150 SNES games reviewed #33: Battletoads in Battlemaniacs

If I was to say Rare in relation to games to most people then they would probably think about the Nintendo 64 and about Banjo-Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Perfect Dark and Goldeneye 007.

 

To me though Rare are so much more than that. I can remember their NES games and I also remember even further back when it was named Ultimate Play the Game and was bringing corker after corker out on the ZX Spectrum. Atic Atac and Saber Wulf were much talked about in the playgrounds of my youth. This is  where I need to briefly stop the review and say go buy Rare Replay and play the living heck out of all of the games and then when you’re done, grab everything you can that’s missing from it.

My Battletoads Battlemaniacs YouTube SNES review 

Now it’s time to get back to business. The game I am going to talk about today is Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. It is a platforming beat ’em up game from 1993 developed by Rare and published by Tradewest. Tradewest no longer exists and Rare – well, I could write a whole article about its fate. The short of it is it is still around but now it is owned by Microsoft and has spent a lot of time making Kinect-based games and hats for Xbox Avatars. Thankfully it has recently made a real game again so here is hoping it has a brighter future ahead of it.

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs was not the start of the story though. This series began with the original beat ’em up Battletoads which was released for the NES in 1991 (this title was ported to the Mega Drive, Game Gear, Game Boy and Amiga). The Battletoads were largely created with the purpose of trying to be rivals to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their video games. In fact at the height of Battletoads’ popularity they even managed to get a television cartoon pilot although this – unfortunately or fortunately depending on if you have seen it and what you thought of it – never got spun off into a full series. If you enjoy 80’s television cartoons I recommend you track the pilot down.

The original Battletoads was a very popular game. It was fun but brutally hard. It was a good beat ’em up with a two-player mode, but it also had sections where you rode on hover bikes and these were mercilessly hard. Worse still, if you were playing them in two-player mode and one of you crashed you both had to start that section again, which led to screaming arguments and shattered friendships.

 

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs follows the story of two of the Battletoads, Rash and Pimple, on a quest to stop Silas Volkmire and the evil Dark Queen from ruling over the world while rescuing a princess and their fellow toads. Many of its levels are enhanced or remixed versions of levels from the original Battletoads, so its a sort of semi-sequel, semi-remake.

The first thing you will notice is that the sprites in this game are large and the game in general is very colourful. The soundtrack is kind of basic but the music suits the game well. This game is not just a beat ’em up, it’s a massive mix of things. Yes, you will fight but then there is also hoverboard racing platforming, and much like the original NES version, the game is enjoyable but sections of it might have you tearing your hair out. If you like hard games with a sence of humour then it might be just for you if however if you hate games with challenging pieces that you’re going to be having to try and try again then you’re going to hate Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. This makes it a very hard game to rate because its overall quality depends on the kind of person who is playing it. Therefore a score I give it might in fact be meaningless to you. I have never completed Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, but I have spent a very long time trying in the past. I see it as a challenge which keeps on bringing me back.

Personally I would give the game seven out of 10. it’s fun, there is a fair degree of variety and its a good game to play with friends – as long as they enjoy a challenge. I have to warn again that if you hate games that will see you die again and again on certain segments then this is not for you.

This game was before Rare’s partnership with Nintendo. In fact it was as far as I know the last game it released for the SNES before beginning to work on projects for Nintendo. It had invested its significant profits from games during the NES period to purchase a bunch of very expensive Silicon Graphics workstations. This move made Rare the most technologically advanced developer in the UK, and I think most of us know what this led to.

If you want to purchase Battletoads in Battlemaniacs then you’re looking at anywhere between £13 to £18 for the cart, and if you want a copy in a box in good condition then you will probably need to look at around double that range. I looked at buying it in a shop cartridge only for £18 but instead ended up buying a cart from online for £14 including postage. This is the most money I have spent on a game specifically for this series but I also feel that copies of this will become rarer in the coming years.

