#136: Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour

JIMMAY!

Hmm... Another sports game with a pro name attached to it. I've only given out 12 F- ratings so far and FIVE of those have been sports games with a pro name. D+ is actually the highest rating given to such a game (unless the name is John Madden). So I really didn't have my hopes up here.

FAULT!

The game actually started off with a 'training' option on the main menu. I went into it and they actually walked me through what the different buttons did and how to serve and tips on how to play well. And it uses ALL SIX BUTTONS!

Crunching the numbers!

The game has two control modes. One where you run around on your own and one where the AI moves for you and you just control swinging the racket. With your 6 different options for how to hit. And I believe you do the aiming, and the power control. So even if controlling your guy is clunky and unresponsive you could just let the computer handle it for you!

Controlling your guy wasn't actually clunky or unresponsive. It was actually really good. Pretty much the only thing missing from the controls that I would have wanted is a 'dive and swing at a ball away from you' button and I completely understand why that doesn't yet exist.

After every 2 games (when you switch sides of the net) it takes you to a neat stat screen which breaks down all sorts of things like your 1st serve percentage and your unforced errors. Stats they'd show you in an actual televised tennis match. Stats that I'm happy to see tracked by the game!

There's a tour mode which looks like it follows the actual tennis tour. You certainly start off at the Australian Open, which I believe is the first big stop on the tour. It has a system for assigning points to each tournament, and a ranking leaderboard of the 16 players. It changes the court based on the actual court types at the physical locations.

In short... This game is amazing. I'm a little worried that I'm letting how terrible most sports games have been that the fact that this one is playable and fun makes it stand out too much from the crowd. But I was really happy with this game, and I actually think I played it a fair bit as a kid. In retrospect I remember playing some game with the tour system in it, anyway.

And while putting in the developer name I realize this game was made by UBI Soft? Yes. That UBI Soft. And it looks like this may actually have been their first console game. Way to go UBI Soft!

Rating: A+

#135: Jeopardy! Featuring Alex Trebek

THIS... IS... JEOPARDY!

Jeopardy! opens with an actual speech sample that sounds an awful lot like the actual intro to the show. I'm really not expecting any surprises from this game. Trivia questions that you have to answer in the form of a question. From 22 years ago.

I'm featured!

Alex Trebek is featured in this game. They have a pretty good likeness of him that has some animation going for him. And they have his voice! He says something to introduce the categories (not the categories themselves, but the lead in to them) and he says 'The answer is' before every single question. Just like the show, really.

THUMPER!

The input screen is a little annoying because of how slow it is. The alphabet is in one long line. I figured out that I could hit up to go to the numbers and then down to go to the letter I (or up then left then down to get to R) which helped, but it sure would have been nice to have a better interface. An alphabet grid or something?

Despite the questions being 22 years old I was able to answer a fair number of them. I smoked the computer! Because I was able to get the Final Jeopardy question which asked about a talk show host. It was Oprah!

I had a surprising amount of fun playing this game. I know I liked it as a kid too. And now I want to see if I can't find a more recent Jeopardy! game.

Rating: A+

#133: Goal!

Soccer in Sim City!

I'd not heard of Goal! before today, and was awfully wary of what I was going to get once I saw it was by Jaleco. The name certainly implies soccer, so I was expecting a mediocre to unplayable soccer game.

GOAL!

In actuality I got a pretty good soccer game. The button scheme was a little weird (R to change players) but once I worked out what was going on it was easy enough to know what I wanted to do and how to do it. The game played fluidly and it didn't feel like the AI was cheating. I suspect it would have been a lot of fun two player back in the day.

Rub it in, why don't you?

The game had a cup mode on top of the exhibition mode that I played. So I don't know if that's any good or not, but given that the rest of the game is pretty smooth I can't see it as being a detriment at any rate.

And as an aside... Does Canada's soccer team really run a blue and hot pink colour scheme? If so, that's awesome!

Rating: A-

#132: Gemfire

Flame on!

When I saw this next game was a Koei game I'd never played before I was tentatively excited. On the one hand if I've never heard of it then it probably isn't spectacular. On the other hand I don't know if I've ever played a bad Koei game. I didn't know what to expect with a name like Gemfire. It sounds like a jRPG?

I wanted the pink haired girl but couldn't
say no to Jim Carrey's The Riddler.

