Duke Nukem

Action platformers were nothing new in 1991. By then there had been several Mega Man games, a pair of Metroid titles, and numerous other examples to flesh out the genre. While these games had varying levels of success, and resulted in varying levels of actual enjoyment, there is one thing that was missing from all of them: a badass in a spandex pink vest.

Enter Duke Nukem.

And of course, the fine folks at Apogee Software misspelled his name on the title screen. Apparently they became aware of a Captain Planet villain also named Duke Nukem, and got worried they would be sued for infringing copyright. Nevermind the fact that nobody even bothered to check if the name was copyrighted; they just changed the spelling of their own hero's name and prayed to avoid litigation. Only after the game was distributed did someone decide to, you know, actually see if the name was available. Naturally, it was, so "Nukem" remained the official spelling from then on.

The plot of the game is basically just a lazy rip-off of Mega Man. The villainous cyborg Dr. Proton has assembled an army of "techbots" to take over the world. He's already leveled Los Angeles, so you know he means business. Duke Nukem is the only one who can stop him, I guess because nobody else was man enough to try. So in Episode 1 of the game, Duke pursues Dr. Proton across the city ruins and dispatches Proton's techbots along the way. These include little wheelie drones, some hovering laser bots, frog hoppers with cannons, and the occasional automated military helicopter.

And oh yeah, why not? Magenta bunnies. For a company so deathly afraid of copyright lawsuits you'd think they'd be a little less obvious about ripping off Dr. Wily's magenta rabbit affinity. And all they do is sprint at you and then pirouette with glee on your face if they reach you. There are also little green radioactive things that crawl on the walls. I don't have a clue what they are supposed to be, but I think they're explained by the frequent appearances of nuclear waste being dumped in the background. The environment? Dr. Proton is not interested.

The game also probably inspired some of the games in the soon-to-emerge First-Person Shooter genre in that most of the levels are really glorified key hunts. There's a locked door in one place that leads to the exit, so you have to explore the entire rest of the level to find the key. Once you do, you're pretty much home free. While in shooters these can get tedious as they feel like a way to just add length to the thing, for some reason it works a bit better in Duke Nukem. Maybe it's the 2D gameplay or maybe it's the fact that the levels were designed with these in mind so they don't feel like cheap throw-ins. Whatever the case, just accept that you'll be searching for a lot of keys and roll with it.

That said, spikes. Well, not spikes per se...these are more like jagged broken PVC pipes more than anything else. They don't make you instantly explode, at least. Touching them will drop one bar of health, as will being damaged by any other hazard or enemy. The game is pretty generous with how much health you get and how much it provides, so even though the maps get more dangerous and the challenge increases, the game never begins to feel unfair. There are only two things in the game that can't be hurt by your little squiggle shooter, and both of those are easily avoided. When the rest of the game feels appropriately difficult, you find yourself not particularly minding the occasional spike-like surface.

As is the case with most all episodic games of this era, you begin each episode from scratch, with none of the abilities you gained (most notably, high jump boots) in the previous episode carrying over. This is inane from a story perspective, but it's tolerable from a gameplay perspective, especially because Duke Nukem does a good job designing the levels to help you feel more empowered as you progress anyway. For example, weapon powerups are provided more frequently to allow you to ramp up your firepower more quickly. You'll also find that many later levels are very short in terms of when you find the exit, but you have the ability to explore the entire area for extra bonuses. If you want to just blow through quickly though, you have that choice. In addition, you have the ability to save your game between every single level (though not mid-level), so there's very little pressure to get things right the first time through.

Episode 2 sends you to Dr. Proton's moon base. This is where I start having some issues with what's happening on the screen. First off, how the hell are you alive?! You're not in a shelter or anything; that moon base is open air. Or perhaps more appropriately, open nothing. In Doom at least we could make an assumption that the marine was wearing a helmet with an oxygen supply. But all you've got here is a pink vest and some jeans. Don't act like you're capable of surviving that. Second, why do you need to find high jump boots here? If you really are just on the naked surface of the moon, you should already have massive hops. Instead the gravity appears completely normal. Third, while this game is supposed to take place in the future, keep in mind the game came out in 1991. You know what year "the future" is according to the story? 1997. Come on! This is why every science fiction story worth its salt goes into the distant future - so that six years later when we haven't actually built a massive lunar facility run by robots, you don't look like a bunch of idiots.

While on the subject of the odd goings on, why does Duke do a sustained pelvic thrust every time he jumps? The only exception is after he gets those high jump boots - then he'll occasionally do an aerial cartwheel for no good reason. Maybe he's just showing off. Maybe that explains the pelvic thrusting too, but it's not like there's anyone out there to impress. You've got robots, radioactive junk, and the crazy cyborg trying to kill you. Not exactly the best audience for flaunting your manhood, you know?

Perhaps the most charming thing about this game is that it has a conscious disinterest in taking itself seriously. This is most obvious in the various pickups you can collect, which either give you health or points. Chosen seemingly at random, they consist of cans of Coke, footballs, purple pennants, turkey legs that turn into entire turkeys when you shoot them, joysticks, and copies of the Duke Nukem game itself. It's a bit meta but that's what makes it great. When you shoot a can of Coke it will actually launch in a fizzy explosion. Where else can you find programming that specific in this era?

