Relevant no matter the era—that’s how many would describe the Jack Finney-penned novel about pod people replacing humans and substituting individual consciousness with collective thought. It’s probably why there’s been four official adaptations.  Countless science fiction movies and television shows also have taken ideas from the original work. While some have fallen flat, Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1978 is probably one of the best adaptations. There are some that believe it surpasses the original adaptation from 1956. Even if one does not subscribe to that view, one can’t doubt that it’s one of the best remakes in cinematic history.

In the current Hollywood environment, where it seems remakes are being greenlit either to just cash in on fondly remembered properties, or to make superficial changes by changing the race or sex of characters without looking at the story from another angle, the word remake can leave a bad taste in the mouth. However, when Philip Kaufman directed this version of Invasion in 1978, he led the way in a decade of re-imaginings of other 1950s science fiction films. The Thing, The Fly, Invaders from Mars, and The Blob probably would not have been produced without the critical and commercial success of this film.

What makes this movie work? First, look to the director. Philip Kaufman is probably not a name on the tongue of most movie watchers. He though has writing credits on Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Outlaw Josey Wales. He later directed The Right Stuff. Then there is the cast; their quirks and interactions with each other turn the science fiction into a human drama piece. Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy come across as people of interest. The main characters struggle to understand what’s happening, then desperately try to escape the danger. The audience feels the loss that would occur if such individuals became the blank slates that the aliens want to turn them into.

The film begins with an amazing visual of the pods assimilating themselves into the fauna of San Francisco. There’s then imagery of an emotionless priest  swinging in a playground while staring blankly. This puts you ill at ease and shows you that things are already askew.

The main characters then enter the story. There’s Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), an uptight health inspector, who seems to be only at ease at home and in the company of Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), a co-worker and close friend, who worries about her relationship with her boyfriend. The second couple is composed of Jack (Jeff Goldblum) and Nancy (Veronica Cartwright) Bellicec, who are bathhouse owners with an artistic bent. Added to the mix is Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a psychiatrist who believes that the turmoil of the modern age is fueling the increasing paranoia and distrust of loved ones. Is he correct? Or have the aliens already replaced him?

There are two additional factors that stand out about the film: The cinematography and the score. San Francisco, when shot well is a city that has as much personality as the characters living there. Michael Chapman does a good job revealing the city as quirky as the characters. And when he films the characters, you can sense the emotions on their faces even when little dialogue is spoken. If there is some light criticism, it revolves around some of the extravagant camera work. I appreciate some of the Dutch angles he uses to convey the strange nature of the situation. However, some shots seem too self-conscious, especially when they linger when there are no characters on the screen.

The score composed by Danny Zeitlin is varied as well. There’s three basic styles: Traditional mid-twentieth century scoring, as exemplified by the “Main Title/Flight Theme,” melancholic jazz in the “Love Theme,” and harsh synthesized soundscapes, appearing when the pods/aliens are on the screen. Innovative sound design mixes with the score to push the impression that the alien takeover is at hand. It’s strange that Zeitlin never scored another movie. Maybe he felt more comfortable in the jazz world from where he came. Likely, he felt that he had composed a unique score that he might never top. Whatever. Despite it being nontraditional, it suits the film, neither overwhelming nor underwhelming the scenes.

Living in today’s special effects driven movie climate, even science fiction fans of recent years might have neglected this film. It does feature stunning effects, particularly concerning the transformation of the pods into human duplicates. However, the film is a very human story. In the late 1970s, western society felt confused. Many felt let down by traditional organizations, dealt with the increased family breakdown, and observed the communist advance across the globe. This caused many individuals to search for “the authentic self.” It makes perfect sense that Kibner is at the center of the characters’ world, treating people for their broken psyches.

As the film progresses, you feel for the characters. You hope that whatever time is left, they can connect with their fellow humans. Thus, not only science fiction fans will take an interest in the film. People interested in human drama should take a look. It’s likely that such an experience will reveal to science fiction skeptics that there’s more than to the genre than the shine of spaceships and laser beams.

Konami, one of the monolithic names in Japan’s gaming industry, has had its hand in the game since 1978 (not its founding, but when it produced its first coin-op game). The company has a string of successful franchises, both past and present, including the iconic Castlevania and Metal Gear series retro gamers have known and loved from the beginning. While many of us (myself included) got our first taste of Konami via the NES, it was arcade coin-op titles that laid the steady foundation for the company’s rise to prominence. Thanks to both MAME and the new life given to retro-style arcades in recent times, I’ve had a chance to fiddle with several of these killer titles, and I’ve chosen three to talk about in my usual long-winded fashion. Let’s waste no further time with my jabber-jawing. Let’s take a look.

