#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-

#48: Rival Turf!

Oh good, a Jaleco game.

Rival Turf started off by asking me to pick if I wanted to play as a pretty white boy or a more brawly looking black dude named Oozie Nelson. I went with Oozie! The game didn't show me the plot, but a quick look on Wikipedia indicates the pretty boy's girlfriend was kidnapped by some thugs and he enlisted the help of his police officer friend Oozie. The game itself is a beat-em-up.

Piledriver!

This game is pretty much identical to Final Fight. The plot is the same. The character choices are the same. The buttons are the same. There was a dagger I could pick up and throw, just like in Final Fight. There was a trash can to break with a food health boost in it, just like in Final Fight. The game sucks, just like Final Fight.

Genie!

Except this game is slightly worse. There are fewer moves to do when grappling. The first boss seemed really hard, because he had a sword that he'd drop. While he had the sword I could easily beat him up. But when the sword fell to the ground my attack button became the 'pick up the sword' button and he'd kill me while I was bent over picking up the sword. It was frustrating. if I wanted to play Final Fight, I'd go play Final Fight. Not the bad clone. You suck, Jaleco.

Rating: D-

#33: Super E.D.F.: Earth Defense Force

If you're going to stick the whole thing in the title, why have an acronym too?

We've hit another game I'd never played before, or even heard of! I recognize the company name solely from Super Bases Loaded which was fine but unspectacular. What is this game, and would it do any better?

It's only logical.

Well, the first thing I got to do is choose a weapon and there's a terrible graphic of a ship being held in place by a couple of robot arms, so this is probably a side scrolling shooter. That's quite a variety of weapons and it's a little sad that I'll probably only get to have one of them at a time. Maybe power-ups will give the rest?

Yep, definitely a side scrolling shooter, but one with no power-ups to collect. The weapon you choose is what you've got until you die. On the plus side you only have 3 health points and no extra lives so you're going to die in a real hurry. Especially if you make the mistake of choosing a weapon that only shoots forward, like the vulcan. The second wave of enemies comes from above! And covers the entire screen! And repeats seconds later! I honestly can't see how someone who chose the vulcan weapon doesn't lose 2 of their 3 health almost instantly. My second choice was the homing missiles which worked exactly as advertised. I no longer had to worry about trying to hit enemies and just had to worry about dodging bullets. Which worked fine until I made it to the boss who covered the screen in lines of bullets. I bet if you knew the pattern you could pre-plan your dodges, but I didn't so I couldn't. And when I died I was forced to restart from the beginning.

Oh, and the game has lag issues when there's lots of bullets on the screen like pretty much every shooter on the SNES thus far.

The game had three buttons, but I honestly couldn't tell you what one of them did. The other one toggled your ship between being terrible and being awesome so you only hit it once. At least it had auto-fire so I just had to hold the shoot button down.

There've been a lot of medicore to bad shooters thus far, and this one definitely falls on the bad side of things. I didn't miss anything as a kid by not playing this game.

Rating: F+

#12: Super Bases Loaded

Gratuitous butt shots have changed in 21 years...

Super Bases Loaded was the first non-bundled game we had for the SNES when I was a kid. (I believe our Uncle John Boy gave it to us at the same Christmas we got the SNES.) As such this is actually one of my most played SNES games. Compared to previous baseball games we'd played (Baseball on the Intellivision and Street Sports Baseball on the Commodore 64) this game was pretty good. The controls were pretty responsive, you could sub in pinch hitters, plenty of different teams to play...

I have played the perfect game.

It also had an interesting rating system. You earned points for awesome plays. You lost points for striking out, and committing errors, and lots of other bad things. It gave the game some bonus replayability that didn't exist in previous games.  Not as good as adding in a season/league format but still a good step forward.

Quorb! Quorb! He's our man!

I tried to remember which team I used to play and thought there was a reasonable chance it was the K team. As soon as I saw the starting lineup page I knew I'd picked right. Even after all these years I still remember Lynn, Leigh, Quorb... Ryan as the starting pitcher. It's definitely time to play ball!

Sponsored by Saiko?

I managed to hit a home run! You get treated to a little montage with confetti and some scoreboard animations.

Underhanded!

One thing I remembered was how stupidly overpowered the K closer was. He threw underhand and had a really fast fastball. You hold up to throw hard and to throw high and it just combines very well with an underhanded pitcher to be practically unhittable by a human player. The computer didn't do much better here!

Whew!

I ended up barely winning the game (I actually had a big lead but then had a bit of a bad inning in the 8th. My closer was only good for one inning it turned out and I tried to play him in the 7th and 8th and it went poorly.) But the real question is... Did I play a perfect game?!?

Turns out no. Not even close. I struck out 7 times, hit a guy, and walked a guy. It was an intentional walk (runner on 2nd, 1 out, and his pitcher was on deck) but the game still dinged me 3 points for it. Sigh.

At any rate I have absolutely no desire to play a second game. It was an interesting nostalgic trip but the game hasn't actually aged all that well. Pitching isn't as robust as I'd like now. No curve balls. No real way to throw high and slow or low and fast. But for the time it was pretty fun.

Rating: C