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.

The Miracle Piano Teaching System

Water into wine.
Sight to the blind.
The Miracle Piano Teaching System™*†.

Walking on water.
Calming the storm.
The Miracle Piano Teaching System™*†.

The Virgin Womb.
The Empty Tomb.
The Miracle Piano Teaching System™*†.

* Compatible only with the Miracle Piano Keyboard™.  RRP $499.99.
† Batteries not included.

Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse

No, Mickey! You'll unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum!

Mickey Mania was a neat little game – fluid animation, confident visual presentation, clever little set-pieces – until someone put a goddamn mine cart level in the second stage.  I fucking hate mine cart levels, almost as much as I hate escort missions (maybe more, I can’t decide).  They’re a crime against platforming, and they should be blacked from the game developer’s palette.  Usually you won’t see one until the latter third of the game, when the level designers have run out of ideas (see Taz Mania, Donkey Kong Country); not so with Mickey Mania.  They’re* even clever enough to disguise the mine cart level as a ride through the Mad Doctor’s lab on a Frankensteinian operating table - but a lacquered turd is still a turd.

A mine cart level by any other name...

They’re* still throwing out interesting puzzles well after that, albeit executing them in the most annoying way possible.  Mostly by sending wave after wave of respawned enemies at you while you’re trying to solve them.  The enemies are more trouble than they’re worth.  Take the skeletons for instance: some take one bean-shot to kill, some take three despite no apparent visual difference, all explode in a flurry of bouncing bones that continue to maim you from beyond the grave.  You’re better off just jumping over them so you only have one or two pieces of enemy to contend with (they throw their skulls).

[* 'They' of course refers to game designers Travellers Tales and Sony Imagesoft, which, most interestingly, included the likes of David Jaffe,  the very vocal director of the God of War games.  Later tonight he will post a video blog from his garage rebutting the many valid points of this article.]

It’s at this point I remember this was probably supposed to be a kid’s game.  Why is it that every single Disney game is far too difficult for its target audience?  Ducktales, Land of Illusion, Aladdin, The Lion King – I could go on forever – each one, though pretty enough to check all those graphics/presentation/sound/music boxes for gaming mag reviews, is the gameplay equivalent of torture.  Child torture.  And last time I checked, that’s against the law, people.

You wanna talk about torture?  Torture is having LOAD TIMES on a cartridge game.  It’s just wrong on so many levels.

'Timeless Adventure' alright!

Let’s go back to mine cart levels, why I hate them with a seething, white hot rage, and why this one in particular has raised my ire.  We’ve just become acquainted with with the titular character, his controls, how he handles, only to have that control unceremoniously snatched from us, helplessly hurtling (and hopping) towards all manner of deadly fates.  Passing the level then becomes an exercise in rote memorisation, and of course, abject frustration.  It’s nowhere near as soul-crushing as that most infamous of mine cart levels – the hoverbike-ride through the Wind Tunnels of Battletoads – but after save/load stating my way through the level, I found that the only way I could make the final jump was to purposely run into the final obstacle.  Who in their right mind’s going to think of something like that?  A child?  A ‘hardcore gamer’?  I know, I’ll just run into that thing that was killing me during the first three-quarters of the level!  On purpose!

Oh, and another thing: what’s with Mickey’s bean-shot?  What’s to prevent him from throwing magic beans anywhere other than directly left or right in a straight line?  I’ve seen platformers and side-scrolling shoot-em-ups get it on before, but Mickey Mania is an experience akin to playing Space Invaders sideways with an abacus.  That’s about the closest I can come to illustrating what a royal pain in the arse it is for a gravity-laden Mickey to shoot rogue bats on the y-axis.  He *can* jump on *some* enemies *some*times, but like all non-Sonic, non-Mario platformers, it fails to distinguish just where, when, and how that will succeed.

It’s a pretty enough cartoon to be sure, but controls maketh the videogame, and – I’m sorry to say – Mickey don’t got it.

Now somebody give me a medal for not mentioning Epic Mickey a single time during the course of this write-up.

Oh.

Mega Man X 3

Who died and made you king?

Mega Man X 3 is like a whitewashed tomb: its pristine and beautiful exterior belies the putrid, rotting corpse within.  I don’t usually subscribe to the whole graphics versus gameplay diametric, but this time the relationship is definitely inverse.  In Capcom’s efforts to make a better looking, better sounding Mega Man, they actually forgot how to make a Mega Man game in the process.  Deliberately unforgiving level designs densely populated with death machines hell-bent on your destruction give way to sparse, open, and redundant rooms, sometimes filled with nothing at all.  The former – characteristic of the NES originals – was frustrating yet strangely fulfilling, to the point where you may find yourself yelling to no one in particular, “I AM A HARDCORE GAMER!!” after some astounding feat or other.  The latter will have you scratching your head, wondering when the game will suddenly kick into gear and become a real Mega Man game.  This, of course, never happens.

Hello? Is anybody there?

I kid you not, some of these rooms exist for no reason whatsoever.  You run into the room, only to immediately run out of it again (you even unlock a door on both ends).  And yet, during both these events, the ‘camera’ slide-transitions as if to signify ‘this is the next area’.  That’s just stupid!  If I was the artist, I’d be pissed, not only for wasting a perfectly serviceable room, but also for wasting my valuable time.