Battlantis (1987)

Two things immediately stood out to me when I played Battlantis: the first one was how it blends sci fi with an “ancient world” motif. Your warrior uses his laser weapon and various other goodies to defend the parapets of a stone fortress from grenade-wielding goblins and horrible monsters. He’s even got a gnarly little Rocketeer-looking helmet. The second thing I noticed was the incredible graphical quality visible in nearly everything onscreen. There are huge boss monsters who are depicted in gruesome detail, perhaps the most self-evident display of Battlantis’s visual show. The final boss is reminiscent of ones we’d see in some Contra series installments, and there’s even one that kind of looks like the Rancor from Return of the Jedi…

The music isn’t bad either, but it’s hardly outstanding. I found the game challenging, but even when I got my space gladiator ass kicked, I wanted another go. Battlantis feels like a very “big” game despite the fact that your motion is limited. It’s an ancestor of “tower defense” with a lot going on, offering both exciting gameplay and a visual feast.

Aliens (1990)

I actually just recently re-watched the first through third movies in this series, and Aliens is still my favorite of the three. I understand even more as an adult how utterly horrifying the alien queen is, all spiderlike and ruthless, churning out a swarm of her acid-blooded spawn deep within the conquered mining colony. I’m better able to appreciate just how good of a cast the film had, which turned out to be a key ingredient for a non-shitty sequel. I also remembered that Burke (Paul Reiser) reminds me of an ex-boss of mine, which adds an extra layer of catharsis for me when he’s rent asunder by a shrieking jet-black monster.

If you think about it, Konami making an arcade adaptation of Aliens was pretty natch. I mean, you can even see similarities between the face-huggers in this game and the little pink scramblers in the last stage of Contra. It sure seems like I’m tying everything back into Contra today, but I swear it’s not calculated. Besides, I’m fairly sure I could do an article just on how many games have borrowed visual inspiration from the Alien series…

Don’t worry. I may sometimes seem like I’m using this as an echo chamber, but I do actually respect you. I won’t write a whole article about that.

Okay, okay. This game is a pretty high-impact side-scrolling run & gun. Ripley, who apparently got a bleach job for the arcade game, skips a ton of what actually happens in the movie and just plows in solo to purge the colony of xenomorphs by traversing it end to end and WRECKING EVERYTHING IN SIGHT. You’re inching through vent shafts, strolling through the breeding grounds themselves, and even going toe-to-toe with the Grand Bitch herself using the powerlifter. The graphics are very good, with lots of SNES-style sprite scaling and lots of detail in the backgrounds. The obligatory diversification of enemies from film canon is fun, and doesn’t make the game seem too goofy. Really, the sound effects stood out to me as the coolest part; the quality of the aliens’ death rattles helps to keep a little edge of creepiness in the game.

Monster Maulers/Kyukyoku Sentai Dadandarn (1993)

This game is fucking unbelievable, and I’m legitimately sad that it didn’t become the next Street Fighter II in 1993. To give the simple description of Monster Maulers, you play as one of three superheroes and beat the shit out of really bizarre monsters in confrontations similar to your typical fighting game. These horrors are roaming the Earth thanks to a sinister organization known as the Happy Droppers. First you thrash the monsters, then you take the Droppers out back and teach ’em how to sing soprano.

I can’t get over how completely insane this shit is. I’m like, moderately skilled at fighting games (at best), and usually don’t play them for long spans of time, but I can’t cool it with Monster Maulers at all. All three characters have lunatic moves worthy of a superhero, including atomic fireballs and pro wrestling moves. I have body-slammed a centaur. I’ve punched a demon in the face repeatedly. I have hurled white-hot balls of plasma at a giant living Moai head until it tapped out in submission. At the end, you brawl with a robot gorilla and fistfight a tank.

I have nothing negative to say about Monster Maulers except that I’m pissed I never encountered it earlier in my life. I’d have probably shit my pants. Part of me is sure Konami limited its distribution in order to soften the titanic blow of its very presence. The music is CD quality, and I’m pretty sure I even heard singing. Don’t even get me started on the graphics. When you make a game that centers around superheroes inflicting career-ending injuries upon massive supernatural monsters, you have to make it look good.

