Retro Games Posts:

Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Super Hang-On

By Chris Littlechild | May 4, 2012 @ 9:06 am

Another of my childhood favourites, Super Hang-On is a nonsensical-yet-endearing motorbike racer from the 1980s. I recently revisited this creaking bastard through the Wii’s Virtual Console service, and came away reasonably entertained. Begrudgingly, against my will, but it wasn’t as painful an experience as these geriatric games often are. (A lot of them are the gaming equivalent of that vindictive old crone in the retirement home, who shrieks incoherently at the staff and always smells of piss.) I’m pleased to report that there’s only a hint of senility about Super Hang-On, and just the faintest odour of urine.
(Alas, that’s the best I can do with regards to selling this fossil, so let’s move on rather swiftly.)

As with Nintendo’s pitiful panorama of turd Excitebike, you are Anonymous Biker Dude 1. You select a course, and are staring at the badly-drawn ‘80s ass of your dude and your opponents. The countdown completes, and Anonymous Biker Dudes 2 through 8 promptly disappear into the distance. The sight is fairly what in the name of Satan’s scrotum just happened? I don’t know what in hell those guys are riding, but it’s uncool to the nth degree that I don’t have one too the first time you see it occur, I’ll concede. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that this is no conventional racer. Your aim is to pass through a series of checkpoints in the fastest time. Your standing with regards to the others is immaterial, indeed placing isn’t recorded. In the logic-resistant world of Super Hang-On, you pass the same seven bikers about a thousand times each en-route to the goal. (My hypothesis regarding this phenomena is that your group of opponents from the starting line had recently indulged in a particularly questionable meal, and were hurrying off for a thunderous dump. Where the endless stream of clones factors in, I can’t imagine.)

These devious doppelgangers exist only to send you sprawling on your ass in a precious-time-wasting Superman dive of pure humiliation. You can’t go more than three inches down the track without one of these asses showing up. They intentionally slow down, just to obstruct you. Even the slightest contact will hideously mangle you and send you careening off the road surface. The actual track is just a tiny part of the visible area, there’s a veritable eternal wasteland stretching off into the distance beyond it. (This is the kind of enigmatic place ancient mapmakers would indicate with a simple here be monsters or some such. There’s some scary shit here.) Tiny trees adorned with about three leaves apiece, the ugliest-looking hedges imaginable (the jaggies could fatally stab you in the balls from across the room) and other assorted ephemera stand sentinel. Should you stray off the track, you’ll either slow instantly to a pathetic dead snail crawl or hit one of these obstacles. It’s irritating, it’s a bitch, but it’s almost worth it to see the ludicrous crash animation.

Imogen: The Best Video Game You’ve Never Heard Of

By Chris Littlechild | May 2, 2012 @ 10:29 am

Imogen was originally released for the BBC Micro in 1986. This hideous Frankenstein’s monster of a machine (floppy disk, cassette tape, and all kinds of decomposing technology was involved) is one I have no experience with. Even so, one look at the fatass thing today is enough to convince you it’d be kinder to just give it some oats and shoot it in the head to put it out of its misery. (The standard procedure for a racehorse that missed a jump, landed on its ass and mangled its leg, or so I’m led to believe.) Almost two decades later, Ovine by Design created an admirable remake which is simultaneously fantastically faithful to the underlying concept, yet is pertinently not as ugly as a Bulldog’s balls. The original, after all, provided a graphical experience you could replicate by staring through filthy glasses into a murky fish-tank. That someone’s shat in.

Imogen is the tale of the eponymous midget wizard. When a big-ass dragon attacked the people, Imogen simply transformed himself into an even larger one. (Touché indeed.) Before the aforementioned dragon could even complain “that’s unfair! I wasn’t expecting one of the man-morsels to do that! If you can become a giant fire-breathing creature with testicles like cannonballs like myself, why would you ever change back to a scrawny old dude in a really shitty hat and dire need of a shave?”, it received a sound beating to the groin and the village is saved. Alas, the strain of transmogrification took a terrible toll on our hero. Returning to his shrivelled-scrotum-beardy-homunculus state, his mind snapped (so the Imogen intro tells us. It also shows the dude using his mad skills to summon a huge-ass lightning storm, as you can see above. Just in case you can’t detect the subtle use of foreshadowing there, the shit is about to hit the fan. In large quantities. It’s one of those high-powered ceiling fans too, I’ll wager, so the shit is sure to go absolutely everywhere.) In fear of an even greater menace, a second wizard (who looks utterly identical to Imogen, but for his green garb. This is either his twin brother or lazy-ass programming) imprisons him in a cavern deep underground.

