The Tower of Retro-Babble: Tecmo

Teh-ka-kan! Teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-ka-kan!

Tecmo: Now with more ninjas! And boobs! And ninja boobs!

Tehkan is dead. Long live the Tecmo. 
(It's Koei-Tecmo now? In that case, long live the boredom.)

(The Legend of) Baluba-Louk
Played: On MAME, sorry!

Like Falcon's Dorodon, The Legend of Baluba-Louk is a new game built on old hardware. Unlike Dorodon or Tehkan's own Pleiades, Baluba-Louk is a largely successful game design that distinguishes itself from Bomb Jack, even though the two games were built on the same foundation.

I have no flippin' idea what these
things are supposed to be. They
look like a dragon had sex
with a Dalek.

You're a tomb raider (not the one with triangular boobs), and it's up to you to grab all the treasures in each horizontally scrolling underground crypt. Beware, though! There are six crypt guards, all deadly to the touch. Crypt guards can't be killed directly, but the title character can light bombs that detonate when a guard steps on them, temporarily leaving the colorful chess piece stunned. Treasure chests contain better weapons, but first, you'll have to crack them open by hitting the floor beneath them with your head.

Is Baluba-Louk as good as Bomb Jack? Not really. The lead character is a lot less mobile, and the cramped caverns leave you feeling helpless unless you're constantly setting traps for your pursuers. Still, it's a strong first effort from Able, a small game company that would eventually go on to make the completely bonkers platformer J.J. Squawkers. Imagine what would happen if Heckyl and Jeckyl took LSD and watched too much anime, and you'll know what to expect.

Bomb Jack
Played: In an emulator designed exclusively to play Bomb Jack

Either you "get" Bomb Jack, or you don't. Internet satirist Sean "Seanbaby" Reilly didn't get it, dismissing the NES semi-sequel Mighty Bomb Jack as one of the worst games on the system. However, players who can adapt to the game's complex jumping mechanics quickly discover the game's hidden brilliance. That includes indie designer Anna Anthropy, who made it the focal point of her masocore action game Mighty Jill Off, and the entire country of Great Britain. The Brits were crazy for Bomb Jack, releasing the game for every game system and home computer that could handle it. (And the ZX Spectrum.) Heck, there was even a Thundercats game in Britain which was a reskinned Bomb Jack sequel!

Stages in Bomb Jack are usually
accompanied by a picturesque
landmark... which typically gets
butchered in the home versions.

The object of this platformer is to defuse all the bombs in each stage. You may have noticed that there are no ladders in Bomb Jack... that's because you won't need them. The lead character can leap the entire height of the screen, or stop his ascent halfway through with a tap of the jump button, or gently float down to earth with rapid taps of jump. 

If you can't get the hang of jumping in Bomb Jack, you'll quickly fall prey to the chrome-plated robots roaming each stage. However, once you master the jumping mechanics, you'll soar through the sky, land cleanly on platforms, and snatch up the more valuable lit bombs like a pro. You may not even need the "P" coin that turns all the robots into coins... but since it's already there, you might as well grab it and clean house!

Like parries in Street Fighter III or the jumble of action buttons in Stargate, Bomb Jack's pixel-precise jumping takes a lot of practice. It's a skill worth learning, because the better you get at it, the more rewarding Bomb Jack becomes.

Guzzler
Played in: A pizza shop in Central Michigan

It's easy to dismiss this as another hackneyed Pac-Man clone... lord knows I did. However, there's layers to the seemingly derivative gameplay of Guzzler. You're an animated water bubble (or is that thing an ice cube?), and you've got to quench the four fires burning onscreen. Fire fiends emerge from the flames and chase you around, but you can use blasts of water to put them out. Guzzler can only hold three blasts, with each blast having less range than the previous one, but stepping on puddles refills his supply. The genre-mandated bonus prize in the center of the screen freezes all fire fiends in place, making them easy targets for your ocean spray.

Squirt your thirst!

There's a weird alcoholic theme running throughout Guzzler... the bonus prizes in the center of the screen are martinis and bottles of whiskey, and a giant version of your character appears in the cut scenes to rescue you from fire fiends, only to be frozen in his tracks by a bottle of booze. "Bourbon! The brownest of the brown liquors! What's that? You want me to drink you? But I'm in the middle of saving my little buddy! Hold on, I need to call my sponsor. Whaddaya MEAN David Crosby is dead?!"

Er, where was I going with this? Oh yeah. Guzzler. There have been better maze games, but also worse ones, and at least this one's fairly original. I could see this being repurposed on home consoles as a Kool-Aid Man game... just replace the alcohol with sugar and flavor pouches, and Guzzler with a big red smiling jug. It'd be more fun than the Kool-Aid Man games we actually got for the 2600 and Intellivision, that's for sure.

Ninja Gaiden
Played in: Practically everywhere, but in particular, the Malt Shop in Mt. Pleasant

I know how it looks on the marquee, but it's Ninja Guy-den, not "Ninja the Gay-den." Also, while most people prefer Ninja Gaiden on the NES, I'm partial to the arcade original, with its sword-swiping, neck-throwing, car-dodging, popcorn stand-smashing action. It's a belt-scroller that earns its keep by being more nimble than Double Dragon, more exotic than Renegade, and more violent than the two combined. 

When you begin, your hero stands defiantly on the front of a boat under the Brooklyn bridge, with the caption "Ninja in USA." And that's it, that's the game. You're fighting masked thugs in a slum littered with signs and oil barrels, swinging on lamp posts to vault yourself over busy highways, and battling claw-wielding acrobats in Atlantic City. Your ninja can fling foes across the screen with a tricky but oh-so-satisfying leaping neck throw, which leads to the game's other headlining feature. 

Smash boom bang! Pretty much everything
breaks in Ninja Gaiden, whether it's oil
barrels or Coca-Cola signs, and if you
try to tell me that's not cool,
you are totally lying.

Practically everything in Ninja Gaiden breaks when you toss an enemy into it, which not only awards you bonus items, but looks and sounds impossibly cool. Even if you don't get that health restoring pill or the pair of swords that lets you easily cleave a path through the armies of log-wielding thugs, it's always, always worth breaking something just to hear the satisfying shatter of glass and gawk at the extensive property damage.

It's not as cinematic as the NES Ninja Gaidens (although not without cinematic ambitions... check out that continue screen with the buzzsaw bearing down on your ninja!), and not as deep as Double Dragon, but arcade Ninja Gaiden is visceral in a way no other beat 'em up had been up to that point. That matters, especially in an arcade setting where first impressions are everything.

Pinball Action
Played in: A convenience store a small Illinois town

This game happened just before Tehkan's transformation into Tecmo, and it's a promising look at the company's future. The classic Tecmo font used in Solomon's Key makes its debut here, and the graphics are blazingly colorful, with a flame-headed woman decorating the pinball table. (Is that Cher? It sure looks like Cher. I'm saying it's Cher.)

Do you believe in life after pinball?

The table is small and compact, without a scrolling playfield, but keep in mind that this was early video pinball. Compared to Atari's own game titled Video Pinball, this is a quantum leap forward... and unlike Namco's GeeBee, this actually feels like pinball, not Breakout with bumpers. The ball behaves as if it's governed by the forces of gravity, and there are plenty of targets to hit, forcing the player to aim each shot carefully to score point bonuses and advance to a hidden second table.

