Ha!Ha!Ha! That's a pretty sweet render. So scary!

One of the first consoles I bought for myself (as opposed to getting it for Christmas or my birthday) was an Atari Jaguar. Why? Fuck if I know. I just had to be the kid getting something other than the actual, you know, good systems that were available at the time. I had to be different, and apparently a bit of a dipshit. So I hit up the nickle ads (what Internet? It was 1994) and found a guy selling one with a handful of games for $300. It came with Cannon Fodder, Brutal League Football, Iron Soldier, Super Burnout (a shitty motorcycle game), Val d’lsere Skiing and Snowboarding (wait…what?), Cybermorph and, of course, the crown jewel: Aliens vs. Predator. Jesus Christ, what a fucking horrible lineup of games. Those are all almost universally garbage. I could pick up that whole goddamn package for a five spot and a no-swallow blowjob. What the fuck was Atari thinking? But I digress.

I used to seriously love Aliens vs. Predator. I was never a computer guy, so I only had word processors, not actual computers. I had never played a real first-person shooter before this one, no Doom or Duke Nukem. I remember being awed by the graphical powerhouse I had before me. You could play as any one of the three: space marine, alien or predator. Playing through the space marine stages, a layover map would gradually fill in, and you’d wander over to corners just to make sure the thing filled in all the way, you know? You’d hear the horrible screech of approaching aliens and the spine-tingling, brutal and honestly terrifying whispers of cloaked predators. Let me tell you something, when you’re alone in your first apartment at 3 in the morning clutching a massive Jaguar controller with sweating hands and your motion detector is going beep…beep…beep beep…beep beep beep…and all of the sudden you fucking hear “Anytime…” whispered straight out of the Predator movie directly in front of you, you’re either shitting your pants, or you’re a straight-up robot with no human feelings. The aliens and predator campaigns were equally as cool. You could use all the weapons at their disposal and kill some shit, but good.

So, I recently picked up the new Aliens vs. Predator on my PS3 for $10. See, it was made by the exact same developer, Rebellion, who made the original on the PC and also my beloved Jaguar version. But then, an hour into the space marine campaign, when I slowly realized I was slipping into a coma induced by medical-level boredom, I began to second-guess myself. This new game was just so bland and generic; was I looking at the old one through rose-colored glasses? I thought maybe I was, so I decided to dig up my old Jaguar and give it another play-through and, well, holy shit.

Blech! Seriously, look at that giant hunk of cat shit.
Before I had a bed at my first apartment I slept on that controller.

First off, two observations: the fucking Atari Jaguar is an ugly piece of shit, and the person who designed the controller has a grudge against ergonomics. Holding it is like holding a giant piece of plastic with two rolls of quarters welded onto the sides. It’s got three giant red buttons and a phone key-pad slapped down the ungodly long bottom half. I felt embarrassed holding it, like my girlfriend’s kids were going to walk in and start making fun of me. Oh and sorry, looking at it now it’s Alien vs. Predator, singular not plural. Never mind that there are hundreds of the stupid things in the game.

“Look at my engagement ring!” Jesus, look how pixelated he is.

So, marine mode first and the initial impressions aren’t that horrible. The graphics are actually not bad, so let’s start walking down the hall. Oh! I found a shotgun. That’s cool, so we’ll just move on and…wait a minute. Why is my arm swinging back and forth like that? That doesn’t look like I’m walking down the hall with a bad-ass shotgun ready to blast some fucking creatures—that looks like I’m a conductor with a tiny baton leading an adorable little orchestra. I lost my overlay cards a long time ago, so I have no idea what the buttons do. After a bit of experimenting, I can side-step with the 7 and 9 buttons, and sort of strafe by holding “c.” But I can’t side-step this way, only strafe and…oh shit, who gives a fuck?

I wandered around for a while, idly wondering at the horrible design decisions, like aliens leaving permanent pools of acid when you kill them, so that every time you walk over one it depletes your health. This is especially bad in the vent areas, which are so narrow it’s impossible not to crawl over them and take damage. There’s absolutely zero music in the game and I found it’s not nearly as scary hearing those predator whispers or alien screams anymore. And when a predator shoots his shoulder cannon at you, it’s a giant blue blob that slowly ambles on down the hallway, giving you time to calmly step aside, bow your head and tip your hat and say “Ma’am,” while politely waiting for it to pass.

