GameCola Podcast #46! Starring almost all of the people who have previously edited the GameCola Podcast—Alex Jedraszczak, Nathaniel Hoover, and Michael Gray. With this all-star cast, we cover such exciting bulleted topics as:

• Reviews from our iTunes page
• Comments from Podcast #41
• Comments from the Turnabout Musical Podcast
• Comments from Podcast #44
• Listener-submitted e-mails

Other topics mentioned in the podcast include the fictional stylings of Diana Lily and Isabella, the GameCola Bottom 50, Paul cosplaying Bebop, Nathaniel’s Backloggery, emoticons, and what exactly is a tanuki.

If you’re ready to take in all of this excitement, you should click on the podcast below! Check it out! The Podcast Commander commands it!

GC Podcast #46

We’re halfway to the end. Beware: The games you’ve seen up until now were a walk in the park compared to these. What follows is pure, untamed garbage. Weapons-grade crap. Steel yourself.

25. Wall Street Kid (NES)

Just read my review. Wall Street Kid manages to find the small sliver of goodness found in investing fake money, rips its heart out, and stamps it on the ground, just like the kid’s in-game girlfriend who only loves you if you buy her a house and a car. For no apparent reason, the game starts on April Fools’ Day, but you’re a fool for buying this trash regardless of what the calendar says. It’s just awful.

- Mark Freedman

24. Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (Xbox 360)

This game can be played with one hand. The other hand can either be used to pleasure yourself, or it can be used to repeatedly punch yourself in the face. The latter is preferred.

Breast physics and skimpy outfits, terrible unplayable minigames, and a game of poker that doesn’t operate like actual poker (not like I know how to play poker, anyway). Do these elements form together to make a game? Do they fuck.

- Matt Jonas

On the Other Hand…

I’m mostly going off of Matt Jonas’ review, which cited casual gamers’ disinterest in breasts as a primary strike against the game. I feel it’s unfair to judge a game by its audience, so I took it upon myself to do excessive extensive research of screenshots and gameplay footage before casting my vote.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, when you’re sifting through a thoroughly unredeemable pile of filth to determine which 50 games are most deserving of a New Mexico landfill, things like an absurd storyline, grating voice acting, profoundly flawed gameplay, and the blatant objectification of women are secondary when there’s just so much titillating eye-candy. We can still watch these absolutely terrible games without playing them, so it makes sense to offer a little amnesty to the better-looking games with the sexy, sexy slot machines.

I mean, c’mon, Wall Street Kid doesn’t have a casino that pretty.

- Nathaniel Hoover

23. Yaris (XBLA)

An on-rails shooter with sloppy aiming centered around a flying Toyota Yaris somehow results in an absolute mess that isn’t even remotely playable. The game doesn’t make any sense! What are you supposed to do in it? Why does it feel like you’re piloting a penguin on ice?

- Matt Jonas

22. Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis)

Complicated controls. Confusing interface and inventory system. Enemies that just won’t die. I had to play this game to get an Achievement in Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, and I haven’t touched it since. It wasn’t even designed for the Genesis originally; the SegaNet modem wasn’t exactly known for “great” games.

- Matt Jonas

21. Space Quest: The Lost Chapter (PC)

Whoa, how did this fan-made adventure game make it to the list?

This game that’s totally unknown to all but the diehards in the Space Quest fan community, and the chosen few who’ve read my GameFAQs review?

The game with a text-parser interface that doesn’t recognize words?

The game that’s dominated by unnecessarily huge, dreadfully bland, confusingly repetitive, and excessively swimming-intensive locations?

The game with the giant squid maze that—OH WAIT. THE SQUID MAZE. PRETTY SURE YOU SHOULD AVOID ANY GAME THAT MAKES YOU NAVIGATE A MAZE OF TOUCH-ME-YOU-DIE TENTACLES THAT BORDER AND BLOCK YOUR VIEW OF THE THREE-PIXELS-WIDE PATH STRETCHING ACROSS THE ENTIRE SCREEN THAT YOU MUST SWIM THROUGH TO PICK UP A STUPID BONE THAT’S NOT EVEN AN ITEM YOU OBVIOUSLY NEED, AND THEN SWIM BACK OUT THE WAY YOU CAME IN.

Also, there’s a bunch of grammar errors.

- Nathaniel Hoover

20. Rocky and Bullwinkle Adventures (NES)

All you really have to do is look at the game, and you’ll know why it made this list. A 5 year old could’ve scribbled this together. I know the animation from the actual animated series was never superior in any way to…well, anything; but this looks like one of the lowest-budget, gotta-get-it-done-in-two-days-or-the-boss-will-probe-me kinds of games. And what kind of a game forces you to hurt yourself when you attack? That’s exactly what happens when you use your antlers to charge as Bullwinkle: your health decreases. Rocky can only barely fly, too; wasn’t he supposed to be a FLYING squirrel? Yeah, way NOT to fly. The music is terrible, as well, causing eardrums to shatter across the nation. Quality assurance at THQ must’ve consisted of a man picking up the cartridge, looking at it, and saying, “Yup, it’s a cartridge, dagnabbit!” before applying the stamp of approval.

