Brad Hates Games

NHL Hockey Series vs. Pirates! Gold

Well, this is it.  After a year and a half, and after writing elimination entries for 705 Sega Genesis games, we’re finally here to decide what the console’s finest game is.  But a thought occurred to us – we’ve had something bad to say about every single game we’ve eliminated so far, and we’ll surely have something bad to say about whichever game we give 2^nd place to.  But what about the winner?  We never said the Grand Prize for winning this contest was an exemption from our withering criticism.  Therefore, we’ve decided to present the case against each of our two finalists before giving you our final decision.

NHL Hockey Series

Brad: Getting kicked seems to be the metaphor of choice for when something really disappointing, frustrating or ironic happens.  The only thing that changes is where.  Some people call things a “real kick in the teeth”, while others will say it’s a kick in the gut, and their slightly less refined cousins will indicate that the kick actually landed someplace a bit further south than the gut, though it does sorta rhyme with that area.  With the NHL series, EA decided why choose, when they can just kick us in all three?

Drew Carey seems pretty excited about Nordiques/Kings.

First a history lesson:  For years, the NHL series weren’t just the best hockey games ever made, they were the best sports games, period.  But they lacked one essential feature that had been commonplace on PC sports games for almost a decade – a full season mode.  Up through NHL ’94, you could play a single game, or you could take your favorite team into the playoffs, but that was it.  Anybody looking for a hockey experience that lasted more than a couple of hours was told to go make some friends, and play NHL ’94 with them.  Hell, if I had friends to play with, we would have just taken up real hockey.

But then NHL ’95 came along, with (more or less) the same great gameplay but now also featuring the much-longed for season mode, and it was glorious.  Or at least it was for a couple of months, until you got about halfway through the season and the internal battery died and erased all your progress, causing you to throw your Genesis out the window.  That was the kick in the teeth.

The next year, EA brought in a completely new game engine for NHL ’96, changing the gameplay in ways that made it less fun.  The series hasn’t been the same since.  There’s your kick in the gut.

And the final kick? Well, all these years later, every one my games from this series other than NHL ’95 – including the ones older than NHL ’95 – still hold onto whatever was saved on them just fine.  Thanks, EA.

Hawerchuk shoots on net as the defense watches with disinterest.

Stryker: Throughout its entire 16-bit era, EA didn’t really make their NHL games with AI that understands the offsides rule, or a way of handing out penalties other than randomly (although that’s actually not too far off from some NHL refs), or with a control scheme that makes getting the line you want onto the ice a smooth process.  Why not?  Because you’re not actually supposed to be playing the game that way.  This isn’t a secret – by default the game is set up to play without penalties, offsides or line changes.  If you want these things, you have to switch them on, at which point the game becomes a disaster.

And can we talk about the defensemen in these games?  Growing up a Sabres fan, I’ve seen more than my share of bad ones, but nothing compared to the D-men in the NHL series.  It’s not just that they play poorly – they don’t seem to be aware that their net even exists. At best, they do little to stop you from getting to it, and at worst, they skate right into the goal whenever you go behind it, as if it’s some kind of optical illusion they’re somehow not capable of seeing.  That wouldn’t be such a big deal, other than the fact that they’re whole job is supposed to be, you know, defending it.  People always complain that the goalies in this game are too easy, but it’s really not their fault.  Kind of hard to make a save when you have to fight through a pile of your own teammates to get there.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just crazy, but if we’re going to give the title of Best Game on the Genesis to a sports game, I kind of would like it to actually look a little bit like the sport it’s supposed to be.

Pirates! Gold

Brad: Pirates! Gold seems to offer you endless possibilities – Four competing nations with ever-changes alliances!  An accurate re-creation of the Caribbean to explore!  A shifting economic/political landscape that changes depending on your actions and what time period you’re playing in! – but the options are more limited than you may think.

See, the only way to get a nice boat, big crew, or a lot of money is to work as a mercenary for one of the four nations in the game. And since the Spanish control almost all of the good targets in the area, you’re not going to want to work for them.  I mean, that would be like a professional thief deciding to work for a giant bank and rob poor people on their behalf.  Although come to think of it, there are people who do that in real life – we call them Congressional lobbyists.

