#AtoZChallenge Reflections: Honorable Mentions

I guess you're supposed to answer a bunch of questions for the official Reflections entry.  Whatever.  A few people commented trying to get me to comment on their blog, but they were blogs I had no interest in.  Like advertising anything, if you advertise your blog on my blog it should be something I might be interested in, not plants or crafting or whatever.  People like that would do better to focus their efforts on more similar blogs.

Of course no one commented on all 26 entries.  I think my brother probably had the most comments.  Generally it seems like people can't be bothered to muster the effort to follow more than a few entries.  So really 26 entries is about 23 too many for most people.

Meanwhile no I didn't really go to a bunch of other blogs or even try to look through the list.  I'm about as lazy as the rest of you when it comes to that.  So sue me.

Anyway, now that that unpleasantness is over, here's a little supplementary entry.

Someone could have made the generic comment, "You sure play a lot of video games."  Which is patently false.  For a poor like me, video games were always expensive, thus my family and me separately never owned a lot of them.  If you look up all the games on RetroGames or something like that there are literally tens of thousands of them, though a lot on that site are different foreign versions of the same game.  Still, I probably never even played 1% of Atari, NES, and SNES games and none for Sega Genesis, GameBoy, or any console after the SNES except the PS2 and again probably not even 1% of the games for the PS2 and maybe 0.00001% of PC games.

Because games were so expensive and we didn't have a lot of them, usually I'd play them quite a few times instead of taking a "one and done" approach.  A lot of Atari and NES games especially I never actually beat because I'm not sure you really could beat them.  Others, like sports games, I'd play through seasons even if there wasn't a dynasty mode.  That was getting more value for my money.

Anyway, the A to Z format makes it hard to fit everything in I might want to talk about.  So here are some that didn't make the cut.

RealSports Baseball (Atari 2600)

The original Atari baseball game was called Home Run and we had that for our 2600 in the early 80s.  It was a pretty silly thing where there was a batter and pitcher and maybe like 3 fielders.  It was not a very accurate game.  RealSports Baseball we got I want to say from Odd Lots (what was later Big Lots, though not in the same location) for not very much.  It was a far more accurate game in that you had the right number of players, though of course they were just pink blobby guys and yellow blobby guys.  Or whatever.

My brother and I would make lineups on notebook paper with players named after old stuffed toys or just stupid made up names like "Ty Lenol."  We'd keep score on the paper and all that, though in reality all of the players in the game were exactly the same.  The game itself wasn't great but we made it more fun than it should have been.

There was a similar game for the Atari 7800 that had better graphics but I don't think we played that one quite as much.

Ninja Golf

This game for the Atari 7800 is exactly what the title suggests:  you're a ninja playing golf!  You start each level teeing off and as you run to where your ball lands, you have to fight ninjas and groundhogs or something that throw mud.  

When you get to the green, you have to chuck throwing stars at a dragon thingy. 

It behooves you to hit the ball well so you have fewer ninjas to deal with.

It's a silly game and yet pretty fun too.  It's the kind of thing I'd love to see in real life.  Then I might actually watch golf.

Super Empire Strikes Back

As you'd expect there are a lot of Star Wars games for the various consoles, starting I think with Empire Strikes Back for the 2600 where you flew a snowspeeder and tried to kill AT-ATs though eventually they'd overwhelm you and destroy the shield generator.

The Empire game for the SNES I played a bunch of times for no real reason other than it's my favorite movie and I was bored.  You play through pretty much the whole movie, mostly as Luke.  It's mostly running and jumping in Luke's pilot suit with his pistol and lightsaber (see picture above), which you get to select between.  In the opening Hoth levels you sometimes get the Tauntaun to ride.  You can jump on things that give you different Force powers and health and whatever as well.  There are levels to pilot the snowspeeder and probably the Millennium Falcon.  Of course you have to fight Vader in the epic duel, which was awesome when I won.  I tried the games for the other two movies but didn't really like them as much.

Bully

The people behind the Grand Theft Auto games basically translated that experience to prep school, which sounds weird and yet was still pretty fun.  You play as Jimmy Gates, a tough kid who's sent to a boarding school.  At first you run around the school and you can pick fights and go to classes and do other stuff.  Later you can go outside the gates and even into the nearby town, where you can steal bikes to get around.

Instead of guns, you have a slingshot and for your BFG you get a potato gun.  There is some kind of campaign but I forget exactly what it is right now.  Like The Godfather, Simpsons Hit & Run, Need for Speed, or even Spider-Man 2 you can do the missions or just fuck around if you want.  It's a pretty fun game, especially if all the violence and drugs and whatever in GTA is too much for you.

