Fun: War of the Console Magi

This is but the beginning of the epic tale that is Sega Fantasy VI, a delightful parody of when they first started putting out game consoles that weren't just game consoles anymore, all using the ending of Final Fantasy VI as its backdrop. If you want to see the show in its entirety, you can follow this delightful little link here.

Discs of Tron

Platform: Arcade
Developer: Bally Midway
Released: 1983
Genre: ---

The Game
Based on the 1982 Disney movie Tron, Discs of Tron puts the player in the glowy blue suit of Tron himself as he plays against Sark in the game grid. Specifically, they compete in a variant of the modified jai alai and disc arena games the programs are forced to play in the movie.

DoT was originally going to be a part of the first Tron-based arcade game (imaginatively named Tron), but Bally Midway was forced to cut it due to technical limitations that they just didn't have the time to surmount. And thank goodness, I say. The first game was a bit crap.

The Characters
You play as Tron, the security program dedicated to defeating Sark and the vile Master Control Program in order to free the ENCOM computer system from their nefarious control.

Sark is a right bastard, the right hand program of the MCP and tasked with the active duties of oppressing everyone and everything that isn't already in the MCP's grip.

The MCP doesn't appear in the game. Nor does anyone else, for that matter. It's pretty lonely out there in the game grid.

The Writing
Though based on a larger narrative, DoT is self-contained, simply running through the paces of the game over and over again.

The Gameplay
The playing field is comprised of two to six platforms (half on your side, half on Sark's) floating in space. Whenever there are multiple platforms on each side, Tron and Sark jump from one to another automatically. Later in the game, these platforms can be struck, causing them to blink out of existence for a short while, limiting Tron and Sark's movements until they reappear.

The main weapon of both programs is their ID discs, frisbee-like items that they toss across the gulf at each other. Both the player and Sark can have up to three of their discs in the air at one time, and if one gets destroyed for any reason, it takes a second or two for them to become usable again. Each side has their own special items as well . . . Tron has a deflection beam with which he can knock away Sark's discs a certain number of times a round, and Sark has some rather nasty energy balls that he can deploy to follow Tron around on the player's side of the field.

In the original arcade box, Tron is moved around the screen through the use of a airplane-style joystick while his aim is adjusted through the use of a dial. Playing the ROM on the computer puts the mouse in the place of the dial, which rides a little bit different from the dial, but still works pretty well.

Overall, it's a pretty unique system that I've always kind of liked.

The Challenge
The difficulty is pretty balanced for an arcade game, and once you start hitting the later stages regularly, the first few levels are easily put down. Sark rarely even gets a chance to throw one of his own discs at first since I tend to take him down so easily.

There are no continues in DoT, as the game doesn't really end. Once you've run through all of the different permutations of the game field, it just starts putting you through the different field types over and over again, the ultimate goal being to get the highest score possible while lasting as long as you can on a single credit.

The biggest challenge of the game, besides the environmental hazards and shields they put in your way, is trying to pay attention to both sides of the game field at the same time. You need to be aiming your discs at Sark and throwing them in ways that trick or force him into their flight path, but you also have to be constantly on the move, making sure his own discs and other tricks don't catch up to you as well. It's pretty good mental exercise.

The Sights
I'd say "for 1983, the graphics are pretty dang good", but the fact is they're still rather nice looking. There's a simplicity to the design that fits the movie environment extremely well, and it really manages to capture the feel of a three dimensional field. This is one of the reasons I said above that I'm glad it wasn't a fifth wheel in the original Tron game . . . it would have certainly looked far worse if it had needed to squeeze in between four other games.

The Sounds
There aren't many sounds in the DoT to speak of, but it does make an attempt at including voice acting with Sark alternately taunting you and cursing your name, depending on the outcome of the match. A lot of games around that time tried to do the voice thing back then with varying levels of success, but I think this was one of the better attempts, even if it didn't sound anything remotely like Sark.

