Wonderful Wonderboy,Washing-up and why I Wonder if anyone reads this

Feck its been a whole week since I avoided thinking like an adult member of society and instead gesculated wildly about some ancient video game.
Well bye bye thoughts of mortgages, and carpets and the evergrowing pile of washing up , and hello Wonderboy

Wonderboy , yesterday

Despite sounding like it should be the title of a gay porn movie , and actually being the title of a Tenacious D song , wonderboy was sega's ...er wonderboy of the eigties and early nineties in the arcades.
Their reply to Mario , it featured a bobble headed (rather aryan looking actually ) youth legging it across variously themed levels.Its pure twitch game play , with a timer constantly counting you down , you have to keep running , jumping , timing your leaps to perfection. They was a tacked on plot about saving your girly , and some nice power ups , a skateboard(with helmet, skate safe kids!) and some axes, oh and you got a bonus for collecting ridiculously hard to get dolls at the end of each level.It was an instant classic and contributed strongly to my wrists being in the state they're in (from video game playing! no sniggering down the back)

The kids demanded a sequel (well probably)

WonderboyII had WB jumping , well literally, into action again , but things had been spiced up with some role playing action added , you could now buy weapons and armour and build up your health by collecting coins , it was still an arcade game , so you had a dirty great timer counting you down , (to keep you pumping in those 10ps).

despite wearing hot pink armour and being called wonderboy,
no one ever questioned his sexual orientation

WB's third outing was on home consoles , Wonder boy 3 (the dragons trap), had you , er well trapped by a dragon (intriguingly the game starts with a replay of the second one which had an ...er dirty great dragon at the end )who curses wb and turns him into a succession of animals.Rather handy as you use these creatures different abilities to help you finish the game :mouse WB can fit into tiny spaces , Hawk WB can fly, Pig WB can roll around in his own filth , and Sheep WB can waggle his fleece to lure farmers out of...er ok maybe not.

wb and his mighty nose shield

Sega , either not wanting to overplay their hand , or just because they're plain crazy made WB4 a sort of shoot em up style game , bearing feck all resembalance to the others ..its shite so I'll close my eyes and pretend it never happened ..la la la

1992: Reservoir Dogs blasts onto the screen,KLF still havent burnt a million quid yet, dr_b is trying to grow his beard (badly) for the first time and WB in monsterland is released, looking decent with its new fancydan 16 bit graphics , and taking up most of my summer.
Similarly to the last two,WB5 further developed the "build up money from killing weak bad guys , buy weapons with it , use them to kill slightly bigger bad guys , to buy a slighly better weapon and so on " theme. You 've had the shoot-em-up , the beat-em-up , kids! its the protestant-work-ethic-em-up.Skill players could finish it in a week with out resorting to all that , dr_b spent six months killing toadstools and grubbing around for gold pieces(hey it took my mind off how badly my beard was going ok )

as tiny and hard to make out as my beard circa 92, its a WB5 pic

And that was that for WB, he hung up his sandals, and his mythril sword of doom (the product of killing oh about 8654 toadstools for gold by the way )
and went to that gray limbo old videogames inhabit , (or as we call it here Courtown)

I've always thought it weird that sega never dusted him off to compete with mario when the plumber went 3d , it would have been perfect
anyway in the words of that (unrelated)song :

Wonderboy, what is the secret of your power?
Wonderboy, won't you take me far away from the mucky-muck man?

...erm maybe not .....

for more WB related tomfoolery :
http://www.geocities.com/wonderboyland/ (not as dodgy as it sounds)

http://www.emucamp.com/monsterworld/games.htm

Schoolyard rivalry

You hear a lot of talk about "Brand Loyalty" , the classic examples usually given as "urban" gimps who swathe themselves in Nike or Adidas or [insert name of sweatshop* using sports apparellel company] clothing and the like.

