D-Force
Game 31 of 715
Publisher: Asmik
Release: December 1991
Some poor bastard got this instead of UN Squadron or Gradius III for Christmas. Sorry, unfortunate gamer.
Lagoon
Game 30 of 715
Publisher: Kemko
Release: December 1991
Lagoon! It’s the adventure of a lifetime!
Lagoon! It’s the most water-filled RPG ever!
…Lagoon! It’s the game I’ve played most recently!
I worry about completely slamming the door on an RPG experience. Every series seems to have a loyal and near-fanatical following, and I always want to figure out why they’re so attached to the games. What is it about this scenario, these characters, this system that drives them to defend the series? While I very rarely hear a defense of the Game Boy Final Fantasy entries, I’ve encountered those who will go to bat even for Mystic Quest. There has to be someone who grabbed the Ultimate Genesis Collection specifically for Fatal Labyrinth, and out there are several groups driving the price of Secret of Evermore to absurd levels on eBay. Never fully discount an RPG; the opportunity to explore a brand-new world and get lost in it for hours on end is one of the more powerful aspects of video gaming.
That said, Lagoon is a total mystery to me. The only role-playing game I can recall that deals nearly exclusively with a sewage-treatment issue, Lagoon recalls Ys or The Tower of Druaga if made by an irrigation-obsessed urban planner with too much time to kill.
Home Alone
Game 29 of 715
Publisher: THQ
Release: December 1991
It may seem ludicrous to consider now, but at the time Home Alone was one of the great phenomena in cinema history. A Christmas movie released right before Thanksgiving, it was still the number one movie in the nation when February rolled around. Hell, it was still in the Top Ten at the box office in frigging June. This weird movie about a ten-year-old boy causing grievous bodily harm to robbers was the biggest thing to hit America since E.T., and it turned Macaulay Culkin into the world’s It Kid.
But what kind of merchandising could come out of this movie? You couldn’t exactly have Kevin McAllister endorse the paint cans he used to render the Wet Bandits unconscious. Maybe a co-branding deal with Child Protective Services? This dilemma would be solved in the sequel, as the glorious Talkboy was created to be the envy of every American child. But in those salad days of 1991, as the success of Home Alone seemed to never slow down, there was a dearth of memorabilia. From this angle, a video game only made sense. A movie about child shenanigans that is essentially one long chase scene should make for a compelling addition to the SNES library, right? The kids will eat it right up!
So here for the Christmas season, a year late but still red-hot, is Home Alone: The Game. It’s the story of White Supremacist Johnny Quest venting his frustrations of living in a McMansion by nailing Oddjob and Glen Hansard in the nuts ad infinitum. Quest must collect rings meant for giants, forever-hovering RC helicopters, and a basketball or two while fighting giant rats and common household objects come to life. Thankfully, Johnny Quest has the power to cause earthquakes just by raising his freakishly-large feet from the ground.
Yes, this is a cartoonish, inaccurate, and downright weird retelling of one of the world’s most popular films. It’s a standard platformer, not at all painful to get through and quite fun in parts, but it also seems to have been created by designers who were still woefully unfamiliar with the development kit for the SNES: backgrounds are too big, sprites are too small, physics takes a vacation. It’s not terrible, but it’s definitely sloppy. I would say it’s not the worst of the platformers on the Super Nintendo, but it gets there by default; this is only the fourth released for the system.
Special attention has to be paid to the digitized graphics and sounds. It’s an early attempt, and the picture of Culkin that accompanies your death looks like a bad parody of someone messing around with MS Paint. At the time it was revolutionary; I can remember staring at it in Toys ‘R’ Us completely shocked that it looked so real. They’re absurd-looking to our modern eyes, but this is only the beginning to something that would be commonplace. It may be the only part of the game that breaks boundaries, as the rest of it appeared in pretty much the same format on the Game Boy and NES. Still, Home Alone, however rote and oddly-constructed it may be, avoids the fate of most licensed games: it’s not totally awful. And for that fans of the movie from coast to coast must be very thankful.
Super Baseball Simulator 1.000
Game 28 of 715
Publisher: Culture Brain
Release: December 1991
The name sounded futuristic to me, so I hoped that at least I’d be playing against killer robots or mutant aliens. Nope. It’s another damn unlicensed baseball game, what seems like the twelfth I’ve played since the system launched all of three months ago. How many of these baseball pretenders do we need in gray carts?
