#124: Super Star Wars

Use the force, Luke!

Super Star Wars opens with music from Star Wars and a pretty detailed title screen for a SNES game. I hadn't played the game before, but I have watched plenty of speed runs for the entire series of games, so I knew what to expect. A variety of stages using a variety of characters as you play through the plot of the original Star Wars trilogy.

Or maybe use a blaster?

Well, as you loosely play through the plot, anyway. I'm pretty sure the movies open with Luke being emo about having to do chores on a farm, not having to jump around shooting scorpions and a Sarlacc Pit Monster with a blaster.

Your droid is in another castle!

I sure don't remember this scene from the movie... I was able to beat the fly around in a speeder level but then the platforming in the Jawa sandcrawler was too much for me. I kept missing a jump and having to start the level over because it's one big climbing level.

The game controlled reasonably well, so I can't really say I failed because the game is bad. Partly I want to blame my hand going numb and partly I want to just say I'm bad at platformers now. I do think this game would have been fun as a kid, even with the creative licenses taken to fit the plot into a sequence of platformer levels.

Rating: B+

#118: On the Ball

Get on that ball!

I was thinking a game named On the Ball was going to be a sports game of some kind or maybe a platformer where you're rolling around on a ball. I was very much mistaken. It turns out On the Ball is a puzzle game where there's a ball which is dropping towards the bottom of the screen thanks to gravity. You as the player need to rotate the terrain clockwise or counterclockwise to guide the ball to the goal. It's a clever little puzzle game.

Colour/pattern overload!

They don't show you an overview of the entire level and the view is pretty zoomed in so they added on arrows to the terrain in an attempt to direct you towards the exit. It worked pretty well. There are zones on the harder levels that subtract time if you bump into them with no real warning that they exist, but I suspect those are the sorts of things you get better at avoiding with practice.

Through everything... Turn... Turn... Turn...

I feel like the puzzle genre has evolved over the last 22 years and I'm not much for time limits and losing when you're too slow at solving a puzzle, but I wish I'd played this game as a kid. I have a feeling my whole family might have gotten into playing it. The game even keeps high scores (I hope between sessions) so you could race for best times and such. Actually, I wonder if anyone has ever speedrun this game?

Rating: B+

#114: Firepower 2000

BANG BANG!

Firepower 2000 certainly sounds like a shooter of some kind. The title screen with a dune buggy and a helicopter make me think it's going to be a scrolling shooter. And likely one where you change vehicles based on the level you're in. Could be interesting... Or it could be two bad shooters in one package.

Beep Beep in a Jeep!

Judging from the scores at the top of the screen I'm now pretty sure this is designed as a two player game where one player controls the jeep and one controls the helicopter. I was the jeep and I had a jump button in order to shoot things that were obviously up in the air like planes. I could also drive backwards if I wanted to (though the screen kept scrolling) and could shoot sideways or on diagonals so that was a nice twist.

Boss fight? Nope...

It all felt a little bland though. It was hard to shoot a lot of things since I didn't have a spread attack weapon so I mostly just dodged around. I thought I reached a boss but he eventually flew off. I suspect this game is much better with 2 players than with 1, since there were things I couldn't reasonably hit with the jeep that the helicopter could probably take out. Especially if it has a spread attack?

It still felt pretty reasonable though. It didn't suffer from the major flaws that other scrolling shooters have suffered from, so it gets a decent rating.

Rating: B-

#112: Chuck Rock

ROCK OUT!

Even before the title screen loaded up this game started off with a pretty sweet rock tune. It got me pumped to try the game for sure. Then the title screen came up and I was hooked. Caveman rock band? Run it! Especially if I get to play someone in the band who made that sweet intro tune!

UNGA BUNGA!

No options menu, no nothing. Hit start on that title screen and get thrown into stage 1. Of what turned out to be a fairly straightforward, plot-free platformer. I'm a caveman. I start each stage by saying UNGA BUNGA with pretty good video game voice synth. (I Blame Bunga.) But then I just need to run from one end of the stage to the other... My only attacks are to thrust my fat belly out, or to jump kick, or to pick up a rock and throw it. I don't even get a club to swing.

PS: Pterodactyl.

