Brad Hates Games

There are a ton of superhero games for the Genesis, and by this point in the project, Stryker and I are getting pretty sick of them. So we gathered up 5 of the remaining titles and decided to put them through their paces. If they’re any good, we’ll let them live to fight another day. If they suck, they’re getting eliminated. Given our experiences with these kinds of games thus far, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

Game #1 – Capatin America and the Avengers

Overview: Beat ‘em up in which Capatain America, Vision, Iron Man and Hawkeye attempt to thwart Red Skull. If that sentence means anything to you, congratulations – you’re a nerd.

Superhero Treatment: Perhaps in an effort not to show up Captain America, none of the Avengers appears to have any kind of superpowers other than punching things. This is particularly notable for Hawkeye, who is always shown with his bow and arrow in hand, yet still resorts to punching his foes. Ironman has been reduced to a point where his most devastating attack involves picking up an empty Coke can and flinging it at his enemies. Keep in mind he can normally shoot lasers out of his palms.

Notable Feature: One of the more impressive translation jobs of the 16-bit era, including conversations like “There’s no escape!” follwed by “No, it is YOU who will be escaping!”

Gameplay: Braindead enemies who, despite having guns, pretty much just walk up to you and get punched, horrendous graphics, and limited control all go out of their way to ensure that this game isn’t any fun. Your actions are limited to jumping and punching, meaning that the guys from Double Dragon have more versatility than some of Marvel’s most prominent characters.

Conclusion: The goofy dialogue provides the only small amount of amusement to be found in this game. We’ve kicked educational games off the list that were more fun than this. ELIMINATE.

Game #2 – The Punisher

Overview: Final Fight style game where you play as the Punisher and clean up the streets of… well, just about everyone. Let’s hope they were all criminals.

Superhero Treatment: The Punisher doesn’t have any true superpowers, beyond a ravenous appetite for destruction and wearing a shirt with a skull on it. So yeah, the game managed to capture that pretty well.

Notable Feature: Just to be sure that nobody mistakes him for merely beating up the criminals without killing them, most stages feature a few sections where the Punisher whips out his sidearm and starts shooting his attackers. In the balls.

Gameplay: Capcom already had a lot of experience with beat ‘em ups, and that influence shows. This game is basically Final Fight with Marvel Comics characters, but that’s a good thing. Enemies find a nice middle ground in between being cheap and being punching bags, the game is fast-paced, and the controls are tight. Shooting sections add some much needed variety. It’s a two button game like Capatin America was, but somehow manages to feel nowhere near as limited.

Conclusion: The Punisher is awesome. PASS.

Game #3 – The Tick

Overview: Beat’em up (surprise!) in which you play as The Tick, the superhero parody beloved by comic-book geeks and nerdy hipsters all across the internet. It was like, the best cartoon show ever, man.

Superhero Treatment: Although the Tick has some superhero powers, such as super-strength and near-invincibility, his main appeal was spoofing mainstream comic book heroes. That kind of thing doesn’t really translate to a game very well.

Notable Feature: Rather than try to recreate the humor of the comic book and animated series, comedy in The Tick is pretty much limited to some humorous animations that get old after roughly 10 seconds.

Gameplay: Not good – the majority of the game is just repeating the same attacks on the same palette swapped enemies, who display little variation in AI routine. There are also some jumping sections so cheap as to make the final stage of Double Dragon seem like a Godsend of level design. You also don’t get anywhere near enough moves to stay interested and can’t even grab or throw your enemies.

Conclusion: This game’s a total disappointment. But after the atrocity that was the live action series, Tick fans ought to be used to that by now. ELIMINATE.

Game #4 – The Death and Return of Superman

Overview: Superman must stop Doomsday from destroying Metropolis. This involves a lot of punching. And dying.

Superhero Treatment: The game actually gives Superman some of his abilities from the comics, including the ability to fly and to shoot lasers out of his eyes. The fact that we find this noteworthy probably explains a lot about why we think so poorly of superhero games in general.

Notable Feature: Superman, for whatever reason, has apparently been cursed with tiny little Tyrannosaur arms, which makes it kind of hard to beat people up efficiently.

Gameplay: The stages go on too long, and there’s usually only two or three different enemies per stage, making things repetitive. Superman’s eye lasers tend to do more damage to himself than whoever he shoots, limiting most of his attacks to punching out his enemies. And since Superman has the ability to fly, you can’t help but wonder – why wouldn’t Superman just fly past all these lackeys and go right to the boss?

Conclusion: This game’s not horrible, but we found still ourselves getting pretty bored by the end of the second level. ELIMINATE.

Game #5 – The Adventures of Batman & Robin

Overview: Revolutionary, one-of-a-kind, puzzle-based adventure game where the world’s greatest detectives must collect clues to figure out and prevent the Joker’s evil plot… No wait, of course not – this is another game where you walk around and beat the crap out of people.

