Natsume Championship Wrestling

Good god, man! It looks as if our shipment of ugly just arrived. I mean, just look at these Neanderthals…

It’s a face only a mother could love. What was your name again? “Fangz!?” Hell, I guess your mother didn’t love you that much, then.

Seriously, science and genetics have failed me yet again. If there isn’t part gorilla DNA in there, I’ll eat my hat. That is, assuming “Python” here doesn’t eat it first.

Alright, you couple of charm-school rejects are on my team. No, don’t try to thank me, I don’t need you to get yourselves all exhausted before the match from attempting to form the right brain waves in order to mimic human speech. Just put on your tights and matching knee pads, drag your knuckles into the ring, and beat each other repeatedly with folding chairs until one team suffers enough blunt-force trauma to the head that they can no longer recall how to properly SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM!!

And no lobbing of feces this time. That’s why they won’t let you back into the Georgia Dome.

* * *

BEARS LOOSE IN THE RING!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!

This isn’t a fight. It’s a slaughter. Aggression. Dominance. A violent choreography of testosterone and spandex, as one side proudly asserts its alpha-male status over the other. To the victor, a giant belt of leather and precious metal, one that will be displayed prominently to win the adoration of the advertisers, action-figure manufacturers, and females of the species. The burly, bearded females of the species…

And where do I stand? Behind the losers, my hands fumbling about the gamepad, trying but failing to properly make heads or tails as to how to keep from getting repeatedly thrown against the ropes and clotheslined. The internet tells me this is actually a great game, though on the condition that you take the time to read the instructions to know the various moves and controls.

Well, guess what? I don’t have access to the manual, so fuck you, internet…smug bastards.

Capcom’s MVP Football

Definitely not the MVP of Football games. Not even close.

I was listening to this story on the CBC this week about this guy who grew up in East Germany during the Cold War.  He talked about the fall of the Berlin Wall and how one of the things people were the most excited about, besides reuniting families after decades of seperation, was shopping.  This was because in the former German Democratic Republic (it wasn’t really either of those things but whatever), there was only ever one brand of anything.  If you went to the store to get butter, you had one butter to choose from.  In the West, however, people could chose from all sorts of butter!

So the controvercial thing I’m saying here is that in terms of sports games we have reverted to a Soviet-approved system based on a complete lack of competition.  That’s pretty remarkable considering how much we’re apparently scrambling to keep capitalism together.  There is only one football brand, Madden, thanks to an agreement with the NFL Players Association.  Other football games, like Blitz, rely on almost football with no recognizable named players (I should note that growing up, we didn’t care about this, but now we’re spoiled).  Any other football game worth mentioning (NCAA or NFL Pro Street) is still made by Electronic Arts.  But back in the day, we had so many choices!

I'm totally digging the Windows 95-style menu screens.

What’s even more crazy about this is that history seems to be teaching us that a lack of competition actually makes for better games.  How’s that for irony?  Madden games improve every year despite a vacuum in terms of real competition (arguably because they have to do more than a roster update because they will aggravate their rabid, semi-literate fan-base), but when we had twenty-five different football games, most of them were garbage.  I call this sports-game-based inverse-capitalism the Greater Madden Theory of Gaming Economics.  The GMToGE (gimtoge) simply states that in a market filled with competition, all competitors can produce a mediocre product and most people will buy it because it has the word “Football” on it and all they know is that they want a Football game, but if there is no competition, those people demand a better product on which to spend their hard-earned dollars and might just opt for last year’s version or not purchase any football games (oh noes!)

So anyway, Capcom MVP Football was terrible, and if this were the former Soviet Union it probably would have had a tarp laid out for it and the bill for the bullet sent to its creators.  That’s all I’m trying to say here.

Ms. Pac-Man

Wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka.

A classic noise that everyone even remotely familiar with video games will instantly recognize. Is it even possible to live in this era without having heard the passing of a Mr. or Ms. Pac-Man?

Wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka.

In Somalia, a small child huddles for safety in the cabin of a boat beset by pirates, and yet somehow he hears this noise.

Wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka.

Deep in the Amazon Rainforest, an animal you’ve never even fuckin’ heard of is bopping its tiny misshapen head to the beat of Pac.

Wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka.

I don’t need to review Ms. Pac-Man, because we’ve all reviewed it already. It’s inside all of us.

Wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka.

Mr. Nutz

Mr. Nutz is a rappa. I know because I saw him call me to throw down… ya know? He went, “chiggy” with his wrist all “whaaaaaaat?” and I was like, playa, no!

You know those guys who like to whip their hand forward as if they are about to spit a verse but never get around to it? Those guys who think they’re Fred Durst all cleaned up and looking for love tonight in a lonely city? These are the same guys who crack their fingers against their other fingers to display that they enjoy something. I think Mr. Nutz is one of those guys…

If you aren’t holding anything and you press the throw button, he does, like, a little “puh, whaaaat,” if you know what I mean. I find this entertaining. I jump on those little plum-style grapes and make ‘em melt like they do and then I go, “oh, no… no I didn’t!” But it’s cool, cause I’m being ironic. And so is Mr. Nutz. He’s the kind of guy who would know all the lyrics to the song “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind because he’s just SO 90s like that. But he’s also the kind of guy who likes nuts. He likes them so much, he’s willing to jump on anyone to get some of them.

As is usual with platformers, the enemies are enemies only insomuch as they unwittingly collide with Mr. Nutz. I put to you, if you were walking along, and some dude jumped on your head, would you know ask the question, “why me?” Well, unfortunately for you, it was because you were a purple plum and you were underneath some treasure. Sure, Mr. Nutz could have avoided you, but that’s not the point of the game. Actually, you may argue, as those who defend the GTA series do, that you could actually go through the game without hurting any of these poor plums. On the other hand, you wouldn’t get nearly as much coin. I mean that in the non-countable way. Coin as the plural. Like sand.

Anyway, the point is, I like to jump on things. And when I’m not jumping on things, I’m watching Mr. Nutz jump on things.

As a concluding thought, I’d like to mention that Mr. Nutz is perhaps a fitting name for an anthropomorphic squirrel that fights wasps at the same time as walking fruits. Mr. Nutz is right. More like Mr. Freudian Nightmare.

Mr. Do!

Mr. Do, you've done it again!

What’s not to love about Mr. Do!?

• It’s a handful of my favourite arcade games thrown into a blender – Dig Dug, Pac-Man and Burger Time, to my mind – and the result is pure game.

He may not look like much, but he's got it where it counts.

• The Can-Can blares triumphantly as Mr. Do cheekily evades his pursuers, digging cherries from the earth and dropping apples on those unfortunate enough to straggle behind.
• Mr. Do can be successfully controlled with one hand, leaving the other hand free for sipping gingerbread lattes, as I have done for this review.
• There’s so much to do in each bite-sized level!  And while I don’t pretend to understand much of what is going on here, it’s all so goddamn glorious.

Doitdoitdoitdoitdoit.

Do it.

Mortal Kombat 3

The Mortal Kombat series, probably better known for its violent array of finishing moves, exaggerated display of blood, and curiously inconsistent misuse of the letter “K” than its actual gameplay contributions to the fighting genre, continues on in this third installment, aptly titled Mortal Kombat 3 (in contrast to, say, the Street Fighter series, which failed to demonstrate its ability to count past the number two until around the ninth installment or so, depending on whether the Street Fighter EX series counts).

So what’s different this time around?

• More characters.
• Multi-tiered levels.
• Umm…a “dash” button.
• Wait, you can turn into an animal, too, which is kinda neat I guess.
• What the…who the hell is this Stryker guy? He looks like some ex-frat guy working as a bike messenger. Or someone’s dad.
• Cyborgs.

Stryker will fuck you up for some Pringles.

Alright, so what’s the same?

• A handful of old characters, most with the same moves as in the previous two games.
• An oddly large amount of blood spewed forth every time you punch someone in the face.
• UPPERCUTS.
• Character sprites are still stretched vertically, which makes them look a bit taller and leaner when fighting, but unnervingly short when you knock them down.
• Cheap AI.
• ADDITIONAL UPPERCUTS.
• My general lack of skill and disdain.

Defeated by myself, proving yet again that I am my own worst enemy. Especially when wearing a mask and wielding iron hooks...no wonder no one wants a hug.

If I recall correctly (unlikely, but possible), the game was still fairly successful, helping keep Midway more or less in the black for another few years. Of course, Midway banked too much on the arcade market for too long, as well as trying to continue to milk what they could from their old arcade franchises well past the point at which people stopped caring about them. There’s obviously more to their demise, but that’s a topic better covered elsewhere. I’m mainly just here to pick apart old, defenseless video games and yell at fictional characters, and my qualifications as to those are questionable at best. My parents must be so proud.

Mortal Kombat

As much as I think Mortal Kombat was/is a pretty shitty fighting game, it deserves our attention.  For those of us in the Capcom or SNK school of fighting games Mortal Kombat always seemed pretty stripped down.  Every character had identical regular moves and were only differentiated by their specials and fatalities.  Out of 7 total characters, two of them even looked identical.  I’ll get to the fatalities in a bit, but mostly Mortal Kombat made for a pretty shallow fighting game compared to its competition.  And, I guess, what’s even more striking about Mortal Kombat is that the franchise stayed this way for some time but maintained a level of popularity that is more or less completely incongruent with most other Acclaim/Midway titles.  I don’t know many gamers who would consider the Midway logo as much more than a seal of mediocrity.  Sort of like the Nintendo Seal of Quality today (burn).

So many choices! Decidedly less stereotypes, though! Progress?

The original Mortal Kombat for SNES was a big deal, though.  I remember crowding around the TV the first time a friend rented this game.  I would have been in grade 4 or 5.  There were so many rumors about the game floating around in our tiny, misinformed heads:

“I hear this game is SUPER GORY“.

“Yeah, but Nintendo are a bunch of pussies and made the blood look like sweat! Pussies!”

“I hear on Sega you can see Sonya’s boobies!”

“Oh yeah?  I heard that in the arcade version you can do sex with her!”

“Cool!!!” (awkward boners abound)

“I heard that there’s a code to make it even more bloody!”

“Chris’ brother heard from a magazine that if your parents split up they’ll each buy you this game to prove that they love you!”

“No way!”

I actually wrote a completely different review before thinking about the ways that Mortal Kombat has been influential.  Just think about your life with Video Games at the age of 10.  If you were a console kid like I was, you probably had your Ninja Turtles, Double Dragon, Mario, Ninja Gaiden, Tetris… I dunno.  Ducktails?  For many of us Mortal Kombat was the first Hyperviolent game we ever played.  Everything before this was cartoony.  Even though the greyish-brown bio-chunks that flew out of fighters in the Super Nintendo version didn’t look like blood, our imagination certainly filled in the gaps just fine. But here were people, digitally rendered and motion captured, being impaled by spikes, set on fire, having their spinal cords ripped out.  And it was happening in our living room.  Even if you were from a family with a computer, Wolfenstein came out the same year as Mortal Kombat.  Doom came out in 1993.  Sure, some PC games had covered serious subjects like rape and brutal violence before, but few games were as accessible to enterprising kids as this holy trinity of gore.

Certainly, by today’s standards, Mortal Kombat is pretty tame.  After playing games like Soldier of Fortune where each body part has a number of articulation points for having limbs sawn off, it almost seems as cartoony as those older games.  Fallout 3 had hilarious limbular explosions in HD slow-motion!  But Mortal Kombat was likely one of the first games that you or someone you know wasn’t allowed to play.  It was a precursor to the congressman-based fervor of Grand Theft Auto.  It played a leading role in the eventual development of the ESRB.  Sure, a lot of parents ignore ESRB ratings even today, but they cried out for a rating system in the first place largely thanks to kids bringing Mortal Kombat home.

It’s other “legacy” is the more dubious one of ridiculous announcers.  Fatality, Babality, Finish Him, Toasty… they all lead to the Headshot, Multikill, Double Kill, Running Riot, Killamanjaro, and Unstoppables of today.  I could actually do without these though, so thanks Mortal Kombat.

Gender roles, you guys.

So yeah, it’s a shitty fighting game, but it might very well have changed the landscape of gaming as we know it.  That’s pretty neat.  And with the demise of Midway and the sale of the Mortal Kombat IP to Warner Brothers, I’m not sure we’ll see a return of the shock-value tuned, mediocre experience that so defined the series.  Who knows, someone make even take the initiative to turn it into something worth playing again.

Monopoly

AW HELL NO I WOULD SOONER SLEEP ON THE STREET THAN PAY GARY CANT 26 DOLLARS

Confession time: I’m a part of the “system.” I work in QA. Right now, I’m in school, so I had to take a QA job doing the most ignoble type of QA work possible: mobile phone games testing.

However, I worked on the most recent version of Monopoly for cell phones, and: it is better than this game.

This should be not a sad point, but a beacon of hope. The games being made for cell phones have more care put into presentation, playability and overall awesometude than full-price console games once were. This one runs too slow, doesn’t display the information you want when you want it, and looks like crap. A regular LG cell phone (we’re not talking iPhone, here) not only has nicer graphics, but they are presented in a more user-friendly way.

Luckily, since the team I am on at work is testing ports of previously-released games instead of pre-launch titles, I can actually talk about them. I’ve tested Monopoly, and several Tetris titles, and even a Sims game on the phone. Heed my words, gamers: the garage is less garbage than it once was. Rejoice.

By the way: for some reason you can select someone named “Gary Cant” as an enemy. I’m not sure if that’s funny to me because it sounds like the name you give a loser (as in Can’t), or the name you give a pretend philosopher (as in Kant), or a name you give someone you hate very, very much (as in _______) (you fill it in, I can’t write that here).

Mohawk & Headphone Jack

God that's sexy.

Headphone Jack, get it? That’s about the only thing about this game I get right now. I’ll let the screenshot do all the talking and rest my poor, fractured brain for just a little while.

Maybe I’ll write more when I can think again. Or my nearest equivalent.

MLBPA Baseball

Here I was, all excited to do a review. And… BAM! Baseball game. Stuttering shit-poo!

I know. We’re going to play a bit of a game. I’m going to make some predictions about this game before I play it, and I’ll see how many of the predictions come true. Folks, you can follow along at home!

1. There will be a dragon in this game.

2. This game will contain, not one, not two, but three references to eighties era David Bowie.

3. One team will be dressed in grey, the other in blue.

4. The “PA” part of the title stands for Pineapple. Major League Base-Pineapple.

5. Singing the national anthem will be our very own Shinia Twain, daughter of Mark! She will show you why her last name is often glossed as “cut-in-two” as she startles the audience by cutting herself in two! Just like in the songs!

6. As I play this game, I will die inside a little.

Okay, Gang! I’m going to play it and report back!!

Well, as it turns out, the only one that came true in the five minutes I played this wet-wipe was number 6. I’ll be honest, not tuberculous (as if that’s an adjective!): I hate this crap. The whole time I was playing that game the crowd kept on chanting, “ohh ha hoo ha… uh hu!” I’ve been to baseball games, and there is some dumb shit that goes on (7th inning stretch = barf) but I’ve never experienced that chant. Also, the camera angle is so dumb… oh my god. I want to murder whoever thought that this game was playable. Whenever the ball is hit, at first you think you know where its going, but then the game farts up a Louise and drinks so much Kool-Aid that it busts out of a wall and goes “OH YEAH!” and it changes the camera angle so hard that you can pretty much just see the ball. You know how you tell where the ball is going? Well, you don’t! All you can do is look at the mini-map on the bottom of the screen and wiggle your penis until the game mercifully ends!

What a dog of a game! Actually, no. I like dogs. What a worthy addition to EA Sport’s lethargic catalogue.