As X-Pected

Well, the results are in from the MSXdev 25 competition. The verdict? Operation Hibernation was selected as the 16th best of the fifty entries, while Eye Brawls nipped at its heels in 17th place. It's about where Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons landed in the last contest, except not really because that was out of a pool of 31 entrants. So I still lost, but I lost more gracefully this year. Hooray for a more dignified faceplant.

I won't even argue with the results. There were many games in the contest that were objectively superior to my own, including "how the hell did they do this?" polygonal showcase DELTA and the more technologically humble but meatier platforming challenge Chrono Runner. There's also Boobie (Chikubi) Ninja, an arcade-quality platformer where all the characters have naughty anatomy for faces. (Look, I don't get it either, but the gameplay and production values are both terrific. Let the man have his boob faces.) 

With the avalanche of quality titles in this year's MSXdev, I didn't have a realistic chance of victory. One of the other contestants made a pretty good point, though... the contest accepts entries for both the prehistoric MSX (just a stone's throw from being a ColecoVision) and the more advanced MSX2 (which gave us Metal Gear 2, among others). Games for both formats are pitted against each other, which makes about as much sense as having a cross-country race between high-performance sports cars and children's sports car beds.

Distressingly, this is not a child's
race car bed.
(image from OddityMall)

One of the contestants, DavePlunder, expressed deep annoyance that his own game, Space Bash: Contact!, landed in seventh place. He complained that the format of the contest effectively denied victory to entries designed for the less powerful MSX. I have a hard time disagreeing with this... Space Bash is an exceptional game considering the limitations of the original MSX, and those limitations aren't taken into consideration in a contest where games for 1983 hardware are expected to compete against releases for later systems with more RAM, more colors, more clock speed, and (in the case of the Turbo-R) an entirely different processor.

It's hard to overstate just how impressive
Space Bash looks on MSX1 hardware.
None of what you're seeing here comes
easily on a system that only lets you
draw two colors on a single line, and
all the color choices are barf.
(image from the Space Bash Itch IO)

Someone made the counter argument that Space Bash did outperform a good many MSX2 games in the contest, but that doesn't disprove DavePlunder's earlier point. His game got to where it was with a massive technological handicap, the equivalent of getting bronze in a Olympic sprint with a boat anchor clamped to your ankle. Gee, you didn't win! I can't imagine why! Guess you should have tried harder... maybe spend a few weeks in a Dragonball Z capsule with the gravity turned up to max.

Another poster observed that if your game is creative and clever enough, it could overcome all technological limitations, which is either tremendously naive or has the bitter tang of weaponized aspiration. "You can do anything if you just believe!" "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" "Maybe you can make the next Tetris!" "These excuses make it easier for me to ignore the obvious inequality of a contest featuring three generations of increasingly powerful hardware!" Yeah, whatever gets you through the night, buddy.

I'm... satisfied with my position in the contest. Even if it had been split into MSX and MSX2 categories, my games would have been soundly thumped by Space Bash, Chrono Runner, and Shift. It's too bad those games didn't get their rightful due, though. Splitting next year's contest into two tiers- MSX and MSX2- would go a long way toward addressing this.

 

 

Also: Byron is a bear. He's a friggin' BEAR. The game is called Operation Hibernation. He's eating fruit to fatten up for the winter! His bonus stage is a fish ladder! Hello?! "Dog character," geez. How many dogs do you know that hibernate for the winter? 

(No, you can't say raccoon dogs! They're dogs that think they're raccoons! Dogs with an identity crisis don't count!)

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Technos

Yoshihisa Kishimoto, the creator of Double Dragon and Renegade, recently passed away. Guess which arcade game publisher just got pushed to the top of my review queue?

(image from Logopedia)

It's hard to overestimate the significance of Double Dragon in 1987. Technos had already pioneered the beat 'em up genre with Data East's Karate Champ, and the side-scrolling beat 'em up with Renegade, but Double Dragon further upped the ante with a grittier setting, two player gameplay, and a deep combat system. As butch martial artists Jimmy and Billy Lee, players could punch thugs, grab them by the shoulders as they're stunned from the opening blows, then either fling them away or hammer their skulls with repeated strikes from an outstretched knee.

It's not quite mortal combat, but Double Dragon is definitely brutal combat. Enemies don't fly off the screen with a single kick like in Kung Fu Master, and there's no referee to stop the fights... these rumbles are for keeps. Even weapons are not out of bounds... hurl a barrel at a knife-wielding Williams, or snatch the whip from a kinkily dressed Linda and give her a taste of her own medicine!

Spike and Hammer...? Who the
heck came up with that, anyway?
It's like how Ralf and Clark from Ikari
Warriors were renamed Paul and Vince
for some reason.
(image from ToyArk)

Double Dragon was big business for Technos, with home ports for every major late 1980s game console (NES, Master System, and Atari 7800!) and a wide range of merchandise. There were comics, cartoons, toys, even a film! The runaway success of Double Dragon convinced Technos to publish its own games in America, starting with the beloved River City Ransom. 

The game (along with the rest of the Kunio-Kun series) was a lighthearted, kid-friendly bookend to Double Dragon, with squat high school toughs smacking each other around with chubby limbs and bicycle chains. The Double Dragon and River City series have had crossovers, prompting squeals of delight from nerdy young gamers years before Marvel vs. Capcom or Super Smash Bros.

Technos games have a distinct feel, with weighty characters who fully invest those pounds into each strike. When someone takes a punch (or a dodge ball) to the face, they reel from the impact... and if they've taken too much damage, they gasp for breath to warn the player of their impending demise. The deep grappling system and "heavy" feel of Technos games lent itself especially well to wrestling, with Technos releasing Mat Mania in 1985, and the wonderfully flashy WWF Wrestlefest arriving six years later.

