The Lone Man Who Gave His Soul to Gaming - or - I Love Japanese Video Game Commercials

A recent post on Gnome's Retro Treasures featured Chu Chu Rocket - a neat little game for one of my favorite consoles - the Sega Dreamcast. More than the game itself, the post reminded me of the Japanese TV commercial I saw for it on YouTube whose song (the melody anyway) stuck in my head despite the fact that I didn't have any idea what the heck the guys were saying at the time:



My Japanese friend Hiroshi translated the commercial for me today - thanks Hiroshi!:
Chu chu rocket, save the mice
Chu chu rocket, cats are scary
Chu chu rocket, rocket is great
Zoobababaaaam!! 
xyz puzzle chu chu rocket 2,800 yen, cheap! Dreamcast. (He said he couldn't quite catch the xyz part. He also informed me that in Japan "chu chu" is considered to be the sound that mice make - like "squeak squeak" is in the US).

And that sent me back to YouTube to watch another few old Japanese video game commercials I recalled seeing. I've always enjoyed those commercials - so exuberant and over the top. I never saw any of them back in the day of course but only discovered them much later after the birth of the internet and when the internet begat YouTube.

Most of my favorites were, as one might guess, developed by Sega and I was going to embed a bunch of them here from the SG-1000, to the Mega Drive, to the Dreamcast but then I rediscovered one of my absolute favorite Japanese commercial advertising campaigns - Sega's Segata Sanshiro - and immediately deleted all the other embeds out of respect to the one true master.



Segata Sanshiro was a martial arts master who cherished his Sega Saturn so much that he made it his mission to travel the world - or at least Japan - and beat into submission all those who did not play the Sega Saturn often enough or with sufficient respect.  I like Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man in the World" - but if I was starting a super hero team of advertising icons Segata would be my first draft pick. Sega did it first and did it better.

I had seen a couple of the Segata Sanshiro commercials before, but last night I stumbled across this one awesome video that chronicles Segata's birth, rise to power, and tragic end as he gives his life to protect the very board members of Sega who are ushering in the Dreamcast and thus ending the life cycle of his beloved Saturn. I defy you to watch his tragic death and not shed a tear. It is an opera-worthy climax. And in the usual random full-circle meaningless coincidence style that I love, Segata (whose real first name is Hiroshi) is killed by a missile that looks quite similar to the rocket in Chu Chu Rocket - well I guess they all do really... His last words as he clings to the missile in deep space - "You must play Sega Saturn... You must play Sega Saturn... You must play Sega Saturn!". And then the end - oops, guess that was a spoiler.

This stuff is pure gold. If I saw these commercials back in the day I probably would have bought a Saturn and gotten back into console gaming a decade before I bought my PS3.  I even put the mp3 of his theme song on my iphone (thanks SegaShiro!) - hell it kept reverberating inside my head anyway - Segata Sanshiro! Segata Sanshiro! Sega Saturn Shiroooooo!!  Rest in peace Segata Sanshiro.



and if you didn't get enough Segata Sanshiro from the official music video - here is a little clip of a cover of the theme song by Segarocks - a Japanese Sega tribute band.

Meteor - My Favorite Asteroids Clone

I was going through some older games on the MAME cab to see which arcade game from the 70's I felt like writing about and given that one of the all-time great arcade games was from the 70's AND starts with the letter A it didn't take long at all to come across Asteroids.

Well, I'm pretty sure everyone currently reading this is quite familiar with the arcade classic Asteroids so I won't bore you with my thoughts on that game other than to say that I am a fan and unlike some I've spoken to I prefer the sequel Asteroids Deluxe to the original.  But no - this post is to give a shout out to an Asteroids clone called Meteor.  There were a few clones and bootlegs of Asteroids when it became popular and they all play pretty much identically to the original, but it was the go-get-'em attitude of the sales staff at HOEI International that really turned me on to Meteor. I envision the brainstorming session to produce the flyer for Meteor went a little something like this:

Manager of Flyer Production: "OK Marvin. We've got this game Meteor that we ripped off from that new game Asteroids and I've never seen either one because that ain't my job.  What is my job is getting these flyers out the door to move these units. So what have you got so far?  What's the point of the game?"

