SNES game review 44 Mortal Kombat

 

My game today is Mortal Kombat the arcade fighting game developed and published by Midway (in 1992) It was subsequently released by Acclaim Entertainment for just about every home video game system that existed back then. It was a massive seller and was one of the few competitors for street fighter 2’s crown in a market which was usually filled with awful semi functioning clones. It started a whole series of games but more than that it actually spawned a successful film adaptation in 1995. It sparked a great deal of controversy though for its depiction of extreme violence and bloodshed by using realistic (for the time) digitized graphics. This game was involved in several hearings on video game violence the results of which resulted in the introduction of age-specific content description ratings for video games. This game certainly changed the world of video games.

 

 

 

When mortal kombat came it came riding a huge train load of hype, at the time nearly all games were released on a friday but mortal kombat just had to break the trend it was released on a monday which was dubbed Mortal Monday… No matter how long ago that was I still remember it for one reason and that’s the fact that the man who owned the local games shop agreed to give a select number of his loyal customers the game on the friday before that. My brother was one of them, he brought the megadrive version and we spent the entire weekend before its release playing it.. Its not uncommon now to get the odd game a day or maybe two before release because it has been posted out and arrived early but back then this was more or less unheard of.

 

Eventually I decided to get the snes version when I saw it at a greatly reduced price. Now a lot of people would expect the snes version to be an improvement and maybe the graphics were a touch clearer but if anything the gritty quality of the megadrive version actually helped to give it a certain grind house feel and if anything covered some of the blur present in the sprites a little and that’s before you even got to the infamous blood code. On both the snes and megadrive versions of mortal kombat when you put them in the machine they would load up and one of the first things you would notice was the absence of blood. For the mega drive there was a simple code you could input which would switch on the gore, unfortunately the snes version simply did not feature this and no button combinations or joypad caresses would get claret flowing.

 

A snes magazine in the uk actually ran an april fools which tried to make its readers believe that the blood was in there as well as an option to play as the boss characters but that the cart needed extra weight adding to it to make all of this obtainable. What they told you to do was glue a one pence piece on to the top of your cartridge before going through a combination of button presses which would open some kind of debug menu. I remember that even after they had admitted it was all a giant wind up I would come across seconds hand copies of the game in various stores and markets which still had a penny firmly glued to the top of them. The funny thing is there were kids at school who swore on there life that they had gotten into this debug menu and then promptly denied ever having said it latter. Now the game mortal kombat often gets compared to is street fighter 2 and yes I admit street fighter 2 is better for combos and has several other advantages but I think MK has enough of its own qualities to warrant its place in the fighting fans collection. Personally I love the characters and there back stories sure people will argue that sub zero and scorpion are essentially palate swaps but there portrayal as mortal enemies from warring clans and just how cool they both were in general was more than enough to make me not care. In some ways it can be said the graphics haven’t aged as well as more basic sprites but I don’t know something about them appeals to me and kind of reminds me of old kung fu films I guess its down to your personal preferences. One thing I loved with Mk was the music and sound effects the beat in the various songs just got you in the mood to rip somebodies head off and the sounds being cried out such as scorpion shouting ”get over here” just had an epic quality to them. I find the game greatly playable but not without its limits, the way I see it is as an excellent starting block for a franchise and I can’t help but give it a 7 out of 10. (I give the mega drive a 8 out of 10 though it just feels more tailored to the system and I guess I am just ”loyal to the gore” (bonus points for anyone who knows where this quote comes from)

 

If you want to play the game on your SNES it is going to cost you around £10 for a pal cart or about £20 for a boxed copy, if you own a megadrive you might want to consider getting a copy on that instead. I also dont want to give anything away but you might want to look at the prices of other games in the series as well.

Snes game review:40 Acrobat Mission

So once again I am doing a review of a SNES game which started out life as an arcade machine before being converted, which you would think means once again I am going to be talking about things that were left out and changes that were made but no the main difference here is that the game I am talking about today is probably one you have never heard of as it was only released in Japan. I cant remember ever having seen or played the arcade machine so I am just not going to worry about that and judge it based on its self and to a least some degree its competition on the SNES.

When I tell you that the name of the game is Acrobat Mission you will probably say what kind of name is that for a game? Is it a game where you are an acrobat, some kind of platformer but no it is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up

The first thing I noticed was that as the game began the story scrolled up the screen and I could read it, yes its a Japanese game but literally all of the language in it, the options, the story is in English which makes it pretty cool for importers.

To start with the graphics looked colourful but basic, in fact you could almost believe that you were playing a NES game, add to that the fact that I pressed all of the button and only one of them actually seemed to do anything and that was shoot, the next thing I tried was holding down the button assuming that there would be some kind of charge attack and well nothing happened. I carried on playing it not really expecting much from it then as things went on it hit me this game ran at a nice speed, even though the players ship seems to be a really basic sprite a lot of the enemies seem to be larger and more detailed. Then I began to collect power up's and found that not only did they effect the way my ship fired they also allowed me to do charged up shots if I held the button, and the bombs I collected actually appeared on the ship and disappeared once I worked out the button which you have  to press to fire them (So in the end there are 2 buttons to use). When you die, which you will because it is a reasonably tough game, instead of instantly exploding or disappearing your ship actually sort of limps along with steam coming out of it, while this is happening your  still in control and can steer your burning space ship, you can in fact steer it into something so that when it explodes you can take enemies with you, I found this to be a really neat and interesting little idea.

The graphics are not the best but there is a lot of variety it puts Super Stirke Gunner I played about 10 days ago to shame in this area. It also has large bosses the first is a large battleship which is so long it is actually about four screens in length and covered in guns. The bullets It fires are larger than your ship and it can be tough because it tracks your movement and shoots at you.An other interesting little fact is that you don’t die if you physically touch enemy ships, sure if you run in to bullets your screwed but you can fly through enemies and get away with it. There is also space debris which can get in the way of your ship and your shots, this is something I like sure its another simply touch but the beauty of this game is all of its simple touches.

OK as for the bad side, by shoot-em-up standards this game has a very limited selection of weapons pick ups, there is the standard shot and then two or three special shots you can get by picking up letters, compare this to the absolute tonne of weapons in other shooters at the time like UN Squadron and its a little disappointing.

Another problem some people have with the game is how short it is, this game relies on being very hard after the first 2 levels to kind of prolong the game, there are only 5 stages and when you think that this game was at one point a full priced retail game that seems to be just a little short of what I think would be a fair number.

I would give this game a hearty 7 out of 10, its not perfect but it was a very pleasant surprise. Unfortunately its not available either as a Pal cart or American but with its heavy use of English and the fact  that it ran on both a modified machine and a very simple converter this is not a bad game for someone who wants to start importing or at least it would be if you could find a cheap copy, the only copy I can see online at the moment is like £25, I brought this from someone as a package deal 7 Japanese carts for £14 all of which apart from this were sports games.

Snes game review 39: James Pond Aquatic Games AKA James Pond Crazy sports

So you have your Sonic's and your Mario's then there are all the sort of lesser known platforming heroes some of which are in games which could rival the likes of the above others who are in games that are poor pale imitations.

If you owned an Amiga there were certain characters you were bound to know and love, one of these was James Pond, he was a well loved star of several games but they wernt Amiga exclusive in fact I think all of them ended up being on the megadrive /Genesis and the super Nintendo got everything apart from his first game (James pond 2 operation Robocod, was released on the SNES with the name Super James Pond, almost ignoring that there was a previous game)

Now you might think that I am going to be talking about Super James pond or its sequel Operation Starfish but actually the game I am going to be talking about today is The Aquatic Games or Super Aquatic Games as it is known as on  the Super Nintendo. Basically this game took the character of James Pond and used him to front  an aquatic-themed parody of the sports mini games joystick wigglers like Konami's Track & Field.

This game is the only James Pond title not to be a platformer, you cant help but think that the programmers had the idea that they could spin the character off in to other genres and in doing so might help him to grow in fame and begin to approach Mario levels.

The First thing I noticed when booting this game up was that I knew the opening music, I more than knew it, it was something I have found myself humming before and then it hit me it was a particularly cheery 8 bit version of Ode to Joy (from Beethoven's 9th). I have to say this was a good start as I put a smile on my face before I had even pressed a button.

Now in talking about Super Aquatic games I have to admit that some of these issues are not really raised in relation to the game but to the whole genre at that time...  theres only so much you can do when its bang buttons like mad till you win or loose, it tires your fingers you get blooming scared you will break the pad. The game does nothing to teach you how to play it so you end up spending so much time just messing around working out what you are supposed to be doing, sure in the day you would have had the manual and that would have helped but it wouldn’t have been that hard to put some in game instructions, some text on the screen before an event ? All of the games are really basic and despite my best efforts I couldn’t come anywhere, I admit I didnt hammer the pad as hard as a kid would have done back when this came out but who really wants to risk breaking a joypad from an old system when the number out there is finite ?

