Retro issue 4 digital onlineversion by Marketing

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ISSUE #4

The Jump Off!

games that elevated one of our favorite genres.

CONTENTS

TEAM RETRO

Where Have You Gone, Conan Fabio? History holds a place for those who leap.

Before platforming was even a word, before speedrunning even had a name, my brother and I spent countless hours attempting to slash and dash our way through Rare’s Wizards & Warriors in record time, and while I had a blast with the likes of Super Mario Bros. and Sonic, those exhilarated hours spent flying up the side of Castle Ironspire on our quest to smack down Malkil and save the princess have always stayed with me.

GameGavel LLC (RETRO) 28516 Sorano Cv Trabuco Canyon, CA 92679 USA T: (949) 842-6671 www.readretro.com

And whether you kept company with a plumber, a hedgehog, or an ambiguous-yet-athletic knight who eventually looked a lot like Fabio, chances are there was a platformer out there that made an indelible mark on your gaming DNA, too.

MAGAZINE TEAM Publishers / Tricia + Mike Kennedy Co-Creator + Creative Director / Mark Kaminski Editorial Director / Brandon Justice Copy Editor / Alexandra Hall Production Manager / Martin Alessi Associate Editor / Chris Powell Associate Editor / David Giltinan Associate Editor / Robert Workman CONTRIBUTORS Alexandra Hall Andy Eddy Bob Mackey Brady Fiechter Brandt Ranj Chris Kohler Dave Halverson Elliot Hillis Graham Cookson Jeremy Parish Kat Bailey Kevin Baird Kevin Steele Luke McKinney Matt Barton Michael Thomasson Mike James Pat Contri Patrick “Scott” Patterson Scott Schreiber Seanbaby Thor Thorvaldson Wes DeSantis COVER IMAGE This issue’s cover image was crafted by Orlando Arocena. See more of his mindblowing work at http://www.mexifunk.com/

In this issue, we’ve enlisted a lifelong gamer who makes no bones about his unquenchable thirst for ledge-leaping goodness, Diehard GameFan’s Dave Halverson, to help us take a look back at many of those classics.

Brandon Justice

Editorial Director, RETRO Magazine By the time you read this, Brandon will be kneedeep in the joys of pre-season football. Life is good. Favorite Genres: Action, RPG, Sports Favorite Games: Phantasy Star II, SOCOM, Speedball 2, Tetris Now Playing: New ‘n’ Tasty!, Sniper Elite III, Destiny (beta) Favorite Platformer: Skullmonkeys all the way!

It’s brought back many a memory for everyone on staff here at RETRO, but thankfully, our trip down this pixel-paved road of nostalgia doesn’t have to end there. As evidenced by titles like CoinOp Story, Shovel Knight, and Chasm, indie developers haven’t forgotten those amazing experiences from the 8- and 16-bit glory days, offering up new experiences in droves and popping up faster than we can say “1UP.” Will it mark a new era in platforming perfection? Considering the neglect the genre has suffered over the last decade or so, we sure hope that’s the case — provided, of course, that it doesn’t result in a resurgence of Fabio’s brief-butbrilliant videogame modeling career. That’s a moment in gaming history I think we can all avoid revisiting.

meet the Team…

ADVERTISING Advertising Director / Mike Kennedy T: (949) 842-6671 E: sales@readretro.com SUBSCRIPTIONS For subscription inquiries, email subscription@readretro.com or visit ReadRetro.com Coverage Inquiries Want to see your product or story in the pages of RETRO? Email contact@readretro.com PRODUCTION Production / http://themagicgraphics.com T: (980) 428-6579 PRINTING & DISTRIBUTION RETRO is published bi-monthly in print and digital form. GameGavel Network ReadRetro.com /RETRO magazine GameGavel.com GamerSpots.com RetroArcadeRadio.com DISCLAIMER RETRO is part of the GameGavel.com Network. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without the express written permission of GameGavel, LLC is prohibited. COPYRIGHT RETRO® issue #4. Copyright 2014 GameGavel, LLC. All rights reserved

www.readretro.com

Mike Kennedy Publisher

Mark Kaminski Creative Director

David Giltinan Associate Editor

Is it September already?! Favorite Genres: Shmups, Twitch, Platformers, RPGs Favorite Games: Resident Evil, Captain Goodnight, LittleBigPlanet Now Playing: Bit Boy!! Arcade, Governor of Poker, Threshold (ColecoVision) Platforming Moment: Snickering knowing I was playing a superior platformer while everyone else played SMB — Wonderboy in Monsterland ftw!

Loving playing through the Ouya library with his daughters ever since he was lucky enough to get in on the all-access pass! Favorite Genres: Action, Shmups, Survival Horror Favorite Games: Twisted Metal 2, Life Force, Resident Evil Outbreak Now Playing: Walking Dead Season 2, Big Action Mega Fight!, Double Dragon Trilogy Favorite Platformer: While Super Mario Bros. was really amazing, I just loved Super Mario Bros. 2 (U.S.) as a kid. It was magical.

This self-proclaimed “geek media connoisseur” has made it his mission to spread his love and knowledge of gaming through RETRO magazine. Favorite Genres: Fighting, Actionadventure, Puzzle, Point-and-click Favorite Games: Chrono Trigger, Maniac Mansion, Street Fighter II Now Playing: Destiny (beta), The Walking Dead Season 2, Stick it to The Man! Favorite Platformer: My childhood wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t say Donkey Kong Country on SNES.

>>CONNECT WITH TEAM RETRO: www.readretro.com @READRETRO FACEBOOK.COM/READRETRO <<

CONTENTS

ISSUE 4

CONTENTS

ISSUE 4

RETRO NATION 4 �� RETRO Responds – Readers pose a long-

standing cover art mystery, request more metroidvania, and share a cool board game with us.

5 �� Bumbling Bonk – Robert Workman takes

a look at the ill-fated comeback of the former TurboGrafx superstar.

42 �� Cookie Quest – Green Lava’s Eduardo

Ramírez talks difficulty, baked goods, and building Fenix Rage on a budget.

43 �� Retro Roots – Developer Blaise

Sanecki talks about the influences and aesthetic choices that are fueling his team’s upcoming pixel-powered adventure, The Way.

6 �� Coin-Operated – Kevin goes Pac-Man

RETROgrade

7 �� Balls of Steele – We take a look back at

44 �� Latest Releases – We take the leap with

crazy in this installment of CO.

the life and works of pinball legend Python Angelo.

8 �� Game Gavel Digest – Check out more

hot auctions from RETRO’s official gaming auction house, GameGavel.com.

RETRO FEED 10 ��The Schwag Bag – USB sentry turrets, God of War cutlery, and an evil radio-controlled Luigi kart? Oh, yes. 12 �� RETRO High 5 – Luke explores how

platformers defined an era.

14 ��Dev-olution – Andy Eddy gets up close and personal with Dude Huge, Cliff Bleszenski. 15 ��Potent Portables – PSP takes a look at some of the best platformers mobile gaming has to offer. 16 ��Primal Soup – Jeremy Parish examines the struggle between authenticity and artistry for modern-day pixel pushers.

RETRO FEATURES 18 ��Industry Icon – We chat with David Crane and Garry Kitchen about the early days of Activision, platform gaming, and more. 22 �� RETROspective – James Paton grants a

Kickstarter wish and dissects Snatcher, the revered but lesser-known Kojima classic.

Shovel Knight, Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty!, Guacamelee!, and more.

47 �� Retro Reviews – Do Space Panic, Kid Niki,

and Black Tiger still make us jump for joy?

COVER STORY: Top 20 Platformers | P26

RETRO ReCollection 50 �� Insane Game Collection – Get a look at

one of gaming’s most impressive portable collections courtesy of The Handheld Museum’s Rik Morgan.

54 �� Collect-a-Thon! – Chris Kohler highlights

the key keepers in the TurboGrafx-16 library.

56 �� Mario Madness – We’ve all played a

Mario game or three in our lives, but Chris points out that finding and owning all of them is tougher than you’d think.

58 �� RETRO Rarities – Jeremy Parish shows

he’s got the ledge-leaping love with a look back at Little Samson.

RETRO Rants 60 �� NES Nation by Pat Contri 61 �� Conventional Wisdom by Kevin Baird 62 �� Seanbaby vs. The World by Seanbaby 64 �� Experience Points by Scott Johnson

INTERVIEW: David Crane and Garry Kitchen | P18

24 �� RETROspective – Alexandra Hall dons

her robotic bunny suit and dishes on why Jumping Flash! 2 still makes her heart hop.

26 �� RETRO’s Top 20 Platformers – Guest

editor Dave Halverson gives us his take on the best platformers to ever grace the gaming landscape.

RETROactive 34 �� An Arcade Homage – Indie dev Pascal

Cammisotto shares details on his upcoming take on Metroidvania, CoinOp Story.

40 �� Diving Into the Depths – Discord Games’

James Petruzzi discusses player choice, atmosphere, and the challenges of crafting their modern-day retro title, Chasm.

RETROactive: CoinOp Story | P34

RETRONATION

READER EMAILS

RETRO RESPONDS

Welcome to RETRO Responds, where we answer questions from readers. If you’ve got a question for the crew, hit us up at letters@readretro.com and you might see yourself in our next issue!

From the mailbag

Letter of the Month: The Konami Cover Art Mystery Your article about Atari’s artwork reminded me of something I’ve been wondering about since the glory days of the SNES. Who did the artwork for Super Castlevania IV? This artist did many different pieces of art for Konami back in the day, such as the amazing cover for Contra III, Castlevania III, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Cybernator, Turtles in Time, and so on. You can tell they’re all done by the same artist, as all the pieces have a unique style. Was this artist’s work limited to videogames? Did they work exclusively for Konami? I would love to know. To this day, I think these are some of the best pieces of box art I’ve ever seen. Surely, one of your contributors could find out who this person is and shed some light on this. By the way, keep the articles on videogame artwork coming. It’s great content. — Raphael Fernandez RETRO responds: Konami’s cover art from the ‘90s certainly is the stuff of legend, and quite a bit of digging has been done on the subject. But after hours of research (including reaching out to a host of concept artists suspected of the work in question) we, too, came up empty-handed. As we mentioned in the Atari art piece, a lot of this info got lost during that time due to a lack of conscious preservation efforts by publishers, and this case seems no different. In fact, it even seems that prior attempts to get the info from Konami themselves resulted in an informational dead end. And while we hate to be the bearers of bad news, we thought that perhaps one of our many readers who has a longstanding history in the industry might read this and be able to help out, as we’d love to be a part of finally unearthing a question that has gone unanswered for more than a decade. If you happen to know who crafted these timeless pieces, let us know! Raph, the team at RETRO, and the dozens of others who’ve sought this knowledge over the last decade or so will be in your debt!

www.readretro.com

More Metroidvania!

Please make an article about the genre Metroidvania. Include some new games of this genre too. — Even Nicolaisen RETRO responds: While we opted for a slightly different theme in this issue, we did include a couple intriguing “Metroidvania”-style games in CoinOp Story and Chasm, and have our eye on several more that will undoubtedly grace the pages of future issues. As for dedicated coverage on the genre in future issues, we may just enlist contributor Jeremy Parish (who many credit as the person who coined the term) to whip up something special. Only time will tell…

What If Sarcasm Was a Thing?

I enjoyed this issue and look forward to the next one. However, I was horrified by your support of the Zelda t-shirt on p. 17, “What if Zelda was a girl?” Zelda is a girl! Link is a boy, and it’s Link who’s dressed in green with the weapons. It’s one thing for a t-shirt manufacturer to screw this up, but it’s another for a retro-gaming magazine to promote such an error. — Amber W. RETRO responds: Yeah, about that…the t-shirt is obviously (well, OK, so we thought it was obvious) a joke. It’s making fun of the rise in fringe gamers who pretend to be hardcore gamers yet don’t actually know that Link is the main character. Apparently you’ve never met any of these champions of knowledge, but we have and thought the shirt was pretty hysterical. Thanks for clearing up our error, though.

On (Yet Another) Rampage In the Retro Responds section Ava mentioned liking Rampage and requested recommendations based off that. Well, have you guys heard of the Rampage board game? It’s a very unique and very physical game. — Keith RETRO responds: While we hadn’t up until you mailed us, we definitely appreciate the tip. That being said, we have to wonder how this seemingly unaffiliated product is getting away with the obvious liberties it’s taking from Bally Midway’s IP.

Facebook Comment of the Month:

The 240 dots in a Pac-Man maze symbolize your karma, and eating them up represent the path to illumination. The ghostmonsters are the obstacles on the path. Red represents anger, blue sadness, pink panic and confusion, and orange is madness and ignorance. The meaning of the prizes is only revealed to initiates of the ninth degree. But they are similar to certain alchemical, astrological and tantric symbols. Some of you know what I’m implying here. Pac-Man is a code for sex magic, to put it plainly. — George Leutz

BRINK OF EXTINCTION

RETRONATION

Bonk:Brink of Extinction

What Went Wrong? Robert Workman

Hudson Soft’s classic platformer went the way of the dinosaur – but why? by

Even though the company’s been out of business for a few years (absorbed into Konami’s collective fold), Hudson Soft’s mark on the game industry remains, from the entire TurboGrafx game library to contemporary releases in the Bomberman franchise, among several others. Gone, perhaps, but not forgotten. Before its demise, Hudson Soft was planning to bring back one of its hit franchises from the ‘80s. Hard-headed caveman Bonk was the star of several TurboGrafx-16 games, as well as Super Bonk for the SNES. Hoping to ride that nostalgia train to new sales, Hudson called upon Pi Studios to produce a new platformer called Bonk: Brink of Extinction. However, in the midst of the company’s business shuffling — and following a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku — the game’s development shut down. It was originally set to release on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and WiiWare. Unfortunately it never happened, and the chances of its revival are incredibly minimal. Perhaps its cancellation had some other reason behind it, not necessarily business or natural disaster. Upon viewing early Xbox Live Arcade videos from the game, it’s easy to see where something might have gone wrong. Let’s closely examine the things that didn’t quite gel with Bonk: Brink of Extinction — at least, from my point of view. The Introduction of Power-Ups Introducing power-ups in a Bonk game is a little unheard of. In some cases I could see it working. For example, in Air Zonk, you can use a variety of power-ups for gunning purposes, including playing cards, a huge plasma beam, and several secondary gunner’s mates that you could merge with. However, that was a shooter, compared to the platforming nature of Brink of Extinction. With this new game, Pi Studios would’ve introduced various power-ups, including a Fire Bonk, Ice Bonk, Mini Bonk, Rhino Bonk, and several others. These would’ve expanded on the typical gameplay that we’ve come to expect from the Bonk series. And therein lies the problem — it wouldn’t have felt like a Bonk game anymore. Bonk Just Didn’t Look Like Bonk Take a look at the classic Bonk games and you could see the charm. Whether climbing a wall using his teeth (!) or simply walking around in a pleasant mood until eating meat sent him apoplectic, there was something really charming about him. Judging by his new appearance in Brink of Extinction — again, from the YouTube videos — there’s something missing. His appearance has been minimized a bit, to the point he looks more realistic and not like his cartoonish self. Some of the magic of the series merely relies on appearance, even in the lacking Bonk 3: Bonk’s Big Adventure. And it just didn’t make the translation to modern platforms. Sure, the environments look good, and some of the effects from the power-ups are interesting to watch, but it’s not quite the Bonk that we’ve come to remember

over the years. Sometimes, a modern-day design just doesn’t cut it. It Didn’t Fit With Konami’s Business Plan Konami is no stranger to marketing hot franchises. Castlevania continues to be a hot brand with Lords of Shadow 2, and Metal Gear Solid never falls out of favor. When it came to Bonk, however, the team was probably running into trouble marketing it for a new audience. Bonk had nostalgia to spare, no question about that, but nostalgia alone can’t sell a game. There has to be something else that ties into it, and considering the waning awareness of the Hudson Soft brand (aside from below-average titles like the Deca Sports series), it just wasn’t there. Granted, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami was devastating, and attempting to release a game during this tragic time would’ve been a terrible idea. However, Konami scrapped the project entirely, instead of shelving it for a later time, when the nostalgia for Bonk would have obviously remained. Chances are that the team just couldn’t find a way to make the game shine the right way. The design didn’t really hew to the Bonk universe as much as the team may have preferred, and it might’ve been a tough sell to gamers seeking more out of a $10–$15 purchase. Will He Ever Return? Now we’re left with the question of whether or not Bonk will ever make a comeback. At the moment, it looks very unlikely, due to Konami’s disregard for most of Hudson Soft’s brands, aside from classic releases like Adventure Island II on the 3DS. Even if the project could see a revival — through Kickstarter or otherwise — it’d still have a stumbling block ahead, as Pi Studios would have to prep it for a new generation of systems, namely the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Don’t fret, though. Even though Brink of Extinction is, well, extinct, the classic Bonk games remain perfectly intact. The first two games, Adventure and Revenge, remain timeless classics that deserve celebration, and the futuristic shooter spin-off Air Zonk has its fair share of fans. Honestly, I’d kill to see a sequel to that. www.readretro.com

RETRO FEED

ARCADE

by Mike Kennedy

Kevin Steele

While most gamers hit up major retailers for their gaming fix, the hardcore know that plenty of hidden gems exist, if you’re willing to do some digging. That’s just as true for cool gaming-related places. Toward that end, every issue we’ll highlight a few gaming hotspots that should be well worth a visit. If you’d like to see your favorite spot featured, drop us a line at contact@readretro.com!

Gaming’s first icon remains surprisingly productive in his 30s.

Welcome back to Coin-Operated, where I cover anything and everything arcade-related. This month we’ve got an amazing grab-bag of arcade news…mostly about Pac-Man, it seems.

Gamers Anonymous 1504 Wyoming Blvd. NE Albuquerque, NM 87112 garetro.com

With two locations in Albuquerque, Gamers Anonymous will help you scratch that retro-gaming itch! They offer a large inventory of classic games from the classics right through the latest and greatest consoles and games from today. They also sell a variety of classic videogame consoles that come with a 30-day warranty. Need an old cartridge-based console fixed? No worries, bring it to them and give your console new life.

Game Over Video Games 110 N I-35, Suite #200-A Round Rock, TX 78758 gameovervideogames.com

If you are in the state of Texas then you are probably somewhere near one of the Game Over Video Games locations. They have stores in Austin, Round Rock, San Marcos, San Antonio, Houston and Arlington. Their stores are super clean and stocked full of retro-gaming goodness goodness from all generations of gaming. Have questions about anything retro gaming? Ask one of their very informative and friendly store staff members (We’ve been here and can’t recommend them enough!) While there you can also check out their small museum display showcasing classic gaming consoles and memorabilia.

Game Wizard

2610 S. Seneca St Wichita, KS 67217 facebook.com/gamewizardks Game Wizard is locally owned and operated and they are all about giving gamers more trade-in credit than the larger national and regional chain stores. Their friendly staff and ever-changing inventory are guaranteed to tickle your retrogaming addiction.

www.readretro.com

Yes, the yellow gobbler is still going strong…stronger than we’ve ever seen him, in fact. Pac-Man is set to star in Nintendo’s Super Smash Brothers, a fighting game of all things. He’ll have some amazing “retro” moves, complete with icons from other classic arcade-era videogames. He’s in his latest 3D incarnation, but if you’d like to see the full evolution of Pac-Man, here’s a detailed list of his many shapes and forms: http://bit.ly/pachist Did you know that researchers have actually been teaching Pac-Man how to solve his own mazes? To be honest, they’re teaching other computers how to play Pac-Man, but that’s actually even more amazing. Matthew Taylor, a researcher at Washington State University, has developed “teaching” computers that teach other computers how to play the game of Pac-Man. Even better, the students are eventually outperforming their computer instructors! Skynet, here we come. And who says Pac-Man can’t stay current and relevant to pop-culture? Within days of this year’s FIFA World Cup, a Pac-Man clone satirizing Uruguay player Luis Suarez’ opponent-biting incident (you know the one) popped online. It was a natural fit, it seems. Luckily, Pac-Man is also contributing to society in a positive way, with a Pac-Man–like game attempting to help children with autism smile. In fact, smiling is the only way to advance in the game — you have to smile to control it! The game actually trains children to create “higher-quality” facial expressions, an aid to helping these children better integrate with society. And finally, if all this Pac-Man talk has got you itching to try to improve your own score, Seth Kadish, a data scientist in Portland, Oregon has developed a “Pac-Man Safety Map.” The darker areas of the map indicate increased danger, and “hiding spots,” outlined in green, show where you can sit indefinitely without being touched, assuming the ghosts didn’t see you move there.

Finally, don’t worry, this column isn’t completely PacMan. At the 2014 Game Developers Conference Eugene Jarvis took a look back at his classic game Robotron: 2084 (disclaimer: this is my favorite game of all time). One of the best insights? That players “enjoy getting their asses kicked.” As proof, he mentioned the success of the mobile game Flappy Bird, a notoriously difficult but simple game. Jarvis described the “iterative” development process he used: Add a feature, play the game, tweak, repeat. One shot at a time not enough? Up it to four. 10 enemies? Not fun. 40? Better, but still too easy. 127? Now we’re talking… The entire retrospective is fascinating. According to Jarvis, “some of the coolest features of a game can be bugs,” such as the oft-exploited “Mikey bug.” Seek out the session’s recording if you’re into the history of one of the greatest videogames of all time (told you I was biased!). Kevin Steele is the former publisher of GameRoom Magazine and founder of RetroBlast.com. Follow his arcade news twitter feed @HomeGameTech, or drop him a line at kevin@ retroblast.com.

PINBALL

RETRO FEED

Kevin Steele

Python Angelo’s final masterpiece may yet see release. It was a bold, unique, and unprecedented pinball design. And it was shelved by Williams management before entering production for being too expensive and infeasible. Angelo was outraged, leaving the company and moving to Capcom.

Python Angelo, who passed away on April 9th at age 60, was an exuberant part of the colorful history of pinball. An artist by training, he lived an artist’s life — madly creative and stubbornly independent. And his greatest accomplishment may still be yet to come. At the time of his death, Python was frantically working on a secret pinball project, designing a “dream machine” on his own terms. Friends later confirmed — Python had been developing a new version of his “master opus,” the incredibly innovative (and never released) Pinball Circus. Even better, June saw confirmation that this new version of his pin would actually see production!

Pinball Circus remained a personal obsession of Python’s and a remake of the design became a mission of his later in life, even after being diagnosed with cancer. According to close friend James Loflin, “For Python’s entire career he worked for companies who assembled his design teams for him. He had to work within the restrictions of the companies. Anyone that worked with Python can attest, he was not best suited to take orders. In his last few months Python assembled his own team. Python, for once, was in complete charge of the process. Python did not have to take orders from anyone, he gave the orders. He wanted to continue to draw, design, and build the machine of his own vision.”

Python was born in Transylvania, Romania in 1954, and later moved to the U.S. at age 17. Trained in art, he later became an animator for the Walt Disney company, only to move over to Williams in 1979. There he helped design and produce the artwork for over a dozen pinball machines, such as The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot, Bad Cats, High Speed, and more. He was also responsible for the popular “rollercoaster” pinball trilogy of Comet, Cyclone, and Hurricane.

“I am still inspired by his work — I play Cyclone every day,” says pinball designer John Popadiuk, “I think his work is much deeper and profound than it may appear. Watch The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, with Charlton Heston) — it’s like being in Python’s brain, or something that really has influenced him, along with the Bible, and ancient history. It’s all in his work — he is retelling the history of the world in a new way.”

Perhaps his greatest creation at Williams, though, is also the one that the fewest people have ever seen: Pinball Circus, the spectacular multi-level vertical pinball machine, of which only two were ever produced (one resides in a private collection, the other at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas).

For more details on the production of Python’s Pinball Circus, visit circusmaximusgames.com. www.readretro.com

RETRONATION

GAMEGAVEL DIGEST

GAMEGAVELDIGEST What’s hot on GameGavel.com // RETRO’s very own auction site!

GameGavel News Every month videogame auction site GameGavel.com hosts some very special retrogaming auctions. Some of these items are rare and command high prices, while others are just cool in their own right. Here are some interesting items GameGavel’s had on the auction block over the past couple months. Now you can view GameGavel auctions paired with all the content on RETRO magazine’s new website, www.ReadRETRO.com. It is the only website where you can read about your favorite classic games and bid on them at the same time. Start growing or financing your collections; buy and sell on GameGavel.com without the high fees on eBay or Amazon.

Nintendo Entertainment System NES-101 The top-loading NES-101 debuted in 1993 for $49.99, and remains many collectors’ desired model, over the standard “toaster” NES. At auction, you can expect to spend anywhere from $50 to $100 for a complete unit.

Buy Now: $65

Mattel Basketball 2 Mattel was one of the first companies to offer a variety of handheld electronic sports games. Basketball 2 was released in 1979 and realistically recreated a basketball game with features like three-point shooting and even fouls and free throws.

Starting Bid: $15

www.readretro.com

JVC X’Eye With Box In the fall of 1994, Sega and JVC teamed up on the X’Eye. It was similar to Sega’s own CDX system and could play both Sega Genesis cartridges and Sega CDs. The unit’s $499 price tag kept it out of reach for most consumers, making it a rare find to this day.

