Psychonauts (PC)

Platform:  PC
Developer:  Double Fine Productions
Released:  2005
Genre:  Platformer

The Story
All young Razputin Aquato ever wanted was to be a Psychonaut.  To use his impressive mental abilities to go on crazy adventures, saving lives and battling evil forces and maybe setting a few things on fire with his mind just for fun.  So when the chance came for him to sneak into the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp - a secret Psychonauts training ground for psionically gifted children - he took it.  And immediately got caught trespassing before the welcoming ceremony was even over.  But despite the fact that he isn't technically a real camp trooper and his parents have been called to take him home the very next day, the camp counselors don't bother to try and stop him from participating in training activities with the rest of the kids.  Or taking part in dangerous, experimental mind tumblings.

And it's during one of these experiments that Raz stumbles upon something sinister.  Not-all-is-as-it-seems is pretty standard operating procedure at Whispering Rock, but what he uncovers is something else entirely, and he is determined to get to the bottom of it . . . in between improving his psi abilities, dealing with weird kids left and right, fighting off telekinetic bears, and going on scavenger hunts.  And most importantly, he needs to get it all finished before tomorrow morning!  Yikes!


The Game
Psychonauts is the brainchild of Tim Schafer, who originally came up with the idea as simply one part of a different game, Full Throttle.  He took that idea about a crazy trip through a whacked out mental landscape and, with the help of his team, developed it into a full story in its own right. Sadly, it sold very poorly when it first came out despite huge critical success, but has since gained a cult following.


The Characters
Razputin "Raz" Aquato is the main character, a young boy with impressive mental potential who quickly begins to turn that potential into reality over the course of the game.  He was born to a family of acrobats - which shows in the extreme ease with which he uses tightropes, trampolines, and trapeze swings to achieve his objectives - but ran away from the circus to join the Psychonauts because he knew his father wouldn't let him go otherwise.  Raz's family had been cursed by evil psychics to eventually suffer horrible deaths in water, you see, and as a result his father hates psychics.  And since Raz himself is a psychic, needless to say, their relationship is kind of rocky to begin with.

Whispering Rock Summer Camp is run by four members of the Psychonauts.  The first of these we meet is Coach Morry Oleander, a squat ultra-military type who enjoys putting the kids through the mental paces in his brutal Basic Braining course, which resides entirely within his own mind.  Literally.  The kids telepathically enter his mind and have to complete the obstacle course within in order to continue on to the next level of training.  It's primarily his influence which allows Raz to start training alongside the other kids.  Once he's seen proof of the amazing power locked inside Raz's mind, he knows that harnessing it is an opportunity he can ill afford to pass up.

Where Oleander is the brawn (or at least the bluster), Sasha Nein is the brains of the adults around camp.  Also impressed with Raz's abilities, he recruits the young psychic for a series of tests using a brain tumbler, sending Raz into his own mind and thus kicking off an adventure to stop vile enemies bent on world domination.  While a bit of a mad scientist type, what with the conducting of quasi-legal experiments on impressionable young camp-goers, Sasha is a very calm, cool, and collected dude, which is represented by the fact that his mindscape is a structured, orderly cube.

Milla Vodelo, on the other hand, is bubbly, passionate, and perpetually cheerful, and her mind is a jumpin' dance party, woooooooo!  She teaches the children the art of levitation, one of the most useful abilities in the entire game.  She's the heart of the Whispering Rock Psychonauts and cares deeply for the kids under her charge.  If you find the secret area locked away in her perpetual mental fiesta, you might even get to see why.

Finally and most importantly is Ford Cruller, semi-retired Psychonaut agent and camp janitor.  He's a fun guy.

Aaaaaaaaaaand then there are all the kids, the villains, and a handful of insane asylum inhabitants, the last of which you spend a good amount of time getting acquainted with their demented mindscapes.  I could go on for hours and hours about each and every one of them, I honestly could, and not just because many of them are important to the story.  Every character is unique and wonderful and really ought to be experienced firsthand.  The characterization in this game is one of the big reasons to play it, because-


The Writing
-the writing is the main reason.  Psychonauts is filled to the brim with clever, witty, and truly engaging dialogue as well as an interesting plot and well-developed setting.  Even during those occasional dull moments when the gameplay started to wear down on me, the thing that kept me going was wanting to hear the next joke or see what the next weird little development in the story was going to be.

So many games (and movies and other things, for that matter) try to be quirky and weird and usually end up being vomited out as a mangled mess by companies that don't really know what they're doing.  Double Fine doesn't have that problem, and their ability to truly be quirky and weird shines brightly in the humor and pure entertainment value of this game.

