Tag: 150 SNES Games Review

Posted on

150 SNES games reviewed #20: Cannon Fodder

Cannon Fodder can best be described as an action-strategy shooting game. It was developed by Sensible Software and originally published by Virgin Interactive for the Amiga in 1993.

It got rave reviews across the board from pretty much every Amiga magazine at the time despite also causing controversy with its humorous take on war. Virgin soon ported the game to other home computer systems as well as to the Jaguar, Mega Drive, SNES and 3DO.

With my complaints about some other games being ported to the SNES people could expect me to get a bug in my butt about this game. After all, the controls pretty much show themselves to be mouse controls pushed on to a pad (play if for just one minute and you will see what I mean, you move a crosshair on the screen and then press a button to move to that point or another button to shoot in that direction).

The player directs troops through numerous missions, battling enemy infantry, vehicles and installations. The game is incredibly playable – sure, the controls might be a little strange, it might also seem a little basic and maybe in some ways it is, but it just works. What the graphics lack in quality they make up for by having an amusing cuteness to them.

Cannon Fodder doesn’t feature much music. There is no music during the missions themselves. Instead these are accompanied by sounds such as bird cries, and of course gunfire, explosions and the screams of the dying. There are a few tunes that play during the briefing and debriefing screens though and these really help to set the scene.

Cannon Fodder’s greatest strength is its dark humorous tone. This is what made some people originally love it but also caused a lot of controversy. Its creators always talked about how they intended it to convey an anti-war message, which some reviewers and fans at the time recognised and which seems obvious to me now. The problem is that certain newspapers and solider-related charities had real issues with it. They thought it was making war into too light a subject and taking the piss out of those who had suffered and died in war.

Cannon Fodder is definitely a game that I would refer to as a classic, and unlike some other games from this time period it is still very playable. That is in part down to its simplicity but you also need to thank its dark sense of humour. This was a rare treat of a game in the fact there was a message hidden behind the action, back when other games just wanted to sell themselves to you as mindless action, this game had a point.

Every time a gravestone appears on the hill, every time you have lost a man you cant help but mourn for his death. The soldiers are not just a group of faceless numbers, by giving them names, by allowing them to rank up and by a cross being added to the hill for every loss, you start to view them as people. You have favourites, not many other games achieve this with the exception of Fire Emblem and X-COM. I am going to have to give my first decimal score here. I can’t decide between seven and eight, so 7.5 out of 10 it is.

I was incredibly lucky with this game. I went to a retro store – one which is usually stupidly expensive (they charge £15 for the old NES Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt cart despite having three copies in stock for one) – and all they wanted for this was £4. Having looked online you can get the PAL cart of this game for about £13 or if you want to spend a little more you could get a boxed copy for around £25. Important things to note though are that this game was available on everything so you might be able to get a cheaper version on another format some of them such as the Amiga version have little things which are missing from the SNES version (the title song has amusing lyrics).

Posted on

150 SNES games reviewed #19: Pinball Fantasies

Pinball Fantasies is a pinball game which was originally made for the Commodore Amiga  by Digital Illusions CE, it was a sequel to there earlier pinball game Pinball Dreams (which was also ported to the Super Nintendo).

A further sequel was released in 1995 called Pinball Illusions but this never made it to the SNES, a remake of it called True Pinball did eventually make it to the ps1 and Saturn though and some of you may have played it.

Digital Illusions began in May 1992 in Sweden and consisted of four people who were formerly members of the demogroup The Silents. Demogroups are teams of people who make computer-based audio-visual works of art which are usually put into the public domain on disc. These were very popular in the Amiga and Atari ST days. If you owned an Amiga you probably sampled a few of these I remember ones with bouncing balls and techno-style music and ones which showed pictures of the Addams Family complete with MIDI music and all sorts. Digitial Illusions’ original office consisted of a small dorm room and this is where their pinball titles such as this were originally made. Eventually Digital Illusions became the company known today as EA DICE who are responsible for the Battlefield games so they’re still knocking about to this day. Apparently, Pinball Fantasies was ported to the SNES by a company called Spidersoft, which basically made a living converting games to different platforms. They also still exist to this day as a part of Rockstar and are now called Rockstar Lincoln. Heck, even the publisher of this game, GameTek, still exists today under the name Take-Two Interactive Software Europe. So I can happily say all companies involved in this game are still alive and kicking.

OK, back to the game at hand. This game has four differently themed pinball tables and they are as follows:

  • Party Land, which is a table based on an amusement park
  • Speed Devils, which is a table focused on car racing
  • Billion Dollar Gameshow, which is a table based on the idea of a game show, and then there is
  • Stones ‘N Bones, which is a horror themed table based on a haunted house.

The sound is functional. The controls although basic serve their purpose well and the graphics are bright and colourful. You would think it sounds like I like this game – well I kind of did like it a heck of a lot on its original platform the Amiga.