Super Off-Road
Game 27 of 715
Publisher: Virgin Games
Release: December 1991
Here’s a rule of thumb for when you’re porting your famous arcade game to home consoles: if your game has some sort of gimmick that cannot be replicated at home, and if that same gimmick is the only reason anyone played your game, go do something else with your time.
Super Off Road has a famous cabinet design, the three steering wheels protruding from its face both an attractive look and a beacon for groups at the arcade to grab a position and attempt to one-up their friends while trash-talking and probably reaching over to sabotage the other players. Player Two is always and forever screwed; there is no room for them to maneuver, and despite their optimal screen placement they are in danger of having their wheel yanked around by either one of the players. Experienced players were as sure to grab the side wheels just as surely as they would avoid Dazzler’s controller in six-player X-Men.
All of this strategy and fun goes out the window in the SNES port. Not only is your trio down to two with the loss of one controller, but any novelty factor from the cabinet is also gone. This game becomes a sixty-dollar simulator of pushing Micro Machines around the dirt, and any child of the 90s could have done that for fifty-five dollars less by simply going outside with their Micro Machines. Now you have an ugly, boring, poorly-controlled version of RC Pro-Am in your hands. Hooray?
ActRaiser
Game 26 of 715
Publisher: Enix
Release: December 1991
And on the eighth day, God said “All I really want to do is go down there and kick the ass of every single person who’s ruining my creation.” And God grabbed a sword and stabbed a lot of people. I mean tons. Wave after wave of them, and also imps, and sometimes centaurs, and one time an evil tree. And it was good.
ActRaiser is what happens when SimCity and Double Dragon have a baby, and then that baby is catapulted back in time seven centuries and given superpowers. The game starts like a well-designed beat-em-up, taking full advantage of the SNES’ abilities. The intro uses Mode Seven in a way we haven’t yet seen, literally throwing the player into the action by dropping them from miles above and spinning them over and over until they’re inches away from the playfield. It’s a galvanizing effect, and the game does not let up in its audio-visual assault. ActRaiser is an above-average platformer which uses the new hardware in ways we have not yet seen. The music is superlative and the visuals are striking to the point where they gave me nightmares in 1991. (Seriously, the Evil Tree is evil, scary, and right at the beginning of the game.) Despite easy-to-defeat early bosses and some odd choices in design—does God really have to yell “HWAH!” every time he swings his sword?—it’s perfect for fans of the beat-em-up genre, giving the SNES its first real move towards an Altered Beast or Golden Axe killer.
And if that was all that ActRaiser was, it would still be one of the shining jewels of the collection thus far. However, when you finish the first level, the game goes in a brand-new direction. Imagine if you were forced to fight your way through your SimCity, battling crime on a micro scale (and never mind that this idea went into effect in Streets of SimCity, because that was a noble failure at best). Imagine if Populous turned into Conan The Barbarian every fifteen minutes or so. That’s exactly what you’re getting in ActRaiser. The game turns into a surprisingly deep God Game between action stages, forcing you to develop and guard the people who you created. You defeated the unholy monster that was terrorizing the land, and that’s great. But what happens to the people afterwards? It’s a question not usually asked in the game experience, and It has an entertaining answer. The player finds themselves caring more about the outcome of the action stages if they have a vested interest in the people they’re defending. You created this land, so it’s only fair that you’re out there fighting for its survival. It’s a smart bit of game design, and it rarely hits that moment where building becomes tedious. (I’m looking at you forever, Populous.)
We’ll get to the sequel much later, but it’s no spoiler to say that it’s vastly inferior. Enix decided that the thing holding the ActRaiser franchise back was its uniqueness, so the world-building elements are discarded in favor of a straightforward action game. We have rarely seen this combination tried again, and it’s a shame. Maybe ActRaiser did it better than anyone ever could. Maybe it’s too complex a concept to sell easily. Maybe I’m just a sucker for strange combinations in games. But ActRaiser stands as one of my all-time favorite games for the Super Nintendo, and I would love to see someone pick this concept up and continue to tinker with it. This game is an oddity that plays better than most any other one on the system.