Rocky Legends

For fans of the Rocky movies, even those who came late to it like me when AMC used to show those all the time, this game is pretty awesome.  It has pretty much every boxer in the Rocky universe from the eponymous Rocky to Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, Tommy Gunn, Spider Rico, and you can even unlock a younger version of Rocky's trainer/manager Mick!  There are also some characters just made up to fill the ranks.

You can do random bouts or there's like a campaign mode where you try to move your boxer up the ladder to become heavyweight champion of the world.  While it is Rocky Legends you can be Apollo or Clubber Lang or Ivan Drago or Tommy Gunn or whoever, though I don't think there was a Create-A-Character generator, which would have been cool.  At first you fight crappy boxers in crappy arenas--even makeshift ones on the docks or in prison if you're Clubber--and eventually you get to fight in big sports arenas against major opponents.  You have to train to increase your stats and master combos and all that stuff.  It was pretty neat.

F-15 Strike Eagle

My brother and I had fun with this one when we rented it a couple of times for SNES.  While I think there is a one-player mode we did it more realistically by sharing the workload.  My brother would pilot and I'd drop the bombs and stuff--which is how they did it in real life.  I don't think we ever bought the game, just rented it a few times.  I forget what the missions were but basically your F-15E Strike Eagle would have to go bomb stuff and dogfight enemy fighters.  By itself of course, unlike in real life.

My brother was more into the flight simulators both the more realistic ones and sci-fi ones like X-Wing and TIE Fighter and their various spinoffs.  I tried those but wasn't all that good at them.

Fury3

This was one sorta-flight simulator I played.  I got a demo somewhere that let you play the first 3 levels.  I thought it was fun so eventually I bought the whole game.  I think I got the control stick to go with it too.

The game was made by Microsoft for Windows 95 and has you fly around in a ship to blow up alien bad guys.  I don't really remember that much about it and I don't think I still have a copy, but I did rip an MP3 of the theme song that came with the game.  I still have that on various MP3 players and discs.

Star Fox

Another sorta-flight simulator that at the time was revolutionary for its 3D graphics on the SNES.  You play as Fox McCloud, who is obviously a fox, and a few other anthropomorphized animals like a falcon, rabbit, and frog.  You have to blow up bad guys on the ground and go through rings and stuff.  I think my brother and I beat it or at least came pretty close to it at some point.

This seems ripe to have a movie or TV show or something made for it though maybe it's not the most popular property in the Nintendo empire.  There were I guess a few sequels for the N64 and GameBoy and whatever but I never played those.

Sim City

Long before The Sims in the 2000s there was Sim City.  You simulate a city, hence the name.  You got squares of Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zones along with power plants, police stations, and fire departments.  You also had to build roads, railroad tracks, and power lines.  And manage pollution, crime, taxes, and other issues like the occasional tornado or Bowser attack.

Your assistant is this green-haired Groucho Marx-Troll guy who'd tell you about problems or congratulate you on doing an awesome job--usually the former.  The goal was to go from a village or whatever to a metropolis and stay there.  But that's really hard to do because you only have so much land and you'll need more and more power and if you use coal plants that creates pollution while nuclear plants can melt down.  And residential zones near power plants and industrial areas won't amount to much.

Far more fun was to build your city a little and then rain down all the disasters at once:  fire, flood, tornado, plane crash, and the aforementioned Bowser who is the bad guy from Super Mario Bros  standing in for Godzilla.  The disasters would leave your neat square zones all ragged and stuff.  Or if the disasters aren't working, you can just bulldoze shit yourself.

If you try to play normally it's pretty annoying in that you'll probably run out of money fast.  The Catch-22 is you need money and you can basically only get it from taxes.  But if you raise taxes over 7% people and businesses leave.  If you lower taxes you get more people and business but you won't have the money to maintain your roads/tracks, power lines, and emergency services.

Like Age of Empires, I always liked using the cheat that gives you $999,999 which is the maximum amount you can have.  It's a little complicated but I found it on Google.  Anyway, with that you can then lower your taxes to 0% and your city will grow a lot faster.  The problem then is like Monopoly it starts to get boring once you develop most of the land.  There's not a lot then to do except watch stuff grow--or not--and usually it'll get stuck around 150,000 people because the rent is too damned high and there's too much pollution and you really have no way to deal with any of it.  At that point, I'd usually start triggering disasters to tear it all down.

One neat little thing is as your city grows, the music changes.  At first it's this really sleepy New Age type stuff.  By the time you get to a metropolis, it's this hard-driving synth track because your city is so busy and stuff, right?

We had this for SNES but there was also a PC version and probably other platforms.  They made Sim City 2000 which was a more futuristic version and then some other Sim games, but I never really played those until The Sims on PS2 and The Sims 2-4 on PC.  I think you know all about those. lol

Roller Coaster Tycoon

This was similar to a Sim game only it's focused entirely on a theme park.  You have to put in rides, booths for games/food, and facilities like bathrooms.  You can design roller coasters.  Like a Sim game you have to keep your customers happy and keep the park growing.  And while you can't trigger disasters like a Bowser attack or tornado, you can take bits out of the roller coasters so people will fall off or pick people up to drop them into water or something.  Like a Sim game that can become more fun once the park is about as developed as you can get it and the game plateaus.  We had this for PC but it might have been for consoles too.

Donkey Kong Country

I think I only rented this a couple of times, but it was a really fun game.  It was similar to the Super Mario World only you play as Donkey Kong on a jungle island.  While originally Donkey Kong was a villain, in this game he's the hero.  I forget what exactly your end goal was but you had to go through different worlds.  You jump on things and over things and swing from vines and stuff.  Instead of coins there were bananas because monkeys and bananas, right?  

Instead of Luigi you had Diddy Kong who is sort of the Robin to Donkey's Batman.  You could play single-player with both characters and basically tap one in or out sort of like tag team wrestling.  Donkey was obviously stronger but Diddy was faster and more agile so sometimes you might want him.

Another neat feature was you could ride animals like a rhino that would knock bad guys and other stuff out of the way.  There were other animals that might let you swim or fly or whatever.

Like the Mario games there were also minigames at some point.  You could talk to other characters like Grampy Kong or whoever.  In levels there were hidden letter blocks to spell "KONG" or something; if you got the whole word you'd get an extra life.  I tried playing it on Retrogames but didn't get too far.  I've never been great at those reflex games where you're always jumping or punching or whatever.

There was a sequel where Donkey Kong is captured and you have to play as Diddy Kong and Dixie Kong to rescue him.  I don't think I rented that as much but it was good too.

Some of the stuff from these games made it into the 2023 Mario Bros movie.

Robocop vs The Terminator

This is another SNES game I rented once or twice.  The idea would actually be a pretty cool crossover movie that could revive both franchises.  The story of the game is that in the future, the resistance finds out that Robocop's mind becomes merged with SkyNet and that's how it creates Terminators and stuff like that.  So the resistance sends a human named Flo back to Detroit to kill Robocop.  But of course she doesn't and eventually Robocop finds out what's going on and gets sent to the future to destroy SkyNet.

The game itself is just a basic side-scroller where you walk and jump as Robocop and use a variety of weapons to kill punks and eventually Terminators.  And fight ED-209 and stuff.  I played it a little on Retrogames and was stuck on the first level until I found out this weird trick where if you climb a ladder and hold down X & A as you go, you can climb up, up, and away!  Basically into the sky.  So then you can jump off the ladder and get above a lot of what's going on.  It didn't work so well in the next level when I accidentally got stuck in a crevice and had to restart.

Anyway, I like the story of the game better than the actual game itself.  There was a four-issue tie-in comic book that I haven't read and is probably only available in paper.  I suppose the timeline of Robocop and timeline of the original Terminator movies wouldn't really work since Robocop is supposed to be "the near future" and "Judgment Day" was supposed to be 1997.  Though with all the crap they've done with Terminator since the second one it probably wouldn't matter anymore.  If they could solve the licensing issues and such it could be pretty awesome.

Grand Slam Tennis

Probably my most favorite Wii game after the Wii Sports one.  It's the game that helped me (sorta) understand tennis.  Basically you can make a player and play in the grand slam tournaments:  French Open, Wimbledon, US Open, and Australian Open--I think.  I made one male player (Spot Mutt II) and one female player (Emma Earl) and I think maybe the female one did better.

I actually did pretty well in the Australian Open with Emma I think.  The caveat was I had to use the simplified mode where the computer did the running so I didn't need to use the stupid "nunchuk" which I never really got used to.

Popstar

This was a goofy little DOS game on the PC.  It was only text, though like a Sims-type game.  You could enter a name and then some song names and you'd try to conquer the world of music.  Sometimes you might have a hit song and be top of the charts and other times you'd pretty much be in the gutter and have to try to fight your way back up.  You also had to manage your dude's health because if you tour and/or record too much he/she would get ill.  There were things where you could go to a rest home for a few weeks or to "Froggyland" the amusement park.  I don't think you could do some stuff real popstars do like drugs or screwing groupies.  For a silly little DOS game it was pretty fun.

Friday we'll get into the other end of the spectrum with some Dishonorable Mentions.