How to (Not) Spend Your Afternoon

So, it's Wednesday already, and I had no article for the week. I woke up to a disheartening phone call regarding a financial situation which started the day off just absolutely peachy.

Now, when deciding what game to write about, I usually choose one that I had noticed being terrible before hand and hadn't actually played all the way through. This time, I figured that I could kill two birds with one stone and eliminate a terrible game that's on my "haven't beaten" list of games I actually own.

Unfortunately, that game happened to be this:

Gravity is still just a theory.

 What brave person decided to mix the words "entertainment" and "education" into the bastard-word (bastord) "edutainment" was probably thinking something along the lines of an interactive museum display on dinosaurs where the dinosaurs come to life or something. Not a slow slog through the world of basic geography. The fact that you play as Luigi was probably supposed to be a selling point, but it would end up haunting his career until the ghosts of his dead popularity would chip in and buy him a mansion to pay him back.

This week, on Cribs...

The story is simple: Mario slips through some sort of inter dimensional portal (cleverly illustrated as a large gaping pit) and ends up in Antarctica where he sees Luigi already waiting for him with Yoshi. What ensues is illustrated below.

Bowser has gotten smarter and started to make "I Wanna Be The Guy"-esque traps to capture Mario outside of his Earth-side base. In a stunning move of brotherly love and sheer stupidity, Luigi enters the castle (that could be littered with even worse traps, like falling cherries or giant Mike Tysons) and tells the dinosaur that can eat anything to wait outside. Not only is that stupid, considering that Yoshi might be able to just gorge himself on enemies that Luigi might face, but it's also dickish behavior since Yoshi, being a dinosaur, is likely cold-blooded, and Luigi is basically telling him to freeze to death.

Well, Luigi enters the castle of doom and destruction. Traps waiting in every floor tile, an army of Koopa Troopas waiting to eviscerate him, and explosively violent Bob-Ombs and Chain-Chomps to completely obliterate Luigi at every turn!

Or, maybe a hallway with five doors... Uh... Evil, sinister doors that are the portal to a hellish landscape made up of suffering and sin! Pain and-

Oh... It's just Rome... I, uh... huh... Really? Nothing about endless torment? Well, at least there's a Koopa Troopa ready to tear into Luigi! He'd better be careful, or else-

Damn it!
Yep. Edutainment means no game overs. That Koopa just passed Luigi like anyone else you meet in Rome. Right, so after wandering around a city map that rivals Grand Theft Auto IV in accuracy

It's so life-like!

You discover that Bowser's insidious plan is to steal national landmarks... For some unexplored reason. Of course, the Koopas have yet to bring the artifacts back to Bowser, presumably because they're just as lost in the city streets as you tend to be. Jumping on the Koopas will make em pop like you did the spiral jump from Super Mario World. Three out of all of those Koopas have the artifacts on them. You'll recognize them by the way that you bounce after landing on them.

And by the way they explode.

I almost wish I were making that up. Hitting the right Koopa Troopa is one of the few moments that you feel anything similar to enjoyment. One will shoot off like a rocket, another will crack and crumble, and my favorite will explode with a hilariously large explosion. (It was hard to get a good screen cap of that, but the explosion gets much larger than that.)

A small white baggie on the ground in Italy... Yeah, that seems legit...

For example, that bag in front of Luigi there contains the Sistene Chapel roof. Not joking. The whole damn roof from the famous Vatican Building is located inside that small pouch 3/4 the size of Luigi's head. Being the good guy that he is, Luigi will bring it back to its rightful location and they'll be overjoyed to have their national treasure back in safe hands.

Actually, the nice lady at the booth will assume that the ceiling that you're packing around is a fake and demand that you prove its authenticity by answering a few questions about its history. What's that? You come from a magical land of talking mushrooms and dinosaur dictators? Well... Here's a pamphlet with all the information you'll need to answer my questions.

Okay, this is a different pamphlet...

