Sega Genesis #6: Valis (1991)

(Who needs body armor when you've got a cool headband?)

I think Valis may have the slowest moving text in the history of gaming. Every cutscene feels like when you accidentally push the button that makes the owl talk to you again in Ocarina of Time. Much of the dialogue is also rather pointless. I appreciate that the developers wanted to give the game personality, but I don’t need a letter-by-letter reveal that Valis does not, in fact, have an umbrella. I suppose that the slowness shouldn’t be too much of a surprise considering this game originated on the MSX computer in 1986. The MSX is most famously remembered today as being the reason Metal Gear is a stealth game. It was supposed to be a fast paced action game, but the software couldn’t handle it, so it became a stealth game instead. Valis doesn’t survive the software limitation quite as well, but it is still a reasonably enjoyable game. 

(Talking about naps is always a good way to start a game)

In this game Valis is on a quest to save the world by running mostly to the right and fighting bosses. She starts out as a typically dressed schoolgirl, but once she becomes a super warrior she loses most of her clothes. I guess that she becomes so powerful that her only vulnerable spots are her shoulders, breasts, and wrists. This is always the dark side of having female protagonists in games. They are often practically naked while their male counterparts wear full body armor. Hopefully I will find some less sexist female characters as I play more games. There have to be more than just Samus and Terra. 

(Right after this she goes up a snowy mountain)

For the most part the game was easy. There are unlimited continues so it becomes an endurance test. There were exactly two hard parts. One was, oddly enough, the very first boss. He has a powerful earthquake attack that is almost impossible to avoid. The first time I tried to play through this game I just figured it was impossible and decided never to play it again. Luckily I forgot my vow and gave it another try. I found a way to minimize the damage enough to get through it just barely. The other hard part is the fifth boss. After you hit her enough times she does an instant kill attack. No matter what I did I always ended up dead. I tried hitting her as many times as I could but that didn’t seem to work. I tried timing my attack to just before she struck and that didn’t work either. Finally I randomly killed her and decided not to ask any questions about it. My reward was a very long, boring cutscene. I guess if I wanted to avoid this foolishness altogether and move on with my life the game gave me plenty of chances. 

(The image of near failure)

I shouldn’t give the cutscenes too hard of a time though because overall I had a pretty good time playing this one. There is something undeniably pleasant in these old Genesis brawlers no matter if they are generic or not. It had enough magics and powerups to make me think a little, and the level designs were decent enough. I could play through 500 games like this one and not feel like my time was wasted, and looking through Genesis catalogue it appears I probably will. This game was the first of a series of four which somehow all made it to America. That’s not bad for a series that most people haven’t even heard of. The world of gaming is a bigger and more interesting place than even I realized. 

Super Nintendo #6: Out of This World (1991)

(If this is the highest rated I'd hate to see the lowest)

When I think of gaming during my childhood years I can't help but think of video game rentals. This is a mostly obsolete concept today, but I grew up during the video store's heyday. I feel like my family rented at least one game every week throughout the entire 1990s. I grew up in a town with about 10,000 people in it, but even in such a small place there were three or four very good video stores with a large selection of games. I played just about every game I could get my hands on too. There weren't too many kinds of games that I did not like. I was never a very harsh critic, so just about any game would get at least passable approval from my part. However, there was one game that I absolutely hated. It was a game that I played for about five seconds before it started to make me very angry. My dad and cousins tried to convince me that it wasn't so bad, but I didn't believe them. That game was Out of This World. Since then I have discovered that many people actually like this game. It is even thought of as a classic. I was always a little afraid to go near it though. I  think I had to wait 25 years for the trauma to wear off before I could give it a reasonable chance. Well the time has finally come and I have played through the most hated game of my youth. How do I feel now that it's finished? I'm not really sure.

(Our hero)

If you are planning in playing this game just be warned. You will die. You will be shot, poisoned, drowned, beaten to a pulp, impaled on stalagmites, ripped apart by wild animals, and go splat on the ground potentially every ten seconds or so. Anything that moves on the screen that is not your character or his one companion must be stopped before it can kill you. Every hole you find is either horrible death or your only hope of escaping. There is really only one way to find out. You do have a gun, but shooting the many guards takes very careful planning, and you have to shoot just about all of them before you can move on. There are also places where you can miss vital cryptic operations that will make the game completely unwinnable so be careful. There is really no way to tell until it is too late, so I hope you've been writing down all those passwords. Does this experience sound like a fun way to spend a Friday night to you? No wonder I hated this game so much as a kid.

