#119: Out of This World

B-ZAP!

Out of This World is a puzzle platformer type of game where there's really only one correct sequence of inputs that will advance the storyline and plenty of incorrect sequences that result in your gruesome death. It reminds me a little of Dragon's Lair that way, actually. Screw up, watch yourself die in a hilarious fashion, try again.

I got too close to a worm and it poisoned me!

The graphics in this game blew me away. I remembered how the game looked but for some reason I was thinking that had to have been a PC version since there was no way the SNES could do this sort of thing. Turns out I was remembering the SNES version. The cutscenes are incredible and the gameplay screens look pretty darn good too. I guess there's actually not a whole lot going on in them so they probably just had a lot of good artists working on it? The minimal movement probably saves on SNES processing power? Maybe? I don't know. I just know it looks fantastic.

PEW PEW!

I beat the first level and unlocked my friend and a gun. The gun has a limited number of shots and you need it to last through a pretty big stage so you can't waste any shots. I am not good at not wasting shots. Eventually I decided I wasn't likely to beat the level anytime soon and gave up, but I was actually making progress. If I was looking to spend a day or two learning a puzzle platformer this game would be the one to do it on. I watched a speedrun of this game in one of the marathons I watched earlier this year and it is pretty sweet.

This game also had a legitimate intro movie where it set the stage for what was happening in the game. More SNES games need to do this! I imagine a lot of the story was actually shunted off into manuals which I don't have but it's still nice to see some of it in the game itself.

Rating: S-

#118: On the Ball

Get on that ball!

I was thinking a game named On the Ball was going to be a sports game of some kind or maybe a platformer where you're rolling around on a ball. I was very much mistaken. It turns out On the Ball is a puzzle game where there's a ball which is dropping towards the bottom of the screen thanks to gravity. You as the player need to rotate the terrain clockwise or counterclockwise to guide the ball to the goal. It's a clever little puzzle game.

Colour/pattern overload!

They don't show you an overview of the entire level and the view is pretty zoomed in so they added on arrows to the terrain in an attempt to direct you towards the exit. It worked pretty well. There are zones on the harder levels that subtract time if you bump into them with no real warning that they exist, but I suspect those are the sorts of things you get better at avoiding with practice.

Through everything... Turn... Turn... Turn...

I feel like the puzzle genre has evolved over the last 22 years and I'm not much for time limits and losing when you're too slow at solving a puzzle, but I wish I'd played this game as a kid. I have a feeling my whole family might have gotten into playing it. The game even keeps high scores (I hope between sessions) so you could race for best times and such. Actually, I wonder if anyone has ever speedrun this game?

Rating: B+

#105: Super Buster Bros.

Bustafazoo!

I recognized the name of this game but I couldn't remember why. Was this one of those games where you shoot coloured bubbles? No, that's Puzzle Bobble and while the name is almost similar that's not it...

Incoming balls!

Right! This is the game where you're a dude with a harpoon gun pointed straight up and the goal is to blow up all of the balls on the screen. When a ball hits a harpoon it explodes into 2 balls of a smaller size. Eventually there's a size that is so small it just disappears instead of splitting again. There's a time limit for each stage and the strategy in the game is to keep the number of balls on the screen manageable (if a ball bounces into you then you're dead) so you ideally want to be shooting the smallest balls that you can while dodging everything. Oh, and a lot of the time there are powerups that come out when you shoot a ball so the gameplay changes on the fly depending on what comes out.

25 worlds down! At least 15 more to go.

There's not a whole lot to say about this game. It's a solid puzzle game. The music was good, the controls were simple to understand, and it's fun to play.

Rating: A+

#100: Q*Bert 3

Q*Bert: A Real American

We're up to the 100th game released on the SNES in the US and what do we find? Is it a hidden gem? An all time classic? Something that really shouts Super Nintendo? No. We get a bad port of a 1982 arcade game.

@!#?@! indeed, Q*Bert. @!#?@!.

Now, Q*Bert is a game I played a fair bit of as a kid, on I believe the Atari 600XL port. It was a pretty good game for that sort of low tech system. A directional joystick and no buttons needed. No real computational power needed since there wasn't much going on on the screen at any given time. It was fun.

Hallelujah!

This game? Really not so much. The controls just don't work with a SNES controller at all. Q*Bert is set up so diagonals are the things that matter, and I seem to recall back in the day you could just rotate your square joystick into a sensible orientation. Try as I could here I couldn't repeat the feat with my xBox 360 controller. The odd shape kept moving back into my hands the way it should, so up was up and right was right. Only this control scheme had up being up-left and right being up-right and if you pick the wrong one in a split second decision you were dead...