I wanted to play a game with a rocking caveman. Instead I got a very bland platformer. It actually controlled quite well, and still had pretty good music and sound. But I didn't know who I was, or why I was platforming. I beat the first boss without losing a life and got bored. I hoped the game over screen would be interesting to I slowly got myself killed. No dice for anything interesting there, either.

Normally I find myself disliking games in this adventure because they're really bad in some way. Terrible sound, or horrible controls, or brutal lag. This game has none of that. It's just super bland.But probably would have been fun back in the day!

Rating: B-

#108: Wings 2: Aces High

CAW!

I'd never heard of Wings 1, and I'd never heard of Wings 2 either. I assumed it was going to be some kind of flying game, maybe a scrolling shooter like Legendary Wings on the NES? It turned out to be a World War I simulator where you play British pilots running various missions in biplanes.

Je suis un pilote. Je peux volez!

You end up playing in a variety of missions. You can fly a top-down view and do bombing runs, or you can do a third person behind the plane view and do strafing runs or dogfighting missions. The controls actually seemed pretty realistic for a WWI biplane, and I was enjoying myself despite not really knowing what I was doing a lot of the time. I only succeeded in one mission and got my 5 guys killed off otherwise. Once by cutting my engines and flying into the ground!

Level up!

On the plus side the one mission I did complete gave me some experience to spend on making my pilot better. I like leveling up and getting better! The game also had a series of passwords so you could play again and pick up where you left off, which is nice.

I really liked the sound and music in the game. It wasn't amazing, but it really fit in with the theme of the game. The graphics were perfectly functional and there wasn't the sort of lag I've come to expect from a bad SNES game.

All in all... A pretty good game, actually. I would have had fun playing this as a kid for sure.

Rating: B+

#106: Super Double Dragon

TWO DRAGONS?!?

Super Double Dragon is exactly the game I thought it was going to be. It's a beat-em-up where you play one of the two dragons. Dragon brothers? Ninjas? I don't even know. The game may have had a plot on other platforms or something but there was absolutely nothing given to me in my entire time playing this game to indicate why it was I was beating up all these (presumably bad) dudes.

Hold your hand, kick your face!

There's really not much to say about this game, really. It ran smoothly without the SNES slowdown lag that sometimes plagues games of this genre. The enemy AI was pretty sketchy so it felt relatively easy? But it also felt entirely playable which is sadly a little surprising for an SNES game. I suspect it would have been more fun with 2 players but it was still fine as a single player game.

NUNCHUK HO!

One thing that did make me sad was how trying to straight up brawl the enemies was a recipe for disaster. If they ever connected with a hit you'd get dazed which meant you were apt to get followed up on with a few more hits. This meant the 'optimal' way to play was to strafe up and down and abuse the AI's obsession with staying on the same z axis depth as you. They wouldn't attack while doing this so you could get the first hit in. Dazing them, which would allow a followup of your own or would let you keep strafing if there were other enemies on screen. It made for a rather monotonous experience.

That whole monotonous experience thing got me thinking about why I don't care much for the SNES versions of this genre yet I love DmC. DmC is set up so you have a bunch of cool moves, and then it makes you mix your play up by giving you bonuses for using a variety of moves and throwing in enemies that are weak to different things. 'Optimal' play isn't the exact same thing over and over until you win. I like that.

All that said, for the time, this is a pretty good game.

Rating: B+

#103: Space Megaforce

By Toho!

I didn't know what this game was going to be, but I had a pretty good idea it was going to be a scrolling shooter of some kind from the name. Speaking of the name, when I saw what game was coming up I instinctively said 'SPACE MEGA-FORCE' out loud. And then the game itself did the same thing in a clear voice. It was a little trippy, and a little awesome. I already like this game!

So many powerups!

This game is, in fact, a scrolling shooter. One with at least 8 different power-ups you can collect. There's a 1 and a 4 on the screen in the screenshot above. It didn't seem like there was a way to switch between them other than collecting a different one again later, but each time you picked a given number up that attack got stronger. So it seemed like just picking everything up to see how they were leveling up was a perfectly valid thing to do. I ended up liking missiles best.

