Tag: 1990s

A Thousand Words: Riding Fight

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Riding Fight

Taito’s Riding Fight is a very unique video game.

It tries to match Mode Seven Style “flat but three dimension” fast movement with brawling. While it doesn’t always succeed, I give it credit for trying, and the presentation and music are excellent. The plot involves superhero-mercs-whoever on hoverboards fighting evil, from Momar Gaddafi (yes the second boss is based on him) to Japanese mystic princesses. The final section involves saving “the young mistress of an important man”, which I really hope was a mistranslation. Otherwise it would be a unique twist on the “Save the princess” (what would his wife think?)

The novelty and ambition alone makes this game worth it.

Review: The Gardner Heist

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The Gardner Heist

Ulrich Boser’s The Gardner Heist is about the largest unsolved robbery by price ever. In 1990, two thieves went into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston and then left an array of paintings worth (albeit by the less than exact standards of painting appraisal) $500,000,000. And as far as concrete undisputed knowledge goes, that’s it. The case has never been solved, zero of the paintings have been found, and not one court-worthy piece of evidence has been made.

I think you can see the problem with someone making a book about this. It’s like DB Cooper. All we know is that a guy jumped out of a plane. From there it’s nothing but speculation and rumor. Boser tries (the sections on how hard it is to track and recover stolen art are excellent), but there’s only so much one can do with basically nothing. A lot of the book is pure padding, which is understandable but not fun to read.

I can’t hold any of Boser’s choices against him. It’s just not a very concrete topic for obvious reasons.

A Thousand Words: Emergency Call Ambulance

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Emergency: Call Ambulance

Sega’s 1999 Emergency Call Ambulance is a perfect footnote for what the arcade would become. Released alongside Crazy Taxi that same year, it has the same basic gameplay: Drive very fast under a time limit-in this case to get the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible. Looking at it and Crazy Taxi (which was reviewed much more positively) shows the obsolescence of arcade machines by this point: By now consoles could deliver effectively the same experience at home, so arcades had to sell elaborate experiences unrelated to the actual game.

This is something I’d still have spent money on to pass time. But it’s one of those ‘post-1945 propeller fighters’ that had the problem of simply being too late. Besides, it has a pet Dalmatian that accompanies one patient and gives a subtitled thank-you speech in dog. How can you not like that.

A Thousand Words: Initial D

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Initial D

One of the most famous car racing works of fiction and the biggest reason why people know the ‘eurobeat’ subgenre of electronic music, Initial D is the reason why there are so many memes of cars and “RUNNING IN THE NINETIES” and “GAS GAS GAS”. It’s the story of ‘touge’ racing through winding mountain roads, tofu deliveryman/prodigy driver Takumi Fujiwara, and the Toyota Corolla AE86, which thanks to it has gained popularity well beyond what a mid-80s Corolla would get.

Seriously, it’s like how in Red Storm Rising the Iceland invasion was a crazy jury-rigged gamble but so much else treats it like normal and standard. The whole point is that it’s an underestimated clunker. It’s like a tank novel with an M48 or T-54 or something with an ace crew and everyone thinks it’s the tank. But I digress.

This is basically an action show/manga with cars instead of glowing superheroes. The most famous “First Stage” initial (no pun intended) anime adaptation holds this to the core: With early CG and blaring music, characters dramatically take actions graaaaaduallly and somehow have the ability to hold huge monologues and conversations while roaring through perilous streets. It honestly sounds better than it actually is, with the pattern of ‘how is this ’86 winning’ being worn down even then.

But still, that music…

Review: The Athlete

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The Athlete

With football/handegg season now upon us, I figure a sports book is in order. As good as any other is Jon Finkel’s The Athlete, a biography of Charlie Ward, a quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy and then went on to a long and successful pro career…. as a basketball player. Especially since, by basketball standards anyway, Ward wasn’t even very tall.

To get the negative out of the way, this is a rose-tinted view of him that excuses one of his most infamous incidents (which thankfully just amounted to him saying something dumb and not doing anything). It also praises him as if he was Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson, which is just a little too much in my eyes. But it’s still an interesting look at a man who succeeded in two places where almost everyone can’t succeed in one.

