A to Z Challenge: Zuma's Revenge

 As the last A to Z Challenge entry for this year I'm going with an obscure little game I got for free from Origin like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 called Zuma's Revenge.  Besides Frogger, it might be the second-most popular video game featuring a frog that isn't Kermit.

The main character of the game is a frog who has to battle some kind of Tiki god thing on a Polynesian island.  Basically there are different maps with balls (or stones) of different colors forming chains around the maps.  Your goal is to shoot colored balls at the balls on the screen to match the colors.  When you get 3 or more of a color, that part of the chain disappears.  You have to destroy all the balls before any of them reach the skull at the end of the level.  Make sense?  No?  Good!

For a silly game there is of course a lot of difficulty to it.  First is that you get different balls at random in the frog's mouth.  You can select between two different ones but that's it.  So if there's no chain on the screen with the color in your mouth, you have to shoot it to the end or another spot and hope you can take care of it later.  But the chains get longer and move faster to make it harder and harder.  Like Tetris you can end up with a chain-reaction that quickly leads to defeat.  In some later levels you get two different chains and if a ball from either one touches a skull, you're done.  In some of those levels you get two rocks to shoot from so you have to keep hopping from one to the other in order to get everything.

Besides just the balls of red, green, yellow, blue, and maybe other colors, there are sometimes different power-up balls that you can shoot that will explode a bunch or explode a certain color or things like that.  When you blow up part of the chain in the middle, it'll separate it into two (or more) pieces.  The front will stop but the back will keep moving until everything is reunited.  That can buy you some time to destroy everything.  When the game says, "Zuma!" that means there are no new balls being added to chain and you only have to deal with what's left.

There is a campaign (or adventure) mode that I beat a couple of times on the easier level.  The adventure mode features a boss battle at the end of every group of levels.  There are also some challenges that I never completed.

Like a lot of silly games, it was pretty fun to while away some time when I didn't feel like doing anything else.   On Retrogames there's a Nintendo DS version and on Amazon (probably other retailers) you can buy XBox 360 and Windows versions, many bundled with other games.

That concludes the A to Z Challenge...until May 15th when I scheduled the Reflections entry.  Thanks to everyone who commented--double thanks if you actually read something!

A to Z Challenge: Yuri's Revenge (Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2)

 I've said before that I liked to use The Sims 3 & later 4 to design characters from stories I was working on or had worked on.  At some point in the mid-2010s, EA decreed that you had to have their Origin platform in order to play.

While Origin was usually annoying in that it was often slow and at least once some asshole in Russia hacked my account, sometimes they'd offer you freebies.  One of the freebies they offered was Command & Conquer:  Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack:  Yuri's Revenge.  Since there aren't really any Y games I ever played (I didn't really play Yar's Revenge for the 2600 or the Yoshi games for the Nintendo systems) I'm going to slot it in here.

Command & Conquer was a strategy game for the PC that was like a more full-featured version of Conflict or an early, military-focused version of Age of Empires.  After a couple of sequels, Westwood Studios made Red Alert, which was supposed to be a prequel to their original games.  

The game takes place in an alternate timeline.  After Adolf Hitler is erased by Einstein in 1924, the Nazis never come to power.  Instead, the Soviet Union expands to take over China and much of Europe.  The first Red Alert game is basically an alternate version of World War II.

The sequel continues this alternate history.  In 1972, the Soviets suddenly invade America Red Dawn style.  If you play the Allied side, you have to blunt the invasion and eventually capture the Soviet leader to make them stand down.  If you play the Soviets, you have to finish crushing the Allies to essentially take over the world.

Since it's an alternate timeline, you get things that didn't exist in our 1972.  There are robot tanks and "Tesla coils" that shoot lightning and are used to defend installations.  You get foot soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships and like Age of Empires, you have to build facilities to make these as well as walls, watchtowers, and anti-personnel/anti-aircraft defenses.  Unlike AOE, you also have to build power plants so you can run all your stuff.  Also like AOE, you have to gather resources like minerals and oil to fund and create your army.  Instead of "villagers" you get engineers or something like that.

Both sides also get like a secret agent type person.  The Allies get Tanya who is played by a real actor in the cut scenes.  I forget who the Soviets get, but it's some dude.  There is a mission or two where you have to help the secret agent get into and out of some enemy facility to destroy a power station or get secret files or whatever.  They can also help you destroy or sabotage stuff in battles.

The expansion Yuri's Revenge focuses on Yuri (big surprise) who's a Rasputin-like dude with psychic abilities.  He creates a machine to let him control the whole world with his psychic powers, but the Allies for their campaign are able to stop him from taking over San Francisco and from there use a time machine to go back and save the day.  As the Soviets you do something similar as both campaigns focus on destroying Yuri.  You can also play missions as Yuri's side, which has a lot of Soviet stuff but also psychic slaves and whatever.  Like the priests in AOE, Yuri and his minions can use their powers to convert units to his cause.

I keep mentioning Age of Empires because I played that game a lot and they came out in the same era and have a lot of similar features.  It's a good point of reference for me.  And it has a lot of the same problems.  In a lot of missions or just in single-player scenarios, the trouble can be building up your forces quickly enough to be able to destroy the enemy.  If the enemy starts hitting you when you're still trying to build up, you will likely get your butt kicked.  Also, the AI controlling your units is pretty dumb, so if you can't micro-manage everything on multiple fronts, things will probably go wrong.

So like AOE or other similar games it can be fun but also sometimes very frustrating.

While I got those two games for free from Origin, when they had a sale, I bought a bundle that had pretty much all the C&C games for only $10 or so.  I tried the first couple but the graphics and gameplay weren't that great; not really what I was used to.  C&C 3 was one I played all the way through.  In the world of that game there's this new mineral called Tiberium that has tremendous value.  You have the Allies and the ruthless terrorist organization the Brotherhood of Nod led by the mysterious Kane.  The gameplay was largely the same as Red Alert 2 but with a few different things and obviously different units as this took place years after the other games.

I tried to play C&C 4 that came in the bundle, but there were some rules changes that didn't make it as fun as the previous game.  I also played C&C Red Alert 3.  That game also had some rule changes and introduced an Asian enemy, the leader of which was played by Star Trek's George Takei in the cut scenes--and was less humiliating than his appearances in the two Oblivion movies on Rifftrax.  I also played C&C: Generals which was not part of the original or Red Alert series.  It was more like a real-world thing where you have the Allies, China, and Middle East terrorists.  You have different scenarios for each side.  The most fun thing with China was to raise money you could create "hackers" who literally sit around with laptops stealing money for you.  So you could "build" a whole swarm of them and they'd each be getting you up to$5 a second or so.  It doesn't seem like a lot but it starts to add up.  And it's often easier than mining or whatever else you had to do.

The other game I played all the way through was C&C Renegade which wasn't a strategy game at all but a first-person shooter game.  Or I guess you could use third-person too.  Unlike the original Wolfenstein or Doom games, you could actually drive vehicles around, though not usually inside buildings.  Like a lot of first-person shooter type games there was often that problem of trying to figure out where the hell to go, to the point that sometimes I had to watch a YouTube walkthrough to find out what I was missing.

When I was using the RetroGames site, I saw there were C&C games for like the PS1 and N64, but they were kind of annoying to play versus on the PC.  Keyboard commands or the mouse work a lot better for that kind of game than a joystick or gamepad.  At least I think so.

I haven't played any of these games for a few years because Origin was so annoying on my old PC and then I think they phased it out and I haven't really done much with whatever new thing EA has now.  C&CRA2 is still my favorite and Generals and C&C3 were decent, but the rest were kinda meh.

A to Z Challenge: Xenophobe/Xevious

 Usually with these things I wind up fudging the X entry because there's so little that actually goes with it.  But thankfully this year I have not one but 2 Atari 7800 games that start with X!

