ARC-S Odyssey

We're not going to talk about the thing. The thing bothers me beyond measure, and I feel like we've lost a little of ourselves by making that thing a permanent thing. But like I said, I'm not discussing the thing. The ugly, rotting thing that grows like a malignant tumor at the base of our neck, sapping away our vital fluids and our will to live. That thing. Not talking about that. No.

The Anbernic RG-S uses the same clear plastic
design as the Skeleton Saturn, released only
in Japan. It's easy enough to ignore if you're
not down with the late 1990s, iMac
aesthetics... you're just going to look
at the screen anyway.
(image from Anbernic)
(which sounds like a celebrity coupling.
You know, like Bran-gelina or Ben-nifer.)

 

But hey, I got one of those fancy-schmancy aftermarket retro handhelds! It's the Anbernic RG ARC S, and it looks a heck of a lot like a Sega Saturn controller with a screen built into it. So it bookmarks well with my Data Frog SF2000, which looks just like a Super NES handheld... that inconveniently has trouble playing games for the system that inspired it.

Yeah, there are problems with the ARC S. It could have been just about perfect for a Sega lovin' guy like myself, but the hardware (the RK3266, which doesn't pack the necessary muscle to handle anything past the original Playstation, and the Dreamcast at a stretch) coupled with a trio of interfaces, each uniquely annoying to use, combine to keep this from totally obsoleting my previous emulation handheld, the Playstation Vita.

First disappointment: It plays Saturn games. Kind of. If "kind of" is as much enthusiasm as you can muster for the Sega Saturn, you'll be happy enough, but for those of us who made it our game console of choice in the late 1990s, the performance offered on the ARC S just won't cut it. Games that only need the 2D half of the Saturn's brain will work more often than not, and you might even shake a good game of Bulk Slash out of it... by the way, if you've never seen that one, imagine a 3D hybrid of Virtual On and Desert Strike and you're on the right track. 

On the flip side, even some of the 2D games run slowly (Blast Wind) or have weird broken graphics*, and 3D games are going to run a little slowly, if they run at all. Even Tempest 2000 is a big nope on this system, despite its seemingly humble hardware demands. My recommendation is if you can find the same version of the game for another system (Playstation for the 3D games, and Neo-Geo or CPS2 for the 2D games), play that instead and just pretend it's a Saturn game. With Capcom's Marvel vs. series, the arcade games are pretty much indistinguishable from the arcade ports anyway.

* EDIT: I mistakenly said Tryrush Deppy had broken graphics. Actually, that one has aggravating bouts of slowdown... it's Purikura Daisakusen that has issues with graphics vanishing at random. Apologies for that.

Dreamcast and PSP fare better, but your mileage may vary. You can get a pretty good game of Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX out of the ARC thanks to the button arrangement, although you'll need to give the PPSSPP emulator a good whack upside the head and move a few buttons around for a more arcade-like experience. Capcom vs. SNK 2 on Dreamcast is practically perfect, with Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Mortal Kombat Gold, and Under Defeat close behind, but Dead or Alive 2 is too slow to play comfortably, and the port of Samurai Shodown: Tenkaichi for the Atomiswave runs almost comically badly. (There are better SamSho games; play one of those instead. Not the third one.) 

Overall, Dreamcast borders on very good... not quite there, but within grasping distance. PSP is not as impressive, but 2D games and some 3D titles won't give you much trouble. Resist the urge to play the God of Wars or the Burnouts, though.

Let me touch on the other problem... there are three interfaces available for the ARC S, including the painfully plain stock OS offered by default, the more attractive but hardware constraining Retro Arena, and Rocknix (nee JelOS), which I hated with a bitter passion in the beginning but adjusted to after putting both it and all my games on one SD card. There are two SD card ports on the ARC S; Rocknix is supposed to read them both but only seems to recognize the first. Weird quirks like this and inconsistent button mapping (A is advance and B is back, until it isn't. Good luck figuring out which is which and when!) are profoundly aggravating, but it runs arcade games faster than Retro Arena and looks a fair bit nicer than the stock OS.

Beyond the gripes, the ARC S is a pretty good system for a pretty specific audience. Most players have fallen out of love with Sega's hardware design in the twenty plus years since it left the hardware business, but I still carry a torch for it, using Sega or Sega-like controllers on any console or computer that will accept them. A floating D-pad on the left and six buttons on the right is just how I like it, and Anbernic left plenty of room in the middle of the ARC S for a crisp, colorful screen. It's not on par with the OLED in the original Vita, but you won't find much else to complain about, whether you're playing fast-paced 3D shooters (Ikaruga, Under Defeat) or arcade classics (Donkey Kong, Black Tiger, and the Metal Slugs).

The RK3266 isn't quite beefy enough for Saturn and some PSP games, but for everything before that, fehgeddabawdit. The overwhelming majority of MAME and Final Burn NEO games run beautifully*, a boon for arcade addicts, and game systems that use the same 4:3 aspect ratio as the ARC S, particularly the NES, Super NES, Turbografx-16, and Genesis, look terrific, showing off each console's respective strengths and quirks. Even the relatively humble ColecoVision looks grand... I took my game Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons for a spin on the ARC-S after hammering out an issue with a missing BIOS, and it's never looked better, putting my actual ColecoVision's meager composite video to shame.

* not on Retro Arena. Kindly fix this.

If you're into 1980s and 1990s gaming, and prefer the feel of the D-pad and buttons on later Sega game consoles, the ARC-S gets an easy recommendation. It's not perfect, and it's aggravating how close to perfect it would be with a better user interface and a faster processor, but Anbernic is definitely on the right track with the ARC-S. (Just get Saturn games running on the follow-up. Running properly, not kinda sorta running.)

All the fixins... or, Happy Coleco-ween!

Hello, all you happy gamers. Jess here. I'm sorry it's been a while since you've heard from me... I'm just trying to hold myself together during a stressful election. Judging from my prolonged absence, you can already tell that's been a losing battle.

When I'm not clutching my chest from heart palpitations and chewing my fingers down to the knuckle, I've been distracting myself with system repairs and modifications. I've been wrestling with this damn ColecoVision for the better part of the year, but after multiple modifications (and an equal number of maddening malfunctions), I think I've finally tamed this wild beast. Behold!

Note that the stock power switch, a flimsy slider infamous for its frustrating flakiness (here's a tissue for all that spittle, by the way), has been replaced with a manly red rocker, with solid construction and a satisfying tactile response. Flip the system on and you'll hear a loud click that resonates through the ColecoVision, making it clear to both it and you that the console is, in fact, on. 

Unfortunately, the switch didn't fit in the crappy stock switch's hole, forcing me to open it up with power tools (ho ho ho). After getting a little too aggressive with said power tools, I had to repair the oversized gap with hot glue and melted plastic before the switch would fit tightly in the system's body. So the ColecoVision isn't exactly stock from the factory, but it WORKS, and that's what counts. When you start a game, it actually starts, instead of barfing random tiles all over your screen, like it did here...

Pardon the finger. I think I earned that profanity, considering that the ColecoVision prevented me from testing my other homebrew gaming gadget.

 

This is my custom made ColecoVision joystick, built from the remains of a Hori Playstation 3 stick, a handful of arcade buttons, and the EZ Coleco joystick adapter from EdLaddin. Twenty five dollars gets you a circuit board and a membrane keypad, which let you turn an unloved game controller thrown into the back of a closet into something you might actually use.

No lie, I hated this joystick when I first bought it. It was better for fighting games than the standard Playstation 3 Dual Shock, but not nearly enough to make it worth dragging this behemoth out for a couple of merely adequate games of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 or Capcom vs. SNK 2. In keeping with Hori tradition, the buttons don't have micro switches, but rather smoosh into rubber pads set over a circuit board, like an oversized joypad. 