It's not Devil's Crush, widely recognized as the best video pinball game ever made, but keep in mind that this was 1985. In those early days, Pinball Action, as cramped and full of Cher as it is, was as good as video pinball could get. It's loud, with a menacing hum in the background, it's explosively colorful, and the ball feels appropriately weighty. You couldn't ask for more from an electronic pinball game of its early vintage.

Pleiad(e)s
Played: On MAME

There has never been a game as unforgettably forgettable as Pleiades. It's like Tehkan was sitting next to Taito in video game class, and asked if it could copy its Phoenix homework. "Sure," Taito replied coolly. "But change things around a little so it's not obvious to the teacher. Take out the handy shield, turn the demon vultures into generic-looking monsters, put in some tap-dancing aliens, and make the cool fight with the alien queen kind of sucky."

And boy, did they! Pleiades looks, sounds, and feels like Phoenix, but everything Phoenix does, Pleiades does worse. The enemies are dumber, the graphics are shabbier, and the sound effects range from "grating" to "the robot devil's barbed wire harp." It's one of the most contrived single screen shooters of its generation, a shambling wooden duplicate hoping that if he wishes really, really hard, he too will become a real boy game some day. Keep wishing, Pleiades... it ain't gonna happen.

Great Value Phoenix.

GORF got a lot of grief for being a greatest hits collection of other early shooters, but its mini-games, derivative though they may be, were based on effective and time-tested designs. They work well on their own, and work well as components of a larger game. Pleiades tries to color outside the lines of Phoenix with new ideas, but they're all bad ones. Even returning to base after a successful run feels like an attempt to shoehorn thrusting mechanics into a game that shouldn't have them.

As you continue to play and not enjoy Pleiades, you can't help but ask yourself... why does this even exist? Don't ask Tekhan; they don't know either.

Rygar
Played in: A movie theater in Charlotte MI

Back in the 1980s, arcade games and home ports of those games were two very different things. Dedicated arcade hardware was at the peak of audiovisual technology, and home consoles like the NES couldn't hope to accurately reproduce that experience. At the same time, arcade games were designed for quick play... the player drops in their coin, oohs and aahs at the spectacle of a looming sunset in the background, gets wiped out after a couple stages, and leaves, only to have another player repeat the process. 

The classic burning sunset, present in
both the arcade and NES versions
of Rygar. By the way, your weapon
is the Diskarmor, a bladed frisbee
on a metal string. It's a video game,
just go with it.

With an NES game, you're going to be stuck with it for a while, at least for the duration of the rental. Straight arcade ports weren't going to hold the player's attention for long, and they certainly weren't going to look as nice as the original, so the designers had to embellish the designs. Stages were broadened, play mechanics were added, resource management became a factor, and items were used as keys to gain access to new areas. 

This was intensely aggravating for arcade maniacs like myself. However, looking back, these rewrites were not only necessary for a different audience of gamers, but often resulted in better, more complete experiences. Rygar is one game that's definitely better on the NES, but that's not to say the arcade version of Rygar is bad. It's just dumb, even by the standards of an arcade game. Levels are typically one long horizontal stretch of land, with fire worms bursting from the ground and other creatures pouring from the sides of the screen. Don't stop to think! Just keep racing to the right, batting away foes with your Diskarmor as they approach. It's intense and bracing, but also light on meaningful content. By the time your lifeless hero is dragged to the afterlife by a creepy ghost, you're also ready to go to a better place. (Specifically, your friend's house, playing the NES version of Rygar.)

Silk Worm
Played in: The Castle Pizzaria in Lakeview MI

That logo, she blow up real good, mon ami!

On its face, Silk Worm seems like an ordinary military shooter, but the secret to the game's success is its dual pronged gameplay. One player takes to the skies in a helicopter, while the other drives a Jeep through enemy territory. Your choice of vehicle greatly alters the way the game plays... the chopper feels a lot like Scramble, with a cannon firing forward and bombs dropping down, while the Jeep is more like Moon Patrol, with jumping and a machine gun that can fire from any angle. It's two, two, two games in one!

The Jeep's limited mobility makes it the less desired of the two play styles, but playing with a friend is your best option, giving you both land and air supremacy. Even when you're playing alone, there's enough action and compelling twists in Silk Worm to keep you hooked. Panels on the ground can be destroyed, releasing clouds of stars. Fly or drive into the stars for temporary invincibility, or fire at them to clear the screen of minor enemies. 

Silk Worm's dual faceted gameplay
lets you attack from the sky as a chopper,
or on the ground as a Jeep. Yeah,
I'd choose the helicopter, too.

Nobody's going to be impressed by this game's humble display of firepower... Silk Worm is as far removed from "bullet hell" as a shooter can get. However, it's got an appealing military aesthetic that's equal parts G.I. Joe and Airwolf, and although the gameplay isn't deep, the action is intense enough to keep you glued to your joystick for a few stages.

Silk Worm is one of those games that's vastly more popular in Great Britain than other territories, and that love is not misplaced!

Solomon's Key
Played: On the NES. This kind of missed me in arcades... 

I imagine a conversation like this happened at Tecmo headquarters in 1986...

"So I was thinking... Super Mario Bros. has been really popular for Nintendo. What if we made our own version of Super Mario Bros. for nerds?" 
"Super Mario Bros. IS for nerds."
"No, I mean smart nerds."
"Oh."

It's an important distinction! After all, Super Mario Bros. and Solomon's Key have the same fundamental gameplay. You run around each stage, smashing blocks with your head, revealing hidden prizes, and torching enemies with fireballs. 

However, while Super Mario Bros. is a breezy side-scrolling adventure that doesn't require much mental strain, Solomon's Key is a series of single screen "escape rooms," and careful decisions and strategy are required to first reach the key, then the door it unlocks. Fireballs are a limited resource, and unlike Mario with his massive Koopa-crushing butt, the wizard Dana is too spindly to stomp monsters. However, he can conjure blocks with his magic wand, building steps to higher platforms and blocking the paths of roving sparks, fireball-spewing gargoyles, and other creatures from medieval fantasy.

Things get complicated quickly in
Solomon's Key. This is actually one
of the earlier stages!

Re-contextualizing Super Mario Bros. as a puzzle game was a pretty smart move by Tecmo's designers. Solomon's Key is brainier than your average side-scrolling platformer, but with the varied gameplay and sense of discovery missing from an ordinary block stacker like Tetris. Solomon's Key is one of Tecmo's most enduring franchises, with sequels, spin-offs, and even a marketing tie-in with Zipang, a television drama set in ancient Japan. It's a really adaptable game concept, and a really fun game, whether you're playing it in arcades, or on the NES with a slight ding to the graphics. 

Star Force
Played in: A convenience store just outside Vestaburg

Xevious was both a pioneer in the top-down shooter genre, and its undisputed leader in the early 1980s. Countless other game companies tried to challenge Xevious for that honor with their own vertical shmups... SNK with HAL 21 and Alpha Mission, Konami with Mega Zone, Capcom with Vulgus, and Nichibutsu with Terra Cresta. Some of these would-be Xevious killers were better than others, but perhaps the most enduring of the lot was Tecmo's Star Force.

