Taz-mania

 

You can’t run forever

Imagine running down a road forever. You’re running down this road and everything looks nearly identical. There’s some trees. Rocks. Bushes. Birds fly around. Every so often a dingo(…?!) on a motorbike tosses you a literal bone. That’s all Taz-mania is. Forever. You run in a straight line—I guess you can go backward, but why would you?—trying to devour birds. If you stomach the number of birds the level requires, you may even get to run down a road with slightly different scenery. It’s all roads.

Dying? no, nothing is so easy

Does this sound fun to you? It isn’t. It’s a Mode-7 abomination designed to hypnotize children into seeing the Tazmanian Devil when they close their eyes. Maybe he asks them to buy a Tweety Bird t-shirt. Maybe he asks them to eat their pets. I don’t know. I’m not going to play this awful, awful game long enough to find out what the Devil wants.

I started aiming for oncoming traffic. To let the bus sweep me under and away from this nightmare. But the bus can’t stop the Devil. It just slows him down. The Devil gets right back up and starts running again. He craves that bird flesh. He wants to crack those little bones in his teeth. He may fall in the middle of the road and start vomiting up everything he’s eaten, but he’ll never stop. He’s going back for seconds, thirds, fourths…it’s All You Can Eat on the open road, and the Devil is never full. He says he’s stuffed, but HE LIES.

I wish someone would “stuff” me into a woodchipper

Maybe you love this game. Maybe you close your eyes and imagine yourself flying down that blocky road, mouth agape and claws reaching for the winged food all around you. Maybe you already let the Devil take you and you ain’t noticed yet.

You got that Taz-mania.

Please let this end

Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

 

A Star War

I’m a big fan of Star Wars, as you can probably tell from my name—that’s right, I spell “Scott” with two lightsabers instead of the letter T. When I say “Scott” out loud I make the lightsaber noise at the end twice and then shout “NOOOOOO!” when you look at me weird.

With this fact out in the open I’m sure you can see why I was elated to be chosen to review Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It’s so firmly in my wheelhouse that I can fit one less wheel in there because of the space Star Wars is taking up. That’s why there’s an old wheel on my front lawn.

First of all, the music in this game is great! It’s just like the music from the movies except way shittier! Considering the technology they had to work with here I’m still fairly impressed that they managed to simulate it so well, even if it is like someone threw John Williams into a digital hole and then filled it up with spit.

Here’s a good example of a game that reminds me my reflexes have deteriorated almost completely: it tells me I’m a Jedi but the controls don’t let me feel like one—instead I’m the drunk guy in the cantina who makes some poor life decisions by threatening space wizards.

Graphically this game looks fairly nice: it has very sprightly sprites and all of the things on the screen look enough like the things from the movie that I can recognize them. Hoth is remarkably populated for an ice planet, but I guess everything just thawed out to run or fly back and forth to slightly inconvenience the player. Your life bar is a lightsaber, which makes sense because as Jedi get hurt their lightsabers slowly turn off.

I enjoy the way they emulated how Yoda talks with this Game Over screen:

Me too, Yoda

This is a screen that you’re going to be seeing a lot because this game is pretty hard. I’m adept at jumping into the icy pits on Hoth that first murder your tauntaun, and then Luke very shortly after. Luke probably has just enough time to really contemplate the fact that he’s about to die right before he dies. He sees the tauntaun die and thinks “I’m next. I’m going to die next in a very similar way.” And then he dies.

He looks at me as if I killed him on purpose! He’s right. I did.

Yoda says “Do or do not, there is no try” at the game over screen, and I agree with him so this review ends here. 

Super Double Dragon

Here I am fainting on top of a phone booth. Luckily the friendly man caught me with his fist.

There’s construction happening right near my house as I type this. The construction has been going on for over a month now. If I’m at home during the day, I hear this:

THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK  THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK

It goes on for hours and hours. I can feel it in my teeth. My bones are disintegrating. Mind my is melting, the incessant vibrations reducing it to even more of a slurry than it was previously.

I mention this only because I’m totally unable to focus on anything aside from this noise. I have become this noise. I am now called THUNK. THUNK will try to review Super Double Dragon, but don’t expect much out of THUNK.

Game look pretty nice. THUNK can appreciate colourful character designs and nice sprite animations. Little men punch and kick and jump and THUNK smile warmly, the thought of a quiet world where the only noise is screaming playing momentarily in what’s left of THUNK’s imagination.

But no, noise returns. Reverberate inside of THUNK.

Game has sound? Most of life sound like THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK THUNK so maybe some of it is lost.

