#26: Super Mario World (1991, SNES)

Often overlooked by almost every developer out there is how important control and feel are to the success of a title - this is important in literally any genre, but becomes crucial in some. No better illustration of this concept can be seen than in examining the plethora of mascot-platformers which inundated the marketplace during the 16-bit era. For a period it seemed that every developer - large and small - determined that it had to have its own mascot, and that this mascot had to star in his own platformer. After all, look at Nintendo and the Mario series, which Nintendo had seemingly ridden to the top of the industry. We still see this happening today, by the way, except now in the shooter genre.

The problem was all of these developers totally misjudged why Mario was so popular. It wasn't that people actually liked Mario as a character that much, outside of the fact that it was this Mario character who happened to star in these Mario games. It wasn't because Super Mario World looked that great, it doesn't really stand out much on the platform. And wasn't popular just because it happened to be packed in - we certainly don't call Genesis pack-in Altered Beast popular, do we. Super Mario World became so beloved because it was a ridiculously well made title, which would go pretty much unsurpassed in the genre for the duration of the 16-bit era (with the possible exception of its pseudo-sequel Yoshi's Island).

Competitors, it would seem, didn't catch onto this. They saw Mario as a character and figured, well hell, how is he even appealing to 90s youth in the first place, we can easily out-attitude a chubby plumber character. That Sonic and his manufactured edginess actually became a bona-fide hit on the Genesis pretty much confirmed this line of thought to these other developers, ensuring we'd spend the early 90s knee deep in Bubsy's, Aero's, Alfred Chicken's, and more. These titles were remarkably similar - large, detailed, and well-animated main characters (who exuded 'attitude'), sparse and uninspired level design, and sloppy play control and mechanics. Now, sometimes these mascot-driven platformers managed to work - a lot of people like Sonic, though their reasons make little sense to me, and Donkey Kong Country manages to be pretty good. But still, let's not go off and start patting these titles on the back, they still managed to be vastly inferior to Super Mario World where it matters - in control, level-design, and gameplay. That a couple of these dozens of titles managed to be ok is a cause for concern, not celebration.

Super Mario World succeeded because of a ridiculous level of polish which it manifested itself in every possible respect. Not a looker by the standards established by later SNES titles, Mario World still presented visuals which both did an excellent job of of demonstrating the power of the SNES hardware (through the use of effects like paralax scrolling, transparencies, and the occasional instance of mode-7) while building on the clean, utilitarian look established in Super Mario Bros. 3. Basically, it did an excellent job of presenting visuals that couldn't be replicated on the NES while avoiding the sort of flashiness and over-ambitiousness that hurt other titles of the era. The soundtrack worked similarly; so many contemporaries seemed to have real problems both with mixing their music (seemingly so excited to have 8 tracks of sound they neglected to take the time to make these tracks sound distinct) and in their selection of samples, with many tending towards the grainy or simply poorly designed for the SNES hardware (witness the dramatic improvement in sound quality between Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI). Super Mario World has one of the cleanest and clearest soundtracks the SNES ever saw.

Exceeding Nintendo's efforts on the presentation front, however, is the polish that went into level and control design. Control is, inherently, hard to describe using words - it is especially hard to describe what it is about Mario's controls that makes these games work so well. The key for me lies in contrasting it with Mario's number one competition of the time, Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic's appeal, as I understand it, lies in running through the levels very, very quickly. To that end, the levels are designed somewhat like race tracks - the player is encouraged to complete the stages as quickly as possible and with stopping as little as possible (encouraged by both the presence of a timer, and Sonic controlling atrociously whenever he isn't going fast). This style falls apart for me for a few reasons, 1) you have to pretty much know the level to go through at full-speed consistently, 2) this tendency to design levels like race tracks leads to levels that overuse locales and elements to the point where it becomes hard to tell different areas apart, and 3) these two factors (samey level design and a need to memorize the levels) work directly against each other, meaning the player spends most of his time not moving fast, where again, Sonic controls absolutely atrociously. Basically, while its levels may contain many different paths to the end, there is a way Sonic is supposed to be played and a deviation from this method is going to lead to a bad time.

Super Mario World doesn't have a way it should be played, it instead has controls designed to stay as far out of the players way as possible. How the game is played is dictated by how the player wants to interact with the world presented. See a koopa ahead? You could hop on him and kick his shell away, hop on him and keep take his shell with you, spin jump on him and destroy him completely, hold down the jump button as you hop on him to use him to boost your jump, or just avoid him entirely. If you have Yoshi or another shell with you, a whole slew of other options open up to you. Enemies are rarely presented solely as obstacles, but more often as tools - as new ways for the player to interact with the environment around them. The levels are designed so as to encourage players to explore, not just for items, but for secret exits which may open up entirely new levels (or perhaps just to find something cool to play with). These secrets can be used to reach the ending while bypassing nearly every level. What's more, Mario can outright out-Sonic Sonic. Granted, the screen doesn't move nearly as fast, but running full-speed through Super Mario World often reveals just how well designed the levels are, with many levels such that a skilled player needn't ever slow down or be stopped by some obstacles. Some levels that prove taxing when taken at a slow pace are revealed to be simple by simply throwing caution to the wind. Contrast this to Sonic, where obstacles seem to exist with the purpose of changing up the pace (lest the player go too quickly). As with pretty much every other Mario title, the name of the game is simply 'play'.



So Super Mario World creams the shockingly weak competition in the 16-bit platformers, but how does it do amongst the Mario pantheon? For my money, it's tops of the side-scrollers. Mario's 1 & 2 are, of course, right out of the competition (no offense), leaving competition to be Yoshi's Island, New Super Mario Bros., and Mario 3. Yoshi's Island is excellent, but the way it handles secrets (being tied to items that need to be collected) sort of bogs it down - rewards are no longer things like shorter routes to the end of a world, but simply things that need to be collected for the sake of being collected. New Super Mario Bros. is also excellent, but lacks the sense of scale and the variety of skills on display here. And Mario 3, well, just doesn't strike the right feel to me - the levels are too short, the difficulty too inconsistent. Super Mario World strikes the perfect balance of these, and nearly lives up to the peaks reached by Mario 64 and Galaxy.