Duke Nukem also goes out of its way to be helpful to the player. Most noticeably there's the constant invitation at the bottom of the screen to press F1 for help, which is pleasant if not entirely useful - it actually just opens the game menu. Also, between every level (in the "save corridor") there's a little sign that gives you tips for the next level. They're less "here's where to find a secret" and more "here's what to expect," but either way that sign is doing you a solid. Which is nice, because the one thing the game does not do well is allow you to see. The graphic design of the backgrounds leaves a lot to be desired, but after a while you realize it's gone from lackluster effort to intentional trolling of your sense of sight. When you see the level with a background comprised of a camo pattern while the actual platforms are a slightly different camo pattern, you'll understand. The sight issues get progressively worse until the final boss, who you fight against a flashing red background that makes it virtually impossible to tell anything you're doing.

As for that final boss, well. It's Dr. Proton, as you might have expected. As you might not have expected, this maniacal cyborg is actually stuck in a hoverchair - 1997's super futuristic version of a wheelchair. We've been down the last-boss-is-handicapped road before, and it was troublesome then, too. After you defeat Proton in each of the first two episodes, he uses his time machine (!) to warp to the future and escape. Granted, this means the future from 1997, so we're talking what, present day at best? When you kill him in the future, he's "permanently defeated," and you return to the past. Where, presumably, he still exists because you haven't killed him yet. Way to end your plot on a time paradox, game.

Overall there's a lot to like about Duke Nukem - challenging gameplay that doesn't get too repetitive or too unfair, tight controls, and a good sense of humor. It's a shame then that issues like decreasing visibility are so prominent. It's enough that it makes it tough to give this game as high a score as I'd otherwise like to. For what it's worth though, most of the levels are littered with No Smoking signs. Duke Nukem cares. Maybe that's all we really need.

Bottom Line: 13/20

Super Street Fighter II Turbo

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Innovation's dead
More Street Fighter II

A mere five months - five months! - after Super Street Fighter II came out, Capcom milked their cash cow one more time. Taking a cue from the home versions of earlier games in the Street Fighter II series, they slapped "Turbo" at the end of the name and made arcade owners pony up the big bucks for the latest iteration of the franchise. And by making several significant changes to the game, they ensured they'd make like Balrog and get paid. So what are these changes?

The first and most obvious change is that for the first time a game with "Super" in the title actually had "super moves." Each fighter has a meter at the bottom of the screen that fills as the character strikes with a basic attack, is struck with a basic attack, uses a special move, or is hit by a special move. The supers themselves, without exception, consist of enhanced versions of special moves. For example, Ken's super is the Shoryureppa, translating to "repeating Shoryuken." Which is good, since that's an accurate description of the move. Likewise, Dhalsim's super "Yoga Inferno" is just a bigger and longer version of his Yoga Flame. This probably was done to enable Capcom to, you know, make the game in five months. So there's not a whole lot of visual impressiveness about the super moves, but from a gameplay standpoint they're a nice touch.

Though with that said, you'll basically never even use them as you play. Bear in mind that you only gain meter as you use your basic attacks or specials. Know what that doesn't include? Throws. Know what will result in a huge portion of the damage dealt in this game? Throws. Not only do you not get meter for throwing someone, but you also don't gain it for getting thrown. When a throw takes off 40% of your life, how will you ever have time to fill a super meter?

Two other gripes here before I get to the game's only other two truly new additions. First, the costume colors. Super Turbo gives each character a choice of seven colors. That's awesome. The original color for that character is not one of the seven. That's not. Look, Ken's sported a red gi since Street Fighter 1. You took away its default status inexplicably in Hyper Fighting, but at least there it was still selectable. Why now can I choose basically anything but red? I can't think of a good justification for it at all.

Second, the game speed. Knowing that different people preferred to play the game at different speeds, Capcom made the game speed configurable as a built-in option for arcade owners. This would be great, if not for the fact that they then defaulted the game to lock the speed on "Turbo 2." Yes, that's right - beyond normal speed, beyond even "Turbo 1," this game runs on "Turbo 2." It's at least as bad as Hyper Fighting's speed was in terms of how the CPU can abuse you. An arcade owner who didn't hate his clients could set up the machine to let the players choose their own speeds (preposterous!), but why not make that the factory default setting?

Finally, the other new additions are basically both ideas stolen from Mortal Kombat: juggle combos and a secret character. Now it is possible to strike an airborne enemy before they hit the ground to continue a combo, which allows for a lot of extra strategy and execution. But then there's this guy. In Japan he's known as Gouki, though elsewhere he's Akuma - the name basically means "demon" either way. It's an apt one, since he's essentially impossible to beat. To even get to him you have to clear all battles in under 25 minutes without using a continue. When you do, and you show up on screen about to fight M. Bison, Akuma drops down, grabs Bison, and murders him. You kidding?

It will only take a couple seconds of fighting Akuma for you to die realize the odds are stacked insanely against you. First off, he moves at essentially one game speed level higher than you do. Even if you're on Turbo 2, Akuma will move at Turbo 3. This also lets him abuse the new juggle system more than anyone else in the game. He's got the same basic moveset as Ryu and Ken, with two notable additions. First, Akuma can phase teleport through anything. Second, he can shoot a double fireball while in mid-air. These angle down and are basically unavoidable. And of course, his damage is easily the highest in the game. And the entire time, M. Bison's broken body lies there, reminding you of your inevitable fate.

