#122: Road Runner's Death Valley Rally

BEEP BEEP! ZIP! BANG!

I grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, and this game really captures the feel of those cartoons. It has the right sounds. It has the right music. The intro video did the whole 'pause the screen and use fake latin to describe the characters' thing.

Coyote so hungry!

You play the role of the Road Runner in this game and you play a Sonic style platformer with the twist that you need to avoid the Coyote and whatever crazy contraption he's put together to try to catch you. I never really played Sonic games so I don't know if it had the same problem this game had, but I found I was moving way too fast to possibly react to incoming obstacles. I'm sure if you played the game a lot you could memorize the locations of all the spikey plants and scorpions and the like but I kept running into them, losing my speed burst, and getting annoyed.

UH-OH!

They managed to make use of lots of buttons on the SNES controller, in particular by making R be a taunt button where the Road Runner stuck out his tongue and L be a taunt button where the Road Runner pulls off a BEEP BEEP sound effect. It made the game feel a lot like the cartoon, where Road Runner would often stick out his tongue or BEEP BEEP at Wile E Coyote after some plan backfired on him. In this case the wheel of his steamroller detached and is about to loop around and crush the poor dejected Coyote.

Now, I need to be honest here... I always hated the Road Runner. I identified with the Coyote. He's a smart guy with lots of cool outside the box ideas who keeps getting taunted by others for his failures. The Road Runner is a bully! I wanted the Coyote to catch him and eat all his delicious bits. The feather that tastes like banana... YUM! Anyway, that makes a game where I have to take the role of the bully not one I really want to play. You wouldn't want to play a Back to the Future game where you're Biff Tannen, would you?

The game has good music and sound and controls and feel. But I didn't like the protagonist and I didn't like the game/level design with being forced to run into obstacles the first time you meet them. But I could see this being a game people could like, so I can't dock it too much.

Rating: C+

#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-

#41: Lemmings

Nice hair-do!

Lemmings is a port of an Amiga game that sold so well they ported it to pretty much every system known to man. The game was designed for use with a mouse primarily, which makes the controls on the SNES a little wonky. Scrolling around is slower than it probably should be, for example. At least they figured out a way to use 5 of the buttons on the SNES controller!

KABOOM!

The game itself is a "puzzle-platformer", the first of the genre, and was ground breaking. The way the game works is a small army of lemmings spawn from an entry gate. They walk in a straight line until they hit a wall, reach the exit, or die. If they reach the end of a platform they just walk off and fall down. Fall too far and they die. Spinning blades? They'll walk right into those and die. Bear traps? Walk in and die. Flame throwers? That's right. They'll get lit on fire and die.

LEMCON ONE!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to guide most of your lemmings to the exit. In this case, 60% of the 50 lemmings need to be saved. The other 20 are completely expendable! The way you make things happen is by turning one of your lemmings into one of eight different professions. Make him into a digger and he'll dig down into a hole. Give him an umbrella and he won't die when he falls long distances. Turn him into a bomb and he'll explode in 5 seconds! KABOOM!

Wikipedia claims that Lemmings was the inspiration for the entire RTS genre. The idea is it was the first game to have computer controlled characters that you, an external overlord, to whom you would give orders. Lemmings itself was created when some dude tried to demonstrate that he could take an 8x8 pixel box and make a perpetually walking animation. Someone else saw this walking animation and wanted to make a game with the characters just walking along forever. So StarCraft 2 owes it's existence to some dude fooling around with an animated gif!

Lemmings uses famous music tracks. I recognized London Bridge is Falling Down and She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain.

The game itself is actually really fun. I played through 21 levels in about an hour and will likely go back for more later tonight. It does have a couple things that could have been better. An 'end turn' button which fast-forwards with no more input from the player would be nice. Solving a puzzle and then having to wait a minute for it to play out gets tedious. It could use variable scroll speeds so you can move around the level faster. I wonder if there's a new version out there for the PC...

Rating: S-