Special note: Super Mario World occupies numbers 26 (SNES), 156 (GBA), and 414 (Virtual Console) in my collection.

Super Mario World
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Released: August 1991
Obtained: Christmas 1993 (Gift)

9.5/10

#178: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past & Four Swords (2002, GBA)

The idea behind Four Swords, turning the top-down Zelda titles we've always loved into a cooperative/competitive game, is so strongly compelling that it is a wonder that it didn't come sooner. The idea is that you, as Link, work with the other 3 Links to work through the dungeon while simultaneously competing for rupees. The answer to why this never took off as it should have may have something to do with the sort of technical restraints required to make it work. As presented/designed in this instance, the players cannot quite share the same screen - the competitive aspect requires that players be able to act in semi-secrecy at least occasionally. This also rules out split-screen, forcing us onto whatever platform most easily provides individual screens. Enter the Game Boy Advance, where this works perfectly. The problem with the GBA, however, is the barrier to entry - a system, cable, and game ~ some $160 in 2003 dollars.

Nintendo nearly fixed this with the GameCube's Four Swords Adventures, which put the action on a single screen... until a cave is entered, which then requires everyone playing to have a GBA and a GCN-GBA link cable, the same barrier to entry then presents itself (a barrier which sank the otherwise promising GCN-GBA venture entirely).



These barriers meant I was only able to play Four Swords enough to complete all 4 of the available dungeons once. What I could see, however, left me feeling pretty bad that this would, by its nature, never be able to become what it should have been. It isn't the only properly harmed in this way - the aforementioned Four Swords Adventures was, as was the excellent Pac-Man Vs. - all of them leave one wondering what would have happened had the GBA/GameCube had WiFi built in like the DS/Wii do (ironically, we still need to wonder, as the GBA/GCN debacle seems to have scared Nintendo off of ever utilizing the DS/Wii in the same way).

[The single-player portion of this title, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, is reviewed here - this score reflects both halves of this title]

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past & Four Swords
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo R&D2 / Flagship
Released: 12/2/1992
Obtained: Christmas 2002 (Gift)

9.0/10

#71: GoldenEye 007 (1997, N64)

When GoldenEye was released in 1997 I had my mom drive me out to Wal-Mart to get it on (or at least near) its release date, and I have absolutely no idea why. At that point I had zero experience with first-person shooters, I wasn't particularly familiar with Rare as a developer (outside of Donkey Kong Country), and I wasn't a particularly big Bond fan (GoldenEye had been the only one I had seen). I don't even remember if I knew that much about it going in, and I definitely don't recall finding the idea of being in a first-person perspective to be something that really blew me away - that is, I never looked at it and really recognized that it was showing things in a perspective that was all that different than what I had seen before - this strikes me as odd when I look back to it.

I assume that what compelled me to get it had to have been the glowing reviews in Nintendo Power - it made the top 10 of their top 100 games list a month or two before it even came out - which would imply that even then I'd been conditioned into running out and getting whatever Nintendo's big release was that quarter (it would certainly explain how I wound up with Diddy Kong Racing).

This is all relevant because I am pretty sure that it is because GoldenEye came in so under my radar - as the next big 'I guess I should get it' game - that it managed to create such a deep impression. Had I been introduced to FPS's on the PC via DOOM and Quake, I probably would have been turned off by it, since GoldenEye bears about as much of a resemblance to DOOM gameplay-wise as it does in aesthetics. The emphasis on GoldenEye was never really on shooting - that the auto-aim is so effective is a hint of this - but rather on completing objectives. Now, on the face there may seem to be little difference in going to point A to meet a scientist before exiting the level and going to point A to get a red key before exiting the level, and if that were as far as GoldenEye went with its objectives that would be an excellent point. GoldenEye does go further, though, with sections emphasizing stealth, through the use of Bond's gadgets to achieve these objectives, through the of character interaction.

Most important, I feel, is the style of level design GoldenEye introduced (remember - it beat Half-Life to the punch by a couple months). Rather than the emphasis on mazes seen especially in id's shooters (as well as contemporaries like Turok), GoldenEye leaned towards a more scripted style, funneling the player through the levels in a much more intentionally designed pathway. While I can certainly appreciate on an academic level what id and DOOM did for the industry, I greatly prefer this style of game, and I'd say that judging by the kinds of FPS's we see made today, I'm far from alone on this.

As I noted in my The World is Not Enough review, that title actually does a better job of feeling like a Bond game, but it can't really come close to matching the feel here. That superb feel is what makes the multiplayer one of the best on the system as well, and really was one of the few things that rescued the N64 from becoming a complete disaster. I tend to overlook GoldenEye when I remember the N64 because, for my money, pseudo-sequel Perfect Dark eclipsed it in nearly every respect - the only spot I can cede to GoldenEye is 4-player deathmath, where Perfect Dark's pushing of the N64 hardware finally comes to bite it in the ass. Luckily for GoldenEye, with that many combatants bots aren't necessary, and the use of the bond license adds quite a bit to the affair.



That Perfect Dark improved so dramatically on what GoldenEye started forces me to hold back on being as effusive in my praise as GoldenEye might deserve. It's absolutely spectacular, but only when judged for its time.

GoldenEye 007
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Rare
Released: 8/25/1997
Obtained: Summer 1997

9.0/10

#70: Star Fox 64 (1997, N64)

Part of the brilliance of Nintendo is how subtle the quality they put out can be. If you'd asked me back in say 2001, near the end of the N64's life, what the best titles on the system were, Star Fox 64 probably wouldn't of come up for a while. Looking back now, few titles hold up better.

