Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D

Brad: There are some bad games out there, and lord knows, we’ve played some doozies in the course of this project, but Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D shows off levels of incompetence we rarely get to see. This isn’t one of those cases where you can tell the game was rushed, or simply not a big priority for the company making it, and you end up with a game that has a few significant flaws, but would otherwise be mediocre. No, Jim Power is bad in a way that seems malicious, something created by a shady developer who was more concerned about making gamers cry than they were about game sales. Clearly “making money” never really factored into the process, as evidenced by the fact the game is fucking named Jim Power.

 

Out of sheer frustration, Jim burns down the cotton candy forest.

A comprehensive list of everything that is wrong with Jim Power would take several years to create, so I’ll just mention the most significant flaw – parallax. For those of you unfamiliar, parallax was a trick you’d occasionally see in 2d games, where different “layers” of the background would scroll by at different speeds. When done correctly, this creates an illusion of depth. Again, that’s when it’s done correctly, with careful attention paid to getting the speeds right so as to simulate movement. When done in Jim Power, where careful attention was clearly not paid to anything, the movement feels much more circular, creating the illusion that the game takes place on a merry-go-round. I’d say that probably wasn’t the effect they were looking for, but when dealing with terrible design on such a wide scale, it’s hard to say for certain.

Stryker: What exactly is Jim Power’s power? He can explode. Like, he just stands there, puts his arms up like he’s signaling a touchdown, and… explodes, as if it’s just something to do. But he survives these explosions, which is kind of remarkable for a guy who otherwise seems to die whenever an enemy gives him a  dirty look.

Eliminations in Brief: Now with 30% More Racing Games!

Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball - Play basketball the Bill Laimbeer way! Which apparently involves a lot of just chucking the ball out of bounds for no particular reason.

Blackthorne – Blizzard started with Warcraft, a fun but simple RTS, and eventually evolved it into World of Warcraft. They grew Diablo into the blockbuster it is today. And they made Blackthorne and said “Yeah… we can’t fix this.

Lamborghini: American Challenge – Honestly, enduring this game a challenge for  every country this game was released in.

 

Redline F-1 Racer  - And suddenly that Lamborghini game doesn’t seem so bad after all…

GP-1 – Finally, it’s that motorcycle game where you get to choose your own mechanic that we’ve all been clamoring for!

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs – Sorry guys, we’ve got just enough room in the budget for the Battletoads remake to either update the graphics or get rid of the damn speederbike level everyone hated; and quite frankly, it’s a little hard to put a picture of “no speedbike level” on the back of the box.

Super Buster Bros. - Oh sure, in writing, it looks remarkably similar to “Super Mario Bros.”, but its amazing what a difference one word and a truckload of incompetence can make.

Metal Combat: Falcon’s Revenge – For those of you filling out a bracket for Metal Madness, I’ve got aluminum, tungsten, lead and mercury in my final four.

Kyle Petty’s No Fear Racing  - Because really, once you’ve failed this spectacularly, there isn’t anything left to fear.

Gun Force - It’s like Metal Slug had an abortion.

Elite Soccer

Our first hint that Elite Soccer might not be very good was when The Joker randomly popped up to complain about how boring it was:

Which made the announcement of “INJURY TIME!” later in the game seem kind of ominous.

Ok, so maybe that’s not entirely fair. I suppose if you spent a lot of time with Elite Soccer – I mean, really got to know it – you could maybe get used to its useless, way too zoomed in camera, its weird game speed, and its braindead AI. Eventually, you’d get the hang of the game and its nightmare control scheme, and might even be able to achieve something that could be described as competency at it. With that accomplished, there’s a small chance you wouldn’t be bothered by its lack of play modes, or the fact that every team in the game appears to be exactly the same except for it’s uniform. You might even stop caring that the game looks and plays absolutely nothing like any kind of soccer you’ve ever seen before. And in doing so, you might, possibly, experience a teensy sliver of what could be described as enjoyment.

Or you could just play one of EA’s FIFA titles. Those games are actually well-designed and fun. Like, on purpose and stuff.

Eek! The Cat

Eek! the Cat, based on the mid-90s cartoon that – let’s face it – you had completely forgotten about until just now, is a 2D platformer that combines two things that never go well on their own: a license from a kid’s cartoon and escort missions. And since alchemy isn’t a real thing, mixing these two different forms of garbage does not magically turn them into gold. The goal of the game is to guide your friends through various stages while everything nearby attempts to murder them. Or, at least that’s what I think the entire game was about. To be honest, I never got past the first level, and apparently nobody else has either, because I couldn’t find any information about the latter parts of the game.

