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.
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.
I really only have two memories associated with this game, and one of them is “Huh, I liked Deja Vu, but geez I’m just not getting this one at all” and that’s why the comic is about something you discover in like, the second room of the game.
The other is set in the Electronics Entertainment Expo in 1999. My editor had sent me to go cover some crappy PC racing game that nobody cared about but instead of going to that meeting me and my friend decided, hey, we’re in Los Angeles for the first time ever, let’s duck out of the show and try to find a place to actually buy some video games. So a half an hour cab ride later we found ourselves in some dirt-covered K-Mart in the middle of nowhere where I bought Super Mario Bros. DX (which was awesome) and Shadowgate (which I had never played before, but figured at the least I could review it for GameSpot and make my money back). Then we realised that we were stuck in the middle of nowhere and had no idea how to get back to the hotel, let alone the convention centre. Somehow we managed to figure out how to us an American payphone (My friend was visiting from Canada and I was a plucky Australian, you know) and ordered a cab.
After waiting half an hour with the thought that not turning up to this meeting was probably a bad move, career wise, a cab pulled up and we got in.
This would have been fine if it was actually a cab and not, you know, a guy in a van pretending to be a cab driver. After locking us in he starts driving the wrong way and ignoring us. We figure out pretty quickly that this is a situation we don’t really want to be in any more, and start demanding to be dropped off.
“DO YOU HAVE FAMILY NEARBY? ARE THEY RICH? DO THEY HAVE MONEY?” he demanded of us.
Well, we didn’t, and they sure as hell don’t because otherwise I would have been a doctor instead of a broke-ass game reviewer.
“GOD DAMN YOU! YOU WASTE MY TIME!” he spits at us before pulling over on the side of the highway and yelling at us to get out (but not before asking us if we have guns for some reason).
To this day we have no idea what God forsaken thing we narrowly avoided, but it made us not complain about the long walk back to the hotel, and I didn’t even mind getting fired for missing that meeting that much.
Oh yeah Shadowgate was good I guess.
I don’t care what you say, Croc was a good game.
It was cute, it was colourful, and it was charming in a naive kind of way. The main character had a cute little waddle while he walked around the small 3D environments, and the platforming action was nicely done if a bit unoriginal. This was the era of Spyro, and Crash, and the dozens of games that looked at Super Mario 64 and said “yeah, we can do that too”. But I liked it, and it was by Argonaut who made Starglider 2 and Star Fox and are therefore absolved of all sins past and future. It went on to sell over four million copies, which is a pretty amazing thing, and there was even a Game Boy Color port which I haven’t played yet and didn’t even know about until I just read about it on Wikipedia.
Did you know Jez San, the head honcho of Argonaut, is now running one of the world’s biggest online poker sites? It’s true!
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.
Who needs Dragon’s Lair when you got Another World! I never played much of this, but man I was jealous of my Amiga-owning friends when I first saw the intro.
Still, it’s a tremendous technical achievement, having graphics like this on a home computer! Too bad the gameplay always felt slow and repetitive to me. I know I probably shouldn’t compare it to a pure platformer like, say, Super Mario Bros. or Great Giana Sisters, but I know which one felt more fun and allowed more experimentation.
Send your hate mail to the usual address!
From Dust is amazing by the way. I can’t recommend it enough.
Yeah that’s right, I’m totally saying that Toad was the best character in Super Mario Kart. You know it, but you just can’t deal with it yet. That’s OK, I’ll be waiting on Battle Course 2 until you return.
The first Street Fighter game was absolutely terrible. I remember playing the arcade version with the giant pad and wondering how anyone was meant to play this monstrosity – the pad was srrounded by a harsh metal frame that looked like it would slice your hand off if your punch was slightly off – and the home conversions were laughably bad. We had International Karate + and that had three characters on screen, so it was BETTER.
Haven’t played Starcraft 2 yet. I would start playing it but, judging by how much the first game consumed my life, I would never have the time to make these comics any more. THIS IS THE SACRIFICE I MAKE FOR YOU!
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