The changes introduced in Turbo would all be important foundations to build on in the future, but they didn't really offer too much this first time around. When coupled with the "Turbo 2" nonsense and the decision to remove basic colors from everyone, it's hard to really give a firm recommendation to this game. It's a nudge better than Hyper Fighting, but otherwise this is the worst version of the Street Fighter II franchise. Hopefully Super Ultra Street Fighter II Mega Titanium Hyper Turbo Arcade Premium Homicide Edition improves on the experience.

Bottom Line: 12/20

Taz-Mania

In 1991, a little show called Taz-Mania hit the airwaves. A charming cartoon in the same vein as Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs, the show followed the Tasmanian Devil (Taz) and his antics on the island of Taz-Mania, based of course on the Australian island of Tasmania. The cartoon would last for a solid four years of modernized Looney Tunes action. When the show became a hit, a licensed game also called Taz-Mania came out for the Sega Genesis system. This game was a bestseller, tied in well with the source cartoon, and by almost all accounts was a pretty solid way to spend an afternoon.

This is not that game.

A couple years later, near the end of the series' run, someone decided to license the rights to the show to Sunsoft, otherwise known as "that one developer where licensed material goes to die." This is what resulted.

The problems with Taz-Mania begin on the opening menu itself. Once you get past the initial three selections of Start Game, Enter Password, and Game Options, your controls on the menu are reversed. Up becomes down, left becomes right, and vice versa. There's a good omen. Why would you do that? Is it because the toilets flush the opposite way in Australia? Do Australian games naturally reverse your controls? I'm not sure, but I know that when you actually start the game things don't get much better.

Each level of Taz-Mania opens with Taz cranking a movie reel to announce the name of the level as though it were some sort of film. Which would be fine, except the reels all say "Taz-Mania in...[level name]." The game is referring to its own main character as Taz-Mania! But that's the name of the island! If Sunsoft can't even get that right, you know we're in trouble. And sure enough, the very first thing you do in the game is make a difficult long jump onto a tiny platform. Which immediately falls away as you touch it. Boom, instant death. That's pretty much how Taz-Mania goes. There's no real way to tell what will and won't be a moving/falling platform until you step on it and die.

And you know what you quickly find out as you play Taz-Mania? This game is a stereotypical platformer. That's not a condemnation in itself, but let's take a step back and think about what we're working with. What's the first image that pops into your mind when you think of Taz? Is it him spinning and making crazy noises, or is it him jumping around collecting diamonds and floating numbers for points? Probably the former, right? Well great, because this game will give you almost exclusively the latter. Look, I'm no game designer, and far be it from me to make a radical suggestion like this to the pros, but why not base a Taz game around, I don't know, SPINNING AT STUFF?

Instead, though you do get a limited number of "spins" per life, spinning just sends you completely out of control. Yes, you're invincible, and yes, you can wipe out enemies as you spin through them, but you have so little control over what you're doing that you're more likely to spin into a pit and fall to your death than anything else. So what's the point? The only time you can really get your spin on is on two little mini-levels that consist of what you see above - some random hunter forces you off a dock into the ocean (read - water level) and you have to spin rapidly to stay afloat. By "spin rapidly" I mean mash the A button as fast as you can. You'll have a power meter to show you how close you are to inhaling salt water, but even that is broken. The meter has 6 bars, but you can only ever reach 4. And the second time you encounter this level it lasts about twice as long. The only conclusion is that the game is actually trying to exhaust your thumb/finger stamina. God help you if you actually die partway through and have to do the whole thing again.

One actual positive about the game is its variety. While most levels find you jumping around generic platforms and over pits until you find an unmarked exit, there are a few other level types that find their way in. There's the aforementioned water-skidding button mash, of course, but there is also a whole world set in an amusement park. The levels there consist of Taz riding in a roller coaster car, jumping from track to track, and using springs to launch to still higher tracks. It's exceptionally dangerous, such that I can't imagine an amusement park actually constructing anything like it, but it manages to be one of the few saving graces of this game. Also in that world is the barbershop pole slide. At least, I think it's supposed to be a slide. You don't actually appear to slide down, so much as the background rotates nauseatingly and random junk flies up toward you. This includes, so far as I can tell, hambones.

There is, sadly, one level type that keeps reappearing despite your prayers for it to die in a fire. These levels consist of a sunny two lane road, ostensibly in whatever location the rest of the overarching stage takes place. This is naturally ludicrous when considering that the stages are things like Easter Island, an amusement park, and the inside of a cave. But that aside, the levels revolve around Taz running away into the distance while the road twists and turns and stuff appears in front of you. This "stuff" can be health, diamonds, or, most likely, hurdles. They can appear in the left lane, the right lane, or right smack on the dashed line between lanes. I'm not going to ask why there are roads littered with hurdles, because there is obviously no acceptable explanation, but the real problem is the utter lack of reaction time the game allows you. Unless you jump at the exact instant the hurdle appears on screen, you will hit it and lose health. But of course, since they want to pretend perspective matters, the hurdles start out small, such that you can't tell if it's a hurdle or a power-up of some kind. So you just run down the road jumping constantly like a moron and missing all the power-ups along the way.

