Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.
It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.
Final Fantasy IV was a masterpiece of soap operatic storytelling. Characters joined, left, fell in love, died, were amnesiacs, and were under mind control. It was a mess, but it was an entertaining tale of redemption for an evil man and his love for his woman.
Unfortunately we still had this very strange story anomaly where you’d play through about 90% of the game thinking one guy was your enemy (Golbez, in this case) only to find out that the real culprit was some other bloke (Zemus/Zeromus, in this case). While we can forgive the weak characterization in these early games, FF IV started to reach the saturation point for this nonsense. Sure, we love fighting evil, but wouldn’t it be nice to not just have a quick “Oh, this guy was mind controlling everyone” kind of thing be pulled on us?
So Zemus/Zeromus happens to be a Lunarian, or a dude from the moon, who’s decided that living on the moon blows. To fix this problem, he’s decided to kill everyone on the planet and take the planet for the Lunarians to live on. The other Lunarians are, surprisingly, not on board, so it’s up to the crew to take this sucker down.
Evil Rating:
He’s evil, but not evil enough to want to get his own hands dirty. 99% of the evil he causes is realized through his mind controlled puppets. I’ll give him points for wanting to kill everyone on the planet, but he’s gotta lose some for laziness. That and he totally gets owned by the heroes and has to let the embodiment of his hatred be the final boss.
7/10 (mostly because his evil intentions raze an entire town, kill multiple player characters, and are cool, but he loses points for the totally lame mind control plot)
Cool Rating:
Well he gets cool points for being from the moon. He’s also too cool for school, preferring to make others do his dirty work while he chills out on the moon. It doesn’t get much cooler than that, except that he gets owned pretty easily and has to unleash his hatred upon the world to actually be formidable.
Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.
It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.
Final Fantasy III spearheaded the amazingly innovative, and often imitated, job system that sneaked its way into every other Final Fantasy game starting with III, was enhanced in V, and up until Final Fantasy VII (I claim that materia is a modified job-system). It was also utilized in Final Fantasy X-2 via dress spheres. Unfortunately for us, it had yet to refine its villain characterization, resulting in a final boss who you basically don’t see or even know about for the vast majority of the game.
The actual final boss of Final Fantasy III is about as nebulous as they come (sorry in advance for this terrible pun). The Cloud of Darkness is a chaotic force that seeks to end the world after it was thrown out of balance by the light and dark warriors and crystals. She (it has female appearance) actually kills the light warriors at one point (the player characters) and it takes the sacrifice of the dark warriors to allow the light ones to even have a chance to kill her.
It’s a tough battle, being an old school FF game and all, but good job composition will allow the team to take her down and save the world.
Evil Rating:
She’s a force of nature hell-bent on ending existence. That being said, what Final Fantasy villain isn’t? You don’t see her until the end of the game and most of the evil situations going on in the world are not even close to her or her minion Xande’s responsibility.
1/10 (remember, wanting to end the universe is not that evil in FF games)
Cool Rating:
She’s an amorphous, naked, green cloud of evil. Lame. She does kill the Light Warriors though, so kudos for that.
It’s probably too early to start calling me Nostradamus (we’ll have to wait until the regular season of baseball ends to know just how good I am), but if you remember this post I mentioned that Mario RPG’s launch on the VC in PAL territories would spearhead a US release. Lo and behold, Mario RPG, one of the greatest Mario games, SNES games, and RPGs in gaming history.
It’s too bad that Square Enix won’t be releasing any of its other landmark SNES RPGs on VC, preferring to milk tons of money out of players with remakes (which we like) and ports (which we find a bit annoying, but kind of like anyway). Go out and buy Mario RPG and let’s hope that Earthbound hits the system soon.
Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
As you all know by now, I love Chrono Trigger. The prospect of this new port of the SNES classic to the DS has me positively salivating at the thought. It all sounds super cool that I’ll be able to own another cart of this fantastic game and that it will have those nifty little improvements made to it.