That most N64 games don't hold up that well owes mostly to being the first 3D titles - naturally game design is going to learn from the mistakes of the predecessors in the same genre. No one will opt for Cruis'n USA over a Burnout Paradise, no one will opt for a GoldenEye 007 - as good as it is - over a Call of Duty 4 (although there is no accounting for rose-tinted glasses). So it is then pretty incredible that - despite two attempts (three if we count Star Fox Adventures) - no subsequent Star Fox title has come anywhere near close to matching Star Fox 64.

What's shocking is that it isn't even a remotely complicated formula. Provide some rail/corridor style shooting levels, provide different paths - this is simple stuff. [I'd say include some all-range areas, but these are easily the weakest parts here - putting the pacing in the control of the player ruins things. Too much time is wasted scanning the horizon for enemies to follow. Going all-range for boss fights works somewhat better, since the opponent is so much easier to find.]

The devil is in the details, however. Star Fox 64's success lies primarily in the nigh-flawless control (provided you aren't in a tank or sub, where the control is merely good) and in the excellent level design, where the stages show a remarkably eye for the pacing needed to pull this sort of game off. Star Fox Assault, the GameCube entry, actually did a pretty good job at this, but then it decided to also do some remarkably terrible on-foot (and in-tank) levels sporting shockingly bad controls (from a layout perspective - it's not like the 3rd-person shooter genre was not well established by that time). Star Fox Command featured no real level design to speak of. Star Fox Adventures wasn't actually a Star Fox game, though its Star Fox levels were actually the closest of all of these to really replicating Star Fox 64's precise control (what else would one expect from Rare - they are masters at mimicking what Nintendo has done before) - they just left out the the branching and bosses and such.

Presentation often cripples N64 titles when they are seen today - people complain when framerates dip below 30 today, they should see nearly any latter-generation 64 title. Star Fox overcomes this by not trying to push the limits of the hardware - much as Mario 64 did before it, and much like F-Zero X would do after it. This isn't to say things look bad here, but rather that later games would look, from a technical perspective, better at the sacrifice of performance. Looking at them now, as they all look pretty terrible, performance becomes significant. That Star Fox uses a fixed camera by default, when so many other titles of the day sported poor cameras also helps (and yes, a platformer then couldn't just do a fixed camera to fix this, but that still doesn't change that the camera is an issue).

Shocking also is that the voice acting manages to not be terrible - it's cheesy, but in a compelling way (as opposed to a distracting way). Yes, Slippy and Falco are annoying, but I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be, my point is that it doesn't have the sort of stilted feel other voice acting of the time had (probably owing to the avoidance of proper conversations, save for the mission briefings - which no one listens to anyway - and a rare exchange or two).



So what makes Star Fox 64 so easily forgotten, yet simultaneously so fondly remembered? Probably a variety of factors - it didn't actually reinvent anything from Star Fox for the SNES, it was then - as it is now - a pretty low tier Nintendo franchise (although Smash Bros. Brawl would have you believe otherwise). It is even enough of a low-tier franchise that Nintendo hasn't even seen fit to do a followup themselves, passing it out like some cheap whore to whoever wants to try their hands at it. But, hey, why bother trying to recreate something they perfected already?

A quick tangent - I had forgotten that Star Fox even came with the N64 Rumble Pak until I saw it featured prominently on the box-art above. Now, I enjoyed the rumblin' well enough at first, but it really becomes distracting to the point where I just left it off and forgot about it. That it was heavy and sucked batteries didn't help either. By the time the WaveBird came out, I was glad that I wouldn't even need to bother turning it off in the future. In the present generation, I've been pleased to discover that rumble is used much more subtly than in the past - unless there's an explosion in a cutscene, at which point developers find it important to encourage me to watch my controller dance across a table (because damned if I'm holding the fucking thing as it rumbles for 20 uninterruped seconds, Halo 3 or Gears or whoever it was).

Star Fox 64
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Released: 7/1/1997
Obtained: Summer 1997

8.5/10

#510: Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008, Wii)

Let's begin with what works really well here. Smash Bros. itself is pretty much unchanged - this is for the better - with the improvements coming from expanding on what was already working so well before - more characters, more levels, more modes, final smashes (which are somewhat hilariously unbalanced from character to character, but whatever). The level of polish on display here is also really pretty incredible, especially the rather dazzling soundtrack, which displays both an astounding quantity and superb quality (at least a good chunk of the time) - rivaling some of the best stuff Overclocked Remix has done. This is in contrast to the soundtrack in Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I always felt, while having some good arrangements, sounded overall too samey and also often too busy. The graphics have been criticized for being too similar to Melee, though I feel people are maybe misremembering what Melee looked like - things are both far more detailed here and also display a hell of a lot more flourishes and effects. The customization features available are also pretty staggering, even if the stage builder is pretty limited. The new stages, though appearing to be a bit too static and similar as they were being introduced actually turned out nearly uniformly excellent.

Perhaps most compelling here is the volume of Nintendo on display - there are Nintendo characters and references coming out of pretty much every possible orifice here. Some like to note that, would Smash Bros. be as well received if this wasn't the case - my reply is that 1) of course it wouldn't and 2) that's a dumb thing to say in the first place - Madden wouldn't be as appealing without the NFL License, but to say that how a license is used (or if it is used effectively) is irrelevant to the discussion of the merits of a title is asinine. The presence of characters that players are attached to (or to teams and players a sports fan is attached to) brings value to the package - plain and simple.