Basically, any shmuck with this pamphlet is prepared to answer her questions. The funnier thing about this premise is the rewards offered for returning the items. A gladiator's spear was another artifact here in Rome (You return it to the Colosseum). See how that's a $2000 reward for returning what is, essentially, just an old death tool? Luigi should be rolling in the cash, considering that for about half of that, Rome could probably just make an imitation that looks exactly like the one that was stolen. But, if that's the going price for an average run-of-the-mill gladitorial spear, you have to wonder what kind of cash the Vatican is willing to part for their precious Sistene Chapel ceiling. I mean, they can't have devout catholics and tourists getting rained on! (I also hear that there's a pretty cool looking piece of graffiti on the underside of the ceiling) I quick guess would be like, $350,000 at the bare minimum, right? Actually, they'll give you $900 for it. Apparently, "Mario Teaches Understanding Economic Value of Priceless Artifacts" was still in the works, because any person with half a brain would know that $900 is a raw deal

Well, now is a good a time as any to bring up your tools menu:

The artifacts show which artifacts you have collected. (Intuitive, I think) However, if you have more than one, you have to make sure you have the right one selected to be able to turn it in. Otherwise, the information lady will say, "Sorry, we're not looking for X" which I think shows an extraordinary amount of social disunity. I show up to the Colosseum and try and use the Sistene Chapel ceiling? They don't even say, "Sorry, we're looking for a spear, but you know who is missing a ceiling?" Nope, just like any tourist information lady, any words that come out of their mouth are just other ways of, "Shut the hell up and go away."

Computer there keeps track of information on the area you've discovered by talking to people or reading pamphlets. By talking to people, you can discern your location, which will allow you to call Yoshi!

He would walk five hundred miles, and he would walk five hundred more...

By getting on Yoshi, you can travel faster and scare away the Prickly Pete (I think that's their name) that blocks the blue exit pipe. You're supposed to figure out where you are based on what people say to you, but usually I could figure it out by trial and error. I see pagodas. Lots of them. And the music sounds Chinese. I must be in China. Out of the two or three locations in China, where could I be? Let's see, do I know of any artifacts or landmarks in Hong Kong? I do. Let's try there.

After returning the three artifacts, mounting Yoshi, and escaping back to the South Pole, you're rewarded with a score counter and a password. What the hell the score is for, I have no clue, since there's no way of seeing what your current score is...

I would go through the tedium of telling you all of the places that you could go, but I honestly can't remember. After the second level, I stopped reading pamphlets and cranked up the emulator speed to 200%. I used save states to breeze through the quizzes which were pointlessly easy anyways. After the first five levels, it was time for a boss fight!

"You know about geography and 3rd grade history?! Now you must... Watch me run around a little."

Of course, since they're about as dangerous as Koopas, the boss fights become a lot like trying to kill a cockroach. They scurry around at random, you're probably going to have to step on them more than once, and they're really not all that dangerous to you. The most you could say about the fight is that you'd be annoyed that you have to do it, if it weren't for the fact that this is the closest you're going to get to an action sequence in this game.

Honestly, I was extremely worried. Around world 3, I started freaking out a bit. There are seven Koopa Kids. That logically follows that there are seven worlds. Eight, even, since that's been a staple since the first Super Mario Bros. game. 7 koopa kids plus Bowser himself. At this point I started to panic and decided to use a password to skip to the end... Only to find out that world 3 is the last world, so I loaded up my save state and finished the game like normal.

Unfortunately, after beating the third (and last) Koopa Kid, the showdown with Bowser is... a little anti-climatic...

Derpiest Bowser I've ever seen.

Luigi flips a switch that releases Mario from prison. Bowser jumps down between them. Luigi flips the switch again and the ground opens up and Bowser falls into a gigantic cannon. (Which is funny, since you already returned the largest cannon in the world to its rightful place in Moscow) He's shot out of his castle and into the Antarctic tundra where he freezes to death and shatters. Roll credits.

