Retro Review Tuesday: Ninja Gaiden NES

INTRODUCTION

What can be said about this one? We've reviewed and talked about a lot of difficult games on this blog. There's the relentless assault of Contra...the remorseless stages of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts...but it's safe to say that this one truly does put those games to shame. Contra can be done if you don't let it discourage you, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is just a harsh test of your nerves and reflexes...but then there's Ninja Gaiden. Possibly the hardest, most sadistic and emotionally obliterating games I've ever innocently put into the Nintendo. And I must admit, the only way I've ever seen the end of this game was by using save states on an emulator.

I regret nothing.

OVERVIEW

A fast-paced side-scroller, this Tecmo classic is a fun test of reflexes and maneuverability...at first. Immediately after the first stage, this killer becomes all business, assuming that you got the main idea of the game throughout level one. Now, it's literally do or die.

30 Years Later and this is still epic

The in-game graphics of the game aren't too sharp, many of the backgrounds being somewhat indistinguishable, likewise for the sprites. There's also plenty of flickering due to high on-screen sprite index and fast moving action. But it is nice that the game doesn't slow down...kind of. However, Ninja Gaiden was one of few games at that time with cutscenes, which features pretty decent graphics, such as closeups of the protagonist and other characters.The opening "duel" sequence is especially notable for its epic graphic power for that time.

Musically, it's pretty good. Tecmo's always had good, complex musical scores, and this game is no exception. The music of the levels is very distinctive and catchy, something that remains with the players of this game for years. It also manages to be pretty epic in some situations.

This thing just looks ominous

Storywise, it tries. Basically an evil force is trying to unite two statues that contain a demon powerful enough to "destroy a nation." On top of that, the protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa is on a quest to find his father's killer and avenge his death with the aid of the Dragon Sword. There are also plenty of plot twists, as far as who's really involved with all of this...




GAMEPLAY

As previously stated, Ninja Gaiden takes the form of a side-scroller, and a painfully difficult one at that. You run the course of the levels, taking out or avoiding enemies. To do this you must jump, duck, and climb to progress. You will collect pickups, special weapons and abilities. Most levels contain multiple areas, which differ vastly from each other. Once the end of an ACT is reached, you will take on a boss character. Most acts contain multiple levels with multiple areas. Losing a life takes you back to the beginning of the area you're in, and getting Game Over takes you back to the front of the level. Towards the end of the game, you will get to a point where game over can send you as far as three level-lengths back. I DID say this one was sadistic.


Once you've managed to beat the area boss, you've earned yourself a cutscene which uses state of the art (at the time) graphics and some questionable translations to further the storyline. Quite a treat and a rarity for a game from this time period. Though honestly they usually leave you with a lot more questions than answers.

Ryu sure it asking a lot of questions for someone who went on a quest based on half a story

Ryu's got a lot of cool ninja moves to aid him in quest to stop the evil. Your character runs forward, backwards, ducks, jumps, climbs ladders, and clings to walls. He can attack while ducking and while in the air. You can also perform special abilities, such as throwing ninja stars by pushing up and the attack button. You can do this standing or while in the air, but unfortunately, not while ducking. A large part of this game would be Ryu's ninja-tastic ability to cling to walls. Do do this, you jump towards a wall, and Ryu will automatically cling to it. I know what you're thinking and yes, that does make for frequent inconvenience. But it can also save you from a plunging death. With some basic maneuverability, you can jump on and off the wall, gaining height each time and scale the height of the wall.

-Enemies-

Your normal enemies will be various flavors of assassin, monsters, wild animals, and...gun-wielding militia personnel. Why them? Who knows. All normal (non-boss) enemies just take one swipe of a sword, or one hit of a projectile to take care of. However, this does not by any means make them easy. One reason would be that some enemies are very quick or are firing a bazooka at you. Another reason would be that although they don't sustain more damage, some enemies can deal a lot more damage than others. Also, since Ryu is thrown back when he is struck, it's very easy to be knocked off a cliff. To make matters worse, Ryu, unlike protagninists in other games, does NOT flash for more than a second after getting hit, allowing you to get absolutely ravaged should you get ganged up on.

A ninja, a punk, a basball bat wielding maniac and demon dog, just a typical American street

And possibly the worst part of all of this is that there is likely no game that respawns enemies as badly as this one. You can literally get yourself into a still position where you can kill the same enemy and infinite amount of times in a row. This makes back tracking doing your maneuvers very dangerous, and often inefficient. How do you deal with this? You...don't, really. Good luck with it.

