Basewars

Vitals:

Year – 1991

Developer – Konami/Ultra

Genre – Sports

Modes – Single Player; Two player Co-op; Two player Competitive

Back to another one of my favourites; Basewars.  For those of you who don’t know what the game is about I’ll lay it out for you, from what I remember.

Imagine baseball, in the future, played by battle ready robots.  Play too close to call?  The one who is still alive wins.  Add to that being able to upgrade/customize your team (kind of like the draft but way better) and you’re rockin.

So I was all psyched to start playing and customize my team – unfortunately I discovered pretty quickly that you can only do that in the ‘pennant’ matches which are player v/s player.  Not having a second player made that pretty difficult.  Everything else was exactly like I remembered though.

It took me a while to get the hang of things, hitting the ball was especially difficult at the start.  Why was it so difficult you ask?  Because the pitcher has control of it the whole time it’s in flight.  Ever seen a ball change direction three times?  Four?  Well if you haven’t come play this game. 

Powering up the pitch was another thing that took some practice.  I learned really quickly that throwing fast balls made for lots of opposing home runs.  The key was to fake out the batter.  Throw a ball like you’re going to hit him, then dodge it at the last second over the plate, they never see it coming.

The base wars were not as fun as I remember.  Basically pummelling the CPU into the ground wasn’t all that entertaining.  I seem to remember that as friends we had a ‘code’ for fighting these battles which involved letting the other guy stand up for a second between your rapid fire punching.  And if you have a sword, or are a flying bot, steal every base all the way to home, you can’t lose.  It’s fun turning an infield ground ball into a home run.

The Good Stuff:

The concept is great, robots fighting over bases.  The execution is pretty great too.  The pitching control and the player controls are quite well done.  You have to get good at guessing where the ball is going to land because you won’t necessarily see your bot until just before its falling.  It isn’t terribly difficult, but takes practice.

The graphics are actually pretty cool for 16-bit days, where you can see the bots close up anyway, the fielding graphics are nothing special.

I remember the customization being one of my favourite parts of the game – it’s too bad I couldn’t get in to that part of it.  Oh well – I still had a bunch of fun stomping all over the CPU players in the open season.

The Ugly Stuff:

I had a lot of trouble throwing the ball to the right place.  I would always be pressing left or right to throw to the ‘next’ base - instead I was supposed to be pressing up to throw to second.  Now this isn’t really a con of the game, being able to throw to home plate from left field is really simple and a one click button/direction – but for some reason my brain didn’t want to work that way.

The battles didn’t live up to my memories of the game.  They seemed to consist of who could press the attack button the fastest.  And the special attacks for the hoverbots were pretty brutal.

When playing the CPU on a foul/fly ball the players wouldn’t run back to their appropriate bases.  So no matter how long I took to finally throw the ball to the right places, I got outs on all of them.  I think this is a pretty big downside to playing against a computer.  I mean, it helped me win a bunch easier, but sure took some of the challenge out of the game.

When having multiple bots on base it was difficult to tell them all to run to the appropriate bases, sometimes two would go to the same place, or one would go backwards instead of the right one moving forwards.

Overall:

Definitely a two player game to get the most out of it.  It held my attention for a while just beating on the computer, but lacking that customization and second player interaction really left me wanting more.  I think that’s the same with most sports games though, they aren’t made to necessarily be played alone. 

What is really unfortunate is that there was never a sequel, and nothing like this has been done since.  Can you picture a Wii game like this?  I sure can.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Vitals:
Year - 1989
Publisher - Konami/Ultra
Genre - Single-Player Platform Action
Starting Life - Not enough
Starting lives - 4
Continues - 2


The first game I decided to go back and retry was Ninja Turtles I. I vaguely remember it being one of my favourite series, and when I pulled this one out I also vaguely remembered it being a kind of side scrolling platformer. What I completely forgot was pretty much everything else about the game.

I was eager to get started though so I popped it in and started up, got the usual welcome screen and some ... interesting animations of small turtles become kick ass ninjas, then I started up. Almost immediately I was welcomed by being flattened by some kind of tank. One life gone.

What’s kind of cool about this game is you don't have just 'lives' but you have your team of four crime fighting ninja superheroes. So when one of them 'gets caught' you just boot up with another one. The second really cool thing was that you can switch back and forth between them whenever you want (Accidentally discovered this by pressing the select button, in the future will read the manuals).

So I was doing ok, killing small rat machine monster things then something flew at me. I was like 'oh crap, back up!'. Well that was the wrong idea. As soon as you back up, stuff reappears, just like you never killed it before. Again my first reaction was - oh shoot, there are guys behind me, I need to go back further to get to a safe area. Wrong again, there's no such thing as a safe area. I was quickly greeted with the following screen that I became intimately familiar with over the next few days.

Going through the first area I ran in to this quandry a lot. Oh, theres a lot of pizza up there - is it going to be worth it for me to go up there and get it? Or will I get my ass kicked on the way back so much that it wasn't worth it? Usually I decided to go for it. It was never worth it.
BTW - How awesome is it that pizza is energy? I mean, whenever I eat a pizza I sure feel like I can beat the tar out of some kind of ninja star throwing, or weird ceiling bouncing monsters, don't you?

I had completely forgotten about my old friends, Rocksteady and Bebop (I think that's right). Hard to be scared when your main enemies are a giant pig and a giant Rhino. At least the Rhino has a big gun, the pig just kept trying to punch me. Is that April they have tied up?? The scoundrels! She's always going off and getting herself in to trouble, where's Casey? Oh, right I don't think he exists yet. Its up to me ... she might be in trouble.


16-Bit April is pretty hawt actually. No kiss after rescuing her though, I was pretty disappointed.








