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Saturday, I posted a list of games that really need sequels. I tried really hard to keep it exclusively to games that never received sequels, but in the course of research for the article (I.E. sitting in my pajamas playing video games), most of the games I came across that really needed sequels were parts of established franchises that had already had at least one sequel. This goes back to what I was saying about good games deserving sequels; obviously, these were games that worked the first couple of times, and, given the chance, would probably work again. Games like…

Battletoads (NES, 1991, Rare)

Battletoads was a really popular game, which is why it’s so weird it hasn’t been revisited since 1994. Nowadays Rare is more popular for their fucking unprecedented run of incredible games for the SNES and N64 from the mid-90s to the late 2000s, but, as my European fans (if any) will know, they’ve been kicking ass since 1982, when they were founded as Ultimate Play the Game, possibly the most obtuse name ever for any kind of company.

Battletoads was partly an attempt at aping the popularity of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was so popular at the time that it was actually elected governor of Connecticut for 2 terms. It actually even had a spin-off cartoon, which had 1 pilot episode produced. It was aired on Fox, but it never got picked up. Being that I was lucky enough to have picked up a VHS with the episode in the bargain bin at Walmart when I was little, I can’t really figure out why. I mean, it wasn’t spectacular, it wasn’t going to be the new G.I. Joe or anything, but it probably could have been reasonably successful. When that failed, they seemed to give up on making it a media franchise, but it wasn’t lost on anyone that this was one of the best beat-em-ups ever made.

Rare has joked about a sequel to Battletoads for years, even going as far as to fuck with people who thought, upon seeing Banjo-Kazooie resurrected for the 360, that other Rare franchise updates were inevitable. And yet they fail to deliver, despite a huge demand from fans. Teh 4ch0ns actually called Gamestop, over and over, for several days demanding to preorder it. Of course that was more of a joke than anything else, but Gamestop isn’t smart enough to figure that out. A current-gen 2D version of Battletoads would be awesome if done correctly. Something along the lines of Castle Crashers, but hopefully a little less repetitive and with more replay value. Actually, now that I think about it, it would be fucking awesome if The Behemoth handled it. It would fit well with their style.

Score: 8/10

Battletoads is fun as fuck. But it’s hard.  It’s unreasonably hard. Most people who hear how hard it is tend to play the first level and think “I don’t know what everybody is talking about, this isn’t that bad.” Then they play a little bit into the second level, where you rappel down a tunnel, and they run into those fucking crows that snip your cable and kill you before you can do anything about it, and they think “Wow, that’s obnoxious, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Then they reach the third level. The vehicle level.

You shoot around at absurdly high speeds dodging obstacles that appear in front of you less than a second before you have to jump over them. And if you don’t? You lose a life, and you have a maximum of 9. The worst part is that, to lull you into a sense of safety, there’s a secret warp you can hit that takes you to another level. “Thank god,” our first-time players say. “I only had 1 life left.” At this point, Battletoads can barely contain its laughter as you walk forward and jump on a goddammed surfboard. That’s right. Another vehicle level. And this one’s even harder than the first. And when you beat it? You fight a ridiculously powerful boss that can kill you in 2 hits. And if you beat him? Well…

You go to the snake level.

God was mocking you with the vehicle levels. Perhaps He had another bet with Satan that His followers would have trust in Him no matter what He did. But with the snakes, God isn’t mocking you. This isn’t his sense of humor. This is the vengeance of an angry god. I actually saw a man die while playing this level once. And it wasn’t a fast death, either. I won’t go into a details, but suffice to say his testicles fell off before it was over.

So I guess my point is that, as great as Battletoads is, it’s a murderer. And that’s worth at least a point or two off.

Killer Instinct (SNES/Arcade, 1994, Rare)

Here we have another Rare franchise, which is equally renowned by those who remember it. Killer Instinct was one of the best 2D fighters of its day, and like most fighting games of its time, it was CHOCK FULL OF OVER THE TOP ACTION! ~ Gamefan Magazine.  KI, however, was over the top in a different way than its competitors. Instead of going crazy with the violence and brutality, Killer Instinct just got really, really excited about the combos you were doing. Really excited. For example, in Super Street Fighter II, when you do a combo, all you see is a little pop-up that says how many hits you got in. With Mortal Kombat, you get a pat on the back from Shao Khan, a small “outstanding!” or something. But in Killer Instinct, everything is a cause for celebration. Did you get an 8-hit combo? Fuck no you didn’t, you got a SUPER HYPER MEGA ULTRA COMBOOOOOO! And when you stop someone in the middle of a combo, the announcer is so shocked that he can’t even speak. He stutters out “C-C-C-C-COMBOOOOO BREAKERRRRRRR!!!!!!!” Presumably he can’t talk because he was so shocked that it gave him a brain hemorrhage.

Rare has been even more of a cocktease about a sequel to KI than it has been about Battletoads. Not only are there references in actual games, employees even directly talk about how awesome it would be to make a sequel. Ken Lobb of Rare (who I know from Nintendo of America through countless hours of reading Nintendo Power as a kid, and who you may know as the namesake of the Klobb gun from Goldeneye and Perfect Dark) has expressed interest in doing it several times, as has Rare head Mark Betteridge. Lobb even went as far as to say it “will happen someday.” The only thing that worries me is that one rumor that Betteridge instigated was that KI3 would be coming out… for fucking Natal. I would love more than anything to see a KI3, but I really couldn’t possibly give a shit less about Microsoft’s goddammed EyeToy. I’m not going to buy one, and I really would like to see a version of KI3 that doesn’t involve me flailing my arms to swat away Fulgore. I’m not on fucking Nick Arcade, and my Xbox isn’t named Phil Moore. Not anymore anyway.