While fighting a boss, you must strike him enough times with your sword or weapon until his health bar depletes, which is located underneath yours, and is displayed throughout the entire level. Boss characters grow very difficult and can give great amounts of damage per attack. Each boss character has their own abilities and style of attack, usually forcing you to fall to them multiple times until you learn their ways.



-Items-

You'll be given several items to help you on your way. While it's still not nearly enough to make this Godless piece of media anything that could jokingly be called fair, we'll still mention them. Items are held in levitating containers that take on many forms, such as lanterns, insects, and candles, and you extract them simply by striking the containers. Some of them are just for points, others will give you the power it takes to use your special abilities. There is also the rare gift of life potion, which will replenish a good amount of your health. Another specific item will cause all enemies to freeze where they are, giving you a very small amount of time to progress reasonably uninhibited. Beware, however, the frozen enemies can still hurt you if touched.

-Weapons-

Another aspect of the game that will help you are the weapons you will be granted. They each have their own unique functions and uses.

Ninja Star - A standard projectile and staple of ninjas, everywhere. Useful in most all situations

Spiral Sword - Push the attack button while jumping and you'll slice your blade through the air as you spin, destroying an enemy who has the misfortune to be there when you land. Good for jumping over an abyss to an enemy-choked surface.

♪And it burns burns burns burns the ring of fire♫

Ring of Fire - A huge ring of fire is blasted out in a forward and upward direction, destroying all it its path. Takes quite a bit of energy to use. Good for enemies above you.

Mega Star - A huge throwing star, this has a boomerang effect, and will stay on the screen until it touched you again, so you can get plenty of use out of it if you're pretty good with maneuvers. Goes through enemies, needs a bit of energy, though.

Fire Protector - Flames revolve around your character, destroying enemies as you touch them, and providing protection. Lasts for a decent amount of time, but it activates as soon as you pick it up, and eliminates your previous weapon/power.

CONCLUSION

No amount of text and pictures can truly express just how devastatingly difficult this game is. For a game that offers unlimited continues, it truly is something that stands for just what classic NES gaming was all about. It is something you could spend your entire life on, while offering less than two hours worth of gameplay, assuming you are flawless. But that's the thing about classic NES games. That kind of assumption will always be meant with patronizing sneers, and that can't get more true with regards to Ninja Gaiden. Anybody who's ever tried it will tell you the same thing: If you decide you want to give it shot, you'd better and good and used to this screen.

~RM

Don't forget to stop by our shop:

Retro Review Tuesday: Haunted House Atari

Haunted House was a serious contender doing during our October, Halloween themed games. We didn't have the space for it then, but it's still a great game and deserves to be highlighted so we thought it would be perfect for this month.

Introduction

Haunted House is one of the first survival horror games to ever grace a home console. The concept, like most for games of this period is a bit thin, but it simple enough. You've come to the dark dusty mansion of the deceased Zachary Graves searching the 4 floors for 3 pieces of a precious urn. The catch being of course that the house is dark, scary, filled with bats and spiders and is of course haunted. It's not Silent Hill, but it does a surprisingly good job of keeping you on edge.

Overview

This is a standard joystick game so the controls are simple. You move around the house with the joystick, light matches with the button. When you encounter items you simply touch them to pick them up, you can only hold one item at a time (other than the urn) so you will automatically switch when you run into a new item. You can drop items as well by hitting the button if you've already got a match lit.

Graphically it's just there. Not the best looking game and not the worst looking game, it gets the job done.

Sound wise there's not a lot going on there's no music and what you do get is a few atmospheric sounds. They're primitive, but effective. As you travel around you hear the sound of your own footsteps and the sound of entering a new floor. When an enemy is around, you get the wailing of a ghostly chilling wind. Should you happen to touch that enemy you hear cracks of thunder while your eyes roll around in fright.


There are only three items but in typical Atari fashion you'll have no idea what they are without a little info.

Magic urn: It's broken into to three pieces which on their own don't really look like anything so if you pickup something weird looking it's probably the urn. It's the whole reason you're traipsing around a dark haunted mansion infested with rabid bats and poisonous spiders. What sort of magic does it hold? Who knows, but you can find out once you've got it all together and escape. (My guess is some sort of hallucinogen given the way the whole house color shifts when you win)

Magic scepter: A completely mysterious relic that keeps ghosts, bats and spiders away from you so long as you're holding it. This sounds a lot more useful than it really is, the holding one item at a time thing means you'll almost never be holding this.

