Review: TaleSpin (NES)

Having just reviewed Capcom's DuckTails game, their take on TaleSpin seemed like a fitting companion piece. The two have a lot in common, visually and structurally, despite fitting into totally separate genres. While they both seem to be marketed towards kids, the difficulty of TaleSpin doesn't dwindle as soon as you figure out how the core systems work. In fact, TaleSpin relies on pattern memorization and quick reflexes to a degree that will challenge most first time players.

TaleSpin is a side-scrolling shooter that requires you to dodge enemy fire, pick-up money and cargo, and defeat a boss character at the end of each of the 8 worlds. The game starts you in a frustratingly underpowered position, allowing you only one shot at a time, and clunky maneuvering capabilities. It's worth stomaching the first level and collecting enough money in the process, because you can use the cash to upgrade between stages. I found that getting the rapid fire gun as soon as possible made the gameplay much more pleasant to work with.

Even with an engine upgrade, the movement controls can feel sluggish from time to time. As a nice touch you can press A and flip your plane around backwards, making the screen scroll left instead of right. Unfortunately you can't flip while moving up or down, stunting the fluidity of an entertaining genre alteration. In general, every game mechanic is a bit of a chore to use until outfitted with the proper upgrade, at which point that device becomes enjoyable. I understand this concept as an incentive builder, but it's killing replay value for me because I know I'll have to drudge through those early stages if I want the game to become fun again.

I appreciate the challenge that TaleSpin throws at you, particularly with some of the boss encounters and the well-hidden bonus worlds. The final boss was the most satisfying and arduous to take down, which is just how I like my action games to end. It's a plane vs. plane dogfight followed by a battle against an immense airship. In order to supe up your flying machine to a level that can compete with these tyrants, it's helpful to gain access to secret bonus worlds. These minigame stages let you rack up points and extra lives with ease by simply piloting around an enemy-less area, popping balloons. Hunting down these locales encourages you to swap between left and right scrolling often to fully explore each area's nooks and crannies.

TaleSpin's flaws end up denting the overall experience, but certainly not rendering it undrivable. Even more so than DuckTales, TaleSpin demands your respect, as it's not to be taken lightly despite it's cartoon tie-in.

:screenshots from Giant Bomb:

Review: DuckTales (NES)

Thinking about the broader concept of DuckTails as a "thing" is a bit mind-boggling. Nonetheless, numerous strings of duck-related cartoons and merchandise poured out of Disney in the late 80s and early 90s. The culmination of this has to be the point where duck-branding seeped into the real world as a professional hockey team. Considering all of this, Capcom's DuckTales game for the NES seems pretty understated and an example of a game that rises above the cash-in tendencies of most licensed fare.

In the game you play as Scrooge McDuck, crotchety mansion dweller and greedy treasure seeker. In an action-platformer style, you cruise through 5 levels, collecting precious gems, uncovering hidden treasures, and defeating several bosses. From the outset you're given a choice of which of the 5 levels you would like to begin with. The non-linear approach is pretty striking, though there does seem to be a planned progression to the levels in their given order, since the designs do gain slight complexity later on in the Himalayas and on the Moon. All in all, the path doesn't matter too much as there's just a cakewalk of a boss in each that needs to be defeated to get the special prize for each world.

The traversal does take some getting used to though. You can jump, but can't kill enemies by simply jumping on them Mario-style. In what is actually a needlessly complicated motion, in mid-air you can press and hold B and down, and Scrooge will start hopping on his cane like a pogo stick. Now you can stomp enemies, reach higher platforms, and open chests, and you'll keep hopping as long as you hold B. It's a fun twist on gameplay that had become pretty conventional, even if getting into the hopping animation takes a little more effort than it should.

I had a hard time making it through DuckTails at first, and was disheartened when I read reviews claiming how it's so easy. I don't think I approached this game with proper respect though, as the change-up in control scheme will make this feel like a different kind of game, and it takes getting used to. That said, once you do get it down, and figure out where the bosses are, the difficulty ratchets down tremendously and I found myself blazing through the entire game in no time. There are higher difficulty settings to add more challenge, but it becomes clear eventually that this game was probably meant for the younger set.

