And I'll Form the Head: Terra Cresta... and Friends!

It's Shmuptember, and in honor of the occasion, I thought I'd take a look at one of my favorite titles from the past. Terra Cresta was released in 1985, and capitalized on the rising popularity of both the recovering video game industry and futuristic Japanese toys like the Transformers. It also raised the stakes for shooters in the 1980s, giving the player a small army of ships while competing games were satisfied with one. If you were really good, you could merge all five fighters together and burn your adversaries to ash with a flaming phoenix!

Here now are reviews of eight games either directly related to the Terra Cresta series or heavily influenced by it.

MOON CRESTA
Arcade/Super NES

The eyes have it.

Moon Cresta was an inauspicious start for the series; closer in spirit to the glut of Galaxian clones available in the early 1980s than the brilliant vertically scrolling shooter it would become. In this game, it's your mission to gun down an assortment of abstract aliens, which fly in unpredictable, often frustrating patterns. Succeed in clearing the screen of hairy eyeballs and atomic piles (hee hee!) and you'll get a chance to dock with another ship, increasing your firepower. Here's the catch, though... you only get three ships, so if you lose one, you can't combine it with the others. Complicating matters is that each of the ships in your arsenal is more powerful but also larger than the last, turning what seems like an upgrade into a dangerous liability.

I'll give it to you straight... there were dozens of games like Moon Cresta in the early 1980s, and a large chunk of them were more entertaining than this. GORF builds on the success of two other classic shooters to great effect, and Astro Blaster serves up tension by the truckload with its tight time limit and devilish enemy formations. If you insist on playing Moon Cresta, the version of the game in Nichibutsu Arcade Classics for the Super Famicom is your best bet, as it's got an enhanced version with the same cacophonous sound effects but more polished graphics. Curiously, it still congratulates you with terms like "Far Out!" and "Right On!," which must have seemed crusty even in 1980, when the original game was released. I guess Nichibutsu couldn't be expected to update everything!

TERRA CRESTA
Arcade/NES

The Phoenix, the Winger's ultimate
form and a recurring character
in the series.

Oh yeah, now THAT'S the stuff! Terra Cresta sent Nichibutsu soaring into the late 1980s with a clever reinvention of Namco's ground-breaking shooter Xevious. Instead of flying solo with the Solvalou, your tiny but formidable Winger can merge with up to four other ships, turning it into a fearsome flying juggernaut. Its strength can be further boosted by splitting the component ships apart, choking the screen with firepower but leaving the Winger unprotected.

With more variety and without jarring pauses in the action, Terra Cresta's fleet of ships is a far more exciting play mechanic than the docking in Moon Cresta. Beyond that, the concept couldn't have come at a better time. Video games were slowly making a comeback after the crash of 1983, and toys like Voltron and the Transformers were red hot. Kids of the '80s were hungry for Japan's giant robot culture, and Terra Cresta scratched that itch in a way no other video game could.

Terra Cresta was successful enough to inspire a dozen sequels and spin-offs. It was also given a surprisingly faithful conversion on the Famicom, although the game took its sweet time reaching America. By the time it hit the NES in 1990, players had already moved on to 1943 and Life Force, with a lucky few graduating to the shooter-heavy libraries of the Genesis and Turbografx-16. It may have arrived a little late, but Terra Cresta was at least worth a rental for fans of the genre who hadn't yet stepped up to a 16-bit game system.

UFO ROBO DANGAR
Arcade

There are three different UFOs,
each with their own signature
weapon.

If Terra Cresta dipped its toe in the sea of Japanese mech culture, UFO Robo Dangar dived into it headfirst. Rather than a phalanx of five ships that combine into one, you're put in the driver's seat of a towering android armed with fist missiles. Survive the relentless assault of your enemies and you'll be awarded a power capsule that gives your already mighty robot a hand cannon. Persevere for even longer and you'll discover a flying saucer which boosts your firepower to devastating levels.