See that pissy-looking yellow pool down there?
That’s acid, and it hurts you when you walk over it and it NEVER FUCKING GOES AWAY.

I only gave the other two campaigns a passing glance. Predator is by far the cooler of the two. He does that predator chuckle I love so much—you know, the one he did right before he blew himself up in the jungle, almost killing Arnie. That Bwuo oh oh oh huh huh huh. The weapons are for the most part pretty neat. Except the stupid shoulder cannon, which shoots way, WAY too goddamn slow. You might as well shoot a rascal scooter out with it to give it a fighting chance, or even just a walker to help it along. The alien campaign is just meh, boring. The whole thing has the stink of a game that was a product of its time, and the world has long since passed it by. Games from the Genesis/Super Nintendo era have aged much more gracefully than this train wreck.

Let’s face it: early 3D polygonal games are just ugly, and the alien and predator sprites are weak all around. Some games are like your dead aunt Margaret. We all miss her a little bit, sure; but really she was an annoying and petty shrew most of the time, and we’re all glad the bitch is six feet under. So, for nostalgia purposes, I give Alien vs. Predator an 8, or no, fuck that, a 9. I loved this game with everything I had back then. But I couldn’t give this thing more than twenty minutes of my time in this day and age without getting bored and grumpy, so how can I rate that any higher than a 1? You’d think that would average out to a 5 or something, but I just threw my rose-colored glasses on the floor and smashed them to bits. Alien vs. Predator, you get an extremely generous 2, you piece of shit.

When a launch title comes out for a console, one has to argue that the game could deserve a perfect score of ten, for being the best the system had to offer at the time. Let me remind you that this particular logic led to the discovery of all kinds of sexual diseases and false religious beliefs. Just because a game did lots of new things, that doesn’t mean it should deserve praise by the metric ton. Just because it is the first game for a system doesn’t mean it is the best game for the system, and only after so long can we drop our “shades of ill perception” and take a real, unadulterated glance at the game in question.

One game often glanced back at through nostalgia-tinted glasses is the abominable Super Mario Land. This title saw American and Japanese releases before I was even born. It very loosely follows what is considered the main rules of the Mario franchise, but given that this was released eons ago, one could argue the Super Mario “franchise” hadn’t been truly realized by that time.

I had fond memories of this game, but I certainly don’t anymore. As a child, the game punished me with what I remembered to be fun yet extremely difficult levels. When I recently re-procured this game, I was thoroughly disappointed. Have you tried playing this game in the twenty-first century? It punishes you in all new different ways – there are games that grow old gracefully, and then there is Super Mario Land. Hideous, disgusting and simple, it tarnishes the plumber’s name and soils his reputation. Super Mario Land, oh let me count the ways…

.

Nintendo Seal of Quality? Whatever you say.

I thought there was supposed to be a standard if games received the Nintendo Seal of Quality. It is the story of my life that some of the games I hold dear are not particularly good games, and in the case of Super Mario Land it seems like everything is wrong and nothing is right. Just like the international Super Mario Bros. 2, the excuse of a storyline in this game doesn’t bear any semblance or relation to the classic Super Mario Bros. story. Many elements are confusing; Instead of the Mushroom Kingdom, Super Mario Land is set in the dumbly named “Sarasaland,” made up of four equally stupid-sounding kingdoms. Instead of the reptilian scourge King Koopa we have a different villain—the Mysterious Spaceman Tatanga. So mysterious that they “mysteriously” forgot to design him with any interesting features, a back-story or even a purpose besides being the main villain. He might as well just be another minor enemy, because Mario shares no dialogue with him and when Tatanga is defeated, that is all that happens. Tatanga is defeated. Game end.

At least one staple is being re-used, the “save the Princess” plot-line. As you might be pleased to find out, we have a kidnapped princess for Mario to save. One of the oddities of this game though is that her name is Daisy (not Toadstool or Peach). In Super Mario Land, our moustachioed plumber adds another number in his little red book. I hope that kiss from Daisy at the end was worth all the shit you went through—hell, the shit you forced me to go through, you ungrateful fat codger. Don’t think I won’t tell Pauline or Peach about this.