Final Fantasy II
Game 25 of 715
Publisher: Square
Release: November 1991
Final Fantasy II is like the stories your friends told in elementary school. One of them would have seen just a snippet of a scary movie that an older sibling had rented on a Saturday night, but on Monday morning it had grown in the telling and had turned into the most monstrous thing a seven-year-old kid had ever heard. Phantasm was about a ball that ate people, Terminator 2 featured kids burned alive in a playground, Akira turned people literally inside out. Everything was bigger, bolder, and more incredible when we weren’t getting the whole story. Somewhere there was a world where these stories were even bigger. Adults got to see them. Their world was filled with terror, and we wanted to be a part of it so much that we would hang on to the scraps we were given.
Final Fantasy II is really Japan’s Final Fantasy IV, an obnoxious naming convention that was used to skip the release of two NES installments and confuse everyone when the series jumped from III to VII with the release of the PlayStation. This game is a bowdlerized and expurgated version of the story that originally saw release on the Super Famicom. It shares a spirit with Warriors of the Wind, Voltron, and Speed Racer in being a strangely culled variation on a wildly popular Japanese property. I expected to feel the changes in the worst way going back to FF II, especially knowing that the story had been softened to remove the threat of death and the fear of God from the game. What I was getting was only the snippet I had experienced as a kid. I worried that as an adult that wouldn’t be enough.
Not to worry. Final Fantasy II may be even more of a triumph as an older gamer, its themes felt more deeply and its complexities more apparent than a bratty neophyte would understand. We are not just given a reason to care about these characters because we are in control of them; their motivations are strong enough that it would be a compelling story without the game elements. For the first time you’re taking control of a character who has moral shading to him, and who, at least at the outset, appears to be working for the bad guys. No matter how scrubbed the dialogue, it’s not lost on us that Cecil, your brave and cunning knight, commits two different acts of terrorism in the first ten minutes of the game. You get your partner killed, you orphan a young girl, and you commit acts of theft in the name of a tyrant. Link or Mario you ain’t in this game; there’s a long road to redemption that’s going to mess up many lives before it’s all over.
This story is not complete. There are intricacies that are missing from even the Japanese release, waiting until technology caught up to tell the full tale. But what is here is a leap forward for games, one that still captivates two decades on. Final Fantasy II hinges on moral choices, on the sort of decisions that can only really be made by someone willing to be the adult in the room. There are certain characters you can’t save no matter what you do. There are some choices that can’t be undone. There is no extra life to make it better. But these advancements, these moral shades of grey, are couched in a gorgeous coat and a rousing adventure. Even expurgated it is nearly perfect, straddling that line between the stories we gather as children and the realities we face as adults.
We're about to return with a vengeance. After defeating Zeromus, we'll be ready to bring you the next chapter of SNESteryear. Hang tight, dudes and dudettes!
Darius Twin
Game 24 of 715
Publisher: Taito
Release: November 1991
Fish! In! Spaaaaaaaaaaace!
The Darius series has always distinguished itself by being the shoot-em-up with the most vehicles that look like fish. Why fish? Why did anyone think that aquatic animals and space shooters would go together? I guess the answer lies in what we refer to as the Dr. Evil Axiom: fish with frigging lasers attached to their heads are necessary for a truly refined and excellent experience. I’m sure many of the games we’ve played would be better with Space Fish (especially you, Hal’s Hole-in-One Golf). Crazy Laser Metal Fish is not only a great name for a band, but also the driving force behind why you would want to play Darius Twin. It’s hard to look away from the screen when you know right around the next corner there’s a cod equipped with an ion cannon that’s ready to blow you out of the sky.
This game is the fifth or so in the Darius series—depending on how you count Saigaia’s various ports—and it’s proof that SHMUP fans will get addicted to anything so long as it has a bit of twitch to it. Darius Twin feels weirdly lethargic compared to the other shooters we’ve played so far, lacking either UN Squadron’s propulsive nature or Gradius III’s overwhelming force. The game is spare and weirdly lacking before you reach the boss fights. There’s a sense of proportion in the best shoot-em-ups, a balance between the size of the ships, the maneuvering room, and the speed of all the sprites. It has to feel like you both have a fighting chance and that everything is coming at you way too fast. You get a sense of neither here; it feels like you move too slowly and have too much space to cover, and yet you can never avoid enemy fire. It’s fun in fits and starts, but the momentum that drives the best examples of this genre isn’t there.
