#46: Contra III: The Alien Wars

UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN...

I don't really have a lot to say about Contra III. I really liked this game as a kid. I really liked playing this game in University. And I really liked playing it again on an emulator. There was a controller quirk which frustrated me, but that's a problem with the emulator or my controller and not the game itself. (The system interprets the right trigger and left trigger on my xBox controller as being the same button. So while I can hit both of them just fine and it can tell the difference I can't hold them both down at once. Which meant I couldn't do the awesome spinny attack. I tried remapping the buttons but I'm too used to using the right bumper as a screenshot key.)

OPEN YOUR VULNERABLE SPOT!
I WANT TO KILL YOU!

After playing so many games in this little adventure I've started to gain a real appreciation for well built, smooth games. Contra III definitely falls into this category. It's hard, but it's definitely fair. Everything works the way it feels like it should work. And it's fun!

One twist the game has is it puts you into a top-down mode for a couple of the levels. It's like you're playing Super Smash TV, except it's well done. You can rotate the screen, there are little indicators showing where you need to go, and you can still use all the weapons from the normal mode.

Contra III also has excellent multi-player. If you want to do well you need to share the limited power ups. If you're like my brother and I instead you learn where the good power-ups will appear and make sure you get there first. I'll take the spread weapon... You can have crush!

Rating: S-

#45: WWF Super Wrestlemania

Eat your vitamins, kids!

I have always been a WWF/WWE fan. I rarely find time to watch on tv anymore, and I haven't seen a Pay Per View event in many years, but I still enjoy tuning in from time to time. As a big gamer who likes wrestling you'd expect I'd like this game...

OH YEAH!

You'd be right! I used to play wrestling games in the arcade, and on the SNES, and a ton of them on the N64. I definitely played a lot of this particular game as a kid. It has a survivor series mode where each team has 4 characters on it, and I definitely had to give that a spin. My team was captained by The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase and was rounded out by The Natural Disasters (Earthquake and Typhoon) and The Macho Man Randy Savage. Snap into a Slim Jim! The computer chose Hulk Hogan, Sid Justice, and The Legion of Doom (Hawk and Animal).

WOO!

Wrestling games eventually evolved with lots of bells and whistles. Characters would get access to their signature moves. You could get steel chairs from the stands. This game is before those times, but was still very fun. The controls are relatively smooth and make sense. They use 6 buttons, which is great! The characters may not have special moves but they do look the parts at least. The Million Dollar Man and Earthquake were my two favourite wrestlers as a kid, and I hated Hulk Hogan, so it was a good blast of nostalgia to be able to take Hogan down with Earthquake.

I haven't played a new generation wrestling game, and now I'm tempted to try to track an xBox 360 one down...

Rating: A

#44: SmartBall

Happy Ball!

I'd never heard of SmartBall before today. The word smart at the front makes me thing that maybe this will be a neat puzzle game of some kind. Unfortunately that turned out not to be true. SmartBall would actually seem to be an interesting but confusing platformer.

Wall walk!

I take on the role of Jerry, a cute little ball of goo. He can run, and jump, and contort his body. His down to squash things you're standing on. Hit up to turn into a spike of sorts to impale things above you. If you hold the run button down you can climb up walls, and you can run along ceilings. There are little pipes you can crawl down. There are balls you cal pick up which end up floating inside you as if you were a gelatinous cube. Turns out if you hit the L button you can shoot those balls out. I found this out after failing to find a way to hurt the first boss. The boss would periodically throw out more balls, so I figured there had to be a way to use them. I hit all the buttons again, and L did the trick.

CAW!

I did a bit of reading afterwards and it turns out there's this big story about how I'm a prince that got turned into a jelly bean thing by someone who was jealous of the princess. This was all in the Japanese version, but Sony cut it all out for the NA release. I guess they figured we couldn't handle a bit of plot to go with our weird platformer. It would also seem that there's some sort of issue with the words Jerry and Jelly. I don't know if it was an intentional play on the Japanese accent or just a brutal mistranslation.

It would also seem a sequel was pretty much completely developed but by that point Sony and Nintendo hated each other so Sony didn't release it. Instead they went and made the PlayStation.

At any rate, the game only used 3 buttons, which makes me a little sad, and it chose to use L instead of a face button for shoot, which made me more sad. The complete removal of any sort of story frustrates me. The character is cute, and the music was enjoyable, but the game seemed to be built around the whole idea of sticking to walls and ceilings and the implementation was a little wonky. In particular, jumping off of them was awkward.

On the plus side, when I went game over it let me start again on the current stage and there didn't seem to be a finite number of continues. That makes me suspect if I'd played this game as a kid I would have played it through to completion.

Rating: B

#43: Pit-Fighter

FIGHT!

I remember renting Pit-Fighter as a kid. Once. I don't have terribly fond memories of the game, but I didn't really remember it as being abysmally terrible. Turns out my memory isn't great.

Alas, poor Buzz.

Pit-Fighter is a 3d ring fighting game. Punch, kick, jump, do some throws. That sort of thing. MMA before there was a real MMA. I know you can punch, kick, and do throws because that's what Exec up there was doing to me. He even got me in a piledriver! For my part I was hitting buttons, which seemed to randomly flail in bad directions, and then getting killed.

What game?

I took a look on the internet to see if I was missing something, but it seems like no. Maybe the game is better with 2 players since then both of you flail around randomly until one of you dies. I'm sure that's how we played when we rented it, so maybe the issue is just the AI is too good. I don't know. Pit-Fighter was apparently ground breaking in that it used footage of actual actors to build the fighters. Also it was an arcade game that got ported around. If there's one thing I'm learning it's that arcade games that get ported to the SNES are _terrible_.

Rating: F-

#42: PGA Tour Golf

Adam is in town visiting for Lounge Day and I saw it as a perfect opportunity to avoid playing another bad golf game! Woo!

FUZZY!

PGA Tour Golf had the interesting take of having actual pro golfers commenting on the holes you're playing beforehand and giving advice to the player. It had little pictures of their faces that looked like them, too. I imagine EA had a deal with the PGAPA or whatever it may have been back then. As much as I may think EA is a terrible company nowadays they really had it together back in the day. Their sports division, anyway!

SPLASH!

The game has 4 courses, which appear to be real courses. Adam played at Sawgrass, and can be seen here on the infamous 17th hole. Hitting the ball right into the pond, just like the pros!

The game actually seemed pretty reasonable. It did a good overview of the hole beforehand, without lagging too much. It showed a good green gradiency, again without lagging. Club selection, a viewfinder, a good hit meter... It actually looked like a very solid golf game, if you like golf games.

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-

#40: Extra Innings

Oh my!

Extra Innings is a baseball game I'd never played before. To be blunt, I didn't miss very much. The characters are chibi style, and the game plays fine, but it's still a baseball game.

Go Copernicus!

I picked a team at random, and it turned out to be pretty sweet. Look at those names! SCIENCE!

Temper Temper...

The game had some nice extras. It has a league function, and it has a 'create a team' function. Batting and pitching worked reasonably well, but were pretty standard. Fielding was slow and plodding, just like pretty much every other baseball game.

There's not really much to say. It's a baseball game. It isn't a bad baseball game. It isn't a spectacular baseball game. I guess if you really want to play some video game baseball you could do worse than this. But I don't want to play a baseball game. With 10% of the games thus far having been baseball games, I'm getting a little tired of them.

Rating: B-