With the Mario series being devoid of decent human characters, Daisy has since made it into pretty much every Mario game that will take her, even though she is a palette-swapped Princess Toadstool. Square have been getting away with this for their Final Fantasy monsters for years, so I really shouldn’t be surprised.

Another obscurity within this game is that Fire Flowers are not “Fire Flowers,” they are “Super Flowers” instead. Rather than throwing fireballs, Mario throws “Super Balls” once he collects one of the Super Flowers. Super balls are bouncy and also help Mario collect coins. In order words, they go completely against the well understood fireball behavior. All of the enemies have strange pseudo-Japanese names, too. Goombas are Chibibos, Piranha Plants are Pakkun Flowers and Koopas are Nokobon.

Even after we point out the discrepancies in the story and character naming, there are then a lot of issues with the controls and physics. I can accept when this game was released and what it actually managed to do, but there are some things we can’t let ourselves forget when we look back to classic games we’re fond of. There is something absolutely wrong with the way Mario moves around, his movement is complicated and controls are at times completely unintuitive. It takes a long amount of time to get used to the way he feels, and you will experience a many number of deaths until you finally familiarize yourself with the glaring mistakes within his leaps and bounds (of which the game makes none). He controls very differently to how he had done in games prior. He is much faster which leads to deaths through misunderstanding of his speed and jump distance.

TO HELL WITH THIS GAME

Oh! Daisy!

Some of the level design is absolutely boring and unimaginative, and can be absolutely punishing. There is nothing worse than a game that is extremely difficult and a chore to play your way through. There are cruelly placed enemies and obstacles that you can’t react in time to avoid unless you memorize where they are. The levels themselves are incredibly repetitive and blatantly copy-paste elements you have already seen earlier in the level. It is as though the game environment was created out of LEGO pieces; there are only a certain number of possible varieties. They are so short yet they seem to drag on and on.

When you finally get to the boss battle of the current world, you realize just how unnecessary they actually are. The ability to completely skip bosses (like in Super Mario Bros.) makes the bosses seem like a waste of time, and in all fact, only two out of the five bosses in the whole game are mandatory. The rest of the boss encounters can be ignored if you’re feeling particularly lazy. I guess that is how the developers must have felt; particularly lazy. Some enemies are previous enemies with slightly different sprites but exactly the same behavior. Even obstacles from one world will end up getting recycled in another, and some enemies frequent every world. Although the game boasts a variety of twenty-six different enemies, there are about six of those that appear every three seconds in every level.

There are four kingdoms in the game, although you wouldn’t even notice they’re different worlds if there wasn’t an intermission between them. That’s a smartypants way of saying that the worlds don’t really show any differentiation, which you think they would if they’re four completely different kingdoms. Apart from a few visual cues in the background, any one of the levels could have their graphics replaced and they’d just be another level of indeterminable origin. I understand that this game was released in 1989, but by that time we’d already had Super Mario Bros. 2! Didn’t the desert stages feel like desert stages, even to the point where switching the graphics wouldn’t have made a difference to the variety of the stage design and layout?

Blaster Master was released in 1988, and didn’t each level feel different to the last one? A year later we get Super Mario Land, and every level feels the damn same and it’s a damn shame. Matter of fact this game recycles elements of itself over and over and doesn’t apologize for it, even when doing so is an act of blatant fucking padding!

The Little Things

The soundtrack in Super Mario Land is amazing. It doesn’t recycle any music from the Super Mario games prior. It is funky, fresh and hip even in our ears at this time. Cheerful bouncy tunes that calm our nerves and makes our third Game Over more bearable than it should ever be. This is music that proves the Game Boy as a welcome platform for amazing chip-music early in its life cycle. Apart from a decent soundtrack, there is one other thing. The auto-scrolling stages in the Sky-Pop and Marine-Pop are absolutely astounding and really show off the Game Boy tech. If these stages had been tightened up and given more of a presence, the game would have been even better. I love how Mario can collect the Super Mushroom in these stages and it results in both him and his Airplane or Submarine growing in size. I love the music on these stages and the interesting enemy patterns. These stages don’t save the game, but they try their hardest to.