Flyer Engineer:  "To destroy salling meteors"

MOFP:  "To destroy what?"

FE:  "Meteors. As they sall by.  And destroy salling UFO too."

MOFP:  "You mean SAILING meteors? I mean sailing is an odd fucking choice of words to describe a meteor, but it makes more sense than SALLING. Pretty sure salling isn't a real word. Let's just make it 'Destroy deadly meteors'."

FE:  "Yes sir, we'll make that change."

MOFP:  "OK what else? How do you destroy the meteors? Are you firing up at them like Space Invaders or what?"

FE:  "No sir. You fire in all directions."

MOFP:  "All directions? Are you sure about that? I've seen video games and you're usually at the bottom shooting up at things."

FE:  "Yes sir. In this game the space ship rotates 360 degrees so you fire in all directions."

MOFP:  "OK well confirm that with the guys downstairs.  Make sure it is OUR spaceship that rotates and not the enemy UFO and then make that point clear on the flyer because that is gonna to throw a lot of people off. And spice it up with some impact buzzwords like NEW! EXCITING! EMERGENCY! ESCAPE! and use lots of exclamation points - that kind of stuff. That it?"

FE:  "We also want to include a picture of the evil galactic emperor that sent the UFO and meteors to destroy us. As you can see from the sketch he is a reptilian being from..."

MOFP:  "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Goddammit Marvin, you may be a hell of a programmer but you don't know shit about making a sale. You think guys want to see lizard aliens?  No! Listen. Change the lizard to a hot lookin' broad - and make sure her tits are showing and BAM we're done!  What other new games we got?  I'm on a roll!"

FE:  "Um - her... tits sir? You mean you want us to have her wearing a tight uniform that accentuates..."

MOFP:  "Who cares about the uniform?  A couple of leather straps and a choke collar and the uniform is good to go man.  Marvin. Let me be clear.  When you come back in here this afternoon with the mockup of the flyer in your hand, it better have a hot blonde... no... make that brunette... It better have a hot brunette on it with both her tits out or you can start looking for a new fucking job. Now get out of my office."

And the rest was history.

Arcade Games of the 70's: Clowns

No 'on-this-day' segue here - just thought I'd ramble a bit about a really old favorite of mine that I used to play on my Commodore 64 - or maybe even on my VIC-20, I can't remember - and I never actually realized it was a port of an arcade game until I accidentally rediscovered it one day on MAME a few years ago.  That game is Clowns. If you are one of those people with a fear of clowns (coulrophobia - gotta love Google) then the C64 game box is gonna scare the livin shit out of you because they managed to squeeze a half-dozen of the grinning maniacs on the front.



Clowns was released by Midway in January 1978 and was apparently a ripoff of Exidy's arcade game Circus which was released the previous year (and subsequently ported to the Atari VCS), but in the bitter Clowns versus Circus rivalry I'm down with the Clowns baby.

Clowns is a simple 2-D single-screen black and white game, but uses blue, green, and yellow horizontal overlays for color. It is sort of like Breakout with gravity and slightly better graphics - and I do mean slightly.



In the game there are 3 rows of balloons floating horizontally along the top of the screen and you control a see-saw at the bottom of the screen that can go left or right. There is one clown standing on the see-saw and soon a second clown comes barreling his crazy ass off an elevated platform and you have to position the see-saw correctly to catch him and launch the other clown into the air to collide with and pop the balloons. Each balloon nets you points with the balloons at the top level being worth more than the ones at the bottom. When the clown comes falling back to earth you move the see-saw under him and launch the other crazy bastard into the balloon-filled sky to bounce around and burst some more. These clowns really hate balloons. Once you burst all the balloons of a particular row/color you get bonus points and then a new row appears to replace it. The clowns hurtle through the air faster and faster and if you don't get the see-saw under the flying clown in time to catch him - well, that's a dead clown. And the circus only has so many before it's game over.



