September 27, 2009
Oh, I’m not done with these TAS capsule reviews yet. See part 1 for a broader explanation.
Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six (NES) makes me long for Bionic Commando. It also makes me research who the Sinister Six are so I can write accurate descriptions for MobyGames (these licensed games often make me to that). Random notes: killer targeted electricity is a threat in the first level; stage 3 has an area without light, not sure how I would negotiate it if I had to actually play; it might be possible to turn on the light but the speedrunner didn’t have a need.
It also occurs to me that having yourself a gang of 6 really lends itself well to a platformer video game.
No matter how horrifying the NES Ghosts ‘N Goblins title was, Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts for SNES is worse in just about every way. The game (at least the speedun version) opens with the opening boss urinating fireballs on you.
Then there is the giant sperm wafting through the air in a later level. And what’s with the many swinging guillotines on the ship level? Who thought that would be a neat idea?
Milon’s Secret Castle (NES) was a bit painful to watch, only because I remember how arduous it was to play and finish, which I did, fair and square, back in 1991, when it was on loan from a friend. Before that, however, I had rented it one weekend and was immediately stuck on the first floor of the castle, just as most players find themselves. For those not in the know on this game, it is impossible to make any progress without knowing how to do a certain block shooting and moving trick that is completely non-obvious. I can attest to the non-obviousness of this since my highly trained, Nintendo nerd eyes spent an entire weekend trying to figure out how to make any progress whatsoever.
Oh, the things I used to put up with. What was I thinking?
As for Demon Sword (NES), it’s fun to watch the TAS but I’m glad I never bothered to play it. Though I found it humorous that this miniboss apparently shops at Target:
The musical score seems heavily influenced by Ninja Gaiden. Also, who builds graveyards on large, steep mountains?
I already knew that Trojan (NES) was a short game. After I mastered it (in a single, short rental period), I figured I could probably play it from start to finish in about 10 minutes. The TAS managed to do it in a little more than 6 minutes.
Ghosts ‘N Goblins for the NES is every bit as insane as I recall. ‘Nuff said.
Nightshade (NES) always looked fascinating, and I even own a copy that I picked up cheap. But I never got a chance to play it. The TAS is utterly bewildering. Something about a private detective/wannabe superhero (in a town where the real superhero has just been knocked off) is trying to stop an ancient Egyptian-themed villain. Something like that.
Tom & Jerry: The Ultimate Game of Cat and Mouse! (NES) makes me wonder why Tom is so obsessed with one measly mouse– Jerry is honestly the least of the house’s pest problems (roaches, ants, spiders and even some ghost insects). My favorite part was the NES in-game. How very meta.
Cobra Triangle (NES) from Rare makes me wonder how much code was reused from R.C. Pro-Am. The game exhibits a weird sense of humor on the stage with guarding swimmers.
Enemy boats and even UFOs are dragging swimmers out of the safe zone and you have to drag them back.
And then I come to Hydlide (NES). I have unresolved issues regarding this game which I easily place in my bottom 5 list of all NES games. I think it may have been a little cathartic to view this TAS as I got to relive my most painful gaming experience in all of about 10 minutes. Everything about this game is the epitome of awful and it must be preserved in MobyGames for all time. I actually rented it twice and eventually completed it. And I remember a screen with a background identical to this one, on which I ground out many an experience level, giving me perhaps the worst headache of my entire life:
This is about the time when I snapped and decided I didn’t want to do this TAS screenshot recon any longer.
See Also:
At MobyGames:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under NES Games, SNES Games | Comments (2)
September 26, 2009
Point whoring has a glorious and storied tradition among MobyGames contributors. To that end, I sometimes like to go over to TASVideos.org and fire up an emulator to watch a tool-assisted speedrun while gathering plenty of emulator screenshots. This is low effort and high-yield in MobyGames contribution points.
However, nothing disabuses me of my nostalgia for old S/NES games like watching these speedruns. “Did I just watch the exact same level being played 13 times in a row, but with different colored backgrounds each time? Would I have patiently and tenaciously played through this game 20 years ago?” Regrettably, the answers to both of the foregoing questions is a slightly ashamed “yes”.
There are too many of these games to warrant individual posts. Further, I obviously didn’t get a good enough feel for the games to be able to write authoritatively about any of them. Instead, I thought I would do brief capsule reviews and highlight 1 or 2 things that caught my eye about each.
The Mask (SNES game based on the 1994 movie) faces off with a Mask’d Dorian in the finale of his eponymous game. That has to be the most grotesque deviation from the storyline– how can they both be wearing the Mask at the same time?
Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel has a Wolverine knock-off for a boss:
To be fair, I think it’s supposed to be an actual, anthropomorphized wolverine rather than a human with claws.
In Daffy Duck: The Marvin Missions (SNES), the Lava Lakes “Pleasure Resort” sounds a bit out of place for this type of game:
Bart’s Nightmare (SNES) violates Simpsons canon by merely having Bart working hard on homework; everything else that doesn’t make sense about the game is explained away by it all being in Bart’s dream. This is the most dull game to watch.
I didn’t recognize Burns as the boss in this level until I analyzed the screenshots later:
Ghoul School (NES) looks like a terribly annoying game. I should probably read up on the storyline if it’s available online, but it seems like the monsters are doing fine and minding their own business, improving themselves, when this mohawked punk shows up at their school and starts causing trouble. Or it could be that the monsters conquered.
The Goonies (NES) is absurdly short (the TAS is done in about 2.5 minutes). It might make more sense if I ever saw the movie, but then again, probably not.
Watching the TAS for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (NES), I’m hard-pressed to recall the many Pizza Hut plugs in the original arcade game, but perhaps I wasn’t so in tune with the product placement issue back then. Maybe I noticed but laughed at how lame it looked… just like now:
Final Fight 3 (SNES) includes a section where the “heroes” invade someone’s boat and beat up the captain (who is trained to hold his own, mind you). Then again, the protagonists of these games have never been shy about trespassing on private property in the pursuit of justice.
In Robocop 3 (NES), our mechanized hero has a final face-off with ninjas that auto-destruct once you key in a code while a knowledge worker toils in the background:
The game features a new low in level design when it makes you backtrack over one level (level 4 is the same as level 3 with Robocop walking in the other direction).
Spelunker (NES) — oh, how I hated this game as a child. Thanks to the miracle of TAS, I can finally see what I missed by not being able to get more than about 10 vritual meters from the starting point in this game. Not much, apparently, and the game is still as obnoxious as I remember, and I gave that game an honest try (again, not much else to play, and I had this on loan from a friend).
Did you know there was a Transformers NES game back in the day? Transformers: Convoy no Nazo, as you might have guessed from the title, was a Japanese game (though there was also a Commodore 64 strategy-type game I remember reading about). After witnessing the TAS for Convoy no Nazo, I feel glad I never had a Transformers game to louse up my Transformers-obsessed childhood.
The hero of this game is Ultra Magnus. Bosses include (I think) Unicron (at least, there’s a round thing in the back of the stage) and also a giant Decepticon symbol. Megatron isn’t even the final boss (it’s the giant Decepticon T-rex Trypticon). It’s interesting to learn that video game adaptations in Japan are every bit as half-assed as their American counterparts.
To their credit, they got the “More than meets the eye” trademark musical lick reasonably duplicated with the NES’s limited sound generation capability.
More TAS capsules to come.
See Also:
At MobyGames:
Posted by Multimedia Mike under NES Games, SNES Games | Comments (0)