Hmmm, well he seems pretty reputable.

For conventional piracy however, it’s still usually a good idea to steal from the guys who have all the stuff you want.  That would be Spain, who has a near-monopoly on the area’s big cities, treasures, and Calypso music.  This is especially true if you plan on playing through the game’s optional storyline, which mostly involves attacking Spanish targets.

This basically leaves you to work for the Dutch, French or English, or more likely a combination of those nations.  And by combination, I mean the French and English, because the Dutch are hardly ever at war with Spain, or anybody else for that matter.  It’s not hard to understand why, though – a nation sitting below sea level tends to be relatively peaceful.  Last thing the Dutch want is a fleet of Spanish Galleons headed for the New World to take a slight detour and turn their homeland into Atlantis.  Wooden shoes are not a floatation device.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with being a pirate and attacking Spain on behalf of the English or French.  It’s fun, it’s profitable, and who knows, you might even get a rum named after you.  But don’t try to tell me about all the “alternate” ways of playing the game.  The other two nations don’t offer much, and the third route – not attacking anyone and simply being a peaceful trader… well what fun is that?

Hey! We buy our boots at the same store!

Stryker: For a game that made its reputation on being a go anywhere and do anything adventure, there doesn’t actually seem to be an awful lot of variety. Sail to target, dodge cannonballs, swordfight (thrust up, thrust down, thrust up, thrust down, win).  Sail to nearest town to collect reward and resupply.  Repeat this about 1,000 times.  Congratulations, you’re the greatest English Pirate/Spanish Explorer/Dutch Trader in history.

Conclusion

Brad: NHL ’95 and Pirates! Gold are two games that I still dig out to play every so often, even after 15 years, and trying to pick a favorite between the two is no easy task.  Despite our exaggerated complaints above, playing either game is pure enjoyment, and both have a unique charm to them that has kept them from being made to feel obsolete or redundant by newer games, including their own sequels.  I don’t know if I’d go quite as far to say that they’re still as good now as they were when they first came out, but they’ve certainly haven’t lost nearly as much of their luster as many other “great” games from the 16-bit era.

Still, only one can be the winner, and I’m going to have to go with Pirates! Gold.  It’s  such a fantastic idea (a pirate game where you actually act like a pirate, as opposed to one where you’re pretty much just a flamboyantly dressed character in a platforming game), and it’s so well executed, that a game would have to be just about perfect to beat it.  And if you were to take the best aspects of each game in the NHL series, and Frankenstein them into the ultimate hockey game (the gameplay of NHL ’94 combined with the features and graphical improvements of NHL ’98 for example), you might have had it.  But that game doesn’t exist and, individually, there is no single game in the NHL series that quite beats out Pirates! Gold.

(Also, for those of you wondering about the insane use of an exclamation point in the middle of the title – Pirates! Gold is the new and improved console version of the PC classic Pirates! - hence, a “Gold” edition.)

Stryker: Pirates! Gold’s blend of action and strategy is both perfectly done and still fairly unique even today.  And despite the limitations we mentioned earlier, the game still gives you a great amount of openness and freedom to play it the way you want.  Although working for some nations may not be a realistic option, you still have a wealth of options in where you go, who you attack, and the order in which you try to complete events.  One of the greatest soundtracks in video games and some great artwork doesn’t hurt, either.

Winner: Pirates! Gold

Also, we would like to thank everyone who participated in our bracket contest, and recognize Eric, who won the whole thing with a total of 95 points!  Eric corrected predicted 34 out of a possible 63 winners, including having both of our finalists in his final four, and even correctly predicting that Pirates! Gold would be in the final (although he had it losing to Gunstar Heroes).  For those of you who are curious, here’s Eric’s bracket, with correct predictions highlighted in green:

Anyway, a big thanks to all of you who have read our blog throughout the tournament.  Don’t forget, we’re not done yet.  Next, we’ll eliminate 14 games that were in the tournament so we can trim the field of 64 down into our Top 50.  And then in coming weeks we’ll rank all 50 games based on their tournament performance and write lengthy articles about them.  So stay tuned!

