Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge

Posted on January 13, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Perhaps I’m a slow learner, maybe I enjoy pain, or it could be that I’m simply quick to both forgive and forget. I’ve already disregarded the not entirely pleasant experience of playing one fighting game on the Sega Saturn. No reason that I should allow that to stop me from trying more of the same genre on the same platform. Plus, there’s that ever-present goal of getting all of this data — good or bad — into MobyGames. With that, let’s delve into Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge.

This game is one in a franchise of Darkstalkers titles from Capcom. Actually, one of the arcade versions of this series, available circa 1995, remains my second favorite fighting game of all time (second only to the original Fatal Fury, but only on the Neo-Geo; accept no cheap SNES substitutes). I always enjoyed the premise of this game– a bunch of mythological creatures and monsters battling it out. This allows for legendary match-ups such as Dracula vs. Frankenstein:

Darkstalkers' Revenge: Demitri vs. Victor

Of course, that’s not actually Dracula or Frankenstein. It’s the Capcom characters, Demitri and Victor. (And of course, purists know that the monster in the Frankenstein tale is not named Frankenstein, rather he was named Dr. Frankenstein’s monster; ironically, the good doctor’s first name was Victor; I first learned that in 10th grade world history class of all places). I found myself wondering this evening why Capcom chose to invent one-off properties instead of using the real deals. I realized that having their own set of slightly unique characters is eminently more copyrightable than stock folklore characters already in the public domain. Further, they don’t have to contend with horror genre fanboys complaining about glaring incongruencies when contrasted with popular legend, such as the fact that the vampire shown above looks less like a sophisticated count and more like a rather sinister Superman with a dinner napkin tucked into his shirt for the sloppy feast.

Whatever. I still find the Darkstalkers characters very interesting. Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia, it’s easy to research the characters and what the characters are supposed to be based on. Some are easy enough to guess, like the vampire, the werewolf, and the Frankenstein monster. But what about the skinny zombie whose body produces any number of sharp edges and also bears a Union Jack? Or the ghostly samurai warrior? (As an aside, I have never understood why some characters in these fighting games get weapons and others don’t; then again, they all seem to be able to fire magical projectiles so maybe it all evens out.)

I had not seen this character, Donovan, in the arcade incarnation I once frequently patronized. This guy has a little girl that follows him around on the sidelines. It’s all very weird. More notably, if you mash enough buttons, you can invariably summon this attack:

Darkstalkers' Revenge: Donovan vs. Victor

Just like the chandelier attack prominently featured in any number of castle movies, the preceding attack works best if the opponent is conveniently located underneath the foot.

I’m pleased to report that this is a great Saturn game. Despite the inherent A/V lag I experience due to my capture setup, the controls are very responsive (thus further evidencing that perhaps Criticom was just bad). My only gripe with this game is load times. I’m so glad I missed this the first time around since I was out of gaming during the original PlayStation/Saturn days.

Saturn Myst

Posted on January 11, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Okay, the mission is simple: MobyGames is missing screenshots for the Sega Saturn port of the in/famous seminal CD-ROM game Myst (and every other of the 9 ports besides Windows 3.1 and Atari Jaguar). So get in, get the Saturn screenshots, and get out. Nothing fancy; don’t try to understand anything about the island– I want this done by the books.

Myst seems to get a pretty bad rap these days. Hardcore adventure gamers blame it, at least partially, for the downfall of the adventure genre (I would refer those people to Old Man Murray’s article, “Death of Adventure Games”). Really, I don’t see how this game deserves any worse of a reputation than E.T. for the Atari 2600 does– both were quite reasonable games in their own times.

To be clear, I was never all that excited about this game, but I can see how others might enjoy it. I have heard it described as a pretty, clickable slide show and I think that about sums it up. The last time I played it was in the summer of 1995 when I borrowed the Windows 3.1 version from a friend. I didn’t have much idea what was going on then and it doesn’t make much more sense now. Though I do know someone who claimed he could finish the game in a minute and a half flat from start to finish. Somehow, I still don’t think I would find the speed run very compelling.

Playing this game reminds me of assorted physics and electronics labs that I had to use in the course of the undergraduate studies– it’s hard to find functional equipment. Every other screen in this game has a switch but almost all of them do nothing. And there’s never anyone around to help you out. And certain books in the library don’t offer assistance, like this one that’s on the fritz when you try to read it… or watch it or something:

I suppose it could be that no one truly enjoyed this game. Everyone was just so captivated by the well-rendered graphics and the occasional, primitive FMV — courtesy of the fresh, shiny CD-ROM technology — that they never realized that this was not a particularly fun game.

Still, I have to give it credit for being pretty and all. That has to count for something.

Clockwork Knight

Posted on January 3, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I’m working on a few other things right now so I wanted another easy game tonight. According to my master spreadsheet, Clockwork Knight still needs screenshots, and could use a much more thorough description to boot.

This game was published by Sega for the Sega Saturn in 1995. You may recall that late in 1994, a little-known company named Pixar burst onto the scene and revolutionized children’s movies forever with their movie Toy Story. Now, I’m not charging that Clockwork Knight is a brazen rip-off of Toy Story, but someone has some explaining to do. This game, like that movie, features a roomful of toys that come to life and have magical adventures when the kid leaves.