Score: 9/10

Other gamers be dammed; I fucking love Killer Instinct. Most people have a bias against non-Capcom 2D fighters, and it’s easy to see why; SF games are not only great games, they created the genre and were responsible for nearly every innovation in fighting game history. But, just like with SNK’s amazing fighting games, like Samurai Showdown and King of Fighters, the Mortal Kombat series, and even Capcom’s own Darkstalkers games, Killer Instinct is a smooth, well-designed, downright fun fighter that got the short end of the stick just for not being Street Fighter. KI is every bit as good as MK, and is even better in some ways. Plus, it had a lot of character, and it-

C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!!!!!

River City Ransom (NES, 1990, Technos Japan)

Everybody knows River City Ransom by now. It’s the Beyond Good and Evil of its day, the game that everyone who actually bothered to buy it worships, and that everybody else discovered long after it mattered. Emulation has made it famous, and now everybody realizes that they should have been mailing envelopes full of money to Technos in the 90s.

In Japan, RCR is part of a huge franchise known as Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, or Downtown Hot-Blooded Story. For some reason the internet doesn’t seem to know how many games are in the series, but rest assured there are dozens of them. While this was the one of only two parts of the main series (the other being the mediocre Renegade) that was released in America, a few tertiary games, like Super Dodge Ball, Crash n’ The Boys: Street Challenge, and Nintendo World Cup, did see a release here. The franchise was revisited briefly in 2004, but all that really came out of it was a remake of the original for the Game Boy Advance. I think that it could benefit from the same kind of treatment Final Fight received last month, playing upon the strengths of the original game while improving the graphics. However, if they choose to do it this way, they should add a lot more areas and shops. The RPG elements of the original are a lot of what made it so fun, and the quirky charm of the shops could be greatly expanded upon.

Score: 10/10

This is pretty much the perfect beat-em-up. Limitless replay value, solid mechanics, and a remarkable amount of depth (compared to other games in the genre). Plus you can eat 100 hamburgers and become more powerful, which is pretty much the opposite of what happens in real life.

Actraiser (SNES, 1991, Enix)

I know I already talked about Actraiser a few days ago, but hey, now I’m doing it again. That other article sucked anyway.

Actraiser was a pretty big hit at the time it was released, as far as I can tell. It’s very fondly remembered, and it’s most people’s go-to example of how you can blend two diametrically opposed genres to make something great. But for some reason, after the somewhat disappointing sequel, which was fun but dropped the sim elements that made the original unique, the series dropped off the face of the planet.

This is unfortunate, because a new Actraiser would be phenomenal. I would happy with a 3D third-person action section (as long as it’s nothing like the “mash the X button until the game ends” mechanics of God of War) melded with a more intricate sim section. One thought, although I can’t fully decide how much I would like this, would be for a more RTS-influenced sim section. When I envision this, I see something like Genesis cult classic Herzog Zwei. You have your main angel unit, which can build stuff, carry units where they need to go, and also directly intervene as an offensive unit. You construct squads to go in and fight demons back to their lair, which you can have a special unit seal, thus killing off all the remaining monsters. You earn resources by killing demons off. Maybe that wouldn’t be the best direction to go in from a commercial point of view, but I think it would be fun. And isn’t that what’s truly important? Me?

Score: 10/10

I love Actraiser so much. It’s one of the first SNES games I had, and I used to play it all the time, even though I didn’t fully understand exactly what I was supposed to be doing in the sim sections. I figured it out pretty fast though, which I’m kinda proud of, since I was like 4 at the time.

I also need to note how amazing the music is. It’s one of the best soundtracks Yuzo Koshiro ever did. Koshiro is a grossly underrated composer. He’s in the same league as composers like Yasunori Shiono and Yoko Shimomura, in that he should really be regarded on the same level as composers like Nobuo Uematsu. The games he wrote for unfortunately weren’t as popular as a Final Fantasy or a Zelda, but the soundtrack is just as good. He also did the soundtracks for the Ys and Streets of Rage series, among other things. His work on Streets of Rage 2 is some of the most solid and atmospheric game music this side of Metroid.

The platforming sections are fun, although the controls are a little bit clunky. It’s forgivable for the most part, but it’s kind of irritating when you jump, bump into something, and fall into a pit of lava. They get really difficult in the later levels, and the new magic you earn in the sim sections add a bit of customization to the game.

The sim sections are where the game really shines, though. There’s never really been a sim game like it. It blends a shoot-em-up-style method of attack with an extremely simplified version of the city building you see in RTSs. It doesn’t sound like much, but it actually gets rather intense in later levels. It’s difficult to balance directing the building of an area with killing monsters before they can kill your villagers. It never gets frustrating though, which makes it pretty much the only sim game I’ve never had to rage quit out of. This is because I am kind of a bitch at RTS games. I mean, hell, I can’t even get a Zerg rush to work properly (kekeke).

