Space Jam (PlayStation)

Year: 1996
Genre: Sports, basketball, arcade
Developers(s): Sculptured Software, Inc.
No. of players: Up to six (with a multitap)
Published by: Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.

The official Space Jam video game, based on the 1996 movie of the same name which recently had a -seemingly less financially successful- sequel, is both one of the biggest wastes of a movie license in relatively recent video game history, and one of the most inconsequential.

There is only one real reason I own this game, and it is because Lola Bunny, one of my earliest furry crushes ever, is in it. I love Lola. Lola is the closest we’ve ever gotten to having a character with the visual design of Petina deMouse in a kids’ movie. Not only is she physically attractive -you know she works out and has developed some perfectly-toned muscles, never mind that she’s never drawn with them-, but she’s tough, dominant, and self-sufficient while still showing major compassion for friends once in a while. She’s the kind of girl who just as soon would kick you in the teeth than cuddle with you and has no problem with doing either. Unfortunately, the only video game to feature her playing basketball -while showcasing none of her amazing skills at it- is this one.

And this one is not a good basketball video game. Not even within its specific genre of basketball video games. Let’s now check out why.

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Battletoads (Famicom)

Year: 1991

Genre: Beat ’em up, vehicle driving, platforming

Developers(s): Rare Ltd.

No. of players: 1-2

Published by: Masaya Games

NOTE: I intended to play as far as I could with two players so I could write how that is, but I basically didn’t think anyone but a handful of people -who were unavailable- would be up for it. I might update this later if I can get someone else to play with (netplay, of course). Also, I haven’t beaten this game yet because I haven’t gotten back to playing it yet -got pretty far, though!-. Also, I know the new Battletoads game is out now, but I haven’t played it, so I can’t venture an opinion on it.

In my Rocket Ranger review, I exposited about something I call the UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s. In summary, the UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s dictates that a good game must look and sound exceptionally well, but at the same time it has to be excessively and unfairly difficult to the point of being almost unplayable. Whether this was done because the developers were amateur, uncaring, or sadistic -many were one or more of those-, or to hide how short the games truly were, it just had to be done because it had to be done and that was the end of that. And in the days before Nintendo reined them in, Rareware inflicted the UK/European model on many an NES/Game Boy owner, while working for the likes of Nintendo themselves, Tradewest (the people who killed Double Dragon), Acclaim, and LJN.

It was Tradewest who published the game that would cement Rare in infamy for all time: Battletoads.

Fame and public preference are fickle things. One second you’re the biggest thing since sliced bread; the next, you’re either an Internet meme or public enemy No. 1. Between 1991 and 1993, Battletoads -one of many imitators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles during that time period- was one of the biggest and most popular video game series in history. Now it’s a punchline for jokes about difficulty, when it’s not being presented as proof-positive that liking old video games is immoral. It’s mostly its own fault. Its games have a very deserved reputation for being ridiculously difficult by way of directly screwing with the player, most infamously exemplified by their original NES outing. However, I have read on The Cutting Room Floor, and I have since confirmed, that the Famicom version of this game is much easier than the NES original; still damn hard, but not torture. On the 26th of July, 2020, I was able to reach level 6 in one sitting, and a day later I got to level 9! So let’s take a look.

The story, which I have taken from the instruction manual of the NES version, is some pretty standard fare. An evil, voluptuous intergalactic conqueror and sorceress called the Dark Queen has been recently defeated by the Galactic Corporation and her forces have made a strategic retreat. On board the Spaceship Vulture, the three Battletoads -Zitz, Rash, and Pimple- and their mentor, Professor T. Bird, are escorting Angelica, Princess of Earth, back home. Pimple, who probably has a bit of a thing for the Princess, takes her out on a joyride through space. Soon enough they’re snatched away into the maw of the Dark Queen’s flagship, the Gargantua, and taken to the planet known as Ragnarok’s World, where they will be held captive inside the Tower of Shadows. Rash (player 1) and Zitz (player 2, even though he’s the team leader) rappel down to the surface of Ragnarok’s World on a rescue mission.

The game is a platformer beat ’em up with some vehicular racing levels. Starting with the third one (the infamous Turbo Tunnel), the levels become long, point-A-to-point-B obstacle courses with checkpoints, while still being either platforming beat ’em up or vehicular. The combat is very basic; you only have a punch -can do combos with it-, a jumping punch, and a headbutt (double tap forward to run and then hit B), but the Battletoads have the ability to “morph” parts of their own bodies to deliver automatic, finishing “smash hits”, such as a giant fist, giant ram horns, a giant boot, or transforming completely into a wrecking ball. The real core of the gameplay lies with the obstacle courses, for which the game certainly gets major points in terms of variety; after Turbo Tunnel, you have platforming in an ice cave, followed by dodging wooden logs and mines on a surfboard, climbing on giant snakes to reach the top of rooms full of spiked balls, Turbo Tunnel again but with missiles and electrical barriers, an elevator shaft with moving girders which have gaps to jump up through, and the inside of a giant plumbing full of gears and killer rubber duckies (another rule of the UK/European Model is to include as much non-sequitur, I-wish-I-was-Monty-Python-esque humour as possible). It adds up to 13 levels, culminating in a final fight with the Dark Queen for the fate of Pimple and Angelica.

The difficulty lies in learning the order, exact moment, and speed at which the obstacles will come at you, and the correct way to dodge each and every single one with pixel-perfect accuracy. The majority of hazards in this game kill you in one hit, from spikes to toxic gas to the rubber duckies. Even the beat ’em up parts are hard; the most basic enemies possible might require upwards of eight to ten hits just to weaken, but they only need to hit you once to drain half your life. And the bosses are some of the most intense you’ll ever see; most of them have one-hit-kill attacks that you have to be extra quick to dodge. The only item that replenishes health are small yellow flies which you can swallow (no pizza or hot dogs here; these are clearly not your regular anthropomorphic animal heroes!), but which only replenish one health point each -you can only have up to six- and which fly across the screen for a couple of minutes before leaving.

To alleviate the difficulty for Famicom players, the speed has been reduced, the number of obstacles has also been reduced, the distance between them has been made slightly longer, and some have been removed altogther. In Turbo Tunnel, for example, there are less walls, and the ones there are are further apart from each other than they were originally, while the ramps have all been moved to the ground and to the center (no floating ramps and no ramps on the sides). On my first time reaching that level in this version, I was able to beat it with only the loss of one continue; in subsequent attempts, I’ve been able to beat it with only the loss of one life. Similarly, in level 6, Karnath’s Lair, the giant snakes are all slow, and there are less spiked balls. In level 8, Intruder Excluder, some of the sentry robots, toxic gas dispensers, and shredding ventilators have been taken out to make certain jumps easier. In level 9, Terra Tubes,, the giant gears that chase you have been made slower, and some more sets of spikes have been eliminated. And so on. The result is comparable to Contra; tough, but not completely impossible to most people -I presume that most people who play old video games are good enough to beat the classics, but not necessarily godlike-. Consequently, I enjoy it far more than the original, to the point that it has allowed me to see the inventive involved in some of its level ideas. Riding a maze of giant snakes and upwards platform jumping through moving gaps are some of the most imaginative ideas for challenges I’ve seen in an old video game.

