#50: Top Gear

Not the UK show.

How could a game called Top Gear be anything but a racing game? The game opened with lots of track selection and difficulty options I couldn't use because you need a password to unlock the later stuff. I was stuck racing in Vegas, presumably on a real track.

Pitstop? Is that you?

The game itself had a very questionable control scheme. Manual gear shifting is annoying but I understand why they put it into games. My big problem is that the #1 button on the controller, the B button, went unused. And the accelerator button was actually X! The least used button in most games was the button I had to hold down! My thumb does not have the muscle memory to do that properly.

FAILURE!

I thought I did a reasonable job in my first race. Especially since I used up 2 of my 3 nitro boosts early on when I was trying to figure out the controls. The game starts you at the back of a pack of 20 cars and I managed to make it all the way up to 8th. The game then awarded points to the top 10 of 20 finishers (I earned 3 points for 8th) and followed that up with a game over screen. WHAT? How are you giving me race series points and then saying I didn't finish high enough to keep playing. Why is 8th worth 3 points if 8th is also a DQ?

The music was annoying. The game was not very interesting. The controls sucked, and the scoring system was flawed. There's pretty much nothing good going on with this game that I can see, except maybe if all the tracks were real tracks. That might be pretty cool if I was a racing fan. But I'm not, so I don't care.

Rating: D-

#49: Super Adventure Island

Sounds fun!

I can remember playing an Adventure Island game in the arcade as a kid. Funky little island dude auto-running to the right, jumping on a skateboard, throwing hammers, and dying a lot. Looking on Wikipedia it turns out the arcade game I'm thinking of was actually Wonder Boy! It would seem Sega owned the rights to the name and the characters but not the game itself or something, so their partner went to Hudson Soft to make a series of clones starting with Adventure Island on the NES.

Lucky dude...

This game doesn't have the auto-running feature from Wonder Boy, but it certainly has the dying a lot down in spades. This idea was prominent in arcade games to convince the player to put in more quarters. On a console with limited continues it's just frustrating.

Duck-a-rang!

The game isn't terrible. It only uses two buttons which makes me sad, and you have no hitpoints which results in lots of deaths. The music repeated through the first three levels and was starting to get pretty tedious, but then the boss fight had pretty cool music. I could see renting this game and not being too disappointed which is sadly a step up from many of the recent games played. But I don't want to play it again now.

Rating: C

#48: Rival Turf!

Oh good, a Jaleco game.

Rival Turf started off by asking me to pick if I wanted to play as a pretty white boy or a more brawly looking black dude named Oozie Nelson. I went with Oozie! The game didn't show me the plot, but a quick look on Wikipedia indicates the pretty boy's girlfriend was kidnapped by some thugs and he enlisted the help of his police officer friend Oozie. The game itself is a beat-em-up.

Piledriver!

This game is pretty much identical to Final Fight. The plot is the same. The character choices are the same. The buttons are the same. There was a dagger I could pick up and throw, just like in Final Fight. There was a trash can to break with a food health boost in it, just like in Final Fight. The game sucks, just like Final Fight.

Genie!

Except this game is slightly worse. There are fewer moves to do when grappling. The first boss seemed really hard, because he had a sword that he'd drop. While he had the sword I could easily beat him up. But when the sword fell to the ground my attack button became the 'pick up the sword' button and he'd kill me while I was bent over picking up the sword. It was frustrating. if I wanted to play Final Fight, I'd go play Final Fight. Not the bad clone. You suck, Jaleco.

Rating: D-

#47: Raiden Trad

PEW PEW LASERS!

I had never heard of Raiden Trad. Or of Toei. Or of Micronics. Or of Electro Brain. This doesn't bode well.

MOAR LAZERS!

The game turns out to be a scrolling shooter with pretty much all the flaws of the other scrolling shooters. It has power-ups, but they all go away when you die. And there are multiple different options that aren't compatible. I was doing fantastic, but then I accidentally replaced my heat seeking missiles with something that just went in a straight line. And then I couldn't damage anything on the sides. And then they shot too many bullets and I died.

Woo!

And then once I was dead I was down to normal bullets and no missiles of any kind and couldn't possibly survive. Too many bullets, guaranteed dead. I did not miss anything by not playing this game as a kid.

Rating: F

#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