Here now are reviews of the Technos games that popped up in local arcades... and they popped up a lot in the Malt Shop, the almost legendary college arcade in Mount Pleasant. A handful of these Technos titles were discovered in truck stops, gas stations, and laundromats throughout Michigan.

The Combatribes

Technos fans like to think of this as the real Double Dragon 3, and who can blame them? The game charitably titled Double Dragon 3 was a hot mess. However, it's probably more accurate to call The Combatribes a spiritual successor to Renegade. Each "act" isn't a fully realized level with a starting point and a destination, but an enclosed arena, with enemies pouring in from the edges of the playfield. So many enemies. So many freaking enemies.

Even for a beat 'em up, The Combatribes is astonishingly repetitive. You'll battle an unholy number of copies of the same two goons in each act, followed by a boss that could take a direct hit from a nuclear missile and walk away with light bruising. Your energy meter, displayed at the top of the screen as a number, quickly drops, forcing you to drop in fistfuls of coins to keep the action going. It's not as exploitative as the micro-transaction filled Double Dragon 3, but it's still pretty quarter-thirsty. You're not going to finish this one with skill alone, unless rapidly tapping the insert coin button is considered a skill.

Yeesh. This just makes me want to
go to "Tone-it-down Land" instead.

On the plus side, The Combatribes feels like a genuine Technos game, with the same heavy handling and brutal attacks, but vibrant settings like theme parks replacing the sepia-toned apocalyptic wastelands of Double Dragon. The characters are appropriately detailed and beefy, and their attacks are even more vicious than the ones in Double Dragon, with the skulls of thugs getting smacked together and driven into the pavement. It's not a bad time with three players, but The Combatribes lacks the variety and technique to stand on even ground with real classics like Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Double Dragon

Double Dragon not only pioneered the side-scrolling beat 'em up, but was the undisputed king of that genre for several years, eventually getting toppled by Capcom's gorgeous Final Fight in 1989. It's not just that Double Dragon looks great for its time, with brawny, exquisitely detailed sprites battling against hauntingly dreary urban landscapes, or that it feels as good as it looks, with sure-footed character control and strikes that land cleanly on solid opponents. It's the technique in Double Dragon that makes all the difference. 

Double Dragons! Double Williamses
and Lopars, too!

You're not swatting away an endless procession of cardboard ninjas (looking at you, Bad Dudes...), but getting into protracted rumbles, first punching your opponent to soften him up, then moving in for the kill with a few knees to the skull and an overhead throw. Weapons and environmental hazards add to the variety, and the player's enjoyment. Rob a thug of his knife, then give it back to him blade-first for big damage and a splash of red at the point of impact. See an oil drum? Pick it up, then hurl it at a massive Abobo to cut him down to size. Chasms and waterways are also handy ways to dispatch goons... just don't fall into them yourself!

Double Dragon is a fantastic experience, marred by two issues. The first is that it's running on hardware that can't handle it, resulting in an obscene amount of slowdown in a game with an already relaxed pace. Things get downright painful at the end of the factory stage, where the crowd of enemies and the rolling conveyor belt leave the CPU struggling to keep up. The other beef is that Double Dragon insists on saddling the player with platforming challenges that don't work well in the context of a beat 'em up. The final stage with its bricks that burst out of the walls is infuriating... if there's a way to get through this without getting ragdolled around the screen by stone pillars, I have yet to find it.

Despite all that, Double Dragon is a great game... and the best way to play it is on the Game Boy Advance. Double Dragon Advance is a remake from Technos successors Million that takes stages from the first two arcade games, strips away the bothersome slowdown, and adds even more technique to the combat. There are now blocks and parries! You can sit on a thug's chest and pound him in the face until he begs to blink away into oblivion! You get a sweet pair of nunchucks, and you don't even have to pay an extra quarter for them like you did in Double Dragon 3! 

Double Dragon Advance is one satisfyingly savage beat 'em up, and represents Double Dragon at its absolute peak. The series has never been better, and it will never be better than this.

Double Dragon II: The Revenge 

This is one of those times where the console version eclipses its arcade counterpart in popularity. Double Dragon II was a blockbuster release for the NES, promising true two player action while the previous game offered a weaksauce versus mode. The colors were brighter, the new set pieces were more creative (how's about a battle aboard a helicopter with a loose airlock?), and the new spinning roundhouse kick makes short work of any nearby Shadow Warriors... if you've got the reflexes to pull off this advanced technique!

Been there, done that. Although
last time, I wasn't fighting an
obese Terminator. You'd better cut
down on the pasta la vista, baby!

Then there's Double Dragon II in arcades. It's got the same bi-directional combat as Renegade, with a left and right attack button along with a jump. However, the levels are either weirdly iterative of the first game (hey, there's that shipping warehouse with the conveyor belt again!) or creatively strained. I'm fighting in front of an active wheat thresher, because apparently Billy and Jimmy Lee don't have the common sense to walk around it. The new characters are slight redesigns of the old ones, and the new weapons aren't particularly exciting... shovels and hay bales, really?

Double Dragon II is playable, even fun when the CPU can keep the action at full speed. (It usually can't.) It just feels like an oversaturated repeat of the first game, while Double Dragon II on the NES goes to great lengths to distinguish itself from its own predecessor. It feels like a legitimate sequel; bigger, bolder, and more inventive than before. Double Dragon II in arcades is just more of the same, disguised with a beard and an eyepatch.

Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone

On the corner of woeful game design and cynical consumer exploitation, you'll find Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone. This game was outsourced to lesser known (and just plain lesser) developers East Technology, and the difference in feel from the last two games is distressingly obvious. Gaunt versions of Bimmy ow, okay, BILLY and Jimmy stiffly hobble around the world, beating up each country's hoods with attacks that never seem to connect. It looks like an overreaching Master System arcade port in motion, and players expected better from the third installment of one of the biggest arcade hits of the late 1980s. 

