DAY 56 / GAME 56
Earthworm Jim
Back when the 16-bit systems were reaching the end of their cycle, game developers started to pump out some really special games as they had finally learned to really take full advantage of the available hardware. Earthworm Jim was one of those games. I remember seeing the commercial on TV and I was in fair disbelief.
Doug TenNapel and Dave Perry created a legendary side-scroller featuring a worm in a super suit that fell from space. Earthworm Jim featured eccentric landscapes, wacky creature designs and an obscure story that finds you traversing crazy levels in search of your girlfriend Princess What's-Her-Name. Earthworm Jim was super tough. I've only ever beat it on normal and even then it took quite a while to get through it. It's got a ton of really difficult levels including one where you have to navigate through tight underwater tunnels in a (very) fragile glass diving bell.
I ended up buying a copy for the Sega CD, which to this day I find is the best version. It featured the best mix of the soundtrack, additional audio for the endings and a couple extra levels. I never did beat it on easy or hard, but I found out by tossing the CD in a player that there are special endings for the two of them. The easy ending finds you being harassed by (Doug TenNapel?), calling you a worm for taking the easy route and then goes on to yammer about worm biology. Beating the game on easy ends with Doug praising you and claiming your achievement is worth making up for any downfall in your life.
Earthworm Jim was just great. It's so wacky and bizarre. Jim was one of those characters that begged to be drawn. I think that's part of the beauty of TenNapel's designs in general. They're just so unique and offset and tremendously peculiar and this game encompasses that whole charm.
Anyone who's interested in more Earthworm Jim style stuff, there's also the Neverhood and Skullmonkeys which were stop-motion animated games. As well as any of TenNapel's great graphic novels like RatFist and Ghostopolis.
DAY 55 / GAME 55
Twisted Metal 2
Twisted Metal 2 was the first game we received for the Playstation when we got the console for Christmas one year back in the nineties. Twisted Metal was and always has been a fairly unique game. Arena-style weaponized vehicle combat would probably be the best description. Pretty much a demolition derby full of murderers and ranged weapons.
Twisted Metal was totally ridiculous and yet at the same time, super fun. There isn't much quite like driving around in various locations in crazy vehicles tuned for mortal combat. Each driver with his or her own backstory, from a psychopath in a ice-cream truck, to a man condemned to live as a vehicle himself.
Twisted Metal was endless fun for my brother and I. It was split screen combat that allowed the two of us to brawl endlessly. The whole thing really was quirky. There was all kinds of hidden secret paths and easter eggs. A bunch of moves like jumping and firing in reverse required you to input key sequences similar to combos in a fighting game.
Twisted Metal 2 was far more polished that it's first. It had a decent single player story mode and a great split-screen multiplayer mode. It was dark, silly, fast, violent and fun. The basic arena combat is very easy to pick up and play. It's no wonder it has continued to receive sequels a few generations of consoles later. I totally missed the release of Twisted Metal X, but I think I'm going to try to get a hold of a copy. Looks like it's about 10$ on Amazon. In the meantime, I think I'll pick up my old copy and go through a few rounds for old time's sake.
DAY 54 / GAME 54
Re-Volt
I can't remember how I got a hold of a copy of this game, all I remember is that I played a TON of it. Back in college, when I lived in a dorm room most of my gaming was done on my PC. Now, I've never been a big fan of racing using a keyboard. But really, that's how it was always the way I had to do it in the past. Until I got a Dreamcast I hadn't really started to ignore racers on the PC. Re-Volt was the last of those racers.
Re-Volt, as the title suggests, is a RC car race game. Which is always tons of fun as all the tracks are based on scaled up real life locations. Places like the supermarket, the suburban streets, alleyways, construction sites and I think there was a museum. The controls were ridiculous. It was very easy to spin out and kinda hard to control. At first this really bothered me. But eventually I really mastered the quirky style and when I did I realised that it was more than likely done on purpose to keep the feel of real RC car racing. Which is no doubt very difficult and similarly hard to control.
I played this game a ton. It was super fun and just difficult enough that you really had to keep at it if you wanted to master the tracks. And you could if you gave it enough time. The other fun thing about this game was that it played whatever audio disc happened to be loaded into your cd-rom drive at the time. And at the time, I had one of the James Bond soundtracks sitting in my drive. Which was perfect, because it was full of car chase music and nothing is better than racing an arcade style racer like this to car chase music.
DAY 53 / GAME 53
Desert Strike
Hot on the heels of Desert Storm, Electronic Arts released this great game for the Sega Genesis. When making a helicopter simulator would end up being a game that is very hard to read visually and difficult to control with a d-pad and 3 buttons, this was a much more appealing alternative.
Desert Strike is yet another game I would have never laid eyes on if it hadn't been for my uncle. And of course this was right up his alley. He loved military shooters and this one one of the best at the time. It was a 3/4 top down shooter that had you crossing various maps to complete various objectives. You may have to escort a caravan of friendlies, or take out an enemy installation. Like a lot of military shooters this game was not easy. I think I only ever completed the first level once. Even then, it was more of an arcade style game with less ties to realism. Which would usually make it a bit easier, but this was not the case.
I played this an awful lot for a game I never owned. Until I checked recently, I thought I actually did have my own copy. I'd love to see this game remade in the same style with updated graphics. Even though, they were actually quite good at the time. Apparently they used early 3D tech to render the sprites from models at various angles to create a smooth rotation of the different crafts. I think I'll have to sit down sometime and really get a nice emulator setup to replace my Genesis for all these games I thought I owned.
