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.

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.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition

I was never into Power Rangers when it was on TV. I must have been around 12 when it first came out, which probably placed me right on the edge of the target demographic. As lineout mentioned previously, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was essentially on its way out, which I had already transitioned from watching almost religiously every time it was on after school, regardless of whether or not it was a rerun, to shrugging off in tired disinterest any time I switched channels to it on a Saturday. Honestly, I probably had better things to do like practice guitar, comb my proud peach-fuzz mustache, or try to download warez off of one of the local BBS’s at 9600 bps.

Don’t look at me like that…I’m not old yet…

So, if I recall correctly, a typical Power Rangers episode went as follows:

1. Some cheesy, one-off story line is presented featuring the Rangers in their normal high-school environment. It’s somewhat like Saved by the Bell, but with considerably less drama fueled by one of the main characters’ addiction to caffeine pills.
2. A crazy person in a monster costume shows up across town and starts killing people and basically just wrecking up the joint.
3. The Rangers jump into their color-coded spandex suits and start beating the crap out of the drug-addled costumed hobo.
4. Some freaky woman with pointy hair and an obnoxious voice uses her magic wand to super-size the monster to Godzilla-esque proportions.
5. The Rangers form Voltron and finish up the fight.
6. The Rangers go back to school and conclude the story line with a smug sense of satisfaction.
7. I die a little bit more inside.

What Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition does is filter the preceding outline down to just the Voltron fighting. Surprisingly, it does a somewhat adequate job of this. The game takes the Street Fighter II route of relying on various button combinations and direction-pad sweeps to execute special moves. There’s also plenty of flashing lights and colors to keep you visually entertained or otherwise induce epileptic fits.

Fun fact: I just realized that the original black ranger was African-American, the original yellow ranger was of Asian descent, and, as far as IMDB tells me, the original red ranger was part Native American. Way to keep things PC, Saban Entertainment!

…or am I the bad guy for pointing out this connection? DEAR GOD, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME!?

Michael Andretti’s Indy Car Challenge

Yes, the wall is covered with nothing but the word "Michael"...

So, do you like IndyCar racing? Do you like looking at Michael Andretti’s face? Do you like looking at Michael Andretti’s name? Not just a little, I mean a lot…

Well, then this game’s for you!

Now keep your distance, you sick bastard…

Hey there...

Excessive display of Señor Andretti’s crude, palletized visage aside, Michael Andretti’s Indy Car Challenge presents us with a fairly bland arcade racing experience. The main championship game mode is supplemented by your typical practice race option, as well as a versus mode in case you have any friends who also share an unhealthy fetish for Michael Andretti. That’s about it. Sure, you can use a password to continue an existing championship game, but who in their right mind that isn’t actively defending the Confederate flag as “heritage not hate” whilst proudly displaying it above the gun rack in their beat-up dually truck would want to continue after playing once?

Controls are at least fairly responsive, helping make the game easy to pick up while at the same time remaining challenging/awkward enough that you’re probably not going to succeed in every race on the first try. The game also has the distinction of providing a “reverse” button, because how many times have you played a racing game and wished you could drive in reverse? Well, in all honesty, I admit that I have. Then again, I’m an asshole, so you can’t expect much less now.

Graphically, this game isn’t going to win any beauty pageants. All cars are palette swaps of the same rudimentary set of illustrations, and the Mode-7 tracks look like…well…Mode-7 tracks. Seriously, you can’t expect much else from the Super Nintendo’s Mode-7 effects. They almost make the platform a breeding ground for boring, ugly racing games.

Unless you absolutely love Michael Andretti and want to have, like, ten million of his babies, you should save your allowance money for something else.

Mega Man X

I’m somewhat confused here.

Mega Man X was Dr. Light’s attempt at creating a self-thinking and feeling robot. Dr. Light was also worried that X might be able to turn against humanity (obviously, because he made the same damn mistake multiple times already in the previous games), so he seals him away in a capsule for thirty-plus years until it can be decided whether X would be a threat.

How about this, Dr. Light: Don’t put guns and crazy super weapons on robots! PROBLEM SOLVED.