The Bottom Line
I probably blew a few hundred dollars worth of quarters on Discs of Tron alone as a kid. When I first grabbed the MAME emulator, this was one of the first games I sought out, downloaded, and played. I'm glad it's held up so well over the years, being just as much fun now as it was back in the day. If I were a rich man, I'd pay good money to have one of the actual arcade machines for my own personal use.

News: I Guess I Should Be Thankful!

Nintendo is apparently working on developing a port/remake of Starfox 64 for the upcoming 3DS. So, one of the best games made for the N64 being given a complete upgrade of its graphics, being made in digital 3D, and playable on a handheld system? The only way it could possibly be more awesome is if it also made all your favorite dishes, downloaded legal currency into your bank account for every bad guy you shoot down, and performed oral sex on you while you played it. (via IGN)

Fun: Who Needs Video Game Soundtracks

. . . when you've got cockatiels?



Is that total win or what?



Yes, that is total win. But what is this little bird's favorite song?



Rock on, little bird. Rock on.

Blog: Expanding YOTGR's Scope

So, I'm thinking of actually advertising the existence of the blog a little more aggressively now that I've got a decent number of reviews under my belt, so it's time to start thinking of ways to make it a little more viable and marketable.  In short, I think I may need to give more reason for people to come by and stick around.

The reviews themselves will, of course, continue to be the main reason for the blog overall, and I hope they're entertaining and informative enough to keep folks from running off screaming and warning their friends and loved ones away for fear that I might end up corrupting them somehow with my awful, awful writing, opinions, and looks.  But I don't put up reviews every single day, and in these highly competitive internets, consistent updating sells.

To those ends and starting tomorrow, I will try to put up at least one news item and/or bit of entertainment every day as regards old school gaming.  Stuff like re-releases of old games, announcements of new games being made for old series, and videos of Mario saying swear words over and over again.  That sort of thing.  And just like the games themselves around here, a lot of this stuff (especially the entertainment parts) are probably going to be old, since I've got a good number of links to interesting stuff saved up in my bookmarks and I'm too lazy to bother looking for new crap all the time.  Still, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you, right?  Right!

Some folks may not care for this sort of thing, of course, and just want to read the reviews themselves.  Or maybe they just care about the news or just the pictures of Samus and Sonic getting it on.  To help facilitate that, I'll be marking the titles of those entries appropriately.  News items will start off with "News:", the entertaining stuff will be marked "Fun:", and entries like this talking specifically about the blog itself will be marked "Blog:".  Reviews will continue unmarked with just the name of the game itself as the title, though "review" will be placed in their tags so readers can sort out all the other crap if they wish.

Sound good?  Yah, that sounds good.  Cheers!

Beneath a Steel Sky

Platform:  Computer
Developer:  Revolution Software
Released:  1994
Genre:  Point and Click Adventure

The Game
A helicopter crash stranded Robert Foster in the wilderness of the Gap as a child to be raised by a tribe of hunters and scavengers.  This life is completely destroyed when years later security goons from Union City bust in, kidnap him, and kill his tribe.  Another helicopter crash strands him in Union City itself, and now he must find his way back out.  But as he delves deeper into the city on his quest, he finds that his past is catching up to him and a destiny he never knew he had is reaching out with writhing, grasping tendrils . . .

BASS, like Flight of the Amazon Queen from about a week or so ago, is a free-for-download game that can be played using the ScummVM utility.

The Characters
Robert Foster is our erstwhile hero.  He was stranded in the Gap (the future name of the harsh Australian Outback) and raised by a tribe that taught him to hunt and scavenge.  He also became a pretty good mechanical engineer and programmer from fiddling around with the scraps of technology he and his tribe found outside the cities.  He's a generally good-natured and resourceful fellah, and despite the fact that he's grown up in what's left of Australia and is surrounded by primarily Aussie and British accents of all kinds, he talks like he's from the United States.  Weird!

Joey is Foster's little robot buddy, who Foster built himself from bits and pieces he found in the Gap.  Joey is destroyed in the intro scene, but Foster manages to save his main circuit board, which he goes on to insert in a number of different robotic shells throughout the game.  Joey starts off as a helpful but sarcastic jerk with a heart of gold, but his personality undergoes changes both subtle and extreme depending on the capabilities and limitations of the shell he's inhabiting.

