Yooka-Laylee and the Lightning that Can Never Return to the Bottle

Man, I don't even know what to do with this dusty old blog anymore. I don't think I updated at all on November, and nearly ignored the blog this month as well. However, it felt right to post something before the end of the year, so here it is. Don't expect anything too organized... I'm just going to prattle on about a handful of games I've been playing lately.

First on the menu is Yooka-Laylee. I grabbed a copy of this for the Switch when the price dropped to three dollars, and it certainly is... a game I've been playing. From the mismatched power couple who serve as the heroes to the inanimate objects with buggy eyes to the referential jokes with all the subtlety of a lead pipe to the back of the skull, Yooka-Laylee's intentions are clear. It wants to bring back the vibe of the European platformers popular on the Nintendo 64 in the late 1990s, but it concentrates way too much on window dressing while leaving the core of the gameplay unrefined. 

And there are minecart races, because you
DEFINITELY wanted to relive those little
nightmares.
(image from New Game Network)

 

Almost from the moment you walk through the doors of the Hivory Towers, Yooka-Laylee reveals itself as cryptic and unfocused. Stages are gigantic, without the benefit of a map to help guide you through them, timed challenges are given ruthless time limits, and obtuse puzzles are frequently presented without apparent solutions. Why won't those plants talk to me? What do I do with this giggling bush? How the hell do I get through this door? Talking to the sexual innuendo snake hidden in each world and buying his moves chips away at the brick walls of confusion the game insists on dropping in front of you, but I still can't fathom how anybody could finish this game without a strategy guide. 

You'll get your three dollars' worth out of Yooka-Laylee just from bumbling through the stages and collecting hidden whatzits, but this is the Switch. There's no end of top-tier platformers on this system, and playing this clumsy 1990s throwback feels like slumming when you've got Kirby and the Forgotten Land and a million Mario games at your fingertips.

Speaking of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, I picked that up in a recent sale, and was quite pleased with it. There was a lot of early hype about this being an open world game, but calling it "open world" is as much of a stretch as Kirby trying to get his mouth around a rusty Volkswagen. The stages are typically wide hallways, granting the pink puffball some lateral movement but little room to explore the environment. You'll find the occasional fork in the road or a path hidden behind some debris, but beyond that Forgotten Land is only slightly less linear than a traditional Kirby game. (Not that I'm complaining after playing Yooka-Laylee.)

The enemies d'jour in Forgotten Land are
Woofos, corgis at their most adorably
deadly.
(image from Nintendo EVERYTHING!!!)

Each recent Kirby title comes with its own signature gimmick, from the all-consuming Hypernova fruits in Triple Deluxe to the mighty mechs in Planet Robobot. Forgotten Land introduces the Mouthful, which lets Kirby partially consume and adopt the characteristics of objects too large for him to swallow outright. Suck up an abandoned car and Kirby becomes the car, letting him crash into walls and soar over ramps. Eat a traffic cone and Kirby turns into a pointy pylon, letting him break through cracks in the floor and impale enemies. It's not one of the most memorable tricks up Kirby's proverbial sleeve, but it does bring variety and simple puzzle solving to the action.

Beyond the faintly open world gameplay and the most optimistic post-apocalyptic setting you've ever seen in a video game, it's business as usual for the Kirby series. Forgotten Land offers a perfect balance between light, breezy fun and a wealth of content... there are tons of goodies to collect and an abundance of distinct stages to visit, but there's never so much on your plate that you feel overwhelmed, and everything's clear enough that you're rarely left feeling confused and frustrated (looking at you, Yooka-Laylee).

Finally, there's Street Fighter 6. Capcom bunted with the last Street Fighter game, but this feels like a swing for the fences, with a story mode that feels like a game in and of itself, rather than a bunch of versus matches sandwiched between exposition (sorry, Mortal Kombat 11). Plenty of reviewers have compared the World Tour to Sega's Yakuza series, and it's hard not to notice the similarities when you're hoofing it through Metro City, finishing silly fetch quests and scrounging money and items from any thug stupid enough to cross paths with you. 

Street Fighter 6 not only makes tons of
references to past Capcom games, but
builds on Final Fight and Street Fighter
lore in unexpected ways. You can fight
pretty much anyone in this game if you'd
like. Starting fights with strangers in
Metro City is just a way to introduce
yourself, like shaking hands, or dogs
sniffing each others' butts.
(image from Tom's Guide)

 

The big difference is that while Yakuza's combat mechanics were only pretty good, Street Fighter 6's fights play like a standard game of Street Fighter, which makes them damn near perfect. As you advance, you'll meet Street Fighter legends and learn both their stances and signature moves, eventually turning your character into a patchwork quilt of martial arts mastery. It's frustratingly limited when the game starts and you're stuck with the move set of the aggressively generic Luke, but the range of your abilities expands as you visit new countries and meet the fighters who live there. Pretty soon you'll have a terrifying Frankenstein's monster of a fighter, sewn together from the body parts of past Street Fighter champions.

And oh yeah, the actual versus fights are spiffy too, although they practically feel like bonus content next to the meaty story mode. Street Fighter 6 dumps the V modes of Street Fighter 5 into the trash where they belong, and replaces them with the vastly superior drive gauge. The drive gauge works a bit like stamina in a Dark Souls game... it's a bar that depletes when you use special techniques like boosting the power of a special move, but refills when you leave it alone. Use it too much and you could drain it completely, leaving you vulnerable and potentially helpless. It's up to you to use the drive gauge effectively but S-P-A-R-I-N-G-L-Y, so you're shattering turtles with the block-breaking Drive Impacts and doling out bonus damage, but not exhausting yourself and getting caught with your pants down. It's a compelling play mechanic and one of the most monumental we've seen in a Street Fighter game since the supers in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Don't be surprised if the Drive Gauge sticks with the Street Fighter series for a few sequels.

