Ren and Stimpy: Stimpy's Invention

Platform: Sega Genesis
Developer: BlueSky Software
Released: 1993
Genre: Platformer

The Story
Stimpy has built a new invention, the Mutate-O-Matic! It's purpose? To mutate disgusting garbage into delicious food! Ren is skeptical about this strange machine, so in order to show off how awesome it is, Stimpy turns it on full. Unfortunately this causes an overload which makes the machine explode, scattering the parts all over the place. In order to keep it from causing lasting damage, the intrepid duo must seek out the various parts, reassemble them, and then shut the Mutate-O-Matic down for good.

The Game
Most everyone who lived during the 90's will remember The Ren and Stimpy Show, an influential cartoon on Nickelodeon that led the way for future weird cartoons (such as Spongebob Squarepants) and future "mature" cartoons (such as Beavis & Butt-head). Its popularity (with the viewers, if not with Nickelodeon itself) brought about the creation of several video games, including a few after the show went off the air.

The Characters
Ren Höek is a depraved chihuahua with an eye for the ladies, a mind for the money, and a temper for anything and everything that annoys him. Which is anything and everything, but particularly his buddy Stimpy.

Stimpson J. Cat is a dimwitted cat whose only real smarts are for inventing weird ass shit. He's jolly, good-natured, and basically nothing like Ren.

Not that you really need to know any of this, since their characterization from the show is hardly used in this game in any significant way past being a general frame for the setting.

The Writing
There isn't any, really. There's the setup at the beginning, then the rest of the game is just running around to various random places to collect invention pieces. There's no real plot or humor or anything, just cartoonish action.

The Gameplay
From the options menu, the player can choose to play as either Ren or Stimpy, but it hardly matters considering you can switch between the two at any time while playing the game, and they don't really have any difference in style except for the purely aesthetic. Their moves may look different, but in most cases they function exactly the same. Both characters are, in fact, playable at the same time, and whichever one you're not playing as will simply follow along with you . . . for the most part.

Basically, the double character play is shit. If you want to do a ranged attack, for instance, you have to have the other character near you. I played Ren most of the time, which meant said attack was Ren grabbing Stimpy and squeezing him so that he'd hork out a high-speed hairball. If Stimpy is even just a few millimeters away from Ren, however? Short range attack. I can't express just how annoying it is to be trying to take down a target that's heading at you, you're brimming with confidence that you can take it out before it becomes a threat, but Stimpy moves just a little bit to the left and you get hit because Ren's puny little flyswatter can't reach all the way across the damn screen. Pretty much half the game was spent popping the air uselessly like this.

Having to rely on the other character is also annoying for various hurdles that require both of you to jump up on something, particularly the fire hydrants in the City level. It takes Ren and Stimpy both to make the hydrants propel you up to higher levels, but in many cases you'll jump up and the other character won't. And you try to jump and jump and jump in a futile effort to get them to jump too, but all they do is just stand there and blissfully ignore you.

If you have a buddy to play with, taking control of the second character, this may ameliorate some of these problems . . . but given the way first and second players of video games tend to cooperate, I kind of doubt it. And anyway, it's not like there aren't enough problems concerning just the stuff that you can do without the second character. Trying to grab onto ladders, pipes, and other climbable things is a horrific experience, relying on you pressing up at the precise nanosecond you enter the precise nanometer of actually climbable space. And jumping . . . hoo boy. I won't say it's exactly a deal breaker for playing the game, but it's still a fair bit inaccurate, and even after I got used to it I ended up overshooting my target several times when Ren or Stimpy got just a little bit too enthusiastic.

Overall, for a platformer, the game doesn't do platforming very well.

The Challenge
The hit detection in the game is rather wonky, so you can't really tell when something getting near you is actually going to hurt Ren or Stimpy. It's pretty much the same problem as the ladders mentioned above, only applied to the enemies, and I think the main reason it's a problem is the cartoony look imposed on everything. Of course, it's got to look cartoony 'cause it's based on a cartoon, but unfortunately this really works against it because most everything has poorly defined boundaries as a result. This makes things a bit more challenging than they would be otherwise as a result, more of that false difficulty so common in (poorly made) games of the time.