This strikes me as odd, because there's nothing remarkable about Star Force. It's as generic as a shooter can get, even when it was released in the far-flung year of 1984. The enemy patterns are predictable, power-ups are limited to an escort ship that gives you turbo fire, bullet-sponging panels provide little incentive to shoot them, and even the boss is a letdown, a metal square with a Greek letter painted on the top.

Star Force! The drrrrry shooter!

For whatever reason, the game was big in Japan, spawning sequels and a just barely legally distinct spin-off in Hudson Soft's Star Soldier. (Apparently you can never have too much mindless panel blasting.) At least Star Soldier gilds this limp lilly a little with heartier power ups and the not especially useful or welcome ability to fly under the background. Star Force is just... there. It feels more like a proof of concept than a fully realized game with its own artistic direction and innovative ideas. Star Force is the kind of game you might find at the bottom of a cereal box, and next to more accomplished contemporaries like Xevious, or the morphin-omenal Terra Cresta released just one year later, it just doesn't cut it.

And speaking of cuts!
Come on, you know you wanted to see this.

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Universal (aka Aruze)

 

The thingie in the logo
is the archaeopteryx, the extinct
missing link between dinosaur and bird.
This brand name went extinct pretty
quickly too, with the company reverting
back to its original name, Universal. 

Universal is one of those obscure game companies that hangs out in the dimly lit corner of the minds of old-school gamers. So let’s throw a little light on the subject! The company’s two most popular games, Ladybug and the first Mr. Do!, were the creations of Kazutoshi Ueda, a journeyman programmer who went on to develop games for the Turbografx-16, Super NES, and Playstation. Universal went through a turn of the century rebranding, becoming Aruze and attempting a hostile takeover of the more popular, but financially ailing SNK. After that blew up in Aruze’s beaky prehistoric face, SNK was resurrected as SNK-Playmore by SNK’s founder Eikichi Kawasaki, and Aruze went back to the name Universal, receding back into the pachinko industry.

Universal’s contributions to the early arcade scene were limited, but hugely influential all the same. Mr. Do! was the Coke to Dig Dug’s Pepsi, and Cosmic Avenger and Space Panic were both brought to the ColecoVision in the arcade port goldrush of the early 1980s. Universal’s games were a little meatier than the average arcade title, with more urgent gameplay and lots of opportunities for bonus points. Many of their games were build on familiar foundations, but they felt like more honest attempts to give players an expert version of the games they’d already mastered. (As opposed to Exciting New Pac-Man Plus.)

Dorodon
Played: Just in MAME, sorry!

If Ladybug asked, “What if Pac-Man had revolving doors?,” Dorodon responded with “What if those revolving doors caused grievous bodily harm?” Dorodon was designed by Falcon, a small player in the arcade industry that gained notoriety with Crazy Kong. (That was the creepily “off” clone of Donkey Kong using Crazy Climber hardware, which I reviewed in a previous installment of this feature.) 

Dorodon uses Ladybug hardware, but unlike Crazy Kong, this is an entirely new game. Well, mostly an entirely new game. The similarities to Ladybug are obvious from the moment you start, but Dorodon is a more frantic and chaotic experience. The blob-like hero must swing all the gates on the playfield to turn them white, but ogres pour out of the center of the screen, hoping to catch him. His defenses include a question mark, which turns all attacking ogres into ice cream cones; a swirl, which swings all white gates, clobbering all ogres standing nearby; and fire, which snuffs out any ogre stupid enough to step on it. (And you too, so be careful!)

After grabbing a question
mark, the ogres turn into
ice cream cones. Sure,
why not.

The gameplay isn’t as immediately intuitive as Ladybug’s or Pac-Man’s, and the ogres will quickly overwhelm you if you don’t swat them down as they appear. While that’s possible in the first stage, subsequent stages get a lot harder, with faster ogres and gates that revert back to yellow or red if you swing them while they’re the target color. The play mechanics are kind of a mess, and nothing really “takes.” I’ve never seen a Dorodon machine outside of the occasional episode of Starcade, and when you actually play it, it’s not hard to figure out why.

Ladybug
Played at: The Malt Shop, in Mount Pleasant MI 
(probably in the basement, where all the good old coin-ops were) 

Ladybug is Universal’s first shot at a Pac-Man clone, and it’s a pretty good eat ‘em up considering its early vintage. It’s a little “sticky” in the way it controls... instead of smoothly gliding thorugh each turn like the man of Pac, your bug crawls along in single pixel increments, making quick ninety degree turns through intersections annoyingly imprecise.

However, the gameplay of Ladybug is deeper than the game that inspired it. Scattered throughout the maze are revolving gates... push through one and it turns. Although you can move through the gates, the enemy bugs can’t, which means that careful shifting of gates can keep you out of their claws and even lead them into fatal skulls. Along with the expected bonus prize in the center of the screen, players can collect color-shifting letters. “EXTRA” in yellow awards an extra life, “SPECIAL” in red offers an extra credit, and the blue multipliers double, triple, and even quintuple the value of everything else, if your timing is just right.

Buggin' out, bugga bugga
buggin' out.

Unlike Pac-Man where you can regularly turn the tables on the roving monsters, Ladybug puts you exclusively on defense. The vegetable prize freezes the enemy bugs briefly, but beyond that, quick thinking and gate spinning are your only hope for survival. It’s a more punishing game than Pac-Man, but also more rewarding thanks to the high point potential offered by the letter tiles and multipliers. The EXTRA bonus in particular would become a mainstay in future Universal titles, starting with...

Mr. Do!
Played at: A gas station (Speedway?) on the edge of Coldwater, MI 

Like Ladybug, Mr. Do! provides a more challenging alternative to one of Namco’s arcade hits. While Dig Dug is relatively placid, with the hero plodding along through the dirt to the tune of friendly banjos, Mr. Do! is more lively. Unlike the Pookas and Fygars who sleepily bounce along in their burrows, the monsters in Mr. Do! immediately make a mad dash for the player the moment they emerge from the center of the screen. I guess I’d better get moving, like, right now.

They want the D.

Fortunately, Mr. Do! is armed with the power ball, which violently ricochets through the tunnels until it strikes a target or returns to the crafty clown. He can also push apples into vertical shafts, crushing anything at the bottom, but unlike Dig Dug’s more passive monsters, the creatures in Mr. Do! are often too wily to be flattened by giant fruit. Also, they don’t float through the dirt as ghosts... they chew through it as ravenous beasts, opening up the maze and quickly closing the distance between themselves and the player.

Ladybug was a deeper game than Pac-Man, and so it goes with Mr. Do! Every ten thousand points, a humanoid Scrabble tile appears at the top of the screen, going against the flow of enemy traffic. Hitting this “Letterman” earns you letters that eventually spell EXTRA, for an extra life. Lettermen also appear when you eat a fruit target in the center of the screen... along with three gooey monsters that devour falling apples. (So much for that tactic.) Stages can be completed by killing all onscreen creatures or collecting all onscreen cherries, and you get a point bonus if you grab eight cherries in a row. It’s extremely technique-dense for a game released in 1982, is the takeaway here. You might even call Mr. Do! the Dark Souls of Dig Dug, but really... just don’t.

Mr. Do's Castle
Played at: A Wal-Mart in central Illinois

Ms. Pac-Man was a lot like Pac-Man. Galaga was a lot like Galaxian. The sequel to Mr. Do! is... nothing like Mr. Do! This may have come as a shock and an annoyance to fans of the original, but Mr. Do’s Castle is a great game in its own right, when taken on its own terms.