- Jeff Day

19. Timecop (SNES)

You can tell I’m the most qualified person on staff to discuss Timecop, because I watched five minutes of some guy playing it on YouTube.

The graphics look like a digitized cardboard cutout festival, and the levels seem to consist of you getting shot in the face and falling down three stories just to get shot in the face again. Ammo for your gun appears to be about as plentiful as ham sandwiches at a Bar Mitzvah, and the only other way to kill all three of the different enemies in the game is to do pilates until one of them trips over your foot. It’s like a poor man’s Batman Forever, and that’s a statement that makes puppies cry.

- Nathaniel Hoover

18. Two Worlds (Xbox 360)

There are many emotions that I like to experience whilst gaming—excitement, fear, happiness, slight arousal—but the only thing I felt when playing Two Worlds was embarrassment. I was embarrassed for this game, to the point where I was struggling to look it in the eye. For starters, all the characters look the same (like the malformed survivors of a nuclear holocaust), yet strangely, every villager talks with a different accent. And I don’t mean like one talks with a southern English accent whilst the next is a bit more northern; I mean that the local farmer sounds like a Scottish fisherman whilst his daughter sounds like she’s from Texas. Finally, let’s talk about the voice acting…Sloth from The Goonies could do a better job. Now get out of my house and don’t come back until you’re better than Skyrim.

- Jillian Dingwall

And so ends the sad story of one of the most disappointing games from the past decade. Joystiq reports that Turtles in Time: Re-shelled—the remake of the classic SNES game that added terrible graphics and removed great music and levels—will be delisted from the PlayStation Network as of June 30. (Other sites are reporting that it’ll be leaving XBLA that day, too.) After next Thursday, you won’t be able to buy this game anymore, though you’ll still be able to re-download Re-shelled if you’d already purchased it.

This, of course, begs the question: why? As the Joystiq article notes, the game’s license runs out on June 30. So why aren’t they trying to renew it, then? Personally, I’m kinda holding out hope that they’re trying to make room for a straight-up port of the original Turtles in Time, but my predictions have been wrong before.

In celebration of The GameCola Podcast turning 30, Alex Jedraszczak, Paul Franzen, Christian Porter, and Matt Jonas discuss the touchy topic of age in videogames. Are videogames agist? Good question, because we mostly just went on about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Topics discussed in this podcast include:

• Most games have underage characters… Don’t they?
• It’s OK to kill adults, just as much as it’s fine to kill monsters and robots
• Battletoads
• Final Fantasy characters are older than they look
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aren’t very realistic teenagers
• Dodongo dislikes smoke
• Old Snake actually just has progeria
• Old people steal a lot and get senior citizen discounts
• We’re good at claiming that something unrelated is actually on topic
• Send us an e-mail!

No, seriously, send us an e-mail. If you e-mail us, you’ll receive a free mocking on the next podcast!

So, have some cake, give it a listen, send us an e-mail, and enjoy!

GC Podcast #30

And, don’t forget! You can also find us on iTunes if you head over here! You know you want to subscribe!

Shadow Complex is one of those titles that shouldn’t be on Xbox Live Arcade. I’m not saying it’s not good enough; nuh-uh, no way. I’m saying it’s too good for XBLA—it makes everything else in the library look like a ROM packaged with an emulator.

Last year, Microsoft ran a promotion called “Summer Heatwave” on Xbox Live Arcade, releasing a new Arcade title every week, and giving a rebate to those who bought them all. If you bought them all, then that means you bought TMNT: Re-Shelled and Trials HD, which were both massive rip-offs in my eyes. (Re-Shelled managed to completely ruin one of the best games of all time, and the remake was based on an inferior version of the game, as well. They might as well have not bothered, because once again I got my blasted hopes up for no reason.)

One of the last games released in this promotion was Shadow Complex.

They kept the best ’til last, as they say.

Shadow Complex takes its main inspiration from Castlevania and Metroid, arguably two of the greatest action-adventure game franchises of all time. Retro-minded development team Chair Entertainment is made up of Epic Games members, and that gives the game a feeling reminiscent of Jazz Jackrabbit 2, one of my most favored underrated platformers on the PC platform.

Also, parallels can be drawn to Contra and Super Contra (especially in regards to shooting toward the background), and Shattered Soldier for its use of three-dimensional graphics while retaining 2D gameplay. That, in turn, makes for a round trip of adventure, platformer and shooter—all welded together almost perfectly.

Foam is one of the cool "new" ideas. (Click to view.)

So far, a great start. But like we saw with Dawn of the Dinosaurs, having its heart in the right place isn’t everything—so it’s good to know that Shadow Complex can hold its own as well as it does.

Besides being a mish-mash of some of the greatest games of all time, Shadow Complex is also a game of its own. It brings its own features to the table—cool turret shootouts (where the game transforms into a third-person over-the-shoulder perspective), immense yet buggy grappling hook controls, and, once unlocked, a suit that makes you invincible if you’re standing still or moving very slowly.

