Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe

February 8th, 2010

“Speedball” was something we would play every year in gym class, and for those of you who never experienced it, the main thing you need to remember about the game is that, much like the Humpty Dance, no two gym teachers would ever have us play it the same way.  Usually, it was kind of like soccer, with teams trying to kick a ball into a goal, except you were allowed to use your hands if the ball came up off the ground.  Sometimes, it was more like football, with players trying to catch the ball in an end zone.  Aspects of dodgeball were occasionally involved.  You might play with everyone all at once, or there may be substitutes, who in some (but not all) versions you would be allowed to pass the ball to in a pinch.  And one time we played it with Nerf Frisbees and it was apparently perfectly legal for the girls to beat the hell out of the boys, since the gym teacher didn’t call any penalties for it.  By the way, thanks for that variation, Miss Blake – at least now I know what it feels like to be mauled by a flock of harpies.

Now while a sport with ever-changing rules could theoretically make for an awesome Genesis game – Infinitely customizable!  No two games are ever the same! – the designers played it safe and went in a different direction for Speedball 2:Brutal Deluxe, giving us a fixed set of rules that don’t change from game to game.  Can’t say I blame them, as most “real” sports don’t rewrite their rulebooks every year either, with the obvious exception of the NHL.

Sports of the future will be 75% more metallic.

Speedball in the world of Sega Genesis plays similar to soccer, except with players running with the ball in their hands and throwing it either to teammates or into the net.  As you may recall from the previous paragraph, this was one of the many versions of speedball I was a bit familiar with already.  Really though, that was more a matter of probability than anything else.  You could describe pretty much any activity at all and chances are it would have been like some version of speedball I’ve played in gym class.

Of course, the biggest difference between the Speedball I played in school and the game represented here is that the Genesis version takes place in the future.  Specifically, 2022.  There seems to be a rule amongst developers that any video game that invents a new sport must take place in the future.  Because apparently nobody could possibly imagine a world exactly like our own present day, except with one new sport in it.  Such a concept would be far too taxing on our imaginations.

And of course, if it takes place in the future, then things are going to be a bit different than they are now.  For one thing, everyone’s equipment must be made out of metal.  That’s only logical – for as long as they’ve existed, sports have always striven for equipment that is lighter, more flexible and enhances the athletes’ ability to perform – and what material possibly achieve this better than good old metal?  Naturally, a metal suit of armor, being a cutting-edge, futuristic piece of technology never seen before, is so expensive the teams can’t really afford them, so fans offer financial support not only through ticket and merchandise sales, but by actually throwing cash onto the playing field during games for the players to pick up.  Apparently “making it rain” is going to be just as popular, if not more so, in the near future.

Ultimately, one cannot play Speedball 2 and not feel a bit let down about human progress over the last 19 years.  Back in 1991, when the game was first released, it seemed perfectly believable that all of this could happen by 2022.  But we’re more than halfway to that date now, and there still isn’t a consensus on how speedball is even supposed to be played, let alone an organized league.  It’s beginning to seem far-fetched that in the next 12 years there could be anything even remotely resembling this game in real life.  How can the world be ready for armor-clad athletes playing for teams like “Brutal Deluxe” and “Violent Desire” when today’s sports seem so tame by comparison?  In a sports world that condemns athletes like Pac-Man Jones, can we really expect fans to not only embrace his behavior, but mimic it?  There was a time when I wanted to believe so, but these days I find myself having serious doubts.

Then again, maybe my disappointment stems more from the fact that this game just isn’t nearly as good as I remembered it being.  This was one of my favorite games back when I was a teenager, but playing it now, I have no idea why.  The control is loose and generally limits you to one action (throwing the ball on offense, slide tackling on defense), the game changes the player you’re controlling without warning, and you can only see a tiny, tiny portion of the play area – not really enough to find open teammates or scope out where your opponents are.  It’s almost as if the people who made it had originally tried to make a soccer game, and then when it turned out to be neither much like soccer or any fun, they decided just to change some things around and call it a brand new sport.