As far as gameplay, THUNK think that game seem slow. Little man can only walk despite presumably time-sensitive life or death situation. RUN MAN! RUN LITTLE MAN! Why little man move like he under water? THUNK move faster when looking for ice cream truck, never mind when he in deadly street fight started by pushing gang members out of way to get ice cream from truck.

Also THUNK play game single player so there only one dragon. Should call game “Super Player-Dependent Number of Dragons.”

Alright, the noise has stopped so I’m capable of using first person nouns again. Me am very happy about this development.

 

Spectre

I just played Spectre and managed to hold it together for like two minutes. It’s a vector based tank game kind of like battlezone but prettier. It looks sort of like this:

That giant checkerboard is the playing field, you gotta get all those yellow flags, the red tanks and the yellow tanks and some other tanks are trying to shoot you. You get points for killin’ tanks and getting flags, and you have a bunch of gauges that can’t go down or you won’t be able to shoot or you’ll lose.

It’s really simple, it’s hard to see how someone might get good at it. There are a lot of buttons that do things that aren’t super clear. There isn’t much I can say about Spectre, but there is a lot to say about manuals. Manuals aren’t really a thing anymore in video games, at least not paper ones. Almost every game just tells you how to play it now in a way that might not have been very easy or fun to do in old video games.

But it became crystal clear after about 30 seconds of playing Spectre that I was going to need a guide. A guide from spectre town. So I found a manual.

On the manual was a 1-900 number for their hint line, so I started by calling that. The number was out of service. I wonder what happened! Did cybersoft get phreaked? Phone-owned? It’s pretty clear that the manual is going to have to suffice.

So when I said that Spectre was a tank game back there? Total lie. Spectre is about roaming around the battlefields of the cyber-war, capturing flags and shooting cyber-enemies. Everything in the game that I thought was a tank thing was a computer thing. I messed up all the metaphors is I guess what I’m trying to say.

I went back and played a little bit more now that I had rich new metaphors to colour my cyber-war experience.

It didn’t help.

But I can say that knowing what hyperjumps and grenades and mines and flags and Soft I.C.E is helped me think about spectre a little bit with all its cyberwar trappings, and that it’s pretty great that people thought that maybe war in the future would be just like regular tanks stuff but in computers and that if you just drove around fast enough you could just take over everybody’s computer.

Because right now taking over people’s computer is tricking them into clicking on things or pasting things that they shouldn’t click on or paste and then you encrypt all their files and steal their memories unless they can give you enough bitcoins. I don’t think that would be a super fun video game but maybe it would!

Maybe somebody stole all of Cybersoft’s memories for bitcoins. Maybe that’s why their hint line is not running anymore! Maybe they became a real cyberwar target because they got too close to what the real cyberwar is like.

 

I think it might all be connected.

Super Alfred Chicken

A bird that could not fly

I can still remember the fervor that accompanied the SNES release of Super Alfred Chicken. I remember the seemingly endless lines, the makeshift tent cities, and of course the elaborate Alfred Chicken costumes that captured our hearts while we all waited for this cultural touchstone.

It seems like a different world now, one so far removed from the violence and rhetoric that plague the cruel year of 2016. It was a simpler, happier time, and much of that was squarely on the tiny shoulders* of our hero, Alfred Chicken. Waiting in that gigantic line with other Chickenheads (as fans of Alfred Chicken are globally known) and breathlessly speculating on the game’s release and what it meant for the beloved franchise…these are some of my favourite childhood memories. Thank you, Alfred Chicken.

Alfred Chicken. Mother Teresa. Mahatma Ghandi. Jesus. Different names for the same being. A point of shining purity and light, staving away society’s shadows, if only briefly. Golden clarity to all those who might be lucky enough to steal a glimpse of history made flesh.

It’s only now, in retrospect, that the looming fall was obvious. At the time, no one could believe anything negative about Super Alfred Chicken. How could we? Here was a bird that had united everyone though his love of awkward jumping and being instantly killed by robotic mice. But unfortunately, we eventually found his true love: eating human ankle skin.

At first it was just rumors. Some journalist would hop out of an interview clutching their foot and swearing under their breath. A child would burst into tears and pull up their socks. Super Alfred Chicken would see a sign for Footlocker and mention that he hadn’t eaten in a while. But everything came to light.

The footage of the shootout between Super Alfred Chicken and the Virginia State Police was all over the news for days. School was cancelled on the first day. Flags were half-mast out of respect for the Great Bird…but as the details began to come out, national mourning became national outrage. It wasn’t until Super Alfred Chicken’s basement was dug up that the true horror began.

It’s strange to be confronted with this grisly spectre of the past. How do you write about such a game without mentioning its lurid history? You don’t. You drink for a while and try not to see yourself in the mirror. We all try to forget and let the skin on our ankles heal.