Golden Key: First off let's get this out of the way, I know it's green, but the booklet claims it's golden. We'll just assume it's gold plated copper and has gotten a nice patina over the years. Basically a skeleton key, it opens any locked doors you find. This is a must have item in the later levels and not remembering where you left it is likely to get you killed.


Gameplay

You start off at the front door they only part of you character visible is the whites of your eyes and your pupils, A pretty familiar darkness scenario if you believe in the validity of old cartoons. If you're playing on the first difficultly level you can see the basic layout of whatever floor you are current on. You can go either up or downstairs by exiting up, down or to the left or right. To find the urn pieces and other helpful items you'll need to light a match otherwise it's too dark to see. Matches only last for a set amount of time before going out on their own, but you've got an infinite supply of them so you can light all you want. The only caveat is that the number you use affects your score at the end, but unless you're playing it tournament style with a bunch of geek friends there's no reason to be particularly concerned with that.

Occasionally while you're searching you'll encounter an enemy, or several as sometimes more than one appears at once. When this happens there will be a flash of lightening and a howling wind will come up to blow out your match you'll have to run out of the room or you'll lose a life as soon as they touch you. Usually they won't spawn right on top of you so they should be easy to avoid. Unless it the ghost of Mr. Graves, which is significantly faster. If you're near him when he pops up, you can pretty much kiss that life goodbye. If you can avoid the ghost of Mr. Graves, getting the urn and getting out is pretty simple given you've got 9 lives to work with. It's when you up the difficulty that things get interesting.

In the harder difficulty levels things get a lot harder for you. The mansion is now so dark you can't see the walls unless you light a match. You can no longer pass freely between all the rooms, you'll have to find a key. Additionally as you'd expect the enemies spawn faster and more often. This combination of factors can get you running scared when the vengeful spirit of Mr. Graves blows out your match and you find yourself running away blindly into a locked door or unseen wall. Making matters worse is that they can and will switch floors and rooms to come after you. It's never really scary but it can definitely give you a shot of adrenaline.

Conclusion

Haunted House brought a lot of new concepts to home gaming, scrolling corridors, multi-screen playing field and a whole new genre, survival horror. As I said before it's not quite something in line with fatal frame or a resident evil, but it's stood the test of time admirably, it is still a very playable and very enjoyable game. It's really a bit of a hidden gem, it should be regarded as a gaming classic and should be in every Atari fan's collection

~Stephanie


Don't forget to stop by our shop for vintage gaming items for sale:

Retro Review Tuesday: Resident Evil Gaiden Gameboy Color

This is our first review for a handheld game/system.

Introduction
Many Resident Evil fans aren't even aware this title exists due to what seems like a large miscalculation by Capcom. It's a mature rated Gameboy color game based on a wickedly popular series of games that debuted on the Playstation. Many players old enough to appreciate blood, gore, and some good ol' fashioned zombie shooting fun weren't toting around GBCs. However, for those of us who were familiar with both we were rewarded a unique perspective on the Resident Evil franchise.

Overview

Controls are simple. A is your action button use it to pick up items, select them in your inventory and shoot your gun. B aims your gun on the normal play screen or switch characters in the fight and inventory screens. Starts shows your map and select shows your inventory. The D pad moves you around. Controls are pretty responsive, but when a zombie is after you they slow down quite a bit.

Graphics are a mix of good and so-so. The basic play screen has rather fluid sprites, but they're undetailed and the backgrounds leave something to be desired. In the fight screens the backgrounds are much more detailed and the Zombies are rendered quite well and have a lot of detail. They don't move a lot, but they're zombies, they don't have to. The cutscenes vary wildly.Your characters are highly unattractive pixel blobs in most of them, but other times they're incredibly detailed and good looking for the format. There seemed to be no graphics quality control on this game.

It's SUPPOSED to be Barry but I'm not sure this isn't red haired Ernest Hemmingway

Soundwise this is a great GBC game. The music is pretty complex and there's quite a bit of variation including changing tempo depending on whether or not you're in danger. There's also several themes you'll hear depending on where you are and what you're doing and all of them manage to be perfectly fitting. The main theme can get a little bit annoying because you hear it all the time, but it really does a good job of making you feel on edge, no small feat for an old school hand held game. The other sounds are good for what little of them you hear, there's the sound of zombies, the sound of your death and the sound of finding an item, that's it.