As a kid's game, DuckTales is really fantastic, but even without that qualifier it's pretty fun. There's a lot of exploration to undertake if you want to collect as much money as possible instead of simply conducting speed runs. The game seems like the type of thing that would have entertained me for hours back in the day, scouring print-outs of maps and hearing rumors at school about secret passages. In 2010 the brevity of the adventure keeps it from having Zelda-esque immersion, but consider how much more you're getting out of a licensed DuckTails product than what you were reasonably expecting.

:screenshots from Giant Bomb:

Review: Abadox (NES)

If the intro cinematic for Abadox doesn't get you excited to play it, I doubt anything I say will change your mind. The setup seems pretty simple. You play as a blaster-toting spaceman who must cut a path through the insides of a living planet-sized alien. The action alternates between side-scrolling and top-down perspectives in classic on-rails shooter fashion. Abadox isn't a perfectly balanced game, but it does have an impeccable visual flair that upholds and builds upon the more-than-competent shooter skeleton.

The analogy of visually overlaying a skeleton is particularly apt in Abadox too. In a genre where it's pretty easy to default to jets, tanks and other standard military combat fare, Abadox rises above a lot of the competition with its disgusting, fleshy art direction that still carries over despite the 8-bit representation. Giant tongues writhe and intestinal masses twitch as disembodied eyeballs and teeth attack from all sides. Altogether it amounts to one of the most creatively repulsive-looking games I've played.

By all accounts, Abadox operates as a serviceable shooter, and true to the hardcore leanings of more contemporary takes on the genre, it's strikingly difficult in a few places. There is an emphasis on pattern memorization and flawless maneuvering to the degree that continuing after your first death (enemies kill you in one hit unless you have certain expendable power-ups) can be a frustrating struggle. After a fatal mistake, your character is reset to just after the most recent boss battle with only your initial bare-bones abilities, expounding the treacherousness of the part of the game that was already difficult to pass with an upgraded arsenal. If nothing else, this forces you to learn the intricacies of the enemy placements, which will inform successive playthroughs.

That said, I seemed to die by running into walls as much as anything else. So, when the game allows the spaceman character model to overlap solid surfaces a little on the top and bottom, the inconsistency of what counts as "contact" is magnified as a significant problem in a game that asks for such agile pathfinding. I'd have to assume that the flipside of this "bug" is that it's an attempt to compromise on the lessened negative space that exists as a result of using relatively large character models. These detailed sprites help set Abadox apart from other similar games like Life Force that may control with more fidelity but offer only minuscule shaceships or indistinguishable triangle forms as protagonists.

Abadox distinguishes itself visually as a unique slice of genre-fare with a solid Konami-like soundtrack. It can satisfy some impulse-play tendencies, but once some of the more arduous levels pop up, Abadox increasingly becomes a casual gamer's nightmare. Abadox is far from being a purveyor of "bullet hell," but it's also not to be taken lightly.

:screenshots from VGMuseum:

Review: Metal Gear (NES)

As I'm playing many of these acclaimed game franchise originators, I've noticed that some possess certain core elements that make the game a blast to play even on older hardware, and others seem overly ambitious or less-than-fully-realized until further iterations down the road. Metal Gear definitely qualifies for the latter category. For example, the first descriptor that springs to mind when I think of the Metal Gear series is "cinematic," owing a significant debt to the movements of the camera in a 3-dimensional space to convey a story across cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid and beyond. This debut game, ported from the truer MSX computer version, isn't able to pull off, in large part, what are understood as the concepts that Metal Gear does best.

This isn't to say that Metal Gear is totally lacking in Hideo Kojima signatures (behold the cardboard box!), but they do come of as underdeveloped in many cases. The largest innovation Metal Gear brought to the table was the notion of stealth gameplay, which stood in substantial opposition to the run 'n gun and brawler games that the action genre was so saturated with. The idea of not destroying everything that moves was certainly novel, as was the narrative twist (along with the something's-not-right-here hints) towards the end of the game. Seeing those two aspects carried out at what feels like such an embryonic stage for the Metal Gear franchise was my favorite component of playing Metal Gear, because it felt like I was seeing the beginning of something great.

