X-Men: The Arcade Game - Retro Reflections

Like Streets of Rage 2, this is another title on the PlayStation Network that is both something that can be purchased and a throwback to a classic title.  I'm going to treat it like a Retro Reflection though as I talk about it.  Now, Streets of Rage 2 held up pretty well for me through the glasses of nostalgia, but it was a free title where as X-Men was one I bought on the PSN.

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Streets of Rage 2 - Retro Reflections

This could fall under a Retro Reflection or a PlayStation Network Review, but I really did not want to break this down into a series of score points.  One of the titles I got to play while using PlayStation Plus was Streets of Rage 2 on the PSN.

This was a classic beat 'em up game from Sega that I played over and over again on my Sega Genesis.  I actually played Streets of Rage 1, 2 and 3 back then - but 2 for some reason was always my favorite of the trilogy.  By today's standards, it can be a bit slow and sometimes the fighting is a bit 'cheap' - but it is still a good throwback to the older days of gaming for those of us who recall Final Fight, Golden Axe, Double Dragon and Streets of Rage so fondly.

The premise is pretty simple - you walk from one side of the screen to the other, causing it to scroll in your direction as you take on wave after wave of street thugs.  Each level culminates in some sort of a boss battle that is equal parts amusing and frustratingly cheap.  Along the way you will pick up a variety of items like food, money and weapons stored in random barrels, benches and more from the environment around you.

You can play the game with a friend, which I recall doing repeatedly when I was younger and it is still fun today.  There is an online versus mode as well that does not hold up nearly as well, for a variety of reasons.  One, the fighting mechanics are really shallow - Street Fighter IV this is not.  Additionally, it seemed like the connections were flaky at best a lot of times.  If I can run around environments like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 and suffer no lag, then it seems baffling to me that a game like this would consistently have trouble keeping up during a single isolated fight.

Beyond that, it seemed like every time I was about to win, my opponent would disconnect with no fear of tangible penalty that I could detect.  Anyway, not a big deal as the majority of my time spent playing was just trucking through the actual story mode on my own.  I beat it two or three times over the span of a few days, and it definitely provided me with a nice dose of nostalgia along the way.

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Retro Reflections - Elevator Action

Elevator Action was an arcade game by Taito that came out in 1983, and was one of my favorite early arcade titles. Basically you are a spy who grapples to the top of a building to collect secret documents while surviving enemy agents. You use a series of elevators to descend the building until you can reach the bottom and escape.

Elevator Action for the NES

Document rooms are behind marked doors - and enemies can come out of them and try to shoot you. They become more evasive the further you get in. I recall however that I really liked the variety in game play - you could shoot an agent, jump-kick him, crush him with an elevator, shoot out overhead lights that could not only crush them but also make the hallway dark which gives you bonus points as well.

I spent way too much time standing in front of one of these.

It was largely the same on the NES when it released as well. This title was one of my first two NES games, and one my dad no doubt had a part in selecting. See, when I was younger, he would take me to the arcade and he would play pinball and I would play cabinets. No doubt he recognized this as a title I played quite a bit back then. How does it hold up today? Not remarkably well, as you would guess, but playing it did have me grinning from ear to ear all the same.

This just made me grin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoR3gaAsHFY
I found this video on Youtube of the arcade game

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Castlevania - Retro Reflections

So a couple of my most recent posts were in regard to Castlevania. Simon's Quest was really my first foray into the series, having gotten that with arguably the creepiest Nintendo Power magazine ever (Belmont holding Dracula's decapitated head was pretty crazy) - but I did rent and go back to play Castlevania one weekend. The game pushed me to my limits at the time. 2 night rental, and I beat it about an hour before my dad needed to take it back on Sunday night. Playing it now, obviously the controls are a bit tight and there is a lack of special 'moves', but the gameplay is still simple and effective. The music holds up well also. Probably the biggest complaint other than some brutal platforming (lots of cheap falls to your death) - is that the graphics flickered like crazy when there were three or more enemies moving on the same plane as you. Still, it was a fun replay.