But let’s not dwell on the plagiaristic aspects. Instead, let’s dwell on the game’s lavish musical numbers (a hallmark of the game, apparently). The 3+ minute intro sequence sets up the conflict. It appears that there is a toy princess and a number of — as the game title indicates — clockwork knights competing for the fair, plastic lady’s affection. The princess is snatched away somehow and it’s up to one of the knights (probably the one they call Pepperouchou since his name is in the game’s subtitle) to rescue her from renegade toys. At least, I assume that’s what’s going on; I haven’t had the time or patience to sit through the whole thing yet. Fortunately, someone else has already posted the entire intro video on YouTube:

This game reminds me of the stories that Sega intended the Saturn to be the ultimate 2D gaming system but then some 3D capability was nailed on the side as an afterthought when Sega heard that Sony’s impending PlayStation would place more emphasis on 3D. As far as side-scrolling action games go, Clockwork Knight is absolutely supreme. It has everything such a game really needs — a jump and an attack button — and lots of pleasing eye candy. This is an incredibly detailed game that rewards the sharp-eyed gamer. Observe the following gameplay screenshot:

This is the first level, which takes place in Betsy’s room. Some random notes I took down, which may help you get a feel for the game.

Not only does Betsy really like her doll Chelsea, she even has a poster of Chelsea in the background.
To be fair about the plagiarism aspect, at least the theme of this game seems to be toy vs. toy instead of toy vs. humans (I think that was the thrust of certain Toy Story movies).
Your power meter is represented by a network of gears. There are 3 gears to start with and perhaps more gears are possible later.
Your knight wields a key sword (reminds me of the Capcom/Disney crossover game Kingdom Hearts which would come years later).
You use your key sword to open toy boxes around the room which function as warps.
The animation is fantastic.
This side scroller has a quasi-3D effect as you run past objects.
Enemies jump at you from the background. Heavy objects such as dollhouses fall down at you from the background.
There is a time limit, but unlike many time limit games, you can grab clock powerups to extend your deadline.
No special attacks, apparently; only sword swipe, crouch and swipe, jump and swipe, and an implicit kick when you approach an enemy that is already stunned.
Betsy exhibits some extraordinary ingenuity with the network of pulleys and platforms she has set up in her room by which the knight is able to turn her room into a standard side-scrolling jumping action arena.
The screenshot above depicts invincibility mode, so the game has that powerup. Check.
You can push stacks of blocks around.
Crayons in pits fill in as deadly spikes.

All in all, not a bad game. I think I would like to play this game a little more to get some deeper screenshots for the database.

Bonus! Here’s another musical number that I lifted from a Sega Saturn sampler CD. It depicts the toy characters of Clockwork Knight performing a spicy salsa number:

See Also:

Another try at Clockwork Knight

At MobyGames:

Clockwork Knight

Purest Pinball Sim: Pro Pinball

Posted on January 2, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Now that the Christmas-New Year holiday is officially over I decided to go with something easy this evening. According to my master spreadsheet, there is a Sega Saturn pinball game that has yet to make it’s way into the database: Pro Pinball by Empire Interactive. What game could be easier to process than a pinball game? Unfortunately, this is also the first Sega Saturn disc of this project to give me substantial trouble. Instead of booting, the Saturn just goes into its audio CD playback control console and offers to play any of the 25 red book audio tracks on the CD while thumping its stereo, 3D, rotating, ostensibly Gouraud-shaded volume power cubes. After enough console resets, the Saturn eventually agrees to play the disc and I fire up the video recording on my video capture card as I do not want to deal with this again.

Right away, the title screen informs me that this may merely be a new platform port of an existing game in the MobyGames database, Pro Pinball: The Web, already known to be available for DOS and Windows. Neither the Saturn plastic case copy nor the CD-ROM mention “The Web” but the title screen clearly does:

I’m not sure why the bottom of the title screen appears cut off. Perhaps a PAL game shoehorned into an NTSC format? The game’s boldest selling point is its endorsement by one Rick Stetta who I guess is the Kasparov of pinballing (Wikipedia knows something of his exploits). “The ultimate and most realistic computer pinball game I’ve ever played.”

It’s time to give it a whirl, especially since I went through so much trouble to get the game to boot in the first place. The main menu has an options screen with a sound test which also allows you to set the graphic sharpness (soft vs. sharp). I didn’t see a difference between the modes. Further, the main menu offers you a slideshow which shows up-close details of all aspects of the pinball table. Curious feature, but there it is.

The actual game is, well, a pinball game, pure and simple. Yes, the physics are all there and all very realistic. The control scheme is quite reasonable, with left on the gamepad affecting the 2 left-side flippers and the C button (the right-most button on the Saturn controller) triggering the right flipper. However, the response lag caused by piping the A/V through my ATI video card is killing me. Anyway, the ball is released, bounces around, hits things, the score mounts up, stuff flashes, there’s a dot-matrix screen where animations occur sometimes, and the game occasionally declares “Ball Frenzy!” where it shoots out lots of balls for you to bounce around simultaneously. The most interesting feature of this game that I have never seen before in a pinball sim is the ability to jolt the table, either forward by pressing up on the gamepad, or left or right by pressing the top left or right buttons on the controller.