Not everything is wonderful with the new additions here, however. The masterpieces mode, where demos of the classic titles whose characters are featured in Brawl can be played, is hampered by the onerousness of trying to play them - the player is removed from the game, loading is slow, and the demos prove so ludicrously short as to make the entire exercise a farce. Combine this with the NOA's galling decision to remove EarthBound from the US release - as part of their 14-year strategy of kicking EarthBound fans square in the balls at every possible opportunity.

That's a fairly minor feature and complaint - I'd say the music alone more than atones for it. Less minor is the fact that SubSpace Emissary, Brawl's big new single-player mode pretty much sucks balls. The problem with it is really very simple - Smash Bros. controls were never ever intended for use in some robust platformer. Expanding on that, the problem isn't actually the platforming - which they were smart enough to design with character mobility in mind - but with the sorts of tasks they present to the player as part of this platform game. Because actual platforming needed to be scaled back, we instead get to just fight a shitload of enemies, ignoring the fact that the enemies one encounters come in two varieties - so easy as to just be annoyances, or so frustrating as to drive the player to quit. Really, what part of what people liked about Smash Bros. indicated that what people wanted was to fight a parade of mooks who all rely exclusively on pattern attacks? Whose idea was it to present boss enemies that the player cannot even smash off the screen? That SSE isn't fun is a shame since it, on paper, would seem an ideal way to make unlocking everyone interesting, as it stands it is mostly a chore (although the crazy-excellent cut-scenes nearly save it).

Special note must be paid to the community built around Smash Bros. They certainly helped illustrate some nifty phenomenon, namely how insatiable fans can be, best evidenced by the palatable disappointment throughout the community when launch came and it turned out there weren't any new out-of-left field characters. This, after the newcomers list already included Solid Snake, Sonic, Captain Olimar, Meta-Knight, Dedede, Pit, Wario, Pokémon Trainer, Diddy Kong, R.O.B. - all without analogues to previous combatants. We're gonna discount these additions because there are three Fox McCloud's? The reason people were disappointed is simple - all these awesome additions were announced too soon (some would say it's because the late unlocks in Brawl are lame - I'd point out that Melee's final unlock was Game & Watch).



In the world of ludicrous expectations, Brawl could be considered to fall somewhat short - online, I hear, doesn't work particularly well - and I suppose they could of added another 20-30 characters (all from 3rd-party series), but I have a hard time bringing myself to be that upset. Even the legitimately disappointing SubSpace Emissary can't get me that down on the whole package here.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Sora Ltd.
Released: 3/9/2008
Obtained: Launch Day (at midnight!)

9.0/10

#16: Tetris (1989, GB)

Since I've found it so hard to really have a discussion about Tetris, Tetris being best described as being Tetris and all, I could instead use it as a jumping off point to examining the types of play present in video games. On the subject of Tetris itself, from a historical perspective this is easily one of the most significant titles ever, doing a great deal to bust videogames out of the 'for kids' mold they had been cast in thanks to its popularity amongst the business crowd as well as pretty much single-handedly launching the Game Boy hardware to its lofty sucess. There isn't much to say about Tetris (again, the reason I'm going to soon go well off-topic) but I will say my complaints with it stem from the fact that there just isn't quite enough to do here.



I'm not a high-score hound, so for me my enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that every game ends in utter defeat and failure - preceded by a good period of time when the game has become so frantic as to cease being entertaining. Meanwhile, something like Tetris DS manages to present a bevy of very fun side-modes to shake things up in addition to providing some good tweaks that make the regular game more playable. It also sports AI opponents, meaning the (excellent) versus modes are always available, rather than only when one has a friend and a link cable. In short - Tetris shines most as a competitive title, and the competitive mode here is a pain to get going.

Tetris
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Bullet-Proof Software
Released: August 1989
Obtained: Roughly Easter 1991 (Gift)

8.0/10

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Now, to pad this out a bit (and since it was Tetris that got me thinking along this route) I'm going to veer into a tangent on some ideas I've had regarding gameplay paradigms, which I break into three major categories (with signifigant overlaps, of course).

Playground games, where gameplay exists as a means of playing in and interacting with the environment. Obstacles are present so that they may be overcome utilizing the tools at a players disposal. Think something like Super Mario 64 (though it blends in a bit of the objective paradigm once one actually starts collecting stars) - or even better something like SimCity.

Narrative-driven games see the gameplay as primarily a means by which to space apart elements in the story. Obstacles are less about being overcome via tools as they are primarily roadblocks in the players path. Think something like Grim Fandango. RPGs would also be excellent example but for the presence of their objectives as well.

Then you have objective-based games, where gameplay exists as something for the player to do. The emphasis is on the goal - whatever that may be - and less so on presenting interesting means for the player to go about achieving that goal. A pure example of this is Tetris, but I also realize this encompasses pretty much everything with a heavy emphasis on the goal - most older titles, owing to constraints on complexity, fall into this bin. Really, most modern titles still keep at least a foot in here due to the demands of gamers for structure - only the deepest extremes of the playground and narrative paradigms (I'll use Garry's Mod and Zork I as the extremes for each category, respectively) to find titles completely eschewing objectives.

An interesting trend over the last few years has been the expansion of the playground style - emergent gameplay is gameplay that was not intended by the game designers but arose as a result of what was made available to the player - such things cannot emerge unless a playground-style environment is present - look at things like Half-Life 2's gravity gun, or Portal's portal gun, or to steer this away from obvious tools or items (and from Valve), look at the mobility given to the player vis-a-vis Altair in Assassin's Creed. Simultaneously, whereas RPGs had been the primary domain of the narrative-objective crossover, more and more we see the narrative take a bigger role - look at Shadow of the Colossus and the way its narrative feeds off of game conventions, or how BioShock blends narrative into your objectives.

This is a pretty half-assed outline of this idea, and it probably won't hold water that well the more I think about it later, but whatever. You may see it revisited in later reviews.