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Kid Chameleon vs. Pirates! Gold

Brad: Kid Chameleon, more so than Sonic, should have been the Genesis’ answer to Nintendo’s Mario games.  The gameplay is fairly similar to the all-time classic Super Mario Bros. 3, and although I know this is a blasphemous thing to say, Kid Chameleon is actually more fun to play.  But the game never really caught on, failing not just as a “signature” franchise for Sega, but being kind of an overlooked, little known title in general.  Surely part of this was timing – by 1993 Sonic had long been crowned Sega’s mascot and interest in platforming games had already peaked (even Mario had moved on to a more lucrative career in things like kart racing and practicing medicine).  But another reason may have been the character himself.  Let’s take a look at the protagonist of Kid Chameleon:

Aha!  So this is what Corey Feldman was up to in the mid-90s.

Yeesh.  Say what you will about blue hedgehogs and Italian stereotypes, both have infinitely more charm than this poser.  No wonder 95% of the game is spent with him dressed up in some kind of costume.  Add in a storyline about some kind of arcade machine that comes to life and steals the souls of the kinds who play it or something, and you have a game that’s actively trying to make people hate it.  Oh, and here’s a typical boss character:

I don’t know what it is, I just know I see it every time I close my eyes.

Look, Kid Chameleon wouldn’t have gotten this far in the tournament if it wasn’t a brilliant game.  I’m just saying that it’s not too hard to see why it never really caught on.

Stryker: Of all the games that made it into our final four, Kid Chameleon is the only one with any kind of genuinely significant flaw.  It’s a long, challenging game – over 100 levels, and almost all of them are tough – that offers you no way to save your progress.  There’s no save files, no passwords, no… well, I think those are the only two ways to do that kind of thing, but anyway you get the idea.  Run out of lives, run out of free time to spend playing Genesis games, or just have the cat step on the power cord and turn the console off, and its back to the first stage for you.

Yes, even axe murderers like the beach.

How the hell did this manage to end up in the final version of the game without anyone questioning it?  It’s not like these were revolutionary concepts in 1993.  Other Genesis games let you save your progress, hell, even some old NES games gave you that ability (The Legend of Zelda, released 7 years (7 freakin’ years!) earlier had save files).  And who decided against passwords?  Even Megaman 2 – a game so ridiculously easy I can beat it start to finish in under an hour, probably while using my feet instead of my thumbs, gives you passwords.

Even if the game weren’t so difficult, it’s still long enough that playing it start to finish is probably more than a two hour commitment.  That moves it out of the territory of games you sit down and enjoy and into the realm of an event you need to plan in advance.  After all, you don’t want your entire quest to be thwarted by dreaded enemies like “dinner time” or “Wheel of Fortune is on”.  All I’m saying is that it’s a good thing they made the first 20 or so levels really good, because you’re going to be playing them a lot.

Winner:  Pirates! Gold

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Warsong vs. NHL Hockey series

Brad: Warsong is one of those ultra-hardcore Strategy/RPGs where if a character dies in a battle, that’s it – no Phoenix Downs, or reviving at the temple, or life spell is going to bring them back.  Losing a general means losing him for the rest of the game.  And while a feature like that is exactly the kind of realistic touch that sim-minded wargamers like myself really appreciate while commanding our armies of mermaids and skeletons through a campaign to retrieve a magical sword, in this particular case it makes the game way more challenging than it ought to be.

See, none of your characters are exactly expendable.  There’s a finite amount of experience to be earned in this game – no random battles or respawning enemies – and there’s barely enough to get your first-string characters leveled up enough to survive.  Having to spend precious XP trying to level up a replacement character halfway through the game is an unthinkable disaster.  So while each battle is designed to be challenging based on the idea that you will lose if your leader dies, in actuality if ANY of your characters die, you’re screwed.  That’s a recipe that’ll have you reaching for the reset button like a confused Russian diplomat.

Dammit, who said they could ride their horses inside the castle?