Then I look at the new Final Fantasy IV remake released on the DS. It’s not just a port like Chrono Trigger is, it’s a full-blown reworking of the game adding 3D, cutscenes, and even voice acting and I can’t help but feel just a wee bit cheated. FF IV DS launched this past Tuesday for $39.99, since Square Enix knows that they’re the only company that can get away with such exorbitantly priced DS games, but I can more or less justify paying that much for a game that is significantly improved over its SNES iteration. The new version has a retooled difficulty level and added content as well, so, while pricey, it’s still a fully-featured new game of sorts.
How can I justify paying for a straight port of the best SNES game out there when I know that the company is capable of putting some effort into coming out with an improved version? Chrono Trigger may be an absolute classic, but it would definitely be served by improved graphics or even a more significant modification like with Persona 3: FES. In that game Atlus actually added on an epilogue of extensive length and substance.
It’s not exactly out of the question to have rereleases of this nature in Japan. Nintendo as been releasing updated versions of its NES Mario games since the days of the SNES with Super Mario All-Stars. I suppose it brings with it a chance to give a new generation an opportunity to play games which are far beyond what is playable without the Virtual Console or similar service, but I just can’t help but feel cheated knowing that I will inevitably pay quite a large sum of money for yet another marginally improved version of Chrono Trigger, despite my intense love for the game.
I guess there may be a silver lining to the rather lackluster effort involved in this DS rerelease: the hopeful high sales of the rerelease may lead to a proper sequel to Chrono Trigger.
It seems that one of my favorite PC games from way back when is about to make a return with The Humans: Meet the Ancestors. A Lemmings-style game in which you guide a tribe of cavemen to the goal, trying to have them not die, The Humans provided hours of fun for me back on our junky Packard Bell until we lost the anti-piracy copy card.
I can’t say that I like the new Humans art style. Here’s a peek at the way the old game looked from some foreign TV station:
The new style is similar, but lacks some of the character of the old style. Oh well, I just might pick up the game anyway when it comes out.
DS Trailer:
PC Trailer (very similar, but spiffier in graphics and with concept art at the end):
Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.
Two videos for your viewing pleasure today.
The first is the debut trailer for a port of one of my favorite games of all time, Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger DS is (kind of unfortunately, I want a sequel) a direct port with an added dungeon, wireless battle capability, and two-screen utilization, but the changes have yet to be seen.
The next video is for an upcoming console baseball game that regular readers of my blog just might know a thing or two about. The US debut trailer for MLB PP 2008 shows the in-game opening and highlights some of the new changes.
If you watched the video, you may have noticed a certain much talked about Cubs outfielder running back to catch a hit ball…
Yeah, I know I told you that this would be posted last weekend, but things got a little hectic with my travel plans, so I decided to hold off until the day before the big finale for this one. I know you’re all on the edge of your seats waiting for the announcement, so let’s get right to it.
The final game of this category comes from a dying genre whose brief golden age drove the development of narrative, graphics, and voice acting. Here are some more clues:
1. The recently VERY troubled studio that produced this game used to put out tons of games in this genre, but has since abandoned the genre to produce games based on the very lucrative movie licenses it owns. If you’re sharp, you already know the company and genre I’m referring to at this point.
2. The protagonist of this game has the unique ability to hold his breath for 10 minutes at a time. Astute readers already know the series, but now need better clues to narrow down the game.
3. This picture will help the less savvy readers figure out the series.
4. Final clue: This game essentially retcons the previous games because the original series creator was not at the helm. Hence, the actual secret is still unknown to this day.
Our one and only runner-up in this category is the incredible Lucasarts classic, The Curse of Monkey Island
Runner-up The Curse of Monkey Island
I should clarify a few points before I get into the CMI love, namely regarding the series creator, Ron Gilbert, and the last great Lucasarts adventure game, Grim Fandango. Ron left Lucasarts after Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge along with the other writers of the series, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. So, as mentioned before, the remaining team members were more or less forced to retcon and/or disregard story put forth by Gilbert, Schafer, and Grossman to further the plot of their own game. I will openly admit that, despite the awesomeness of CMI, MI2 is actually the best in the series, story and scenario-wise, but that doesn’t mean it should beat CMI on this list, in my opinion.
