Atari Jaguar #2: White Men Can't Jump

(As far as I know, only this and NBA Jam TE used the multi-tap)

Because I really love you guys I played through White Men Can't Jump. This game gives off infamy like plutonium gives off radiation, and they are about equally welcome in American living rooms. This is a game that managed to take a fun activity like basketball and ruin it. Even the worst basketball game usually has the essence of fun in it. How can you ruin basketball? This is one of the many questions  that game players back in 1995 had about this oddity. They also had to ask themselves why the game had nothing to do with the movie. It has none of the characters or story other than the basic premise of street ball. Why even pay for a license if you're not going to use it? Of course it shouldn't be that surprising for Atari in 1995. By this point they had gone completely off the rails They had a handful of good games sandwiched between some of the most bizarre and ill-advised games in history. Unsurprisingly it would be their last full year making console games. So what about the game itself? 

(I will admit The Street Sharks do seem kind of cool)

 You can tell right away that it is a game made by a bunch of people who didn't quite understand how a game is supposed to work. They put very little thought into how the mechanics of basketball work or how it is supposed to translate to video game form. The game was developed by High Voltage Software who are amazingly still around today. According to Wikipedia this was their very first game, and they would actually be one of Jaguar's go-to developers in its waning days. They would end their relationship with Atari by developing Fight For Life which is an equally infamous, and actually much worse, game than WMCJ. I will write about that one if I can ever stomach playing through it. Trust me, that game is brutal. With WMCJ I get the feeling that it could've been at least a decent game if they had focused on the right parts.

(The first thing you see when the game starts)

Right away you can tell something is wrong by the way the games start. The game promises fast basketball action, but the fastest moving part is the menu screen. I found it tough to pick the team I wanted because they scrolled through too quickly. This is only the beginning of the trouble. A typical basketball game gives you a closeup with two players jumping for the ball. In this game we get a faraway view with a bunch of text on the screen obscuring your view. The game is already in progress as the camera slowly starts to scroll in. You have probably already been punched and stripped of the ball about three times before you even realize what's going on. All the zany 90s lingo appearing on the screen is what the game is most remembered for. Thankfully there is an option to turn it off, so I am not going to linger on it too much. It seems like most of the onscreen messages refer to the two computer players who are constantly punching each other while they don't have the ball. Once again it's an example of the developers focusing on the wrong thing. Shouldn't they have instead focused on making you able to see what is going on when the game begins instead of trivial messages that don't even refer to what's going on? That's what I would've done anyway.

(I would love to know more about these two. I'm assuming they worked on the game)

Because I like to spend my days off playing through twenty year old train wrecks I went through tournament mode on a snow day a while back. The way it works is that you borrow money from a couple of shifty loan sharks and save up enough to play in the championship. The loan sharks appear as a couple of real actors although it is only for two frames repeated over and over again. The voices and real people would've been impressive if this game hadn't come out around the same time Playstation did. Jaguar never could get the timing right. Anyway, you get to pick different games depending on difficulty and play until you have $5,000. When you have enough you get to play in the tournament which is actually only one game. It's kind of a letdown to only have one game in a tournament, but by this time I was ready to stop playing and was a little relieved. This doesn't usually bode well for a game review.

Probably the saddest part about this game is that once you strip away all the goofy window dressing than it's just a bland basketball game. After playing a couple of games I quit even noticing the text on the screen. The in game voices aren't much help so that aspect doesn't stick on my brain either. The teams are silly enough, but once you're playing they become just regular players albeit with different skills. I like to go with the good three point shooters personally. I think I played it for an hour or two and ended up beating it in one day. The controls are decent enough and I don't remember anything egregious about the shot detection although other reviewers say otherwise so maybe I am wrong. It just sort've becomes boring basketball after a little while. 