Super Off-Road (Arcade/Several Consoles, 1989, Leland Corporation)

This is going to be quick, because there really isn’t much to say. Remember this game? Even if you don’t remember the name, if you went to a pizza place or a gas station between 1989 and 1994 you played this at least once. It’s a classic arcade cabinet. 4 steering wheels, placed awkwardly sticking out in the middle (I guess because they thought only 4-feet tall kids would be playing it).

Ordinarily I would pitch an idea for a new Super Off-Road game, but there’s really not anything terribly new that they could do. It pretty much has to be a top-down racing game. I suppose they could add in some stunts and expand the awesome truck customization, but other than that, there’s really not any way they could do it any differently than the original and make it the same game. I know this, because there were 3 sequels to the game that didn’t have anything in common with it except for the presence of trucks.

Score: 7/10

Super Off-Road was great at the time. There’s not a whole lot else to say. There weren’t a whole lot of games like it, and it was especially fun if you managed to round up a couple of friends to play with, although unfortunately no one gets to play as the silver truck. That’s Ivan “Ironman” Stewart. The game carried his endorsement, and, as is always the case with racing games, the endorser was granted superhuman abilities. It’s just like with Gran Turismo and its continued insistence (even when they promise to stop) that their licensed cars cannot be harmed in any way. Ironman drives 6 times faster than everyone else, has complete metaphysical control over his truck, and is probably sleeping with your girlfriend.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve missed putting up an article here recently. I promise I’m working on a long one. But this week has been particularly stressful, what with finals and work and all. I deserve a couple of days of playing Wave Race 64 and sleeping until noon. But I promise I’ll be back with a vengeance soon. And I’ll bring some special surprises. Just stay in tune. Key of C and whatnot.

Remember Nester? Probably not. He’s this guy:

This cocky motherfucker appeared in Nintendo Power until the end of 1993. He was the co-star of Howard & Nester, the epic comic adventures of Howard Phillips, Nintendo spokesectuive. Howard and Nester got into various problems (all of them caused by Nester being an overly self-assured dick) which inevitably led to them somehow being inside of a Nintendo. Then Howard would completely obliterate Nester at something. They were awesome, especially to kids, and they were a big part of making NP feel so personal. Eventually, when the real Howard Phillips left Nintendo (for JVC. Seriously?), the comic became Nester’s Adventures, and Nester went kind of crazy without Howard’s fatherly influence. For the most part, the comic kept its greatness.

However, some of them were completely insane, and that’s saying something for a comic about a 3 foot tall balding teenager with a perfectly circular head and Cloud Strife hair with schizophrenia. Just look at this one from issue 30:

Wouldn’t it be funny if this were the whole comic? I should just leave it out of context.

Here, we have Nester, who is apparently now a spiteful, murderous box car derby driver, destroying other kids’ cars for no particular reason other than that he takes sadistic pleasure in it. Not many kids would be tried as an adult for something they did in a box car derby, but I think this would be enough to convince a judge that the only place Nester is safe is in a cell guarded by 4 of the ass-whompingest guards the state has to offer. I swear, he’s supposed to be the hero of this comic. But look at the expression on his face in that last panel! He clearly takes very sick pleasure in watching these kids’ dreams go out in a storm of fire and shattered soap box.

Here we see the twist to the story, where the referee hits the “F-Zero Virtual Reality” button all homemade wooden cars have, Nester sees himself competing in the F-Zero tournament. Because logically, the best thing to do when you have a kid with violent tendencies is put him in an environment where he sees the cars he’s ramming as evil space aliens to defeat by ramming, with support and bonus tips on murder from a superhero. By the time his car is completely destroyed, the referee finally comes to his senses and realizes that he needs to get Nester into police hands now before he goes on a shooting spree in a shopping mall.

As crazy as this makes him look, Nester was still totally awesome. The comic ended in 1994, but Nester continued to crop up for years, in a couple of one-shot comics in Nintendo Power, disguised as “Lark” for some reason in Pilotwings 64, and even in his own game for the Virtual Boy, Nester’s Funky Bowling. It was, uh, funky.

I’d love to see Nester make a comeback. I know it’ll never happen, because honestly I don’t see any way it would work, but I’d love it if for absolutely no reason the comic began appearing in NP again and Nester started appearing in Chinatown Wars and Madworld. Judging from this comic, he’d be right at home.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I feel like a dick.

Yesterday, I posted my article about weird sports games. In it, I went on a wild, totally unrelated-to-Uniracers rant about Nintendo’s Play It Loud! campaign. I bashed Sega’s ad campaigns, in which they focused on Nintendo’s games as being for little kids. While I stand by my opinion that that ad campaign preyed on really stupid kids, I also attacked Sega for generally not having games as good as Nintendo, and specifically for having shitty 3rd party support. Well, I kind of stand by those statements too, but I still fucking love Sega. Well, 90s Sega anyway. 21st century Sega I can’t say the same thing about. Jesus. I just don’t understand how a company can manage to blow 60 years of very powerful good will in such a short amount of time.