Also important to mention, to me, is the superb Grim Fandango. Written by the brilliant Tim Schafer, GF is one of the best adventure games I’ve ever played with an epic, funny story, great characters, and an amazing setting but it just doesn’t meet the intangible bar that CMI set, mainly due to the fact that it left less of an impression on me.
CMI just has something about it that will instantly make you love Guybrush Threepwood, so even though it can be beaten in individual categories like the story of MI2 or the setting and plot of GF, CMI is just more fun to play.
No doubt feeling some pressure from the shift in graphical style of the King’s Quest series with their seventh installment, CMI shifted to a cartoony, almost Disney look with its portrayal of Guybrush and the world around him. Gone were pixelated sprites, in were scenes and animations geared toward making you think you were playing a cartoon. If you really think about it, we’ve had cutscenes since the early days of video gaming, but most of those were rendered in-engine (nowadays some series do still render cutscenes in-engine (Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid) as a stylistic choice). CMI featured fully animated cutscenes in a seamlessly integrated art style to the in-engine graphics. Needless to say, it was and, to a degree, still is a beautiful game that makes the player feel like he’s controlling a cartoon, ages before cel-shading would start to become mainstream.
More important to the in-game immersion was the choice of Dominic Armato to voice Guybrush Threepwood. The prior two games were still a little early in the computer game timeline to feature voice acting, but I honestly believe that Gilbert, Schafer, and Grossman would be hard-pressed to find a voice actor better than Dominic Armato to voice the lovable pirate. Say what you will about the direction the series has headed since the loss of the original brains behind the series, but Armato was the best man for the job. His voice just jives with the goofy, inept, clueless, and sarcastic nature of Guybrush so well that it’s hard to skip dialog even the nth time through the game just cause you want to hear him say the same goofy lines the umpteenth time. The rest of the cast is also well-voiced, but Guybrush is the standout role, as he should be.
Plot idiocy aside, the writers for CMI definitely didn’t slack in the humor department, with snappy one-liners filling the game from opening to closing coupled with sight gags, brilliantly written insult swordfights (complete with rhyming!), and the only in-game song that could possibly give “Still Alive” a run for its money. CMI had it all in the days when the adventure game was fresh, fun, and, most importantly, still considered a viable genre. Aside from Telltale games, it seems that no one is interested in adventure games any more. That being said, it’s not like today’s gamers aren’t being tricked into playing them nowadays, between the Phoenix Wright games, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and Hotel Dusk: Room 215 at least plenty of Nintendo DS gamers are still able to get a small adventure game fix. With Ron Gilbert getting Hothead games to publish DeathSpank, hopefully we’ll see a bit of an increase in other adventure games. Sure would be nice, I miss the genre.
Here’s one of the best in-game songs you will ever see, complete with some Insult Swordfighting:
A little fun at the expense of the KQ series:
There you have it, another era summed up in a few games. I’m not saying that these are the only good games, just that they represent some of the best. Be sure to tune in tomorrow to see my favorite games of the current generation.
“It used to be, if you found a key in a Zelda game and you didn’t know what a key did, you were either mentally handicapped or you reached for the instruction manual. I suppose, eventually, someone in Nintendo’s R&D did a big Powerpoint presentation, with the cooperation of a local psychiatrist, proving — quite logically — that people absent-minded enough to forget what a key does have probably also lost both the box and instruction manual of the game they’re playing. As an employee in a videogame company’s marketing division myself, I could put up a convincing presentation to explain that we should probably just explain once what a key does, and then leave it up to these instruction-manual misplacers to either remember that, or figure it out anew. If anyone attacked my views and said that we can’t shut out the morons and the idiots just because most people — not to mention most gamers — aren’t either, I would jump up onto the boardroom table and scream, what the fuck do you do if the person loses the fucking cartridge, huh? What the fuck do you do then! Would you give out a free game and console to a shaky kid who showed up at a game shop and said that first he lost the manual, then the box, then he forgot what keys did, then he lost his lunch money, then he lost the game cartridge, and then his DS? There’s a certain line, separating the place where enough is enough and the place where enough is more than enough, and incessant “You got a key!” messages, as a habit, is at least a couple steps into “more than enough” country.”
