#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

#81: Monopoly

Rich Uncle Pennybags!

I know it hurts my boardgamer cool factor but I actually like Monopoly. It's not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination but I had a lot of fun playing it as a kid and I still enjoy rolling dice and seeing what happens. You can certainly play with rules mods that make the game worse (like Free Parking being Profit Parking) and I have to admit I don't think I've played the game since Tom and I schooled Andrew and Ken when we played it for money back in University but I still like the game. So I was oddly looking forward to this game more than most thus far.

WOOHOO!

Unfortunately the things I like most about video game adaptations of board games are not present here. The biggest problem is that they added in an animation when a piece moves around the board. And then they play it every time someone moves. It's like playing the game with someone who doesn't realize the board is divided up into 5 and 10 space segments so they have to count out each and every space. Only it's worse than that, because they're counting VEEEEEERRRRY SLOOOOOOOOOOOWLY. And they're counting it out for each player. Having animations on the community chest cards seemed a little more reasonable. You need to pause and read the card anyway. (Well, no you don't, just give me my $10.)

Nick, are you a moron? PRESS A!

The AI was TERRIBLE. This is the first trade offered in the game, from the guy who has Boardwalk. He is interested in my Park Place and is willing to give me nothing at all for it. This wasn't just the AI trying to fleece the rube either. I was playing a 4 player game with 3 AIs and they insisted on offering each other trades of something for nothing. The worst part is it went into all the menus to show them building the trade of something for nothing. The other AI would reject the trade. Then on the other AI's turn they'd offer nothing for something back the other way. I had to sit and watch them try to trick each other back and forth with it taking a lot of time for each 'trade'.

I ended up quitting before even finishing a single game. Not because I didn't want to play Monopoly... In fact I actually want to play a game of Monopoly more now than ever! But because this version is abysmally bad. I wouldn't recommend even the most diehard Monopoly fan give this a try.

Rating: F-

#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+

#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-