Atari Jaguar #1: Flip Out!

Every time I play Jaguar I get a little depressed, and it's not really because the games are so bad. I remember when this thing came out I thought it might actually save Atari. Even in the early 90s I was a nostalgia junkie who dreamed of all those great old Atari games. When the Jag hit the stores I couldn't be more excited. Sadly nobody wanted to make games for it. I don't know if the thing was just hard to build for or if there was too much competition, but Atari would take just about anything they could get. This led to a slew of extremely odd games that could only have existed on Jaguar. I wish I could say this was because of the high res graphics, but in reality it was because no other home console would take games so weird and difficult to play.

Flip Out is a prime example. It is so weird that I am not even sure how to explain it. On simplest terms it is a puzzle game, but it really isn't about solving puzzles. See you got all these tiles flipping around and you gotta get them in the right places to match the colors. You do this by getting the tiles to switch places by pushing a button. The trick is to always keep one in the air. It is sort of like juggling in that respect. Yes that's it, this game is like juggling.

Of course if it was only a juggling simulator it would only be bad and not Jaguar bad. What gives this game that Jaguar feel more than anything is the setting. Your main levels take place on the Cheese Planet. It is inhabited by little aliens who mostly just get in the way. In between these levels you get to rearrange other things like Easter Island heads and Mt. Rushmore. Try not to get Jefferson and Washington's eyes mixed up! The whole game is set up like a contest, as if these aliens have nothing better to do than to get squished by rotating tiles. They should really be doing some cheese related activities. Anyway, you do this for quite a few levels and then take on King Fluffy. Does this all sound fun to you?

Actually the strangest thing is that this game really isn't too bad. It is certainly unique and challenging. It just seems to be going too far out of its way to make people not like it. Sometimes I wonder if there was a conspiracy against Atari which made everybody purposely ruin their games. A simple color matching action puzzler would've been a refreshing entry into the Jaguar library. It would've been a nice compliment to the excellent Zoop. Unfortunately, it is a confusing game where you are a space juggler on Cheese Planet trying to avoid a bunch of annoying space bugs who keep getting squished. How could this game not be a metaphor for Jaguar's failure? Yep, I think I'll go back to being sad again. I've thought about this game too long.

NES #43: The Great Waldo Search

This should be an interesting one. I can almost guarantee that it will take me longer to write this article than it took me to beat this game on the hardest setting. Well I guess using the word "hardest" is actually incorrect seeing as there are only two settings. Am I correcting my own grammar already? That's never a good sign when I start padding these things in the first paragraph. I guess I will talk about the game now.

I have a feeling that if I had known about this game in 1992 I would've been all over it. That was when I was reading (or looking at) the Waldo books, watching the Waldo tv show, and eating the Waldo pasta. I could probably re-watch the cartoon and talk about how much it sucks now, but I'm not going to destroy my entire childhood just yet. This was a much more innocent time, and I would not have been scared off by the THQ logo on the front. If I had played it in 1992 instead of 2014 would I have enjoyed it, or would it have been one of those crushing moments when I first started to realize that people only cared about making money and not making kids happy? It's hard to say.

The concept for this one is actually a somewhat sound one. The fact that the images are not stuck for all eternity on a piece of paper means that Waldo can actually be in a different place each time you play. It is also not a chore to play. Sure you're just moving a cursor around looking for things, but it controls well and the timer does give it some excitement. So far the game is actually sounding pretty good in spite of all the bad reviews. Is this one of those cases where online reviewers give it a hard time simply because it is based on a known character and funnier to insult than to praise? Nope.

The fatal flaw with this game is that it is just too easy. There are only five levels and none of them are all that big. The clock doesn't last all that long, but there are plenty of extra ones to pick up even on the harder setting. I turned this game on for the first time and was done with it in about twenty minutes. Now I know that I am an adult now, but this game does not seem like it would be much harder for kids. The skill of looking for things and pushing a button is something that develops rather early in children. Now you can go for the high score, but I don't see there being that much of a difference in score from round to round. It is set up to where it should be around 50-60 thousand every time. Of course I could just suck, but I'm not even sure if that is possible with this game.

So in the end this is one of those games that brings out the cynic in people. This is a quickly thrown together game that was meant to trick kids into making their parents spend money. They will quickly be done with it and have to spend more money on another wonderful game by THQ. I wouldn't have realized this as a child. I would have lived in wonderful ignorance where everything was fun and that's all that mattered. Now I am grown and I know that most people are just out to get me, but at least I know what to watch out for. I'm not sure which is worse.

NES #42: The Three Stooges

Okay, so once again I am trying to relaunch this blog of mine again. Usually when I do that I like to come back with something big that people actually care about. I like to do a system review or a profile of a legendary game that everyone has played. So this time I'm doing Three Stooges. Sorry it's some game that nobody cares about, but I already wrote about Zelda and Mario and this game happens to be fresh on my mind. I have gotten so far behind that I hardly even remember many of the games that I have played through. Also, I am tired from work and a little dizzy from my new medication. So Three Stooges is what you are getting. Enjoy!

There are two things I want you to take away from this article. The first is the term "multi-genre action." This is a term that is applied to games like Three Stooges which have multiple styles of gameplay. Usually this means that it is split up into a bunch of puny mini-games. This is a style of game that took a long time to perfect. Nintendo got it right many years later with the Mario Party and WarioWare series, but back in the 80s and 90s it was usually a way to use licensed characters without making much of a game around them. These games were almost always a failure. Outside of olympic style games like Track and Field it is hard to think of one worth playing. Three Stooges is actually one of the better ones and it still kinda sucks. I am surprised that so many companies kept trying to go for the "multi-genre action" because they sucked and nobody liked them. I guess the concept sounded good on paper.

In this game The Stooges are trying to save the orphanage by raising money, which I am pretty sure was the plot of that recent movie that everyone hated. To do this you have to play a bunch of mini games over the course of 30 days. You select them by pushing the button at the right time. I suppose this does keep you from just playing the one game you are good at over and over which is always a problem with games like this. The games themselves are playable, but they don't make a lot of sense without instructions. Even after I read how to do it I don't understand the cracker eating contest. Am I supposed to eat those little round things or the ones that look like shredded wheat? Why does Curly keep screaming? Oh well, I always make a lot of money one this one. Perhaps it's better if I don't understand. Anyway, you do this kind of thing for 30 turns and then hopefully earn enough money. I was able to finish it and did not have a bad time doing so. This article could probably end right here if not for something else I noticed about this game.

This brings me to the second thing I want you to take away from this article, and that is how much love is in The Three Stooges. I honestly can't think of a licensed game from the era that cared more for its properties. Right from the opening screen which has the Stooges clowning around over their old movie intro and making fun of Ghostbusters you can tell that this game mostly exists because some programmers out there really loved Three Stooges. They go so far as to make sure the mini games all come from Stooges shorts. They cared about the characters too much to have them jumping over bottomless pits, avoiding spikes, and dodging lava rocks. They have the stooges doing what they should be doing: throwing pies, beating each other up, and racing through hospitals. They even put in some early digitized voice acting which actually sounds like the Stooges. That aspect of the game is very impressive.

And that's where the trouble lies with profiling this game. It is a game that kinda sucks, but it was made with love and care. They didn't just throw it together to make money, they wanted to make something that plays more like a tribute. In that respect it is a rousing success. Just don't expect any remarkable gameplay. With that revelation it is time to close. Hopefully I won't take so long getting back next time.