Think of it this way – your typical Strat/RPG is kind of like taking your kid and seven of his friends to the zoo.  Obviously, you don’t want ANY of the kids to get eaten by the animals, but if one does, it’s not that big of a deal as long as it’s not your kid – he can always make new friends, after all.  Warsong is more like taking all 8 of your own kids to the zoo.  Now you can’t let ANY of them get eaten, otherwise you’ll never reach your goal of fielding an entire Arena Football team made up entirely of your own children.  And if you’re not going to do that, what was the point of having 8 kids in the first place?

Stryker: You have to love the way Warsong basically throws into one seemingly impossible battle after another.  It’s not just that the battles are hard –  although they are – it’s that they’re cruel.  The game’s favorite trick is pulling a sneak attack out of nowhere just when it looks like things are going to be ok.  Turn the tide in a grueling battle, and all of a sudden, enemy reinforcements show up on your exposed flank.  Or the regular soldiers turn into monsters.  Or else a Kraken shows up and starts kicking everyone’s ass.  By the last battle, I kind of expected the people I was fighting against to develop nuclear weapons.

A few battles with unexpected ambushes keeps the game from getting too predictable,  but a constant barrage of them just seems unfair and kind of, well, anti-strategy.  Hard to come up with a good battle plan when everything you know is wrong.

Winner:  NHL Hockey series

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Shining Force vs. Pirates! Gold

Brad: You want to see some bad AI? The next time you play Shining Force, take your weakest character and have him rush in and attack the strongest magic user you’re facing. Then sit back and relax as he retaliates with BLAZE 5, wasting all his MP to do enough damage to kill that single weakling three times over. Better yet, the nearest enemy cleric will then cast HEAL 7 to restore that one HP of damage you did, wasting all of his MP, too. That’s two powerful enemies you won’t have to worry about anymore.  Not a bad trade for your worst guy.

Now I realize AI back then wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now, and Shining Force does a good job relative to other games of it’s era.  However, compared to games that came out only a few years later, let alone today, the opponent strategy in Shining Force is supremely easy to predict and manipulate to your advantage.  I’m not saying I need to face off against the CPU equivalent of Napoleon or anything, but I would at least like to have used more advanced tactics than “trick computer into wasting spells”.

Yeah, and that’s why girls like me better.

Stryker: Shining Force’s combination of RPG-style leveling with turn-based strategy works brilliantly about 90% of the time, but leads players to make some decisions that make no sense strategically yet are perfectly rational within the game.  For example, you’d probably never hear a commander on the brink of victory order his troops to retreat so the can fight the battle all over again and level up some more, but it’s a tried-and-true tactic in Shining Force.

The weirdest outcome of this setup however has to be constantly cheering for your best fighters to maim, but not kill your enemies.  Are we taking prisoners?  No, but since killing enemies is by far the fastest way to level up your troops, it’s important for all your weaker “support” units to dispatch their fair share of monsters.  That means they will need to be feed a steady stream of enemies with 1HP remaining if you expect them to survive in the later battles.  It’s sort of like how a mother cat will bring a half-dead mouse back to her children so they can practice “hunting” it.

So in a sense, about half your soldiers in Shining Force are just like kittens.

Winner:  Pirates! Gold

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Today Stryker and I discuss Bobby Clarke’s captaincy of the 1970s Flyers, headlines seen in the London Times, and Tonya Harding punching people in the nuts.

Greatest Heavyweights of the Ring vs. NHL Hockey series

Brad: Well, given how many great sports games there were on the Genesis, I suppose it’s only appropriate that the system’s best fighting game would also be a sports game.

Stryker: I agree… wait, are we talking about boxing or hockey?

Brad: I meant Greatest Heavyweights of the Ring.  NHL’s fighting takes a hit because they didn’t include it in every year of the series.

Stryker: True.  But you really have to admire EA’s willingness to keep fighting in these games as much as they did.  Back for NHLPA ’93, they had to choose between either making a fully licensed hockey game without fighting, or one that would have fighting but wouldn’t include any team names or logos, and they decided gamers would rather have fighting than an official NHL license.  Considering that they changed their mind the very next year, I guess it turned out they were wrong, but still… that’s dedication.

Brad: I would agree that the NHL series put a lot more effort into including fighting than Greatest Heavyweights did to including hockey.