Of course, this is a UK/European Model game, and that means the graphics and sound are top-est of the top notch. Graphically, the game shows off some neat visual effects such as the 3D ship from the introduction sequence, the movement of the tall robots’ legs, the smooth waving background of the vehicular part of Volkmire’s Inferno, and the rotating Tower of Shadows. Sound effects aren’t very convincing (the Smash Hits are accompanied by a wimpy-sounding “plap” that does not sound like the fist of an enormous, muscular creature), but the music, by Rareware composer David Wise, is some very hard-hitting stuff; the title screen, the first three levels, and the cutscenes all have catchy tunes you’ll be still remembering after many years.

In conclusion: I think this Famicom version of the original Battletoads is the ideal version of the game. Still a challenge to the reflexes and memorization skills, but not as demoralizing as the NES vesion. It hits a certain “sweet spot” between frustration and enjoyment that I think all the best action games on NES have. If you’re planning on buying the real cartridge, though, a word of warning: it’s not easy to find.

Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64)

Year: 1996
Genre: 3D platforming
Developer(s): Nintendo EAD
Nº of players: 1
Publisher: Nintendo of America, Inc.

Recently, something happened which I greatly lament, although it didn’t exactly plunge me into depression or anything. Gustavo “Gus” Rodríguez, editor of Mexico’s official Nintendo magazine, Club Nintendo (“ClubNin” or “CN” to her friends), passed away on April 11 of this year at the age of 61.

“ClubNin” began publishing on December 1991. Much like the US equivalent, Nintendo Power, it had news, reports of such game expos as E3 and Nintendo World, previews and reviews of the latest games, cheats, walkthroughs, answers to individual readers, nostalgia sections and various other things, all of it directly related to the Nintendo universe. They had a colossal bias towards Nintendo -an imposition from “above”, i.e. the brand’s numerous distributors in Mexico-, which constantly made them contradict themselves -CD has always been the best format; Nintendo abandoned the SNES-CD; now cartridges have always the best format-, praising stuff they shouldn’t have -the Virtual Boy- and claiming some real nonsense -one time they claimed Lugia is a fusion between Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres-. But there was a good reason to overlook all of that; the writing style was humorous, complicit; it gave the feeling of a casual conversation between friends about video games, not just an adult gamer talking down to kids. There was no excess of that, nor the excess of snark that reigned supreme in European mags. Even if you didn’t own any Nintendo consoles or games, their camaraderie made it pleasant to read.

I have since understood this all had a great influence on my own writing style and my own aspirations for my retro reviews – to relate what the game is like, on an introductory level, and then giving my personal impressions of it while avoiding the “angry reviewer” and other mean-spirited stereotypes. I regret the loss of Gus, no matter the criticism I might have -and had- for the magazine, and I wish to make this review as a homage to him.

Keep in mind; all the games I review are usually emulated, because I can’t acquire nor maintain a huge game collection, but since Nintendo 64 emulation is terrible since 1999, I have to rely on physical hardware for it. So, if I don’t have an N64 game, I can’t review it. And this is Super Mario 64; the game that made me interested in video games. I gotta do it justice. But that’s another story.

For now, let us, as the commercials for the Game Boy Color used to say, “get into it”.

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The story of the game, as simple and sufficient as you’d expect from Mario, is as follows. Princess Toadstool, “Peach”, has invited Mario to her castle to eat a cake she’s just baked for him. When Mario arrives, he finds no one, except for Toad cowering in a corner of the lobby. Talking to him reveals what would be a discouraging situation for anyone but the heroic plumber: the evil Bowser, King of the Koopas, has kidnapped Peach. Again! But that’s not all; he’s also stolen the Power Stars that protects the castle, and with their power he’s created worlds filled with creatures -good and bad- and obstacles inside the paintings and walls. His goal is for his creations to overflow from their worlds and become an army he will use to take over the castle, and then, the entire Mushroom Kingdom. Mario is the only one who can enter these worlds and collect the Stars which are hiding in each, as well as the fifteen Secret Stars hidden by Peach herself before her capture, so that he may face Bowser and defeat him.

To be truthful, there is a 3D platforming game from 1990, six years earlier than this game: Alpha Waves, a French game for Amiga (called “Continuum” in the Américas). Don’t ask me if it’s any good; I’ve never played it -nor are my expectations for it to be good very high-.

Anyway. Super Mario 64 is a 3D platformer, a genre which had its moment of greatest popularity in the mid and late 1990s. In each of the large worlds, or “Courses”, of the game, there’s a number of Power Stars to collect for the purpose of opening access to more worlds -located behind locked doors with a number indicating how many Stars are required to open them-, in whhich to locate more Stars, and so on, until you reach the end. Peach’s castle serves as a hub from which you may access these Courses, while counting as something of a Course itself -the reason for the Secret Stars to exist-. These Stars are earned by accomplishing certain objectives: defeating bosses, solving puzzles, win races against other characters, collecting eight Red Coins -the recurring objective par excellence- and other stuff. One of the things this formula does stupendously is to have an “open” nature. It’s not necessary to collect every Star in every Course to proceed to the next ones, and it’s not necessary to collect them in a specific order either. In fact, it’s completely possible to defeat the last instance of Bowser and see the ending without having collected the 120 Stars there are in total -the only thing that’s different is Bowser’s final dialogue… and one other thing, but that’s for my readers to find out if they don’t know already-. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, once referred to this by assuring that anyone could finish his game, whether they were an experienced player or not -or at least, Club Nintendo claims he did-.

Mario has an impressive amount of moves, all of which are at his disposal from the very beginning of the game and often explained to the player through signs they can read, on the Courses, the castle and its grounds. Not only are you able to jump and run, but also punch, kick, trip the enemies, triple-jump (three successive jumps ending in a forward somersault), backwards somersault, side-somersault, and long jump, as well as crawlon the floor, pick up and throw objects, hang from certain ceilings, descend from poles, swim underwater, pound the ground with your butt (yeah), slide down slopes… And not just all of that; there are ways to find special Switches, which, as in Super Mario World, can be activated to make certain red, green and blue Blocks visible. These blocks contain special Caps which give Mario special, limited-time powers, such as flying, turning into Metal Mario -indestructible, so heavy he can walk on the bottom of the sea- or becoming invisible and immaterial to walk through walls. However, such classic items as the Mushroom or the Fire Flower are absent, and there are no equivalents.

You can also talk to pink Bob-Ombs so that they’ll activate special cannons, from which you’re able to shoot yourself like a human cannonball to reach certain places. In later worlds, it’s even possible for Mario to lose his normal cap -revealing a brown pompadour underneath-, which makes enemy attacks do more damage than normal and presses you to retrieve the cap as soon as possible.

Bowser is a boss three times; the doors leading to him are indicated with large stars, and lead to more linear Courses, at the end of each of which is a gigantic Bowser with a deep, growling voice. The fights against him -which are counted among the most memorable parts of the game- consist of managing to get behind him, grab him by the tail and rotate the Control Stick in circles to swing him around, until you throw him away by pressing B, like in hammer toss; the goal is to throw him at the bombs around the platform. When defeated, he drops keys which open doors to the castle’s basement, first, and the upper floors later. Later, in other encounters with him, he demonstrates more powers other than breathing fire, including teleporting and causing shockwaves by stomping his feet.