I feel kind of bad for leaving this section so short in comparison to just how good the writing really is, but you can just imagine that I've written twenty or thirty glowing paragraphs of drooling praise, because that's pretty much all I'd be doing.  And really, while I typically don't worry much about minor spoilers in these reviews, I don't want to give any of them out let alone the big ones in any detail so folks can really get into the meaty part of the game for themselves.


The Gameplay
Now, what I'm about to say here is both true and misleading.  Compared to the writing, the gameplay is a little crap.

This is not to say that the actual game aspects aren't good!  They are.  Sort of.  I mean, they're adequate.  See, Psychonauts didn't do anything that so many platformers before it didn't do.  It's pretty much strictly boilerplate actiony adventury jumpy-aroundy and collect stuffy.  Nothing new or innovative.  You could probably pick up any random Ratchet & Clank and get a similar experience.  And that includes a few small, standard glitches here and there.

But y'know what?  It gets the job done.  It may not excel, but neither does it bog things down, and thus it serves as a perfectly good plate on which to deliver the delicious steak that is the writing.

Now, with that said . . . that's not all there really is to say.  I played the PC version, you see, and unfortunately, the PC port really is complete crap.  Not to the point of being a gamebreaker, thankfully, but still, one or two steps further down the crap line and it probably would have been.  For those of you thinking of playing this version, I would high suggest that if you do not already have a gamepad, you should really consider investing in one.  There were many interesting choices made regarding the controls, but the most blatantly mystifying of these is that the mouse does not control the camera.  Instead, you have to use the numberpad to angle Raz's view around while you use the basic WASD to move Raz himself.  Which is more than a little awkward.  And though this next part at least can be changed, it seems almost equally odd that they still mapped some of the controls onto the mouse buttons as the default.

The gamepad controls are, fortunately, just fine and work like they should.  Yet it's not entirely free from petty annoyances itself, as certain parts of the menu (that being those parts regarding sound, resolution, and other stuff added in by the folks doing the port) can't be directly changed with the pad, meaning you have to use the mouse for those parts.  So make sure you get all your settings right the first time!


The Challenge
For the most part, pretty easy.  There are a few moments here and there in almost every level where things get frustrating, but once you get past those, the rest isn't much of a problem . . . with two major exceptions.

The first and foremost of these exceptions is collecting everything for 100% completion.  The particularly applies to gathering the Figments, of which there are often a couple hundred in each mindscape, and they are all 2D, neon outlines that fade in and out, some of which are moving around and others are very small, and all of which makes it very very very hard to find all of them, especially in the more brightly lit levels.  But so what, right?  It's just the 100% thing, so who cares?  Well . . . probably not many people, admittedly.  Gathering all of this hidden stuff is actually part of the upgrade system, and the more stuff you find, the more powerful you become.  But even without doing any truly diligent searching, the average player will probably find more than enough of the collectables to manage just fine.

More problematic is the last level of the game.  The original version, which was on XBox, gained a great deal of noteriety for being stupid difficult to a punishing degree.  One of the things they did right in the PC port was add a couple things and take out a couple others in order to make it easier, and yet I still found it to be the most highly frustrating part of the game, far more so than any other section.  And one of the things that made it yet more frustrating was that the boss fight was almost insultingly straightforward.  Not that the others were overly complex games of cat and mouse, mind.  But it's still the difference between picking boulders up (with your mind) and throwing them at the bad guy that you've set on fire (also with your mind) after penetrating their defenses (again with the mind thing) versus just running up and punching a guy in the face every couple of minutes until he stops trying to follow you.  It's just a little disappointing, that's all.


The Sights
I have to admit, at first I wasn't exactly thrilled about the super-deformed look of the characters, but over the course of the game they all grew on me, and now I can't really imagine them any other way.  The insane architecture, however, felt completely fitting to me from the very start, and it was always fun to find out just what the next person's inner mind was going to look like.  The minds of the insane asylum residents were definitely the most interesting to me, particularly one that is nothing but an extremely long alleyway styled like a velvet painting lit by blacklight.  Absolutely gorgeous.


The Sounds
A very well put together soundtrack, with each song wonderfully complementing the mind or other landscape it's attached to.  So much so that it tended to fade into the background for me, and I'd only really notice it when A) it became obvious they had threaded a bit of classical music into it (such as bits of the 1812 Overture sneaking into Napoleon's game table) or B) I realized I had been humming along with it for the past few minutes without thinking about it.