The problem is that the game when it was on the Amiga was on three disks and was about £10 as far as I can remember. So once you take these three disks and plant them on to a SNES cart they are suddenly trying to sell it for £40 and if anything it was a slight step backwards as the SNES did not seem to have as large a colour palette as the Amiga.

I suppose when trying to rate this there are several ways to look at it, I could mark it down for being a port from a non-Nintendo machine with no real effort to play to the machine’s strengths. I suppose though you need to look into what people’s options were at the time both on the SNES and on its direct competitor the Mega Drive. On the SNES you have Pinball Fantasies, Pinball Dreams and Super Pinball (I have never actually seen or played this one) and thats pretty much it for PAL pinball games. If you look abroad at Super Famicom games there is one called Battle Pinball which people tend to speak very highly about. There is also one called Jaki Crush which tends to receive mixed reviews, Super Pinball had a sequel that didn’t make it here. As you can see though your options as a SNES gamer were very limited when it came to pinball.

The Mega Drive had Psycho Pinball, Sonic Spinball, Crüe Ball, Dragon’s Fury, Dragon’s Revenge, all of which seem to be tailored much more to the hardware. I would argue if you want to look into retro pinball games you’re much better looking at the Mega Drive or the PS1 (There was an excellent import-only Power Rangers Pinball game on the PS1).

The game does control well enough and is good for a quick pick up and play session but then we now live in a world where you can pay a lot less then you would usually pay to track down a retro pinball game and get a couple of tables on a brand new pinball game on your console or PC within seconds. Pinball Fantasies is a bit of a hard sell in a world with things like Pinball FX, unless you’re really into your retro stuff.

I would have to rate Pinball Fantasies as a six out of 10. It’s not a bad game, in fact it is at times quite fun, but it doesn’t have any real, lasting value. If you have no one to play against, no one to beat, or to challenge to beat your high scores it all becomes shallow and pointless far too quickly. You can get a PAL copy of the game cartridge only for about £10. Boxed complete copies seem to settle around the £40 mark but like I have previously mentioned unless you are buying this as part of a collection or to fulfil a need for more SNES games then there are a lot of avenues where you might be better spending your money for a pinball fix.

Posted on

150 SNES games reviewed #18: ESPN Speed World

“EA Sports – It’s in the game,” as some of the old games used to say. I never quite got this. I didn’t quite know what it really meant. I presumed it meant that EA Sports games had great playability, a certain je ne sais quoi (a special quality which defies explanation).

I never got this myself though. Sure from time-to-time I would enjoy a EA Sports title but most of the time I saw them as being a celebration of style over substance. It was less about what was really ‘in the game’ and what they could put around the gameplay. What they could add to the presentation which would make there game seem like the A* football game or A* american football experience.

This might have seemed a slightly strange start to this review when I tell you that the game I have been playing is ESPN Speed World and that the game was made by a company called Park Place Productions and was published by Sony Imagesoft, you’ll see what I mean with the rest of this review though. The game was released in 1994 exclusively in North America as it was based on a TV series of the same name that was shown over there. The game has an official ESPN license but despite being about racing, Sony didn’t gain a NASCAR license, so you’re racing NASCAR Winston Cup stock cars but the real-life drivers’ names and likenesses are not here. At the start of the race though your met with some digitised footage of ESPN sports broadcaster Dr Jerry Punch which I am sure back in the day looked and sounded amazing but to my eyes now it looks rather poor.

Everything seems to be there – the tracks, the cars, the commentary – it’s only when you start driving that you realise something is really wrong. You don’t feel like you’re in control of the car at all. You feel like your in control of a skidding line. With some practice you can start to score wins but it never feels fun, it feels like a chore from start to end. I have literally have had more fun on racing games on the ZX Spectrum than on this game. This is when you start to realise that people would have realised this game was a pile of trash much quicker if it wasn’t for the licence and the fancy digitised speech and graphics glued on to this basic mess. It is a real lesson in how video game companies tried to polish a turd with licences and a bit of fancy presentation.

I spent £5 on this game including postage. I basically bought it because I was looking for cheap games I hadn’t played or really heard of before. I figured that I would take a shot at this game, and in honesty I regret it. If you want to try this game either because you don’t believe me or you like bad games there are a few important things to consider. The first is it was only released in the US so you’ll need either an NTSC machine, a modified machine or an import converter,  and the second is that you’re more than likely going to have to import it from the US (buy it from an eBay seller over there). This means even if you can get it cheap there’s going to be a fair bit of postage, a pain in the butt weight and a larger risk of it getting lost in transit, or the post services trying to charge you some kind of import tax on it. I strongly recommend you don’t bother as I rate this game as a three out of 10 at best, its certainly one of the worst ones I have played for this series so far.