Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

If there are any young whipper-snappers reading this, you might find it hard to believe, but at one time it was possible to buy a sports game based on one of the professional leagues that didn’t have the letters ‘EA’ emblazoned across the cover. Now I’m not going to go on a rant or even claim that EA necessarily does a bad job with their sports titles, but in every industry competition is a good thing, and when it came to hockey games the Super Nintendo also had NHL Stanley Cup.

It was the first hockey game on a console to simulate a 3D, first-person perspective, and while it relied heavily on the SNES ‘Mode 7′ technology and sprite-based animations, the effect was really convincing. (Even if the camera was extremely frustrating at times.) Of course even back in 1993 game developers still had to deal with licensing issues for sports titles, and unfortunately NHL Stanley Cup was only able to secure the rights for the official NHL teams and logos, not the actual player rosters from the NHLPA. But even the most passive of hockey fans knew that it was worth sending the puck to #99 or #66, even if their jerseys lacked a name on the back.

For a while I actually found NHL Stanley Cup to be quite challenging, and even playing against a friend usually resulted in pretty low-scoring games. That is until one Christmas eve when my 6 year old cousin handed me a devastating and embarrassing 16-2 loss. Now while I’m pretty sure most 6-year-olds could still easily beat me today, he thankfully took pity on me that night and revealed his ’secret’ for winning the game.

It turns out that NHL Stanley Cup had a small ‘bug’ he’d discovered. If you brought the puck up through the middle of the rink and simply dumped it as you passed center ice, the goalie would inexplicably come too far out of the crease allowing the puck to sail over their head and into the net. Unfortunately from that day on the game stopped being about passing and setting up intricate plays, and became all about stopping the other guy from coming up the middle of the rink and scoring goal after easy goal. Needless to say the game became less interesting after that revelation, but it’s not like EA’s hockey titles at the time were immune from the same problem…

[ MobyGames - NHL Stanley Cup ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you thought last week’s Lemans was as basic as graphics could get on the Commodore 64, I’m afraid you ain’t seen nothing yet. While Omega Race might not be at the absolute bottom of the barrel when it came to pushing the C64’s graphic capabilities, it’s still pretty far down there. Even with the ability to choose any 2 color scheme you preferred, instead of the default black and white scheme pictured above.

The game was often compared to Asteroids for obvious reasons, but I think Omega Race changed things up enough to make it a worthy alternative. I mean sure you were shooting at ‘droid’ ships that broke apart instead of asteroids that broke apart, but the game screen was surrounded by a force field that everything (except your laser blasts) would bounce off. In Asteroids everything would wrap to the other side of your display whenever they went off-screen, but Omega Race was more like a game of interstellar pool. Except that when your ship hit the surrounding force field you could never really predict what angle it would bounce off at.

But I always thought that the most challenging part of Omega Race was that your ship never lost momentum. So if you wanted to come to a stop for any reason, you had to spin around and thrust in the opposite direction. (That’s what she said.) But this extra challenge also facilitated my ’secret’ technique. When the game started I would rotate my ship until it pointed towards the top of the screen before giving it a boost. Then, because of the perpetual momentum and force fields, the ship would continually bounce up and down across the screen allowing me to swivel and strafe at the enemies whenever I had a clear shot that wasn’t blocked by the high score board in the middle of the screen. While it might not have been in the true nature of Omega Race, it resulted in some pretty decent scores. And since the game had no final ‘goal’, the high score was all that mattered.

[ Moby Games - Omega Race (C64) ]

By Andrew Liszewski

It’s pretty obvious that Lemans was one of the first games available for the Commodore 64, and not just because it came on an actual cartridge. (At least my copy did.) The graphics and sound effects were incredibly basic, and while the gameplay wasn’t terrible, I don’t think it was enough to make up for the aforementioned shortcomings. But what made the game playable for me, even enjoyable, was the fact that it used the Commodore 64’s paddle controllers. (I’m pretty sure Commodore sold an official set of these, correct me if I’m wrong.) Instead of swinging a joystick left and right or using the keyboard to steer, the paddle controller provided a surprising amount of accurate control as you careened around the twisty tracks and tried to dodge the other racers on the circuit. Now I know Lemans wasn’t the first game to use a paddle controller, since it came well after Pong, but it was a new and novel concept to me and let’s face it, it doesn’t take much to impress a kid.

In the game you were pretty much racing against the clock and the scoreboard, since it gave you 60 seconds to reach a score of 20,000 points. Points were of course accumulated by driving as fast as you could go and by passing your computer opponents, and if you managed to reach 20,000 you were given 60 more seconds to reach 40,000 and so forth. I think you can see the pattern. But the longer you drove, the more hazards you’d have to deal with like iced roads which reduced your ability to steer, and the dangerous (and confusingly random) ‘night driving’ where you could only see other cars on the road once they entered the beam cast by your own headlights.