A 1996 fragment from the Mexican TV show “Nintendo Manía”, more or less the same thing as the magazine but in live-action. Hosted by Gus, his son Javier Rodríguez Ávila, and a rotating cast, the show ran from 1995 to 2000. Many more VHS recordings of complete episodes can be found on YouTube.

Another great aspect of the game is that, despite the enormous amount of crucial elements there are to gameplay on a basic level -a level from I’m writing this-, it’s never hard to learn how to play. Some Stars are harder to get than others; sometimes depending on the player’s experience -try to get a small child to face the Chain Chomp alone and see what happens-, sometimes because of Course design -my absolute most hated ones are 14 and 15, Tick-Tock Clock and Rainbow Ride respectively-, sometimes because of reasons which involve little logic -how come the only way I could climb on the roof of Big Boo’s Haunt was by crawling?). But the majority of the game’s rules and how to follow it is clear from the beginning. In any good game for general audiences, Nintendo’s primary trait, it is crucial that the player be able to “pick up and play”, and Super Mario 64 is outstanding in that respect.

Cover of the magazine’s July 1996 issue, commenting on that year’s E3 where the first N64 games were shown.

It’s not a perfect game, of course. One of its potential flaws may or may not be the recurrence of collecting eight Red Coins, and later, finding and stepping on five secret spots. After a while, someone might become bored and think “Isn’t there anything else? More bosses or anything?”.

But definitely the biggest problem -as it was of the game’s many, many imitators- is the camera. The camera is controlled by the yellow C buttons, which let you move it around yourself, push it close, pull it away, and look around in all directions from behind Mario’s head. But you don’t move the camera; you simply change its angle, for it’s only able to take you in from predetermined angles under the excuse that Lakitu -the turtle on a floating cloud- is a “seasoned cameraman” and knows where best to show the action from -one of my favorite moments from the game is when you look at yourself on a mirror and Lakitu is reflected with you-. Thus, many times you’re simply unable to put it in a comfortable angle with you; at the least, in a least inconvenient one; and on top of that, Lakitu tends to move on his own anyway (particularly when you’re walking on narrow bridges) leaving you unable to see where you’re going unless you’re constantly reining him in. Since “looking around” is moving Mario’s head while he’s standing still, you can’t look on all directions because you can’t spin his head that far (or else he’d be Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist).

And there’s one thing I really detest. Flying with the Wing Cap is enormously uncomfortable. Mario is constantly descending; you can keep him steady for a while, but sooner or later he’ll dive down by his own weight and immediately climb back up (with a yell of “Yippee!”), but you can’t ascend higher than that anymore, and manuevering in mid-air feels very, very stiff. Stars such as collecting the eight Red Coins on the Red Switch’s Course force you to get them on your first try perfectly.

In conclusion: Super Mario 64 is that rare, almost-unreachable ideal; an original that has very, very, very difficult to surpass. Nothing less could be expected from an adventure with Mario, a character with games so timeless that each new game of any of them still feels like the first one.

Rest in peace, Gus, until we, the Nintendomaníacos and Nintendomaníacas, meet you again.

¡Estamos en contact!

“Gus” Rodríguez

1958-2020

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

Original title: Sonic the Hedgehog
Country of origin: USA
Genre: Comedy, action, adventure
Year: 2020
Running time: 99 minutes

Why, yes, I do movie reviews too! Not as often as I do video game reviews, but I do them. And here’s one I’m still very happy to be writing.

Yesterday I went to see the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie, which had raised so much -and so despair-inducing- controversy because of the title character’s look and having to go fast (ha! ha!) into his redesign. I won’t dwell on that, however.
I’ve liked the Sonic video games all my life, and I’ve always held on to the hope that the character’s public reputation (marred by a long string of video game installments ranging from “okay” to “abysmal” and a horrendous, insane mass of scum of a fandom) to rebound. Well, here’s the movie that may have just accomplished that. No; I’m certain that it did accomplish that. That’s right; I am giving a positive review to Sonic the Hedgehog, the movie that no one gave a dime for and which seemed doomed to fail. Keep reading and you’ll learn why…

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As is common, though not universal, in the microcosm of Sonic adaptations, here we have Sonic as an alien who falls to our world. At a very early age, Sonic discovered his amazing ability to run at the speed of sound -and with his body covered in lightning like he’s a Super Saiyan-. The enemies of his mentor, an owl named Longclaw, found him out, and to save him, she teleported him to Earth using a Ring -although it may not look like it, this is a reference to the video games; specifically, Sonic 3D Blast, where you had to gather birds and put them into Big Rings to teleport them out of danger.
Ten years later, Sonic has managed to live alone and secretly on a California small town called Green Hills, becoming familiar with its inhabitants and especially its police sheriff Tom Wachowski (James Marsden, whom I first knew as Cyclops in the X-Men movies), who is planning to move to San Francisco because he dismisses his own home town, where nothing ever happens.
Oh, Tom, are you in for a real happening! Because Sonic, since he can’t reveal his existence to anyone, doesn’t have any friends on Earth; which is what he truly wants and the cause of his biggest frustrations. Taking said frustrations out one night, he runs so fast that his power causes a PEM big enough to leave the entire Pacific Northwest without electricity, which attracts the attention of Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), a government scientist extremely depreciative of society, who develops an obssession with capturing Sonic and use him to power his machines. Sonic ends up revealing himself to Tom, and together they head to San Fran to retrieve Sonic’s bag of Rings, which he needs to use to teleport to the Mushroom Village where Longclaw said he would be safe from her enemies.

When Carrey was announced as the villain, many assumed he’d be the only good thing about the movie. While he’s in good acting form -although not necessarily physical, nor, sadly, mental-, he’s not the best thing about the movie. The best thing about the movie, against all prediction. is Sonic himself. He’s been written as a sort of Roger Rabbit; wacky, but not loud; neurotic, but not unbearable; and, above all, optimistic. He spends the majority of the movie having the time of his life, making wisecracks and doing all kinds of fantastic -as in fantasy- stuff with his superspeed (his bar fight scene against a bunch of biker thugs is a total riot), and the viewer can’t help but join in his enthusiasm, never seemingly able to get tired of his antics. I think a good reason for this is precisely that they redesigned him into something that looked more like he does in the games, but I’m not saying this because I’m one of those horrendous, insane Sonic fans. I say this because it helps put the audience into the mindset that he’s a cartoon character, like Roger Rabbit -hence the comparison-. It’s a lot easier to take a cartoon character’s antics with a straight face when they look like a cartoon character. As far as I can remember, the last movie that did this with CGI was The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), which I haven’t been able to see yet.

But the comings and goings of a Hollywood cartoon Sonic aren’t what drives me to recommend this movie.

The cockfighting between Marvel and DC movies has led Hollywood’s movie industry, its audience and its critics to believe that live-action adaptations of family-friendly material can only be done two ways; either “darker and grittier” like Christopher Nolan’s Batman, or “ironic” and prone to savagely making fun of the source material like Joel Schumacher’s Batman. Each form is approached -by both its makers and its audiences- from the assumption that any person who prefers the other is evil. Due to this, we have lost the tendency there was with Superman II, Batman 1989, or the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy; that of telling the stories with “sincerity”. That is; knowing that these are unreal stories about unlikely heroes saving entire worlds from the threat of demented villains with evil laughs, they tell them just the way they are, without the need to “justify them” or “ground them in reality”, nor to “constantly reassure the audience that we acknowledge that this is a very stupid thing that no one should care so much about”.

