Survival Horrors – Do’s and Don’t’s

Survival horror is perhaps one of the most slippery slopes in gaming. That feeling you get when you walk into a room you have never been in. You can barely see, the shadows in the room take on forms that look ominous, the silence in the room is louder than any noise that you will ever hear, and everything is still, motionless, eerie. There is a creeping feeling in your brain that tells you that you should not be there, and the darkness begins to take its toll on your nerves. There is a sudden flash from outside the black curtains in front of the window that makes you stop in your tracks as all of the forms of the room are brought to light for a single instant, but that only makes it worse as the darkness returns. One sudden motion, and your heart can skip a beat, you begin to feel the dreading that something is watching you, something is coming for you, something is about to crawl out from underneath the furniture that is covered in white sheets and grab your ankles, pulling you into a place unknown, a shadowy place of which there is no return.

It is up to the game developers to first capture that feeling in a setting for your character, and simulate that feeling of absolute helplessness. Do you have a weapon with which to defend yourself? Can you survive if something truly does lurk in the shadows? Well, that’s where we start to get into the true cusp of a much larger world, one that has captured the hearts of millions, but also caused some of the largest disappointments ever seen in the gaming world, rivalling that of E.T. for the Atari.

Truly terrifying horror games are some of the most difficult things to write and develop. While there have been some terrific successes, there have also been some horrific failures that completely trounce the number of good games that are meant to invoke fear. When you step out from the middle of the trees, and get a good look at the forest for what it is, you can start to see where the successes bleed together. They have certain elements in them that are worth noting and if used properly, can truly give the player what they came to see and feel, true terror!

Horror movie fans are normally the target audience. Those people that go to the theater to see a scary film, even if chances are it is not going to be good, they are willing to risk it. These are the ones that want to take that extra step further and live in that world. They want to interact with that horror movie and be a part of it. If you can make your audience feel like that, you have won the race that is called survival horror, and you will be greatly rewarded for your efforts.

Then there are attempts that just miss the point entirely, or do not have the means nor the know-how to truly make the player become engulfed in their dark, horrific reality. This could be from a lack of funding, a lack of skill, or just a simple lack of knowledge on the subject. Some people think it’s just as simple as shoving someone into a dark room and have people talk cryptic nonsense. Well, today we’re going to delve into some of the elements from certain games that got it wrong and right. In the next article we will go over some important items involved with making survival horror video games in detail. Stay tuned and be sure to keep an eye out.

Heavy Artillery: Do not get me wrong. There are plenty of games that give you weapons, and still maintained their stance in the survival horror world. However, the use of guns such as machine guns, gatling guns, sniper rifles, lasers, whatever they are; these are things that just do not belong. When you give your player the means to wipe out monsters with air strikes and missile launchers, that fear and dread you mean to invoke are just not there. A big bad monster comes out of nowhere. Oh, I shot him. Well that was fun, what next? These are known as action games. Do not slap the genre “survival horror” on a game and give your player a magical one-hit sword. Most of the time, it just really does not work.

Over Complicated Puzzles: Puzzles in survival horror are quite common, in fact, they’re in just about all of the noteworthy titles. However, there comes a time whenever you need to look at your overall story and ask yourself “How long will this puzzle take?” If you’ve done your job correctly, given your player a good amount of fear factor in an area, made your haunted house nice and spooky with that subtle tinge of fright, good on you! However, putting a Myst-level puzzle in the middle of a room with which to slow their progress is highly discouraged. After a while, you lose all feeling of uneasiness in favor of confusion. That confusion can turn into boredom very quickly if you are not careful. Then your player goes off to a walkthrough of the game and that just takes them out of the experience as a whole. Was it really worth it?

Fast and Easy Scares: Perhaps the most used and abused element of the survival horror genre. Before terror or eeriness sets in, we are treated to a big fat monster with scary fangs going booga booga! No… just no. There is a method to this, and popping out at the very beginning to scream at your player is not the answer. These things take time to build, they need to progress slowly before you jump the gun.

