Tag: kerr9000

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150 SNES games reviewed #14: Sonic Blast Man

It’s funny how sometimes all you need to see is a company’s name on a box and it’s enough to get you excited. In fact it’s sometimes enough to make you buy something on the spot with no real research.

Back in the PlayStation days I remember a lot of people would feel totally safe in just picking up anything with the Square logo on it. For me a company who I have always rather liked is Taito. They made a lot of great games back in the day, so the sight of their name on a cart is cause for a hopeful smile.

Some of you who used to go to the arcades as kids might have heard of the name Sonic Blast Man. It was the name of a pretty sizeable arcade cabinet which came with boxing gloves and a punching pad. You would play the game by trying to punch the pad as hard as you could when it told you to. I remember it started with you punching a thug who was trying to assault a lady and if you got to the end you were trying to punch a meteorite away before it could strike the Earth.

I loved this game I would hunt high and low for it in arcades up and down the coast. Apparently, in March 1995 Taito recalled Sonic Blast Man machines due to reports that some players had sustained injuries while playing the game. Although I have to cry BS on this one, you wore gloves and you punched a well padded sensor. Sure I have seen people injure themselves in connection to the Sonic Blast Man machine but these were idiots who were punching it bare-handed and had no real idea of how to punch it or worse. I once saw a guy try to run and fly kick the pad in an arcade, he miss judged it and landed on a very painful part of his body as it made contact with the corner of an old Operation Wolf machine. Yet in the US, Taito had to pay a fine of $50,000 for failing to disclose these “injuries”.

When I heard as a kid there was going to be a SNES verion of Sonic Blast Man my mind went nuts. How could they turn it into a SNES game? It would cost the earth if it came with boxing gloves and a usable sensor pad, plus I could imagine it would be a PR nightmare as one child punched another child while missing the sensor or punched the TV. (What I saw happening in my mind was basically what we all saw upon the Wii’s release with all of the remote related accidents, newspaper stories, etc.) I kind of expected them to go down the old joystick waggling sports games path, where you’d have to bang buttons to fill up a meter or something but then I stopped and thought that would be awful. The arcade game was very short and was fun purely because of the novelty factor. Five levels of banging joypad buttons to fill a meter to punch something would have been an awful Idea for a £40 cartridge based home game.

The SNES version is actually a side-scrolling beat ’em up. Sonic Blastman’s mission is still to save the Earth, but this time it is from all manner of street gangs, terrorists, aliens and robots. The fight starts on a construction site, but you’re soon moving from place to place and it’s nicely varied for a game of its type.

One minus point is the game is only a one-player game much like the original Final Fight was on the SNES. There is only one character as well Sonic Blastman himself which feels a little limiting. As in all scrolling beat ’em ups the game consists of defeating the enemies on the screen before continuing walking to the right to face more until you complete the stage. Sonic Blastman can do all of the usual moves for a game of this type. He can punch, jump, and grab a hold of enemies. When he approaches his enemies, he is able to grab them. From here he can shake them and throw them, or he can unleash a series of rapid punches, depending upon the direction you hold on your joypad.

The bonus levels are an adaptation of the arcade version of the game which is a neat little touch for fans. Obviously they have been converted to be played with your fingers instead of your fists. They’re not bad, though I am still glad they didn’t use them for the basis of a whole game.

The best thing about the game’s graphics are the large sprites. They are big and colourful and will remind you of arcade and Neo Geo games to an extent. The backgrounds are more or less what you expect to see in a background on a city neighborhood, factory and sewer, so they’re functional but not thrilling. But I would argue that as you get further through the game they become more interesting and seem to have more little details hidden here and there.

The music sounds like some kind of fusion of jazz and elevator music but I kind of like it and I think it suits the game well. The sound effects are pretty decent and give it a good comic book feel. You hear Blastman say little soundbites like  “Take that!”. Overall, I think it works.

I would say this is one of the better scrolling beat ’em ups on the system. Sure a two-player mode would be nice and its absence, along with a few other little things, stop me from calling this game perfect. But for me its a good eight out of 10. I think thanks to the big sprites and the simple but fun gameplay this game has aged a lot better than some of the stuff I have been playing. Having a go now I enjoyed it as much as back then.

The game came out in all regions but I have never seen a PAL copy in the flesh in my life, neither now nor back when released. My copy is a Japanese cartridge which I have had since I was young, I am not sure where I got it, I just remember being very excited to get it. Looking around you might be able to grab a Japanese copy for between £10 to £25 if you’re lucky, but every time I have seen an US copy its been ridiculous money like £60 or more, and I am still to see a PAL copy for sale.

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150 SNES games reviewed #13: Mecarobot Golf

So you have a game which is basically a vehicle for a real life star, but you find out that he is only a star in your country, and no one else knows who he is, so what do you do?

You could just remove the connection to the star and hope the game sells on its own strengths. You could try and find another person or people famous to the other markets you want to release it in. Or you could just add robots – yeah , that’s what you could do, you could just add robots.

This is what happened to Serizawa Nobuo no Birdie Try, a Japanese Super Famicom game staring Japanese professional golfer Nobuo Serizawa. He was replaced with Eagle the robot and the game got the name Mecarobot Golf because well robot plus anything equals better, doesn’t it?