This time the clown is playing exterminator in a castle infested with... unicorns? (Am I reading this right?) These aren’t the fun, cuddly, My Little Pony kind of unicorns, however! Imagine red, vaguely equine gremlins... they’re still kind of cuddly, but deadly to the touch. Like those gremlins from the movie, they have a habit of multiplying and getting more hostile if left unattended, so squish ‘em quick with your trusty unicorn-bashing hammer! A direct hit will do the job in the first two stages, but past that you’ll have to crush them with the blocks that make up the floors. Choose your targets carefully! Any block you drop leaves a gap that could leave you stuck until the unicorns fill it. (They poop blocks. It’s a video game thing; best not think too deeply about it.)

I mean, they're kinda like
unicorns? But they walk
like people, and poop
like wombats. (Look it up.)

Unlike the first Mr. Do!, Mr. Do!’s Castle is a platformer, a bit like Donkey Kong but a whole lot more like Lode Runner and Universal’s earlier Space Panic. As an arcade game from 1981, Space Panic felt rough and unpolished, but Mr. Do!’s Castle illustrates the difference two years of design experience and improved technology can make. It plays cleanly, with the jester scurrying across the playfield, dropping blocks, kicking over ladders, and generally making a nuisance of himself. It looks better than the first game, with a sense of depth to the castle interior. The soundtrack is bouncy and energetic, a perfect fit for the frantic action.

Mr. Do’s Castle exudes confidence in its design. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and does it better than either Lode Runner (too finicky for arcade play, although there have been arcade versions...) or Space Panic (which runs about as smoothly as a UNIVAC mining Bitcoin). It’s definitely not the Mr. Do players wanted, but it’s a detour that’s well worth taking.

Mr. Do's Wild Ride
Played at: A laundromat in Tekonsha MI

This is where the Mr. Do! series hits its first snag. Mr. Do’s Wild Ride borrows even more heavily from Donkey Kong than the previous game, but the amusement park setting ultimately proves its undoing. Like Donkey Kong, it’s a race to the top of the stage, but instead of girders and barrels, Mr. Do! is on the tracks of an active rollercoaster. Mr. Do! will quickly become Mr. Done if he’s clipped by a rollercoaster car or one of the other rides at the theme park, forcing the player to frequently shimmy up ladders to dodge the oncoming traffic.

Where do I even start with this one? First, the premise is idiotic. Bubble-blowing dinosaurs, hungry yellow spheres, and time-travelling space ships I can buy as charmingly odd video game concepts. Running up an amusement park ride while cars are racing on it just seems senselessly suicidal. There’s really no better way to do whatever you’re trying to accomplish here? Can’t you just, you know, buy a ticket? Better to ride the rollercoaster than to get smeared all over the front of it.

You don't have a jump button, because
jumping on a rollercoaster track would
be... too... dangerous? Look, it's just
easier to call this game stupid.

Beyond the stupid concept, Mr. Do!’s Wild Ride is just obnoxious to play. There’s a lot of overly lateral gameplay where the ladders don’t get any you closer to the goal and the only upward movement you’ll get is from the track loops on either end of the screen. Holding down a button triples Do!’s speed, but you’ll still need to spend a lot of time loitering on ladders to keep from getting bounced around the screen by oncoming rollercoasters. Way to take the fun out of the fun park, Universal.

Kids, just say no to playing on rollercoaster tracks! It’s dangerous, and even worse, it leads to games like Mr. Do’s Wild Ride. 

Do! Run Run
Played at: An arcade inside an IGA grocery store 

Finishing up the series, at least in the 1980s, is Do! Run Run. Out of all the sequels, this is the closest in spirit to the original Mr. Do!. This dot munching maze game is seen from an elevated overhead view. Some platforms are higher than others, so when you throw that power ball, take care that it doesn’t fly over the heads of the clams and snakes chasing after you!

Colorful tubes replace the apples from the first game. Tip one over by either pushing it from above or knocking out the supports below, and the tube rolls downward, crushing any monsters in its path. The Lettermen from Mr. Do! and Castle return, and Mr. Do! can boost the value of dots by drawing a box around them, turning them into lemons and pineapples. Seems like a lot of unnecessary busywork, but it’s there if you want to wring more points out of the game.

Hee, hee! Someone's getting squished
by this gaudy looking drum!

Do! Run Run wasn’t built with the same confidence as the original or Castle... some of the new play mechanics in particular feel contrived. Qix called, it wants its territory marking back! Still, Do! Run Run has the feel of an impromptu band reunion on the roof of the Universal office. It’s a little unpolished, but the heart is still there, and you’re just happy to see one more performance from the old gang. Rock on with your bad self, Mr. Do!.

Ex-Box

 

Welp, that's it for the Xbox brand. Turn off the lights when you leave, will you?

Long story short, former Xbox head Phil Spencer and his imminently forgettable second-in-command Sarah Bond have both left the company... Spencer by choice, and Bond after being nudged out by incoming Xbox CEO Asha "Please don't squeeze the" Sharma. Sharma was the former head of Microsoft's AI division, suggesting that 1) She doesn't really give a damn about gaming and 2) She doesn't need to give a damn about gaming; she's the cleaner. Sharma is there to put an end to the Xbox brand, and determine the fate of the numerous third parties Microsoft bought when they thought they could force their way into the industry by purchasing half of it.

Look, we all saw this coming. Anyone old enough to have owned a Dreamcast for the fraction of a second that Sega supported it could see this coming the minute Microsoft informed the world that through the power (?) of cloud gaming, everything is an Xbox. 

It sounds like the logic of a petulant third grader... "Well, MY game system sold the most, because I say everything's an Xbox! So there!" As this figure shows, this attempt to divide and conquer through brand expansion rarely works. The 3DO had multiple manufacturers, but the price of the machine made it a non-starter no matter what company logo was on the front. The N-Gage was a dud right out of the starting gate, and efforts to turn it into a hardware standard for cell phones fizzled out just as quickly. Like the 3DO, the Nuon was made by multiple manufacturers... but around the time it launched, there was already a game system with DVD capabilities and much stronger gaming capabilities. A Sony, even, not some third-rate hardware from Goldstar.

Whenever console manufacturers try to awkwardly expand their brand by, say, making a joystick with the N64 logo that doesn't actually work with the Nintendo 64, or licensing games to a competitor's lousy handheld, it's a sign of weakness. It's a big neon sign flashing "XBOX IS ABOUT TO DIE!," and it's readily apparent that Microsoft is no longer dropping in quarters to keep this brand clinging to life. 

Trust me, I've been into video games for nearly all my life, and I've lived for over half a century. The patterns and behaviors of a game company going down in flames are easy to recognize... lord knows I've seen it enough. When a company tells you "We're behind right now, but we're coming back stronger than ever!," it's an effort to stop the bleeding and keep the customer base placated until the company's finished digging the grave and nailing together the coffin. Sega was telling Dreamcast fans they planned to support the system days before announcing it was pulling out of the console business.

Maybe it's the chin, but this dude looked 
like Sega's answer to Master Higgins.
(Or would that be Wonder Boy?)