Much more noticeable and even more laudable is the voice cast, each and every one of them being guilty of doing a double fine job.  As excellent as the writing is, I don't think it would have been even half as funny without the stellar work of the actors using it to its fullest potential.  Not that it should really come as a surprise that they did such excellent work, as there are some pretty hefty VA names in the bunch, such as Tara Strong, Steve Blum, Stephen Stanton, Nick Jameson, and Richard Horvitz.


The Bottom Line
For the longest time, this was one of those games I was both intrigued by and wary of.  Because of the cult following, I had heard pretty much nothing but good things about it, that it was more or less the best game ever made in the history of best games ever made.  So while part of me wanted to check it out and see what all the hub-bub was about, bub, another very large part of me was shooting up red flags and warning flares that spelled out "Too Good To Be True".

Well, I'm not going to say that it was the best game ever.  But I am going to say it was good.  Damn good.  Certainly worth playing, and once I get another game or two knocked back, definitely worth going back to for 100% completion.  Even with only slightly above average gameplay and PC port deformities, it's still far more entertaining than a lot of other platformers I've played, and even more so than many other games in general.  If you've got the wherewithal to pick up a copy - be it for XBox, PC, or PS2 - I'd say it's well worth your time and money.

In the meantime, the possibility of a sequel dangles above our heads, as Mr. Schafer himself has said he would love to make one and only a few reality-check issues (such as funding) stand in the way, and I would be absolutely tickled if they finally made it a reality.  But I think, even more than that, what I would like to see is a TV show based on the game's setting.  I'd watch the hell out of that, and I'd bet that a lot of other people would too.

Mickey Mousecapade

Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developer: Hudson Soft
Released: 1988
Genre: Platformer

The Story
Mickey and Minnie hear a cry for help from a mysterious source! Ever ready to lend a hand to someone in need, they set off on an adventure to save whoever it is from whatever the heck is going on!

The Game
Though not exactly a remarkable game in and of itself, the background of the game is actually a bit interesting. It was originally titled Micky Mouse: Adventures in Wonderland when it was released in Japan by Hudson Soft. Capcom then brought it over to the English speaking world, changing the name to Mickey Mousecapade (not Mickey MousecapadeS as so many people, including myself, have called it), altering almost every sprite in the game, and changing the story a bit. The full scope of these changes will be described in the appropriate sections below, but suffice it to say . . . they didn't make too much sense.

In any case, MM is also remarkable in that it started an era of Capcom making Disney-themed games. If nothing else, I think we can all thank MM for paving the way for Duck Tales.

The Characters
The main two characters of the game are Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Disney's prominent mascot and his girlfriend. They're sort of emulating their mostly-silent versions here, as Mickey says a total of two different words throughout the entire game, and as far as I can remember Minnie doesn't say anything at all.

These two intrepid mousies are off on an adventure to save . . . ALICE! ALICE ALICE ALICE! Y'know, from Wonderland? There, I spoiled the surprise. But I had to, you see. Firstly, because in the Japanese version, it's not a surprise. Right from the start it's known that you're going to be battling your way through Wonderland (I mean, heck, it's in the title) to save poor little girl Alice who has been caught and imprisoned and whatnot. Secondly, it needs to be mentioned to help along with the talking about the changes that were made to the game thing. And thirdly, I remember just how bitterly disappointed I was that I was saving Alice. It was made out to be this big huge mystery as to who I was trying to save . . . and it was just li'l ol' Alice.

I mean, I guess she deserves to be saved just like anybody else, but Capcom actually set things up to be like some sort of cool mystery, like there was going to be an awesome twist at the end. Like you beat the game and it turns out you were actually saving Mickey and Minnie and you weren't the real Mickey and Minnie but robots from the future made to look like them sent back to the past to save them from their certain death! But no, it's just Alice.

So if you haven't played the game before and you might have been intrigued by the cool mystery, I have just saved you the bother. No need to thank me. Just doin' my job.

Anyway, next we have the bosses. This is where the major changes to the game come in. As mentioned enough to make one gag already, the original version of MM was set in Wonderland. You wouldn't really be able to tell it from the stages unless you thought about it way too hard, but at least the bosses were Wonderland material through and through. The Cheshire Cat, the Dodo, the Caterpillar, and finally her big bad majesty, the Queen of Hearts. Well, there's also Captain Hook of Peter Pan fame. Apparently Neverland takes up some Wonderland real estate. In the Americanized version, however? These become a witch, a crocodile, a snake, and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. Oh, and the good Cap'n is replaced by Pegleg Pete in his pirate garb.