All those things would matter if the game had any kind of strategy to it at all, but since it’s almost completely mindless, I guess it’s not a big deal.  That’s probably not the best way to compensate such shortcomings, though.  I guess nobody suggested “make the game not suck” at their brainstorming sessions.

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Soldiers of Fortune

February 8th, 2010

Brad: Ugh.  There’s few things I hate more than when a game gives the impression of  allowing you multiple ways to solve it and places to explore, but in reality is just dragging you along by the nose from one scripted event to another.  You see this in a lot of 1st person shooters on the PC – there will be a factory level with the convenient hole in the fence that leads to an area where someone just happened to leave a big wooden plank right across that gap that would otherwise be too big to jump across (Half-Life 2, I’m looking in your direction here), which leads to a wall you can’t possibly jump over, but wouldn’t you know it – there just happens to be some stackable crates nearby.  Eventually this will bring you to a rusty grate that naturally breaks apart after a few whacks with your trusty crowbar.  Some people really like these kinds of games – it feels like they’re discovering things and solving puzzles, but in reality, there’s only one possible course of action, and it’s generally so obvious that the designers might as well have painted neon green arrows along the floor.

Multiple levels of some of the most realistic looking dirt ever seen on the Genesis!

Anyway, Soldiers of Fortune is one of those kinds of games, except with an overhead perspective.  Oh, and instead of solving puzzles, you just kind of wander around until you find keys, which magically make walls disappear and allow you to go farther.  You know what though?  This game actually was pretty fun at one time.  You know, back in 1985 when it was called Gauntlet.

Stryker: Hey, if you want me to explore these levels, and do all this backtracking to find new areas that opened up, why not do me a favor and at least not make them all look exactly alike?  That would make it a little easier to not get disoriented.  And if for some reason you can’t pull off that modest feat, at least give me something more interesting to look at than level after level of bugs, primordial swamps, and varying shades of gray.

Mr. Do!: As always, overhead shooting and exploration go together like ice cream and getting hit by a car.

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Out Run

February 5th, 2010

Brad: Back when I was in 9th grade, we watched a movie about the dangers of underage drinking.  Whenever they came on the subject of drunk driving, they used footage of the game Out Run to illustrate the point, and ended by showing one of the game’s infamously spectacular crashes, in which car veers off the road and flips over, ejecting the passengers.  But that’s totally the wrong message.  Out Run has nothing at all to do with drunk driving – there’s no mention of booze in the game anywhere, and if anything, the cars are actually TOO responsive, which is the opposite effect of what drinking is supposed to do to your driving ability.  No, the real lesson that Out Run teaches us is the awesomeness of speeding while not wearing seat belts.

Remember kids, you ARE invincible.

Stryker: The one thing that’s always really bothered me about Out Run is that it forces you to shift between a “high” and “low” gear as you drive.  What’s the point?  You could argue that since real Ferrari’s don’t have automatic transmissions, neither should the ones in Out Run.  But I refuse to believe that a game with cars that can turn on a dime at 150 mph, and can flip through the air and land upside without being destroyed decided that adding a 2-speed transmission was the key to ultimate realism.  And if that’s not the reason, then we have to conclude that the designers genuinely thought shifting made the game more fun.  With such a skewed idea of what “fun” is, I’m amazed the rest of the game ended up being as halfway decent as it is.

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Mega Turrican

February 4th, 2010

Brad: Usually when you take a couple of things that are great individually and combine them together, one of two things happens.  Either they’re totally awesome – think Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups – or else they’re incompatible and it’s a complete disaster, like chocolate cake and hardcore pornography.  Although to be fair, chocolate cake doesn’t really combine well with much of anything.  Anyway, for whatever reason, there usually isn’t much of a middle ground in these situations, just one of the two extremes.  So when I tell you that Mega Turrican combines gameplay from two beloved NES classics, Contra and Bionic Commando, it is a reason for both excitement and trepidation, kind of like the feeling you would get if you were going to a NHL game but the arena was in a really bad neighborhood.  You know, like the New Jersey Devils.  Except I don’t know that if anyone would actually get excited about going to a hockey game involving the Devils.  So more like going to a Detroit Red Wings game, I guess…  I mean, assuming they weren’t playing the Devils that night.