A final interesting piece is that Finkel doesn’t really try to answer the counterfactual everyone is going to ask: Could Ward have been a viable NFL quarterback? Could have been Russell Wilson two decades earlier, or an undersized runt who’d get crushed by pro defenders? The correct answer is “We don’t know”, but it’s a little disappointing to not even consider it.

While not the best book, this is a good look at someone I knew growing up from his time on the Knicks.

A Thousand Words: Big Fight

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Big Fight: Big Trouble in the Atlantic Ocean

On one hand, the 1992 arcade brawler Big Fight can be viewed as nothing but a mechanically bland copycat of Final Fight and the like. While this is true, it’s also very hard to deny that the game is also a very weird and bizarre eccentric game with a premise that could have been written by Jon Land, graphics that fit said style perfectly, and translation terrible even by the standards of the day that weirdly adds to the charm.

See, the entire game takes place on a cruise ship/battleship/supervillain base called the “SKELETON CREW”. There are three protagonists with designs that aren’t anything to write home about the standard fast/strong/balanced differences. The normal enemies likewise are standard fare… but then come the bosses. They not only include a sumo-kabuki and an ancient Egyptian mummy-wizard, but the big twist is that after each defeat, everyone except the final boss becomes a playable character.

Every one has the same dialogue, repeated here verbatim: “[boss]: ‘Now I came to my sense. Can you take me into partnership? [character who beat the boss]: Sure.”

It’s not explained if they were mind controlled or whatever, but yeah. The sprites and backgrounds are not ‘good’ in terms of pure detail, but they’re bright and do exactly what they need to do. The ship has a variety of zoos, gardens, gyms, and the like to rival Spaceball One.

Is this a good game to actually play? No better than other ones of its time. Is it fun to look at? Oh yeah.

A Thousand Words: Double Dragon 3

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Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone

Double Dragon basically made the brawler what it was. Unfortunately, its position at the height of beat em ups was very short lived. By the third game, an externally developed one called “The Rosetta Stone” that replaces the postapocalyptic streets with a world tour, it had been left behind by the likes of Final Fight. Really far behind.

If Final Fight has fluid controls that only seem slightly worse or clunky now than they did over thirty years ago, this feels like someone at the time who played both would have noticed it. The characters just move like they’re pieces on grooved slots (maybe it was even programmed like that). On top of it, being able to buy power ups with real quarters made this one of the first games with microtransactions.

So yeah, there’s a reason why Double Dragon fell out of favor. It didn’t make good games, and this was definitely not a good game.

Review: Trial By Fire

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Harold Coyle’s Trial by Fire is about a…. second Mexican-American war? Uhh? Oh, it was published in 1992. That explains everything. Besides the (long) setup and (shorter) conflict, we get one of the most controversial cheap thriller characters beginning here: Female infantry commander Nancy Kozak, who has a less than ideal reputation among Coyle’s readers.

Sadly, the book once against reinforces my view of Coyle as a one-hit wonder whose Team Yankee, magisterial as it was, could not be exceeded or equaled by any other book by the same author. It’s a weird anti-Goldilocks mixture of either too fast or too slow, and the understandable but contrived background does it no favors. Hate to say it, but… just read Team Yankee again, IMO.

Review: Rust Skies

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Rust Skies

TK Blackwood delivers another World War III treat in Rust Skies. I loved the unusual-for-Fuldapocalyptic standards location in Turkey (which was, after all, one of the few direct NATO-USSR borders). I also liked the timely political dilemma about an enhanced American military draft, which is both plausible and interesting. It does stuff a lot of plot and characters into a small package but rarely overwhelms and never feels bad.

The big “problem” is that it ends on a cliffhanger. Oh well! I’ve done it myself, so I guess I can’t complain.

Review: Nothing Last Forever

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Nothing Lasts Forever

Sidney Sheldon’s Nothing Lasts Forever is the worst book of his I’ve read since The Other Side of Midnight. The story of female doctors in a California hospital, romance, drama, and of course murder, it has all of his weaknesses but very few of his strengths. Namely it’s overloaded with the “pop” part of “pop epic” while totally lacking the “epic” part.

It’s less pretentious than Midnight but otherwise has the same problems. His female main characters are simply wicked or shallow instead of ambitious and powerful. That combined with low stakes and a decided lack of interest makes it hard to care about anyone or anything.

So it seems like he was in the decline by this point. But that’s understandable, as nothing lasts forever.