Sonic doesn’t do either of those things. Sonic is a movie about a cartoon blue hedgehog who can talk and run very fast, who beats down an evil scientist in red with a very bushy mustache, and saves the world. The argument is never told as if it was anything else. It has humor, but it doesn’t take potshots at itself the whole time. It has serious moments, but it’s not pessimistic. Its makers feel no shame about the material they’re working with, and therefore they make no attempt to justify its existence, nor themselves. They know they’re working with a character who doesn’t need to be one or the other to succeed. They know there’s a spectrum between grimdark and irony, and they have wisely put their movie within it.

This is why I recommend this movie. This is why I say my hopes of seeing Sonic vindicated have come true. And I know there are others like me, even if we won’t open our mouths to expose ourselves. And their hopes might have come true as well.

In conclusion: We need more movies like Sonic the Hedgehog.

Doom II (1994, MS-DOS)

System: MS-DOS
Genre: First-person shooter
Year: 1994
Developer(s): id Software

When I was a child, my parents wisely never let me watch any movies or TV shows I wasn’t old enough for (responsible parenting, what an idea!), but I deliberately avoided video games rated M, which my father gave me lots of trouble for. The two M-rated games I can remember tolerating were Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom II. Today, I tell you my thoughts on the latter.
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Doom games are usually extremely light on story; most of the bare-bones plot they normally have is told to you, rather than shown. id Software’s design philosophy is that nobody cares about story in video games, so there’s no need to develop one. It’s a philosophy that worked for the kind of games they used to make, and it certainly works here.
You, the nameless space marine (colloquially known as “Doomguy”), had to fight tooth and nail through an invasion of demons from Hell who had slipped through the interdimensional gates created by Earth scientists on Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. You’ve just arrived back on Earth after escaping with your life. You thought the horror was over, but you’re about to discover the awful truth: the demons have invaded Earth, annihilated most of the human race, and mutated some of your fellow marines into combat zombies. It’s Hell on Earth! The last humans alive have boarded the last spaceship, but the demons have surrounded it with a giant wall of flame. Your goal is to reach the last spaceport, remove the flames and allow the ship to escape, while staying behind to finish off the invasion alone.

Doom II is an early first-person shooter. Each stage has the same objective -find the exit-, but each is a big, multi-layered maze full of doors, weapons, items, and enemies. These run from zombified marines to the enormous Cyberdemon, a cyborg satyr with a rocket launcher. To help you destroy them, there’s a varied selection of weapons strewn throughout the levels, which include a chainsaw, a handgun, a double-barrelled shotgun (the jack-of-all-trades weapon in any FPS of this age), a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle, and the screen-clearing BFG 9000, a thing so powerful and destructive it can kill enemies it’s not even being fired at. Items also exist, such as medikits and armor (to heal yourself and boost your protective armor, which shields you from damage to your health), small and large boosts to your health and armor (to make both go beyond 100%), the “Berserk” medikit (full health and makes your bare fists more powerful than normal), temporary invincibility, temporary partial invisibility, temporary anti-radiation suit (for walking unharmed in radioactive waste),backpacks with extra ammo, and -most importantly- colored keys. Many doors in the game are locked, but require you to find a key of the same color as the lock (the game will warn you, as you attempt to open them, that “you need the [color] key to open this door”. Finding the keys involves negotiating the big mazes that the levels usually are, and encourages exploring every single corner, which is also good for finding secret paths, rooms, and items inside the walls. You’re rated at the end of each level depending on how many enemies you killed, how many items you obtained, and how many secrets you found.

By its own admission, Doom II isn’t a very complicated game; it’s action-oriented first and always, but that doesn’t mean it’s mindless. Not only do you have to figure out which switches open which door(s) in each level, but you also have to know how to conserve ammunition, since the farther you get into the game, the deadlier the enemies become and the tougher weapons they die to. Whenever you can, you have to find ways to kill several enemies in one stroke; in the early levels this is done to zombies and Imps by luring them near the barrels of explosive radioactive waste (lots of radioactivity in this game, isn’t there?) and blowing the barrels up with a shotgun. The blast radius is usually big enough to kill most of the weaker enemies in one hit, as is that of the rocket launcher. Other times, you’ll have to know when not to fire a single shot; in the level “The Crusher”, for example, early on there is a bunch of Hell Knights standing on a platform. The Hell Knights are tough and you’re not in a position to just shoot them all down. What to do? Nearby, there is a switch, which lowers a portion of the ceiling down onto them and squashes them flat, killing them all in one stroke without you having to waste any ammo on them – hence the level’s name, “The Crusher”. Being a PC title from the days when PC players were assumed to be willing to put up with puzzle logic that was, at best, loopy -see also: almost all of the King’s Quest games-, the only clue you get is in the level’s name, and by then it’s more of a “Oh, so that’s why it’s called that!” than a “Oh, so there’s a crushing ceiling in this level!” situation. As the enemies get tougher and the odds more overwhelming, you may find yourself near-hopelessly stuck from time to time. The final boss, a giant mural of a demon’s head with an exposed brain (known as Baphomet, the Gatekeeper, or the Icon of Sin depending on who you ask), is an absolute pain to figure out how to kill, almost one as bad as actually trying to kill it.

There’s a matter that I’d like to initiate some kind of discussion about. You might recall the Superman review where I explained why “tank controls” weren’t the ideal setup for action games, where your reflexes are being put to the test and painstakingly turning yourself left or right to engage enemies isn’t the quickest response you can make. Yet Doom II has tank controls (the arrow keys are for front/back movement and turning while the , and . keys are lateral movement) and it plays like a dream. It had never occured to me before, and it helps me understand why tank controls became so commonplace in later years; because the classic Doom series was their model. Whichever Greek philosopher it was that said “I only know that I know nothing” was absolutely right.
I believe that I may have an idea of why this is the case. For one thing, Doom II’s controls are much quicker and more responsive than those of its imitators. For another, Doom II doesn’t require the player to jump, crouch, or aim up/down. Gaps are cleared by simply running across them, and if an enemy is in your sights, your gunfire will hit it. Attempts to incorporate most of this stuff into later games usually only contributed to their encumbrance; while the simplicity of the control scheme ensures that Doom II earns a place in the “easy to learn, hard to master” library occupied by plenty of retro classics in the vein of Super Mario Bros. or Pac-Man.

Graphically, it’s what you might expect from a game this old – an early 3D engine (which allowed for stairs and multiple planes, although not for multi-story buildings like LucasArts’ later Star Wars: Dark Forces) populated by 2D sprites, the kind that get blurrier the closer you get to them. The music, though – the music! – Classic Doom has some of the best music I’ve heard in a video game, from decadent “sinister hellish landscape” to Megadeth-esque material. Did you guys know that “Christian black metal” is a thing? The next game after Doom: Eternal should get on that!

