X-Box 360 #1: Sneak King

Not too long ago I was sick with the flu. I wasn't able to do much besides lay on the couch and complain to my equally sick wife about how awful I felt. During this time I had a really weird recurring dream. In this dream I was a guy dressed in a king costume delivering food to skinny construction workers dreaming of cheeseburgers. Their dead faces still haunt me but luckily it was just a dream. Wait, it's a real game you say? Are you sure, because that would be a really weird concept for a game. I'd better dust off the ol' 360 and make sure you're not just messing with me.

Sure enough Sneak King is a real game, and it is actually a fairly fun one if you can get past the pure commercialism of it. Back in 2006 Burger King released three games that you could buy with value meals. One is a racing game, one is "multi-genre action" and this one, the best of the bunch, is a stealth game. The whole concept is likely to turn people off, but for me it feels like a throwback to a simpler time in video game history when games were thought of as toys and marketed to kids. There wasn't the seriousness and over the top production value that there is today. Of course I have to remind myself that this game is now almost a decade old. This is an old game that makes me think of when I used to play even older games. How old am I? I probably need that cheeseburger now.

In this game you wander around delivering food to hungry skinny people. They are all skinny and beautiful. The trick is that you have to sneak up on them. If they see you they are suddenly not hungry anymore and you hang your head in shame. Also if you don't deliver the food in time they will pass out from shear hunger. Has this ever happened to you? And if so, did you get right back up after it happened and start chopping down trees again? It is an important question. The challenges are scattered throughout the levels, and they get harder as they go. I was actually a bit surprised by how difficult this game could get. It is almost as if the developers actually cared about making a decent game. The game is split up into five large levels. Sadly they decided to go with realism in level design so we don't get to deliver any food in space. Instead we get places like a street during the day and another street at night. Each level has 20 challenges, so this makes for a total of 100. That's not too bad for a game that came packaged with a whopper.

So is this game actually worth playing? I think it is, but I am really awful at stealth games. It was nice to have one that was actually in my skill level. I think it was interesting to take such a lighthearted approach to the genre. Are there any other stealth games that go for whimsey over throat slitting? I know that it is basically a commercial for burgers, but at least they don't try to hide it. They mostly tell it like it is. There are some hungry people and you give them some food. It's not like the Whoppers give you super powers. You don't eat chicken fries and suddenly turn into Super King. It is a game that plays pretty well and knows what it is. That's worth a playthrough in my book. I just hope it turns our all my hazy memories are actual gameplay and not fever dreams. Let me know if it was actually all in my head.

Playstation #1: Final Fantasy Tactics

There is something about my playthrough of Final Fantasy Tactics that confuses me. There are actually a few things that confuse me about this game, but I will probably not dwell on those too much. The thing that I don't understand is how was I able to finish this game so fast? It seems like most people finish this game in the 40-50 hour range, but I got through it in a brisk 33 hours. I am not complaining or bragging about this. It just makes me wonder if I missed something. Was there something in the mechanics that I skipped over? I will say that I got very lucky with some of the bosses. The final boss I defeated on my first try with the last possible hit from a confused character who luckily attacked the right person. Still I did my share of leveling. It just confuses me a bit. Perhaps I was just hoping it would be longer.

The game is a tactical RPG in the purest form. The towns and overworld are stripped down in favor of fights and more fights. There are shops and taverns, but you don't get to move you character around in them. This always annoyed me a little. Every shopkeeper looks the same, and often they have the same equipment for sale as other nearby shopkeepers. Seems like they could've just let you push a button to go shopping if they didn't want you to explore the towns. The fights are slow paced but engaging. I loved the battles where I had to take out the whole enemy team, especially that moment where the tide turned and I finally felt like I was winning. I did hate how easy it was to put my character in the wrong spot and not be able to attack. So many times I would place my character in what looked like the right spot only to find out that I was one space away from attacking. By then it was too late to move my character back. I don't think this ever caused me to lose a fight though, and for the most part I had a great time battling my way across Ivalice.

This game also brings up some interesting observations about gaming spinoffs. I think at the time there were four main series Final Fantasy games released in America. We also had four games on Game Boy that had Final Fantasy in their titles. These games, however, were all parts of other series in Japan. The only spinoff that was made as a Final Fantasy game was Mystic Quest which was a simplified game made specifically for the US market. Tactics was the game where Square truly started to dip their feet in the franchise water and make different types of games using the FF title. There are many notable differences in tone between this game and the games in the main series. First of all it is very bloody. Just about every character that doesn't join your party ends up getting violently stabbed in the stomach with their blood splattering everywhere. Then the stabbed people sometimes get in one last stab before they die causing even more blood to splatter. It is a bit jarring for a series that never had much blood before. This game also seems more realistic than what the series is known for. The more sci-fi and supernatural elements are kept to a minimum, and the story mostly deals with nobles and priests having trouble knowing who to trust during a war. This is about as realistic as a Final Fantasy game gets, but it does still have magical stones that turn people into monsters. This could be seen as a metaphor about how power corrupts. I'm sorry, sometimes my English degree pops out when I don't mean for it to.

