The Fair Shake
Ode to my Pentium 3.
I wanted to pay homage to an old friend who will soon depart on a journey to a new land, much like Bilbo Baggins at the end of the LoTR trilogy.
I wanted to pay homage to an old friend who will soon depart on a journey to a new land, much like Bilbo Baggins at the end of the LoTR trilogy.
Welcome to a brand new edition of Bad Guys Anonymous. This week, we’ll be taking a closer look at the very first minor minion gamers encounter in Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
Right after our intrepid gorilla hero blasts out of his cave top loft and discovers that his “Banana Hoard” has gone missing, players immediately do three things: they collect their first bananas, they break Diddy Kong from his barrel prison and they square off against the exceptionally basic Gnawty.
Look out, friends, we’re in Donkey Kong pun territory here.
The Angry Video Game Nerd. I discovered his videos back in 2006, and have been watching his work since. Although I don’t find his more recent videos to be as memorable as his older ones, one of my favorite videos of his is the Virtual Boy review. After watching it back in November, I decided to get the red machine just to see if it was really as bad as James and most other gamers say it is.
Some of you might be thinking, “A Mario game on the 2600? Surely you jest, good sir! Might it not merely have been a videoed game of the home-brewèd variety?” Well, my learnèd friends, you’d be wrong. Mario Bros. for the 2600 was a port of the original arcade game and is without a doubt the greatest Mario game ever made (besides this one obviously). Here are the top 10 reasons why:
Imagine for a moment you just got the seventh Chaos Emerald in Sonic 2 or just reached world seven of Super Mario Bros and your mom says it’s time to study or time for bed. What do you do?
If you said “leave the console running until morning” congratulations, your energy-wasting ways have caused the polar ice caps to melt another three inches. (If you also left the TV on, I hope you get mauled by an angry tree or a huddle of homeless penguins)
See, we humans like progress, we like that feeling of accomplishment, especially in our games. And when that accomplishment is taken away, particularly moments after achieving it, well, we get a little upset. Arcade games had to strike a profitable balance between intentionally screwing players so as to force them to drop more quarters to keep playing and making the game fun/addicting enough so players would want to keep playing. This unfortunately meant that few players would actually see the end of a game (if there was one) because arcades couldn’t feasibly save the progress of every player. Arcade games weren’t, understandably, about making continued progress through a game or story but more about achieving high scores and being better than your friends.
Welcome to Bad Guys Anonymous, a weekly column that I came up with when tapped by the folks here at 1 More Castle.
In this space, we’ll examine one bad guy at a time from games in the retro era. However, these aren’t the bad guys that made headlines and cover art as epic bosses. No, these are the bad guys that come and go before you even spend five minutes exploring any given title.
Bad Guys Anonymous is all about the first baddie you encounter in any given game. That’s the rule for this column. I think we’ll find, over time, that there’s a significant amount of deliberation that goes into which enemy players meet first. Despite their exceptional simplicity, opening baddies are more interesting than you might think.
Which brings us to the easiest first choice any writer has ever come upon: the Goomba from Super Mario Bros. on the NES.
It’s kind of a no-brainer to kick off Pinball Alley by talking about, well… Pinball. Sure, there are other pinball games for the Nintendo Entertainment System that are better, more complex, or even recreations of actual licensed pinball tables; however, Pinball from Nintendo is really where my story begins.
Any of you kids grow up with an Atari 2600 AND a Starpath Supercharger? No, it’s not the name of some spaceship in a Star Wars movie. It’s the name of a third-party add-on meant to give the 2600’s capabilities in a fairly convoluted way. First you put the cartridge/adapter with a wire sticking out of it into the cartridge slot, then plug said wire into a cassette player’s earphone jack, which is where you’d actually put the real game as they were all stored on audio cassettes. One of these very cassettes had quite possibly one of the most insane video games ever made. I suppose you should expect nothing less from a game titled “Communist Mutants from Space.”
Hello, 1 More Castle! You guys kept my room just how I left it! I am back and very happy to be writing here once again. This post will not be in my usual N64 Connoisseur series because I have something a bit more personal to discuss today. That feature will return in 2 weeks. To me, it is always noteworthy when a person or a group of people defy a reputation. That noteworthy quality becomes magnified when I am personally involved in the situation. Such has been the case over these last couple of months.
While most people either gave away, lost, or had their old games thrown out on them back in the day as some sort of right of passage into adulthood, I instead saw dollar signs, and short sightedly sold 75% of my PC games in one big eBay auction back in the early 2000’s. “I’ll NEVER want to play this stuff again” said myself, circa 2003. If I had a Delorean I’d go back in time and kick myself. Alas, I have no Delorean and I have no bruise from a self induced kick. In hindsight, the $40 I received in exchange for a barbeque grill-sized box of games and manuals wasn’t worth it, because of course, like most regular readers of my column, I DO want to play some of that stuff again. I can’t even recall what I spent that $40 on. Le sigh. As I later find, everything old, given enough time, is indeed new.
