#134: Gods

I AM A GOD!

The name didn't ring a bell but once I started playing the game seemed rather familiar. You play a muscled dude in a platformer. Climb ladders, throw knives at enemies, collect gems from their corpses. Get some keys, open some doors. Pretty straightforward stuff.

Bird are jerks!

One of the things I often complain about is bad use of the SNES controller and this game has that covered! One button is for jump. 4 buttons are for nothing. The last button is for attacking, activating switches, picking up items, and managing your inventory. And it's particularly awkward how it decides which thing to do. If you're upright or jumping then you attack. If you're ducking and on top of an item then you pick the item up. If you're ducking and not on top of an item then you switch to a different inventory slot. Stand up with an item selected and you drop it so you actually only have 3 item slots, not 4. Note that this means there's no way to attack while ducking. Enemies often fire projectiles that you need to duck under and it sure would have been nice to be able to hit them! And then to activate a switch you need to be facing the wall, which you accomplish by hitting up. You can't attack while facing the wall, but you sure can get attacked!

ARG!

This may seem like a pedantic argument, but when you get game overed you get to put your name in for the high score screen. But you can't use vowels, and you can only use 3 letters. Ok, fine, maybe it's a weird restriction from arcade machines... But then to have them use vowels and full names for the sample scores... STUPID!

The game also suffered from having enemies spawn on top of me and gank me. It has annoying clunky controls too, so enemies coming from multiple sides at once was a real pain. Both are things you could learn to deal with by memorizing the spawns and knowing when to switch directions and such. But I didn't like it.

I feel like this game would have been a fine Commodore 64 game. Those had awkward controls because joysticks only had one button. Clunky movement made sense too. But to have those in my SNES game? I am not a fan.

Turns out this was initially an Amiga game, but it came out in 1991. So the SNES port was only one year later. No excuse for not using all the buttons... 

Rating: C-

#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+

#125: Wing Commander

CAW?

Wing Commander opens with a credits screen where it starts off with the 3 writer/directors. Considering most of the games I've played in this adventure have felt like the plot could have come off the back of a cereal box that's really encouraging. Now, I played a lot of this game as a kid (my friend Robin owned it and lent it to us every now and then), so I remembered it as being pretty sweet as far as story goes. You go on a bunch of space combat missions with a variety of goals and the story changes based on how good you do on those goals. You can lead humanity to victory or you can actually be forced to run away from the bad guys.

Ten-Forward!

The game opens with what feels like an old Sierra point and click game. I move the cursor around and click to interact with the people and things on the screen. There's a training simulator, a bartender, some fellow pilots with advice, a scoreboard, and an exit. The whole time there's some pretty great background music playing.

RIP ZIGGYNY

This game really went all out on the cutscenes. When I go for my first mission it has lots of little videos with people standing up, and running, and it all looks really awesome. I was doing pretty good on my first mission (I killed 3 enemies!) but then I flew into an asteroid and died. It did a death replay video, and then it went to a memorial cutscene where they gave me a eulogy and then sent my body off into space. I hope I land on the Genesis planet!

I did some reading and apparently this game was first released on PC and was ported to the SNES two years later. It spawned an entire genre of games, including one of my favourite PC games in high school, Tie Fighter. It was well received at the time, and it was still pretty fun now. The graphics and the music and the sound are all top notch. Having a real, coherent plot that changes based on your actions is mind blowing. And then to actually have a pretty good space combat game on top of that? I'm flabbergasted.

Rating: S

#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-

#21: Paperboy 2

Wait, what's a newspaper?

I can remember the original Paperboy being one of my favourite games on the Commodore 64. It was hard, and controlling it with a joystick was wonky, but compared to other games at the time it was pretty fun. And the fact that you'd get game over after a few minutes wasn't so bad because it meant my brother could then take a turn. And then he'd lose in a few minutes and I'd get to go again!

That's not fair!

Paperboy 2 definitely continues that tradition. Most sewer grates do nothing. Some of them have monsters that reach out and kill you. Pranked!

Baby Bung?

The camera angle is a little wonky. I get that you need to see the houses in order to aim your papers at the mailboxes instead of at windows. And to see people throwing junk at you. But then you get no time at all to react to something like a runaway baby carriage.

Wanh waaaaah.

I'm sure there's a lot of pattern recognition going on. You learn to avoid the grates. You learn to stay off the left hand sidewalk. You learn the right timing for each speed to hit the mailboxes. I don't feel like playing enough to get good at this game. I played 3 times and definitely got a higher score each time. But it wasn't terribly fun. I donno. Quirky things happening on a street just isn't amusing to me anymore. Repeated game-overs just aren't my thing either.

But those are issues with the game design, not with the game implementation. This game is very good for what it's trying to be. It's not trying to be a long, fair game. It feels like it's trying to be an arcade game which wants your quarters and is giving you small chunks of a fun game in return.

Rating: B

#6: The Chessmaster

Can you beat Gandalf at chess?

Do you have a desperate need to play a slow, plodding game of chess with bad sound effects and AI? Then Mindscape has the game for you! The first thing that happens when you hit start is you get thrown into a game against an opponent of unknown difficulty. This AI was really big into trading units and actually had a one pawn lead on me into the late game. I don't know how/why it happened (I certainly didn't plan it out) but he ended up losing a rook for no cost and that was pretty much game. I promoted a pawn into a bishop (it said to hit A for a queen but the A button on my xBox controller is in the same location as the SNES B button) but it was good enough.

Suck it, Black!

I'm bad at chess. So the fact I won the first game either means the AI is bad or it let me win. After that game it actually took me into an options menu that I feel should have been available from the start...

2-Player Mode for those without a set.

I tried turning the background music on and let's just say it's very good it defaults to off. It actually reminded me of my first computer programming class in high school when people first discovered they could make qBasic play 'music'. A lot of this game felt like an intro programming class, actually. The graphics feel amateurish. The sound effects certainly are, with the same sound playing both when you take a piece and lose a piece. And the music is just terrible.

The only thing it has going for it is actual chess AI. There are a bunch of different 'level of play' settings that probably change the game a fair bit and which I wouldn't expect a teenager to be able to program. Maybe this game was ok at the time but it seems pretty mediocre now. I'm pretty sure I rented this game at some point in my youth since I remember the Gandalf intro screen but I doubt I was very happy with that decision.

Rating: D-