It seems a bit lopsided to be writing about hummingbirds and hornets in late November… but this is the kind of game for which I readily make exceptions. I never had a 32x for my Genesis, but a kid who lived down the street did. His name was Brian too (except, of course, spelled differently), and he was a lot like that Lazy Town character, Stingy. What I’m getting at is that Brian seemed to get a perverse thrill out of being overtly antagonistic, always had a shitty bite-back for everything, and absolutely lorded over his material possessions like Cerberus at the gate to Hades.

Occasionally, when he wasn’t feeling malevolent (or just not malevolent enough to shun company), he’d invite me to play video games with him. It was in this realm that I saw my first wedgie and my first instance of a non-baby crapping his pants. I also saw Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Sonic… and then, when the Sega CD and the 32x got united with the Genesis into some unwieldy (unholy) sort of Voltron… that’s when things marched out to left field and set up camp.

This kid and I ended up becoming decent friends by the time he and his family packed up and hopped a jetliner to Who Knows Wheresville, and we’d done it saving Dana Plato from vampires, nudging Kid Chameleon carefully through the Blood Swamp… but we never saw hide nor hair of this game. Maybe he saw it and didn’t like it. I love it now like I would have then. A shooter fan from the first time I played Galaga at an old bowling alley, the genre has bolted itself to my heart. It’s a formula you can’t go too wrong with, providing excitement and a good test for the reflexes.

But you aren’t usually a cute little hummingbird. You’re usually a badass theoretical spaceship design or perhaps a robot who can fly.

Like a tiny little flying Yes album.

Kolibri was conceived among the minds of a firm then known as Novotrade. I don’t imagine there’s ever been a ton of developers in Hungary; that’s no slur against Hungarians, but you just… well, you don’t hear about Hungary’s booming games trade. Of all places, it’s where Novotrade was based when they adventurously set the heroic hummingbird free on the 32x world. One year later, in 1996, Novotrade relocated, settling itself proudly in sunny California. A change of name was also decided to be in order, and so they became Appaloosa Interactive.

But back to he bird.

Left to Right: The Euro and US box art. I guess Nihon didn’t want none of this one…

Here is the backstory of Kolibri, part of which you get to act out on your own: While not common knowledge among humans, it is well know among the animals that a sentient crystal is the source of much of Earth’s life. Of course, eventually its antithesis arrived, in as hot a pursuit as crystals hurtling through space might hope to achieve: an evil, corrupt crystal-being, intent on undoing all that had been done and then some. The crystals wage a low-profile war with each other, and just before its demise the original crystal looks around itself desperately. It hopes to find a creature worthy of its powers… and transfers them into the body of a tiny little hummingbird who’s spent all day being bullied. I’m not joking about this. The game starts you off very close to a bunch of other male hummingbirds, who will gang-push you away from any flower they can see.

Anyway, not only does the Earth crystal grant the cute little bird its power, it also imparts upon him very strongly the dire situation at hand. So now we have our champion, the being who will save Earth from the evil crystal… a tiny, hyperactive bird whose taxonomic family averages just over 4 inches in length, the heaviest known species averaging a tremendous 20 grams.

To be fair though, you do get homing lasers and shit…

Tiny little orbs simply fill the air in some locales, each containing its own gun swap. You can also get “lives,” that is to say insurance against being whomped and having to start over. As someone who’s always initially sucked at any game until I’ve had a month or two to really absorb it, I did appreciate one gentle slope to Kolibri: while you can run out of lives and get a Game Over, you effectively have infinite continues.

If I were to make one gripe about Kolibri, it’d be this: it shares something in common with another Novotrade game featuring an animal as the hero… Ecco the Dolphin. What I’m dancing around is that Kolibri features a few more puzzles than one might find reasonable. These get more difficult on a quick scale, but I only had to look online for the way through a couple of them. They take the form of entire area, again not unlike Ecco. However, there are far worse things than monotonous puzzles out there, as the intrepid little trochilid battles nearly every conceivable kind of creature from the wilderness. I seems that evil crystal has been doing a lot of recruiting in preparation for its nihilist suicide/genocide/ice cream party.

Dickhead.

Over on the upside, we have an obvious place to launch; the game plays much like a shooter, and the story unfolds in a truly rich, vibrant game world. While they certainly didn’t break it in half, Novotrade seems to have taken great advantage of the superior color range the 32x offers over its 16-bit nucleus. It also has delightful music, though there’s not much variety to it.

After playing the game about 90% to completion, I would drop Kolibri‘s difficulty nearly in the exact middle for the type of game it is. You skirmish with hornets, frogs, violet scorpions, snakes, and lots of creatures capable of pummeling you flat. Why did I really stop, though? Well, the later game is just a it too involved for my taste as of late. If I’m gonna get that invested, give me stats and XP.