I couldn't make this up if I tried....

So thus ended my foray into Mario is Missing. I can cross it off my list of games I own but haven't beaten. It's quite a great collectors item, though. But this wasn't my whole afternoon. I thought what would make a great article was to feature several edutainment games. The next on the list was

Luigi Teaches How to Steal Your Brother's Girlfriend (Alternate Title)

I had actually played this one back in fourth grade. I hunted it down at demu.org only to find out that I'd probably need a MSDOS emulator to run it. I figured, screw it. It would be too hard to take screen caps anyways. But there were lots of other edutainment games I'd played. I briefly thought of Mario's Time Machine

Only I remembered that the SNES version is so crazy that I don't even really know how to play it and the NES version is pretty lackluster.

So I moved on to another game that wasn't Mario related...

The answer... is relative. (YEAAHHHH!)

I have this one for the NES but figured that since I already had my SNES emulator on my compy, might as well play the better version. The game is pretty simple. You're a Time Agent trying to stop a series of thefts in the past. You go and collect clues and stuff while bouncing all around time to find the culprit. (Spoiler alert: It's probably NOT going to be Carmen Sandiego.)

I'm a sucker for anything time travel related (hence why I have tried to play Mario's Time Machine more than once, sadly, to no avail) and so I signed up.

Basically, that contract says I work for them, but they're not even going to notify next of kin if Carmen has a gun.

I'm given a Chronoskimmer (Which is not the title for the next Chrono Trigger game.) and am allotted 40 hours to find the culprit. Every action I do uses up a couple of those hours. Talking to people, checking out my informant, scanning for clues, searching the culprit database for relevant matches, and (confusingly enough) traveling through time. This is one thing that I never understand. Be it from Doctor Who or Back to the Future, they're always rushing around against the clock. YOU'VE GOT A TIME MACHINE!!! You literally have all the time in the world. What the hell is with the 40 hour time limit on catching the culprit if I can literally just go back in time and tell myself where he or she was and save myself the hassle of investigation? Well, my own version of it is called save states which allow me to know what my informant is going to say before I actually talk to him. So that's pretty sweet.

I'd played this quite a bit on the NES and there were a few things that bugged me. One, the evidence I collect is actually hearsay and rumors I pick up from random witnesses. It's stuff like, "He had blue eyes" or "His hair was a dark brown". The more random stuff was "His favorite artist was a Dutch post-impressionist". Sadly enough, in the evidence list you have spaces for sex, eye color, hair color, favorite author and favorite artist. I understand edutainment constraints, but I've never seen a CSI or Law and Order episode where some random guy on the street happened to know nothing about the crime or what the suspect looked like, but did know that Rudyard Kipling was his favorite author. Even in Case Closed where that might be the whole crux of the plot doesn't have that kind of craziness! And that's a show about a teenage genius who's shrunk down to the body of an 8 year old by some magic poison! (It's a great show, by the way.)

The second problem I have is with the time constraint. I remember being literally one step away from catching the culprit. I had the warrant ready and all I had to do was deploy the Catch-Bot to apprehend the criminal. I use the action to apprehend the guy and that uses up my last few hours. I'm called back by the Chief and am chewed out for letting the criminal get away. I'm in a time machine. The bad guy is right in front of me and I can't get a single hour more on my time limit?

All in all this game gives you a kind of boring frustration that you can't really froth about since it's exactly what you expect from an edutainment game. Words can't really describe the exact amount of disappointment and irritation I got from playing these games today, but luckily, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego can help me out:

Yep. It's kind of like that.

History Class

Sometime early in my life, I think it was probably around 1993, my family walked into a second-hand game store. I was probably three at the time, my sister was about 8 and my brother was around 10. My brother had taken some old NES games that he didn't play anymore and was trading them in to get a better game. Unfortunately, he had to contend with me and my sister. Now, I defer to my brother's judgement in hindsight, and I'm sure he was going to get a much better game. But me and my sister were taken in by a game with relatively cutesy cover art and we out-voted him by means of a tantrum. He begrudgingly took home this cart:

This looked awesome to a three year-old.