It turns out to be Romance of the Fantasy Kingdoms. It's pretty much just a stripped down version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series with a couple of neat twists. Every army is evenly split into 4 units. One archer, one cavalry, and two infantry units. Then each army can also bring along a fifth awesome unit. Each faction has their own wizard they can bring every now and then, and you can recruit a wide variety of fantasy creatures like gargoyles and skeletons and fire breathing lizards.

Wizards are insane!

I think this is the first game in an awfully long time where I lost track of time and just kept playing the game. Probably Soul Blazer was the last one way back at #72, so more than a year ago. The AI is not great (I was able to leave provinces completely undefended and it would take a fair number of turns before the AI would attack in) and I feel like my start in one corner province with a small army was going to end up winning the game.

The music in the game is pretty good. The graphics are not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination but it conveys the information you need to know in a pretty good way.

The game was also introduced at the beginning as being part of their 'imagination series'. I'd heard of the 'historical series' but not the imagination one. I wonder if there are any more games in it? Turns out yes, kinda. There's one other game in it, a PC only game.

I definitely would have loved this game as a kid, especially since I'm sure we would have played it two player to get rid of some of the issues with the AI.

Rating: A+

#131: The Duel: Test Drive II

En Garde!

Here is another game I didn't know existed. The name had me leaning in two directions... Duel implies a fighting game but test drive implies a driving game. It turns out it's a head to head driving game. I'm not a fan of driving games in general so I wasn't really looking forward to this.

It's the Fuzz!

Have you ever been pulled over for speeding in a racing game? I have! In this game you pick a powerful sports car (I was in a Lambourghini and I raced against a Ferrari) and then have a race on a real road. The other car played 'safe' and only topped out at 100 miles per hour. I managed to hit the speed cap at 168 miles per hour. I'm pretty sure the speed limit would have been something like 55, so I was driving down the road at more than three times the legal speed! And it turned out getting pulled over is the wrong thing to do when a cop starts chasing you. The right thing to do is drive super fast and lose him!

Of course it turns out driving that fast on a road with other people on it is a little dangerous. They give you 5 lives so you're allowed to crash a few times.

Perhaps most importantly, the game actually controlled well. I suspect the physics of skidding when driving that fast aren't realistic, but they felt good. Not too easy to control, not too hard either. Good sound/music/speech synth as well.

I don't like driving games in general, but I really enjoyed playing this game. Well done, Accolade. Well done.

Rating: A+

#117: John Madden Football '93

MADDEN! MADDEN!

Wow, when I turned this one on did the memories every flood in. The opening music is stuck in my brain for ever and ever. The intro graphics are cheesy, but they're the right kind of cheesy. And they got real, solid voice coming through. Touch-touch-touch-touchdown! HUT! HUT!

You sure did, John.

I didn't own this game as a kid but I'm pretty sure Robin did and I'd borrow it every now and then. I never played football as a kid, and I didn't really watch it on tv either. But playing this game showed the possibilities that existed in this sport. It's like Pounder says; football is a two player strategy game where the random number generator is played by large men. Madden '93 has full playbooks. It has audibles. It has different pass targets for each play. It really is a turn based strategy game.

And the crowd goes wild!

EA started to get some of the little things going with this version of the game, too. I got sacced for negative yardage on one play and the crowd booed at me. Pull off a 25 yard pass and it shows a clip of fans cheering and plays a nice roar. They didn't have the NFLPA on board so my Detroit team was lead by #20 at running back instead of by Barry Sanders, but it's ok. #20 is still awesome.

The controls still felt smooth. I was certainly rusty but I'll blame that on getting old not on the game itself. This was a very good football game. It still is, really. I could see myself playing this game for days on end again if I didn't have so many other games to play.

Rating: A+

#116: Imperium

Giant robots, yo!

November 1992 appears to have been the month for shooters I'd never heard of. I'm going to pretty happy next week when this streak breaks... But for now, another shooter!

CYLON!

This game started off with some good music and an actual intro. I know the backstory for the game. There are evil robots, and enslaved robots, and the enslaved robots built a super machine to fight the evil robots. The twist? Only a human can pilot the super machine. I don't know where they found a human, but I am that human. And now I get to ride the super machine. Woo!

PEW PEW!