But wait, there's more! Each stage typically starts at a Weapons Shop. You're invited to come on in, take a look around, and spend REAL MONEY on extra fighters, extra weapons, and extra health. This isn't such a big deal now that emulation lets you credit-feed to your heart's content, but in 1990, no arcade-hopping teenager on a tight allowance was going to spend real money on in-game digital content. Any fool who did part with their money was "rewarded" with lame partner characters and weapons that were freely strewn throughout the streets in the first two games.

Roney? Really? With a name like that,
he'd better have muscles.

The larger problem is that Double Dragon 3 doesn't deserve the player's first quarter, let alone the bucketful it's expecting from players. It sucks. The unappealing characters shamble across the screen like corpses, collision detection is squirrely and imprecise, and the fist-to-face impact of the previous games has been pared down to an unenthusiastic finger flick to the forehead. As threequels go, Double Dragon 3 is every bit the flaming disaster Jaws 3 and Godfather 3 were in theaters.

It's worth pointing out that there was an overhauled NES version of Double Dragon 3, with a game engine actually designed by Technos. That at least makes it feel like a legitimate Double Dragon game, but it's not one of the better ones. The difficulty is almost comically high, and combat isn't as satisfying as it was in earlier games. It's like the designers desperately didn't want to make this, and punished the players for its existence. Sorry kids, but if we have to suffer, you have to suffer along with us.

Mat Mania

Technos provided the button-mashing blueprint for wrestling games with Mat Mania. As the up and coming wrestler, "You," you'll tangle with such made-up superstars as Insane Warrior! Karate Fighter! And Coco Savege! Er, SAVAGE! Tenderize their steroid-packed muscles with punches and kicks, then lock up for a grapple and let loose with a devastating piledriver. Get your opponent weak enough and you can finish the match with a pin, announced with scratchy enthusiasm by the referee. "One! Twoooo! THWEEE!"

I don't like where this
is going...

It's telling that pretty much every wrestling game in the 1980s played just like Mat Mania. You start each fight with simple punches and kicks, wearing the opponent down and working your way up to the crowd-pleasing finishers. Double taps of the joystick send you (and You) running into the ropes to set up a clothesline or a diving pin. Climbing a turnbuckle is as simple as walking up to it. It's all easy to understand, but deceptively deep. Mat Mania was a solid foundation for future wrestling games, and there's not much to the design that needed to be changed or improved.

As for the graphics? It's 1985, so the characters lean toward the small and comical. Mat Mania is about on par with Konami's Yie Ar Kung Fu visually, although it does capture some of the glitz of mid-1980s professional wrestling, with hot-headed announcer Cory introducing each match, and the wrestling network's broadcast flickering off into a dead grey screen if you've been beaten. You'll just have to drop in another coin to restart your wrestling career. Talk about Pay-Per-View!

Renegade

Say what you will about Renegade, but it's an important step forward in the evolution of the beat 'em up. It pioneered the elevated side-view perspective that practically all side-scrolling beat 'em ups use, and there's a sense of brutality in the fighting that's missing from contemporaries like Kung Fu Master or Yie Ar Kung Fu. In a typical fight, Mr. K first flattens a thug's face with a few punches, grabs him by the collar, kicks him in the groin a few times, then hurls him over his shoulder, possibly into the ocean or off the edge of a thirty foot high subway platform.

These guys don't come off their
bikes until you KICK them off their
bikes. Aw, you just got tire marks
on my brand new leather jacket!

Renegade is a mean, gritty game, especially in the kid-friendly arcades of 1986, and especially when it was brought to America with all new graphics. Instead of high school delinquents, you'll go mano-a-mano with greasy thugs, biker gangs (sometimes jump kicking the gang members off the bikes as they're riding them!), and prostitutes. If you lose, they'll rub salt in the wound with a digitized insult. If you win, it'll be by the skin of your teeth. Renegade is tough, giving the player a single life and no continues. (Advice? Tweak the DIP switch settings to give yourself another life and tone down the difficulty to a somewhat manageable level.)

There's one other thing worth mentioning about Renegade... it uses a bi-directional combat system, with one button attacking to the left and another attacking to the right. Pressing the left attack button while facing left makes Mr. K punch, while pressing the right attack button while facing left makes him kick in the opposite direction. The idea was to let the player defend themselves from two angles, but Renegade's bi-directional melee combat isn't as handy or intuitive as the omni-directional firing in Robotron: 2084 or Smash TV. It was worth a shot, I guess. (Probably wasn't worth revisiting in Double Dragon II, though.)

Super Dodge Ball

The game you dreaded most in gym class comes to arcades, without the bruising and hard feelings. As a high school dodge ball team, you rise up the ranks by beating the other teams... to death. Team members don't just walk off the court when they're tagged with the ball... you'll have to pummel them repeatedly, draining their health bar until they leave the arena and this plane of existence as angels. (And you thought Blades of Steel's fist fights were hardcore.)

This sporty off-shoot of the Kunio-Kun series is most fondly remembered on the NES, and frankly, it's a better game there. The characters are smaller and less detailed, sure, but they're also faster and control more tightly, making it more fun to play whether you're gunning for the championship in single player mode or hurling rock-hard dodge balls at your friends. There's even a free-for-all mode that erases the court divider, letting you get up close and personal with those dodge ball strikes.

There's no question that the NES version of Super Dodge Ball is the better game, but at least the arcade version looks nice. Each country's court is adorned with famous landmarks in the background, and every team has its own super sized captain, who can take more damage than his puny teammates and also possesses the Power Shot. Race across the court and throw the ball as you approach the divider and it streaks toward the opponent at mach speed, three times stronger than usual and just as tough to catch. The Power Shot play mechanic works better on the NES, like pretty much everything else about this game, but at least it's there.