Superhero Treatment: Batman’s main power in the comics was his array of technological gizmos that he relied on. This is represented in the game by him throwing crap at his enemies. Certain power-ups in the game upgrade this to throwing giant glowing blobs of snot at them.

Notable Feature: The game actually lets you choose whether to play as Batman or Robin… you know, in case Robin’s mom wants to play or something.

Gameplay: In the first level, clowns try to hit you with their flashlights and you throw crap at them. Then you get bored. I’m just going to go ahead and assume the rest of the game is like that, too.

Conclusion: On the Batman awfulness scale, this game ranks somewhere in between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, and the Penguin attacking Gotham City with a bunch of missile-equipped penguins under mind control in Batman Returns. ELIMINATE.

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When I was in ninth grade, three of my more brilliant friends invented a sport called Wäk-Ball (pronounced whack ball), as part of an assignment for gym class. It was sort of a combination of baseball and dodgeball. And insanity. At first, it started off as a way for them to use the phrase “Wäk-ing Off” (the “official” term for batting) in a paper for school, but they ultimately ended up creating a game that was actually sort of fun to play. Before long, it turned into a genuine phenom, with games drawing small crowds of neighborhood kids. There was even an MVP trophy given out after each game – the coveted Wäk-Plaque.

Not to brag or anything, but I did win a few Wäk-Plaques during my career.

One particularly intense game of Wäk-Ball ended with some controversy over who deserved the Wäk Plaque. This one guy Ben thought he deserved it, even though nobody else thought he had played that well. So when the Plaque was awarded to the another player, Ben declared himself a co-MVP, took the award and broke it into two pieces. He kept his half and gave the other half to the official winner. This touched off a bit of controversy and when all was said and done, Ben’s half ended up on the roof of his house.

Ben went into his house to get a ladder but very soon he re-emerged with startling news. A raccoon, possibly interested in claiming the Wäk Plaque for itself, had somehow gotten into Ben’s chimney and was going crazy. So we called the police, and 10 minutes later, the cops arrived at Ben’s house. Shortly after that, a fire truck arrived. And trailing behind the fire truck was a man on a bicycle.

As he rode up on his bike, we all marveled at how impressive he looked in his Richard Petty jacket, tight jeans, and thick glasses. Though he looked to be a relatively youngish late-thirties, it immediately became obvious to us that he must have been in charge of the fire department. You could tell from the way he kept trying to tell everyone what to do, even as the other firemen kept ignoring him and telling him to go sit down and watch from across the street. Surely, he must be the Chief of the Hamburg Volunteer Fire Department.

It was my friend Ken who first saw through this carefully woven illusion. “Look!” he said, as the police officers threatened to arrest the man on the bike if he didn’t stop interfering, “that guy isn’t a real fireman.” And suddenly, it became clear to the rest of us. This man apparently followed the firefighters around on his bike and tried to work with the other firemen when he arrived on the scene. As he shadowed the police and real firemen around Ben’s house, we could see that they weren’t interested in his help or advice. In fact, they seemed kind of annoyed by him, yet also resigned to his pestering, as though this was not the first time this had happened.

You wanna be a fireman, you have to equip yourself like one.

He’s Captain Pretend! declared Ken. “He goes around pretending he’s a fireman.” Well, was it really so strange? Didn’t we all pretend we were firemen at some point in our childhoods? This guy probably loved the fire department so much that he never stopped pretending. Once he grew up he bought a scanner and would ride his bike to the scene. I suppose anyone who wanted the dream bad enough could have been driven to this kind of behavior… or they could just join – it was a volunteer fire department, after all.

Ultimately, I’m pretty sure that there are still raccoons in Ben’s house. At least, I don’t remember them bringing any out that day. Eventually, everyone left. The Wäk-Ball players went home. The police went back to Hamburg Village Hall. And the firemen climbed back onto their red fire truck and went back to the fire station. Captain Pretend hopped on his bike screaming “Wait for me, guys!” and rode after them, later spending the rest of the day going through their dumpster looking for “fireman stuff.”

What does any of that have to do with Crack Down? Well, Crack Down might be considered a more militaristic version of the Captain Pretend story. The game’s opening text explains that 2 special agents have a mission to destroy an enemy base with a new type of bomb. And perhaps at some point – maybe in a sequel or something – that actually happens. But Crack Down is about two completely ordinary looking guys, Ben and Andy, who seem to think that they’re secret agents, and attempt to destroy the enemy base on their own with bombs they appear to have made in their garage. The game doesn’t show them riding their ten speeds into enemy territory, but I’d say its a pretty safe assumption.

The gameplay takes place in the bottom-left corner. The rest is taken up by useful stuff like the inventory of the guy who isn’t playing.