A playing card reject with an unhealthy
addiction to steroids. Just what I always
wanted in a Street Fighter game!
(image from Capcom)

There are new characters, and as expected from Dimps-era Street Fighter, they're hit or miss. One of the highlights is Kimberly, who carries the teenage schoolgirl ninja torch first lit by Ibuki, but zests it up with graffiti and a street smart attitude. On the downside, you've got gladiator giantess Marisa (ME WANT SNU-SNU!!!) and JP, an elderly man in a top hat* who's almost as exciting as Capcom's last dud Necalli. Maybe you guys should stop serving up fresh cowpies like El Fuerte, F.A.N.G., and Rufus, and just steal ideas from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and Bloodsport again. Just sayin'.

It has become apparent that I'm entirely too high to finish the rest of this review, so I'll just conclude by saying that Street Fighter 6 is the very best Street Fighter has been in years. Years! Kudos, Capcom. Way to catch up to Mortal Kombat after nearly a decade of eating its dust.

* Okay, so I mixed him up with the other guy from Street Fighter 5, another lame-tastic lamie from the land of lame fighting game characters. Shit, you might as well bring back Angus from Kasumi Ninja, complete with great balls of fire that erupt from his lifted kilt.

Microsoft Can Stick It (or, One Giant Leap)

Attention, fighting game fans! Evidently, these are the new rules for playing video games on the Xbox, effective November 12th.

(image from Rabbits Full of Magic)
(also, that's Kerri Hoskins)
(yes, Sonya Blade from the early MK games)

 

It's not what you agreed to when you bought your Xbox Series, but Bill Gates has altered the agreement. Pray he doesn't alter it any further. 

Needless to say, I'm pretty cheesed off at this development. Look, I've got a ton of game controllers for various consoles. Many of these have USB cables, and many of them can be used on Xbox systems with the aid of an adapter, like the ones manufactured by Mayflash. This gives me the freedom to play any Xbox game with any controller I please, be it a six button Saturn joypad best suited for fighting games or a perfectly functional arcade joystick whose sole fault is being designed for the orphaned Xbox 360. When this new rule and the firmware update that enforces it goes into effect on the 12th, I'm going to lose a lot of that flexibility, and will be expected to shell out hundreds of dollars for licensed controllers, just to get some of it back. 

(Some. Not all. I've got a clicky stick Neo-Geo controller coming in the mail that will be useless on the Xbox in two weeks. Frankly, it's doubtful that 8BitDo will pay a licensing fee to make that controller specifically for a machine that's already laid down its arms in the console wars of the 2020s. They're third place in a three man race. You know what that makes them? Last place. Sorry Microsoft, but nobody in last place gets their own game controller.)

Poorly played, Microsoft. You can't just cram the controller genie back in the bottle after letting it roam free for years. By your own admission, the Xbox Series is well behind its competitors in this console generation, and this move will not go over well with the few fans you have left. What's the point of buying every game publisher you can get your filthy, blood-stained claws on if you're going to chase away Xbox owners with draconian policies like this?

Now it plays your favorite Supervision
games! I can't wait for the update that
opens the doors to the exciting HyperScan library!

Hmph. In more open source news, fans of the Data Frog SF2000 were given a massively expanded software library, thanks to a Multicore firmware developed by Adcockm and his team of hackers. Officially, the SF2000 can run games for the NES, Genesis, Super NES, and three flavors of Game Boy, but unofficially, with the aid of this firmware, the system can handle Sega CD, TurboDuo, Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and Neo-Geo Pocket games as well. 

I've said in the past that the SF2000 is the king of el cheapo handhelds, and this only strengthens that opinion. Say what you will about emulation, especially on a handheld you might find at the bottom of a cereal box, but I owned an Atari Lynx years ago, and Data Frog's system is every bit as good a Lynx as an actual Lynx. Heck, it's better, because you've got save states handy for longer games like Slime World, and aren't risking your vision trying to make out details on the washed out Lynx screen. 

And that's just the Atari Lynx! The Data Frog can do a pretty convincing imitation of a Neo-Geo Pocket, a TurboExpress, a Supervision (for those of you, ahem, into that sort of thing...) and even a couple of CD-based systems you wouldn't have dared imagine playing on the go in 1993. It may be only twenty dollars, but the SF2000 is punching so far above its weight class it could send Mike Tyson into orbit.

Lucky Number Thirteen

These blog updates are getting pretty slim, aren't they? I guess I just don't have much to talk about lately. One thing that does bear mentioning is that after two years of battling regulators, Microsoft has finally laid claim to Activision, the world's first third party game publisher. This of course means that Activision no longer is one, although it's likely they'll still publish games for the Nintendo Switch. The Switch is regarded as something of an industry neutral zone, even if Sony has shown little interest in publishing games for the system.

Microsoft will still be obligated to make Call of Duty games for the Playstation 5 as part of the terms they agreed to honor with both Sony and government regulators, but that's hardly a concern for me. First person shooters aren't my bag, baby... I can't even play a boomer shooter like Doom without getting hopelessly confused as to where I should go next. I need a red keycard to get to the end of the stage? But it's guarded by a series of crushing walls that I can't seem to dodge? Lovely. By the time I've reached that keycard, I won't even need it... I'll be flat enough to slide under all the doors.

In other slightly worrying merger news, there are reports that Disney's CEO is being pressured by investors to purchase Electronic Arts. Bob Iger has claimed in the past that Disney's never had much success in the video game industry, and indeed, their stab at the toys to life market in the 2010s ultimately didn't amount to much. However, Disney has never given up on video games completely, as evidenced by the upcoming remaster of the old Gargoyles game for the Genesis. Personally, I'd suggest resurrecting the LucasFilm Games label (yanno, the brand they already own) or investing in long time partner Capcom instead, but hey, it's not MY billions and billions of dollars they're spending.