Hey, don’t ask me how a giant missile came out of that little gun.  It just did.

The weird thing about Mega Turrican, however, is that it is neither great nor terrible.  It’s just pretty good.  Which is all very confusing in a way.  Simple mathematics tell us that Bionic Commando plus Contra should equal awesome.  There are some things that would explain a deviation from that formula, but none of them fit – the styles of gameplay complement each other rather nicely, and the execution of this concept is handled pretty well.  So the conclusion we have to draw is that Mega Turrican is somehow breaking the laws of mathematics, and that can’t possibly be good.  Because once people stop respecting the law, we’ll have anarchy.  Not exactly sure how that works with the laws of math – maybe 2+2 will start equaling 7.  Or maybe it means that Isaac Newton will rise from the grave and stab you in the leg.  Neither one is desirable.

What can explain this, then?  How can a game that combines the best aspects of two awesome games, and executes this concept seamlessly, be anything other that the greatest game ever made?  We’ll probably never know for sure, but this screenshot from the intro may provide a clue:

So there you go.  Just goes to prove that an anime influence can ruin anything.

Or maybe not.  A closer look revels that Mega Turrican’s problem might be that the idea of “combining” two games seems to have been lost on the developers.  The game starts off strong, with the first stage blending the rope swinging of Bionic Commando with the frantic, run and gun action of Contra.  But then the next two stages abandon the swinging almost entirely, and the stage after that relies on it almost exclusively with little action at all.  One might conclude that a world designed by Factor 5 would be dreadful one devoid of true combinations of any sort – a package of Reese’s Cup would come with one all peanut butter one and one all chocolate, instead of narwhals we would have only unicorns and whales, and Combos… well, there wouldn’t even be Combos.  It’s almost too tragic to imagine.

Hmmm, this seems… familiar.

Stryker: One other reason this game may not have lived up to expectations is that it both of the games it took influence from were really well-made, and Mega Turrican, while not bad, isn’t quite up to those high standards.  Sure, it’s like Contra, but it isn’t nearly as good as Contra, and the same can be said of the Bionic Commando aspects as well.  If these styles had been blended more fluidly, it wouldn’t have been as noticeable, but taken separately as they generally are, it sticks out.  You’re basically playing one level that’s a knock-off of one game, followed by a level that’s a lesser version of the other.

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NBA Jam Series

February 3rd, 2010

Side note, of all the games in the NBA Jam series, these were the editor’s favorites:

Brad: NBA Jam Tournament Edition

Stryker: NBA Jam

Brad: Like just about any decade, there are a lot of things from the 90s that we look back on and say “What the hell were we thinking?”  Don’t get me wrong, there was crap back then that we knew was crap all along and never really caught on – like Joey Lawrence’s solo album.  I’m talking about stuff that was legitimately popular, like Blossom, the show that gave us Joey Lawrence in the first place.  That show got decent ratings for a few years.  What the hell?

Or Zubaz pants.  Hard to imagine now, but those things were one of the hottest fashions of the early 90s.  Why?  Well, it’s important to remember that in a lot of ways, the early 90s were really, really, awful.  A recent ad playing locally featured a woman wearing a pair or Zubaz as part of some retro-themed event, with her crying out “What are these things?” in the kind of panicked tone that made it sound like she was being put into some kind of horrible torture device that, even though you don’t know exactly WHAT it’s going to do yet, you can already tell is going to be really bad.  And in a sense, I suppose she was, although I’m not sure the Geneva Convention recognizes “irreversible social stigma” as torture.

The list of regrettable 90s crazes goes on:  Blues Traveler, Backstreet Boys, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, WCW, clean-cut corporate dudes wearing suits and glasses and sporting long ponytails, AoL, MTV sports… I mean seriously, what the hell were we thinking back then?

Who will ever forget the dominant Pippen/Armstrong Bulls teams of the early 90s?

