Stop N Swop's Eternal Mystery

I never liked this game.

There's something inherently mysterious about the Nintendo 64. Maybe it was because it was the first time I ever saw a game in full 3D. Maybe it was because so many games had tiny little secrets to fill up the extra space they hadn't planned on using. Or maybe it was because we owned at any one time, 3 N64 games and one of them was always Automobili Lamborgini. Probably the last one.

I was somewhere around 8 or 9 when I started to really get into the Nintendo 64, which is handy, because that's about when they started actually filling out their game library. (There were 9 US releases in 1996, the year the system came out...) I've said in other venues that I love older games because of the nostalgia that I felt, and the specifics of that nostalgia were the mystery of an unexplored world. Games like Link to the Past held my attention for so long because it seemed like there was always more to explore. By adding a new dimension to a game, my interest was exponentially peaked. Add on to the fact that I was fairly gullible and the internet was brand new in our house, I was able to extend the replay value of most games far beyond the normal time.


Here's something to consider, and something that I've had to face myself. There are no secrets in video games anymore. By a quick Google search or checking out GameFAQs, you can know every intimate detail of any game within a matter of days after the game's release. I was playing Ocarina of Time 3D on my nephew's 3DS (not owning one myself, mind you) and he gave me a few pointers on how to do some things. First I squelched my instinct to trump him. Yeah, I know that you have to shoot Gohoma with the slingshot. I've done it without a sword on my back! (Incidentally, I can't remember the last time I booted up OoT on the N64 without glitching away my sword...) He told me of a few secret places that, having owned this game for almost 15 years now I already knew. But it surprised me that he knew. He then explained to me that he saw it on Google...

This made me sad because his generation will never know of the wonders of finding secrets by yourself, by some douche-bag kid on the playground named R.J., or by sifting through billions of angelfire webpages to find them.

You asshole, R.J., you don't have ANY industry connections, do you?

I had extra hours of fun looking for cheats, secrets and glitches back when there was no certain, reliable source for game information. All while my brother was yelling at me because we had dial-up and he needed to make a phone call.

These were the codes for the unobtainable.

So, my friend's uncle works for Nintendo and he says that this is totally, real. In order to get the Triforce in Zelda, you have to play Saria's Song on the Fairy Ocarina 999 times and then get to Hyrule Castle by only doing backflips...

Codes like these were everywhere. Some of them, like the one mentioned above, were easily spotted as fake, even to a gullible 9 year old. (But, to my chagrin, I would for years claim that the Debug Code was a fake until PopFiction proved me wrong.) Sometimes they would offer something else, like a new sword, or a different color Epona. The stupidest one was a “secret ending” which more or less implied that Link and Zelda had sex. Which is rediculous, not because Nintendo would never allow something like that to be in one of their games, but because a princess and a common forest boy? Perish the thought!

Now, there was some logical reason that these codes existed, though even to me at 9, I thought was stretching logic a bit. First was that there was a Triforce shape on the Quest screen in the center of all the medalions. (They claimed that that would fill in). Second, in two out of 3 console Zelda games, the main point of the game was to obtain the Triforce. But most damning of all was the Unicorn Fountain picture and the Triforce from the treasure chest picture that Nintendo Power first displayed along with 98 other screenshots of the yet-unreleased Zelda 64. (Along with a beam-sword attack that would get dropped much to my disappointment.)

But while my search for new ways to lengthen my Zelda game play time took me to further horizons of stupidity than a 9 year old should be aware of, there was one game that intrigued my interest well into my adulthood: Banjo-Kazooie.

Her beak says no, but her eyes say yes...

Banjo-Kazooie, for those of you poor unfortunate souls who haven't played it, was the perfect platformer for the N64. The levels were varied enough, you had just the right amount of power-ups and attacks to fill out your roster, and there were just the right amount of collectibles. Something that Rare would take to extreme measures until they would parody it in the 360 game, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Plus, the songs are so catchy that even ponies can sing along.

Maybe if I smash my head against the ice for a few more hours...

About halfway through the game, you came to the obligatory snow level, which was Christmas themed. In a small cave at the back of the level was a tunnel that was blocked off by a wall of ice. Behind that wall was the mystical and fabled Ice Key. It would taunt you. Surely it was a puzzle. An enigma that you needed to solve. Let's see, there's fire in the cave, but I can't bring it over to melt the wall. Can I position Kazooie to shoot eggs at it? I can, with enough finagling, but they just bounce off. The variety of wall-breaking attacks in my arsenal either don't affect the wall or can't be attempted here. How the hell do I get that?!

Now, this was in a time when games were a lot more picky about space requirements. It didn't make sense for the game developers to include something and not make it usable or obtainable in the game. Or, at least, not for them to do that and then put it prominently on display somewhere in the game.

Of course, if you're a completionist like me and got all 100 Jiggies in the game, you were rewarded with something even more infuriating: A clip at the end of the game showing Banjo and Kazooie prancing tantilizingly close to the Ice Key and two large colored eggs. We were promised that they would be able to be collected in Banjo-Tooie, at which point seemed like a joke. Toting a sequel in a video game?! Now it's standard practice to turn any well-selling game into a trilogy. (Or, if you're Halo, into 6 games, a remake, and a new trilogy coming soon) But back then, to my juvenile mind, that seemed preposterous. That's like counting your chickens before they hatch. Sure, this game was fun, but there's no way that it was like Mario or Zelda. There was no guarantee that there would ever be a sequel.