(I love how all you can see are the words "White Men." That's a good hint as to how bland this game really is)

It all serves as another reminder of just why the Jaguar was such a failure. Twenty years later and people are still talking about the onscreen commentary and lack of connection to the movie instead of the actual gameplay. This is because the bad parts about this game are the only memorable parts. If it just had some generic name like Jaguar Street Ball it would have just faded into the Jaguar library like any other sports game. Instead it is an in-your-face assault of mid-90s ridiculousness. The developers knew they had a boring game and decided to hide it under as much stupid as they could. That's why this game is so infamous today. It stands for a time that Atari had quit making games and starting making jokes. It's probably barely in the bottom 10 worst games for the system, but it lives on as a reminder of just how far a great company can fall before it becomes an embarrassment to an entire industry. Little did they know that after the E.T. debacle of 1983 Atari was just getting started. Nintendo had the family fun, Sega had the attitude, and Atari had the disaster.

 

Playstation #2: Mega Man X4

 

If you are reading this blog than you have probably been playing Mega Man games for most of your life. The series has been part of the fabric of gamer's childhoods since the first game debuted in 1986. I still remember seeing a picture of that lantern fish from MM2 in the old Sears Catalogue and dying to play the game. It's one of the ten games that had the most impact on me as a kid. Mega Man is still fairly popular these days, and it seems that they've always been able to keep updating it enough so that kids still connect with the character. It's one of those game series that seems proud of the fact that kids play the games as well as adults. That's why I find Mega Man X4 so interesting. This is one of the darkest platform games I have ever played, but somehow it still feels like a regular Mega Man game. They didn't go 90s extreme or give the characters gritty makeovers. Instead they found the darkness hiding just under the surface.

(How could it be so serious? It's got this goofy looking guy)

On the surface everything seems normal. It's the first X game to come out on Playstation, so of course it is better looking than the earlier games. Actually, it's one of the best looking PS1 games out there. The developers wisely stuck with the 2D perspective. so instead of a bunch of ugly polygons we get stylish anime cutscenes. They are still a pleasure to look at even after all these years. The voice acting is bad in the typical late 90s fashion. All the bad guys sound bored and tired while the good guys are way too energetic at all times. It would be a while before voice acting found its goldilocks zone.

On the surface everything seems normal. It's the first X game to come out on Playstation, so of course it is better looking than the earlier games. Actually, it's one of the best looking PS1 games out there. The developers wisely stuck with the 2D perspective. so instead of a bunch of ugly polygons we get stylish anime cutscenes. They are still a pleasure to look at even after all these years. The voice acting is bad in the typical late 90s fashion. All the bad guys sound bored and tired while the good guys are way too energetic at all times. It would be a while before voice acting found its goldilocks zone. 

(No platform game is complete without a snow level)

I also greatly enjoyed that level design in this one. I have played through the original Mega Man X and always thought that the levels were uninspired. I feel bad because everyone loves that game so much. In this game every level is something different. There is a timed evil computer level and a high-speed shooter to go along with more classic environments like jungles and snow. The set-up is normal for the series. You fight eight robot bosses, have a couple of interludes, and the move on to the endgame. It is very fun, but very typical. It could be a cozy sweater of a game if not for the dark storyline.

(I love the stairs even though it had been done before)

In this one everyone is sad and confused. Sigma, the series' main antagonist, is able to get different robot factions fighting against each other while X and Zero try their best to figure out what's going on. The conclusion is that everything is a mess and they will probably have to turn evil at some point. This time around many of the bosses are old friends of the heroes and are either misguided or believing that they are doing the right thing. This makes killing them carry more gravity than it usually does. In most of the games the robot bosses are simply evil and don't have any other motivations. This game uses the fog of war to make everyone more sympathetic. Friends will betray friends with only the big boss Sigma seeming to actually be evil. It all leads up to a couple of downer endings for X and Zero. Expect more fear and disillusionment than celebrating. It really took me by surprise.

