Werewolf: The Last Warrior

Data East, 1990

So let me start off with one for the NES, since I just said that.

Data East made a game about a werewolf with swords for hands and released it in North America several months before releasing it at home in Japan. I like to imagine that the conversation leading up to this decision involved the statement, “the Americans will eat this shit up.” That’s what I’d say. And I’m American. We love our nacho hot dogs and our spicy-ranch burger nuggets, and we love our idea mashups too. We’re basically a nation of five-year-olds. I’m lumping myself in too, don’t worry. I am thirty-seven years old and still struggle with the idea that I’m not supposed to eat cake as a meal. I’m not looking down my nose at anyone here. Especially since the idea of a werewolf with swords for hands is pretty fucking cool.

I, a proud American, am in fact eating this shit up.

There is a plot, but you can throw it in the trash along with the cellophane the box came wrapped in. Something about an evil doctor who takes over the world with mutants and how the world’s last hope is some werewolf with swords for hands. You have an ANGER METER that you fill with bubbles to get stronger/jump higher, and you pick up W’s to transition from man to beast and back. Being a man sucks. Be the beast. The beast that can still totally handle ladders with his sword hands and whose hourglass figure is the envy of all the ladies about town.

Pictured: them hips and them knife-hands totally working it… into a sewer.

I have no real complaints about Werewolf: The Last Warrior, nor does it really distinguish itself too strongly in terms of presentation. It has some pretty cool cinematic bumps in between levels, but after a little while it gets irritating to start a level and have a cut scene immediately interrupt it after you take like three fucking steps. I enjoy the separate mechanics of being a werewolf and being really fucking mad. Our hero can be absolutely furious AND/OR be a ravenous wolf-man, and I think it’s important to teach young people that being as pissed off as possible gives you superhuman power independent of any separate moon-shifting curse you may have. It’s part of the human condition. The music and sound are adequate, and most importantly, the fun factor is there. I got tired of WTLW less quickly than I expected. 7 out of 10 for a novel (if silly) concept done decently.

Cross Fire

Sanritsu Denki/Kyugo, 1990

Imagine if Contra kind of sucked. That’s Cross Fire.

I’m sticking with “kind of sucked” because this game is playable. It’s just not as awesome as Contra and made me want to play Contra again instead. It makes me imagine an executive showing Contra to some desperate and underpaid developers and suggesting they also make Contra. Compared to the werewolf with sword hands idea, this is fucking shameful. So, to risk sounding repetitive here: it’s Contra with a life bar, and instead of defeating an alien menace intent on ruling the world, you’re just some soldier asshole who “fights evil” (looks for trouble) worldwide. But be ready to basically play a slower Contra with shittier everything.

This is to art what a hammer is to a delicate porcelain plate.

I won’t call the graphics terrible, but I could. What I will call them, out loud and with a sneer on my face, is lazy. This is low-effort shit for 1990, and I’m including placement in that assessment, not just quality. Your audio experience will not be much better. Fuck it, it won’t be any better at all. I won’t lie or sugarcoat anything. I will give Cross Fire one positive appraisal: it isn’t totally unplayable if you can deal with:

1) looking at it

2) hearing it

3) feeling vaguely insulted by it

It doesn’t totally suck. It just mostly sucks, and only because it was allowed to. 4 out of 10 out of sheer contempt for Cross Fire.

Atomic Runner Chelnov

Data East, 1988

In real life, the only powers that radiation will give you are the superhuman power to always be sick and the special ability to eventually die of radiation. Chelnov is another classic example of the trope we’ve never truly let die: a man who became a superhero instead of a charred corpse or a short-term hospice patient due to nuclear radiation. He’s an Atomic Runner now, and he’s running for his goddamned life from the KGB or some other “secret organization” that wants his powers for evil. Slings and arrows, man. Every fucking time.

I don’t feel like it’s entirely outlandish that this makes me uncomfortable on some small level.

I know this is a forced-scrolling game, but it’s still very much a platformer; it’s like playing those “athletic” self-scrolling Mario levels in sequence while Data East throws some giant zombie arms and metal-helmeted fire dinosaurs in there for good measure. The scrolling only stops when it’s boss time. There are a variety of weapons and power ups (six counts as variety, shut up) to find, and you’ll want them. Part of what’s so fun about this game is just looking at it; both the arcade and Mega Drive versions are gorgeous for their time, especially some of the background art like the weird person-tree jungle and the Aztec-esque temple area. Chelnov also offers fantastic gameplay, combining a little bit of constant pressure (the nonstop movement) with a ton of action (everything is intent on murdering you, as usual).

My only complaint about it is possible burnout; I’m glad I took a shot at it on emulator so I could save my game state, just so I had a few minutes to look away now and again. I cannot imagine playing this shit in the arcade. Not only do I hate being watched by strangers, I also sweat at the most inopportune times and I’m sure I’d look like a Butterball turkey in a convection oven while playing this. 8 out of 10.

The Incredible Hulk

Probe, 1994

“At least it’s not any Spider-Man game.”

I am so tired of superhero-themed shit, especially the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’ve had force-marketed to us as a combo of sociopolitical “message” and barely-written entertainment. Feel free to email me if you would like to defend milady Marvel Comics at court. I have always liked the Hulk, though. The Hulk gets shit done in perhaps the most honest and cathartic way of any of Marvel’s woke-soap-opera characters: by absolutely losing his shit and stomping the bad guys a new asshole.