Game over, man, game over!

Xenophobe was kind of a forerunner to the first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.  The basic premise of the game was kind of like Doom, where you have to go around a station and kill monsters, only there are various ships and stations you explore.  The other difference is the monsters were more like cut-rate versions of those in Aliens.  Along the way you find different weapons.  Like Wolfenstein and Doom, you start with a puny pistol.  There's also a laser gun, a rifle that shoots lightning, and a thing that shoots puffs of poison or something and you also get grenades that you can chuck at the monsters.

The game was side-scrolling and what was neat was you could have two-players working together to explore the map.  The top half of the screen would show Player 1 and the bottom would show Player 2.  Like I said, you could split up to explore different parts of the level and find stuff easier.  So my brother and I would do that sometimes.  To finish the level you have to clear all the aliens or after a certain amount of time it will self-destruct and you beam out.

It was a pretty neat game for its time.  I'm not sure if they made it for the NES or not; I haven't seen it on my knockoff Gameboy or console.  

The other X game is Xevious.  It was more of a front-scrolling game.  Or top-scrolling?  Basically you pilot a little ship and fly from the bottom of the screen towards the top and shoot bad guys and find power-ups and all that.  You have to try to shoot enemy fighters and bomb targets and if you take even one  hit, you die.  Meanwhile the screen keeps moving forward the whole time, so you can't double back if you miss something.  I think the screen will freeze if you get to a boss fight though.

Like a lot of early video games there wasn't really an ending to it; you would basically keep going until you die.  I think once or twice me or my brother got pretty far in it, though I'm sure not as far as some players got.

This one I think was in arcades and there's a version on my knockoff Gameboy so it was for the NES as well as the 7800.  Hooray!

A to Z Challenge: Wii Sports

 Back in 2010 I had one of my brilliant holiday ideas:  I was going to joke gift everyone in my family a Snuggie!  I got like 5 of them and then sent them to my mom's house, figuring it'd be easier to do that than to try to fit them in my Focus along with the real gifts.

My genius plan for mischief was ruined when of course my sisters snooped in the box.  With the joke ruined, I decided to do a 180 and get them a really good gift instead.  So I got them a Nintendo Wii.  The Wii had been out for a couple of years, being that gift everyone wanted but stores didn't have in the holiday season a couple of years earlier.  But by now they were available and cheaper.

So after hooking the thing up to my mom's living room TV, we put in the game that came with it:  Wii Sports.  The game that comes with a system is usually one that's supposed to give you an idea of what the machine can do, like Combat for the Atari 2600 or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt for the NES.  In this case, maybe Wii Sports was too good at its job.

As you'd expect, Wii Sports features sports.  There was tennis, baseball, golfing, bowling, and boxing.  None of these games were really complicated and all of them took advantage of the Wii's motion-capture thing.  That was where you moved and the character on the screen would do the same thing--supposedly.  Sometimes it could be a little wonky.

The games were almost all really fun.  We had such a good time--even my mom who probably never played a video game in her life--that when I got home, I decided to get a Wii for myself.  I think the one I got came with Wii Sports and one of its sequels:  Wii Sports Resort which had basketball, fencing, water skiing, new golf and bowling games, and some other things.  It was OK, though Wii Sports was still the gold standard.

But while the games are fun, the novelty starts to wear off after a little while.  All of the games are basically mini-games.  You can't play a season of baseball or basketball or any of those.  You can't really play a lot of different courses or courts with the golf or tennis.  So it's pretty easy for it to get boring after a little while.

As I've said a few times before, the problem then became that a lot of the other games for the Wii didn't really take advantage of the motion capture stuff.  Especially the non-Nintendo ones distributed to multiple platforms, it seemed the companies didn't want to take the time to program something especially for that technology and so the controls would be clumsy or downright terrible or just not really use the motion stuff at all.  Some like NBA Jam or Super Mario Bros you could actually use a "classic" controller, ie just play them like a regular game.

I spent plenty of money on Wii games and accessories I thought might take advantage of it like the Wii Fit platform thing that would supposedly let you walk.  But again, there were few games that really used that and it didn't really work great for a fat guy like me--it actually said I was underweight!  I got one of those dancing games with the mat but found it was made for people with tiny feet.  Not that my feet are huge either.  Within a year or so most of that stuff I traded in to Amazon or other sites and mostly I used the Wii like a Roku to play Netflix movies or whatever.  Eventually I sold the Wii itself along with Wii Sports.

In the end, it's a fun game, but one fun game (or two really with Wii Sports Resorts) isn't really enough to sustain a whole console.

VROOM! Need for Speed Most Wanted

 I could have put this in the "N" entry but I wanted to talk about my NHL teams.  So since I couldn't think of a good "V" game I actually played, I'm going to talk about Need for Speed: Most Wanted.  While there were some Need for Speed games before this one, I didn't ever play those.  Though some dick in Russia used my Origin account to download one.  And then changed my account's default language to Russian so I had to use Google Translate to change it back.

Anyway, I got this game free on Origin.  It was pretty fun to drive a bunch of different cars around.  You get everything from super-exotic sports cars to an F-150 Raptor pickup and a Land Rover SUV to actual F1 race cars.  There's even a Ford Focus, though it's a higher-end sportier model than either of mine.

The game is somewhat open-world in that you can just drive around grabbing the different cars where you find them and dodging cops.  There are also different races you can partake in that take you around whatever city.  There are different difficulties to the races and some you only do one lap while others you have to do a few laps.  It can be really difficult.  It's more difficult when you have to use the keyboard controls because you don't have a controller that works with Origin for the game.

There's a "heat meter" on your screen that lets you know if the cops are after you or not.  The heat meter goes up when you steal a car or when you hit another car or hit a pole or something.  If you go speeding past a cop, just like in real life they might come after you.  And if you hit one with your car, they'll definitely come after you.  Then cops will keep chasing you until you can lose them and the heat meter goes down.  A good way to lose them is to get in a different car when they aren't close by.

Unlike The Godfather or Simpsons Hit & Run or other games, you can't take just any old car and drive it around.  There are only certain cars at certain points.  Some of the higher-end cars aren't unlocked until you beat them in a race.  There are in particular 10 elite sports cars to race and once you beat them, you get them.

Real 2014 Porsche 918 Spyder, not actual gameplay

My favorite car to drive around was the Porsche 918 Spyder.  It was a two-seat roadster that was fast but I always thought more maneuverable than some of the high-end sports cars.  I mean some of the really fancy ones were like steering the rocket car in the Simpsons game when you really get them up to speed.  When you're doing races, especially the kind with laps, you need to be able to make turns and veer around objects, not just go flat-out fast.

Actual gameplay

The picture above I posted on Facebook and it came up as one of my "Memories" which is cool.  I think this is the roof of a building where I was hiding out from the cops.  In some spots there are ramps you can use to get to roofs to hide from the cops and to find hidden cars that you can drive.

I did, through much difficulty, get all of the cars in the game at some point.  Then I stopped playing for a little while and when I tried to play again, the screen kept jumping and flickering so I had to stop.  I haven't seen if I could play it on my newer PC yet.

Besides the Spyder, it was often fun to get in the F150 and basically use it like a tank against other cars--especially the cops.  You couldn't really lose the cops in the F150 because it's slower, but you could push them around a lot better than in a Bugatti or F1 race car--or Focus.

For whatever reason there are no people in the game.  You can't run over pedestrians or anything like that.  Maybe that would have made it too mature or something.

I think through Origin you could buy extra cars and upgrades and things like that but I never spent any money on the game and still did most of it.  There were also I think expansion packs to let you access more of the city like the airport and things like that.  The game would just stop you and make you turn around when you got to the edge of one of those areas.

It was a fun game but I never tried getting any of the sequels or the ones before.  I did watch the movie with Aaron Paul, though it wasn't really that good.