No Sleep 'Til Brooklin (and Ellewood)

Heh, I guess I'm not done with this blog yet. The Kbin thing seems to be working out pretty well for me, though... I've got over a hundred watchers at the moment, and I keep it updated on a semi-regular basis. Well, more than this place, anyway.

Anyway! I'm writing here because Microsoft was caught with its proverbial pants down, with tons of last year's internal memos becoming external memos, to the glee of fans. Courtesy of Verge, here's what can be gleaned from this leaked information, provided that any of it remains valid. Microsoft frat boy in chief Phil Spencer suggests that the data is already obsolete in 2023, but I strongly doubt all of it is.

Microsoft is firing on one cylinder
with its mid-gen refresh, codenamed
Brooklin.
(image from Polygon)

 

 

NEW XBOX SERIES X

Say hello to the new model of the Xbox Series X... and say goodbye to physical media. Yes, in the distant future of 2024, even the Series X won't have an optical drive. This could be inconvenient for Microsoft, as all of their retail discs up to this point have "designed for Xbox Series X" written on the top. Will Microsoft just stop selling discs from this point forward? Or is this some of that outdated information Phil Spencer swears this leak contains? We probably won't know for sure until next year.

What Brooklin will have is a doubling of internal storage (2TB versus the single terabyte in the Xbox Series X), an ugly but feature-filled controller that adds haptic feedback, and a USB-C port. You know, the small one with the oval-shaped connector that doesn't particularly care which way you plug it into your system. The system itself has a strange cylindrical shape that brings to mind stylish but decidedly low-tech appliances like trash cans or air purifiers (thank Madlittlepixel for that comparison). Also, I'm sure that the cylindrical design will make the system that much tougher to repair or modify. The only way you're adding more storage to this thing is with those hella expensive expansion cards.

Meet the new budget boss, same as the
old budget boss. Give or take new Bluetooth
technology and a USB-C port.
(image from GamesIndustry)

 

NEW XBOX SERIES S

Yes, the budget-priced game system that every developer hates is back with a vengeance... and with double the storage of the original, thank goodness. I've learned from personal experience that 512GB (really more like 384GB) is nowhere near enough these days, especially when cross-buy games like Mortal Kombat 11 force you to install them on the Xbox Series S's paltry internal hard drive. Beyond that, things are largely kept consistent with the original, with the same shape and (phew) price. Sure, you get slightly faster Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, plus a USB-C port on the front instead of the rectangular port, but past that, it's business as usual. No, they're not bumping up the RAM like they did with the PSP refresh. Sorry, Larian Studios.

Sense and Sebile Abilities.
(image from TrueAchievements)

 

NEW XBOX CONTROLLER

Microsoft plays catch up with its competitors by introducing a game controller with all the features everyone else already had ten years ago. Personally, I like the relative simplicity of the Xbox Series controller, but if you'd like a gyroscope and "precision haptic feedback" to go with your gaming, soon you'll have them. What precisely is precision haptic feedback? I don't fully understand the technology, but it's supposed to offer a more realistic tactile sensation than ordinary rumble motors. When you drive over gravel in Forza Horizon, it really feels like you're driving over gravel. Nintendo calls this "HD rumble," and has mastered it to the degree that there's a game in 1-2 Switch which has you guessing the number of ice cubes in a glass, by shaking your Joycon and feeling them.

It kind of sucks that Microsoft will have to shoehorn compatibility with this controller into its existing games, but I suppose that this isn't so much a problem now that games have downloadable updates. I was still in my teens during that awkward transition between three and six button controllers on the Sega Genesis, and that was oh so much worse. Pressing start to switch between punches and kicks in Street Fighter II was such a load of...

CLOUD HYBRID XBOX PLANNED FOR 2028

So the good news is we won't have to shell out for a next generation Microsoft console for another five years. Hell yes, win one for the cheapskate! The bad news is that it's supposed to be a "cloud hybrid" system, which suggests that the machine will be at least partially reliant on the internet and won't be fully playable while off the grid. Also, the games may not even be directly on your system but instead streamed off a network somewhere, which will have a profound negative effect on lag and visual fidelity. Cloud gaming apparently works in small, tech-savvy nations like Japan and South Korea, and even in large American cities, but what about those of us out in the boonies? Our internet sucks, and it's not likely to improve anytime soon. Please don't make the same mistakes Don Mattrick did ten years ago and tell us to suck it up, or settle for last generation's tech.

August or Bust

Lots has happened in the gaming world since the last time I posted. Where do I even begin?

I preferred Martinet's portrayal of Wario,
myself. He's-a nuts!
(image from Nintenderos)

* Charles Martinet has been demoted from Mario's principal voice actor to a Mario "ambassador," whatever that means. He'd been playing the role for thirty years, starting with the Super Mario Bros. pinball table from Gottlieb, and his absence will surely be felt by fans of the series. Who will be Martinet's replacement? Either Nintendo isn't willing to divulge that information right now, or doesn't know itself.

* The Xbox 360, Microsoft's most successful and arguably best game system, is on borrowed time. Its digital storefront will be closed in just eleven months, and from that point forward, you won't be able to purchase games for the system online. However, Xbox 360 games purchased before July 29th 2024 can be re-downloaded from Microsoft's servers, and of course, Xbox 360 games compatible with the Xbox One and Series can be purchased for those systems after that date.

* Atari is releasing yet another game system, the 2600 Plus. This machine plays both 2600 and 7800 games, and outputs them in glorious HDMI... but there's a catch. Some games aren't compatible, and the whole shebang will set you back $130. This is eighty dollars more than an Atari 2600 Jr. cost in 1988, and kind of hard to justify when there's already a jillion ways to play Atari 2600 games at home. Some of them are even legal!