So was this game meant as a break in the regular series to give Square developers a chance to make a different kind of game, or a game that was slapped with a familiar title so that people would buy it? This is a difficult question to answer. It does have enough references to traditional Final Fantasy games to make it seem like a deliberate creative choice. There are chocobos and a Cid. You do also have an encounter with a certain flower girl which references one of the most famous scenes from FF7. I suppose I shouldn't worry about it with a game as fun as this one is. Even after one of the more lengthy and frustrating battles I felt like I wanted to keep going. One of my main themes on this blog is to not worry about series so much and just enjoy the games. Of course, I'm probably the only one thinking about this anyway. This is a great game that deserves to have the name Final Fantasy title attached to it. I'm glad I finally got around to playing through it after all these years.

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.

List of the moment: Early games from famous developers

I thought that this time around I would look at some of the early games made by famous developers. This is not a list of debut releases but instead a look at some interesting early works. It is interesting to see how some of these companies have changed over the years. Wait till you see what Bethesda used to do! Anyway, here is today's list.

Activision - Dragster

When Activision made and released Dragster it changed the world of video gaming forever. Before they started making their own games there was no such thing as a third party developer. Every game that came out for Atari the first three years of the system's existance was published by Atari. Then some disgruntled employees left to start their own company where they could credit the game designers and make games for all the different systems. This is the reason that David Crane is so famous even though he only made about five good games. Atari actually sought legal action against Activision at first, but by then the floodgates had been opened and nobody could stop the sudden stream of games and systems which still continues to this day. Dragster is a game where you try to go real fast without blowing up your engine. If you are good it will take about six seconds to play. Dragster may be simple, but it is one of the biggest game changers in video game history.

Bethesda - Home Alone and Where's Waldo?

Yes, that Bethesda. The one that makes the Elder Scrolls and Fallout Games. The company that has been responsible for taking more hours of my life than any other over the last few years used to make really awful NES games. These games were even published by THQ, which is the worst lisenced publisher of NES games. What's most notable about these two games is how shallow they are. In Home Alone you simply escape from the Wet Bandits in your house for 20 minutes and are treated to a one screen ending. In Where's Waldo you, well, find Waldo. On the easy setting you can basically close your eyes and pick a spot and have a fairly high success rate. How they went from making games like this to making some of the most immersive and complex games in history is beyond me. In fact just three years after these train wrecks they released the original Elder Scrolls: Arena. It seems that it didn't take them very long to start making some of the greatest games of all time. It's a very interesting story.

Gamefreak: Mendel Palace

     Game Freak is the Sub Pop of gaming. You can look that one up if that reference is too old now. What I mean by that is they started out as an underground 'zine and later took over the world. That might be a slight exaggeration, but you have to admit that their major creation, Pokemon, is just about everywhere. Here it is almost 15 years after the first game in the series came out and those characters are still on lunchboxes and child sized hats. With their sudden success it feels like the story of Gamefreak as a developer begins with Pokemon, but they spent a few years making odd puzzle games before they started their world domination. Mendel Palace is probably the most interesting of these early games. It has a very unique style of play which involves flipping over tiles and defeating enemies with their shockwaves. It is both fast-paced and intuitive. Also, unlike other early Gamefreak titles like Yoshi, this one is not related  to any other game or franchise. It's interestesting that the developer on this list that is most closely associated with one specific franchise has an oddball title like this one laying around. You should check it out sometime.

Konami - Frogger

Until I started compiling this list I didn't even know that Konami made the original Frogger. Back before they were known for Metal Gear, Contra, and Castlevania they made quite a few classic arcade games. Most of them, such as Pooyan and Gyruss, are fondly remembered but seldom played today. I think it's interesting that by far the most famous of the old Konami game is hardly even associated with the company anymore. It might have something to do with the amount of different companies that have released it over the years. Back in the day it was released by Sega, Sierra, Parker Bros, Arcadia, and Hasbro to name a few. It seems that for whatever reason Konami wanted to distance themselves from the game fairly quickly. They didn't even work on Frogger II which only came out a couple years after the first one. I am not sure why this game quit being associated with Konami so quickly, but it is certainly an important moment in their rich legacy.

