Video Game Tales

The Results!

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:35:02 GMT

QUOTE:

So (like most of you I'm sure) I have way too many games that I haven't beaten. I have games still in the plastic from Christmas. Every summer I usually end up doing the same thing, replay the Doom games, replay Quake 2, replay the Marios, replay the Sonics, and replay Super Metroid.

But now that finals are over I say that this time things will be different. I have here a list of nearly 20 games which I will beat, not 100% but I will see a damn ending for them. I refuse to buy any games until at least half of them are completed

* Chrono Trigger
* Doom 3
* Earthbound
* Final Fantasy V
* Half-Life
* Legend of Zelda: LttP
* Link's Awakening
* Metal Gear Solid
* Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2
* Psychonauts
* Quake 4
* Resident Evil 4
* Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles
* Super Mario Galaxy
* Super Paper Mario
* Yoshi's Island
* Zelda Twilight Princess
* Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

So I suggest that we all work together because I know you guys are probably just as bad.

And to make this a bit more likely, rather than start up all these games at once I'm sticking with 1 handheld game, 1 console game, 1 pc game, and 1 emulated game. The first to go are the ones I have bolded.

Ok time to play Team Fortress 2 which is going to completely fuck up this plan because it's so fun.

Chrono Trigger - Haven't started a game in.
Doom 3 - Played for maybe 10 minutes. I got a shotgun.
Earthbound - Have yet to defeat the sharks in Onett.
Final Fantasy V - Made it to the second world and rescued Galuf.
Half-Life - Beat maybe two levels.
Legend of Zelda: LttP - In the process of rescuing Zelda from the castle, you know, the first thing you do.
Link's Awakening - My PSP ate another memory stick so hasn't been started since my progress was lost. Was at level 2.
Metal Gear Solid - Still at the same part of disc 2 where you go down a cargo elevator.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 - HEY I JUST BEAT IT TODAY
Psychonauts - The game is installed!
Quake 4 - Still in the box
Resident Evil 4 - Rescued Ashley, am currently in a house with Luis that we have to defend.
Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles - Beat the first level.
Super Mario Galaxy - Haven't played at all this summer.
Super Paper Mario - "
Yoshi's Island - Haven't started a game in.
Zelda Twilight Princess - Still has the Twilight hack and not my save on it.
Zelda Phantom Hourglass - Still in Plastic.

Games Purchased despite my NO PURCHASING GAMES rule:
Viewtiful Joe
Viewtiful Joe 2
Garry's Mod
Okami
No More Heroes
Penny Arcade - On the blah blah of Darkness
Garry's Mod

Current TF2 Stats:

So yeah that went about as well as I expected.

How Dr. Wily can defeat Mega Man in Mega Man 9:

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 03:07:33 GMT

As a kid Mega Mans 1-6 for the NES were some of my favorite games. They've aged well (other than the first) and are still a lot of fun to play to this day. Now Capcom is being all kinds of awesome and making Mega Man 9 in the old NES style. Aside from this they also had the benefit that if I couldn't beat a level, I could ignore it and play another one hoping to return later with all sorts of new weaponry and E-Tanks.

Dr. Wily clearly has a lot of funding. Evidence:

The thing is in each of the six games there were spots where today you'd have a decent chance of dying, but as a kid you'd be looking at a game over screen soon after.

Also I'm an idiot who couldn't find FCEU's screenshot button for a bit so bear with the giant cropped shots.

Mega Man 1: Gutsman's moving platforms

Those green platforms would move along the track, but when they went over a thin section the platform would drop. You had to time your jumps and there was very little room for error. As a kid my brother and I just wouldn’t play Gutsman’s stage since this is the very first thing you have to do. Maybe if Dr. Light would beam you in just a hundred yards over things would’ve gone smoother.

Mega Man 2: Quickman’s Beams you dolt

This goes without saying. The obvious solution is to use Flashman’s Time Stopper ability to freeze the beams. The thing is you couldn’t STOP using the time stop and the beam section lasted longer than a full meter anyway. You had to get through a few screens safely before you could use it. By the way, I died in that screenshot.

Also if you land on that platform you lose all your speed and will die. But hey there was a large health refill there!

Mega Man 3: Geminiman’s Water

Why there was water in this stage I’ll never know. This screenshot sums it up. Make some jumps while fish shoot missiles at you and mosquitoes home in on you. The knockback ensures that if you get hit you’re dead. If you’re lucky enough to land on that E-Tank (or earlier 1-Up) you have to use Rush to get back up. You need to use him once just to start the section, and only get like 4 or 5 uses, so god help you if you purposely get the life and E-Tank and then die twice.

To add insult to injury, this game had RUSH MARINE where you could just swim in that water and kill the fish no problem. Except at the end of the segment was a ladder going up which you couldn’t reach so once again you’d just die.

Mega Man 4: Brightman’s Moving Platforms

The way this works is pretty simple. Land on that red platform there and it follows that track. The track is U shaped. When the platform reaches the end it plummets vetically to its demise. There’s an optional earlier section in the level with these, but if you fall there you land on solid ground.

It’s not too bad, until you add those lightning bug like enemies.

They shoot bullets that will stay on the screen. These can easily get in your way and like Geminiman's section, one hit is pretty much death.

So you decide to shoot the stupid bugs before they shoot at you.

Have fun with that. Now you can’t even see the track and believe me when I say you have to jump at the very end if you want to land on the platform for the next one.

Mega Man 5: Crystalman’s Crystal Chutes

This area consists of chutes which drop out chunks of crystals. Get hit, fall in a pit. The only issue is there is no pattern! It seems the chutes just randomly decide not to send out rocky death. When you finally realize it’s not dropping anything that’s when it decides to start again crushing your robotic skull.

This one however has one nice trick. Beating Star Man gives you the Super Arrow powerup. If you shoot an arrow at a wall it sticks and acts as a platform. Using this you can take hits and merely land on your arrow.

Mega Man 6: Plantman’s Springs

These are springs just like in any other game. You land on them and get bounced up. You hit the jump button at the right time and jump really high. Too bad the timing on this is somehow so terrible you’ll often be an inch in the air as you try to jump a huge chasm. I’d love to get a screenshot of it but since I had no abilities the minibus gutsdozer things killed me.

Dos presents one sentence reviews of all DS games and Homebrew on his new flashcart:

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:16:16 GMT

DSOrganize - So I can (kind of) browse the web, (slowly) chat on irc, keep a calendar, to-do list, listen to music, and check a master list of other homebrew which I can then connect to the Internet and download right to the flashcart no computer required?

DSDoom - Finally a handheld can decently run the game with decent controls at a decent framerate even if it has no music.

DSMaster Plus - Tails' Adventure is a lot more fun when the batteries don't die after every level.

jEnesis DS - It's pretty weird that Sonic plays just fine with automatic frameskip clearly taking out lots of frames.

Lameboy - I've yet to run this, but I'm confident I can play Pokemon Red and then Pokemon Fire Red without changing cartridges.

Nes DS - Looking forward to Zelda with a D-Pad that works well enough that I can change directions without coming to a complete stop first.

NethackDS - Even on a tiny screen like the DS the tiles look terrible.

Pocket Physics - Oh man I love drawing balls.

Pokey DS - Wavy Navy, Keystone Kops, and Getaway are all I need for the Atari 800.

Powder - A roguelike made for the DS so you have enough buttons.

ScummVM - On a PC when I open a door in Monkey Island I can get my character to in rather than just closing the door in my face.

SNEmulDS - When Mario World has graphical issues, something has gone terribly terribly wrong.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin - I heard this game makes war all depressing instead of being fought by 10 year old generals.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike - It must feel pretty awful to know your nation's future depends on the decisions of a 10 year old general.

Contra 4 - If the Konami code doesn't work I'll probably never play it.

Cooking Mama - Mama looks happy on the little DS icon.

Cooking Mama 2 - Mama look really happy to get a sequel.

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime - I was under the impression this game was about battling giant mobile castles and not running around rescuing nun slimes from treasure chests.

Drawn to Life - I quit when I had to draw my hero and realized that I can't draw for shit and using one of the premade characters is just a cheap cop-out.

Electroplankton - The reason Hanenbow is a stage in Brawl is because it's way too fun in this game.

Elite Beat Agents - Sk8r Boi.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies (TM) - I bet this is fun.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 - I got really nervous for a second until it asked about me being left handed.

Izuna - Because Nethack and Powder are not enough

Kirby: Canvas Curse - I was told this game was good and feel lied to.

Mega Man ZX - Hoping this game is more Mega Man X than Mega Man Z

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer - Because Nethack, Powder, and Izuna are not enough.

Ossu Tosomething Ouendan - A horse stops a bank robber on a motorcycle thanks to the support given to him by three male cheerleaders who happened to be watching the horse race.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney - I imagine if I play this I'll have to yell OBJECTION.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations - Tiles and Tribulations was a cool Klax clone.

Picross DS - Like Sudoku but cooler.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Because Shiren the Wanderer, Nethack, Powder, and Izuna do not contain a Gengar being an enormous asshole.

Pokemon Ranger - You really do draw lots of circles.

Pokemon Trozei - Powerpuff girls + pokemon + panel de pon

Sim City DS - It's Sim City so it's good.

Star Fox Command - Why do furries like Krystal so much when the real awesome random character from the series is BILL from the Indepence Day level in Star Fox 64?