Like any good (or not-so-good) platformer, each world ends with a boss fight, and of course they are all immune to your spins. Why is this a Taz game again? Now, my memory of the cartoon is admittedly hazy, so I can't really speak to whether the bosses are related in any way to the show, but regardless: these are some stupid creatures. One boss looks like a bobcat, but it attacks by standing still and judging you while random boulders fall from the sky. Another is some kind of viking wizard that tries to kill you with fireballs until you dodge enough that it gets mad, sprouts tiny wings, and flies around grimacing. One is an apatosaurus that attacks you by trying to crush you with its chin. No, not biting. Chinning.

Even the final boss is just some zookeeper in a helicopter that you attack with see-saws. And he's the easiest boss by far! When you beat him the game says "WELL DONE YOU HAVE DEFEATED THE ZOO KEEPER" as Taz grins like an idiot. At first I thought this meant that beating the zookeeper was the actual objective of the game until I realized it was probably more accurate to assume the game had no real objective whatsoever and the developers just felt that was as good a spot as any to give up. Even the music stops playing halfway through the end credits, as though the game's composer realized partway through recording that he was the only guy still at the office. "Well, F this," he said as he took off for the weekend.

Once you get past the relatively enjoyable amusement park, you're stuck in a stage called "Dark Drip Island" and the rudeness factor really starts to rise. First off, this is where spikes decide to make their first unwelcome appearance. I know, I know. "For all this game's flaws, at least I haven't heard anything of spikes yet," you thought optimistically. Tough luck, bub. But that's not even the worst of it. Look at the right. There is no indication anywhere that the floor is going to kill you on contact until you're actually fried. And you know what? While mildly annoying, I'd be totally okay with that. But on the very next level there is another electrified rail and THAT one has a warning sign posted to let you know that it will kill you if you touch it. They wait until after you already know it's a deathtrap to tell you! And then the signs are EVERYWHERE. The entire level is littered with them! Come on!

But that's still not the biggest issue with the picture above. The real problem is that little unicycle cart. You have to ride around on them to get past the electrified rails, which wouldn't be a problem if not for the fact that they make a constant loud CLINK CLINK CLINK CLINK sound for as long as you're on them. And, to guarantee maximum exposure to this unholy din, they made sure the carts move like molasses. Which becomes a compounded problem when you realize that every level runs on a short timer. They scatter little clocks around as pickups to increase your chance of making it through, but by the time you get to Dark Drip Island, they have begun sticking them in spike traps.

The rudeness culminates in a level involving ladders. You will never see a ladder before or after this level, but the entire level itself is practically nothing but the things. But see, Taz-Mania has a big issue across the board with detecting where you are in relation to things - power-ups, enemies, objects, etc. So this means that to actually climb a ladder, you must be exactly centered on its base. If you are the slightest bit off, the ladder is totally non-functional. Worse, when you reach the top of the ladder you can't directional jump. The moment you hit left or right you fall all the way down (and have to recenter yourself perfectly to try again). You have to jump straight up then finagle your way over in mid-air so you can proceed. And of course this level, where your forward progress is continuously stunted by bad programming, is the one they chose to be impossible to complete in the allotted time. You have to take side paths and find hidden time bonuses to be able to complete it. Again, I say: RUDE.

Overall, there are enough things that prevent Taz-Mania from falling so completely into the bad game abyss that it warrants a middling score instead of a terrible one. The amusement park stuff is legitimately fun for what it is. The different level types, though almost all are flawed, at least prevent you from getting bored. And the music is...tolerable. But there are problems aplenty with this game, and I didn't even get to the nit-picky stuff (like, why does Taz balance on one foot any time he's on anything that moves? Why can you jump on a ghost to kill it if cartoon logic is in effect?). Ultimately, the moral of the review is this: the best way to make a gem of a game is not to force the player to collect them while jumping on parrots. Because when it comes right down to it, that's really all Taz-Mania is. Give it a skip and then pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

Bottom Line: 9/20

Contra

Contra is a man's game. A manly game for manly men. It features men killing things in manly ways. It's so manly I had to look in a thesaurus to find a word manly enough to describe its manliness. And you know what I found? "Twofisted." Hell freaking yeah. Contra isn't just manly. Contra is freakin' twofisted. Don't be jealous.

Contra stars Bill "Mad Dog" Rizer and Lance "Scorpion" Bean on their quest to go kick some ass. One's a blue-eyed blonde-haired all-American, and the other is a blue-haired blonde-eyed all-Anime warrior. Of course, in the game itself they're both sporting reddish brown hair, but by that point who cares? Even the name of the game is manly. It's really just a Latin prefix meaning anti or against, and it doesn't actually make sense without some sort of target object. But forget that man, these guys are Contra! And if you got a problem with it, they'll be contra you next. Believe me, you don't want guys named Mad Dog and Scorpion coming after you. It can't end well.

The game takes place in present-day South America (so, 1988) on an unnamed island. Mad Dog and Scorpion are the two man (some might say twofisted) strike team sent by the US to put an end to the terrorist organization calling themselves Red Falcon. They get dropped off in the jungle by helicopter, shirtless and armed only with their crazy jumping skills and a rifle filled with infinite bullets. The US fully expects this to be enough, and you don't want to make your bosses look bad, do you?

