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)

Tetris/Dr. Mario

I sort of miss these old boxes.

How the fuck is a guy supposed to review Tetris and Dr. Mario? I mean, Tetris? Really? It’s fucking Tetris. Besides solitaire, what game is more broadly available and recognized than Tetris? Would you review solitaire (or ask that question to Tom Petty)? COULD YOU (if maybe you knew Tom Petty)? I suppose people have jobs wherein there are supposed to review a Tetris game specifically. Like, one iteration of Tetris. You could objectively say that one Tetris experience is better than another Tetris experience. Or, you might be so bold to suggest that a game that is nothing like Tetris is actually the best game bearing the name Tetris. (See: Tetris Attack)

But fuck, no matter how you gussy it up, it’s fucking Tetris! And this Tetris is the most fundamental of Tetrises (Tetri?).

Conclusion: Shut up, Tetris!

Ok, but Dr. Mario, yes. What I sort of love about Dr. Mario is that it never really changed. Tetris came with so many sorts of different modifications like bombs and different shapes and all sorts of things. Powerups! Whatever! But Dr. Mario really stuck with the formula, which is to say, solid puzzling. Also, Dr. Mario has way better music than Tetris, even if people could recognize Tetris music on the wind from miles away.

Uhh… but that’s it? I suppose the real shame is that maybe a lot of people will not have played Dr. Mario because a) it’s strictly a Nintendo product, and b) it’s not really all that prominent on consoles or cell phones or giant wrist watches or whatever the fuck we play games on these days. And that’s a goddamn shame.

Dr. Mario is clearly amazing.

Brief aside: I once claimed to have beaten Dr. Mario, which I can admit now is more or less impossible. But I felt at the time that making it past level 100 was as close as beating a game like Dr. Mario as any human can achieve and I stand by the “accomplishment”.

Test Drive II: The Duel

I know that I rented this game when I was a kid. I also know that, despite with my capacity for playing awful games at length, Test Drive II was an underwhelming experience for me even then. So check this out. You pick a car and a track. And you drive. Down a road. From a cockpit perspective. Sometimes a thing beeps, which presumably means that you are close to the police. The police might turn their siren on, but if you outrun them a man says “yeah!” and you’re in the clear (this is intuitive because it is exactly like real life, obviously).

That’s basically it? You can race another car if you like. There’s traffic to dodge. But that’s all the things. I suppose that maybe the graphics might have been impressive and that’s probably one of the most ridiculous things about reviewing old games. We’re never impressed by how they look unless they’re outstanding.

Just racin' the ol' car... no big whoop.

But also, “realistic” racing games in a post-Gran Turismo world? Unless it’s a kart game, forget it. You can’t even compete. It’s really hard to go back. You can’t go home again. And maybe that’s the real problem with post-nostaligic game reviews? It probably is. I mean, here we are in a world where Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is playable on a phone that fits in your pocket. And then I boot up a rom of a 16-bit game that is completely unspectacular? So, I suppose, I write something witty (obviously not what I’m doing right now, but whatever) and move on to the next game, until I hit something I recognize and can write about with a little more authority.

Essentially, I feel sorry for these games. But what’s really neat about this is that I’m sure there’s a bunch of people out there who played Test Drive II: The Duel and loved the shit out of it. They made it into their own game and provided their own subtext. They imagined a situation where you were racing your arch rival across the country to win the heart of the girl you both love. Who even knows?

Fillin' up on ice so I can stay... uhhhh... superrrr... cool?

Tecmo Super NBA Basketball

tl;dp

Honestly? What’s so super about it? It’s licensed, I guess. That’s probably a Big Deal. I don’t even know anymore.

Can I just say, for the record, that nothing about videogame basketball makes me feel any differently about what I don’t like about basketball. Like, with Football, I thought it was boring but then stumbled across Madden, had a time, and started enjoying actual football. This isn’t happening with basketball. I can’t even figure out why there are so many guys on the court or what they’re for (and, keep in mind, I like sports).

Now, if life were anything like NBA Jam, I’d be fucking on board. People getting 10 points literally catching fire. Yeah. Yes. That.

touchdown!

Basketball. I’m not that into you. I’m sorry. Stop throwing yourself at me. I know some people think you’re super exciting. I know some people shell out dollars to play simulated versions of you on their televisions. It’s not this guy.

I’m unliking you on Facebook (you were never liked). Don’t poke me, either.

We’re through, basketball.

I'm sorry basketball, you never stood a chance.

Tecmo Super Bowl II

Holy fuck, enough already.

