Grim Reaper's Game

We've all heard the term “Nintendo Hard”. If you haven't then you're probably at the wrong site. (Google can help you find more on whatever boring subjects you'd prefer to read about) Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm a sucker for old school games. Honestly, though, I'm not a fan of the difficulty. I find it amusing at best but if you've read my previous articles, you know that I cheat a lot when it comes to beating any game that so much as looks at me funny. I'm a strange hybrid of gamer that prefers the nostalgia of retro gaming but thoroughly enjoys the benefits of games that have a “very easy” difficulty setting that in no way effects the outcome of the game.

I played it on "Narrative" and got the same ending as everyone else...

In my last article, I mentioned something called “artificial difficulty”. Some of you might be wondering what that was. (When you weren't wondering why I was displaying some rather creepy childhood cartoon crushes that I may or may not still maintain)

In games, you really have two kinds of difficulty. Kinds that you can control and kinds that you can't. For example: Bongo Bongo in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time might be one of the harder bosses in that game. The reason is because he does a lot of damage and is kind of a pain in the butt to actually damage. This is the first kind of difficulty. You're in control of you character and the challenge comes from controlling your character in such a way that you can be victorious. Link dodge-rolls, shoots arrows, and attacks disembodied hands in just the way that you're accustomed to and if you lose, despite how much you might be yelling at the television through bitter, bitter tears of frustration, you ultimately have to admit that it was your fault that you lost.

Really Navi?!!! I just have to look at it with the Eye of Truth?!!! WHY DON'T YOU TRY TO DO IT THEN!!!!

The second kind of difficulty is what we call artificial difficulty. This is difficulty that you can't really control. This comes from poor game design. At the risk of beating a dead horse to undeath, creating some horrible My Little Pony: Zombies are Magic situation that will slowly sweep the nation's young-adult demographic, I'm going to refer back to the Sonic 06 example in his infuriating “Let's Speed It Up” segments.

Sonic is rushing down a linear road, going insanely fast. The challenge in this part should be the dodging of enemies and obstacles while keeping your ring count high. Sonic should be under your reasonable control, allowing you to rely on your wits and reflexes to complete this part. Anyone who has played this game understands that this isn't the case. The best wits and reflexes are thrown out the window when the game designers decided to put the camera in front of you instead of behind you, forcing you to watch the harmless terror behind you (glorious to see, but ultimately, benign) and taking your eyes off of the cars and debris which might be immediately in front of you, causing you to spill rings. Or, even worse, a pit-fall which instantly punishes you, the player, for what was ultimately the creator's screw-up. You're no longer in control of your destiny. You're at the hands of fate. And Fate, as we can recall from Chrono Cross, is a complete bitch in video games.

You killed Robo!

This is the kind of rookie mistake that Nintendo Hard games made. You'd think that this kind of crap couldn't have lasted long. This week I'll be reviewing the most infuriating Artificial Difficulty situation that survived for far too long.

Instant Death

This one is on the list because instant death is kind of a disproportionate punishment in most situations. The best of the worst examples of NES Hard games that best demonstrate this is Battletoads. Show me a man who has beaten the game, and I'll show you a man who knows that there really isn't that much “battling” for the toads to do in that game.

ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit!

I recently had the pleasure to try and tackle this game with a close friend. This was the first time that I would ever regret choosing a multi-player option in a game that wasn't a Mario Party game. (Only really applies when your friend up and leaves mid-game, forcing you to either wait for him to get back or restart the punishment all over again.) Everyone important knows about the infamous “hoverbikes” portion that consist of level three. One hit and you have died. The obstacles come at you really really fast that you either need millisecond reaction time, or have the entire course cataloged into muscle memory. (Just knowing where shit's coming from isn't good enough for the Battletoads.)

I wanted to know what came after that level for so long. So, after using cheats, and then realizing that cheats wouldn't help, gratuitous use of save states finally allowed me to see the rest of the game. I should point out here that this is why I regret choosing 2 Player: if you die in 2-Player, both of you have to restart that portion. So, unless me and my friend Jack got so synchronized that we could pilot two EVAs to take down the seventh Angel, we were doomed to repeat and repeat until luck allowed us to both make the jumps.

Well, much to my dismay, level 3 wasn't just a poorly planned level in comparison to the rest of the game; it was an appetizer for things to come. Out of the 12 levels that we had completed so far, only 3 involved actual battling. The rest were platforming nightmares that required you to know what was going to happen. The slightest error would result in your untimely death and many curses of frustration to the health bar that hadn't been touched in the past four hours.

This is artificial difficulty since just because I touched a spike, I'm doomed to repeat the entire ordeal over again. There is no forgiveness for error. And considering that after level 3, about 90% of all the following stages would be made of spikes, gas traps, or crushing platforms that all resulted in death. The enemies were no threat in comparison. (In case you wondering, the rest of the levels were 5% benign platforms, 4% empty space, and 1% enemies that you could actually fight)

In the old NES Hard games, this was understandable, since a great deal of games were ports from arcade games, and the purpose of arcade games was to make you spend as many quarters as humanely possible. You only got that by high life-turnover. While it took game developers a little while to catch on to the fact that playing at a home console was completely different from playing in an arcade, they all finally figured out that players rarely wanted to dish out $60 to be punished. 