A to Z Challenge: Ultimate Alliance & X-Men Legends

 I think it was about 2004 or so, after the first two X-Men movies but before the not very good third movie (or all the spinoffs and soft reboot movies) that X-Men Legends came out for the PS2 and XBox.  Instead of a side-scroller beat 'em up game or fighting game, it was more of a role-playing game like the D&D games I played in the 90s, only I think the combat wasn't really turn-based like the D&D games.

You play as a new female mutant with volcanic powers.  Then you form a party of four with various other characters from the X-Men universe:  Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Jean-Grey, Beast, Psylocke, and so on.  And as you go on, you train your character so her powers get greater and also level up the other characters.  As I recall they got Patrick Stewart's voice for Professor X but not really any of the other movie actors.  Reading the Wikipedia entry, some of the other voices would be familiar from Star Wars shows like Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum.  Lou Diamond Phillips voiced Forge, who I don't think was ever in the movies.  The venerable Ed Asner voiced a Morlock healer who could help you fix injured characters.

The mansion or school serves as the base where you get to walk around as the female mutant and save the game, play a trivia game, or work out in the Danger Room or stuff like that.

In that game you fight Magneto and the Brotherhood but also some evil humans and Sentinels.  There was a sequel with Apocalypse where I think you get Magneto and the Brotherhood as playable characters but I didn't get that game.

Anyway, it was a fun game for the most part.  The neat thing is after you finish it the first time you can unlock alternate costumes.  The original ones in the game were more like the movie ones, so mostly black and yellow.  It was kind of annoying then because your party would often look pretty similar.  But once you can unlock the costumes you can get the more brightly-colored traditional looks like Wolverine's yellow Spandex, Cyclops's blue suit, and Phoenix in green or red.  I loved the green Phoenix one.  I think there was a cheat code to unlock those sooner.

Shortly after that, they came out with Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which used the same game play but broadened it to the whole Marvel universe.  This was before the MCU had started so other than the X-Men, Blade, and Spider-Man hit franchises and flops like Hulk and Daredevil, there wasn't a lot yet for that. 

In the same way as the X-Men game, you form a party of four from a bunch of different heroes.  You can change your party to fit the situation as sometimes you want raw power and other times you might want more skilled characters or some with magic or whatever.  And you level them up and unlock different powers and costumes and stuff along the way as you fight Dr. Doom.

No matter what you do, though, Dr. Doom is going to steal Odin's power and transform Earth into his playground.  There's kind of a creepy cutscene where you see a bunch of the heroes lying dead while Cyclops I think it is does an Ironhide from Transformers the Movie and meets the same end.

But of course Dr. Doom doesn't just kill all the heroes and your team (whoever they are) were protected at least temporarily by the Watcher and relocated to the Moon.  After fighting some aliens--including Galactus--you return to Earth with some helpful toys.  You get to go into Doom's fortress and defeat him and get Odin's powers back.

I think the first time I played through I used more normal heroes like Captain America, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and someone else.  But another time I created a team of all female heroes:  Sue Storm, Storm, Ms. Marvel (aka Captain Marvel now), Spider-Woman, and one or two others I'd slot in like Jean-Grey, Elektra, or Psylocke or someone like that.  It was pretty fun.  I nicknamed my group the Grumpy Bulldog's Angels after Charlie's Angels:

Another neat thing is like the X-Men game you could change costumes.  They had a lot of alternate costumes from throughout the years for the different characters.  For Blade you could get the weird Robin Hood-esque costume he had early on.  Spider-Woman I think I used her SHIELD outfit instead of the red one--as shown above and Ms. Marvel is in a red outfit that was probably from earlier on.  The cool thing with using the alternate costumes is as you can see above, each has a different hair color, which helps to tell them apart in the middle of a battle.

One lame thing was you couldn't play the Hulk on the PS2 version.  You could only get him on XBox and only in the "Gold" edition.  As if I'd buy a whole new console just to play one freaking game.  I mean, again*.  (*See the "I" entry.  Gratuitous Grumpy Bulldog)

A strange thing is that after you beat the game, Galactus swears to destroy Earth. So you'd think that would be the sequel, right?  Right?  Wrong!

They came out with a sequel that was supposed to be modeled on the "Civil War" story.  First you have kind of a "Secret War" or something story where your team attacks some foreign country and then as the fallout, the government wants to register heroes.  When the heroes pick sides, you get a lot fewer heroes to choose from for your party and have to fight those other heroes.

But that's only like 2-3 levels of the whole game.  Then everyone gets back together to fight the Tinkerer--whoever the hell he was.  Honestly, it wasn't nearly as good.  The PS2 version especially wasn't nearly as deep or full-featured as the first game.  I think a lot of that was it came out when the PS2 was being phased out in favor of the PS3.  It seemed like the programmers just really didn't give a shit about the PS2 version and basically just put in the bare minimum of effort.  Maybe to help drive people to buying the PS3.  Again, as if I'd buy a new console just for that.

A different company developed a third game in 2019 for the Nintendo Switch but obviously I never played that.  There are a lot of other Marvel games for phones and so on.

A to Z Challenge: Tetris

The weird thing about video games is the least complicated games can also be the most fun.  The original Pong was just two rectangles and a square "ball" and people played it for hours or maybe even days thanks in part to the novelty.

Another great example of this is the classic game Tetris.  It's a Russian puzzle game with a catchy theme song that became an instant classic on the NES and Gameboy and because of its simplicity has managed to stay relevant in the smartphone era.

The rules of Tetris are pretty simple:  there are puzzle pieces that fall into a rectangular chute.  You can turn the falling pieces to fit together to fill rows of the chute.  Once a row is filled it disappears and everything above that moves down.  If you're lucky you can get rid of up to 4 rows at the same time.  

The challenge is the pieces will come faster and sometimes new pieces are added.  One little mistake when the pieces are coming fast and furious can start a chain reaction that leads to disaster.  Once the pieces get so backed up that new ones can't be added, the game is over.

Last year there was a movie about the guy who created Tetris back in Soviet-era Russia.  I haven't seen it since it's an Apple movie.  Anyway, the game was and remains to be hugely popular.

While I don't think there was an Atari version to play in the 80s, it came out for the NES, though we never had it.  But later I think maybe we had it or some version of it on the PC.  There have been plenty of sequels and different versions of it for just about every platform.

Mostly I played it for hours on a not-really-smartphone back in the late 2000s, almost up to 2013 or so.  Since that phone wasn't too smart, there weren't a lot of games you could play, so Tetris was one of the few that worked well.  I got over 50 levels completed a few times, but obviously that's not as much as some really good players can do.

There are probably tournaments and all that stuff for the really great players.  It's a testament to the game's simple yet addicting design that it remains circulating about 40 years later.  Like Super Mario, I have the Tetris theme song on an album by the London Philharmonic, which can really get stuck in my head.  I'm hearing it right now!  Maybe you are too.

A to Z Challenge: Spider-Man 2

 There are plenty of games you can use for S, but let me use one of my favorite PS2 games:  Spider-Man 2.  Unlike all movie tie-in games to that point, SM2 had an open world that let you swing around New York City as the webslinger to make it more than just a cheap merchandising product like Happy Meal toys or collector cups.

There is of course a campaign that you can complete.  You have to tangle with Mysterio and maybe Electro or another Spidey villain and work with/against Black Cat in addition to Dr. Octopus.  One of the neat things is they used the movie actor voices for Spidey (Tobey Maguire), Mary-Jane Watson (Kristen Dunst), and Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina).  And your guide to the game is none other than Bruce Campbell!  Early on, Bruce will educate you on the controls and such in his own sardonic way.  After you finish the campaign you don't hear from him anymore, which is sad.

And you may ask yourself:  Well, how did I get here?!

