#129: Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball

Junior Baseball?

Well, it's pretty obvious what we're going to run into here. A baseball game with Cal Ripken Jr's endorsement. I'm not a terribly big fan of baseball games now, but I used to like them a lot back when I was a kid. Is this a game I would have liked back then?

FIRDY BIRD!

This game has some high points, and some low points. The high points include the really great music and sound effects. It has an organ playing a pretty good rendition of the US National Anthem, for example. And it said "Play Ball!" at the end of it just like it felt like it should. I like those little details in a game. The low points involve fake rosters (except for Cal Ripkin), horrendous pitching, and terrible fielding. The batting wasn't great either. And I can't talk about the baserunning since the only time I didn't get out was when I hit a homerun.


Watch live video from TheGreatZiggyny on Twitch

I streamed my experience playing this game. Mostly as a test of my ability to stream through an emulator, but it worked well enough I'll probably do it again next week.

Anyway... I don't think young Nick would have enjoyed this game very much at all. But it is a functional game, I have to give it that. And the sweet music is enough to earn it a plus.

Rating: D+

#123: Spider-Man & X:Men: Arcade's Revenge

Does whatever a X can!

I vaguely remember playing this game as a kid, and I remember watching a speedrun of it in one of the marathons I watched this year, so I knew what I was getting into. It's a platformer where you get to choose which character you want to play. Not so you can use the right abilities to beat a level as each character has their own level to play tailored to them. So no interesting choices, really, you just get to pick what order to play in.

GAMBIT! NOOOOOOO!

The game opens with a comic style intro, which is awesome. I like when a game tells me a little about what is going on. Even when it's as little as 'garbage truck has been eating X-Men, Spider-Man watched from above and is going to help out'.

My spider-senses are tingling...

You know how I said I watched this game in a marathon? It was during a block of AGDQ where they switched what the A stood for. Most of the week was 'Awesome Games Done Quick' but for a chunk of time they instead did 'Awful Games Done Quick'. This game was Awful. And it still is. The controls are bad, and the level design is terrible. Spider-Man had to backtrack through his level 4 or 5 times to collect all the items in order to open the door. All the enemies are killed off on the first pass... Blerg!

It looks like a cool enough game. But it plays awfully. 5 different characters, 5 different platformers, 5 different sets of controls... All bad. Still a playable game, so better than some of the dreck I've played, but really not any good at all.

Rating: D

#113: Cyber Spin

That font is the best thing about this game...

Cyber Spin is another game that's new to me, and that I was way off base when I guessed what it would be from the name. Cyber Spin sounds like some kind of cyberpunkesque skating game or probably a platformer that looks like Tron. Instead it turned out to be a high speed racing game. The name probably comes from how easy it was to make the car spin out and crash into a wall? And by crash I mean bounce, because apparently this car can crash into a wall at ~400 km/h and take no damage like it was a bumper car.

Screwy turn ahead!

The one good thing this game has going for it is the way it flashed up the direction of an upcoming turn to let you setup for it. No track map was annoying but at least the little diamond signs gave me a chance of steering at high speeds.

Game over? I guess?

I raced a bit and got this cryptic game over screen. I'm guessing I had to actually race in under 45 seconds? I tried again, made use of the turbo button to put up what I thought was a pretty good time, and still was over 45 seconds. That's about enough of this game.

Speaking of a turbo button... They made a pretty bad use of the buttons on the controller! Y, a pretty standard button, did nothing. B was for breaking, something that was never needed in the first level at least. A was for going fast and you had to hold it down. X was turbo. I'm pretty good at holding down a button while pressing another one, but the Y into X combo is a weird one. I feel like that means it rarely got used in games while I was developing my controller skills. I was able to do it, but it was weird. L and R caused big skids in one direction or the other. Again, not needed on the first track. Maybe those are more relevant later on? I'll never know.

I don't much care for racing games, especially ones like this that look like they should be realistic but aren't. I get the appeal of games that emulate real racing even if I don't like them much. I get the appeal of games that go way crazy and are obviously using fake physics like Mario Kart. I don't get why someone would make a game like this one, or why someone would want to play it. Well done, past me, for avoiding this one.

Rating: D-

#111: Captain Novolin

Suck it, giant evil donut!