X supposedly has thoughts and emotions in-line with a normal human. Nice, but then add a titanium-alloy skin and a fucking energy weapon for an arm, and it doesn’t take a PhD to point out that we have a damn KILLING MACHINE on our hands. I mean, what kind of emotions do you expect to go through his head the first time he meets someone and they want to shake his hand, only to find that it’s been replaced with a space-man gun? Or when he tries to hold a loved one on a cold night against his icy, metallic epidermis?

“Hey, X, high five! Oh, shh…sorry man, I forgot…”

Asshole.

Math Blaster: Episode 1

Continuing from last week’s trend of educational games, we now take a look at the SNES port of Math Blaster: Episode 1. Unlike the veritable abortions of Mario edutainment though, this one is somewhat alright.

We start out with the game’s hero, Blasternaut, and his pathetic little slave-droid, Spot. For some reason, their ship won’t start, so Blasternaut sends his dejected sidekick out to fix it while he steps out of scene. In Blasternaut’s absence, a three-eyed “trash alien” stops by and kidnaps Spot (for reasons unknown to this very day). A heartbroken Blasternaut, incapable of doing much on his own besides shoot things and solve simple math equations, must then go on a mission to rescue Spot from his kidnapper.

Math *and* spelunking? My weekend plans are all set!

The game proceeds in three different stages, each presenting a different type of math exercise for the player. You begin by shooting pieces of trash in space corresponding to a number missing in a math expression, after which you must make your way upward through various levels within a cave, culminating in the final confrontation with the trash alien’s ship. Exercises either cover addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division, depending on the math difficulty level selected at the start of the game. The game does a decent job of combining some level of action with problem-solving (at least as far as educational titles go), so the player isn’t likely to get too bored too quickly.

While I never played any of the Math Blaster games myself as a kid, this does seem like something I would have somewhat enjoyed (sure, I was a bit of a weird kid growing up as well, but my social awkwardness and oversized head shouldn’t be of any consequence). Mind you, it’s still targeted for younger audiences, so don’t expect anything like Star Fox with math mixed in. Star Fox doesn’t need math. Star Fox is all action, baby. Except for Star Fox Adventures…I’m not sure where that fits in.

Mario’s Early Years: Fun With Numbers

Mario’s Early Years: Fun With Numbers. Just reading the name alone, I already know that I have no business playing this game. Chances are, you have no business playing this game. You probably already know this, and you’re secretly laughing at me and the other writers at this site for playing games targeted toward preschoolers. I can’t blame you; I would do the same if the tables were turned. Unfortunately, here I am, firing up my 100% legitimate review copy of a game made for two-year-olds.

Fun With Numbers, from what I can tell, is a re-skinning of the other Mario’s Early Years titles, this time with the focus on numbers, shapes, and such. Gameplay, if you can call it that, is extremely basic: move around a cursor to click on the correct object, rinse, and repeat until you know how to recognize Arabic numerals and squares and shit. For someone like me whose already a fully qualified math-magician, such matters are of the most trivial sort (for the record, I really did form this thought as if I were renaissance-faire actor dressed up as a magician, which will probably give me nightmares for the next few days). For a preschool child, it’s probably fairly simple as well. I can’t say for certain how a young child would react to this, though. If I recall, my dad was probably trying to get me to play Astrosmash on the Intellivision instead of some educational title back when I was in preschool. I think he made the right choice there.

This...this doesn't have anything to do with numbers. You're not even trying!

So, to sum it up, how does Fun With Numbers deliver? Well, yes, it has numbers. No, it’s not fun. I didn’t see many “with”s in there, though. Ughh…why the hell am I still talking?

Magic Boy

What the…what the hell is this?

What the hell is going on here? Okay, wait…I think…I mean, I’ll shoot some little alien critters with this magic wand, and…umm…okay…

Seriously, I’m not sure what is happening here. I mean, okay, it’s…umm…I just picked up the little alien, and now he’s a slab of meat attached to my ass. Err…okay, fine, just get it off me now…

Alright, enough is enough! What’s going on here!?

No, seriously, stop it! Quit messing around! It’s not funny anymore!!

I’m not kidding!! What the…get it off me!! GET IT THE HELL OFF ME!!