I suppose you could argue that after the first level, the game actually gets really, really good, and that by passing up on it too quickly, we missed out on one of the SNES’ finest titles. But c’mon, it’s a game based on Eek! the Cat that opens with an escort mission. You really think the team that came up with that had a lot of great ideas they were saving for later on?

Come for the poorly controlled platforming, stay for the part where you get to second base with an old lady.

Get Free Genesis Games From EA! (This will require a time machine)

Last week, I took a trip back to my hometown of Buffalo. Fun trip – got to see all my friends, and after almost two years of collaborating with Stryker online, it was nice for us to work face to face again. Of course, by “work”, I mean that we hit up the flea market and a couple of used game stores, where I managed to get my hands on a pretty nice, complete copy of Bulls vs. Lakers for the Genesis. Ok, so maybe an old basketball game wasn’t the most exciting find, but look what came inside:

This is EA’s Buy Two, Get One Free promotion from summer 1992. I actually took advantage of this back when it originally ran, and one of the two games I bought was, oddly enough, Bulls vs. Lakers. The other was Desert Strike, and the free game I received was F-22 Interceptor, which was my first choice, because I didn’t know any better (Road Rash would have been a better option). For some reason, it came in a weird box that was taller and thinner, without any kind of bracketing to hold the cartridge in place.

By the way, interesting side note – there seems to be some inconsistency about whether the company should be abbreviated EA or ECA.

I’m not exactly sure why EA ran this promotion. When you give away merchandise like this, the biggest cost generally isn’t the game itself, but rather the loss of a potential sale to all those people you’re giving a free game to who might have bought that game anyway. Which is probably why most of the titles being offered are a little bit older – the idea being that most of the people who were going to buy these games already had (and to be sure, there was no way I was paying actual money for a copy of F-22).

My best guess is that EA needed or wanted a cash infusion right away (hence the relatively short time frame), and this was seen as a way to get people to buy games a little sooner than they might have otherwise put off a bit. Maybe they had a new project they were trying to fund, or some kind of financial report that they wanted to make look good. But that’s just a guess. It could just as easily be that they had a warehouse full of copies of The Immortal they wanted to get rid of, and saw this as a way to unload those in a way that made people more likely to buy newer EA games. Or maybe they just wanted to do something nice for their customers.

But if the prospect of one free game doesn’t excite you, how about 20?

Now that’s a pretty sweet offer! This isn’t just any random twenty Genesis games, either – we’re talking Electronic Arts, circa 1992. That means potentially Starflight, Desert Strike, NHLPA ‘93 and a lot of other fantastic titles (and probably all those games being offered in the Buy 2 promotion). I would have been all over that as a kid. Heck, I’d be all over that now. Of course, it was a sweepstakes, so probably only one or two people won it.

We still see stuff like this today, though usually it comes from stores or restaurants offering to enter you into drawings for gift cards if you take their online surveys. Basically, companies are desperate to learn about who is buying their products and why, but don’t have a great way of finding out. This is a big deal, without any kind of feedback, companies are often in the dark about the demographics of their customers, or how they are finding out about them in the first place. There’s an old joke in advertising – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. Getting a little info on your customers is a good way to figure out which half.

The questions give us some hints as to what EA wants to know. The basic demographic info is necessary on the off chance you actually win the sweepstakes, but also useful for finding out if certain regions buy certain games more often (for example, they probably had a theory that Madden sells better in cities with NFL teams, which this could be used to verify). Age and sex are the big ones, though – very useful information there.

Still, that’s all “standard” stuff. The questions on the bottom half of the page are where you really get a glimpse into the kind of info a game publisher wants. What kind of games do you like best? Pretty obvious why they’d want to know that. Asking if players try games before they buy them, and where, gives them a good idea of how people are making their purchasing decisions, and offers hints as to what kind of marketing they need to do. For example, if a lot of people said they rented a game before buying it, they might try to work out a deal with Blockbuster for a lot of in-store advertising; and if people said they played it at an arcade, they would… probably get pretty confused, actually since they didn’t make any arcade games (though a coin-op Rings of Power would have been incredible). Asking how many hours per week you play games tells them whether their customers might be interested in lengthier, more in-depth games, or something more casual, and finding out how long you’ve had your Genesis gives them an idea about whether the market is growing. Finding out what other systems players own gives them data on what other platforms might be worth publishing games on, but also could demonstrate a preference for the Genesis over these other systems if the game purchased was available on one of the other platforms.

Finally, asking what other types of games you’d like to see them make is an invitation for all kinds of bad ideas, but maybe also the occasional good one.

The postage on this card is already paid, and I’m torn between keeping it for posterity, or filling it out and sending it in. There’s no expiration date on this thing, and I’ve been having trouble finding a copy of Might and Magic that’s still in decent shape.