As you would expect from such an old game, the sound effects and the graphics are both very simple but surprisingly satisfying (except for the jarring noise to alert a player when he gets a bonus jump - not a fan of that). The game is pretty addictive so the replay value is good (if you're me anyway) and although the 1-player play is OK, like most old games it really shines when you have 2 players competing (turn-based play rather than simultaneous).

I finally got a chance to see a real Clowns machine in person when I made the pilgrimage to the American Classic Arcade Museum in New Hampshire last fall.  I managed to snap a picture of this young man as he sidled up the game to start clowning around.  Look at how joyful he is to find a real Clowns!



But that joy quickly turned to rage when he discovered the game was broken!  The poor sap wanted to play it so badly he even inserted a second token which the machine politely swallowed as it had the first without any sort of compensatory entertainment return whatsoever.  It even went so far as to taunt him with the screen in play, but the see-saw was frozen in place so the suicidal clowns just jumped blindly off the ramps to their doom.



The gentleman was escorted from the premises by arcade security and forced to cool down over a turkey dinner at Hart's Turkey Farm Restaurant down the street.  I never knew there were so many different meals made out of turkey. But I digest.




David Nelson holds the official record for Clowns with 61,390 points on June 1, 2004. So far my best effort has only netted 19,320.

Assuming you're playing it on MAME (and not the real thing) be sure to play it with a trackball, spinner, or mouse. If you try to play it with a joystick you are going to completely hate it. I booted up Clowns on the MAME cab before writing this and discovered to my dismay that the colors were gone. I guess the devs got rid of the workaround code that added the color. Now I have to wait for someone to add it back in as an artwork file.  You'd be surprised how much 3 little plastic strips of color adds to a black and white game. 
I give it 7.4 insane clown posses out of 10.

Oh, and in addition to my VIC-20/C64 version, Clowns was also ported to the Bally Astrocade in 1981 as the combo-pack Clowns and Brickyard. There were several other ports/clones in the Circus/Clowns "genre" as well.

















Circus by Exidy in 1977
T.T. Acrobat by Taito in 1978
Acrobat TV by Taito in 1978
See Saw Jump by Sega in 1978
See Saw Jump II by Sega in 1978
Circus Atari for Atari 2600 in 1978
Clowns & Balloons for Atari 400/800 and TRS-80 Color Computer in 1982
Stunt Clown (public domain) for Atari 400/800 in 1983
Monkeys and Balloons for Atari ST in 1988

There have even been a couple of modern-day remakes of the game based on the Atari 2600 Circus Atari that you can download for free - Circus Irata and Circus Linux.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Armor Attack and the Anti-Draft Sentiments of Tim Skelly

According to my handy dandy "This Day in Tech" feed it was on this day in 1840 that Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for his dot-dash telegraphy signal system known as "Morse Code". So it seems a nice opportunity to chat a bit about one of my favorite old vector arcade games that actually contains genuine Morse code in its sound effects - Armor Attack!



Vector game specialists Cinematronics released Armor Attack in 1980 and also licensed it to both Rock-ola and Sega for release as well. The game takes place on a single screen which shows a top-down view of a bombed out urban landscpape in which you, and a friend if you happen to have one lying around, control a small jeep and must drive around the war-torn city avoiding the tanks and attack copters that are trying to kill you while trying to bring them down with return fire of your own. You can bring the copters down with a single shot if you are good enough to hit them before they shoot you while they circle around the playfield, but the tanks take two shots to polish off. Your first shot immobilizes the tank but it will still turn its turret and continue to shoot at you until you are able to administer the coup de grace.

Being an early vector game, the graphics were simple monochrome wireframe, but like a lot of early video games it used overlays to give the illusion of more sophisticated graphics. In fact the buildings behind which you take cover from attacking enemies are not even present at all electronically - they are represented ONLY by the graphic overlay, but the code was written so that they provided cover and obstacles just the same.