After weighing the good and the bad, Kolibri gets 7/10 from me. It’s a vibrant game that draws you in, and it holds an immense initial charm. However, the game’s long-term fun factor suffers as the puzzle challenges and grist-mill combat progress bar the door shut on your attention span. Despite all this, and despite myself, I do think a little hummingbird was a daring and ballsy choice for a protagonist. I think the only major thing wrong with Kolibri is that it handed us a weaponized hummingbird and made us solve Ecco the Dolphin puzzles with it.

I can’t tell if I’m reviewing a game or a movie with this one, RetroFans. I’ll leave that up to you.

When the CD-driven generation of consoles and console add-ons hit in the early 90s, they offered unprecedented opportunities in terms of home console gaming. More data, better data, could be stored on the new medium. This included actual video footage and live-recorded audio, not just pixel-mapped images and digitized sound effects. One of the less esoteric devices on the market was the Sega CD (called the Mega-CD overseas), which hooked up to your Genesis or Mega Drive and lent it astounding capabilities. At least in theory, that’s how it worked.

After a while, it got to be more like playing with Transformers than hooking up a video game system.

The vast majority of titles released for Sega’s CD ROM attachment were simply gently-retooled incarnations of Genesis titles, usually with expanded gameplay options, slightly better sound, or touched up graphics.

Then we had games like Night Trap, which blurred the line between console and cinema.

You left the screen door open again, the house is full of bloodsuckers, and Dana Plato is pissed.

Night Trap was originally filmed in 1987 for Hasbro, who had something called Control-Vision in development at the time. Codenamed “NEMO” during its development, the system was to use VHS tapes instead of cartridges. The quiet death of NEMO is its own fairly boring story, but it resulted in Night Trap‘s footage being shelved for four years, until it was bought in 1991 by a company called Digital Pictures… who just happened to know what to do with it. Some extra trimmings were added and the final product was released in 1992, quickly followed by a version that also utilized Sega’s 32X attachment for even better graphics. The title was eventually ported to the 3DO and the PC later on.

The film footage stars two notable Hollywood names (at least, notable to us Retro nerds): Dana Plato, whose notoriety comes from Diff’rent Strokes and her tragic end; and Andras Jones, known to horror fans as Rick from the fourth Nightmare on Elm Street installment. The third notable star is you, the player. You star as the pivotal member of the SCAT (Sega Control Attack Team). Your job is complicated, to say the least; you see, girls have been disappearing at the Martin house (which is described as a winery as well as a residence). A new group of young ladies will be arriving soon, one of whom is an undercover agent (played by Plato). You must watch through a set of cameras (one at a time, or how would it be challenging?) to keep an eye on them, find out what’s happening to them, and neutralize threats using a strange set of Scooby-Doo style booby traps throughout the house that you’ve covertly been given control of. It’s possible for the hosts to find the cable connecting you to the trap system and unplug you, so you have to defend against that as well. Your hands, literally and figuratively, are full.

I never want this dude as my boss in real life.

I will straight up tell you: this game is not a casual one. Gameplay is borderline stressful, but it can be very fun. Constant vigilance (or elaborate memorization) is required. If you’re off by even a few seconds, you get the privilege of watching helplessly as the young women are kidnapped and drained by Augers. 

What are Augers, you say? Well, they’re sort of like vampires, but decidedly less pleasant, if that’s possible (it is).

Those dudes in the right-hand picture? The ones all done up like Dracula’s Olympic fencing team? Those are Augers. 

And what does the Martin family have to do with this? Well, I don’t want to spoil anything, but let’s just say if they unplug your trap control cord, it’s not just because they think someone’s stealing their cable.

Oh. Good.

Along with Doom, Mortal Kombat, and other video games from the time period, Night Trap figured strongly into the early 90s Senate hearings on video game violence that eventually brought us the ESRB. Night Trap was cited as having, among other qualities, “an unprecedented level of realism” and as depicting “an effort to trap and kill women.” Sega went so far as to take it off the shelves after its initial release, making the original version a relative rarity to this day. The CD/32X and subsequent ports were released after the outcry had died down, along with a reissue of the base Sega CD version.

In 2014 the original producers made an effort on Kickstarter to reinvigorate Night Trap, claiming they’d even look into doing sequels if the project was successful. To keep that story short, it wasn’t. However, the original footage remains popular on YouTube and elsewhere on the web, and most conversations among gamers that touch on the Sega CD inevitably involve Night Trap. Other games in a similar vein followed, such as 1994’s Double Switch, but by then these elements of gameplay were more commonplace. Night Trap was the one that made the waves.

As one of the more innovative and memorable titles for the Sega CD, not to mention an overall decent game, I give Night Trap 8 out of 10. It’s worth taking a look at, and it’s definitely worth playing if you find yourself so fortunate as to get a chance.

 

 

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