But I can think about a much better earlier example of loyalty to one brand. Computer/Console Brand Loyalty..
Trust me , even the most vicious,rabid,flame filled, no-holds-barred Mac vs PC debates has nothing ..NOTHING on a Commodore Vs Speccy debate when it got into full swing, we're talking people who were ready to defend their chosen platform physically if they had to.

*allegedy

The speccy had better games, the commodore had more games and you could control them with a joystick that did'nt involve mad professor style interfaces to plug them in. The Spectrum had higher resolution graphics, but the commodore users didn’t care as at least their computer could display proper colours and more than four colours at once too. The Commodore was an ugly breadbin, but the Spectrum came with a power supply that got so hot you could easily heat a decent sized semi detached with it, and so on ...anyway at this point the two debaters would be on the ground tearing each others hair out. Strangely enough get a few nerds drunk talking about games in a pub and invariably you'll get something similar to the above happening, only there’s less hair to pull now.
.....and this kind of thing didn’t stop with the early machines either ...forget Ali vs. Frazier or Tyson vs. Holyfield, we had SNES vs. Megadrive (nearly lost a tooth over that one) Amiga vs. ST, Saturn Vs Playstation.
You don’t really get the same thing now though (Mac Vs PC isn’t really about gaming to be honest) take a look at a Nintendo GameCube, Xbox and PS2 releases.... Half the time the 3 platforms get almost identical version of games and when they don’t: The Xbox has either watered down 6 month old PC games, or takes what should be a PC game, slaps shite controls on it and blocks the release on PC for six months to make it an "Xbox-exclusive". PS2 release are (with a few exceptions) "Generic fighter 4”, "sports franchise '05", and "driving s3quel", the only breath of fresh air is the eye toy, but that was done on the pc first anyway. The N: GC gets the odd decent game and sequels to Nintendo’s vast catalogue of older games (Zelda, Metroid, Mario etc) but there’s not a whole lot out there for it, its all so bland and uniform that there’s not much worth fighting over.
I think though, if you want to see what the rivalry is going to be over in the future look at the handhelds, The Sony PSP (when its finally released here) has mobile versions of some good older games (well Ridge racer anyway), some decent new ones, plus it brides the gap between console and the multimedia PDA's by being able to play Mp3's and Movies, from its rewriteable memory card and also proper movie releases on its disk system.
Nintendo have gone back to their roots and really tried to look at what makes games fun and new. What do I mean? , Well consoles normally have one screen, and rely on a standard controller and a few buttons .the Nintendo DS has two screens, one for the game and one usually for info, or a map, or as a controller ...yep that’s right controller.. Its a touch screen (again like a PDA) which allows games where you have to draw, or rub or scratch to win. Theres a mike built in to the DS too, some games involve you speaking or even blowing into it to play! There’s motion sensors built into some games (Warioware twisted -a GBA game) that involve you actually spinning and turning your console around to move control your character, brilliant fun! (Although it might look mad if you try it on a packed bus)
This is the kind of fresh thinking that'll have them fighting in the schoolyards over which is better, and long may there be something to fight over!!

Lost Games Vol#1

Lost Games Vol#1

I've been avoiding retro gaming stuff for a while here , so I think were overdue some.
Presenting the first in an occasional series of "lost games" , here’s
"Great Giana Sisters"

Growing up as a kid in the 80's and early nineties there were certain truths we all knew

Batman would only appear in a DC comic
(ok later on there have been umpteen crossover/amalgam comics but it was gospel at the time)
The starship Enterprise would only ever appear in Star Trek , never anywhere else.
(although a sneaky voyager was added via cgi to a spaceport in star wars EpI)
and Super Mario brothers was only on Nintendo