X 3 is full of these unnecessary flourishes that force you to expect more than it can hope to deliver.  The polished visuals and cyperpunk settings scream ‘anime’, but its back foot remains firmly planted in the NES era.  The ’story’, ‘acting’ and dialogue is especially cringeworthy, and while I’m sure it’s no worse than what you’d expect to find in Mega Mans (Men?) 1 through to 6, at least they were upfront about their intentions: to be games.  By bringing the presentation forward, Capcom have announced their anime aspirations.  By leaving the rest behind, the game appears naked and antiquated.  The playable ‘intro’ would have been nice if it wasn’t just a pre-game wank.  You’re Mega Man, you run in there, blow up a few things, only to get punked by a former ally within the first minute (“you’re far too trusting, Mega Man!”).

Excuse me, waiter! There's some Elizabethan acting in my Mega Man!

This is the game’s ‘Raiden’ moment, where Zero (a robot replete with ridiculous anime hair, originally groomed to be the star of the X series) must rescue Mega Man.  Except, instead of saying “I thought this was called Metal Gear Solid because it had Solid Snake in it”, you’ll be saying, “I thought this was a Mega Man game!”  Once you’ve rescued him, though, it’s back to business as usual, and Mega Man will be handling things from here, thank you very much.  This ‘intro’ seems to have served no other purpose than to show off a playable Zero character, only to neuter the titular character in the process.  For the rest of the game, Zero is relegated to piece work and similarly showy cameos.

Robot hair is all the rage in 21xx.

I tried oh so hard to love this game, but I couldn’t help but compare it to its uglier, more frustrating cousins – you know, games with some semblance of level design.  And then it dawned on me that level design, important though it is, is never graded by the mainstream gaming press alongside the bullet points of graphics/sound/gameplay/replay value.  Even though graphics should be servant to level design; good gameplay is a symptom of good level design; and replay value is a symptom of good gameplay. Followed closely by: how many poorly designed videogames got a pass on those four bullet points alone? Answered by: probably this one, for starters! And then I started thinking about games with good level design, and booted up a new game of Super Metroid.

Mecarobot Golf

Japanese professional golfer Nobuo Serizawa

“Hey Nobuo!  What’s happenin’?”

“Mm-hmmm, mm-hmm–that’s great, listen, got some good news for ya, buddy.”

“Hmmm…nooo, not quite…”

“…Nooo, not that either…haha, you’re a sly dog, Nobuo, I’ll give you that!”

“Alright, I’ll lay it all out on the line for ya.  Here comes:”

“You don’t have to play in the PGA anymore.”

“Not this year, not any year.  I know, ain’t it great?”

“Why? Why, ’cause you’re my special little guy, that’s why, and if my special little guy doesn’t wanna play in the PGA, he doesn’t have to play in the PGA.”

“What’s that?  You say you do want to play the PGA now?  I thought you said you hated the PGA.  Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already!”

“What, you don’t remember saying that?  I even wrote it in my diary here…mmm…now, let me see…ah! Here it is!  ‘Dear Diary, I wish Nobuo would stop going on and on about just how much he hates the PGA Tour.  It’s getting really tiring!’”

“You never said that?  Nobyyy…Nobyyy! Now Noby, you wouldn’t call me a liar would you?”

“Well I’m tellin’ ya, it’s right here, in black and white: ‘I hate the PGA with the fire of a thousand suns.’ ~ Nobuo Serizawa.  Right there, on the page.  C’mon man, I’m your agent!  We’re supposed to have a little trust thing going on here.  Back and forth, back and forth, it’s a two-way street.”

“Mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm–I understand, see, here’s the thing: the thing is, my hands are tied, the deal’s been signed, the JGTO really wants this.  Plus, they’ll swing you a few hundred Gs…if it wins.”

“Whoo!  Noby boy!  I gotta hand it to ya; you sure know how to ask the tough questions, and I love that about you!  Inquisitive much? Haha, just kidding–look, allow me to be perfectly candid with you…the JGTO, they’ve been doing a lot of focus testing; trying to break into the Western market.  And – how do I put this – Western audiences are bored with *just* straight, normal golf.  They need something more.  I mean–and don’t take this the wrong way – they don’t even know who you are!  Let alone how to pronounce your name!”

“I know, I know, it’s not that hard – ‘Noo-buu-oo Se-rii-zaa-waa’ – but the kids don’t know that.  They just look at it and see ‘foreign’; their eyes glaze over.  No, focus testing found that Western audiences would be much more open to the idea of golf if it had robots in it.  And we thought, well that’s great, we’ve got all we need right here in our own backyard: advanced robotics, programmers, AI, and – get this – a great golfer to model it from.  That’s you, buddy.”

“I know!  Crazy, huh?  Robots! I’ll be honest with you, we watched a lot of videos of you out there on the links – great stuff on the Mitsubishi Diamond circuit, by the way – and even you’d struggle to tell the difference.

Sure, he doesn’t look as handsome as you, except c’mon, he’s a freakin’ robot! How cool is that?”