Well, after spending a lot of time with NBA Jam and its sequels, I think it’s safe to add them to the “What the hell?” list.  Immensely popular at the time of its release, it was believed that NBA Jam would change all sports games as we knew them.  Looking back, it’s hard to imagine why.  NBA Jam seems like the end result of somebody holding a convention for bad game designers to get together and exchange ideas.  Actually, considering that it was published by Acclaim, that’s not such a far-fetched idea – they referred to these events as “company meetings”.

At the foundation of the NBA Jam series lie several questionable design choices.  The complete lack of defense makes the game high scoring, but also reduces the entire affair to watching teams take turns running down the court and dunking on each other.  This stalemate is generally broken when one team miraculously stops their opponent a few times, and one player is able to score 3 baskets in a row, causing him to be “on fire”.   This makes him almost unstoppable on offense and good enough on defense to keep the streak going until you rack up a big lead.  Not that it will help – as soon as the score starts to get a bit uneven, the computer assistance will kick in, boosting the trailing team’s abilities dramatically, and allowing them to make a quick comeback.  Here’s the most important thing you need to know about NBA Jam:  If you’re ever losing by more than 5 points, start going for three pointers.  From anywhere.  You’ll make them.

In this way, the best strategy for playing an NBA Jam game is to basically ignore the first 3 quarters of the game, then, if you’re losing, just shoot a bunch of threes to get the game close, and then try to get “on fire” near the end of the game, so your opponent doesn’t have enough time to stage a huge computer-assisted comeback of their own.  It’s all the drama of the real NBA, minus the game’s best players!  Oh right, about that…

Partly due to bad timing, and partly due to licensing issues, the roster in the NBA Jam games, particularly the first one, has some glaring omissions.  The game came out too late to have Larry Bird or Magic Johnson in there, and Shaq, Michael Jordan, and Charles Barkley were all off making their own terrible video games.  Keep in mind that 4 of those guys were included in the starting lineup for the 1992 Olympic Dream Team, and the other guy is Shaq  (side note – it really is weird that it happened to work out the 5 most noteworthy missing players all happen to play different positions).  The absence of these guys is a little bit of a letdown, especially in a game that puts such a heavy emphasis on individual performance and star players.  Not to mention that it turns the Utah Jazz into the most dominant team in the game, which is just crazy.

If not for the Bulls, Lakers, Celtics, and Suns, these guys might have won at least one of NBA championship.

Stryker: The argument in favor of the NBA Jam games has always been that it’s fun to play a fast-paced, exaggerated, arcade-style game of basketball.  Fair enough, but it’s not like the other basketball games available at the time were hardcore simulations.  Bulls vs. Blazers was just as capable of giving you unrealistically high scores and plenty of dunks.  The difference seems to be than in NBA Jam, the players could jump way over the net while doing it.  Oh, and you could make the ball start on fire.  I guess that’s something.

If those features sound like a worthwhile trade-off for putting up with grainy digitized graphics, annoying sound clips (apparently both were a prerequisite for all Acclaim games from this era), rubberband AI, and none of the league’s best players (we couldn’t even get a Tecmo-style SG Bulls?) then by all means, check out the NBA Jam series.  Or better yet, do some research on time travel and figure out a way to go back to 1993 – trust me, you are going to love it.  Brad might even let you borrow his Zubaz.

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Zoom!

February 2nd, 2010

Brad: Even though it’s a fairly primitive and simplistic game that never really fared well with critics, Zoom! charmed us with its similarities to Pac-Man.  You run around a maze avoiding monsters and although you’re tracing the outline of a grid instead of eating dots, the  gameplay ends up being pretty much the same.  Oh sure, using an isometric view and giving your character the ability to jump means the game most closely resembles Pac-Mania, widely considered to be the worst Pac-Man game by anyone who’s never played Professor Pac-Man.  Even so, you can’t go wrong copying the Pac-Man formula.  Just ask Miner 2049er.

Kind of hard to tell from this picture, but that orange dot came from your character’s butt.

