Just One More Thing...

For my money, this guy is the better eccentric
detective on Comcast's payroll, not that
annoying Monk dude.
(image from Medium)

It seems someone found the early prototype version of Sonic the Hedgehog, with a different set of stages and a ton of bugs that would ultimately be squashed in the final release. (These days, they'd probably just release the game as it is and fix the bugs a year later with patches.) Anyway, here it is if you're interested, courtesy of the Hidden Palace.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled end of year drinking and debauchery, already in progress.

This Crappy Year: 2020 in Review

With a contagious disease costing people both their lives and their livelihoods, and people refusing to believe that said disease even exists, the best part of 2020 is that very little of it currently remains. Fortunately, gaming brought some good news to a year which could desperately use it. Here now are the highlights from the past twelve months.

JANUARY

The toughest game you'll ever love/loathe.

I learned both the pleasure and the pain of Dead Cells, a side-scrolling action title that's equal parts Castlevania, Dark Souls, and that time you foolishly accepted a dare to put your tongue on a frozen metal pole. Preservationists uncovered the rumored Super NES version of Coolly Skunk, which was eventually released for the Playstation with improved graphics and a slightly different title. Sadly, this thoroughly unremarkable mascot, unfit to shine Sonic's sneakers, remains unimpressive even by the humble standards of a 16-bit console, proving that a skunk by a different name still stinks.

FEBRUARY

We've known for years that the Game Boy Advance can play Doom, but some hackers proved that it could play the game better, touching up the graphics while adding features missing from Activision's official release. Speaking of things that are both portable and pointless, Hasbro's Tiger division brought back several of its dedicated handhelds from the early 1990s. They're exactly the same as you remember them despite twenty-five years of technological progress, but that hasn't stopped tinkerers armed with a Raspberry Pi from bridging the gap to the 21st century...

MARCH

Ken Shimura, one half of the comedy duo Kato-Chan and Ken-Chan which inspired our own America's Funniest Videos, was one of the early victims of COVID-19. This had impact on me as a gamer, as JJ and Jeff, the Americanized version of their video game, was one of the first titles I played on the Turbografx-16, and influenced my overall opinion of the console. Seriously, the bulk of the system's library were simple, colorful action titles originally based on some Japanese property. Remember the pack-in Keith Courage? That was really some kid's cartoon called Mashin Eiyuden Wataru, with the characters and storyline given a macho, US-friendly makeover.

Is that Doogie Howser?

I also went to bat for killer apps getting ported to other formats- it used to happen all the time, guys, don't blow a gasket over it- and complained at length about the Commodore Amiga using single button controllers for most of its games. Yes, that was thirty years ago. I'm still frustrated by it, because the Amiga was released in the same year as the NES and had advanced 16-bit features that lent themselves especially well to video games. Considering the direction the video game industry was moving- away from simple arcade challenges and toward complex adventures with a need for more input- Commodore should have known better. Nobody was going to want to play Mortal Kombat with an Atari joystick eight years later.

APRIL

I finally broke down and bought a Switch, a decision I'm still questioning months later. It's not that the system itself is bad; it's just that the Lite variant isn't well suited to many of its games, with a small screen that makes text difficult to read. I'll be complaining about this issue repeatedly in future posts.

My first game for the system was Hyper Sentinel, an offshoot of the Uridium series where you skim over the tops of massive battleships, steadily weakening their defenses with laser blasts. It was definitely not the reason I bought a Switch, but that fifteen cent price tag was impossible to resist.

Speaking of irresistible purchases, the price of the Neo-Geo Mini dropped to thirty dollars on Amazon, so you know I had to buy one of those. I'm sure it was a disappointment for one hundred and thirty dollars, but for a small fraction of the original price, its flaws become a lot easier to ignore.

MAY

Johnny Turbo's Arcade was a focal point for this month, with reviews of a half-dozen Data East games featured in one post. (I got a lot of flack of panning Bad Dudes, by the way, but I'm standing by that review... it wasn't great in 1988, and this paper-thin beat 'em up sucks even more thirty years later.) I also took a second look at the Neo-Geo Mini and picked five of my favorite games from the venerable Pac-Man series. (Venerable: it's more fun to use in a sentence than "old.")