Crack Down is far from the worst game we’ve played on this project and would actually be kind of fun if it didn’t feature one of the most monumentally stupid design choices we’ve ever seen. It’s an overhead shooter that’s played on just barely more than 1/4th of the screen. Yes, that’s right – a game that is centered around shooting and dodging enemies is designed in a way that ensures that you can’t see the people trying to kill you until you’re practically on top of them. The rest of the screen is cluttered up with mostly useless information that nobody would miss if it wasn’t there. This isn’t a case of incompetent programming or low-budget development – the people who made the game did this on purpose because they thought it was a good idea. Which is pretty sad when you think about it. Not unlike a certain “firefighter” in my hometown.

If there’s one lesson that we can learn from Capatin Pretend, it’s that letting delusions continue on unchecked can eventually lead to negative outcomes. Therefore it is for its own good (as well as our own), that we confront Crack Down about its awfulness and revoke its Seal of Quality.

Brad: Well, here’s what we’ve been waiting for – a game that chronicles Indy’s little-known adventures as a Belgian spy during World War I.

Stryker: Wait… what?

Brad: Yeah. Didn’t you know that’s what this game was about?

Stryker: Um, no. They maybe should have put that into the intro or something.

This seems far-fetched, even for Indy, who once rode on the outside of a submarine across the Indian Ocean.

Brad: I think they just assumed that you would have already know that from watching The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

Stryker: That seems like a really questionable assumption to make about anyone.

Brad: It was an educational show! On network TV. In prime time. This actually happened.

Stryker: That’s terrifying.

Brad: The 90s were so awesome.

Stryker: This isn’t going to be another update where we just reference a bunch of crap from the 90s and try to get a jump on the inevitable nostalgia wave, is it?

Brad: POGs! Suddenly Susan! Tamagotchi!

Stryker: God, it’s like working with a VH1 executive.

Brad: Silverchair! Cross Colors! Just the Ten of Us!

Stryker: Got it all out of your system yet?

Brad: Yeah, sorry. All better now.

Stryker: How much longer before the whole nostalgia/irony thing hits the 90s in full force? Five more years?

Brad: Way less than that. I’m kinda surprised it hasn’t happened already, actually. And when it does, we’re going to have a lot to answer for. People our age been pretty smug in our treatment of the 80s, but our decade was far from flawless. But we should probably get back on topic.

Wait, did they even have jackhammers back then?  And why’s that guy so huge?  I thought this was supposed to be educational!

Stryker: Agreed. So Indy is a spy in this game?

Brad: Yeah, this is before he became an archaeologist.

Stryker: Well, that answers my questions about why they would send him to prevent the German agents from meeting with scientists to exchange secret weapon plans. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you would need an archaeologist for.

Brad: Yeah, but it doesn’t explain why he’s carrying that whip around. Spies generally try to keep a low profile, and it just seems like cracking a big ol’ bullwhip everywhere is going to draw a lot of attention. This isn’t a Devo video. Or Double Dragon.

Stryker: It might explain why everything in the game is trying to kill you. Including birds.

Brad: On the Tibet level, fish actually jump out of the water onto land, sacrificing themselves to a slow, agonizing death, just for a chance to attack you. That takes some real hatred.

Stryker: What the hell were we doing in Tibet anyway?

Brad: Same as every level – trying to prevent German agents from obtaining the plans to secret, advanced weapons. Tibet is a hotbed of secret weapon development, apparently.

Stryker: I like that on the stage select screen, they have Germany listed, but you aren’t allowed to pick it until you beat some of the other levels. Seems like a desperate attempt to give players the false hope that at least one of the levels in the game might not be completely horrible. Believe me when I tell you that the awfulness of this game goes beyond mere level design, though.

Brad: Yeah, like control. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to make it so that Indy will automatically change from walking to full sprint without any warning. Or to almost always seem to put a pit about two steps right before he does that.

Stryker: Maybe that’s the programming for the game. Instead of pressing a button to sprint, or having him start running after a certain number of steps, the game’s programmed to have him run whenever he gets close to a pit.

Brad: “IF PitDistance < 2 THEN Sprint.”

Stryker: Or maybe he wasn’t running at all. Maybe they were all black holes.

Brad: That could be the real secret weapon that the Germans were working on – A Black Hole Gun.

Stryker: You mean that the Tibetans were working on. The Germans were just trying to buy these technologies.

I knew we couldn’t trust that Dali Lama.

Brad: That’s right. But a Black Hole Gun would sure make the title of the game more accurate. The weapons you’re trying to stop the Germans from obtaining in the game – a flamethrower, mustard gas, ball-bearing bombs and Gatling guns – are all deadly, but calling them the Instruments of Chaos might be getting carried away. I mean, we have them now and we don’t live in chaos.

Stryker: By the way – and admittedly, I’m no expert on explosives – but do you really need secret plans to design a ball-bearing bomb? It seems like just coming up with the idea would constitute about 95% of the necessary research into making one.

Brad: So how bad was this game? Was this the worst game we’ve played so far?

