Yes, I know when you were all voting for me to make a comic about Star Control 2, but I’ll save that one for another day.
Star Control 2 was pretty damn great.
Anyway, I liked how the camera kept zooming in during combat, but I think it could have gone one step further, you know, for extra visceral and immersive realism or whatever other fuff they go on about these days.
I never got just what exactly all these people had against this poor kid and his mate. Sure he had stupid ’90s hair and stupid ’90s sunglasses but we ALL did, man. Maybe that’s why it bugs me so, the thought that at any time any of us can be targeted by a giant talking bull and an old dude with a toaster in his head.
Anyway! This was a pleasant enough Amiga platform game that would have been quickly forgotten on console but managed to garner a decent audience on the host machine. The bosses were pretty good from memory, but geez the level layouts were crazy long and winding. I know I complain about the linearity of modern games but there’s got to be a middle ground somewhere?
No? Oh well back to playing Wizball then.
Also found in the museum:
Part man, part machine, all cop that has to move his arm in awkward 45 degree increments because that’s how 8-way joysticks worked back then. What made it even worse was that when you aimed up and to the right or left Robocop would keep moving in that direction too so you’d end up walking directly into the line of enemy fire. Just another day in the life for video gaming’s greatest cyborg.
The arcade version of this is my favourite of them all, simply because they stuck to the home console design but didn’t have any of the C64 or Amiga’s technical limitations. Big beefy sprites and an awesome looking ED-209 to contend with plus lots of sampled speed which was a big deal back in the day of course.
The C64 version had horrible bugs which meant one level was a garbled mess, so much for quality assurance back then.
Good morning. Welcome to a nightmare come true.
Of every game I’ve ever played, the opening line to Deja Vu has stuck in my head the most. It’s a really emotive line and I found myself saying it every morning when I woke up before starting another day of living in a one room apartment reviewing Army Men games.
It may sound great, but most Army Men games were terrible.
Anyway! This was probably the first time I played a game with icons and a mouse-like interface in it, not having being exposed to such wild things on the Commodore 64 previously. If I remember right I never got that far through it but loved mucking open with the idea of being able to pick up items from the game play window and drag them into the inventory, open them up, close them, move stuff around etc…it was like a game in itself, except that it wasn’t, but it beat dying three screens into this game because I missed some item somewhere.
And yeah I thought the guy had a question mark stuck to his face for the longest time…I take things way too literally sometimes.
As a kid living in a boring town with two streets and one store, an hour’s drive away from a slightly less boring town with four streets and two stores, California seemed like an amazing place to have fun. I formed that opinion primarily from playing California Games.
Actually now that I think about it most of my geography knowledge was based on the games I played. I was kind of diappointed when I visited Sydney for the first time and didn’t see anyone having karate fights across the river from the Opera House.
California Games was a gem of a mini-game collection, barring the stupid frisbee game. That thing was pants and to this day I’ve never caught a frisbee in it ever. I really liked the BMX section, the rollerblading section (once I figured out the controls) and the skating was also pretty good even though I preferred the skate bowling duel game in Skate Or Die. Hacky Sack was pretty good too if only for as long as it takes to hit that bloody seagull.
To me though the star of the show was the surfing. It was a real skill to keep moving ahead of the wave, not to mention pulling off tricks. You had to position your board perfectly right on the re-entry or you’d fall off the board quicker than you can say “whoa dude that was a totally gnarly wipeout” or whatever lingo I picked up from watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons.
It was pretty harsh that you sometimes got eaten by a shark though, maybe that was left in for a version of the game designed for sharks to play.
California Games was converted to all sorts of formats along the way – the C64 and NES versions were the most popular around the world, of course, but I remember sinking a lot of time into the Master System version. The BMX section in particular was a lot better on that system than any other to me. I was especially interested in the Lynx version – the only one to have simultaneous multi player! – and remember thinking that the waves in the surfing section looked amazing. You could pull off tricks a lot easier in the Lynx version, too.