If it wasn’t for the argument that this game was released before I was born for hardware that was completely brand new, I would not be generous towards this game. I enjoyed the trip down memory lane, even if only for an excuse to rant about this dreadful game and get it forever off my shoulders so I don’t have to associate myself with it anymore. I definitely wouldn’t recommend this game to younger players or those new to Super Mario, because you will absolutely hate this game. It is confusing, disgusting and it convulses over your hands whilst you play. Sure, dust this cartridge off and give it another go for old time’s sake, but you will sully your proud and fond memories of this game for the remainder of your life. If you’ve never had the chance to play the major launch title for one of my most beloved hand-held consoles, you’re lucky.

TO HELL WITH THIS GAME

Panthro, Cheetara, Tygra, Wilykat, Wilykit. Not pictured: a yiffpile.

Nostalgia is a very powerful force. It’s what makes Thundercats seem like one of the awesomest shows ever when you think back on it. Then you watch it again, and the pitiless sledgehammer of objective reality knocks you upside the face and makes you realize that it is not only poorly written and the voice acting is horrible, but it seems to have served as the archetype for something that didn’t really have its renaissance until the Internet popularized fanfiction years later—homoerotic furries.

The lesson here is that nothing turns shit into pure, golden sunshine quite like nostalgia, and that goes for videogames as well. Nostalgia in the videogame community is what causes an otherwise sane individual to say “Yeah, I could play Mass Effect 2 or Portal, but I’d rather play Bubsy! Remember Bubsy?! Oh man, that cat is so witty, he’s got an exclamation point on his shirt so you just know he’s trouble!”

Now, normally I intend to use this column to take cheap jabs at bad old videogames, but I figure I’ll start things off big this time and attack a game that is not only not considered to be a bad game, but is considered to be a classic, largely due to nostalgia: Castlevania.

At the time of its release Castlevania was a pretty groundbreaking, even epic, game. You traverse a huge castle filled with zombies, monsters and hellspawn fighting everything from Frankenstein’s monster, Death, and Dracula himself. The question is, however, does the game hold up today? In a word: no.

“Blasphemy!” cries the videogame community in unison.

Give the game a playthrough now and you’ll realize that the graphics are sub-par even for the time period. That can be forgiven, but much more importantly, the whole thing feels very rough—especially the controls. Simon moves around with the fluidity of a sack of bricks, which would make any game frustrating, but in a game made to be very difficult, like Castlevania, it’s downright maddening.

Still not convinced? What does it say about the franchise that no real Castlevania games have been made since the mid-90s? Sure, there’s been Symphony of The Night, Dawn of Sorrow, Lament of Innocence, and other morosely titled sequels that sound like possible HIM song names, but if you play them you’ll see that they’re all based on Metroid, not the original Castlevania. And for those of you who may be citing the N64 Castlevania or the Wii’s new Castlevania: Judgement as a “real Castlevania game,” I cordially invite you to go get a full-time job as the lead product tester at an AIDS factory.

So, if Castlevania doesn’t pass the test of time, then what does? Well, how about Ninja Gaiden, for a start. Between the concept of destroying light sources for items and that dead giveaway life bar it’s rather obvious that Ninja Gaiden ripped off Castlevania something fierce—so why is it still fun? It holds up today simply because it took everything that was weak about Castlevania and fixed it—along with adding a few other perks. Simon Belmont moves like Steven Hawking at a squaredance; Ryu Hayabusa moves fluidly and responsively. While I was trying to get Simon to climb stairs properly instead of passing the ones I intended him to climb, Ryu was jumping around, sticking to walls like some agile fly-man.

So, if Ninja Gaiden plunged Castlevania into unplayable obsolescence, then, one may wonder, why couldn’t I say that Super Mario World did the same to Super Mario Bros.? The reason is actually pretty simple. Super Mario World improved on the original. Super Mario Bros. had no serious flaws; it was an amazing game, and later sequels like Super Mario World simply improved on it and added to it. Ninja Gaiden fixed Castlevania by replacing Simon Belmont’s robotic gait with Ryu’s catlike fluidity and adding fun things like wall-crawling.