I loved the 3 James Pond platformers as a kid, I found them funny charming and enjoyable, I even enjoyed picking up the DS re-release of the second one so the problem here is I was and am invested in the character I think James Pond rules and if you cant manage to sell a spin off to someone who clearly loves the original franchise then you are clearly barking up the wrong tree.

Its just a shame, the games bright, has good music but just doesnt deliver, it feels souless and shallow and well I feel I need to give it a 2.5 out of 10 ….a sad sad day for James Pond. At first I thought that it didnt even hit these shores as all the copies I saw were American and between the realms of £10 to £15 add to the fact that a modfied machine wont even play it without a heavy duty Datel Universal Adaptor and well its expensive, but then I realised that in the UK it was called James Pond Crazy sports on the snes and its about a £8 to £10 pal game, its still not worth it

150 SNES games reviewed #35: UN Squadron

U.N. Squadron is a side-scrolling shooting game which came out in arcades in 1989. It was programmed by Capcom and released for use on their CPS arcade hardware. I won’t explain what this was but if you look back at my Final Fight review there is an explanation there.

The game was released in Japan under the name Area 88, the same name which was used for the Super Famicom (Japanese version of this game). The game is a typical side-scrolling shooter, unlike many of Capcom’s other shooters around this time such as their 1940 series which are vertical-scrolling shooters. It was based on a Manga series Area 88 which never really came to these shores. But the game has a nice intro which explains the rough idea behind the story.

My UN Squadron SNES YouTube Review 

Unlike some shooters which are one hit and you’re dead this game is a little different. If you’re hit then your plane is damaged but if you can keep it safe from harm for a little while then you’ll be fine. This actually adds to the excitement, you will find yourself going: ‘OK I have got to keep away from the enemies as you keep trying to dodge incoming fire and hold on’. When you manage it you will thump the air in triumph, and when you fail you will curse yourself for not having quick enough reflexes but the main thing is it always feels like any failures are down to your own lack of skills.

Before starting a level you get the option of purchasing special weapons or added defense options from the shop. As you shoot down enemies you gain cash and at the end of the level any special weapons you purchased and did not use get converted back in to funds and added to your cash reserve. This is a great little addition as once you get better at the early levels you can try to challenge yourself with the added benefit of an easier time in later missions by trying to complete the earlier ones on a strict budget allowing you to hold back enough money to kit your plane out with lots of special weapons for the later missions.

 

If you were a big fan of Capcom then the SNES was definitely the machine for you to get your arcade fix on back in the day. If you have read my Final Fight review then you might be asking what has been dropped from the original arcade version?

Well the SNES version is not an exact replica of the coin-op. Yes, it is a port and yes, this port does have certain things missing and disappointingly one of these missing things is once again the two-player mode. Some of the game’s levels are different or modified from the arcade version but it is not always in a bad way. It’s not really a worse version. it’s more of a slightly remixed version. In this case they didn’t just strip things from the game, there are actually a few additions including some more weapons and the chance to purchase different aircraft. Ignoring the missing two-player mode this game is no worse than the arcade machine, it’s just a little bit of a different version.

With bright graphics, enjoyable music and epic action it is hard to see what this game could do better. The end of the level will see you meeting some kind of large end of level boss which you will have to defeat. At this point you better hope you have held something back to save the day. I would have to give this game eight out of 10. It’s a darn good scrolling shooter. The only thing it is really lacking which would make me bump the score up would be a two-player mode, at this point some of you must be wondering if Capcom ever managed to bash out a high-quality SNES game which catered for more than one.

If you want to try this game you will most likely be paying £15 minimum for a cart of it. I managed to get one for £10 but it took a heck of a lot of looking around and waiting. Capcom have actually made quite a few of those classic collections but U.N. Squadron has never seemed to make the cut, and this is probably one of the reasons it holds its price.

150 SNES games reviewed #30: Super Mario Kart

Super Mario Kart – what can I say about it that you won’t all have heard a million times?

 

I cant even build anticipation by trying to hold my opinion back until the end and starting this review by talking facts and figures. So let’s just start by saying I love this game and work from there. Mario Kart was developed by Nintendo EAD it came out in 1992 in the US and Japan and 1993 in Europe. It went on to sell nine million copies worldwide. This figure in the end made it the third best selling SNES game overall. If you add this on to all of the sales it has made digitally with its release on both the Wii and Wii U Virtual Consoles then you start to realise what a golden egg laying goose this game has been for Nintendo.

My Super Mario Kart SNES YouTube Review 

Nowadays everyone knows what Mario Kart is and the announcement of a new version is met with an onslaught of happiness, sales jumps for the platform it’s coming to and a media frenzy. It wasn’t always quite like this as far as I can remember though. When people first got wind of the original Mario Kart the responses were more on the lines of what the heck is Nintendo doing? Sure Mario had been used for tiny cameos in Nintendo sports related titles and such but a babyish looking car racing game, ‘What were they thinking?’ was the sort of question I remember being asked by other kids at school. There was a genuine belief by some that Nintendo had lost the plot. Yet not one kid could manage to keep this opinion after they had played it. A lot of the guys at school did that thing guys at school always seemed to do when presented with something that proved there initial opinion wrong, they denied ever having said a bad word, they claimed that they had been Nintendo’s biggest supporter all along and knew that Mario Kart would be an all time classic from its inception.

Super Mario Kart received positive reviews across the board no one seemed to have a negative word to say about it. Apart from Sega that is, who tried to use it in their adverts to show Nintendo to be some kind of slow, old-fashioned baby toy compared to their sleek, fire-breathing Mega Drive (the advert were Mario Kart is running on the side of an old caravan. This now seems crazy because Mario Kart is not a slow game)
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Mario Kart is often credited with creating the cart racing genre. More than this though it was the game that gave people a sense of confidence that Nintendo could achieve anything they tried after the first Mario Kart game. If Nintendo had told you they were making Mario’s Bungee Jump Massacre you would just nod and go: “They know what they are doing.”

For those of you who haven’t played the original Mario Kart, the young and hermits, I will quickly talk a little about the game itself. In Super Mario Kart the player takes control of one of eight Mario characters, each with different qualities – high top speed, good acceleration, great handling. All of them are basically equal but lend themselves to certain play-styles. In the single player mode players can race against computer controlled characters in multi-race tournaments trying to win the gold, silver or bronze cups. There are power-ups found on the track, you pick up flashing boxes which then give you one of several power-ups – a red shell which acts like a heat seeking missile, a banana skin which causes anyone who drives over it to skid out, etc. The screen is always split in two with one half showing you racing and the other showing a map. The graphics are not necessarily amazing for the time, they are however colourful and full of character. This is not just some carting game with Mario and co thrown in it, you actually feel like you’re driving through the Mario game lands and this is one of the game’s greatest advantages. The music is brilliant, you can hear noises related to your driving – the car engine, the tyres skidding – but they are always nice little background touches never interfering with the great music that plays.

I just cant fault this game. The SNES version is still brilliant. I wasn’t going to review this game so early on but recently I brought my third copy of this game. I got a Japanese cart for £5 loose and ever since the day I got it I have put it in to my machine and had 20 minutes on it every single day. Some games age badly but this is still brilliant and I feel sure I could put this in the slot 20 years down the line and still feel the need to play it, for this reason I can not help but give it 10 out of 10.

If you want Mario Kart the news is good in that It is still available on both the Wii U and Wii Virtual Consoles and is well worth the cash. With a bit of effort you should be able to get a PAL cart of this for about £17 or a boxed copy for around £40. It’s super popular but it sold by the shed load so there’s no shortage of copies.

150 SNES games reviewed #23: Final Fight

I try to keep games like this that everyone will know to a bear minimum or at least thin them out as much as I can, but I kind of felt that I needed to get Final Fight out of the way – and not in a bad way.

 

My Final Fight YouTube Review 

 

The game was important for a lot of reasons. The fact that it was on the SNES but not the Mega Drive was one of them, as this was part of the reasoning behind Sega coming up with the Streets of Rage franchise. The game touched and affected the whole of the market. I am going to try to talk about it but do my best not to retread the exact same ground everyone does (this will be hard with how much the game has been talked about).