You still take control of Solid Snake here, infiltrating the oft future-referenced Outer Heaven stronghold, to rescue POWs and gather intelligence about what kinds of heinous activities are taking place there. You're dropped off on the island in the jungle with only your fists and a pack of cigarettes at your disposal. Early on you learn how to use cover to your advantage to sneak up behind guards and take them out quietly. Throughout the game you will build an arsenal of weapons and gadgets that will make handling unfriendlies much easier and allow access to areas of the map that would have been otherwise restricted. Freeing POWs and responding to transceiver frequencies will prompt you to the next destination and provide hints for items to look out for.

The problem is in how the game actually plays, despite the grandiose framework it's supposedly built on. The efficacy of the stealth method is often compromised by indecipherable hit detection. When you approach an enemy from above, it's a touchy guessing game to see how close you need to be to land a punch. Character movement is also a bit clunky as Snake frequently gets snagged attempting to hug around corners. These aspects suck some of the cool factor out of the Escape from New York-inspired protagonist.

I can't go any further without addressing the cumbersome and tedious menu system, which interrupts the flow of the game throughout its entirety. You can assign one weapon and one item to your A and B buttons from the menu screens, but anytime you want to switch, you must reenter the menu and choose the new item. Other games have pulled this off without issue as even the original Legend of Zelda comes to mind. The main flaw here is that the game is full of doors that require 1 of 8 keycards to pass through them, and each of these cards are represented as separate items on the menu. This means approaching a door and pausing and unpausing the game up to 8 times until the correct card has been found. It's baffling in the face of such a simple solution as recognizing the highest rank keycard in your possession and allowing doors to open accordingly without having to individually equip them. I'd recommend keeping a map handy just to eliminate the trial and error process. Finally, with regard to the menu, it's worth mentioning the inconsistencies of its button navigation. The "back" button varies depending on which section you're looking at, making even simple menu navigation require memorizing an obtuse control scheme.

There remain a cavalcade of other minor annoyances in Metal Gear that serve to mar what could have been a truly great game. Each caveat adds it's own brand of monotony to the proceedings, leading you to trudge through one poorly designed element after another. I won't list all of the issues individually, but the point is that what this game lacks that the Metal Gear Solid series really utilized to its advantage, is polish. I understand that Kojima has dismissed this NES port as some kind of bastard child, but regardless of where the blame lies, even he understands where this forebearer fell short. And no, Metal Gear is not a bad game, but it's certainly not up to the usual standards of the pedigree behind it.

:screenshots from VGMuseum:

Review: Pixelated (Mobile)

This past weekend after my Samsung Instinct touchscreen phone died, I picked up a sharp new BlackBerry Curve and set out to see what apps I could download for free. A quick stop at the Top 10 list gave me the game Pixelated by Ebscer, which turns out to be a simple and addictive little puzzle experience. The game sort of plays like a combination of 7up's Spot for the NES and Tetris if you play with the random garbage blocks turned on to fill up a level. Beginning in the upper left corner, you have 21 turns to switch the entire mess of colored blocks on screen to one color. You select one color at a time to decide which color of adjoining blocks to convert next. Soon the rectilinear blob will be overtaking the rest of the squares in waves as you make strategic decisions as to which color selection will yield the greatest advancement while also tunneling the most effective avenue across the board.

Pixelated's appearance is as basic as it gets, this side of color TV. The squares are as directly geometric as they sound and there are no graphical flourishes or sound effects to correspond with the moves you make. That said, the game doesn't really require any of that, and it's otherwise justified by the game's nonexistent price tag (unless you want to Plus version, which has extra difficulty settings and other options). I basically made a competitive analog version of this game 2 years ago using construction paper and a tile floor, so I understand why Pixelated's banal aesthetic has it's own brand of appeal. Also, this being a mobile game, the easier it is to distinguish between objects, the better.

I'm just speaking from playing the free version, but one of the keys to Pixelated's addictiveness is the 21-move completion point. For the size of the board, 21 moves is the perfect number to maintain a relative level of difficulty and force most rounds down to the wire. I actually enjoy how the free version doesn't display a move counter, adding a degree of suspense when you whittle the screen down to a couple of remaining squares and you wonder for a quarter second whether or not you've got enough selections left to complete the round. Maybe I'm being overly dramatic about what is essentially an on-the-go twitch puzzle experience, but I still see a simplistic elegance at work.