Well tough cookies son, because this game is going to take you to school. Contra practically defines hard. You might have infinite ammo, but you die in one hit. That's right: if anything touches you, you are dead. Like a real man. And the enemies are going to spawn infinitely at you, so don't think you can just sneak by the firefights as they come along. You let your guard down and you are jungle food, you hear me? And here's the great thing about it all: it's fair. I can't emphasize enough how absolutely critical that is to the gameplay experience. Contra is crazy hard and will test your memory and reflexes alike, but you will never complain of a cheap death. There's never going to be some glitchy pit or some unavoidable enemy to steal a life from you; if you die, it's on you. Take some responsibility for your failings. Like a real man.

Konami did two things to help you get through the game though. The first is that they removed any all and time limits. You can take as short or long a time as you need to take care of business, and the only penalty is seeing some more enemy soldiers appear along the way. But as they all die in one hit as well, so if you stay alert you can handle it. The second is the infamous Konami code. They'd used it before, but Contra made this thing legendary. You see, there is a sequence of buttons that can be pressed on the title screen that will grant you 30 lives at the start of the game, and 30 more after each continue. Considering that the game normally gives you 3 lives, and only 3 continues, this is huge. The code is famous because it's the only way most people were able to beat the game. Now, I went ahead and cleared it without the code (like a real man!), but it did take an awful lot of practice and memorizing. Doing it legit is not for the faint of heart. Or those with actual things to do.

To that end, the game displays your current extra lives as medals in the upper left corner of the screen. But it won't display any more than four. It's like the developers didn't want to waste precious lines of code displaying something you'd never attain anyway. "You know you don't have that many lives, kid. Don't even argue." When you do inevitably die, you'll at least come back right where you were, with a few seconds of invincibility to get your bearings back. You'll lose any gun upgrades you acquired though, which can make it quite the uphill battle to make further progress. More on upgrades in a bit. For now I'd like to point out the image above and ask something in earnest: How the blazes is there an arctic forest on the same small island as a tropical jungle?! I saw that ice covering the ground and almost drenched my undies. As if the game weren't difficult enough without skidding all over the place. Blissfully, I needed worry not - your traction is unaffected. Contra doesn't need gimmicks to beat you. See? Tough, but fair. Like a real man.

The level design itself is really standout here. Contra blends a few different kinds of gameplay into its stages, keeping the challenge high (by forcing you to adapt) and preventing the game from ever becoming boring. The first stage is a typical run-and-gun sidescroller, but the second level actually switches the entire perspective. At that point the camera shifts to the back of your hero as he moves forward through an enemy base. Then attacks come from the back of the screen instead of one side or another, and boy do they keep the obstacles coming. After that stage's boss, you'll have the waterfall level, which is an up-scroller (if I may coin the term). You have to keep jumping to progress, and you can't head back down without dying. Getting to the top earns you another base level, but you finish with four straight sidescrolling stages after that (albeit with totally different designs and challenges). One thing that bothered me about the enemy base levels: the main enemies you'll keep seeing there are these dudes wearing green spandex suits. For some inexplicable reason, they do little ballet hops across the screen while they shoot at you. You can just sit there indefinitely if you want to watch a whole ballet performance, what with the infinite enemy spawns. Why would you dance at me? That's not manly at all. It's contra-manly.

What, really? The bosses too?! Come on big robot man, you can do better than that! This guy is like the head general of the whole organization, and this little wimpkick is his only attack. Unless you count running into you at normal speed an attack. Is this what the Red Falcon terrorists do in their spare time? Just practice ballet? It's like that prison in the Phillipines that taught its inmates the Thriller dance. Just too much time on their hands. Anyway, it's a good thing that every time you press jump you do crazy high flips like a real man, or you'd never be able to avoid this dude. Seriously, just jump over him and shoot him while he ballets the air. The other bosses though are mostly just automated defense systems, which is a nice change of pace from the usual "here's yet another big dude who won't die" mechanic that these kinds of games can fall back on a bit too often.

The weapons are the real defining point of the game's action, though. Throughout the game you'll find upgrades, either by shooting down little balloon things that fly by or by shooting falcon emblems in the levels. The upgrades are all just big letters between a pair of wings, so you know they're gonna be awesome. "M" gives you a machine gun, allowing you to hold down the fire button instead of having to press it for each shot. "F" gives you a flamethrower with slower shots that loop in a wide radius, letting you set up and trap enemies. "L" grants a laser, which fires a long beam of energy. There's a slight learning curve on it because rapidly pressing fire actually will make it totally ineffective. You've got to place shots carefully and let them connect fully. "R" is rapid fire, which increases your maximum firing rate with any gun. There's also a "B" which makes you completely invincible. Since "invincible" obviously doesn't start with the letter B, I'm just going to guess it stands for "Badass mode." There's a glowing falcon too that will blow up every enemy on the screen, but you'll almost never find it.