Overall, it would be stretching to call Castlevania a downright bad game. It was an epic adventure that introduced a lot to the platformer genre and presented a dark storyline to the usually cheerful games of the NES. Despite Castlevania not being awful, it is most certainly overrated and, considering the tens of thousands of classic games and great new games coming out all the time, there’s only one real reason to dust off that old Castlevania cart—nostalgia.

Won't you help little pixel art spaceship find a home?

Yes, Retro Game Challenge received a bit of praise here and there for its originality and charm, but it otherwise came and went with little fanfare—unless you count the sound of the publisher whining about the disappointing sales. But you can hardly be blamed for this: based on the packaging alone, the game looks like just another retro compilation. I mean, let’s face it, we’ve all had this experience with retro compilations: you play the few good games once or twice, but then never touch it again because your friends are too cool to play 2-player Bubble Bobble with you so you can get the “Happy End.”

Ah, but therein lies the catch: Retro Game Challenge is not a compilation of retro games, but rather a compilation of fake retro games. “Demake” isn’t quite the right word, and “retromake” is too obvious. I was leaning toward “submake” or “pseudomake,” but the Wikipedia article on English prefixes has led me to settle on “megalomake” as the most awesome option, if not necessarily the most suitable. Retro Game Challenge is thus a unique collection of megalomakes wrapped up in a quirky and engaging presentation. One could perhaps even say that it is not so much a collection of retro-styled games as it is a game about retro-styled games, but since this isn’t an academic term paper I will refrain from posting several pages of bullshit for the sake of word count.

Hey, you got story in my retro compilation!

Regardless of what we call it, the game goes to great lengths to recapture the retro experience of the 80s. Rather than the usual straightforward “Game Select” menu, you’re treated to a storyline involving time travel, a floating polygonal head, and the dull mediocrity of a lonely friendless childhood. Each game comes with a correctly proportioned in-game manual that you are free to never read. As you complete challenges, you receive issues of GameFan magazine with tips, secrets, reviews, and the latest info about upcoming fake releases. Commentary is provided by the kid sitting next to you, who shouts such well-known 80s catchphrases as “Whoa,” “Dude,” and the ever popular “Look out.” His mom even yells at you to stop playing videogames all day, and you, of course, ignore her. The only element missing from the experience is the giant purple blotch in the upper-left corner of the screen where my brothers and I used to press magnets against the TV.

The games themselves are pulled from a mish-mash of genres, and can be described through reference to other well-known 8-bit classics. Cosmic Gate is Galaga with the addition of…wait, no, it’s pretty much just Galaga. Robot Ninja Haggle Man is similar to Ninja JaJaMaru-kun, with which will you undoubtedly be familiar if you were one of the suckers who were taken in by the enticing “IMPORT” tag on Nintendo’s Virtual Console. Rally King is a clone of that bitchin’ awesome Micro Machines game that the kid down the street owned, and Rally King SP is a slightly more difficult palette swap with the addition of product placement billboards. Star Prince is a decent vertically-scrolling shmup, and Haggle Man 2 is Haggle Man with oversized stages and a billion enemies everywhere. Up to this point, it’s a nice variety of quick, satisfying, pick-up-and-play gameplay.

FUN: Haggle Man, Rally King, and Star Prince.

BOOOOOORING: Guadia Quest.

But this brings us to the two biggest games, which are simultaneously Retro Game Challenge’s central showpieces and its greatest downfalls. Guadia Quest is a fan favorite for reasons that I cannot fathom: it’s just a turn-based JRPG from the Dragon Quest “wander and grind” school of design. I managed to slog through the mind-rendingly dull entirety of Dragon Quest II, and yet even I ended up using Guadia Quest’s secret “skip to the credits” cheat as soon I learned about it. To be fair, it’s actually pretty good as far as boring turn-based JRPGs go, but it just feels out of place: I was left feeling that a Zelda or Crystalis clone could have filled the epic fantasy niche while being less disruptive to the flow. All of the other games that make up Retro Game Challenge are like zippy little cars zooming down the highway; Guadia Quest is the bloated corpse of a giant squid that drops from the sky and brings traffic to a screeching halt. (Lay off; that is a damned fine squid-based metaphor.)

Oh god, the 90s draw near!