John Madden Football
Game 23 of 715
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release: November 1991
Madden is the unstoppable juggernaut of sports games. It has destroyed all comers from Quarterback Club to NFL 2K, eventually becoming the only name in pretending to be a football star. The game has most probably influenced most of the guys playing in the NFL now, doing much to encourage a new style of play that translates from the controller to the turf. Madden is synonymous with American Football.
Which makes it hilarious to go back to the beginning and see how odd the early entries were. This is the first iteration of Madden for the SNES, and it’s a rudimentary and occasionally cartoonish game. No coin toss, no NFL license, barely any use of the man himself. The trademarks of the game have yet to form, so what you’re left with is the primordial soup of the franchise. Out of this the rest of the games will spring, and you can see the beginnings of something great. And since the Super Bowl is today, why not try to predict the final score with the power of the Super Nintendo?
I decided to throw my weight behind the Seahawks, figuring that the John Elway-led offense would be dominant to the point of overpowering my defense. Elway was superhuman—as he was in every game except the one named after him, in which he was godlike—but his offensive prowess was of no help as I dismantled every Bronco attempt to contain my running game. The AI had yet to advance to its current state, so defenses in John Madden Football have the stopping power of a greased gate and the memory of a goldfish. How else to explain how I racked up twenty consecutive scoring drives by dropping back and then running forward? Can they not grasp the idea that I will not continue inexorably backwards until the end of time? If this had been an accurate representation of the NFL in 1991, then Chick Harris would have held the single-season rushing record with an improbable 25,000 yards. Meanwhile, television audiences across America would have been treated to the sight of twenty-two grown men doing the Kriss Kross Jump at midfield as they attempt to grab a batted pass.
To be honest, this sounds better than anything that happened in the league between Bo Jackson’s injury and The Tackle.
As my score climbed into the triple digits, I decided to declare mercy on the Mile High. Maybe this wasn’t the best way to decide what was going to happen, but this isn’t the last encounter we’ll have with this franchise. There will be plenty more Madden incarnations to enact our football fantasies.
Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball
Game 22 of 715
Publisher: Hudson Soft
Release: November 1991
This premise is so gleefully wrong. It’s like if SmashTV played by FIBA rules. It’s The Running Man meets NBA Jam. It’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to a SyFy Channel Original Movie for the SNES. It’s a flying ego trip for a middling basketball player, a Blood Bowl ripoff, and an advertisement for Mohawks all in one. Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball defies explanation. It’s baffling; there’s little reason to believe this game actually exists and isn’t just conjured from a fevered mind. But I have the proof in front of me. This is a real thing.
Why is it Combat Basketball, and why is Bill Laimbeer there? Here’s the story. It’s the year 2030. Laimbeer, after being forced out of the NBA in the early 90s for his rough and competitive play, has returned to become the new commissioner. Cyborg-clone Laimbeer—you can tell he’s both because he’s still in his 30s and also wears a bitchin’ chrome body suit—immediately fires all the referees and gets rid of fouls. Weapons are now legal on the court, and you can do anything to get the ball and win. It’s basketball the Bill Laimbeer way: often sloppy and mean and forgotten by the 21st century!
Seriously, this is the plot of the game. It leaves out the part where Bill Laimbeer coaches the New York Liberty for a while and David Stern pilots the league into increasing irrelevance, but I’m sure that’s covered in the sequel, Jeremy Lin’s Linsane Sixth Man Challenge. The stage is set for men in Mohawk hairdos (everyone has a Mohawk) to run into each other and step on mines and use flying razor missiles in pursuit of the three-pointer or the posterizing move.
So how does the game play? Barely. I have a feeling that every match is predetermined, and any inputs I make on the controller are disregarded. We could blame this on Bill Laimbeer, but we all know Isaiah Thomas was doing the heavy lifting. The top-down viewpoint is nonsensical, the controls are busted, the fouls are called seemingly at random, and the power-ups don’t seem to do anything. Combat Basketball turns failure itself into a game. Will you be down more than thirty points at halftime? Will you have failed to score a single basket? Can these atomic supermen score threes from half court even though you have three guys on the ball? Let out a Marv Albert’s Head-style “YES!” to each one of these. Failure becomes your constant companion, and as it seeps into you it finally makes sense why Bill Laimbeer made this game. He’s a two-time champion and four-time all-star, but he really wanted us to hate him. He wanted to live up to his bad boy image so much that he intentionally sullied his image.