Atmosphere: Let’s face it, if you do not have the skills to create a truly unsettling atmosphere for your player to lurk, survival horror is going to be nigh impossible. This can be done in several creative ways, some ways need very little expensive backgrounds, but at the same time, the more creative you aim, the better you should probably be with your surroundings and the more time you should spend adding just that extra tinge of subtle paint on a wall that looks like it may or may not be blood.

The Antagonist: Perhaps one of the most important things you can get right and wrong is the main villain of the game. Dracula is a very hefty example of this, so let’s use him, shall we? Dracula has been depicted in thousands of ways, whether it be the ancient Transylvanian vampire or a new age, bleak depiction of the vampiric lord, he can be menacing, or he can be an outright joke. Say you bring him into the fray and he does his thing, but then in walks his father. The bigger, badder vampire guy with the aura of mastery will overshadow our favorite blood sucker, and then all credibility will be lost. You just killed any vibes you were aiming for in favor of a new, scary bad guy with bigger shoulder pads. Well, what about Dracula? If he’s sitting there trying to impress his daddy, why do we care?

Or, let’s say you go a little overboard with his villainous traits, give him that evil laugh that we all know, make him just walk in, spout out some threats and kill a kitten. Well, now we’re just sitting there saying “Okay, we get it, we want to kill you. You don’t need to rub it in!” Subtlety, that is the key to giving us a fulfilling urge to reach the goal, and it also makes us fear this guy. We need to be afraid of his fangs and his power, and once we get into that final boss battle, we can truly concentrate and wonder “Well, crap, what do I do now? I need to pay attention. OH GOD! PLEASE HAVE MERCY ON ME!”

Helplessness: This can be completely abused and horribly mistreated. However, when done right, it can be the kicker that makes your game truly great! If you truly feel helpless in the eyes of a terrifying entity, but have that chance of escape/victory, the urge to survive will come to you naturally. Hence the name “survival horror.” You want to survive, and thus you will play every facet of the game in order to obtain the ability to do so. Even if you are given a pistol with which to defend yourself. If that pistol does not stop the monster, though it may slow it down, the horror is heightened! “Crap! What do I do now? I need to run! Please don’t catch me!” Boom! You have just successfully upped the fear factor and made your game that much better.

Forced Fear: Finally, it is worth talking about one thing that many games seem to fall back on as a means to invoke some sort of reaction. Do not tell the player what they are feeling. Do not have a fear meter or some random character saying “This place is so scary!” We will be the judge of that! Telling us to be scared and driving it into our heads like you’re commanding us to emote just does not work. Yes, having the character we play show how scared they are can affect us, but that is only if it is done properly. There are tones you need to set, traits you need to build upon and relationships you need to cement into us before we truly begin to feel for what they are going through. Telling us when to scream is overstepping your bounds as a game, and usually draws an opposite reaction of perpetual eye-rolling.

You can have a great game with amazing game mechanics at your disposal. Good on you. However, before you start labeling your genre to the capacity of Lovecraftian horror of the survival variety, make sure you at least make an effort to bring us into that mindset. It is not easy, especially if you are aiming to truly make us bite our nails. You can throw in all of the jump scares you want, but unless you get us in that dark, abysmal place in our psyches that invokes those emotions we came here for, you have failed your mission. Pay attention to what truly brings out the scares and makes us delve into that world. You will be glad you did. But first, always remember to drink water.

Indie vs. AAA: The Sonic Spectrum

To be frank, Sonic has had it pretty rough in the past decade or so. Ever since his massive success on the Sega Genesis in three massively beloved titles, he has been the victim of some very bad luck. Many would attest that it all began with Sonic the Hedgehog on the Xbox 360 (commonly referred to as Sonic ‘06), it actually started further back than that, Sonic ‘06 is just when it really became noticeable. Going back and forth in quality from the decent success of Sonic Generations to the abysmal failure of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, the Sega Mascot has had a dual failure/success rate of gigantic proportions.

One clear example of this is the very recent fanmade super game headed by Christian Whitehead, Sonic Mania. One could say that Sonic Mania is the most success the little blue hedgehog has seen in literally over a decade. That’s not to say there aren’t good recent Sonic games by major developers, but Sonic Mania has seen success that is unparalleled by the likes of Sonic’s most recent game, Sonic Forces. Talk about quality difference of day and night, Sonic Mania has enjoyed the highest ratings even by some of the most skeptical gaming reviews while Sonic Forces has been left in the super speeding dust.