I'll just state for the record that this is a lousy way to design what's advertised as an arcade joystick. Mad Catz never did this. ASCII didn't do this. Pelican didn't do this for its high end products, even though they looked like this. Even my crappy iCade, designed as an accessory for Apple tablets, doesn't do this. It's a little insulting that Hori thought it was fine and dandy to put membrane contacts in its arcade joysticks, especially considering their reputations as better than average third party controllers. Apparently nobody who buys Hori products has ever compared them to real arcade hardware, because brother, that's not what they're giving you. 

Luckily for me, the shell of Hori's joystick can be repurposed with a little drilling (keep your stick on the ice). Competing joysticks are said to be more mod-friendly, and it was certainly no picnic drilling a gap for the membrane keypad's ribbon cable, but I managed... and with all my fingers intact! Good, because I'll need one of those if the stupid system doesn't work.

Now I've got a perfectly decent ColecoVision joystick; one that brings some measure of arcade quality to an experience Coleco marketed as the "arcade experience at home." It's doubled my scores in DK Arcade, the sensational conversion of Donkey Kong by Opcode Games that should have been what ColecoVision owners had gotten right out of the box. It's made games like Frenzy that used to be a struggle with the stock controller a joy. It's still not the best arcade joystick I currently own- the Street Fighter IV stick with Sanwa parts that I bought from ShopGoodwill still wears that crown- but it's better than any ColecoVision controller that existed in 1983. It's not even a contest.

Oh yeah, I've done some mods not specifically related to the ColecoVision, although they're not ones I would have willingly made. A couple months ago, the Seagate Game Drive I had plugged into my Xbox Series decided that it was tired of living (it must have been following the election, too...) and randomly disconnected from the system, before refusing to work with it entirely. I had all my Xbox 360 games on you, you bastard! You want me to re-download fifteen years of games, on the microscopic internal storage Microsoft gives you by default? Oh no, Mr. Seagate. You will live again... even if I have to resurrect you as a zombie. It's bad enough that I lost all my games... I'm not paying another sixty bucks for another damn hard drive!

The reaper shall be left wanting! In the name of
all that is thrifty, you shall live again!
(image from Collider)
(yes, that's the smarmy alien who gets
killed a lot on Deep Space Nine)

 

So I took that drive out of its enclosure (and the Seagate people don't make this easy, believe me...), formatted it, and popped it into another enclosure I had lying around. Crash boom bang, the drive worked in its new home, and has continued to work for over a month. My best guess is that the connectors inside Seagate's enclosure got all melty when set atop the Xbox Series, but the actual hard drive survived the heat. One might suggest that Seagate should take these issues into account during the design process, rather than just shipping them out to stores as ticking time bombs, but whatever. As long as the drive keeps working, and as long as I'm not forking over another fistful of money, I'll live. 

(If the damn election doesn't kill me.)

This Connecticut Leather Chafes!

I owned an Atari 5200 years before I had a ColecoVision, and the 5200 never gave me the kinds of problems the ColecoVision has. This machine may be the preferred console of the early 1980s for most gamers, but thanks to its substandard build quality, the ColecoVision is a system that quite literally hasn't aged well. 

The stuff of nightmares. Yes, the 5200
controller is bad, but the ColecoVision
controller isn't necessarily less bad.
(image from Wikipedia)

The first things to go are the controller interface chips. The tiniest static discharge (say, from unplugging the awful stock controller and replacing it with something that doesn't prompt white hot rage) will damage them, affecting the system's ability to read any controllers. Sure you can replace them, but removing calcified components from the ColecoVision mainboard is a massive pain, and will likely result in damaged traces which could keep the system from functioning at all.

Next to meet the Grim Reaper is the power switch, which eventually fails due to wear and the industrial grease inside drying into clumps of oily goo. If your power switch no longer works, you're not playing ColecoVision games, necessitating a replacement. You used to be able to run down to the local Radio Shack and get an improved one (some even have lights inside, a welcome addition to a system with no LED indicators), but without a ready source for electronic components, your options are limited to Amazon and eBay. Have fun waiting for them to arrive.

Garbled graphics and faulty chips!
That's how you know it's a Coleco!
(image from AtariAge)

Oh, but there's more! The ColecoVision is known for failing video RAM. If you don't have working VRAM, you get a garbled up mess of a picture, not far removed from an NES game with dirty cartridge pins. Or because the pins inside the NES are bent out of shape and no longer make proper contact. Or because you didn't stack an NES game on top of the first one to hold it in place. Or because you coughed too loudly, offending the NES. (Okay, so the ColecoVision isn't the only system with aggravating hardware issues.)

Forty years after its release, the ColecoVision is an endless parade of hardware faults. I suspect we're going to see that happen to a LOT of game systems in the immediate future. Hell, the ColecoVision's second cousin, the Game Gear, is almost impossible to find in working condition thirty years later, thanks to leaking capacitors. Sega's not repairing that crap for you twenty years after it dropped out of the console race, so it's on you to fix the problems... if the capacitor acid hasn't already burned its way through vital circuits.

I'm painfully reminded of the scene from
Cowboy Bebop when Spike and Jet retrieve
ancient 20th century technology. Hey, I
remember when that stuff just came out,
and- uh, never mind. Forget I said that.
(image from Overthinking Cowboy Bebop)

Then there are the game systems that came from the factory broken, like the early Xbox 360 with its red light of death, and the Playstation 2 with its disc read errors, forcing you to open the system and turn the potentiometer in just the right amount, so you can play Chulip instead of God of War. At least the ColecoVision had the courtesy to die long after it was discontinued by the manufacturer... Xbox 360 and Playstation 2 games were still on store shelves when my two systems took a dirt nap.

Remember when you were younger, and you couldn't fathom these cutting edge systems breaking down from old age? Hell, I couldn't imagine playing The Legend of Zelda long enough to wear out the internal save battery, yet here we are, in an era of bit rot, dead batteries, leaking capacitors, and optical lenses that have developed cataracts. What was science-fiction in 1990s gaming fanzines has become a painful reality. That game system you cherished so as a child will probably die before you do.

Welcome to the future of gaming, ladies and gentlemen. It's been hell on the past.

The Tower of Retro-Babble: A Mysterious Annex

Remember that Namco Museum mini-cabinet I hacked last year, and became worryingly obsessed with over the next couple of months? I don't play it all that much anymore, but sometimes I'll take it out for shiggles and get in a few games of some arcade obscurity I haven't played in years.

Tucked away in a dusty corner of the cabinet's system menu are the most obscure titles of all... those non-hits from tiny companies that flashed into existence in the blink of an eye, then flickered out almost as quickly. These are the orphans of the arcade scene, frequently denied greater fame on home consoles. They were destined to remain forever trapped in laundromats, 7-11s, and truck stops... or at least until pop culture vultures like Piko Interactive swooped down to pick at whatever meat was left clinging to their bones.

Most of these games are easy enough to leave in the past, but there are a small handful of titles that deserve your attention, even in 2024. Read on to find out which of these lesser known arcade games shouldn't be skipped the next time you fire up your favorite emulation box.

ANTEATER
Tago Electronics
Found: on the arcade game show Starcade

It's a long way down this
anthill, but those scrumptious
ant queens are worth the risk.

Hot on the heels of another video game about a weird mammal, Kangaroo, comes this title about the big-nosed, bushy-tailed, ant-oholic anteater. The title character sticks his considerable snout into a anthill, and pulls out anything six-legged and tasty with a tongue that the player controls. You can even eat those juicy beetles if you attack them with the tip of the tongue... just don't let them touch anything else. Hold the fire button to make a tactical retreat and slurp the tongue back into the anteater's snout, but don't dawdle! When the sun falls and night arrives, so do the poisonous spiders...

Anteater is bit like Pac-Man, and a bit like the cell phone favorite Snake, but a whole lot more like Oil's Well for the ColecoVision, along with its multimedia-flavored reboot on home computers ten years later. It's anyone's guess as to which game came first, but Anteater is a perfectly palatable take on the formula. Nothing about the graphics or sound will blow your mind, but Anteater doesn't need to make a strong first impression on the player. Like Tetris and Sokoban, Anteater is more about flexing your neurons than delighting the senses.