Starting Bid: $100

Radiant Silvergun Sega ST-V Cartrige

Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP — NES Edition

Back in 1995, Sega released their ST-V (Sega Titan Video Game System — dubbed Titan as a nod to one of Saturn’s 62 moons). This was a ROM cartridge-based arcade board that played a variety of (mostly) popular Japanese videogames in arcade cabinets. ST-V was essentially built from Saturn hardware, and as one of its most popular shooters, Radiant Silvergun is a solid addition to any library.

The Game Boy Advance SP was available from 2003 to 2008. Nintendo offered up a variety of designs including this homage to the classic NES console.

Sold For: $100

Sold For: $60

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Pac-Man Arcade Cocktail Table MANUFACTURER: Namco URL: hammacher.com RELEASE DATE: 10.01.10 MSRP: $3,500

Are plain old arcade cabinets not retro enough for you? Then take a gander at this blast from the past! Commemorating the 30th anniversary of everyone’s favorite yellow ghost-gobbler, this cocktail table-styled machine plays Pac-Man, as well as 12 other classics, in a comfortable, head-to-head format. Just pull up some chairs and take a trip down memory lane.

Master Chief Premium Format Figure MANUFACTURER: Sideshow Collectibles URL: sideshowtoy.com RELEASE DATE: 07.09.12 MSRP: $399.99 What better way to display your Halo fandom than with this beauty? This 25-inch representation of Master Chief looks good on any gamer’s shelf, and is sure to turn some heads to boot. Standing on a rock in the classic hero’s pose, Chief towers over most fruits (as seen in the image), and comes with two weapons to equip in battle: the Assault Rifle and Magnum Pistol. Now all you need is some proportionally sized Grunts to kick around.

The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia MANUFACTURER: Dark Horse Books URL: hyrulehistoria.com RELEASE DATE: 01.29.13 MSRP: $19.75 Think you know everything about The Legend of Zelda? Think again! Whether you’re just getting into Link’s adventures or are a diehard Nintendo fan, this beautiful emerald-green hardcover will have something for you. Included are a full history of Hyrule, previously unreleased concept art, and an introduction from Mr. Nintendo himself, Shigeru Miyamoto. Hyrule Historia is a collector’s item for the ages.

The Boss 1/6 Scale Figure th

MANUFACTURER: Sideshow Collectibles URL: sideshowtoy.com RELEASE DATE: 06.12.13 MSRP: $214.99 In what we would classify as the “So Real, It Hurts” category, this insanely detailed figure of The Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a must-have for collectors from many walks of life. Most impressive is the intricate work done on her chest scar and face. If you consider yourself a fan of the franchise and still get goosebumps from that final fight with Big Boss’ mentor, there’s no question here. This needs to be on your shelf.

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Portal 2 Sentry MANUFACTURER: Aperture Science URL: thinkgeek.com RELEASE DATE: Available Now MSRP: $29.99 Fans of the Portal series will undoubtedly feel a surge of new-school nostalgia with this awesome little drone around. When plugged into a USB-enabled device, the mini-turret will go into a Defend Mode, protecting your desk from co-workers and renegade test subjects alike. Upon detecting motion, it will open up, speak one of many lines from Portal 2, then make gunfire sound effects. It has special dialogue when knocked over, vibrating fruitlessly until deactivated. “Target acquired,” indeed.

bag

SCHWAG

tice & by Brandon Jus

GEAR

David Giltinan

Bubble Bobble Plush Soft Toys MANUFACTURER: gamerabilia.co.uk URL: gamerabilia.co.uk RELEASE DATE: TBD 2014 MSRP: £16.99 Any self-respecting retro gamer has heard of Bubble Bobble, which became an instant classic back in 1986. Now take the game’s twin dragons home with you, courtesy of Gamerabilia. These plush toys not only look authentic, but sound it too, with built-in soundchips that will bring you back to those nostalgic times at the arcade. Bubbles are not included.

Mario Kart Radio-Controlled Luigi MANUFACTURER: Goldie International URL: walmart.com RELEASE DATE: 11.15.13 MSRP: $99.99 “Here we go!” Mario’s oft-neglected brother now takes the steering wheel in this awesome, remote-controlled vehicle straight out of the Mario Kart series. Control Luigi and have him navigate down the street, around the living room, or around the corners of your own racecourse. Three AA batteries are required. The only thing missing now is the death stare.

God of War Blade of Chaos MANUFACTURER: United Cutlery URL: knife-depot.com RELEASE DATE: 12.2014 MSRP: $99.99 Prepare dinner in the most epic way possible with this no-joke, sharp-as-Hades replica of one of the Blades of Chaos. Normally swung around by God of War protagonist Kratos, you can now wield this weapon of destruction — with caution, mind you! United Cutlery is known for making high-quality blades, and this collector’s item is no exception, with its zinc aluminum material and tabletop display for showing off to friends. Grab another one with a chain connecting them for true authenticity.

Virtual Pinball Game MANUFACTURER: ArcadesRFun URL: arcadesrfun.com RELEASE DATE: 2013 MSRP: $7,995 Everyone has played a pinball machine at some point in their life. The thrill of chasing after a high score and keeping your balls alive has always been an easy sell, but now you can add to the immersion with force feedback in this state-of-the-art virtual pinball machine. This amazing piece of hardware comes built with a 46-inch LCD playfield, 32-inch LCD backglass, and the aforementioned force feedback option, which adds sounds, vibrations, and lights. The result is a truly authentic pinball experience for the modern age.

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HIGH 5

PLATFORMERS

RETRO High 5 by Luke McKinney

How Platformers Embodied An Entire Era... Platformers flattened the soul of a gaming era down to two dimensions. Like a butterfly collection, but with more brightly colored creatures, more time spent in the air, and way more death. A world where science never developed, because the apples kept killing the Newtons, and parabolas were treated like the speed limit. Platformers were how corporations held kids hostage for months without SWAT getting involved, so now we’re looking at how they represented our gaming childhoods. 02 // Introducing a Generation

01 // They Embodied the Hardware Platformers were a more inevitable result of technology than cavemen noticing that stones were harder than skulls…and resulted in more cranial trauma. The last time with so many platforms was the sixties, and at least it had drugs to explain them away. When your hardware can only render a few sprites in two dimensions, your options are mazes, killing everything, and platforms. Most games chose the non-Shining option…then went full Jack Torrance by murdering everything anyway. We killed mushrooms, robots, bats, crocodiles, sentient burgers — the only quality they shared was that they were somehow alive, which was enough reason to kill them. You killed so many random things in so many happy settings you’d swear it was an eviler opposite of Clockwork Orange reprogramming.

revealing that the Adventures of Tron computers didn’t 2 198 ide world ins ng. as look quite amazi

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No one would be so restricted by their hardware to move forward and kill everything until James Cameron invented Terminators. And even Terminators got a platform game, where they fought RoboCop. RoboCop! Less jumping ability than the parked bus of a wheelchair basketball team, but the ease of scribbling new sprites over floating rebar meant almost every movie adaptation for a decade was a platformer. It didn’t matter if you were Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, or an indestructible cyborg: Your new movement method was jetéing your way through the world’s most murderous ballet.

He crushed or burned everything he ever met and stole all the money he ever saw, but a lot of people still love Mario. Mario starred in the first true platform-jumping game as “Jumpman,” an exotic pet-abusing carpenter, which may be why he changed his name so quickly afterwards. He would later lead Nintendo’s console war against Sonic and Sega, a war Nintendo won so hard Sega forgot how to make consoles around the same time Nintendo was making millions from a Parkinson’s detector. The first thing I learned on consoles was A is for Jump Button, B is for Fireball, and C is for people who could afford a Genesis. For an entire generation of players jumping was our first electronic action, the noob-orn equivalent of crying. If real newborns could leap triple their own height as a first action we could replace caesareans with dunk births. We learned that meeting something face to face meant you died, but your foot to their face meant you won, which is surprisingly competent street-fighting advice for a whimsical kids’ game.

PLATFORMERS

HIGH 5

So hard we thought skipping chunks of the game we paid for was a good thing.

We cursed her existence, but she was a sweetheart compared to Ghosts ‘n Goblins’ Red Arremer.

03 // They Were True Single-Player Gaming The best platformers were iron maidens we jumped inside to relax. If you were off by a millimeter you died. There are brain surgeries that aren’t that precise. In most triple-A games that’s not just the rating, that’s the exact button combination to beat most challenges. If you pause a YouTube of someone else playing Ryse: Son of Rome, you both have equal control of the action. Finishing most modern games is like finishing a gallon of ice cream: If you keep going you’ll definitely make it, but it’s not an achievement you can take pride in.

04 // Destroyed by Hardware For something to truly embody an era, it has to die with it, like an unlucky explorer entombed with ancient treasures. Which was the exact plot of 4% of all platformers. These games went the way of horse-drawn carriages and steam-powered masturbation aids: rendered obsolete by improved technology, or hideously painful for those who tried to apply the new power to the old entertainments. Advancing technology destroyed platformers like a strike from an anti-Mjölnir: ruining them by adding an extra dimension. In 2D you had total vision and tighter control than Tinkerbell doing kegels. In 3D you were a greasily skidding victim desperately searching for where you were meant to go next. You went from being a cruel god to being a desperate drunk, which isn’t the right way to go near bottomless pits. Half-Life was and still is one of the greatest games ever made, and its platform sections

us artwork Millennia of religio d. never looked this goo

Most other modern games are multiplayer, because programming AI is actually pretty hard when there are more options than “walk forward” and “keep doing that off a cliff.” Either that or you were that world’s most terrifying monster, a genocidal tyrant with such a fearsome reputation that enemies would commit suicide rather than risk facing you. Which would perfectly fit your behavior in that world.

05 // Brutality We mock MMORPG players (including ourselves) for grinding the same thing over and over again just to do something slightly different. In platformers, we ground the exact same thing over and over again to do that exact thing faster. We’d play the same eight levels for an hour just to get one more try at level nine, where two seconds of instant-kill flying-medusa-head bullsh*t would send us all the way back to the start. I remember the first level of Manic Miner more clearly than some of my relationships. And it involved me getting screwed more often.

er inside the You honestly felt saf anti-mass ing ash dimension-sm spectrometer.

They used reincarnation as a game mechanic. Dying meant starting all over again and trying to do better, and if you didn’t develop the cool of a Buddhist robot in a liquid-nitrogen spa you weren’t going to make it. The U.S. Special Forces sniper manual says that a maximally trained human being cannot concentrate fully for longer than 15 minutes. But that’s because they spent all their time training instead of playing videogames. We could focus for hours. With sufficiently bad parenting we could focus all summer. If we focused any harder we would have torn open a portal to R’lyeh, won a staring contest with the Old Ones, sent them skittering back into the shadows in fear of our madness, and that would still have been easier than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles water levels — and a saner thing on which to have spent our free time.

are still the worst things ever done to game characters outside of Internet porn. Jumping around Xen when you can’t even see your own feet isn’t fun, it’s how you apply impact trauma to an existential nightmare. Sure, Super Mario 64 was brilliant, but that’s because Mario can and has enjoyed everything up to and including golf. Mario could make opening a Hellraiser cube fun. But the horde of stuttering polygons that followed showed that creating a good 3D virtual world took only slightly fewer resources than building a real actual planet. The result was a worse combination of camera work and collision detection than live-streaming white-cane jousting.

The Resurgence of Retro Joy Platformers have leapt back into the spotlight with indie innovations because they’re easier to make, and with mainstream indulgences because they’re tremendous fun. Rayman Origins is what happens to platform characters when they lived a good life before landing on spikes.

The bomb is the least-lethal thing in this picture.

Modern platformers are the luxury of having a horse or your own personal steam engine: You don’t have to deal with all the sh*t, or the painfully broken machinery, because now they’re what we want instead of something everyone uses. They’re just one of the many options afforded by our incredible wealth of gaming technology. Our hardware can run every style of game we’ve ever invented. It’s up to us to remember that, and take a break from the endless gritty-sh*tty third-person shooters to just jump for joy.

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RETRO FEED

A.EDDY

Dev-olution

Cliff bleszinski by

Andy Eddy

How Cliff Bleszinski went from bumming games to widespread fame. Dev-olution is a regular Retro column that looks at how veteran developers got their starts in making games. If you have comments about the column or recommendations for who you’d like to see covered in a future installment of Dev-olution, you can reach Andy at andy@readretro.com. Cliff Bleszinski admits his early years as a gamer had him playing “anything I could get my grubby, little hands on.” It forced him to “mooch off” his friend to play NES, and even when he got his own, he was often relegated to “sit in my room and play on a black-and-white television.” Despite that dodgy start, he was sure that games would always be important to him. “I made a conscious decision that I continue to consistently play them for the majority of my adult life,” Bleszinski says. As with many developers-to-be, playing games led to trying his hand at creating them. He admits that, despite being “a terrible artist and a terrible coder,” he churned away on the easy-to-use Visual Basic, created graphics in Windows Paint and made a point-and-click adventure game he called Palace of Deceit. He sold it out of his mother’s house under the Game Syndicate Productions banner (a tribute to Ice-T’s Rhyme $yndicate), using the online service CompuServe as his main digital-distribution platform. Palace got the attention of Epic MegaGames’ founder, Tim Sweeney, who offered for Bleszinski to join the company — at first, working as a remote contractor. His first full game at Epic was Dare to Dream, which he admits didn’t do that well and “didn’t make sense,” but that was followed in 1994 by Jazz Jackrabbit, a breakout hit that he calls “one of the first and very few character-action platform games for the PC,” and which was heavily inspired by his appreciation for Mario and Sonic titles. The next few years brought a number of Jazz sequels and spin-offs, as well as a move in the late ’90s to Raleigh, NC, to work full time at Epic’s new headquarters. That year also brought the release of Unreal, a project that he notes had “an extremely protracted and difficult development cycle” of nearly four years.

After a rough start with the franchise — “Epic, if I recall, was screwed out of money to some extent by [Unreal publisher] GT Interactive,” Bleszinski says — the developer created Unreal Tournament, originally intended to be an add-on pack to the original Unreal, and the franchise took off. Epic was a solid, thriving studio.

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Despite the public success he and the company were having, behind the scenes Bleszinski felt that Epic “was beating Unreal into the ground — there was Unreal Tournament this and Unreal Tournament that.” He wanted to “get out of the silo of an existing franchise and make something brand new.” That something was 2006’s Gears of War, which in turn became a successful series. Bleszinski’s stock as a design lead was never higher. Even when you’re on top, it’s not a bad time to consider a change, and in 2012, Bleszinski decided to leave Epic. With his future undefined, he stated that he’d been at the company for over 20 years, having started there in his teens, and that it was time for a much-needed break. Two years have since passed, and he recently announced that he was starting up a new endeavor in Raleigh, which would be called Boss Key Productions. Bleszinski already has some solid plans for the initial steps Boss Key will take. “We want to start off fairly small…we’re going to be at about 12 people building up to 20. I want to pump the brakes on the hiring at that point. I want to find the fun with a small team,” he says. “With the right spec of the right game and with the right outsourcing and making the right game-design decisions, I think we can make a pretty great arena first-person shooter.” The project, currently under the working title BlueStreak, will be a free-to-play title published by Nexon. The game will be developed “in a relatively transparent way,” Bleszinski says. “[We’ll] build the company and the community and the game at the same time…and let people see the behindthe-scenes on how the sausage is made.” For a guy who’s seen a lot of good and bad come from the meat grinder of game development, there are a lot of hungry players who are expecting nothing but the best from his wurst. Andy Eddy is a long-time carnivore in the world of interactive entertainment, having been a gaming journalist for over 25 years.

PLATFORMERS

Platformers to Go, Please

Here are the 9 best platform games on iOS and Android.

The platformer has been a popular videogame staple for more than 30 years, ever since Donkey Kong and Space Panic pulled quarters from the pockets of early ‘80s arcade fans. Today, thanks to smartphones and tablets, not to mention reissues of all-time classics, the platformer lives on in the pockets, backpacks, and purses of players across the world.

MOBILE

Mikey Shorts RELEASE: 08.23.12 DEVELOPER: BeaverTap Games Help the determined but chinless Mikey Shorts rescue all the people in a game that appeals to both casual and dedicated gamers. This is perhaps the most perfect blend of retro game elements sprinkled with modern-day ingredients you’ll find in a modern platformer. While experienced gamers will likely complete the game in short order, they’ll be compelled to go back and try to do it faster or better, again and again.

Limbo

Mutant Mudds

RELEASE: 07.03.13 DEVELOPER: Playdead

RELEASE: 12.06.12 DEVELOPER: Renegade Kid

The Xbox Live Arcade classic finally made its way to mobile devices last summer, and while the controls are obviously not as tight on a phone or tablet, this terrifying puzzler remains a masterpiece. Perfectly suited for quick play or for long airport layovers, players of all types will be challenged by helping this poor boy through the dark forest.

The main character might look like that nerdy kid from ABC TGIF lineup classic Step by Step, but he has a rocket pack and can jump between the background and foreground. That feature alone makes the game stand out in a crowded field, along with being flat-out addicting and just frustrating enough to make you try and try again.

Sonic CD

Jetpack Joyride

RELEASE: 12.15.11 DEVELOPER: Sega

RELEASE: 09.01.11 DEVELOPER: Halfbrick Studios

It is somewhat amazing that a game that was once touted as a cutting-edge CD game (back when CD games were seen as cutting edge) can be translated so well to the same device you use to call grandma. Even better, you can choose to experience the classic Sega title in either its American or Japanese forms, giving you twice as much fun (or at least music).

Double dipping on games that use a jetpack, Jetpack Joyride still holds up even several years after its original release. Easy to play and addictive, you help a main character named Barry Steakfries in a game that may be even more addictive than Halfbrick’s most famous title Fruit Ninja, and without the messy clean up.

League of Evil 3

Punch Quest

RELEASE: 06.27.13 DEVELOPER: Ravenous Games

RELEASE: 10.25.12 DEVELOPER: Rocketcat Games

The latest version of an entire series that could have taken up space in this list, League of Evil 3 will satisfy anyone who wants to carry Mega Man–level frustration in their pocket or bag. It will kick your head in and you’ll ask it for more. Just don’t throw your phone.

No list of platformers would be complete without a good ol’ beatem-up and Punch Quest fits the bill perfectly. This game somehow manages to make an endless-runner gameplay style fit with action brawling; it’s like the discovery of peanut butter and chocolate all over again.

Lode Runner Classic

Pix’n Love Rush

RELEASE: 01.17.13 DEVELOPER: Tozai Games

RELEASE: 06.16.10 DEVELOPER: Bulkypix

Likely a controversial choice that appears here out of sheer partiality, Lode Runner still stands as one of the most perfect combinations of platforming and puzzle solving ever seen in videogames, and the computer classic holds up well in mobile form once you settle into the control scheme.

The grizzled veteran release of the list, Pix’n Love Rush still holds up as a near-perfect stew of retro and modern gameplay features. The five-minute chunks require you bring your A-game, while an Infinite mode exists for those who want to see how long they can last.

Patrick Scott Patterson is a videogame media personality with 33 years of videogame experience. He has yet to throw his smartphone like he once threw his NES controllers, but lived in constant fear of doing so while putting this list together.

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RETRO FEED

J.PARISH

PRIMAL SOUP Jeremy Parish

Can you believe it’s been nearly 10 years since Daisuke Amaya’s Cave Story helped ignite the indie gaming revolution? One man almost singlehandedly put together a masterpiece of an action game that played like an extended nod to 8- and 16-bit classics while simultaneously playing quite unlike anything that had come before it, what with its unique physics and hidden endings. Cave Story has been played by millions of people…and many of them took away the realization that with enough time, talent, and passion, creative individuals could take the art of game design back from corporate entities. Besides galvanizing so many aspiring game designers to explore the DIY approach, Cave Story also offered a working demonstration of the practical value inherent in old-school pixel-art graphics. The games industry collectively dropped bitmap sprites like a bag full of tumors as soon as PCs and console developed the ability to render objects out of big, clumsy triangles. By the end of the ‘90s, the sprite art that had defined the medium’s first few decades of existence had been relegated to kids’ games and puny portable systems. Then, just a few weeks after Nintendo and Sony released DS and PSP — handheld consoles capa-

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ble of respectable 3D graphics, relegating bitmaps to the dustbin of history — Cave Story came along and proudly presented its virtual world with simple, low-color, low-resolution sprites. This wasn’t simply an incidental element, either; on the contrary, pixel art represented a point of pride for Amaya, who published Cave Story under the alias Studio Pixel. The lo-fi look made perfect sense, too. How could a single person hope to put together an entire game of such impressive scale and scope with cutting-edge 3D visuals? But Amaya’s minimalist approach — using simple, super-deformed pixel graphics consisting of large areas of flat color and rudimentary shading — placed the possibility of creating an entire world within his grasp. Cave Story’s squat character designs didn’t require detailed animation cycles, and they allowed a great many things to happen onscreen at once without causing the action to become confusing or distracting. They boldly tied the game back to the 8-bit classics that inspired it while simultaneously giving Amaya the means to up the ante for retro-style action games by filling the (higher than true 8-bit resolution) screen with dozens of flying, spinning, shooting, exploding objects: Metroid design discipline with bullet-hell flash.

J.PARISH

RETRO FEED

For every indie game that takes pixel art and does something fresh and unique, there are multiple creations that ride the bandwagon without really understanding the reasoning behind the look they’ve co-opted. Needless to say, Cave Story became a landmark for game development. Countless aspiring game designers took inspiration from Amaya’s creation… and they took its lessons to heart, too. A decade ago, a game that looked like souped-up NES software was practically impossible to come by. These days, you can’t swing a dead cat at your Steam library or the latest Humble Bundle without getting fur all over a few dozen of them. But as often happens when people borrow a great idea without taking the time to make it their own, the purpose and logic that informed Cave Story’s visual style doesn’t always come along for the ride. For every indie game like Hyper Light Drifter — games that take pixel art and do something fresh and unique with the concept — there are multiple creations that ride the bandwagon without really understanding the reasoning behind the look they’ve co-opted, games whose creators haven’t taken the time to observe the creative discipline that informed Cave Story’s aesthetics from start to finish.

color-blocking style of the best Capcom and Konami NES games. Not only that, but director Sean Velasco says the team actually removed frames of animation from creatures to prevent them from seeming unconvincingly smooth. Which is not to suggest that every game should adhere to the strict limitations of dated hardware. But if you want to evoke a specific style, it’s not enough to simply get it kind of right and say, “good enough.” Old games appeared a certain way because they were sharply constrained; NES sprites could only consist of three colors plus a transparency, for example. The system could only display a handful of colors from a palette of 52. Sprites flickered because the hardware could only draw so many at a time and would stop drawing objects for a frame in order to ease the burden.

It’s a shame, because there are genuine benefits to using pixel art. It’s not just a style or a trend, it’s an ethos — a means of expression, a practical workaround to limited resources, and a form of tribute all at once. Take those things away, though, and you end up with an empty imitation. Poorly conceived “retro” graphics have diminished the movement’s impact and undermined the style’s integrity, and that’s a shame.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with breaking the rules of those old consoles; even Mega Man 9, amazingly authentic as it seemed, cheated in small ways to enable things that couldn’t be done on NES. But it’s important for today’s designers to properly understand the nature of what they’re mimicking. The best faux-classic games come not just from a place of deep affection, but also from a place of understanding what made them the way they were. Whether the result is intensely faithful to gaming’s roots (as with Shovel Knight) or a fascinating new take on classic concepts (like Capybara’s Below), sometimes the best way forward is to really and truly learn to appreciate the past.

Thankfully, a few developers still get it. Yacht Club’s debut title Shovel Knight is quite possibly the most faithful fake NES game I’ve seen since Mega Man 9. The game perfectly imitates the limitations of the NES, from its harsh color-display restrictions to its coarse animation. It totally captures the bold

Jeremy Parish works as editor-in-chief at USgamer. net, co-host of the Retronauts podcast, and mad curator of handheld museum GameBoyWorld.com. He wears neckties and dress jackets in his free time as a desperate ploy to convince people he is in fact a grown-up. www.readretro.com

INDUSTRY ICONS

Garry Kitchen & David CranE

Industry Icons:

Garry Kitchen and David Crane by

Mike Kennedy

Take a leap back in time with two of the architects behind Activision’s third-party revolution. When it comes to game mechanics these days, it often seems that revolutionary new ideas are few and far between. But back in the early 1980s almost every game concept was a new one, sending gamers into a frenzy with each new release.

particular detail was better than the competition.

Two of the gentlemen responsible for creating some of the best titles in videogaming’s “golden years” are Garry Kitchen and David Crane, and they recently took some time to sit down and chat about their opportunity to influence the formative years of our favorite pastime.

