#36: The Legend of the Mystical Ninja

Spooky font!

Legend of the Mystical Ninja fits a fairly unique niche for me. It's a game I didn't play as a kid, but had played before this little adventure. I don't remember much of the game but I know I played a Japanese rom at some point in University. I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't even make it out of the town and quit, but I did play it at some point! I was actually surprised to see an English version.

Juh?

One of the things I'm really noticing when playing these SNES games is how little effort goes into the plot for most of these games. Even though this game had a lot of text before I could start playing it didn't actually explain anything. There's a hot girl ghost who lives in a temple and is causing trouble or something. So I guess I need to go find a temple. I start in a town, right outside my house, and am immediately attacked by my fellow townsmen. Sometimes when you kill people they drop a fish, sometimes they drop a cat. Fish hurt you. Cats upgrade your weapon. What? Oh, and sometimes a townswoman would show up instead, but if you tried to hit her with your yo-yo you'd lose $100. I don't understand why the men in this town are trying to kill me but the women are dainty and fragile.

WHAT?!?

This may be the weirdest continue screen I've ever seen. Where do you want to continue?

I definitely see the ghost part...

The actual dungeon itself turned into a more traditional 2d platformer. With a gimmicky boss fight. It took me a full continue before I figured out how to hurt her, and by then I was too low in life and ended up dying anyway.

I feel like the platforming part was reasonable but unspectacular. I really didn't understand what was going on, though, and that makes me sad and detracted from my desire to start over when I ran out of continues. I probably could have gotten into this game back in the day if I'd rented it, but for now it is nothing special.

Rating: C

#35: Super Scope 6

AKA: Blastris/LazerBlazer

This is the game that came bundled with the Super Scope accessory. The NES had a pistol add-on, the SNES took it up a step by having a shoulder mounted rocket launcher add-on. Reading about the science behind the Super Scope is interesting. And pretty much all I can do, since I can't possible play the game. The emulator I'm using crashed when I tried to turn on the Super Scope mode. I used to own this game, and actually went looking for it, but the Wiki article makes it clear that even if I had found it I wouldn't be able to play it. The Super Scope requires a CRT television and I don't have one of those.

PEW PEW!

I do remember playing the game, a lot, as a kid. Even though I wear glasses which made it tricky to use the eyepiece it was a lot of fun. It's called Super Scope 6 because the cartridge had 6 different, though similar, games to play. One of them was whack-a-mole!

I'm actually disappointed that I can't play the game because I remember liking it. But I don't have a CRT tv and have no plans to ever get one. I don't feel like it makes sense to assign a grade to this game if I can't give it a spin, so it gets the first incomplete grade of this little adventure.

Rating: INC

#34: Wanderers from Ys III

No real title screen for this game, somehow...

Wanderers from Ys is a game name that has stuck with me for 22 years, but I can't remember a single thing about it. I know it was available for rent from Midnight Video and that means I must have rented it at some point but I don't know what it is. Even after playing it a bit today I can't remember having played it before. But that name is pretty sweet, huh? And apparently this is the third one? A brief look at Wikipedia claims the Ys series is actually the second largest jRPG series after Final Fantasy. Huh. I'd have guessed something like Dragon Warrior. Apparently it has two animes and an MMO!

I see you, bug thing!

The game plays out as an action-adventure game where you play a red headed hero who is wandering around aimlessly with his buddy. His buddy gets a scary fortune told which portends disaster in his home town. We have nothing better to do since we're wandering aimlessly anyway so we go back to his home. Where my buddy immediately locks himself in the inn and I'm stuck wandering around town. Turns out some monsters have attacked the quarry and the mayor is trapped. I volunteer to go save him. I start the game with 1000 gold and no gear... Why? I seem to recall Lagoon started the same way and it just seems stupid. I have enough money to afford a full set of gear at the shop. I'm an adventurer! Why am I walking around naked? Heck, in the intro movie my character even kills a wildcat with his sword... Where is that sword?

Chopped!

I didn't end up making it very far. All the early enemies took two hits to kill and I mostly couldn't find a way to hit them without getting hit back. So I took a hit from every ground enemy and some of the flying ones. Then I made it to this guy who seemed to do more damage or something since I died almost immediately. Maybe I needed to grind on bugs at the start of the mine until I leveled up? Go back to town and spend some of the cash on healing potions if they exist?

Combat was pretty uninteresting (I had a jump button and a short ranged attack button that I just held down) but I was willing to give it another try. Except it forced me to start at the beginning, including watching the intro speeches again. And wander through town buying my gear again. And there didn't seem to be a decent way to speed through dialogue. The game didn't interest me enough to do that, so I'm done.

That said, there was a save feature and I probably could have saved before going into the cave. Grinding for experience and cash may be a bit of a foreign concept now but it's certainly the way the RPG world worked back in the day and I could see myself having liked this game enough to keep trying back then. Combat seemed pretty smooth and quick and I probably could have gotten better at it, so this game felt better than Lagoon did.