* Sorry I've been neglecting this blog. I'm doing most of my video game posting on Kbin these days. Check out my magazine OldGames4OldGamers for more frequently updated content.

Bye, July!

And good riddance, you miserably molten month. Don't come back for another eleven months, or much much later than that if it's at all possible.

I cannot play this game to save my life.
(image from CDRomance)

Anyway. (Ahem.) Some pretty good news to report for the Dreamcast, which hasn't seen much in the way of excitement since the pandemic, when two hackers brought the bulk of the Atomiswave library to Sega's last game system. Not only is there an English translation of SNK's Cool Cool Toon, but Atomiswave titles like KenJu and Rumble Fish now have sensible button layouts, and... okay, here's the one that's really got me excited... King of Fighters Evolution finally offers support for VGA monitors. It probably should have had that support from the start (cough... cough... SNK), but better twenty-three years late than never!

Okay, onto the ever present rumors of a Switch successor, given credibility by reports from more trusted sources than the usual shady customers on the internet whose predictions are right 52 percent of the time and wrong 48 percent of the time. (It's still a better batting average than Michael Pachter. Yes, I'm going with a joke ten years past its expiration date.) Tom's Hardware, GameSpot, and Game Revolution all claim that the Switch 2 is arriving in the middle of next year, and that third party developers already have development kits in their hands. 

Not too much is known beyond that, which means that we don't know if the Switch 2 will be backward compatible with the original Switch, and if so, by what degree. Developers have already made it clear that they don't want backward compatibility because it would stifle "innovation*" (ie reselling us the games we already own as whoop-de-doo remasters, a tactic we first saw in 2013), but personally speaking, I don't WANT a second Switch if it's not compatible with the first. I've got umpteen million classic collections and Arcade Archives games on my Switch, and I'm quite insistent that they remain available to me. 

Much has made made of the report that 87% of mass market video games are not currently available for purchase, but look, the Switch went a long way toward filling out that remaining thirteen percent. There was no way to buy an authentic version of Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. prior to 2017... your only options were piracy or some weaksauce NES port with dull colors and gameplay that just didn't feel right. Compared to what had come before, the Switch is a wonderland of arcade goodness, an Aladdin's Castle you can fit in a backpack or a purse. Pac-Man? Crystal Castles? Double Dragon? Terra Cresta? Moon Patrol? Vs. Super Mario Bros., the arcade one with the harder stages? Street Fighter friggin' III? A decade's worth of King of Fighters games? They're all right there in your two hands, and they're yours to keep, legally, forever.

Or depending on the whims of the console manufacturer, perhaps just the life of the system itself. When you buy something in the Xbox ecosystem, it tends to stick around for a while. The digital copy of Crystal Quest I bought for my Xbox 360 in 2006 is still available to me, seventeen years and two console generations later. Sony's commitment to past purchases is a little spottier, but you can still play PSP games on your Vita, or PS4 games on your PS5. 

Unfortunately, Nintendo has not fared so well in this brave new world of digital downloads. Games purchased on the Wii eShop could be ported to the Wii U (sometimes at an additional cost to the user), but once those games were on the Wii U, they were stranded there. You couldn't take them back to the Wii, and you couldn't push them forward to the Switch. As a result, I have dozens of games that I love, trapped on a game system I've grown to hate. I'd like to play Metroid Zero Mission again. I would not like to dig out my Wii U and its senselessly oversized controller to do that, and I would very much not like to pay Nintendo a subscription fee for access to a game I've already purchased. Hello? This is already mine? You got your money, now where's my damn game?

For me personally, compatibility with the original Switch is an absolute must, a higher priority than anything else. I've tied too much money into the first Switch to abandon that collection and start anew. Just give me what you already made six years ago, boost the performance so old games run better on the new hardware, and ensure that the backward compatibility is as close to 100% as you can make it (without burdensome conditions and limitations) and I'll be happy. Hey, it worked for the Xbox Series.

* Tech companies to customers: "Bend over and drop your pants! Here comes five inches of innovation!"

It's All Over But the Digestion

That's game, set, and match in the legal skirmish between Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission. The final score? 2-0 in Microsoft's favor. The spoils? A little video game publisher you might have heard of, called Activision. Or is it Activision-Blizzard? Or maybe Activision-Blizzard-King? Whatever. It's all just Microsoft now.

Whenever I hear the name "Activision
Blizzard King," this is typically what
comes to mind.

What does this mean for gamers? Probably not much at first. It'll take a while for Microsoft to fully subsume the first third party video game company, and the software giant promised both the FTC and the gaming community that the Call of Duty series would remain cross-platform for the immediate future. One change we should expect sooner than later is the ouster of former Activision CEO and corporate shark Bobby Kotick, who vowed to leave the company after the deal was finalized. Well, it happened Bobby, so get 'ta steppin'. Don't let the door hit you in the Moneyballs on the way out.

What I would like to see happen is a revival of Activision IP that had went into hibernation during the reign of Kotick. Now that Microsoft is in control, I'd like to see Activision Anthology make a comeback. This was one of the better classic collections for the Playstation 2 in the early 2000s, ranking up there with Capcom Classics Collection and Atari Anniversary, and a sequel on the Xbox Series (and the Switch, and the Playstation 5) would be deeply appreciated by old-school gamers like myself.

There was speculation that the Activision merger would bring more Xbox and Xbox 360 games to the Series, and while I don't think this has a realistic chance of actually happening (when was the last backward compatibility update, anyway? 2019?), I would certainly not mind it happening. In fact, I'd be happy to offer suggestions for Activision-published games that Microsoft could make compatible with its current generation console. How about Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, the parallel universe-hopping action game with four classic Spider-Man voice actors returning to the role? Or what about Blur, the strange but enticing racing game that's a hybrid of Need for Speed and Super Mario Kart? Even better, why not Bloody Roar: Extreme? I've got a physical copy of this ferociously frantic fighter, but I'd love to see it make a comeback on modern consoles, with a sharper resolution and improvements to the already spiffy graphics.