Garry Kitchen: From my standpoint, not having come from Atari, I joined Activi-

So grab your favorite beverage, sink into a comfy chair, and prepare to soak up some wisdom from two of the pioneers who helped make games what they are today! RETRO: In general Activision’s games were a far cry better than most anything Atari (or any other developers for that matter) themselves were releasing. How were Activision’s games all light years ahead of Atari’s own releases? It’s almost like you guys “held back” until you left Atari and started Activision. David Crane: When we founded Activision, we had both a greater responsibility for the quality and ultimate market success of our products, and a greater range of creative freedom. As owners of the company we each required more from ourselves and everyone else who worked there. Atari’s focus was making home versions of their arcade hits. Activision had no arcade hits and had to come up with original game concepts. That different focus was a big factor in bringing about great, original titles. As the “upstart” start-up we were driven to improve on what was out there, and Atari was the standard. We would often spend days, and sometimes weeks, on the smallest detail of imagery or gameplay until the entire design team agreed that a

As time went on, we felt pushed by our own products as well. We not only had to be better than the competition, but we also had to be better than the previous year. It was a lot of pressure, but it made for great games.

sion because their games were better than those from the competition. The original founders had set the quality bar high for a game bearing the Activision name and it was up to me as a new designer to maintain or exceed that level of quality. It was a highly competitive environment, in a fun and respectful way, to see who could raise the bar to a higher level. RETRO: Who was in charge of your fantastic-looking box art and instruction books? And when and why did the trademark rainbow graphic come into play? Does any of the original artwork still exist to your knowledge? DC: Activision was the perfect synergy of four top game designers and a marketing genius. Our CEO, Jim Levy, spent as much time working on the company’s presentation to the public as we did making the games. I was in Jim’s office one early day where he had every Atari 2600 game on his bookshelf. He pointed to them and commented “They have no common art direction…Every box is slightly different, even on the spine.” He felt that a publisher should have a “look” that consumers would identify with. You see that look when you view your collection of 2600 games lined up on the bookshelf. The four founding game designers had opinions as well. We were appalled that many videogames misrepresented their screen art on the box, leading to a consumer being disappointed when they got the game home. We were proud of our game imagery, and we didn’t believe in false advertising, so we insisted on a true

Garry Kitchen & David CranE

INDUSTRY ICONS

David CranE

GARRY KITCHEN game screen on the box. The ultimate compromise was a stylized artistic cover such as those people have come to expect on a novel, and a true game screen illustration on the back. Once we came up with the trade name “Activision” (we incorporated as Computer Arts Inc. just to put something in the box), the rainbow was one of the logo treatments that we liked the best. Bob Whitehead first put the monochrome logo at the bottom of the screen, which we adopted to separate us from Atari. A couple of years later some of our more creative new designers added the rainbow to the onscreen logo. Garry, do you want to tell about that? GK: I agree, no doubt Activision had some of the very best marketing of that videogame era. One interesting tidbit is that Keystone Kapers was the first game to display the Activision logo with a rainbow. Not sure if it was the first to ship with it, but adding the rainbow was something I added early in the development of the game. I showed it to David, who immediately took what I had and dramatically improved it, adding the slanted “flying A” effect. From that point on, all future Activision 2600 games displayed the enhanced logo. In hindsight, the Activision logo with rainbow was likely the first example of many successful collaborative projects that David and I have worked on over the years. Re: the original art, I have the original painting for the cover of the Keystone Kapers manual. And I thought David had an original piece of art re: Pitfall!. Dave? DC: Sort of…I have the original concept painting (oil on canvas board) developed during the packaging phase of Pitfall II. This did not end up as the final cover art, but it includes all of the elements of the game.

I have left instructions with my family that it is to go to the Videogame History Museum when I am no longer around to enjoy it. RETRO: What gaming “generation” do you each feel was the best? DC: For most people, the “golden age” of videogames is the one where they played videogames to the exclusion of all else, and that era usually ended when they got out of school and had to earn a living. Those people have a very clear “golden age” that they can point to. It is the time in their life when they were having the most fun (and few responsibilities). I am the opposite. For me, I transitioned from school to making videogames for a living. (You have to think about that to see how different that is from the average game player.) But in a similar fashion, my favorite era is the time when I was having the most fun. There are few things more enjoyable that starting your own company doing something you love. I also love a challenge, and programming for the Atari 2600 was the most challenging thing I have ever done. So for me it is the ‘80s. GK: I have different feelings about each generation. I agree with David that the ‘80s generation was my favorite, for me because of the pioneering nature of what we were doing. When I wrote my first videogame, there weren’t 30,000 people attending GDC; in fact, you could probably have fit all of the professional game designers in a small restaurant (or large closet). And the satisfaction of a coding or graphics breakthrough on the Atari 2600 was indescribable. Re: the current generation, I’m very concerned about the price erosion that has led some gamers to think that a $0.99 game (that I may have worked on for 500 hours), isn’t “worth the money”; i.e., isn’t worth as much as a soda at a fast food restaurant. And I have grave concerns about the industry’s current direction, often designing for monetization over fun. Let’s hope these issues work themselves out. www.readretro.com

INDUSTRY ICONS

“

Garry Kitchen & David CranE

I was genuinely surprised when the early retro/8-bit style games saw success on present-day devices. – Garry Kitchen

RETRO: What characteristics should be a part of any good/fun platform game? DC: A platform game is all about exploration. You want the player to believe that anything is possible around the next bend — because anything is possible. The world should be a place where the player might want to go in real life. Then for a game to be fun, the designer has to be careful not to confuse “challenging” with “hard.” One of my favorite game design lessons on that issue is from Rob Fulop, who asks “You want hard? OK, you walk into a room and find an old man sitting before a locked door.” He says “To pass, pick a number between one and a million.” That’s hard, not challenging. Combining those two elements, a platform game should take place in an interesting world where the player can complete each task or explore each region with the right level of challenge without causing frustration. GK: The phrase we use often when talking about good gameplay is easy to play, difficult to master. There has to be a feeling of reward and accomplishment within the first minute or so or you risk losing the player. Also, if the player has to read the manual to play you’ve already lost them. As David alluded to to in his exploration comment, discovery is also critical. You want to keep introducing new elements and surprises to encourage replayability of the game. As a player, if I think I’ve seen everything in a game I’m pretty much done. Super Mario Bros., the king of the platform games in my mind, did that better than anyone. RETRO: What are some of your favorite platformers and mascots of all time? Are you enjoying any new platformers today on mobile, tablet, or console? DC: I enjoyed playing Donkey Kong in my local arcade. (It arrived midway through the programming of Pitfall!, after the game design was complete.) I also liked the way Sonic brought us high-speed platform gaming. In the more modern era, I like the way the 2D physics engine has made objects into platforms. That has added a new dimension of interaction where the definition of a platform has blurred. (I know, that is a genre and not a game, so I will give the nod to Angry Birds as the best implemented of the breed.)

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GK: As mentioned earlier, Donkey Kong was a favorite of mine. I was addicted to Super Mario Bros. when it first came out on the NES. I was frankly amazed at the amount of content in it. It felt like you could play that game 100 times and still find something new. I also remember getting hooked on Miner 2049er on the Apple II. Despite the crude graphics, it played really well. On the 2600, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns was certainly a tour de force that didn’t achieve the installed base of the first game because it came out late in the life of the VCS. And don’t forget H.E.R.O., a superb platform game lost in the demise of the 2600. Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64 was an amazing platformer done in 3D. I also remember being impressed with the Oddworld series of platformers when they came out. Platformers on touch-screen devices are very difficult to make fun because that type of game doesn’t really lend itself to motion-style (swipe) controls. And don’t dare put a game in front of me with a simulated joystick or d-pad on the screen, they are just terrible. There is a platform game about to come out that I like a lot, designed by some brilliant guys in a small San Francisco studio called Dynamighty. Definitely check out CounterSpy, coming soon from Sony on console and mobile devices. RETRO: 2D Platform games have kind of fallen off the map since the transition to 3D. Do you think 2D platformers still hold up in this current generation of gaming? And on the flip side, do you think 3D platformers are all they are cracked up to be? Personally, I’d take a 2D platformer over 3D anytime. DC: Well, the distinction between 2D and 3D has blurred. After all, the intention of the 2D platform game’s cross-sectional aspect ratio is to simulate a 3D world. But the essence of a 2D platform game is side-view gameplay. And I believe that in certain gameplay scenarios, a player can get a better “feel” for the game’s interaction from that viewpoint. Even systems that are capable of full 3D rendering can benefit from side-view gameplay. A 3D platform game can suffer from a lack of player control, and it is the player control that makes a game fun. GK: Referring back to my comments above, Super Mario 64 was a 3D platform game done right. Oddworld also had a 3D component but maintained solid gameplay and

controls. But I agree that in most cases 2D is the right technology for a platform game. Also, the aforementioned CounterSpy effectively uses a 3D engine to create a kickass platform game experience. RETRO: Where do you think the platform game genre ranks among other genres like shumps, first-person shooters, racing, fighters, puzzle, maze, etc.? DC: I don’t think you can compare genres. Looking back on my career, I once realized that my greatest successes came from switching genres. I would design a game that was different than what was out in the market, for no more reason than I was tired of the predominant genre. And since it took a year for my next game to come out, everybody was tired of that genre and leaped at something different. What I am saying is that every game genre can have its popularity over all others, but the next year players will flock to something unique and different. In its heyday, the platform game was number one. But where any genre ranks against any other fluctuates dramatically over time. GK: Like David, I don’t think I could rate them on a popularity scale. Everyone has their own genre of game that they’re passionate about. More than anything, I’m hoping that new genres continue to be developed, expanding the choice of games for people to enjoy. RETRO: Thankfully, the retro movement is in full swing. Game designers are creating games that harken back to the less sophisticated games of yesteryear. Do you think these retro-style games will continue to be popular on new gaming devices? DC: There are two issues here: retro style and retro gameplay. Retro style will always have a following, just as

Garry Kitchen & David CranE

INDUSTRY ICONS

there are people today who prefer the swing music of the 1920s over any other style of music. Retro gameplay emphasizes a fun and challenging activity over a story experience. I was at a conference talking to the author of one of the biggest movie-like games of the last decade when he told me “I recently tried to make a simple one-screen game like you did in the ‘80s…I couldn’t do it. I know how to create characters and compelling story lines, and I can produce a mega-hit movie game, but figuring out how to make a simple activity that is so fun and compelling that you can’t put it down is really hard.” To me that is the essence of the retro games that people still play today. They have almost as much fun the thousandth time they play it as they did the first. GK: I was genuinely surprised when the early retro/8-bit style games saw success on present-day devices. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been, because it just proves what we’ve said along, that “it’s all about the gameplay.” Case in point, while graphics are important, you don’t hear anyone complaining about the visuals on Minecraft. Great games done in a retro style are still great games, with the added bonus of the visual presentation harkening back to a fondly remembered era. Retro games will be around forever. RETRO: What do you guys think will be the next big break in gaming? DC: For me that would be when people are again accustomed to paying more than 99 cents for a game. (Or is that just wishful thinking?) Whatever the next big break is, I hope it is based on quality of game and not “how do I monetize my customer?”

GK: Hard to say. It could be augmented reality (graphics overlaid on a real-world environment in real time, like the first-down line on football TV broadcasts), geo-location gaming (real-life treasure hunts, races, etc.), virtual reality (e.g., Oculus Rift), or cooperative social experiments like Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? More short term, I’d expect to see a continuing evolution of the Skylanders concept, combining physical action figures with videogame play. There’s still a lot of innovation to come in that area, combining compelling gameplay with physical objects. I’m interested to see what Nintendo’s going to do in that arena.

DC: I am always noodling over game concepts. But I spend my days working as an expert, primarily analyzing patents. There is often overlap between patented ideas in non-gaming fields and the innovations that first took place in the early days of videogames. I like to find those connections. GK: Like David, I spend much of my time consulting as a technical expert with gaming and technology companies on issues involving patent and copyright infringement. But I still find time to prototype game concepts with the hope of releasing something in the near future. We’ll see…

RETRO: So what are the two of you doing now? Do you have any plans on making more games in the future? www.readretro.com

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Before Metal Gear turned Solid, Kojima had another sci-fi story to tell. James Paton by

The NEC PC-8801 may be unfamiliar to the majority of gamers, but it will forever have the honor of launching one of the greatest cyberpunk adventures ever created. In 1988 Hideo Kojima wrote and directed a noir thriller in the style of a PC adventure game, completely linear in structure but nevertheless a bold step forward in both videogame storytelling and the mature nature of its content. I am, of course, referring to the magnificent fusion of cult film influences and gorgeous artwork that is Snatcher. In Snatcher’s alternate 1996, a catastrophe strikes the Earth, seeing over half the human populace wiped out by a mysterious bio-weapon known as Lucifer-Alpha, developed and released from the fictitious Russian locale of Chernoton. The area of the original outbreak remained uninhabitable for 10 years, but the virus mutated into a non-lethal form over time, which brings us to the start of Snatcher, 50 years after the catastrophe. On Japan’s artificial island of Neo Kobe, strange bio-mechanical creatures known as Snatchers start appearing, murdering humans and taking their places within society, near indistinguishable from their victims. A special task force, known as J.U.N.K.E.R., rises to combat this new threat, and you take control of an amnesiac member of this anti-Snatcher team, Gillian Seed, who must discover who he is and what his connection to the Snatchers is.

Game Info:

Publisher: Konami Developer: Konami Platforms: PC-8801, MSX2, PCE SCD, Sega CD, PS, Saturn Release: 11.26.88 Players: Single-player ESRB Rating: NA

It’s not much more than Whack-a-Mole, but the Sega CD version also supported Konami’s Justifier light gun.

The story plays out over three acts, the first of which concerns Gillian’s first day on the job as a Junker, when he is welcomed to the team and then promptly sent out to investigate an alarm triggered by his colleague, Jean-Jack Gibson, which sets into motion a series of gripping events of life-or-death intrigue. The bulk of the game plays out in a first-person perspective. You progress by selecting options from various menus, sometimes selecting the same action multiple times in a row to elicit different responses. Between its cinematic styling and lengthy exposition,

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Adult-Oriented: An early trail-blazer for mature themes, Snatcher didn’t shy away from startling imagery.

Shades of Blade (Runner): The influences of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic are undeniable.

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MENU ACTION: It’s way more fun than it looks.

Blade Runner (with a nod to Invasion of the Body Snatchers) was clearly the game’s primary influence, with the setting, style, and even some of the character designs coming straight from Ridley Scott’s bleak, sci-fi classic. The Snatchers themselves are biomechanical creations with flesh on top of a metal endoskeleton, a creature that can sweat and bleed, and is designed to become fully integrated into society — much like the replicants Rick Deckard hunts. However, with the flesh removed, the machines bear a more than slight resemblance to James Cameron’s Terminator. The international release saw some subtle changes made to the Snatchers in order to reduce the similarities.

Snatcher stands apart from more traditional PC-based puzzle and adventure games, earning the moniker of visual novel. Perhaps it could even be described as an interactive movie. The basic gameplay flow involves searching the current area for clues and color commentary, using items in your inventory to solve puzzles, chatting with other members of the game’s cast, and moving to other areas. There are also action segments where you’re tasked with shooting enemies by way of a 3x3 grid. It’s not much more than Whack-a-Mole, but the Sega CD version also supported Konami’s Justifier light gun. The PC Engine Super CD version added the third act, while the Sega CD release included additional exploration and action segments in that concluding chapter to add an increased level of interactivity. Those were not the only changes the game saw over the years. In its original form, Snatcher had a violent scene involving the convulsing body of a dead dog, whose intestines can be seen through the gaping wound in its body. This was slightly censored in the Sega CD release — no twitching. Some names changed over time too, including the record store which was originally called Joy Division (it became Plato’s Cavern in 1992). The definition of the J.U.N.K.E.R. acronym was altered in the English language version (the horrendous Judgement Uninfected Naked Kind and Execute Ranger became Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger), and, for some reason, Gillian’s poster of Marilyn Monroe was changed into one of Madonna. There are some scenes of nudity, including a shower scene with Katrina, whose age was changed from 14 in the original Japanese release to a more Western-friendly 18. Likewise, after the death of Jean-Jack, Gillian discovers that he had been eating whale meat (in the original release), which was changed to buffalo for those outside of Japan. Interestingly, the PC Engine version had a couple of features that were exclusive to it, including the ability to pick up Katrina’s underwear and a very entertaining conversation that Gillian has on a sex line, where he also pays reference to the film Wayne’s World. There were also additional changes to the visuals, and the addition of a CG video on both the 1996 Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn releases. Sadly, the former also includes additional censorship.

Regardless, Snatcher was set in a brilliantly bleak near-future venue with a cast of well-realized characters and a fairly complex story divulged through what was at the time extremely well-written dialogue. With the game mostly comprised of static images, you’d think that Kojima would struggle to convey the appropriate emotions needed to create a compelling experience, and you would indeed be correct, if Konami hadn’t put so much effort into the voice acting, hiring professional actors for every role. Between this and the excellent score composed by Seiichi Fukami, Masahiro Ikariko, Mutsuhiko Izumi and M. Shirakawa, the atmosphere of Snatcher, and its ability to captivate audiences, was assured. There is a severe lack of noir thrillers in videogames, which would probably go some way to explaining the ludicrous sums of money one has to part with to pick up a Sega CD version of this game. That, and the unfortunate sales the game tallied after its U.S. release. It shifted only a few thousand copies in total, thereby rendering it one of the rarest games available for the machine. As a result, a copy will likely set you back somewhere between $250 and $300, while import PC Engine, Sega Saturn, and Sony PlayStation copies usually range between $20 and $50 depending on condition. Whichever format that you choose to play it on, though, you’ll find an envelope-pushing adventure game that stands the test of time and will remain fondly remembered as an important stepping stone in the evolution of videogame narratives. As a side note, a spin-off title was released on the MSX2 in 1990. SD Snatcher swapped the gritty art style of the original game for a “super-deformed” variation, with the big-headed characters taking part in standard console RPG gameplay. In 2011 Kojima revisited his classic thriller to create a prequel story, SDATCHER, which was told in the form of a radio-style drama. This was actually written by Goichi “Suda51” Suda and produced by Kojima, with the soundtrack composed by none other than Silent Hill maestro Akira Yamaoka. If this is anything to go by, then Kojima hasn’t quite managed to do everything that he would have liked with this legendary IP. If we’re all lucky, who knows? There may even be another full-fledged Snatcher game in the future. www.readretro.com

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Alexandra Hall

Exact’s 1996 charmer heralded a 3D platforming future that never came to be. The venue: nerd forums. The topic: PlayStation, and how unbearably bad its graphics seem today. “Unplayable,” charges one critic. “Intolerable!” agrees another. The consensus: Unsalvageable. Don’t even bother. Game Info:

Publisher: SCEA Developer: Exact Platforms: PS Release: 08.31.96 Players: Single-player ESRB Rating: E

I’ve always been a gameplay over graphics sort, but it’s not hard to see where such folks come from. PlayStation’s 3D graphics are usually chunky at best; other good words include low-res, grainy, jerky, swimmy… don’t even mention that texture-warping. It’s too bad that such sentiments might stop modern players from discovering some of the most creative games of the ‘90s. PlayStation’s primitive 3D fostered a creative renaissance, particularly in Japan. Its 360,000 polygons a second opened up whole new interactive worlds to explore, often resulting in entire new genres. King’s Field. Armored Core. Carnage Heart. Parappa the Rapper. LSD. Bemani. Ore no Ryouri. Just about anything from Artdink. Our beloved 16-bit seems mundane by comparison. Exact’s Jumping Flash! was another of these early iconoclasts, and it arrived just a little after PlayStation hit

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America (some discovered it thanks to the console’s pack-in demo disc). Jumping Flash! married platforming to first-person action, making for another completely unique, PlayStation-exclusive experience. It worked shockingly well, but today we’re checking out its superior sequel, which, in early 32-bit fashion, came a mere eight months later. Let’s Try That Again Jumping Flash! 2 was typical of early PlayStation sequels: same engine, same gameplay, new levels, and slightly better tuning. But that was all it needed. You play Robbit, a mechanical, space-faring rabbit tasked by Universal City Hall with taking out villainous threats to galactic peace. In this case that means Captain Kabuki, a planet-sized, banana-looking entity who’s terrorizing Little Muu, home planet of both the adorable, tripod-like Muu Muus and Baron Aloha, the German-accented antagonist of the original adventure. Jumping Flash! 2 retains the same novel first-person platforming as before. Robbit can not only leap several stories, but launch again at the peak of that jump, and

RETROSPECTIVE

then yet one more time. This allows him to achieve some serious altitude, and the very vertical level design’s built to accommodate that.

Jumping Flash! 2 because of the outsized charm and good vibes it generates via handcrafted, fun-to-explore worlds, unique visuals, and a one-of-a-kind soundtrack.

First-person jumping’s always been a dicey proposition, plagued by general inaccuracy and a lack of depth cues. But the Jumping Flash! games have a very elegant solution: The camera tilts downward when you double-jump, which lets you see Robbit’s shadow and know exactly where you’re going to land. Problem solved: Suddenly you can leap around 3D environments with the accuracy of a 2D Mario game, if not the same lively, organic physics.

The so-so level designs of the first game are no more, replaced with sprawling, floating worlds rife with interesting details. Every level has a unique theme, including a tropical resort, a snowy Japanese temple, Dr. Aloha’s submarine, and an abstract orbital world composed of neon tubes and everyday household objects. An early highlight is the vacation-themed second level, with whales and giant turtles lazing through the tropical sky (you can ride them, of course) as kiwis hang-glide amid surfboards, beach chairs, and a fragmented golf course. I’ll have what they’re having.

Six new worlds await, most containing two levels and one boss fight. Your goal each level is to locate and pick up the four stranded Muu Muus and ferry them to the exit platform. Various whimsical enemies (case in point: ambulatory hamburgers) make token efforts to stop you, but Robbit’s pea shooter, jumping stomp, and single-use, fireworks-based special weapons more than tip the odds. Enemies just end up adding color; your real challenge is simply navigating the stage without falling into the abyss. That, too, isn’t very difficult. Completing the first loop unlocks slightly more challenging remix levels, “slightly” being the operative word. Like its predecessor, Jumping Flash! 2 is a very easy game. The few times I died I’d find myself annoyed that I had to collect the Muu Muus again, rather than enjoying the process of doing so. To me, that’s the hallmark of a game that could use more refinement in the gameplay department; the very best action games are always fun to tool around in, no matter that you just died 10 times. Playground in the Sky So it’s not super compelling as an action game. No, I like

In contrast to many modern games, little in Jumping Flash 2! feels pre-fab or cloned; you can tell every floating island and bit of quirky scenery was conceived and placed with care. There are lots of little details to observe, cute vignettes set up by the designers to catch your eye and elicit a smile. This is a game to explore and savor, not carelessly rush. The a/v experience impresses, too. Not in a technical sense — PlayStation 3D, remember — but the often-vibrant, always colorful scenery transcends the limitations of low resolution, limited draw distance, and modest framerate, transporting you to an abstract world of skyborne archipelagos that recalls early PlayStation-era creativity at its best. And the soundtrack? Killer. The late Takeo Miratsu also scored the first game, but he outdid himself here. Most of the eclectic, atmospheric tunes beautifully complement their corresponding scenes. In the first two worlds alone you’ll hear elements of Hawaiian, funk, ancient Jap-

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anese, and a riff on PilotWings, and that’s just the beginning. (Completing the second loop regales you with the transcendently goofy “Rap La Muu Muu” over the credits scroll.) Jumping Flash! 2 has a foot in both the catchy, memorable melodies of 16-bit and the more sophisticated, intricate compositions of the PlayStation era. This is “videogame music” at its best. Robbit, Adieu Alas, the series soon leapt into obscurity. Sony absorbed Exact and a few key staffers moved to new internal dev group Sugar & Rockets. In 1999 they released what may be the best PocketStation game (a dubious honor) in Pocket MuuMuu, and a strange sequel in the bite-sized-mission-based Robbit Mon Dieu, which got mixed reviews and never left Japan. (Any fan translators reading?) This leaves the Jumping Flash! games a fascinating evolutionary dead end. Massive, first-person jumps through fantastic scenery could’ve paved the way for a wave of strange new 3D platformers, but the incredible success of Super Mario 64 and its revolutionary, third-person camera soon butt-stomped that possibility into so many lingering sparkles. You can still buy the first two Jumping Flash! games on PSN, though they’ll look rough on LCDs. (To tame the jaggies play on original hardware and a CRT, or in an emulator with CRT shaders.) Playing Jumping Flash! 2 recently, I realized how rad a game like this could be if developed for modern hardware, particularly with virtual reality support (vertigo!). There was nothing else like the Jumping Flash! games in 1996, and there still isn’t today. If you can brave those chunky graphics, you too can enjoy vacationing in a universe far stranger than our own. www.readretro.com

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Peerless Platformers

by Dave Halverson The word “retro” implies old or antiquated, but the titles displayed in the pages that follow are anything but. A game is a game. They’re only new until they’re old, which in the world of videogames isn’t very long. What defines a great game is part story, part graphics, part gameplay, and part music. What makes a game timeless, however, is a far more subjective thing. A given FPS like Call of Duty might deliver all of those things but flatline with people like myself with more classical tastes; just as Dynamite Headdy wouldn’t gel with most CoD fans. Whether you’re looking to engage in realistic war, or, like me, disappear into a fantastical universe not of this world, it’s that special something that speaks to you — like the people that created it share your exact DNA. Actually, scratch that. That’s me being diplomatic. Personally I don’t think any game that depicts realistic war, or just about any FPS for that matter, no matter how realistic, can ever be considered timeless, because no matter how real they appear,

you’re more or less doing the same old thing: simulating war. 20 years from now today’s latest Call of Duty will look and play like doody, because military first-person shooters are defined by technology. Dynamite Headdy, on the other hand, will remain a masterpiece forever more because of its art and originality. Take Doom II for instance. It stood at the pinnacle of the genre in 1996 but stacked up against the top FPSes of the day it’s naval lint. [We still love Doom, Dave, but point taken. –Ed.] Take a look at any one of the burning hot platformers released that same year however, such as Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and Earthworm Jim, and it’s a different story. A great first-person shooter is fleeting, but a great platformer is forever, be it in two dimensions or three. In 2014 playing Doom II is akin to a spontaneous root canal, while Dynamite Headdy is still more fun than front-row center at a Mini Kiss concert. That’s why they’re worth honoring here. Let’s get started!