Stryker: Seriously.  I think Greatest Heavyweights should have included a few hockey players.  Tie Domi, Rob Ray, and maybe even Bobby Clarke for that “historical” aspect.

Brad: Did Bobby Clarke actually fight a lot?  Or do people just think he did because he was captain of the Flyers?

Stryker: Hmmm, good question.  I just assumed that’s how one becomes captain of the Philadelphia Flyers.  You beat the current captain in a fight.

Brad: Like pro wrestling.

Stryker: Or, you know, boxing.

Brad: I thought it was kind of strange that a game calling itself “Greatest Heavyweights of the Ring” didn’t have any of the really big boxing icons of the late 80s – you know, Mike Tyson, Bald Bull, King Hippo…

Stryker: I’m pretty sure Nintendo had exclusive licenses with all of them.  But you could get around that by making them in the create-a-boxer mode.  And then you could try to copy their distinctive styles if you really wanted to get into it.  Sort of like a boxing RPG.

Brad: I just made a generic-looking guy that I named Ass for some reason.  I think I was hoping to see newspaper headlines like “Holmes beats Ass” if I lost matches.

Front page news – Boxing coverage!  Also, the conclusion of a war in the Middle East.

Stryker: Did it work?

Brad: No, I kept ending up with ones that said things like “Ass Frustrated”.

Stryker: I’m pretty sure I saw that as a subject line in my spam folder yesterday.

Brad: To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why the London Times was dedicating it’s front page to coverage of boxing matches between two fighters both ranked in the mid-20’s anyway.  I don’t read the London Times, but that seems unusual.

Stryker: I just like that you set up your fighter based on the expectation that you were going to lose a lot of matches.  That seems like a fair assumption to make in this game.

Brad: Yeah, difficulty spikes are kind of a problem here.  You can cruise through a bunch of matches, and then all of a sudden, it’s like somebody flipped the “On” switch for the AI.  You run into an opponent who can actually box, and then you’re in trouble.

Stryker: It’s kind of a simulation of “Baby” Joe Mesi’s career.

Brad: Yes, well congratulations on writing a joke exactly nobody will get.

Stryker: That seems to be about the going rate for our humor.  But getting back to your point, boxing the computer does seem to get unfair at times.  Sooner or later, you fight a guy who, no matter what the attributes say, just seems a lot faster than you.  That’s what finally spoiled the game for me.

Brad: Yeah, I don’t know if it was control, or just the computer cheating, but you start getting into these seemingly impossible fights where the computer is just all over you.  There’s not much fun in spending an entire match blocking and getting decked in the stomach whenever you try to hit back.  That would be like being married to Tonya Harding.

Stryker: Except without the low blows.

Winner:  NHL Hockey series

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Kid Chameleon vs. Light Crusader

Brad: Light Crusader is probably the best of all the action/RPG games to appear on the Genesis.  The dungeon designs are great, the gameplay is a lot more solid than Landstalker or Beyond Oasis, and a lot of the puzzles are truly ingenious.  This truly is Treasure’s finest effort, which is saying a lot considering the developer’s track record.  Even so, I really have to question the motivations of a game that is normally really hard, but offers you the remote chance that an enemy in the first level will drop the game’s best armor when you kill it.

Jeez, I hope it lasts a while then…

I mean, I want to believe that it just supposed to be a cool little secret, something that would go unnoticed by most players, and only be discovered by a lucky few.  I’d hate to think that Treasure put this little “secret” into their game knowing all along that word would get out, and frustrated players everywhere would spend countless hours killing lily pads over and over in the hope that eventually, by some miracle, their persistence would be rewarded and one would drop the coveted Gold Armor.  That over time, when day after day has been wasted in a fruitless effort to get this rare item, players would become isolated from the outside world, losing contact with friends, family and society, until the only thing they had in their lives was Light Crusader, Gunstar Heroes, and other fine Treasure games.  That’s some real New World Order shit right there.

So, um thanks, Light Crusader.  Your pioneering efforts at fostering addiction have made the worst aspects of modern MMORPGs possible.