[I also spent quite a while developing the idea of a timesink paradigm - sort of a twist on the objective paradigm where the objective was suddenly more of a means unto itself, that is, a way simply to waste some time. Consider things like collect-a-thons and power leveling. Puzzlers like Tetris also fit very neatly into this as well, but I found it to difficult to place something like Mega Man anywhere under this idea. Along these same lines I had a venn-diagram to put here, but the 'pure' sections are a lot bigger than the blended sections, and the blended section is where most things fall, so... Also I did it before I ditched the timesink idea.]

#223: Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (2004, GCN)

I am simultaneously compelled towards and repulsed by the entire Harvest Moon series. The premise is something that I, having a deep love for the goofy and off-the-wall, am greatly compelled towards, while the actual style of gameplay contained within is largely antithetic to how I like to play video games. So with each new Harvest Moon, I become excited at the idea of running a farm, get the game, then quickly lose interest as I realize, again, that the series simply isn't for me.

I like being able to take my time - to explore and experiment with my limits at my own leisure. I don't like it when I feel that I need to compartmentalize my time in some fashion. Nowhere is this tact better represented than by my feelings towards the two Pikmin titles. In the first, the player has a time limit within which they must collect all 30 ship parts. The 30 days given are, I know, more than enough to complete this task, yet the mere knowledge that there was this deadline looming in the background was enough to pretty much turn me off to the game entirely. So despite the fact that there is more than enough time to explore at my leisure, I never felt comfortable enough to do so - it felt as if the game discouraged this behavior. Contrast that with Pikmin 2 - with the time limit stripped away I suddenly encouraged to take my time and to unearth every stone. With this weight off of my mind I suddenly found myself having a total blast.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is a tremendous success for the series in that it is the first entry to actually feature a very compelling world well worth exploring. Part of this comes from the series finally properly embracing 3D (Save the Homeland for the PS2 apparently did as well, but I never played it) by providing an interesting environment, and part comes from a long list of interesting things to do. It aids its case by de-emphasizing farming which is made to be more about quality of crops - developed through hybridization, cross-breeding, &c. - than through the seer volume emphasized in earlier titles. Character interactions are also dramatically improved, proving more dynamic and more rewarding.

The rub then comes from these things being so compelling - one wants very much to experience pretty much all of them, but time rears its head. The days in the game simply aren't nearly long enough to do everything one wants to do and thus leads to the player (or at least, this player) feeling compelled to compartmentalize and schedule his time in his zeal to have it all. As such, the compelling to explore world suddenly becomes useless - even worse, because, for example going down a lush pathway to a locale may take some 30 to 45 minutes of game time one finds himself resenting the fact that there is so much to explore and see as it gets in the way of the schedule.


Video from Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life - identical to this game, but that the main character is female.

It also has something of a bad case of "you're doing it wrong" - the hybridization feature, for example, is so vast and so poorly explained in the game that it simply becomes utterly off-putting - devoting time to it may make it rewarding, but, the players time is already tied up in trying to juggle some 30 relationships with townspeople, handling livestock, and running errands or making trips around town. In short, these features when coupled with the litany of other things to do simply becomes overwhelming. For people who don't mind missing things or don't mind just sort of playing it by ear, I can certainly see how it could be appealing.

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life
Publisher: Natsume
Developer: Marvelous Interactive
Released: 3/16/2004
Obtained: March 2004 (Gift)

7.5/10

#477: Tecmo Super NBA Basketball (1993, SNES)

Timing can be a tremendous influence on ones impressions of a videogame. Take for instance the competing early-gen SNES basketball games Tecmo Super NBA Basketball and NBA Showdown (by Tecmo and EA Sports, respectively). They are, on the margins, very similar - sporting the same perspective, the same general control schemes, and similar feature sets. One of these I received as a youth, spent significant time playing, and genuinely became very attached to, the other I bought used on a whim a couple years ago and was largely unimpressed by it for the short duration I spent playing it (before filing it away in my collection). I get the feeling - despite the fact that my opinion spouting the superiority of one to the other being very much genuine - that they could just as easy of swapped positions.

To be clear here, NBA Showdown was the title I spent hours playing in my youth (going to far as to get about 20 games into a season - playing 12 minute quarters), while Tecmo Super NBA Basketball is the one I got on a whim and haven't spent much time playing. Is NBA Showdown clearly better? I feel pretty strongly that it is, but I also have a very good feeling that this opinion comes largely from their roles in my gaming lifetime.

Even examining my reasons doesn't really help me - I like NBA Showdown's slower and more deliberate pace - or did playing NBA Showdown so much as a child train me to enjoy slower paced basketball? If NBA Jam had been my first basketball game, would I now find all basketball sims unbearable? (I'm kidding here, NBA Jam flat sucks) I also find NBA Showdown's menus straightforward and easy to navigate while Tecmo Super NBA Basketball's feel obtuse and outdated - despite being set up nigh-identical to Tecmo's other dozens of sports games I've played extensively. Is this because I'm used to NBA Showdown, or is it that, by 1993, the Tecmo method genuinely was obtuse and outdated? They did, after all, overhaul things for Tecmo Super Bowls 2 and 3 on the SNES.

There are still issues with it that I likely would have found even then - it, like Tecmo's other forays into the 16-bit sports world, felt too stagnant. Little is changed from Tecmo NBA Basketball for the NES - even in controls, despite having 4 more buttons to use (x,y,l,r) - forgivable if perhaps a SNES launch title, but unforgivable coming out in 1993. Granted, the NES Tecmo Basketball I managed to like quite a bit - but I give a much greater benefit of the doubt to 8-bit basketball games (of which there are few that are even passable) than I do to 16-bit basketball games (of which there are several that are excellent, specifically the NBA Live series). Also, things like Tecmo's patented cut-scenes went from charming, to surprisingly creepy (see the embedded video). Tecmo was also late to the party on many of the basic customization features that EA Sports had made standard by then, like, say, trades and customizable rosters.