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King's Bounty - Retro Reflections

This particular post is a fun one for me.

I recently reviewed King's Bounty - Legend. But this game had much older roots than this release a few years ago. It was a PC game initially - one I don't really recall. However, it was among a handful of strategy games I got on the Sega Genesis years ago. It was on the Sega Genesis where I really discovered my love of strategic games. Shining Force, Warsong and King's Bounty. I had actually beaten King's Bounty - Legend about 3 weeks ago. So why the long wait to post about it and this Retro Reflection? Twofold:

1) I really wanted to get through the Potato Sack - no small undertaking.

2) I had gotten King's Bounty and Warson as birthday presents from my parents years ago. Well, today's my birthday - so I thought it would make this particular retro reflection particularly relevant.

So, I fired up this game again, after all these years off. My initial thoughts? Lordy this game was ugly. :P The terrain and textures are all right out of the 8-bit NES era. Low-budget NES era. The music? Nowhere do you hear the symphonic sounds of King's Bounty - Legend. The score in this game is horribly repetitive and honestly, just a hint grating. But the game? The game is deep strategic fare, and that aspect still holds up rather well today.

There are clearly elements from the Legends version that were found back in the Genesis version. From what I've read, there was no overhead wandering in the original PC game, but here you wander, find items, and combat monsters. Leadership still dictates the numbers of your army. There are some quests, some spells and troops you can slowly increase in number. The size of your troop, just like in Legends, is not only their health, but combat effectiveness. It's a great system overall that holds up quite well.

Surly many improvements were made since then - especially to the numbers system. In Legends you deal damage, and if you are fortunate, kill enemy numbers. Here, all it reports back are the soldiers killed - seeing a damage score reported or some indication of remaining live would be nice (the giant in my retro video is a good reflection of this).

The password system stinks. Seriously, things like 0 and O should be easier to tell apart. This was not the best strategy game I played back then (I'd probably tip my hat to the well-known Shining Force games, or the far less-well known Warsong), but overall it was fun to play it again - a birthday present from a long time ago.

Below is a brief video I made, so you too can share in the strategy, as well as the rather horrible music and graphics. I may not be posting quite as much over the next few weeks - I have a lot coming up. My dad's visiting from Florida and we're going camping shortly after that. I'll try to get a few small things up and going once in awhile - but my torrid every other day pace is going to come to a temporary end. I should be back up to full steam though after camping, so like the 3rd week of June. Have fun until then, and maybe after my birthday I'll even have a few more games to report on.

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Mortal Kombat - Retro Reflections

I have played a LOT of Mortal Kombat over the last couple of weeks. This was done in no small part because of the new release about a week and a half ago. I've posted on Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe as well as the Mortal Kombat reboot, but I also got a chance to dust off a handful of older Mortal Kombat games (I didn't eve know we had all of these until my son mentioned a few).

I have a lot of fond memories of Mortal Kombat, and like NBA Jam, those memories were a bit kinder than the realities - especially when pitted against having played the recent modern counterpart. The graphics actually hold up okay, as do the sound effects and music, but the controls killed me - often literally. I used to be fairly good at these games, but it took me quite a while to get the hang of playing again with favorites of mine (like Scorpion), and some systems were better than others.

I made a quick video montage of the versions we had laying about:

Mortal Kombat 1 for the SNES
Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 for the Sega Genesis
Mortal Kombat Trilogies, 4, and Mythologies for the N64

Of them all, 3 and Trilogies aged the best I think. 4 was very 3-D heavy and felt off to me, and Mythologies was more of a side-scrolling adventure game. I will admit though, it was fun using Scorpion to use the fire-breathing skull fatality on Sub Zero in MK1 (that's on video). One thing I found interesting were the range of settings for things like blood, and also the button configurations. The genesis pad wasn't too bad, but I found the N64 controller a bit awkward for fighting games. Anyway, it was a fun stroll down memory lane, and you can definitely see their influences on the new release, which I am still playing and thoroughly enjoying.

