This is a long one and I haven’t got it in me to do a preamble. I’m still on my Double Dragon kick, and it feels only natural to finally dabble in the Battletoads series as well. I honestly quite liked the look of this reboot based on its cutscenes, even if seeing them next to gameplay did one-eighty my perception, but it’s only fair to give it a swing myself.
While I enjoy a good brawler, I tend to stick to the ones I’m comfortable with, but pal ShaolinTurtle very much keeps up with what’s hip and happening, and had been keeping tabs on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind. Ever since Shredder’s Revenge, there’s been a whole swathe of pixelated beat-em-ups based on retro properties — the Karate Kid, Toxic Crusaders, G.I. Joe, even Jay & Silent Bob… and no doubt more I’m forgetting, there’s so flippin’ many!
What made Rita’s Rewind stand out is that it showed more than just standard brawling — shooting galleries, auto-runner vehicle sequences ala Konami’s G.I. Joe arcade game, and even Punch-Out style Megazord battles. It certainly got my attention!
Full disclosure, I did not purchase this game, I simply took part via Steam Remote Play, and have not been back to the game since. My positivity and defence of it might come from not paying for the experience…! The game’s since announced major updates to remedy quirks and feedback, so what I describe is likely a thing of the past.
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So, uh, playing Maiden Cops might have encouraged me to pick up other games on Steam for the sole purpose of ripping their sprites, whether I enjoyed them or not. I played Fast Food Rampage for less than twenty minutes and my verdict was “criminally unsatisfying.”
I wasn’t aware of its history at the time, but apparently the roots of this game began in an animation for the YouTube channel Mashed, a parody of Hatred — god, remember that? The same self-serious monologue about the inferiority of others, only it’s delivered by a fast food mascot bemoaning the rising popularity of health foods as he weaponises the McDonalds menu to make people explode from overeating.
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I continue to be zonked out of my gourd, and the insistence of Northern Ireland sporting unpleasantly hot weather really isn’t helping matters. I would love to be writing or drawing or doing any number of things, but in these circumstances I gravitate towards whatever quick-fix distraction feels even mildly productive… which is a long-winded way of saying the sprites section updated with a bunch of guff:
We’ve got Arvoesine; Bomberman ’93, GB and Quest; Bubble Bobble Double; Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales; Double Dragon Gaiden; Drake & The Wizards 2; Elevator Action Old & New; Fast Food Rampage; The Flintstones (GB); Frogger 2 (XBLA); The Itchy & Scratchy Game; Neutopia II; Rampage (Lynx); Shamisen Brothers; Snoopy Tennis; Street Fighter (PCE); Strikey Sisters; and Toryumon.
Which ties into today’s ramble: a game I picked up for the sole purpose of ripping its sprites, but The Spriters Resource has obliged with a temporary removal on request of its devs until it gets its full release on all platforms. I figure it’s good manners to do the same as well. I’ll then proceed to befoul those good manners by being disparaging towards the game in the ensuing ramble, and for that I apologise!
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While sorting through comics I found my sole issue of the UK Earthworm Jim series, and was reminded of my uneven feelings for the franchise. The cartoon is the only part I ever truly clicked with — the two games I’d played were not exactly its shining hours in any way (Earthworm Jim 3D and the botched port of the first game on GBA), but I felt like there had to be something in this that resonated with me…! The first two games have since been added to Switch Online, and I felt compelled to give them as earnest a try as I could muster. Will they work for me this time? (before you start holding your breath, the answer is no)
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The games I played in 2023 review is done with the addition of Lois & Clark and Combo Rangers. Hopefully I can freakin’ write some different things for a change! In the meantime… uh, more dumb game reviews, sorry.
Have you ever played a game, read a book or watched a TV show forever ago, left it unfinished, and wondered how it panned out in the end? And if you do decide to finish it long after the fact, is there any hope of it matching your expectations…?
Spud! is a game my brother and I were bought in the early days of PC gaming, a point-and-click adventure where you’ve got to rescue Santa Claus from the evil Dr. Chillbane with the help of toy gnomes and fluffy bunnies. Its first-person perspective for its point-and-click puzzles is really unique, offering 360 degrees of panoramic view at every waypoint, though perhaps to the point of excess — does even your inventory need to be a sprawling dome of shelves…?
It’s decidedly off-kilter, between its questionable depictions of Santa’s reindeer and the kooky characters you meet on a tropical island, not to mention its penchant for bloody violence — if you don’t send out the gnomes or bunnies as human shields (or the species equivalent), Spud is liable to come a cropper via a spear through the eye!
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I dread being asked what my favourite anything is. I’ve a whole lotta favourites! Literal stacks of favourites that I shuffle between depending on the mood or time of day! It’s like asking what my favourite pair of socks is — I cycle them! You can’t ask me to rank one pair of socks above the other! They’re all the same colour! And it’s at that point the analogy begins to fall apart. Not unlike my socks, actually.