#20. Bionic Commando

#19. Rocket: Robot on Wheels

#18. Blaster Master

System: NES Developer: Capcom Publisher: Capcom Release: December 1988 Why It Made the List: Not to be confused with the arcade game of the same name, the console edition of Bionic Commando was a much deeper, well-executed excursion. It was the first game to prominently feature hook-and-grapple gameplay (along with ample gunplay), and it did so, astonishingly, without the inclusion of a jump. Between the masterfully executed swinging mechanics, overhead shooting sequences, and wiretapping to graze enemy intel, this was a NES classic to be reckoned with, and sadly, censored. God forbid we paint a negative picture of the most notorious genocidal maniac in human history…although we did get to see his head explode.

System: Nintendo 64 Developer: Sucker Punch Publisher: Ubisoft Release: October 1999 Why It Made the List: The first game out of Sucker Punch was as ingenious as it was indicative of things to come. Rather than settling on something tried-and-true for their studio debut, they opted instead to try something few developers dared even contemplate, creating a realistic physics-based 3D platformer…on Nintendo 64. The resulting robot on a wheel (had to point that out) not only pulled it off, but became the undisputed champion of inertia-based gameplay for the time. The quirky uni-wheel robot strove to prevent a diabolical raccoon from taking over his creator’s theme park…seems like somebody in Bellevue had a thing for raccoons. Rocket was as untraditional as they came, from form to function, but once you dialed it in, it was smooth, pleasant sailing to the end.

System: NES Developer: Sunsoft Publisher: Sunsoft Release: November 1988 Why It Made the List: Being a NES addict was no bed of roses. Finding a game with great gameplay and a central character you could actually get behind was no easy task among the sea of laminate cards at the local Toys “R” Us. But when you did, oh what a feeling. Known as Chô Wakusei Senki: Metafight in Japan, Blaster Master had a killer story featuring a maniacal space emperor, a planet called Sophia the 3rd, a hero named Kane Gardner, and a tank christened the Metal Attacker. The U.S. version, however, involved a boy named Jason chasing his fleeing pet frog down a hole only to discover a handy tank (and suit, helmet, space gun…) in which to pursue him. Otherwise, Blaster Master was as breakthrough a NES game as you could hope for, featuring top-down laby-

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Peerless Platformers rinths and boss battles outside of the vehicle that drove the 2D platforming gameplay inside the vehicle amidst awesome visuals and an indelible 8-bit overture.

#17. Battletoads

destroying The Neverhood once and for all. Utilizing everything from his perilous butt-bounce and Phart Head to crazy Cousin Willie he quelled many a Clay Keeper, Loud Mouth, Mental Monkey, El Barfo, (etc., etc…) and a boss or five, as he leapt his way through a stop-motion extravaganza filled with perilous platforming, gut-splitting nose-squirting humor, and lots and lots of clay balls. Skullmonkeys was no walk in the park (what game worth its salt ever is?) but once you pressed start The Neverhood had you.

#15. Rocket Knight Adventures

System: NES Developer: Rare Publisher: Tradewest Release: June 1991 Why It Made the List: Battletoads was a technical marvel. Not only did it feature parallax scrolling reserved to 16bit machines, it possessed a level of detail and color that should have burst the NES into flame and a Dark Queen that still haunts me to this day. It was also brutally hard to the point of uncontrollable spontaneous controller flingage. But somehow that left me wanting more, which inevitably came by way of Battletoads in Battlemaniacs on the Super NES, another effects-drenched milestone (once again hard, although not nearly to the extent of the original) that forever furthered my fandom. If you’ve yet to partake in the adventures of Zitz, Rash, and Pimple, my advice would be to skip the NES version in favor of the slightly easier and prettier Genesis port, or better yet, seek out the arcade-only Super Battletoads. It’s not a platformer (although it retains a few platforming elements) but what it lacks in diversity it makes up for in buckets of blood and brutality.

#16. Skullmonkeys

character models but it was among the first to do so amid fully 3D backgrounds and bosses. The real story, however, was “Pepper” himself. Initially horrified at the thought of a Sega launch without Sonic, after a few minutes with Sir Tongara de Pepperouchau III I was just as if not more hooked on him as I was on the blue blur. Sega’s elegant new universe filled with classic toys worked for me. The story wasn’t all that original, essentially mirroring Mario’s, but the presentation (which, oddly enough, predated Toy Story by mere months) and character design were surprisingly original for a Sega-born franchise, and the gameplay wonderfully varied. Using a key as a means for both attacking and progression amidst the game’s multiple planes, it was like a Virtual Boy game with color. Sadly we haven’t heard from Pepper and company since Clockwork Knight 2, but only time will tell.

#13. Virtual Boy Wario Land

System: Genesis Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Release: August 1993 Why It Made the List: Just when I thought the critter kingdom was tapped, Konami showed up with an armored opossum ready to do battle against…pigs?! How awesome is that? Not just any pigs though, these bacon stations fight for the Devotindos Empire and their nefarious leader Devligus Devotindos, and they’re in town to snag the keys to the most powerful ship in the galaxy, the Pig Star. In any case, RKA is all about fresh new gameplay by way of a mystical sword and jetpack that introduces strategic rebounding, air drilling, opossum-istic platforming and all kinds of sword play. But accept no imitations; the Genesis-exclusive RKA and its cross-platform sequel, Sparkster, are awesome, but Sparkster Genesis and SNES are two different games. Nobuya Nakazato of Contra III: Alien Wars, Hard Corps, and Shattered Soldier fame designed the Genesis games, while Hideo Ueda of Axelay fame (no slouch but this is Nakazato’s wheelhouse) did the honors on SNES.

#14. Clockwork Knight: Pepperouchau’s Adventure

System: PlayStation Developer: The Neverhood Publisher: DreamWorks Interactive Release: January 1998 Why It Made the List: After his exit from Shiny the co-creator of Earthworm Jim (and friends) formed The Neverhood from whence a peculiar creature named Klaymen would soon emerge. From wire armature and a mountain of clay he would rise and travel to the planet of Idznak to stop his twin brother Klogg from building Evil Engine Number 9 and

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System: Sega Saturn Developer: Sega Publisher: Sega Release: May 1995 Why It Made the List: Clockwork Knight wasn’t the first game to incorporate 2D versions of prerendered 3D

System: Virtual Boy Developer: Nintendo R&D1 Publisher: Nintendo Release: November 1995 Why It Made the List: In 1995, sticking your face into a virtual reality machine was like stepping into the future. A very red future, but the future nonetheless. I dug the Virtual Boy’s illuminated red-on-black graphics. It designated the games as unmistakably Virtual Boy and helped pronounce the spatial divide between planes. And then there was Wario; the ying to Mario’s yang. I fell in love with the podgy little miscreant the moment I laid eyes on him. The world needed another straight-laced side-scrolling Mario clone like it needed another season of The Tick (which it reluctantly received), and Wario was just the ticket. Not only was the gameplay bursting with Nintendo coin-grabbing goodness, the 3D was unbelievably deep and effective. Jumping to and fro between the game’s horizontal planes, grabbing loot and taking names as the fat little wretch was nothing short of revolutionary to me. I guess the rest of the world disagreed, though, as the Virtual Boy’s fate was sealed early on when sales failed to meet Nintendo’s expectations. But, hey, we’ll always have Wario.

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Peerless Platformers

#12. Ranger X

Gruntilda (aka Grunty)

Appearances: Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, and Nuts & Bolts Likes: Picking her nose, bad parodies, rhyming Dislikes: Bear and Bird, and anyone more beautiful than herself, which is pretty much everybody Strengths: Broom riding, fireball pitching Weakness: Large boulders

Appearances: Ratchet and Clank, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Likes: Courtney Gears, robots Dislikes: Organic life form “squishies,” Captain Qwark Strengths: Hatching galactic schemes, worked well with others (once) Weakness: Ratchet, Clank, Captain Qwark, wedgies

Dr. Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik

Mother Brain

Dracula Vlad Tepes

Dark Queen

Bowser

Queen Bloated, Pulsating, Festering, Sweaty, Pusfilled, Malformed Slugfor-a-Butt

Appearances: Every Sonic game, comic, novel, and TV series, Wreck-It Ralph (cameo), and his very own OVA Likes: Robotics, world domination Dislikes: Small animals, especially hedgehogs Strengths: Engineering impromptu WMDs and minions, taking hostages, long-winded monologues Weakness: Design flaw that leaves everything susceptible to hedgehog attack (including his head)

Appearances: Castlevania franchise (all but three) Likes: Human blood, demon castles Dislikes: Sunlight, the human race, God Strengths: Immortality, super-human strength, shape shifting, interior decorating (right?) Weakness: Belmonts or any descendant thereof

Appearances: Mario franchise Likes: Princess Peach, kart racing, dominating others Dislikes: Mario, Luigi, turtle shells Strengths: Razor-sharp teeth, horns, spiked shell, black magic, fire breathing Weakness: Girth

Neo Cortex

Appearances: Crash franchise Likes: Himself (a lot) Dislikes: Bad hygiene, bandicoots Strengths: Ability to construct 40-foottall mecha-bandicoot Weakness: Flawed domination plots, the Psychetron

Dr. Nefarious

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Appearances: Metroid series, Super Smash Bros. Brawl Likes: Control, impact-resistant glass jars Dislikes: Dying at the hands of Samus Aran, shattered jars Strengths: Giant brain (so she’s smart) Weakness: Giant brain (so she’s lonely)

Appearances: Battletoads series Likes: Evil magic, anthropomorphic pigs and rats, galactic conquest Dislikes: Pimple, Zitz, and Rash Strengths: Tornado spin, sex appeal Weakness: Large metallic objects… attached to amphibians

Appearances: Earthworm Jim (game and TV series) Likes: Universal conquest, ruling Buttville Dislikes: Her twin sister Princess What’sHer-Name Strengths: Ultra high-tech indestructible super space cyber suit (when she possessed it) Weakness: Jim’s Plasma Blaster

The Great Mighty Poo Appearances: Conker: Live & Reloaded Likes: Opera music, sweet corn Dislikes: Flushing Strengths: A huge supply of tish Weakness: Toilet paper, good little squirrels

System: Genesis Developer: Gau Entertainment Publisher: Sega Release: May 1993 Why It Made the List: It’s nearly impossible to beat Ranger X in sheer technical and visual prowess. From the subtle, seamless melding of robot and vehicle to the line-scrolling and original gameplay it remains in a class all by its lonesome. Finesse is a word rarely associated with gameplay, but nothing describes the balance between action and platforming in Ranger X better. Whether you were engaged in high- or low-speed assaults, preloading and popping into the air as the bike, operating the jump jets, or taking on one of the epic bosses, it was utterly beguiling to behold, and the wireframe cinemas remain some of my all-time favorites of the age. Why no sequel? It was a Sega of Japan game. The best we could hope for was decent box art…oh, wait. We never got that, either.

#11. Mischief Makers

System: Nintendo 64 Developer: Treasure Publisher: Enix, Nintendo Release: October 1997 Why It Made the List: After a slew of amazing Sega games that included Dynamite Headdy, Alien Soldier, Guardian Heroes, and the oddly intoxicating Light Crusader, the Nintendo 64 was the last place anyone expected to find Treasure. But there they were, flying the Enix flag. What followed was at once the oddest (and by far coolest) side-scroller ever birthed on the N64; packed with surreal locales and situations amid some of the most manic gameplay yet seen. This was a game for experts well versed in Nintendo’s stellar new pad, but it was worth every ounce of effort to see it through. The action begins simply enough, but wastes no time going from frolicking boost-and-hover to

Peerless Platformers physics-based mania anchored by shake-based grabs and throws and an infectiously joyous soundtrack. Toward the end things snowball into full-scale scaling warfare with an emphasis on grabbing and hurling projectiles as well as the hyper-maniacal mecha lords giving chase in some of the most outrageous boss battles ever created.

#9. Banjo-Kazooie

There has never been and will never be anything like it because originality on this level died long ago. So, if you haven’t had the honor, I highly suggest proceeding to the nearest Nintendo 64 and getting acquainted with Ultra-InterGalactic-Cybot G Marina Liteyears.

#10. Sonic the Hedgehog

System: Genesis Developer: Sonic Team Publisher: Sega Release: June 1991 Why It Made the List: The day Sonic the Hedgehog rocketed past Mario as America’s most well-known and beloved videogame character is one I’ll never forget. Sonic changed everything. He was so much cooler than Mario. The game seemed to eclipse the entire 16-bit world. While the memory of that day will remain forever fond, I’m still not sure why that was. The core gameplay is simplistic and undemanding and the duration painfully short. Was it the speed? The loops? Partially, but what really propelled Sonic was something you can’t define, rooted in Sonic Team’s overall production. From the snappy opening theme and logo to the overall soundtrack and splash screens, Sonic exuded a happy frolicking nature. He’s as endearing as Mickey Mouse but with a glimmer in his eye; the ultimate mascot regardless of age. It’s been a bumpy ride since, with more ups than downs (though there were some pretty big downs) but sadly, it will soon be over. He may have survived his absence on 32-bit but nothing could endure the tragedy that is Sonic Boom. That is not Sonic…And what is that, NFL Knuckles? Somebody please, help!

System: Nintendo 64 Developer: Rare Publisher: Nintendo Release: June 1998 Why It Made the List: On the heels of GoldenEye 007 and Diddy Kong Racing, Rare finally saw fit to release its first original platforming brand since joining forces with Nintendo. After starting life on the SNES as a boy and then a rabbit, Banjo was reborn a boxy bouncing bear (with bird attached). As with most Rare games it was better (much better) late than never, as Banjo (once again) introduced both new technological innovations and ingeniously devised 3D gameplay. By incorporating a cooperative character contained in a backpack, Banjo was able to scoot and fly when brute force didn’t get the job done. This made for some wonderfully diverse gameplay among BK’s surprisingly rich textures and patently strange cast of characters, including Mumbo Jumbo (a shaman with a skull for a head) and Rare’s gift to villain-kind, Gruntilda (aka Grunty), a rhyming, malicious, vain, and altogether foul witch. By the time Nuts & Bolts rolled around eight years later, she was but a detached head made whole again by Lord of Games (L.O.G.) to do battle once more in arguably the most misunderstood underrated platformer of all time, thanks to a clueless marketing “strategy” and Microsoft’s altogether witless handling of the press.

#8. Castlevania Bloodlines

System: Genesis Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Release: March 1994 Why It Made the List: After three celebrated NES editions and the almighty Super Castlevania IV, chances of the series appearing on Genesis seemed pretty slim. Yet there it was, gracing the pages of Mega Drive Beep (Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet so the only means of grazing Jap-

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anese prerelease info was select Japanese bookstores like Kinokuniya). Combing each magazine’s trickle of so-so screens and scarce details my expectations dwindled. Why was Konami playing it so close to the vest? Would this be the series’ undoing? And then it happened. In a time when dry spells were as commonplace as PS3 updates, anytime low expectations were met with great results was a big deal, and Bloodlines was like expecting Velma and Daphne shows up…drunk. Produced by Tomikazu Kirita on the heels of Snatcher and Rocket Knight Adventures and resembling the 8-bit lineage on a handful of steroids, Bloodlines contained the same platform-laden gameplay as its 8-bangin’ counterparts only in a slightly varied package. The tiny hearts that arose cracking whip to sconce were replaced by crystals, and the story was coagulated with bits of Bram (Stoker) pitting best friends John Morris (son to Quincy Morris) and Eric Lecarde against Dracula’s niece, so bent on reincarnating her uncle she orchestrated World War II. I was so dumbfounded by the effects — reflections, multi-jointed god sprites, mock rotation — and overjoyed by the gameplay it could have been about vampires that glisten in the sunlight and go to high school (on purpose!) for all I cared. And that music…it couldn’t possibly be pumping out of the Genesis. But it was. This would be the day the name Michiru Yamane would be forever tattooed on my psyche. (I thought about an actual tattoo, but that would have been weird.) Enemy-wise, the song remained the same; zombies, vampire bats, the gamut of weapon-wielding skeletons, fish men, ravens, minotaurs, harpies, sword knights, medusa heads, pillars of bone, and the rest of the series stalwarts peppered every parcel of neo-renaissance architecture joined by eye-popping mid- and end-level bosses, from the giant howling werewolf Cerberus that graced the initial corridor to mecha knights and golems joined in multi-jointed matrimony. It remains a matter of personal choice which 16-bit Castlevania is better, but I like to think of them as equally matched: the absolute best of two distinctly different worlds.

#7. Dynamite Headdy

System: Genesis Developer: Treasure Publisher: Sega Release: August 1994 Why It Made the List: Throughout the 16-bit era, there existed a handful of developers that stood out like manatees at a poodle parlor, so superior that it seemed as if they had an unfair advantage. While that was actually

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Peerless Platformers

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

(2008 / Xbox 360 / Rare) Rare’s initial plans for a 360-bound Banjo-Kazooie saw many iterations before finally settling on Nuts & Bolts’ building theme. Problem was, they never really made clear what the game would play like until its release, leading to less-than-expected initial sales. It performed well over time but fell well short of Rare’s Nintendo-era numbers. If you’ve yet to partake in its buildy goodness, I can’t recommend it highly enough. If it’s any indication, I’ve logged over 200 hours and created over 350 vehicles over the years and still return whenever the mood or crazy idea strikes. The latest: Banjo-Zilla!

Hermie Hopperhead: Scrap Panic (1995 / PlayStation JPN /

Yukes) Developed by Yukes, Hermie was Sony’s designated mascot for the Japanese PlayStation. A junkyard adventure with shades of Mario and Yoshi, the gameplay and overall designs — while nothing revolutionary — spun the lineage of the day with a plucky verve, but the painfully misplaced soundtrack (ragtime?) grated increasingly with every step. A mustown game for PS1 platforming fans.

Wonderdog (1992 / Sega CD /

Core Design) Before they became the house that Lara built, Core Design was known for much more lighthearted fare such as Chuck Rock, Son of Chuck, and the wonderfully weird Wonderdog, the preeminent (and altogether fetching) side-scroller starring a dog from outer space. This one never gets old.

Legend of Kay (2005 / PS2 /

Neon Studios) Before Kung Fu Panda gnawed his first bamboo shoot, there existed a similar tale about a cat warrior who set out to save the mystical land of Yenching from plundering gorillas. It may have been a hair too difficult for some but it remains a deep, incredibly well-produced PS2 platformer for the initiated.

Pulseman (1994 / Mega Drive /

Game Freak) Born of an AI and its digitized creator (long story, that), the half-human “C-life” boy fights cyber-terrorism from the inside and out in one of the Mega Drive’s most supercharged side-scrollers (also available on Virtual Console).

The Misadventures of Flink

(1994 / Sega CD / Psygnosis) Flink’s gradual cadence can be a real nuisance, but the game excels in every other category and was easily one of the most lavishly bedecked of all Sega CD games.

Billy Hatcher (2003 / GameCube / Sonic Team) It simply had to be done. Somebody had to build a 3D epic around chickens. And who better than the purveyors of Sonic? Chosen to save the chickens of Morning Land, Billy dons the Legendary Chicken Suit to rescue the six Chicken Elders from the clutches of Dark Raven…need I say more?

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Super Magnetic Neo (2000 /

Dreamcast / Genki) Though he looks like a cross between a Smurf and a cereal box, Super Magnetic Neo was the one and only multi-perspective platforming epic on the Dreamcast and, though difficult at times, stands as one of the most original platformers out there to this very day thanks to some truly magnetic gameplay.

McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure (1993 / Genesis /

Treasure) In the battle of the fast-food games there can only be one. Oddly, the second-best fast-foodbased game (Global Gladiators) also bears the Golden Arches, and both are Mega Drive/Genesis-only. What does it all mean? Absolutely nothing. This one was Treasure’s first so whether Ronald gives you night terrors or not you’ve got to check it out.

Mamono Hunter Yohko: Makai Kara no Tenkosei (1991

/ Mega Drive / NCS) Based on the demon-slaying anime Devil Hunter Yoko, Makai Kara no Tenkosei was among the first platformers for Mega Drive, and remains a uniquely captivating excursion using Yoko’s sword and regenerative qualities to fend off demonkind.

the case in some circumstances, it definitely was not so at Treasure, a small Japanese studio started by ex-Konami elite bent on creating new innovative games while avoiding the stifling nature of sequels. After their U.S. debut, Gunstar Heroes, a frenzied run-n-gun packed with eye-popping effects that seemed to transform the Genesis into a much more powerful system, it was anyone’s guess what they’d do next. Enter Dynamite Headdy, a quirky switch-headed puppet that stood as a testament to what Treasure was all about. It couldn’t have been more of a departure, but it was every bit as brilliant if not more so. This was also where Treasure began to show their proclivity for the playfully surreal, and exploring bold new previously unimaginable concepts. A discarded puppet with a detachable head doing battle against an evil puppet king while being pursued by a rival puppet driven by jealousy… on Genesis? Headdy employs a myriad of headstrong powers, each with innate abilities required to overcome a particular scene in each act, each a wild ride in its own right driven by spectacular level design, jaw-dropping special effects, and one of those soundtracks (vocal exclamations included) you’re able to conjure anytime, anywhere for the rest of your days. It was a platformer like no other and remains one of the very best 16-bit games ever made.

#6. Donkey Kong Country

TryRush Deppy (1996 / Saturn /

System Supply N-Tech) The one and only platformer starring a taxi. SS N-Tech created an entire world populated by cars…hmmm. The wonderfully depicted and surprisingly sticky gameplay is one of the Saturn’s best-kept secrets.

Super Tempo (1998 / Saturn / Red Company) After the failed 32X, Red Company’s second stab at music-infused platforming featuring a hybrid boy/grasshopper finally hit the mark, but fell mainly on deaf ears, remaining exclusive to Japan. Beautifully hand drawn and animated, Super Tempo’s a weird one, so of course highly recommended. Keio Flying Squadron 2: Keio Yuugekitai Katsugekihen

(1996, Saturn, Victor Entertainment) The second game in the Keio Flying Squadron series (and by far the best) featured Japan’s favorite dragon rider in a side-scrolling platformer dispensing of enemies via umbrella, mallet, and bow, though she does climb aboard her pet dragon for a pair of inspired shooting stages.

Blasto (1998 / PlayStation / Sony Interactive) Sony Interactive’s ambitious platforming-shooting-space farce starring the late Phil Hartman wasn’t perfect but what it lacked in polish it more than made up for in originality and attitude. Phil Hartman’s enthusiastic bellow echoed through the halls of Uranus as Captain Blasto rescued every last Space Babe and put down the diabolical space tyrant Bosc forever.

System: SNES Developer: Rare Publisher: Nintendo Release: November 1994 Why It Made the List: In DKC, Rare took Nintendo’s preeminent primate and spun it into a budding franchise by way of a ground-shattering 2D revival that only got better with age. It was one thing to look as good as it did — the pre-rendered SGI graphics glistened with innovation — but to play as intuitively and invigorate the brand so wholeheartedly was a testament to Rare’s dominance and overall commitment to excellence. Every aspect of the game shone with platforming goodness, from rhythmically head-boinking the lumbering Kremling hordes to the ingenious and demanding pattern-based levels — which now included a cavalcade of controllable creatures to help reap as you sowed. And of course, like every Nintendo first-party opus before it, DKC featured a pitch-perfect soundtrack to match every moment. Leave it to Rare to make a couple of apes swimming through shark-infested waters a transcendent experience. Pure Nintendo magic, by way of the once-mighty Rare.

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Peerless Platformers

#5. Super Metroid

Western-bred platformer to sell a million copies in Japan — a huge deal at the time. Action figures and plush toys followed and we almost lived happily ever after... It’s downright criminal that Activision cancelled the open-world I Am Crash (which promised to be sooo good it was scary) before they laid him to rest, which begs the question: Why buy the brand only to kill it, thereby crushing the dreams of millions of loyal fans? Can we at least get a Crash Skylander…something!