You may notice that only two of these replacement bosses really have any direct connection with Disney. Of course, there have been some attempts by people to place the others somewhere in the Disneyverse as well. The most logical and probable of these is the crocodile, thought to be the clock-swallowing croc who's always after Captain Hook's other hand. The reason this seems sound is the fact that said tick-tock croc is actually on the game's American box art. Of course, this brings up the question of why they bothered putting in the croc if they took out Hook? Less probable is that the snake is Kaa from The Jungle Book. I mean, it's possible, but it barely looks anything like him. And the most bewildering of all is the witch. There have been a couple of witches in Disney cartoons, but this one doesn't look anything like any of them past the whole stereotypical witch look.

Then there are the smaller, regular baddies that roam the various levels. And though most of them had absolutely nothing to do with Alice in Wonderland or even Disney in general, many of them were changed as well. Stuff like switching out gophers for cats and one kind of bird for another kind of bird and even simple color swaps like turning pink flowers red. At least if the flowers had been white in the original and they'd been changed to red for the overseas release, that could have been a very clever inside joke on Capcom's part.

I've taken a look around to see if I could find the reasons for these changes, but the overwhelming evidence seems to indicate that nobody knows why Capcom did this. People have theories of course, but then people always have theories. In the end, it just doesn't seem to make any sense. The only reason to have hidden the Wonderland characters was to keep Alice's presence a secret, which in itself didn't make sense.

The Writing
The original story is very straightforward. Alice is kidnapped by the Queen of Hearts. Micky and Minnie try to save her. As mentioned before, Capcom tried to mix this up a little . . . and in this at least they were halfway successful in making an intriguing story. They hid the identity of the person in trouble, adding some mystery to the proceedings. The box art and the ads showed footprints leading them on, and I remember feeling a sense of following those footprints in the game itself. Which was kind of exciting, sort of like I was an adventuring sleuth on the trail.

But, as also mentioned before, the mystery guest is just Alice. So . . . yay? Seems like a waste of a good marketing campaign. And basically that was all they succeeded at in the writing arena: making a good marketing campaign. The game itself is typical of most older platformers in that if you can find any actual narrative structure, then more than likely it was merely accidental, not something the creators had intended.

Even if one took into account that the game was supposed to be proceeding through Wonderland as per the original storyline, the levels simply have little to nothing to do with Wonderland. You could make cases for the house being the mirror house from Through the Looking Glass or the ocean level being the ocean of Alice's tears, or the forest being . . . um. Well, there were a couple of different forests in the movie, I guess. But see, that's the thing, the levels are at best only vaguely connected to anything Disney in general much less Wonderland specifically. They're just sort of generic settings for Mickey and Minnie to jump around in.

Capcom gets an E for Effort regarding the adverts, but they and Hudson both get an F for pretty much everything else.

The Gameplay
Much of the game is set up to be a pretty standard platformer. There are enemies running around trying to attack you. There are items to pick up. There are, ultimately, platforms.

Players take control Mickey as he jumps his way around these platforms, shooting at enemies with stars (energy balls in the original) and generally just being a typical platformer hero. Players also take control of Minnie. Though by "take control" in this instance I mean "hope she kind of does what you want/need her to do at any particular moment".

Those of you who remember my review of Stimpy's Invention (and why shouldn't you, it was just a couple of weeks ago!) will surely remember that I was rather disparaging of the double-character control setup. Mickey Mousecapade is not disabusing me of that disparagement. Minnie does bring a little to the plate after you've procured her star attack, enabling you to utilize her in an inventive way during boss fights (protip: she's invincible against enemy attack and can climb ladders while you stay on a lower level), but otherwise she's a drain. A lead weight. A nuisance.

If she dies, Mickey dies. And when you're jumping over deadly pits like in the ocean level, she can and will fall into said deadly pits if you're not careful to keep her right there with you. If Mickey is at an exit but Minnie isn't, neither of them can leave the room. This lead to at least a few instances (especially during the final stage in the castle) where I'd clear out an entire room and it would still take me an extra half a minute or so trying to get her up all the platforms to the exit.

And then there's the thing where you find secret items and reveal them with your star shooter only to find out that it's a monster that kidnaps Minnie and you have to get her back by finding a secret key and then playing a guessing mini-game to get her back. So that's fun.

Not.