*sad trombone*

Unfortunately this game suffers from the same problem as pretty much every scrolling shooter. If you ever die you lose all your power-ups and respawn in a part of the game designed for having lots of power. I made it all the way to the first boss without dying, but then he killed me. And I couldn't get more than a couple screens forward from the checkpoint after that because I was shooting 2 bullets instead of 6 and 6 missiles.

That said this game didn't seem to suffer from sprite slowdown. It seemed to have a decent selection of power-ups. I think it could be really fun if a scrolling shooter is what you want to play. I didn't want to play a scrolling shooter so I didn't have a ton of fun, but I can't blame the game for that.

Rating: B

#99: Phalanx: The Enforce Fighter A-144

Phalanx: The Super Long Subtitle

I'd never heard of this game but the very descriptive title gave me a pretty good idea of what to expect. A SNES game with a fighter is going to be a side scrolling shooter, I bet!

PEW PEW! LASERS!

Yep.

Water sucks, yo.

There's actually not a whole lot to say about this game. On the plus side you have 3 health so you aren't instantly dead if you get hit. On the minus side when you do get hit 3 times you lose all your power-ups like in most other games of this genre. I've always found the level of perfection required with that stipulation to be a little much, though I did practice Gradius III enough to beat it so I guess I didn't mind it too much when I was younger.

At any rate, while this game didn't seem to be anything special it also worked just fine. It wasn't mind blowing and the rate of gaining power-ups after you died was on the slow side but all in all I think I could have really gotten into playing this game as a kid. It isn't bad.

Rating: B-

#97: King of the Monsters

Godzilla?

I recognized the name King of the Monsters from when I was a kid but I couldn't remember much about it. I thought it was going to be a Rampage style game where you were beating up a city with an enemy monster. In a sense that's exactly what you do; the game is a wrestling game between two giant monsters that takes place in the 'ring' of a city in Japan. It turns out delivering a piledriver to Godzilla does a far amount of collateral damage to the city at large!

YES!!!!!!!

King of the Monsters is immediately amazing for this mode selection screen. The window at the top cycles through a list explaining what all of the buttons do! Absolutely nothing beats this as an introduction to a game. Tell me what the buttons do so I know what my options are! I guarantee I never would have known how to use the beam special attack if they didn't tell me right away. (The beam attack seemed abysmally bad so my fights would have gone better without trying to use it but the point still stands.)

German Suplex? On it!

As far as wrestling games go this actually seemed pretty good. The controls made sense, and were smooth. The concept was a little corny, but pro wrestling is a little corny too, so it fit. Only having 4 characters seemed a little weak but maybe you could unlock more as you played the game? I didn't really play for very long as I was getting ready to go out of town for the weekend but what little I played (2 matches) was enough to have some fun. I imagine multiplayer would be pretty good too, and I like that it was an option.

Rating: B+

#95: Irem Skins Game

Skin those lions!

I have never heard of the company Irem, nor their skins game. Given how absolutely terrible most of the golf games have been thus far on the SNES I was not really looking forward to playing this game. (It turns out Irem is perhaps best known for the game Moon Patrol which I used to play when I was a wee lad!)

ActRaiser Golf!

The biggest reason I've soured on the SNES golf games is they try to do way too much graphically and end up lagging pretty badly when they try to render the course. Irem Skins Game somehow manages to get it right and avoid that problem entirely. I can rotate my character around without it taking seconds to redraw the screen. And while it doesn't look terribly realistic it still looks pretty good. There are clouds, and trees. The overhead view reminding me a lot of ActRaiser, and that's always a good thing.

GIVE UP!

The interface for the game took a little getting used to (you use L/R to move around the menu at the bottom and only that one section would work so you couldn't rotate while changing clubs like you can in other golf games) but once I caught on it all made so much sense. There are a bunch of different things you can adjust in your golf swing and you get to change them one at a time or skip over them.

I had never played this game before, and I birdied two of the first three holes. My first few swings back at other golf games, which I had played before, went a matter of feet. I was scoring 8+, not 3. This is a really big deal and means this game just makes sense out of the box. I really, really like that.

There's also an interesting difficulty setting in the game which is a big step up from other games. There are 4 playable characters and each has different strengths and weaknesses which they tell you about right off the bat! I chose to play as the girl, of course, and her stats were such that she hit for the least distance but had the most accuracy. (Maybe that's why I was able to actually hit the fairway and get birdies...)