OH GOD NO…IT’S…IT’S STILL THERE!! NO, I MEAN I CAN STILL FEEL IT ON ME!! GET IT OFF!!

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T SEE IT!! IT’S RIGHT…OH GOD, IT’S EVERYWHERE!! IT’S EVERYWHERE!! IT’S ALL OVER THE…THE AIR!! I CAN’T…I CAN’T NOT BREATHE IT IN…

OH GOD, NO…IT’S…IT’S SO COLD!!

It’s…so cold in here…

so…cold…

…

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom

In case you haven’t had enough of 16-bit console RPGs, here’s another!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve come to enjoy many of the classic RPGs of the era, despite never having a Super Nintendo growing up (I was fortunate enough to grab a TurboGrafx-16 back in those days, although not quite fortunate enough to acquire the CD attachment with which I could’ve further damaged myself playing Ys Book I & II for hours on end). It’s unfortunate really, as such games require a fair deal of time investment to get through, whereas work and borderline alcoholism have severely limited my ability to focus on extracurricular activities over the years.

But I digress.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom takes the standard ’90s RPG formula and more or less gives it right back to you without trying too hard. Linear storyline taking place in a fantasy setting? Check. Endless random encounters and turn-based combat? Also check. Add your typical character and inventory management as well, and you’ve got yourself a game! SHIP IT!!

So, now wait a sec, you might be thinking, “Well, most Final Fantasy games do about the same, so what makes them ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE in a manner dissimilar to Lufia?” While I can’t really vouch for the power of the Scorpions delivered in video-game form, I’ll try to play along…

For starters, the storyline is fairly weak. In a gist, a group of “evil beings” that were thought to have been defeated nearly a century earlier seem to be making a comeback, and—brace yourself—they want to destroy everything. Not really sure why; it’s just their thing. Either way, the main character ends up being the one who has to venture out to save the world, along with his stalwart party of companions. Now, I may be able to forgive a generic storyline (which is often the case with most video games), but the dialog was so awkward and painful that I almost tried to locate the Japanese version just so I wouldn’t understand what was going on (fortunately, exhaustion and alcohol eventually took care of that issue).

EEEEVVVVIIIIIILLLLL!!!

Combat isn’t too special, either. Everyone takes turns attacking, casting spells, defending, or using items. Encounters are, for the most part, random, so moments when you’re trying to get somewhere so you can save the game and switch the TV to America’s Next Top Model before it starts can be a bit frustrating when you’re interrupted every now and then by an angry bowl of Jell-O trying to pick a fight.

I mean, I didn’t completely hate this game. It’s effective enough as a time waster. You can do better with a console RPG, though. You can also do much worse.

Lester the Unlikely

Before I dove in on Lester the Unlikely, I decided to do a bit of internet research (a.k.a. “procrastination not involving browsing for pornography or YouTube videos of kittens falling asleep…come on, I mean, awwwww…”) on the title in question. The premise, as it turns out, is that the main character, a young man of notably poor posture, falls asleep while reading his favorite generic superhero comic book at the local docks, and finds himself accidentally whisked aboard a ship on its way out to sea. Poor choices in reading locales aside, the ship ends up under attack by pirates, and Lester manages to swim to safety at a nearby island.

So, now we end up with our good boy Lester trying to manage his way off the island. But lo! Lester, having rarely left the safety of his parents basement (well, other than to read comics at docks among the swarthy sailors, apparently), is scared shitless of just about every hazard he encounters. The first time he comes across a creature or obstacle, he’ll either run away in fear or jitter in place for a brief period of time, only to slowly approach afterward in trepidation until such hazard is dealt with (usually by kicking it until it’s dead). This, combined with some unique character animations, add a bit of personality to the whole deal.

Sounds good so far. Color me intrigued.

Gameplay, on the other hand, turned out to be a fairly bland platforming experience. Enemies tend to be either fairly easy to handle or simply frustrating, with little in between. Levels are fairly short. Puzzle elements, if you dare call them that, are usually very simple (i.e. take object “A” to point “B”, move onto the next area). Almost every islander you come across just wants to chuck spears at you, and, really, that just seems racist.

Color me unhappy.

Anyway, I don’t want to leave on such a sour note today, so here’s a kitten falling asleep.