Except they forgot one thing – the power pellets.  Without these, the game misses out on a big chunk of Pac-Man’s appeal, namely the ability to turn the tables and suddenly turn your tormentors into your prey.  More than just psychologically satisfying, this had major gameplay implications.  It allowed you a chance to clear the board of enemies in order to rack up a high score and give yourself some breathing room to clear out the maze.

No worries, though, because in Zoom!, you can poop some kind of projectile at any enemy that’s chasing you.  Um… yeah.  It’s pretty effective too, which makes sense I suppose.  I know if I was chasing someone and he suddenly burst into projectile diarrhea aimed at my face, I’d almost certainly back off, too.

Still, Pac-Man would never resort to something so crass.

Mr. Do!: Jesus Christ, neither would Mike Tyson for that matter.  I don’t care how fun the game is, that’s just fucked up.

Stryker: I guess a good way to judge this game is to consider how much fun I thought it was before I found out about the poo attack button, and how much less so afterward.  Some of that is simply because it makes the game a lot easier, but I think it’s mostly because, well…  I mean, this is a game where you intentionally poo at your enemies.  Do I need to explain?

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The Disney Massacre

February 1st, 2010

On a system as oversaturated with platforming games as the Genesis was, every one of them needs something to help set itself apart from the crowd.  In a perfect world, that “something” would be really, really good gameplay.  But then again, if every one of them had really good gameplay, none of them would actually stand out from the crowd at all since they’d all be awesome.  In such a scenario, a game that wanted to stand out would actually have to be really, really bad on purpose.  This is the kind of thought process that leads to games like Risky Woods, at which point my whole theory collapses on itself because, by definition, Risky Woods could not exist in a perfect world.

Since its not possible for every game to stand out by being great, many instead rely on gimmicks – movie licenses, quirky characters, innovative gameplay mechanics.  And as far a gimmicks go, putting Disney characters into your game isn’t a bad way to go – the kids love them.  Or at least parents seem to think kids love them.  I don’t know, when I was a kid the things I thought were cool were He-Man, Ninja Turtles and Bon Jovi.  Not Mickey.  But parents are the ones buying the games, which is why we ended up with a dozen games starring Mickey Mouse and not a single one with Bon Jovi.  By the way, I really wish there was a synonym for “Bon Jovi” – that last sentence would have flowed a little better.

Anyway, it’s the end of the line for our remaining Disney titles, World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Quackshot Starring Donald Duck and The Great Circus Mystery: Starring Mickey and Minnie.  Because the games are fairly similar in nature, we figured a lengthy elimination article for each one was unnecessary, and instead gathered the staff together to dish out some swift justice.

World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck


Brad: Like all things Disney, I really dug this game’s visuals, but found most of the rest kind of shallow.  One cannot help but get cynical when considering the unfairness of the level layouts – this game was designed for children who, not knowing any better, will probably blame themselves for every cheap shot Mickey and Donald absorb.  It’s not hard to convince kids that the problem is they suck at playing games, not that you suck at making them.

Stryker: Old Man Murray once ran a feature in which they judged popular PC games (mostly FPS) based on how far into the game you could get before the appearance of the first crate, “which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.”  Substitute crates with underwater or ice levels, and you have a pretty effective way to judge 16-bit platformers as well.  And by this standard, World of Illusion does very, very poorly.

Mr. Do!: Hey, kids!  Want to play a fucking horrible game with lots of cheap deaths and characters who move slower than your Grandmother during a Wheel of Fortune marathon?  No?  What if you got to be Mickey?  Great!  Go ask your parents for $50, ‘cause I’ve got a game for you…

Quackshot Starring Donald Duck

Brad: I guess my main problem isn’t with the game itself, but with Donald’s sailor outfit.  I’ve seen cartoon characters in military uniforms before.  And I’ve seen cartoon characters that don’t wear pants.  But combining the two?  What kind of navy wouldn’t include pants as part of the uniform?  Then again, what navy would recruit a duck?  The whole concept is madness.