Stryker: No, not that bad. But it might be the worst one I was unfamiliar with before we started this project. I knew what I was getting into with Dark Castle and Jurassic Park, but this was an unpleasant surprise.

Brad: This game had me longing for my comparatively pain-free days working as a Quality Markets cartboy in the dead of a Buffalo winter.

Stryker: It left a bitter, metallic taste in my mouth.

Brad: It’s one of those games that’s so bad you instinctively start trying to chew your thumbs off while playing it.

After seven months of doing this, we’re a little sick of writing, and you’re probably a bit sick of reading. So we took 10 games that are bad, but not really bad in any way interesting enough to write about at length, tried to find some screenshots that illustrated their awfulness, and then Stryker and I provided a little bit of commentary. I’ll spare you the tired cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words and instead tell you that putting up screenshots is about a million times easier than writing anything.

Pit-Fighter

Brad: I’d like to think that this is how all illegal, underground fights end – with the winner triumphantly standing on a forklift while the crowd throws money under him and compliments him on how studly he is.

Stryker: What this screenshot doesn’t show is that sometimes during the fight, a hooker will run out of the crowd and starts stabbing the shit out of you for no reason. As crazy as that sounds, it’s probably a lot closer to a real street fight than games like Street Fighter, which make fighting seem organized and kind of glamorous.

Midnight Resistance

Brad: This game begins with one of the greatest introductions scenes ever – a dude with a machine gun riding on the hood of a jeep while his heavy metal friend drives. Things go downhill from there, but really, who could keep up that level of awesomeness for very long?

Stryker: In a perfect world, this is exactly how I would get to work every morning.

Wacky Worlds

Stryker: Wacky Worlds is one of those children’s art-making games that probably should have been disqualified before we even started this project. But since we failed to do that, we went ahead and drew this picture for you.

Brad: We were trying to recreate the first level of Doom. I think it came out pretty well.

Bonanza Brothers

Brad: What the hell? I know we’ve been brainwashed over the years into believing that we’re not supposed to care about a game’s graphics, but seriously, this game looks like it was made for the Atari 2600.

Stryker: This is a “crime simulator” in which you break into buildings and shoot cops in the back like in Grand Theft Auto. But unlike GTA, parent’s groups never protested it – probably because nobody could figure out what was supposed to be going on.

Batman: Revenge of the Joker

Stryker: Holy vampires, Batman! We’ve somehow ended up in the NES version of Castlevania!

Brad: My favorite part of this game is that when Batman dies, he fucking explodes.

Last Battle

Stryker: Last Battle is kind of like Altered Beast except you don’t get to turn into a Werewolf and it isn’t any fun.

Brad: The awfulness of the dialogue is pretty representative of the rest of the game, too.

Combat Cars

Brad: Every time I look at “Growl”, the first thought that pops into my head is “Chewbacca would be the worst telemarketer ever.”

Stryker: If you could imagine two very inept Russian spies in the 1980s trying to disguise themselves as American teenagers, they would look exactly like Sadie and Ray.

The Incredible Crash Test Dummies

Brad: The whole fucking game is like this.

Stryker: I hear the writers for this game eventually got jobs writing children’s birthday cards.

Bubble and Squeak

Brad: This screenshot actually shows a part where I got trapped, couldn’t move, and ended up slowly drowning. I’m being totally honest when I say that is my biggest real-life fear in the entire world. So nice job giving me nightmares for the next month, Bubble and Squeak.

Stryker: The entire game is based around the premise of guiding your idiot friend through the levels. You know, because what everyone wanted was an entire game of nothing but escort missions.

Whip Rush

Stryker: You can’t exactly tell just by looking at it, but in this screenshot, we’ve just picked up a a weapon that shoots in the opposite direction from whatever you press on the control pad. If there’s a more counterproductive power-up in the history of shooters, I can’t even imagine it.

Brad: Defender used to have a button called “Hyperspace” which, 90% of the time that you pressed it, would kill you instantly. I used to refer to it as the “Fuck You” button. Guess what – that’s still more useful than Whip Rush’s opposite direction cannon.

Brad: Anytime you make a game about a family of bears going on a camping trip for vacation, you’re already starting off on a pretty shaky premise from a logical standpoint, and things only get worse from there. I really had to question the parenting skills of anyone who decides to send their kids off exploring on their own when the campground is located in between a haunted forest and an abadoned diamond mine. And in between being attacked by alligators and pecked to death by angry woodpeckers, I also began to wonder whether the Mama bear really had her cubs’ best interests in mind. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have expected too much from the woman sitting around in her pajamas in the middle of the afternoon.

Stryker: What’s to say? Another mediocre at best plaformer based on a license from the very fringe of marketability. I don’t know who thought the Berenstain Bears would be enough of a selling point that they didn’t have to put much effort into making a fun game, but that person is probably dangerous.

Mr. Do!: Bears are famous for doing one thing in the woods, and it sure ain’t camping. Then again, I guess Berenstain Bears: Pooping Adventure would be kind of a weird idea for a game.