Union City is further populated by lots of colorful characters with which Foster and Joey must interact as they try to find their way back to their home in the Gap.  Most are simply callous toward Foster (Gilbert Lamb, the owner of the pipe factory) or simply too self-absorbed to give him much notice (security officers Sam and Norville), and most won't do anything for him without some sort of repayment (the travel agency clerk and Dr. Burke) or sponsorship from someone else (Billy Anchor and the bouncer at the club), but there are a rare few who are actively helpful (the lovely Anita).  And almost without exception, they are all wonderfully entertaining in some way.

The Writing
Humor is pretty much a staple of most point and click adventure games, and BASS is no exception, but in this case the humor is tempered by a dark and gritty cyberpunk plot filled with violent deaths, societal decay, paranoia, and generally mean and nasty people.  Which, personally, I love!  I'm a big cyberpunk fan, particularly the works of William Gibson, so the tale told by BASS is right up my alley.

But don't think I'm trying to sell the humor short.  A lot of it is dark, satirical, and sarcastic, but there's plenty of it in there.  I may not have guffawed out loud very often, but playing this game definitely kept me constantly smirking in dark satisfaction and thinking, "Yah!  Take that, society!"

The story itself is quite well constructed and the dialogue was stupendous as well as well delivered, giving me a real connection to the characters and their plights.

The Gameplay
Even more than some other point and clickers of the time, BASS has a pretty simple interface.  Right click to look, left click to use.  There's an inventory window that drops down from the top and uses the same basic mouse clicks.  Simple, elegant.

But while it's very well set up for the most part, there are a couple of points which caused some problems.

The first is that Joey is a slowass.  Joey's abilities are required to solve a number of different puzzles, especially at the beginning of the game, but he moves like his treads are made out of sections taken from a movie theater floor.  He also has a tendency to just wander around for a little while before he even realizes Foster has left the room, and you might be all the way over on the other side of one of the city levels before he's made it halfway through the first room.  There is fortunately an option to increase (or decrease) the game speed so he'll show up faster, but it still a bit of an inconvenience.

The second is that the game is somewhat buggy.  Occasionally Foster will get stuck while trying to talk to NPCs, necessitating a restore to the last save point.  Due to a compression problem with the sound files, it takes a second or two for each segment of dialogue to load up, making the characters all sound a little stilted as they suddenly stop talking partway through or in between sentences.  Sometimes you can perform sequence-breaking actions, such as the time I grabbed a glass from a guy before I was supposed to be able to . . . I still went through the motions I needed to perform that would have allowed me to have gotten the glass legitimately, but it was mostly pointless since I had the glass already.  And once I tried to use one of the LINC terminals and not only would it not work for me, it caused the game's lettering to shrink (as if it had been bolded before but wasn't any longer), making it a little more difficult to read.

These are all minor hassles, however, and didn't really detract too much from the overall experience.

The Challenge
The puzzles in BASS are a curious mixture of several types.  They're all your basic point and click puzzles in one way or another, but even in that narrow style, there are a few variations, and this game seems to want to try and incorporate them all.  There are those that open up only after you've gone through a specific series of conversations with specific people, necessitating you go from one end of the game map to the other - sometimes making multiple trips - before you can open up some new section or puzzle.  There are logically proceeding item use and combination puzzles where you rub everything in your inventory against each other and every NPC and static object you come across.  And then there's the moon logic puzzles.

I've played through BASS a few times now, though the last time was admittedly a long time ago.  The point is, even when I knew the exact reasons, results, and methodology behind a couple of the puzzles, it still doesn't seem extremely obvious to me just why I should pick up, say a cassette of kitty videos.  It just seems like a random item to swipe from someone's apartment, and it leads to a series of further events which kind of mystify me even though I know what they're all eventually leading up to.  I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that I understand in the end why Foster would take all these things and perform all these actions with them, but during the sequence of events themselves, I have to keep wondering "Why the hell would Foster use the kitty video to distract a dog long enough to steal its biscuits?"  These seem less like the actions of a hero (anti- or otherwise) and more like those of a madman.  And because these actions are sometimes so weird and out there at the time, it's hard to figure out exactly where you're supposed to go with them next without simply doing trial and error from time to time.