JUNE

Chuck E. Cheese, the famous amusement center and unwitting inspiration for the Five Night's At Freddy's franchise, went bankrupt this month. I used to love this place when I was a kid, but the rat and I went our separate ways a long time ago, so I'm not too broken up over it. They could have had the decency not to buy out the more adult-focused Peter Piper Pizza and drag them down to Chapter 11 hell with them, though...

Take four, they're small.

I also found a cache of rare GameCube games at a bookstore in Sierra Vista, and first learned about the Game Gear Micro, a revival of Sega's handheld from the 1990s with a form factor best described as "Lilliputian." Seriously, this thing be tiny. It's also expensive, costing fifty dollars and containing just four games. It's a slightly better deal than the recently released Game and Watch with only three games, but at least that has a screen you can actually see with the naked eye.

JULY

Not much happened on Kiblitzing this month, with just four posts. One of them was a detailed comparison of all the Sega Genesis ports of Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, including the lackluster prototype by Opera House. ("Opera HOOOOOUSE!") Even if you weren't happy with the version Capcom ultimately released, you'd have to agree it's a good sight better than what Opera House had created for them.

Also, I started building an entertainment system out of a beater PC I bought for five dollars at a garage sale, and warned readers to check the batteries in their handheld systems. Turns out they don't last forever, and neither will your PSP if you leave a bad battery inside it.

AUGUST

The entertainment system I built in the previous month wasn't all that impressive at first, but it got better, thanks to the addition of a video card, an SSD drive, and a high performance CPU. Now it's my favorite way to play old arcade and console games, putting my Raspberry Pi into retirement. I'm sure I'll find some use for it eventually, if I can find it under all that dust...

In less pleasant news, it turns out that SNK has been making stealthy edits to its old Neo-Geo games, removing references to Taiwan to appease the Chinese government. This got me pretty hot under the collar, but it may not be a problem for long now that SNK is under new management...

SEPTEMBER

Okay, we're finally in the "ber" months! September marked the end of the 3DS line of handhelds. I have fond memories of this system, although a lot of that comes down to social features like Streetpass and Miiverse. It was way too much fun busting that stupid pink rabbit's chops in front of a live audience. (And oh yeah, some of the games were fun, too.)

Not having too much trouble keeping THESE
in stock, I see.

Nintendo pulled its usual artificial scarcity BS by limiting the production of Super Mario All-Stars 3D to just six months. Once March 2021 arrives, you won't be able to buy this collection in stores or on the eShop. The Game and Watch referenced earlier in this post was announced this month, but judging from personal experience, it doesn't look like anyone who wants it will have trouble finding one. That's if they want one... even hackers have had trouble finding uses for this machine beyond what Nintendo intended, thanks to limited onboard storage.

OCTOBER

Night in the Woods was everything I expected and just a little bit more, exploring the decay of middle America that the rest of the media seems content to ignore. Sony ended support for its legacy consoles, including the Playstation Vita, which is just one year older than the PS4, and Michael Pachter opened his big dumb yap again, suggesting that Nintendo put an end to the Switch's docking feature. You know, the defining trait of the system that makes the text in Switch games large enough to actually read. Alex Hutchinson also said something stupid, but it's very hard to say something more stupid than Michael Pachter... he's had years of practice.

NOVEMBER

A prototype of the deeply flawed Sega Nomad was revealed by Sega, looking a bit like a high-class Game Gear. By the way, we deserve a portable Sega Genesis that actually works, with games that sound like Genesis games and not funeral dirges. Somebody get on that.

The big news for this month, aside from the bewildering acquisition of SNK by the Saudi government, is that someone found a way to port Atomiswave arcade games to the Sega Dreamcast. Not all of these games are great (Demolish Fist is very not great), but it's nevertheless gratifying to know that the Dreamcast had a little more gas left in the tank, and could have lasted a couple more years if Sega hadn't been so eager to abandon it.

Also, Capcom announced a mini console, as if we didn't have enough of those already. It looks idiotic, like Mega Man's love child with an old IBM PC, but at least it's full of nifty games. At a retail price of $210, it had better be.

DECEMBER

Oh hey, that's right now! The prototype version of Superman for the Playstation was recently released. It's entirely different from the Nintendo 64 version, and consequently less bad. Would I call it good? No, let's not go that far. It sure does exist, though.

Apparently Seph's aim has gotten rusty
after twenty-three years.