This game has enough items to warrant a basic items list here. The things you'll pretty much always have in your inventory are:

Thank goodness the knife has infinite ammunition

Key items you haven't used yet, you'll need to go into the screen to use these when you're in the right location, just having a key in inventory won't open the door for you.
Your PDA it gives your current mission objective helpful if you were distracted during a cutscene or came back to playing after it's been awhile.
Guns and ammo self explanatory. Only one character can use a certain gun at a time. If Leon is holding a gun and you want Barry to have you'll have to do a bit of finagling to make it happen, it's best to get that done before entering a battle you can do it during but it will get you mangled most of the time. Also, you can not pick up ammo for a gun you're not carrying. Apparently your character thinks to themselves, Well I'm sure I'll never find this gun no need to pick up the ammo even though I've got space for it. So try to make mental notes as you will often have to backtrack to get really nice ammo.
Herbs Like all Resident Evil games you find herbs to heal yourself there are 5 different types in this game, but you don't mix them this time, how you receive them is how you use them, predictably there's a manual on the ground with how to use them so I'm not going to describe that.
Armor  New to this game, there are 3 types to find with varying levels of protection. As soon as you get nice armor you're going to want to put it on, it helps more than you could possibly imagine.

Gameplay

You start off as Barry, who you may remember from such situations as: constantly saving The Master of Unlocking and having some things to check out on the other side of the mansion (RE1). In any case Barry is sent to try to figure out what happened to Leon. Leon, who you may remember from such incidents as: His first day at the Racoon City Police Department(RE2), was dispatched to a distressed luxury cruiser over 24 hours ago and hasn't been heard from. So with this in mind Barry gets down to the boat. Things start off as you'd expect in a resident evil. Ho hum I'm exploring, then, OH MY GOD IT'S A ZOMBIE HORDE!

Luckily zombies rarely get embarrassed when they show up in the same outfit.

The members of the undead army come in varying flavors as well, normal male, normal female, poisonous female, crowbar male and BOW. Each of these has their own special style of attempting to get at the delicious innards of your skull, learn them, and you'll be a lot happier.

Where are zombies getting all these crowbars?

Your first instinct is probably going to be to take the zombies out. You can either aim at one, which will ensure it's too far away to give you a good swipe if you enter attack mode, or let one get too close which will cause it to be directly in front of you (unless you struggle enough to push them back). In either case, instead of fighting on your normal screen, you enter a battle screen where you have to time your hits with the cursor. The cursor moves faster or slower depending on how nice of a gun you have and the "hit zone" get smaller the further away from the zombie you are. So while a zombie right in front of you with a hand gun will be fairly easy, trying to hit one from across the room with a grenade launcher is quite a feat of timing. Making matters worse is that other zombies that are on the screen can show up leaving you battling multiples. Fighting this way is a lot less scary than just being jumped at, but it's also a lot harder. You can't just twitch shoot your way through it, you've got to have a bit of strategy.

If you're familiar with the Resident Evil series you know that there's no way you can take out all the zombies. The most reasonable course of action is to try to avoid them. It's worth noting that sometimes you want to meet the zombies head on even if you can avoid them, if a red exclamation point pops up it means the zombie nearest you has an item (occasionally it's a key item, but usually it's just ammo or herbs). Unfortunately, you won't know if it's important or not until you take it down. When you do want to run though it's not easy. For some reason when a zombie has you in it's sights, it's tell tale groan gives our hero pause so you slow WAY down making it an awfully hard to do so. Additionally it's very easy to get stuck on door frames or random debris and when that happens after you're slowed you're pretty much screwed. If you get stuck in the fight screen you can hit start and escape the battle. However, before you can escape you'll have to hit the strike zone dead on. Meanwhile the zombie gets closer much faster and you can't hit it because you're running away. Often this is a more dangerous proposition than just fighting the zombie in the first place. Unless you're cornered by multiple zombies, you're probably safer knifing one than you are running from it.

This deck is a lawsuit just waiting to happen.

Running from zombies both on screen and in the fight screen is the most annoying thing about this game and given that it is impossible to take out all the zombies (even if you knife the majority of the normal ones like I do) it's very easy for this aspect to make you hate playing the game. I enjoy a challenge, but the slowdown, poor collision in tight spots and the sheer numbers of zombies make it kind of ridiculous.

Exclusive screenshot of the Boxxle zombie add-on

Managing to cheat death, Barry eventually locates a survivor on the ship using a surveillance computer. Thee survivor is a young girl with strange powers of prediction named Lucia who helps lead him to Leon. Lucia is a much more useful character than most you'd find under these sort of circumstances as you can actually equip her with items and use her in a pinch. Of course before you can actually make use of this you've got to meet up with her which means a lot of opening of locked doors that have keys (or items you can use to open them) located in the most inconvenient places possible. Given the limited graphics of the game, the items do not show up on the ground directly. You can be in a room full of items and you won't know right away, you'll have to root around for your loot. Basically you'll blindly run around until you hear a noise and see a little green exclamation point letting you know there's an item to pick up. This can be annoying enough for just the time consuming aspect, but worse is that it means tangling with an awful lot of zombies on your quest to see whether or not all the nooks, crannies and corners have items in them. Hooray for unavoidable zombies!