Final Fight is a side-scrolling beat-’em-up produced by Capcom. Originally it was released as an arcade game in 1989. Final Fight was the seventh title Capcom made to work with its CPS-1 arcade system board. The CPS-1 worked a bit like the Neo Geo, you had a system board and other smaller boards could be mounted on top of this, and the large board was the guts of the arcade unit and the small board held the actual game. I actually own a CPS-1 board but the only game board I own for it is Pang! 3.



The game is set within the fictional Metro City. In the arcade game you get to pick one of three characters: Former pro wrestler-turned-mayor Mike Haggar, his daughter’s boyfriend Cody, and Cody’s friend Guy. The whole idea of the game is to take down the Mad Gear gang and rescue Haggar’s daughter Jessica.

The game originally began development as a sequel to the first Street Fighter arcade game but the genre was switched from a one-on-one fighting game to a scrolling beat ’em up and the title was changed following the success of Double Dragon. This is probably one of the main reasons that Final Fight characters have popped up in Street Fighter games.

When the SNES version was released it was in some ways limited. There was only Haggar and Cody – Guy had been dropped (although there was a version released in some territories called Final Fight Guy which removed Cody from the game and replaced him with Guy). There was also a level stripped out of the game and then there were some minor changes in connection to policies Nintendo had for games released on their machines. Female members of Mad Gear were altered to appear male as Nintendo had objections in regards to the ability to violently beat up women, even if they were busy trying to knife you to death. None of this broke the game or made a huge difference to how it played. I do think that with some effort they could have squeezed Guy in. I have seen games cheat to free up room by using the same legs or arms for characters before sometimes just colour swapped and I am sure there would have been a way to do something like this to free up a little room. The main thing that people tend to talk about is the fact that the game has no two-player mode, which I have to admit is a shame as this was one of the things that made the arcade machine so popular, the fact that you could go through the whole game with a buddy. It is not a game breaking deal though as long as you know about it in advance. The graphics are big, bright and impactful, the music is just as good. The only negatives there are can’t really be termed negatives with the game and more deficits from the arcade machine.



The game is a great scrolling beat em up to play on your own and even bearing this in mind I would have to give it eight out of 10. However I fully recognise that if you want to play with a buddy or have a friend around you would be better looking at one of its competitors or even one of its sequels (they are usually expensive though).

I have had my copy since I was a kid. I bought it before I even owned a SNES. It was September and I knew I was getting my SNES for Christmas, I already had a cheap converter and Final Fight came up for sale NTSC in my local games shop a place called Games World for £10. I used to get £5 a week pocket money and £2 a day lunch money. So I did what I think most game crazy school kids would do. I took an apple and a bottle of water to school everyday without my parents knowing and ate these for dinner while pocketing the money waiting for Saturday to come so I could buy Final Fight. Following this kind of logic I had a nice little collection by the time Christmas rolled around.

If you want to buy Final Fight PAL versions exist but whenever I see them they are crazy money. US NTSC versions crop up for around £15 for a cart. To be honest if you have a Wii U you can download Final Fight for £5.50 (the SNES version). Or if you have a PS3 or Xbox 360 you can get a perfect emulation of the arcade machine for about £6.50. It can be found under the title Final Fight: Double Impact, and for your cash you get both Final Fight and another Capcom game called Magic Sword (which was also ported to the SNES).

150 SNES games reviewed #20: Cannon Fodder

Cannon Fodder can best be described as an action-strategy shooting game. It was developed by Sensible Software and originally published by Virgin Interactive for the Amiga in 1993. 

My Cannon Fodder SNES review 

It got rave reviews across the board from pretty much every Amiga magazine at the time despite also causing controversy with its humorous take on war. Virgin soon ported the game to other home computer systems as well as to the Jaguar, Mega Drive, SNES and 3DO.


With my complaints about some other games being ported to the SNES people could expect me to get a bug in my butt about this game. After all, the controls pretty much show themselves to be mouse controls pushed on to a pad (play if for just one minute and you will see what I mean, you move a crosshair on the screen and then press a button to move to that point or another button to shoot in that direction).

The player directs troops through numerous missions, battling enemy infantry, vehicles and installations. The game is incredibly playable – sure, the controls might be a little strange, it might also seem a little basic and maybe in some ways it is, but it just works. What the graphics lack in quality they make up for by having an amusing cuteness to them.

Cannon Fodder doesn’t feature much music. There is no music during the missions themselves. Instead these are accompanied by sounds such as bird cries, and of course gunfire, explosions and the screams of the dying. There are a few tunes that play during the briefing and debriefing screens though and these really help to set the scene.

 

Cannon Fodder’s greatest strength is its dark humorous tone. This is what made some people originally love it but also caused a lot of controversy. Its creators always talked about how they intended it to convey an anti-war message, which some reviewers and fans at the time recognised and which seems obvious to me now. The problem is that certain newspapers and solider-related charities had real issues with it. They thought it was making war into too light a subject and taking the piss out of those who had suffered and died in war.
Cannon Fodder is definitely a game that I would refer to as a classic, and unlike some other games from this time period it is still very playable. That is in part down to its simplicity but you also need to thank its dark sense of humour. This was a rare treat of a game in the fact there was a message hidden behind the action, back when other games just wanted to sell themselves to you as mindless action, this game had a point.

Every time a gravestone appears on the hill, every time you have lost a man you cant help but mourn for his death. The soldiers are not just a group of faceless numbers, by giving them names, by allowing them to rank up and by a cross being added to the hill for every loss, you start to view them as people. You have favourites, not many other games achieve this with the exception of Fire Emblem and X-COM. I am going to have to give my first decimal score here. I can’t decide between seven and eight, so 7.5 out of 10 it is.

I was incredibly lucky with this game. I went to a retro store – one which is usually stupidly expensive (they charge £15 for the old NES Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt cart despite having three copies in stock for one) – and all they wanted for this was £4. Having looked online you can get the PAL cart of this game for about £13 or if you want to spend a little more you could get a boxed copy for around £25. Important things to note though are that this game was available on everything so you might be able to get a cheaper version on another format some of them such as the Amiga version have little things which are missing from the SNES version (the title song has amusing lyrics).

150 SNES games reviewed #19: Pinball Fantasies

Pinball Fantasies is a pinball game which was originally made for the Commodore Amiga  by Digital Illusions CE, it was a sequel to there earlier pinball game Pinball Dreams (which was also ported to the Super Nintendo).

My Pinball Fantasies YouTube Video 

A further sequel was released in 1995 called Pinball Illusions but this never made it to the SNES, a remake of it called True Pinball did eventually make it to the ps1 and Saturn though and some of you may have played it.


Digital Illusions began in May 1992 in Sweden and consisted of four people who were formerly members of the demogroup The Silents. Demogroups are teams of people who make computer-based audio-visual works of art which are usually put into the public domain on disc. These were very popular in the Amiga and Atari ST days. If you owned an Amiga you probably sampled a few of these I remember ones with bouncing balls and techno-style music and ones which showed pictures of the Addams Family complete with MIDI music and all sorts. Digitial Illusions’ original office consisted of a small dorm room and this is where their pinball titles such as this were originally made. Eventually Digital Illusions became the company known today as EA DICE who are responsible for the Battlefield games so they’re still knocking about to this day. Apparently, Pinball Fantasies was ported to the SNES by a company called Spidersoft, which basically made a living converting games to different platforms. They also still exist to this day as a part of Rockstar and are now called Rockstar Lincoln. Heck, even the publisher of this game, GameTek, still exists today under the name Take-Two Interactive Software Europe. So I can happily say all companies involved in this game are still alive and kicking.

OK, back to the game at hand. This game has four differently themed pinball tables and they are as follows:

• Party Land, which is a table based on an amusement park
• Speed Devils, which is a table focused on car racing
• Billion Dollar Gameshow, which is a table based on the idea of a game show, and then there is
• Stones ‘N Bones, which is a horror themed table based on a haunted house.

The sound is functional. The controls although basic serve their purpose well and the graphics are bright and colourful. You would think it sounds like I like this game – well I kind of did like it a heck of a lot on its original platform the Amiga.

 

The problem is that the game when it was on the Amiga was on three disks and was about £10 as far as I can remember. So once you take these three disks and plant them on to a SNES cart they are suddenly trying to sell it for £40 and if anything it was a slight step backwards as the SNES did not seem to have as large a colour palette as the Amiga.

I suppose when trying to rate this there are several ways to look at it, I could mark it down for being a port from a non-Nintendo machine with no real effort to play to the machine’s strengths. I suppose though you need to look into what people’s options were at the time both on the SNES and on its direct competitor the Mega Drive. On the SNES you have Pinball Fantasies, Pinball Dreams and Super Pinball (I have never actually seen or played this one) and thats pretty much it for PAL pinball games. If you look abroad at Super Famicom games there is one called Battle Pinball which people tend to speak very highly about. There is also one called Jaki Crush which tends to receive mixed reviews, Super Pinball had a sequel that didn’t make it here. As you can see though your options as a SNES gamer were very limited when it came to pinball.

