Tomb Raider

Video games, especially back in the 80s and the 90s, had a noticeable lack of strong female protagonists. Often in games, the women were little more than quest objectives, meant to be kidnapped by the villain of the hour and retrieved by the player's decidedly male hero. In some games, this was the entire mission. In others, the saving of the girl was a secondary goal. But almost never was it the woman doing the saving. Metroid was an exception, of course, but even then the folks at Nintendo had to trick their players into thinking they were playing as men and then reveal the truth afterward.

So it was into this landscape in 1996 that Tomb Raider burst onto the scene, making no bones about putting its players in the shoes of archaeologist/adventurer Lara Croft. It's as though it was telling players "You're going to play as a woman, you're going to be a total badass, and you're going to like it." This was a big deal at the time, and really helped push for a new level of gender equality in games. This is all very positive stuff. But none of it speaks to what Tomb Raider as a game was really all about. And unfortunately, when you get right down to it, Tomb Raider is a game that feels like it's not really sure what it wants to be. It tries to be a story-driven adventure game, and it almost succeeds. It tries to be a third person shooter and it almost succeeds. It tries to be a 3D platformer and it almost succeeds. But by trying to be all three at once, it falls short of being any of them. Let me show you how that ends up working out.

First off, the story. When you start the game, you don't even know what it is. You might check the printed manual that came with the thing, but all it tells you is about Lara's background - she was a stuck up, rich English girl who got lost in the wild for a spell, and over that short period of time learned every survival skill in existence. Cool, I guess, but now what? The game opens with an incomprehensible cinematic showing some explosion, then cuts to Lara in some house (Is it her house? Someone else's? We'll never know.) talking to a hick and watching what looks something like a Nintendo DS as she's told about an artifact in South America. And that's it! Next thing you know you're in a cave and the game's begun. What's my motive, man?!

So off you go, cavorting (some might say raiding) through tombs, looking to claim some mythical artifact you've never heard of solely because it might be there. As you go, you'll encounter some of the same characters from the opening cutscenes again, though if I'm honest you will rarely realize that's who they are. These characters mean nothing to Lara as a character and even less to you as a player, and the game doesn't make any effort to change that. So when hick dude ambushes you after you get the artifact and tries to steal it, there's no big sting of betrayal. You almost don't even realize it's the same guy. You're just going "Oh, this redneck wants my loot. I guess I'd better shoot him."

That mindless decision to solve problems by shooting at stuff is a running problem through the game, and we'll get to it shortly. But perhaps the most infuriating thing about the story is this: it eventually gets good! It takes until the final few levels but the story eventually makes sense and it's pretty well thought out and intriguing. But where was that the entire rest of the game? And I don't mean to say the story is boring for a while but then picks up near the end. What I'm saying is that there's no story at all until the very end of the game, when a story is laid out that puts the entire game into perspective. They give you retroactive motivation for clearing the levels you've already beaten. You start to go "Well hey! This all meant something and that's pretty cool!" But wouldn't it have been nice to have that along the way? I mean, you had the material! You clearly planned it out and wrote a decent narrative! Why did you deny it to me for so long?!

Then again, I suppose that even if they did string that story out over the whole campaign, it would have been hard to take seriously. Suspension of disbelief would be destroyed with nearly every room you entered. By that I don't mean with the nature of the enemies, or even the lingering implication that an aristocrat lost in the wilderness with nothing but a will to survive would manage to become an akimbo pistol expert before being rescued. It's the smaller things. It's the way those two pistols have, conveniently, an infinite number of bullets inside and require no reloading mechanism. It's the way the other weapons you find have ammunition liberally distributed around the environments you explore, which of course are supposed to be ancient tombs sealed away for thousands of years. It's the way your tiny backpack can hold dozens of medical packs that will instantly cure you of gunshot and other wounds. When you look at it, these are the conventions of shooter games. While you, the player, think you're playing a story-driven adventure, Lara Croft is 100% sure she's stuck in a shooter game, and she acts accordingly.