WWF Superstars 

WWF Superstars is a perfectly adequate wrestling game that suffers next to its amped-up sequel. It's better than the NES Wrestlemania game for sure, and better than most wrestling games available at the time, but it's light on content, as well as the flair fans expect from the WWF brand. There are six wrestlers available, and while they're recognizable as Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, and... uh... Honkey Tonk Man, they're kind of shrimpy and plainly drawn. And while the game plays well enough, it doesn't go out of its way to impress the player.

Even the cut scenes are lacking next
to the ones in WWF Wrestlefest. Gene
Okerlund looks like a constipated
Joe Polito.

Like Galaxian and the original Streets of Rage, WWF Superstars is a competent game doomed to languish in the shadow of its follow-up. Why pay for the dress rehearsal when you can have the full performance?

WWF Wrestlefest

Compared to the relatively timid WWF Superstars, WWF Wrestlefest goes way over the top in its presentation. Wrestling superstars like Jake the Snake Roberts and the Big Boss Man have never been bigger, there's driving music and color commentary from an unseen announcer, and the action is peppered with gorgeously drawn cut scenes featuring the Legion of Doom and Mean Gene Okerlund. If you know who any of these people are, you'll be thrilled. Even if you don't, just drink in the sights and sounds, because they're some of Technos' best work.

Wrestlefest offers two play styles... the Royal Rumble, where every wrestler piles into the ring and the last man to remain inside wins, and Saturday Night Main Event, a standard tag team mode. Like a real WWF match, wrestlers don't stay on the sidelines even if they're tagged out, running interference if their teammate is pinned. It keeps the bouts tense and exciting... even if you've made a pin with one wrestler, you'll have to use the other one to keep it.

That's a whole lotta ugly dudes.

Fundamentally, WWF Wrestlefest isn't much different from Mat Mania, but it's the spectacle that makes it so memorable. There's an avalanche of digitized voice, the characters are even larger and more detailed than the ones in Street Fighter II, and the artwork captures the essence of each real-life wrestler beautifully, with Hogan cupping an ear to hear the cheers of the crowd and Earthquake bouncing around the ring before landing elbow first on his opponent. In the world of arcade wrestling games, WWF Wrestlefest is top-card talent, as legendary in its own ring as its wrestlers are in theirs.

Xain'd Sleena

Technos goes off the beat 'em up path with Xain'd Sleena, a side-scrolling science-fiction platformer that takes place on a half-dozen different planets. Xain (who looks like a 1980s version of Halo's Master Chief) is armed with a wimpy hand blaster and a jet pack, which isn't strong enough to let him fly freely, but does provide enough power to let him double jump. His goal is to infiltrate enemy territory on each planet, plant a bomb on their headquarters, and escape into space before the explosion leaves a crater where the enemy base used to be.

Hey, Empire! You're about to get Xain'd!

Xain'd Sleena is an aggravatingly fidgety game, with power up capsules offering weapons (none impressive, and some laughably weak) at random and enemies delivering inconsistent damage. Sometimes you'll just get a scratch from an enemy encounter, but sometimes the attacker will put you on life support. The larger aliens will ignore your "gage" completely and just stomp you into orange marmalade on contact. The especially annoying shooter segments between planets dispose of the health bar entirely, ensuring that every collision with the unrelenting swarms of ships is fatal. 

It's a nice looking game for sure,
especially for the mid 1980s.

So it's not a great game overall, but Xain'd Sleena gets by on presentation alone. Each planet you'll visit is distinct, and the science-fiction artwork is some of the best you'll see in a 1986 video game, with rocky outposts set against a sea of stars and alien rainforests teeming with the deadliest wildlife in the galaxy. The artists on this project get an A for their work, while everyone else on staff just gets an "Eh."

 

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Sunsoft

 

Image from... I'll be dipped, Sun Denshi.

I've been a little off my game as of late, so we'll start off slow and review a couple of games from Sunsoft. Sunsoft is well known to kids who owned an NES... it was one of the star players among Nintendo's licensees, stumbling out of the starting gate with weak ports of Midway arcade hits but quickly finding its footing with exquisitely polished and satisfying games like Blaster Master, a video game adaptation of Tim Burton's first Batman movie, and a ballsy continuation of Spy Hunter that's actually a better sequel than Midway's own Spy Hunter II!

Not a perfect NES game, but
a really flashy and ambitious
one, with more special effects
than you'd expect from an
NES game. Sunsoft understood
the assignment.
(image from Game Fabrique)

(I didn't review Spy Hunter II in the Midway chapter of this feature. Honestly, it didn't deserve it. The game tries to bring the action of Spy Hunter into the third dimension, but the sorry hardware makes it look like an antique next to OutRun, and the aggravating stop-start gameplay doesn't hold a candle to the non-stop excitement of Roadblasters. The artwork from Brian Colin doesn't save Spy Hunter II, and even seems out of place in an sleek action game about vehicular espionage. But I digress.)

Sun Corporation didn't have the same presence in the arcade space, however. The only Sunsoft games I've personally seen in an arcade were Kangaroo and Route 16. While Kangaroo did pretty well for itself as a Donkey Kong substitute for Atari, Route 16 didn't get much press or media attention, and was relegated to a port on the feeble Emerson Arcadia 2001 alongside other loser coin-ops like Kaneko's Red Clash, Tehkan's Pleiades, and Konami's Turtles. 

(As Jeremy Parish pointed out in one of his videos, the good video game systems get Frogger! If you're the Odyssey2 or the Arcadia, you have to settle for Turtles. Stop crying, Odyssey2, I saw what you already did to Popeye.)

The wacky wild Waku Waku 7 cast,
courtesy of Alchetron.