Also of note: Sephiroth nearly put a hole in Mario with his impractically long katana, Capcom Arcade Stadium was announced for the Switch, I hacked Super Mario Bros. so Bowser's fireballs weren't ass-backwards, and the NX hoax from a few years ago wasn't nearly as hoaxy as we all thought. Yeah, that was an official Nintendo design according to documents leaked from the company, although it never went any farther than brainstorming sessions. 

Also, 2020 ends in just three days, which is the best news I've heard all year.

Which Switch? What Switch? When Switch?

So hey, remember that image of an early Switch prototype with thumbsticks buried into the screen that got everyone worried about the finished product, but turned out to be a fake? It might not have been as "fake" as we thought, according to Twitter user Forest of Illusion. Here's an image he posted from the latest Nintendo "gigaleak," featuring... a handheld console with thumbsticks buried into the screen.

So it wasn't real, but it was an official concept, and it came much closer to becoming a reality than any of us would have liked. Look, I get enough fingerprints on my Switch Lite as it is... a system with a screen that swallows the front of the unit whole would have been a total grease magnet. What's most alarming is that this design dates back to 2014, suggesting that Nintendo had known the Wii U was a dead man walking and was eager to put it out of its misery just two years after its launch. Special thanks to Game Rant for the scoop.

"What have you been playing on the actual Switch?," you don't say, but I'm saying for you so I have an excuse to pad out this blog post. Fortunately, Nintendo has the answer to this and many other not-so-pressing questions on their year in review web site. Here's what I played the most:

I know, Highrise Heroes: Word Challenge sounds lame, and if you judged it entirely by its plot and a synthy soundtrack plucked from a 1990s drama on Lifetime, I guess it would be. However, it provided many hours of word-hunting, debris-clearing, lab chimp-rescuing entertainment. I'm a sucker for these kinds of games, as evidenced by my previous addictions to Alphabears and Bookworm. Highrise Heroes' only major problem is that it doesn't know when to make a graceful exit... ninety levels is a bit more than anyone really needs, and the bonus challenges were completely unnecessary. Thank goodness they were also completely optional.

Moving down the list, we have Smash Bros. Ultimate and Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan (Curse of the Mayan what?). I'm sure we're all familiar with Smash Bros. at this point, and this was a pretty good entry in the series, giving with one hand (Terry Bogard is a downloadable character, and that's pretty freaking awesome) and taking with the other (the new story mode feels like busywork, and has got nothin' on Subspace Emissary or Smash Run). 

Sydney Hunter was the big surprise for me, a side-scrolling action-adventure game that plays like a hybrid of retro classics from the past, without borrowing too heavily from any of them. It's a little like Montezuma's Revenge, but with more variety and a goal beyond racking up a high score. It's a bit like indie hit La Mulana, but more fun to play and not nearly as obtuse. It's got some classic Castlevania in there but there's fewer cheap deaths and more freedom in exploring the intricately crafted stages. If you enjoyed any of the previously mentioned games (and don't mind wading through an ill-considered tribute to Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle about halfway through), you ought to buy Sydney Hunter the next time it's on sale.

Next we have Far Cry: Zelda Edition- er, I mean Breath of the Wild, and Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. Breath of the Wild didn't click with me... it's a little too vast, too open-ended, and too aimless, and the fragile weapons drove me bananas. I might go back to it if I can get a Zelda Amiibo that will keep me well stocked with swords, but even that's doubtful... I'm sure I could find better uses of my time, particularly with all the Switch games I've purchased but never touched. (Someday, Starlink, someday.)

At the end is Steamworld Quest, a fun if somewhat linear RPG that uses custom-built decks of cards in its combat system. It's hard to fault any part of this game... the attractive, painterly graphics remind me of Vanillaware's best work, the characters are charming, with the eager, lunkheaded soldier Armilly leading her eccentric friends into battle, and the card combat is entertaining, if occasionally frustrating. (One fun trick the game likes to pull on you: incapacitating one of your fighters, then continually dealing cards only he or she can play. Gee, thanks a lump.) Still, I suppose it's telling that I never finished this one, and was never inclined to return to it.

As for how much time I spent playing my Switch, here are the deets:

My use started in April when I bought the system, crested in May, and precipitously dropped by the end of the summer, likely due to my mayfly-like attention span and the Switch losing its new console smell. 

Right now I'm at just four hours for this month, which is slightly concerning. Hopefully things will pick up next year... I'd hate to think that I spent two hundred dollars on something that kept me entertained for four months.