NES bad box art: Ironsword

OK so if you have been following my blog for any length of time then you will have most likly realised that I love looking at cover art, often comparing different art from different regions. In most cases it has been megadrive/Genesis cover art and usually I have been looking at which region provided the best art. Today is a little different as I am looking at a piece of NES box art, it's an Infamous piece of art. As I have obviously posted the above picture then you know I am talking about Ironsword. If you look at the case without having played the game you might wonder what the issue is, well to put it simply they put a famous model Fabio on the front cover dressed as a barbarian the main issue with this is the fact in the game you don't play as a Barbarian you play as a knight.

Here is the games title screen and the in game sprite basically matches this so that basically tells you that the people responsible for the case art had either never either tried the game or been in touch with the creators to get any information on what the game was like beyond its title. It was like someone just really wanted to be around Fabio while he was getting oily barbarian loin cloth photos done, usually he was on the front of romance books so who knows, but the cover certainly didn't fit the game and often when you do hear about the game it's for the infamous cover art as it's a shame as it's quite a cracking little title.

This is the sort of thing I would have made as a front cover for ironsword wizards & warriors 2 for the NES instead of the famous Fabio one, seeing as you play a knight in armour in the game I thought it would be more appropriate to have an armoured figure on the box art. Yeah the armour might not be exactly the same as the one in the game and be a little more realistic but it in my opinion certainly fits the theme more. Maybe if the game had gotten something a little more like this it would be remembered fondly on its own merit as apposed to for its quirky cover.

SNES Game review 82:Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!

Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! Or as it is known as in Japan Super Donkey Kong 3: Mystery of Kremis Island is surprise surprise a platforming video game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1996. The game was the final instalment in the Donkey Kong Country series to appear on that console and it very much sticks to the formula set by the first game. The game was also ported to the Game Boy Advance in 2005 but it had a different soundtrack and added features, I guess this makes it one of the games which added to the SNES based library on that machine making people often refer to it as a sort of portable SNES. Still I am glad it got rereleased like this because I don’t think it got the attention it deserved. I would defiantly argue that Sales of the game were hurt by the release of the Nintendo 64 console, which came out a few months before this game. Sure the original Playstation came out around the time of the second game but that was a rival machine and some people loved Nintendo so much that they wouldn’t jump ship, but this game launch alongside their own ‘’superior hardware’’ this resulted in this game having even lower sales than the previous entry. I must admit though even though it didn’t do the numbers I think it deserves it did far better than one might expect and Nintendo could defiantly consider it a success.

I have to admit I don’t have a big story about how I came to play this game. I don’t think I even had a go on it at release. None of my friends got it, none of the independent shops I knew were letting people play it, heck most of them didn’t even seem to be stocking it. I wasn’t pre-occupied with a Nintendo 64 either as I didn’t get my first one of those till over a year after release and then it was a second hand machine which I sold about another year latter to help fund my second PC for doing college work on (I did get another one not to long after). I guess I was pre-occupied with my PlayStation, I think around this time I would have been hammering Tekken 2 and Kingsfield (This is a game made by the people responsible for dark souls games and can be seen as something of a predecessor to them). I got my first copy of Donkey Kong country 3 as an American version long alongside American version of the rest of the trilogy. I am trying to pin down exactly when in my mind but it’s difficult, I know they were a Christmas present and I remember the gamecube being the console under my main television. My SNES was set up upstairs and I had gotten a good number of retro games that Christmas. Once dinner had been taken care of, I had played with my daughter and finally put her to bed for the night I went and started to play through the games and this session would be my first proper experience of the third Donkey Kong country game.