In conclusion: You don’t always need a “cinematic experience” or a gripping storyline with twists and turns in order to have fun. Sometimes, all you need is a double-barreled shotgun, a bunch of monsters, and some hard music… and a little patience for mind-warping expectations -on the part of the developers- of your ability to survive.

Rocket Ranger (1988, MS-DOS)

System: MS-DOS
Genre: Action, strategy
Year: 1988
Developers(s): Cinemaware Corporation

Before I can tell you what this game is about, I want to talk about something I like to call the “UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s”. The UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s was the foundation on which almost every video game made in that region (mostly by cracktro artists with unbelievable, god-like demoscene skills, and always on inexpensive personal computers such as the Amstrad CPC and the ZX Spectrum, which is what was popular there instead of the Atari 2600 or the NES) was built, and it defined their video game industry for nearly twenty years. It has only three rules, as simple as they are mandatory. They are as follows:

Rule 1: The graphics and audio must be MIND-BLOWINGLY AWESOME. Score 7x if you can get the gaming press, then and now, to say this is “considering the system’s limitations”. The ideal goal is nothing less than wringing digitized voices out of a Spectrum or a real-time polygon engine out of an Amiga.
Rule 2: The game itself must be so MADDENINGLY DIFFICULT as to be almost completely impossible to play, thanks to the development team’s staggering inexperience in actually making games. Anything from “unresponsive controls” to “no brief invincibility after a hit” to “deliberately making the game unbeatable” is not only acceptable; it’s encouraged.
Rule 3: There must be a high score table. I don’t know why the game has to pretend it’s 1:1 identical to a real arcade machine, but it has to.

And yet the UK/European magazines of the time always treated these games as masterpieces descended from Heaven (many, like RetroGames, still do), and UK/European games can always be counted on to rudely question the mental capacity and non-American citizenship of anyone who doesn’t like them. I’m personally convinced it’s done out of some unacknowledged form of extreme nationalism. We on this side of the pond were subjected to many of these games on the days of the NES and SNES without knowing it; brought to us by the likes of Ocean Software, Rareware when they worked for Acclaim or LJN, Beam Software, Probe, Software Creations, Delphine, Bitmap Brothers, Loriciel, Rainbow Arts and others.

And so we come to Cinemaware Corporation, an American company that made the UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s not just their game design model, but their life philosophy. Their stated goal was to make “interactive movies”. Today, that term means “games that make you feel more like you’re watching a movie with occasional button prompts”, but their definition was “games that make you feel like you’re playing a movie”; games that told gripping, classic storylines homaging classic movie genres of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (hence the company’s name), experienced through short, straightforward minigames -euphemistically referred to as “arcade sequences”- connected by some form of a mechanically simple strategy game, all wrapped in amazing graphics and sounds (on select machines, primarily the Amiga).
The minigames had awkward controls, unfavorable mechanics and not immediately obvious goals, and the strategy was heavily stacked in the AI’s favor -all of which was most certainly done on purpose to hide the games’ brevity-, but the audiovisuals were incredible – here were games that looked and sounded like VGA+Sound Blaster long before any of those things were invented. Defender of the Crown, their first game, was from 1986, but you’d never guess that if I didn’t tell you. It was living in the 24th century while the 20th was still going!

Allow me to let you in on a secret. The Amiga versions of Cinemaware games are never actually the best ones. The aforementioned UK/European gamers will claim otherwise, based on the superior audiovisuals. But everyone else knows that video games looking good doesn’t mean they play good. Indeed, the MS-DOS PC versions, widely reviled for looking and sounding far worse, are the best ports I’ve played (once you’ve set the DOSBox cycles to the correct speed for each), and the ones that made me a Cinemaware fan in the first place. Case in point: Rocket Ranger.
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The game is claimed to have been inspired by the old “Commando Cody” movie serials of the 1950s, but it’s really more like the “Rocketeer” comics from the early 80s -the Disney movie from 1991 didn’t exist yet-. The year is 1940. You’re an American military scientist, lost in thought, when suddenly a bunch of highly-advanced-looking equipment materializes on your desk, along with a note. The note claims it’s from the year 2040, a future in which the Nazis won World War II. Your own future descendants knew the Allies were supposed to win, and sent you a jetpack, a laser gun and other future equipment back through time, so that you alone may stop the Nazis and save the future.
The Nazis apparently won through the use of a substance called “lunarium”, which causes mental deficiency and sexual impotency in men (women are immune to it), and which they are somehow mining directly from the Moon and shipping to Germany by train. The object of the game is to acquire 500 units of lunarium plus five rocketship parts, go to the Moon and sabotage the Nazis’ lunarium mining operation from the source, before the Nazis can conquer the US and/or before the end of 1944.

As said before, this is a simplistic strategy game where the battles are in the form of simplistic action minigames. The formula goes like this: first you go to your War Room, which shows a map of the world; you check in on the activities of your secret agents, which you’ve previously sent around the world on missions of either infiltration or resistance; depending on their reports and clues, you determine which countries have key Nazi installations, and where to strike first and in which order; finally, you “take off” with your jetpack to the desired destination(s) and beat the proper minigames, thus successfully sabotaging the Nazis or gathering lunarium/rocket parts. Most of the minigames have you flying with a 3rd person view, blowing up German fighters, anti-air guns, or missiles from a zeppelin; but you also have one for taking off (hit the space bar in rhythm with your footsteps to run faster, then hit Up as soon as you hear a beeping sound), a shooting gallery similar to the old game “Cabal” against a temple’s defenses, or fistfights with Nazi guards for rocket parts.

That’s just a very basic overview – the devil is in the details, as normal. Lunarium is also your jetpack’s fuel, so you need it to fly from country co country, and you have to be careful not to run out of it at the worst moments, especially because you don’t automatically go back to the US every time you finish a minigame. But, it’s also part of the copy protection – what old PC games had instead of DRM; normally you had to input a secret word from page X, paragraph Y of the manual, or whatever. Rocket Ranger used a cardboard wheel, which, once turned to a starting country and a destination, gave the correct amount of lunarium required for that trip, which you must then input in the game (the amount is substracted from your jetpack’s lunarium tank). If you input too much or too little for the intended origin and destination, you end up somewhere else, or (worse) you die, while recalling your grandmother’s words: “If God had meant for man to fly, He would have given him wings”. Also, the correct values are different between the American and European versions.
The cool thing about this is that wheel is also in the game, mentioned as part of the equipment you received from the future; a bit like the “feelies” from Infocom text adventures (random in-universe items packed in the game’s box). Eventually you could download and print text files with the correct amount for every possible trip, but the original method was both conceptually clever and vital to the main gameplay.

Your secret agents are five, and you may assign one or more to any country. There are two objectives you may assign them: “Infiltrate” and “Organize Resistance”; the former has them infiltrate an enemy country and keep you informed of where key targets are or may be, while the latter has them mount a freedom fighter movement against that country’s occupation. If you organize a resistance in a country with a lunarium depot, they will periodically send lunarium back to the US for as long as possible. They may be ordered to keep either a “high” or “low” profile; an agent with a high profile carries out their mission much more quickly, but runs a higher risk of being discovered and killed (when this happens, you get a taunt from the Nazis when you ask them for a report), the same risk you run when you assign more than one agent to the same country at once. Keep in mind, as well, that sometimes their report will be vague, like “I hear there’s something going on near the Mediterranean” or similar.