Feel My 'Roth

It's been a while since I've posted, and some pretty monumental things happened in the past week. Let's see what happened at this year's Game Awards!

image from Know Your Meme

Whoa, Sephiroth skewered Mario?

image from Know Your Meme, again

...or maybe he didn't. Anyway, he'll be a downloadable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, so he'll have plenty of chances to improve his aim.

What got me excited is the news that Capcom will release packs of its old arcade games for the Switch. You can see the full list of games at the always trusty Tiny Cartridge web site, but it's probably worth mentioning that many of games in the last two packs will be redundant if you already own the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle and Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. Also, there's no Darkstalkers or its two sequels, which strikes me as one heck of a missed opportunity. 

Nevertheless, I'm eyeballing the first pack, which contains Forgotten Worlds and Ghouls 'n Ghosts, two favorites on the Sega Genesis that weren't included in the Switch port of Sega Genesis Classics. Plus you get 1943 as a free appetizer, which beats the heck out of the stale pretzels at the local bar.

What else? Apparently the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 was a phone-in on home consoles... if you want the real experience, you'll have to buy it for a properly specced PC. If you bought it for a home console anyway, you'll have to wait to get updates that bring the port up to speed with its PC cousin, or wait to get your money back... or wait for the inevitable "remastered" version on next generation consoles.

It begins, folks... people with Xbox Ones and PS4s are already being left out in the cold, just one month after their successors were released. Why, I remember back in the days of the NES, when Nintendo was still making quality games for the system years after the Super NES was launched! These days, the current generation of systems become doorstops the moment the next generation is on store shelves.

Oh, you think that makes me sound old? Kids get off my lawn, why are there so many battery sizes, Werther's originals. There, NOW I sound old.

While we're on the subject (of next generation consoles, not me being old), does anyone have the straight scoop on backward compatibility for the Xbox Series X and S? At first, it sounded like every game from the past three generations of systems would work on the new machines, then it sounded like only the games that already work with the Xbox One would work on the Xbox Series, and now, I'm looking through Game Pass and noticing that very few of the Xbox One games listed are stamped with X/S. Is there an official list on what works and what doesn't? Because I'm confused over here, and not just because the names of the last gen and next gen systems are so similar.

Flippin' Fireballs!

So, I was digging around Deku Deals, debating with myself on whether Hamster's old-as-dirt arcade games were worth eight dollars a pop (they're not, really, but it didn't stop me from buying Donkey Kong and Moon Patrol earlier...), and came across this image from Vs. Super Mario Bros.

image from Deku Deals

Two things stand out. The first is that they dialed up the saturation levels to HyperDeath™ in the needlessly difficult arcade version of Super Mario Bros. Bowser is suddenly greener than all of Ireland, and the reds are bright enough to permanently burn images of Mario's overalls into your retinas.

The second thing is that, well, the fireball is facing the wrong way. It looks like Mario is firing it at Bowser, but no, Mario's fireballs are tiny rolling balls of flame. That's actually the Koopa King's projectile, and it's headed right for Mario... even though this screen shot suggests otherwise.

I'm sure others had figured this out a long time ago, and even I probably had a suspicion that something was amiss when I first tangled with Bowser back in the 1980s. Someone may even have already fixed it, but with nearly four hundred different hacks for this game listed on ROMhacking, I thought it would be easier for me to make the change myself rather than dig through that massive pile of edits for the right one.

There, that's more like it. No more moonwalking fireballs! I'm not going to share the IPS file for this hack because I'm certain someone else has already done this a long time ago, and because Nintendo has been so remarkably paranoid about its copyrights lately. You're seriously going after some guys for making controller shells in honor of the late YouTube celebrity Etika, hoping to sell them to make money for suicide prevention charities?! Wow, who dropped their pants and dumped a homemade lump of coal in your stocking?

Anyway. All you need to know is that the hack is pretty easy to do... you just load Super Mario Bros. into a tile editor, find three tiles that look like a fireball, flip them horizontally, and swap the positions of the first and third tile. Clamp clamp kabam, the fireball is fixed. Speaking of flipping, if you were wondering how Nintendo managed to animate the fireball with just three tiles, they flipped the sprite vertically on every other frame to give the flame a burning comet tail. You tend to lean on ROM-saving shortcuts like this when your game is only 41K in size.