The campaign though wasn't really the selling point.  As I said, there was an open world allowing you to go all around New York with familiar landmarks like the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Madison Square Garden, and even Ground Zero.  I doubt everything was exactly accurate, but for a 2004 game it was pretty good.  And really cool to swing up to the top of the Empire State Building, dive off, and then catch yourself by shooting a web right before you go splat.  You can also perch on a building or bridge and watch the sun rise or set.  It's pretty neat.  At that point it was probably the closest you could get to a game that just let you just walk around (or swing around) BEING the superhero.

Even after you complete the campaign, there are still missions you can do while you're swinging around.  They're just mundane ones like stopping robberies, stolen cars, sinking boats, or runaway balloons.  Yes, you get to save balloons which is harder than you might think.  You can't shoot it with webbing or it'll pop so you have to be able to climb up and snatch it, which can be hard.

For the longest time I could not beat the final battle with Dr. Octopus.  Whatever I did, something went wrong.  I finally gave up and just figured I couldn't do it.  A few years ago at random I took the game out and beat that last mission in only like 3 tries.  Maybe I was just trying too hard before.

By now there have certainly been better superhero games but it's still pretty decent for a movie tie-in from 2004.

A to Z Challenge: Rebellion

If you ask people what their favorite pre-Disney Star Wars video game is, a lot of people would probably say Knights of the Old Republic or its sequel.  Or maybe X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, Force Unleashed, Battlefront, or some of the various other ones.  I'm not sure many would even remember Rebellion, which was released in the late 90s only a year or so ahead of The Phantom Menace.

But Rebellion is probably second only to Age of Empires as my favorite strategy game of all time.  It is sort of an Age of Empires game, only set in the Star Wars universe.

Like AOE or even Conflict, there's a pretty simple goal:  destroy the other side's base and capture its leaders.  The Rebellion has to capture the Emperor and Vader and take over the capital world of Coruscant.  The Imperials have to capture Mon Mothma and Luke Skywalker and capture the Rebel base, which unlike the Imperials can move around the board.

You get a map of the entire galaxy from the Core worlds of Coruscant to the Mid-Rim, Outer Rim, and Wild Space.  Most of the Outer Rim and Wild Space are unexplored, so you can dispatch units to go explore and claim those.

There are resources you need to build ships and troops to conquer planets.  So when you take over a planet, you capture any mines it already has and can build more up to however much energy the planet has available.

To build ships you need a Shipyard and to build troops you need a Barracks.  The more shipyards and barracks means the faster each unit gets produced.  The shipyards and barracks can also be upgraded to "Advanced" ones along the way.  But still, to create a Death Star is going to take a while.  

One great thing compared to AOE is you can assign your helper droids (C3PO for the Rebels and some evil droid for the Imperials) to manage your resources for you so you don't have to supervise building mines and dumb shit like that while you're trying to win a war.

There are a few different ways to take over a planet.  The most direct is to launch a planetary assault.  Typically you want to destroy ground forces from orbit with your starships and then land your troops.  Once you do, you'll need to leave a garrison so there's not an uprising to tie up your resources or even to overthrow your units to make the planet neutral or go to the other side.  Another way is to dispatch a diplomat (like Princess Leia for the Rebellion) to cajole the planet to join your side.  That only works with neutral planets, not ones siding with the other side, though you can maybe eventually convince them to be more sympathetic to your cause.  For unclaimed planets, you just land troops and leave a garrison.

Making it more difficult, is that each planet can have defenses:  shields, ion cannons, or laser cannons.  You can't bombard a planet from orbit if the planet has a shield.  Or if it only has a weak shield you need a ton of firepower to overwhelm it.  Bombarding a planet with an ion cannon could disable one of your ships and bombarding a planet with a laser cannon can destroy one of your ships.  For that reason you usually want to try taking those planets by other means.  You can use commando units or certain characters to sabotage the defenses so you can then swoop in and take the place over.

Besides the characters I've mentioned, you get all the main characters from the original 3 movies and a lot from the "Expanded Universe" at the time.  You start out with a few characters but then you have to "recruit" more using some of your characters--Mon Mothma/Luke/Leia/Han for the Rebels and the Emperor/Vader for the Emperor probably have the best chances to recruit someone.  Characters have different abilities and uses.  Some like Leia are diplomats.  Some like Lando or Thrawn are useful to research new weapons.  Some like bounty hunters and special forces types are more useful at sabotaging defenses or capturing other characters.  And some like Ackbar or Piett are more useful for commanding your fleets.  Force users like Luke can train to increase their skills.  At the start of the game, Luke is like at the start of Empire, but at some point he'll run off to train and come back as the Return of the Jedi version.

One funny little thing is you can send the Emperor on missions.  If he succeeds in his mission he'll of course take all the credit.  If he fails he'll say, "You did not adequately prepare me for this mission.  And it has failed."  Sounds like pretty much every boss I've ever had.

Like AOE or Conflict, you start off with only limited weapons you can build.  Stuff like basic troops, X-Wings, TIE Fighters, corvettes, or light cruisers.  As you research, you get newer and better stuff like A-Wings, B-Wings, TIE Defenders, Mon Calamari Cruisers, and Super Star Destroyers.  The Imperials get the Death Star while the Rebellion really has no equivalent.  What sucks with the Death Star is if you actually blow up a planet, basically the whole galaxy will start turning on you.  What's the point of having it then?

If you choose, you can control the battle between forces.  I always found that too slow and clumsy.  So I would always choose to simulate the battles.  But you have to make sure you have enough firepower to do the job then because otherwise you'll probably lose and your units will be destroyed or damaged and have to retreat to the nearest planet you own.

Given the size of the galaxy, a campaign can take a long time.  You can do a shorter game where you only have to take a base, but the longer game is more fun.

If you're the Rebellion, you start off mostly in the Outer Rim with your base on Yavin, though you might have a couple of Core or Mid-Rim worlds like Mon Calamari.  What you want to do is explore the Outer Rim to build up resources and try to convince some neutral planets to your side.  Only then can you try to defeat the Empire's Core worlds.  And you'll want to move your base around a couple of times to make sure it's not too easy for the Empire to find. 

As the Empire, you get a lot of Core worlds, so you have better resources than the Rebellion.  Still, you need to shore up the Core and start taking planets in the Outer Rim to acquire more resources.  You can send units to Yavin, but it's likely the enemy will be gone long before you get there.  

Traveling around the galaxy can take a while, especially from one side of the Rim to the other.  Going from Yavin to Hoth for instance would basically take a fleet months.  For that reason, you need to have shipyards in multiple areas so you have forces able to easily reach almost anywhere.  Think of it like how the US has a Pacific Fleet and Atlantic Fleet so they aren't always having to send ships from one ocean to another.

Playing the game a couple of years ago on Steam it is a little weird in that you don't have the planets and characters from the prequels or any of the TV shows like The Clone Wars or Rebels.  So if you play it now, you might wonder, where's Naboo?  Or Geonosis?  But they didn't exist yet since the game came out just before The Phantom Menace.

As much as I would have liked it, I don't think they ever made an expansion or sequel.  It's too bad, because it is a really fun game if you like strategy games.

A to Z Challenge: Q-Bert

 As I've said before, a lot of old video games had pretty nonsensical stories.  Take Q-Bert, where you guide a weird orange critter around 3D boards by hopping up, down, and sideways.

The big deal about the game at the time was the 3D design of the boards.  They start out as basically stacks of cubes and you have to guide Q-Bert around to touch them all.  But there are other critters like snakes who will untouch the cubes so you have to go back and retouch them until you have them all.  Like Joust it's a weird game but the simplicity makes it fun to play.

In the picture you can see some rules/tips to sort of explain the game.  Why anyone would think this up, I have no idea.

While I'm pretty sure there was some merchandising for Q-Bert in the 80s, the character didn't become a lasting cultural icon like Pac-Man, Mario, or Sonic.  You can probably still find the game to play on your phone or knockoff game systems.