Beyond the aesthetic changes, UFO Robo Dangar is largely the same game as Terra Cresta. Ships pour out of the edges of the screen in mesmerizing patterns, and you blast them while weaving around their bullets. You can split your mech into three ships and fan out your shots with a tap of the Formation button, but it's a temporary solution, and could end in tears if your lead ship is destroyed.

Aside from the robot motif, there's one other thing that distinguishes UFO Robo Dangar from Terra Cresta. On rare occasions, you'll stumble across a black hole which takes you to a world with a creepy bio-organic look. That art style would later resurface in Armed Formation F, a distant cousin of the Terra Cresta series.

TERRA FORCE
Arcade

Is that decayed brown building on the left
Nichibutsu headquarters?

Terra Force takes the same "two games for the price of one" approach as other late 1980s shooters like Life Force, with both horizontally and vertically scrolling stages. However, it's a move that distances the game from its predecessors, turning it into an experience that's pleasant, but quickly forgotten. Terra Force gives you a single ship with a chance to collect two escorts, but you can't combine the three fighters into one bullet-spewing behemoth. Instead, you're given power-up panels that increase the strength of your bombs and lasers... a depressingly predictable move from a series that usually strives for better.

You can change the game's perspective from top-down to side-scrolling and back by flying into specially marked tunnels, but Terra Force feels more like a genuine Terra Cresta title when played from an overview view. It also gives you more room to dodge the waves of non-descript aliens, and makes your bombs a little less useless. That last sentence was dripping with the same lack of enthusiasm that went into this game's design, so I'll just close by saying that Terra Force is a respectable shooter that's kept grounded by its low aspirations.

HYBRIS
Commodore Amiga

It's not Terra Cresta, but a remarkable simulation!

Out of all the video game gadgets, gizmos, and geegaws in existence, I don't think I've ever wanted one more than the Commodore Amiga. First released in 1985, the Amiga was a personal computer with a heavy focus on multimedia applications. For Commodore, that meant dazzling business presentations and professional video editing. For me, it meant only one thing: awesome video games.


The Amiga delivered exactly that, dropping jaws with killer titles like Ruff 'n Tumble, Turrican III, and the headliner Shadow of the Beast. This side-scrolling action game doesn't hold up under close examination, but when you're a fifteen year old video game addict playing the demo in a computer store, it makes a big impression. It also made it awfully tough to go back to that crusty old NES...

Anyway, on to the game! Many Amiga titles were European riffs on arcade favorites, and Hybris is no exception, doing its best impression of the Terra Cresta series. You're still piecing together a heavily armed battleship and splitting it apart to spread out your firepower, but this time, you'll be doing it to a catchy Eurosynth beat, and dropping bombs to clear the screen when the action gets too frantic. 

Hybris's only major malfunction- aside from plain graphics that sometimes camouflage the bullets you need to avoid- is that it's a three button game that has to settle for a one button joystick. This happened a lot with Amiga software... even Mortal Kombat was playable with one button, if you can call that "playable."

ARMED FORMATION F
Arcade / PC Engine

The Insect Stage is guaranteed
to make your skin crawl.

Armed Formation F borrows heavily from the Terra Cresta series, but it's not a true game in the series... more of a black sheep in the family, like Irem's R-Type Leo or Konami's Xexes. Its biggest departure from Terra Cresta is that the Constructicon angle has been completely abandoned. You've only got one ship, along with two sidecars called Armers. The Armers lay down a spread of horizontal fire, and can either be sent behind your ship or in front of it by tapping the Formation button.

Using the Armers isn't as fun as merging and splitting ships in the Terra Cresta games, and the narrow playfields leave the player with less room to dodge the bizarre creatures in each level. Despite all that, Armed Formation F is still a fairly diverting shooter, as long as you stick with the arcade game. The PC Engine conversion loses a lot of the original's charm thanks to overly tiled backgrounds and smaller, less detailed monsters.

TERRA CRESTA II
PC Engine

A triumphant comeback for the Terra Cresta
series. Uh, better make that an adequate one.