But it kept going...

While the Sonic games kept pitfalls (which have always been an instant-death scenario) alive and well, the problem got worse in the 3D games, since there were a near-infinite amount of opportunities to fall into a pit. Most of this was because of the fact that the levels needed to seem like they were open spaces, just like the old Sega Genesis games did. But, they can't actually be open, so they needed a happy-medium: lots of open space in the nether in which every level hung. This made it so you were actively punished for trying to go off the beaten path by instant-death.

But, since I've said enough about Sonic to last at least a month, I'll use the best example I've ever had with this particular game design error:

Parasite Eve.

Back when Square could crap out a battle-system and label it 'innovative'

While a majority of the game was pretty nice and interesting, allowing for proper difficulty for the controls at the time, there was one moment that was unforgivable: the ending.

After defeating the three phases of the end boss, it was reduced to some blue, watery-looking skeleton thingy. They talked vaguely about how it was still dangerous, but, I brazenly walked right up to it. I now had a gun that did 9999 damage per shot, and even if the magic, phlebotinum bullets couldn't be used, my gun had dealt pretty sick damage before anyways. I'd be fine... Except that when I touched the beast, it devoured me instantly.

This being a Square RPG, I had to start back at the previous save point, which would be right before the boss-fight. So, I laugh at myself and beat the boss again. This time I run into the ship I'm on and head straight for the phone, figuring that if I'm going to die, I might as well save right now so I don't have to keep fighting the boss again. The phone was dead, not allowing me to save. The sad side-effect of this was that the time I used to run to use the phone had allowed the beast to catch up to me. He caught me and killed me. Again.

Lame, right? Well, I could laboriously detail every encounter in the ending, but to make a long story a little shorter, I died 7 times before ever seeing the ending. The ending sequence required you to know exactly what to do (rig the ship to explode) which was kind of counter-intuitive to what you wanted to do (run away from the monster slowly getting faster behind you).

There are still examples of this in games now, but luckily, most games have gotten better at not instantly killing you. Even the Resident Evil games have gotten better at that, although they did it at the expense of losing the “Survival Horror” part of the genre and slowly turned it into “zombie action shooter”. Don't get me wrong, I still love the series (and the fact that I go to work every day with my Tri-Cell messenger bag should be evidence of that), but it felt more like survival horror when an encounter with three, slowly-shambling zombies scared the crap out of you because you only had, like, 5 bullets and a boss fight was coming up soon.

She's about to become one hell of a Jill sandwich...

Best Evasion

Zelda has always been good about this one. If you fall, you lose a heart. If you get crushed, you lose a heart. In fact, I've played almost every Zelda game and I can't think of many (if any) situations that will instantly kill you. The only one that comes to mind is waiting until day 4 in Majora's Mask, and considering that you had 3 days leading up to that, it's not like that was completely unavoidable...

Procrastination is like masturbation: in the end, you'll kill everyone with the moon.

 As far as most games nowadays go, however, we've gone in the complete opposite direction with this, and while that's mostly a good thing, it does however eliminate the excitement that we used to have from old games. Earlier today I beat Castlevania: Bloodlines and my heartrate dramatically increased when fighting Dracula at the end. Compare to last night when I beat Fallout New Vegas and casually mowed down all of Caesar's Legion while listening to episodes of Scrubs.

So, now we have an interesting dilemma where the problem is the opposite: we don't get punished enough for our mistakes. We simply have to reload from our last save point. And since a lot of games now allow you to save wherever you want to, we've made it that much easier to enable my cheating. 

The only game that retained unreasonable punishment as a feature would have to be Steel Battalion. The game forced you to restart the entire game if you died or retreated from your mission. This, in my eyes, is excusable since it was going the extra mile to establish it as a mech-warrior simulator, including simulating what dying in a mech would mean, assuming that you had a bunch of clones or were reincarnated again and again as a mech pilot.

Welcome to life human clone #224, please report to basic training.

Filling

So, while my new job has caused me to go to a normal work schedule, like a heathen, I've been trying to come up with something to write about. I had all but decided to go for a second consecutive week without a post until a friend of mine specifically requested that I write something presumably because he gets really bored and wants to read something. So, while I don't have anything really on my mind, I do have a near inexhaustible resource of ranting that I could do, so here it goes:

Sonic the flipping Hedgehog: what the hell happened to my favorite childhood hero?! I'm not just saying that I'm a fan of Sonic, but I did literally wait for the night where I had a dream about hanging out with the hog. I'm still freaking waiting!

Maybe I should explain a little before I get to share some things that will get really creepy. We never had a Genesis in the house. We were a Nintendo family. But, every Thanksgiving, we'd drive up to Meridian, Idaho where my grandparents lived along with my degenerate uncle Rodger. He was cool to a little six year old. He smelled faintly like smoke, had his own computer and had a TV in his room! His copy of Sonic 2 was actually Wonder Boy in Monster Land (which, incidentally, totally needs a sequel). He swapped out the ROM boards after renting the game from Blockbuster. (Which I thought was totally badass and clever) But most importantly, and should've been included before I mentioned Sonic 2 so the narrative would've flown better, he had a Sega Genesis.