I first learned about the existence of this game earlier this year while watching Awesome Games Done Quick. One might think that this game would therefore be awesome, but it was in the subsection they run called 'Awful Games Done Quick'. Ruh-roh!

Your SNES is not a licensed doctor.

This game was designed to teach kids about diabetes. Donuts and hot fudge sundaes are evil and will kill you if you touch them. Each level has good food pickups you can make, but if you pick up too many of them then you also die. Presumably if you pick up too few that would be bad too, but I had a hard time not picking up the pick-ups in a platformer. Gotta catch them all! You're routinely forced to check your blood sugar level, inject yourself with insulin, read factoids about diabetes, and answer quizzes about the factoids.

This game has jumped the sundae.

I remember hearing from people's donation comments during AGDQ that this game was actually reasonable for helping kids learn about their diabetes. That's fantastic for it. But it's an atrocious game! It's a platformer where you can't go backwards and there are no platforms. Move in a straight line avoiding or killing the big sugary things while hitting most of the small things.

The controls are also terrible. Your only attack option is to jump in the air then hit down to stomp. I didn't realize this the first time I tried and couldn't beat the first level. I went and found a control listing online and found out how to kill things and made it pretty far into a very short game. The game only uses one button, which sucks. I hate when games only use one button. (Jump, in this case.)

Maybe edutainment is a real thing worthy of praise, but I'm looking at if I'd have wanted to actually play this game now, or back when I was a kid, and the answer to both questions is no. But it probably did some good in the world, so it gets to escape an F rating.

Rating: D-

#107: TKO Super Championship Boxing

TKO!

Well, I sure know what I'm getting into from the title of this game. Some sort of boxing game. Punch some dudes, knock them out. Maybe only technically knock them out, but knock them out regardless.

Licensee name on the corners? Tacky!

TKO turns out to be a game where you can move around in a 2 dimensional ring and where you have a limited amount of stamina to use on punching before you need to stop punching. There are different kinds of punches (jabs, hooks, etc...) and different ways to dodge a punch. Unfortunately the controls are garbage and I could never figure out how to dodge at all, let alone how to choose which dodge to use. The AI could dodge though, so as soon as I got past the first couple fights and they started dodging I was screwed.

I feel like laying down some tar...

The 2 dimensional aspect had the same 'problem' as Double Dragon did, which was the AI wasn't very good at working out how to attack someone not on the same plane as them. So it was pretty easy to strafe up and down in order to attack when I had full stamina and flee when I wanted to regenerate. It worked like a charm until the AI learned to block and then I was in trouble.

The game had a neat leveling system where after each win I'd get to pick one of five ways to train which would raise a stat and make me better at something. I like this idea a lot. If only it wasn't in a game that was pretty bad otherwise...

Rating: D

#98: NCAA Basketball

No developer credits on the title screen...

As far as hardcore gamers seem to go I'm a pretty big sports fan. Watching sports, playing sports, playing sports games... I tend to like it all. Except basketball. For whatever reason I've always found basketball to be frustrating to play and boring to watch. Maybe it's being short and bad at jumping with low upper body strength? I don't know, I'm terrible at other sports and I can still enjoy them. Just not basketball.

BUFFING!

If there's something else I've never gotten into it's the NCAA. I'm not from the US so US college sports has never appealed to me. There are football bowl games and this whole March Madness thing but I've always just found it easier to ignore it than try to figure it all out. All the power to people who do get into it, but it's not me. So while this game looks like it has all the actual conferences and teams and things, that gets no bonus points from me. It also looks like the player names are faked since I looked up the Demon Deacons rosters from around 1992 and none of those players were on it. (Aside: Demon Deacons is such an awesome name and they have a fantastic logo!)

Hughes is _wide open_ down court?

The game itself has the 'interesting' rotating camera movement that I remember from Stanley Cup Hockey. I remember finding it disconcerting in that game and it's not much better here.

The controls didn't make a whole lot of sense. I couldn't find a way to actually do anything when the enemy had the ball. I could move around, and I could jump, but I couldn't find a 'strip the ball' button. That's probably realistic? Basketball defense is probably a lot of standing around in zone control and jumping to block shots? Shots never got blocked though. Either way.