A to Z Challenge: Pac-Man & Pitfall

 There were a few Ps to choose from here (including the original Atari game Pong) but I figure I have to do the classic Pac-Man.  While Mario and Sonic became icons of the industry, Pac-Man was there first.  He had games, toys, a TV show, crappy vitamins, and even a song!

If you've never played, the concept is simple but kinda silly.  You control Pac-Man, the mostly yellow circular dude who goes around the board chomping up pellets.  He's chased by 4 ghosts:  Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.  There are 4 super pellets, one in each corner, where Pac can become invincible for a limited time.  Then he can eat the ghosts, who go to the center of the board until they respawn.  Sometimes a fruit pops up in the middle for bonus points.  

You can get extra lives so you can keep going for a long time.  There is in theory an end, but I'm not sure how many actually made it that far.  

After Pac-Man came Ms. Pac-Man that introduced his girlfriend.  It was pretty much the same game only she had a pink bow!  Then there was Super Pac-Man where he turned into a giant Pac-Man.  And later some spin-off games like Pac-Man Land that I think were more in response to games like Super Mario Bros.

It started in arcades and the 2600 and has been on other platforms.  Google even replaced the "doodle" once with a Pac-Man game you could play.  The Atari 2600 version was apparently so bad that it helped to drive a video game market crash in 1983 along with other junk like ET.  The video game market remained depressed for a couple of years, until the NES came along.

In the book version of Ready Player One, Parsifal plays an entire game on one quarter in an arcade and wins a special token to give him an extra life in the Oasis later on.  So the game remains a part of pop culture today.

I also decided to talk about Pitfall.  The game was one of those licensed games not by Atari for the 2600 and probably also an arcade version too.

You play as Pitfall Harry, who's sort of an Indiana Jones character.  You have to go through the jungle, avoid deadly animals and traps.  Sometimes you could grab a vine to swing over water hazards or bogs, in which case the game would make sort of a Tarzan yell.  Sometimes you had to go underground into tunnels.  The tunnels might then be bricked up so you'd have to go back to the surface.

There were different things to find, though I forget what the ultimate goal was.  Or if there even was an ultimate goal.  It might have simply been one of those games that just went on and on forever until you died, got tired of playing, or the game/power failed since there was no saving anything for the Atari 2600.

There was I think a sequel and some revivals or reboots or whatever for other consoles and PC/Mac.  Maybe you can even get it on your phone now.  It seems like the kind of game they could make a movie for but maybe the similarity with Indiana Jones makes that too difficult.

A to Z Challenge: Oregon Trail

 In the early 90s, Oregon Trail was one of those games you could play a lot on school computers because it was "educational."  Though in all actuality, I don't think my schools really played it that much.  I remember we had this other game in middle school called Life and Death where you got to be a surgeon trying to remove someone's appendix or other stuff.  Though if you're a sadist, it's more fun to torture and kill the patient by not using anesthetic and then cutting them up.

Anyway, Oregon Trail was about trying to guide a family of pioneers from Independence, Missouri or wherever to Oregon.  Along the way you'd have to worry about food, disease (you have died of dysentery!), and Native American attacks.  It was pretty tough to beat, especially if you only had a few minutes at school to play before you had to let someone else have a turn.

There were I think a few sequels and maybe a revival more recently.  In a more recent American Dad episode, the Smith family is trapped in the game (or a game like it) and Klaus or Roger has to save them by winning the game.

It wasn't a big deal to me but it was more so for other kids from the 90s.  Maybe my sisters.  So there.

Another O game I did play was One-on-One Basketball featuring very crude versions of Dr. J (Julius Erving) & Larry Bird.  You can play as Dr. J or Larry Bird and play the other guy in one-on-one basketball, which is only half the court.  It can get boring pretty quick but the fun thing is when you dunk, you can smash the backboard and then this guy comes out and yells at you while he cleans it up:

By the time this came out for the 7800, I'm pretty sure Dr. J had retired and Larry Bird had only a few years left as a player.  Celebrity endorsements like this are why the 7800 never came close to surpassing the NES.

A to Z Challenge: NHL (EA Sports)

 My favorite sports game series has been EA's NHL series.  I first started playing it with NHL 95 for the SNES.  While some people might like other years better, I had a lot of fun with it.  It might not have been the first one where you could create a player, but it did have that feature so you could make your own guy or guys to play alongside the real players.

(In the picture above I took 5 Hartford players against Steve Yzerman and Bob Essensa in practice.  It didn't take long for future Red Wing player/exec Pat Verbeek to score.  About a year later, Hartford would move to Carolina to become the Hurricanes.)

Of course I played the Red Wings a lot, who back then had a really good team.  Though playing it a couple of years later, I'd usually trade Keith Primeau and Paul Coffey for Brendan Shanahan as the Wings did in real life.  You could assemble most of the 97-98 teams if you traded with some other teams for Shanahan, Tomas Sandstrom, Kris Draper, Kirk Maltby, Doug Brown, Mike Vernon, and maybe some others.  You would probably have to make a few others like Tomas Holmstrom, Mathieu Dandenault, or Aaron Ward.

Anyway, besides the regular game, I had a lot of fun with the practice feature.  That let you choose from 0-5 members of two different teams.  So you could play 5-on-5 or 5-4 or even 5 against just the goalie.  You could practice offense or if you let the computer have 5 guys and you only have 1 or just the goalie, you can practice your defense.  Unfortunately that wasn't a feature EA continued.

The next ones I bought were for the PC, starting with NHL 2000.  The graphics were better and the roster building was a lot better too.  You could sign free agents, make your own players, and of course do trades.  I think I had 2001 too, which might have been a little better.  But 2002-2003 weren't that good.

NHL 2004 was one I played a ton on the PS2.  The cool thing with that was not only could you create players; you could create whole teams!  You could make up a city and a logo and then create your own roster with an expansion draft.  But I usually created my own roster--the Mutts!  I made a whole team based on some old stuffed animals.  Spot Mutt II was the star and captain with his son Spot III as the sniper on the top line and his son Spot IV as "the Hammer" or the bigger guy who fought and did the dirty work.  Spot V and Spot VI then were the defensive pair with one being more offense-minded and one more defense-minded.

The second unit featured raccoons with Ricky Raccoon at center and Vern and Zeke as the wingers.  And then a couple more as the defense.  The third unit used St. Bernards with Bernard St. Bernard at center and a bunch of B-names on offense and "Dave" Beethoven on defense.  This line was intended to be the "checking line" or the line that would hit people and play defense more than score.  (Because St. Bernards are big and can be mean.  Get it?)  The final unit was just some randos like Artful Dodger, Cooler Mutt, and Jeremiah Mutt.  The goalies I made one of each animal though they were all female:  Spot's wife Marshy Mutt, Ricky's mother Laura Raccoon, and Bernard's wife Bernice St. Bernard.  Which one was in goal would depend on who had the hot hand--or paw.

Besides making my own team, I'd grease the settings a little to play a faster game.  None of that "trap" bullshit for us!  When you won the Stanley Cup, there was a cool montage at the end that would show your guys and give stats.  And then in "Dynasty Mode" you could go on to the next year!  Your team would carry over and have to do it again.  As players got older, their stats would decline and after a few years some of the more veteran ones would have to be dumped for new players.

Unfortunately, the next year EA mailed it in, probably because of the lockout.  NHL 2005 was shit that I never actually bought, just rented.  I don't think that one even let you create players!  WTF?!  I tried NHL2K5 but the minigames were more fun than the real game.