I spent hours at that thing. I would play from sun-up till about sundown. It would slowly get dark and I'd be so glued to his TV that I wouldn't notice or bother flipping the light switch. I'd slowly go through his game collection until I had exhausted all of my favorite games, and would swear that this year I was old enough and mature enough to not totally freak out at playing games like Bram Stoker's Dracula or Warlock. Both are great nightmare fuel to a little kid and doubly so when playing it in a strange house in the dark by yourself. So, after getting shaken up, I'd invariably decide to try playing a game to get my mind off how freaked out I was. If I was smart, I'd pop in Sonic. If I was dumb, I'd pop in Kid Chameleon, die, and then race out of the room as fast as I could because of the demons shouting, "DIE" when you die in that game. (And now you know all about my obsession with Kid Chameleon, which will get more attention at a later date, I guarantee it)

Sonic was the coolest character in town. He was fast, had a kick-ass TV show, and dated a chick who sometimes, wore nothing more than boots.

First cartoon crush and first sign that I would someday be a furry.

He stood up against the pollution stereotype that was so prevalent in the 90s, but didn't feel the need to be preachy about it. Instead, he'd just smash the hell out of some robots. The games had awesome music, the cartoon series was jaw-droppingly awesome, and Sonic could do no wrong in my eyes. (I hadn't seen Sonic Underground yet, but it's awesome in a totally different way.)

Jump to today. Sonic has gotten so ingrained into the pop-culture that he's now selling insurance. And yet he's in some of the worst games to ever disgrace my PS3. I played through Sonic 06. I must admit that I never saw the "true ending" since I couldn't stomach the Shadow levels, and to be honest, I still find the whole human/hedgehog shipping to be a bit distasteful. (I know, I'm hypocritical, so sue me.)

The game had me frothing at the mouth while I waited three minutes for the game to load two lines of written dialogue and then have me wait another three minutes. Anyone who has played this game knows what I'm talking about. Now, I'm not going to say that it's the worst game I've ever played. (I'm sure Dino Riki is still topping that list) but it was kind of an eye opener that I just didn't love Sonic like I used to.

For me, Sonic started going downhill in Sonic Heroes. I beat that game completely and was pleasantly surprised by Big the Cat showing up (the best third-tier character in the Sonicverse) but had started noticing a few things that had gone on for far too long. Things like endless rails over nowhere, a huge focus on the Chaos Emeralds, and sub-par dialogue.

This had actually all started with Sonic Adventure, but it was his debut to 3D and there were far worse games out there. In fact, it was just a matter of fact that we accepted poor 3D platforming because we didn't have anything to compare it to. The graphics were ahead of its time, but the animation was poor during certain cut scenes, the voice acting was irritating at best, and the camera had its issues too. But we overlooked all of that because we were kids and we didn't know better. Neither did the industry. Sonic Adventure 2 should've alleviated those problems, and while the lip-syncing was a lot better (since they decided to get rid of the tongues in the mouths) and the dialogue just tiny less bit cheesy, the game still suffered from flaws that were growing. Things like instant-death scenarios, since falling caused you to die and all of the levels were effectively large floating islands in the nether. Wonky camera that wanted you to focus on the truck behind you, while still expecting you to dodge obstacles in front of you. (This would be amped up in Sonic 06) And of course, attacks that would either kill the enemy, hurt you for some reason, or hurl you into who knows which direction. But, Sonic Adventure 2 was one of my favorite games at the time, and being about 12 when I first played it, I can think of two reasons:

By now I knew that I wasn't normal.

Too many game-hours to count...

While I still have the game in my GameCube stash, I haven't played it in a long time. Partly because the game hasn't aged well, but also because I lost my Tails Chao from Phantasy Star Online and until I can get another one, I don't even want to see the Chao Garden. (You only love once...)

Next was Sonic Heroes which crushed my dreams of a new and improved Chao Garden, but did bring back Big, which as I said before, was a pleasant surprise. It also brought in the Chaotix crew which was even more interesting. But the game had some terrible lines and some terrible rail controls that made me very angry. This was the first time that I really started to notice how much I was starting to hate the direction the games were going.

Touche...

First of all, the stories were getting more and more repetitive. How many times can Dr. Eggman steal the Chaos Emeralds until he realizes that any plan that involves the word "CHAOS" as part of an energy source cannot, by its very definition, go according to plan? What's more, with the introduction of Shadow, the side-story was getting more and more convoluted.

By now, I had realized that the games were trying to be more story driven, which would be a good thing, except that they were still neglecting some serious camera control and artificial difficulty issues. Also, the story would've been helped a bit if the characters had a little bit more background than just a theme song and a brief introduction in the manual. Somehow, we were supposed to know that Tails was slowly getting sick of being in Sonic's shadow but didn't want to abandon his friend either. Knuckles never had any motivation except to protect the Master Emerald (and for some "fists metal crackle" according to his rap song about Pumpkin Hill.) Amy still is the most two-dimensional character out there with nothing in her motivation but pure, white-hot hatred love for Sonic.

