Backlog Project, Games 6 and 7: The Adventures of Batman & Robin and AH-3 Thunderstrike

 

Original Release: 1995 (Batman) / 1993 (Thunderstrike)
Platform: Sega CD (both)
Estimated Length of Time Owned: 6-7 years (both)
Estimated Amount of Previous Play Time: None (both)

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“Why would you keep playing a game that you didn’t like?” my fiancée asked after I told her I was about to sit down and play more of a game that I just told her was awful. “It’s for the blog,” I replied. “I have to play a minimum amount of each game, no matter how I feel about it. That’s the point of the Backlog Project.”

Well, it shouldn’t be. While this exercise was supposed to be about making me play games I may have never gotten to if left to my own personal choices, should the “point” of it be forcing myself to drudge through games that I’m thoroughly not enjoying? Or should I just dabble in the mediocre-to-bad ones just to say I’ve “played” them but only spend a measurable amount of time on the gems I stumble upon that would’ve otherwise been unfortunately overlooked? After all, I’m no longer 10 years old and relegated to only one or two new games on gift-giving holidays and have to make myself like those games no matter what since that’s all I’ll be getting for awhile. I have literally hundreds of good to great games sitting in my house right now, and all I’m doing is wasting my time by playing more of a bad game than I have to when there is probably a game more deserving of my time sitting just another slot or two down on my list. I’m still going to give every game at least one solid play session, enough to at least give a paragraph-length impression of it, but if the game is so bad that I actually dread having to play it again, well, then I’m not going to. Life’s too short to intentionally play and write about bad games (when I’m not being paid to do so).

Of course, that doesn’t give me back the time I’ve already wasted on the absolutely dreadful Adventures of Batman & Robin. The Genesis game of the same name was actually a decent beat-em-up, and as many Sega CD games were just slightly better looking versions of Genesis games with sometimes much better sound, I thought I might be in for a treat with this one. Well, not only is this a completely different game, it is a completely awful one. A game based entirely around driving the Batmobile isn’t a terrible idea in and of itself, but when that game ends up being less deep than the original Spy Hunter but nowhere near as fun or playable, then we have a problem.

After a nice little intro movie done in the same style as the cartoon series in which this game is based (ignoring the quality of Sega CD’s video capabilities, which looks like a VHS cassette that has been dubbed back and forth 9 or 10 times), I was put behind the wheel of the Batmobile and told to do something or other, I don’t even remember what, but it involved driving up a narrow three-lane street absolutely packed with cars – and lined with the same two blocks of scenery looped over and over again. There didn’t seem to be any real strategy to this other than awkwardly bouncing between them like bumper cars in the hopes that I reached some random, unspecified checkpoint before the timer runs out.

After multiple retries and a steadily rising blood pressure level, I managed to get past that first part, all the while wondering if it was the designers’ intention to make half the challenge of this game be in daring you to actually keep playing it. Anyway, my next objective was destroying - with my clunky slow-motion rockets - two other cars who were driving just ahead of me and hurling random, generic sprites at me, which I assume are supposed to be bombs or weapons of some kind but were impossible to make any sense out of. I managed to finish these two off, my reward being a five minute full-motion video sequence sequence where Batman must thwart Poison Ivy’s attempt to rob a bank. It’s fun to watch, but what it basically amounts to is a boss fight that you do nothing but watch. Rather than a cinematic showing you driving to the bank and then letting you play the part where you actually fight somebody, the developers thought it would be clever to reverse it, and let the traveling to the destination be the playable section and the action that takes place once you get there be the non-interactive movie sequence. How novel…and not at all fun! After Ivy got away, I hopped back into the car and got to actually play again…unfortunately.

Now it was time to stop Ivy from getting away. First, that involved trailing right behind her while she threw the same odd sprites at me that the others were hurling. After I hit her a certain number of times, she sped off, and I had to weave my way through the trees that she had planted in the road. The controls alone made this a frustrating proposition, but to make matters worse, there was a distance meter on the screen that showed me how far from you Ivy was getting, and if it gets to high, I lose her and have to restart the level. Well, I lost her. A lot. Because the only way to have any chance at all of keeping up with her is to constantly be going at maximum speed, but doing that makes the trees that much harder to dodge and slows you down that much more when you hit one. After several deaths, continues, and restarts, I finally got through this section, only to have to battle her up close again for a few minutes…and then have to chase her through trees again. Only this time, the trees had random branches that would shoot out to the left or right, meaning that simply avoiding the trunk wasn’t enough anymore – now I had branches to worry about. Some cursing and a very sore thumb later, I was able to catch up to her again, and finally finish her off…or, no, there she goes again, speeding off for me to pursue her. Now I’m weaving through bushes. Bushes instead of trees…this is the most “variety” they could muster up. God this game sucks.

