#28: Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (1993, SNES)

You won't see me review many traditional fighting games because, simply put, I don't like them very much (and thus own very few of them). While I certainly respect the sort of dedication exhibited by fighting game fans - the dedication needed to master combos and special moves (I liked to use this programmable controller I had, which had all the special moves mapped to buttons for me) and the investment in joysticks and all of that, these things hold very little sway with me. I prefer (greatly) the sorts of titles I can just jump in and play - and acquit myself pretty well without exerting much of an effort into improving my 'skills'.

Now, I am a pretty quick learner. When given a new game, I can get up to speed quicker than most - meaning in the early rounds of a new competitive type game, I'll probably be ahead early. My lack of patience for intricacies or for improving my skills, however, usually means I stagnate at that level and find myself pretty quickly surpassed. Now, with some genres with which I am deeply familiar (first person shooters, platformers) I am actually able to develop some skill - the skills which tend to be common amongst differing titles in these genres. In other titles where there may not be a lot of depth or advanced skills to learn (Bomberman, Mario Kart) my difficulty in advancing to a more elite level is also not an issue.

I'm saying all this to basically set up the fact that it is difficult for me to properly review something like Street Fighter II Turbo because it just isn't a genre I play or enjoy much. In other words, I'm disclosing that I'm pretty biased against it. Objectively I can recognize that it does a lot of things right - precise control, strong presentation. I can also recognize that it is a pretty dramatic improvement over the first edition of Street Fighter II on the SNES - more options, and the addition of the 4 'boss' characters for use by the player. It's a game that I can recognize the craftsmanship involved, and one that I've certainly had fun with (especially matched with equally unskilled opponents) - which given that I just don't care for this kind of game is about as hearty an endorsement as you're likely to get from me.



I want to make a special note of the soundtrack, specifically as it pertains to the game music remix community. You'd be hard pressed to find a 16-bit era soundtrack that was more... in the background then that of Street Fighter II (or fighting games in general) - it just isn't something one really hears while playing - there is too much going on on screen. Yet it has berthed some of the better remixes out there - witness the excellent Blood on the Asphalt album. Meanwhile, the Final Fantasy series has excellent music, yet hasn't lent itself nearly as well. Part of this is surely that Final Fantasy's music - light on beat and heavy on melody - doesn't lend itself to the styles of music commonly seen in the remix community. But a big part of it for Street Fighter II would be, if I hazarded a guess, that in part because it is so low-key in terms of what you hear while playing, and so lacking in terms of strong stand-out melody, that it provides the remixes an excellent jumping off point. The same thing is seen in comparing Sonic music remixes and Mario music remixes - Sonic's low key melodies, combined with the Genesis hardware's problems with producing sounds that sound like something other than the Genesis hardware provides the perfect jumping off point for remixers (witness the also excellent Hedgehog Heaven or Project Chaos).

Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Released: August 1993
Obtained: Christmas 1993

8.0/10

#34: Super Play Action Football (1992, SNES)

Interesting to think that whereas today it is considered appropriate to have separate football games for the professional and college games, at the SNES launch one was deemed sufficient. I'd dwell more on this if I had ever really touched the pro or college modes in Super Play Action Football, but I didn't. Why? Because in the High School Mode, I could name my own team and pick the colors of their uniforms, that's why.

When it comes to sports games, I'm pretty much completely a create-a-team junkie. Despite the fact that I follow professional sports extensively, I never feel compelled to control real players when playing sports games. There is just something about the fact that they are real players that turns me off - there is no room for me to invent characteristics, like playing style or role on the team, around someone that actually exists and for whom those traits are already in place. This has pretty much always been the case with me. On NBA Showdown, one of the first sports games I played extensively, I played most of a season using a Charlotte Hornets team after first swapping many of their starters with starters on other teams, then by promoting some of their bench players to the starting lineup (specifically Kenny Gattison). The result was that I was left with a squad with so little resemblance to anything real that I could then effectively call it my own. Thus Kenny Gattison averaged 38 ppg and Scott Skiles led the league in assists.