So in this game Dixie Kong has got a promotion from sidekick status and is the main hero, and her sidekick is her baby cousin named Kiddy Kong. This is something I always found a little weird with the Donkey Kong country games. Mario is the hero in the first Mario, the hero in the second the hero in more or less every game only going missing or getting captured for strange side projects, if he is missing Luigi fills in but is automatically demoted the second his brother is back. In the Donkey Kong games in an actual numbered sequel Donkey Kong is gone and his side kick has become the hero, in a numbered sequel it blows my mind. So you take that knowledge and then when you hear that a third one is coming you sort of go Oh the Kong man will be back and in charge and maybe just to add to it and go one bigger one better he will have Diddy and Dixie tag along. What we got though was a promoted sidekick’s sidekick now becoming the star of the 3^RD game with a sidekick of her own. I never really got the Dixie character I know a lot of people complained that Diddy was a product of board meetings on throwing in something that was hip and cool at the time, a cap wearing boom box carrying, dancing down with the kids walking promotional tool and that might be how he started his life but within a few levels of the first Donkey Kong Country he had found a place in my heart, the way I saw him was as a youngster following around and trying to emulate the much bigger older Donkey Kong, he was the shortround to Donkeys Indiana Jones so to speak. Dixie felt like hey lets have a female Kong so we aren’t seen as sexist and girls might like this, maybe other people feel different to me on this and I guess beyond a mild annoyance it doesn’t really alter the game really. Kiddy Kong also feels a little barrel scrappy to me to be fair. Personally I had kind of hoped that they would have gone a little bigger with things, that we would have had some Super Mario 2 (Mario USA) going on with like 4 characters you can select from all with their strengths and weaknesses, so you’d choose 2 to take on your adventure.

OK I am very aware that I have gone a little negative here but let’s just stop and admit that the first game in particularly shocked the living heck out of us all, people assumed it was headed for the N64 and didn’t think the humble SNES could handle something like that, so it’s a bit negative of me to expect giant leaps. What we did get was a series which consistently provided a high level of entertainment and tried to provide more and more content despite the fact it must have been pushing the ever living crap out of the system.

So let’s get on to the positives. The level designs in Donkey Kong country 3 give players more opportunity to interact with the environment than the layouts in the previous games did.

Sure the game still contains the standard mix of platform jumping and enemy killing, rope climbing and barrel blasting, walls and floors to smash, but now there are also switches to pull, rocket barrels to ride in and other little added bits. There are a few forced scrolling stages too, involving mine carts, sleds etcetera which add a great change of pace every now and then. Riding on top of and transforming into animal friends once again comes into play. Rideable animal buddies are once again in the game but there are some new faces added here. One area where I would argue this game improves upon is the bosses they just seem to be that little bit more creativity than those in the previous DKC games did, I would also say in some cases the way you dispatch them is also more interesting but I don’t want to give spoilers here as more people really need to give this third entry a try. It can be argued that the changes I have mentioned on top of the already high quality found across the whole series make this third instalment the best of the trilogy even if it is nothing much more than a cookie cutter sequel with the expected added layer of chocolate sprinkles.

The game has amazing graphics, great sound, bags full of replay value, both in the way there is lots to collect but also in the way that it is so fun to play you won’t care if you have finished it before or not. Do I recommend it? Well that depends do you own the original Donkey Kong country? If you don’t own that game then it is the perfect starting point to this adventure and you can most likely pick it up far cheaper than this game. If you own or have finished that game though and want more then YES get this game, and grab number 2 while you are at it. It is important to mention that the GBA version does have added levels and features so if you are a GBA fan you might want to consider that version. Personally I am glad to own the SNES one as its great to have all 3 games across the same platform. If you want this game it is available on the Wii U for the usual price of a SNES virtual console game but if you want a cart based copy then you will be looking at about £18 to £25 pounds for just the cart (I have seen it as high as £55 in some retro shops) looking at price upwards of £40 for a boxed pal cart. If you have the ability to play imports then the cheapest way to go is to go for a Japanese loose cart of the game which you should be able to find for around £7 on ebay including postage (although people do try and get the same kind of £20 price for these sometimes).

I do wonder if demand for this and the other SNES Rare games will increase now with Rare Replay wetting peoples appetites it wouldn't be a bad thing if that game encourages people to look for the Rare games that didn't make it on there for various copyright and space issues. I also hope that the Number One chart position Rare Replay hit along with their general high quality output in the past will give the company a rebirth with Microsoft treating them a bit more seriously and investing. I know a lot of people who made Rare into Rare have long since left but I don't think the spirit of Rare is dead, even if it is treading water on life support at this moment in time, let’s all hope Rare Replays sales can be the start of an attempt at resuscitation.