Sunsoft had more luck with the Neo-Geo, publishing a solid if slight fighting game in Waku Waku 7. That game's explosion of creativity and style demonstrates just how much the company had honed its craft since its arcade debut in the early 1980s. 

Kangaroo
Played: An ice cream shop in Nashville MI 

Donkey Kong was one of the blockbusters of the early 1980s arcade scene. The competition bought the home rights before you could get them for your own game system, and you're feeling serious pressure. What will you offer your customers as a substitute?

For Atari, the answer was Kangaroo. Kangaroo is a lot like Donkey Kong, right down to featuring primates as the bad guys. These pink monkeys are a whole lot smaller than Donkey Kong, but there are a whole lot more of them, climbing up and down the trunks of the trees bracketing the playfield. Beware any monkeys who've climbed onto the branch where you're currently standing... they're armed with apples, and they're not afraid to use them!

In your corner is Mama, the game's leading marsupial. She's delightfully animated, capturing all the silly charm of real kangaroos with big, floppy feet that make a big, floppy noise whenever she walks. She's also armed with a pair of boxing gloves, letting her punch out nearby monkeys and their pelted produce. The fruit prizes hanging from the trees give Mama points, and a bell replenishes the supply with more valuable prizes. Don't spend too much time harvesting pineapples and strawberries, though! Your joey is held hostage at the top of the screen, and the longer you wait to rescue him, the more likely you are to be nailed by a stray apple (or get your gloves stolen by a gorilla. No, not that gorilla) on your way up.

It doesn't take long before the
game starts showing its teeth.
This is the second stage.

There are four stages in Kangaroo, ranging from a straightforward climb up a handful of ladders to punching out a totem pole made of monkeys to some vicious platforming challenges. Mama is fragile and doesn't have Mario's solid center of gravity, making the gap-filled second stage a perilous climb. It doesn't help matters that you have to jump by pressing up, leaving the gameplay feeling even more wobbly and imprecise. Will you make that next jump? Probably. Maybe. I think so?

Still, Kangaroo isn't a bad stab at the Donkey Kong formula. It's playable enough even with the slightly sketchy controls, and it manages to distinguish itself from, and even elevate itself above, other arcade platformers of the early 1980s. Kangaroo also has mountains of personality; enough to get its own cartoon series, airing alongside Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. in Ruby-Spears' Saturday Supercade. Granted, it wasn't a good cartoon, but it's more than Burgertime or Roc 'n Rope ever got.

Well, at least Ruby-Spears thought
these two deserved equal billing.
She's "K.O. Katy" the Kangaroo in
the show, by the way. Also, Paul
Dini wrote this episode, because
upcoming cartoonists have got to
eat too. Look, it was either this
or Rubik the Amazing Cube!

Route 16
Played: In a Mount Pleasant movie theater

If you're looking for Route 16, you'll find it on the corner of Rally (X) and Venture-a Boulevard. It's effectively a fusion of those two games, with the player driving a race car to sixteen city blocks to steal bags of cash. Each block is a maze, but they're not tidy, symmetrical affairs like the one in Pac-Man, often snarling themselves into tight spirals with dead ends. When you visit a block, get all the money and get out quickly, before one of the patrolling green cars spots you. If green cars corner you in a city block and there's not a checkered flag nearby to turn the tables, you're as good as roadside scrap. Also, do mind the bombs (gulp).

Money bags have a nasty habit
of turning into oil, which slows
you down. You'll just have to
wait for it to change back... and
hope the other cars don't find
you first!

Route 16 frequently switches views, from a map of the city with you and the rival cars displayed as tiny dots, to the interior of the city block, with its tangled maze structure and hidden prizes in full view. You'll have to strategize on the map screen where to go next, then dive into the city block to harvest its goodies and escape before you're noticed by the other cars. It's a pretty good hook... it's just a shame that Route 16 handles like a jalopy next to the buttery smooth ride of Rally-X. The graphics are blocky, the slightly stuttery cars flicker even when there's no logical reason for it, and the soundtrack is coarse and high-pitched. 

Whatever this game used for hardware should have been left in the 16th century, but at least Sunsoft gave the game a slight glow up on the Famicom with Route 16 Turbo. Its graphics are more detailed, and there's even an amusingly hopeless attempt at a camera zoom in the transition from the map view to the block view. Mode 7 it's not, but at least the designers made the effort!

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Williams

"Who's the baddest mofo on the arcade floor?"
"Who makes the games that are (almost) never a bore?" 
"Williams!"
"You're daaaamn right."

Originally known for its pinball, Williams made a smooth slide into the video game industry with its 1980 debut, Defender. Defender is the kind of arcade game that immediately comes to mind when you think "arcade games"... obnoxiously loud and colorful, with big explosions, ruthless enemies, and a control panel that's maybe a little too complicated for the player's own good. 

Eugene Jarvis makes a sneaky
cameo appearance as a delivery 
guy in an episode of NewsRadio,
where Dave Foley's character
is addicted to "Stargate
Defender." Who calls it
Stargate Defender?

Games by the Vid Kidz team (consisting of Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis) made up the bulk of the Williams arcade library, and would make frequent appearances in classic game collections by Digital Eclipse, starting with the 16-bit era of home consoles and continuing up to 2011's Midway Arcade Origins. Williams' Arcade's Greatest Hits was a godsend for Saturn-owning arcade nuts who were deprived of Namco's library and didn't yet have easy access to emulation on PCs.

There's a reason these games keep showing up in collections... they're really good! Robotron: 2084 would pioneer the dual stick shooter still popular today, Joust is a grand time for two players, with a sweet science-fiction fantasy aesthetic, and nothing builds tension like the construction of the all-consuming Sinistar. 