I think the most frustrating part of the game though was that your car would ‘explode’ (with an effect that looked like someone had covered it in gray goo) by just grazing another vehicle. It was nothing like GTA where your vehicle can survive a lot of damage before it goes up in flames. No, once a single atom from your car collided with a single atom from your opponent’s car you would be forced to go into the pits for repairs which of course cost you valuable speed and time on the clock. It was frustrating for sure, but that’s the way it was and we liked it!

[ Lemon64.com - Lemans ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Sorry for skipping last week’s The Games We Played. I’m afraid circumstances beyond my control meant I was on the road and didn’t have a chance to dip into my big box o’classic gaming, but next week things will be back to normal (or better!), I promise.

In the meantime, why not spend some quality time at work with this perfect flash recreation of Texas Instrument’s Speak & Spell? I’ve linked to it before, but it’s one of those flash games that you can actually justify playing while ‘on the clock’ since it’s technically improving your spelling. What boss would complain about that? When I was younger I was always suspicious of these ‘educational games’ that tried to pretend they were fun, but I had a soft spot for Speak & Spell’s cold synthesized voice. Not sure why. But since it pre-dated both my Commodore 64 and the Tiger Electronics handheld era, it pretty much had a monopoly on my attention.

[ HANDHELD REMAKES :: The Archive - Speak & Spell ]

By Andrew Liszewski

The Commodore 64 had a wealth of games available for it, but without the internet or magazine racks full of gaming-centric publications most titles were dependent on word-of-mouth when it came to advertising. (Since you couldn’t really tell how good a game was just by looking at the misleading box art at your local Babbage’s.) So it’s not surprising that some great titles fell through the cracks, and one game I particularly enjoyed, but haven’t found too many others who’ve even heard of it, was Racing Destruction Set. (Which I still accidentally refer to as ‘Destruction Racing Set’, which seems to make more sense in my mind.)

It was a racing game that used an isometric view instead of the standard first-person in-car view, which made it feel more like playing R.C. Pro-Am than Test Drive. But you had your choice of driving a VW Beetle, a stock car, a dirt bike, a Porsche and even a lunar rover on a selection of 50 different tracks. And whether you played against a computer or a friend, the game always used the top and bottom split-view (seen above) which had a ridiculously wide aspect ratio, but it never seemed to be a problem.

Looking back at the games I tended to play more than others I realized that it didn’t matter how crappy the graphics or sounds were, as long as they had a high replay value. And nothing adds replay value to a game like customization, and that’s where Racing Destruction Set excelled. Besides the 50 built-in tracks, the game included a track designer which allowed/required you to spend hours laying out and tweaking corners, jumps and straightaways with various types of terrain like dirt, ice and pavement. You could even screw with settings like the gravity which either resulted in your car catching air on even the tiniest of jumps, or not even being able to make it up a hill. And if you did get stuck because you thought it would be hilarious to crank up the gravity, you were basically screwed since there was no way to exit a race in progress until both cars finished. The only ’solution’ was to reset the C64 and lose an afternoon’s worth of track designing. Ah, the good old days!

[ Lemon64.com - Racing Destruction Set ]

By Andrew Liszewski

The Commodore 64 had it’s share of frustratingly difficult games, but none were as aptly named as Impossible Mission. I’m sure I would have had a bit more success with the game if I had access to the instruction manual, but since my copy of the game was probably a copied copy of a friend’s copied copy, the original manual was at least 10 steps removed from me. Needless to say I never even made it close to finishing it.

In the game you play as a secret agent tasked with stopping Professor Elvin Atombender’s evil plans by infiltrating his maze of a lair and collecting various puzzle pieces that will eventually give you access to the computer in his main control room. Some of the rooms you visited had a lab motif, while others were clearly bedrooms with furniture like dressers and beds scattered about, but they all seemed to be designed by an architect with a fetish for 2D platform games. I mean it’s a great design if you’re trying to trip up a secret agent, but imagine the poor chap who has to navigate the room seen below on his way to bed each night. Oh, and did I mention that the majority of the rooms were filled with robot henchmen that could shoot electricity? Yeah, that didn’t make things any easier.

At most I think I maybe solved 2% of the game’s puzzle, but I still played it quite a bit, not because it was fun or challenging, but because I was oddly fascinated with Impossible Mission’s synthesized speech. As a kid I was pretty blown away that my C64 could actually talk, just like the computers I saw in the movies, and if you mention Impossible Mission to anyone who had a C64 (or one of the many consoles and computers the game was available for) I guarantee their first response will be to quote Professor Elvin Atombender’s famous ‘Stay A While’ greeting from the start of the game. Your character also had a rather entertaining scream whenever he fell down a hole, and I purposely sent many a secret agent to their doom just to hear it again and again.

And if you were a big fan of Impossible Mission and have been hankering to try it again, I highly recommend picking up the version released for the Nintendo DS last year. While you can play a modernized version of the game with improved graphics, it also includes the original version of the game in all of its 1984 graphics glory. (The way it should be played.)