Exhibit A: This is the most typical sight you'll see during your adventures in Tomb Raider. Most combat in the game revolves around Lara finding some kind of high ground, seeing some number of wild beasts down below, and shooting them like fish in a barrel. Nothing is off limits here. No creature is safe. In this picture is one dead lion, a second soon-to-be dead lion, and a gorilla running for its life. That's smart of the gorilla, considering that Tomb Raider nearly put the species extinct. In one level alone, I killed 19 gorillas. NINETEEN! Why are there 19 gorillas in this ancient tomb? And why does Lara Croft, an archaeologist who supposedly wants to conserve things, not even hesitate to eradicate them with deadly force? You could argue that, if given the chance, the gorillas would attack her, but what threat is this guy posing? What's he going to do from 15 feet down in a pit? There's just no call for it.

It's not just the gorillas, either. The more visually astute among you will have seen the dead alligator floating in the water in the picture some paragraphs above. You know how you kill alligators in Tomb Raider? You stand up on a ledge and shoot into the water while they're swimming. Here's some other helpless animals you'll fill with lead from up on high ground: wolves, panthers, rats...the point is that this is basically all you do. The only animals you aren't shooting down at are bats, though that doesn't put them any less on the receiving end of your gunfire. As a player it starts to get a little boring. There's nothing exciting about firing your infinite bullets into a creature that can't even defend itself against you, and it begins to feel like the game is just throwing these animals your way just to keep you busy. You become numb to it all.

Say, here's a thirsty bear making its way to a small pool for a refreshing drink of water. Rationally, I know that I'm in the buried ruins of a city and civilization long forgotten. I know that nobody has been down here for hundreds of years or more. I know that somehow, against all odds, this bear has managed to survive in a caged off room that I only just opened. I know that this is the only source of water it's got, and its very life depends on just getting a little bit of that water to keep it going just a while longer. I know that I can simply run through the now open door and continue my quest, having given this bear a better shot at life. I know that, once my quest in this place is over, the humane thing to do would be to find a way to release the bear completely; to let it back into the wild where it can thrive and the balance of nature can be restored.

Nahhh, let's shoot it.

Not even your human enemies can figure out how to exist properly in a three dimensional environment. Case in point: during your entire second mission in the game, which spans several individual levels, you are periodically confronted by a man with a gun. It is never explained how this man continually gets in front of you as you navigate the tombs, or even how this man is otherwise integral to the plot, but that's not the point. The point is that he will appear and begin shooting at you. You must return his fire and hurt him for a while. "A while" is vague, because he seems to be programmed to take a bit of damage and then simply disappear. Once you've hurt him "enough," all you have to do is look away from him, whether by turning around or by putting a wall of some sort between you and him. Then he will just be gone. It's kind of neat, I guess, but here's the problem: his AI is super dumb. SUPER dumb.

What this guy does is run up directly to you, firing the occasional shot, until he accidentally bumps into you. Then he turns around in circles, forgetting what he was doing, only occasionally looking your way again for a quick potshot. So when you hurt him enough, he doesn't always just run off and disappear like a good NPC. More often you have to do that work for him by turning around like you're playing hide and seek with a four year old. And if platforms get involved, you're screwed. I once encountered this guy and sat on my high ground like always, shooting endlessly into his chest. I was surprised at his apparent intelligence when he then came around and walked up the ramp to my little spot to assault me. I figured I'd sit there and exchange some point blank shots for a while; I could always just heal through any damage he dealt me. Except it never freaking ended. Up on that little platform with me standing there, he had nowhere to leave my sight and no idea how to disappear; he was unable to just jump off the platform and flee, and he couldn't remember how to use the ramp anymore. I tried then to jump off the platform myself onto the ground five feet below and give him his chance at escape, but the poor guy's mind was already broken. He was an immortal, forever doomed to spin in circles, confused about how to end his existence. Ultimately I just had to load a saved game.