Pictured: Hulk tearing Abomination a new, improved, second asshole.

This is one of the few playable early-console-era games licensed by Marvel. I’ve talked about LJN and their sins against us ever since I started writing for NRW, and I will let God smash the gavel on that shit. This game is decent, despite being published by the eternal shit-puddle U.S. Gold. Probe kept this game simple without making it too vanilla. When you give me a controller and the Hulk is on the other end of it, I expect to be tearing shit up worse than Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel on a bender.

You don’t really get that here, but what you do get is a game where the Hulk isn’t a hapless clumsy asshole like every digital version of Spider-Man you saw during this era (except Maximum Carnage, that was fairly good). They can’t have you tearing down buildings all over the place or taking antitank rounds to the chest while laughing, but the Hulk still feels pretty Hulky. You get a decent set of special moves to beat up the Leader’s robots with, including bear hugs, head butts, and a very MK-esque uppercut. It is also decently difficult to harm the Hulk, despite his invulnerability being watered down for a video game. Things don’t get too challenging until they get weird later on in places like space. That’s where shit should start getting challenging for anyone.

Everything looks great, very much arcade-quality without diverging too far from the comics feel of the source material. The Hulk’s walk is kind of goofy, this weird arrogant stomp-march, but I guess he can walk however he wants. He’s the Hulk. Non-shitty digitized sounds are accompanied by an OST that sounds vaguely like the one for Sonic Spinball here and there (which is far from a negative thing). 8 out of 10.

Jewel Master

Sega, 1991

This game is totally my kind of shit. Deep-ass fantasy lore intro (here is a link), elemental magic, a demon lord… shit, what else do you want?

You punch fireballs out of your hands and collect elemental rings to combine for use in your mystical ass-kicking of evil. If you ever played Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, it’s a bit like the DSS Card System, but way less frustrating and slow to build. Another neat angle is how certain types of monsters may be more or less vulnerable to certain elemental attacks; it’s a small but welcome element of basic strategy that adds a bit of additional satisfaction to giving the demon king’s minions an ass whooping.

This dragon doesn’t stand a chance against me in the dance-off.

Like too few of its run-and-shoot platformer buddies, Jewel Master allows the player to aim and shoot upward, instead of just having things come at you from overhead and fuck you up while you sort of waggle your arms forward like John McCain and look foolish. I will never stop dunking on two things in this world: politicians and Mega Man.

It’s a Genesis game developed by Sega, so Jewel Master is pretty damn good all across the board. Its audiovisual artisanship is on par with arcade games of the era, as one would expect from the console itself, let alone games made by the console’s developer. The composer was apparently really into prog-rock, and it sort of shows in the soundtrack, which is probably my favorite part of Jewel Master by a nose. 8 out of 10.

That finishes out May, RetroFans. See you in June! Stay Retro!

Donkey Kong is credited as the first true “platformer,” and you bet your ass I double-checked in Google because you’d think some obscure forerunner of that game would hold the title, but no, it’s just plain old fuckin’ Donkey Kong. Running around like a ninny and performing very unsafe long jumps at great heights would go on to become the basis of countless titles, because it really was the best game in town.

Platform titles were so popular during the 80s and 90s, in fact, that almost every developer tried making one just to see if it would sell. Sometimes these games were predictably shitty, but once in a while there would be a diamond in the sand, waiting for us to discover it and rent it three consecutive times and then forget to return it for six months so that the video store just charges us for it and it’s ours now… despite that gold sticker the rental store put on it. Today I’ve picked out five from the NES game library for us to dissect. Let’s make the first incision…

Dragon Fighter

Natsume, 1990

Now, this is not called Dragon Fighter because you go out of your way to fight dragons, but neither is the title only a vague reference to the mythical beasts. When you’re not prancing around as a warrior with a fondness for ornate hats and what look like spandex onesies, you can dead ass transform into a fucking dragon and tear shit up just about as severely as you’d expect a dragon to tear shit up. All this awesome shit is limited (of course) by a gauge that fills up in human form and then ticks down while in epic-murder-monster-myth-mode.

The jump-and-slash formula is pretty well-represented here, at least when you’re not in dragon form; when you change shape the game takes on an R-Type/Gradius vibe as you begin to gently “rail” to the right and shoot down oncoming threats with your color-coded dragon breath. The compulsion exists to just hammer through the game haphazardly in dragon mode, but I found myself saving up my dragon-time for whatever waited at the end of each stage. Gameplay feels good either way.

Unashamed use of color and a ton of variety really help the graphics stand out; we’re not looking at anything groundbreaking for a 1990/91 release for the NES, but it’s a decent looking game. Dragon Fighter’s audio experience is acceptable, but nothing to write home about. Composer Kouichi Yamanishi keeps things basic with the music, but it’s far from boring or repetitive. My only hairs to split are that 1) the dragon form looks a bit gaudy all solid-color with such bright hues 2) is he dead serious with his unitard or whatever? Unitard + knee-high “fuck me” boots + long-billed feathered cap?

What does that equal? It equals 6 out of 10, because while it’s not necessarily a classic, Dragon Fighter has a neat gimmick and plays like more than minimal effort went into it.