Stryker: Light Crusader might be the most efficient action/RPG ever made.  After a brief intro and a stroll through the game’s only town, it’s into the first dungeon.  And once you finish that, it’s right on to the second.  In fact, it’s not even in a different area, it’s just a lower floor of the one you were already in.  Aside from a few stops back up to the town for new supplies, you spend all your time dungeon-crawling.  It feels like some kind of East German approach to game making – it’s all well executed and designed, but… where’s the heart?  Where are the townspeople pacing in circles saying inane things?  Where are the vast stretches of wilderness between abandoned castles for you to explore?  Or the guys out in the middle of nowhere selling potions at slightly inflated prices?  As much as we like to make fun of these things, and complain when they distract us from the “real” game, you’d be surprised how much you miss them when they’re gone.

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Alright, we’re really in the thick of it now.  Games that win this week will move on the the final four, which a lifetime of overhearing conversations about college basketball tells me is a really big deal.  I don’t know, maybe it’s not as big of a deal for old Genesis games as it is for basketball.  Hmmm, this intro isn’t kind of getting away from me.  Let’s move on to today’s matchup:

Starflight vs. Warsong

Brad: If there’s an award for the game in this tournament who’s name least effectively conveys how awesome it is, it should probably go to Warsong.  I remember seeing articles about it in magazines as a teenager and thinking “There’s no way I’m playing a game called Warsong.”

Stryker: It kind of sounds like an RPG where you go on a quest to learn some ancient melody that has the power to soothe the giant evil dragon that’s threatening the kingdom.  And you would have to play it on some obscure instrument nobody’s ever heard of before.  Only instead of soothing the dragon it would just kind of make him explode.

Brad: But in a soothing way.

Stryker: Also, all the characters would be androgynous teenagers with huge eyes, and there’s a random encounter every ten seconds.  Against the same 4 monsters over and over.

Brad: And at least half of your party members would be those pain in the ass characters who are useless when you get them, but then eventually turn into gods if you  manage to power level them for 60 hours.

Stryker: Of course, the real Warsong’s nothing like that at all – it’s a totally badass strategy/RPG.  So I kind of blame Treco’s marketing department for the fact that it took me 18 years to actually play it.  If they had given it a better name I would have picked it up a lot sooner.  Who knows, it might have made my teenage years like, 1% happier.

Brad: Really?  I’m not sure “more video games” would have been the key to a better adolescence for me.  I think the answer might have actually been “fewer video games” and “more girls”.  But everyone’s different, I suppose.

Stryker: Getting back on the subject of game names, Starflight does a much better job with its title – you explore the galaxy, discover new worlds, communicate with alien life forms, and try to unravel a mystery that threatens to destroy the universe.

Brad: …and go mining.  You do an awful lot of mining.

Stryker: Yes.  Funny how they don’t mention that part on the box, even though it’s probably what you’ll end up doing for 2/3rds of the time you spend playing it.

Brad: Well, you need to pay for all your rocket fuel, ship upgrades, and repairs somehow.  Those things get expensive.

Stryker: It’s kind of like a free-market capitalist’s version of Mass Effect.

Brad: If anything, Starflight is actually a pretty good social critique of capitalism.  The world is literally being destroyed, you have the power to stop it, but instead you’re off trying to get rich.  In a sense, the free market is indirectly responsible for the extinction of all life in the galaxy.  The whole game is one big metaphor for global warming.

Stryker: From 1991.  Disguised as a game about space exploration.  Hate to say it, but you’re probably giving the game designers too much credit there.

Brad: Probably.  But at the very least they do deserve credit for making a game about space mining that’s at least 10 times more fun than it ought to be.  I kept driving around the surface of planets in my little landing vehicle, jamming on the B button to dig up rare minerals and thinking “There’s no way this should be as much fun as it is.”

Stryker: More fun than Warsong?

Brad: Well, no.  But Warsong has the advantage of not being about mining.

Stryker: Or soothing dragons.