CHINESE HERO
Taiyo Systems
Found: at a rustic theme park near the Illinois border

I want to preface this review with a note about where I found this game. My family stumbled upon a woodsy theme park somewhere in Illinois, with log cabin buildings and that crowd-pleasin', pants-wettin' attraction, the flume ride. 

The digitized screams at least
give Chinese Heroes the
ambiance of an epic kung fu
movie. You won't find much
of the excitement, though.

The experience probably wouldn't have made much of an impact on me if it hadn't been for the arcade. Tucked away in one of the buildings was a wonderfully random assortment of lesser known titles... Road Runner, by Atari Games! Us vs. Them, by Mylstar Electronics! Bank Panic, by Sega! As a young arcade nerd eager to make new discoveries, this place was the Holy Grail, the Maltese Falcon, and the Klotman Diamond all rolled into one.

One game that stood out even among these oddballs was Chinese Hero, by Taiyo Systems. It looked an awful lot like an NES game I'd rented a year before, and that wasn't a coincidence... turns out Chinese Hero was the arcade antecedent of Kung Fu Heroes. It also just so happens that Taiyo Systems was the previous title of the company we now know as Culture Brain. Sorry, I could never get past that name... it sounds like an unsanitary lab experiment gone horribly wrong.

Anyway! Chinese Hero feels like a top-down take on Super Mario Bros., with your two... uh, Chinese heroes punching blocks to earn power ups and taking down wandering enemies by stomping on their heads. One could give the game credit for its forward-thinking design, but one could just as easily give Chinese Heroes an X scrawled in red pen for its nebulous collision detection and game rules that are hard to grasp. Things seem to happen at the CPU's whim, whether it's a bonus stage seemingly served up at random or a mummified monster that chases you around the playfield. The bandaged behemoth can be beaten, but it takes many "tumbling kicks" to cut it down to size, and you risk getting stomped flat every time you try. What's safe to touch on this thing? What will I touch when I finally land from this Moon Sault jump? You spins the wheel and you take your chances.

Clearly, Culture Brain was going somewhere with this game's design, but Chinese Heroes spends so much time wandering around aimlessly that it never finds its destination, or a justification for its existence. If you're looking to scratch an itch for kung fu fightin', leave this one behind and take the high road (namely, the Shaolin's Road) instead.

CRAZY KONG
Falcon
Found: in a convenience store a stone's throw from Mackinac Island
(and also your nightmares)

These days we have so much technology that the excess fills up closets, garages, and eventually landfills as e-waste. That wasn't always the case, though! In 1982, the hardware used in arcade games was expensive, and shortages would force developers to cut corners. Take Crazy Kong, for example. When Donkey Kong became a smash hit, Nintendo couldn't make enough cabinets to satisfy demand, and turned to external developer Falcon to fill in the gaps. (Falcon. A "fly by night" company if ever there was one. Heh.)

Falcon's solution was to port Donkey Kong to the older, less sophisticated Crazy Climber hardware, and the end result was one of the most deeply unsettling video games of the early 1980s. You don't notice it so much when you're a kid, banging away at a cabinet with the volume turned down in the corner of a dimly lit party store. However, with the benefit of MAME and sufficiently loud speakers, you quickly realize that Crazy Kong is the Black Mirror version of Donkey Kong... familiar, yet disturbingly wrong in so many ways.

What's wrong with this picture?
Just about everything, really, but
especially "Crazy Kong's"
head twisted in the opposite
direction.

The music in the introduction has taken on a discordant edge, and the animation of Donkey- er, Crazy Kong carrying Pauline to the top of the skyscraper feels... off. Then the game begins, and you notice the pleasantly springy "boing" of Mario's jump has been replaced with Crazy Climber's harsh, squeaky "wi'yah!" Crazy Kong doesn't grab barrels and throw them at you... they just pass through him, as if he willed them into existence. I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of them roll out of his butt. Pauline seems to float a couple pixels above where she's set (she must have learned that trick from fellow distressed damsel Princess Peach...), and starbursts that appear when barrels are struck with a hammer hang in the air long after they should have vanished.

This comedy of terrors continues as you progress, from a stitched-together cement factory to the final confrontation against a Kong drawn wrong. Loosen all the rivets holding the girders together and Crazy Kong plummets to the ground, snapping his neck on impact. As much as he would like to join him in the sweet release of death, the mutant Mario is denied his own escape from this tortured existence.

The whole experience is best described as Donkey Kong on meth... sure, it's the same guy you've known since you were kids, but he's missing a lot of teeth, he hasn't eaten for days, and he can't stop shaking, because he can feel Death's skeletal hand tightening on his shoulder. The reunion is a little nostalgic, but mostly just depressing.

DR. MICRO
Sanritsu
Found: In MAME

This is the factory where Dr. Micro
builds his robot army. Better
grab that gun on the way to the
top floor... some of these robots
have already been assembled,
and they're the kind that shoot
rocket powered fists from
their arms.

Nope, I never found this in a real-life arcade. That's a shame, as it's a flawed but refreshing take on the Donkey Kong formula, with wildly different stages and objectives. The first stage of the game has you leaping on platforms suspended over water, fighting animated beakers. The second stage lets you catch a ride on bubbles, which carry you to the top of the screen and eventually an open air vent. This leads to the third and final stage, where Dr. Micro schemes to take over the world with a militia of mass manufactured mechanical men. (Say that five times fast!) This level feels the most like Donkey Kong, with your headphone-donning hero weaving his way through fiery forges, stacks of conveyor belts, and crushing hydraulic presses on his way to face the mad scientist.

It had no hope of challenging Donkey Kong as the king of fixed screen platformers, but Dr. Micro manages to keep pace with the lesser games in the genre. It's light, breezy fun, and a lot less punishing than Donkey Kong's disappointing sequel.

DRAGON UNIT
Athena
Found: In a bowling alley somewhere in central Michigan

Huh huh. Huh huh huh. "Dragon Unit." Okay, I got that out of my system. Carry on.

Dragon Eunuch is more like.

Dragon Unit is probably better known to NES owners as Castle of Dragon, a clunky and linear action game starring an armor-clad knight. The arcade game is pretty much the same... yet also pretty different. The level designs are heavily altered, with the action sometimes taking place on two planes, and the graphics have received a 16-bit touch up, but beyond that the two games share an unmistakable family resemblance. They're brothers in jank.

The arcade version of Dragon Unit isn't an especially good game, with a constipated lead character who's got all the jumping prowess of a woolly mammoth trapped in ice. As you might imagine, this becomes a bit of a problem in the platforming heavy stages, with footholds suspended over enough spikes to give Mega Man a nervous breakdown. Your hapless hero also has a nasty habit of sponging up damage from the many monsters in his path. You don't get so much as a single frame of invulnerability after being hit, resulting in dozens of lost lives and nearly as many lost quarters. Show me someone who can beat this game on a single credit, and I'll show you a liar.  

If there's anything that can be said in Dragon Unit's favor, it's that it's a boldly tasteless video game, rivaling even the legendarily tacky Time Killers and NARC with enemies that explode into splashes of blood and the incessant wail of heavy metal guitar riffs put on infinite loop. It's almost worth sticking around just to watch the car crash. Just play Dragon Unit in an emulator with one finger perched on the 5 key... otherwise, this game will send you to the poorhouse by the time the credits roll.

EYES
Digitrex Techstar
Found: At a bowling alley in picturesque Lake Odessa
(Be sure to stop at the nearby lake to check out the swans!)

Eyes is a provincial favorite, most popular in my home state of Michigan. That's where Roogie Elliot (...Roogie?) earned the game's highest recorded score back in 1982, a score that has yet to be topped forty years later.

You might call this a vision quest.

I've played on the same Eyes cabinet Roogie used when he stopped by Lake Odessa fourteen years ago, in a publicity stunt for the local arcade. Most likely, it was also the same cabinet Elliot played when he first got that record-breaking high score in the 1980s. It ain't much, but it's as close to a brush with video game history as you're likely to get that far from Tokyo and Silicon Valley.