The time: Thanksgiving 2007
The place: My parent’s house out in Florida
The game: Super Mario Galaxy
I may have some of the details wrong, of course, but I distinctly remember the conversation. Shortly after receiving a new game and liberating it from its plastic prison, I immediately popped that sucker into my Wii and started playing the game, eager to see if this was as good as all the critics claimed. Eric saw this and then he asked me a question. “You’re not gonna read the instruction manual first like we always used to?”
I don’t remember if I told him my reasoning or not at that point, but it all boils down to the fact that, after the opening cutscenes have ended, the game explicitly tells me that I can jump by pushing the “A” button. Why should I bother trying to pick up and read the manual to a game when I’m gonna have to learn how to play the game in the opening zone anyway?
Video games weren’t always in such dire straits when it came to hand-holding (I addressed a similar topic, difficulty, not too long ago here). Blame it on the limitations of the medium, but the video games of the past had neither the time nor the desire to try and clue you into the mechanics of the game. Take Tim Rogers’ example of the key in Zelda. Graphics had evolved far enough from the Atari days that we could recognize that Link was picking up keys. They had also evolved enough that a door blocking our path had a keyhole in it, something that most people have the schema in place to understand requires a key to open. There was a counter in the bottom left of the screen and when you used a key on a door, the door permanently opened and the counter performed a little n– (although this may have predated C++…).
As games approach “photo-realism” you can be damn sure that keys look a hell of a lot more like keys. Zelda games are also not shy about the locks they put on their doors: behemoth masses of chains linked to a lock whose size is approximately 1/2 the height of Link himself. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t even need the game to tell you that you’ve picked up a key. Whenever you walk over one for the first time or you get one from a chest, you’re always treated to a scene where Link holds it high over his head. An explanation may be necessary to understand just what a bombchu or hookshot is, but a key? It’s trivial.
Back to game-starting tutorials: it’s not a mystery as to why they have superseded the instruction manual. You think gamers bitch enough about having to read in-game text? Imagine forcing them to :gasp: read a booklet to understand how to move around the map. I can also see the compelling argument that, as a kinetic medium, gameplay is best learned kinetically. It’s one thing to read that to aim in first-person in Metal Gear Solid 3 all I have to do is hold R1 to enter first-person mode, hold L1 (I think) to pull out your weapon in aim mode, and then push Square to fire, all while using L2 and R2 separately to lean left or right, respectively, or both simultaneously to move your first-person view up. It’s another thing entirely to do this properly in the game (I should know…I got my ass handed to me by Olga Gurlukovich the first time I fought her in MGS2). If you think about it, teaching you how to do it while the game is running is brilliant. You not only are learning how to play the game so you don’t throw down the controller and quit in frustration, you’re also getting some practice in.
So, as soon as they could start to fit them in the game, the (oftentimes mandatory) in-game tutorial was born. This was a real bummer for me for two entirely selfish reasons:
1. If I knew how to play a game already (I read the manual, for Christ’s sake, I know how to jump!) I was stuck playing something that counted as a level for the designers that was mega boring and unskippable. Final Fantasy games as early as FF VII mercifully allowed you to skip their materia tutorials and whatnot, but their modern day equivalents like FF X have fully scripted, unskippable tutorial battles! Ten games in and only now do they feel the need to teach me how I should be battling. Really?