The next one I bought was NHL 2007 for the PS2.  It was a lot more like NHL 2004, with most of the same features.  And it added in a bunch of European league teams from Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and Russia.  The neat thing about that was sometimes a player might go to Russia for a year or so and then come back, so you might find him on the roster of a team in that league and be able to put him where he was.  Or the team in Sweden or Switzerland might have a prospect an NHL team calls up so you could trade him to that team.  The first couple of years it was a good way to help keep rosters somewhat current.

Again you could create a team and I used basically the same team.  I think the difference was this time with a salary cap you had to be more careful about the players you created so they wouldn't be too expensive.  The montage at the end wasn't as good but overall the game play was largely the same.

I apparently got NHL 2009 as well so some of my memories from 2007 might be for that game.  Or I might not have played it much.  I don't really remember.

Since the PS2 stopped having games made for it a year or two later, I never got any more NHL games.  I could get them for the PC but I don't really care.  I haven't watched a lot of hockey since the Red Wings stopped being good so I don't even know most of the players anymore and a lot of the ones I do know are getting old.  I mean Sid "the Kid" Crosby is like 35 now.  A lot of the star players from the 80s-2000s are coaches or executives now.  Such is the way of things.

A to Z Challenge: It's-a him, Mario!

 Mario became a symbol of Nintendo and the video game industry in general after pretty humble beginnings in Donkey Kong.  In that game for the Atari 2600 and arcade, you had to guide the blobby Mario up ladders to rescue the princess from the giant gorilla, who in no way was like a donkey.  Along the way you jump over barrels or smash them with a hammer.  It was the kind of game that just kept going and getting more complicated.  Maybe at some point you did actually win.

In Donkey Kong Jr., Mario is actually the villain holding Donkey Kong captive while his son has to rescue him.  There was also a regular Mario Bros game where you did...stuff.  I think they made that for the Atari 2600 but we didn't have it.  That was probably the game that introduced Luigi and maybe that they were plumbers.  So you had a good chunk of the Mario mythos established!

When the NES console came out in the mid-80s, Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt were the games that usually game with it.  This time instead of Donkey Kong, Mario and his brother Luigi battle Koopa, who has taken the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom.  You have to jump on or over enemies like "goombas" or turtles and avoid the spiny bad guys and bullets.  You got two upgrades from hitting special ? bricks with your head.  First a mushroom would make Mario/Luigi grow.  Once at full-size another brick would have a flame flower that allowed you to launch fireballs.  Those were helpful against a lot of enemies but not beetles or bullets.

The game had 8 "worlds" each with 4 levels, the last of which was always a special castle where you'd have to jump over a Koopa only to find that "Our princess is in another castle" until of course the last level.  But you don't have to play all 32 levels; you can beat the game by playing only 1/4 of that.  You play 1-1 and then in 1-2 there's a "warp zone" that lets you jump to 4-1.  Then in 4-2 there's another warp zone to 8-1.  From there you have to play through to the end.  

Worlds 2-2 and 7-2 are underwater levels that can be tricky because the water really hampers your ability to move around; it's almost better to be small so you're more agile.  2-3 and 7-3 then you have to run like crazy as flying fish come at you from above and below and you can't really kill them easily.  The third level on a lot of worlds are jumping levels where you have to jump from trees to platforms and stuff.  Those are always a little nerve-wracking as there is no room for error.  Miss something and you fall to your death to probably go splat.  To amp up the difficulty, a couple of these also have bullets flying by.  With the bullets or flames in the castle levels, the problem is you can hear them launch but by the time you see them you might be in mid-jump with no way to correct before you get hit.

The game was (and still is) hugely popular.  On the knockoff Gameboy and knockoff SNES I have, there are versions of Super Mario where someone puts in different characters or different enemies, sort of like the Doom WADs I made in the 90s.

Super Mario 2 then was a really weird game that didn't use much of the gameplay from the first game.  You throw turnips and stuff and...whatever.  It was a bizarre Japanese import that most American players didn't really like because we were expecting something more like the first game.

Raccoons are known for their flying, right?

Around 1988 or 89, they made Super Mario Bros 3, which was far more like the first game.  The gameplay is largely the same, but expanded so you could get the fireball suit but more often a feather that gave you a raccoon tail to let you fly.  In the aquatic levels you could get a frog suit to swim better.  And there were "P Wings" that let you fly a lot longer and higher than the tail.  There were also minigames like matching cards or lining up three objects or just picking from treasure chests.  These things gave you extra lives or spare mushrooms, tails, and so on that you could use.

We didn't have an NES for a while and didn't have Mario 3, though I think we might have rented it a few times.  And on my knockoff Gameboy I've played it, though I keep getting stuck on the pyramid in World 2 because I don't think the controls work all that great for what you need to do, which is throw beetles around to break bricks.

In the cheesy product placement movie The Wizard, Super Mario Bros 3 is the final game played in the "Video Armageddon" tournament.  And as the Rifftrax points out, it's funny how the one player's brother and friend are shouting tips for a game they've never played.

In 1993 there was also a super-cheesy Super Mario Bros live action movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi and Dennis Hopper as Koopa.  The movie is pretty much nothing like the video games.  One time I watched the Rifftrax and then thought about what they could have done differently.  The thing is, I don't think a live action movie could have worked back then especially.  With CGI still in its infancy and really expensive, they'd have needed a budget like Waterworld or Titanic to make it and it still probably would have sucked.  Even now it was a lot smarter to go the animated route than trying to work live action into it.

The 2023 animated movie was obviously better, though I didn't think it was really great.  It did make a ton of money, so I'm sure there will be a sequel at some point.  That movie featured Easter eggs from pretty much all the games featuring Mario and Donkey Kong.

Besides the Super Mario Bros games, there were also games featuring Mario like Dr. Mario and Mario Paint.  When the SNES came out, there was a new game called Super Mario World.  Unfortunately I never had that one because I got the basic SNES that didn't come with that included.  I think I got the most basic one that didn't have any game included.  There was also Mario Kart that let you race around in go-carts with characters from Mario games.

I think then there was another new Mario game for the N64 along with spinoffs for Luigi and Yoshi.  And that continued with the Wii, Wii U, and Switch.  Plus the Gameboy.  For the Wii you could get the original Mario games to play on it, but I never bought that.

Anyway, as I said, Mario has become the symbol for Nintendo and largely for video games in general.  He's basically the Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny of gaming.  (Maybe he's Bugs and Pac-Man is Mickey?)  Even the music from the original Super Mario game has become iconic; I have an MP3 of a version recorded by the London Philharmonic.  Not bad for a plumber from the Bronx.

A to Z Challenge: Legos!

Doing a quick Google search, I found this article that gives a brief history of Lego video games.  So go ahead and read that and I'll see you on Monday!

OK, actually I have played a couple of the Lego games but not a lot.  I think I played the original Star Wars one (the prequel one) a little bit.  And then I know I played the second one with the original trilogy, though I don't think I owned it.  This is a screen shot from a Gameboy version on RetroGames

I know I got the Batman one in a Humble Bundle or something for the PC.  Like most of these games it's fun and somewhat easy, though sometimes not as easy as you might think.  I remember I got stuck on one point and then found it's because you were supposed to do something that you hadn't done before in the game so I had no idea that I could do what they wanted me to do.  Make sense?  No?  Good.

The ones I have played, you generally follow a story of some sort.  You use Lego building to create bridges or other platforms; fix or build vehicles to travel; or to repair or create some other machine for the level.  If you're not careful you can get shot or hit with something or fall down a chasm and then your Lego character will break apart into pieces.  The same can happen to vehicles.

While the games started on the PC, they were also made for the various consoles of the 2000s-today.  Like the later Star Wars specials on Disney+, the stories are generally done tongue-in-cheek with slapstick and nerd humor.  As that article says, that was really good with the prequels considering how much they sucked to most people not named Tony Laplume.

The success of the games is probably a large reason The Lego Movie and Lego Batman Movie came to be.  And at least with the video games it doesn't hurt so much to step on them, right?

