#134: Gods

I AM A GOD!

The name didn't ring a bell but once I started playing the game seemed rather familiar. You play a muscled dude in a platformer. Climb ladders, throw knives at enemies, collect gems from their corpses. Get some keys, open some doors. Pretty straightforward stuff.

Bird are jerks!

One of the things I often complain about is bad use of the SNES controller and this game has that covered! One button is for jump. 4 buttons are for nothing. The last button is for attacking, activating switches, picking up items, and managing your inventory. And it's particularly awkward how it decides which thing to do. If you're upright or jumping then you attack. If you're ducking and on top of an item then you pick the item up. If you're ducking and not on top of an item then you switch to a different inventory slot. Stand up with an item selected and you drop it so you actually only have 3 item slots, not 4. Note that this means there's no way to attack while ducking. Enemies often fire projectiles that you need to duck under and it sure would have been nice to be able to hit them! And then to activate a switch you need to be facing the wall, which you accomplish by hitting up. You can't attack while facing the wall, but you sure can get attacked!

ARG!

This may seem like a pedantic argument, but when you get game overed you get to put your name in for the high score screen. But you can't use vowels, and you can only use 3 letters. Ok, fine, maybe it's a weird restriction from arcade machines... But then to have them use vowels and full names for the sample scores... STUPID!

The game also suffered from having enemies spawn on top of me and gank me. It has annoying clunky controls too, so enemies coming from multiple sides at once was a real pain. Both are things you could learn to deal with by memorizing the spawns and knowing when to switch directions and such. But I didn't like it.

I feel like this game would have been a fine Commodore 64 game. Those had awkward controls because joysticks only had one button. Clunky movement made sense too. But to have those in my SNES game? I am not a fan.

Turns out this was initially an Amiga game, but it came out in 1991. So the SNES port was only one year later. No excuse for not using all the buttons... 

Rating: C-

#104: Super Batter Up

Swing batter batter batter batter...

Super Batter Up is, unsurprisingly, a baseball game. A baseball game that was entirely new to me, even. Was it going to be good, bad, or ugly?

RICKY!

I start off and I get to pick from actual MLB teams. I took my favourite team from that era, the Oakland A's, and played against my hometown team the Toronto Blue Jays. And even 22 years later I still recognize most of the names. I didn't see any MLBPA logos or anything so I wonder if they were even allowed to do this? Anyway, it's certainly a good start to the game!

Jays win! Jays win!

I played a game and I got blown out. I simply couldn't score and the controls were clunky enough I couldn't really field well either. It has the standard baseball game problem where you control all of your players at the same time. So if you move the shortstop towards the ball but he isn't close enough to actually get to it you've also managed to move your outfielders out of position so they can't get to it either. The AI doesn't suffer from this problem so they were always able to get to my hits. The runners were so abysmally slow compared to actual baseball that even if I hit the ball into a gap I couldn't ever get a double. The AI got lots of doubles though because it would take so long for me to recover from my bad movements.

Pitching was also annoying. You had the option of throwing a ball in the dirt, but I couldn't figure out a way to see that the ball was going to be unhittable until it was too late. This meant I would sometimes strike out without having a chance to adapt. It also meant I could guaranteed strike out my opponent by just throwing balls in the dirt over and over again. I don't find that to be fun, so I didn't do it after I tested it out to verify I could.

The game does have tons of amazing bells and whistles. Toronto was the home team so it played the notes from the last line of Oh Canada! I tested again with Detroit as the home team and it played the end of The Star Spangled Banner instead. I think that's pretty awesome. It also played a lot of typical baseball game organ music during the game which was nice. It had an animation for the 7th inning stretch and played Take Me Out To The Ballgame. When a homerun was hit it animated all the guys who were on base waiting at home plate to high five the batter. Eckersley even pitched sidearm!

It felt like this was a game made by some people who loved baseball and were able to add lots of neat things in. But then they went and failed at making a core fun game. Oh well.

Rating: C-

#62: Super Battletank: War in the Gulf

Who is Garry Kitchen?

Does the video game industry create games glorifying current wars because they think that's what people want to play or because they're in some way propaganda? I don't know, but there were plenty of Kuwait/Iraq war games when I was a kid. I hadn't heard of this one before today, but from the name I expect to be driving a tank in the gulf.

FIRE!

Yep. I am in a tank. I am driving around, finding other tanks, and blowing them up. As far as SNES era tank games go, though, this is actually pretty good. I have four different weapons with ammo levels. It makes use of all 8 buttons on the controller! (Accelerate, decelerate, open map, shoot weapon, turn left, turn right, select weapon, and pause.) There are all sorts of gauges and doohickeys that make it feel like I might actually be driving in a tank.

SCUD!

The game has an overarching plotline that I assume mirrored the actual campaign in the gulf war in some way. Maybe? I don't actually know. But sending in a tank to take out a SCUD launcher sounds like the sort of thing that would have actually happened.

The game controls well, and matches the theme well, but it really isn't my cup of tea. Maybe I would have played it a bit as a kid, but I'm pretty confident it wouldn't have been a two-renter. I died on the second mission this time (I tried to figure out what an icon meant on the map by driving near it, and I think it was a mine field) and decided I didn't really want to start over. This game is what it is, and what it is isn't for me.