2. I loved reading instruction manuals. I can still still remember the (asinine) story of Donkey Kong Country as told by its instruction manual. The epic tale featured a frightened Diddy Kong guarding a treasure trove of bananas before he is beaten up and stuffed in a barrel. That’s all without mentioning the hilarious asides that Cranky Kong tossed into the margins of the manual as he complained about the complexity of modern day games compared to games of his day.
The problem is that I’m in the majority for #1 and the minority for #2. I know too much about games and love stuff like Final Fantasy too much for them to care about annoying me with tutorial battles. They just don’t want to scare away that tiny market fragment that’s never played a Final Fantasy game. As for the second problem, well I like to read and that’s kind of rare in the video game audience. For every one of my friends who loves an epic storyline that you have to read or listen to, I can think of two or three other friends who shudder at the thought cutscenes in general (”Why am I not killing stuff yet?”). Even friends of mine who love reading in their spare time make the distinction that they don’t love to read when they’re playing a video game. Just try and get one of them to have to read an instruction manual before they understand what’s going on in a game and you’ll find yourself minus one game sale.
We mustn’t forget that the instruction manual quality has also been dropping, since no one reads them any more. Why spend extra bucks on a good writer for something that most people aren’t gonna even take out of the game case? Heck, many of them aren’t even in color anymore to cut costs.
I recognize that I’m a part of a dying breed of gamers who used to enjoy instruction manuals. Tim Rogers (boy I bet you’re sick of hearing that name in this blog by now?) is just about the only non-family member I know who loves them too, as evidenced by his spending a whopping three paragraphs and 561 words reminiscing (although some commentors would say droning on) about how much he loves and misses them in his review of Blue Dragon and that’s just the intro; I’m pretty sure he talks about them more in that review. Still, I can’t let go of them and I hope they one day return to their former glory.
Unfortunately, with the advent of digital distribution, I’m pretty sure we can kiss the instruction manual goodbye. When your game doesn’t even have to be physically put into a box, you can be damn sure that most won’t even bother with a .pdf to explain game mechanics when they can just do it in-game. Here’s to hoping that in-game tutorials stop sucking some day soon. Whether they’re just too damn long like GTA IV (5-10 hours in and STILL doing tutorial missions) or too damn boring like Super Mario Galaxy (”Press A to jump!”), they can still use some major tweaking.
Yesterday we examined the cream of the crop of the glory that was 16-bit gaming. Today we’re gonna look at another two great games, one of which was super close to being on that list yesterday.
As stated before, these games do not automatically earn a place at the “Table of Honor,” but they do get the “all-stars” tag in the post to denote their excellence. Also note that, unless otherwise denoted, runner-ups are not listed in any particular rank or order. So let’s get this party started:
This first runner-up was just barely edged out by Link to the Past, only because it just didn’t have that je ne sais quoi that Link did. Here’s a hint: you could find out who the protagonist was using Justin Bailey, but chances are you would have been shocked to find out that he was a she. Yeah, that was pretty obvious, our first runner-up is Super Metroid.
Runner-up: Super Metroid
Super Metroid is yet another one of those games that I never played during its actual lifespan. A full two systems after the launch of the game, I finally played Super Metroid on a ROM (DISCLAIMER: ROMs are morally and potentially legally wrong and I do not play them any more at all) prior to the release of Metroid Prime, just to see what all the hubbub was about and get some perspective on one of the most lauded franchises that I’d never played.
Since I was playing this game in 2002, I was decidedly unimpressed with the opening vocals, but I was very quickly pulled to attention by the instantaneous breakdown of events. The space station was trashed, thanks to the pirates, and here I was being called in to clean up the Alliance mess yet again. I’ll be the first to say that I’m a bit of a wuss when it comes to horror aspects of any type of modern game, but I remember being distinctly creeped out by the empty space station that provided no resistance to Samus as she wandered around, looking for traces of the Space Pirates and the last Metroid and passing the dead bodies of science team members. I also remember, and don’t laugh, this was my first Metroid game and I was playing it on a keyboard, losing to Ridley in the first boss fight of the game.