Now, I understand that no one from Sega is reading this, and I also understand that my articles, despite my best efforts to the contrary, do not travel back in time and unleash my rage on people that haven’t worked in the games industry in 20 years. Furthermore, I realize that none of you give a shit how I feel about Sega’s ads in 1992. Regardless, I would still feel awful if I bashed the people that brought me Vectorman, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Phantasy Star without proper context. This is my love letter to Sega.

My experience with Sega actually began when I was lucky enough to get a Master System. I don’t remember at all when I got it. All I have from early on are vague memories of Zillion 2, Double Dragon and Gangster Town.

I liked Zillion 2 and Gangster Town (and I still do. I still think the Master System light gun, the Light Phaser, is the best I’ve ever used), but I loved Double Dragon. I know, I know; everybody does. But not everybody played the Master System version. The NES version of DD is good, but the Master System version is spectacular. Everybody who has played it typically agrees; it has much better graphics, the controls are smoother, it doesn’t have the mystifying level up system of the NES version, and it can handle more enemies on screen at once. Plus, you have infinite continues (until the final stage anyway), which helps with that bitch-ass bridge in the third level.

Although these are the only games I remember having as a kid for the Master System, when I got a little bit older I found several other games that I had apparently had always had stashed away in a box in my closet. Among them were Afterburner and The Ninja. Those weren’t necessarily treasured childhood memories like the others were, but they were solid, fun games. I later got addicted to the arcade version of Afterburner after my local arcade got the totally sweet motion-ride cabinet (I’m not sure exactly how they got a working version of this cabinet in 2003, but I’m not complaining). I bring these games up, though, because they demonstrate one of my favorite things about Sega games: the colors. With all of their older arcade games, the Master System, the Game Gear, and even the Genesis, Sega had a very particular way of designing their games to use unique, instantly identifiable colors. Just look at Fantasy Zone:

A lot of Sega’s games looked like this, for several years. They’re still so pretty in so many ways, with the thick sprite outlines and pastel colors. Sega kept this up for a long, long time, pretty much until they started trying to make their games look 3D. Around that time, games like Sonic 3D Blast and Vectorman demonstrated the graphical problems with the Genesis, mainly that everything looked waaaaay too fucking dark. But until about 1995, everything they did managed to look so uniquely colorful that they didn’t have to rival anybody else; their graphics stood in a league of their own.

Another big part of my love for Sega was the mystique everything they did had. In Nintendo, I felt like I had a personal relationship. They communicated with me by strategy guides, TV shows, books, print ads, and of course Nintendo Power. With Sega, though, I didn’t have much to go on. All I knew is that they did what Nintendidn’t. If Nintendo was the cool camp counselor who got down on one knee to talk on my level, Sega was the mysterious suited man who bought me candy, smiled, and walked away without saying anything. Sure, they seemed to have my best interests in mind, but why? They always had ads, but they focused only on the games, with only the briefest of connections to the brand (“SEGA!”). They had an official magazine, but it was apparently more elusive than Bigfoot’s ghost; I’ve still never seen a single copy of it. Sega’s mysterious slogans (like “Welcome to the Next Level”), forbidding parental advisory ratings, and attractive, modern fonts (no, I’m not being sarcastic, dickmouth) didn’t attract me the same way Nintendo’s more personal ads did; they mystified me, made me feel curious and slightly afraid. To pull a feeling like that out of me while simultaneously telling me how fun playing as a super fast blue hedgehog with ‘tude was is pretty impressive even now. The only other company that has been able to do that since was Sony (with its URNOTE ads), and they ended up forgetting about that mysterious and forbidding attitude with the PS2, and then taking it waaaaaay too far with the PS3 (Seriously, look at those ads. It’s like they completely forgot what they were even supposed to be advertising and just decided to try to scare children shitless so they’d never buy their products. Fortunately no one else bought them either, so hopefully they learned their lesson).

But of course, the biggest thing Sega did to ingratiate themselves to me was make excellent games. The merits of Phantasy Star, Virtua Fighter, and of course the Sonic series are well documented, but Sega had a lot of fantastic one-offs too. Spider-Man vs. the Kingpin was the first superhero game that really captured the feeling of being a superhero, and was a good game to boot. Likewise, Spider-Man, The Video Game, the arcade beat-em-up, is one of my favorites in the genre and brings back warm, fuzzy memories both of being taken to play it at the local gas station/hot dog shack (see, here in Tennessee, instead of street food vendors, we have gas station diners. They’re pretty much two sides of the same coin, except our diners have arcade games, whereas street vendors have questionable health standards) and learning more about it as I was trying emulation for the first time (specifically, learning that I couldn’t play it in MAME, because the system it ran on, the Sega Arcade 32 board, wasn’t emulated yet). Chakan, despite the bizarre poses the main character could make (you could make him look like he was directing a plane landing on a runway) and the incredible degree of difficulty (the real final boss is so hard he’s thought to be essentially impossible to beat without cheating, and Sega apparently though so too, because they never programmed the ending you’re supposed to get after beating him), was a really fun and unique platformer, and was really dark compared to other games of the time. Shinobi and its progeny are some of the best run-and-gun platforming available for any system, particularly Shadow Dancer, with its odd-yet-charming dog attack mechanic. Comix Zone is possibly the most underrated, and definitely one of the best, beat-em-ups ever. Hell, even Vectorman, which I was just bashing 2 paragraphs ago is a great game.