So we've established that platforms of any height are unassailable bastions of safety - impassable obstacles your enemies cannot hope to overcome. But what about you? After all, when you're not blazing down the latest endangered species on your hitlist, you basically spend the game exploring massive ruins and tombs, and that consists largely of 3D platforming. It would help if that were fun or manageable, right? Well here's the thing - it works, but only if you've done the tutorial. I can't stress that enough. With the tutorial complete, navigating platforms in Tomb Raider is logical and occasionally enjoyable. If you haven't done the tutorial, platforming is an impossible guessing game of jump timing. I was shocked it made that big a difference, but it really did. Of course, I didn't even know the game had a tutorial at first, and that's part of the problem; they just stick it on the main menu with an icon of a Polaroid picture and the label "Lara's Home." What does that sound like to you? A bit of background lore perhaps? Maybe a concept art gallery? Even a guided tour of her mansion? Wrong. Platforming tutorial. Come on!!

Even once you understand the controls and spacing enough to make the game playable, platforming has its rough edges. There's a notable spot where, in order to get a powerful weapon, you must first tiptoe to the edge of the platform you're on, then slowly turn around, then say "Oh hell, here goes nothing" and take a backflip of faith to land in the area with the gun. This shouldn't be a thing. This stuff is exacerbated by the game's camera work which is, in a word, bad. It just does whatever it wants, whenever it wants to. You can't even adapt to it by trying to avoid certain spots depending on the layout of a room. It'll just let you find the place you want to stand, then zoom up right in your face and sit there. You can't control it. Don't even try.

There is a simple pleasure and peace though to be found in just wandering the game's large environments. Even if the camera is bad and the platforming a little finicky, the level design itself is superb. There are numerous times during the game when you'll feel completely lost or stuck, but you always realize deep down that you aren't; you just have to explore a bit more. Try to find a way up to a ledge that looks unreachable. Find a hidden passage in a wall or under the water. Once you hit that "eureka" moment, it's profoundly satisfying. That makes the experience worthwhile as a whole. That, and the fact that if you try to use a key on a lock it doesn't fit, Lara will straight up tell you "NO" in that snobby British accent of hers. For those two things, it's worth the story frustrations, and it's worth the mindless massacre of everything that moves. Heck, as you look above you'll notice we're not even dealing with real animals by the end. The game sort of gives up and just turns into Doom along the way, and that's OK. PETA was probably upset enough with the whole thing as it was. I mean, with everything else you'd killed, what else was even left to surprise you? Dinosaurs?







All right, I think we're done here.

Bottom Line: 12/20

Super Mario Bros. 3

The year is 1989. It's been a little more than a year since Americans were treated to the bizarre dreams of Mario in Super Mario Bros. 2, and they're ready for more. Enter...The Wizard? Anticipating that nothing could hype the American youth more than watching Fred Savage watch some other kid play Nintendo games, the company released a feature film full of product placement to increase sales of everything from Contra to the Power Glove. But Nintendo, they knew what they were doing. The movie's video game climax revolved around a brand new mystery game that tournament contestants had to play, and that game...that game was Super Mario Bros. 3. Just a couple months later, in 1990, the game was released and the future was changed.

Mario 3's plot is (barely) more involved than earlier games in the series. First, the Mushroom Kingdom has been expanded to the Mushroom World, with seven other kingdoms populating the region/planet/whatever it is. What's particularly notable about these other seven kingdoms is that they all have kings. I mean, the fact that Princess Toadstool isn't Queen Toadstool tells us that at least one of her parents must still be kickin' around somewhere, but clearly they're not doing anything if they let her get repeatedly kidnapped and put the responsibility of actual rule on her shoulders. I wish I could say Mario 3 was a quest to find the Princess' deadbeat dad, but alas. Perhaps that's an idea for down the road.