#3. Rayman 2: The Great Escape

System: SNES Developer: Nintendo R&D1 Publisher: Nintendo Release: April 1994 Why It Made the List: It was a picture of sci-fi perfection on both the NES and SNES, and after 12 games, remains as beloved and anticipated as any game of its kind. This fusion of shooting, morph-ball, and platforming gameplay coupled with a distinctly isolated air and nonlinear exploration remains as extraordinary as it is intoxicating. After my first encounter with Mother Brain on NES I was so taken aback by the female (Samus!) reveal at game’s end I took a picture of the screen and have remained a loyal vassal of Samus ever since. I love every game in the series, FPSes and all, but Super Metroid reigns supreme, followed by Other M (sans the story bits), and the mesmerizing original.

#4. Crash Bandicoot

System: Dreamcast Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier Publisher: Ubisoft Release: October 1999 Why It Made the List: The Atari Jaguar’s awkward tenure among the console elite yielded but a single praiseworthy platformer, one which seemed utterly out of place amid the console’s other anemic offerings. Beyond the tried-and-true death-by-head-bashing technique made popular by Mario, Michel Ancel and company employed a slew of endemic maneuvers such as telescopic punching, ledge grabbing, ring grappling, and helicopter hair that helped define a new hero’s debut. But there was something else, something very special lurking behind those succulent visuals. Akin to Nintendo’s penchant for creating flawless franchises, Rayman boasted a cast of characters and overall mystique that lent it a look and feel all its own.

System: PlayStation Developer: Naughty Dog Publisher: Sony/Universal Interactive Release: August 1996 Why It Made the List: After a dismal start, 3D platforming finally began to take shape in 1995 with Bug! and Jumping Flash!, but it wasn’t until a certain marsupial spun onto the scene that it finally came into its own. Sporting a state of visual euphoria beyond what anyone thought possible, Crash Bandicoot offered a pure instinctive brand of platforming that showed for the first time that truly great platforming was a reality on Sony’s first-generation 3D console. Levels like The Road to Nowhere painted permanent smiles on many a platforming fan’s face (and grimaces on everyone else’s) but the team at Naughty Dog incorporated oh-so-much more, introducing a level of horizontal and vertically side-scrolling stages the likes of which we’d never seen, along with Indiana Jones–style chase stages and masterfully crafted real-time in-game cinemas, making Crash altogether new and all kinds of exciting. What really drove Crash, however, was Crash himself and the crazy universe they built around him, teeming with whack-a-do bosses and one seriously disturbed arch nemesis, Dr. Neo Cortex; so diabolically delicious he went on to be voiced by Clancy Brown! As dumb and aloof a marsupial as Crash was, he exuded a level of vulnerability that made him altogether loveable and, of course, he controlled like a dream. Crash also became the first

The ensuing 3D sequel Rayman 2: The Great Escape catapulted Ubisoft into the mainstream and made Rayman and his creator household names. What Rayman did for 2D, Rayman 2 blew out of the water for 3D, innovating at every turn, from the opening cinematic throughout the entire game. Through the Glade of Dreams and its inhabitants, Globox, Ly the Fairy, the Teensies, and Polokus a new level of storytelling was born with playfully mystic origins and an air of sophistication that bordered on the surreal, with Rayman as savior. Tasked with healing the Heart of the World after a band of robot pirates from outer space render it all but deceased, Rayman must collect 1000 pieces of the world’s core, known as Lums, and reunite the four magical masks that awaken Polokus, creator of all that is and will be; the world’s last hope. This involved busting Lums and Teensies out of their cages — once you found them — using Rayman’s fists and ample strafe to fire off orbs and swing across chasms, riding plums and rockets, flying, climbing, and of course, lots and lots of platforming. For his latest trick Mr. Ancel delivered us to the promised land via quite possibly the finest platformer ever made, Rayman Origins, but it all began with The Great Escape.

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Peerless Platformers

#2. Super Mario 64

#1. Earthworm Jim

System: Nintendo 64 Developer: Nintendo Publisher: Nintendo Release: September 1996 Why It Made the List: The 16-bit console wars were a long, hard-fought battle. There were days I thought they would never end; casualties piled high atop mountains of blood-soaked control pads. I was in the minority among my friends and the status quo touting the Genesis/Mega Drive as the mightiest console in the land. Well aware of its inferior color palette and (so they say) sound — I’ll still take the Bloodlines, Gunstar Heroes, Bare Knuckle, Earthworm Jim, Landstalker, and Dynamite Headdy soundtracks over anything the SNES has to offer — Genesis games just looked, sounded, and felt better to me.

System: Genesis Developer: Shiny Entertainment Publisher: Playmates Interactive Release: August 1994 Why It Made the List: It’s easy to delineate whether a game (or any form of entertainment for that matter) is good or bad. Beyond that however it is entirely subjective, and in my eyes when it comes to first- thru fifth-generation platformers it just doesn’t get any better than Earthworm Jim.

And I hated Mario. My love of NES games was forged on Ninja Gaiden, The Legend of Zelda, Bayou Billy, Metal Gear, Faxanadu, Wizards & Warriors, Mega Man, Castlevania, Blaster Master, and Battletoads. Why would I want to play any game starring a fat plumber? What was next? Gary Gardener? Carlos the Cable Guy? It just had absolutely no effect on me. It wasn’t until I finally got around to playing Super Mario World that I realized the magic of Mario (and moreover Yoshi) but it wasn’t like I was ready to denounce my love of all things Sega. Fast forward to 1996 and there’s no sign of Sonic on the fledgling Saturn, but Sony has just entered the fray with Crash. How can Mario possibly stack up on the cartridge-based Nintendo 64? Never underestimate Nintendo. If ever a 3D game could be classified as miraculous this was it. Super Mario 64 didn’t join the fray, it reinvented it, shaping an entire generation of 3D platforming epics to come. It hit me playing Jolly Roger Bay. Something about the music and serenity of that level washed away my notion of Mario as a plumber, and more importantly, laid to rest the residual Super Mario Bros. movie side effects I was suffering. All those night terrors and uncontrolled bouts of lament, gone for good! Literally everything was new, from the tree-filled hub to the many splendid Mario linchpins meticulously reimagined in 3D, not to mention Koji Kondo’s inspired reimagining of the franchise’s many melodies. In Super Mario 64 Nintendo also set an important precedent, proving superior technology doesn’t guarantee superior games, a point they drove home with the Wii. Following Super Mario 64, games like Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy, and the series’ various 2D endeavors (2D was dead eh?) have preserved my admiration for Mario, although my partiality has shifted to his plumper purple opponent, Wario. As amazing a cornerstone as Mario has been, I’m personally powerless to the allure of games like Virtual Boy Wario Land, Treasure’s Wario World, and Wario Land: Shake It!. Show me over 2000 frames of hand-drawn animation (on a single character) with opening and closing cutscenes from Production I.G. and I’ll show you life-long devotion. Either way, in Nintendo I will always trust.

Already a friend and advocate of David Perry on the heels of Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators, Cool Spot, and Aladdin, I made sure to stick my head in Shiny’s door before the paint was dry and after meeting the likes of Doug TenNapel, Mike Dietz, Nick Bruty, Nick Jones, and Tom Tanaka I knew that everything they touched would turn to gold. I was lucky enough to be a fly on the wall sporadically throughout Earthworm Jim’s development, and was given the honor of being the first non-employee to play the game (in front of the entire team, no less) the day it was completed. In a time when developers could pick and choose when, how, and with whom to roll out their games, it was a huge honor. Does that make me biased? No way. I’ve been everywhere and met everyone since. For me, it’s always been about the game first, which is why I was sitting there in the first place. I knew that Jim was destined for greatness the moment I laid eyes on him (he’s a friggin’ worm in a space suit for sh*t’s sake) along with the freaks that wanted to pull off his head and stick it on a hook: Psy-crow, Bob and No. 4, Evil the Cat, Professor Monkey-For-A-Head, Major Mucus, Peter Puppy (but only sometimes), Doc Duodenum, and The Evil Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed Slug-for-a-Butt. You could feel the magic at Shiny. As a unit, they possessed a level of ingenuity that transcended the constraints of the time, which they married to liquid animation, ultra-responsive gameplay, and a soundtrack that drove it all home. That’s what happens when a brilliant programmer surrounds himself with brilliant storytellers, artists, programmers, level designers, and musicians, then sticks them in a dream studio on the sun-drenched shores of Laguna Beach, CA. This was as happy a studio environment as I’d ever seen; the inmates running the asylum like a well-oiled machine all spilled into a single game called Earthworm Jim. It wasn’t about complexity or redefining any gameplay aspect in particular (save for maybe animation). It was about making the best game possible at the time. Everything EWJ does, it does to perfection. Firing Jim’s gun or grabbing his head to whip that crow for the first time just feels really, really good. The same goes for jumping, clambering up a ledge, swinging with Jim’s head, tube and pod racing, or bungee jumping tethered to a band of snot. And besides, where else are you going to find a cat from Hell (okay, Heck) that sprinkles salt on deshelled snails for kicks, or a professor with a monkey grafted onto his forehead? The only reason we’re not rushing to the multiplex for Earthworm Jim 4: Revenge of the Nut Log and playing the current-generation game in the franchise… well, that’s a tale for another time, but rest assured, the cow will fly again.

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Peerless Platformers

Psychonauts (Xbox) Developer: Double Fine Publisher: Majesco Release: April 2005 Prior to Psychonauts, I knew of Tim Schafer, but my disdain for any game tethered to a PC at the time, coupled with the fact that he created mainly point-and-click adventures, kept me from partaking in his many storied wares. So you can imagine how elated I was when news of Psychonauts hit. Even though he’d had nothing to do with platformers in the past, I knew that somehow Double Fine would find a way, and did they ever. Psychonauts is so incredibly ingenious and original that it knows no equal, and likely never will. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3) Developer: Insomniac Games Publisher: SCEA Release: October 2007 Like Nintendo, Sony knows that the way to gamers’ hearts is through first-party anthropomorphic beasties. There’s just something about them one in three gamers (or thereabouts) simply can’t resist. That’s why great brands like Ratchet & Clank, delivering the goods for 12 years and counting, are so invaluable to our good health. I love every game in the series, but Tools of Destruction never ceases to amaze. Then again, neither does All 4 One, A Crack in Time, Into the Nexus… Rayman Origins (Xbox 360) Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier Publisher: Ubisoft Release: November 2011 Just…perfect.

Maximo: Ghosts to Glory (PS2) Developer: Capcom Digital Studios Publisher: Capcom Release: February 2002 Who said an in-house team at Capcom USA couldn’t make a triple-A platforming epic? David Siller and co. proved otherwise with a little help from Susumu Matsushita and Tommy T. Alice: Madness Returns (Xbox 360) Developer: Spicy Horse Publisher: EA Release: June 2011 I can’t say enough about American McGee’s latest and by far greatest brush with Alice. A gothic masterpiece is born. Epic Mickey (Wii) Developer: Junction Point Studios Publisher: Disney Interactive Release: November 2010 Still the best Mickey ever in my opinion, though a remake on Xbox One and PS4 would be nice. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (PS2) Developer: Naughty Dog Publisher: SCEA Release: December 2001 The first open-world, loading-free platformer, The Precursor Legacy stands as one of the most significant games of the latter generations, and one of the greatest trilogies of all time.

COVER STORY

Jet Set Radio Future (Xbox) Developer: Smilebit Publisher: Sega Release: February 2002 This was Sega at its very best, back when teams like Smilebit and Team Andromeda were pumping out original masterworks year in and year out. Among them JSRF remains one of my favorite games of all time. The fusion of gameplay and music creates a vibe that will never be equaled. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2) Developer: Sucker Punch Publisher: SCEA Release: September 2005 Rocket: Robot on Wheels made me a fan, Sly and co. turned me into a stalker. I think it’s time for Sucker Punch to return to their roots. Infamous is amazing — though a guy in a beanie doesn’t do it for me — but Sly Cooper is what the people want. Wario World (GC) Developer: Treasure Publisher: Nintendo Release: June 2003 Once upon a time, Treasure, arguably the finest independent studio in all of Japan, made a Wario game for Nintendo and all was right in my world. Why aren’t they making a sequel right now? Anybody?

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FEATURES

COINOP STORY

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COINOP STORY

FEATURES

Brandon Justice

Can a one-man army build the ultimate tribute to arcade gaming? RAP SHEET Publisher: KaMiZoTo Developer: KaMiZoTo Platforms: PC Release Date: When It’s Done Players: Single-player

The heydey of the arcade wielded a certain type of magic. Armed with an arsenal of eye-catching artwork, amplified audio, and the latest in ideas and innovation, the soft glow of countless new experiences called out to your quarters with an urgency that no true gamer could resist. Arcades were places where friendships were formed, rivalries were born, and the accomplishments of a mighty few were etched in eternity.

who grew up in these flashing labyrinths of undiscovered electronic bliss. It may be too late to help them “wise fwom their gwaaaves” but, like many of us, independent developer Pascal Cammisotto still remembers, and presently finds himself on a oneman mission to bring us all to the altar of nostalgia — in the form of a cheeky, charming Metroidvania package, no less. “I was and still am a huge gamer. But I particularly remember my admiration for the arcade machines. It was the best of the best at that time. When I played on an arcade cabinet, I had my mind blown. That was truly magical and I realize this feeling automatically comes back when I see a screenshot or hear the soundtrack of one of these games. This is chemical. This is nostalgia. And that’s what I’m seeking to achieve; bringing back these old feelings and triggering a smile.” In this, CoinOp Story is his vessel, one that reflects Cammisotto’s considerable relationship with digital entertainment.

And just like that, they were gone. The widespread adoption of comparably powerful home consoles coupled with the rise of specialty retail resulted in a home gaming explosion that saw gamers abandoning the arcades in droves. The result? Thousands of once-proud currency-crunching cabinets found themselves reduced to new gigs as bowling alley background noise, storage fodder in some dusty warehouse, or, worse yet, the newest tenant in the local junkyard. They were an amazing glimpse into the future of gaming, and their abrupt exit from mainstream popularity remains a moment met with a subtle, knowing sadness from all those

“Videogames have accompanied me all along my life,” he explains. “I started to get interested in them around age seven, and no matter the medium, as long as it was a videogame, I had to try it. At my home, at a friend’s house, in a pub, anywhere! I played lots of games on different computers: Mo5, Commode 64, Amstrad CPC (464 and 6128), Atari 520 ST, Amiga 500, PC. I also discovered a lot of consoles: Game & Watch, ColecoVision, Vectrex, Lynx, Master System, SuperGrafx, Neo Geo, Mega Drive, Game Boy, SNES, GBA, Dreamcast…and of course a mass of arcade machines! That was and still is my number-one hobby. I’m a videogame eater. My love for videogames isn’t innocent. This is an important part of my life, an important part of me.” www.readretro.com

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COINOP STORY

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COINOP STORY

“I particularly remember my admiration for the arcade machines. It was the best of the best at that time. When I played on an arcade cabinet, I had my mind blown.” — Pascal Cammisotto Nowhere is this more evident than in his choice of career, as Cammisotto went into game development to make the most out of his passion. Unfortunately, he found that games are often much more fun to play than they are to make. “I worked for many years as a game designer on licensed games for different publishers (Disney Interactive, Nobilis, Ubisoft, etc.). Constraints were often strong, but the creative latitude was increasingly low. It resulted in lots of frustration and was pretty discouraging at times.” So much so that in 2011, he made the decision to break away with a few close friends to try something different, forming a small indie studio called Okugi and managing the release of two products for Steam and mobile platforms before a new sense of frustration arrived. “The experience was very rewarding,” explains Cammisotto. “There were no more publisher

issues, but we discovered another big problem: the entente between partners. A real pleasure! Irony aside, the company closed because of those disagreements and there I was, jobless and wondering what to do next.” As luck would have it, Cammisotto stumbled upon a 2D game-creation tool called Construct 2 just before the fledgling studio closed, and began to teach himself the basics. After gaining some proficiency, he determined that the solo path might be the best move for his next endeavor, and began brainstorming on the idea that would become CoinOp Story. “I wanted no more absurd conflicts, no more endless discussions about ‘I prefer the blue one; I prefer the red one…’, No more concessions to please everyone and realize we lost the thread. So I got in the challenge of creating everything by myself and, at the same time, leveling up all my skills. I started working on a simple platform

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The Trouble with

TRADEMARKS

When development first began on CoinOp Story, Cammisotto featured the real names of each arcade cabinet in the game when each new board was revealed. However, he came to find out that offering these up as parody might be a bit more trouble than it’s worth. “The trademark/copyright issues are actually tricky,” he says. “Even if the game is free, the rights holders can sue me. It seems trademarks (registered names) are the most problematic.” As such, he opted for a slightly different approach, one that ended up being a better fit. “In order to stay Zen, I ended up modifying all the JAMMA game titles. And finally, with hindsight, I think it was a good idea because players laugh reading those fake titles! And finding the real title of each JAMMA game card is a game in the game. It hasn’t always been easy to find a fun working title. Some are less inspired than others, but overall, I’m pretty satisfied.”

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FEATURES

COINOP STORY

Solo Stuggles

As you might imagine, being a one-man dev team isn’t all mushrooms and rocket launchers. Luckily, Cammisotto seems to know what he’s getting into. “Making a game alone is not always easy. I’m aware of my limits so I must be smart in my choices,” he explains. “My first concern is about the level design of the game. I’m not really good at it. I wanted to do a very small and simple game and now I’m ending up with a Metroidvania bigger than expected! My other concern is technical. I hope the game won’t crash too much and have a decent framerate. I realize I’m really bad at optimizing.” If his desire to stick it out matches his creativity and love for gaming, we’re pretty sure he’ll figure it out. That, or find that ever-elusive John Carmack JAMMA board to upgrade his coding skills.

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I wanted no more absurd conflicts, no more endless discussions about ‘I prefer the blue one; I prefer the red one…’, No more concessions to please everyone. So I got in the challenge of creating everything by myself.” — Pascal Cammisotto game to try that creation software. And after adding different gameplay bricks, the idea of the arcade-cabinet hero finally came (I have a real arcade cabinet right behind my computer screen, so…).” CoinOp Story is retro-themed platformer porn in the classic 16-bit style, but what sets it apart is the idea behind it. Commisotto’s cabinet has gone from a home-office prop to its first starring role, as Story tells the tale of a broken-down JAMMA cabinet named Gen (‘cause he’s generic, get it?) who’s given a second chance at life by a wayward strike of lightning. Unfortunately, he’s been stripped of his board and is having a little trouble getting around. But our hero is a special sort of cabinet. When he finds a fellow arcade machine, they offer up their boards to his quest. Each is inspired by a classic game from the glory days of the arcade such as R-Type, Bubble Bobble, Black Tiger, and more, and while some only offer cosmetic changes, cabinets labeled as “dedicated” give Gen special new powers à la Mega Man that allow him access to new areas of the world.

COINOP STORY

For example, Gen begins his quest without any limbs, awkwardly lunging around to the sound of clanging quarters, but runs into an old Donkey Kong cabinet whose board gives him the ability to run and (you guessed it) jump over obstacles. Nab the Outrun board and you can do slick wheelies that allow you to roll under low-hanging barriers. Or maybe you find the Operation Wolf cab, who gives you a pair of twin Uzis that are quite handy when blasting through barricades. You get the idea. As you can see from the screens and artwork that graces these pages, all of this is delivered with an extreme sense of humor and style that shows both Cammisotto’s creativity and appreciation for arcade gaming, not to mention the Metroidvania sub-genre. As he tells it, this blend of gaming iconography is no accident. “My goal is not to make a hard game like a lot of coin-op games. The thrust of CoinOp Story is not in the difficulty but in the discovery. It’s a game

for people who loved the ‘80s and ‘90s videogame El Dorado that chemically marked our mind. But after the launch of the demo of the game (in January 2014), I was surprised that lots of young players enjoyed the game and its world without even knowing all the references. If CoinOp Story can give some of them the desire to discover and try these oldies, I would be very proud!” To even earn the chance to expose this new generation to these age-old greats, he’ll have an adventure of his own to complete, full of long nights, shoestring budgets, and countless trials by fire. But if there’s one thing old-school arcade gaming has taught Cammisotto, it’s that, sometimes, saving the world means blowing everything up. If nothing else, he’s ready to put what he’s learned to good use. “I think [I] got tired of the ‘technology race,’” he says. “Only big studios could compete. More and more licensed games; less and less creativity and risk. I needed to get out of that circle. But when you want to make a game with a smaller team, you must return to basics. What is important is not the number of polygons, or the screen resolution, or the number of different instruments in a tune. What is important is the core gameplay and the immediate fun it gives. I think that is why we look back on the old games with such fondness.”

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The REST OF THE

STORY?

Cammisotto’s love for console gaming also shines through CoinOp Story’s design, so why did he decide to shoot for an arcade-themed game? As he tells it, that’s not entirely out of the question: “To be honest, I would also love to dedicate a game to my [favorite] childhood computers and consoles: Computer Story and Console Story. That would be an awesome trilogy!” Sounds like a plan to us. So what’s stopping him? “I have to finish this one first.” Fair enough, but we look forward to more info on the Story trilogy when the time is right.

RETROACTIVE

CHASM

Childhood nostalgia meets carefully constructed Metroidvania.>>

Brady Fiechter

Publisher: Discord Games Developer: Discord Games Platforms: PS4, PC Release: TBD Players: Single-player ESRB Rating: TBD

A great voice once said, “It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.” They must have been a gamer. A mysterious blank slate is what defines a game at the start screen, drives us to achieve and move forward and build momentum to a satisfying conclusion. If you love Metroid, this all carries a particular weight, a language. And if you love Castlevania, same thing; when that Castlevania is associated with Metroid, you get “Metroidvania.” “The core of the game is really built around three central mechanics: exploring, platforming, and fighting,” says Chasm creator James Petruzzi of his classically inspired project. “Exploration is the key tenet of any Metroidvania, and we’ve attempted to stay true to that first and foremost.” As Chasm continues to the finish line, some intentions have shifted. When asked what has changed since the game’s inception, Petruzzi says, “Quite a bit, actually! The funny thing is, it’s never really been a conscious decision to change the game on a grand scale — it just kind of happens one little decision at a time. What we have now is much more akin to something like Dark Souls or Zelda than Diablo. The floor concept has been scrapped — we now have a sub-area design that can interconnect in all kinds of interesting ways, and is much more conducive to exploration and backtracking. We’ve been pushing consistently for a high-quality classic adventure experience

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that blends hand-crafted content with procedural generation to keep things exciting and fresh.” In the world of Chasm you are Daltyn, a soldier returning from a war with a heavy burden to carry. Along your travels, you pass through a remote town called Karthas, where a group of miners have been trapped deep below the mountainous surface. In this labyrinth of mines a temple has been uncovered, and within it consequences. Perhaps you could think of these mines as dungeons, prisons you don’t want to be locked up in for an eternity. Evil’s lurking. “The original Zelda is probably our single biggest influence,” says Petruzzi. “I think it left a very deep impression on all of us as kids — there was really nothing else like it. I remember getting in trouble when I was in kindergarten, and having my NES taken away from me for a week. I was so ecstatic my save file wasn’t lost when I finally got it back that I ran around the house screaming with joy. It had pretty much everything you could want from a great game: tight controls, awesome items and puzzles, lots of secrets, and a great art style. There’s also a feeling or atmosphere to the early Zelda games that I think many people connect with. It’s a mysterious world filled with challenge, but it has just enough humor and cuteness to balance it out. We’ve definitely taken a lot of influence from Zelda in everything from gameplay to story and atmosphere.”