We can assume that Rouge is still there for the emeralds that she knows she'll never have, and for the echidna which she should never have, since monotremes and mammals should never mix. Big never had any sort of motivation except for his friend Froggy making him much like Cream in the sense that without the person their looking for, they loose all character motivation. Omega honestly shouldn't exist, since Dr. Eggman couldn't possibly create AI that would have unshackled freedom to turn on him like he does. This list obviously omits dozens of other characters whom I either don't care about (Charmy) or just don't know anything about (Nack). In the end, while all of these characters seem just interesting enough to keep them around, their whole story is never investigated in satisfying way to keep them interesting.

Nope, never investigated in a satisfying way.

 Sonic 06 is the epitome of the worst of all of these things. The camera that forces you to rush ahead while dodging obstacles that you can't see because the camera wants to show you that totally bitchin' tornado behind you was implemented in Sonic's stages, presumably because Sega hadn't figured out how to make people see red when they saw the blue blur. The game's loading times were a joke for a current-gen console. While the graphics were undeniably pretty, it was hard to focus on them when they were falling through the ground for no apparent reason. The new character introduced here was Elise which delegated Sonic's role to that of a Mary Sue, as someone on TVTropes pointed out. He literally only exists in the story to fall in love with Elise in order to have someone cry at his passing. All the rest of the actual plot is taken care of by secondary characters, like Shadow or Silver. (Who, incidentally, is one of my favorite Sonic characters, as fate would have it.) The story gets even more ridiculous when someone pointed out that with the time-travel and chaos emerald swapping, one of the emeralds, stays in an impossible paradoxical loop.

Timelines solve everything.

Logically, that means that the blue chaos emerald cannot be possibly used in any other event in any Sonic story. If Sonic 06 were to stay canon, no other Sonic game that included the blue chaos emerald could be accepted canonically too. Which pretty much just leaves us with Sonic CD, since those were Time Crystals or something. And I think that Knuckles Chaotix could exist, too, I guess. Still, that's pretty damn bleak if the Sonic 06 game is so bad that if taken seriously, not only ruins itself (on account of it being so bad) but also ruins retroactively the rest of the series!

It was the last Sonic game I've played. I've been told that the newer ones are getting better, but until they figure out how to catch the same spirit of the game I'd been playing since I was 5, it's going to be hard to convince me that they're still worth my time.

Instead, I'll stick to the Archie Comics who seem to treat all of the characters with a bit more respect.

Except Marina. 'Strewth.

The Best Quest

I'd like to start off my blog this week a day late and by saying that I finally found a piece to my Sega Genesis' AC-in port. I had ended up jerry-rigging the missing piece with a bent push-pin, but maybe I'll desolder everything again to have the intended part back in place... Meh...

When I was five or six, I got literally the best thing I've ever gotten out of a cereal box before. (The cereal in Cinnamon Life cereal box is usually the second best thing.) I happily tore into the box to find this:

A whopping 50 hours of AOL!

 A free video game. Now, this was back in 1996, so it was before any random company could afford to get a game that was a shameless rip-off of another game. (Now, I'm pretty sure that the entire online cereal industry thrives off it.) The game was none other than, Chex Quest!

For those of you who never had a chance to play this wonderful game, let me tell you: it's a kiddie version of Doom with more references to nutrition and breakfast than space marines and demonology. However, this wasn't some cobbled-together rip off of Doom. That would imply that the company, Digital Cafe, had tried to imitate Doom's engine. ID Software actually handed them the tools to make it. Or rather, they licensed the Doom engine to them. (This was back before it was freeware.)

The game itself is pretty much like a G-rated Doom. The demons are now a race of gooey, snot-like aliens called "Flemoids".

Seen here ominously advancing...

The kick-ass space marine is now a kick-ass Chex marine (or as best as I could figure.) And most of the violence has been "zorched" away with the zorcher. A magical teleporting weapon that would harmlessly transport the Flemoid back to its home world. (Or so the nice cereal scientist guy would have us believe.)

"The screaming is a side-effect of the Zorcher, I assure that the Flemoid feels no pain at all..."

The thing that never made sense about all of this was that your melee weapon was a spoon...

Spoons: Not just for gouging anymore!

The cynic in me loves the fact that literally within minutes of explaining that only Zorchers could work against the Flemoids, the game breaks its own continuity and establishes that a normal spoon has the power to banish aliens back to their own world. While the cynic sneers at that, the nerd in me just giggles in excitement to what replaces the chainsaw weapon:

My friends, I introduce, the Boost-Spork. Possibly the best weapon to ever grace a computer screen. Never go head to head with a man who attaches a high-power motor to a spork.

The game is pretty straightforward. Scientists are trapped in a laboratory that happens to be where the aliens attack. Only one man (cereal) has the testicular fortitude (nutritional fortitude) to go in and kick some ass (zorch some ass).

This game is, was, and might forever be my favorite FPS.

The game was about five levels long, though in actuality, almost all of Doom was included in the files. Apparently, by using some cheat codes, you can access some of the Doom levels, but since the creators didn't use all of the sprites, many enemies were left blank. This is an aesthetic improvement from most of the enemies in Doom, but turns what was already a nightmarish game into full-on nightmare fuel, since many of the stronger enemies are completely invisible.