The Mega Drive had Psycho Pinball, Sonic Spinball, Crüe Ball, Dragon’s Fury, Dragon’s Revenge, all of which seem to be tailored much more to the hardware. I would argue if you want to look into retro pinball games you’re much better looking at the Mega Drive or the PS1 (There was an excellent import-only Power Rangers Pinball game on the PS1).

The game does control well enough and is good for a quick pick up and play session but then we now live in a world where you can pay a lot less then you would usually pay to track down a retro pinball game and get a couple of tables on a brand new pinball game on your console or PC within seconds. Pinball Fantasies is a bit of a hard sell in a world with things like Pinball FX, unless you’re really into your retro stuff.

I would have to rate Pinball Fantasies as a six out of 10. It’s not a bad game, in fact it is at times quite fun, but it doesn’t have any real, lasting value. If you have no one to play against, no one to beat, or to challenge to beat your high scores it all becomes shallow and pointless far too quickly. You can get a PAL copy of the game cartridge only for about £10. Boxed complete copies seem to settle around the £40 mark but like I have previously mentioned unless you are buying this as part of a collection or to fulfil a need for more SNES games then there are a lot of avenues where you might be better spending your money for a pinball fix.

150 SNES games reviewed #18: ESPN Speed World

“EA Sports – It’s in the game,” as some of the old games used to say. I never quite got this. I didn’t quite know what it really meant. I presumed it meant that EA Sports games had great playability, a certain je ne sais quoi (a special quality which defies explanation).

 

ESPN Speed World You Tube Review

 I never got this myself though. Sure from time-to-time I would enjoy a EA Sports title but most of the time I saw them as being a celebration of style over substance. It was less about what was really ‘in the game’ and what they could put around the gameplay. What they could add to the presentation which would make there game seem like the A* football game or A* american football experience.

This might have seemed a slightly strange start to this review when I tell you that the game I have been playing is ESPN Speed World and that the game was made by a company called Park Place Productions and was published by Sony Imagesoft, you’ll see what I mean with the rest of this review though. The game was released in 1994 exclusively in North America as it was based on a TV series of the same name that was shown over there. The game has an official ESPN license but despite being about racing, Sony didn’t gain a NASCAR license, so you’re racing NASCAR Winston Cup stock cars but the real-life drivers’ names and likenesses are not here. At the start of the race though your met with some digitised footage of ESPN sports broadcaster Dr Jerry Punch which I am sure back in the day looked and sounded amazing but to my eyes now it looks rather poor.

 

Everything seems to be there – the tracks, the cars, the commentary – it’s only when you start driving that you realise something is really wrong. You don’t feel like you’re in control of the car at all. You feel like your in control of a skidding line. With some practice you can start to score wins but it never feels fun, it feels like a chore from start to end. I have literally have had more fun on racing games on the ZX Spectrum than on this game. This is when you start to realise that people would have realised this game was a pile of trash much quicker if it wasn’t for the licence and the fancy digitised speech and graphics glued on to this basic mess. It is a real lesson in how video game companies tried to polish a turd with licences and a bit of fancy presentation.

I spent £5 on this game including postage. I basically bought it because I was looking for cheap games I hadn’t played or really heard of before. I figured that I would take a shot at this game, and in honesty I regret it. If you want to try this game either because you don’t believe me or you like bad games there are a few important things to consider. The first is it was only released in the US so you’ll need either an NTSC machine, a modified machine or an import converter,  and the second is that you’re more than likely going to have to import it from the US (buy it from an eBay seller over there). This means even if you can get it cheap there’s going to be a fair bit of postage, a pain in the butt weight and a larger risk of it getting lost in transit, or the post services trying to charge you some kind of import tax on it. I strongly recommend you don’t bother as I rate this game as a three out of 10 at best, its certainly one of the worst ones I have played for this series so far.

SNES Game Review 149: Whirlo AKA Xandra no Daibōken: Valkyrie to no Deai

The game I am reviewing now is Xandra no Daibōken: Valkyrie to no Deai or at least that's what it was called in Japan, this basically translates to Xandra's Great Adventure: Encounter with the Valkyrie. The game didn't come out in America but it did hit Europe and Australia where it was called Whirlo, heck of a title simplification isent it? 

The game is a prequel to a NES game, a game called Valkyrie no Bōken: Toki no Kagi Densetsu that game had you play as a Valkyrie but featured a supporting character called Krino Xandra (known as Whirlo in Europe). This game takes that supporting character who for simplicities sake I will mostly call Whirlo from now on and thrusts him into the role of hero.

So what kind of game is Whirlo? Well its an action-adventure platform game it was developed by Nova Games Ltd and published  by Namco on July the 23rd of 1992 in Japan for the Super Famicom hitting Europe and Australia on the SNES as Whirlo sometime later during the same year. Now this is actually one of 10 games that Nova Games Ltd made for the SNES but in all honesty information about them is pretty much none existent, if you try to look up Nova Games you will find a mobile phone games developer which set up shop in 2014 and a Nova Games Limited which clearly cant be the one which worked on these SNES games as it was set up in 1993 a year after this games release, this particular company was a British game distributor located in Coppull, Lancashire, England which manufactured strength tester machines that had Addams Family and Star Trek licenses. I guess some game studio names just sound so cool they get used multiple times and no one cares as long as the company which used the name last is dead and gone.

OK so lets start talking about the game and lets start with the story. Whirlo/Xandra is living a peaceful and happy life deep in the countryside with his wife and there son in a place called Sandros/the Land of Marvel (Depends on the version your playing). Everything doesn't remain peaceful though, nope one day all of this peace is broken by a huge explosion which is so loud and powerful that it is heard throughout the land. This explosion releases an evil fiend who causes a deadly dust to fall from the sky and this dust makes many of the people across the Land of Marvel ill, it gives them some form of withering disease. Whirlo's son is afflicted with the disease and after overhearing talk of a marvelous curing medicine, Whirlo leaves his wife and child and sets out on a journey to find this medicine and save his son. 

So not that I have talked about the story I guess I will move on to the graphics. Well to start with Whirlo is a great looking little character, basically he is a tubby little green jelly baby sort of looking thing with a three pronged head who walks around naked holding a pitchfork. Strangely on the English box they gave him a mouth which is not present in either the game or the original Japanese art and well they also made him look a little bit more like a frog in my opinion as well as taking away his pitchfork. Its bad art and well OK I should stop talking about box art now and save that for another time. The graphics in general are great though, they look very polished, and there are a lot of different areas with there own designs and everything just moves so beautifully smooth. The game looks nice and pleasant but as I will get into later don't let the happy friendly graphics deceive you.

The music is absolutely brilliant stuff, not only does it fit the game perfectly but I also think its some of the best virtually unkown music on the system, well unknown outside of Japan at least, not really sure how big this game was there so for all I know everyone over there into retro gaming might frequently talk about this game.

I am guessing that this game was released in very small numbers over here, as I never ever saw it as a kid and well it also goes for a heck of a lot for a SNES game nowadays. After playing it I have to say that its such a shame that such a good game seems to be basically unknown. OK so I have let the cat out of the bag and sad the game is good, its good but its also blooming difficult , its darn challenging  but it is also cutesy platforming at its best. One touch from any enemy in the game and you die there is  no energy bar here and no power ups. You have the tool set your given from the get go and that's it.

The jump mechanics in this game are unusual and at first kind of confusing but with a bit of practice you will soon be impressed with what you can manage. You have two jump buttons B and A . B is your standard regular jump button. If you give it a little push then you do a little jump and if you press it for longer then you do a higher jump. A is also used to jump. If you hold down A, Whirlo/Sandora will crouch and start charging and when you release it you do a charged jump which goes even higher, think mario 2 on the NES if you have played that. If you start it from a stationary position the jumps not exactly super high but if you were running when you started holding A then you will jump much higher. If you charge for too long though you will tire Whirlo out and cause him to collapse out of exhaustion for a little bit. If while you're running you tap A then, you will do a long hop. It's a long jump with no real height but a lot of distance. At first all of these different kinds of jump are kind of confusing, it seems weird to have such a range of jumps but this is the beauty of the game, each and every one of them has its own use.