I was dead a lot.

The enemies were so slow that I didn't really need to go fast and make split second decisions. So I was actually able to beat a few levels by concentrating really hard on keeping my diagonals straight. But concentrating really hard on the controls for a game isn't fun. It's the mark of a terrible game. Besides, I want the enemies to move fast enough that I need to make split second decisions! That's the essence of Q*Bert! Make snap decisions properly over and over or die. I want the decisions I'm making to be figuring out enemy movements to chart a safe path, not how do I move down-left.

Even in the game where I beat some levels, disaster struck. I jumped out of bounds somehow and ended up in a glitched out, frozen game state. I don't know if that's an emulator issue or part of the actual game but I don't like it.

The game's music and imagery were all really silly, as though the people who put it together remembered playing the game from when they were kids and decided they had to make it feel very kid-like. It didn't really fit.

Now, on the one hand, this was actually Q*Bert. So I don't know that it deserves an F... It was a legit port that just couldn't work with the SNES controller. Or couldn't it? I'm pretty sure diagonals actually work fine if you code the input handler properly. Which means they didn't. Q*Bert is a fine game. Q*Bert 3 is terrible.

Rating: F

#71: Rampart

JOIN UP!

There are some sounds that stick with me for no discernible reason. I wouldn't have been able to describe the opening sound for Rampart before I played it today. Even now, 40 minutes later, I can't describe it at all. But as soon as it started playing I knew right away that it was time to build cannons and destroy my brother's walls.

PEW PEW!

Unfortunately I don't have a brother here so I can't destroy his walls. Instead I was stuck destroying these little boats that kept swarming my island. Stupid little boats. Stop attacking me! Shooting the little boats wasn't actually very fun. Targeting is quantized and not along the right grid to make it clear where to shoot to sink a boat. If they started moving it was right out. Even now I don't know if I needed to hit them multiple times, or if there was a chance to miss, or if I was just aiming badly. I ended up just unloading tons of bullets at each boat and taking many waves to kill them all. This is made easier by building more cannons every wave, I guess...

Tetris!

The other aspect of the game is the rebuild your walls stage. You get given a random piece of size 1 to 5 which you can rotate. You can't build over existing stuff like cannons, castles, or fires. Surround extra castles for bonus points and extra cannons! This aspect was actually really stressful. Am I going to get the piece I need? Can I mash buttons fast enough putting pieces into any legal spot to try to search for the right piece? Is it even possible to succeed? (Fires along the coast could make it impossible to fix a give castle.) Fail to surround any castle and lose.

I remember liking Rampart as a kid, and it was still ok even now. I suspect it would have been better with a second player? Even alone, this would have been a definite rental.

It even had actual voices! CEASE! FIRE!

Rating: B+

#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-

#60: Krusty's Super Fun House

Evil ratses!

Movie and TV tie in games tend to be very bad. I believe The Simpsons games in particular are widely seen as being terrible. Tie in games get to be so bad because people who don't play games see something they recognize and buy it regardless of how good it might be. For movie ones there also tends to be a pretty harsh deadline... No one wants to buy a tie in game two years after a movie comes out! I owned Krusty's Super Fun House as a kid. I'm pretty sure it was a gift from someone who recognized The Simpsons.

Whoa there Krusty, don't fall!

In this case that wasn't actually a problem. Krusty's Super Fun House is actually super fun. Back then, and now. It's essentially Lemmings with a different coat of paint. You have little rats that spawn and walk in a straight line until they die. Unlike in Lemmings, however, the goal is to kill all the rats. There are 'exit' locations on the map but instead of saving your rats, they kill them. Bart will smash them with a giant punching glove. Homer will zap them with a gigantic laser. Your goal is to make sure the rats make it to their doom by picking up and dropping different blocks. Krusty can only hold one block at a time, and the placement of the blocks needs to be precise, which is where the game finds it's challenge.

ZAP!

On top of the Lemmings game there's also a passable platformer pasted on top. Krusty needs to jump around and find all those blocks he needs. There are enemies to kill or avoid, points to collect, extra mans to earn. Puzzles are awesome, passable platformers are fine. Especially compared to some of the other drek I've played recently.

The Simpsons franchise actually adds to the game. Lemmings is a fine game, but it's pretty bland. Getting all the trappings of The Simpsons made the game more entertaining. There are signs in the background from various Simpsons characters. Unlike Super Soccer where the signs in the background are advertising other games these ones are just there for comic relief. The Simpsons world fits in well with a game designed around murdering a bunch of innocent and stupid rats.

Rating: S-

#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-