Finally, Haggle Man 3 finishes off the compilation, breaking from the long tradition established by the previous two fake titles in the series. With a release date just on the cusp of the 90s, the character design accordingly shifts from cute and super-deformed to an edgier style, but is softened by a greater social awareness as evidenced through the inclusion of such characters as “Haggleman Lady.” The gameplay has likewise evolved, and is now a clone of a game that people have actually played: Ninja Gaiden. Unfortunately, Haggle Man 3 suffers from some of the same problems as Guadia Quest: it’s just too long and tedious compared to the rest of the compilation (although at least it’s action-packed tedium this time around rather than “Jam A to get through every battle” tedium).

It may sound like I had a negative experience with some of the individual games, but Retro Game Challenge is more than the sum of its parts. This is often code for “The game actually sucks but I’m trying to avoid saying s0,” but it really is true in this particular case. Most of the games are reasonably fun reinterpretations of classic favorites, but there’s also a lot of entertainment to be had in the gaps between games: the Bart Simponesque fake names in the “Letters to the Editor” section in GameFan, the prophetic jokes about the sequelitis that will one day plague the industry, or the repeated pushing-back of the release date for Guadia Quest.

Indeed.

Retro Game Challenge was clearly made by people who remember the retro experience, warts and all. It’s a worthwhile nostalgia trip for $20 (as of the time of this review). And hey, even once the nostalgia wears off, you still might play Star Prince at least once or twice more before sticking it on the shelf with the rest of your retro compilations.

I figured the best way to start off the new GameCola would be to take a look at the sequel to the very first game I reviewed for GameCola. The original Snowboard Kids is the source of many warm and fuzzy memories from my childhood, but I made a note in my review that I had never gotten my hands on the sequel. Well, the planets lined up, God smiled upon me, the blue moon was shining, Lady Gaga became famous (I still don’t understand how that happened), and a used copy of Snowboard Kids 2 was on sale for $6.99 at an obscure game store in Clay, NY that happens to be the best place on Earth. By the name of everything in the name of Glee, if you live in Central New York and have never bought a game from Microplay, located across the street from Great Northern Mall, and yet indulge yourself in countless pre-order deals at local GameStops, I will come to your house and bludgeon you with that baseball bat you really thought pre-ordering Left 4 Dead 2 was worth.

To understand how I feel about Snowboard Kids 2, think about a friend from your childhood. A close one: one that you can remember every single little detail about. Now imagine not seeing her (or him) for eleven years, and suddenly you see each other again, all grown up. Even though she’s an adult now, there are still so many things familiar about her. Her hair seems to be dyed a slightly different color, she gives off a little more attitude, she’s wearing a Bob Marley shirt, and she may or may not be high. That was my first impression of Snowboard Kids 2. It retains a lot about the original game I fell in love with 11 years ago, but at the same time, there’s so much about the character and tone of the game that isn’t familiar at all. And there’s a lot more dinosaurs. And aliens. And robots.

SBK2 perfects a lot of the gameplay from the original. The controls are as tight as ever, though people that never played the original always seem to have trouble understanding that holding the “A” button down doesn’t make you go. Everything is totally familiar for people who have played the first, though. If you couldn’t control the original, don’t even bother with the second, because you’ll be just as infuriated as some of my now former friends whom I forced to stop playing FUCKING MODERN WARFARE 2 for ten seconds to try out this curious and new sensation I’m feeling in my pants, and, later Snowboard Kids 2.

The major difference between the two games is the inclusion of Story Mode in the second title. It’s not really a story as much as it is a series of vignettes seen before and after races, which set up the rather fantastic lands the kids race down. While the original game doesn’t get too unrealistic aside from snowboarding down a grassy hill and in an amusement park, this game goes underwater, in a castle, into outer space, and inside one of the lead character’s houses, seen from the vantage point of being six inches tall. It’s a good thing I hate realism in my videogames. I tried to snowboard down an erupting volcano once. All I got was first-degree burns all over my body and a stupid t-shirt that burned in the erupting lava.