Brad: Hey, Koei – I’ve never commanded the Pacific fleet before. I just thought I should mention it because you seem to have mistaken me for someone who has. Why don’t you tell me how much of my budget should be allocated to fuel? Will I get more money later? How far can I go on 100 of your arbitrary fuel units? How many ships do I have right now? Those are all things I need to know before I can start making decisions that will affect the rest of the game. Even if you get through the opening screens without screwing up your fleet too badly, the rest of the game really doesn’t get any less overwhelming or confusing.

To put it another way – the company that made this game, also made Aerobiz, a business sim about the airline industry. I know even less about running an airline than I do about commanding the Navy, but I was able to figure out how to play it without too much trouble (or without even reading the instructions), because it’s designed to not be impossible. P.T.O. could lean a thing or two from that concept.

Add in some of the most menu-intensive, unintuitive gameplay ever seen on a console, and you’ve got yourself one nightmare of a strategy game.

Stryker: I don’t mind investing a fair amount of time in order to learn how to play a game, but I also I don’t want to have to earn a PhD just to play it. PTO is absolutely brutal with the amount of detail it has, and the fact that it does absolutely nothing to ease you into it. Even after reading the instructions and a detailed FAQ, I still had no idea what the hell I was supposed to be doing, and probably made a lot of bad choices that would have hindered my war efforts if I had ever been able to get things going in the first place. Maybe if I had a few years to learn this game, I could get my head around it, but I just don’t have that kind of free time.

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For whatever reason, the Genesis seemed to encourage a bit more creativity than most other systems. When it worked, it made for some pretty remarkable titles. But when it didn’t, things often got weird – the Genny was home to some pretty strange titles, and we’ve already gone through more than a few of them while doing this project. But a quick scan over the list of remaining games revealed a small group that, even by Genesis standards, was pretty, um… inspired. We decided to pick out the 5 weirdest games left on the list and put them in a little contest. First place is a spot on the Top 100. Second through fifth place is elimination.

Game #1 – Marvel Land

Overview: Marvel Land is a platformer, very similar to Super Mario Bros., set in an amusement park.

Not pictured: Slug Car.

Strangeness Rating: 4/5 – Marvel Land is whimsical, but at first glance, it doesn’t really appear to be any more strange than a lot of other platformers. Take a closer look though, and things definitely take a turn for the weird. The main enemy early on isn’t just a slug, it’s a slug that been turned into some kind of car. There are plants with faces on them, not too weird – until they throw their lips at you. Marvel Land takes the normal cartoonishness seen in a lot of video games, and adds a bizarre, sometimes sinister edge to it.

Epitome of Weirdness: This walking, man-eating flower, which just happens to also be a dominatrix, complete with whip, leather bikini, and red high heels.

This is troubling on multiple levels.

Conclusion: Marvel Land plays like a rejected version the first Super Mario Bros. game. On drugs. At times it almost feels as though someone took a copy of SMB1, removed the fun parts, and replaced it with whatever their fever-ridden brain happened to think of. It may be strange, but it’s also simplistic, dated, and pretty mediocre.

Game #2 – Alex Kidd in Enchanted Castle

Overview: Another platformer, but with special items you get by playing a minigame.

Strangeness Rating: 1/5 – Alex Kidd isn’t much weirder than a lot of other platform games, although he does look like a cross between a monkey and a hobbit, and he punches the shit out of cars. What is a little unusual is that he lives on the planet Paperrock, where everyone is obsessed with playing Rock/Paper/Scissors. There’s an ominous warning in the intro that anyone who isn’t good at the game won’t last long…

Epitome of Weirdness: Playing a game of Rock/Paper/Scissors in which the winner gets a helicopter and the loser… is murdered.

C’mon, don’t be a wuss.

Conclusion: It’s really not that much fun playing a game that’s centered around life-or-death matches of Rock/Paper/Scissors. Yes, it’s a bonus game to get you special items, but without the special items, this is a pretty below-average platformer. To be fair, it was one of the earliest Genesis games, but that still doesn’t make it fun.

Game #3 – Stormlord

Overview: You play as the Stormlord (or something), and need to free fairies from imprisonment through a combination of platforming, puzzle solving, and action.

A typical screen in Stormlord.

Strangeness Rating: 3/5 – Stormlord takes place in a fantasy setting, and by fantasy, I mean that the cover of Heavy Metal magazine threw up all over the stages. There’s plenty of fantasy-themed stuff scattered throughout the stages – cauldrons, giant skulls, tress that have been made into houses, but it’s all just thrown around in a completely helter-skelter way. There’s no rhyme of reason to any of it, and the overall impression is rather strange.

Epitome of Weirdness: The landscape is dotted with these fairies coming out of pots… for some reason. They don’t move or do anything other than occasionally block your path.

I guess a wall would have been too ordinary.