But even if the double character nonsense got taken out, there's still a lot of little annoyances in the game from a single character perspective. I do have to say that it's interesting in a way, at least. Playing a lot of these older games makes me realize just how much we now take for granted in platformer games, even the fancy 3D ones of the modern age. Stuff that simply doesn't exist in this game. Stuff like being able to jump from ladders and being able to jump straight up in the air but then move around to some other position like a floating leaf that tumbles at its own discretion. Here you can only drop from ladders like a stone, usually right into enemy fire, and if you just straight up in the air then you're not going to be doing anything other falling straight back down.

This isn't really bad, per se. It's annoying, but only because I've been pampered by modern gameplay. Otherwise it's merely an interesting thing to note about the evolution of the platformer genre in general.

The Challenge
Y'know, I remember that when I was a kid, I thought Mickey Mousecapade was tough as hell. Ridiculously hard in the grand tradition of many Nintendo games of the age. I was surprised, then, upon picking it up for first time in at least two decades and busting out the first three levels with only a few minor irritations. They were, sadly, irritations of the type where things aren't really challenging in a fair and balanced way but in a "oh FUCK YOU, GAME" way. Still, easily surmountable.

Then I got to the pirate ship stage where the game suddenly became a cheap-shot whorebitch. Fuck you, MM, for setting up four rooms in which hits cannot possibly be reasonably avoided and progress is done more through luck and determination than through skill and gradually learning the curve. Fuck you so very much.

At the very least it had the decency to actually limit it to just those four rooms. The castle level after is back to a more sprawling architecture and is still rather difficult to navigate, but at least it isn't the complete middle finger to the players that the pirate ship manages to distill and compress so well.

I'll give the game a middle of the road assessment on challenge, but only as an average of the two extremes.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I can't really state with any authority of the final boss. I managed to get an invincibility fairy right toward the end of the game and touched Maleficent just before it wore off. I didn't really expect it to work but thought, "Eh, what the hell." It did work, meaning I beat her in a possibly record breaking two seconds. Go me!

The Sights
Honestly, I was fully prepared to just about completely bypass this section with a simple "meh", but upon reflection I find I can't. Much of this reflection has a great deal to do with checking out the various sprite differences between the Hudson and Capcom versions of the game. The thing is, compared to the vast majority of early NES games, MM has it going on. The stages are pretty vibrant, the sprites are actually pretty well constructed in both versions, and it almost looks like it was made at a later stage in the system's life than it actually was. The forest stage is probably the best of the settings, which is kind of surprising given it's pretty much the same thing over and over again only in different seasons.

The Sounds
Not stellar, but still pretty catchy. Seemed like a nice preview of the much better music that would later be heard in Duck Tales.

The Bottom Line
Eh, I have a tough time categorizing this one, really. If you've got nothing else to do some lazy afternoon, bust this game out and give it a whirl. It can be a fun little romp when it's not causing minor blood pressure spikes. But more than it's worth as a game, it should probably be played through at least once for the appreciation of the place in video game history it occupies. Much of what Capcom became through the late 80's and early-to-mid 90's was because they handled publishing this game.

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!

Sonic CD

Platform: Sega CD
Developer: Sonic Team
Released: 1993
Genre: Platformer

The Game
For one month every year, the Little Planet, home of the Time Stones, appears over Never Lake. Intent on harnessing the power of the planet and its stones, Dr. Robotnik takes over the place and starts doing his mad scientist thing. Sonic, as the designated hero, zips his way up to Little Planet and starts kicking robot booty.

Sonic CD (or Sonic the Hedgehog CD when its mama wants to make sure it knows it's in trouble) is the product of an interesting set of circumstances. It was developed by good ol' Sonic Team, the group responsible for making most of the Sonic and Sonic-related games in existence . . . but only part of Sonic Team. Yuji Naka, one of the most prominent members of the team, had himself a fit, grabbed up a bunch of the best and the brightest from Sonic Team, and went over to the US to start working with Sega Technical Institute on developing Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Naoto Oshima, the actual creator of Sonic, took what was left of his team and started developing Sonic CD.

Originally, the two were supposed to be the same game, but eventually they branched off from one another (quite wildly, I'd say) and became their own thing. So how does the CD side of the equation hold up? Well, let's see.

The Characters
Sonic the Hedgehog is the same rude blue dude as always, the somewhat callous but still heroic figure who beat Robotnik once and aims to do so again. The tools at his disposal are his super speed, his cutting quills, and a new figure-eight extra fast running move that was not in the first Sonic game and has never, to my knowledge, ever been seen again. He just revs up his legs in a figure-eight cycle and then blasts off. Whee!