The level in which Ren and Stimpy puff themselves up like balloons is annoying as hell, particularly since the other character suddenly becomes solid and can either block your path or bump you into bad guys. Even more frustrating is that they also don't help whatsoever except to pick up items along the way, which they'll only do incidentally, never on purpose. So whatever limited usefulness they may have been in other levels becomes completely negated in this one.

Furthermore: FUCK YOU, BICYCLE LEVEL.

Basically, whenever the game tries to change up the formula from a standard platformer, it fails and fails hard. The new mechanics feel horribly out of place and end up being even more frustrating than the already poorly designed regular mechanics. As a result of these changes they become the most difficult parts of the game, but purely because they're crap design.

And then what do I get for all my troubles? A crappy instrumental version of the "Happy Happy Joy Joy" song with accompanying bouncing ball karaoke that's off in its timing. Fuck that noise.

The only saving grace is that it didn't take very long to beat. Just a few hours, really. Stimpy's Invention is just one of those games that isn't particularly hard to beat, but every setback feels twenty times more frustrating than it should and there's so little in the way of reward to offset that frustration.

The Sights
If there is one spot where the game excels, it's in the looks department. Said looks may have made the hit detection go all awry, but they're still pretty good. It's got the feel of the show down pat, and it's a rather pretty game overall.

The Sounds
For the first little while trying to play the game, I thought there was a problem with my emulator because the sound wasn't coming on. I thought I'd fixed the problem, but then I learned that the problem was with the game, not with the emulator or the ROM itself. My sources tell me that every once in a while the sound simply won't be there, even if you're using one of the original cartridges. I'm fairly certain that emulating the game may have made it worse, however, as I had to reset it around ten or more times regularly before the sound finally popped on.

But then when it did start up, I almost immediately felt sorry it had. The background music wasn't particularly bad, but the sound effects were. Especially egregious were the fart sounds in the balloon level. I mean really, there are plenty of non-annoying fart sounds they could have used, surely. Why pick the ones that stab me in the ear in a way reminiscent of mosquito buzzing?

The Bottom Line
Honestly, I never really enjoyed the Ren and Stimpy cartoon. I don't hate it or anything. It's just not really my thing. But the fact that the game is Ren and Stimpy was one of the least disappointing things about it in the end. Poorly made from one end to the other. The only real enjoyment I got out of it was the pretty graphics and slapping Stimpy around like it was going out of style. YOU STOOPID EEDIOT!

Comix Zone

Platform:  Sega Genesis
Developer:  Sega Technical Institute
Released:  1995
Genre:  Beat 'em up

The Game
Sketch Turner is just your regular rock musician who decides to try and make a comic book when he's suddenly zapped by lightning, which somehow causes him and the big bad of his story to switch places!  Now trapped within the pages of Comix Zone, Sketch has to make his way to the end of the comic, all the while dodging the obstacles put into his path by the sinister Mortus!

Comix Zone is the brain child of a fellah named Peter Morawiec, who first presented the idea to Sega back in 1992 via a concept video called "Joe Pencil Trapped in the Comix Zone".  You can check it out here, which I highly recommend, 'cause it's pretty damn slick looking.  Oh, and by strange coincidence, the movie Cool World was released that same year.  Hmmm . . .

The Characters
Sketch Turner is a typical 90's rock musician/comic artist, and his wardrobe does everything it can to confirm this fact.  He's even got the ponytail and small, round sunglasses.  I can imagine him touring from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, belting out the sounds of alternative rock in between righteous sessions with his sketch pad.  Seriously, dude.

Roadkill is his pet rat, who is also trapped within the pages of Comix Zone and helps Sketch out by finding hidden items, flipping hard to reach switches, and acting as bait for certain baddies.  He's a pretty cool little dude.  Respect the rat, yo.

