#118 - Castelian

 

  

Yup, that looks about right.

 

 This is the first screen of the game. I died several times here. I wish I was joking.

What's a Castelian, you ask? At first I thought it sounded like a top-secret Italian dish; like, if you were Italian, you would enter into a restaurant, pull the waiter down to your ear, whisper "Casteliano." He would nod, a grim, knowing look on his face. Twenty minutes later, he would present said Italian with the best Italian food you've never heard of. If only Castelian was a succulent secret and not an attempt at making a game. After having engaged myself in Castelian's world for more than twenty minutes, I've decided that it is not a game. It is a cartridge-shaped mass that contains all of the known and unknown evil in the world, programmed by one man, Duncan Meech. Whether Mr. Meech knew what he was creating or whether the project got out of hand and overpowered him, is unknown. It doesn't matter. May God have mercy on the souls who have played this game, and of those who have yet to venture unknowingly down its nightmarish path.

You play a frog-ish creature whose goal is to progress up several flights of stairs. You avoid eyeballs, bouncing balls – any manner of ball that you can think of, really. Once you ascend as many flights of stairs as Duncan Meech thinks you should, you enter a door and progress to the next tower where, yes, several more flights of stairs await for you to climb them. Remember those old RPGs where you ascend insanely large towers with hundreds of floors, grind until your eyes bleed, acquire cool items and weaponry, only to die and have to start all the way back at the beginning? I think Castelian was trying to go for that style of gameplay in an action format. It's not a bad idea, in theory, but the incentive for progression just doesn't exist like it does in an RPG.

Let's get to why I, and several others like me, believe this game is an abomination from the pit: the controls. When I first started playing, I noticed that the "A" button shot out white pellets from my frog-ish creature's mouth. I pressed the "B" button and nothing happened. My conclusion from this was that the developers made a game that didn't require a jump function. I moved forward and when I ran into my first eyeball enemy, I tried shooting white pellets at him. It didn't seem to be hurting him, but I continued to move forward and hit him. As I did, I jumped into him, effectively killing myself. I did this several times without knowing why, until I discovered that pressing left or right and the "A" button at the same time makes you jump. Unfortunately, jumping is essential to moving forward in this game. You need to make precise jumps to land on elevators or to move up flights of stairs. One misstep (and there will be more than one) and you could land all the way back at the beginning. This will make you hate your own life, the "game," and/or Duncan Meech.

This is the end of the first level. I never made it here nor did I want to after twenty minutes of soul-sucking madness


In all my months of reviewing NES games, never have I encountered a game where I died several times on the first two screens. Even in other terrible games like Beetlejuice, or my favorite, Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, I've been able to move forward even if I didn't want to. Castelian's problem is that it hides behind the facade of cuteness and simplicity. In truth, if you wanted to make a friend think they suck at video games, you could recommend Castelian by saying, "Yeah, you play this cute frog and all you have to do is get to the top of the tower in every level. Pretty simple stuff, really." Set up a hidden camera in their room and laugh as they try to tackle one diabolical level after the next. Once you realize that you're a voyeuristic psychopath who wants to harm his own friends, it is already too late: the evil of Castelian has entered you.

F-

 

#117 - Casino Kid II

                              
  I'm not sure who the "kid" is supposed to be in this picture. Certainly not Alan Thicke on the right

 

Paul Kieton stars as Adolf Hitler in Casino Kid II

After all of my ranting yesterday about how the game Casino Kid is largely to blame for the ills of society – drinking, drugs, prostitution - among other disasters like tornadoes, crazy preachers and malnutrition in the third world, I looked forward to my review of Casino Kid 2. Would this sequel right the wrongs of its misinformed, inept older brother? Or would it continue down the same egotistical, vainglorious path not caring who or what it has to take out along the way? The truth is, yes.

Casino Kid 2 opens with you having beaten all of the so-called US Casino Champions. You're sitting in your trademark white suit next to a roulette table, calmly tossing a hundred dollar chip in the air. There's a woman on your lap and she's drinking champagne. Next thing you know, you get a phone call: the World Casino Champions are none too thrilled about your newfound fame and glory, and invite you to take them on one by one. Having just acquired a million dollars, it's of little expense to you to fly around the world several times, simply to beat a bunch of wackos who think they know it all about poker, blackjack, and roulette. Besides, if Casino Kid can conquer the States with his devil-may-care skill, the world shouldn't be too hard to handle. If nothing else, he'll still have his suit.

