Friday Flashback: Pilotwings 64
The NES pioneered a lot of video game concepts, and the SNES perfected them. However, the SNES didn't quite get everything right, and for a few games it took the 3D processing power of the Nintendo 64 to reach true excellence. Mario Kart was great, but Mario Kart 64 was amazing. F-Zero was great, but F-Zero X was amazing. Pilotwings was decent, but Pilotwings 64 was awesome.
Mode-7 graphics were awesome for some effects, but the early Super Nintendo games really overused them. While they produced the best racing and flight effects at the time (until Star Fox came out with the SuperFX chip, at least), they were really missing something. Pilotwings 64 gave players an entire 3D world to fly around, not just a strange, flat landscape with ethereal floating rings over it. The Pilotwings 64 levels were big and detailed, with great flourishes like Mario's head on Mount Rushmore. The added dimension of graphics really made the flying feel more real, with mountains and buildings actually sticking up in front of players instead of laying flat like Mode 7 textures.
Friday Flashback: Sewer Shark
Usually, Friday Flashback games are great titles that few people have heard of or look back nostalgically. This week, let's turn it around and look at an utterly terrible game that everyone inexplicably remembers. This game was stupid. It was borderline impossible to play. It had horrific (and hilarious) cut scenes. And yet, if you mention the Sega CD to the average gamer, this is the game that they think of.
When you hear Sega CD, you don't think Sonic CD. You don't think Lunar: The Silver Star. You don't think Ecco: The Tides of Time. No, you think Sewer Shark.
Oh, this game is bad. However, it's also freaking hilarious. The story is utterly nonsensical and told through FMV cutscenes with the poor man's Bill Paxton and Danny DeVito, David Underwood and Robert Costanzo. Fun fact about Costanzo: He also provided the voice of Detective Bullock in the 90's Batman cartoon. The cutscenes look like what would have happened if Wing Commander was shot in a dilapidated warehouse on a $20 budget. .
Friday Flashback: Metal Storm
Robots are awesome. Gravity-defying physics are awesome. 2D, Nintendo Hard side-scrollers are awesome. And yet, with all of these qualities at the forefront, Irem's Metal Storm remains an obscure NES game far from most gamers' minds. It's really a shame, because this is a great-looking, challenging, creative shooter/platformer that deserved more respect.
At first glance, Metal Storm looks like another side-scrolling shoot-em-up, like Contra or Mega Man. While it indeed follows the formula of "go from point A to point B, fight boss at point B," it incorporates a few unique game mechanics. First, you can switch your personal gravity at any time. Hitting up and jump at the same time lets you fly to the ceiling, where you can move back and forth normally, but fall up and jump down. Combined with one-way platforms and moving walls that would shift whenever you switch gravity, this made for some challenging, creative level design. There are no bottomless pits in Metal Storm, either; in levels where you can fall off the screen, you just fly in from the other side. Certain levels can scroll up and down endlessly, forcing the players to use the repeating layout to get past traps and obstacles.
Friday Flashback: Dragon Spirit
Nearly a decade before Panzer Dragoon came out, Namco released another dragon-based shoot-em-up stormed arcades and home consoles. It's all but forgotten now against the more famous shmups of the time, but it still holds the distinction of letting you fly a freaking dragon.
Friday Flashback: Jumping Flash!
There's something about great heights in video games that commands us to jump. The Empire State Building in Prototype? Dove off the spire. Stonewrought Dam in World of Warcraft? Leaped off of it and pancaked into the Wetlands. Tall, Tall Mountain in Mario 64? Yahoooooo-splat. It's the fun of falling from really high up that makes Jumping Flash! an entertaining Playstation game.
On the surface, Jumping Flash looks like another strange 3D platformer that came out around the days of the N64 and Playstation. It features a colorful character (robot bunny), huge, floating platforms, and graphics that, in retrospect, look like they were assembled from Duplo blocks. However, Jumping Flash came out a full year before Mario's 3D debut, just a month after the Playstation hit North America. Sadly, despite solid reviews, it never got the attention as a pioneer that it deserved.