 

* I’m not sure if chickens have shoulders and I refuse to educate myself on this matter. Please leave this as a fun mystery for me to take to the grave.

 

Star Trek the Next Generation: Future’s Past

Someone needs to clean this screen.

We’ve been gone a very long time on this website. Did I learn anything about reviewing SNES games? No. I didn’t learn anything at all, let alone learn anything about reviewing SNES games. If I’m being totally honest, I may as well have suddenly jolted awake from a coma to write this article. Aside from a passing knowledge of pop culture, it would be exactly the same thing. I’m the reason humanity will ultimately fade into dust, forgotten among the stars like it deserves.

Anyway, Star Trek the Next Generation doesn’t seem great on the surface. The interface is clunky at best but at least the idea of some ensign spinning in a cool circle to interact with the other Star Fleeters is pretty funny.

PICARD: What is the new boy doing, number one? The new boy, the boy over there.

RIKER: I believe he’s working, captain.

PICARD: Why is he a spinny boy, Riker? Do I call you Riker? That’s your name so that’s probably a thing that I do on this ship. Or do I just call you “number one” all the time like a toddler that needs to pee?

RIKER: …it’s just how he moves, captain.

PICARD: He’s making me dizzy. Spinny boy is making me dizzy. Were his parents a dreidel and a merry-go-round?

RIKER: Is that a racist thing to say? That feels like it could be racist. Maybe it’s your shaved head, captain.

PICARD: Wait, listen: ♫ spinny boy, spinning across the stars, spinny spin boy. Little spin boy going for a star spin ♫.

RIKER: Sir you may be having some kind of seizure.

 

Let’s cover some of the regular review bases here!

GRAPHICS: I give this game “yes it has graphics” out of “does this game have graphics?” I can identify the people and the planets and the space controls. Everything is very thorough in that regard. Not once did I mistake a Klingon for a desk.

MUSIC: It’s Star Trek! A lot! Over and over! Thanks, old games!

CONTROLS: Spin spin spin spin read read read read spin spin spin spin

FUN FACTOR: There’s probably some fun in here? Maybe if you progress far enough in this game there’s a compelling story that will whisk you away to space adventures with your favourite characters who are undoubtedly more important than you in the grand scheme of things. Me, I’d rather play a game where I don’t have to remember the name of a planet that’s almost the same as 20 other planets. Why can’t the computer take me where I need to go? That’s what computers are good for: transporting us to other worlds where I don’t have to think.

Space Ace

I’m sort of glad that we’re back to visiting these old games. There’s a part of me that feels like we’re digging into this old bin of artifacts left behind by a long-past, at-least-marginally-loved family member. Like a belligerent aunt, I guess. Or, at least, some sort of contemptuous cousin. These dusty (not literally) titles represent lifetimes (I really hope not literally) of treasured memories. I know – from the myriad comments that arrived years after we posted reviews – that my panning of titles people probably spent a lot of time with sometimes hurt their feelings.  At the very least, the amount of time and effort that went into building these games was likely non-trivial. We can only do so much.

Largely what we discover is that our marginally-loved family members were only marginally loved for a reason. They were probably weirdos. Or malcontents with stacks of newspapers all over. And when you get a box of stuff owned by a dead person you don’t care about mostly you don’t have any feelings for the materials within that box. They only serve as a grim reminder that you and all of your shit aren’t long for this world.

Anyway, fuck Space Ace.

I just want to point out that when games like this were released they probably retailed for like $90 Canadian. Or more. And at this time (hello, 1990s) the key demographic for Super Nintendo games was, I think, probably teens and/or young adults. You had to save for a SNES game. Or rent it, I guess. If I’d rented it, I’d have returned it. Space Ace is a game where the guy from DragonQuest and a space genie are fighting over a woman. Honestly, the space genie can have her. This guy’s no ace. It’s not even close.

Here’s guy one. He’s our Space Ace.

Here’s guy two. He’s our villain, I guess because he is a different color (spacism was alive and well, I see).

But when you get down to it, guy two is a man flying on a disc machine shooting lasers at guy one. You tell me which of those two guys sounds like a Space Ace to you.

The game itself can be characterized as infuriating. You die when you get hit by anything. You die when you miss a jump (you will miss many jumps). Achieving a game over will put you back at the beginning of the game. It’s a good thing that no one can hear you scream. I “cheated” to get a little deeper and the second level featured mode 6 flying graphics and additional abrupt deaths.

No, thank you.