Rare: Slalom

It's hard to think about the NES without thinking about Rare. They made more great games for the system than just about anybody. However, their first shot out of the gate was nothing special. The first game developed by Rare as we know them today was Slalom, a simple skiing game. It was a fairly interesting skiing game though. It moved very fast for a game at the time, and it had several different types of gameplay. It wasn't simply going downhill the same way everytime. I guess you can call this a sign of what was to come for Rare. They never wanted to make the same game that everyone else was making. They took a genre which had very little critical success up to that point and tried to give it new life. Sadly this game got a little buried in all the high quality early NES titles. It still ranks a bit near the bottom of the NES black box games, but it's better than Urban Champion.

Within a year of Slalom Rare released RC Pro-Am and Wizzards and Warriors. These are two of the watershed games for the NES. They continued to make genre defying games like Snake Rattle n Roll and Cobra Triangle while putting out the occasional mainstream game like Battletoads, but they first got their feet wet with Slalom. I suppose the world needed some decent skiing games. I'm not completely sure if Slalom was it, but it does show signs of actual effort. That's more than I can say for some of the entries on this list.

Sega: Sub Scan

I am not sure why I am so dead set on showing off the worst of a developer's early titles, but if you want to see a boring game by a great developer than Sub Scan is the one. It is a very simple shooter where you are a ship at the top of the water dropping depth charges onto submarines. After you do this for a while you stop. The charges fall very slowly and the only challenge is timing your shots. The original arcade version had submarines shooting back at you, but the more common Atari 2600 version just has them quietly floating by. Of course, Sega had some great old arcade games, and at this point they were only a couple years away from more advanced games like Space Harrier and Hang-On so this one was more of an early misfire than an all out disaster. Luckily nothing bad would ever happen to Sega again.

Treasure - Gunstar Heroes

As this list shows, sometimes a developer has to make a few games before they know what they are doing. With Treasure, however, their first game was effing Gunstar Heroes. It's one of the most intense and downright fun shooters of all times. It is a true legend that excites classic gaming enthusiasts to this day. When the Contra series was trying to get back on track in the early 2000s they did so by basically ripping off Gunstar Heroes. With a game this great you might think that Treasure would burn out quickly, but they kept making great games for years especially on the old Sega consoles. Hopefully some day I will go more in depth about this one, but until then let this one serve as inspiration to all you would be game designers out there. Don't be afraid to try. The game you make might just turn out to be Gunstar Heroes.

Nintendo 64 #2: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

If you are a gaming enthusiast like me than games will make you feel all kinds of emotions. A game can make you happy, sad, or often in my case hopelessly frustrated. However, games rarely ever get you to ponder life's big questions. They are usually a pleasant diversion. Whenever I play Majora's Mask, however, I can not help but ponder the meaning of existence. If you are starting to play this one get ready for some depressing and philosophical gaming that has Link living the same three days over and over again, which also happen to be the last three days before the moon crashes into the planet and kills everybody.

This is a really dark topic for any game, let alone a Zelda game. Despite how seriously people take the series, before this game it was fairly lighthearted. They always had bright colors and goofy characters and worlds where you spent time fighting off Gannon or waking up giant psychedelic fish. The kingdoms Link were entrusted to save were usually heavy on spiders and low on people. The stakes never seemed that high. I mean, what would Gannon get really if he took over Hyrule, a bunch of old guys living under trees?

Majora's Mask finally gives you a world that actually feels like it needs saved. There are interesting people to meet everywhere in this one who actually seem to be living full lives. It is very interesting that their stories and emotions progress over the three days. As the moon gets closer and closer they get ready for oblivion in different ways. Some of them try to hide from it while others pretend that it's not even happening. The theme of loss is so strong in this game the the five major areas are all based on the five stages of grief. In addition to that Link's main source of power is the faces of recently dead people. When he wears these masks everyone thinks he is the deceased person. That is incredibly dark, especially for a franchise that used to be a Saturday morning cartoon! I could never imagine this in a Duck Tales video game.

I haven't touched on the gameplay yet, but of course if you've played any Zelda games before you know what you are going to get. There is one thing that will probably annoy everybody but me. This game only has four dungeons. It is much more about puzzle solving and story. The only items you get in the dungeons in this one are arrow upgrades. This is a little disappointing, but at least they are all things that you will still use after moving on farther in the game. This game also marks the first appearance of Tingle. In case you forgot, he is that character that everyone hates even though he's never in the games very long and is actually useful. Why do people hate him so much? Is it because his parody of faries makes people wonder if Link is actually cool? I suspect so.

This game was extremely polarizing back when it came out and remains so today. Everyone was still gushing about Ocarina of Time and were hoping for something along those same lines. They weren't expecting all that time skipping and backtracking. Hopefully enough time has passed so that people will just see it for what it is and not what it isn't. Sadly people rarely think like this and get way too wrapped up in the franchise. Don't be a jerk. Appreciate creative games!