Audio-wise, the game should stay entertaining with those 25 aformentioned red book CD audio tracks. And the right and left flippers actually come out of the correct speakers, though this was my first clue that something was amiss in the audio path between my Saturn and my headphones– the stereo was reversed.

So what’s my overall impression? Yeah, it’s a phenomenally accurate pinball simulation. But I have to tell you, I’m still highly partial to Epic MegaGames’ Epic Pinball. It occurred to me that this game might appeal to the pinball purist the way that the venerable Chessmaster series might appeal to the devotees of that timeless strategy game. Frankly, if I’m itching for a perfectly authentic pinball experience, I can always find some arcade or bar nearby with a machine. But I always appreciated the way that Epic Pinball brought some unusual twists (like the Enigma table) that you can’t get with a real pinball machine. Accurate computer simulations work best for things we can’t easily do in real life, like build cities or civilizations.

First Saturn Game: Criticom

Posted on December 31, 2006 by Multimedia Mike

I have quite a bit of free time during this week between Christmas and New Years Day and I am using it to get into the groove of playing and writing up one game per day. I think I have the Windows thing locked down but I also have a lot of Sega CD, Saturn, and Dreamcast games to work through. I can’t say I’m necessarily looking forward to the Saturn part of the exercise, for it means that I need to dust off my old Saturn console, hook it up to my ATI video capture card and fight with it until both audio and video come through into my computer, and then hope beyond hope that the old gaming unit still agrees to play the old, used, possibly battered and scratched Saturn CD-ROMs. And don’t even get me started on the screenshot workflow.

But somehow, I managed to get it all hooked up. So here’s the first Sega Saturn game of the Gaming Pathology experiment– Criticom. The game title seemed somewhat familiar even though I don’t remember ever playing it. When I started watching the low-grade, 1995-era FMV, I realized that I had already watched all of the FMV files from this game thanks to my efforts to reverse engineer the dominant Saturn FMV format. So the entire game is already spoiled for me. Everything except for the actual gameplay, that is.

Criticom is a one-on-one fighting game with a sci-fi/fantasy backstory. Basically, there is some crystal artifact (I think this might be the game’s namesake) that is the source of a huge amount of power. This game is about 8 different fighters brawling to decide who gets the crystal.

The option screen explained what the controls were — 2 jab buttons, 2 kick buttons, and 2 ‘special’ buttons. I didn’t pay too much attention since I planned to just mash buttons, as is my custom on games like this. For my first match I chose the character Demonica. Even though the narration explains that not much is known about her, I have to admire her sheer courage for approaching hand-to-hand combat with almost no clothing.

Further, I must give the game credit for fleshing out its storyline and individual characters so well, each with its own animated FMV intro sequence. Even though the narration is read with the same emotion and cadence as you would expect from the narration at an elementary school Christmas production, the creators took pains to give each character depth outside of the fighting ring.

Speaking of the ring, that’s exactly what the combat arena is– a big circle sitting high up, sometimes atop fire or lava. If you fall, it’s match over. There are no rounds; rather, after your fighter’s energy meter is depleted, you get one more refill. And there is a configurable time limit for matches. So, in essence, a match can be won by KO, TKO, or knocking an opponent out of the ring.

So, I’m not very good at this. I mash buttons but don’t get much response from Demonica. She can’t possibly blame it on being too cold due to her ensemble since there is lava just below the ring. I get wiped out pretty quick, into the (hot) drink. That’s okay– there are plenty more characters to choose from. An unusual facet of this brawler is that more than half of the fighters are female (Exene, Demonica, Delara, and Yenji). There are 3 male fighters (Dayton, Gorm, and Sonork), and one presumably asexual robot named S.I.D. (sentient intelligence drone, if memory serves). I try the robot next:

S.I.D.’s intro (as read by the dispassionate narrator) explains that the S.I.D.s wander the land looking to kill carbon-based life forms. You would think that they would be better at it by now. What I’m saying is that I didn’t have much better luck playing him. I think one problem I might have is delay resulting from sending the Saturn A/V signal through my computer for presentation, which would account for the lack of responsiveness from the controls. Still, I think the game could have used a practice mode. I tried my luck with one more character — Yenji, sort of a futuristic ninja lady — and actually won a match, but only because my opponent tripped and fell out of the ring and into the abyss.

I remember using a separate video player to watch all the endings for the various characters. The most amusing one is for the S.I.D. robot. He claims the crystal, runs a robo-scan for analysis, recognizes its practical worthlessness, and tosses it aside.

Now that I have enough data for a MobyGames entry, I can finally do the same with this game.

At MobyGames:

Criticom

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Sega Saturn Games

Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge

Saturn Myst

Clockwork Knight

Purest Pinball Sim: Pro Pinball

First Saturn Game: Criticom