Winner: Warsong

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Streets of Rage series vs. Shining Force

Brad: The Streets of Rage series is kind of like a Frankenstein’s monster built from the clichés of other beat-em-ups games.  Let’s take a look at the checklist they were apparently working off of:

• A “clean up the streets” plotline (Final Fight, to a lesser extent Double Dragon)
• Final stages taking place in corporate high-rises (Final Fight again, Combatribes)
• The whip woman (Double Dragon)
• A boss fight against a guy who’s a doppelganger of one of your own characters (Double Dragon)
• Pro-wrestler look-a-likes (Final Fight)
• Factory level (Final Fight yet again)

And that’s just the first game.  For the sequel they added a rollerblading character, ala DJ Boy, and broke out the ol’ “rescue the kidnapped person” storyline seen in at least 50% of these games by having  one character get abducted (I guess President Ronnie wasn’t available).  And even when Streets  isn’t stealing ideas from other games, it’s not exactly being “original” – let’s face it, you’re not going to win any creativity awards for adding a boss who’s a blatant rip-off of Freddy Krueger.

Honestly, I never understood why people complained that Final Fight never appeared on the Genesis.  It seems like I’m playing it right now.

Stryker: Not that this was a hard choice anyway, but when in doubt, it’s always a good idea to go with the game that doesn’t have you playing as a 12 year old wearing inline skates, or using a pepper shaker as a weapon.

Winner: Shining Force

Gain Ground vs. Pirates! Gold

Brad: Hey, I’m not the most politically correct guy out there, but even I had to raise an eyebrow when I saw that one of the characters you first start out with in Gain Ground was a black guy who throws spears at people.  Shouldn’t there have been somebody at the company who saw that and thought “Hey maybe we should change his weapon to something not completely fucking racist.”  Other games have had black characters who embodied a few stereotypes or were at least mildly insensitive (Barrett in Final Fantasy VII, Zack in Dead or Alive 2, Birdie in Street Fighter Alpha), but I think Gain Ground is the only one to feature a literal representation of a racial epithet.

In addition to the spear, his special abilities include being a helicopter landing pad, apparently.

Stryker: Each character in Gain Ground has a special attack that can hit a different range then the standard attack.  Some guys can shoot over walls, some can strafe, and some have a powerful attack that only works at close range.  In terms of gameplay, it works, as you have to come up with a strategy that takes into account everyone’s abilities and limitations.  But it’s also completely illogical.  Is there any reason a guy would be able to shoot in two directions at once, but only if it’s east and west and not north/south?  And even if that were possible, shouldn’t he talk to the guy who can strafe, but only if he’s facing north?  Maybe they could learn from each other.  Or even just piggyback and be able to shoot in 3 directions at once.

I suppose you could argue that chess is the same way – there’s no logical reason a bishop could only move diagonally, but it makes the game better.  But here’s the thing – people have been playing chess for centuries.  Gain Ground’s hasn’t even been around for 20 years and already I can’t find people who have even heard of it, let alone played it.

Winner: Pirates! Gold

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Greatest Heavyweights of the Ring vs. Madden NFL

Brad: The Madden series on the Genesis went through kind of a weird cycle, where first the gameplay got better every year, but then peaked and started to decline just as they started adding more and more good features.  There were still some pretty good years – Madden ’95 plays really well and has a season mode – but there’s no ultimate version of Madden.  I want a full season to play through with trades and create-a-player, the tight gameplay of the early-mid years, with no passing windows, and the ambulance that drives on the field and runs over all the non-injured players.  Is that really so much to ask?

Stay tuned after the game for 60 Minutes and an all-new Murder, She Wrote.

Stryker: I love Madden on the Genesis because it represents the last time I was actually competent at a football video game.  In the post 16-bit era, players on the opposite teams have caught more passes from my QBs than their own, and the performance of my defense largely depends on the 10 guys not being controlled by me.  But while it’s nice to be able to play a football game where I can throw the ball without fear and not have to hope that one of my teammates has a career game for us to win, I have to wonder if that’s really the mark of a great game.  Someone as bad at football games as I am probably shouldn’t be having any kind of success if the game is really that great.

Winner: Greatest Heavyweights of the Ring

Sonic the Hedgehog vs. NHL Hockey series

Brad: Sonic the Hedghog pulls one of the all-time level design dick moves in the second stage.  They give you this character who is supposed to run super-fast, and in the first stage, you get a little taste of it, but any attempt to plow through the level with reckless abandon is quickly derailed by an enemy.  Early in the second stage though, you get an invincibility power-up.  The music starts going faster, nothing can kill you – it’s like being given the keys to a Ferrari and getting told “Let’s see what this baby can really do!”

…of course, lurking just off screen from where you get the invincibility is one of the few things that can still kill you, a bottomless pit.  Anyone who’s ever taken a Driver’s Ed course has probably seen a movie that shows what happens when you combine unrestrained speed, a naïve belief in immortality, and some unseen danger.  It ends badly.  The same principle applies here.  Everyone falls in the pit their first time, and rest assured that somewhere, even today, that level designer is laughing at you.

A blue hedgehog with spiked hair and an “extreme” attitude?  It seems like Sonic should have been the mascot for some kind of juice boxes or children’s cereal first, and THEN gone on to star in an overhyped Genesis game, instead of the other way around.

Stryker: The original Sonic and pretty much any version of NHL Hockey are two of my favorites for the system, but they’re also completely different kinds of games, so it’s hard for me to really look at them side by side and say which one I like better.  What I can tell you though is that these days, there’s a new version of NHL Hockey every year, and four times out of five it’s pretty good.  And every couple of years there’s a new Sonic sequel, which are so bad it makes me fear the color blue.  So based on each game’s respective legacy, I’m going to go with the NHL series here.

Winner:  NHL Hockey

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Castlevania: Bloodlines vs. Kid Chameleon

Brad: After giving us a fairly responsive, agile character in Super Castlevania IV, Bloodlines brings us back the realm of the slower, stiff moving protagonists as seen when the series appeared on the NES.  As much as I’d hate to argue with a 1,000 years of vampire hunting tradition, I’m starting to wonder if it’s wise to leave the fate of the world in the hands of the Belmont clan.  We might be better served by a family of Dracula slayers that are a little less predisposed to early-onset arthritis.

Medusa heads AND rising water at the same time?  Yeah, thanks for that.  Ever think maybe that’s why you’re not moving on to the next round?

Stryker: Wait, so sometime in between Castlevania IV on the SNES, and Castlevania: Bloodlines, we’ve somehow forgotten how to aim our whip at anything above or below eye level?  How does that happen?  I mean, I realize that about 300 years passed between the two games on the Castlevania timeline, but it’s not like we’re talking about some arcane secret.  Aiming up and down seems like the kind of knowledge that shouldn’t have been too hard to preserve through the generations of vampire hunters.

Winner:  Kid Chameleon

Aerobiz Supersonic vs. Light Crusader

Brad: This is a pretty tough matchup between two games I had never played prior to this project but both immediately made a strong favorable impression, and managed to soak up hours of my free time.  While both games are brilliant, and you should definitely check them both out, I’m going to choose Light Crusader here, if for no other reason than that I didn’t have to set up a complicated spreadsheet to beat it like I did for Aerobiz Supersonic. Look, there’s “ahead of its time” in the sense that something might be innovative, and cutting edge, and then there’s “ahead of its time” in the “we probably shouldn’t be trying to pull this off on a Genesis” kind of way.  Light Crusader is the first.  Aerobiz Supersonic is both.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve heard of people who do pretty well at this game without having to take any kind of extra measures like setting up spreadsheets or filling up a notebook with flight plans, pricing and budgets.  Those people exist.  But I’m just going to go ahead and assume that they’re all Rainman.

Ron Jeremy would like to show you his spreadsheets.

Stryker: In Aerobiz Supersonic, every single one of your flights must pass through your hub.  And you only get one per continent.  While that kinda makes sense for intercontinental flights, it’s completely illogical for flights within the same region.  Imagine flying an airline where any trip from Los Angeles to Denver required catching a connecting flight in New York.  I realize they probably did this for the sake of simplicity, but given how complex the game already is, this seems like a weird area to scale things back.  Besides being unrealistic, it takes away would could have been an interesting aspect of the game – competing within domestic markets.  That would have been a lot of fun… you know, for you nerdy, spreadsheet making types.

Winner: Light Crusader

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