Rating: C-

#53: Xardion

XARDION! (What does that mean?!?)

Xardion is a game I'd never heard of before, and the game actually opened with a bit of an intro before the title screen which game me a bit of an idea about what was going on. There are three planets under attack by another galaxy or something, and they decide to band together to fight off the invaders. Each planet sends a champion in a ship which makes me think this game is going to be a side scrolling shooter with three different characters to choose from, like UN Squadron. Yay. I sure haven't played enough of that genre thus far!

Panthera, I choose you!

It turns out the game is actually a platformer with three different characters to choose from. You can swap between characters by hitting select which actually reminds me a lot of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on the NES. Each of the three characters is significantly different which is more like The Lost Vikings. Both of those games are awesome. Unfortunately this game is not.

Tongue attack, go!

It turns out the game only seems to use two of the six buttons which makes me very sad. The three characters are different, but not in good ways. One guy can aim his gun up which makes him the best. One guy is a cat so he can crawl into tunnels which makes him situationally useful. The third guy just seemed terrible.

Interestingly the game has experience bars so your guys can level up by killing dudes. Unfortunately experience isn't shared, so Triton (who could shoot up) ended up gaining some levels while everyone else kept sucking.

I made it to one boss fight and made good use of character swapping to keep fighting as long as I could. But then I died. It restarted me at the start of the level with full health on the guy who died and old health of the other two... Which really made me never want to use those guys again.

There were lots of item pickups I could get, and I think they were incrementing my numbers on the select menu, but I never found a way to actually use any of them for any purpose. Which made me sad. Maybe that stuff was used after beating the first boss. Maybe some arcane sequence of button presses would work it out. But I couldn't find a way.

Infinite continues and a level system means I'm pretty confident I eventually could have won. I just didn't want to. The controls were sluggish too. But I feel like if I'd played this game as a kid I would have liked it a fair bit and definitely would have played it a lot.

Rating: C+

#18: Darius Twin

I popped in Darius Twin, a side-scrolling shooter where you have three lives, and went game over in less than a minute. I started a second game and went game over in less than a minute. I started a third game where I didn't try to kill things, just avoid them until I got some power-ups, and made it a little bit further. Then I started a fourth game where I cleared out two levels without dying once...

This game suffers from the problem many power-up based games suffer from. The level designers didn't seem to understand that the power of your ship was going to increase massively over time. So your ship without power-ups can't even kill the wimpiest enemy in one hit. Your ship with a bunch of power-ups is essentially invincible. I died once, costing me my powered up shield, and then died many times in succession to lose in short order. (The level had foreground overlays so I couldn't see the enemies coming until they were on top of me... Knowing where they spawn from now I could get through the level I'm sure, but I really don't want to.)

How is my score so high for only doing zone A, C, D?

Enemy design was interesting in that they were all giant fish. I liked that the game had 'auto-fire' turned on so I just needed to hold the shoot and missile buttons down instead of mashing them, but even that started hurting my hand. No other buttons did anything. So why didn't they just have my ship always auto-fire? I couldn't conceive of a reason to not be constantly shooting so there was no decision making involved...

It's like the 'run' button in RPGs. Initially you couldn't run at all. Then you had to equip an item and hold a button down to run. Then you had to hold a button down to run. Then you ran automatically and had to hold a button down to walk. I want games like this to have a 'stop shooting' button and otherwise just constantly shoot!

I actually don't think I'd played this game before. But it's pretty much a worse version of other shooters. It has the same lag when tons of stuff is going on. It has the same problems with bad difficulty design relative to expected power-ups. And it doesn't have any power-up customization like some of the better shooters (UN Squadron/Gradius III). It did have a level map where you didn't have to do every stage so there was some replayability there I guess.

Rating: C-

#9: Hal's Hole In One Golf

Is this the bar arcade game?

I think this may be the first game in this series which I hadn't played before. I'm not really sure since it plays pretty similar to most golf video games.

Do I really need a sand wedge?

Growing up golf games were actually pretty popular in my family. I can remember playing different golf courses on the Commodore 64 as a family outing. But I don't remember doing so on the SNES. I'd think we would have rented an early golf game for sure if it was available at any rental place but maybe it just wasn't in my area.

Laggy to generate, but impressive!

The game lets you analyze all the holes in detail as far as slopes and whatnot. What the game doesn't do is tell you where a given club is likely to land. It tells you distance to hole, and distance your club will go, but on longer holes it doesn't give you any way to know where the ball is going to go. You have to guess. Probably this is reasonable if you play the game over and over so you get a feel for avoiding the bunkers and water hazards on each hole. Playing it once? Meant I spent a lot of time in the water on some of the holes.

15 over par makes the cut, right?

Putting was pretty easy once I got a feel for it as you can see in my scorecard above. I even managed to get a couple of birdies near the end which was nice.

As far as golf games go this was decent but not spectacular. It wasn't much of a chore to finish out my round to have a final score to post but I had no desire at all to play again. I doubt it would have been a popular play back in the day, either. I feel like it had fewer features than the C64 game and almost as much lag when generating the maps but that could just be rose coloured glasses remembering the C64. At any rate, this game is playable even now but not a ton of fun.

Rating: C-