Super Princess Peach - As soon as the princess got a real name she suddenly stopped getting kidnapped.

Tetris DS - It's Tetris.

Challenge of a Masterspy

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:35:50 GMT

Looks innocent enough, doesn't it?

From all the way back in the mid-80s, the days of the Amstrad PC, there is a game that's become near legendary in my family and unknown pretty much everywhere else. I even had to get quadralien to send it over to me after I remembered about it, as I was unable to find it anywhere on the Internet. And though nostalgia has a lot to do with liking anything, this is just too clever to drop out of existence. It's Masterspy by Albert Ball. I mentioned in my last post that games have become increasingly difficult to categorize only recently, but I can only describe this as a puzzle-action type thing. We got it from a coverdisk of PC Plus, the IT magazine that my dad used to buy (and it's still going, in its 22nd year with 270 issues) and it was instrumental in teaching my brother to read so early on. In fact, he was the only one who could successfully complete it, and he was only three or four.

And that's the other reason I want to draw attention to this - it's because after starting it up again, marvelling at everything I remembered and everything I didn't, and then actually trying to complete a game of it, I realized that I... can't. And now I'm half incredibly impressed that anyone can do this and half absolutely envious of him for being able to come anywhere near it. Therefore, I wanted to issue the challenge to anyone who will listen - download it and attempt to solve it. Absolutely reams of documentation (and, helpfully, maps) are provided with the ZIP to guide you in treating the game as a logical problem on top of several other logical problems.

Snakes and Ladders (and Bees)

It involves having to guide four separate disembodied heads around an environment each, with the eventual aim of getting each of them to escape from the game by picking up a [vehicle] TICKET and using it on a [shape] DOOR. Only one environment is available to each character per game. You have to explore a cave system (Potholes), a river with deadly crocodiles (Stepping Stones, although I was certain it was called Crocodile Creek), a parody of the London Underground with a stupidly confusing permit system (Underground Railway), and a demented board game with bees flying across it (Snakes and Ladders).

There are multiple tickets and doors - two of each in every environment. And the ticket that corresponds to a door that lets you escape is never found in the same environment as that door - you have to collect the ticket with someone else and pass it to another agent first. To even find the correct doors, you have to gather clues given by other pickups scattered around - radios, telephones and letters - to work out which ticket corresponds with which door. However! Two types of these pickups will lie to you, and you have to work out the clues that contradict each other to work out the type of pickup that's giving you true information. Makes no sense so far? Keep going, it gets even better.

On top of that, there's a mole among your group of four characters. Also using clues provided by the pickups I mentioned above, you have to work out who this is before you accidentally allow them to collect the correct ticket and use it on the correct door like your other characters. You can, however, capture him, because if at any point you use the wrong ticket on a door, a cage will come down and trap that character (much like what happens when you go through customs today if you look foreign). However (however), you've got to do this last, after all your other characters have escaped - because only one character has access to each environment even though you have a common inventory, so whenever a character escapes you lose the chance to collect any other vital clues or tickets from their areas. Similarly, letting someone escape before you've got a necessary ticket from their area will stop you from completing it as well.

Marginally less diabolical than the real London Underground

No, I'm not finished yet. On top of the problem squared that I've laid out above, each environment has its own obstacles and way of moving around it - you're up against irate travellers and cave-dwelling demons as well as the aforementioned deadly wildlife, and two of the environments are mazes that somehow fill in behind you, so you have to plan ahead so as not to block off any routes to tickets or doors later on. The other two are only too happy to dump you into dead ends when you least expect it. At the start of the game you have the option of whether you want to actually be killed by the dangers or not - the classic "PRACTICE? (Y/N)" prompt - the disadvantage (oversight, more like) of using the Practice mode where you can't be killed by anything being that if you box yourself in on one of the mazier levels, or reach a dead end on one of the "nicer" ones, is that you're stuck there and can't reverse the process short of resetting the entire game. In which case your progress is entirely lost and the game starts over with a different set of clues.

As you can probably imagine it was absolutely amazing for its time, if not in terms of gameplay in itself then in terms of the sheer scale of the problem that you were expected to solve. Especially in 42KB - you need more memory than that in your own head to have a hope of winning. If I ever do it, rest assured I'll make another giant post boasting about it - until then, you're welcome to try and beat me to it.

You'll need DOSBox, too - 1000 cycles seems to work quite well

And D-Fend ~~if you're too stupid to use DOSBox~~ if you want a front-end

Operation: Beat these fucking games already

Thu, 08 May 2008 23:32:47 GMT

So (like most of you I'm sure) I have way too many games that I haven't beaten. I have games still in the plastic from Christmas. Every summer I usually end up doing the same thing, replay the Doom games, replay Quake 2, replay the Marios, replay the Sonics, and replay Super Metroid.

But now that finals are over I say that this time things will be different. I have here a list of nearly 20 games which I will beat, not 100% but I will see a damn ending for them. I refuse to buy any games until at least half of them are completed

Chrono Trigger
Doom 3
Earthbound
Final Fantasy V
Half-Life
Legend of Zelda: LttP
Link's Awakening
Metal Gear Solid
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2
Psychonauts
Quake 4
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Paper Mario
Yoshi's Island
Zelda Twilight Princess
Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

So I suggest that we all work together because I know you guys are probably just as bad.

And to make this a bit more likely, rather than start up all these games at once I'm sticking with 1 handheld game, 1 console game, 1 pc game, and 1 emulated game. The first to go are the ones I have bolded.

Ok time to play Team Fortress 2 which is going to completely fuck up this plan because it's so fun.

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:12:22 GMT

This isn't by me, but I thought it was remarkably appropriate to this LJ group.

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/04/quiz_me_qwik_being_pranked_by_michael_trewartha.php

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:20:17 GMT

Quick open up notepad and prepare to write some stuff!

Every videogame code ever printed or put online is destroyed.

Using only the secrets of your mind list every code ingrained in your memory whether it be something you could understand remembering like a level select or a password for level 2.

And don't look at the cut or comments until you make your list.

And when I say code I don't mean glitch so things like missingno and item duplication don't count. Console cheats don't count either, as in FPS games hitting ` and typing noclip.

Up up down down left right left right b a (Select because you have friends) start - Contra 30 lives (and others)
Down Y Down Down Y - Donkey Kong Country warp to cave with infinite animal bonus rounds. The Diddy/Dyddy code.
Zelda - Legend of Zelda, go right to the 2nd quest
Up Down Left Right Hold-A Start. Sonic 1 level select
Priscilla - Sim City 2000 Debug
Control-Shift-C - The Sims cheat menu
rosebud - $1000 in the Sims
move_objects on - Move anything and everything. You could argue this is just a console command, and really it is, but the console is traditionally hidden
Control+Alt+QWERTY - Chip's Challenge Level select
[] /\ X O X - Twisted Metal 1 Rooftop level
X [] /\ /\ /\ - Twisted Metal 1 Suburbia level
iddqd - Doom god mode
idkfa - Doom all items
idchoppers - Doom 2 chainsaw
idfa - Doom all items, no keys
idspispopd - Doom noclip (ID smashing pumpkins into smile piles of putrid debris)
Hold L and R on the Acclaim screen - Mortal Kombat II's 2-player endurance mode
MKBRLN - Bubsy password for the carnival levels. MaKe BeRLiN without the vowels.
THE - The Incredible Machine password for level 2
INCREDIBLE - " level 3
MACHINE - " level 4

Best Songs

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:39:45 GMT

Today I will purposely put a bunch of songs in your head because I will be talking about the 10 best songs in any games. (More accurately the 10 awesome songs that first came to mind.)

I was going to link to the original songs but I'm too lazy to upload even more files.

Duck Tales - Moon

Suggested remix

Ok, so I was always terrible at Duck Tales as a kid, but I knew well enough that it was a great game with excellent music. The Moon level being the best example of this. Really Capcom had a hard time not making great music. The only problem with the moon is rarely getting to see most of it, since if I recall it required you get a key from another level. For a nonlinear game Duck Tales was pretty linear.

Cave Story - Moonsong

Suggested remix

In the unlikely event that somebody here hasn't played Cave Story, please drop everything in your life right now and get it. If there's ever been a game where you actually cared about the characters, Cave Story was it. At the point of the game where moonsong kicks in, everything is bleak, the doctor has the red flowers, Sue and the others have been captured, and it's only a matter of time until the doctor unleashes an army of mimigas. Kazuma gives you the option to give up and flee the island with him, netting you the worst ending. Everybody of course told him to fuck off. By this point you were nearing the end of the game, and the music and graphics for the area as you climb up the side of the island fit the mood perfectly. If I attempted to sort these into a real top 10 list, this would probably be #1.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Sky Tower

Somebody find a remix please.

Ok, I have to confess two things here, 1) This screenshot is a preview of PMD2. 2) I never got to the Sky Tower in PMD1. Having only played the GBA version as a rom, I could tell it was a great game, but really really needed the DS's features to make the controls not terrible, and the map not annoying. I don't know what's happening when you go here, but I bet it's something important. I bet you fight a Skarmory or something. PMD had an excellent soundtrack and everybody should buy PMD2 since it comes out this month.