But perhaps I'm not being fair here.  I read in another review of this game (yes, how horribly unprofessional of me, but how else am I supposed to steal other people's ideas and pretend like they're my own?) that Foster's kleptomaniac-like tendencies were actually quite brilliant, and I have to say I found myself agreeing with their reasoning.  He used to be a member of a tribe that survived by scavenging everything they could find and using it in whatever way they could.  So in a way it makes sense for him to continue applying that mentality to his big city adventure.  He'd snatch up the kitty video and the doggy biscuits and all the other things he grabs simply because they weren't nailed down (though even that doesn't always stop him), and even if it didn't always make sense at first, he'd try his best to find some way of putting it all to use.

Still, for those of use who didn't grow up in the Gap, it's a method-in-the-madness that might take some getting used to.

Now, I'm gonna go ahead and spoil a later section of this review and say that I love the graphics in the game, but unfortunately they can hide certain things you need to interact with.  The backgrounds, foregrounds, and everything else are a little too lush at times, making smaller items difficult to make out, and it might take several passes with the pointer to figure out there's something you need to take, pull, push, or otherwise fiddle with.

So, what am I trying to say here?  Hmm . . . I forgot.

Wait!  No, I've got it!  The challenge is very uneven.  Not so much that I was ready to take a bite out of my keyboard, but still sort of an emotional rollercoaster.  Fortunately everything else is so damn good that it can distract from the more frustrating bits or deflect the anger caused by such.

The Graphics
omg it is so pretty

Every part of this game looks like a gorgeously rendered panel from a comic book, which - in a sense - is exactly what it is.  The intro is pretty much entirely a comic created by Dave Gibbons (he of Watchmen fame), and in fact it was included as an actual mini-comic with the game.  All of the backgrounds are based on his designs as well, making the entire game one long sequence of scenery porn.

Now, I haven't found anything to absolutely confirm or deny this, but damn I'd swear that all the character sprites and some other small objects and items are 3D, at least partially.  Even if they aren't - and I suspect that this is the case - they are so well made that they look 3D in many ways.  I think it may have something to do with the insanely beautiful and detailed shading job they did.  It makes my eyes bleed, but in a good way.  Also, the sprites are all so expressive, not always relying on just a few stock poses.  Foster especially has some movements that are unique to only certain situations, seen once and then never again, like a rare and beautiful butterfly that flits by, leaving only the bright memory of its existence behind to bring a soft smile to my face from time to time.

Sadly, I can't just leave this section as a testament to the everlasting perfection of BASS' graphical acumen.  There are a couple of perhaps ill-advised attempts to bring full and partial animation to the comic intro and (much shorter) ending of the game.  It's actually disturbing to see the horrific attempts to sync the stiff, unnatural lip movements to the spoken dialogue.  From what I've come to understand, Revolution relatively recently re-released (wow) the game with even more of this type of animation spread throughout the cut scenes . . . I can only hope they managed to do a better job with it this time than they did the first go-round.

The Music
The music was good, with my only real problem being the same as that I had with FOTAQ . . . it's a bit distracting at times.  Not as distracting, but still.  This would be even less of a problem if the music sound level slider would stay where I put it in between game sessions.  Instead, every time I opened the game in ScummVM, it would be right back up where I couldn't concentrate on what I was doing or hear what people were saying to me.

The Bottom Line
The problems are really minor, and they're easily ignored in the face of the superb story, voice acting, setting, backgrounds, sprite animations, humor, satire, and everything else that Revolution did oh-so-right.  There have been rumblings concerning a possible sequel (both Revolution Software - who still exist! - and Dave Gibbons are interested), and I fully support them having another go at it.  Even if BASS 2 ends up being only half as good as the original, that's still several times better than a lot of other games that have been coming out recently.  More BASS please!