The long overdue sequel to Terra Cresta suffers from being a pretty good shooter on a game system that's home to a whole lot of better ones. You've got to put on one hell of a show to compete with the likes of 1943 Kai, Blazing Lazers, and R-Type, and Terra Cresta II can't meet those high standards.

Having said that... for fans of the series, it's good enough. A game as inherently Japanese as Terra Cresta is a comfortable fit for the TurboGrafx-16 hardware, and the gameplay has evolved in subtle but welcome ways. Ship pieces are now held in metal capsules, and shooting them causes the ends to pop off, destroying anything they touch for a huge point bonus. You can also design formations for your fleet of ships, an idea first explored in the NES conversion of the first game. Finally, the music stands as some of the best you'll hear on the TurboGrafx, with rich, complex tracks that add tension to the action.

There are issues, of course. The game doesn't put up much of a fight, with enemies quickly falling to your overpowered guns. There's also not much to distinguish one stage from the next beyond themed wallpaper. One level takes place over active volcanoes, and another sends you into the ocean to blast spinning turtles. There are no truly iconic moments, like chasing after pagodas on tank treads in M.U.S.H.A., or one of the many wild boss fights in Paradius. Nichibutsu could have done so much more with this game, but a pretty good Terra Cresta sequel is better than none at all...

TERRA CRESTA 3D
Sega Saturn

Your Saturn can do better than this.
Much, much better.

There are plenty of great shooters on the Saturn... but I'm not reviewing any of those. Instead, I'm stuck with Terra Cresta 3D, the unfortunate end to the Terra Cresta series. This Saturn exclusive (to the great relief of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation) was released at the worst possible time, after Nichibutsu had abandoned action games for nudie mahjong, and during gaming's awkward transition from two to three dimensions. It's not a change that serves Terra Cresta well... the number of ships you can combine has been dropped from five to three, and the action is largely forgettable, with a sluggish pace and bland level designs. 

Things go from bad to worse during the boss battles, which are fought from a behind-the-ship viewpoint that adds only superficial depth and leaves the action disconcertingly cramped. The game's got competent orchestral remasters of the themes from the original Terra Cresta, but even they're not up to par with the music in better Saturn shooters (read: nearly all of them). Even if you're as attached to the Terra Cresta series as I am, you're better off flying right past this tragic conclusion.

Full Disclosure

Jenn Frank, a respected video game writer who was recently forced out of the business by the more fanatical members of the "GamerGate" movement, was kind enough to give some press to a Game Boy Advance version of GORF I'd written a few years ago. I welcomed the coverage and was deeply grateful for it.

Also, gamers have kind of been acting like a-holes lately, and I'd like to see that come to a screeching halt. Everyone's got different opinions and it's very easy to let your enthusiasm get the better of you, but the bullying and the doxxing and the death threats and the rape threats (!?!) have got to stop. Don't give me any of that "it's all been faked" crap, either. It's like claiming you haven't raided the cookie jar while brushing the crumbs out of your beard. Come on, people, you're better than this. (I hope.)

(image courtesy of Springfield Files)

Fourth Time's The Charm?

From the makers of the Nintendo 3DS... and the Nintendo 3DS XL... and the Nintendo 2DS... it's the brand new Nintendo 3DS FX-U! This latest model of the popular handheld includes a faster processor that delivers astonishing special effects, just for you! 

Want the second analog stick the system probably should have had in the first place? FX-U! Want to play great games like Xenoblade Chronicles that were almost impossible to find on the Wii? FX-U! Craving 3D you can see without being completely motionless? FX-U! Interested in our upcoming Skylanders rip-off Amiibo figurines? FX-U! That's right, all these features and more will only be available in the new Nintendo 3DS FX-U, coming in 2015 to obsolete the system you bought last week! 