This game actually takes a couple twists on the genre that I really, really liked. To start, you don't die in one shot when you get hit. You have 5 health bars and are just game over when they run out. So it's still harsh, but it doesn't mandate perfect play. The second twist is how powerups are awarded. Normally in a shooter you have a bunch of enemies that are irrelevant and a couple that give powerups. In this game every enemy is worth experience and you level up after set values of experience. Leveling up heals you and unlocks a new attack. You also have a speed value so you control how fast you move.

I found the game pretty hard, actually. I didn't make it to a boss or the next level or anything. But I like hard when the hard is from legitimate challenge and not from bad interface or mechanics. Add on the good music and an actual intro and this is a game I regret not playing as a kid.

Rating: A

#105: Super Buster Bros.

Bustafazoo!

I recognized the name of this game but I couldn't remember why. Was this one of those games where you shoot coloured bubbles? No, that's Puzzle Bobble and while the name is almost similar that's not it...

Incoming balls!

Right! This is the game where you're a dude with a harpoon gun pointed straight up and the goal is to blow up all of the balls on the screen. When a ball hits a harpoon it explodes into 2 balls of a smaller size. Eventually there's a size that is so small it just disappears instead of splitting again. There's a time limit for each stage and the strategy in the game is to keep the number of balls on the screen manageable (if a ball bounces into you then you're dead) so you ideally want to be shooting the smallest balls that you can while dodging everything. Oh, and a lot of the time there are powerups that come out when you shoot a ball so the gameplay changes on the fly depending on what comes out.

25 worlds down! At least 15 more to go.

There's not a whole lot to say about this game. It's a solid puzzle game. The music was good, the controls were simple to understand, and it's fun to play.

Rating: A+

#102: Sküljagger: Revolt of the Westicans

SKULL!

This game has quite the title. It sounds like it means something, a sequel or a movie tie-in or something. But I've never heard of a Skuljagger or of a Westican. I have no clue what kind of game this is going to be. The opening music is pretty high quality though, so it has that going for it right off the hop.

Ahoy matey!

Ok, it turns out to be a platformer and I'm a pirate of some kind. There was a lead-in plot screen so you'd think I'd know what was going on... But I don't. I know Skuljagger is searching for a sword of some kind, but I don't know who Skuljagger is. Am I Skuljagger? I already have a sword. But maybe there's a cooler sword... I don't care if I'm Skuljagger or not, I want the cooler sword!

????????

I picked up some grapes and when I hit a button that presumably ate the grapes I turned into a giant purple ball. You can see my limbs trying to escape from my prison. But I seem to be invincible and kill anything I touch when in the ball... It's like a weird, slow starman.

There were some other fruits I could pick up, which actually seemed to be flavoured gum. Orange let me spit bombs. Cherry let me fly, I think. It let me blow a big bubble which made me float but it quickly popped. I don't know if it was just me blowing too hard into the bubble or if I hit something or what. I never found another cherry to test with.

The platformer movement actually worked out pretty smooth. The sound in game was a good quality. This game felt like a game designed to use the SNES hardware as opposed to some of the recent drek that was just a sloppy port of an old game.

I didn't beat the first level because the game actually seemed reasonably hard. I had the problem that I kept needing to make blind jumps and landing on enemies I couldn't see. Those are the sorts of things that are annoying when you're playing a game once but if I'd rented this as a kid I'm sure I could have learned where to jump and this would have been a good game to play.

Looking the game up on Wikipedia it sounds like the game came with an 80 page comic/manual! Which presumably explained that Skuljagger was the bad guy and I'm a Westican trying to revolt out from under his slavery. And it has a password system. This sounds great!

Rating: A

#70: Mario Paint

Paint!

I remember renting Mario Paint as a kid, because it came in a stupidly big box compared to other games. This is because it came packaged with a mouse and pad. This game was the first time I ever used a mouse (the early computers we had all had joysticks as input devices)!

Swat those bugs!

As far as an actual game there isn't much here. There's a fly swatter minigame buried in a submenu where various bugs fly around the screen and you need to use the mouse to hit them while avoiding their projectiles. I was able to play this on my emulator by emulating the SNES mouse with my actual mouse. It turns out after using a mouse for a couple decades the novelty has worn off, so it wasn't actually very fun. The cartridge also came with a drawing program, some animation functions, and a music player...


The music player may be one of the best things to come from the SNES. There are people who use it to play songs from other things. Songs like the one above from Final Fantasy VIII.