Now, while Super Play Action football may have sparked my love affair with creating my own team, unfortunately the game itself is somewhat... lacking. For starters, you have a very zoomed in perspective - fine unless you want to say, pass the football. This isn't a problem on easy mode (high school mode), but good luck spotting the open receiver in collegiate or pro modes. Yes, you have a nice little mini-map showing your targeted receiver and indicating if there are any other little dots near him - but to expect the player to be following this map while also looking for the rush is a bit much. Also, it is so zoomed in you can't even look at your receivers coming off the line to see if they've been picked up by a defender (unlike in say, Tecmo Bowl). The result is that, unless you want to see yourself get picked off a lot you'll be doing a lot of short passes, or a lot of keeping yourself exposed in the pocket. The harder difficulties also resulted in a pretty dramatic increase in the complexity of the playbooks - again, a good idea for a game that allows you to exploit these complex routes and schemes, not as good an idea in something that throws barriers in front of you on the most rudimentary gameplay levels.



Now, this isn't to say it wasn't fun to run up the score in easy mode - it was. But compared to say, the Tecmo Bowl series (of which I was unacquainted with at the time), these sorts of qualifiers aren't necessary.

Super Play Action Football
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo R&D 1
Released: August 1992
Obtained: Sometime in 1994

5.0/10

#509: Solar Jetman (1990, NES)

I don't know what happened to Rare in high school, but for a development house that would eventually turn out the Banjo, Donkey Kong Country, and Perfect Dark games, they seemed hellbent on showing everyone that western developers could clobber the Japanese when it came to making the most impossibly frustrating games imaginable. Now, I could just as easily have been setting up a review for Battletoads there, but at least Battletoads has an easy first level - Solar Jetman is stupid-hard from the get-go.

The shame here is that, if one were to just tweak the difficulty here, you would have a rather excellent sort of space sim/shooter here. The idea is that you, Sol "-ar" Jetman (I'm making that name up), have to travel from planet to planet exploring and collecting spaceship parts (the titular Golden 'Warp'-ship) in your little pod. Along the way you fight robots and aliens, and also have to make sure you don't run out of fuel and such. Sounds a lot like Pikmin, which was awesome, right? The problem begins when it was decided that there would also be super-realistic physics modeling at play.

This sounds good - gravity will behave like real gravity, momentum must be considered and factored into movement, but the thing is they went much to far with this. In the earliest levels it is a rather large problem, especially whenever you're trying to tow something. By the end of the game, when the gravity is something like 6 times Jupiter, it becomes ridiculous, taking minutes to move vertically. Compounding this is that any contact with anything (including the swarms of enemies which are seemingly unaffected by gravity) pretty near instantly kills you. Basically, the fun exploration game goes out of its way to make this exploration as frustrating as possible.

The cruelest joke is the final-final level - after completing the most difficult planet yet, the player is instantly sent into a poor Gradius clone where a death (quite likely since this stage is also pretty hard, and importantly, completely unlike anything the player has just spent the last several hours playing) sends you back to the beginning of the previous planet. It's like the final bosses of Ninja Gaiden, if those last bosses consisted of dirtbike racing or Burgertime or something.



Luckily for all of us (or at least those of us that kind of like Rare, like myself) Rare would eventually learn the value of applying their gifts for making good looking games with good concepts to gameplay that actually worked (as opposed to say, Battletoads, which was literally impossible to complete in 2-player).

Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship
Publisher: Tradewest
Developer: Rare
Released: September 1990
Obtained: March 2008

6.0/10

#508: Guerrilla War (1988, NES)

The idea of difficulty in video games has come a long way from the 1980s. Then, it was pretty hard to find a game where you didn't have a shitload of stuff flying at you at absolutely all times, in addition to having relatively weak attacks, limited life (or no life), and a very limited set of lives - the net result being that without either cheating, or a lot of patience and practice, you'd typically never see anything beyond the second level of most games. Later, as the idea of playability was emphasized and the idea of challenge was deemphasized, these tropes have fallen by the wayside. Good luck finding a game that expects you to play the whole thing in one sitting with one set of lives, for example. Hell, good luck finding games that still use lives at all.