The game had a difficulty setting, and I put it on easy, which meant almost all of my 3 point shots went in no matter where I shot from. Getting stuck playing a sports game where I can't score at all is pretty frustrating so I like that this exists, but it also meant winning was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Assuming I could find it in myself to actually play out 24 minutes of basketball. (Spoiler: I couldn't.)

Rating: D

#96: James Bond Jr.

Nice colour scheme!

So... Is James Bond Jr actually a thing? I have to admit to never having seen a full James Bond movie and really the only way I've ever interacted with the franchise at all is Golden Eye 64 on the N64. There was no James Bond Jr in that game!

Got my shoe powerup, now I can jump high!

The game started off with some pretty cool music. Very different from anything else I've ever heard from the SNES. I liked it. There was a bunch of cutscenes explaining the story which is nice. Bad guy steal shiny thing. Bad guy use shiny thing to do evil. James Bond Jr get shiny thing back from bad guy. Then I got dumped into what seemed to be a mediocre platformer. My jump and attack buttons weren't beside each other on the controller (B and X) which was super awkward.

PEW PEW!

The platformer didn't last long. I think I fought two enemies before I got whisked into a helicopter where I got to play a mediocre scrolling shooter. A hard scrolling shooter. It kept making me fly through little tiny corridors (by blocking most of the screen with gigantic trees) and then it would shoot fireballs through the corridor such that I couldn't find a way to avoid taking damage. One hit kills you if you don't have the shield power up. I died five times before making it to the end of the stage so I don't know if there was going to be a boss, or if I was going to get to platform again, or what.

The platforming seemed bad but I wanted to give it a chance on a real level. The shooter was bad, and I got game overed so I never got to find out what the split between the two genres was going to be. And I still don't know if James Bond Jr is a real thing. (Wikipedia tells me yes, as a bad American spin-off. James Bond Jr is James Bond's nephew.)

Anyway, the music was awesome but everything else seemed pretty bad to mediocre.

Rating: D

#93: Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

Sequel ho!

The original Home Alone game got a pretty decent rating from me (B+) but a lot of that was probably nostalgia. This game feels pretty similar, and the controls may even be a bit tighter, but I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing or why I should be doing it. Maybe it's because I haven't seen the movie? I guess I don't understand why the movie got a sequel and I really don't understand why the game got one. Ok, looking at the box office numbers Home Alone was actually #5 all-time when it came out behind only ET and the 3 Star Wars movies. Adjusted for inflation it's still #38 all-time which is crazy! Thankfully Independence Day is #37 so my world still makes some amount of sense.

This sucks.

The game feels a lot like the first one where you have to run around, jump and dodge different animated objects and people, and collect things. The original game made some amount of sense, though. There are robbers so you're trying to store valuables in the vault. The people trying to kill you are breaking into your house so it makes sense that they're after you. Why is the french maid of a hotel standing on a bed throwing pillows at me? What kind of vacuum cleaner is big enough to eat a 5 foot tall boy?

Hey lady, do you have any pizza?

I also didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. There was only really one way to go, so I went that way, but I don't know what my goal was supposed to be. Am I trying to find my hotel room? If so, why do I keep getting off on the wrong floor? Why did it animate the elevator going up 10 floors when I first got on? It took longer to watch the elevator than to run past all of the obstacles on the ground floor! And I didn't find a single collectable that seemed relevant.

I don't know... Maybe this game made sense back in the day if I'd been one of the few people to watch the Home Alone sequel. But I wasn't, and this isn't back in the day, and I got game overed 4 times before the end of the first level. So for me this game sucks.

Rating: D-

#90: David Crane's Amazing Tennis

Amazing, eh?

I assumed David Crane was a tennis player who I'd just never heard of but it turns out he was one of the Atari game programmers who got fed up with how bad Atari treated their programmers and quit to form Activision. He was involved in games like Pitfall and Ghostbusters! Apparently he was a big enough deal that he got to put his name on a game, like Sid Meier with his Pirates and his Civilizations.

Gender, race, size? Nope, the only player
customization option is handedness.

