Random Reviews – Games that Desperately Need Sequels.
WARNING: This paragraph contains an absurd amount of semicolons.
Whether we admit it or not, gamers love sequels. Even though we so frequently complain about the “sequelitus” that is supposedly destroying our hobby, we all wait with bated breath for the sequels to our favorite games, whether they’re somewhat unlikely, like Crackdown or Just Cause, or inevitable even though the original was shit to begin with, like God of War or Assassins Creed. Sometimes they fix everything that was wrong with the original (that was the case with both Just Cause and Assassins Creed), and other times they just ruin something beautiful (like every Prince of Persia game released since Sands of Time). And, of course, sometimes companies just churn out the same bullshit over and over, which I think is the only real problem with sequels (God of War, I’m looking in your direction). But on the whole, if a game is good, it deserves a sequel; to say a company should always abandon a (commercially or critically) successful concept in favor of trying something “fresh” is ludicrously idealistic. Sequels don’t even have to be uncreative redos of the originals; plenty of sequels have been able to build upon the concepts of their predecessors to the point of practically being new genres without losing the feel of the original. Just look at Half-Life 2, Ocarina of Time, and Sonic Adventure, for Christ’s sake. And even if a sequel is a shitty rehash, there’s no reason the incoming funds from the brain-dead hicks who will buy anything with the God of War name on it (just kidding, I know some intelligent people who love GOW, for some reason) can’t go toward something great; using that example, Sony’s success with GOW and other games led to the creation of LittleBigPlanet and Uncharted, which were completely fresh and innovated the genres of social game creation and fight-two-people-then-jump-from-ledge-to-ledge-for-45-minutes (again, I’m kidding, sort of, although the sheer amount and frequency of ledge jumping in that game took the dramatic tension of hanging on a ledge from “nail-biting” to “this is more mundane than riding the bus” in like 1 level), respectively.
But, as far as I’m concerned, the only thing worse than when a terrible game franchise shits out a completely uninspired sequel is when a deserving game never gets a sequel. In that vein, here’s a trio of games that desperately need a sequel:
Comix Zone (Genesis, 1994, Sega)
When most people think of beat-em-ups, their order of thinking goes like this:
Final Fight-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-Streets of Rage-Final Fight (again)-random arcade beat-em-up-Turtles in Time
But I consider myself somewhat of a beat-em-up connoisseur. Me and my friends will sit around and play various obscure beat-em-ups, discussing the finer points of them just as the pretentious do with wine, except that we’re actually able to determine differences between beat-em-ups. And yet, with all the beat-em-ups I’ve played, I’ve still yet to see one like Comix Zone.
Comix Zone tells the tale of a man named Sketch Turner. If 10-year-olds could vote, Sketch would have been elected president of the 90s. He’s a struggling comic artist/hard rock musician with a bad haircut and weird sunglasses. He’s the epitome of everything kids thought was cool at the time. He even owned a pet rat named Roadkill. To be honest I wouldn’t have been surprised if the twist ending of the game revealed he was actually a 5th grader. Sketch creates a comic book, then gets transported into it during a lightning storm.
Featured is the primary villain of the game, a drawing of an undertaker from 1870. Bonus points for the badass mustache, which Sketch is too distracted by to realize he's JUST A DRAWING!
This brings me to a mystery I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now. I understand why people though you could get superpowers from nuclear radiation. Obviously it’s just going to give you lymphoma in real life, but in comics and movies it makes sense, because we don’t have any contact with radiation on a day-to-day basis. But lightning? We understand lightning. We see it all the time. I’ve personally never been brought back to life or traveled through time because of lightning. Why would I think it would send a comic book artist into his own creation? They could have at least made it, like, a wizard lightning storm or something.
Score: 9/10
Regardless of the shaky logic behind the premise, Comix Zone is a fucking classic. It’s probably the best beat-em-up for the Genesis (except Streets of Rage 2), and the visual design perfectly captured the then-current anti-hero-centric comics the mid-90s were so famous for. It’s been getting a lot more attention lately, but it was tragically ignored for the first 10 or so years after it was released. Recently it’s been released on the Virtual Console, XBLA, and Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, and the Game Boy Advance saw a really shitty port that only got released in Europe (for some reason, publisher branches in Europe love to fuck the whole continent over as much as possible with awful retitles, terrible ads, and only the worst exclusive releases that weren’t good enough to see release anywhere else). Hopefully this current… hmm, I hesitate to call it momentum… vague notoriety that Comix Zone has will lead to interest in a sequel. It’s such a simple concept that it could be feasible on just about in system. It could be in 2D platformer, a 3D 3rd-person action game, a throwback retro sequel, a new-generation reimagining, just about anything.