Mega Man 2 - Wily Stage 1

Suggested remix

This is another example of "Oh god you're at the final stage you're screwed / Oh man you're at the final stage you are going to kick this game's ass!" music. Since we're talking about the level with that goddamn dragon, you're screwed in this case, but damn if you didn't feel like a huge badass for making it here.

Legend of Zelda - Level 9

Somebody find a remix please.

Ok, this screenshot is from a romhack going by that stupid map layout that should be a badass skull. I have a thing for screwed/awesome final level music, and the original Legend of Zelda does a great job of making that last dungeon tense as hell thanks to the music. It's a massive labyrinth full of darknuts and wizrobes and minibosses. Thank god for the potion shop just west of spectacle rock. I'm pissed that this didn't get in Brawl.

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Windmill Hut

Suggested remix

Why this song was tucked away in a single room I'll never know. This song is a paradox. The guy in the windmill teaches it to adult link claiming how some jerk kid played it and fucked things up, then you go back in time and play the song to him as young link and fuck things up.

Jazz Jackrabbit - Tubelectric

I think I heard a remix of this once, but it was awful.

This song is probably responsible for half the game's sales. Jazz Jackrabbit was a fun game but got way too hard in later episodes, but that's what value was back then, it would take you forever to beat not because it was lengthy, but because it was too damn hard. More games need to have Gravis Gamepads in them.

Super Mario RPG - Beware the Forest Mushrooms

Suggested remix
Bonus
This is the best song on the Super NES, the biggest disappointment is that the forest is so short, but you get Geno so nobody really cared that much because Geno. This game is begging for a DS port. Also bonus song with lyrics.

Chrono Trigger - Frog's Theme

Suggested remix

I never played too much of Chrono Trigger, but I could tell right away that Frog was an awesome character. He may be the most classy frog ever.

Sonic 3 + Knuckles - Doomsday Zone

Suggested remix

The real ending to this level is robotnik died and there was peace forever and because of that no more sonic games were ever made. The Doomsday zone had hyper Sonic chasing down robotnik who was really fucked. The entire level is you smashing into asteroids and hardly noticing because you're sick and tiring of Robotnik's shit. You can tell I don't feel like writing anymore.

Mike Tyson and Dracula

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:01:49 GMT

I was referred to this community by dr_dos on my post of top ten SNES games and this seemed like a pretty cool community. I figured I'd share with you my very first two videogames.

The year is 1988 and I am visiting my family in southern California. My mom had been against getting me a videogame system, but to every careful parent is a heel in the form of a relative. In my case, my uncle who was also my godfather. It was because of him that I received the gift of my first ever gaming console. A Nintendo Entertainment System, an NES Advantage joystick, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! and Castlevania.

So here I stood with with a one-on-one fighting/sports game and an action/adventure game. Needless to say I was as happy as a kid could be. My godfather had great wisdom in the titles that he chose as my first since I can look back on them with my current knowledge of the history of games and say without bias that he chose some wonderful games. Eventually I got other games such as all three Mario games, Contra, Ducktales, Gunsmoke, and Tetris, but Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! and Castlevania were my first.

Back then my father was great with videogames and loved playing my NES as much as I did, so I was able to judge how well I was doing based on how well he had done. But not only did I have my father to help me in these games, I had the most indispensable tool any kid with an NES could ask for: The Official Ninteno Player's Guide. This charming book had plenty of strategies and codes for various games and hand drawn maps as well. There was a full map of Zebes for Metroid, a complete walkthrough of The Goonies II, maps for The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and Kid Icarus. It also had strategies for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!

With Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! I never had any problems defeating Glass Joe since all enemies except him require good rhythm and reaction. You learned how read your opponent's moves and time counter attacks just right. And if you managed to get your opponent really off-guard, you could earn a star and with it the chance to do a powerful uppercut. But if you were a kid and managed to earn a star by sheer dumb luck, chances were your uppercut would only end in it being countered faster than you can say KO.

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! was divided into circuits. The Minor Circuit with three boxers, the Major with four, the World with six and finally the dream bout with Mike Tyson himself. I remember my father reaching the World Circuit and facing Piston Honda in the first bout thinking "Him? This should be easy since I beat him back in the Minor Circuit!" only to realize that the Japanese boxer had significantly improved in this form.

But eventually we both learned to beat him and then came the boxer who I came to know as the bane of my existence: Soda Popinski. I could never defeat Soda Popinski as a kid. His moves were sudden and without much warning and always caught me off guard. He made me ... drink punch. Then there was his laugh. You see some fighters would laugh at you when you lost to them. Not Soda Popinski. He would laugh at you everytime you were knocked down and then again when you lost to him. This only added insult to the injury of having your little rear handed to you by a drunken ... er, soda-loving Russian. I would not beat the pink Russian with the sinister laugh until my adulthood when I had not touched the game in years.

As for Castlevania, it was absolute fun. Exploring a monster-filled castle beating everything from Mummies to Frankenstein to Dracula with whips, holy water and crosses? It was like Halloween everytime you popped in the game. Not only was the game fun, but the music was awesome. When I was a kid I actually at one time put my audio cassette recorder right up to the TV speaker and recorded myself playing the game so I could listen to the songs which I learned in my adulthood had named like "Vampire Hunter" and "Wicked Child". However since I never beat Castlevania as a kid, I never made a "complete soundtrack". When I got the internet I learned that they made soundtracks to these games and downloaded them all.

This brings me to another thing about Castlevania. It was hard. Really hard. Most especially trying were the flying Medusa heads which always flew in wave patterns. Eventually you learned to follow their patterns which made dealing with them easier, but in Castlevania if you got hit you would be sent flying back a couple of tiles. Which meant that if you were hit while standing on a narrow platform, you were toast. I think the only things more annoying than the Medusa heads were the hunchbacks. You had to kill them right away because if you didn't, they would jump all over you until you were dead. Not a pleasant way to go out.

I probably wouldn't have gotten that far into the game if it weren't for The Official Nintendo Game Player's Guide. It of course had maps, strategies and tips for Castlevania. It even revealed how to get that secret treasure chest by standing on some special blocks in level 2. It also had a listing of every item and enemy in the game. I always thought it was odd how the final boss was refered to as "The Count" as opposed to "Dracula" or "Count Dracula" as he is in the other games because it made me think of the Sesame Street character of the same name.

Castlevania's levels were like two progressive climbs. The first level was the entrance to the castle with that small dip in the sewers with the fishmen the giant vampire bat at the end. Then you climbed up in the castle which as painted red for some reason, and littered with Medusa heads, narrow platforms and spiked ceilings that lowered on top of you plus a Queen Medusa at the end. Level 3 took you to the top of one part of the castle and once you beat the twin mummy bosses at the end and you were tossed all the way down into some dungeon sweer river ... thing. This is where the strategy guide ended, leaving you to cross the river on the slow-moving platform (heaven forbid you get hit while on it) on your own. If you managed to get across, you then had to deal with a line of dragon skeletons guarding some doors.

Should you manage to get through the skeledragons you'd have Frankenstein and Igor to deal with. Igor would fly around the room dropping fire ... because that's what Igors do. Early on I made the mistake of concentrating on Igor instead of Frankenstein. The results were not pretty. I remember one where I managed to kill Frankenstein at the same time he killed me. The red crystal dropped on my lifeless body. I do remember once getting to level 5 once, but I never got far enough to tango with Death.

Eventually I gave away my Nintendo and all the games for it. I was able to beat Castlevania II which was more non linear and had passwords, but I never beat the original Castlevania while I owned it. Many years later I learned about emulators and roms and set out to conquer Castlevania once and for all. With a little help of save states I did eventually beat Castlevania. Probably not in the preferred way, but I still did it.

So there you have it. My first two Nintendo games ever. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! and Castlevania. If you will, a fighting game and an adventure game. I suppose it fits since years later when I got my Gamecube, my first games for it would also be a fighting game and an adventure game: Bloody Roar: Primal Fury and Starfox Adventures. Which makes me wonder ... with so many GBA and DS Castlevania titles, how come we never saw any for the GCN?

Super Mario Bros.

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:07:39 GMT

The first video game that I ever played was Super Mario Bros.

I remember those early years well. Sitting on the couch in the family room, with the TV on the far wall with the NES next to it; the controller cables just slightly too short to reach to the couch, so we'd have to sit on plastic stools that had a ruffled pattern on top that made your butt look like it was made out of corrugated cardboard.

It took the better part of a day to get the NES set up. Had to hook it through the VCR and then to the TV. It took an hour to figure out that a switch had to be flicked on the back of the VCR to get the TV to display the picture. Of course no one really knew what we did to get the whole thing working; it was almost forbidden to ever move the NES, VCR, or TV, as it would take another day to get the cables set up right.

But we did get it working. And the first game I played was Super Mario Bros. And I was terrible at it.

I don't know how many times I died to that first goomba. My strategy was to lure it out to the left, and then to jump over it. If I tried to run--and I use the term "run" lightly, as no one figured out how to move faster than a walk until some time in World 8--straight into the level, then I'd end up jumping into that first block, and then falling smack into that goomba. And you can forget about actually jumping on top of the goomba. Why, I may as well dance on the head of a pin.

The mushroom I understood. Get a mushroom, get bigger. Everyone knew about that. I probably knew that before I could speak my first words. Nintendo did a good job of marketing.