Speaking of Sega! Hideki Sato, creator of all of Sega's flagship game consoles, passed away at the age of 75. I loved the Sega Genesis the moment I got one from a Toys 'R Us store in 1991, and I've grown to appreciate what the Master System can do in the years since. Sato took the creaky TMS9918 graphics chip and turbo-charged it, resulting in the most powerful purely 8-bit game system you could buy in the 1980s. Mr. Sato, I salute-o you. Your contributions to gaming will surely revive Zanoni be remembered forever. Hell, the way things are shaping up, people will keep making games for these five machines for an eternity.

It's no contest. (Also, Eye Brawls development journal)

For me, I mean. My latest game, Eye Brawls, was barred from the 2026 SMS Power contest, because it was submitted to SMS Power a day before it started. Or some horseshit. Funny how I'm always slightly too early to join these contests, as if the rules were enforced to specifically bar me from participation. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. 

"But feel free to join the contest next year!" Feel free to pick off the little granules of turd clinging to my butthole hair with your teeth. Putz.

...but anyway. Eye Brawls is out, it's available on Itch.IO, and it sure would be grand if someone gave the goddamned thing some love, because I sure poured a lot into it.

Digitrex Techstar's logo, which looks more
painful to step on than most video game logos.

"And what IS Eye Brawls?," you ask. Well, imaginary reader, it's like this. There was a video game way back in the 1980s, from a little-known Miami game developer called Digitrex Techstar. Its founder, and the man who made all its games, was Luis Sanchez, which gives you a pretty good idea of how small his operation really was. Games from Digitrex Techstar include Gorkans, Lizard Wizard, and the company's headliner, Eyes.

Eyes is best described as Pac-Man, with shooting. That's it, that's the game. As a tiny, confusingly drawn eyeball (I went for years thinking that flattened hat was a cluster of muscle around the eye, as if it had been ripped from someone's socket), you've got to blast a bunch of spastically pulsing objects while keeping one step ahead of the game's unnamed enemies. Some move faster than others, but they're all singularly focused on finding you, then zapping you with an optic blast. Similarly, the twisty maze of Pac-Man has been flattened out to a series of horizontal and vertical bars, resulting in a lot of long corridors and tense shoot outs with the roaming eyes. 

Get an eye-full of this! Heh, that's
the best I can do for a joke at the
moment. 

It's a dumber game than Pac-Man for sure. Enemy behavior never gets more complicated than "AFTER HIM!!!" in Eyes, while in Pac-Man, the monsters were sneaky, cornering you in the warp tunnel and making rare, unexpected 180 degree turns (not constant backtracking, like in Baby Pac-Man. A-hem, Dave Nutting and Associates) to play with your head. However, it's also a more intense and immediate game, with death literally coming at you from all sides. 

A classic? Maybe not, but a sleeper hit for sure. It's better than many Pac-Man clones, including Midway's own Exasperating Exciting New Pac-Man Plus, and it made big waves in Michigan, where Roogie Elliot achieved some small measure of fame by getting over 23 million points in one game. I met him briefly in Lake Odessa, or more accurately, stood next to him as he tried to revive his magic touch on an Eyes arcade cabinet. (Years of being behind the wheel of a long-haul truck left him a little rusty.)

Fast-forward to two years ago. Oscar Toledo Gutierrez, a Mexican IT expert better known to the world as Nanochess, released a BASIC compiler for the ColecoVision, and after getting familiar with the software, I went right to work on Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons, along with a ColecoVision port of Eyes. WESEB got finished, but the newly minted Eye Brawls got put on the shelf for a while.

The Eye Brawls cast, featuring one-eyed puns
for the four wandering eyes. Pops and Pete
are sluggish and have lousy reflexes, but Sandy
and especially Samson are more dangerous.

Fast-forward again to just about now. After frustration with the enemy logic in Pyrebirds, I stepped back from that cliff and attempted something less demanding. I went back to Eye Brawls, adding collision detection, sound, and an improved engine for the onscreen whatzits, now called whirligigs. There's a lot of optical puns, as you can see... the previously unnamed hero is now 20/20, and the four evil eyes are now named after Cyclopean celebrities like Peter Falk, Sandy Duncan, and Sammy Davis Jr. It's silly, bordering on crass, but it felt like it fit.

It took about two weeks of work to convert the Eye Brawls alpha into a full-fledged game, thanks to the power of CVBasic and me having no social life. There were frustrations, to be sure! Enemies absolutely insisted on cutting through the horizontal bars near the center of the screen, and it threatened my already thinning hairline and fractured sanity, held together with duct tape and hope. The solution was to force the eyes to move away from them with a command that superceded all the other ones. That was easily, without a shadow of a doubt, the toughest part of this project.

A tear swings from 20/20's eye-self when he's
hit with an optic blast, one of the additions
Eye Brawls makes to the arcade game. The
other ones you'll have to find for yourself!

In the end, I'd say the Eye Brawls project was a success, and a fitting tribute to a game that didn't get the kudos it deserved. (Boy, can I relate.) Because it's so easy to port a game to other formats with CVBasic, Eye Brawls is available for not only the ColecoVision, but the MSX and the SG-1000 as well. The SG-1000 port I'm regretting in light of recent events, but hey, I'll know better next time.

 

2025 Dies Screaming

Good lord, what a dogshit year. At least the video games were pretty good! Let's take a look at some of the stuff I played in 2025, or as I prefer to call it, Anno Diablo:

FINAL FIGHT MD

The Sega Genesis conversion of Final Fight, a project started in Brazil three years ago, is quite close to finished, hovering at 92% completion in its most recent build. Was a Genesis conversion of Final Fight strictly necessary in 2025, where you'll find pixel perfect emulations of the game everywhere else? Not really, but Final Fight MD isn't as much for the players as it is for its designer Mauro Xavier, who wanted to flex his programming muscles by bringing this big, big arcade hit to a humble home console, with as little compromise as possible.

I'm happy to say that this seemingly impossible task was a success. Final Fight MD ranks up there with Strider, Forgotten Worlds, and Chiki Chiki Boys as one of the best Capcom arcade ports you'll find on the Sega Genesis. You want all three heroes from the arcade game? You've got 'em, plus Maki from Final Fight 2 in a special "Mega" mode with additional content. You want all the stages? They're here, including the flame-filled foundry that left players a little crispy around the edges. You want achievements? Well, Xavier wanted them, so you're getting them... and you'll need to get a whole lot of them to unlock everything the game has to offer.

There are frequently points in Final Fight MD when the Genesis is pushed past its limits, crushed under the weight of six huge onscreen enemies and up to three (!!) players. You will definitely notice slowdown and flicker, but it's easy to forgive when the little Mega Drive that could is pushed to the point where it just barely can. Three-quarters of the time, the game mimics its arcade ancestor flawlessly, to the point where you won't even notice the difference on a handheld device.

Yes, you've probably played Final Fight a million times on a million formats, but it's worth playing it again on the Genesis, if only to marvel at Brazil's mastery of this ancient hardware.

EARTHION

Speaking of unexpectedly recent and awesome Sega Genesis games, Yuzo Koshiro hit us with a doozy in Earthion. It's a side-scrolling shoot 'em up with lofty aspirations, looking as though it was meant for the more powerful Neo-Geo with stunning intermissions and gigantic bosses.

Earthion's more than just a pretty face, though. The weapon system is one of the best I've seen in a shmup, with "adaptation pods" that force the player to make difficult decisions early in the game to benefit from additional weapon slots later. Weapons range from the dull but effective (V-Fire) to the slow but devastating (Prism Laser) to the tricky to use but deeply satisfying (Apex, a bomb which lets out a bass-heavy explosion as it scorches the earth below. War crimes have never been so much fun!).