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Metroid - Retro Reflections

I've been on a Metroid kick the last several days. I thought that fan game IGN showed a video of on Wed was pretty cool, and overall I enjoyed my time spent with Metroid: Other M and put that review out there recently. But this is about the first game in the series, Metroid for the NES.

Now, I didn't play this game right away. My first couple of games were Elevator Action and Dragon Power. I actually had gotten Kid Icarus pretty early on as well, but Metroid was a game I got from a friend via trade when he was sick of it a year or two after it released. I loved the game though, barely getting through it on my own the first time, and then played through it almost immediately after using the maps in a spread of Nintendo Power to get every last little item the game had to offer.

So, I gave it a while the other day for a time (which was a bit of a challenge since my PC game controller's not working right now - I need to pick up another one it seems), so I used my keyboard for a time. Overall, the game holds up pretty well though. Response-wise running, jumping and shooting were all good, and the graphics were pretty solid for a game of that age. The sense of progression as you find and unlock new items became a staple in Metroid games going forward, and quite a few other games as well. Overall, this one stands up better than most of the others I've played with since starting Retro Reflections.

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TI99/4A, Munchman, TI Invaders - Retro Reflections

So somewhat recently, I did a review on Space Invaders - Infinity Gene. And then yesterday I did a review on Pac-man Championship Edition DX. I played some Pac-man over the years - my grandpa even had it for his Atari and I played Pac-man and Super Pac-man in the arcade a bit (the latter was at Chuck-e-Cheese when I was a kid).

I never had an Atari, but I did get a TI99/4A (TI as in Texas Instruments) for Christmas when I was about 5 years old. That thing was my introduction to home video games, and set me up for a life of fascination with the hobby. It was a cartridge based system, like the Atari, but it also had various peripherals you could acquire, like a Speech Synthesizer and a built-in keyboard. It also came with 'Basic' built in, and my dad at one point gave me a book on programming in Basic when I was roughly 8 - he likely figured it was cheaper than buying video games themselves. That is largely what got me into programming and a deeper understanding of computers and video games beyond the controllers and cartridges and was the foundation of what I would apply to my MUD - Kingdoms of the Lost - over a decade later.

Anyway - I'm rambling a bit, but I may call back on the TI99/4A, since when it comes to game reflections, it doesn't get any more retro for me than this. The two games I wanted to touch on briefly were TI Invaders and Munchman. Basically - Space Invaders and Pac-man remakes, but in some ways, a bit deeper than their originals.

TI Invaders works much like Space Invaders - you have little aliens in descending rows with the occasional UFO passing by over top of them, while you are a tank, using destructible barriers for shelter in between your shots to fend them off. This was not my favorite game for that system, but I did spend quite a bit of time playing it. I don't recall what the highest level I got to was, but I do recall I was better at it than my dad. :)

Munchman was a similar to Pac-man: you have mazes to wind through, while avoiding 4 enemy characters that attempt to collide with you. There are 4 power pellets in opposite corners of the screen. Eat them, and you can then eat your four wandering assailants. One thing that was different about Munchman was that the 'ghost' characters actually took on several different shapes with each new stage (if I recall properly, there were 20 stages in all before it looped back to stage 1). Also, instead of eating pellets you created a chain-link behind yourself. The objective was to fill all of the passages with the chain link. A couple of variants included a level (7 maybe?) that had invisible walls, making it much harder to get away from the 'ghosts'. I think the last level, or near the last level, you were eating things instead of making a chain. When you 'eat' the 'ghosts', you make a small burp sound. This game, I had gotten good at (and had cleared all of the levels).