Poor video game skill aside, I also got a quick taste of the trademark Samus Aran escape sequence once I finally conquered Ridley. Yeah, I knew about the escape sequences, I mean, I didn’t live underneath a video gaming rock, I’d just never played Metroid. This is when the real story starts, as Samus lands on Planet Zebes and begins her trek into the Space Pirate’s subterranean fortress. Of course, when I say story, I mean it very loosely. We had that bit in the beginning and we’ll have a bit at the end, but the rest of the story, in typical Nintendo non-Zelda fashion, is really just boss battling and item collecting. Retro Studios would later correct this in its Metroid Prime series with a really cool scanner feature, but despite the lack of story, I still found myself feeling like I was a part of an epic mission. I can only attribute this to excellent game design if they can make me care about working my ass off to fight a boss just to get a heat-resistant suit to explore the next area.
This type of item/upgrade-driven gameplay is primitive, that’s for sure, but it’s also elegant in its simplicity. There’s no pretending that there’s some sort of necessity for you to get the wave beam beyond the fact that you can’t proceed any deeper without it. There’s definitely a more epic arc to, say, obtaining wings on the Epoch in Chrono Trigger to gain access to the rest of the map, but, as I’ve said, it says something when I can just get an upgrade for the sake of making myself more badass and still be content with that.
I think that the real reason that I had to put Super Metroid as a close fourth to Link to the Past has everything to do with the lack of a story. I can still connect with Samus as a gamer because she’s a part of an expertly constructed video game, but there’s no pathetic (as in pathos) connection. Samus Aran links up with the part of be that likes to blow evil Space Pirates up, but not to the more human emotional parts of my personality. I think Nintendo knows this now too and they’ve done a lot more on this front with Metroid: Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion, particularly in the latter, to try and connect you on a more than superficial level with the most badass bounty hunter in the galaxy.
What else is there to say about Super Metroid? The ambiance is perfect, the pacing (as in when they dole out boss battles and weapon/equipment upgrades) is spot on, and the bosses are all (mostly) really cool. From the first time you open a blue door to the moment you blast off of Planet Zebes trying to not get blown up, you’ll be on the edge of your seat anxious for more (unless you get hopelessly lost, like I frequently did).
I wasn’t originally intending to keep putting commercials in these, but since speed runs are boring and I didn’t want to show a boss battle, ending, or soundtrack snippet, here’s the Japanese commercial for Super Metroid:
The American one sucks. Don’t bother watching it, it’s boring…
Not being able to find a good Youtube clip for Metroid is making me kind of blue. I could probably be pulled out of this stupor by a gold ring or something. Maybe something with “NONSTOP POWER PLAY!” and a “New Save Feature!”
That’s right, got the commercials out of the way early. There’s something…well, not better, but different at the end of this one.
While it’s not the first third-party game to make any of my lists, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the first to make it on a non-Nintendo platform (but will it be the last?). I want to start by addressing the whole Sonic & Knuckles thing. I know that technically Sonic 3 and S&K are really the same game split in two to cut costs and even Yuji Naka has claimed that the true, full game is Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Still, it didn’t feel right to give the combined games a spot on the list, since you could totally be like my family and own Sonic & Knuckles, but not Sonic 3. The only way we were able to experience the splendor of Sonic 3 was by renting it. So, if I was able to own one and not the other, it’s conceivable that many did not own both. Plus, they were released as sequels. If I could combine the two games into one, well I could just add entire franchises all willy-nilly to this list, destroying its integrity. If I ever have a top list of games that could be combined to form one game, I’ll be sure to include Sonic 3 & Knuckles and those Legend of Zelda: Oracles games.
Anyway…
Sonic 2 did something pretty neat by introducing the expendable sidekick Miles “Tails” Prower, allowing younger brothers everywhere to not be quite so bored when their older brothers were playing Sonic games. Tails and Knuckles, by the way, are the only two characters added to the Sonic universe that don’t make me want to end my life whenever I am forced to listen to them babble in the lame 3-D Sonic games of the present. They were truly the last two cool additions to the cast, but I digress yet again.