Snes Review 80: Donkey Kong Country 2

What with Rare Replay having come out just recently celebrating the companies long history I thought it would be a good time to review a SNES game made by them. Now there are no SNES games on Rare replay with 3 of them it is because Nintendo owns the rights to them these are the Donkey Kong Country games. Now I already reviewed the first Donkey Kong Country so now I guess it is time to talk about its first sequel.

So Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest or as it is known as in Japan Super Donkey Kong 2: Dixie & Diddy was a 1995 adventure platforming video game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was released in November 1995 in Japan and America coming here mid-December. Now I wish I could tell a heart-warming tale of my youth in how I waited for this game with bated breath or how I got it and my friends got it and we all played it together but the real truth is it largely passed me by. There used to be a great game shop in my small town and the guy who owned it had a Japanese Super Nintendo Television, it was literally a TV with a cart slot in the top and he had the Japanese version of this in there on it trying to encourage sales, I used to fetch him coffee and check on competitors prices for him and in return he gave me enough cash to get myself a coffee as well and let me play on the games. So I played enough of it there to know that it was good but it launched just after the original PlayStation and everyone was saving and scrambling trying to get their hands on one of those.

It is a shame when the twilight games for one system get shadowed by the arrival of new technology but part of the world of Video games is built on this continual technological progress. I eventually got my own copy of Donkey Kong country 2 as a boxed NTSC American game along with American copies of the other two Donkey Kong Country games but what I used for the purpose of this review was a loose Japanese Cart I picked up about 4 months ago.
A s the title suggests, this is really Diddy Kong’s game, in fact you can’t even be Donkey Kong in it, he has been kidnapped and the plot of the game is that Diddy along with a female companion called Dixie is on a quest to rescue him.

The gameplay is pretty much the same as in the original but most players will notice that the levels soon increase in difficulty, this would make it a bit tough as a starting point for newcomers but it is ideal for those who have played the original as it lets you sort of carry on enjoying the gameplay without you having to be babied through the start of the game. Diddy Kong’s Quest is pretty much equal in terms of its graphics and audio to its predecessor but really the first one was pushing the machine hard so it would be foolish to have expected any great leaps. The atmospheric orchestrated soundtrack returns, providing catchy and eerie tunes alike. The music is beautiful, I cannot fault it even in the slightest and the graphics are very detailed, with brilliant charter animation and design which is absolutely full of character.

Much like in the first game you get to switch between the games two characters. Diddy is the quicker character, but Dixie has the ability to glide in the air by using her pigtails, which begs the question how in the heck does that work? There are still animals to ride, things to collect and bonus stages to enjoy. If you have played the first game then you know exactly what you are getting yourself into.

To be honest I really like this game and would have no trouble recommending it, it is a lot better than some of the PlayStation games which people were going wild for at its time of release. A lot of us would probably have been better off enjoying this and biding our time waiting a little longer for the PlayStation but it’s easy to say that in hindsight. I would however recommend the original first unless you already own that as it is a much better starting point and would most probably be a great deal easier to find. If forced to give this game a score I would give it an 8 out of 10, it’s a sold good looking chunk of platforming but it really is a typical by the numbers sequel.

OK so if you want to buy it how much of an investment are you looking at? Well it’s on the Wii U Virtual console for the usual price (I think it’s about £6.50 it’s been awhile since I have purchased a SNES game on there) which if you just want to play it is a fair figure for a great game like this. If you want a real pal cartridge the price for a copy seems to start around £18 but in some cases can be much higher, I have seen actual retro stores try to get up to £40 for a loose cart, boxed versions will usually start around £40 with the condition and price varying widely. If you want to save some cash but still play it on a Super Nintendo and can play imports I have frequently seen Japanese copies on eBay under the name Donkey Kong Country 2 including postage go for around £6 to £7 and with it being a cartoon platformer there is no real language barrier this would probably be my recommendation.

My Rare Replay was supposed to arrive today through Amazon. I cant moan that much though because in general everything I have ordered from them has arrived promptly and in good condition. I am however absolutely itching to get it and to start playing the games. I grew up on a lot of these titles Atic Atac one of the Spectrum games on the disc was one of the first Spectrum games I remember really enjoying.