Even more fun can be had by swapping out the WAD files from the actual Doom, allowing you to play through Chex Quest as though it were other Doom levels, or even more fun, play through some Doom levels as though they were Chex Quest.

The game had something of a sequel-hook to get you involved with those 50 free hours of AOL: a sequel, Chex Quest 2 could be downloaded at a website that you could get the address to if you finished the game. Since this was right around the time most kids were actually getting dial-up in the home (if they were lucky) it was hard for me at the time to have to sit out the sequel for almost a full decade. Finally, after I reached an age where I could appreciate nostalgia, I started to look for the sequel only to find myself even more pleasantly surprised:

Finish the Fight!

 Charles Jacobi and Scott Holman, two people who worked on the original two games, decided to finish the originally planned trilogy on their own, much to my delight. In 2008, more than 10 years after the game came free in a breakfast cereal, the saga finally ended... Or did it?

Yes. Yes it did.

Looking back on things, the only problem I have with the series is that the enemies grow only when fed nutritious substances. This is horrifying to a bunch of vitamin-enriched "crunchy even in milk" beings. But, the problem is that everybody grows on nutritious substances. Even the Chex-Man himself!
While it makes sense that the bad guys would have a reason to target a nutrition base on Bazoik (hell, who wouldn't?) it also means that the very kids who are playing the game are essentially committing mass murder in their breakfast bowls every morning. My goal every morning is more or less the same as the Flemoids. I show up unexpectedly on the poor citizens of Pantria (The Pantry planet, close cousin to Food-Cupboardia), ransack their nutrition lab (which was cleverly defended with a plastic shielding underneath their hard "cardboardium" force fields) and devour them by the spoonful. Or handful if I'm going more for a snack than a legit meal.

Also, the problem with the weapons needs to be addressed, and kind of already has been in the sequels. The intro says that they recalibrate their Zorchers to tap into their teleportation matrix. You basically teleport the Flemoids back to their home planet. Presumably so they can regroup and tell everyone about the delicious sources of food they'd found. The sequels follow the same vein as the Doom games. You saved the far-away world only to realize that you forgot to lock the front door to your own world! At the end of the third game, you defeat the Lord of Flemoids. And by defeat, I mean to say, you just sent him back home. The same place that he had no qualms of leaving to invade your sorry-ass planet. There's nothing to stop him from doing it again, only this time he knows what to expect and can plan accordingly.

Also, what the hell are Zorchers?

"What the hell is in my hand?"

The Zorchers are already commonplace things if we take the intro movie at face value. They aren't created specifically to fight off the aliens, they're just recalibrated. There are only a few options. One is that they serve some other purpose than self-defense, which would just be silly. The picture above shows a quad-barreled zorcher for rapid zorching. They come in bigger and heftier sizes. According to Urban Dictionary, the only other non-military use for a zorcher would be, apparently, "to suck the fart out of someone's butt" which I personally find quite distasteful in all senses of the word.

The only other options are all very militarized in nature. Honestly, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that cereal people would happen to have some terrible enemies and would need to defend themselves while blowing up their enemies simultaneously. But there's honestly no way to apply any serious thought to that notion without being overcome by hilarity when you think of the terrible and devastating wars that the Chexonians presumably fought.

"My Crunchling forces will destroy your cities and drink the blood of your people! As part of a complete and balanced breakfast."

 Even stranger is the fact that, although this is a civilian base on Bazoik, constructed only to grow things like fruits and vegetables and study nutrition, there seems to be some really heavy artillery sitting around. Like, smear the room with whatever used to be standing in it kind of artillery. Suddenly, it also strikes me as odd that they'd go all the way to a deserted planet to study mundane things like nutrition. I think that whatever the Chexonians were doing on Bazoik, the nutrition lab was a cover-up for insane military testing. Stuff like testing bio-chemical agents on cute puppies and/or building teleporters into Hell.

Hell-Portals aren't going to build themselves!

Or maybe they were too distracted by the rampant nutrition on their home-planet and needed to get away from it all so they could finally study it without moral qualms of breeding Chex with Kix (which would taste fantastic by the way...)

In the end, the games are pretty solid to play through, if not a little dated. The original version had an interesting glitch where if you tried to play the game on the hardest difficulty, you'd be hard-pressed to beat it, since the last room has so many enemies spawned that it will invariably crash the game if you actually look at them. The new version runs off of the ZDoom engine which allows for free Y-axis movement, so aiming up and jumping are allowed. You can find the entire trilogy here.

May the... Chex... be with... Aw, screw it, there's no way you can make a phrase that doesn't sound horrible...

I'm a Blasting Master

Okay, being a retro-gamer, I've obviously played Blaster Master for the NES. It's one of the more popular games for the NES that never seemed to make much of a splash at the time. If you haven't played it, you definitely should, since it's awesome. I'm a huge fan of the game. I've beaten it several times. I sometimes draw my rendition of SOPHIA (the tank), have read the A.L. Singer (Worlds of Power) novelization of the game, and have even named my car SOPHIA the 3rd. Okay, that's a lie. I don't have a car. So I've named my bus pass SOPHIA the 3rd instead for the time being.