And I needed that mushroom. Because then there were pipes that I had to jump over, and some of those pipes had goombas walking between them. And not just one goomba, either, but two goombas, walking right next to one another. An invincible squadron of goombas. Yes, sometimes I could jump on one of those goombas, but if the second one didn't immediately walk into me, then it would confuse me by quickly changing direction. Normally I would wait for them to gather near the pipe I was on, and then jump over the two of them.

But even if I made it through all of that, I would come upon a great chasm. Yes, I could jump. And I could even move-and-then-jump so I would cover some distance. But if I fell in that hole, then that was it, and I would be dead.

Sometimes I would jump too soon, and jump right into the pit. And sometimes I would jump too late--"the button didn't work"--and run right into it.

But I couldn't get over that pit. I played for hours. And then for hours the next day. My mom has said that I even cried over that pit. It's certainly possible: it was a tough jump! It was a big pit!

It was a pit designed so that no one could get past it.

It was a pit that stretched on past the edge of the screen!

It was a huge pit!

It was. . .

. . .It was two tiles wide.

But darn it, it seemed bigger!

And now I'm older. And better at video games. And when I play through World 8, I wonder how I ever had such difficulty with the game.

But even still, every time I reach that pit in the first level, I pause for just a moment. And my palms become ever so slightly sweaty. And I become so imperceptibly tense.

And then I'm over the pit, and back to normal. But that pit will always have an effect on me.

That pit, it is a part of me.

Mighty Bomb Jack: A Screed

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 01:57:48 GMT

Hi everyone! I'm new here, and I wasn't sure if this sort of thing was what you guys are looking for, but ravenworks said that you guys might enjoy it. If this sort of thing isn't welcome here, blame him. ;)

It's a little write-up about a game called "Mighty Bomb Jack".

Before my NES blew up, I had a game for it called Mighty Bomb Jack. Now, when I was a kid, I wasn't yet quite experienced enough to tell the difference between a good game and a bad one. I knew when a game bored me, which wasn't very often, but other than that, my only criteria for judging a game was its difficulty. I couldn't differentiate between a game that posed a genuine challenge and a game that was difficult because it was fundamentally, irredeemably broken, so Mighty Bomb Jack was, at the time, filed in the same category as games like Contra and The Legend of Zelda: Fun, but not something I'd play seriously.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun with the game, because back then getting a new game was so rare that I HAD to have fun with it - who knew when another new game might come along? I would force myself to have fun whether I was actually having fun or not.

Thus, nostalgia makes me look back at the game fondly much the same way a smoky bar and a drink or two causes you to look back fondly on the girl you brought home who would later end up hand-cuffing you naked to the creaky motel bed and stealing off in the middle of the night with all of the 126 dollars in your wallet. Despite the fact that you know that she was a psychotic bitch, that fuzzy first impression you have of her makes you wonder in the back of your mind if, deep down, there was really a decent person in there who was simply driven to desperate measures called for by desperate times.

It's okay. It's part of the coping process.

The fact of the matter is that Mighty Bomb Jack abused me, and it's time I come to terms with that.

Mighty Bomb Jack is the biggest abortion in the history of video game design. I wouldn't call it the worst game ever made - that dubious honor goes to (a three-way tie) Super Smash Brothers, Super Smash Brothers Melee, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl. But from a design standpoint, it's hard to imagine any other ways MBJ could have possibly gone wrong.

Let's start with the title. "Mighty Bomb Jack" conjures up imagery of an action game, possibly one where you play as a Superhero whose theme and weapon of choice is the bomb. It could be a basic linear platformer, maybe even an uninspired "Mario" clone, where you pick up bombs to toss at your enemies. There are different kinds of bombs, including one that kills every enemy on the screen and one that blasts open walls leading to secret passages.

The game I just described is not "Mighty Bomb Jack". You can tell by the fact that by the description that the game sounds sort of playable and may even have a chance of providing some modicum of entertainment for the player.

Mighty Bomb Jack is actually a game where you play a man in a cape and mask who collects bombs much in the same manner that Mario collects coins. Do the bombs do anything? No. Can he throw them at his enemies once he collects them? No. Is there some sort of penalty for NOT collecting the bombs? No. The bombs are completely benign. They do absolutely nothing. You could erase every trace of bombs from the game, change the name of the game to "Mighty Joe Young" and it'd be pretty much exactly the same experience with only a slightly more confusing title.

Okay, so if the hero doesn't throw bombs at his enemies, what does he do? Does he stomp on them like Mario? Is he equipped with a gun, like Megaman? Can he suck his enemies, like Kirby? Well, he sucks, but I'm afraid the type of sucking presented in this game isn't anywhere near as fun as Kirby.

What Mighty Bomb Jack does is this: He jumps. And that's pretty much it! There are items you can collect that will turn all of the enemies on the screen into coins (which, like the bombs, do nothing) for about 5 seconds, but that's not the sort of power-up you can really be proud of. It's sort of like an invincibility star in a Mario game in that it lasts just long enough to be completely useless. Once those five precious seconds of rest are over it's back to jumping and dodging as if your life depended on it. Because it does! You get one hit-point with no means of further protecting yourself. You get three lives and no continues.

You'd think that in a game where all you can do is jump, they'd at least do a decent job with the jumping mechanics, right? Wrong. It has the most bewildering control scheme I've ever seen in a platformer. You tap the jump button to jump. One tap sends Jack flying up almost an entire screen length. You can tap the jump button again to "cancel" the jump, sending Jack floating gently down to the ground as if he were on the moon. Not only that, but you can tap the jump button to float down even MORE slowly, gliding like a dandelion seed blown from a puff by a gentle summer breeze.

Why they couldn't have made it like every other video game in the world, where the length of your jump corresponds to the amount of time the button is pressed down, is beyond me. I guess they were worried that'd make it too much like an actual video game.

The layout of the labyrinth you're in is maddeningly complicated. It's ostensibly a pyramid, but the room layout has as much in common with a pyramid as my bulbourethral gland (that is to say, not much.) If you've beaten the game without using a map then you're a liar. If you're telling the truth then you're still a liar.

You see, the genesis of MBJ was an old arcade-style game called "Bomb Jack". It was a fairly straightforward one-screen action game where you jump around collecting bombs trying to avoid enemies. It sort of made sense, because each stage was a graphical representation of some famous landmark. The statue of liberty or the Eiffel tower and shit like that. And somebody's trying to bomb them, and you need to defuse the bombs. It wasn't the best game in the world, but it sort of worked, for what it was. (Every level of MBJ includes a Bomb Jack-style level at the end. It's by far the most enjoyable part of the game.)

Then somebody at Tecmo had the bright idea, "Hey, let's turn this into a platformer! It worked for Mario!" There was only one problem with this idea: Tecmo didn't have Shigeru Miyamoto.

Tecmo eventually made a decent platformer when they ripped off Castlevania to produce the superior Ninja Gaiden, which also ushered in an era of more sophisticated in-game storytelling. I suppose Mighty Bomb Jack was a necessary step in the evolution of Tecmo's game design, but holy Christ, it was an abomination.

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of everything that's wrong with this game. I mentioned the maddeningly confusing layout of the so-called "pyramid", but what I didn't mention is that the game has multiple endings depending on whether you collected a bunch of arbitrary items scattered throughout the levels. The game gives no indication what these items are for or even that it's possible to get better endings in the game. (I suppose it's possible that they mentioned something about it in the manual, but come on, who seriously reads manuals?) When you die, it gives you an indication of how well you did in the game by giving you a number called a "GVD", but it doesn't explain what it is. It doesn't really explain anything.

There are two items you collect in the game that actually do something. Mighty coins and mighty drinks.The mighty coins, which I mentioned earlier, change Jack's color. If you use one, it turns him blue, allowing him to open orange chests. If you use two, it turns him orange, allowing him to open any chest by touching its sides instead of jumping up and down on it. If you use three mighty coins, it turns Jack green, which is what turns every enemy on the screen into coins for 5 seconds. This is your ONLY defense against enemies, and there's constantly several enemies on the screen which can fly and seek Jack out.

Mighty drinks add 5 seconds to the timer. Yep, there's a time limit on top of everything else.

The largest number of mighty coins you can hold is 9 and the maximum amount of time you can have is 99 seconds. So, what happens if you collect a mighty coin or mighty drink that would put you over that number? It probably has no effect, right? Either that or it just gives you a few extra points. That's what all games do when there's an upper limit to the number of things you can collect, right?

Wrong! If you collect a tenth mighty coin or a mighty drink that would bump the timer to beyond 99, it takes you to the torture room. This is a special part of the game specifically designed to be as annoying and frustrating as possible. It's an empty room filled with enemies, and you have to jump 50 times before you can get out. Doesn't that sound like fun? Jumping 50 times while dodging a bunch of enemies bouncing around the room?

Well, once the fun's over, it takes away ALL your mighty coins, resets the timer to the default, and starts you over at the beginning of the level.

For comparison, imagine you were playing Mario 3. Imagine you had picked up a bunch of power-ups from Mushroom Houses, but haven't really felt the need to use any of them yet, because you were doing just fine starting each level as tiny Mario. Imagine you had filled up your inventory by the time you got to Giant World. Halfway to the castle, you forget that you're full and visit a mushroom house, getting one more item than your inventory can hold. "Whoops!" the game says. "Sorry, you're too awesome at this game. Off to the torture chamber, fag!" It teleports you to a one-screen room where, as tiny Mario, you have to jump 50 times. There's four Boos flying around, but they're three times as fast and don't stop when you're facing them. When you manage to jump 50 times or die, it gets rid of all the items in your inventory and starts you off back at the beginning of Giant World.