The minigames’ controls, which use the numeric keypad and the space bar, are amazingly responsive, especially for an action game on MS-DOS in the 80s. This is the true “deal or no deal” difference between this port and the Amiga original, which controls like trying to play arm wrestling with the joystick. Most notably seen in the very beginning of the game, at which point the Nazis have already landed a zeppelin on Washingon DC and kidnapped Dr. Otto Barnstorff and his daughter Jane. Where would an old-timey Hollywood movie hero be without a woman to rescue, right? Once you’ve successfully taken off and plotted a trip from America to the Atlantic Ocean, you’re in pursuit of the zeppelin, shooting down its missiles and, eventually, its cockpit, which you must hit without hitting the zeppelin itself; otherwise, it will explode. The steering feels much more precise, and the zeppelin stays still so you can aim at it more easily. A conversation screen, in which you originally had to pick up the correct response to prevent being mistaken for a Nazi spy and thrown overboard, has been removed; whether or not you’re thrown overboard depends on your performance (or so I think).

The number one problem is the difficulty level in the War Room. Success depends on being able to bring down the Nazis’ performance percentage as low as possible in one go, in order to slow their conquering capacity down (to my knowledge, there’s no way to win back countries they’ve conquered), but because the key targets’ location is randomized with each new game and you depend largely on your agents to find them, you may well end up doing them much less damage in a single turn that they can do to you, and being able to stash enough lunarium to strike several crippling blows in a row and going back to the US depends pretty much on sheer dumb luck. Not to mention, time is against you; you can’t spend more than one month in the War Room, or you automatically lose as the government arrests you for cowardice; and every moment not spent crippling the Nazis as much as possible could be deadly. Few people in the entire world have been able to finish this game because of this.

The other problem is the nature of the central design itself. It’s a minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant. It’s a fun minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant, but it’s a minigame gallery wrapped in a Risk variant nevertheless. Eventually, the minigames become repetitive and quickly learned, and much of their initial challenge is lost.

To be perfectly level with you, I do wish the audiovisuals were better than EGA (16 colors) and PC speaker. Cinemaware could have benefited from releasing “deluxe” or “upgraded” MS-DOS ports of their games, like LucasArts and Sierra used to do. The closest thing they did was the EGA port of Defender of the Crown. But that’s another story for another time.

In conclusion: Cinemaware games prove that better graphics don’t make a better game… by trying to prove otherwise, failing, and then immediately discrediting themselves. Other than the strategy part’s insincere difficulty and its overall very short length, Rocket Ranger on MS-DOS is the best “old pulp rocketman” game you will ever play that’s not called Dark Void, especially when you look at what it has (the tight controls) instead of what it doesn’t have (the supreme graphics). Plus, you get to punch Nazis!

NOTE: Run it on DOSBox at a speed of about 578 CPU cycles for best performance.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist (1992, Sega Genesis)

System: Sega Genesis
Genre: Action, beat ’em up
Year: 1992
Developer(s): Konami Co., Ltd.

Like with plenty of other people my age, my first contact with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was through the comically ridiculous but still serious enough (you CAN do both, folks, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) cartoon series from 1987-1996 and the massive advertising machinery it powered. The video games based on it were once one of Konami’s premiere series, up there with the likes of Castlevania, Contra or Metal Gear. The arcade games from 1989 and 1991 are particularly revered, and for good reason – they had tons of enemies at once for up to four players simultaneously to satisfactorily pummel into submission, topped by colorful graphics that looked just like the cartoon series and lots of catchy music themes. The “variety or bust” people will take me to court over this, but as long as I have a good supply of bad guys to punch in the face and vent my frustrations on, I’m good. The success of the hack ‘n slash genre (successor to beat ’em ups) clearly agrees with me.

This game basically exists because of Nintendo. The early years of the Famicom/NES saw all the cool licensors of the day (Konami, Capcom, Tecmo, etc.) work pretty much on Nintendo only, because they were under contract not to do it for anyone else. And so the Sega Genesis missed out on both console ports of the Turtles arcade games. Thankfully for everyone, this became more lax as time went on, and now you could play Street Fighter II’: Special Champion Edition or Smash TV on your Sega Genesis as much as you could elsewhere. But Konami had something of an odd habit of remodeling their games entirely for Genesis, instead of porting them over as they were. Sorry, you can’t have Contra III: The Alien Wars, but here, have Contra: Hard Corps instead. And we can’t give you Turtles in Time, but The Hyperstone Heist should hold you over.

Did it, though? Let’s see.
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The plot is a variation on that of TMNT: Turtles in Time, the second arcade game, released on Super Nintendo as “TMNT IV: Turtles in Time”, the fourth game. (It’s a long story.) The Turtles are watching news reporter April O’Neil live from the Statue of Liberty, when suddenly the Statue and the entire island of Manhattan seem to vanish into thin air with an explosion-like flash. The broadcast is then interrupted by the Turtles’ arch-enemy, the Shredder, who announces he has stolen the Hyperstone from Dimension X and used it to shrink Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty down to the size of dioramas, and that it’s only a matter of time before he uses it to shrink and conquer the rest of the world. He challenges the Turtles to go after him, which they do right away.

Basically, if you played the Super Nintendo version of Turtles in Time, this is that game, but changed around a little and without the ability to throw the enemies into the screen. You walk from left to right, fighting your way through Shredder’s Foot soldier robots and other enemies while avoiding such enviromental hazards as rolling boulders, manholes, cars that start all of a sudden, lasers, incinerators, freeze rays, etc., until you find and defeat a boss at the end. Other than the one missing move, the Turtles’ attacks are the same as that game; you have a basic 4-hit combo, three variants of a jump-kick depending on how soon you attack after jumping, a special attack that detracts a little from your health (attack+jump) and differs between each turtle, grabbing the enemy by the arm and slamming them against the floor, a shoulder charge, a low slide forward, a sliding kick forward, and a “brief invincibility” item.
The Turtles are distinguished by range, speed, and strength – Raphael, for example, is light and quick but not very tough and with a short weapon range, while Donatello is pretty strong and his Bo has a nice long reach, but he’s the slowest. Michelangelo is unusually the strongest (considering the original NES game made him an utter weakling); his regular attacks are so powerful he doesn’t need the fourth hit in the 4-hit combo to kill Foot soldiers! Must be on a serious pizza rush. Pizza (to regain health) is, BTW, the only item in the entire game other than invincibility. You can get an extra life at 100 points, and then every two hundred points thereafter, but considering that every enemy only gives you one point each (even the bosses), I think this game and its predecessors could have benefitted from having infinitely respawning enemies – usually one of my most detested things in retro games (see the arcade version of Narc), but which would have best fit, for once, here.

Does it hold you over for Turtles in Time? I’d say yes, but once you’ve played that one, it’s honestly not so easy to go back to this one. Without being able to throw the enemies into the screen, and some other of Turtles in Time’s graphical effects (such as Neon Night-Riders, redesigned into F-Zero on rails and with all the cool Mode 7 effects thereof), and with how it kinda looks like Turtles in Time but is clearly not Turtles in Time, it feels like a second-rate knockoff rather than a legitimate installment. The core gameplay is still there, though, and if you don’t mind the missing stuff and the “remixed” levels, you’ll definitely have a good time.