The gameplay feels like the missing link between Yumekobo's Pulstar and Blazing Star, with the quarter-munching accessibility of the latter. You're given a generous health bar that refills over time, and even if you're blasted out of the sky, your next ship appears inches from the smoking remains of the last one. The game kind of has to be gentle with the player, because the sky is often thick with bullets, and collisions aren't always fair. This is especially true in the miserable bio-organic stage, full of claustrophobic tunnels, moaning worms, and a poorly telegraphed ambush from a gruesome monster that chases you through the start of the level. And you were doing so well up to this point, Mr. Koshiro...

Even with that unbelievably crappy stage, Earthion is one of the best and certainly the most eye-catching shooter on the Sega Genesis. After Mighty Number Nine, I look at the hype surrounding crowdsourced video games with a jaundiced eye, but this is every bit as good as the screenshots and the blurry video previews suggested it would be. (Aside from that crappy, crappy bio-organic stage. Did I mention it sucked a whole lot? It's a point worth belaboring.)

ATARI VCS
(not the old one, the more recent one)

This has got to be the most confusing video game branding since Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. The Atari VCS is not a remake of the Atari 2600, nor is it an Atari 400 or 800 as the two available models suggest. Rather, the VCS is a low-spec x86 computer running its own proprietary operating system... Atari's half-assed answer to the Xbox Series and PS5, basically.

When used as its creators intended, the VCS is nothing special. There's a bundle of classic Atari games built into the unit, but if you want more software, you'll have to buy it from Atari's digital storefront. The selection of games is both underwhelming and overpriced, with the only big (or any) budget title being an awkward re-imagining of Food Fight as a Splatoon-like online action game. The rest of the titles are a jumble of unremarkable indie games, along with a handful of Atari 2600 and 7800 homebrews.

The average gamer would starve to death before finding much nourishment in the Atari VCS e-shop. However, you don't have to use the VCS in an official capacity... it's better to crack it open, add an M.2 drive, and turn it into a handy emulation station. It's not easy to do this, but once you have, you'll find the VCS absolutely creams single board computers like the Raspberry Pi in overall performance. You might even be able to use the VCS as an ersatz Steam Machine, although you'll want to stick with old-school titles like Freedom Planet and Peggle 2, as opposed to hardware-heavy juggernauts like Doom Eternal.

In short, the VCS is a pretty bad system if used as directed, but a pretty good plaything for nerds with some IT experience and a lot of free time. Those individuals will be able to mold the VCS into anything they want it to be... as long as they don't expect this eighty dollar toy to perform at the level of a supercomputer. If you're smart enough to hack this, you're also smart enough to recognize its limitations. 

Have You Played A Turkey Today?

This just in! It's already December, somehow. It's not going to be one of my better Decembers... in fact, it could be the last December for an aging loved one, whose health has been on the decline over the last couple of months. She seemed all but invincible as early as last year, lifting huge bags of pet food and cat litter into the back of her car during grocery trips unless I was there to intervene... and even then, it took some convincing to get her to let me lift the bags for her! 

But now she's confused, and scared, and subject to wild mood swings. It's like her memories are playing back from a hard drive with corrupt sectors, shifting from one scratched ceramic plate to the next in order to stave off a system shutdown. During a family Thanksgiving party, she cried about her daughter's death from cancer in the early 1980s, as if it happened yesterday. The family can't even trust her beyond the wheel of a car anymore, and it's got me worried for the future. It could just be the side effects of an infection, but I'm not optimistic. I mean, as a general rule I'm not optimistic, but especially not about this situation.

As a result, it's been hard to concentrate on my creative pursuits, including this blog. I do feel it's a good time to look back at the last month of gaming news. The first, admittedly anecdotal report? I bought an Atari 7800+ and an Atari VCS on sale from Woot and Atari, respectively. While the Atari VCS (effectively a laptop computer minus the screen, squeezed into a vaguely console-like shell) has yet to arrive... or even ship after four days... the Atari 7800+ has stunk up the house for a couple weeks now. 

As you may have already gathered, I'm not impressed with this machine in the least. It's not a real Atari 7800, using a system on a chip running an emulator, connected to a cartridge slot. What this means is that you're introduced to significant access time as the contents of the inserted cartridge are dumped and transferred to system RAM. Access time! On a cartridge! An ATARI 7800 cartridge! They're rarely more than 128K in size! You could put a dozen of 'em on a floppy disc!

One of the best things about old game systems like the Atari 7800 was their immediacy... you pop in a cartridge and press the power button, and you're already at the title screen, one squeeze of the joystick button away from the action. The Atari 7800+ somehow merges the worst of modern and old-school gaming... you're getting Atari 7800 quality games, at the interminable speeds of a new game console, with its penchant for corporate logos that swallow the screen and lengthy loading that burns through your precious free time. 

Does that sound like a winning combination for anyone else? Because Atari games that start at glacial Neo-Geo CD speeds is a total non-starter for me. I'd rather go the mini console route, where you're given instant access to a library of highlights in that console's library. Hack the thing and you can squeeze a good chunk of the library onto the system. It's what I've done with the Genesis Mini and Super NES Classic, two consoles which I've grown to love as much as the consoles that inspired them.

The Atari 7800+ in all its, ahem, glory.
Note the controller, with its buttons
set five blocks apart from each other. I
wasn't big on the ProLine joysticks either,
but good lord, this isn't much of an improvement.
(image from WallpaperAccess)

The Atari 7800+, on the other hand, rarely finds its way out of its box. It's comically hard to update*, comes with a cheap feeling wireless controller with buttons that seem to have restraining orders against each other, doesn't include any games beyond the okay-ish Crystal Castles follow-up Bentley's Crystal Quest, and will never play anything beyond titles for the Atari 2600 and the Atari 7800, nobody's favorite in the console wars of the late 1980s. The Atari 7800+ kind of blows, is the takeaway here. There's a million ways to play Atari games, instantly. Why the hell would you wait twenty-five seconds to do it? 

I hope the coming Atari VCS is better. It would just about have to be. 

* even for a seasoned IT expert! Good lord, I worked at a computer store during the malware epidemic of 2003, and updating this hardware was tougher than fumigating Bonzi Buddy from the Dell Granny Gertrude bought from Circuit City in 1998!

Aged Like Fine Milk: The Ten Most Future-PRONE Game Formats

Some game consoles have smart hardware designs that keep them relevant years and even decades past their expiration dates. The Atari 2600's life spanned three decades. The Neo-Geo only died because its manufacturer SNK did, some thirteen years after its introduction in 1990. Heck, they may still be selling Master Systems in Brazil, forty years later! Their longevity alone makes these machines legendary.

Like Squidward, these game systems
are not E.

Not every game console has that kind of endurance... in fact, an unlucky handful were obsolete on launch, held back from greatness by limited resources, bewildering architecture, and plain old-fashioned short-sighted design. They're not necessarily bad systems, but they're a whole lot harder to love than the machines in my last article...

MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY2

Back in 1981, most game-loving families had an Atari 2600. A lucky few had the Mattel Intellivision, while the less fortunate- myself included- had to slum with the Magnavox Odyssey2.