Why yes, I AM annoyed by Nintendo's latest game system! Other players are excited about the New 3DS, perhaps mesmerized by that new toy smell. Personally speaking, I've never been fond of stopgap consoles like this one. I didn't appreciate the Sega CD, was enraged by the 32X, and felt that the Game Boy Color was a cop-out, mercifully retired by the far more impressive Game Boy Advance just a few years later. 

Maybe Nintendo is feeling the pinch of the 3DS's admittedly wimpy processor and wants to close the technology gap between it and the Vita. That battle's already been fought and won, though... the Vita is no longer a threat to the 3DS even in its current form. Besides, the system is already capable of great things even without the speed boost. Have you seen Super Street Fighter IV or Kid Icarus Uprising? I'm just not sure it's necessary for Nintendo to drive a wedge in the 3DS user base by releasing yearly hardware updates and designing software that will only work with the current year's model. This isn't Apple we're talking about... although lately, you wouldn't know it from looking.

Three 3DS models were plenty, Nintendo. You should wait for the system's true successor for any significant improvements.

Time Makes Fools of Us All

Time is a funny thing, isn't it? One day it seems to be your best friend, and the next it leaves you behind with jaw agape, wondering what happened. Nowhere is this more true than in the video game industry. Huge leaps in technological progress make the gaming experience change drastically from one generation to the next. We've gone from the the simple but intense twitch action of the Atari age to the deep scrolling adventures of the NES era, and from the vibrant visuals and rich sound of the 16-bit revolution to the fully explorable 3D worlds that defined the late 1990s, when the Playstation reigned supreme. 

All of these paradigm shifts brought with them profound resentment from the old guard. Having played video games since the late 1970s, I've seen it all. I've watched disgruntled Atari fans call Nintendo's historical impact into question, damning the NES and using ugly racial slurs to describe the company that made it. I found myself shaking an impotent fist at Sony when it steamrolled the Dreamcast with the Playstation 2 and cluttered the market with an unending deluge of sandbox games and first-person shooters. Now, we're seeing it all over again with the rise of the mobile gaming market and the embrace of a wider audience. The players who grew up with Grand Theft Auto and Halo are splitting hairs, declaring their favorite software to be "real games" while arrogantly dismissing everything else. The Wii, despite selling 100 million units, wasn't a "real" game console. The thousands of apps on iPhone and Android aren't "real" games. Women, who recently overtook teenage boys as the most active game players in America, aren't "real" gamers. And so on.

These players are entitled. They're obnoxious. They're even threatening, if the recent antagonism of feminist gaming blogger Anita Sarkeesian is any indication. But beyond all that, they're on the losing side of history, just as those Atari fans were in the late 1980s, and just as I was ten years ago. They're desperate to keep the undivided attention of the game industry, but things have changed in the last decade. The console manufacturers which cater to them are losing money at a breakneck pace, and the handheld designed to offer the experience that "hardcore" gamers crave has been a dismal failure, selling fewer units than the Dreamcast in the same span of time. With AAA titles increasingly becoming a losing proposition and the industry hanging its hopes on smaller independent developers, the gamers that identify as "hardcore" are quickly losing their relevance. No amount of chest-thumping and anonymous death threats will change this.

To those selfish gamers who've struggled mightily to keep the industry under their thumbs: Your time is up. Adapt or be left behind.

It Came From the Potato Festival! August Yard Sale Finds

It's been a while since I updated, hasn't it? Let's fix that.

Last weekend was the potato festival, when our humble midwestern town celebrates the tuber that keeps America plump and its own economy healthy. When I was growing up, the festival was a wonderland of carnival rides, flea markets, and even a makeshift arcade set up under a tent. However, as the years went by, the festival limited its ambitious. A couple of years ago, it was limited to a rodeo, a few T-shirt vendors, and trucks selling the usual assortment of artery-clogging junk food. 

Apart from an admittedly impressive fireworks display, this year wasn't much more exciting. However, there's one thing you can always count on from the potato festival... dozens of yard sales. There's something about this time of year that gets people eager to clean their homes of unwanted junk. And when that happens, you'd better believe I'm there, ready to take those unloved items off their hands. You know what they say about one man's trash!