Is Mario Paint a game for me? No. Drawing and making music are both things way outside my skillset. Is Mario Paint a good game for someone who would actually use it for more than swatting flies? I believe it is.

Rating: A+

#69: Magic Sword

RAWR!

Magic Sword is a game I didn't think I'd heard of, and I know I didn't play it as a kid. But the more I played it today, the more familiar it seemed. I feel like maybe I played it on an emulator at University? Or maybe I played a sequel/spin-off? I'm not sure, but it was definitely interesting.

Level Select at the start of the game?

Magic Sword is a single player platformer where you take the role of a scantily clad, muscle bound blonde with a big sword and a shield. There are three buttons. Jump, swing sword, and hurt yourself. I'm sure the hurt myself button pulled off some sort of super move but I never saw it do anything except drain my own health so I stopped using it. The twist for the game is the ability to get an ally who follows you around jumping/attacking when you jump/attack. There seemed to be a large number of potential allies. I know I saw a ninja, a thief, a white mage, a black mage, an ogre, a dragon, a knight, and a girl.

He-Man and She-Ra?

On top of that, there's an item slot which holds one item at a time. What those items do was not clear to me, and I just picked everything up indiscriminately. When an item dropped it was never clear if it was going to be worth points, or restore health, or go into my inventory slot. Or hurt me? I know I lost health sometimes without knowing why. So I just took them all.

The gameplay reminded me a bit of ActRaiser. ActRaiser is my second highest rated game thus far, so that sounds like it should be high praise. But the platforming in ActRaiser was not great. It got such a high rating for the world building and the awesome integration between the two. The platforming here is playable, but with nothing special going on. Jump, attack. Jump, attack. Awkward dodge. Hardware slowdown. Attack.

After each level the game would give little tips about what was going on. So eventually I learned the diamond ring is used to recruit the dragon. The gold book is used to earn more points. The white mage can damage undead while the black mage cannot. Thieves detect trapped treasure chests. Those are the sorts of things I would have written down if I'd rented this game as a kid back in the pre-internet days. And probably would have been enough to let me figure out what was going on. That would add a lot of replayability to the game. I don't really want to keep playing it now, but I think I would have played it a lot back then.

The music is also very good. And also reminded me of ActRaiser. I think it's the organ base to the music maybe? It really fit in with the idea of climbing a tower and killing the undead. I like it.

Rating: A+

#55: Arcana

Hal America with a non-sports game?

Arcana is a first person dungeon crawling RPG game that I vaguely remember renting a few times as a kid. All of the characters and enemies are represented by cards which have different elemental associations and which have cute two-step animations in combat. Guy standing in a ready stance -> guy swinging a sword. That sort of thing.

No Teefa, the pleasure is _mine_.

The game actually has a text intro with some plot backstory which is really nice! I live on an island that's been at war for a really long time. The biggest city had an evil advisor perform a coup and become king and things are looking grim. A long lost friend shows up and tells me I need to go seal some cave. Only I can do it as I am the last living Card Master! I definitely can see being a Card Master! My character seems a little leery of my long lost friend since his father is an advisor to the evil advisor. My friend assures me he's nothing like his father, honest, and tells me to take his pretty assistant along for the adventure. Deal!

Intense music? Must be a boss fight!

I cleared out most of the first level of the dungeon (it reminds of of Wizardry V with the stone walls and the rudimentary map) and picked up some treasure chests and such. While trying to figure out what the stuff I found did I discovered that Rooks and Teefa have no equipment on, which explains why they attack for very small numbers. I should have checked before I left town. But really, which starting the main character off with no gear is an annoying buy standard situation I'm a little surprised that the tag-along assistant who knew she was going into a dungeon has no gear of her own. "Hi, I want to come on an adventure with you. Oh, and I'm naked. Is that going to be a problem?" No problem here, ma'am!

At any rate I went back to town, bought some gear, and started swinging for 7 times as much damage. I killed the boss of the first floor and went up to the second floor. Explored around there a bunch, found the boss of that floor, and fought him a bit. By this point I'd run out of mana so I couldn't heal anymore. But Rooks was full so I didn't see the need to drink my ether. Teefa was low health and her name was flashing red but what could go wrong? Even if she went down Rooks and Sylph would win the fight and I could go on or go back to town. WRONG!