So I’m sorry, Sega. I didn’t mean to be a jerk. I love you, and I want you to take me to the next level every night. That’s why I got a Sega CDX. This has already become one of the most valuable things I own, and I only paid $100 for it. It routinely goes for anywhere from $350-$1200 online. But I don’t care about the value. Well, maybe I care a little. Or a lot. But regardless, I’ll never sell it. I’ve spent the last couple of nights playing Sonic CD and a shitton of Genesis games, and they still hold the same mystique they’ve always held. I love you Sega. I hope you really are developing a new console.

P.S. Sorry I didn’t get to the Dreamcast. That’s gonna require a whole article to itself. Someday. ;D

One of the advantages video game have over sports is that video games can imitate and build upon sports, but sports can’t do the same for video games. You can have a video game where, instead of just playing football, you’re playing some kind of crazyass murder football featuring the Visigoths vs. the Vikings in 621 A.D.. With sports, however, you can’t have a game where you simulate with a ball sieging a castle on the Moon with a dozen of the rough n’ tumblest anti-hero space marines this side of every shitty 3rd person shooter made in the last 10 years. As awesome as it is that games let us experience what our favorite American pastimes would be like with gratuitous violence (most of them would be like the NBA is currently), sometimes games go a bit over the “(sport) with a twist” category. In fact, these games put such a twist on sports you’d think they were the voodoo zombie of Fats Domino.

Kirby’s Dream Course

Sport: Mini Golf

Ok, granted, mini golf is already a weird take on golf. But Kirby’s Dream Course takes the concept of putting balls in holes to crazier new heights than Tiger Woods, Happy Gilmore, and the entire porn industry put together. And honestly, even though you can see the mini golf elements in the game, it’s really more of a physics game than anything else. Yes, that’s right, a modern-style physics game. 9 years before Half-Life 2. Just look at this video:

These shots are beautiful, and show off the crazy mix of physics and physics-altering special powers that make this game so fun. It’s also kind of depressing to think that in 15 years we still haven’t been able to create a better physics engine for putting than Nintendo came up with for a zany, cartoonish take on mini golf.

Uniracers

Sport: Cycling? Stunt Cycling? Is Unicycling a sport?

First, an interlude:

I remember Uniracers mostly as being a big feature of the Play It Loud! campaign Nintendo ran. It looked crazy, although even at the time I couldn’t figure out how riderless unicycles doing stunts in an existential clown hell fits with the “extreme” image Nintendo was trying to foster. In truth, a big part of the campaign was Nintendo combating Sega’s “grown up” image. In the early 90s, most exchanges between the companies went like this:

Sega: Oh, look, it’s the Super NES. Whatcha playin’? Faggot Brothers 4? That’s a great game, if you’re a dick-humping homo emperor!

Nintendo: No, I’m playing The Legend of Zelda.

Sega: Oh, yeah, that game where you’re a gay blond baby! That game’s pretty good, even though ONLY BABIES LIKE IT! Boy, Nintendo, you’re lucky your own game developers are good! Otherwise you’d be screwed!

Nintendo: Actually, I just finished playing Donkey Kong Country, Super Castlevania IV and Contra III and was thinking of playing Final Fantasy II, Killer Instinct, or Actraiser.

Sega: W.. well… those are all baby games! For BABIES! OUR Mortal Kombat has blood!

Nintendo: Our Mortal Kombat doesn’t have wonky controls. Additionally, our Mortal Kombat 2 beats the holy shit out of yours.

Sega: Um… yeah, but… um… we have arcade-perfect hits like Ghouls n’ Ghosts!

Nintendo: We have games that are superior to their arcade versions, like Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts.

Sega: Well… um… well… ALL YOUR FANS ARE BABIES!

Nintendo: Sigh. *goes back to playing fucking Zelda, for God’s sake*

Going into the mid-90s, however, somebody did a poll of some very, very stupid children, and what they found was that really dumb kids didn’t like to admit they played the SNES because they saw it as being for “little kids.” Nowadays, we know this is retarded, and no one falls for that argument anymore (haha, just kidding), but at the time, Nintendo took it seriously. This, in turn, led to the creation of the Play It Loud! campaign. (Because I grew up the 90s, I am forbidden by law to leave out the exclamation mark in that phrase.) Basically, they showed off how superior the SNES was to the Genesis while trying to associate it with youth culture. From it came the special colored Game Boys, the Virtual Boy, some incredible games, and some ridiculous commercials (be careful with that last one, it’s fucking gross. You’d probably be better off just not clicking it. It still makes my stomach churn).  A lot of people point to the Play It Loud! campaign as a low point in Nintendo’s history, and while I’ve covered how untrue that is from a game release standpoint, I guess I kind of see what they’re saying. The ads were pretty hollow, I guess. I dunno. I don’t think Nintendo should have been trying to compete with Sega on that front, but because that hit campaign right at my prime marketing age, I just can’t hate it. I remember everything from this era very fondly, and it still warms my heart. Most of the people who chide Nintendo for their advertising from this time are the same people who still talk about how awesome Transformers and G.I. Joe were, and those were basically 30 minute long toy commercials. And I really don’t have a problem with that! I’m old enough to love those shows too. But no one acknowledges that transparent attempts to advertise to children existed in their generation, because they were in the prime market at that time. You can look down on Play It Loud! with a holier-than-thou attitude if you want, but the fact is, my generation is reaching their 20s, and we’re about to take over the internet. We’re going to be looking back on the commercials we grew up with as fondly as you look upon the ones you grew up with. They made us as cool now as He-Man made you in the 80s. So why don’t we call off the dogs and learn to take things at face value?