Armor Attack was controlled entirely by buttons - no fancy shmancy joysticks here!  I have always been strangely attracted to games that are controlled solely by buttons without any joysticks (e.g. Astro Blaster, Asteroids, Rip Off) so this one is right up my alley control-wise. You control the jeep pretty much the same way you control the spaceship in Asteroids except that when you stop pressing on the gas, inertia doesn't keep carrying you forward - you more or less stop on a dime.  And you can make some really nice tight turns too to avoid enemy fire. Here is the control panel.



I don't recall ever actually playing this game in the arcades but I saw the artwork one day on the MAME cab and checked it out and suddenly I had a new one for my favorites list. The graphics are simple and the gameplay is admittedly redundant with just a single-screen that in true old-school arcade fashion just keeps getting harder and faster until you die, but the game is strangely addictive and never really gets old to me. One-player mode is fun, but it also offers a two-player co-op mode where you team up with a partner to kick tank and copter ass together which adds a new dimension to the game. The sound effects are excellent too for 1980. High replay value - at least for me it is - I give it an 8.0.

So what about the Morse code you ask? Interesting story.  The U.S. government had reinstituted the draft registration during the game's development and Tim Skelly, the game's designer/programmer, was a longtime opponent of the draft. So to voice his anti-draft opinion Skelly encoded the message "don't register" into the repeating morse code beeps you hear in the game. Skelly discussed it in the following interview piece.

Armor Attack was done at a time when I felt I had worked out a few things about game design. I was just trying to do an artful update of one of the earliest video games, "Tank." Everything went smoothly. There were only two problems. One was that (again and again and again!) (Jim) Pierce wouldn't allow the mirror technique used in Warrior to be used here for a background. Pierce and (Papa Tom) Stroud (the owners of Cinematronics) were cheap, cheap, cheap! With every game they took away one more color from the cabinet art because each pass cost a few pennies more. Check it out. If I had done one more game the artwork would have been black on black!

Like Warrior, I just didn't have the drawing time to draw the (very important!) background outlines on the screen during the game. (They can be seen by themselves in the test mode for alignment.) So, the clever solution that management came up with was to use the same kind of overlay that was used on Star Castle. The problem was that the overlay wasn't covering/coloring anything but black! That's why the playfield for the game is either black or slightly-greenish-black. Ah, well. It worked well enough I guess.

A second event occurred about the time I had just started the game. We heard through the grapevine that Atari had completed a tank game and was testing it in the Bay area. Obviously we were concerned. One of the management guys went through the phone books for the bay area and called every arcade until he found the one with the test game. (He used a cheesy hillbilly accent. It was pretty funny.) We flew up immediately. When we got there we spotted the game, which turned out to be 'Battle Zone.' Since it was 3D and mine was top-down with entirely different game play, we went ahead with our plans, despite how good we thought the Atari game was. But that's not the funny bit. While everyone else was checking out 'Battle Zone' I wandered around the arcade like I usually did, looking for games I hadn't played. I found one and really got into it. It, too, was an Atari test piece, but none of the management guys thought much of it. Funny, I really thought 'Missile Command' would make it. ;>)

At the time I was finishing the game, the (US) government decreed that every male of draft age had to register, even though there was no draft in effect. This pissed me off (old draft resistor), especially since my buddy Scott Boden was someone who had to sign up. I wanted to use morse code sounds in Armor Attack, and I knew morse, (old boy scout) so that's real morse code in the game beeping out "dontregister." I was also assuaging my own conscience, since I had heard that Atari had sold Battle Zone to the Army.

Armor Attack was ported to the classic vector home game system Vectrex in 1982 - and when I finally buy me one of those beauties I will also be getting a copy of Armor Attack.

Tom Larkin holds the official high score record for one-player on Armor Attack with 2,009,000 points on September 25, 1982.