Alyssa Cyan is the requisite hot chick of the game.  She is the first of the comic's characters to greet Sketch, ignoring his protests in order to send him out on a dangerous mission to defeat the mutants.  She spends most of the adventure back at the New Earth Empire base, radioing Sketch to give him helpful pointers of how to get past particularly difficult spots.

And finally there's Mortus, the leader of the mutants . . . aliens . . . or whatever they are.  Though Sketch doesn't actually face him until the very end of the game, Mortus' presence is still felt throughout as he uses his unique perspective to draw new enemies and other obstacles in Sketch's path, all in a bid to destroy Sketch, become real, and start wreaking havoc in the real world.  He's a bit of a bastard.

The Writing
The story of Comix Zone is somewhat interesting in that there are actually two stories going on at once.  On the one hand, we've got the main story of Sketch and Mortus switching universes and Sketch's quest to get to the end of the comic and get back out again.  And on the other hand, we've got the story of the comic itself, a tale about the human race mounting a defense against invading monster alien mutants.

But who cares, right?  The story is basically just a prop for the game's gimmick and to push the action along.  Still, for all that, it's a very well constructed and entertaining gimmick/action-pushing prop.

Almost all of the writing in the game is conveyed through the use of caption boxes and word balloons . . . 'cause you're in a comic, get it?  It's a pretty neat conceit, actually, right up until some of the word balloons end up hanging right over the action and you're just swinging blindly, hoping you're hitting that nasty mutant alien monster thing instead of the other way around.

The Gameplay
Combat is quick, intense, and nicely intuitive.  There are a surprisingly wide number of combos you can use that don't take horrifically convoluted sequences of button mashings to execute.  It's all pretty simple, moving everything along lightning fast while also being satisfyingly varied.  A lot of fighting games could probably learn a thing or two from Comix Zone, in my opinion.

The item system is pretty basic, but that's all it really needs to be.  You can pick up three items at a time (with one of the items generally being Roadkill, when you haven't got him out and scampering about and he hasn't run off a cliff somewhere), most of which do some sort of damage to enemies and/or objects.  Usually you won't find more objects than you can carry, so that limitation isn't a very harsh mistress.

Sketch's movements are pretty fluid, but he has a tendency to be a little too broad in his gestures.  One wrong tap of the directional pad can mean the difference between a living Sketch standing five feet away from a landmine and a crispy fried corpse sitting on top of the remains of an exploded landmine.

The Challenge
If I had to rate it on a scale of one to ten, I'd place Comix Zone's challenge rating at a definite AW HELL NAW.

I mean come on, guys, I'm pretty sure we were supposed to have left the Nintendo Hard games behind about three or four years before this, right?  I shouldn't be playing a mid-90's game and be wanting to throw my controller and myself out the window!

And what really sucks is how much of the difficulty curve is obviously artificial.  The fact that the bad guys are blocking gods from the very start is bad enough, but the fact that destroying objects - doors, crates, etc., many of which you are absolutely required to destroy in order to continue progressing through the game - causes your life meter to drain . . . well, that definitely takes first prize in the "Cheap Bullshit" competition.

When the developers start throwing in things that you have to do that also hurt you, then you know they've just run out of ways to make their game naturally challenging and just don't care about creating a balanced and enjoyable experience for the player whatsoever.  They might as well just come to my house and slap me in the face personally.  I really don't think it would be any more insulting.

The Graphics
Damn, but this is a pretty game.  It really looks like you're fighting your way through a comic book.  It's not quite as fine looking as the concept movie I linked up above, but I figure that's pretty understandable, and it looks damn fine enough as it is.  Sadly it does have a few minor glitches here and there, but overall every stage is beautiful to behold.

The Music
Man, to be honest, I don't really know.  I was too busy fighting for my life to notice the music very much.  What little I did catch seemed pretty rockin', and having looked up some background stuff on the game, it seems that they developers were proud enough of the soundtrack to release it on CD back when such things weren't as commonplace as they are now.