I have done everything possible today to ignore the fact that it is not yet in my possession, I have played other games, I have gone out and brought retro games from a charity shop I even brought and hammerd the Path of the Ultimate Warrior DLC for WWE 2K15 (I will talk about this soon enough). I think one of the things I have spent the most time doing though is simply thinking about Rare Replay, thinking about what is on the disc, what is not on the disk, why these games are missing be it down to licensing issues or other reasons. It is obvious why the Donkey Kong games are not on there with Donkey Kong belonging to Nintendo, I can understand GoldenEye not being on there due to the bong license but when we have BattleToads NES and arcade on there why did the SNES BattleToads in battle maniacs not make the cut?

One thing that really hit me when I stopped and thought about it though is that there are now more N64 titles available on the Xbox One than there are on the Wii U. Even saying or writing that seems strange but here are the facts.

On Rare Replay released today you can get the following N64 games

Killer Instinct Gold
Jet Force Gemini
Blast Corps
Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Banjo-Kazooie
Banjo-Tooie
Perfect Dark


(The first four are pure N64 Emulated, the last three have had slight touch up's)

On the Wii U’s Virtual Console shop, you can buy and download

Paper Mario
Donkey Kong 64
Super Mario 64
Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
Mario Tennis
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

If you want those six N64 games on the Wii U though you will need to pay £54 in total and have nothing Physical to show for it at all, with no real chance of discount (Unless you get a discounted Nintendo cash card from somewhere like CDkeys).

Or you can get the 7 N64 based titles on Xbox one for, well depends what seller you go to but its £18 on Amazon (I did see it for £16.50 on one site for awhile) and you have a disc to keep as well and all kinds of extra challenges added in, documentary footage, making of videos plus a whole bunch of Spectrum games,Nes games, an arcade game, an original xbox game, 5 or so Xbox 360 games on top for your money.

When you look at it in this way from my perspective at least this just makes Nintendo look kind of greedy and not as business savy as they should be in this digital area. OK if you make your Wii U go into Wii mode you can go to the Wii Virtual console and then this puts the amount of N64 games you can get up to around 20 but still at a high high cost.

I cant wait to see sales figures for Rare Replay. It does raise all kinds of questions though. What would have happened if Nintendo had brought out Rare, would we be looking at Rare Replay on the Wii U with added Donkey kong related games? Or would Nintendo have preferd to have slowly drip fed these games on to there virtual console store at £9 per N64 game, £3.50 per NES title etcetera? We will never know what would have happened if Nintendo owned Rare maybe would have milked the IP for every penny maybe they wouldn't have. Why not leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Games I think get too much hate. 1: Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts.

Ok so today I am going to be talking about Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and first things first to get this out of the way, I really like Nuts and Bolts in fact I think I would go as far as to say I love it. I know its a popular game to hate, it seems to attract an almost never ending stream of venom to the degree that it has become pretty much cool to hate on it. I can even understand some of this hate after all it is a sequel which is very different to its predecessors when most people really wanted more of the same. People also feel that some of the comments made in the games opening are kind of insulting to the fans of the original games but I don't really see it like that myself.

For me the opening with Banjo and Kazooie having gotten fat and out of shape is really kind of funny. I mean think about it. Most games with sequels are kind of like a TV show in which no matter what happens the status qua is always re-established at the end of a story or at the start of a new episode. Think about the Simpsons for example yes they go on a crazy adventure and become rich or adopt an elephant but most of these changes never last there universe always seems to default to a set state and the characters never really change or age. If you pick u a Mario game be it the first game or the most recent Mario looks more or less the same well apart from the difference in graphical fidelity at least. Nuts and Bolts with the whole fat joke basically was poking fun at this, instead of 6 years having passed in the real world but time having stood still in Banjo's world they decided to make a joke that since saving the world Banjo had sat around eating and doing nothing because there were no adventures to go on. It might not be the funniest joke in the world but it got a small laugh out of me and I think the hatters like to read to much in to it and are just looking for holes to pick. 