“Replacing you with a robot?!  *Pfft* we’re not replacing you!  That’s ridiculous, replacing you with a robot! Now who’s talkin’ crazy talk?  It’s still you in there – sort of – all your stats, anyway.  Just think of him as your wingman, ‘Mecarobot – The International Face of Nobuo Serizawa.’  I mean, you can’t be everywhere at the same time; man’s gotta eat, sleep, drink, party – am I right?  Huh? Well now you can do all those things; focus on the games at home, let Mecarobot handle all that nuisance stuff overseas.”

“No…Nobyyy…C’mon now, how many times do I have to tell you, we’re not replacing you with a robot…geez, I thought you people loved robots!  Look, tell ya what, just stay right where you are, don’t move, alright?  I’m coming over right now with Mecarobot, we’ll have a little meet and greet, and I guarantee you’ll feel one hundred percent better about the whole thing.  Now, what do I keep telling you?”

“You’re my special little guy, that’s right.  Love you too, man.  Sit tight!”

Mario’s Time Machine

It’s a summer’s day, you’re playing hockey in the street with your pals, as all North American kids your age do, when you notice what appears to be a Super Nintendo cartridge lying on the ’side-walk’.  You run over to it and read the label – sound it out – “Maaa-rii-O’sss…Taiii-mmm…Maa-sheeennn – Mario’s Time Machine! Cool!  A new Mario game!  And he can travel through time!”  You reach down to pick it up, but it’s pulling away from you, across the front lawn, up the driveway – it’s attached to a length of string!  You follow the cartridge-on-string up the driveway, and you notice the garage door rolling up ever so slowly.  It’s a surprise from Mom and Dad!, you think to yourself, squinting to see what might lie beyond the gaping maw.  As your young eyes adjust to the dark, you begin to make out shapes of a chair, a desk, an apple, a man with right arm outstretched.  Depth of field returns to you, and shapes give way to objects.  The apple, red and juicy, sits gleaming atop the desk beside pencils, books and sheets of paper; the chair tucked neatly underneath.

This familiar conglomerate of images evokes a feeling of immediate danger; you swirl them around in your head as if to taste them all.  DANGER.  Before you hear the next five words, you know you want to run, but you can’t.  Your joints are frozen; your legs like pylons sink into the concrete floor.  All you can do is look, listen, and taste.  The figure steps out from the shadows – it’s your father, and his right hand is holding a stick of chalk.  Your dread is confirmed by the final image – a blackboard mounted on the wall behind him – and those five, fateful words:

“WELCOME TO HISTORY CLASS, SON!”

Your summer is ended.

Fade to black.

Magic Sword

Friendship: The Videogame.

Magic Sword is a game about The Power of Friendship.  What appears on the outside to be an overly linear, side-scrolling hack ‘n’ slasher through a castle that sports faaaar too many treasure chests, keys, and doors (far more keys than there are doors, in fact) belies a rather profound co-operative single player experience.

“Waiiiiittaminute…single player co-op?!  How is that even possible?!“  I hear your brain explode.

I know, I know!  I was surprised too!  I’ll try a few different illustrations to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here.

Okay, okay, I’ve got one:

Imagine you’re playing a NES game two-player with your Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.), except he actually works.

'Operating' being the operative word. NOT!

Oh, you say you’re not one of the five richest Tsars in Europe, and you don’t actually own a R.O.B.?  Well, then this one’s for you:

Imagine you’re playing an escort mission, except the AI that follows you around isn’t completely useless, and *gasp* actually helps you.

I know!  It’s ridiculous and unheard of in videogames, and that’s what makes Magic Sword so amazing.  For once, the AI on your side isn’t as dumb as dogshit, walking off of cliffs, or any of that nonsense, and you don’t feel like ringing their neck.  More than that, you actually feel close to this virtual warrior with whom you share your travails.

I got your back, bro!

My only real issue with the game is just how short-lived some of these friendships can be.  As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of treasure chests lying around the castle, which you smash open to collect a lot of keys (treasure chests containing keys – go figure), which you use to open – you guessed it – a lot of doors.  Well, behind a vast majority of these doors is a new traveling companion.  Unfortunately you can only travel with one companion at a time.  Oftentimes you’ll encounter three doors in a row, meaning you’ll travel barely one in-game metre with your new buddy before he disappears and is replaced by an even newer buddy.

Sorry White Wizard, you're ditched! Dark Wizard is my new Best Friend now! Best Friends Forever!

Just where they disappear to, I’ll never know, but at least there’s 50 levels packed to the gills with keys and doors, so you’re sure to become acquainted with them again (*how* they get trapped behind other doors to be rescued yet again, is another mystery).  Just think of it as an episode of Friends, or something – sometimes Joey just hangs out with Chandler; sometimes Joey hooks up with Rachel; mainly Rachel hooks up with Ross (and then changes her mind); Ross is Monica’s brother; Monica is Chandler’s girlfriend; Phoebe plays “Smelly Cat” on her guitar far too often at the cafe downstairs where Rachel works YOU GET THE IDEA – they’re on rotation.  I suppose if you wanted to stick with say, the ninja for a bit longer, you could just *not open the doors* for a while, but when you’ve got this whole Spartacus-frees-the-slaves thing going on, you really don’t want to.  It’s satisfying.  You open the door, a friendly warrior appears, he or she says “thank you!”, throws you a special item to you, and agrees to fight alongside you.  So basically, you get to make nine new friends during the course of the game, and they’re all completely awesome.  Like this guy:

"You can always depend on the kindness of strangers/ To pluck up your spirits, and shield you from dangers/ Now here's a tip from Blanche you won't regret/ Yes, a stranger's just a friend you haven't met/ Youuu haaa-ven't met!"