Anyway, what was I talking about?

Uniracists? What the fuck is that?

Oh. Right.

Uniracers honestly wasn’t a game I got to play when I was little. I always thought it looked cool, but I was lucky enough to live near a rental shop with a crazy good selection, so I was too busy renting other, better games to get it.

Ok, that’s not really fair. Uniracers is a good game. It’s just, 0there were so many good games at that time, and sorry, but Mega Man X and Earthbound will always beat out any racing game for me. It’s a very, very weird game, though. It tells the story of sentient unicycles who exist in an abstract series of multicolored tracks and loops. They’re thrown into courses by an unknown entity, and catcalled and hollered by invisible, omniscient hillbillies to do tricks and move as quickly as possible. And you move fucking fast. To tell the truth, I actually have a lot of trouble playing the game even now, because it just moves so quickly. I once played the game the last level of the game, and it moved so fast that everything turned into a blur. When I could see again, I found myself forced into a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1930. This was a big part of why Uniracers was released (to show off the system’s speed, not to assassinate Hitler). Nintendo wanted to prove what bullshit “blast processing” was (and it was) by showing that not only could it move as fast as Sonic, it could move far, far faster, for better or worse.

Plus, you moved faster as you did stunts, which was not only weird, but would pretty much be the wet dream of every person in charge of licensing extreme sports to be made as video games. Too bad they used the idea on unicycle racing, which, as extreme as it is, is too associated with clowns to be marketable.

Bonus trivia: This game was made by DMA Design, which is now Rockstar North, which of course is now famous for the GTA series. This fulfills my legal obligation to relate this piece of trivia, per Federal Statute 611-B, which mandates that, upon reviewing a game by DMA Designs, all journalists and writers much relate, in Paul Harvey fashion, “the rest of the story,” explaining what DMA Design eventually became.

Bonus bonus trivia: I met Billy Thomson, who worked for DMA and Rockstar creating GTA and GTA 2, and was also lead designer on Crackdown and Crackdown 2, at PAX East 2010. This isn’t related to Uniracers. I just like to tell people that.

Super Dodge Ball

Sport: Dodge Ball, specifically the super kind

Seanbaby already pretty well covered this game, so I’ll keep this brief. In fact, to sum it up in a word, Super Dodge Ball is dick-yankingly good. Actually, on second thought, ew. Anyway, the entire Kunio series, which also included such classics as River City Ransom and Nintendo World Cup, was actually pretty amazing (more on those later, on a day where I haven’t been writing for hours). Super Dodge Ball is one of the weirdest entries in the series, though. Apparently, in Kunio’s world, dodgeball is a blood sport, a brutal, murderous game of back and forth played by only the bravest, or most foolhardy, escaped lunatics with psychic dodgeball powers. The USA team starring you travels from country to country killing a veritable rainbow of minorities before finally ending up before the sinister USSR dodgeball team. Since SDD was released in the 80s, you probably already know that this means some serious shit is about to go down. The Russkies take forever to kill, and their brutally trained soldier-players are out for capitalist blood. But the real weirdness is when you beat them: while cheering about your victory, you suddenly enter an odd vortex. When you come out the other end, you are stunned to see standing before you… YOURSELVES. That’s right, part of a dodgeball tournament in the Kunio world is apparently the same thing as the force training Yoda gives Luke in Return of the Jedi. After vanquishing your own dark side, you then are transported to paradise! Haha, just kidding. You actually go back to soviet Russia, where ball dodges you.

This is going to be a short article, mostly because having to fucking rewrite yesterday’s article took up so much of my time, and I really am busy with finals coming up next week.

However, it will make up for the length with complete lunacy. You see, I have a “problem” with Mario Paint. Actually, not just with Mario Paint, but with any game that allows you even the slightest degree of creativity. Whether it’s a game show that allows you type in your own answers, or a completely freeform creative application game, I go completely fucking bonkers with it. I’m talking really crazy. Like, this shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S crazy.

Look at this drawing I did in Mario Paint:

What is that? What is going on there? Why is Mario’s head so big? Why is there a ladder to a terrifying God? Why are that cactus and that elephant playing a prank on that Koopa Troopa? And, for that matter, why did they turn him into a tiger as a prank? That seems a bit overboard. And how did they do it? Cacti and elephi can’t turn things into tigers. Were they granted this ability by Mardok, Lord of Terror over there? And seriously, why is Mario’s head so big? What is he even doing there? He doesn’t belong there.

I do this every time I’m given any degree of freedom in a game; it’s always a terrifying look into my mind. And apparently I’m not the only one who does that:

That’s terrible! And yet I would probably do something worse.

Maybe that’s why we’re given godawful shit games like Dante’s Inferno instead of anything creative. Maybe the game industry is trying to save us from ourselves,  before we turn each others’ skin into lampshades.