Run awaaaay!
(picture courtesy of Amazon.com)

Unfortunately, my first find was trashed for a reason. Remember ten years ago, when palm-sized television games by Radica and Jakks Pacific were all the rage? That fad lasted all of ten minutes, and the gadgets now regularly surface at garage sales for a dollar or less. Some of these TV games are surprisingly entertaining, but this early model, featuring five of Namco's greatest arcade hits, isn't one of them. 

Its conversions of Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Rally X, Bosconian, and Galaxian are dreadfully flawed, with imperfect graphics and simplistic sound effects. I get the sinking feeling that the games are running on the Famicom-on-a-chip that was all too frequent in the cheaper TV games units. The ports aren't any worse than the ones on an actual Nintendo Entertainment System (in the case of Pac-Man, it's hard to imagine how that would be possible...), but the five games nevertheless fall far short of the arcade perfection players must have been expecting. Bosconian in particular was eviscerated by the decision to set the radar over the playfield and a diamond gate inside the joystick that makes it impossible to move diagonally. You won't be hearing your co-pilot shout "Blast awwlf!" either, but after all I've told you, you probably guessed that already. If you haven't already graduated to one of the Namco Museum collections, the much more faithful TV Games unit starring Ms. Pac-Man is a better bet.

Pardon the dust!

Things got better the next day... a whole lot better. I stumbled across a sale with a handful of high-tech equipment, including this desktop computer for a tantalizing price. A quad-core processor, four gigs of RAM, a one terabyte hard drive, and the much beloved Windows 7 operating system, all for thirty bucks? How could a guy possibly pass up a deal like that?

It's actually not that hard when you don't have the cash. So I haggled with the seller and weaseled them down to twenty dollars. After a quick trip to the grocery store to wrangle the money out of my dwindling bank account, I had my prize... a computer with definite potential as a Steam machine. It may not be bleeding-edge technology, but believe me, for the price I ain't complaining.

Catching the Rhythm

This is gonna be a quick update, just to let you know what's been rolling around in my head as of late.

I hate your guts, mandrill.
(Image from MTV.com. Wait, really?
They're still a thing?)

Some time ago, I picked up a clearance-priced copy of Rhythm Heaven Fever from a local K-Mart. I heard great things about the game, often described as Wario Ware's musically-inclined cousin, but to be honest, I wasn't that thrilled with Rhythm Heaven Fever the first time I played it. In addition to the gameplay being astonishingly simple (you press A and B on the Wii remote. Sometimes you push them together. That's it), the timing in the musical mini-games seemed off. Try as I might, I could never hit the golf balls tossed by the mandrill in the first stage, and the robots I manufactured in the second weren't fit to build Yugos. (It was a car from a third-world country on the verge of collapse. Look it up.)

It turns out that it wasn't just my questionable skills that were to blame for my lousy performance. Rhythm Heaven Fever doesn't always sync up well with high-definition televisions, throwing off the timing and making it more difficult to play. So I popped the game into my Wii U, connected to another high-def television through an HDMI cable, and lo and behold, the experience improved dramatically. I was building robots like a champ, and my shins were (mostly) unbruised by the mandrill's sneaky underhanded throws.

Still, something was not quite right. Squeezing small buttons on the Wiimote didn't seem like the best way to play a game like this... not that Nintendo offered any other options. Rhythm Heaven Fever is designed solely for the Wiimote, without support for any other controllers or peripherals. If you wanted to play the game with, say, the Donkey Konga drums or even the classic controller that plugs into the bottom of the stock Wii controller, you were out of luck. It was a wasted opportunity on Nintendo's part, especially when you consider that the arcade version of Rhythm Heaven had great big lit buttons, perfect for smashing along to the beat.

It couldn't aim for crap, but at least
it was good for something!