Dr. Robotnik is the goofy but still somewhat threatening evil genius bent on dominating all in his path and turning everything and everybody into robots. He appears at the end of the third zone in each area with a new mecha monstrosity with which to smash, slice, crush, or puree Sonic.

Amy Rose got her introduction here in Sonic CD, though for American audiences she was renamed "Princess Sally", I suppose because Sega thought that American kids wouldn't understand why Sonic would have a love interest that wasn't Sally from the animated Sonic series made by DiC Entertainment. The fact that Sally and Amy look look absolutely nothing alike besides both being female didn't seem to deter them. Anyway, Amy is a young pink hedgehog with a complete and utter crush on Sonic, though Sonic does not return her affection in any way whatsoever. Her entire purpose for being in the game is to follow him around in a couple of the early stages while cartoony hearts float around her head, then get abducted by Metal Sonic.

And speaking of Metal Sonic, he's Dr. Robotnik's newest creation, a machine shaped like and (almost) as fast as his namesake. He is the primary antagonist in the Stardust Speedway level, in which he and Sonic compete against each other in a deadly race.

Besides these four, there are the usual array of evil robots trying to drill, saw, spike, or beat Sonic to death and - if you save them from a nasty Metal Sonic hologram - a bunch of happy, peace loving animals that bounce about the screen, forcing the player to consider if those mushrooms they ate just before starting the game had gone bad.

The Writing
What writing there is I cannot fault. It's a pretty interesting setting . . . a tiny world in temporal flux. Sadly much of the rest is pretty much boilerplate. An evil twin (albeit a very cool one), unrequited love, bid to take over the world, so on and so forth. Structuring one entire zone into a race was fairly inventive for the time, tho', so good on 'em for that.

The Gameplay
First off, let me say that I am a complete and total old school Sonic fanboy. The first one I played was Sonic 2, and almost every 2D Sonic I've played has made me quite happy. So it was that I sat down with Sonic CD with the expectation that I was going to have more or less a pretty good time. But . . . I didn't.

Oh, it was alright, I suppose. There were some interesting ideas going on in the game. But overall I found myself constantly frustrated, and it wasn't until I was almost finished that I realized why.

See, Sonic - both the character and the game series - is all about speed. Wooshing around like a maniac, grabbing rings and kicking 'bot butt. It really goes without saying, but I'm saying it anyway, and the reason I'm saying it is because Sonic CD isn't about speed.

It was when I was jumping from an inconveniently situated pit to an inconveniently situated ledge to another inconveniently situated pit et cetera in the Metallic Madness level that I came to this realization. One of the gameplay conceits of the game is that Sonic's temporal state on Little Planet has some leeway. If he touches a lamppost marked "Past" or "Future" and then keeps up his top normal running speed for a certain amount of time without stopping, he will shoot into either the past or the future where the zone layout is a bit different, the enemies are altered (or, in some cases, no longer present at all), and Sonic can make the future better by destroying the robot manufacturing machines in the past, thus eventually going on to get the Good Ending. Because of the need to run without stopping in order to time travel, the stages are built specifically to be a hurdle in this process. Even in areas where there aren't any timeposts nearby, there are little obstacles in the way that will keep Sonic from reaching and maintaining his top speed for very long.

Thus Sonic in Sonic CD is slow, and my brain rails against the entire concept.

Now, I like a thinking game as much as the next braniac. I rather enjoy puzzlers, games that test my wits and force me to figure out the optimal positioning to do whatever it is I need to do to proceed. But that's not what I play Sonic for. I don't go to McDonald's for their Chinese food, y'know? So it is that this game in which I have to pick out a good spot for an extended run, clear it of enemies, find a timepost, and hang on to the charge long enough to pull off a temporal jump just so I can go on a scavenger hunt instead of just blast through from beginning to end doesn't feel like a Sonic game at all. The entire gameplay mechanic has been toppled by a new paradigm of level design built to accommodate a new story element, and it bothers me.

I understand, of course, that this was actually very early in the game and it wasn't known at the time that Sonic 2 would pretty much forever place its stamp on all future Sonic titles, pushing the whole speed thing even further, perhaps even to ludicrous levels. Maybe if I had played Sonic 1 first and then went straight to Sonic CD, I would have been able to handle the change and even come to prefer it. But things didn't happen that way and I'm looking back at the game from the standpoint of being used to Sonic moving so damn fast that he leaves the screen at times because the camera simply can't keep up.