Stryker: I realize that to make the game kid-friendly, they couldn’t have Donald running around blasting everything like it was Doom (even though he basically does later on in the game when he gets some better weapons), but a toilet plunger gun?  You do realize what a toilet plunger is for, right?  Let’s just say that if you need to use one, the water you’re putting it into probably isn’t very sanitary.  In a way, I find this primitive biological warfare far more disturbing than if Donald were to just shoot his enemies in the face with a regular gun.

Mr. Do!: Why is Donald so pissed off all time time?  Probably because they keep putting him in average Genesis games with goddamn awful puns in the title.

The Great Circus Mystery: Starring Mickey and Minnie

Brad: The real mystery is – who goes to the circus anymore, anyway?  Mickey and Minnie do.  Because they do lame things.  And if you’re playing this game, than apparently you do, too.

Stryker: At this point in the project, I’m completely out of original ways to say “decent platformer but nothing special.”  I know, I’ll try it in German:  anständiger platformer aber nichts Spezielles.  Hmm, apparently “special” is a proper noun in German.  Learn something new every day.

Mr. Do!: This is the best out of the three games, but… and you probably already know where this is going… anyway, that’s really like being the sardine filling in a fish-flavored Oreo.

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Rugby World Cup ‘95

January 28th, 2010

How on fire was EA Sports back in the fall of 1994?  Looking back, it was one of the strongest lineups the brand has ever assembled:  Madden ‘95, FIFA ‘95, NHL ‘95, and NBA Live ‘95 are all arguably the best entries for each of their respective series during the 16-bit era, and while each of those franchises has had other successful years since, we’ve yet to see another season where so many of their games were peaking all at the same time.  Hell, these days, it seems like Madden and NHL are taking turns being good for each generation on consoles, and NBA Live seems like a punishment being inflicted on NBA fans for reasons we may never fully understand.  Maybe EA programmers are all Milwaukee Bucks fans.

Nevertheless, 1994 was a golden age for the EA Sports brand.  And it was during this time that EA decided to release Rugby World Cup ‘95. It was certainly an inspired choice, with most of the brand’s other franchises being relatively “safe” bets, you know, in that they were sports people in this country might have actually seen before.  Who knows?  Maybe the world was really clamoring for a Rugby game back then.  Perhaps it was one of those short-lived 90s fads nobody even remembers anymore, like Y.B.T.  Or maybe EA, drunk on success, got cocky and assumed that they could make an awesome game about just about anything, although that explanation seems kind of unlikely.  I mean, it had only been a year since they released Power Monger, so they should have still remembered that lesson.

This is about 90% of the gameplay in Rugby World Cup ‘95

Whatever the reason, Rugby World Cup ‘95 was thrust into EA Sport’s otherwise spectacular lineup that year, not entirely unlike Don Beebe’s stint on the Super Bowl Champion Packers a few years later.  Yes, we are full of obscure references today.

If during the course of this review it appears that I don’t know a lot about rugby, it’s because I don’t.  My experience with the sport is limited to the few times I’ve caught glimpses of it on that cable channel that usually talks about the Mets but switches over to English sports after 11pm, and a British acquaintance of mine who once tried to get me to join a game by telling me “It’s just like your American football, only more violent.”  Most European sports are described to us in ways that make them seem more sophisticated than ours.  Soccer is the “beautiful game”.  Cricket is like baseball, except for smart people with a whole lot of free time.  But rugby – that’s just football with the violence cranked up to a catastrophic level.

That’s a simplification, but it’s still a pretty apt description, at least as far as describing how the sport is represented in Rugby World Cup ‘95.  If American football is kind of an abstract simulation of war, then rugby is closer to a simulation of a riot, except there’s nothing abstract about it at all.  Which probably is a big part of its popularity worldwide – after all, New Zealand or Ireland isn’t going to win a war against Britain anytime soon, but a riot?  That’s 50/50.  Rugby is basically like watching two street gangs murder each other, with occasional attempts to move a ball up and down the field as a nominal means to justify this violence.  I’m convinced that 90% of Rugby players are clinically depressed people who have committed to killing themselves in the most spectacular way imaginable.  The other 10% are dumb American kids who didn’t fully grasp the apocalyptic scale of something that had been described to them as “like your football, only more violent.”