I still get the feeling that if we had met in a different time, Tecmo Super NBA Basketball could have been really good friends but that I had become too set in my ways when we finally met for me to give it a proper chance.

Tecmo Super NBA Basketball
Publisher: Tecmo
Developer: Tecmo
Released: 1993
Obtained: October 2007 (Used)

6.0/10

#219: Bad News Baseball (1990, NES)

For whatever reason, I'm somewhat of a big fan of 8-bit baseball games - not in the sense that I particularly enjoy them, but more in the sense that it is interesting to see both 1) how similar they tend to be to each other, and 2) how small design decisions can have big effects on the overall playability of the given title. When they do achieve the proper feel - that is, the proper balance of good hitting, pitching, and fielding - they can then be quite fun to play. The problem then is that very few of them achieve this balance. Most can do pitching and hitting pretty well, but very, very few do fielding halfway tolerable. That Bad News Baseball actually does it pretty well sets it pretty far apart from the competition.

8-bit baseball fielding is a delicate beast. The hardware provides certain limitations, such as the fact that I can't think of a title that actually had the sense to put a target where the ball is going to land, and in forcing the perspective to typically be pretty pulled back. What does one do with control of the fielders - will they be controlled one at a time (depending on who the ball is headed to, probably the best solution) or all in tandem (which was used frequently)? It also needs to effectively balance the needs of the player on defense to be able to properly anticipate the trajectory of the ball and have a chance to field it with the desire of the batting player to see the sucker fly. The best entries ensure that the fielders move responsively enough and provide a good indication of ball trajectory so as to allow the player time to get under those hits they should be able to get. Throwing proves a less difficult issue, though also prone to mucking up (like base-running). For Bad News Baseball, it appears Tecmo learned good lessons from those titles that came before it, as it avoids many of these mistakes and proves itself amongst the best baseball entries on the NES.

It also has the good sense of being goofy as all hell. Your umpires are all rabbits (a bunny being Tecmo's mascot at the time), and matches feature a bevy of cartoon cut-scenes during close calls at bases, following homeruns, and between innings - a technique frequently used in Tecmo sports games of the time. But no other Tecmo titles featured cut-scenes approaching this level of, well, cartooniness (save for maybe Tsuppari Oozumou) - most evident in the inclusion of a Mr. T character in the line of players giving high-fives after certain runs are scored. Customization is also rather excellent (as was par for the course for baseball games at the time), featuring full roster control. Also available was a 'girls-mode' - holding down a button combination when turning on the system would allow players to play as, well, girls.



Tecmo really were wizards of the 8-bit sports scene. Everyone knows about the Tecmo Bowl series, which I will wax poetically on when its turn comes, but Tecmo had strong entries into pretty much every sport out there - even sumo, nearly always being at least amongst the top entries for a given sport, if not the outright best available.

Bad News Baseball
Publisher: Tecmo
Developer: Tecmo
Released: 1990
Obtained: February 2004 (Used)

8.5/10

#374: Wii Sports (2006, Wii)

As I waited those 10 hours in line at Wal-Mart to get my Wii, Wii Sports was pretty far down the list of reasons I was excited. Twilight Princess was the big reason I was there on launch day, and as we went to my friends house afterward to play I figured we'd do a round or two of tennis before we put in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz and had the real multiplayer sessions. Wrong. Wrong.

Wii Sports is incredible for how deceptive it is. No one really anticipated 1) how quickly it would seize the general consciousness and 2) how much value it would hold for people. I count myself amongst those who underestimated it. I went on record to my friends when the Wii came out that, having heard that it would be relatively well supplied (relative to the PS Triple, at least), that the Wii would be outright easy to find that holiday season. I assumed that the Wii would take a DS style trajectory, failing to really catch on (catch on beyond the Nintendo fan subset, like myself) until it saw software that really captured what the system was capable of. For the DS this came in the form of things like Kirby: Canvas Curse and Nintendogs. I simply didn't realize that the Wii would have its existence rationalizing title packed into the box. So where I figured the Wii would be relatively easy to find until it later exploded (when, say, Mario Galaxy came out) it exploded right out of the gate. In fact, you still can't find them that easily - I actually saw one on a retail shelf for the first time ever within the last few months - some 16 months after release.

Also unanticipated was the level of staying power Wii Sports has had. I assumed that, while it was sure to be fun, that the lack of features (baseball is 3 innings, golf is 9 holes, etc) would harm its long term value, but I guess I didn't realize quite how much fun it would be. Now, yes, I've mostly moved onto other titles, but I'm also a big time gamer here - even if Wii Sports had 5 fully featured sports games I'd be moving on eventually. It does remain, however, high in the rotation of good party games - joining the ranks of classics like Bomberman 64 and TimeSplitters 2 as something of a defauly source of fun for the entire console generation. For those not as 'hardcore' as myself (I really despise that term, but it is useful) Wii Sports has also been something of a touchstone. In my time at work only three games have come up in conversations - Guitar Hero/Rock Band, that 'Wii driving game' (Mario Kart Wii), and Wii Sports. This is a degree of permeation that games typically don't achieve.