Fast-forward a bit, and I’m trapped in some giant virtual reality game concocted by the Riddler. The setting is actually a little bit cooler than the generic streets of Gotham I’ve had to traverse up to this point, and for a moment I’m hopeful – until I have to maneuver an obstacle course of giant stationary O’s and sliding X’s with a time limit that demands nothing less than a perfect run to beat. After that, I am attacked by giant dice, and then I’m on a backgammon board, and then…oh screw this, I’m done. This game is terrible. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about it save for the brief video interludes, but the game sandwiched between them doesn’t make it worth the trouble. I understand by looking at the back of the case that I would’ve eventually got to fly the Batwing had I stuck with this game, but something tells me that is more of a threat than a promise.

Ironically, the other game in this twosome – AH-3 Thunderstrike – takes place entirely in the air. In a helicopter, to be precise. Truthfully, this game wasn’t half bad. It wasn’t especially great, either, but it was at least playable, which is more than I can say for a lot of Sega CD games. It plays a bit like EA’s “Strike” series, in that each level has you flying around a sectioned-off area completing objectives and taking out enemies. The game has decent “3D” visuals for the Sega CD, better than your average mode-7 or scaling trickery that the 16-bit systems pulled off but still extremely simple. The controls take some getting used to thanks to the lack of shoulder buttons on a Genesis controller, which makes strafing a tricky proposition – you can only do so if you press left and right from a dead stop. While moving, all you can do is turn. Other than that, the game plays pretty well, and shooting down enemy choppers and blowing up their camps and buildings is done with relative ease. The objectives are your standard fare: Destroy all the buildings in the enemy base, blow up the bridge, protect the convoy, etc. All in all, it is a functional if unremarkable game that would’ve been a decent, lengthy game to pick up if you were stuck with a Sega CD and desperate for something not terrible to play, but beyond that there is no reason to give this game another thought once you’ve finish reading this sentence. I don’t know what ebay auction I won that this game got thrown in with but I’m sure it has been re-gifted more often than it was ever actually played.

Now onto a game that I’ve actually wanted to play for quite some time, Banjo-Kazooie for N64. It somehow seems fitting to play this game just as Donkey Kong Country Returns is hitting stores. This is the first time on my list that a game and its direct sequel come up back-to-back so I’m not sure how I’m going to handle that yet. We’ll see how it goes.

Friday Top 5: Favorite NES Games Not Made By Nintendo

In case you haven’t heard – and if you haven’t, then my blog is probably not going to be of much interest to you – this Fall marks the 25th of anniversary of the release of the NES in America. As such, everyone who has their own little corner of the internet devoted to video games is marking the occasion by making lists of their favorite NES games. What kind of message would I be sending if I acted like I was too good to participate? However, I quickly realized that my top 5 NES games would pretty much be three Mario games, one Zelda game, and Little Mac and Samus battling for the fifth slot. So, in an effort to make things a little more interesting, I decided to exclude anything developed by Nintendo and make a list of my 5 favorite non-Nintendo NES games. I’m not saying that there are necessarily going to be any big surprises in this list, but at least it evens out the playing field a bit.

Backlog Project, Game 5: Advent Rising

**For a little background on what the “Backlog Project” is, read my original post about it here.

Original Release: May 2005
Platform: Xbox
Estimated Length of Time Owned: 3-4 years
Estimated Amount of Previous Play Time: None

I knew it was going to take longer to finish Advent Rising than the mostly arcade-centric games I’ve had in the backlog project so far, but I didn’t anticipate that it was going to take months to get through it. More than anything, I blame the game’s lack of Xbox 360 compatibility. I do happen to have my original Xbox set up in my bedroom, mostly serving as a stopgap DVD player after the last one we had in there decided to retire. Still, I underestimated how hard it was going to be to make myself play in there given the fact that sitting on the edge of the bed is the only viable way to play effectively on a TV that small – which was fine when I was 8, but now I’m pushing 30 and I’m just not built to be hunched over and straining my eyes for long periods of time anymore. On those rare occasions when I’d finally convince myself to actually sit down and start playing it, I’d usually make a fair amount of progress, but the superior comfort of the living room and its far better selection of consoles proved too alluring of a choice to not make more frequently. Still, I was determined to finish the game, no matter how long it took, and I finally did it. 

Friday Top Five: Most-Wanted HD Remakes

There are a lot of games that would be timeless if it weren’t for how poorly they’ve aged graphically. There are also games that were so good to begin with that all they need to be made relevant for today is a little visual polish. I’m not talking a full-on Resident Evil for Gamecube-caliber remake, just a touched-up HD upgrade like Perfect Dark or Call of Duty Classic on XBLA. We tend to remember old games through rose-colored glasses, and would be surprised (maybe even disgusted) by how rough they actually looked and played if we revisited them now compared to our memory of them. That’s what makes remakes like Perfect Dark so great: They are made to actually look and play the way we swear the originals already looked and played (but don’t by a long shot). 3D games are especially prone to this, as polygonal-based graphics just don’t have the timeless quality of 2D art and hand-drawn sprites. That’s why classic SNES games are easier to stomach today than most PS1 or N64 games, for instance. In other cases, maybe a game was released on a system that was just a little underpowered for what the developers were aiming for (again, like Perfect Dark), so the game deserves another chance to live up to its ambitious on hardware that can handle it. My list here is a mixture of games from all of these types of examples, and are the 5 games that I personally would most like to see remade today, going mostly unchanged save for a few passes of smoothing and anti-aliasing and coat of HD paint on top.