They did. I am out of words for this.

Battlantis – 7/10 (It was cool to find this. It reminded me of modern tower-defense games, which causes me to see it as their ancestor.)

Aliens – 7/10 (overall it’s nothing legendary or unique, but it’s very good for a licensed game and also a good choice of play-format for the source material.)

Monster Maulers – 9/10 (I wanted to give it a 10/10, but I have to maintain what little inner discipline I have. Monster Maulers is… monstrous.)

Funk.

It means all kinds of things. Let’s look at the two most binding definitions of the word:

This iconic game has plenty of jams and plenty of implied bad smells… and a lot of everything else, too. ToeJam & Earl is a piece Mega Drive/Genesis bedrock, not to mention a game that stood unique among contemporaries with its gameplay style and innovative combination of concepts. Further boosted by its incredible soundtrack, the game is part of any core collection for the console.

Work began on TJ&E in 1989, when two Electronic Arts developers – Mark Voorsanger and Greg Johnson – set out on their own to develop a game that combined the real-time action of a console title with the elements of a roguelike.

What’s a roguelike, you ask? Well, it’s kind of like an RPG… except you’ll almost certainly die, the world you’re in is randomly generated, and everything is turn-by-turn instead of real-time. That is, you control the pace of the game completely, and in between actions, it remains frozen in time. The term comes from the original game of this kind, Rogue, which is a rather bland-looking (by modern standards) text and ASCII based game for early computers. There are newer reworkings with graphical tiles and enhanced interfaces, but the idea remains largely the same. Voorsanger and Johnson took this idea to Sega, and Sega liked it so much that they asked to publish it exclusively for the Genesis.

TJ&E can be played by one or two people, controlling the titular characters: ToeJam (a little red guy whose entire “head” is represented by two long stalks ending in huge eyes) and Earl (a tubby orange alien wearing some stylish shorts and classic wraparound shades). Their totally righteous but comically designed rapmaster spaceship has crashed, and they need to find all of its component parts to repair it and continue on their way through the cosmos.

The greatest part of this vehicle’s design is its total and brazen ignorance of the fact that sound does not carry across the vacuum of outer space. It also looks like something Jacques Cousteau would draw on a napkin while high as fuck.

Players guide the duo across a plethora of floating space-islands in ¾ perspective, avoiding constant peril and totally lame hassles all the while. If ToeJam and Earl end up separated, the screen simply splits along the middle, tracking their separate wanderings. The universe through which this search-and-retrieve mission is conducted can be randomly generated at the time of play, or a fixed-in-place set of levels that are the same each time you play the game.

ToeJam hard at work, while Earl… well, Earl just kind of stands there. Good job, Earl.

Besides your ship’s missing parts (which are represented VERY abstractly), you’ll find all kinds of funky shit on the ground and wandering around this bizarre floating maze. One of the primary elements of play is the scattering of pickups represented by garishly wrapped presents all over the place. Mimicking another element of most roguelikes, these presents all do different things (most good, some bad), and once you open a present of a certain type (using the menu you access with the B button), you’ve identified all future instances of its kind that you find. Until then, they are mysteries. One present even randomizes (and thus negates all your identification of) all presents. What a pain in the ass.

You’re not alone on this bizarre chunk of earth, either; an astonishing variety of weirdos roam the environment, some wishing you more harm than others. One of my favorites is the hula dancer. She often shows up around more harmful guys like the little red devils, and drawing too near her results in ToeJam or Earl compulsively mimicking her dance (and allowing the other nasties to get the jump on you). There’s little in the way of offensive tools in the game, forcing players to adopt a careful and thoughtful approach to moving through the world. Some beings will be found asleep, and holding down A allows you to creep by them slowly but quietly. Some also behave in certain predictable ways, allowing you to pay attention and use that to your advantage. Telephones reveal parts of the map (accessible by pressing C), and elevators move you up to the next board. Usually, a hint will appear to tell you that a ship part is on the level you’re entering… so scour the whole thing!

ToeJam & Earl features a lot of color and wackiness in it graphics, strongly tied to its overall early-nineties vibe. Its amazing soundtrack, composed by John Baker, comes on even stronger with the 90s power, with a R&B funk style inspired by musicians like Herbie Hancock and thick with bass and flex. The music is another example of a soundtrack really turning that YM2612 all the way out, and I rank it among the finest in the Genesis game library.