Anyway. Eyes is a more aggressive take on maze games like Pac-Man, with your disturbingly fleshy eyeball firing optic blasts at pulsing shapes. Clear the screen of these colorful doo-hickeys and you advance to the next stage... but be wary of rival eyes, who chase you through the maze and fire lasers the moment you wander into their field of view!

It isn't up to par with the best games in this genre, but Eyes is at least as good as some of Pac-Man's ill-advised sequels and spin-offs. The emphasis on firing gives the gameplay the urgency of a wild west shoot out... will you have the reflexes to pick off that eyeball coming around the corner, or is there too much shot-absorbing clutter in the way to take that risk? There's been worse hooks in maze games. I'd take this over a green puffball who steals all your food, or earning your energizers from the world's most barren pinball table.

THE GLOB
Epos Corporation
Found: At a bowling alley hidden somewhere in Michigan
(See a pattern?)

Oh boy, have I got a story about this one. I found The Glob at a bowling alley deep in the heart of the mitten state. It had an impressively broad selection of arcade titles, ranging from Popeye to Big Run: The Paris-Dakar Rally to Time Pilot '84. And then there was The Glob. The game wasn't working quite right, set to free play with a level skip available to players. After a few underwhelming games, I complained to the guy repairing the machines that The Glob was almost as fun as a mouth full of mucus. He must have agreed, because soon afterward, he tore the PCBs and wires out of the cabinet, like the entrails of an unlucky Mortal Kombat opponent. "Fatality," indeed.

Here's a game in desperate
need of the MST3K treatment.

My big mouth cost me free access to an arcade machine, but when the machine in question was The Glob, it's hard to get all that upset about it. Put simply, this game sucks. Put more verbosely, The Glob brings elements of Elevator Action and Pac-Man together in an awkward hybrid that looks like early IBM PC shareware. The jiggling Jello mold in the game's title presses buttons to call down elevators, then rides them up to gobble the fruit on every floor. When violently jittering creatures like pigs, frogs, and crocodiles approach you (possibly to ask for more crack), H.G. Blob sticks to the ceiling, then drops down on their heads for an acid-filled ambush. You don't want to stick a spoon into this Jello mold, no matter how much fruit it's got floating around inside it. You'll wind up with one less spoon, and possibly three less fingers.

I was going somewhere with this... oh yeah, The Glob sucks. I said that earlier, but it's a point worth belaboring. It's kind of playable, but it's also alarmingly unprofessional for an arcade game, with the most abrasive sound effects this side of a construction site. Worst of all, The Glob was the most successful of Epos Corporation's games. You should see the unholy crap they made on a bad day. 

LIZARD WIZARD
Digitrex Techstar
Found: At a mini golf place set squarely between Grand Ledge and Lansing

A wizard equipped with a
jet pack and a laser gun. Uh,
just go with it.

"Lizard Wizard" sounds like a fictional video game you might see as a plot point in a sitcom, like Bonestorm or Space Suckers or Escape from the Big Apple ("look out, Dad, it's nickel beer day!"). I assure you, though, it's quite real... whether you like it or not.

Imagine Joust, except instead of a knight astride a surprisingly aerodynamic ostrich, you're a wizard held aloft by a jet pack. (Who wrote this game, an eight year old? Might as well throw in some pirates, ninjas, and robots while you're at it.) Instead of dropping on your foes to kill them, you shoot them with a ray gun, and instead of a menacing pit of lava, there's a volcano that spews chunks of molten rock everywhere. The stage objectives are muddled, the graphics are underwhelming for its 1985 vintage, and the game struggles to find a hook that just never materializes. Unlike the previously mentioned sitcom games, Lizard Wizard exists... it's just hard to understand why.

META FOX
Jordan
Found: At a truck stop perched on the Michiana border

The soundtrack does a
lot of heavy lifting for
this otherwise ordinary
shoot 'em up.

With its screaming J-punk soundtrack, mid-shelf quality visuals, and generic yet comfortably familiar gameplay, Jordan's Meta Fox is as white trashy as a Japanese shooter can get. No wonder I found it at a truck stop on the edge of the Michigan-Indiana border.

Meta Fox strikes a middle ground between 1943 and Raiden, with your late 20th century warplane fending off tanks and swarms of enemy aircraft. Take down a bullet resistant helicopter or blast open specially marked ground targets, and you're awarded with power ups, screen-clearing bombs, and auto-fire, which saves a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on your fingers.

Eventually, you'll encounter a boss, and the already intense music switches to a performance of "Lonely Boy," with piercing vocals and guitars that could shred the hide off a rhinoceros. It's completely ridiculous, but admittedly kind of thrilling... and it must have made one hell of an impression on players in 1989, when ROM space was precious and couldn't be wasted on such frivolities as music with digitized voice and realistic instruments.

Meta Fox is completely unremarkable in most respects, but it's comfort food for less invested shoot 'em up fans who don't want to creep their way through dense bullet patterns. It's sometimes so easy that it borders on insulting... but that soundtrack is such a guilty pleasure, you won't care that this fox's bark is worse than its bite.

NEW YORK! NEW YORK!
Sigma (not the indestructible robot with the buttchin)
Found: That very same bowling alley in Lake Odessa. Have you seen the swans yet? Just don't get too close... they're swans.

New York! New York! comes from Gottlieb and perennial bunter Sigma, which gave us video game non-classics like Shadow Blasters for the Sega Genesis and R2D-Tank on the Emerson Arcadia. Yes, that's the name. R2D-Tank. There have been worse titles for games featuring armored military vehicles... how does Tanks But No Tanks grab you?

In the US version of the game,
the mothership dares you to
shoot at it, as if its pilot was
a former dunk tank clown. It's
just a dollar for three balls!
Let's see what you got, punk!

Back to New York! New York! It's as generic as a fixed screen shooter gets, with a conga line of UFOs (sometimes literally the word "UFO," in the shape of a flying saucer) swirling around an orb bristling with tentacles. Hit the mother ship and it squeaks out brief digitized taunts. Sink a dozen shots into this proto-boss before it vanishes, and it bursts into a violent explosion seemingly lifted from the film Akira. You're not likely to deliver the coup de grace to the mothership, since its fleet of UFOs coat the screen with missiles and it will make a hasty escape just as it's safe to attack it, but it's theoretically possible.

As video games go, New York! New York! is certainly... one of those. Aside from the previously mentioned explosion and the Statue of Liberty in the background, it doesn't go out of its way to dazzle the player, with tiny, mostly single-colored sprites. The gameplay is similarly uninspired, without power ups or a second button to expand the player's strategic options. Phoenix let you raise a shield to defend yourself against kamikaze attacks, and the superlative Astro Blaster gives you bullet time to deal with more aggressive fleets of enemies, but New York! New York! expects you to get by on shooting and dodging alone. Even in 1981, that wasn't enough.

RAIDEN
Seibu Kaihatsu
Found: An arcade somewhere in Illinois
(I found the sequel in a southern Michigan video store, sitting next to a Neo-Geo)

Raiden? Rayden? Let's call the whole thing off. Apparently, Acclaim had to do just that when porting Mortal Kombat to home consoles, because the name of its thunder god sounded a little too much like Seibu Kaihatsu's cash cow for comfort.

Raiden the storm out.

As was implied earlier, Raiden was far and away Seibu Kaihatsu's most popular video game. It STILL gets spin-offs and sequels some thirty years later, which is puzzling to me personally, as I never thought the original game was all that special. It's as boilerplate as a top down shooter can get, and aside from the sleek ship designs, it doesn't do anything Toaplan hadn't already done with Truxton or Fire Shark or Twin Cobra years earlier. Heck, Raiden's power up system is even more pared down than Fire Shark's, with two kinds of missiles, two kinds of beams, and a screen clearing bomb. That's it. It makes Capcom's 1943 seem like a smorgasbord of WMDs by comparison.