Conclusion: Weird or not, Stormlord is really, really crappy. The control is less than ideal, cheap deaths abound, and there’s a bunch of ways to screw yourself over and not be able to win. This game just plain sucks.

Game #4 – Decap Attack

Overview: Play as Chuck D. Head, as you journey through stages and kill enemies by whipping your head at them.

Strangeness Rating: 2/5 – Aside from the fact that you use your own head as a weapon by throwing it at enemies, the rest of the game isn’t really extraordinarily strange. Then again, how much weirder do you really need it to get after that?

Epitome of Weirdness: Using your head in such a reckless fashion can lead to some interesting outcomes. For instance, you might lose it. Don’t worry though, there plenty of spare heads laying around to substitute it with. They’re pretty interchangeable.

Conclusion: Decap Attack is kind of fun, but nothing really special. It depends a little bit too much on the novelty of its concept, and once you get over the whole head-throwing thing it’s a solid, but pretty ordinary, effort.

Game #5 – Trampoline Terror

Overview: Overhead-style game in which you dodge enemies and do some minor puzzle-solving.

At least the turtles look happy.

Strangeness Rating: 5/5 – Airships have blanketed the skies over your homeland, and its up to you - Trampoline Terror (yes, that’s your name) – to destroy them. Luckily for you, Trampoline Terror (a name so awesome bears repeating), the engineers who designed these ships left a bunch of self-destruct buttons on the outside of the ships. Apparently oversight isn’t a big deal with these guys. So its just a matter of running around on these ships, mid-flight, and pressing all the buttons. Oh, one other thing – each airship is made out of trampolines. So, to recap, the point of the game is to save the world from the eminent threat of being surrounded by groups of flying trampolines.

Epitome of Weirdness: The flying trampoline airships are, naturally, infested with wheeled snapping turtles that want to kill you.

Conclusion: It takes a little bit to get going, but after about the fifth stage or so, the game starts to get pretty fun. Like the girls you used to date in high school, the fact that it’s more than a little bit insane merely adds its charm. But even without that added bonus, this would still be a pretty good game.

By now we’ve already eliminated 2 other WWF games that were almost identical to WWF Raw, so there isn’t much more to say. I mean, really – bad wrestling game that relies too much on button mashing, and stars crappy wrestlers nobody remembers anymore. There, all done. That seems kind of short though, so me and Stryker decided to go one step further and review each wrestler in the game individually.

Vince and King look at each other in confusion at Doink’s first appearance

Diesel

Brad: Coming up next on Raw, see Diesel do his three moves!

Stryker: The Big Boot. The Big Boot Again. The Powerbomb.

Brad: Of course. All tall guys do the Big Boot. That’s a rule.

Stryker: Why is the Big Boot such a devastating move?

Brad: Because it’s like running into a solid object at a moderate speed. Nothing is more devastating than that, except for Hulk Hogan’s leg drop. My brother did that to me once – it didn’t hurt, but it made my nose feel like it was full of water… Which I guess is kind of debilitating.

Stryker: Remember Hulk Hogan’s old gimmicks, like he could use his belt as a weapon because he wore it to the ring. And then later in the match he would become super powered and nothing could hurt him… Although I don’t think anyone ever tried anything besides punching him in the bald spot, which he had when he turned 16. Hulk was awesome.

Luna Vachon

Brad: You know, I was just thinking that the problem with the last two WWF games for the Genesis was that they didn’t give you a chance to beat the hell out of a woman.

Stryker: I know you’re joking, but there was probably a small part of the WWF audience who watched her matches specifically for that reason.

Brad: It’s hard to look at the entire history of pro wrestling, and pick one moment and say “That was the worst, most rednecky moment in wrestling”, but if you’re right, that might be it. Either that or when Golddust was a bad guy. The whole idea was you were supposed to hate him because he was gay. Remember when he fought Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Piper was like “I’m gonna beat up that sissy!” and all the fans we’re like “Yeah! Go beat up that gay guy!”

Stryker: Yeah, but at least you weren’t supposed to be cheering against Luna only because she was a woman. She did other things to be a heel. The idea wasn’t just to enjoy watching some giant dude beat up a woman.

Brad: Wait, did Luna wrestle against men, or only other women?

Stryker: Honestly, I never saw her at all. This game came out right in the middle of a 6 year window during which I tried to forget pro wrestling even existed. Not unlike right now, actually.

Wait, is that a woman?

Yokozuna

Stryker: I think the fact that Yokozuna didn’t win the Royal Rumble every year is all the proof you need that wrestling is fake.

Brad: Actually, any doubt I had was settled the first time I watched a barber wrestle a cowboy. You try to explain how that would ever happen naturally.

Stryker: Some kind of war against mullets?

Brad: Unlikely, considering that the barber in question had one himself.

Stryker: Maybe their jobs had nothing to do with it. Like you could go to hockey and get into a fight with another player, and it would just be a hockey fight.