We plugged it in and enjoyed it for the whole of 10 minutes as frustration set in that we'd been duped into getting this game for $15 (Mine had the price tag on it for years) that none of us could get past the first level. Despite being cleverly marketed to young children, it would take me 18 years to actually beat the game. And that was with an emulator and hacking it so I could have invincibility, unlimited lives, and the best weapon in the game.

I would've used level select codes, but I'm too much of a man for that.

Even with the prospect of never seeing the game over screen (and hearing it's catchy little jingle) completely eradicated, I had to use a lot of save states to ever make it to the end. At this point, I'd go ahead and start telling you the story of Dino Riki and why he's perpetually marching towards the top of the screen, but as far as I know, this game has no story. There's no little tid-bit thrown in by localization talking about how Dino Riki is searching for food, or for shelter, or to get laid. (That would pretty much cover the spectrum for a cave-man, I would imagine.) Nope, just one caveman against the world.

We start off the game in the first (and for the better part of my life the only) level in the game. It's reminiscent of Pocky & Rocky, only this came out before hand. You slowly march onward towards oblivion as random crap comes flying at you at the speed of really really fast. So, it's a shooter. Only you also have to jump.

I have to wonder if video game characters have to go through some sort of therapy to get over aquaphobia.

I don't have to tell you that the water is deadly dangerous. The jumping is a little complicated by the fact that in order to actually go anywhere, you need a running start. While the world somehow scrolls below you. If Dino Riki could stop marching towards his death for one second, I wouldn't have so many problems. But at least here, the lily pads give a larger target than later in the game.

World one is just like this. Desolate jungle prairie with rocks with a few rivers and lakes. Also in the lakes are moving land masses that too roll under Dino Riki's feet. I'm not sure which is more confusing: the moving land masses or the fact that Dino Riki doesn't move with them.

After a few dozen tries I finally got passed the platforming parts and started to make my way to the bosses' chamber.

He's clearly terrified to know what lurks in the shadow of the cave...

 
I think I've made it this far once without any cheats before. But I'm not entirely sure. To be honest, my no cheating policy is past its statute of limitations when it comes to games older than 15 years. Doubly so if I happen to have a cheat device handy...

Which I do.

Other game reviewers tend to try and make it through the game on skill alone. But, one: I don't really review the games, I just write about them, and two: for the games I like to write about, reviewing them would be me just ranting about them. There are tons of more entertaining ranters for that kind of coverage. (For example, Angry Video Game Nerd) In a lot of cases, I've just never actually beaten the game before and I want to see the end.

Back to Dino Riki-

Great, he started fighting the boss without me! In case you can't tell, that's a pterodactyl. Honestly, from that screen-cap it could be a lot of things. The boss is hard if you're not cheating like I am. I am cheating. So the boss was really easy. He just moves back and forth shooting projectiles that you can shoot down. Actually, if you have the torch power-up (which I did) he'd be pretty simple even then.

Soon, you're whisked away to world 2...

Now, this might just be me nit-picking, but where did this architecture come from? The game is clearly the Adventures of Dino Riki. The last boss: a dinosaur. The protagonist: a cave man. Not only is there advanced civilization here, but it's already come and gone! I can't blame the creators for not wanting the game's scenery to get repetitive, but seriously? Ruins? Ancient ruins? In the middle of the Paleozoic? I dunno, Hudson-Soft, you've just lost a lot of respect.

Not that I was brimming with it beforehand.