But who are we kidding, really? There's only one weapon you'll ever really want or need in Contra: the Spread Gun. It's so good I capitalized it. It's so good people tattoo its emblem on their shoulders. It's so good they named an entire collegiate football offensive system after it. This badboy shoots five full-power bullets at a set of angles that's basically guaranteed to hit anything in front of you on the screen. And the closer you are to an enemy, the more of the bullets hit, giving you double, triple, quadruple, or yes, quintuple damage. You can fire this from a safe position and just annihilate anything that comes your way. Even the random enemy soldiers will outright explode from one of these shots, just like a real man. You know what the best incentive is to avoid death in Contra? It's not to save continues. It's not even to beat the game. The best reason to not die is that you get to keep the Spread Gun. For real! You die with this thing and you're bummed about losing it far more than you are about dying in the first place.

What terrorist could possibly stand up to you when you're packing heat like that? With all its benefits you'd think the only limitation is an inability to fire into the third dimension. Yet when you enter an enemy base level the gun fires its spread horizontally instead of vertically. That's right - it actually converted its mode of fire to fit its surroundings. Gracious. Those Red Falcon boys are going down. Let me just get through these bases and kill that ballet general and...

WHOA MY GOD THAT'S A BIG ALIEN! What's happened here?! My whole sense of reality is a-shambles. One minute I'm fighting terrorist forces in a frosty rainforest, and the next thing I know there are aliens barfing fireballs at me. Sad but true, it's our worst fears realized: alien-financed South American terrorism. Apparently Red Falcon isn't just the name of the organization; it's also the codename for the head alien itself, pulling all the strings. Of all the sneaky... But hey, I guess it all works out in the end, right? I mean, the developers were basically trying to make a video game that combined Rambo and Schwarzenegger's Predator, so mission accomplished. And when you destroy the alien hive, you get treated to a lovely cutscene of your single helicopter blowing up the entire island. Like a real man.

Contra is an absolute blast to play. It's that brilliant blend of challenge and timing and avoids practically all the usual pitfalls that approach can create. You can even play as a two player simultaneous co-op, though be warned: if one player lags behind, you'll probably both get killed. Really the only complaints are the ease of the bosses relative to the rest of the levels, and specifically how anti-climactic the final fight is. It can also occasionally be hard to see an enemy bullet flying at your face, but again - these are just little nitpicks. It's good to see that Konami learned its lesson from Castlevania (which was hard for all the wrong reasons). That game surely could have used a little Contra in it. Heck, I'd play that game. Contravania. Make it happen. Like a real man.

Bottom Line: 18/20

Kirby's Dream Land

Kirby is a character that almost never happened. A simple pink blob (despite the fact that the box art for Kirby's Dream Land depicts him as white), Kirby pioneered the puffy ball of cuteness in a time when one's response to "Jigglypuff" was typically "God bless you." But did you know that Kirby's design was just a stand-in while the developers tried to come up with a real character for their game? They just found the little rascal so cute they decided to keep him on. Then they named him after a vacuum cleaner, stuck him in a Game Boy cartridge, and called it Dream Land.

The basic plot of Kirby's Dream Land is that the self-proclaimed ruler of Dream Land, King Dedede, has gone around stealing food from everyone because he's hongry. Kirby, a resident of Dream Land who is honestly equally famished, decides to go retrieve the food. That's basically it. Two gluttons fighting over a banquet. Also, as though it's somehow important, the feast is supposed to be eaten at midnight. I don't know if there's some sort of Cinderella vibe going on here, but the game itself never alludes to this - in fact, it's never even dark, which would seem to put the whole thing to rest. Unless...

Maybe Dream Land has multiple suns! You know, it's not Earth or anything. We're talking about a world where little pink things go around swallowing everything that moves. Why should we assume that they have the same sort of solar cycle as we do? Or you know what? Maybe they don't even have a sun at all! Yeah, maybe the world is lit up by something magical. Like...um...maybe the ground is covered in glittery gumdrops! They're too small to see on the Game Boy, of course, but they project enough light to make it like an eternal day. But see, they're spread out so uniformly that you don't notice they're the world's light source at all, unless you really get down and examine them scientifically. But nobody does science in Dream Land! That's got to be it!

Aaaaaanyway, Dream Land really is a happy place. They even name their major landmarks things that invent memes. I mean, who was really using the internet back in 1992? And if you were, you certainly weren't hunting down memes. You didn't even know what they were. But here comes Kirby's Dream Land, dropping the lulz all over you. Now, I admit it's possible that this is pronounced "low low low," but doesn't that just make it the predecessor for this instead? You cannot avoid the truth here: Kirby's Dream Land changed the entire course of mankind. There, I said it.

Kirby's main weapon is a little on the lame side. It's air. See, Kirby can inhale, exhale, and that's basically it. But he can inhale a lot of air, to the point where he can even float around. Now, this doesn't make any sense, because inhaling the air doesn't make him lighter than air, but you have to remember that this is a Game Boy game, and stop expecting so much. He can also expel this air with such force as to kill small lifeforms, something which will occur with some frequency in this game. In addition, of course, you can just directly inhale the enemies themselves, and spit them out as stars. Don't ask.

Now, Kirby's air-sucking abilities allow him something rather unique in platformers; he can essentially fly anywhere at any time. It's this dynamic that sets Kirby apart, more than any other single thing. They even have you fight a boss in this way, though they give you a power-up just prior that allows you to spit air puffs indefinitely. The other bosses are largely forgettable, except for the first. That's Whispy Woods, a tree that tries to Newton you to death, dropping apples from its branches in hopes that one of them will strike you. This would turn into Kirby's sort of trademark boss-that's-not-really-very-important-to-the-story, which a few other games utilize as well.