So, I’d like for you to imagine a 10-year-old boy who fucking loves space waking up on his birthday. He gets home from school and his parents tell him they’ve got a cool gift he’s going to love. It’s Space Ace. And he’s like, “I fucking love space, you guys”. That’s what he says to his parents. He’s crazy about space. And he puts this thing in and dies 5 times in a row in ways that are vexing and/or unfair and/or baffling. He does this for the better part of the week. He gets deep in the game, memorizing every misstep and movement. By the end of his childhood, he can play Space Ace in his sleep. He’s written stories about the titular ace and his adventures. He’s done drawings. By the time he reaches high school he’s moved on to some different games but his bar is low. He ends up working as a records manager at a local government office and dies alone, tragically, from a heart attack at 50 years old. You were his nephew. In his house, after the wake, you see these framed drawings of a man in a space suit and many paperback books about space adventures. You didn’t really visit him much. You say, “man, what a sad guy”. You find a dusty, still-working Super Nintendo in the corner. You’re sure you can sell it for a few bucks. And in the console is this game called Space Ace. “Ha ha… you say. Motherfucker loved space, that’s for sure.”

You play the game for 30 seconds… that’s long enough to die to the point where the game will rank you as a “Space Freeboid” and make you start over. You turn the console off. You look around and realize the impact this game had on his life. The drawings. The paperbacks. You get up and walk out of the house, and you never look back. Your dad sees you on the way out and says, “jeez, you don’t want any keepsakes from your uncle’s place?”

“Nah,” you say. “He’s given me enough”.

The return of Every Game Ever

I always pictured Everygame as an artifact. Even when I was a few articles in, it was something that I didn’t really think of as a process; it was something I wanted to look back on years after it was finished, and say, “look at that dumb thing. It exists. A thousand dumb noodly articles, barely related to some video games.”

It kinda became something else.

Originally, I gave myself the Sisyphean task of playing, screencapping and writing these thousand articles, one a day, for I guess three years. That obviously wasn’t going to play without quitting my job, probably taking a bunch of drugs and shutting the rest of my life off. But eventually, I got the idea to get other people on board, and, all of a sudden, it seemed a lot more attainable. Pretty much anyone who asked got to write (however, they didn’t get to pick what they were writing; you were stuck with what you got). So, for a year, maybe more, we happily chipped away at the stupidest pile of shit ever, forced ourselves to adhere to arbitrary deadlines, and wrote.

Eventually, it kinda fell apart. We got exhausted. Levels of effort dropped. Deadlines were missed. The cynical tone mutated into one that was downright contemptuous. Every fucking 90s sports game became a week-ruining ordeal. What can I possibly have left to say about baseball?, we each individually said probably five or sixty times.

And then there were the expectations of the audience we had accidentally built. Somehow, we were getting linked on Gamasutra and Twitter. Due to some accidental SEO I farted out, we started appearing in Google searches. Comments would pop up. Among the dozens of weird spam messages, there would be questions about what the fuck was wrong with us for hating a game that we’d spent ten minutes on. It was never the point to be fair to any game, though. The point was to create a space where a game would be a jumping off point for writing.

The point was to make an artifact.

So much has changed since 2010, when the project fell off. Most of us left our 20s and entered our 30s. Twitter went from big to massive. Google Reader died (bye, everyone who ever read this!). We’ve all learned that the word “retard” is bad and casual misogyny isn’t funny (By us, I mean those of us writing. A large amount of the world had already caught on by then). We learned new words. English invented new words.

Anyway: we’re finishing it. The current plan has us running the remaining games from August 20th to December 28th, year of our videogames 2016. Then it’ll be done. Then, when I think about it, maybe I can have that gentle, soothing sense of longing that comes from remembering something you enjoyed and finished (like, say, Chrono Trigger) and not the low-level crushing disappointment of knowing you never did (like, say, Earthbound).

Stay tuned. Or, get tuned. Or whatever. RIP Google Reader.

X-Zone

SUPER MOUTHWASH

When I first read that I’d be reviewing the SNES game X-Zone, I was pretty excited. Finally, I thought, a game that I’ll enjoy: pornography. Well, as it turns out, X-Zone isn’t porn. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

“Unknown circumstances” are responsible for a malfunction in Compound X’s central bio-computer that controls “X-TRA” (really?), the external threat recognition assault system. Basically what this amounts to is that a bunch of robots are going to try and kill people. If it launches its “global retaliatory strike,” then all life on this planet will be “x-tinguish(ed).” (REALLY?!)

Fiine.

The game begins with you entering the “X-termination zone” (ok, fucking whatever) to activate the bio-computer’s shutdown sequence. So, let’s do it!