Turns out this game actually doesn't abstract away death behind some 'swoon' condition. If one of your party members dies, that's it. Game over.

I actually think this is a pretty good game mechanic assuming the fights aren't so rough that people get gibbed, and that certainly wasn't the case here. I could have healed her to full at the cost of a consumable. I just didn't think I'd need to. But since I hadn't saved state I would have to go back to when I went back to town and buy weapons. Which would be fine, but I had enough to get a feel for this game again.

That said, the music was good. I like the layout even with the combat seeming pretty trivial thus far. I remember there being a whole elemental system that mattered. Sylph could turn my party into air elemental if that became relevant. Pretty sure in the plot my long lost friend backstabs us as soon as I seal the thingy. I am actually interested to reload and play some more to see what happens.

Rating: A

#45: WWF Super Wrestlemania

Eat your vitamins, kids!

I have always been a WWF/WWE fan. I rarely find time to watch on tv anymore, and I haven't seen a Pay Per View event in many years, but I still enjoy tuning in from time to time. As a big gamer who likes wrestling you'd expect I'd like this game...

OH YEAH!

You'd be right! I used to play wrestling games in the arcade, and on the SNES, and a ton of them on the N64. I definitely played a lot of this particular game as a kid. It has a survivor series mode where each team has 4 characters on it, and I definitely had to give that a spin. My team was captained by The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase and was rounded out by The Natural Disasters (Earthquake and Typhoon) and The Macho Man Randy Savage. Snap into a Slim Jim! The computer chose Hulk Hogan, Sid Justice, and The Legion of Doom (Hawk and Animal).

WOO!

Wrestling games eventually evolved with lots of bells and whistles. Characters would get access to their signature moves. You could get steel chairs from the stands. This game is before those times, but was still very fun. The controls are relatively smooth and make sense. They use 6 buttons, which is great! The characters may not have special moves but they do look the parts at least. The Million Dollar Man and Earthquake were my two favourite wrestlers as a kid, and I hated Hulk Hogan, so it was a good blast of nostalgia to be able to take Hogan down with Earthquake.

I haven't played a new generation wrestling game, and now I'm tempted to try to track an xBox 360 one down...

Rating: A

#32: Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninjas

SUPER GAME!

Ok, I can't keep quiet about this... Why is this game subtitled "Caveman Ninjas"? I have an idea of what it means to be a ninja and there's no way Joe or Mac are ninjas. Ninjas are supposed to be stealthy. Agile. They should use cool weapons like katanas and throwing stars. They're apt to be tall and thin. Joe is a short, beefy man who wields a club and throws dinosaur bones. He has bright coloured hair and wears a loin cloth.

Joe the Angel

The game itself is a reasonable platformer. I don't know if there's a plot to the game covered in the manual or something but there was nothing at all in the game. You run around clubbing dinosaurs for a short period of time and then you do a predictable boss fight. Repeat. I vaguely recall the 2 player mode being a good addition but I can't really check it out now. One innovation it had is the 'angel' that appears after you die. You can fly him around such that you get to choose where you respawn on the screen. I remember this fetaure showing up in New Super Mario Bros Wii and thinking it was pretty innovative. Well, it was in Joe & Mac 21 years ago!

Rawr!

After beating a boss a scantily clad tall woman with very bright hair runs onto the screen to give Joe a kiss. I believe I saw red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. So there's a whole rainbow of tall amazons out there looking to make out with a caveman ninja. Are these women being held captive by giant plants and dinosaurs? Are they groupies following Joe around? And why are they all so much taller than Joe? It's not like they're wearing high heels either, since they're barefoot!

Rating: A-

#30: Super Castlevania IV

Where are Super Castlevanias I, II, and III?

I was looking forward to playing this game though I didn't remember anything about it from my youth. Mostly I remember how awesome some of the later Castlevania games were (like Symphony of the Night) and was looking forward to putting a lot of time in on this. I started playing Friday evening with every intention of playing it a lot on Friday and a lot on Saturday.

Nice '3d' touch with the passable gate.

Unfortunately I didn't need nearly that long. I made it through most of 3 levels and then got stuck falling into bottomless pits and gave up. Maybe it's that I was sick when I was playing it so may not have had top reflexes or sufficient patience but I just got really frustrated with how far back the last checkpoint was. Eventually I ended up falling into other bottomless pits on the way to the one I was stuck on. With my skills degrading I decided to give up.