A to Z Challenge: Krynn (AD&D Games)

 I was never into paper Dungeons & Dragons (and still am not despite all of Michael Offutt's posts about it) but in the early 90s, my brother and I bought some of SSI's Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games.  I think one of the first we played was Champions of Krynn which was from the Dragonlance series.

Like with the physical D&D, you first have to make a party of characters.  There are a bunch of different races:  humans, elves, dwarves, and whatever.  And different classes:  knights, rangers, paladins, mages, clerics, and thieves mostly.  And then you got to make a blocky little character that could be male or female and different colored clothes, skin, hair, and weapons.

Then like probably a lot of the physical games, it starts at a tavern.  You meet Sir Karl, a knight of the realm or whatever.  And eventually you get started on an adventure that takes you around the world of Krynn.  You traverse dungeons and castles and keeps and all that stuff.  Ultimately you go to the flying castle thing on the cover.  Along the way you have to fight parties of bad guys, which gives you better equipment and experience so you can level up.

RIP Squirrel

It was a pretty fun game but to really find your way around it helps to have the "clue book" that was probably $20 or so back then at Waldenbooks or Electronics Boutique.  When I replayed the game a year or so ago after getting it from GOG.com, I found the clue book online in a PDF.  I also needed to get the journal in a PDF and print it out because to log in it would ask you for a word from the journal like, "Page 13, Paragraph 6, Word 1" and then you type the word.  That was I guess to make it harder for people to copy the game's disks to let someone else play because back then it'd be hard to copy the manual unless you had some money--and why not just buy the game yourself then?  It was kinda the early form of trying to stop people from sharing passwords!

The sequel to Champions was Death Knights of Krynn.  It wasn't as good of a game or as deep either.  Basically, Sir Karl, who died in the previous game, is a zombie and he and other zombies or whatever the game calls them are up to no good so you have to stop him.

The annoying thing when I tried to play it a year or so ago was that you can't transfer your team from the previous game like you could with the original disks.  The best you could do was modify a premade team but they wouldn't have the items and skills the same as the end of the previous game.

The final part of this trilogy is The Dark Queen of Krynn.  This one had upgraded graphics and a little different game play.  Unfortunately I still couldn't import my team from any previous games.  What I remember of the original was it had a better story than the second one with more depth and breadth.  

Besides the Krynn series they made a couple of other series.  The first one they made in the late 80s was called Pool of Radiance.  I think at some point we got that one and played it.  Since it was older, it wasn't quite as good as the Krynn ones because it didn't have as good of graphics or as many features.  They made a few sequels to those "Forgotten Realms" ones:  Secret of the Silver Blades, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Pools of Darkness.

Another newer series was Gateway to the Savage Frontier and its sequel Treasures of the Savage Frontier.  I think those were newer than the first couple of Krynn ones so they had better graphics and features.

The last series they made was the "Dark Sun" series:  Shattered Lands and Wake of the Ravager.  Those had better graphics and some different gameplay.  While they were D&D games I think they were in more of a different world, one where it was largely desert.

They also made a Buck Rogers game that was more based on the comics and stuff than the 70s TV series.  That was a pretty fun game as it had a lot of the same gameplay only with spaceships and lasers and stuff.  That one wasn't in the bundle I got from Gog.com.

I liked those games for the most part.  Though I had some ideas how to make them better and sent the company some annoying letters, though by now I forget about what.  It was like 30 years ago.

A to Z Challenge: Joust

 Like I mentioned before, a lot of the early video games (and even some today) were pretty silly.  One of the silliest was Joust.

The concept was entirely weird:  you're a knight who pilots an ostrich-type bird.  On the screen are different levels that have teleporters on them to spawn enemy knights on birds.  You have to fly up and hit them from above; hit them from lower and you'll die.  If they die, they release an egg that you have to collect before it hatches to basically respawn the enemy.   And there's lava at the bottom that'll kill you if you fall into it.  The first couple of levels the bottom is solid but then the bottom starts shrinking to reveal the lava.  Oh, and sometimes a pterodactyl will fly around to try to kill you.

That all makes sense, right?  Yeah, not at all.  There's a quickie Robot Chicken sketch that just shows the gameplay and someone basically says, "WTF?"

Ummmm...what?!

But like a lot of these weird old games, it can be pretty fun.  We had this for the Atari...one of them.  I think there was both a 2600 and 7800 version.  Or maybe we just had the 2600 version that we played on the 7800?  Anyway, I'm not sure how far I got into it, but one of those where it was never that far.

I think there was probably an NES version or at least there is on my knockoff Gameboy thing.  

A to Z Challenge: Invasion & Battlecry (Robotech)

Because I have something else for R & had something else for B, I'm doing my Robotech PS2 games here even though Invasion was the second game made for the PS2--at least in America.

I've probably said it before, but the first Robotech PS2 game Battlecry was the main reason I bought a PS2 in the first place.  While they made Macross games in Japan, there was never really a Robotech game for older platforms or the PC.  Battlecry was really the first attempt on this side of the pond to create a game that would let you do some (but not all) of the stuff from the TV show.

Like most of these games, you don't play as Rick Hunter, Roy Fokker, or anyone like that.  Instead you're Jack Archer, a guy who's sort of like Rick or Roy but not.  The game starts when the Zentraedi invade Earth to steal the SDF-1.  The unfortunate thing then is you don't get to go with the SDF-1 to do some of the cool stuff from the TV show like battle in Saturn's rings or go to Mars or stuff.

You do get to be in the final battle to help the SDF-1 destroy Dolza's flagship.  Then a large chunk of the game is afterwards, trying to put down riots in the cities that remain after the "Rain of Death" and put down rogue Zentraedi in the wastelands.  The final battle takes you to deep space, where even if you win, you die alone in space.  Hooray?

The awesome thing about this game is instead of the side-scrolling type for older platforms, you can play from the cockpit or outside of it.  And best of all, you can change your Veritech between all three modes:  plane, robot, or the hybrid Guardian mode.  You have the Veritech's gun and also missiles to take down various bad guys.

Of course since this is mission-based, some of the missions can be a real pain in the ass.  For instance there's one where you have to escort famous singer/actress Lynn-Minmei and of course then there are Zentraedi who show up.  You could probably just scoop up her car and fly in Guardian mode to safety, but no, you have to painstakingly follow her car around while killing bad guys.  It can be very annoying.

Through most of the game, Archer has a female boss who's voiced by one of the women who worked on the original dubs.  If you're slacking off on a mission--or she thinks you are--she'll break in to berate you with something like, "Wolf 10, what are you doing?!"

While not a perfect game, it was really awesome for me to fly around in a Veritech and shoot Zentraedi pods and stuff like I was Rick Hunter.  

I was then excited for the next game a few years later.  They skipped over the "Second Generation" with its Hovertanks to go right to the "Third Generation" based on Genesis Climber Mospaeda.  The game is called Invasion because it's about the Invid, you guessed it, invading Earth and taking over.  You play as "Locke" a dude who can't remember who he is but gets a Cyclone and starts helping the resistance fight the Invid.  Like the other game you don't get to interact with Scott Bernard or other main characters a lot.

What was disappointing to me with this game is you only get the Cyclone (no Alpha or Beta Veritechs) and you're in its robot mode pretty much all the time.  You don't get to change to its motorcycle mode while fighting, which is kind of lame.  I guess they figured letting you do that would mess up the whole first-person shooter thing.

So most of it you're walking or running around while killing Invid mechs.  And then like "Ariel" in the TV show, your guy starts to realize that he's actually an Invid creation.  And then he helps to get the Invid Regis to leave Earth or whatever.

It was not nearly as much fun as Battlecry.  I don't know if there were development problems or what but it wound up being a cut-rate Robotech-themed HALO.

The problem with both games was since neither had an open-world aspect the replay value wasn't great as you could basically only do the missions over again.