Brad: Yeah, but I wouldn’t be billing myself as Brad “The Internet Writer” Lawrence vs. “The Mall Employee”. The fact that these two wrestler’s professions were their gimmicks implies that them fighting was somehow related to their jobs.

Stryker: Then Yokozuna’s gimmick actually made sense, since he was supposed to be a sumo wrestler.

Brad: Well, it made sense right up until the moment he fought an Undertaker and when things started going badly, an IRS agent ran in and saved him.

Lex Luger

Stryker: What was this? An attempt to fill in as the “patriotic guy” after Hulk left?

Brad: I always thought it was an attempt to fill in as the “steroids guy” after Hulk left.

Stryker: It’s bad enough that it’s almost all white guys in this game, but Lex has to be the most cracker-tastic white wrestler ever.

Brad: You mean, besides the Honky Tonk Man.

Stryker: Well, obviously. But the point is – did the WWF even have any black guys back then?

Brad: This was probably pre-Farooq and Ahmed Johnson, but I think they had Mabel.

Stryker: Who the hell is Mabel?

Brad: He was this heavy black wrestler who came out to this bad, generic-sounding rap music with police sirens in the background. I don’t remember, but I’d guess his gimmick was that he was a criminal. The WWF made all their black wrestlers be criminals.

Stryker: Typically enlightened approach for the woman-beatin’, gay-bashin’ wrestling federation.

Brad: I’m just surprised they didn’t just go for the racist trifecta and have his finishing move involve basketball somehow.

1-2-3 Kid

Stryker: What the hell? What was the WWF thinking?

Brad: It’s the 1-2-3 Kid. You know, Syxx.

Stryker: They must have been preparing the fans for his tremendous amount of suck with his song.

Brad: Yeah. It must have been easy to recreate on the Genesis, because it already sounds like the music in a Genesis game. A BAD genesis game.

Stryker: It kinda has the Undertaker’s riff in it. I think Jimmy Hart used the same loop with a different tempo, like some kind of a late 80s, early 90s Wesley Willis.

Brad: You ever see when Neil Young was touring with Pearl Jam, and they would get to the part where Neil Young was supposed to play a solo, except he couldn’t, so he just beat the hell out of his guitar for a few minutes? It sounds kind of like that… wow, I just compared this song to a Neil Young guitar solo – that’s a bit harsh.

Stryker: At least we can honestly say this game isn’t the lowest point of X-Pac’s life. He did eventually make a porno with Chyna.

Razor Ramon

Brad: More wonderful WWF racism. Razor Ramon is supposed to be a Cuban, and because of this, he has greasy hair, chews toothpicks and is the “Bad Guy”. I’m surprised they didn’t have a Mrs. Ramon that he would go home and beat the hell out of. Wasn’t that pretty much his whole character?

I can’t exactly explain why, but I love this picture.

Stryker: He was the bad guy. Had lots of gold… OOZING MACHISMO? I don’t get that. Does that mean he sold lots of drugs, didn’t take showers, or just smoked cigars. After all, he was supposed to be Cuban.

Brad: Or at least the WWF’s version of Cuban. Anyway, I’m pretty sure his music is the same music as the beach level of Streets of Rage… except the boss of that level was Ultimate Warrior, not Razor Ramon.

Stryker: Did the boss run out and yell racist things at you?

Brad: Maybe. I liked how after Ultimate Warrior gave that racist speech at UCONN and got in all that trouble, he started complaining that the audience had been disorderly and kept distracting him with their yelling. I mean, I saw him get his head crushed by a chair once while he was rambling to Mean Gene, and that didn’t even faze him.

Stryker: How many different Ultimate Warriors were there?

Brad: Technically, just one – Jim Hellwig. But, I believe he once said that we were ALL Ultimate Warriors in our own way. Anyways, back to Razor Ramon’s theme – What is that thing in the song supposed to be? The wind? Car tires screeching?

Stryker: A razor cutting? Maybe cutting open a huge bag of cocaine?

Bret Hart

Brad: Tell me this doesn’t sound like the music a stripper would dance to 20 years ago. Or even now, for that matter. People who had never seen wrestling before must have been really confused when a big guy in a leather jacket came out to this song. It’s totally stripper music.

Stryker: Yeah. Or else it could be in an 80’s movie. Like, where the hero gets his ass kicked and then has to train really hard to learn karate or weightlifting so he can come back and be victorious. This would be the music while he’s training.

Brad: And then, because he finally learned cooking or breakdancing or whatever, he could use that to save the neighborhood from crime.

Stryker: And then for the sequel, he’d have to train even harder, and learn a secret, never-before-seen move that could never really work.

Brad: And that would save the youth center for evil land developers.

Stryker: How old do you think this song is. Early 90’s?

Brad: Oh no, mid-80’s for sure. This was the Hart Foundation’s music. Bret Hart and Jim “The Anvil” Niedhart used to wear these insane pink and black naval commander uniforms. I have no idea why. They looked like the gay version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Stryker: That was back when Jimmy Hart wrote all of the music!