Even with the dream game mechanic of original character creation, Sonic Forces had very little else to offer. With poor level design, questionable controls, and the fact that you play as Sonic through most of the game anyway, onlookers were scratching their heads asking “why create a character in the first place??” Sonic Mania blew all of it out of the water and turned that nostalgia dial to eleven. We were gifted with familiar gameplay and level design with a nice little twist here and there to brighten it up for the new generation of gamers while leaving plenty for older gamers to ogle. Even the seemingly outdated graphics are updated and beautiful in a way that does not impede on the oldstyle 16-bit look.

It’s starting to look pretty clear on what Sonic games should have been doing the entire time. There have been successful titles that go outside the fast-running platforming of his original games, but those have been so few and far in between. Now we have two that are mapped out and marketed very near one another for a comparison that paints a very clear picture. Sonic fans are now hoping and praying that Nintendo takes some serious notes of this outcome, because it’s clear that even true blue Sonic fans are getting fed up with the treatment that he has been getting as of late.

In the end, it was a one hit knockout. This contrast really goes to show you that innovation and imagination can do some serious damage against just throwing money at a problem in hopes that it improves. AAA Gaming has been under some serious fire for lack of ideas in the ways of Sonic franchise fatigue, cash grab titles and using nostalgia as a way to lure oldschool gamers into spending their money for games that have little to no effort put into them. This fan game may have been distributed by Sega, but let’s face it, it’s an indie game through and through. Now Sonic fans are hoping that the Sonic Team can learn from this experience, but at the same time, given his very questionable past treatment, there is really no telling what they have in store for our blue radical dude. All we can really do is stay tuned and drink water.

Indie vs. AAA: Mighty Number Nein

Although there are innumerable times where AAA has defeated indie games in the rat race, there was one particular time where the failure was so great, it caught the eye of countless among the gaming community. Any retrogamer will tell you about Mega Man, released in 1987, and a great majority will tell you which one is their favorite, whether it be part of the original series of games or part of the Mega Man X series. Both parts of the franchise were legendary among gamers.

Mega Man 2 is very popularly known as the favorite among the original series, while the first Mega Man X is held as the king of the second. Whatever side of the franchise they stand on, both factions will tell you that they were wholly disappointed by the crowd funded passion project known as Mighty No. 9. Keiji Inafune had worked on the original Mega Man, and since Capcom hadn’t released a new Mega Man for several years (due to extreme franchise fatigue), he decided to take it upon himself to create what he called a spiritual successor.

The game was fully funded within just a couple of days and, by the end it had reached around three million dollars, several times more than it was expected to reach. This is where a great deal of mystery enters into the fray. Despite infinitely more money than they could have ever needed, the scene became quite bleak. Though fans were still on the hype train with beautiful gameplay still frames, promising kickstarter prizes and a game mirroring the greatness of the blue bot himself, they curbed their doubts. However, for reasons unknown, the game was met with numerous delays. Many questioned how they could be losing so much time with all of the budget they could ever want and plenty of time between the start of its production to its intended release. Still! They thundered ahead and readied themselves for the release!

The fans were stomped with absolute disappointment. The graphics were not nearly as good as they initially looked in the original press release, the gameplay had very questionable extra, unneeded content, the voice acting rivalled Mega Man 8 for how terrible and stilted it was, and the story intermixed with constant interrupting character dialog was so very frustrating when you were trying to concentrate on playing the game!

Questions began flying at Inafune at a horribly extensive rate! His gross mismanagement of the game’s content and quality was called into question multiple times and their reaction to these questions boiled down to: At least you got a game. Needless to say, contributors to the funding were not happy, and those old school Mega Man fans were less than impressed with the game’s content. Mighty Number 9 reached the status as one of the Worst Games of 2016 across the internet.

