racketboy.com

Holy crap! Another Solar Jetman fan!

If your Dad bought you 15 NES games for Christmas back in the day then you are the luckiest kid on earth since he probably spent anywhere from $450.00-$675.00.

Jumping Flash
Jumping Flash was a platforming game released in1995. This game, featuring Robbit, is an excellent gem for the Playstation. This exhilarating game raced hearts. Finding the next Jetpod excited even the most emotionless of players. The cute, animal-like creatures of Jumping Flash attracted the toughest of tough men. Even the title pulls amusement from players, it being a play on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones.

Can anyone imagine the world without Robbit’s triple, single, and double-jumps? The coveted hexajump obtained after beating the entire game? What about his blasting attack? These jumps, movements, and attacks became particularly effective with the game’s first person view. Who can forget the cherry bombs, rockets, roman candles, or twisters? What a joy to use!

With Baron Aloha attempting to defeat the world, Jumping Flash exerted a certain feeling of emotion. A feeling of care for the world, hoping to help this small world, saving Crater Planet from emptiness and Aloha was created with the story’s deep immersion. Lastly, who could forget Aloha’s famous quote: “Curses! My base! I’ve lost another battle! You got away with it this time, but I won’t give up! Remember, Robbit, as long as science still exists in this world, I’ll be back! Goodbye… until we meet again!”

Thanks for giving an estimate as to how much time is left, racketboy. What's the exact deadline, though? I'm in the middle of a move at the moment, but I'm planning to submit some more posts when I have time. I also need to get a new s-video cable for my Dreamcast, as the left audio doesn't seem to work with my current one. Stereo AV for me at the moment.

I do, of course, own a VGA adapter (which I use with my VGA monitor, of course), but I'd much rather play Capcom Vs. SNK on a 42" plasma television, which - sadly - doesn't have VGA input.

By the way, does that VGA box with s-video output use standard s-video cables, or does it require the proprietary Dreamcast ones? If it uses standard cables, maybe I'll just hold off on purchasing new Dreamcast-specific s-video cables.

kevinski wrote:Thanks for giving an estimate as to how much time is left, racketboy. What's the exact deadline, though? I'm in the middle of a move at the moment, but I'm planning to submit some more posts when I have time. I also need to get a new s-video cable for my Dreamcast, as the left audio doesn't seem to work with my current one. Stereo AV for me at the moment.

I do, of course, own a VGA adapter (which I use with my VGA monitor, of course), but I'd much rather play Capcom Vs. SNK on a 42" plasma television, which - sadly - doesn't have VGA input.

By the way, does that VGA box with s-video output use standard s-video cables, or does it require the proprietary Dreamcast ones? If it uses standard cables, maybe I'll just hold off on purchasing new Dreamcast-specific s-video cables.

Deadline is December 31st
and the box uses standard cables

Sweet. I hope I win.

Little over a week left!

Battle City:

System: NES


Battle City is a great co-operative tank game that I believe began its existence before the NES even came out, and was a first generation NES game, Nintendo 8-bit games don't get any more retro than Battle City. What makes this game a hidden gem is the multiplayer co-operative play that stressed strategy, patience and skill over button mashing. It is also one of the easiest to pick up and play co-operative two player games, and that is why it is in my top five two player games of all time.
The basic gameplay is that you and/or a friend are tanks who have to defend a little city at the bottom of the screen from a onslaught of enemy tanks. Some enemy tanks are quick, some take two shots, and some fire very quickly. The key to victory is for you and your friend to take positions where you can ambush the enemy and minimize your own exposure to enemy fire. What complicates this game is the power-ups that appear, some of which are worth getting and others which absolutely are not. Sometimes you will be in a great position, but will absolutely want a tank upgrade which will allow you to fire through metal walls or fire faster or even destroy all enemies on the level, but will risk your life and your friend's doing so. The shovel in particular stands out as being a pretty useless power-up, except in certain situations.
Even though the game is inherently co-operative, there are some elements that are competitive as well, for example the score system gives a pretty tidy score to a player for picking up power-ups and rewards the player who kills the most enemy tanks not only just with the points for the tanks themselves, but with a bonus. Also, there is a form of friendly fire in this game, where you can stun each other, but it is only temporary, but it is often deadly because it often happens when enemies are around.
The controls are as simple as it can get, you move with the directional pad, and you fire with one of the buttons. Those are the only controls in battle city. It is a great pick up and play game when someone comes to your house, there is no explaining how to play it. Also, although you can't save your game, you can start at any level you want from the start screen, which is probably the only way you will ever see all the levels in battle city, since you cannot continue.
One element about this game that seems unnecessarily unforgiving is that if you die after upgrading your tank you lose all your upgrades, and there are three levels of upgrades. On the higher levels having to start again with no upgrades feels like running around naked, but you can still make a come back easily if your playing two-player, but single player would be exteremly challenging. It is important to protect your city, if the enemy blows up your city, game over, literally, you play for an hour your dumped back at the title screen. Battle City in general is a very difficult game, and even if you can manage not to get killed, your city often will, which makes the game more complicated than it appears. I have played alot of Battle City and can safely say that if anyone can beat this game starting on level one and not using save states, they are a super-hero of gaming.
The real problem of this game is the graphics, as I mentioned before this is a first generation Nintendo Entertainment System game (before it was commonly known as NES), and this game was a port of an older computer game I believe (I had it or something similar for the Atari 800). It is evident how old this game is by the fact that there is no scrolling and the original Super Mario Brothers looks much better. You can think of this game as amazing looking Commodore 64 game, or an ugly NES game, but either way at this point evey NES game is pretty outdated looking. What really matters is that the gameplay in Battle City holds up, and is still a great game to play with a girlfriend or anyone, you can pick it up and start playing right away without having to explain the buttons. I have been a little hard on this game, but it is great, and you should try it.