It doesn’t matter that the dungeons-and-dragons setting has been done to death; it doesn’t matter that your character is a blatant He-Man rip-off; it doesn’t matter that the game is altogether too easy; it doesn’t even matter that the title is grossly misleading (there is no singular ‘Magic Sword’ as such, rather multiple magic swords that you obtain during the course of the game, and your quest is to destroy the Black Orb, as wielded by the Dark Lord Drokmar…) – this game plays like a good friend.  And friends aren’t always perfect.

Madden NFL ‘94

My initiation into the Ways of the American was a brutal one.  I had just got off the plane, set my bags down in the dorm, ready to have a lie down, when the Three Matts (I lived with three guys called Matt – creepy or convenient?  You decide!) tugged at my arm.

“C’mon Ossy (that’s how Americans pronounce ‘Aussie’.  Protip: it’s actually pronounced ‘Ozzy’ as in ‘Ozzy Osborne’)!  There’s a game on out back!”

“A game on?  What, like Halo, ’cause that’d be super-sweet (my Fratboy-anese was starting to come together at this stage)!”

I lost a fair few brain cells that day (for reasons which will soon become apparent), so my recollection at this point of the conversation is a little hazy.  But basically they explained to me that despite having just got off the plane, and despite my apparent state of jet-lag, they were about to thrust me headfirst into a game of American football, and yes, they were deadly serious.  I don’t know what they were thinking, to be honest – maybe they were under the misconception that I wrestled crocs on a regular basis, and figured I could handle it – but American frat-boys are renowned for their over-exuberance, and so I obliged.  I put on some shorts and a singlet and headed out to the oval with the Matts three.

Upon our arrival, it was widely announced that there was an ‘Ossy’ in their midst, and I think I heard whispers of crocodiles and magic boomerangs.  This was not good.  I was going to get hurt.

I played it cool, though.  That is to say, I played the n00b, and asked lots of questions about the rules.

“Is this okay?”
“What do you do when the guy with the ball comes at you?”

I think I diffused their over-enthusiasm just a little bit with this charade, though I did still get the snot beaten out of me.  See, I actually did know the rules, I just didn’t understand them.  Everything I knew I learned from NFL 2K for the Sega Dreamcast.  Being that it was the only decent DC game  I owned that wasn’t Sonic Adventure initially, I actually grew quite familiar with the sport of American football, dare I say even fond of it.  It became a vested interest a month later when I was living in Seattle and the Seahawks had made it to the Superbowl (sadly to lose to the appropriately-named Steelers, who stole the victory – I maintain – thanks to a series of dubious calls from the referees).

I did that. No really, I did.

But understanding – truly understanding – the sport of American football cannot be taught.  It’s part of America’s cultural DNA.  It’s a strangely regimented and heavily codified form of football – specific formations with specific plays, with specific positions taking specific pathways – and surprisingly so, given the nation’s cultural aversion to Colonial Britain’s stick-up-the-ass mentality and America’s generally freewheelin’ ways.  The number of set plays that can be employed in any given game of American football is absolutely mind-boggling, and memorising their names alone must be a pain in the ass, let alone their tactical benefits and deficits.  “Middle Joker Sky” (is that even a real play name?), “All Fire Press”, and the “Statue of Liberty play” are terms that appeal to me, but ultimately mean nothing to me.  Sometimes I yell out random words and numbers for the hell of it…

Despite my ignorance, I have over the years developed a great respect for the sport.  I like to think of it as a game of chess between two coaches, except all the pieces are sentient, and both sides execute their moves (nay, a full game of chess) simultaneously each ‘turn’.  Each team has a specialised line-up for offense and defence, and specialisation in the workforce is something to be admired.  But it’s the things that separate American football from other football codes that I believe do not lend themselves to good videogaming.  Translated to a videogame, it doesn’t really know what kind of game it’s trying to be.  It’s essentially a turn-based strategy game whereby both teams take their turn at the same time.  Once selected, you must then execute your turn in real-time.  It sort of feels like trying to swim against a tidal wave of your own making.  Set play and improvised play are two dissonant notions that I can’t seem to hold in stead (how do you play Civ II and Starcraft at the same time?).  The crunch and flow of each play execution is continually interrupted by huddles and line-up switches.  Conversely, the huddles are too short to make any sort of sensible decision without having memorised the entire playbook (this is where the DNA comes into it).  And because both teams select their plays at the same time, they can’t really respond to the opposition other than on the fly.  And yes, I know none of these things pose a problem to the real-life NFL quarterback, but I believe they are a problem for your average gamer.

WTF?!