This level contains quicksand instead of water, which admittedly is more of a real threat than a water hazard would be. Also the introduction of these guys:

Here we see Dino Riki learning that fire is instantly fatal (a fact that I only hitherto suspected). They're weird looking triceratops that breathe fire. Again, Dino Riki is marching slowly to his doom. I can run forward to dodge them, but I have to still wait for the screen to scroll. Making this fire instantly deadly is kind of a shot to the nuts, really. As if it weren't hard enough to dodge all the crap flying at me, you want me to time a dash to the top of the screen (where bad guys come from) only to slowly tap downwards so I'm not hugging the place where I'm sure to die? I'm just going to say it: I hate shooters for this very reason.

I can handle the sheer number difference (1 ship vs an entire solar system's worth of star destroyers) and even the one-hit kill policy prevalent in many of these types of games. But I can't stand not being in control of when I go somewhere. Even in Super Mario Bros. 3, the slow moving wall of death in a few of the levels pisses me off. I don't like being forced forward, and when I am being forced forward I don't like some invisible barrier telling me that I can't go any faster. This game suffers from this syndrome far worse than most shooters, though. You'll see why soon enough.

Back to Dino Riki, he's found the boss by now after navigating some primordial ruins.

Holy... Alright, I didn't notice until know but it looks like the T-Rex is shooting fire out of his crotch! Oh man, that's hilarious. I call this boss the Tigersaurus Rex because it looks like it has tiger stripes and I thought it was a clever play on words. He trudges back and forth and sometimes in a swooping motion to the bottom of the screen while shooting fire balls out of... his mouth. Sorry to disappoint you. He's just as easy to beat as the Pterodactyl if you have the upgrade (which I'm certain that you do not). After you shoot him enough times he'll die the same death that all the dinosaurs before him did.

He'll inexplicably explode.

World three is weird because... well... I think you're trudging through the land of the dead to be honest. The world is a sickly shade of green, there are flying skulls and crap, and then you've got fun skeletons that like to bull rush you after looking just like the background.

Okay, no, I've got it, I've traveled to that distant world that the Power Rangers went to in the movie. You know? Billy rides a giant dinosaur skeleton like a cowboy, says, "I've got a bone to pick with you!" and then takes out the load-bearing bone (located somewhere near the base of the neck) and the whole thing collapses? Yeah. That must be where I'm at. But, unfortunately for me, I'm not a Power Ranger, so trying to mount one to remove that bone is instantly fatal as well...

"I've got a bone to-THE PAIN!!!"

After awhile, the enemies call upon their good friend Gaia to try and screw me up.

But little does that titan know that I have save states that allow me to try and retry every pit she opens up for me. I finally make it to the end of the level. Surely with such a hard level, the boss is going to be pretty fantastic. I don't know how they could possibly top the T-Rex though... Maybe they're going to throw a T-Rex with a Pterodactyl on it's back?

Or a snake... Snakes are good, I guess. Though it seemed more or an appropriate boss for the desert world I was just in. The snake would be a little more difficult. It fades in and out, teleporting all around the arena, lobbing off a few fireballs, only to disappear again. He can even appear at the bottom of the screen, which is totally unfair since Riki here can't fire down. I can't fathom why Dino Riki can't fire behind him. I understand the game's reasoning: it was poorly made. But it's Riki's reason that eludes me. Maybe it's some crazy caveman superstition. Presumably the same one that overrules survival instincts and tells him to march forward off a cliff...

World four starts and... well... Remember how I speculated that World two was a ruin because they didn't want to repeat scenery? Scratch that. All three parts of World four are rehashes of the previous three worlds, only shorter and with a boss battle at the end of each section. Also, they're a hell of a lot harder.

Nature has many subtle ways of telling you to **** off.

It was at roughly this point I started wondering what Dino Riki's motives were. What was the drive for all of this suicidal insanity? I imagined the staple cutscene I would see at the end of the game... Would it be him with a girl and a little heart above their heads, assuring me that little Riki was going to become a man that night? Or maybe this was all about getting food. Maybe I'd see him chowing down on a piece of meat. You know, that one bone with a meat cylinder smack dab in the middle that you tend to see in anime and video games. Maybe that would be the whole crux of the game. I wondered if maybe the instruction manual came with a little back story, or if there would be a little cutscene at all. Maybe the ending would have nothing to do with the rest of the game because localization totally dropped the ball. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened, right? Well, I beat the Tigersaurus Rex again and move on... 