I only played three holes because I really don't feel like playing golf right now, but I'm not turning the game off in disgust. It was actually fun. Which is a HUGE step up from the other golf games thus far. well done, Irem. I hope you make good money in the pachinko business.

Rating: B+

#84: The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare

Worst intro screen... EVER!

Bart's Nightmare is a game I can remember renting multiple times as a kid. There weren't too many games that meet that criteria so this game must have been pretty good, right? Or maybe just really hard? I'm not quite sure...

Bartman VS Barney!

One thing I do know is this game feels like The Simpsons. It has so many little things thrown in to reference individual episodes... Jebediah Springfield's cut off head rolling down the street, for example. Or Blinky, the 3 eyed fish. It has Simpsons music, and Simpsons appropriate voiceovers. It feels like a really good themed tie-in game.

D+ is better than F!

The game itself is a little frustrating. You start off on the street in a dream sequence and need to platform your way around trying to survive until a page from your homework floats down the street. Jump on the page and you get teleported into a minigame. Beat the minigame and make progress towards getting your homework completed. Fail and you get kicked out into the street.

I didn't get to all the minigames this time around, but I could remember some of them from more than 20 years ago regardless. Itchy and Scratchy, Bartman, Bartzilla, a really weird Indiana Jones level, an even weirder level where you're floating in a bloodstream using a tire pump to kill army cells while you collect Smilin' Joe Fissions. I think there are 8 in total? I beat 3 of them this time before I died which is how I got that lovely D+ on my homework.

The minigames are fun but the street section is annoying. You acquire powerups by jumping over things, but that only works if you're on the exact same plane as the enemy and the enemies move across planes so it's annoying to do. A lot of the street level feels like a way to throw in episode references, which is neat the first time you see them, but gets old. Surviving until you find a page isn't a terribly interesting game mechanic and it gets even worse when the bets way to survive is a skateboard that moves so fast you can end up missing pages!

I wonder if there are any glitches in this game to speed beating it up...

At any rate, I was having fun and only played the one time because the sound was messed up in my emulator. I think I may need to download a new one or something because this problem is cropping up more often than I'd like. This was a fun game back in the day, and actually feeling like The Simpsons has to be worth a bump.

Rating: B+

#73: Strike Gunner: S.T.G.

S.T.G. stands for STrike Gunner? Do you need the periods?

Strike Gunner is a pretty straightforward scrolling shooter. Get in a plane, shoot the things flying towards you, dodge the bullets that they're shooting at you. Reach a boss. Shoot parts of the boss so his weapons fall off. Win.

PEW PEW!

Strike Gunner does have some things going for it. It doesn't suffer from much hardware slowdown at all. It has a relatively straightforward weapon scaling system. It has 15 different super weapons to use with your super power meter. The controls are smooth.

Sonic boom!

Things aren't all perfect with this game. The music is mediocre, the plot is practically nonexistent (other than that it takes place is some sort of post apocalyptic future set in 2008), and it only uses two buttons. TWO BUTTONS! The SNES has 6 main buttons to use... I want more games to use them!

One interesting twist is with the super weapons. There are 15 to choose from but as soon as you beat a level with one of them you lose the ability to choose it. So for the 3rd stage I couldn't use the homing missiles or the plasma shield. This is the sort of thing I like and would have made this a good rental as a kid. You need to play a bunch to figure out the weapons and then you get to plot out the right order to use them based on the levels. I used homing missile on the first level and it was very straightforward so it was a waste. It would have been much more useful on the second or third level! I also suspect that if you play 2 player you can't share weapons which just adds more interesting decisions!

Rating: B

#71: Rampart

JOIN UP!

There are some sounds that stick with me for no discernible reason. I wouldn't have been able to describe the opening sound for Rampart before I played it today. Even now, 40 minutes later, I can't describe it at all. But as soon as it started playing I knew right away that it was time to build cannons and destroy my brother's walls.

PEW PEW!