Dishonored (Xbox 360, PS3)

Brad: I don’t know that I realized just how much I hated Dishonored until I played Far Cry 3. That might seem like a strange criticism, but hear me out. Dishonored was slow, annoying, and not much fun; yet despite all these shortcomings, people kept telling me how great it was. So I figured it was one of those games I just didn’t “get”. Maybe I just wasn’t patient, careful, and cunning enough to properly enjoy this type of game. That theory held up right until I played Far Cry 3,  saw it do what Dishonored was trying to do, except about a million times better, and I had an absolute blast while playing it. It’s remarkable how much better I got at being a stealthy and skilled assassin when it was actually, you know, fun.

Part of this thing that makes playing Dishonored so joyless is that while it gives you multiple ways to get through a mission, it still feels like it’s leading you around by the nose. There’s always a window conveniently left open, or a board that just happens to have been laid across the gap you needed to clear, or a control switch stupidly placed outside the range of some critical defense mechanism. The “preferred” course of attack is usually so damned obvious that it doesn’t feel like you’re really figuring anything out, and if you feel creative and try to deviate from it, the game breaks down and turns into a pretty easy and shallow FPS. For all the freedom it’s supposedly giving you, I couldn’t go “off script” in Dishonored without feeling like there was a developer disappointed in me somewhere.

“If you were playing the game the way I wanted you to, you wouldn’t have to have a boring fight against these three easy guys.”

Stryker: At some point in the development/testing of Dishonored, this conversation must have happened:

Player: You know, I really feel like my badass assassin ought to be able to carry more than ten bullets. Maybe like twenty or so.

Developer: Twenty bullets? What? And you just carry them around? Yeah, ok, Hercules –  sorry, but we’re trying to keep this game realistic. Now use your magic spell to teleport over there and kill that guard.

Far Cry 3 is The Saboteur on a Tropical Island, and We Love Both Those Things (Xbox 360, PS3)

Brad: Every so often, Cracked’s Robert Brockway will write an article highlighting men’s adventure magazines from the late 40s and 50s, and their insane cover art. Men are shown taking on wild animals with their bare hands, single-handedly fighting of the Japanese Imperial Navy, or fighting each other with logging equipment. Each one is a portal to a fictionalized world hundreds of times more exciting and crazy than our own.

Far Cry 3 is what happens when you take the covers of those magazines and make a video game out of them. It’s a game where you sneak up on you enemies and drive a machete through their torso, steal whatever random junk they had laying around their homes, then take it to a store and trade it for guns; which is exactly how the economy should work in real life. You hunt rare and dangerous animals to make equipment out of their skins, because if you’re going to go into battle carrying four heavy weapons and enough ammunition to put a hole in the world, you might as well do it while looking like an insane pimp and killing off a few endangered species along the way. You light pirates on fire because FUCK PIRATES. It’s pretty much the best thing ever.

At one point, it even plays a song about fire while you burn everything.

If you’re anything like me, the words “light pirates on fire” was enough to get you to load up Amazon in another tab and order the game already.

Stryker: We really liked The Saboteur, and were bummed that the company that made it went out of business, because it meant we’d never get a sequel (another thing preventing a sequel: the end of World War II). And while Far Cry 3 is definitely not related to The Saboteur, it does pretty much all the things that we liked about it – the near perfect blend of action and stealth, the open world that gives you significant rewards for doing stuff in free play, and the way you can actually see the influence of the bad guys being diminished as you play through the game. Add to that some great characters (there was at least one bad guy I felt bad about killing just because it meant I wouldn’t get to see him anymore), gorgeous environments, and the ability to fight crocodiles with your bare hands, and you’ve got one of our favorite games of this generation.

Seriously, the hell with Keith. Buck’s way more fun to hang out with.

Rook Island Freedom Fighter Jason Brody Killed in Glider Crash

Local authorities confirmed late Friday that American-born freedom fighter, Jason Brody, was killed in a glider crash earlier that day. Eyewitness reports say that a hang glider Brody was piloting crashed into the side of a cliff at a high speed. Trauma from the crash killed Brody instantly.

Despite being heavily involved in the ongoing conflict with local pirate gangs, it is not believed that Brody’s crash was in any way related to the fighting. “He just flew straight into the cliff for no damn reason” said one witness, “stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.” Brody had gained a reputation among locals as a pretty terrible hang glider pilot, and was known to have sustained serious injuries on several past occasions.