Given all the hordes you'll be taking down, even if you become the zombie avoidance master, you're probably going to see the "you died" screen quite often. Luckily the good folks at Capcom aren't completely heartless so you can either start from the last save(which is a spot determined by key points in the games and could be a long ways away from where you are now) or from where you last came through a door or killed a zombie. I can not express how wonderful this second option is, I'm fairly certain that it kept me from smashing the Gameboy into tiny bits several times.

Just in case all the zombie killing and death dodging wasn't exciting enough for you, once you unite your team members (all three of you) you will be given the wondrous honor of being hounded by huge zombie, they'll refer to as the BOW. This zombie seems determined to not only obliterate your sparse STARS team but to kidnap Lucia. He's stronger and faster than your standard zombies and has a tentacled stomach, giving him much longer reach. Which all means you'll die twice as fast (you'll even get a special "you died" screen when he kills you, fancy right?) If that's not annoying enough on it's own, it's one of your mission objectives to eliminate it. The joy in this game just never stops! But wait! That's not all! The mega Zombie runs away rather than being defeated, so he just keeps coming back and every time you meet him he mutates, changing just enough to be a bigger uglier pain in your butt.

He really ought to get that checked out

So of course you need some plot to hold together the story or really the game would have been over in roughly 20 minutes once you have both Lucia and Leon in your party. We can't have that so we need a plot device or two. So imagine you're Leon. Being plagued by zombie problems and having the survivor you're trying to protect kidnapped by a huge ugly zombie is pretty much ruining your day. But you can you depend on your partner to help you out in these troubling times, right? Nope, instead you get some of Barry's , I just have to check something out, antics, thickening the plot. However, after a series of confused and muddled events that involve Umbrella, a submarine and more zombies, Barry comes out looking just fine (again).He even manages to avoid telling Leon he was almost a sandwich and that alone makes him a better partner this time around.

I guess I WON'T take this time to consider my proposal for waffles as the ultimate in home building materials then

Basically add a few more details to the thin to plot to hold it together and that's the entire game. Kill zombies, avoid zombies, attempt to kill super zombie, avoid getting your brains eaten and unravel some inane and implausible plot. It's a zombie game, you shouldn't be expecting too much more than that, and it's actually more fun than it sounds. It's worth mentioning, the final boss battle(s) in this game are very long and arduous, you've really got to earn that victory and really hope you've saved enough ammo. It 's honestly something you're likely to have to attempt several times if you don't get annoyed and swear off the game before then.

Conclusion

People either really like this game or absolutely despise it. I have to give the creators credit for trying something new and making a pretty decent original game for a hand held. The storyline is
crap, but really all of the RE games that came about between 2 and 4 had some pretty questionable and incoherent storylines as well and I don't see as much outcry with those. Besides someone must of liked it because Capcom basically remade this game with an even more ridiculous story and added light gun, calling it dead aim. Overall I think that RE fans might be a little disappointed in this one as while it has characters you're familiar with but it doesn't fit into the main storyline, isn't considered canon and basically becomes a "let us never speak of this again" chapter. But in my opinions as a gamer looking for a unique old school zombie experience this is a good solid game.

~Stephanie

 Don't forget to stop by our shop for retro gaming collectibles:

Retro Review Tuesday: Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Atari

Today's retro review will be an extra special super vintage Atari double feature dedicated to the two releases by the short lived games division of Wizard Video, Halloween and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Introduction

It's a common cliche. "It's so bad it's almost good." Maybe that's not quite what describes Halloween on the Atari 2600. But something makes us keep coming back to it. Perhaps it's the repetitive music, the amusing death scenes, the character designs or maybe just the captivation of seeking an end to one of an entire generation of games not exactly known for having one.

Overvew

Michael Myers is loose in the house. You must run from this pixelated maniac and avoid his "attacks" until you can find the weapon and...well, you don't really stop him, you just...poke him and he...runs away. Then he comes back. Faster. Perhaps you...shouldn't have done that.