It may be just another bomb-bomb-bomb-die shooter, but at least Raiden gets all the fundamentals right. The futuristic enemy designs are sleeker than anything you'll find in a Toaplan game (or even worse, a UPL game. For Pete's sake, how do half of these alleged space ships FLY?), satisfying explosions ring out when you bring down an especially tough enemy, and there are little details like running rivers and cattle grazing in grassy fields that bring life and realism to the proceedings. Seibu Kaihatsu leaned hard into those details in the sequel, with the screen often filling with pyrotechnics and spinning chunks of metal from the ships you've blown to pieces. You can actually see the pieces, along with massive glowing craters where defeated bosses used to be. Add a third weapon, a serpentine beam that curls around enemy ships, and you've got a game that's more deserving of Raiden's legendary status. 

Then again, Raiden is available on practically every game console in existence (even the Lynx. Even the Jaguar!), and Raiden II is on almost none of them. Unless you've got The Raiden Project on the Playstation, you're probably going to have to settle for sloppy seconds.

THE SHANGHAI KID
Taiyo Systems
Found: A Pizza Hut in Grand Ledge

Back in the uncertain days before Street Fighter II (the BC of fighting games), neolithic tribes of fighting game designers couldn't figure out how to make a fast paced one-on-one martial arts match work in video game form. Some of these prehistoric fighting games were too limited in scope (Violence Fight, Pit Fighter), and others too counter-intuitive (Karate Champ, Budokan for the Sega Genesis). Even the original Street Fighter suffered from clumsy movement and a design that was unsure of itself. Turns out Capcom Caveman made stone wheel square at first, but then carved wheel into round shape using crude chisel and CPS1 hardware and clean, responsive control. Unga bunga! This revolutionize way we beat each other over head with club in video games.

You've got to give credit to Culture
Brain for taking a stab at this genre
before it found its footing with
Street Fighter II.

Where was I? Oh yeah. The Shanghai Kid was one of those early forays into the fighting game genre, and its solution to the intricacies of blocking and attacking in martial arts was to turn the match into Dance Dance Revolution. When a circle appears over your fighter, you point in that direction with your joystick to block incoming strikes. When a circle appears over your opponent, you target that area of their body with the joystick and press either punch or kick to attack. It's a daring approach, but it feels mechanical, and you have to completely retrain yourself from what you've already learned from Street Fighter II to play it effectively. If you can suppress thirty years of muscle memory and learn to play The Shanghai Kid on its own terms, it's a game you can at least admire from a historical perspective. Try to ignore the weird color palette and the dull character designs.

By the way, for those of you who think this sounds familiar, Shanghai Kid is indeed the forerunner to Culture Brain's Flying Dragon series on the NES and Super NES.

STAR CASTLE
Cinematronics
Found: The mini-golf course in Grand Ledge-sing again

Asteroids clones were a dime a dozen in 1981 when this game was released, but Star Castle finds its own niche in this crowded ecosystem, and is arguably the best of the titles reviewed in this feature. Heck, it inspired Howard Scott Warshaw to create Yar's Revenge for the Atari 2600... that alone is cause for celebration.

Star Castle's monochrome graphics were
enhanced by a color overlay. And also a
constellation based on a centerfold in a
nudie magazine, but the Cinematronics
people didn't like to discuss that.

Star Castle is a mano-a-mano battle against a turret in the center of the screen, sealed inside three rotating walls. Blast the segments of each wall (taking care to leave at least one piece intact so the barrier doesn't repair itself) and you'll eventually clear a path to the turret. This is good, because one clean shot is all it takes to send this menace to Space Hell. This is also bad, because once the turret has a clear shot at you, it sends fireballs your way... fireballs that are larger and faster and a great deal deadlier than your own shots. Adding to the pressure are sparks that first cling to the castle walls, then detach to seek you out. Sure, they're not that hard to evade, but they're one more distraction you'll have to worry about while lining up that golden shot that blows up the turret and brings down the castle walls.

Star Castle is frantic, nerve-wracking fun. It's just as fun to re-introduce the game to my brother every ten years or so... he'll swear he doesn't remember it, only to be spellbound once again as he pecks holes in the castle walls, darting around the playfield to dodge fireballs and keep his distance from those pesky sparks. "Damn addicting artifact," he muttered after playing the game on my Vectrex for longer than he cared to admit to friends. Yeah, Star Castle is friggin' great, and don't you forget it! If you do, I'll be there to remind you.

TURTLESHIP
Philko
Found: In the corner of a video store in Champaign, IL

Lots of game companies pretend to be Capcom (cough cough Visco cough), but few took their sincerest form of flattery as far as Korean design team Philko, which apparently reverse-engineered Capcom's early arcade technology and used it to create this very familiar sounding, looking, and feeling shooter. 

Not exactly a Doppleganger calibur boss here.
While R-Type developer Irem took its inspiration
from HR Giger, Philko seems to have taken
its ideas from old episodes of Yo Gabba Gabba.

Unfortunately for Philko, it won't take much convincing for the seasoned player to believe it's not butter. Hardware doesn't make the game... that magic is in the software, and next to legitimate Capcom shooters like 1943 and Side Arms, Turtleship comes up short. It's... okay, I guess? Drained of inspiration and thematically vague and kind of frustrating besides, but playable enough if your expectations aren't all that high. It's got a few power ups, although none of them are especially exciting. There are both vertically and horizontally scrolling stages, a'la Life Force. You can credit feed to the end if you're a content tourist with nothing better to do. There's this Korean Battlestar Galactica plot in the opening about leaving Earth for a new home in space, if you can get into that? That's the extent of the positives.

The overarching problem is that Turtleship wasn't necessary, at least in this territory. We already have Capcom games. We don't need Capcom games at home, or more accurately, weird off-brand versions of them. Really, we're good with the genuine article.

Catch Up and Mustn't-Turd

 

After twenty agonizing years, Capcom
vs. SNK is finally back on the menu
for console gamers. No more digging out
your dusty Playstation 3 or your hacked
Dreamcast to play this classic!
(image by MobyGames)

 

Okay, so lots of stuff has happened since my last post. First and foremost is the announcement of Capcom Fighting Collection 2, a cornucopia of great versus fighters originally released for the Dreamcast. You're getting Capcom vs. SNK and its vastly superior sequel, both Power Stones, the sequel to Rival Schools, the insubstantial yet strangely entertaining Plasma Sword, and... well, nobody wants Capcom Fighting Evolution, but you're getting it anyway. Tech Romancer would have been a better choice, but one little stumble in the game selection isn't going to stop me from buying this giant leap for fighting game fan-kind. 

I just wish Capcom had plans to bring the game to Xbox. I never connect my Switch to a television set, and the only time I turn on my Playstation 4 is to watch DVDs. Sorry, I just like the Xbox interface and ecosystem better... and I don't think I should be punished for that preference. Capcom, are you listening to your fans? Or do they just not count if they own an Xbox?

Mass Market Mediocrity, courtesy
of My Arcade.
(image from Amazon)

What else? Well, I bought My Arcade's Data East classics mini-cabinet. Fresh out of the package, this thing is absolutely dreadful; inferior to the already flawed My Arcade Namco Museum cab with sketchy emulation and color banding that sticks out like a sore thumb if you're not looking directly at the screen. I'd say that Data East deserves better, but let's not kid ourselves. Aside from a handful of standouts like Burgertime and Bump 'n Jump, Data East was the RC Cola of 20th century game developers, and this is precisely the quality of product this company deserves.

("Then why'd you buy it?," you immediately respond. Because it was cheap, smartass. Shut up.)

My Arcade's Data East cabinet is pretty lousy, but like most of these products, the proper application of software hacks and power tools helps bring it up to "almost acceptable" status. The system runs on repurposed Android hardware, and even its dated Allwinner A23 processor can be coaxed to do a lot more if you can reach the micro SD port buried deep within its plastic case. Glen's Retro Show recommends that you heat the side panel stickers with a hair dryer and peel them away, then remove a zillion screws and pull the case apart to reach the port. I opted for a more violent option, drilling through the back and side of the case to reach the motherboard, then jabbing an on-the-go cable into one of the holes. Look, this cabinet blows. It's as much of a keepsake as a paper placemat from McDonald's. It doesn't deserve to be babied.

