#203 - Dragon's Lair

Imagine a child, who loved the arcade version, getting this for Christmas. Then imagine the dragon on the cover eating said child.

                                   The first screen. Welcome to your doom.

Of all the important things I'm thankful for – family, food, friends, a job - I'm also thankful that I have stuck with this quest for as long as I have. Were I a weaker man, I would have turned back several times by now. Today would be a prime example. Dragon's Lair may not be the worst game I've ever played, but its atrocities against humanity certainly propel it into the upper echelon. First off: every child of the 80s and 90s remembers the original Dragon's Lair, right? It was an arcade point-and-click cartoon adventure directed by Don Bluth a.k.a. The "American Tail" guy. It was well-received for its time because no other game resembled it, but the better technology has become, the more obsolete and uninteresting Dragon's Lair has become. Whether you recall Dirk the Dashing's adventures fondly or not, the NES, uh, "adaptation" isn't even worth picking up. I can't recall whether I've ever had a game kill me so much on the first screen (yes, the Angry Video Game Nerd once again gets it right). Instead of a point-and-click adventure, NES Dragon's Lair is a side-scrolling exercise in madness. It begs you to wonder what will and won't kill you. For example, on the first screen, there is a drawbridge that will only open after you kill a dragon that pops out from under the bridge. Should you try and jump into the drawbridge, you will disintegrate into a pile of bones. Yes, wooden doors really are that powerful. Should you trip on the bridge due to a disappearing piece of the bridge, you will once again become a pile of bones. Don't worry, though: bats can hit you over and over, and you're good. In order to kill the dragon, you have to crouch down and throw your weapon before the dragon crouches completely under the bridge. The dragon is so savvy and Dirk's movements are so slow that I couldn't kill the dragon. Thus, I couldn't get past the first screen and my experience with Dragon's Lair came to an end. If a game doesn't want you to play it, I say, why enrage it any further? Who knows what other horrors await me within the actual castle?

F

#112 - California Games

This cover contains all the evil wrought in the 80s. It must be destroyed.

When sidewalks fight back...


Before Rare blew our collective gaming minds in 1994 with the graphical powerhouse Donkey Kong Country, they blew their collective programming chunks in 1989 with the underwhelming, oft hilarious California Games. Apparently hackysack, surfing, BMX bikes, skateboarding and other Xtreme sports were only available in California in the late 80s; at least that's what the British-based Rare implies with this particular gray cartridge's titular title. Plus, it does sound better than Florida Games or Wyoming Games or some other crap. Whatever you call California Games, though, this game is crap; in the 80s, in 2011, and forevermore.

I will rate each game in order of least to most crappiness because I can:

Foot Bag is probably the least crappiest game, if only because I was so amused at seeing virtual hackysack in a NES game. Control an androgynous young something and do tricks and twirls with your sack for as many points as possible. I have also never heard hackysack called “Foot Bag,” which, to be honest, offends me.

Flying Disk would be interesting if it went anywhere. Control your speed and and your angle and let your frisbee rip. Must Rare be so stuffy? “Yes, let's go out for a jolly good game of golf flying disk, mates!”

Surfing is serene and there's not much to really say about it. Get on top of the wave and stay there. I think sharks come along sometimes, but once you get on the wave, you don't need to worry about anything. Bland, useless, etc.

BMX started off ok. You're basically pedaling along a track, avoiding obstacles and trying to do tricks. Problem is, the BMXer is only capable of doing one of the aforementioned. Try to do both and you will fall down, while text at the bottom of the screen insults your abilities with quips like “Bummer!” and “Way to biff!”

I probably should have included Skating lower on this list because it features my favorite “biffing” animation. When the young girl on rollerskates fails to jump over a crack in the sidewalk, her whole body and face smack down hard onto the pavement. I'm pretty sure more time was spent making that animation then this entire game. Other than that, Skating is no more Californian than the rest, and I'm not sure what that means.

Last but not least, the crème de la suck, the Half Pipe. Nowhere at any time could this ever be considered fun by anyone. The controls are nigh impossible to figure out. Your character will continue to fall and slide across the halfpipe like a war-torn crash dummy.

The real reason to seek this game out is if you're an insane Nintendo collector who happens to have two multi-taps, eight controllers, and lots of booze for the people you want to play California Games with you. Yes, up to eight people can play this game. Considering the time period in which this was released, it's pretty ambitious, though no parent in their right mind would have blown hundreds of dollars for California Game parties back in the late 80s. This game has a literal replay value of nil. You can trust me on that because calculating the sum of “nil” takes awhile. Dude!

F

#100 - BreakThru

  Woops, wrong image!

When cadets get drunk...

 I was really hoping for a more pastel blue on the tank, but you can't win 'em all


So I guess I've finally "broken through" to 100 game reviews!... yes, I'll wait until the two of you stop laughing. It's ok, it really wasn't that funny of a joke, or a joke at all. Moving on... I'd like to thank everyone that's been keeping up with these "daily" bundles of joy! I'm not sure what I had in mind when I first started, but I certainly wouldn't have envisioned getting to the 100th review and still being on the letter "B," that's for sure. For those that are curious, yes, I still love writing these reviews if only because I feel complete freedom to write however I want, depending on my mood. Personally, I feel that real game journalism or criticism is a good thing, but writers do have a tendency to take game reviews too seriously. As a result, the majority of game reviews tend to sound very similar. I wanted to switch it up a little bit, which is why, unless a game is just fantastic and should be addressed as such, I try and give a light-hearted/craptacular feel to each review. It makes me happy and it's different. Not all of my reviews hold together as well as they could, and I don't probably give as much time to games as I should, but that's what makes the reviews special, con sarn it. They're just so darn slapped together! Thanks again for reading, and here's to approx. 665 more reviews!