The controls are simple. If you're lucky enough to be enjoying this piece of work with a joystick then it's as simple as push up to move up, pull back for down, left goes left, right goes right and you can even move diagonally, Fancy! You can push the button to perform actions like controlling and using the weapon or drag one of the kids along as bait. (If you're on an emulator then it's whatever you set the controls to) Overall, the function doesn't seem to be too bad.

The graphics of the game are Atari graphics. What else can be said. Your character does manage to be clearly female, however, and everything is reasonably distinguishable. You can even tell that your lives are represented by what are supposed to be pumpkins.

The music is...yeah, get used to the music. The classic score from the Halloween series plays every time you see Michael Myers on the screen (And you'll see him on just about every single screen). Although when he's not yet present the lack of music can almost be seen as...eerie?

Gameplay

You start off inside the corridor of a "house" consisting of a random collection of hallways. Right away, Michael will come after you, just stabbing his "knife" over and over. Contain your laughter, (although, really...just look at that) and run to either end of the screen to switch areas. Unless you're at the end of a hallway, Michael will appear in the next area and just about everywhere you go. Some areas will have a "door" you can run through to change areas of the house or you can change floors by going through the doors at the hallway ends. Some uppers rooms flash from light to dark, blinding you to your own whereabouts and the position of Michael, often proving to be problematic for you, if not fatal.

The game can actually manage to "scare" you since Michael doesn't always appear at the same time, or from the same areas. He can appear from the right, from the left, or even from a doorway, and this can cause you to jump a little, especially if you're heading in that direction. It's especially bad in flashing room where it's difficult to tell where your own character is.

Ultimately the goal is to lead the children you're babysitting to the safe rooms, the ends of the hall. The truly glorious thing about this is that Michael seems to be more interesting in killing them than you. Sure, perhaps that's not how it works in the actual series, but who's to prove if your character is even Laurie? Frankly I've taken to calling her Connie just for the hell of it. Maybe it says for certain in the booklet who exactly Connie/Laurie/Ms.Feminine pixels is, but I don't have that luxury. Anyway, by pushing the button, you can take children with you or just use them as bait to distract Michael while you haul ass out of there. This becomes especially useful the further you get in the game. When Michael touches them, he decapitates them so you lose a chance to save one but it's better their heads than yours. The hardest part will be trying not to laugh, and leaving the area.

Additionally, you're looking for the "weapon" to use against Michael so that you may gain points. What kind of weapon is it? Who knows. Maybe you see a knife. Maybe you see a hammer. Maybe you're something of a cynic and just see a collection of black pixels, but at any rate, when you find this item, you push the button while standing over it to pick it up. Then, once you encounter Michael again, you wait until he's just about on top of you, and push the button to "thrust" your weapon, giving him a real mean poking, and he'll run away until...you change rooms. Do this twice or save enough children and you'll go up a level. Meaning when you see him again, he'll be faster. Eventually, he'll get so fast that he matches your speed and you can no longer outrun him, just avoid touching him.

Should you let ol' Stabby get too close, before you know what could have possibly actually happened in your altercation, you'll find yourself headless, with delightful little "blood" pixels erupting from your neck. Not unlike a beheaded chicken, you run away, seemingly in distress, off the screen. You've now lost a life. .You repeat this process until you lose all three. Then the game is over, and there's nothing else to do now but reflect upon this interesting little experience. If there's an end other that to this game, most people, including us, wouldn't know about it.

Conclusion

If you're a horror fan, a retro-gaming fan, or like me, both, then honestly, this is a must have for your own Collection of Geekery. However, this game is incredibly rare, and expensive for just a used, boxless copy. So it would be unrealistic for me to tell you to go buy it. However, if you've got a computer (and I have it under decent authority that you do) you just may want to download this oddity. It's certainly one hell of a novelty, and it's hard not to somehow enjoy it.

~RM

________________________________________________________________

Introduction

Even back in 1983 companies were trying to bombard consumers with different incarnations of their franchises by marketing shoddy poorly conceived merchandise. Wizard Video was no different. Being the original home video distributors of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre they thought it would be a great money maker to introduce their film and themselves to the budding video game market. The result was not well received by most consumers but it was innovative. It brought the first horror video game into the home market, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Overview

In a role reversal from most of the survival horror games of today, you play as Leatherface, the terrifying chainsaw wielding nutjob. Your goal is simple, to kill as many screaming Texan women as possible before you run out of gas.

Controls are simple, it is an Atari joystick after all. But, it's still got everything you need to be a killing machine. You move up down left and right with the joystick and run the chainsaw with the button.

Soundwise it's pretty standard for the Atari. There's the sound of Leatherface walking, the sound of firing up your chainsaw, the shrill beep (scream) of a potential victim and the sound of a triumphant kill.