Review: Final Fight (WiiVC/SNES)

Unlike the other older games I've reviewed on the site so far, I played Final Fight back when it was current. Though I'm sure I previously touched the SNES port I'm evaluating here (via Wii Virtual Console), my primary experience with it was in the arcades. Unfortunately the console port loses some key components of Capcom's original product. That said, this is still classic beat 'em up action with iconic characters and late-80s style at its most ridiculous.

Structurally, Final Fight is incredibly simple. The plot is no more than a save-the-kidnapped-girl story while the game plays as a basic two-button brawler. However, the strongest appeal of Final Fight is its style, which melds perfectly with the rudimentary backdrop. You play as either Metro City Mayor, and former pro wrestler, Mike Haggar or streetwise roughneck, Cody. The level of cheesy machismo on display here is at superhero action figure status, where musclebound, often bare-chested thugs will take you on in the streets, in subway cars, and across other rumble-worthy locales. In between tussles you can bust up barrels to reveal large plates of barbecued meat, which act as health items. The wrestling motif also continues with set-piece fights staged in a boxing ring and in a steel cage match. One reoccurring enemy is Andore, a 16-bit replica of legendary grappler Andre the Giant. In fact a lot of the bad dudes in Final Fight could be interpreted as homages to WWF heel characters. You have to be able to extract value from this kind of dumb, sweaty-guy soap opera source material to appreciate the vibe Capcom was going for with Final Fight because they absolutely nail it.

Pro wrestling and John Carpenter film references aside, the gameplay mechanics of Final Fight hold their ground. As with many games of this type and era, the solutions to the game's challenges often involve very game-y tactics. For example, enemies frequently fly off-screen after taking several punches, and instead of waiting for them to come back, it's most efficient to walk to the edge of the screen and rapidly jam on the attack button as the gang members continually waltz into your blind jabs. It might seems strange today, but this was just the way games played back then, often acknowledging space outside of the viewing area, but only allowing the player to partially access and exploit it. One could draw the connotations between this and the knowledge that pro wrestling is fake. Knowing this might cause some disillusion, but allows for a more honest appreciation (or disgust) of what is actually happening.

With those positive aspects of Final Fight laid out, it's worth addressing the porting issues that make this Wii Virtual Console version of the SNES game not the quality of product that a fan of the arcade game would hope for. A quick list of problems and omissions is as follows: no two-player cooperative play, only two of the three protagonists are present (no Guy), various censorship throughout, including that of salty language, transvestite/transgender enemies, and other non-kid-friendly (as determined by Nintendo) components, the lack of an entire level from the original, and a drop in audio/visual quality due to the limitations of the console hardware. These are serious shortcomings that may dissuade someone from purchasing this title. It should be noted that Final Fight: Double Impact is heading to PSN and XBLA in April, which looks to be the best version of this rather old game to date and rights all of the wrongs I mentioned while adding a hearty number of unique bonuses. If Wii is all you have then the SNES Final Fight may be the easiest choice, but it's a bittersweet package. My final technical note is that I played this game with a Gamecube controller, which has a painfully misguided and unalterable button configuration (Y=punch, B=jump) that makes special moves frustrating to execute and is just plain uncomfortable for rapid button presses. Why the punch command isn't the giant "A" button, I cannot fathom.

Despite these caveats, Final Fight is still a fun old-school beat 'em up game, and one of the best in its class. The SNES version doesn't offer the full original experience, but if you're just looking to feed a quick fix, it can do the job. Otherwise, seek the more robust port which will be widely available soon.

:screenshots from VGMuseum:

Review: Sin & Punishment (WiiVC/N64)

10 years ago cult-favorite developer Treasure put out Sin & Punishment, an English voice acted on-rails shooter, for the Nintendo 64, but only made it available in Japan. It's the N64 game that I came closest to importing purely on the basis of how it looked and what I had read about how it played. There's a grandiose anime-inspired, more mature (for N64) storyline with StarFox-like action, but you control a person instead of a plane. It was a game that looked extremely desirable in tiny screenshots on the back pages of EGM magazines. Now that Sin & Punishment has finally come stateside on the Wii's Virtual Console service, it was time to see if I was actually missing out.