Surviving World 4, part 3 practically requires that you're cheating in order to win. Check this out:

All of the places that aren't brightly lit are death. So, you have to jump (with finnicky jump controls, I might remind you) onto little platforms the width of your body, while Riki continues to march slowly upwards and the screen scrolls downwards. Even worse is that the game will send out baddies to intercept you here as well. Lots of them. That shoot. With fire. (Or whatever it is that they shoot, I don't know...) It took me about 50 tries to get past this part... only for this to happen:

The earth rips itself a new one to rip me a new one.

Let me narrate what you're looking at: My death. While trying to leap from the top left platform over to the solid ground on the left, Riki didn't make it. Of course, that was a good thing because as the screen scrolled a little further after my death, a new whole appeared, meaning that my leap of faith came with a 50/50 chance of survival anyways. I'd need to jump to the right in order to progress and after that, still land on a tiny island of safety to jump to the entrance of the boss' room. It's at times like these, I wish that game designers would be straight up honest.

Level 4 in its entirety

World five is just like World 2 only harder with more instant death-traps and an insane amount of baddies swooping at me. At least the boss shakes things up a bit:

Mario Paint eat your heart out.

I giant fly that shoots out smaller giant flies. This boss would be seriously hard without cheats. Not impossible, probably, but I know I couldn't do it. After a few hits, the fly will split into two and bounce around the top of the stage, impervious to your shots until the two become one again. After a few good hits, the fly explodes into nothing. I can't wait to see what the ending will bring! Maybe a "Conglaturation! You are win!" screen or something like I wrote above. Maybe just little Dino Riki walking in place with a little jingle that was sometimes the only reward you got for beating a game. Or maybe-

... Really? Not even a little victory, "Hey you just beat the last boss, good for you" jingle? I know that cutscenes, real cutscenes, were not often seen back then, but even Mario got him and the Princess standing together and a big ol' "Thank You". So, I went ahead and took the liberty of making a ending screen for the game.

... This game is mean to me....

The Hero We Deserve?

THEY can use super powered rings, why can't you?

Those of us who survived the early nineties knew that there were loads of dangers. Maybe it was getting hooked on crack and ending up a burn out that needed help from Kirmit the Frog and the Ninja Turtles in order to break the destructive cycle. Maybe it the possibility of getting kidnapped because you trusted a man you'd never met before. Or maybe it was just because of your Cabbage Patch doll who wanted to eat your head. But there was one thing that we were certain about: the ecology of earth was in danger... Or, at least, that's what Captain Planet and the Planeteers would have us believe.

The premise of the show was simple. Gaia, the Spirit of Earth, gets 5 teenagers to help preserve nature with the aid of 5 magic rings, each representing an element. Earth, fire, wind, water, and heart. Although the heart is definately more of a vital organ than an element, we're going to let that slide for now. Now, as a stand-alone, these powers were pretty awesome. Fire could conjure up flames at any moment. Earth could make you an Earthbender. Water would give you dominion over all water. Wind could... well... blow wind... And Heart would allow you to talk to animals. When these powers combined, however, we got a green-mulleted, shiny super hero named Captain Planet who would be the embodiment of all of these powers.

There are a couple of flaws in this show that maybe got overlooked. The first and most shocking to me is that they gave the troubled, inner-city youth dominion over fire. This just screams attempted arson. Even if he's not that troubled, giving a boy the ability to conjure up flames at his beck and whim is terribly irresponsible. Every boy goes through something of a pyromaniac stage, burning all sorts of crap just because it's there to burn. Another thing that I'd want to point out is that it seems like if anyone in any cartoon gets the ability to talk to animals, it's always the Indian kid, right? And finally, I'd just like to point out for anyone else interested that the voice of Linka was also the voice of Sally Acorn from the Adventure of Sonic the Hedgehog and is also the voice of female undead in World of Warcraft. (Kath Soucie)

Only two of these had disturbing fan art when I image searched the names. Try and guess which ones!