Is there a solution?  I suspect not – not if the authentic NFL experience is to be maintained.  As people complain each year, the NFL videogame formula hasn’t really changed that much at all, even between Madden NFL ‘94 and NFL 2K.  (Though here’s a piece of craziness that will blow your mind: Visual Concepts, the developers of Madden’s arch-rival NFL 2K series, also developed Madden NFL ‘94 and ‘95.)  In all honesty, I believe they refined the formula as much as they could – long ago – without fundamentally messing with the sport itself, or without drastically altering the input method for videogames (watch this space!).  Seemingly all they have done is improve the bullet points of graphics, sound, and extra modes, which is to be expected.

Vintage Madden.

HOWEVER, if someone was to develop a videogame based on backyard American football, I’d be all for it.  There was no lack of crunch or flow that sunny afternoon in Alabama.  There were no huddles (okay, maybe one), no line-up switches – everything was spontaneous, and the momentum of the game never slowed.  Sure, we weren’t as good as the pros of the NFL (especially not I!); and sure, I had a busted lip and a cocktail of jet-lag and concussion by the end of it; but we were having a great time.  I even smashed a guy with a Rugby League tackle (don’t worry, he was the receiver!).  When he struggled to get back on his feet, I asked aloud, “is that legal?  Am I allowed to do that?”  The three Matt-keteers just laughed and high-fived me.

"Young offensive weapons" -- WHOOP!

An American football videogame without the trappings of pre-planning sounds like something I’d be interested in playing.

Looney Tunes B-Ball

There’s a reason people are getting excited for the new Mickey game.  Mickey Mouse, by and large, has a heritage of pretty good videogames, and Disney has respected the videogame medium (and their characters) enough to roll up their sleeves and make the games themselves.  When was the last time you saw Mickey Mouse in a cartoon or film?  Never, right?  But you *have* seen him in Kingdom Hearts.

Things have changed, Warner Bros.  Videogames don’t play second fiddle anymore, and you failed to see it coming.  You didn’t respect the medium or your characters enough to treat a videogame as anything more than just another piece of merchandise.  And so now we have abominations like Bugs Bunny: Rabbit Rampage and Looney Tunes B-Ball to contend with.

Look at those four on the bottom of the screen. Just happy to be there!

Being the great house of animation that you once were, you *could* have sat down with this new-fangled ‘computer game’ thang and tried to work it all out.  Of all the studios, you could have created the most beautifully fluid animated works of the 2-D gaming era.  Instead you commissioned hacks like Sunsoft and Acclaim to butcher your legacy in no time at all.

Take Looney Tunes B-Ball for instance.  This could have been the Mario Kart of basketball games.  What we have instead is a dull, drab, street b-ball game with Looney Tunes characters pasted in.  I could have just glued their heads to paddle-pop sticks and it would have been more enjoyable.  Nay, this could have been better than Mario Kart and NBA Jam.  We expect madness from Bugs and Daffy, and we sure as hell expect more than stiff pie-throwing animations.  Slapstick humour is more contextual in a Looney Tunes game than it will ever be in Mario or the NBA – neither of them are funny in their own right – they were merely placed in humorous situations.  Conversely, here I find America’s funniest cartoon characters placed in a decidedly unfunny situation.  You have to collect gems to purchase powerups during play of the ball fer cryin’ out loud (and that’s before you can even use them)!  Why not just cut out the middle men and have them collect the powerups direct instead?  And why not eliminate the need for another button press, and have the powerups kick in immediately upon pickup?  It makes sense in a stupid NBA Jam kinda way.

Ehhh...no. Not today.

Do you think maybe you could have spared a comedy writer and an animator or two to help out with the game?  What’s that, they were all busy working on Space Jam?  Wait a minute, SPACE JAM? Isn’t that that movie where the LOONEY TUNES play BASKETBALL in OUTER SPACE?! What did you do, tell the guys at Scultpured Software that you were *maybe* thinking of doing a Looney Tunes cartoon where they play basketball?  You didn’t even tell them about Space Jam – did you? Did you ever consider that maybe you could have developed the game in tandem with the film, take a little more time to make the game actually good; add in a few more characters like, I don’t know, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweetie Pie, Speedy Gonzales, Pepe Le Pew, Road Runner, Porky Pig, MICHAEL JORDAN AND BILL MURRAY?  Was da scwipt to Space Jam weally so sacwed dat you couldn’t share da wuv wid da iddy-biddy game makers?

The same team ended up doing the Space Jam movie tie-in anyway!  Instead of rushing two mediocre games out the door, you could have commissioned the New Greatest Basketball Game on the Planet.  But you didn’t.  You were happy to pump out just another piece of merchandise.  And here we are, years later, not giving a damn about your characters or anything they appear in.

There’s a reason the world waits with bated breath for Epic Mickey and not Epic Bugs:

Relevance.

You missed the boat, Bugs.  You could have been ahead of the curve, but you got sloppy.  Now all we have to remember you by is a collection of crappy videogames.

"That's all Folks!"

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Would-be videogame critics plough their way through mountains of bad games, studiously chattering away at their keyboards; squinting and crying like kitchenhands dicing onions with dull blades, in the faint hope that by being faithful in the little things, they will one day land The Big One, or at the very least, the Good Game By Accident (as those assigned to reviewing Mini-Ninjas recently can no doubt appreciate).  Be careful what you wish for, Constant Reviewer; there is always someone waiting in the wings to hang, draw and quarter you for crimes against ‘their’ game.  One need look no further than last year for examples of this.  Grand Theft Auto IV got a perfect 10.0 from IGN, which was furore enough (I too, would argue that a 100-point scale is sufficient scope to adequately express less-than-perfection in a videogame), but the real pain came when Metal Gear Solid 4 received its 9.9 (I don’t know why game developers didn’t just pack it in and call it a day by this stage; perfection had just been achieved – TWICE, nearly – and where do you go from perfection?!), which Playstation 3 owners for some ridiculous reason took as a slight against ‘their’ system. In between spamming cries of ‘teh biased!’, did you ever stop to think how fortunate you were to have two ‘near-perfect’ videogames instead of one?  This is the kind of stupidity you’re up against when time comes for you to review a potentially great videogame.  And so it is with great trepidation that I come to this review of Nintendo’s classic game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Watch out for the guards - they'll getcha!

There is no perfect introduction to this great work of art (yes, I just went there, and I don’t regret it in the slightest) that has ignited so many imaginations; a game that has danced in the minds of young children with magic and possibility. I know this because I rehearsed them all in my head a hundred times before I could even muster the curry to sit down and write this, and each one of them – in the nicest possible way – failed to encapsulate the full gamut of what this game represents to Gaming as a whole.  How do you review something that you know will outlive you? How do you review…a Legend?

Well, you can start by slinging a few tired cliches. Let’s call them ‘adages’ for legitimacy’s sake.  There are two adages that spring to mind when playing A Link to the Past:

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

AND

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Zelda games are 3-D now, but graphical updates aside, scant little of them have strayed from the indelible watermark set by this game.  It may as well be set in stone: the multi-level dungeons, the hookshot we all take forgranted, the Pegasus Boots, the MASTER SWORD, the Spin Attack, HYRULE CASTLE – THE HUB OF THE ENTIRE SERIES, Nintendo’s now-infamous Light World/Dark World theme (or in broader terms, travelling between two parallel worlds) – all emerged for the first time right here.  Even the fan-favourite Ocarina has its origins here, though the English translation yielded only the word ‘flute’ (presumably the Western gaming world was not yet ready for the word ‘ocarina’). Zelda’s musical landscape as you now know it – “Zelda’s Lullaby” (Princess Zelda’s Theme), “Ganondorf’s Theme”, “Hyrule Castle”, “Kakariko Village”, “Fairy Cave” (better known as THE SELECT SCREEN SONG) – was brought into being by Koji Kondo for this game. Even Link’s wide sword swing had its genesis in – you guessed it – A Link to the Past. So little has changed because so little needed changing. If any Zelda game or game *period* deserved a dubious 10.0, it was this one.

Speaking of dubious 10s, The Ocarina of Time is a sacred cow that I take great pleasure in sacrificing on a regular basis. Those familiar with this particular habit of mine; feel free to roll your eyes knowingly at this point.  But when the two games sit right next to each other on my Virtual Console, comparisons are going to be made.  Ocarina of Time is, for all intents and purposes, A Link to the Past in 3-D.  It was not the revolutionary trend-setter 19-year-old Nintendophiles claim it to be.  It’s barely evolutionary, and its ‘innovations’ – context-sensitive buttons; NAVI, YOUR HELPFUL FAIRY GUIDE – loathe as you may be to admit it, could well be the reason you have to sit through a compulsory three-minute tutorial before you can play Wii Sports Resort. The introduction of one of Gaming’s most irritating support characters was the first of many steps towards Nintendo’s long-term stupefication of the gaming population. Z-Targeting meant a lot to 3-D games, but only insofar as it made what was already a simple task in 2-D games tolerable on an additional axis. Like the fifth generation consoles themselves, the shift to 3-D was completely arbitrary. I don’t know what flavour Kool-Aid we were drinking, but all of a sudden we were willing to lay down Super Street Fighter II for Battle Arena Toshinden, Sonic 3 for Crash Bandicoot, Tetris for Tetrisphere.

And Link to the Past for Ocarina of Time.

Never mind the fact that these mechanics work better in two dimensions; never mind the garish, jagged, polygonal puppet show before you; it’s in 3-D, kids! I often wonder what might have been if Sega stuck to their 2-D guns instead of panicking and cramming a second CPU in there (alternate realities are the Last Bastion of Hope for the Displaced Sega Fan). Did we ever reach the pinnacle of 2-D game design? Allow that question to fill the air and let it breathe for a while.