To be fair to those overly optimistic gamers
who thought Robocop would appear in this
cabinet, the Robocop film is as close to
being a video game as a film can get. Some
movies were just meant to be video games,
and Robocop was definitely one of them.
(image from Wikipedia)

Anyway... a few ADB commands later, the Data East cab became a great deal more versatile. It's still running on a prehistoric version of the Android OS (KitKat?! Gimme a break, indeed!), and the sluggish processor will prevent you from running more demanding games at full speed. However, there's just enough "oomph" in this machine to run early arcade titles; a whole lot more than you get by default. 

If you were disappointed that Robocop wasn't included in this cabinet, just load the game in MAME4Droid, then flip a double eagle to MGM, who owns the rights to the movie, and My Arcade, who was too cheap to pay the license. The cab even runs some games at full speed that the Namco Museum cabbie couldn't, although the fact that its screen is yoko while the Namco cab's is tate offsets that benefit somewhat. C'mon, any seasoned arcade goer knows that the best games from the early 1980s are vertically oriented! On the vertically oriented Namco cabinet, Burgertime and Bump 'n Jump look terrific! On its Data East counterpart, uh, not so much.

Honestly, while you can hack the Data East classics mini cabinet to play more arcade games, you could use a chainsaw to trim your nose hairs, and I don't recommend that either. You really ought to spend the extra duckets on a Sega Astro Mini or a Taito Egret II instead. That Astro Mini was just one hundred dollars during this year's Amazon Days sale. The Egret II is a bit most costly, but more than justifies the added cost with a screen you can flip on the fly, making it ideal for both tate and yoko games. It's one cabinet that does the work of two.

Unjustly panned by picky gamers.
Then again, I paid thirty dollars for mine,
so I'm a lot less picky than the gamers
who paid full price for it.
(image from Amazon)

Hell, even the Neo-Geo Mini- yes, the micro cabinet everyone hated that quickly plummeted to thirty dollars on Amazon- savagely beats the Data East cabinet in every respect. Sure, the joystick doesn't use micro switches, but it's not a damn plastic knob you screw into a D-pad, either. Sure, it just plays Neo-Geo games... but it plays a lot of Neo-Geo games, and the games you get are almost without exception vastly superior to what's on the Data East cabinet. (Bloody Wolf vs. Shock Troopers? Oh, puhleeeaze.) Sure, the screen's kind of small... but it's crisp, and there's none of the color banding that makes the Data East cabinet look like a raccoon's tail whenever you play shoot 'em ups.

Honestly, I forgot just how good the Neo-Geo Mini was in comparison to My Arcade's mass market monstrosity. That kind of shit flies when you're charging twenty dollars for a barely functional keychain at the Cracker Barrel, but the Data East cabinet retailed for ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS when it was first released. A whole C note, for this oversized Gachapon reject. You don't charge a hundred damn dollars for a cabinet that's barely fit to rest at the bottom of a really big box of Cap'n Crunch.

Sure, you could hack the Data East cab to make it do some things well, instead of almost no things, but why do that to yourself? You can't polish a turd, and hacking a turd with a USB cable isn't much better. You'll just dirty your hands, and a perfectly good USB cable.

Zesty, Testy Genesis Reviews

A long, long time ago, back when the internet wasn’t a thing and the only way you could share your dumb opinions about video games is by publishing a newsletter, someone told me, “Don’t write angry.” But eh, where’s the fun in that? On a whim, I decided to load up my Genesis Mini with some of the worst games available for the system, and wrote withering descriptions of each. 

Since I haven’t written reviews for Kiblitzing in what seems like a dog’s age, I’ll be sharing them with you now, with added detail for the handful of titles that warranted further discussion. Maybe some of these games aren’t quite as bad as popular opinion would have you believe! Not Action 52, though. That lives up to its status as legendary kusoge and then some.

ACTION 52
ACTIVE ENTERPRISES/FARSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES

Action 52 was offered as a value proposition to unwary gamers. Sure, it’s two hundred dollars, but there are over fifty games in the cartridge, so it evens out, right? Wrong. These fifty two games are some of the worst you’ll experience on the Sega Genesis, a cavalcade of low budget platformers and shooters with the scintillating depth you’d expect from a Tiger handheld. The headliner of the bunch is Cheetahmen, featuring a trio of martial artists based on the world’s most neurotic and inbred wild cat. You’re trying to save the world with felines who need an emotional support animal in zoos to keep them from falling apart. ‘Nuff said.

AERO THE ACRO-BAT
SUNSOFT/IGUANA

Being a winged creature takes all
the suspense out of an acrobatic act,
doesn't it? "Oh no, he fell off the trapeze!
Eh, whatever."

One of the less loved characters from the great furry mascot rush of the early 1990s, Aero the Acro-Bat was the brainchild- er, scratch the brain part- of David Siller, previously known as Sushi-X. He was the guy who never let an issue of EGM go by without dissing the original Game Boy, but he probably shouldn’t have be throwing stones when he’s got the deed to this glass house.

Anyway. Aero the Acro-Bat feels a bit more like Super Mario Bros than Sonic, with less inertia to the player’s movement and flatter, grid-based stages. The game’s nocturnal hero spirals upward and downward to knock out enemies, a method of attack that sometimes works, but sometimes sets you up to take a cheap hit from the insane clown posse roaming each circus-themed stage. Everything in the game has a gaudy big top motif, with Aero diving through flaming hoops, shooting himself out of a cannon, and scarfing down carnival food, making you wonder how he squeezed himself into that leotard. It also makes you glad the sequel has more variety in its level design. Just try not to look directly at his possible love interest and likely betrayer Batasha.

AIR DIVER
SEISMIC/COPYA SYSTEMS

How do you disguise the Genesis’s obvious difficulties with 3D graphics? If you’re Copya Systems, you fill most of the screen with a heads up display and cockpit window panes. Nice try, but the extreme choppiness of the terrain as it jerks past your stealth fighter is still obvious even with a blind spot so massive it would leave even Mister Magoo swearing up a blue storm. If the surprisingly solid port of Afterburner II for the Genesis was just too darned enjoyable for you, play this instead... you’ll find none of that pesky quality and ambition here.

ART ALIVE
SEGA

A picture only says two words in this case,
but they're the only words that are
needed to sum up this disaster.

Okay, so you've heard of Mario Paint, right? Nifty Super NES exclusive that's part toy and part high tech creativity suite? Lets you make all kinds of nifty drawings, animation, and even music without making your parents shell out massive drachma for a new home computer? Maybe it's not Nintendo's most successful innovation, but this could be the secret best idea Miyamoto and company ever had, ranking right up there with the Game Boy Camera that literally puts the player in their video games, and takes the video game characters out of the games as thermal-printed stickers.

Art Alive is Mario Paint, except for the Genesis. And there’s no mouse support, reducing your precision to nil. And instead of bringing joy to players, the developers actively sought to extinguish it. It’s BAD, yo. Bad enough to give you a whole new appreciation for Microsoft Paint, the Etch-A-Sketch, and half-melted crayons. Sure there are Sonic stamps, but there are far better ways to put Sonic on your television set than this.

AWESOME POSSUM
TENGEN

The most subtle sociopolitical commentary
since the heady days of Captain Planet
and the Planeteers.

Awesome Possum is most certainly not awesome, and he does not kick anyone’s butt. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before... he runs super fast, like Sonic! He’s an insufferable smart-ass, like Sonic! His arch-enemy is fat, bald, and leaves a carbon footprint larger than Godzilla’s wherever he goes, like Sonic! And his game feels like it was constructed from the random litter “Awesome” picks up on his choppy, irritating, and scratchy quip-filled adventure... quite unlike Sonic, actually. As video game mascots go, this environmentally-conscious critter (who should be beaten unconscious) will almost make you reconsider your opinion of Wild Woody, the Sega CD’s disconcertingly phallic pencil.

BACK TO THE FUTURE III
ARENA/PROBE

Trip on a cattle skull or be impaled by an axe?
It's your choice, but avoiding them both
is out of the question.