Although we wouldn’t have known the terminology we'd already had the concept of intellectual franchises browbeaten into us. Now the Big N, (aka Nintendo) were quick enough to lock down their boarder, once the market had stabilised after the big games crash of 83/84 they put a stop to their games featuring on other platforms, there had for example, been a port of the original Mario bros game to the c64, (not to be confused with super Mario .Bros mentioned later). , MArio bros consisted of a single screen of Mario defeating turtles via a system of platforms.. So when the groundbreaking SMB came out on the Nintendo entertainment system, the only way to play it was to shell out for one of the grey boxes.
Now a year or so later, Reviews started appearing in games mags for a game called "great giana sisters" notice the ..er similar name.
Here’s a pic of "Super Mario brothers":

now a pic of "Great giana sisters"(or as I shall now refer to it GGG)

..er slightly similar eh?

both played pretty much the same , jump on bad guys to kill them , collect powerups , secret levels etc. As with SMB , playing as player 2 lets you play as a character called Maria , Giana's sister , (SMB has Luigi, Mario's beanpole brother)
After the first set of levels the two differ , GGG is actually trickier to finish ,t the graphics , while not no great shakes today, at the time were outstanding, and amazingly , considering the c64 is a less "powerful"(heh) machine than the NES , actually look better than the "original"

I'm kind of guessing though that no-one at Rainbow Arts , (publishers of GGG)actually talked to a lawyer at any point .The phrases "intellectual property", copyright" or "sweet farkin jebus ,Nintendo'll sue the pants off us",where probably not heard within the companies walls. It was a simpler time I guess
The game made it to video game stores and remained on shelves for , all of 15 seconds , before Nintendo lawyers turned up in a big black van , swept them off the shelves and drove off.
Somehow they must have missed a few , as tiny amount of gamers got their hands on copies of GGG, thanks to the magic of ,at first doubletapedeck copying , then BBS's , finally the net , GGG spread via the underground picking up fans on the way....
If you want to see what all the fuss was about (and 15 years on its probably safe to..)
GGG can be downloaded here

and you play it via a c64 emu

next time on lost games (provided I can be arsed)

the lost Tetris
Nasty media baron of the 80's Robert Maxwell’s software company designed and wrote probably the best port of Tetris ever , then discovered the guy who sold the rights to it didn’t actually own them himself ...

Stations of the cross (And square and circle and triangle..)

Stations of the cross (And square and circle and triangle..)

I've had a chipped Playstation (the manly rugged, rectangular Playstation not to be confused with its teletubby incarnation, the teeny tiny psone) sitting in a drawer unused for a few years now, but I came by some import games for it recently.
So, after dusting off the old grey box, looking puzzled and realising you need a SCART adaptor to run import games in colour, and then going out and tracking down one after everywhere had sold out (game - 21 quid!, they saw me coming )I got down to playing.

King's field -
I'd never heard of this until fairly recently ."The state" refers to it as "the most hostile RPG I've ever played" .This is true , everything ,and I mean everything , can and will kill you, snails, fish , dragonflies, a bizarre walking kraken squid like thing...all will in fact hunt you down and kill you. Its a first person RPG , so when the wildlife do massacre you its quite disturbing ,I've started being mildly afraid of snails after playing this. The music consists of about eight or nine notes played over and over in a minor key, and the human inhabitants of the island are blank faced freaks who turn slowly to look at you when you talk to them as if they were trapped souls forever tormented in hell...or something , its a creepy game.
But perversely I've actually started enjoying it , given its cruel nature and the fact that its profoundly broken in the learning curve stakes(look, even the save points are hidden , yes HIDDEN!! behind fake walls, that’s how hard it is) you get a real satisfaction out of even surviving 2 or three encounters. Whether I'm playing this in a month though , or whether its stupidly hard settings break me is another matter though...(for anyone interested , that state link above happens to have another link to a copy of the game, how illegal it is to download a 9 year old game for a system you cant buy new anymore is up to you..)

Blood Omen :legacy of Kain
or Zelda the Goth years
or how to be a complete bastard :Undead edition
I've mentioned this game before so I won’t go into detail again , it’s a Zelda style RPG lite , but with added vampires. As I've mentioned before you start off trying to be good, and resist your vamp nature, but since sucking blood tops up your health , you will be knee deep in drained wenches and dead innkeepers by teatime. A bad thing? Probably not. Graphics wise the game is a bit creaky, but the voice acting is great, and the story is both twisty and turny so it’s worth a gander. The PC version is over at the home of the underdogs site , but is missing the rendered cut scenes though...