The NES game was a clone of Metroid, except that it had (in my opinion) tighter platforming controls. It varied the gameplay by forcing you to leave your tank and wander around as Jason (a cute little bite-size Jason) and fight the bosses in an overhead mode while you were out of your tank, exploring random caves and structures. It's got a great soundtrack, awesome graphics for its time, and one of the more catchy "game over" tunes. Seriously, even when I was frustrated at having died, that little tune would make me feel just a little better. (Especially that little noise at the end that sounds kind of like, "Browser") In short, it's one of my favorite games. I even had designs for a reboot of the series in the works until someone beat me to the punch.

Unfortunately, the game's franchise has been terrible. It's had a variety of sequels, including one for the Playstation (which I may review at a later date.) A gameboy color release, which was more or less a remake of the NES version with a few alterations, and a rip off of Bomberman. But none of these were as terrible (save the Playstation version, perhaps) as was the Sega Genesis version.

This just screams "Trying too hard"

The game picks up a few years after the events of the first game. I should point out that I mean the American events, because apparently Americans prefer a backwoods farm-boy chasing after his mutated frog as the story. The Japanese version was a bit more simple.

I don't honestly know or remember the story of Blaster Master 2, but that's okay because neither does the game. Or if it does, it doesn't factor in to the ending in any way. (Much like Mass Effect 3.) I had high hopes the first time I found out that this game existed. My first warning sign that things were going to be bad when instead of just taking me straight to the game or showing a quick little intro, the game instead brought me to an options menu where I could choose how many continues I could have and configure the button scheme. This has rarely, if ever, been a good sign of things to come.

The game begins...

And you can immediately deduce that everything is trying to kill you. I couldn't make it past the first level without having to use a variety of cheat codes. Now, my playing experience was made worse, admittedly, by the emulator I was using. I can't reassign the "save state" and "load state" shortcuts, and therefore am forced to use the F5 and F8 keys respectively. This normally isn't a problem, except that I'm playing on a laptop, and that means that those F-keys are always doubled up with another function, forcing me to press the "function" key before being able to press any of the F-keys. This really sucked later on. But for now, suffice to say that the game is rediculously hard at the get go. Most of the enemies take more than three shots to kill. If you're making a video game, please, please, for the love of all that is holy, never have baddies in the first level that take upwards of three hits to kill. And if you're dead set on it, at least make them rare and easy to hit.

The first level is kind of like a forest, although the color scheme reminds me of Angel Island Act 2.

It's been years, but I still can't figure out how Tails can fly...

After a little while, you fall down a pit and enter the underground. The underground is a woefully tragic story of robots, deadly dripping water, and fireballs that will kill you if you don't keep moving.

Rush hour traffic would greatly benefit from that last one.

Now, the gameplay itself hasn't varied all that much from the original NES version, except for how they've made it more retarded and difficult to do anything. Jason can still get out of the tank and has to if he wants to explore doorways that lead to boss fights. The height that he can jump has improved a lot, though.

You'd think that ladders would be kind of unnecessary in his world...

However, Jason still suffers from falling damage, which is a terrible thing to have if you happen to be in a platformer. Sadly enough, if Jason dies from falling, his body just kind of breaks apart and scatters, as though you had the "Bloody Mess" perk from Fallout turned on. This tends to happen a lot if you play as Jason and the game designers must have loved level 4 from the original Blaster Master because not only do you spend a lot of time on foot as Jason, but 1/4 of the game's rewards are keys to access a door to the end of the level.

Well, Level 1 has two bosses. In these boss battles, they've done away with the overhead view of the boss fights, as well as the originality of the first game's bosses. Here are the first two bosses.

At least Jason is all grown up now, for some reason.

Now, at this point, I should point out the counter-intuity (probably not a word) in the control scheme. To make Jason leave the tank in the NES game, you press Select. To make him walk through a door, you pressed up. That makes sense. To make Jason leave the tank in this game, you must press down and C (or whatever you've mapped the "Special Fire" button to) which would be all fine and dandy except that on your Sega Genesis controller, you have this nice little "Mode" button that isn't being used for anything in the game. You must do the same thing to enter the tank, which makes entering the tank a tad bit difficult if you parked over a ladder. And then you have the doors. I was literally stuck in that first boss room for fifteen minutes trying to use that damn door. At first, I tried pressing up, because that's what I seemed to remember doing to get in. Nothing. Maybe I'm not standing right? Adjust. Nothing. Down? Nope. Down and C? Nuh-uh. I pressed just about every combination of buttons there were and started to panic that the codes I had put in had made the game unplayable. I deactivated the codes right as I stumbled upon the secret of the doors. Up and Shoot. I had apparently stumbled on this combination as I entered the room by mistake. I don't know why they felt the need to add the shooting part to make it work. Especially if I'm already accustomed to the "Special Fire" C button as what lets Jason in and out of things. This was pointless, and maybe I'm being nit-picky about it, but I literally couldn't find any help in getting out of that room. I even looked at GameFAQs.com to get some help, but couldn't find any walkthroughs or codes. The only one they had didn't tell me anything but an intro, some "Frequently Asked Questions" (that I doubt were ever actually asked) and a bunch of "Don't steal this!!!" disclaimers that most FAQs and Walkthroughs on GameFAQs tend to be noted for.