Mission accomplished, Bill. You and your Thunderdome rejects can go dribble a rock. Unless the NBA actually switches over to chrome cyber-suits for their uniforms, in which case I’d watch every day.
Paperboy 2
Game 21 of 715
Publisher: Mindscape
Release: November 1991
Welcome back to the weirdest damn neighborhood on the planet. Ghosts will assault you. Cannons will fire from behind suburban walls. Infant after oddly placid infant will rocket down the sidewalk in a terrifying affront to physics. In all of this you must steer your bike towards a Sisyphean obstacle course and a meaningless finish line, repeating the same routine time and time again to earn minimum wage.
This is the hellish landscape that is Paperboy 2. You will not escape with your sanity intact.
Released for nearly every home system available at the time, Paperboy 2 is equally playable on the ZX Spectrum, the NES, and the Game Gear as it is on the SNES. This will give you an idea of how much this game is taking advantage of the leap in processing power. Aside from a few more obstacles and headlines that change depending on the tasks completed, this is the exact same game as its predecessor. Eight years has seen neither refining of the engine nor tightening of the controls. This is still a sloppy and impossibly difficult game. Your paperboy (or papergirl, as this is the 90s and that option exists) continues to handle the bicycle as if it is some kind of foreign contraption steered by a combination of psychic power and contempt for the player. The result is a trip through suburban hell, one where you use your newspapers to murder old couples and auto mechanics for sport, and where the zoning laws allow cemeteries to exist next to trailer parks and 7-11s.
Oh, and when you pause the game it doesn’t stop the audio. Instead you’re subjected to whichever note was playing stretched out into eternity. Some prankster at Mindscape figured that we would want to hear one synthesized “ding”—and all of the notes go “ding”—for however long it took for us to go to the restroom or grab a soda. The game demands that you play it nonstop or else it will assault your ears. Thankfully the experience will only last as long as it takes for you to wrench the cartridge from the SNES and pick up our next game: Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball.
Wait…WHAT?
RPM Racing
Game 20 of 715
Publisher: Interplay
Release: November 1991
Long before their crafts—War or Star—made a full impact on the gaming world, Blizzard was the first American developer to make it to the Super Nintendo. After a slew of Japanese-developed games, some of which only had tenuous connections to the American market (because how many kids were really screaming for an Ultraman game?), here was a game by Americans and for Americans. The good old U-S-of-A had come through again, making sure their citizens had the red-blooded mom-and-apple-pie sort of gaming that was needed for the country.
Or they could make a weirdly sterile and broken racing game with an insane nonsense title. That could also work.
Radical Psycho Machine Racing (yes, I know) is one of the more 1991-style things to have happened in 1991. Of course the P in RPM stands for Psycho! Dan Cortese is hosting a show about sports on MTV! Everything is extreme! All sentences must end with exclamation points! They must be yelled from tops of mountains while jumping from helicopters and pounding back Mountain Dew! And there must be explosions everywhere! And your car should slow down when coming in contact with anything, especially air molecules!
Yes, it’s a wholly broken and lugubrious engine that Blizzard has brought us, the product of a lot of ambition and not a whole lot of understanding. The game is developed in the SNES High Resolution Graphics Mode, and I’m not sure anyone tested this mode before it was implemented. The detail is sharp, but there’s not too much to see. In order to run this mode everything seems to have undergone a fire sale; there are no backgrounds to speak of and the cars are simple. Worse still there appear to be only two textures in the game: your car and everything else. The grass surrounding your track—and it’s all grass, only grass, grass as far as the eye can see—is made of the same stuff as the pavement, a rickrack pattern that shifts in a moiré and causes headaches. It’s stunningly sharp, but in this case that’s a terrible thing.
We’ve already experienced the insane speed of F-Zero, and Super Mario Kart is not too far behind. RPM Racing has to be stunning to be a viable option for racing fans, and it’s not. My first race featured half of the field getting stuck on a hill, their chasses rumbling back and forth attempting to mount the incline, sputtering and floundering as I passed them over and over again.