I am not overly familiar with the X series in general, but I know that this one gave me an experience that I wasn't really prepared for. It was cartoonish game safe for kids which also brought up big philosophical questions. It's an anti-war game that also features robots on motorcycles. It is a formulaic game that also poses a great amount of challenge. The levels have to be learned, and some of the bosses are brutal. X and Zero are both playable characters, and neither one of them make it very easy. I probably fought the final boss 30 or 40 times total. The victory left me feeling satisfied, but the questions posed afterword made me wonder if all this fighting meant anything. I don't often feel so confused at the end of a game, and this is why it's one of the great ones on Playstation. It's also still affordable. Some of the earlier X games go for hundreds of dollars. This one can usually be tracked down for less than 30. It is a winner no matter how you look at it.

Sega CD #2: Lunar: The Silver Star

It took me a long time to track down the original Lunar. First I had to get a Sega CD which isn't the easiest thing to do in the 21st century. Then I waited around until I found an affordable copy of it. Luckily I was able to pick one up right here in Lansing. Finally, in 2015 I was able to play a game that had intrigued me for so many years. So why do I always go the long way around when finding games? It is hard to say. I do get more pleasure out of a game if I am playing it on the original system with the original controller. It also excites me finding games like this in an actual store. I always keep my lists, usually mental ones, as I go to used game stores. Finding games like Lunar pleases me to no end. It is probably something I won't be able to do forever. There keep being new systems to replace the old ones so space is limited. How much longer are they going to keep selling Sega CD games? So I was happy to get a copy of Lunar on Sega CD although there are probably easier ways to find it. In the end though it would turn out to be a bit problematic. I will get back to that.

If you know anything about Sega CD than you probably know it has Sonic CD, a bunch of goofy FMV games starring dead people, and a few expensive high quality RPGs. Lunar is  one of the most well known of the latter category as it has been remade several times over the years. I can understand why it has such a strong legacy. It is one of the earlier RPGs that relies more on story than on gameplay. It has a cast of interesting characters who interact with each other and give the game much more definition. Also, it is very funny.

(Nash is such a cad)

The humor is what this game is most remembered for, but it still took me a little by surprise. Just about everyone has something funny to say even as the story gets more and more serious. Sometimes it made me laugh out loud. There were so many references to early 90s pop culture that it does run the risk of being dated. Was Wayne's World really that much of a cultural phenomenon? They sure reference it enough. I am assuming the funny parts came from the translators. They brag about their "improvements" in the poorly written instruction manual going so far as to show off their less romantic lyrics to the theme song. On more recent ports have they left the funny dialogue the same? Would modern gamers even get them? It's a translation that is certainly a product of its time.

(A typical battle scene. You do fight a bunch of shrubs in this game)

The gameplay has its ups and downs. The leveling is well balanced which is always a major plus. I never felt too strong nor too far away from gaining another level. It moves at a fairly quick pace for a game with so much dialogue, and the world is quite large. It can be a bit awkward at times though. The battles are a bit odd in that you can move around the battlefield, but this doesn't seem to help things very much. It's mostly going to be your strong fighters attacking and everyone else casting spells from far away until the monster gets too close. I also wish the instructions had done a better job explaining what the items do. Most of them have to be equipped to be used in battle and with such little inventory space I never knew what to do with anything. I guess I should've just used the internet, but that still feels like cheating to me even if it's just for looking up inventory items.  I do have to keep in mind that this game is from 1992 and there weren't that many well built console RPGs out there. The good far outweighs the bad in this one.

(Another timeless reference)

Because I was playing this on such old technology I almost got stuck at the end. I kept getting into the final battle only to have the game freeze on me. This is one of those games where you can save just about anywhere, so it didn't take me too long to get back to the end again, but it sure made me nervous. No matter what I did the game kept freezing. I could always tell in the middle of a battle because the sound would suddenly cut out. I was able to finish the final battle, but not see the ending. Finally I broke down and watched it on Youtube. I would say this still counts because I finished all the playable parts. Sometimes I am glad I live in the 21st Century. I was able to finish the game even though it kept freezing. I am still glad about all those hours spent on the Sega CD even with the error at the end. It's all about the experience! So that's my experience with Lunar. I am still thrilled that I finally got to play this game. It makes me a little sad though because when am I going to be able to write about Sega CD again. How hard is Ecco the Dolphin?

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.