Then there is the whole point where a character in the game basically tells you that no one wants a platformer anymore they want to shoot things, people seemed to view this as the games producers saying ''look we know what's best for you, we will give you what we think is best and you can shut up and like it'' I never personally took it this way at all. I took it more as a comment on the state of the video game world and how it had changed. Growing up for me yeah sure there were games where you could shoot and kill aliens but there was so much more than that, cute platformers had been popular it had been cool to like Mario and sonic and before that there had been some weird games on the spectrum games where you would control a man who just wanted to hide from his wife, or a game where you controlled a music groups management, and even a game where you controlled a plumber trying to unblock pipes before they flooded with shit. Rare had been around a long time both as Rare and as Ultimate Play the Game they had seen this change they had felt it happen around them and this was simply them commenting on it. There is an argument made that it was Microsoft who forced rare to make Nuts and bolts a car based game as opposed to a traditional platformer but even if that's true than this still stands, it is someone or a group of writers within Rare making a point possibly even poking fun at those above them in control.

I think most of the backlash against the game is from people who simply just wanted more of the same and while I also would have been happy with more of the same I really like what we got. I remember playing Nuts and Bolts for the first time and really loving the building aspect to it. I would play it with my 6 year old daughter on my knee laughing and clapping to her it was a video game representation of the lego's she played with. She loved to build her own vehicles to watch me build them and to talk about what we could do, and how we could do it.

The vehicles can be built freely by the player from over 1,600 different components including body panels, engines, wheels, wings, propellers,weapons, fuel and ammo containers. Basically you are met with various challenges and you build the vehicle you think you need to succeed. There is no one right answer , the vehicle you build to do it might be very different from the one I build and this is half of the fun. The physics engine allows the vehicles to behave in relation to how they are built, the sense of weight is somewhat exaggerated but you know if you put more armour on a vehicle it will effect how it moves and if you don't remember to balance the weight on either side/end then its going to cause problems. You can construct vehicles can be paint them, then save them in order to use them latter or to come back to them and edit them. Your always unlocking new parts. So maybe you made a bike and it was fast but its too slippy in the way it handles to complete a new challenge, easy you load up your blue print for it and add the new high gripping wheels you found problem solved. There is a test track area provided so that if you make subtle changes to a vehicle you can test them out before attempting to really use it. One of my favourite things about the game though is that Players can also send and receive blueprints online, so if you have people on your friends list with the game and you think you have built the ultimate vehicle well you can send them it to play with.

Nowadays we are very used to games that have this sort of creativity but I think its important to note that this game launched before the likes of Minecraft got popular. Look at the way Minecraft has become this massive phenomenon this creative outlet which no one can get enough off, its seen as so much more than a game, its a game but its also one of the few electronic experiences that educational institutes such as schools feel like they can get behind and support because of the creative aspects of it. Yet when you look at Nuts and Bolts laid bare it had a lot of the same qualities. Maybe it was simply before its time. Maybe if it had come out a little latter or been made as its own stand alone without the Banjo name it would have fared better

Just look at Minecraft and the way it seemed to take over the whole world. The way it still remains popular and relevant to this day while other new titles fall by the wayside one after another. It seems to have attracted a whole new generation of players to its innovative open-world, sandbox styled gameplay, and inspired so many other games. Now we have things like the Little Big Planet series helping you to build your own levels, and kerbal space programme helping you build space ships to try and travel through deep space. All of these games being considered special both fun and to some degree creative and educational.

So why is Nuts and Bolts hated so much? Its only mistake was trying to pass itself off as a new Banjo-Kazooie game. If people had hated on it a little less and seen the positive side of it well then it could have achieved so much. It was offering some of the creativity that minecraft does before minecraft did. It could have been a creative force for good it could have brought more people to gaming but unfortunately some people just want to moan and complain about what they don't have instead of looking at the positives.

I will always enjoy Nuts and Bolts both as a game and as a part of a whole group of special moments of fun and laughter I got to share with my child. No matter what anyone says to me it is an underrated gem. hopefully with its inclusion on Rare Replay which is released in a few days it might reach a new audience.