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

In conclusion, fuck this game. The fact that Nintendo actually has the audacity to sell this game on the Virtual Console is a fucking insult to gamers everywhere. It might be worth playing the game just to see for yourself how bad games can actually be, but please, don't give Tecmo or Nintendo any more money for this game. This is what NES emulation was made for.

Alternately, you could play Mighty Jill Off (parental advisory: adult themes), a "tribute" game that reduces the experience down to pure jumping, and is actually sort of fun, because the game (1) gives you infinite lives, and (2) gives you a checkpoint every few screens. It's short, and it's really about getting to the top as quickly as possible.

Well, I've said my piece. Rot in Hell, Mighty Bomb Jack, wherever you are.

Come to think of it, he actually recommended this place to me when I wrote a glowing LJ entry about how I felt about Doom II awhile back. Again, I'm not sure if it really belongs here, but here it is anyway:

Doom II is videogaming perfection.

Not just Doom II, but other games with the Doom II engine, like Final Doom (which I recently started playing.)

It's amazing how well the game stands the test of time. Sure, the graphics are lame and the enemies are sprites that can only be viewed in 8 positions and you can't stack room on top of rooms and everything looks silly. But in my imagination it doesn't look silly. In my imagination it's absolutely terrifying.

No game has come close to reproducing the visceral fear of the doom games. Doom 3... it was good, but it failed at being a doom game. It failed HARD.

Doom isn't about good enemy AI or maneuvering stealthily through dark corridors. It's about walking out into a big open room with a BFG 9000 sitting invitingly on a platform. You know it's a trap, but you don't know the nature of the trap. So you step onto the platform and whirl around to see what burst out of the walls at you. Nothing yet... you turn back the way you came but right before you reach the exit, you hear a SLAM as a barrier closes in front of the only exit, barring your way out. Before you have time to process that you hear an ungodly screech. You whip around and find yourself face-to-face with what must be a thousand goddamn imps and, towering above them like incarnates of Satan himself are two Barons of Hell, and they're not wasting any time in launching huge green fireballs at you.

You barely sidestep them, your heart pounding as you make your way through the room, trying to find some sort of cover from the army of Satan bearing down on you. You see a cranny. Before you can duck inside it, you're pummeled in the back with a dozen fireballs. Suddenly, you find yourself at 12% health. Holy shit. You duck into the cranny, power up your BFG, and unleash death upon the army. Most of the imps fall, but the two Barons of Hell are still there, and now they're pissed and coming towards you. You're out of BFG cells and out of rockets, so it's back to your trusty double-barreled shotgun. You jump out of the cranny and artfully circle-strafe around the Barons, pumping lead into them. Infuriated, the Barons throw their evil green fire, but you dodge, and they end up hitting... each other. You duck into the cranny again, peeking around the edge as the Barons of Hell tear into each other, saving you the trouble and the ammo.

Sweet.

I don't want good enemy AI. I don't want stories. I don't want puzzles. Not when I play a FPS, anyway. I want to go one-on-one with an impossible hoard of the damned and come out alive. I want treacherous traps and unique enemies that truly terrify me.

I haven't even gotten to the Arch-Vile yet.

The Arch-Vile is quite possibly the most fiendish enemy in the history of video gaming.

You find the button that releases the barrier and open the door, and you're confronted with an Arch Vile. Before you have time to react, you find yourself surrounded by crackling flames. The flames don't hurt, but you know it's a sign that if you don't get out of the Arch-Vile's line of sight in the next 2 seconds, it's going to hit you with some sort of psionic attack that hits you instantly for about 50 damage (more than enough to kill you) and sends you flying through the air. You turn around in a panic, trying to find anything to hide behind. You succeed for now. The flames subside and you are unharmed. But to your horror, you hear the familiar "swish" sound. The Arch-Vile came into the room where you fought the imps and the Barons of Hell, and it's reviving them, one by one. The Barons roar back to life, thirsty for blood.

Fuck.

Now it's really starting to get fun.

Any feedback, including harsh criticism, is welcome and appreciated. I know I'm nowhere near good enough, but I'd love to get into video game journalism some day and I'm hoping if I write practice stuff like this enough I may be able to someday become better. Maybe.

Eyes, less than nine but more than seven of them

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:42:00 GMT

I promised davidn I'd make an entry about this game, and then I forgot to. :( But here it is now!

As we all know, we get nostalgic for old games and we love them, but when viewed objectively, some are better than others. Maybe they haven't aged well (people used to consider this hot, after all,) or maybe we were just remembering them wrong, or attaching irrelevant memories to them to form a bias (Lagoon just plain isn't a good game, no matter how fondly I remember the Hastings I always used to rent it from.) Today we'll be discussing the beloved Taxan (who?) classic, 8 Eyes. Or 8-Eyes, or 8Eyes, or maybe 8EYE'S according to the title screen. But hey, at least the box art is awesome. Sure, it's from the era where every box in the world looked like that, even when mildly to wildly out-of-place compared to the actual game...but hey, in 8 Eyes' case, it's an improvement, so I'll take it. :)

So yes, 8 Eyes. You are a cool dude named Orin with a cool falcon named Cutrus, and it's up to you two to...um...beat the bad guys and stuff. You know, whatever sword-wielding action-platform heroes in those days did.

First, let me make one thing abundantly clear: if you're not sitting on a large stockpile of nostalgia to help color your vision, this is a terrible game. Why?

First, it's a blatant-enough Castlevania ripoff to lose a plagiarism lawsuit. You've got the eerily similar placement of life bars, the subweapon (which goes in that currently-empty box in the status stuff on top) that's powered by an Item bar that's filled with floating crosses you collect from bad guys (all it needed was hearts and a counter and we'd be set) and those stairs. Those horrible horrible stairs. I don't know about you guys, but when I think "I should make a Castlevania ripoff," I know the first thing that always comes to my mind is always "Because then I could include those stairs that everyone loves so much."

Second, there's an almost Megaman-ish stage select with every boss you beat giving you "a more powerful sword" as a gift, which is a neat idea, except it has absolutely no actual effect (regular enemies don't seem to care that your sword is more powerful) except that it imposes a de-facto required stage order. Actually, this FAQ puts it better than I could:

"When you complete a castle, your sword is replaced with a "more powerful" one from the duke you defeated. It isn't really stronger against the normal enemies you encounter, but it does twice as much damage to one other duke. Which one? That's the trick...if you pick the wrong one, you will have a really hard time winning a battle against him. Even if you do somehow survive, you will then get another new sword that will be effective against some other duke, meaning that you will no longer have an easy battle with the boss that you should have fought before."

I swear I remember some of them being literally invincible without the right sword, but then again, I remember a lot of things that turn out to be blatantly wrong. Hundreds of enemies in that one Dungeon Master corridor (there were actually 10,) anyone?

Third, the game ends with a puzzle involving setting eight different jewels in the correct order using clues ("Red and green are not next to each other," "Black is to the left of blue but the right of red," etc.) Normally, those are fun, and I like them. However, the clues are hidden rather well in the eight stages throughout the game, and it's very possible (and in fact extremely likely) that you'll make it to the puzzle without having nearly enough clues to figure it out, and then you'll have to either give up in frustration or launch a brute force attack that would take years to complete. (Seriously, picture a color puzzle with eight colors and eight possible locations for them, and all you know is "green is to the left of red." That's it. And it takes about three minutes to arrange them all to guess due to the slow interface. Have fun!) It's actually pretty fun if you can find all the clues so you can actually do the puzzle fairly, but you need a walkthrough for that.

And finally, the plot:

(Copied out of the instruction manual)

After hundreds of years of chaos, mankind has finally emerged from the ruins of nuclear war. This world of the distant future has once again flourished under the guidance of the Great King, who harnessed the power of the 8 Eyes to rebuild the planet.

These strange jewels of power were formed at the eyes, or centers, of the eight nuclear explosions which nearly destroyed the Earth. In the wrong hands, the 8 Eyes could cause untold destruction... and now, they have been seized by the Great King's eight Dukes, in a desperate bid to gain control of the world for themselves. They have banished the King to the nuclear wastelands, and already their squabbling threatens to plunge the world into war once again!

The task of retrieving the 8 Eyes falls to you, Orin the Falconer, the bravest and mightiest of the King's Guardsmen. With your fighting falcon, Cutrus, you must penetrate each of the eight Dukes' castles. There you will face the Dukes' soldiers, and battle strange nuclear mutants such as living skeletons, giant wasps, and mud men. You must defeat the monstrous Boss of each castle to retrieve the Jewel of Power he guards.

Then, to complete your quest, return the 8 Eyes to the Altar of Peace to await the return of the Great King, so that he may finish the rebuilding of Earth. Your reward will be the eternal gratitude of all mankind!