Shatterhand

Jaleco/Natsume, 1991

Just the intro animation sells this one. Shatterhand is the heartwarming story of a man who lost both his arms, only to rise above adversity… by pummeling adversity into rubble with his new robot arms. You can even punch bullets! There are also different kinds of little helper-robots you can get, presumably when the automatons get a look at your chromed-out “guns” and recognize you as a fellow Skynet agent. No, wrong story. This one is mostly about you and your little hovering robot helpers beating the shit out of some cyber-soldiers to save the world and get revenge on them for taking your normal human meat-arms… but maybe you should be thanking them! After all, could you punch bullets before?

Let me answer that for you, nerd: no, you fucking couldn’t.

Shatterhand is a blast to play, but I could do without the elaborate pickup system. And don’t tell me I’m simple. I know I am. And that’s how you should keep your pickups in games like this. Don’t have me playing punch-Tetris on the fly trying to pick a Greek letter. It’s a cool way to have all the types of helper robots, but come on. You could have just had them, without all the fiddlin’ and diddlin’. Otherwise the game plays well and has a respectable challenge to it. The graphical style sits somewhere between the rich detail of a Sunsoft game and the effective simplicity of something like Contra. Composers Iku Mizutani and Hiroyuki Iwatsuki deliver a soundtrack every bit as hard-hitting as the game’s protagonist.

Shatterhand would be an 8 if not for the weird powerup system and the eventual repetitive nature of the gameplay. Instead it’s a solid 7 out of 10. I know a bunch of you think this game’s a total classic, and you’re not wrong, but maybe I give things lower ratings than they deserve because I suck at video games, okay?

Kick Master

KID, 1992

And so we go from arms to legs with Kick Master, one of the better-loved platformers of the late NES era, and for very good reason. Along with its fantasy theme, we see yet another decent melding of the action game essentials with some basic RPG elements (leveling up, etc.) as a continuation of a trend established in Legend of Zelda, Crystalis, etc. In Kick Master, your life has been royally fucked up by a powerful witch named Belzed, who has killed the king and queen and kidnapped the princess (natch). Your dumbass brother somehow gets killed by a skeleton (a circus-peanut-tier monster) even though your brother is wearing armor and wielding a sword when this happens. His dying words are so patently absurd that you are agape in shock:

The thing is, you do kind of have “great kicking skills.” You’ve got magic, too… but the kicking. The kicking is what’s great. Stay focused on that.

The graphics for Kick Master are superb for their time, with early examples of parallax scrolling visible and some dynamic (if laughably poorly written) cut scenes. You fly around the screen in a well-animated fury, raining hell (and feet) down upon your foes across eight stages filled with lush backgrounds. For all your kickmastery and wizarding bullshit, the controls aren’t cumbersome, either. I wish I could praise the sound, but it’s not great. In fact, the boss at the end of the swamps makes a horrible noise that sounds like a high-gain modem dial-up sound being recorded through too mics that are way too close together. Yo, why did you choose to put that sound in any game? It made me think my ROM was fucking up… no, it’s just Kick Master.

7 out of 10 for Kick Master. Terrible sound, mitigated by a fun and innovative RPG hybrid play style.

Bucky O’Hare

Konami, 1992

This intellectual property, which followed among others in the wake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is actually criminally undervalued. I remember the cartoon (and its theme song) to be well-written as if someone still loved what they had created… or at least had money to spend on it for a while.

The NES game is no exception, positively gleaming with Konami quality throughout. With a splash of color true to the source material, the game spans four worlds rendered in vivid, exaggerated terms. Not only does Bucky O’Hare look like a Konami Game, it sounds like one too; Tomoko Sumiyama’s soundtrack milks every bit of that distinctive Konami soundset we all know and love, producing laudable results worthy of any flagship title. Gameplay is a masterpiece, though many find Bucky O’Hare to be a bit difficult (including little old me). Characters can be played as they are rescued, and there are reasons to play each one, not unlike how certain parts of the Mega Man games are best done in sequence…

A firm 8 out of 10 despite it being so fucking hard I can barely finish the first level.

The Krion Conquest

Vic Tokai, 1990

Do you like Mega Man? Good, because you’re playing a reskinned Mega Man. Robots are still trying to take over the world, but these robots are from space and they’re vulnerable to magic, motherfucker. Krion Conquest is another one of those games that had a plot when it got on the airport in Japan but must have left it under the seat of the plane. The long and short of it: you’re a witch “from a place full of demons” and you’re the only one who can hurt all the robots.

Leave it to a knockoff to improve on the formula of what it rips off. You can aim upward and crouch in this game, two things that Mega Man, a futuristic android hero, simply cannot manage to do. So as strange as this may sound, I find Krion Conquest slightly more playable than any of the first three Mega Man games, just due to the added versatility of being able to look upward and point my wand-thingy up there too. Seriously, of all the things a state-of-the-art futuristic cyber-champion CAN’T do, it’s crane his neck and lift an arm above his head? There are men in their nineties who have Mega Man outclassed.

The graphics and sound are all over the place. Some of it is, well, just Mega Man sprites used as a tracing stencil. I won’t even itemize all of what’s ripped directly off; even the “GET READY” at each stage’s beginning and the life bar/weapons menu are barely given a new coat of paint. Most of the enemies look like if you paid the folks at LJN to redraw Mega Man baddies, but after buying those LJN folks a few shots of liquid hillbilly brain damage juice. The Krion Conquest has two composers, and two heads are… about the same as one in this case. Most of the music, regardless of its other points of quality, comes off as repetitive.