Why do I feel the need to tear strips off Ocarina of Time – a great videogame adored by thousands (millions even?) – for a Link to the Past review?  Think of me as the critical Robin Hood, robbing the rich to feed the poor. Earlier I alluded to a very vocal segment of the gaming population, the circa-19-year-old gamer whose first videogame console was the Nintendo 64, to whom Ocarina of Time represents the dearest experience one can have with a controller (albeit an absolutely terrible one). To those people, please understand that it is not my desire to stomp all over your childhood memories, I merely seek to contextualise the pedestal you place them on. The fifth console generation coincided with the rise of the internet, and so unanimously lauded franchise entries reached critical mass very, very quickly. Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, Super Mario 64, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – all new entries to long-standing franchises; all made relatively successful transitions to the third dimension; all were the first of their respective series to appear on the fifth generation of consoles; all were hyped like hell on a worldwide scale by online and print media – all received unanimous critical praise, and all have been claimants to the title of “Greatest Game of All Time”. Gamers today are no strangers to “Sequel Syndrome”, nor its dark brother “sequelitis”, and so I’m sure you can appreciate the powerful effect this had when unleashed on the international consciousness for the first time. Again, that’s not to belittle the achievements of these great titles, but the fifth generation of console owners had found their international voice for the first time, and that voice was saying “[Franchise Sequel X] is the Greatest Game of All Time” on a semi-regular basis. Those that had experienced previous console generations and earlier iterations may have perceived Franchise Sequel X in a different light, instead approaching it in the wider context of their place in the series as a whole.  Had the internet reached critical mass in say, the late 80s, we might have proclaimed “Final Fantasy III/Metal Gear 2/Super Mario Bros. 3/The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is the Greatest Game of All Time” upon release.  And we may have been right.  But that’s not the point – the point is that the current Loudmouths of Gaming first owned a Nintendo 64 and their favourite game is Ocarina of Time.  I disagree.  I put my own bias under scrutiny, however, with the admission that I reached the “golden age” for gaming (that’s eight years old) during the 16-bit era and my first console was the Sega Megadrive.  And so this could easily be [mis]interpreted as generational walking-stick-waving at good-fer-nuthin’ whippersnappers who don’t know no better.  “In my day we played real games with real difficulty, no tutorials, and graphics that don’t look ugly as fuck in retrospect, and we walked barefoot eight miles to school every day in the blistering snow” and so on and so forth. I can hardly be accused of enshrining those experiences, though, given the vast majority of my output on this website (playful jab: besides, I wasn’t nearly as starved for games as N64 owners were! ).

Now, whenever I ask [goad/provoke/whip into a frenzy] OOT fans just what it is that makes the game worthy of ‘Greatest Game of All Time’ status, they are happy to provide me with a laundry list of reasons.  However, it wasn’t until I played A Link to the Past for EveryGame that it occurred to me: a vast majority of the things they loved about Ocarina were present in the series before Ocarina. To be precise, most of the things they loved about Ocarina of Time were introduced in A Link to the Past.  The rest centred around nostalgia or something else unquantifiable like watching a Hyrulian sunrise for the first time (which, by the way, sounds like a great name for a drink). None of these things are enough to melt this cold, cold heart.  Now, if someone was to craft a compelling argument citing OOT’s contributions to the development of Hyrulian anthropology, that is something I could get behind (after all, the game introduced and developed the Kokiri, the Deku, the Gerudo and Goron tribes).  It’s all unquantifiable of course, but in pure gaming terms, I’d have to award my “Best of Series” to A Link to the Past.  Now falls to me the thankless task of convincing you.

Let’s begin by revisiting one of my earlier statements:

‘[The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is] a great work of art  that has ignited so many imaginations…’

Recently I likened creative genius to a bag of Pop Rocks, buzzing and crackling with ideas and potential – it’s a strange feeling, to be sure, but damn if it doesn’t feel great.  Now, Miyamoto is credited with most of these – it’s difficult to tell with the Japanese – certainly he was [and is, and probably always will be] ‘the fall guy’, taking responsibility for the team’s collective brilliance and blunders.  Regardless, Link to the Past bursts at the seams with all the vitality of an art form that’s never been done before.  There’s a sense that these guys are creating their own rules; their own language; and quite frankly, it’s exciting.  Those who travel to the Dark World without the aid of the Moon Pearl transform into a creature befitting of their nature, in Link’s case, a pink rabbit.  The Book of Mudora can be used to translate ancient Hylian runes.  A curse that threatens to ‘halve’ your magic bar actually doubles it.  What kind of topsy-turvy wall is this? At this point I was willing to accept that the helpful sage, Sahasrahla, might communicate his cryptic clues via wall-intercom; though others seem to put this down to telepathy; or even something as unremarkable as wall plaques (spoilsports!).

"...and User of Intercoms!"

Returning to the rest of that sentence:

‘[The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is] a game that has danced in the minds of young children with magic and possibility.’

I’ll make that more specific for you: Link to the Past is the quintessential boy’s game.  It’s packed with the things that boys love to do.  One need only look as far as Link’s inventory screen to realise this: a sword, a shield, a bow and arrow, a mallet, a boomerang, a grappling hook, BOMBS, and a BUG-CATCHING NET. Let’s focus for a second on the bug-catching net.  Nothing appeals to my boyish mischief more than catching a fairy in my bug-catching net and being asked by the game:

“you have caught a faerie!  Would you like to:
→ Keep it in a bottle
→ Set it free?”