The plot is strange and generally unnecessary. You're a robot bunny trying to recover landmarks from an evil villain by jumping really high and running everywhere collecting jetpacks that spell "EXIT." It's just an excuse to run around 6 colorful worlds, jumping everywhere and using fireworks to blow up enemies.
Friday Flash-Sideways: Retro Game Challenge
This week's Friday Flashback only came out last year, but it packs in the nostalgic awesomeness of an entire decade into its little DS card. XSeed's Retro Game Challenge (known in Japan as Gamecenter CX: Arino's Challenge) puts you through the early days of the NES/Famicom with 7 different games based on classics from the era. They're not "real" games, but they're crafted with such nostalgic love that they still evoke memories of weekend cartridge rentals and Saturdays spent on the living room floor in front of the TV.
In the game's bizarre narrative, you're sent back in time by Game Master Arino, a crazy video game addict who's become a floating polygon head with a crown and a d-pad. He forces you to play through the best games of the 80's with his childhood self, taking you from 1983 with the release of "Cosmic Gate" to 1989 with the release of "Robot Ninja Haggleman 3" and the last days of the 80's.
Friday Flashback: Super Mario All-Stars
Okay, we've all played and loved every Mario game (except maybe Sunshine) 15 times. We know the ins and outs of the pre-00's 2D games better than we know our family tree. The sheer excellence of the first four Super Mario Bros. games make this week's Friday Flashback one of Nintendo's greatest releases and one of its worst shames.
In 1993, Nintendo released Super Mario All-Stars, a compilation cartridge for the SNES that featured Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, the "real" Super Mario Bros. 2 in the form of "The Lost Levels," and Super Mario Bros. 3. It wasn't just straight ports, like most anthology releases. Nintendo overhauled each game to take advantage of the SNES hardware. It changed every sprite, every animation, and every background to colorful, 16-bit goodness that made the original games look like cave paintings. It added a save file system, so players could put the game down and come back later. It made some of the best games on the NES even better.
Friday Flashback: Rock n’ Roll Racing
Take the isometric perspective of Super Off-Road, the cutthroat weapons-based combat of Mario Kart and Wipeout, and the most hilariously "extreme" 90's style of Rob Liefeld's worst nightmares and you have Rock n' Roll Racing, one of the best games to come from Blizzard before it was even called Blizzard.
Yes, this utterly rad SNES and Sega Genesis racer (not to be confused with the much less rad Rad Racer) was made by Silicon & Synapse, the developers that would eventually become Blizzard Entertainment. You select from six racers (seven if you input a special code to play as Olaf from The Lost Vikings) and crash your way around a wide variety of track-filled planets. There's a fire planet, an ice planet, a desert planet, and a creepy dark black light planet, all with their own hazard-filled tracks and menacing AI "villains."
(Belated) Friday Flashback: Capitalism
Apologies for the tardiness of this week's Friday Flashback! Well, Saturday Flashback now. This week we'll look at one of the deepest and most obscure empire-building sims of the 90's. You don't raise armies or build a civilization or craft a city in this game. You build a financial empire. This is Trevor Chan's Capitalism.
In Capitalism, you build and shape a business into whatever you want. You want to own a chain of department stores? Go for it. Want to build cars? Go ahead. Want to mine gold? Start digging. The choices are amazingly broad, and you can insert yourself anywhere in the supply chain of any product, whether you want to process raw materials or sell other companies' wares to consumers.
Friday Flashback: Xardion
Xardion is a strange mash-up of a bunch of different video game elements. It has side-scrolling robot action like Turrican, it has level and enemy design like Contra, it has hidden areas and upgrades like Metroid, and it has RPG elements like, well, RPGs. It also has a robot panther. For a game with so many awesome aspects, it's surprising it isn't higher on most peoples' SNES nostalgia lists.
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