Adam Ezagouri
TheRetroCritic is a film and game reviewer specialising in all things great and retro. He runs a blog at retrocriticblog.blogspot.com and can be found ranting on Twitter @TheRetroCritic.
Last Christmas, I made a short, stupid little video in which I joked in an AVGN-style rant about the game Daze Before Christmas and how every time demon Santa enters his own bag (I’ll get to that) it looks as if he’s imploding into an oversized piece of dung.
As you can tell, it’s a year later and I’ve totally grown-up.
Something a little bit different this week, let’s take a look at a text game!
I’ve been playing a bunch of them over the past month so I thought I’d talk about The Hobbit since the movie’s out this week and all.
Back in the day, the game did really well in terms of sales and it got gamers slightly closer to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work, so close in fact that the game even came with the book! The scripting language in the game (or “parser”) was slightly more advanced than in a lot of other text games in that you could actually combine items and ask more complete questions with adverbs and such.
So that all sounds pretty awesome. Can you imagine? Actually interacting with Tolkien’s novel?!
*geekgasm*
Ah Cool World.
My childhood wouldn’t have been complete without the nightmares and headaches caused by this bizarre little partly-animated flick. A big fan of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? at the time, despite how terrifying Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom truly was, I expected the Brad Pitt-starring cartoon film noir to really be the next best thing but it just freaked me out.
Something tells me I might enjoy it more re-watching it today though, we’ll see.
I never played any Cool World game back in the day because, as far as I was concerned, Cool World was evil and needed to die. But, after having tracked down a copy of the Game Boy game since and giving it a go, I can finally confirm that…
Cool World is evil and needs to die.
Or that one game, at least.
Now I’ll give it that: it probably has the best Game Boy opening ever.
What do we know about The Punisher? In a nutshell?
– He’s tough.
– He pulls off silly emo T-shirts better than most.
– He likes to shoot things.
Well, turns out that’s all LJN knows about the character too and boy are they gonna squeeze the most out of that!
Topless werewolves…
Yes, there is a new Twilight movie out and yes, I’m about to talk about an Amiga classic only known as: Wolfchild.
Which also involves topless werewolves, of sorts.
If you’re at all familiar with The Gremlins, chances are you’ve also come across its cartoonish sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch. And, if you’re really lucky, you’ve also tried out this little NES gem back in the day!
What? You’re unfamiliar with The Gremlins’ plot?
Let me fill you in:
Some games start and you just know instantly you’re in for something special.
Case and point: Kid Chameleon.
Happy Halloween 1MoreCastlers!
How about we once again turn to the Game Boy and check out a truly electrifying, terrifying retro game?
Dr Franken, you’re up ;)
Hey y’all! Guess what?
It’s Halloween! (in like a week)
Let’s explore the darkest, scariest, most disturbing recesses of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, shall we?
Damn you Skyfall…
After talking The Duel last week, I felt that good old James Pond deserved better than a mere cameo mention so here it is: not so much a full-on review of The Pondmeister’s first Genesis game but rather a general look at just how random the whole thing is.
GoldenEye this, GoldenEye that…
It’s the Bond game everyone remembers and talks about.
But although I did, of course, play GoldenEye quite a bit back in the day, as well as the likes of Nightfire on the X-Box, the 007 game I always recall playing the most has to be The Duel, on the Sega Genesis.
Movie crossovers…
The problem with stuff like Freddy vs Jason, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus or Alien vs Predator is that there’s really no one to root for. I mean, how much can you really get behind a villain? Let alone two of them!
Fighting each other!
RoboCop vs The Terminator gets we need a hero in there, regardless of whether both robo-dudes make sense in the same universe or not.
Los Angeles, Detroit: potato, potahto.
Past, present, future…
Three more potatoes spelt in various other ways.
Not only is it a genuinely retro-gasmic concept, the very mention of it prompting mind-boners the likes of which you only dream of as a kid, but it’s one hell of a game!
On the Genesis, that is. Read More
Yes. Barbie.
This is what happens when you poke around the depths of the NES catalogue looking for something nice and lame to play/review.
Now I’m no Barbie connoisseur but I’ve played quite a few retro games, as you know, so I should be able to play that one and judge it on its merits as a game at least without knocking the beloved doll and breaking some of 1MoreCastle’s Barbie fanatics‘ little hearts. [ Editor’s Note: My heart may be little, but it is also rock hard and ice cold. Bring it on, silly man. — E. ]
Here we go.
So there’s a new Judge Dredd movie out and it’s…
Decent!
As if that wasn’t weird enough, there also exists a decent Judge Dredd game on the Sega Genesis and it’s based on a movie that, at best…
Don’t act like you’ve never played this one.
You were a Simpsons fan, like everybody else at the time, and bought any game that had these big-eyed freaks on the cover. You played it for like a day, got stuck and gave up. Occasionally going back to it and getting stuck again, of course.
Weirdly, I have fond memories of Krusty’s Fun House on the Sega Master System.
But then again I have fond memories of most Simpsons retro games, no matter how ridiculously hard (Bart Vs The Space Mutants) or flawed (Bart Vs The World) they were.
Krusty’s Fun House is basically Lemmings but nowhere near as involving.
You’d think games based on nothing but soulless fast-food/soda logos would be worse than this.
Remember McKids on the NES? Hardly a must-play but really not that bad a game. Kinda like Super Mario Bros. except way worse and near incomprehensible. It was a fun mess for the most part, a guilty pleasure.
Cool Spot however, a game based solely on a bubbly Sprite double, was just plain good.
Of all the movies, of all the TV series, of all the characters I would have picked to lead a video game: Larry, Curly and Moe were WAY down on my list.
Like, waaaaaaay down.
But with a new Three Stooges movie out this year (another brilliant idea) and a classic NES game to make fun of, let’s not waste anymore time and check out one of the console’s strangest, most unnecessary creations.
Yup, I went there.
Probably one of the least liked, most negatively reviewed NES games around, Total Recall is one of those games that actually does try to stay close to the source material but in the process forgets to be good. A shame because a Total Recall game could (read: should) have been classic.
I mean, it’s not like the movie lacked material: Mars, triple-breasted whores…
But instead what we got from the NES wasn’t worth Dick. Philip K. Dick, that is.
If there’s one movie I never expected to have a good retro game attached to it, it’s The Lawnmower Man.
You remember The Lawnmower Man, right?
Of course you do.
Sure the virtual reality plot device lends itself to obvious possibilities game-wise but really, the best I was hoping for on Sega Genesis was a lame side-scroller at best. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like the movie in all its dated, silly, 90’s glory, but it is one goofy-ass flick and a hard one to take seriously so a game could have been a disaster of Alf-like proportions.
But as patchy as this game is… I kinda like it!
Alf was great.
Oh sure, looking back he looks pretty gross and the awkward tension on the set of the show is palpable throughout every episode, and maybe he wasn’t exactly funny “per se” but we still loved the Melmacian back in the day so a game should bring back some happy memories.
Right?
Oh now I remember, that Sega Master System game RUINED MY LIFE!