Well, there was. It was even called Banjo-Tooie, as Rare looked at my little face and yelled, “SUCK IT!” (I'm still opposed to the name since it seems so glib.) I rented it and enjoyed it, and even was able to shoulder all the extra story and collectibles. All because I was promised that I could get the Ice Key and whatever the hell those eggs were. Well, I did and I didn't. I got the Ice Key, but not by entering Wozza's Cave from the front and passing that ice-door/wall thing as the clip from Banjo-Kazooie showed. I got it from a back door. I also got 4 eggs from little B-K N64 cartidges scuttling around the world. The unlockables for these were greatly disappointing. Don't get me wrong, I loved using Dragon Kazooie, but the rest of the unlockables weren't worth the wait. And even for a small child, I started to know what it felt like to have a game company lie to my face. (A feeling I would come to know very well)

I never ended up having to suck anything down.

Looking for relief and mollification that Rare had screwed the pooch on this one, I started to search for answers. My search would eventually lead me to the Rare Witch Project (now the much easier to type therwp.com). Here I found out that, just like everything else in Banjo-Kazooie, there was a code to unlock the Ice Key and six (WTF?) eggs in Banjo-Kazooie. My mind was blown, and being the skeptic to random codes I find online, I promptly rented the game and gave them a go. To my surprise they worked splendidly, but instead of satiating my curiosity, they only made me hungrier, a feat that 6 eggs has never once done in my life. (Four are usually my limit for breakfast at any time)

Suddenly, questions abounded. Why were there six eggs instead of the four that we saw in Banjo-Tooie? What was this mysterious Stop N Swop? And to what end or purpose were these originally planned for?
Now, only one of these has ever been answered satisfactorily. The Stop N Swop.

The original plan was to rely on the N64's RAM memory cache, which stayed active for about 40 seconds after the console was turned off. There's a patent made by Rare that details the idea of loading in a small bit of data into that residual RAM memory cache and keeping it active until the games were swapped out (I guess in Europe they spell it with an 'o') and the system started up again. The new data would trigger a flag in Banjo-Tooie which would unlock something and vice versa. Basically, linking the sequel to the prequel.
What happened (and is something that I might expand on in a later date) was that Nintendo was getting ready to get all the systems capable to run RAND-NET, something that would be crucial for the Disk Drive add-on that would be coming out shortly. (Lol) Part of this was to make the systems with more efficient RAM caches. The new version of N64 only had residual RAM of about 3 seconds, which more or less shot that plan to hell. (Also, it would eventually require more RAM to run the Disk Drive which is why we got the Expansion Pak) So, panicking, Rare decided to boldly pretend like this is what they had planned all along.

"See? The Ice Key and the *cough* four eggs!"

Now, as for their original plans, they're open to speculation. There is still rampant speculation as to whether or not there is anything that the eggs and Ice Key do in Banjo-Kazooie at all, other than open a new window in the pause menu. Of course, Rare, being classy, broke down shortly after the release of Banjo-Tooie and explained to the fans exactly what was going on...

Abstract math is hard...

Or, rather, they kept making cryptic statements on their Q&A section of their official webpage for years and goaded us even more by making a cryptic diagram on a blackboard in Grabbed by the Ghoulies depicting an Key + four eggs with ?'s in them = ???
Technically, the Ice Key and eggs were used in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts by linking it up with Banjo-Kazooie from the Xbox LIVE Arcade, you could unlock awesome powerups. And by awesome, I mean stupid decorations that no one could possibly want.

To beat the game, you must beat two other games twice.

The mystery goes deeper with the the eggs and Ice Key when running through snippets of code of Donkey Kong 64, hackers found the phrase “ICE KEY” hidden in the code, possibly meaning that there was going to be some connectivity with Donkey Kong 64 at some stage, too. Knowing the completion requirements for Donkey Kong 64, it was likely that you had to stop playing DK and finish Banjo-Kazooie 100% to continue in your progress.

I think at some point, Rare realized that their biggest mistake was trying to act like it never existed. By treating the Stop N Swop items like they weren't a thing, they dug themselves a deeper hole that made it less and less likely that the fans could be satiated by the real purposes of the eggs and Ice Key. No doubt that the powerups that you get in Banjo-Tooie were actually the powerups that you were intended to get with Stop N Swop, along with Bottle's Revenge, a dummied-out two-player co-op mode of Tooie. But as time went on it, and speculation became deeper and deeper, it was less likely that saying that what you got was the plan all along was going to go over well with the fans who meticulously pondered over every line of code in the original game.

To this day, though, I can't help but be awed by the sheer amount of intrigue and mystery that I felt when I first discovered that the eggs and Ice Key were obtainable in Banjo-Kazooie. It sparked a love of the strange in video games. Things that make me hiss at the screen, “Why do you even exist?!” things like blackjack at the ending screen of Final Fantasy IX. The Video Relaxant item in Earthbound. Yoshi on top of the castle in Super Mario 64. (Pointless prize of 99 lives, after you've done everything you possibly could in the game) To me, it's like they act like a beam of light coming from the cracks of a closed door. Mysteries that could only be understood if you were in the production team. It's largely the reason I want to get into game design. I'll be on the other side of that door. I'll be the one creating the puzzles and meta-games for obsessive players like myself to ponder and lose sleep over. I'll also do my best to make sure that the prize for solving the mystery is better than what the prize usually is: the ability to make a forum post that raises a few eyebrows.

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...