Some time should be spent talking about what's included in the package here. Of the 5 sports available - boxing, baseball, tennis, bowling, and golf - boxing can be tossed out pretty much immediately, it simply proves too tiring for extended sessions and too imprecise to be actually fun in the first place. Tennis and baseball are decent enough ideas but are harmed by a seeming lack of 'to do'. Tennis is overly simplified - I'm not even referring to the fact that you don't move your character, but rather to the fact that your shot angle is pretty much entirely defendant on timing and not on, say, method of swing. With baseball it simply is too hard to balance hitting and pitching - either you're going to be going scoreless due to being unable to hit or you're going to be racking up runs because you got your timing down. That the game is 3 innings further harms things, especially when you can't hit, as the game ends before you've begun to feel comfortable with the timing of your swing. Golf is nearly a winner - I quite enjoy it, at least, though I know others have trouble with the consistency required to swing. If one can achieve this consistency, however, it becomes a very fun and rewarding mode. Bowling is the real winner of the package - pretty perfectly capturing the feeling of the game (barring getting used to holding down b when back-swinging, or however that mechanic works) and not feeling as if the sport has been truncated in its incarnation here.



The power of parts coming together to form a whole is on strong display here - none of these titles would, individually, stand well on their own - even if free pack-ins, but taken together they prove a resounding success. Also, as simple as they may seem to do it is worth noting that no other collection for the Wii has yet matched Wii Sports in quality or accessibility - witness things like Deca Sports or Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games - even Nintendo's own terrible Wii Play.

Wii Sports
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Released: 11/19/2006
Obtained: November 2006

9.0/10

#27: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992, SNES)

Allow me to put on my hater hat here as I explain how Link to the Past is one of my least favorite entries in the entire Zelda series. There is simply something about it that leaves me feeling cold - probably the same something that leaves me ambivalent towards Finding Nemo and Princess Mononoke with regards to their places in the Pixar and Ghibli canons. It is a weird feeling - for all of these I can totally respect their quality and the technical proficiency on display, yet I am at a loss to see how they can manage to stir such passions amongst their many fans, or at least at a loss that others can see them as obviously superior to other entries in the same series.

Forced to pinpoint what, exactly, turns me off probably lies with issues I have with the control mechanics. There's just something about the way Link swings his sword - his reach and the notable lack of crunch - and something about the way Link moves - with a slight delay in acceleration, and a seeming lack of urgency - that just doesn't quite work for me - especially when compared with Link's Awakening, which was released around the same time and nailed these things better than any other 2D Zelda title out there. This is combined with a story that just lacks the sort of heart or inventiveness seen in titles like Majora's Mask, Link's Awakening, and Wind Waker - or even drier entries like Twilight Princess.

These may seem to be rather nit-picky type complaints in what is otherwise an excellent title, but the fact is that, even in an adventure game, control is king. Also I expect the absolute best from Miyamoto and his team, and they are really really good at delivering on this in spades 90% of the time - that they are a bit off here makes it worthwhile to take them somewhat to task.

Setting aside complaints, there's still just a ton of good stuff going on here. Most notable is probably the sheer enormity of the quest here - there's a good what, 12 dungeons? Compare to Wind Waker and its maybe 5 (being generous in what constitutes a full Zelda dungeon) - or Majora's Mask and its 4. In fact I can't recall any other entries that went over 9. And these aren't Zelda 1 style palette swaps either, but expansive and unique locales each with a well utilized item to find (barring the lame tunic upgrades). Link to the Past was also responsible for developing some of the concepts that would become mainstays of the series going forward. Let's not forget that this is only the third title in the series - it invented things like the use of parallel worlds, dramatically expanded on what story telling is seen in the Zelda series, brought us the Master Sword, hookshot and more.



It's pretty surprising, though, how uninteresting it is to talk about what makes the Zelda series work. They pretty much just sort of do. There's a satisfaction to derived from the exploration and the solving of puzzles. What's incredible is that as banal as it would seem to be to put one of these together, no one else seems able to really come close to matching Nintendo on the adventure game front. Sure, others are able to easily surpass them on the artistic fronts - witness Shadow of the Colossus and Okami for example, who pretty much blow every Zelda title out of the water in both artistic style and storytelling - but neither can quite match the gameplay or design quality on display here, even if it isn't up to the standards of the series.

Special note: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past occupies numbers 27 (SNES), 178 (GBA), and 410 (Virtual Console) in my collection. The Four Swords mode of the GBA version will be reviewed separately.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Released: 4/13/1992
Obtained: Christmas 1993 (Gift)

9.0/10

#520: RoboTrek (1995, SNES)

This isn't anywhere near apparent from playing this game, but it is brought to us by the illustrious Quintet - responsible for an excellent string of titles for the SNES before they more or less vanished from the face of the earth, including the excellent Teranigma and the also very good Actraiser and Soul Blazer. These titles are all very similar in theme - they all are about the concept of rebirth and they're all also pretty serious in tone. This is totally not the case with Robotrek (released under the title Slapstick in Japan - this is a hint to what they had in mind, by the way), where you live on the planet Quintenix, and you fight the evil 'Hackers' (shades of the Smokers from Waterworld, if you ask me). Of course, trying to be light-hearted doesn't stop them from being talkative as all hell either (though, mercifully, it never reaches the insane levels of inanity that Golden Sun did).

It occurs to me that I should spend some time explaining what the hell Robotrek is, that being that it is an RPG where you, as the son of the great Dr. Akihabara, try to stop the evil hackers from doing something with some crystal or some shit, using your team of robot friends (and I prefer to use the Dr. John Zoidberg pronunciation of 'robot' here) which you get to build. This, the customization of your robots, is easily the most compelling part of this game - whereas a complex customization feature in a RPG can often be overwhelming and off-putting, Quintet manages to keep it straightforward and manageable. As a result, this is a rare example of a RPG where the battes are actually fun and keep you playing.

This makes it all the more remarkable that everything else built around the battle system is such a mess. Really, no one ever pays a lick of attention to level and quest design in RPGs because, well, isn't that the easiest part to pull off? It's a bit like play control - when its good, you simply don't notice it, and when its ever so slightly off you can sense it right away. An excellent example of this is the time I, in what I think was the 3rd of 4th dungeon, managed to get pretty much completely stuck without the slightest idea of what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go - even when checking every possible branch and switch. Granted, I probably was missing something - but the point is that this should not be coming to this in the first place. I expect a developer who is as experienced (and talented) as Quintet to be able to make clear objectives, especially in what is ostensibly a light-hearted romp of a game.