There are a few "what were they thinking?" moments in the early Williams library, like the good clean not-so-fun of Bubbles and the bold misfire that was Robotron's first-person sequel, Blaster. However, for the most part, Williams arcade games are among the greatest ever made. If there is an arcade on Mount Olympus to amuse the gods, you bet your sweet ambrosia Robotron: 2084, Defender, and Sinistar would be in there.

If Nichibutsu's games about
transforming robots were
morphin-omenal, Jaleco's
Aeroroboto is closer to
morphine-omenal.

 

Williams also dabbled in the localization of Japanese titles, with games like Toaplan's Truxton and Jaleco's Aeroboto. The last arcade game by Williams as an independent brand was NARC. It wasn't a fantastic game, feeling nearly as over-encumbered as Xenophobe, but the digitized graphics and copious violence found its share of fans, and would lead to bigger, better, and bloodier things under the Midway banner.

Blaster
Seen in: A Grand Rapids mall arcade
(I don't know if I actually played this, or ran out of quarters and just stared at the attract mode for five minutes)

Weird swerve, Williams. Robotron: 2084 is a dual stick shooter seen from an overhead view, but its canonical sequel Blaster takes things into the third dimension for what feels like a caveman ancestor to After Burner. As you flee Earth in an escape ship with the last surviving human family, you're accosted by bigger and even blockier GRUNTS from the previous game. Manage to escape orbit and you'll then have to fight through meteors, swarms of flying cats, vampire ships (yes, space ships can apparently be vampires), and anything else the design team could pull out of their (ahem) hats at the last minute. There's no unified artistic vision here; just "let's put a lot of crap on the screen for the player to shoot."

Blaster is a boldly experimental game, you've gotta give it that. Arcade games didn't often attempt a first-person viewpoint in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, playing Blaster makes you realize why such games did not flourish in pre-Mode 7, pre-Super Scaler 1983. It looks rough; generally a whole lot of flashing squares and somewhat convincingly animated sprites, with the occasional starfield to suggest depth. It's harsh, but psychedelic, like a drug trip David Bowie once had while watching the Disney movie Tron.

Blaster looks rough, attempting a
first-person viewpoint but mostly
just throwing a lot of squares and
rectangles at the player. There was
a planned Atari computer version
which pares down the graphics, but
not by that much!

Blaster is an adequate shooter that gets a lot of brownie points for its innovative first person gameplay. Sadly, it never feels like it finds an identity beyond its 3D graphics, and there's no year beyond 1983 where graphics like these were anywhere close to acceptable in an arcade game. If you squint, you can see the DNA of Space Harrier in Blaster, but the game is attempting tomorrow's ideas on yesterday's technology, and the two rarely pair well.

Bubbles
Played: A Chuck E. Cheese in Grand Rapids

It would be easy to take one glance at Bubbles and conclude that it's based on Scrubbing Bubbles, a bathroom cleaner from the 1980s with a memorable animated ad campaign. Bubbles with brushes for feet skate across sinks and tubs to clean stubborn stains, leaving them as clean as they were the day you bought your house.

A scrubbing bubble, or
"scrubble," if you prefer.

Bubbles is not officially associated with the bathroom cleaner by S.C. Johnson (a family company!), but you'd have a hard time telling while playing this. Bubbles is basically the Scrubbing Bubbles commercial, in video game form. As a slippery, soapy sphere, you'll need to clear a sink of clutter, while dodging razor blades and the dreaded cockroach. Steal a broom from a tiny cleaning lady (maybe she's the Tydee Bowl man's wife?) and you can use it to slay a single roach for extra points. 

This might pair well with Rug Rats
if you're the Felix Unger type.

The more filth your bubble scrubs away, the larger it becomes. Once it's big enough to have freckles and a derpy grin (what, me worry?), it can hit the drain to escape the stage. Be warned! There's a time limit, and eventually your bubble will be flushed down the drain whether it's large enough to survive the trip or not. 

It's a functional game design, but you won't last long in Bubbles' later stages, where there's just barely enough crumbs, ants, and grime to bring your bubble to adulthood. Most likely, you'll have to build your bubble up to drain-proof size over the span of two lives, making Bubbles a battle of attrition you're destined to lose. It's amusing, briefly, but at the same time you don't wonder why Bubbles was trimmed from the Super NES and Genesis versions of Arcade's Greatest Hits. Really, you 16-bit holdouts aren't missing a thing.

Defender
Played at: A bowling alley near Portland

Defender was the toughest game you could find in a 1980 arcade, the Dark Souls of its era. Players were given a joystick, along with an unholy number of buttons for control. Instead of pressing left and right to move in those directions as one would expect, the player had to maneuver their ship with taps of thrust and reverse. It takes a lot of practice just to learn to play Defender because of the complicated controls, and mastering the game is an almost Herculean feat. Git gud? You'll have to git exceptional to roll the score on this one.

Swarmers! Always with the accursed
swarmers!

Defender has you darting across the surface of a distant planet, which is so massive you'll need a second radar screen to see it all at once. Humanoids dot the surface of the planet, and green Landers hope to kidnap them. Any Lander that succeeds in taking a humanoid off-screen merges with it to become a more hostile Mutant. If all your humanoids die, the game doesn't end, but it might as well be game over for you! The planet explodes, and all Landers become Mutants, leaving you hopelessly overwhelmed. 

In case I haven't belabored the point enough, Defender is tough. It's tough to get a handle on the senselessly complicated controls. It's tough to first blast an escaping Lander, then catch the humanoid it was carrying without turning them both into pixel soup. It's tough to resist the temptation to hit the smart bomb when you're faced with a flock of swarmers, and it's extremely tough to survive when the planet has been annihilated and you're surrounded by a dozen of the game's worst enemies.