I wish I knew what/where Ys was. The intro didn't explain that at all. I bet this is another case where the backstory was listed in the manual. Oh well.

Rating: B

#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+

#32: Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninjas

SUPER GAME!

Ok, I can't keep quiet about this... Why is this game subtitled "Caveman Ninjas"? I have an idea of what it means to be a ninja and there's no way Joe or Mac are ninjas. Ninjas are supposed to be stealthy. Agile. They should use cool weapons like katanas and throwing stars. They're apt to be tall and thin. Joe is a short, beefy man who wields a club and throws dinosaur bones. He has bright coloured hair and wears a loin cloth.

Joe the Angel

The game itself is a reasonable platformer. I don't know if there's a plot to the game covered in the manual or something but there was nothing at all in the game. You run around clubbing dinosaurs for a short period of time and then you do a predictable boss fight. Repeat. I vaguely recall the 2 player mode being a good addition but I can't really check it out now. One innovation it had is the 'angel' that appears after you die. You can fly him around such that you get to choose where you respawn on the screen. I remember this fetaure showing up in New Super Mario Bros Wii and thinking it was pretty innovative. Well, it was in Joe & Mac 21 years ago!

Rawr!

After beating a boss a scantily clad tall woman with very bright hair runs onto the screen to give Joe a kiss. I believe I saw red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. So there's a whole rainbow of tall amazons out there looking to make out with a caveman ninja. Are these women being held captive by giant plants and dinosaurs? Are they groupies following Joe around? And why are they all so much taller than Joe? It's not like they're wearing high heels either, since they're barefoot!

Rating: A-

#31: Super Off Road

Sponsored by Toyota

Super Off Road was a reasonably fun arcade game ported to the SNES three years later. Would they add anything to make it better or is this yet another sad arcade port?

Sponsored by Toyota

It turns out it's not really either one. They added a couple tracks and changed the game over criteria but otherwise it's very faithful to the arcade game, and not in a bad way. Setting it up so you need to finish not last instead of first is a really nice touch. As long as you never have a bad race you can keep playing and upgrading your car and having fun.

WANH WAAAAAAH!

Of course, you have a bad race and it destroys your car. I lost most of my purchased upgrades and would need to play 5 or 6 races to get back to my old state. After I just lost. If losing had been a function of my car not being good enough and not a function of me driving the wrong way for 30 seconds this would be a big problem. As is, though, I probably could have recovered if I wanted to. But the punishment was so brutal and the game wasn't actually that fun so I didn't want to.

Part of the appeal of the arcade game was getting to use a steering wheel and gas pedals. The controller worked fine, but it wasn't as interesting. There's nothing actually wrong with the SNES port, I'm just not a big fan of the genre in general and the continue feature was a little too brutal for me. The music is pretty good even if part of it is based on a Toyota commercial jingle.

Rating: B-

#30: Super Castlevania IV

Where are Super Castlevanias I, II, and III?

I was looking forward to playing this game though I didn't remember anything about it from my youth. Mostly I remember how awesome some of the later Castlevania games were (like Symphony of the Night) and was looking forward to putting a lot of time in on this. I started playing Friday evening with every intention of playing it a lot on Friday and a lot on Saturday.

Nice '3d' touch with the passable gate.

Unfortunately I didn't need nearly that long. I made it through most of 3 levels and then got stuck falling into bottomless pits and gave up. Maybe it's that I was sick when I was playing it so may not have had top reflexes or sufficient patience but I just got really frustrated with how far back the last checkpoint was. Eventually I ended up falling into other bottomless pits on the way to the one I was stuck on. With my skills degrading I decided to give up.

WHEEEE!

That said, Super Castlevania IV had some interesting gameplay twists that I liked. I love being able to hook my whip onto these little ring things and swing around. Makes me think I'm Indiana Jones! The gates were nice. Crumbling blocks over pits are a staple of the platformer genre around this time and it was nice that they respawned if you walked away from the screen and back again. They put some serious work into making neat graphics as well. The wooden bridge in the below screenshot has the wooden planks move down when your weight is on them, and if you jump up you wiggle the rope handrail.

There were also plenty of downsides. I had no clue who my character was. I had no clue what he was doing. I assume since it's a Castlevania game that I'm some sort of Belmont out to kill Dracula but some sort of cutscene or plot development or text of any kind on the level intro screens would have been nice. As far as I could tell I was playing a spooky but mediocre platformer. Honestly, platformerwise it felt pretty comparable to ActRaiser. A jump button, an attack button, a cast a spell button. Orbs to hit for points/health nodules. Bosses with easy to learn patterns. ActRaiser had a whole other game beside the platformer though, and Castlevania does not. I feel like it's better than Home Alone, though, and I suspect if I was a little better at one jump that I'd have enjoyed the game a lot more. The spooky music was definitely a plus as well.

Rating: A-