The show, understandably, got some parents in a fervor. I had friends whose parents wouldn't let them watch the show. The problem is that all of the villians are usually big-wigs in corporations. So, in the Captain Planet world, all corporate heads are terrible villians. There isn't a single company in this show that is eco-friendly. So, it gives something of a weighted view for young viewers. They grow up thinking the same thing. How much of that is steeped in truth and how much of it I just made up is anyone's guess. But I think that's the same reason why there's so much hooha about the new Lorax movie...

ANYWAYS, this series spawned a game with 10 levels of eco-friendly awesome.

HE'S HEADING RIGHT FOR US!!!

I had the opportunity to play this game all the way through, but to be fair, I only made it to level two with insane amounts of save states and then after that I hacked for lives and health. The main design flaw is that your attacks use energy. This is the same energy that you use as life. While this is not that important while flying in the helicopter (as one hit will kill you dead), this is terribly unfair when you're playing as Captain Planet. Understand that while Captain Planet only exists to fight things like pollution and toxic waste, the very thing he battles renders him weaker than a heart-attack patient. Blow some smoke in his face and he's on the ground. The game makes sure you remember this by coating the walls in any sort of slime that is very fatal to our beloved blue captain.

Level one has you trying to stop Hoggish Greedly as he's tapping oil reserves or drilling for oil or whatever. The point is that he's got an army of helicopters ready to shoot down a bunch of teenagers because he's violating every EPA law and code that has ever existed. After a seemingly never ending side shooter that's horribly redundant and insanely difficult, you land and the Planeteers summon Captain Planet. The ritual is simple: you draw a pentagram on the floor in chicken's blood and get someone to start reading from the 6th chapter of the Necronomicon. While you've got someone chanting, you sacrifice any sort of small animal in the center with the sacrificial knife. What's that? You only remember having to combine the power of the Planeteer's rings to summon him? Well... sure... I guess that would work too...

Captain Planet infiltrates the base. Here he can punch and fly. Also, he can kind of do this Sonic Spin-Dash attack which turns him into whatever element you have chosen. Now, it's at this point that I must point out that in order to change the element you have selected, you must press Start. To pause the game, you must press Select. Now, maybe it's just me, but it seems like they broke like, the only real law there is to video games: Start button pauses the game. You never mess that up. It might bring up a menu screen, but the game will be stopped after pressing Start. This led to many unnecessary deaths on my part when I tried to either pause the game or tried to switch out what power I had equipped.

Now, using these powers drains your health bar. Getting hit drains your health bar. Staying in one place probably drains your health bar. When you get to the end of the level, you fight Hoggish Greedly as he stands in a control room controlling two robotic arms that will keep grabbing you. The battle was interesting until I realized that attacking the arms does nothing, and instead I had to fly to the blind spot for the arms and bullets which is right in front of the glass to the room Hoggish is standing in. You punch through the glass and beat the level.

The next level you're back in the helicopter. The wicked Dr. Blight wants to dump toxic waste into the water! Why, you might ask? Because screw you, that's why! That toxic waste isn't going to dump itself into the water! This level requires you to use the power of earth to throw a rock in front of three different trucks to stop them from dropping the sludge into the water. I was able to thwart the first one just fine. The second... well...

Damn you nature!

The second truck is nigh impossible to catch up to before it reaches the next dump point. (Your helicopter inexplicably explodes when it starts to dump the sludge) After watching my helicopter blow up half a billion times, I decided that this level was broken, on account of the truck perpetually going faster than you helicopter, and used a password to skip it. (637511, in case you were wondering...)