The graphics and audio are, well, the same as Turtles in Time, only run through a “Sega Genesis” filter. They were good on Super Nintendo, and they’re good here. Not really much to write about them that you can’t see on the video below.

In conclusion: Worth tracking down for TMNT ’87 fans and those who appreciate the simple pleasures in life, like beating up lots of robots in a row until they run out.

Here comes a new challenger!

Hey, guys! I’ve had some good feedback on the Superman post and now I’m certain I’ll enjoy doing this blog as much as I do the other one.

Heads-up; we’re having a guest author now! My friend, Mr. “Virtua Neptune”, has some pieces he’d posted elsewhere, but the previous site ended up shutting down and he’d like to share them again here, so I offered to be the host. Expect his work to show up right now and in the coming days.

Later!

-Ognimod

Superman (1999?, PlayStation)

System: PlayStation
Genre: Action, 3rd person
Year: 1999?
Developers(s): Blue Sky Software, published by Titus

Hello and welcome! My name is Ognimod and I run this little repository for the stuff I like to write. For a little while, I’ve been entertaining the idea of writing an old video game review blog in English to serve as a supplement for my already existing one in Spanish, which you can read (if you can read Spanish, I mean) at https://ognimod.wordpress.com . I have lots of English-speaking pen pals and acquaintances who I’m sure would love to read my material; the question was, which game to talk about first? Lo, the opportunity has come knocking on my door. Is it a good one?

Writer Mark Twain once humorously defined the word “classic” as “a book which people praise and haven’t read”. The rise of Internet reviewers has given us what I call the “anti-classic”, and video games certainly have their fair share of anti-classics; games that everybody hates but nobody has played. E.T., Big Rigs, Sonic ’06, anything made by LJN, the list goes on. I can never forget the time I read a user review for E.T. (rated 1/10, of course) in which the author actually admitted they had never actually played the game; they were just judging it on what everyone else had said. Does that sound like good form? Not to me, nor should it to anyone. (I might bring over my E.T. review from the main blog sometime! I warn you; it’s a negative one)

One of the games I’ve most wanted to play for myself in order to have a real basis upon which to review it, in any language, is Superman 64, on the Nintendo 64 (that’s not actually the real name of that game, but let’s call it that for the audience’s sake), a real anti-classic if there has ever been one. The reason I haven’t is because I don’t own a real cartridge; I could emulate it (and I have), but N64 emulation is, last time I checked, still on a depressingly pitiful state after more than 25 years since the machine first came out. However, to quote Lex Luthor from the movie Superman II, what I’m giving you is the next best thing. I’m giving you a prototype of the unreleased PlayStation game that was meant to be a “sister game” to Superman 64. It was to be published by the same company as Superman 64, Titus Software; and developed by Blue Sky Software, who gave us Vectorman 1 and 2 on Sega Genesis.

Now for my customary pre-review context; if I may, I will simultaneously allow my personal bias to take over for the next couple of paragraphs.

It is a verifiable truth that Superman video games throughout the character’s long and illustrious history have ranged in quality from “meh” to “godawful”. The best ones I’ve personally played are Shadow of Apokolips (emulated on Gamecube) and Superman Returns (on Xbox), not exactly remarkable achievements when the competition is stuff like the NES game (the one where you have to ride the subway to reach certain areas). I am convinced that the primary reason for this is that every developer which has had the license has been made up entirely of Batman fanboys. I mean, that’s gotta be it; I don’t buy the excuse that “he’s too powerful” when we have stuff like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, or several generations of Dragon Ball Z fighting games since 2002. If great games can be made about the guy who annihilated an entire paramilitary army and killed the Great King of Demons by propelling himself right through his body (and this was all before he even found out he had unknowingly belonged to a race of invincible alien warriors the whole time), why should Superman be a problem? The only explanation I will accept at this point is that everyone who’s ever been tasked with making Superman games is a toxic “Comic Book Guy” type. If I were you, I wouldn’t hold my breath for Rocksteady’s long-rumored/hoped for Superman game to be any good; those guys clearly like Batman better.

Eric Caen, one of the founders of Titus Software, has recently claimed that he, as lead designer on Superman 64, had a great plan for an amazing Superman game until Warner Bros. and DC Comics, the character’s owners, meddled with the development and forced him to change his vision. Video game players at large, for reasons that escape me entirely (although I do have a hypothesis), believe him unquestionably. He has also claimed, in the same interview, that the final product is actually not bad and that its infamous reputation is only because Superman is such an iconic and beloved character that gamers’ expectations were unreasonably high.
Number one: I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have high expectations for a game about a guy who can fly, smash mountains with his bare fists and melt through diamond with his eyes. Don’t you? Number two: Titus, in their lifetime, also made Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (N64), Xena: Talisman of Fate, the seldom-known Game Boy Classic version of Superman (which is actually worse than Superman 64, if you can believe that!) and Dick Tracy on Commodore Amiga (which is so bad makes the NES version look like a piece by Rembrandt). Is he going to tell me that Warren Beatty in person went all the way over to France to make sure Dick Tracy on Amiga sucked? Once in a while they came out with something decent enough like Prehistorik 2, or 1/16th-decent like Titus the Fox, but their track record is not an inspiring one. My hypothesis mentioned earlier is that Caen is taking advantage of the fact that the average gamer only knows Superman 64 out of all the crud he also made, which allows him to get away with the excuse. To wit: on the interview where he makes the claims, he doesn’t actually say what his original design was, claiming that he’s not at liberty to discuss it. How convenient.
There is a prototype ROM of Superman 64 out there, which everyone lauds as superior to the final product. I cannot say; I haven’t played it. As far as I can tell from watching videos of it, the only thing it does better is not having the floating rings.

For the final stretch of pre-review context, the YouTube channel of the “PlayStation Museum” has two videos of an almost complete prototype of this game, or at least much more complete-looking than the one I’m reviewing; unfortunately, it can never be played by anyone ever again, because the guy who had found and recorded it refused to dump it for less than a substantial amount of money, which no one else was willing to part with. He was so irritated over this that he did what any [un]reasonable adult[-sized child] would have done in his place; he deleted the .iso file from his hard drive and destroyed the physical CD, in a fit of “That’ll show you! You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!” rage.

It’s probably not a big surprise that the “video game preservation” scene has attracted some serious hoarders, glory-hogs, cyberpunk hacker wannabes and other undesirable types, and it’s extremely regrettable whenever anything once considered lost and now found ends up in the hands of people like that jackass. Our consolation is that, inevitably, at some point down the line he must have realized that he can’t play his own game anymore, either, not even at least keep it permanently untouched in a glass case to show it off to the “peasants”, and it’s all because he couldn’t let anyone else have it. His ego was just that gargantuan, and yet that fragile. Serves him right!

And with that, I thought for sure that was the end of Superman PS1, and that no one would ever get to play it again. But behold, it lives! This review is based on an earlier prototype, unfortunately much less complete (no intro FMV, missing/unfinished levels, etc.), which was discovered last year and dumped properly with no additional cost. Maybe, since Titus were only the publishers, it might have a chance to be better than anything Caen can lie about. At the least, I expect something on the level of Shadow of Apokolips. So, with the pre-review context finally out of the way, let’s get on with it.