The whole robot thing is a gimmick. And not a good gimmick, not one layered with reasoning but a rubbish palate swap of an idea. Buying this game I had another game in mind which was the Neo Geo game Super Baseball 2020, a game in which you have whole teams of robots playing baseball together with excellent presentation and gameplay.

Nothing is actually wrong with Mecarobot Golf it controls in a similar way to most golf games with pressing buttons at the right time in accordance to a meter. There are a decent number of holes but the robot thing serves no purpose at all. You don’t even play as a robot – you’re a human trying to beat the robot. I have read notes that there is some story to this game that in the world in which this game exists humanoid robots are considered to be second-class citizens, their rights are limited and one of the things they are not allowed to do is participate in golfing tournaments. So a rich benefactor purchases Eagle and builds all of the golf courses for him to play against the robot on. This story must have just been manual fodder though, as I never got any of that from playing it. All I got was I am playing as a boring generic man against a poor transformer sprite for no real reason at all.

Other than the weirdness of its birth there is nothing to much I can say about the game. The music’s fine, the graphics are decent if not amazing and the game plays fine. It’s just another average five out of 10 game – don’t get drawn in by the robots.

I spent £3 on getting my cart and that includes postage. It doesn’t come up for sale that much over here as its a US import that never saw release here, and in Japan it came out but with the title I have given above. If you do go for it on the rare occasions it surfaces it never seems to go above £10. Heck after buying mine I saw a boxed copy that was a bit beaten and battered for £8.

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150 SNES games reviewed #12: Wing Commander

I’m not sure how many of you will have heard of Wing Commander. It’s a long running franchise which started out on PC which was then ported to various systems including the SNES, hence me talking about it.

Wing Commander can basically be called a space combat simulation. It wasn’t the first game of its type really but it was unique with its branching mission tree, complex characters and attempt at a cinematic-style story. You start as a rookie pilot aboard the Tiger’s Claw. Before you start blowing stuff up you get to walk around the ship, talk to other pilots, talk to the bartender, etc. There is a lot of stuff there purely to try and make your adventure seem real. For example you can enter the barracks were you will see other pilots sleeping, you will see and hear water dripping into a bucket on the floor and you can open your locker to see your shirt and see what rank you currently are and what medals you have.

Once you visit the briefing room, that’s when things really start. First you attend your briefing where you’re told what your mission will entail and who your co-pilot will be. This is all done with a mix of text, graphics and animation. Once this is over you get to see animation of you running to your ship in your gear with exciting music playing to get you pumped up ready for battle. You start out heading to check points to investigate them and its not long until you meet the vicious feline Kilrathi. In the first mission you’ll have to fly through an asteroid belt and destroy several small lots of Kilrathi before making your way back to your base ship. The best part is if you die you get to watch your own funeral which contains more animation and text than some games bother with for an ending when you’ve completed the whole game and attained everything possible.

I found that the game works quite well at drawing you in to the plot, making you want to see how the story unfolds, and in a very short space of time you begin to form opinions on the other pilots. You forget that they’re all drawings with AI attached and begin to go: “Bossman is cool but I cant stand that Iceman”. With the fact that there is a chalk board on which you can check your kills against other pilots kills it can become quite competitive. There are times that you can almost forget you’re on a game you will get so into it.

The downsides of the game are in my opinion so few and so slight that it is hard to pick real fault, there are more things you can do than there are controls on a SNES pad, but they got around this by means of tricks where you hold one button while pressing another to do something totally different from what that button would normally do.

This game must have done quiet well on the SNES in the day, maybe because there wasn’t a lot of stuff like it. It did so well that a PC expansion pack was turned in to a second Wing Commander SNES game (Wing Commander: The Secret Missions) and Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi was ported to the SNES (but was never released due to financial projections and a drop in SNES sales by the time it was finished, unfortunately). The sad thing is that the original Wing Commander on SNES had been handled by Mindscape on behalf of Origin and what happened was that it tried its best to recreate the PC game on a SNES. Origin handled the second one itself and apparently went to great lengths to tailor it to the SNES to build it from the ground up as a version that would best appeal to Nintendo players.

I would rate Wing Commander as a solid eight out of 10. I have owned my copy since I was young and it was the start of  a brilliant adventure, I happily brought Wing Commander: The Secret Missions and then when I found out that Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger was coming to PlayStation and had Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame in it I nearly exploded. I had a look online at prices for this game and you can get the PAL version for like £10, and sometimes it is even boxed for that price, so really you can’t go wrong. The only possible thing worth pointing out is that you can get the PlayStation Wing Commander III complete for the same price and as this is a bit more advanced if you own a PlayStation you might decide that III is in fact a better starting point for you. All of the Wing Commander games are basically linked but they all tell more or less self contained stories so there is no real issue with dipping in to the series at any point.

Back in the SNES’ day there were so many platformers, so many beat ’em ups and so many sports games the real beauty of Wing Commander was and still is that there is so very little on this platform like it, sure we have faster arcade style stuff like Star Fox and then there are the first-person shoot ’em ups like R-Type, but actual tactical space combat like this is not really one of the machine’s big selling points so it makes it stand out all the more.