The basic enemies in this game are actually mostly "normal," considering everything else going on. You've got Waddle Dees, which appropriately do nothing but waddle. You've got Waddle Doos, which are like the Dees, except cycloptic and they shoot crap out of their eyes. Perhaps most treacherous are the Gordos, which are, and I ask that you brace yourself, sentient, mobile spikes. Say WHAAA? Remember in Sonic how dastardly those things were? Or heck, go back even further to Mega Man! Or even Mega Man 2! Jiminy Crickets man, even Mega Man 3! Spikes are deadly abominations of sin. You see a Gordo, you RUN. You hear me? RUN!

And then there's these little spawns of Satan. I know. You think I'm some sort of cold-hearted maniac. How could anyone not adore those happy little bunnies floating there disembodied staring blankly into space? You're in for a rude awakening. These guys are no less vicious than the rabbit that attacked King Arthur and his knights at the caves of Caerbannog (check your history textbooks; it's there). You make one wrong move, and they will charge you and explode. All over your face. That glee on their face isn't because they think Dream Land's a pretty spiffy place to raise a family - it's because they can't wait to blow you into little pink bits the color of which your game system can't even recognize.

With all of this, it's nice that the game gives you a health bar instead of the Mario style "stub a toe on a goomba and die" method of meting out punishment. And the health can be healed by - what else? - eating. Specifically, there are giant tomatoes emblazoned with the letter M that will restore your life completely. Or, if you're only feeling a tad thirsty, you'll find bottled water lying around, ready for the ingesting. You eat the plastic too, but to no apparent ill effect. And look at it this way: when you have to poop, you're recycling!

So...King Dedede. Did you know he's a duck? A big ol' duck with a hammer. Wearing a wooly cap and a bathrobe. All right, I'll roll with it. I've come this far. Defeating him is a tad troublesome at first because, like the other bosses in the game, he is immune to your bursts of air. But, unlike the previous bosses, he doesn't generate any objects for you to inhale and spit back at him. Eventually you've got to just say "This is crazy, but..." and swallow the biggest thing you can see in the foreground other than King Dedede himself - the animation of his hammer hitting the ground. Yes, the cute little star that poofs out to show impact is itself your weapon. It's ridiculous, it's absurd, it's genius.

Beating Dedede causes his castle to start spontaneously ejecting all the food he'd collected. So I guess if you ever had a strong desire to watch a castle vomiting various fruits and fish, you can always hit up Kirby. I have to admit though that it's really an unsatisfying finish. Frankly, the game is too easy. From start to finish, nothing here is a challenge. They even have you replay all the earlier bosses before fighting Dedede in the Mega Man style, but the bosses were easy the first time, and now you already know how to beat them. It's a rather short game too; you can finish it in 30 minutes or less without any real problem the first time through.

All this is mostly rectified, however, by the inclusion of an "extra game." After emerging from Dedede's castle victorious and sitting through the game's credits, you'll be presented with a code to enter at the title screen for this extra game. It's the same thing, only with harder enemies (same dealio as Super Mario Bros.). It won't take long before you notice the increased difficulty here. There are more enemies, and all of them are more difficult than their previous incarnations. You'll even see little walking cupcakes that launch their icing at you. Nothing really ever shot at you the first time through. Whispy Woods starts dropping Gordos from his tree as well as apples, and he drops them faster. The list goes on, but the point is that the extra game is basically the challenge that Kirby arguably should have been in the first place.

Kirby is a refreshing departure from the usual offering of platform gaming, daring to be creative in what was already threatening to be a stagnant genre. You've got to respect it for that. While its concept was original and entertaining, its execution left a bit to be desired. It was too easy, too short, and relatively unfocused. Still, they gave us an option in the game to correct the first flaw on that list, so all in all, you've got to say it was a good start for Kirby and the gang.

Bottom Line: 13/20

Star Wars: Dark Forces

When you think about it, Doom was one of the best things ever to happen to Star Wars. The franchise had already seen some games released, but they were at times just pitiful Game Boy ports of nearly as pitiful NES games. Even good games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter only granted you interaction into one aspect of the Star Wars universe: ship combat. But with the onset of first-person shooter technology made effective and popular by Doom, they could finally set you in the role of an individual without resorting to stupid side-scrolling levels full of spikes.

In Dark Forces you play as Kyle Katarn, a mercenary running jobs for the Rebel Alliance because the Empire had a hand in the still-not-totally-resolved murder of his father. The game opens with you having to steal the Death Star plans to deliver them to Princess Leia, which of course immediately precedes the first film's events. Cool tie-in, if nothing else. Then the rest of the game takes place between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but by now you're a known entity, and the Empire wants you dead.

Maybe it's just the fact that this is the first time Star Wars has ever been experienced in this format, but Dark Forces is just so full of murderous intent it's a little frightening. Everyone in this game wants to violently end your life. We're not talking about the legions of hell from Doom, or even the dehumanized Nazis from Wolfenstein anymore. These are living, breathing, thinking, presumably otherwise moral human beings. Sure, they may hide under clunky white suits of armor, but for crying out loud, doesn't anyone think twice before pulling the trigger? Has anyone really ever sat back and contemplated what it truly means to end a life?