I listen to a LOT of video game music. I have a huge collection of soundtracks, many of which I’ve had to convert to MP3 myself, and probably about 2/3, maybe even 3/4, of my iPod is filled with video game music. There are a lot of different reasons for this. I’ve mentioned before that nostalgia is a huge part of my personality, and as a result, listening to the music from games I always used to play brings me back to a happier time in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty happy right now, it’s just that my childhood fucking ruled. I always paid very close attention to the music in games. As I got older, I translated my love of this music into a fascination with understanding how to convey what I like about music as a whole to others. Despite this, I still can’t quite explain exactly what elements of the types of music I like make me like them. I can point to examples that demonstrate everything I like about game music, and music in general for that matter, but I can’t quite describe them. Partially as an attempt to explain that, and partially as an attempt to fill my article quota for today (I know, I’m cynical), I’m going to try to analyze my three favorite composers (in no particular order), who all happen to be video game composers: Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, and Yoshihiro Sakaguchi.  This probably won’t be particularly funny, because I’m very bad at making jokes about my idols, but I hope at the very least it will be interesting. With that, let’s start with the most logical beginning:

Koji Kondo

Everybody knows Koji Kondo. Everybody. Even if they don’t know him by name. As the composer for the Super Mario Bros. series, Koji Kondo has composed some of the greatest and most memorable music of all time. Nobody who has ever heard the Super Mario Bros. theme forgets it. Hell, Nobuo Uematsu once said that it deserves to be the Japanese national anthem. Composing that one song is basis enough to be called a legendary composer. And yet, the Mario series is only a small part of his legacy. He’s composed many, many other songs for which he would deserve the title of legend.

For example, the main theme from The Legend of Zelda. This is perhaps the most epic song ever made. In just a few notes, you know how big the adventure is. You just know, no matter which version you’re playing, no matter how complex or simple the game. When you hear that music, your imagination takes over, and you’re no longer manipulating a small, blocky set of pixels poking a red bug with a triangle. You’re traversing the Hyrulian landscape, deftly avoiding the projectiles of an Octorok before plunging your sword into its back. I can’t name a single piece of music I’ve ever heard that can create such powerful, imaginative images. When Zelda games started looking better, I loved it, but I never got the feeling that I was seeing something I had never seen before, because that one, short, simple piece of music set the stage for my imagination to see everything Shigeru Miyamoto wanted me to see. The enhanced graphics had nothing new to offer me; I had seen the world they wanted to show me. This is the exact purpose a composer should fill, and in my opinion, very, very few people have filled it as well as Koji Kondo.

Yoshihiro Sakaguchi

This is probably the only name on this list that a lot of my readers won’t immediately recognize. It’s a shame, too, because every gamer knows his music. Yoshihiro Sakaguchi is the composer of the first two and last two Mega Man games, as well as Street Fighter I and II. He also composed the soundtrack for Capcom’s NES game Ducktales, which, while not quite as glamorous as Street Fighter or Mega Man, has one of the greatest soundtracks of all time.

The music for the Moon level of Ducktales absolutely floors me. Any gamer of a certain age, whether they played this game or not, will instantly be transported back to the NES era when they hear this song. That’s because, more than any other video game composer I’ve ever heard, Sakaguchi really knew how program music for the NES. The other two composers on this list did great work in spite of their limitations; he succeeded because of them. The limited sound technology the NES had is usually considered a primitive hindrance, but to Sakaguchi it was a boon. He especially took full advantage of how great the swells and bends the synthesizers could make sounded. This is clearly demonstrated in most of his music from Mega Man, but is at its best in the track from Ducktales. This song also presents an example of the problem I mentioned in the intro. I can explain how much I love this song, but I can’t quite explain what it is about it I love so much. It’s at once heroic, spacey, and nostalgic (and not just because I grew up with it, because I actually only owned the sequel growing up). The main part of the song has the sound of the ending song of an NES game, that kind of triumphant but backward-looking sound. This is tied for my favorite track for the NES with another Sakaguchi composition, the Elec Man theme from the first Mega Man (more on that tomorrow).

Nobuo Uematsu

When I first started playing games in 1990, my favorite games music-wise were the first Mega Man, the Mario and Zelda games (obviously), and Blaster Master (I know that sounds weird, but the music from that game was incredible). Later on, I got into other, more complex stuff, especially Square’s RPG music. Square’s name is virtually synonymous with video game music, and for good reason. This brings us to my first favorite composer: Nobuo Uematsu. Uematsu is, speaking objectively, probably the finest digital composer of all time, and has gotten praise from all over the damn place, including an article in Time Magazine (who, despite obviously respecting his music, still treat him with the “DERP DERP DERP COMPUTAR GAAAAAMES! KIDS LOVE THEM! BOY GAMES HAVE COME A LONG WAY SINCE PAC-MAN SPACE INVADER! ALSO REMEMBER PONG?” novelty attitude they always treat anything related to games with) praising him as one of the top 100 innovators in music. It’s easy to see why. Nobuo is proficient in pretty much every conceivable kind of music, from opera to pop to metal to techno to choral to classical to fucking ragtime. He’s written a song in just about every style I can think of, in many cases several, and I can hum just about anyone of them from memory. He’s one of just a handful of composers who have written pieces that are not only good music but that can stand up to being looped infinitely. His music is incredibly mood-setting and never gets repetitive. Much of his music also exudes a strong element of mono no aware, a sense of awareness to the impermanence of all things and a feeling of bittersweet sadness at their passing, something like the feeling of coming to terms with losing a loved one. While Aeris’s Theme from Final Fantasy VII is the most often cited example, there are several tracks from Final Fantasy VI that capture the same feeling, perhaps even better.