For starters, let's get the unmet lofty expectations out of the way. S&P does not belong in the pantheon of all-time great N64 games, but it is still an incredibly stylish and unique product that has moments of absolute brilliance. Visually the game has a low polygon count for its characters, but not unexpectedly so, given its turn-of-the-millennium release. That said, the character models are rather grotesque, but in a way I find undeniably appealing. Everything has sharp, pointy angles, rigid joints and muddy textures. It seems like Treasure was trying to pull off something ambitious and cinematic with the designs, but I'd argue the game's all the better for these shortcomings as the characters literally look uncomfortable in their own skins.

This individualized discomfort seems to be one of the key elements of the story, but the character models alone do a better job of conveying this than any part of the formal plot in S&P. You control a guy who occasionally transforms into a giant mech-like monster and a girl who fights through an alternate future dream world and ultimately against the evil plot of their supposed-friend who I think they originally shared a common enemy with. So the story here, told mainly in non-interactive cutscenes, is nonsense that can be casually watched for awkward laughs, but thankfully skipped at will. As for the English voice acting, it's on par with some of the worst out there. All of these sloppy elements combine to create a broad feeling of camp that may have been awkward had this game actually been played in the US 10 years ago. S&P's overall presentation has aged both extremely poorly and extremely well, if that makes sense.

The design elements of S&P are worth noting, but are overall somewhat inconsequential to what this game is about. Like other games from Treasure, particularly those from the shooter genre, S&P leans heavily toward the hardcore sect. You control a character that, at times, must strafe, double jump, target, and shoot and/or sword slash at the same time, with each of those actions mapped to separate buttons. The control scheme has a sharp learning curve that requires significant practice to even handle properly, much less master. None of the three control setups offered are ideal on the Gamecube controller that I used to play the game, but hopefully the Classic Controller is more intuitively functional. S&P isn't a game that gives you much time to feel this stuff out either (though there is a tutorial mode) as you're quickly thrust into barrages of unrelenting enemy fodder at the game's outset that never let up. Still, it only takes about an hour to get through everything, so learning takes place on successive playthroughs more than over the course of one. As a side note, I would personally prefer a more movement-sensitive targeting cursor, as the sluggish one you're given makes parts of the game frustrating that could have been simply challenging. If it's not already clear, I recommend playing this game on Easy difficulty before engaging with Normal.

The strength of Treasure's game is its epic set-pieces. The ocean fleet chapter is particularly thrilling. The protagonist stands atop a floating platform that dramatically sweeps past armed frigates, waves of jet fighters, and countless energy blasts. Players would do well to get into pattern-memorization mode in such levels if they hope to get through with the least damage and highest score. After the sea battle the scene shifts to the sky where you must then take out a giant satellite fortress. Once destroying that, a huge asteroid mass hurtles towards your transformed mechanized monster friend and it's up you to tail the rock and detonate it before impact. There are quite a few tricky moments in this chapter, but in general it makes for an intense ride. Speaking of epic, the final boss fight is against some kind of evil clone Earth, and feels like an updated take on Space Invaders. When Sin & Punishment puts you in these larger-than-life scenarios, it's easy to get wrapped up in the excitement and discard the half-hazard story behind the action.

As with many elusive products, Sin & Punishment seems to be viewed by many critics through rose-colored glasses, glossing over the game's faults in favor of hardcore allegiances. To be fair, it does appeal to those tastes, but all in all it didn't live up to the expectations I've harbored for this game over the past decade. Perhaps the best news to come out of the Virtual Console version of S&P is that Nintendo plans for an international release of Sin & Punishment 2 for Wii this year. I have to imagine this sequel will control much more naturally given the light-gun style aiming that will be implemented into the Wiimote controls. The original Sin & Punishment still remains a stylistically unique, frantic shooting experience, but one would do well to keep their expectations in check before getting all huffy towards Nintendo for depriving US and European gamers of it for so many years.

:screenshots from Giant Bomb and IGN: