Tag: Video Game

A Thousand Words: Tough Turf

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In 1989, Final Fight revolutionized the arcade brawler. In that same year, a game called Tough Turf showed just how much Final Fight revolutionized the genre. The game has… no story. Just a well dressed person beating up a bunch of less well dressed people.

Do you like stupid arbitrary game-over restrictions even by arcade standards? Controls terrible even at the time? Platforming that Final Fight mercifully stopped? Then Tough Turf is the game for you. About the only good thing is the jumpy upbeat music. That and the weird conclusion where the would-be damsel in distress is actually the final boss and the ending is just a picture of her slumped body.

Just play Final Fight instead.

A Thousand Words: The Simpsons Wrestling

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The Simpsons Wrestling

Simpsons games have a reputation for a few hits (Hit and Run, the original arcade game) and a lot of misses. One of those is The Simpsons Wrestling, one of the last Playstation 1 games released. By this point, a lot of wrestling games had been made. A lot of 3d and 2d fighting games for it had been made. A lot of Simpsons games were just low-quality knockoffs of the big popular genres, from skateboarding to platforming.

This is at least interestingly bad. It’s a 3d fighting game whose only actual “wrestling” is a pin incorporated in the final knockout. The characters are laughably imbalanced, and the action is unhinged (and not in a good way). Simpsons characters with crude early 3D models pinball around the wrestling ring. Yet the worst thing is the moveset. You have only three attacks, something that Street Fighter 1 had more than twice of.

But if “it’s interestingly bad” is the best one can say about this, then… it’s bad.

A Thousand Words: Chains of Freedom

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Chains of Freedom

the XCOM-esque game Chains of Freedom is a new turn-based strategy game that I’ve just completed. It’s well, uh, something. So I wouldn’t have finished the game if it was bad , but man is there so much that drags it and keeps it from being what could have been. A lot of it.

The first issue is the story and setting. Do you want Brown Age throwback graphics of one Cyrillic wasteland after another? Do you want a plot and setting that’s what you’d get if you prompted an AI to go “Make me a science fiction setting based on Command and Conquer, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro, and throw in a couple of general cliches for good measure”? Do you want characters who are either dull or who you’ll hate from the start?

Then there’s the gameplay. Probably the most distinct thing about it compared to other XCOM-likes is that you have to scrounge and craft for items between battles. This is one of those things that’s a lot better in theory than in practice. Other than that, it’s a pretty standard “cover turn based strategy.” Which is a problem when you get into the final act and the game throws monotonous giant swarm after monotonous giant swarm at you. As if to compensate, the last few encounters and the final boss are anticlimactically easy.

This is a 49% game. And as the last couple of Super Bowls have shown for the team that bears that name, close doesn’t let you win. (Hey, gotta drop a football reference on NFL Draft day!)

A Thousand Words: Buckshot Roulette

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Buckshot Roulette

A minimalist and creepy horror/puzzle/party (seriously) game, Buckshot Roulette is “what if instead of a revolver, you used a randomly loaded pump-action shotgun in a game of wits with a creepy big-teethed guy?”

While it might sound like a trolling anti-game, it actually works as a combination of luck and skill. Power ups can see which shell is chambered, can eject a shell, and so on. Whoever can get lucky the most wins. While this isn’t the deepest game, it works for what it is.

A Thousand Words: OutRun

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OutRun

Sega’s legendary car driving game OutRun was an arcade time attack game where you control a couple in a Ferrari trying to make it to the end of a series of branching paths before the clock runs out. That is the least impressive thing about it. The most impressive thing is that a game in 1986, even an arcade game, manages to still look fresh and well animated to this day, and have things like a changeable radio and diverging paths. Remember, the console stuff at this time was the likes of Mach Rider.

It took over a decade to finally be able to make an arcade-quality home port of it. Which speaks to how limit-pushing it was/is. While today its most direct legacy of giant arcade machine driving games with steering wheels and frequently even pedals is viewed as outdated kitsch, every game with vehicles owes a lot to this.

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.

A Thousand Words: Road 96

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Road 96

The game Road 96 is an adventure game in the style of the old Telltale ones where you walk around, do dialog choices, and play the occasional quick time/minigame as one of a series of teenage runaways trying to escape the country of Petria in the mid-1990s. You go through one somewhat different set of campaigns which you can change through varying degrees, either by dialogue choices/actions or picking how you’re going to travel (via hitchhiking, transport, a car if available, or if you’re really crazy, walking).

On one hand, I saw basically every plot twist coming and the setting is a little iffy. Not the graphics, which are good for what they are and have an excellent visual design. Petria is a semi-eastern European country (its strongman leader looks like Brezhnev) whose residents have the demographics and style of 21st Century Americans. And for a desperate-to-escape country, it really only resembles a moderately lower-class area of the West.

The characters make up for all of it, as they combine quirks with genuinely hidden depth. While the story is a little janky due to the nature of the gameplay and has the adventure game problem of your choices ultimately not mattering that much to the main plot, it works and more importantly can jump between tones in scenes without it being seeming forced or jarring.

So yeah, I had a lot of fun with this game, even if it’s not normally my style.

A Thousand Words: Wario Land 3

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Wario Land 3

Wario Land 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. Wario Land 3, coming out on the preceding Game Boy Color not long before, is not. This is one of those games that you could tell the developers really just needed more power and focus and it would click. With the GBA and a clearer focus, it worked. Here it didn’t.

This is less linear than Wario Land 4 and has the gimmick in that Wario can’t actually get killed (but can get knocked back and cost the player time that way). The problem with losing time instead of losing health is obvious, especially since WL4 didn’t have any absolute game overs. In fact, this game can be described as slow, slowly moving and slowly backtracking in the semi-open world. A lot of this is probably due to the 8 bit GBC’s limitations, but that only makes it dated.

Thankfully, the graphics are very good for the hardware limitations and do not feel dated, and the chiptune soundtrack is beautifully quirky and excellent. The game just doesn’t really gel and has the “misfortune” of being followed up by a classic.

A Thousand Words: Mach Rider

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, Review1 Comment

Mach Rider

Like many video games, Mach Rider was a minor hit for Nintendo in the mid-1980s and then languished forgotten until Smash Bros. revived it. The game is a pretty crude but impressive-for-the-time ride along a twisting track and dodge and destroy the evil giant tricycles until you eventually fail, but it has a couple of quirks.

The first is that it was one of the first games to have a level editor, even if it was only in Japan and very limited in practice there. The second is that it has a vague story (there’s minor justifications for you fighting back against an alien invasion in the various track missions) but no ending. The third and most interesting is that the titular rider has been alternately depicted as male and female (the former being in screens showing a helmeted but clearly male figure and the Smash Bros. Melee trophy using ‘he’ while the latter is a female biker in a piece of official art and a woman in the arcade version that’s implied to be a Mac Rider). I guess the different color riders are different people.

Of course, back in the day I remembered the Mach Rider theme as an alternate stage track in Smash Bros. that I loved and nothing else. Which can be said about a lot of things.

Wither GTA?

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With the official trailer for the next Duke Nukem Forever Grand Theft Auto 6 finally being out and the game having a vague ‘sometime next year’ release date as of this post, I’m reflecting on how uh, “meh” a lot of people are about it. Since it’s been over a literal decade since the release of the previous installment, which is about as much time between GTA III and V. Back in the day, when we had to walk uphill both ways, for people’s consensus to be “ok, something to look out for” at best and dread at worst would be as unthinkable as the Cubs winning the World Series. But here we are.

So what happened?

  1. Diminishing returns in graphics making it harder to razzle-dazzle people with its visual brilliance.
  2. A decade of both seeing the issues in the series and seeing more open world games to the point where it’s arguably played out.
  3. GTA Online, a monkeys paw that brought Rockstar piles of money at the expense of reputation. GTA V was able to continue getting griefers and Xbox Live Kids to buy shinier and shinier gimzos with real money, at the same time making it a joke to everyone else. And not the good kind.
  4. The issue of what tone to adopt, where a mixture of blended ChatGPT-made (ok, I might be a little hard on the AI) scrambled crime drama mixed with juvenile ‘shocking’ Bart Simpson meets Dennis Rodman antics that were a little edgy in 2001 that the series previous had has aged horribly…. but with reasonable confidence that what’s left of Rockstar might not be able to do something differently better.

I still think it’ll be playable, make a gargantuan amount of money, and look good. But the old-time hype is just gone.