Krion Conquest can have 5 points out of 10 for at least cheating well. It’s a bag of blatant borrowing, but it’s at least playable.

We’ll be seeing more of each other later in the merry month of May, RetroFans! Best Believe!

It could be said that if you wanted to make a good profit with a video game, be it now or in the 80s or 90s, the “dragons and wizards” angle has never been a bad way to go. This is a culture that embraced Conan the Barbarian in film 46 years after his original author-creator’s death (the film came out in ’82, while Robert E. Howard died in 1936), and it’s the same culture that’s currently obsessed with Game of Thrones. My personal favorite medium for the genre, Dungeons & Dragons (which I never fail to mention whenever there’s even a remote reason to), is in its 5th edition of rules and still has a strong base of adherents. Barbarians, trolls, demon princes, and magic swords are perennially totally cool.

Ad for the TG-16 version, complete with absolutely lush fantasy art.

So is Cadash, a game I’d only heard of in passing, but that was mentioned to me in a recent conversation by a friend who has a distant interest in retro gaming. “If you’re into D&D but you like Golden Axe, too,” he said, “check out Cadash. It’s basically a mix of both.”

He wasn’t entirely on point, but his heart was in the right place. Cadash hit the arcades in 1989, so it was kicking around them the same time I started to; what surprises me more is how I missed the Genesis port in 1992. It was also released for the Turbo Grafx 16, which is how I recently subjected myself to it (since nearly every MAME32 emulator runs like utter shit on my computer). It’s a pretty fantastic game for its time, combining elements of the RPG and the platformer with some gnarly graphics. It’s got some pretty good sound to boot, but the arcade version seems to come out ahead in that regard.

From the intro of the Genesis port. The King demands that you kneel, but it’s no big deal if you have your sword out.

Cadash‘s story isn’t very complex, and you really wouldn’t want it to be: A demonic warlock born of a human woman has rallied the monsters of the underground kingdom, who have never forgotten their banishment by the humans. The overworld is nearly in ruins, and this warlock (called, with various spelling variables in the three versions, the Balrog) has kidnapped the daughter of the King of Dirzir to use in a ritual that would truly solidify his evil power and doom the human world. Of course, in the custom of video game RPG kings, the ruler of Dirzir has promised you his entire realm if you can save his daughter and finish the Balrog once and for all.

The 4-player cabinet. Ideal for corners, I guess.

The arcade version, if configured the right way, could handle up to four players, but the console versions were 1-2 player games. The players choose one of four classic fantasy RPG roles: the fighter, mage, priestess, or ninja. Each one has its ups and downs, but the game’s pretty approachable with any of the four. Single players might have a better time with the priestess though, as she’s got a good reach for her weaponry and a lot of defense-oriented powers. The fighter and the mage have a lot of offensive power, although the fighter’s much better early on and harder to kill. The ninja’s, well, a ninja. He moves very quickly and has some neat tricks up his sleeve. Sadly, the Genesis port has only the fighter and the mage, so if that’s how you experience Cadash, I hope one of those suits you.

Fighter has perfectly conditioned and brushed hair, but not one stitch of armor to speak of. At least everyone else brought their shit, Fabio.

Regardless of who you pick, you use gold from slain monsters to gradually beef up your equipment, and your capabilities increase as you gain levels as well. All of this progress is fueled by killing monsters, but you can’t just wander idly and do that all day (at least not in the arcade version)… there’s a time clock you have to keep feeding. This can be done with rare item drops or by dumping heinous gold at shops where you buy other stuff. This element adds another layer of strategy to the game, where a player or group must measure the clock against their need to level-grind. There’s not really a dull moment in Cadash.

Screenshots from various versions, offering a sample of what’s constantly trying to murder you beneath the ground. Click to enlarge.

The five areas of the game represent the already-conquered territory of the Balrog’s forces; you must fight your way through all of this, and not always in the most linear way either. For instance, at one point you have to double back and save a mermaid from a kraken to get an item that lets you breathe water… and then you can keep moving ahead by swimming through a flooded area. All said, none of it’s very confusing, and the action’s pretty engaging. You can swing your weapons in various directions, which is handy since there are a lot of foes who will come at you from above or below. A lot of the monsters bear superficial resemblance to the orcs, goblins and other standbys of fantasy media; others are just weird. You move through environments mundane and strange, from caves to villages to places where the whole floor is just crunched-up bones. The world of Cadash has heavy hitters too; periodically there’s a boss monster waiting to add your name to the hero obituary.

Satan’s seen worse than your Mardi Gras beads and your nightgown.

The graphics are very crisp and colorful, and seem to translate well to the console ports with very little loss of vibrancy. With an original palette of 4,096 colors, it’s not a drab game by any measure. Cadash also has decent sound, although SFX are sparing; the music is respectably well done, but sometimes seems a bit meandering. Some loops can even be a bit maddening, but that almost seems appropriate. Nitpicking aside, it’s worth exploring the soundtrack for the handful of good tunes in it.