CHASM

Sensory input is multilayered in games — perhaps more than in any other medium. Chasm’s backdrop of a lost mining community is as rich as it is simple in its pixel art brush strokes. “Visually speaking, we’re shooting for a very diverse-looking game,” explains Petruzzi. “Each of the six areas has its own unique feel: the cold and desolate Mines, the creepy and dangerous Catacombs, the lush and beautiful Gardens, and a few more we’ll be unveiling this summer. From a gameplay perspective, it’s all built on a hierarchy that utilizes the procedural generation, but works with a higher-level hand-crafted experience. For example, your first quest in the Mines will always be to get the mine elevator working, but the rooms you go through to get there, the platforming and combat challenges you’re presented with, and the story elements found, can all differ each playthrough. Our goal is to keep the ‘room to room’ ever different, while maintaining clear objectives and direction for the player.” The style of “pixel art” seems fairly broad. Some retro-inspired games can look dated, not pleasing. There can be a fine line between looking old and looking austere. “I knew from the beginning we’d need a much wider-range color

palette than say a SNES could do,” says Petruzzi. “Between the colors, unlimited parallax layers, and unlimited perpixel particles and effects, we’re still able to create a very vibrant and alive world. It’s all presented in a classic low resolution though, so it tends to all blend seamlessly into something that feels like it could have been on SNES or Genesis. We know the pixel graphics will turn off certain people, but it’s a design decision we all feel very strongly about.” I suggest that in the right hands, there can be a certain freedom to working within a pixel-art palette. “Yeah, for sure,” agrees Petruzzi. “We’re definitely all big proponents of the ‘less is more’ philosophy. Creativity always seems to flourish when you place restrictions on your work. We tend to find it helps a lot with generating more creative ways to solve problems or approach situations. We’re really happy though with how the visual design of the game turned out. It can certainly be limiting sometimes with such a low native resolution (384x216), but it gives it a particular look that is otherwise very hard to convincingly replicate. I don’t think pixel art saves any time versus more traditional art though, as

traditionally thought. Some things can be a huge pain, like if you want to try and layer equipment on the player. In 3D, this is very easy, but in 2D requires going through literally hundreds or thousands of frames of animation and customizing as needed.” When your game is relying on a very specific language for that sensory input, I’m of the growing opinion that excessive exposition is continuing to cloud the purity of an interactive experience. Metroid and Castlevania and Zelda and the like thrive on visual expression. There’s still a lot of learning to be done, and the finish line of design will be different for individual gamemakers. Petruzzi is imagining Chasm’s world as a mystery letter more than a library of text. “We’ve definitely worked hard on the story and lore for the world, but we’re well aware it can’t get in the way of the gameplay,” he says. “Instead, you’ll discover most of it by exploring and finding things like notes, journals, ruins, and artifacts you can examine to fill in the blanks. We also work hard to make sure characters don’t ramble on forever. I’ve self-imposed a limit of five dialogue boxes in a row before saying ‘OK, they’re rambling story points, let’s figure out

RETROACTIVE

a better way to tell this.’ Imposing limitations like that forces you to be more creative in how to actively engage the player versus overloading them with text for plot points.” The expanding indie space is so healthy for gaming right now, and one reason, among many, is an uncompromising vision. Chasm is for a very specific audience. “We know Chasm is going to have to be deep, challenging, and rewarding to please the hardcore crowd. It’s definitely not made for ‘casual’ gamers,” insists Petruzzi. “We know it wouldn’t exist without our hardcore Kickstarter fanbase, so we’ve always said we’re making the game we want to play, as oldschool gamers who also love modern games. But, I am a huge proponent of proper gameplay design and teaching players without them realizing it. My hope is that anyone can pick up and easily learn to play the game, but will have to struggle to truly master it. Chasm is really our love letter to all the amazing games we grew up with, but evolved for modern audiences and old-school gamers looking for something familiar yet fresh.”

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PREVIEWS

Behold, Costa Rican–style masocore platforming is now a thing. >> by Alexandra Hall Publisher: Reverb Developer: Green Lava Studios Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Mac Release: Q3.2014 Players: Single-player ESRB Rating: TBD

I can’t be totally sure, but Fenix Rage may well be the first Costa Rican videogame I’ve played. It’s the upcoming project of one Green Lava Studios, a three-person outfit that hails from the Central American tourist paradise. Green Lava’s staffers don’t have many colleagues. “Game development in Costa Rica is a very small industry. So we get to explore this vast and untapped market filled with possibilities,” says Eduardo Ramírez, Green Lava CEO and lead designer on Fenix Rage. “But on the other hand…it is a vast and untapped market filled with possibilities, so selling these services has been very hard.” Apparently at least one local company asked the studio to develop a complex game for all of $500. Yeah, not happening. As Ramírez explains, it’s hard to get financial support to develop games in Costa Rica, and various international complexities make Kickstarter a nonstarter. “For these reasons,” he says, “we had to do it the good old-fashioned way: Make games for other companies and save all the income we can in order to fund our own projects. We are making Fenix Rage out of our savings.” A previous game of theirs, Bonfire Trail, won third place in Square Enix’s Latin America Game Contest 2012, granting a very welcome cash prize.

Now, the fruit of their labors is almost ready to harvest. Fenix Rage is as direct a Super Meat Boy homage as you’ll ever see, starring a small spiny creature named Fenix who practices enemy avoidance through over 200 obstacle-laden levels. The pace is lightning fast, and no sooner have you died than you’ve respawned to try again. The demo world I played, some 20 levels long, only began to hint at what will undoubtedly become a hair-pullingly difficult platforming ordeal of Team Meatian proportions. www.readretro.com

Fenix is a pretty simple guy, but beyond the old run and jump he can dash in any direction, including upward. This means he can effectively fly, if you keep tapping that dash button, but good luck trying to keep him alive as you tap-tap-tap around screenfuls of the game’s rapidly oscillating cubic foes, many of whom move in chaotic patterns that would seem simple if they weren’t all whizzing around each other in small bits of real estate. It’s usually easy to see where you have to go; actually executing on that is the hard part. Beyond all the dashing, the magic of friction imbues Fenix with flames when he slides down a wall, briefly letting him smash through frozen blocks to open new paths. After playing with fire a bit I asked Ramírez if any other gameplay additions awaited later on. The answer was no. “It’s kind of an old-school design decision: right from the start of the game, the player has all the powers they need to beat the game, and it’s up to their skill and puzzle-solving ability to get through each level. The reason for this is that we want the player to feel powerful from level one. That said, the core gameplay mechanics present are used in different new ways in each of the incredibly varied levels. We also have various game modes that build even more upon the existing mechanics.” From what I’ve played, Fenix Rage seems simple yet polished. The controls are tight, the obstacles cunning, and the unlimited dashing gives Green Lava a little room to grow it beyond their beloved inspiration. Fenix Rage’s biggest challenge may well be standing out amid an increasingly crowded field of indie games. PC games juggernaut Steam recently threw open the indie floodgates, unleashing a torrent of new games onto the popular digital storefront to the point that it seems impossible to keep track of them all. Good thing, then, that Green Lava just announced PS4 and Xbox One versions. And let’s not forget: Everyone likes the feel-good story of a victorious underdog, so maybe this hard-working trio from far, far south of the border has a fair shot at their piece of the pie, too.

PREVIEWS

“If we were to name the main themes of our game we would probably go for dedication and sacrifice.”

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Out of this world? Yes, precisely. >> by Brady Fiechter Publisher: PlayWay Developer: PlayWay Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux Release: 09.2014 Players: Single-player ESRB Rating: TBD

Maybe Flashback isn’t one of the “best games ever made,” but it’s one of the very few games I tend to go back to every now and again, year after year, and one of the reasons I’m glad my faithful Sega CDX is still soldiering on. No other games these days give me a Flashback fix, nor can games in past generations of consoles deliver a similar essence. Blaise Sanecki, the creator of The Way, seems to agree. “Games like that don’t even exist. But there were some platformers with similar mechanics,” he says. “If the developers wanted them to be like Flashback or Another World, then the biggest mistake they made was not analyzing the games they were inspired by. They probably blindly copy-pasted ideas instead of trying to understand what people loved in the originals. We do analyze and get pure inspiration from the classic precursors. We try to capture the spirit of those games instead of simply reconstructing the exact mechanics. In each level we ask ourselves ‘does it feel similar?’ and the answer can be ‘yes,’ even when we try something different or add something new.” Like Flashback, Another World, and Heart of Darkness, Sanecki’s adventure game draws from the simple poetics of a backdrop that expresses mystery and mood. The Way’s protagonist is part of a team who explores space, and he is searching for something he hopes will bring some sort of resolution to the loss of a woman he loved to the ends of the earth. During his journey, he discovers clues that the end of life may not be what we imagine.

“Our artist kept drawing some simple mocked-up scenes to inspire us all until he hit the jackpot,” says Sanecki of the game’s thematic beginning. “A silver-haired, older, bearded man standing on a cliff, looking at a ruined city in the distance. You can even see this scene at the end of our trailer. We knew that this scene would end up in our game so we began to build story around it. We asked ourselves, ‘who is this man?,’ ‘why is he here?,’ ‘how long has he been here?,’ ‘why was he here for so long?’ And slowly, the final concept was born.” Adventure games like The Way are often framed with a lone hero in a desolate world. But here you will be exploring at times with a creature by your side. “We have decided that adding a companion provides us with interesting gameplay possibilities,” explains Sanecki. “Simply adding another human being or an alien with high communicative skills could destroy the feeling of alienation and loneliness in this vast dangerous world. That’s one of the most important aspects of the game, so we simply couldn’t do that. That’s why we have decided for this big and dangerous alien creature domesticated by our hero. It gives us a lot of possibilities but acts more as a loyal dog instead of a friend we could talk with when feeling lost and lonely.” Loneliness can be a loaded emotion. Sanecki speaks of emotion as a centerpiece to The Way. “It was obvious for us that we had to put an emphasis on emotions because it fits naturally with the atmosphere we’re aiming for,” he says. “The mere fact of being alone on an alien planet is reflecting the hero’s feelings: He lost his beloved one and now he’s alone with the whole world seeming distant and alien to him. The game has many places of both retrospection and reflection as it spans for nearly the entire life of our hero. If we were to name the main themes of our game we would probably go for dedication and sacrifice.” www.readretro.com

RETROGRADE

REVIEWS

Can you dig it? >> David Giltinan

Publisher: Yacht Club Games Developer: Yacht Club Games Platforms: Wii U, 3DS, PC, Mac, Linux Release: 06.26.14 Players: Single-player ESRB: E

OUR RATING

Summary In many ways, Shovel Knight is the perfect modern-day

As a highly successful Kickstarter campaign that doubles as a heartfelt love letter to old-school platformers like Mega Man and Castlevania, there’s a lot riding on Shovel Knight being nothing short of a fun, brilliantly executed title. Luckily for developer Yacht Club Games, that’s exactly what we got. You play as the eponymous, spade-swinging, horn-helmed hero on a quest to avenge his fallen comrade Shield Knight and take down Malefice— I mean, The Enchantress. In order to reach her, you need to take out the eight members of The Order of No Quarter. Each one of these Mega Man–inspired bosses represents their respective gimmicks very well, such as the dark and brooding Specter Knight or the anchor-slinging Big Daddy–wannabe Treasure Knight. Thanks to some slick dialogue and animation, these characters feel alive and fleshed out.

platformer, staying close to its roots while also digging its own path.

Shovel Knight’s gameplay hews strikingly close to its roots. Mega Man fans will feel right at home with the platforming and level design. Not only that, the music — a fantastic collection of some of the finest modern chiptune tracks — clearly has the Blue Bomber’s best soundtracks in mind. No surprise, as Manami Matsumae, the original Mega Man composer, is on board. Then there’s the overworld map that clearly took lessons from Super Mario Bros. 3, the Ghosts ‘n Goblins–like Lich Yard level, and a pogo attack that would have Scrooge McDuck dialing his lawyer. This is all a real treat for any red-blooded retro gamer. Much like the 8- and 16-bit titles of the past, Shovel Knight relishes being difficult. Whether it be by spiked floors, icy platforms, or the Clockwork Tower’s conveyor belts of doom (in sections of the level that are vertically scrolling, no less), it’s best to prepare yourself to die…a lot.

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Luckily, there are no lives to lose in Shovel Knight, but rather treasure. You see, finding jewels and treasure chests is key in acquiring a variety of upgrades, including meal tickets to increase your overall health, better armor for bonus abilities, and improvements for your patented ShovelBlade. Dying leaves behind winged sacks of coin that will float around where you fell, ripe for the picking as long as you can reach that area again. The more cash you carry, the more you lose, so spend wisely and often. This ends up giving the game that coveted “just one more time” type of addiction, which balances out a lot of frustration one would normally feel in an old-school action-platformer. The enemies are varied in their appearance and attack methods, prompting you to switch up strategies on the fly. One particular enemy, a knight, will use strategic movement and his shield to react to your approach. There’s a strange sense of satisfaction seeing an enemy smart enough to defend against your aerial moves. Boss battles are also, for the most part, supremely satisfying. Some, like Tinker Knight, have a set pattern that ultimately takes a lot of the challenge out of the encounter. The Polar Knight, on the other hand, is a much more intense duel that requires precision and a little bit of luck to survive. These elements combine to ensure that the difficulty continues to escalate as the game soldiers on, which only makes Shovel Knight that much more satisfying to beat. There are few games considered “NES hard” that have the balance of overall fun down to a science. Shovel Knight does, thanks to its awesome characters, useful items, and variety of deviations from its main path. Couple that with a New Game+ mode that ups the challenge further and you have yourself a masterpiece well worth its $15 asking price.

PROS/CONS Great responsive gameplay that harkens back to classic titles while forging its own system Awesome eclectic cast of characters, each with their own charming animations and personalities One of the best chiptune soundtracks you will ever hear

Can be frustrating in certain parts, especially near the end Certain bosses feel a little too easy once you figure out their game plan

REVIEWS

RETROGRADE

Mayhem in premise and design. by

Publisher: I-Mockery Developer: Adult Swim Games Platforms: Flash Release: 02.04.14 Players:

Single-player ESRB: NA

OUR RATING

David Giltinan

To say Bionic Chainsaw Pogo Gorilla is strange would be an understatement. You may think that you know what it’s all about by name alone, playing as a crazed ape with its arms and legs replaced by chainsaws and a pogo stick, respectively. The absurdity only starts there, however, ramping up considerably as you progress through the game’s six levels. Made by the same folks behind the cool NES love letter Abobo’s Big Adventure, Bionic Chainsaw Pogo Gorilla tries to take an original (albeit odd) hero in a classic platforming quest for revenge. The only buttons available are jump, melee, and a ranged attack, which can be very hit or miss. Most of the time your best bet is to stick with holding the melee button down whether there’s combat or not. This, in turn, makes you a whirling dervish of death that can plow through a majority of enemies. It also, unfortunately, makes a chunk of the game boring to play. The traditional platforming parts aren’t much better either. Jumping works for the most part, but too often there will be times when a severe drop in responsiveness will prevent you from closing a gap, resulting in unintentional backpedaling or even a grisly demise. Likely, this is due to the fact that moving left and right has you naturally bouncing around, which I’ve noticed can infrequently screw up the jumping mechanics.

There’s also the level design, which, while offering a fair mix of scenery, feels too bland. Instead of a traditional side-scrolling path, a lot of it is comprised of jumping up on platforms to reach the exit door near the top. Having a few stages implement this style is fine, but not for the whole game. It’s not all bad, though. As promised by I-Mockery, boss battles are huge and each one requires a specific strategy to come out victorious. These are surprisingly tough most of the time as well, so be prepared to restart often. Playing through the game and earning achievements will unlock new costume pieces for your bionic gorilla. This effectively allows you to customize your hero with things like nunchuks for arms, or a donut body. Told ya it only got weirder! Despite an admittedly fun premise and fun boss battles, there are some glaring problems that will keep folks from completely sinking in. Here’s hoping that if there is a sequel, the core gameplay can keep me from going bananas.

It’s more scrumptious than Scrab Cakes. by

Publisher: Just Add Water Developer: Oddworld Inhabitants Platforms: PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, PS Vita, PC, Mac, Linux Release: 07.22.14 Players: Single-player ESRB: T

OUR RATING

Brandon Justice

In many ways, the arrival of the Sony PlayStation marked the beginning of the end for 2D gaming’s stranglehold on the mainstream. Despite a handful of hopeful holdouts such as Konami’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Interplay’s Heart of Darkness, industry executives had largely decided the time for ushering in our inevitable polygonal future had arrived, and the rest is history. But before we dove headlong into a sea of shoddy cameras and rehashed war simulators, an unlikely hero emerged in the form of everyone’s favorite mudokon, Abe. Challenging, charming, and breathtakingly beautiful for its time, Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee’s personal-yet-playful indictment of the worker bee’s struggle against corporate greed was everything that old-school gamers had hoped for in a next-generation platformer. In the end, it wasn’t enough to save 2D gaming from the shadow of its blocky baby brother, but at least it was one helluva sendoff. Fitting, then, that as modern gaming renews its love affair with old-school sensibilities, Oddworld made the call to revisit this timeless classic in the form of Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty!. Much more than a simple rerelease or overthought reboot, NnT! is the definition of love-based labor.

For starters, the game’s presentation makes Abe’s adventure look less like a 20-year-old relic and more like a leader of the recent 2D revival. Audio, player models, texture work, lighting, and cameras have all received significant tweaks, making this one of the most impressive packages on next-gen consoles to date. Even better, the tweaks to control and difficulty have subtly improved this timeless classic in nearly every way. Abe’s movement is noticeably tighter, making the game’s demanding puzzles more technique-driven, and checkpoint adjustments and the addition of a quicksave feature really take the sting out of those moments that make you want to smash a controller. They still exist, mind you, but at least you feel like you have a fighting chance this go ‘round. All told, it leaves New ‘n’ Tasty a delicious example of how it should be done: a reboot that gives OG fans a refreshing new take on one of their favorite titles while simultaneously delivering an experience that stands up with the current generation’s best and brightest. Now, about getting a similar treatment for Abe’s Exoddus…

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RETROGRADE

REVIEWS

a lot of promise that fails to deliver. byTom Hall

Publisher: Nowhere Studios Developer: Nowhere Studios Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux Release: 05.28.14 Players: Single-player ESRB: NA

OUR RATING

Many games begin their life on Kickstarter, and the results have been a mixed bag. Monochroma was funded in August of last year and saw its release in May of 2014. Understandably drawing a lot of Limbo comparisons, Monochroma tries to bring an artistic elegance to the puzzle platformer. In the beginning, you are chasing your little brother through what is essentially a trailer park. This is used as a quick tutorial to give you a feel for the game. You finally catch up to him and you both fall through the roof of a barn. From that point forward you must carry him. I’m assuming he was injured in the fall but that is never explained. In fact, nothing is ever explained. There is not a single word spoken in Monochroma, nor is there any text dialogue or narratives. It seems that this was designed to be part of the art style but all it really does is confuse. Not a lot of games have ever been able to pull off the silent storytelling well, and this is another one. When the earlier LEGO games pulled this off, it was because they had a charm to them and the characters were still able to convey emotion via their quirky personalities. That doesn’t exist here. Now carrying your brother, you realize that you are, in fact, controlling the world’s strongest human. You are wearing this kid like a backpack and making crazy jumps, climbing ropes and chains, making jumping grabs of ladder rungs, and other crazy acrobatics. Someone ate their vegetables. The concept from here on out is simple. You can jump higher if you put your brother down. You can only put him down in a well-lit area. You can also not

progress very far without him. You must figure out a large number of puzzles to keep moving along with him. The puzzles really get you thinking and there are many instances where you will accidentally kill him, yourself, or both of you trying to figure it all out. At first, this is fun and refreshing. It doesn’t take long, however, for it to get tedious and repetitive. Toward the later parts of the game, the precision required of your jumps is unrealistic and frustrating. Needing to jump so precisely wouldn’t be too terrible if not for the controls. They are inconsistent and, at times, downright awkward. Additionally, despite having full controller support, any tutorial text that displays shows the keyboard controls instead of realizing that all of your input has been via controller, and adjusting accordingly. It makes it seem as though controller support was an afterthought and for a game like this, it is needed. The real draw to this game is its presentation. The backgrounds are all dark and shadowy and kind of depressing. It is very beautiful, and you come to really appreciate the times you get to see red, which is the only non-blackand-white color featured. The music is well-placed and really adds to the ambiance. There are also a lot of little touches, like when you are walking on a roof with clay tiles, you hear the tiles clanking. Definitely no complaints in the presentation department. Overall, Monochroma is a game that starts out very intriguing and then quickly falls flat. As much as I wanted to love it, there are just far better uses of your gaming dollars.

Robert Workman

Publisher: DrinkBox Studios Developer: DrinkBox Studios Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, Xbox 360, PC Release: 07.01.14 Players: 1–2 players ESRB: E10

OUR RATING

DrinkBox Studios knows its way around a good platformer. Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack achieved great success on the PS Vita and even more so on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Now, its other recent hit, Guacamelee!, has found its way to new consoles this week, with a Super Turbo Championship Edition releasing for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U. But this isn’t some cheap cash-in on the original title. In fact, in some ways, this is the game DrinkBox was originally intending Guacamelee! to be, a full-on adventure with plenty of abilities, challenging enemies, and bravura style that makes it stand out just as much in this new generation as it did in the previous. It’s an essential platformer for folks who love the genre. As the game begins, Juan doesn’t have many abilities to speak of, but, in pure Metroidvania fashion, he can unlock new ones by exploring and breaking open stone statues. By doing so, he really opens up a powerful arsenal, from a devastating uppercut to a headbutt that could send a goat flying across the room. These really prove useful, especially when it comes to accessing new areas on a map, which can only be opened by destroying blocks that stand in the way.

Fighting isn’t all Juan needs to do. Some levels require some quick thinking in the platforming sense, jumping through multiple dimensions and figuring out how to avoid spikes of death on the floor and walls. Figuring out the solution is part of the fun, and DrinkBox Studios makes it a gracious enough process that you won’t be gnashing your teeth too hard trying to figure it all out. www.readretro.com

The original Guacamelee! provided a fun co-op experience, and it’s further heightened here with the new edition, thanks to a secondary currency system that unlocks new outfits, thus giving you and your mysterious partner more potential for slamming enemies around with style. This alone makes the new version of the game worth it, although the addition of some new levels and enemies, along with balancing of the original game’s general difficulty, add to the overall value. While Guacamelee! hasn’t gone through a major graphic overhaul in its transition to the new platforms, it doesn’t necessarily need one. The 2D art style still works wonderfully, with tight animations, classy décor that does the Lucha theme proud, and outstanding music. There isn’t any voicework to the game, but it isn’t really needed, as you can read most of the comical banter with no problem. It’s easily a game that you can enjoy throughout, even while you’re hunting down its most diabolical secrets. The original Guacamelee! really showed what DrinkBox Studios could do in terms of starting a new franchise with potential, and, even though it’s not a full-on sequel, the Super Turbo Championship Edition comes even more recommended. With better-balanced difficulty, new content to dig into and unlock, and the same classy style, it’s the ultimate director’s cut of one of this generation’s best platformers. Olé!

REVIEWS

RETROGRADE

A sword-spinning superstar.

Publisher: Data East Developer: Irem Platforms: NES Release: 11.27.87 Players:

Single-player ESRB: NA

OUR RATING

David Giltinan

Before Naruto, there was Kid Niki. This spiky-haired ninja, the most radical of them all, is on a mission to save the kidnapped Princess Margo from the evil Stone Wizard. Okay, so the story isn’t terribly captivating or original, but it’s all Kid Niki: Radical Ninja needs to kick off this simple but cool side-scrolling action-platformer. Each of the eight levels features a ton of crazy and unique enemies to beat, including kung-fu pigs and fire-breathing frogs. Don’t slack off on them, though, since a single hit is all that’s needed to take out our sword-spinning hero. That’s not counting the other perils you’ll face such as pits, falling platforms, and bubbles. Yeah, freakin’ bubbles! Killer soap, it’s a menace. Luckily, Kid Niki is well-equipped, starting with his trusty sword that he spins out in front of him in the blink of an eye. Equally deadly is a power-up that makes a spinning ball rotate around you for a brief time. Another power-up shoots a smaller spinning sword out as a projectile which, as you can imagine, comes in real handy when a conga line of ninjas tries to bum-rush our radical hero.

At the end of a level, you’ll face a boss battle, which fundamentally plays out the same way but with a different strategy to keep things interesting. Hit them with your weapon, said weapon flies off to the side, chase after and retrieve it, rinse and repeat. Some of them are pretty memorable, such as Death Breath, who looks like a rejected South Park character, or the burrowing and easily filleted Green Grub. No one, however, beats the Mad Monk, with his speech clouds that say “FOOL” and literal F bombs. Kid Niki: Radical Ninja displays just the right amount of difficulty for seasoned platforming fans with its barrage of enemies and tricky boss battles. At no point does the game cheat you with cheap kills due to bad programming. Controls are very tight. The music is super catchy, but over the course of the game it repeats itself so damn much that you’ll wish to be smacked off into the sky with a spinning sword yourself. Overall, Kid Niki is a simple but strong linear action platformer that is worth your time. The world needs more radical ninjas like this guy.

When there’s no more room in Hell the chipmunks shall throw crates. by David Giltinan Publisher: Capcom Developer: Capcom Platforms: NES Release: 06.08.90 Players:

1–2 players ESRB: NA

OUR RATING

After releasing the surprisingly competent DuckTales, Capcom went with the next best thing on the Disney Afternoon lineup. Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers starred the eponymous cartoon rodents as they solved cases, usually to the chagrin of their arch-enemy, Fat Cat. Amazingly enough, this translates well as another superb cartoon-licensed platformer. It all starts off when a case to find a missing kitten is quickly revealed as a ruse by the nefarious Fat Cat in order to kidnap fellow Rescue Ranger Gadget. It’s a simple enough plot to drive the game forward playing as either Chip or Dale (or both, in co-op). Each level is full of enemies that can be blasted offscreen by throwing a cornucopia of items such as crates, bombs, and apples. (Seriously, how big are these chipmunks?) Moving, jumping, picking up, and throwing objects is fast and responsive. You can throw to either side, above you, or even hide underneath your held object to use it as a stationary shield against incoming enemies. The gameplay simply feels great. The overworld map offers branching pathways, letting you decide which levels to tackle. This allows for certain levels to be skipped entirely, if you so choose. It’s a nice break from the straightforward linearity that’s usually a staple in such games.