It is a 2D single-player experience where you will need to use stealth, cunning and combat abilities to solve puzzles, requiring thought and creativity to figure out what you need to do—which, in English, means that you won’t get stuck or lost like in the traditional Metroid titles.

Shadow Complex is rather good fun, and it’s massive. There is a vast cliff-side terrorist base to explore—and doing so should take you roughly ten hours. Just like with its predecessors, this time can easily be improved upon in further runthroughs. The incentive to replay only comes from the game’s minute selection of Achievements, though, so once they’re taken care of, there isn’t much left.

Nolan North, known for voicing Desmond Miles, the Prince of Persia, Nathan Drake and every other main character in the last two years, provides the voice of main character Jason Fleming. Jason also looks a bit like Nathan Drake anyway, so I hereby accuse the character department of being lazy. Take that, losers.

Jason Flemming. What kind of name is that, anyway?

The first boss of the game. (Click to view.)

Characters make the story, and story makes the game, but so does the engine. For reasons too boring to disclose, I hate the Unreal Engine. I have a passionate dislike for it that stems from many different causes.

The Unreal Engine is a decent engine plagued by thousands of bugs. It isn’t the cleanest engine when it comes to gaming bacteria.

Shadow Complex appears to be an exception to the rule (albeit the occasional bug is to be expected). The most troublesome glitch is that the blue-line for mission locations will disappear off the map, and switching it on and off doesn’t help. This usually happens if you progress a little further than you should (easily done), or if you backtrack to grab items and go a bit too far back.

The way I see it, Shadow Complex is in the wrong place. The gameplay is solid and fantastic, and the overall amount of effort put into it is incredible for an Xbox Live Arcade title. I’d happily pay more for this game. No, really—I would. Just like how, back in the day, we’d pay three or four times this for the next Metroid game.

Background enemies pose a threat. (Click to view.)

The one thing I don’t get—Xbox Live Arcade has been home to some of the best arcade games ever made, but it is also home to a number of non-arcade styled games. For every Sonic the Hedgehog, Golden Axe or Pac-Man CE, there is a Lucidity, a Braid or a ‘Splosion Man. These aren’t “arcade” games. This is the one thing holding Shadow Complex down—a game like this deserves more than a petty two hundred gamerscore to its name. It’s massive…it really, really is.

If I had to pick on Shadow Complex for anything else, it would be for coming out before Games on Demand did. Shadow Complex is far bigger than anything else on Xbox Live Arcade—if you like Metroid: Zero Mission or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then why are you still reading this? Go. Get some Microsoft Points and buy this game. It’s fucking awesome!

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.

I love crossovers, I love Ninja Turtles, and I love this movie. Bring me this movie! I don’t care that the voices are all completely wrong, or that it might be poking a little too much fun at the original series, or that April O’Neil has apparently undergone plastic surgery to become a woman; bring me this movie!

According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, the movie will premier on Saturday morning on November 15th on the CW network, after which, presumably, will come the DVD release, though the DVD doesn’t yet have an Amazon.com listing.

Sadly, the Ninja Turtles from this version of the franchise are not slated to make an appearance. (As far as I know.)

Let me tell you why you should lose your happiness.

This totally isn’t the first new Turtles side-scroller in a while. Konami made a series of them in the early 00s; you just didn’t notice because they didn’t get much publicity, because, while they aren’t bad enough to warrant hilarious reviews about how awful they are, they also aren’t nearly interesting enough to deserve any kind of write-up at all. They’re for the GBA, they’re based on the newer cartoon, and they’re all horribly boring. (Konami also made a series of 3D Turtles beat-’em-ups for PS2-era consoles, one of which won GameCola’s “Most Dissappointing” award in our year-end awards.)

If Konami—the company that made the original games—wasn’t able to make good Turtles games then, why should Ubisoft be able to do it now? After all, this is the same company that actually managed to ruin Turtles in Time, in the form of a God-awful XBLA remake-—why should I think they can do something good with this license? Especially since, holy crap, did you look at that screenshot? Does that look like a good game? Does it look at all like the original Turtles games? Is there any way you’d even consider playing that, if it wasn’t aTurtles game?

I hate to ruin your happiness, but there’s no reason to think that Ubisoft has any idea what made the original Turtles games good. It’s more likely that they think they’ve waited long enough after the previous batch of crappy games to make a new batch of crappy games. Ubisoft’s just going to keep churning out crappyTurtles games, which the public will buy, because the public will be so excited about a new Turtles game, and they won’t know or remember what’s become of the franchise. It’s kind of the exact same thing that’s happened to Sonic.

From what I understand, this upcoming XBLA remake of Turtles in Time is going to be exactly like the original…except that it’s going to have ugly 3D graphics. Now, I’m all for getting Turtles in Time on every system possible, since it’s one of my favorite games; however, wouldn’t it make just as much sense to just…port it, without the ugly graphics?