Brad: Yeah, how did that work? Was he just the music guy, and then one day they’re like, “Hey Jimmy, you’re last name is Hart too. Go manage the Hart Foundation.”

Stryker: He was the Mouth of the South.

Brad: Managing two Canadiens.

Stryker: And he still got to be music guy.

Brad: Maybe he was a manager first, and then they just made him start writing songs. “Hey Jimmy, here’s a Casio keyboard. Write us some themes,” and he turned out to be sort of okay at it.

Undertaker

Stryker: Remember when he was invincible, and his manager just had to rub an urn to give him all his power back? Hulk Hogan outsmarted him when he dumped the ashes from the urn and Undertaker couldn’t do anything but flop around the ring like some nerd whose computer crashed and he can’t play World of Warcraft.

Brad: Hulk must have really done a thorough job, too, because that’s pretty much how Undertaker spent the rest of his career.

Stryker: You know what was the best Undertaker music? When it started with him going “Are you scared?” and then all of a sudden “They call me cowboy…”

Brad: Ugh, I was trying to forget about when Undertaker came out to Kid Rock songs.

Stryker: …and it was like “Wait, Undertaker’s a biker now?!?!”

Brad: He did look like a biker. It kinda made sense.

Stryker: But he was still called the Undertaker.

Brad: I always liked when he was an undertaker, and they acted like wrestling was just something undertakers do. Like it was a normal part of the job.

Stryker: And his manager was Paul Bearer, but he wasn’t actually a pall bearer.

Brad: And nobody ever stopped and went “Wait, this is insane.”

Shawn Michaels

Stryker: Michaels was weird. I mean, he was a Rocker, and then one day, he threw Marty Jannety out of what must have been “The Window of Forever Sucking” and then became the Heartbreak Kid.

Brad: I would have liked to have been at that meeting – “Shawn, from now on, you’re new gimmick is that you’re good looking. That’s it.” “Wait, how does that help me wrestle better?”

Stryker: “Well…um… that guy is an Undertaker. And that guy is Cuban”

Brad: Worst song ever, by the way – listen to the background singers. I think those are men trying to sound like girls. Maybe even just one guy, using echo effects to sound like a group.

Stryker: It’s probably Jimmy Hart.

Brad: Or Shawn.

Bam Bam Bigelow

Brad: He probably would have been pretty intimidating if he didn’t wear what looked like little kid pajamas.

Nice outfit, hobo.

Stryker: Yeah, I mean, he’s this gigantic, bar-room brawler with tattoos on his head, a beard, and some missing teeth. But it looked like he was wearing some kind of low-budget superhero costume. Like one of those Halloween costumes you see at the dollar store, and it has a name like “Action Man”.

Brad: Naming him after a Flintstones character maybe wasn’t the best move either. He’s a big enough guy that he probably would have been really scary if he just had a more intimidating name. It worked for Psycho Sid.

Stryker: You mean Softball Sid? I wonder if Sid really did take a leave of absence from wrestling to play beer-league softball. It’s a weird enough rumor to be true, and if it is, its my all-time favorite wrestling story.

Brad: So, do you think the highlight of Bam Bam’s career was losing a match to Lawrence Taylor?

Stryker: No, I think it was his 3 week reign as ECW champion, where he won the belt from Shane Douglas and lost it back to him less than a month later.

Brad: Seriously, what was the point of that? Did Shane have some kind of bonus in his contract if he held the title for so many weeks, and ECW was trying to get out of paying it?

Stryker: Maybe Bam Bam was trying to impress a girl, so they let him “borrow” the title for a little while.

Doink

Brad: Clowns are supposed to be funny, but usually end up being scary. Doink was probably supposed to be kind of scary, but ended up being… what’s the word for it?

Stryker: A fucking travesty.

Brad: Yes, that’s it. Whatever happened to Doink anyway?

Stryker: He sold his costume on eBay, got $2.56, and bought a happy meal, thus ending his pathetic career to pursue his true dream – being a guy with a Happy Meal.

Brad: On my list of priorities, I know I’d put that way ahead of being Doink.

Owen Hart

Brad: Hmmm, it’s kind of hard to say anything bad about Owen Hart, considering the tragic way he died.

Stryker: Oh, don’t be a pansy. Raul Julia died right after filming Street Fighter, and you didn’t see critics lining up to heap praise on his portrayal of M. Bison.

Brad: That’s true, and it’s not like Owen fell from the rafters and smashed his face on the magical turnbuckle of not-sucking.

Stryker: Dude, that’s wrong.

Brad: What? You told me to make fun of him.

Stryker: I said make fun of him, not make fun of him dying in the middle of a show. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Brad: Wait, I didn’t even want to say anything!

Stryker: No, forget you, man. You’re a bastard. I don’t even want to talk to you right now.

Brad: Goddammit!

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