He only has the one game named after him, and I can imagine why. Amazing Tennis is only amazing in terms of how bad it is. The characters are pretty sluggish and I had a hard time moving into position to even make contact with most of the balls. Maybe it's realistic to be able to hit the ball where the other person can't reach it but if I can't have a rally in a tennis game it isn't much fun. Especially since I couldn't find any way to precisely aim the ball myself so I had no hope of hitting the ball where he couldn't reach it. I actually managed to score a total of one point total across an entire set.

Kanyanta > Ziggyny

I'm sure part of it was just not knowing the controls very well, but I found the game to be sluggish, frustrating, and not fun.

Rating: D-

#89: Blazeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge

BLAZE ON!

blaZeon is a game I'd never heard of, but from the name it sounded like it was probably a racing game of some kind. Turns out it's a side scrolling shooter ported to the SNES from the arcade. That hasn't gone very well thus far in this adventure...

PEW PEW!

This game has a twist on the standard kill things to get power ups to become viable and then die once and get screwed thing. There are no standard power ups at all. Instead every now and then a gigantic mech will come out and attack you. You have a stun pod you can launch at it which turns it blue. Then if you fly into it you become the giant mech! Interestingly if you do any damage to the mech before you stun it your captured mech keeps that damage so you need to just stun it, never hurt it.

What? I don't even...

I got to the boss of the first level, lost my mech, and then had to try to win the fight with my remaining 2 lives and basic ship. I failed. I tried again. I failed.

The problem is this game was originally an arcade game. It wasn't built to be fair, or beatable. It was built to convince you to pump quarters into it. I'm generally pretty good at 'bullet hell' but this boss was something else. I really think he was just designed to kill you over and over. Want to get back to being awesome in a mech? Pay more money.

Man... Were original arcade games pay to win?

Rating: D

#80: George Foreman's KO Boxing

Stick to the grills, Georgie.

I remember George Foreman for his TV show and his meat grills. He was also quite the boxer and has several records relating to his world heavyweight championship victory at the age of 45. This game came out in the middle of his 'old man comeback' and plays up the fact that he's still just as strong a puncher as he was in his youth.

PHYSICS!

Unfortunately while the game claims he's still a powerful puncher the game itself disputes that quite heavily. You play as George Foreman and you do no damage with your punches. You need to land dozens of punches to do the same amount of damage that your opponent does in a single punch. George Foreman was reknown for winning by knockout; I won two matches and they were both by decision.

PS: Eat Doritos.

Take a look at that stat line! I landed 35 more punches and yet I got knocked down and he didn't. The first guy was pretty easy to dodge and counter attack so I can almost see why they'd want to set it up this way... But I'm supposed to be the awesome George Foreman. If the first guy is easy to dodge and counter attack so be it. Let me lay him out! Let me murder him! That's what boxing is all about!

On the plus side the game had voice overs and I like the way the faces get beat up as the fighters take damage. On the down side George Foreman doesn't do enough damage and that's a really big down side. Having Little Mac need to dodge and punch a bajillion times to take out Mike Tyson feels like it might make sense. But having George Foreman need to dodge every single punch and land a ton himself to get ahead? Sorry, that's just not right.

Rating: D-

#68: Kablooey

KABLOOEY!

I didn't know what to expect when I saw the next game was called Kablooey. Platformer? Shooter maybe? I was not expecting a puzzle game, but that's what I got. One with very low definition graphics if the title screen is any indication!

Game Instructions!

The game opened with an instruction screen which is something more games could use. Unfortunately the instructions were in a box that can show 19 characters at a time. Less than 1/7th of a tweet! It slowly scrolled sideways and took about 10 minutes to finish off. I almost fell asleep during it. Perhaps even worse, it didn't tell me what the buttons did, or how to explode bombs. It told me what the different tiles would do and that was about it. So despite 10 minutes of instructions I still didn't know how to play!

Graphics didn't get any better...

It turned out I had 2 buttons which were each duplicated twice so it seemed like I had 4 buttons but it was all a lie. One of the buttons let me pick up a bomb but I couldn't figure out why that mattered. (It turned out there were little trenches you could drag bombs along on later levels, so it didn't matter on the first stage where I was trying to figure out the controls. Terrible game design, that.) The other button started a detonation timer... Hold it down for 3 seconds on a bomb to prime the bomb for an explosion. Then I had a brief window of time to run one square away before the bomb exploded.