Despite all that hardship, it's also tough to stop playing. Defender has the raw look of a VidKidz game, with pulsing colors and massive, messy explosions, and your ship's laser blasts look terrific, stretching across the screen as long neon trails. You'll stumble over the controls, and you'll swear when a humanoid slips through your grasp and plummets to its death, but you'll keep coming back. I can do better next time, really! I've almost got the hang of it!

Joust
Played: Among other places, a convenience store just outside of town

Arcade games are good. Arcade games that let two players play together are even better, and Joust is the best of them all. It was the king of two player gaming in the 1980s, until Street Fighter II came along a decade later to knock it off its throne.

And what will two players do when they play Joust? As the name suggests, they joust with their enemies... in space, on a flying ostrich. Hey, it's a video game! It doesn't have to make any sense! Players mash the flap button to fly, then collide with evil knights astride green buzzards. The highest knight in a collision wins, with the other either dying outright or turning into a harmless egg. Defeat all the rival knights (and clean up any of their eggs, because they will hatch) and you're whisked off to a new, more dangerous stage.

The lava troll exacts a heavy toll
on anyone who approaches his
domain. Mm, buzzard barbecue!

Joust is fun and frantic. Keeping an ostrich airborne is exactly as hard as it sounds, with the player hammering flap to maintain altitude, and the gameplay subtly changes from stage to stage, with survival waves challenging you to stay alive for a hefty point bonus, and egg waves that force the player to grab a dozen eggs scattered across the playfield before they hatch into new opponents. You can unite with the second player to defeat the buzzard army, or challenge them to impromptu jousting matches... entertaining, if counterproductive.

Past all that, Joust is a brilliant work of art. The warbirds are all smoothly animated and meticulously detailed, with artist John Newcomer using the book Animals in Motion to make the player's ostrich especially lifelike. (The second player rides a stork, and you can tell the difference between the two birds at a glance, a testament to the game's incredible graphics.) Lava pits on either side of the stage bubble ominously, with the hand of a lava troll bursting out of the magma to drag any nearby warbirds to a fiery doom. Take too long to complete a stage and a shrieking pterodactyl arrives to punish you for loitering. Lose a life and your next one rises out of a spawn pad, flashing a rainbow of colors as it waits for you to take command.

Joust is just cool, in a way only video games can be cool. It's cool the way Strider Hiryu, a high-tech ninja armed a light saber/police baton and a robot sabertooth tiger, is cool... confident, creative, and way over the top in its presentation. Fans of Balloon Fight will argue all day long that their game plays better, but Balloon Fight feels like Joust with all the edges filed off. In that grand Nintendo tradition, it's harmless, friendly, neutral... and neu-tered, compared to Joust.

Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest
Played: In a Lansing movie theater

This is not the greatest two-player game in the world, and it's a lousy tribute. Joust 2 steps up the quality of the original's already fantastic graphics, but the gameplay is buried under an avalanche of discordant ideas, like so many toppings dumped onto a scoop of Cold Stone ice cream. Really, can I have some ice cream to go with my mountain of gummi bears and Oreo crumbles? No wonder Cold Stone hasn't been a "thing" for at least a decade now.

You'll often feel them when playing
this game. The low-down, no-damn-
place-to-go, smashed-into-a-tin-can
blues.

And that's the problem with Joust 2... too much noise, not enough signal. There are new play mechanics galore, even when they don't add to the experience and don't even make sense. Players can swap their steed from an ostrich to a pegasus and back, but the winged horse weighs a half ton, and pega-sucks at anything other than being a bulky target for buzzards. Hatched eggs now become knights with a fatal lance, and red buzzards apparently made out of a cereal box deposit crystals which hatch into pesky bats. Oh, oh! And if any enemy eggs fall into lava, they re-emerge as mutants, larger and deadlier than the already aggressive garden variety buzzard. Gee, another nuisance designed to chew through my credits! Thanks, you shouldn't have.

And on and on it goes with the new ideas, with the design team blissfully unaware that the new vertically oriented monitor doesn't have the space to contain half of them. It makes Joust 2 a claustrophobic, quarter-sucking experience, doubly so with a second player. You may recall that two player gameplay was a vital component in the first Joust... in its sequel, player two is just another hazard in a congested screen. Even if you did convince a friend to join you, they'd just share your disappointment.

Joust 2 was never ported to any home game consoles, at least not before emulation. Perhaps there wasn't much interest in the license. Perhaps Williams just preferred to pretend it never existed. 

NARC
Played: A Lansing arcade

Williams' last game before it merged with Midway, NARC is a blood-smeared sneak preview of Midway's approach to game design throughout the 1990s. As one of two police officers decked out in riot gear, it's your job to clean the slums of drugs, while painting the streets with the blood of dealers. While you can follow police procedure and just arrest them, it's a lot more reliable (and satisfying!) to gun 'em down with your firearm, or launch a rocket into a crowd of addicts and fill the screen with a shower of severed limbs. Say "hi" to William S. Sessions for me when you meet him in HELL! Haw haw haw HAW!!!

NARC's Judge Dredd approach to winning the drug war felt out of step with the games Williams had released in the early 1980s... yet would be right at home among the games it released under the Midway banner. NARC uses the same style of digitized graphics (and even some of the same actors!) as Midway's smash hit Mortal Kombat, and it's every bit as gratuitously violent as either that game or Smash TV. 

I'm pretty sure this guy was also Kano
and Crun-Chi from Mortal Kombat.

Granted, NARC isn't as good as either of those games, or most of Williams' older ones. The thick crowds of exploding drug dealers leave the game feeling cheap and messy, and when you peel away the controversial content, you won't find much actual game underneath. Walk from left to right, pick up baggies of coke, blast a thousand suspects into dog chow because arresting them almost never works, wonder why the hell you need a duck button, get stabbed with a bunch of syringes you couldn't reasonably avoid or even see, and dump in a couple more coins to keep the blood flowing. Also, there's occasionally a sports car you can ride around in, squishing addicts until it gets blown up. That's it. That's the whole game. Where depth is concerned, it makes Rampage look like Nobunaga's Ambition.