The Y button is your attack button, press it and Whirlo will use his pitchfork to attack enemies. If you do it when standing you'll do a straight stab. You can also stab below you. One of the coolest moments in this game for me is when you run and jump and attack an enemy below you with your pitchfork, you'll find yourself bouncing off of them and if you get the rhythm right you can bounce from enemy to enemy unleashing awesome stylish cutesy death upon your enemies. Its a tough game and it also seems to be pretty darn long, but its highly enjoyable, although for people who find hard games frustrating I can see this game rubbing some people up the wrong way.

OK so if I was to rate this game I would give it a 8.5 out of 10. I would score it higher but I do seriously think its difficulty level might be a barrier to some peoples enjoyment, maybe it could do with a few different difficulty levels perhaps one with a health bar? So if you wanted a Pal cart of this game what would it cost you? The cheapest pal copy which looked genuine that I have seen for sale was about £100 if you include postage. I have often seen people asking for sums like £230 for a loose cart of this, with people asking for £450 or more for boxed copies. Plus you get absolutely loads of fake copies and reproductions of this game. If you want to play it without paying a fortune or resulting in emulation then your best of looking at a Japanese copy of Xandra no Daibōken: Valkyrie to no Deai, you should be able to get a cart only one for about £10 if your willing to keep your eyes open, wait and have it imported, heck sometimes boxed copies of the Japanese version come up for about £30, obviously you need an import console, a modified console or a convertor in order to play it.

150 SNES games reviewed #15: Taz-Mania

You can’t talk for long about the SNES without mentioning the Mega Drive. Most people when I was young would have one or the other, but I was one of the exceptions to this rule.

 

I got a Mega Drive at first and then later I got a SNES. I like to think this made me less biased, as I was willing to see the strengths of both machines, willing to recognise good games on both platforms. The SNES game I’ve played to review was Taz-Mania. The game featuring Taz the Tasmanian devil (yes, the one from Warner Bros.’ Bugs Bunny cartoons and later his own show, Taz-Mania).

This was one of the cases where games bearing the same name came out for both SNES and Mega Drive more or less around the same sort of time, but were actually totally different games developed by different studios. Sometimes this turned out for the best because it meant both machines got games tailored to their own strengths as opposed to a game being made for one then ported to the other, or one simply being made taking the limitations of both platforms in to account. Taz-Mania on the Mega Drive was a 2D side-scrolling platform/adventure game which was developed by Recreational Brainware and published by SEGA. Taz-Mania on the SNES was a very different beast, developed by Visual Concepts and published by Sunsoft.

In each level of SNES Taz-Mania Taz must race against time to grab and eat a set number of kiwi birds, a number which if he does not manage to consume will see you lose. Enemies will attempt to stop Taz by running over him or bumping into him. In all of the levels you run up the road in a fashion a little bit like a car game, you run, you jump and you spin in an attempt to catch up to the birds needed while avoiding all perils. The graphics are nice and bright with a big Taz sprite who is full of character, this instantly makes you want to like the game but once you’ve played for a while you find that it all feels rather soulless. There are a lot of reasons for this, I think one is the fact that the controls feel very floaty – I never felt like I was properly in control of Taz. Whether or not I managed to catch the birds seemed to be based more on luck than any level of skill I did or did not possess. Any game which makes you feel like you’re winning or loosing based on your level of luck is off to a bad start because its only going to bore you even quicker. Add to this the fact that every level in the game is the same – they are all just running up the road looking for birds. Sure, more gets thrown in – rivers to jump, extra enemies – but it all still feels the same and it all feels like it relies on luck.




You can see why Sunsoft avoided the platformer route and went for something original, something different. It was a brave decision but one that I just don’t think paid off. If this bird eating racing had served as just one style of play in the game, or had been an almost Sonic the Hedgehog 2-style bonus level interspersed with platforming it would have been a lot better.

If I had to give SNES Taz-Mania a score I guess it would have to be three out of 10. It is perfectly playable, it’s just not very fun and it doesn’t have much to bring you back to it. Sure, some people would argue that it deserves more because it has good graphics and technically there is not enough wrong for it to deserve a score this low, but let’s face it, games are supposed to be fun. They’re supposed to draw you in and make you want to spend your time on them and if they fail to do this then they just fail in general.

I paid £5 for an NTSC cart of this game. You can get either a UK or US one usually for around £8. Heck, I’ve seen a fully boxed PAL copy online for £13 before. I can’t recommend anyone spend anywhere near £8 for it though to be fair. It’s not how bad this is, it’s how good some of the other things you could spend your cash on are. If you have a Mega Drive you can get a boxed PAL copy of Mega Drive Taz-Mania starting from £5 and this would be cash much better spent.

SNES game Review 147: Super Bomberman 2

Well my 65th Review was for Super Bomberman, which I just kept calling Bomberman totally forgetting the super part for some reason. When I reviewed the original I said that it was part of a long running franchise and since that review a Switch version was released which I grabbed, I also managed to get a copy of the original English Spectrum Bomberman game Eric and the Floaters. I dont want to get into how long this franchise has been going on again but I think the above does that. My purchase story behind Super Bomberman 2 is not a particularly exciting one, I grabbed it years later in a charity shop for a few quid. I should mention now that if you have read my review for the first Bomberman then it might sound like I am repeating myself but that's because this sequel is very much more of the same.

The normal 1 player mode of the game is just like any other Bomberman game. You control Bomberman, and you have to use your bombs to destroy various obstacles and opponents, ultimately using your bombs to turn on light switches that allow you to exit the level and progress on to the next. After completing a set number of levels, there is a boss battle, and how do you think you defeat the bosses that's right you do it by using bombs. You start the game only being able to lay one bomb at a time, this bomb will have a very small explosion, basically it will only harm things one square away in any direction. By destroying various obstacles some of which are bricks and others are mushrooms or treasure boxes it depends on the level you can find hidden powerups, what power ups can yoh get? Well you can pick up a flame this will increase the area your bomb damages, then you can pick up extra bombs so you can lay more than one at a time, you can also pick up shoes which make you move faster and more. Everything you can get in single player you can also get in the Multiplayer battle mode.

It is very easy to play Super Bomberman 2 there are very few buttons to get to grips with and very simple but tight controls. In order to become an absolute master at the game though you need to get smart. You will find yourself starting to understand how everything works, you will learn how large your explosion will be if you pick up a flame icon or 3 flame icons, all of this information will start to lodge in your brain, you will start having a greater awareness of how everything works and how you can use this to your advantage. If a bomb explodes and the flame hits another bomb it will cause this second bomb to detonate early. This is where the game starts to be far from simple as with multiple bombs and power ups you can either intentionally or accidentally cause large chain reactions in an attempts to get your opponents. If you panic and drop bombs all over the place causing huge chains of explosions then you will most likely kill yourself and this is where the game gets good. You need to learn how everything works and then learn how to keep a cool head and how to put your new found skills to work in even the most stressful of situations.

The single player story mode is basically partly there to entertain you when you are on your own but in honesty it also sort of serves as a training mode getting you ready for the real portion of the game the Multiplayer Battle mode. Super Bomberman 2 is one of the few games to use the SNES Multi-tap adaptor and with this you can have up to four players battling to blow each other to kingdom come.

If you don't have a multi-tap, your stuck to playing it in one or two player mode but luckily the computer will join in controlling AI characters to reach the full number. One of the interesting things is that there are multiple difficulty levels you can pick for the AI controlled Bombermen which is helpful as it means no matter what your skill level is you should be able to find an AI level that will allow you to have a good competitive game, its also cool from a training perspective as if your trying to improve you can keep upping the difficulty as you get better. If I have any issues with the AI it is that they all basically play in a highly defensive manner, it would be a nice touch if you could set some parameters that would make one be a little kill crazy willing to die if he took you down with him, then a defensive one, and a risk taker but I guess that's just expecting a lot given the hardware and when this game came out.

There are about ten maps you can choose from in multiplayer mode, and each one is different. The first map is sort of your bog standard no thrills one but each one from then on is  unique having its own quirk which makes it stand out and makes playing on it just a little bit different. For example one map has that sort of Pacman style thing where if you exit from the top of the map you reappear at the bottom. Sounds simple but it means that you can basically go from one side of the screen to the other in seconds and get the drop on your opponent or that they might do that to you.

Graphically the game is kind of basic but bright and fun and full of character, it might not be anything that flashy but it has aged well and it offers a pretty wide amount of variety which helps to keep things fresh.The sound in my opinion is good it manages to be cutesy catchy and it also manages to work with the on-screen action to make the game feel tense in the best possible way.