There are times where being a medieval fantasy setting that's actually post-apocalyptic in disguise can work. Sometimes it even makes a good plot twist if they save the truth about "the ancients" or whatever until near the end of the game. (I have examples, but I won't name them for fear of spoilers.) Sometimes, though, it's just a completely unwanted and burdensome addition to the story. Is there any particular need to say that the gems were formed by eight nuclear explosions, that the skeletons and stuff you fight are "strange nuclear mutants," and so on? To me, this just seems like the actual veil when calling this game a thinly-veiled Castlevania clone. (Castlevania wasn't post-apocalyptic, so clearly this is different! Clearly....)

There is some good nestled amongst the bad, though! Mostly good ideas mangled by poor execution, but good enough that I remember and appreciate what they might have been trying to do.

As you might have observed from the cool box art and the fact that the screenshots show there being two life bars, the fact that Orin has a falcon is significant. Up+B made Cutrus fly off your shoulder and begin a rather slow and dippy pattern of flying back and forth from one side of the screen to the other. Down+B made him do a swift diving attack wherever he happened to be at the time, and Up+B while he was already out made him come back. There were even some puzzles that involved using Cutrus--99 times out of 100 taking the form of "This switch opens this door but not long enough to go all the way over there, so you need to stand over the door, while using Cutrus to hit the switch," but still. Plus, all those clues you need for the jewel puzzle at the end are hidden in fake wall tiles that usually only Cutrus can reach.

The cool extension to this idea is that the game is sort of two-player simultaneous, in that if there are two players, player 2 can control Cutrus. It's the same controls as before--Up+B gets on and off Orin's shoulder and down+B attacks. You can't really move aside from just following that dippy back-and-forth pattern, but it's you doing the diving and getting on and off, anyway! This is where I get most of my nostalgia from this game--my friend at the time and I would play it all the time, and I was always Cutrus, because I thought the game was too hard to even be Orin, let alone play them both at the same time. So he adventured along and I flicked switches and dived at enemies sometimes, and generally got to feel like I was sort of helping.

Plus, that puzzle really is fun if you actually have enough clues to figure it out.

Overall, this game sucks, but it's the sort of thing I'd really like to see a remake of. Of course, remakes are for games people actually somewhat cared about--Metroid was an extremely popular first-party smash hit classic, so it got a sort-of-remake/spiritual successor in Super Metroid and a more direct literal remake in Zero Mission. Who the hell has even heard of 8 Eyes? Or Taxan, for that matter? Let's face it; the 8 Eyes franchise isn't exactly hot must-have intellectual property.

But man, if I was cool enough to make platform games, I would totally make 8 Eyes the game it should have been. Better graphics (maybe the guy could look like the box art, even,) better Cutrus controls (like the ability to freaking move instead of following a horrible pattern, generally making him faster and less clumsy,) maybe a few more creative Cutrus-requiring puzzles instead of an endless series of doors he needs to open, and do something about that "better sword" thing.... Really, I think the "guy and a falcon whom you both control" idea has potential, it's just that this is a bad game. Maybe davidn can pass this post along to the Click community and see if anyone good at platform games needed some inspiration, if this is even the sort of thing you can do with that. :)

Because of this game, every game I make and even most non-game projects I do always have a character named "Orin" in them somewhere. It's like the Final Fantasy Cid thing, and my way of paying tribute to a cool guy with a cool falcon who really deserved not to be in a game that sucked as much as it did.

Tiles and Tribulations - Hexen II

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:18:30 GMT

Hexen II, starring Gene Simmons.

I think I can speak for all of us in saying that we love our classic games. Nostalgia tends to be kind to everything, but there are still titles that we played growing up which stand up well even today. There are some other ones that we know aren't terribly good technically but have the sheer charm and character (or were so much a part of your life) to make you like them anyway. And sadly, there are also games to which our memories have been too nice - those that we want to be good but on replaying them turn out either to have aged very badly or just weren't that fantastic in the first place. I've been playing through Hexen II again recently, and although it pains me a bit to admit it, I think it's turning out to be one of these.

But it tries, it really does, and I still want to like it even though there seem to be unfair or just plain poor game design decisions at every turn. In the tradition of Raven Software, it's a fantasy game based on one of ID Software's existing engines with a few enhancements - the Quake engine, in this case, expanded to allow you an inventory and RPG-like statistics. In addition, each time you kill one of the various monsters walking, flying or scuttling around the game, you get experience points that eventually earn you a Level Up (indicated by an insanely overenthusiastic "YOU ARE NOW LEVEL 2!" console message with about twenty exclamation marks after it) and more capacity for hit points, mana and special abilities. This game doesn't have health and armor, it has HP and AC - that should tell you all you need to know about the tone of it. Everything makes it clear that even though this looks like a first-person shooter, it's actually an action-adventure Zelda-em-up in disguise.

The Aztec level is composed of Crystal Maze-like platform games.

So as I just mentioned, it looks much like Quake with a couple of graphical enhancements like transparent surfaces (and with the GL version an incredibly disorienting texture-distortion wobbly underwater vision that has to be seen to be believed) and some destructible scenery. Time has definitely not been kind to many early true-3D games, but it's not absolutely terrible to look at, though you need to adjust the brightness quite far to have a hope of seeing anything. It takes some doing to get it out of 320x200 mode, too - you can only upgrade the resolution through a set of command line switches, and having a crosshair and mouselook are very much afterthoughts, needing a couple of console commands or editing of an autoexec file to even activate them. Not that you get a crosshair in the end anyway, it's just a + sign from the normal bitmap font plonked in the middle of the screen. Anyway, those were the days.

The general storyline is that Eidolon, the last of the Serpent Riders (see Heretic, Hexen, Heretic 2) has arrived on Thyrion and laid waste to the four continents that look coincidentally like different historial periods from Earth, and it's your job as a crusader, paladin, assassin or necromancer to stop both him and his servants, who happen to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Even though there are a few monsters scattered around each map, the emphasis is definitely on exploration and puzzle-solving - something hinted at quite strongly by the way you only get four weapons.

Actually, that's not as bad as it first sounds. Every character's weapon lineup is different, so in the game location where the Crusader would find the ice staff to go into his second weapon slot, the Assassin would instead find a crossbow, and so on. But they all share a common pattern for use of ammunition - a non-mana-using melee weapon, followed by something that uses blue mana, then green, then both together. Except the Paladin, who gets a second melee weapon that can use blue mana to make itself more powerful if you have any available, but I can't remember what the actual effect of it is offhand. So that's sixteen weapons in the game already, and if you include the effects of the Tome of Power (which upgrades all your weapons when you use it, often giving them strikingly different effects) then you could even bump it up to thirty-two.

Spot the secret passage.

But none of that really matters because most of the time you'll be using said weapons to tap on walls repeatedly looking for secret passages. The trouble is that there's only so much you can do with adventuring in the Quake engine - items are picked up by bumping into their rotating icons, and used by standing in the right place at the right time - and to counteract this, the game designers seemed to feel they needed to hide virtually everything. You begin outside a little fortress-like place in which you're meant to notice that one of the designs on a mural sticks out a bit further than the rest of it, and if you don't notice that at this point and batter it to open a passage across the room that eventually opens a door later on in the game, you're going to have a lot of trouble later on when you come to said barred door with no way to open it. Another example is a button hidden under a bridge slightly later on that's the only way of activating a teleporter to get you to a vital area. This game took me well over a year on and off to see the ending (I can't use the word 'complete' for reasons I will describe later), and most of that time was spent running around stuck and belting every wall, floor and ceiling with the Hammer of Justice +5 to see if any of them opened.

Another thing that I noticed this time round is that the puzzles... well, to put it simply, they make absolutely no sense within the plot or goal of the game. The first world is particularly guilty of this, because you don't find out what you're actually supposed to be doing until well into it - the eventual goal is to defeat the Crystal Golem so that you can get past the barrier that's tied to his existence. But to even get anywhere near this, you have to do a selection of incredibly random things. Shortly after the game begins, you skip happily into what looks like a wizard's lab and find a book on the table. "You need the Bone Dust of Loric to complete the spell of mythril transmutation", it says. That's a nice and clear objective, but who, for example, was Loric and why are his bones so special? Come to think of it, why do I need to make this potion of mythril transmutation in the first place? Later on you find out that there's a mythril wall you can't get past at the bottom of a castle moat, but once you're past that, why do you suddenly need to find the altar of the Brotherhood of Hunger (secret passage, only accessible through hammering on a wall with a slight seam in a house later on) and seek out "sand, glass and grindstone" to see through an arbitrarily-placed magic barrier?

Even mundane things seem artificially protected - in order to dig up a key early in the game, you logically enough have to find a shovel. But the only shovel to be seen in the entire castle area is the most well-defended shovel in the universe, only accessible through a secret passage that you have to open up by jumping across the beams on the roof of a stable and pulling a lever within, and even when you get that open it's defended by a golem. The whole thing makes no sense at all - without any character interaction beyond the odd dying note left by someone whose vital organs are now generously distributed around the room, you never find out the reason all these places and unlikely magic hindrances you're running back and forward between even exist, and by the time you get to the Egypt level and are seeking out the Sceptre of Lots and Lots of Darkness from the Pyramid of Lots and Lots of Evil, you've forgotten what you were originally supposed to be doing entirely (also being distracted by the nagging thought that you might have missed a tiny wall switch a few maps ago, and some bits of the Egypt level just need you to bump into the right wall to get things to happen).