So I said to myself, "Self, wouldn't it be great if you built your own controller for this game out of spare parts?" And myself said, "I don't have any spare parts!" And I said back, "Sure you do! Don't you remember that crappy light gun you bought for the Wii during your brief obsession with Dead Space: Extraction? Why don't you try that?" And myself shrugged and said, "Sure, it wasn't like I was doing anything with it." So after pulling myself together, I dug the gun out of the closet, took it apart, and broke out the trusty soldering iron for a little... elective surgery. (cue maniacal laughter)

It was an easy job... I just needed to solder a wire on the solder points for each of the buttons, four in total. After that, I soldered on some small buttons for testing purposes. The results weren't ideal- I didn't have anything to mount the buttons on, so I had to hold each one awkwardly between my thumb and forefinger- but it did indeed work, opening the door for a sweet (if superfluous) mod. Now all I need are two big buttons and a wooden enclosure to mount them on and I'll be in business!

"I'm a big button, and I need a big cereal!"
(Image from Karlsson Robotics)

However, I'll need to work out the logistics first. Those big buttons mentioned earlier are expensive, generally selling for ten dollars on internet retailers like Adafruit and Karlsson Robotics. The latter site offers cheaper buttons for six clams, but they come with defects like weak springs, and nobody wants their buttons to give out in the middle of an intense jamming session. Next, the wooden enclosure would have to be weighted down to keep it steady while I'm pounding away on the buttons. Finally, I'd have to find some place for the gun itself. I could mount that on top of the wooden box, but it would likely get in the way. It would make a lot more sense to set it on the side and use a connector to plug it into the box, so I could take them apart for later storage.

It's a lot of work for a game I can't imagine playing for more than a week tops. Still, I've put more effort into stranger things. We'll see where this goes.

Viva PlatforMonth! Battleblock Theater

First order of business: there's a crazy good game sale currently going on over at the Xbox Live Marketplace, with over a dozen different Capcom games and expansion packs at clearance prices. You don't need to be a Gold member to take advantage of these deals, so if you're in the market for a cheap copy of Street Fighter III or just need all the extra characters in Street Fighter X Tekken, here's your chance to clean up. (Speaking of cleaning up, Dustforce is also part of the sale, in case you needed to get in touch with your inner janitor.)

Things get a little, uh, hectic later in the game.
(Image courtesy of Microsoft)

All right, now to the second order of business. I missed Anne Lee's last two Game-Along months, so I figured now would be the time to make up for it by reviewing one of my latest acquisitions. Battleblock Theater was offered as a Games with Gold freebie last month, and I can confidently say that this is one of the best side-scrolling action titles I've played all year. Sure, the rough-edged, anarchic graphics (supplied by Dan Paladin of Castle Crashers fame) might be a turn-off for some, but the level designs are absolutely sublime, as clever and intricate as anything you'll find in the Super Mario Bros. series. 

You'll walk across clouds, push blocks over lethal laser beams, launch yourself into the air by stepping on heated coals, and trigger chain reactions of exploding cubes, all in pursuit of the green gems scattered throughout each stage. You'll need only three to escape the current level, but finding more will improve your grade for the stage and let you buy new characters. There are tons of customization options in Battleblock Theater, and while they don't change the core gameplay much, it's still a lot of fun to swap the hero for a pirate... or a wizard... or a koala... or a blue mushroom armed with a plunger.

The game's only serious flaw is that the fighting should either have been redesigned or removed entirely. Your character, who moves as nimbly as a gazelle when racing across platforms and leaping over spikes, has all the reflexes of a NyQuil addict while in combat. Admittedly, chasing after cats to steal their gems can be a lot of frantic fun, but most of your encounters with felines will end with you luring them into spikes or water, because melee combat is so utterly hopeless.

Fortunately, it's usually not a problem. Eighty percent of the time, you'll be leaping for distant platforms, shimmying up ladders, and stumbling across hidden paths, all while an eccentric announcer comments on your performance. It's simple, satisfying fun in the grand tradition of the NES, illustrating that when the designers at The Behemoth were playing late '80s classics like Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man, they weren't just enjoying themselves... they were taking notes.