Explosions would chain, and bigger bombs had bigger explosions. You could still only run away one space, so manually detonating a big bomb was suicide. So the goal was to figure out the order to explode the bombs and the chains you wanted to have happen. I like puzzle games, and these puzzles were fairly interesting.

Unfortunately the interface was terrible. You died if you walked off the cliff, or got exploded. You'll note the board is set up with diagonal movement while the SNES controller is up/down and left/right. So sometimes I'd just walk off the cliff for no reason. Movement was also painfully slow, and the whole 'hold the button down for 3 seconds and then run' mechanic didn't seem to serve any purpose at all. Push a button to tag a bomb to explode when you walk off would seem to be a better interface. That way I wouldn't accidentally kill myself by mistiming things, which did happen. It also took forever to reload after a mistake.

On the plus side, it had actual speech to introduce the levels. Just 'Player One, Get Ready' in a very robotic female voice, but still pretty good for an SNES game. Minus points for being player one get ready instead of ready player one, though.

So while I like the idea of the game, and could see playing it as a browser game or something, the SNES game was painful to play.

Rating: D-

#64: Thunder Spirits

Thunder... Thunder... THUNDER SPIRITS!

I had never heard of this game so I didn't know what genre to expect, until I saw the title screen. This is going to be a side scrolling shooter. Or maybe a top scrolling shooter. Seika is the company that has brought us Drakkhen and Lagoon which were definitely on the sketchy side of the RPG genre... How would Thunder Spirits compare to other shooters?

PEW PEW!

The first thing I try in a new game is to hit all the buttons on the face of the controller. Three of them did nothing (no bombs?) and one of them shot my guns. Very slowly if I held it down, or I could really mash the button to get a semi reasonable stream of bullets. Maybe it's just me getting old, but I don't like having to constantly jam the button that much to accomplish something. Give me autofire! Or a limited number of bullets so mashing is detrimental. Don't make the only way to reasonably play your game be to mash one and only one button!

TROGDOR!

I got some powerups along the way. Some of them seemed to do something, others did not. Then I noticed there were more icons at the bottom of the screen. Could I hit select to change them? Nope. But it turned out L and R both cycled through the options at the bottom. R would change my currently equipped weapon. L would change my current ship speed. Changing speed sounds good, because it means I could go slow through an intricate maze of bullets and fast to avoid sharply turning enemies but because you could only toggle in one direction and there were 4 speeds it didn't seem plausible to change on the fly. So I just set it to as fast as possible and hoped I wouldn't careen into things. I did. Changing weapons was interesting in that the powerups would only buff some weapons and death would only level down the currently equipped powerup.

The game had limited lives, and limited continues, but if you continued you got to keep going right from where you died. So it was more like slightly less limited lives. I still managed to lose them all without beating the first level. I may have made it to the dragon boss but he had a fire breath attack that seemed to be unavoidable. Once I ran out of continues I had no desire to restart from the beginning. Especially with my right arm going numb from all the button mashing.

Rating: D-

#63: Super Soccer Champ

Taito strikes again!

Hot on the heels of last month's Super Soccer, today we have Super Soccer Champ. I'm wondering if Taito was making a Super Soccer of their own but when they asked Nintendo for cartridges they were told to stuff it since Nintendo was making their own Super Soccer. Was Super Soccer rushed in order to hit the shelves before Super Soccer Champ? And why does it seem to be so hard to make a fun soccer game?

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I went into the option menu and one of the options was for the game to explain what all the buttons did! YES! Taito, you rock! Now can you explain to me why the Y and B buttons were overloaded to have 6 or 7 functions each while X, A, L, and R all had no game effect? Taito, you suck!

OOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAALLL!

Super Soccer didn't give me power ratings for any of the teams, but I went with what I assumed was going to be a pretty good team: Brazil. It turned out Brazil was overpowered. They had one guy who was way faster than anyone else I played against. So I tried to pass it back to my right defender and then he just ran circles around the other team. I would run near an enemy in order to get him to follow me, and could end up kiting multiple players in a circle. Then I just had to run across the goal crease until the goalie was no longer in a position to stop my shot and score. I could only shoot every 45 degrees, so I actually don't know how I would possibly score without these cheating trick unless maybe the goalie can just miss a shot straight at him.