At which point my car exploded and I lost.
The only thing I can think of is Rufus turning to the camera at the end of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, apologizing for the heinous jam session the audience is watching: “They do get better.” Better luck next time, Blizzard.
Super Castlevania IV
Game 19 of 715
Publisher: Konami
Release: November 1991
Now that’s how you do a spooky platformer!
Castlevania comes to the Super Nintendo, labeling itself “four” when it actually should be “nine.” (We are apparently ignoring the Game Boy, MSX, and Arcade installments, among others.) Weird numbering conventions aside, this game is a godsend for the burgeoning SNES library. It’s definitely the best platformer we’ve seen since launch, and it stands as one of the best games to hit the system at all.
What’s interesting about the Castlevania series is the way it manages to recycle basically the same plot into different permutations. This game is, at least for the first few levels, a direct remake of the first Castlevania for the NES. Simon Belmont, vampire hunter extraordinaire, enters Dracula’s castle (or Devil’s Castle Dracula if you’re playing the significantly more Metal version released in Japan) to hunt down the most famous of all vampires and destroy him. Along the way he meets all kinds of creepy crawlies and dispatches them with Vampire Killer, his trusty whip. It’s a gaming’s version of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. You’re in the castle to meet some famous monsters and some non-copyrighted knockoffs of famous monsters. Along the way you’ll kick the ass of Medusa, Frankenstein, Death, Fred Astaire (Fred Astaire?), and the Hunchback of Notre Dame before you finally reach an unfair and lugubrious fight against the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula.
How Universal never sued over the obvious infringement on their work I will never know.
There’s a thrill in Super Castlevania IV from meeting up with these ghouls, ghosts, demons, and villains of yore, but it would all be for naught—okay, it would all be Super Ghouls’n Ghosts—if the game wasn’t innovative and a total blast to play. What’s interesting about the Castlevania series is the way each installment tries new twists and keeps the ones that worked in previous games. Many of the Castlevania games released now take their cues from the Playstation’s Symphony of the Night, so it’s interesting to see what was most important to the franchise before that shift in priorities. The fast-paced gameplay of Dracula’s Curse and the level design of Castlevania are retained here, and within those constraints the franchise begins to play with what can be done in the 16-bit world. Here we see the first introduction of the multi-directional whip; your weapon is not just good for nailing the baddies in front of you, but also for defending attacks from all over, as well as helping you navigate levels and reach higher peaks. The best parts of Super Castlevania IV have you hanging on for dear life as the level twists around you, turning you from vampire hunter to Tarzan wannabe as the castle throws you about. It’s a stunning moment, and it served as a touchstone of what could be done on this new system. There was no need to be absolutely linear in the way designers put together platform games. Nearly anything could happen now.
Those unexpected points—enemies jumping from the walls to grab you, the floor suddenly becoming the ceiling, attacks from all sides at all times from demons that would change their form as you attempted to destroy them—added to what Castlevania had been trying to achieve from the beginning. Not truly a horror franchise, these games were more interested in what director Sam Raimi refers to as “spook-a-blast” storytelling. That’s why the opening theme throws a rock-n-roll vamp on a classic organ sound, why Simon must fight a golem ten times his size, why one level takes place on what appears to be a carnival tilt-a-whirl. The game is trying to scare you a bit, but it wants you moving forward and having the time of your life. Super Castlevania IV is, to this point, the closest video games have ever gotten to a theme park dark ride. You’re occasionally scared going through, but you exit laughing and exclaiming about what a ride that was.
Super Ghouls'n Ghosts
Game 18 of 715
Publisher: Capcom
Release: November 1991
Welcome to the SNESteryear Halloween Special!
Submitted for your approval: a platform game so difficult it seems to be from the fevered nightmare of a madman. This is no ordinary adventure, but rather a trip into a realm where the laws of physics and nature need not apply, where every possible outcome leads to terror, and where two small taps can lead to an abyss known to us only as “death.” You’re about to enter…The Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts Zone.