Another level as Captain Planet. These are ridiculously easy if you're cheating. If you're not cheating... well, if you're not cheating or using billions of save states, then you're probably still on level one. I beat the boss. Praise is had.

"Well done in stepping back and letting me get all the glory! Couldn't have done it without you!"

Level 5 has you playing underwater. Hoggish Greedly is now poaching sea creatures. (Hoggish is kind of a dick, in case you hadn't noticed.) This is a really hard level, since you move so slowly and you'll have these homing mines that make you explode. There are also these missiles that launch up and will make you explode. And these walls... that... make you explode... I think maybe the submarine is made of nitroglycerin? Well, there are other boats of better structrual integrity that are poaching the sea creatures. You use the power of heart to command the animals to attack the boats for you. Or fall in love with them.

The yellow squid, romantically entangled with a boat... Nature is beautiful...

Jokes about squids copulating with watercraft aside, this level really is a beast. But it pays off as you dock in Hoggish Greedly's base and have Captain Planet stop him before any fish get really hurt.

Oops... Well, better late then never, right?

The showdown with Hoggish is even easier this time around. You just need to get to him. There's a hallway of vacuum pipes that feed into meat grinders (like the one above) that you have to dodge and then once you get near Hoggish he gives up and Captain Planet blows up the base, because looting and polluting is wrong, but terrorism is hunky dory.

The next level is rather interesting. Looten Plunder is hunting the African Elephant for its tusks. Ivory is a big deal, even today. Of course, this is wrong. We must stop it. What we do here is... It's easier to show you, actually...

Not shown: Using the elephant to take out anti-air missile bases... Seriously...

The power of heart apparently can be used as some sort of flesh magnet to pick up and elephant. You then drop him off right before an anti-air missile silo for it to trample it to smithereens and then it trundles off into a wildlife preserve. Of course, in reality, an elephant can't survive a fall much larger than a foot, much less three to four times its height. But we couldn't have the Planeteers be killing off the elephants while trying to save them, could we?

Finally, after all (read: 3) elephants are safe from captivity, Captain Planet is summoned to stop the slaughter of the elephants. This is where things get messed up for a kids game...

Captain Planet is channeling fire power, in case you were wondering. Pictured above is an elephant's skeleton (tusks intact, interestingly enough) at the bottom of a pool of blood. Watered down blood, perhaps, but you are in a slaughterhouse after all. That's definitely not Kool-Ade.

After navigating the slaughterhouse maze and freeing a bunch of elephants along the way, you get to fight the boss. It's actually more of a chase that requires luck and memorizing the path that you run along. You just need to get close enough to punch the ship and then it disappears.

Now we're in the home stretch. The last two levels are facing off against none other than Duke Nukem!

He's here to radiate and chew gum... and he's all outta gum...

Not who you were expecting, huh? The creators of the Duke Nukem we know and love actually changed his name to Duke Nukum for a little while to avoid a potential lawsuit until they found out that Captain Planet's Duke Nukem wasn't actually copyrighted, so they changed the name back. And Gaia looks totally hot right there. Kind of like Storm's long lost sister or something. Mmmm.... Nature....

This is the most infuriating level of the game, aside from level 3. I used a billion save states to get to the end, because you're forced into little tiny pathways that always include a fatal trap at the end, while enemies are shooting at you from every which direction. Also, touch anything and you'll explode. That's why I didn't get any screen caps until the very end.

I never thought that I'd see the radioactive monster's evil lair as a sanctuary until now.

The last level of the game is kind of like Contra. Everything makes sense up until then. The last level is a myriad of colored balls and radioactive isotopes. All of which hurt you. The end fight is actually a puzzle. Duke Nukem will shoot some sort of laser at you. All around the room are little mirrors that you have to position correctly in order reflect the beam at the energy core that Duke is standing under. After three self-inflicted blows, Duke is susceptible to a single punch. And like that, Captain Planet has saved the day! Roll ending sequence!

YEAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

...Unless you didn't make it that far...

Great Odin's beard! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!!!