Casino Kid 2's aesthetic changes are welcome. Instead of wandering around in a casino trying to find the right person to play with, you're taken to a world map that lists the different people you have to "battle." They're ranked in order of difficulty from one to three chips below their name and picture, so there's no second guessing who you should play against first. Once you beat a character, they're crossed off the map and you move on. It felt like Sofel wanted to have an interesting story without all of the casino clutter; designing the look of several different casinos around the world probably wouldn't have been in their budget anyway.

While the game's AI doesn't feel as cheap as the original, the core game still plays like the first. For those who didn't read my review of the first game, that means a whole lotta blackjack and poker. Poker is genuinely fun and feels fair, but once again, blackjack just feels cheap to me. If you ask for a hit above 13 or 14, you will almost always lose. Sofel actually added roulette into CK2, but roulette is such a game of cheap luck, I ended up never playing it; despite the fact that Chun-Li is hosting roulette in China. There's no password system either in this game, so beware: if you lose all of your winnings, the game's over. I suppose that makes logical sense: if Casino Kid lost all of his money, he couldn't fly around the world. But c'mon Sofel, IT'S JUST A GAME!!!

If you liked blackjack and poker in the first Casino Kid, there's nothing to prevent you from liking blackjack and poker (roulette sucks) in this game. All hyperbolic, asinine statements from the first paragraph aside, CK2 doesn't completely right the wrongs of its predecessor, but I certainly enjoyed myself more than the first. Like many games on this blog, I question the need for a sequel to such a game as Casino Kid, but as long as there's entertainment to be found, I can't fault it too much. Except for North Korea. That is completely Casino Kid's fault.

C+

#116 - Casino Kid

  

This cover is brought to you by Duran Duran

If Lisa has to ask if you want insurance, it means she's about to be incredibly cheap.

Any game that teaches gambling to children has to be a good thing, right? I mean, if congressmen aren't up in arms about it, we as a society shouldn't be worried. When it comes to video games, congressmen know what's best for our children, which means Nintendo gambling games named Casino Kid are ok. For those parents who are still concerned about getting their child a used Nintendo game from the late '80s, don't worry: the Casino "Kid" in question is of legal age to gamble. He's just a kid compared to all of the other old washed-up gambling addicts in the casino he frequents.

Compared to other gambling games like Blackjack or Caesar's Palace, Casino Kid has some genuine personality. Instead of a nameless, faceless, invisible entity playing cards, you're a teenage anime character fighting for his right to win a million dollars. Win a million dollars and go on to face "The Best, Most Mysterious Gambler Ever" and your right to become the Casino Man. You start off walking around a bustling casino, interacting with patrons, provocatively dressed waitresses, and poker and blackjack dealers. Find the appropriate dealers and face off against them in a battle of wits and cojones.

Many of the dealers will insult you unless you have a certain amount of money. Find the dealer with the lowest amount of cash on hand – Lisa for Blackjack and Johnny for Poker – and engage in a raging casino card battle with them. The only games on deck in this casino are blackjack and poker, so I hope you enjoy playing ridiculous amounts of both of those. Also, the computer cheats like a boss. I played several games of blackjack with Lisa and lost every time. It's not like blackjack is a difficult game to comprehend, so why can't I beat this bimbo even once? I was better at poker, which is amusing because I'm actually worse at poker in real life, but even Johnny had the occasional too-slick-for-rick move that had me reeling. Once you clean out the dealer, you move on to the next dealer with a higher starting bid. There is a password system so you don't have to start over every time. Can you imagine playing thousands of poker games in a row, your winnings are up to $978,000 and lightning strikes your NES? Just remember, if you lose your temper in that situation, you have a gambling problem.