Great Scott, Marty! It’s another double-decker turdburger with flies from Probe Software, and yet another disappointing video game stapled to a film series that deserves better. Well, maybe not Back to the Future II, but the crappy games based on that movie are on Nintendo systems. Worry not, though, Sega Genesis owners! There’s more than enough disappointment for you here. Submitted for your disapproval are four mini games, including a borderline impossible race on horseback to save Doc Brown’s future (past...?) wife, a shooting gallery, Marty bringing pie tins to a gun fight, and a final battle aboard a train. Reach the engine before its boiler (and your blood pressure) reaches critical mass and you win. You don’t win much, but the game ends and you no longer have to play it, so I’d call that a victory.

BALLZ 3D
ACCOLADE/PF MAGIC

1994 game concepts generally don't partner
well with 1988 game hardware. This would be
reinforced a year later with Sega's own
Genesis conversion of Virtual Fighter 2.

PF Magic (the magic that happens to your colon after you eat too much PF Chang’s?) gets points for wrongheaded ambition, but a 3D fighting game just wasn’t going to work on a 16-bit system, even with plenty of Gen-X focused, MTV-approved attitude and a mountain of annoying voice samples. Oy! Yeah! Oy! Yeah! Uh huh! Okay, you can shut up now. Ballz 3D gets bonus demerits for combat that’s simplistic (approach an opponent, then hammer the kick button until you win) yet needlessly complicated (every fighter has the ability to morph into any of the other characters, because... uh, reasons), proving that you can defy the laws of physics by making a game that sucks and blows at the same time.

BRUTAL: PAWS OF FURY
GAMETEK

Okay, so there was this animated film released at the end of the 1970s called Animalympics, where critters competed in an international sports competition, complete with abrasive announcers and a marathon ending with an unlikely romance between a goat and a lioness. The comedy works more often than not and the expressive animation is just shy of gorgeous... imagine Hanna-Barbera’s Laff-A-Lympics, but good. Brutal is kind of like that, except a fighting game. And not good at all. I’d describe the gameplay, which forces you to earn special moves your opponents have by default, but I’d much rather talk about Animalympics. If you’ve got Amazon Prime, watch it. You won’t regret it, unlike the time you rented Brutal.

CHAKAN: THE FOREVER MAN
SEGA

Chakan spent a millennium just practicing
his semaphores.

Chaka-kan! Cha-cha-cha-cha-chaka-kan! Chaka-conned a lot of kids out of their hard-earned money in the 1990s. Chakan promises a grim action adventure with tons of weapons, but like the Faustian bargain that inspired the comic, also delivers eternal frustration and a hellish GEMS soundtrack. You've never heard so many annoying noises come out of your Genesis. If Space Invaders '91 or Gauntlet IV was the Genesis soundscape perfected, Chakan is the opposite of that. It's fingers on a chalkboard made of fingernails.

Billytime Games, bless his heart, did his best to polish this turd with a patch that lowers the difficulty and adds SRAM to save your progress... if you manage to make any. Unfortunately, just like Chakan himself, there’s nothing that can save this game from an eternity of mediocrity that spans the vast, cold emptiness of the universe.

CHASE HQ II
TAITO

Chase FU is more like. This misbegotten Taito release somehow shimmies under the low bar of expectations set for first person Genesis racing games, making it an expert at limbo but a miserable failure at everything else. The undeniable excitement of forcing criminals off the road in the arcade game has been denied to Genesis owners, thanks to flat, undetailed graphics, crashes with all the jarring impact of a speed bump, and digitized voice that’s terrible, even by Genesis standards. (Am I supposed to take orders from Nancy, or order a Big Mac and fries?) My advice? Scratch your itch for vehicular homicide with Road Rash II instead.

DARK CASTLE
ELECTRONIC ARTS

Like the later Braid, one of the stages
is a tribute to Donkey Kong. Sir, I knew
Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong was a friend
of mine, until he fell to his death after the
machinations of a scheming carpenter.
You sir, are no Donkey Kong.

Dark Castle stars Prince Duncan, one of the biggest weenies to ever stumble into a video game. Painfully clumsy and fragile, Duncan gives even Lester the Unlikely on the Super NES a run for his money. At least Lester overcomes his awkwardness as he progresses, eventually boosting his strength and confidence to become a real hero! Well, maybe a Joxer from Xena: Warrior Princess. Let's not give him too much credit.

Lester may ultimately prove his mettle late in his own game, but Duncan is weak to the last drop in Dark Castle, tripping over stairs, getting knocked down by tiny bats and "nee-nees" (you'll know when you see them...), and wrenching an arthritic arm into place to throw stones; a suitably ineffective weapon for a man who’s barely fit to clean the royal stables. Any kingdom that chooses this putz as its savior is an empire that deserves to fall.

DEADLY MOVES
KANEKO/SYSTEM VISION

Instead of Blanka, your opponent is Baraki,
evidently Ed Asner dressed as an island
native on Gilligan's Island. "Ooga booga!
I hate spunk and coconut cream pie!"

Deadly Moves was the thin gruel Genesis owners had to subsist on while waiting for a legitimate port of Street Fighter II. As one might expect from an early cash grab copy of Capcom’s smash hit, this game is cheesy, contrived, and loaded to bear with dumb ideas, such as a level up system after each fight, and free vertical movement that brings nothing to the gameplay and limits your attacks to a single punch and kick. Considering the acrid stench that hangs in the air when you play it, maybe System Vision (creators of the equally rancid Neo-Geo game Shinoken) should have called this one Silent But Deadly Moves.

EX-MUTANTS
SEGA

When trouble threatens your city, who ‘ya gonna call? Not the X-Men... they’re busy doing something important. Looks like you’re stuck with the Ex-Mutants, the stars of a forgettable Malibu comic in an equally forgettable action platformer. Don’t get this confused with X-Perts... that’s the crummy action adventure title with computer rendered graphics and overly involved mission objectives. Ex-Mutants is more charmingly crappy, with grungy graphics, cheap enemies, and the expected GEMS soundtrack, but vaguely arcade-like gameplay that brings to mind a bargain basement Black Tiger. It’s almost okay. Not really, though.

GADGET TWINS
GAMETEK

This game is a little too twee and British for
its own good. Oh yes, they're a cheeky
lot, these two!

Go go Gadget Twins! Go somewhere else, because your game really sucks. In contrast with other cute ‘em ups, Gadget Twins uses slapstick cartoon props as attacks, each assigned to a different direction. If the Genesis had four buttons on its controller instead of three, it might have almost worked! But it doesn’t, so it doesn’t. As an added, ahem, bonus, there’s no period of invincibility when you’re hit, so you’ll just keep on soaking up damage from the swarms of wind up airplanes and metal marlins until you take a fatal nosedive into the island of misfit toys. Frankly, that’s exactly where Bump and Bop, the stars of this sad-sack shooter, belong.

GALAXY FORCE II
SEGA

Ha ha! HA HA HA!
Oh, you were serious! Let me laugh even harder.

Some things just shouldn’t be. Take for instance this Genesis port of Galaxy Force II. What was an eye-popping special effects extravaganza in arcades is more of a Galaxy Farce on the scaling and rotation deprived Sega Genesis. Instead of racing through craggy caverns on exotic planets, your ship drifts through endless concentric rectangles desperately trying to create an illusion of 3D movement. These in-your-face visuals, so crucial to Sega's success in the arcade market, tend to look pretty shabby on the Genesis. However, next to Chase HQ II, Galaxy Force II is as bad as 3D graphics get on this system.

GREENDOG
SEGA

Frequently lampooned for its dubious quality in episodes of the YouTube series Game Sack, Greendog was a Sega Genesis pioneer. After all, it was one of the first of many, many crappy American-made platformers on this system. Sure, it’s not as bad as The Little Mermaid or TaleSpin... there’s a certain hokey charm to the laid back soundtrack, the awkward attempts to relate to a teenage audience, and the knobbly-kneed surfer who must have left his face at the beach house. However, you’re not doing so hot if you find yourself in the same sentence with those two duds.