NES Music Video

Hello out there blogosphere. Been quite busy at work lately so although I have managed to squeeze in a LITTLE gaming here and there I haven't had time to do much posting about it. And by much I mean any whatsoever. But I have a nice quickie one today to get back in the swing of things.

Sebastian Bender, the guy who made the Game Boy music video that I posted about a while back has made another one over at his site Gnarl-o-Rama. His musical instrument of choice this time is an NES. He's blowing on cartridges. He's clicking zappers. He's rubbing the case ridges like a hillbilly on a washbboard. He's doing it all!

And you know how you always wondered if a copy of Super Mario 3 could be used as a kazoo? Yes. Yes it can.

So if you liked the first one then check out the new one below. Reminds me of the Rockit music video by Herbie Hancock sans synthesizer. I know - I'm old.

Uncharted the Movie, Still a Chance!

Yes, Sony and their open-door policy regarding my personal information and credit card numbers has been irritating me a bit of late.  But at least for the moment they went from goat to hero for this old gamer when I heard that they had, in essence, fired the idiot director David Russell from making the upcoming Uncharted movie - which apparently is no longer upcoming, at least for now.

From the article in yesterday's Variety: 

"A pair of tentpole-sized studio projects have lost their helmers, as David O. Russell exited "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune" over creative differences with Sony".



Word is that Sony is now searching for a new writer/director for the movie and the casting is starting from scratch.  I don't even care anymore whether or not it's Fillion playing Drake. I'm just glad they are restarting to try and hopefully stay a little closer to the storyline instead of Russel's opium-fueled vision of a globetrotting family of treasure protectors - or whatever the hell it was.  And of course, the big win here for mankind at large, is that there is just a little bit less of Marky Mark Wahlberg in the movies.  I think everyone can agree with me, even Mark himself because I have to believe he is filled with self-loathing, that less Marky is good for everybody.

So thank you Sony. I salute you.  Now seriously, stop giving away my credit card numbers. 

Majestic Twelve (Super Space Invaders '91)

I saw a documentary on the History Channel about the Majestic 12 - the alleged code name of a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials supposedly formed by Harry Truman in 1947 to investigate UFOs following the incident at Roswell, New Mexico. Now whether or not there is any validity to that story is debatable but it gave me an excuse to boot up the ol' MAME cab and finally complete the old Taito arcade game Super Space Invaders '91 (called Majestic Twelve - Space Invaders Part IV in Japan).



Super Space Invaders '91 was released in 1990 - don't ask me why it wasn't called Super Space Invaders '90, I never could figure out why they do that with cars either. It is the third arcade sequel of Taito's 1978 seminal classic behind Space Invaders Deluxe in 1979 and Return of the Invaders in 1985.  Two more arcade sequels would follow - Space Invaders DX in 1994 and Space Invaders '95 - The Attack of the Lunar Loonies in 1995, but '91 might just be the best of the bunch.

Super Space Invaders '91 features the familiar gameplay of the original but with nicely updated graphics and a multitude of new invaders and improved sound effects. The game also introduces several new features to the series including power-ups, bonus rounds, boss battles, and the excellent added option of 2-player simultaneous play to really give it a new twist.

The power ups are dropped from the mother ship crossing the top of the screen if you are able to hit it. Power ups include the Buster Laser (a vertical laser that can vaporize multiple vertical columns of invaders), the Hyper Laser (vaporizes the lowest horizontal row of invaders), Shield Up (strengthens your ship's shields), Arm (creates physical shields like in the original Space Invaders that block enemy shots but you can move them up with your lasers to collide with enemies, Power Up (rapid fire laser shots), Fire Flower (a missile that blows up in a flowery explosion), Destroy Beam (my favorite - multiple bright tracers shoot out and slither rapidly all over the screen destroying everything in site, and Time Stop (a giant butterfly floats onto the screen and all the enemies freeze in time allowing you to blow them away with impunity).