If you're not going to do any of that, at least give us a new Activision Anthology. Heaven knows we've waited long enough for one. 

Semi-Sweet Nothing: Clockwork Aquario

Better late than never. But not
much better.

Westone's Clockwork Aquario is the quintessential arcade game... loud, colorful, and unapologetically dumb. Perhaps a little too dumb, considering that it missed arcades entirely and was instead ported to modern game consoles like the Nintendo Switch. While it's great from a preservation standpoint that Clockwork Aquario was finished and released, the game itself is a distressingly empty experience, even by the standards of a 1994 arcade title, and certainly now, nearly thirty years after Westone started designing it.

As one of three heroes (the distinctly average, verdant-haired Londo, his panty-flashing female counterpart Elle, and a derpy walking scrap pile named Gush), it's up to you to destroy the mechanical island fortress of the sinister, fish-faced Dr. Hangyo. As you might expect from the title, most of your enemies in Clockwork Aquario are robotic sealife... fire-spitting clams, hungry pikes, and balloons bearing Hangyo's Piscean likeness. The balloons are harmless but nevertheless irritating, getting in your way as you try to fight schools of flying fish and hop to nearby platforms.

Clockwork Aquario tries to bring technique to its simple gameplay... punching out a fish stuns it briefly, letting you toss it into clusters of nearby enemies for a big point bonus. Alternately, you can hop on stacks of Hangyo's balloons to reach distant items and further boost your score. The problem is, the collision detection is a little sketchy (prepare to swear as you're somehow injured by the creature you tried to stomp), the sprites are too large for precision platforming, and crowds of monsters guarantee cheap and frequent deaths. You "get" what Westone was trying to accomplish with Clockwork Aquario, but the play mechanics just don't hold together well. You'll think you've got the hang of it, only to credit feed in frustration as the flat level designs become more annoying and you're overwhelmed with fishy foes.

On the plus side, Clockwork Aquario is colorful and cartoony, a pleasant throwback to the good old days of video games when the extreme violence of Mortal Kombat was more the exception than the rule. At the end of every stage, Dr. Hangyo appears in a marine mech, ranging from a shell-clapping otter-bot to a bulbous penguin that can't seem to keep its pants around its waist. (Do penguins even have waists? Talk about mission impossible.) It's a treat for the eyes, but as a game, Clockwork Aquario wouldn't have been good in 1994, and isn't particularly good now. It's one of those coin-ops you would have walked away from after feeding it a handful of quarters, and it's just barely worth the three dollars it costs now. Don't even think of paying the full retail price for this one.

This review was also posted on Cohost and Kbin! Support federated social media, because the corporate stuff sucks.

Video Games? Home Computers? What's the Difference?

People have complained that this generation of game consoles and the past one are too similar to computers... and while both the Xbox Series S/X and the Playstation 5 do indeed use slightly customized x64 computer CPUs, it's important to note that the line dividing home computers and video game systems was blurred from the start.

In the 1970s, technology was still in the early stages of development, and hugely expensive. Consumer electronics like video games were massively primitive to offset those heavy costs. The first home game console was Ralph Baer's Odyssey, not much more than an electronic Etch-A-Sketch with pin jumpers for cartridges and plastic overlays for your television. By the late 1970s, game consoles had improved, but were still hamstrung by limitations. The Atari 2600 had no video RAM of its own, forcing designers to "race the beam" of a television set and draw graphics in a fraction of a second, before the electron beam in the television could make another split-second pass over the display. The Odyssey2 had an appallingly low 64 bytes of RAM... that's not gigs, or megs, or even kilobytes, but 64 bytes (characters), just enough memory to hold a small sentence. The Intellivision's internal clock speed can be measured in mere kilohertz rather than megahertz, resulting in the plodding pace of many of its games.

By the 1980s (especially after the disastrous Atari 2600 ports of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong), players demanded more power from their game consoles, to more accurately capture the elusive arcade experience. Console manufacturers addressed this need by taking the more robust hardware of 1970s personal computers, and turning this withered but still useful technology into next generation game consoles. The successor to the Atari 2600 was the Atari 5200, which used the hardware of the Atari 400 computer as a foundation for its design. Indeed, the two machines are so similar that Atari 400 games can be ported to the Atari 5200 with ease... and they continue to be to this day, to fill gaps in the latter system's anemic library. Atari would return to this well in the late 1980s for the XEGS game system, a console with the added power of the XE computer line and an optional keyboard. (If you called an XEGS "two Atari 5200s duct-taped together," you wouldn't be far off.)

The Atari 5200's more successful competitor, the ColecoVision, was made from off the shelf parts, which means it shares its DNA with a whole lot of 8-bit home computers and game consoles. Its closest cousins are Sega's SG-1000 and the Japanese MSX computer, with Britain's ZX Spectrum hanging on a nearby branch of the family tree. The Bit 2-in-1 Dina, a Taiwanese game console sold by video game mail order company Telegames, offers compatibility with both the ColecoVision and the SG-1000, thanks to the two machines' similar hardware. The MSX is moderately more powerful than the ColecoVision and thus not directly compatible with it, but its games can be run on a ColecoVision with tweaks to their code and the aid of a peripheral called the Super Game Module, designed by Eduardo Mello. The later Sega Master System contains the legacy hardware of these machines along with its own vastly improved graphics processor, and can be coaxed into running games for the MSX, the SG-1000, and even the ColecoVision.