Super Bomberman 2 is definitely a very good game, especially if you have a multi-tap and a bunch of friends to play with. If you aren’t interested in a party game and prefer being a solo player then the single player game is not too bad but your really missing the part that makes this game the stand out classic that it is. Of course being a sequel there is the inevitable question is this one better than its predecessor? I find this a really tough question to answer as I am kind of biased to the first Super Bomberman because all of the levels and tunes from the game are burned into my brain, its the one I played as a young lad and its the one I have the really fond memories of. I gave Bomberman a 9 but I find myself having to give the second one an 8. Its still a brilliant game and I know some people prefer it but for me its just not quiet as good. If you want to try Bomberman 2 then the cheapest Pal carts I could find of it were about £25 with boxed copies being around double this. I would argue that the game is worth it but I would say don't worry about getting more than one of the SNES Bombermen games because there all just sort of variations of the same thing and hey it might also be worth looking at different versions on other formats, I am particularly fond of Bomberman Battlefest which was a download game for the Xbox 360 which has recently been added to the Xbox one via there ever growing backwards compatibility service, as this is only £6.75 to download I personally think its a complete steal and if you have been living under a rock for the last 30 years and don't know what  Bomberman is it would be a great cheap place to start.

150 SNES games reviewed #12: Wing Commander

I’m not sure how many of you will have heard of Wing Commander. It’s a long running franchise which started out on PC which was then ported to various systems including the SNES, hence me talking about it.

 

 

Wing Commander can basically be called a space combat simulation. It wasn’t the first game of its type really but it was unique with its branching mission tree, complex characters and attempt at a cinematic-style story. You start as a rookie pilot aboard the Tiger’s Claw. Before you start blowing stuff up you get to walk around the ship, talk to other pilots, talk to the bartender, etc. There is a lot of stuff there purely to try and make your adventure seem real. For example you can enter the barracks were you will see other pilots sleeping, you will see and hear water dripping into a bucket on the floor and you can open your locker to see your shirt and see what rank you currently are and what medals you have.



Once you visit the briefing room, that’s when things really start. First you attend your briefing where you’re told what your mission will entail and who your co-pilot will be. This is all done with a mix of text, graphics and animation. Once this is over you get to see animation of you running to your ship in your gear with exciting music playing to get you pumped up ready for battle. You start out heading to check points to investigate them and its not long until you meet the vicious feline Kilrathi. In the first mission you’ll have to fly through an asteroid belt and destroy several small lots of Kilrathi before making your way back to your base ship. The best part is if you die you get to watch your own funeral which contains more animation and text than some games bother with for an ending when you’ve completed the whole game and attained everything possible.

I found that the game works quite well at drawing you in to the plot, making you want to see how the story unfolds, and in a very short space of time you begin to form opinions on the other pilots. You forget that they’re all drawings with AI attached and begin to go: “Bossman is cool but I cant stand that Iceman”. With the fact that there is a chalk board on which you can check your kills against other pilots kills it can become quite competitive. There are times that you can almost forget you’re on a game you will get so into it.

The downsides of the game are in my opinion so few and so slight that it is hard to pick real fault, there are more things you can do than there are controls on a SNES pad, but they got around this by means of tricks where you hold one button while pressing another to do something totally different from what that button would normally do.

This game must have done quiet well on the SNES in the day, maybe because there wasn’t a lot of stuff like it. It did so well that a PC expansion pack was turned in to a second Wing Commander SNES game (Wing Commander: The Secret Missions) and Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi was ported to the SNES (but was never released due to financial projections and a drop in SNES sales by the time it was finished, unfortunately). The sad thing is that the original Wing Commander on SNES had been handled by Mindscape on behalf of Origin and what happened was that it tried its best to recreate the PC game on a SNES. Origin handled the second one itself and apparently went to great lengths to tailor it to the SNES to build it from the ground up as a version that would best appeal to Nintendo players.



I would rate Wing Commander as a solid eight out of 10. I have owned my copy since I was young and it was the start of  a brilliant adventure, I happily brought Wing Commander: The Secret Missions and then when I found out that Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger was coming to PlayStation and had Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame in it I nearly exploded. I had a look online at prices for this game and you can get the PAL version for like £10, and sometimes it is even boxed for that price, so really you can’t go wrong. The only possible thing worth pointing out is that you can get the PlayStation Wing Commander III complete for the same price and as this is a bit more advanced if you own a PlayStation you might decide that III is in fact a better starting point for you. All of the Wing Commander games are basically linked but they all tell more or less self contained stories so there is no real issue with dipping in to the series at any point.

Back in the SNES’ day there were so many platformers, so many beat ’em ups and so many sports games the real beauty of Wing Commander was and still is that there is so very little on this platform like it, sure we have faster arcade style stuff like Star Fox and then there are the first-person shoot ’em ups like R-Type, but actual tactical space combat like this is not really one of the machine’s big selling points so it makes it stand out all the more.

150 SNES games reviewed #11: Championship Pool

Championship Pool came out in 1993 and, as you can obviously tell from the title, it is a pool simulation. It was released for the NES, SNES, Game Boy and the Mega Drive. It was developed by Bitmasters and released by Mindscape.

 

The game is straightforward, it is a virtual version of pool, in which you can play either a one-off game, tournaments, multiplayer or even just practice. I like the presentation on this game, it offers you what looks like a wealth of choice and options but it also has a layer of style. Your opponents are represented by little pictures, you get to see the coin toss for who goes first, etc but once you actually start playing looks wise there is nothing to separate this from any budget pool game you could pick up on the live markets of various device stores.

In the past I don’t remember there being a whole lot of games based on either pool or snooker, at least not on consoles. The truth is I hadn’t even played this one when I was a kid. I brought this game for £3.50 with free postage from eBay purely for this series. I did own a pool game when I was a Mega Drive/SNES owner but it was Side Pocket on the Mega Drive and I never looked for another one as that always filled my pocketing needs. When I try to compare this in my mind to Side Pocket then that wins, but I cant really be sure if it’s a fair competition having not played Side Pocket in 10 years, and maybe I am remembering it through the eyes of a child.



The main thing that annoys me about Championship Pool is it seems to be very unforgiving even on your first opponents – you break, pocket a ball. take a shot pocket another ball. and then you miss. You would think that you would watch your opponent take their shots and then when they screw up you would be put back in control, but that’s not quite how it works. Someone decided that watching the computer play would be boring or something, so instead they’ve made it so you when you screw up, it says it’s the computers go, you get a screen saying that the computer has had its go and now it’s your turn again. You have a look and the computer has pocketed four balls – four balls which you have no idea how many shots it took it to pocket, four balls you don’t feel you could have got given six shots due to where they laid on the table the last time you saw them. So the computer’s fortune seems to almost border on an unholy pact with the Devil and you have no way of seeing how they achieved this Herculean pool feat and you just have to shrug and go OK. Problem is you then pot another ball and then miss then you get a message saying the computer took its shots and won the game, you don’t even get to see the winning shot.  This just makes me feel very disconnected from it all. I know that in a lot of games everything is decided by random dice throws or some form of statistical probability matrix but when you can see it happening you kind of forget this and get drawn in to the magic of it all.

I would rate this game four out of 10. It might have got better out of me back in the day but nowadays there are so many pool or snooker-based games you could try. Looking online it seems like the going rate for the cart only PAL is about £8. It can go for more and sometimes you see it for less, I even managed to get my cart for £3.50 with free postage. So if you have a SNES and don’t have many games it wont break the bank. I am not saying my four out of 10 is a concrete score, read the good and the bad sides and see what you think about them, it might not annoy you like it does me.

150 SNES games reviewed #9: Super Goal! 2 (aka Takeda Nobuhiro no Super Cup Soccer)

I have plainly admitted on most days it has been a case of stick my hand in the box, and providing the game is not the same genre as one I have played in the past few days, I play it and then talk about it.

I did things a little bit differently this time, I actually picked this game out. I didn’t pick it out because of the game itself, I picked it out because it represented something I want to talk about.
Nowadays we live in a very much ‘Coke and Pepsi’ world when it comes to football games. There is FIFA and there is PES and more often than not that’s as much choice as you have – one or the other. Back in the days of the SNES there was a lot more choice than that. Sure, there was FIFA and there was International Superstar Soccer (the game which eventually became PES) but there was also a lot of other games. Loads of companies would try their hand at the football genre and this is something I miss. Choice is a good thing and the more options one has when it comes to games the better I feel it is.

So today I have been playing Super Goal! 2 (or as it’s known in Japan Takeda Nobuhiro no Super Cup Soccer) by Tose which was published by Jaleco. The first Super Goal made it to these shores but the second one was only brought out in Japan and the US as far as I know (there was at least one further sequel in Japan).