There is an emulator out there for the game system (it's one of the few systems I actually don't still currently own) - and it includes several first party games (but none of the later-released 3rd party ones like Moon Patrol or Donkey Kong). What's awesome about this emulator is Texas Instruments approved of the creator including several of their games, like the two shown here. If you're at all interested, I found his page here. I was just mucking around with a keyboard and not a controller, and I was obviously struggling with some of the default key bindings - so I stunk it up in quality fashion in the embedded video below. But, take a look and I hope you enjoy taking a peek at some of my very earliest gaming memories.

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X-Men Mutant Apocalypse - Retro Reflections

Okay, the trilogy of X-Men (technically, Marvel) articles on the weekend. I doled out Marvel vs. Capcom 3 for the Playstation 3, then Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for Xbox Live - now I'm headed back to the Super Nintendo.

I couldn't think of any throwback Marvel vs. Capcom games I had floating around the house (though I recall similar beat 'em ups in the arcade once upon a time) - so I decided to look around for an X-Men or Marvel title, and found X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse for my Super Nintendo and figured I'd toss it in for a bit. Now, while the other two games I talked about this weekend were fighter games, this one is a beat 'em up/platformer. It lacks the depth of field you find in Final Fight, Double Dragon or Streets of Rage, but you have to time your jumps and memorize attack patterns a bit more along the way.

Early on levels are designed around whichever mutant you are going to play (Psylocke, Wolverine, Cyclops, Beast and Gambit). It's an interesting idea, since most games of this sort let you pick from a pool to get through a level - and that happens later in the game, but early on each X-Man is assigned a task in a different location, forcing you to use them all. This is a good and bad thing since you may prefer one character over the others, but it does add a bit more variety to the gameplay as well when you have someone like Wolverine who just tears through people using his claws while moving left to right, as opposed to someone like Beast who can cling to ceilings and attack enemies from above as well.

The story's a bit of a mess, which is often the case in these older comic games, but the sounds get the job done and the graphics actually look pretty good. I didn't spend a ton of time playing this one again - I honestly don't have the patience for memorizing platforming like I did years ago, but I got a grin out of my time running around beating people up along the way.

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NBA Jam - Retro Reflections

Continuing my weekend NBA theme (couldn't the Pistons have at least put up a fight Friday night?) - here's my Retro Reflection.

So I posted the NBA Jam review for the Wii already, and that got me thinking to the SNES version. Now, I'll be honest - I've owned a few copies of NBA Jam over the last 15 years or so, but had completely forgotten we owned it for the Super Nintendo. Most of my older gaming systems have made their way upstairs to the "kids' living room", and I have probably forgotten at least half the games we own. I was always a bit of a gaming packrat - I kept boxes, booklets and I even stored them in alphabetical order. There was no easily accessible used game trading store when I was a kid, like Gamestop now, which keeps my current gen games going through a bit more of a revolving door.

Anyway - after having spent so much time lately with the Wii version of the game, I was a bit surprised by a few things when I fired up the Tournament Edition on the SNES. For starters, I recall playing the Wii game thinking: These graphics are pretty old-school. Gameplay is pretty much what I remembered it to be. The announcer is as awesome as ever. That sort of thing.

Maybe I should have done the reviews in opposite order? The Wii version is much improved on so many fronts - as one would honestly expect with a decade's difference between the releases. Still, the graphics were okay on the SNES version, but you could not really say: Oh yeah, that's Joe Dumars I'm using. Looks just like him. And while it's the same announcer, he has a whole lot more to say with the current iteration as well. It was interesting last weekend when I played the Ninja Gaiden games, and found them to be pretty much how I remembered them, and then to put in NBA Jam here on my SNES and realize - I remembered this game a lot more fondly than it may have deserved. It was still fun to poke around with, and some of the roster combinations cracked me up (like Pippen and... BJ Armstrong for the Bulls). There's some fun to be had here: both of these games are fast paced and have that same over-the-top style of action, but honestly if I have a craving for NBA Jam, I'm going to pick up and play the new Wii version first.

Screencast version of the video:




Youtube version.

