3D adventure.. with creatures that look just like Pokemon. Seriously, a spooky deer keeps showing up and it’s so close to looking like Xerneas that it kind of gets uncomfortable.

Yikes!

Beasts is really short, consisting only of three game worlds that fly by quickly. That’s FINE, because this is meant to be a breezy, no-pressure light-hearted adventure and not every game has to be a 40 hour epic. In that time, not counting the instances where I seemingly locked the game up, I took pictures of almost everything. In fact, I was a bit startled when, after about ten minutes of walking around the first level, I got a notification that I had just taken a picture of every kind of plant on the stage. “Really?” I thought. Nothing was really hidden. It just all out in the open, and sometimes, I wasn’t even trying to get those pictures. Not only do you not need to take quality pictures, but you don’t even need to necessarily see what you’re taking photos of. You can just turn on the camera and scroll around, and when something new is in the frame, it says NEW right on the screen. Just take a picture and you’ll check whatever it is off the list. Even if it hasn’t loaded the sprite for it into the game engine, you’ll get credit. Check out this ten second clip, where I get credit for capturing a picture of a flower that isn’t even visible from the distance I’m at.

In my opinion, a photography game CANNOT WORK if "take GOOD pictures" isn't a requirement.

Want to know why?

Watch this.

No effort. The thing I'm shooting isn't even loaded into the game engine. Yet, it's now checked off my list. Not cool.#IGCReviews #BeastsOfMaravillaIsland pic.twitter.com/Z2NW8BS1ck

— Indie Gamer Chick (@IndieGamerChick) July 14, 2022

Well, that’s not fun! The photography is the entire hook of Beasts, but I took plenty of pictures of things that weren’t even rendered yet and got credit for them. Beasts of Maravilla Island is an ambitious game buried by technical limitations and haphazard execution. The island itself isn’t far off from a Disneyland-like setting, but my immersion was constantly being broken by frame rate hiccups, janky animation, or seeing that my character wasn’t physically touching the vine they were climbing up. Beasts of Maravilla Island looks great.. in still screenshots. But the world itself never feels authentic and alive, which you need if you want a game like this to work.

Well, the first two worlds look great in screenshots. The third and final world, which I completed in roughly 20 minutes, looks like cars from Cel Damage could pop by to frag me at any second. Also, this entire level felt like someone was snapping their fingers the entire time saying “come on, let’s wrap this shit up.”

The shame is, there’s actually a really good video game buried in this mess. The characters and animals are fun, and there’s even some nice puzzles involving guiding beams of light to flowers. The team who made this aren’t hacks by any means. They had a good idea, and it was just a little too ambitious for the resources they had. Really, Beasts needed more time to cook. The photograph system needed a point beyond being a scavenger hunt where just looking in the general direction of something new doesn’t count towards checking whatever off the list. I can’t imagine I’d ever want to just take pictures of the animals featured just for the sake of it. I need a reason, and the game doesn’t really give you one. There’s only three “featured” animals who you have to capture different behavior of, and the game sets you up with the scenarios to get those. Like, you want to see the Otter-Crocodile thingy doing a backflip? It gives you a rock to throw into the water to make it do the move. Easy peasy. Did you not even get the thing in frame and only barely captured the tip of its tail? It still counts. ✔️ Other creatures do things like run across water or whistle or show their plumage, but all that matters is checking them off the list.

This is like combining the Mime in the Box with the Mime with the Rope Ladder bit.

So, no, I didn’t like Beasts of Maravilla Island. And the stuff I mentioned already is hardly the only problems. The level design is dull and easy to get lost in. There’s majestic temples that fuck all happens in. The game sets up this mechanic where you get glowing flower pollen all over you to help lure things closer to you, but it feels like it’s inconsequential to actually getting photographs of animals. And ultimately, it just feels unfinished, rough around the edges, and directionless. It’s not fair to compare a small scale indie game to a blockbuster like New Pokemon Snap, and I’m not. As its own thing, Beasts of Maravilla Island is a photography game where the photography doesn’t even matter, and that’s just plain not any fun. That’s like doing a racing game where crossing the finish line doesn’t matter. You had one thing to do!