So, by all means, I liked this game. A lot. I laughed when it was funny the way I laugh when Snuffleupagus says something depressing. I enjoyed the crazy tracks the way I enjoy LSD. But, at the same time, Snowboard Kids 2 did not have that impact on me that going back and playing the original game does. And after realizing that, I think I really began to understand what nostalgia is all about. I mean, I’m one of the younger guys on this site, but now I understand how people ten to twenty years older than me will find and enjoy obscure and sometimes shitty things like, say… Biker Mice from Mars or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the goddamn Snorks. I will never understand why anyone liked Snorks. It’s like Twilight, only there’s no pretentious vampires, everyone’s underwater, there weren’t any box-office-smash-yet-critically-panned movies based on it, and the characters are much more arousing to me.

Snowboard Kids 2 is a fun game, a real fun game. If you ever get a shot at playing it, do so. It’s a wacky diversion from the onslaught of ultra-brown realism we get in gaming these days. It’s also taught me to treasure the games and memories that I’ve had since I was a young’un. Snowboard Kids 2 is a fun diversion for me. The original Snowboard Kids is a reminder that I can always go home again.

Unless your home was the old GameCola. That bitch be dead. It’s been a fun first two years here. Here’s to many more.

OK, the only reason I’m reviewing this game at all is because I have a pocket of time to fill and a third review that needs to be done. I’m not even at home as of writing and I don’t know what else to write about. I do know I played this game, again, recently, and since my half-serious reviews aren’t ever looked at anyway, I figure it’s my best shot at efficiency.

I’m not a huge fan of first-person shooters. Not for any real bias or bothering purpose—I just never really play them. So when I say the Atari Jaguar version of Wolfenstein 3D is the best first-person shooter I’ve ever played, take it with a grain of salt. In fact, stop reading this review altogether.

I enjoy Wolfenstein 3D on the Jaguar mainly for nostalgic reasons. I bought a Jaguar back in 1996 before the N64 came out because I had money and I totally bought the whole “64-bit” thing. This was also the first violent videogame I was allowed to own. Furthermore, I was getting into the computer thing at the time, so all the really good pieces of middle-school-age memories were starting to come together. I enjoy it because, even in those days, simple shoot-’em-ups were all I really needed. And boy, is this game simple. Doom is actually the definitive version of what a first-person shooter should be, IMO, and Wolfenstein just the blueprint precursor. You only get five guns, five different types of enemies, and basic point-and-click map editing design. It’s basic and pretty boring after a while, actually, and Doom really expanded outward, gave it a lot more creativity, and did the design justice.

Still, I find myself returning to Wolfenstein 3D for the Jag because that’s the origin of fun for the genre. No complicated puzzles and little if any backtracking through the levels. No tricks; just straight and simple Nazi-blasting. With such a fundamentally simple base, it’s easy to get creative and expand upon it further, even though this title only expands so much.

I’ve played other versions of Wolfenstein 3D, too, and let me tell you—this one tops them all. First, the graphics are MUCH better than in the other versions. The pixilation is way, way down, and the sprites just look much better overall. I don’t remember much of the music, but the music in this game is pretty good, even though it’s very minimalistic. Each song is just a simple theme with some build up, then modulated, then brought back down to the original key, then repeat. You get a lot of floors to blow through, about 32 plus two, and the game starts building to some intriguing and creepy qualities as you start fighting giant doctors and zombies.

You may argue that the PC version is, as always, superior, but that version is hard to look at and slow, and it has only three guns, no map (a huge problem in first-person shooters), and very different levels. I tried playing the PC version, and it just disgusted me. Every time I want to play Wolfenstein, I play this version, and I’m very very very happy.

But making someone happy as they play doesn’t mean the game is very good. Let me bring up the old Jeddy vs. Meteo argument again and give some Jeddy some credit, because if Joe Fuckface decided to play this game today, he would be quickly bored by it. I enjoy it purely because of its history and context, but that’s a personal thing that is isolated from the title itself.

Good memories aside, Wolfenstein isn’t much. You get to blast through Nazis for 34 levels, but it’s a one-note game that gets old quickly. There is some variety, but it just can’t defeat the fact that you’re only doing one thing in the game—blasting the same Nazis over and over again. Even I get tired of the game by about the fourth mission. This is a major caveat and it shows just how old the game really is.

Not really much else to write about. I love the game, but it’s not much fun and it’s mainly just a blueprint for DOOM. Next time I won’t get so busy that I have to shit out a review to make the deadline.