Cadash merits a strong 8 out of 10. It’s a title I’m sorry I missed in arcades, but the gameplay I’ve seen for the arcade original leads me to believe that my experience on the TG-16 is pretty authentic. It’s a great melding of action and RPG elements, it’s got a lot to keep players engaged and sweating, and its over-the-top fantasy elements make it memorable among its contemporaries of the time.

Thanks, RetroFans! See you later in September for more!

 

 

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2016/09/04/cadash-taito-1989/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2016/01/16/felix-the-cat-hudson-soft-1992/ https://newretrowave.com/2016/01/16/felix-the-cat-hudson-soft-1992/#respond Sat, 16 Jan 2016 02:53:13 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2016/01/17/2016116felix-the-cat-hudson-soft-1992/

Hey RetroFans, remember Felix the Cat?

Or do you just remember the idea of him?

Exactly. He’s a cartoon cat from the silent film era who’s managed to earn himself a mid-tier seat in pop culture. His image is memorable, but most people can’t tell you a second thing about him. He was a hoot in the roaring 20s, enjoyed a revival in the 1950s and a much quieter one in the late 80s… and inexplicably got an NES game in 1992. Here’s the biggest shocker: it’s actually a pretty good game.

In 1954, Joe Oriolo took over the storylines for Felix the Cat’s cartoons (he later bought the intellectual property completely in the 70s). Most of these animated shorts revolve around some antagonist or another trying to get Felix’s magic bag from him. That’s more or less the plot of this game, or at least it’s supposed to be. The Professor (that’s all the name we get for the bushy-faced bastard) has taken Felix’s heavy-lidded gal pal Kitty hostage. If you’ve ever played 2/3rds of all NES-era platformers, you know the drill. Felix has to use that same bag of tricks to rescue his missus from the wicked scientist.

1. The Professor doesn’t really explain much of anything, he just kind of threatens Felix in the vaguest manner possible. 2. Kitty looks completely unconcerned about this whole thing. Maybe it’s because she realizes she’s been kidnapped by a completely inept jackass. 3. Who buys sofa chairs with their own face on them?

Here’s where the surprise kicks in. You start off doing pretty standard platform-action stuff, fighting deceptively cute looking enemies and collecting milk and little images of your face These are just for points. When you get enough of them, a heart flies out of almost nowhere. If you pick it up, you change form a little bit. In the regular land levels, the progression goes like this:

Magic Boxing Glove—>Magic Wand While Felix Laughs Like a Lunatic—>Magic Vehicular Manslaughter via Car Horn—>Magic Inexplicable Tank

Felix The Cat: An Ancient Being Who Takes Many Forms

There are underwater and aerial levels, where you can get submarines and planes, but the gameplay model remains pretty steady. Most of your foes are cartoonish and non-threatening; in fact, one could say that Felix The Cat is a little bit on the easy side, until right around halfway through when you reach the more bizarre levels. I’m gonna come clean and admit that I don’t know what some of the bosses are. I think the first one is some nerdy kid riding a mechanical donkey? Another one I thought was pretty great was a bouncing dog-man with a gun. It got a good shock out of me but was pretty out of place in an Egyptian pyramid. I think there’s a cactus or something too… the point is, you do eventually reach the Professor and save Kitty… who still doesn’t look too worked up over the whole ordeal.

I’m overwhelmed with relief to see you too, Kitty. Lets get you a cup of coffee.

You may be thinking, “this one is far from a classic. Why even talk about it?” To be honest, I like it because it’s such a rarity in terms of NES titles: it’s a licensed game from late in the console’s time span, clearly beating a dead horse by capitalizing on an ephemeral 1920s cartoon character, yet it still manages to be playable and fun. Felix the Cat, as absurd as this may sound, is the kind of NES game we could have used more of as the console saw its way out of the limelight. It’s got decent graphics and music, a really approachable and gradually curving difficulty, and it’s surprisingly well-designed overall. The only nits for me to pick are that the music loops are a bit short and some of the instrumentation is a little, well, harsh. I’ll let you be the judge.

I’d say that Felix the Cat gets 7/10 stars. If you’re an emulator player or a console cart collector, grab this if you don’t have it and give it a try. It’s an often-overlooked entry into the platform genre that really surprises the player with its fun factor.

See you at the end of the month, Retro Gamers!

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2016/01/16/felix-the-cat-hudson-soft-1992/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2015/11/30/kirbys-dream-land-1992-halnintendo/ https://newretrowave.com/2015/11/30/kirbys-dream-land-1992-halnintendo/#respond Mon, 30 Nov 2015 10:39:00 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2015/11/30/20151130kirbys-dream-land-1992-halnintendo/

Greetings, RetroFans! I sincerely hope you had a nice Thanksgiving holiday, whether you pigged out with the family, watched pigskin with your posse, or did something else that suited your fancy. Me? I thought long and hard about the subject of my next article. I thought, “You’ve never written up a Game Boy game. The Game Boy was kind of a big deal. You should crank out a few words on one of those titles.” Well, I think I chose a pretty good one. It’s certainly one of my favorites.

Released in April of 1992 for the Japanese market, Kirby’s Dream Land hit American and European shores that August and was a huge hit. Originally, the game was called “Twinkle Popopo,” and Kirby’s name was Popopo. There was even a debate as to whether he should be pink or yellow, but eventually pink was settled upon. Kirby is now considered one of the Nintendo family’s core members, and he’s a staple in the Smash Bros. series of games that continue to dominate group console sessions today.