Of course, just because a video game system contains the CPU of a home computer does not mean that the two systems are at all similar. The Sega Genesis has the 16-bit 68000 processor of the Commodore Amiga, but differs from that system in many ways, with less RAM, an entirely different graphics processor, and a sound chip built from the brains of the Sega Master System. Although there were a good many Amiga ports to the Sega Genesis (The Killing Game Show, Risky Woods, Shadow of the Beast, and Lemmings among others), they had to be rewritten from scratch, and were often lesser games than their Amiga counterparts.

On the Nintendo side of the fence, the Super NES contained the Ricoh 65C02, an 16-bit off-shoot of the CPU in the NES. One might think that this would make the Super NES cross-compatible with the Apple IIgs, but one would need to think again, as the Super Nintendo was packed with cutting-edge, custom-designed technology that elevated the system's graphics and sound past its competitors. By contrast, the Apple IIgs used the 65C02 to maintain compatibility with previous systems in the Apple II line. It was still a 16-bit computer that offered improvements over the dusty old Apple IIe you might have used in middle school, but despite using the same CPU, the Apple IIgs doesn't come anywhere near the quality of the Super NES as a games machine.

Future game consoles would also share a genetic link with home computers... the Xbox is essentially an x86 PC tailored for the video game experience, and the GameCube took the PowerPC architecture of late 1990s Macintosh computers and smashed it into a purple lunchbox. Then Nintendo took the same hardware and smashed it into two other shells, with extra RAM, extra cores, and extra... uh, waggle.

So if you were wondering when video game systems suddenly became home computers, the answer is is that it's always been this way. You just didn't notice.

Bon Chance... and Tough Luck! Lock 'n Chase re-emerges on Atari 2600 as LUCKY Chase!

M Network was one of the underachievers among the Atari 2600's many third party developers. As a division of Mattel, the makers of the competing Intellivision, they had no reason to bring their best work to the 2600... and so they very much didn't. Games by M Network were almost certain to be vastly inferior to their Intellivision counterparts, whether it was a sorry home port of Burgertime where everything but the chef and the hot dogs were rectangles, or a conversion of Tron Deadly Discs without precision aiming and the Recognizer battles between stages.

Shown: Lock 'n Chase by M Network. Yeech.

Lock 'n Chase is no exception. The game, originally debuting in arcades as Data East's response to Pac-Man, was functional on the Atari 2600, but squeezed completely dry of its charm. The police officers became men's room signs, the lead character became a featureless hat with feet sticking out of it, and the treasures were turned into striped squares that don't look like something anyone would want to steal. What even are these? Ribbon candies? It's almost as underwhelming as the beige Pop-Tarts that would pop up in the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. No thanks, I think I'll skip breakfast.

If you were a fan of the arcade game, the 2600 version of Lock 'n Chase will leave the same empty feeling in the pit of your stomach that Pac-Man did. Luckily, programmer C Centeno has Quantum Leapt into action, making right what once went wrong with his own port of the game, called Lucky Chase. The title is a bit of a reach (what's so lucky about being chased by cops?) but the game is outstanding. In contrast with the cold and sterile M Network version of Lock 'n Chase, Lucky Chase offers plump, friendly characters dressed in vibrant hues, and looks as much like arcade Lock 'n Chase as you could reasonably expect from the venerable (that means seriously old) Atari 2600.

Now here's C Centeno's conversion.
Okay, now that's more like it! The only way
this could be better is if it wasn't Lock 'n Chase.

It even plays better than M Network's Lock 'n Chase. I'm not big on the door play mechanics (and they didn't thrill me in Exidy's Mouse Trap, either), but when you press the fire button, Lucky drops a door right where and when you want it. Opening and closing doors is a lot twitchier and less reliable in M Network's version of the game... you're more likely to drop two doors in rapid succession or even trap yourself in front of the door, leaving you at the mercy of the cops. If any. (Yay, not so subtle social commentary!)

There may be better ways to play this game (and better maze games than Lock 'n Chase, cough), but on the Atari 2600, it doesn't get any better than Lucky Chase. Kudos to C Centeno for a brilliant port... that'll show stuffy old George Plimpton a thing or three about what this system can do when pushed to its limits!

Riding on the Rim with Grim

As a promotion for the birthday of its purple mascot Grimace, who vanished from the restaurant after the release of the film Super Size Me, McDonald's introduced a berry shake bearing his trademark plum color, along with... a video game? And it's a skateboarding game. Because when you think of totally bodacious, gravity-defying stunts on the half-pipe, braw, you definitely think of a bell-shaped buffoon from a fast food joint.

That helmet somehow makes
Grimace look like a member of Run DMC.

And here's Grimace, in all his inexplicable, cross-promotional glory. Look out, Kool-Aid Man and Cool Spot! There's a new frosty mug in town, and all the boys in the yard are going to want his milkshake! No, really, he has to deliver his purple milkshakes to everybody he knows... on a skateboard. It makes no sense, but after Sneak King, why does anything need to make sense?

This screen is endlessly confusing
for anyone who's actually playing
this on a Game Boy Color.

One fascinating fact about Grimace's Birthday is that although it can be played on a web browser, the code is designed specifically for the Game Boy Color, making it compatible with that system and, through the magic of emulation, practically everything else. Even my Data Frog can play this game, albeit with glitchy text. You've got to wonder why the developers at Krool Toys didn't step up to the big leagues of the Game Boy Advance, but creating Grimace's Birthday for the lower spec Game Boy Color means the game will play on more systems, and the marketing will find more eyeballs.

Beyond that, making Grimace's Birthday for this specific system makes a lot of sense. The Game Boy Color's humble 8-bit graphics make the game seem like it was released at the turn of the century, when handheld technology wasn't quite up to snuff and the towers hadn't fallen yet and Twitter was just a noise birds made and Morgan Spurlock hadn't demolished McDonaldland. 