Granted, the story isn't worth a damn either, but it rarely is in videogames. So that, despite a very compelling battle system, the poor level design can sink things as badly as they do. (Also, on the subject of sinking things, I'd be remiss to not mention the battle music - decent enough as a standalone song, not the style you want to be hearing over and over again). And I'm also probably being a little too hard on it due to the pedigree I expect it to live up to - but if we can't expect the best from one of the best developers of the 16-bit era, [insert some idiom here].

RoboTrek
Publisher: Enix
Developer: Quintet/Ancient
Released: 10/1/1995
Obtained: April 2008 (Used)

7.0/10

#331: Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1994, SNES)

It's really quite remarkable to go back and see how repetitive games used to be. The Super Star Wars series was really a sort of a Gears of War for its day - a very straight forward sci-fi shooter. Gears takes care to ensure that the core gameplay is fun and robust enough to support the several hours of gameplay, and is also mindful of when things are beginning to get boring or old, and shakes things up accordingly. It also features enemies that are interesting to fight and provides any number of ways to go about (in a strategic sense, not just a mechanical sense) killing them.

The Super Star Wars series, however, seems to think that offering up some confusing force powers and the choice between a lightsaber and a blaster is enough to sustain several dozen levels of gameplay - provided some janky mode-7 sequences get shoehorned in every couple levels. Most egregious is how dull the levels are - there will be a ton of variety from level to level, but within a level if it weren't for the fact that you're always going to the right it would be incredibly easy to get lost - levels also have a habit of lasting 5-10 minutes past when it stopped being interesting seeing the same corridors and enemies. This is especially problematic later in this particular title as you move to sparser levels (like the Death Star or Endor) that are suspended in space without a ground level to use as a frame of reference - the entire level becomes a blur.

Return of the Jedi here actually deserves quite a bit of credit for sporting far more variety than either of its predecessors. They have the sense to eliminate the more free-roaming mode-7 levels that bogged down the earlier games, although it now includes a terrible and frustrating Death Star escape sequence. They also manage to turn pretty much everything from the movie into a level, sporting a good timing balance - this is a dramatic improvement over Super Empire Strikes Back, where literally 2/3rds of the game is on Hoth. It also continues the series tradition of doing a remarkably good job of recreating the Star Wars soundtrack through the SNES hardware.



Still, none of this helps the fact that the base gameplay here isn't very good. The Mega Man X series, for example, sports better combat mechanics, much better platforming mechanics, far better level and boss design and has the good sense not to overstay its welcome (well, the levels have the good sense, the series sure didn't).

Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Publisher: JVC/LucasArts
Developer: Sculptured Software
Released: 6/22/1994
Obtained: July 2006 (Used)

6.0/10

#56: NBA Jam: Tournament Edition (1994, SNES)

Someday I'll be able to tell the lovely story of the time I asked for Final Fantasy II (since renamed Final Fantasy IV) for Christmas and was mildly disappointed to instead receive a brand new copy of Final Fantasy III (a.k.a. Final Fantasy VI) instead - it being a title I had never really heard of but which would soon blow me away and vaunt itself to the top of my favorite games list for quite some time. Instead I get to tell you about the time I got NBA Jam: Tournament Edition when I had asked for regular-ass NBA Jam instead. At the time I figured, well, this is just as well. It even had more players (including my favorite at the time, Scott Skiles) and the ability to choose your on-court roster at any given moment. Really a fantastic idea. But it turns out, whereas adding substitutions to something like Tecmo Super Bowl served only to enhance an already excellent experience, here it seemed only to ruin it.

How such a thing could occur really boils down to what the developers hoped to gain through the addition. For Tecmo, it would at least seem the addition was done simply as a way of flexing their technical know-how (since your better players are almost always going to be starting anyway - unless you're the Pats with Steve Grogan) and adding the ability to include injuries in the proceedings. How they didn't muck it up lies in the fact that this is the extent of what it added to the game. Granted, condition was new as well - meaning sometimes, if a player wasn't 'feeling' well his backup may prove to be better - but these conditions never changed during the game itself, in fact if you weren't doing a season you'd never experience this effect at all. So ultimately, while this wrinkle may effect pre-game planning, it never got in the way of the (excellent) core gameplay.

The creators of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, however, thought it would be a simply splendid idea to, in addition to allowing players to select their on-court lineups, to add stamina to the original NBA Jam. This was really a terrible, terrible idea, because it rather directly interferes with what made NBA Jam fun in the first place.

I can absolutely imagine hardcore NBA Jam fans welcoming adding this layer of strategy over the original product - they mastered what was already available, so all the more wrinkles the better. For the rest of us, however, who simply enjoyed NBA Jam for the arcadey title that it was, this layer is simply off-puting. I'm going to want to play with LJ and Zo for 4 fucking quarters, and I should be able to, ass-holes. Don't make me sub in Hersey Hawkins. I'm also sure as hell am not going to want to worry about being attacked during the game itself (as this saps stamina), or being attacked while attacking to steal the ball. The whole whack-a-mole strategy certainly could work if the brawling were fun (look at the success of Smash Bros.) - but it isn't such a brilliant idea when your brawling is so overly simplistic.



All of these are reasons NBA Jam: T.E. can't stand up to NBA Jam, combine that with the fact that NBA Jam wasn't that good to begin with (which will be discussed when we get to NBA Jam), and you're left with something simply better avoided, even with Scott Skiles.

NBA Jam: Tournament Edition
Publisher: Acclaim
Developer: Iguana (port), Midway (arcade)
Released: 1994
Obtained: Christmas 1995 (Gift)

4.5/10