And I didn’t even know there was a MegaDrive version until I was doing research for this comic! That looks pretty cool, I should give that a go sometime. And the Atari 2600! man, that version must look INCREDIBLE.
You know what, now that I think about it, I really missed out on a lot not owning a Lynx.
You’re never really given a reason why you’re meant to be destroying all these buildings, perhaps you’ve just been brainwashed so much by the cult leaders that it really doesn’t matter to you.
I really like this game a lot. Once you look past the technical wonder of the rotating tower – it spins around in a manner that just shouldn’t be possible on the 8-bits – there’s a solid and inventive platform game to be discovered. The weird little green thing proves himself an adept character, jumping around the place and shooting ping pong balls at random weird shapes as he makes his way to the top. Hidden short cuts, secret elevators and multiple paths literally around the corner make each level a joy to explore.
Of course most of my time was spent with the C64 version, which I thought was just lovely with all the special effects in the regular levels and the bonus shoot ‘em up stages, but the Amiga version had its own charm and also for some strange reason blue domes on note of the buildings that I used here in the comic.
Did you know there was a GameBoy version? Neither did I until I took it upon myself to play every GameBoy game EVER one day. It was called Tower Toppler which I guess is amore literal but less silly name. It was also pretty good but man the GameBoy was not a pretty system.
For the longest time after Shadow of the Beast came out I thought there was something wrong with me.
This was the game to own if you had an Amiga. Not having the luxury of owning one when this game came out, I figured it was my role to be envious of Amiga owners who could play it. All the magazines were gushing about it. The screenshots were stunning. It all looked so…big. Polished. Far beyond what we were used to thinking what a video game looked like at the time. All those levels of parallax scrolling! The music! The box art!
And yet…I just wasn’t fussed about it.
This was the first time I really couldn’t get what the hype was about. Was it me? Was I just jealous that I didn’t own a machine capable of such awesome 16-bit graphics? Maybe I was just growing out of video games?
Or maybe, just maybe, the game was a bit crap.
Come on, you can admit it now, the game was a bit crap. It was slow and boring and the combat was comically simple and you never really knew what you were meant to be doing. It just wasn’t any fun. Underneath the slick exterior was a simple maze exploration game made artificially hard by cheap deaths and unfair collision detection.
I did like checking out all the conversions that came later, it’s always interesting seeing how a technically ambitious game gets fit into less powerful hardware. The Lynx version had nice sprite scaling, the Master System version was pretty average and they even managed a C64 conversion for the C64GS. It was pants.
So what if it was basically an overblown Breakout, Arkanoid was the killer app that sold me on the idea of using a mouse to control a game. Sure, you could play it well enough with a joystick but if you wanted total control you really needed to play it with a mouse.
Thanks to the simplicity of the game (I mean really, it was just a bat and ball game that you could make yourself in an afternoon) there wasn’t a bad home conversion. Even the Spectrum had a great version of Arkanoid! Chances are whatever you’re reading this on has a version of Arkanoid available for it. The DS had a neat one that came with a paddle you plugged into the GBA cartridge port – I thought it was funny we came so far along with technology that we went back to playing games with a paddle.
Anyway, it was the Amiga version that was the business back in the day. It looked just like the Arcade game, as long as you don’t mind a third of the screen being devoted to a bunch of logos and junk. But you got to play it with the mouse, and it felt glorious, and it made me mad I didn’t own an Amiga yet.
Now, you can say whatever you like about the movie, I only saw it once and it seemed kinda dumb and it had that horrible hell beast Sandra Bernhard in it, and isn’t it good that we live in a world without her in it now, but I will not hear anyone disparage the Hudson Hawk video game.
It was a cute, colourful bouncy platformer that was a lot better than it otherwise should have been. You played as Hudson and you had to steal stuff, and avoid traps – it was basically a stealth platformer with the occasional funny bit where you threw balls to distract guard dogs. Yeah, it wasn’t going to set the world on fire but it was a game i totally didn’t regret buying at the time, not that I ever finished the darn thing.
AND it came with a Hudson Hawk hat in the box, that was neat.
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