(Snif. Sorry, I'm getting a little misty eyed over here. I really miss those damn shortbread cookies. You know, the ones with a light citrus flavor, molded into the shape of the McDonaldland characters. Okay, FINE, I'll get back to the game.) 

Like 90% of third party titles for the Game Boy Color, Grimace's Birthday isn't fantastic. However, it's a fun injection of nostalgia, and it's free, so why not indulge? It's certainly healthier than the purple shake, if nothing else.

Oh, by the way! This is important from a historical perspective. Microsoft just pulled the plug on the Xbox One, a machine stabbed in the heart by Don Mattrick and left in a (sales) coma for ten years. Do I regret buying an Xbox One in hindsight? Not really... I'm certainly not as embarrassed by that purchase as the Wii U, Nintendo's most cumbersome game console since the Virtual Boy. Nevertheless, the Xbox One never quite met expectations, limping through the last generation with an unsavory reputation, underwhelming exclusives, and some utterly agonizing load times. I won't miss it, especially since the Xbox Series S is almost 100% compatible, and is much better at being an Xbox One than an actual Xbox One.

The Sega Genesis is also dead... in Brazil. That's after thirty three years of support, and mostly because TecToy ran out of the parts to build them. Luckily, this has absolutely no bearing on the development of Brazilian Mega Drive games like Sunset Riders and Final Fight MD. (Whew.)

The Man Who Erased His Physical Copies

Now you see 'em, soon you won't.
(image from Amazon)
(specifically the HG Wells book The Invisible Man)
(by the way, watch Time After Time. Malcolm
MacDowell is HG Wells, and the guy who played
Sark on Tron is Jack the Ripper. It's great.
Malcolm MacDowell kicks ass.)

Well, that's distressing. Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name (whew), the latest spin-off of the long-running Yakuza series, will be the second major console game to be released without actually being available in stores. Like Alan Wake II, if you want this title, you'll have to get your system online, and be willing to sit through what one presumes will be a lengthy download. Like the fly trapped in the split second before hitting a car's windshield, I don't think I'm going to like what comes next.

I'll be completely honest with you. I've gone the digital route with most of my games from the last two console generations, especially the Switch, where my digital collection far exceeds the games I've got on cartridge. (Plus, the digital games taste better!) At the same time, it's going to be a major blow to preservation efforts. You can't keep a game that exists in the cloud any more than you could clutch a real cloud in a closed fist. Once the servers holding your game are taken down, it's just gone, and you'll have cross your fingers and hope for a remaster. If one ever arrives, and if a completely different design team doesn't completely butcher it. (Cough. Cough. Ahem. Gee, I've got a scratchy and bitchy throat today.)

Yes, this is quite literally a case of Old Man Yells at Cloud. Consarnit.

Speaking of living in the past, I finally bought a ColecoVision power supply to go with the ColecoVision I bought six years ago. This thing is the Voldemort of wall warts; too heavy and gigantic to realistically hang from a wall outlet. If you don't have an extension cable for one of these monsters, you will be deprived of the joys of the Connecticut Leather Company's greatest game console and its wide selection of accurate (heh) arcade conversions until you get one.

The ColecoVision's default color set is,
by my humble estimation, a big 'ol bag of barf.
It's like a bag of Bertie Botts jellybeans, except
nearly all of them are some variation of pine
cleaner, phlegm, or earwax.
(image from AtariAge)

You may note a hint of reluctance at getting this system up and running. Well, the first thing is that I'll probably also have to install an A/V mod, as a standard RF signal just doesn't cut it anymore... especially not on modern flat-screen television sets. The second things is, well... my heart belongs to the Atari 5200. It's a big, clumsy, wrongheaded mess of a game system that saw the yawning gap of oblivion and screamed "FULL SPEED AHEAD!," but I have a weakness for these kinds of sad sack consoles. My very first system was an Odyssey2, I've got both a Saturn and a Dreamcast, and I was on the Neo-Geo Pocket train while everyone else was riding the Game Boy Color express. They're the little PC Engines that couldn't, but you have to admire how hard they try. (Except the Odyssey2; that was clearly goldbricking.)

May Showers (quick thoughts)

Let me just jot something into this space before the month ends. First, I saw Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Fun movie... loud movie. 

(twists a pinky in his ear for a couple of seconds)

It seems like the Guardians, or at least the original cast, have retired, and that this was the final chapter of the series. Spiffy way to go out, I'd say. Brought back fond memories of Secret of NIMH, an earlier flick about genetically augmented woodland creatures. I'm not sure why anyone thought it would be a good idea to put wheels on a walrus (making... a wheel-rus?), but I guess I don't have the creative vision the High Evolutionary does.

What else? Sony just announced a handheld, Project Q, but it's not an independently operating handheld with its own software... more of a peripheral for the Playstation 5. Specifically, it's a controller with a screen in the center that lets you play console games in the absence of a television set. Yes, Sony is imitating the magnificent success of the Wii U, ten years later. Uh, good luck with that? While you're scrounging through Nintendo's garbage can for ideas, they also had this neat all-red virtual reality headset you might want to check out.

One other thing. I'm not playing the Data Frog as much as I did when I first got it, but it's still nice to be able to pick it up, switch it on, and play a Genesis game ten seconds later. Doesn't matter which one... maybe I want to play the Final Fight demo, or Space Invaders '91, or Bubsy, for some unfathomable reason. It's right there waiting for me on my couch, and in a matter of seconds, I'm playing whatever I feel like from the late 1980s to early 1990s, without sitting through obnoxious logos or wading through a counter-intuitive interface, and without tying up my computer. It's far from the best third-party handheld out there, but the Data Frog gets you pretty far on a tight budget.