The actual setup for the game has Bowser (same baddie, new name, despite the fact that the game only calls him "King of the Koopa") having apparently sired seven unholy abominations children by some unknown mother. These children, called the Koopalings, each took an airship to one of the seven "other" kingdoms of the Mushroom World and stole that king's magic wand. They then used that magic wand to turn the king into an animal of some sort and then never bothered to leave. I just don't get it, man. If your goal is to wreak as much havoc as you can, and only the magic wands can turn the kings back, run away! Steal them and get out of there! Throw the wands to the bottom of the ocean! You do have oceans in the Mushroom World, don't you? Instead, the door is open for Mario to go to each of those seven kingdoms and retrieve the wands. Princess Toadstool is not only surprisingly not kidnapped, but she even sends you items after every successful wand recovery.

Which brings me to the first huge difference between this game and its predecessors: items. Not only did the game add far more power ups than just Super Mushrooms and Fire Flowers, but it also implemented an item storage system, by which you could hold a large number of power ups and save them for use before any given level down the road. You receive these items typically from Toad Houses, which is where the Toads seem to live when they're not suffocating in sacks in random castles. This makes the Toads really useful, which is a bit of a shock when you remember that the only previous time a Toad was any help was in Super Mario Bros. 2, which of course took place entirely in Mario's head. It's not unreasonable, therefore, to call the existence of these Toad Houses Mario's dream come true.

The most notable of these new power ups is the Super Leaf, which gives Mario raccoon ears and a matching tail. A leaf is obviously a logical segue into raccoon-hood, so we'll go with it. This allows Mario to build up running speed and fly around levels, which is nifty and opens up a bunch of secrets. There's also a frog suit for water levels, a tanooki suit that turns Mario into some kind of Buddhist statue, and even a shoe. That's right. You find a goomba hopping around in a green boot, kill it, and steal the boot. The boot is amazing, as you can just jump on anything to kill it, even if it would normally kill you. Sadly it's limited only to a level or two.

The Princess isn't slouching either. She'll mail you a few different things, but none more effective than the "P-Wing," or Magic Wing, which gives Mario the same power-up as a Super Leaf except that for the entire next stage he can fly infinitely. That's great for situations like the one at right. Where's Mario in that mess of death? Flying a safe distance above it, that's where. No need to put yourself in harm's way, man. Be cool. I could go on about the various power-ups, but there's just so much new stuff I can't hit it all. Mario's even got new basic abilities, like picking up and carrying around the shells of defeated koopa troopas. There's so much new stuff that the game manual literally dedicates four entire pages to covering Mario's moves, and doesn't finish the job before giving up.

It's not just the moves and power-ups that are new, either. Mario 3 added a ton of baddies to the equation. There are amphibians throwing boomerangs at you. There is a creature of indeterminate inspirational species that barfs spiked balls into its hands and then throws them at you. There are goombas with wings that fly around giving birth to tiny infant goombas. There are even undead koopa troopa skeletons that magically reassemble themselves every time they are killed. And I didn't realize it until writing it out, but everything above is absolutely nightmarish. While you play you just kind of go "Oh hmm, that sun looks pretty angry." Then it shakes a bit and tries to collide with you. I mean, the freaking SUN has a personal wish to engulf you in its endless nuclear plasma and melt you to nothing. That's terrifying!

...But not quite as terrifying as an ice kingdom. Look, I get it. Each of these seven kingdoms needs to be somehow distinct for gameplay and design purposes. It's understandable. But when I rescued the king of Water Land and gently reminded him that his sovereignty was an oxymoron, I thought I'd seen the worst the Mushroom World had to offer. What could be more heinous than an entire nation of water levels? And then came Ice Land. "Say, what if we took all that water and just, like, you know, froze it?" DIE. That's the worst idea of all time. You spend your lives in Ice Land slipping and sliding down pits, into enemies, and generally into the inescapable depression that accompanies your glaring inadequacy. They give you the occasional fire flower so you can melt some tiny bits down, but it's not enough, and by then the psychological damage has been done.