He didn't say "no."

Acclaim had high hopes for NARC as a franchise, hiring Rare to make an NES version (with everything that made NARC entertaining stripped away...) and even including Max Force and Mr. Big in the cast of the Power Team, a segment of the Video Power television series. The Power Team was a low-rent Captain N, with the insufferable Johnny Arcade and a bunch of Acclaim-licensed characters riding around in Bigfoot, the monster truck. They had Quirk the Chilled Tomato as a sidekick. He rapped once, with all the funky flow of Ben Stein at his most boring.

From left to right: Tyrone from Arch-
Rivals, Max Force from NARC, Fabio
from Wizards and Warriors, and
Quirk the Obnoxious Orange Chilled
Tomato.

As you might expect, Max Force was less violent in the Power Team cartoon. (Now he has a grappling gun, wink wink!) After meeting Quirk, I imagine he'd consider going back home for his rocket launcher, broadcast standards and practices be damned. Tomato bisque, anyone? 

Robotron: 2084
Played: A bowling alley not far from Portland. The Michigan one, not the important one

Legend has it that Robotron: 2084 was created by Eugene Jarvis after he broke his hand in a car accident. He couldn't manage a handful of fire buttons, but he could play test a game using two joysticks. Little did Jarvis realize, he stumbled into one of the most intuitive and enduring control schemes in the history of video games.

Dual sticks have become standard equipment for video games in the 21st century, letting the player move with one stick while adjusting their view of the environment with the right. With Robotron and other twin stick shooters, one stick moves your character, while the other aims and fires. It's a brilliant design, because no matter where you're going, you can always defend yourself from any angle, at any moment.

Things start getting hairy when the
Brain Robotrons come out to play.

Shooting that versatile could make the average game easy, but Robotron: 2084 isn't easy. The screen is absolutely choked with robots at the start of each wave... mostly mindless GRUNT soldiers, but also Indestructible Hulk robots (in green, heh heh), cunning brain robots, and Spheroids that cower in the corners while pumping out an endless supply of bullet-spitting Enforcers. Hidden in the chaos are the members of the last surviving human family... catch them before the robots do and you'll get up to 5000 points for each rescue.

Robotron is a very flashy game, with tons of onscreen activity and a kaleidoscope of strobing colors. It's also a very mechanically sound game... its various enemy types and their behaviors make it feel like you're playing chess in real time. With lasers. And robots. And a damn good attract mode, explaining the gameplay while throwing in enough exciting science-fiction buzzwords to tickle the neurons of young nerds like myself. You tend to notice references to genetic engineering when you watched The Secret of NIMH the week before.

Sinistar
Played: In a bus stop (train stop?) right next to Elevator Action

Here's Williams' answer to the free-roaming space shooter, just in time to nick some quarters from Namco's Bosconian and distract players from Konami's forthcoming Time Pilot. And it's a nice effort... not quite up to the standards of Williams hall of famers Robotron, Defender, and Joust, but unforgettable all the same.

Your mission is to use a laser to strip minerals from stray chunks of space rock, then process the ore into Sinibombs. Don't worry about collisions... just bury your ship's nose deep into a meteor, and fire away until it's dust! While you're mining for Sinibombs, worker drones will be using the same ore to build their master, the ferocious Sinistar! Once he's complete, this metallic monster will chase you to the ends of the galaxy, sucking you into his fang-filled mouth if you get too close. Give him a taste of Sinibombs instead... that'll curb his appetite! Nail Sinistar with thirteen Sinibombs and he's finished... at least until the worker drones build another one.

They put this guy front and center
in the advertising, and for good
reason. He looks like Hordak from
She-Ra tried to turn into a UFO
and got stuck that way. 
(image from Strategy Wiki)

Sinistar is a pretty good game with one of history's all-time best video game villains. When he awakens, Sinistar will let you know with growling voice synthesis. (At minimum, you will be startled by the news... at worst, you'll need new underpants.) If you're not already headed in the opposite direction when Sinistar is brought to life, he'll quickly swoop in to turn you into a Sini-snack. The deck is perhaps stacked too high in Sinistar's favor, but the sense of doom that washes over you when you realize you're a couple bombs short of victory and he just woke up is one hell of an experience, and one you won't find anywhere else.

Stargate 
Played at: An arcade tent at the Potato Festival in central MI
(yes, I said "potato festival." I don't know, they just think they're neat.)

Making a follow-up to an arcade hit is risky business. Maybe you'll get a classic like Ms. Pac-Man, or maybe it'll miss what made the original so compelling and wind up like Donkey Kong Jr., or maybe it'll be a cynical rehash that mistakes annoyance for challenge. (Looking at you, Exciting New Pac-Man Plus.)

Even more things to blast!
And be blasted BY!

Stargate takes the Millipede approach, with the same core gameplay but a whole lot of new elements sprinkled into the mix. Ship-cloaking "inviso" has been added to your auxiliary weapons, alongside the smart bombs and hyperspace from the first game. A stargate in the center of the map takes you directly to the humanoid most in need of your help. Classic enemies like the Lander, Swarmer, and Baiter have been joined by Fireballs, Phred and the Munchies, and Yllabian Space Guppies, thin ships that are infuriatingly good at slipping between your laser blasts. 

If you couldn't learn to play Defender, forget about Stargate... it will crush you flat. However, fans of the original might enjoy the added nuance this sort-of sequel provides. One highlight is the ability to hold multiple humanoids, which not only awards more points but lets the player jump ahead several waves... you just need to know the trick. Players love hidden Easter Eggs like this, and Stargate was one of the first arcade games to offer them.