To escape this fate, you must conquer sixteen levels of balls-out weird puzzling pursuits. The areas are small, but packed to the rafters with comic brainteasers. In one example, you climb your way to the longbow on one side of the level, before returning to your starting point. Something that looks like a giant-sized living jelly baby brought to life at 3am by some unholy brand of necromancy in a mad scientist’s laboratory awaits, hanging from a balloon. You utilise your rather funky new weaponry to shoot him right in the balls. He plummets and dies painfully-yet-amusingly, whereupon the balloon is able to float higher and becomes accessible. As you can see here, a later instance finds our man dispatching another Elephant Man-esque Jelly-Baby-Freak with a revolver. It’s the Al Capone approach to problem solving, all told. The moral of the story is, woe betide any freakish abominations that try to get between Imogen and the Weird Shiny Teleporting Thing (as I’ve decided to Christen it) that takes you to the next stage. With all 16 of these in hand, you return to the surface and the game is complete.

Remember SkiFree, and That Notorious Stick-Limbed Yeti? Turns Out, He’s STILL an Ass

By Chris Littlechild | May 1, 2012 @ 10:54 am

Back in the terrible bygone age of computing, when offal from butcher’s shops was casually tossed in the street to fester and chamber pots were merrily emptied from second floor windows, there was SkiFree. I believe it was released as part of those free packs of groin-grabbingly awful titles you get pre-installed on new PCs. (I certainly hope so, because even Satan himself would feel deep, squirm-inducing shame on attempting to sell this horsecrap for actual money.) This ancient sports sim, (if it warrants such a label) sucked balls heartily then, and certainly continues to do so now. Maintain the upmost vigilance for low flying high-velocity shits from those chamber pots, and let’s take a look.

You play as the little guy you see here, a ski-enthusiast with exasperatingly dire taste in bobble hats. (Look at the damn thing, what was he thinking? Not to mention the embarrassing ensemble as a whole. No wonder the far cooler-looking ski dudes you pass on the way down give you a well-deserved beating if you stray too close. Looking like an ass always results in a swift fist to the groin. I should know. I was the groin-ee, not the groin-er, but I digress.) You go barrelling down a thoroughly nondescript mountain, in pursuit of the ever-wily and elusive style points. What the hell these supposedly do, I can’t fathom. But they have their own box in the corner of the screen there, so they’re quite plainly desperately important. On your perilous journey, you’ll be beset by a murderous myriad of obstacles. These range from appallingly drawn vegetation (to wit, a Christmas tree summoned forth from the mind of a less-than-precocious four year old with a crayon) to humongous rocks and something that appears to be the turd of some alien species. All of these bastard things seem determined to send you flat on your ass, with a shadenfreude-enhanced chuckle as your score goes down the shitter. So focused are they on achieving this goal, I saw one of the goddamn trees sprout stumpy tree-legs and wander into my path. Literally, it brought to mind those Birnam Wood shenanigans from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I’m not ashamed to admit I crapped myself, just a little, at this sight. Sentient, angry plant life? Holy balls, no thanks. That kind of caper is simply uncalled for.

But then you reach the bottom, and you’re really screwed.

Somewhere in this frozen Sodom lurks that skinny-ass Yeti. You’ll be merrily making your way down, blissfully unaware that the agent of your hairy doom is about to make an appearance. Then he’ll dash on screen and eat your balls right off before you can even demand to know wtf is that? Every run in SkiFree ends this way, a little incongruous sadism in an otherwise pleasant (if still nut-numbingly terrible) experience. (Pleasant providing you aren’t eviscerated by an Ent-wannabe beforehand, of course.) Those that have had the misfortune to experience the game before know the plight I speak of.

Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Streets of Rage

By Chris Littlechild | April 26, 2012 @ 9:21 am

And so we arrive at the very zenith of retro gaming. I still vehemently maintain that octogenarian dentures-incontinence-and-boobs-drooping-to-the-floor-like-gorilla-arms games don’t get any better than Streets of Rage. I’ve been known to challenge dissidents to this actual knowledge-fact to a vicious bareknuckle fight to the death. (There was hair-pulling, ball-kicking, all that shit. It wasn’t pretty.) The fanaticism is strong with this one, as Darth Vader once (almost) wheezed asthmatically.

The city quakes in the tyrannical grip of Mr. X and his goons. This guy’s criminal cornucopia is never detailed, but I’m sure he’s guilty of everything from failing to flush the toilet to running over someone’s hamster. (Either the hamster was in the road or the car was in the house... both seem entirely implausible, but that’s the kind of asshole you’re up against. Driving straight through your living room window to squash a small rodent sounds like just the kind of thing he’d do to liven up a rainy afternoon.) You take the role of one of a tenacious triumvirate of police officers, who have vowed to kick the many asses required to bring order back to the streets. You’ll also have to sweep up the vast puddles of rage that appear to have been wantonly spilled everywhere. I fear the bad guys hijacked the trucks of rage that were delivering it to the local emporiums of rage. What the hell will they do without their rage supplies? Local businesses are at stake!

But as I say, Axel, Blaze and Adam are on hand. They’ll progress through eight stages of scrolling beat ‘em up action on the way to Mr. X. Your journey will encompass a downtown area, a beach, some kind of factory, and more. There’s a whole miscellaneous mélange of locations and opponents. With only the ever-trusty jump button and attack button, you’ll take on hordes of weird punk guys, ninjas, wrestlers and dominatrix women with whips. (Quite a cosmopolitan place to live, wherever the hell this is supposed to be set. I never meet women like that around these parts, that’s for sure. The occasional sumo wrestler does stroll by, granted.) The bosses are a highly irregular bunch as well. The first of these is the guy on the right, who appears to be sporting a rather fine pirate fancy dress outfit. He also wields a razor-edged boomerang, and attempts to kick your teeth down your throat from right across the screen with those damn lanky legs of his. I don’t approve of either of these unscrupulous activities. As you can also see on the right, an oddly Scandinavian-looking dude in an unwashed Die Hard vest has appeared on the scene. By the look of it, he’s either going to beat him to death or have an impromptu techno-rave with the pirate in the middle of the street. (Probably the former, that place is festooned with enough neon lights to rival Akihabara. Madness.)

Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Balloon Fight

By Chris Littlechild | April 18, 2012 @ 10:05 pm

Balloon Fight arrived for the NES in 1984. It must be firmly shunted into the genre marked other, because you don’t see this kind of sheer balls-out weirdness often. The core gameplay is reminiscent of uber-geeky arcade title Joust, with an attempt at family-friendly presentation. (Which failed miserably.) It seems primary coloured and pleasant at first glance, but there are deeply questionable undertones. Balloon Fight, then, is the murderous clown from IT, friendly until you approach the sewer it’s lurking in. Then the benevolent veneer vanishes, and it gleefully eats your face off.

In terms of plot, the game takes a pissed soap opera writer approach. To wit, anything resembling a storyline is viciously purged. You’re a little dude with two balloons, wearing something that looks like Mario’s dungarees and a matching swimming cap. In the primary mode, you and your balloons/alluring ensemble pass through a series of stages. These are populated by other amateur aeronauts. You pass to the next area by mercilessly destroying the other guys. One button will send you soaring skywards, while the other needs some relentless mashing or precision presses depending on the situation. Aiming for one of the opponent’s balloons from above will burst one, with the second hit sending them plummeting into the sea below. These bastards can do the same to you, so float carefully. It’s also worth mentioning that they are either hideous mutant weevils from some unholy subterranean lair, or other little kids wearing masks of some sort. Abysmal blocky graphics make it impossible to tell. But whether innocent children or terrifying monstrous midgets, your goal is unchanged: mangle them all.

I haven’t tried the multiplayer, but I don’t doubt that it sucks just as hard (ie the combined strength of a Dyson showroom). Beyond this, your other option is balloon trip mode. Here, there are none of the aforementioned weevil-children to oppose you. Instead, you leave the small arenas behind and are unleashed upon an endless stretch of sky. You try to reach the furthest distance possible, all the while avoiding death by clouds and shiny things. I can’t fathom what the shiny things are, (stars? UFOs? Top secret military technology, like those rumoured stealth planes?) but suffice it to say that they’re positively innumerable and kill you horribly on contact. Also, falling too close to the sea below will summon the giant fish of instantaneous death. This bastard is like the Grim Reaper himself, but slightly less cheery. No pleas, no bargaining, just a quick devouring. Terrifying stuff indeed.