Unfortunately I don't have a brother here so I can't destroy his walls. Instead I was stuck destroying these little boats that kept swarming my island. Stupid little boats. Stop attacking me! Shooting the little boats wasn't actually very fun. Targeting is quantized and not along the right grid to make it clear where to shoot to sink a boat. If they started moving it was right out. Even now I don't know if I needed to hit them multiple times, or if there was a chance to miss, or if I was just aiming badly. I ended up just unloading tons of bullets at each boat and taking many waves to kill them all. This is made easier by building more cannons every wave, I guess...

Tetris!

The other aspect of the game is the rebuild your walls stage. You get given a random piece of size 1 to 5 which you can rotate. You can't build over existing stuff like cannons, castles, or fires. Surround extra castles for bonus points and extra cannons! This aspect was actually really stressful. Am I going to get the piece I need? Can I mash buttons fast enough putting pieces into any legal spot to try to search for the right piece? Is it even possible to succeed? (Fires along the coast could make it impossible to fix a give castle.) Fail to surround any castle and lose.

I remember liking Rampart as a kid, and it was still ok even now. I suspect it would have been better with a second player? Even alone, this would have been a definite rental.

It even had actual voices! CEASE! FIRE!

Rating: B+

#67: Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

Warrior or Worrier?

I will admit to being very surprised when I went to load up this game. Apparently there are 11 different Street Fighter II roms that were in the download pack I found when I started this little adventure. I played a fair amount of SNES SFII way back in the day, but I think it was mostly on the Turbo edition.

Uh, Gief? I don't think that's appropriate touching.

I kicked things off with my favourite character, Zangief! The gigantic bear wrestling dude from Russia. I do recall that some versions of the game have a terrible Gief, and some versions have a truly terribly Gief. And one version had an absurd Gief where his spin made him fly and he'd wrap around the top of the screen back to the bottom. This version has a truly terrible Gief. He doesn't move at all when he spins and he has no other move. A bunch of throws, which are impossible to use on a smart opponent. The AI did not start smart, so I got to murder them with Gief. Then they stopped being bad and I couldn't win.

YA-TSA!

I beat a few people with Ken, and then got stuck on Mike Tyson Balrog. Eventually I decided to pull out the big guns and use the cheating fat man on him. Cheating fat man doesn't really get to cheat in this version (Honda is rooting when using his hundred hand punch) but just standing still with it up was good enough. Balrog had no way to attack me through it, and eventually got bored and threw himself into the hands. Over and over until I won.

Then Vega blew me up and I got bored and quit. Street Fighter is still a great game, regardless. Better against a human instead of just the AI, but still fun.

Rating: B+

#65: Clue

Whodunnit?

I have always been a huge fan of logic puzzles as appeared in puzzle magazines, and I've always been a huge fan of board games. It should come as no surprise that I loved to play the Clue board game as a kid. Video game adaptations of board games, on the other hand, tend to be pretty flawed. Either the AI is terrible or the interface is terrible or both are terrible. But since Clue is really just a single player puzzle with other people racing against your clock it isn't actually so bad.

Shake-a, shake-a... Boom!

The game had difficulty levels to choose from, so I chose the hardest one. It ended up giving me a game that wasn't the same as the Clue board game. The normal action of interrogating to find out what cards other people held seemed to be limited, and I used all mine up right away. The rest of my turns, and all of the AI turns, consisted of entering a room and nominating a person and a weapon. Then the game would try to link those objects together in some way, or not. So it might tell you if Mr Green was in the Lounge, or if he had the candlestick, or if the candlestick was in the Lounge. Basically turning the whole thing into a really big logic puzzle.

Winner!

The AI found out for me that Mrs Peacock was in the Conservatory, and I had that card, so I got to exclude her from my calculations. I had the Scarlet and White cards dealt to me, and someone showed me Plum during my limited interrogations. So I knew it was down to Green or Mustard and put all my efforts into figuring out which weapons they had. Green had the candlestick. Mustard had the revolver. Either could have been the weapon. I excluded both of them from a couple of the rooms I had, and then the AI found out that Green was in the Hall. I couldn't see how I was going to get better than 50-50 to win with my earlier wasted interrogations so I went for it as an accusation. Success! Suck on that, Mr Green! Colonel Mustard rules the day!

The game had some cute music clips that played for each room and each character, which I liked. The game's music bugged out halfway through when I alt-tabbed to notepad where I was making notes and it ended up with the looping choppy sound that kept me from playing Jack Nicklaus Golf. Pretty sure that's an emulator flaw. I considered finding a different emulator but decided I could play Clue without sound and just took my headphones off.

