#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