As much fun as it all is, this is a very easy game. It gives away 1-ups as freely as Oprah does cars. These are either obtained by collecting enough flower icons, prompting a 1-up star to float into the stage, or randomly found underneath certain crates. Boss battles are very basic as well, with each one utilizing the same “chuck and run” strategy. These are supposed to be the most exciting parts to any game, yet they’re quite the opposite. One thing that Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers nails, however, is presentation. Each character is represented well here, including fellow teammates Monterey Jack and Zipper. And much like with DuckTales, Capcom strikes audio gold here with some of the catchiest music of the 8-bit era. Although not the most challenging platformer, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers presents a fun diversion that beautifully captures the fun and essence of its source material. We can only hope that much like its predecessor, a “remastered version” is just around the corner. www.readretro.com

RETROGRADE

REVIEWS

Ninja

Hattori-kun

The most famous 8-bit platformer you’ve never heard of. byKevin Tambornino Publisher: Hudson Soft Developer: Hudson Soft Platforms: Famicom Release: 03.05.86 Players: Single-player ESRB: NA

OUR RATING

Mention platformers to a Japanese gamer who lived through the Famicom years and they will likely mention titles like Super Mario Bros, Akumajo Dracula (Castlevania), Rockman (Mega Man), and Ninja Hattori-kun with fondness. Ever hear of that last one? No? Despite selling 1.5 million copies (more than any other Hudson Soft game), Ninja Hattori-kun is almost entirely unknown outside of Japan. The game is based on the manga created by Fujiko F. Fujio (of Doraemon fame). You play as a young martial artist using shuriken and ninpō (ninja arts) to dispatch enemies. It’s a side-scroller that feels like a shoot-em-up. Much like in a shmup, the enemies advance in waves with pre-set patterns, and you must rapid-fire your throwing stars at them. You collect scrolls as you progress and need to decide to use them right away or save them for better abilities, à la Gradius. This cart lacks the tight control of a game like Super Mario Bros. (released a year earlier) and it can be very difficult to land jumps that require precision. You might get frustrated by Hattori-kun when you first play it, but stick with it and you will discover that the key to winning is the 12 ninpō power-ups. Using the correct ones will make the game a lot easier. For example, the high jump ninpō makes it easy to avoid the pits of “death water” or, instead, you could choose to make your shuriken more powerful. The speed boost lets you Sonic

your way through a level and collecting the symbol for power (カ) allows you to use multiple ninpō at once. It becomes more fun and less frustrating the longer you play it. Despite the cute characters, Hattori-Kun is notoriously challenging. There are no save points or continues. You will need to start from the beginning many times, subjecting you to the game’s grating music again and again, which consists of a poor rendition of the Hattori-Kun theme and a lazily arranged Georges Bizet piece. Ninja Hattori-kun is very import friendly. There is no Japanese text in the game (just bad English) and you can easily acquire it online for under $10. If you enjoy unique platformers, and can deal with the game’s learning curve (and music), it’s definitely worth picking up.

The Capcom game that never made it to the NES (but should have). byMark Kaminski Publisher: Romstar Developer: Capcom Platforms: Arcade Release: 08.1987 Players: Single-player ESRB: NA

OUR RATING

Capcom was pretty busy on the NES in the late ‘80s. In 1988 they released five games, the exact number that Nintendo allowed any company to release in a year. Sadly Black Tiger was not among them. As such, the only way to enjoy this mace–slingin’ platformer was in the arcades. An arcade fantasy platformer much like Rygar, Black Tiger is one of my favorite types of games, This multi-directional platformer feels like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and Castlevania made a baby — a more platforming-oriented predecessor to Magical Sword. At the time, nothing played anything quite like it. There’s RPG elements in which you can upgrade your armor, weapons, and health, but it also featured great action/platforming. There are eight levels with a boss at the end of each. Along the way you pick up Zenny (bling!) and you can rescue old stone hermits to upgrade your armor, mace, vitality, keys, potions, time, or hints. Enemies include ogres, snakes, slimes, skeleton warriors, dragons and yes, the much-hated booby-trapped chests. I’ve always liked this soundtrack, as much as you can for an ‘80s game. It changes with every level and intensifies along with a change in the melody when you meet the level boss.

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Even though the game can be difficult, it doesn’t feel like it’s cheating you like Ninja Gaiden. At about one hour for a playthrough, it feels much longer than some of its contemporaries and also offers decent replay factor. Even if you beat the game, there are hidden dungeons and collectibles that make it worth going back through again. In that sense, this 1987 platformer has aged well.

Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger.

If you ever dreamed of what it feels like in the shoes of a barbarian, mace in hand, shield and helmet with prominent horns, this is the right game for you. Black Tiger was a great game and still is. For a modern-day cousin, check out Volgarr the Viking.

REVIEWS

RETROGRADE

1980’s Space Panic introduced players to platform games. by Mike Kennedy Publisher: Universal Developer: Universal Platforms: Arcade, ColecoVision Release: 1980 Players:

1–2 players ESRB: NA

OUR RATING

It’s hard to believe there was a time when platforming games didn’t exist. That was until 1980, when arcade game maker Universal (Mr. Do!) created what is now known as the world’s first platformer, Space Panic. Space Panic is a simple game comprised of five levels of rock floors with a variety of ladders connecting the floors together. You take the role of a lone astronaut as he negotiates cavern levels beneath the planet’s surface. His only weapon? A shovel which is used to dig holes in hopes of trapping the roaming aliens. Once an alien’s trapped, you start burying it, sending it careening to its death and scoring yourself points in the process. Adding to the challenge are different colored aliens that require falling through one, two, or three consecutive floors to their demise, meaning you have to think ahead if you’re going to kill them off. Clear each level of its alien horde and you move on to levels with more and varying types of aliens. Space Panic’s repetitive gameplay and crude graphics seem simple by today’s standards, but you can see the evolution of its ideas in subsequent games like Donkey Kong and even Super

This mole’s got soul.

Mario Bros. Other titles that borrow upon the “shovel and trap” formula introduced by Space Panic are Brøderbund’s Lode Runner and Universal’s own Mr. Do’s Castle. Space Panic can be enjoyed today via its 1982 ColecoVision port or via your favorite arcade emulator. If you are lucky, you might even find an original arcade version floating around on Craigslist or a local arcade game auction. Did you know: There was an almost identical game to Space Panic on the Apple IIe? It was called Apple Panic and released by Brøderbund.

Mike James

Publisher: Gremlin Graphics Developer: Jason Perkins Platforms: C64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum Release: 1985 Players: Single-player ESRB: NA

Videogame characters span the gamut from hedgehogs to fish and dragons to plumbers, so it was only a matter of time before the lowly mole got the game hero treatment. Monty Mole, to be exact, is a miner by trade, and being of British extraction, wears a monocle. He first appeared in the 1984 game Wanted: Monty Mole where he makes his way through a coal mine, then came the 1985 game Monty is Innocent which sees him in prison for stealing coal. In that same year came the finest game in the series, Monty on the Run, before a further three outings.

OUR RATING

In Monty on the Run, Monty is trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities after becoming embroiled in the infamous miners’ strike, and to succeed, he must escape from his house in a bid for freedom across the English Channel which is where the sequel Auf Wiedersehen Monty picks up the story. In order for our intrepid hero to make it to the safety of Europe, he must make his way through a truly enormous map, passing through the house, an escape tunnel, a sewage works, a hollow tree, and then in true British escape style, a breathtaking ride on a Sinclair C5. Before you begin, though, Monty has to choose the five items that will make up his Freedom Kit. Some of the items will allow you to access certain parts of the map so Monty must choose wisely or face not being able to complete the game.

The huge game map doesn’t scroll, and you make your way around a screen at a time, sometimes revisiting past screens at different points in order to collect all of the bonus items, such as coins for 50 points and cream cakes for 200 points. Graphically and gameplay-wise it’s very similar to the classic Manic Miner, more specifically its sequel Jet Set Willy with its freedom of movement. The key as usual is to collect the shiny things and avoid the deadly things like water and mines, as well as the many mole-crushing pistons. Monty on the Run is a quintessential British platform game. It has a slightly unusual central character, weird and wonderful enemies, vivid colors, and a magnificent tune. If you’re looking for an overlooked title with plenty of charm, it’s definitely worth a play. www.readretro.com

RETRO RECOLLECTION

INSANE COLLECTION

Mike Kennedy

Above: Coleco’s mini-arcades accurately portrayed their arcade counterparts.

Collecting classic videogames has turned into a massive hobby for many retro gamers. Every issue, Insane Collection will take an in-depth look at some of the most monolithic and noteworthy videogame collections in the world. Do you think your game collection is insane and want to share it with others? Then email your contact info and a short description of your collection to tips@readretro.com, and it might adorn the pages of a future issue of RETRO magazine. Last issue we featured one of the world’s largest arcade and pinball collections, but on the other end of the spectrum are some sizeable collections of the portable variety. And in this pint-sized arena no one has a larger collection of handhelds than Mr. Rik Morgan, curator and owner of handheldmuseum.com. Rik’s collection of handhelds is truly inspiring, as it include games from all around the world, most complete in box. Let’s learn more about Rik and his insane collection of handheld electronic games! RETRO: What got you started collecting electronic handheld games? What was the game that started it all? Rik Morgan: It was the Coleco Mini-Arcades…I always wanted those as a kid (but never got one), and then sometime in 1998 or so I realized I could just buy them myself off eBay and finally have them! Five games… That’s all I wanted… RETRO: Do you still have any of your original games you had as a child?

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RM: My pride and joy back in 1979 was my Milton Bradley Microvision. I can still remember seeing the commercials on TV in about October, and looking at my Mom and saying “I want one of those for Christmas.” Come December they were sold out everywhere, so I had little hope. But Mom was a smart shopper, she went out in October and got one and hid it in the house somewhere that I never found…Still have that very Microvision, in excellent condition with the box and everything (and I had every game back then too, which I still have). It still works too. I was even smart enough at 11 to realize what fingernails would do to the membrane keyboard, and trained everyone to use the pads of their fingers. My Mom loved Pac-Man, so we were both excited when I got Entex Pac-Man 2 for Christmas in 1980 (which I still have) as we both challenged each other for the high score… My brother got Mattel’s Football and Basketball which I found at my parents’ house a few years ago (and promptly stole), so those may count too…

INSANE COLLECTION

RETRO RECOLLECTION

Honey I shrunk the Arcade: Popular arcade and home console games were shrunken down for handheld play.

RETRO: How long ago did you start this collection? RM: Not counting the games I had as a kid, it was sometime in 1998 I believe that I started looking for the Coleco Mini-Arcades. I honestly had no idea there were so many other games (especially when I discovered the foreign games I never knew existed). I seriously thought it would just be 5–10 games… RETRO: How many games do you have in your collection? Are most of them complete in box or loose? RM: The actual count is a little out of date (I’m in the process of a full re-inventory to fix that), but I had about 1008 listed in my database as of 2011. About 80% are boxed, and probably about 30–35% are actually in new condition.

and really made companies aware that there was a market for these things…For the first couple of years everyone was basically trying to out-clone Mattel’s sports games. RETRO: What type of games do you prefer? LCD? LED? VFD (vacuum fluorescent display)? Something else? RM: Personally, I prefer VFD. They have the coolest-looking displays (usually), and it’s a technology that is not used in games anymore (and hasn’t been since about 1984 I think). LED games are usually fairly simple in design, and LCD just has a common “yeah, I’ve seen that before” look to them as they are still made today. VFD games pretty much existed from 1980–1984, and then were never seen again. RETRO: What was the most you spent to add a game to your collection?

RETRO: What are your top five handheld games? RM: Microvision will always be a special game to me because of the nostalgia of having it as a child, and some of the games are still fun to play. Entex Pac-Man 2 is my favorite Pac-Man handheld. For both nostalgia from having it as a kid, and I think it’s the best handheld Pac-Man game made. It had the closest-looking maze to the arcade, ghosts that got faster and faster as you play, and was actually quite challenging. Coleco’s was pretty good (and definitely cooler looking), but Entex had the gameplay down. For general collectability and coolness, any of the five original Coleco Mini-Arcades have to be on the list…PacMan, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaxian, Frogger, and Donkey Kong. They play well, and just look cool sitting on a shelf. For rarity or value, the Entex Adventure Vision would have to top the list. Not really the best playable game, but certainly one of the most expensive when found in good condition. Mattel Football is one that should be recognized as basically creating the genre…Auto Race might have been the first all-electronic handheld (i.e., circuits vs. moving parts), but Football was the one that sold in the millions

RM: On a single game, that’d be my MIB Adventure Vision with all three cartridges sealed. It was a warehouse find several years ago, two cases of systems were found (four systems in a case), and at least enough cartridges to pair up complete sets with all eight I believe. So only eight are known to exist in this condition…That cost me $2500 when I got it. One of the eight sold to another collector for $3500 a couple of years later, that was the last time I saw one in this condition sell. RETRO: I see many of the games are imports, how did you acquire all of these? A great deal of the Japanese ones I got directly from Japan. I had somehow managed to create an account on Yahoo Japan’s auction site long before these “buying agent” sites existed. I had a few lines of dialogue translated to Japanese so I could basically ask “Can I buy? Will you send to U.S.? I will mail you cash.” That last sentence usually convinced them (no PayPal in Japan at the time). I would convert money to Japanese yen cash and FedEx it to them, and they’d send the games to me, and it would still be cheaper than anyone that was trying to sell them directly in the U.S. No one had easy access to Japan back then, and the games are mostly really common there (like a Coleco Pac-Man here, for example), so they’d sell for $50–75 and I could resell them on eBay for $300–400.

Eventually people in Japan noticed the value, and they’d create accounts on eBay…And then the buying agents started to appear and now anyone can pay a 10% fee and get anything that is for sale in Japan. The games are still fairly cheap there, so it may still be worth it to get them that way, but some of the fun has gone out of it. The original joy and excitement was actually discovering these games. For years no one knew/remembered that foreign Microvision games were made out of colored plastic. A Gakken Dig Dug handheld game was just a rumor…And no one knew that the Japanese animation used to make the LaserDisc arcade game Cliffhanger (Lupin III) actually had handheld games! It was like finding a whole world of games that no one knew about! The Internet as a whole, and eBay in particular, have of course killed that short-lived era of exploration and discovery, but it was a hell of a lot of fun… RETRO: Many of your games are handheld versions of arcade games. What handheld arcade ports are the best in your opinion? RM: As I mentioned above, I think Entex Pac-Man 2 is the best Pac-Man handheld for staying as faithful to the arcade as possible. Coleco’s is pretty close too… Coleco’s Donkey Kong is very well done with the limits of the technology. It doesn’t have all the levels, but it’s still fun. The Japanese Dig Dug handheld from Gakken is fun to play, though not strictly following the gameplay of the arcade. Parker Brothers Q*Bert is another one that is fairly faithful to the arcade game. Fortunately the design and gameplay is easy to replicate on a static-sprite type of display. It’s always interesting to look at the arcade “ports” and see how they managed to achieve gameplay that would be comparable in some way to the original, but practical enough to do in a handheld form. Both Coleco and Bandai’s attempts at Zaxxon are good examples of this. I think Bandai’s is a little more playable, but they both make use www.readretro.com

RETRO RECOLLECTION

INSANE COLLECTION

of semi-transparent mirrors to create a 3D effect of your ship flying over a landscape. It’s pretty cool to just look at, thinking that it was made over 30 years ago… RETRO: How many games do you think are still missing from your collection? RM: That depends on where you put the cutoff in the timeline! Me, I tend to focus on pre-1984 games. Once they all had simple LCD screens I kind of lost interest. I know that still leaves hundreds that I don’t have, but fortunately I’m not trying to get them all. There are still at least an easy 30–40 that I’m actively searching for, but they are fairly hard to find, and tend to be expensive… RETRO: Are there any holy grails you have yet to attain? RM: The one game I’m really after would be the Tiger Star Castle tabletop. Problem is, I’ve never been able to prove it was actually made. I have a photograph of a prototype from a catalog, but I have never seen one “in the wild,” even in other collections. As far as games I know exist, there are a few at the top of the list, obscure games like Actronics Mr. Digger and Wanted G-Man (boxed preferably). Tiger’s Galaxx boxed (only

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one I’ve seen sell went for more than $1000). Entex Black Knight Pinball boxed — I only know of one or two, and they aren’t moving. That’s a surprisingly rare game for one that was released by a domestic company here in the U.S.… As for prototype rarity, Entex was going to release a game called Do As I Say in 1981. They built two working prototypes of this talking, Simon-like game, but it never went into production…I can only hope the prototypes didn’t end up lost or buried in a landfill…There’s a few others like that, Toy Fair mock-ups that I have pictures of, stuff like that…I hope it’s out there. Some of the original inventors of these games have their hand-built prototypes still too. That was amazingly cool to see, and hopefully they end up in a museum one day (mine, CGE’s, or someone’s where they will be preserved and shared with the community).

Commodore 64 stuff from back in the day). I collect development hardware for some more modern systems (original Dreamcast, Xbox, PSP), and any of the “vintage” handheld consoles (Game Boy, Lynx, TurboExpress). The prototype and development stuff is what I enjoy most. I have a handmade NES development system that was used in the development of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure and The Mutant Virus. Cool-looking wire-wrap thing wired into a hacked NES that could plug into a computer and have game code “downloaded” into custom-made RAM cartridges.

RETRO: In addition to handheld games, do you collect anything else, like console games? What are some of your favorites?

I have a Game Boy Color prototype system, and a handmade Atari Lynx device that appears to be used to monitor the data lines between the cartridge and the system itself.

RM: All my life I’ve joked that I “collect collections.” I have a little bit of everything it seems…I have a mild collection of some classic consoles (2600/5200, Intellivision, tons of

One-of-a-kind stuff like that I love (or at least, less than 100 of a kind). And I’ll probably think of some other cool thing as soon as this interview is over.

INSANE COLLECTION

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INNOVATION: In 1979 Milton Bradley’s Microvision featured the world’s first handheld system with interchangeable cartridges.

RETRO: How long ago did you start handheldmuseum. com? RM: The original site started sometime in 1999. At that time it was simply just an “inventory list” of every handheld game made (or, that was the attempt, at least) including photographs. It was made for my personal use, so I didn’t mind grabbing images from anywhere…The more I looked for a website about handheld games, the more frustrated I got. There just wasn’t one. There were several of people’s collections, but the site only featured what they actually had. I wanted a site of everything, whether I owned it (or even wanted it) or not. So I started to convert my little inventory list into something other people could use and just sort of “sat it out there” on the ‘net. The following year I decided to make a real website, and registered handheldmuseum.com on July 27, 2000. I’ve been adding to it and updating it ever since. I haven’t added any new games to the site in a couple of years, but I’m always updating descriptions and photos when I get them… RETRO: What resources are there for others who are collecting electronic handheld games? RM: There are several other website that, while they are sites about someone’s personal collection, are still quite detailed as the owners have quite a large collection of games. Electronic Plastic is a very impressive site (handhelden.com) based in the UK. The author of the site has put on displays of his collection around his country and has published a really cool book on handhelds.

RM: If you have a general interest in handheld games, check places like thrift stores and occasionally garage sales and swap meets to see what you can find. Most things found at places like that would likely be inexpensive, and you can build up a collection quickly. If you know what you want, check completed auctions on eBay (focusing on items that have actually sold) to get an idea of what it might be worth, and then decide what you can spend. The difference between a loose game and one that’s new in its box can be in the hundreds. Generally, going after specific games will mean buying on eBay, some of the seller sites that specialize in classic gaming, and classic gaming shows/conventions. RETRO: If someone finds a game that is not working, generally, how hard or easy are these types of games to repair? What are some of the common problems with non-working games? RM: That can obviously depend on what is wrong with it, and what type of game it is. A cracked screen really isn’t going to be fixable, but battery corrosion and broken wires usually are. Battery corrosion and bad contacts under buttons are probably the most common problems. Corrosion is usually fixable just by cleaning it out, but it can cause the battery contacts to break off and if it’s really bad it can get into the circuitry and cause further damage there.

There are several other sites listed in the “links” section of the Handheld Museum for both personal collections, and some retailers that sell games.

Most buttons and little joysticks have a rubber pad under them that actually makes the contact on the circuit board. Over the years (and hours of play) these can lose their springiness, or fall apart and stop working. The easiest way to fix them is to get a replacement from the same (or a similar) game. But even taking the rubber pads from almost any game and cutting them to fit your game is a workable solution. It generally means sacrificing a game though, which is why I usually keep parts from any game that is deemed beyond repair.

RETRO: What advice do you have for someone just starting out collecting handheld games?

Another common problem with games that have AC adapter ports is that the game does not work at all.

There are plenty of sites that deal strictly with the Nintendo Game & Watch series, which I know are quite popular although I don’t collect them myself.

These games are usually VFD games, but I’ve seen a few LED and LCD with adapter ports. Generally, the problem is from someone plugging in the wrong power supply (too much voltage, or reversed polarity). In most cases, this blows a transistor or two. The repair is a little more involved (soldering and buying components), but almost every game I’ve gotten in this condition has been repairable with just a few dollars in parts. RETRO: Where can someone see some of the games in your collection in person? Do you display them at any gaming expos? RM: Right now, the only places I display my collection is at Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas in September of this year, and with the Videogame History Museum at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles (which is in mid-June annually). When the Videogame History Museum has a permanent location, I will most likely be displaying a large number of handheld games there as well. RETRO: How many batteries do you go through in a year? RM: Hah! Surprisingly few, that I have to pay for at least. I get a lot of games that have batteries in them already, so I have quite a few in boxes ready to go…And I learned early on the value of an AC adapter (or Battery Eliminator as Coleco calls them), and have even built special adapters that can power a dozen or so games at once. I usually have a row of games on display at Classic Gaming Expo that are connected to this so people can play them.

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COLLECT-A-THON

Kohler’s Collect-a-Thon!

You’re Not Going Chris Kohler

Your guide to building the ultimate retro library

Are You?!

The market for original classic games has never been hotter. Whether you’re obsessed with collecting or just want to play your old favorites in their original format, you’re paying more for old games than ever before. Each issue in Collecta-Thon!, we’ll break down the current collecting scene for a particular platform.

THE PLATFORM

Back in the day, half the kids had Super Nintendo, the other half had Sega Genesis, and nobody had TurboGrafx-16. Oh, sure, maybe you’d find one kid. He was a freaking unicorn. Going to his house was like walking into an alternate dimension, since almost every game was exclusive. And they came on weird credit card-sized media! NEC and Hudson really gave it a go with this pseudo-16-bit platform, which laid claim to the very first CD-ROM add-on ever, but was never able to make a dent in the market outside Japan even with caveman mascot Bonk leading the charge.

COLLECTING IT NEC released the TurboGrafx-16 in 1989 and it was off the market by 1995. While it started off competitive with Sega’s 16-bit Genesis, it became a niche item by the mid-1990s. Many of the games released late in its life were only produced in small batches and often sold through direct mail; the TurboZone Direct catalog serviced the diehards who stuck it out until the bitter end. Although few gamers owned a TurboGrafx back in the day, the games were given lots of fawning coverage by the gaming magazines at the time, and we all dreamed of someday owning one. There were only 94 games released on the HuCard cartridges and

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44 released on CD, making the total library very small and seemingly easy to finish. But there are many games that are very rare and sought after, and that list keeps growing as more collectors jump into the mix.

THE HOT ONES Here are the games any collector would go crazy to find in a box of junk at a flea market. Every piece of these games, from the cartridge to the manual to the box, is worth big bucks. Note: While the rarity of certain items rarely changes, price often does — both up and down. These prices are generally accurate as of mid-2014, but anything could happen. Magical Chase (HuCard, 1993) A cute shoot-em-up in which you play a witch riding a broom — just like the Cotton series, but totally unrelated. As the final HuCard release, this was printed in very limited quantities. Just the card alone can sell for upward of $2000, with boxed copies getting $6000 or more. The Stadium Events of the TurboGrafx. The Dynastic Hero (CD-ROM, 1994) A slightly tweaked version of the Genesis game Wonder Boy in Monster World, Dynastic Hero is to the

Turbo CD what Magical Chase is to the HuCard format — the rarest, priciest release. In today’s market, anything less than $1000 is cheap. Super Air Zonk (CD-ROM, 1993) Hot on Dynastic Hero’s heels is this sequel to the shooter starring Bonk the caveman’s futuristic descendant. It goes for over $700. Syd Mead’s Terraforming (CD-ROM, 1993) Syd Mead is a visual artist whose futuristic designs include the lightcycles of Tron and the robot Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. He lent his singular design sense to this horizontal shooter that bears his name. Expect to pay $700 to own one. Bonk 3: Bonk’s Big Adventure (HuCard and CDROM, 1993) Bonk’s final outing was released on both CD and cartridge; the CD version includes a full-quality soundtrack and an extra two-player mode but the main game is identical. The CD will cost you $500; the cartridge about $300 complete in box. Legend of Hero Tonma (HuCard, 1993) Irem’s port of its 1989 arcade platformer action game is another tough HuCard to track down. Expect to shell out $400 or more for a complete copy.

Illustration by Thor Thorvaldson

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COLLECT-A-THON

Beyond Shadowgate (CD-ROM, 1993) This follow-up to the classic adventure game is not a port of a computer title — it’s a true TurboGrafx exclusive. Find another $400 if you want to continue the adventure. Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra (CD-ROM, 1993) More like Might and Magic: Three Hundred Fifty Dollars.