The gameplay reminds me of Prince of Persia without so much jumping and Oddworld without all the problem solving. You play as a regular person who ends up in a strange and deadly world. I found this to be very strange as a child. It was very confusing seeing a game character doing real world things like drinking a can of soda. Of course if you just press start you will miss the intro movie and end up in a deep pool of water that you have to swim out of before you die. This is about as odd a way to start a game as possible. The first section of the game starts out on the surface where your foes are deadly animals. You eventually run into one of the humanoid inhabitants of this world who, surprisingly enough, shoots you. Strangely you end up in a cage instead of a coffin and with the help of your buddy in the cage are able to slowly escape while experiencing a million annoying deaths. This is one of those games where every creature kills you unless it is vital to the plot that they don't. If they wanted you dead so much than why didn't they just kill you at the beginning of the game? It would have put us all out of our misery that much faster. Even near the game's climax you are falling to your potential death when one of the aliens decides to save you just so he can beat you to death. Why didn't he just let you fall? This game piles confusion upon confusion. 

(Guards and prisoners are all identical. Why that's not confusing at all!)

I will say that this game has a very unique look for a Super Nintendo game. It has a very blocky early-90s computer look that reminds me of early concepts for virtual reality. It goes with a bright color scheme which I appreciate even though most of the game largely takes place in caverns and prisons. The only problem is that the blue and green interiors would sometimes make me think I was in a water filled room and about to drown. That's a reasonable assumption in this game. I hated the more realistic graphics as a kid, but now that's my favorite part of the whole game. Super Nintendo graphics have a timeless and unified feel to them for the most part. It doesn't matter if it's a game from 1991 or 1997. You see it and you instantly know it's SNES. Out of this World is one of the rare cases where you could see screenshots and not know what system it came from. It could just as easily be Jaguar or Sega CD. At least I should give the game a few points for that. 

(Blue on blue with blue)

My own playthrough of this game was a mixed bag of excitement and frustration. The game plays as one long level, but there are checkpoints along the way, although you don't know where they are until you die and respawn. Some of these sections would involve obtuse puzzle solving while at the same time having to fight about a dozen guards in close combat. I remember some of these sections taking me thirty minutes or more. It is hard for me to feel good about myself when I'm looking at the same three or four screens over and over again. I got tired of the shooting parts very quickly because almost all of the targets are the same guard over and over again so the strategy never really changes. You have to make a shield, blow away their shield, and then shoot them. The only difficulty comes in the speed and timing. I got annoyed when I would complete some puzzle that took fifteen minutes and then get blown away by that guard again because I was a little bit too slow. I enjoyed the non shooting puzzles much better. I liked the part where I was rolling through tunnels and the swimming sections. Yes, this game had a swimming section that I actually enjoyed. The threat of drowning makes for some tense moments that give the game a much needed change in momentum. I will say that I enjoyed when I would finally figure out what I was doing and a whole section would come together, but this feeling was somewhat ruined by the knowledge that it might still take me a dozen attempts to get through a section without getting killed. Sadly, the bad seemed to outweigh the good in this one. I really can't say I had that much fun playing it, and the brief ending just left me feeling empty inside. 

(These lasers don't kill you because of reasons)

As you can probably tell I'm not too keen on this game. I expected that due to its awkward gameplay it would have a somewhat mixed reception. However, it seems to have almost universal acclaim. It was well received when it came out, and people still have a high opinion of it now. My question is why? It seems to have every element that people don't like in other games. The gameplay is unfair and based mostly on trial and error. The controls are stiff and awkward. Why are A and X both run and shoot? Couldn't they pick one function for each button? All that does is lead to mistakenly shooting or running when you don't mean to. The graphics are nice, but they lead to more problems than anything else. I hate how sometimes gunshots are just background scenery and sometimes they are deadly. The puzzles are often headscratchers which are nearly impossible to solve without cheating. The ending is worse than an old static  "The End" screen in an NES game. Any one of these problems would cause another game to get bad reviews, yet Out of This World has all of them. Why do people love it so much? 

So if you both read my blog and enjoy this game, please let me know. What is it that makes you enjoy this one? It's a puzzle I have been trying to solve for the last 25 years. It is more difficult for me to understand than any of the puzzles in the game itself. What is it about this game that impresses people? Your insights would be appreciated, because I am totally lost.