Oh, and they play without any kind of protective equipment.  Well, a few of them wear wrestling headgear, but they’re considered pussies by all the other players.  Hell, these guys would probably play naked just the avoid the minimal protection offered by a shirt if they could.  But of course that’s a terrible idea in a sport that sometimes involves tactics that the announcers describe as “jiggery pokery”.  To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what that even means.  I just know it’s the kind of thing I would want to have pants on for if it were going on around me.

Once you start playing, you’ll begin to see that the description of rugby as a more violent form of American football is pretty accurate.  However, a more precise description – and again, this in in the video game version, I’ve yet to see much “real” rugby – might be to say that it’s like a version of American football that has been fine-tuned specifically to maximize the amount of devastation.  Between two evenly matched teams it’s a nonstop barrage of assaults.  As the guy with the ball is getting tackled, he throws it to a teammate, who then immediately gets tackled and throws it to another teammate, until eventually everyone is laying on the ground with injured spleens.  Should a player fail to get rid of the ball before hitting the ground, players from both teams form what is known as – no joke – a maul, which is basically a big pile of guys murdering each other, until one guy emerges with the ball and the whole cycle starts again.  Unlike American football, it’s actually considered advantageous to kick the ball off to the other team and let them have possession of it, much in the same way it might be advantageous to allow your opponent to start with possession of a pork chop if you were both trapped in the lion cage at the zoo.  Speaking of lions fighting over scraps of meat, if the ball should go out of bounds, play is restarted by having both teams line up 3 feet away from each other, and then throwing the ball into the middle of both teams and having them kill each other for it.

This is actually a different picture than before.  This just happens a lot.

As I said, that’s what a game between two evenly matched teams is like.  If two mismatched teams should play, things are a little different, as the better team will have more more time and space to work with the ball.  This is closer to what I believe rugby is supposed to be like, with teams passing side to side, moving the ball up and down the field, and actually scoring points.  I assume this is closer to “real” rugby, as evidenced by the fact that real rugby games occasionally have survivors and scores higher than 0-0.

In the end, I suppose that’s the problem with Rugby World Cup ‘95.  If you want to take a really good team, and play against a really bad team, it can be fun for a little while, at least until the score gets out of hand.  But between two teams that are fairly close to one another, the entire thing is just a series of instant tackles, mauls, and other moments where it really feels like the computer is playing the game for you.  Oddly enough, you can actually get a much more satisfying “rugby-like” experience playing Pigskin Footbrawl, which is set in Medieval Europe, is endorsed by Jerry Glanville, and isn’t even meant to be about rugby at all.

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Dick Tracy

January 25th, 2010

Back when we we’re doing a Top 100 list, Dick Tracy presented a bit of a dilemma for us.  On one hand, it’s more fun than the 600 or so games we had already eliminated.  On the other hand, we seem to be the only people who think so, and given the intense hatred that so many gamers harbor toward this game, its inclusion on our Top 100 List could have undermined the credibility of our entire project.  See, on any given website, 75% of the readership is made up of people who don’t actually care for the site itself, but are merely scanning it for evidence to prove their theory that the website’s writers are asshats.  And on a video game related website, that number jumps up to about 99%.  So keeping around a game so universally loathed, especially when we’ve rejected a good number of more popular ones already, is basically just inviting people to say “Hey, they crossed Vectorman off their list and kept Dick Tracy!  These guys are asshats!”  Not that people aren’t willing to read a videogame website written by a bunch of asshats, but Gamespot already has that niche filled.

Dick Tracy000

That might have something to do with the fact that you preemptively shot every single person you saw last stage.

Now that we’ve decided to do a Top 50 list instead, that crisis has been averted.  Dick Tracy will share the same fate as so many games that came before it, having it’s Sega Seal of Quality revoked and being lumped into that big unranked grouping of games that weren’t good enough to make the cut.  On the plus side, this should spare us from the ire of our readers who, for reasons we cannot comprehend, keep insisting that Out of This World and Ecco the Dolphin are good games deserving of finishing ahead of DT.  On the down side, it means that Dick Tracy – one of the system’s most pretty-good-but-not-really-great games – can essentially be considered the equal of crap like American Gladiators or Shadow of the Beast.  I’m pretty sure this sort of mentality is precisely why communism failed.