Aliens (Arcade)

Platform:  Arcade
Developer:  Konami
Released:  1990
Genre:  Shoot 'em up

The Game
Lt. Ellen Ripley must bust her way through several levels of a space colony infested with vicious xenomorphs to save Newt, a young girl that was the only survivor of the alien massacre.  All she's got to get her through this horrific ordeal is a homemade rifle/flamethrower/missile launcher and balls of steel big enough to take down the Empire State Building.

Aliens is based on the movie of the same name, the second in a series of movies involving the titular xenomorphs and interplanetary badass Ripley, played by the lovely Sigourny Weaver.  The game was released about four years after the movie and was the second to have that name, the other being for the MSX home computer and developed by, of all people, Squaresoft.

The Characters
Ripley is the protagonist, and if you've got a buddy with some quarters to burn, she can be joined by Corporal Dwayne Hicks (played by sci fi darling Michael Biehn in the movie).  There's no real dialogue to speak of in this game to convey their personalities, but I think it's safe to assume that they're both the same awesome folks we see in the movie.

Newt is the spunky young girl who just can't seem to keep from getting kidnapped by those nasty xenomorphs no matter how many of them you dispatch.

The xenos are those nasty buggers trying to bite off Ripley's head and spit acid down her throat.  Unlike just the three basic types we see in the movies (queen, face hugger, drone), there's tons of different critters running around the game's colony, all of them working as hard as they can to end the human incursion into their nest with their various unique abilities.

The Writing
There's not much to speak of past the basic exposition given at the very beginning of the game to get the player caught up to speed, but I have to give major props to Konami for picking the best section of the movie to use for a game.  Though there's actually only some moderate action when Ripley goes down to retrieve Newt in the film, the leadup to her mounting her rescue mission definitely suggests that something more like this game should have happened.  Kudos to them for making this expectation a reality!

The Gameplay
Basic run and gun with pretty basic mechanics.  You can shoot at two levels for most of the game: standing for the big stuff or crouching to wipe out the face huggers and other small critters.  Bombs can be found scattered throughout the levels, as can gun upgrades, allowing you to plow through the xenos with missiles, scattershot, and purifying fire.  My personal fave is the flamethrower, not least because seeing the special burning version of the enemy sprites is pretty damn cool.

The basic blast-hell-outta-them levels are broken up by the occasional cart ride which operates like a rail shooter as you take out xenos that try to jump on the front of your cart and chew on your face, air vent crawls in which you get a HUD set up like the movie's motion detectors, and freight loader sections that have Ripley take control of that kickass yellow mecha that always fascinated me as a kid.  Hell, I'd still love a ride in one today!

The action is fast paced, xeno blasting fun!

The Challenge
I actually beat this game as a kid tooling around in the local arcade, and I remembered it being pretty hard.  This time, however, I pretty much blazed right through.  I still ended up using about three fake dollars, though.

Hey, remember back when all arcade games were only a quarter a play?  Those were the days.

The Graphics
I've always enjoyed arcade graphics, and even some of the earliest games still impress me.  That said, Aliens manages to impress even above many of the other impressors.  The colors are a little gaudy, but the level design is quite good and the enemy sprites are very well made, especially the bosses.  I think my favorite of the latter has to be the xeno with the black sectioned armor on the back of his entire body so that he looks like a big wad of cockroaches when he curls into a ball and rolls around.  The infested human enemies are pretty creepy, especially the half-a-bodies that crawl along the ground and try to shoot you.

The Music
Music?  I was too busy dodging acid blood and filling hardened carapaces with burning death to notice any damn music!

The Bottom Line
Aliens has long been among my favorite arcade games, and this recent playthrough hasn't changed that.  Great graphics, entertainingly hectic gameplay, and great selection of setting . . . this is what more licensed games should be like.  I just wish it was a little longer, but that's arcade games for ya.