END.

Christmas 1999: One gift for the “family” (read: me) left to open. As I tear away the wrapping paper, I see the letters “N”, “H”, and “L” staring me down. This is followed by a “‘94″ tacked onto the end. I yelp with joy, and rush down to play it with my brothers, ignoring the countless Nintendo 64 games brought to me by Santa Claus.

Summer 2001: I spend a lengthy time at my brother’s beach house inside playing NHL ‘94, until we finally win the Stanley Cup for the very first time. A large celebration ensues.

These are just some of the highlights of my fixation with this game. Ever since playing it for the first time I’ve been hooked, and it’s not hard to see why. Sure, you can have your next-gen games, with your polygon counts, and your 45 thousand bits, and your stats and drafts and your create-a-players; but with NHL ‘94, you have so much more than that. When playing this game, with its ancient-by-today’s-standards graphics, you get a warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feeling; an honest, “this is a good game” feeling, and that’s way better than playing with any freaky, considerably-more-realistic-looking-than-anything-pre-Playstation blue-haired person I could create on my own.

It seems like no more than your typical old-school hockey game: start the game with a face-off, and the team with the most points at the end wins. Pretty standard stuff. The modes themselves are standard as well; you can chose to play a normal, inconsequential game, start a playoffs series, continue a playoffs series (with a password supposedly given to you where you left off last time you played, but finding codes is a cinch on the internet), stage a shootout, etc. You have the option to have an automatic goalie, a manual goalie, or no goalie at all. The third option can produce some real exciting games, since shooting from one side of the rink can cause a goal in the other, whether intentional or not.

It’s not necessarily the game itself that’s special; rather, it’s playing the game with a group of friends on a hot summer day, when there’s nothing better to do. It’s wasting time waiting for your parents to come pick you up, even though you don’t really want them to. It’s earning the Stanley Cup with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, finally showing those bastard Hawks what you’re made of. NHL ‘94 is happiness in a gray cartridge.

Control
——–
9/10

Control is crisp and simple to memorize. A shoots, B passes – that’s all you need to know. Within minutes of getting the game out of the box (if you find yourself lucky enough to be in possession of a boxed cartridge, that is) you’ll be scoring points left and right (and up and down, if you’re really skilled).

Graphics
———-
8/10

Exactly what is to be expected from this circa 1993 game; kind of bland, but I’m not at all sure if there’s anything that could be done to improve it. I’d look to NHL ‘95 to see if they did any better with that, but I distinctly remember that game not being nearly as good as the previous year’s, mainly due to my sucking at it, throwing the controller towards the ground in a fit, and vowing never to play it again.

Sound
——-
9.5/10

This is the kind of music I’d expect to hear in the unlikely event that I was drugged and forced to attend a professional hockey game. Tracks include “do do do DO do do do do DO do do do DO do do do…. dodododo, DO DO!” and “DO dodododododododo DO dododododo DO dodo DO dododododododododo”. Sound effects seem to be true to life, with the screeching of skates as one makes a sudden stop, and the thud of a stick being rammed into another player’s body (speaking of which, you can check not only members of the opposing team, but your own as well!)

Replay Value
————–
10/10

The year is twenty oh two, and I’m still leading my All-Stars West team to victory. If a game can keep you hooked for nine + years, then I’d say it’s a winner.

Fun
—–
9/10

To this day, the only electronic hockey game that I’ve enjoyed more is Wayne Gretzky’s 3-D Hockey for the Nintendo 64, and that’s only because you can set the net on fire. If goals were ablaze in NHL ‘94, it would be the premiere hockey game.

Overall
———
9.1/10

I cannot praise this game enough. I feel somewhat saddened by giving it anything less than an 11/10, but no game is perfect. If you need stellar graphics in order to enjoy a game, then put this cup of tea away, because it’s not for you. The graphics by no means suck, but they’re by no means even decent by today’s standards. But, graphics don’t make the game. Entertainment does. How well you enjoy yourself does. Fun does. NHL ‘94 contains an abundance of all three of these categories, and is, by my definition, a superb game. If you happen to own a Super Nintendo Entertainment System, then do yourself a favor and obtain this game.