Well, the horror was over, the quest for whatever the hell I'm doing in the game could finally continue. I pass through a door and enter the world of overhead view...

The horror... THE HORROR...

These parts were extremely stressful and unnecessary. First, controls. For the first time, I actually regretted not changing anything in the options menu at the beginning of the game. You see, the designers had the novel idea that since SOPHIA is a tank, you should be able to pivot her gun separately from her treads. Good idea on paper, but terrible execution. Here's why. In the standard set up, A button fires the cannon, but the B and C buttons rotate the canon counterclockwise and clockwise respectively. It seemed more natural that B should turn the cannon to the left (being further left on the controller) and C should turn the cannon right. Not so. The enemies move fast here, and before you leave the first level's top-down mode, you'll have encountered a spawn point for infinite enemies. You take heavy damage everywhere you go and thanks to the amount of detail provided by the designers, you lose a lot of control trying to accelerate, decelerate, or even just turn thanks to your treads having to reposition. You bounce off walls like they're made of rubber, often times throwing you back into the same danger that you'd just avoided.

"But what are you complaining about?" I'm sure you're wondering, "You've got cheat codes!"

First of all, interrupting is very rude. I was talking about the difficulty of this part of the game and you came in here all, "Hey, I'm gonna interrupt you with my interrupty-ness. Derp de derp." and it totally threw me off my groove. Don't do that again.

Second: for some reason, I couldn't find any cheat codes that worked for this part. I don't know why. Infinite lives code? Doesn't work on overhead mode. Invincibility? Doesn't work on overhead mode. I don't even get any special weapons in this mode to help defend myself. You'll notice in the screenshots that I actually lose lives in this part of the game. That's because between the difficulty of these areas and the convoluted way that I have to go about making save states, I got stuck in some very nasty situations. I was always lucky if I ended any one of these sections with any life left in my health bar.

After trudging through what could only be described as hell from above, I finally made it to level 2.

I'm honestly just as confused about what that thing is as you are.

First of all, I felt the need to ask something. Why do so many Sega games have skulls in them? Kid Chameleon alone had like, a bazillion. It just seemed like any time Sega wanted the game to be edgy or dark, they'd throw in a couple of skulls in the scenery like Martha Stewart throws flowers into a centerpiece arrangement.

The second level is much like the first. The exploration that you had in the first Blaster Master game is long gone by now. There is no back-tracking, no Metroid-esque exploration. Your path is pretty linear with a few branches that lead to dead ends, sometimes with goodies other time without.

Well, I guess now is a good time to explore your equipment screen.

Two of these options are set to 'ON' and I've yet to see them do anything. Wanna know why? Because everything to the right of the controller is actually a power-up you haven't gotten yet. I suppose that you would already guess that you'd get the hover ability, but it takes the anticipation away when you know that it's an eventuality. If we compare this to the first game's inventory screen:

Each dash represents a component that you would get for the tank, plus one for Jason. It led an air of mystery and kept you on your toes. It didn't just tell you outright what you were going to get. In fact, the only clue you'd have that there was a hover ability at all were the 'H' pickups that didn't do anything until you got the hover module. What's more, there's nothing special about Blaster Master 2's screen at all. Everything is in an ON/OFF position which is cool and all, but we really don't need a full position for "HOVER ON" and a full position for "HOVER OFF". The lights going on or off would do the trick. Greying out the boxes until you'd gotten the add on would help you feel like you could track your progress in the game.

But, I digress: Bosses...

Tanks for all the memories.

Eeeyup. Around here I've started to realize that each boss is just a rebuild of the previous one for the level. Here you get some armor which protects you from an electrical conduit (the only one in the game) and the other nets you the drill arm. (Which you will use exactly twice and has no other applications) Already, the game is setting up extra doodads and macguffins to pick up to pad the gameplay experience.

After some more exploring, you get another overhead portion (HATE HATE HATE)

World 3 is a world engulfed in flame.

This game is the harbinger of the apocalypse.

This is a fun one, since I got lost here for a very long time. The most confusing part was walking through a far away door as Jason only to come out of one that was closer. Upon trying to backtrack through that door I got:

He was also revved up like the roamer in the night.

I discovered that I'd need another pointless powerup that wouldn't directly affect the rest of the game: sunglasses. After a boss fight, I got the glasses, backtracked through the door, only to discover that there was no point to it at all. If I'd already gone the long way around, I didn't need to go through that door at all. To make matters worse, the boss will die over a fire pit, dropping your new power up in fire that hurts you.

Post-humus douchebaggery at its finest.

Both of the bosses will do this. The second drops fire armor which, to the best of my knowledge, is completely pointless after this level anyways. At this point, it's kind of like if Samus got the Ice Beam after a lot of exploration only to discover that its only use was to open the door from the inside of the Ice Beam room. Most of these powerups have been failing to do anything useful. I'm sure that the armor actually affords Jason some extra protection against attacks, but it still seems really pointless.

More overhead sections and then level 4.