The Video Game That Out-Tetrised Tetris (By Not Being Ass)

By Chris Littlechild | April 17, 2012 @ 11:43 am

Tetris is a game that renders any attempts at introduction utterly moot. Conceptually, it sounds like the kind of throwaway distraction a math teacher would occupy his mind with whilst taking a dump. Even so, a Russian wunderkind achieved the impossible feat of making such a tedious notion criminally engaging. As such, these irritating little shapes have become ubiquitous, even spawning the dastardly Tetris effect (where you close you eyes at the end of a session and phantom tetrominoes continue their relentless cascade in front of your face). It seems like a peculiar nightmare situation to me. An eccentric super villain is painstakingly burying you alive, or attempting to. “I’d have been done hours ago if these damn things would fit together! Curse you, blocks as uselessly misshapen as the Elephant Man’s lumpen penis!”

Therein lies my issue with Tetris. I’ve always found myself completely immune to its uniquely infectious Soviet charms. I’m perhaps being immolated on geeky bonfires worldwide for this, but it’s not my fault. I’ve tried to ingratiate myself with it, but an average game ends in short-lived disaster. Always, a single block will find itself in the perfect location to effectively shit all over my precisely laid plan. Once panic sets in, the result is a wonkily precarious Jenga tower on a double-time march to the top of the screen. Puzzlers became the bane of my gaming life around this point. (That old just one more go idea is lost on me. I suspect it’s a shortened form of If I’m forced to endure just one more go, I may have to crap in someone’s mouth in rage.) This was when I was introduced to the extravagant plagiarization that is Columns, and my fondness for shape-shifting shenanigans was restored.

I first played Columns on the Genesis in the 90s, and it’s been an on-and-off compulsion ever since. The difference here is the now-trusty match three mechanic employed. You heft jewels with three multicoloured sections around, and matching pieces disappear. This is infinitely less awkward than Tetris’s rows, (a concept I’m still convinced Satan pulled out of his ass one day and subjected us all to) and is far more enjoyable as a result. It also features the funky stylings of the magic jewel, or family jewel if you will. This resplendent beacon will remove every piece of the colour you choose to ravage from the play area. This not only provides points-amundo, but serves to assure us that Jesus himself approves of the game. Which sounds like a good thing to me.

Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Golden Axe

By Chris Littlechild | April 10, 2012 @ 11:15 am

Golden Axe, scrolling hack-and-slash and possessor of the most ridiculous creature since the duck-billed platypus, was released in 1989. Death Adder has invaded the castle and taken the royal family hostage. Most fortuitously, a motley crew of warriors are at hand, ready to bring justice for this heinous crime. Via sharp pointy objects, and much kicking little dwarf-dudes right in the face. That’s how heroes roll, it transpires.

This shitty Conan the Barbarian-esque narrative is presented solely by an awkward dialog box that appears for about an eighth of a second. It informs us, further, “my good friend Alex was also killed in the battle. To defeat them and to bring peace to the land is my duty!” Just in case you were thinking: it’s just the royal family, balls to them. But Alex as well! Not Alex! Now I’m pissed! Ma, fetch my sword of ultimate stab-tastic vengeance! Quite plainly, everyone wants to take the role of mighty dwarf/awesome beardy shortass Gilius Thunderhead. Alas, back in the day I was constantly relegated to player two status. This left the Sophie’s choice of either utterly lame barbarian guy in something that resembles Medieval speedos, or Amazon warrior-woman with the hugest, blockiest ass anyone’s ever squeezed into a thong. Both, in case it wasn’t clear, suck giant gorilla balls.

The stage is then set for six-or-so levels of archaic, godawfully ugly goon-pummelling. It’s a simple attack button and jump button affair, albeit with a liberal dose of pure wtf mixed in. Between levels a map screen will appear, charting your progress towards Death Adder. At the end of a bout with his demented henchmen in the village, you’ll read 'the village was on the back of a giant turtle.’
Of course it was. Nothing screwy there.