Beasts of Maravilla Island is not IGC Approved

Beasts of Maravilla Island was developed by Banana Bird Studios
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Steam

$4.99 (Normally $9.99) said the selfie mode never seemed to get another animal in the picture, so why even bother in the making of this review?

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with Beasts of Maravilla Island, Beasts of Maravilla Island PC Review, Beasts of Maravilla Island Review, Beasts of Maravilla Island Switch Review, Beasts of Maravilla Island Xbox Review, Really I'd only call one of the animals here a "beast"

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Final Rankings

GAME REVIEWS

1943 Kai: Midway Kaisen (1987) Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Avengers (1987) aka Avenger, aka Hissatsu Buaiken (Deadly Hooligan Fist) Designed by Takashi Nishiyama Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Black Tiger (1987) Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Block Block (1991) Designed by Shinji Sakashita, H.K., and M. Miyao

Capcom Sports Club (1997) Designed by Yoshifumi Fukuda

Chariot (1991) Game #2 of 3 from Three Wonders Designed by Shoei Okano

Darkstalkers Series (1994 – 1997)

Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (1994) Designed by Junichi Ohno Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1995) Designed by Junichi Ohno Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Don’t Pull (1991) Game #3 of 3 from Three Wonders Designed by Toshihiko Uda

Eco Fighters (1994) Designed by Keisuke Mori

Gun.Smoke (1985) Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Hyper Dyne Side Arms (1986) Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto & Noritaka Funamizu Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition (2003) Directed by Ryota Suzuki Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

The King of Dragons (1991) Directed by Tomoshi Sadamoto Also included in Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle

Knights of the Round (1991) Designed by Akira Nishitani Also Included in Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle

Last Duel (1988) Designed by Takashi Nishiyama

Magic Sword (1990) Designed by Yoshimi Ohnishi, Tomoshi Sadamoto, and Yoshiki Okamoto

Mega Man: The Power Battle (1995) Designed by Koji Ohkohara

Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (1996) Designed by Koji Ohkohara

Midnight Wanderers (1991) Game #1 of 3 from Three Wonders Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto

Pnickies (1994) Designed by Masanobu Tsukamoto

Rally 2011 LED Storm (1988) Designed by Tomoshi Sadamoto

Savage Bees (1985) aka Exed Exes Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Saturday Night Slam Masters (1993) Designed by Tetsuo Hara Directed by Takashi Sado

SonSon (1984) Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto Free to Play without purchase of Capcom Arcade Stadium 2 Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

The Speed Rumbler (1986) Designed by Tokuro Fujiwara & Yoshiki Okamoto Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Street Fighter (1987) Designed by Hiroshi Matsumoto Directed by Takashi Nishiyama Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors’ Dreams (1995) Designed by Noritaka Funamizu, Haruo Murata, and Hideaki Itsuno Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996) Designed by Noritaka Funamizu, Hidetoshi Ishizawa, Hidetoshi Ishizawa, and Katsuyuki Kanetaka Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Street Fighter Alpha 3 (1998) Directed by Naoto Ohta, Mamoru Ōhashi, Buruma, and Koji Okohara Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix (1997) Designed by Katsuhiro Eguchi, Naoto Ohta, and Mamoru Ōhashi Also Included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996) Designed by Naoto Ohta and Katsuhiro Eguchi Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection because.. um.. it says “fighter” I guess?

Tiger Road (1987) Designed by Tokuro Fujiwara

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PORTAL (2007)

PORTAL 2 (2011)

IS PORTAL: COMPANION COLLECTION GOOD?

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LIFEBOAT!! Nintendo Game & Watch (1983) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

TOWERING RESCUE!! Gakken (1981) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

SNOOPY!! Nintendo Table Top (1983) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

SNOOPY’S TENNIS!! Nintendo Game & Watch (1982) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

TURTLE BRIDGE!! Nintendo Game & Watch (1982) Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

BASEBALL!! and ENGINE ROOM!! and DEFENDO!! Vtech Explorer Time & Fun (198?) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

ROLLER COASTER!! Vtech (198?) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

CONDOR!! Vtech (1981) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

PIRATE!! and MONKEY!! Vtech (1981) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

PARACHUTE!! Nintendo Game & Watch (1981) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

PANCAKE!! Vtech (1981) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

BANANA!! and SLEEP WALKER!! Vtech Time & Fun (1981) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