I know people love Tecmo Super Bowl. I know people love it so much. Bo Jackson was a force in it, apparently. Did you know that Bo Jackson’s pro career was basically ended by a degenerative hip disorder that threatened to prevent him from ever walking again? Bo knows the universe has a sense of humor. It’s not laughing with him.

But look, here’s the thing. Even if you haven’t played Tecmo Super Bowl (or had no idea that there was a sequel, like this guy), that doesn’t mean that you don’t know exactly what it is. It’s a football game. I’m not even going to boot it up…

No… look… I don’t care how much you.. fuck! NO! It’s not happening. I don’t care. It’s fucking football. I love football and all, I really do, but I think we’ve had enough. If I could convince Chuck Klosterman to write a review of Tecmo Super Bowl II, it would be great. He would have lots of interesting things to say. I am not Chuck Klosterman. Regrettably. I could have maybe gone for a long thing about Brett Favre’s penis getting sent to cheerleaders too. There was low-hanging fruit here. I simply refuse.

I have sampled the fruit of SNES football and I am stuffed. There is no more room for football in my retro-game stomach. When I cared about writing fresh reviews of old games, I wrote this.

I was not always this way.

 

T2: The Arcade Game

Any side-scrolling rail shooter where you don’t have the luxury of a gun to shoot and you just move a cursor around is profoundly stupid and boring. Any side-scrolling rail shooter where the excuse to the complete lack of environment is that “the environment was destroyed by robots” (while actually sort of cool when I say it out loud) is just as stupid and boring.

You’ve played T2 before. Or you saw your friend play it in an arcade maybe.Remember arcades? This game does them a disservice.

Normally when I play these games and I hate them, I try to play them until I die. I played this game until I noticed that holding the trigger down made my gun eventually overheat and shoot slower. How can I hope to defeat an army of meandering (sometimes they just walk by you while you glide around on your… I dunno? Segway?) killing machines if my gun is only useful for 10 seconds?

I hate this game so much. I hate it so much I can’t even bother to write about it wittily or creatively. That’s true hatred.

Let’s not question it.

I want to take a second to point out that if this is the first thing you see when you turn on a game, that's not a good sign.

Super Widget

BBA Nightmares

You might remember widget as the protagonist of a cartoon series by the same name. It was about this cute little alien who can turn into other things or something. He was supposed to save the planet, I think. I’d go look it up on Wikipedia, but I’m afraid the entry would be so detailed that I’d find it depressing.

I know I played this game when I was young. A friend had it. I remember sort of loving it, even though it’s pretty unremarkable. You jump through brightly colored areas and collect icons. You hit baddies with (brief aside: aren’t you glad we don’t really say “baddies” as much anymore? I wouldn’t have used it myself, but I have a hard time calling a lemon with a mohawk my “enemy”) fists or spit leaf things when you transform into a bug or atlas-like underwater he-man.

“Ok, what?” (that’s what you just said)

So what I learned about Super Widget is that it’s basically a fever dream. I’m going to share a few screenshots here without any context (it’s ok, though, because there isn’t any to begin with):

Soo, uhh… yeah. I think maybe when you’re a kid you take all this at face value. “Of course the letter M turned me into a crab with a shell-hat that shoots bubbles from it’s claws, what else were you expecting?” But these days I expect a little less confusion. Sadly, as I get older, confusion is really all I have to look forward to.

Because I had this realization while I was playing Super Widget, I figured I’d make the most of things by eating a pot cookie and playing more. But then I got distracted by the way my menus scrolled around on my laptop and THEN I ate a plate of leftover chicken wings and had a two hour nap.

Lesson: sometimes life is hard.

Super Tennis

oooh

You know what’s neat about Tennis Games? I’ve never met a single person who can competently play tennis who likes them. But I’ve never met anyone who likes games who says “I fucking can’t stand tennis games.” No one does that. It’s just tennis. It’s benign. It’s this friendly little sport that, when it’s on your television anyway (well, not like if you’re watching… you know what I mean), is basically just ping-pong. It’s rarely awful, even when it’s really really shallow in the game-play department.

Tennis is hard to fuck up.

A = Smash, B = Lob.

While my roommate was playing the super-realistic NHL 11, I was playing this tennis game from 1991. When I just missed a return I’d go “fuck! I almost had it!”. I was easily as animated over a 1991 mediocre tennis game as he was playing a hockey game neither of us seem to be able to put down.

That’s fucked.

Step 1: Make Tennis Game, Step 2: ...., Step 3: Profit.