Maybe it's just that they're too stupid to even reflect on such matters. After all, if you stand behind a transparent forcefield, they will continue to shoot at you with reckless abandon, even as the lasers reflect back into their own armor. Yes, that's right. You can eliminate entire rooms of enemy soldiers without ever firing a shot, simply by standing there and letting them shoot themselves down. They're more efficient at that than at shooting you anyway. Stormtroopers have never exactly been renowned for their accuracy.

But you know what? I think they get judged a little unfairly on that. After all, Dark Forces is the first time we really get to use that blaster rifle for ourselves. And let me tell you - it ain't going to win you any target shooting contests. It's not that the stormtroopers have abysmal aim, it's that the gun the Empire foists upon them can't fire straight in the least. I can only imagine the frustration. We're talking about the dominant force in the galaxy with all the resources you can imagine and they just refuse to equip their infantry with so much as a gun that can fire straight. It's darned irresponsible, that's what it is.

Not that accuracy is really going to be working in your favor either here. Dark Forces defies reason and makes all your weapons shoot off to the left instead of the center. Why this is I have no idea, but it'll throw you way off at first. Even your "accurate" pistol has this issue. Once you lock down what the correction is in terms of aiming to the right of what you want to hit you'll be fine on that issue, but there are others. You see, Dark Forces made a couple leaps forward in FPS technology. For the first time, levels are in legitimate 3D. This means you can jump, duck, swim, have rooms on top of other rooms, and perhaps most notably, look up and down. Unfortunately you can't aim vertically with your mouse. You've got to actually hit your page up and page down keys to adjust your vertical aim, and there's no way to restore you to default height automatically.

The game tries to make up for this by auto-adjusting shots vertically to an extent. This creates graphical confusion when you point a gun straight forward and see the laser shoot to the left and downward at a 70 degree angle, but I guess it does make the game playable. I'll give them a bit of a pass, because I understand that nobody had worked out all the 3D kinks yet. I mean, they include "bottomless" pits in some levels that all have visible bottoms. You may even intentionally leap into one because you can see the floor and you think "I might survive that." Nope. You'll just hear yourself screaming from a stock sound effect and have to try again. Works the other way too though - I don't know why, but you can jump like 5 feet vertically in Dark Forces. Don't be silly.

You want proof this game wants to end your life?
ICE LEVEL.
Why is there an ice level in a shooter?! And don't tell me it's just aesthetic because that crap is slippery for reals. You actually have to find "ice cleats" in the level to stop from sliding uncontrollably, and you know where they put those things? On a narrow cliff over a bottomless (that is to say, bottomed) pit. You also get other little gadgets and extras as you go, like IR goggles that don't actually view anything in infrared (it's more of a night-vision puke green), and a gas mask that is absolutely necessary to survive one section of a level.

What? Plot? Oh, all right. The main premise of the game is that the Empire has begun building "Dark Troopers." These are, for lack of a better word, Terminators. You've got to find out how and where they're making these things and then destroy all associated facilities in their production before blowing up an Imperial ship acting as the mobile launching base for them. Eventually the metal endoskeletons get enhanced with armor, a jetpack, and a giant plasma rifle with an attached missile launcher. Yipes. But they're still not the scariest things in the game. That distinction is reserved for two other baddies.

The first are the Gran. They're an alien species with multiple eyes protruding out of the forehead. Eyes that in Dark Forces glow green. In the dark. And guess what they do?

Do they lob infinite numbers of thermal detonators?

Absolutely correct!

Good news? You can load up on the things when they die and use them to explode entire rooms of guys who would do the same to you if given half a chance. They've got sick aim too. And those eyes....*shudder*

The other most deadly enemy? Turrets. There are ceiling turrets in various places throughout the levels. They have tons of health, a fairly quick rate of fire, and they never miss (even if you're sprinting randomly). Probably responsible for a healthy majority of the deaths I experienced playing this game.

You'll notice I didn't include any bosses among the game's enemy elite. There's a couple reasons for this. First, there's only one boss in the whole campaign, at the very end. Secondly, if he weren't chatting dialogue at you as the fight started, you wouldn't even realize he was a boss. He acts virtually identical to the Dark Troopers and doesn't seem any more difficult to kill. Who I really feel bad though is the single Imperial officer hanging out in the only room after the boss fight. He was assigned "guard the shuttle" duty, but the idiots had the brilliant idea to load the shuttle bay with explosive barrels. And if you just knocked out the "hardest" enemy in the game, what chance does this fool have? Makes me think that all their efforts to execute me might actually be in vain.






!!!





Dark Forces is a somewhat decent game flawed by a number of imperfections that can mostly be chalked up to being the first to attempt the things they were attempting. The cutscenes are pretty good for the era, though I do feel obligated to mention that the line "Stop, rebel scum!" isn't said with as much zest as would feel appropriate. It's a moderately tough shooter that looks and feels a lot like Doom without the demons...though those garbage monsters come pretty close. Don't swim in trash, folks. Shizz is nasty.

Bottom Line: 12/20