That's Really Subpar, Superman

Over the last forty-three years of home video games, there have been a multitude of titles based on the adventures of Superman, with several of these being utterly horrible and none being any better than adequate. The recent discovery and release of the Playstation version of Superman, alas, does not break this streak.

Developed by Vectorman creators Blue Sky Software but ultimately shelved by its publisher Titus, Superman for the Playstation was rumored to be the game Nintendo 64 owners should have gotten, with more complex gameplay and missions that go beyond flying through hoops obscured by a Kryptonite fog. While it does deliver on those promises, the Playstation version of Superman is hardly a high point in the system's library, pinned to the ground by slow, tedious gameplay and visuals that don't do justice to the 1996 animated series that inspired it.

Thank goodness for that.
(image from YouTube)

Years ago, a friend of mine described a different game, Cosmic Chasm for the Vectrex, as "process oriented." "Shoot waves of ships, drill through barriers, navigate to the center of the cavern, plant a bomb at the fusion core, escape through the exit, and sign papers in triplicate detailing your mission," he lamented, joking only about the last part. (I've played this game too; signing the papers at the end of a mission would have been the most exciting part. It's no wonder that when it was ported to arcades a year later, they streamlined the controls and trimmed away its excesses.)

"Process oriented" perfectly describes Superman 32. It's so rigidly tied to procedure that it makes Cosmic Chasm look like a non-stop thrill ride. The first stage alone has you unwinding a Gordian knot of tedious tasks as you climb to the fifth story of a parking garage, where Lois Lane awaits. Paths are blocked off by Kryptonite force fields, so you find generators, destroy them all with your ice breath, and proceed to the next floor. Women are held behind burning hot walls, so you use your ice breath to cool down the barriers, punch a hole through them, rescue the hostage trapped inside, but oh! You can't rescue her until you find a health pack, which is behind another Kryptonite force field, which can't be removed until you destroy the generators on that floor. Repeat until the unrelenting boredom threatens to send you into a coma.

I'll save you, uh, Lois?
(image from Stranno)

Eventually, after dozens of hot walls and trapped hostages and health packs and power generators and keys to unlock doors but the doors require five keys and you can only hold one key at a time because Superman's outfit doesn't have pockets and oh lord just shoot me now, you find Lois Lane. She looks more like the Lois Lane from the 1950s Superman television series with George Reeve, but whatever, I'll take any Lois Lane at this point as long as she's not played by Amy Adams. You scoop her up in your mighty Super-arms, and instead of punching a hole through the wall of the parking garage and making a hasty escape, you have to fly down five floors to the exit, while avoiding security droids and roving Kryptonite orbs. 

Of course, a Superman game has to have Kryptonite. It's the only check on his considerable powers, and without them, the game (and frankly, Superman as a character) would be dreadfully predictable and boring. Here, Kryptonite temporarily neuters the man of steel, robbing him of his abilities for several seconds while assaulting your eardrums with a droning dirge that will make you hate the stuff as much as he does. Here's the twist, though... in this game, Kryptonite is even more dangerous to humans. If you happen to be holding Lois while touching any green radiation, including the orbs that move back and forth through tight corridors, the mission instantly ends. Sure, you'll be sent to a continue point, but it takes you back to the third floor, before Lois and before the gauntlet of walls, generators, hostages, health packs, keys, and doors that you didn't want to finish in the first place.

I tapped out at this part, but there's someone on YouTube named Stranno who finished the entire game, no doubt risking his sanity in the process. What I could glean from his playthrough is that Superman 32 takes two hours to beat, doesn't substantially improve after the first stage, doesn't use the proper voices from the cartoon series, and makes Superman's ice breath the only power with any practical use. Also, there are boss fights, but they're very stupid boss fights. Fly up to one of the villains from the cartoon, punch him in the face a couple of times, get hit with a Kryptonite beam while he runs away, repeat.

To be fair, Superman 32 is better than its Nintendo 64 counterpart, and it is important that it was preserved. Evidently the person who found it was hounded so much by hordes of entitled gamers with the gimmies that he deleted it from his hard drive out of spite. He recently had second thoughts and pulled it out of the abyss with recovery software, and he deserves a lot of credit for making that decision... even if the people who demanded it didn't necessarily deserve it. However, as a game, Superman 32 just barely crests over the high watermark of average that has defined Superman games for nearly a half century. Play it if you're bored (and you want to be more bored), but there's more excitement packed into the late 1990s Superman cartoon that spawned it.