“In retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have let him anywhere near a glider,” said an islander involved in the resistance, who asked not to be identified. “He was actually the only guy doing anything to fight the local warlord. The rest of us just show up after he kills everyone and talk about how tough we are. Shame, too – Brody had already wrecked most of their infrastructure and was only one or two missions away from getting get of all the criminals on this island for good. Now that he’s dead, I guess it’s back to being subjected to atrocities.”

“Come to think of it, we probably shouldn’t have kept sending him out to hunt really dangerous animals with all kinds of crazy weapons, either. That was pretty unnecessary, and it’s amazing he didn’t get killed doing that. Really, we just dumped every single problem we had on him. I guess we’re an incredibly lazy people.”

A source close to Brody explains that he had taken a break from fighting in order to collect historical relics scattered around the island. “I kept telling him he needed to get back to fighting our enemies,” said the source. “But he had become obsessed with these relics. He kept saying that finding them was the key to becoming invincible or some nonsense. I don’t know, he was on a lot of drugs – constantly jabbing himself with various syringes. By the end, he was pretty far gone.”

Brody’s two brothers and girlfriend are also recently deceased. He is survived by his mother.

Xena Warrior Princess

Brad: The TV show Xena, and it’s close relative, Hercules, were what I always referred to as Saturday afternoon shows. These kinds of shows all seemed to have a common vibe, even though the actual content was pretty dissimilar. There would things like American Gladiators, bowling tournaments, off-road races, or that WWF show where mid-carders would inevitably destroy guys nobody had ever heard of before (I swear, Tommy Angel’s WWF record has to be about 2-87, with both victories coming from disqualifications after his opponents smashed him over the head with a chair). The only really obvious similarities with Saturday afternoon shows were their place on the broadcast schedule and that the commercials tended to be for things like motor oil or car parts stores (this makes a bit more sense when you consider a good number of people watching TV on a Saturday afternoon were probably in the waiting rooms of auto shops). Beyond that, there was just a general sense that all of these shows were just barely entertaining enough to watch, but not nearly good enough to plan ahead for. I imagine that’s exactly how you end up in the Saturday afternoon time slot in the first place.

Oddly enough, Xena: Warrior Princess seems to have taken this sort of format to heart, resulting in a game that’s just barely good enough to play if you have absolutely nothing else going on.

You really shouldn’t though – I mean, It’s a Saturday afternoon, it’s beautiful outside, and you don’t really want be wasting such a nice day on crap like this, do you? Call one of your friends and go play outside. Or else do some yard work and at least get some exercise. Trust me, you’ll be thankful you did when you’re a grown up (spoiler: probably not).

Stryker: Despite having all of the awesome powers of Xena at your disposal, the easiest and most effective attack in the game is simply kneeing your opponents in the groin. Because of this, the gameplay is probably best described as “Xena kicks her enemies in the balls repeatedly”. But since the game has all kinds of camera, control, design, and balance issues, it’s probably safe to say the game thinks of the player as it’s enemy, and thus, the same description used for Xena the game character is also pretty accurate for Xena the Playstation game. Rarely does a game’s on-screen action so closely reflect the actual experience of playing it. Wear a cup.

 

Bebe’s Kids

Brad: When you set out to play every single game released for a console, you’ll inevitably come across a few stinkers, but few of them could ever hope to approach the levels a staggering incompetence seen in Bebe’s Kids. This game is apocalyptically bad, and I don’t mean that as an expression, but in the literal sense that I believe some enemy of humanity, quite possibly Gargozarra, the bad gaming demon, set this game upon us in the hopes of sowing discord and bringing about the end of civilization. It’s that bad.

 

Bebe’s Kids, based on the animated comedy that literally nobody – including presumably the people who made it – ever watched, does have one thing going for it – it is one of extremely few games from this era to feature African-American protagonists. So it’s kind of like the Jackie Robinson of video games, except if instead of a great baseball player, Robinson was a terrible SNES game in which you go to a theme park and then just start stealing everything and beating people up for no reason. Yeah, when you say it that way, this game seems pretty racist, actually.

 

What else wrong with this game? Everything. Everything is wrong with this game. The gameplay is beyond shallow, control is stiff and unresponsive, there’s a near-complete lack of animation, and the background music is the worst 2 seconds of noise you’ve ever heard in your life, repeated forever. The background of the first level lists the theme park rules and about half of it is just the words “no bevis” over and over.

What the hell?

 

Now, normally when I say that a game does everything wrong, I’ll make one exception and say that at least it actually works, in the sense that if you stick it into your Super Nintendo and turn it on, the game will load up. But in this case, that just means that you’re this much closer to playing the damn thing, so that seems more like another problem with the game. Like I said, Bebe’s Kids does everything wrong.

Stryker: Say what you will about the state of modern gaming, at least shit like Bebe’s Kids doesn’t get released on major consoles anymore.