UP AND COMING There are actually quite a few more TurboGrafx games that are creeping up in price, especially if they’re complete with all of the pieces (see “Know What You’re Buying,” below). You can expect to have to put up at least $200 each for Dungeon Explorer II, Soldier Blade, Godzilla, Dragon Slayer: Legend of Heroes, Cotton, and Shockman. $150 if you want Bomberman ‘93 or the original Air Zonk. And there are many games that can get over $100, like Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu, New Adventure Island, Neutopia II, Dead Moon, and even Ys III: Wanderers From Ys. “But those are most of the games I want!” Yep. At least you can still buy Bonk’s Adventure and Alien Crush without breaking the bank — for now.

WORKING DESIGNS The TurboGrafx is also notable for being the birthplace of Working Designs, the legendary RPG-centric publisher that brought over Japanese classics and

lavished tons of attention on their packaging. While the Working Designs TurboGrafx games don’t reach the levels of insanity that their PlayStation games eventually would (seriously, little fold-out cardboard characters inside Lunar?), they still added some bells and whistles that other publishers did not. On the HuCard side, we have Working Designs’ first two releases, Parasol Stars: The Story of Bubble Bobble III and Cadash. Expect to pay over $100 each in complete condition. Less hard to find are the Turbo-CD RPGs Cosmic Fantasy 2 and Exile; sealed copies of these were going cheap a few years ago so you should be able to get at least mint ones for $50–60 today. The final two Working Designs releases were more limited, so expect to pay $150 for Exile: Wicked Phenomenon and Vasteel. These originally came with gold foil-stamped, paper slipcovers that wrapped around the CD-ROM cases, so watch out for these if you want truly complete examples.

BIKINI GIRLS There are no unlicensed TurboGrafx games that were distributed in America, but there are these three oddball discs: Bikini Girls, Local Girls of Hawaii, and Hawaii Island Girls. They’re just collections of JPG slideshows of girls in bikinis that play on Turbo CD. Don’t laugh.

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Sometimes this was all you had for porn, back then. Turbo completists will pay $150 each for these glorified slideshows. (Apparently that’s what they cost back in the day, too!)

KNOW WHAT YOU’RE BUYING I’ve never seen a fake TurboGrafx or Turbo CD game. That said, there are a great deal of aftermarket game cases that you might mistake for the real deal. All HuCard games for TurboGrafx (except the Keith Courage pack-in game) came in tall cardboard boxes. So if you have a HuCard game in a jewel case, it’s not truly complete without the outer box. Now, inside most of those boxes is a CD-style jewel case that holds the cartridge and the manual. But for the later releases, they cheaped out and just put a plastic tray inside the box that holds the cartridge. So there is no jewel case for, to name two examples, Legend of Hero Tonma or Magical Chase. Complicating matters is the fact that eventually they eliminated the outer cardboard box for CD releases. So while Ys III: Wanderers From Ys has an outer cardboard box, The Dynastic Hero was shipped in a plain jewel case. In other words: Do your research before you buy a game as “complete!” Chris Kohler (@kobunheat) is the founder and editor of Game|Life, the gaming channel of WIRED. He is a lifelong game collector and the author of the books Power-Up and Retro Gaming Hacks.

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RETRO RECOLLECTION

COLLECTING MARIO

and therefore buy piles of classic videogames with no rhyme or reason behind your actions, you might be entertaining the notion of building a more focused game collection. And if your tastes in classic gaming run to the platform genre, it’s likely that you may consider acquiring all of the Mario games. Congratulations to you! Unlike those poor suckers who decide to collect RPGs or shmups, you’ll find it’s not too difficult or expensive to get all of the main series games in which Mario and/or Luigi take the starring role. This is because Mario has never not been popular, and all of his adventures were produced in mass quantities. And many of you have probably already been collecting Mario games since you were a child, anyway, so you’ve probably got a head start. But no franchise as popular as Mario could make it nearly 35 years without some ill-advised cash-in products. And insofar as some of these took the form of computer games, you will have to do some digging if you want to put together a truly complete set of Mario’s adventures.

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COLLECTING MARIO

DO THE DONKEY KONG Before Nintendo brought the NES to America, it licensed the rights to create Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. games to Coleco for consoles and Atari for computers, and those two companies wasted no time putting Mario’s first few games on any platform they could. So there are versions of one or all of these games on the 2600, 5200, 7800, ColecoVision, Intellivision, TI-99, Apple II, IBM PC, Vic-20, and so forth. Many of them are pretty terrible. In the U.K., publisher Ocean released versions of Donkey Kong for computers like the ZX Spectrum, MSX, and Commodore. In other words, if you think you have all the Donkey Kongs, you probably don’t. Obtaining the original “black-box” line of Nintendo Entertainment System launch games isn’t that difficult, although finding the cardboard boxes they came in can be. Sadly for Mario collectors, the boxes for Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. can go into three figures. Mario Bros. isn’t as tough to find because they made more copies. Condition is very important to black-box collectors, so keep an eye out for slightly beat-up boxes and you might get a deal. (And luckily, you technically don’t have to buy Donkey Kong 3: no Mario!) And then there are the dedicated handheld devices. Coleco made a Donkey Kong LCD game shaped like a miniature arcade machine and two different versions of DK Jr. And of course, Nintendo produced many Game & Watch handhelds starring Mario, including Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and Mario the Juggler. It even did a tabletop version called Mario’s Cement Factory. All are high-priced treasures today, especially if you want the original boxes. 16-BIT WEIRDNESS Since it was packed in with many, many Super Nintendo consoles, Super Mario World is one of the most common games on the platform. What’s hard to find is the box. The pack-in version only had the cartridge and manual. But once Nintendo started selling SNESes without Mario, they put a standalone version on store shelves. It originally shipped in a box similar in style to other SNES releases, but this was quickly replaced with the (less desirable today) “Player’s Choice” variant. A complete-in-box Mario World is now a difficult piece to add to a SNES collection. There’s an often-overlooked Mario game on SNES that’s tough to track down. Eventually Nintendo started packing SNES machines with a special version of the multi-game collection Super Mario All-Stars that added Super Mario World into the mix. It even had an updated Luigi sprite that wasn’t just a palette swap of Mario. It also has its own manual (but no box). Also in the early 1990s, Nintendo thought that it wanted to produce a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES, and tasked Philips with the job. As part of the deal, Philips got to produce games with Nintendo characters. The best one they came up with was an action game called Hotel Mario, for their CD-i platform. This is worth it just for the terrible cartoon cutscenes. YOU CAN’T SPELL EDUTAINMENT WITHOUT TAINT Nintendo eventually stopped letting other developers create Mario action games,

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but liberally licensed its hero out to all and sundry who wanted to educate the youth of the world. You may know about Mario is Missing! (a Carmen Sandiego– style geography game) and Mario Teaches Typing (impressively, he could do it with those puffy gloves on). But have you played the whole group of three Mario’s Early Years games for preschoolers on the SNES? Or Mario’s Time Machine, on NES and SNES? There’s also Mario’s Game Gallery, a DOS game in which you play against Mario in games of Go Fish and Checkers. The “big box” original version is tough to find today. (It’s also the first game, predating Super Mario 64, to feature Charles Martinet as the voice of Mario.) But the rarest seems to be Super Mario Bros. and Friends: When I Grow Up, a virtual coloring book for MS-DOS released in 1991. IMPORTS In the U.S., we got one version of Mario Bros. for the NES. Oddly enough, in Japan and PAL regions, they got two different upgraded versions of this classic arcade game. Kaettekita Mario Bros. (Return of Mario Bros.) for the Famicom Disk System has more levels, fine-tuned controls, and a series of advertisements for real Japanese food products. Meanwhile, the Classic Series rerelease of Mario Bros. in Europe isn’t just the same game in a redesigned box: It, too, has more features, including “intermission” scenes between levels. Japan also had its weird, authorized-but-not-made-by Nintendo computer games. Hudson Soft created two spin-offs of Mario Bros. for various Japanese computers. Mario Bros. Special is an original platform game. Punch Ball Mario Bros. has Mario carrying around a pink ball that he has to use to defeat enemies. Super Mario Bros. Special is a crappy version of Super Mario Bros. Finding these is quite difficult today, and forget about playing them on the original hardware unless you buy vintage Japanese computers and cassette tape drives. One thing you should keep in mind that does not exist in Japan is a cartridge of Super Mario Bros. 2, aka “The Lost Levels.” It was only released on the Famicom Disk System, and any cartridge versions you see are pirates. (But convenient ones, if you own a Famicom but not the notoriously failure-prone Disk System add-on!) Nintendo sure did love pairing Mario up with the oddest products. There’s another rare Mario game on the Disk System called All-Night Nippon Super Mario Bros., which remixes levels from SMB and The Lost Levels and adds in DJs from a Japanese late-night radio talk show, for some reason. Since Famicom Disks can be copied, there are a lot of illicit copies of this out there. If you see one on eBay with no disk label and no slipcover art, it’s a copy made recently and not worth the $300–400 that an original will fetch. EVERYTHING ELSE This isn’t even touching all the Mario sports games! Or the Mario Party series! Or games like Golf on the NES, in which Mario is clearly the main character! One thing’s for sure: You could probably collect only Mario games for your entire life and never quite be done. www.readretro.com

RETRO RECOLLECTION

Rarity Report

Rarity Report Jeremy Parish

Little Samson

NES | 1992 | Market price: $600–1000

What is it?

Widely considered a true NES masterpiece, Little Samson represents one of Taito’s final 8-bit home releases in the U.S. Like all of Taito’s end-of-life NES titles (see also Power Blade 2, The Flintstones, Bubble Bobble 2), Little Samson sells for absolutely preposterous prices these days. Expect to shell out nearly a thousand bucks for the cartridge alone, and even more for a complete-in-box copy in decent condition. Why so expensive?

A perfect storm of rarity and reputation have driven Little Samson’s price into the stratosphere over the past decade. Taito produced very few copies of its final wave of NES releases, and of those few titles Little Samson was the most obscure at the time. Yet it was also the most ambitious and creative, which has made for a game that collectors overlooked for years and now covet eagerly. Granted, NES prices in general have skyrocketed thanks to nostalgia and a growing collecting scene, but outside of truly rare releases (like World Class Track Meet or the golden Nintendo World Championship carts) there’s nothing quite on Little Samson’s price tier.

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Rarity Report

Is it worth the hype?

Barring the question of whether any game is worth $1000, of course, the answer is…yeah, it really is. Little Samson is a true gem of a NES platformer, with some of the most stunning graphics and music ever seen on the system. Not only that, but it plays well, too, with extremely varied mechanics and a clever narrative arc. Little Samson tells the tale of four heroes who come together in order to save the realm, or the world, or whatever…really, the particulars of the game’s objectives aren’t as important as the fact that Little Samson’s pantomime plot creates an excuse for some of the most entertaining action of any 8-bit release ever made. Each of Little Samson’s opening stages introduces the game’s playable cast. Besides the eponymous protagonist, there’s also a dragon, a golem, and a mouse. Each character features wildly different play mechanics. Samson basically amounts to a Son-Goku-comelately, a monkey-like lad wielding a rod and capable of climbing walls and even ceilings. The golem boasts prodigious strength and the highest endurance of any character, the dragon can fly and shoot flames, and the mouse balances out his paltry sliver of a life meter by slipping into areas too tiny for his companions and chucking powerful bombs at enemies. Once you work your way through the introductory prologue, the characters meet up and, in classic comic book style, fight one another before becoming friends. With your party assembled, you work your way through the remainder of the adventure — a collection of dazzling levels and enormous bosses — with the freedom to swap between your four party members at any time. The free-swapping style had appeared in other NES games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Contra Force, but Little Samson trumps them all in terms of the

RETRO RECOLLECTION

party’s diversity, situational advantages, and sheer quality. It looks great and plays wonderfully. In other words, this isn’t one of those pricey-but-wretched games you’d buy simply to be able to claim you own it. It would make an eminently playable centerpiece for any collection.

But I don’t wanna pay $1000!

Sorry, them’s the breaks. Taito’s NES games aren’t exactly clogging up the reissue pipeline. Square Enix bought the company back in 2007, and aside from the NES version of Elevator Action they’ve done exactly nothing with Taito’s back catalog on Virtual Console. That seems to be Square’s overall mindset with all its peripheral properties, actually. The company has access to a huge collection of great classic games that we’d love to see made available, but outside of a glut of Final Fantasy releases and some questionable iOS versions of classic Dragon Quest, the company seems content to sit on those golden oldies. It’s not quite so absolutely bleak as all that, though. Little Samson has no text or dialogue to speak of, so if you have means to play Famicom games (the Japanese versions of NES games), you can import the relatively common Japanese release for a fraction of its going rate in the U.S. and enjoy the exact same experience as the more expensive American release. It still ain’t cheap, but I managed to track down a cartridge-only copy of the game on Yahoo! Auctions (what Japan uses instead of eBay) for about $80 last fall — a savings of roughly 90%. Keep your eyes peeled for “Seirei Densetsu Lickle,” the game’s original Japanese title, and get friendly with a Japanese resident who’s willing to be your import mule. Unless you use a proxy service, unfortunately, Yahoo! Auctions users rarely ship overseas.

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RETRO RANTS

P.CONTRI

Pat Contri

Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island, Tiny Toon Adventures: just three of the dozens of quality platformers released on the NES. The genre fit the ol’ gray box well, and through Nintendo, platforming went on to largely define the 8-bit gaming era. But for every well-known and popular platformer like DuckTales, a lesser-known game like Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt was released to little fanfare, fated to be left unplayed on your local Kay Bee Yoys shelf. That’s why I’m here to do my part and shine a small spotlight on a few of the more obscure NES platformers. Maybe it will interest you enough to emu…err, purchase one of these titles!

The Jetsons: Cogswell’s Caper! Release Date: 12.92 Developer: Natsume Publisher: Taito

Wayne’s World Release Date: 11.93 Developer: Radical Entertainment Publisher: THQ

Alfred Chicken Release Date: 02.94 Developer: Twilight, Hookstone Publisher: Mindscape

Totally Rad Release Date: 03.91 Developer: Aicom Publisher: Jaleco

In this adaptation of the famous cartoon series, George Jetson sets out to stop the mining facility set up by Mr. Cogwell’s competing company. George can defend himself against the numerous robots and other enemies by picking up and throwing boxes, apples, and whatever else he can get his hands on. Controls are pretty tight, and the platforming in the varied stages is both inventive and challenging. This title is part of the “Hanna Barbera Super Stars” line-up, which really is only this title and Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, and is using what looks to be the same exact game engine. This game had a much wider release than that title though, which is why you don’t see this one being hoarded as much by game scalpers and those trying to take advantage of the game-collecting community. But it’s not like that sort of stuff bothers me. No, not at all!

You take control of the goofy Saturday Night Live duo out to save their TV show. Stage areas alternate between playing as Garth, armed with a taser gun, and Wayne, who attacks with a kick. Controls are bad — overly stiff — and controlling jumps is awkward and cumbersome. Shooting enemies isn’t so bad with Garth, but trying to kick enemies with Wayne is a terrible experience due to timing issues, bad controls, and very poor hit detection. Graphics are below average and the gameplay is simplistic, consisting of just fending off a couple of different enemy types per stage to get to the door at the end of the level. I was never the biggest fan of Wayne’s World, but fans of the movie still deserved much better than this. When people try to bring up LJN as the worst NES-licensed game publisher, I always try to point out that THQ, in fact, was the worst. Not only did they publish some clunky, sub-par games of which none are good (even LJN managed a few good ones), they also ruined several opportunities for decent TV/movie game adaptations due to their incompetence and lack of care.

Alfred the chicken sets out to battle the Meka-Chickens who have kidnapped his animal pals and girlfriend Floella. The objective of each platforming level is to have Alfred locate and peck all of the balloons in order to float up and reach the end of the level where Alfred will reach a bonus area or engage in a shooter-style boss battle. Controls are very precise, which makes jumping and bouncing around the levels pretty fun. There is a slight learning curve and the challenge is above average, but you can do a lot worse for an inventive and oddly charming platforming experience. Alfred himself is a quirky and loveable-looking main character. He’s a red chicken with spiky hair! What’s not to love? Oh wait, red chicken? Wouldn’t that be a rooster? So shouldn’t this game really be called Alfred the Rooster? What’s going on, developers? I smell a “fowl” conspiracy here. I just slapped my knee so hard it broke the skin.

Jake, a “surfer dude” apprentice magician, must rescue his girlfriend Allison from the underground evil Edogy. Jake attacks his enemies with a weak magical projectile blast, which can be powered up by holding the B button. Jake can also cast dozens of limited-use spells including transforming into either an eagle, lion, or fish (with different abilities), as well as attack boost and health restoration. Some nice cutscenes tell the story, and decent music round out a strangely themed but above-average effort. The manual is insufferable, though. It’s absolute drivel written with Bill & Ted–style lingo featuring dozens of “cool” words such as “righteous,” “dude,” “gnarly,” and “bogus.” If that’s not enough, the writer thought it would be a great idea to insert picture “jokes” in the manual that aren’t related to the game at all. One such picture is of a young blonde woman who is called a “very righteous babe” by the author. It’s embarrassing, and it makes me feel queasy knowing that somewhere out there a real person was made a part of an unfortunate and unfunny joke by some hack NES instruction manual writer.

The NES library is large and often intimidating. While there are plenty of known classics and standards, there are also many lesser-known titles worth checking out for a good time (or a good laugh). So if you’re in the mood for a platformer, perhaps sometimes you should pass up that game of Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers and try out something like Puss N’ Boots instead! You (probably) won’t regret it! www.readretro.com

K.BAIRD

Conventional Wisdom

RETRO RANTS

AN ODE TO THE

ARCADES Kevin Baird

DIP switches on the Galaga CPU board could ruin you I was at a store in Downey, California in 1987 when I first saw Super Mario Bros. Arcades were still popular back then but the end times were coming. Mario was leading the way by bringing the arcade experience to home consoles. In fact, this version (entitled Vs. Super Mario Bros.) was a port of the home console game to the arcades; a failed experiment to get people out of the house and back to the arcade. Unlike console titles, arcade machines weren’t permanent. Arcade owners would switch machines out whenever they needed to make room for a new game, or if the old one was broken. So every arcade game tended to have a limited shelf life. This would cause brief periods of mania where kids would show up en masse in an attempt to get a chance to play the game while they had the chance. If you were lucky enough to get behind the sticks, there would inevitably be some guy that would appear behind you and set his quarters on the machine while you were playing it. This unwritten rule of videogame douchery was a way for that guy to indicate that he was next up to play. At times, some gamers would find this behavior annoying and throw the coins off the machine. That could lead to arguments and weak fisticuffs of pushing, back slaps, ear punching, and hair pulling. Sort of like watching two drunk girls fight over some boy, but in this case it would be two dudes fighting over Mario. Eventually they’d both get thrown out and whoever was standing around could jump on the machine and start playing. Timing was important though; hop in too soon and you could get pulled into the fight, after which stories would be told of your idiocy at school. Other times, you could be wandering around the arcade, only to find your favorite machine was occupied by a three-year-old smashing the buttons and moving the joystick but not actually playing the game. This small, abandoned lunatic comprised an advanced obstacle between you and playing the game. Since they were trained not to speak with strangers, you could not negotiate with the kid to go somewhere else. Pushing the kid off the machine would result in crying, finger

pointing, and the boy’s knuckle-dragging, shopping averse father showing up and pulverizing you for disrupting his child’s fun (and his brief moment of respite). The manager would often be out talking to girls in the food court so options were limited, and waiting was usually the only answer. If you actually did manage to get on a working game, away from everyone, and could play through it in peace…then the experience was amazing. Not enough can be said about the sound systems in arcade machines, and how they immersed you in to the game experience. We have emulators out there for the game and the display, but no emulator can replicate the unique speaker positioning and the wood-framed boom of those units. It really was a different experience. Once you were behind the machine, the actual gameplay was determined by hidden settings and DIP switches the arcade operator would set for every game. A seasoned player could go through an easy game with only one quarter, so the settings would be changed from easy to brutal. If you weren’t prepared for this, your game could end in seconds. Literally seconds, and then the game would ask for another quarter to continue. It was obvious why people started stepping away from these quarter-crunching meccas, given these types of tricks. Shortly thereafter, arcades slowly started to close around the country, and people chose to experience the controlled atmosphere of games at home, for many a good reason. However, I do think that those who enjoy videogames and have yet to experience a true arcade should seek out the remaining relics and find the time to play. See what those old machines were like. Almost all of them were built custom, with unique sticks, buttons, screens, and sound systems. Rather than one console fits all, arcades offered a mesmerizing world of new and different experiences… nerd punches included. Watch out for those.

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SEANBABY

Seanbaby invented being funny on the Internet at Seanbaby.com. Bad decisions have led him to specialize in terrible and absurd games. Follow him on Twitter @Seanbabydotcom.

Worst Platformer Mascots: Making Lava Pits Less Fun Since The ‘80s

THE

Illustration by Thor Thorvaldson

RETRO RANTS

More than any other genre, a platforming game needs a comBad mascots are usually easy to spot from their physical pelling mascot. For instance, a shooter’s narrative doesn’t sufdeformities and outrageous attitude. Others manage to fer when your protagonist is a grunting sociopath. And RPGs are suck in more subtle ways. But regardless of how they got on still good when everyone in your party is a child dressed by Japthis list, here are the mascots that managed to make awful anese sex criminals. But without a great mascot, a platformer games worse. is just a couple hopping monsters stealing a girl back and forth.

Bubsy Like a Buzzfeed list about 11 Disney Princesses Wearing Diapers, Bubsy Bobcat was designed backwards from some desperate idiot’s idea of what people might like. The desperate idiots missed this time. If you lived in a refugee camp and loved Sonic the Hedgehog, Bubsy is the knockoff monstrosity your mother would make you from the clothes of the looted dead. “Is like your beloved Sonic Hodgemonster, no? I am sorry… perhaps this Bubsy is only reminder of our terrible sadness.”

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Boogerman If you’re the kind of person who thinks boogers and snot are funny enough for hours of gameplay and dozens of settings, you’ll both love Boogerman and never stop laughing when you realize how much this looks like a butthole: *. For everyone else, listen: In 1994, these disgusting people made a thing called Boogerman and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

SEANBABY

RETRO RANTS

Without a great mascot, a platformer is just a couple hopping monsters stealing a girl back and forth.

Tim Allen You might be shocked to learn that Tim Allen has starred in more than one bizarre, barely playable platformer. Home Improvement on the SNES had the tough task of translating a sitcom about a DIY specialist into an action game. I’m not sure if “dinosaurs” was their first idea, but it’s the one they went with. Years later, Tim Allen starred in The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause on the GBA. I’m about to explain what this game is like, but I’ll need your help. Reread the second half of this sentence for the rest of your life: Santa stiffly jumps over some spikes to get more cookies. If you stopped rereading that and have moved onto this sentence, hi. You now know exactly how long you would have played TSC3:TEC. Tim Allen games obviously take some liberties with their source material. For instance, on the TV version of Home Improvement, dinosaur battles were unusual at best. And there are parts of the The Santa Clause 3 film that aren’t a lonely man devouring cookies. Still, fans never complained about these slight differences, mostly because anyone playing a game based on a Tim Allen comedy knows they deserve all that misery and more.

Awesome Possum Arnold Schwarzenegger If there’s ever been anyone who could make murder loveable, it’s Arnold. Whether he’s tearing your arms off or impaling you with a steam pipe, he’ll tell your corpse a terrific joke before your insides have even hit the floor. He only became governor so he could call death-row inmates to scream, “YOU EXPECTING CLEMENCY? WELL, YOU ARE IN FOR A SHAHHWK.” The point is, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a really fun cause of death. Unless you’re in a videogame. The Nintendo versions of Total Recall and Terminator 2 are so ugly and dull you’d swear they were based on Arnold’s extramarital sex life. The Terminator 2 movie is about future robots killing each other, usually from vehicles. Literally every videogame studio should have already been working on that exact game. They could have picked the best one and renamed it, but they instead designed something from scratch that was half hopping, half punching, all diarrhea. It’s so boring it borders on the impossible. Making a bad Terminator 2 game is the kind of unnatural act that would have gotten you burned alive in the 17th century.

Awesome Possum is what an art teacher would show to his wife if she asked him why he’s so unhappy at work. The art, gameplay, and level design are blatantly copied from Sonic except all of the enemies are holding chainsaws. And somehow even that becomes lame when you find out it’s part of the game’s heavy-handed environmental message. Each level ends with a quiz about rainforest depletion as if it’s okay to steal as long as it spreads tree awareness. Also, how is Awesome Possum’s audience in a position to help? They clearly aren’t capable of good decisions. The nicest thing they’ll ever do for Mother Earth will be falling in love with a sheep. Thanks to the constant accidental pregnancies of the stupid, platformers starring rejected ‘90s cartoon characters will always have an audience. There may be nothing we can do about that. Here’s all I can give you: The next time you see a stupid caveman or ferret smirking at you from behind sunglasses, know that it could have been a lot worse. It could have been Tim Allen. www.readretro.com

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