What kind of boy wouldn’t take the first choice? A fairy boy, that’s what! I chuckle evilly as I stuff the helpless creature in its glass prison. It tries to get out, but I knock it back in and press the lid down tight. I shake it up a little to let it know who’s boss. I put breathing holes in the lid of course! Then I stuff the jar in my rucksack. My childhood was filled with stuff like this – I have a fairly amusing story of a boomerang that flew into a tree and disappeared (a MAGIC BOOMERANG, if you will) – and who here hasn’t fashioned a sword, or bow and arrow out of wood to fight with their brothers? Who hasn’t tied a stick to a length of rope and swung it onto the roof? Who hasn’t – with their friends – pooled together resources from their fathers’ garages to make a bomb and set it off in the park?

…

Oh.

Never mind that last one. Link to the Past lets you do all of these things and more without fear of reprisal from disapproving and fun-hating adults – mischief is encouraged! Where do I sign?! A Link to the Past is A Link to Your Past; it taps into your boyhood fantasies* and imaginary play, and coming at this game for the first time as a full-grown man (debatable, I know), I can say that its effect is profound. It doesn’t rely on nostalgia, it evokes nostalgia.

* Sorry ladies, how about, um…Animal Crossing?

ALTTP reminds me of another ‘toy’: Rubik’s Cube. The entire game is a puzzle, from the Hyrulian overworld to the deepest dungeon. You can view the puzzle holistically (from a ‘helicopter view’, if you will), then by working away at a particular section, the puzzle begins to open up to you. And when you discover the secrets of a dungeon or a map, it feels as though they’re opening only to you. It’s all a clever ruse, of course, as they’re often necessary to completing the game, but this is a feeling distinctly missing from all subsequent Zelda titles. The Navis and the Midnas of the 3D Zeldas robbed me of any cleverness I might have had, and for the most part secrets have now been relegated to ancillary discoveries. In A Link to the Past, the dungeons themselves are the puzzles. And while the game does bottleneck at points (most notably at its beginning and end) – like Rubik’s Cube, there’s no ‘correct’ order of completion. The design encourages a particular dungeon order, but it does not force one, which is, you know, kinda nice. Multiple routes means you can skirt most of the overworld from the start, despite not being able to access it in its entirety. It’s not a case of “what are you doing here?! You’re not allowed in this area yet!” More like, “I wonder how I can get over there…” As you gain new items on your dungeon crawl, new paths begin to open up in your mind, and you begin to see how the Rubik’s Cube fits together. Then you start getting real clever, when you can exploit the subtle differences between the Light World and its Dark World counterpart, switching between the two at will.

Light World, Dark World, Light World, Dark World...

The Hyrule of Link to the Past is the perfect size: open enough to explore from the very beginning, but dense enough so as to prevent getting lost or bored, with enough *just* beyond your grasp to keep things intriguing. The place is a veritable hive of activity, where stuff actually happens. Guards are constantly scouring the streets and forests for you, thieves are trying to rob you, and the villagers are trying to run from you. The landmarks are distinct and memorable, and it ranks as the only incarnation of Hyrule I’ve ever memorised incidentally. By comparison, Ocarina of Time (et. al) may as well be a barren wasteland (the original Hyrule was intentionally a wasteland, in line with its narrative**).

Hyrule will never be the same again.

While we’re on the boredom score, what other Zelda game throws you headlong into its main dramatic situation from the outset? None, that’s what! **The original game didn’t have a dramatic situation at all per sé, instead motivating players through its over-arching narrative of survival and exploration, and power to it – but every other Zelda game opens with a whimper that can only come from performing menial tasks for village idiots. Link to the Past opens with a telepathic distress call from the titular princess. You receive your sword immediately from your dying uncle, and head directly to Hyrule Castle for the rescue. There are, of course, other forces at work, lest the game be finished within its first half-hour, but no time is wasted on Navi-coddling (“hey, listen!”) or training (welcome to Link’s Crossbow Training – who’d've thunk they’d ever make a full game out of it?).

Like most elements of this game, the combat is nuanced enough to be satisfying, but simple enough to keep things in perspective. There’s less dicking around in the item-switching department, for one.  Power gloves and flippers kick in at will when required, while boomerangs, arrows, bombs or hooks can be fired in tandem with sword-swinging without overtaking your primary aim (compare this to say, Twilight Princess, where the world virtually stops for you to take the shot). That’s not to say it’s a cakewalk, either – indeed, if you’re not on your A-game, you can find yourself in a very tight spot, scrounging for hearts wherever you can.  The combat is never drawn out; rather it’s a vehicle for further puzzling. In this way it’s similar to one of the truly great 2-D-to-3-D migrations, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – combat is a pace-changer but not a pace-breaker. Unlike those 3-D adventures, however, Link to the Past’s combat isn’t lumbered with an invisible tractor beam in the field of battle. Z-targeting was Ocarina’s ’solution’ to its own camera-wrangling problem, praised for its ‘innovation’ – what it *was* was a sufficient stop-gap, not a praiseworthy one. Would you praise a biochemist for providing the cure to the flesh-eating virus of his own creation? Would you thank a snake for biting you and then slipping you the anti-venom vial? No, you’d be relieved perhaps, if not slightly annoyed at the inconvenience, before you dust yourself off and be on your way. And so it is with a mixture of relief and annoyance that I approach the Past and ask the snake [Nintendo], why bite in the first place if you’re not going to make a meal of it? Why create a flesh-eating virus if not to wipe out millions?

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?