And one OTHER other thing! The Greek homebrew Tetris for the Game Boy Advance, Apotris, is about ten thousand times better than the official Tetris game released for that system in the United States, and you really ought to get a copy for yourself. Tetris Holdings threatened legal action to stop the creator of Apotris from selling the game on itch.io, and you should know from past experience that a Tetris game Henk Rogers doesn't want you to play is the one you should be playing.

Cream of the Crap: The Data Frog SF 2000

Like Big the Cat, this Froggy is slow and simple,
but strangely endearing.
(image from NME. I don't recommend shopping
for minions at this place, by the way.
Total thumbs down, F---.)

The Data Frog SF 2000 is an impossibly cheap handheld game system sold on AliExpress, which you probably already heard about elsewhere. It's also not very good, as you probably already guessed from the price. Here's the thing, though... for its price, it might be just good enough.

Let me provide some context here. I've been involved in gaming for quite a while, at least forty years by my estimation, and I have seen some handhelds. Handhelds with smeary black and white displays, handhelds you can't see at all without standing directly in front of Green Lantern's lantern, handhelds that burn through batteries in a couple of hours, handhelds with miserably small software libraries... and every single one of them cost way more than the SF 2000 does.

Frankly, handheld gaming was a little crap until the Game Boy Advance SP shed some much needed (front)light on the subject. If the SF 2000 is what passes for crap twenty years later, it's clear that handheld technology has made colossal leaps and bounds in that span of time. You're getting a full color screen at 240p resolution, an analog thumbstick, a rechargeable battery, and thousands of games spread across multiple systems. Do you know what you could get for $19.99 back in the 1990s? Allow me to show you!

It never fails to infuriate me when that hand throws a Super Nintendo cartridge in the trash. At least it wasn't Space Megaforce... then I'd have to take a hostage.

Where was I? The commercial says it all... the Pro 200 is a handheld that plays eighty variations of legally-distinct-from-Tetris and other insultingly simple diversions, presented with the blandest, most all-purpose graphics you've ever seen in a video game. Watch with bemusement as a cluster of blocks that vaguely resembles a race car weaves through blocky traffic! Gasp in dismay when you realize every game uses the same set of blocks, making even the Odyssey2 and its army of white robots look versatile by comparison! Reach for the phone to call your bank and ask them to reverse the charges on this purchase!

You just can't
beat this price on
a handheld game
system, at least
without a five
finger discount.

It's got a buttload of flaws (you guys seriously made a handheld that looks like a Super Nintendo controller but can't handle most Super Nintendo games?), but I can't bring myself to hate the SF 2000. It's not only leagues better than el cheapo handhelds from the 20th century, but it's superior to other twenty dollar portables available now. Stop by a Five Below if you happen to have one nearby and grab yourself one of their handhelds. You'll be getting a Famiclone with a mealy looking screen and hundreds of NES games, ranging from old favorites with the serial numbers scratched off to new titles seemingly designed at gunpoint. If you don't like playing them, you can always take solace in the fact that the designers didn't like making them, either.

The SF 2000 is better than that. It's better than the Game Gear clone AtGames sold in dollar stores, it's better than many of the other handhelds AliExpress sells at cutthroat prices, and it's certainly better than Tiger's LCD handhelds, which recently made a puzzling comeback. The SF 2000 plays roughly half of its thousands of games pretty well, with the Neo-Geo and CPS2 being standouts. It's possible to add even more games, but it's going to be hard to find anything missing from the system's immense library. The control is adequate, with a lackluster D-pad but an analog stick that works wonders in fighting games. The NES, Genesis, and two flavors of Game Boy run perfectly well, although you'll want to run this script to smooth out the kinks in the key mapping. Nobody should ever have to jump with a shoulder button... that's just inhuman.

What else? Hackers have already made in-roads to making the SF 2000 a better experience, and its mass adoption coupled with newly discovered information about its processor suggests that a custom firmware (with support for more systems and better emulation for the handful available) could be possible. Even if that doesn't happen, you're still getting decent emulation of NES, Genesis, and yes, even Capcom arcade games, and you're getting all that for twenty dollars. It's not hard to find better handhelds than the SF 2000, but good luck finding one cheaper.

Is This the End of Zombie Xbox?!

Atari and Bubsy, a match made in... uh, what's
slightly less severe than Hell? No, purgatory
is too cushy. How about a match made in
New Jersey?
(image from AtariAge)

Just a quick update. Atari has gotten increasingly aggressive about its IP acquisitions... it recently bought Accolade, creators of the annoyingly omnipresent Bubsy series. So we'll be stuck with the quipping furball for at least another twenty or thirty years. Everybody thank Atari, now! You all know which finger to use.

One acquisition of damaged goods Atari might want to consider in the future is Microsoft's Xbox division, because things haven't been going too well for it lately. Xbox CEO Phil Spencer (in the middle of his awkward transition from dudebro to dadbod) has openly admitted that the brand isn't performing to expectations, with sales of the stupidly named Xbox Series dragging well behind those of its competitor the Playstation 5. 

Well, let's look at how things currently stand for the Xbox brand. Redfall was a critical flop, the planned Activision merger seems to have cratered, Microsoft is selling games on rival consoles, the low-spec Xbox Series S is being sold at a hefty discount to Verizon phone service subscribers when it's not given away outright... I guess Phil is just admitting what we can all see with our eyes.

Perhaps I'm potentially being too pessimistic and presumptuous (wipes spittle off his screen), but if we've reached the end of the line for the Xbox brand, I have one simple request... give us one last firmware update that gives us back User Window Programs! I could easily see using my Xbox Series S for at least another decade if I could use it as a cheap emulation box. 

(...at the very least, don't take away Dev Mode, because I paid for that crap. Once I've put money on something, it's mine. You'll have to dig up my coffin and pry it loose from my corpse's calcified clutches.)