Kirby’s Dream Land was designed as a game for both novice and skilled gamers, and was chock full of unlockable features and other rewards that wouldn’t become common in games until the era of the Xbox and the PlayStation. Kirby’s Dream Land was a gentle and easy-to-learn game on the surface, but it featured a “hard mode” players could unlock to challenge themselves as they grew in skill and confidence. Once you beat hard mode, you could even tinker with things like Kirby’s hit points and lives, and listen to sounds and music in a separate menu.

Our story: King Dedede is a jerk.  Less of a true villain and more just a selfish asshole, he’s made off with all the food in Dream Land. Now, most of the regular folks in Dream Land are gentle souls, so they took this lying down. Not Kirby. Kirby likes to get his eat on as much as anyone. Maybe more (definitely more). In fact, it helps him face down King Dedede’s goons on his way to face the big penguin down himself.

King Dedede, more of a bully and a glutton than a proper villain. He even joins forces with Kirby in later games, notably some of the Game Boy Advance titles.

I really do love Kirby. He’s a creature after my own heart. He’s an adorable little pink dude with a cute smile and little flappy arms… and he devours his enemies whole while they’re still alive.

“I’m terrifying if you think about it! Heeheehee!”

Kirby will eat anything to get this done, from jugglers to hippos to ghosts and more. They become big cartoon stars in his belly, which he can then spit out to harm foes in his path. He can also swallow them, which just gets them out of the way so they don’t weigh him down anymore. In later games, Kirby can copy the abilities of certain foes he swallows, but in this first installment of the series, he hasn’t learned how to play with his food that way yet.

The original American box art has Kirby colored white, because of the aforementioned uncertainty about what color he should be. Nintendo of America figured that since the Game Boy was in monochrome, it couldn’t do too much damage to just put him on the box this way. When I first saw this as a kid, I straight up though this was a game about a silly ghost who ate stuff. By then I was used to video game absurdity and wasn’t confused.

The levels are arranged in a way that’s not always linear, but usually makes enough sense that you know where to go. Sometimes you’ll get stuck in a room where you have to accomplish something specific to move on. One example is the rooms where a set of enemies runs out to throw stuff at you and you have to sort them out before you can continue. Each little realm you cross on your way to King Dedede has one of his cronies guarding it as a boss. These thugs range from big goofy trees to spiked storm clouds with eyes. The threats come in a staggering variety, but every boss unwittingly gives you a way to defeat it. Use your head, and more importantly, use your gullet. Eventually you reach Dedede himself, whose innovative and thoughtful way of attacking you involves swinging a hammer around like Thor on a bender. He’s still a handful, so don’t get cocky.

Kirby’s graphics were very good compared to, say, Super Mario Land (the Game Boy entry into Nintendo’s flagship series). Of course, there’s not a ton to be said about monochrome, but this game does a lot with what it has. It has a cartoony and cute visual style, and Kirby himself is very expressive and animated. The composer of the game’s music, Jun Ishikawa, created a fittingly whimsical and light-hearted soundtrack for the game. He has since worked frequently on later games in the series, and set the tone for the franchise music-wise.

The little pink glutton is more than just eye candy, ladies. He’s an icon.

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2015/11/30/kirbys-dream-land-1992-halnintendo/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2015/09/05/kid-chameleon-sega-1992/ https://newretrowave.com/2015/09/05/kid-chameleon-sega-1992/#respond Sat, 05 Sep 2015 15:16:02 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2015/09/05/201595kid-chameleon-sega-1992/

In 1992, I was 9. I was really into video games, I was really into sci-fi movies, and I knew who Nirvana was. Hell, I even had access to a copy of Nevermind (my sister’s). I thought I was a pretty cool little dude.

I was wrong. I didn’t know a damn thing about being cool. Not compared to this cat right here.

Are you… are you out here slingin’? Hold on, Kid Chameleon, let me get my wallet.

Released in May of 1992, Kid Chameleon was one of those games that didn’t get a huge ad campaign but nonetheless made its mark. Considered an iconic title for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, it is a challenging and action-packed game that has a lot of replay value. Sega produced a good number of platform-style games for the Genesis console, and most of them were at least playable, but Kid Chameleon easily outpaces most of them in terms of sheer awesome.

I stand partially corrected. I did find this ad. I never saw it as a kid, though. The ad copy is kind of shaky… they just make him sound mentally ill. Hell, maybe he is. The best heroes are.

In Kid Chameleon, you play the role of a gamer. I don’t mean just you, holding the controller; I mean that the main protagonist, Casey, is a super-cool video game whiz. A malevolent AI called Heady Metal (no, not a typo) has taken control of a virtual reality game called WildSide and is kidnapping everyone who can’t beat the game. So far, that’s been everyone. However, Heady Metal didn’t count on a kid in a Ramones jacket running some product through his hair and heading over to start the VR world’s biggest jailbreak. Casey’s so good, he’s got a nickname. Even back then, “gamers” were a thing, and they took themselves just as seriously as they do now. So really, there’s an element of self-insertion here for everyone who wishes the world would suddenly somehow need their awesome thumb skills.

Every time I see this particular enemy, I can’t help but laugh. Even Kid is looking at me like “I know, right?”  And then the man-lion cooks my ass with some bizarre homing projectile and I remember I’m playing Kid Chameleon.