DAY 52 / GAME 52
LocoRoco
If you enjoy games where you control tiny blobs that sing to the background music, then you'll love LocoRoco. Back when I first got my Sony PSP handheld I hopped online and started downloading a bunch of demos. It was kind of a first at the time, you could download them onto your PC, load them into a memory card and play them off your card on the PSP. LocoRoco was one of the first of these I tried. It was actually a while before I bought the game because they kept releasing new, holiday themed demos.
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| Leia enjoying LocoRoco |
LocoRoco is a unique platformer where your characters can only jump. Jump and either burst into a bunch of baby blobs, or merge back into a big blob. You're able to move about the platformer format levels by titling the world right or left. Your blobs then roll one way or another where you can hop up into moving level components like windmills and tiny cracks that require you to split up into tiny baby blobs to make your way through.
LocoRoco has this great 2D graphic design that works well on both mobile and larger platforms. The level is full of great characters. It's one of those things where all the enemies and obstacles have cute smiley faces like a Scott C. painting or something and everything is singing and dancing along to the music. It's really something actually. When you're a big blob, it lipsyncs to the music and sings and when you're a bunch of baby blobs they all sing in sync with slightly higher pitch voices. It's super cute.
This game was super fun and unique. I remember Leia loved just staring at the little guys singing their little songs. The only thing I'd love to see now is for someone to port it to the Wii-U gamepad or the 3DS (or iOS for that matter). Something with tilt control. It would be perfect.
DAY 51 / GAME 51
Heavy Rain
I've been following Quantic Dream closely ever since they made that crazy sci-fi game featuring David Bowie, Omikron. But they've come a long way since 1999 and in 2010 they created one of the most emotional, story driven games I've ever played until Last of Us in 2013.
Heavy Rain was generally well received and won multiple game of the year awards but truth be told most people I talk to have never played it. They were turned off by the idea of a game that was essentially one big Quicktime event. I saw it as a lot more complex than that. In a typical game, you're still basically just hitting designated keys at appropriate times. But in Heavy Rain your controller is being remapped constantly. Everything is context sensitive. Button options float around on the screen and different kinds of button combinations and movements are necessary for different scenarios. This is particularly great during tense action scenarios where you have to really be keeping an eye on what you need to be doing.
Heavy Rain is an insane psychological thriller. Drawing from movies like Seven, you find yourself playing five different characters. Each a part of a larger story. A story where a serial killer is kidnapping children and forcing their parents to prove they deserve them. It's even more complex and interesting than even that, but there are people here who may get around to playing it sometime and I don't want to ruin the fantastic story.
Heavy Rain's demo showed you the introductory backstory where the one character looses his child in a busy mall. The stress is palpable. This is a real scenario and anyone with a kid knows this very well. But there's humor to be found everywhere. During this playthrough, you 'pressing X to call to Jason'. You run around yelling "JASON!" into the crowd. While attending PAX East, just after this demo dropped, we heard people in the crowds yelling "JASON!" over and over. It took and second before it clicked, but when it did it was way funnier than it should have been. In fact, one of our friends explained this to his wife when he got back and she thought it was absolutely awful.
Heavy Rain looked absolutely beautiful. It was a fantastic story with terrific acting and the option of multiple storylines all depending on how you attack different parts of the game. I recommend anyone who is iffy on the gameplay style to put that aside so they can enjoy one of the finest movies gaming had ever produced.
Oh, and by the way. If you do, I recommend playing in French audio with English subtitles. It was produced in France and so it was written for French language and it seems to be better voice acting. .
DAY 50 / GAME 50
Super Mario Brothers 3
Ok, 50th post! May as well be something big! So how about a blanket favourite? Super Mario Brothers 3. I never had a Nintendo, our first system was a Sega Genesis. But I remember playing Super Mario at other people's houses and I remember how excited everyone was about the release of Super Mario Brothers 3.
Eventually, with the release of Super Mario All Stars on the SNES, I had the opportunity to put some real time into it. Super Mario 1 was good, but basic. It got the job done. Super Mario Brothers 2 was a weird departure from 1; super fun on it's own, but was missing a bit of the Mario feel. Mario 3 however, was about as polished as the Mario platformer could get on an 8 bit system.
It really had it nailed down. There were a ton of levels, each divided nicely into 'worlds' with their own theme. There was a bunch of variety, providing a real draw to getting into the later worlds and little mini-games loaded into the 'overworld' map between levels. You could play 2 player, which worked out a lot nicer than just taking turns as in previous games. Since you could use the map to pick levels and collect powerups individually. Graphically it really pushed the system. I'm a little surprised still how nice it looked on the original NES. I think this was just one of those examples of stylistic choices that really don't try to do something the system can't do and instead push within the limits so that it's visually readable and not messy. Mario 3 also really introduces a whole slew of great characters. Here we got to see more than just 3 different baddies with minor variations. We saw Piranha Plants, Chain Chomps, that big angry sun and a whole ton of dudes whose names I can't recall.
Great game or not, it was just one of those staple games most everyone from the time has enjoyed at one point or another. It's become basic gaming knowledge for everyone; everyone knows raccoon tails make you fly and as long as you get into a giant wind-up boot you're pretty much safe from anything underneath you. Denise and I have had some great times going through this one together. And yet, we still can't beat the last world. Nice thing is, 5, 10, maybe 20 years from now we'll still pick this one up and perhaps we'll beat it then.