So what makes Guerrilla War interesting is its surprisingly liberal approach to difficulty (or as surprisingly liberal anything in a game about Che Guevara can be). It is, basically, the same game as either Ikari Warriors or Commando - a straight forward top down shooter where you (the hero) shoot down hordes of enemies. Maybe you'll throw a grenade or something. These games are very hard, and so is Guerrilla War. But whereas those games will kick your ass back to the title screen when you've died enough, Guerrilla War lets you keep going without so much as making you start the level over. Literally the only thing stopping you from slugging your way to the end is whether you get bored halfway (luckily, it's pretty fun - and pretty short).

The idea of unlimited continues was pretty unheard of at that time, which is what makes it so refreshing to come back to this now. We, in these modern times, have little patience for things like lives or punishing difficulty, we want to play a game for as long as it takes for us to get bored of it, then toss it to the side. By removing the impediments to this approach, Guerrilla War feels almost like it was designed with the modern gamer in mind - down to the Cuban Revolution backdrop which is sure to please anyone in search of ironic entertainment.



Now, the game itself? Infinite continues aside, I still prefer Iron Tank in the world of top-down shooters, mostly due to Iron Tank's sense of scale and its boss fights, but when it comes to looking for some quick NES fun (with 2-player co-op, no less)? It's hard to find much to fault here.

Guerrilla War
Publisher: SNK
Developer: SNK
Released: 1988
Obtained: March 2008

7.0/10

#160: Team Fortress Classic (1999, PC)

I imagine it must be pretty hard to make a online-multiplayer title that can be fun to play even when you're completely and utterly overmatched by your opponents. Take something like Gears of War, which is excellent, and consider how boring it can get when one finds themselves completely overwhelmed by the opponents - I know I tend to feel a bit flustered in this situation and cease to enjoy myself. Yet I can play Team Fortress Classic, die roughly 30 times for every kill I make, and have a pretty good time doing it. My theory as to why this is I think lies in the relative amount of responsibility placed onto the player - Gears has small teams and lacks specialization, as such I know that I am supposed to be taking down my opponents at a roughly 1:1 pace, and I also know that if I don't, that puts a lot of pressure on my teammates (being at most 4 on 4). By comparison, in a 10 on 10 TFC match where I, being a Pyro or a Medic (as I usually am), have a pretty specific role or task I suddenly feel a lot less guilty if I do poorly. Suddenly I'm in a position where I know there are a lot more guys to cover my ass, and I'm in a role where I know my primary task is not to rack up kills, but rather to wreck havoc (pyro) or help out others (medic).

I'm not sure which of these two factors contributes the most to this feeling of liberation from the usual responsibilities of a team-shooter. On the one hand, I'm sure that the crowd factor is big, since I also enjoy playing Counter-Strike, where I consider my role as being that of a meat shield for my more talented teammates. On the other hand, the presence of roles, with the expectations for performance or style that come with them provide me with an excellent way to style my play in a somewhat guided fashion.

TFC also promotes a fast and imprecise style of play that makes it rather well suited for casual play. Unfortunately, it also boasts a number of quirks and glitches that lends itself just as well for obsessive and hardcore play - the exact kind that tends to intimidate novice players and discourage casual play. These same hardcore players insistence on limiting themselves to a single map (the relatively boring 2fort) which lends itself the best to these glitches also tends to discourage casual play.



Complaints about the hardcore TFC crowd should carry the caveat, however, that it is this same crowd that has kept the game relevant through the years, essentially keeping it alive for its exposure to new blood. Also, like I said at the start, I manage to enjoy myself pretty well in spite of the huge talent gulf - the core game itself is simply a fun way to waste some time.

Team Fortress Classic
Publisher: Sierra
Developer: Valve
Released: 5/30/1999
Obtained: Early 2002

8.5/10