HEAVY NOVA
MICRONET

The opponents in Heavy Nova will make you
their robo-bitch. Remember everything you
learned from SNK and Netherworld bosses,
grasshopper! Find a cheap technique the
CPU isn't programmed to counter, and
milk the absolute hell out of it!

Ah yes, here it is... the grand poobah of miserable Sega Genesis games! A cartridge so bad that even two dollars for a rental seemed like two dollars too much. (It’s not even worth the 1024K it takes up on your Genesis Mini’s slim internal storage... better put this one on a flash drive!) Don’t be fooled by the nifty cinematic introduction straight out of an episode of Gundam... this game comes creaking to a halt the moment the action begins. Or tries... it’s hard to tell with how slow everything is in both the platforming sections and the one-on-one battles with other robots, who have no trouble cleaning your digital clock despite lumbering along as if they haven’t been oiled in seven centuries. The only thing Heavy Nova does quickly is make you reach for another cartridge to replace it.

THE LION KING
VIRGIN

It starts. The player-abusing, controller-smashing
troubles, I mean.

At Disney’s behest, this game was made artificially hard, making what could have been a fun if insubstantial jaunt through the scenes in the film (and admittedly, they’re faithfully reproduced) into a painful test of endurance. After wandering aimlessly through interconnected caves, getting clotheslined by tree limbs on ostrich-back, and leaping for tiny hippo tails, only to plunge into waist-deep yet puzzlingly fatal pools of water, you won’t be in any great rush to be king. I mean, what's at the end of that rainbow, anyway? Eighteen hours of sleep, four hours of actually doing something useful, and two hours of licking your butthole clean? I don't need to be a lion to get that experience; the life of an unemployed writer ain't all that different. (Well, the added feline flexibility would be helpful with that last thing. Since I have a bidet, I just fill those last two hours with Amazon Prime. Again, really not all that different.)

NORMY’S BEACH BABE-O-RAMA
ELECTRONIC ARTS/REALTIME ASSOCIATES

The collectible objects d'jour in Normy's
Beach Babe-A-Rama are beach balls.
Because he's a beach bum, got it.

It almost feels unfair to pick on this one, considering that it was created by Realtime Associates, the masterminds behind the Intellivision. Its hero Normy is actually the cartoon persona of Keith Robinson, the late founder of Intellivision Productions and the closest thing the video game world had to Santa Claus. (He’s quite far removed from the man who took his place as the owner of the Intellivision brand. Fortunately, that didn’t last long... but I digress.) Keith Robinson was by any metric a decent guy. If only his janky and aggravating platformer could live up to his lofty standards. At least the graphics are cute, in a zany, American Greetings Shoebox kind of way.

STARMOBILE
MINDWARE/M2

The worst crime a puzzle game can commit is to leave the player bored and confused, and no game bores and confuses quite like Starmobile, a recent Genesis conversion of a game for the obscure X68000 computer that probably should have remained there. Seriously, Sega and M2... hundreds of great titles were available for the X68K, and THIS is the one you chose to bring to the Genesis?! I mean, Zugya, Cho Ren Sha, and Nemesis ’90 were right there, ripe for the picking, and you went with Starmobile. Good friggin’ grief.

Ugh. Anyway, the object of this game is to put stars of varying weights on either side of a scale, either matching their colors or sandwiching stars of one color between the stars of another. If the scale becomes unbalanced (with the stars whose weights aren’t obvious at a glance), the stars on it tumble, and you lose points, which are essential for advancing to the next stage. Look up “counter-intuitive” in the dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of Starmobile next to it... along with a warning not to play it.

SUPER HYDLIDE
SEISMIC/T&E SOFT

A game this advanced shouldn't be this
ugly. Super Hydlide looks at least a
generation behind the curve visually,
with animation best described as
terminally constipated. You're not
working with a business computer
anymore, T&E Soft! Let me introduce
you to this nifty video game innovation
called SPRITES!

There’s a patch which aspires to make Super Hydlide good, adjusting the difficulty to be more respectful of the player’s time and blood pressure, and trimming down the senseless busywork that made the original so hard to love, even for RPG fans starved for new meat on the Sega Genesis. (There were good RPGs on the Sega Genesis, honest! They just didn’t spring out of the water and slap you in the face like they did on the Super NES. Or was that Asian carp in the Great Lakes? Well, either/or.) The problem is that “Hydlide” and “good” are two words so violently in opposition to each other that combining them is like dropping a Mentos into your Coke. All you’ll get for your trouble is wet, sticky, and deeply ashamed.

Super Hydlide is admittedly better than the crap-riffic NES game released two years earlier, but it’s anything but super in the visuals department. Characters jerk along the grimy backgrounds in eight pixel increments, giving you the impression that the game is running on a Tandy rather than what was at the time a cutting edge console. And by “Tandy,” I don’t mean the low-octane computers sold at Radio Shack in the 1980s, but dead actress Jessica Tandy. It’s also laboriously slow, and complicated, and obtuse, and unfair for the first few experience levels. Step outside the city as a newb and the first hit you take could be your last. 

Having said all that (allllllll of that...), there’s an oddly compelling RPG here with a surprisingly catchy soundtrack, if you’re willing to apply the patch and have the patience of the patron saint of turtles. It’s a fix for adventure lovers... but it’s a really dirty fix. Roll up your sleeve, stick in that used needle, and be faintly amused for a few dozen hours. Then recover from that awful Hydlide addiction at the 16-Bitty Ford Clinic, and transition to the methadone that is Crusader of Centy or Beyond Oasis. I'm going too far with this analogy, aren't I?

THE TICK
FOX INTERACTIVE/SOFTWARE CREATIONS

A little wishful thinking on Ben Edlund's part.
By the way, the vulnerability remains the
same... just grab a bar of green mineral
and you're assured victory against Clark,
ahem, Oppenheimer. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Definitely legally distinct from Kent.

Gag me with a... SPOOOOON! One of the greatest cartoons from a decade bursting with great cartoons becomes one of the most GRATING games on the Sega Genesis. It’s a hopelessly dull beat ‘em up with little of the charm from the show, aside from the faithful animation including The Tick's mighty flick to the forehead that knocks enemies cold. There are also platforming sections with The Tick running on rooftops (gee, just like the show!), but the exhilaration of charging across the city from ten stories above it is gone, replaced with random objects thrown off-screen and aggravating “subplots” (read: mini bosses) that serve as punishment for missed jumps. Maybe this game was intended to work as a parody of horrible video games based on beloved cartoons, like how The Tick is a parody of super hero comics? Nah, that's giving the designers too much credit. Just watch the cartoon while playing through Streets of Rage 2 again... I promise you won’t be missing anything.

X-PERTS
SEGA

If Comix Zone was an inspired farewell performance by the Sega Genesis, X-Perts was its last labored breath while fading away in hospice care. Guide Shadow from Eternal Champions, an apparent escapee from the movie Small Soldiers, and Dot Matrix from Spaceballs through a multi-layer underwater compound. If the computer rendered soldiers (and we all know how well computer rendering works out for the color-handicapped Genesis...) don’t stop you, the tangled mission objectives and the stultifying boredom will!

ZOOP
VIACOM NEW MEDIA

Tiny cups of espresso and poetry sessions
not included.

Viacom New Media desperately wanted Zoop to be “a thing,” releasing it for every game console under the sun and letting players take it home free with any rental at Blockbuster. Even at the low, low cost of free, Zoop was a hard sell for gamers spoiled by Tetris and Puyo Puyo. It’s a cross between Sega’s Columns (itself no great achievement in puzzle games) and the Midway arcade game Space Zap, with shapes of different colors approaching you from four angles. Unfortunately, there’s precious little technique to keep things varied- not even the chain reactions in Columns!- making this one combination that’s less peanut butter and chocolate and more peanut butter and chalk. Even the game’s laid back beatnik vibe and trendy Memphis art design can’t justify its existence. There was time in the 1990s for Klax, but at no point in history could anyone spare a moment for Zoop.