However, despite the lost feeling of the mediaeval levels and the labyrinthine design of the Aztec levels (like in Quake, there is no automap, but the levels in Hexen II are far more complex and non-linear, meaning that you really need to draw a paper map as you go if you want to have a hope of not going utterly insane), I did somehow make it up to this Egyptian world without any help from a guide - this is something of a spectacular achievement for me as far as adventure-type games go, and even if I do say so myself, even more impressive in this particular overdramatic game of Spot the Difference.

Take a look at this. You'll be seeing it a lot.

But then I hit a barrier. Not a literal one like the ones that I'd got past every time before, but a wide open space that contained something far worse. At this stage of the game, you're trying to collect four canopic jars from around the game world, and there's one clearly visible in the Ancient Temple of Nefertum just over a bridge. This particular bridge is made up of nine tiles arranged in a grid, and elsewhere in a neighbouring map, there are three remarkably similar-looking grids on the wall with bits of them coloured in. So obviously there are three possible combinations to try, and one of them will be the right one. This should be simple, shouldn't it? Shouldn't it?

I'll get you, Michael Gummelt.

I think it's no exaggeration to say that quadralien and I spent days repeatedly trying to get past this tic-tac-toe game of doom. None of the three given combinations worked. Neither did any other possible combination when I went through them all. In addition, you can't just hop over the tiles because there are invisible barriers in the way between them and around the sides (which seems an incredibly artificial way of getting the puzzle to be an actual obstacle, while I'm on the subject). Varying the time spent waiting on each tile before continuing had no effect on the outcome. Neither did staying in between the tiles long enough for them to rise again behind the player. Doing the opposite of that and dashing over all the tiles in your sequence as fast as possible was even less helpful. We checked and double-checked that painting on the wall. Suddenly one of us had a brainwave and we tried doing them from top to bottom instead of bottom to top. That didn't help either. We just had to mindlessly keep trying the three combinations we'd been given and hope that somehow, one of them would eventually work.

And one of them did work in the end - after we'd lost count of the number of different techniques and bizarre superstitions we'd attempted, one of the given combinations suddenly produced a "Sequence completed!" message instead of either dumping us outside with a "Nothing seemed to happen" message, or dumping us outside with no message at all - two events that seemed to happen roughly randomly when the game decided the combination was wrong, which usually happened once we'd got to the end of the bridge but sometimes happened at random in the middle just out of spite. So with that canopic jar in our bag, we ran away from it as fast as possible.

But even though by blind luck we got over that bridge eventually, this was the game-ending event that made me give up. Not feeling like dealing with any more of the Egypt level despite the fantastic music, I used the NOCLIP cheat to sink through the floor of the hub room and go to the next world myself. (As it happens, it turns out I could have completed it easily from where I was if I'd been a bit more observant in another map, at the altar that flung me back across the room whenever I went near it. I could have gone underwater instead to avoid the invisible barrier, hammered on the left wall a bit, silently opened a passage at the other side of the level, found that and gone through to collect the last of the four canopic jars from there, then travelled to the afterlife and aligned the sundial to free the Staff of Nefertum from the very start of the world. That would then have allowed me to turn the zodiac dias in the present day as well as 1000 years in the past, therefore aligning it to both equinoxes at the same time and fulfilling the Prophecy of Set. Sounds obvious now I say it.)

The rest of the game is reasonable enough, although this is largely because I had put God mode on by that point and the tiles puzzle had taken so long that GameFAQs had been invented during the time we tried to get past it so I had a guide to see me through. But that nine tiles puzzle always nagged at the back of my mind - I knew there must be some better solution to it that didn't involve sacrificing a raven or pointing your computer in the right alignment with the moon before starting. But I never found it - every guide on the Internet, even the one on Raven's own site, just advised you to keep trying until something magically happened and you were allowed past. Other guides had their own theories about it, but none of them knew for sure.

Last year, after I hadn't thought about it for ages, the lead programmer for Raven Software, Michael Gummelt, suddenly appeared on the Clickteam forums. Naturally I got him talking about his involvement in Hexen II and its most infamous puzzle - the topic still exists here, and we continued it over private messages. I hoped that finally, we would get an answer.

If I recall, the one that was the right one depended on what path you took through the temple. i don't think he (Brian) intended you to know, for sure, which one was the right one. It was just an overthought puzzle that made a lot of people stop playing, unfortunately... :/

So basically, he didn't know either (and also, you'll notice, tried to shift the blame on to Brian Raffel). When no guide on the Internet knows what to do, and the man who wrote the blasted thing can't remember how to get past it, something is definitely wrong. And it looked like no-one would ever know for sure what the game was thinking... but thanks to quadralien himself, who put forward a theory that I put to the test a couple of days ago, I now know the secret.

Basically, part of the set of invisible barriers that I mentioned earlier involves having an invisible teleportation field just behind the last row of tiles to stop you from leaping over them and getting the jar that way. This invisible teleporter is meant to turn off when you get the combination right, but they put it a bit too far forward, meaning that more often than not you accidentally step into it while going over the last row of tiles even if your combination was correct. When this happens, you're thrown outside with no message, and the puzzle will be in a weird unstable half-finished state that will fail you at a random point in the future. This is the bit that misleads everyone. The puzzle has only reset itself correctly when you get the message "Nothing seems to happen" when you're teleported outside, because that's the result of a different teleport that triggers when you put the wrong combination in and it's recognized as complete but incorrect.

So in conclusion, all you have to do is crawl/walk very slowly over the last tile that you're going to step on so that you don't hit the badly placed defensive teleporter before the game turns it off, and if that rejects you with the message, just to go back and try one of the other combinations. Using that technique I'm now able to get past it consistently. To be honest I was rather disappointed that the solution was this simple after years of not knowing what was going on, but it's completely baffling until you realize the game bug that makes it quite so accidentally difficult. Once you understand what it's thinking it's easy, but then, you could say this about everything to do with computers, and I have a job trying to get the things to do what I tell them to. I had had a suspicion that there was a difference between getting the message and not getting it, but I had never been able to work out what it was.

So now, thanks to his heroism, I'm now legitimately on the last of the four worlds, which resembles the Roman empire, but beyond that I honestly can't remember anything about because I God-moded and noclipped through the whole thing before. But this time I'm going to finally complete it, because no matter what it throws at me, I'm confident that there's nothing in it nearly as bad as those nine tiles.

Because I like being in control, I guess.

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:33:42 GMT

So, after a very long absence, I started playing City of Heroes again. I had gotten to about level 35 or so last time, and quit because the content was starting to get repetitive; go to instanced mission, kill bad guys that come in various River City Ransom-style gang/villain group affiliations but all more or less boil down to "here are the minions, here are the lieutenants, here's the boss." Some of the groups are fairly interesting either in that there's variety in what the enemies do (the bosses from The Lost are hypnosis-inducing psychic bastards) or groups that exist in a wide enough level range have fairly interesting storyline progression (low-level Circle of Thorns are more or less goth kids who signed up for the free Ringwraith outfit, but by level 35 I was going to their hidden city and fighting actual ancient demons and such.) At the time I quit, I was primarily being pointed toward the Devouring Earth, who are pretty comparatively boring. At least CoH isn't a typical equipment-based fantasy MMO, but still.

After enough time elapsed, I kind of missed the game. Sure, I was doing one thing over and over again, but after a long enough absence, that one thing started to sound fun again. Plus, I'm pretty much a huge slut for any game with extensive enough character/costume customizing, and the absolutely legendary City of Heroes character creation is easily the most customizable of any MMO, and probably the most customizable of any game I've played, period. Hell, if CoH ever released their creator as a stand-alone program (just a HeroMaker-like application where you can make a guy and then...um...take screenshots or something,) I'd probably get it. Another nice thing is that CoH doesn't use equipment (it's all just your powers, enhancements to your powers, and more slots to hold additional enhancements for your powers,) so you're in full control of what your character looks like at all levels--there's no danger of any particularly awesome features being obscured by generic armor.

So, with the nostalgic cravings simply refusing to go away, I got back in. It's been a very long time since I played, and all sorts of things have been introduced since then. Supergroups (CoH's idea of a guild) can have bases now, for one thing. I'm normally extremely antisocial in MMOs due to the somewhat disappointing social interactions when I do try, but I managed to get suckered into a Supergroup on a kind of symbotic contact-less basis; my being a member just happens to net them points they get to spend on base upgrades even when I do my own solo missions, and in return, I get to use the teleporters in their base to get around the city. I don't think I've even met anyone in the group aside from the person who recruited me.

The problem is that I hate their base. I can tell from looking at it that the base creation system is just as awesome as the character creation, but I hate what they did with it--the tileset they used is way too high-tech-science-lab-y, the room layout is just weird, etc. I almost want to form my own Supergroup just so I can make my own base to my liking, but as the whole system is designed for huge numbers of members feeding the group, that's a little unfeasable--we're talking one of my missions nets the group about 250 points, and one basic piece of furniture is about 20,000.

So...this is an extremely long-winded, extremely roundabout introduction, but I'm actually not here to talk about City of Heroes. You see, it eventually dawned on me that what I really wanted with this whole Supergroup thing was just to plan a house/base/whatever and furnish it to my liking, and knowing that's what I wanted, I went and re-installed The Sims.

Good old Sims 1, because I already have the CD right here and I don't want to spend money. Deluxe Edition (Sims 1 + Livin' Large expansion.)

