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.