When I saw that Breakthru, a game I had never played or heard of, was to be my number 100, I got out my gamblin' dice, blew on 'em, shook 'em up real good, and threw 'em on my Texas Hold'em Poker Table for some reason. You guessed it: snake eyes. The worst part about snake eyes is, until the dice both land, you think you have a shot at a higher number. Breakthru begins like it's going to be a decent NES adaptation of a game obviously made for arcades. You're a truck, you're plowing through the mountains, you're shooting stuff that comes at you. It appears to be total Eighties greaties, and it complemented my viewing of "Predator" this evening (seriously just watched "Predator" for the first time tonight - my abs grew by thirty percent!). But then, as the amount of cheap deaths grew and grew, the other dice landed and I wept. My one-hundredth review was to be... a crappy game.

Breakthru would be a rip-roarin' good time, if it weren't for the crappy controls. Instead of pressing "A" to accelerate, like every other NES racing game ever, you push right on the "D" pad. This frees up the "A" and the "B" button to be "jump" and "shoot" respectively. A seemingly wise decision, until you realize that going fast is tantamount to instant death, and slowing down is tantamount to a slower death that you can easily see coming, so you're free to shout "NOOOOO!!!!!" as your truck explodes. I'm going to paint a picture of the first level: you're driving fast, shooting stuff, dodging out of the way of trucks and what-have-you, when suddenly, a rainstorm of boulders falls on you and you die. Alright, take it slower. You do this, shoot up the boulders after they fall, and they can't hurt you. Perfect, until you run into an avalanche of rocks that you can only jump over when you're going fast. So after experimenting and finding what I believed to be the perfect mix of precision, speed, and awesome, I propelled my truck forward past the falling boulders, past the rock avalanches (two separate things, trust), and finally, two large missiles came out of the sky and made me explode. And yes, after trying to get past the missiles repeatedly, I cursed the number one-hundred with all my might.

When you "game over," the title screen comes up and the cursor is automatically set to continue. I've seen games do this before, and have been able to turn them off without issues in the past. For some reason, despite my disgust for Breakthru, I couldn't stop playing it; simply because the cursor was set to continue instead of "Player 1." I kept playing it and playing it, and dying and then dying some more, until finally, I set the controller down and realized I had a problem. Why was I playing this masochistic game? I needed something that was less entrancing, addictive, and horrible. With trembling knees, I stood up and saw the poker table where I had rolled the dice. I smiled as I had an epiphany. Enough with these terrible Nintendo games! Gambling shall be my new hobby! So now I'm off to the casino on the senior bus and I don't know if I shall return to these reviews. Let it be proclaimed now and forevermore that, even if I don't make it out of the buffet line alive, Breakthru was a soul-shattering game.

D-

#91 - The Blues Brothers

I'm shaking my head for the entire gaming populace

The crappiness of this game cannot be captured: it must be experienced.


Jake and Elwood were on a mission from God in the original 1980 movie "The Blues Brothers." I haven't seen it (sacrilege...?), but I've heard it is a really well-done comedy, in an era before fart and boob jokes roamed the earth, stomping all other true comedy in their path. I'm pretty sure, though, that Titus, the developers of the Blues Brothers game, were on a mission from Satan, as nothing about this game works. It's not just because the game came out eleven years later than the movie: The game is broken. Akklaim and LJN (brothers from another mother) would be proud to welcome Titus, in forming a Nintendo trifecta of terrible gaming trash.

The one thing I do know about the movie is that Jake and Elwood Blues ran a lot, which coincidentally, is all you do in this side-scrolling action game. Trying to attack enemies? Out of the question. You can't even jump on the lime-green spiky balls or the security guards and stun them. It's run or be killed, which makes me believe that the Blues Brothers are pacifists or at least Titus is. The most threatening Jake or Elwood ever look in this game is when they're holding down their hats as they run; granted, they do look pretty boss, but you know what would be twice as boss? Being able to hurt the things that hurt you. In lieu of that, "A" is jump and "B" is run, and if you aren't able to combine those two should-be-easy functions, it's Chinatown for you. You need to be able to run and jump all over this b. Honestly, this is another one of those games where if you get farther than five minutes in, you should be awarded a Congressional Medal of Nintendawesome. Platforms disappear as you stand on them, enemies disappear only to reappear, running jumps happen sometimes and fail other times. John Belushi is rolling over in his grave.

Many good men have battled their way through this game, only to hold their heads in shame as they die over and over again from faulty game mechanics. There are only so many ways to say a bad game is a bad game, so I will say this: I'm pretty sure the "Blues Brothers 2000" movie is better than this game, if only because John Goodman is featured in the movie (in John Belushi's position, if I'm not mistaken). Considering the movie was an abomination to mankind and all copies were destroyed from the earth, this is saying a lot. Do not play this game.

F

But wait...

 

Dear God...