In the first console war, the Odyssey2 wasn’t a major player like Stalin or Churchill, but more akin to Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes. At first glance, it looks like a genuine threat, with a membrane keyboard and neon-lined science-fiction box art. However, from its first stumbling step, the Odyssey2 demonstrates that it’s far from the Dutch uber-console Phillips would have you believe.

Every game system in the early 1980s had compromises in its design to keep it at a consumer-friendly price point. The 2600 had no video RAM, and the Intellivision had a sluggish clock speed... these were severe handicaps, but smart developers could work around them to deliver fun and distinct gaming experiences.

Pop-Aye-Aye-Aye!

Phillips’ compromise for the Odyssey2 was cutting the available RAM down to 64 bytes, while including a built-in character set with all the objects one would need to make a video game. That was fine in 1978, when the machine was first designed, but as the gaming industry evolved and video games developed as an artistic medium, the Odyssey2 couldn’t keep up. Ports of arcade hits like Frogger, Q*Bert, and Popeye were eventually released for the system, but they were more like abstractions, drained of visual identity and even basic play mechanics. 

Against all logic, the Odyssey2 has fans in the 21^st century, including a few programmers who’ve made their own games. Writing a video game for this machine must be like painting a detailed landscape on a grain of rice, but at least the Odyssey2 is still providing gamers with a challenge...

EMERSON ARCADIA 2001 

Shitty box art rounds out
the thoroughly shitty
Arcadia experience.

Powered by a Signetics 2650 processor (in the same way a potato might power an alarm clock), this early game console designed by Hong Kong’s Universal Appliances Limited was released in a whole lot of countries, under a whole lot of names. Here in America, we either called it the “Emerson Arcadia 2001,” or “the only game console my parents could afford.”

The problem with the Arcadia is that it was designed to compete with the Atari 2600... with budget Hong Kong parts... in 1982, on the cusp of the arrival of the ColecoVision. The Arcadia couldn’t compete with the massive library of titles on the Atari 2600, and certainly couldn’t go toe to toe with the next wave of game consoles, with their boosted specs. The ColecoVision promised an arcade-quality gaming experience, and sometimes hit that mark. With eight acrid colors and screechy sound, the Arcadia had no chance of reaching that target, let alone the bullseye. What else would you expect from a game system designed by Universal Appliances Limited? Maybe they should have stuck with toasters... 

ATARI JAGUAR

Oh, you want me to do the math? Here’s an equation for you! One leftover Atari ST, plus a handful of new chips that work about as well together as The Three Stooges, plus an obnoxious marketing campaign, equals one of the least popular game systems of all time, selling a miserable 250,000 units. The 3DO sold three million units, and that was at three times the price!

Cybermorph gets the lion's share of ridicule
from gamers, but for my money, it's Trevor
McFur that deserves all the contempt. It's
a game that thinks it's Star Fox on the Super
NES, but is actually more like Star Fox on
the Atari 2600.
(image from retrogamesreview.co.uk)

Atari pushed the notion that the Jaguar was 64-bit, which wasn’t really true... putting two 32-bit processors together in the same console doesn’t add up to 64 bits. However, you don’t have to be an IT expert to know that Jaguar games fall well short of expectations for a next generation console. Many of the Jaguar’s titles were holdovers from the Genesis and Super NES, a little shinier than before but not dramatically improved. It could handle 3D better than Sega and Nintendo’s 16-bit consoles, but was soundly thrashed as a polygon pusher by both its rival, the 3DO, and the 32-bit consoles that would arrive years later.

In spite of, well, everything, the Atari Jaguar has a small but dedicated fanbase, and homebrew software does exist for the system. It couldn’t have been easy to code with the Jaguar’s convoluted architecture, and it can’t be easy to run with so few physical units and a dearth of worthwhile Jaguar emulators, but it’s there.

NEC SUPERGRAFX 

From an American perspective, the entire Turbografx-16 brand was a fizzle, but Hudson’s almost 16-bit console was a hit in Japan, coming at just the right time to tempt players away from the Famicom. Nintendo’s first console was released much earlier in Japan than the United States, and players in the East had more time to get disillusioned with the Famicom’s limitations. The PC Engine was originally conceived as a sequel to the Famicom, with a similar processor but access to larger sprites and richer colors. Nintendo didn’t want the machine, but the players did, and the new and improved PC Engine sold millions of units. (The number is contested, but long-running Japanese magazine Famitsu seems to think it was five million.)

Hudson and manufacturer NEC picked the perfect time to release the PC Engine, at the peak of Japan’s Famicom fatigue. (You may recall that this tactic also worked pretty well for Sega, which released the Genesis at the peak of America’s own Nintendo burnout.) However, with the powerful Super Nintendo on the horizon, what would Hudson and NEC do for an encore? 

The choppy aerial combat game
Battle Ace illustrates how unprepared
the SuperGrafx was for the Mode 7
effects of the Super NES.
(image from StrategyWiki)

The unfortunate answer is the SuperGrafx, which took the momentum NEC built up with the PC Engine and slammed on the brakes. What did Japanese gamers get for their three hundred dollars? A PC Engine with double the RAM... and that’s it. While this opened the door to parallax scrolling and more sprites, as illustrated in its killer app Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, the measly five and a half games of the SuperGrafx library didn’t provide much of a value proposition for players. Even the Sega CD, widely considered a failure, introduced significant improvements to the core Genesis hardware, and had... let me crunch the numbers on this... thirty-four times the games.

The SuperGrafx was an evolutionary dead end for NEC, the definition of “too little, too late,” and its negligible performance enhancements would be left out of NEC’s later consoles. The company’s final misstep in the console wars, the anime-heavy, gameplay-light PC-fx, would face similar issues... it was much too expensive for what it offered players, and was instantly eclipsed by later 32-bit consoles.

GAME DOT COM

“Oh, come on! You can’t put a Tiger handheld in a list like this!”

Oh yes I can! Especially when the Game dot Com was specifically designed to challenge the Game Boy with its own library of cartridges. Tiger made a lot of tall promises about the system’s abilities to the gaming press of the time... it’s got digitized voice! It’s got big names like Sonic the Hedgehog and Duke Nukem! It’s got online capabilities! It’s got a touchscreen!

The Game Dot Com got a slimline model,
the Pocket Pro. It's a game system no pro
would ever put in their pockets.
(image from eBay)

What it’s really got is plenty of disappointment. Technically, you can play Duke Nukem on a game dot com... but don’t expect it to be much like the shareware hit on home computers. Same deal with other high-profile game dot com titles like Sonic Jam and Fighter’s Megamix. They exist, but with a blurry monochrome display and a processor so primitive it should have come with a wind-up key, you won’t be enjoying them much. As for the online features, wi-fi wasn’t a thing back in those days, so you’ll have to be plugged into a phone line to use them. So you can use your game dot com to surf the internet, but only twenty feet from your home computer, which does it better, and in color. Okay...?

The game dot com was soundly spanked by the black and white Game Boy, and didn’t stand a chance in hell when more powerful handhelds like the Wonderswan Crystal and Neo-Geo Pocket Color arrived. By the time the Game Boy Advance joined the fray, the game dot com was a distant, bitter memory. As they say, “and nothing of value was lost.”