VibRibbon

Bizarre this one, although I was expecting something stranger..you play by guiding a 2d wireframe cartoon rabbit like character over a 2d obstacle course filled with loops , pits and hills, by pressing various buttons. the view then gradually circles the 2d course in a sort of 3d effect.
The CLEVER bit though is that the "course" is really just a representation of the music playing in the background, a kind of psuedo-ossciloscope fashion , with the pits and loops being created by the beats etc, a bit like the years old cthuga software on the pc , only not)..even more CLEVER is that you can put on one of your own cd's for a new challenge(I recommend Daft Punk's: Discovery by the way) .It all looks nice, as its wireframe runs stupidly fast on the psx and Vib himself with his weird synth muppet voice is endearing enough(hit too many loops and pits and he devolves into as skipping frog thing , then into a weird TV/tadpole hybrid , its a bit like the DC game REZ only cuter.)
What would have been more CLEVER would have been that you had to move Vib along the "ribbon" with the analogue stick , up and down with the music , and press buttons to over come obstacles as well, but we'll save that for the sequel eh?

Right! thats my lot of now , I have more Playstation flavoured gaming goodness on its way to me in the form of Exhumed , Castlevania SOTN ,and Bishi bashi special so more from me as and when (or if past forms to be expected, probably sometime in Feburary)

..the long one , the square one, the L-shaped one...

This thought struck me a few says ago,and I reckon theres either a a really long and quite interesting answer to this , or a rather dumb short one:
Why is it that Tetris is an awful lot easier to play if you dont concentrate on the screen and try and think of something else instead??

....answers on a postcard to the usual address.........

summat for nowt

summat for nowt

A quicky from me today ,thought I'd mention a few games for the descerning gamer on a tight budget , ok , well no budget as, they're free:

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Online shootyness

Wolfenstien:enemy territory

About 3 years ago , ID software released a remake of the classic shooty game
wolfenstien 3d.It featured enough world war II, undead nazi sorcerer action to keep gamers happy, but the online play was a bit lacking.So a counter strike stylee add on was commissioned.Only for some bizzare reasoning that probabably made sense to someone , it was turned into a standalone game.(i.e you didnt need to already have Wolfenstein to make it work).
And then for some even more arcane reason it was released free on the net.`
Which is bad for them , but good for us gamers, Download it here

Tribes:

Huuuge across the water , but ignored over here , tribes was released a few years back. It possibly didnt do so well in this part of the world as broadband hadnt had the kind of coverage in Europe it does now, and tribes large battlefields and even larger teams dont really cut it on dialup.A mazingly considering it was released around the time of Half-life, Tribes was doing things like large outdoor arenas, proper team based play,and most importantly vehicles.Yup years before the likes of Battlefield and its ilk, you could drive or fly your way to an enemy base.Oh and you did a lot of flying , as rocketpacks mean you spend a lot of time in the air.Anyway Sierra released it as a download a few months back, so here it is:

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Offline shootyness

meant to mention this a while back
TUMIKI fighters

crazed jap bizzareness...its an old school shooty game , with fighters made up of pastel shaded 3d objects (they look like they're made with DUPLO lego).shooting down bad guys causes them to fall from the sky,if you get your ship in the way they "stick" to it , increasing your firepowe,its hard to describe but very satisfying and a lot of fun.Yes its aboslutely barking but its well worth a download
(and it took me an hour of trawling through the legendary penny-arcade site to find that link)

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Finally theres supposedly a compliation pack of the Last Ninja games coming out on PS2 according to the latest retro gamer mag.Details are scant but apparantly the graphics have been updated and its going to sell for a tenner (UK).Cant find a mention of it on the web , or even on the rather extensive , last ninja archives site though........