ESCAPE!! Vtech (1981) Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

BOMB FIGHT!! Vtech Mini-Time & Fun (1982) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

RUSSIAN GAME & WATCH CLONES!! Angstrem (1980s) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

MICKEY MOUSE!! and DONKEY KONG CIRCUS!! Nintendo Game & Watch Panorama Series (1984) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate/Juggler

PENGUIN LAND!! by Bandai (1983) Gameplay Type: Versus Action

WILD MAN JUMP!! and MONKEY JUMP!! Vtech (1981 and 1982) Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

DONKEY ANGLER!! Gakken (1982?) Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

GRAB MAN!! Unknown Developer (1980s? 90s?) Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

LAS VEGAS!! Bandai (1981) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

TOM & JERRY POPPER!! Gakken (1983) Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

MOTOR CROSS!! Unknown Manufacturer (19??) Gameplay Type: Racer

ISIDORO & SONJA – CACCIA AL LADRO!! aka HEATHCLIFF & SONJA – HUNT THE THIEF Vtech (1982) Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

ISIDORO & SONJA – IL FUOCO!! aka HEATHCLIFF & SONJA – FIRE Vtech (1982) Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

CRAZY CHEWY!! Vtech (1982) Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

CHICKY WOGGY!! Vtech (Tini-Arcade 1981/Arcade Time & Fun 1982) Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

GALAXY II!! Epoch (1981) Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

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SONIC THE HEDGEHOG!!Tiger Electronics (1992)Gameplay Type: Combative

1943 Kai: Midway Kaisen (1987)
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Avengers (1987)
aka Avenger, aka Hissatsu Buaiken (Deadly Hooligan Fist)
Designed by Takashi Nishiyama
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Black Tiger (1987)
Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Block Block (1991)
Designed by Shinji Sakashita, H.K., and M. Miyao

Capcom Sports Club (1997)
Designed by Yoshifumi Fukuda

Chariot (1991)
Game #2 of 3 from Three Wonders
Designed by Shoei Okano

Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (1994)
Designed by Junichi Ohno
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge (1995)
Designed by Junichi Ohno
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Don’t Pull (1991)
Game #3 of 3 from Three Wonders
Designed by Toshihiko Uda

Eco Fighters (1994)
Designed by Keisuke Mori

Gun.Smoke (1985)
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Hyper Dyne Side Arms (1986)
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto & Noritaka Funamizu
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition (2003)
Directed by Ryota Suzuki
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection

The King of Dragons (1991)
Directed by Tomoshi Sadamoto
Also included in Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle

Knights of the Round (1991)
Designed by Akira Nishitani
Also Included in Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle

Last Duel (1988)
Designed by Takashi Nishiyama

Magic Sword (1990)
Designed by Yoshimi Ohnishi, Tomoshi Sadamoto, and Yoshiki Okamoto

Mega Man: The Power Battle (1995)
Designed by Koji Ohkohara

Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (1996)
Designed by Koji Ohkohara

Midnight Wanderers (1991)
Game #1 of 3 from Three Wonders
Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto

Pnickies (1994)
Designed by Masanobu Tsukamoto

Rally 2011 LED Storm (1988)
Designed by Tomoshi Sadamoto

Savage Bees (1985)
aka Exed Exes
Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Saturday Night Slam Masters (1993)
Designed by Tetsuo Hara
Directed by Takashi Sado

SonSon (1984)
Directed by Yoshiki Okamoto
Free to Play without purchase of Capcom Arcade Stadium 2
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

The Speed Rumbler (1986)
Designed by Tokuro Fujiwara & Yoshiki Okamoto
Also included in Capcom Arcade Cabinet

Street Fighter (1987)
Designed by Hiroshi Matsumoto
Directed by Takashi Nishiyama
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors’ Dreams (1995)
Designed by Noritaka Funamizu, Haruo Murata, and Hideaki Itsuno
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996)
Designed by Noritaka Funamizu, Hidetoshi Ishizawa, Hidetoshi Ishizawa, and Katsuyuki Kanetaka
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Street Fighter Alpha 3 (1998)
Directed by Naoto Ohta, Mamoru Ōhashi, Buruma, and Koji Okohara
Also included in Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection

Super Gem Fighter Mini Mix (1997)
Designed by Katsuhiro Eguchi, Naoto Ohta, and Mamoru Ōhashi
Also Included in Capcom Fighting Collection

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (1996)
Designed by Naoto Ohta and Katsuhiro Eguchi
Also included in Capcom Fighting Collection because.. um.. it says “fighter” I guess?