This stinks because I sure would like to engage with folks on Twitter a bit more often, but unless it’s a multi-tweet thread about a topic that’s of interest only to myself and no one else living or dead, then I typically don’t wanna do it. I do appreciate folks daring to tag me in tweets, but it invariably results in a week of hand-wringing whether I’ll respond or not… and then not responding anyway because to reply after waiting a week just feels rude. Rest assured I read all emails, DMs and correspondence, and I appreciate it and give them a lot of thought, and then rarely actually put those thoughts into a reply. I don’t think that’s very reassuring, actually. My apologies.
Whatever point I was trying to make, I assume it applies to when pal herrDoktorat tagged me in naming iconic RPGs I’ve played in my life. There’s maybe a dozen I’ve played long enough for me to say with confidence I have played them, but RPGs aren’t really my strong suit…! To name off three game titles without context doesn’t gel with my brand of being needlessly fucking verbose, so let’s just rattle off all the RPGs I’ve played enough to have a tangible opinion on. I never said they’d be good opinions, so I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the court! You’re talking to a man who associates Mario with RPGs more than flippin’ Dragon Quest…!
Final Fantasy VII
My introduction to RPGs! A friend of my dad’s just gave the game to us for whatever reason, and it was unlike anything we’d played before. I, as a dumb youngster, was put off by the fact you couldn’t jump. Why have all these detailed 3D environments if you can’t jump!? But watching my brother play it was fascinating, seeing the story play out through text and many varied setpieces and environments. When Shadows of the Empire on Nintendo 64 was as cinematic as a console game had gotten in our experience, this was a whole other kettle of fish.
Because Europe missed out on so many iconic JRPGs, this was probably how most folks were introduced to the genre? Without Chrono Trigger or the like, the only alternatives were obscure Game Boy titles or flippin’ Rings of Power on Mega Drive, I don’t know. Even in America it seems like the first RPG to take on mainstream success, thanks to its big-budget advertising campaign.
As such, it’s kind of resulted in a lot of people reading the game the wrong way; for your first RPG to tackle a complex narrative and themes of unreliable narrators and withheld memories is going to cause some complexities, even before you factor in its iffy translation. I should be the last person to judge people for reading a story the wrong way, (Dok will attest to my lousy reading comprehension), but it’d be nice if people got their personalities right once in a while. Aeris is meant to be spunky!
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Because I’ve already gotten a headstart on being a very wordy bastard, Some games I played in 2020 is up, though unfinished, as you might expect. Check back in four months and I might have some shockingly tepid takes on Persona 3! Though it’s likely I’ll have more to say about Croc 2. You know what I’m like.
And of course, Scans & Bits updated with the last missing episode of Crash Bandicoot Dance Jump Daibouken, some more CoroCoro Sonic, and also links to more scanning and translation efforts, as well more MEGA uploads of Fami2Comic and Dengeki Nintendo. My scanner’s currently on the fritz, so I can’t tackle the stacks of magazines I still need to scan in full. If there is a hell, that is absolutely not among the list of tortures, but darn it, I’m upset.
I assumed my internet connection was just being dodgy, but it seems longtime ClassicGaming-era fansite Kirby’s Rainbow Resort has finally shuttered this year. There’s still a gateway page, but almost all of the pages have vanished — not even replaced with a 404 error, but simply blank white pages! The forums are still accessible, though largely abandoned and plagued with PHP and MySQL errors… yet some of the site’s oldest pages are still alive, strangely.
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Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated with unused objects in MS7 and Advance among other things, sourced from reader submissions that have been sitting in my inbox for at least two years. I don’t know what I do to deserve this kind of support, but y’all might wanna reconsider. Why, you can drop this stuff on TCRF without having to wait on me to get off my keister!
I’ve been on an inexplicable Kid Icarus kick lately, for some reason. It’s a game that’s always stood out among the early first-party NES library, automatically earning a reputation as the counterpart to Metroid in some capacity. Paired with its Game Boy sequel and prolific appearance in the likes of Captain N, for years it felt like a franchise that was forever missing in action, at least until Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Uprising gave it a very anime makeover.
Unlike other NES titles of its time, it’s a game you don’t quite immediately ‘get’ within just 30 second of playing. Most folks’ impression of the game is largely based off of climbing for a bit, entering doors that lead to nowhere, then falling down a pit and turning the game off. Not quite as pick-up-and-play as the likes of Balloon Fight, is it?
I figured I’d finally give the game the time of day, and did so by playing the 3D Classic version on 3DS, which offers a new “custom” mode that eliminates Pit’s slidey movement and allows you to slow his descent while falling. It doesn’t undo all the game’s old-fashioned quirks, but paired with the digital manual, it made the game that bit more accessible to a total rando otherwise unacquainted with the game. The price is still something worth balking at (someone please put bricks through Nintendo’s windows until they re-evaluate their dodgy prices), but paired with the colourful new backgrounds it’s at least a better show than just a raw Virtual Console release with no extras.
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Updated with some Scans & Bits, including the last remaining chapters of Sly Cooper, the final episode of Mutant Turtles ’96, the missing episode of Crash Bandicoot Dance! Jump! Daibouken, a few more scraps of Dr. Mario-kun and Shogakukan’s Sonic the Hedgehog, and all but the intro of the short-lived Advance Wars manga.
Under the cut: waffling about the story of Bomberman games, and the one story that actually made a good impression on me. Riveting stuff, I know.
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