Archer Maclean’s first major game release wasn’t so much a game that was inspired by Defender as it was an out and out clone of it, but it was the ’80s and nobody really cared about copyright back then.
Oh wait it’s the video game industry nobody cares that much about it now either!
I recently played this in my nostalgia-free excursion into the NES back catalogue, and I liked it a lot! I was just mislead by the title a bit.
First of all, apologies to my United States readers – it wasn’t until I was halfway through colouring this comic I remembered that Green Beret was called Rush’n'Attack over there, which kinda…uh…wrecks the entire joke. OOPS!
Anyway, Green Beret was one of those games I kind of knew about but never really got into. The C64 conversion of it was pretty slow and janky thanks to having to use the space bar as well as the joystick. The NES version was much better, though!
OK next time I’ll do a comic that translates well over the Pacific ocean, honest.
Usually I try not to do comics about the ‘big’ games but I started doodling Pac-Man’s death sequence and figured hey, why not?
I’m not actually a huge Pac-Man, my memories of it are of playing the official Atari 2600 conversion and even then when I was a young kid who was desperate to play anything I recognised that it was hot garbage within a few minutes. So we played a Pac-Man clone called Jawbreaker where you were a pair of teeth and in between levels a big toothbrush came out and gave you a good scrubbing. Hey, I should do a comic about that!
Send your complaints to the usual address!
I never understood what the draw to this game was, it just looked like Pac-man but with…oversize burgers? Or were the burgers regular size and the chef was miniature? I could never get past the unanswered issues of scale this game asked me to ignore. Even though I was like 8 when this game came out I could recognise that the plot holes were huge like those buns. Or were they tiny? AGH!
OK so I said I would never do a Mario game here but this is a red headed step child of a Mario game so I’ll let it slide just this once.
This game was pretty good, but certainly no Tetris, and it always seemed so sedate and pedestrian compared to the more hectic puzzle games of the era. I did like the Game Boy version a bit more than the NES one though, since it felt a bit more cramped and therefore had the pressure turned up a bit.
Dr. Mario has fake credentials and I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to dispense medication without a valid medical license, heck I don’t even think Mario is qualified to work in a chemist let alone come up with his own virus-busting pills. BUT HEY VIDEOGAMES.
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.
I couldn’t decide which comic to do so I did both! Yay who needs sleep?
OK I have to admit not having played Battletoads much, it always seemed to hard for me and I thought it was a weird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rip off. But it seems kind of fun!
And for some reason I own a Battletoads toy. Why did I buy this back in the day? I mean LOOK AT THIS THING:
I had way too much disposable cash when I was a kid.
Did you know there was an Arcade version of Battletoads? And it was published by Electronic Arts? Neither did I! That was weird. Battletoads was a weird franchise. I mean what other game had a cross over with Double Dragon for no apparent reason.
Oh by the way YES I know Battletoads came out in 1991 not 1992 but there were so many versions of the game that came out between 1991 and 1993 that I think I can get away with it in 2012 
Update: I’ve since been notified that the toy is not a Battletoads toy and is, in fact, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy. WHOOPS!
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.
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