To set the stage: one of the (many) brilliant things about Final Fantasy VI is the way the entire game is presented much in the way of an opera. I’ve never heard anyone else mention this, and I’m not sure why. There are several similarities between the presentation of an operatic story and the presentation of this game. There’s a large of archetypal characters (the brave protector, the tragic hero, the troubled loner, the brave knight) that show up in several operas, and the overall story and arcs are very similar as well. But in particular, the way the music is used is very similar to opera. Important characters and places have their own themes, Wagnerian leitmotifs that make it easy to tell what character is important in a scene or setting. These themes are often spun into different variations. These are the tracks I was speaking of before, which demonstrate such a palpable feeling of bittersweet sadness. Songs like Forever Rachel (a variation on Locke’s theme), Epitaph (Setzer’s theme) and Coin Song (Figaro/Edgar and Sabin’s theme) do a remarkable job of conveying the particular emotions expressed by those characters in the respective scenes they’re used in. That’s what is so striking about his work; it can be at times grandiose, funny, touching, and exciting, but no matter what, it always perfectly captures the mood of the scene.

Many people still consider video game music to be a novelty, and not just the people you would think. I know plenty of people that clearly enjoy the music but don’t listen to it because it’s “not real music,” something to be avoided because it doesn’t sound the same as what they usually listen to. For a while I thought the same thing, but once I really started listening to the music, the differentiation between game music and “real” music disappeared. I could no longer tell the difference. There was just music. Now, I pick my music to listen to by how much I enjoy it, and one only needs to look at my last.fm profile to see what kind of music really speaks to me.

If you’re wondering why an article wasn’t posted yesterday, your guess is as good as mine. An article was written yesterday, and certainly I hit the publish button, but for some reason yesterday there was no new article up. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but there’s an article I wrote yesterday that seems to have just vanished in the haze. But don’t fret! (May god help you if I see you fret.) There will be two articles today. And no, smartass, this will not be one of them.

Mr. Mayor,

I’m writing to you about a problem that I feel is very serious in Simcity. Why are there so many plane crashes? It seems I cannot go a single day without my work commute cut off by the burning wreckage of a 747. I have lived in several towns, including Metro City, Willamette, Silent Hill, and Tampa Bay, and while all these towns had their problems (particularly Tampa Bay), none of them, or any other town I’ve even heard of, has had a problem with frequent plane crashes. Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that these plane crashes began literally the same day you took office, and only seem to stop when you go out of town. I am especially concerned about this issue because Simcity doesn’t even have an airport. I fear to question a man who seems to be able to pull airplanes from the sky, but what connection, if any, do you have to these crashes? Are you Jacob? Am I a candidate?

Sincerely,
42 - Fischer

Mayor,

I would like to address the current state of our transit system. Namely, that the roads in our town cause a 6% increase in the level of pollution. I would like you to completely dismantle the road system in our town and replace it with railroads. As you have complied with my previous requests to build 6 nuclear reactors  to fit the energy needs of our 20,000 citizens and to cover every last area of earth in our city’s zoning area with park ground, I feel assured you will respond to this request in kind.

Thank you,
Brian Davis

Dear Mayor… ???,

I didn’t vote for you. In fact, although I like your parks intitative, and therefore would have loved to have voted for you, I didn’t see your name on the ballot. Or on any campaign advertisements. Or even on the city register. I can’t seem to find any proof of exactly who you are, and everyone just seems to call you “mayor.” Why do you not have a name?

Signed,
James Phillips

To: Mayor
From: Advisor
Re: Suggestions

This city needs a massive overhaul of its power industry. Please replace the old coal plants with nuclear reactors.

Crime and fires are too rampant in this city. Please increase police and firefighting budgets by at least 600%.

Simcity could also use a new stadium. The 2 we have are nice, but you know.

We could also use a brand new international airport. Also, a massive new seaport.

The city only has 4 amusement parks. Please build more.

We should build a massive, gleaming, solid gold statue of Mario, from the popular Super Mario Bros. video game.

Also, many citizens are not happy about the level of taxes in this city.

Let me know when these problems are solved.

Thank you,
Dr. Wright

Dear Mayor Dong Wrangler,

This is Mike Haggar, and I’m pretty fucking pissed. I’m the mayor of Metro City. I know you know that, because I saw your note referring to me as “Mayor Faggar.” Do you know who the last person that called me that was? It was state senator Todd Burkett. Oh, you’ve never heard of him? That’s probably because I convinced my friends in the probate court to put out an order changing his name to “Baron Fagcock von SerialRapist.” His wife left him, he lost his re-election campaign, he couldn’t get hired anywhere, and now he sits under the bridge on the interstate drinking varnish. Oh, wait, one of my aides just let me know that he jumped off a building. Serves him right.

So I heard you have problems with giant lizards attacking your town! You better hope one of them takes out your fucking house, because so help me god, if I find out where you live, I’m going to eat you, shit you into every toilet in your house, and then light the septic tank on fire.

Your pal,
Mike Haggar

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