Now, let’s be honest. It really was not a terrible game when you stand back and look at the forest for the trees. It worked, it was challenging, and the level design wasn’t terrible. Sure, some of the bosses were cheap and cringe inducing in their tactics and while the story is abysmal, it still served its purpose for the most part. The reason the game failed in a massive cloud of hatred was because it tried to build itself as a return of a beloved franchise in the form of a fan requested game. It had all of the makings of a great game, but for one reason or another completely missed the mark.

AAA titles have had their failures in the past, and many of them failed harder than Mega Man’s would-be successor. This should serve as a lesson on par with Icarus and the burned wings, but let’s face it, if they can build you up to their hype, development companies are going to do it. Inafune could have won big with this title but failed to pull it off in the end.

However, once again, at least we have our silver lining. Evidently Capcom caught onto Mighty Number 9’s kickstarter success and decided that they would release their own game and do it proper this time. Mega Man 11 is set to release later in the year 2018 and it already looks smooth! Inafune may have spent multiple millions of dollars on failure, but at least his failure managed to cause another AAA win.

Wait, what am I saying?

Indie vs. AAA: I don’t know! You had it last!

The argument between two forms of game development has been going on for quite some time. While it is true that there are pros and cons to both small house indie development teams and big name AAA companies, there has been a noticeable trend of the games they have been producing. Though it is quite often that the big name developers have stomped the indie game competition, the opposite has also been very true. Then there are times when both types of game developers have dropped the ball for one reason or another.

A very infamous example of when both types of developers failed to produce a single promised product was the game demo simply known as P.T. (or Playable Teaser) was free for download. Konami was in the works for the new project of the franchise Silent Hill, titled Silent Hills. The hype train was so huge for this game that many were already calling it the ultimate in survival horror without even knowing the actual core game mechanics. However, the P.T. was so innovative and so amazingly detailed in its tone, atmosphere, storytelling and graphics that no one could possibly blame them. It was a horror experience that did not rely on jump scares to creep a player out. Both Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro were matched up to produce this game themselves, and what they were planning was seemingly made of pure awesome sauce.

However, as many of you know, what the fans got was a big goose egg. Without warning or explanation, Silent Hills was cancelled and the fans were not happy in the least. Another party that was not happy about this was their shareholders, as Konami’s stocks plummeted as a result. Soon after, Hideo Kojima was fired from Konami… more or less sealing themselves to a fate of their own making. While they did survive the backlash from that decision, it was not a fun day for anyone.

But alas! A ray of hope came about gamers in the form of a group called Team17 and their upcoming project, Allison Road. Gamers were treated to a brand new spectacle of survival horror very similar to P.T., in fact so similar to P.T. it was very quickly called the spiritual successor to the non-game Silent Hills. For an indie game, the preview looked amazing, creepy, and surprisingly well detailed. Beyond anything, Allison Road gave Silent Hill fans some solace from the heartbreak of Konami’s screw-up. After scaring the pants off of onlookers and showing us that we may still get a swell consolation prize, once again, fans were completely shot down by disappointment. Team17 cancelled production of Allison Road. Once again, fans’ faces hit the dirt with an audible THWACK.

Though, now there is something of a happy ending to that tale, as the project Allison Road was picked back up soon after its cancellation by another group called Far From Home. However, with very little to no updates on the production’s progress as of January 2018, it is clear that we will not be seeing Allison Road anytime soon.

The good news, though, is that after two complete failures by both a AAA Gaming Company and Indie Game group, a third and successful attempt was already in the works. The P.T. style of survival horror was noticed by yet another AAA Gaming company. Capcom took notice of P.T.’s success, and since Konami pulled the plug on their game, they decided to pick up the slack and produce one of the best games of 2017, Resident Evil 7.

So, in the end, yes, it was a AAA Gaming company that saved fans from a completely dismal experience, but what a bumpy ride! You would think that such a focused concept would have been handled a little better, especially with such an enormous fan feedback. It got to the point where people started to suspect the whole concept was cursed; doomed to failure before its own inception. While the whole story is still fraught with unanswered questions, in the end, we got a game of the year out of the deal and the Resident Evil series has had a soft reboot to a seemingly much brighter style of gameplay. Let’s hope they can keep the ball rolling.