So Tails was added in the last game and he makes a return in three, but this time you can even play as him in the single-player mode. This basically means that You have one way of getting through the game, Sonic’s speed, and another where you’re able to fly as Tails. They also still had the familiar two player mode that even allowed you to carry Sonic to unreachable locales, combining what was cool about both characters. If you can’t tell from the comments by my brother, my household was huge on co-op gameplay (holy cow, how could I forget to mention yesterday that FF VI let you play with a buddy during battle?), so being able to play as Sonic and Tails was a huge plus for us, even if Tails would oftentimes get screwed by Sonic’s selfish actions…
Sonic 3, as the last true side-scrolling Sonic game of the 16-bit era also managed to be the best of the lot. The trip through the Angel Island is as tight a platforming experience as the series has ever seen. Sure, it’s got the Sonic level clichés like the water level, casino-type level, industrial/futuristic level, etc., but they’re all so well done that you don’t recognize that you’ve been through these levels twice before. The Robotnik battles are all creative and fun and some are just downright tense. Then there’s the music. If you watch old video, you’ll recognize very quickly that the Genesis hardware really didn’t handle music well. At all. Listening to each of those tunes brings back such fond memories that I can’t help but overlook the awful music processing hardware and just enjoy the bloops and bleeps as I run through the loop de loops of Memory Lane.
It’s a real shame that the only modern Sonic video games of any worth come out on the Nintendo DS. I’d love to see Sonic Team not suck as bad as it does nowadays, get its act together, and make Sonic Unleashed everything that Sonic 3 was for a new generation. I’m just not that optimistic that it can happen, what with every Sonic franchise getting progressively worse with each release.
On that slightly depressing note, here’s a video by some sick bastard who likes to watch Tails suffer:
“Wow Dan, the 16-bit era sure seemed awesome! I can’t wait until you start to cover the next era!”
Whoa there, slow down buddy, we’re not done with 16-bits. Tune in on Tuesday for more runner-ups!
Here’s the funny thing about this list of all-star games per era I’ve been constructing: there are more than three games that I feel are worth mentioning. What’s a guy like me to do?
The answer is simpler than you think. I just write blog posts about the ones that didn’t quite make it. These games do not automatically earn spots at the Table of Honor, but they are definitely all-star games and the post will be tagged as such. Some eras will have only one game in them, like the 8-bit era, but others will have several runner-ups spread across several blog posts.
So what’s bringing up the caboose of the radical games from the 8-bit era? What just couldn’t pop the bubble and make its way into the top three to receive such a dubious awesome award? Why it’s Bubble Bobble!
Runner-up: Bubble Bobble
You boot up Bubble Bobble, select 2P mode (is there any other way to play?) and then subject yourself to some difficult, old-school, tortuously hard gameplay. Now, given some of the videos and whatnot that I’ve seen related to Bubble Bobble, it seems that it was my youth and lack of practice that caused me to be so bad at the game, it being yet another NES game that I never actually completed, but I still stand by the fact that the epic journey of Bub and Bob (they had names?) was and still is quite challenging.
I have so many memories of plowing through the levels of Bubble Bobble with my brothers, encasing monsters in bubbly prisons and transmuting them from their monstery essence to delicious treats for us to eat. The wikipedia article lists all sorts of complex bubble jumps and other moves that, as far as I knew, none of the three of us ever mastered or even cared about. That never mattered though, the fact of the matter was that Bubble Bobble was fun and we totally loved to play it, die, and start over. If there were ever a game that needed a DS or XBL update, this would undoubtedly be in the top ten list.
Check out this Video Game Vault feature on Bubble Bobble:
So with that, I officially close out the 8-bit era, but feel free to throw out any suggestions that you think deserve to make this list. If I’ve played it and have something to say about it, I’ll either laud the game as genius as I have for this past four or I’ll let you know why you’re wrong.