Why did Sofel think it was a good idea to produce Casino Kid  for the NES? When I was a kid in the early Nineties – an actual child, not an eighteen-year-old "kid" – I had no desire to gamble. I thought it would be fun to throw down a slot machine or two, but that was merely because I liked all the colors, lights, and change clinging together. I understand that parents also played the NES, and perhaps, in lieu of going to the casino, these games are a good way to get one's virtual gambling fix. But simply by inserting the word "kid" into the title, Sofel is not making clear who their audience is supposed to be. Thank goodness these aren't actual discussions we should be having in a public forum. They're nigh unanswerable!

C-

#115 - Captain Skyhawk

This will be the Captain's last mission as he's suffering from jaundice. Do him proud!

 

All aboard the Skyhawk Express, a non-stop flight to pain.

Any classic video game that contains a ¾ degree isometric camera angle for its main point-of-view brings me to inward tears. It's not that a good game can't be made with such an angle; it's that good games are often hampered by such an angle. I'd argue more and offer up examples and such, but it's such a subjective point of contention that no one cares about anyway unless they're a nerd. Anyways, if you couldn't guess, this game contains such an angle. Surprisingly, it works for the arcadey flighty style that Captain Skyhawk possesses. Also, Rare made it on their lunch break, so double props for that.

Captain Skyhawk is eight missions of arcade flight action. You control the good captain in his signature gray fighter jet, and your only job is to destroy any and everything you see; unless that isn't your only job. Sometimes you have to drop supplies into holes that open up on the ground. Such missions are frustrating because you have to be entirely too precise, and you can't control the speed of your plane; nor can you turn around if you miss, which means, you will have to repeat the entire level over again. Fortunately, though, cargo missions are few and far between. It's mostly fly and shoot action, which makes for a good half-hour to forty-five minute romp through the entire game.

But yeah, that camera angle... even though the game probably couldn't have possessed a different angle, it can be a nuisance at times. You always have to watch your plane around the borders of the level and the raised up pyramid-esque hills amidst the level. If you clip your wings on them, prepare to explode. Also, I blame the camera for my many deaths-by-projectiles. Sometimes, it seems as though you're passing right by the enemies' projectiles, and you explode. Just as often, a projectile will come rip roaring towards you and it won't connect. My strategy was to weave as often as possible and shoot as much as I could. I didn't die as often, and I felt like more of a BA.

For the past week, my brain has felt smothered in fog. I can't think clearly, I can't write as concisely and epicly as I normally can, and I don't have insurance so I can't afford to go to the doctor. Truthfully, it's the reason why I haven't been updating this blog as often as I used to. SWEET! All of that has nothing to do with Captain Skyhawk, except to say that, I wish this review could have been written with a clearer mind; with a more piercing wit and a clearer explanation of the game mechanics. Look for a revision in the far, far future.


B-

#114 - Captain Planet and the Planeteers

The real power lies in the Captain's mullet.

It's Captain Planet's game, I swear!

Captain Planet and his teenage slaves known as the Planeteers were part of the weird “get kids into recycling” phase that happened during early-to-mid Nineties Saturday morning/weekday afternoon programming. Most memorably, the “Recycle, Reduse, Reuse... AND CLOSE THE LOOP!” commercial ran for a solid ten years, at least. Least memorably, “Camp Candy,” the show starring John Candy as a camp counselor and teaching kids how to respect and love Mother Earth. I miss John Candy but I definitely don't miss that show. Looking back, I'm not sure what kids would have recycled, other than hundreds upon thousands of soda cans. Recycling hadn't become the craze/norm that it is today, so why drag children down into such a boring adult process? Anyways, I never fell for Captain Planet when I was a child. Even then, I recognized it as an agenda-based cartoon – and I liked my cartoons to be simple, often sordid fun. Besides that, Captain Planet himself was only in each episode for about five minutes; enough time for him to show up, make some mock speech about loving the planet, then sweep the literal/metaphorical trash under the earth's rug and fly away. And yeah, they made a game about him.