And thumb skills you will need! The difficulty curve of Kid Chameleon is gradual, but once you’ve made some headway you’ll know you’re in Big Kid Town. I think it also bears mentioning that the game has 103 levels. Let me type that out: one hundred and three. Not all of these levels are on the main “path” to the end, but there’s no way in hell you’ll know where to go the first time without some kind of guide. While this lends a lot to the replay value of the game and adds a mild exploration element, it can be confusing and frustrating to players who didn’t expect it.  There is also, as with so many platform games, a time clock. If this runs out you are doomed. Add in the monsters roaming around, the lava and spikes, and it’s not a pretty picture. On the upside, you do have a life counter (however tiny) that expands when you pick up a helmet.

“Oh, that little dragon guy doesn’t look to b- OH SHIT FLYING SPIKES EVERYWHERE!”

There are pickups that give you extra time, lives, and continues, but most of what you’ll find will be helmets and little crystals. The helmets each grant you a different set of abilities. Some of those are powered by the crystals, but your main one is usable at will. For instance, the samurai always has his sword, but he can use the crystals to fuel an attack that slows down enemies or spend even more of them to kill them outright by summoning a huge snake thing. Besides the samurai, there is a knight helmet that helps you scale walls, a rhino-type one that lets you plow through them, a winged helmet that lets you become a flying whirlwind, and numerous others. My personal favorites are the skull tank (whose gun shoots bouncing, laughing skulls of course) and a blatant Jason Voorhees rip-off who tosses around a seemingly infinite supply of hatchets.

The helmets. The lower middle one is actually kind of in vogue right now. I think I saw someone wearing that on a vaporwave album cover recently.

To finish a level, you must reach either a flag or a teleport pad. The levels cycle through a set of themes, from caves and forests to cityscapes, beaches and even lava-filled chasms. The enemies are pretty generic and unexceptional, and usually their contribution to the challenge factor has more to do with HOW and WHERE they are placed. There are a couple foes who will give you real headaches; one of them is a big disembodied hand that will latch on to you and not let go easily. Another is a blackish pile of goo that will pop up out of nowhere to attack you. You will usually need the powers of a particular helmet, at least temporarily, to get through certain obstacles or areas. What immediately comes to mind is one of the early city-themed levels; it is necessary to keep the fly helmet for almost the whole thing, or you are trapped, because the fly’s size and wall-jump ability are the only way to move forward. There are other levels, like this one, where you are chased by a huge wall of death as everything else conspires to block your path however possible. When you hear that distinctive, intense background music, you know it’s time to run.

There are periodic mid-bosses before you reach the final one, and all of them are iterations of Heady Metal. Now, imagine if someone took Dhalsim from Street Fighter II, detached his head, made it levitate, blew it up to about the size of a hot air balloon, and hit Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V like a maniac. That’s Heady Metal, and you’re going to fight him several times in several different environments. It’s not hard to beat Heady in most situations if you can get above him and exploit the game physics, and his offensive tactics are actually pretty slow. As far as bosses go, I feel like Kid Chameleon falls a little short on creativity.

yyyyyyyyyyup. This is it. THIS IS EVERY BOSS IN THE GAME.

The sound and music is typical of the Sega Genesis, high in quality and rich in depth. It’s also a very 90s score. Lots of 808-sounding drums, snappy bass, and back-hitched dance style hooks let you know that this game was made in 1992 and it’s proud of it! The graphics are pretty simple for most sprites, but the level backgrounds and interstitial screens are what really shine. It’s a great level of detail for 16 bit, and it’s a nice combination of cartoonish color and pulp-comic implied danger.

I’d like to mention something before wrapping up this article: it was cruel of Sega to design a game without a save function and then put 103 non-linear levels in it. It was also cruel to name 32 of those levels “Elsewhere” and not explain it at all. If you took a conventional approach to the game, you may have become convinced at one point that it was just infinite. Like some jerk at Sega cooked this up to torment us. But damn if it wasn’t fun to turn on and play.

Kid Chameleon gets six out of ten (6/10) stars from yours truly. It’s a great example of what the Genesis could do for platforming, and it’s a generally solid title, but the sheer length of the game and its anticlimactic boss setup leave me feeling a little flat on the true action.

Stay tuned for more Genesis goodness this month, RetroManiacs!

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2015/09/05/kid-chameleon-sega-1992/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2015/08/05/batman-the-video-game-sunsoft-1989/ https://newretrowave.com/2015/08/05/batman-the-video-game-sunsoft-1989/#respond Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:08:38 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2015/08/05/201585batman-the-video-game-sunsoft-1989/

In 1989, Warner Brothers released the blockbuster film, Batman. A merchandising storm ensued, with both movie-related and general Batman-themed items flying off shelves. Around this time, the NES was at the dizzying height of its popularity as a home console, and it only stood to reason that a game be made. DC Comics dropped the license to Sunsoft, and one of the NES’s better late-era games was the end result.

I’ve wanted to do a Sunsoft NES game for a while now, and I may eventually do all of them… but this one was the first Sunsoft title I recall playing as a youth. I always loved the company’s style of presentation; they often found ways to inject color and vibrance into even the most gritty, drab themes. Sunsoft is undeniably late 80s/early 90s to the core. Batman: the Video Game is no exception.

A watchful eye on Gotham City. A huge, looming, watchful eye. Massive and constantly staring at Gotham City. Damn, Batman, cut us some slack.

The game is loosely themed after the 1989 film, though prototype graphics show that this wasn’t initially a priority for the development team. In the end, it was mostly graphics that tied the game and the film together anyway; I don’t recall Batman fighting a flying beetle-man or two separate malevolent AIs in the film. All things considered, the basics are the same: you, as Batman, must stop the Joker from dominating Gotham City with his campaign of poison and terror. Batman must travel through the Axis Chemical Factory, an abandoned laboratory, and other locales to reach Joker atop the Cathedral for the final battle. The game plays similarly to many action platformers in most ways, but one function you will be using often is Batman’s wall-jump. I mean, you have to become PRECISE with this move to get through the mid to late stages. Well-timed wall-jumping can also be used to avoid harm from certain enemies perched in hard to reach places… while you make your way over to punch them to death. Half of the game’s respectable challenge is simply navigating a level without dying, and the enemies only play a part in that. There are plenty of static hazards you have to avoid touching, such as ooze, grinding gears, and electrified surfaces. Batman: the Video Game is challenging, but thankfully, as the Dark Knight, you’re prepared for the challenge.

Batman can not only punch (quite rapidly, in fact) but can also use 3 different weapons. He gets his trusty batarangs, a triple-shot “dirk,” and…a gun. I mean, it shoots little missiles, but it’s a gun. Didn’t Batman have a thing about guns?

Anyway, you’ll need these weapons, since Batman’s up against some pretty varied and tricky opponents. Your regular baddies include little spiky toaster-ovens, dudes who look kind of like French Legionnaires, ninjas, hopping giant mutants, very slow-walking androids with claws, and dudes who squat in place with flamethrowers. Fighting most of these enemies involves either careful timing or simple blitz tactics, depending on how they move and how far they can reach with their attacks. You’ll find bad guys posted on narrow ledges pretty often, and it will usually be while you’re trying to do the wall-jump to climb vertically. When you kill an enemy, you almost always get some kind of small reward; hearts give back health, the missile icons give you ammo for your weaponry, and the “B” icon just gives you 1000 points.

A sprite rip of most of the common enemies in the game. Found at www.spriters-resource.com

The bosses are as colorful as the array of underlings, and two of them are actually machines. The first boss you fight, right outside City Hall, is a flying fireball tosser who seems daunting until you realize you can just stand to one side of his blasts and then boomerang his stupid face when he swoops down toward you. Axis Chemical Factory contains the first of the two electronic bosses; Batman must first shut down its outer defenses before blasting away at its energy core. At the end of the underground level, you fight Electrocutioner, a mohawked Mad Max extra with a claw for one hand and a deadly lightning gun for the other. (It is worth noting that most of the bosses, including him, are based off actual minor villains in the comic books.) If you’re patient, you can literally get this guy to attack the wall while you nuke him from the other side of the room. Level 4 is an abandoned laboratory that ends in a fight against another robotic boss. This one is a bit more straightforward; Batman must defeat two large and very dangerous cubes that move about the room and try to destroy him.

Level 5, the Gotham Cathedral, has two bosses: Firebug and The Joker himself. Firebug looks and behaves a lot like someone you’d expect to see in Fist of the North Star, and his routine is a pretty scary pattern of anime jumps and massive fireballs. The Joker is, well… a joke. His elaborate strategy consists of shooting you, running away, and pointing to the sky to summon lightning bolts that you can avoid by standing about one arm-span away from him. Once you defeat Joker, you get to watch one of the coolest cut scenes I’ve seen outside of Ninja Gaiden.

Batman: the Video Game has some really cool graphics, which manage to be both colorful and suitably drab for the setting of Gotham City. The background graphics are especially good; while they are undeniably 8-bit, some of them, namely the first stage, look surprisingly realistic. There are also some truly delicious cut scenes; these loosely follow the film and add a good dramatic element to the whole experience. The music was composed by Naoki Kodaka, and it is probably my favorite part of the game. The title screen music is completely flat, but every other track makes up for it. The level music is all pretty rock & roll. It’s as intense as it should be. I particularly like how mean the boss music sounds, and I especially enjoy Level 4’s music.

There was also a game for the Sega Genesis, which most consider to the better game; it’s not only on a more advanced system, it stays much truer to the film. Eventually Sunsoft also released a sequel (of sorts) for the NES, Batman: Revenge of the Joker. I have taken a cursory look at it, and it’s not a terrible game… but it’s very silly. There have been a multitude of other games released during the Caped Crusader’s more prominent periods on TV and the big screen; to list them all here would not make for interesting reading. I will say, however, that most of the ones based on the later films… well, they suck just about as bad as those films did. 

When the newer series of Batman films began a few years back, there was an outcry among hardcore comic/Batman fans. This says more about how good the 1989’s Batman was than it does about the new series. As a kid who sat wide-eyed in the theater during the Batwing scene and the cathedral fight in the ’89 film, I can relate to the feeling that they did it right the first time around. I also poured a lot of hours into this game as a kid, and enjoyed it enough to surmount its considerable difficulty.

See you mid-month, RetroManiacs!

No car is as cherry as the 1989 Batmobile. Look at his face. He knows he’s fly as hell.

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