Graphically, once again, it's an Atari game, you can't expect much if you're used to all sorts of newfangled 3d rendered perfectly polished games. But for the time period they were pretty good. Everything is easily recognizable from the girls, to the cow skulls to the truck in the background. There's even enough detail on Leatherface to give him a grimace. My only real complaint here is that Leatherface's chainsaw is the saw color as his body leaving things open to some rather unwholesome conclusions.

Gameplay

The game starts of with you as Leatherface out in the Texas countryside looking for fresh young victims. You can walk either left or right seeking your prey. You'll know you've found one when you hear the extremely shrill beep to signify their screams. You're faster than they are so if you just keep up the chase you'll eventually get close enough to use the chainsaw leaving a bloodied corpse in your wake. Though you'd better enjoy it in the moment because it disappears pretty quickly leaving you to wander off looking for another victim to quench your blood lust.

This sounds pretty easy so far, but it wouldn't be much of a game without a few obstacles to overcome. The first of which is gas, your chainsaw uses a bit of gas while you're just standing around letting it idle and it uses considerably more every time you fire it up. Leatherface can only carry enough for three refills so no matter how important it makes you feel, it's best not to leave the chainsaw running when you're not using it on some poor woman.

The Second problem is that on your way to the fresh meat you'll have to avoid fences, bushes cow skulls and wheelchairs (one has to wonder if the developers of the silent hill series started off their young lives playing this game). If you run into one of these obstacles you'll have to use your all purpose handy dandy chainsaw to cut it out of the way using some of your precious gas in the process.

The final obstacles is your victims themselves. The women will try to dodge you when you get close and will change directions, suddenly appearing on the other side of you This is not only annoying, but a big gas waster. The women in pink seem to be slightly more prone to doing this effectively.

Once you've used up all your gas by either slaughtering victims or cow skulls, the screen goes black and Leatherface is left with a useless chainsaw. Meaning Leatherface himself is totally powerless. While a stationary useless Leatherface sits on screen grimacing off into oblivion one of his potential victims comes up behind him and gives him a sift kick ending the game.

Conclusion

While wantonly killing is fun and a great stress reliever for a short period, it gets pretty old pretty quickly unless you've got friends to play and compare scores with. Playing it makes it pretty clear that it wasn't ever supposed to be a great video game, only a great marketing ploy.
However while not the best Atari game you can play, not by a long shot, this game has earned is place in the annals of classic gaming for it's unique "killer perspective" and bringing video game horror into the home.

~Stephanie

Don't forget to stop by our shop for retro gaming collectibles for sale:

Retro review Tuesday: Toejam and Earl: Panic on Funkatron

Toe Jam & Earl: Panic on Funkatron is one of those games you either love or hate. If you were a big fan of the original, then chances are pretty good that you won't like the format that was chosen for the second game. However, if you're like me and an unabashed fan of platformers, this is a great one.

-Overview-
The basic concept of this game is that when Toe Jam & Earl came back from Earth from the first game, they brought a bunch of earthlings back to their home planet of Funktron by mistake. Now their job is to capture all the invaders and send them back home. This is done by using special capture jars which you toss onto the earthing capturing them like bugs. unlike bugs though you don't scoop them up with nets or anything, you just through a bunch of glowing jars until they get squished into one (unless you've got a superjars powerup in which case as soon as a jar hits them they're in it). About midway through the game you also get a subquest to bring the funkapotomus, Lamont, out of hiding by locating all his favorite things which are hidden in secret areas.

The controls are simple and quite responsive, especially if you have a six button genesis controller. C jumps and controls the swimming speed while underwater, B throws the capture jars, and A uses your "funk". With a six button controller, X is your funk scan, Y is your panic button, and Z is your funkVac. If you have a standard three button controller, all you have to do is press start then your a,b,c buttons will fill in. Those are just the defaults, you can to change them to anything you like in the menu screen.

Graphically it's a bright and colorful with large fluid sprites. The character designs for TJ and E are pretty much the same as in the first though they're quite a bit larger this time around. The designs for the denizens of Funkatron are unique, interesting and memorable. The earthling cast features some from the fist game, like the boogeyman and some absolute insane newcomers like a duck on a flying carpet and a ghost cow. The background landscape of Funktron is a mix of dr.suess type landcapes with the sort of questionable structures that only appear in platform games and as a nice bonus especially for the time period is quite interactive. You can, and will often be forced to, shake trees and search bushes.