There is a wide variety of invaders as you progress through the levels - complete with different background graphics, and this time the invaders have more attack patterns than the simple left all the way to the end, drop down, right all the way to the end, repeat.  Some invaders widen to twice their original size when you blast them so you have to blast them some more, some split into two invaders, some attack in a circular vortex pattern (kind of like the black hole level in Gorf except with a bunch of them instead of 1 at a time), some dive bomb you, some disappear into the right side of the screen and reappear on the left side of the screen, and some break away from the pack and conduct their own separate pattern.

You no longer blow up from a single shot, your ship is equipped with shields that can absorb several shots before you explode. And unlike the original game, if the invaders reach the bottom and land on earth the game isn't over, you just blow up and lose a man.



There is also an enjoyable little cattle mutiliation bonus round where flying saucers abduct your cows for their damnable alien experiments and you have to blast the saucers without accidentally hitting your bovine buddies. If you manage to shoot the saucer without blasting the cow he oddly floats safely back to the ground for bonus points.  Extra points are earned the higher in the sky the saucer is when you hit it. This little bonus level plays a lot like the old 1980 Namco arcade game called King & Balloon.



This version also adds several boss battles - I think there were 4 different ones (damn - I should've kept better notes). The bosses looked different but the fights were all pretty much the same - avoid their fire and shoot them in their small vulnerable spot which was intermittently open to fire.  The bosses were not that difficult to beat but like the cattle mutilation bonus round provided a nice break from the regular invader blasting.


Co-op play adds a whole new dimension to the franchise to try and keep the gameplay as fresh as possible. Co-op shooters are one of the few arcade games that my wife actually enjoys playing with me so we joined forces to complete the game.

After we completed the arcade version I tried out a few of the ports - Super Space Invaders was also released on the Master System, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Game Gear, XBox, PlayStation 2, and PC (as part of the Taito Legends 2 compilation on the last 3).

The nice thing about these gallery shooter games, they translate well to a variety of systems.  The Master System version included a nifty little introduction where a communique was being transmitted to you from Central Space Command (or whatever it was called).  It played very well and was pretty true to the arcade version.



For some reason the Speccy version decided to make the background the same color as the invaders which gave it a monochrome look. Maybe this was done due to technical limitations, but it made it a little difficult to see all the invading going on.



The Amiga version was particularly solid - staying true to the arcade version but also including additional animations and storyline details before, during, and after the game that weren't on the original arcade version. Oh, and the Amiga introductory theme song is pretty cool too - it incorporates the game sound effects into the song.



Now, this is a Space Invaders game, so the gameplay does get repetitive after a while, but all-in-all this is a solid facelift to the age-old classic and I've come back to it on several occasions. For me the original arcade game is the definitive version and I'd rate it a 7.9.

I couldn't find the official arcade machine record high score, but according to Twin Galaxies, the high score for Super Space Invaders '91 on MAME (without continues!) is 382,290 by Brandon Y. LeCroy. My best effort so far without continues is only about half that.

If you like vertical gallery shooters like Space Invaders, Galaga, etc. and get a chance to play one of the versions of this game I suggest you check it out.

Crush the Castle!

OK - I know I lazily embed these videos from Dorkly way too often, but this one led me to try a nifty little online flash game that I'd never played before so... I gotta do it. Like I've mentioned before I'm not a portable gamer and I avoid phone games pretty much altogether, so I've never experienced (nor do I expect to ever experience) the casual gaming phenomenon known as Angry Birds. But I'm not against spending a few minutes on a free online flash game.



Like the Tiny Wings bird, I was unfamiliar with Crush the Castle so I googled it and gave it a play. Turns out it's a nice little physics-based online game wherein you control a trebuchet to sling various projectiles at castles to bring them to the ground and crush the royal subjects within. The structural integrity of some of the castles is extremely suspect and they fall easily, but some of them are quite sturdy and some of them actually require a little bit of puzzle solving as far as what area to target to bring it down. Then a map pops up and you move on to the next castle. Your projectiles upgrade after a while to multiple boulders, then larger boulders, then a bomb. There are some other features too like building your own castle etc., but like most online flash games I found it amusing for a while - long enough to destroy all the castles on the map in this case - but not interesting enough to entice me to fully explore all the features. But like I said, a fun little waste of a few minutes at work so try it out HERE.