WHEEEE!

That said, Super Castlevania IV had some interesting gameplay twists that I liked. I love being able to hook my whip onto these little ring things and swing around. Makes me think I'm Indiana Jones! The gates were nice. Crumbling blocks over pits are a staple of the platformer genre around this time and it was nice that they respawned if you walked away from the screen and back again. They put some serious work into making neat graphics as well. The wooden bridge in the below screenshot has the wooden planks move down when your weight is on them, and if you jump up you wiggle the rope handrail.

There were also plenty of downsides. I had no clue who my character was. I had no clue what he was doing. I assume since it's a Castlevania game that I'm some sort of Belmont out to kill Dracula but some sort of cutscene or plot development or text of any kind on the level intro screens would have been nice. As far as I could tell I was playing a spooky but mediocre platformer. Honestly, platformerwise it felt pretty comparable to ActRaiser. A jump button, an attack button, a cast a spell button. Orbs to hit for points/health nodules. Bosses with easy to learn patterns. ActRaiser had a whole other game beside the platformer though, and Castlevania does not. I feel like it's better than Home Alone, though, and I suspect if I was a little better at one jump that I'd have enjoyed the game a lot more. The spooky music was definitely a plus as well.

Rating: A-

#29: Super Baseball Simulator 1000

One thousand or a really precise one?

Super Baseball Simulator 1000 is certainly one of the games I played the most on the SNES as a kid. It had everything a baseball game needed to have in order to keep my interest for a long stretch of time. Would it still hold some of that luster 21 years later?

165 games is a lot of games!

The first thing the game has going for it is the ability to actually play a full baseball season. The game accurately tracks every at bat that happens in the game and keeps hitting and pitching statistics for every player on every team throughout the season. I didn't actually like playing baseball all that much as a kid but I loved baseball stats. I used to keep score for games I'd watch on tv and wrote a spreadsheet to track my house league team's stats using whatever spreadsheet software it was that came with GEOS on the Commodore 64. So for the game to keep data over almost 500 games for a season was pretty awesome for me.

Mercy ruled!

But as I said, I didn't really like playing baseball... This game would let you simulate games you weren't playing which was nice. But on top of that you had the option to not really play baseball. You could play super enhanced baseball. In the field you'd have a jump/dive button and a super jump/dive button so you could jump to the roof of the stadium to catch a home run if you timed it right. You could slide all the way from one side of the field to another. Hit X before getting the ball to charge up a super throw that would get to the base fast. Hit Y before getting the ball to power up your glove allowing you to actually catch some of the super hits. Every batter had a special hit they could use like turning the ball into an exploding bomb that stunned whoever it hit or turning the ball invisible or reversing the controls of the defender so up was down and left was right. Pitchers had 4 super pitches they could choose from with things ranging from the iron ball that would frequently break bats to the SSFB (Super Super Fast Ball) that went, as advertised, really freaking fast.

Other 'super' pitches weren't so super.

You could set up your league to allow a limited number of super moves per game. This terrible leaf pitch would cost you 4 of your quota. You could turn super moves off entirely by setting the quotas to 0. Or you could set them to unlimited and just be crazy awesome on every play. Guess what I did?

Now, the computer couldn't quite handle the concept of super moves. It wouldn't use them very well, it had no idea how to deal with some of my super moves, and it would trivialize others. For some reason the super hit which made the ball invisible was easy to deal with. I think the computer would cheat and know where the ball would land. On the other hand the super hit which made the ball's shadow invisible broke the AI. It would simply stop moving players until the ball landed. Even though it could make sense that the computer could do an ok job of working out where the ball 'should' land given that you can still see the ball itself!

The game was really easy. Back then it was really easy, now it was really easy. But I played it a lot so I guess I didn't care that it was really easy. I wasn't playing the game to win so much as to try to twink out my player stats. My lead off hitter would basically hit an inside the park homerun every at-bat. Only when the computer would randomly make an error would I get screwed (for some reason the stats engine would treat that as an at-bat but not as a hit which would lower my average). I can remember being bitter about the mercy rule which called the game after you were up by 10 if you were the home team. If you were the away team you could score as much as you wanted because theoretically they could come back in the bottom of the inning. I'd run into problems trying to have my guys show up on the stat lists because they wouldn't get enough at bats because most of them would only bat once in the first inning and then the game would get called.