Usually, I start my video game reviews by citing the game’s story, or at least what you’re told about it at the beginning. The prototype (dated October 29, 1999), like Superman 64, is based specifically on Timm/Dini’s Animated Series; but being incomplete, it has no intro, nor cutscenes nor, to my knowledge, an ending. What I have been able to extract is that Brainiac threatens to destroy Earth, Lex Luthor is selling off Earth’s precious natural resources to Brainiac in exchange for alien technology, and Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are caught in the middle. The Parasite is in this prototype, and I know Mr. Mxyzptlk was supposed to be in the finished game; presumably you were supposed to fight several other villains from the cartoon series on your way to Brainiac and Luthor; again, much like Superman 64, only with 100% less baloney about virtual replicas of Metropolis.

The title screen only has a “Start Game” option, which automatically loads the first level, an underground mine. There’s a debug menu you can bring up by pressing Start, but I haven’t tinkered too much with it except to load/restart levels and change the camera angle, so I don’t know what any of the options do.
Seven of the nine levels you can load are a series of indoor enviroments where Superman must rescue hostages (including Lois and Jimmy several times) and prevent catastrophes, including the mine, a dam, a parking garage, the subway, Lexcorp and a couple others. Blue Sky wisely chose not to have a full-size Metropolis to fly around in, knowing the PS1 wouldn’t be able to handle it without tons of fog (nobody likes fog in Metropolis, least of all video game players! =P ). You can still fly, and, while not as smooth as it could be, the steering is definitely less floaty than it is in Superman 64. It even allows for some very slight degree of fine-tuned control if you use the left analog stick.
Superman’s powers for the occasion are flight, super strength, heat vision, ice breath, and some kind of forward shoulder rush that doesn’t seem to do a lot of damage (and doesn’t even break down walls or doors). The levels are maze-like and full of closed doors and kryptonite force fields which you must open by hitting switches; depending on how complete the levels are, sometimes you see which switch opened which door, sometimes you have to backtrack; sometimes kryptonite force fields stay turned off and sometimes they turn back on (most of the switches are one-time use only); sometimes you have a time limit of fifteen minutes for the entire level, sometimes you don’t; sometimes the levels have items such as extra time or extra lives (I believe this is what the blue numbers are supposed to be), sometimes they don’t. The levels aren’t too big, but you have no map, which becomes a problem when you have a time limit.
The two remaining levels are boss fights against the Parasite and Brainiac, respectively; the Parasite is a complete wimp (just hold your heat vision on him until he drops down), but Brainiac’s stage runs extremely glitchy on ePSXe, so I haven’t beaten him.

Whether by design choice (I hope!) or incomplete status, Superman is almost invulnerable and his three “projectile” powers (you switch between each with Triangle) never “run out”. In the mine level, if you fall on lava, your vision becomes distorted by heat, but you don’t take any damage. In accordance with The Animated Series’ treatment of Superman’s power, you need scuba diving gear to go underwater, and a space suit to board Brainiac’s ship; however, your only powers in this form are super strength, flight and super shoulder rushing. The only damage you can take is against kryptonite weapons, which leads into the game’s way of presenting Superman with challenging enemies; androids that shoot kryptonite missiles at you. If you’re hit by Kryptonite once, you lose health, part of the Superman logo on the HUD’s bottom left becomes green, and you lose all your powers temporarily until all the green runs out. Each successive hit by kryptonite makes the logo more green and takes out more health. There are certain enemies that seem to be armed with non-lethal kryptonite and can’t hurt you in any way, which are mechanical jellyfish and piranhas (in the dam) and Brainiac’s robots (in space); presumably, they were supposed to be able to hurt you, but they hadn’t quite figured out how to let the player destroy them without getting too close to their kryptonite weaponry. It depends on the level, too; on Brainiac’s ship, pretty much nothing but force fields and time running out can kill you.

So far it sounds like the game is better than Superman 64, but don’t get too excited; it still has problems. To begin with, you have tank controls, because, after Tomb Raider, every other third-person action game on PS1 had to have them. Now, tank controls in video games are usually thought of these days as nothing short of a hate crime, but there are games where I will defend their use to my death, such as Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, and Code Veronica, where crippling the player on purpose was the basis of the horror; and Grim Fandango, which is an adventure game and thus doesn’t require anything in the way of quick reflexes. Action games, however, do; that’s where their particular challenge comes from; and when your reflexes are being put to the test, you need quick, responsive controls; which tank controls, to put it simply, are not. Turning yourself so painstakingly slowly in order to face an android and kill it with heat vision will leave you open to their missiles many, many times, and more often than not, you will be hit. And when you lose your powers by the effect of kryptonite, this includes flight AND super strength, which means the androids will now take about four or five times the amount of punches they would with your full power. Your only lateral movement is a quick dodge left or right, which doesn’t do you a lot of good when the camera is hiding the androids from you.
Which is problem number two; the camera. As soon as you start the game, go to the debug menu and switch the camera angle to “Dumbass Cam”. It’s an unfortunate name, but it keeps the camera behind your back at all times, the only acceptable alternative to it developing a mind of its own and getting stuck in awkward places when you’re running down narrow corridors.
Problem number three, which seems to be a constant with all the decent-enough Superman games (including the aforementioned Shadow of Apokolips and Returns, The Death and Return of Superman, the arcade game, and the Atari 2600 game), is repetition. Almost the whole game is mazes of doors and switches with innocent people and/or Lois and/or Jimmy to rescue, with pretty much no variation except in size and, occasionally, enemy type. This is actually concordant with a preview I read in a Spanish (from Spain, not my home country) PS1 magazine many years ago, which concluded that it was still not a good game. I add; it’s still not a good enough game despite being superior to Superman 64 in a lot of ways.

Now I will briefly talk about the graphics and audio. The graphics are your standard, lowest-of-low-poly PS1 affair. If you ever played a PS1 game, you’ll know exactly what I mean; blurry warping textures, jagged edges, poorly defined faces, etc. However, as previously stated, the enviroments are fully clear of fog, a definite improvement over the infamous “kryptonite fog” (and indoors-specific black kryptonite fog, I suppose). Here’s some trivia for you. Did you know that the instruction manual for Superman 64 does NOT mention kryptonite fog once? Not a single time. The green fog being described as “kryptonite” in actually from an early version of that game shown at an E3, in which the story wasn’t set in a virtual Metropolis.
The music and sound effects are taken straight from Superman 64, and other than a couple sound bytes of “Over here, Superman!” and Luthor’s laugh (ooooohhhhhh!), there doesn’t seem to be any voice acting.

I owe you guys a video; have some screenshots instead.

In conclusion: This prototype is certainly better than Superman 64, but not by much. Every level functioning the same as all the others would be tolerable if not for the inappropiate controls; and I am certain they would have remained that way in the finished game, because why would they miss that sweet Tomb Raider train? And yet, just like the N64 prototype and Caen’s sweet-talking, I am sure that this thing will become a “classic” – or, rather, an anti-anti-classic – a game everybody praises over a game everybody hates without anyone having actually played either.