[ MobyGames - Impossible Mission ]

By Andrew Liszewski

It seems only fitting that I should follow up my TGWP GoldenEye 007 post from last week with GoldenEye’s own sequel, Perfect Dark. Now after GoldenEye 007 pretty much established itself as one of the main reasons to pick up Nintendo’s last cartridge dependent console, most fans of the game, myself included, started to anticipate what Rare had planned for a sequel. Unfortunately though, it turned out that for whatever reason they were unable to secure the Bond license again, which meant GoldenEye’s successor would end up being an original creation. While this news made a few people worry that the sequel wouldn’t be as good as the original, those concerns turned out to be unfounded as Perfect Dark ended up being better than GoldenEye 007 in every aspect. Sure the catchy Bond theme was gone, and playing the game wasn’t like reliving one of the 007 movies, but improved graphics, better weapons and an amazing multiplayer mode more than made up for it.

And like with GoldenEye 007, it was the multiplayer mode that made Perfect Dark a real hit. In fact, I think my friends and I usually spent more time customizing the ‘perfect’ match than actually playing it. Another thing I particularly liked was the new weapons introduced in PD which included a ridiculously fun remote controlled rocket and the Farsight gun which allowed you to snipe an opponent across an entire level even if you were inside a building. The other thing that made Perfect Dark’s multiplayer entertaining for me was the stat tracking. I can only speculate how many hours of my life were spent playing GoldenEye, but Perfect Dark not only kept track of those hours, but also the virtual miles your character ran, kills, shots fired and pretty much any bit of data you could need to prove you were a batter player than your friends. And isn’t that what was really important?

[ Wikipedia - Perfect Dark ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Last week I wrote about the type of game that players hopefully only ever experience in their nightmares, so this week I thought I’d take a look at a game that sits on the other end of the greatness spectrum. Now before I begin, let me say that I recognize the brilliance of such games as Halo, Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto and countless others that I’ve played over the years, but for me, nothing provided as much sheer enjoyment and downright fun as GoldenEye 007 for the N64 did.

Before the game was released, I remember reading a small blurb about it in a now defunct gaming magazine, and they kind of brushed it off as another movie-to-game conversion that probably only Bond fans would appreciate. But little did they (or any of us) realize that Rare would not only create a game that was remarkably true to a pretty decent Bond flick, but also show the gaming industry that the first-person-shooter could work outside of a PC. In fact, for being the first real console FPS, I still think Rare knocked it out of the park. Sure, there were some compromises, like having to stand still in order to precisely aim and what-not, but I never considered them a downside, just a new and unique challenge that made the game even more interesting.

And while the single person game stayed remarkably true to GoldenEye the movie and was quite fun, I don’t think any fan of the game will deny that the true greatness of GoldenEye 007 came with its multiplayer. There were a couple of Summers I can remember where 3 friends and I spent a vast majority of our waking hours behind a big TV in my parent’s basement playing GoldenEye 007, and to be honest it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. If I remember correctly, the multiplayer aspect was actually a last minute addition to the game, but thankfully Rare didn’t do a last minute job, and added a good level of customizability as well as a fantastic collection of weapons. I mean come on, how fun was it being the guy who was the first to find the RCP-90 or the Cougar Magnum in a 4 player match?

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve actually played GoldenEye the game, but I managed to catch the movie on AMC a few weeks ago, and I have to say I was surprised how often it reminded me of the video game, rather than the other way around. And for a game based on a movie to transcend the original film is a pretty impressive accomplishment in my opinion.

[ Wikipedia - GoldenEye 007 ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Whenever the topic of ‘worst video game you’ve ever played’ comes up, the answer for me is always easy. While I’ve definitely played some real disappointments over the years, nothing has come close to the truly awful, awful Superman for the N64. (Or Superman64 as it came to be known.) The game was developed by Titus and actually came out a year late thanks to a terrible showing at E3 in 1998. But for some reason most of the problems the game exhibited at E3 seemed to still be in the final retail version. Now the N64 was far from a 3D powerhouse, but Superman64 suffered from a particularly limited draw distance, and instead of trying to fix the problem, the developer originally explained it away as a “Kryptonite fog” that Lex Luthor and Brainiac deployed to confound the man of steel. Of course no one bought their explanation, so for the final version of the game the developer cleverly changed the storyline so that Superman64 was actually stuck inside a virtual reality version of Metropolis created by Luthor. Yeah, that’s easier to swallow.

But horrendous graphics were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Superman64’s problems. The controls were atrocious and there were endless bugs that made the game almost impossible to play. However, that could actually be considered a plus, since the game itself was just not fun. Playing as Superman it was your responsibility to rescue Lois and Jimmy which usually involved navigating a clever maze setup by Luthor. And by ‘clever maze’ I mean a set of floating rings you simply had to fly through in a set time limit, which the awful controls and bugs usually made impossible. Like most people I opted to rent the game from Blockbuster instead of buying it, and ironically I can remember Superman64 appearing at the top of their rental charts for a while, since people were flocking to rent it just to see how bad it really was.

But on the flip side, next week I’ll be taking a look at what I still consider to be the greatest game I’ve ever played, and oddly enough, it was also an N64 exclusive…

[ MobyGames - Superman(64) ]