Nice, then, that they give you a map. For the first time, Mario isn't railroaded from one level to the next automatically. Instead, each world has a map screen with the locations of levels ("action stages," according to Nintendo) and other points of interest marked. Between levels you can navigate the map and use items you've collected. It's not a 100% necessary feature, but it's better to have a map you don't need than to be missing one you can't live without. And the maps are nice to look at, especially because natural landmasses like hills can't help but dance to the background music. And they give you access to fun little mini-games, like a memory matching game that gives you items, or a pseudo slot machine that gives you extra lives; fun elements that add onto the game without feeling like they are necessary chores.

As would be expected, the end of the game has Mario taking on Bowser in his home region. Also perhaps as expected, the reason for Mario going there is that Bowser used the distraction of the first seven worlds to kidnap the Princess. That's right - Bowser was in it for the long con and never took his eyes off that sweet sweet prize. So maybe it's guilt that drives Mario forward; the Princess did, after all, dutifully mail you helpful items (though hell if I know what those cloud or music block items were). The least you could do is make sure she's not going to end up mothering more Koopalings. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned lust. Who knows? All I know is that Bowser has his place defended better than any legitimate kingdom in the Mushroom World. You have to work through a procession of tanks, a navy of warships, a series of fast battles against some harder enemies, and a fleet of airship bombardment platforms. And then you hit the first actual level. His castle even has statues of himself that shoot lasers out of their eyes at you. Dang, Bowser!

You'll notice in the above paragraph alone a description of a variety of levels. Mario 3's designers really went above and beyond on that. While Super Mario Bros. got more challenging as it went, the levels themselves remained linear. And the design of The Lost Levels was purposed simply to be as stupidly hard as possible. Mario 3 evolves the series to a much better place. For one thing, you can now backtrack on most stages, encouraging some exploration. More importantly, the stages themselves often include puzzles or new mechanics you need to figure out to progress. For example, throughout the game's worlds there are "mini-fortresses" that contain challenging traps and a small boss at the end. When you reach the first such fortress on World 7, you find that it contains only three rooms and is entirely empty. There is not a single enemy or obstacle to be found, save for a pit of lava in one room that you just need to not leap into. You quickly realize that the objective in that castle is not to fight your way through enemies and traps to the end, but to figure out how the heck to even get out of the place. Your enemy becomes the clock, which gives you ample time, but stays there as a reminder that you need to keep thinking. This type of puzzle platforming is a large step forward for the Mario series, and helps to really spice up the variety in the game.

So you'd think that after fighting a multitude of new enemies, working through eight total worlds without being able to save (thanks, NES), and solving all sorts of clever design puzzles as you went, that you'd get some sort of reward for your efforts. Nope! Here's the Princess laughing at you and saying bye. And yes, that is the actual end of the game. There is no "second quest" or harder run-through or World D-4 or any other such nonsense in Mario 3. You beat the final boss, you're done. Congratulations! Now escort this wench home. I feel like whatever else Luigi's faults might be, he wouldn't stand for that. Remember Princess Daisy from Super Mario Land? Yeah, that's Luigi's girl now, Mario. You're stuck with Pretty In Pink over here. Have fun with that.

And speaking of Luigi, Mario 3's got unquestionably the best multiplayer experience of the series to date. In the two-player game, the brothers team up and alternate levels and lives. So instead of the first Super Mario Bros. where Player 1 got to play until finally dying, and then Player 2 could take over, here everyone is guaranteed a turn in relatively short order. On top of that, they took the old Mario Bros. arcade game and remade it specifically for Mario 3. Now Mario and Luigi can engage one another in a versus battle old school style to see who gets to move on. Can't agree on who gets first dibs on a level? Settle it with a POW Block fight! It's still one of the best ideas multiplayer platforming has had.

Super Mario Bros. 3 was a platforming revelation. It showed the world that there was much more a platformer could be than just running and jumping - or in other words, that the Mario series could go beyond itself. Future games would perfect this even more, but Mario 3 is a landmark game for a reason. Even the main complaint one might have about it - that players can't save their games - is alleviated by the hidden "warp whistles" that allow the player to skip over entire worlds. And how would a player find these whistles? It's simple: watch The Wizard.

Bottom Line: 16/20

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