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.
——————————————————————————-
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.
——————————————————————————-
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.

Virtua Sonic: Into Dreamcast

Well, better late than never! Here you go, folks – it’s the first post we have from Virtua Neptune! We begin with his personal retrospective on the Sonic the Hedgehog games on Dreamcast. I personally have my suspicions that they’re not so good as 10 year-old me would have thought (let alone when their fans seem to be so adamant about how they must be played on the original Dreamcast for the purest experience -are there that many Dreamcasts still in good working order today?) but, from my experience with the PC ports, their respective Sonic-specific levels are a pure delight, so it’s not all doom and gloom from me. -Ogni

The Dreamcast was a follow-up system that any Sega Saturn fan could ever want. Not only did it possess Star Wars games (which are strangely absent from the Saturn) but the Sonic games it possesses were far better received and have even garnered acclaim from both gamers and critics. Many Sonic fans will tell you that despite their clench factor, the Sonic Adventure games brought about a whole new genre that the Blue Streak could explore.

That’s not to say these games were perfect. It was, after all, the introduction of the infamous Big the Cat and his stupid frog named Froggy (I’m sure that took all night). These were the worst parts of the game. The biggest complaint is that the platforming in a 3D environment was sometimes atrocious. Some of the tasks made you perform especially awkward feats with your characters (namely Knuckles’ emerald missions) and sometimes this alone would cause players to rage quit.

Still, the gameplay itself had some amazing moments of fast paced, amazing action. The moment of glory that comes to mind is when Sonic commits cold blooded murder, flying away from an exploding helicopter and surfing down a declining street being chased by a semi-truck. Yes, perhaps the devs were compensating for the more frustrating aspects of the Adventure games, but we came out on top with a gaming moment of greatness.

With the addition of the Chao pets, Sega spawned an entire game within a mini-game within the game! People were playing these games for eons just so they could raise a better Chao in their Chao daycare. The mere fact that you could transport these chaos onto a Tamagachi were enough to keep fans breeding them to be winners! (Article now rated R)

Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 can be considered deeply flawed, but no more so than many games that are considered masterpieces by the mass populace. The gameplay is gripping, and the graphics show off the 6th Gen graphics as they move away from that blocky, pixel-heavy look more and more. Our hero has definitely looked worse.

Such as a game where you play as popular Sonic characters in a boardgame-like environment where you compete against computers or other players. This was a totally original concept and was not at all worse in every way. It rose to the top of the charts and did not bomb as an abysmal failure at all. Yes, I am doing this whole paragraph sarcastically, isn’t it sooooooo great?

Let’s be honest, I never played this game, so if you want a detailed overview of its mechanics, you may look elsewhere. What I can tell you is that the really sad part is that Sega has had some bad ideas, but this one is a real head scratcher. Kart racers are one thing to get wrong, but a concept so simple as a competitive boardgame? If the gameplay videos are any indication, you may as well choose another game on the shelf. However, if you find it cheap enough and you’re a true blue fan? Why not? Some bad games are good times. You may even like it.

Then comes the Sega Smash Pack! Yes, this one is a collection that only has one Sonic game in it, the original for the Genesis. That’s right! Sonic came full circle when it came to his roots. He started out in the beginning of the life of the Sega Mega Drive and with that same game, he appeared in his roots in the very last console Sega ever made. How poetic. So, along with a whole bunch of other games, if you wanted, you have another port of the original. Merry Christmas.

Problem is, it’s not so much a port as it is an emulation, meaning it was an afterthought. Nothing was done to improve it, however, it was downgraded in overall quality to make room for the rest of the Sega Smash Pack! Well, it was a cool thought while it lasted, right? It’s okay, Sega. We still love you!

So, yes, the Dreamcast era for Sonic was not without its pitfalls. Whether you love raising Chao to compete or couldn’t look past some of the flaws, Dreamcast certainly left its milestones in the Hedgehog’s lore. The mere fact that they were able to give us a few more unique additions to the Sonic Franchise is something to be grateful for. Sometimes, it’s nice to keep things in house.

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.