Although it came out around the same time as the Disney movie, Dick Tracy the Genesis game seems to have little relation to Dick Tracy the film.  Then again, I haven’t seen the movie since I was in sixth grade, so I could be wrong.  Does it really matter?  Is there anyone reading this right now who would base their decision whether or not to like Dick Tracy on how closely it resembles the movie?  This whole paragraph suddenly seems pointless.

Anyway, Dick Tracy has decided to put a stop to the rampant crime in the city, and this time he’s not fucking around.  In the world of Dick Tracy, a civilian is just a criminal who hasn’t tried to kill you yet.  You begin the game by shooting three unarmed men outside the police station, and then gunning down two more in the background that appear to be running for cover.  It’s hard to imagine what someone would make of this if it was the first video game they’d ever been exposed to.  Experienced gamers already know that people approaching you from the right side of the screen are always bad guys, but to the casual observer, you’d probably look like you’re a cold-blooded killer on a rampage.

Dick Tracy011

What, isn’t this you you get around?

And deep down, I think that’s what stands out the most about Dick Tracy.  Sure, the gameplay is pretty good.  And yes, the way the game adds a pseudo-3rd dimension to the typical run-and-gun gameplay by allowing to to shoot at enemies in the background is a nice feature that surprisingly didn’t get “borrowed” by too many other games.  So it’s unique in that regard.  But really, it all comes down to one thing with this game – walking down the street in broad daylight and shooting everyone you see before they even have a chance to threaten you.  Let’s just assume they were all criminals.

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Trampoline Terror

January 21st, 2010

Editor’s Note: Earlier in the project, we rounded up 5 really weird games and decided that the best one would get a spot on the Top 100.  Now that we’re only doing a Top 50, all bets are off.

Brad: Can we just go ahead and say that a game about a gymnast walking around on spaceships made of trampolines in order to step on their self-destruct buttons probably isn’t the best Genesis game ever made?  Do we really need to go into much further analysis than that?  Discussing this game feels like writing a preseason forecast for the Pittsburgh Pirates – you know they don’t have a chance in hell of winning anything, so lets just cross them off right away and move on to the real contenders.

Stryker: Who puts all the self-destruct buttons on the outside of the ship?  That seems like it’s just asking for trouble.

Brad: Honestly, I think building a spaceship with ANY self-destruct button is just asking for trouble.  I can’t think of a single good reason for having one in the first place.

Stryker: That’s true.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say “Boy, it’s a good thing we had that self-destruct button.”

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Not too many other games can claim to have… this.

Brad: No, it’s usually more like “Holy crap!  I almost accidentally pushed the self-destruct button.  Who’s bright idea was it to put it in the middle of the control panel?  Maybe we should put some tape over it or something.”

Stryker: “Man, somebody should really put those things on the OUTSIDE of the ship where nobody will push them by mistake.”

Brad: Honestly, if you did find yourself in situations where people were in need of a self-destruct button, you’d probably want to re-examine your lifestyle.  I think it’s safe to say you’re doing something wrong.

Stryker: For example, piloting a spaceship made out of trampolines.

Brad: Especially if the planet you’re attacking has a world-class gymnast to protect them.  His name is even Trampoline Terror – that’s how afraid of him trampolines are.

Stryker: Which is  some terrible planning right there.  If they had done a bit more research, they might have found out about him ahead of time and attacked with a different kind of ship.  Maybe one made out of waffles or something.

Brad: A waffle ship?  That wouldn’t have made any sense at all.

Stryker: What the hell were we thinking when were going put this game in the Top 100?  Were we just in a really good mood that day?

Brad: Well, it’s certainly original.  And when 90% of the games on a system star either John Madden or Sonic, that counts for something.

Stryker: Even so, I think this was the biggest reason why we changed our mind and decided to make a Top 50 list instead.

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