But I think you all get the point, so I'll stop harping on it. Instead, I'll go on to say that the temporal jumping is rather nifty and I found myself trying to make the leaps even when I didn't actually do anything ending-altering with it. The music and scenery changes enacted by those leaps made it worthwhile enough for me.

I also found the shrink ray areas in the last stage to be absolutely delightful. Running around as teeny tiny Sonic was both a blast and utterly hilarious. I kind of wish they'd had those rays in more areas of the game.

While I may not have enjoyed Sonic's new paradigm, I totally dug Robotnik's. Instead of just finding different ways to wail on him, you have to instead find different ways of getting to where you can wail on him. Eh . . . that sentence might not make too much sense right now, but you'll get it when you actually play the game. Just trust me, it's interesting.

I also liked the special stages, though I was a bit rubbish at it at first. I finally got the hang of it and got my first Time Stone, however, so yay me!

The Challenge
Even though they slowed things down a bit and put more environmental dangers in the way (hell, I'd say 75% or more of the game was entirely environmental dangers with only a handful of 'bots thrown into each level just to make things interesting), it's still a Sonic game in many other ways, and I've been playing those for more than half my life. I pretty much blasted right through it, with only the last stage giving me any sort of real trouble. Relative Sonic newbies might find it a bit harder, but not terribly so, I don't think.

The Sights
I read somewhere that Sonic CD was one of the only games on the Sega CD that looked worth a damn, and now that I've played a couple of other Sega CD games, I can definitely see where they're coming from. The game doesn't really try anything fancy (most of it would look right at home on the Genesis), and where it does it keeps the fanciness pretty understated. The result is deceptively simple, hiding subtle beauty wherever you look.

Once again I praise the special stages, and I was almost shocked at just how good their pseudo-3D look came off. Also wonderfully done were the animated sections at the beginning and the end of the game. Very reminiscent of animation in the Sonic OAV from way back, and I'm kind of curious now whether or not it was made by the same people. Not curious enough to actually look it up, mind.

If there's one place this game does not disappoint, it's in the looks area.

The Sounds
Dreams Come True, the composers of the music from the first two Sonic games, has spoiled me. Every bit of music in the series gets compared against the masterpiece that is the Sonic 2 soundtrack especially . . . but this does hold up well on its own rights. I liked the main theme - Sonic Boom by Pastiche - especially and may be playing it every once in a while and humming it to myself in the shower.

I've come to understand that the soundtrack I heard while playing the game isn't the original, and that there was some big hullabaloo over the change when it was first released over here in the states. I might end up joining the haters if I ever hear the original Japanese soundtrack, but for now I'm quite happy with what we got myself.

The Bottom Line
I want to like this game. I really really do. But I just can't get over my own preconceived notions of what a Sonic game is and isn't supposed to be. If it were something completely different, like a fighting game or an RPG, then maybe it wouldn't be a problem, but it's just too close to a regular title in the series for me to not see the differences.

Still, it's a gorgeous game, the music's pretty cool, and there are some few gameplay changes that I can get behind, so I'm gonna grade this one "well above average". I did beat the game but haven't gotten the Good Ending yet, and I find myself not entirely disgusted with the idea of giving a Good Ending run another try later on.

Super Castlevania IV

Platform:  Super NES
Developer:  Konami
Released:  1991
Genre:  Platformer

The Game
Dracula has once again risen to plague the land.  Simon, a member of the Belmont clan and sworn to face and defeat the evil vampire, must take up the legendary whip Vampire Killer and meet his destiny in Dracula's castle.

Super Castlevania IV used to occupy a somewhat strange area in the Castlevania series.  It was built to be a remake of the original Castlevania and was considered so over in Japan.  When it was ported over to America, however, Konami's American branch presented it as a sequel to the previous games in the series.  It continued in this dual role for some time, but now it is universally considered to be a remake only.  Which is a good thing, really, because otherwise it would have made an already confusing timeline even more convoluted than necessary.

It still carries the moniker "Super Castlevania IV" here in the English speaking countries despite this clarification.

The Characters
Simon Belmont is our hero, purportedly one of the greatest if not the greatest member of his clan.  If nothing else, he seems to be the most highly revered.  But like most silent action game protagonists, he's got very little in the way of characterization.  About all we know about the guy is that he's plenty determined to plant the tip of his whip right in between Dracula's beady little eyes.

Dracula is Dracula.  You know the drill, surely . . . swanky nobleman type with mysterious powers and an unending streak of evil several miles wide.  He also drinks the blood of the living, leads an army of monstrous minions, and has some prime Gothic real estate.