Anyway, I can’t explain it. You probably don’t hate tennis. I defy anyone to hate tennis with the same verve they seem to direct towards hockey or baseball or football games. Tennis games are a safe bet. We don’t care about them. They don’t have to be great to be great. I don’t understand how that happened. All tennis games deserve the exact same rating, but I don’t think it makes sense to rate them on the same scale as other games. They’re a genre of their own. You can say “this is a pretty good tennis game” or “this tennis game is amazing” or “this tennis game sort of blows”, but anyway you slice it, it’s still tennis and you probably won’t really object to playing it. But you also won’t seek it out? I don’t know. I’m sure there are people who get upset when tennis games aren’t amazing. I bet they don’t actually play tennis?

I’m so confused.

Super Star Wars

... didn't know that licensed movie games were supposed to be awful.

Super Star Wars starts out innocuously enough. You get your scrolling text from A New Hope about something something galactic whatever. You get the shot of the Star Destroyer shooting at the Corvette (you read the second sentence and you were like “oh, fuck this guy who doesn’t know anything about Star Wars” and then I start dropping ship knowledge… whaaaaat?). You see the pod jettison down to Tatooine. Then you play as Luke Skywalker just dicking around on sand dunes with a blaster that, if you upgrade it enough, shoots homing missiles.

So close.

It's a lot less impressive if you kill the sarlac before you even know about the force and you have a missile gun. Seriously.

But whatever. Luke’s hair wafts in the wind while you run. It’s pretty for an SNES game and the controls are tight. You platform. A lot. And it’s surprisingly tough. It’s probably worth playing through in some respects, but of course the problem with a licensed game like this is that I know how it ends, and I’m not particularly inclined to see it through.

It's pretty faithful...

On the other hand, I think I would be so happy to play this game it if came out now. Advances in physics engines mean that stuff like the force are really cool to see on screen. It’s sort of funny when you think about how the movies were made on these scant budgets with all of these primitive special effects that almost everyone seems to universally believe is better than the newer digital counterparts. But then I play this and I gotta tell you, mode 7 just doesn’t cut it. You sort of can’t go home again.

Toshi Station, here we come!

Anyway… I think we’re all aware that the greatest Star Wars games of all time have very little to do with the movies themselves. I’m talking about Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy (still my favorite), X-Wing, Tie Fighter, X-Wing VERSUS Tie Fighter, and I guess the Republic Commando game is supposedly pretty awesome. Star Wars has a fun universe, it’s always neat when you get to play in it without the movies getting in the way.

But I guess the sad part of these games is that they’re a few out of thousands of licensed movie games that are pretty good. I would have been more than content with this when I was a kid. The only reason I’m not super content with it right now is because I have four other reviews to write and it’s kinda hard. Unsurprisingly, that probably still makes it one of the best games I’ve reviewed for the site.

Anyway, it’s Star Wars. You’d probably like it if you’ve got a controller, a little patience, and an afternoon.

Super Putty

Honestly? Alright.

Guh

Let’s get this over with. Actual simple review (one sentence): Super Putty is challenging platformer with repulsive and often confusing graphics that I’m sure someone loved dearly but is basically horrible. The longer story is that I hate basically everything that this game represents. First of all, the character. There’s only room for one amorphous blob in video games, and that is the blob (and his boy):

I don't want to hear any of this "the original was better" horseshit. It might have been better in terms of "fuck this game it's way too hard" but it was way less better in terms of "ha ha, he just blew up inside that other frog monster thing and that's awesome".

Super Putty takes a cute blue thing and lets it do things that Putty should do (except rub offs of your favorite comics) and then puts it in a platforming fever dream where you can do a million things but all you’ll want to do is jump. You can’t just jump though. You have to stretch (I have no idea how this is better than jumping), go flat (which absorbs things), punch stuff, and presumably some other things I’d know if I had a booklet. It all starts off pretty unassuming.

ALSO, it's worth noting that this game had a tutorial level. That's a pretty big rarity for this generation.

So there’s a little blue guy who can stretch and bounce. Got it. You exit the level by taking robots to their space ship, which you do by absorbing them and spitting them out. It’s not clear why a ball of putty needs to do this. But then this bullshit happens:

BLAM

Basically what the game does then is get so ugly that you want to stop playing it immediately and then [SPOILER ALERT] you do just that.

Also the blob eats hamburgers, but he teaches us about things.

For those of you keeping track at home, that means that Super Putty represents every awful game that tried to invent a lovable character who is mostly unremarkable and then puts him in convoluted and stupid setting that reminds you of better games (Commander Keen, A Boy and His Blob). And it’s also super, super ugly.

Yup.