That said, I think using an actual limit on super moves would make the game more strategic. Do you really want to use the super throw from the out field on this play? You can guarantee strike the other guy out by throwing 3 warp pitches in a row... In order to have a game you need some way to prevent that from happening. Gentleman's rule or by putting in a cost you can't always pay. I'm glad they built such a system into the game even if I never used it.

At any rate, I played a full 5 game season, went undefeated, and had fun. Still a good game.

Rating: A+

#23: Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts

Super Spooky!

One of the old video game review sites I read posted a review of this game a year and a half ago and I remember getting a little riled up about it. He talked the game up as being one of the hardest on the SNES, then gave up after getting killed repeatedly about 4 monsters into the game. At the time my memory of the game wasn't one of a hard game. I know my brother used to rent this a fair bit and we were both pretty good at it. Of course we'd played a lot of the C64 Ghosts and Goblins game and maybe we're just really, really good at games? I don't know.

Unhand my blue haired beauty!

I loaded the game up and got right into it. The first level started with a rock I couldn't jump over. I mashed some buttons, discovered I had a double jump, and was off to the races. I was double jumping all over the place because that's what you do when you can double jump. Of course it turns out you can't change direction while in the air (except by jumping the second time which defies the laws of physics in many ways and lets you change direction). So I quickly started dying by coasting into enemies during my second jump. Ok, lesson learned... Only double jump when you have to, and never double jump at maximum velocity toward the edge of the screen since enemies could spawn where you can't avoid them.

Green armour!

Ghouls 'N Ghosts features a lot of power-ups you can obtain as you play. You start with silver armour which absorbs one point of damage. You can get green armour which powers up your attack but still only absorbs one hit. If you have green armour you can get gold armour which really powers up your attack and still only absorbs one hit. Then you have a wide variety of primary weapons. Lance, dagger, bow, magical fire... Magical fire sounds awesome but has the real problem that you can only have 2 of them on the screen at once. So if you throw two of them to your right you actually have no way to damage enemies from the left until the old ones completely finish their animation. It sucks! Well, you have to adjust to it, anyway.

A very popular screen in this game.

The early platforming part wasn't too bad. I got the hang of using the weapons properly. I got the hang of being careful with my jumps. I learned the patterns of all the enemies and could make it to the halfway point of the level pretty handily. At the halfway mark a giant wave sweeps up from the background and wipes out about two-thirds of the land. If you were standing in a spot that got wiped out you were instantly killed. There was no warning. There was no way to know which spots were safe. If you died you had to go back to the very start. And while I could beat that stuff it still took a fair amount of time and was by no means guaranteed.

So I had to memorize safe spots from the wave. Fine, got it... And then died to the next wave. Ok, get back there, live through two waves... Get hit by a clam which knocks me backwards into a pit. Dead. Ok, get back. Manage to survive the third wave without warning... And then double jump my way into a pit. I give up.



Take a listen to the first stage music. This music is awesome. It properly conveys the feeling of being in a graveyard, attacked by zombies, but has an uplifting beat because you know you can win if you work at it. Which is how I feel about this game. It's hard, but it isn't exactly unfair. On the one hand it sucks that the wave thing will instantly kill practically everyone who gets to it the first time. But on the other hand it doesn't take out random sections of the terrain. It takes out precise sections and you can totally memorize where to stand. This game feels a lot like pattern recognition. Demon dogs will kill you when they first show up but you learn how they jump and then can beat them pretty easily.

Maybe that's why I remember my brother and I beating this game as kids? We had the time and the inclination to die over and over again while adding new patterns to our memories? It certainly helped that we had the video game motor skills to pull off the moves needed once we figured out what those moves were. And plenty of spare time to sink in.

When I think of video games of my youth this game actually really personifies the era. You die a lot. And that's ok! Just keep trying. The game doesn't apologize for what it is. And while I don't currently have the time or inclination to get good at it again that's not a flaw in the game itself. I like that the game is hard, but ultimately beatable. Video games today have fallen away from this point of view (look at 'looking for raid' raids in World of Warcraft, for example) but that doesn't mean I have to like the change. I liked the way games were and I'm going to reward this game with a good rating for really following the old school way.

Rating: A-