I've played two other soccer games recently and they both earned a D- rating. This game was slightly more fun than those were, because I was able to score and win. Instead of losing 40-0 I would win 5-0. Neither makes for a good game, but one was slightly more fun.

Rating: D

#59: Super Soccer

Soccer sure is super!

Super Soccer is pretty much exactly what it claims to be. It's a soccer game for the Super Nintendo. It has 16 teams, a tournament mode, and 8 different formations. It has teams with stereotypically correct names. Maybe even the actual names from international soccer around that time? I don't know.

You can do it, Franz!

What the game doesn't seem to have is penalties of any kind. It also has both slide tackles and shoulder checks, so it's very hard to actually go anywhere with the ball. The big problem for me is the buttons changed functionality based on the location of the ball. So I'd hit the shoulder check button, but the ball would be in the air so instead I would anemically kick at the ball. The computer never suffered from this problem since it knew when the buttons would do the right things. As such I couldn't ever make progress against the computer except by slowing headering the ball down the field (when the ball is always in the air the computer could never throw a shoulder check) and the computer could easily make progress against me.

PS: Buy SimCity!

The game ended 19-0. Most of the game was spent the same way... I'd kick the ball to my teammate in the circle, he would immediately get hit and lose the ball. The computer would pass it to a teammate who would shoot on net and probably score. I ended up getting one shot on net the entire game. The computer stopped it.

This is yet another game where I feel like the controls are bad enough that the AI has a stupid advantage over a human. Maybe this would be a good game to play with another human, but as a single player game it stinks.

Rating: D-

#52: World League Soccer

League is like Cup, right?

World League Soccer is a game by Mindscape, which surprised me. I remember Mindscape from way back in my Commodore 64 days, and I liked their games, but I didn't think they made SNES games. I mean, they did put out The Chessmaster that I've played already, but that game felt like something a high school student wrote for a class project. How would they fare in the sports game world?

FOUL!

Well, not very well. The graphics are something I would have expected from the Commodore 64, not from the Super Nintendo. The gameplay too, since although at least 4 of the buttons seemed to do things they all seemed to do the exact same thing. Diving tackle without the ball, kick the ball with the ball. So exactly what I'd expect from a single button joystick setup!

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!

I played as Japan vs Ireland, and the names seemed very Japanese and very British. Did they have the actual teams from those countries from 1993? I don't know. It would be cool if they did. The game had a 'World Match' mode which looked like it emulated the World Cup format. It had other game modes too, which I like to see.

However, just like The Chessmaster, this game really suffers from terrible controls and bad graphics. I don't think Mindscape shifted into SNES development very well. They did put out 14 more games on the SNES... I hope they got better!

That said, despite the bad controls I do think I could have rented this game as a kid, played with my brother, and had some amount of fun. We sure played a bunch of C64 sports games and enjoyed it, so I suspect we would have done the same on the SNES.

Rating: D-

#50: Top Gear

Not the UK show.

How could a game called Top Gear be anything but a racing game? The game opened with lots of track selection and difficulty options I couldn't use because you need a password to unlock the later stuff. I was stuck racing in Vegas, presumably on a real track.

Pitstop? Is that you?

The game itself had a very questionable control scheme. Manual gear shifting is annoying but I understand why they put it into games. My big problem is that the #1 button on the controller, the B button, went unused. And the accelerator button was actually X! The least used button in most games was the button I had to hold down! My thumb does not have the muscle memory to do that properly.

FAILURE!

I thought I did a reasonable job in my first race. Especially since I used up 2 of my 3 nitro boosts early on when I was trying to figure out the controls. The game starts you at the back of a pack of 20 cars and I managed to make it all the way up to 8th. The game then awarded points to the top 10 of 20 finishers (I earned 3 points for 8th) and followed that up with a game over screen. WHAT? How are you giving me race series points and then saying I didn't finish high enough to keep playing. Why is 8th worth 3 points if 8th is also a DQ?

The music was annoying. The game was not very interesting. The controls sucked, and the scoring system was flawed. There's pretty much nothing good going on with this game that I can see, except maybe if all the tracks were real tracks. That might be pretty cool if I was a racing fan. But I'm not, so I don't care.

Rating: D-