Sounds wise is an area where it really excels, as one would expect with a planet name like Funkatron, the music is most certainly funk. Much more the your standard game beeps and boops it's got rich layering and sounds more like the background track to a 70's pimp flick than a video game made in the early 90's. The other sounds are just as appropriate, with the earthlings having annoying catchphrases and words of encouragement such as "awesome" and "funk that" when you pick up power-ups.

-Difficulty-

This game has two difficulty settings, normal setting or kid mode. Kid mode only allows you to go through the first seven levels, but it allows you to play the game in an invincibility mode which allows you to get a good grasp of how the game is played and an opportunity to find secret areas without worrying about being killed by the pesky earthlings.

On normal difficulty the game can get pretty challenging. It is very easy to get hurt, but there are a large number of "food" items around to heal yourself. Like in most games though, it always seems plentiful when you don't need it and scarce when you do. The underwater areas can be a total deathtrap, there's not much to hurt you down there, but your oxygen meter runs out fairly quickly and when you're stuck in one of the maze like areas you can forget finding a "kissy fish" in enough time.

In playing in two player mode you can share health, when of you is low you can just give each other a high five to set both health meters to middle. Unlike older games where you can really screw your friends, both players have to consent to this health swapping by pressing down on the control pad. Though since you're sharing health (and lives for that matter) it can be much easier to die. So if you're on tow different skill level you may find yourself at the continue screen more often than you'd like. Luckily for every human you jar, every power up or secret you find, you get points and you get another extra life at every 10,000 points, so once you've got a grasp on the game and the point earning system it's pretty easy to earn enough lives to keep you safe.


-Gameplay-

When you first start the game assuming you're playing alone you get the option to choose how you want to play. You can be Toejam and Earl , if you're playing two player mode. In one player mode, you can be just Earl, he's much slower than Toejam, but stronger and can move items faster and takes more damage or, just Toejam, he's quick but gets hurt easily and takes longer to move heavy items. Once you've made your character choice, you start in the games early levels with the basic task of finding the earthlings and capturing them. You do this by tracking them down and tossing jars on them. There's a convenient sensor at the bottom of the screen that lets you know which direction you should be headed in, in order to find them. Once you grab them all you head to the end of the level and toss them on a rocket headed back to earth. With that patch of earthlings cleared out you get launched into to space and fall back into a new human infested area of Funkatron where you do it all over again.

Once you hit level eight or so, you start hearing from the
other aliens you encounter (either via bonus stages or ringing their doorbells) about how the great "funkapotomus" aka Lamont is hiding and won't come out
due to the earthlings. So while continuing to round up all the earthlings your additional mission becomes to find his favorite things to help coax him out of hiding. The aliens give you clues throughout the levels as to where to find the hidden doors and the objects, but it will still take quite a bit of searching and "funk scanning".

Meanwhile the earthling searches get more and more difficult with earthlings appearing in bigger groups and with attacks that are harder to avoid. These dark times are when you should use your power ups. Your funk vac will suck up any earthlings you can see on the screen. The panic button causes your character to throw out a barrage of jars as you run around flapping your arms. They're both rather imperfect methods of capture, but can really save your butt. And at around level 14 once you've used all your power ups and been "flashed" by numerous tourists and nibbled on by an endless barrage of poodles you start to really enjoy the rough and careless tossing of the jars full of earthlings into the rocket.

To break up some of monotony of constantly catching annoying earthlings, scattered throughout the levels there are several mini games, which are some of my favorite parts of the game. These are usually accessed by putting a coin into one of the numerous parking meters spread through out the levels or pushing one of the lighted "push me" buttons. There are the rap sessions "jam out", "hyper funk zones" bonus point collecting areas, and the "Fungus Olympics" where you bounce on sponge like fungus and get points and items from the judges. It's also worth mentioning that the parking meters and buttons can make all manner of secret snacks, platforms and other fun stuff appear as well as a couple of not so nice things, but it's usually worth the coin, or the few seconds it takes to push them to find out.

After 17 long levels of this nonsense, not including bonus levels, you've finally rounded up all the earthlings, hopefully found all Lamont's favorite stuff and coaxed him out of hiding, making Funkatron the peaceful patch of funkiness it once was.

-Conclusion-

Overall this game is a standard platformer though longer and more fun than most. It's uniqueness in terms of concept and characters makes it a games that will stay with you for years to come. Since I first played this years ago, I have beaten it numerous times and find a new hidden door or super jar power-up every time, it never gets old. Every vintage gaming fan should give it a try.

~Jen


Don't forget to stop by our shop: