Brad Hates Games

Once again, it’s time for our Wednesday ritual of knocking 10 games out of contention. This week, all of the games are run-of-the mill platformers that didn’t really offer much to set them apart from the crowd. That’s the real reason we’re eliminating them. But since that’s not a great read, we came up with these snappy one-liners that probably aren’t quite valid reasons for taking them out of contention.

As an added bonus, 8 of these games also appeared on the Super Nintendo, so it’s like revoking 18 Seals of Quality for the price of 10!

Aero the Acrobat – There’s something about watching Aero try to act cool by putting on sunglasses and doing the moonwalk that just screams “Focus groups came up with this character.”

Aero the Acrobat 2 -Wait, can’t bats fly? Why do I have to do all these damn jumping sections if I can fly?

Izzy’s Olympic Quest – Let’s face it, the original mascot for the ’96 Olympic games in Atlanta – a Union Army General with a torch in each hand – would have made for a far more interesting game.

Toy Story – Honestly, how do take a game starring a cowboy and an astronaut and fuck it up this badly?

Pagemaster – I don’t need all my protagonists to look like Rambo, but do you seriously expect me to play through this game as a blond version of Harry Potter with sparkly shoes?

Marko – Despite my claims to the contrary over the years, this game has proven that it actually was possible for me to care even less about soccer than I already did.

Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool – It’s about as good as you’d expect a game starring a snack food mascot would be.

Chester Cheetah: Wild Wild Quest – They actually made two Chester Cheetah games? What, as a joke?

Tinhead – Cheap attacks from off-screen AND an unintuitive control scheme? Woo-hoo! Is it my birthday already?

Pink Panther Goes to Hollywood – Nobody expects much from a Pink Panther game, but even so, no game has any business sucking this hard.

So that’s it for this week. We’re taking a long holiday weekend to rest, relax, and try to catch up on a few of these games we’re supposed to be such experts on. See you Monday!

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Stryker: I thought it was kind of an odd choice to have you play at Sylvester and attempt to track down and eat Tweety, since in the cartoon, he’s always failing and getting his ass kicked. I mean, who wants to play as the guy who always loses? That would be like playing as the Falcons in Madden.

But what I found to be even stranger was the way Granny was turned into an unstoppable force of destruction. Every level that she’s in, she becomes this constant menace, an unkillable enemy who ruthlessly pursues your destruction. Clock Tower’s Scissorman has nothing on Granny – shes like the Terminator armed with a broom.

Brad: My cat constantly tries to run away, claws the furniture, wakes me up in the middle of the night, eats the plants, and knocks everything off the table onto the floor. She’s still easier to control than Sylvester is in this damn game.

Brad: Even by beat-em up standards, this game is painfully repetitive. It’s not just the fact that you spend almost the entire game walking left to right and beating the shit out of anything that gets in your way – that’s every game in this genre. The real problem is that you spend the majority of the game fighting against the same two or three enemies, the stages go on FOREVER, and you end up using the same move in almost every situation. The best beat-em ups, like Streets of Rage or Golden Axe, make efforts to add variety any way that they can. TMNT takes almost the exact opposite approach.

Stryker: Jump kick. Jump kick. Jump kick. Make sure you get that jump kick down cold, ’cause it’s the only thing you’re going to be doing for the duration of the game. Look, maybe it’s a bit hypocritical for me to be picking on any game for being a mindless, repetitive beat-em up, but Hyperstone Heist really gives in to the worst aspects of the genre. Like some redneck who eagerly draws attention to his lack of class, this game almost seems to takes pride in its shortcomings.

Making a game is a fairly complicated process with several steps involved. First, somebody has an idea for a game. And then that guy’s boss approves it. Then a team of programmers sits down and makes it, and (hopefully) a team of testers plays it. After that, it gets shipped off to a publisher to be marketed and mass produced. From there, it’s loaded onto trucks, and sent to stores, where its put onto shelves and people buy it.

What I’ve just given you is, of course, a simplified version of this process, but it should give you some idea of the many steps involved in the creation of a game, and the number of different people who are involved along the way.

The reason I bring it up is because Radical Rex is a game about a skateboarding T-Rex and his battle for survival against poetry-speaking mammals. Yet at no point did any of the many people involved in its creation stop and think – “Wait, this is insane.”

Who knows? Maybe the executives had too much faith in the guy who came up with the idea. Maybe the programmers who made it were afraid to question their bosses. And maybe the people in charge of purchasing inventory at the various stores that sold it didn’t pay real close attention to what they were ordering. And then maybe the customers… well no, if sales numbers are to be believed, it was the customers  who finally came through and put a stop to this madness. But it never should have gotten that far. Radical Rex is more than just a mediocre game based around a terrible premise – it’s proof of a complete systematic failure within the game industry.

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As crazy as it may sound, Fun ‘N’ Games is a kid’s game where you can dress up as a pimp and club seals. Don’t believe me? Check out these screen shots:

Surprisingly, it’s not as much fun as it sounds.

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Happy Wednesday!

Batman Returns - Completely average in every imaginable way, and so uncreative in its design that we’re having a hard time finding the inspiration to come up with an original way to criticize it.

Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi – The game that taught us that a ninja’s most closely guarded secret is his love of shadow dancing.

Universal Soldier – For once, having a bunch of enemies that all look exactly alike actually works out in the game’s favor. Too bad nothing else does.

Alien³ - Uncontrollable, incoherent, and a pale imitation of the vastly superior SNES version.

3 Ninjas Kick Back – The path of the true ninja apparently involves a lot more hanging out in caves and running away from boulders than I had originally thought.

Ayrton Senna’s Super Monaco GP II – Easily the best Genesis game ever endorsed by Ayrton Senna. We’re eliminating it anyway.

Aerobiz – Tell you what: if you can come up with a good reason for us to have two business games about the airlines on the list, we’ll let Aerobiz back in.

Funny World & Balloon Boy – You ever wonder just how bad a game has to be to not have gotten a Sega Seal of Quality? Well, here you go.

Exodus – Perhaps the strongest argument ever made in favor of creationism, as evolution would never have allowed for a sequel to Bible Adventures to exist.

Virtual Pinball – At what point did “Be better than CrueBall” turn into an impossibly high standard?

Sometimes game designers don’t think their ideas all the way through. The plotline to Normy’s Beach Babe-o-Rama is pretty straightforward – beach babes get abducted, and it’s up to Normy to rescue them. Seems like a not-too-subtle way to include some T&A into a Genesis game. But here’s the problem – if the beach babes all got kidnapped, it means you barely see them until the end of the game. That’s a lot more time looking at Normy and a lot less time oogling girls in their swimsuits than anybody really wanted.

I know what the designers were thinking – the prospect of rescuing swimsuit-clad females would be enough to motivate all the testosterone-driven teenage boys who bought the game to play it all the way to its conclusion, even though the game itself wasn’t anything special. Nice try, but even back during the (mostly) pre-internet era in which Normy came out, there were much easier ways to see scantily clad women. We still had MTV, the USA network, and in the worst case scenario, TNN’s entire lineup consisted of nothing but Dukes of Hazzard reruns. Not to mention that this game came out only a few years after the creation of Baywatch.

Next time, if you want to get us to play all the way through your game, try making it more fun. And if that should prove too difficult, at least follow your original idea to its logical conclusion and make a game where you play as the beach babes as they attempt to rescue Normy. Or better yet, just make a fighting game where they mud-wrestle each other.

Deadly Moves is one of those fighting games that has 8 characters, but like Shaq-Fu and Slaughter Sport (and there’s a fine precedent to be following), forces you to play as the weakest, most ordinary character in the one player mode. I have no idea why some games do this – each character is available in to use in the two-player mode, so its not like they weren’t programmed to be controlled or something. Maybe they just want you to use a specific character because it fits better into the story. You know, because everyone plays fighting games for the story, just like people read Playboy for the articles, and Stryker drinks because he likes the taste.

Anyway, this being a fighting game made in the post-Street Fighter II era, your character gets two special moves. You want to guess what they are? Do I even need to tell you? A fireball and a flying uppercut. Just like every “main” character in every fighting game ever made since Ryu in Street Fighter II.

Other games at least try to disguise this a little. Maybe changing the fireball to a little earthquake wave, or the uppercut to a flying kick instead. Not our guy! Not only does he openly steal his moves from SF2’s Ryu, but his fireball uses animations that are almost exactly the same, too. And despite the game’s title, these moves deal very little damage to your opponent. We’re pretty sure the game got its title because all your opponents seem to have deadly moves. Either that or because the publisher thought calling the game Tickle Fight!, while perhaps more accurate, wasn’t quite as marketable.

Deadly moves has perhaps the saddest roster in fighting game history. Instead of a martial arts tournament, it seems more like the employees at the local grocery store organized a fight club after work. None of them seem to know anything about fighting styles or moves, and they all either look like normal people, or like normal people in cheap Halloween costumes. In the one player mode, you play as Joe. Joe looks exactly like Ryu, except without the headband. Seriously, that’s the only difference – he wears the same clothes and everything. Believe me, Superman put more thought into his Clark Kent disguise than this, and, unlike Joe, he wasn’t infringing on anyone else’s copyrights.

Besides Joe, there’s a guy who thinks he’s a pirate, a glam rocker, the token female character and some other stock fighting game characters. By far my favorite was Warren, an overweight guy with a mullet and handlebar mustache who looks like he’d be more comfortable sweeping floors that participating in a martial arts tournament. Perhaps this is why he also looks sort of bored and depressed – he probably doesn’t really want to be on that raft in the middle of the ocean, caving in your face with his meaty fists.

Since your character has a distinct power disadvantage compared to most of his opponents, gameplay in Deadly Moves tends to be defensive. You stand in one corner of the screen, wait for the enemy to come to you, then hit them out of mid-air (your enemies are obsessed with jump kicks), and hope they don’t use any special moves (in which case you’re screwed). Attacking your opponents directly will only get you crushed. Actually, sitting back and playing defense will also get you crushed, but it will take a bit longer, and make it feel like maybe you had a chance, even though you never really did.

In other words:

By our last count, the Genesis had nine boxing games available for it. We’ve already eliminated James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing, but that still leaves 8 others, which is about 7 too many. So today, we’ll be looking at all the boxing games. The best one gets a Seal of Approval and an automatic bid into the Top 100. The other seven get eliminated. Also, since real boxing matches are scored by a panel of three judges, we will be using a similar format, with Brad, Stryker, and Mr. Do! all weighing in.

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What happened here? Did the creator of the original Space Invaders go into a coma for 10 years without anyone telling him? The improvements Space Invaders ’91 makes over the original – updated graphics, giving the enemies slight variations on the classic “over then down one row” movement pattern, and letting them shoot in different directions – are so minor that you would expect to see them in a sequel that was released no more than two years later. Ever since the original Space Invaders came out back in the late 70s, countless other shooters were created, each making its own little refinements to the formula. Space Invaders ’91 basically ignores the decade’s worth of evolution that took place within the genre it created, and as a result, feels embarrassingly behind the times.

If you want to go for nostalgia, then just re-release the original. But if you’re going to try making a “new and improved” version, you’ve go to do a hell of a lot better than this.