The Bottom Line
Comix Zone is one of those games that I love to hate and hate to love and all that nonsense.  It's a wonderful idea, beautiful setting, and interesting game mechanic that gets dragged down by it's horrific difficult level and brutal brevity.  It plays much like an arcade game in many ways, like it was designed specifically to eat up the quarters of bratty little kids who have been let loose at the local mall.  But it isn't an arcade game.  It was made specifically for console gaming, and it should have therefore been easier (or at least been given a gentler difficulty curve) and longer.  I'd definitely be willing to play it again, but never to actually beat it again . . . just tooling around in the first couple of stages would be fine for me, leaving my blood pressure more or less unmolested.

Shadowrun (Genesis)

Platform:  Sega Genesis
Developer:  BlueSky Software
Released:  1994
Genre:  Action RPG

The Game
Joshua is not a happy man.  His brother Michael was killed in a failed shadowrun, and he intends to find out who did it and why.  To these ends, he spend the last of his money to buy a ticket to Seattle to visit Michael's last known place of residence, a coffin motel in the Redmond Barrens.  From there, Joshua becomes a shadowrunner himself, traveling back and forth across the Seattle Metroplex and beyond in his tireless quest to avenge Michael's death.

The Genesis version of Shadowrun was released a year after its SNES cousin by a different developer and with a completely different storyline and gameplay.

The Characters
You play as Joshua, a somewhat hot-headed young lad who starts out looking for revenge and ends up on a quest to save the world.  The way he does this is partially determined by the player's choice of archetype at the beginning of the game . . . specifically, he can be a decker (hacker who projects his very consciousness into a virtual construct of the computer system), a street samurai (big, tough fighter skilled in the use of guns, armor, and punching things very hard), or a gator shaman (magician who follows the precepts of his spirit animal, allowing its magical energy to flow through him).

You face a number of different adversaries, but the main ones are Renraku, one of the biggest megacorporations around, and Thon, a free spirit bent on world domination.  These two forces have joined together in a mutual bid for power that naturally degenerates into each side trying to use and then lose the other.  Many of the other baddies you end up facing are working for either one or both of these nasty villains.

Fortunately for Joshua, he's also got a lot of folks on his side, though not all of them work for free.  He meets up with a number of Mr. Johnsons, people who specialize in working as middlemen for corporations and other organizations and do the actual hiring of shadowrunners for their various illegal and quasi-legal activities, who give him jobs and information.  He cultivates a list of contacts who are willing to provide him with info, gear, and various services for the right price.  And there are several fellow shadowrunners hanging about and are willing to team up with Joshua as long as he keeps them paid and alive.

He also eventually meets and teams up with Harlequin and Frosty, two legendary figures in the Shadowrun setting.  So that's pretty neat!

Like its SNES predecessor, the Genesis SR has a lot of characterization floating around.  Virtually every NPC you meet has their own unique personality and mode of speech, with only a few glitches here and there . . . every single hotel owner, for example, bitches about all their towels being stolen, even in the classiest joints.  Though there may just be an epidemic of towel thieves in Seattle, meaning it might have been done that way on purpose!

The Writing
The game's story is even deeper than the characterization, branching in several interesting directions with nicely cinematic reveals of important plot elements.  It really feels like Joshua is moving through a long and complex Shadowrun campaign, and it's great to see how they pull various disparate elements together to make a cohesive whole.

The dialogue between Joshua and the NPCs is extremely well written, and in several parts it and/or the narrative sections are interspersed with what amounts to action scenes, putting you in a short firefight before returning to the discussion at hand.  And while it partakes of the Shadowrun slang from time to time, it doesn't try to beat the player over the head with it and uses it in contexts where it's easy to understand if you're not already familiar with it.

The Gameplay
If nothing else, the gameplay alone in this game makes it worth playing.  It's an overhead game with a sandbox setup, allowing you to go anywhere in the game right off the bat as long as you're willing to pay cab fare and - in one case - for a passport.

Combat is as easy as cycling through targets and shooting/punching/magicking them until they stop moving, but the mechanics behind it are very deep.  You have a sizable list of attributes which can be advanced through gaining and applying karma, there is a wide selection of different types of guns and spells, you can buy various cyberware upgrades to enhance your stats and abilities, and you have two different life meters, one for physical damage and another for stun damage.

Your attributes also include a number of non-combat stats, including but not limited to Negotiation (influences buying and selling as well as the pay for shadowrunning jobs and for hiring other runners), Electronics (allowing you to pick maglocks and hack security systems), and Reputation (allowing you access to certain buildings, reducing the costs of entering certain clubs, and getting the attention of certain high-class contacts), adding even further depth to other areas of gameplay.

When speaking with NPCs, Joshua can pick from up to three different dialogue options (one each for the A, B, and C buttons on the Genesis controller), making chats with other people a decently interactive experience.

The menu screen overall is incredibly in-depth, storing tons of information about your character and the mission he's on.

Running the Matrix - the cyberspace construct of the city's computer grid - can get a bit repetitive at times, but there's so many options of what you can do that the player can mix things up a little if they start getting bored of the same old "continuous Deception/Attack" routine.

While there are many other games that were made since that have this kind of depth or more, this was one of the few console games of the time that went to such lengths to give the player such an immersive experience, and in my opinion all that hard work was worth it.

The Challenge
The game remains fairly challenging throughout - unless you go on a shadowrun binge and simply upgrade everything to insane levels - but is especially so at the very beginning, mostly because your stats start off so low as to be almost non-existent.  Joshua is a very weak character to start off with, and it takes a great deal of time grinding shadowruns before things start equalizing.

This is one of my few gripes with the game.  There is a nice variety of runs you can go on, but by the time you get to where you really need tons of cash and karma to get where you need to be to advance the storyline, your options have been whittled down to only two real choices:  Matrix runs or breaking into corporate buildings to retrieve a package/person.  The challenge at this point is to merely keep up the grind without getting burnt out.  I realize, however, that the limitations of the Genesis were probably what kept the developers from introducing even more variety in the run types . . . but it can still wear the player down after a while.

The Graphics
Overall the graphics were very well designed.  The opening screen itself with the Shadowrun logo looks absolutely beautiful, and all of the different areas of the city look like they should.  There's a lot of great detail all over the place - from litter and debris lining the streets in the barrens to the futuristic looking high-tech gadgetry on the desks in the office buildings - but some of it is marred by a strange sort of pixellation effect.  Some of the streets and sidewalks, for instance, look like they're only about half there, as there's a grid of black spots laying across them.  I think it may have been an attempt to give them a more textured look, but I'd say it failed if that's the case.

Another small but sometimes annoying problem is a slight warping of the image from time to time.  Most noticeable in office buildings and out in the woods, a horizontal section of the screen will sometimes become raggedy.  It doesn't obscure the image any, but it is a bit distracting at times.  I've played this game both as a cartridge and as a ROM and this ghost warping occurs in both, so it's definitely a problem with the programming of the game itself, though I can't personally imagine the exact mechanics behind it.

A lot of the NPCs that wander around outside are clones of each other with no real individualization, and there's only about five different types at most.  Meh.

These are all just minor issues, however.  The game as a whole looks great.  Especially cyberspace . . . even though they use a very basic topography (in the pencil and paper RPG, the virtual construct of a computer system can look like virtually anything the programmers want it to look like), it's very pretty and utilizes a pretty snazzy mock 3D setup.

The Music
Shadowrun is one of the few games I'd consider buying the soundtrack from.  Where it's SNES predecessor was kind of "rock noir", the Genesis version is much more techno with an occasional hint of grunge underlying it.  Each specific musical snatchet is completely appropriate for the area it plays in as well, adding to the atmosphere without taking it over.

Only problem is that when you load your game while you're already playing, the music glitches and starts playing the Redmond Barrens theme no matter where you had saved last.  Fortunately it fixes itself once you leave the area.

The Bottom Line
I absolutely adore this game.  Though it has its moments where it's a bit of a grind, the excellent gameplay keeps even doing the same thing over and over again interesting.  I love that it's very tightly based on the Second Edition Shadowrun rules, making it feel even more like Shadowrun than just the setting alone could do.  Great story, great graphics, great music . . . overall, this is just a great game and I highly recommend it.