PANASONIC 3DO

The 3DO was a victim of bad timing... too early to start a new console generation, but too dated in design to compete with the next generation consoles released two years later. With a bleeding-edge RISC processor, a dual-speed CD-ROM drive, and 3D visuals beyond the grasp of the Genesis and even the Super NES, the 3DO was pretty amazing. In 1993. If you could afford it. (At seven hundred dollars, you couldn’t.)

Immercenary for the 3DO. Hey, 3D gaming
had to start somewhere.
(image from MyAbandonware.com)

Two years later, the 3DO dropped in price. You know what else dropped? The Playstation and Saturn, two consoles from Japan which had two years to mature, improve, and streamline. Suddenly the 3DO, which was a hard sell at seven hundred dollars, was a hard sell with two cheaper, more powerful consoles bracketing it on store shelves. The token support the 3DO received from Capcom, Taito, and SNK quickly shifted to the Saturn and Playstation, and the system was finished. A sequel system, the M2, was planned but cancelled, with units being repurposed as video kiosks in car dealerships. (Hey, it beats the Atari Jaguar’s master mold being used to make dental equipment.)

As an orphaned game console, the 3DO doesn’t get much love from homebrew developers. It’s a little too slow to run emulators and a little too obscure for arcade ports, although there was a valiant attempt by a fan to port Mortal Kombat II to the system. It’s a bit cramped and the AI doesn’t perfectly match the arcade game’s, but it’s still better than any other digitized fighter on this system.

SEGA SATURN

Let me preface this by saying that I love the Sega Saturn. With its famously responsive six button controllers and a buttload of old-school arcade titles, it’s like Sega made a game console just for me. And Del the Funky Homosapien. And a handful of Japanese hipsters.

Shining Force III, one of the final releases
for the Saturn in the United States. If
you're underwhelmed by this, you should see
one of the Saturn's bad games.
(image from MobyGames)

The problem is that millions more did not want this system. As a 2D powerhouse that struggled mightily with first and third person action games, it stood in defiance of what gaming had become in the late 1990s. Rumor has it that support for polygons was added to the Saturn hardware at the last minute, and you can feel it in the way many of its 3D games look and play. Almost without exception, the Playstation versions of a major release, be it Resident Evil or Tomb Raider or Doom, look better than their Saturn counterparts, with more detail and better special effects. 3D is just not the Saturn’s forte, which was unfortunate for Sega, as it was what players wanted in 1998.

It should also be noted that the CPU that handles the 2D games in the Saturn and the CPU that handles the 3D games don’t play well together, resulting in headaches for both game designers in the 1990s, and emulator authors now. Ymir has made great strides in Sega Saturn emulation, but it’s taken twenty five years to get to that point. If you’re expecting a Saturn mini built with budget parts, you might have to wait another twenty five years.

ACTION MAX

Move over, "blast processing!" Worlds
of Wonder has given us the most
meaningless marketing catchphrase in
video game history!
(image from Parry Game Preserve)

When Nintendo first launched the Nintendo Entertainment System in America, they partnered with Worlds of Wonder, a toy company responsible for the runaway success of Teddy Ruxpin in the mid 1980s. When the popularity of the NES snowballed, Nintendo broke its ties with Worlds of Wonder... and WOW retaliated by releasing its own game system. If you want to call it that.

The reality is that the Action Max was about as much of a “video game system” as the animatronic bear they sold years earlier. The console includes a light gun, a siren light, and connections for your VCR. The “games” are video tapes; corny movies with targets on the screen. Firing at the targets lights up the siren and adds to a counter on the console, which goes all the way up to 99!

Even in the distant year of 1987, the Action Max looked like a low-tech, cobbled together relic. There were only five late night cable movies- er, games- and the best Worlds of Wonder could do to promote it was product placement in the woeful spy comedy Leonard Part VI. (There were not five previous Leonards. Be eternally grateful for this.) The Action Max couldn’t catch a break. As a VCR toy disguised as a video game system, it didn’t deserve one.

MATTEL HYPERSCAN

Slightly better than the Action Max (but just barely...) is the Mattel Hyperscan, the toy company’s not-so-triumphant return to the video game market in 2006. The Hyperscan, which looked like the unholy love child of a Sega Dreamcast and a George Foreman Grill, used trading cards to boost the stats of your character. When the trading cards actually scanned properly, which wasn’t often. Also, the library was comprised of throwaway licensed games, roughly on par with what you might find on a Jakks-Pacific Plug ‘n Play unit. Five titles are available for your playing, uh, pleasure, including a stiff rendered X-Men fighting game and an action title starring shape-shifting boy hero Ben 10.

With its patented design, the HyperScam
drains the fun directly out of your fingertips!
(image from Kinguin.net)

Forget future-proof, the Hyperscan wasn’t even present-proof. It was released in 2006, when the Xbox 360 was already on store shelves and the Wii and PS3 weren’t far behind, yet would have been put to shame by consoles released ten years earlier. The Hyperscan processor is a system on a chip which runs at 100MHz. There’s 16 megabytes of RAM, a fraction of what you’d find in 1998’s Sega Dreamcast. It’s got no I/O beyond a couple of proprietary joystick ports, the CD-ROM, and a hardwired A/V cable. It runs five games, none good. The Hyperscan probably could be hacked, given enough time and a hacker with absolutely nothing better to do. However, considering its wimpy, obscure hardware, it’s not so much of a question of “how?” as “why?”

NINTENDO 64

Nintendo 64 games have a distinct look, as you
can see from this snapshot of Turok: 
Dinosaur Hunter. His greatest enemy?
Nearsightedness!
(image from MobyGames)

The Nintendo 64 feels weirdly out of step with Nintendo’s previous consoles, using hardware originally crafted for Silicon Graphics’ CGI workstations. You’d think this would give the system an advantage over its competitors in rendering 3D visuals, and indeed, the Nintendo 64’s best moments were presented in three dimensions. However, Nintendo 64 graphics weren’t necessarily better than those on the Playstation; just different. Instead of wobbly but sharp polygons, N64 games had blurred edges, smeary textures, and low frame rates, with thick curtains of fog to mask the short draw distances. This brings a hazy, dream-like quality to Nintendo 64 games. That ethereal vibe fit epics like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time perfectly well, but in a lesser game like Superman 64, it just felt cheap. Apparently Superman now has super-cataracts.

The look and feel of Nintendo 64 games is subject to personal taste, but almost nobody was down with Nintendo’s decision to use cartridge-based media. While this meant instant loading for games and Tonka-tough media that could withstand a child’s wrath, it also significantly curtailed the scope of the N64’s games, and left third party publishers with high aspirations scrambling to Sony and its Playstation. Nintendo lost the support of Squaresoft for years because the company’s big ideas just wouldn’t fit on a cartridge. Other publishers continued to support Nintendo, but reluctantly... their N64 games often felt feeble next to their Playstation counterparts, due to the limitations of the cartridge format and general indifference.

After attempting to fill the void of a CD-ROM drive with the 64DD, an oversized floppy drive, Nintendo stopped trying to plug holes in the Nintendo 64 and abandoned the sinking ship, replacing it with the PowerPC-based GameCube in 2001. Time has not been kind to the Nintendo 64 in the years since... its complicated architecture makes it a bitch to emulate. And forget about homebrew games! Even the professionals at Treasure lamented the stubborn N64 hardware in an interview with Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata. If even they can’t get a handle on this machine, the average coder doesn’t stand a chance.