This game was one I remember renting multiple times as a kid. I loved Clue. I still do, really. The movie is awesome and I've even named a Blood Bowl team after the characters. The SNES adaptation was still fun even 21 years later.

Rating: B+

#58: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II

KOEI!

I have a confession to make. I love the Final Fantasy games, and Square is now probably my favourite game company, but back in the day my favourite was Koei. I loved their historical simulation series. Uncharted Waters, Pacific Theatre of Operations, Aerobiz, Romance of the Three Kingdoms III... All awesome, awesome games. It helped that they were mostly games that could be played multiplayer so it was easier to rent them to play with my brother. RPG games aren't very good for sharing, but these neat simulation games were.

Yes, Nick Page is totally a Chinese name.

I hadn't played this particular game before, as it wasn't available for rent in any of the nearby stores. I played the sequel a lot, though. The game is a pretty interesting civ building game. You have a city and a couple generals. Each month each of your generals can take one action. It can be spending money to improve infrastructure. It can be making your army better. It can be trying to recruit more generals. There's espionage, and plotting, and all sorts of dastardly things you can do. Combat is played out on a tactical hex grid, and there's lots of stuff you can do there too. Personal combat between generals. Armies can attack in a variety of ways. You can try to bribe enemy generals. You can start fires. There's terrain that matters. If the fight doesn't end after a set number of turns the fight gets paused and you take another round of city turns, and then the fight resumes again. You need to eat food to keep this up, so you can try to win a fight by starving the enemy out.

RIP Kong Rong

Like all good simulation civ games you need to know what's going on before you can play it well. This game suffers a little in that I could spend a lot of time learning how to be good at RotTK2, or I could just go play more Civ V, and that's a game I know and enjoy. So I didn't put much time into this one. I threw my second general into a fight that it turns out I couldn't win. Oh well! I remember enough to know that I desperately needed to recruit more generals so that I could attack with more than 100 troops.

That said, while I don't really want to play this game more now, I totally would have wanted to play it as a kid. I would have needed to find it before RotTK3, because that game was better, but if I had I think I would have really liked this one.

Rating: B+

#44: SmartBall

Happy Ball!

I'd never heard of SmartBall before today. The word smart at the front makes me thing that maybe this will be a neat puzzle game of some kind. Unfortunately that turned out not to be true. SmartBall would actually seem to be an interesting but confusing platformer.

Wall walk!

I take on the role of Jerry, a cute little ball of goo. He can run, and jump, and contort his body. His down to squash things you're standing on. Hit up to turn into a spike of sorts to impale things above you. If you hold the run button down you can climb up walls, and you can run along ceilings. There are little pipes you can crawl down. There are balls you cal pick up which end up floating inside you as if you were a gelatinous cube. Turns out if you hit the L button you can shoot those balls out. I found this out after failing to find a way to hurt the first boss. The boss would periodically throw out more balls, so I figured there had to be a way to use them. I hit all the buttons again, and L did the trick.

CAW!

I did a bit of reading afterwards and it turns out there's this big story about how I'm a prince that got turned into a jelly bean thing by someone who was jealous of the princess. This was all in the Japanese version, but Sony cut it all out for the NA release. I guess they figured we couldn't handle a bit of plot to go with our weird platformer. It would also seem that there's some sort of issue with the words Jerry and Jelly. I don't know if it was an intentional play on the Japanese accent or just a brutal mistranslation.

It would also seem a sequel was pretty much completely developed but by that point Sony and Nintendo hated each other so Sony didn't release it. Instead they went and made the PlayStation.

At any rate, the game only used 3 buttons, which makes me a little sad, and it chose to use L instead of a face button for shoot, which made me more sad. The complete removal of any sort of story frustrates me. The character is cute, and the music was enjoyable, but the game seemed to be built around the whole idea of sticking to walls and ceilings and the implementation was a little wonky. In particular, jumping off of them was awkward.

On the plus side, when I went game over it let me start again on the current stage and there didn't seem to be a finite number of continues. That makes me suspect if I'd played this game as a kid I would have played it through to completion.

Rating: B