And now that I’ve said that, they’ll probably release a “dark” adaptation of the game where Sketch is a badass anti-hero space marine. The industry loves to fuck me over. Especially when they can do it with space marines.
Sküljagger – Revolt of the Westicans (SNES, 1992, Realtime Associates)
There will never, ever, ever be a sequel for this game.
It’s a damn shame, too, because this is one of the best, and weirdest, platformers the SNES ever saw. Sküljagger finally combined all the elements of great stories you’ve been waiting to see together for so long: skeleton pirates, magic bubblegum, evil bugs… Sküljagger had it all. It was developed by Realtime Associates, which isn’t really involved with the industry in a traditional sense anymore, mostly producing “serious games,” games with purposes like teaching kids not to jump in front of moving vehicles and teaching soldiers not to shoot innocent people (guess which one of those is harder to teach). That’s admirable, but honestly, they were never really involved with the industry all that much to begin with. Sküljagger is pretty much the sole game of note they did. Other than that they were mostly in charge of Game Gear ports and Sega Pico educational games. The weird thing is, even though they never really did anything else, they had at least one luminary among their ranks: Doug fucking TenNapel, who 2 years later shot to superstardom with the creation of Earthworm Jim.
Sküljagger is the story of you, some guy, who somehow steals a sword from a pirate/dictator, possibly named Sküljagger, who is also a skeleton for some reason, to fight for his freedom, or his nation’s independence, or something. The game isn’t entirely clear on most aspects of the story, but it is clear on one thing. That fucking skeleton hates you, and he may or may not be sending giant evil insects to kill you. You have to use magic bubblegum, which for some reason looks exactly like fruit, to kill the evil bugs, and possibly go to find Sküljagger and kill/defeat/usurp him!
Believe it or not, that's the skeleton pirate I was talking about, not a one-eyed zombified Telly Savalas.
Score: 8/10
Sküljagger is fun as fuck. But for whatever reason, it’s absurdly obscure. The only reason I know about the game is because the name stood out from when I saw codes for it in the Classified Information section of an old Nintendo Power. I’ve never seen an actual copy of the game, and apparently it’s so obscure it doesn’t even get a Wikipedia page. To give you some perspective on that, BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge has a Wikipedia page, and I think I may have just made that title up. The game is a mess of disparate elements, but somehow it all works out in the end. Kind of like a train wreck between a shipment of chocolate and peanut butter, only with less coal and fewer dead bodies.
Captain Skyhawk (NES, 1990, Rare)
If I had to declare my favorite airplane-based shooter, I would probably say U.N. Squadron. But Captain Skyhawk would be really, really fucking close.
Yet again I have no clue what the fuck the game is about, but it seems to be about a man who flies an airplane across space into plain, monochromatic landscapes shooting all of the bizarre, sometimes abstract enemies he saw, including sentient sphinx statues, RC cars, and the All-Seeing Eye. It’s an early work by Rare, who seems to be the master of making great games then forgetting about the for 20 years (see: Battletoads, Killer Instinct, about 10 other games), and features a really underrated soundtrack by David Wise, the greatest non-Japanese game composer of all time.
Oh, and don't forget sentient jet engines. What?
Score: 10/10
Ok, I admit, this game is getting a little extra love from me due to the fact that it’s the very first game I ever picked out for myself. Remember when Toys R Us had the big glass case with all the games in it? I do, and I was only 2, so you have no excuse. I absolutely hated it at first because my plane would just fall out of the sky for no reason sometimes. Fortunately my parents somehow figured out that, in the most baffling game design choice ever, you have to hold down on the D-pad the entire time you played it.
Besides the fact that the soundtrack is phenomenal, the story was somewhat intriguing, and the game was fun as all fuck, Captain Skyhawk deserves a remake for this reason alone: someone needs to rectify the choice of making you hold the down button the entire fucking time. Rare has made an absurd amount of great games, but the fact that they made this one completely incomprehensible mistake bugs me.
There are plenty of reasons to make a sequel to this game, but they’re all kind of hard to explain, so here’s the ROM for the game. Don’t say I never gave you anything, even if it is something that is remarkably easy to access all over the internet.
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