On the RetroGame site there were a bunch of Japanese Macross games and two Robotech games.  One was just a prototype N64 game called Crystal Dreams that let you fly the Veritech from the cockpit or outside of it:

And another was a Gameboy Advanced game that was neat in that you could transform, though it was too slow.  That game let you fly as different characters like Rick Hunter, Roy Fokker, Max Sterling, Miriya, and Ben Dixon.

Most of both the Macross and Robotech ones on there are side-scrollers where you take on swarms of Zentraedi.  A strategy game would have been neat.  You could have played as Gloval in charge of the RDF or Breetai in charge of the Zentraedi and then reenacted some of the battles from the series.

A to Z Challenge: Hit & Run (The Simpsons)

 There have been games based on The Simpsons since the original NES in the early 90s.  I have two games for my PS2.  The first, Road Rage, was an OK game where you just drive various vehicles from the Simpsons universe to race people and stuff.

Hit & Run is a much better game that like The Godfather in my previous entry applies more of an open-world concept to let you somewhat experience the world of the TV show.  And like The Godfather, there are missions (starting with the "easy tutorial level") that have you go a bunch of places and meet a bunch of characters.  Sometimes you have to race someone or find stuff or do something silly like help Cletus collect his "flat meat" from the road.  There are 7 total levels and each one you get to be a different character:  Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, or Apu.  Each character has different phrases they'll use periodically.

The game does a good job of working in a ton of Simpsons references and locations.  Besides the Simpsons house (and Flanders') you have the school, church, power plant, Qwik-E-Mart, Android's Dungeon, and many more places.  You don't necessarily get to fully explore these places, but they are at least there.

The town is divided into a few different sections.  You start in the Simpsons neighborhood.  There's another section for downtown and another by the water and another up in the hills.

Since it's called Hit & Run, a lot of what you do is driving.  You get the Simpsons car and other vehicles from the show (at that point, which was maybe like Season 15 or 16?) like a monster truck, a Shriners car, the Car Designed By Homer, and the rocket car bought by the bum who created Itchy & Scratchy.  You can even swipe the pink Cadillac that crashed into the Planet Hollywood-type place.  If you're a fan of the show--or were a fan until it jumped the shark about fifty times--it's a lot of fun just to have sort of a 3D version of Springfield to play around in.

Since it's somewhat open world, you can do the missions or you can just fool around, stealing cars and driving around Springfield.  One fun thing to do is rev the rocket car up and jump it off a ramp just to see how high you can get before smashing back down.  I also liked the Stonecutters tunnel that's complete with the classical music used in the show.  Near the end of the missions, the game transforms Springfield into a Halloween-themed version where you can drive around in the car from the "Homega Man" episode and stuff like that.

The actual "story" of the game is pretty silly and actually rips off a South Park episode where the boys find out Earth is the setting of a reality show.  Or maybe South Park ripped them off.  It's something I ripped off for Chet Finley vs The Machines of Fate only instead of just a reality show the aliens are making bets on human behavior.  While a sequel would have been rad the developer lost the rights before one could be made.

I haven't played the game in a while and at one point I loaned them to my sister, who probably lost them.  I'm sure by now they've made other Simpsons games, but this one is my favorite.

A to Z Challenge: The Godfather

 Someone at Electronic Arts or whatever thought it would be a really good idea to take the popular open-world game Grand Theft Auto and set it in the 40s with characters and missions based on The Godfather, one of the most respected movies of all time.  And while Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino and others hated the idea, I found it to be a really fun game both for the missions and the open-world play.

Like a lot of these games you don't play as a character from the movies.  Instead you make your own guy, choosing different facial features, body type, and clothes from a menu that was sort of like a trimmed-down version of The Sims.  Then you start as an "outsider" who joins the Corleone family and works his way up to becoming the Don of Dons, or head of all the crime families in New York/New Jersey.

There are two main components to the game.  The first are missions that are mostly taken from the first movie.  You have to protect Don Corleone as he's taken to the hospital after being shot, help Michael protect him in the hospital, help put the horse's head in the movie producer's bed, and take down the heads of the other families while Michael is at the baptism.  You can choose to do some right away, though some you can't really do at first, or you can wait until later.  I think you have to do a few just to open up the map a little.

The open-world part of the game lets you go to the territories of the five families.  You start in Little Italy, which is under siege from other families.  You have to take over various shops by bribing or coercing the owner with violence until he agrees to pay protection to you.  The more places under your protection, the more money you get.  Sometimes another family will then take the place over again and you have to go back.  There's also a warehouse and/or train yard for each of the other families that if you take it over, you get a lot more money flowing into your coffers.  The obvious goal then is to take over everything in Little Italy, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen, and New Jersey.

Each family has a compound that you have to storm to wipe them out.  It can be really difficult so it's not something you do straight off.  But once you take that family compound down, they won't be able to take over your businesses anymore.  The Corleone compound near Little Italy has health, ammo, and cars you can use and a save point.  Sometimes you can talk to characters like Michael (made to look not like Pacino), Tom Hagen, Fredo, other members of the Family, and even Mama Corleone, who doesn't really have anything interesting to say.

Besides the Corleone compound, you can go into various hotels to take them over and then use them as save points.  That's crucial as you expand your territory, because nothing is more annoying than doing a bunch of stuff and then getting killed (or having the game freeze or power go out or something) before you can find a save point.  The hotels usually also have ammo and health and phones you can use to get messages telling you where you need to go for missions.

Some of the hotels have gambling rackets that you can take over to add money to your coffers.  A lot of places have safes that you can blow up with dynamite to get some extra money.  Scattered around the map are doctor's offices where you can get healed.  You can blow up their safe or punch the doctor or nurse but then the cops will come after you.  You can also go to a couple of police stations and steal a police car and then turn on the lights and siren to make people get out of your way.  You can steal taxis too if you want. 

The other families will also have trucks you can rob.  First you have to stop them by ramming them with a car or shooting them.  The trick is as soon as you shoot it, the truck will floor it, so it's best to hit it with something high-powered in heavy traffic if you can.  Once the truck stops, you have to kill a couple of goons and then you get money and maybe some ammo or something.

To get around, you drive cars.  There are cars owned by the family that you can take or if you wreck that--or just want something faster--you can steal a car, though if a cop is nearby he might try to stop you.  Some cops walking the beat you can bribe to be on your payroll, which helps to take heat off you when you want to take stuff over.  There are also banks you can rob periodically for some money; the banks in Manhattan are the best-guarded but have the richest takes.  You have to get the money back to a save point before it'll count as being yours and the heat will die down.

It can take days to do all the stuff in the game.  Sometimes it can be frustrating, especially the compounds, docks, and railyards that are heavily guarded.  You get a variety of weapons like brass knuckles, a baseball bat, a pipe, a revolver, a pistol, a shotgun, and a machine gun.  Then there are upgrades to each weapon to make them carry more ammo and do more damage.  Like Wolfenstein or Doom, some weapons are better than others for different situations.  The pistols are better close-up or for precision shots (a shot to the head will instantly kill someone) while the shotgun does more damage but doesn't hold as much ammo and the machine gun does damage quickly but can run out pretty fast if you're not careful.

As you get more money, you can also change your character to reflect his new station.  You can buy fancier clothes and sunglasses and stuff like that.  And no you can't have a female character.

Even after you've done all the missions and taken over everything, with the open-world you can still screw around endlessly robbing banks, stealing cars, or just beating up random people.  Then you can get the cops to chase you and try to ditch them or really piss them off until you finally get caught.  It's not as much fun, but you can do it.

Anyway, while some would criticize the game for being a cheesy cash grab based on a beloved movie/book, I thought it was a lot of fun to play on the PS2 though I'm sure it was also made for XBox too.  I still have my copy that I could play if I hook up the PS2.