Aim Higher

As I play through Heavy Rain, I get really excited about the future of games as interactive movies. While games still have some ways to go before they reach the same level of quality as movies in terms of storytelling and character development, I think the framework is definitely there to deliver Oscar-worthy movies that just happen to be interactive video games. A lot of people feel that this is the future of gaming, and that one day you’ll barely be able to tell movies and games apart. Mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer recently said as much in an interview with a UK website  about the upcoming Prince of Persia movie (of which he’s an executive producer), stating, “I really believe in the next 10 years you won’t be able to tell the difference between movies and games”. I certainly hope that is not the case.

Video Games: Art Thou Art?

Deciding what officially constitutes “art” is a lot like trying to reach a universal agreement as to what love feels like. Both concepts are completely subjective. Art is a little less abstract then love and we can at least narrow it down to some basic principles that most people would agree upon, but there still aren’t clear, rigid guidelines that all creative works must fall into in order to be labeled as unquestioned works of art. You can’t say “Anything that contains X and makes you feel Y is art. Whatever doesn’t, isn’t.” It just isn’t that simple.

Friday Top Five: My Favorite Fighting Games

I can see now that narrowing down my lists of favorites to just 5 is going to be extremely tough in some cases, this being one of them. However, I will resist the urge to take the easy way out by expanding it to 10 whenever I have a little trouble, due in no small part to the catchy alliteration of “Friday” and “Five”. Plus, there’s the whole slippery slope thing: Once I cross that barrier and break that rule, then it gets just a little easier to do a top 15 next time, then a top 20, and before you know it this will turn into a weekly top 50. But hey, at least we’d have that alliteration back.A lot of people, myself included, tend to separate 2D and 3D fighting games into their own distinct categories, pointing out the often drastically different styles of the two types. While that may have been truer in the early days of 3D fighters, which were slower and more deliberately-paced due to the limitations of polygons vs. 2D sprites, the gap has closed significantly in the last 10 years or so as technology has allowed characters and objects created and rendered in three dimensions to have all of the speed and fluidity of even the fastest 2D games; anyone who doesn’t believe me hasn’t played Street Fighter IV. That said, all fighting games went into the arena together for this top 5, and after a long, bloody battle, the winners stand here before you. 

Friday Top Five: Most Games Finished Per Series

Rather than do an opinion-based list this week, I decided to do one based entirely on facts and numbers. Quite simply, I’ve ranked the five game franchises that I’ve beaten the most installments of. Before I crunched the numbers, I was planning on making it clear that this isn’t necessarily a list of my five favorite franchises; but now that I look at the final list, I don’t think it is actually too far off from what I would also consider my favorite game series. As far as what are considered “true” entries in a series, for a few I just had to made a judgment call. For instance, I counted MGS: The Twin Snakes and Metroid: Zero Mission as their own separate entries even though they are technically remakes because they are substantially different than their respective originals. However, I didn’t count games that are just slightly enhanced or changed ports like the DX version of Link’s Awakening or the DS version of Super Mario 64 as separate entries.

Rock Stars Are People Too, Even If They Don’t Think So

What is it about Rock Band and Guitar Hero that so many musicians find offensive? Professional athletes actively promote and even play sports games. So why do a lot of rock stars treat music games like a major affront to their profession, and to music in general? Talking to the European music outlet NME, Jack White (of the White Stripes, The Raconteurs, et al) was asked what three pieces of advice he would give to up and coming musicians. His response: “They need to quit playing video games, throw away their Auto Tune program and cut three strings off their guitar.” Obviously that was meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek with the Auto Tune comment thrown in there, and I certainly don’t see anything wrong with telling people that they should spend less time playing video games and more time being productive (boy, this sure is coming up a lot lately). However, given comments that Mr. White has made in the past, it’s hard not to wonder if there was a bit of venom behind his call to musicians to stop playing video games.

You Watch TV, I Play It. You Are Better…How, Exactly?

Here we are, the year 2010, and video games are still looked down upon by so many as a second-class and/or childish entertainment behind the other forms of popular media (television, movies, books). While it is assumed that almost everyone has at least a passing interest in movies, music, reading, and television, when it comes to video games you still have to specifically ask each person you meet if they play them rather than just feeling comfortable openly discussing them with anybody like you can with the other things I mentioned – can you imagine having to go out of your way to make sure someone watches movies before you can even begin talking about them? The people who don’t play video games at all often treat it like some obscure niche hobby, like building ships in a bottle or restoring old cuckoo clocks, not the multi-billion-dollar industry that it is; they don’t get it, they won’t do it and they can’t even understand why anyone even would, all the while condescendingly shaking their heads at those that do.