Now in my hour or so of playing I learned a few things, one being it ain’t so bad. Sure the computer seemed to get away with fouling me a lot even in the penalty box without it giving me a free kick or penalty every time, apart from once. I also found it pretty hard to score goals but then I am not the best at these sort of games. The important part is I got into it, I was enjoying myself and never once did I stop and say ‘boy. don’t I wish I was playing FIFA’. To all intents and purposes this game provided a perfectly entertaining spot of football. There were all the options you’d expect – exhibition, season, penalty practice. You can pick whichever country you want to be and you can choose the formation you play in. Of the pad’s four face buttons, one seems to be a hard shot, one a soft, one a high shot and the other passes to whichever player has pass flashing above his head.



Back in the day this game seemed to get a lot of scores in the range of six to seven. Nintendo Power gave it 3.1 out of five. I tend to agree with this basic score range. What do I actually want from a football game on the SNES, you might ask? Well, I would like it to be a little easier to score but more than anything what I really wanted was a little piazazz, a little bit of flair. I want to hear “GOALLLL” shouted when someone scores. I want to see a close-up of a player screaming “Yes” or punching the air. I suppose that’s one of the problems with having a lot of options, it makes you want more. Nowadays when the only choice is largely FIFA or PES (unless you want a wacky game like Super Mario Strikers, etc) you don’t tend to ask for as much. Maybe that’s why both of them can come out every year and ask for another £40 with just a handful of new bells and whistles added to the previous year’s model.

I got this game in a bundle of Japanese carts, I think it was five carts for £10, and to be honest looking on eBay you can get this game Japanese for £3.60 including postage. If you want a US copy it will cost you a little more, around £10.

150 SNES games reviewed #8: Power Moves (aka Power Athlete)

 

Rule number one if you are going to try to make money by copying another game is to make sure you get a copy of the game you’re trying to copy and play the living daylights out of it. Sit and analyse it. Try to see why it is so popular, and what your game needs to contain in order to attract the same amount of fans.

Why am I talking about this? Well basically because the game I have been playing is Power Moves, one of many of the games which came in the wake of Street Fighter II. When playing this game though I am reminded far more of the original (less famous) Street Fighter. Power Moves – known in Japan as Power Athlete – (at least on the SNES, the Mega Drive version was renamed Deadly Moves) came out in 1992 and was developed by System Vision and published by Kaneko. It came out towards the end of 1992, many months after Street Fighter II, which I add because I want everyone to know this key fact.

The one player mode on this game is basically the same as Street Fighter. You get no choice of character you are simply made to play as one guy, in this case an almost Americanised looking Ryu clone with the name Joe. Truly there can be no mightier martial arts name than Joe, maybe his last name is Bloggs? But I digress. You are Joe, you do an energy move from your hands out in a straight line (we all know it as a fireball, just like the original Street Fighter), though the motion to do this is over-complex and therefore a pain. There are only three buttons – one punch, one kick and one jump – if you are very close then the kick button also doubles as a throw. I did somehow manage to get Joe to do another move, it was sort of a two-handed dragon punch which went much more diagonal than the ones we are used to.

Even on the middle difficulty the game comes is hard, and this is where the game has a little flair of originality. You don’t start with a full life bar, you start with a bit and by beating opponents this bar grows in size as do other bars you can see which represent your strength, speed and defence. You can choose who you want to fight next out of all of the enemy characters but some outclass you by having much longer bars. If you wanted to you could fight and beat an opponent multiple times in order to fill your bars and make your future fights against other enemies easier. You have a set amount of continues, which I think increase as you win fights or at least it seemed that way to me.



At first I found the game so hard that I was almost going to give in, but then it just seemed to click. I got into the rhythm of the game and managed to beat opponent after opponent with very little trouble and this was without repeating fights in order to level up my bars. I only repeated one fight and that was just to see if it would let me. It only took me about 20 minutes though and once you’ve finished the game nothing changes you can still only be Joe in single player and apart from going into the options and upping the difficulty there is no reason to ever play the single player mode ever again, which is a big disadvantage when you compare this game to other games from this period in time.
In the two player mode you can be Joe and any of enemies except for the final boss, which is a bit of a shame as Mega Drive owners got the chance to play as him in their version of the game.



The characters in this game are (I haven’t listed Joe as I have already talked about him):

• Warren: A  wrestler from Hawaii who looks just a touch like a grey-haired Hulk Hogan wannabe.
• Reayon: The token female, clearly she is ‘inspired’ by Chun-Li.
• Vagnad: A huge wrestler with an odd skin colour, he looks like he should be the boss of the game to me. He reminds me of a less weird version of the boss from Street Fighter IV. (Apparently in some of the manuals and information released on the game he was described as a survivor of the Holocaust.)
• Buoh: A kabuki-style fighter. He teleports all over the screen and attacks with his hair. He earns bonus points in my book for not seeming like a complete Street Fighter rip-off.
• Gaoluon: An acrobatic Chinese martial artist, who uses a pair of curved blades both to slash you and to throw at you.
• Baraki: A tribal warrior who shoots flames like Dhalsim while making noises and spinning across the screen Blanka-style.
• Nick: A street dancing matador. His fighting style uses a combination of break dancing alongside quick slashes with a knife, clearly he is meant to represent this game’s Vega.
• Ranker: He is (in the SNES version at least) the non-playable final boss character. He comes across as being a big, army-style guy. Imagine an Arnold Schwarzenegger character who can throw energy across the floor and do a punch equivalent of Chun-Li’s rapid kick move.T

To be honest I cant see anyone bothering much with the two player on this. Not when you could play all manner of other fighting games, it’s not like we were lacking them back in the day, nor are we now really.

I would give this game four out of 10, its not an awful game but there are so many other better beat ’em ups out there. If you want to try this game I think you will need to import it. I haven’t seen an PAL copy but I am sure the Mega Drive one came out over here. I have seen lots of US imports for about £10 for the cart, and a few Japanese ones for £5. I was lucky and got my copy recently for £3.50 with free postage. Personally, I would invest you money elsewhere.

SNES Game Review 145: Pop'n Twinbee

My 100th review for this project was Pop'n Twinbee Rainbow Bell Adventure and I mentioned in that review that I should probably review Pop'n Twinbee before Rainbow Bell but that I couldn't and wouldn't be doing that as I didn't own it. (I only review things I have the actual cartridge for) Well as I am drawing to the end of my project I have started being a little more picky about what I review, I have looked at a few things I have really wanted to review but didn't own and looked at getting them. So I grabbed this game purely to do this review.

So Pop'n Twinbee is a top-view shoot-'em-up game originally released in march 1993 by Konami for the Super Famicom in Japan. It was never released in the American market but it did make its way to the Pal regions during November of 1993. If I was to try and explain this game any more I would call it a vertical moving cute em up shoot em up. In fact as far as I am concerned the first game in the Twinbee series Twinbee (an arcade game) alongside sega's original Fantasy Zone are the games I would say kick started the whole cute em up genre. This game Pop'n Twinbee is in fact the 6th game in the Twinbee series but in all honesty when it came out here I had no idea that it was a part of a Series maybe cause it was the first one to hit our shores and back then we didn't have the internet and the freedom of information we have now. I have fond memories of playing this when younger at a friends house but as far as I can remember I never actually owned it, in fact I don't remember ever seeing it in the wild or having the chance to grab it. I guess that's the good thing about collecting as an adult its a lot easier to earn the money to buy the games and to go through all of the trouble of finding them. People might moan when paying £20 for an old game now but remember when we were kids and these games were the in thing they were frequently more than this, there was no internet to help and so tracking a copy down could involve taking the bus all over the place or begging your mum or dad to drive you all about.

OK so the game plays pretty much like any other shoot em up you will have played you travel up the screen shooting enemies and collecting bells which you can either just grab  straight away and gain points or you can shoot them. If you shoot the bells then they will change color with each color representing some kind of power up. If you learn what color means what power up then you can start trying to shoot things until they become the color you need to gain your desired upgrade. You can get a speed boost, a shield, a split shot, a satellite.

This bell-based system of power ups really gives the game a unique feel. At times the screen can be  full of enemies and bullets yet you not only have to think about shooting and avoiding them but you also need to think about the bells. Should you grab the bells now or would going towards them see you shot and damaged, or can you afford to shoot them enough to turn them in to the desired color. It helps that in this game its not 1 shot and you explode, nope you actually have a life bar so maybe you can afford to take a little damage if it leads to you getting the desired power up.

You don't just have to worry about the enemies in the  air at the same height as you though, in fact you have your regular shot but you also have a  separate lock-on weapon which can hit enemies who are below you, then you have a  bomb button which causes your ship to spew a multitude of smaller bees which cover almost the whole screen attacking. If you hold down your lock on button then you can use this to deliver a short-range punch attack, which doesn't seem all that useful to me but its still kind of cool.