The Writing
You are Simon.  You gotta kill Dracula.  Doesn't get much simpler than that.  Nor does it get any more complex.  But that's to be expected for this type of game.

The Gameplay
SCIV is notable for upgrading Simon's abilities from the original Castlevania with many of those abilities becoming staples of the series from that point forward.  Instead of just flicking his whip out in one way over and over again, Simon can now attack in almost any direction . . . though whipping downward in any way requires him to be up in the air.  He can also hold the whip out and flick it around lightly (while still able to cause damage) in whatever direction the player presses, one of the innovations that was carried over in several later titles in the series.  He can latch on to fixed points and swing Indy Jones style from platform to platform.  And so on and so forth.

Overall, I was half-impressed and half-disappointed in the gameplay.  Being able to whip in virtually any direction was a most definitely welcome addition, the whip flicking worked well both offensively and defensively, and Simon moves very well.

But!

You can jump onto stairs, you can jump down from them, but you can't jump up from them, causing a bit of frustration.  It doesn't matter how dire the situation is and how helpful it might be for you to jump up to a higher platform from the stairs to get away from congregating enemies, Simon is stubbornly stuck to those steps as if they were all made of glue.  This becomes especially annoying with the stairs that connect right to the edge of a platform.  Several times I found myself trying to jump from that platform to another one, but because I was just a single pixel to far to one side, I would end up flailing helplessly on the jump button while Simon stood there on the top step and looked at me all confused, saying "What?  What?!  I don't know what you're wanting me to do!"

Whenever Simon gets hit, he flies around like the victim of a 10,000 volt current.  I understand that this is supposed to be a hazard and is a common element of both a lot of platformers in general and Castlevania in particular, but in this game, it really does seem like he's been caught in a miniature explosion, throwing him several yards to one side.  The overblown nature of this effect is especially felt in areas where getting hit is both almost entirely unavoidable and invariably results in getting tossed down the nearest pit.  Simon really should have taken his anti-convulsants before going into Dracula's lair.

I was both impressed and disappointed right from the beginning by by dual layered fortress level (1-2).  Though a simple gimmick, I rather liked it and it gave some extra depth (Get it?  Two layers?  Depth?!) to the level, but sadly it was not repeated again in later levels.  I thought it was at one point and was all excited until I realized that there was just stuff hanging down on another, non-playable layer in front of me.  I find it kind of strange that they would not take further advantage of this game mechanic throughout the rest of the game.

Still, overall, it's not too horrible bad.  It all evens out to a pretty standard platform experience.

The Challenge
This game can't seem to make up its mind whether it's trying to be super-easy or super-hard.  The difficulty curve does indeed gradually curve upward overall, but in specific instances it will shoot up and down erratically at breakneck speed.

One of the parts where it seems to be easier than it really should is whenever you die and start the level over.  At the beginning of the game and every time he dies, Simon starts out with a basic leather version of his whip.  It's short and it's not very powerful, but pretty much without fail the very first candle you snuff out will provide you with a whip upgrade.  And then within the next five to ten candles, you get the second and final whip upgrade.  If they're just going to hand out these upgrades like it's Halloween and you're wearing your very best vampire hunter costume, then what's the point of having the upgrades at all?  I think I killed approximately seven monsters in all with anything less than the fully powered up whip.

One of the parts where it seems to be harder than it really should is whenever spikes are involved.  Fuck you, spikes!

End bosses seem to be a mixed bag.  One might be somewhat challenging, the next taken down with a mere flick of your whip in its general direction, and the one after that a nightmare from which you may never wake.

The Graphics
I gotta say, the graphics are pretty nice.  Each area is pretty creepy, the sprites are fairly lively, and there is some good use of the SNES' Mode 7 feature, including one stage that has the background constantly rolling in the background, making it look like you're moving through a massive funhouse tube.  The boss sprites are pretty imaginative and well made . . . I can see why a lot of them were reused in Symphony of the Night.

The Music
I wasn't really paying attention to the music for the most part (oops!), but what I recall of it was pretty good.

The Bottom Line
I'm gonna be up front here . . . the straight platformer Castlevania games aren't my favorite things in the world.  I'm one of those guys who much prefer the Metroidvania style entries that eventually took over the series.  Still, this wasn't half bad.  Good graphics, decent gameplay, and the addition of some of the things that I like about the later Metroidvania games all add up to a pretty good installment.  Points off for being just one of a few remakes of the original Castlevania, but still a pretty good game despite that.  Worth playing.