Killzone 2 (another FPS), and Hogan's Heroes

I just got around to completing Killzone 2 for the PS3 (thanks Fallguy - I think that's all of them now I'll ship 'em back).  It was a serviceable FPS game, but nothing memorable.  I don't really understand how it got such high ratings from most reviewers - on Metacritic it got a Metascore of 91/100.  Me, I give it more like a 73/100.

You play as Sergeant Sevchenko (a fact it took me a very long time to realize) and are bringing the space war to the Helghast planet. I don't know the history of this war since I never played the first Killzone, but according to your own government's propaganda anyway the Helghast started it.  OK fair enough.  And that's pretty much the story - kill all the Helghast baddies and work your way up the boss chain to Vasari - the head big bad daddy - basically Future Hitler of this army of Space Nazis.

However, even though the uniforms, symbols, etc. all had a decided Nazi flair to them, for some reason all the Helghast spoke with an English accent. Does this mean that a London scientist invented the universal translator that enabled me to hear the Helghans swearing at me?  Or maybe the future British were allies or collaborators with the Helghast?  Maybe there is even some sort of connection to Grand Moff Tarkin - that overconfident member of the Imperial English aristocracy that stubbornly refused to evacuate the Death Star in his moment of triumph (should've evacuated Moffy). I dunno.

And of course when I talk Nazis, well I'm gonna talk Hogan's Heroes.  Colonel Radec, the no-nonsense sadistic Helghan officer was, as far as I'm concerned, modeled after Major Hochstetter - the no-nonsense Nazi who was always busting Colonel Klink's balls.  And maybe Vasari, the leader of the Helghast, was supposed to make me think of Hitler, but to me he was the long-lost brother of one General Burkhalter - another of a long list of Nazis that enjoyed busting Klink's balls and was always throwing around that threat of sending Klink's ass to the Russian front.


...and of course the vast array of almost identical Helghast soldiers who march single file into their role as cannon fodder are all the loveable Sergeant Schultz, except of course that they are constantly cursing at you and have an unrealistically optimistic expectation of killing you.



The AI of the enemies is pretty poor and the AI of your squad mates is even worse. They are constantly getting in your way while simultaneously barking at you to get off your ass and follow them.  And you can't shoot them - I tried. I emptied full clips into their eyes in frustration and blood flew everywhere but not a scratch. By the way, all FPS games should, by default, have friendly fire enabled. Nothing breaks up the realism of a firefight worse than when you accidentally fire a round into a fellow soldier's head and he just yells something stupid at you like "OK! that hurts!" or "don't shoot at me, shoot at them!"

And the guys were CONSTANTLY swearing.  It's not like I'm offended by cussing. Fuck. See? It's just that the cussing was so relentlessly forced and the dialogue was so juvenile it just seemed silly. Kinda like Starship Troopers if you've ever seen that movie - except sillier. And all the steroid-soaked characters were so interchangeable - like Gears of War with its soul stripped out.

The various levels and minimal cut scenes felt generic and gave virtually no sense of progress - so much so that I think if you randomly mixed up the play order of the levels you wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

And I kept hearing about how great the graphics were but they didn't look particularly good to me. Even for 2009 when it actually came out. Like the rest of the game the graphics seemed average.

And that's it in a nutshell - Killzone 2 wasn't bad but I'm forced to damn it with faint praise. It was passable. Decent. Average.  In my opinion, there really just wasn't much to Killzone 2 to set it apart from all the other war-based first person shooters out there. An OK shooter but basically forgettable.