Initially, ToeJam & Earl sold poorly, but it built a cult following and also rode on the coat-tails of Sonic the Hedgehog during the Christmas of 1991. It spawned two sequels, and a Kickstarter for a new game successfully reached its funding goal in 2015.

I give ToeJam & Earl 8 out of 10. It’s a pretty fun game, if not a little meandering and open-ended sometimes… but it was definitely a unique spin on console gaming with its combination of source ideas. And man… that SOUNDTRACK.

See you in September! Get your asses back to school (or just get ready for autumn if you’re a grown-ass adult) and STAY RETRO!

If you had an NES as a kid, and you lived near a video rental store that also dealt in games, Contra was probably one you tried. The difficulty curve may have thrown a lot of kids off, but Contra was (and still is) nonetheless a popular game, one that spawned a franchise. The intense action and challenging gameplay enthralled NES players when it came out in 1988, but the game has a much richer history than many know.

Contra was originally released as an arcade game in 1987. The game was known as Gryzor in Europe and Australia. The arcade version’s gameplay is slightly different from what you may be familiar with, and it has (obviously) superior graphics and sound. Otherwise, it is recognizable as Contra. The NES version was produced in-house by Konami, during the late 80s when there was a rush to produce titles for the NES system. In fact, Konami started a branch company, Ultra Games, to circumvent licensing limits set by Nintendo and truly dominate the market. However, Contra was among those produced under the Konami name. In addition, a licensed port was made by Ocean Software for various home computers (such as the C64 and ZX Spectrum) and Konami also released a PAL region version called Probotector.

One of the more memorable aspects of Contra’s gameplay is the switching up of viewpoints and angles. In most of its levels, your commando moves through the environment in a familiar side-scrolling fashion. However, in the two “bases,” this is switched for a pseudo-3D view over the backs of the heroes as they rush forward into the base. During the boss fights within the bases, the view returns to something similar to normal, save that the default direction your gun points is upward.

Contra’s original storyline involves two Marines, who are sent to investigate the Red Falcon organization. The arcade story places them in “the Galuga Archipelago near New Zealand,” but in the NES version this is simply “The Amazon.” Wherever it takes place, the goal is to infiltrate the island and discover the source of the Red Falcon organization’s true power. This leads to confrontations with enemy soldiers, automated guns, mutants, alien spawn, and more. Powerups come in the form of pylons or floating balloon-like objects that can be shot, releasing the goodies within. Players will find different types of guns, including a laser beam, a corkscrew-trajectory fireball, and the ever-popular spread gun. There is also a powerup that simply makes your fired projectiles move faster, as well as a rare powerup that makes you (very briefly) invulnerable to harm.

And trust me, harm is waiting for you everywhere in Contra. The game is notorious for its difficulty; it is playable, and not impossible to beat without cheating, but doing so is definitely something to brag about. Most players of the NES version would enter the “Konami Code” (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B button, A button, start) to gain 30 “lives” instead of the standard three. It is remarkably easy to die in Contra; you have no life bar, rarely any protection from harm (except for the rare powerup mentioned above), and touching any part of any enemy soldier or object instantly spells your doom. Even with the thirty lives granted by the cheat code, the game is no joke. Staying alive requires very quick reflexes and a good sense of what’s going on around you. Focusing on that while also blowing away your foes… well, therein lies the challenge.

I make no complaint by pointing out the difficulty. Some NES games were difficult and also boring to play; Contra is difficult but keeps calling you back because of the inherent thrill involved in playing it. Dyed-in-the-wool retro gamers will back me up when I say that there are very few “easy” games for the NES that were any good. Contra is a good example of an arcade-style port to the system that both translated well and had broad replay value. It spawned several sequels across decades of gaming systems; there is, in fact, a game in the franchise for the DS, the Wii, and the PS3. All three are quite good. Notable among earlier sequels is the Genesis game Contra Hard Corps, which expanded gameplay options and featured four selectable characters with unique sets of weapon powerups.

It goes without saying that Contra belongs in line with Konami’s other home-run franchises. One measure of success is longevity, and the series has shown that. The original arcade/NES game stands out even today as a challenging, entertaining classic.

Keep an eye out next month, Retro Fans! We’ll be kicking off May with another classic: River City Ransom.