Console:  Sega Genesis

Grade:  B

Publisher:  Namco

Year:  1993

Genre:  Gore

Since the late 80s, Splatterhouse has made its name with the copious amounts of blood, gore, and general grossness that appear in each game, and the third entry in the series is no exception.  If you want slime, guts, and what can best be described simply as “assorted crawly stuff”, then this game will have what you’re looking for.  Also, there’s a good chance you’re 12 years old.  Let’s face it – there does come a point in most people’s lives where this kind of stuff begins to lose it’s appeal, and seems more childish than scary.  Here’s my advice: if your kid is asking for this game for his birthday, and it’s more than a few months away, don’t get it for him.  He’ll likely have outgrown it by then.

Also, since when do kids ask for games that came out before they were born?

I suppose that back in 1993 though, stuff like this might have seemed shocking and possibly even creeped players out a little.  Not like today, when you’ve likely seen things ten times more disturbing than anything in Splatterhouse simply by accidentally clicking the wrong link on YouTube.  The horror of fighting hordes of mutilated zombies in a blood-soaked mansion pales in comparison to the terror of accidentally watching some kind of not-quite-porn for people with very strange, and very specific fetishes, and following the suggested links on an online video site is often like a real life game of Minesweeper – 90% of them are fine, most the rest you know better than to click on, but then every so often you make a mistake and end up watching a video of a nurse pouring custard onto a schoolgirl.  That, my friends, is a kind of terror no video game can compete with.

Still, while the game might come across as being more silly than scary, it more than makes up for it with its gameplay.  Ditching the side-scrolling elements of the prior entries in the series, SH3 is a beat ‘em up style game, focused solely on brawling.  More importantly, though, it’s a really GOOD beat ‘em up, a feat which is harder to pull off than it sounds.  Games in this genre tend to be pretty similar, so design is everything, and the line between a really good game and a really bad one can get pretty thin.  Splatterhouse 3 excels due to a fast pace and a good balance of enemies – most of them being of the punching bag variety, with just enough tough ones mixed in to give the player a challenge.  A time limit further increases the need to hand out the beat-downs with ruthless efficiency.  As a result, you’ll often find yourself thinking “Man, I can’t believe how much ass I’m kicking!” while you make zombies’ heads explode with your fists.

And really, isn’t that exactly the right emotion to have while plowing through hordes of grotesque monsters in a haunted mansion?

In other words, this game is a lot closer to Final Fight than it is to, say, Cliffhanger, and that’s obviously a good thing.  Which is why we’re more than happy to overlook the fact that just about everything in the game looks like something that would get rejected from a Rob Zombie movie for being too cheesy.  Including the story.

Splatterhouse 3 begins five years after the previous game in the series with Rick, our protagonist, now married with a child,  They’re living comfortably in a mansion after he successfully transitioned from monster hunting to a lucrative career as a stockbroker.  This seems like kind of a strange career path to me, most people usually just study finance at a university and then get low paying entry level jobs.  Perhaps the demons you fought in the first two games were supposed to be metaphors for higher education, internships, and all the other challenges a person goes through before being ready to enter the modern workforce.  And in the third game, these monsters now symbolize the struggle of entering adulthood and settling down into a stable home life.

Then again, I might be giving WAY too much literary credit to a game with the word “Splatterhouse” in the title.

Anyway, things are going great until the monsters come back, take over the mansion, and kidnap Rick’s family.  Rick then does what he always does in these situations – dresses up in his Friday the 13^th Halloween costume… er, I mean puts on the terror mask (apparently the blue coveralls are just what he happened to have on at the time, you know, during his normal everyday activities working on Wall Street) and sets out to kick some monster ass.

Which, sadly, is not at all similar to monster booty.

One thing you’ll realize as you make your way through the game is the impracticality of having a gigantic mansion with hundreds of rooms.  When every room is filled with traps and monsters, this can be something of a liability.  Think of it this way –  when I first got married, we lived in a five room apartment.  It got a little cramped sometimes, but I could rest assured knowing that if it ever turned out to be evil and haunted, and monsters kidnapped my wife and cats, they were only going to be one or two rooms away at the most.  That’s like, three, maybe four zombies I’d have to beat up to rescue them.  Even the average 2 story house only has what, ten rooms at the most?  You could probably kill that many monsters armed with a couple of heavy books or a pointy stick.

And even in non-monster circumstances, it doesn’t really make sense.  Rick has a wife and one kid.  That’s it.  How much space do they really need?  There is such a thing as having too much house, even if cost isn’t an issue.  You still have to furnish all those rooms.  So in addition to familiar-looking areas like a kitchen or dining room, there are plenty of rooms where they clearly didn’t know what to do with the extra space – one room is just filled with grandfather clocks, which looks kind of neat, but doesn’t really make any kind of sense if you think about it.  There’s another long room with no furniture at all, and the only adornment is one small portrait on the wall.  You start to get the feeling Rick and his wife probably ran out of ideas by about the 50^th room or so.

Either that, or the monsters kidnapped most of his furniture, too.

Not to mention the amount of maintenance a house this large would require, which was clearly an issue at Rick’s house.  The wallpaper is looking tattered, the paint is peeling, and some of the fixtures are clearly broken.  I suppose some of this could be blamed on the hellspawn running through his home, but probably not all of it.  I mean, it’s not like there’s an epic boss battle against a demon that eats drywall.

This was the last game in the Splatterhouse series (upcoming PS3 reboot notwithstanding), which is a shame because it’s also the only good one.  Who knows, maybe after this incident, Rick finally moved into a reasonably sized home, stopped taking directions from taking hockey masks, and hired professionals to take care of any future monster infestations (I hear the Belmonts resisted the allure of Wall Street and opted to stay in the family business).  Or maybe people just stopped playing beat ‘em ups, and Namco realized there might be more money in this new “Tekken” thing they were working on than it making sequels for a series that, at best, had a small cult following.  Either way, this game ended up being kind of rare, and commands a fairly respectable price in the online marketplace.  Still, if you’re a fan of the genre and ever have a chance to borrow it from a friend (thanks, Stryker), or see a cheap one at a garage sale, or just have loads of money to burn on old Genesis games, Splatterhouse 3 is worth checking out.

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Console:  Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo

Grade: B

Publisher:  Tecmo

Year:  1993

Genre:  NES

Anyone who’s ever played Tecmo Super Bowl on the ol’ NES knows that it was not the most realistic representation of NFL football.  The punters could kick the ball into the parking lot, the quarterbacks could throw the ball 80 yards and hit a receiver in full stride, and length of the field running plays were no surprise.  Fast quarterbacks dominated the league as rushers, since defenders would stay in pass coverage even as the QB ran by them.  And rather then base the difficulty on the quality of your opponent, the game got progressively harder every week, regardless of who you were playing.  Before you knew it, that mysterious “QB Bills” who was throwing all those incredible touchdown bombs in week one would do nothing but toss interceptions in the Super Bowl… although now that I think back, that part was kinda realistic.

Pictured:  Realism

Still, despite these frequent departures from reality, TSB was a huge hit with football fans.  It was sort of the perfect blend of a video game and a sports simulation – just barely realistic enough not to be considered “arcade”, yet still offering typical video game aspects such as having music during the action, and interrupting plays with cutscenes.  It was kind of like how exciting and highlight filled you thought football was when you were a little kid, before you grew up and got a enthusiasm killing dose of NFC power football with its thrilling 9-6 outcomes.  Or maybe it was more like the Arena League, with the obvious difference that people actually pay attention to Tecmo Super Bowl.

Perhaps the AFL just needs some of Tecmo’s Ninja Cheerleaders.

Either way, it’s amazing that while Tecmo Super Bowl remains one of the most beloved NES games of all time, its 16-bit follow-ups aren’t remembered as fondly, if they’re even remembered at all.  Many gamers think that this series died with the NES, and those who are aware of a Genesis or SNES version often remember Tecmo Super Bowl 2 or 3,  two games that ditched the old TSB formula in favor of trying to imitate Madden, and doing about as poor of a job at it as that fat idiot who used to be on Mad TV.

But believe it or not, the later consoles did get one good version of TSB, complete with everything you loved about it on the NES.  Want to throw length of the field touchdown bombs to Andre Rison?  You can do that here.  Want to see Barry Sanders dodge 20 tackles on his way to the end zone?  Check.  Want to dominate a game as Bo Jackson?  Well, too damn bad – by 1993 the only thing Bo knew anymore was career-ending hip injuries.  A real shame, too.  If he had stayed healthy, there’s no telling how many AFC Championship games the Raiders could have gotten blown out of.

You can’t see it in the picture, but he’s actually jumping out of the window of his burning mansion.

This actually brings up an interesting point – although the game stays pretty close to the formula that made it a success on the NES, it did come out two years later, so you’re getting an updated, 1993 version of the NFL instead of the 1991 season that the NES game was based on.  Whether or not this is a big deal depends on your favorite team. Some teams, like the Cowboys, are a lot better, while others, like the aforementioned Raiders, or the Eagles, lost key players and are on the downside.  Kansas City is kind of a wash – Christain Okoye is no longer the human wrecking ball he was in the original TSB, but this is offset by the addition of Hall of Famer QB Chiefs, who won 3 Super Bowls back when he was QB 49ers.  Detroit fans should probably just be happy that the NES version came out during the only year in the entire history of the Lions that they were any good.

And of course Bills fans can rest assured that the core players that made them the dominant team in the AFC are all still on the team and ready to bring home that one last Super Bowl loss.

Thanks to the 1991 Lions, there’s at least one year that Buffalo Bills fans can point to and say that the NFC Championship game wasn’t the “Real Super Bowl”.

As somebody who was in his early teens during the Tecmo Super Bowl era, I have a particular soft spot for these games.  These are from the years when I first really started caring about pro football, and each game is like a snapshot of the NFL that particular season.  I get a kick out of seeing games on the schedule and remembering watching them in real life, seeing players I haven’t thought about since I was in Jr. High, and scoring touchdowns with guys whose trading cards I might still have in my attic somewhere.  I get a little nostalgic thinking about the Eagles once-mighty defense, the Oilers Run and Shoot attack, or that freak year where the Atlanta Falcons were actually good.  I realize that “guys who were 15 when the game came out and liked football” is probably a pretty niche audience, but if you’re still reading  this far into an article about Tecmo Super Bowl on the Genesis, then chances are, you’re in that niche, too.

There’s really no simpler, or more effective way to say it:  This is Tecmo Super Bowl, almost exactly as you remember it on the NES, except for the Super Nintendo and Genesis.  What’s not to love?

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Console:  Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo

Grade:  B

Publisher:  Viacom New Media

Year:  1995

Genre:  Depressing

Puzzle games occupied a relatively high number of spots on our Sega Genesis Tournament, especially considering how few were released as a percentage of the Genesis’ library.  The same will probably hold true if we ever get around to doing a SNES version, too.  If you find that to be a bit surprising, keep in mind that we focus on which games are still fun to play even now, and puzzle games tend to retain their appeal better than most other genres.  The reason is simple enough – more so than any other type of game, puzzle games depend on their originality for appeal.  You can’t just throw in some prettier graphics or add a movie license to Tetris the way you might for a platformer.  And while that makes it a lot tougher to make a good puzzle game (not all of these original ideas are great, after all), the ones that succeed are less likely to be made obsolete a few years later.  Good puzzle gameplay is timeless.

Just about everything else about Zoop, however, is not.  This game screams mid-90s, from its stupid name, to its visual style, to the simple fact that it was published by Viacom during that era when big media companies (Fox, Virgin, etc.) all tried their hand at publishing video games.  It is, in nearly every way, a great big corporation trying to capitalize on the whole “alternative” trend in style but not in substance.  Which is really what the mid-90s were all about – mainstream “non-conformity”.  Corporate-sponsored counter-culture.  What?  You thought all those identical, tuneless alt-rock bands you were watching at Woodstock ’94 or on MTV were really preaching an anti-establishment message?  Don’t be so mayo.

Garish colors and weird level select screens?  This is Viacom being edgy.

For people around my age, seeing a throwback like this can actually be a bit disquieting.  Everybody likes to think that things haven’t changed that much since their teenage years, but the15 year mark is kind of that point where the delusion starts to reach a breaking point.  Things change so gradually you don’t even notice them when its happening, but after this much time it gets harder not to notice.  It’s not that you’re in complete denial, sitting around in a flannel shirt at a coffee shop listening to Tripping Daisy, it’s more that you’ve completely forgotten that’s what people used to do back in 1995.  Admit it – you think that the way things are now was basically the way they were back then.  Oh sure, we have a better internet and more people have cell phones and stuff, but from a non-technological standpoint, everything else stayed the same, right?  It’s only when you catch a rerun from the first season of Friends or youtube a Smashing Pumpkins video that you look at it and notice that the haircuts and clothes look really stupid.  And then you dig out the yearbook and realize that you and your friends all had those same stupid haircuts and clothes back then, too.

What happened?  You used to be young.  And hip.  I mean, you wore grunge clothes and rocked that shaggy, center-parted haircut like nobody’s business.  Then somewhere along the line, buying clothes at the thrift store became something you did out of necessity rather than fashion.  You told the barber to cut your hair differently than the last time (unless you’re David Spade).  Got a job (again, unless you’re David Spade).  Turned thirty.  Probably got married and had some kids. And now they’re the cool ones and you’re just… old.

God, could this box BE any more mid-90s?

So yeah, play Zoop.  It’s quite possibly the most unintentionally depressing game ever made.

Editor’s Note:  Writing about puzzle games turned out to be a less interesting read than being bummed out about getting old, so sorta forgot to spend much time actually discussing the gameplay of Zoop.  If you’re really interested, here’s a pretty good review from Sega 16, although they didn’t enjoy it quite as much as we did.

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Console:  Sega Genesis

Grade:  B-

Publisher:  Taito

Year:  1992

Genre:  Budgetary Misdeeds

Words can’t accurately convey just how insane Chase HQ 2 is, so today Stryker and I will be discussing some screenshots.

Brad: We were going to write a long article about what made us like Chase HQ 2 enough to include it on our Genesis Tournament, but as soon as I took this screenshot, I realized we wouldn’t have to.  Everything you need to know about why this game is awesome can be seen in this picture.

Stryker: Every game designer should keep this picture somewhere on their desk, with the quote “More like this.”  That’s the problem with games these days – too many cutscenes, pretentious narratives, and failed attempts at being highbrow, and not nearly enough chasing purple vans in a Ferrari while guys shoot rocket launchers at you.

Brad: The next time you hear about your local elected officials wasting a bunch of taxpayer money on some kind of foolish public works project that does more harm than good, just be thankful you don’t live in whatever city Chase HQ 2 takes place in.  In the wake of a huge surge in crime, they decided to take bold action.  So did they hire more police officers?  Install security cameras?  Invest in community watch programs?  No.  They bought the cops a Ferrari.

Stryker: And not just is that they didn’t just buy any ol’ “normal” Ferrari either.  Not a 308 or a Testarossa that only costs a mere couple of hundred thousand dollars.  No, they went all out and got the F40, the million-dollar street legal race car of which fewer than 1,500 were ever made.

Brad: It’s so rare and so expensive that it’s really more like a work of art than a vehicle – a little piece of automotive history that should probably be displayed in museum or, failing that, rammed into a criminal’s getaway car at over 200mph.

Brad: See?  This is why you shouldn’t build bridges at sea level.

Stryker: And since they spent all their money on the Ferrari, the city hasn’t been able to put up guard rails.

Brad: The Ferrari which, it’s worth pointing out, the cops aren’t even using here.  Remember when you were a kid and your parents would buy you an expensive toy, but then, because it was expensive, they expected you to play with it 24/7?  I kinda feel like that’s how the taxpayers would feel about the police department’s F40.

Stryker: “I don’t care if you need 4 wheel drive to get through the water on the incredibly dangerous bridge we built!  We spent good money on that Ferrari, and you’re going to drive it!”

Stryker: Apparently, instead of constructing overpasses, the city decided that simply putting a ramp in the middle of the road any place where two freeways intersect was a viable alternative.

Brad: Really though, the citizens should have expected this when they made Evel Knievel their Highway Commissioner.

Brad: Aha!  So that’s what became of the blue guy from Double Dragon!  He went on to become a police officer.

Stryker: Both games have a Taito connection, so that’s sort of possible, I guess.  And the way he’s pointing at himself almost seems to say “Yeah, that’s right, I’m the guy from from Double Dragon.”

Brad: Apparently, the entire police force consists of four people.  When you consider one is the chief and another the dispatcher, this means that blue guy and the dude with the mustache are the only 2 patrol officers.

Stryker: Well, as long as all the crime in the city is being run by the Shadow Boss, it ought to be enough.

Brad: Even so, I’m sensing some misplaced priorities here.  In addition to the Ferrari, they also have the option to drive either an SUV or a semi, meaning that the police force actually has more cars than they do officers to drive them.

Stryker: Perhaps when the mayor hired his budget director, he shouldn’t have gone with the guy who just drew pictures of cars all over the job application.

Brad: Illegal practices?  Is that what you do while you’re trying to get better at breaking the law?

Stryker: Hmm, back when I played little league baseball, the league had rules on how often the coaches could hold practices, so that there wouldn’t be any dictator-style coaches who would work the kids night and day to create of superteam of miserable, but unbeatable baseball players.  Maybe they’re arresting him for breaking that rule.

Brad: Or maybe he was the coach of a dog fighting team.

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Console: Sega Genesis

Grades:

Golden Axe: C+

Golden Axe: B-

Golden Axe 3: C-

Publisher:  Sega

Years: Golden Axe – 1989

Golden Axe II – 1991

Golden Axe III (Sega Channel only) – 1995

Genre:  Crowd Management

Although this review was supposed to be about the entire Golden Axe series, we’ll be spending almost the entire article discussing our unanimous favorite of the trilogy, Golden Axe 2.  The original Golden Axe, while a solid game, is basically a more primitive, less fun version of its successor, with no significant differences in terms of game design or mechanics, and Golden Axe 3 was only available via the Sega channel.  Considering that few people had the Sega channel to begin with, and it hasn’t been around for over 10 years, that’s kind of like saying that the game was only ever able to be played at Better Than Ezra concerts.

Golden Axe 2 tells the story of three brave warriors as they attempt to defeat the evil lord Dark Guld.  Dark Guld, possibly upset over having such a silly name, has been leading his army of evil creatures across the land, spreading chaos and destruction in his wake.  Also, he has taken the powerful Golden Axe, which is a symbol of peace and prosperity.  Shockingly, it turns out that an axe can also be used for destructive purposes.  The game never really explains how he managed to obtain the Golden Axe in the first place – maybe after they recovered it in the first game, the good guys had left it laying around in the mud or something.  Who knows.  This introduction also doesn’t give us much insight into our characters or what their own motivations might be, but come on, it’s not like we needed some kind of explanation for why a barbarian known as Axe-Battler wants to chop guys up with an axe.

What it lacks in story, it tries to make up for in awesome racks.

Not like anybody cares, though.  I think it’s safe to say that very few people pop Golden Axe into their Genesis expecting a riveting tale with interesting characters that will make them feel emotions other than “SMASH!”  What you get with the Golden Axe games are some of the finer entries in the beat ‘em up genre.  Do you want to experience “games as art” or do you want to kick the living crap out of somebody with medieval weaponry, while listening to music that you’ll be able to recall 15 years from now?  I know what I’d rather do.

See, back in the days of the Genesis, we didn’t have a class of asshat “game journalists” trying to make our hobby out to be more than it was.  Nobody talked about the emotional impact of Double Dragon, or the underlying themes of Barkley! Shut Up and Jam! (which included the importance of keeping one’s mouth closed.  Also, dunking.)  If you wanted a great story you read a book or watched a film.  Life was better this way – games could focus solely on being fun, and our literary standards hadn’t been lowered to the point where you can walk into a Borders and buy 30 different books written about Halo.

The Golden Axe series is a throwback to a simpler, and in some ways better, era when games didn’t have to take themselves so damn seriously.  Golden Axe 2 excels because it’s a well-designed game, supported by some neat graphical effects (the lava cave has a background “heat haze” effect that ought to thrill enthusiasts), a kickass soundtrack, and a few minor gameplay refinements, such as magic spells and better enemy AI.

Don’t get me wrong on that last one, though – the enemies you fight aren’t exactly Harvard graduates (or maybe they are are – does attending Harvard make you better at fighting?), which is actually for the better.  The last thing you want in a beat ‘em up is a bunch of bad guys who know how to block and avoid getting their skulls cleaved.  Comix Zone had that, and it was a slow-paced grind.  Golden Axe 2’s enemies are still dumb enough for you to split them like firewood, but use a couple of clever techniques, most notably, constantly trying to surround you.  It’s just the right amount of smartness from your enemies, and it turns every skirmish into sort of a weird puzzle game, where you’re constantly trying to maneuver in a way that keeps everyone on the same side of you.  The game is designed around this principle, so that you’ll almost never encounter a lone enemy.  Even bosses fight in pairs or at the very least bring along some underlings.

The woman and old man are fleeing to a place where the typical greeting involves less weaponry… so probably not Oakland, then.

Golden Axe 2 begins in a village that’s being overrun by the enemy horde, with your heroes arriving just in time to save some of the populace.  From there, you’ll travel across some ruins, then through a lava cave that leads to Dark Guld’s castle, and then finally into the castle to face the dark lord himself.  After each of these stages will come a short cutscene, which fleshes out the story by giving you important plot details like “We went through the ruins” or “Now we’re going into a cave”.  You could argue that these little interludes don’t really tell us much we couldn’t have figured out just from playing the game, but again, you probably shouldn’t expect too much from a story starring characters named Dark Guld or Gilius Thunderhead.

Axe-Battler and his pink chicken/rhino dare you to take this game seriously.

Actually, the more I think abut it, I’m starting to think these guys might have intentionally let the Golden Axe get stolen, just so they’d have an excuse to run around killing stuff.  It’s not like barbarians, dwarves, and amazons have a lot of marketable skills in peacetime, so once they recovered the Golden Axe in the first game, there probably wasn’t much for them to do other than sit around and wait to die of plague.  The intro mentions that Dark Guld was supposed to be imprisoned, but somehow he got loose and started wrecking havoc everywhere, so it’s not hard to imagine one of our protagonists sneaking into the jailhouse, covertly unlocking his cell and then slipping a note under the door saying “By the way, the Golden Axe is sitting in a crate down at the end of the hall.”

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Console:  Sega Genesis

Grade: B-

Publisher:  Konami

Year: 1993

Genre:  A little looney

Tiny Toon Adventures:  They were tiny.  They were toony.  They were all a little looney.  ALL of them.  It was a show being made entirely by lunatics.  This was before Fox News existed, so that was kind of a novel concept at the time.

Few people remember it anymore, there was a brief period when Tiny Toons was kind of a big deal.  Critics raved about it, kids watched it, and a whole generation was introduced to the music of They Might Be Giants through it (at the time that was considered a good thing).  It’s almost hard to believe now, as the show only experienced a few years of popularity in the mid 90s before fading into obscurity.  Kind of like me in high school, actually.

This mad scientist wasn’t on the show very much, but appears in the game with his nefarious mind control device to, I don’t know, make Dizzy Devil even more of a villain or something.

So we’ve all seen this formula, right?  Get the license to make a video game about a popular show kids like, create the game as cheaply and quickly as possible with little concern for quality, and then dump it out on the unsuspecting populace in time to ruin Christmas.  Because that’s the real motive of game publishers.

We’ve seen this dozens of times before, with the Power Rangers, with just about every Disney movie to come out during the Genesis era, hell, even with Garfield (note: my surprise at this isn’t because I would have expected a Garfield game to be awesome, but rather that some company even tried in the first place).  These games are invariably Mario-style platformers, with graphics that look barely like the licensed properties, bare-bones animation, and level designs that tend to be at best lazy and uninspired, and at worst, broken.  And there’s usually some bad control or sloppy hit detection to top it off.  Because an awful game without bad control is like a sundae without a cherry on top, or a tuna net without any dolphins in it.

Well, apparently Konami didn’t subscribe to this theory.  Or else they just figured that the Tiny Toons license wasn’t going to be enough to sell the game on its own and they were going to have to put a little effort in.  Whatever the reason, we have in Buster’s Hidden Treasure a beautiful, well-designed game that is actually fun to play.  If not for the fact that it’s a platformer, it would almost be the exact opposite of every other 16-bit game based on a cartoon.  For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, that’s like having a doctor tell you you have a rare disease that’s the exact opposite of cancer.  If that doesn’t make you wanna check this game out, I don’t know what will.

A haunted pirate ship, perhaps?  Not pictured: Knights, which also appear on the ship… for some reason.

Perhaps the key to succeeding where so many others have failed is that most licensed games get obsessive about re-creating the movie or show that its based on, often to detrimental effect.  Either they add a bunch of bad levels and gameplay elements that don’t really work in order to make it “just like the movie”, or else they end up coming up with some completely insane interpretive version of the subject matter in order to shoehorn it into the framework of the game.  Conversely, Buster’s Hidden Treasure looks like it was made by a group of people who were completely unfamiliar with Tiny Toons and were just working off a chart that listed every character ever to appear on the show, both minor and major, with Buster Bunny labeled as “Good Guy”, Montana Max labeled as “Bad Guy”, and everyone else labeled as “try to put into the game”.

Montana Max is a rich douchebag who, despite his wealth, dresses kind of like a hobo.

However, one aspect of the cartoon that the game doesn’t really seem to know who its target audience is.  For the most part, TTA seemed to be a show for younger children – it was about child relatives of popular Looney Tunes characters attending school after all – but it was constantly making pop culture references to R-rated movies, current events, and other stuff that only an older audience was going to get.  I mean, It’s hard to imagine a 7 year old sitting there going “Ha ha!  Bill Clinton DOES talk like that!”  And I can’t even imagine anyone under the age of 70 who was going to appreciate Babs Bunny’s desire to become a vaudeville-style comedienne, or a guest appearance by Henny Youngman.  By the way, I’ll give you one guess as to what kind of animal Henny Youngman was on this show.  Here’s a hint: Tiny Toons liked obvious gags.  Like, REALLY obvious ones.

Anyway, in the spirit of the show, the game starts out as if designed for a younger audience, with their favorite cartoon characters (assuming this was either back when the game first came out, or you’re raising your children in some kind of weird experiment where you make them think it’s 1993), happy music, bright colors, and moderate challenge.  Then, about halfway through the game, the difficulty triples, and you suddenly find yourself in levels where you have to make a long sequence of quick wall jumps over lava in order to get through a stage.

Sorry kid, come back when you’re a little older and develop some mad skillz.

Still, a Tiny Toons game that demands you be able to do wall jumps.  How cool is that?

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Console: Sega Genesis

Grade: B-

Publisher:  Dreamworks Games

Year: 1990

Genre:  Biography

There are very few shooters released anymore these days.  Most people say it’s because the genre is outdated, obsolete, and soon to go the way of PC adventure games or “pick fight off a menu”-style RPGs.  But I think there’s a different reason – developers finally discovered that each console really only needs one decent shooter, not because demand is low, but because once you pass a certain threshold of competence, there really isn’t much to differentiate them.  To have more than one good shooter on a console ends up being a bit redundant.

One way to understand this better is to think of shooters as being like pizza.  When pizza is bad, there’s almost no limit on just how bad it can be.  It might be burnt, greasy, or, in the case of the place down the street from me, the pizza may taste like somebody peed on it.  I’ve even been to a place in North Carolina that seems to use a crust made from communion wafers.  So, like shooters, when pizza is bad, it can get really bad, and you can pretty much tell right away.  But when pizza’s good… well, there’s kind of a limit on just how good it can be.  A pepperoni ceiling, if you will.  Good pizza is good pizza, and while some might be better than others, the differences end up pretty marginal.  Think about it – there might be three or four really good pizzerias near your house, but you probably go to the same one all the time, and its probably your favorite for reasons other than because their pizza is marginally better than the other ones.  Maybe they’re a bit cheaper, or you’re stalking the really cute girl who works there.  The place I usually go to is my favorite because it’s across the street from a liquor store that has the Viggo painting from Ghostbusters 2 in its window for reasons that nobody has ever been able to explain.

Also, they have their own parking lot, which is pretty handy.

And just as good pizza is an important part of a balanced diet, a great shooter is an important part of any console’s game library.  They are supremely easy to pick up and play, as you only have to remember two simple rules:

1. Don’t get shot
2. Shooting stuff generally makes #1 a lot easier

If you can remember those two things, then you’re ready to go.  This isn’t like Grand Theft Auto, where you have to spend 3 hours learning how to ride a goddamn bicycle and driving your idiot friends around on their errands before you can punch your first granny.  There’s no slugging through 5 levels of crap in the hopes that it might get better once your guy is powered up and they start letting you play the “real” game.  Nope, you just turn it on and start dodging bullets.  Instant gratification.

Fire Shark’s story is a bit of a mystery.  Most of the stuff I’ve read about it online is really, really vague, hinting at cut communication lines and a possible invasion of the earth by… Aliens?  Germans?  Corporate superpowers?  We don’t really know.  There’s no intro or cut scenes to explain what’s going on, and we didn’t have a box or instructions to help us either.  Stryker claims he used to have a complete copy in his collection, but one day a customer came into his store and made an unbelievable cash offer for it ($7), so he sold that copy.  He eventually managed to find it again, but only the cartridge.  The label on the cart doesn’t even offer us any clues, as it’s a plain white label that simply says Fire Shark! on it.  That’s the pinnacle of marketing right there.

Combat was also the pinnacle of marketing

According to Stryker, who claims to have read the box once before selling it, it explained that you were some kind of mercenary pilot aiding the underdogs in a brutal civil war by flying missions for them in your biplane.  It’s possible that he’s remembering that correctly, but it’s equally possible that he’s confusing it with the time I told him about Count Carl Gustaf Ericsson von Rosen, and his role in the Nigerian/Biafra Civil War.  I’m going to go ahead and assume that 99% of the readership of a blog about Sega Genesis isn’t up to speed on all the obscure African wars to take place in the last 50 years, so here’s a brief summary.  Von Rosen was a Swedish count who in the late 1960s heard about the civil war in Nigerian and the way the rebel Biafrans were suffering cruelly. Much like today’s celebrities taking up similar causes of Rwanda and Darfur, he decided to do something about it.  Only instead of staging a U2 concert or a rally in Washington D.C. to protest it, the good Count hopped into a Cessna and started flying missions for the Biafran Air Force.  Combat missions.  Oh, one other thing – he WAS the Biafran Air Force.  Like the entire thing.  One guy (at least until he singlehandedly created the rest of their Air Force). Anyway, here’s a link to the wikipedia entry, but for a far more interesting article, check this out.

I assuming the Cessna he flew in was a 2-seater, so that there would be some place to put his gigantic balls.

Oddly enough, perhaps the best explanation of what’s going on in this game would be if it actually some kind of biographical account of the Count and his adventures fighting over Nigeria.  Think about it – while playing almost any shooter, we’ve always thought to ourselves, “Why would they send one lone fighter against an entire armada?” but here we have a real-life situation where it really was only one guy against an entire nation.  Of course, no company is going to release a shooter based on some obscure Swedish nobleman and his adventures fighting in a little-known war in a country that most gamers aren’t even 100% sure is real.  So even if this game really was meant to be about Count von Rosen, the “official” storyline to Fire Shark is probably about aliens or whatever.

Aliens with World War I era battleships.

As is typical in articles about old Sega Genesis games, we’ve spent most of our time discussing Africa and pizza.  But what about Fire Shark?  Well, it’s a very good shooter, and as I said before, every console needs one.  There were actually a few really good shooters on the Genesis, and had Fire Shark not existed, any one of them could have been considered of the the Genesis’ Top 50 Games.  But as we established before, we really only needed one.  Compared to the others, Fire Shark is more interesting, the challenge is better balanced, and the music just kicks a lot more ass.  Every Genesis enthusiast ought to check this one out, as it’s a perfect example of old-school gaming doing what it does best – accessible, straightforward fun.  Even on a machine that is best known (and loved) for innovative and unique games, it’s always nice to mix in an occasional dose of some well executed, familiar gameplay.

In other words, not only is Fire Shark the Genesis’ best shooter, it’s also my favorite game that may or may not be based on a real life one-man air force.

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Grade: C+

Publisher:  Electronic Arts

Year: 1991

Genre:  Gravity

Blockout is a puzzle type that basically plays like Tetris, except in three dimensions instead of two.  Keep in mind that Tetris was originally developed as a training exercise to test Soviet Cosmonauts’ understanding of spatial relations.  I’m not sure of the true origin story of Blockout, but if I had to guess, I’d imagine it involved a group of the smartest people in the entire world getting together for a relaxing game of Tetris, and coming to the conclusion that the game – the one used to train freaking astronauts -  would be pretty fun if only it were just a little more mentally stimulating.

Researching Blockout turned up the interesting fact that the two people who developed it, Aleksander Ustaszewski and Mirosław Zabłocki, were from Poland, so my new theory is that it’s some kind of revenge for the last hundred years or so of Polish jokes.  If so, then well done guys – from now on, when I hear the tired joke about the Polish Mafia making you an offer you can’t understand, I’ll assume it’s because the offer was made by two nuclear physicists and involved a lot of exponents and stuff.  I’m not sure why there would be scientists working for the Polish Mafia, but then again, I’m not sure why they’re designing video games, either.

I mean that – I really don’t know why two brilliant Polish scientists were making a better version of Tetris.  Poland was a communist country back then.  I’m no expert on these things, but my understanding of command economies is that  if you want to make a computer game, great.  But if you want to actually get paid to make a computer game, well, then the government has to tell you to do it first.  I have no idea why these countries were having some of their smartest people design puzzle games instead of, say, better military technology or functioning infrastructure for their socialist paradises, but you almost have to wonder if it wasn’t some kind of act of sabotage by some CIA operative within these nations’ governments.  In which case, good on you, American spies – not only did you bring down the Iron Curtain, you also got us some kickass games in the process.

But let’s talk about the game shall we?  Blockout is the same general idea as Tetris – different shaped blocks fall down, you arrange them in neat rows, and every complete row disappears, making more room for you to operate.  The difference here is that instead of working in two dimensions, up/down and left/right, Blockout adds a third dimension (closer/farther, I guess?).  This is perhaps best illustrated with a screenshot:

Pretty much all of the pictures are going to look like this.

Right now, you’re probably looking at that and thinking “Well, that doesn’t look too hard.”  In fact, it probably looks like it might be a bit easier than Tetris, what with all that extra dimension there to work otherwise inconveniently shaped pieces into.  But of course that’s on the super-easy, “designed for people in countries where they don’t have such a huge surplus of brilliant scientists that they use some of them to design games” difficulty setting.  Cranking it up to the more “normal” difficulty gives you pieces that look more like this:

What? Betrayed by the 3^rd dimension again!

See, now that third dimension is starting to work against you a bit, as the pieces are no longer flat.  Accounting for that extra dimension is tougher than it looks, and the overhead view means that as pieces stack up, your view of the lower layers becomes obscured, until your board looks something like this:

OH GOD.

And that’s on the medium setting.  There’s a third difficulty level which forces you to work with pieces out taken directly from some kind of abstract-cubist’s fever dream:

I’m a tetrapolyhemagon, and I will eat your eyes.

By the way, the pieces are rigid, too, so if one little segment of a piece gets caught on another piece, the whole thing settles right there like some kind of physics-defying Jenga tower until that layer is cleared.  Assuming, of course, that it ever is.  To be perfectly honest,  I’ve never even cleared a single layer while using most difficult piece set.  This game doesn’t just want to fill your virtual well with oddly shaped blocks, it wants to beat you down, take your lunch money and make out with your girlfriend.  I take back what I said before about communist nations not using their best scientists to design weapons.  This game is the ultimate weapon, using the guise of a fun, family friendly game to secretly crush your otherwise indemonstrable American spirit and melt your brain in seconds.  It’s a damn good thing President Reagan had already singlehandedly won the Cold War before this thing reached US shores.

Fans of Columns are probably pretty confused right now, partially because they only exist within this sentence, but also because the main complaint we have about Columns was that no matter how much we played it, we never got any good at it, and each game quickly devolved into a blind panic of throwing pieces everywhere and hoping for a miracle.  If that was the problem with Columns, why is it acceptable for Blockout?  Well, the answer is that Blockout is hard because you have to have to do something really hard – figure out how to fit all those weird shapes together on the fly.  Columns has you do something a Kindergartener could do- matching colors – but forces you to do it at a speed that makes it almost impossible to look at the screen and find matches.  We play Blockout and think we would be a lot better at it if we just a bit smarter.  We play Columns and think we could be better at it if we could somehow put in on a computer that had a lot of slowdown.  Secondly, fuck you – nobody likes Columns.

Outside of the gameplay, there isn’t much to discuss.  Like most puzzle games, Blockout’s story is not explained in great detail, as there’s not much to work with.  Stuff is falling in a well… for some reason.  Go line it up nicely before it fill it all the way to the top.  You could maybe make a story out of that, but I doubt it’d be a good one.  The game menus are best described as “functional”, and the graphics and sound effects get the job done without being anything amazing.

Musically, this game was published by EA, and for whatever reason, the music in their games tends to sound pretty similar.  At first, I thought maybe the same guy did all the music for most of their games, but this isn’t the case.  So the most logical assumption is that Electronic Arts had a company-wide policy of demanding that all their composers use the same musical style.  And that musical style is probably best described as “a farting bass guitar”.  Try to imagine a remixed version of the Road Rash theme.  Or the music in Madden ’93.  Or any EA game, really.  It sounds kind of like that.

We picked on this game a lot, but obviously Stryker and I enjoyed it or it would have revoked its Seal of Quality by now.  Unlike so many puzzle games ripping off Tetris, Blockout is one of the few that actually feels like an improvement.  And with a bit of practice, we actually did get a little better at it.  You know, moving up from being really, really bad to just kinda bad.  Still not clearing any layers on the hardest difficulty, but on the medium setting I can get kind of far.  Not sure if playing the game is making me any smarter, but I can levitate small objects with my mind now, so that might be something.

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Grade: C+

Publisher:  Tengen

Year: 1993

Genre:  Attrition

Mustache!

The original Gauntlet didn’t have much of a story – there was a dungeon full of monsters and treasure, and you were in it.  Everything else was speculative – did the dungeons belong to some evil wizard you were trying to kill?  Were you just an ambitious treasure hunter?  Some kind of medieval exterminator?  We didn’t really know.  We didn’t really care, either.  It was 1985, and games didn’t need stories – if there was something we enjoyed doing back then, we didn’t need to invent a reason for doing it other than it was fun to do.  This probably explains Bon Jovi’s popularity as well as why so much of the population was using cocaine back in those days.  Hmmm, now that I think about it, the latter in that example probably explains the former.

Eight years and a few sequels later (though I’m still unconvinced of the actual existence of Gauntlet 3 – honestly, have you ever actually seen Gauntlet 3 anywhere?  I suspect it was originally a trick by the game company, that now lives on as some kind of bizarre internet prank), and things are different.  Well, not too different, actually.  Gauntlet 4 plays about the same as the original, and the story is… well, we’ll let the story speak for itself:

So yeah, this is the story of “The mystery protected by the old castle towers”.  Just rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?  Anyway, as in the earlier Gauntlet games, you have your choice of 4 different types of characters.  Let’s meet them:

Warrior!: Best known for needing food badly, the Warrior is a slow, powerful character, who can take a lot of punishment because, according to the game, he has really tough skin.  While that may be true, it seems like a really poor excuse for running around all these dungeons in his underpants.  I mean, if tough skin is already preventing a lot of damage, imagine what covering said tough skin with some chain mail would do.  You’d be practically invincible.  Maybe it’s not quite as macho, but who is going to question the toughness of someone who’s charging into a magic tower full of ghosts, demons and multiple grim reapers, simply because he decided to do so while wearing a little armor?

You should play as him because: By sacrificing speed in exchange for increased attack power and damage resistance, the Warrior is the ultimate tank, capable of clearing most levels through sheer attrition.  And when it comes right down to it, “sheer attrition” is pretty much the most apt description of Gauntlet’s gameplay ever written.

Valkyrie!: The Valkyrie actually has the best damage resistance in the game, thanks in part to her battle armor and probably also to the fact that she’s some kind of Norse supernatural being.  Her ranged attack of whipping swords at people isn’t particularly powerful, but she is good in close-quarters combat, meaning that she’s the ideal choice for anyone using a controller with a broken “shoot” button.

You should play as her because: With a nice mix of power, speed and toughness, the Valkyrie is probably the most well-rounded character… oh who are we trying to fool?  You’re going to pick her so you can spend the entire game staring at her boobs.

Wizard!: The original Gauntlet described the Wizard’s motivation for joining the quest as a mystery, known only to him.  Considering his age though, there’s a good chance that the Wizard had gotten confused and was actually attacking his own tower.  Nevertheless, he’s here again in Gauntlet 4, bringing his signature combination of slow speed,  poor damage resistance, and moderately effective attack power.  Arcade operators like to refer to the Wizard as “the gold mine”.

You should play as him because: Despite being a weaker character in combat, the Wizard makes up for it with his prowess in magic.  Any potion the Wizard uses will completely clear the screen of enemies, making him a very powerful character, especially in a supporting role.  No, we’re kidding.  Potions come up once in a blue moon, and they usually get shot by accident before you can pick them up, anyway.  You should never pick the Wizard.

Elf!: The Elf is the character of choice for finesse players, sacrificing power for quickness.  Not only can the Elf run fast, but he also has a high rate of fire, allowing him to run and dodge, while wearing down his enemies with a quick succession of shots.  Yeah, good luck with that technique in the cramped, crowded dungeons of Gauntlet, where seemingly infinite monsters spawn constantly, and there’s rarely much open space to avoid them.

You should play as him because: Somebody else will probably have already claimed the Warrior and Valkyrie, and he’s still better than the goddamned Wizard.

Once you’ve picked your character, it’s off to solve the, er, “Mystery protected by the old castle towers”.  The gameplay will be immediately recognizable to anyone who played the original Gauntlet. This is especially true if you choose the arcade mode, which actually is the original Gauntlet.  Not that I’d blame anyone for not immediately recognizing a game that they probably hadn’t played since the Reagan presidency, during a time while they were quite possibly coked out of their mind.

The heart of the game, however, is in the all-new quest mode, which takes the gameplay of the original  but adds various RPG elements to the mix.  For those of you unfamiliar with Gauntlet, it’s kind of like a simplified version of Diablo.  And for those of you who are unfamiliar with both Diablo AND Gauntlet, well, I’m not sure what you’re getting out of this article, since you apparently aren’t that interested in old video games, but your readership is appreciated nonetheless.

Gauntlet has always been known as kind of an action/overhead shooter game, but that doesn’t really give enough credit to it’s level designs, which have always involved a fair amount of puzzle solving.  Admittedly, a lot of these “puzzles” involve simply killing monsters over and over until you find a hidden switch that opens up the path to the exit, but there have always been a fair number of head-scratching levels in each game that produce a satisfying “Aha!” moment when you figure them out.  That idea has actually been expanded in Gauntlet 4 thanks to the “tower” concept.  Now instead of just trying to figure out how to get from one level to the next one, you may have to travel back and forth between multiple levels in order to open up a pathway to the final area of each tower.  It’s actually a pretty cool idea, and not something a lot of other games were doing at the time.

Finally, the other thing that’s different from previous Gauntlet games is that you can upgrade the equipment for your characters, using all that previously useless treasure you’ve been picking up to buy better weapons and armor.  In the case of the Warrior and the Wizard, I’m assuming better armor means even tougher skin and less flammable robes, respectively.  How much satisfaction you get out of buying these upgrades is questionable though, as buying a new sword really just means “do more damage”.  People make fun of MMORPG players for what appears to be spending countless hours playing just so they can upgrade from the yellow armor to the green armor (overlooking whatever bonuses the green armor offers), but at least they get the satisfaction of a new look in addition to their upgraded capabilities.  In Gauntlet 4, each upgrade is really just a moderate boost to your stats.  Whether or not this is a big deal for you depends on just how brutally you need to kick the collective asses of a room full of ghosts.

But then again, who doesn’t want to really, really kick a ghost’s ass?

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Puggsy –  The harder it is to differentiate between “playing the game the way it was meant to be played” and “exploiting glitches in the game’s physics”, the more likely it is that the game needs to be fine-tuned, overhauled, or maybe just set on fire.

Mortal Kombat – The Super Nintendo version of Mortal Kombat was censored, removing almost all of the game’s infamous blood and violence.  This wasn’t necessary for the Genesis version however, since the horrible digitized graphics made it impossible to make out what the hell was going on, anyway.

Did I just rip that guy’s head off?  …Um, maybe?

The Lost Vikings – If you make a puzzle-solving adventure in which 3 different characters have to work together to get through a level, the player is going to end up having to overcome many of the obstacles 3 times.  Given this inherent repetition, it might be nice to not use the same obstacles over and over throughout the game.

Dynamite Headdy – Yes, this seems like a perfectly acceptable use of time and resources that otherwise might have been put towards making a Gunstar Heroes 2.

Fatal Fury 2 – I liked this game better when it was called Street Fighter 2, had interesting characters, and didn’t totally suck.

Ghouls ‘n Ghosts – We sometimes question the motives of a game that is both brutally hard, and has your character running around in his underwear after he gets hit.  I’m not saying this game specifically wants you to spend hours watching Arthur run around in his boxers, but you have to wonder…

Exile – Exile?  Sounds like a brilliant idea.  Please take Mortal Kombat with you.

Damn you, suspicious guy!

Bubba ‘N’ Stix – If you make a puzzle/platforming game and the platforming parts of it really suck, it doesn’t matter how good the puzzle solving is, your game still really sucks.  Also, if the answer to every puzzle is “find something to jab Stix into”, the puzzle solving aspects of your game aren’t really that great, either.

Columns – Gee thanks, Columns.  Now I hate colors.

Gemfire – It’s generally better if a video game doesn’t require a college-level course in order to understand how to play it, since most universities don’t actually offer courses in Gemfire… and you should probably be a little suspicious of the ones that do.

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