Long held as a shining example of a “Nintendo Hard” game, my experience with Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts has been mostly frustrating. Okay, it’s actually been completely infuriating, leaving me with nothing to show for hours of play but some new invented compound profanities and an extreme distaste for the game. I’m convinced that most of this game is a hoax, that there is nothing programmed after the first level and that it’s all an elaborate trick to get you to die over and over again. The game teases you by showing an expansive map before each attempt, detailing the world ahead of our protagonist Arthur. Then it gives you two hits before you die, each of which are taken up by cheap shots from unavoidable projectiles and enemies who can move faster than you. You would figure that a medieval knight wouldn’t wear a suit of armor that explodes off his body after contact with a feral dog, but you would be very wrong. This is the world of Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts.
Now, I’m pretty decent at video games; I wouldn’t have started this project if I wasn’t. Not to toot my own horn, but I once beat Contra without continuing. I’m always up for a challenge, and I’m not going to declare that a game is cheap or cheating without having real evidence for it. So I have two likely scenarios here: either this game is broken and designed to induce maximum frustration, or I was hit by a car and this never-ending torment of cheapness is my own personal version of Hell. Like a Vegas where I never lose or a post-apocalypse where I decide to not go looking for another pair of glasses after mine break, Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts is tailored to the things I hate in order to punish me for the crimes I committed in my mortal guise. It doesn’t even have the good sense to advertise itself as a bad game. From the looks of it, Capcom has put together a fun platformer with a neat aesthetic. But a few minutes with the game reveals what must be the startling truth: it is impossible and you are in hell.
Or maybe this was all just a dream, and Capcom manufactured an early SNES title that confuses difficult with challenging. Zombies, werewolves, and flaming skulls are all excellent for Halloween fun, but there’s nothing fun about playing the same 500-pixel-wide space for a week trying to see if maybe you’ll reach the second level. You won’t, and now the background music is stuck in your head along with the obnoxious sound your weapons make. Is there anything more terrifying than that?
Next Time: A horror-themed game that doesn’t suck…but its villain sure does…
True Golf Classics: Waialae Country Club
Game 17 of 715
Publisher: T.E. Soft
Release: November 1991
I have now spent more time searching for a copy of this game than anyone actually spent playing it. Those who needed a golf game have probably already flocked to Hal's Hole-in-One Golf, making me wonder exactly why there are two golf games on the console and only one RPG. I can tell you without playing the game that it is indeed golf, that it probably employs a lot of Mode 7 and that there's a reason we see very few golf games on current consoles.
I promise to come back and give this a full breakdown if and when I can find a cartridge. Until then, it's on to one of the classics!
Super Tennis
Game 16 of 715
Release: November 1991
Super Tennis was a launch game in Europe, which may explain the utter dominance of the Mega Drive over there.
A barely-playable mess, Super Tennis combines all the fun of almost looking like Martina Hingis or Jimmy Connors with the Harlan-Ellison-like futility of getting your ass kicked by a computer fully and routinely. Full matches will go by with sustained aces from your computer opponent, the ball landing in physically-impossible manners as far away from you as possible. It strains credulity that a tennis ball could soar twenty feet in the air and then make a sharp right turn to evade your racket, but that's the sort of futile world that Super Tennis creates. No longer will you wonder what it is like to be Glass Joe of Punch Out!! fame; after the beating you sustain at the hands of any member of the Super Tennis roster, you will know exactly what it's like to have been defeated by plucky youngsters ninety-nine times in a row.
As with Hal's Hole-in-One Golf, I will ask who exactly is so stoked about these sports games that they will shell out their money for something unforgiving and half-assed. Madden I can understand; it's hard to get twenty-two people into pads, and the thrill of suiting up as your favorite player is not to be dismissed. But tennis takes two people and a little bit of equipment; there's no huge barrier between you and it. Even the fantasy aspect has disappeared here. While pretending to be John McEnroe might be awesome--mostly because you get to yell and throw stuff--there is not a single person on this earth who is stoked to play as "Brian" or "Barb" of Super Tennis fame. These are anonymous players involved in a broken version of the game, and there's barely any reason to go at it.
Ultraman: Towards the Future
Game 15 of 715
Publisher: Bandai
Release: October 1991
There may be no more useless endeavor in video games than the one-player fighting game. Combine that with the often-terrible licensed tie-in title and you’d probably think the resulting game would be atrocious.
With Ultraman: Towards the Future, you would be right.