The goal of the game is to bring down Hoggish Greedly, an evil pig in a business suit; subtlety was never the cartoon's strong point. You blast and mast your way through five worlds, with two stages in each world. In the first stage in each world, you play as all of the Planeteers smushed together in the form of an helicopter, airplane, or some other flying device. Your weapons are fire, wind, water, earth, and heart respectively, and you'll only ever want to use fire. The rest are pretty useless, and you have a limited amount of times you can use your weapons. <---------- DID YOU JUST READ THAT LAST SENTENCE BECAUSE I CAN'T BELIEVE I JUST WROTE IT?! Unlike, say, Mega Man where each weapon has its own power bar, all five of your weapons are connected to the same bar. Once your bar is depleted, you're on your own. It's stupid: just because this is a videogame about saving the planet doesn't mean I want to conserve my resources/weapons

In the second stage, you call upon Captain Planet to save the day. From here, the game turns from a shmup into a platformer where your main character floats and has to avoid every little thing. Seriously, Captain Planet is a wuss. Running into ooze slathered on a wall will kill him instantly, and other enemies will deplete his life faster than a solar-powered vehicle... well, maybe that's not a good analogy. Anyways, his life depletes fast, which means his forms of attack should be awesome. Unfortunately, his main weapon is his fist, and his secondary weapon is to turn into the elements, whether it be fire, wind, water, etc. As expected, the fist is useless, and while turning into the elements looks cool, it doesn't really hurt anything and it drains your power bar which, in the Captain Planet stages, doubles as your life-bar. It's not fun, and the more I played, the more I hated Mother Earth.

It's a shame because, for a split second on the first stage, I thought the game could be average. It had decent graphics, an entertaining musical number that constantly repeated, and, besides the lousy hit detection, some half-way decent controls. The farther I got, though, the more I realized that the programmers must be working for Big Oil or something. How else to explain the maddening difficulty and sheer evil that power this game's cells? Also, even though I could care less about the cartoon, it's a crime that the Planeteers are actually more powerful in the game than Captain Planet.

D-

#113 - Captain America and The Avengers

Oh, if only the game was as epic as the cover.

Hawkeye decides that the middle of a firefight is a good time to do squat thrusts.

I've never understood the appeal of Captain America. Sure, during World War II, his existence made sense. He lent moral support to “the boys” overseas and made the women at home swoon. Unlike other comic book heroes who have grown with the times, though, I feel like Captain America is lost back in that tumultuous time. Does anyone really care about him anymore? I know there's a movie that's supposed to be coming out soon, and even it is being filmed in England. What does that say? The Avengers are still pretty sweet, but does Captain America need to be leading them? Important questions all, and I'm sure if I were a comic book nerd of the highest order, I could pretend to know what I'm talking about and answer them. As it stands, I'm an NES nerd, so said questions will remain rhetorical.

In the game, Captain America and Hawkeye are out to save Iron Man and the Vision from the clutches of Mandarin and the Red Skull. What this amounts to – besides just being your typical comic book plot – is that you can only play as Hawkeye or Captain America during the game. This makes the title feel like a rip-off – I want Captain America and the Avengers, not Captain America and Hawkeye his Robin-esque sidekick. I know this is a port of the arcade game – one of the few arcade brawlers I disliked as a child - but other four-player arcade ports like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II managed to include all four turtles, so what the fuss, Data East. This might sound like a paltry complaint, but it really is annoying to only be able to play as two characters.

The game itself is standard Contra ripoff fare, although the levels themselves are easier than Contra's. Throw your shield and shoot your arrows at baddies around none-too-crowded side-scrolling levels. There are little power-ups in floating cannisters all along the level, but aside from the heart and a glowing orb that made the exit appear, I'm not sure what the rest of them did. The levels do ramp up in challenge eventually, but only in small increments. I plowed through the first few levels only to have both Captain Ahab and T. Hawkeye die horrendously in this one section, where wave after wave of enemies kept coming without end. There are no continues, so it was back to sqaure one. This is where Data East failed to see the beauty of Contra. Whereas Contra is difficult the entire way through, Captain America has pockets of difficulty amongst otherwise easy, bland levels.

Sometimes mediocre games bother me more than terrible games. At least if a game is terrible, it's terrible through and through. It's admirable that the developers of crappy games are so committed to making a crappy game, that almost every aspect of their design is terrible. But when a game like Captain America has promise – decent music, good controls – yet fails to fully deliver or considerably fail, you have to wonder why Data East would even bother.


D