Tiger Road (1987)
Designed by Tokuro Fujiwara

LIFEBOAT!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1983)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

TOWERING RESCUE!!
Gakken (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

SNOOPY!!
Nintendo Table Top (1983)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

SNOOPY’S TENNIS!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

TURTLE BRIDGE!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1982)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

BASEBALL!! and ENGINE ROOM!! and DEFENDO!!
Vtech Explorer Time & Fun (198?)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

ROLLER COASTER!!
Vtech (198?)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

CONDOR!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

PIRATE!! and MONKEY!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

PARACHUTE!!
Nintendo Game & Watch (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

PANCAKE!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

BANANA!! and SLEEP WALKER!!
Vtech Time & Fun (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

ESCAPE!!
Vtech (1981)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

BOMB FIGHT!!
Vtech Mini-Time & Fun (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

RUSSIAN GAME & WATCH CLONES!!
Angstrem (1980s)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

MICKEY MOUSE!! and DONKEY KONG CIRCUS!!
Nintendo Game & Watch Panorama Series (1984)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate/Juggler

PENGUIN LAND!!
by Bandai (1983)
Gameplay Type: Versus Action

WILD MAN JUMP!! and MONKEY JUMP!!
Vtech (1981 and 1982)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

DONKEY ANGLER!!
Gakken (1982?)
Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

GRAB MAN!!
Unknown Developer (1980s? 90s?)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

LAS VEGAS!!
Bandai (1981)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

TOM & JERRY POPPER!!
Gakken (1983)
Gameplay Type: Spinning-Plate

MOTOR CROSS!!
Unknown Manufacturer (19??)
Gameplay Type: Racer

ISIDORO & SONJA – CACCIA AL LADRO!!
aka HEATHCLIFF & SONJA – HUNT THE THIEF
Vtech (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

ISIDORO & SONJA – IL FUOCO!!
aka HEATHCLIFF & SONJA – FIRE
Vtech (1982)
Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate

CRAZY CHEWY!!
Vtech (1982)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

CHICKY WOGGY!!
Vtech (Tini-Arcade 1981/Arcade Time & Fun 1982)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

GALAXY II!!
Epoch (1981)
Gameplay Type: Gallery Shooter

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG!!
Tiger Electronics (1992)
Gameplay Type: Combative

BACK TO THE FUTURE!!
Tiger Electronics (1988)
Gameplay Type: Racer

INDY 500!!
Tiger Electronics R-Zone (1995)
Gameplay Type: Racer

DORAEMON!!
Bandai (1983)
Gameplay Type: Maze Chase

ULTRAMAN
(1983, Bandai)
Gameplay Type: Dodger/Spinning-Plate

ROBOCOP 2!!
Tiger Electronics (1990)
Gameplay Type: Combative

ROBOCOP 3!!
Tiger Electronics (1992)
Gameplay Type: Combative

SWAMP THING!!
Tiger Electronics (1991)
Gametype: Combative/Adventure

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

JUDGE DREDD!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Combative

THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS!!
Tiger Electronics (1993)
Gameplay Type: Dodger

SUPER DOUBLE DRAGON!!
Tiger Electronics (1993)
Gameplay Type: Combative

THE INCREDIBLE CRASH TEST DUMMIES!!
Tiger Electronics (1993)
Gameplay Type: Racer

BATMAN FOREVER: DOUBLE DOSE OF DOOM!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Combative

MC HAMMER: U CAN’T TOUCH THIS!
Tiger Electronics (1991)
Gameplay Type: Rhythm

GARFIELD!!
Konami (1991)
Gameplay Type: Dodger

KINGMAN!!
Tomy/Tandy (1982)
Gameplay Type: Cross the Road

GOLDENEYE 007!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Combative

SPACE JAM!!
Tiger Electronics (1995)
Gameplay Type: Basketball