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Tecmo Super Bowl - Retro Reflections

We'll consider this the Super Bowl special edition. I was trying to think of what game or games would be most relevant this weekend. What did I come up with? Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES. Before there was Madden, there was Tecmo Bowl, which I played a fair amount of when it came out. But it wasn't until I could play out an entire season, complete with rosters, stat accumulation and the Pro Bowl teams that I first fell in love with the NFL. I was discovering Barry Sanders on my Detroit Lions around the time this game came out, and they really were what developed my interest in sports games.

So how did the game hold up when I put it back under the microscope this weekend? Surprisingly well! There's only 8 plays on offense and defense. It's a guessing game, you call defensive plays and if you guess the same one the offense guesses, you decimate them. Call something similar to what they call, and you have better odds of defending it. Offense is 4 running and 4 passing plays. They vary up a bit by team. I usually used the Lions, the Bills or the 49ers back then.

Calling a run play with Barry Sanders had me grinning ear to ear the first time I 'juked' (that's putting it nicely. I ran at diagonal angles is all) a defender, and when I got a sack with Ball after he tossed the blocker aside like a rag doll, I laughed aloud. It's really a gimmicky offense most of the times: drop back basically forever. Toss the ball really deep. 100 yard passes are not as impossible as they should be. It was still a blast taking control of Chris Spielman at linebacker and drilling the running back with a dive tackle.

In the video I made, I played the Pro Bowl rosters and had one play that epitomized the game for me years ago as I dropped back, immediately identified the bottom wide receiver with no one covering him, threw the ball very badly, but he leapt up, grabbed it, sprinted to the goal line and shed the defender for a touchdown. The cut scenes were fun to see as well - and I got that last sequence in the video I provided.

I don't know if this was the first game to use all NFL teams, have full NFL rosters, or to have full season stat tracking - but it was the first one I ever played and it set me down a path of more than 20 years (and counting) of NFL licensed football games and a lot of good memories playing them. Appropriate for Super Bowl Sunday, wouldn't you say?

Now for the videos... I've got Youtube first, Screencast 2nd







The Screencast one looks better, but it auto-sizes better, doesn't re-encode either. Youtube however doesn't attack my bandwidth the same way an offers the option of other people finding it. I'll probably do some tweaking and do one more comparison next week, but I am leaning toward Youtube at the moment - I just need to get better with the dimensions.

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Something new...

I want to try something new. The big technical reviews are fun, but they are time consuming. Also, I fear, I'll eventually run out of games to talk about if I try to keep up a pace of two per weekend (I say that as I spy a stack of games and think: I didn't have this 'problem' in college - unplayed games that is). The dilemma of adulthood: I love my games as much as ever, and I can actually afford to go out and spend on my habit - the downside is, I don't have nearly as much time on my hands to play games as I used to.

Then that got me thinking: I used to play a ton of games. I still have a ridiculous number of old game systems and games laying around the house. Why not spend a bit of time each weekend, just tossing in an old game that catches my eye for one reason or another, and just write about it? No technical scores (really, is it fair to try and rate the graphics of Double Dragon on the NES or Sonic on the Genesis when we know that modern games easily surpass those?).

The idea behind my technical scores and longer reviews is that I am talking about games people may actually be interested in purchasing for current systems. Sure, it's just an opinion, and it's only my opinion, but that is what I had in mind when I began this blog. So, instead I'd like to just talk about older games for a bit - what I remember about them, what my thoughts are now after dusting them off for a bit. It's more me reminiscing about older games, and hey - maybe you will see one of them come out on the virtual console for the Wii or release on Steam or the Playstation Network. If so, and my ramblings encourage or discourage you from buying it? Cool, and I'd love to know what I said that caught your eye.

So, I'm hoping to do one of these each weekend, just a short run of images and video from hooking the console up to my desktop and giving it a few minutes to a few hours and sharing my thoughts. Hope you peek in this weekend as I get my first one posted under Retro Reflections. This week's will be Ninja Gaiden.

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