Just over 2 minutes to disarm an unknown number of bombs was pretty rough, scraping through that took quite a bit of time. For turtles they sure don't swim very well. I'm not sure how many times I had to go back (right from the beginning, thank you 3 continues) and do it all over again before I even found all the bombs. It was sure helpful to discover that last time through that there was a map in the character select screen that helped with stuff like that. In the end - I disarmed a bunch of bombs and all I have to show for it is this silly pose. Oh well, what can you do.


16-Bit Shredder is pretty cool too. I still want his helmet/mask combination, best villan outfit ever - giant cheeze grater of doom or what??

I picked up these tight rope man walking powerup things. The manual says they are for swinging between buildings. You think I can figure out how to use them? Nope, the thing only has 2 buttons, what else can I do? I'm standing on a building jumping around pressing all kinds of buttons. Finally after 15 minutes I just give up and move on. Then later what do I find ... well, they work automatically, and only in this one certain place ... *headdesk*. Well dev's weren't always as smart as they are now were they?


There was this interesting room that I don't have a picture of, because to stop for that long would be suicide. The walls move, they crush you, if you touch them you die. Now ... imagine that you only have 4 chances to do it before starting all over again. Now picture your face after the 5th attempt of having to start the whole game over. My face was much worse than yours. In fact I gave up at this point for a while because I couldn't take the punishment any longer. The next day when I got back I discovered that there wasn't just one of these rooms, there were two of them, one after another.


There was this one hallway where a bunch of jetpack guys come in, no matter what I did I couldn't avoid getting hit, then getting trapped in the hallway where so many of them just pop out of. The only way I could figure was to just run through them all to get to the end, but they take away so much HP that just didn't work. I couldn't get it for the longest time, then finally I ended up getting in the hallway, and what happens? The guys fly up to me and run off! I couldn't believe it. If I didn't smack them they just came half way, then floated backwards, I had to duck their laser beam, but they didn't keep attacking me! It was like ... magic or something.

Shredder is barely even worth mentioning. I poked him with my stick over and over whenever he jumped up and that was that. The ended was great too - Spinter turns back in to a real boy and April is all 'Oh! Splinter, you're a -real- boy again ... Figures, humans get all the girls - and she offers a pizza to the guys who actually did all the work.

The Good stuff:
You get to play as a ninja turtle, how much better can it get? The gameplay was pretty smooth; I always knew what the controls would do for me. The game was pretty linear so I didn't get lost. Going in and out of the wrong holes in the ground don't count. I enjoyed the strategy to the game, since everyone's weapons do different things and different damage using the right turtle in the right situation was really key to moving on. Of course, having that turtle be dead at the time was quite problematic. What would have really been great is if the manual told you about that.

I also had to perfect ways of beating monsters that didn't lose energy. Like the space helmet guys, learning that boomerangs saved you from their flying helmets was a lifesaver in a lot of situations. Of course, I was pretty screwed when I ended up running in to them with no boomerangs. There were enough different kinds of enemies to explore that it was interesting, and not too many that I couldn't remember who they were and how to kill them (never did figure out a good way for the jumping boomerang guys, praying didn't seem to work).

For the most part I was quite unhappy with the 'go back and get eaten by enemies you've already killed' thing, but for some parts it was kind of nice. Like going back for that full pizza right next to the exit ladder (and stuff like that). Though generally I just died because of it - so a very small bonus.

The Ugly stuff:
Having it auto switch out my special weapons sucked at times. Loosing scrolls for single shurikans was pretty brutal. But that wasn't the only problem, having it auto switch to your special weapon when you're fighting and jumping for your life - that became a rather large problem at times.

Having a life bar and then running in to things that autokilled you also kind of sucked. There were times I really didn't appreciate falling in water and losing a turtle with full life - especially on the levels where you had to do it over and over and over to get all the timing right. But hey, that’s what these games were for right?

One thing I don't miss about these older games is the lack of continues, 4 turtles, 2 retries, then back to the start. It makes for a much longer gaming experience, and you get 'really' good at some levels really quick, but its hard losing all that progress so often. I had originally planned on keeping track of how many times I restarted, but I lost count pretty quickly.

Overall:

Still one of my favourites. But it made me remember why I had a Game Genie back in the day. Just unlimited continues would be great, I don't mind starting a whole mission over, it was starting the whole game over that really sucked up my time. But this was actually a pretty short one once I put it all together and got to the end. I can see why they had to throw in the extra difficultly, I could have probably done it in 2 days without having to restart all the time.

Introduction

Recently I was playing a computer game that was just ... awful.  So then I picked up another one to replace it, and it was pretty bad too.  I started looking at these games thinking 'Who the heck designs these things, why back in my day ... ' (not that I'm aged or anything I haven't hit 30 yet) ... but back in my day games were difficult to play, fun to win and did what they were made for - provide entertainment.

I'm not sure what has happened, but lately I just haven't been entertained.  Now I admit there are some games that come out now and then and keep me occupied for a few weeks, but thats it.  Not like the old days where I could play a game for months before getting that coveted 'The End' screen that didn't pop up because I'd died, but because I was just plain awesome.

Lately I've been missing the awesome.  So here we are, with this blog.  And the blog only exists because recently I've discovered that blogging is awesome in itself, and I've really enjoyed it.  But I picked a very limited niche to start with and I want to broaden my horizons.

Now to the plot, or content, or whatever you call the meat of a Blog idea.  I will be using my trusty time machine to go back and snatch (S)NES games, then bring them to the present and tell you all how they stack up.  I'm sure there are tons of game review sites out there ...  but none of them have me!  So this one will be the best.  Which you'll see shortly.