Everyone’s favorite bespandexed Tokukatsu warrior from outer space is an unlikely candidate for the first fighting game on the Super Nintendo, and his title arrives with all the grace of a man in a rubber monster suit attempting to perform brain surgery in a rowboat. The controls are stiff and awkward; this will be the first time on the SNES that many gamers are left trying to remember what each of the six buttons are used for. In a sort of classic fighter blunder, the moves to perform grapples, throws, and anything more complex than a punch or a kick are left obscure, so much so that it took me twenty-three years to realize that this game does indeed have a throwing move. And this has to be the only fighting game that not only requires a finishing move, but also requires you to perform it exactly when they say it’s time to unleash it. But that move is on a completely unrelated timer, so those times may never sync up correctly, leading to your horrific demise well after your foe should have exploded. You get two continues to beat eight foes, all of whom take the same mind-numbing amount of time to defeat.
So if you like crippling defeat that you must face alone in a never-ending battle against your own happiness, Ultraman: Towards the Future is for you!
The sad thing is that this game didn’t have to be terrible. The premise is sound: everyone loves using giant monsters to raise holy hell against each other and cityscapes. King of the Monsters over on NeoGeo did this same concept incredibly well. Ultraman should be the basis for a raucous time, the sort of game that brings a huge crowd around the TV to root on their favorites and applaud close victories. A two-player option at least turns this game into the first option for Super Nintendo owners to go head-to-head against each other. As it is, we’ll have to wait nearly a year for such a game.
Drakkhen
Game 14 of 715
Publisher: Kemco
Release: September 1991
Today’s Unnecessary Amiga Port comes to us via Kemco. Seeing the early lack of role-playing games on the Super Nintendo, they strike first with Drakkhen, a French oddity of an RPG. The plot—as far as I can figure—is something like this: the gods have punished the world for getting rid of all the dragons, so they made more dragons, except this time the dragons have beefy arms and walk on two feet.
Essentially, your party has been dropped into a world full of Trogdors.
Other than that, your goals are nebulous. After a gibberish opening—a result of both poor translation from French and the worst mish-mash of clichés from fantasy novels I’ve ever encountered—the game starts in media res, pushing your pre-fab adventuring party into the world and telling you to go to a castle where a prince resides. The narration neglects to mention the following facts:
a) You will stop every three steps to fight a large clump of rats that look like diseased Rasinets.
b) This prince is a big giant huge dragon dressed in a spangled tunic.
So this guy sends all of his foot soldiers to kill the hell out of your party, and when you fight your way through all these guys the prince greets you with open arms and says he’s happy to see you. And that you should go to the castle on the direct opposite side of the map to tell his sister that he says hello. Then I walk out of the castle and a giant dog head appears and incinerates my guys. Game over.
Um…what?
Certain RPGs seem to be built to recreate both the absurdity and tedium of modern-day life with surreal trappings. I remember a conversation I had with my brother right after Fallout III was released, where he stated that he wanted to play a grand adventure, “but that game had me delivering mail to a vampire.” Over the course of the next few attempts, my Drakkhen characters met their demise at the hands of a slow-moving shark while trying to enter a museum, were struck dead by the Wicker Man while trying to find food, and eventually stabbed to death by lizard men while attempting to deliver that “hello” from Prince Fancypants. I have never experienced more fatalism in a role-playing game, and it only fits that it’s French. There is a vague ennui to the proceedings, with characters communicating in belches and sighs that indicate their desire to be free from this charade we call life. Sometimes I thought my characters were willingly striding into danger, each time hoping that the sweet embrace of death would envelop them. That would explain why it felt like pressing on the controls did less than nothing. Press A to die, press B to speak to a dragon that can’t do his own damn chores.
This is not okay, Kemco. If you were going to give us something from the Amiga, why not port F/A-18 Interceptor or Pushover or even that weird Back to the Future Part II game? No one is this desperate for a certain kind of video game. I doubt those chess fans who bought The Chessmaster were even that desperate. We are less than two months away from the release of Final Fantasy II, an absolute masterpiece. Drakkhen has no reason to exist.
The Chessmaster
Game 13 of 715
Publisher: The Software Toolworks
Release: September 1991
A chess set is cheaper and doesn't have as many obnoxious sound effects.