I had a somewhat mixed reaction last time I played The Sims. The house construction is awesome, but it always bothered me how quickly time elapsed and how quickly the Sims' needs plummeted. In real life, I've occasionally been hungry and felt the urge to go to the bathroom at the same time. However, it usually isn't particularly difficult to address those needs one after the other. At the very least, I don't say "Gee, I could go to the bathroom, but that takes two and a half hours, and there's a very good chance I will die of starvation by then. I'd better just pee on the kitchen floor while working on dinner, just in case. I can just mop it up when I'm done, assuming I don't get tired and pass out in the half a day or so it takes me to eat."

Still, I'm doing more or less well so far, and I will now recount the harrowing tale of how my Sim family has come to this point. I seem to have a bizarre need to make my Sims crawl up from the absolute lowest of existences to eventually claw out a living in their sorry excuse for a home. It's because I'm so strongly against having a pre-made house; this is my Sim house, damn it. We're buying the completely empty long and building it from the ground up, and if that leaves the family with one room with unpainted walls, no furnishings, and $30, then they can get a job and the rest will come later. My first week or so with a new Sim family is always awesome.

To start, I picked the fifth neighborhood, where it's literally all vacant lots--absolutely zero neighbors. My Sims are hermits, you see. I made a family of two adult males. They'd get their social fix by talking to each other as they were doing chores or whatever, and wouldn't have to worry about the time-wasting ordeal that is entertaining guests. (When it takes about 45 minutes to so much as answer the doorbell when someone visits, making friends is a huge commitment.) Every single career path in the game requires you to have a certain number of neighbor friends to get promoted, but that's okay; my guys were eventually going to get into Gnomecrafting anyway. (I will discuss this later.) I picked two guys because if they're the only two people that exist in this world, romance is inevitable, if only because of the Flowers in the Attic effect. At least with guys, there's no chance of having a baby.

So, at first, these two guys had shelter and that was about it. They got jobs, but their first day of work wasn't until the next day, so that was an...interesting first night. At least they were always good about cleaning up their messes from wetting themselves, if only because they had absolutely nothing else to do. If I recall correctly, the combined $500 they made from their first day of work went toward getting a basic cheap refrigerator, just so they had a food source and could thus last through the night and work again the next day. I had to consider the priorities of their needs, after all; if a Sim's hunger level hits zero, he starves to death. If energy hits zero, he passes out on the floor and recover energy as they sleep (though less than if they were to use an actual bed.) If bladder hits zero, he wets himself, bladder becomes full again, a mess is created on the floor, and hygiene instantly hits zero. If anything else hits zero, all they really do is whine about it. So, I got them a refrigerator so they wouldn't die. They probably wished they were dead at this point, but that wasn't really my problem.

Then the bastards almost undid my attempts to save up money to get them anything else by nearly snacking themselves out of house and home. They deduct money whenever they grab something from the fridge to simulate grocery shopping, you see. My Sims had a tendency to grab snacks at every conceivable opportunity, if only because it broke up the monotony of doing nothing but staring at a wall and mopping up your own pee all day, but the snacks were horrifically expensive and did almost nothing to their hunger level. I had to get into redecoration mode and turn the refrigerator around so the door faced the wall, so they couldn't access it until it was time for their one honest-to-God meal of the day.

With their proceeds from day two on the job, I got them a kitchen sink. Now they could actually clean the dishes after they ate. I admit that the big mountain of dishes with flies swarming over it might have influenced this decision. I got a trash can, too, since I forgot they were only like $30, and that prevented them from having to walk all the way out to the garbage can on the street (which is about an hour-and-a-half walk in Sim time) to throw away their instant noodle packs or whatever waste was left from that meal. They started washing their hands every five seconds like they had obsesive-compulsive disorder, probably because it was the best they could do to fix their hygiene rating (no plumbing whatsoever, frequent accidents, and no way to bathe afterwards probably hurt that level just a little.) They even got in the occasional fight over whose turn it was to get to hover over the sink.

I started to grow a little concerned over their energy levels relating to their jobs by this point. There's no command to make them go to sleep on the ground; they just pass out whenever they happen to hit zero energy. I wasn't sure whether it was possible to rouse them immediately after they did this, and if they happened to pass out ten minutes before their carpool to work arrived, I'd be in trouble. So, day three's income got them their very first bed. It's a spartan one-person bunk and they had to take turns, but the job I found for them on day one happened to be the Army, so I was sure they'd be used to it by now.

I'll never forget the excitement when I finally got them a toilet on day 4. One of them walked into the bathroom, looked at the toilet, and literally jumped up and down in celebration, arms raised, "whoo hoo!" voice clip playing.

They had to go the next day without any new furniture for a day as I was saving up, but after that, I got them a bathtub. Now they could finally do something about hygiene and comfort.

There was a minor panic at this point as I had suddenly realized that I was supposed to be paying bills. Bills come in the mail every three game days. I had completely forgotten that I was supposed to be checking my mailbox and that they weren't just left on the ground or something like the newspaper is. I forget what happens if you just completely don't pay them, but probably something bad. I had about $350 or so worth of bills to pay. Remember, my guys made $250/day each, and I usually immediately spent it on another piece of the vital collection of appliances and furniture they were slowly driven into madness from not having. I happened to have enough of a reserve to handle that, but there went their upgrades for the next day or so.

At some point, I bought a second bed for the same reason I bought the first; now I could control their resting so that I didn't have to worry about either of them missing their job. I also bought one tile's worth of counter space. Evidently, having a counter to actually prepare food on when using the "Serve dinner" command means the difference between instant noodles that leave garbage you have to throw away and a plate of what appear to be mixed vegetables or something that leave dishes you have to wash. That made the meals a lot more filling, though. And that's when it dawned on me: I was approaching this game wrong. I had been complaining that I never had time to meet the Sims' needs because of how fast time moves. That it took them literally half a day to eat enough to fill their hunger bar, almost an entire day if they're employed. If I want to keep their needs high in the amount of time I'm given, I have to focus on quality over quantity. If they only have time to nibble on one piece of bread a day, then it should be the best piece of bread ever and that one bite should fill them instantly. High cooking skill and appliances help with that, I think. And hey, maybe they'd have a little more time if their beds didn't suck as much, so they could get the same amount of energy from less hours of sleep. Of course, the higher-quality stuff is expensive. If I had held out for the good refrigerator, my Sims would have died sometime during day two. It's something to save up for, though, I guess.

The boldest move was when I bought a KraftKing Woodworking Table. This is a device that, when used, sets your Sim to work crafting lawn gnomes. It slowly raises his mechanical skill (like how reading a cookbook slowly raises your cooking skill, etc.) with the added bonus that he is actually making the lawn gnomes, which you can then sell. There is a tremendous warm-up period before this becomes useful. A Sim with an actual job and no mechanical skill only has time to make one gnome in an entire day, and that's setting aside his other needs to do so ("he can go to the bathroom tomorrow....") And that gnome sells for $1. As the mechanical skill rises, though, the speed and value goes up. One of my Sims now has a mechanical skill of 6 out of 10 and quit his Army job, and just makes gnomes all day. He can currently make about six and they sell for $35 each. Not quite comparable to the $250/day the other one (who's still in the Army) pulls in, but getting there. My main obstacle right now are all the minor needs like Fun and Comfort. Remember when I said before that all they can do when those are low is whine about them? Well, that's assuming they have a real job. You can send a Sim off to work no matter how much he wants to die, and the worst that will happen is that he'll suck at his job. (Poor job performance prevents you from getting a promotion and can even make you get demoted if you had been promoted before, but my guy is already at the lowest level, so it really has no effect on him.) Gnomecrafting, though, is entirely different; minor needs like comfort effect the overall mood score, and a Sim can and will refuse an order to make gnomes (the same way they can refuse to study) if their mood is too low.

I bought a bookshelf for the family. It has cookbooks for one of them (the soldier) to study to make the one meal of the day count more, and for-fun books that sort of raise the fun level. A little. Enough that I can squeeze a gnome or two out of the other guy, but it's always a battle. Fun is actually my biggest obstacle right now, since the bookcase is all I have for it, and it's so low-quality that it takes an entire day to raise fun even halfway so that he can hopefully make some gnomes tomorrow. I'm currently saving up for "Meet Marco," the $6,500 super-TV of the future that should hopefully get their fun levels up a little faster (it claims to have a fun rating of 9, and is +study, whatever that means, as opposed to the +1 fun/+study bookshelf.) That's going to take a while to get, but I'm not really in any danger of failure in the mean time. They have food. Their needs are met to the point where their mood usually hovers around neutral. (It can go between +5 and -5, and seems to be right around 0 as I write this. It needs to be +1 or higher for them to be willing to study or make gnomes.) They can pay bills and still be making positive amounts of money overall. In short, they're getting by. Hopefully Meet Marco will save enough time getting Fun up that the available work time goes up, then I can buy a second table and the other guy can quit his job and start making gnomes too. Eventually I'll make the house a little less depressing--you know, paint the walls, make a kitchen to put all the kitchen-y stuff in, etc. But hey, according to the game's stats, they've been living there for 17 days now, and they barely survived the first couple, so they're moving up!

Screenshots:
Their house thus far. Note the "under construction" walls, mostly-empty rooms, kitchen stuff in the living room, etc. But it's livable!

They are the lonely kings of Mt. Lonely.