Revenge of Shinobi and Shadow Dancer.

Why do Revenge of Shinobi and Shadow Dancer rule? Revenge of Shinobi rules because it is pure video gaming. No plot, no characters, just rire breathing dinosaurs on cargo planes, boss battles with spider-man, who turns into batman after taking damage and of course copious amounts of Ninjas. Shadow Dancer is the sequel to Return of Shinobi, ignoring Shadow dancer's sissy name, it kicks ass because the first level has exploding manholes that have flame popping out of them and you have a dog that you can sic on people, that's what sequels are all about. No sneaking around in this game, just chopping people up into quivering bloody sushi.

These games have all the ninja fan-service you could ever want, you can chuck shurikens from a distance, or double jump and chuck eight shurikens at once, get up close and whip out your Katana and slice fools just for living. Also, what game about ninjas would be historically accurate wihtout ninja magic? The magic system in Return of Shinobi is more complex, and allows you to do have different cool powers, while Shadow Dancer's magic system is more basic but since this was based on a arcade game so it is understandable that it lacks the depth of it's predecessor.

Revenge of Shinobi has that excellent "Genesis game" look to it, and was perhaps the best looking launch title. It's not the most beautiful Genesis game since it was so early in the Genesis life cycle, but the art style is second to none, and the the bosses are amazingly creative as are many of the later levels (though the first two are pretty bland unfortunately, a dojo and a caver for crying out loud). As the game progresses, it gets more and rewarding to look at. The gameplay itself is very good as well, though it has not aged as well as Shadow Dancer's due to the controls. The difficulty in Return of Shinobi is pretty high by today standards, but not to bad compared to other Genesis games of the day, meaning you will have to start from scratch a few times since this does not let you load from the last check point unfortunately (that's a new innovation).

Shadow Dancer has aged better I would say. The game is still beautiful and really pushes the Genesis hardware to its limits, with scrolling backgrounds, big clear sprites, you name it. Its almost as good as the arcade version. The gameplay is quicker and the controls more responsive than Revenge of Shinobi, both of which make Shadow Dancer seem more fun. However, one hit and your dead, no life bar. If Shadow Dancer had a life bar, it would be the easy winner in this match up, but the lack of a life bar really hurts this game, but other than that it is the superior title in regards to graphics and controls. However, in terms of boss fights, Revenge of Shinobi has some of the most memorable boss fights I can remember, who actually thought that after fighting a bunch of M-16 wielding soldiers on a cargo plane the boss would be a fire breathing Brontosaurus? Definitely not me. Revenge of Shinobi is available on the Sega Genesis Collection for the PS2, if you dont have a Genesis laying around, which also has a bunch of other great Sega games on it. I recommend both games and even say that the really over looked "Return of Shinobi" for the Sega Saturn is worth playing, most people seem to hate that game just because the graphics look funky, but it plays really well.

Revenge of Shinobi: B
Shadow Dander: B

Gain Ground - Sega Genesis

Gain Ground for the Sega Genesis is the one game that when I saw was on the Sega Genesis Classics collection I cheered. This game never got the recognition it desierved for being a great co-operative game as well as a single player game that had an amazing amoung of replay value. Gain ground was an over head game where you controlled a small band of tiny warriors all of whom possessed different attacks. The concept of the game is that you are trapped inside of a mad computer that recreates various times in history, such as prehistoric times, Medieval times, World War I times, Post-Apocalyptic times and the Future, where they build robots just to kick your butt.
The gimmick the game uses is that you enlarge your army by picking up soldiers who were often put in hard to reach spots, thus gaining more useful recruits and enlarging your army. Obviously, some characters were much better than others, the Viking could take out most of the first two worlds single-handedly, and the lady with the side-ways boomerangs was also pretty amazing at polishing off bosses while both the grenade characters were largely cannon fodder with their short range attacks. THe screen did not scroll, so aside from enemies who were off screen, you could see all the action. Your choice was to either run for the exit, kill all the enemies, or gather recruits and get them to the exit. Sometimes you dont want to waste a good soldier in a unknown situation, so you send in some cannon fodder. The time limit makes this game very intense, and on some levels you might have to give up that new recruit to finish the level before the time expires. An interesting side note is that when your current character dies, you can rescue them by getting them to the exit. There are high attacks and low attacks, meaning attacks that can get enemies who are perched on ledges, or behind cover, and low attacks can shoot ground level enemies. Usually you have to choose one or the other, with characters like the Viking being the only of a few characters having both a mediocre low and high attack. This is why co-operative play is so fun, because then you can play more specialized units. If you are playing the original cartridge or on the Sega Genesis Collection for PS2, and not using save states on an emulator. When things go wrong and that enemy armored unit that takes more hits than you thought breaks through your defenses starts running amok and kills you and your buddy starts running away blindly that this game gets really frantic.
I have never played the arcade version, though I saw it once as a kid. I can say that the Genesis version is much better than the PS2 remake in the Sega Ages colleciton, which is terrible. The graphics are pretty poor in Gain Ground, since it was a launch title for the Genesis (1989 anyone?), but the gameplay will have you and possibly a buddy nailed to your seat for hours. The main complaint is that the enemy AI is pretty much stone stupid, and some of the levels are really difficult, especially the final boss who just feels a little cheap, though not impossible (I beat him without savestates). This should be a Wii virtual console title for sure. The Ps2 or PSP the Sega Genesis Collection are a really good way to get this old title for people who dont already have this game, and you get 27 other really good Genesis games to boot.