Journey Escape. Yes, Journey, THAT Journey. If you don’t who Journey are, leave now. No, don’t go googling it. Just forget I ever mentioned them. Save yourself. Come back next week when I’ll talk about a game not based on a band whose music has been known to destroy people’s entire lives.
The social media mega-destination Facebook has been derided by many as being old and boring, dreary and useless, shrinking and obsolete, far too mainstream and not as cool as Twitter and Google+. I remain active on it, though, for one simple reason: A lot of people use it, and thus it is a great forum for open discussion (go ahead, befriend me).
Case in point: I recently gave my Facebook friends a simple challenge, “Quick, name a retro video game!” After an eyebrow-raising 127 people responded, I took a look over the list and to had to smile. Here, check it out yourself, since I went ahead and typed it out, in order of appearance.
I like a good fighting game, especially the one-on-one, martial arts showdowns. They can be very tense and invigorating and can make or break friendships. However, I’ve never really been able to successfully play or enjoy a real fighting game. Why? THE FREAKIN C-C-C-COMBOS!!!!
No player can deny that over its history, violence (both realistic and cartoonish) has permeated the video game industry. From the innocent jumps of Mario onto a nearby Goomba, to the brutality of Manhunt, violence has become an almost inescapable part of video game design and culture. Some parents, teachers, politicians and a certain disbarred Florida attorney might say that these games are popular because of their base, gruesome gameplay and that the average gamer is infatuated with violence and gore, essentially turning him into a volatile sociopath bent on murdering innocent people. While I’m personally not even against the theory that violence in games is desensitizing players (it seems possible to me), I think that the murder-training label for games is a bit much. As well, I think I have a bit of an idea as to why video game violence is attractive to gamers.
In a previous Atari Poop, I wrote about the game commissioned by the American Dental Association, so it should come as no surprise that the National Restaurant Association would commission a game of their own: Fast Food.
It was revealed this week that System Shock 2 would finally be coming to GoG and Steam! For those of you who don’t know System Shock 2, it is one of the most highly-revered PC FPS games of all time. Taking place on a spacecraft in the year 2114, you play the role of a soldier trying to stem the outbreak of a deadly genetic infection. While a FPS at heart, the game incorporates a role-playing system, where the player can develop skills such as hacking and psionics.
The game should now already be released on GoG, and should be on Steam in the near future. But, perhaps, we should take this time to look at what tools there are out there to make this old gem shine.
Use this! No, push it! Pull it! Pick it up! No, take it! Open it! Look at it! No, examine it! Turn it off! Turn it on!
SWEET MOTHER OF JENOVA! TOO MANY OPTIONS!!!
Ok, backing up; remember in those text and graphical text adventure games where you had to manually type in exactly every action you wanted your character to do? And you had to slowly figure out what words the game did and didn’t recognize? And then you had to figure out which actions worked on what objects in which situations? Infuriating.
China Syndrome is a 1982 action/puzzle/shooter-ish game for the Atari 2600 sandwiched between two unbelievable conspiracy theories.
As for the first conspiracy, have a look online and you’ll find out that China Syndrome refers to either a movie, this video game, or a theory regarding the safety of nuclear power plants and that the first two are loosely based on the third. It appears that some people thought the power plants made in the 60s weren’t very safe. In particular, there were worries that a loss of coolant could potentially cause a meltdown where everything would burn through the bottom of the reactor and continue straight through the centre of the Earth, and exploding on the other side in China.
Now, you might be thinking “What were these people, idiots?! China isn’t on the opposite side of the Earth in relation to the U.S.!” You’d be right to think this, to a certain extent. China isn’t at the opposite end of the world; however, the reason it’s called the China syndrome and not the Australia (or somewhere off the coast of Australia) syndrome is because an American reactor never melted down straight thrown the Earth’s core and exploded on the other side in Australia.
One of the downfalls of old games is, well, they eventually begin to show their age. Yes, they may be your favourite, but after 20 years of playing them you might want a little more. I’m not saying the games are bad of course, there’s just some room for an extra feature or two. This is where mods come in. Read on to learn about some mods that will breathe new life into some of your old favourites.
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I have a very complicated relationship with Role-Playing Games or RPGs. On the one hand I love the open-ish worlds, the deep story-lines, the interesting characters, the complex character leveling and the strategic battles. On the other, I hate the confusing world maps, the constant random encounters with enemies every two feet, the vague or cliched story-lines, the often paper-thin characters, the overly complex item and leveling system and the plodding pacing that often requires level-grinding for several hours before you can enter a new area. So yeah, it’s complicated.