Now, understand that I'm only referring to the single-player story campaign here. I didn't even play the online multiplayer which I of course realize is the target audience component of the modern FPS game.  I know a lot of FPS guys don't even play the single-player story and would tell me that I'm missing the best part of the game, but I just don't really enjoy the online deathmatch stuff that much anymore.  Back when I played the first Resistance on PS3 I quite enjoyed it. Then when I got Modern Warfare I still enjoyed it but maybe a little less. And my interest in the online multiplayer has just continued to wane since then until now I am at the stage where I just won't buy a FPS game unless the story component sounds like it is enough up my alley to merit buying it on its own.

So anyway - it sounds like I'm trashing the game, but I'm not. It was a decent middle of the road shooter. Just nowhere near as good as I had heard and not quite good enough to prompt me to try the multiplayer, replay, or want to buy Killzone 3.

Thunder, Thunder, Thundercats... HOOOOOOO!!!

I recently saw a picture (on Dorkly again) of the comic Carrot Top juxtaposed with his twin brother Lion-o of the Thundercats.



If you don't remember the Thundercats it was the 1980's cartoon about the race of humanoid cats from the planet Thundera, led by their Lord Lion-o in regular battles against the evil Mumm-Ra. Thundercats came out quite late in my cartoon-watching youth so I wasn't a die-hard fan or anything but I did see enough of them to figure out that I hate Snarf - the Jar Jar Binks of the Thundercats.  Here is the intro for the cartoon.



I thought I recalled seeing an ad for a Thundercats game in one of my old gaming magazines and sure enough there was one - released in 1987 by Elite for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga and Atari ST. So I gave the C64 version a go.



The game is basically a horizontal scrolling hack and slash game along the lines of Shadow of the Beast or maybe Ghosts and Goblins (but not nearly as good). You are Lion-o and are trying to rescue several fellow Thundercats and recover the fabled Eye of Thundera from the evil clutches of Mumm-Ra and his henchman. You run, crouch, jump, slash, and shoot your way through a number of different levels, one of which even allows you to pilot a laser-firing air-car. The game seemed like it would be quite easy at first glance, but it turned out to be pretty damn difficult - mostly due to to sluggish controls that almost never gave you time to slash one guy at your front and then turn around to kill the dude heading your way from behind even though it looked like you should have plenty of time. This was extremely frustrating to the point where my wife got sick of hearing me yell out cusswords and basically told me to shut the hell up.



In a nutshell here were my reactions to the game - number of plays approximated:
Try #1: Nice theme song. Game looks kinda weak, but easy enough to run through quick. Wow dead already - OK guess I'll actually try next time.
#2-5: Dang, this game is actually pretty challenging. And better than I initially thought. Not bad. What the hell are those things? Pigs?
#6-7: OK. New joystick - this one should work better than that old Atari joystick. What the... dammit!
#8-10: OK! Another joystick switch. My old Gemstick should do the trick! Arrghh! Why the hell does Lion-o vaporize any time one of these guys even just barely touches him? Are they antimatter or something? Stupid!!
#11: Goddamn this game. Fuck it - I'm switching to the Trainer mode with unlimited lives so I can at least see all the levels and then cross it off the list.
#12: Bored. Wanted to hang in there till the end but screw you Mumm-Ra. I'm done.

I've always felt that way about cheats for infinite lives. Even on great games (which this isn't) it just makes the game boring. So I gave up before the ending but I saw online that the ending was extremely lame. Basically the last level was a fight with Mumm-Ra not much different from other fights then this dazzling ending screen was revealed.



Lame.

If you care to give the game a go you can try an online Java version at Vizzed.com. But like I mentioned before the best part about the game is the theme music played at the opening screen - pure SID goodness. I discovered that the tune was actually created by Rob Hubbard, somewhat of a legend in the Commodore 64 music scene (yes, there is still a C64 music scene). A guy posted the entire song on Youtube with screenshots from the game so check it out:



Oh, and finally, I came across a review of the game in the December 1987 edition of Zzap!64 magazine. If you care to read their review from back in the day you can click below - they gave the game 74%. I wasn't quite that generous.