He even is starting to look like Samus now...

Level 4 had an interesting premise, that there were dozens of doors to choose from. Choose the wrong one and get sent to some random place. Unfortunately, that random place was probably just one door south of the first door you walked through. The third door gets you a boss battle and the hover upgrade.

"Jason, your tank is the tank that will PIERCE THE HEAVENS!!!"

The boss is the only thing worth mentioning this time around, since the second rendition of him has him teleporting around like Nightcrawler from X-Men.

Incidentally, it's good to see that Master Chief wasn't always a big-shot.

I think they were trying to recreate the boss from level 3 of the NES version. Photophage, but as we called it in our family, Miss Madame Block. (I'm not being cutesy here, that's literally how we referred to the third boss)

If you never cried in frustration because of this boss, then you aren't a man.

The only problem was, because of his teleporting, the boss from Blaster Master 2 is a lot easier to beat, since he will teleport, move to ram you in a random direction, then disappear again. He won't always hit you with the ramming move, but will frequently jump in front of your line of fire.

Well, more overhead portions (I didn't get many screen caps since I was trying desperately not to die.)

Level 5 is the water-themed one. Only there's not that much water. It took me forever to find out where to go because I wasn't aware that Jason could shoot down. (Knowing that would've shaved 30 minutes off of Level 3) The boss is a giant fish that tries to ram you. He actually becomes less deadly the closer you get to beating him, since you get hit twice when he's slow (since you're still in his hit box as he swims past you) but only once when he's fast and near death. Then, just like so many fish before him, he turns red and explodes.

I'm not sure that this is physically possible...

It's at this point that I realize that the game is requiring me to get all of the bosses, because the powerup from this boss wasn't anything special (the ability to use rockets like the tank, but as little Jason). But beating him inexplicably caused a wall to disappear allowing me to move on. Onto the water part of the stage where SOPHIA can't jump. Just like Level 5 in the NES version. Only in the NES version, you got a sweet submarine attachment for SOPHIA. In this one you get...

A toy Scuba-SOPHIA?

Which allows you to...

Jump.

The worst part about this, again, is that it would be useful... If there were ever any use for it afterwards. Once again, Samus is given the Morph Ball for the sole purpose of escaping the room where the Morph Ball is stored. This is the first and last instance in the entire game where your vehicle is completely immersed in water. It's also the first and last instance in the entire game where water doesn't inflict damage to your body.

This part would've been hell without cheats.

Alright, so I skip over the overhead parts because there is nothing cool to see there and they were insanely hard. The safest place was right near the entrance of the overhead level. I still died there more than 3 times.

For that one guy who will not shut up about the overhead parts.

Level 6 is indistinguishable from previous levels. It lacks creativity and just proves that the creators were just trying to pad the game to a good round number of 8 levels. Around level 3, I was hoping that there would only be 5 levels. This was the last nail in the coffin for that dream. (Of course, the fact that I hadn't figured out what the white backpack thing in my inventory was is another good clue)

It's never a good sign if the creators are recycling bosses. I can't remember what I got here, but I honestly think that it was just two keys to doors to continue on to the next level.

Level 7 is another place holder level. The only thing worth mentioning is that by now you have the jetpack for Jason which eliminates falling death. The downside is it seems to burn up more hover fuel than the tank does. (And they somehow inexplicably draw from the same fuel tank...)

I know it's not clever or witty, but damn that's a big key...

I can't remember anything else about this place. The bosses were repeats of the bosses of level 2, which means that they've literally just added two levels of filler for no other reason than to prolong the game. But finally, through perseverance and a helluvalotta cheating:

I was born ready...

Level 8 is red, as you would expect from a game like this. It seems like a staple of early 90's games that the last level had to be red. This one has an interesting gimmick where any door you walk through will put you back at the beginning of the level. I would like to point out that you've gotten one or two gun upgrades for SOPHIA by now, but all of the enemies still require like, 6 or more shots to kill.

Finally, after abusing save states to avoid backtracking, I stumble upon the correct door.

Nothing prepared me for this...

This is the big bad of the game. I have no clue who he is. I'm more confused than in the first Blaster Master, after I'd blown up Fred the frog, why I was still progressing through other levels. Leave it to the Sega Genesis to come up with a boss like this. Honestly, I think they might have ripped this guy off of Kid Chameleon.

Another game known for it's repetitive levels, recycling bosses and nightmare fuel.

Well, just like any other boss, after a million shots, several changes of fighting style and shades of red later:

WHO ARE YOU? WHY WERE YOU SHOOTING ME? WHY AM I EXPLODING?

He blows up and the game ends. Roll credits while SOPHIA rolls on out...

And flies away...

...Um... Yes?

Well, unfortunately, I know that it's not the end. Blaster Master: Blasting Again continues the story. The only interesting thing to note is that the Worlds of Power novelization of Blaster Master is the only legitimate backstory you could get for Blasting Again. They ended up using the story that he created originally as filler since Blaster Master had little to no story for 90% of the game. It deals with Jason and SOPHIA's creator, an alien girl named Eve. They fell in love during the course of the book and have a son named Roddy... But that's a story for a different time...

Still a better love story than Twilight