The game has seven stages each with a boss at the end and you can either play alone or in two player mode. I find two player to be pretty cool as when playing with 2 players certain options are available to allow you to help each other, you can give the other player a bit of your life energy to replenish there's  or even use your team mates ship as a projectile against the enemys. In the options menu you can switch between normal and couple mode. Now couple mode is something which is very interesting for a multiplayer game like this. If you select couple mode, the games enemies will primarily attack Player 1 giving Player 2 a much easier time of things. This mode is intended to allow less experienced players to still enjoy the game. This is something which I really like as it would allow you to play the game with a partner or child who is less experienced, it is something I would frankly like to see in more co-operative video games. I think it is also important to note that this game has 7 different difficulty levels which is quiet a lot by most games standards, the levels also do seem to have quiet a bit of difference. I think this is great as not only does it mean that there should be a level which suits you but it also gives the game some replayability as if you finish it on one level you can always try to finish it on a higher level (well unless you finish it on level 7 that is).

Not only is Pop'n Twinbee incredibly cute hence my referring to it as a cute em up but it also obviously has a very strong anime influence. The game has lovely color-filled backgrounds, realism maybe cast aside in favor of cuteness but detail certainly is not. The first stage sees you fly over  forests, crop fields and  towns. This is pretty good for a first level some games would have saved each of these types of area for a level all of there own. This game is always providing you something new to look at and its not just the stages. The enemies are also very varied ranging from normal looking ships to angry vegetables to flying attack pandas. Throw on top of this the fact that you have cute short little intermissions between levels and the game is just so delightfully cute and well Japanese.

The audio is also in my opinion so darn happy and enthusiastic it really sets the mood for this games whole personality perfectly. Add to this the fact that there are great sound effects for the the shots and explosions plus some really cute little bits of  voice-acting including little pained cries when your hit and shouts of  glee when you grab an item.This game is just dripping in charm and personality to the point that I simply challenge you to not smile at it, in fact if it doesn't make you smile at some point then I think you might just be dead inside.

So what would I score this game? Well I would give it 8 out of 10 and that's coming from someone who is not really that big into the whole space ship shoot em up genre. So how much are you looking to pay for it if your interested? Well the game seems to most often go for £18 to £25 for a loose pal cart but it is worth looking about as I got mine for £11 for a loose pal cart. even if your not the sort who would usually go for a shump this might well be worth a look as well its just so darn cute and happy. Also it gets a big shout out both for its large range of difficulties but also for its unique couples setting.

SNES Game Review 144: Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures

Pretty much everyone will have played a movie license at one point in time, heck I have played a couple of movie tie ins during these reviews but what I don't think I have played yet for this series is one game which is based on an entire trilogy of movies. The majority of movie tie ins usually release either to coincide with a films cinema or home release, but occasionally you will get a game made for a film that came out ages ago, here we have a game made which is a video game interpretation of three films Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the first of which was released 13 year before this game and the last of which was released 5 years before this game. Nowadays this kind of thing doesn't seem as strange as it did back then, after all nowadays we get all kinds of trilogy games usually made in lego but back then this really was an original proposition.

So how did it come about? Well apparently it came from the success of Super StarWars and Super Empire Strikes Back made by Sculptured Software that led to Lucas Arts believing that maybe they should take the Indiana Jones films and do the same thing. Apparently the game was made using the same engine as the above games (and Super Return of the Jedi) but it wasn't made by Sculptured Software it was made by Factor 5 an independent software and video game developer which was co-founded by five former Rainbow Arts employees in 1987 in Cologne, Germany. Factor 5 only actually made 3 games on the SNES Super Turrican, Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures and Super Turrican 2. With the fact that I will only review games I own and the Turrican games are pretty darn expensive this is really my only chance to talk about them. I adore Factor 5 they are probably best known by most people for being the developers of the Star Wars Rogue Squadron series the 2nd of which Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader was the first ever game I grabbed for the Nintendo Gamecube, it was in fact what made me get a Cube about a week after the machine was released. Still with the first Turrican under there belt and the engine from the Super StarWars games in there hand what could go wrong?

I remember there being quiet a buzz about this game before it released I would have been around 14 so in one of my later years of secondary school, which was sort of one of the best times for me games wise. You see I hung around with a small bunch of lads and all of us gamed, some of us had Super Nintendo's and some had MegaDrives I was one of the only ones to have both. We would go to each others houses and play games, we would occasionally manage to beg one of our parents to have all of us around to play winner stays on street fighter 2 tournaments we would play each others games, trade games, pretty much all the games related stuff you can think of. One thing we also did was to show each other our gaming magazines and discuss up and coming games. Everyone was excited about this Indy game both the SNES and Megadrive gamers, you see originally this game was supposed to be coming to the MegaDrive in fact it was apparently finished and ready to be released some time between the summer and autumn of 1995, heck it even got reviewed but it never came out. This cut off half of the groups interest in this game the other half seemed to get wrapped up in excitement about the playstation but what about me? In all honesty I have no idea I just guess with everyone stopping talking about it I just forgot all about it. So when was my attention brought back to it? Well that would be years later when walking round a local carboot. It was one that used to be held every Thursday evening at 5pm. I frequently visited it and there were a lot of regular sellers who I had forged quiet friendly relationships with and one Thursday this cart was sitting on one of there tables with a fair bit of dirt on it and a sticker on it saying £3. Suddenly everything came back to me and I grabbed it and paid quickly. How could I have forgotten this game and ignored it up until this point? I guess I had gotten excited about the upcoming next generation of machines and I had forgotten all about my Love of Indiana Jones, how could I forget that after the approximately 300 times I had watched The Temple of Doom, after I had waited for The Last Crusade to come out and with the fact that I had an old EX-rental copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark sitting on my shelf given pride of place as something I wanted to draw peoples attention? What did I do after I paid for it? Well basically I walked back to my house whistling the Indiana Jones theme and then instantly played it.

OK so what do you do in the game? Well most of the time its an action platformer you play as Indy and you go through most of the main events in all three movies in order. This starts with twelve stages based on Raiders of the Lost Ark, including the iconic bit with the giant giant boulder, then you have eight stages based on Temple of Doom, and then you get eight levels based on The Last Crusade. So what can Indy do well he can run and jump around, do a tactical roll, punch and once you pick it up you can swing his whip and the same goes with Indy's gun find it and you can use it, there are also grenades to find which are like powerful screen clearing attacks. The whip though its so satisfying to use, the noise it makes the cracking animation and yes there are castlevania style bits where you can use the whip to swing over gaps or to reach previously unreachable extra lives and other pick ups. What about when its not an action platformer? Well basically you have levels that total change the game style completely for a start instead of being 2D they are 3D and they use the SNES's much loved Mode 7. You have for example a stage where you control a rubber boat sliding through the snow, a mine cart chase and a biplane riding level all of which are based on events in the movies. These levels have there own objectives and well they are really good for just braking things up a little bit, if there is anything I can say about them it is that they are all pretty awesome and the game probably could have done with a few more of them.

OK I have already said that the game is based on the films and that the levels reflect the films but there are also lots of cut scenes made up of digitized pictures from the films and dialogue in text form. Add to that the fact that the game contains great 16bit versions of some of the music from the movies which if your a fan you will probably recognize but its worth noting that almost all of the tracks are taken from the first movie, with only a tiny amount of them being taken from the second and not a single tune taken from the third film. There are also a few little pieces of digitized speech, not much but it is cool, I really love when the level starts with Indy saying ''lets go''. The presentation in the game is just top tear and it makes the game feel like a love letter to the movies which is brilliant when most licenses don't get this right and instead end up feeling like crummy cash grabs with no heart. Some people have complained that this game is hard but in all honesty I find it pleasantly challenging. I realize that I haven't mentioned the graphics at all, well there OK, if they were early in the SNES's life I would say there good but for late end of lifespan SNES graphics there not that wonderful. Still you know what I say gameplay is king.

OK so to cut to the chase I had a lot of expectations when it came to this game and in honesty I think it lived up to all of them. I would give this game a very positive 8 out of 10 sure its not perfect but its a darn good game particularly if you like either the Indiana Jones films, action platformers like this or both. So if you wanted to buy a cart of this well the cheapest I have seen it for now days is £25 with it often going for a lot more. If its worth this kind of cash or not well that's up to you and how much you are willing to spend on Super Nintendo games. It might be worth looking for a copy of Super StarWars first if you don't have that as its a very similar game and you can try that to test the waters and see if your likely to like this or not. You can get it for not too much cash on the Wii virtual console but if you haven't heard then that's closing down soon so if you want to get it that way then you'll have to try and be quick about it.