Hmm…not sure how to proceed here since X-Zone makes use of the Super Scope and I don’t have a Super Scope. Damn my lack of proper tools! I’ll just follow in the grand journalistic tradition of making up facts to suit my lack of preparation in writing this story. Here we go!

Wow! I didn’t realize the SNES was capable of photorealistic graphics! It’s like there are ACTUAL BIO-COMPUTER DRONES flying out of my computer monitor! Whoa! That was a close one! I need a haircut, but not that bad! Yikes! If these—and I can’t emphasize this enough—incredibly realistic SUPER VISUALS weren’t enough to recommend X-Zone, then the cunningly well-designed sound should! Heck, if I was blind I’d be utterly convinced that it was time to take shelter in my basement from a cloud of laser-firing future machines!

Jumpin’ Jehosaphat! I thought things were intense on the first level of X-Zone, but it was nothing compared to the second level! This is a whole new experience! My exclamation key is getting worn through writing this review! The second level of X-Zone involves some kind of experimental sound wave that makes the game float in front of your eyes in 3D! I don’t understand how this preceeded IMAX by so many years and is so much better?! It literally does not make sense. My ears are ringing from explosions and I can barely keep my hands from shaking as I type this. It was like being in the centre of the greatest futuristic light show in the universe. The big bang was probably junk compared with this.

The third level. You can’t understand it and I feel sorry for you. When you witness the light, you will be at peace. X-Zone is the greatest work of humanity. Our civilization continuing to produce anything after its creation is a foul joke.

Level four. Life is the game, compared to level four.

Level five. It is everything.

X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse

You'd buy it. Don't judge me.

I bought X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse when I was but a small boy filled with wonder and hope. I spent all of my Christmas money on it. It was something like $105 at a Radioshack and I paid this because I’m Canadian and I make poor decisions. I took it home and was thrilled that I could play as a number of my favourite X-Men characters (but let’s be honest, everyone wants to play as Wolverine all the time and there’s so little reason to care about anyone else, at least when you’re 11).

And then…. I couldn’t make it past the second fucking level. I remember trying, certainly. I spent $105, afterall. The platforming was clunky and the enemies abundant. And, when you lost a character, you fucking lost that character. I remember thinking to myself at the time that I’d been suckered into buying a game I should have rented. But I saw the ad for it in Nintendo Power and it looked so good (those 4 screenshots in the ad really sparked my imagination!). I went for it. I took the plunge.

This is what one gets for taking plunges...

And this game….

I’ve previously written that I don’t have the patience for games that are pointlessly hard. I’m not even sure that this game is pointlessly hard. And, additionally, I’m afraid to play the game now only to discover that I was a simple child (this was maybe the case). But I can tell you that this game was a perfect example of the GameEnder Scenario.

The GameEnder Scenario

The GameEnder Scenario is when you play a game and are having a great time with that game up until a single point of failure. This failure could be the result of something you’ve done or something the game has done to you through poor design. This sounds like whining. Sometimes it is. So, you reach the portion of the game where you encounter this frustration that prevents you from moving forward in the game. You try a few times. You turn the game off. You maybe never play that game again.

I one put something like 30 hours into Chrono Cross, which was not a difficult game generally. I got to the a pivotal point in the game where I had to fight some significant boss and this boss beat me. The boss-fight itself was pretty long and the game didn’t seem to be especially compelling. I never touched the game again. Not once.

That’s likely an extreme case, but a great example of the GameEnder Scenario being my own fault.

An example of the GameEnder Scenario being the fault of the game itself would be Final Fantasy Tactics and the Weigraf battle. It’s notorious for being one of the toughest battles in the game and if you’ve either level built too much or not enough it can really ruin your day. I’ve known at least one person who suffered GameEnder in this way.  In this case, the issue often has to do with multiple save games. If you can’t win the battle, and you saved before the battle, and you didn’t have more than one save, you could very well be stuck on this fight some 15 hours into the game (or whatever) and be force to started entirely.

And so…

X-Men Mutant Apocalypse might have been my gateway to GameEnder Scenarios… a game that I played for a very brief time, got very annoyed with, and stopped playing altogether. There were probably lessons I could have learned from the process. I could persevered and learned something about seeing things through. Or I could have worked tirelessly to squeeze my dollars out of the purchase. Or, I could have done what I did in this case, which was get super frustrated, take the game out, toss it in the corner of the room and play some motherfucking Super Mario Kart.

(I AM SORRY THAT THIS TURNED INTO SOME STUPID ESSAY ABOUT HOW I QUIT THINGS EASILY, BUT MAYBE YOU DO THE SAME THING SOMETIMES AND SHOULD SHARE YOUR TALES IN THE COMMENTS, I GUESS)